Three Stories in Ryga: A Journal of Provocations

Three of my short stories appear in the inaugural issue of Ryga: A journal of Provocations, a new publication of The Ryga Initiative at Okanagan College, in association with the Okanagan Institute.

Ryga: A Journal of Provocations consists of a single or multiple works by writers whose work the editor considers worthy of readers' attention. It is published as a 275-page book, on good quality recycled paper, with a full colour laminated cover, 4 times a year, and offered for sale at $20 each through the book and periodical trade, and on http://www.ryga.ca/.

Ryga editor Sean Johnston writes:

Carpenter's quietly moving stories are about endurance in the wake of tragedy. They're about the impossibility of fully understanding the world we live in. Bodies of water dominate the stories and the constant, rhythmic movement between the literal and the figurative undersurface emphasizes the fragility of human life.

The narrator in "Truth, Dare, Double-Dare, Promise to Repeat," for instance, longs for the inevitable sexual knowledge of adulthood, but the sinister nature of the impaired vision, the silty water where she and her friends swim, makes the future dark and dangerous.

. . . . .

Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The week of January 25, 2010, I'll be a Guest Lecturer in Kate Pullinger's Fiction Module in the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at de Montfort University, in Leicester, England. I'll deliver the lecture from South Devon, England. Students will tune in from Oman, Vienna, Oxfordshire, Lublijana and the USA. I mention these diverse locations because they fit in so nicely with the theme of the lecture, which is: the conjoined notions of memory and place in The Cape. Not Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA. That's a real place. The events and characters in The Cape are fictional. I built the web iteration of The Cape over the course of 10 days in August 2005, but some of the sentences in The Cape have been kicking around in my brain since the early 1990s. The Cape: The Backstory charts their migration through visual art, installation, theory, print, digital and zine forms.


[print-out used to create the web iteration of The Cape]

In November, 2008, I delivered a guest lecture to the online MA Creative Writing and New Media at de Montfort on Mapping Web Words. That and many other online lectures delivered as part of the MA from 2006-2010 are now online in The Creative Writing and New Media Archive. In these lectures, delivered online by leading practitioners across the world, via video, Skype, chatrooms, slideshows, websites and plain old-fashioned discussion boards, the speakers outline the realities of working in new media; detail the rigorous creative and theoretical challenges, and celebrate the sheer pleasure of breaking new artistic ground in this dynamic medium. Their legacy and influence still continues in the work of CWNM students as they graduate and begin their careers.

The Archive represents an important snapshot in the history of new media writing and will be of use to researchers, teachers, writers and readers. For more information, please visit: http://www.transliteracy.com
. . . . .

To See The Sea

On a clear day, and there aren't very many of those, from a spot at the top of the drive you can see south to the sea. This is confusing, because the sea appears to float above a wave of hills. A thin strip bluer than the sky.

Lower down the drive, a view of the River Dart opens north to Totnes. I would say this driveway boasts the best views in England, but so far it's the only driveway in England I'm familiar with.



[The Dart from the Sharpham Drive, North to Totnes]

Sometimes I lie awake and think about the river carving its path through the night, north to Totnes, south to Dartmouth. North to the Dartmoor, south to the sea.

Amanda said, For some reason I imagine if you're thinking about it you can hear it and the thought of the sound of a river makes me happy today.

Linda said, I went for a walk by the ocean yesterday, the sound and smell makes me happy, too.

I can't hear the river from the house, but I can see it from the bedroom. Last week there were gale force winds and rain for two days. When the storm stopped in the night the silence was so sudden it woke me. I lay awake and thought about the rain-swollen river opening its muddy mouth to the sea.

On Sunday I said, I'm going to the seaside to see the sea.

Sonia said, Please do sell some sea shells.

I confessed to Sonia that I was sorely tempted to wheel a wheelbarrow through streets wide and narrow singing cockles and mussels alive alive oh. But, this being Devon, there were no streets wide, only narrow.

Nora said, How bout a beautiful pea-green boat?

There are Owls roosting all up and down the River Dart. But no Pussycats.

And I am a Carpenter, after all. As such, I assured Nora, when the Walrus said, "The time has come to talk of many things," I immediately brought up the subject of the beautiful pea-green boat, but he kept going on about shoes and ships and sealing-wax, cabbages and kings and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings.



[The sea at Blackpool Sands, South to Slapton Ley]

This photo of Blackpool Sands came out kind of dark. Possibly because the beach has black in its name. And, although the sun was shining on the sea, shining with all his might, this was odd, because it was the middle of the night.

The Walrus and I were wearing wellingtons and walking close at hand; we wept like anything to see such quantities of sand.

Nora wondered, as did the Walrus, ..if seven maids with seven mops swept it for half a year, do you suppose that they could get it clear?

Wait, I said to Nora. Is one of those maids my Bonnie? My Bonnie lies over the ocean, and, if you've seen her, could you please bring back, bring back, bring back my Bonnie to me, to me?

The Bonnie bit may seem a bit tacked on after that Walrus and Carpenter bit, but Amanda, Linda, Sonia and Nora all lie over the ocean, and that's what made me think of it.
. . . . .

12 or 20 questions with J.R. Carpenter

On June 18, Rob McLennan posted in interview with me as part of the second series of "12 or 20 questions," interviews with Canadian and American (etcetera) poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, as a follow-up to the original series that ran from September 2007 to June 2008. The second series includes interviews (so far) with Jason Dewinetz, Matthew Tierney, Sandra Ridley, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Carrie Olivia Adams, Dayle Furlong, Antanas Sileika, Sharon Harris, Ken McGoogan, Daniel Allen Cox, J.R. Carpenter, Anita Dolman, Ray Hsu, Karen Houle, Susan Olding, Jeanette Lynes, Asher Ghaffar and Zachariah Wells.

Interviews are still forthcoming with Peter Norman, Eric Baus, Betsy Struthers, Graham Foust, Steven Mayoff, Mike Spry, Kevin Killian, Charles Bernstein, Forrest Gander, Chris Ewart, Andrew Faulkner, Mary Pinkoski, Rebecca Rosenblum, Arielle Greenberg, Peter Richardson, Eva Moran, Ken Sparling, ross priddle, Michelle Berry, Stephen Henighan, Annabel Lyon, and plenty of others.

The series as a whole, with links to individual interviews (to be updated every day or three over the next six months or so), lives here: 12 or 20 Questions

The interview with me lives here: 12 or 20 questions with J.R. Carpenter
. . . . .

"Wyoming is Haunted" wins the QWF Carte Blanche Quebec Prize

Last night at the annual Quebec Writers' Federation Awards Gala at the Lion d'Or in Montreal my recent non-fiction story, Wyoming is Haunted, was awarded the Carte Blanche Quebec Prize. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, is published online twice a year. The Carte Blanche Quebec prize is awarded once a year in recognition of an outstanding submission by a Quebec writer. The prize is sponsored by The Quebec Writers' Federation.

Wyoming is Haunted is a nonfiction narrative of some of the adventures fellow fiction-writer Karen Russell and I had while in residence at the Ucross Foundation, an artist in residence program located on a 22,000 acre ranch in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. The piece first appeared Carte Blanche 7 earlier this year. Two other of my short stories have also appeared in earlier issues: Aerial Photograph & Wasn't One Ocean.

Thanks QWF and Carte Blanche, for all you do for English writing in Quebec, even when it's from Wyoming. Thanks CALQ for helping me get out way out west. Thanks Ucross for accepting me and Karen Russell at the same time. And thanks Wyoming for scaring the heck out of us. As this photo clearly indicates, Wyoming is pretty damn haunted.

"As we walked we invented fictional colour-names for things, with Flannery O'Connor's rat-coloured car as our model, though, as Karen noted, makeup colour-names would also be a great source of inspiration. The road was a rawhide strap. The fauns were faun coloured! The Angus cows were so black they looked hollow."

Excerpted from: Wyoming is Haunted, J. R. Carpenter
Winner of the 2008 Carte Blanche Quebec prize

. . . . .

WORDS THE DOG KNOWS - Montreal Launch - Friday, November 7, 2008

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us for an evening of stories, drawings and music in celebration of the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and Emily Holton's two novella's Dear Canada Council / Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press), with readings by J. R. Carpenter and Emily Holton, drawings by J. R. Carpenter, Elisibeth Belliveau and Emily Holton and a presentation of J. R. Carpenter's recent web-based writing project in absentia (presented by Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal).

