The SpokenWeb Podcast: Recent Episodes
SpokenWeb
Stories about how literature sounds. SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast that shares stories from the audio archives of Canadian literary history. Drawing on Canadian literary archival recordings from across Canada, episodes are snapshots of Canadian literary history and contemporary responses to it, including interviews, panel discussions, lectures, readings, and audio essays.
In this episode, producer Maia Harris and co-host Emily Stuchbery say goodbye to The SpokenWeb Podcast and introduce the all new Literary Listening Podcast.
With contributions from past team members, a sneak peak at VOLUME!: Sonic Scholarship in Literary Studies, this episode celebrates the 6 seasons of The SpokenWeb Podcast and ushers listeners into the new project on the same RSS feed, Literary Listening.
Special thanks to those who contributed their voice to this special episode:
Jason Camlot
Katherine McLeod
Hannah McGregor
Stacey Copeland
Kelly Cubon
Miranda Eastwood
Kate Moffatt
Judith Burr
Thank you to TJ MacPherson and Lou Raskin for help in the booth.
Summary
This "farewell" podcast episode was recorded live at the SpokenWeb Institute on May 17, 2025, at the University of British Columbia Okanagan campus, Kelowna, BC. Producers Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya, with host Maia Harris, lead an audio-visual journey exploring the roots and evolution of SpokenWeb's Symposia and Institutes from 2019 through 2025.
"The SpokenWeb Symposia Retrospective: Celebrating Sound Studies Since 2013" presents original voice, sound, and music from SpokenWeb collaborators (including Ali Barillaro, Nix Nihil, and Jason Camlot); clips from past Symposia manifestos; live panel guests (including Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Karis Shearer, and Klara du Plessis); pre-recorded interview segments (including Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Annie Murray, Jason Wiens, Cole Mash, and Erin Scott); and a ShortCuts interlude featuring an "unarchiving" of Phyllis Webb combined with live flamenco dancing from Katherine McLeod--yes, you can dance in a podcast!
Join us as we "re-sound" some memorable moments from the Symposia and Institutes of SpokenWeb’s past. We will also look to the future, as our guests speculate on the legacies and possibilities of our research, creative performances, archives, and community.
Topics
In this episode, producers Nick Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya interview various SpokenWeb members and reminisce about past Symposia and Institutes.
- Introduction
- Pre-Recorded Interview with Annie Murray and Jason Wiens
- Live Panel with Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod
- Pre-Recorded Interviews and Soundscapes with Jordan Abel and Oana Avasilichioaei
- ShortCuts Interlude with Katherine McLeod
- Pre-Recorded Interview with Cole Mash and Erin Scott
- Live Panel with Karis Shearer and Klara du Plessis
- Conclusion
- Credits
Show Notes
The SpokenWeb theme music was composed by Jason Camlot, with vocals performed by Ali Barillaro. She recorded a new version for this live show Redux, over a beat produced by Nix Nihil.
In the ShortCuts interlude, Katherine McLeod danced to a remix by Jason Camlot of Phyllis Webb reading “Rilke” in Montreal in 1966.
Myron Campbell hosted the “Draw by Night” event on the first night of the SpokenWeb 2025 Institute. UBC Okanagan student Evan Berg designed the SpokenWeb Logo. The design work and branding package for the Re-Sounding Poetries Conference is by Mikah Assaly.
Conference illustration is by artist Reuban Scott, whose work you can find on Instagram at @roobtoons.
Camlot, Jason, and Katherine McLeod, editors. CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780773559813.
Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 1-18. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903552.
Camlot, Jason. “Listening Practice Guided by Jason Camlot – Disciplinary Listening: Does Literature have an Audile Technique?” The SpokenWeb [website], September 18, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/events/listening-practice/.
McFarland, Joe. “Schulich Professor Says Municipalities around the World Are Learning Lessons from Calgary's 2024 Water Feeder Main Break.” UCalgary News, January 7, 2025. https://ucalgary.ca/news/schulich-professor-says-municipalities-around-world-are-learning-lessons-calgarys-2024-water-feeder.
McLeod, Katherine. “SpokenWeb Concordia Has Launched Ghost Reading Series” [blog post]. SpokenWeb Concordia, December 1, 2018, https://spokenweb.ca/spokenweb-concordia-has-launched-ghost-reading-series/.
Murray, Annie, and Jared Wiercinski. “A Design Methodology for Web-based Sound Archives.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 2 (2014), https://dhq.digitalhumanities.org/vol/8/2/000173/000173.html.
Music and Sound Effects
“Sounding Out!” by Jordan Abel, Conyer Clayton, Manahil Bandukwala, Liam Burke, and Nathanael Larochette, performed and recorded live at the SpokenWeb Symposium 2023 at the University of Alberta, May 2, 2024.
“Operator” by Oana Avasilichioaei, performed and recorded live at the 2019 SpokenWeb Sound Institute at Simon Fraser University.
Chalice by Blue Dot Sessions.
“Culpable Tranquility” by Nix Nihil and Psyoptic. Used with permission from the artist.
“Canadian Cicada (Okanagana canadensis)” by Wil Hershberger, Songs of Insects, https://songsofinsects.com/.
“Sunwaves” by Nix Nihil and Psyoptic. Used with permission from the artist.
Soundfx from freesound.org:
“Creek Swimming,” by JazzyBay, (https://freesound.org/people/JazzyBay/sounds/435055/), licensed under Creative Commons.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our live and pre-recorded guests for sharing their stories and memories of the SpokenWeb: Annie Murray, Jason Wiens, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Jordan Abel, Oana Avasilichioaei, Cole Mash, Erin Scott, Karis Shearer, and Klara du Plessis.
We are grateful for the support of the talented 2025 SpokenWeb Institute organizing committee and tech team: in particular, Erin Scott, Garth Evans, and Kailee Fawcett, who helped in countless ways behind the scenes to make the live show possible.
Summary
In this episode, we reflect on the life of Kurtis Vanel, SFU's longtime audio engineer, and a fixture of Vancouver's music scene in his own right. Featuring archive recordings of Vanel, as well as an interview with SFU alumni Dr. Deanna Fong, we uncover the interesting relationship between the archive and those who helped build it.
Interviewee
Dr. Deanna Fong, postdoctoral fellow in English and History at Concordia University
Archival Recordings
Douglas Gyseman and Robert Denis, 1978, from the Simon Fraser University Archives
"The Valley Dansrs" from the album Past Eroticism by bill bissett
Show Notes
Previous mention of Kurtis Vanel in appears in this episode, and a full discussion of Vanel's work as an audio engineer can be found in this publication by Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, "Modeling the Audio Edition with Mavis Gallant’s 1984 Reading of 'Grippes and Poche'" (English Studies in Canada).
Check out John Mackie's article, "A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces" (Vancouver Sun) for more about Vanel's story plus cool photos.
For more on the ideas related to collection thinking explored in this episode, see this publication, Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives, and Museums(2023).
Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show is a bi-weekly radio show on CJLO, the campus radio station of Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada). On air since September 2024, the show features “sound recordings from 1888 to the present that document times when people have whispered, spoken, howled and screamed literature out loud” (“Sonic Lit”). Co-hosted by us – Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod – the radio show is an extension of our collaborative and creative research about “new sonic approaches in literary studies” (McLeod and Camlot). Prior to stepping into the booth, we had imagined the show as a curation of audio recordings as catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers working with various community and institutional holdings of literary audio across the network. However, as the show began, we had to sort out how the definition of “spoken word” as understood by regulatory bodies in Canadian radio intersects with “spoken word” as understood by poets and scholars of poetry recordings. Making audio for radio turned out to be a vastly different experience than making audio for podcasts such as this podcast, The SpokenWeb Podcast. We soon realized that our radio show was a performative exploration of a set of research questions relating to the affordances of radio for “literary listening” (Camlot). For example, what are the affordances of radio as compared to a podcast when it comes to sharing and discussing literary audio? How does spoken word poetry register in relation to other discursive forms on the radio? How do we as hosts perform "talk radio" in talking about poetry? And what is our sense of audience when on air? What does listening sound like on the radio? We produced this audio, "Listening on the Radio," as a radio-show-as-podcast-episode to answer these questions and others – out loud.
References
Camlot, Jason. “Toward a History of Literary Listening.” ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 271.2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 263-271. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17421
Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies."
ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020 (published in 2023), p. 1-18. https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/esc/article/view/17412
“Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show.” CJLO 1690 AM, http://www.cjlo.com/shows/sonic-lit-spokenweb-radio-show
SHOW NOTES
The audio of "Listening on the Radio" is currently presented as part of the digital gallery of Poetry Off the Page, Around the Globe (University of Vienna) in June 2025.
Listen to the radio show Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, on CJLO 1690 AM in Montreal on Mondays at 2pm EST, or check out past episodes online at cjlo.com.
Recordings played during “Listening on the Radio” include the voices of poets Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Cyano Sun Suite), Maxine Gadd (from SGW Poetry Series), David Antin (The Principle of Fit, II”), FYEAR (FYEAR), A.M Klein (Five Montreal Poets), bpNichol (Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1970 - 1980), Allen Ginsberg (from SGW Poetry Series), and P.K. Page (The Filled Pen).
Main narration audio recorded by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod at the AMP Lab, Concordia University. Audio excerpts from Sonic Lit: A SpokenWeb Radio Show, The Tommy John Show, and 514-Core were recorded on air at CJLO’s studio at the Loyola Campus of Concordia University.
Mixing, mastering, and musical composition by Jason Camlot
Produced by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod
How does timestamping shape the preservation and curation of literary sound? This roundtable episode brings together four SpokenWeb researchers––Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Mike O’Driscoll in conversation with moderator Michael MacKenzie––to explore this deceptively simple yet profoundly complex question. What emerges is a layered, multidisciplinary view of timestamping, not just as a technical task, but as an archival, aesthetic, and philosophical practice.
In Part One, the conversation begins by situating timestamping in broader historical and intellectual contexts. Panelists reflect on the epistemology of time, from ancient timekeeping and annalistic history to modern digital temporality. What does it mean to mark time, and how does a timestamp compare to a page number, an index, or a narrative structure?
Part Two asks what it means to think critically about timestamping. Here, the guests draw on their scholarly practices to examine the subjectivity of timestamps, the tension between precision and ambiguity, and the role of annotation. The discussion turns to digital media’s microtemporalities and how timestamps carry expressive, affective weight beyond their data function.
In Part Three, the panel listens to an experimental performance by Jackson Mac Low and considers the challenge of timestamping layered or deliberately disorienting sound. What responsibilities do timestampers have in maintaining a balance between accessibility and artistic intention? Can timestamping illuminate without flattening?
Part Four focuses on vocabulary. Why does it matter if we tag something as a “reading” versus a “performance”? How do controlled vocabularies shape what we can learn from large-scale literary audio corpora? This final section explores how even the smallest metadata decisions reflect theoretical commitments and institutional values.
Ultimately, this episode makes one thing clear: timestamping is never neutral. It is an interpretive act, grounded in choices about meaning, representation, and access. From poetic performance to archival platforms, timestamping remains central to how we listen to—and understand—literary sound.
Show Notes and Resources:
Abel, Jordan. Nishga. McClelland & Stewart, 2021. pp.243-73
Bernstein, Charles. “‘1–100’ (1969) .” Jacket2, jacket2.org/commentary/1%E2%80%93100-1969. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
Though cut from the episode, this appeared as an example from O’Driscoll during the uncut roundtable and stands alone as a fascinating example of marking time. You can access a full performance of the short poem by Bernstein hosted at the above link, at Jacket2. O’Driscoll: “The numerological is itself potentially … not a neutral medium. It is potentially an expressive medium … so that timestamps can have an aesthetic, they carry value and meaning, they can shape the way that we think about things and that they're subject to a level of performance as well too.”
“Charles Bernstein (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Feb. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bernstein_(poet).
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation. MIT Press, 2000.
One central point of departure for our research, though we had to cut our remediation questions due to time.
“Eadweard Muybridge.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge.
Eliot, T. S. “‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets.” Four Quartets - 1 Burnt Norton, www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
“Gertrude Stein.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein.
“Hayden White.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 5 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_White.
“Jackson Mac Low at SGWU, 1971.” Edited by Jason Camlot and Max Stein, SpokenWeb Montréal, 17 Aug. 2015, montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1.
The full version of the recording shown during the episode can be found here. The portion shown during the episode begins at 1:09:35.
“Jackson Mac Low.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2025, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Mac_Low.
“Susan Stewart (Poet).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Sept. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Stewart_(poet).
Though cut from the episode, Stewart’s work on the “souvenir” appeared as an example from Camlot during the uncut roundtable helping bridge the gap between timestamp and annotation. Camlot: “I would probably want to think of it as a dialectical relation between the timestamp, sort of the demarcated moment and times unfolding, and then the larger narrative account within which the timestamp has significance … like Susan Stewart's work on the souvenir … this sort of partial representation of a whole that can only be supplemented by narrative.”
“Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theorist).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Ernst_(media_theorist).
More information about our participants can be found at:
“Jason Camlot.” Concordia University, www.concordia.ca/faculty/jason-camlot.html. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
“Michael O’Driscoll.” English and Film Studies, University of Alberta, apps.ualberta.ca/directory/person/mo. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
“Tanya Clement.” College of Liberal Arts at UTexas, liberalarts.utexas.edu/english/faculty/tc24933. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.
Music Credits:
This podcast uses music from www.sessions.blue:
For post-question pauses, we used Jemeneye by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
For framing the podcast itself, we used the song The Griffiths by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
For framing the roundtable and preceding questions, we used portions of the song “Town Market” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).
This podcast also uses these sounds from freesound.org:
"Mechanical Keyboard Typing (Bass Version)" by stu556 ( https://freesound.org/people/stu556/sounds/450281/? ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
"Monitor hotler", by iluminati_2705 ( https://freesound.org/people/iluminati_2705/sounds/536706/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
"Monitor hotler", by tobbler ( https://freesound.org/people/tobbler/sounds/795373/ ) licensed under Attribution 4.0
“aluminum can foley-020.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
“whoosh_fx”, by ScythicBlade ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/800102/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
“ignite_dry_02”, by DaUik ( https://freesound.org/people/DaUik/sounds/798712/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
“Dewalt 12 inch Chop Saw foley-049.wav”, by CVLTIV8R ( https://freesound.org/people/CVLTIV8R/sounds/802856/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
“Electronic Soap Dispenser 5”, by Geoff-Bremner-Audio ( https://freesound.org/people/Geoff-Bremner-Audio/sounds/802734/ ) licensed under Creative Commons 0
Acknowledgments:
We thank Jason Camlot, Tanya Clement, and Michael O’Driscoll for their contributions to the roundtable. Additional thanks to Michael O’Driscoll, Sean Luyk, and the SpokenWeb Podcast team for production support. Technical support was provided by the Digital Scholarship Centre, University of Alberta.
Episode SummaryThis podcast episode performs a sound-media meditation on a live event based on a collection of printed scholarly articles. In May 2023 a triple-issue of English Studies in Canada (ESC) was published on the topic of “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” Edited by Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. The issue, designed to explore how sound, literature, and critical methodologies intersect, included thirteen scholarly articles, and an interdisciplinary forum on the place of listening as a methodology in a wide range of scholarly and artistic fields.
As the editors considered what kind of “launch” would be best suited to this issue, they felt it should build on the printed scholarship, but also take it further – respond to it, sound it, and perform it. They asked, “What would this journal issue sound like as a chorus or collage of voices?” They proceeded to organize an event to enact the idea of sounding and performing a scholarly collection as a kind of poetic reading of criticism. Each contributor was invited to select an excerpt to perform, and the performances unfolded in sequence within the 4th Space research showcase venue at Concordia University, and through the virtual participation of some contributors on Zoom. The performance event was also the object of an experiment in the multi-track recording of a spoken word event, with microphones of different kinds situated throughout 4th Space, and even outside the venue itself.
The eight tracks of audio resulting from that recording session serve as the raw material, the bed tracks, for a podcast that playfully explores the affordances of sound design for the presentation of scholarly research about literary audio. Some of the simple yet profound possibilities of working in sound to think and argue about sound that are explored here are those of amplitude (playing with the relative loudness of sounds), temporality (the movement and mixing of historically-situated times), speed (the movement of sounds in time), space (the relationship of sounds to the places they happened), noise (the sounds we are supposed not to want to hear), intelligibility (the intention of sounding for meaning), positionality (from where and to whom one is sounding), timbre (the textural quality of sounds and what they do), among many others. The goal of this production has not been to deliver the content of the journal as one might grasp it from the print journal (read the special issue for that!), but to emphasize the possibilities and features of sound, sometimes apposite and sometimes in opposition to the intention and circumstances of the intended message. Archival voices and sounds haunt, taunt and disrupt the planned “Sounding New Sonic Approaches” event. Parallel temporal situations compete with each other. Time is sped and stretched. Speech and vocal timbre are mimicked and mutated by an occasional soundtrack scored for monotonic analogue synths. One mode of meaning is lost, while the potential for new kinds of meaning and feeling-making in sonic scholarly production are amplified for the listener’s consideration and pleasure.
In-person and online performers: Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Annie Murray, Michael O’Discoll, Mathieu Aubin, Julia Polyck-O'Neill, Jason Wiens, Klara du Plessis, Kandice Sharren, Kelly Baron, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Juliette Bellocq, Kim Fox, Reem Elmaghraby, Daniel Martin, Kristen Smith, Kristin Moriah, Mara Mills, Andy Slater, and Ellen Waterman.
Live Recording Event produced by Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, James Healey, and Douglas Moffat.
Podcast and Sound Design by Jason Camlot.
Episode SummaryA proprioception-enthusiast and a thespian walk into a podcast booth.
Together, they engage with scholars from three different fields outside of those traditionally working with and through the sense of proprioception. From spatial music mixing, to arts education, to English literature, our hosts learn how these scholars understand and apply the sense of proprioception for their work.
Through the engagement process, the proprioception-enthusiast and the thespian come to understand the affordances of proprioception for framing bodies in space and time and refigure how they understand the space between you and me.
Works CitedMerrill, Gary. “Proprioception and Balance” from Our Intelligent Bodies. Rutgers University Press, 2021, De Gruyter academic publishing, pp. 68–89. https://doi-org.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/10.36019/9780813598550.
Noë, Alva. Action in Perception. MIT Press, 2004.
Oliveras, Pauline. “Rhythms (1996).” Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, iUniverse, Inc., Lincoln, Nebraska, 2005, pp. 48–49.
Works ConsultedHan, Jia, et al. “Assessing Proprioception: A Critical Review of Methods.” Journal of Sport and Health Science, vol. 5, no. 1, Mar. 2016, pp. 80–90. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2014.10.004.
Hickok, Gregory. The Myth of Mirror Neurons. W.W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 2014.
Starr, Gabrielle G. “Multisensory Imagery.” Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Show NotesMechanical Buttons (DaVinci Resolve Advanced Panel) by PixelProphecy -- https://freesound.org/s/497026/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
End Credits Music by vibritherabjit123 -- https://freesound.org/s/738579/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
Walk - Gravel.wav by 16FPanskaStochl_Frantisek -- https://freesound.org/s/499245/ -- License: Attribution 3.0
snare 2 SMALLer.wav by Logicogonist -- https://freesound.org/s/209884/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
right x small crash.wav by Logicogonist -- https://freesound.org/s/209870/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
Magazine Rustle and Book Closing by Zott820 -- https://freesound.org/s/209577/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
End of 78 Record Gramaphone Running Down .WAV by trpete -- https://freesound.org/s/627419/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
Ragtime – https://pixabay.com/music/vintage-ragtime-193535/ Liscence: CC0 License
relaxation music.mp3 by ZHRØ -- https://freesound.org/s/520673/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
celestial arp loop c 01.wav by CarlosCarty -- https://freesound.org/s/572560/ -- License: Attribution 4.0
165 bpm - Broken Beat - Guitar.wav by MuSiCjUnK -- https://freesound.org/s/320630/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
Synth Lead by EX-AN -- https://freesound.org/s/561505/ -- License: Creative Commons 0
Shopping theme (90bpm).wav by Pax11 -- https://freesound.org/s/444880/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 3.0
Sky Loop by FoolBoyMedia -- https://freesound.org/s/264295/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Episode SummaryThis month, the SpokenWeb Podcast is happy to showcase an episode from our sister podcast, the SoundBox Signals Podcast from SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan. SoundBox Signals is hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer.
In this episode, from Season 2, Episode 1 of the SoundBox Signals Podcast, University of Exeter undergraduates Sofie Drew and Emily Chircop carry out a close listening of a 1980 recording of Sharon Thesen reading from her first book Artemis Hates Romance at George and Angela Bowerings' house. Drew and Chircop's conversation focuses on the intimacy, sociality, and ambiguity of the recording, and how this shapes interpretation. The episode features multiple archival clips from the digitized cassette tape, alongside interview audio from Karis Shearer and George Bowering. “Sharon Thesen's Reading at the Bowerings’” was co-produced by Emily Chircop and Sofie Drew as part of the Press Play project. The SoundBox Collection is part of the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Episode NotesThese readings helped inform the episode and/or may be of interest to listeners:
“Side A: Sharon Thesen's Reading at [George and Angela] Bowerings'” from Sharon Thesen fonds, nd. 2019.002.002, SoundBox Collection, AMP Lab at UBC Okanagan, Kelowna, B.C. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/sharon-thesens-reading-at-bowerings/
Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire”: Studio Reading of “The Fire.” Ed. Amy Thiessen. https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/reading
Thesen, Sharon. Artemis Hates Romance. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1980.
Thesen, Sharon. Refabulations: Selected Longer Poems. Ed. Erin Moure. Talonbooks, 2023. https://talonbooks.com/books/?refabulations
SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 1 “Stories of Spoken Web”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/stories-of-spokenweb/
SpokenWeb Podcast Season 1 Episode 2 “Sound Recordings Are Weird”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sound-recordings-are-weird/
The Capilano Review, The Sharon Thesen Issue. Spring 2008. https://thecapilanoreview.com/issues/spring-2008-the-sharon-these-issue/
Specifically, Thea Bowering’s article “Sharon Thesen: Poem in Memory, and growing up there”
https://journals.sfu.ca/capreview/index.php/capreview/article/view/2674/2674
Sharon Thesen was born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan. She spent spent most of her early years in Kamloops and Prince George, eventually moving to Vancouver to study and teach. In 2005 she joined UBC Okanagan where she is now Professor Emerita. Thesen is the author of 11 books of poetry including a number of chapbooks. Her books have been finalists for a number of prestigious awards including the Governor-General’s Award and the Dorothy Livesay Prize; her book of poems A Pair of Scissors won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She currently lives in Lake Country, BC.
SUMMARY
From medieval itineraries to modern livestreams, Christian pilgrimage is often, if not always experienced through an imaginative transposal from a physical reality to a spiritual truth. In this episode, hosts Lindsay Pereira and Ella Jando-Saul explore the concept of virtual pilgrimage through conversations with two guests: Michael Van Dussen, a professor in the Department of English at McGill University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, teaches us about the medieval experience of pilgrimage in the British Isles while Simon Coleman, a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto teaches us about the modern reconstruction of pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, England.
Simon Coleman's latest book, Powers of Pilgrimage: Religion in a World of Movement, can be found here.
*
VOICE AND SOUND CREDITS
Interviewees:
Dr. Michael Van Dussen, Professor of English Literature, McGill University.
Dr. Simon Coleman, Professor of Anthropology and Religion, University of Toronto.
Theme music:
“Ai Tal Domna”: composed by Berenguier de Palou, recorded by Zep Hurme ©2014. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC. Available at https://ccmixter.org/files/zep_hurme/38429
Voice credits:
Stephen Yeager, voice of the Host
Ghislaine Comeau, voice of the Miller
Andre Furlani, voice of the Reeve, drunkard, beggar, and donation collector
Sound credits:
Magical Minstrelsy: Where Medieval Meets Modern Through Mimesis, Season 1 Episode 1: Virtual Pilgrimage uses sounds from Freesound. All sound samples that were used in this episode are licensed under CC0 1.0:
Footsteps on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/lzmraul/sounds/389454/
Birds: https://freesound.org/people/MATRIXXX_/sounds/519110/
Water: https://freesound.org/people/BurghRecords/sounds/415151/
Cows: https://freesound.org/people/Nontu_Lwazi00/sounds/541920/
Sheep: https://freesound.org/people/rent55/sounds/709921/
Horse on dirt: https://freesound.org/people/Ornery/sounds/233345/
Horse with cart: https://freesound.org/people/bruno.auzet/sounds/538438/
Footsteps on cobblestone: https://freesound.org/people/SpliceSound/sounds/260120/
Medieval city: https://freesound.org/people/OGsoundFX/sounds/423119/
Church bells: https://freesound.org/people/Audeption/sounds/425172/
Coins: https://freesound.org/people/husky70/sounds/161315/
Blacksmith: https://freesound.org/people/Emmaproductions/sounds/254371/
Music: https://ccmixter.org/files/asteria/2615
Church coins: https://freesound.org/people/scripsi/sounds/335191/
Gregorian chant: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ecce.lignum.Crucis.ogg
Crowd gasping: https://freesound.org/people/craigsmith/sounds/480774/
Baby crying: https://freesound.org/people/the_yura/sounds/211527/
Breath: https://freesound.org/people/launemax/sounds/274769/
Heartbeat: https://freesound.org/people/newlocknew/sounds/612642/
Works Cited and Consulted
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2015.
Arsuaga, Ana Echevarría. “The shrine as mediator: England, castile, and the pilgrimage to Compostela.” England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century, 2007, pp. 47–65, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603103_4.
