lapsus linguae

Next Stop, SappyFest!

Literary types of all stripes will invade SappyFest this year. Thursday, July 30, I’ll pack a suitcase full of zines and novels and join the migration eastward.

SappyFest is a little independent music festival produced annually in partnership with the Ok.Quoi?! Contemporary Arts Festival, Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre. The festival takes place July 31 – August 2, 2009, in Sackville, New Brunswick, the centre of the universe.

If you happen to be in the centre of the universe that weekend, come visit me at the Zine Fair, Saturday August 1, 12 to 4 PM at the United Church. There will be participants from across Canada, a kids workshop, a presentation by Andy Brown (Conundrum Press) and readings by Jeffrey Makie, Jaime Forsthythe and Dawn-Aeron Wason.

Sunday, August 2, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, check out the The Vogue Writers Block, a multi-media event at The Vogue Theater (Sackville’s art deco movie theater) featuring The Joe, Catherine Kidd, J.R. Carpenter, Lezlie Lowe, Andrea Dorfman, Ian Roy, and Thesis. I’ll reading a section of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, that traverses three different electronic literature projects (How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome, Entre Ville, and in absentia).

Now a registered non-profit organization, SappyFest Incorporated, the festival was founded in 2006 by the good people of Sappy Records, Julie Doiron, Jon Claytor and Paul Henderson.

Ok.Quoi?! is an interdisciplinary festival of contemporary art, focusing on video, audio, new and independent music produced by Struts Gallery & Faucet Media Arts Centre in partnership with SappyFest. The works of over 50 artists will be presented over 6 days in a variety of screenings, installations, concerts, broadcasts and performances. Alongside exciting international and national work, Ok.Quoi?! features new and innovative projects from local and regional artists. All events save for the Last Chance for Summer Romance concert and barbecue are free, and open to all ages.

More info: SappyFest & Ok.Quoi?!

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Vallum Cafe/Culture Reading Series – July 23, 7pm

I will be reading some of my most poem sounding prose in Montreal this Thursday when Vallum: contemporary poetry reading series Cafe/Culture returns with fantastic lineup of Oana Avasilichioaei, J.R. Carpenter, Holly Luhning and Anne Cimon grace the ultra-cool Le Zigoto Cafe, 5731 du Parc (just below Bernard). Door prizes and a surprise musical guest! It all starts at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009.

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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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WORDS THE DOG KNOWS – Toronto Launch – Monday, November 17, 2008

We invite you to join us in celebration of the publication of Emily Holton’s latest book, Dear Canada Council/Our Starland (Montreal: Conundrum Press) and J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, Words the Dog Knows (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Animations, music, and two beautiful books – take your pick! – they’re all great excuses to come drink too much in Parkdale on a Monday night.

A This Is Not A Reading Series event presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Conundrum Press and EYE WEEKLY.

Monday, November 17, 2008, 7:00pm
Gladstone Hotel Ballroom
1214 Queen Street West
Toronto, ON

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 please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html

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 Dear Canada Council / Our Starland 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
THIS IS NOT A READING SERIES: http://www.pagesbooks.ca/events.php

So many dear friends turned out for the NYC and Montreal launches we can’t wait to take the show on the road. Here’s some of the fun we’ve had so far:

NYC launch at KGB Bar, Thursday October 23, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
Maya Merrick at the he Book Table

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
We love you Andy Brown.

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008

Montreal at Sky Blue Door, Friday November 7, 2008
It’s this much fun!
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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)

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

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
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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).
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New York City Launch – Words the Dog Knows – KGB Bar, October 23, 2008

Dear Friends. We invite you to join us in celebrating the publication of J.R. Carpenter’s first novel, WORDS THE DOG KNOWS (Montreal: Conundrum Press) with an evening of readings from Montreal and New York-area fiction writers that will take you from the swamplands of Florida to the streets of Montreal and onward to points beyond. J.R. will be joined by New Yorker Karen Russell, fellow Conundrum author Corey Frost, and Canadian New Yorker Nora Maynard.

KGB Bar http://kgbbar.com/calendar/
85 East 4th Street, New York City, NY
Thursday, October 23, 2008
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm (free)

For more information on Words the Dog Knows, including a full launch event listing and ordering information, please visit: http://luckysoap.com/stories/wordsthedogknows.html or Conundrum Press: http://conundrumpress.com

J.R. Carpenter is a two-time winner of the CBC Quebec Short Story Competition and a fellow of Yaddo, Ucross and The Vermont Studio Center. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and her electronic literature has been presented internationally. Words the Dog Knows is her first novel. http://luckysoap.com

Karen Russell is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, ST. LUCY’S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS RAISED BY WOLVES (Knopf). Karen’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Zoetrope, among others. She is currently at work on a novel. http://www.randomhouse.com/author/results.pperl?authorid=70463

Corey Frost is the author of MY OWN DEVICES: AIRPORT VERSION (Montreal: Conundrum Press). Corey has performed his stories at Lollapalooza, The Perpetual Motion Roadshow, and at festivals around the world. http://www.coreyfrost.com

Nora Maynard is a winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts Chapter One Competition and a fellow of the Ragdale Foundation, the Millay Colony, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. She is a columnist for Apartment Therapy Media’s The Kitchn, and is completing her first novel, BURNT HILL ROAD. http://www.noramaynard.com
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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.

