Category Archives: art/write

Never out of style

Posted on by laurie macfayden

White Shirt of the Week

‘The white shirt is now an omnipresent part of the fashion scene, a wardrobe staple
of the world’s most stylish women.’

Not to mention the world’s most stylish sax players…

I’ll be reading from White Shirt on Saturday, Dec. 4 as part of the ‘Book Lover’s Christmas Sale’ at Stanley Milner Library (Centennial Room, lower level).

It’s a Writers Guild of Alberta event, from noon to 5 p.m., and more than 40 authors will be on site to sign their wares, with more than 100 titles — plus CDs, bookmarks and other specialty items — up for grabs.

I’m slotted into a poetry trifecta with Alice Major and Peter Midgley from 2:30 to 3 p.m. The complete reading and signing schedule is available here.

White Shirt (Frontenac House, $16) has been long-listed for the Alberta Readers Choice Awards.

 


Beneath the White Shirt: Passion, tenderness, vivid colour

Posted on by laurie macfayden

Lovely review of White Shirt from George Elliott Clarke
in Sunday’s Halifax Chronicle Herald:

“White Shirt announces itself with stunning cover art by MacFayden herself. The cover art, Allegra, its violent lashings and splatters of paint, testifies to MacFayden’s sensibility: Her work is ejaculations, vivid, colourful, clashing, all indelibly marking the white page. Her first poem, my date with jackson pollock, is explicit about this esthetic: “i want the spatter! but he’s / cleaned himself up / i want loose fields, / vigorous lines, angry smears!”(Come to think of it, MacFayden’s cover painting also recalls the black, yellow, red explosion that is the cover for Irving Layton’s poetry book Fornalutx. She also seems to share his admirable frankness.)”

Clarke continues: “There’s mucho — even macho — passion here. There’s tenderness, too, as when the poet recalls an exhilarating day riding 10-speeds with a girlfriend, the twain, “just grinning like hell and knowing that, oh man, we are best friends, we are invisible,
we are invincible, we are fifteen.”

“White Shirt is a fine collection — especially recommended for readers who usually ignore poetry.”

UPDATE: White Shirt was recently long-listed for the Alberta Readers Choice Awards.
I’ll be reading from it on Saturday, Dec. 4 at the Writers Guild of Alberta’s Book Lover’s Christmas Sale, Stanley Milner Library (downtown Edmonton), 2:30 p.m.

5 minutes avec chemise blanche

Posted on by laurie macfayden

on the nightstand:

outliers by malcolm gladwell; left hook by george bowering

on the iPod:

david gray; emmylou harris; the supremes; abba; kd lang; the fugitives; justin rutledge; kate rusby; laura love; rufus wainwright

what white shirt had for breakfast:

egg, potato, spinach & red bean burrito; two coffees with homo milk

SAY WORD / SAY WHAT?:

‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that is poetry.’

~ Emily Dickinson

cufflinks of the week:

garlic grilled cheese sandwich at cafe mosaic; raving poets open-mic at the kasbar (wednesday) jocko benoit at greenwoods’ bookshoppe (thursday).

the gospel according to white shirt:

… are you getting any REM sleep, greenland?
(indelirium, page 60)

poetry immersion 101

Posted on by laurie macfayden

it’s national poetry month — and what a month it is!

on april 3, i had the pleasure of sharing the stage with michelle boudreau, mary pinkoski and jasmine whenham at a music & poetry shindig at the axis cafe.

on april 10, edmonton’s raving poets celebrated 10 years of spoken word wonderfulness with a big bash at riverdale hall. i was one of 10 featured readers selected to help represent the decade of debauchery & drinking — two things the RPs have helped define (or is it refine?) over the years.

the highlight for me comes near the end of the month. a year ago my debut poetry manuscript, white shirt, was selected for dektet 2010, a 10-title collection being published this month by frontenac house in celebration of their 10 years of showcasing canadian poetry.

the book is now a reality.

if you’re reading this blog and happen to be in the vicinity, you’re cordially invited to attend the edmonton launch of dektet, featuring white shirt, on tuesday, april 27 at stanley milner library theatre (7 sir winston churchill square) beginning at 7 p.m.

