[{"id":"9284","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E6, Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 1 March 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/a9212c02-0491-458c-9d5a-eae284bc37f3/audio/3d08da82-0039-4ad4-8ed7-f1377e559fd8/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:03:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"60,822,300 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-reads-grippes-and-poche-at-sfu/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-03-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/11/29/grippes-and-poche\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Painful Affair.” The New Yorker, 16 March 1981, p.39 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/03/16/a-painful-affair\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “A Flying Start.” The New Yorker, 13 September 1982, p. 39. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1982/09/13/a-flying-start-2\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “In Plain Sight.” The New Yorker, 25 October 1993, p. 96. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/10/25/in-plain-sight\\n\\nkyles. “cassette tape deck open, close +tape handling.” Freesound, 5 December 2018, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/450525/.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMavis Gallant. “Preface.” The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.\\n\\nMackie, John. “A hidden treasure of 1960s Vancouver recordings resurfaces.” Vancouver Sun, 31 December 2019, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/a-hidden-treasure-of-1960s-vancouver-recordings-resurfaces\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549494956032,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["On February 14, 1984, Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University. She did a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche,” which was published in the New Yorker in 1982  — her ninety-fifth work in the magazine. Containing the full recording of her reading, which includes Gallant’s live commentary as she reads, “Mavis Gallant Reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU” celebrates Gallant’s voice in print and audio. \n\nPart one of a two-part series, this episode engages with Gallant’s voice and the materiality of the recording: how do we perceive Gallant’s explanatory interruptions, unincluded in the printed work? How do we hear the physicality of the audio recording itself? While this episode takes up these questions in regards to the recording of the event, part two will take them up in combination with further consideration of the live event itself.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices]\n00:00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: stories about how literature sounds.\n00:00:36\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What is your favourite way to hear a story? How does a written work change when it’s read aloud, interrupted, or framed by moments of laughter and applause? At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we are always considering what transformations happen in the conversions between printed words, live events, and our un-archiving of recorded stories. These questions frame today’s episode, which will be a special treat for Canadian literature fans of prose and the short story. We present you with a full audio edition of a 1984 recording of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story “Grippes and Poche” at Simon Fraser university. This story was originally published in the New Yorker magazine in 1982. Our episode producers, Kate Moffatt, Candace Sharon, and Michelle Levy are researchers of book history.\n00:01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThey contextualize Gallant’s reading and invite you to consider the physical lives of her stories. How do we respond differently to this recording of a live reading, as opposed to engaging with a printed work? What do you hear in Gallant’s reading voice and her comments as she reads? This is part one of a two-part series based on this recording of Mavis Gallant. In June, part two of the series will guide us in a deeper exploration of the characters in the short story, the author, and recorded questions from the event we will hear today. We hope you enjoy this audio edition. Here are Kate, Kandice, and Michelle with [Begin Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Episode Six of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Mavis Gallant reads “Grippes and Poche” at SFU [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:02:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLike all people who read or perform – I’m a fetishist. The watch has to be there and not there. And you see, that’s why I’m doing all this fiddling. Can you all hear me?\n00:02:36\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Accordion] goes into background piano] On February 14th, 1984, acclaimed short story writer Mavis Gallant visited Simon Fraser University to do a reading of her short story “Grippes and Poche”, which was printed in the New Yorker in 1982. My name is Kate Moffatt.\n00:02:56\tKandice Sharren:\tI’m Kandice Sharren.\n00:02:58\tMichelle Levy:\tAnd I’m Michelle Levy.\n00:02:59\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd as three members of the Simon Fraser University SpokenWeb team, we are inviting you to come back in time with us 37 years to February 14th, 1984, to attend Gallants reading of her story [Audience Chatter].\n00:03:11\tKate Moffatt:\t“Grippes and Poche” was published in the New Yorker in November of 1982. The print publication spans nine pages [Sound Effect: Page Flipping] and includes what one expects from the New Yorker: cartoons on every page, a poem partway through, and the beginning of the next section of the magazine on the last page, which reads “social notes from all over” and includes an announcement for a Susquehanna County Sunshine Club meeting of which municipal police chief Charles Martel and his police dog will be the guests. Gallant’s reading, of course, includes none of this. And in fact, she did not read from a New Yorker copy of “Grippes and Poche”. She mentions partway through the event that she’s reading from proofs.\n00:03:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tI have an editorial query here. Is he imagining this? [Laughs] Yes. These are proofs.