Canada's Post-Prorogue Senate Gets Down to Business

When Stephen Harper Prorogued Parliament earlier this year, he took the opportunity to stack the Senate with like-minded Canadians. Check out this bit of legislative razzmatazz from the recently passed (in Senate) Bill S-10. In essence, "those who support this measure support it without quantifiable evidence; it just feels right."
Thank you, newly stacked Senate, for your investment in the prison-industrial economy. It's an investment that is bound to return in kind.

From Bill S-10:
"Those who support mandatory minimum sentences argue, in part, that there can never be positive proof that sentencing policies have an impact on the rate of crime – the variables involved are simply too complex. They contend that mandatory minimum sentences are imposed in any event because society believes in denouncing certain crimes and holding people responsible for them. They argue, in addition, that “common sense” dictates that such sentences have at least some deterrence value, even if it is not possible to prove how much, and that deterrence and denunciation remain very important sentencing principles."

Update: not much happening

Not much has been happening, which is fine. When things start to happen, you never know…

I’ve just dug out my most recent manuscript and have begun some light edits. Right now, it’s with several publishers and the silence is stunning.

I have also started on some new poems. Here comes part of one now:

How To Know

Little should rattle us by now.

We’ve seen rocks

fall to invent the earth

and blurred mysteries

that evade science,

microbes that are poison to us

in a universe made from our thoughts.

And just because we have not

said it out loud,

we’ve seen it all the same,

watched it in the vague moment

before we give to sleep, our eyes

see what the brain

cannot decipher and so

ignores; half the thing forgotten,

half ignored.

***

Anyway, it’s still a baby.

Thanks for reading.

People of the Land, Readings in Thessalon, Ontario

Could not have dreamed up a more beautiful day for a drive to Thessalon, Ontario, to read and play a tune in a church turned cafe and concert hall known as The Auld Kirk. It's a nice place with good sound and gallery space. About 30 people were there.
Some highlights: finally met and heard Lesley Belleau whose Colour of Dried Bones (Kegedonce Press, 2008) I've just ordered. Lesley read from her soon-to-be published novel and it was fabulous. The passages she read described a birth, both the beauty and the terror. She's a writer to watch out for.
The always lovely and talented Rolland Nadjiwon read. Rolland is a pleasure to speak with, funny, positive and wise. His Seven Deer Dancing should be required reading for all young Canadian poets.
Many other readers, too many to recount. I'll try to post some pictures if i come across any.

The Great Giller Shortage

Several interesting repercussions to Johanna Skibsrud's Giller win for her novel The Sentimentalist (Gaspereau, 2009). First, we were witness to a wonderful, human response from a writer that most thought didn't have a chance of winning the prize traditionally claimed by authors from the big corporate houses.

The celebration quickly ended, when the print media and those heavily invested in the mass production of the objects formerly known as books realized that Gaspereau, Skibsrud's publisher, wouldn't be able to keep up to the expected demand. The Toronto Star, projecting from the sales of last year's winner, predicted 75,000 copies would be needed in the first year. Gaspereau, the producers of absolutely gorgeous books, can produce a mere 1,000 hand bound, letterpress (i think letterpress, anyway) copies each week.

This projected shortage has sent consumers, and those who claim to represent the best interests of consumers, into frothing madness. To make matters more complicated, Gaspereau Press has thus far refused all offers from mass printers and publishers for "help." In the corporate world, this sort of independence is threatening. The reasoning is that if the little company can't produce quickly enough to meet the whimsical hunger of the impressionable masses, a big company should move in to make it happen. Really, everyone is pissed that they can't have a slice of the goods.

But it's a ridiculous controversy. Skibsrud spent untold years writing the book, surely readers can wait a few months for a copy. A few days ago, most people had never heard of the book and now, if you believe the popular press (here and here), the future of the humanity depends on getting those books to people.

I'm going to place an order with Gaspereau for The Sentimentalist -- not because the book won a prize, not even because I am dying to read it (although I'm sure it's terrific) -- but because I love books and respect anyone who puts as much love and energy into the creation of books as does Gaspereau Press.

