I can’t keep up with all the things you’re doing, people say. I mean, maybe a person said this once. or twice. but either way, i thought it worth listing as many projects as possible in one place, for easy reference. i’ve been a chapbook publisher since July 1993, running above/ground press [website here; substack here; link to reports on events, including annual anniversary spectaculars]. back when the press turned twenty-five years old, i even solicited a mound of authors to write little essays on their experiences/relationships with the press, which is pretty cool. the 33rd anniversary reading/launch/party occurs at Anina’s Cafe on August 22nd, by the by (details soon). since starting the above/ground press substack, i’ve been running a series of interviews with repeat authors on their new titles, with some three dozen interviews posted to date. the press itself has produced some 1,500 items—mostly single-author poetry chapbooks, although a prose series as well—as well as the quarterly Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] [website here], which recently celebrated fifty issues. i aim to have no two contributors per issue from the same city, so if nothing else, i’m introducing contributors to each other. and i’ve posted more than three hundred interviews-to-date with contributors as part of the site, interviews focused around their particular submission in that issue. above/ground press also publishes the occasional G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] [website here], which quite literally is what it says it is in the name. i solicit editors of current/former journals or presses to edit an issue, and so far have included more than two dozen issues, including around AngelHousePress, Gap Riot Press, Ethel Zine and micro-press, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs and The Figures. also, The Peter F Yacht Club [links to issues and our (mostly) annual Christmas party/reading/regatta here], which is a writing group occasional journal we started in the early 00s [see the write-up i did on the founding/history of the journal here] that still occurs every so often, usually for VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival [i’ve been artistic director of that since October 2023 or thereabouts, which is pretty cool]. the festival occurs every March, and in 2027 we’ll hold our seventeenth annual festival. VERSeOttawa, which administers and runs VERSeFest, also administers Ottawa’s Poet Laureate program, and we have two simultaneous laureates in English and French, which is also pretty cool.
above/ground press also used to produce the long poem chapbook-sized journal STANZAS magazine (1993-2006) [see the bibliography here] and Missing Jacket: writing and visual art (1996-1997) [see the bibliography here]. there have been other journals throughout, but that’s really getting into the weeds. i’m still producing occasional “poem” broadsides [see an out-of-date bibliography here], which, when they occur, post here.
there’s also a series of festschrifts (celebrations of a particular individual) produced through the press, Report from the Society [link here] a Covid-era project in which it felt worth celebrating writers, with new poems/responses as well as reprinting reviews, essays, interviews, etcetera. another project begun during the Covid-era is the above/ground press prose/naut series of prose chapbooks [link], including fiction, essays and memoir, often leaning more into the experimental.
i’ve also been running occasional readings since January 1993, a series unnamed for the longest time, renamed Poetry 101 when i was holding events at Gallery 101 (events also via mother tongue books, The Mercury Lounge, the Carleton Tavern, Ten Toes Coffee, etc), later renamed The Factory Reading Series [see links for such here]. readings occur occasionally, sporadically, almost randomly, although one can always count on a pre-fair reading event the night prior to the ottawa small press book fair [link here; bsky here], an event i co-founded with James Spyker back in fall 1994 and have been running twice a year by myself since. to keep up with other local small press activity, a group of various small press publishers in town now all post to the (ottawa) small press almanac [link here; bsky here], so check there for various activities. a long time ago, i did attempt to start the ottawa poetry newsletter [link] for various folk to post reviews, reports and such, but that was always tough to convince people to participate.
above/ground press did extend into a trade press, Chaudiere Books (2006-2016), a press co-founded with Jennifer Mulligan and eventually run with Christine McNair. we produced fifteen titles, all of which are still available through Invisible Publishing. through the Chaudiere Books blog [link here], i’ve posted more than two hundred writers (either currently or formerly Ottawa residents) in the six questions interview series [see links to whole series here], as well as daily poems across National Poetry Month (April, fyi) since 2014 [see links to whole series here]. when Derek Beaulieu and i co-edited The Calgary Renaissance anthology through Chaudiere, i posted a whole series of interviews with contributors here, as well.
