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February 2012

Thursday February 9, 2012
The Long Poem Workshop - Jay MillAr

Thursday February 9, 2012
Problem Child & The End of Civilization - George F. Walker - Telus Studio Theatre

Thursday February 9, 2012
Moving Along - Chris Craddock - Roxy Theatre

Thursday February 9, 2012
The Fighting Days - Wendy Lill - Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre

Wednesday February 15, 2012
Write Here Readers Series - North Island College

Thursday February 16, 2012
2012 Gabriola Poetry Festival

Friday February 17, 2012
House - Daniel MacIvor - The ARTS Project Theatre

Saturday February 18, 2012
HOME FRONT, a reading series - Sharon Thesen

Thursday February 23, 2012
Talking Stick Festival presents In a World Created by a Drunken God

Friday February 24, 2012
Galiano Literary Festival - 2012

Saturday February 25, 2012
red diva projects - Marie Clements, Michelle St. John, Women from DTES Centre

Tuesday February 28, 2012
The Leisure Society - Trafalgar Studios - UK

March 2012

Thursday March 1, 2012
Fred Wah - Versefest in Ottawa

Thursday March 1, 2012
The Kranky Reading Series - Raoul Fernandez, Jordan Abel, and Gurjinder Basran

Thursday March 1, 2012
Gordon - Morris Panych - Revue Stage

Thursday March 1, 2012
Where the Blood Mixes - Kevin Loring - Remai Arts Centre

Friday March 9, 2012
Ms Thing - Vancouver Women in Film Festival - Embracing the Darkness

Saturday March 10, 2012
How To Write A Poem For The Queen: a workshop with the Parliamentary Poet Laureate

Wednesday March 21, 2012
BellaLuna's Fresco - Lucia Frangione - Shadbolt Centre and Cultch

Friday March 23, 2012
Words on the Water - Campbell River Writer's Festival 2012

Saturday March 31, 2012
Visual Poetry Presentation with derek beaulieu - A B Series

April 2012

Friday April 13, 2012
Bordertown Cafe - Kelly Rebar - Toledo Repertoire Theatre

Thursday April 19, 2012
Down Dangerous Passes Road - Michel Marc Bouchard - Encore Theatre

Tuesday April 24, 2012
The Real World? - Michel Tremblay -Tarragon Theatre

Monday April 30, 2012
M.A.C. Farrant at Banff Centre in 2012

Imperial Canada: Talon statement on "libel chill"

At the start of this year, Talon Books Ltd. announced and scheduled Imperial Canada Inc.: Legal Haven of Choice for the World’s Mining Industries for publication in May 2010, both in our seasonal catalogue and on our website. On February 12, 2010, Talon received a fax marked “WITH PREJUDICE” from Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, the law firm representing the Barrick Gold Corporation, on the subject of the alleged “Involvement of Talon Books in writing, translating, publishing, disseminating or promoting Imperial Canada Inc.” That fax stated, in part, under threat of legal action, that: “In the circumstances, we are therefore instructed to demand that you provide the undersigned with a copy of any portion of the manuscript or text of Imperial Canada Inc. that makes direct or indirect reference to Barrick, Sutton Resources Ltd., or to any of their past or present subsidiaries, affiliates, directors or officers no later than by 5:00 p.m. on February 19, 2010.”

While Talon did not reply to the February 12 fax from Barrick’s lawyers, much less accede to its extra-judicial demand to interfere with our publication process and invade our authors’ and translators’ privacy by 5:00 p.m. on February 19, we did mark our announcement of the May publication of Imperial Canada Inc. as “cancelled” on our website. What have become known as SLAPP suits work especially well in Canada, and we, of course, like most Canadians, can’t afford one.

Every spring we mail scholars, writers and readers around the world our catalogue, as well as a letter to its recipients in which our publisher Karl Siegler offers some of his topical thoughts on the current intellectual climate of the world, which he then uses as a meta-narrative in which to embed Talon’s recent and forthcoming publications. This year, Karl’s Leitmotif (which it used to be called before the invention of the hyphenated word “meta-narrative”) was the appropriation of language for commercial gain and the implications of this trend for freedom of speech, a thematic that seemed to demand special comment on Barrick’s pre-publication threats regarding Imperial Canada Inc. His letter said in part:

What kind of culture, what kind of socio-economic reality, what kind of community have we come to live in, where a corporation is allowed to appropriate the full weight of our country’s legal apparatus to threaten the authors, translators and prospective publisher of a book (Imperial Canada Inc.), with “proceedings against Talon Books, as well as against anyone else that plays a role in the publication, dissemination or promotion of this book” for “substantial damages as well as injunctive and other relief,” unless the authors, translators and prospective publisher accede to the corporation’s lawyers’ demand to have delivered to them the manuscript-in-progress of that book, by a deadline they have set three months before that book has been scheduled for public release?

Think about this for a minute—imagine yourself receiving a legal letter [last February], marked “WITH PREJUDICE” from a corporation, that demands you deliver to it a copy of the paper you are preparing for public presentation at the annual Congress of the Learned Societies this coming May, by 5:00 p.m. within one week of your receipt of that letter, because the corporation has seen your paper announced in the Congress program and suspects it may possibly contain (though no court in the land has yet proven it to contain) statements that said corporation might consider defamatory or libelous.

It didn’t take too long for one of the recipients of the letter, Phillip Resnick, to decide the story was worthy of wider circulation, so he wrote an article about it in the Tyee on April 21, 2010. This began to attract national attention from organizations like the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and most recently from Jian Ghomeshi who ran an interview with Karl Siegler and John Dixon of the BC Civil Liberties Association on his program “Q” on May 12, 2010, broadcast nationally on the CBC. You can find it here.

