The SpokenWeb Podcast

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.