Pivot at the Press Club
Anita Lahey prepares to take us on a critical journey.Pivot Readings are at the core of Toronto’s literary scene. Bi-monthly at the Press Club, writers and readers extricate themselves from their Wednesday slumps and find new and familiar faces tucked into the cozy bar on Dundas West. On Wednesday October 30th Pivot hosted a very diverse line-up that included poetry, prose, and non-fiction.Anita Lahey’s new book, The Mystery Shopping Cart: Essays on Poetry and Culture was published just a few weeks ago with Palimpsest Press and it is really something unique. There are not enough female Canadians writing criticism at the moment, or rather, there are not enough women getting their work published. It was therefore an extra pleasure to hear Lahey share her title essay and offer a narrative that is anecdotal and concerned with the realities of writing in Canada. “Diana and the Mystery Shopping Cart” is about discovering that, as an author, you’re stuck with being an author. It begins with the eerie image of a shopping cart on a lawn, very much like a cinematic establishing shot, and the narrative seamlessly switches to a reflection on how and why Lahey began writing. The late poet Diana Brebner was Lahey’s mentor and left the cart on her lawn (with the help of her other students) to demonstrate that writing is not accidental or a sequence of coincidences. It takes hard work to write—and to figure out that you’re the victim of a very enlightening practical joke. Her non-fiction is insightful and entertaining, and she maintains a unique blog that privileges her point of view as a reader, not as a writer.Puritan alumna Laurie D. Graham took the stage next and shared some poetry from her first collection, Rove, published by Hagios Press. Graham is an Assistant Editor at Brick Magazine in Toronto, but she grew up in Sherwood Park, Alberta. Rove is a book “of years and origins,” and is structured as a cycle of poems without titles that jump back and forth between places Graham has been and seminal periods in her life. To prepare for the first piece she read, Graham sought the oldest family memory available to her. In the poem, the narrator relays her Great Grandmother’s memories of Cossacks in the Ukraine, albeit with a self-conscious flair that tests the fidelity of memory. When the narrator exclaims, “bless my mom remembering baba,” amidst “horses crazed for being too much alive," the poem demonstrates the difficulty of relating to a “hearsay” memory, a difficulty that is altogether necessary for creating a sense of family identity. The fourth poem that Graham read also imbued memory with a sense of alienation. Graham writes, “Say my father is sitting on the roof,” and throughout the piece the repetition of “say” posits memory as a proposal, an event to be negotiated, and not a verified fragment of a fact.The final reader of the night was Andrew F. Sullivan—who happens to be The Puritan’ s associate fiction editor—and he read from his debut fiction collection All We Want Is Everything, published by Arbeiter Ring Publishing (ARP Books). Sullivan shared “Hatchet Man,” a very appropriate story to read the day before Hallowe’en. It is told from the point of view of young Austin who, now that his grandmother has died, can claim his “true” name, Hatchet Man, given to him by his Juggalo father. While Juggalos may be one of the strangest subcultures out there, Sullivan imbues his main character with a vulnerability that is universal to teenagers struggling with their identities, ICP-inspired or not. More importantly, Sullivan is extremely funny and dark. His ultra-contemporary authorial voice is simultaneously aggressive and boisterous and absolutely impossible to ignore. When Austin—er, Hatchet Man—confronts his grief, he laments, “Fuck Grandma and the dog and the fish and everything else that leaves me,” and it’s Sullivan’s ability to maintain a precarious balance between humour, sadness, and anger that makes “Hatchet Man” such a pleasure to read.On November 13th Pivot will be hosting Catherine Bush, Amanda Leduc, and David O’Meara, as well as Puritan contributor Bardia Sinaee, who is also slotted to read at our 2013 Black Friday bash!