there have been three anthologies celebrating above/ground press that i’ve edited. we celebrated the first decade through GROUNDSWELL: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2003). i still have copies available, by the way. there was a second volume, Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003 – 2013 (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2013) as well as a third, groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013 – 2023 (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023), both of which are still very much available via Invisible Publishing.
since April 9, 2013, i’ve been curating a weekly poem via the dusie blog, dusie: the tuesday poem [website here; twice-a-year updated full list with links here], with more than seven hundred new poems-to-date (and not a single repeated author, by the way). you can sign up to receive weekly poems via email here, which also includes lists of some of these other things as they occur. you probably already know i’ve been reviewing regularly (some one hundred and fifty-plus book reviews annually) over at my clever blog [link here], but have also been doing a kind of annual ‘best of’ round-up of Canadian poetry titles since 2011 (selected from poetry titles i’ve reviewed). you can see the link to those lists here. oh, and the ‘12 or 20 questions’ series has interviewed more than two thousand writers since September 2007 [see series one here; series two, still ongoing, here]. i attempted a small press version of same, but that was harder to keep going.
since May 2016, i’ve been curating the monthly Spotlight series via Medium [link here], in which i solicit poets to do a statement on their own work, with a new poem or two, with more than one hundred and twenty poets featured-to-date. more recently, for Chicago writer Olivia Cronk’s peripety and/or tronies blog, i’ve been curating the Canadian Poets Series [see the link to the series here], offering those on Cronk’s radar a sense of just how amazing we are up here, with more than thirty Canadian poets listed. elbows up, indeed. as well, have you seen the many gendered mothers [link] site? we’re always looking for essays.
at one point, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell and i decided there needed to be further conversation and criticism on and around Canadian poetry, and ran the online journal Poetics.ca (2003-2007) for a few issues, which evolved into my online seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (2008-2018). when my web designer and hosting site fell apart from that project, i founded periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in March 2020 [website here], which includes a whole slew of curated threads, from reviews to interviews, translations and new poems to write-ups on residencies, literary activity and small press activities. the site started like gangbusters during the first few weeks of the Covid-era with the virtual reading series, with more than one hundred videos of poets reading from their work, all of which lives on the YouTube channel. it also includes a series of essays by above/ground press authors on their new titles. furthermore, i’ve been working a sequence of clusters of interviews with shortlisted authors for various lists as part of the journal, from the poets up for the Bronwen Wallace Award to the Governor General’s Award for Poetry to the Griffin Prize. before i’d begun periodicities, i did a variation on same when i interviewed all the 2014 shortlisted authors for the awards The League of Canadian Poets administers: the Raymond Souster Award, the Pat Lowther Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award [see the links to all the interviews here]. i did solicit various writers for a site i started call my (small press) writing day [link here] to expand a conversation around those of us that write, but it has been a while since i’ve posted any of those. i have a Patreon page, also, which i do attempt to post to occasionally, also (including a patron-only blog), as well as an Instagram.
i’ve been attempting to keep a bibliography of current/former Ottawa-based literary presses and journals [link here], with a slew of links, including a bunch of interviews i had conducted with editors of long-shuttered presses. i did attempt to expand that a bit through a bibliography of Canadian literary journals and presses [link here] as well. a lot of these publications are pre-internet, so they just fall away, otherwise. related to such, i was solicited by Ottawa’s Arc Poetry Magazine in 2018 to do a series of literary walks around town, and posted the texts for my Arc Walks [see link here] online after each had occurred. when Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press turned forty, i did solicit a bunch of his authors to respond to their thoughts on the press through the Forty Proper Tales site [link here] (i’m hoping he does something cool for the upcoming fiftieth anniversary). oh, and in 2016, University of Alberta celebrated forty years of their writer-in-residence program, so i attempted to interview every writer-in-residence they’d had across those four decades. you’ve probably noticed i’ve been posting a sequence of pieces from my notes on the recent fiftieth anniversary gathering at the Banff Centre (there’s plenty more to come). there’s probably other stuff, but that’s all i can think of right now.
if you want to keep track of things as they occur, i recommend signing up for the ‘Tuesday poem’ emails, as i am attempting to keep this substack focused on prose—excerpts of works-in-progress, whether essays, memoir, novel, short stories, etcetera—as well as the occasional ‘author’ update.
[ “poem” broadside photo by Brian Pirie,
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