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Reading List 2007

Gordon Lish, Dear Mr. Capote
Peter Carey, My Life As A Fake
N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer
Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message
Emily Holton, Little Lessons in Safety
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere
Andy Brown, The Mole Chronicles
Zoe Whittall, Bottle Rocket Hearts
Lance Blomgren, Walkups
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Gail Scott, My Paris
Melissa A. Thompson, Dreadful Paris
Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones
Angela Carr, Ropewalk
David Markson, Reader’s Block
Jonathan Lethem, Men And Cartoons
Ellen Ullman, The Bug
James Salter, Dusk
Steve Almond, My Life in Heavy Metal
Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry
Lucretius, The Nature of the Universe
Amiee Bender, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt
Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man
Margaret Atwood, Power Politics
Corey Frost, My Own Devices (Airport Version)
Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi
Elizabeth Hay, Small Change
Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day
Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno
Martin Amis, The Information
Gregory Maguire, Wicked
Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners
Petronius, The Satyricon
Machiavelli, The Prince
Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing
Sam Shepard, Cruising Paradise
Nathaniel G. Moore, Let’s Pretend We Never Met
Angela Hibbs, Passport
Don DeLillo, End Zone
Aimee Bender, An Invisible Sign of My Own
Shapard & Thomas, eds., Sudden Fiction International
Paul Virilio, Ground Zero
Sean Dixon, The Girls Who Saw Everything
Elisabeth Billiveau, Something to Pet the Cat About
Janet Kauffman, The Body in Four Parts
Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Café
Danzy Senna, Symptomatic
Lynda Barry, Cruddy
Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Larissa Lai, Saltfish Girl
Linn Ullmann, Stella Descending
Tobias Wolff, Old School
Nicole Brossard, Notebooks of Roses and Civilization
Alejo Carpentier, The Chase
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
Lorrie Moore, Self-Help
Charles Baxter, A Relative Stranger
Stanly Elkin, Van Gogh’s Room at Arles
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Christia Wolf, Cassandra
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Iris Murdoch, The Italian Girl
Barry Yourgrau, Haunted Traveller
Shulamis Yelin, Stories from A Montreal Childhood
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Mark Anthony Jarman, 19 Knives
Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History
Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Heather O’Neill, Lullabies For Little Criminals
Mary Gaitskil, Bad Behaviour
Denis Johnson, Jesus’s Son
Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Junot Diaz, Drown
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance
Eudora Weltly, The Wide Net
Hortense Calisher, In the Absence of Angels
Lynn Freed, The Curse of the Appropriate Man
Truman Capote, A Tree of Night & Other Stories
Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms
Jane Mayhall, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day
Eleanor Clark, Rome and a Villa
Hortense Calisher, Saratoga, Hot
Jonathan Ames, Wake Up, Sir!
Steven Heighton, Flight Paths of the Emperor
Alan Gurganus, The Practical heart
Joy Williams, Escapes
Jay Rogoff, How We Came to Stand on That Shore
Joy Williams, Taking Care
Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple
Steven Millhauser, Enchanted Night
Alison Smith, Name All the Animals
Joan Leegant, An Hour in Paradise
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel
Raymond Carver, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Janet Frame, The Reservoir
Janet Frame, Mona Minim and the Smell of the Sun
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Vanished
Carolyn Beard Whitlow, Wild Meat
Robert Lowell, Lord Weary’s Castle
Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
Mary Robison, Days
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
Merce Rodoreda, Camellia Street

Reading List 2006 >>>

Reading List 2005 >>>
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The Year in Book(stores)s

2007 was a great year for reading. It started off at Yaddo where for six weeks I dined every evening in the Yaddo Authors Library. It was sometimes difficult to follow the thread of so many different dinner conversations going on at once between so many brilliant writers, painters, film and video makers and composers. Not least of all because we were surrounded on four sides by floor to ceiling shelves of books of Yaddo authors past and present dating back a hundred years. These humbling and motivating surroundings enabled a frenzied period of writing and reading impossible to sustain in the outside world.

Yaddo Authors Library

Over the course of the spring I had occasion to travel to New York, Boston, Montpellier and Toronto for various different reason reasons. These cities are home to some of my favourite bookstores so I stocked up. In New York, in additions to the prerequisite trips to the Strand, a friend in publishing snuck me into his place of employ to peruse their impressive book room. I made out like a bandit. Bliss. In Boston/Cambridge the MIT Press bookstore and the Harvard Co-Op are favourites, in Montpellier Rivendale is an old friend and in Toronto, though Type is new and exciting, Pages can’t be beat.

I don’t know what they’re talking about in the media when they say: summer reading. It was a long hot slow loud disruptive unproductive and generally aggravating summer chez nous. There were lots of days when I couldn’t work at all. My idea of “not working” is reading. Does that count as summer reading? When there’s too much heat, humidity, construction and/or neighbour noise to read, I go for a walk. My idea of going for a walk is walking to the bookstore. One of the highlights of the summer was the move of S. W. Welch bookseller from the Main up into Mile End. If you’re trying to find me and I’m not home, look for me there: 225 Saint-Viateur West.

I also bought lots of new books in the fall on account of every single person I know in Montreal came out with a new book. For a few weeks in September/October there were launches and/or a readings 3, 4, even 5 nights a week. Happily, many of these events happened in bookstores. Nothing I love more than a bookstore jam-packed with people buying books and drinking booze. Some new favourite bookstores: Port de Tête Bookstore at 262 Mount-Royal Avenue East and the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore at 211 Bernard West.

running short on shelf space

The fall brought some exciting new writing projects my way. Each shifts the direction of my reading slightly. For “Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams” I am brushing up on my hypertext theory. For “in absentia” I’m delving into short French fiction. And I continue to be obsessed with very short English fiction. I’m happy to report that I’m working on a collection with Conundrum Press for fall 2008. So in addition to all this reading, I’d better get some writing done too!
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