Arvay, Susan M. “Private passions: The contemplation of suffering in medieval affective devotions.” (2008).
Bailey, Anne E. “Reconsidering the Medieval Experience at the Shrine in High Medieval England.” Journal of Medieval History, vol. 47, no. 2, Mar. 2021, pp. 203–29. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03044181.2021.1895874.
Beckstead, Zachary. “On the way: Pilgrimage and liminal experiences.” Experience on the Edge: Theorizing Liminality, 2021, pp. 85–105, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83171-4_5.
Beebe, Kathryne. Reading Mental Pilgrimage in Context: The Imaginary Pilgrims and Real Travels of Felix Fabri’s “Die Sionpilger.” West Virginia University Press, 2009.
Benjamin, Walter. “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, 2018, pp. 217–220, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429498909-39
Cassidy-Welch, Megan. “Pilgrimage and embodiment: Captives and the cult of saints in late medieval bavaria.” Parergon, vol. 20, no. 2, 2003, pp. 47–70, https://doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2003.0101.
Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Tradition as play: Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth.’” History and Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 3, 2004, pp. 273–288, https://doi.org/10.1080/0275720042000257430.
Coleman, Simon, Ellen Badone, and Sharon R. Roseman. “Pilgrimage to ‘England’s Nazareth’: Landscapes of Myth and Memory at Walsingham.” Intersecting Journeys: The Anthropology of Pilgrimage and Tourism, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 2004, pp. 52–67.
Coleman, Simon, and Marion Bowman. “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Heritage, Adjacency, and the Politics of Replication in Northern Europe.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 1–23. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515341.
Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. “Pilgrimage to Walsingham and the Re-Invention of the Middle Ages.” Pilgrimage Explored, edited by J. (Jennie) Stopford, York Medieval Press, 1999. WorldCat Discovery Service, https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=16637.
Díaz-Vera, Javier E. “Exploring the relationship between emotions, language and space: Construals of awe in medieval English language and pilgrimage experience.” Studia Neophilologica, vol. 88, no. 2, 2015, pp. 165–189, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393274.2015.1093918.
Foster, Elisa A. “As You Came from the Holy Land: Medieval Pilgrimage to Walsingham and Its Crusader Contexts.” Crusading and Ideas of the Holy Land in Medieval Britain, edited by Kathryn Hurlock and Laura J. Whatley, Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 91– 114.
Gertsman, Elina, and Marian Bleeke. “The Eve Fragment from Autun and the Emotionalism of Pilgrimage.” Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History, Routledge, New York, NY, 2013, pp. 23–41.
Grazia Di Stefano, Laura. “How to be a time traveller: Exploring Venice with a fifteenth-century pilgrimage guide.” Making the Medieval Relevant, 2019, pp. 171–190, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110546316-008.
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press, 2010.
Hill, Joyce. “Rome in Ripon: St Wilfrid’s Inspiration and Legacy.” History, vol. 105, no. 367, 2020, pp. 603–25. Wiley Online Library, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.13027.
Hill‐Smith, Connie. “Cyberpilgrimage: The (virtual) reality of online pilgrimage experience.” Religion Compass, vol. 5, no. 6, 2011, pp. 236–246, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00277.x.
Hundley, Catherine. “Pilgrims in the Parish: A Method and Two Herefordshire Case Studies.” Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, vol. 8, no. 3, Oct. 2022, pp. 40–87.
Hurlock, Kathryn. “Virtual Pilgrimage.” Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage, C1100-1500, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 145–174.
Jenkins, John. “Replication or Rivalry? The ‘Becketization’ of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals.” Religion, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 24–47. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2018.1515327.
Kempe, Margery, and Anthony Paul Bale. The Book of Margery Kempe. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Kuefler, Mathew. The Making and Unmaking of a Saint: Hagiography and Memory in the Cult of Gerald d’Aurillac. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Langland, William, and Schmidt A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-Text. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Nickell, S. A. The Limits of Embodiment: The Implication of Written and Artistic Portrayals of Mary at the Foot of the Cross for Late Medieval Affective Spirituality, Graduate Theological Union, United States -- California, 2011. ProQuest, https://lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca/login?qurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.proquest.com%2Fdissertations-theses%2Flimits-embodiment-implication-written-artistic%2Fdocview%2F875240824%2Fse-2%3Faccountid%3D10246.
Ousterhout, Robert. “‘Sweetly Refreshed in Imagination’: Remembering Jerusalem in Words and Images.” Gesta, vol. 48, no. 2, Jan. 2009, pp. 153–68. www-journals-uchicago-edu.lib-ezproxy.concordia.ca (Atypon), https://doi.org/10.2307/29764905.
Powell, Hilary. “Saints, Pilgrimage and Landscape in Early Medieval Kent, c. 800-1220.” Early Medieval Kent, 800-1220, Boydell Press, 2016, pp. 133–53.
Sinnett-Smith, Jane. “Ætheldreda in the North: Tracing Northern Networks in the Liber Eliensis and the Vie de Seinte Audree.” Late Medieval Devotion to Saints from the North of England: New Directions, edited by Christiania Whitehead et al., Brepols, Turnhout, Belgium, 2022, pp. 285–303.
Wynn, Mark. “God, pilgrimage, and acknowledgement of Place.” Religious Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2007, pp. 145–163, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0034412506008778.
SUMMARY
In this first episode of Season 6, producer Andrew Whiteman invites listeners to step into an arena of collaboration between poetry and sound. We all know it when we hear it, and we have mixed feelings about it. Why does the archaic meeting place of music and poem hit such a nerve? Is this art form literature or is it music? Surely, it’s not song, is it? And if poems already carry their prosodic intentions within themselves – why bother supplementing them with extraneous audio?" These questions are answered by Siren Recordings, a new digital-DIY sonic poetry label run by Kelly Baron and Andrew Whiteman.
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SHOW NOTES
Audio played in the episode
“Happy Birthday Ed Sanders Thank You!”, written and performed by Edward Sanders ( from "This is the Age of Investigation Poetry and Every Citizen Must Investigate” part of the “Totally Corrupt Dial-a-Poem Series by John Giorno. Found at https://www.ubu.com/sound/gps.html ) and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track.
Audio clips of Amiri Barak, Helen Adam, and the Four Horseman from Ron Mann’s 1980 film Poetry in Motion. found at https://vimeo.com/14191903.
“The Great Reigns” written and performed by Erica Hunt ( from Close Listening with Charles Bernstein at WPS1 Clocktower Studio, New York, June 20, 2005, available at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Hunt.php ), and Andrew Whiteman.
“#7” by Alice Notley and AroarA. Unreleased track. Text taken from Notley's book “In The Pines”, Penguin Books. 2007.
“ Pinbot” and “Abu Surveillance” by Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman. Unreleased track. Text taken from Waldman’s book “Iovis: the Trilogy”, Coffeehouse Press. 2011.
“How I wrote Certain of my Books” by David UU and the Avalettes. from the casette Very Sound (Sound Poems By David UU). Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.18. 1984.
"whn i first came to vancouvr” by bill bissett. from the cassette Sonic Horses. Underwhich Audiographic Series, No.19.1984.
"From The Life & Work Of Chapter 7 (For Steven Smith)” by Tekst. from the cassette "Unexpected Passage”.
Underwhich Audiographic Series – No. 15. 1982.
“ Canto One” by Andrew Whiteman featuring Robert Duncan, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieberth, Al Filreis. buried somewhere at Penn Sound. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/. Unreleased track.
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PRODUCER BIO
Andrew Whiteman is a founding member of the indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene, and a PhD student at Concordia University investigating the confluence of mythology and experimental poetics. He is a musician, producer and sound artist with special interest in Sonic Poetics, and has collaborated on recordings with Alice Notley (In The Pines, 2013) and Anne Waldman (IOVIS, 2023) among others. This work has led directly to the creation of Siren Recordings, a boutique sonic poetry label, hub and ever-growing archive he runs with Kelly Baron and Brandon Hocura. His divinatory practice is located at https://intarotgate.com.
Hold onto your hats, because the SpokenWeb Podcast is back!
This season, we'll continue to bring you episodes exploring the archive and the ever-changing landscape of literary sounds with all new stories from researchers across the SpokenWeb network.
Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don’t forget to rate us and send us a shout.
Cheers to Season 6 ~
ShortCuts as a series on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed is coming to an end.
For the past five seasons, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been bringing you deep dives into the archives. Through this process, ShortCuts has asked the question of what it means to listen closely and carefully to short ‘cuts’ of audio. ShortCuts has become a sonic space to practice of feminist listening, and that listening has informed continued audio-based research, performances (including performances based on ShortCuts audio) and publications (such as “Archival Listening” and “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice”).
For this final ShortCuts, we listen to Brandon LaBelle in a conversation recorded on-site at Errant Bodies Press in Berlin. Listen to hear a reading from LaBelle’s “Poetics of Listening” (as published in ESC “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies”), to hear about Errant Bodies Press and what it sounds like to be there, and to hear the open door as a way of listening. That open door listening will continue even after ShortCuts ends.
Stay tuned for what is next!
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SHOW NOTES
More about Errant Bodies Press and The Listening Biennal.
LaBelle, Brandon. "Poetics of Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 273-277. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903562.
McLeod, Katherine. "Archival Listening." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 325-331. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903565.
Copeland, Stacey, Hannah McGregor and Katherine McLeod. “The Kitchen Table is Always Where We Are: Podcasting as Feminist Self-Reflexive Practice.” Podcast Studies: Theory into Practice, eds. Dario Linares and Lori Beckstead, Wilfrid Laurier UP, forthcoming in December 2024.
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APPLAUSE
A round of applause for all who have been part of the production-side of ShortCuts, from 2019 to the present: Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGregor, Manami Izawa, Judith Burr, Kate Moffatt, Miranda Eastwood, Ella Jando-Saul, Kelly Cubban, Zoe Mix, Yara Ajeeb, James Healey, Maia Harris, and of course ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod.
SUMMARY
How can artists harness algorithmic processes to generate poetry, music, and dance? And what can we learn from the longer history of creative coding and early experiments in human-computer collaboration?
In this live episode recorded during June's 2024 SpokenWeb Symposium, producers Nicholas Beauchesne and Chelsea Miya venture into the roots and future directions of algorithmic art.
Thank you to interviewees Michael O’Driscoll, Kevin William Davis, and Kate Sicchio, as well as the live studio audience.
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SOUNDFX & MUSIC
The score was created by Nix Nihil through remixing samples from Kevin William Davis and Voiceprint and adding synthesizers and sound effects. Additional score sampled from performances by Davis and Kate Sicchio.
Davis, Kevin William. “Elegia.” On Remembrance. Created with the Murmurator software in collaboration with Eli Stine. SoundCloud audio, 5:25, 2020, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/elegia.
Davis, Kevin William. “From “From ‘David’”” From Three PFR-3 Poems by Jackon Mac Low for percussion quartet and speaker; performance by UVA percussion quartet. SoundCloud audio, 4:13, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/kevinwdavis/from-from-david.
Pixabay. “Crane load at construction site.” Pixabay, https://pixabay.com/sound-effects/crane-load-at-construction-site-57551/.
Sherfey, John, and Congregation. “Nothing but the Blood.” Powerhouse for God (CD SFS60006), Smithsonian Folkways Special Series, 2014. Recorded by Jeff Titon and Ken George. Reproduced with permission of Jeff Titon.
Sicchio, Kate. “Amelia and the Machine.” Dancer Amelia Virtue. Robotics: Patrick Martin, Charles Dietzel, Alicia Olivo. Music: Melody Loveless, Kate Sicchio. Vimeo, uploaded by Kate Sicchio, 2022, https://vimeo.com/678480077.
ARCHIVAL AUDIO & INTERVIEWS
Altmann, Anna. “Popular Poetics” [segment]. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.
Davis, Kevin William. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 25 Oct. 2022.
Jackson, Mac Low. “A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin.” Performed by Susan Musgrave, George Macbeth, Sean O'Huigin, bpNichol, and Jackson Mac Low, 1974. PennSound, http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mac-Low/CDs/Doings/Mac-Low-Jackson_09_Vocabulary-for-Mattlin_Doings_1982.mp3.
O’Driscoll, Michael. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 23 Aug. 2022.
Onufrijchuk, Roman. Performing “Tape Mark I,” a computer poem by Nanni Balestrini. “Printing and Poetry in the Computer Era.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 20 May 1981.
Sicchio, Kate. Interviewed by Chelsea Miya for The SpokenWeb Podcast. 4 Nov. 2023.
WORKS CITED
Balestrini, Nanni. “Tape Mark I.” Translated by Edwin Morgan. Cybernetic Serendipity: the Computer and the Arts. Studio International, 1968.
Davis, Kevin William. From “From ‘David’” [score]. 2017. http://kevindavismusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/From-From-David.pdf.
Dean, R. T., and Alex McLean, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Higgins, Hannah. Fluxus Experience. University of California Press, 2002.
Mac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 23 January 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.c, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.
Mac Low, Jackson. Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. Instructions. 19 September 1974. Mimegraphed sheet, 28 x 22 cm. Bonotto Collection, 1.d, Fondazione Bonotto, Colceresa (VI), Italy. https://www.fondazionebonotto.org/en/collection/poetry/maclowjackson/4/3091.html.
Johnston, David Jhave. “1969: Jackson Mac Low: PFR-3” [blogpost] Digital Poetics Prehistoric. https://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2008/08/26/1969-jackson-mac-low-pfr-3-poems/.
Mac Low, Jackson. A Vocabulary for Sharon Belle Mattlin. 1973. Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, CC-47567-68576.
Mac Low, Jackson. Thing of Beauty, edited by Anne Tardos. University of California Press, 2008. https://doi-org.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/10.1525/9780520933293.
O’Driscoll, Michael. “By the Numbers: Jackson Mac Low's Light Poems and Algorithmic Digraphism.” Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963-2008, edited by J. Mark Smith. McGill-Queens University Press, 2013, pp. 109-131.
Russo, Emiliano, Gabriele Zaverio and Vittorio Bellanich. “TAPE MARK 1 by Nanni Balestrini: Research and Historical Reconstruction.” The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, June 2017. https://zkm.de/en/tape-mark-1-by-nanni-balestrini-research-and-historical-reconstruction.
Stine, Eli, and Kevin William Davis. “The Murmurator: A Flocking Simulation-Driven Multi-Channel Software Instrument for Collaborative Improvisation.” International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), 2018. https://elistine.com/writing-blog/2018/4/14/the-murmurator.
FURTHER READING / LISTENING
Higgins, Hannah, and Douglas Kahn, eds. Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts. University of California Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520953734.
Noll, Michael. “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” LEONARDO, vol. 49, no. 1, 2016, pp. 55-65.
Reichardt, Jasia, ed. Cybernetic Serendipity. 1968. 2nd edition. Studio International, 1968.
Rockman, A, and L. Mezei. “The Electronic Computer as an Artist.” Canadian Art, vol. 11, 1964, pp. 365–67.
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BIOS
Chelsea Miya (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sherman Center for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University where her research focuses on questions of ethics, gender, and sustainability in the context of digital cultures and design. She is a Research Affiliate with the SpokenWeb Network, and she has also held research positions with the Kule Institute of Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC). You can hear her other co-produced episodes "Sounds of Data," "Drum Codes," and “Academics on Air" on the SpokenWeb Podcast.
Nicholas Beauchesne (he/him) completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Alberta in 2020, specializing in twentieth century occult literary networks and modernist “little magazines.” He is currently teaching at the U of A. Nick is an aspiring skáld, a teller of runes. He is also a vocalist and synthist performing under the pseudonym of Nix Nihil. His visionary concept album, Cassandra’s Empty Eyes, was released on the spring equinox of 2022 (Dark StarChasm Noise Theories Records). For a comprehensive overview of Nick’s and Nix’s academic, professional, mystical, and musical services, with links to his various social media, see: www.nixnihil.net.
SUMMARY
In this month’s episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts is taking over the airwaves.
ShortCuts is the monthly minisode that takes you on a deep dive into archival sound through a short ‘cut’ of audio. In this fifth season, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod has been presenting a series of live conversations recorded at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium – and in this full episode, we’re rolling out the last of those recordings. You’ll hear from Moynan King, Erica Isomura and Rémy Bocquillon. You’ll also hear the voices of our then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt and our then-sound designer Miranda Eastwood, who was there behind-the-scenes recording the audio and who joins in the conversations too.
Listening is at the heart of each conversation, and each conversation ends with the question: What are you listening to now? That ends up being quite an eclectic playlist and do check the Show Notes below for links.
If you like what you hear, check out the rest of Season Five of ShortCuts for conversations with Jennifer Waits, Brian Fauteaux, and XiaoXuan Huang. And, of course, this month’s episode with the longest ShortCuts yet: “ShortCuts Live! Talking about Listening with Moynan King, Erica Isomura, and Rémy Bocquillon.”
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SHOW NOTES
TRACE at Theatre Passe Muraille
Steve Roach, Quiet Music 1
False Knees, Montreal-based graphic artist drawing birds talking
Éliane Radigue
Kishi Bashi, “Manchester.” (Did you catch that this song is about writing a novel and Erica had just talked about novels? Not to mention the bird references. There are many more Kishi Bashi songs to listen to, but linking this since we played a clip from this one in the episode for these serendipitous reasons!)
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BIOS
Moynan King
Moynan Kingis a performer, director, curator, writer, and scholar. She was the recipient of a 2020 Canadian Screen Award for her writing on CBC’s Baroness von Sketch Show on which she also made regular appearances as an actor. She is the author of six plays, and the creator of many performances including TRACE with Tristan Whiston. Moynan was the co-founder and director of the Hysteria Festival, the co-director of the Rhubarb! Festival (for four years), and has been the curator of multiple cabaret events including Cheap Queers. As an Assistant Artistic Director and Associate Artist at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre for a total nine years, they developed such works as The Beauty Salon and Bathory among many others. Moynan holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University. Her critical writing on theatre and performance is widely published and they are the editor of Queer Performance: Women and Trans Artists (CTR 149), Queer/Play: An Anthology of Queer Women’s Performance and Plays, and co-editor of Sound & Performance (CTR 184) with Megan Johnson. As of September 2022, Moynan will be post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario working with Dr. Spy Dénommé-Welch on a sound-based research project entitled Queer Resonance.
Erica Isomura
Born and raised on the west coast, Erica H Isomura is a poet, essayist, and multi-disciplinary artist, exploring graphic forms and mixed-media art. Her work speaks to a complex relationship with land, politics, and yonsei 四世 Japanese and diasporic Cantonese identity. Erica's writing has appeared in Canadian literary and independent magazines, including ArtsEverywhere.ca, ROOM Magazine, Briarpatch, The Tyee, XtraMagazine.com, The Fiddlehead, Vallum, and carte blanche, among others.
In 2023, Erica was artist-in-residence at The Blue Cabin Floating Artist Residency in Steveston Village, BC. Erica is a recipient of ROOM magazine's Emerging Writer Award and won first prize in Briarpatch’s Writing In The Margins contest for creative non-fiction. Erica currently resides in Tkarón:to/Toronto, ON. https://ericahiroko.ca/
Rémy Bocquillon
Rémy Bocquillon is a Postdoctoral researcher and Lecturer in Sociology at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany. His research interests revolve around epistemic practices bridging the gap between arts, science, and philosophy, which he explores through his own creative work as a sound artist and musician. His latest projects include the publication of his book “Sound Formations. Towards a sociological thinking-with sounds” and the sound installation “Activating Space | Prehending the City”.https://remybocquillon.eu/
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Kate Moffatt (interviewer) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.
Miranda Eastwood (sound recording) is a game writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Montréal. Miranda holds a master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University, where they passionately pursued works of many forms, including the development of a radio drama, several ongoing comics, and the release of a full-length audiobook, and made audio as the sound designer for The SpokenWeb Podcast. https://mirandaeastwood.com/
Katherine McLeod (producer) is an Assistant Professor, Limited Term Appointment, in the Department of English at Concordia University. She is the principal investigator for her SSHRC-funded IDG project “Literary Radio: Developing New Methods of Audio Research.” She has co-edited with Jason Camlot a recent special issue of English Studies in Canada, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies.” She co-hosts The SpokenWeb Podcast and produces ShortCuts as a series for the podcast feed.
This month, we’re back with another Shortcuts Live, talking with researchers in person and starting those conversations with a short ‘cut’ of audio. These ShortCuts Live conversations were recorded on-site at the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium held at the University of Alberta.
In this conversation, Xiaoxuan Huang talks about hybrid poetics (and more) with then-supervising producer Kate Moffatt. The audio that informs this conversation is a clip from an audio-visual poetry collage by Huang called “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.” The audio of this collage beautifully sets the sonic environment for this conversation. Listen, and find yourself turning towards the sound.
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EPISODES NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Maia Harris
Sound Design: James Healey
Transcription: Yara Ajeeb
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AUDIO
Huang, Xiaoxuan. “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”
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RESOURCES
Read “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang,
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
All archival audio played in this episode is from SpokenWeb’s Ultimatum collection—including interviews conducted by Mathieu Aubin and Ella Jando-Saul with Alan Lord, Fortner Anderson, Sheila Urbanoski and Jerome Poynton, as a way of building this archival collection—with the exception of one clip of Alan Lord sourced from here.
WORKS CITED
Schulman, Sarah. The Gentrification of The Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2013.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Maia Harris
Sound Design: James Healey
Transcription: Yara Ajeeb
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Listen to the entire recording of Maxine Gadd reading at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) here.
Adam Hammond is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Far Shore: Indie Games, Superbrothers, and the Making of Jett (Coach House, 2021) and Literature in the Digital Age (Cambridge UP, 2016). His is editor of Cambridge Critical Concepts: Technology and Literature (Cambridge UP, 2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature in a Digital Age (forthcoming, Cambridge UP, 2024). He co-edits the series Cambridge Elements of Digital Literary Studies. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and Wired.
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Works Cited
Marit J. MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” Cultural Analytics 3.1 (2018): https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022
Brian Fauteux is Associate Professor of Popular Music and Media Studies. He holds a PhD in Communication from Concordia (Montreal) and has completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship in Media & Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies music industries and music radio, often from the interrelated perspectives of cultural studies, history, and policy and is currently a co-investigator on a SSHRC-funded research project that investigates copyright and cultural labour in the digital music industries. His book, Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015), explores the history of Canadian campus radio, highlighting the factors that have shaped its close relationship with local music and culture. The book traces how campus radio practitioners have expanded stations from campus borders to surrounding musical and cultural communities by acquiring FM licenses and establishing community-based mandates.
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Show Notes
Fauteux, Brian. Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015
deWaard, Andrew, Fauteux, Brian, and Selman, Brianne. "Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)." Popular Music and Society 45.3 (2022): 251 - 278. [open access]
In February 1952, Barbara (Cohen) Holdridge and Marianne (Roney) Mantell, two recent graduates of Hunter college, founded Caedmon records, the first label devoted to recording spoken word. In this episode, producers Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz revisit the early history of Caedmon records. They pay tribute to Holdridge and Mantell by re-listening to two poems from the Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading, first released in 1957 from and now held in SFU’s Special Collections. Michelle discusses Robert Frost’s recording of “After Apple Picking” with Professor Susan Wolfson, of Princeton University, and Maya chats with Professor Stephen Collis, of SFU’s English department, about William Carlos Williams’ reading of “The Seafarer.” As they listen to the poems together, they debate what it means to listen to as opposed to read these poems, with the recordings providing what Holdridge described as a “third-dimensional depth, that a two-dimensional book lacked.”
Featured graphic credit: photographs by Phillip A. Harrington, courtesy of Evan Harrington
Works Cited
Onion, Charlie. “Caedmon Spoken-Word Recordings go Digital.” Wag: a magazine for decadent readers, June 2002, http://www.thewag.net/books/caedmon.htm. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Caedmon: Recreating the Moment of Inspiration.” NPR, December 2002, https://www.npr.org/2002/12/05/866406/caedmon-recreating-the-moment-of-inspiration. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Caedmon.” HarperCollins.com. https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/caedmon. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading: Gertrude Stein, Archibald MacLeish, E.E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Empson, Stephen Spender, Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Richard Eberhart, Ezra Pound, and Richard Wilbur reading #604.” n.d. Sound recording. MSC199 #604.. Simon Fraser University Sound Recordings Collection, Simon Fraser University Archives, Burnaby, B.C. November, 2023.
“Mattiwilda Dobbs – Bizet: FAIR MAIDEN OF PERTH, HIgh F, 1956 ” Youtube, uploaded by Songbirdwatcher, June 14, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxZZtxM8ykam-Rml9Q7ij4J2OIWLrx3lUB.
Etude 8 Dimitri by Blue Dot Sessions
Frost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking. Accessed 30 January 2024.
“File:Mattiwilda Dobbs 1957.JPEG.” Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mattiwilda_Dobbs_1957.JPG. Accessed 14 February 2024.
Harrington, Philip A. “[Marianne Roney and Barbara Cohen of Caedmon Publishing Company pushing a wheelbarrow full of boxes of their recordings of modern literature in New York City]”. December, 1953.
“How two young women captured the voices of literary greats and became audiobook pioneers.” Writers and Company. CBC, July, 2023. https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompany/how-two-young-women-captured-the-voices-of-literary-greats-1.6912133. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
“January 20, 1961 - Poet Robert Frost Reads Poem at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration.” Youtube, uploaded by Helmer Reenberg, January 15, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AILGO3gVlTU.
“Oread.” H.D. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48186/oread. Accessed 30, January 2024.
