I’ll be reading at the Gladstone Hotel tonight from 7pm to 9pm, as part of Small Press of Toronto event featuring Sang Kim, Stevens Han and Yuliana Grant-Kim.  Hosted by Michael Park-Ingram. Free hors d’oeuvres and books for sale!  Drop by if you’re in the west end.

Brick Books will be publishing my next poetry book, currently titled ‘Belonging’. It’s been a long time coming, years and years of writing and polishing poems, then shuffling them into a folder. Since my last book I’ve had 2 babies, directed some films, written one novel manuscript and started another, and read lots of great books by Jacob Polley, Jeramy Dodds, Karen Connelly, Peter Behrens, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, David Foster Wallace, Anar Ali, Camilla Gibb, Marguerite Pigeon… and so many more.

Individual poems from ‘Belonging’ have been published here and there, but I’ll be reading from the manuscript on Thursday, October 5 at the Brockton Writers Series’ 2nd birthday event with Patrick Connors and Aisha Sasha John. More information at this Facebook page:  Brockton Writers Series

I saw you one mile long, decade long
step ago on that beach where sand
washed back and forth at our feet,
your eyes like two chirrup notes,
a bird sighting its tree,
the call of the sea answered
in the fist of a brain tightening
over knowables not ascertained
but inherited like DNA
or bad character flaws.
a little crook in your smile
swindled my soul of its armour
and I saw you and the whole stretch
of what it would be, you and me -
the never closing mouth of a vast intimacy –
as eyes sought eyes under a
cloud-covered sun, the day bright
and precarious, like our love.

- – -

a hush on the phone, a dropped moment
and you are all underbrush, ferns,
delicate plants curling from sun.
I press on, my words a brisk breeze
agitating tall branches, a shadow-puppetry
of light falling to damp earth and its
fungal undergrowth of silent unfurlings:
between every word of ‘no’ is a curtailed ‘yes’
latticing its spores beneath the forest floor
to poke through rotting leaves, in the furrowed
bark of a tree, under mossy rocks bloom
soft white gills of attention

oh this is what it is to say yes in a hundred places
tiny hands pushing myself out from in,
this is love working its surgery on me
all my hearts opening and closing
their valves as I breathe.

thinking about farm fields in Quebec and rounds of raw, unpasteurized cheese – one of the poems from my manuscript ‘Belonging’ is published in the April issue of Literary Review of Canada. The issue includes reviews of 2 great books by Sarah Selecky: ‘This Cake is For the Party’ and Sheila Heti: ‘How Should a Person Be?’ – both are on my reading shelf.

IN DEVELOPMENT - Shot in Asia, Southeast Asia and North America, this documentary reveals the heroic work carried out by an international underground railroad assisting North Korean fugitives. This film/rich media project forges a unique aesthetic combining actuality with animation. Pyongyang Express will be released in 2012. By Fathom Film Group in association with TVO, The Canada Media Fund, The Bell Fund, and The National Film Board of Canada.

We’re happy to announce that the National Film Board of Canada will become a development partner for our film and new media project currently titled Pyongyang Express. Shot in several countries, Pyongyang Express reveals the inner workings of a modern day international underground railroad and follows the journey of North Koreans on the road to freedom.

We finished our first round of interviews with North Korean refugees for our doc in development.  It’s an unparalleled experience listening to one person after another telling stories of suffering and atrocity. You wonder what you have in common with these individuals who have been through so much. Would you have been as brave or as strong or determined? One can’t even begin to grasp how much they have lost.

One of the interviewees, a woman in her late 30s, was trafficked 3 times to three different Chinese men. She was caught in China and repatriated back to North Korea twice, whereupon she was sent to prison camps. During her second prison stay, she was starved, then denied all food and water for 9 days straight. She fell unconscious. They threw her outside the prison walls along with other corpses and left her for dead. She survived.

One boy and his 2 sisters were abandoned by his dying parents when they were kicked out of their single room home. The kids were 4, 7 and 9 years old. The boy, 7 years old, made it his mission to keep his 4 year old sister alive and stole and begged for food. They scrounged for wood in the bitter winters to light a fire every night. They warmed stones on the fire, and slept over the warmed stones overnight, with a plastic tarp over them. They woke in the frigid mornings, wet with condensation from the underside of the tarp. They did this every day.

These stories may be part of our international documentary/rich media project that is currently in development with TVO.

Fathom Films is happy to announce we will be going into development with TVO on our latest documentary film and rich media project. Shot in several countries, this film/web series reveals the astounding workings of a modern day international underground railroad.