SKY BLUE DOOR
5403B Saint-Laurent (view map)
(south of Saint-Viateur, behind Enterprise Car Rental - enter via alleyway)
Friday, November 7th, 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm (free)



J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Theo and Simone set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view. Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking though the the jumbled intimacy of Montreal’s back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood ­ and each other ­ in a whole new way.

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including full event listings and purchase information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

J. R. Carpenter's web-based writing project in absentia addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. By manipulating the Google Maps API, Carpenter creates an interactive non-linear narrative of interconnected “postcard” stories, thus haunting a satellite view of the neighbourhood with the stories of former tenants of Mile End (fictional or otherwise) who have forced out by economically motivated decisions made in their absence. in absentia features new fiction by J. R. Carpenter with invited authors: Lance Blomgren, Andy Brown, Daniel Canty, Alexis O’Hara and Colette Tougas. Some of the stories in in absentia also appear in Words the Dog Knows. To view in absentia online please visit: http://luckysoap.com/inabsentia



Emily Holton's novella Dear Canada Council is an illustrated plea for plane tickets, in which the narrator details her plans to "found a town". Complete with Incas, crickets, and a small family of deaf-mutes, her written request doubles as what also might be the craziest love poem you've ever read. Awestruck and sleepless in Hamilton, she is haunted by visions of celebrity reporter Brian Linehan, obsessed with a young boy she saw once on the TV news, and just wants to do better, get married, and wear a sash, a red mayor's sash. Can't Canada Council help her out? // Emily Holton's Our Starland is a novella broken into small, dreamy pieces. Flash by flash, its pieces ferry a cast of characters through a season as they navigate the fruit picking diaspora of the Okanagan Valley. Hitchhiking, nightwalking, these characters remember the constellations wrong, leave their daughters alone, and sleep outside, once again, but with a sleeping bag this time.

For more information on Our Starland / Dear Canada Council please visit: http://www.conundrumpress.com/nt_holton2.html


J. R. Carpenter: http://luckysoap.com
Emily Holton: http://www.emilyholton.com
Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com
Dare-Dare Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal: http://dare-dare.org
. . . . .

Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The week of November 3rd, 2008, I'll be a Guest Lecturer at de Montfort University. De Montfort is in Leicester, UK. But I'll be in my office in Montreal. And the students will be tuning in from the UK, Gambia, and Canada. How is this possible? De Montfort offers an online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This 95% distance learning course has a unique commitment to the connections between writing and new media and offers an excellent online experience combined with one week's intensive study at the De Montfort campus. The course is designed by Professor Sue Thomas, writer and former Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre, and Kate Pullinger, acclaimed novelist and new media writer. It has extensive links with important initiatives including DMU's Institute of Creative Technologies, research into digital narratives and new media writing, and the creative, digital and publishing industries.

This degree is informed by contemporary thinking on transliteracy, meaning the ability to read, write and interpret across a range of media from orality through print and film to networked environments. Creative Writing, indeed the very nature of text itself, is changing. No longer bound by print, there are many opportunities for writers to experiment with new kinds of media, different voices and experimental platforms, both independently and in collaboration with other writers or other fields and disciplines. Not only is writing evolving, but writers themselves are developing broader expectations and aspirations. Novelists are learning about the potential of hypertext and multimedia to change the ways in which a story can be told. Journalists are finding that blogs and wikis are radically affecting their relationships with their readers. Community artists are discovering powerful collaborative narratives. And the commercial world is finding new and creative ways to interact with its employees and customers in the fast-growing attention economy of the internet. While digital media have altered the way we disseminate and gather information, readers – both online and offline – still hunger for compelling narratives. As readers, we want to be told stories; we want complex and interesting ideas and characters; we want vivid pictures in our heads. As writers we want to communicate. We need good stories well-told, whatever our choice of delivery platform. The MA in Creative Writing and New Media provides an opportunity to focus on developing work at the cutting edge of the new technologies and enables new ways of thinking about narrative.

To visit the current students' course website and to see examples of the guest lecturers on the programme and successful applicant profiles visit: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com

To read the lecture I've prepared for the MA in Creative Writing and New Media visit: Mapping a Web of Words.


. . . . .

The Pilot Reading Series October Edition

Presented by Matrix magazine, Pop Montreal and the QWF.

J.R. Carpenter
a. rawlings
Darren Bifford
Michelle Sterling
Rebecca Silver Slayter

hosted by Mike Spry
music by Billy Fong Parade

Sunday October 26th
Bar Blizzarts, 3956A St. Laurent, Montreal
doors @ 9 - readings @ 9:30



J. R. Carpenter grew up on a farm in Nova Scotia and has lived in Montreal since 1990. She is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a Web Art Finalist in the Drunken Boat Panliterary Awards 2006. Her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Her short fiction has been broadcast on CBC Radio, translated into French, and anthologized in Le livre de chevet, Short Stuff, Lust for Life and In Other Words, and has appeared in journals including Geist, The New Quarterly and Matrix. Her first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is published by Conundrum Press (Montreal, 2008). http://luckysoap.com

a.rawlings’ first book, Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006, Alcuin Award recipient, Gerald Lampert Award nominee), documents a night in the life of Northern Ontario. rawlings co-edited Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2005), co-organized The Lexiconjury Reading Series (2001-6), and hosted Heart of a Poet (2005). She currently facilitates sound/text/movement workshops for all ages. a.rawlings' escapist fantasies feature kynlíf með álfum, Ghentish snails, and a theremin; and yes, someday, she will escape.

Darren Bifford currently lives in Montreal, where he teaches philosophy at Champlain College, St. Lambert. He is the reviews editor for Matrix.

Michelle Sterling lives and longs for the nineties in Montreal. She is a member of the Soulgazers writing collective and her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Islands Fold, $2 Comes With A Mixtape, and The Art of Trespassing by Invisible Publishing.

Rebecca Silver Slayter is an MA student in creative writing at Concordia University and an editor of Brick literary journal. She has published fiction in places like The Antigonish Review and The Hart House Review, and won a Hart House Poetry Prize and a Hart House Fiction prize in 2003 (2nd place in both cases).
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows

Words the Dog Knows, J. R. Carpenter
conundrum press (Montreal)
October 2008
978-1-894994-34-7
Novel
5x7 inches, 168 pages
$15 CDN / US

Words the Dog Knows is now available in many fine bookstores including some of my favorites: Pages, in Toronto, and the Drawn & Quarterly store on Bernard Street in Montreal. The best place to order the book online is from the conundrum press website.

Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog.

Words the Dog Knows Launch Events:

NYC - Thursday October 23, KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm
with readings by Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost
more info

Montreal - Friday November 7, Sky Blue Door
5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11 pm
also launching: J. R. Carpenter, in absentia
in association with Dare-Dare

Montreal - Sunday November 9, Blizzarts
3956A Saint-Laurent, 8 pm
with Harold Hoefle and Katia Grubisic.

Toronto - Monday November 17, This Is Not A Reading Series
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West, 7:30 pm
also launching: Emily Holton, OUR STARLAND/DEAR CANADA COUNCIL
more info
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows is at the printer

At long last my first novel, Words the Dog Knows, is finished. Written, edited, copy edited, laid out, illustrated, proof read, proof read again and sent to the printer. All in just under 10 months! Word on the street is Words will be back from the printer sometime late September / early October. Launch event details are listed below.



Words the Dog Knows is published by conundrum press (Montreal). Here's what the catalog had to say about it:

J. R. Carpenter’s long-awaited first novel Words the Dog Knows follows the crisscrossing paths of a quirky cast of characters through the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal. Simone couldn’t wait to get out of rural Nova Scotia. In Montreal she buries her head in books about far off places. Her best friend Julie gets her a job in the corporate world. Traveling for business cures Simone of her restlessness. One summer Julie’s dog Mingus introduces Simone to Theo. They move in together. Theo is a man of few words. Until he and Simone get a dog, that is. They set about training Isaac the Wonder Dog to: sit, come, stay. Meanwhile, he has fifty girlfriends to keep track of and a master plan for the rearrangement of every stick in every alleyway in Mile End. He introduces Theo and Simone to their neighbours. He trains them to see the jumbled intimacy of Mile End’s back alleyways with the immediacy of a dog’s-eye-view.

