Harold Rhenisch
News
and Views . .
Winging Home: A Palette of Birds is here in time for spring!
Readings, Workshops, Celebration
I've been waiting for our Easter snow, and, right on time, it came in the night: two inches, the colour of the palest cotton candy in the early morning light. At 6 a.m., a pair of geese waiting for the pond to thaw out back hurtled through the trees, squeezing their bicycle horns
That's what Winging Home is all about: birds. It's about living with birds, with coots and mergansers, loons and buffleheads, eagles and grebes, crows and pine siskins, cliff swallows and red-winged blackbirds singing the spring away in their barbershop quartets.
After eleven years of living on the shore of 108 Lake in the Cariboo, I bringing you my book of love for the land, for family life, and, above all, for birds. Check out the book here, or read a sample at the publisher's site
Winging Home is illustrated by renowned Cariboo birder and artist Tom Godin.
I will be reading in Penticton as part of The Meadowlark Festival. In fact, I will bring the book to the North Okanagan, the Shuswap, and the Thompson as well, for a series of readings, as well as workshops in how to see the world as a palette of colour, and how to use this excercise in seeing to write the world new.
Saturday, April 22, 2006. 10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Okanagan Books. Penticton, B.C. Book Signing
Saturday, April 22, 2006. 3 p.m. - 5 p.m. The Can Coffee Shop, at the Cannery. Penticton, B.C. Reading.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006. 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Allan Brooks Nature Centre. Workshop. $25 (includes lunch)
Join award-winning bio-regional writer Harold Rhenisch in a hands-on reading, tour, and workshop exploring landscapes within the mind, the heart, and the earth itself.The walking will be contemplative, the exercises will be congenial, and the skills you learn will be concrete and easily applicable to any project. They will stay with you for years.
In this workshop, Harold will lead you into the grasslands, into a world of grass and stone, water and air and soil, where under the guidance of his many years of experience and with references to other writings about the local landscape, we will create palettes of colour, texture, sound and movement.
As we retire inside, he will lead you through exercises in which we will apply our palettes to the written page.
Expect a refreshing and inspiring day in the landscapes of the earth and the mind, as we cross back and forth between them. You will develop a sharper sense of your landscape and your writing, and with your own palette, which you can apply to your writing for years to come.
You will leave with a new appreciation for the earth, a new vision of how to see yourself within it, and new skills with which to share it with others, whether in conversation, painting, or, especially, writing, Harold will pass on his skills and enthusiasm for writing about the earth.
Tuesday, May 2, 2006. 7:00 pm (gate opens at 6:30 pm) Allan Brooks Nature Centre. Reading. 250 Allan Brooks Way (just above army camp off Mission Road), ph:260-4027
Bring a jacket or blanket and a lawn chair as the reading will take place outside (weather permitting).Lawns chairs provided for the first 25.
Wednesday, May 3, 2006.7:30 pm (doors open at 7:00 pm). Gallery Vertigo.Suite #1 3001 --31st Street, Vernon Reading.
Friday, May 5, 2006. 7:30 p.m. Thompson Rivers University, room AE 104. Reading.
Saturday, May 6, 2006. 10:00 a.m. Thompson Rivers University, room AE 104. Workshop. Description.
Sunday, May 7, 2006. 1:00pm to 3:00pm at the Prestige Harbourfront Resort, 251 Harbourfront Dr. NE., Salmon Arm. Reading and Workshop.
Award-winning bioregional writer and poet Harold Rhenisch will be reading in Salmon Arm on May 7 in a special event sponsored by the Shuswap International Writers' Festival. Around a public reading of his most recent book, Winging Home, a palette of birds, a book about raising his family among birds on the Cariboo plateau, he will present a series of workshops, an open mic session, and blue a pencil session for local writers. In June, he will return to Salmon Arm to present a poetry workshop at this year's Shuswap International Writers' Mini-Festival on June 24, 2006.Mr. Rhenisch lives in 150 Mile House, BC. In addition to having taught at the Victoria School of Writing for two years and leading many summer workshops, he has won numerous awards, including the Arc Poem of the Year Award, 2003, and Arc Critic's Desk Award for best long poetry review, 2003, and most recently the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, 2005. He has been a seven-time runner-up in the CBC/Tilden/Saturday Night Literary Contest and won the BC & Yukon Community Newspapers Association Award for Best Arts and Culture Writing, 1996. His non-fiction book Tom Thomson's Shack was shortlisted for two BC Book Prizes in 2000, and its sequel, The Wolves at Evelyn, will be published by Brindle & Glass in September 2006.
