Great news today – just learned that White Shirt made the shortlist for the Lambda Literary Awards in the Lesbian Poetry category: “Finalists for the Lambda Literary Award were announced today by the Lambda Literary Foundation in Los Angeles. Books from major mainstream publishers and from academic presses, from both long-established and brand new LGBT […]
Author: Laurie MacFayden
The Gospel according to Kandinsky
Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want? The more frightening the world becomes … the more art becomes abstract. Of all the […]
Q the Arts … and hop on the bus, gus
The last couple of months have been bittersweet. My 2010 ended with the sad, sudden death of a dear artist friend. Around the same time, an injury to my dominant (painting+ writing) hand, followed by four weeks of a tenacious flu, forced me to endure a frustrating period of creative dormancy — but also allowed […]
Get your lust on
This ain’t no namby-pamby cinnamon hearts & chocolate flowers couples fest. This is Gypsy Valentine, an afternoon of smokin’ hot verse and bohemian music at Leva Cafe on Sunday, Feb. 13. Edmonton poets Mandie Lopatka, Kelly Shepherd and Amy Willans and I will start the fire, accompanied by the smouldering violin of Karen Donaldson Shepherd […]
quote of the week
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~ Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered […]
creativity quote of the day
When I’m asked about my work, I try to explain that there is no mystery involved. It is work. But things happen all the time that are unexpected, uncontrolled, unexplainable, even magical. The work prepares you for that moment. Suddenly the clouds roll in and the soft light you longed for appears. — Photographer Annie […]
Alberta Views tries White Shirt on for size
‘Laurie MacFayden’s White Shirt is the sort of garment that appeals and reveals far more than it conceals. Love, longing, loss and desire drip and swirl like the poet’s own Pollock-inspired cover art. Simple strategies work well here: the Tower-of-Babel adjectival pileup that describes one babelicious mouth in ‘dear life’ leads into other catalogues and […]
Never out of style
‘The white shirt is now an omnipresent part of the fashion scene, a wardrobe staple of the world’s most stylish women.’ Not to mention the world’s most stylish sax players… I’ll be reading from White Shirt on Saturday, Dec. 4 as part of the ‘Book Lover’s Christmas Sale’ at Stanley Milner Library (Centennial Room, lower […]