Stop! Look! Listen! is your one-stop destination for The Fiddlehead's cultural engagement.
The irony behind the “Doodling for Writers” catchphrase, “If you can write, you can draw” is that I was introduced to this book during a workshop I took because I was in a slump and could not write. My need to create pushed me to explore alternate means of expression, which led me to a comics workshop and this book.
While I’m happy to write, I’m just as pleased to read. This is what Poetry Weekend means to me. My poems, my friends’ poems, the moving words of professionals and colleagues and artists are all the better heard echoing from the walls of Memorial Hall. I’ve only attended in-person twice; I started reading my own work during the Zoom years. I’ve been writing my whole life but poetry only for three years, and I know I have so much to learn and catch up on. This makes two days of poets and their work so valuable and so fulfilling.
In the 25 years since it was given to me as a birthday present, I’ve recommended Time and the Art of Living more often than The Sixteen Pleasures or Mao’s Last Dancer.
As winter approaches, we should start to consider what music will accompany the gloom. Like central heating, stews, and mulled wine, Toronto musician Luka Kuplowsky’s, Capturing the Evening Song, is an essential comfort to get us through the cold. Released in the guts of winter 2022, Capturing the Evening Song is a meditation collection reminiscent of work by Beverly-Glenn Copeland and Hiroshi Yoshimura. It is a dreamy, synthy contemplation on simple, daily scenes.
I taught a class called Cotton at my New England university. In the course, we discussed the history of the crop, of the land, and the America commercial traditions of management, capital, and mortgaging, all of which came into being with plantation slavery. We wrote formal poems in response to contemporary news stories in which black men and women were being violently erased. At the end of the semester, my students pieced together a quilt.
I recently discovered a unique album called “I am in Need of Music: Songs on Poems by Elizabeth Bishop.” The Silken Water Suite with music composed by Alasdair MacLean and featuring soprano Suzie LeBlanc is arresting and beautiful. The four parts are: I. The silken water is weaving and weaving; II. Dear, my compass; III. Close, close all night; IV. Breakfast song.
To understand more about my Native heritage, I’ve been immersing in books about Aboriginal healing. I’ve found three sources, two non-fiction and one fiction, that are giving me a very full perspective.
A recent read-turned-favourite is There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, written by Kikuko Tsumura and translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. The narrator, burned out from her previous job, tries out a series of temp jobs with the caveat that they must be as undemanding as possible: “ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair”. Contrasted with our society’s focus on finding meaningful work, this premise is compelling from the start.
Amongst those who know me, I’m not known as someone who can supply music fit for every mood. If anything, I select a song list entirely against the tenor of the evening, the moving vehicle, or the dish pit. Slow sad burners when the night is ablaze and the inverse. Not to be contrarian, but more so oblivious.
