Tag Archives: St Catharine’s

Spring! And Conferences are popping up all over!

After a long and difficult winter, it’s finally spring: conference season. While academic conferences run year ‘round, there’s an overabundance of them when the winter term ends and before everyone takes off to wherever for research and/or down-time. I’d submitted abstracts for two, completely forgetting about a third conference that had been postponed from last year. So having done no conferences last year, I did three in three weeks—which is kind of nuts, but sort of fun too.DSC_0240

The Canadian Society for the Study of Comics held its third annual conference on May 9-10 in Toronto in conjunction with the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. I’d submitted a proposal on the medicalization of comic book superheroes, something I’m considering expanding towards post-doc research. I thought it might be a little off-side for them, but they went for it. I was hoping to get input from people who’ve read more comics than I have, and I wasn’t disappointed. Having taken lots of notes, however, I’ve set that work aside for now to focus on the dissertation. Can’t do a post-doc until I’ve finished the doc!

From May 20-22, I attended an independent conference held at Humber in Toronto. I’d never been to their campus and was really impressed with both its buildings and its green space. In November 2012, I’d attended a conference sponsored by the International Network for Alternative Academia in Montreal. Unfortunately, it was just days after Hurricane Sandy had decimated the north-eastern seaboard and wreaked havoc on air transportation in North America. About half the delegates weren’t able to come, and some of them spent the conference stranded in various airports. This time, in Toronto, with no major catastrophes, attendance was, surprisingly, almost as poor. A bit disappointing. What I really like about these conferences is that they’re interdisciplinary and international; we had scholars in English, philosophy, communication and linguistics, and professionals from psychiatry, writing, activism and acting (I’ve probably missed a few). People came from Ireland, Japan, Spain, the US and Canada (again, I’ve probably missed a few). The other thing I like is that although the papers presented are a jumping off point, the real event is the dialogue between attendees. There’s something exhilarating about a dozen or so intelligent people sitting around a table hashing out some thorny abstract debate. Supporting the conference’s theme of Creating Characters, Inventing Lives, I presented a paper called Embodying Story-Life examining narrative from the seemingly very different perspectives of patient narrative (drawing on work by Arthur Frank) and Native narrative (drawing on work by Thomas King). While there was some interesting discussion, this also brought me back closer to my dissertation.DSC_0239

Yesterday, I took a day-trip to Brock University in St Catharines which was this year’s host for Congress. With many of the major roads in and out of Toronto under repair and causing massive delays, I decided to take the train, which I prefer anyway. VIA proved an expensive option and had limited scheduling for this trip, so I took the GO train. I got out of the city without issue and had a smooth ride to Burlington, where I transferred to the GO bus, well beyond Toronto’s stagnant traffic. The problem is that the GO bus doesn’t arrive at the main terminal in downtown St Catharines, but stops at Fairview Mall. To get from there to Brock via transit requires two city buses and another 30-40 minutes. After two hours in transit already, I splurged on a cab; it’s a short but expensive ride. After arriving on campus, I discovered that I’d worn the wrong shoes. One doesn’t just arrive at Congress; one has to register… on the far side of campus. This was where the throng was gathered. Hot and cold running academics wandered the corridors and great hall, some, like me, looking lost, others hooking up with comrades they only see once a year.

I confess that when I first heard academics talk about Congress with breathy excitement, it sounded like an orgy—and in a way it is. Congress is a veritable smorgasbord of intellectual delights. Organized by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, aka SSHRC, Congress brings together 75 Canadian associations and over 8,000 delegates in an annual eight-day interdisciplinary intellectual feeding frenzy. Keynotes, meetings and panels make up the conference’s +2,500 events and +5,000 presentations. Clearly, it was a very different experience from the previous weeks’ more intimate conferences. Although it’s a Canadian academic mainstay, I confess that this is the first time I’ve attended. The numbers make it sound much more daunting than it is in practice, as each organization breaks off into its own area for panels and presentations.

