shelfie

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A different kind of 'shelfie' : being all the books I've worked on since starting at UMP in 2011. 

(See all the orange I've snuck in?)

swag grab bag

I know I usually post piles of books, both new and new-to-me.

But after I unpacked my suitcase and various satchels from UMP-related travel to Victoria (for the Congress of the Humanities) and Saskatoon (for NAISA), after I'd sorted the books I'd picked up into to-read-immediately and to-read-later piles, I was left with this pile of swag.

Swag is the branded stuff that organizations hand out as prizes or at conferences.

I'm not sure what it says about me that neither of two organizations where I've spent the bulk of my communications/administrative day-jobbery could afford good swag.

A paper gift bag or a fistfull of pens (made out of corn!) was about as far as either organization can/could legitimately stretch itself.

And, really, most swag is useless. Weird non-BPA-free plastic waterbottles. Strangely lightweight carabiners. Cheap hats.

But publisher swag is in a category all of its own.

I mean, how can you go wrong with pens, book bags, and post-it flag thingies?

(I'm still sort of in awe/skeptical of the UTP fortune cookie...)

I'll have you know that I wasn't a bookfair vulture, which is to say that I didn't swoop down and devour all the swag of the other exhibitors. 

My favourites are the pins.

Though I'm not much of a pin-wearer, I could wear the Robert Kroetsch Too Bad cover and Marita Dachsel "Wife" poem pin all day.

(Sourced from the respective booths of the University of Alberta Press and Anvil Press...)

One day, I'm hoping to talk UMP into post-it flag thingies. Or maybe even a black woolen hat with UMP in white on the front...

Tuesday!

I know it's my job to be excited about UMP's events, but I'm excited about this event.

It's always exciting to see a community get behind an event.

And when I say community, I mean the faculty and staff at U of Wpg's Oral History Centre, who offered us a classroom for the event.

I mean Judy Da Silva, who agreed to drive three plus hours to Winnipeg for the event and Susanne McCrea of the Boreal Forest Network and Thor Aitkenhead of the film Scars of Mercury, who've agreed to speak.

I mean everyone who pitched in to help us promote the event, activists and academics alike.

UMP decided to publish the Canadian edition of Anna Willow's Strong Hearts, Native Lands because her history of Grassy Narrows First Nation's activism is a local story. It is a story that needed to made available to other local communities.

I've enjoyed working on this book for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is because it spends so much time in the boreal forest.

And I'll look forward to sitting behind the book table at this event, listening to all the impassioned voices at this last UMP event of the season.

See you there?

Pumpkinhead!

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(Clockwise from top left): The ghost pumpkin M carved into sugar skull goodness doing double-duty as my noggin; soontofu chigae and all the fixings from Kimch'i in the Exchange with my friend Perry after a morning of postering for UMP's Grassy Narrows event; still-life with slippers, specifically, M's and mine on the floor in front of our bed this morning; Kirsten Wurrman introducing Cheryl Miki and I at an Imagining Winnipeg event at Westwood Library,

* * *

Is it just me, or has this fall been particularly pumpkinhead-y? (By which I mean chock full of deadlines and events...)

But in amidst the tearing around and the bleeding eyes (and that cold that lasted three weeks), there was lots of good stuff that I sort of wanted to acknowledge for myself, if no one else.

Like dressing up Aa in a sugar skull costume that involved an involved face painting and watching M apply all his small/precise skills to the ghost pumpkin he'd picked up.

Like unearthing my slippers and noting ruefully the wear pattern in the rabbit fur that edges it. I hate the idea of being predictable, but apparently I cross my ankles the exact same way every night, when sitting on the couch watching TV with M.

Like all the events, some for UMP and some on my own behalf. I sometimes forget, in the midst of planning and promoting said events, how necessary they are, not for selling books (or not only) but also for connecting, as people, with audiences. 

For instance, I spent an hour or so on election night in the basement of Westwood Library. I was there because I was doing a slideshow/talk from UMP's Imagining Winnipeg photo book with my smart-as-a-whip colleague Cheryl Miki. And I couldn't help but notice how everyone was made just a little bit happier by sitting in the dark, looking at photos and talking about bad old Winnipeg.