For a spin-free telling of this Can-Lit scandal, check out Rob McLennan's blog, the most rational take I've seen so far.

Readings: Bayliss Public Library

A fun night at the lovely Bayliss Library in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.
Again, it was a stormy evening. What is it with me and stormy evenings?
The first snow storm of the year, with a sour wind, slammed us on our way to the reading.
Thank you to Susan and Ken, and everyone at the Superior Poetry Cafe for organizing the event.
Photos to follow.

No other news.

Reading Seamus Heaney's Human Chain and Brenda Hillman's Pieces of Air in the Epic. Both are marvelous for different reasons.

The Ted Plantos Memorial Award

I’ve just received word from The Ontario Poetry Society that a few of the poems from Ghost Music have won the Ted Plantos Memorial Award.

It’s a tremendous honour and I am thrilled. More about this at the TOPS website, and more available here later.

Book Tour: Sault Ste. Marie Public Library

What a wonderful evening at the Sault Public Library. I've been told that 74 people squeezed into the Story Room for poems and songs. A crowd that size is a rare and beautiful thing, and I thank everyone for coming out and for spreading the word. I hope to post some photos (maybe some video footage) from the evening. Thank you for your support.

Sault Star article on Ghost Music

The Sault Star has just published a generous article about Ghost Music.
Star scribe Jeffrey Ougler interviewed me a week ago, with a follow up earlier today.
I didn't expect that he'd fit everything (almost) that we talked about into an article.
Check it out: "Sault Area History Sparks Poet's Imagination" (Sault Star, Sept 28).

Book Tour: Sudbury -- Thursday, Sept. 23, 2010

A rainy night in Northern Ontario, and a fine group of poets and friends came out to the Sudbury Public Library. Thank you to Sudbury poet laureate Roger Nash (pictured left) for organizing the evening. And thank you to all the readers who made the long drive seem shorter.

Ghost Music has Arrived!

Well, the book is here. It's beautiful, if you don't mind me saying. Buschek and the printer, Hignell's from Winnipeg, did good work with the cover image. Maria's painting is all deep blues and black and could not have been easy to reproduce. I will post some news from the readings. First one in Sudbury tonight night. Everybody's calling for deep rains. I hope the highway holds. Thanks for reading.

More Video News

Thank you to everyone who has commented on the book trailer. Both Stephen and I are thrilled you like it. Weird thing: the youtube channel hosting the video is listed (as of this writing) as #40 Top Visited Canadian Musician channel. That's neat. I'm not sure what it means, didn't know there was a YouTube listing, but thank you for watching. If you'd like to see the video, here is the link:
Ghost Music.

Ghost Music video

This stunning video was produced by multimedia artist Stephen Lang to celebrate the upcoming launch of Ghost Music. Enjoy. And here's the link.

Ghost Music has a face!

Here is the front cover of Ghost Music. The image is a detail (one panel) from a 16-panel painting by Maria Parrella-Ilaria.

The book should be ready to roll by mid-September. Check the "Readings and Concerts" window to the right for events.

Books

This is one of the reasons I love William Carlos Williams, from “The Library,” Book 3 of Paterson:

For there is a wind, or ghost of a wind

in all books echoing the life

there, a high wind that fills the tubes

of the ear until we hear a wind,

actual .

to lead the mind away

Ebooks and Used Books

A very thoughtful article from The Sault Star quotes yours truly and a couple other local booksellers. The writer even mentions our beloved cat, "The Pooch," who left us earlier this year. I am glad to know he is remembered.
Article link: "Technology & Books" by Jeffrey Ougler, The Sault Star, Saturday August 14th

Neighbours

"Neighbours," a reading from Ghost Music.

Coltrane

In response to Gary Barwin's "On Listening to Coleman Hawkins," I offer the less elegant offering below:


A Love Supreme

To describe Coltrane's reed squall
we refer to animals in nature
as depicted in storybook recordings:
elephant, walrus, a lion under fire.