\n00:03:56\tKate Moffatt:\tThe recording provides us with an opportunity, not only to hear the author read her own work, but to hear a version of the story unavailable to readers complete with her inflections and added commentary. Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant is one of Canada’s most noteworthy writers, known for short stories, novels, plays and essays. During the 1940s, she worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard where she began publishing some of her early stories, before moving to Paris in 1950 to pursue writing full-time, and where she remained until her death in 2014. The year after she moved to Paris, saw the beginning of her lifelong relationship with the New Yorker. Between the publication of “Madeline’s Birthday” in 1951 and “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” in 1995, she published over 116 stories in the magazine. “Grippes and Poche” embodies the complex linguistic, political, and national cultural spaces Gallant occupied. Although her family was Anglophone, she was educated at a convent where only French was taught. Gallant explained that she learned to write primarily through her reading of English books. And by the age of eight, she writes, English was irretrievably entrenched as the language of imagination. Born in Canada, but living in and writing about postwar France in English for an American magazine “Grippes and Poche ” speaks to the multiple cultures and histories her writing navigates. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:05:15\tMichelle Levy:\tAt the time of this SFU reading, Gallant was an established and critically successful writer. “Grippes and Poche” was her 95th story to appear in the New Yorker. Published on November 29, 1982, the story is the third in a four-part series with recurring characters. Previously, Henri Grippes has appeared in two stories, “A Painful Affair”, March 16, 1981, and “A Flying Start” September 13, 1982. Stories that recount Grippes literary rivalry with the English author, Victor Prism, and detail their early encounters with their American patroness. In 1985 these three stories were reprinted in Overhead in a Balloon, a collection that brings together 12 stories set in Paris. Nearly a decade after “Grippes and Poche”, she returned to Grippes for her final installment in the series: “Within Plain Sight”. A story that takes us forward to an aging Grippes recounting his refusal to accept the advances of his long suffering neighbor Madame Parfait, and his troubled past in Nazi occupied central France. Importantly, Gallant collected the four stories together under the titular character’s name in 1996. [Begin Music: Accordion]\n00:06:31\tKandice Sharren:\tThe audio cassette containing this recording is housed in the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department, where it is accompanied by a poster advertising the event, which was hosted by the now defunct Canadian Studies program in Images Theatre, a lecture hall on the Burnaby campus. Michelle unearthed this recording because of her interest in Gallant. However, once listening, we were struck by the story itself with its sharp jabs at French bureaucracy, which were emphasized by the clarity and dramatic range of Gallant’s voice on a tape recording from the 1980s. In addition to our work on SpokenWeb, Kate, Michelle, and I research 18th and 19th century book history. And in our conversations about how to approach this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we were struck by the impact of material circumstances on the recording, both in the clues it provides as to what those circumstances were and the way it imposes them on us.\n00:07:25\tKandice Sharren:\tOur framework for working with print also impacted our interpretation of this reading. Throughout Gallant interrupts herself to explain French words or phrases, or to provide additional contextual information. Independently, all three of us began referring to these asides as akin to footnotes, even though for a listener, they are not marginal commentary that can easily be ignored or skimmed, but rather are fully integrated into the reading. As you listen to this recording, we invite you to think about the places where print and audio performance intersect as well as where they diverge. What are the gains and losses of hearing the author read the story rather than reading it yourself in print. What evidence exists within the recording about the event itself? How big does the room sound and how full is it? How many people seem to be present? How does Gallant respond to their presence, reshaping her proofs along the way? Our interpretation of the recording was also impacted by the material form of the cassette, which only allows for 45 minutes per side. This means a break occurs roughly 35 minutes into the reading that attendees of the event would not have experienced. We’ll check back in with you at this break to talk more about its significance. For now, we’ll leave you with Gallant “Grippes and Poche” in 1984.\n00:08:41\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThis is a story called “Grippes and Poche”. Henri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It’s just a very gentle send up. The Poche in question is the income tax man in Paris.\n00:09:14\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt an early hour for the French man of — [Aside] if you can’t hear just say something and I’ll do the best I can — At an early hour for the French man of letters Henri Gripes, it was a quarter to nine and an April morning. He sat in a windowless brown painted cubicle facing a slight mop headed young man with horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. The men wore a dark tie with a narrow knot and buttoned up blazer. His signature was O. Poche.\n00:09:46\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHis title on the grubby, pulpy summons Grippes had read sweating was: controller. He must be freshly out of a civil service training school, Grippes guessed. Even his aspect of a priest hearing a confession a few yards from the guillotine seemed newly acquired. Before him lay open a dung-coloured folder with not much in it. A letter from Grippes full of delaying tactics and copies of his correspondence with a bank in California. It was not true that American banks protected a depositor’s secrets. Anyway, this one hadn’t. Another reason Grippes thought O. Poche must be recent was the way he kept blushing. He was not nearly as pale and as case-hardened as Grippes. At this time, President de Gaulle had been in power five years, two of which Grippes spent in blithe writer-in-residence-ship in California.