Archive for the 'WLU Press' Category

Disclaimer: Real poets, beware. What is about to happen may offend, inspire, or have literally (figuratively) no impact on you.

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Welcome to Collaborative Digital Poetry [Amateur] Night, featuring Blaire Blogs die-hard fans (Dad, that’s you!), occasional readers, and random passersby. This post will be especially eye-opening if I only get three responses, so please, save my ego: tell your friends. (Thanks Jordan and Matt, as always, for the shameless twitter promotion.)

Recently, I have been engaging in an ongoing debate with my favourite red wine philosopher about which we seek out more often: to be seen or heard (or, if they are, in fact, manifestations of the exact same thing which embody deeper human urges presented differently in each individual…but I won’t get into it). Today—in celebration of National Poetry Month—I’m fusing them together with a digital poetry experiment.

Make a one-statement case for/about being seen or heard, and we’ll make one relentless collaborative poem out of it. Do not be afraid to contribute more than once; I like my poets greedy for airtime. Express yourselves!
I’ll start.

SEEN/HEARD
by: Blaire, Matthew, Carly, John, SB, Brenna, Lorna, Carrie, BH, PjM

To hear me is to see inside my dwelling place.
To hear me is to see the things I want you to.
Listen to what I’m telling through my movements and my clothes.
But hear me when you listen, even through my lows.
It’s seeing the options in front of me, yet hearing me out.
Hear me to see me in my truest form.
Look and see, listen and hear … and discover what I’m ALL about!
To hear me is to see the chaos inside me.
Now see what I am showing with the words tumbling out of my mouth.
I hear the grumblings, I see the look, but listening closely is all it took.
Likewise the heard carries the unheard unseen.
Even though I scream thoughts, the loudness disappears.
Seeing what’s in front of you, listen, without saying a word.
The silence confronted, I continue to move through.
Because the ear is the eye of language.
And the eye is the ear of sound.
Seeing me is hearing what I did not say.

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Take a look at our traditional print Laurier Poetry catalogue in all its digital glory on Edelweiss and BNC CataList. Have a poetic month!

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The BookNet Canada Tech Forum was a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t just an excuse for Canada’s book industry to get together and eat cookies for two days (though we did just that), it was an opportunity to feel genuinely inspired about the future of books and publishing—not in spite of, but as a result of technology (gasp!). So how does that happen? The general rule in this shadow of impending doom has been to believe that the digital direction of the industry is something we don’t need to worry about: people love physical books. They like to display them on shelves, feel their pages, read them in sunlight—they like to possess them. Bottom line (confident voice): we’re not worried. Books are our business and people love them! *Here, enthusiastically insert statistical evidence that print books outsell e-books at an astonishing rate. Then, cross arms and look smug whilst quelling inner fear of being jobless in five to ten years.* We have all, officially, been feeling very reassured about this interesting (terrifying) digital shift (phase).

But we were wrong. Books aren’t our business, expression is our business. Stories, theories, memories, research, art, words: that’s our business. Books, as we know them, are merely the container to our true product: content. Digital publishing simply frees that content from its traditional packaging, and that’s far from our cue to close up shop.

Publishing’s digital revolution means beginning to think about the content of a book separately from its container. It’s not just time to evolve the way we think about books, it’s time to have fun with them; embedded discussion links, interactive fiction, background music—none of that happens on paper. By nature, print books are restrictive to content—there are only a few ways to present it. With the digital world expanding around us, the book industry is tasked with challenging our product to do more than it ever has before. We aren’t witnessing the dwindling of literature, but the re-imagination of its potential. If anyone is up to this immense creative task, it’s publishers. After all, every day they face down a TV-dazed public and say “Hey! Read this.” and survive. (Yesterday, I caught a Walking Dead TV series fan reading the graphic novel and almost cried with joy.) We’ve got this.

But books without jackets? Shelves without spines? It’s daunting, sure, but I’m not worried. People do love books, but we love what’s in them even more: authentic human expression.

Content unbound—let’s see what we can do with that.

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“Censorship does not protect society; it smothers creativity and precludes open debate of controversial issues.”

—From the Book and Periodical Council’s Freedom of Expression and Freedom to Read position statement.

Last week was Freedom to Read week in Canada, and in case you missed it, take a look at some of our current censorship issues.

It may seem strange to think of Canada as a society threatened by censorship, but books and magazines are banned at the border and removed from shelves in our libraries, schools, and bookstores all the time. And it’s not just about what’s in print: social media is the newest venue for free speech, and thus, censorship. Though the internet expands our potential for knowledge, it also enables more immediate personal restriction. Freedom to Read is about intellectual independence and, above all else, the right to choose—what we read, what we express, and how we learn. So, read! Speak! And decide for yourself.

Have you read a recently contested publication? I bet you have.
A selection of works challenged in Canada within the past ten years:

Adbusters: A Journal of the Mental Environment
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Antigone by Sophocles
Contes pour buveurs attardés by Michel Tremblay
Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart
Gossip Girl (all fifteen books in series) by Cecily Von Ziegesar
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter (all seven books in series) by J.K. Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Maclean’s
My Mom’s Having a Baby! A Kid’s Month by Month Guide to Pregnancy by Dori Hillestad Butler
NOW magazine
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art by Richard Meyer
Rolling Stone magazine
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
Something to Tell by Ann Alma
Sports Illustrated
Star Wars: A New Hope by George Lucas, Hisao Tamaki, and David Land
Takes One to Know One: An Alison Kaine Mystery by Kate Allen
Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak by Deborah Ellis
To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper
“What’s Happening to Me?” An Illustrated Guide to Puberty by Peter Mayle

Still think we’re in the clear?

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“The question of how to market a scholarly book is a perennial one for academic presses. While it goes without saying that scholars with similar interests will purchase it, or at least assure that the book is purchased by their university library, what about people beyond that admittedly rather specialized demographic? Though it is true that it should not be incumbent upon scholars to ‘sell’ ideas like pulp fiction or used cars, there is middle ground: a reading public for books that have both scholarly worth and a wider appeal. I know many people don’t believe in such a middle ground, but I do, partly because I’ve been to the ground and tested the soil. Verdict: perfectly healthy.”

The paragraph above is from a blog post by Tanis MacDonald, poet and scholar (Laurier Dept of English and Film), and author of The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies. She writes about her desire to do more than a host a gathering of friends with cookies and tea to launch a book that was years in the making. And so she envisioned The Elegy Roadshow and proceeded to tour a scholarly book (combined with poetry) in six cities across Canada.

Tanis thoughtfully thanks the press for the work our staff did on her book, but we in turn thank her for being a tireless supporter of our publications. Please check out the rest of her post, read her poetry, and maybe, just maybe, tuck her scholarly book into your electronic shopping cart on our site (with a 25% discount).

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