Author Amber Dawn visits Halifax for the first time to share her Hustler’s Memoir.
Poetry is renegade. Poetry is sex. Poetry is rebel. Poetry is Amber Dawn’s first love.
Her sophomore book, How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (Arsenal Pulp), brings the award-winning author to Halifax for the first time, reading with Kaleigh Trace, author of the forthcoming Hot, Wet and Shaking: How I Learned To Talk About Sex, at Venus Envy, Monday June 9.
“To honour my hosts and my co-performer, Kaleigh, I’m going to bring the sex,” Dawn says. “I’ll be reading a mix of work from How Poetry Saved My Life and brand-new work—all very sexy.”
Dawn’s first book, Sub Rosa, winner of a Lambda Literary Award in 2011, is a dark fantasy about a posse of magical sex workers who fend off bad johns in the underworld. Her new one charts more personal turf— survivor pride, sex work and queer identity. Part prose, part poetry, Dawn explores the years she spent hustling the streets of Vancouver with harrowing honesty.
While aspects of sex work took away elements of her self-esteem and sense of self, she found a lifeline in poetry and literature. This is survival unhinged, and poetic. Dawn is fierce and tender. Her powerful voice resounded so deeply in the city of glass, her poetry collection was awarded the Vancouver City Book Award 2013.
“I made a promise to Vancouver that if it took care of me that I’d take care of it,” she says. “I’m keeping my promise in the ways that I know how: using my voice, volunteering, activism and on-going learning.”
Dawn’s memoir illustrates parts of the city invisible to the tourist’s eye. Even though the issues of sex work, risk and violence against women are palpable in every Vancouverite’s mind, the number of murdered and missing women is inexcusable.
“We know that Vancouver is changing in ways that cause homelessness to continue to rise. I can’t speak for the vulnerable people in Vancouver, but I can speak about a set of close-to-the-bone experiences. I’m so grateful the city recognized me for speaking up.”
Dawn’s voice pierces, and courses deeply. Gertrude Stein is her personal grandmother of inspiration, yet jazz poetry, language poetry, hip-hop ignite. In the introduction of How Poetry Saved My Life, she quotes Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? embodying the toughness of poetry. How it is a finding place, not a hiding place. “A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.”
Currently, Dawn is finishing a second poetry manuscript, an entire book of glossa poems, a form where the poet selects a quatrain of another poet’s work—her references include Stein, Trish Salah, Leah Horlick—and builds their own poems. The book hits shelves spring 2015, meanwhile she continues to work her second novel, a queer horror. She sees no division oscillating between poetry and fiction as a writer. It’s all life, and she couldn’t understand why an artist would want to focus on a single form or discipline.
“I deeply enjoy not being tethered to narrative and all the expectations of plot. Poetry helps you let go of this dominant cultural idea that everything needs a reason or an answer,” says Dawn. “If we want to truly rebel against the mainstream, we can do it through poetry. Poetry has nothing to do with the status quo.”
Amber Dawn is a writer from Vancouver and the author of the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life and the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire and With A Rough Tongue. Amber Dawn was 2012 winner of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT writers. Until August 2012, she was director of programming for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. She currently teaches Speculative Fiction writing at Douglas College.
Amber Dawn was the first to send us her seed text, an essay of what might be considered postcards from the map of her body. Without her present we read, reread and discussed her letter. We spent quite a while talking about it and even talked about ways to interact with it. The next week she popped by with bars of exquisite fair trade chocolate. Not that she needed to sweeten the deal! But this sort of consideration is typical of her.
We have turned to her essay/letter/body map several times and have continued to mention it and draw from it. Several weeks after our initial interaction we scooped one line and write on that. How does time effect our experience of the text? An interesting discussion. Part of the process has included handing the letters to anyone who missed the initial class on them. Because of this, we refer to them in staggered mentions, sometimes referring to them in a different context or background. I can only think this enhances the response.
We’re very excited to read in a joint event with Amber Dawn and Alex Leslie, who reached out to each other with the idea of this. Here is a beautiful poster Madeleine Thien made for us and a Facebook event page we would be happy for you to share!
Please join us June 19, Thursday, from 7-9pm at Lost + Found Café on 33W Hastings. Both authors will be reading a letter they wrote to Thursdays Writing Collective and hearing, for the first time, individual responses from Collective participants who used those letters as seeds for new work.
All are welcome to this free event. Accessiblity details will be posted shortly. Light snacks will be served.
Here is the accessibility info for the event, provided by Alex Leslie. Please get in touch if you have any questions.
Main entrance: 5 feet wide, double doors that open outwards, wing handles 41” from ground. Weather permitting, doors to street will likely be left open. There are no steps to entrance. The space inside Lost & Found Café is stair-free. Signage is a sandwich board on the sidewalk.
There is parking (paid by metre) on Hastings St directly outside and opposite the café. There are bike lock-ups directly outside café, as well as the Hastings bus stop. There will be transit tickets available at the event for those who need them.
This event is a scent reduced space. Please refrain from wearing heavily scented perfumes and hygiene products.
Readers will use a microphone and the space has minimal echoes. Lighting is even throughout space.
There are a variety of seating options. A variety of upholstered seats & couches with and without armrests. The majority of seating consists of unpadded wooden chairs with no armrests. There will be space for those who wish to stand. There will be priority seating reserved for elders; these seats will be marked “Reserved for elders”, please help yourself as needed. If you need a particular kind of seating for your physical comfort, please get in touch with us beforehand and we will have that set aside for you.
There will be snacks provided for all attendees. There will be vegetarian options. Water is freely available. Alcohol is not provided but is available for purchase in the space. Counters are 3’3” from ground.