\n00:10:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tReturning to Paris, he had left a bank account behind. It was forbidden under the fifth Republic for a French citizen to have a foreign account. The government might not have cared so much about drachmas or zlotys, but dollars were supposed to be scrapped and converted to francs at bottom rates, and of course counted as personal income. Grippes’ unwise and furtive moves with trifling sums, his somewhat paranoid disagreements with California over exchange, had finally caught the eye of the Bank of France as a glistening minnow might attract a dozing whale. The whale swallowed Grippes, found him too small to matter, and spat him out. Straight into the path of a water ox called Public Treasury Direct Taxation Personal Income. That was Poche. What Poche had to discuss, a translation of Grippes’ novel, the one about the French teacher at the American university and his doomed love affair with his student Karen Sue, seemed to embarrass him. Observing Poche with some curiosity, Grippes saw unreeling scenes from the younger man’s inhibited boyhood.\n00:12:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sensed, then discerned the Catholic boarding school in bleakest, Brittany. The unheated 40 bed dormitory and nightly torment of unchaste dreams with astonishing partners. A daytime terror of real hell with real fire. Human waywardness is hardly new, said Grippes, feeling more and more secure now that he had tested Poche and found him provincial. It no longer shocks anyone. It was not the moral content of the book he wished to talk over, said Poche, flaming. In any case, he was not qualified to do so. He had flubbed philosophy, had never taken modern French thought. He must be new, Grippes decided, he was babbling. Frankly, even though he had the figures in front of him, Poches found it hard to believe the American translation had earned its author so little. There must be another considerable sum placed in some other bank. Perhaps Monsieur Grippes could try and remember.\n00:13:11\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe figures were true. The translation had done poorly. Failure plagued Grippes’ advantage reducing the hint of deliberate tax evasion to a simple oversight. Still, it hurt to have things put so plainly. He felt bound to tell Poche that American readers were no longer interested in the teacher-student embrollio. Though, there had been some slight curiosity as to what a foreigner might wring out of the old sponge. Poche gazed at Grippes. His eyes seem to Grippes as helpless and eager as those of a gun dog waiting for a command. Encouraged, Grippes said more. In writing his novel, he had over the essential development. The airing professor was supposed to come home at the end. He could be half dead limping on crutches. Toothless, jobless, broke, impotent. It didn’t matter. He had to be judged and shriven. As further mortification, his wife during his foolish affair would have gone on to be a world-class cellist under her maiden name.\n00:14:18\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWife had not entered Grippes cast of characters, probably because Poche didn’t have one. He had noticed Poche did not wear a wedding ring. Grippes had just left his professor driving off to an airport in blessed weather, whistling a jaunty air. Poche shook his head. Obviously it was not the language he was after. He began to write in a clean page of the file taking no more notice of Grippes. What a mistake it had been, Grippes reflected, still feeling pain beneath the scar, to have repeated the male teacher-female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Fleaubair, his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. The novel had not done well in France either. Poche still had to get around to that.\n00:15:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe critics had found Karen Sue’s sociological context obscure. She seemed a little removed from events of her time, unaware of improved literacy figures in North Korea. Never once mentioned. Or that since the advent of goalism, it costs 25 centimes to mail a letter. The Pill — that’s the Pill —was still unheard of in much of Europe. Readers could not understand what it was Karen Sue kept forgetting to take, or why Grippes had devoted a contemplated a no-action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. The professor had not given Karen Sue the cultural and political enlightenment one would expect from the graduate of a preeminent Paris school. It was a banal story, really, about a pair of complacently bourgeois lovers. The real victim was Grippes, seduced and abandoned by the American middle-class.\n00:16:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was Grippes’ first outstanding failure, and for that reason, the only one of his works he ever re-read. He could still hear Karen Sue. The true, the original, speaking of every vowel a poignant question. “I’m Karen Sue. I know you’re busy. It’s just that I don’t understand what you said about Flaubert and his young niece.” He would call her with tolerance, the same tolerance that had weakened the book. Grippes was wise enough to realize that the California Bank affair had been an act of folly, a conman’s aberration. He had thought he would get away with it knowing all the while he couldn’t. There existed a deeper treasure for Poche to uncover well below public treasury sites. Computers had not yet come into government use. Even typewriters were rare. Poche had summoned Grippes in a cramped, almost secretive hand. It took time to strike an error, still longer to write a letter about it. In his youth, repaid received from an American patroness of the arts three rent bearing apartments in Paris, which he still owned.\n00:17:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe patronness has had been the last of a generous species, Grippes one of the last young men to benefit from her kind. He collected the rents by devious and untraceable means, stowing the cash obtained in safe deposit. His visible way of life was stoic and plain. Not even the most vigilant controller could fault his under-furnished apartment in Montparnasse shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents. He showed none of the signs of prosperity public treasury seemed to like, such as membership in a golf club. [Aside] And this is not a joke — on French income tax form you’re asked if you belong to a golf club. It puts you in another bracket.