In 1994, still in the birthing years of the Internet, Goose Lane Editions, Canada’s oldest independent book publisher, made history by becoming one of the first publishing houses in the world to launch its own website. After 18 years, the site has gone through numerous [...]
In an effort to fend off the blahs of short days and bipolar weather patterns we recently organized an event at Gallery Connexion in Fredericton that saw the telling of stories brought to the stage. Inspired by the Moth storytelling series and podcast, the performers would simply present their tales, loosely following the theme “Lost and Found,” in a very off-the-cuff conversational manner, without notes or props of any kind.
I am just a reporter, author and storyteller in a small province in Canada, a journalist devoted to covering seemingly prosaic concerns distant from the epic struggles, or literary hot spots, that marked the careers of Whitman, Hitchens and Havel. But lazy thinking and equivocation are universal, as is the need for clear thinking and clear writing.
What if all that junk in your head came out? You don’t have to have “mental issues” to know that there are rules in conversation, things that can be said and things that should remain hidden or reserved. I always seem to have Edgar’s caveat at the end of King Lear in my head: “speak what you feel, not what you ought to say,” that next-to-impossible ideal that is supposed to keep tragedy at bay.
Jeffrey Donaldson via Poetry Daily
If art has value at all, it does so because it speaks to us about those aspects of our lives that have nothing to do with money — our joy in the visible world, our longing for order wrought from chaos, our desire for transcendence of the merely material. Things of that nature which music, dance, painting and language offer us to help articulate our common humanity.
We read alternately, having chosen work which used the same material — fire, building our house, pine-bark beetle damage in the Interior of B.C. — so that the audience got the sense of how two very different writers respond to similar themes.
Reporting on any and all activity, even your bodily functions, or while engaged in bodily functions, seems mandatory. I stood at a urinal in the Vancouver airport while the man in the next spot talked loudly on his cell phone. He even had a cigarette in his mouth. I asked him, “Is that what they call voice-over-I-pee.” He sneered and jutted his chin at me over the divider, causing the ash to drop, hopefully not anywhere delicate. He growled while I fled.
The two notions – trees and memory – became entwined and led me to writing about trees and how my life has been shaped by them, shaded by them, nourished by them. I couldn’t have anticipated some of the paths I ventured down but I have to say I loved writing the individual essays and really enjoyed the process of pulling them together into a book.
As one of the oldest independent publishers in Canada, Goose Lane Editions celebrates story, ideas and cultural expressions. 26 years into it, Scriver still finds very new book a thrill. “Publishing in its most basic definition means ‘making public,’” she says. “In some ways, the print book holds and some manner defines the content….”
Shannon Webb-Campbell/The Telegraph-Journal