“The Caedmon Treasury of Modern Poets Reading 2LP Caedmon TC 2006 Vinyl Record.” Boundless Goodz, https://www.ebay.com/itm/374791681072?itmmeta=01HPJMRA2M8G311HNSS83Q5Z2G&hash=item5743533430:g:ESgAAOSwdLVkomcL&itmprp=enc%3AAQAIAAAA8OcrOX8GrjGcCKd73gETrLCg9HgtTomQcdBFQsfuKIbZJCerwOPQAP8v95zLuLDTLfzKCEpHr6ciRZXXlKA1iJKJQIZBNBP68Ru6LBfSoa%2FfPEP7%2Fa%2BIRslUZ5i2RDM4SZwOC2l6XlwBx5qb9ihywjJIDK71WKdGDo8mhOnddK0NPBgnn26N5JH6N9DSuSkFkjy7BoQeE7hzXcLV76vAmN2Q6IKkpjLN5l%2B4M36eDSYpXhiFfxsmyok%2Bn1aYfEds46k8%2FfPX0doDJv7qXPKwVi5g99nrSnyZ95AdrCWpR3Tj3%2FkxYp0wlrb2dQ%2F%2FuEaktQ%3D%3D%7Ctkp%3ABFBMwHh1LRj. Accessed 14 February 2024.
Williams, Williams Carlos. “The Seafarer.” University of Washington, http://www.visions05.washington.edu/poetry/details.jsp?id=18. Accessed 30 January, 2024.
In this crossover episode (Episode 7, Season 2), Linda begins with the sound of her father's old espresso machine, to explain how she sees -- or hears -- sound working in Magnetic Equator (published by McClelland & Stewart) by international poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough. You can hear a sample of his sound poetry here. This episode includes a small excerpt read by Kellough himself (with permission by Kellough). In the "take-away" section, Linda talks about a biography she recently read by Sherrill Grace, about Canadian author Timothy Findley (published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press). If you'd like to know more about sound poetry, and about Kaie Kellough as a sound poet, check out Adam Sol's blog post about Kellough on "How a Poem Moves."
Get this episode and more by following Getting Lit with Linda - The Canadian Literature Podcast on all major podcast platforms.
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Linda Morra is Professor of Canadian and Indigenous literatures, a former Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies (2016-2017) at UCD, and the Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar (2021-2022) at Simon Fraser University. Her book, Moving Archives, won the Gabrielle Roy Prize in English (2020) and her podcast, Getting Lit With Linda, won in the category of Outstanding Education Series in the 2022 Canadian Podcast awards. Getting Lit With Linda is entering its 5th season.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Maia Harris
Sound Design: James Healey
Transcription: Zoe Mix
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Archival audio excerpted from this episode of Radio Survivor:
https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/11/podcast-22-were-all-moving-to-the-fm-dial-now/
Blog post with photographs from Jennifer Waits’s tour of Radio K:
https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2015/10/my-grand-tour-of-college-radio-station-radio-k/
A past Radio Survivor episode featuring SpokenWeb:
https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2021/02/podcast-284-spokenweb-and-literary-sound/
SPECIAL GUESTS
Jennifer Waits (interviewee) is the co-founder of Radio Survivor and Radio Survivor’s College Radio and Culture Editor and Social Media Director. Jennifer is also the Founder and Editor of SpinningIndie, a website devoted to the culture of college radio. She’s worked in college radio at 4 different stations (off and on) since 1986 and is currently a DJ at KFJC 89.7FM in Los Altos Hills, California. Jennifer has a Master’s degree in Popular Culture Studies and has written about radio, music, youth culture, and pop culture for a number of publications and websites, including Radio World, PopMatters, the scholarly Radio Journal, youth culture blog Ypulse, beloved teen mag Sassy, and music site Uplister.
Kate Moffatt (interviewer) is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romanticism, women’s authorship, walking and pedestrianism, and print culture. She is the former supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, and she is the current co-host of The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast.
This episode navigates this question using an associative method which links stories and sounds, forming a non-linear audio collage. Listeners are invited to tune in to their affective and embodied responses to end time stories including Lulu Miller’s podcast and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s horror film, and stories of endurance, with Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem and Tanya Tagaq’s audiobook.
Nadège Paquette (she/they) is a white settler living in Tiotià:ke/Montréal, on the lands and waters of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, where they are completing a master’s degree in English Literature at Concordia University. Their research interests aggregate around the relationship between human and nonhuman forms of life and nonlife. They are drawn to narratives of the future extrapolating present troubles and delving into already-existing Indigenous, decolonial, queer, and non-anthropocentric alternatives to a colonial and capitalist world. For them, some of those alternative worlds take the form of collective gardens where they love to work with plants, soil, water, animal, and human neighbors.
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Show Notes
Music:
Tom Bonheur https://www.instagram.com/dj.g3ntil/
Kovd, Kvelden, Tell What You Know, Ivory Pillow, and Fever Creep by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/
Podcast:
“The Wordless Place” Lulu Miller https://radiolab.org/podcast/wordless-place
“Why Podcast?” Hannah McGregor and Stacey Copeland https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html
Short Film:
Anointed, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Dan Lin https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/
Film:
Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Additional sounds from:
“Interview with Tanya Tagaq,” Alicia Atout https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FupatQbcTeM
“Open Dialogues: Daniel Heath Justice,” Centre for Teaching, Learning, and Technology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBN8_IGuuw
“Monster 怪物,” United for Peace Film Festival https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OJulGi1Rg
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Works Cited
Bouich, Abdenour. 2021. “Coeval Worlds, Alter/Native Words.” Transmotion 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.22024/UniKent/03/tm.980.
Butler, Judith. 2003. “Violence, Mourning, Politics.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 4 (1): 9–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/15240650409349213.
Chion, Michel. 2017. L’audio-Vision : Son et Image Au Cinéma. 4th Edition. Armand Colin.
Copeland, Stacey, and Hannah McGregor. 2022. Why Podcast?: Podcasting as Publishing, Sound-Based Scholarship, and Making Podcasts Count. Vol. 27, no. 1. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/27.1/topoi/mcgregor-copeland/index.html.
Eidsheim, Nina Sun. 2019. “Introduction: The Acousmatic Question: Who Is This?” In The Race of Sound, 1–38. Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpntq.4.
Goodman, Steve. 2010. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Technologies of lived abstraction. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&doc_number=018751433&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina, United States: Duke University Press.
Hudson, Seán. 2018. “A Queer Aesthetic: Identity in Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Horror Films.” Film-Philosophy 22 (3): 448–64. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2018.0089.
JLiat. 1954. Bravo. Found Sounds. Bikini Atoll. http://jliat.com/.
Justice, Daniel Heath. 2018. Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, dir. 2001. Pulse. Toho Co., Ltd.
Lamb, David Michael. 2015. “Clyde River, Nunavut, Takes on Oil Indsutry over Seismic Testing.” CBC. March 30, 2015. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/clyde-river-nunavut-takes-on-oil-industry-over-seismic-testing-1.3014742.
Lin, Dan, and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, dirs. 2018. Anointed. Pacific Storytellers Cooperative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEVpExaY2Fs.
Madwar, Samia. 2016. “Breaking The Silence.” Text/html. Up Here Publishing. uphere. Https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence. 2016. https://uphere.ca/articles/breaking-silence.
Miller, Lulu. 2022. “The Wordless Place.” Radiolab. https://radiolab.org/episodes/wordless-place.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Posthumanities 27. Minneapolis (Minn.): University of Minnesota Press.
Raza Kolb, Anjuli Fatima. 2022. “Meta-Dracula: Contagion and the Colonial Gothic.” Journal of Victorian Culture 27 (2): 292–301. https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac017.
Robinson, Dylan. 2020. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. 1 online resource (319 pages) : illustrations vols. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6152353.
Sontag, Susan. 1966. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Penguin Classics.
Tagaq, Tanya. Split Tooth. Viking, Penguin Random House, 2018.
Tasker, John Paul. 2017. “Supreme Court Quashes Plans for Seismic Testing in Nunavut, but Gives Green Light to Enbridge Pipeline.” CBC. July 26, 2017. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/supreme-court-ruling-indigenous-rights-1.4221698.
Yamada, Marc. 2020. “Visualizing a post-bubble Japan in the films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi.” In Locating Heisei in Japanese Fiction and Film : The Historical Imagination of the Lost Decades, 60–81. Routledge contemporary Japan series. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=2279077.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Maia Harris
Sound Designer: James Healey
Transcription: Zoe Mix
SHOW NOTES
Archival audio sampled in this episode is from these past episodes:
ShortCuts 4.2 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Sarah Cipes about Feminist Audio Editing,” produced by Katherine McLeod, The SpokenWeb Podcast, 21 Nov 2022
https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-sarah-cipes-about-feminist-audio-editing/
ShortCuts 4.3 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project Archives,” produced by Katherine McLeod, The SpokenWeb Podcast, 20 February 2023 https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-faith-pare-about-the-atwater-poetry-project-archives/
ShortCuts 4.4 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya,” produced by Katherine McLeod, The SpokenWeb Podcast, 20 March 2023
https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-ariel-kroon-nick-beauchesne-and-chelsea-miya/
ShortCuts 4.5 “ShortCuts Live! Talking with Annie Murray,” produced by Katherine McLeod, The SpokenWeb Podcast, 17 April 2023
https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/shortcuts-live-talking-with-annie-murray/
ShortCuts 4.6 “What’s that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival Archives,” produced by Ella Jando-Saul, The SpokenWeb Podcast,
https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/
Ghislaine Comeau is a PhD student in the English department at Concordia University. Her SSHRC funded doctoral project, inspired by the recent Global Middle Ages movement, focuses on re-examining texts from the early medieval period to further investigate direct references and allusions to “Saracens.” In addition to her more “traditional” approaches to scholarly work, she has recently discovered that she has a great appreciation for and desire to consume and produce research-creation projects that can serve a wider audience – popular or pedagogical.
Works Cited / Featured Audio
Creed, Robert Payson. “The Ruin (Modern English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CSWnfuyzyM .
Cronan, Dennis. “Cædmon’s Audience.” Studies in Philology, vol. 109, no. 4, 2012, p 336. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sip.2012.0028.
The Fyrdsman. “Anglo-Saxon Poetry: The Ruin (Reading).” YouTube, uploaded by thefyrdsman9590, 9 Nov. 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRRny7oyLg&t=318s .
Hammill, Peter. “Imperial Walls (2006 Digital Remaster).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Universal Music Group, 24 Aug. 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0KW9CMFC_E .
Magennis, Hugh. “Chapter 1 Approaching Anglo-Saxon Literature.” The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature, Cambridge UP, 2011, pp. 1-35.
Raffel, Burton. “The Ruin (Old English).” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube and provided by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 30 May 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-dtP_73WTs&t=110s .
Smith, Mark M. “Echo.” Keywords in Sound, edited by David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny, Duke UP, 2015, pp. 55-64.
Silence is Leaden. “The Ruin: An Anglo-Saxon Poem.” YouTube, uploaded by silenceisleaden188, 20 Jan. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D68n9F8Yozc&t=25s .
Staniforth, Daniel (aka Luna Trick). “The Ruin.” YouTube, uploaded by lunatrick7098, 28 Jun. 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IIoZfOR5MQ .
The SpokenWeb Podcast is back for another season as we continue our quest to uncover "what literature sounds like."
With a whole new line-up of episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network, we’ll explore the sounds of translation, the act of uncertain listening, audio pedagogy, the intersection of computing, voice, and poetics, and much much more.
Our fearless host Katherine McLeod is back and will be joined by Hannah McGregor, host of seasons 1-3. Welcome back Hannah!
We have something for everyone curious about the affordances of literature, sound, history, and the amorphous "archive," so join us for monthly episodes of innovative audio scholarship.
Subscribe to The SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. And don't forget to rate us and send us a shout! Cheers to Season 5 ~
Episode Producers:
Maia Harris : Supervising Producer
James Healy : Sound Designer
Hannah McGregor: Host
Katherine McLeod: Host
Zoe Mix: Transcriber
SUMMARY
“Though staff turnaround is a challenge for student-run publications, community support remains when people love it. Let’s revive the love for Headlight.”
This was the sign-off of an application for managing editor for Headlight, Concordia University’s graduate student-run literary journal. Carlos A. Pittella’s application was accepted shortly after—along with Sherine Elbanhawy’s application for co-managing editor—and the 24th edition of Headlight was put into motion.
This episode is a behind-the-scenes look at Headlight 24, and an exploration of what happens when print publication meets audio production. Diving into a host of recordings made along the way, the episode revisits readings from authors featured in Headlight 24, as well as recordings from the journal’s launch at the De Stiil bookstore in Montreal. Also featured is a roundtable conversation with the editorial team—Carlos A. Pittella, Sherine Elbanhawy, Alex Affonso, Ariella Ruby, Olive Andrews, and Miranda Eastwood—as they revisit the challenges faced in reviving the journal following pandemic restrictions, as well as the exciting new directions embraced by this year’s team.
Headlight 24 will host the second part of their launch at the 4th SPACE at Concordia University, August 31st, at 2pm. We hope to see you there!
EPISODE NOTES
Host: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Transcription: Zoe Mix
FEATURED READINGS
Bandukwala, Manahil. "Turning Twenty-Four on the Rise of the Sturgeon Moon". Headlight 24, 2023.
Solomon, Misha. "Tubes". Headlight 24, 2023.
Mazur, Ari. "A&W". Headlight 24, 2023.
O'Farrell, Paz. "I don't even know what to do about all this". Headlight 24, 2023.
Palmer, Jade. "Onyx and Rose Gold". Headlight 24, 2023.
Trudel, Nadia. "Goblin". Headlight 24, 2023.
Cirignano, Sophia. "Giverny". Headlight 24, 2023.
Wayland, Tina. "The Tending of Small Gardens". Headlight 24, 2023.
SUMMARY
Have you ever heard a sound on a recording and weren’t sure if it was intentional? That’s what happened to the Listening Queerly research team when they were listening to a recording of the Ultimatum Festival (Montreal, 1985). This team works under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Aubin as part of a SSHRC-funded Insight Development Grant. They’ve been working with a series of recordings of the Ultimatum Festival, which are part of the Alan Lord audio collection, a collection currently being digitized and catalogued by SpokenWeb (Concordia). The Listening Queerly research team – Mathieu Aubin, Ella Jando-Saul, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, and Rowan Nancarrow – first attempted to confirm who they are listening to in their selected audio file for this ShortCuts by cross-referencing with other recordings of Christopher Dewdney, Tom Konyves, and bill bissett, but then, as the team re-listened to this recording, they focused more and more on the rhythmic thumping sound throughout this clip. What is the cause of this sound and its effect on us as listeners?
Listen to this episode of ShortCuts to hear how, even if a sound is an unintentional sound caused by the recording equipment, it still affects our interpretation of the recording.
This special episode of ShortCuts is produced by Ella Jando-Saul, with contributions from Mathieu Aubin, Misha Solomon, Sophia Magliocca, Rowan Nancarrow, and James Healey.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Notes for the audio in folder U-2-2:
U-2-2. 0000 Christ 3-4 Christopher Dewdney suite. 0400 1-2 Tape. 3-4 Voix - débute vers 875. Tom Konyves 8,45. Fin 8 1225. 0000 genital of mover [?]. Tom Konyves 5-6 - bande. 7-8 - voix. 0250 Bill Bissett. Partie 1 pistes 1-2 voix [illegible]. Partie 2 vx 34.
Notes on label for “BRAVE NEW WAVES. CBC Stereo 93.5 FM. ‘ULTIMATUM”:
U-BNW-T5. CBC label has fallen off (included in separate bag with board for temporary preservation) — Handwritten notes on reverse: “Tape 5 Tape out. 1. Christopher Dewdney Runs: 23:50. 2. Tom Konyves 21:30. 3. Bill Bisset - Runs 20:25. Tech: Yves Lepage.”
SHOW NOTES
bissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-2-2. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
bissett, bill, Christopher Dewdney, and Tom Konyves. U-BNW-T5. 2 May 1985. Folder 2, Deliverables, Audio-Deliverables, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
Those interested can find more information about these recordings in the following documents:
bissett, bill. Participant acceptance form. AL-Folder2-img003-04, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
bissett, bill. Letter to Alan Lord. AL-Folder2-img195, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
Konyves, Tom. Sketch of stage setup. AL-Folder2-img186-187, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
Lescaut, Roxa. "Le Premier Festival de Poésie urbaine de Montréal." interModule 2. AL-U85-img029-32 and 035-38, Folder 1, Alan Lord Archive, The Alan Lord Collection. SpokenWeb Collections, Concordia University, Montreal.
During the Covid pandemic, before she had ever set foot in a classroom dedicated to learning about libraries, Maia Trotter discovered a YouTube video titled "Library Ambiance." This video didn't contain the typically fabricated sounds of a library that someone had layered over each other like book pages turning and a fireplace crackling in the background, but a live recording of the sounds of a public library out there in the world. These sounds are what helped her to get through the isolation she felt during those long months at home.
Having now been surrounded by ideas about libraries for the last two years, Maia decided to investigate the different sounds of libraries, how they have changed over time, and how they make people feel. For this episode, Maia interviews three staff members of the Edmonton Public Library Stanley A. Milner branch who work in unique spaces to get their perspectives on the way sound affects patrons and staff members alike. She interviews staff members who have worked in the Makerspace, Gamerspace, and the children's library in order to explore the relationship between feeling and sound in libraries, and how the sounds of libraries have changed over time.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Maia Trotter (she/her) lives, studies, and works on Treaty 6 territory. Maia is a recent graduate of the Master of Library and Information Studies student at the University of Alberta. She received her Bachelor of English Honours from Simon Fraser University. Her current research interests are focused on community and feminist-driven metadata practices in digital initiatives, and the evocations of sounds of public spaces like libraries.
Episode Guests:
Charlie Crittenden is a library assistant at the downtown branch of the Edmonton Public Library. He is in the final semester of his Master of Library and Information Studies program. In his spare time, he works as an editor for local magazines, pursues various creative projects, and frequents used bookstores.
Dan Hackborn is a library worker and an MLIS/MA candidate at the University of Alberta. He lives and works on Treaty 6 territory, the land of nations including the Blackfoot, the Dene, the Assiniboine, the Nakoda Sioux, the Saulteaux, the Métis nations, and the nehiyaw.
Anna Wallace is a library assistant for the Shelley Milner Children's Library at the Stanley A. Milner branch of the Edmonton Public Library. When she's not refereeing her den of chaos goblins, you can usually find her writing, reading or baking.
Show Notes:
EPL Makerspace
https://www.epl.ca/makerspace/
The Makerspace is a hub for all things creative. The space offers patrons many tools and services such as 3D printing, vinyl cutting, recording studios, a heat press, and sewing machines. In the future, the Makerspace plans on being able to provide tools for bookbinding, video production, laser cutting, and photography. They host lots of cool events and provide certification and training for their services.
EPL Gamerspace
https://www.epl.ca/milner-library/gamerspace/
The Gamerspace at the downtown branch is only a few years old and is a source of much joy and excitement within the library. The space is open to everyone, regardless of gaming expertise or experience, and patrons have access to a wide variety of games across various platforms and consoles. The space, which is colourful and bright, has PC stations, an Xbox, a Playstation, a Nintendo Switch. and a few retro arcade cabinets.
Shelley Milner Children's Library
https://www.epl.ca/milner-library/childrens-library/
The Shelley Milner Children's Library is housed in the downtown branch of the Edmonton Public Library system. It is a bright and vibrant space for children and families and provides children with access to many materials such as books, online resources, games, and a children's Makerspace where they can experiment with 3D printing, photography, and music. The children's library hosts many events like Baby Laptime, singing circles, and Family Storytime where kids get to play, learn, and explore in new and creative ways.
Katherine McLeod, "Listening to the Library"
https://labs.library.concordia.ca/listening-to-the-library/
Citations:
Valentine, P. M. (2012). A social history of books and libraries from cuneiform to bytes. The Scarecrow Press, Inc.
Peesker, S. (2019). Sounds like hard work: How the right noise can help you focus and be more creative. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article-sounds-like-hard-work-how-the-right-noise-can-help-you-focus-and-be/
Buxton, R. T., Pearson, A. L., Allou, C., Fristrup, K., & Wittemyer, G. (2021). A synthesis of health benefits of natural sounds and their distribution in national parks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(14). https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1073/PNAS.2013097118
Han, Z., Meng, Q., & Kang, J. (2022). The effect of foreground and background of soundscape sequence on emotion in urban open spaces. Applied Acoustics. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1016/j.apacoust.2022.109039
What does it mean to “read” an audiobook? What happens when we think about the audiobook pedagogically? Featuring a round-table conversation with graduate students at Concordia University and an interview with Dr. Jentery Sayers from the University of Victoria, this episode by Dr. Michelle Levy and SFU graduate student Maya Schwartz thinks through what it means to invite audiobooks into the literary classroom.
Works Cited
Baron, Naomi S. How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. Oxford University Press, 2021, https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/book/41098.
Carrigan, Mark. “An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/12/17/an-audible-university-the-emerging-role-of-podcasts-audiobooks-and-text-to-speech-technology-in-research-should-be-taken-seriously/.
Harrison, K. C. “Talking books, Toni Morrison, and the Transformation of Narrative Authority.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011, p. 143.
Sarah Kozloff, “Audio Books in a Visual Culture.” Journal of American Culture, vo. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 83–95, 92.
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.
Pergadia, Samantha. “Finding Your ‘Voice’: Author-Read Audiobooks.” Public Books, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/finding-your-voice-author-read-audiobooks/.
Rubery, Matthew. “Introduction: Talking Books.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011.
–––. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Tennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1890, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/cabinet_kiosk_16_march_2021_rubery_matthew_audio_002.mp3.
SUMMARY
This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! Producer Katherine McLeod talks with Annie Murray about the EMI Music Canada Archives at the University of Calgary, and their way into these archives begins with a cassette tape. And not just any cassette tape. Listen to find out which tape and why this tape unfurls a story of recording not only in relation to what’s on the tape but also to archival collections of Canadian music. Audio objects are sonic objects in the sounds they hold, the stories they tell – both on their own as materials and in our affective attachments to them – and this episode of ShortCuts dives into all of this, and more. Annie and Katherine’s conversation about archives is full of whimsy, suspense, and even the sounds of a power ballad – yes, archival research can sound like this.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Transcription: Zoe Mix
RESOURCES
EMI Music Canada fonds, https://asc.ucalgary.ca/emi-music-canada-fonds/
Van Dyk, Leah and Murray Annie. “Audio Time Travel: An Interview with Annie Murray.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 15 December, 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/audio-time-travel-an-interview-with-annie-murray/
In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.
This sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices’ that constituted Wah’s listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah’s conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.’ The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.
Special thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.
SUMMARY
This month, ShortCuts presents another ShortCuts Live! It is a conversation with Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya about their collaboration in producing “Academics on Air” (May 2022) for The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode became a paper that Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea co-presented at the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and Institute. After that presentation, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod sat down with Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea around a microphone in the SpokenWeb Amp Lab at Concordia University. They talked about processes of collaboration and archival listening that shaped their work. Starting with one audio clip as the short ‘cut’ that caught their attention in the archives, they talk about about context of that clip in the Voiceprint archives, the potential for podcasting to be a radical act of unarchiving, and what makes recordings of a radio show a unique task for cataloguers working with literary sounds recordings, and much more.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Transcription: Zoe Mix
AUDIO
“Academics on Air.” Produced by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 2 May 2022, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/.
“‘A Voice of One’s Own’: Making (Air)Waves about Gendered Language in 1980s Campus Radio.” Presentation by Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya. SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, a Graduate Symposium. Concordia University, 16 May 2022.
What is sound design? This is the question Miranda Eastwood, current Sound Designer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, is looking to find out. Exploring soundscapes of all shapes and forms, Miranda draws from interviews with friends, colleagues, and academics, as well as Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network to tackle this particularly tangled question. From sonic literature to audio walks, podcasting to music, this episode is a deep dive into what it means to “sound out” any and all audio texts, and the affective power afforded to sound as a medium of art and communication.
Show Notes
James Healey's music: https://thejupitermachine.bandcamp.com/album/soulless-days
Kaitlyn Staveley's music: https://www.youtube.com/@theradiokaityshow1481
Works Cited
Bijker, W. E. and Law, J. 1992. ‘General Introduction’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds.), Shaping Technology/Building Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Brinkmann, M. (2018) The 'audio walk' as a format of experiential walking, Phenomenological research in education. Available at: https://paed.ophen.org/2018/06/25/gehen-spazieren-flanieren-das-format-audiowalk-als-erfahrungsgang/
Cardiff, J. and Miller, G.B. (no date) Walks, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Available at: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/
Grint, K. and Woolgar, S. 1997. The Machine At Work. Cambridge: Polity.
Hutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42856294. Accessed 13 Dec. 2022.
Kellough, Kaie, et al. “‘Small Stones’: A Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography.” “Small Stones”: a Work in Poetry, Sound, Music and Typography - SpokenWeb Archive of the Present, https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/small-stones-a-work-in-poetry-sound-music-and-typography/.
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton University Press, 2015.
McLeod, Katherine, host. “The Voice That Is The Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, ShortCuts, Season 3, Episode 5.
Mills, Mara. Novak, David, and Matt Sakakeeny, editors. Keywords in Sound. Duke University Press, 2015. “deafness” p.45-54.
Ricci, Stephanie. The Making of "Small Stones" (2021) SpokenWeb Archive of the Present. SpokenWeb.