We look to the machine world:
to trains, factories, to scrap yards.

And in locked-up places,
the determined hinge tearing --

but find only
more Coltrane.

from Ghost Music (BuschekBooks, 2010), coming soon

Another One Bites the Dust

My hometown is notorious for allowing its old buildings to be torn down. A few years back, a beautiful building, formerly a bank, from the early 20^th century was razed to make way for a Tim Hortons fishbowl.

There have been many more to meet the wrecking ball. Today, a splendidly spooky old building, formerly a hotel and known as The Cornwall Building, is going down. Now, I know the building was in bad shape. It needed serious work and care. For years, it had been rented out to nonprofits and artists' groups, neither of which demographic can contribute much in the way of restoration costs. In fact, my wife and I had a studio/office space on the third floor for years.

Inside, a wide spiral staircase, all extinct wood, with ornate wood banister, ran from roof to basement. On the third floor, just beside our old space, an immense walk-in safe, as big as a very large bedroom, in which I dreamed of recording an album, was a reminder of the position the building once held in the community. Its ceilings were at least 15 feet. Its frame old timber and solid brick painted a powder blue. My guess is that it was built in the late 1800s or early 1900s.

And, in other day, it will be gone. Private investors bought the building and are planning to replace it with a modern office building. Glass for brick. Of course, I can’t blame the city for having a short memory and a lack of loyalty, can I? With the right amount of coin, one could buy just about any old building and tear it down.

I hope, at least, the new building is an eco-design. However, in a place where things tend to be done on the cheap, I have my doubts.

Ideally, it would be great to see effort going into preservation and upgrading rather than demolition.(To see the building, pan right -- its the big blue baby).

View Larger Map

Drones and Blogs

The twenty-four hour news cycle has been blamed for promoting worthless, mundane nonstories as earth-shattering “Breaking News.” With so much time to fill, networks allow windy anchors to blather on about nothing; much like a blog, I guess. But the twenty-four hour broadcast day also allows networks to bury stories. Many important bits of news are lost in the barrage of vacuous coverage.

 

Even with the thousands of bloggers and news sites out there, many stories are simply missed or intentionally overlooked. I think there are more worthy stories than there are people and resources to disseminate the news. What we need are Robojournalists, News Drones, that can fly about recording human experience and uploading it to the web. Surely, the technology is capable. If the US war machine can pick a target in a desert, fly with a remotely controlled device, and sometimes even destroy the intended target (with a few weddings, nurseries, and picnics mistakenly bombed), certainly they can build News Drones to document every facet of humanity.

 

For more on remote warfare, check out Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. It was prescient.

 

“Poetry is news that stays news,” Ezra Pound, The ABC of Reading.

A demo of a new song, "On Your Side"

Here is a demo version of a new song called "On Your Side" http://

Change For the Better

A reporter for the local newspaper interviewed me recently for a piece he was planning on the future of print. During the interview he asked what it is like teaching college English these days. Are students interested? Can they look away from their iGadgets long enough to participate in a class? The generalized answer is an overwhelming Yes.

I have been at this teaching gig for not quite six years, so I'm still learning (may I always be learning), but what I've noticed of today's students, compared with students of my era, is that they are less likely to accept rules and paradigms on face value. Likewise for assignments. They see right through make-work projects. Every activity in the class must be justified. The purpose must be clear. In this way, most students are partners in the instruction. This generation has access to facts and dates like no prior generation. For the most part, they don't need their instructors to provide content solely -- at least in the Humanities. There is, of course, room for this "banker's" model of education. The instructor has to determine what is important and is often called upon for the contextualization of facts.

Mostly, the instructor is a guide and a coach, showing students how and where to find what they need, how to interpret the information critically, and how to organize the information for a reader.

The classroom is now a level field and it's tremendously exciting.

Read More Books

When I can afford the luxury, I enjoy sitting in the little used bookstore Read More Books that we run from a small commercial space in our home. Its location is prime, actually: on the main street, next door to a cafe (DISH) and a hair salon (The Gallery). The selection is mighty, if i do say myself, but business is slow. A large sign outfront would help, I know. And this is something I'll get around to someday.

