lkirshner's blog

I've had a great time being W.I.R on Open Book Toronto -- thank you to everyone for reading my musings and watching my new-wave video clips. I'm not disappearing entirely, though.

Dorothy Howarth had guts. In the dark heart of the depression, she resigned from her teaching job and set out to become a bona fide female journalist, eventually becoming the first woman to win a National Newspaper Award. You can read about Dorothy Howarth's brave life in The Globe and Mail by clicking here.

Q) Is that another book on writing?
A) Yeah. It's by this woman named Natalie Goldberg. She used to be a teacher and she's a Buddhist. I think that's why her writing's so clear. The style is like...she caught the words in a cup from a stream."
Q) You really think a book can teach you how to write?
A) Yeah. It's working.

This is going to be a great event -- check it out if you can!

Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009
Time: 7:30pm - 10:30pm
Location: The Central
Street: 603 Markham Street
Email: http://www.livewords.ca

On Thursday July 23 livewords presents the Misunderstandings Magazine Issue 12 launch party!

With readings by contributing authors:

Clara Blackwood is a Toronto-based writer. Her first poetry collection, Subway Medusa (2007), is the inaugural book in Guernica Editions’ First Poets Series, which showcases first books by poets thirty-five and under. From 1998 to 2004, Clara ran the monthly Syntactic Sunday Reading Series at the Free Times Café.

There's a very old and beautiful apartment block in my neighbourhood that's been boarded up for years, and I've always been curious about it. Called The Sylvan Apartments, it's an L-shaped brick low-rise on Havelock Street in the College and Dufferin neighbourhood. It has pillared verandas and acanthus leaves carved into the plaster trim near the roof, and in the backyard are climbing pink roses. I love this place. It reminds me of a city residence for the ladies of the film Grey Gardens.

The last few days have been so gray and rainy that I'm beginning to feel like it's October, and the garbage is just adding to the surreal Grand Theft Auto feeling in the streets. Last night I stepped out for a quick coffee with a friend, and the first thing I saw outside my door was the city garbage bin overflowing with trash. People had even stuck milk cartons, cans, and other detritus inside the tape that covers the receptacle's litter-bottles-newspapers openings.

I read a lot of first-person novels narrated by women. It’s a predilection of mine, maybe even a habit. There’s just something about hearing the “I” of another woman’s voice that affects me viscerally, an old pigtail-trigger response I blame on Sylvia Plath. I was fourteen the first time I heard Esther Greenwood’s empathetic, electrifying voice on page one of The Bell Jar and since then I can’t pass Wychwood public library without thinking of that sound.

A doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, Angela Szczepaniak is neck-deep in a dissertation on innovative poetry, detective fiction, and comic books. Her first book is a novel-in-poems, called Unisex Love Poems. In addition to publishing poetry and critical essays, she recently participated in a hygiene themed poetry-art project with LOCCAL, and as a result her visual poetry can be found on placards in some of the finest public restrooms in Seattle. At the moment, she lives in Toronto, where she thinks about being ravaged by time’s withered claw.

Richard Meltzer. Nick Kent. Julie Burchill. Michael Azerrad. Steven Wells. Of all the music journalists to use sleight of pen to squeeze the strutting power of rock and roll into words, Steven Wells was the icon, the vitriolic voice of dissent in an age of press-release-driven journalism. He died on June 24 at the age of 49.

I'm sitting in a cafe that used to be an auto garage listening to Interpol, a band that makes me imagine cinematically brutal break-ups in clubs where people are very creative and also very wealthy, and the guy beside me is wearing a hand-drawn "I'm huge on Twitter" T-shirt and typing on his MacBook, and I'm having an "Am I in LA moment?" only I know I'm in Ocean City, NJ, because I'm sunburned and thinking of hermit crabs ("Free with Purchase of Carrying Case!"). And oh yes, today is the last day of my vacation.