OPEN TEXT READING: RITA WONG

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the Capilano College Creative Writing Program

The FALL 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College concludes on Monday November 26th, 2007 with a reading by Vancouver poet and critic Rita Wong.

Monday, November 26th
Library 321 @ 12:30
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver

RITA WONG’s book of poems, monkeypuzzle (Press Gang, 1998), received the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award. Currently she is Assistant Professor in Critical & Cultural studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. Her second book, entitled Forage, is forthcoming with Nightwood Editions in 2007.


achtung!


with crumpled deutschmarks in my pockets…


choke on gucci and starbucks as you tread towards checkpoint charlie

the fiscal year of the living dead

caveat emptor in the trauma room

lederhosen, lederhosen, let down your girth

the streets are alive with the sound of money, podcast

or ac/dc: back in black down memory lane in melbourne, berlin, calgary

skins & masks, still

don’t want to be someone's escape fantasy nor their fear of invasion

nor their model majority

pudendum, addendum, memorandum: what’s your agenda, pussycat?


-- from “forage” (Nightwood, 2007)


For more info, contact:
Roger Farr, Capilano College
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)

OPEN TEXT READING SERIES: THREE NORTHERN POETS

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the Creative Writing Concentration at Capilano College


"The north moves north. / The song is an article of evidence."

– Ken Belford


The FALL 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College continues on November 20th, 2007 with a reading by three Northern poets: Ken Belford, Rob Budde, and Si Transken.

Tuesday, November 20th
Library 197 @ 12:30
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver

KEN BELFORD was born to a farming family near DeBolt, Alberta, and grew up in East Vancouver. For 35 years he lived in the remote, unroaded Nass River headwaters at Damdochax Lake. His gaze is of subsistence and the other, in that he looks out at the consumptive habits of western culture from the mountains. In addition to 15 chapbooks. he has published four books of poetry; Fireweed, The Post Electric Caveman, Pathways Into the Mountains, and ecologue. His most recent chapbook, from Nomados, is When Snakes Awaken. Difficult to categorize, Belford's poetics blend borders. He is a self-educated land(d)guage poet who mixes a learned pre-industrial knowledge with the push and pull of the questions, conversations, and what he sees as new linguistic possibilities.

ROB BUDDE teaches Creative Writing at the University of Northern BC. He has published five books (two poetry - Catch as Catch and traffick - two novels - Misshapen and The Dying Poem - and, most recently, short fiction - Flicker). In 2002, Rob facilitated a collection of interviews (In Muddy Water: Conversations with 11 Poets). Finding Ft. George (Caitlin 2007) is a collection of poems about Rob's growing relationship with Prince George and Northern BC. He lives in Prince George with his partner, Debbie Keahey and four children: Robin, Erin, Quinlan, and Anya. Check out his online literary journal called stonestone <http://stonestone.unbc.ca> and his poetry blog writingwaynorth <http://writingwaynorth.blogspot.com>.

SI TRANSKEN uses her creative writing to educate, vent, stir up troubles and joys, have fun and accomplish solidarity. She reads at Gay Pride, Women's fundraisers and other social justice events. She has been an activist in these movements for more than two decades. Si works at a shelter with drug addicted/ homeless/ survival sex trade workers. In her ivory tower roles she teaches for two universities in sociology, women's studies and social work. Entirely unbelievably she gets people laughing. Her work has been published in scholarly contexts such as Cultural Studies & Critical Methodologies, Atlantis, Canadian Women's Studies and her funky stuff has been published in contexts such as This Ain¹t Your Patriarchs' Poetry Book; Groping Beyond Grief; Stress (Full) Sister (Hood); and Battle Chants.


For info:
Roger Farr
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)

OPEN TEXT READING: JEFF DERKSEN

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the Creative Writing Concentration at Capilano College


The Fall 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College continues on November 19th, 2007 with a reading by Vancouver poet and critic Jeff Derksen.

LIBRARY 195 @ 12:30
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver

JEFF DERKSEN's first book Downtime (Talon, 1991), received the Dorothy Livesay B.C. Poetry Prize. Other works include Until (Tsunami, 1987), Dwell (Talonbooks, 1993), and Transnational Muscle Cars (Talonbooks, 2003). A founder of the Kootenay School of Writing in Vancouver, Derksen is also a highly regarded critic of globalization, culture and urbanization. He teaches writing and literature at Simon Fraser University.

"Phatic Weather"

I just want
the connection to be
inked in or intruded
on. So I can enter

an individual history
of my group.

The truck driving
beside the bus
appears not to move, mimicking
a model of one culture
viewing another.

Here the light
of heavy industry
doesn't mar the river
as much as it now
makes it.

New. Compensation's body
is a green image, arms
filled with lumber. But production's
miracle is its occurrence, oiling
a century. Our role
is the crisis. Sliding
so I can clarify
a centralized management

in this continuous present
of product, "excess," resource.

A company's head office
puts down roots: "Caring Hands
Extended out to Our Multicultural
Community." The question

of "also" is contextual.

-- from "Dwell" (Talon, 1993)

For info:
Roger Farr
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)

Creative Writing at Capilano: Spring 2008

Spring 2008 Creative Writing Courses will be registering soon -- here is some course information:


English 191-01 Creative Writing II - Crystal Hurdle
When is a poem really a story? When should you leave a draft alone? Through in-class writing, weekly homework assignments, and personal projects, you will write up a storm in a number of genres. You’ll be introduced to professional writers, from Lorna Crozier to bp Nichol, from Thomas King to Gabriel Garcia Márquez, all in aid of developing your own style.


