Proceeds will be donated to RAVEN & Climate Justice Toronto. |
A warning, a movement, a collection borne of protest.
In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Writers and artists confront colonization, racism, and the social inequalities that are endemic to the climate crisis. Here the imagination amplifies and humanizes the science. These works are impassioned, desperate, hopeful, healing, transformative, and radical. This is a call to climate-justice action.
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Another Story Bookshop ~ Coach House Books ~ Glass Bookshop ~ knife | fork | book ~ Librairie Drawn & Quarterly ~ Massy Books ~ Munro's Books If you are an independent bookseller and are carrying this book, let us know! This anthology is not to be missed. The pandemic may have defined our year, but the climate crisis defines our time in geological history. See how this roster of talented writers and artists advance the conversation, put the crisis in context and call for climate justice. |
change Medium: performance documentation Duration: 10m19s April 2020 change is a 10-minute performance comprised of a single-channel video projected over a lone singer. The singer’s voice first delivers a rendition of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come through a vocoder, then moves into spoken poetry. By manipulating archived, found footage and combining it with its interactions between the body and voice, this performance confronts decolonization through an Asian-Canadian lens, notably putting the singer/speaker/artist directly into the environment being challenged. Created and performed at the wake of the pandemic, change’s main function is to respond directly to the xenophobia, Sinophobia, and unabashed racism that the current COVID-19 pandemic and biased mainstream media encourage. James Legaspi is an emerging Filipino-Canadian multimedia artist currently completing an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and Sheridan College, living and working in Brampton, Ontario. Recent activity includes work exhibited at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and Gallery 44, curatorial work at the Blackwood Gallery, professional experience as a teaching assistant at Sheridan College, and participation in the most recent rendition of Visual Arts Mississauga’s Creative Residency.
If you missed our Word on the Street Toronto event, you can watch it here. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on the present and future consequences of the climate emergency. Ice caps are melting, wildfires are raging, and species extinction is accelerating. Dire predictions about the climate emergency from scientists, Indigenous land and water defenders, and striking school children have mostly been ignored by the very institutions – government, education, industry, and media – with the power to do something about it. Join us for a conversation with editor Kathryn Mockler and anthology contributors Carleigh Baker, Simone Dalton, Christine Leclerc, and Carrianne Leung on their calls to action for the climate crisis facing us all. The City Imagines series is presented by The Word On The Street, a national celebration of storytelling, ideas, and imagination. About the Panelists
Carleigh Baker is a Cree-Métis/Icelandic writer. She was born and raised on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Stó:lō people. Her first collection of stories, Bad Endings, won the City of Vancouver Book Award. Simone Dalton is a Trinidadian-Canadian writer, arts educator, and recipient of the 2020 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Prize for nonfiction. Her work is anthologized in Watch Your Head, Black Writers Matter, and The Unpublished City: Volume I. Her play VOWS was produced in 2019. As a memoirist, she explores themes of grief, inherited histories, race, class, and identity. Christine Leclerc lives, works and studies in Coast Salish Homelands / Burnaby, B.C. She is an award-winning author and Physical Geography major at Simon Fraser University. Leclerc serves on the non-profit boards of Embark Sustainability and Climatch. She has also served on the board of Sierra Club BC. Carrianne Leung is a Canadian writer, who won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award in 2019 for her short story collection That Time I Loved You. Originally from Hong Kong, Leung moved to Canada in childhood, and grew up in the Scarborough district of Toronto, Ontario. Moderator Kathryn Mockler edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. Her debut collection of stories is forthcoming from Book*hug in 2023, and she is an Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at the University of Victoria. SWANS One frigid midwinter afternoon, early for the symphony, I look out on the frozen lake. Unseasonable cold, I worry. Climate change. That moment a huge bird glides by, slow motion, long neck outstretched, black bill, wings extended, body a downy white. I’ve never seen a trumpeter swan, mythical creature, surely dreamed to life. Inside the concert hall beautiful music swirls, like the thrill of the swan, elevating me, a wild reminder I’m part of the living world, an animal too. Trumpeter swans were nearly extinct. We think we protected them. But they protect us, from the impoverishment of a world without trumpeter swans. The music ends and I rush out, hoping to glimpse the swan, what it offers us -- a rare, precious encounter with what is real, the given world. Kirsteen MacLeod’s poetry and prose has appeared in many literary journals, and she was a finalist for Arc Poetry’s Poem of the Year in 2020. Her nonfiction book, In Praise of Retreat, is forthcoming in March 2021 from ECW Press. Her debut collection of short fiction, The Animal Game, was published in 2016.
