Issue 2: December 2010
Editors
Emma Healey (Editor-in-Chief) lives in Montreal. Her writing has been published in Matrix, Joyland, Broken Pencil, Cellstories and a few other places. She was the recipient of the 2010 Irving Layton award for poetry.
Michael Chaulk (Associate Poetry Editor) is a licensed Canadian seaman, but also a mostly-unpublished writer living in Montreal above heavy street traffic. He is also the Poetry Editor of The Void Magazine at Concordia University.
Richard Rosenbaum (Associate Fiction Editor) is a writer from Toronto, editor of the short story anthology “Can’tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine (ECW Press 2009),” and one of precious few survivors of an ill-fated expedition to discover the ruins of a hidden and nameless city erstwhile regarded by experts in the purview as mythological at best. Fortunate to have escaped with his life, if not, alas, his sanity, he has vowed never to speak of the event in hopes of sparing human civilization from the grim tidings thence descried, foretold only in whispers by unseen revenants tween the calcite-carved monuments of unfathomable horror strewn throughout the detritus of its long-untended shrines and cemeteries. He has since retreated to his ancestral island manor, where he was last glimpsed wearing a hideous mien of direful comprehension.
Poetry
Karen Correia da Silva (Guest Editor)
Karen is a Canadian poet and performance artist. She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the art collective and webzine Steel Bananas, a Graduate Research Assistant at the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, and the Assistant Editor and Designer of the literary press Tightrope Books. She formerly served as Associate Editor of Existere: Journal of Arts and Literature, and has been published in Broken Pencil Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, Flying Walrus, Excalibur, Steel Bananas and other local zines. In 2009 she co-edited GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (Tightrope Books, 2009).
N. Alexander Armstrong is a performer, philosopher, and poet living in Toronto. His work has appeared in Steel Bananas and The Incongruous Quarterly. His story “The Finger Points at its Own Tip” was anthologized by Tightrope Books in Gulch: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Flying Walrus, a student magazine at York University.
David Berridge is a writer based in London. He curates VerySmallKitchen. Recent chapbooks include Game Global Green Grown Guys (Beard of Bees) and The Moth is Moth This Money Night Moth (Knives, Forks and Spoons Press). He curated WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ PUBLICATION (The Pigeon Wing, London, 2010) and THE DEPARTMENT OF MICRO-POETICS (AC Institute, New York, 2010). Texts appear in Jacket, dear sir, Streetcake, Syntax, and Rubric, amongst others. See http://verysmallkitchen.com
kevin mcpherson eckhoff‘s very first book ever, rhapsodomancy, rocket-shipped into the universe from Coach House this past spring. He “teaches” literature and writing at Okanagan College in British Columbia. He’s in love with a pocket pit bull named Daisy.
Emily Falvey is a Montreal-based independent curator and art critic. Her poetry and fiction have appeared previously in Descant, Bywords, experiment-o, Decalogue 2: Ten Ottawa Fiction Writers (Chaudiere Books, 2007), and Departures (above/ground press, 2008). She recently received a John Newlove Poetry Award honourable mention.
Christopher Felling graduated with a BA from University of Victoria’s Writing Department in 2010, where he studied poetry, stage drama and philosophy. He still lives in Victoria, BC where he works, writes, blogs and plays Dungeons and Dragons. He blogs at http://canonfire.wordpress.com/ and is preparing to debut at CultureVultureVictoria.com. Thanks to Lorna Crozier, Michael Nardone and Colin Fulton for direction in editing “Profound Scenes from Space Thunder Kids.”
Colin Fulton is twenty-three. He lives intermittently in Victoria, the Okanagan region, and Nova Scotia; his work has appeared previously in Grain magazine and the online journal ditch.
D. Cole Ossandon is a writer from Toronto & Guelph, ON. Her poetry has appeared in Matrix Magazine, ditch, Books@Torontoist, and in the Inanna Publications anthology Other Tongues, as well as in the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives anthology Feminism FOR REAL: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. She also currently writes for Shameless Magazine and Canada Arts Connect.
Adam Parrish teaches about and engages in lexicoludics, procedural malarkey, and other lists of strings. He lives in New York City.
