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Stephen Collis launches his book The Red Album and Kim Minkus launches Tuft. Special guest will be Gregory Betts, co-editor of RUSH: what fuckan theory by bill bissett.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
The People’s Co-Op Bookstore
Vancouver, BC
7:30 PM
More information is available here.

Adeena Karasick
NEW YORK
Fri. May. 31, 2013
Present “Ceci n’est pas un Téléphone or Hooked on Telephonics: A Pata-philophonemic Investigation of the Telephone” as part of “Multi-media futures and other New Dimensions for Publishing and Content Dissemination” at BookExpo America 2013,
Javitz Center, New York, NY

Baba Brinkman, author of The Rap Canterbury Tales, presents Ingenious Nature as part of his Evolutionary Tales series.
May 31 – June 21
The Players Theatre
115 MacDougal Street
New York City, NY, United States
Ticketing and other information are available here.

Baba Brinkman, author of The Rap Canterbury Tales, presents the Rap Guide to Evolution as part of his Evolutionary Tales series.
June 1 – June 22
The Players Theatre
115 MacDougal Street
New York City, NY, United States
Ticketing and other information are available here.

Baba Brinkman, author of The Rap Canterbury Tales, presents Canterbury Tales Remixed part of his Evolutionary Tales series.
June 2 – June 23
The Players Theatre
115 MacDougal Street
New York City, NY, United States
Ticketing and other information are available here.

Talonbooks poet Cecily Nicholson (Triage) will be participating in the panel discussion “Writing In/Against Notions of a Commonwealth” at the 2013 Virginia Woolf Conference in Vancouver, Virginia Woolf and the Common (Wealth) Reader.
Thursday, June 6
2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Coast Plaza Hotel
1763 Comox Street
Vancouver, BC
Conference runs June 6 – 9
Full conference details here

Local author Patrice Martin joins Octopus Books on June 6 to read from his debut novel Kafka’s Hat. Martin’s story humorously follows the misadventures of a bureaucrat in his attempt to collect “Kafka’s hat.” He expects that this seemingly simple task will grant him a personal and professional promotion. Yet he seems to have overlooked some of the systemic difficulties within modern bureaucracy, and the task won’t be as easy as he initially expected.
Octopus Bookstore
116 Third Ave, Ottawa, Ontario
June 6, 2013
7:00 PM
“Patrice Martin’s first novel revels in the humour, witty eloquence, and intelligence of the author.”
– Le Devoir
Patrice Martin is a writer and politician who claims to have been bumping into the spirit of Kafka for most of his adult life. His years spent in government, first as a procedural clerk in Canada’s House of Commons, then as a municipal councilor, no doubt helped shape his first novel, the deliciously absurd, Kafka’s Hat. Martin holds a Master’s degree in political science from the University of Ottawa. He lives in Gatineau, Quebec, with his wife and daughter.
Organized by:
Octopus Books and Talonbooks

For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again
Created by Michel Tremblay
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Directed by Glynis Leyshon
A Western Canada Theatre Production (Kamloops, BC)
Starring Lorne Cardinal and Margo Kane
June 7-11, 2013
NAC Theatre
53 Elgin Street, at Confederation Square
Ottawa, Ontario
In this hilarious and heartrending tribute to his mother, Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay has created one of the great female characters in Canadian theatre. Lorne Cardinal, familiar as Sgt. David Quinton, the laid-back cop on CTV’s Corner Gas, plays the narrator, regaling us with tales about his feisty mother – a born storyteller with a love of exaggeration and invention.
Margo Kane, an award-winning actor and the Artistic and Managing Director of Full Circle First Nations Performance and the Talking Stick Festival in Vancouver, is every ounce the 1950’s homemaker as she irons, scrubs and tugs her husband’s underwear through the ringer. Her tongue can be sharp and ruthless but she is the Narrator’s most influential teacher. Even though she exasperates the son she so fiercely loves, she proves an inspiration for his art and the one to awaken his artistic passion.
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is a loving portrait, a midlife Valentine’s card from Michel Tremblay to his late mother, who died of cancer before he rose to prominence. Margo Kane’s performance as his long-suffering, but highly imaginative mother, highlights the imperfection of all mothers. Her startling authentic portrayal is underpinned with love and intelligence and the humanity that inspired one of our greatest living playwrights.
Visit the Northern Magnetic Festival website for more information.

