Introducing the AngelHousePress Essay Series
as an occasional feature on the site, AngelHousePress will be publishing a series of essays by our authors about their work. AHP's belief and hope is that ongoing conversation about the work will lead to more creativity and more conversation about art, risk, the act of creation and the works themselves.
Please send your piece in PDF form to amanda@angelhousepress.com, and include a brief biography at the bottom of the piece. Also send a current author photo. Please also include a brief synopsis of the work as part of your cover letter.
2023BACKGROUND
In August 2022, I invited creators to participate in the writing of a collaborative flash fiction novel. Together we wrote a whimsical first chapter that included remixes, Oulipian techniques, AI generated text and more. It was great fun. We decided to continue and to invite more people to join us. This year’s wild and whimsical installment was great fun to write. I hope you enjoy it. Thank you to all who took part!
When we began this experiment in creative collaboration with no restrictions, I had no idea how much fun this would be or how generative it would be. Visual poetry, collage, erasure and art have been joyous new additions.
I like doing a project in one month and seeing where it leads. I like not insisting on credentials from participants and just letting them create without restrictions except those enforced by technology. I like working with creative, whimsical creators.
All being well, we shall resume our flovel (flash fiction novel) next year! If you want to read the first installment, please go to the pdf on the AngelHousePress.com site in the essay section for 2022. You can click on this link to access the pdf directly.
If you want to take part next year, please e-mail me at amanda at angelhousepress dot com.
Caring Imagination advisor Rae White provides a list of suggestions for events staff to help increase gender inclusivity at literary festivals and events, including: managing registration and the event space, and use of language. This is part of the Caring Imagination's initiative to commission guides for creative and cultural workers who wish to create, produce and disseminate their creative work with compassion.
We are offering an honorarium of $50 CAD for up to 10 pages and $100 for more than 10 pages, from a total pool of $500, which was provided by an anonymous donor. If you are interested in writing a guide, please contact amanda @ angelhousepress dot com with a query.
As part of The Caring Imagination initiative, AngelHousePress will publish guides to help creators and cultural workers who wish to create, produce and disseminate work with compassion. This first guide is for those who wish to raise money to fund their creative endevours and is especially focused on fundraising for community support, such as paying contributors and promoting activities, such as small press publication. It is a work-in-progress based on my experience and is by no means definitive. I welcome your suggestions for additions and changes at any time, and I welcome any questions you may have.
I am also looking for more guides on subjects such as how to create events that are accessible, how to find sensitivity editors, and more. Please visit CaringImagination.com for an idea of the type of resource we are looking for. There will be a small honorarium. You can e-mail me at amanda at angelhousepress dot com if you have an idea for a guide.
Kate Siklosi's companion interview to Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry with an introduction by Johanna Drucker and responses by several contributors to the book.
In this beautiful photo essay, German American artist, Susanne Eules offers their meditative and creative engagement with snow.
Charlotte Jung writes on minimalism and feminism and their relationship to her concrete poetry.
Experiment-O and NationalPoetryMonth.ca contributor V. Rivers writes of her experience of sensory meltdown, using the children’s toy Buckaroo as a metaphor.
This is the first draft. It is aimed at those who want to submit visual poetry for publication and those who want to purchase visual poetry. I am grateful to those who offered suggestions. Please send suggestions and corrections to amanda at angelhousepress dot com.
I’m steadily creating a directory of publications and sites with women and gender nonconforming editors, publishers and curators of visual poetry. Please note that you must check the individual sites to find out who they publish, what type of work they are publishing and if they’re currently seeking submissions. My hope is that this list will encourage submissions and collaborations and be inspiring and reassuring to other women and gender nonconforming visual poets who may often feel like there’s no place for their work. One of my missions for AngelHousePress is to center women and nonconforming artists and writers. I've now moved the list over to a general list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pFMLnPNhvj76cZl6MWW1gtu_77-aigh-v8X0VjE92r4/edit?usp=sharing
An Essay About Writing A Talk About Poetry or Thoughts on Play, the Other and Duende
Presented at the Factory Reading Series Talk, November 21, 2013, Raw Sugar, Ottawa with talks by Amanda Earl, Brecken Hancock and David O’Meara.
First published in Seventeen Seconds, edited by rob mclennan, 2016. Since the online journal is no longer online, I thought I would share this talk about duende and play in my poetry practice here, so that it has a permanent home.
Interview with Sarah Jaworski and Ben Toner of Wyrdsmyth Press
Over e-mail I interviewed local poets and artists, Sarah Jaworski and Ben Toner, the editors and creators of Wyrdsmyth Press to talk about their press, which makes papercrafts, broadsides and chapbooks paired with linocut prints, billets-doux, fortunes and favours, oracle cards. Their practices are linked to community, magic, nature, and whimsy.
Amitiés
In this fascinating memoir, American writer Dianne Hunter writes of feminism,psychoanalysis, love and friendships that began in Paris in the 1980s.
Writing on the Wall
Sharon Suzuki-Martinez writes about walls as obstacles, sites of introspection and sanctuary from the point of view of a resident of Southern Arizona, the site of traditional O'odham homeland where indigenous communities have been resisting the building of a border wall between Arizona and Mexico.
Neo-and-Marat-stopping-bullets-V
Peter Ciccariello is a cross-genre poet, artist, and photographer, who is fascinated by words and the invisible spaces between things. His current interests are in experimenting with the melding of text and images in virtual worlds, the erosion of context, and the investigation of obscurantism. His latest book, “Uncommon Vision” is available at http://uncommon-vision.blogspot.com/. Links to his current online work can be found at http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/.
“Art is not deep twilight experience, it cannot make consciousness it is simply the waiting for and the hardly ever arriving.”