\n00:18:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter a minute of speculative anguish and the airless cubicle, Grippes saw that Poche had no inkling whatsoever about the flats. He was chasing something different. The inexistent royalties from the Karen Sue novel. By a sort of divine even handedness, Grippes was going to have to pay for imaginary earnings. He put the safe deposit out of his mind so that it would not show on his face, and said, “What will be left for me when you finished adding and subtracting?” To his surprise, Poche replied in a bold tone, pitched for reciting quotations, “what is left? What is left? Only what remains at low tide when small islands are revealed emerging.” He stopped quoting and flushed. Obviously he had committed the worst sort of blunder, had let his own personality show, had crossed over to his opponents ground.\n00:19:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It sounds familiar,” said Grippes, enticing him further. “Although to tell you the truth, I don’t remember writing it.” “It is a translation,” said Posche. “The Anglo-Saxon British author, Victor Prism.” He pronounced it Priss-um. “You read Prism,” said Grippes, pronouncing correctly, the name of an old acquaintance. “I had to, Pris-sum was on the preparatory program. Anglo-Saxon commercial English. They stuffed you with foreign writers, Sigrid with so many of us having to go to foreign lands for a living.” That was perilous. He had just challenged Poche’s training, the very foundation of his right to sit there reading Grippes his private mail. But he had suddenly recalled his dismay, when as a young man he had looked at a shelf in his room and realized he had to compete with the dead: Proust, Flaubert, Balzack, Scondale, and on into the dark. The rivalry was infinite, a Milky way of dead stars still daring to shine. He had invented a law, a hand on publication that would eliminate the dead, leaving the skies clear for the living.\n00:20:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAll the living? Grippes still couldn’t decide. Foreign writers would be deported to a remote solar system where they could circle one another. For Prism, there was no system sufficiently remote. Not long ago, interviewed in “The Listener,” Prism had dragged in Grippes saying that he used to cross the channel to consult a sear in Halfmoon Street, hurrying home to sit down the prose revealed from a spirit universe. Sometimes I actually envied him, Prism was quoted as saying. He sounded as though Grippes were dead. I used to wish ghost voices would speak to me too, suggesting ribbons of pure prism running like ticker-tape round the equator of a crystal ball. Unfortunately, I had to depend on my own creative intelligence, modest though I’m sure it was.\n00:21:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not know about this recent libel in Anglo-Saxon commercial English. He had been trying to be nice. Grippes made a try of his own. “I only meant you could have been reading me!” The trouble was that he meant it ferociously. Poche must’ve heard the repressed shout. He shucked the file and said, “this is too complex for my level I shall have to send it up to the inspector.” Grippes made a vow that he would never let natural peak get the better of him again. “What will be left for me?” Grippes asked the inspector, “when you have finished adding and subtracting.” Madam De Pelle did not bother to look up. She said “somebody should have taken this file in hand a long time ago. Let us start at the beginning. How long were you out of the country?” When Poche said send up, he’d meant it literally. Grippes looked out on a church where Delacroix had worked in the slow summer rain.\n00:22:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAt the far end of the square a few dark shops displayed joyfully trashy religious goods. Like the cross set with tiny seashells Madame De Pelle wore round her neck. Grippes had been raised in an anti-clerical household in a small town, where posing factions were grouped behind the schoolmaster, his father, and the parish priest. Women, lapsed agnostics, sometimes crossed enemy lines and started going to church. One glimpsed them in grey creeping along a grey-walled street. You were free to lodge a protest against the funds said Madame De Pelle, but if you lose the contestation your fine will be tripled. That is the law. Grippes decided that he would transform Madam De Pelle into the manager of a brothel catering to the foreign legion, slovenly in her habits, and addicted to chloroform. But he found the idea unpromising. In due course, he paid a monstrous penalty, which he did not contest, for fear of drawing attention to the three apartments.\n00:23:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt was still believed he had stashed away millions from the Karen Sue book, probably in Switzerland. As summons addressed by old Poche’s shrunken hand the following spring showed Grippes he had been tossed back downstairs. After that, he forgot about Madam Dupel except now and then. It was at about this time that a series of novels offered themselves to Grippes, shadowy outlines behind a frosted glass pane. He knew he must not let them crowd in altogether or keep them waiting too long. His foot against the door, he admitted one by one, a number of shadows that turned into young men, each bringing his own name and address, his native region of France portrayed on coloured postcards, and an index of information about his tastes in clothes, love, food, and philosophers. His bent of character, his ticks of speech, his attitudes to God and money, his political bias, and the intimation of a crisis about to explode under foot.