QWF Writes

Author: john@qwf.org

  • Spoken Word Is Dead by Ian Ferrier

    I started writing poems in my teens and I was one of the few who didn’t stop. I started doing spoken word in my late twenties.

    In between those times a lot of things about the Canadian poetry scene put me off my food: I couldn’t find one poet who had anything good to say about any other poet. It was weird … this ferocious competition and backbiting for what seemed like so few places at the pinnacle of Canadian poetry, and for what? What was at the pinnacle? Were there even readers? Was there any reward so worth it that poets would rip each other’s throats out to get it?

    The answer is a simple no, there wasn’t. The infighting was awful because the rewards were paid in that worst of currencies, perceived prestige. No one read poetry. The year I started doing spoken word the person who won our Governor General’s award for poetry had sold three hundred copies of her book.

    That statistic made it clear that if somebody didn’t do something, poetry would become a dead art.

    So in Montreal we started playing poems on the radio station CKUT 90.3 in the same way DJs played songs. Poets started appearing in the top 40, then in the top 10, and finally, less than three months into this project we called Wired on Words, a poet usurped the musicians and hit number one on college radio.

    Then along came this roar from the US of A: the poetry slam. Teams of poets from cities all around the US were competing onstage for the title of best performance poet of the year. Vince Tinguely wrote a column on spoken word for the Mirror weekly, and you could find poets working beside musicians in clubs around the city. The CBC ran nationwide spoken word contests.

    And the scene now? Straddling the end of March and the beginning of April this year we put on the 3rd annual Mile End Poets’ Festival, a five day festival featuring spoken word, music and dance by performers from across Canada. On the same weekend Kalmunity, a music ensemble that regularly features poets onstage, was celebrating the 10th anniversary of its performances in the city. The show I host and curate, the QWF’s Words and Music Show, has presented poets, musicians and performers every third Sunday of the month for over twelve years at Casa del Popolo.

    Lately, you can also catch the Throw Poetry Collective’s monthly slam down the street at Divan Orange.

    This fall twenty-four teams of five poets each from cities throughout Canada will be landing on our streets as Montreal hosts the annual Canadian Festival of Spoken Word in November.

    But the most unbelievable cross-cultural impact is on YouTube, where Shane Koyczan’s most recent poem To This Day has over eight million views. Tanya Davis, who performs at our Casa show, has another poem, How to Be Alone, that’s been seen and listened to over five million times.

    I got into spoken word because I saw it as a way to sidestep all the infighting over definitions of what’s poetry, and instead, to help create a bigger scene for poets.

    To a large extent this has happened. Fans of poetry are no longer just specialists in esoteric literature. (I love these specialists deeply. I love anyone who has a shelf full of poetry at home. You can invite me for dinner anytime.)

    And the poets themselves have found a much larger arena. One performed at the Olympic opening ceremonies in Vancouver. It’s just something we do here.

    Ian Ferrier is a Montreal poet and performer. He is the founder of Wired on Words, a spoken word record label, of the Mile End Poets’ Festival and of the online performance review litlive.ca. His most recent CD, with the band Pharmakon MTL, is entitled To Call Out in the Night. You can hear it at CBC Music. You can watch him perform on YouTube or in Montreal’s One Man Band Festival on May 26th.

  • Where We Meet: The QWF at 15 by Claire Holden Rothman

    Where We Meet: The QWF at 15 by Claire Holden Rothman

    Writer Frances Brandow and I met in 2003 for coffee at the Brûlerie near the Université de Montréal, where one of her daughters was studying. She was small, with fading auburn hair and eyes the colour of cornflowers. Scottish looks, which surprised me because she lived in the Beauce region of Quebec.

    We talked for two hours. About her short stories, and, as we grew comfortable, about her life. She was born in southern Ontario, where, one summer in her teens, she met a guy from Quebec. When she followed him back to his hometown soon afterward, she spoke only English. The winter I met her, some twenty years later, she was working as a translator. Apart from her fiction, her whole life was French.

    Most of us writing in English in Quebec aren’t as isolated as Frances. In Montreal proper, around 19 percent of the population speaks English at home. Sizeable pockets of English speakers reside in the Townships and in western Quebec. But writers tend to be solitary. Often we need to be coaxed from our lairs.

    And this is the genius of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. For fifteen years, it has been coaxing us non-stop into building a local English-language literary community. The writer from the Beauce was an early beneficiary, receiving help on a linked story collection the year the QWF mentorship program came into existence.

    Imagine, for a moment, life without the QWF. In the mid-eighties, when I was trying to figure out how to make it as a writer, guidance was hard to find. I was working in an office by day and writing nights and weekends. Concordia University was the only place in Montreal offering English writing workshops, so that was where I went. Not for a degree, particularly. For community.