Peter has been published by AngelHousePress in NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment-O Issue 2.
The Power Of Metaphors And Analogies And A Disabled Body
In the latest in the AngelHousePress Essay Series, Oakley Kiss explores the connection between their disabled body and writing as a white, Disabled and Queer unapologetic Pro-intersectional Feminist who loves to do things differently.
While I am grateful that Arc Poetry Magazine publishes chapbook reviews, Jan Conn's review of Christine Sloan Stoddard’s The Tale of the Clam Ear (AngelHousePress, 2018) demonstrated ableism and a lack of sensitivity. Chris Johnson was good enough to share the review with me before it went to print. I e-mailed my disappointment to both the author of the review and to Chris. Chris and the Prose Editor, Kevin Shaw apologized and assured me that they would be more careful in future. I invited Christine to respond. Here is her call for sensitivity and compassion. I am proud of Christine, and will always fight against ableism and other forms of prejudice and bigoty in the publishing world and in the world in general. -- Amanda Earl, publisher of AngelHousePress
in which i discuss our priority to publish 2SLGBTQIA, BIPOC, women, D/deaf and disabled writers and offer the beginnings of a list of links to diverse writers and artists.
Interview with Joakim Norling of Timglaset Editions
Timglaset Editions of Sweden has become a force in the world of visual poetry publishing in the last few years. I speak with publisher, Joakim Norling about its inception, evolution and future.
presented as part of Kanada Koncrete Material Poetries in the Digital Age, University of Ottawa, May 4-6, 2018. Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for funding part of the Vispo Bible in 2018.
In the latest AngelHousePress essay, Sacha Archer talks about some of the consideration for his visual poem series, "Framing Poems."
In this companion piece to the Small Machine Talks Interview, a.m. kozak and Guillaume Morissette discuss the challenges of living in the internet age. In this extension to their conversation, they talk about Guillaume’s novel, The Original Face (Véhicule Press, 2017) and how the main character, a millennial named Daniel, navigates relationships, work and art in this climate.
You can also enjoy our two-part interview here:
Part 1: https://soundcloud.com/user-301339427/episode-25-part-1-interview-with-guillaume-morissette
Louise P. Sloane: Portrait of An Artist in Her Own Words
Louise talks about her evolution as an artist and the role dyslexia and family affect her work.
Created in response to the Bush presidency, using the text from the constitution of The United States of America up to the point where a president is sworn in.
We discuss swirling 60s and 70s rock show posters, Ernst Jandl, glitch art and S. Cearley's concrete poetry.
In “Sum: Word Maps,” Gil McElroy offers a systematic and creative form of (dis)organization of text into visual poems in analogy with living organisms in order to free text from meaning, metaphor and connotation.
The non-Concrete Manifesto of Concrete Poetry
In “the non-Concrete Manifesto of Concrete Poetry,” S. Cearley suggests that concrete poetry can be seen as a misunderstood grammar, a form that creates its own symbol, and is communicative as an expression of language. He makes an illustrative analogy with the language shared between aliens and humans in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
asemic writing: recent history and ongoing research
In “asemic writing: recent history and ongoing research” jim leftwich questions the common definition of asemic writing as having no specific semantic content and discusses its readability while exploring the form as experimental textual poetry rather than as visual poetry or writing.
[Photo credit - Scott MacLeod]
Doing Franz Kline
Mark Young discusses his poetic process when working from figurative and abstract paintings, particularly the paintings of Franz Kline, an abstract expressionist painter and member of the New York School.
Breaking the Narrative to Open Up the Poem
a note on current poetics; the fine art of stumbling; Poetry has its reasons, which Reason cannot understand. Jack Spicer's dictation, Fred Wah's drunken tai chi, working against the notion of what David McGimpsey calls a people's trigonometry.
Chris Turnbull traces the evolution of her rout/e project, in which she places poems in the great outdoors.
David Emery offers a companion piece to rob mclennan's profile and Peter Gibbon's personal memoir about In/Words, an Ottawa-based literary collective now in its teens. AngelHousePress admires this persistent adolescent for its sense of community, the variety of publishing activities it has taken on & its sense of creative whimsy & mayhem. In/Words is our bratty older brother & we couldn't be more pleased to see it celebrated & remembered.
in this very lyrical & poetic interview, j/j hastain and Lark Fox discuss ceremony, the verb "to winter," wildness & its relationship to non gender conformance, about feeling freest on the edge of things & the importance of rust. I admit that I thought these two were the same person, given the affinity of their creative & life philosophies.
In the latest AngelHousePress essay, "Stochastic Acts: the search string as poetry," Mark Young examines the collage of realities and talks about poem making strategies involving the Google search string.
Matthew Rader offers a brief memoir about his experiences with Michael V. Smith's latest novel Progress (Cormorant Books, 2011).
The essay is structured as a review of Donna Haraway's book When Species Meet; more broadly, however, the piece discusses the theory of posthumanism, and why this theory is imperative in our era.
Camille Martin is not only a poet, but also a collage artist. We learn more about her collage making in this interview, the latest in the AngelHousePress essay series.
A response to Monty Reid’s “Twenty Minor Improvements for Greg Betts”
In response to "Poets Against Authorship: A 5 minute Manifesto in 20 parts, 15 seconds each" by Gregory Betts, published in 17 Seconds, Summer 2011 Issue.
Greg Betts' reading his manifesto at IgniteTO
a piece by Don McKay on the 25th anniversary of Brick Books in 2000, and the temerity of its founders despite naysayers and obstacles. Brick Books was founded in 1975 and I, as an avid reader of Canadian literature and particularly of books by Brick, am very glad they are here and thriving. Please visit their wonderful site www.brickbooks.ca and buy their books.
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