But after the outward push of effort out in the world this fall, I'm greatly looking forward to the blank slate that is the winter. I have one last deadline and then my writing days are ALL MINE.

Which is such a goddamn relief.

Has your fall ALSO been a great and marvelous gongshow? I'm curious...

Imagining! Winnipeg!

This is another day-job post. Specifically, about MY day-job, as promotions/editorial assistant at the University of Manitoba Press.

Like most writers, I have a day-job. Luckily, mine is a part-time day-job. And, if I have to have a day-job at all, I'm pretty content to have it be at UMP, especially as my job description there veers more and more towards multimedia goodness.

Anyways, yesterday what I persist in calling 'the Foote book' arrived from Friesens, the printer we use in Altona, MB.

I thought I'd share this image of our traditional look-see, where staff stand in a circle in the main office, muttering about details like the spine, the back cover, how the paper looks.

It's the first chance we have, as a staff, to see the culmination of all the steps in the editorial and printing process. 

The look-see for Imagining Winnipeg took longer than usual. We had to call in Esyllt W. Jones, the book's author, sand several other UMP authors and SJC faculty happened to drop by just after the book arrived.

I found myself peering at the backgrounds of the images, as details I hadn't seen when working with digital images kept emerging...and I suddenly wanted to find a quiet room and spend hours poring over the photos. Again.

In a word: fun!

* * *

From top right: UMP Managing Editor Glenn Bergen, Sales and Marketing Supervisor Cheryl Miki, author Esyllt W. Jones; UMP author Jim Blanchard (giving me the stink eye), and the hand of former Parks Canada historian (and now SJC fellow) Robert Coutts.

Foote note

Imagining Winnipeg LAUNCH
featuring Esyllt W. Jones

When: Wednesday September 26, 7:00 pm
Where: Atrium, McNally Robinson Grant Park (1120 Grant Avenue)
Cost: FREE

Please join University of Manitoba Press for the launch of Imagining Winnipeg: History through the Photographs of L.B. Foote.

The launch will include light refreshments in addition to a slideshow of images from the book and a short talk by author Esyllt W. Jones.

* * *

In an expanding and socially fractious early twentieth-century Winnipeg, Lewis Benjamin Foote (1873-1957) rose to become the city’s pre-eminent commercial photographer. Documenting everything from royal visits to deep poverty, from the building of the landmark Fort Garry Hotel to the turmoil of the 1919 General Strike, Foote’s photographs have come to be iconic representations of early Winnipeg life. They have been used to illustrate everything from academic histories to posters for rock concerts; they have influenced the work of visual artists, writers, and musicians; and they have represented Winnipeg to the world.

But in Imagining Winnipeg, historian Esyllt W. Jones takes us beyond the iconic to reveal the complex artist behind the lens and the conflicting ways in which his photographs have been used to give credence to diverse and sometimes irreconcilable views of Winnipeg’s past. Incorporating 150 stunning photographs from the more than 2,000 images in the Archives of Manitoba Foote Collection, Imagining Winnipeg challenges our understanding of visual history and the city we thought we knew.

Esyllt W. Jones is a history professor at University of Manitoba and is the author of the award-winning Influenza 1918: Death, Disease and Struggle in Winnipeg.

Born in Newfoundland, Lewis Benjamin Foote arrived in Winnipeg in 1902, where he bought a house on Gertrude Avenue and began a career as a professional photographer. For more than 50 years, Foote’s photographs chronicled the development of the city. He was an active photographer until 1947 and died ten years later.

* * *

Work started on this book just as I was hired at UMP, so I've been intimate with it for more than a year. My part of the project was putting together a blog entitled Lost Foote Photos and for coordinating the accompanying public call for Foote photos.

Later, I worked with UMP director David Carr on compiling new captions for the 150 images in the book. Which was basically research heaven for a girl interested in the history, the people and places, of Winnipeg.

I think the launch will be a humdinger. And there'll be wine! (That's what 'light refreshments' means in UMP-land...)

Press check!

