blogged down by bogs!

Hmm, another blog? True, there's so much reading to be done at all times - bone up on the classics, keep up with the new releases, poetics, reviews, sites, etc. etc. I admit I don't always have time to read these things, though make time for certain articles on rob mclennan's and Jon Paul Fiorentino's and ryan fitzpatrick's blogs.

So I'm going to keep this very minimal, with reviews I've had published here and there, or am looking to publish, and other imported musings.

First, though, a longish thing: who the heck am I?

Having been a military brat, I've lived all over: born in Comox, moved to Cold Lake, moved to Baden Soellingen, at-the-time-West Germany til I was ten, where I took school and Girl Guide field trips all over the Schwartzwald, into Switzerland, and France; then to the little oil and military berg of Cold Lake in Northern Alberta again for hellish Junior High. Having been in Germany, where everyone's clothes came from Canex or the American PX, I was an instant outcast in Cold Lake, where everyone had to have name brands from the city. Plus, those hot pink New Kids earrings were totally out! But I got heavy into competitive figure skating, and made great friends with the local skating club kids.

Next came Ottawa, where I skated at the Minto Club under Tom Jackson. Ottawa writer Melanie Little's short story collection Confidence rings so many bells, since we apparently shared similar experiences and even some of the same coaches. Soon had to quit skating though when my one sibling, older brother Jeff (he's gettin' hitched this year!) started at the U of Ottawa and it was just too expensive.

What could possibly fill the spiritual and artistic void? I met my best friend, the poet Armour Garland, drummer for the school band. Armour would sit me down in his parent's trippy basement, crank up the Robyn Hitchcock or Syd Barrett and we'd write separate poems, then share. With Armour, I stumbled into the Dusty Owl Reading Series at the now-defunct Cafe Wim on Sussex. There, I shyly choked out one of my first notebook poems while veteran Ottawa poets like Ronnie Brown, Allison Comeau and David Collins sat kindly listening, looking cool, all scarfy and curlyheaded. Who were these people? Poet and Ottawa small press guru rob mclennan was there, my one-day first time chapbook/anthology publisher, and handed me a bunch of fliers for other readings like TREE and submissions calls.

This series of happy accidents let me know there was actually a city scene, and even a national scene, for contemporary Canadian poetry. Who'd a thunk it? Also visited Montreal several times when the $10/way Allo Stop carpooling company was still in service, before a certain monopolic bus company (that inbred bitch) found a loophole and sued them out of existance. (Next they'll sue me for libel). A Montreal, j'ai visite la poete Larissa Andrusyshyn, qui I'd met in the front row of a concert in Toronto. Lari introduced me to the amazing scene there as she knew it and showed me, by her person and by her Montrealaise lit savvy, what energy means.

Ever since, in addition to my writing, I have tried to do what I can to let other artistic-minded folk know about the poetry community, by volunteering for local small press and readings, talking about them on campus radio shows, helping with the Ottawa International Writer's Festival when I'm in town for it, and by putting out my little zine 'blue moon'. A songwriting singer/guitarist, I also get involved with the grassroots advertising of local music, designing and putting up posters.

Since 19, I've lived on my own; my Dad retired last year as Chief at 441 Squadron. (Dad hit military big-cheese type when I was in High School, amusing as nervous boys imagined Tomahawk missiles aimed at their houses if they broke my heart). The travelling I always swore quit when I had the chance became an instinct that continues, and informs my written work; somehow I end up somewhere else, ever displaced and wondering who I am. The constantly changing scenery is both exciting and disorienting. A foreign exchange student I met at Ottawa's El Dorado reading series, studying at the U of Quebec at Hull from his school in Marseille, wooed then exported me to various locales of France and Turkey for several months in 2000 (his mom was Turkish, his father French, and he'd grown up in both places). Oddly enough, though poetry isn't worth much to most people here who are much more acquainted with pop culture, it was some kind of license to be Quentin's girl overseas. It was okay that he had a Canadian girlfriend since I was, as he kept telling friends, "Lau-rie (rolled r) is _poete_." He'd ask me to read for his parents and friends, which was okay but a little embarrassing as he knew English much better than they and I knew how boring it must be for them. In Turkey, he didn't ask me to read; it was enough, apparently, to be a young white girl with auburn hair. Eventually I thought to myself, "Couldn't they just like me for me?", but of course with a language barrier, how could they? Thus the loneliness of a traveller, even with a local for company, though Quentin was equally interested in showing me off like some kind of weird prize or justification for having gone to Canada, and watching all the games of the French and Turkish teams in the World Cup of Soccer (schitzophrenia sets in when the two teams in you play each other!). He insisted we skip all the 'lame tourist destinations' like the Eiffel Tower and the Blue Mosque I'd been dying to see, although we did see a number of places I couldn't identify and he couldn't explain: eg., "Here, zees place vit za big fings, you know, ...?".

