PAST WALKS ALONG A RIVER...
VARIATIONS ON THE RIVER WALK:
Rivers tell stories. Paths of travel and connection. Forces of destruction and rebirth. Listen. What do we hear? Come walk into a site-specific story inspired by these particular places, in collaboration with Ariel Gordon, Mari-Lou Rowley, Nanci Lee and Gwen Davies.
WINNIPEG - Meet at Bridge Motors Parking Lot, 20 Maryland Street
SASKATOON - Meet at the parking lot beyond the entrance to Gabriel Dumont Park (715 Saskatchewan Crescent W)
Halifax - meet at the Emera Oval at 5775 Cogswell Street
The walks go forward whatever the weather and last approximately 80 minutes.
Ariel Gordon is a Winnipeg writer. Her second book, Stowaways (Palimpsest Press, 2014), won the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. She is currently writing creative non-fiction about Winnipeg’s urban forest, slated for publication in 2018 with Wolsak & Wynn, and co-editing an anthology of menstruation-lit with Tanis MacDonald and Rosanna Deerchild, due out with Frontenac House in 2018.
Mari-Lou Rowley is an eco-science poet and interdisciplinary adventurer. She has encountered a timber wolf, come between a black bear and her cub, interviewed an Italian astronaut, found over 44 four-leaf clovers, and published nine collections of poetry. Her most recent books are Unus Mundus (Anvil Press 2013) and Transforium (JackPine Press 2012) in collaboration with visual artist Tammy Lu. She is currently finishing a PhD in social media, neuro-phenomenology and empathy at the University of Saskatchewan.
Gwen Davies is a writer who often paints the early seventies, a time that shook the world. Boularderie Island Press recently published a collection of her stories, Facing the Other Way, and Bright Crow published her practical wisdom in the book 5 Keys to building a clear & usable website. Her short stories appear in literary and other magazines and one of them won the Sheldon Currie Award. She teaches fiction and memoir writing, and started and ran the Community of Writers at the Tatamagouche Centre. Halifax Magazine featured her in the summer issue, 2013, for taking up parkour in her sixties – a sport that involves climbing and jumping and overcoming obstacles.
Nanci Lee is a poet and adult educator who works with cooperatives, alternative economic models and gender justice. Narrative is central to her work and her poetry. Nanci won the Nova Scotia Federation of Writers’ manuscript award in 2009, a chapbook contest with Freefall Magazine and published a letterpress chapbook with Thee Hellbox Press (both 2017). Her book of poems Hsin is about a 4th Century Chinese poet, an adoption, a love affair, a prisoner, a cave of forgotten dreams, a warrior and a thousand lotus seeds unseated.
Lisa Pasold has created site-specific walking stories in cities such as New Orleans, Paris, Saskatoon and Toronto. Her storytelling practice is an experience of place with the audience: moving through a landscape or walking down a street, to imagine together possible histories and lives of the specific place and its community. Lisa’s Any Bright Horse (Frontenac House, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2012 Governor General’s Award. Frontenac has just published her new book, The Riparian, “a love story and thirty tragedies, overheard on a piano dismantled, marooned, with the river washing through its exposed strings.”
More here about my interest in all things riparian.
OTHER PAST WALKS
Saskatoon:
BREAKFAST IN VEGAS was a site-specific story written for the heritage Broadway Theatre. Why is there a gambler living in the crying room of the Broadway Theatre? What does the Broadway have in common with Las Vegas? When does the craps game start? All because of one irresistible factoid: the Broadway Theatre in Saskatchewan first opened in December, 1946: exactly the same month & year that Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas!
Toronto:
As a part of Jane's Walks, I told a story of Napoleon's illegitimate daughter, who haunts the historic alleys and byways around the rail yards and industrial buildings of Queen St. West...photo below.
