Notes on the Voyage
Of Owl and Girl

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual events, locals, persons or texts are entirely intentional. These notes conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of sea voyages into the unknown North undertaken over the past 2340 years or so. The ever-shifting computer-generated portion of this narrative is composed from fragments of stories of fanciful, fluid, and quite possibly fictional floating places described or imagined in such diverse works as Tacitus, Agricola (97-98), Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries (1589–1600), and Eugene Field, Wynken, Blynken and Nod (1889). The characters of Owl and Girl are borrowed from Edward Leer’s Victorian nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussy Cat (1871). In my version, a girl most serious, most adventurous, most determined and her lazy friend the owl set out, set sail, sail away toward a strange sea in a boat, craft, raft of pea-, bottle-, lima-bean- or similar shade of green. The cartographic collage they voyage through is a confusion of islands and soundings from Scotia Bay and the South Orkney Islands (1967), and my own photographs from Nova Scotia (2008-2011). Of the horizontally scrolling texts which annotate this mythical, implausible, impossible voyage toward seas unknown, the northern lights, the fountain of youth, the text in grey which begins "7 May: departed from Dartmouth" is an erasure poem based on The second voyage attempted by Mr John Davis with others, for the discovery of the Northwest Passage (1586). The Morse Code quotes a line from a Peter Høeg novel. All the other notes are composed by me. By me, of course, I mean the girl.

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl launched at Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New 'Born Digital' Literature held in conjunction with the Modern Languages Association Convention, Boston, USA, January 2013.

Live performances based on this work have been presented at: In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, The Banff Centre, Canada, February 2013; Chercher le texte, Le Cube, Paris, France, September 2013; Trapped in the Ice, Frozen in Time, British Library, London, UK, February 2015.

A print iteration of this work was published in Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review 20.2, 122-128, May 2014.

Find a video performance, and teaching notes on Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl in Poetry Connection: Link Up with Canadian Poetry, an initiative of Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah 2011-2013.

MANY THANKS: Barbara Bridger, Jerome Fletcher, Caden Lovelace, and Fred Wah