R aining in Vancouver but on the edge of leaving here, flying back to chilly Edmonton today, then tomorrow driving the Yellowhead to a metal festival in Calgary for the weekend. Hard to write on the road, I find. I need the routine of black coffee, domesticity, a view of the berm from my window where usually I’m standing by the stove working on my web collaboration with photographer Paul Saturley, a collection of “sliver fictions” called Food I Ate with Frank or poems for Truss on freaks. Bolstering such leaps are books like Geek Love, the diary of May Sarton’s 70th year, Canadian sonnets and Paglia’s Sexual Personae.
Anticipating November already when I set out on tour for Frenzy, a book of muse-quests from Anvil Press. I’ll take DOG with me too and continue drafting epistles to Joe Rosenblatt for our mad correspondence called Hoofprints in the Snow as I shuttle between trains and planes on the way to St John’s.
Sometimes it’s as if I exist in an urge to translate the whole world into language. Other days, there’s just this familiar weather, silence.
Catherine Owen is the co-author, with poet Joe Rosenblatt and photographer Karen Moe, of Dog.
