What we're doing to stay afloat--the book!!

Yes, it is true, by the end of October 2015, What we're doing to stay afloat will be available in book form. 

The end of September and it was all done: the pages checked and double-checked and the cover proofed in emails and phone calls back and forth between publisher, designers, copy-editor and me. Ten days earlier the version I'd corrected vanished from the book designer's in-box; for some reason her email server would not accept messages from any of my accounts. We waded through the details on the phone and I sent my marked-up copy from my partner's email account. Success! One more version to proof, which we did, and then everything was sent off to the printer. Now we wait, and sometime towards the end of October there will be a book, a tangible object to touch and to hold, to open, to leaf through, to read.

Where can you get a copy? You can email me, leave me a message in the comments section of this blog or via facebook messenger, or order a copy directly from Indigo Books here  https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/what-were-doing-to-stay/9781897426753-item.html
or Nimbus Publishing here http://www.nimbus.ca/What-Were-Doing-to-Stay-Afloat-P7335.aspx

Meanwhile, I'm also planning, building a website for, and soon will be installing my first solo video installation, entitled Flows (Given Water).  The show features video haikus of meltwater, looped projections of shifting inter-tidal zones, and enormous silent projections of moon jellies propelling themselves through deep green seawater. The weather turns rainy, and my dreams, too, are submerged in water greens and dim anxieties: is any of it good enough? Have I worked through my ideas fully enough? Will others see what I see, or wish to stop and muse in these spaces of drift and damp? I hope, and will know more in time.

https://givenwater.wordpress.com/

Water, water everywhere--and yes, at the show, I'll be offering water (locally sourced, of course,) to drink!

Dreaming Sloth Leisure

Still mourning the passing of summer--the slippage from heat, light and leisure to frost, darkness and haste.  Once the semester starts I feel forever behind--in tatters, belated, in arrears.  Breathless.  I will never catch up.  So I hear, particularly loudly, Robert Lowell's lament to Elizabeth Bishop, when, in the full sweep of too much going on he writes: 

[C]an anything be well done that isn't accompanied by dreaming, sloth, contemplation, leisure?

In part, he's trying to make Bishop feel better about the painstaking slowness with which she writes--months and years may run out before she completes a poem.  Though at this writing, in late October 1963, revolution and a military coup are brewing in Brazil, where Bishop lives with Lota de Macedo Soares, and Kennedy will soon be assassinated--preoccupations that may slow even the speediest of poets.  And within weeks Lowell will be hospitalized by the onset of another manic episode--his own painful way of braking excessive speed.   

I just catch the flu--and then scramble on.  As Lowell writes, signing off, "Pardon this flurry.  It's just in the nerves."

Notes
Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, "Letter #285" (October 27, 1963). Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.  Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton, eds. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008): 513, 514.