SUMMARY
This month, ShortCuts presents another episode of ShortCuts Live! This month’s episode was recorded as a live conversation on Zoom with the current curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, Faith Paré. As a former SpokenWeb undergraduate RA, Faith’s SpokenWeb contributions have included editorial and curatorial work on Desire Lines; an interview with Kaie Kellough on SPOKENWEBLOG; performing as a spoken word poet in Black Writers Out Loud; leading a virtual listening practice on Black noise; and a reading at SpokenWeb’s “Sounding Undernames” at Blue Metropolis. This is all to say that she had a wealth of experience to draw upon when, as a curator, she was handed a folder of recordings.
How to reactivate the archival past of a reading series while at the same time looking ahead? What is it like to curate the past and future of a reading series? Find out by listening to ShortCuts Live! A conversation with Katherine McLeod and Faith Paré about the Atwater Poetry Project archives.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Production Manager and Transcriber: Zoe Mix
SHOW NOTES
The Atwater Poetry Project, https://www.atwaterlibrary.ca/events/atwater-poetry-project/
“Performing the Atwater Poetry Project Archives, guest curated by Katherine McLeod and Klara du Plessis, featuring the sounds of poets from the APP archives,” 20 February 2023, https://spokenweb.ca/events/performing-the-atwater-poetry-project-archive/
What makes a genuine conversation? And why is it so difficult to have one? Frances Grace Fyfe is on a quest to find out. This madcap talk therapy session has the SpokenWeb RA consider the literary concept of the dialogue, the verbatim transcription of speech in writing (through an exploration of—what else?—Charles Dickens’s early forays in court stenography), especially "expressive" phonemes, and david antin’s experimental talk poems of the 1970s. An investigative journalist, a peer supporter, and one especially sincere friend weigh in to help FG orchestrate the most genuine conversation of all: one that’s scripted, recorded, and edited for distribution in podcast form.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Frances Grace Fyfe is an MA student in English and Research Assistant for SpokenWeb at Concordia University. She’s interested in reading, writing, speaking, and the body—basically, everything. More recently, she’s thinking about “communication difficulty” in literature: how writers navigate what is too hard to say in the first place.
Citations:
antin, David. “Talking at the Boundaries.” How Long is the Present: Selected Talk Poems of David Antin. Edited by Stephen Friedman, University of New Mexico Press, pp. 31-64. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1975.
Diepeveen, Leonard. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception. Oxford UP, 2019.
Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places. Simon and Schuster, 2008.
Kreillkamp, Ivan. “Speech on Paper: Charles Dickens, Victorian Phonography, and the Reform of Writing.” Voice and the Victorian Storyteller, Cambridge UP, 2005, pp. 69-88.
Chelsea Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the SpokenWeb research team at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the Kule Research Institute (Kias), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), and the Orlando Project. She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).
Guests:
Tunde Adegbola is a Research Scientist, Consulting Engineer and Culture Activist. As Executive Director of African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i), Ibadan, Nigeria, he leads a team of researchers in appropriating human language technologies for African languages. In this regard, Alt-i partnered with Microsoft to localise Microsoft Windows and Office Suite for Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. A Chevening Scholar, Honorary Fellow of the Linguistics Association of Nigerian (LAN), former Council Member of the West African Linguistics Society (WALS), former board member of West Africa Democracy Radio (Dakar, Senegal) and recipient of various academic and professional awards, he has published many papers and journal articles in local and international scientific journals in the area of Human Language Technology (HLT).
Oana Avasilichioaei’s practice interweaves various areas, including poetry, translation, photographic and moving image, sound, and performance. Oana often explores various means of translating between these areas, bringing aspects of one area into another as a way of putting pressure on the very meaning, conventions, structures, and genres of these fields. Some ideas she engages with include language as trace and resistance, polyglot and polyphonic poetics, phonotopes (intermediary spaces between words, sound and image), and transformation. Oana regularly performs her work and gives talks/presentations on poetics and translation in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe.
Matt Russo is an astrophysicist, musician, and sonification specialist who teaches physics at the University of Toronto. After completing degrees in jazz guitar and astrophysics he began to merge his two passions by founding the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. His work has been featured in the New York Times and he frequently collaborates with NASA to make astronomy more accessible to the visually impaired. He is also a scientific consultant, having worked on Netflix's Umbrella Academy. Matt's TED Talk "What does the universe sound like? A Musical Tour" has been viewed almost 2 million times.
Peter Olálékan Adédòkun is a master of the Yoruba Batá “talking” drum as well as a drum maker and trainer, performer, and gospel artist. You can follow his work on Instagram: @lekan_drums_intl, @adedokun_peter_olalekan, @drumsvoice_of_Jesus, @iluyoruba_yorubadrums; and Twitter: @Drumsvoicej, @lekanadedokun1
This month, it is ShortCuts Live! We’ll still take a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio, but, in these ShortCuts Live! episodes, ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod takes ShortCuts out of the archives and into the world. This month’s episode was recorded on-site at the SpokenWeb Symposium and Sound Institute in May 2022 at Concordia University in Montreal. It is a conversation with UBCO doctoral candidate Sarah Cipes.
At the time of recording this conversation, Sarah had just presented a paper called “Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives.” In fact, this paper was already in conversation – that is, part of a collaborative article in development with Dr. Deanna Fong and Dr. Karis Shearer who have developed feminist listening methodologies in their introduction to Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch and to their article, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” Listen to ShortCuts Live! to hear Sarah talk with Katherine about feminist redaction when working with sensitive materials in audio archives, and where this collaborative research will take her next.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Production Manager and Transcriber: Kelly Cubbon
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Archival audio in this recording is from the SoundBox collection, housed at UBCO’s Amp Lab. Find out more about the SoundBox collection here.
RESOURCES
Cipes, Sarah. “It’s more of a feeling… Digitizing Reel-to-Reel for the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection.” AmpLab, online.
Fong, Deanna and Shearer, Karis. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Recordings.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 21 April, 2022.
Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch
. Eds. Deanna Fong and Karis Shearer. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2020. Print.
“The Night of the Living Archive” is an audio drama/mock interview between research assistant Liza Makarova and Fred Wah’s poems Mountain (1967), Limestone Lakes Utaniki (1987, 1989, and 1991), and Don’t Cut Me Down (1972), which currently live in the Fred Wah Digital Archive (fredwah.ca).
Poems within the archive are independent documents that live incredibly interesting lives that are celebrated within this episode. Over a series of three interviews, Liza invites these poems, drifting in “the Great Universal Archive,” to speak about their existence in the digital realm. These poems are given the opportunity to speak their minds on topics such as how digital archives are treated, the poems’ complex histories, and their relationships with each other on a literal and literary level.
This episode will also present excerpts of Fred Wah’s archive of audio recordings, ranging from his 1979 Poetry Reading Series to an interview which aired at a literary arts radio show in Calgary. As an artist, educator, and writer, Wah has built an incredible social network throughout generations through his poetry, which has the capacity to tell its own story.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
kurichkaaa (liza makarova) is an interdisciplinary artist, experimental playwright, and poet currently based on earth. kurichkaaa writes about love and grief, lesbians and communism, and how to empower people to feel hopeful about the future. they have read for the flywheel reading series by the literary magazine filling Station and will soon be published in The Capilano Review. They are in the process of developing a script with Playwright’s Workshop Montreal.
Works Cited:
In For Instance Radio Show: Literary Arts Program Interviewing Fred Wah, https://fredwah.ca/node/431
Poetry Reading - March 8, 1979, https://new.fredwah.ca/node/438
Fred Wah: Classroom Conversation on March 9, 1979
Wah, Fred. Mountain. Buffalo, NY: Audit/East-West, 1967. Print.
https://fredwah.ca/content/mountain
Wah, Fred. Limestone Lakes Utaniki. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer College P, 1989. Print.
https://fredwah.ca/content/limestone-lakes-utaniki
Wah, Fred."Limestone Lakes Utaniki." Karabiner: the Journal of the Kootenay Mountaineering Club 30 (1987): 9-12. Print. https://fredwah.ca/content/karabiner-journal-kootenay-mountaineering-club-30
Wah, Fred. “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” So Far. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991. Print.
https://fredwah.ca/content/so-far
Wah, Fred. “Don’t Cut Me Down” Tree. Vancouver: Vancouver Community, 1972. Print.
https://fredwah.ca/content/tree
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode. If you are a SpokenWeb RA with an archival clip to feature on ShortCuts, do write to us at spokenwebpodcast@gmail.com with your pitch.
Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
Production Manager and Transcriber: Kelly Cubbon
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Check the transcript for the timestamps for where this audio appears in the episode and for a map for all of the sounds. Here is a list with links for finding out more about these archival recordings.
Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.1 “Sounds”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds/
Katherine McLeod, from ShortCuts 3.9 “Re-Situating Sound”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/re-situating-sound/
Archival audio, Dionne Brand, 1988 reading, from ShortCuts 3.3 “Communal Memories”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/communal-memories/
Archival audio: Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977; Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980; Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981 — all from ShortCuts 3.6 “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Doug Barbour” (guest produced by Michael O’Driscoll): https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/
Archival audio, Daphne Marlatt, 1970, from ShortCuts 3.4 “Sonic Passages”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/
Daphne Marlatt interview with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart played on “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive” an episode of SoundBox Signals that was aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast (co-produced by Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart, and Nour Sallam), clipped on ShortCuts 3.4: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sonic-passages/
Interview with Kelly Cubbon, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, Creativity,” (co-produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod), S3E9 The SpokenWeb Podcast, June 2022: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/
Interview with Kaie Kellough, ShortCuts 3.5 “The Voice that is the Poem”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-that-is-the-poem-ft-kaie-kellough/
Archival audio, Oana Avasilichioaei, from ShortCuts 3.8: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-event/
Archival audio, bpNichol, November 1968, from ShortCuts 3.2: “What the Archive Remembers”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/what-the-archive-remembers/
Archival audio, Phyllis Webb, from ShortCuts 3.7 “Moving, Still”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving-still/
This month, the SpokenWeb Podcast features an episode created by our former supervising producer and project manager Judith Burr. This audio is part of Judith’s podcast, “Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley,” which she produced as her master’s thesis at UBC-Okanagan. While Judith was working on The SpokenWeb Podcast, she was also working on the research methodology of making a podcast as thesis and on the compiling of interviews and tape that would become the sound of this representation and intervention in ecological thinking. The episode features a number of Judith’s interviews about living with wildfires in the Okanagan, including the story and poetry of Canadian poet Sharon Thesen. Listeners of the SpokenWeb Podcast might remember Thesen from past episodes, including Episode 7 of last season about the Women and Words Collection, or from episodes of our sister podcast SoundBox Signals produced by the Audio-Media-Poetry Lab at UBCO. In Judee’s conversations with Sharon and other interviewees, we hear first-hand perspectives of those who have witnessed and lived through the dangers of these wildfires. We hear about challenges of resource management and land-use planning in fire-prone geographies. And we hear about the role that storytelling may have to play in helping us reckon with these challenges.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Notes from "Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley":
This episode features interviews with poet Sharon Thesen; foresters Daryl Spencer, Dave Gill, and Gord Pratt; UBCO Living with Wildfire project lead Mathieu Bourbonnais; forest technologist Jeff Eustache; and FireSmart program lead Kelsey Winter. They discuss protecting communities in and around the Okanagan Valley from wildfire danger in light of recent wildfire seasons.
“Listening to Fire Knowledges in and around the Okanagan Valley” was created by Judith Burr as her master's thesis project in the Digital Arts & Humanities theme of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. This work was supported by UBC-Okanagan’s feminist digital humanities lab, the AMP Lab. This project was also supported in part by the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) through UBC Okanagan’s “Living with Wildfire” Project. This podcast was created on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation.
EPISODE PRODUCER:
Judith (Judee) Burr is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. She recently completed her MA in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Her research uses audio media and storytelling tools to examine the complexities of human culture in fire-adapted landscapes, connecting to the rich world of the digital environmental humanities. She has worked as an environmental researcher and writer on projects including the Value of Rhode Island Forests report and the Forestry for RI Birds project. She also co-founded the live lit reading series Stranger Stories in Providence. She graduated with a BS in Earth Systems and a BA in Philosophy in 2012 from Stanford University, where she contributed to the podcasts Generation Anthropocene and Philosophy Talk.
SHOW NOTES
These show notes are approximately in order of mention, rather than alphabetical. See them cited to specific moments of the episode using the episode transcript.
In this episode, we hear clips from a cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” from the Lent Fraser Wall Trio’s album “Shadow Moon.” Used throughout this episode with permission from John Lent. The rest of the music in this episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, and you can find specific tracks cited in the transcript: https://app.sessions.blue.
Catherine Owens, Locations of Grief: An Emotional Geography (Hamilton: Wolsack & Wynn, 2020).
“It is clear that a successful record of fire suppression has led to a fuel buildup in the forests of British Columbia. The fuel buildup means that there will be more significant and severe wildfires, and there will be more interface fires, unless action is taken.” Filmon, G. (2004). Firestorm 2003: Provincial Review. Government of British Columbia, https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/public-safety-and-emergency-services/wildfire-status/governance/bcws_firestormreport_2003.pdf.
“Master Plan for Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park.” 1990. Kamloops, B.C.: B.C. Parks, Southern Interior Region.
My analysis of B.C. Wildfire Service data using QGIS. Okanagan watershed defined by watershed atlas polygons and compiled by fellow Living with Wildfire researcher Renée Larsen. Area burned data from: “Fire Perimeters – Historical.” Statistics and Geospatial Data. BC Wildfire Service. Available at https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-statistics.
Xwisten et al., “Xwisten Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Xwisten (Bridge River Indian Band) (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), Accessed April 2022 at https://vimeo.com/383104228.; Shackan Indian Band et al., “Shackan Indian Band Report Executive Summary,” Revitalizing traditional burning: Integrating Indigenous cultural values into wildfire management and climate change adaptation planning (Department of Indigenous Services Canada (DISC) First Nations Adapt Program, 2019), https://www.fness.bc.ca/core-programs/forest-fuel-management/first-nations-adapt-program.; Eli Hirtle, Shackan Indian Band (Masinipayiwin Films, 2019), https://vimeo.com/383108850.
Forest Enhancement Society of BC, “Projects,” Accessed May 2022, https://www.fesbc.ca/projects.
Amy Thiessen, “Sharon Thesen’s ‘The Fire’,” English Undergraduate Honours Thesis, 2020, https://sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net/about.
More Resources: FireSmart Canada, https://firesmartcanada.ca/; Blazing the Trail, https://firesmartcanada.ca/product/blazing-the-trail-celebrating-indigenous-fire-stewardship.; Nature Conservancy, Prescribed Fire Training Exchanges (TREX), http://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/FireLandscapes/HabitatProtectionandRestoration/Training/TrainingExchanges/Pages/fire-training-exchanges.aspx; Karuk Climate Change Projects, “Fire Works!,” https://karuktribeclimatechangeprojects.com/fire-works; NC State University, “Prescribed Burn Associations,” https://sites.cnr.ncsu.edu/southeast-fire-update/prescribed-burn-associations; Firesticks Alliance, https://www.firesticks.org.au.
More Fire Podcasts: Amy Cardinal Christianson and Matthew Kristoff (Hosts), Good Fire Podcast, https://yourforestpodcast.com/good-fire-podcast; Amanda Monthei (host), Life with Fire Podcast, https://lifewithfirepodcast.com; Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski (hosts), “On Fire: Camas, Cores, and Spores (Part 1),” Future Ecologies Podcast, August 29, 2018, https://www.futureecologies.net/listen/fe1-5-on-fire-pt-1.
Hello and welcome to another season of The SpokenWeb Podcast! We’re back with a new line-up of exciting episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network. The SpokenWeb Podcast asks, “What does literature sound like? What stories do we hear when we listen to the archive?” In this season, we have episodes that dive into the lives of archival objects—university poetry events—what it means to read an audiobook—and so much more. This season has something for everyone from lovers of literature and history to sound studies scholars, so come and join us as we continue listening to literature and the archives.
We would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Kate Moffatt is a PhD student in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. Her research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women’s book history, and women in the book trades and book trade archives. In addition to being the supervising producer of The SpokenWeb Podcast, she also produces The WPHP Monthly Mercury podcast for the Women's Print History Project.
Miranda Eastwood is a Montreal-based transmedia artist studying towards their master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Focused on sound design, they are developing a radio drama for their thesis, and is the audio engineer for the SpokenWeb Podcast.
Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and magazines as middlebrow media. She is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda. She is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug 2018).
Katherine McLeod @kathmcleod researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She was the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library and, at present, she is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia, where she is the principal investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research” (2021-2023).
The WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of the Women's Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, The WPHP Monthly Mercury investigates women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
SUMMARY
Episode 10 of the SpokenWeb Podcast – “starry and full of glory”: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam (produced by Stephen Collis) – is a moving commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb. Along with archival clips, the episode features conversations with two poets – Isabella Wang and Fred Wah – in which they talk about an unpublished poem of Webb’s. Listen to this replay of ShortCuts Ep. 3.7 “Moving, Still” and then, listen to Collis’s episode about Webb as a collective listening. What does the archive remember?
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Phyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.
ShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.
This episode is a commemoration of the life and work of Canadian poet Phyllis Webb (1927-2021). Drawing upon archival recordings of Webb’s readings, poet Stephen Collis, a friend of Webb’s, charts a path through the poet’s work by following the “stars” frequently referred to in her poetry—from the 1950s through the 1980s. Included in the podcast are two interviews, discussing specific poems, with former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah, and poet Isabella Wang, with whom Collis discusses a recorded reading of an unpublished, uncollected poem.
Special thanks to Kate Moffatt for her production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books and Library and Archives Canada for the archival recordings featured.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (2010), Once in Blockadia (2016), and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (2018)—all published by Talonbooks. A History of the Theories of Rain (2021) was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and in 2019, Collis was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.
Works Cited:
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Knopf, 1961.
Duncan, Robert. Quoted in Thom Gunn, “Adventurous Song: Robert Duncan as Romantic Modernist.” The Three Penny Opera no. 47 (Autumn 1991): 9-13.
Keats, John. Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21 December 1817. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69384/selections-from-keatss-letters
Library and Archives Canada. Item: Webb, Phyllis - Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)
Robinson, Erin. Wet Dream. Kingston: Brick Books, 2022.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems of Phyllis Webb. Ed. John Hulccop. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014.
SUMMARY
In the making of ShortCuts, series producer Katherine McLeod often talks about how recorded sound is held not only within archives but also by the work of contextualizing whenever one selects an archival audio clip and presses play. Returning to an audio recording of Dionne Brand played in ShortCuts 2.9 “Situating Sound” (June 2021), Katherine reminds us that the process of unarchiving sound is an embodied one. We listen as bodies to the archive. Moreover, how we choose to contextualize sound impacts any listening to it, and written transcripts too frame our understanding of the audio content. Building upon the most recent episode of The SpokenWeb, “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity,” this episode of ShortCuts explores the transcript as another version of holding the sound, while, at the same time, invites a listening to that which exceeds that holding.
“...even those that do not hold a wind’s impression”
- Dionne Brand from Primitive Offensive
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Archival audio excerpted in this episode is from “radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988” held in Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.
Sound effect is “Automatic tapedeck rewind, fastforward, play” (stecman) Free Sound. 6 January 2017. https://freesound.org/s/376058/.
RESOURCES
Brand, Dionne. Chronicles: Early Works. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2011.
“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.
Kinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.
Our Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.
“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.
“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.
“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.” Produced by Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 21 June 2021. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/.
“Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity.” Produced by Kelly Cubbon and Katherine McLeod. The SpokenWeb Podcast. 6 June 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/talking-transcription-accessibility-collaboration-and-creativity/.
Transcriptions of podcasts provide visual renderings of audio that increase accessibility. But what are the best practices for transcribing a podcast, specifically a podcast about literary audio? In this episode, Katherine McLeod of ShortCuts and Kelly Cubbon, transcriber of The SpokenWeb Podcast, explore the role of transcription in the making of podcasts and how responsible transcription unfolds through collaboration and conversation. In fact, their episode uncovers just how much transcription is collaboration and conversation.
Part One starts with reflections from Katherine and Kelly about how they came to the work of transcription and key concepts that have influenced their thinking throughout the process of making this episode, such as accessibility and ableism. This section also features an interview with Dr. Maya Rae Oppenheimer, a studio arts professor at Concordia University and a regular user of podcast transcripts.
Part Two consists of an interview with Judith Burr, the Season 3 SpokenWeb Podcast supervising producer and project manager, about generative challenges that have come up during collaboration on podcast transcription for the podcast and how decision making has evolved over time.
And Part Three is an interview with Bára Hladík, a poet, writer, and multimedia artist, about the convergence of disability, accessibility, technology, and poetics. Here, Bára discusses the healing possibilities of sound and the creative potential of transcripts.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Katherine McLeod @kathmcleod researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph (under contract with Wilfrid Laurier University Press) that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She was the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library and, at present, she is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia, where she is the principal investigator of her SSHRC Insight Development Grant, “Literary Radio: New Approaches to Audio Research” (2021-2023).
Kelly Cubbon is a recent graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing program. She is a content marketing specialist and perpetual history nerd who is passionate about the transformational power of storytelling in environmental, disability, and social justice.
Featured Guests:
maya rae oppenheimer (phd) @mayarae is a daughter, sister, aunt, plant-mother of Icelandic and Canary Islander descent who receives financial remuneration as a writer/researcher /educator. She was born in Treaty 1 territory and spent over a decade living in London (UK). maya is now an uninvited guest on Kanien'kehá:ka territory where she preoccupies herself with writing as a social practice and the tangles of narratives that inform our worldviews. Structures of institutional knowledge formation and validation are often the focus of her projects, from museum narratives to histories of social psychology and laboratory experiments. Experimental writing, performance, radical pedagogy, open-access publishing, DIY tactics and rogue archival gestures make up her tool-kit. maya joined the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in September 2017 as Assistant Professor in Art History. She now works across the Department of Studio Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies in Fine Arts and is the founder of OK Stamp Press.
Judith (Judee) Burr is a MA Candidate in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan. Her research uses audio media and storytelling tools to examine the complexities of human culture in fire-adapted landscapes, connecting to the rich world of the digital environmental humanities. She has worked as an environmental researcher and writer on projects including the Value of Rhode Island Forests report and the Forestry for RI Birds project. She also co-founded the live lit reading series Stranger Stories in Providence. She graduated with a BS in Earth Systems and a BA in Philosophy in 2012 from Stanford University, where she contributed to the podcasts Generation Anthropocene and Philosophy Talk.
Bára Hladík is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. Born in Ktunaxa Territory, she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2016. Her work can be found in Contemporary Verse 2, Carte Blanche, EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue and elsewhere. Bára’s first book New Infinity is published with Metatron Press. She is now a guest in Esquimalt, "B.C."
SHOW NOTES & RESOURCES
‘About Us’, Queer ASL
AIM Lab: an experimental research hub concerned with disability, access, and affordances, based at Concordia University.
Alt Text Poetry Project by Shannon Finnegan and Bojana Coklyat. Plus, the Alt Text work at the Banff Centre for the Arts: Distinct Aggregations.
Amanda Monthei’s Life with Fire podcast
Bara Hladik – poet. artist. Facilitator.
- Place an order for Bára’s first book New Infinity published June 2022.
- Listen to Bára’s ambient electronic album Cosmosis here on Bandcamp.
- Join Bára for Dreamspells (@dream_spells), a collaborative project with Malek Robbana (@melekyamalek) with a monthly new moon dreamspells event
- registration: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMpc-ygqTouHtaiP7HfwXvhxLi-GXljKu8o
Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (BIT)
Carmen Papalia, An Accessibility Manifesto for the Arts
Daniel Britton on typeface design
Disability Art is the Last Avante Garde with Sean Lee, Secret Feminist Agenda S4E22
SoundBox Signals podcast (UBCO)
SpokenWeb Podcast Transcription Style Guide
Talila A. Lewis, “Working Definition of Ableism January 2022 Update”
‘Terminology’, Critical Disability Studies Collective, University of Minnesota
“The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast
“The Voice That is the Poem, ft. Kaie Kellough” produced by Katherine McLeod for ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast, 03:10.
Transcription Tools
Descript (audio and video editing through text, paid), https://www.descript.com/
Express Scribe (speech to text, free), https://www.nch.com.au/scribe/index.html
Otter AI (speech to text and real-time transcription, paid), https://otter.ai/
TEMI (speech to text transcription, paid), https://www.temi.com/
Music Credits
- “Wavicles” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
- “Erudition” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
- “Atmosphere” from Cosmosis by Zlata (Bára Hladík)
- “Scarlett Overpass” by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions
- Cloud Cave by Kajubaa via Blue Dot Sessions
- Pacific Time by Glass Obelisk via Blue Dot Sessions
Sound Effects
“campfire in the woods” by craftcrest, https://freesound.org/people/craftcrest/sounds/213804/
“Page turn over, Paper turn over page turning” by flag2, https://freesound.org/people/flag2/sounds/63318/
“Wall clock ticking” by straget, https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/405423/
“Mechanical Keyboard Typing” by GeorgeHopkins https://freesound.org/people/GeorgeHopkins/sounds/537244/
SUMMARY
This month, ShortCuts will be released on the first day of the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium. Diving into a recording that concluded last year’s symposium, producer Katherine McLeod plays excerpts from Oana Avasilichioaei’s live performance of “Chambersonic (IV)” and Klara du Plessis’s reading of “Post-Mortem of the Event.” What is the sound of this event? Listening to the recording now invites reflections on what this event sounds like: how do we hear its affect, its traces, and how it shifts in time?