There will be two All Genders washrooms for the event.
The hallway leading to the washroom is 32” wide. There is a 90 degree turn in the hallway with a turning area of 40” by 37”. There are two washrooms, both of which have one stall. The doors to the stalls open inward and the stall entrance is 33” wide. The washroom on the lefthand side is the larger of the two; its stall is 57” deep and 61” wide with the toilet located in the rear left corner of the stall, immediately beside the wall. There is no grip bar. There is a scooter and wheelchair accessible public washroom located at the Carnegie Centre at Hastings & Main, three blocks East of the venue. For further info regarding accessibility, contact Lost & Found at 604-559-7444
I love experiments with genre for the most part as in French novellas like Blais’ Three Travelers that read like long poems or Mike Blouin’s latest I Don’t Know How to Behave which blends reportage with screenplay and other tactical genres to create a powerfully engaging narrative loop da loop.
Books that combine genres as with these two texts, both offering essays & poems, are a little trickier. Mainly because, as a reader, I am quite particular as regards the genres I read at different times of the day (I am OCD Crow recall…:) and, desiring to read poetry first thing in the morning, I don’t want to encounter an essay yet, nor do I really enjoy my reading of essays in the early afternoon interrupted by the distinct reading mode often required by a poem.
Despite this resistance, I still relished both of these vastly divergent (or are they) memoirs.
(& yes I have cast away my original format of shines, stumbles and echoes entirely, and replaced it with an organic elaboration instead of the works at hand)
1/ Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2013)
The title, the cover image of the tough-lovely author, all very enticing. Courage is crucial for a writer, being vulnerable before their material, regardless from where it emerges, but craft is essential. I initially associated Dawn with a spoken-word circle and thought perhaps many of these pieces would be from the “here’s my blunt woes” rant school. Instead, pleasantly, I read that Dawn was inspired at first by Kate Braid’s book Inward to the Bones, along with other published poets, and then saw that the initial piece in the memoir is a glosa called “Oral Tradition,” based on lines by Irving Layton (even better is her reverse or scattered glosa based on lines by beth goobie). Phew says what some would sneer at as my elitist self and others understand as the relief underpinning the realization one will be reading a writer with some literary education (and I don’t care where it’s found, the streets or an institution or family.) And then the fourth page in, oh glory, the wonderful insight-line, ” Grief is an underdeveloped language and so your body is tasked/with mourning.” I am there.
Of course the content is powerful, full of feminist, lesbian, sex-worker rage and also longing, which makes it complex and ambivalent at times and thus very real. But what interests me more is how something is told because that is the sign of art being made. And yes there are regular injections of art here to keep the most discerning reader hypnotized, from the boyfriend dilemma of the essay-story, “Melhos Place,” to the anaphoric trip-trop of the early lyric, “Sex Worker’s Feet,” and the poignant essential critique of the problematic grief rituals in our culture, especially for the liminal, the rejected, titled “How to Bury Our Dead”
: “Our lives are worth the fruit baskets and raisin cakes. We are worth calla lilies and pink roses. We’re worth stone markers and scattered ashes. Hymn and song. Wine and ritual. Surely we’ve all earned hours of storytelling. And most certainly, our lives are worth the tears.”
Could be accused of sentimentality but the pure impulse and the knowledge of rhetorical power here saves all utterly.
I felt the book could have been organized differently than Outside, Inside and Inward – maybe I thought the distinctions were unnecessary or that some narratives in Inward like “The One Thing that could have kept me in Fort Erie, Ontario,” might have served more as frontispieces as it isn’t really important to the reader when per se the writer composed the section (“the past couple of years” Dawn explains in the preface) but how it satisfies a narrative arc. Even the occasional didactic moments didn’t end up bugging me (“It took many women to teach me this lesson: how love can open you…”) as the textured interplay between the styles works and the subject matter is so rare in terms of its public expression and therefore vital.
Initially, what could be more different than Dawn’s memoir of sex-work in various locales and a rise into lesbian consciousness? Lemay’s essay-poems mostly take place in art galleries (and not on the stairs, naked , suburbia, the library and at cocktail parties where the author ponders paintings, the state of contemporary poetry and her life as a wife and mother. Her work is also relentlessly poetic, literary, and meant to be read on the page, not as a rallying cry but as a sigh into beauty over a cuppa tea.
But that doesn’t mean Lemay’s experiences are always safe and comforting while Dawn’s are constantly trembling on the edge. Again, it is craft that conveys the importance of the material to the reader. Lemay’s technique is to be much more densely textured but still retain, for the most part, a lucidity. Her goal is to express beauty and to bewail those who spurn the topic, those for whom beauty has become “unfashionable…problematic, suspect.” Both Lemay’s and Dawn’s books are in a sense texts of mid (or nearing mid) life re-assessments, Dawn’s unfolding from the years of sex-work and her emergence as a writer and political being, Lemay’s of her place as a “seer” poet and obsessive ekphrastivist (to coin a term) now that she has been doing this for “decades” through bouts of “inadequacy…questioning…struggle.” Her fragmentary directives in “To a Young Poet” (“I would advise you to write your own manifesto…I would advise you to comb your hair”) along with her bursts of querulousness about whether her or any art will survive, books will endure, whether she can keep speaking to the ostensible silence (the whole ache for/fear of awards behind this anxiety),and the “shabby neglect and betrayal” (Compensations) one suffers, are all signs of this era in an artist’s life.
