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September 2010

Wednesday September 8, 2010
Pivot Readings - Jesse Huisken, rob mclennan and Meaghan Strimas

Thursday September 9, 2010
Tear the Curtain! - Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr

Thursday September 9, 2010
Vigil - Morris Panych

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Trespassers by Morris Panych - Belfry Theatre

Tuesday September 14, 2010
The Olive Reading Series presents a night with Robert Kroetsch

Friday September 17, 2010
The Refugee Hotel - Passe Muraille

Friday September 24, 2010
David Homel at the Kingston WritersFest

Friday September 24, 2010
Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest

Sunday September 26, 2010
Carmen Aguirre - Word on the Street

Tuesday September 28, 2010
Ali & Ali: The Deportation Hearings

Posted: Wednesday September 1, 2010

The Collected Books of Artie Gold Have Arrived!

Who was Artie Gold?

Endre Farkas indicates: “Along with Ken Norris, we were the original poetry editors of Vehicule Press, although he considered himself the ‘disassociate’ editor. He and I ran the Vehicule reading series in the early ’70s. He was the disassociate host and when we started the mimeographed magazine Mouse Eggs, he contributed the name, some poems and his disassociation. And though he was always disassociating, he always believed in poetry as a noble obsession and in supporting the development of a vital and hip poetry scene. 

George Bowering, Canada’s first poet laureate, who knew Artie well, wrote of him: “I knew that he was serious about poetry. He was not interested in getting famous or expressing his uniqueness or preparing himself for a job teaching creative writing. Artie never chased any kind of job very hard. What keeps coming through his poetry is his learning, his engaged reading of the avant garde. Since his first poems Gold has always shown taste.“ 

The Collected Books of Artie Gold includes his eight published books, which arrive as a startling discovery for many readers, presenting a unique and singular voice in Canadian poetry.

Posted: Wednesday September 1, 2010

Jamie Reid reads from PREZ: Homage to Lester Young

for Jamie & Carol (August 2010) from Lary Bremner on Vimeo.

Jamie Reid is also the author of I. Another. The Space Between

Posted: Monday August 30, 2010

Vancouver Opera presents Lillian Alling

This fall, Vancouver Opera will present the world premiere of its new commissioned opera by Canada’s foremost opera-creation team: composer John Estacio and librettist John Murrell.

In 1927, in the true story and legend, young Lillian Alling arrives in New York City from Russia in desperate search of a man called Jozéf. Penniless, she walks across North America and into the wilds of northwestern BC, following Jozéf’s elusive path. During her brave trek, she is embraced by a Norwegian farming community in North Dakota, incarcerated in Oakalla Prison Farm near Vancouver, and loved by Scotty, a lineman along BC’s “telegraph trail”.

Seeking freedom in the future but bound to a dark past, Lillian’s fierce determination and alluring mystery drive her into danger and forever change the lives of everyone she meets. A cathartic scene on the banks of Skeena River reveals a shocking truth and brings Lillian face to face with destiny. Her story will take you deep into the emotional heart of love and courage.

At $1.6 million, Lillian Alling is the biggest and most expensive production VO has ever taken on. With two hours of music, 14 scenes, 12 principals, a chorus of 36, a 60-piece orchestra, and more than 175 costumes, it’s guaranteed to be well worth taking in.

Lillian Alling has performances on October 16, 19, 21, and 23.

Visit the Vancouver Opera web site for more information.

Posted: Thursday August 26, 2010

The Remarkable Emily Carr

This month, the audience at the Chemainus Theatre Festival is in for an educational treat.

The Remarkable Emily Carr traces the artist’s life, very much in her own words, from age 6 to 60. Two actresses share the role of Carr. Ella Simon portrays the artist as a young woman, while Barbara Pollard, a 30-year stage veteran, plays Carr in mid-life and beyond.

A former member of Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Barbara Pollard now lives in Vancouver. She’s one of the original authors of the smash Canadian hit, Mom’s the Word.

Sarah Rodgers, the director, is fresh from winning outstanding director kudos at the Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards for Billy Bishop Goes to War. She appreciates the fact that Susan Shillingford pieced together the play using Carr’s autobiography titled Growing Pains. “What’s unique about this play is that it’s all her own words,” Rodgers said.

The Remarkable Emily Carr runs from August 25th to September 18th.

Visit the Chemainus Theatre Festival web site for more information.

Posted: Wednesday August 25, 2010

Muthologos is here!

We are pleased to announce that Ralph Maud‘s second edition of Muthologos, a collection of Charles Olson‘s lectures and interviews, is now available.