That interview continues to draw a broad and vociferous response from a variety of people who feel that Barrick’s actions with respect to Imperial Canada Inc., have the potential to seriously undermine the principle of free speech in Canada—a democratic right that cannot be dealt with in a cavalier fashion in any society that wishes to continue to think of itself as “free.”

As for Imperial Canada Inc., we have put it back on our list for fall 2010 publication.

• Carmen Aguirre on Being Called a Terrorist
• Something Fierce Wins Canada Reads!
• Who Will Be Calgary's First Poet Laureate?
• Canada Reads 2012: Something Fierce by Carmen Aguirre Trailer
• Jerry Wasserman on Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer
• Whale Riding Weather Hits the Sex Festival!
• A Preview of Chris Craddock's Moving Along
• Jeff Derksen reading from Dwell at Capilano College
• 8th Fire: Drew Hayden Taylor
• Promo Video for Carmen Aguirre's Blue Box
• An Interview with Fred Wah
• Jillian Fargey In Absentia
• Ryan Beil, Classically Trained Actor DVD Intro
• Eric Peterson Nominated for ACTRA for Billy Bishop!
• Librettist and Playwright John Murrell Returns to the Stage
• Meg Tilly Hailed By Critics' Choice Spotlight Awards
• The Rap Guide to Evolution! on MSNBC
• All Is Flesh! Is Here!
• The Leisure Society In Vogue
• Fred Wah Is Our Poet Laureate!
• Adeena Karasick at post_moot
• Real Vancouver Writer's Series - 2nd Anniversary!
• Support Your Indie Bookshop This Sunday!
• The Poets are Coming to Pages in Calgary!
• Meredith Quartermain and Daphne Marlatt at Play Chthonics
• Cecily Nicholson at Play Chthonics
• A B Series Launch For Two New bill bissett Books
• Talonbooks Presents Karl and Christy Siegler's Farewell Bash
• Carmen Aguirre Tours Blue Box in 2012
• Fangtastic News for Josh MacDonald's The Corridor!
• Ride the Cyclone is Sold Out!
• Endre Farkas lauded by Quebec writers
• Joan MacLeod wins the 2011 Siminovitch Prize!
• Shadow Catch - Daphne Marlatt Pens Libretto for Local Opera
• Talk About David French's Salt Water Moon on CTV
• George Bowering - Memories of Victoria College
• Judith's Sister, Miss Take, and Then We Were One Have Arrived!
• Billy Bishop Goes to War - Official Movie Trailer
• textual vishyuns is here!
• Stuart Aikins and Jerry Wasserman on Urban Rush
• B.C. and the GGs in 2011
• Jeff Derksen - Vector Association Round Table Conversation
• The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi at NAC Studio
• Siminovitch Prize Short List Announced!
• Post-War Apology and Reconciliation
• Inside the Mind of Lucia Frangione
• 100 Thousand Poets for Change: Vancouver, BC
• Karl and Christy
• Daniel MacIvor on His Greatness
• The Four Horsemen Get All Emotional
• Jane Rule Upon Receiving Her Degree
• Sachiko Murakami's Launch of Rebuild in Toronto
• Lorne Cardinal to play Norval Morrisseau and Michel Tremblay's 'Narrator'
• Word on the Street Vancouver, 2011
• They Rule!
• Working in a Bookstore: The Virtual Experience
• Uniform Landscapes / Hybrid Dialogue
• Vancouver Poets Pay Homage to bill bissett
• Poetry is Dead: Chain Letters to the City of Vancouver
• Anishnawbe Keeshigun pays homage to all First Nation peoples
• Elee Kraljii Gardiner on the Writing Community at SFU's The Writer's Studio
• The Best Canadian Feature for Horror!
• Summer Dreams: A Night of Honour for George Bowering
• Rappin' Chaucer
• In Piazza San Domenico, Ordinary Time, and Rebuild are here!
• Mom's The Word: Remixed at the Belfry in August!
• I'll Drown My Book, Conceptual Writing by Women
• Don't Miss Hosanna at the Stratford Festival!
• Richard III Goes A-wooing at Stratford
• The Vancouver 125 Poetry Conference!
• Come to the Launch of the Vancouver Anthology!
• Move into Project Rebuild - A Poetry Project Initiated by Sachiko Murakami
• Kudos to the Winners of 2011 Jessie Richardson Theatre Awards!
• bill bissett & Friends at The Whitehorse Poetry Festival
• Robert Kroetsch, Teacher of a Generation
• One Thousand Stories!
• Festival Players Open Up The Book of Esther
• Carmen Aguirre at the Toronto Women's Bookstore
• TAJ is Tonight!
• Bring it Home, Vancouver!
• Billy Bishop Returns to Soulpepper!
• Riders on the Storm - Ray Manzarek & Michael McClure
• Pick Up Your Book Freshener Today!
• Support Megaphone and Pins and Needs
• Talonbooks Has New Distribution!
• it's a bouche time!
• This is What Happens Next in Ottawa
• Carmen Aguirre on Studio 4 with Fanny Kiefer, Part 1
• One Book, One Vancouver: Boxing at the Square
• Tomson Highway: On Canada's Beauty
• Go See Fronteras Americanas!
• Robin Blaser - 'It springs on you'
• Another Spring - A Renga For Japan
• Alain Deneault on Canadian Mining Companies
• We Have Confidence in We - The Script Tease Project
• Salt-Water Moon at the NAC
• Garry Thomas Morse at the Anza Club
• Cecily Nicholson at the Anza Club
• Two Poetry Titles Shortlisted for W.O. Mitchell Book Prize!
• Weather-Permitting, Poetry is in Bloom in BC!

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.

> Go to story...

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!

> Go to story...

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.

> Go to story...

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.

> Go to story...