Having thrilled to Lemay’s previous collection of solely essays, Calm Things, I was a little disappointed in Asking, just a tad. I think because the pieces seemed less focused in their structure throughout the book: Conversations almost wholly strong, Writing Prompts (how I resist that last word!) mostly grabbing me in the aforementioned Young Poet piece and the sharply honed “Seven Remembered Still Lifes,” “It must have been Weird” an interesting query about how the internet has altered our attention span for art, and the final section, “Conventions of Ekphrasis” getting slightly repetitive as one starts to feel more the author’s passion than our own engagement as readers (always a risk with obsession!). Ahhhh, the delicious sensation of stroking this book’s encaustic-feeling cover though, and looking at its juxtaposed lavish bloom and eroding chair.
More books should be written like Dawn’s & Lemay’s that serve as passageways for exploration, attention and transformation in whatever realms their authors move.
Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy and Research on Sex Work in Canada
Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin and Victoria Love, editors
reviewcanada.ca
To be a sex worker is to negotiate space.
My own body came second, as I continually negotiated what body parts and sexual activities I would make available, or not.
Venue and environment also demanded ongoing negotiation. I moved from survival street work in Vancouver’s East Side to massage parlour work in Kitsilano, and from coyly worded advertisements in the Buy and Sell in the 1990s to explicit online sex hookup sites in the 2000s.
And within each workplace venue, I found myself further negotiating space. For example, because I am a white woman and was a college student, one massage parlour’s madam instructed me to work in The Den fantasy room, which included a handsome globe, a brown leather chair and a dusty set of hardcover literary classics. I could work also in The Roman Room if need be, but never The Safari Room.
All of this proved to be quite unelaborate in comparison to the complexity of negotiating space as a sex work activist. The more vocal and visible I became, the more I spoke up outside of my workplace, the more labyrinthine the negotiations became. Where could I find a platform for dialogue? Who had spoken before me? Were these speakers sex workers, or did outsiders lead the dialogue? What was said? What previous discussions and meanings were already attached to my story before I myself voiced it? Who was my audience? Would they be allied listeners, or antagonists? How could I tell the two apart? What reasons did audiences have for listening? How would my voice and story be used? And, an important question for the poet in me, can a sex worker ever express herself or himself without explaining herself or himself?
I have posed these questions in lectures I have given at Canadian and U.S. universities. I have sought mentorship from groundbreakers, including San Franciscan activist Carol Leigh, aka Scarlot Harlot, who coined the very term “sex work,” and New Yorker Audacia Ray, founder of the Red Umbrella Project. Most recently, I published a poetry/memoir hybrid book entitled How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. My book, like myself, is both hesitant and unable to provide sweeping answers. A single definite statement can be made: nothing about, without us—nihil de nobis, sine nobis. Every negotiation about sex work must have sex workers holding that space.
It is with this declaration—nihil de nobis, sine nobis—that I approached Selling Sex: Experience, Advocacy and Research on Sex Work in Canada, edited by Emily van der Meulen, Elya M. Durisin and Victoria Love. Turning to the contributor pages at the back, I discovered that 5 of 33 contributors chose to highlight sex work in the first sentences of their biographies. Certainly, all the contributors who highlighted “assistant professor” or “doctoral candidate” could potentially be experiential; academic work and sex work are not exclusive to one another. However, when, for example, Victoria Love opens her professional bio with “is a sex worker … and has experience in a number of sectors, including erotic dance, massage, and escort,” she disrupts the deep-seated idea that sex work skills are invalid; Love invites the reader to view the credible merits of her work.
Red River further challenges the oft-devaluing of sex work skills: “Many sex workers have great professional skills, but they can’t put them on their résumé for fear of stigma or the simple fact their work isn’t recognized as legitimate.” River cites his own résumé—which shrinks from four pages to a page and a half by omitting his sex work and activism skills and accomplishments.
The anthology is a dedicated space for contributors to demonstrate, again and again, the validity of sex workers’ skills, determination and community building, with one third of the book specifically addressing the theme of “experiences.”
Workplace skills are not the only experiences that have undergone erasure. Entire intersectional identities are overlooked in popular discourse. This erasure seems to scream in “We Speak for Ourselves: Anti-Colonial and Self-Determined Responses to Young People Involved in the Sex Trade,” an interview between contributors JJ and Ivo. Ivo calls out: “We as young Indigenous peoples have limited ways to identify ourselves in terms of both sexuality and gender. In my home territory of Cowessess First Nation, we had over 120 different words for sexuality and over 40 for gender alone … Who was it that robbed me of this knowledge?” Ivo goes on to show that when her youth or indigenous communities’ stories do show up, they are co-opted by the rescue profession: “Organizations that want to save us … rely on traumatizing stories of youth exploitation to get funding,” says Ivo.
Sarah Hunt, whose essay largely focuses on women in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, echoes Ivo’s concern about the co-option of indigenous experiences: “As Indigenous people, we have long experienced being spoken for, misrepresented, and silenced by dominant discourses.” Hunt breaks the silence by asking: “That’s usually where the story ends: the missing women. What about the women who are still working in the sex trade today?”
Other contributors answer Hunt’s questions by uncovering the ground-breaking histories of nihil de nobis, sine nobis—experiential peer-driven sex work groups and movements, found in advocacy-themed sections.
In “Working for Change: Sex Workers in the Union Struggle,” co-author Trish Salah reflects upon the important political work lead by trans sex workers in the late 1990s: “Trans sex workers and their allies developed front-line peer-run drop-ins and social services for street-based and poor trans people, like the High Risk Project in Vancouver, Meal Trans in Toronto, and Action Santé Tranvesti(e)s/Transsexuel(le)s du Québec.”
In “Né dans le Redlight: The Sex Workers’ Movement in Montreal,” Anna-Louise Crago and Jenn Clamen offer an inspiring anecdote of a sex work visibility action: “Street-based sex workers distributed pamphlets during the city’s large outdoor Montreal Jazz Festival, requesting passersby to call city hall and denounce the annual wave of arrests of sex workers.”