So I got to go on a press check on Thursday for UMP's Imagining Winnipeg book (which I still refer to as 'the Foote book' in my head...).

l-r: David Carr, Randy the pressman, and Steven Rosenberg.

After a twelve-hour day, driving to and from Altona, where the Friesens plant is, my camera is full of pictures of UMP director David Carr and Doowah Design's Steven Rosenberg.

My clothes still have that 'new book smell.'

But more than that, my head is still full of the enormity of the place. Reams and stacks of paper...

What look like water pipes, coming down from the ceiling, specifically for ink to feed the presses...

The ancient embosser in the middle of all the machinery, including a robot arm that lifts boxes...

The immense art book that retails for $5,000 in Friesens trophy room...

And yet, homemade cherry pie in the cafeteria where we waited the 45 minutes or so between signatures. And the Safeway bag on a cafeteria table full of extra cucumbers. And the quilted version of the cover of Robert Munsch's Love You Forever on the wall.

Thanks to Glenda for showing us around, for making sure we had covers and one of each of the signatures we approved to take home and for directing us to Jasmine's Tea Room, just down the street from Friesens.

Also, yay for my first press check!

A banner day

So I wrestled with this banner for one of UMP's spring titles today, a Canadian reprint of a book about Louis Riel and Canadian identity formation. Like the L.B. Foote project, I'm excited about this book...

Part of my pleasure is being paid to look at photos of Louis Riel. Though it isn't a particularly good photo, I keep returning to this image of Monsieur Riel addressing the court at his trial.

The photo I used for the banner was in the running for the cover - which was designed by David Drummond, who is a FAR better designer than I am - so I decided to re-use it here.

So it was the best kind of wrestling...and I got to look into Louis Riel's poor sad eyes all day.

Foote fetish

So I've been working on the project described by this article non-stop the past few weeks. And it's the first time that I've been so proud of / excited about a day-job project...

Now, don't get the wrong idea. I take pride in ONLY working-for-money for organizations whose work I believe in. And I've often felt a sense of accomplishment at work when a project is complete.

But this is different...

I think my zip-zippy-ness can be attributed to the fact that as someone interested in Winnipeg's history generally - and as a poet who worked specifically on a poetry/photography project focused on Winnipeg derelict buildings - I've spent a lot of time with L.B. Foote's photos over the years.

Since that time, my interest in photography has grown, though I have very little interest in anything NOT found in the woods.

And then there's the fact that M's a news photographer, that he shoots many of the same things that Foote would have shot.

On a day to day basis, I hear M's stories about the subjects who grumbled about having their pictures taken, about the flood waters he's waded through, the scrums he's wedged himself into. I've washed the smoke out of his clothes after he's spent the morning at a fire and tried to spot him on the sidelines of televised football games.

So let's just say I'm strangely aligned with Foote.

So the prospect of working not only on the book UMP is publishing of his pics but also on a side project to find/share new Foote photos...well, let's just say I'm over the moooon.

For those of you unaware of Foote's work, here's a bio:

Born in Newfoundland in 1873, Lewis Benjamin Foote arrived in Winnipeg in 1902, where he bought a house on Gertrude Avenue and began a career as a professional photographer. For more than 50 years, Foote’s photographs chronicled the development of the city. He was an active photographer until 1947 and died ten years later.

What I've been doing...or not doing.

So I've been spending heaps of time lately, both at work and at home, riffling yellowed pages.

At work, we're preparing for the publication of a book of L.B. Foote photos, introduced and prepared by historian Esyllt Jones.

The pic on the left is from a quick visit we made to the Archives of Manitoba to look at Foote's notebooks, clippings and ledgers...in addition to the nearly 3,000 images they have in the Foote Collection.

Given that Foote documented Winnipeg and environs for nearly five decades, it's clear that the 3,000 images at the archives can only constitute a fraction of the photos he shot.

So we've issued a call to the public so that we might unearth some of the 'lost' Foote photos. And I've started a blog to document this process, which means that I've been thinking about photographs and ephemera and Winnipeg history on someone else's dime.

Which is really best-case scenario for me...of course, I'm tempted to start writing poems to some of the pics, but I need to get more work done on my solely-neglected manuscripts before I even think about taking on a new project.

