Follow us: Facebook | Twitter | Latest News | YouTube
Our Latest Tweet:
Suffragette City: Wendy Lill's The Fighting Days http://t.co/CERvxhab @MTCWinnipeg #theatre #winnipeg Thursday February 9, 2012
Email: info@talonbooks.com
Telephone: 604 444-4889
Outside Vancouver: 1 888 445-4176
Fax: 604 444-4119

Japanese Noh is well known for its traditional masks but beyond that how much do you know about Noh?
Noh, like opera, is a distinctive genre. According to Noh expert Richard Emmert, Noh is a highly stylized dance drama that mixes passages of dialogue with poetic song. In Noh, “…actions of the past are presented as completed and emphasis is focused on the moods that are created in the main actor as he or she recalls these incidents.” When people tell Emmert they have written a Noh play, they are often mistaken in thinking that that Noh is like a Shakespeare play.
In 2006 Pangaea Arts used Noh to communicate the aftermath of the Japanese Canadian internment during World War II. The Gull: The Steveston Noh Project, written by Daphne Marlatt and directed by Richard Emmert, follows two young Japanese Canadian brothers in 1950 as they return to the village of Steveston to fish. They lost their parents and their father’s fishing boat during the internment years. They are visited by the shite, a ghost and a gull who resembles their mother and warns them to “Go home,” back to Mio, Wakayama, Japan.
Although The Gull retains the traditional musical structure of a Noh play, it departs from classical Noh in its being set in the 1950s on the West Coast. For Daphne Marlatt, writing The Gull integrated her two loves of Steveston and Noh. Richard Emmert considers The Gull to be the first Canadian Noh play.
The Gull is now available in print for the first time. This bilingual edition (English and Japanese) features rich colour images from the Pangaea Arts production. Purchase your copy today.

Thursday February 9, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Suffragette City: The Fighting Days
(Marina Stephenson Kerr plays Nellie McClung, on one side of an ethical split within the suffrage movement in Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days)
In the play, Francis Beynon, who is passionately antiwar, clashes with Nellie McClung over military conscription, and over McClung’s position that the vote should be withheld from “non-Empire” immigrant women during the war.
Thursday February 2, 2012 in Meta-Talon
How to Bank Your Life on Speculative "Futures"
Jonathan Ball interviews Garry Thomas Morse about various speculative “futures”:
In two volumes of The Chaos! Quincunx, I use what William S. Burroughs called the “fold-in” method, which feels rather like battering some batter in a bowl. This process is exciting, because of its sense of immediacy. I’m never quite sure what the characters are going to do next!
Thursday January 26, 2012 in Meta-Talon
For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again Comes to Kamloops
Michel Tremblay’s For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again comes to Kamloops:
They may seem like everyday moments — and in many ways they are — but, with Lorne Cardinal and Margo Kane playing the only two characters, the play becomes “an homage to his mother,” Leyshon said.
Monday January 23, 2012 in Meta-Talon
Anis Shivani Interviews Michael McClure
Anis Shivani interviewed Beat Poet Michael McClure On Jim Morrison, The Doors, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac for The Huffington Post on March 03, 2011:
Shivani: Is Olson the major figure in American poetry after Pound?
McClure: I do not like seeing poetry as literature rather than art and I’m not happy with the separation of Poetry and the sister arts, I prefer to see Art as Art. I perceive that a major figure after Pound would be Jackson Pollock, and instead of looking at “American” Poetry as William Carlos Williams exhorted all to do, I would look worldwide at the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and of course Charles Olson, and all.
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program; and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for our publishing activities.