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt
Audio Engineer / Sound Designer: Miranda Eastwood
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Audio excerpted in this ShortCuts is from a recording of The Words & Music Show, online, on May 23, 2021, with readings by symposium participants Kevin McNeilly, Klara du Plessis, SpokenWeb community members Cole Mash and Erin Scott, and a featured performance by Montreal-based poet and SpokenWeb collaborator Oana Avasilichioaei.
RESOURCES
Watch the filmpoem “Tracking Animal (an extemporization)” by Oana Avasilichioaei.
Read and listen to an early version of “Chambersonic (I)” published in The Capilano Review.
Read and explore Oana Avasilichioaei’s “Living Scores” (Blackwood Gallery).
See FONDS (Anstruther) by Klara du Plessis and read her book Hell Light Flesh (Palimpsest).
Learn more about The Words & Music Show by listening to “The Show Goes On: Words & Music in a Pandemic,” produced by Jason Camlot for The SpokenWeb Podcast (Feb 2022).
Learn more about the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium by listening to “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium,” produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stephanie Ricci for The SpokenWeb Podcast (March 2022).
Learn all about the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium and future SpokenWeb events here.
In the early 1980s, the University of Alberta funded a series of experimental literary radio programs, which were broadcast across the province on the CKUA community radio network. At the time, CKUA station had just been resurrected through a deal with ACCESS and was eager for educational programming. Enter host and producer Jars Balan – then a masters student in the English department with limited radio experience. For five years, Balan produced three radio series, Voiceprint, Celebrations, and Paper Tygers, which explored the intersection of language, literature, and culture, and he interviewed some of the biggest names in the Canadian literary scene, including Margaret Atwood, Maria Campbell, Robert Kroetsch, Robertson Davies, and many others.
This episode is framed as a “celebration” of those heady days of college radio in the early 80s. In it, clips from Jars’s radio programs, recovered from the University of Alberta Archives, supplement interviews with Balan and audio engineer Terri Wynnyk. Special tribute will be given to the recently departed Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb through the inclusion of their in-studio performances recorded for Balan’s own Celebrations series. By looking back on the pioneering days of campus radio, this episode sheds light on the current moment in scholarly podcasting and how the genre is being resurrected and reimagined by a new generation of “academics on air.”
Special thanks to Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta's Archives and Special Collections, and to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrison, who worked behind the scenes on this episode.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Ariel Kroon is a recent graduate of U of A. Her PhD thesis studied narratives of crisis in Canadian post-apocalyptic science fiction from 1948-1989, and what contemporary Canadians can learn from them. She is interested in the ways that the attitudes of the past shape our future-oriented imaginaries and actions in the present. She has published in SFRA Review and The Goose, and is currently a non-fiction editor at Solarpunk Magazine. Research interests of hers include post-humanist feminist theory and philosophy, ecocriticism, and solarpunk. Connect with her on YouTube, at Academia.edu, or her personal blog.
Nick Beauchesne (U of Alberta) completed his doctoral studies at the University of Alberta in 2020. He currently works remotely as a sessional instructor at the U of A, and in-person at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC. His speciality is in twentieth century occult literary networks and modernist magazines, and he is also a vocalist and synthist performing under the pseudonym of Nix Nihil. As a SpokenWeb RA, he is currently preparing to present at the upcoming Symposium on Campus Radio at U of A in the 1980s and its contribution to debates around sexist language.
Chelsea Miya is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the SpokenWeb research team at the University of Alberta. Her research and teaching interests include critical code studies, nineteenth-century American literature, and the digital humanities. She has held research positions with the Kule Research Institute (Kias), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC), and the Orlando Project. She co-edited the anthology Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene (Open Book Publishers 2021), and her article “Student-Driven Digital Learning: A Call to Action” appears in People, Practice, Power: Digital Humanities outside the Center (MIT Press 2021).
Sound FX/Music
BBC Sound Effects. “Communications - Greenwich Time Signal, post January 1st 1972.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07042099.
BBC Sound Effects. “Doors: House - House Door: Interior, Larder, Open and Close.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07027090.
BBC Sound Effects. “Footsteps Down Metal Stairs - Footsteps Down Metal Stairs, Man, Slow, Departing.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07037171.
BBC Sound Effects. “Industry: Printing: Presses - Electric Printing Press operating.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07041078.
Bertrof. “Audio Cassette Tape Open Close Play Stop.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/351567/.
Constructabeat. “Stop Start Tape. Player.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/constructabeat/sounds/258392/.
Coral Island Studios. "28 Cardboard Box Open" Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Coral_Island_Studios/sounds/459436/.
Gis_sweden. “Electronic Minute No 97 - Multiple Atonal Melodies.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/429808/.
GJOS. “PaperShuffling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/GJOS/sounds/128847/.
IESP. “Cage Rattling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/IESP/sounds/339999/.
InspectorJ. “Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/398160/.
Johntrap. “Tubes ooTi en Vrak.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/johntrap/sounds/528291/.
Kern PKL. “Limoncello.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/104864.
Kyles. “University Campus Downtown Distant Traffic and Nearby Students Hanging Out Spanish +Some People and Groups Walk by Steps Cusco, Peru, South America.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/413951/.
Lillehammer. “Arbinac.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/album/9f32a891-6782-4a63-8796-cafa323b711e.
Michaelvelo. “Packing Tape Pull.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Michaelvelo/sounds/366836/.
Nix Nihil. “Vocal Windstorm.” Psyoptic Enterprises, 2016.
Oymaldonado. “70's southern rock mix loop for movie.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/oymaldonado/sounds/507242/.
Psyoptic. “Forest of Discovery.” Thought Music. Psyoptic Enterprises, 2006.
Sagetyrtle. “Cassette.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/sagetyrtle/sounds/40164/.
Suso_Ramallo. “Binaural Catholic Gregorian Chant Mass Liturgy.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Suso_Ramallo/sounds/320530/.
tonywhitmore. “Opening Cardboard Box.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/110948/.
Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. “Second hand Rose” [restored version]. George Blood, LP. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/78_second-hand-rose_fanny-brice-grant-clarke-james-f-hanley_gbia0055858a/Second+Hand+Rose+-+Fanny+Brice+-+Grant+Clarke-restored.flac
Archival Audio
Carlin, George. "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Indecent Exposure. Little David Records, 1978.
“Dorothy Livesay.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 Feb. 1984.
“Douglas Barbour.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 10 Oct. 1983.
“Margaret Atwood.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 12 Oct. 1983.
“Marian Engel.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 Jan. 1984.
“Linguistic Taboos and Censorship in Literature.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 April 1983.
“Phyllis Webb.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 16 Nov. 1983.
“Poetry: The Sullen Craft or Art.” Paper Tygers. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 1 Jan. 1982.
“Robert Kroetsch.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 23 Nov. 1983.
“Rudy Wiebe.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 21 March 1984.
“Stephen Scobie.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 26 Oct. 1983.
“Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 4 March 1981.
“Speech and Its Characteristics.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 March 1981.
Works Cited
The Canadian Communications Foundation, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.
Bashwell, Peace. “Weird and Wonderful Scenes from the Bardfest.” The Gateway, November 10, 1981, pg. 13. Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1981/11/10/13/.
The Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “CKUA-AM.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/listing_and_histories/radio/ckua-am.
Fauteux, Brian. “The Canadian Campus Radio Sector Takes Shape.” Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, pp. 37-64.
Kostash, Myrna. “Book View.” The Edmonton Journal, 17 Jan. 1981.
Kirkman, Jean. “CKUA: Fifty years of growth for the university's own station.” University of Alberta Alumni Association: History Trails, March 1978, https://sites.ualberta.ca/ALUMNI/history/affiliate/78winCKUA.htm.
Remington, Bob. “Banning of Radio Show Called Cowardly.” The Edmonton Journal, 26 May 1983.
Further Reading
Armstrong, Robert. “History of Canadian Broadcasting Policy, 1968–1991.” Broadcasting Policy in Canada, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 41-56.
The Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “A Brief History of Educational Broadcasting in Canada.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.
Deshaye, Joel. The Metaphor of Celebrity : Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. University of Toronto Press; 2013.
Gil, Alex. “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make” [blog post]. Minimal Computing, 21 May 2015, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.
MacLennan, Anne F. “Canadian Community/Campus Radio: Struggling and Coping on the Cusp of Change.” Radio’s Second Century: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, edited by John Allen Hendricks, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 193-206.
Rubin, Nick. “‘College Radio’: The Development of a Trope in US Student Broadcasting.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 47–64.
Walters, Marylu. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For. University of Alberta Press, 2002.
SUMMARY
In this episode, ShortCuts returns to a recording of Phyllis Webb in order to re-listen through this season’s question of how the archive remembers. What is held in the ‘room’ of the recording, and how does that differ from the room where reading took place? Or from the room of personal memory? What exceeds those rooms? And what does it feel like to hear their contours? Join producer Katherine McLeod as she reflects upon these questions while listening to a 1966 recording of Phyllis Webb reading from Naked Poems.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Kate Moffatt
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Phyllis Webb reading (with Gwendolyn MacEwen) in Montreal on November 18, 1966, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/phyllis-webb-at-sgwu-1966-roy-kiyooka.
ShortCuts 2.7: Moving, 19 April 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/moving.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems. Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.
Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind the scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.
Special thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU's Special Collections and Rare Books.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Kate Moffatt is an incoming PhD student in English at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests lie primarily with women's book history and women's writing of the Romantic period. She brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.
Kandice Sharren is a postdoctoral research fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.
Citations:
Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.
"Castor Wheel Pivot." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713
"Dust Digger." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.
"Flipping through a book." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/
Heavenly choir singing sound, "Ahhh." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/
"Palms Down." Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905
"Record Scratch." Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/
Rooney, Frances. "activist; Gloria Greenfield." Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.
Our guest-producer this month, Michael O’Driscoll, invites us to listen to the introductions of the late Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 - Sept 25, 2021) from readings held at the University of Alberta. What are we listening to when we hear introductory remarks from past readings spliced together? By asking us to listen to remember, this episode remembers Barbour in his element —in sonic performance — and what we hear in the selected recordings is a combination both of poetic sound and sounds of deep care as he welcomes each writer to the microphone.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Guest Producer: Michael O'Driscoll
Series Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
GUEST PRODUCER
Michael O’Driscoll is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and his expertise in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on poetry and poetics as a form of material culture studies. His interests in material culture range from sound studies, archive theory, radical poetics, and technologies of writing to the energy humanities and intermedia studies. He is a Governing Board Member and a member of the U of Alberta research team for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
AUDIO
Audio played in this ShortCuts is excerpted from the SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by the University of Alberta. The audio is currently being catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers.
Audio of Douglas Barbour reading “The Gone Tune” is from the cassette tape recording of The Bards of March (15 March 1986).
Audio of Douglas Barbour’s introductions are selected from readings recorded in 1977-1981. The poets introduced are, in order of audio appearance: Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Maxine Gadd, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, Penn Kemp, Leona Gom, John Newlove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and bpNichol.
RESOURCES
NeWest Press: IN MEMORIAM: DOUGLAS BARBOUR (1940-2021), https://newestpress.com/news/in-memoriam-douglas-barbour-1940-2021
Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 - September 25, 2021), https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2021/09/douglas-barbour-march-21-1940-september.html
“Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp.” Produced by Nick Beauchesne & Penn Kemp forThe SpokenWeb Podcast and starts with a clip from the Trance Form reading hosted by Douglas Barbour at the University of Alberta (1977).
This is a mixed format episode presenting SpokenWeb members Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci’s critical commentary after taking part in the organization of and attending the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium. Bridging techniques from journalism and oral history, this episode includes sounds from the conference, interviews, and critically reflective discussions between Mathieu and Stéphanie. This episode was produced by Mathieu Aubin and Stéphanie Ricci, with audio engineering by Scott Girouard.
This episode explores the Symposium from the perspective of a first-time conference attendee coupled with a veteran attendee; these join the voices of multiple conference participants. Mathieu and Stéphanie focus on the process of organizing, holding, and listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium, and they discuss its themes of listening, sound, and agency as they emerge through the presentations and discussions. The episode begins with the theme of listening ethically and intentionally, before diving into a discussion of issues surrounding sound politics. It concludes with the topic of agency in relation to the amplification of sound as a potential means of empowerment.
A special thanks to the 2021 Listening, Sound, Agency organizing committee, especially Jason Camlot, Klara DuPLessis, Deanna Fong, Katherine McLeod, Angus Tarnawsky, and Salena Wiener, whose voices are featured at the beginning of the episode.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Mathieu Aubin is a Research Affiliate at Concordia University and Principal Investigator of the SSHRC IDG project “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides.” He is also a Research Associate at Higher Education Strategy Associates where he provides advice to postsecondary institutions on how to improve equity in higher education across Canada.
Stéphanie Ricci is an undergraduate student completing a journalism major with a sociology minor at Concordia University. Passionate about storytelling in all forms, Stéphanie is a contributing writer for the Forbes Leadership section, and scriptwriter for The CEO Series radio show with Karl Moore. Stephanie has previously worked on SpokenWeb’s online presence and outreach tactics as social media coordinator. Her past experiences also include working as an investigative reporter for the Institute for Investigative Journalism, volunteer copy editor for Her Campus Media, and production intern with CityNews Montreal.
Audio Engineering:
Scott Girouard is a Front-End Developer based in Toronto, Canada with a lifelong background in music and creative practice.
Audio Credits:
Kvelden Trapp from Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/94421
Citations:
Bergé, Carole. 1964. The Vancouver Report. FU Press.
Brittingham Furlonge, Nicole. May 19, 2021. “‘New Ways to Make Us Listen’: Exploring the Possibilities for Sonic Pedagogy.”
Du Plessis, Klara. May 21, 2021. “From Poetry Reading to Performance Art: Agency of Deep Curation Practice.”
McLeod, Dayna. May 18, 2021. “Queerly Circulating Sound and Affect in Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall.
Robinson, Dylan. May 19, 2021. “Giving/Taking Notice.”
Sun Eidsheim, Nina. May 20, 2021. “Re-writing Algorithms for Just Recognition: From Digital Aural Redlining to Accent Activism.”
On ShortCuts this month, producer Katherine McLeod talks with poet, novelist, and sound performer Kaie Kellough about a memorable recording from The Words & Music Show.
What are we listening to? Kellough upacks what we are listening to — which turns out to be a highly technical, performative, and polyphonic sonic object, along with it being an early version of a passage from his Griffin Prize-winning book of poetry, Magnetic Equator.
Listen to this ShortCuts for the story behind one archival recording, and what this story reveals about how we remember the feelings infused within live performance.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
ARCHIVAL AUDIO
Archival audio in this episode is excerpted from a recording of The Words and Music Show on November 20, 2016 (Casa del Popolo, Montreal).
The performers that night were Eve Nixen, Kaie Kellough, Tawhida Tanya Evanson’s Zenship [Tawhaida Tanya Evanson (voice); Mark Haynes (bass); Ziya Tabassian (percussion); Caulder Nash (keyboards), with guest performance by Nina Segalowitz (Inuit throat singing)], Paul Dutton* and pianist Stefan Christoff.
SHOW NOTES
Kellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. McClelland and Stewart, 2020.
—“Rough Craft: Notes on the creation of the audio / visual / textual work Small Stones.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 22 May, 2021, https://spokenweb.ca/rough-craft-notes-on-the-creation-of-the-audio-visual-textual-work-small-stones/.
“The Show Goes On.” Producer Jason Camlot. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 7 Feb 2022. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-show-goes-on-words-and-music-in-a-pandemic/.
How has the reading series been transformed by the Covid pandemic and its accompanying technologies of virtual gatherings? In this episode, Jason Camlot - SpokenWeb Director and Professor of English at Concordia University - takes us on a reflective listening tour through recordings of the Words and Music Show as it has evolved through the pandemic since early 2020. The Words and Music Show has been organized by Ian Ferrier for two decades to bring performances of literature, art, and music to live audiences at the Casa del Popolo in Montreal. Jason assisted Ian with organizing after Covid sent the series online, and this episode takes us into the in-person and virtual sounds of the Show. In this episode, we listen to the journey of one reading series and its co-curator over the past two years. Join us in reflecting on how the pandemic has changed the ways we share and connect to each other through literature, art, and performance.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Jason Camlot is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb, a SSHRC-funded partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), and the co-edited collections Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Jeffrey Weingarten | Wilfrid Laurier, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod | McGill Queen’s, 2019). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill Queen’s, 2021). Jason is Professor of English and Tier I Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Words and Music Shows of the Pandemic Period:
This episode contains sounds from most of the Words and Music Shows held between 29 March 2020, when it was forced to move online, through to the return to a “live” in person show at Café Resonance held on 24 October 2021.
We are grateful to everyone whose words, music, movement, art, ideas, and voices contributed to this episode. This episode features the voices of many wonderful performers who have performed in pandemic period online Words and Music Shows, including Alexei Perry Cox, Ali Barillaro, Angela Szczepaniak, Cole Mash, Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré, Ian Ferrier, Jason Selman, Jay Alexander Brown, John Sweet, Judee Burr, Katherine McLeod, Kenny Smilovich, Klara Du Plessis, Mike O’Driscoll, Nicholas Beauchesne, Nisha Coleman, Rachel McCrum, Roen Higgins, and Tawhida Tanya Evanson. Many other voices and sounds from the online shows are integrated into short audio-collage portraits of the events that can be heard in the episode.
A full list of the shows and performers that inspired the episode is as follows:
22 March 2020, Ian Ferrier posted this announcement about the upcoming Words and Music Show:
Tonight's show is not canceled, only postponed. We are collecting tracks from all the performers who were scheduled to present, and preparing the way to present them live in this group sometime this upcoming week
Stay tuned and stay safe!
Ian Ferrier
29 March 2020
Brian Bartlett, Lune très belle (Frédérique Roy. Eugénie Jobin), Alexei Perry-Cox. Nisha Coleman, Sava (Dina Cindrić, Sarah Albu, Antonia Branković, Sara Rousseau).
19 April 2020
Liz Howard, Liana Cusmano, Ian Ferrier, Lauren DeRoller, Mary St-Amand Williamson.
17 May 2020
Maureen Hynes, Cassidy McFadzean, John Arthur Sweet , Eryn Dace Trudell, Louise Campbell.
21 June 2020
Moe Clark, Taqralik Partridge, Cara Lessard Cole, David Bateman, Jay Alexander Brown, Angela Hibbs.
23 August 2020
Silvervest, Faith Paré, Cole Mash, Ali Barillaro, S.B. Goncarova.
20 September 2020
Rachel McCrum and Jonathan Lamy, Robin Durnford, Greg Santos, PC Vandall.
18 October 2020
John Arthur Sweet, Carolyn Marie Souaid, Erin Scott, Fortner Anderson and the Growler Chorus, and the winners of the Lawnchair Soirée videopoem contest.
15 November 2020 (“Live” from Sala Rossa)
Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré, Jason (Blackbird) Selman.
13 December 2020
Roen Higgins, Naomi Steinberg, Klara du Plessis, Angela Szczepaniak,Tatiana Koroleva.
21 February 2021
Roen Higgins, Fabrice Koffy, Faith Paré, Jason Selman.
21 March 2021
Tawhida Tanya Evanson, Emilie Zoey Baker, Raymond Jackson, Marie-France Jacques, Francis Caprani, Kelsey Nichole Brooks, Ramela Arax Koumrouya
18 April 2021
Sarah Wolfson, Geronimo Inutiq, Louise Belcourt, David Bateman, Marie-Josée Tremblay, Ian Ferrier.
23 May 2021 (The SpokenWeb Show)
Oana Avasilichioaei, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier, Shannon Maguire, Cole Mash, Jason Camlot, Kenny Smilovitch, Kevin McNeilly, Erin Scott, Katherine McLeod, Michael O’Driscoll, Ali Barillaro, and other special guests.
1 August 2021
RC Weslowski, April Ford, Natasha Perry-Fagant, Poet Riley Palanca, Nathanael Larochette (of Musk Ox).
22 Aug 2021
Jerome Ramcharitar, Marc-Alexandre Chan, Samara Garfinkle, Shawn Thicke, Tracy Yeung, Hosted by Guest Curator Avleen K Mokha, with backup from Ian Ferrier and Jason Camlot.
19 September 2021
Rachel McCrum, Jay Alexander Brown, John "Triangles" Stuart, John Arthur Sweet, For Body and Light.
24 October 2021 (Back in Person at Resonance Café)
Silvervest (Nicolas Caloia, Kim Zombik), Jason Camlot, Dark Sky Preserve (Ian Ferrier and Louise Campbell), John Stuart.
This ShortCuts episode responds to poet Daphne Marlatt’s conversation with Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart in the recent SpokenWeb Podcast episode “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive.” By listening to audio from Marlatt’s previous archival performances, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod considers how we remember feelings attached to reading a poem out loud. What does it feel like to hear a recording of your own voice? Are you reminded of how you were feeling while speaking, and can the archive ever hold the memory of those feelings?
*
“Sometimes, unknowingly, one writes a few lines that continue to reverberate as some kind of pointer for future years of writing.”
— Daphne Marlatt, “Afterword: Immediacies of Writing” (Rivering)
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO
Audio in this episode is from a 1970 recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal at the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, and from a 2019 interview with Marlatt conducted by Karis Shearer and Megan Butchart and that aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast’s sister podcast, Soundbox Signals, and re-aired on The SpokenWeb Podcast.
Listen to the full recording of Daphne Marlatt reading in Montreal (1970): https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daphne-marlatt-at-sgwu-1970/.
Listen to the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, “SoundBox Signals presents Performing the Archive”: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/soundbox-signals-presents-performing-the-archive/.
Listen to the previous ShortCuts on Marlatt, “Then and Now” mentioned in this episode: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-then-and-now/.
RESOURCES
“Daphne Marlatt & Diane Wakoski: Performing the SpokenWeb Archive.” SpokenWeb. Concordia University, 21 November 2014, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/oral-literary-history/daphne-marlatt-diane-wakoski-performing-the-spokenweb-archive/.
Marlatt, Daphne. “Afterword: Immediacies of Writing.” Rivering: The Poetry of Daphne Marlatt. Ed. Susan Knutson. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014.
— “Bird of Passage.” Origin, vol. 3, no. 16, Cid Corman, Jan. 1970, pp. 1–68, https://jstor.org/stable/community.28042112.
McLeod, Katherine. “Daphne Marlatt reading ‘Lagoon’.” SPOKENWEBLOG, 28 November, 2019, https://spokenweb.ca/daphne-marlatt-reading-lagoon/.
Shearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab. UBC-Okanagan, 17 November 2019, https://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/.
This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are excited to share with you a special episode from our sister podcast Soundbox Signals. Host Karis Shearer, guest curator Megan Butchart, and poet Daphne Marlatt have a conversation about Daphne Marlatt's 1969 archival recording of leaf leaf/s and her experience of performing poetry with the archive in 2019. This episode was co-produced by Karis Shearer and Nour Sallam.
Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan’s AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. Hosted and co-produced by Karis Shearer, each episode is a conversation featuring a curator and special guests. Together they listen, talk, and consider how a selected recording signifies in the contemporary moment and ask what listening allows us to know about cultural history. https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Karis Shearer is an Associate Professor in English & Cultural Studies at UBCO where her research and teaching focus on literary audio, the literary event, the digital archive, book history, and women’s labour within poetry communities. She is the editor of All These Roads: The Poetry of Louis Dudek (WLUP 2008), and has published essays on Sina Queyras’s feminist blog Lemonhound, George Bowering’s little magazine Imago, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Long Poem Anthology. She is the author of a chapter on gendered labour and the Vancouver Poetry Conference in the book Canlit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queens UP, 2020) and is co-editor with Deanna Fong of Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020). She also directs the AMP Lab, is a Governing Board member and lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant. She held the 2010-11 Canada-U.S. Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at Vanderbilt University.
Megan Butchart is currently an MA student in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She received her Bachelor of Arts at UBCO in 2020, majoring in English and History. She is interested in Archival Studies and is passionate about the preservation and conservation of artifacts, and the making available of such resources for public research and study. She is pleased to participate in The SoundBox Project, which merges literary, historical, and archival elements.
Nour Sallam co-produced the original episode for SoundBox Signals. She is a former UBC-Okanagan undergraduate student, who graduated with Honours in English and Political Science.
Featured Guest:
Daphne Marlatt (1942-) grew up in Penang, Malaysia before immigrating to Canada in the 1950s. While studying at UBC in the 1960s, Marlatt was one of the editors during the second-phase of TISH. Marlatt has written over twenty collections of poetry and prose including Steveston (1974), The Given (2008), and Reading Sveva (2016). In 2006 she received the Order of Canada. Marlatt lives in Vancouver.
For the shout-outs mentioned in this episode, please visit the links below:
John Lent's “A Matins Flywheel”: https://thistledownpress.com/product/a-matins-flywheel/
David R. Loy's “Nonduality in Buddhism and Beyond”: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Nonduality/David-R-Loy/9781614295242
Daphne Marlatt's Ana Historic: https://houseofanansi.com/products/ana-historic
Inspired Word Cafe: http://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/
Read more about the AMP Lab’s events with Daphne Marlatt:
Shearer, Karis. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt, leaf leaf/s, then and now.” The AMP Lab Blog. 17 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/17/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt-leaf-leaf-s-then-and-now/
Buchart, Megan. "Poetry, Campus, Community: Tuum Est.” The AMP Lab Blog. 18 November 2019. http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/11/18/poetry-campus-community-tuum-est/
Oddleifson, Shauna. “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt.” In Featured Stories and Our Students, UBCO Faculty of Critical and Creative Studies. 11 September 2019. https://fccs.ok.ubc.ca/2019/09/11/performing-the-archive-daphne-marlatt/
As part two of ShortCuts 2.9 Situating Sound—and as one of the many remembrances of Stó:lō writer and activist Lee Maracle—this ShortCuts explores how the archive remembers and who these memories serve. The audio recording for this episode is a 1988 recording of Lee Maracle and Dionne Brand, recorded for broadcast on Gerry Gilbert’s radio program “radiofreerainforest” (Vancouver Coop Radio; SFU Digitized Collections). Building towards Maracle’s reading of the poem “Perseverance,” producer Katherine McLeod selects audio clips from this recording in which we can hear feminist placemaking in action.
