WORDS THE DOG KNOWS Shortlisted for Best English Book - Expozine Alternative Press Awards

The Expozine Alternative Press Awards Gala will be held Tuesday, March 3 at Casa del Popolo, 4873 St-Laurent in Montreal. The Gala starts at 7 pm, awards will begin being presented shortly after 8 pm, and you are all invited to stay and mingle during the DJ night that follows at 10 p.m. Admission is free and beer and liquor specials will be in effect all night.

Come and celebrate the best of the nearly 300 small presses that took part in last fall’s Expozine small press, comic and zine fair! Six prizes will be awarded, recognizing the best book, comic and zine sold at Expozine.

The winners were chosen by an esteemed panel of judges out of the hundreds of publications submitted at Expozine in November. The gala is a rare chance for you to meet and mingle with the most talented up-and-comers of the local publishing scene, as well as purchase copies of the 36 short-listed titles.

The Nominees / Les nominés:

English Book:

Words the Dog Knows, J.R. Carpenter, Conundrum Press, www.conundrumpress.com
The Debaucher, Jason Camlot, Insomniac Press www.insomniacpress.com
The Sunlight Chronicles, Chris Dyer, Divine Life LLC, www.sunlight-chronicles.com
Fear Of Fighting, Stacey May Fowles & Marlena Zuber, Invisible Publishing, www.invisiblepublishing.com
Blert, Jordan Scott, Coach House Books, www.chbooks.com
Jack, Mike Spry, Snare Books, snarebooks.wordpress.com

English Zine:

Four Minutes To Midnight no. 10, www.lokidesign.net/2356
Nailbiter: An Anxiety Zine, www.steemilie.free23.net
Soulgazers, Camilla Wynne, www.endlessbanquet.blogspot.com
Lickety Split no. 7, www.licketysplitzine.com
Mostly True vol.19 issue 7, Bill Daniel, Microcosm Publishing, www.billdaniel.net, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Place Magazine, Winter 08 issue, www.placemag.org

English Comic:

Mourning a lover, Sofeel, myspace.com/sofeel
Welcome to the Dollhouse by Ken Dahl, Microcosm Publishing, www.microcosmpublishing.com
BFF by Nate Beaty, Microcosm Publishing, natebeaty.com, www.microcosmpublishing.com
Hypocrite, Dakota McFadzean, dakota.mcfadzean.googlepages.com
Finding Joy, Luke Ramsey, Anteism Publishing, islandsfold.com
Kieffer #2, Jason Kieffer, jasonkieffer.com

Nominés francophones fanzines :

Trio à emporter, par Kathey Tibo
Gargouillis indigeste #003, www.gargouillis.com
Ffsshmrwlbaouarf par Simon Bossé/ Mille Putois, www.myspace.com/milleputois
Ectropion, collectif de crémation littéraire, www.myspace.com/ectropion
Fanzine sans titre, Geneviève Dumas
Toxico (Fanzine # 3), par Delf Berg, delfberg.blogspot.com


Nominés francophones BD :

Hasemeister : C'était 2007, Frédéric Mahieu, www.hasemeister.com
La terreur noir pâle, C. Reney
Fatima, A. Desmarteaux, Egotrip Productions, www.arthuro.ca
Une aventure de M. Pixel, Étienne Beck, L'Employé du Moi, www.employe-du-moi.org
Chimeris 1: Sirus, Adeline Lamarre, Vaar Éditeur, www.vaar.ca
Humoro Sapiens, Yayo, Les 400 Coups, www.editions400coups.ca

Nominés francophones livres : À venir …



EXPOZINE
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Nuit Blanche Readings from Le Livre de chevet @ theCCA Bookstore

I will be reading from Les huit quartiers de sommeil at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Saturday February 28, 2009, as part of a Nuit Blanche slumber provoked by Daniel Canty, Haunted by the images of Ms Annie Descôteaux and Mr Pol Turgeon. Graphic Design Feed. Scenography Amuse.

The table of contents presents - in collaboration with the CCA Bookstore and Nuit Blanche - 16 premonitory readings from Le Livre de chevet, and the launch of www.latabledesmatieres.com

Readings by Salvador Alanis, Mathieu Arsenault, Oana Avasilichioaei, Nathalie Bachand, Daniel Canty, J.R. Carpenter, Angela Carr, Renée Gagnon, Louis-Philippe Hébert (Onil M.), Annie Lafleur, Erín Moure, Steve Savage (Desavage), Mélisandre Schofield, Franz Schürch, François Turcot and Jacob Wren

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Can you hear, deep down in sleep, the murmur of books? Le Livre de chevet conveys you into their secret. This collective and more or less practical tome, to be published in the Fall of 2009, is designed to accompany and to alter your slumber.