The revised edition, arriving some thirty years after George Butterick’s first, adds several new items: “At Goddard College, April 1962”; a second Vancouver 1963 discussion, “Duende, Muse, and Angel”; a short addition to the “BBC Interview”; a second “On Black Mountain”; and a further hour of Olson’s conversation with Herb Kenny. In addition, all the available tapes of these talks and interviews have been listened to again, and many of their previous transcription errors have been corrected.

This is a “must-have” item for scholars, critics, and followers of Charles Olson.

Posted: Wednesday August 25, 2010

Charles Olson reads 'The Librarian' (Mar 1966)

Posted: Monday August 23, 2010

Steve McCaffery reading from Carnival @ Instal 09, Glasgow

Steve McCaffery has been twice nominated for the Governor General’s Award and is the co-author of Rational Geomancy with bpNichol.

Posted: Thursday August 19, 2010

On Healing Family

With her play Doc, Sharon Pollock appears to confirm the theory by Marcel Proust that a neurotic makes the best physician, since only this person is attentive and understanding enough to treat himself, and therefore others. However, said physician must suffer from what they are actively trying to cure.

In Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock, Sherrill Grace has written the story of Pollock’s life from her family roots in New Brunswick through her pioneering years as a Canadian playwright to the present as she continues to make theatre. Pollock’s semi-autobiographical play Doc makes it clear how close to home many of her earlier plays are, as the audience is visited by a version of her own personal “ghost story”.

Pollock makes a rather intriguing remark about the role of reality in fiction:

I always say that the realities of life are the flour and eggs and vanilla a playwright puts into the cake that she’s baking. And when it’s all finished, who can taste the flour and eggs and vanilla anymore? It’s all about the cake itself.

Doc recipient of the Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the Governor General’s Award for Drama, is being revived by Soulpepper in a production that runs from August 19 to September 18.

To purchase tickets, visit the soulpepper web site.

Sharon Pollock has two plays with Talonbooks, Saucy Jack and Walsh.

Posted: Wednesday August 18, 2010

The Book of Esther

The Book of Esther by Leanna Brodie is currently running at the Blyth Festival. This epic story tackles issues of faith, farming and sexuality with a refreshingly frank approach.

Set in the early 1980s, stoic Seth Dalzell is struggling to hold onto his Century Farm in the rural community of Baker’s Creek. His devoutly evangelical wife, Anthea, is struggling to keep her family intact. Todd is a middle-aged pillar of the gay community, living in Parkdale and providing shelter for homeless youth. And A.D. is a teenage hustler, happiest when he’s raising Cain. What do they all have in common? Esther Dalzell. She is fifteen years old and she has just run away from home.

“This is a play about running away and the overwhelming urge to escape our problems, instead of dealing with them head on,” says Artistic Director Eric Coates. “It tackles some big issues, but it does so in a very balanced way.”

The Book of Esther is Brodie’s second premiere at the Blyth Festival. Her critically acclaimed Schoolhouse premiered as a sold-out hit in 2006.

The Book of Esther plays at the Blyth Festival in repertory until September 4.

Posted: Wednesday August 18, 2010

The Road Forward

The Road Forward is a 10:00 video now circulating film festivals throughout North America.

Directed by Marie Clements, The Road Forward was inspired by the groundbreaking movement of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, and dedicated to the countless First Nations women who have “disappeared” on B.C.‘s Highway of Tears. 


Featuring: Evan Adams, Byron Chief-Moon, Leela Gilday, Jennifer Kreisberg, Kevin Loring, 
Pura Fé, Ostwelve and Michelle St. John.

The performance includes choreography by Michael Greyeyes and an original sculptural installation by Connie Watts.

The Road Forward was originally commissioned by the 2010 Cultural Olympiad and presented by The Four Host Nation’s Aboriginal Pavilion as the closing performance, with support from Canada Council for the Arts.

Posted: Wednesday August 18, 2010

Tear the Curtain!

Tear the Curtain! has been custom built for the Arts Club Stanley Stage and reflects the Stanley’s dual identity as both historic cinema and playhouse. Written as a screenplay, this live production slips seamlessly between play and feature film. It’s a stylish thriller inspired by the “reel” history of the theatre. It uses and abuses Hollywood film noir archetypes like the mob boss, the femme fatale, the hardboiled detective, and the girl friday. It is an attempt at authentic originality in a world of imitations and stereotypes. It is a story of ultimate compromise. Can the truth be revealed somewhere between the stage and the screen?

Written by Electric Company’s Jonathon Young and Kevin Kerr, this show will run from September 9 to October 10.

Visit Tear the Curtain! for more information.