    The QWF was born in the spring of 1998 out of the merger of QSPELL and FEWQ, two pre-existing groups promoting Quebec English-language literature and writers, respectively. It’s an astonishing success story. Currently, the QWF has around six hundred members. Every year more people join, and its activities keep pace. Writing workshops are the most popular, bolstering community and helping the established local writers who lead them pay rent. The mentorship program is fully subsidized, a blessing if you check out costs for similar programs at Humber College or elsewhere. Writers in the Community supports at-risk teens through a range of literary activities. Writers Out Loud showcases local talent at readings throughout the province.

    The crowning jewel is, of course, the Gala. Every November, the QWF hands out $12,000 in prizes for Quebec’s best English books and translations. To mark this year’s 15th anniversary, the Gala will be held at the Virgin Mobile Corona Theatre on Notre-Dame, but the past several years it was held at the regal Lion d’Or. Last autumn, the hall was packed to capacity. Looking out at the sea of faces, master of ceremonies Josh Freed cracked a joke about Anglos convening on the corner of Papineau and Ontario – the heartland of French Montreal – to honour English words. It is a paradox. And most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.

    Claire Holden Rothman’s new novel, My October, will be published next spring with Penguin Canada.

    *This article has been modified to correct a factual error regarding QSPELL.

  • Translating Montreal: Where Blueberries Are Not Myrtilles by Neil Smith

    Translating Montreal: Where Blueberries Are Not Myrtilles by Neil Smith

    Last time I was in Paris, two men travelling on my train got into a fight when one dared address the other using tu.

    “Vous m’avez tutoyé, monsieur! Vous m’avez tutoyé!”

    A face was slapped. A beret was knocked askew.

    Their hullaballoo over tu reminded me of the time I was at my Montreal gym and asked a fellow if he’d finished with the bench press.

    “Avez-vous terminé?” I said.

    Looking vexed, he replied, “Pourquoi tu me vouvoies, ’stie?”

    If you haven’t lived in Quebec long, you might foolishly think Quebec French and French French, c’est du pareil au même.

    They aren’t the same diff. As a writer, you must understand this.

    Say you publish a novel in English that creates enough buzz that a publisher in France – call it Éditions Les Nombrilistes – buys French rights. You’re thrilled: your franco friends can discover what a creative artiste you are.

    Les Nombrilistes hire a Frenchman named Didier to translate your Mile End novel, The Fractured Hipster. Sadly, Didier has never set foot in Montreal.

    When Le branché débranché comes out, your young protagonist, Julian, buys his cigarettes chez l’Arabe, goes out with a nana, wears pull-overs and baskets, washes his clothes at a pressing, and eats myrtilles and pastèque. He swears by yelling, “Putain de merde!”

    Quebecisms – dépanneur, blonde, chandail, espadrilles, buanderie, bleuets, melon d’eau, câlisse – appear nowhere in your book. Didier and the Nombrilistes have Gallicized both Montreal and Julian to death.

    If this erasing of Quebec colour and culture happened to Leonard Cohen’s Les perdants magnifiques and Mordecai Richler’s Le monde de Barney, it can happen to Le branché débranché.

    Should you be upset? Would Michel Tremblay be peeved if that pregnant fat lady next door, in her English incarnation, watched the telly, travelled on the tube, ate crisps and swore by screaming, “Bollocks!”?

    How to ensure this tragedy doesn’t befall your hipster? Consider doing what Ann-Marie MacDonald did for Fall on Your Knees. In her contract with French publisher Flammarion, she specifically requested a Canadian translator, someone who can render an English Quebec story more faithfully.

    If your publisher still foists Didier on you, insist he preserve your novel’s Quebec colour. If your French is weak, have a Québécois friend read Didier’s translation far in advance of the pub date.

    Remind the publisher that if the book is too France-ified, the Quebec press will lampoon it and Quebec readers ignore it.

    Les Nombrilistes and Didier might insist les Français will be perdus and even démoralisés if they come across a word like dépanneur.

    Tell them that when you read a book set in, say, New Zealand, you don’t expect to understand every expression either, but the context usually helps you make a good guess.

    Tell them one of the joys of reading is discovering a new culture.

    Tell them les Français desperately need to learn that.

    And if they still argue with you, you may need to slap a few faces and trample a few berets.

    Neil Smith is a French to English translator from Montreal. He’s also the author of the book of stories Bang Crunch, which was published around the world. His next book, a novel called Boo, is out in 2014 with Knopf.