The Canadian Communication Association conference I was part of offered six concurrent sessions, so we ended up with about a dozen people in the audience. What was really exciting was presenting with two of my colleagues from Communication and Culture, Sara Martel and Yukari Seko. It made sense, as we’re all working around imaging related to health, but in very different ways. As I think we’d all intuited when writing the panel abstract for Health Beyond the Visible Surface: Visuality, Technology, Power, our unique work fits together really well. Someone had suggested to me that co-presenting with colleagues would take the pressure off, but I actually felt the opposite. When I was writing Data Ghosts Haunt the Living: Medical Imaging’s “Productive Encounters with Corpses” I was conscious of a sense of responsibility towards the panel, not just myself. Although we had some idea of each others’ dissertation research, engaging with it in twenty-minute presentations clarified how much commonality and divergence our work has. I’m hopeful that we’ll find something more to do with this work together.

I didn’t give myself much opportunity to explore Congress—maybe next time. Someone suggested doing multiple presentations for different organizations at Congress to rack up professional development activities on burgeoning academic curriculum vitas, but that just sounds exhausting to me. I’d want to have everything prepared well in advance. We’ll see what next year brings.

So now I’m back home. Tired, fighting allergies, but enjoying the increased sun and heat. No more conferences on the books for the moment. I won’t be teaching again until late June, and even then it’s only one course. I’m looking forward to having time to focus on the dissertation. I feel much better when I’m actively working on it. Pushing to complete the writing this summer. We’ll see how that goes.DSC_0096

© Catherine Jenkins 2014 all rights reserved

Old Friends and New Transit

This is my update for Marpril (March and April), even if that does sound like an Agatha Christie heroine. It was an overly busy winter and between an out-of-town reading, researching and writing two articles for peer review, teaching five classes—oh, and trying to write my PhD dissertation—I kind of ran out of time to post anything in March. So this post, on the last day of April, will have to do double duty.

On March 10, I was in Ottawa. I was invited to read at the Carleton University Art Gallery for an event celebrating the work of Dennis Tourbin. I was flown in, put up at a hotel overnight, flown home, and paid a reading fee. Poets don’t usually get treated like that. I felt like a rock star.

The flight left from the Toronto island airport. Calculating transit and the half-hour buffer requested by the airline, I figured that leaving 90 minutes to travel the maybe 40 minutes to the airport, was ample. The subway, which had been closed for signal upgrades the previous weekend (I was travelling on a Monday morning) moved painfully slowly down the University line. I waited 20 minutes for the airport shuttle that runs every 15 minutes. I waited 15 minutes for the airport ferry. I arrived at the island airport as my flight was gunning down the runway. For the first time in my life, I actually missed a flight. They readily re-booked me, and another passenger, on the next flight to Ottawa. But seriously, there’s no way it should take 90 minutes to get from the Annex to the island. That’s longer than it takes me to get to Pearson International airport. It just shows how truly broken Toronto transit is.

My old friend Michael Dennis picked me up in Ottawa. When I hadn’t arrived as expected, he wondered if we’d missed each other, if we’d failed to recognize each other after so many years. But in fact, we recognized each other instantly. He drove me back to Kirsti and his house where we spent the afternoon talking. Their house is full of art. It made me realize that I need to get the art back up on my walls. I took it down to repaint a couple of years ago and still haven’t gotten around to putting most of it back up. I realize that this is part of why I feel somewhat dislocated these days. We picked up Kirsti from work and went for dinner, then on to the main event.

More than fifty people packed into a gallery full of Dennis’s work. I got to see folks I hadn’t seen in decades, folks from Ottawa and from Peterborough too. There was John and Terri and Billy the K, Grant and Rob, Gilles and Larry. I was only in Ottawa overnight, so wasn’t able to see Peter or Sandra or Stuart, but so happy to see the people I did see.

I hadn’t done a reading in a while, and it felt good. Mostly, I read Dennis’s work, adding a couple of my own poems about his death. Being there, reading that work, to a largely familiar audience, was incredibly moving. I was also humbled that Nadia, Dennis’s wife, enjoyed what I did and said that my reading of Dennis’s work gave her chills. That got me thinking about how we are, in sometimes unexpected ways, products of our mentors. I learned cadence and a lot more from Dennis, embodied it without realizing. I felt privileged to be part of this event. Thankful to Dennis for pulling us all together once again; he always did have that kind of magnetism, that light, that pulled people together, that ignited the room with joy. In addition to the artwork and the words, he also left behind a strong sense of community. Thank you.

