A Night of Laughs, Gasps, and Oh My!s

by Janelle Curry

Naughty bits always make things fun—they literally keep life going—but sometimes we want more than that (no, really). Sometimes we want swear words, too. We want puns. We want serious haikus that makes us feel smart and political. We want clever haikus that take a few seconds to grasp. But, more than anything, I guess we really do want haikus about penises.

In times of need, the Winnipeg Poetry Slam team is here.

Accompanied by author Tom Howell, who wrote what is probably the first story of the English language to make you laugh out loud rather than snore, the slam team performed poems to make us laugh, cry, and be all introspective, followed up by an intense Haiku Death Match. 

“Forewords” was held in Salle Antoine-Gaborieau at Centre culturel franco-manitobain (CCFM), September 20^th at 8pm. There were tables and chairs placed on the rather large stage, as well as bar service and letter-shaped pretzels.

So, what else do we want from poetry, culture, history, and Saturday nights? Well, let’s look at these separately.

From poetry, we want something that moves us. In a sense, we want to be told what we already feel, but in new ways. We want to be engaged by it, challenged by it, and humoured by it. And really, we want to feel like part of something—whether it’s a mindset, an obscure reference, a contextual pun, or even just feeling part of the same wonderful, confusing, expressive language.

The phenomenal thing about language is that even though it’s so often depicted on the page, and as a structured rule-bound entity, language is truly shaped and changed by its speakers. Language is a tool of humanity, and arguably the most useful one we’ve ever come up with (though soap is really, really important too). With all that in mind, what better way to experience language than through the voice of another? To hear the tone, the passion, and the nuance that a person has attributed to her words changes a poem from something we read and interpret as best we can, to something we experience, feel, and see. Slam poetry provides an interaction between poet and audience that fills the room and makes everyone part of the same funny, raunchy, contemplative beast.

On to culture. This is a biggy. Let me narrow it down a bit to Literary Culture. Now if you’re anything like me, you’ve taken an English class or two. You may have even taken some in University. Maybe enough to award you a degree, or a seething hate for 17^th century agrarian travel literature, and other such genres. Maybe you’ve encountered so much literature in formal settings, with money and grades and essays and citations involved, that you really just roll your eyes when someone asks how you’re liking the English Honours program. Maybe you had given up on the culture, thinking that all it had to offer you were more biblical references and phallic symbols than your secular feminist brain could possibly hold.

But then you attend an event like this, or you read a book like Howell’s, and it reminds you of what literary culture really is. How the English language gets wrongly trapped in rules and paper, so too can English literature be wrongly trapped in formal essays and anthologies. There are obvious benefits to both these aspects of English: you know how to interpret these written words, the sentence structure, and you probably nodded your head in agreement about all those bibles and penises. But to keep a language or a culture alive and thriving, we need to keep it interesting and fulfilling. This event, gloriously provided by the Thin Air Writer’s Festival, is a reminder to us all that we can have fun while being silly, and witty, and dirty (oh my!) with words.

History has always been an interesting subject, and I doubt there’s a single person out there who has not said “oh, wow, that’s cool” to a bit of historical information. But there’s one rather chunky electric blue elephant in the room: how can anyone really know what happened four thousand years ago? Or even four hours ago? How do we know what influenced which decision that caused which war? Because how can someone even know what is reality versus what is biased perspective? But okay, before you run off and stream the Matrix trilogy or pick up old intro to philosophy textbooks, hear me out. This is an elephant. It won’t stop being an elephant because you ignore it. You can try to work around it, but we all know it’s still there. So how about we all get real for a moment, and figure out how to utilize this chunky animal.

Oh wait, Tom Howell has already done the work for us in his book The Rude Story of English. Cheers!

He’s used the elephant to play around with theories on what was the first English word spoken. He calls this world the “asterisk reality”, which is a reality that is aware it doesn’t have all the materials, but by golly it’s going to try to paint you a picture anyways. He goes through how the language has changed, been influenced, and has spread across the world, all in the shoes of the language’s macho hero Hengest (J.R.R. Tolkien-approved). Because when we get down to what we want from histories, it’s ones that don’t take themselves too seriously. We want smart authors who not only admit that they don’t know everything, but celebrate it, while poking fun at smart people who think they do. We also want rude sketches of these asterisked histories.