We invite you, on this All Nighter, into the darkness of the CCA bookstore. From 8 pm to 1 am, 16 authors from the book to come will step up, every 20 minutes, into the ghostly glow of dreams, to give you, at the sound of the alarm, with clocklike precision, a premonitory reading in English or in French.

Over the course of the evening, 16 sleeping places in Le Livre de chevet will also be auctioned off to the highest bidding dreamers.

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Le Livre de chevet
Montréal, Le Quartanier, 240 pages
ISBN 978-2-923400-60-0
To be published in fall 2009
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All-Nighter 2009
Saturday February 28
to Sunday March 1
from 8 pm to 1 am

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CCA Bookstore
1920 rue Baile
Montreal (QC) H3H 2S6
t 514 939-7028

www.cca.qc.ca/Bookstore
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NON-LINEAR NARRATIVES & MULTI-MEDIA POETICS: AN INTRODUCTION TO ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

I am teaching an electronic literature workshop through the Quebec Writers' Federation on Saturday, March 28, 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. 1200 Atwater Avenue, Suite 2 (2nd-floor computer lab). This workshop is ideal for experienced writers interested in expanding their existing practices to include web-based forms of non-linear, interactive, intertextual and/or networked literature

The one-day workshop will provide an introduction to reading and writing web-based electronic literature. Electronic literature combines literary and new media practices, resulting in multi-media literary works that couldn’t exist in print form. Consideration of technology at the level of the creation of the text distinguishes electronic literature from e-books, digitized versions of print works, web publishing and other products of print authors ‘going digital,’ none of which will be discussed in this workshop. Unbound by pages and the printed book, electronic literature moves freely across the web, through galleries, performance spaces, and museums, yet does not reside in any single medium or institution. Electronic literature often intersects with conceptual art, web art and sound art, but the reading and writing of electronic literature is situated within the literary arts.

This workshop will begin with a brief historical background of the genre, including a discussion of some of the pre-web literary forms that digital writing evolved from. We will focus on looking at, reading and understanding works of electronic literature. I will show some of my work and explain how it was built, then propose a number of ways for beginners to approach the web medium for the creation and dissemination of texts. In particular, we will look at ways to use existing Web 2.0 structures to create distributive literary works. Writing exercises will include: writing 140-character stories in Twitter and writing postcard stories in Google Maps. There will be some technical discussion of how these works function, but prior knowledge of web programming is not required.

If participants have electronic literature projects in mind, we can discuss strategies for creating these works. Visual and new media artists who use are using text in their work and wish to learn more about the literary aspects of digital writing will also find this workshop useful, as will avid readers of experimental literature from Calvino to Borges, and anyone interested in audio/video mashup, performance, remix culture, etc., who wishes to learn about this exciting new hybrid, hypermedia genre.

A list of links to online resources, further technical resources and venues for reading and submitting electronic literature will be provided. For registration information, please visit: http://www.qwf.org/workshops/spring2009/carpenter.html.

J. R. Carpenter is winner of the QWF's 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec Prize and the 2003 & 2005 CBC Quebec Short Story Competition. Her electronic literature has been presented at Jyväskylä Art Museum (Finland), Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (Toronto), Electronic Literature Collection Volume One Web Biennial 2007 (Istanbul), Rhizome.org and Turbulence.org. Her short fiction has been anthologized and published widely. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, was published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). She serves as President of the Board of Directors of OBORO New Media Lab in Montreal.
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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS excerpted in Geist #71

I love Geist Magazine. And not just because they just published an excerpt of my novel Words the Dog Knows in their latest issue (Winter 2008-2009 #17). No, I love Geist because they picked a particularly odd ball section of the novel to excerpt, a section that speaks to the very core of what the novel is about, a list of rhetorical words the dog-sitter is convinced the dog knows. As they put it over at Geist: "A human interprets the way a dog interprets the world of humans."

Here are a few words from that list:

home Home is where they keep the kibble. Home is both the origin and the terminus of the walk. Locus of the soundest sleeps, at home all scents are known.

cyberspace The place where people go while dogs are sleeping.

infinity In the time between sleep and waking there is the great nothingness of the nap.

Read the rest on Geist.com: Words Dogs Know

P.S. Another reason why I love Geist is that they published a very short story of mine called Roads out of Rome back in issue #63, two years ago to be precise, that expanded to become one of my favourite sections of Words the Dog Knows. Thanks Geist.
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Which circle of hell does air travel fall into?

S’s brother was late to pick us up to drive us to the airport because he had to wait for his mother to finish making us a week’s worth of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t starve to death on the plane. Thanks to this mayonnaise-related delay, we arrived at the airport only two hours before our departure time, instead of the airline-recommended three. Miraculously, we still made it to our gate with over an hour to spare. The waiting area was the loudest airport waiting area I’ve ever been in and I’ve been to some damn loud airports over the years. It’s a little too festive in here, I said, scanning the horizon for a teenager-free zone. We retreated a far corner to a single row of seats hidden between the window and the back wall of the last gift shop before Cuba. We tucked into the bag of egg salad sandwiches so we wouldn’t have to carry them onto the plane with us. Pair by pair other child-less couples made their way our way. This will be us in Cuba, I said. Hunting for the quite spot. Hiding out way down at the very far end of the beach.