Required Texts:

• Gary Geddes, ed. 20^th-Century Poetry & Poetics
• Gary Geddes, ed. The Art of Short Fiction
• The Capilano College issue of TCR (Winter/Spring 2007)
  

===============

English 191-02 Creative Writing II - Ryan Knighton
In English 191 we will continue to develop our skills by asking how writing can be made, not what it might mean. Specifically, we will further engage with questions of poetry, microfiction, and so-called creative non-fiction, as directed by their form and history. Our workshops, however, are neither roundtable editing sessions, nor, worse, copyediting boot camps. Rather, we will share draft examples of our own work in order to further our discussions, to expose new questions, and to seek the effects of craft. Some case examples from published works may be provided in class, but our own writing will serve as the primary texts. So will Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, which is pretty damned fine. By the final class, students should have at least one reworked submission of writing ready for a magazine or periodical. To that end we will survey some of the nuts-and-bolts of pitching and publishing, too.

===============

English 191-03 Creative Writing II - Reg Johanson
This course will focus on poetry and fiction. Our interests in fiction will be on the sub-genre of “biofiction.” Our interests in poetry will be very broad, including the sonnet, the “social,” documentary forms, aleatorics, and work inspired by “language” poetics. We will also be attending the OpenText reading series sponsored by the College and the Canada Council. We will read as much as we write, finding out what we can about the work and methods of the writers we read.

Required Texts:

• Wah, Fred. Diamond Grill.
• Farr, Roger. Surplus.
• The Capilano College issue of TCR (Winter/Spring 2007)

===============


English 290-01 - Creative Writing (Poetry) – Roger Farr
Poetry and Poetics of the Small Press: The small press revolutionized poetry in the second half of the twentieth century by shifting attention away from an earlier obsession with “the well-wrought urn, or “the perfect poem,” and focusing instead on the poem as the interface between a writer’s process, the process of print production, and a literary community. In this spirit, ENGL 290 will give students practice in both the writing of poetry and in small press production, in both print and digital forms. Thus, in addition to our class discussions and practice with poetic forms and techniques, we will consider the material and visual aspects of poetry: the page, the book, fonts, layout, paper, the fold, etc., and how these aspects contribute to our sense of what a poem is, or can be. We will attend readings by poets visiting the campus as part of the Open Text Series and discuss their work with them; and, to familiarize ourselves with the printing process, we will tour a print-shop which uses the latest “print on demand” technology to produce small runs of high-quality books. Finally, if we can muster sufficient resources, we might experiment with this technology by publishing a collection of our own poems in book form.

Required Texts:

• Farr, Roger ed. The Open Text Reader: Fall 2007.
• Other small-press texts will be available from the instructor in-class.
  

OPEN TEXT READING SERIES: LISSA WOLSAK

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the Creative Writing Concentration at Capilano College

The FALL 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College continues on October 18th, 2007 with a reading by Lissa Wolsak.

October 18th
Library 195 @ 12:30
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver

LISSA WOLSAK lives in Vancouver, British Columbia where she works as an energy/thought-field therapist and as a goldsmith. A poet and essayist, she has has authored several long poem sequences including: Pen Chants or nth or 12 spirit-like impermanences (Roof, 2000), An Heuristic Prolusion (Documents in Poetics, 2000), The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (Tsunami, 1994), A Defence of Being, and THRALL. Squeezed Light: Collected Works 1995 - 2007 is forthcoming from Station Hill Press.


from its desto, adualurescence

from its hair-space, azimuth

confessional yields

victims winched to a tortoise

spreadeaglism.. posture-sur-

faces escape into the cloth,

dress-groups inter-marry....

so throve close-woven


Come, vapour-bath, come.


-- from Pen Chants

For info:
Roger Farr
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)

http://capilanocreativewriting.blogspot.com

OPEN TEXT READING SERIES: GEORGE BOWERING

Sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts
& the Creative Writing Concentration at Capilano College


The FALL 2007 OPEN TEXT series at Capilano College kicks-off on September 20th, 2007 with a reading by former Poet Laureate of Canada, George Bowering.

Cedar 148 @ 12:30
Capilano College
2055 Purcell Way
North Vancouver


GEORGE BOWERING is one of Canada’s most celebrated writers. His many works have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese and Romanian. In 2002 Canada named him its first Poet Laureate. More recently, the Vancouver Sun recognized him as one of the most influential people in British Columbia. His most recent book is US Sonnets (Pooka Press, 2007).


1.

“When I have fears that I
may cease to be
open to pain that shines
wet on the side of a gold
fish in my own, I thought,
pond

I ought to forget
comfort, forget family
history, drive a black sedan
over thin prairie roads
looking for a town even
my mother does not believe
was ever there

knowing
pain is not colour, not value
but condition, the cost
of starting a damned life
in the first place, where no
thinking man ever was.”

-- from “Do Sink”


For info:
Roger Farr
rfarr@capcollege.bc.ca
604.986.1911 (2554)

http://capilanocreativewriting.blogspot.com

Capilano Creative Writing Program Kick-Off!

Pat's Pub, 403 E. Hastings
Tuesday Sept. 18th
8:00 pm

Please join past, present, and future students of Capilano College for an open-mic reading to celebrate the new Associate of Arts Degree in Creative Writing. All past and present Capilano creative writing students and faculty are invited to sign up to read.

To sign up, or for more information, contact Reg Johanson:

E: <rjohanso@capcollege.bc.ca>
T: 604. 986. 1911 (2428)

~

The Associate of Arts degree with a Creative Writing Concentration combines instruction and practice in both creative and critical writing, hosts the Open Text Reading Series, supports a student magazine (The Liar), and provides internships, scholarships, bursaries, and awards. Students who complete the program obtain first and second-year transfer credit in both English and Creative Writing, allowing them to major or minor in either subject should they decide to transfer to university.

Check out: <http://www.capcollege.bc.ca/programs/english/creative-writing.html>

~