I don’t know about you, but from now on all my Saturday nights will be compared to the Saturday night I saw a Haiku Death Match.

The rules were simple: five people enter, five people leave, but only one is victorious. Well, not really. Two people compete against each other by each presenting in turn a 17-syllable “poem” to the audience, which then votes for which poem they liked better, or which made them feel less awful for laughing at. The winner remains up front, while the loser goes back into the line of rotation, and a new opponent steps forth. Things get real, people. The poets work off of audience reactions, come up with strategies, have these fail, then give up and go for the penis joke. Some haikus take a while to understand. For example, I only just got the punch-line of one while writing this. Invisible ink indeed. Well Played, Ulysses, well played.

Now I’m so keen on these haiku things that I invite you all to join me in a little Haiku Death Match in the comment section. Of course, like all word battles over the internet, there can only be losers. So join me in being a 17-syllable loser. Form doesn’t so much apply, make it what you will. And brownie points for writing something Hengesty. Here goes nothing:

Sandals hurt my feet,

So while others mourn the heat,*

I find my Sorels.

AND GO.

PS. I highly suggest you pick up a copy of Tom Howell’s book, The Rude Story of English. It is filled with facts, humour, literary puns, asterisk realities, Hengestness, and, yes, naughty bits. Available anywhere. Well, not Home Depot. He didn’t break into that market yet. But here’s hoping.

*I didn’t intend this to rhyme, yours really don’t need to.

                                    

Forewords 2014: Perspective #1

by Eva Rodrigues

To paraphrase Steve Locke, the poets at Thin Air’s ForeWords event “seized the [night] with their teeth,” leaving the audience enraptured.

Four members of the Winnipeg Poetry Slam team - Steve Locke, Ulysses Knope, Steve Currie, and Mike Johnston - performed both time-honoured and newer pieces. 

Locke started with a poem celebrating our city, encouraging the audience to join in on the motif “Hail Winnipeg!” With the crowd warmed up, he performed “Long Live The King,” a reflection on humanity as a sum of parts and individuals as part of the sum.

Knope then presented two poems, one about “pop up puberty” and her classic “A Touch Deathly.”

The third performer was Currie, who discussed love in the face of apocalypse and the sensual potential of space - “you carrying our child, never feeling her weight but only her heartbeat” - and performed a piece about a “bully 2.0.”

Johnston wrapped up the slam team’s performance, wowing the audience with both of his pieces. In “Brunch,” he contemplates the radically changing face of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis at its helm - “they are telling him that communion wafers should be organic kale chips and he is listening.” The final poem of the set was “Question Box,” where Johnston talked about his day job taking a “beautiful complexity ... to a multiple choice questionnaire” while teaching human sexuality.

The team is in top shape heading into the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word, taking place in Victoria October 13-18 (http://cfsw.ca). They will certainly make Winnipeg proud of, and the rest of the country dazzled by, their work.

We then headed into the asterisk world* of the history of the English language with Tom Howell. Howell read from a section of his book, The Rude Story of English, that detailed the life of Hengest, the accidental inventor of English. He explored the ratio of piggybacks given and taken by Hengest and his twin brother while a larger-than-life drawing of the twins loomed over his head.

All five performers then shared the stage in the Haiku Death Match, an energetic one-on-one exchange of seventeen-syllable doses of puns, innuendos, and the occasional insult. After each round, the writers rotated. This was fantastic for getting the crowd involved in the performance as each round ended in an audience vote for the better haiku. 

Howell and Johnston surfaced as the Haiku Death Match co-winners, accepting the honour with a desperate attempt at a co-written haiku speech. It was an evening brimming with excellent poetry, stellar stories, and a camaraderie that shone through right to the end of the death match.

*The asterisk world, as Howell explained, is the world in which “facts” are made up to account for gaps in knowledge. This note is an exception. 

The Luminaries: The Fortunes Are Told In The Stars

By Jason C S Cheung

To be very honest, I hadn’t done my due diligence and read The Luminaries before I entered the centre culturel franco-manitobain. After some reasearch, I was fascinated to learn that the novel is set in 19^th century New Zealand. It's a mystery and a historical period piece: one of my favourite types! Eleanor Catton was a true inspiration this evening as she read, then shared her insights and reflections on her book. She illuminated us on an epic journey across the ocean to 1860s New Zealand (the setting of the novel is the gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand, a wild frontier).