For now, a bunch of booklovers and travellers (travellers always seem to find the place, and never complain about the lack of signage) drop in to browse and pick up a copy of this or that.

In the two years that Read More Books has been around, I've found it entertaining to watch the changing interests of readers. For example, last summer there was a run on Tom Robbins. It was unbelievable. It seemed that touring bands couldn't get enough. There were at least four bands on their separate ways across the country stopping in for T.R. books. The summer before, it was Barbara Kingsolver and Herman Hesse.

This year's been slow. There are not as many travellers about, it seems. Being mid-July, most of the townies have left town for their camps (what most people call cottages). So, we're here with the constant drone of vehicles passing by on their way to the next stop light, and the occassional pedestrian out for a stroll. And that's fine.

Here's what's been selling this summer:

Malcolm Gladwell, I've sold 6 copies of both Tipping Point and Blink;

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann -- not sure why, but there's been a run;

Robert Heinlein, plenty of movement there;

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood -- maybe its the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe or the announcement that scientists are less than a decade away from regenerating human organs, but something's in the air.

Trendy Discussion of Ebooks vs Print

The New York Times is reporting that sales of Amazon ebooks have surpassed hardcover sales, and everyone is hearing the death knell of print. Amazon claims to have sold 180 electronic books for its Kindle device for every 100 hardcover edition. Reading the Kindle's cryptic policy guide and recalling the great Orwellian recall of 2010, one might consider the word "rented" to describe the sales transaction with Amazon.

The article also says that hardcover sales are up 22% overall (source: American Publishers Association), but no one has bothered to notice that.

It's good news then all around then. Book sales are up. Hardcover sales at that.

Personally, I don't think ebooks will entirely replace print. Perhaps newspapers will no longer be paper. Heck, most of them are no longer news. If anything, ebooks and print will exist side by side. Print on demand devices will allow readers to purchase bound books. Small publishers will continue to print their books. I think the print book could become an even more splendid thing with limited runs and meticulously designed and bound editions.

I'd like to see a sales model wherein the electronic book can be purchased with the print edition. Why not let the consumer decide which format is best for the situation?

Beefcake and Brawny Writers

The June/July issue of Poets and Writers features a profile of "young writers to watch for," or some such title of enthusiastic promise. Among the writers discussed is James Kaelan, who will be biking up the coast of California to promote his new book. Not only is Kaelan a "young writer to watch" he also sports an impressive tattoo on his chest and a physique most writers only write about.

Perhaps then it's not surprising that P&W used a photo of the shirtless author on their frontcover. Yet it makes me wonder if the new paradigm of book marketing is based on the appearance of the author. It used to be that an author's photo was plastered on the cover of a book or the cover of a magazine because her or his work was well known or respected. I wonder, based on P&W's latest cover, if the same beauty-based model that has infiltrated the music business is creeping into publishing as well.

I suspect, way down in my potbelly, that aesthetic marketing of books and authors has always been. It's just that most authors are too homely to market for anything but their work.

The Process

Patience is everything.

In August of 2009, I sent my fourth poetry manuscript "Variance" to five publishers. A few weeks later, I received an offer of publication from a small but fairly well-known Canadian publisher. Of course, I was thrilled. But the offer wasn't all it seemed. The publisher wanted me to guarantee that I would purchase a third of the run, which worked out to about $2,000. He was very adamant that his company is not a vanity press (a publisher that will print anything if you pay them enough). I agreed. He was willing to put some money into the project, and, as he said, "we always lose money on poetry." No, this publisher wasn't a vanity press -- they are a subsidy press. This title didn't sit well with the publisher either.

So, I let that one fall away.

A rejection from a second publisher followed: all part of the process.

Then, in November, came a real offer from a very real, small publisher. BuschekBooks from Ottawa offered a no-strings, straight-up publishing deal for a first book of poetry. I accepted.

