Headlight Anthology 15

I'm excited to announce that my short story, Beverly Wong, has been published in issue 15 of the Headlight Anthology, a publication out of Montreal, QC that showcases Concordia students and alumni. The issue features myself and several other stunning works of poetry, fiction, and visual art, centered on the theme, Lost and Found.

Read an except of the story is below. If you like what you read, feel free to pick up a copy of Headlight Anthology wherever fine books are sold, and support the magazine on Facebook.
Wooo for published work!

    My aunt by blood, a woman named Beverly Wong, is standing in line at a bank and decides that she can no longer take it. She raises her arms above her head in a packed room of strangers, and speaks in a dialect that no one else can hear or understand.

   When she falls, her hands hit the ground first, and when she starts to beat the floor, someone in the room begins to cry. She pulls at her clothing and people move toward the door. The security guard comes over and asks her if she is all right. The sound of her fingernails on the linoleum floor does not blend in with the music playing on a loop from the speakers on the ceiling. The guard can’t stand the noise so he calls for help and heads outside. Fifteen minutes later, she is carried in a gurney out of the building, sedated when she passes the small, impatient crowd. The ambulance is loaded and drives away. Everyone files back into the bank and resumes the line. But the marks in the floor of Canadian Savings are deep enough to be permanent, and a large section of the linoleum tile must be replaced at a cost of $55.50, plus tax.

   The bill is sent to our address by mistake, along with a notice of my aunt’s stay at the Hillston Rest Home, located sixty miles from a federal prison and one hundred and twenty miles from the nearest gas station. Because my mother is dead and Aunt Beverly is from that side of the family, my father tells me to treat the bill like all the other junk mail received at our house, as lining for the dog cage and filler for the fireplace.

   When I slip the bill into my jean pocket, I felt compelled to do it, though it would not have mattered if there had been any witnesses. I barely knew Aunt Beverly. After my mother’s death, she did not keep in touch. Someone who knew her and knew us would see her at a supermarket, or in another city on the street, but it would always turn out to be someone else with certain similarities. My father was never close to my mother’s family, and the numbers and addresses that he had for anyone on that side now belonged to other people entirely. So there is no way I could have known that my aunt had already disappeared, returning in a place for the quietly insane one town over from where my father and I now live.

Handmade Type

Artist Tien-Men Liao takes three dimensional type to a literal level. After my flimsy Illustrator attempts at shape poetry, her work is a much simpler and to the point. I've always had a fascination with typography. Writers who mention their chosen font at the end of their book, or combine several fonts to make the perfect one for a particular story are just my type of OCD. But enough with the language games! Maybe it's time to pick up this Taschen book on Type and get serious.

The Little Girl and Her Big Man

More rules, this time from Sigrid Nunez, from Susan Sontag. I read Against Interpretation, then I read On Photography, and then I read Styles of Radical Will, and felt pretty small. But I don't think Sontag would approve of feeling small. Speed, cigarettes, the typewriter, the movies, urban nature, and conscious living. Guess she didn't need much else. Read the rest of Nunez's piece, Sontag's Rules, for Tin House here.

Mirroring Evil: A Q&A with Diana Thorneycroft

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Winnipeg based artist Diana Thorneycroft while she was in town to discuss the exhibit of her latest series, A People's History, at the Art Gallery of Calgary. We talked about feeling "icky", revisiting the brutal side of Canadian history, and dolls in compromising positions.
Check out the Q&A, via Luxe Lust blog.

Henry Miller's Commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."
3. Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can't create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Never Quit

  "I'll write after I'm settled," my wife said. "I think I will, anyway. But first things first. We'll have to see."
  "Now you're talking," the deputy said. "Keep all lines of communication open. Good luck, pardee," the deputy said to me. Then he went over to his car and got in.

  The pickup made a wide, slow turn with the trailer across the lawn. One of the horses whinnied. The last image I have of my wife was when a match flared in the cab of the pickup, and I saw her lean over with a cigarette to accept the light the rancher was offering. Her hands were cupped around the hand that held the match. The deputy waited until the pickup and trailer had gone past him and then he swung his car around, slipping in the wet grass until he found purchase on the driveway, throwing gravel from under his tires. As he headed for the road, he tooted his horn. Tooted. Historians should use more words like "tooted" or "beeped" or "blasted"--especially at serious moments such as after a massacre or when an awful occurrence has cast a pall on the future of an entire nation. That's when a word like "tooted" is necessary, is gold in a brass age.

Not Quite Zaroum

For lack of a better, official, straight from the poetry gods' lips term, I'm using shape poetry to describe three pieces that I created for a catalogue curated by a friend for Art Pop, out of Montreal. I was asked to create creative writing work that would also stand out visually on the page, and I got to thinking about manipulating text on the white space. Initially, I didn't want to get too basic with it and do literal shapes with the words, but the results ended up somewhere in between I think. I linked all three pieces together with the same characters and story arc. They were also my first attempt at teaching myself how to work in Adobe Illustrator.

At the time, I was also pretty obsessed with Cia Rinne and her zaroum works, found via ubuweb. Rinne creates word pieces that are like games, dissecting the physical (letters) components of the words, and their meanings, in several different languages. Some pieces are clever, playful, and quick to hit you with their simplicity, in English, ("to get her"), German ("nein" "nine")  and French ("belle merde"). Several pieces frame an object drawn out by Rinne, making shapes with the letters and words around the object, representing the "thing" or "idea" both visually and linguistically.

By deconstructing common phrases and anecdotes, Rinne plays on the turns of phrase to the max until she can no longer manipulate the idea into something else. She also uses rhetorical questions, re arranging the same or similar words to create a series of different questions. 

In an interview with 3:AM Magazine, Rinne talks about her love of languages and the connection between music and language in her work. Beyond the fact that she speaks (and in several cases, writes in) about ten more languages than I do, she also talks about trying to create and write work in the simplest way possible. 

"If there is a concern, it is trying to reduce the form to the minimum necessary in order to visualize a thought or idea. Tomas Schmit said in an interview with Wilma Lukatsch that it worked for him like that, “What you can say with a sculpture you do not need to build as architecture, what you can do with a drawing you do not need to search in image, and what you can clear up on a piece of paper does not need to become a huge drawing; and what you can make up in your mind does not even need any piece of paper.” This is something I can fully agree with, the ideal would probably be a constant reduction to almost nothing! In a way it is a countermovement to the massive flood of information and waste of material, too."

She also does wicked readings of zaroum, which helped me see/hear the John Cage and Marcel DuChamp referencing!

Trying to summarize Rinne's zaroum in scraps and screen shots almost ruins its brillance, (what she calls "linguistic anarchy") so I highly recommend downloading the PDF or printing out a copy and looking through the work in its entirety.