She has won the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General Award for her bestselling novel.

An Ambience Set By Giving

The evening began with greetings from many honoured guests. The most memorable moment was from elders Clarence and Barbara Nepinak’s blessing of the event, which reminded us that we were on treaty land, and welcomed us to a sacred place of respect and sharing. They offered our guest a gift that carried significant meaning, as it was prepared by members of the Nepinak's community. Giving, Catton later told us, is an act bigger than ourselves, and one that defies the laws of nature. Much like reading a novel and experiencing the gift bestowed by the writer upon us, we are welcomed and enriched by the characters’ experiences as if they were that of our own. This theme inevitably ties in with the economy of worth versus value, which was central to some of the ideologies in her characters’ development.

Graceful Style, Grateful Audience

In her dialogue with festival director Charlene Diehl, the discussions of plot structure and archetypes really intrigued me. I was impressed with her analysis of archetypes versus stereotypes. From what I learned, an archetype is a mould: “a basis for the infinite to be filled,” whereas a stereotype is a reduction of a person to a series of traits. This is where it gets very interesting: by incorporating the elements of the twelve zodiacs, each character is generated through a set of pre-existing characteristics. Catton went on to describe the Freudian relationship between some of the planets, which was very complicated (beyond my meager understanding), but nevertheless breathtaking.

As the Planets and Signs Dictate

The way Catton described the interconnectedness and the interdependence of the stars and planets in motion truly mesmerized the audience. Personification of archetypes in celestial objects is nothing new, but to learn that she used them to shape her characters was definitely a breath of fresh air. The meticulous inner workings of miracles weaved into the magical network of her characters was truly astounding. I felt transformed by the intricacies of her storytelling, and her elegant presence.

Fortune telling as a Career?

I would like to ask Eleanor a personal question:

I am one of your archetypes of the constellation characters in the novel: Chinese, male, and a Virgo. Would you be kind enough to give a personal chart reading? In sharing your story and personal journey in the development of this astounding work (which I will surely read), it is rare to find a great novelist, but it is rarer still to find an author with such eloquence in language and a graceful presence that is still a bit mysterious to me.

Thank you for travelling to the other side of the ocean to visit us.

Well, better get started on the long journey of 832 pages. Good for reading on the plane!

Please join us for more wonderful events at the 18^th Winnipeg International Writers’ Festival, and happy reading!

Jason C.S. Cheung

Detachment: An Adoption Memoir

Remarks made at the launch of Detachment: An Adoption Memoir
at McNally Robinson, Winnipeg, Sept 5, 2014


Many of you will wonder why I wrote this book. Perhaps your wondering will include some questioning of my sanity or parenting credentials. Believe me, that’s appropriate.

I wrote Detachment with as much grit and honesty as possible because the story matters. It’s a story of being a father, a son, and a husband. It’s a story about me screwing up over and over, and refusing to give up. That probably doesn’t sound very entertaining. Let me start over.


Detachment is a quest for connection, really for spiritual and emotional empathy with the suffering, the humour, and the humanity of other people. Detachment tries to be realistic about the challenges of family life post-adoption, and about the specific struggles I've had understanding my kids and their damaged history, as well as my dad with his scarred past, and with my wife over my own failures to attach. But even with the necessary darkness, I wanted to take the reader along an arc where the future became brighter for me and my family.


A lot of things were tough about this book. One of the toughest things was I had to decide what could be public and what had to remain private. For the book to be compelling, it needed to be intimate, but I didn't want to hurt my kids or other family members either. God knows if I got that balance right.

I structured Detachment like a novel because most of the memoirs I admire borrow storytelling techniques from fiction: Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Warren Cariou’s Lake of the Prairies are such books, all of which have inspired me.