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO CLIPS
All audio in this episode is from the Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection, held at Simon Fraser University and part of SFU’s Digitized Collections.
RESOURCES
Maracle, Lee. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism. Vancouver: Press Gang, 1996.
Maracle, Lee. Memory Serves: Oratories. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli. NeWest Press, 2015.
“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection. SFU Digitized Collections. https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988
“ShortCuts 2.9: Situating Sound.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 21 June 2020. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/situating-sound/
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, N.C: Duke UP, 2003.
Wilson, Michelle. “Forced Migration.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 December 2021. https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/
Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land
As uninvited guests on Indigenous land, we are continually told that national parks, and our conservation system in general, are a benevolent inheritance from our settler ancestors. The creators of parks and conservation societies crafted archives in the form of magazines and biographies to document the salvation of charismatic species like the bison. In this episode, artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines these archives to create alternative stories of the bison's path to conservation. These audio essays reveal how ideologies around capitalism, human exceptionalism, and white supremacy have influenced settler relations to the more-than-human world. In this episode, we will hear from poet Síle Englert who helped distill Michelle's more extended essays into these shorter, affective pieces of prose, and musician and composer Angus Cruikshank whose score enriches Michelle's audio storytelling. Michelle's project seeks to extract narratives from a white supremacist, patriarchal written tradition and play with the immediate and affective possibilities of audio performance and sound design. The audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map “Forced Migration”. It is on view at Museum London as part of the GardenShip and State exhibition until January 23rd, 2022.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Michelle Wilson is an artist, mother, and researcher currently residing as an uninvited guest on Treaty Six territory in London, Ontario. In her current work, she makes palpable the presence and absence of bison and their inseparability from the land and its people. In the Euro-American archive, bison bodies have been used to convey colonial knowledge systems, and their story of survival has been used to perpetuate myths of “settler saviours”. This is the legacy that Wilson, as a feminist of settler descent studying in colonial institutions, has inherited and is confronting.
Wilson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario and recently held her thesis exhibition and a corresponding symposium titled Remnants, Outlaws, and Wallows: Practices for Understanding Bison at the McIntosh Gallery.
Script Editing and Guest Interview:
Síle Englert is a poet, fiction writer and visual artist from London, Ontario. Her short stories have been shortlisted for Room Magazine’s fiction contest and longlisted for Prism International’s. Her poetry has placed second in Contemporary Verse 2’s 2-Day Poem Contest and has been featured in journals such as Room Magazine, Ascent Aspirations Anthology, Misunderstandings Magazine, The Saving Bannister Anthology, and Crannóg Magazine (Ireland), and is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead.
Sound Design and Guest Interview:
Angus Cruikshank is a musician currently residing in London, Ontario. He has played in numerous bands in Canada and abroad including Clock Strikes Music, Squids, and Telechasms. He is currently enrolled in the Bachelor of Science and Nursing program at the University of Western Ontario.
Vocal performance:
Pat Rousseau and Paul Chartrand
Episode Links:
In the Spirit of Atatice: https://csktribes.org/more/videos/in-the-spirit-of-atatice/in-the-spirit-of-atatice
To Wood Buffalo, With Love, by Chloe Dragon-Smith and Robert Grandjambe: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/to-wood-buffalo-national-park-with-love
Forced Migration: https://scalar.usc.edu/works/remnants-wallows-and-outlaws-a-multidisciplinary-exploration-of-bison/forced-migration
GardenShip and State at Museum London: https://www.gardenship.ca/exhibition
Buffalo Treaty: https://www.buffalotreaty.com/
In this episode, ShortCuts explores one of the methods of listening from the previous episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast. That episode, produced by Julia Polyck O’Neill, listens to the emotional weight of archives. Julia’s conversations with poet Lisa Robertson uncover the ways in which archives record the relationships between memory, affect, and mortality. In this ShortCuts, producer Katherine McLeod listens to the emotional weight of archives through a recording of bpNichol, reading with Lionel Kearns in Montreal on November 22, 1968. How does the archive record loss? What can the archive never record? And what do we remember as listeners?
EPISODE NOTES
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
SHOW NOTES
Bowering, George. “bpNichol: 1944-1988.” The Long Poem / Remembering bp Nichol. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 122-123 (Autumn/Winter 1989): 294-297.
McGregor, Hannah. “The Voice Is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020.
Polyck-O’Neill, Julia. “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast. 1 November 2021.
Pound, Scott. “Sounding out the Difference: Orality and Repetition in bpNichol.” Open Letter: bp + 10 (Fall 1998) 50-58.
Singh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum Books, 2018.
AUDIO CLIPS
Audio for this ShortCuts is clipped from a recording of Ear Rational: Sound Poems 1966-1980 available on PennSound, a partner affiliate of the SpokenWeb research network, and from a recording of bpNichol and Lional Kearns from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series audio collection.
Nichol, bp. “Pome Poem.” PennSound – and a link to the same recording is also available on the official bpNichol archive.
“I wanted to forget you.” bpNichol reading with Lional Kearns. Sir George Williams Poetry Series. Montreal, 22 November 1968. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/bpnichol-and-lionel-kearns-at-sgwu-1968/#1
In this episode, SpokenWeb contributor Julia Polyck-O’Neill shares an archived recording of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson with us and talks us through two interviews she recorded with Robertson. Polyck-O’Neill invites us to consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections in light of the relationships between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. In examining these conceptual, material and immaterial dimensions of the archive within Robertson’s personal narrative history of the Kootenay School of Writing, Polyck-O’Neill points to how creative and feminist approaches to the archive and to archival practice are exist within Robertson’s practice. Polyck-O’Neill shares with us how Robertson’s archives are influencing her research and the ways she approaches the topic of archives and intimacy in her work and her life more broadly.
Addendum: Listening Notes
Nancy Shaw (1962-2007), a celebrated curator, poet, writer, and organizer, at times collaborated with Lisa Robertson and also wrote work in dialogue with Robertson’s poetry. Robertson wishes to mention how greatly the absence of her good friends Shaw, Stacy Doris (d. 2012), and Peter Culley (d. 2015) has affected her. Additionally, XEclogue was, in fact, Robertson’s first book, although she published chapbooks prior; additionally, she does not think of her books as collections, as they are written as single, cohesive works. The new edition of R’s Boat is titled Boat and is being published by Coach House in Spring 2022.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, poet, and writer. A former lecturer at the Obama Institute at Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz (2017-18) and international fellow of the Electronic Literature Organization, she is currently a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of Visual Art and Art History and the Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology at York University (Toronto) where she studies digital, feminist approaches to interdisciplinary artists’ archives. Her writing has been published in Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (The Journal for Aesthetics and General Art History), English Studies in Canada, DeGruyter Open Cultural Studies, BC Studies, Canadian Literature, and other places.
Citations
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.
Fong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” No More Potlucks, 2018, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019.
Morra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.
Robertson, Lisa. “At the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, 1994: Launch of XEclogue on January 8, 1994.” PennSound, n.d., https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Robertson/Robertson-Lisa_Reading_Kootenay-School_Vancouver_01-%2008-1994.mp3. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.
Singh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.
Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.
Music Credits:
Clouds at Castor Ridge by Zander on Blue Dot Sessions: https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/69017
Kothbiro by Real Vocal String Quartet on Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Real_Vocal_String_Quartet#contact-artist
Sunsets and Rockers by Rebecca Foon on Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Rebecca_Foon/Live_At_CKUT_on_Montreal_Sessions/03_Sunsets_And_Rockers
ShortCuts is back! Season Three of ShortCuts begins with a listening exercise. We attune our ears to what it sounds like and feels like to hear archival clips ‘cut’ out of context. Join ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod in this exploration of the sonic and affective place-making of ShortCuts as podcast. What kind of creative and critical work can these archival sounds do? On their own, or together as an archival remix?
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
Audio Excerpted
Voices heard in this episode: Katherine McLeod, Tanya Davis, Ali Barillaro, Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Avison, Stephanie Bolster, Barbara Nickel, Mathieu Aubin, Dionne Brand, Alexei Perry Cox and Isla, and Phyllis Webb.
All audio has been played on previous ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast.
Try listening to this episode first without knowing whose voices you are hearing. Afterwards, explore the audio that caught your attention. Use the transcript to find the ShortCuts episode that the audio is clipped from, and there you will find the original audio sources listed in the show notes. For a full transcript of this episode, check out the link above.
Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you.
Over the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.
Featured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Producer Bio:
Myra Bloom is Assistant Professor of Canadian literature at York University-Glendon campus. She is currently writing a book called Evasive Maneuvers about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart, and is preparing a SSHRC-funded podcast on the same topic.
Guest Bios
Kim Echlin is a novelist. Her novel, The Disappeared, was short-listed for the Giller Prize. She has written a biography of Elizabeth Smart titled Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity in which she discussed the work and life of Elizabeth Smart in the context of writing, motherhood, and earning a living. Her new novel will appear next year.
Maya Gallus is an award winning documentary filmmaker whose work screens at numerous international film festivals. Most recently, The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution, was the opening night film at the 2017 Hot Docs Film Festival and the 2018 Berlinale Culinary Cinema programme. She is also recognized for her critically acclaimed literary biographies, The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche and Elizabeth Smart: On the Side of the Angels.
Sina Queyras is a Canadian writer, editor, and creative writing professor at Concordia University. They have published seven collections of poetry, a novel and an essay collection. Their third collection of poetry, Lemon Hound, received the Pat Lowther Award and Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, and their fourth, Expressway, was shortlisted for the 2009 Governor General’s Award for poetry. They are currently researching Elizabeth Smart for an academic project.
Rosemary Sullivan is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and the author of By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life. She has published fourteen books in the multiple genres of biography, memoir, poetry, travelogue, and short fiction. Her biography Shadow Maker: The Life of Gwendolyn MacEwen won numerous prizes including the Governor General’s Non-Fiction Award. Her latest book, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, published in 23 countries, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize, the BC National Non-Fiction Award, the RBC Charles Taylor prize, the Plutarch Biographers International Award and was a finalist for American PEN /Bograd Weld Prize and the U.S. National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Special thanks to Vineeta Patel for transcription help. Donna Downey at the MUN archives. The Glendon Media Lab. Aisha Jamal, Ali Weinstein, Heather White, Lauren Neefe, Sarah O’Brien, Lynn Bloom, Leonard Bloom, Lana Swartz for feedback.
Credits:
Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.
MUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.
All the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Clips Featured in Introduction:
The voices of Michael O’Driscoll, Annie Murray, and Jason Camlot from Stories of SpokenWeb
A clip of Mavis Gallant from Mavis Gallant Reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU
The voices of Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy from Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU
A clip of Muriel Rukeyser and the voice of Katherine McLeod from ShortCuts minisode You Are Here
Music in the introduction is Lick Stick by Nursery from Blue Dot Sessions.
Tape noise sound effects from FreeSound.org.
We would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Trailer Producers:
Judith Burr & Hannah McGregor
Clips Featured:
KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from S2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”
Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from S2E9 “Mavis Gallant Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”
Mathieu Aubin, in S2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”
“Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, and Katherine McLeod in S2E8 “Talking about Talking”
Penn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”
Wisdom Agorde, from S2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1: The Language of Talking Drums”
Klara du Plessis, from S2E1 “Deep Curation: Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice”
Stacey Copeland, from S2E5 “Cylinder Talks - Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”
Treena Chambers, from S2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”
Music:
“Slapstick” by Moon Juice from Blue Dot Sessions
In this episode from The Podcast Studies Podcast, formerly known as the “New Aural Cultures” Podcast, co-hosts Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead come on the SpokenWeb Podcast to take us back to key moments of their past episodes. They introduce three segments from past episodes that engage with podcasting in relation to media forms and cultural contexts. You will hear a segment from an interview with academic Ella Waldmann on S-Town as a literary form; Galen Beebe from the Bello Collective website discussing ethics, social justice, and podcasting’s media heritage; and Dan Misener on the misunderstood notion of podcast branding. The episode of the Podcast Studies Podcast that we shared with you today was produced by Dario Llinares and Lori Beckstead. Visit https://www.podpage.com/podcaststudiespodcast to subscribe and find more details.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCES
Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Phyllis Webb’s reading in Montreal on November 18, 1966. The entire recording can be accessed here.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
---. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned for Season 3 this Fall!
Episode Producer:
Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb Director) is Professor in the Department of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media (2019) and Language Acts (2007). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, What the World Said, and Vlarf.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO SOURCES
Ali Barillaro’s recording of reading of her blog post, “Tanya Davis performing ‘How to Be Alone’” on SPOKENWEBLOG, 6 August, 2020.
Tanya Davis performing “How to Be Alone,” recorded at The Words & Music Show at Casa del Popolo, Montreal on 12 December 2012. Listen to the entire audio here: https://spokenweb.ca/tanya-davis-performing-how-to-be-alone/.
Excerpt of Cover of “Digging my own grave” by Thrice performed by Ali Barillaro and Vincent Pigeon here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y6H9QuL6q8
RESOURCES
Watch Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s 2010 film of the poem “How to Be Alone”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7X7sZzSXYs
Watch the 2020 film made by Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman in which they revisit the poem as “How to Be at Home”: https://www.nfb.ca/film/how-to-be-at-home
Find out more about all of SpokenWeb’s audio collections here.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a group of poets at UBC Vancouver began a little magazine: the TISH poetry newsletter. The TISH poets would later be called one of the most cohesive writing movements in Canadian literary history. In the summer of 2019, Craig Carpenter visited one of the former editors of TISH magazine —who is also his former professor of modern Canadian poetry. Based on interviews conducted during this visit and a subsequent visit in the winter of 2019, Craig has created an episode that explores his evolving relationship with his former professor and scenes from more than 50 years of literary history. Craig takes us through the relationships and the stories that formed a part of the TISH movement and the poet that Robert Hogg has become.Craig gives a heartfelt thank you to all those who took the time to offer feedback on early script drafts: Deanna Fong, Judith Burr, Mathieu Aubin, Marjorie Mitchell. Special thanks to Dr. Karis Shearer, all of his colleagues at the UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, and, of course, to Robert Hogg.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: spokenweb.ca. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Craig Carpenter is an MA student in the IGS Digital Arts & Humanities theme at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan). A poet, journalist, sound designer, and former literary editor, Craig brings a diverse set of skills to the SpokenWeb project. His thesis will explore the podcast as public scholarship and engages archival recordings of second wave TISHITES Daphne Marlatt and Robert Hogg. With particular attention to Charles Olson’s 1950 essay PROJECTIVE VERSE, he is investigating the intersection of proprioceptive poetics, the embodiment of voice in performance and sound studies.
Musical score by Chelsea Edwardson: Chelsea Edwardson uses music as a tool to transform stories and concepts into the sonic realm, creating experiences through sound that heal and inspire. Her background in ethnomusicology brings the depth of tone and expression that transcends culture, taking the listener to worlds beyond a physical place and into a landscape of feelings. To learn more, visit https://www.chelseaedwardson.com.
Featured Guest:
Robert Hogg was born in Edmonton, AB, and grew up in Cariboo and Fraser Valley, BC. Hogg graduated from UBC with a BA in English and Creative Writing. During his time at UBC, Hogg became affiliated as a poet and co-editor a part of TISH. In 1964, Hogg hitchhiked to Toronto and visited Buffalo NY, where Charles Olson had been teaching at the time. At SUNY at Buffalo, he completed a Ph.D. on the works of Charles Olson. Shortly after, Hogg taught American and Canadian poetry at Carleton University for the following thirty-eight years. Hogg currently lives at his farm located in Ottawa.
Sound Recordings Featured:
Archival Audio from PennSound.com
Short intro clips of: Warren Tallman, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, George Bowering: all from PennSound digital archives.
Recording of “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC/the_red_wheelbarrow_multiple.php
Recording of “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” by Robert Duncan: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Duncan/Berk-Conf-1965/Duncan-Robert_01_Often-I-am-Permitted_Berkeley-CA_1965.mp3
Recording of “I Know a Man” by Robert Creely: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley/i_know_a_man.php
Recording of “Maximus From Dogtown I” by Charles Olson: https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Olson/Boston-62/Olson-Charles_14_Maximus-Dogtown-2_Boston_06-62.mp3
Archival Audio from AMP Lab’s Soundbox Collection
Robert Hogg reads at Black Sheep Books, Vancouver, 1995: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/
Archival Audio from KPFA
Robert Hogg reads at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965: http://www.kpfahistory.info/bpc/readings/Young%20poets.mp3
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO SOURCES
Dionne Brand, recording played on radiofreerainforest, 7 August 1988, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.
RESOURCES
“#101 Renee Rodin.” BC Booklook, 28 January 2016, https://bcbooklook.com/101-renee-rodin/.
“Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto arts publishing.” Art Gallery of York University, https://agyu.art/project/desire-lines/.
“Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection.” SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/gerry-gilbert-radiofreerainforest-collection.
Kinesis. Periodicals. Vancouver : Vancouver Status of Women, 1 Sept. 1988. https://open.library.ubc.ca/collections/kinesis/items/1.0045699.
Our Lives. Toronto: Black Women’s Collective. Volume 2 5.6 (Summer/Fall 1988), https://riseupfeministarchive.ca/publications/our-lives-canadas-first-black-womens-newspaper/ourlives-02-0506-summer-fall-1988/.
“radiofreerainforest 3 & 28 July and 7 August, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-357/radiofreerainforest-3-28-july-and-7-august-1988.
“radiofreerainforest 7, 25 August, 1988 and 30 October, 1988.” Gerry Gilbert radiofreerainforest Collection: SFU Digitized Collections, https://digital.lib.sfu.ca/radiofreerainforest-90/radiofreerainforest-7-25-august-1988-and-30-october-1988.
This episode features Kate, Kandice, and Michelle's efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also their own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and their interactions with the surviving archival materials. This led them to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.
With additional archival materials available in a supplementary slideshow, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.
This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Kate Moffatt is a recent graduate of the MA program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research interests lie primarily with women’s pedestrianism in the Romantic period and women’s book history, and she brings a keen interest in the digital humanities, book and literary history, and archives and archival practices to her work as a Research Assistant for SpokenWeb.
Michelle Levy is Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at Simon Fraser University. She brings a strong theoretical background in literary and sound studies to the SpokenWeb Project, and extensive expertise in data architecture and management that contributes to our creation of metadata standards necessary for the aggregation of diverse corpora of recorded literary readings.
Kandice Sharren is a recent graduate of the PhD program in SFU’s Department of English. Her research focuses on print culture of the Romantic period, and she brings her experience with digital humanities, archival research, and book history to the SpokenWeb project.
Featured Guests:
Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis is retired from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where she was the Executive Director of the Vancouver campus. During her thirty-four years there she served in many capacities, notably founding the Writing and Publishing Program and co-founding the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing. The constant theme in her career has been her interest in literature and communication, her belief in lifelong learning, and the responsibility for educators in the support of civil society. In her retirement to private life she enjoys singing in the Performing Arts Lodge (PAL) Chorus, sharing the lives of family and friends, and pursuing the occasional speaking engagement or program development project.
Carolyn Tate worked as the Director of Information for Continuing Studies at SFU from 1980 to 1982, and as Director of the Liberal Studies program in Continuing Studies at SFU from 1982 to 1987. She has a BA from UBC, an MA from McGill University, an unfinished PhD from University College, University of London, and an LL.B (J.D.) from Queen's University. She is now retired from law and resides in Toronto, Ontario, but takes trips to various continents and has fun with her grandchildren.
Citations:
Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.
Gallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.
vladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.
“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295.
“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.
Errata:
We refer to the “Liberal Studies Department” in the episode; Liberal Studies was actually a program that was part of Continuing Studies.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Judith Burr
AUDIO SOURCES
Audio clipped from “The Words and Music Show” (29 March 2020), https://www.facebook.com/1541307492796466/videos/891396077972589.
Audio clipped from “ShortCuts 1.3 Where does the reading begin?” (Kaie Kellough reading at “The Words and Music Show,” 16 Nov 2016), https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-where-does-the-reading-begin/.
RESOURCES
Gibson, Kenneth. “Jessica Moss ponders the mysteries of the universe.” The Concordian. 22 January 2019, http://theconcordian.com/2019/01/jessica-moss-ponders-the-mysteries-of-the-universe/.
Moss, Jessica. Entanglement. https://jessicamoss.bandcamp.com/album/entanglement.
Perry Cox, Alexei. Finding Places to Make Places. Vallum, 2019.
----- Revolution / Re: Evolution. Gap Riot, 2021.
In this episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast, jamilah malika and Jessica Karuhanga sit down with producer Katherine McLeod to talk about the sounds and sound-based practices that have informed their projects as recipients of the 2020-2021 SpokenWeb Artist-Curator in Residence Award. For her residency, jamilah is building an online archive highlighting Black women sound artists across Canada to provide inspiration and representation for future sound art from Black femmes across Turtle Island. Jessica is creating “a sanctified Black space in the form of a website that celebrates aural, visual and somatic witnessing” through shared audio recordings of personal stories.
jamilah and Jessica share two pieces of audio from past works that set the groundwork conceptually and methodologically for their current projects. As the producer of the series ShortCuts on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, Katherine brings her approach of using an audio clip as the starting point for conversation. When talking with jamilah, they start by listening to the audio composition “Listen to Black Womxn” and, when talking with Jessica, they start by listening to the audio composition, “ALL OF ME.” In between these conversations, Katherine talks with SpokenWeb RA, poet, and spoken word artist Faith Paré about her work with jamilah and Jessica in listening to and searching through the SpokenWeb audio collections with their projects in mind. Questions of the archive and the archival impulse run throughout these conversations about the sound of sound art, archival recordings of voices speaking specifically as Black women and Black non-binary folks, the vocalic body in and as archive, and the agency of the listener. All of these questions start with talking, or, as jamilah says early on, “talking about talking.”
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producer:
Katherine McLeod (PhD) researches archives, performance, and poetry. She has co-edited the collection CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). She is writing a monograph that is a feminist listening to recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb, produces ShortCuts, a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed, and curates the site Where Poets Read. She is the 2020-2021 Researcher-in-Residence at the Concordia University Library. Find her at @kathmcleod.
Featured Guests:
jamilah malika (SAIC, MFA '19) is an artist and writer contemplating refusal, repetition, dedication and intimacy. sometimes this means text off page, sound, video, textile, photocopies and/or objects at times combined as installation. whether embroidering yaki ponytail hair on burlap, mounting paper sculpture or shaking up spaces with sound, she centres Black womanhood with care. her work has played or shown from Berlin to LA and across Canada including Contemporary Field Gallery (Vancouver,) Circuit Gallery (Toronto) and Artscape (Peterborough).
Jessica Karuhanga is a Canadian Ugandan-British artist whose work addresses issues of cultural politics of identity and Black diasporic concerns through lens-based technologies, writing, drawing and performance. Through her practice she explores individual and collective concerns of Black subjectivity – illness, rage, grief, desire and longing within the context of Black embodiment. She has presented her work at SummerWorks Lab, Toronto (2020), The Bentway, Toronto (2019), Nuit Blanche, Toronto (2018), Onsite Gallery, Toronto (2018), Museum London, London (2018), and Goldsmiths, London, UK (2017). Her writing has been published by C Magazine, BlackFlash, Susan Hobbs Gallery and Fonderie Darling. She has been featured in AGO’s Artist Spotlight, i-D, DAZED, Visual Aids, Border Crossings, Toronto Star, CBC Arts, filthy dreams, Globe and Mail and Canadian Art. She earned her BFA from Western University and MFA from University of Victoria. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese and Québécois ancestries. Her writing is forthcoming in Carnation, and has previously appeared in GUTS , Ossa , and Shameless Magazine. Faith is a proud alum of Our Bodies, Our Stories, a creative collective for queer, trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour artists mentored by Kama La Mackerel, and she recently completed the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2020 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship for Underrepresented Writers under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze. She is studying for her Hons. B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Find her @paretriarchy and faithpare.com.
*
SpokenWeb’s 2020-2021 Artist-Curator Residency Award was adjudicated by Dr. Kristin Moriah (Queen’s University) and Tawhida Tanya Evanson (Mother Tongue Media). Find out out more about the residency, the projects, and the process here: https://spokenweb.ca/announcing-the-spokenweb-artist-curator-in-residence-fellows-fall-2020-winter-2021/
Listen to the full audio of Jessica’s composition ALL OF ME https://soundcloud.com/kichoncho/all-of-me
Read jamilah’s article “Listening Feels” in Canadian Art: Frequencies (Spring 2021).