The reading and workshop presentation will be on Sunday, May 7, 2006 from 1:00pm to 3:00pm at the Prestige Harbourfront Resort located at 251 Harbourfront Dr. NE. He has generously offered to include an "open mic" session to allow participants to read from their work (4 minutes per reader) and he will also be offering blue pencil sessions to those who email him a sample of their work one week ahead of time at rhenisch@telus.net
An accomplished editor, he has brought many manuscripts, small and large, to completed shape, and can bring a clear and creative eye to your work.
Admission to the event is $5.00 for the Reading or the Workshop, $8.00 for both, payable at the door. There will be a fee of $30 for a 30-minute blue pencil session, payable directly to Mr. Rhenisch, which will cover both the session and preparation of the manuscript. Please contact him directly to arrange your session, either by email at rhenisch@telus.net or by phone at 250-296-0039.
Winging Home, a palette of Birds is Harold's 19th publication, and promises to be of great interest to nature lovers everywhere
April 12, 2006
Linda Rogers' Book is Fiiiiiiiiiiiiinnaallyy Out!
Linda Rogers: Essays on Her Work is out. Linda has made it her life to write about and for children, and in her latest work she has elevated this mission into a heartfelt vision of humanity that integrates society at all levels, in bright, intensely lyrical, and passionate poems and witty stories, and the blues for children. John Gould's essay on Linda's spiritual life and the long interview I had with Linda in the basement of her Victoria home are worth the price of the book alone. Don't let the title fool you: this is a startling and transformative book. About 6 years back, Guernica Editions asked me to edit a book of essays and interviews on the Victoria poet Linda Rogers, as part of their series on major Canadian writers left out of the spotlight during the two-decade long dominance of Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje. After 3 years and countless edits and re-edits and pauses while the material inspired me to start novels and poems and finish books of poems, the manuscript was done. After 3 more years of publishing difficulties, it is finally here. It was worth the wait.
June 18 2005
Malahat Review Long Poem Prize
Every two years, the Malahat Review awards a Long Poem Prize, split between the best two long poems submitted for their competition. This year, the winners are Margo Button and Harold Rhenisch. I received the prize for my poem Abandon. I was soooooo happy, and took it as a vindication of all of us who write away for years and years on a poem that never seems to be finished or find a home. Well, Abandon was finished finally, but not until 20 years had flowed under the bridge. It started as a translation of Iamblichus' On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians, as told to Porphyry by the Prophet Anebo -- a rather turgid piece of translation, which deviously found its way from 3rd Century Syrian, to Greek, to Latin, to 18th Century latinate English (sort of). That was in 1984. I spent a year on it, and pretty well taught myself how to write poetry in the process. After that, it went out in pieces to every literary magazine in the country, and came back, with praise but no cigars. Finally, in 2001, the Seattle poet James Gurley suggested that I update the context, as so much 3rd Century Syria was probably not doing the trick. I did that. The result was a lament, not merely for the lost world of magic, which I had made out of Iamblichus' attempts to transform that world of magic into a world of rhetoric (pretty successfully, too, as in the process he created the intellectual movement which led to medieval scholasticism, which led to the university system, which led to the Malahat Review, which was founded by a magician, Robin Skelton, which...), but for lost British Columbia, robbed from its citizens by the transformation of British Columbia into a hinterland for Vancouver in the political upheavals and sleights-of-hand in 2001. As a model, the poem has Charles Lillard's masterpiece, Rivers Were Promises, which is an elegy for an even older British Columbia.
June 18 2005
Readings in Victoria
I will be reading Abandon at the Malahat Review launch in Victoria on October 15. The night before, October 14, I will readl from Living Will, at the Mocombopo reading series -- always a great time. Folks, if it's not too hot a night, I'll wear Will's suit.
Mocambo Coffee, 1028 Blanshard, Victoria, B.C., Canada, V8W 2H5,
(250) 384-4468
FRIDAYS, 7:30 PM, $3 at the door
June 18 2005
Critic's Desk Award
ARC, Canada's national poetry magazine, has awarded me the Critic's Desk Award, for the best criticism published in their magazine in 2004. The award was given for my review of the finalists for the 2004 Lampman Prize for the best book of poetry published in Ottawa during the previous year, Five Laureates on the Red Earth Road. I am honoured.
June 18 2005
John Hagan Reconstructs Shakespeare
John Hagan has updated his site on his reconstruction of Shakespeare's face, featured on the cover of Free Will. Check it out!
Reading with Anna Värje
On June 9, I read with a former student Anna Värje in Chris Harris' Straw Bale Gallery at 105 Mile Ranch. It was a treat. Anna performed performance pieces on sexuality, identity, and coming of age, including a haunting piece on the Castrati, boys were were neutered in Renaissance Italy, so they could sing High C over C forever, interspersed with songs, including one of the songs the boys would have sung onstage. You probably haven't heard of Anna, but those of us who were there saw the future, and it's glorious. It was especially gratifying to see and hear the promising 13 year old girl I first met 9 years ago fulfill her promise. It was one of the most evocative and enjoyable readings (and concerts) I have ever attended, and that my poems from Living Will dovetailed perfectly with Anna's work, was an extra, and unsuspected, surprise. Look for Anna on the Vancouver performance poetry circuit, or at an opera near you.