Statement My creative leaning is expressionistic, towards exposing the battle-lines of people vs place; the examination of the edges & intersects of nature/ construct, culture/ chaos, order/ anarchy, failure/ success; what emerges from people, collectively, and what happens when we’ve disappeared. Decades ago, autodidact/ bloody-minded optimist kerry rawlinson gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. Now she stalks Literature & Art’s Muses around the Okanagan Valley, still barefoot, forgetting to eat. Some contest achievements: Winner, Edinburgh International Flash Fiction Award; Hon. Mention, Fish Poetry Prize; CAGO Online Gallery. Newer pieces in Foreign Literature, Synchronized Chaos, Across The Margin, Painted Bride, Tupelo Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Pedestal, Boned, Arc Poetry, amongst others. Visit tumblr; Tweet @kerryrawli
note: this video was made in may 2017 by 2017-emilie, four months before emilie got sick. video transcription: the video is in portrait mode. finger-dragged words read bottom-to-top in grey sand that gets darker/wetter to the right. they say: “TIME IS RUNNING SHORT WITH MOST THINGS I FEEL LIKE THE TIDE RISES TOO FAST.” after six seconds, a wave takes most of them. the words left: “SHORT THINGS FEEL LIKE THE FAST,” or, almost, “SHORT THINGS FEEL LIKE THE PAST.” em/ilie kneifel is a poet/critic, editor at The Puritan/Theta Wave, creator of CATCH/PLAYD8s, and also a list. find 'em at emiliekneifel.com, @emiliekneifel, and in Tiohtiá:ke, hopping and hoping.
Bluescape from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo. Faces In the Stones from Stephen Barrett on Vimeo.
Stephen Barrett is a writer, teacher, dad and husband. He composes poetry, writes songs and loves playing his guitar and blues harp. Winters are spent scouring used bookstores in Toronto for old volumes of poetry and summers walking the shores of Lake Huron looking for unique stones and detritus on the beach.
FAREWELL, MY SEA — poem for the Salish Sea The morning the quake hit the city I swore I’d ride full gallop into that sea never look back. I listened to Jay-Z, shoved tiny nectarines into my satchel, and fled West past the Prime Minister who stood at the corner of 4th and Trutch disguised as a Dutch milkmaid with rosy cheeks. Kits beach was furious. But I found my pony di Esperia standing in my dory and so put myself upon her and we rowed – At Howe Sound a gang of dinghies shepherded by muscular oilers slicked up around us. In their faces the coast was a Shrinky Dink. Dogs and cats galore were chucked and dunked into the floatsam. The masked activists who had lain their bodies down beneath bulldozers at Burnaby Mountain flung themselves straight as arrows off the Sea-to-Sky cliffs. Pony and I, in those first days, small in our boat, shared our raisins and stale Triscuits with pirates from Fort McMurray who stabbed each other up for their last rails. All of the city’s private property was now public, but useless, floating as it was, in shit. None of it, not the iPhones or Jaguars, the Hunter boots or toy giraffes imported from France, now bobbing maniacally in the water, mattered. We shared stories and whatever raisins were left. Alanis Obomsawin, sitting around our campfire beside Pauline Johnson, asked what colour the sky was. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Ike and Tina, Joan of Arc, Marco Polo, Snuffaluffagus— they all came galumphing back. Buffy St. Marie. Neil Young. Louis Riel. We all sat around roasting raisins – all of us intermittently marooned on an unidentifiable Arctic island at Great Bear Lake. The sky? We hadn’t looked at it. Babies cried. Laura Secord handed out milkshakes. Georgia O’Keefe stood as still as a petroglyph, entranced by the horizon. We’d come too seldom to the ocean. We were too busy with the 21st century. But eternal return isn’t infinite. Not everyone comes back, nothing lasts. My pony refused to do the dirty work and her brackish eyes were glassy. On her way to the slaughterhouse, years ago, standing in a dark box car, despondent, she felt the sudden hospitality of a man’s arms around her neck. Turns out those arms were Nietzsche’s, crash-test dummy, beloved by thousands of boy students of philosophy the world over, lover of blood and birds and horses. When, after more Arctic transit, we moved from ice cap to ice cap and watched off the coast of Greenland the final outburst of the tide flower up and die, we stopped so that Pony could peer into