selected texts
( 1992 - 2002 )
Many of the following works were made possible through
the generous support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts. Some have
been published in print, some on the Web.
My thanks to the artists, writers, editors and
arts administrators who found value in my work. Thanks also to the people
who inhabit certain online communities, notably trAce, Webartery, and the Nevada
group. Various of these works are available as spoken word mp3's, and can be heard here.
prose
- Tha Naked Tourist: I can't remember what got me started, but I have a series of photographs in which my naked body is a participant in each scene. I've always been fascinated by ruins: fallen mine works with hand-hewn beams; roofless fieldstone houses once carefully constructed stone by stone; near-ghost towns with dust-blown facades; bankrupt factories. These are the haunts that stir my imagination, like half-told tales. Each deserted place evokes a particular sensation, and being naked makes me more vulnerable to those sensations, or spirits.
- fisisix: A 4000 word short story, a literary nonfiction
based on a particular night from my nine years of driving
taxi.
- prairie markers: A series
of prose poems or snapshots drawn from fifteen years of driving prairie
backroads, photographing grave markers. Strangely, while cataloging
the collection of slides for donation to my local archives -- recording
locations, dates, names, and materials -- I was filled with wonder.
Each marker represented a life. And voices filled my head. These are
those voices, outpourings on foolscap, scrawls on the margins of county
maps. Each voice is marked by the legal description of a particular
cemetery.
- transitions:
A short collection of snapshots, moments of transition.
- travel journal:
A collection of short pieces from a travel journal kept while journeying from the Canadian prairies to a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey.
- spewing:
Some days my list of complaints is endless. I feel like
screaming at God. Words become more burden than
they're worth. Eventually, I calm down and write something.
poems
- from fields to sea:
The first poems in this suite were written on the front porch
of a rambling old house in Riverdale, a community
on the river flats in Edmonton, where
the North Saskatchewan makes a wide bend. The middle poems were
written on the road, during a year of travel.
The final three were written in my new home on Vancouver Island.
The first and last poems are separated by a decade.
- the impala poems: These poems are based on ghazals, a form originating in Persia. But they are not true ghazals, so I call them impalas, because they still leap like ghazals. They proceed by couplets, five to a poem. The impalas were written in response to: the war in Kosovo, a list of homicides in my hometown, a lost love, an argument about poetics.
- cutups:
The original texts for these
cutups were found on a online writers community discussion board,
and were many thousands of words long. Following are the arbitrary,
self-imposed rules I used for cutting the text:
- no original sentence can remain intact
- words must be used in order found
- retain imprint of original meaning
- punctuate freely
- should be somewhat unsettling
- keywords must refer to original discussion
- [con]cuts: These works were originally part of a larger Web art piece called [con]artist, but have been rearranged and cut into individual poems. They are accompanied by versions created by other writers and a link to the original.
- my computer: Like many writers these days, I have developed a relationship with my computer, by turns fruitful and frustrating. Each work offers a link to a Web version.
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