I struggled with how to tell the story in Detachment for five years; meanwhile the story kept changing while I lived it. The breakthrough came for me in Banff three years ago, when Michael Crummey, one of the faculty members, pointed out that I could start the book with my sessions seeing a psychologist, in crisis. Michael observed that shrinks are like priests: they can't ever reveal what you might fictionalize; he also has the best bullshit detector of anyone I've ever met, aside from my wife Betsy. That first chapter now forms the prologue, which I called "Shrinking." From there the book moves back to 2005, when we adopted our sons, and the adoption story is told chronologically. But the story of my father's childhood is interwoven in flashbacks.


The book is dedicated to my sons: the younger two Peter and Bohdan, and my oldest, Jeremy, who was born here in Canada and was also affected by my past, including the fact that I'd had 34 addresses by the age of 17, and for whom I was an often absent and detached father. All of us need to make sense of history on our own, but I hope that this book will help my three sons figure out their own roots. As one of Patrick Friesen’s characters in his long poem The Shunning puts it:

Do you understand this? where we came from?
it all adds up
figure it out for yourself


I have many people to thank, starting with Betsy. As the Beach Boys say, “God only knows what I’d be without you.” The short answer might be homeless. But really on top of eating much worse and going to the gym less, without you what I was trained in childhood to call my spiritual life, something I still believe in, would be irretrievably damaged. I can only be a whole person with you.

Then I must thank my aunt Lil, who told me the story of my grandfather’s disappearance, my grandmother’s rape and early death, and explained so much to me about my her and father’s struggles to overcome the horrors of their childhoods. Someday maybe I’ll be as good a storyteller as she is.

As you know, Mennonites are not Italians; we have trouble expressing ourselves emotionally sometimes. My father, an orphan at the age of ten whose earliest memory is a Holocaust atrocity, would now be described as having PTSD, and possibly a form of attachment disorder. By telling his story in this book, I gained empathy for him, a father who was at times detached himself, and being a more empathetic son helped me understand and empathize with my own sons.


I hope that this book speaks to the experience of children who have suffered neglect and abandonment, and also to the experience of children who are war refugees like my father was.

Like Dorothy Parker, I take more pleasure in having written than in actually doing the work. Parker also said brevity is the soul of lingerie, but that’s another topic.

Maurice Mierau

On Yearning

So after I launching two kids and a book in two years back in the early 2000s, I went through a bit of publishing dry spell.  Then this year, with two books coming out within six months of each other, those in-the-know told me I should start developing my “online presence.”

Unfortunately, turns out coming up with a “presence” really sucks. My fiction is never remotely autobiographical. I have no marketable “persona” other than ones that have been blogged to death ― working mom, harried volunteer, opinionated artist. Other than the stories I tell, there is nothing particularly remarkable about me or my life.

I ended up calling my blog “Write in the Middle,” with the tag line: I’ve lived in Winnipeg my whole life. It’s an unassuming, middle-of-the-continent kind of place that sometimes yearns for greatness — which is why it suits me, I guess.

It kind of made sense given that I’m a mid-career, mid-life writer who lives in a place that as far as many are concerned, is neither here nor there. But probably the key word is yearning.

Pretty much all my stories involve a pervasive, sometimes senseless yearning.

In Your Constant Star, my YA novel that came out this past spring, the three young protagonists collide like electrons, attracting and repelling each other as each seeks something they can’t really name.

Faye, adopted from China by a couple from Winnipeg, wants to understand what may never be understood ― why is she so pissed at her doting parents? What makes her long lost friend, Bev, tick? How can her birth country be so brutal and so beautiful at the same time? Bev, unexpectedly pregnant and determined to give her offspring what she doesn’t have, just wants to feel something ― to give a shit for once in her life. As for Mannie, Bev’s self-sabotaging baby-daddy and hero is in own mind, he just wants to come to the rescue for once in his life.

The interconnected Winnipeg stories in my other new book — Boy Lost in Wild, launched this fall — similarly explores our common ability to yearn. No matter what their age or circumstances ― from a sixteen-year old Iranian “sandwich artist” who defies her secular parents by wearing a head scarf, to a Ukrainian octogenarian who remembers the 1919 General Strike ― these Winnipeggers are united by their search to figure out who they are, and where they belong. 

No matter who we are, to feel alive, is to yearn. So I write about yearning, in all its forms.

And hopefully, my stories are also about mercy. For yearning means we all walk around with a nagging sense of the unattainable and unrealized, of who we want to be and who we really are.