Three contributors I personally know and admire—Joyce Arthur, Susan Davis and Esther Shannon—recount a long-standing history of advocacy:
Vancouver’s diverse sex worker movement began to organize community-based initiatives in the 1980s, such as founding sex worker support groups, safe work spaces, and harm reduction programs, as well as engaging in labour and community organizing, dialogues with police and government, public education campaigns, and activism … Over the past thirty years, more than twenty sex worker rights groups have formed [in Vancouver] … Almost all these groups still exist today.
Selling Sex not only negotiates space, but also claims it with 349 pages of histories and voices. I will proudly arm myself with this anthology as I continue my own activism. It will be a resource I turn to when the ongoing questions overwhelm me. This anthology has accomplished what it—and perhaps all sex worker activists and allies—intended to do. To sum this vital intention up, I will end with a quote from Sarah Hunt: “Let’s make sure to put the voices, needs, and rights of sex workers themselves at the centre of this movement.”
Brave the weather for Casey Plett’s debut collection
Casey Plett, A Safe Girl to Love
(Topside Press, 2014.) Paperback, 216 pp., $16.95.
Reviewed by Amber Dawn
Let’s hear it for being at the right place at the right time.
In early June, I found myself at the right place, which was Blue Stockings Books—Manhattan’s Lower Eastside stronghold indie bookstore—and the right time was the launch of A Safe Girl to Love, a debut fiction collection by Casey Plett. On my way down 6th Avenue, I got caught in a torrent of warm rain. I considered taking cover in a frozen yoghurt bar, but I’m a Vancouverite and Casey Plett is a Winnipegger and Canadian authors don’t wait for fair weather.
In the balmy bookstore, Plett read from “Not Bleak,” one of eleven short stories that feature transgender women as narrators and central characters. “Not Bleak” is a homecoming story with a familiar premise: urbanized character returns to rural hometown to become acutely aware of the tensions between their past and present notions of self, between belonging and alienation. Plett wonderfully employs the pastoral beauty that frequents such stories, with images of simmering canola fields and long, dirt driveways. The call home is equally poetic, coming in the form of a sick Mennonite grandfather. However, any homespun wistfulness is withheld from returnee character Zeke, whose homecoming means abandoning her female identity and re-inhabiting her familial role as a “good Christian boy.” Zeke’s action of re-becoming the “boy” her grandfather knows and loves adds remarkable dimension to the proverbial homecoming story. Plett further shows her gift for point-of-view by having this story told not by Zeke, but through the perspective Carla, a friend who agrees to a very big favour:
So I’m going to be asking you a favor, said Zeke […] And I just want to make clear. It’s totally okay if you don’t want to do it […] I’ll be asking a lot here […] You remember my grandpa … I’m going to see him in a few weeks. And I won’t be going as a girl, unfortunately, but. … I would really rather not travel alone […] I was wondering if perhaps you would come along with me, and, well, pretend to be my girlfriend.
[…] Honey, I said—and I enunciated clear hear—you don’t want me … the blind could read me [as trans].
Well Carla, she said. You have to understand. They don’t even know what [transitioning] is .”
Casey Plett
The themes of belonging and alienation for Zeke and Carla’s homecoming resonate highly, amplified by the negotiation of how their gender is being perceived in each and every new scene. This makes for a fresh, tactfully complex read. It also is emblematic of a new movement in literature—trans literature—that Plett, along with her publisher Topside Press, is advancing.
Trans lit is an artist-applied label. What qualifies as or hallmarks trans lit is discussed by the artists themselves as the movement evolves. Many literary movements are founded in just this artist-led way; nonetheless, trans lit is a breakthrough considering how other mediums—film and television in particular—have poached, then bargain-merchandised trans stories and identities for popular entertainment. In a recent interview with Canadian Women in the Literary Arts, Plett spoke to the oft overlooked for value of authenticity: “To want to read trans women writing fiction and poetry, you have to actually want to hear what’s on our minds.”
For many readers, the pursuit of a credible voice will be enough reason to pick up A Safe Girl To Love. Other readers may wisely want in on this burgeoning literary movement. Others still may simply want to see traditional narratives—like the homecoming, the coming-of-age and bildungsroman, the love story, the satire—blown open and rebuilt through a sharp trans perspective. Casey Plett has ensured that any motivations for reading her debut collection are rewarded. And you don’t even have to walk through a New York rainstorm to get a copy.
Amber Dawn is a writer from Vancouver, Canada. Author of the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life (2013) and the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa (2010), and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire (2009) and With A Rough Tongue (2005).
Through a series of literary events, I’ve become friends with the remarkable author/musician/filmmaker Vivek Shraya (God Loves Hair and She of the Mountains). Check out the photo of us at the most recent Lambda Lit Awards in New York! So when Shraya recently tagged me in this Blog Hop phenomenon thing, I said, “Okay friend, for you.”
Here are my Hop answers:
1) What am I working on?
I am working on final edits for “Where the Word Ends and My Body Begins” which is a collection of glosa form poems. I wrote eighteen glosas as an homage to and an interaction with some of the poets I consider champions of queering verse—from celebrated poets Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti and Adrianne Rich to the up-and-coming voices of Leah Horlick, Jillian Christmas and Trish Salah.
2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Do I differ? I mean, everything I write is part of much larger literary movements and traditions. My writing traverses memory and relations, trauma and healing, and unblushing queer sex and ecstasy. Writers have been exploring narrative medicine for a long time. I owe my work to many others. For example, I admire Jen Cross’ writing ourselves whole model or Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha transformative justice model for writing.
