Launching new poetry book on April 24 in Cobourg!

My second-ever Cobourg launch happens tomorrow, April 24, at 7 pm at the Human Bean. Once again, awesome singer-songwriter Shannon Siblock kicks off the festivities. I’ll be reading from my new book, You Exist. Details Follow., which has a heap of poems about Cobourg. I’ll read some of those, plus some other stuff, and books will be on sale.

With my last book, the novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, we packed the joint. Hoping for a similar happening tomorrow. I’ve already launched the new poetry book in Paris (Ontario), Toronto, Kingston, and Ottawa. Next weekend I launch in Vancouver, the home of my publisher, Anvil Press.

The book is in stock now at King Street Books as well.

Cobourg is feeling more and more like home to me. In all respects, except when it comes to literary community. Just haven’t managed to find my place here yet. Or to make a place I can fit into. I’ll get to that one of these days. Hopefully this launch will help it happen.

Hello, Cobourg.

 

28 Lines About Cobourg

On October 1, I read with Peter Norman at the AB Series in Ottawa. The venue was Gallery 101, and the host was Max Middle. I read for the first time from my poetry chapbook Cobourg Variations. For this piece, I sort of rip off David W. McFadden’s poem “37 Lines About Horses.”

Hello, Cobourg.

Zorras in Cobourg!

I’m getting used to this thing of living in a town where only occasionally do interesting artistic things occur publicly. And then you really embrace them.

Tonight, the music/poetry/video performance troupe Zorras is appearing at Cathy Thomson’s amazing and tiny gallery, 22 Kings, at 22 King Street East. Cathy opened up just a couple months ago, but she’s already enriched this town immensely.

I hooked her up with my friend Sandra Alland, of Zorras, when I heard Zorras were coming from Scotland to do an Ontario/Quebec tour. I joined Zorras on the road for their Kingston gig at the Artel on Tuesday evening, and though I’d seen Zorras on video and heard Zorras on CD, I’d never experienced them live. They were fantastic. Personable, talented, spontaneous, and crowd-pleasing.

Here’s a little email interview I conducted with Sandra this week. Looking forward to tonight’s show! It starts at 8 pm. Previous to the show, Cathy is opening a really amazing photography exhibition by local artist Gary Mulcahey, at 7 pm.

Who is/are/am Zorras?

Zorras make poetry-music-video-weirdness fusion. With megaphones. Zorras are Sandra Alland (me) and Y. Josephine. Sometimes we also collaborate with Ariadna Battich. I compose and read/perform the poetry (and a few stories), and create most of the video work. Y composes the music; she also sings and plays guitar, electric bass and percussion. Ariadna makes some of our videos and assists with technical details.

Tell me about the genesis of Zorras.

Zorras formed in late 2007 in Edinburgh. Basically Y and I saw each other perform at an event and really dug what the other was doing. In December we met in a bookshop to rehearse, and had our first performance at Edinburgh’s Forest Cafe in January. At the beginning, we had the impulse to collaborate but little idea of exactly what we wanted to create. Surprisingly, though, we set the groundwork for our style quite early on. Over the years we’ve worked on better combining different media, so that now we’re creating work that’s more integrated.

How has Zorras enjoyed its Canadian tour so far: Toronto, St. Catharines, Kingston, Montreal, Ottawa…

We have loved every minute of the tour so far. Grey Borders is a wonderful poetry series in St. Catharines at the Niagara Artists Centre — which is a gorgeous gallery with great tech and a lovely staff. We were fortunate enough to read with Aisha Sasha John, Shannon Maguire and Camille Martin. And we were piped in!

Toronto highlights include The Art Bar (after which some amazing guy ran down the street after us and handed us money), Inglenook High School (what a dream school), a secret patio concert with lovely old friends, the ever-fabulous Toronto Women’s Bookstore… and the amazing LAL, who came through for us with their beautiful space when The Ossington kicked out Toronto New School of Writing for a higher-paying customer. Rosina and Murr of LAL also joined us for one of our pieces, which was a huge honour. I also got to teach at Influency at U of T (Margaret Christakos’class). That was my first real experience of having my work studied, wow.