Waiting to hear about the two articles I submitted. Just received proof pages for a peer-reviewed book chapter being published this fall. More on those happenings as news comes available. As of this morning, I’ve finished this term’s classes, grades are in, and I can relax about teaching for a while. I’m presenting at three conferences in May, two in Toronto and one a day-trip to St Catharines. Mostly, I’ll refocus on the dissertation over the next few months. Some events in the offing for late summer, but if I tell you now, it’ll spoil the fun.

© Catherine Jenkins 2014 all rights reserved

Ode to a Mentor

I met Dennis Tourbin when I was nine years old. He and his then-wife, artist Denise Ireland, bought S.S. No. 8, the schoolhouse my Mum had attended, and when the For Sale sign came down, my mother had to see who’d moved into “her” schoolhouse. My parents liked this young artist couple, and regularly stopped en route to the cottage to visit. My parents had met each other at an Arts and Letters Club art class and my recently retired Dad was interested in the Bohemian lifestyle he’d never actually tried. He even grew a goatee. Those early days weren’t easy for Dennis and Denise; to make ends meet, she worked at a dress shop in Brookdale Plaza and Dennis pumped gas.

I remember Dennis coming to the cottage. My nine-year-old self trying to impress the adults with my best Jacques Cousteau imitation; snorkelling for hours, looking for crayfish under rocks in the shallow water, while the grownups talked on shore, maybe over a beer. Years later, Dennis told that he thought I was a really weird kid; I’m not sure that opinion ever changed. I knew by age ten that I was a writer. Although the solemn announcement to my family at age twelve drew snorts of derision, Dennis, this skinny guy who wore granny glasses and loud ties, took me seriously. He published my earliest work, and displayed numerous poems of mine in the Poetry Box outside Sandy’s Bookstore on Charlotte Street. In 1974, Dennis co-founded Artspace, along with David Bierk, John Moffat and others, still a going concern in downtown Peterborough.

As a teenager, I typed Dennis’s manuscripts from handwritten notes, learning more than I realized at the time. Once I could drive, I’d stop by the schoolhouse to talk and see new paintings and listen to stories. In 1982, he was artist-in-residence at the Canada Council’s Paris studio, and returned with watercolour collages, inspiration for the painted play Paris la Nuit, and some wild tales. I was dealing with my own crises involving parental health and, of course, boys. I remember attending a live reading of the complete Port Dalhousie Stories (Coach House Press, 1987) when it was recorded at Artspace. And I knew that it was a special night, one of those performances that stays in your flesh ever after. He was still living at the schoolhouse with Slim, a stray black cat, and Gladys, the Springer spaniel. With my Mum’s permission, he trapped minnows from the Bear Creek where it ran through her property, to bait bigger fish. He had a whole freezer full of fish—food that didn’t cost money. Dennis made it seem possible to live the artist’s life.

After marrying Nadia Laham late in 1983, Dennis moved from outside Peterborough to Ottawa, and I lost touch with him for a time. I lived in Ottawa briefly too, then an adult, but still caught up in my own drama and trying with difficulty to unpack difficult things that often defied words, or were, at least, beyond my writing skills at the time. I remember sitting in a pub on Bank St with Dennis and John Moffat and a few other artists (all guys, of course; it always seemed to work out that way) talking about art and people and drinking too much. At some point in the evening, Dennis would start the joke, “A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, why the long face?” And he’d crack up, assuring everyone at the table that it would get funnier as the night wore on and we drank more. I miss those nights, but know they’re gone.

In 1991, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa purchased and exhibited a major work by Dennis, La crise d’octobre: chronology. According to Nadia, Dennis said it was “like winning the Stanley Cup” and when the exhibition was displayed, he’d hang out at the gallery, listening to viewers’ reactions, their responses to part of Canada’s collective memory. I was still in Ottawa when Dennis’s long-awaited National Gallery show was cancelled for fears that its political content around the October Crisis would prove too provocative in the environment of the 1995 Quebec referendum. It was a devastating moment to watch, when an artist comes so close to such an important show, at such a pivotal historical moment, and then it’s snatched away. It was a lesson in the volatility of art and politics; be careful what you say and when. Later, in 1997, La crise d’octobre: chronology was part of a National Gallery show that toured across Canada.

