WONK has good news! Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst is coming to read in Wetaskiwin on October 26 at the Pipestone Food Co. Things will get rolling around 7:30.
Momentum is an funny thing. In strictly physical terms, it is simply a measurement of the velocity of an object multiplied by its mass. Applying this definition to WONK of late makes us realize that, because of how rapidly we lost our momentum, we are neither very heavy or very fast. We hope to change all of this with our upcoming issue (W8), aiming to, once again, gather a mass and velocity that is representative of the great artists and writers that have graced our publication thus far.
The only way we know how to do this is to put out another great issue, and the only way to do that is to get great stories, poems, and pictures from you. Right now we are flirting with a handwritten issue. This would see all of the poems and prose written in the authors own hand. Of course, and as usual, we don’t expect you (or us) to be hemmed in by themes: if you have a great submission that is typed, please send it in and we will fold it in our arms with as much love as a themed submission.
If you are a writer and are interested in submitting to Wonk, please see the submissions page for details. Happy writing!
Back in October, WONK had the privilege of hosting a poetry reading with two fantastic poets and orators, Jenna Butler and Glen Sorestad. The night of poetry was well attended and all were glowing with the embers thrown by Jenna and Glen’s reading. Shortly before the event, WONK’s Jonathan Meakin gave us an in depth interview with Jenna Butler where we learned about Jenna’s processes, as both a writer and a publisher. Recently, WONK caught up with Glen Sorestad with hopes of learning a bit about the things that impact his poetry and how, in turn, his poetry impacts the world.
Glen Sorestad is a Saskatoon based poet with a large body of work, spanning several decades. His poetry has been translated widely and is enjoyed in many languages, throughout the world. Glen has been a recipient of many awards for his poetry, the most recent being his investment in the Order of Canada. Like Butler, Sorestad has been engaged in both the writing and publishing end of poetry, the latter through his establishment of Thistledown Press, which he and his wife, Sonia, ran until about ten years ago when they passed on a twenty-five year legacy of ground-breaking publishing, one that continues today. WONK caught up with Glen via email and he was kind enough to provide insightful answers to the following questions.
WONK: As I was reading What We Miss (Thistledown Press),I often found myself feeling as though I was taking a long walk through the seasons of a year, each interval with its own unique sense of description. Does your poetry move with the seasons? Is it inclined, like many northern dwellers, to undergo mood swings from season to season? How do seasonal changes affect your writing and habits, are they part of the process of writing or are they, as for many of us, simply obstacles in the way of getting on with life?
GS: Yes, in many respects my poetry is definitely in tune with the seasons and that is because the natural world has always been a very important part of my life, especially since I grew up from age ten in a rural area of east-central Saskatchewan. Being attuned to nature has always been important to me and I would imagine that anyone who reads through the entirety of my poetry would very likely suggest that the mood or tone of the writing is often affected by the seasons. I am not at all convinced that my writing habits change greatly during certain seasons, but I do know that I find writing comes more easily and more frequently whenever I am away from home and especially if I am in a more natural setting – in the mountains, at the seashore, at a lake writing colony. In the dead of winter, I seldom write very much new work (unless I’m somewhere else), but instead choose to work on the rewriting and revising process. Winter, it seems, is for hibernation. Or escape.
WONK: Your latest collection of poems, What We Miss, is one of over twenty that you have had published. With so much writing experience, is there anything about writing poetry that still surprises you? Does anything ever leap onto the page and catch you off guard? If so, what types of ideas or images are they, and what do you do with them?
GS: One of the joys of the writing process for me is that the element of surprise is never very far away. Sometimes I think it is a genuine surprise, right at the beginning, that the poems still come up from that mysterious well of remembered images, voices, tales, impressions. The unexpected word or phrase that leaps onto the page and catches me entirely off-guard, the suddenly remembered image (now where did that come from?), the phrase that reaches back to childhood, anything that seems to appear as if by some mysterious and unheard calling, something unbidden that offers itself to the poem and finds its way into the flow of the lines. Surprise keeps me writing. If the day should come when I am no longer surprised by things I write, then I expect that will be the signal to quit writing altogether. When I write something new, I want and expect to be surprised by the unexpected. I anticipate it and I’m disappointed if it doesn’t happen.