In Montreal we played Casa del Popolo thanks to VInce Tinguely… and the sizzling Gord Disley joined us onstage for one piece (he will again in Ottawa, ye-haw). Last night in Kingston was grand; Artel has another to-die-for space with a huge screen and excellent sound. The audience was small, but a downright dreamy group of people who we wouldn’t trade for a full stadium.

In short, we have been spoiled. Seeing old friends and meeting new ones, getting to experience some new work from old and new colleagues too. Next we rock Cobourg, then Ottawa.

Why Zorras in Cobourg?

Zorras in Cobourg because it’s a pretty cool town. It has bookshops, art galleries, a whole lot of artists and writers, at least one punk band, several tattoo shops, good coffee, a drive-in, a beach, many poodles, and Stuart Ross. And my lovely parents!

We’re really grateful to Cathy Thomson of 22 Kings Gallery for putting us up. And we get to perform near the works of Gary Mulcahey.

What does the future hold for Zorras?

We’re performing at Birmingham SHOUT in November, hosted by Amy Lame. I also have a photography/film/zine exhibition at Midlands Art Centre (Birmingham) for the month of November, in collaboration with the LGBTI Disabled & Deaf artists’ collective “b)other”. Then Zorras run off to Liverpool to perform at Homotopia. Then we sleep for a month. When we wake up, we call Ariadna and plan our intermedia performance/gallery installation for spring 2012 in Edinburgh.

Why, thank you, Zorras. And Hello, Cobourg.

Zorras in Kingston

“Cobourg Commerce”

 

Hello, Cobourg.

Poetry at the Farmer’s Market

So I took a very big step: I’m going to have a tent (!!!) at the Port Hope Farmer’s Market Arts Festival this Saturday (August 13). I assume that most of the vendors there will be visual artists, craftspeople, soap-makers and so on. But they let me in as a writer.

My girlfriend bought me a 10-foot-by-10-foot gazebo, her parents loaned me a table, and I’ve been working like crazy on a chapbook of poetry called Cobourg Variations (groany nod to J. S. Bach) so I’ll have something unarguably local to sell. Beyond that, I’ll have my books of poetry and fiction and essays, and a couple of my magazines (including HARDSCRABBLE, named for Cobourg’s 19th-century nickname), and some other chapbooks I’ve published through my Proper Tales Press.

I’ll have my recent novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (which just got a great review on Free Range Reading!) and my less-recent book of short stories, Buying Cigarettes for the Dog. I’ll have copies of my poetry collections I Cut My Finger and Razovsky at Peace, and of my book of rants, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Oh, and the anthology I edited with Stephen Brockwell last year, Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament.

I’ll have some propaganda: pamphlets promoting my writing-coaching services, and maybe flyers for  a local poetry workshop I can organize in the next 48 hours. And a sheet for people to add their emails for my long-promised Cobourg reading series!

The festival runs from 9 am till 3 pm, and I expect to sell just about nothing. But it’s all part of my program of integrating myself further into my new home. The new chapbook contains six or seven full-length poems and six haiku, all about Cobourg, most written over the past week or so. I’m also throwing in my column from sub-Terrain, “The Terrors of Tiny Town.” I’m doing everything I can to alienate myself from the very community I’m trying to integrate myself into!

But I don’t care if I don’t sell any books. It’ll be fun. And I’ve never had my own gazebo before. My friend Laura, a great visual artist (Laurajean, Laurajean) who works occasionally at King Street Books, said she’ll help me put up the gazebo.

And then I’ll sit there. What will happen? I don’t really know.

I’m giddy.

Most likely I’ll watch as people selling twig reindeer and Jell-O birdhouses make millions. I don’t know how those Jell-O birdhouses work. Don’t the birds get stuck to the inside walls?

Hello, Cobourg.

No laureate I

So a couple of weeks ago I got an email from James Pickersgill. James is a one-man poetry machine here in Cobourg. He’s involved in the Third Thursday Reading Series at Meet at Meet at Meet at 66 King Street East; he runs a weekend poetry festival in the spring; he puts out a serial poetry leaflet almost weekly that has so far published 7,587 poets from Cobourg and the rest of Planet Earth. It has an issue numbering system that my Grade 10 math doesn’t allow me to understand.