Eric Schmaltz is a writer who currently lives in St. Catharines, Ontario. His creative work has been featured in various places online and in print including ditch, poetry and CounterExample Poetics as well as several local anthologies. He has worked as an editorial assistant for PRECIPICe literary journal and regularly reviews fiction and poetry for Broken Pencil Magazine. Eric is the current coordinator of the Grey Borders Reading Series.
Jacob Spector was born in the woods of New Milford, Connecticut and now studies at Concordia University in the city of Montreal, Quebec. Jacob, a mostly unpublished writer, would rather talk of Blade Runner and Terminator 2 then to indulge in any serious conversations on poetics especially if your favorite poet is Walt Whitman. It is these Pop Culture topics of interest in addition to many others, which Jacob finds most stimulating and useless; perfect for poetry.
Robert Swereda was raised in rural Alberta, and studied creative writing at Capilano University in Vancouver, where he was an editor and contributor of The Liar. He has authored three chapbooks. Other work has been published by magazines The Puritan, ditch, West Coast Line, Flask & Pen, The Monongahela Review, Northshore News Blogspot, The Capilano Review, and forth coming in Poetry Is Dead. He has a Youtube page full of experimental music and video art http://www.youtube.com/user/burntumber
Andrew Topel: editor of RENEGADE – http://visualpoetryrenegade.blogspot.com/
editor & publisher of avantacular press – http://avantacular-press.blogspot.com/
Fiction
Saleema Nawaz (Guest Editor)
Saleema Nawaz’s fiction has appeared in journals including Grain, The New Quarterly and PRISM International, and her short story “My Three Girls” won the 2008 Writers’ Trust of Canada / McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Her debut collection of short stories, Mother Superior, was released in Fall 2008.
Marc Boudignon has written album reviews for Chart Magazine and their website, Chartattack.com. His story, “Outside-In,” appeared in Exact Fare Only 2, published by Anvil Press. Marc works full-time as a film editor in Toronto and spends his daily commute working on a novel.
Caleb JW Brasset lives in Toronto.
Stephen Kempster Whelpdale Thomas‘s first night in Barcelona (26 September 2005) he checked into a hostel that would give him cash back from his credit card cuz he had no money. Around 10 it started to rain. He had been out on the streets a bit, but he had been he thinks reading in the evening. Possibly the common room a little. Possibly it was earlier when it started to rain. People were tired out from the weekend, big “Merce” festival, and not many were going out. Bodies stretched out over maybe 3-5 beds of the 15 or so in the big wooden room. The gauzy curtains of the windowless balcony moving simply in and out with the rain and the breeze. The room as he walks into it dark, hot, close, wet, familiar, intimate, atmospheric, peopled, dense of feeling but easy, light, sensuous. Just that. The room. And the lightning and thunder outside. A white guy with no covers or sheets on him, just his boxers in the humidity. A girl on a top bunk to his left as he comes in. The sound of rain. A few more people in different beds. The big stinking backpacks piled up everywhere. Sometimes in situations as soft as this eye contact is made with people on your eye level lying down on top bunks. He got his umbrella. Went out into the rain. Walked the streets, looked. Nobody out. Bought a drink or food. Bought an overpriced tourist sandwich, went back inside and ate it at the hallway’s juliet balcony looking down onto the alley and out at the world in general. On 13 January 2011 at “12:00:00 AM” his domain thestephenthomas.com will expire and his public web presence will only be accessible through stephenkempsterwhelpdalethomas.com.
Janelle Weed is an ex-pat Albertan living in Toronto. She is a communications and new media specialist by day and spends evenings resolving international political conflicts and watching bad science fiction.
Music
Dan Beirne (Guest Editor)
Dan is a writer and actor based in Montreal. He is a co-creator of The Bitter End and writes for Said the Gramophone every couple of days.
Grand Trine injects the energy of rock with the liberating sonic adventurism of the avant-garde. They do it with violence, piss, life and primitivism. The band captures that primal four-on-the-floor frenzy epitomized by proto-punk outfits like the Stooges, MC5, Electric Eels, and early Velvet Underground, those sounds that lit the spark for the initial punk movement.
