Well folks, it appears the festival is over for this year. It was my first time attending Thin Air, and obviously my first time blogging for it.

Not fully knowing what to expect I went into the week a little anxious but excited. And, it was awesome!

I jumped right in, attending three out of five nooners, fiver out of the six evening mainstages, four of the campus readings, two AfterWords, and one TV premier.

There were many great moments throughout the week but the highlight for me was George Elliott Clarke who I made sure to see twice. I was a little disappointed when he ran out of books at Red River (he was selling them for $15) but I made sure to buy one (for $24.95) at the AfterWords reading at Aqua Books. I waited to meet him and have him sign the book and it was worth it. He's very kind and seems to enjoy chatting with his fans. Inscribed in my copy of his new verse-novel I & I are these words:

For Brandon--who is a poet already , given the sincerity and the passion!

Truly,

George Elliott Clarke
25 September IX

Now I have to write.

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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.

And so it went... I made my way to Polo Park expecting to be early enough to browse the bargain book section before the event was to begin. But when I got there (at 6:45) Robert J Sawyer was already up front talking about the process of adapting his book to tv. When I inquired I was told that the time was bumped to 6:30 as opposed to the 7:30 start time in the program (I guess Charlene was onto something when she said check the website because things can change).

But anyway, I was there, and the show hadn't started yet.

BUT...the place was packed! The only chairs left were at the very back and when I finally wormed my way through the crowd to an empty seat and sat down I found I could only see the top third of the screen. This was just not going to work, so when the show finally started, after hearing Sawyer yap on and on about how good the acting was and how satisfied he was and about how much money he was making, and on and on, I, along with the gentleman next to me, decided to stand up so we could see the screen better. This was okay, but not the most comfortable way to spend an hour, but hey, there are commercial breaks, right? I can sit down then.

WRONG. There were commercial breaks, but before the first one even arrived who should come in even later than myself and find and sit in the seat that I had been sitting in? Why Christian Bok of course, along with his ragtag gang of two.

So there I was, standing at the back, leaning against a wall of military history books, right behind Christian Bok and company. FOR AN HOUR.

Was it worth it?

I kept telling myself that there was always the option of cutting out early, maybe even heading to the mainstage where there are chairs and cheese and Margaret Sweatman, but I. could. not. seem. to. pull. myself. away.

It caught me, it pulled me in. The premise is this: everyone in the world blacks out at the exact same time for the exact same length of time, 2 minutes 17 seconds. During that time, each person has a vision of their life exactly six months into the future.

Crazy, right? That couldn't happen. But I guess that's why they call it speculative fiction. Anyway, it's one of those serial dramas, like Lost, which means you have to keep watching every week or you won't know what's going on. But you'll want to know what's going on so you will watch because it's interesting and mysterious. They got me. Now I have to try to find someway to watch it next week to see what happens. And then, I'll have to find someway to watch it the week after that, and the week after that. This is not good. Especially since I don't have any tv stations. But, with things the way they are these days, I can probably find it online which would be just dandy.

There are also some pseudo-interesting philosophical undertones to the story: questions of whether or not us knowing the future can allow us to change the future, and things like that.

It was all pretty good, but I kind of wish I hadn't gone, because now I have to keep watching and if I don't, I'll forever be left wondering why it was that Harold (from Harold and Kumar) didn't have a vision...a FlashForward of his future.

Sawyer was extremely happy with how it turned out and it seemed Christian Bok and friends were as well, when at the end they started chanting, "Sawyer, Sawyer, Sawyer."

Thankfully, no one else joined in.

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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.

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.

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.

I am a firm believer that writing should be, needs to be, rooted in a place, or places. In my own writing I nearly always put in references to specific places, however subtle or overt those references may be. Where we are, where we’ve come from are important to who we are, and who we are is where our writing comes from.

What is poetry without roots? Who are we without history? Poetry does have roots and we do have history, it is acknowledging that and embracing it that is important.

Cyril Dabydeen has roots in three places: India, where his family emigrated from; Guyana, where they immigrated to; and Canada, where he has lived for nearly forty years. His writing acknowledges and draws from all of these places and the places between. India, Guyana, and Canada each have their place in Cyril Dabydeen’s writing, both his poetry and his prose.

The immigrant experience, I imagine, is largely a liminal one--constantly existing between two places.

Writing from places we know is how we share who we are.

We live in places. We exist between where we live and where we’ve come from.

Elizabeth Bachinsky lives in BC. She exists between BC and the Ukraine, where her roots lie. Her poetry is aware of and reflects this beautifully.