*
Music used in episode:
Original SpokenWeb Theme by Jason Camlot
Night Watch by Blue Dot Sessions https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/34642
Links to sounds and artists mentioned in this episode:
Lillian Allen: https://lillianallen.ca/
Octavia Butler, Kindred: https://www.octaviabutler.com/kindred
Michelle Pearson Clark, Suck Teeth Composition (After Rashad Newsome):https://www.michelepearsonclarke.com/suck-teeth-compositions/
Nikita Gale, Hot World: https://www.nikitagale.com/hot-world
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals:https://www.alexispauline.com/
Jessica Karuhanga, through a brass channel: https://www.jessicakaruhanga.net/through-a-brass-channel
“Riddim and Hardtimes” by Lillian Allen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pm80etkAzE
Shani Mootoo fonds, https://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/manuscripts
Soledad Munoz: https://soledadmunoz.com/
Rashad Newsome, Shade Composition: https://rashaadnewsome.com/performance/shade-compositions-pittsburgh/
Jeneen Frei Njootli: https://www.jeneenfreinjootli.com/
Rucyl, Sound Prism: https://rucyl.com/
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producers: Judith Burr and Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCES
Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Phyllis Webb’s reading in Montreal on November 18, 1966. The entire recording can be accessed here.
RESOURCES
Collis, Stephen. Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten. Talonbooks, 2018.
McGregor, Hannah. “The Voice is Intact: Finding Gwendolyn MacEwen in the Archive.” The SpokenWeb Podcast, 6 April 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/.
McLeod, Katherine. “Listening to the Archives of Phyllis Webb.” In Moving Archives. Ed. Linda Morra. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2020. 113-131.
---. “Poetry on TV: Unarchiving Phyllis Webb’s CBC-TV Program Extension (1967).” CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event. Eds. Jason Camlot and Katherine McLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 72-91.
Webb, Phyllis. Naked Poems, Periwinkle Press, 1965.
Webb, Phyllis. Peacock Blue: The Collected Poems. Ed. John Hulcoop. Talonbooks, 2014.
This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Deanna Fong is a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where her research project, “Towards an Ethics of Listening in Literary Study” intersects the fields of Oral History and Literature through an investigation of interviewing and listening practices. She co-directs the audio/multimedia archives of Fred Wah, and has done significant cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Roy Kiyooka. Her critical work appears in the recent publications Canlit Across Media (MQUP, 2019) and Pictura: Essays on the Works of Roy Kiyooka (Guernica Editions, 2020). With Karis Shearer, she co-edited Wanting Everything: The Collected Works of Gladys Hindmarch (Talonbooks, 2020).
Michael O’Driscoll is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies in the Faculty of Arts, and Special Advisor to the Provost as Convenor for Congress 2021 at the University of Alberta. He teaches and publishes in the fields of critical and cultural theories with a particular emphasis on deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and his expertise in Twentieth-Century American Literature focuses on poetry and poetics as a form of material culture studies. His interests in material culture range from sound studies, archive theory, radical poetics, and technologies of writing to the energy humanities and intermedia studies. He is a Governing Board Member and a member of the UAlberta research team for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Interviewees:
Mathieu Aubin is a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where he is co-leading the Oral Literary History project. His work currently focuses on the role of literary events in advancing LGBTQ2+ social justice initiatives in Canada since the second half of the twentieth century. He has published on queerness and feminism in Vancouver’s small presses and literary magazines in Canadian Literature.
Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sathloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the traditional ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including traditional territories of the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations. Clint is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Program, Department of English, Simon Fraser University and works on psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, Indigenous literature, and digital culture. His most recent book is Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture, (Bloomsbury, 2018), and he is co-editing, with Paul Kingsbury, Lacan and the Environment forthcoming in 2021 from Palgrave. (Photo by Chris Brayshaw)
Treena Chambers is a Métis scholar who has worked as a bookseller, union organizer, researcher, and writer. She has a BA from SFU in International Studies and is currently a Masters' student in the SFU School of Public Policy. She brings her experience as a mature student and her Métis background into her studies of decolonization and identity. Her 2018 essay "Hair Raizing" was shortlisted by the Indigenous Voices Awards, as well her 2020 work "Forest Fires and Falling Stars." She has also contributed work to the book "unsettling EDUCATIONAL MODERNISM".
T.L. Cowan is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies (Digital Media Cultures) in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) at the University of Toronto. T.L.’s research focuses on cultural and intellectual economies and networks of trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) and other minoritized digital media and performance practices. This work includes a monograph, entitled Transmedial Drag and Other Cross-Platform Cabaret Methods, nearing completion. T.L. is also a performance artist, who appears in alter-ego form on cabaret stages and in video screens as Mrs Trixie Cane.
Credits:
The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses
Take Me To the Cabaret by Billy MurrayOld phonograph “Cabaret”
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret
Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax
Blur the World by Tagirijus
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world
Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta
https://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise
The following are spoken word performance clips
Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.
“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books.
Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text,
T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCES
Archival audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Margaret Avison’s reading in Montreal on January 27, 1967.
Audio clips of Stephanie Bolster and Barbara Nickel are from SpokenWeb’s Listening Practice, led by Katherine McLeod and held on January 27, 2021.
Audio clips of Katherine McLeod in conversation with Mathieu Aubin are from a conversation recorded over Zoom on March 9, 2021.
RESOURCES
Aubin, Mathieu, “Audio of the Month – From Poetic Surveillance to an Avant-Garde Dinner Fit for a Queen.” ShortCuts 1.6, 15 June 2020, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audio-of-the-month-from-poetic-surveillance-to-an-avant-garde-dinner-fit-for-a-queen/.
@mathieujpaubin. “In today's listening to the Sir George Williams collections, I heard Margaret Avison, who was introducing one of her poems, being interrupted by a man in the audience who mansplains her own work... eh boy. But, as a bad ass, Avison calls him out, making the audience laugh.” Twitter, 23 February, 2021, https://twitter.com/mathieujpaubin/status/1364328694341246980.
Avison, Margaret. Winter Sun and The Dumbfounding, Poems 1940-66. McClelland & Stewart, 1982.
Sarah, Robyn. “How poems work: Thaw by Margaret Avison.” Globe and Mail, 2 September 2000, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/how-poems-work/article25470778/.
Nickel, Barbara and Elise Partridge. “The Wholehearted Poet: A Conversation about Margaret Avison.” Books in Canada 33. 6 (September 2004), 34-36.
Quebec, Ike. It Might as Well Be Spring. Blue Note Records, 2006.
Part one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.
Episoder Producers:
This episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.
Citations:
Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.
Gallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.
Gallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p.
Gallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39.
Gallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96.
kyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.
Mavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.
Mavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.
Mackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces
vladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.
Simon Fraser University wishes to hear from any copyright owner, or their representative, who believes that this project has not properly attributed their work, has used it without authorization in violation of Canada's Copyright Act, or has released confidential information in violation of the BC Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
In this season of ShortCuts we’ve spent some time in a 1969 recording of poet Muriel Rukeyser, and we’re going to stay in that recording for this minisode, partly due to the depth of material within this single recording and partly as an opportunity to reflect upon what a minisode can do – through archival listening – to make connections.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
AUDIO SOURCE
Audio clips for this ShortCuts minisode are cut from this recording of Muriel Rukeyser’s reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969.
RESOURCES
Keenaghan, Eric. “Interchange – How to Be Anti-Fascist: Muriel Rukeyser and The Life of Poetry.” Interchange, https://beta.prx.org/stories/355960.
Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/
Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive, http://murielrukeyser.emuenglish.org/.
Rukeyser, Muriel.“Elegy in Joy.” Waterlily Fire: Poems, 1935-1962. Macmillan, 1963.
---. “Käthe Kollwitz.” The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.
---. The Life of Poetry. Current Books, 1949.
---. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” [audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series]. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969
Music and Sound Effects
bay_area_bob. "Sound FX for a notification." Freesound.org, Nov 2020.
original music by Jason Camlot, 2019.
scissors audio (original by K. McLeod), 2020.
Together we listen back to select "Cylinder Talk" sound production assignments created by Concordia graduate students, and unpack the experiences, ideas and discussions that the production and study of sound can incite across disciplines. A 3-minute audio project assigned to students in Jason’s most recent graduate seminar - Literary Listening as Cultural Technique - the Cylinder Talk draws on a history of early spoken sound recordings, inviting us into an embodied sonic engagement with literature studies.The episode features sound work by Alexandra Sweny, Sara Adams, Aubrey Grant and Andrew Whiteman.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Jason Camlot (SpokenWeb director) is Professor in the Department of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media (2019) and Language Acts (2007). He is also the author of four collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, and What the World Said.
Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Communication Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She received her MA from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture program and a BA in Media Production from Ryerson University. She is currently the podcast project manager for The Spokenweb Podcast and the supervising producer of Amplify Podcast Network. website: http://staceycopeland.com/
Cylinder Talks Featured:
- Alexandra Sweny, “Ethics of Field Recording in Irv Teibel’s Environments Series”
- Sound Clips: Original recordings of Montreal by Alexandra Sweny.
- Sara Adams, “Henry Mayhew and Victorian London”
- Sound Clips: “Victorian Street.” British Library, Sounds, Sound Effects. Collection: Period Backgrounds. Editor, Benet Bergonzi. Published, 1994.
- Aubrey Grant, “Poe’s Impossible Sound”
- Sound Clips: Lucier, Alvin. I Am Sitting in a Room, Lovely Music Ltd., 1981.
- Andrew Whiteman, “Bronze lance heads”
- Sound Clips:
- “Robert Duncan Lecture on Ezra Pound” March 26, 1976, U of San Diego; accessed from Penn Sound Robert Duncan’s author page. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php)
- “Ezra Pound recites Canto 1” 1959; accessed from Penn Sound Ezra Pound’s author page (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)
- —“The Sound of Pound: A Listener’s Guide” by Richard Siebruth, interview with Al Filreis May 22, 2007. (https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.php)
- Sampled 1940s film music; date and origin unknown.
- Original music; composed by Andrew Whiteman, Dec 2020.
- Sound Clips:
References:
- Eidsheim, Nina Sun. The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre and Vocality in African Music. Duke UP, 2019.
- Feaster, Patrick. “’The Following Record’: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877-1908.” PhD Dissertation. Indiana University, 2007.
- Hoffman, J. “Soundscape explorer: From snow to shrimps, everything is a sound to Bernie Krause.” Nature, vol. 485, no. 7398, 2012, p. 308, doi:10.1038/485308a.
- Kittler, Friedrich. Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, 1999.
- Krause, Bernie. The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places. Little Brown, 2012.
- Peter Miller, “Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe,” PMLA 135.2 (March 2020): 315-328.
- Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.
- Picker, John. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford University Press, 2003.
- Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Bells”, Complete Poems and Selected Essays, ed. Richard Gray, Everyman Press, 1993, pp. 81-84.
- Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
- Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Inner Traditions/Bear and Co., 1993.
- Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Rea. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Fordham UP, 2015.
- Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York University Press, 2016.
- Teibel, Irv. Environments 1: Psychologically Ultimate Seashore. LP Record. Syntonic Research Inc., 1969.
- World Soundscape Project - Sonic Research Studio - Simon Fraser University. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio/worldsoundscaperoject.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2021.
Additional Sound Clips:
- Camlot, Jason. Ambient Music for “Cylinder Talks”.
- “A Christmas Carol in Prose (Charles Dickens: Scrooge’s awakening )(w Carol Singers [male quartet]).” Bransby Williams, performer. Edison 13353, 1905.
- "Big Ben clock tower of Westminster - striking half past 10, quarter to 11, and 11 o'clock" (Westminster, London, England). July 16, 1890. Recorded by: Miss Ferguson and Graham Hope, (for George Gouraud). Edison brown wax cylinder (unissued). NPS object catalog number: EDIS 39839.
- bpayri. “crowd chattering students university loud”, Freesound, 2015.
- Humanoide9000. “Glacier break”, Freesound, 2017.
- “Micawber (from ‘David Copperfield’).” William Sterling Battis, performer. Victor 35556 B, 12”
- disc, 1916.
- New, David, director. R. Murray Schafer: Listen, National Film Board of Canada, 2009.
- sbyandiji. “short alarm bell in school hall”, Freesound, 2014.
- Spliffy. “Hallway of University in silence”, Freesound, 2015.
- “Svengali Mesmerizes Trilby.” Herbert Beerbohm Tree, performer. Gramophone Concert Record, 10” Black Label Disc, GC 1313, 1906.
- “The Transformation Scene From Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Len Spencer, performer. Columbia matrix, [1904] 1908.
- Udall, Lyn. “Just One Girl.” Popular Songs of Other Days, 2012/1898.
- Westerkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Transformations, Empreintes DIGITALes, IMED 1031, Enregistrements i Média (SOPROQ), 1989/2010. https://electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_1031-1.3.
A fresh take on sounds from the past, ShortCuts is a monthly feature on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed and an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ShortCuts on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly SpokenWeb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
Resources
Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/
Robinsong, Erin. “Anemone.” Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis. Coach House Books, 2020. Find out more about Watch Your Head as a book and online project here.
Rukeyser, Muriel. “Muriel Rukeyser at SGWU, 1969” [audio recording from the Sir George Williams Poetry Series]. SpokenWeb, 24 January 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969
Find out more about poet Muriel Rukeyser by visiting Muriel Rukeyser: A Living Archive.
For hundreds of years, the Yorùbá people of West African have used “talking drums” to send messages across great distances. West African languages are highly musical, full of rising and falling tones. The pitch of talking drums can be adjusted to mimic these tones, so drummers can “speak” to one another. The drummer encodes the language, converting it into drum patterns, and in the process, poeticizes it.
In part two of 'Drum Codes', airing next season on The SpokenWeb Podcast, we sit down with a master drummer and learn more about how drums function as information compression tools.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Chelsea Miya is part of the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. She is a PhD Candidate and CGS SSHRC fellow in English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta with a background in journalism. Her research explores the intersections of data and art/culture.
Sean Luyk is a Digital Projects Librarian at the University of Alberta, where he works as a member of the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. He studies local music collecting and ideas of place in music. He is also a drummer, singer, and lifelong musician.
Voices Heard:
Chelsea Miya: Twitter: @chelseamiya
Sean Luyk
Titilope Sonuga: https://titilope.ca/
Wisdom Agorde
Tunde Adegbola: African Languages Technology Initiative (Alt-i) http://www.alt-i.org/
Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún: https://kolatubosun.com/
Peter Olálékan Adédòkun: Instagram: @lekan_drums_intl, @adedokun_peter_olalekan, @drumsvoice_of_Jesus, @iluyoruba_yorubadrums; Twitter: @Drumsvoicej, @lekanadedokun1
Print References:
- Babalọla, Adeboye. “Yoruba Literature.” Literatures in African Languages, edited by B. W. Andrzejewski, S. Pilaszewicz, and W. Tyloch, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 157–189.
- Finnegan, Ruth. “17. Drum Language and Literature”. Oral Literature in Africa. By Finnegan. Open Book Publishers, 2012, 467-484. Web. .
- Ngom, Fallou, Daivi Rodima-Taylor, and Mustapha Hashim Kurfi. “The social and commercial life of African Ajami” Africa at LSE Blog, 1 Oct. 2019, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2019/10/01/social-commercial-african-ajami-culture/.
- Owomoyela, Oyekan. The Columbia guide to West African literature in English since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
- Sonuga, Titilope. This is How We Disappear. Write Bloody North, 2019.
- Strong, Krystal. “The Rise and Suppression of #EndSARS.” Harpers Bazaar, 27 Oct. 2020, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a34485605/what-is-endsars/.
- Túbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. Edwardsville by Heart. Wisdom’s Bottom Press, 2019.
- Villepastour, Amanda. Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bàtá Drum: Cracking the Code. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2010.
Recordings:
- Adédòkun, Olálékan. [various tracks].
- Sonuga, Titilope. “My Mother’s Music.” Mother Tongue, Titilope Sonuga, 2013.
- Sonuga, Titilope. “This is How We Disappear - Titilope Sonuga.” YouTube, uploaded by Titilope Sonuga, 21 August 2017, https://youtu.be/JbLwsLYrjzw.
- Túbọ̀sún, Kọ́lá. “Ọláolúwa Òní reads "Being Yorùbá.” SoundCloud, 2019, https://soundcloud.com/kola-tubosun/olaoluwa-oni-reads-being-yoruba.
Sound Effects:
- BBC News. “End Sars protests: People 'shot dead' in Lagos, Nigeria - BBC News.” YouTube, 21 October 2020, https://youtu.be/Il5qL7YbawY.
- Bloomberg Quicktake: Now. “Shots Fired in Lagos Amid #EndSARS Protests in Nigeria.” YouTube, 21 October, 2020, https://youtu.be/hu9FzU2TDvQ.
- The Dinizulu Archives. “Asante Ivory Trumpets - Ancient Akan Music - Pt 1.” YouTube, 23 March 2009, https://youtu.be/P3XxEefvpr8.
- felix.blume. “Dugout On The Niger River In Mali SOUND Effect.” Freesound, 20 January 2013, https://freesound.org/s/174933/.
- FilmOneNG. “Living in Bondage Trailer 1.” YouTube, 18 October, 2019, https://youtu.be/bQ9pUsXFqoA.
- Lily Pope TV. “MAIN MARKET ONITSHA|| COME WITH ME.” YouTube, 9 July 2019, https://youtu.be/DJ3NyfV7tgs.
- “Nigerian Crowds - Lagos, native quarter with traffic & crowd atmosphere.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07015037.
- “Outdoor Clock - Church clock striking, 6 o'clock. (All Saints Church).” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07002268.
- Pasadena Conservatory of Music. “African Roots, African American Fruits: A Musical Journey (Concert Highlights).” Vimeo, 8 March, 2016, https://vimeo.com/158205356.
- Patrickibeh. “Nigerian Young girls playing 'Hand-clap' game.” Wikimedia Commons, 25 February 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nigerian_Young_girls_playing_%27Hand-clap%27_game.webm.
- Protests.media. “Buhari Must Go Protest in Lagos, 17th of October 2020.” Vimeo, 27 October, 2020, https://vimeo.com/469395263.
- Rueda, Manuel. “Oaxaca whistle language.” Vimeo, 2004, https://vimeo.com/77702616.
- Muir, Stephen. “City Street Winter Day - Toronto - Bay St And Cumberland St.” Dreaming Monkey Inc.“Wamba Indigenous Music - Repetitive tune using a two tone communication whistle(vocal).” Recorded by John Watkin. BBC Sound Effects, 31 March 1996, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=NHU05003080.
The audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from recordings of the Sir George Williams Poetry Series, all available to listen to here: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ and listed individually below.
ShortCuts minisodes are developed from ShortCuts blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG and the post that inspired this one is here.
A fresh take on our past minisode series – “ShortCuts” is an extension of the ‘ShortCuts’ blog posts on SPOKENWEBLOG, this series brings Katherine’s favourite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of ‘ShortCuts’ on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week) following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
AUDIO IN THIS MINISODE
Berrigan, Ted. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 4 Dec 1970, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/ted-berrigan-at-sgwu-1970/
Hine, Daryl. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 1 Dec 1967, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daryl-hine-at-sgwu-1967/
Hindmarch, Gladys. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 21 Nov 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gladys-hindmarch-at-sgwu-1969/
Simic, Charles. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 19 Nov 1971,
https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/charles-simic-at-sgwu-1971/#2
Wright, James. [Recording] Sir George Williams Poetry Series, Montreal, 13 December 1969, https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/james-wright-at-sgwu-1968/
While her subjects are varied, and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, poet Penn Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects, while the voices in the air produce others altogether.
In conversation with SpokenWeb Researcher Nick Beauchesne, a clip from Kemp's performance of Trance Form at the University of Alberta (1977) is brought into conversation with more recent material from When the Heart Parts (2007) and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017). The episode concludes with a live reading from Kemp’s brand-new Pandemic Poems (2020).
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Nick Beauchesne completed his PhD in English at the University of Alberta in 2020; he studies the magical practices of modernist “little magazine” culture and works as a research assistant on the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. Nick has been a performance artist and vocalist for over 20 years, going by his magical name of Nix Nihil. His music is available at soundcloud.com/nixnihil.
Penn Kemp has been giving creativity workshops, teaching and performing her poetry since 1966. A Canadian poet, performer and playwright Penn has been celebrated as a trailblazer since her first publication of poetry by Coach House (1972), a “poetic El Niño”, and a “one-woman literary industry”. Her latest poetry is River Revery (Insomniac, 2019) and forthcoming in 2020 is P.S., a collaboration of poems with Sharon Thesen (Kalamalka Press).
Voices Heard:
Penn Kemp, Nick Beauchesne, Nix Nihil, Ann Anglin, Bill Gilliam, John Magyar
Special Thanks to Adam Whitaker-Wilson for technical assistance and recording resources. Douglas Barbour for hosting the Trance Form reading at U of A in 1977.
Print References:
- Penn Kemp’s Pandemic Poems originally published in:
- Belanger, Joe. “It's time to embrace London's poet laureate, Penn Kemp, and all artists.” London Free Press. 11 Apr. 2020. https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/belanger-its-time-to-embrace-londons-poet-laureate-penn-kemp-and-all-artists. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Kemp, Penn. “PENN KEMP - Home.” Weebly. http://pennkemp.weebly.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Kemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp: Penn, poet/playwright/performer.” Wordpress. https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Kemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. From the Lunar Plexus. Pendas Productions, 2001.
- Kemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. "Night Orchestra." Barbaric Cultural Practice, Quatrro Books, 2017.
- Kemp, Penn. Trance Form. Soft Press and Pendas Productions (reprint), 2006.
Recordings:
- Kemp, Penn. “[Night Orchestra] Barbaric Cultural Practice.” Soundcloud,
- https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/sets/barbaric-cultural-practice. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Kemp, Penn. "Penn Kemp - Trance Form, Live at U of A, February 18, 1977 (1).” Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/penn-kemp-trance-form-live-at-u-of-a-february-18-1977-1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Kemp, Penn. Trance Dance Form, Pendas Productions, 2006.
- Kemp, Penn. “When the Heart Parts - Sound Opera.” Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/when-the-heart-parts. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.
- Ambient vocal loops and drones courtesy of Nix Nihil.
A fresh take on our past minisode series – “ShortCuts” is an extension of the 'ShortCuts' blog posts on SpokenWebBlog, this series brings Katherine's favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed. Stay tuned for monthly episodes of 'ShortCuts' on alternate fortnights (that's every second week) following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode.
The audio for this ShortCuts minisode is cut from the introductory remarks made by Muriel Rukeyser at her reading in Montreal on January 24, 1969: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/muriel-rukeyser-at-sgwu-1969
Producer: Katherine McLeod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
Resources
Malcolm, Jane. “The Poem Among Us, Between Us, There: Muriel Rukeyser’s Meta-Poetics and the Communal Soundscape.” Amodern 4: The Poetry Series (March 2015), http://amodern.net/article/poem-among-us/
This episode of The SpokenWeb Podcast is a little different than episodes you’ve heard from us before. It is a kind of “feminist memory-work” - An audio collage, a method, an approach to community building which aims to honor lesbian-feminist collective histories and renewed public attention to lesbian feminist culture.
Episode producers – Felicity Tayler, Mathieu Aubin and Scott Girouard - cordially invite you into their feminist sonic memory world: A three-part audio collage of “Lesbian Liberation Across Media”. A virtual film screening and discussion held Summer 2020 in partnership with SpokenWeb, and featuring three iconic lesbian feminist films: “A Working Women’s Collective” (1974), “Labyris Rising” (1980), and “Proud Lives: Christine Bearchell”(2007). Through a weaving together of the voices of over 60 participants in attendance, along with original music scores, archival clips and more - we ask, how do we listen to Canadian lesbian liberation movements across media? Whether it’s a feature length film or a spirited virtual chat session, this audio collage episode invites you to experience a citational politics that makes audible the intergenerational relationships, conflicting concerns, nostalgic reveries, and a sense of togetherness while apart in the pandemic-related time of crisis.
Episode Producers:
Felicity Tayler is the E-Research Librarian at University of Ottawa with a portfolio in Research Data Management and currently the PhD Interim Head, Research Services Arts & Special Collections uOttawa. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, in Journal of Canadian Art History,Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.
Mathieu Aubin is a scholar on print and performance cultures in Canada. He completed his PhD at UBC and is now an Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University where he holds a leadership position within the “Oral Literary History” research component of the SpokenWeb project. As part of this project, he is working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture. His work on queerness, literary communities, and Vancouver has been published in the journal Canadian Literature.
Scott Girouard isa Front-End Developer based in Toronto, Canada with a lifelong background in music and creative practice.
Acknowledgements:
Additional Voiceover by Emma Middleton
Music by Scott Girouard and Mathieu Aubin
Thanks to Stacey Copeland, Hannah McGreggor, Jason Camlot, Katherine McLeod, Constance Crompton, Michelle Schwartz, Rachel E Beattie, Raegan Swanson, May Ning, Jake Moore, Becki Ross, Amy Gotlieb, Rachel Epstein, Maureen FitzGerald, Marusya Bociurkiw, Baylee Woodley, Elspeth Brown, Stark (pseudonym) .
Humanities Data Lab at U Ottawa, SpokenWeb, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada Project, University of Toronto Media Commons Archives, ArQuives , VTape, VIVO Archives
References:
- Anger, Kenneth, director. Scorpio Rising. Ruban VHS, 1964.
- Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Routledge, 1993.
- Godard, Baraba. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Canadian and Quebec Women’s Writing.
- ECW P, 1987.
- Media Mothers, directors. A Working Women’s Collective. 1974.
Moores, Margaret, director. Labyris Rising. V Tape, 1980. - Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling. Ambra Verlag, 2014.
- Nicol, Nancy, director. Proud Lives: Chris Bearchell. V Tape, 2007.
- Ross, Becki. The House that Jill Built. U of Toronto P, 1995.