\n00:24:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAntoine provided a Jesuit confessor, a homosexual affinity, and loss of faith. Spiritual shilly-shallying runs long. Antoine’s covered more than 600 pages making it the thickest work in the Grippes canon. Then came Thomas with his spartan mother and a Provisal fruit farm rejected in favour of a civil service career. Bertrand followed adrift in frivolous Paris tempted by neo fascism in the form of a woman wearing a bed jacket trimmed with Marabou. Renee cycled round France reading Chateau Brianne when he stopped to rest. One morning, he set fire to the bar and he’d been sleeping in leaving his books to burn. This was the shortest to the novels and the most popular with the young. One critic scolded Grippes for using crude symbolism. Another begged him to stop hiding behind Antoine and Renee, and to take up the metaphysical risk of revealing Henri. But Grippes had tried that once with Karen Sue, then with a roman a clef mercifully destroyed in the confusion of May, 1968.\n00:25:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe took these contretemps for a sign that he was to leave the subjective Grippes alone. The fact that each novel appeared even to Grippes to be a slice of French writing about life as it had been carved up and served the generation before made it seem quietly insurrectional. Nobody was doing this now. No one but Grippes. Grippes for a time uneasy, decided to go on letting the shadows in. The announcement of a new publication would bring a summons from Poche. When Poche leaned over the file now, Grippes saw amid the mop of curls at coin-size tonsure. His diffedent steely questions tried to elicit from Grippes how many novels were likely to be sold and where Grippes had already put the money. Grippes would give him a copy of the book inscribed. Poche would turn back the cover, glance at the signature to make certain Grippes had not written something compromising and friendly.\n00:26:53\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe kept the novels in a metal locker fastened together with government issue webbing tape and a military looking buckle. It troubled Grippes to think of his work all in a bundle in the dark. He thought of old fashioned milestones, half hidden by weeds. The volumes marked time for Poche too. He was still a controller. Perhaps he had to wait for the woman upstairs to retire so he could take over her title. The cubicle needed paint. There was a hole in the brown linoleum just inside the door. Poche now wore a wedding ring. Grippes wondered if he should congratulate him, but decided to let Poche mention the matter first. Grippes could swear that in his string of novels, nothing had been chipped out of his own past. Antoine, Thomas, Bertrand, Renee and by now Clement, Didier, Laurent, Hughes and Yves had arrived as strangers, almost like historical figures. At the same time, it seemed to Grippes that their wavering ruffled reflection should deliver something he might recognize.\n00:27:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tWhat did he see bending over the pond of his achievement? He saw a character close mouthed, cautious, unimaginative, ill at ease, obsessed with particulars. Worse, he was closed against progress, afraid of reform, shut into a literary reactionary France. How could this be? Grippes had always insincerely voted left. He had proved he could be reckless, open-minded, indulgent. He was like a father gazing around the breakfast table suddenly realizing none of the children are his. His children, if he could call them that, did not even look like him. From Antoine to Eve, his reflected character was small and slight with a mop of curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses and dimples. Grippes believed in the importance of errors. No political system, no love affair, no native inclination, no life itself would be tolerable without a wide mesh for mistakes to slip through. It pleased him that public treasury had never caught up with the three apartments. Not just for the sake of the cash piling up and safe deposit, but for the black hole of error revealed. He and Poche had been together for some years.\n00:29:22\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAnother blunder, usually controller and taxpayer were torn apart after a meeting or two so that the revenue service would not start taking into consideration the client’s aged indigent aunt, his bill for dental surgery, his alimony payments, his perennial mortgage. But, possibly, no one except Poche could be bothered with Grippes, always making some time-wasting claim for my new professional expenses, backed by a messy looking certified receipt. Sometimes Grippes dared believe Poche admired him, that he hung onto the dossier out of devotion to his books. This conceit was intensified when Poche began calling him maitre. Once, Grippes won some city of Paris award and was shown shaking hands with the mayor and simultaneously receiving a long cheque-filled envelope. Promptly summoned by Poche, expecting a discreet compliment, Grippes found him interested only in the caption under the photo, which made much of the size of the cheque. Grippes later thought of sending a sneering letter, “Thank you for your warm congratulations,” but he decided in time it was wiser not to fool with Poche. Poche had recently given him a 33% personal exemption. 3% more than the outer limit for Grippes category of unsalaried earners. According to Poche, a group that included as well as authors, door-to-door salesmen and prostitutes. The dung coloured Gaulist-era jacket on Grippes’ file had worn out long ago and being replaced in 1969 by a cover in cool banker’s green — that is with the advent of a Pompidou who had been connected with a bank — green presently made way for a shiny black and white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early ‘70s Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder, “Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn.”\n00:31:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not ask what culture. He continued, bravely, ” Food for the cats. They depend on me.” said Grippes, but they had ready, settled the cats as dependents. And for all Poche drooped over Grippes is smudged and unreadable figures. Grippes tried to count the number of times you’d examine the top of Poches’ head. He still knew nothing about him, except for the wedding ring. Somewhere along the way, Poche had tied himself to a need for retirement pay and rich exemptions of his own. In the language of his generation, Poche was a “fully structured individual”. His vocabulary was sparse and to the point, centered on a single topic. His state training school, the machine that ground out pelles and Poches all sounding alike, was in Clermont-Ferrand. Grippes was born in the same region. That might’ve given something else, them —excuse me —something else to talk about. Except that Grippes had never been back. Structured Poche probably attended class reunions as godfather to classmates, children jotted their birthdays in a leather covered notebook he never mislaid.