WONK: As we are — beautifully and sometimes hilariously– reminded in Road Apples (RubiconPress), you and your wife travel extensively. During those trips, have you ever come upon a place that threatens to pull you from Saskatoon permanently? If such a place exists, what type of place is it? What is it about it that beckons you? What is it about home that makes you stay?
GS: I love to travel and explore different places with their different landscapes and features and there are times when I am in another land when I can very well believe for a moment that I could live happily in that very different place. Besides, I am of Nordic stock and people of my heritage seem to be able to make their homes quite happily anywhere – and do. But this feeling doesn’t last very long for me. The prairies have been my home now for over 60 years and I need this particular landscape to nourish me and to keep me on an even keel. In the end, I can’t imagine leaving Saskatoon, other than winter reprieves, for it has grown around me like a comfortable jacket or sweater. It holds me. Friends, long established relationships – they hold me, too.
Having said that, I find New Mexico an intriguing place because in so many ways it feels comfortable to me when I’m there and I’ve been visiting it on an almost yearly basis for close to 30 years. It is part of the Great Plains and may have many geographical differences, but it has a familiar feel like an old glove. When I am among New Mexicans, it feels very close to being among prairie folk from Saskatchewan or Alberta. It seems to me that we share similar worldviews and attitudes influenced by the great openness and the distances, that huge sky, the incredible play of light and landscape.
WONK: Your poetry has been translated into several different languages and is enjoyed all over the world. Does this international readership surprise you in any way? What do you think draws a reader in Norway or Slovenia to poems that were conceived, born, and raised on the Canadian prairies?
GS: No, I cannot say I am surprised to have an international readership because most of my poetry is about people and place, along with the natural world — something to which all readers can relate. Walking my morning round through the seasons in Lakewood Park is not much different from someone walking a familiar neighbourhood route through the seasons anywhere else in the world, be it across the heathered hills of Scotland, or along a fjord-side path in Norway, or through Central Park in New York.
Of course, there will be a few things that would clearly identify my poems as Canadian, but some purely Canadian or localized references are not going to stand in the way of a reader’s enjoyment of the poem. Part of our understanding of the landscapes and features of other countries has come to us through our reading of poems by poets like Burns or Wordsworth or Yeats or Yevtushenko. We have often carried our “imagined” visuals of certain places before we ever come to visit them
WONK: In June you were appointed to and in November invested in the Order of Canada. Although this is far from the first award you have received, how does, if at all, such an award affect the way you write? Do you feel any added pressure to be more or less of anything in your writing when you are given such a formal reminder of the impact that your writing has?
GS: While any form of award is always appreciated by any writer as a form of recognition and affirmation, I don’t believe that it has, nor should it have, any effect whatsoever on one’s writing. Awards have to do with the public individual and writing has to do with the private individual. The Order of Canada will not change the way I write or what I write in any way, shape or form, nor should it cause me to second-guess anything that I choose to write, or that chooses to be written. It is strictly a public designation that has nothing to do with the creative process.
WONK: Over the years of your literary career, what has changed the most about your writing? On the other hand, what has stayed constant throughout this same time, what are the things you have been unwilling to let go of or to revise? What would you like to change, but have been unable to.
GS: I am probably not the best judge of how my poetry may have changed over the forty-some years I have been writing. I’m sure there are many obvious changes, such as my tendency to use more traditional stanzaic forms more often now than the free-flowing and loose line structures that were part of my earliest writing. I also have tended to take a more traditional approach to the punctuating of poems, as well as the use of capitalization, as I wrote more and learned more about my craft. I would hope that an objective reader would see the changes as being for the better.
What has stayed constant for me are the main themes or concerns of my writing. I am still writing about what interests me and that is people — the always-fascinating interactions of humans trying to understand one another and themselves. I am still responding to the natural world as I did in my earliest poems and have been doing ever since because that world of nature and the turn of the seasons continues to seize my attention and my interest.