A fresh take on our past minisode series – “ShortCuts” is an extension of the 'ShortCuts' blog posts on SpokenWebBlog, this series brings Katherine's favorite audio clips each month to the SpokenWeb Podcast feed - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
Stay tuned for monthly episodes of 'ShortCuts' on alternate fortnights (that's every second week) following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode.
Producer: Katherine Mcleod
Host: Hannah McGregor
Supervising Producer: Stacey Copeland
Archival sounds played (in order of sonic appearance):
- Maxine Gadd with Richard Sommer, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Feb 1972, featured in ShortCuts 1.2
- Daryl Hine, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 1 Dec 1967, featured in ShortCuts 1.1
- bill bissett, reading on CKVU-TV Vancouver, September 1978, featured in ShortCuts 1.6
- Kaie Kellough, reading at The Words and Music Show, 20 Nov 2016, featured in ShortCuts 1.3
- Daphne Marlatt, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, featured in ShortCuts 1.5
- Gwendolyn MacEwen, reading at the SGW Poetry Series, 18 Nov 1966, featured in ShortCuts 1.7
This episode - The Season Two Premiere of The SpokenWeb Podcast - chronicles different phases in the evolution of Deep Curation as a poetry reading curation practice, from its earlier iterations with Klara merely choosing the poems read by the authors and the order of their presentation, to its more robust form, with excerpted and intertwined works creating a thematic, cohesive arc. Poets featured from Deep Curation archival audio, include Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, and Erin Robinsong.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Klara du Plessis is a third year PhD student in English at Concordia University and one of the governing board student representatives of the SpokenWeb research team. She experiments with a new practice of literary event organization called a Deep Curation, navigating the texts presented and their strategic, thematic arc. Klara’s debut collection of multilingual long poems, Ekke, won the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and garnered much critical acclaim. Her second book-length narrative poem, Hell Light Flesh, is freshly released, September 2020 from Palimpsest Press.
Jason Camlot’s recent works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), the co-edited collection, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019), and the article, “The First Phonogramic Poem: Conceptions of Genre and Media Format, circa 1888” in the open access journal, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History (February 2020). He is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb, a SSHRC-funded partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. He is Professor of English and Tier I Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia U in Montreal.
Voices Heard:
Lee Ann Brown, Margaret Christakos, Isis Giraldo, Kaie Kellough, Kate Lilley, Sawako Nakayasu, Deanna Radford, Erin Robinsong
Print References:
Bernstein, Charles. ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2009.
Brown, Lee Ann. In the Laurels, Caught. Albany: Fence Books, 2013.
Christakos, Margaret. charger. Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2020.
du Plessis, Klara. “Santa Cova Muscles.” Unpublished.
Kellough, Kaie. Magnetic Equator. Toronto: Penguin Random House, 2019.
Longair, Sarah. “Cultures of Curating: the Limits of Authority.” Museum History Journal 8.1 (2015): 1-7.
Middleton, Peter. “How to Read a Reading of a Written Poem.” Oral Tradition 20.1 (March 2005): 7-34. Web. 25 December 2016.
Nakayasu, Sawako. Texture Notes. Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2010.
Obrist, Hans Ulrich and Asad Raza. Ways of Curating. New York: Faber and Faber, 2014.
Radford, Deanna. Poems. Unpublished.
Robinsong, Erin. Rag Cosmology. Toronto: Book*Hug, 2017.
Rogoff, Irit. “Curating/Curatorial.” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 19-38.
Vidokle, Anton. “Art without Artists?” Ed. Beatrice von Bismarck, Jörn Schafaff, and Thomas Weski. Cultures of the Curatorial. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. 216-226.
Wheeler, Lesley. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Poetry Recordings:
Deep Curation 4th Space. Feat. Margaret Christakos, Kaie Kellough, Deanna Radford. 7 November 2019. Personal archive.
Deep Curation Boston University. Feat. Lee Ann Brown, Fanny Howe, Sawako Nakayasu. 30 January 2020. Personal archive.
Deep Curation Mile End Poets’ Festival. Feat. Aaron Boothby, Klara du Plessis, Canisia Lubrin, Erin Robinsong. 24 November 2018. Personal archive.
Sir George Williams Reading Series. Feat. Jackson Mac Low. 26 March 1971. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/jackson-mac-low-at-sgwu-1971/#1
Four Horsemen. Two Nights. 9 and 10 October 1987. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/4-Horsemen.php
Ambient Sounds:
Cmusounddesign. “02 Museum.” 03:02. 29 November 2009. Attribution License. https://freesound.org/people/cmusounddesign/sounds/84529/
Ecfik. “Museum Ambiences.” 01:16. 2 August 2019. Creative Commons 0 License. https://freesound.org/people/ecfike/sounds/478349/
Pastabra. “Lounge tea party: Ambience.” 03:21. 31 October 2016. Attribution License. https://freesound.org/people/Pastabra/sounds/366194/
Wilhelmsqueek. “Cutting_Croissant_ST.” 00:20. 9 June 2016. Creative Commons 0 License. https://freesound.org/people/wilhelmsqueek/sounds/347384/
Music:
“Manny in Sound” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue). Attribution Noncommercial License.
“Turning to You” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue). Attribution Noncommercial License.
Tuned Down and Slowed “Turning to you” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue). Attribution Noncommercial License. Manipulations by Jason Camlot
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Trailer Producers:
Hannah McGregor & Stacey Copeland
Clips Featured:
S1E2 - Sound Recordings are Weird.
S1E3 - Invisible Labour
S1E4 - The Agony and Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart
S1E8 - How Are We Listening Now?
Music - Palms Down - Blue Dot Sessions
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned for Season 2 this Fall!
Episode Producers:
Sadie Barker is a PhD student at Concordia, working at the intersections of aesthetic and affect theory, sound and decolonial studies. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies. She is increasingly interested in the affordances of podcasting to mediate interdisciplinary spaces.
Emma Telaro is an MA student at Concordia in the department of English, and a RA for SpokenWeb. She is interested in the disruptive potential of sound and of silence in the literary. This is her first official podcast.
Ali Barillaro is an MA student in English at Concordia University and a SpokenWeb RA interested in both the study of comics in the social media age and the sounds of audience response in the context of poetry readings.
Jason Camlot’s most recent critical works are Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), and the co-edited collection, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019). He is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb and Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
Bibliography:
Bender, John and David E. Wellbery, "Rhetoricality: On the Modernist Return of Rhetoric." The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Ed. Bender and Wellbery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Copeland, Stacey. "A Feminist Materialisation of Amplified Voice: Queering Identity and Affect in The Heart." Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media. Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 209-225.
Llinares, Dario. "Podcasting as Liminal Praxis: Aural Mediation, Sound Writing and Identity." Podcasting: New Oral Cultures and Digital Media. Ed. Dario Llinares, Neil Fox, Richard Berry. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. 123-145.
Rapp, Christof, "Aristotle's Rhetoric", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .
Sterne, Jonathan. "The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality," CanadianJournal of Communication 36.2 (2011): 207-225.
Ong, Walter J.: Orality and Literacy--The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Routledge, New York, 1988.
Find a list of Ambient Sounds, Music and Additional Recordings used in this episode Linked Here.
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/gwendolyn-macewen-reading-i-should-have-predicted/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Produced by the SpokenWeb team at UBC Okanagan AMP Lab, SoundBox Signals brings literary archival recordings to life through a combination of ‘curated close listening’ and conversation. You can find more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.
Resources:
The SoundBox Collection: https://soundbox.ok.ubc.ca/
Amy Thiessen's Honours Project / Digital Exhibition on Sharon Thesen's "The Fire": sharonthesenthefire.omeka.net
The Real Vancouver Writers' Series: https://realvancouver.org/
Episode 7 of the SpokenWeb Podcast produced by Hannah McGregor: https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-voice-is-intact-finding-gwendolyn-macewen-in-the-archive/
Secret Feminist Agenda podcast: https://secretfeministagenda.com/category/podcast/
Christine Mitchell's "Can You Hear Me?": https://amodern.net/article/can-you-hear-me/
Due to COVID-19, both the Tech Talk Series and the Inaugural Sharon Thesen Lecture by John Lent mentioned at the end of this episode were unfortunately cancelled or postponed.
Producers and Guests:
Nour Sallam is an Honours English and Political Science major with a passion for literature and art. She is interested in journalism, digital reporting, and the impacts that language and discourse have on perceptions of the world. Nour is also the Copy Editor of The Phoenix News. She is excited to practice attentive listening and explore literary sound through her work as the SpokenWeb UBCO Podcast Producer.
Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, is an associate professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She sits on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and is the lead UBCO Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant, contributing expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture.
Amy Thiessen is an Honours English student at UBCO where she is working on a digital edition of Sharon Thesen's poem "The Fire." She is a writer, an RA and project manager for the UBCO SpokenWeb project and an aspiring teacher.
Emily Murphy is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at UBCO's Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies. She is also Assistant Director of UBCO's AMP Lab. She researches technology and cultural memory.
Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor in Publishing at SFU where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. She also hosts a number of podcasts including Secret Feminist Agenda and the SpokenWeb Podcast.
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
Listen to Mathieu Aubin's Audio of the Week featuring an audio clip of bill bissett on CKVU-TV September 1978 here along with links to recordings and works mentioned in this minisode: https://spokenweb.ca/bill-bissett-on-ckvu-tv-september-1978/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Mathieu Aubin, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
This episode was a special cross-over between the SpokenWeb Podcast and Secret Feminist Agenda.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
References:
Constellations Audio. https://www.constellationsaudio.com/
Glass, Ira. “Freedom Fries.” This American Life 23 January 2015. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/545/if-you-dont-have-anything-nice-to-say-say-it-in-all-caps/act-two
“The Lesbian Show.” Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony. https://alotarchives.org/collection/lesbian-show
Mermaid Palace. https://mermaidpalace.org/
Noor, Poppy. “What is 'sexy baby voice'? We spoke to a sociologist to find out more.” The Guardian 26 Feb 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/26/what-is-sexy-baby-voice-sociologist
The Queer Public Podcast. https://www.queerpublic.org/
Episode Producer:
Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. Her work can be found in various journals including Participations, Modernism/modernity Print+, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Studies in Canadian Literature; she is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Bookhug 2018). Hannah is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, which is currently undergoing an experimental peer review process with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She is also the host of the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast*, an experimental collaborative research podcast created through the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership.
Guest:
Stacey Copeland is a media producer and Joseph-Armand Bombardier (SSHRC) Ph.D. candidate at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master of Arts from the Ryerson York joint Communication and Culture graduate program where she studied radio production, sound studies, media culture and gender studies. It was during her Master’s work that Copeland co-founded FemRadio, a Toronto, Canada based feminist community radio collective. She is currently the podcast project manager for the SSHRC-funded partnership SpokenWeb.
Marlatt tells the audience that she will explain the local references as she goes along, starting with the first poem that refers to Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. What she could not have anticipated is that the poems would become pathways to revisit the city when republishing many of them years later in Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (2013).
Listen to the full recording of Daphne Marlatt's 1970 reading at SGWU here: https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/daphne-marlatt-at-sgwu-1970/
--
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/news/daphne-marlatt-reading-lagoon/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
Jason Camlot’s critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Routledge 2008), and the co-edited collections, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule 2007). He is also the author of four collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, and What the World Said. He is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb. He is Professor of English and Tier I Concordia University Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia U in Montreal.
Katherine McLeod researches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. She has co-edited CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Jason Camlot, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019). Currently, she is writing a monograph on archival recordings of women poets reading on CBC Radio. She began this research as a SSHRC-funded Postdoctoral Fellow (TransCanada Institute, U of Guelph) and then as a SpokenWeb Postdoctoral Fellow (Concordia). She received her doctorate from the University of Toronto. Katherine explores the intersection of dance and poetry in her own creative practice, along with curating SpokenWeb’s Audio of the Week, the Audio of the Month for The SpokenWeb Podcast, and Where Poets Read, a listing of Montreal poetry readings.
Interviewees and Voices Heard:
Oana Avasilichioaei, Ali Barillaro, Sadie Barker, Arjun Basu, Naomi Charron, Alexei Perry Cox, Nisha Coleman, Klara du Plessis, Ian Ferrier , Priscilla Joly, Rob McLennan, Heather Pepper, Lindsay Presswell, Deanna Radford, Kian Vaziri-Tehrani, Brian Vass, Isabella Wang, Alvaro Echánove, Marlene Oeffinger
Print References
Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Labelle, Brandon. "Auditory Relations." In Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum, ix-xvi.
Peters, John Durham. Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999
Petriglieri, Gianpiero. Twitter Post. April 3, 2020, 7:43 PM. https://twitter.com/gpetriglieri/status/1246221849018720256
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2014.
Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994.
"Sounds from the global Covid-19 lockdown." Cities and Memory. https://citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds/
Poetry Recordings
Antin, David. "The Principle of Fit, II" (Part I). 26.:32. June 1980. Recording at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. PennSound. https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Antin/Antin-David_The-Principle-of-Fit-II-Side-A_DC_06-80.mp3
Cox, Alexei Perry. Poems from Finding Places to Make Places. 42:39. The Words & Music Show, March 22, 2020.
Coleman, Nisha. "The Church of Harvey Christ." 40:53. The Words & Music Show, March, 22 2020.
Plath, Sylvia. "Daddy." Originally released on The Poet Speaks, Record 5, Argo, 1965. YouTube audio. 3:56. Posted December 29, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM
--
Find a list of Ambient Sounds, Music and Additional Recordings used in this episode Linked Here.
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/news/dorothy-livesay-introducing-and-reading-bartok-and-the-geranium/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Guest Bios:
Hannah McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Publishing at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on podcasting as scholarly communication, systemic barriers to access in the Canadian publishing industry, and the history of middlebrow periodicals. Her work can be found in various journals including Participations, Modernism/modernity Print+, the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, and Studies in Canadian Literature; she is also the co-editor of the book Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Bookhug 2018). Hannah is the co-creator of Witch, Please, a feminist podcast on the Harry Potter world, and the creator of the weekly podcast Secret Feminist Agenda, which is currently undergoing an experimental peer review process with Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She is also the host of the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast*, an experimental collaborative research podcast created through the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership.
andrea bennett is a National Magazine Award–winning writer and editor. Their writing has been published by The Atlantic, the Globe and Mail, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Hazlitt, Vice, Reader’s Digest, Vogue Italia, Quill & Quire, and many other outlets. andrea’s first book of poetry, Canoodlers, came out with Nightwood Editions in 2014. Their Moon Travel travel guide to Montréal is now available, as is their guide to Québec City. Their first book of essays, Like a Boy but Not a Boy, is forthcoming with Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2020.
Katherine McLeod researches and teaches Canadian literature through sound, performance, and archives. Her recent publications include a chapters in the books Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics, Moving Archives (Wilfrid Laurier UP), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (MQUP), which she also co-edited with Jason Camlot.Currently, she is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Concordia University, where she researches CBC Radio recordings and where she is organizing SpokenWeb’s Ghost Reading Series. Follow the site she curates for Montreal readings at WherePoetsRead.ca and @poetsread.
Jen Sookfong Lee's books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award; The End of East, and Gentlemen of the Shade. Jen teaches writing at The Writers’ Studio with Simon Fraser University and co-hosts the podcast, Can’t Lit.
Episode Resources:
bennett, andrea. Excerpt from “The People's Poetry.” The essay appears in the book Like a Boy But Not A Boy: Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, fall 2019.
Camlot, Jason and Katherine McLeod. "SGW Poetry Remix" MP3 file, 12 Dec 2018.
MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc
MacEwen (a performance)." Resurfacing: Women Writing across Canada in the 1970s. Mount Allison University & Université de Moncton, 26-28 April 2018.
--- "Performing the Archive: A Remix." Performed with Jason Camlot. Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival, Montreal, 5 May 2019.
MacEwen, Gwendolyn. “Dark Pines Under Water.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHTMxvxNGc
--- Reading with Phyllis Webb at Sir George Williams University, Nov 18 1966. https://montreal.spokenweb.ca/sgw-poetry-readings/gwendolyn-macewen-at-sgwu-1966/
--- "Past and Future Ghosts." Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987.
McLeod, Katherine. "(Un)Covering the Mirror: Performative Reflections in Linda Griffiths’s Alien Creature: A Visitation from Gwendolyn MacEwen and Wendy Lill’s The Occupation of Heather Rose." Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice. Eds. Sherrill Grace and Jerry Wasserman (Talon, 2006). 89-104.
--- "An Archival Remix" Performance by Katherine McLeod and Emily Murphy. Toronto: Modernist Studies Association, 18 Oct 2019.
Music:
“Flamenco Rhythm” by Sunsearcher: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Sunsearcher
"Soothe", “At Our Best Alone,” “A Certain Lightness,” “The Bus At Dawn,” “Slow Slow Sky” all from https://www.sessions.blue/
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/news/kaie-kellough-the-words-music-show/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
You can find the full-length recording of the bill bissett clip and more episodes from SoundBox Signals at soundbox.ok.ubc.ca.
For the shout-outs mentioned at the end of this episode, please visit the links below:
bill bissett's Breth (Talonbooks):
https://talonbooks.com/books/breth
bill bissett on PennSound:
https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/bissett.php
Cut and Run Podcast by Brady Marks:
http://furiousgreencloud.com/wordpress/blog/author/furiousgreencloud/
Sarah Tolmie's The Art of Dying (MQUP):
https://www.mqup.ca/art-of-dying--the-products-9780773552715.php
Ian Ferrier at the Inspired Word Cafe:
http://www.inspiredwordcafe.com/
Each month on alternate fortnights (that's every second week following the monthly spokenweb podcast episode) - join Hannah McGregor, and minisode host and curator Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb's Audio of Month mini series.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/news/maxine-gadd-reading-shore-animals-with-improvised-flute-by-richard-sommer/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
With presentations from Lucia Lorenzi, Milena Droumeva, Brady Marks, and Blake Nemec (moderated by Hannah McGregor) the panel explores how we understand sound, noise, voice, silence, and voiceless-ness when they intersect with gender, feminism, and the expected, mandated, or performative aspects of speech. Including a new interview with Dr. Milena Droumeva that reflects on her presentation, project and sonification, Episode 5: “Revisiting ‘Feminist Noise, Silence, and Refusal’” returns to the 2019 SpokenWeb Symposium as Kate invites us to listen toward a new decade of feminist sound politics.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.
To find out more about Spokenweb and our next Symposium in 2020, visit: spokenweb.ca. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers: Kate Moffatt, Michelle Levy
Podcast Project Manager: Stacey Copeland
Show Host: Hannah McGregor
Resources:
The program for the SpokenWeb Sound Institute 2019 can be found here (https://spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Spokenweb-SSI-Program-2019.pdf)
The program for the SpokenWeb Symposium 2019: Resonant Practices in Communities of Sound can be found here (https://spokenweb.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/SpokenWeb-Symposium-2019-Programme.pdf).
SpokenWeb's Audio of The Month: ‘mini’ stories about how literature sounds.
An extension of Katherine's audio-of-the-week series at spokenweb.ca, Katherine brings her favorite audio each month to the spokenweb podcast - so if you love what you hear, make sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more.
https://spokenweb.ca/category/audio-of-the-week/
Produced by: Katherine McLeod, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Featured in this month's episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer.
This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).
All the music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.
Episode producer: Myra Bloom is Assistant Professor of Canadian literature at York University-Glendon campus. She is currently writing a book called Evasive Maneuvers about Canadian women’s confessional writing, including Elizabeth Smart.
Resources:
Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart - English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.
MUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.
SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from (and created using) Canadian Literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca . If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
Episode Producers:
SpokenWeb UBC Okanagan AMP Lab Team with audio production by Nour Sallam and Craig Carpenter. Keep up to date with their current projects and events at amplab.ok.ubc.ca.
Resources:
Tallman, Warren. "[Warren Tallman reading Walt Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry']." N.d. Home recording. Reel-to-reel tape. SpokenWeb at UBC Okanagan, SoundBox Collection, Warren Tallman fonds, 2012.002.005.
To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on itunes, spotify, or wherever you may listen. Join us every first monday of the month for a brand new episode from the SpokenWeb Canada network. If you love us, let us know! Rate us and leave a comment on iTunes or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.
References
Camlot, Jason. Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings. Stanford Universiy Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23893
---. "Historicist Audio Forensics: The Archive of Voices as Repository of Material and Conceptual Artefacts." 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 21 (2015). https://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/articles/10.16995/ntn.744/
Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Ed. Jussi Parikka. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Feaster, Patrick. "Framing the Mechanical Voice: Generic Conventions of Early Sound Recording."
Folklore Forum 32 (2001): 57-102.
Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era.
Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999.
Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Rubery, Matthew. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2016.
Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke
UP, 2003.
UCSB Cylinder Audio Archive, http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/
SpokenWeb is a literary research network, dedicated to studying literature through sound. But how did this project begin? What kinds of literary recordings inspired it and where were they found? And what happened next in order for these recordings to be heard? For this inaugural episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Katherine McLeod seeks to answer these questions by speaking with SpokenWeb researchers Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong. All of their stories involve a deep interest in literary audio recordings and all of their stories, or nearly all, start with a box of tapes... Find out more at https://spokenweb.ca/
Guests: Jason Camlot, Annie Murray, Michael O’Driscoll, Roma Kail, Karis Shearer, and Deanna Fong
Host & Writer: Katherine McLeod
Producer: Cheryl Gladu
RESOURCES
Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed. Charles Bernstein. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Camlot, J., Swift, T. (eds) (2007) Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007)
Fong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. Gender, "Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts," No More Potlucks, online http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/
McKinnon, Donna. "A New Frontier of Literary Engagement: SpokenWeb’s network of digitized audio recordings brings new life to Canada’s literary heritage." https://www.ualberta.ca/arts/faculty-news/2018/august/a-new-frontier-of-literary-engagement
Morris, Adalaide, ed. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Murray, Annie and Jared Wiercinski. "Looking at Archival Sound: Enhancing the Listening Experience in a Spoken Word Archive." First Monday 17 (2012). https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3808/3197
Shearer, Karis. "Networks, Communities, Mentorships, Friendships: An SSI Reflection" http://amplab.ok.ubc.ca/index.php/2019/07/09/networks-and-communities-an-ssi-reflection/
Toppings, Earle. "Gwendolyn MacEwen." Accompanying Material by Earle Topping about Gwendolyn MacEwen. Earle Toppings Fonds. Victoria University Library (Toronto).
Urbancic, Ann, editor. Literary Titans Revisited: Earle Toppings Interviews with CanLit Poets and Writers of the Sixties. Ed. Ann Urbancic. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2017.
BIOS
Katherine McLeod is an affiliated researcher with SpokenWeb at Concordia University. After receiving her doctorate from the University of Toronto, she held a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship with TransCanada Institute (University of Guelph) and a SpokenWeb post-doctoral fellowship at Concordia University. She has published on performance and Canadian literature, and her research focuses on broadcasts of poetry on CBC Radio. Most recently, she has co-edited with Jason Camlot, CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019). She tweets from @kathmcleod and curates a list of Montreal poetry readings at http://wherepoetsread.ca/.
Cheryl Gladu is a podcast producer with SpokenWeb. She is an interdisciplinary Phd Candidate at Concordia University, studying collaborative communities in both the design and business schools. She first got involved in podcasting through a media project for Future Earth called the Worlds We Want. You can learn about her broad range of seemingly unrelated interests at cgladu.com.
*
Jason Camlot is the principal investigator and director of The SpokenWeb, a SSHRC-funded partnership that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. Camlot's critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford, 2019), Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic (Routledge, 2008), and the co-edited collections CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (McGill-Queen's UP, 2019) and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century (Véhicule, 2007). He is also the author of four collections of poetry, Attention All Typewriters, The Animal Library, The Debaucher, and What the World Said. He is a professor in the Department of English at Concordia University in Montreal.
Deanna Fong recently defended her PhD in English at Simon Fraser University, where her research focuses on the intersections of auditory media, event theory, literary communities, and affective labour. With Ryan Fitzpatrick and Janey Dodd, she co-directs the audio/multimedia archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah, and has done substantial cataloguing and critical work on the audio archives of Japanese-Canadian poet and painter Roy Kiyooka. She has been the first Student Representative on the SpokenWeb Governing Board and has participated on SpokenWeb's Metadata Task Force. She is also cataloguing the "Readings in B.C." collection of audio recordings at SFU Special Collections.
Roma Kail is the Head of Reader Services at Victoria University Library in the University of Toronto. She participates in and manages operations and services related to reference, research, instruction, access and circulation. Her current research and coursework involves completion of a certificate in Archives and Records Management from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information.
Annie Murray is Associate University Librarian for Archives and Special Collections at the University of Calgary, where she oversees The Canadian Architectural Archives, Special Collections, the University of Calgary Archives and the Library and Archives at the Military Museums. She is a longtime co-applicant in the Spokenweb project to develop web-based interfaces for the exploration of digitized literary audio recordings. She is currently overseeing the preservation of the EMI Music Canada Archive, with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Michael O'Driscoll is a Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, and Vice-Dean in the Faculty of Arts. He is a Governing Board Member and lead U of Alberta Researcher for the SpokenWeb SSHRC Partnership Grant.
Karis Shearer, Director of the AMP Lab and the SoundBox Collection, is an associate professor at UBC’s Okanagan campus in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. She leads SpokenWeb’s Pedagogy Task Force and contributes expertise in the areas of Canadian poetry, performance, pedagogy, and media culture.
Say hello to SpokenWeb host Hannah Mcgregor as we kick off our brand new series - The SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. Find out more at https://spokenweb.ca/