Anyway, his email: my name came up in the nomination process for Cobourg’s third-ever poet laureate. Same thing happened last year. I declined to be considered last year, just as I declined this year.

Cobourg’s first poet laureate was Eric Winter. He was poet laureate for ten years. The next poet laureate was Jill Battson. Jill left her four-year term early when she ducked out of the ‘Bourg after a brief residency here.

How come James Pickersgill isn’t poet laureate? He does an awful lot here in the name of poetry. Or Wally Keeler, of the People’s Republic of Poetry, who once spray-painted “Poetry is Poetency” on every dog in Cobourg? Or how about Richard Greene, who was this year’s winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry?

I realize that Town Council is paralyzed until a new laureate is appointed. Cobourg has ground to a halt. As the “‘go to’ place for poetry,” one where no one seems to buy poetry books from the local bookstores, my adopted town just can’t get up in the morning these days.

I could’ve been a contender. But I chose not to be:

Thanks for the note. It’s very encouraging that my name was put forward again for position of Cobourg’s poet laureate. As was the case last time, I don’t feel I know Cobourg well enough yet, or that Cobourg knows me well enough, for me to take the position. Again, I think there are poets with deep roots here, people who are naturals for the position.

Last time around, when the second laureate was appointed, I received a letter from the mayor’s office thanking me for being a nominee but that someone else got the position. I hope that won’t happen again — it’s no fun being a loser in a competition I didn’t take part in!

Should there be a vacancy on the nominating committee sometime in the future, that position might interest me (depending on my work and other commitments at the time). Meanwhile, I hope to continue making a contribution to Cobourg’s literary life in my own ways, and I look forward to the announcement of the town’s third poet laureate.

And so I retire again into a poetic obscurity of my own choosing. Maybe I’ll sit on my porch and try to sell another book this weekend.

Hello, Cobourg.

A Cobourg poem

Cobourg, Night

If I shove the boxes
of books aside, drag
the curtains, crane my neck
just so, I can see the clock
on Victoria Hall. It
chimes twice. My parents
died in another city
75 minutes away. The story
of their lives, as filmed
by Ealing Studios, is screened
on the night sky. Here
it is exotic. Tonight:
the screening. Tomorrow:
the Pulled Pork Festival.
Down below, vines have tumbled
from the brick walls, encumbering
the porch. A green ribbon has
unravelled. I wind it tightly
around my well-sucked thumb.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Stuart Ross

Sitting on my porch, trying to sell my books

I’m sitting on the steps in front of my place on Division Street, a little north of downtown. Today is the busiest day of the year in Cobourg: Canada Day. We had a parade, there are awesome onion rings down in Victoria Park, and there’s a beer tent there, a crafts tent, an art tent. Bikers are roaring down the street. Girls in bikinis are sauntering by. The mosquitoes are having a jamboree.  It’s all happening today.

I’ve got a sign at the bottom of the steps: “Authentic Cobourg Writer: Buy My Books $5 – $20.” I’ve been out here three hours. I’ve sold a single book. That’s OK with me. I’m getting some editing done while I’m here. The sun is out. There’s a cool breeze. My sign could be funnier, though.

I spent much of the 1980s standing out on Yonge Street in Toronto selling my poetry and fiction chapbooks in a similar manner. There were days when I sold nothing, but usually I moved five to ten items to the many hundreds of people who passed by me. I didn’t get rich, but over the course of the decade I sold about 7,000 chapbooks of my weirdo lit. I met Margaret Atwood, Earle Birney, W. P. Kinsella, Alice Munro, Peter Gzowski, and probably some other famous writers I didn’t recognize. I met a lot of crazies. I made some friends.

