Ottawa Small Press Bookfair

Okay, it might be a tad late for most who read this now, but as of this posting, you have exactly 2 minutes to get down to the Jack Purcell Communitiy Centre to get your Ottawa lit fix. My take this afternoon? A handful of jwcurry publications; several broadsheets from Tree Reading Series (from Jennifer Mulligan); a mitful of Stuart Ross's books; a envelope-ful? of rob mclennan's stuff; and a couple of left-handed copies of this publication called Moist, from Amanda & Charles Earl's Bywords table. I don't know what it's about, but the picture are nice. Also picked up for listening pleasure Word Life: Tales of the Underground Griots, a compilation executive produced by Anthony Bansfield. It's going to be hard to switch out the other CD, Tales of the North Coast, currently in very heavy rotation in my car. "It's a fine time to be alive."

One of the jwcurry works I picked up was a little film cannister. The lable reads, "seventeen blossoms blowing in a western wind without origin". If you have ever purchased anything from John you will know that he keeps track of what it was you bought. You know, the item, the number of the edition, and so on. So he wanted to know what edition this was. This is a collection of Haiku by various artists. My ham-fisted fingers took me close to one hour (not all at once) to pull apart ten (of 17) pieces of very thin eighteen year old paper before I found the colophon page with the title and number: Industrial Sabotoge #40 edited & assembled by jwcurry, may '87. thanks to M.Dudley's letters for the issue's format. cover by Nicholas Power CURVD H&Z 350 #127/185 Now, I have to get back to him with this info.


Here's an unofficial portrait of rob mclennan as he is about to introduce several authors at the 'teaser' reading at Mother Tongue Books on Bank Street, Friday June 17th.