the oily face of the sea. *This poem was published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018. Previously published at New Poetry (ed. George Murray) in 2018. Gillian Jerome is the author of a book of poems, Red Nest, which was nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and won the ReLit Award. She co-edited an oral history project, Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which won the 2008 City of Vancouver Book Award. Her poems have recently appeared in GEIST, Hunger Mountain and New Poetry. She teaches literatures and writing at the University of British Columbia where she has taught full-time since 2004. She serves a teacher-mentor in the Poetry in Voice program and teaches sexual health to teenagers. Born in Ottawa and raised in Orléans, Ontario, she lives in Vancouver with her daughters, Rory and Micah Sophia, and their silver-eyed unicorn Geneviève Hugo.
WHAT ABOUT THE WEATHER? 1. July 2, 2012, Vancouver, just after 7 pm. In 32 out of 49 United States temperatures are higher than ever recorded, a hundred and five, a hundred and seven, a hundred and nine or more.... In some TV places the air is un- conditioned, no longer homes there, where fires have demolished neighbour- hoods in Colorado Springs. Everything here is lush, soaked, just a little out of season. I can sleep — if I’ve walked, worked at my desk, felt loved by someone, but these days even love won’t assuage anxiety. It’s not just a globe that’s warming, it’s something else – a rise in obfuscation, a lilt of lies? Oil oozing over the map will be no surprise and even the rain won’t stop it now, (such small hands and all that talk is over) — citizens gloved and scared. 2. The summer of 2015, Vancouver, the rain did stop, at least for too long, April to October there was never enough. The shock of turning off the tap, just brush with a cup, do not wash your car, your bike, the shoes you wear, stand with the hose and let a little dribble quench the roses, that old hellebore still blooming, let moss die on stones, my steps stay dirty, neighbourhood vigilantes take their high road turns. The day of my party, a turning point in life, in weather, rain flooded the patio, the pool, the fancied guests. But we were only midway and our thirst was bigger than the rain—a modest spatter, enough for a rainbow, not enough to turn the clock back to that glory life, the one we thought we had forever. After starting out as a poet, short story writer, journalist (The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories, The Observer Magazine (UK), CBC, NFB), and co-author of several non-fiction books, Judith Penner spent a long time preoccupied with family, travel, teaching yoga and related workshops throughout India and North America, and her work as an editor. In recent years her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in catalogues (readymades, Smith Foundation), anthologies (Sustenance, Anvil Press), The Poetry Foundation, and in literary magazines, including Geist, Prism International, The Capilano Review online, and SubTerrain. Nomados published A Bed of Half Full: a landscape in 2018. She lives in Vancouver.
BUCK She hopes no one sees her superstition built on years of evidence. Two fingers to her lips, a kiss blown in quiet embarrassment, Inherited from buck, long gone buck, bye bye buck. The rivers break and the banks crumble, at sunset, at emergency. Marney Isaac is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto. Her research program investigates plant-soil interactions and ecological principles that govern the structure and function of diversified agroecosystems. Dr. Isaac serves on the editorial board of applied ecology and agronomy journals and has published widely in the field of environmental science. She has also contributed to numerous non-scientific writing projects, including the uTOpia series GreenTOpia: Towards a Sustainable Toronto (Coach House Books).
www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~misaac/ @MarneyIsaac |
AboutWatch Your Head is an online journal of creative works devoted to the climate crisis and climate justice.
New work is published monthly! Masthead Mission Submissions Contact Gallery Film & Video Nonfiction Fiction Contributors Donations Resources Check out our latest project: a print anthology published by Coach House Books!
Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis
Coach House Books October 2020 Archives
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