Carpenter writes with humour and directness, melding the emotional precision of her award-winning short fiction with the narrative ingenuity of her pioneering works in electronic literature. The result is a fresh and accessible first novel written and illustrated in the vernacular of the neighbourhood. Cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time.

Words the Dog Knows isn't a story about a dog. It's a story because of a dog. Walking with their dog though the same back alleyways day after day, Theo and Simone come to see their neighbourhood – and each other – in a whole new way.

Launch events:

NYC - Thursday October 23, KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, 7-9 pm
with readings by Karen Russell, Nora Maynard and Corey Frost
more info

Montreal - Friday November 7, Sky Blue Door
5403 B Saint-Laurent, 7-11 pm
also launching: J. R. Carpenter, in absentia
in association with Dare-Dare

Montreal - Sunday November 9, The Green Room
5386 St Laurent, with Harold Hoefle and Katia Grubisic.

Toronto - Monday November 17, This Is Not A Reading Series
Gladstone Ballroom, 1214 Queen Street West, 7:30 pm
also launching: Emily Holton, OUR STARLAND/DEAR CANADA COUNCIL
more info
. . . . .

Words the Dog Knows – Reading at The Yellow Door

This has been the most indoor summer ever, but boy has it been productive. I've written a novel. I'm as surprised as you are! It's called, Words the Dog Knows. It’s not really about the dog. It’s because of the dog. Because of the dog the characters come to see their neighbourhood – and each other – in a whole new way.

It's almost, almost, almost, but not quite finished, but I'll be reading excerpts from it anyway at The Yellow Door later this week. Once the book is actually printed, there will launches in Montreal, New York and Toronto. Information about those events will be posted soon. Meantime, here’s the Yellow Door info:

The Yellow Door
POETRY AND PROSE READING
http://www.yellowdoor.org
3625 Aylmer, Montreal (between Pine & Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Thursday, August 28, 2008
Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. Her novel, Words the Dog Knows, is forthcoming from Conundrum Press, fall 2008.

Hugh Hazelton is a poet and translator. His third book of poems, Antimatter, was published with CD by Broken Jaw Press in 2003.

Liam Durcan is a Montreal writer whose novel, Garcia's Heart, was published in 2007 by McClelland & Stewart.

Rita Donovan Author of six novels & one non-fiction. Her novels have won several awards, among them: CAA/Chapters Award for Fiction, Landed.

Saleema Nawaz's fiction has been published in Prairie Fire, Grain, & PRISM. Mother Superior (Freehand Books, 2008) is her first short story collection.

Ken Kalman is a poet, playwright, and novelist. Among his publications are a novel, Jesus Loves Me, a play, Defenceless, and Poetry of the Jews.

Laura Golden is author of a poetry book, Laura's Garden, 1978-2007. Artist, Reiki master, art therapist. From Now On, and Loneliness (Baico Publishing).

Tony Robinson-Smith is author of Back in 6 Years (Goose Lane Editions, 2008): In his first book, adventurer Tony circles the planet by land and sea.

Milton Dawes was one of the seven drummers who started the Tam-Tam drumming on the mountain.

. . . . .

Wyoming is Still Haunted

Late in 2006 I spent six weeks in residence at the Ucross Foundation in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. I was supposed to be working on a collection of short stories set mostly in rural Nova Scotia, but in no time Wyoming's big sky and high plains were demanding most of my writing attention. It didn't help that the deeply funny Karen Russell, author of St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves, was in the studio down the hall from mine. Every few days we'd go for a walk, which sounds harmless enough, but all of our walks turned into epic adventures. Whenever something happened to us out there in the wild Karen would say: Man, I can't wait to read about this tomorrow on your blog! I've never had such a dedicated audience before.

Now, finally, at long last, the Amazing But True Real Life Wild West Adventures of J. R. Carpenter and Karen Russell have been published for all the world to read. Published somewhere other than on my blog, that is. Carte Blanche, the literary review of the Quebec Writers' Federation, has included a condensed version of our adventures in their latest issue: Wyoming is Haunted.


. . . . .

Air Holes

In 2006 my short story “Air Holes” was one of the three winners of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition. The competition called for short stories under 1200 words, my favourite category. "Air Holes" weighs in at a wee 930 words or so. The story was broadcast on Cinq à Six CBC RadioOne July 2006.

In 2007 the competition changed its name and rules and regulations. Now now short fiction, travel writing and memoir all fall into one category, which seems like a cruel and unusual thing to do to short fiction. Oh well. Every three years Véhicule Press still publishes an anthology of winners and honourable mentions. “Air Holes” appears in the most recent of these anthologies, In Other Words: New English Writing from Québec, launched last weekend at the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival in Montreal. Here is the opening paragraph:

"The tide will go out at two today. The kids and I will go down to the beach. Between the tidemarks, beneath our feet, tight-lipped steamer clams will burrow sandy deep. But we'll find them. Their air holes will give them away."
J. R. Carpenter, “Air Holes”

. . . . .

It was a dark and stormy exquisite corpse

The 10th annual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival begins April 30 and runs until May 4, 2008. During the festival I will teach two workshops on electronic literature as part of the Blue Metropolis Student Literary Programme. The programme is designed for traditional authors to read from their work, discuss writing as an occupation, explore a literary genre with the students and then lead them in practical writing exercises in that genre. The students are then invited to read their creations and discuss them together. There will be between 30 and 50 students in each class. For most this will be their first introduction to electronic literature. For the past few weeks I’ve been wracking my brains trying to figure out how to lead 50 high school students at a time through a two-and-a-half hour hands-on writing workshop in electronic literature with only one computer in the room.

We will begin at the beginning, by looking at pre-internet pre-digital forms of writing that helped put the hyper into the hypertext markup language we know today. Among the printed texts most often cited as being hypertextual: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, at least half of Joyce, most of Calvino and Borges and just about all of Blake. I doubt any of those authors are covered in high school English – they certainly weren’t in my day.



The “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books inspired my early hypertext work: Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls. But that genre came and went before most of the students in school now were born. And besides, non-linear narrative structures are complex to create individually, let alone in a group. The vision of 50 16 years trying to decide if our hero should take a trip to petition the territorial legislature for better laws and enforcement (turn to page 96) or decide to get other sheep ranchers together and enforce the law herself (turn to page 110) put me in mind of the game Broken Telephone. A re-enactment of the lossy-ness that occurs when data moves through networks would certainly underline a basic Internet principal, but it wouldn’t necessarily count as a writing exercise. Fortunately, thinking about Broken Telephone immediately reminded me of the game Exquisite Corpse.

Exquisite corpse is a method of collective writing invented by Surrealists in 1925. It’s similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed. The resulting text is known as an exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. The name comes from the phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game:

"Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau."
The exquisite cadaver shall drink the new wine.

So we will attempt to write an exquisite corpse together, and then we will attempt to put it online together. A sudden rainstorm last night gave me a great opening line:

It was a dark and stormy night…

This, the quintessential opening line, is now so synonymous with a style of writing characterized by self-serious attempts at dramatic flair, the imitation of formulaic styles, an extravagantly florid style, redundancies, and run-on sentences that it becomes a neutral starting point for us.

One of the interesting things about the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" in the context of a workshop on electronic literature is how many times it has been altered and adapted to new contexts and new literary forms – including electronic ones, as we shall see.

The phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" was originally written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It was the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Dark and stormy nights are a common cliché in horror and suspense films. Mad scientists always prefer to perform their experiments under cover of a storm. In Mary Shelly’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, chapter 5 begins:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

In a number of English translations of Alexandre Dumas's 1844 novel The Three Musketeers, chapter 65 begins with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night.” In the original French, the opening line of the chapter is C'etait une nuit orageuse et sombre.

Madeleine L'Engle's 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time also opens with this line. A Wrinkle in Time remains one of my favourite novels of all time. The main character, Meg, is a teenage girl regarded by her peers and teachers as a bad-tempered underachiever. She and a misfit collection of characters travel through the galaxy by means of tesseract, a fifth dimensional concept similar to folding the fabric of space and time. They save the universe of course. It may also be inspiring for aspiring young writers to note that, this award-winning internationally best-selling sci-fi classic was rejected at least 26 times before it was finally accepted for publication.



