THERE'S GOING TO BE A READING IN OOTISCHENIA MAY 6TH!

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Well. Almost half-way though the month. Am I really going to post something every day? Giving it a shot, that's for sure.

I think today, instead of reviewing anything or posting a new poem (and I actually have one, this being Contemporary Verse's 2-Day/10-word poem contest weekend, and even though I've pretty much decided to stop entering contests and concentrate on sending work off in little packages, I really do enjoy this annual CV2 exercise, so I made an exception), I'm going to post something that's poetry-related. I'm kind of tired, having fiddled with the ten words yesterday and today, except for tonight when I went out for dinner, and at lunch when I was making a frittata for my daughter-in-law who came to pick up her son who spent the night and who I took to a play last night, but even so I got the thing sent off an hour-and-a-half ahead of deadline. 

Instead, here's a look at a poster-in-progress for a reading that's happening on May 6th right here in my neck of the woods. My friend Stuart Ross is going to be in the Koots and we're going to do a reading. There'll soon be a Facebook invitation, but in the meantime, you heard it here first!

About Stuart, who I'm pretty sure I ran into on Yonge Street, back in the day:

Stuart Ross published his first literary pamphlet on the photocopier in his dad’s office one night in 1979. Through the 1980s, he stood on Toronto’s Yonge Street wearing signs like “Writer Going To Hell,” selling over 7,000 poetry and fiction chapbooks. A long-time literary press activist, he is co-founder of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair and a founding member of the Meet the Presses collective, Editor at Mansfield Press, and for eight years was Fiction & Poetry Editor at This Magazine.

He is the author of two collaborative novels, two story collections, seven poetry books, and the novel Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. He has also published a collection of essays, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, and co-edited the anthology Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament. Buying Cigarettes for the Dog won the 2010 ReLit Award for Short Fiction. You Exist. Details Follow. won the Exist Through The Gift Shop Award, from l'Académie Litteraire au Tournant du 21e Siêcle. Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew won the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction on a Jewish Theme.

Stuart teaches writing workshops and coaches writers one-on-one. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, and has been coming to the Kootenays just about every spring since 2005 to work in local schools and communities.

So, May 6th, if you're around, we'd love to see you.

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