Today I made my only sale — $20 for a copy of Buying Cigarettes for the Dog — to a real neat guy: a 92-year-old former piano tuner on a scooter. He stopped and we talked for a while: he told me tons of amazing stories of his life. He looked 75. He said his vision was bad, but he’d buy a book. How much? I told him 20 bucks and he said that was nothing to him. But when he dug into his wallet, he didn’t have the cash. Said he’d be back after he hit a bank machine. He scooted off. I didn’t expect to see him again.

But half an hour later, here he was. We completed the transaction. I loved this guy. I’ll be wrestling with whether I can, ethically, write him into my fiction.

A while later, a nice couple stopped by and chatted, had a look at my books. They’d seen the article on me in Thursday’s issue of the Northumberland News. Ultimately, no sale. But that was okay with me.

A few other people have smiled at me and some have said hi.

I’ve been a little frustrated that in nearly two years I haven’t been able to make more than a miniscule part of my living here in Cobourg. A few months ago —

OH MY GAWD I JUST MADE MY SECOND SALE!

— I held a workshop in the library here. I took in $225. With my (now) two sales (the second was to a friend who happened by) today, I’m at $260.

I’m not complaining. Just trying to figure it all out. Strange as it may seem, it feels good to have $35 in my pocket today that I earned here in Cobourg through my writing. That’s a lot of onion rings.

But here’s the thing that interests me most. You often hear writers say they’re the lifeblood of a community; the heart of the nation; the conscience of the culture; blah blah blah blah. Shelley said we’re the “unacknowledged legistators.” I agree with the “unacknowledged” part. Some of these freakin’ hot-shot 20-something writers with agents and contracts should spend a day standing out on the street with a hand-scrawled sign and a few copies of their books.

It’s character-building.

Hello, Cobourg.

Mansfield Press books in Cobourg

Here in Cobourg we have two good indie bookstores and a shitty chain store. Avid Reader, across from the No Frills, has built a loyal following over the years with its broad selection (except in the poetry category) and its great special-order service. (They bring in a copy of American Poetry Review and Poetry just for me.) The smaller King Street Books, right downtown, has been open since winter and offers a different kind of book-buying experience (in addition to coffee, cigarettes and lottery tickets for the people who still think it’s Scotty’s Convenience Store and don’t notice the books lining the wall).

King Street Books has two shelves of poetry and a surprising representation by small presses. I’m editor at a Toronto literary press called Mansfield, and you’ll find a lot of Mansfield books in this store.

Over in the poetry section, there’s Campfire Radio Rhapsody, the second collection by Windsor’s Robert Earl Stewart, whose first book was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Prize; Stray Dog Embassy, the debut collection by Toronto-based Natasha Nuhanovic; Winter Sport: Poems, by acclaimed poet/novelist Priscila Uppal; Floors of Enduring Beauty, by Toronto surrealist legend Steve Venright; and Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament, edited by Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell and me.

And in fiction, there’s Dog Eat Rat, the stunning novel by Toronto playwright/poet/novelist Tom Walmsley, and Mongrel, a devastating first novel by Montreal’s Marko Sijan.

So here we are in Cobourg, a town they say is filled with poets and writers. Will these poets and writers support an indie bookstore that supports them?

Hello, Cobourg.

The Terrors of Tiny Town

For the past half-dozen or so years, I’ve been writing a column called “Mondo Hunkamooga” in the Vancouver-based literary mag sub-Terrain.

I wrote about my new small-town life for the current issue. Here it is. 

 

THE TERRORS OF TINY TOWN

Stuart Ross

OK, so I lived in a big city for half a century, and then I moved to a small town about 75 minutes away. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It took me leaving Toronto to realize why about half the membership of the Writers’ Union of Canada lives in that city.

But it’s not like I want to move back. Not entirely, anyway. When I left, so many of my writer friends were saying, “But I can’t imagine the Toronto literary scene without you!” They seem to have adapted pretty quickly. My phone almost never rings here in Cobourg. And I don’t get invited to give readings in Toronto anymore. When my name comes up on Queen Street West, they spit on the sidewalk and cross themselves.