all 10 dektet authors will be there, reading from and signing their books, and all 10 titles will be available for purchase ($15.95 each).

two nights later the dektet festivities continue in calgary (thursday, april 29,
7 p.m., john dutton theatre, macleod trail) in conjunction with the calgary international spoken word festival.

to help promote the dektet collection, i’ve been invited to talk poetry with george bowering, canada’s first poet laureate, during the edmonton poetry festival’s ‘book chat’ at CBC centre stage, city centre mall, on thursday, april 22 starting at noon. this event is not being broadcast live, so if you want a front-row window on the conversation, come on down and be part of the audience. it’s free, and audreys will have a book table set up featuring the works of pofest authors.

the rest of the pofest sked is available here.

spread the word.

p.s. my poem ‘things you need to know before you give yourself to a poet’ appears in the lists edition of the new quarterly (TNQ) literary journal. look for it on magazine stands in early may.

My Canada includes Kate and Anna McGarrigle

Posted on by laurie macfayden

Just days after Canada lost poet, novelist and painter P.K. Page at 93, Kate McGarrigle has left us at the far too young age of 63.

Mother of Rufus and Martha Wainwright (she used to be married to American folksinger Loudon Wainwright III), Kate is best known as half of Quebec’s beloved folk duo, the McGarrigle Sisters.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle are folk and roots music legends; true Canadian icons (not like Celine Dion or Nickelback, god forbid, but in the manner of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and, dare I say it, Pierre Trudeau). For three decades they weaved a simple, understated magic with their harmonies and original songs, which have been covered by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Maria Muldaur and Kirsty MacColl.

Kate died at her home Monday in Montreal after fighting sarcoma, a rare form of cancer, since 2006.

“She departed in a haze of song and love surrounded by family and good friends,” Anna posted on the McGarrigles’ website. “She is irreplaceable and we are broken-hearted.”

Count me among the broken-hearted.

Love Over and Over (from the early ’80s album of the same name) has always been one of my absolute favourite songs, its catchy baby baby baby ’til my tongue spirals outta my head … riff impossible to get out of your own head once it’s gleefully inside. One of my top two Edmonton Folk Music Festival workshops (the other being Buffy Sainte-Marie rockin’ out with Mary Gauthier) featured Kate and Anna on Stage 6 with Tom Russell, Nanci Griffith and Greg Brown. Songwriters’ songwriters, every one of them. The afterglow lasted for days.

The unglamourous McGarrigle sisters sang of joy, of sorrow, of driving cab for the Star Cab Company and of eating dinner at the kitchen table. They sang jaunty folksongs in French and English. They sang love is a shiny car / love is a steel guitar / love is the pleasures untold / and for some love is still a band of gold.

I’ll allow that, like Iris Dement, they were a bit of an acquired taste. And just as there are many Canadians out there who have never heard of the remarkable P.K. Page, there are many who will claim to have never heard of Kate & Anna McGarrigle. To them I say, you may not have heard of them, but you’ve definitely heard them.

If you’re Canadian, eh, and of a certain age, you would have heard them providing the delightful vocals on The Log Driver’s Waltz, a song written by Wade Hemsworth and forever engraved on our true north DNA thanks to a three-minute animated National Film Board vignette that got tremendous play on the CBC network in the 1980s. (“For he goes birling down a-down the white water; that’s where the log driver learns to step lightly. It’s birling down, a-down white water; a log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely …”)

To me, Kate and Anna McGarrigle represented the best parts of a Canada that doesn’t exist anymore. A Canada that is polite and proud of it, eclectic, a bit fearless, a bit naive, and still (thankfully) a little untamed; a fair and caring nation, heartbeats accelerating.

I would like to have it back.