Our relative peace was abruptly disrupted when another couple sat down on our bench and the woman started talking to S. And kept on talking, and talking. Within minutes we knew her entire vacation itinerary and the full contents of her carry on luggage. A regular Talking Machine. S had to fake a nap to shut her up.

A small group of beer-bellied men gathered at the window in front of us, birds of a feather flocking to the sight of random runway machinery – baggage carts, food service trucks, snowploughs, wing de-icers, big shiny airplanes. You know how they tell you, I said to S, that if you have a fear of public speaking you should try and picture the audience in their underwear? Well it just occurred to me that we’re going to spend all week staring at these people in their bathing suits. S shuddered. We surveyed the waiting area. Not one hot bod in sight.



Most people’s first reaction to the words Air Transat is an involuntary hunching of shoulders. Yes, the seats are narrow. No, there’s no legroom. But why didn’t anyone warn us about the noise? For four hours we were subjected to a level of noise usually found only at Hungarian family reunions or at the back of the school bus on the last day of school before summer vacation. The two sugar-crazed pre-pubescent monsters sitting directly behind us produced a disproportionately high portion of this noise. They screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered non-stop, eight inches from the backs of our heads. They kicked at the backs of our seats while sitting and grabbed at the backs of our seats to stand. The father was in the row ahead of us. The mother and children yelled right through us to get to him. Only, nothing got to him. Not even the daggers shooting out of my eyes at him. He chatted amicably with everyone around him at the top of his lungs while, behind us, his kids fought with each other and called their mother nasty names and she screamed, yelled, screeched and hollered right along with them. The Freaks. We put in earplugs and could still hear them loud and clear.

I am not a praying person. What’s the point? If "There’s Probably No God" is writ large on the sides of Canadian busses, than there isn’t likely to be a God lurking in a small regional airport of a crumbling tropical communist dictatorship. But pray I did, that when the customs official was done flirting with me and all our visas were stamped and suitcases retrieved, we would not board the bus to our resort and find the Talking Machine or the Freaks headed out way. We were spared this torment, but our bus brought new tortures. A tour operator attempted to “animate” us in garbled French via a crackling loudspeaker as we embarked on an hour-long drive through utter darkness. A new Talking Machine sat three rows back. And a new family of Freaks screeched and hollered across the isle from us: Famille de Dan, we called them, as a man named Dan was clearly their ringleader. He regaled the whole bus with stories from his past trips to Cuba while we hurtled along. The bus’s headlights momentarily revealed, then concealed again, strange apparitions: families floating in florescent interiors; television screens glowing in door-less, roof-less roadside shacks; donkey carts waiting alongside Ladas at stop signs as we motored past; lone bicyclists materializing out of blackness and then disappearing again out on the open, pot-holed road; low branches scraping the bus roof; bats smacking the windshield.



Whichever circle of hell air travel falls into, hotel check-in is in there too. Luckily, by then we’d had plenty of practice at tuning out noise, hassle, assholes and the petty injustices that long line-ups breed. When all was signed and done we were quite done in, but there is no rest for the aggravated. We set out again immediately - along a maze of paved pathways through strange foliage-induced rustling sounds, up long flights of twisted stairs - in search of the bar. On a scale of one to hell, the bar was the airport, the airplane, the bus and the hotel lobby combined. Talking Machines and Freaks galore. The Famille de Dan had already staked out a table; they were yakking and boozing and smoking up a storm. There was no mint for a mojito, no tonic for a gin. We wound up with something martini-flavoured that came with ice cubes and a straw. Not the last straw, by any means; the first of the many hundreds of drinks we figured we’d have to drink in order to cope with our fellow tourists. Hell is not hellish because of the location. Hell is hell because of who else is there.

We set out walking again, to escape the bar, and make sure there really was a beach out there somewhere. By the time we sunk our feet in sand it was well past midnight. There were mysterious tire tracks leading we knew not where and a man lurking in the shadows. Security, we hoped. We couldn’t agree on which way north was. It didn’t help that the stars seemed to be all in the wrong places. The moon sent our shadows rushing headfirst, headlong into the Atlantic. A small heard of Quebequois could be heard, but mercifully not seen, skinny-dipping out on the reef.



Sometime hundreds of hours earlier in the morning, back in Montreal, I had packed a new translation of Don Quixote with high hopes of reading it here on this far beach. By bedtime I suspected Dante’s Inferno would have been more apropos.
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