I don’t know how to answer the rather intriguing question of what I may have been unwilling to let go of or to revise. I am a tireless reviser and rewriter and so I just accept that anything I write will have to go through the process of assiduous, ongoing revision until I’m satisfied. I won’t let go of a poem until I’m ready, but I haven’t held anything back for a reason other than that I didn’t think it was good enough. Some poems just aren’t meant to be – and I accept that. I just move on to another poem.
What would I like to change? There are many published poems that I have been sorely tempted to rewrite entirely and in my last Selected Poems (Leaving Holds Me Here) I did make some changes in earlier poems. But I am beginning to feel that perhaps earlier poems ought to stand as a measure of what and how I wrote at that time because I am afraid that to alter poems after 40 years is to impose an entirely different set of poetic values on the earlier me. I think I’ll just let them be whatever they are.
The time to stop talking and to start doing is finally upon us. Because we recognize this, WONK has been hard at work putting out WONK6, which features great work from a number of writers and illustrators. The theme was loosely based around children’s literature and our contributors blew away our expectations, turning us in directions we never, well, expected. In fact, W6 might be one of the most diverse issues yet, filled with poems by Lyle Weis and Annie Polushin, short fiction by Cindy Dextraze, a graphic novel excerpt from Gail Sidonie Sobat and (illustrated by) Spyder Yardley-Jones, and beautiful cover art from Teresa Sturby. Although themes can sometimes create boundaries, it seems as though none of our contributors noticed and WONK6 has reaped the benefit. As usual, the new WONK is available (for free) in the Wetaskiwin Library, for free as an online subscription or, for a very small cost, mailed right to your door. To do either of the latter, simply click here.
Also in the spirit of “doing stuff”, and besides getting WONK6 out, we are working on a couple of other things. The first of these might seem rather predictable given that our last effort was called WONK6. You guessed it, our next big thing is… WONK7. But that’s not all; along with the release of W7, WONK is hosting an evening of poetry with Glen Sorestad and Jenna Butler at Wetaskiwin’s (licensed) Pipestone Food Company. Since we aren’t completely accustomed to doing things, the idea of doing three things (and two at the same time!) is a little frightening. That said, we are going to do our something anyway and we think (based completely on gut feelings and the fact that Glen Sorestad and Jenna Butler are on board) that our something must be pretty cool.
We promise to get more information out soon regarding this event, but, for now, the basic details will have to suffice (thank goodness those same details are on a mighty fine poster). We hope to see you there!
We at wonkWeb thought that we’d be remiss if we were to let another moment pass without an update on our twitter poem project. For the record, the project started out brilliantly. We received two very well crafted lines of the poem from, first, @EcDevGuyRick and then from @linoleumbob. Each seemed to offer a different insight into how social media is changing the way we all interact. It seemed like, to blatantly continue the metaphorical twitter cliché, that the birds were chirping happily on a beautiful spring day. But, then it happened. An unexpected frost. A frost so heavy and complete that all the tweeting stopped. Actually, that’s a little dramatic and, also, not completely true. It’s possible that the truth is that the wonkWeb editor (it seems fruitless to mention names at this point) heading up the twitter poem project neglected to take into consideration the fact that, at the time, @yourwonk only had nine followers (unlike the 23 loyal and discerning followers that we now boast). Given our follower statistics, the turnout for the poem project was actually impressively high (on a percentage basis). If you don’t have a calculator or a grade 4 student near by, I’ll do the math for you: twenty-two percent! With our high ratio of contributions to followers, it seems as though waiting for a few more followers might have been a good idea after all. To put it another way, I guess we could say that we should have put a little more network in our social networking.
It is worth mentioning that, in fairness to the contributors to the poem (as well as wonkWeb’s desperate need to not fail at this), the @yourwonk twitter poem project is not dead. I repeat, THE PROJECT IS ONGOING! Hopefully any of you reading the lines below will be inspired to continue the process. So, without further ado, something beautiful betrayed by a neglectful keeper:
We used to listen to the birds chirp, but then we learned to tweet
and now we can’t hear the person for all the people we meet
Some say we tweet of freedom some say we tweet for fame
yet I feel the tweets are hiding us behind a self-preserving (screen) name
Once again, a big thank you to @EcDevGuyRick and @linoleumbob for bringing the poem as far as it has come. If I failed to mention it before, the project is still a go, so, for the rest of us, feel free to keep the poetry coming and to be the next step in the process of collectively making poetry.