Marcus Yousseff and James Long present their play Winners and Losers at the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in Ottawa, Ontario.
”Winners and Losers is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.”
Magnetic North Theatre Festival
June 11-15, 2013
Ottawa
More information is available here.

Adeena Karasick
GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN
June 20-23
Present “Ceci n’est pas un Téléphone or Hooked on Telephonics: A Pata-philophonemic Investigation of the Telephone” at the 14th Annual Convention of The Media Ecology Association
Grand Valley University
Grand Rapids, Michigan

The 2013 Whitehorse Poetry Festival: 20 to 23 June 2013
A festival for poetry lovers and writers of all kinds
•Be entertained by award-winning poets
•Get editing, publishing, promotion and tax tips from industry experts
•Find out what’s on the minds of some of today’s leading writers
Guests are Noelle Allen, Stephanie Bolster, Brad Cran, Dina Del Bucchia, Jamella Hagen, Ian LeTourneau, Kitty Lewis, Bren Simmers, Garry Thomas Morse and Jo Shapcott.
As well as hearing great poetry in the land of the midnight sun, you’ll be able to get practical advice from writing industry professionals and even have a chance to get on the spot tips in a one-on-one session.
The Whitehorse Poetry Festival takes place from Thursday 20 to Sunday 23 June, 2013 at the Old Fire Hall, 1105 1st Avenue, Whitehorse, Yukon, Y1A 5G3, Canada.
All events are at the Old Fire Hall, 1105 1st Avenue,
Whitehorse, apart from Poetry in the Park.
Check back to find out when tickets go on sale.
Thursday 20 June
5:30 to 7 pm – Trade Talk
The Art of the Personal Tax Return
with Brad Cran
Friday 21 June
12pm – Poetry in the Park, an Arts in the Park event
A lunchtime outdoor feast of international and Yukon poets
LePage Park, 3rd Avenue and Wood Street, Whitehorse
5:30 to 6:45 pm – Craft Talks
Solitary Collaboration – the Whys and Hows of Ekphrasis
with Stephanie Bolster and New Forms, New Shapes for Poetry
with Jo Shapcott
7:30 pm – Longest Day Poetry Bash
with Stephanie Bolster, Brad Cran, Dina Del Bucchia, Jamella Hagen, Ian LeTourneau, Jo Shapcott, Bren Simmers, Garry Thomas Morse
Saturday 22 June
9:45 to 11:15 am – Trade Talk
The Fine Art of Editing, Publishing and Promoting
A panel discussion with Noelle Allen, Dina Del Bucchia, Ian LeTourneau and Garry Thomas Morse, moderated by Patricia Robertson
11:30 am to 12:30 pm – Poetry Reading with Brad Cran and Bren Simmers
1:30 to 2:30 – Poetry Reading with Jo Shapcott and Garry Thomas Morse
2:45 to 4 pm – Poetry Reading with Stephanie Bolster, Ian LeTourneau and Dina Del Bucchia
Sunday 23 June
10 am to 12 pm – Meet the Experts one-on-one 15-minute consultations
1:15 to 2:30 pm – Trade Talk
The Road to Publication with Kitty Lewis, featuring Stephanie Bolster and Jamella Hagen
5 pm – Yukon Night with Jamella Hagen and other local poets

The 11th Annual Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival
July 18-21, 2013
This year’s event will feature another impressive list of talent, with moderator Katherine Gretsinger, a journalist and UBC professor.
This year’s returning Writer-in-Residence is Jack Hodgins, a nationally renowned author and teacher, who will provide twenty hours of classroom instruction and guidance in this year’s Writer-in-Residence Program. Be sure to register early as the class limit is 10 participants to work with this well respected Canadian author and teacher.
Visting Writers This Year
Maude Barlow
J. Edward Chamberlain
Kevin Chong
Esi Edugyan
Terry Fallis
Lorna Goodison
Katherine Monk
Steven Price
Anakana Scholfield
Fred Wah
Visit the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival website for more information.