Quentin's little cousin from Istanbul thought I was great, and sat me in front of a newspaper, where she began teaching me to pronounce Turkish words. The Turkish family we visited near Pammukale, on our hot car road trip south, didn't think I was so great. Turkish women, I discovered, are mostly allowed to wear Western clothing if they want to; but they aren't allowed on the Internet to see what Western women were up to, and are taught from childhood that the best dream they could possibly have to fulfill is to serve a man as best they can. Sitting around the pool, waiting for the barbecue lambchops to cook, the men offered me first a cigarette, and then a beer. They laughed uproariously when I lit a smoke; laughed even more when I accepted the beer, then took it from me and gave me a .05. When I continued to drink it, their amusement turned to disgust, and Quentin made a longer-than-usual face. Later he told me, as we bathed clothed in an ambiant cloud of mosquito spraytruck fumes (who needs the hammam?), that he wished I could be more like the Turkish women: quiet and manserving. Oh, sure; hang on a minute while I completely efface myself. That was pretty much the end of us.

From Turkey we went back to France, and at the travel agent I was only able to get a plane ticket to Toronto, not Ottawa. Having just enough money to either get to Ottawa and be completely broke, or get to Winnipeg where my parents lived and get back on my feet, I opted to move to Winnipeg for a year. An excellent poetry scene there, and music scene too. Memorable occasions for me there included having my work edited by George Amabile when he was writer-in-residence at the Winnipeg Public Library; attending the launch of his Signature Editions Selected, called Tasting the Dark, at the Press Club, where I played pool with Catherine Hunter and her friend, cheesed off J. Gordon Shillingford (sorry J!), and tried to explain to a late-arriving CBC reporter just in for a beer what was going on, and what the worth of poetry; visiting poet Colin Smith at the Junto Library, and with him, running into his old friend George Bowering at the Mondragon Cafe prior to his Artspace reading at the Writer's Festival, who gave me a chocolate coin; reading at McNally Robinson, the prairie bookstore, with rob mclennan on one of his tours through Winnipeg, and going for beers with he and Cooley at the Mayflower; and attending events at Bread and Circuses and Borealis Books, where I finally met and/or got to hear great writerly people like Tom Schmidt and Andris Taskins, John Dowling and Di Brandt, Lynette D'Anna and Sean Virgo, Clive Holden and Terrance Cox.

Back to Ottawa I went, drawn back to that fold that was first of any to enfold me. Quentin was long gone back to Fenneville, his family's farmhouse near Paris, after he'd visited Winnipeg and my parents wouldn't let us sleep in the same bed. "Canadiens barbares!" Barbaric throwbacks from stuck-up England! He also loved to throw things and break them when he didn't get his way, and my parents' Sardenian ceramics and Bossen heads were too tempting. Then there was that Turkey rift, where even the romanticism of blue olive hills and Ephesean ruins couldn't save us. The sense of disaster from all those floods and fires and ransackings Ephesus received got under our skin through the dust in our sandals, set our libraries ablaze, wrecked our Heraclitis. Stepping into the same stream again, the Ottawa River I guess, but never the same stream twice as the aphorism goes, I got another year's worth of English Lit studies in at Carleton University. Battling the same old problems with being too broke to feed myself, pay rent, and get to school, I was forced to rent a room at a ramshackle place in Mechanicsville where my roommates turned out to be ultra paranoid Slayer-metalhead crackheads ("Freebase isn't crack! We just use a spoon"), linemen for the phone company, whose basement garden almost got us all thrown in jail when the police threatened to come search for my friend Gareth, a moody musician I met in Winnipeg who'd run away from home. Spent a few Ottawa summers working at various bagel and wrap joints downtown and busking in the Byward Market, where I wrote songs and befriended street people, artists, and terrific local musicians. The relationship with one such musician became my second stalker experience; the relationship with another, a debauched degenerative low-budget drug and alc fest such as you'd read in a short story by Ottawa writer Michael Bryson or a poem by Anders Carson.

Terrible living and boyfriend conditions, along with my mother's cancer surgery, brought me back to Cold Lake, where I worked at a couple of restaurants and cafes, wrote a manuscript of poems exploring the quirkiness of a North Alberta smalltown, researched local Cree legends and started a Writer's Group.

In Cold Lake, I met my boyfriend Blake at a guitar jam, over at Richard the Drummer's place. Blake and I have tons in common: guitar, songswriting, and poetry. He was also staying at his folks' place to recouperate from a botched Cold Lake escape attempt. Together, we moved to Calgary this past December. There's tons going on here. Dammit, I need to know everything fast, get caught up, consume literature as though I'm at school, and see about attending the U of Calgary, where great writerly people like Christian Bok and Pamela Banting teach. For now, I'm working at a mountainview seniors' residence, where I gaze up at the Rockies and tell myself if I just scrub a bajillion more floors and serve a thousand more coffees I can get there next, maybe check out Banff School for the Arts, or visit Victoria, catch a reading by Tim Lilburn and Jan Zwicky... Currently reviewing poetry books for Fast Forward (the local street paper), working on poetry and songs, hitting the open stages and local readings like filling Station's flywheel and Single Onion, exploring the surprisingly wondrous and amazing indie college rock scene, and trying to save up enough money to get surrealcanada.com and its affiliate, bloom oon Canadian Surrealist Journal, out into the atmosphere - as well as get back to my home base, Ottawa, and my writing group - not the Cold Lake one I started that fizzled as soon as I left, but Ottawa's Peter F. Yacht Club, before they further disown me. Hello to Melanie, Peter, Stephen, Max, rob, James, Anita, Vivian, Bruce, who still inspire me greatly from so far. Ottawa's still my Home Base as I travel hither and thither, and yon, even, getting a feel for the country and gathering inspiration from excellent poets all over the land.

bloom oon cooming s'oon!