Speaking of which, the pic on the right was taken at the end of a writing day, just before I reluctantly put everything away and started dinner. They're Edison biographies, the earliest of which is from 1929 and the latest 1989, and I've been rooting around, trying to build a timeline from the conflicting accounts of a minor character...

...who's a major character for me, of course. A main witness.

This is the most rudderless I've ever been, writing wise. Usually, I write poems and then I edit them. With this work, I've been reading and reading and scribbling, but nothing that resembles a poem.

But they might eventually resemble a poem or several poems. And for now, that's enough...

The books! The books!

So I did a reading last week at the St. John's College Library, which is quickly becoming my ALL time favourite library.

(That is, after my childhood library, which was small and full of well-thumbed teen romance novels...knowing the Sweet Valley High canon was NOT, unfortunately, any help when it came to St. Vital's social scene in the late eighties.)

I'm enamored of the SJC library because A) it's just down the hall from my University of Manitoba Press office B) it's the Can-lit library on campus C) I can order books from other U of M libraries and they're delivered to SJC AND I can take books out for months and months at a time.

So it was a treat to plan a lunchtime reading at the SJC library with UMP author/librarian Jim Blanchard which included cookies and an urn full of coffee.

I really enjoyed reading against a backdrop of books, of words and sentences and stanzas.

But I REALLY really enjoyed show-and-telling How to Prepare for Flooding (and, as you can see from the photos, other JackPine titles by Jennifer Still and Sharon Caseburg) with new(ish) U of M friends and colleagues.

Yay! Fun!

And thanks to all the SJC library staff for putting on the event, the first of many they'll be having at the library over the months to come.

Thanks too to Polly Washburn, who went from the event to a screening of her feature film Passionflower but still managed to take these pics for me...

Image/text/image

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If I were in a punny frame of mind, I'd say that it's been a banner few months for me, working life-wise.

But I'm NOT feeling particularly punny, so I'll just say that it's been an interesting exercize creating these banners for the University of Manitoba Press' website.

For many of the banners, I'm able to use the archival photos used in the books themselves. But some don't have photo sections and/or don't lend themselves to a particular visual concept.

Though I am not and will never be a designer, making images out of text (or around text) is an interesting reversal of my normal writing process, which is images to text, the world to the word.

Paperwork

* * *
O the paper I have pushed, lo these last few weeks!

Clockwise from left: The low(est)-tech way to give away a free book to UMP fans on Facebook; first pages of Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, which is just about to go to press; and a coil-bound version of Laura Lush's Carapace, just before it was shipped off for GG consideration.

Beach reads

Otherwise known as the stack I'm bringing to the cabin. There's more here than I can possibly read in two weeks' time, especially given that I've also got two UMP manuscripts to leaf thru, but it's also a symbolic act:

I'll be reading my way back into the Edison manuscript.

I've had a stack of exciting-for-me biographies out from the library and haven't been able to get to them. (Renewed them twice already...)

And I really really need to get into some kind of routine with this manuscript or I will pull my hair out and perhaps even attempt to get a grip on the short hairs on M's shaven head.

That bad, yes. But there have been a few extenuate-ings and I'm still reasonably certain there's still juice in the poems. (I have a bit of a thing for the poems, in fact, which is probably why I'm so impatient...)

There's also books here that I have been putting off reading for months, again because of the pile of must-reads.

You also have to plan for different reading moods when going out of town, where there's no TV and only the cooling night between me and bed.

Finally, right on top of the pile is the How to Prepare for Flooding proof that I've been playing show and tell with for months. Now we have to do final text/image touches and get the damn thing printed.

And one more...

* * *

I'm not sure where this door leads. I suspect out to the expanse of rooftop out my windows. But I WILL find out.

First day

* * *

So I've been working at the U of M Press for two weeks now.

The is the view out of my door that includes the St. John's College Library, whose focus is, at least in part, Canadian literature.

Which makes it a VERY friendly neighbour...

Beyond that, one wall of my office is windows; it's light and I can work away the whole day without talking to more than a handful of people.

It's precious and twee but also true: I'm entering the job a manuscript/web page at a time.