\n00:33:01\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tUnstructured Grippes could not even remember his own age. Poche turned over a sheet of paper, read something Grippes could not see, and said, automatically, “We can’t”. “Nothing is ever as it was,” said Grippes, still going on about the marbled effect folder. It was a remark that usually shut people up, leaving them nowhere to go but a change of subject. Besides, it was true. Nothing can be as it was. Poche and Grippes had just lost a terrifying number of brain cells. They were an instant closer to death. Death was of no interest to Poche. If he ever thought he might cease to exist, he would stop concentrating on other people’s business and get down to reading Grippes while there was still time. Grippes wanted to ask, “Do you ever imagine your own funeral?” But it might’ve been taken as a threatening, gangsterish hint from taxpayer to controller. Worse, far worse than an attempted bribe. Folders of a pretty mottled peach shade appeared — that accompanied [inaudible] rain.\n00:34:10\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche’s cubicle was painted soft beige. The torn linoleum repaired. Poche sat in a comfortable armchair remember—resembling the wide leather seats and smart furniture stores at the upper end of Boulevard St. Germain. Grippes had a new straight metallic chair that shot him bolt upright and hurt his spine. It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading. Grippes and Poche had not advanced one inch toward each other. Except for the paint and the chairs and maitre, it could have been 1963. No matter how many works were added to the bundle in the locker, no matter how often Grippes had his picture taken, no matter how many Grippes’ paperbacks blossomed on airport bookstalls, Grippes to Poche remained a button.\n00:35:07\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe mottled peach jacket began to darken and fray. Poche said to Grippes, ” I asked you to come here, maitre, because we have overlooked something concerning your income”. Grippes’ heart gave a lurch. “The other day, I came across an old ruling about royalties. How much of your income do you kick back?”\n00:35:29\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Excuse me?”\n00:35:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“To publishers to bookstores,” said Poche. “How much?”\n00:35:34\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Kickback?”\n00:35:35\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“What percentage?” said Poche, “Publishers, printers?”\n00:35:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“You mean”, said Grippes, after a time, “how much do I pay editors to edit, publishers to publish, printers to print, and booksellers to sell?” He supposed that to Poche such a scheme might sound plausible. It would fit his long view over Grippes’ untidy life. Grippes knew most of the literary gossip that went round about himself. The circle was so small, it had to come back. In most stories, there was a virus of possibility, but he had never heard anything as absurd as this or as base.\n00:36:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche opened the file, concealing the moldering cover, apparently waiting for Grippes to mention a figure. The nausea Grippes felt he put down to his having come here without breakfast. One does not insult a controller. He had shouted silently at Poche years before and had been sent upstairs to do penance with Madame Dupell. It is not good to kick over a chair and stalk out. “I have never been so insulted!” might have no meaning from Grippes, keelhauled month after month in some lumpy review. As his works increased from bundled to heap, so they drew intellectual abuse. He welcomed partisan ill treatment as warming to him as popular praise. “Don’t forget me,” Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table of La Hune, the left bank bookstore, looking for his own name and those quarterlies no one ever takes home. “Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead.”\n00:37:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tBut even the most sour and despairing and close-printed essays were starting to mutter acclaim. The shoreline of the ‘80s, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left wing heartbeat could be heard loyally thumping behind the armor of his right wing traditional prose. His re-established hero had curly hair, soft eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, dimples, and a fully structured life. He was pleasing to both sexes and to every type of reader, except for a few thick-ribbed louts. Grippes looked back at Poche, who did not know how closely they were bound. What if he were to say, “this is a preposterous insinuation, a blot on a noble profession and on my reputation in particular,” only to have Poche answer, “too bad maitre, I was trying to help.” He said as one good natured fellow to another, “well, what if I own up to this crime?”\n00:38:23\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“It’s no crime,” said Poche.” I simply add the amount to your professional expenses. “To my rebates?” said Grippes. “To my exemption?” “Depends how much.” “At third of my income!” said Grippes, insanely. “Half!” “Ohhh—reasonable figure might be 12 and a half percent.” All this for Grippes. Poche wanted nothing. Grippes considered with awe the only incorruptible element in a porous society. No secret message had passed between them. He could not even invite Poche to lunch. He wondered if this arrangement had ever actually existed. If there could possibly be a good dodge that he, Grippes, had never even heard of. He thought of contemporary authors for whose success there was no other explanation. It had to be celestial playfulness or 12 and a half percent. The structure, as Grippes is already calling it, might also just be Poches innocent indecent idea about writers.