Life with & without *Slam*, AURAL Heather @ the &Now Conference in New York, Ferry Godmother

Finally coming up for air and an opportunity to write! Some home improvement is on the agenda this weekend, a little fun as well. We plan to cavort a bit down at Bowfest this evening. I wonder if the beer tent sells wine. I can’t drink beer anymore; not sure why and there are only a few wines I enjoy. The weather is cooperating, no rain on the parade this morning.

Injured my knee thanks to our brute of a pup, SamIAm. Some kid and his mutt came by the house with a flyer and Sam went ballistic. Junior pays no attention to what the hounds are up to so I had to run downstairs to intervene. Then I see Brinda-our favourite flight risk-on the porch! So I’m wrangling the two of them at one time, trying to get Brinda inside while preventing Sam from getting outside and at the kid’s dog. Sam adores people but not other dogs. He is also a very powerful and determined 85 pounds. At one point I slammed my knee hard on the floor wrestling and cursing Sam and son. Should have named the beast “Slam.” Annoyed too that people come up our drive uninvited and set the dogs off. It was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses the other day. I remained polite while cutting off their spiel, explaining, “Thanks but I’m an atheist,’” then shut the door in their faces.

So the knee, just below the cap, distended immediately to a golf-ball sized blue hematoma, forcing me to seek medical aid. I thought I might need an x-ray, difficult to tell if the bone had been fractured under all that swelling. Fortunately the doc determined it wasn’t and I didn’t have to go to North Vancouver to have my entire day shot. I came home and managed to get the AURAL Heather storyboard and travel grant application done after dinner.

Roderick and I—AURAL Heather—have been invited to participate in the &Now Conference of Innovative Literature and the Literary Arts in Buffalo in October! I am excited. SUNY-Buffalo is a poetics Mecca and Kurt says it’s competitive venue. We were selected from over 300 proposals. I’m working on a NYC gig and hoping I can get some help with travel expenses.

&Now is a unique conference in that its primary investment is thinking about the nature of innovative writing: which is to say, writing that defies easy categorization whether it is described as experimental, avant-garde, hybrid, or cross genre; whether it is called surfiction, avant-pop, or postmodern. These are, however, the terms under question in order to initiate an inquiry into why innovative writings tend to slip outside easy examination. The work of the conference is therefore to examine what role the innovative plays: how it functions with respect to more traditional expressions of writing; how it explores the limits of language and form; how meaningful its political expressions may be. In short, &Now participants tend to consider what, at base, the innovative can do—and whether it should do anything at all.

As such, &Now writers tend to think across traditional rifts that suggest issues of theory and praxis are autonomous concepts. Instead, &Now participants are interested in collapsing that divide, in thinking through how praxis and theory are inherently related constructs, how creative thinking is nothing short of a critical practice, and how critical practices arise and rely on creative alignments. It might be said that &Now writers—in their differing modes—are self-consciously aware of their own production: the language that gives their work shape, the history that gives context to their work’s form.

&Now therefore strives to bring together a wide range of writers whose chief mode of inquiry is focused on the possibilities of form, the limits of language, and the future of artistic expression in its manifold representations. &Now writers are particularly interested in writings which defy easy inclusion in any literary genre, which think across forms and borrow techniques and strategies from one another in order to reflect on the current status of aesthetic expression.

Back on the homefront, we are staining a fireplace mantle, painting a coffee table and designing a deck. It can’t be rushed. There are myriad possibilities and I worry we will overlook something, kick ourselves later. I think benches doubling as storage space are a good idea. I would love a fire pit and an alcove for the grill. A gazebo or an arbor would be oh so sublime and we must consider lighting and the colour of the stain. Then there is the pond that needs to be lined and filled and made feasible in order to blend in with the deck. Like many home improvement projects, it just keeps growing! We’re spending a lot of money on this place but I don’t want to move again, love it here so might as well fashion it to our liking. Should have bought a bigger house though. I am grateful that I live on an island relatively free of dread, crime, smog, viruses and slam. We’re still hosting hootenanys, for Christ’s sake. Granted, they do call them Open Mikes like the rest of the pop-culture flattened world.

Enjoyed a lovely visit with my California girls, dear girlfriend Saint Teresa and her daughter, my godchild Ava Rose. It was their first time in Vancouver and they marveled constantly at the trees and “so much green!” Their flight was uneventful, the way they should be, and a relief because Ava was a little apprehensive. She did lose her electronic pet however, and was upset and pretty focused on it until we got to the ferry, her first ferryboat ride! I told them they must have brought the sun with them because it was a lovely day on the top deck and Teresa got some fantastic shots of us, including one with my red hair in relief against a sea the colour of glacial water.

The next day was rainy and cold so we stayed pretty close to home, had a roast chicken dinner and danced until bedtime. Next day we tooled around the island, exploring, stopped at the pier for tacos. Ava got stung by a wasp! Poor thing. We stopped at Alderwood Farm to see the donkeys, chickens and emus. Man, they emit some otherworldly sounds. I thought someone was playing a drum. Teresa said they used emu sounds for the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Ava spent the rest of the afternoon in the hot tub, splashing and playing with one of the rubber ducks she found in our bathroom. Saturday was warm again and we went to Bowfeast, a market of local produce and wares, had a picnic as bands played at the Willie Dixon festival at the marina. Chris Corrigan and his friends were playing at the Snug and Ava happily danced to their Celtic tunes. We went to the library and borrowed some books and DVDs, then drove back to the sunny side of the island, Cowan Point. We showed them the golf course and trekked down to the little beach at Seymour Bay. There were some other kids with a puppy playing. Ava got naked too and frolicked in the waves. During the rest of their stay we had a fabulous beach/swim day and took the Bowen Express to Granville Island, walked around the market, had Siegel’s bagels for lunch, wandered the Kids Market where Ava painted a ceramic butterfly, played in the Adventureland indoor playground and filled a bag of precious stones in the Cave of Wonder.

My goddaughter is very precious to me and I want her to hear all the things I never heard growing up, like “you are beautiful, in mind and spirit. You deserve to be happy and I will always love you no matter what.”

One thought on “Life with & without *Slam*, AURAL Heather @ the &Now Conference in New York, Ferry Godmother

  1. Godmother Hedder,
    We had such a wonderful time on your Treasure Island! So full of green, with patches of blue shining through the pink streaked sky…

    Ava and I talk about or mention something about you and Canada and Bowen Island, just about every day. Just tonight, we sighed and talked about how much fun it was to go…

    Thank you for everything, for being such a stellar hostess, and for making it happen.

    Love you,

    T.

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