In the mean time, we can all look forward to wonk6 which is (still/finally) in the works. The tentative theme is children’s writing/art. If you are a child who writes, know a child who writes, are a writer who writes about children or any combination of the above, please see the submissions tab for details on having your work published in wonk6.
“Twitter is for kids, it’s only a trend, it won’t last”. These are all things that WONKweb hears almost daily and, who knows, they might be true. Whatever the case (or fate) might be for Twitter, we at WONKweb think that, while it’s still around, Twitter offers a forum for some truly collaborative writing to happen within. As with most things “WONK”, we don’t have a completely clear (any) idea of where this might go, but we do have a reasonably clear idea of where it might start. At least in this manifestation of the collaborative twitter project, WONK envisions a twitter based poem formed completely from the tweets (directed at WONK’s twitter site) that readers/contributors like yourselves write. While twitter itself limits submissions to 140 characters (their guidelines, not ours), there is every reason that a single contributor should tweet multiple times as they are inspired by those who tweet before and after them. In this way, the twitter poem can be thought of as the project of some strange little writing group except that, instead of simply collaborating to improve our own writing, we are also trying to create something that is distinctly ours out of the process as well. Here’s how such a project might work:
Once you have signed up to follow WONK, start tweeting to us your section/s of the poem (who will be brave enough to go first?). This can be done by putting “@yourwonk” (without quotes) in front of your tweet, by using the “mention” option to start your tweet or by simply replying to one of yourwonk’s tweets.
WONK will re-tweet your portion of the poem so that everyone who follows “yourwonk” on twitter will get to see it (this seems more complicated than it is).
Check back often to see how the poem is coming. If you are further inspired by someone else’s writing, add more to the poem; if not, either sit and fume at the direction the poem is taking or get in there and set it straight!
Once the tweets are in, WONKweb will compile and publish the poem in its entirety, right here on yourwonk.com . Barring the incredibly offensive or threatening, the poem will receive very little editorial massaging and anyone who contributed can feel free to tell their friends about the poem they recently had published on WONKweb.
Given that this is an experimental project, we will cap the number of entries to about thirty or so tweets for this first attempt (or the next available natural break in the poem). Provided this first attempt goes well, WONKweb would like to take the experiment a little further and have a handful of poets (particularly those who contribute to the poem) use the same tweets to create entirely different poems through the artful and nuanced rearrangement of the original components (tweets). If there are any of you out there who think this might be something you’d like to be a part of, please let us know.
Obviously, twitter is not for everybody. In fact, WONK isn’t even entirely sure if twitter is for us. Truth be told, WONKweb is a bit fickle: if our readers-cum-contributors take to this project, we’ll probably love twitter. If they do not, it’s very possible that WONK will completely disavow any connection with twitter, tweeting, or birds in general. So for the good of our feathered friends, get tweeting soon.
WONK5, after an arduous journey from the contributors’ pens to the eager hands of WONK editors, is now only one step away from its new home. Some of the WONK5 progeny now sit in the Wetaskiwin library and others are being prepared (with a bonus addition) for mailing to subscribers and contributors. The only remaining step required to completely fulfill WONK5’s destiny is for you to go pick one up (or, for subscribers, to just sit and check the mail every couple of days to see if it’s there yet).
And, while you are sitting either waiting for the mail or basking in the after-glow of having just read WONK5, you might just think about picking up your own pen and finishing off that poem/story/drawing/moustache on your cat – that has been nagging at you – and sending it to us for WONK6. In fact, for this instalment, you don’t even need to type your submission (one less thing, right?). One of the themes that is gaining headway for WONK6 focuses on handwritten originals (scanned and emailed or real-mailed). With that in mind, it might just be time to brush off your pen to see if it still works. Other themes that are trailing, but only slightly, are letters (any type you can think of: correspondence, abcd, etc) and children’s literature. Of course, themes can only take you/us so far, so don’t feel too hemmed in by ours.