Posted: Monday August 16, 2010

Adeena Karasick at the Kingston WritersFest

For over twenty years, Adeena Karasick’s linguistically provocative, philosophically complex wordplay has excited national and international audiences. “Electricity in language,” says Nicole Brossard. “Plural, cascading, exuberant in its cross–fertilization of punning and knowing, theatre and theory,” adds Charles Bernstein, while the Globe and Mail describes Adeena’s writing as “a tour de force of linguistic doublespeak.”

Adeena Karasick will be reading on Friday, September 24 as part of Vox Performa at the Kingston WritersFest. Her most recent book with Talon is Amuse Bouche.

Posted: Monday August 16, 2010

Des Walsh on Rocking the Cradle

Des Walsh talks about how he adapted Federico García Lorca’s Yerma to create his own play Rocking the Cradle.

Posted: Friday August 13, 2010

8th Annual George Ryga Award Shortlist Announced

The George Ryga Centre, BC BookWorld, CBC Radio One and Okanagan College are proud to announce the Shortlist for this year’s 8th Annual George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in BC writing and publishing. The top three books submitted for the award are: God Of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood Editions); A Thousand Dreams by Larry Campbell, Neil Boyd & Lori Culbert (Greystone), and Where The Blood Mixes by Kevin Loring (Talonbooks).

“Once again, we received a a large field of well-written submissions this year,” said John Lent of Okanagan College. “It’s maybe a sign of these times that this award draws such strength from the writing community, so many strong responses. If anyone ever thought writers weren’t engaging in the issues of our times, the books submitted for this award would convince them otherwise. In the end, these three books—a piece of non-fiction, a book of poems and a play—were the books that kept insisting themselves forward.”

This year’s winner will be announced in the Lecture Theatre of Okanagan College’s KLO Campus in Kelowna at a gala celebration of The Ryga Award on Saturday, November 6th, the last day of George Ryga Week. Excerpts from Bachinsky, Campbell and Loring’s works will be broadcast on CBC Radio One before the final winner is announced.

Posted: Friday August 13, 2010

Dramas Illumine Dark Matter

This fall in Toronto, Theatre Passe Muraille, Canada’s oldest alternative “theatre without walls”, will be presenting two plays that use outlandish comedy to explore serious issues.

BASH’d! is a fast-paced, high energy, musical love story, told almost entirely in rhyme. Performed by two gay hip-hop artists, T-Bag & Feminem, BASH’d! tells the story of Dillon and Jack. Dillon is a young man who comes out of the closet, leaving his conservative parents and the “905” suburbs behind for the downtown streets of The Big Smoke. Jack has two gay dads, and already lives in the big city. He is fabulous and fun, stylish and charming. Jack and Dillon meet, fall in love and get married; but just before they can live happily ever after, Jack is viciously attacked.

The Refugee Hotel is a moving portrayal of a group of Chilean political refugees who arrived at a Vancouver residential hotel in 1974, months after Chile’s bloody military coup. Passionate and insightful, the play brilliantly captures the immigrant and exile experience in Canada. It is a story about love and the strength of the human spirit.

Listen to Carmen Aguirre talking with the CBC.

The Refugee Hotel previews on September 16 and runs from September 17 to October 4. BASH’d (A GAY RAP OPERA) previews on October 14 and runs from October 15 to 31.

Visit the web site to see the Passe Muraille 2010 schedule.

The Refugee Hotel will be available from Talonbooks this month and BASH’d! will be available with the Spring 2011 list of titles.

Posted: Thursday August 12, 2010

For the Pleasure

Michel Tremblay‘s play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again is a series of five vignettes and a tribute to his maddening, melodramatic and marvellous mother.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s production of the play opened Wednesday with Stratford veteran Lucy Peacock playing the playwright’s cantankerous mother and Tom Rooney taking on the role of the Narrator — the playwright as a boy and young man reflecting on several exchanges between mother and son.

Tremblay is being praised in number of reviews for reanimating his mother as she was to him during his life in an unsentimental portrayal that suggests her own capacity for artistry.

Donal O’Connor makes a number of astute observations in his review for The Beacon Herald:

A discussion about one of Nana’s favoured melodramatic novels leads to questions from her son, as he grows older, about what’s plausible in art and what isn’t. “It makes sense in the book and that’s all that matters,” Nana declares as the Narrator focuses a critical eye on what he feels is nonsensical.

The play continues in repertory to September 26.

Read a review by The Globe & Mail.

Posted: Wednesday August 11, 2010

Trigger Premieres at TIFF

Bruce McDonald’s film Trigger has been chosen to be the first film to have its premiere at Lightbox, the new headquarters for the Toronto International Film Festival.