3) Why do I write what I do?
I write what I know. This creative writing credo—write what you know—has come under attack recently, markedly by the New York Times discussion between Zoe Heller and Mohsin Hamid titled “Write What You Know: Helpful Advice or Idle Cliché?” I enjoyed the discussion, BTW, as I have contemplated other discussions of a similar ilk. For me, I write what I know because my life experiences, values and hopes provide me with more than enough material. This doesn’t mean there isn’t magic or speculative aspects to my work. The “unreal” is still based on myself and my experiences.
4) How does my writing process work?
Fake it until I make it. Try not to hurt myself along the way.
Teck Gallery in SFU’s Harbour Centre Campus 515 West Hasting Street, Vancouver, BC
Featured Poets
For 15 years in the 1980s and ‘90s, Kate Braid worked as a construction carpenter, a trade that even now is not exactly acceptable for a woman. Her mentor during that time was (deceased) painter Emily Carr, another woman who was told “Not!” Braid has since written, edited or co-edited 11 books of non-fiction and prize-winning poetry. See www.katebraid.com
Amber Dawn is the author of the magical realism novel Sub Rosa and the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, winner of the 2013 Vancouver Book Award. Her writing traverses themes of sex work, queer identity, survivor pride and the transformative power of literature.
The Georgia Straight says her poetry is “lit by compassion and courage … a tribute to survivors.”
Vancouver’s professional LGBTTQ theatre company does Davie Village! Please join the franksters for this hip-hop-themed cabaret, hosted by the one and only Delica C as the brilliant, doomed Queen of Soul, Amy Winehouse, and featuring some of Vancouver’s finest LGBTTQ authors and performers, including Amber Dawn, Aaron Chan, Daniel Zomparelli, C. E. Gatchalian and Antonette Rea. DJ’d by the aforementioned Daniel Z. Plus a silent auction and door prizes.
A fundraiser for Telling It Bent, the frank’s writing program for LGBTTQ youth.
Booked! Fernie Writers’ Event: Amber Dawn at Fernie Heritage Library
Saturday, January 31, 2015
At 7:00pm
Time:
7:00pm
Bringing top Canadian literary talents to Fernie for readings and discussion at the beautiful Fernie Heritage Library. This is a Free event! Join the authors and other patrons for an intimate meet & greet, appetizers, cash bar and live entertainment prior to each reading. Contact the library for more information.
This week features: “How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir” by Amber Dawn
Winner of the 2013 Vancouver Book of the Year Award, this book has been known to move readers to tears. Powerful stories reflect the author’s life as a sex worker on the streets of Vancouver and her equally insightful reflection about her life working towards a Masters of Fine Arts at UBC. As Abdou, one of the driving forces behind the Fernie Writers’ Series, listened to Dawn speak in Vancouver, she knew she needed to bring the writer to Fernie: “I listened to her explain the way those two lives – which seem so impossibly far apart – continue to intertwine and depend upon each other. I listened, and I thought: this woman is a force. This woman is just warming up. We’re going to hear a whole lot more from Amber Dawn. As soon as I heard her, I made a 2014 resolution to get her to Fernie. Done. (You’re welcome.)”
Amber Dawn is the award-winning author of the novel Sub Rosa, the memoir How Poetry Saved My Life, and a forthcoming collection of poetry, all published by the Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press.
Dawn’s fictional debut tells the story of Little, a teenage runaway who joins an underground world of magical prostitutes, in a fresh voice and magic realism—style that brightens its dark subject matter and does what only the best books do: make you see something in an entirely new light. A speculative fictionalized version of her own story, Sub Rosa was followed by a memoir comprised of prose and poetry that brings together nearly 15 years of writing. Offering a poignant and powerful glimpse into Dawn’s lived experience hustling the streets of Vancouver, the memoir preaches what it practices with a call to arms that asks readers to honour and speak their own truths.
Interview by Tracy Stefanucci and photographs by Megan Prediger
Tracy Stefanucci: Sub Rosa had a big impact on me. I read it when I was living in Strathcona on Pender Street and the bushes behind my house were the site of a lot of sex work. At first, this was really hard for me to reconcile – my socially programmed responses of fear, pity, or even disgust didn’t sit well with me, but I wasn’t sure what I should feel or think instead. For me, your book humanized sex workers in a way that nothing else I’d ever encountered had. When you first began working on your novel, what was your inner conversation around taking up such a subject?
Amber Dawn: Working in the bushes on Pender Street does sound hard! There is no running water. No way to keep the workspace clean or secure. I hate working in the bushes.
I didn’t want the protagonist of Sub Rosa to work in the bushes. I portrayed Little’s working environment as large, clean and bright: “Nowhere did [Little] spot a dust bunny or fingerprint or scuff mark.” Little also works alongside her own household and an extended community of sex workers. Information about work skills, working conditions, and the clients are openly shared amongst members of this community. Writing these kinds of conditions into Sub Rosa is humanizing. It is the way all workers should be able to work. Isolation, silence, stigma, and expulsion from society are the very core of dehumanizing. And as we’ve seen in Vancouver and worldwide, when people–especially poor women – are dehumanized, their lives are utterly unprotected.
I wanted Little and the other characters of Sub Rosa to not be burdened with dehumanizing working conditions. I needed their focus to be on an emotional landscape that was ‘higher’ than mere survival.
TS: The idealized world you create for Little is a powerful device. I had so much fun going on Little’s journey with her that at times I would pause and think, “Wait, is it okay to view this as fun?” I almost felt guilty, as if I were taking pleasure in something I shouldn’t be. This inner dialogue encouraged me to question the ‘good/bad’ and ‘right/wrong’ dynamic that I was bringing to the subject.