The life of a writer and that of a mother intersect in many ways; in some aspects, one has become nearly as central to our definition of humanity as the other and, yet, the process of each remains predominantly entrenched in the private sphere of life. Marita Dachsel is living proof that simply because parenting and poetry tend to happen primarily in the private sphere, one need not come completely at the expense of the other.
In her latest collection, Glossolalia, Dachsel brings to the public, in poetry, the private thoughts of thirty-four different women as she reanimates the wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the church of Latter Day Saints. Preceding Glossolalia, Dachsel’s poetry has been widely published, including the full length collection, All Things Said and Done, which was shortlisted for a ReLit award. Recently WONK had the privilege and fortune to ask Marita a few questions about her latest work and the process of living and writing that helped bring her to it.
WONK: Sometimes when I come home after a long day away, I see spinning within my wife’s eyes all of the chaos that unfolded during her day at home with our two kids. As a self labelled ‘mother of boys’, how does the inevitable chaos of parenthood slip into your poetry and, when it does, is it usually something that you embrace or is it something that tugs at your sleeve, pulling you from your writing, asking for another peanut butter sandwich? How do you balance the world of mother and writer?
Dachsel: So far, the chaos hasn’t entered my writing. The chaos has prevented me from writing many times, but when I have the time and space to write, I don’t let it in.
I’m still in the trenches of early motherhood, so there is no such thing as balance. Time to write is incredibly precious and can feel to be incredibly rare, although that is changing. Before becoming a mother, I was clueless to how much time I had and how I completely squandered it. But once my first son was born, I panicked and feared I’d never write again. Carving out writing time became essential for my sanity, and I’d get it when I could. At times it would simply be revising a poem while nursing. Last year, thanks to the amazing gift that is the Norwood Child and Family Resource Centre, I had two afternoons each week to write. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but a regularly blocked time like that was a godsend.
My husband is very supportive. He’s also a writer and understands not only the need for time and space, but also that the writing process is much more than getting words on paper—staring off into space doesn’t have to be justified. I have been very fortunate that Kevin is able to be so flexible with his work. At times, I’d get a day or two to just write while he parented full-time. If I wasn’t married to a writer, it would have been impossible to attend the Banff Writing Studio last spring for five weeks when my boys were one and three. I wrote more in those five weeks than I had the previous three years. But now that Kevin’s contract at the university is over and I’ve been very fortunate to get a grant, we’ve switched roles. He’s the stay-at-home parent and I get to write. We’re both excited about the change.
WONK: I read an interview from 2007 in which you mentioned that you had yet to become an Edmontonian. Now, two and a half years later, do you feel like you have become a local or are you still somewhere on the outside, looking in? What are the major differences between being a Vancouver poet and being/becoming an Edmonton poet? What is it that defines each experience for you?
Dachsel: Edmonton has been very welcoming. It is a city full of kind and generous people, and I’ve been able to elbow my way into a small place in the poetry community. Despite this, I still don’t feel like a local. It took me about seven years of living in Vancouver before I could confidently call myself a Vancouverite. Edmonton and Vancouver are very different cities, so I don’t think it would take seven years here, but I know I’m not there yet.
Because Edmonton is a smaller city than Vancouver, there is more fluidity between the camps and poets here truly do go to everything despite the type of poetry one writes. I’ve been exposed to much more spoken word, sound and experimental poetry than I had in Vancouver. It’s not that it doesn’t exist there, it’s just that there are so many more events happening in Vancouver that you can be very active in the community and still choose not to attend those events. It was very easy to become complacent.
I was very comfortable in Vancouver. Almost all my friends there were writers or theatre artists, and most of my writer friends I had made through the UBC Creative Writing program. I didn’t have to work to find community or a place in the city. When we moved to Edmonton we didn’t know anyone and I had to seek out like minded people.
Moving to Edmonton has been incredible for my writing. My writing has improved exponentially and it’s thanks to a cocktail of new opportunities (the arts are blessedly and generously supported here), the isolation of not knowing anyone initially, and being exposed to new artists and ideas. The city has been great to me.