Charles M. Schulz made the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night” famous in a 1965 comic strip in which Snoopy lugs a typewriter up to the roof of his dog house and writes this novel:

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night, by Snoopy

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out! A door slammed. The maid screamed.
Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!
While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day.
At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was making an important discovery. The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. She moaned softly.
Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?

The intern frowned.
"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves. A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An uppercut to the jaw. The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.
The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END

The ever versatile “It was a dark and stormy night” was adapted once again by hip-hop artist Erykah Badu in the opening line of her 1997 song Apple Tree, from the album Baduizm.

It was a stormy night
you know the kind where the lightning strike
and I was hangin' out wit some of my "artsy" friends
ooh wee ooh wee oooh
The night was long the night went on
people coolin' out until the break of dawn
incense was burnin' so I'm feelin right -- ah'ight

See I picks my friends like I pick my fruit
& Ganny told me that when I was only a youth
I don't go 'round trying to be what I'm not
I don't waste my time trying ta get what you got
I work at pleasin' me cause I can't please you
and that's why I do what I do
My soul flies free like a willow tree
doo wee doo wee do wee

And if you don't want to be down with me
You don't want to pick from my appletree

Erykah Badu - Baduizm - Appletree (Live at the Jazz Cafe)

“It was a dark and stormy night” is much maligned as the worst opening line ever and there is in fact a Edward Bulwer-Lytton competition for the worst story written from that beginning. But there’s something wonderfully liberating in the knowledge that culturally iconic characters as diverse as Snoopy and Erykah Badu can both start narratives with the same line and move off into completely different directions.

The theme of the over-blown literary cliché is taken up in this video exquisite corpse collaboration, Greatest Story Ever Told:



Each collaborator added to this story in sequence, only being allowed to see THE END of what the previous person contributed.

Our process will be similar. Will be in a hotel conference room with a borrowed computer with Internet access and a web browser but little or no other software. If all goes well we will post our exquisite corpse as a blog. And since blog posts always wind up being read in reverse chronological order – i.e. the first post written appears last on the page – we might attempt to write our narrative in reverse order. Whether we decide to open with it or close with it, with such a rote line as our starting point we know that we can improve upon it.
. . . . .

The Evolution of the Mini-Book

When I was about six I had a subscription to Owl magazine. In one issue they had a page you cut out, cut up and collated into a mini-book about birds. In 32 pint-sized panels The Owl Mini-Book of Birds introduced twenty-seven orders of birds beginning with the most primitive, flightless birds, and ending with the most advanced, perching birds. I’ve moved house at least 12 times since I was six, but somehow that wee book never got lost in the shuffle. I still have it.



When I was in high school I was painting horrible abstracts in acrylics on canvas board, writing excruciating poetry and studying classical guitar. I can sight-read music, but I’m completely tone deaf so a career in music was out. It was a toss-up between writing and visual arts until, when I was fifteen going on sixteen, I spent a summer in New York studying life drawing and anatomy at the Art Student’s League. There under the tutelage of Nicki Orbach I became simultaneously addicted to drawing and anatomical drawings and decided to apply to art school. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Nicki Orbach, know that you changed my life.

When I was seventeen I got into Concordia Fine Arts and soon after got a job at the Concordia Fine Arts Library. There I became simultaneously addicted to the disordered stacks of the now defunct Norris Library and the Fine Arts Slide Library photocopy machine. I used the hell out of that photocopy machine. I carried obscure anatomy books out the library by the armload, photocopied all the diagrams and returned the books unread. There were complaints. I almost got fired a number of times. For more on my tawdry affair with the photocopier, read: A Little Talk About Reproduction.

This was in the early nineties, I should mention, before personal computers came along and made themselves accessible. The drawing classes at Concordia were not quite on par with those at the Art Students’ League. I took a collage class with David Moore. There were photos I didn’t want to cut up. So I photocopied them. There were books I didn’t want to cut up, with anatomical diagrams in them more beautiful than anything I could draw, and there were also diagrams for all my other favourite things: botany, embroidery, analytical geometry, you name it. So I photocopied them, called them "found drawings" and found uses for them.



The first mini-book I made as an adult bore the slightly adult title, Bound For Pleasure. It was based on a poem of the same name and was illustrated with an erratum of diagrams ranging from a garter belt to a bandaged foot. The poems got better over time. The collection of found drawings grew. In art school I made four mini-books: Bound for Pleasure, The Confrontation, The Probability of Mummification, and The Basement Family Pharmacy. They’re no longer in print. Mostly I just gave them all away.



In the fall of 1993 I discovered the Internet, got a Unix shell account and set out to learn everything there was to know about computers. By the fall of 1994 I was no longer working at the Slide Library and thus no longer had illicit access to an after-hours photocopy machine. In the fall of 1995 I did a 10-week thematic residency at the Banff Centre, which was call the Banff Centre for the Arts back then. It turns out that all the big things in life happen in the fall.

The theme of the Banff residency was: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. The first story I told them was that I was a writer, which, as far as I knew, I was not, but they let me in anyway. At Banff I attempted to make a number of mid-sized mini-books using the computer, but they never went anywhere. I made this one book based on a circular story. Because it was a book, when people got to the end they just stopped, because that’s what you’re supposed to do with a book. Then the guy in the next studio over pointed out that if I made it into a web page I could link the last page to the first page so the reader could keep going around and around. So I did. My first ever electronic literature project was designed for Netscape 1.1 and it still works: Fishes & Flying Things. The guy in the next studio over was Velcrow Ripper. If you’ve just Googled yourself and are reading this now Velcrow Ripper, know that you changed my life.

I didn’t even think about making another mini-book for years. Too busy paying off my student loan. Luckily web art led to a few marketable skills. I’ve worked in every aspect of the Internet industry, as artist, designer, programmer, teacher, consultant, and even, once, a three-year stint as the manager of a multi-national web development team. I quit that job in the fall of 2001. Yes, in the fall.

After three years in the corporate world I never wanted to look at the web again. So I began writing a novel. About eight months into that as yet unfinished project I realized how long it would take. Needing to finish something immediately in order to sustain my sanity, all of a sudden I found myself making a mini-book. Not surprisingly, that book, Down the Garden Path was all about how incredibly long it takes to "make a thing which then exists and maybe it is beautiful."

I’m still working on the novel. And a collection of short stories. Or two. The post-corporate traumatic stress disorder has worn off and I’m back to making electronic literature again. Sometimes I do these things separately, more often all at once. Each new mini-book begins with a piece of writing, a short piece that I can’t get out of my head. Images accrue around it. Sometimes other texts attach themselves to my text and sometimes there are videos too. Three of the most recent mini-books are based on web projects: Entre Ville, The Cape, and How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome. The web is nice, but nothing beats cutting stuff up with scissors.

Look for these and other mini-books in DISTROBOTO machines around town. Or just ask me next time you see me – there are usually some in my purse.
. . . . .

Tributaries and Text-fed Streams

a feed-reading of The Capliano Review
a new work of electronic literature by J. R. Carpenter
curated by Kate Armstrong

The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, has commissioned me to create a new work of electronic literature based on a recent issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 "Artifice & Intelligence," guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar, included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla Sava, Kevin Magee, Jim Andrews, Gordon Winiemko, Nancy Patterson and Darren Wershler-Henry.

Tributaries & Text-fed Streams will be a personal, experimental and playful rereading of and response to these essays. I will explore the formal and functional properties of RSS, using blogging, tagging and other Web 2.0 tools to mark-up and interlink essays and to insert additional meta-layers of commentary in order to play with, expose, expand upon, and subvert formal structures of writing, literature, and literary criticism.

Over a four-month period I will read and re-read the essays, parsing them into fragments, which I will then annotate, mark-up, tag and post. Fed into an RSS stream, the fragments will be re-read, reordered, and reblogged in an iterative process of distribution that will open up new readings of the essays and reveal new interrelationships between them. The result of this process-based approach will be a blogchive – part blog, part archive – at once an online repository for the artefacts of re-reading and a stage for the performance of live archiving.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of the work. Streams of consciousness, data, and rivers flow through the interface and through the texts. Through this process of re-reading and responding, this textual tributary will feed a larger stream while paying tribute to the original source.


Tributaries & Text-fed Streams: A Feed-Reading of The Capilano Review will launch simultaneously on thecapilanoreview.ca (Vancouver) and turbulence.org (New York) in the spring of 2008.
. . . . .