June 18 2005
Literacy in the Similkameen
On June 4, I read back in my home town of Keremeos, in the library that I remember as the shop bay of Innis's Shell Station, as part of literacy awareness in the Similkameen. I read about my mother and her friends in 1960's Similkameen life, from The Wolves at Evelyn, as well as a selection of poems about Keremeos, to a collection of about 25 people scattered throughout the library stacks. We followed the reading with an open mic, with poems and stories from the Similkameen to Sri Lanka, and an evening workshop at Barrington Price's old Grist Mill on Keremeos Creek, or the Keremeos River as it was known over a century ago. At the workshop we laughed our way through a series of exercises on imagery, while the sun set in the trees and the fridge fridged, hmmmmmm. Before I left, I had to promise to come back soon. As a bonus, 6 people signed up as literacy volunteers for the comng year..
June 18 2005
Electronic Writer in Residence Goes Real
The last few months (and through the rest of the year) I have been Electronic Writer in Residence with the Canadian Author's Association in Niagara. When in Ontario, I put my virtual persona to the test by showing up to do a workshop on a collection of card tables in an empty house in Welland. For four hours those card tables shook and squeaked, as we made our way through a series of exercises to remove the speaking 'I' from poetry. And we did. As I arrived early, I checked out the bargain store just down the street and snapped up a copy of Jean de Florette. I've been looking for that for years. Now, if anyone knows where there's a copy of Manon de Source...?
June 18 2005
A Close Call
Living Will. was launched at the Powell River Festival of the Arts on April 15, 2005, and it was wild. Harold dressed in tights and a brocade jerkin and Will Shakespeare coming alive again. But it almost didn't happen! The books were delayed due to a publishing snafu, and arrived in town 2 hours before the launch. It ended with a scene from The Keystone Cops, and chasing the courier van through town, on its only run of the day. I then went on to Toronto, where it was even crazier at the Victory Cafe.That was one fun reading. Changing in a bathroom stall was a little cramped, and some eyebrows were raised as I came in with The Outfit, but out on the street afterward? Well, no-one paid me a moment's notice out on the street.
June 18 2005
Cover
We have found a great cover for The Wolves at Evelyn! It's as if the photograph was taken just for this book.
This is a photograph by the German photographer Rémy Markowitsch, from his exhibit On Travel, and is represented by the Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin/Leipzig.
On Travel is available from Amazon, right here.
You can see more of what Rémy Markowitsch is up to here.
March 29, 2005
Evelyn
On a recent reading trip to Prince Rupert, I had a chance to stop in Evelyn and take a couple shots...
That's Hudson's Bay Mountain. The trees in the front are on my family's old farm. Here are the woods from the book...
... you know, the ones in which the wolves walked my mother to school and back, in 1947.
Festival
I am looking forward to teaching at the Powell River Festival of the Written Arts from April 15-17, 2005, where I will also be launching my new book of poems, Living Will.
While teaching at the Victoria School of Writing for the past t wo summers, I came to understand that there are two arts which we call writing: the art of creation, shall we say, and the art of revision. Don't let words fool you: the revision is often as creative as the original writing. It does, however, use quite different skills.
I will be guiding the writers at the festival through this skill set. It makes writing so much easier!
March 11, 2005
Touring
My publisher, Wolsak and Wynn, is arranging a launch for Living Will in Powell River, and a tour in Southern Ontario. This ought to be about the 200th reading since the launch of Taking the Breath Away back in 1998. It's been a gas. Actually, taking my books on tour has taught me that no manuscript is finished until you see the proofs, no book is finished until it is printed and bound, and no book is complete until it is read to an audience. My readings have completely changed the nature of my writing. It's about the music.
Living Well?
You bet! My newest book, Living Will, contains the 154 sonnets of William Shakespeare translated into English. It's been 400 years. We've suffered long enough. Wild! At readings, these pieces have always been popular with the musicians.This is the companion to Free Will.
My Calgary publisher, Brindle & Glass, and I are starting to edit the manuscript for The Wolves at Evelyn, my sequel to Out of the Interior. When that book came out back in 1993, one reviewer expressed frustration that the book was about men, but not about women. Well, there were women there, but their real story was subtle -- a story so strong I had to spend 12 years living into it to understand it. This book about women and the civilization of their own which they have tried to protect for years, from Germany to British Columbia, blows the lid off of British Columbia. This place is at the centre of a storm. Look for it in September, 2005.