WONK: I have been enjoying several of the interviews from your Motherhood and Writing project and have found so many of the responses to be incredibly honest and complex. With that in mind, I have decided to lift one of your own questions and turn it back on you: Did you always want to be a writer? A mother? How does the reality differ from the fantasy?
Dachsel: Thank you! I’ve really enjoyed it, too. Those women are so smart.
My mother kept a scrapbook type of book that chronicled my public education. Every school year I was to check what I wanted to be when I grew up and almost always I chose “author” (although architect, fireman, and lawyer were also chosen at times). When I was very young, I didn’t know what that really meant. I knew that I loved books and wanted to write books so I wrote stories all the time, but what the actual life of a writer was continued to be a complete mystery until I became an adult.
Similarly, I always knew I’d have a family. When I was young, it was just a given with not much thought behind it. I’d go to university; I’d be a mother. When I became an adult, I never, ever fantasized about babies. I’d imagine a large table with lots of kids around it sharing food and stories, and I’d long for it. I still do. I hope when my boys are older there will be afternoons that live up to that fantasy. I think it’s reachable.
Both writing and motherhood are given a false veneer in society. The writing life is portrayed as glamorous and passionate, when the reality is sitting alone at a desk for a long, long time doubting yourself almost every step of the way. It’s a job with long hours and little reward. Motherhood is supposed to be full of beautiful nurturing moments backlit by golden sunshine with flitting butterflies and chirping birds. In reality there are soiled diapers, meltdowns, sleep depravation, and again, a lot of self-doubt.
WONK: In some of your latest work, including the piece published in WONK, you have showcased and extended the stories of the wives of Joseph Smith, the polygamist founder of the Mormon church. Where did your interest in these women originate and have any of the women’s stories and historical personalities surprised you or taken your poetry in a different direction than you had expected them to? Who was the most influential of Smith’s wives upon your writing and why?
Dachsel: I have always been interested in fringe religions and about six years ago I became quite obsessed with the FLDS in Bountiful, BC. It was apparent that their practice of polygamy kept them apart from the rest of society. Sure, it was easy to be titillated by it or vilify it, but I wanted to move beyond that and understand why it was so important to them. I started researching and soon discovered that polygamy was secretly practiced by Joseph Smith. I wondered about his wives. They didn’t have generations of this tradition ingrained in them. Why did they agree? What did this mean to them? What were their lives like? And of course, I wondered what I would have done if I had been in their situation. I came across a book that had biographies of thirty-three of his wives and another biography of Emma, his first wife. Of some of the women, very little is known, while others ended up being extremely important to early Mormonism with many biographies.
I was often surprised by details of their stories. He married a few sets of sisters, and one mother/daughter pair. Also, about a quarter of his wives were married to other men and continued to be. This still boggles me.
Very early into the process, I knew that I wanted to do a full manuscript—give each wife a chance to voice her story. Just the magnitude of the project forced me to approach the material in different ways. These are women who mostly married Smith between 1840-1843, came from similar backgrounds, had the same belief system. I was very conscious that I didn’t want to be writing the same poem thirty-four times, and really worked on voice. In a way, they are as much monologues as they are poetry. There were some women who I heard instantly and others with whom I’ve struggled immensely. I also wanted to play with form. In a few instances I found texts where the women told their own stories. I had never created poems from found text before but knew it was something I needed to do. They were quite challenging, but I’m happy with how they turned out. Lucy Walker was one where I tried at least ten different forms over three years based on her words. She was such a struggle. But finally, inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets, I found what I hope will continue to feel like the perfect form for Lucy: the blackout. I wanted to throw a parade when it all came together.
I am very close to being done, with just one wife left—Emma, Joseph’s first wife, the only who married him monogamously. I’m having the hardest time with her and I think that’s because she’s the one I feel for the most. She married this man against her family’s wishes and less than three years after their elopement he started the church. She faced hardship after hardship and seemed to struggle between wanting to support her husband by being a dutiful, obedient wife to a self-described prophet and what was best for her and her children. The more I read about her, the more I respect her. I want to write a poem that reflects that struggle, but be as interesting and as engaging as I imagined her to be.