As I was leaving Ottawa, Black Squirrel Press offered to publish a chapbook of my work, the first time a collection of my poems would be wrapped in covers. submerge was published in 1997 and I asked Dennis to write the introduction. He wrote that it was the work of “a desperate voice searching for meaning” and also that it was a “book about the future.” But I’ll never forget what he asked me: “Why isn’t this a full book?” It was the moment that I knew I’d arrived. Dennis, my creative mentor, who’d watched me grow from this weird little kid snorkelling in the shallows, into someone who’d captured and developed her own voice, had identified me as a book-worthy writer. And although I’d known quietly for years that I was writer, and even though I’d had work published in literary journals by then, the fact that Dennis thought I was a writer, that he knew I had whole books in me, was incredibly powerful. The writing became more real; it felt like a responsibility. Dennis had identified my true calling, had named it, and expected me to do something about it.

In 1996, I moved to Toronto. I meant to stay in touch, to phone, to write, but I didn’t: I was waiting to show Dennis the first full book. In early May 1998, I got a phone call from another old friend, poet Michael Dennis, who told me that Dennis had suffered a major stroke and was in the hospital. Michael phoned with updates for the few days until Dennis died. I felt utterly lost.

I attended the funeral at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Ottawa, and the memorial across the street at the National Gallery. Both were packed. I returned to Toronto and tried to behave as if everything was normal. It wasn’t. Some sense of foundation had been eroded. I stopped writing. Within a few weeks, I became very ill with a viral infection; I was sicker than I’ve ever been and it took a couple of years to fully recover.

This winter, I turned the same age Dennis was when he died. I feel like I’m just getting started. Since he died, I’ve had two books published by Insomniac Press: blood love & boomerangs and Swimming in the Ocean. I’ve just finished a new novel—Pairs & Artichoke Hearts will appear between covers in the foreseeable future—and have a few other manuscripts brewing. After several stressful years, I’m back on track and can actually sit and focus and complete book-length work.

Last fall, shows of Dennis’s work appeared in both Ottawa and St Catharines, thanks in large part, I’m sure, to Nadia’s persistent efforts. The Firestone Gallery in Ottawa displayed a series of Dennis’s collage-style watercolours in dialogue with cubist artists. I was glad I went, but it only opened wounds and left me wanting more. Similarly, the work at the Niagara Artists Centre (a gallery he co-founded in 1969), the complete painted set for Paris la Nuit, brought back memories, but wasn’t enough. It was the Language of Visual Poetry exhibit at Rodman Hall in St Catharines that brought some relief and joy; I stayed immersed for hours. I saw paintings I hadn’t seen since I was a kid. And I realize that it’s only now that I can begin to understand what Dennis was doing as a multidisciplinary artist; it’s as if I’m seeing these canvases and painted objects and performance videos for the first time, through adult eyes and with some temporal distance. In the photos and videos displayed with these exhibits, he looks so young.

Dennis’s creative life mediated visual art and literature; looked at television through the lens of theatre; painted canvases not just with collages of images, but with words—words referencing yesterday’s newspaper headlines torn off, abridged, and out of context; words that painted stories over a series of vibrant canvases that filled whole gallery walls. Images of brightly painted poems inspired by Picasso and Tom Thompson and McLuhan and Pop Art and the FLQ and the October Crisis and Paris and Buckhorn and Jackson’s cows and television and mass media and fishing streams and conversations and the landscape and the city and memory and meaning and wonder and truth and life.

Thanks to Nadia Laham for correcting some factual errors.

© Catherine Jenkins, 2013

Fall / Winter 2012

Oh my. It seems to have been another long while since I updated the website. I still blame the PhD, although I’ve added some teaching responsibilities as well, so in fairness, it is, perhaps, the combination. You will, I hope, be pleased to note that I have not been so remiss in my book writing. Pairs & Artichoke Hearts is nearing completion and I expect to begin marketing it to publishers by the spring. If you want to read more about it, please go to the Works in Progress page, and my entry into The Next Big Thing!