For most us, if we’re lucky, we come to understand that being neither here nor there is a pretty good place to be.

Brenda Hasiuk

"Engaged Audiences, Engaged Readers"

Last year at this time, I was at home in The Pas, anticipating a birth.
In early September, fifteen copies of my first novel, Swarm, arrived in the mail in a cardboard box. My puppy insisted on chewing the corner flaps as I pulled the parcel open.

The thing took nearly five years from creative spark to the final push of page-proofs and there it was, with its beautiful turquoise cover, full of words, in my hands.

How strange.

Earlier that summer, I’d had the good fortune to hear from festival organizer Charlene Diehl. She loved the advance copy of the book, she told me, and offered an invitation to read at Thin Air.

I was over the moon. Not only would it be the book’s first outing, but it would also give me a chance to hang out with other writers, an opportunity I don’t get very often, living up here in The Pas.

It would also be only my second appearance at a major literary festival. The first had happened two months prior at the Leacock Festival in my former home town of Orillia, before the book was even available.

There is a key event that stands out for me at the festival (apart, of course, from the dramatic explosion of a glass of red wine in the writers’ lounge at the end of a very trying day, so I was told, for the tireless, dedicated festival organizers – cue shout-out here for all their hard work).

It’s an event that I remember mentally marking because of its resonant significance, the sensation that it gave me that I was indeed making a mark, getting somewhere with this craft I’ve been practicing and living my life for going on twenty-five years.

It was the moment when I walked out on the main stage, reading that night with Andrew Pyper, Lucie Wilks, Daniel Canty, and Dennis Cooley, all great writers, and I, there, with them.
Exhilaration.
Charlie Wilkins was in the audience, whose book Little Ship of Fools I’d read that summer and loved, and later I would discover that he was also a fan of mine.

A high school friend I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager was there, as well as a Winnipeg writer I’d connected with online and hadn’t yet met in person.

Writing is a lonely act, but then there are these amazing opportunities: to share the story you’ve spent many years living with, pouring yourself into, labouring over, all alone.

Engaged audiences, engaged readers, mean everything, or nearly that, because they give us community and a pretty huge reason to work.

Last year, I gobbled up Thin Air – not only my own events but those I experienced as audience, as reader, as kin to all of you who love books – because words are not just my vocation and my calling: they are my passion.

And it’s clear that in this, I am far from alone.

Lauren Carter,
September, 2014

Feeling blocked?

At the post-reading question-and-answer at last year’s Pint of Bitter Murder at the Park Theatre, Gail Bowen and I were asked if we ever experienced writer’s block. Or perhaps it was “suffered from” the aforementioned condition. The questioner had a plaintive tone in her voice––or at least I think she did, since her question, one of many good ones that afternoon, lived a kind of half-life with me. I can remember the question. I just can’t quite remember my answer. It may have had something to do with not experiencing writer’s block, which was unhelpful of me. But then I’m never sure what others mean by “writer’s block.” I’ve always assumed it to be the almost pathological inability to produce a word, sentence or paragraph for days, weeks, months or years––by which time the writer, so-called, should seek another vocation or avocation. Moments of dullness in front of the computer, the inability to come up with a fresh thought or the perfectly appropriate word or phrase, the feeling of gawwwwd, do I really have to do this this morning is not writer’s block any more than moments of inattention and general funk driving a taxi is taxi driver’s block. Writer’s block, if that’s what this is, is perfectly normal––probably little more than the eager brain, wanting to wander, rebelling at the need to concentrate, or the vital body, wanting to roam, rebelling at the need to sit still. All the usual nostrums apply: get up, walk around, take a shower, or just fuhgeddaboudit for the day. Are you on a deadline? Probably not. If you are, then writer’s block has an astonishing way of vanishing. And here’s proof: Thin Air publicist Bruce Symaka asked if I would contribute to this year’s Thin Air blog. Yes, I said, though I didn’t have a blessed idea what I would write about. But I had a deadline––Labour Day. And though it is now, as I write, Labour Day Eve, and still don’t have a single bloody idea what the hell I’m going to write about (writer’s block!), I have a deadline. And that concentrates the mind wonderfully.


C.C. Benison’s latest novel, Ten Lords A-Leaping, arrives in paperback November 4.