Pivot Readings at the Press Club

It’s March, and Pivot’s coming in like a lion with readings from Rob Benvie, Lynn McClory, and Angela Szczepaniak. Come revel and roar in the bluster of new poetry and prose at the Press Club!

Rob Benvie is from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and currently lives in Montreal. He has recorded and performed with many musical endeavours, including the rock bands Thrush Hermit, Camouflage Nights and The Dears. He is the author of the novels Safety of War and Maintenance, both from Coach House. Maintenance is a apocalyptic journey to the suburbs of 1999, complete with ex-volleyball champs, Empowerment Expos, Robitussin binges and the Do It Dynamic! self-improvement campaign. But it’s more than just that: it’s a look at a suburban family falling apart, people losing their grip on what it means to live in a world that exists in a continual state of conflict. The National Post, who recently compared the book to works by Coupland, DeLillo and Franzen, said, ‘There is a lively use of language and a well-handled scheme of metaphors throughout … but this is also a novel with a real sting in its tail.”

Lynn McClory attended UWO and graduated with a BA in English from the University of Toronto in the dark ages. She was a member of the collectively managed SCM Book Room in Toronto for close to a decade, later founded a sales agency for university publishers and travelled Canada to its many bookstores twice a year for twenty years, when bookstores were a force for theory and literature in Canada. Since winding down her job in 2007, she spends more hours reading than writing, is a perpetual student at Margaret Christakos’ Influency: A Toronto Poetry Salon and has participated in many workshops at the Toronto New School of Writing where she learned more ways to steal than she had imagined. She has had poems published in BafterC poetry magazine, Ars Medica, industrial sabatoge, the Quarry Press anthology, Garden Variety, online with blissfultimes.ca, and writes poetics for the Influency online magazine. Lynn is a member of the Influency magazine Editorial Group.

Angela Szczepaniak is doctoral candidate at the University at Buffalo, where she is neck-deep in a dissertation on innovative poetry, detective fiction, and comic books. Her first book is a novel-in-poems, called Unisex Love Poems. In addition to publishing poetry and critical essays, she recently participated in a hygiene themed poetry-art project with LOCCAL, and as a result her visual poetry can be found on placards in some of the finest public restrooms in Seattle. At the moment, she lives in Toronto, where she thinks about being ravaged by time’s withered claw. Her latest book is The QWERTY Institute of Cosmetic Typographical Enhancements from BookThug, a collection of “visual fictions” that gives insight into the secret lives of letters.

Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Rob Benvie, Lynn McClory, and Angela Szczepaniak
Wednesday, March 7
850 Dundas Street West
8 PM
PWYC
Hosted by Sachiko Murakami

Pivot brings you the cure for your post-Valentine sugar-crash blues: join us February 22nd for a sweet evening of readings by Toronto darlings Jennifer LoveGrove, David Seymour, and Nathan Whitlock. No one stole your heart this year? Don’t worry, baby: at Pivot we always choo-choo-choose you.

Jennifer LoveGrove is the author of poetry collections The Dagger Between Her Teeth (ECW Press) and I Should Never Have Fired the Sentinel (ECW Press). She has recently completed a novel and is currently at work on a new manuscript of poetry. Her writing has been published widely, most recently in THIS Magazine, Taddle Creek and The Puritan Magazine. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the K. M. Hunter Artist Award for Literature. For several years, she produced and hosted the literary radio show “In Other Words” on CKLN 88.1FM, and for a decade, she edited and published the literary zine dig. Currently, she divides her time between downtown Toronto and rural Haliburton, and can be found online at jenniferlovegrove.com

David Seymour’s first book, Inter Alia (Brick Books), was short-listed for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Some of the poems in Inter Alia were used as lyrics by the roots-rock band The Warped 45s for their debut album 10 Day Poem for Saskatchewan. Recently his poetry was short-listed for the 2009 CBC Literary Award, and thrice now has been included in the Anthology of Best Canadian Poetry. David’s second book, For Display Purposes Only, will be released by Coach House in 2013. He currently lives in Toronto where he works in the film industry.

Nathan Whitlock is the author of A Week of This: a novel in seven days (ECW Press). His fiction, reviews, essays and journalism have appeared in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Maisonneuve, Toro, Geist, Fashion, Quill & Quire and elsewhere. He is currently the culture editor for Toronto Life magazine.

Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Jennifer LoveGrove, David Seymour, and Nathan Whitlock
Wednesday, February 22
8 PM
850 Dundas Street West
PWYC
Hosted by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

It’s true: February is the coolest month here at Pivot, and we’re bringing in the ladies to prove it! All the way from Manitoba, prairie girl poet Meira Cook (A Walker in the City) joins Essex County sweetheart and novelist Dani Couture (Algoma) and from North-of-Algoma, poet Sarah Pinder (Cutting Room). Yes yes yes, these ladies all live in cities and what does geography have to do with it? Never mind. I had to get your attention somehow. See you on the 8th!

Meira Cook’s  poetry collections include A Fine Grammar of Bones (Turnstone 1993), Toward A Catalogue of Falling (Brick 1996), Slovenly Love (Brick 2003), and A Walker in the City (Brick 2011).  She has published a book of literary criticism, Writing Lovers: Reading Canadian Love Poetry by Women (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), and edited and introduced a selection of Don McKay’s poetry entitled Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006).  Her poetry won first place in the CBC Literary Awards in 2007, has been published in The Best Canadian Poetry of 2008, and has been featured in Winnipeg Transit’s “Poetry in Motion” program.  She has been the Poetry Editor of Prairie Fire magazine and teaches creative writing classes at the University of Manitoba.  http://www.brickbooks.ca/?page_id=3&bookid=231

Dani Couture is the author of two collections of poetry: GOOD MEAT (Pedlar Press, 2006) and SWEET (Pedlar Press, 2010). SWEET was named one of Maisy’s Best Books of 2010 by Maisonneuve Magazine, was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and won the ReLit Award for poetry. In 2011, Dani also received an Honour of Distinction from The Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Grant.  Her debut novel, ALGOMA, was published in fall 2011 by Invisible Publishing.

Sarah Pinder lives in Toronto. A zine maker of more than a decade, her work has been shortlisted for the Expozine Small Press Awards and NOW Magazine’s Best of Toronto. You can find her writing in the anthology She’s Shameless, journals like Room, Canadian Woman Studies and invisible city, and Montreal’s Distroboto art vending machines. Her book Cutting Room is forthcoming with Coach House Press, in fall 2012.   http://bitsofstring.wordpress.com/

Pivot Readings at the Press Club
Featuring Meira Cook, Dani Couture, and Sarah Pinder
Wednesday, February 8
8 PM
850 Dundas Street West
PWYC
Hosted by Elisabeth de Mariaffi