Taking Shakespeare
By John Murrell
Directed by Diana Leblanc
July 13 to September 22, 2013
Opens July 30
Studio Theatre
34 George Street East
Stratford, Ontario
An aging and disenchanted professor whose career is on the wane agrees to tutor the university president’s son, Murph, who is floundering in his freshman English course and in his life. A chasm of difference lies between teacher and student, yet as they explore Othello together, both draw new strength from Shakespeare’s extraordinary insights.
Visit the Stratford Festival website for more information.

Taking Shakespeare
By John Murrell
Directed by Diana Leblanc
July 13 to September 22, 2013
Opens July 30
Studio Theatre
34 George Street East
Stratford, Ontario
An aging and disenchanted professor whose career is on the wane agrees to tutor the university president’s son, Murph, who is floundering in his freshman English course and in his life. A chasm of difference lies between teacher and student, yet as they explore Othello together, both draw new strength from Shakespeare’s extraordinary insights.
Visit the Stratford Festival website for more information.

KlezKanada’s Laurentian Retreat for 2013, the Chai Year, will be Monday August 19 to Sunday August 25.
Here is their plan, including an amazing poetry retreat:
Join us in the Mountains for the 18th edition of the KlezKanada Laurentian Retreat, Canada’s largest annual festival of Jewish/Yiddish culture and the arts. Featuring: an all-star faculty, world-class concerts, workshops for instrumentalists, singers, dancers, and visual artists of all levels, films and lectures on Jewish history, literature, language and culture, children’s and teen programs that set the standard for learning and creativity.
Check out the “KlezKanada Poetry Retreat (Three Millennia of Poetic Subversion)”, North America’s first Jewish poetry intensive retreat. The poetry seminar will be led by Minister of Semiotic Turbulence, Canadian poet and professor Adeena Karasick, as well as Chief of the Discordant Talmudic Crisis, poet and performer Jake Marmer.
The AM classes will be divided into 3 hour-long segments led by Adeena Karasick & Jake Marmer, on the topics listed below.
Tuesday: What is a “Jewish Poem”?
This session will focus on what formal qualities or processes play a part in Jewish writing – is it about nomadicism and exile? Is it using overt Jewish thematics? Lexicon? Or is it about the way its written, its structure, form, the way it’s inscribed in nomadicism, exile, perhaps. Is it the humor? The disruptions? The questions? Dialectic? This session will not so much as provide answers but open up the field of the relation of writing to culture.
Wednesday: Poetry of the talmud / Practice of darshening
This session will explore various ways that the Talmud is poetry; the intersections between Talmud discourse and poetry, focusing on both form and content and the ways we can use such texts as the Talmud for poetic inspiration. Secondarily, this session will show how cultural ancestry manifests through contemporary semiotic practice –
With Darshening, we will foreground the necessity for continued active interpretation, dwelling on how to be a good writer is to be a good reader and will encourage a continued dialogue with various texts in order to appreciate the infinite
possibilities available with every letter, phrase, inscription.
Thursday: Poetry as Prophecy
Through this session, will will focus on various means of prophetic divination through letters. Whether it be looking at Kabbalistic meditations or Gematriatic methodologies, ecstatic writing, automatic writing, or just the profound way texts
can become a source of visionary inspiration and cause us to see the world in a new way, through a new lens.
Friday: defining G-d / concrete Poetry / Uncreative Writing
This session will look at ways various poets have come to express the Divine; say the unsayable, contain the uncontainable. Thus, through a process of veiling and unveiling, this session will show how a definition is not inscribed in deafening finality, closure but an infinite spiraling of possible expression.
We will also discuss the physicality and materiality of the page. We will explore different forms of expression and investigate ways in which the actual space and material makeup of the letters and other infusions such as collage, graphics, layered or mutated texts not only interrupt but as a means of ever expansive literary expression.
Visit the KlezKanada website for the latest updates and schedule.

