The SpokenWeb Podcast

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