The new Saskatchewan Poet Laureate

...has been announced.

After spending the bulk

...of yesterday on the more practical matters related to writing, I cuddled up with a novel. It's so easy to slip into the worlds created by Guy Gavriel Kay. He's one of my favourite authors. I had a hard time putting the book down. I can't remember the last time I stayed up that late.

Tonight

...I checked out the readings on AuthorsAloud.

Explore

...the reworking of orally-derived poetry and myth amongst philosophers in the Hellenistic age over at Oral Tradition. "The Poem Performed" and "The How of Literature" are among the many articles that caught my eye.

Well

...I was away again. This time I came home with books by Robert Currie and Marie Elyse St. George.

On Sunday we spent some time at the Eco-Centre in Craik. It's lovely and the food is excellent. Their cinnamon buns are gigantic.

Can someone recommend some good restaurants in Saskatoon? By good I mean good food, good service, reasonable prices, and a great dessert menu.

Saskatoon is

...a beautiful city, even more beautiful in the rain. We spent the weekend there and it rained the whole time. It was wonderful. On Saturday night we went to a fantastic thesis celebration. There we met some great people. I'm sure I ate my weight in cake. The cheesecake was unbelievable. It was by far the best cheesecake I've ever inhaled. I thought the celebration would be the perfect time to return the book I'd borrowed from her way back when. I even put it in a gift bag.

After that we zipped over to the Brick Books and JackPine Press co-launch. It was a full house. I now own When Earth Leaps Up by Anne Szumigalski and the marvelous new chapbooks by Don Domanski and Holly Luhning. On the way home the next day, I read Don Domanski's chapbook aloud. Then I read it again. And again.
It's amazing.

It's nice to see that

...my inconsistent system of annotation is not unusual. These days I have no system. I just go with whatever strikes me. At one time I used to underline with ink and employ highlighters of various colours. My copy of Criticism: Major Statements is an embarrassingly gaudy mess of blue, green and yellow, and to top it off, some of the yellow passages are underlined with red ink. Yikes. When I studied Mircea Eliade's The Sacred & The Profane, I was in my green phase. The occasional red ink asterisk appears on the dog-eared pages. Very cute asterisks, though. Then there's Northrop Frye's The Educated Imagination. Surely he'd roll over in his grave if he could see what I've done to that little book. My attempts at highlighter colour mixing were rather unsuccessful. The most important passages are so hideous I can barely stand to look at the page. And then there's The Cunning Man, a novel by Robertson Davies. I failed to mark some passages at the time, but after 10 years their essence still haunts me. I've flipped through the 469 pages a number of times, wanting to pull out a quote that applied to a conversation, but that didn't work. I'll have to read the book again.

No doubt

...my manuscript will be every bit as gigantic as this one. The Word Count function really should have an alarm that sounds when you're exceeding the word limit. No, make that a siren. Ya, just to be on the safe side, I think Word should have a little police officer who pops up and pulls you over if you exceed 100,000 words. If you don't stop, the officer would lay down a spike belt. In your chair.

By the way, my cat prefers manuscripts to be free of mousie toys. They get in the way. I think she believes she's a multipurpose tool. Paper shredder and hole punch. (Link found on Maud.)

Procrastination

...gets the better of me sometimes. It's at its worst just before I enter into a long spell of writing or painting. I suppose it's just part of the process, something I should be used to after all these years. During this phase, part of me struggles to harness the restlessness and put it to good use while the more reasonable part of me sits back as if on a hammock on a windy day. Several years back I was given a cartoon from the paper by someone who knows my process all too well. I have it posted in front of me, the newsprint yellowed. The cartoon reminds me that I'm not alone in this, but it does nothing to ease the relentless on-tiptoes-just-about-to-dive-in excitement.

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I'd like to invite

...a few of you over for coffee and cake. I want to read you a poem. It's more of a hat, really. Every time I go back into it, I pull a new poem out by the ears. I suppose I should just let it be a hat. Last night I chatted with another poet about it. The poet came up with a cute title for the work, a title I might just play with.

After a day lost in the never-ending poem, I'll turn to The Other Side of Eden. What a fantastic book.

Deceit

...and self-deception.

A great title

...sets the tone right off the bat. Blogs titles prove especially tricky. I've been looking forward to this wonderfully titled blog for quite some time.

Ditches

...kept me occupied over the weekend. My project is coming along. This morning as I was clicking through the hundreds of images and thinking about related writing, I felt a tap on my shoulder. Three taps. I jumped, screamed and spun my chair around only to discover an equally startled cat. I suspect the cat was looking for an invitation to jump on my back. Either that or my muse paid a visit and I frightened him off. If I had a muse, I'm sure he'd be just like Gazoo from the Flintstones. That would explain everything.