\n00:39:30\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche was reading the file again, though he must have known everything in it by heart. He was as absorbed as contented and somehow as pure as a child with a box of paints. At any moment, he would raise his tender bewildered eyes and murmur,”four dozen typewriter ribbons and a third of the fiscal year, Maitre we can’t. Grippes tried to compose a face for Poche to encounter. A face above reproach. But writers, considered above reproach, always looked moody and haggard, about to scream. “Be careful,” he was telling himself, “don’t let Poche think he’s doing you a favour.” These people set traps. Was Poche angling for something? Was this bait? Attempting to bribe a public servant. The accusation was called. Bribe wasn’t the word. It was corruption the law mentioned; an attempt to corrupt. All Grippes had ever offered Poche were his own books formally inscribed, as though Poche were an anonymous reader standing in line in a bookstore where Grippes wedged behind a shaky table sat signing away.\n00:40:39\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Your name?” ” Whose name?” “How do you spell your name?” “Oh, the book isn’t for me. It’s for a friend of mine.” His look changed one of severity and impatience until he remembered that Poche had never asked him to sign anything. He had never concealed his purpose: to pluck from Grippes’ bright plumage every bright feather he could find. “Careful,” Grippes repeated, “careful. Remember what happened to Prism. Victor Prism, keeping pale under a parasol on the beach at Torremolinos, had made the acquaintance of a fellow Englishman. Pleasant, not well-educated, but eager to learn, blistered shoulders, shirt draped over his head, pages of the Sunday Express around his red thighs. Prism lent him something to read because his sunburn was keeping him awake. It was a creative essay on three emigre authors of the 1930s in the reviews so obscure and ill-paying that Prism had not bothered to include the fee on his income tax return.\n00:41:42\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPrism had got it all wrong, of course. Putting Thomas Mann to die in the charity ward of Paris hospital, sending Stefan Swag to be photographed with movie stars in California, and having Bertolt Brecht, who’s playing name Prism could not spell, win the Nobel Prize and savour a respected old age in a suburb of Zurich. As it turned out, none of Prism’s readers knew the difference. Prism might’ve got off with the whole thing if his new friend had not fallen sound asleep after the first lines. Waking refreshed, he had said to himself, “I must find out what they get paid for this stuff.” A natural reflex, he was at the inland revenue. He’d found no trace, no record. For inland revenue purposes death and exile did not exist. The subsequent fine was so heavy and Prism’s disgrace so acute, that he fled England to spend a few days with Grippes and the cats in Montparnasse.\n00:42:44\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe sat in a kitchen chair while Grippes, nose and mouth protected by a checked scarf, sprayed terrored cockroaches. Prism weeping in the fumes — prism, excuse me, pronouncing it in French! — Prism weeping in the fumes, wiping his eyes, said, “I’m through with queen and country!” — something like that — “And I’m taking out French citizenship tomorrow.” “You would have to marry a French woman and have five male children,” said Grippes through the scarf. He was feeling the patriotic hatred of a driver on a crowded road seeing foreign license plates in the way. “Oh, well then.” Said Prism, as if to say, “I won’t bother.”\n00:43:26\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Oh, well then.” Said Grippes, softly, not quite to Poche. Poche added one last thing to the file and closed it, as if something definite had taken place. He clasped his hands and placed them on the dosier. It seemed shut for all time now, like a grave. He said, “Maitre, one never stays long in the same fiscal theater. I have been in this one for an unusual length of time. We may not meet again. I want you to know I have enjoyed our conversations.” “So have I,” said Grippes with caution. “Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time.”\n00:44:09\tKate Moffatt:\tIt’s 2021 again. And at this point, the cassette holding Gallant’s reading needs to be flipped. The recording on Side A has neatly stopped after Poche’s comment, and the tape now has 12 blank seconds before it ends. We’re none of us listening to this reading by playing a physical cassette, but at this pause where I had to close the digital file with the recording of Side A and open the digital file for the recording of Side B, we were made aware of physical limitations of the cassette holding the recording that resides in the SFU archives. If you were listening to a physical copy of this cassette on an old tape player, you would be pressing the eject button to open the little plastic door, pulling the tape free, flipping it, and inserting it again, before closing the door with its soft click.\n00:44:49\tKate Moffatt:\tAnd here time grows fuzzy. We’re listening to Gallant reading in 1984, not reading her work from a page. And that brings with it an altered experience of “Grippes and Poche”. We can hear Gallant’s inflections, her commentary that doesn’t appear in print, the audience’s laughter, all the evidence alive event. We don’t see the New Yorker cartoons on every page, or Roberta Spear’s poem “Diving for Atlantis”, which appears halfway through, or the traditional New Yorker layout that looks much the same for short stories printed in the magazine today…which makes Gallant print publication in 1982 less obviously indicative of its age than the cassette recording of her reading in 1984. Even the recording itself asks us to consider the circumstances of its creation more than 30 years ago. The 12 second pause following Poche’s complete comment suggests interference by a critical editor or recorder of the reading, someone as aware as we are of the necessity to flip the tape from Side A to Side B and aware, too, of how moving from the end of one complete sentence to the beginning of another is a very different experience than hearing only the first half of a sentence and having to fumble your way towards the second.