“Toronto’s Holy Fuck creates dance music that careens off the grid yet possesses a ragtag sense of discipline…(the band) galvanizes with rambunctious grooves that’ll make you shake your can and cause you to wonder why more techno doesn’t fizz with this kind of raw, triumphant energy.” – XLR8R. Find their full bio and band website here.
Jumbling Towers are a powerfully singular rock band from St. Louis. They make luscious, tempting, horrifying music.
Amy Klein is a writer and musician living in New York City. She loves feminism and seeks to help make the world a better place for young women. You can find her blog at amyandronicus.tumblr.com.
Little Scream’s music is—like her moniker—full of perfectly satisfying contradictions. It is at once familiar and completely distinct; effortlessly absorbing multiple genres into a sparkly and cohesive landscape. From her early days performing with a battered acoustic guitar through a cigarette amp, to her current multi-layered solo act typically combined with a rotating band of all-star musicians; one thing remains true for Little Scream: things are always done in her own weird and wonderful way.
Born in Iowa and raised along the Mississippi River in an ‘Addams Family meets 700 Club’ home, Little Scream, aka Laurel Sprengelmeyer, learned violin and piano as a child. ‘When my parents divorced, all my mom got out of the deal was a green Chevy pick-up truck. When that truck was dented up in an accident, my mom used the insurance money to bring home a Washburn banjo and the black Fender La Brae I still sometimes play at shows. I spent the following months locked away in our root cellar learning guitar tablature. Mostly Aerosmith’.
Little Scream escaped to Montreal as an ‘exile of the spirit’ where she went to University and ‘majored in getting a visa in Canada’. She emerged onto Montreal’s music scene at her own pace, appearing and disappearing on stages alongside the likes of Atlas Sound, Stars, The Sea and Cake, and Handsome Furs; all the while slowly crafting the sounds that would become her debut full length: The Golden Record.
Co-produced with Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre), The Golden Record features Little Scream on guitar, vocals, violin, and keyboard. In typical Montreal fashion, it showcases a healthy slice of local talent including Richard Parry, Mike Fuerstack (Snailhouse), Becky Foon (Silver Mt. Zion), Patty McGee (Stars), and Sarah Neufeld (Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre). The National’s Aaron Dessner also contributed on “Heron and the Fox”.
The title refers to the 1977 Voyager Space shuttle time capsule recording that contains sounds, language and music intended to represent earth. In Little Scream’s words: ‘It is a poignant if not futile gesture of communication with some form of sentience that might intercept it in the distant future when we are the distant past’. The otherworldly cover of The Golden Record is one of Little Scream’s own original oil paintings. Watch out for the Spring 2011 release of The Golden Record.
Lowlands is Abrahm Del Bel Belluz on guitar, vocals, bass. Gordon Auld on guitar, vocals, accordion. Brian Schirk on guitar and vocals. Their drummers right now are Micheal De Paola and Hugh Mater.
By way of a biography, Mean Wind swing from the sturdy beams that hang over New Scotland (mere Kilometers away from the Sgurra Bhreac). Edith loves them. More on this later.
Jasmyn Burke is the lead singer of RatTail, the best smoke-voiced rock trio in Toronto.
Siskiyou is the new group led by former Great Lake Swimmers member Colin Huebert in collaboration with Erik Arnesen (who still plays with the Swimmers). The group is based in Vancouver, Canada where Huebert has recently settled after a stint working on an organic farm following his departure from the Swimmers.
Huebert had channeled the songs comprising siskiyou’s eponymous debut with immediacy and austerity, recording dozens of tunes at home with only voice and guitar, generally within minutes of their conception, as an exercise in unmediated documentation. From this audio sketchbook, Huebert and Arnesen began building gently ornate arrangements on top of various tunes, recording overdubs in itinerant fashion in hallways, stairwells, bathrooms and parks throughout the Vancouver area. Banjo, piano, accordion and electric guitar play the lead roles in adorning Colin’s initial acoustic guitar sketches. The resulting collection of songs thrums with a scrupulous lo-fi backwoods energy and restraint. The music has been described as perfectly conjuring the lush, crisp yet often chilly landscape of the Pacific Northwest, and we tend to agree.