Writing can not exist outside of Place.

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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.

Last night following the first half of the Mainstage I decided to buy featured writer Jon Paul Fiorentino's recent novel Stripmalling.

And I figured, since he was standing there with a pen anyway, I'd ask him to sign it.

He thanked me for the support and while I told him I enjoyed the reading and the cover of his book, and how the parents described in the novel are very similar to my own he was writing something rather lengthy on the inside of the book.

We thanked each other again and shook hands and I made my way to the bar and the cheese table and then back to my seat.

I opened the book and immediately burst into laughter at what he had written:

Brandon!

Let's make sweet love behind the 7-11 on day street--3 am ok?

xo Jon

And while I'm honoured by the proposition, the answer, Jon, is no. Sorry.

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Jon Paul Fiorentino's most recent novel is Stripmalling. ECW Press: Toronto, 2009.

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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.

Poetry and what?

What is this ever so enigmatic phrase “The Common Good?”

And what, even, is poetry?

Okay, that one’s easy...right?

Poetry is the harnessing of ideas, putting ideas to work by way of carefully chosen words, punctuation, line breaks, etc. It is images and metaphors. Poetry can be stories, conversations, abstractions. Poetry can be confessional, can be didactic.

According to Gwendolyn MacEwan,

Poetry has got nothing to do with poetry.
Poetry is how the air goes green before thunder,
is the sound you make when you come, and
why you live and how you bleed, and

The sound you make or don’t make when you die.

Now, I’m aware of the impossibility of pinning down words with ostensive definitions, poetry especially, so I cite our dear friend Mirriam Webster as just another example of how we define poetry:

Main Entry: po·et·ry
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a: metrical writing : verse b: the productions of a poet : poems
2: writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm
3 a: something likened to poetry especially in beauty of expression b: poetic quality or aspect .

With poetry being all these things and more, the questions still remain, what is the common good and what does Poetry have to do with it?

I’ll leave those questions to you to think about, as I myself am still pondering their plethora of possible answers.

At any rate, when I made my way out to CMU this morning to see Rhea Tregebov and Gregory Scofield read their poetry I was hoping they’d shed some light on this subject, seeing as the title of the event was Poetry and the Common Good. Instead I was treated simply to a traditional reading that saw Gregory pouring out passionate poems that bounce between English and Cree with a most amazing sense of rythm and cadence, and Rhea reading old and new poems and one, entitled “The Gardens of the Antarctic,” a poetic sci-fi dystopia about what it might be like if we consume ourselves to extinction (a speculation that doesn’t seem all that far-fetched anymore).

Maybe poetry is by its very nature acting towards a common good.

...poetry...is always political and subversive: it uses our foremost technological tool, the ur-tool that is language, against itself, against its tendency to be the supreme analytic and organizing instrument. In poetry, language is always a singer as well as a thinker; a lover as well as an engineer. It discovers and delights in its own physical being, as though it were an otter or a raven rather than simply the vice president in charge of making sense.

-Don McKay

Maybe poetry is by its very nature pushing us toward a common good, causing us to rethink normal and see that there might actually be a different way of going about things. Imagine that.

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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.

I don't speak French, so It's a good thing Winnipeg based author and poet Bertrand Nayet speaks with his hands, reaching up and out, grabbing words and phrases from out of thin air and weaving them into passionate pieces spoken with grit and gusto. So even though I couldn't understand what he was saying I knew that he was saying something. And even though I couldn't understand what he was saying, the passion with which he spoke, with both his voice and his hands, made his contribution to the opening night a pleasure to be a part of. I was half expecting him to translate after, but was neither surprised nor disappointed when he didn't. Still, I should probably learn French.

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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.

Greetings folks! Allow me to introduce myself...

My name is Brandon and I have to admit I've never been to a writer's festival before, let alone blogged about one. But, I've heard rumours of boxed wine and room-temperature cheese, so I'm sure It'll be right up my alley. Not to mention the fact that after four years wading through the waters of undergraduate academia, more or less directionless, I have finally declared myself as a Creative Writing major, so reading and writing are what I study and what I do. So, over the course of this next week I'll be dipping into the literary scene, taking in readings, lectures, and launches, and more than likely falling behind in my studies. Sometimes there's just no time for sleeping.

Anyway, I just thought I'd say hello.

I just pulled some delicious cheesy flat-bread out of the oven, so I'm gonna sign off for now and slice into that before getting ready for Voices From Oodena in just a couple of hours. Maybe I'll see you 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.