So now I’m in this town of 17,000 people. There are a few writers’ groups here, including the Cobourg Poetry Workshop. They have a reading once a month, at a place called Meet at 66 King Street East. So if you’re going, you phone your friend and say, “Do you want to meet at Meet at 66 King Street East? Oh, it’s located at 66 King Street East.” Each reading there features one visiting writer and two local writers. It used to be that the workshop raised its funds by charging the local writers $25 to read with the visiting writer. This is among the weirdest things I’ve ever heard. But they don’t do that anymore: you just pay $60 a year to be part of the cabal, which means you can go to their monthly workshop.

When I chose not to join — it wasn’t the $60; just, I haven’t belonged to a writers’ group since I was a teenager; it doesn’t interest me — I realized I might look like a big-city snob or something. And maybe I do. When my name is mentioned here on King Street East, they spit on the sidewalk and cross themselves.

I moved to a small town because I thought it would be crazy to live my whole life in Toronto. I thought of moving to New Denver, B.C., population 600, a place I’ve visited every spring for the past five years. I love it there. But how the hell could I make a living? I considered Paris, Ontario, where Nelson Ball lives, and then I could visit Nelson Ball all the time and drive him crazy. But an opportunity arose (a girl was involved) to relocate to Cobourg. To a house just three minutes from the lake. A space where I’d be able to have my own office.

It sounded so fucking serene. There’s a place here called the Buttermilk Café. Know what I mean? There’s a store called Friendly Fires (they sell fireplaces, not ordnances to be used against your own troops): their slogan is “Fires That Are Friendly.” There’s a park with a bandshell. Everyone owns a dog, and if you don’t own a dog, you get thrown into jail, which is now a bar called Al Capone’s and the jail cells are in the basement with cartoon crooks painted on the walls.

Goodbye, Toronto, and good riddance. I can see the bell tower of Victoria Hall from my study window.

Little did I know that my literary career would plummet like a grand piano pushed off the CN Tower. I’ve got this novel out and it’s barely getting reviews: some blogger wrote that it had no plot so she couldn’t write a “synapsis” of it: it’s just a big “mis-mash.” When you leave Toronto, you are at the mercy of reviewers who write stuff like that and give you one star out of five.

I’m hungry for people to talk writing with here. I’m also hungry for East Indian buffets. Friends come to visit, and they are charmed by this town. I beg them to move here. I offer to be their butler. “I could imagine living here,” they say, and then they go back to Toronto and eat mattar paneer for every meal and go to three literary readings a night.

So I experimented. I launched my novel, Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, at a local coffee joint, the Human Bean. I was terrified no one would be there. But the place was packed out, standing-room only. Must’ve been 35 people. Some of them I didn’t even know. One guy had a blog about Cobourg and he’d recently posted that I lived here and wasn’t that just like learning that Tolstoy lived in your town? I thought his blog was a prank, but there he was at my launch.

I’ve learned that if you’re in a small place and you want some culture, you have to create it yourself. So my experience at the Bean has encouraged me to start a reading series. I’ll pass a hat to pay the writers who come. I’ll promise them a tour of the old courthouse in Victoria Hall. They can look at the Friendly Fires sign. They can run around in circles on the bandshell and pretend they’re Bon Jovi. I’m sure I can get a dozen people out to see them! Maybe fifteen!

Because otherwise I’m going to go crazy in Cobourg. Thing is, I like it here. But I’m going to go crazy. A million literary things are going on west of me in Toronto. (Tonight I missed a reading by David W. McFadden and Paul Vermeersch!) Half a million east of me in Kingston. (Tomorrow I might miss the book launch of my friend Sarah Tsiang!)

If I hadn’t spent 50 years in the despised literary nexus of Canada, I probably wouldn’t care.

I would spend my time reading the zillion books I own and haven’t read. I would write up a storm every day. Then go and contently watch the beautiful storm on Lake Ontario, just three minutes away. I would get to know everyone in the Buttermilk Café by first name. I would be in heaven.

***

Stuart Ross’s most recent book is the novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew (ECW Press, 2011). He runs a small magazine called HARDSCRABBLE, which was Cobourg’s nickname in the 1800s, and has his own imprint through Mansfield Press. Write him at hunkamooga@sympatico.ca.

Hello, Cobourg.