In spite of the favourable tone of last fall’s post, I’ve reverted. I’m still working on the apartment, and hope to get back to working on it more seriously over the winter holidays. And I’ve returned to my cave; I’m only venturing out when necessary. Looking forward to a long and productive hibernation as winter’s chill sets in. On a brighter note, I’ve returned to cooking, creating vast quantities of hearty soups and chili to stave off the cold. Even on nights when I don’t feel like cooking, I can go to the freezer and heat up a homemade meal, which is always pleasant (not to mention considerably less expensive and healthier than ordering take-out).

Life was moving along quite smoothly, and I was making excellent progress on my dissertation—right up until the rental car I was driving back from the cottage got T-boned by a cab in early September. I’m okay, but still on the mend, with the assistance of many alternative healthcare practitioners, lots of sleep, and gentle downtime. The cats, who were also in the car, were fine and recovered much more quickly than I have. This is an event I could have done very nicely without, an event which has caused considerable internal stir, not only physically, but also psychically. The police concurred that the accident was entirely the fault of the other driver, and yet I’m the one who suffered injury, and is still recovering more than three months later. The notion that I could be doing everything right, or at least nothing wrong, when the universe whaps me upside the head for no apparent reason, is very disconcerting.

Then events unfolded in Newtown, Connecticut these last few days. While this is one more in a long line of such tragedies, this particular one has affected me more than most, I think because it involves young children. They weren’t doing anything wrong either, and yet now they’re dead or traumatized. I know I’m looking for logic where none exists. My heart goes out to all those involved, the living and the dead. But yes, this rightly brings up the question of “the right to keep and bear arms,” the second amendment of the American Constitution, adopted, I would add, in 1791. I suspect that the gentlemen who saw to its passing would shudder at some of the ways it’s been twisted over time, as well as the “improvement” in killing power of today’s weapons over the single shot rifles they were thinking about. My mother grew up in a pioneering family towards the end of the pioneering era in the Canadian outback in the early 1900s. My grandfather had rifles; they were kept in a locked cabinet and were used to hunt food or euthanize injured or rabid animals. These are not problems most of us encounter in our comfy urban settings. In the US, to a lesser degree in Canada, and to a greater degree in some other countries, we have turned such weapons on each other. The statistics support that countries with fewer guns have many fewer firearms casualties. In spite of this, when mass shootings happen in the US, people buy even more guns. Where is this heading? Are people going to pack little Billy and Sally off to school with their respective Spiderman and Barbie lunchboxes, along with their flak jackets and handguns? Maybe a .22, something small enough for a child to handle, in black for him and pink for her? Maybe more guns isn’t the answer; maybe a more compassionate society that actually listens to the needs of its children, especially its young men and boys who are statistically more likely to respond with violence. The individual responsible for the devastating carnage in Newtown used his mother’s legally obtained and licensed assault rifle and handguns that she had purchased for self-defense. Seriously? The population of Newtown is about 27,000 and by all reports, it was a peaceable place to live and raise a family. If Americans living in such postcard perfect small towns feel so paranoid that they need military weapons in their homes, then the terrorists won a long time ago.

Maybe it’s just my perception, but it seems that all around the world, people have dug in on opposing sides and there’s no room for the middle path, no room for negotiation. I see this around the question of gun control versus the right to bear arms, but I also see it in the widening gap between rich and poor, between capitalists and environmentalists, and among fundamentalists of every stripe. It seems that if you’re not dug in on one side or the other, then you’re a victim, and no one wants to be a victim. I’m not sure when we became so ardently polarized. But it scares me and makes me very uneasy about the future.

Enough. The holidays are almost upon us. I’m done for the term. I need a break. I’m taking the train to an overnight getaway in Niagara Falls. En route, I’m stopping in St Catharine’s to visit two exhibits of work by Dennis Tourbin, my late friend and creative mentor. I’ve never seen the Falls in winter or at night, so I’m looking forward to that strange magic, in conjunction with all the kitschiness that is downtown Niagara Falls. I even snagged a Fall’s view room! Looking forward to the opportunity to reset, and hoping to begin the New Year with a new, more positive, outlook as I push towards the completion of a couple of major projects in 2013. Best wishes to all for a happy, healthy, and peaceful New Year.

© Catherine Jenkins 2012