Marcus Yousseff and James Long present the play Winners and Losers at the Brighton Festival in the United Kingdom.
“Winners and Losers is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.”
Aug 21-24, 2013
Noorderzon Festival, Netherlands
More information is available here.

The St. Leonard Chronicles
By Steve Galluccio
Directed by Roy Surette
WORLD PREMIERE
October 1 to October 27, 2013
Centaur Theatre Company
453 St. François-Xavier
Montreal, Quebec
Arrivederci St. Léonard.
Hello Beaconsfield!
From the award-winning author of Centaur’s runaway hits Mambo Italiano and In Piazza San Domenico comes a saucy, delicious new comedy about a young couple in St. Léonard. There is barely a hint of gilded rococo in their newly renovated duplex – not just a cultural infraction but a telltale sign. Now Terry and Robert want to move to the Anglo-Saxon suburb of Beaconsfield, seen as tantamount to committing a mortal sin by their traditional Italian relatives. When they confess their plans to their family, this admission opens the floodgates to other unspoken desires and revelations, turning conservative St. Léonard values upside down. Surprisingly touching and sidesplittingly funny!
Visit the Centaur Theatre website for the latest updates!

Seeds
by Annabel Soutar
Directed by Chris Abraham
Centaur Theatre Presents
A Porte Parole Production
October 29 to November 24, 2013
Centaur Theatre Company
453 St. François-Xavier
Montreal, Quebec
Sowing the seeds of deception.
Claiming a patent on life.
This gripping, modern day David-versus-Goliath docudrama chronicles the epic legal showdown between Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser and Monsanto. The agrochemical firm accused Schmeiser of illegally growing its patented, genetically engineered canola seeds on his farm, while he claimed they were blown in with
the wind. Based on court trial transcripts and interviews, the play brings us behind the scenes through a maze of patent wars, opinionated scientists and clashes between farmers and the biotechnology industry.
When Schmeiser famously asked the question, “who owns life?” before the Supreme Court of Canada, his words galvanized the anti-GMO (genetically modified organism) movement around the world.
Visit the Centaur Theatre website for the latest updates!

Marcus Yousseff and James Long present the play Winners and Losers in Toronto, Ontario.
“Winners and Losers is a staged conversation that embraces the ruthless logic of capitalism, and tests its impact on our closest personal relationships as well as our most intimate experiences of self.”
Nov 10 – Dec 8, 2013
Presented by Crow’s Theatre in association with Canadian Stage
The Berkley Street Theatre
Toronto, ON
More information is available here.

WASHINGTON, DC
Nov. 21-24
Present “Rants, Antics and Manic Semantics:
Deconstruction and Its impact on Communication” at the National Communication Association 99th Annual Convention: in the Applied Semantics and Practical Communication Across the Disciplines Session

Adeena Karasick
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Tues. Nov. 26 2013
Art Bar Series
Q Space, 382 College Street West
Toronto, Ontario
8:00 pm

OTTAWA, ONTARIO
Sat. Dec. 14 2013
Adeena Karasick performs with bill bissett for Annual Christmas Party AB Series: Global Poetry, Music and innovative Arts
Sugar Café
692 Somerset West
Ottawa, Ontario,
8:00 pm

OTTAWA, ONTARIO
Sat. Dec. 14 2013
Adeena Karasick performs with bill bissett for Annual Christmas Party AB Series: Global Poetry, Music and innovative Arts
Sugar Café
692 Somerset West
Ottawa, Ontario,
8:00 pm