Many people ask how i choose publishers and markets to send to. It's always a gamble. Sending your work away, you have to accept that it becomes prey to the whims of chance and the tastes of editors. A piece that might be perfect for a specific magazine or journal might find an editor in the middle of the worst day of his or her life. So, it's not enough that the work has to be good. It has to be received at the precise moment when it will be welcomed.

When i first began sending my work away, 24 years ago (yes, it's been, and continues to be, a long apprenticeship) I'd send to the largest markets possible. Write a short science fiction story, it's going to Asimov's. Write a poem, it's going to Poetry. Of course, these were always rejected. After years of this, and needing to make a living at something, I started to pitch ideas for articles to small, regional magazines. The old High Grader, run by now-MP Charlie Angus and his partner Brit Griffin, was a fine publication in my backyard. After a few rejected pitches, I landed an article there and wrote freelance for them for about four years. They were great to work for and they taught me a lot about writing, publishing, and getting the story.

With a few publishing credits to my name, I branched out and began pitching to all manner of magazine -- this was in the mid-90s, the internet hadn't squashed the magazine market just yet -- and over the years wrote CD, book, concert and product reviews, articles on everything from bridge maintenance and snow removal, bloodhounds, and pet cemeteries. It was fun. It was also exhausting.

The freelance writer works every moment of the day, always looking for a story and a market for that story. During the most intense period of my freelance experience, I was sending out about 50 pitches a week and maybe getting 3 jobs/month. Sometimes these were well paying, several thousand dollars for an article with photos. Other times, the gig paid 50 dollars for a CD or book review. It averaged out around $200/job. Considering that each article took about a few days to a week to research and write, it's easy to see that it can be a hard go.

Over time, one builds up a list of clients. Sometimes the unexpected happens, editors change and bring in new writers, magazines fold, or airplanes smash into the World Trade Center.

The freelance market, along with everything else, was shaken by the attacks of 911. One of my most lucrative clients lost all of its ad revenue in one week and folded. It resurrected a couple of years later but as an in-house only magazine, meaning no freelance writers. Other magazines went the same way, tightening the editorial belt.

But I started out discussing a book of poetry, which is an entirely (almost) different thing from freelance writing. First, there is little to no money in poetry. Publishers offering poetry are really doing cultural work on the frontlines. Therefore, it's not about money -- whereas much of the freelance work I've done (and continue to do) was (and is) about money.

Back to the question: "How do you choose which publishers to send a poetry manuscript to?"
Here, for what it's worth, were some of my considerations:

1. What writers are in the publisher's stable? If there are writers there that you admire, good. If you see that some of the writers have gone on to publish more books with the same publisher or with other publishers, better;

2. Are they small enough to care? Will my book be just another in a list that will be forgotten as the publisher labours on its next batch of releases, or will they work with me to promote the book and give some guidance throughout the process? I read everything I could about the publisher, including interviews with their authors to determine whether they stand by their writers;

3. Are their books nominated for awards? It's not about winning, or even being nominated. Awards mean nothing to the work itself. Yet, if a publisher's books are consistently nominated for awards, it means that someone is at work. You want a publisher that will promote the book.

4. How long is the waiting time. I've had manuscripts sit on editors' desks for a year and longer. Life's short, get on with it.

5. How likely is the publisher to read the manuscript and to accept it? With a first book of poetry, or any literary work, it's difficult to get noticed. Many large publishers accept only work submitted by agents. It's unlikely that Faber & Faber is going to accept a first book of poetry from a Canadian poet with a few poems published in literary journals. This is not to say it can't happen. Personally, looking at the pattern of my life and, ahem, career, a contract from F&F seems unlikely. So, go closer to home.

Okay, this should have been two entries: one on freelance writing; one on poetry publishing.

Back to the beginning. I accepted the offer from BuschekBooks. My manuscript underwent significant transformation and will be published as Ghost Music this fall. As of this writing, we are entering the final edit phase, tossing away some poems, polishing others.

I will post all updates and adventures here as the book goes to print and as I wander the earth promoting it, and will try to stay on topic.

Thanks for reading.