Getting In On The Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together

In the beginning there were only a few of us. That we knew of. We thought there might be others, but we weren’t sure where to look. We were in a room. It was a small room. If it had a glass ceiling, we couldn’t see it. The point was to share the room, and what was in it. What was in it was a lot of paper and also, a computer. It was our understanding that the computer would replace the paper. We hadn’t got that working yet. We had other, more pressing questions: Where is this place called cyberspace? And who pays for it? We asked around, but no one would tell us anything. Go away, they said. You’re no good at math, they said. Which only made us ask more questions: What are they hiding from us – passwords, codes, equipment? What are we missing – information, networks, power? What don’t they want us to know – that if they can do it we can do it? If they can do it than how hard could it possibly be?

One day we decided we would ask the computer. Computer, do you contain any answers to the many questions you engender? We huddled around it. We only had the one. It was a grey-beige box with a beetle-black glass eye. We knew we had to get past the surface of the thing. We knew that deep down inside our grey-beige box was much larger than it appeared. It was connected to other grey-beige boxes in other rooms. Stashed away inside these millions of boxes there must be billions of answers.

We switched the computer on. There was a click, a whir, and then a steady hum. Soon enough we sat basking in a blue-green glow. A cursor blinked at us. We blinked back. Now what do we do? Expectations were running high. We’d been promised progress, deliverance, another chance. And there was this cursor clearing a path to the command line for us, a clean slate. Before we knew it we were giving it orders: run, kill, execute. This kind of language was hard for some of us to take. Some of us just wanted to: sleep, jobs, stop, exit. Others wanted to know more: list, who, finger, history. Cables coiled at our feet. They snaked out the door. We slipped out with them. So this is how we shed our skin!

We had stumbled into uncharted territory, an outlaw zone where we could be anything, anyone, anywhere. We could be logical. We could be abstract. We could be “it” or “he/she” or we could log in as Guest and cruise anonymous through Archie, Gopher, Telnet and FTP. We wandered around like this for a dog’s age. Which, in Internet years, was just a few days. We still had bodies. Our wrists were sore. And everywhere we went we were: @gender, language thwarting us at every turn.

One day we were minding our own business writing shell scripts on the command line when a bright spec appeared on the horizon. It was a pixel. It was a mass of pixels. The pixels joined forces. Soon they formed a thumbnail, and then a whole jpeg. An image! The next thing we knew no one knew who was issuing commands anymore. We were all clicking away on icons. What we saw was what we got. One thing linking to another, faster and faster, around and around we went.

Now all we have to do is ask, and answers come racing at us. So many answers. What were the questions again? They were merely predictions. They enabled us to move forward. Toward what? We never would have guessed. How many of us there are. How much we do and do not know. How are we going to remember all this? Will our uncertainties be stored online, along with our desires? Maybe we’d better print them out just in case. How necessary is closure? Well, it’s a start anyway.

"Getting in on the Ground Floor: A Hazy History of How and Why We Banded Together," an essay by J. R. Carpenter, published in xxxboîte, an artifact produced in celebration of the first ten years of Studio XX, a Feminist art centre for technological exploration, creation, and critique.


. . . . .

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

a new web map writing project by J. R. Carpenter

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006

I moved to Montréal on the night train. I've lived in eight neighbourhoods since and each has had a different quality of sleep. There are eight hours for sleeping in, four quarters in each hour, many more quarters in each city. Some quarters never sleep, or so they say. Others seem to be built for dreaming in. These are les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006: Car Crash Sleep, Bamboo Blind Sleep, Waterbed Sleep, Louvered Door Sleep, Purple Parakeet Sleep, Break and Enter Sleep, Gondola Sleep and Greek Sleep.



To navigate these neighbourhoods of sleep, take the night train to Montréal (warning: this method may take 16 years). Or do a Google Maps search for J. R. Carpenter les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montreal 1990-2006 and view the user generated content (warning: this method may return variable results). Or follow a direct link to the Google Map of les huit quartiers du sommeil here: http://luckysoap.com/huitquartiers

A Note on the Type: I wrote the text of les huit quartiers du sommeil during a bout of insomnia at Yaddo, January-February 2007. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table for listening to the thunks and whirrings of this text coming to life. Thanks CALQ for helping me get to Yaddo. I built the Google Maps and HTML versions of huit quartiers in Montréal May-July 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant idea, and thanks Michael Boyce and Lisa Vinebaum for the careful readings. The aerial photographs are totally copyright you, Google Earth. Thanks in advance for having a sense of humour. The other images were found using Google Images and then altered using Photoshop filters until they looked like something I would do. Except for the street maps, those I drew by hand as you can probably tell. Merci Daniel Canty, your English is better than mine. Et merci Stéphane Vermette pour tous.

les huit quartiers du sommeil de Montréal 1990-2006
. . . . .

Let’s Pretend We Met last Week

Last week we launched Nathaniel G. Moore’s new book of poetry – Let’s Pretend We Never Met – at the Casa del Popolo, “we” being Nathaniel G. himself, Angela Hibbs, Mary Williamson, me, J. R. Carpenter, and some of our closest friends. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to write about this event before it happened, for PR purposes, but things didn’t work out that way. It was a lovely evening thanks to the many sweet friends who showed up minimal prompting.

The first person to thank is Nathaniel, for writing a new book – a new book is always such a good excuse for a reading and a reading is always such a good excuse for hanging out with friends and drinking. A far as I know Nathaniel and I have never pretended that we never met. We’re both Rome junkies. Let’s Pretend We Never Met riffs on the poems and life of Catullus, a Roman poet of the first century BC. Catullus was the first to write about his personal life in the tawdry way we all do nowadays. Nathaniel drags the lusty lovelorn mourning Catullus kicking and screaming, leering and heavy petting into the twenty-first century – or at least into the nineteen-eighties – into a grimly-lit rec-room reality-TV sort of post-pubescent angst. Which sounds awful, but it totally works. Let’s Pretend is a weirdly compelling book – or maybe it’s a concept album? Anyway, pound-for-pound it’s a page-turner.

Another person to thank is Angela Hibbs. Her book is smaller and redder and there’s a girl on the front instead of a guy. Passport is a collection “escape from Newfoundland poems.” I don’t think Ms Hibbs would mind them characterized in this way. They’ve got enough perspective in them to indicate to the reader that the author did indeed escape, but at the same time enough razor-burn rawness to them to indicate that it was a narrow escape, an all-around close call. I would also like to thank Angela for wearing short-shorts, thigh-high stockings and high-heeled cowboy boots.

Third up was Mary Williamson who read a story not presently in a book but bound to be one day. I’d only just met Angela and Mary three nights previous. On that occasion Angela was wearing a blond wig and a gold lame gown and Mary was wearing a redhead wig and a baby blue ball gown and then a red brocaded and fringed flapper number which she kept hiking up to dance flapper-type dances. Given the flapper theme it was all one could do to refrain from yelling: Nice gams! At the reading Mary was reading a story from a boy’s point of view so she was wearing a boy’s cap, undershirt, and jeans found in the garbage. Nathaniel was wearing pants found in the garbage too. Or maybe his were from a yard sale. Mine were.

I was wearing a pair of super skinny jeans bought up the street at a yard sale for three bucks. It’s hard not to buy three-dollar jeans. It’s also hard to sit down in them, these ones anyway. These are my standing up jeans, I kept saying to reading attendees lest they think me pacing nervously. I read some Rome related stuff: Notes On Arrival, a short prose poem culled from the How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome web project; A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, a new piece written especially for this reading, and Roads Out of Rome, another piece that began as part of Broken Things and was then expanded and adapted and eventually made its way into Geist last winter.

Highlights of the evening included – in no particular order: when, in my reading of A Timeline of Notable Arrivals in Rome, I skipped ahead 1200 years and paused and said – I’m skipping ahead here – and everybody laughed (phew); when friends showed up even though it was summer and Tuesday and a poetry reading no less, and when the afore-mentioned Angela Hibbs showed up in short-shorts.



Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
J. R. Carpenter, How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
. . . . .

a few reviews

Oh webstats. You’re so informative! Thanks for letting me know that a quite possibly Australian fellow named Bill Bly wrote a lovely blog post about The Cape, which he discovered in the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. From The Cape he followed links to Entre Ville, which he describes so vivdly in his post that if I didn’t live here I’d move. Thanks Mr. Bly. http://infomonger.com/bbly/blog/2007/05/between-city.html

Webstats also informs me that CIAC’s Electronic Magazine #27/2007 is dedicated to Net Art: heir, aujourd’hui, demain and that it includes a well-written review by Patrick Ellis of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. He mentions The Cape and Entre Ville. Thanks Mr. Ellis. http://www.ciac.ca/magazine/en/compterendu.htm

There are links to other reviews of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 on the Electronic Literature Organization web site, including an interesting one by Edward Picot in the Hyperliterature Exchange. Also of note, N. Katherine Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007) will include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1. The first chapter, Electronic Literature: What Is It? is also now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website. Thanks ELO.


. . . . .

Roads Out of Rome

Roads Out of Rome appears in Geist #63, on newsstands now.

All roads lead to Rome. It stands to reason that they lead out of Rome as well. It’s helpful to know someone who has a car. And isn’t afraid to use it. When in Rome, one thing to do not as the Romans do, is to drive. In Roads Out of Rome, my Roman friend Barbara drives me around and I live to tell the tale.

Here's an excerpt:

"So now I trust Barbara: to not kill us, even when she’s shout-talking in Roman dialect on her mobile phone; to know where we’re going, even if not how to get there; and to always be late, unless I’m late, in which case she will be early. Today I was early and she was very late."

J. R. Carpenter, Roads Out of Rome

See also: How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome
. . . . .

a dream come true

Very early yesterday morning I boarded a Greyhound bound for Saratoga Springs, New York. And what are you going to do in Saratoga Springs; they wanted to know at the border. I was somewhat disappointed that none of the US customs and immigration officials had ever heard of Yaddo, but relieved that they let me into the country anyway.
Rain cratered the Saratoga Springs bus stop parking lot puddles. I found a taxi right away, but the driver had never head of Yaddo either. And he was al local. I was starting to think that Yaddo was fictional. Makes sense considering it’s a place you hear about most from fiction writers. I quickly learned, from my chatty cranked-up cabbie, that he was really a bricklayer – in the union and everything, he assured me – who had only just started driving a cab after his recent injury. Luckily I had consulted a number of online maps prior to my departure and was able to tell him where to take me: it’s on Union Avenue, past the racetrack. It’s an estate; look for a gate, or an archway or something. So what are you going to do at Ya-doo; he wants to know. It’s a place for artists and writers… You mean poets? Yeah… Well, it turns out my fast-talking bricklaying cabbie is a poet. What do I want to hear – a wisdom poem, a love poem, or what? Okay, give me your best wisdom poem. And off he goes. A street poet. A white rapper. Very 8 Mile.

Just when I think he’s going to challenge me to a poetry slam duel right there in the cab, he spots the gate. Ya-doo! he cries. Good eye. We turn in onto a narrow road that winds through close tall evergreens, across a river, past a waterfall… So you’ve never been here before? No. Damn! Now that’s a mansion. We take a few wrong turns and wind up out on the road again. He pulls a u-turn across four lanes of traffic and then another one and there we are back at the gate. When we finally find the office I ask him to wait till I find someone who can tell me where to take my luggage. He comes into the office with me. We’re both impressed by how old the building is. This wall is plaster, he says. You couldn’t punch a hole through it if you tried. Good to know. A few minutes later, and not a moment too soon, the programme coordinator gets into the cab with us and we proceed deeper into the estate. At the dreamy creamy cottage that will be my home for the next 5.5 weeks, we get out and I ask my cabbie what I own him. Whatever you want to give, he says. This one’s off-meter.

And so now all of a sudden I’m here. Yaddo does exist after all. The mansion is closed for the winter, though it hardly feels like winter. It’s January and the grass is green. I live in Pine Garde, a house much lovelier than its name, which is evocative of cleaning supplies and deodorants. My studio is in the sun porch. My other studio is in the back off of my bedroom. Two studios? Yes, and an en suite bathroom. And a kitchen and living room with a working fireplace and only one other writer living and working in the house. Could I be dreaming all this? It is quite possible that I am.

I arrived at Yaddo exhausted, trailing a string of late nights, sleepless nights, groggy mornings and busy days. I’m sure I made a less than clever first impression. I kept re-asking people’s names at dinner but they were nice about it. Most imagined Montreal was a long day’s travel from Saratoga. And in an attempt to justify my mental sluggishness I did little to dispel this myth. Geographically Montreal and New York City are the same distance from Saratoga Springs. Culturally, New York is very close to here. Many of the New Yorkers in residence have been to Montreal and love the city. I am the only Canadian here at the moment and although I have not traveled a greater distance than most to get here, yesterday, after dinner, perusing the library of Yaddo Authors, it came over me what a long journey it has been.

Last night I crawled into bed early with a stack of books written by illustrious guests of Yaddo, some written at Yaddo, some quite possibly written in my Pine Garde sun porch. I fell asleep immediately and for the first time in weeks I slept heavily and for a long time.

Toward morning I dreamt that I was at Yaddo. I have been having this dream for years, but this time it was much more vivid. Finally, all the details filled in. I woke up and guess what! A dream come true.
. . . . .

Deleted Zines in Broken Pencil

My friend Nathaniel G. Moore wrote an article all about the mini-books I used to make before I stopped making mini-books for a while and then started again. Isn’t that awesome? Nathaniel really is irrepressible. Don’t even try repressing him. No, instead what you should do is go out and buy the new issue of Broken Pencil. You know, the magazine of culture and the independent arts. Issue 33. In his feature article – Deleted Zines: Digging the Dirt on Ex-Zinesters – Mr. N. G. Moore asks: Where Are They Now? Why Are They Now? Where For Art They Now? I know the answer to some of these questions, but I’m not dishing. Go buy the magazine. And look for my un-deleted and totally twenty-first century mini-books from a Distroboto machine near you.

Nathaniel G. Moore: http://www.notho.net

BROKEN PENCIL: http://www.brokenpencil.com

DISTROBOTO: http://www.distroboto.archivemontreal.org/

EXPOZINE: http://http://www.expozine.ca/
. . . . .

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1

THE CAPE – a recent web art fiction – has been included in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, now available in CD-ROM format and online: http://collection.eliterature.org/

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 features 60 digital literary works by: Jim Andrews, Ingrid Ankerson, babel, Giselle Beiguelman, Philippe Bootz, Patrick-Henri Burgaud, J.R. Carpenter, John Cayley, M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Luesebrink), Martha Deed, David Durand, escha, Damien Everett, Sharif Ezzat, Edward Falco, Mary Flanagan, Marcel Fr’emiot, Elaine Froehlich, geniwate, Loss Peque~no Glazier, Kenneth Goldmith, Tim Guthrie, Richard Holeton, Daniel C. Howe, Jon Ingold, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Aya Karpinska, Robert Kendall, Deena Larsen, Kerry Lawrynovicz, Donna Leishman, Bill Marsh, Talan Memmott, Maria Mencia, Judd Morrissey, Brion Moss, Stuart Moulthrop, Jason Nelson, Marko Niemi, Millie Niss, Lance Olsen, Jason Pimble, William Poundstone, Kate Pullinger, Melinda Rackham, Aaron A. Reed, Shawn Rider, Jim Rosenberg, Megan Sapnar, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short, Alan Sondheim, Brian Kim Stefans, Reiner Strasser, Dan Waber, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Rob Wittig, Nanette Wylde.

The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 is an initiative of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), a non-profit organization established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature, headquartered at The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, College Park: http://eliterature.org

AUTOSTART – A Festival of Digital Literature – will celebrate the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 in a series of workshops, discussions, readings and jams at the Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA on October 26 & 27, 2006: http://writing.upenn.edu/wh/autostart.html

WARNING: Cape Cod is a real place, but the events and characters of THE CAPE are total fiction. The photographs have been retouched. The diagrams are not to scale. Don’t believe everything you read: http://Luckysoap.com/thecape
. . . . .

Sniffing for Stories In-situ

Want to go for a walk?
If you were a dog that would be a great opening line.

Want to go for an interdisciplinary audio walking tour of Mile End? If so, head over to the Casa del Popolo this weekend to partake in In-situ Cité, an ensemble audio piece created by five Montreal-based artists.

