The Merchants of Green Coffee
2 Matilda Street.
for information: draftreadings@gmail.com
Copies of the Draft publication will be available at the reading.
Here’s a map to get to the venue.
We’re on hiatus for the summer and look forward to seeing you in season six.
The dates for the new season have already been set:
October 31, 2010
Day of the Dead Edition
November 28, 2010
March 6th, 2011
April 10th, 2011
May 15th, 2011
We’re proud and delighted to continue our association with the folks at Merchants of Green, our new venue: www.merchantsofgreencoffee.com
We look forward to seeing you then. In the meantime, watch this space for updates on who’s reading when, and who’s thinking what.
I made martinis the other day. It was one of those beautiful days over the Easter weekend that felt like a gift and duped me into believing that it was summer. And that I could still hold my liquor.
I don’t use a recipe for martinis, nor do I measure, much, so it’s really hard to describe these drinks, except that they involved a lot of rich, dark blackcurrant juice, and various other sliced fruits. I tasted them before I served them, of course, adding a little of this, a little of that, slopping juice all over myself and the kitchen. Some time later I managed to serve up a round of them.
But one sip in, I wasn’t satisfied. They were a little too acidic. They were missing something. And so I continued mixing the drinks in the very glasses of our guests: adding another splash of juice, a slice of tangerine. Demanding that they take sips to make room for the next ingredient. Quite drunk by this time, I had what seemed a profound revelation: I was revising my martinis – so to speak – after publication. Maybe, I thought, our friends might like to enjoy their flawed libations in peace. Maybe I could add the tangerine in the next, um, edition.
I’m fascinated with that boundary between draft and final version. More fascinated than I realised, I guess. Even when supposedly relaxing I find myself pushing and prodding at it, testing its limits. Trying to understand it better. This fascination taken on more dimensions lately, as I look forward to April’s edition of the Draft reading series, on the theme of rejection.
It’s very black-and-white, this business of rejection, acceptance. It divides process very starkly from product. Perhaps in a way that diminishes both. It introduces the idea of judgement. Yes, this is worthy of publication. No, that isn’t. And somebody else gets to make that judgement, somebody external to ourselves.
In order to put together the series, we have to become judges. There has to be some kind of process of acceptance and rejection.
“How do you choose your readers?” Somebody asked me the other day.
I didn’t know how to answer. I said: “We approach them, sometimes they approach us. We brainstorm at meetings … ”
“No, not how do you find them, how do you choose them?”
I can’t even remember how I answered, but I know I wasn’t satisfied with what I said, because I’m still mentally revising it. Here’s how the dialogue continues, in my head.
“It’s hard to say. It’s not a come-one, come-all process, exactly, but it’s done in a kind of sideways, not-completely-rational fashion. I for one am wary of taking on the role of judge. Of yeah or naysayer. Which is not a criticism of anyone who does take it on.”
“But some readers are good and some are not.”
“I know. But I think it’s good to have some not-so-good ones on board.”
“What? Knowingly, deliberately, you put people through the mysery of listening to a bad reading?”
“No of course not. It’s just that there should be a place where it’s okay to have a wild variety among the readers, not just of age and experience and background and subject matter and form but – well – quality. Whatever that is. There has to be a place where it’s okay to read badly. To be a bad writer, even.”
At this point, my imaginary listener walks away shaking his head, but I continue trying to work it out.
It’s not that I want to put people through the misery of hearing something bad or mediocre or hopelessly rough, it’s that I hope to cultivate an atmosphere where it really doesn’t matter. To extend the environment we need to create for ourselves as writers – that openness to whatever comes – one step further, and take it out in front of an audience. I want to invite audience members to listen, in the same spirit as the readers write.
This is the experience I hope people will have at Draft. Of course, I have no idea what anyone does bring to it. Maybe if we served martinis at readings I’d be shaking people by the shoulders and asking them at every moment what they think. But we don’t. And that might just be a good thing.
mm
Rejection ain’t what it used to be. For one thing, there’s a lot more of it going around. And editors often refer to “the present climate” as their reason for saying no.
For National Poetry Month, Draft celebrates rejection, as we take a sounding of our notorious “climate” in work, art and — oh yes! — love.
We’ve asked our authors this month to present work that’s been rejected, or work about rejection.
In the meantime, we’d like to hear how you’re responding to rejection these days.
Do you yield to despair, or do you feel more at ease with rejection because it’s so clearly “not about you?” Have you rewritten something that you might otherwise have thought was finished? Have you published online, or self-published? Have you found new satisfaction in writing workshops? Distributed your work door-to-door?
Details of the reading:
Sunday, April 18, 3 p.m.
The Merchants of Green Coffee
2 Matilda Street.
for information: draftreadings@gmail.com
Copies of the Draft publication will be available at the reading.
Here’s a map to get to the venue.
We’re grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the League of Canadian poets for their support of this reading.
Draft is a literary reading series held in the Riverdale/Leslieville area of Toronto.
Draft is a celebration of process. Readers are invited to try something new … anything they’ve always wanted to try but never had the opportunity. This might involve simply reading new work, but it might also include writing in a genre they’re not known for, collaborating with another writer or someone from a different discipline, incorporating elements from the other arts, reading upside down … anything and everything.
With between four and six authors reading for about fifteen minutes each, the readings are fast paced, and very eclectic. It is part of our mandate to host both experienced and emerging writers, and the readings go in alphabetical order: no feature readers as such.
Another component of the series is a publication called Draft. This is a numbered, limited edition available only on the day of the reading, with contributions by the readers. Contributors are invited to send rough drafts, collages, sketches, any kind of raw material, and this might include a quote from someone else’s work.
Here’s a list of all the authors who have read at Draft since our first reading, November 16, 2005.
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AfBcRXPF0rd8ZGRzOHhxbTNfMzV3cnBudHRjZg&hl=en
