Monday, January 23, 2017

many gendered mothers : call for submissions




O god save all the many gendered-mothers of my heart, & all the other mothers, who do not need god or savior,

our hearts persist in excess of the justice they’re refused.
Dana Ward, “A Kentucky of Mothers”

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers (http://literarymothers-blog.tumblr.com/), created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, this site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

Basically: which female ,femme, trans or non-binary writer(s) made you feel like there was room in the world for you and your artistic temperament, or opened up your understanding of what was possible, either as a writer or a human or both? Perhaps you were closely mentored by a particular writer or editor, or perhaps their work was highly influential, even if not in the most obvious ways.

While submissions by men are highly encouraged, the argument that male literary influence has been long explored in print and online is a reasonable one. This isn’t an argument for levelling the field but, instead, expanding it.

We are currently accepting short essays of 500-1000 words as a .doc or .docx file, with “many gendered mothers” in subject line. Please include: “Your Name” on “Author Name(s),” subtitle (optional) and a short bio for yourself, as well as a .jpg image of your subject (if possible). And: multiple submissions are encouraged! Simply because you’ve already had a piece accepted for the site doesn’t mean you still can’t submit something further down the road.

Submissions can be sent to any of our editors (if you know how to reach them), or directly to neitherliterary@gmail.com

Friday, January 06, 2017

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with kevin mcpherson eckhoff



Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further (ongoing) interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff loves poetry parties and saying “Me me me, me memememe … mmmmm.” Forge and rhapsodomancy are his fault, as are the final issues of dANDelion magazine and Open Letter, guest edited with his bff, Jake “The” Kennedy. Sorry! BookThug published MerzStructure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play. Check it! Out! Library-style! When kevin’s not teaching at Okanagan College, he hangs out with a Laurel and two kiddos, sometimes cuddling at the Starlight Drive-in during a full moon in July or dipping into Halfway Hotsprings during a light February snowfall. Oh, and you can catch his face as “Tall Security Guard” in the film Tomato Red.

Q: How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?

A: I bodied & spirited in Calgary on-and-off for about two years, between 2005 and 2007. I had applied to three MA programs; the only one to accept me was the U of C.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

A: I don't really remember. "Get involved in" sounds like i joined Satan's Helpers. I wrote unfortunate poems and stories all through my undergrad, but Calgary was my first experience with an actual community of writers, which just sort of respirated outward from the mitochondrion of classes, readings, pub hangouts, and friends of fiends of friends...

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?

A: This question has hugely helped me figure out, I think, my current unwriting ways, my lack of current. For the past about 18 months, I’ve been a co-stay-at-home fodder for a baby and a toddler and have been totally unprepared for the loneliness and the ensuing lost lust for poetry, readingly and writingly. In part, I suspect it has to do with the temporary suspension of any reason to procrastinate—i.e. avoiding class prep & essay grading are super poetry energizers for me. I feel, however, an equally significant factor is the withering of my social life. Hanging out with writers, critics, mentors, artists, and performers in Calgary hugely inspurred/inspored/insparred/inspired my understandings of contemporary poetry, historical con/texts, language’s political uses and abuses, the business of publishing, etc. This setting was hugely generative for me: two-and-a-half of my books came from work that started during my 16-months living there.

Since leaving Calgary, my sense of community has shifted, expanded across borders, somewhat dissolved, and concentrated in a bff; overall, it has slowly become more and mar isolated, mostly due to geography. And probably my incapacity to thrive on the sextuple-you (www). I know I’m leaping like an acid frog between past & present, but there’s not really one without the other, eh? I never really realized how remarkable my moments and comrades in Calgary were until recent years.

Calgary provided a readymade audience of peers and mentors—totally a support group, of sorts—that accepted just about anything as poetry. I could name names, but other Renaissancers have already named them all. Here might be something: the community out there allowed me to write for myself, and by whatever means I liked. You know that dumb adage: “write what you want to read”? For me, in Calgary, it became: “write what/how I want to write (because writing isn’t reading)”.

Q: What prompted your move away, and what kind of effect has the shift made in your work?

My partner’s spirit rejected all of Calgary’s anti-matter, and I started teaching at Okanagan College pretty immediately after graduating. For the past eight or nine years, I’ve tried to recreate the kinda community I found in Calgary by organizing poetry readings, starting the Bureau of Vertigo Bookmakers, working with Kalamalka Press, etc. However, the pattern of trying to energize students every semester, only to have them transfer away to another institution after a year or two and having to start over has finally got me a little exhausted/defeated at the moment. This is to say that one major shift was from arriving at a readymade literary community that invigorated my work to striving to create such a community, but never quite achieving it, at least not consistently.

Another effect of moving back to Armstrong was the slow death of the chapbook press I had started in Calgary, by the skin of me teeth. Its life had been fueled by the literary gift economy that thrived in Calgary, primarily derek b’s No Press, but also Jonathan Ball’s Martian Press and other one-offs that folks would self-publish. I’ve tried resprouting the press both online and in print as our teeth, but it’s been challenging to find the kind of work that excites my ions, especially innovative critical writing. I’m a terrible solicitor. I think I’m an extrovert who needs a real-life literary culture in my face to provoke my work ethic, both as editor and poet. Overall, the shift has meant a general decrease in productivity. Or maybe shifting priorities. I dunno. Let me get back to you in a few more years.

Sheesh. This is depressing. And that’s almost a pun.

Q: What are you working on now?

Bah. I usually need to work on multiple things simultaneously. There’s a something called The Fool’s Sermons and another tentatively titled ☐☐, but both manuscripts move at a pace of about three poems a year. I’m also supposed to working on a speculative young adult novel. Ah, and the webseries Robot & Snail. Sporadic collaborations with my dear pal Moez Surani. Performance/acting workshops. Learning how to dad. Carriage house renovations. Volunteering at Caravan Farm Theatre. Allyship & witnessing. 


Monday, January 02, 2017

Amanda Earl : Vallum magazine,

Chaudiere author Amanda Earl has appeared twice on the blog for Montreal's Vallum magazine over the past few days, including as part of "Vallum 2016 Year in Poetry" and as their first "Poem of the Week" for 2017!