Friday Special Blend
Friday June 17th, 2022 with Susan Johnston
Ottawa Fringe, then "But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves" -- new work by Conyer Clayton

Join us for some Ottawa Fringe teasers (thanks to Danielle K. L. Gregoire and Velvet Wells), then a deep dive into Conyer Clayton's brand new book (But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves) featuring a conversation and lots of readings. Want to know more? Danielle K. L. Gregoire -- Soap & Other Stories is a true, personal storytelling show based on audience suggestion. Danielle K.L. Gregoire is a well of strange and wonderful stories, and with every show that happens new stories bubble to the surface. No two shows are the same, because they take your suggestions (for a gift of hand-poured soap) and create some right there, on the spot. Just don’t ask about the flamingoes. Velvet Wells -- (Re)Tired Magical Black Man will take you on a 60-minute magical caper. After a lifetime of being taken for granted, dJerald the Djinn discovers the joy of being magical for their community and themselves. With help from their puppet friends, and maybe even you, dJerald unretires to fulfill an impossible wish — Stealing World Peace from the oligarchs Conyer Clayton -- But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, Conyer Clayton’s follow-up to her award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, is a collection of prose poems that employs surrealism, humour, and body horror to cope with CPTSD, assault, loss, fear, and the memories of it all. The narrator weaves her way through largely aquatic landscapes — water parks, ponds, beast-filled lakes, vast oceans. She walks through time, reverting to childhood and back within a few lines, has the sureness of knowledge that exists only in dreamscapes, and foreshadows the inevitable with a calm derived from accepting the absurd. These poems, hallucinatory and unexpected, are threaded by repetition: Here is another car accident. Here is another man to flee from. Here is questioned memory. Here is the site of grief, revisited, and sometimes, within it, tentatively, hope. In these poems, Clayton explores how we question the validity of our own memories, especially those related to abuse and assault, and the way we forget — or obsess over potentially forgetting — memories of those who’ve died. These poems validate dreams, by proxy, and all internal experience as authentic and valid experience that carries wisdom . . . even when we don’t know it. (https://www.anvilpress.com/books/but-the-sun-and-the-ships-and-the-fish-and-the-waves) Music by Church of Trees, Moonfruits, Conyer Clayton and Allie Goodyear