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.

This ShortCuts presents the first of many conversations recorded at the University of Alberta as part of the 2023 SpokenWeb Symposium. Recorded on site by SpokenWeb’s Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood, the conversations often took place in spaces where the sonic environment of the symposium is audibly present. As always on ShortCuts, we begin with an audio clip from the archives, but this time the interviewees are the ones bringing an archival sound to the table. What will we hear? And where will these sounds take us? Join us for this ShortCuts Live in which a conversation with Jennifer Waits that takes us on a magical audio tour into the sounds of campus radio stations.  

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

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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/

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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.

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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.

Welcome to Season 5 of ShortCuts. 

ShortCuts started out on the podcast feed as a ‘minisode’ during our first season and it soon took on a life of its own. ShortCuts host and producer Katherine McLeod would take you on a deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives through a short ‘cut’ of audio. What did it feel like to hear archival audio? And how could we carefully unarchive its sound? These questions evolved into conversations, and thus emerged ShortCuts, Live! Last season featured Katherine’s conversations with Sarah Cipes, Faith Paré, Chelsea Miya, Nick Beaschesne, Ariel Kroon, and Annie Murray, along with a special episode produced by Ella Jando-Saul. And, this season, ShortCuts Live continues. It will be even more ‘live’ and in-person season than ever before, but before we go there, we do what we always do to start a new season. We perform what Shortuts sounds like in sound. Listen to this episode, listen to past episodes, and then stay tuned for our new season on The SpokenWeb Podcast feed. 

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.

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Host and Series Producer: Katherine McLeod

Supervising Producer: Maia Harris

Sound Designer: James Healey

Transcription: Zoe Mix

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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/

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 King is 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.

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.

Audio technology and audio data come in radically different forms. This month's episode, "Sounds of Data" is a follow up to Season Two’s “Drum Codes” and takes us deeper into the sonic world of data: from the sounds of surveillance to music of the stars to the wireless transmission of drum songs. Featuring interviews with sound artist and poet Oana Avasilichioaei, NASA sonification expert Matt Russo, and speech technologist Tunde Adegbola, each offering a unique perspective on the question: what does data sound like?

Special thanks to master drummer Peter Olálékan Adédòkun, whose music you hear in the first half of the episode. Original music and performance clips were also provided by Oana Avasilichioaei and by Matt Russo and his team at SYSTEM Sounds. Thank you, as well, to Sean Luyk, who co-produced the “Drum Codes” episode and played a significant role in conceptualising this follow-up.

Producer:

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.

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: 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.

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. 

*

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

*

AUDIO

Huang, Xiaoxuan.  “the way we hold our hands with nothing in them.”

*

RESOURCES

Read “Vibrate in Sympathy,” a poetic reflection on the 2022 SpokenWeb Symposium written by Xiaoxuan Huang, 

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/.

For most people, the “poetry reading” conjures stuffy intonation styles, cheap wine in plastic cups, and polite clapping. But for a riotous underground scene in 1980s Montreal, the poetry reading was the site for radical experimentation in artistic performance. At the Ultimatum Urban Poetry Festival, which first took place in 1985, literary all stars like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, John Giorno, and Herbert Huncke performed alongside obscure Quebecois poets, all while embracing new technologies and a punk ethos to push poetry to its limits. The event—which ultimately dissolved into financial near-ruin and briefly required one of its organizers to flee the country to escape his creditors—broke boundaries in poetry and performance that have hardly been paralleled since.

Until recently, recordings from the Ultimatum Festival were mostly kept in personal archives, and considered lost to many of the people who were part of the events. This episode recovers some of these recordings, made newly available for research since their digitization by a team at SpokenWeb. Featured alongside these recovered recordings are oral history interviews conducted by the “Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides” team—led by Principal Investigator Mathieu Aubin and researchers Ella Jando-Saul, Sophia Magliocca, Misha Solomon and Rowan Nancarrow—whose unique approach to archival study considers what it means to reconstruct a literary  event from the margins.

This episode was produced by Frances Grace Fyfe, with support from Mathieu Aubin and the Listening Queerly Across Generational Divides team. Mastering and original sound by Scott Girouard.

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. 

Aubin, Mathieu. "Listening Queerly for Queer Sonic Resonances in The Poetry Series at Sir George Williams University, 1966 to 1971." ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 46 no. 2, 2020, p. 85-100. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/esc.2020.a903543.

FURTHER READING / LISTENING
Lord, Alan. High Friends in Low Places. Guernica Press, 2021. 

Stanton, Victoria and Vince Tinguely. Impure, Reinventing the Word: The Theory, Practice and Oral history of Spoken Word in Montreal. Conundrum Press, 2001.

"What's that noise? Listening Queerly to the Ultimatum Festival." Produced by Ella Jando-Saul. The SpokenWeb Podcast, 19 June 2023, 

https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/whats-that-noise-listening-queerly-to-the-ultimatum-festival-archives/

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

As April is the month of poetry, we’ve taken a pause in this year’s ShortCuts Live conversations to listen back to one of the first episodes of ShortCuts, “ShortCuts 1.2 / Audio of the Month: Improvising at a Poetry Reading.” In the archival clip played in this episode, we hear Maxine Gadd pausing during a reading with Andreas Schroeder. She asks Andreas if he would like to improvise with her for the poem, “Shore Animals.” Listening now, we can ask: what does it feel like for archival listeners to encounter a moment of improvisation? It is a truly memorable moment of listening and worth returning to now in this fifth season of ShortCuts. 

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. 

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.