And let the sun set on the ocean
I will watch it from the shore
Let the sun rise over the redwoods
I’ll rise with it till I rise no more

(Kate McGarrigle, Talk to me of Mendocino, 1975)

inside the drawer from hell

Posted on by laurie macfayden

unable as i am to throw anything away,
i came across in the junk drawer the other day:

bits of string
expired pizza coupons
chinese takeaway menus
three hundred and sixteen twist ties
seven golf tees
recipes for chicken wings (i’ve been vegetarian
for twelve years)
screws of various lengths
fridge magnets
yellowed dilbert comics clipped from the newspaper
dental floss
the joker from a pack of playing cards
seed packets for wildflowers
a dead chapstick
a guitar pick
nine ketchup packets
dad’s swiss army knife
an eaton’s charge card
five dead batteries
shoelaces
folk fest wristbands from three different summers
several brittle elastics
two broken pencils
nine dried-out felt pens
thirteen business cards
joe’s wedding invitation
lorne’s funeral notice
a radio shack tape recorder
four “special” beer caps
a postcard from new york city
a plastic skull ring
ribbon
a bic lighter
eyepiece caps from a pair of binoculars
visa receipts from 2002
warranty cards for kettle and microwave (both of which
are long gone to kitchen appliance heaven)
film negatives clipped to photo reprint orders
popsicle sticks
a piece of petrified double bubble
a black and white photo of dad playing the harmonica
with jamie on his knee
a red crayon
fourteen ETS bus schedules, twelve of them out of date
a mix tape of songs from 1986
half of a very linty chocolate bar
an oilers key chain
picture hanging wire
three pairs of one-armed sunglasses
nineteen paper clips
candle ends
a kazoo

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

below the line:

and this is just the stuff that i KEPT …

when private people go public

Posted on by laurie macfayden

many of you are aware that i walked away from a 30-year career in journalism last summer in order to concentrate full-time on my own writing and painting. the latest step in this ongoing creative process is the construction — finally — of lauriemacfayden.com — a website devoted to my visual art.

it’s been a weird evolution for me. ask anyone in my family and they’ll tell you i was a painfully shy girl growing up. shy, and intensely private. i used to hide in my room when company — even relatives — came to our door because i didn’t want to have to talk to anybody. school assignments that involved public speaking almost paralyzed me. piano recitals (ugh) would have me sweating buckets weeks in advance.

it took the better part of three decades, but somewhere along the line i seem to have gotten over most of that. i now feel totally comfortable reading at open-mic stages and poetry festivals, and have almost gotten used to seeing my paintings on view in public spaces (although, oddly, hanging my art up on display, in relative anonymity, has proven to be much more gut-wrenchingly stressful than reading to a room full of strangers potentially armed with insults, tomatoes or, worse, indifference).

nashcan-blog1almost a year ago i started this blog, a step i felt would help me become more comfortable with the idea of exposing my writing and arty bits to a wider audience. the catch-22 there is that the wider audience (which all artists/writers desire, right?) leaves the artist more vulnerable. by inviting more people to pay attention to your work, you are opening the door to more criticism of your work. you may believe you can handle it, only to discover that criticism can be unwelcome, unpleasant, unfair, scary, destructive, demoralizing, and all of the above. obviously the more public you go, the thicker your skin needs to be. that’s a given; otherwise your tender artist’s psyche may collapse under the strain … forcing you to retreat back to the comfort of anonymity (not to mention poverty. thank you, stephen harper.)

i wasn’t sure whether i would stay with the blog after the honeymoon euphoria of the first few posts wore off. but i started getting a few regular readers, a few comments … and now i have had more than 5300 views on this little spatherdab entity. i realize that’s not a lot — there are celebrity bloggers out there who get thousands of hits per day. but for me, a little goes a long way. it is very satisfying to receive a comment from someone i don’t know and will probably never meet, from, say, texas or glasgow, telling me they love a poem they found on my blog, or that they really like a certain painting i’ve shown online. but it can also be disconcerting to get e-responses from people claiming to be fans of poetry who have clearly missed the point and really just want to argue with you; or overly enthusiastic strangers wanting to get a little too chummy; or unsavory entrepreneurs whose ulterior motive is to link your page to their international house of spam.

vulnerability factor aside, i think i’m going to enjoy having my very own dotcom page (thank you very much to the fine folks at MG creative).
do check it out if you have time. feedback is always welcome.
as long as you aren’t trying to sell me auto insurance.