I also found myself wondering if this world was the ‘reality’ of the book or Little’s translation of her experience. Were you intending to set up the possibility that Little might be an unreliable narrator using fantastical amplification to process and communicate a harsh reality?
AD: Yes, I understood while writing that Little would be seen as an unreliable narrator by many readers, and that the idealized world that surrounded her would be considered aspects of her own creative coping mechanism. I was careful never to completely confirm or discredit either reading of Little’s character and experiences. To me, it’s more interesting to see where the reader arrives with Little for themselves. The grey area between reality and fantasy is as critical to me as the vast grey area between right and wrong.
“The grey area between
reality and fantasy
isas critical to me as
the vast grey area between
right and wrong.”
TS: I love that! It is so poignant how speculative fiction reflects that perception is always a “grey area,”as reality and truth are subjective. Maybe that is part of the reason why the genre is so suited to stories that challenge the status quo. How did writing in this style help you put words to this story?
AD: Readers trust a magical or fantastic container. Normally, as soon as magic is introduced into fiction, the reader can expect a victory of some kind. Magic is an ally a protagonist can count on. As soon as Dorothy puts on the magical silver shoes (made into ruby slippers for the film) the reader can rest assured that magic will allow her to make a comeback from all the hardships of Oz. Similarly, magic allows my readers to have confidence in Little’s journey. Magic gives Little – and all the characters in her community – the upper hand that reality does not. Magic allowed me to introduce readers to a community of runaway, young prostitutes and not have them spend the entire book worried about the girls’ safety.
TS: What gave you the “strength and inspiration,” as you put it in the introduction of How Poetry Saved My Life, to write Sub Rosa
AD: I really dug into what Sub Rosa was, as a novel, between 2007 and 2009. This is long enough ago that I don’t exactly remember how I did it. Sometimes it seemed I was in a trance. I remember literally lying on my bed, face down in a pillow, while my arms were outstretched in front of me, fingers still tapping away on my laptop keyboard. I went the MFA route to learn my craft and Sub Rosa was my graduate thesis. As I expected, I was involved in the discussion of: “Can magical (speculative) fiction be literary fiction?” These ongoing debates did not hinder my process; I was well-supported as I wrote. However, I crashed after graduating. I no longer had the MFA workshop to nurture me. Sub Rosa – the thesis – was not yet working as Sub Rosa the novel. I got very low and lonely finishing the final drafts on my own. I wish I could say I didn’t feel pain while writing it, or that I didn’t relapse, or that I was proud of myself. Writing my memoir was much easier than Sub Rosa, because with the novel, I – the author – had the power to change the way sex work looks. It was both an opportunity and an incredible emotional burden. All in all, I simply knew I just had to finish the darn book. As inhabitants of this trepidatious world, we only have so many chances to declare “The end.”
TS: How was collecting and publishing the texts in your memoir, a different experience?
AD: Surprisingly, I found publishing my memoir an uplifting and healing experience. I felt strong owning my story. And the personal nature of the book has brought me close to scores of readers. Readers often hug me or share tender words with me at literary events. I waited and waited for antagonistic responses, and no such responses reached me. When I won the 2013 City of Vancouver Book Award at the Mayor’s Arts Awards, it really sank in: people want to hear from sex workers and survivors – not just debate about them – but hear their authentic, complex, unique stories.
TS: In your memoir you quote Jeanette Winterson: “A tough life needs a tough language– and that’s what poetry is.” How did poetry give you a voice?
AD: It was healing to use poetry to tell part of my story. Poetry is a great genre to disrupt any dumbed-down popular culture messages and to invite the reader to really re-think meaning and story. In this day and age, poetry is an underdog genre – I can relate! Poetry and so-called ‘outsider stories’ make great mates.
TS: What advice to do you have for other authors who are grappling with personal, stigmatized topics?
AD:Reach out to your people. Honestly, don’t work in 100 percent isolation. It isn’t ideal for sex workers and it isn’t ideal for writers either. Even if your sole way of connecting is via an online writers’ community or organizing a writers’ group that meets as few as four times per year. Attend readings of writers you admire – introduce yourself. Let your friends, lovers, your yoga teacher – someone you know that you are writing challenging work. If your friends are not writers or avid readers, ask them to support you in the ways they know how – like going to see a big-budget action movie with you or making you some chicken soup. See what I’m saying here? Reach out. It’s totally unreasonable for writers to employ these creative, brave voices in our writing if we are not able to ask for what we need from others around us. Reach out.
Where the Words End and My Body Begins, Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn’s first full-length book of poetry is a suite of poems written as an homage to — and an interaction with — a number of legendary and emerging queer poets. Among them: Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti, Adrienne Rich, Leah Horlick, Rachel Rose and Trish Salah. A gutsy and lyrical debut by the Lambda Literary and Vancouver Book Award winner.
Amber Dawn’s first full-length book of poetry is a suite of poems written as an homage to — and an interaction with — a number of legendary and emerging queer poets. Among them: Gertrude Stein, Christina Rossetti, Adrienne Rich, Leah Horlick, Rachel Rose and Trish Salah. A gutsy and lyrical debut by the Lambda Literary and Vancouver Book Award winner.
This week’s Snapshots diverge and intersect with one another. Where the words end and my body begins explores the depths of the body and rewrites her state of being, while Safely Home Pacific Western rewrites the mind in order to uncover the beauty of object and place. The Uncertainty Principle brings the body, the being, the object, and the word all together at once, as if Bennett were wrapping up Latosik and Dawn’s words in her own creation and understanding of the world.
