Hi folks,
Some recent writing updates on the go:
•Please continue to pre-order The Repoetic: After Saint-Pol-Roux, which is out in the spring of 2023. It’s my first full-length book, and pre-order sales are huge for a book’s lifespan. Order it into your local and university libraries as well if you can, and if you know someone who’d like to review it, or interview me for radio or a podcast, or want to book me to talk to a book-club or the like (online, ideally), get in touch and we can figure something out.
•I have recently acquired several very loud dress shirts to trick myself into committing to ‘touring’ the aforementioned book, which I’m aiming to do late April-ish. Hoping to hit Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton. Could be coaxed to visit Saskatchewan, and maybe if we can find some sort of funding I could get out to Atlantic Canada to read in my fav places in Charlottetown and Fredericton, &c. (September, when I’m out for a wedding, seems like the time for that end of the country).
•A review I wrote on MLA Chernoff’s SQUELCH PROCEDURES was recently published by ex-puritan, and I’m really proud of it. It’s full of memes and trying to think through what it means to write ‘authentically’ when you’re writing in an arts culture that by and large only understands (and certainly only trusts) didactic work.
•I am currently working on a sci-fi novel that is, if you can believe, being funded by the Canada Council for the Arts! Thank you to them for making dating affordable / groceries possible / dog treats abundant ahahah.
I just finished re-reading Samuel R. Delaney’s Dhalgren a few days ago, so, my competitiveness is driving this new book of mine along right now, and I’m really looking forward to finishing it and finding it a home.
•Also hoping to find my grad-school thesis, a novel-in-stories, a home this year too. It’s gothic, rife with lud0- and meta- narrative gimmicks and barbs, and is super curious and menacing and rural and insane, style-forward and unapologetic. I’m really pleased with it. Lisa Moore, sweetheart-deluxe and genius, was my supervisor on the original incarnation of it, so I promise someone was there to help keep the bumpers up and that the book is actually pretty good!
•I’m beginning to publish micro-poetry zines again this winter, with two titles (#s 7 + 8) forthcoming—and one is by the inimitable Hugh Thomas!!!! I’ll post more when I decide to ‘launch them’ proper. Many from this season will be in, gasp, full-colour, so they’ll be $3 instead of $1. I have just a handful of bundles of books 2-6 from many years ago leftover, which I’m selling for $6 (including shipping within Canada), so if you’re into ephemera, come and get it.
•If you are working in concrete/vizpo, any sort of visual form, any sort of rpg-writing, trad poetry, micro-fiction, anything at all pretty much, and you like the idea of a very tiny zine, I’d love to look at what we might be able to make together (or to set you up with a collaborator) via bnnybybks. Payment is a pile of the assembled copies of of the zine you get to sell (plus the digital, so you can print and sell more for yourself indefinitely), well over half the print-run, and my gratitude for getting to help make a thing that is yours and put it in the world.
Email me at benjamin.dugdale@gmail.com with ZINE_SUBMISSION_SURNAME as the subject line if you’re interested in submitting.
Soft-deadline end of January, 2023. Open to folks literally wherever, but it probably helps your odds if we have mutuals / overlapped interests.
•I am going to be selling rug-poems with a partner in the new year as well, like, big fukn shag rugs that are poems. All wool. Wild wild shit, gun-tufted and hand-hooked alike. Big ticket items. I have room for a couple more commissions at present as well, so don’t hesitate to get in touch if you want that custom janky/bootleg/sweat-soaked rug of your dreams.
•If you’re looking to hire someone to review or blurb your book, or think I would really love it and want to ask me to do so for free, get in touch. Likewise for editorial work (I prefer to look at full manuscripts, but am happy to do smaller projects as well), in fiction, poetry, essaying, whatever.
Hope y’all and yours are staying warm and well this winter. With love from wintry AB, Treaty 7 Territory,
B(enjamin/onny) C.D.
Benjamin C.utie Dugdale 