Motherhouse
By David Fennario
World Premiere
February 25 to March 23, 2014
Centaur Theatre Company
453 St. François-Xavier
Montreal, Quebec
A spirited and moving tribute.
Truth emerges from the darkness of war.
Penned by the renowned author of Balconville this powerful drama gives a voice to the disillusioned working class women employed at the British Munitions Factory in Verdun, Quebec during World War I. With tensions running high across the country over conscription and linguistic and religious issues, dedicated mothers, wives, sisters and sweethearts assemble artillery shells to support the war effort and inadvertently find themselves assembled to bring about change. This munitions manufacturer employed over 4,000 women, including Fennario’s mother. Tragically, the city of Verdun sacrificed more soldiers to both World Wars than any other place in Canada.
Visit the Centaur Theatre website for the latest updates!

Albertine, En Cinq Temps
DU 11 MARS AU 5 AVRIL
de Michel Tremblay
mise en scène Lorraine Pintal
Théatre du Nouveau Monde
84, rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest
Montréal (Québec)
TOUTE UNE VIE DE FEMME DÉTRICOTÉE PAR LES MOTS
Il y a trente ans, Michel Tremblay a écrit un des grands textes du théâtre contemporain en plaçant face à elle-même une femme aux différents âges de sa vie. Entre l’Albertine de trente ans désemparée d’avoir presque battu à mort sa fille de onze ans et celle de soixante-dix ans qui, apaisée, entre en foyer d’accueil, Tremblay trace cinq lignes de vie pour dessiner l’arc de toute une existence déchirée entre la culpabilité et la rage. Dans l’atmosphère suspendue du crépuscule — entre les flamboyances du couchant et le lent lever de la lune pourpre d’été — les Albertine, inspirées par l’écoute attentive de leur sœur Madeleine, nous livrent la cantate de leur propre vie transfigurée par l’âpre lyrisme d’une langue à la fois terrible et caressante.
Lorraine Pintal voulait depuis longtemps mettre en scène ce chef-d’oeuvre de notre dramaturgie afin de montrer toute la lumière qui émane du trajet de cette femme qui, en accédant à la conscience de son propre destin, saisit tout le tragique de la condition humaine. En réunissant pour cette oeuvre chorale des comédiennes de Québec et de Montréal, elle a assemblé une fabuleuse distribution emportée par la présence souveraine de Monique Miller.
Coproduction Théâtre du Trident / Théâtre du Nouveau Monde
Visitez Théâtre du Nouveau Monde

They Called Me Number One: Photos from the Vancouver Launch

Last evening at Vancouver Community College (Clark campus), about 130 people celebrated the launch of the book They Called Me Number One, which is currently in second place on the BC Bestsellers list.
Wednesday May 22, 2013 in Meta-TalonDaniel MacIvor’s Cul-de-sac Reviewed by Ed Huyck
Cul-de-sac, a play by Daniel MacIvor, is currently being staged in Minneapolis, Minnesota, put on by the Loudmouth Collective at the Open Eye Figure Theatre.

Ed Huyck reviewed the play for CityPages.com. A few excerpts follow.
Monday May 6, 2013 in Meta-Talon
Way More Than A Thousand Words: Coping with Emotions and Otters Launch
Ash Tanasiychuk takes pictures. Of Dina Del Bucchia. Nuff said. Oh, and Otters!
Monday April 29, 2013 in Meta-Talon
Other People’s Moccasins: Joanne Arnott Interviews Wanda John-Kehewin
Joanne Arnott interviews Wanda John-Kehewin about her new book In the Dog House:
I can’t really say there were many poets of the past that influenced my writing. I think when I really started to be inspired was when I heard that there were other Native writers, and that wasn’t until I moved to the West Coast in 1991. For some reason I didn’t think it was actually something an “Indian” could do. There weren’t any books in the library that were by First Nations people when I was growing up.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.