My contribution to In-situ Cité is called Sniffing for Stories. It's a prose poem. It's one block long. It's a long block. It's a walk we walk every day. Here's an excerpt:

We take other walks besides this one, but lets say we don't.
Let's say our dog walks us up and down this alleyway three times a day.
That's eight-and-a-half years of up and eight-and-a-half years of down.
Nine thousand three hundred laps of toenails clicking on cracked concrete.
Trail zigzagging, long tail wagging, long tongue lolling, dog tags clacking.
Ears open, eyes darting, nose to the ground.
READ THE REST OF SNIFFING FOR STORIES >>>

To hear Sniffing for Stories in-situ head over to the Casa del Popolo between 12 & 5PM on Saturday September 30 or Sunday October 1, 2006. I will be at the Casa from 4PM on the Saturday for a talk-back session with the director, Stephen Lawson.

The tour is free. It lasts about an hour. You'll be equipped with a map of the route and a CD player. For further such logistical information visit: http://luckysoap.com/statements/sniffingforstories.html

Sniffing for Stories in In-situ Cité
Casa del Popolo, 4873 boul. St-Laurent.
September 30 & October 1, 2006
Between 12 & 5pm

INFO & RESERVATIONS: 514.843.3685

In-situ Cité is presented by Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal in collaboration with Les Journées de la Culture, OBORO & CKUT.
. . . . .

Two Generations - Abridged

Rachelle Viader Knowles has written an article about her FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT for the online journal GLOWLAB - recommended reading for those I’ve inexpertly explained the project to in recent weeks.

Although I have yet to see photographic evidence, Rachelle assures me that my short story, Two Generations Ago, is now printed on a fridge-magnet affixed to the Williamsburg Bridge. The story is most certainly online, along with those of the other participants: Charlotte Barker, David Khang, Adriene Jenik, Carol Weliky, Kim Morgan, Jenny Levison, Marlena Corcoran, Jessica Greenberg, Myron Moss, Jane Deschner, Rupert Hartley, Suzanne Lindgren and Michelle Jacques.

Thanks Rachelle, for allowing my tenuous former resident of Brooklyn status. I hope I also sort of used to live wherever you set your next FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT.
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Sniffing for Stories on Cinq à Six

Tune into Cinq à Six on CBC RadioOne 88.5 FM in Montréal at 5PM this evening to hear an interview Host Patti Schmidt recorded with me earlier this week about In-situ Cité. I read an excerpt from Sniffing for Stories, and then we went on to talk about all kinds of other stuff. So fun. You can also listen online: http://www.cbc.ca/cinqasix/

In-situ Cité takes place next weekend, Saturday September 30 & October 1 between Noon and 5PM. The start-off point is the Casa del Popolo, 4873 boul. St-Laurent. My Entre Ville mini-books will be on sale there and I will be at the Casa for a talkback session with In-situ Cité Director Stephen Lawson Saturday at 4PM. For more information follow the above links and/or to make reservations call: 514.843.3685
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Two Generations Ago

Look for my very short story, Two Generations Ago, on the streets of Brooklyn this September. Literally. It will be on on a street somewhere near the Williamsburg Bridge.

Rachelle Viader Knowles has included the story in her FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT, which launches during Conflux Festival September 14 - 17, 2006, in Brooklyn NY, USA.

THE FORMER RESIDENT PROJECT explores the city through the narratives of the no-longer resident, people whose lives have been shaped by their experiences of places they no longer inhabit. For many of us, 'residence' is a multiple thing, a series of narratives and residues that shift and slip over time. When we leave a place, what do we take? And what do we leave behind? The project includes stories donated by former 'residents' of Brooklyn about something that happened in a particular location. Each story has been printed onto a fridge magnet and posted near that location. The the address are listed on the website: http://www.former-resident-project.net

If you don't happen to be in Brooklyn you can also read my story here:
Two Generations Ago
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POETS FOR RED CROSS: 9/11 FIVE YEARS ON

Nearly 90 poets from around the world have contributed to Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on, an anthology of poems reflecting on direct and indirect consequences of 9/11. These poems aim for more than pious hand-wringing. The anthology is free to download, but readers are requested to donate to the Red Cross.

nthposition, the London-based website behind the anthology, has listed Babylon Burning on iTunes as a PDF in hopes of maximising the money raised . Poetry editor Todd Swift notes: "Auden said that 'poetry makes nothing happen', but we think it can, and we'd like to prove it."

Contributors to Babylon Burning are: Ros Barber, Jim Bennett, Rachel Bentham, Charles Bernstein, bill bissett, Yvonne Blomer, Stephanie Bolster, Jenna Butler, Jason Camlot, J R Carpenter, Jared Carter, Patrick Chapman, Sampurna Chattarji, Maxine Chernoff, Tom Chivers, Alfred Corn, Tim Cumming, Margot Douaihy, Ken Edwards, Adam Elgar, Elaine Feinstein, Peter Finch, Philip Fried, Leah Fritz, Richard Garcia, Sandra M Gilbert, Nathan Hamilton, Richard Harrison, Kevin Higgins, Will Holloway, Bob Holman, Paul Hoover, Ray Hsu, Halvard Johnson, Chris Jones, Jill Jones, Kavita Joshi, Jonathan Kaplansky, Wednesday Kennedy, Sonnet L’Abbé, Kasandra Larsen, Tony Lewis-Jones, Dave Lordan, Alexis Lykiard, Jeffrey Mackie, Mike Marqusee, Chris McCabe, Nigel McLoughlin, Pauline Michel, Peter Middleton, Adrian Mitchell, John Mole, David Morley, George Murray, Alistair Noon, D Nurkse, John Oughton, Ruth Padel, Richard Peabody, Tom Phillips, David Prater, Lisa Pasold, Victoria Ramsay, Harold Rhenisch, Noel Rooney, Joe Ross, Myra Schneider, Robert Sheppard, Zaid Shlah, Henry Shukman, Penelope Shuttle, John Siddique, Goran Simic, Hal Sirowitz, Heather Grace Stewart, Andrew Steinmetz, John Stiles, William E Stobb, jordan stone, Sean Street, Todd Swift, Joel Tan, Nathaniel Tarn, Mark Terrill, Helên Thomas, Vincent Tinguely, Rodrigo Toscano, John Tranter and John Welch. All gave their work for free.

Download Babylon Burning: 9/11 five years on: http://www.nthposition.com/babylonburning911.php
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in-situ Cité so far

1. first steps

I borrowed a mic from a friend who has a one-year-old

the kid kept grabbing the mic so we gave him a toy mic

then we gave him a toy ball

we rolled the ball down the hall and he chased it

when we tried to record our dog running in the alley

the dog thought the mic was a stick with a ball on the end

he grabbed the foam wind guard and ran off with it

in the early stages, children and dog are quite alike

2. by my calculations

if our dog is eight-and-a-half

than we’ve lived in our five-and-a-half for a dog’s age

we walk our dog other places besides our alley but let’s say we don’t

eight-and-a-half years of three times a day up and three times a day down

that’s eighteen thousand six hundred and fifteen lengths of alley

writing for one length of alley is harder than I thought it would be

it takes five minutes to walk from Fairmount to Saint Viateur

six if you walk slowly

seven if you walk as if intent on studying every scent

eight-and-a-half years if you walk as if sniffing for stories

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in-situ preview

This summer I’ve been working on an audio narrative walking tour project that will be presented by the Playwrights’ Workshop Montréal during Les Journées de la Culture, September 30 – October 1, 2006. Here’s what the PWM website says:

PWM is proud to present In-situ Cité, five short original environmental theatre pieces, organized as an audio walking tour of the Mile End. Directed by Stephen Lawson, In-situ Cité will showcase the works of of J.R. Carpenter, Nathalie Derome, Skidmore, Geeta Nadkarni, and Rosella Tursi.

From the outset I’ve thought of my piece as a continuation of Entre Ville, with our neighbours as characters and the back alleyway as the terrain. The alleyways of Mile End are a world known and shown to us by our dog. The week we thought Isaac the Wonder Dog was dying (see August posts) I had a massive anxiety attack about In-situ Cité. In the long hours spent sitting and waiting on the concrete floors of vets and animal clinics my whole idea of neighbourhood and community and humanity underwent some major revisions.