In the story penned by Daniel MacIvor, Kat (Molly Parker) and Vic (the late, great Tracy Wright) are two rock and rollers who once shared a friendship, a band and a whole lot of bedlam. A dozen years after the breakup of their band, Trigger, the lovable yet dysfunctional duo reunite to rediscover their friendship, relive their rock and roll memories and reignite bits of their wild past. The film also stars Wright’s husband Don McKellar, along with Sarah Polley and Callum Keith Rennie.

McDonald is known for making films in the art house tradition that are connected to the Toronto and Vancouver rock scene, including Hardcore Logo and Highway 61, which includes a cameo by local great known unknown musician Art Bergmann.

Posted: Thursday August 5, 2010

Dear Betty,

We would like to congratulate the 2010 Betty Mitchell Award Nominees, which involve plays by three Talonbooks authors!

Communion, the third play of a trilogy penned by the ubiquitous and multi-talented Daniel MacIvor, has a vote for best production, as well as best direction for Linda Moore.

7 Stories, the brainchild of Morris Panych, has received 4 nominations, including best direction for Simon Mallett.

A nod also goes out to Chris Bullough for his supporting role in Abraham Lincoln Goes To The Theatre, one of the new titles by Larry Tremblay available this fall. The play explores the nature of celebrity-obsessed culture during various attempts to restage the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Posted: Friday July 30, 2010

Charles Olson reads from The Maximus Poems

The following clip contains a segment of the film about Charles Olson, Polis Is This. In this segment, Olson reads “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27” with what Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls choreographic gestures, motions that continually point up the forward/backward, in-body/away planes or zones of geographic understanding.

Muthologos, the revised second edition of Charles Olson‘s lectures and interviews, will be available this fall.

Posted: Tuesday July 27, 2010

12 Hour Marathon Reading of George Bowering's Burning Water

Photograph by Jack Bawden


The W.A. Deacon Literary Foundation is pleased to announce a marathon reading of George Bowering‘s award winning novel Burning Water (1980), a novel about George Vancouver’s exploration of the coast of British Columbia.

The venue is a pilot program of the City of Vancouver. Everyone is welcome including students and the general public who will have a chance to take turns reading the novel.

Date of the event: (Friday) 30 July 2010.

Location: 700 block of Granville (between West Georgia & Robson Street).

Time: 8:00 am to 8:00 pm.


George Bowering‘s latest Talonbook is My Darling Nellie Grey.

Posted: Friday July 23, 2010

How High Is the City, 
How Deep Is Our Love

(Photograph by Sabine Bitter)


Fillip is pleased to announce the immediate online release of How High Is the City, How Deep Is Our Love by Jeff Derksen — the second in a series of essays on art and publicness, which thematizes the majority of texts in Fillip 12.

Leading up to the publication launch of Fillip 12 in September 2010, essays will appear on the Fillip website every week for the next two months as a way to build an open dialogue around the relationship between art and its public.

Jeff Derksen’s text is being released in advance of the forthcoming International Chilliwack Biennial where a risograph-printed pamphlet of the essay will be available free to all attendees, and form the basis of a reading group especially organized for the event.

Learn more about Fillip.

Jeff Derksen is also the author of Annihilated Time.

Posted: Monday July 19, 2010

A Good Sign for Faith Fraud & Minimum Wage

George Mihalka has received a DGC Best Director nomination for Faith Fraud & Minimum Wage, a film based upon Josh MacDonald‘s original play Halo.

The film features Martha MacIsaac (Superbad) as a misfit donut shop employee whose sublime intervention captures the imagination of an entire town.

Posted: Friday July 16, 2010

B.C. Battle for the "Spirit" of the Arts

(Marcus Youssef, hosting Black Eye Dinner Party during 2010 Olympics)


The decision to fund a series of art-related festivals called “spirit festivals” throughout B.C. in February is meeting with a fair amount of opposition from members of the Arts community. Of course, planning a three-year $30-million program to fund these aforementioned festivals in order to help people cope with the sad state of the economy does not sound like the most logical use of taxpayer loonies.

> Go to story...

Posted: Monday July 12, 2010

20th Anniversary of the Oka Crisis

On the weekend, more than 400 Mohawks and their supporters marched through Oka, Quebec to mark the 20th anniversary of the Oka crisis, a land claims standoff between First Nations people and the Canadian army. Provincial police raided the barrier on July 11 in 1990, sparking a 78-day standoff between protesters and authorities.