Where the words end and my body begins
by Amber Dawn
Arsenal Pulp Press
In Where the words end and my body begins writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn rebuilds her glosa poems by constructing them on quotations from queer, gender-creative, feminist, and/or survivor writers. Dawn uses repetition as a method of regeneration to revitalize the seemingly strict structures of the glosa form and to transform her poems into something powerful and subversive. “If possible,” she writes, “hear me tell a different story. / Survivorship is not hard stars, it’s not a dim fable fucking / with me.” Based on the words of Bachinsky, Stein, Clifton, Horlick, Queyras and many inspiring writers, Dawn deconstructs what we think we know in order to put our ideas back together again in a different order. In “Mother Did her Own Stunts” she challenges the distinctions between film and life, tearing them apart at the seams: “Costume blood: / and tomato, glass shard crown. What if / your father never got up from the ground? / Letterbox what memory has recorded / borders of the Real, surrounded“. Although seemingly chaotic, Dawn’s poetry does not let anything go unchecked: “Apathy is / the world’s worst lover, over and over. // Queer Infinity”
Amber Dawn is a writer, filmmaker, and performance artist based in Vancouver. In 2012, she won the $4,000 Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers’ Trust of Canada, an annual award given to a lesbian, bisexual or transgender writer who shows promise in their work. In 2013, she released How Poetry Saved My Life, a memoir about sex work and how Amber Dawn changed her life through the power of writing.
How Poetry Saved My Life won the Vancouver Book Award and was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
From How Poetry Saved My Life:
“How old are you?” he asks as he opens the door.
There is no right answer to this question, so I guess. “Twenty-seven.”
“Becky told me you were twenty-five.”
Becky isn’t a real woman. She is the name that all three of the receptionists at the escort agency use when arranging outcalls. Becky’s job is to move product. The product is sexual fantasy, which differs from other products in that the buyer wants to be an uninformed consumer. In this marketplace of attractive inaccuracy, if the client on the phone likes breasts, Becky makes double Ds out of C-cups. If he likes younger women, Becky tells him I am twenty-five.
As the worker–the sex worker–the job is less about embodying the client’s fantasy and more about making the imitation seem like money well spent. Lying about my age, breast size, weight, cultural background, hair colour, college education, lust for certain sex acts and so on, is a routine guile that routinely causes me anxiety. Where will the client draw the line between fantasy and deception? The fantasy holds my payment. But finding myself on the side of deception is delicate. Let’s just say that in sex work, there is no standardized way for a client to lodge a complaint.
Standing rigid and at least six feet tall in the threshold of his waterfront home, this man begrudgingly decides it is worth $250 to pretend that I am twenty-five, when actually I am thirty. He hands me a billfold and ushers me in.
There’s evidence that D.H. Lawrence enjoyed an erotic power exchange relationship with his wife, that James Joyce was into scat (among other things), and that Oscar Wilde—well, most of us know what Oscar Wilde liked. These literary geniuses explored radical sexual agency and desire in their work and in their relationships, but little beyond rumors and personal letters exist to tell us what they themselves thought of their turn-ons and the ways in which those dovetailed with their writing. Even if space for such a discourse and community had existed back then, Lawrence, Joyce and Wilde couldn’t freely discuss their sexuality. As it was, they faced censorship and generated scandal wherever they went, and of course Wilde went to prison for his sexual behavior.
Although our world is still intolerant of sexual difference, I want to believe we’re at a point where people can speak openly about the consensual ways we express our erotic selves. And I’m interested in the connections between those private expressions and the larger, more public work we do in the world. This series is meant as a forging of community; a validation of that which gets called sexual deviance; and a proud celebration of the complex, fascinating ways that humans experience desire.
In this ongoing series of short personal essays, writers in all genres—novelists, poets, journalists, and more—explore the intersection between our literary lives and practices and our BDSM and fetishistic lives and practices. In other words, these essays aren’t about writing about non-normative sex: rather, it’s a series about how looking at the world through the lens of an alternative sexual orientation influences the modes and strategies with which one approaches one’s creative work.
If you have questions or comments, or if you’re a writer who would like to contribute, please contact me at kinkwriting@gmail.com.
–Arielle Greenberg, Series Editor
Cunts & Catastrophes: Trauma Play and Writing
Last June, Feminist Press made an English-translated and unabridged reprint of Violette Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle available in the US for the first time. I had been waiting for this particular banned book to appear in circulation. Shameless disclosure: I own a VHS copy of the sexploitation film adaptation of Thérèse and Isabelle, a wannabe art house production that Roger Ebert pronounced the worst movie of 1968. And it’s not just this film I love: I can easily waste a day binge-watching grindhouse hits directed by Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, and Doris Wishman. While many cult followers laud the nonsensical narration and low-production aesthetics that hallmark the sexploitation genre, I look specifically for arousing variations on a theme that I’ll call Cunts & Catastrophe—or Muffs & Malcontent, Boobs & Burdens, Tits & Torment (add to this alliterated list as you like). So when I read Thérèse and Isabelle in one sitting, it was not to observe a nearly lost text from the lesbian canon. I was just greedy for more Cunts & Catastrophe.
Consistent with just about every other teenage lesbian narrative, Thérèse and Isabelle’s secret affair suffers the threat of being exposed, though the crux of their suffering comes from aggrandized insecure-attachment behaviors. Again and again, they fail to make eye contact that is intense enough, to vocalize their desires persuasively enough, or to hold each other forcefully enough: “We squeezed each other until we nearly suffocated. Our hands shaking… our arms fell back, our inadequacy astonished us… ‘Harder harder, squeeze,’ she demanded… ‘don’t you know how?’”