Isaac walks us up and down the alleyway three times a day. He introduces us to our neighbours and befriends children – things we would never do of our own volition. We’re not crazy about our neighbours. We’re dog people, not children people. But we make the best of things. We try and look at things from the dog's eye point of view. Which is how I am now aproaching my In-situ Cité piece.
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The Greyhound Eulogy

I'm back from Banff, caught up on sleep, reacclimatized to high heat and humidity and happy to announce that my short story The Greyhound Eulogy appears in Matrix Magazine #74, in stores now, in Montreal at least.

I can't remember who, but someone said - Gordon Lish maybe, or John Gardner - that it's impossible to write an unsentimental story about your grandmother. Even though The Greyhound Eulogy is about writing my grandmother's eulogy on a Greyhound bus bound for NYC, it's hardly depressing at all thanks to the unsentimental readers: Amy Hempel, Ibi Kaslik, Lilly Kuwashima and Kate Sheldon. Much thanks also to Matrix editors Rob Allen and Jon Paul Fiorentino.

Here's an excerpt of The Greyhound Eulogy:

"In the town of Glens Falls, N.Y., the Greyhound passes through a protest in progress. On one street corner, amid a cluster of hand-printed placards one small sign stands out: ‘Another veteran against the war.’ On the other side of the street, a wind-warped banner reads: ‘America is worth fighting for.’ I write: ‘Always the optimist, she brought humour to every situation,’ and try to remember her favourite burning Bush joke."

J. R. Carpenter, The Greyhound Eulogy, Matrix #74, Montreal QC, Summer 2006.
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Some Thoughts on Letter Writing

"Writing a letter today, I was struck by the fact that I had been here only three weeks. Three weeks elsewhere, in the country for example, would be like a day; here they seem like years. And I mean to write no more letters. What’s the use of telling anyone that I am changing? If I am changing then surely I am no longer the person I was, and if I am something else than heretofore, then it is clear that I have no acquaintances. And to strange people, to people who do not know me, I cannot possibly write." Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. M. D. Herter Norton, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1949. Page 15.

"I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read." Anne Carson, On Ovid, from "Short Talks" in Plainwater, NY: Vintage 1995. Page 32.
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into the thin air

the thin air has made thieves of us.
homeless and breathless and dry-eyed,
we steal through the night.

through the night our skin thins and flakes,
elbows ashen and ankles arid enough to
scratch the surface of our illicit food dreams.

illicit food dreams feature fillets of fish flying
into our purses. deserts disappear in droves
and wherever we go crumb trails follow.

crumb trails follow us into the forest.
we gnash at snatched sandwiches
and feast on our forbidden fruit.

our forbidden fruit fills us with careful cunning.
into a stash of stolen moments we disappear,
thieves into the thin air.
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The Loudest Room

We live in the loudest room.
Our walls are made of sudden noises.
Other people’s showers rain down on us.
Far off phones ring extra loud so we can hear them.
People will talk to a telephone about just about anything.
All the doors travel down the hall to shut near our door.
Our door is in love with the door next door.
The door next door posted private information about us on the Internet.
Now everyone knows there’s a shortcut right though our room.
Outside voices don’t wipe their feet when they come in.
Pieces of passing conversations hang out in our closet.
Housekeeping knocks through the wall to give us fresh towels.
The window is too small to let a breeze through.
But large enough to let the construction crew through.
And the laundry truck’s full arsenal of beeps and groans.
The security guards have top-secret meetings at our desk.
They use up all the coffee whitener and leave the seat up.
The jazz musicians think we think they’re entertaining.
We see through them, passing practice off as serenade.
We don’t know why they need to rehearse.
All they do is improvise.
And hog the bed.
A tenor sax warms up near our heads.
A standing bass strings us along.
We live in suspense, in the loudest room.
Suspended in sleepless animation.
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Telling Stories, Telling Tales

Babel, Babble, Rabble, On Language and Art is my second thematic residency at The Banff Centre. Ten Years ago I attended a residency called: Telling Stories, Telling Tales. I was 22 when I applied, and had never written and artist’s statement before. Given the theme, I thought a quasi-fictional tone would be appropriate. Here’s what I sent them:

I could tell you stories. Like the time I was three, and they brought my brother home from the hospital. My uncle ran out into the driveway with an afghan over his head. I could take you to Nova Scotia and show you the afghan. My mother still has it. Then would my story be true? I could take you to North Carolina and we could ask my uncle, but I think his mind’s gone soft with drink. I don’t know, he never writes…

Then when I was five I got in trouble with my teacher for saying that Jupiter had a ring like Saturn. She told my mother I was telling stories.

These stories build and feed and build and feed upon themselves and meet up with themselves around certain corners and repeat themselves and make less and less sense.

I told the story of Chanukah about 8,000 times to the Christian school children of rural Nova Scotia. No one ever believed me.

I train language around the obstacle course of truth, fiction, image and word. I position myself between reading and writing, between pulp fiction and cultural theory. In strange twists of the body, I hold myself between the theoretical convictions of Daily Life Montreal, the rural convictions of Childhood Nova Scotia, and the critical convictions of Grandmother New York. Just today I was a storyteller, a gossip, a theoretician, a geologist and a great fan of analytical geometry.

I could tell you stories about the first time I fell in love. I performed a comedia delle arte retinue of stories, a different one each night, but she didn’t want to hear them. I tried to bake them into a cornbread, but she wouldn’t eat it. So I let the long cool silences of late September afternoons speak for me. I lay in her bed and said nothing. The text left my face and became soft and my teeth melted around her nipple. I woke up in January and realized that she had not understood a word I had not said. I told her I was running away from home, leaving for the mountains, but that I would write her a letter everyday. She laughed at me. She said I was telling stories.
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Hennessey's High Pasture

My short story, Hennessey's High Pasture, appears in The New Quarterly, #98, Waterloo, ON, Spring 2006. This story used to be called The Bayley-Hazen Road. I began writing in 1996, and submitted it to at least a dozen journals since then. I am grateful to every editor who had the good sense to reject it before it was ready. My thanks to the Trautz family, for helping start the story off; to Jenn Goodwin, first reader; Amy Hempel, generous reader; and Kim Jernigan, The New Quarterly editor who turned up at end of the old Bayley-Hazen Road.

Excerpt from Hennessey's High Pasture:

"Most nights the dogs and I walk up to Hennessey's high pasture. You can see the whole King's County from up there. Even when it's dark you feel it, the earth curving away from you. But I'm not ready yet. I smoke a cigarette. No matter which way I hold it, the smoke blows toward Earl."

J. R. Carpenter
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Yellow Door Reading

I'll be reading at The Yellow Door, Thursday, April 27, 2006

3625 Aylmer (between Pine and Prince Arthur) Tel: 514-398-6243

Doors open 7:00 pm Reading 7:30 pm At the door $5

Poets & Prose Writers & Musicians featured:

J. R. Carpenter Poet, fiction writer & new media artist. A two-time winner of the CBC/QWF Quebec Short Story Competition (2004 & 2006), her short fiction & poetry have been published in journals & anthologies in Canada, US, & UK. More information about her writing and web art projects can be found on Luckysoap.com

Stephen Morrissey Published seven books of poetry & chapbooks. He is a founding member of the Vehicule Poets. He is editor and publisher of www.coraclepress.com Visit the poet: www.stephenmorrissey.ca

Victoria Stanton Performance artist who has presented her work nationally, in the U.S., Europe, Australia & Japan. She is the co-author with Vincent Tinguely of Impure: Reinventing the Word (conundrum press, 2001).

Fortner Anderson Co-founder with Ian Ferrier of the Wired on Words record label. His CD, six silk purses, is forthcoming. Read at the Mondes parallè le 50//litté rature festival in Lille, France.

Talleen Hacikyan Fiction writer & visual artist. First prize winner at the 2005 Victoria School of Writing Postcard Story Competition. Selected for the 2003-2004 QWF Mentorship Program. Short story published in Ararat.

Ilona Martonfi Blue Poppy, a first book of poems TBA published by Coracle (2006.) Published chapbook, Visiting the Ridge (Coracle). Poet, editor, producer/host Yellow Door readings. Co-producer/host of Lovers & Others.

Producer/host Ilona Martonfi Tel/Fax 514-939-4173

www.yellowdoor.org/coffeehouse/spoken_word.html/
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