A new chief federal negotiator has been appointed to settle the Mohawks of Kanesatake’s Seigneury of Lake of Two Mountains land claim. The Mohawk community of Kahnawake held a powwow on the weekend, with native leaders billing the event as an opportunity to heal scars from the crisis.

More about the Oka crisis can be learned from Lasagna: The Man Behind the Mask, the story of Ronald Cross, the Mohawk with Italian heritage whose image became a symbol of this confrontation in the media, even as the events of that summer etched themselves indelibly into the minds of North Americans as the latest episode in the continuing 500-year history of “Indian wars” in the Americas.

Posted: Tuesday July 6, 2010

Hair-Tickling Tales of Torment and Teenagers

The creators of Mom’s the Word are back with their uproarious sequel Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged. The original Mom’s the Word played to sold-out crowds at Just for Laughs in 2001. A French version, translated by Michel Tremblay and directed by Denise Filiatrault, played Juste pour rire the same year.

Jill Daum, Alison Kelly, Robin Nichol, Barbara Pollard and Deborah Williams make up the writing team for Mom’s the Word. The women create collectively, each one contributing personal stories. And each of them remembers what it was like to be a teenager.

Colin Thomas from The Georgia Straight had this to say about two of the actors after a 2005 performance of the sequel:

Deborah Williams is a particularly gifted comic writer. She talks about “falling in love so hard it hurt my hips”, and in the wake of a parenting mistake, she comforts herself with the knowledge that “I will only feel this bad about what I have done until I do something worse.” Jill Daum can also be wickedly self-revealing. She’s freaked out because she knows what a terror she was in her own adolescence. She wants to trust her son, she says, but “the coke-snorting, shoplifting slut from my past won’t let me.”

Mom’s the Word 2: Unhinged is playing at Just for Laughs from July 6-18.

Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon

If Nothing Was to Happen in Autumn: Something on The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Garry Thomas Morse discovers Gold:

He imbues this particular book with a wonderful nonchalance that tempers the sense of desperation about—what else but the difficulty and often failure of language to serve as a vehicle for our thoughts and emotions, at least not without a great deal of tinkering. Artie Gold leaves behind one poem after another for us, “like a cake placed in a two hour oven / in a building with a bomb, not caring.”

> Go to story...

Wednesday September 1, 2010 in Meta-Talon

Terrorism: Today’s ‘Yellow Peril’?

Author Roy Miki studied the official language that stripped his Japanese Canadian family of rights. He sees lessons for today.

> Go to story...

Friday August 20, 2010 in Meta-Talon

Rational Babblerap with BABA Brinkman

Creator of the first peer-reviewed hip-hop show, Darwin devotee and science celebrant Baba Brinkman is intent on spreading the word, discovers Roger Cox

> Go to story...

Tuesday August 17, 2010 in Meta-Talon

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...

Monday August 16, 2010 in Meta-Talon

For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, and Again

It is a rare thing to make a love letter both dramatic and moving. There are plenty of mothers on the stage who get their moment of love and recognition at the end – even Mama Rose gets hers – but only after two and a half hours of battle.

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Friday August 13, 2010 in Meta-Talon

George Bowering - from My Darling Nellie Grey

Those / flimsy shoes / would never get / anyone through hell

- from the month of August (According to Brueghel)

> Go to story...

Monday August 9, 2010 in Meta-Talon

A View of The Madonna Painter

In his introductory note, Michel Marc Bouchard, ably assisted by Linda Gaboriau’s translation, warns us that his play “is writ in scarlet pigments, in holy wine and haemoglobin, all the shades of red that flow through us, from our sex to our souls. It is a collision of ecstasies, a bouquet of lies disguised as a fable.”

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Monday August 9, 2010 in Meta-Talon

The Seminal Transmission of Orphic Ghosts: A Review of Garry Thomas Morse's After Jack

Before Morse was a mote, Spicer delivered a series of lectures in Vancouver (Morse’s stomping grounds) in which he revealed the poet as medium more than artist, and inferring a certain talent—nay, absolutism—to receptivity as priority over composition. Far too clever for its own good, After Jack is a large rabbit-eared radio, indeed.

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Friday August 6, 2010 in Meta-Talon

Looking Back at They Write Their Dreams on the Rock Forever

York’s voice is never far from anywhere in this text. She explains how these rock writings were the records of people who recorded the results of their spirit quests, dreams and visions on the rock walls of the Stein Valley, and how they could be read and interpreted by any one who was properly trained to “read” them.

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Wednesday August 4, 2010 in Meta-Talon

Artie Gold - from The Collected Books of Artie Gold

Preview a poem from The Collected Books of Artie Gold (coming this fall).

> Go to story...