WONK: Of all the people that do insane things, few illicit as much attention as do mothers and few as much romanticism as do writers. Being both a mother and a writer, who do you think has more of a right to act out: the creatively brimming writer or the mother with one (or two, or three) too many kids, and why?
Dachsel: Hands down, give it to the mothers. I’m not a fan of bad behaviour, but I think mothers are restrained to a higher standard than the rest of the population and it’s just not fair. Yes, they are raising our future citizens and leaders, but so are the fathers and we should all be modelling good behaviour.
I have a very hard time with the tortured artist syndrome. Being a writer is not an excuse for wallowing in self-pity, drunken binges, or drugs. It’s a job. I hate the stereotype and I hate even more those who use it as an excuse for being an asshole or a wanker. I have zero patience for those who play this role.
Marita Daschel’s poem “Fanny Young” appears in the now available WONK5. A special, limited edition of her poem “Elvira Cowles Holmes” will also be included in the print subscriber version of WONK5.
March 28, 2010 – It’s official, wonk-web is going to be featuring an interview with the talented Edmontonian poet, Marita Dachsel. In addition to the interview, wonkers can look forward to some provocative excerpts from her poetry as well as select previews from Wonk5.
On the analog/print end of things, we have several very talented people confirmed: poetry from Camille Martin, Rachael Sylvia Lee and Marita Dachsel; short prose from Thomas Trofimuk and Emily Rush; and artwork from Andrew Topel and Ian Pierce. The print version of Wonk5 is shaping up to be released sometime in the next few days or so, with wonkweb coming shortly after – don’t worry though, we will let you know all about it when it happens.
Oh yeah, we also have a theme that is absolutely sure to bring deep meaning to all that you read in Wonk5. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Then it will probably hinder your reading and make you wonder why we’ve imposed such a horrible thing on you. In case of the latter, or either, actually, feel free to disregard the theme altogether and just read the great stuff inside Wonk5. Here’s the theme: family / connections / relationships, if it helps.
If you’ve forgotten where you can pick up a copy of wonk5, please see Lucas’ thorough yet non-authoritarian directions below.
Pick them up for free at various places in Wetaskiwin (including the library, and Caelin Artworks) and Camrose (Merchants Tea House);
Get them from a friend who has a copy of WONK who is either not looking or is finished reading, his mind sufficiently blown;
Subscribe for freeto the electronic version. Which has the same content but not same awesome layout and/or smell.
Subscribe for a small fee.Have your own personal copy of each WONK (there will be 12) delivered right to your mailbox in all its paper and black and white (and maybe some colour) glory. Included in the envelope will be a) a few extra copies to do whatever it is you kids do with extra WONKS, b) a personal hand written letter from the editors or someone they have met and convinced to write a letter and c) any back issues that you don’t already have.
Why no why? When it comes to Wonk, there is no why – only great submissions and loyal readers. Of course having more of both would never hurt. So, those of you who have yet to read Wonk4 (or W3, W2, or W1), please take the time to do so now. And, those of you who have yet to submit for Wonk5, there is still time and a bit of space left for your original piece, so send it in! (but only if you want to – I don’t want the exclamation point to force you into anything).
The other thing, beside submissions and readers, that we Wonk-ers think we need more of, is online presence. It seems unfair to keep engaging in literary/artistic one-night-stands with so many talented poets, writers, photographers and artists. What can we say? We’re needy, we want to cuddle a little. Actually, forget that metaphor, it’s a bit creepy, but we really do want to take the opportunity to get to know our fantastic contributors a little better and this blog is one of the ways we are going to try to do it. No details now (only because we don’t know what they are yet) but watch for some more activity here at yourwonk.com to coincide with the release of Wonk5 – which, by the way, is getting close to press (but not so close that we won’t seriously consider your submission).
So, the way we see it at the Wonk, is that you only have three choices remaining: 1. read the Wonk (including all back issues) 2. submit your work to the Wonk (it feels really good to do so) 3. Do nothing and completely live up to your 9th grade science teacher’s expectations of you as a procrastinating, underachieving delinquent. It’s up to you and it might be the only way, short of re-learning the unit on eco-systems, of redeeming yourself.