This doomed symbiosis titillates me, and feels rather familiar. More familiar still is a passage found on page thirty-seven where, during the close of a love scene, Thérèse begins to talk about her mother. A hostile mother with appallingly unhealthy boundaries, a mother character who closely resembles Leduc’s own childhood abuser, whom Leduc wrote unflinchingly about in her only well-received book, her memoir La Bâtarde.
La Bâtarde, published in 1964, was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, a prize nomination that ought to have earned her esteem. Two years later Thérèse and Isabelle was banned. Censorship and controversy have battered much of Leduc’s fiction, with critics targeting explicit lesbian sex and themes of incest and familial abuse. I wonder if Leduc was ever admonished for writing her abusive mother into love scenes? Was the reoccurrence of trauma, which readers applauded in her memoir, the reason why her subsequent books were censored or banned? While other queer text had been celebrated in France the 1950s and 1960s, why was Leduc deemed unfit for readers?
Read the full Essay: http://therumpus.net/2016/08/kink-10-writing-while-deviant-amber-dawn/
A few weeks ago we brought you Three New Queer Vancouver Writers. The five Vancouver authors featured in this post are well-established pros from here in Vancouver who have made their mark across Canada and internationally.
The title says it all: these are writers whose work you can’t miss.
Ivan Coyote
Fans of spoken word and/or live storytelling should be ashamed if they haven’t yet seen Ivan Coyote perform in or out of Vancouver. Their subtly disarming kitchen-table style storytelling is breathtaking both on the page—six short story collections, one novel, and other collaborations—or in person. Whether Ivan is taking on the nuances of butch and trans identity, small-town childhood in the Yukon, or searching for a no-nonsense cup of brewed coffee in East Vancouver, you’ll be captivated. Check out their website for upcoming live storytelling performances, which are an essential queer Canadian experience.
Wayson Choy / Image via weblog.johnwmacdonald.com
Wayson Choy
If you’re looking for a (gay) writer who brings Vancouver’s Chinatown to life, look no further than Wayson Choy who was born and raised there. He is often praised for his complex, authentic characters and beautiful, literary style; in fact, he’s won all kind of awards from the Trillium Book Award to the City of Vancouver Book Award. His debut novel The Jade Peony is a family saga set in 30s and 40s Chinatown and features a gay Chinese-Canadian character. If memoir is more your thing, Choy has also written two of those: Paper Shadows (about his Chinatown childhood) and Not Yet (after two brushes with death).
Amber Dawn / Image via amberdawnwrites.com
Amber Dawn
Amber Dawn is one of those writers whose talents can’t be contained in one form or genre: she has published poetry, memoir, fantasy, erotica, horror, and essays. Whatever the medium, she often writes about queer identity, survivor pride, and sex work. For example, her latest book How Poetry Saved My Life is part memoir, poetry, and even a bit of erotica; it chronicles her experiences hustling Vancouver’s streets and how poetry acted as a lifeline during those years. Sub Rosa, in contrast, is a dark urban fantasy novel set in the downtown east side. Like Wayson Choy, Amber Dawn has also won the City of Vancouver Book Award.
Hiromi Goto / Image via canadiannikkei.ca
Hiromi Goto
Hiromi Goto is well-known for the spell-binding magic she brings to all her writing. Darkest Light and Half World, two companion YA books, are deliciously dark urban fantasy—with lovingly specific details of East Vancouver—heavily inspired by Japanese mythology. The best part of Half World is the unlikely heroine’s even more unlikely sidekick/guide. When was the last time you read a book where the old, wise kick-ass mentor was a Chinese-Canadian lesbian? Probably never. Hiromi Goto has also written books for adults, all with a touch of magic: The Kappa Child, Hopeful Monsters, Chorus of Mushrooms, and more!
C.E. Gatchalina / Image via cegatchalian.com
C.E. Gatchalian
Most well-known as a playwright, C.E. Gatchalian is also a poet, (non)fiction writer, editor, and teacher. He’s the only person on this list who was born and raised in Vancouver, and still lives here. His plays, such as Falling in Time, Broken, Crossing, and Claire, have appeared on national and international stages. They often tackle tough, controversial subjects and have been praised for being brilliant as well as disturbing. Gatchalian is the artistic producer of The Frank Theatre Company, whose mandate is to promote queer and sex-positive theatre in Vancouver. If you’re looking for queer stories on the Vancouver stage, look no further than C.E. Gatchalian.
Casey Stepaniuk is a writer and librarian-in-training who runs the website Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian, where you can find LGBTQ+ Canadian book reviews and a queer book advice column. She also writes for Book Riot. Find her on Twitter: @canlesbrarian
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Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (2011), Bluets (2009), The Red Parts (2007), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (2007) and Jane: A Murder (200). Nelson was granted a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. Since 2005 she has been on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at CalArts, where she currently directs the MFA Creative Writing Program. She lives in Los Angeles.
Amber Dawn is a writer living on unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir won the 2013 Vancouver Book Award. She is the author of the Lambda Award-winning novel Sub Rosa, and editor of the anthologies Fist of the Spider Women: Fear and Queer Desire and With A Rough Tongue. Her newest book Where the words and my body begins is a collection of glosa form poems. She currently teaches creative writing at Douglas College and the University of British Columbia, as well as volunteer mentors at several community-driven art and healing spaces.
The Argonauts was chosen for the 2016 One Book: One SFU. Presented by SFU Library, UBC Creative Writing Program, Vancity Office of Community Engagement, SFU Woodward’s and Pulpfiction Books
, suburbia, the library and at cocktail parties where the author ponders paintings, the state of contemporary poetry and her life as a wife and mother. Her work is also relentlessly poetic, literary, and meant to be read on the page, not as a rallying cry but as a sigh into beauty over a cuppa tea.
