Results tagged “sharonharris”

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

You really have to wonder how performance artist and sexual activist Louise Bak always manages to schedule the very best mix of the Toronto literary scene for her Box Salon series. The successful poet and CIUT "Sex City" host founded the event back in 1998, and a decade later it is still the most entertaining literary night out in Toronto. While many other reading series can be hit or miss, the Box is consistently fresh, fun and, well, not all that “literary”—Bak curates an evening that keeps testing the boundaries of what literature is, regularly including filmmakers, playwrights, fashion designers, and musicians amongst the regular stock of poets and prose writers.

A big congratulations goes out to Toronto-based press House of Anansi for publishing this year’s ReLit short story winner, Bill Gaston’s Gargoyles. The ReLit award is set up to give well deserved attention to books produced by the independent presses throughout Canada. House of Anansi’s winning entry is joined a number of its other publications on the poetry and novel short list. (Also nominated for the long list was Torontoist’s very own Sharon Harris for her wonderful book Avatar.)

Last night, one of Torontoist’s adolescent fantasies came true … no, not that one…we finally saw synth pop group The Spoons in concert!

Running from June 1–10, Luminato takes over our fair city, with over 100 events spanning just about everything arts-and-culture-related. As they boast on their website, "Luminato was created to bring Toronto's best to the world, and the world's best to Toronto." A noble goal, and one they seem to have accomplished: Leonard Cohen! Philip Glass! Uh...Stephen King! Dancers! Artists! An Art Boat! Many things!

love/hate relationship with the city for over a decade, but thanks to a move and the graffiti, "love won." Our own "I Love You" collector Sharon Harris, likens photo collections to a concept album as compared to a single because it has narrative. Pryde discovered Harris's images through Google, but she also looks for her handmade declarations of love in store windows and indoor spaces. "They are everywhere," she says. "The conversation ebbs and flows, but its positivity is a constant." It's also an ongoing dialogue. The image above was taken at Sneaky Dees. "The amount of work that went into it impressed me, says Pryde. "I still always look to see if that booth is empty so I can sit there when I scarf down a Veggie Eater and some nachos."

Toronto’s Small Press Book Fair runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today at the Trinity St. Paul Centre, 427 Bloor Street West (just west of Spadina on the south side). Now in its twentieth year, the fair presents about 70 micro to medium-sized publishers and magazines. An archive of some of the fair's past and present exhibitors links to many of Toronto's small presses.

How is National Poetry Month treating you? On the second week of celebration, Torontoist is beginning to buckle a little under the strain of too much fun, but it warms our hearts to witness the large number of bookish events offered this April. We are happy to announce the winners of our poetry contest as part of the nationwide festivities.

On the way to the sold-out Bunch Family Salon at The Arts and Letters Club last Saturday, my eight year old son looks into the window of our subway car and sees an alternate universe; it's just us, but backwards. After he asks me to call him by his inverse reality name, "ttenraG," he ponders how my name would sound. Turns out that even in other worlds, my name is "moM."

Nicole Brossard is one of Canada’s most prolific and avant-garde writers, with more than thirty books to date and a dizzying list of awards to match. Her work is often sharply self-referential: saturated with the impossibility of a seamless translation and the problem of writing in a language already loaded with meaning, Brossard’s work is a meditation on how to write outside of a coded imaginary. While Brossard’s oeuvre has been associated with a postmodern aesthetic (in Mauve Desert, for example, references to the Beats work alongside a critique of the foundations of Western philosophy), her writing doesn’t render itself slick to the point of ineffectual.

WARNING: The following report may shock and offend some readers.

Toronto graffiti artist Toivo (Finnish for "hope") has painted an eponymous rainbow around town for the past two years. Her optimistic messages span the downtown, but are most easily located on cement tree planters in The Annex and Little Italy. You’ll also find them in the quietest of laneways.

Reading Toronto states "the city is a book with 100,000 million poems." Torontoist is aware of many poems that have been written by Toronto poets, but thinks there is ample room in the GTA for a few more (maybe a million-or-two would improve the present un-poetic monstrosity that is Dundas Square). We're also curious to know where new poems are being written: During TTC commutes? On the picturesque grounds of Casa Loma? Under the Gardiner?

For poets Stephen Cain (American Standard/Canada Dry), Jay MillAr, and Sharon Harris, Christmas is coming early this year. The Mercury Press is holding a holiday-themed book launch to celebrate two new books: Harris’s first collection of poems, AVATAR; and Cain and MillAr’s Double Helix, a series of 52 “micro-fictions.”

Apologies for the lack of listings last week. The combination of the previous night’s Halloween party and an encroaching deadline on another project left little time for me to gather all the literary happenings in the city.

Since 2001, photographer, poet and writer Sharon Harris has been stalking the streets of Toronto taking photos of the mysterious "I Love You" tags all over the downtown core. Over the last few years she's accrued dozens of photos. They'll be up at Dooney's Cafe for the next few weeks, with a launch tonight from 5-8pm.