I'm starting to feel a little overwhelmed by all the readings (mainly poetry with a little prose scattered about) and am going to take a break tonight and just watch some TV. I'm going to go to McNally Robinson Polo Park for the Premier of FlashForward, the television series based on Sci-Fi author Robert J Sawyer's book of the same name.

I've never really been a big sci-fi fan, but like I said, I need to take a break from the readings and try something a little different.

Should be interesting. But I don't think there'll be cheese there.

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Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.

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After receiving the Banff Center Bliss Carman Poetry Award - i.e. the ring - Linda Frank contemplated the other rings she always wears, a simple wedding band on the one hand and a silver double-ring on the other. She adjusted the rings, moving the Bliss from one hand to the other and wiggling her fingers until her hands felt 'right.'

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Linda Frank's Books:

Cobalt Moon Embrace. Ottawa: Buschek Books, 2002.
Kahlo: The World Split Open. Ottawa: Buschek Books, 2008.

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Ariel Gordon is the Winnipeg-based author of two recent small press chapbooks and has had poetry published in fine lit mags such as Carousel, PRISM International and Prairie Fire.

Her first collection of poetry, Hump, is forthcoming from Ontario's Palimpsest Press in spring 2010.

When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

It’s been a different festival this year for me.

Last year, I attended far more of the afternoon book chats and far fewer of the Mainstages.

Mainstage #1: Bonnie Burnard’s tough frailness while reading and thinking through how to describe her book about middle-aged friends.

How she quietly and unmusically took over the stage after the more performative Gregory Scofield, despite the fact that even she didn’t think she could do it.

This year, it’s been Nooner/Mainstage every day and I haven’t hit any of the uni readings. They’re sort of like my dirty little lit secret, you know? Mostly attended by students, who get assigned to write something about the book or the author, they’re a different window into the festival, a different audience, a different attempt to connect with readers…

Afternoon Book Chat #1: Observing the unspooling of Cyril Dabydeen quick and prodigious memory. He was charmingly self-praising and even, as THIN AIR director Charlene Diehl noted, glossed his own poems for the audience. And they had a little afternoon tea-table set up, where I was able to get orange pekoe and date square.

But I will console myself collegially tomorrow with George Elliott Clarke at RRC and the Friday afternoon panel (The Future!) at UW.

That panels consitutes another of my festival traditions. No matter the subject, no matter the authors, they’re always always memorable.

Mainstage #2: The familiarity terrain – geographically and, also I think poetically - of David O’Meara’s S. Korea poems. We talked bibimbop afterwards, mostly because I was feeling nostalgic about my time in S. Korea. Also, although I only caught the tail-end of Jaqueline Larson’s reading, I greatly appreciated her storm-trooper boots but also the sass and energy of her work.

Tonight is my last Mainstage, on the theme Love Actually. I haven’t seen local Struan Sinclair read yet, or heard Margaret Sweatman’s new novel yet, and both Rhea Tregebov and Tim Wynne-Jones’s fictional work is entirely new to me.

See you there?

Today at the nooner Jeanette Lynes told us that it took her 7 years to write her debut novel. (It’s called The Factory Voice and I’m gonna get me a copy.)
But Ariel quickly got her to point out that during that time she had also published numerous books of poetry, and also she teaches.

But anyway, 7 years has got me thinking.

I have been sorting through a lot of thoughts lately, about what makes a writer. What validates a writer as a writer and what makes a writer ‘good’.
I’ve concluded that, despite the popular pressure of
publishing = writer = good writer= writer that feels validated in their craft

its all bs and everyone that wants to write is entitled to be called a writer, and who even knows what’s good or not when its all based on opinion anyway and there are SO many different and wonderful styles of writing in the world.

Really it’s about people having a voice and being able to share that voice with other people, and about connecting with other people through voice.

So that means that sometimes you might not write a damn thing for months, or years, or sometimes you find your grandma’s old journal but its not actually a journal, it’s a bunch of short stories scribbled down and partly finished and you realize that she is a writer and you are a writer and even that girl in your first year English class who really liked to write about the time she found her cat dead and rotting and how it was really just a poorly veiled metaphor for how she felt in high school, she is a writer too.

I know I’m being idealistic. And I know that there are probably some of you out there that are editors or teachers and you are like “Courtney, I have seen all kinds of writing, and trust me darling, not everyone that wants to be a writer is a writer”
And I respect that I have never been in your position.
I also respect that it can be important to support people in developing their writing.
(but always we have to ask-who's support? who's ideas of developing?)

I just feel like it is so dangerous to put limitations on who can write, and what is good, and what is good enough to be shared. What I am interested in is knowing that everyone feels like their voice is good and valid and valued.

Because writing is an act of resistance.

All of this has nothing really to do with Jeanette Lynes or her reading today. I really enjoyed what she shared of her novel, it was fun and intriguing and it made me laugh. And she also wrote a poem about her mother’s feet and I liked that too. Oh, and I really like her hair.

Have a good day.
See you tonight at mainstage.






Courtney Slobogian was born in Winnipeg and likes it that way.

She is a writer/understated activist/ irreverent feminist.

Some of her work can be tracked down in quiet corners of the internet.

She co-hosts a radio show on CKUW called Tiger Lilies are Poisonous, and dislikes cotton socks. She wrote a thesis once.

Bloggers at the nooner, having made up.
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Sometimes, when playing Scrabble, I find myself facing a tray full of vowels, consider myself unlucky, and carefully add one or maybe even two of them onto a previously placed consonant on the board, making a word like 'eye' or 'ewe' or 'tea' or 'tee,' for minimal points, and reach into the bag of letters with closed eyes hoping for anything other than an a, e, i, o, or u.

From now on when I find myself in that situation I'll think of Christian Bok (I don't know how to place the dots over the o) and wonder what he would do in a similar situation. Maybe he'd find an N on the board and make a word like 'eunoia,' the title of the book that is his wild and daring love affair with vowels.

Hearing Bok read from Eunoia (which, as it happens, is the shortest word in the English language to contain all five vowels) at last night's mainstage poetry bash was an experience to say the least. An experience all together different from reading the work on one's own.

In fact, I was so into the reading that I didn't even think about the cheese on the table near the bar! Imagine that.

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See Christian Bok today (Thursday) at 1:00pm in room 3M69 at the University of Winnipeg.

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Brandon James Bertram is an English/Creative Writing student at the University of Winnipeg. He reads, writes, rides bikes, and drinks coffee.