\n00:45:51\tKandice Sharren:\tThe fact that this break does not occur mid-sentence made us suspect that the recording may have been transferred from reel-to-reel. Although our attempts to learn more about how this reading was recorded turned up little solid information, they did draw our attention to a piece of SFU trivia: that many of the events held at SFU during this period were recorded by the highly regarded Vancouver-based recording engineer, Kurtis Vanel. While we have been unable to turn up definitive evidence about who recorded Gallant, our deep dive into SFU’s AV history served as an important reminder of the often unseen human hands that shape archival materials. Conversely, the unanswerable questions this break raises reminds us of the fragmentary nature of the archive as theorized by Diana Taylor in The Archive and the Repertoire. No document, whether paper or sound, can fully capture a live lived event or practice. It is with these considerations of time and form that we return to 1984, to Gallant’s reading, where her voice is shaping the story. And we’re Poche has just told Grippes that…\n00:46:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\t“Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time —” [Sound Effect: Cassette Tape Deck Open and Close] “So you have read them,” said Grippes, with an eye on the locker. “Why, I read those I bought,” said Poche. “But they’re the same books.” “No. One book belongs to me. The other was a gift. I would never open the gift. I have no right to.” His voice rose and he spoke more slowly. In one of them when what’s-his-name struggles to prepare his civil service tests —and now he quotes something, presumably from one of the books — “the desire for individual glory seemed so acquisite suddenly in a nature given to renunciation.” “I suppose it is a remarkable observation”, said Grippes. “I was not referring to myself.” He had no idea what that could be from and he was certain he’d never written it.\n00:47:56\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tPoche did not send for Grippes again. Grippes became a commonplace taxpayer filling out his forms without help. The frosted glass door was reverting to dull white. There were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in. A new French fashion for having well-behaved Nazi officers shore up Western culture gave Grippes a chance to turn Poche into a tuberculer poet trapped in Pari, by poverty and the occupation. Grippes throughout the first draft in which Poche joined a Christian-minded resistance network and performed a few simple miracles. Unaware of his own powers, he had the instinctive feeling that a new generation would not know what he was talking about. Instead, he placed Poche sniffling and wheezing in a squalid hotel room, cough drops spilled on the table, a stained blanket pinned around his shoulders. Up the feeted staircase came a handsome German colonel, a Kurt Juergen’s type smelling of shaving lotion, bent on saving liberal values, bringing Poche buttered cognac, and a thousand sheets of writing paper.\n00:49:09\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tAfter that Grippes no longer felt sure where to go. His earlier books, government tape and buckle binding them into an oeuvre, had accompanied Poche to his new fiscal theatre. Perhaps, finding his career blocked by the woman upstairs, he had asked for early retirement. Poche must be in a gangster-ridden Mediterranean city, occupying a shoddy boom period apartment he’d spent 20 years paying for. He was working at black market jobs, tax advisor to the local mayor, a small innocent cog in the regional mafia. After lunch, Poche would sit in one of those Southern balconies that hold just a deck chair, rereading in chronological order all Grippes’ books. In the late afternoon, blinds drawn, Poche totted up mafia accounts by a chink of light. Meanwhile, Grippes was here in Montparnasse facing a flat, white, glass door. He continued to hand himself a 45 and a half percent personal exemption.\n00:50:15\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe astonishing 33, plus the unheard of 12 and a half. No one seemed to mind. No shabby envelope holding an order for execution came in the mail. Sometimes in Grippes’ mind, a flicker of common sense flamed like revealed truth. The exemption was an error. Public treasury was now tiptoeing toward computers. The computer brain was bound to wince at Grippes and stop functioning until the Grippes exemption was settled. Grippes rehearsed: “I was seriously misinformed”. He had to go farther and farther abroad to find offal for the cats. One tripe dealer had been turned into a driving school. Another sold secondhand clothes. Returning on a winter evening after a long walk ,carrying the parcel of sheep’s lung wrapped in a newspaper, he crossed Boulevard du Montparnasse just as the lights went on. The urban moonrise. The street was a dream street, faces flat white in the winter mist.\n00:51:20\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tIt seemed Grippes that he had crossed over to the 1980s, had only just noticed the new decade. In a recess between two glassed-in sidewalk cafes, four plain clothes cops were beating up a pair of pickpockets. Nobody had to explain the scene to Grippes, he knew what it was about. One prisoner already wore handcuffs. Customers in the far side of the glass gave no more than a glance. When they got the handcuffs on the second man, the cops pushed the two into the entrance of Grippes’ apartment building to await the police van. Grippes shuffled into a cafe. He put his parcel of lights on the zinc-top bar and started to read an article on the wrapping. Somewhat unknown to him, a new name, pursued an old grievance. “Why don’t they write about real life anymore?” “Because to depict life is to attract it’s ill-fortune,” Grippes replied.\n00:52:16\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tHe stood, sipping coffee, staring at nothing. Four gun-bearing young men in jeans and leather jackets were not final authority. Final authority was something written. The printed word. Even when the word was mistaken. The simplest final authority in Grippes’ life had been O. Poche. What must’ve happened was this: Poche, wishing to do honour to a category that included writers, prostitutes, and door-to-door salesmen, had read and misunderstood a note about royalties. It must’ve been in italics at the foot of the page. He had transformed his mistake into a regulation and it never looked at the page again. Grippes climbed three flights of dirty wooden stairs to Madam DuPell’s office — I have an editorial query here: Is he imagining this? Yes. [Laughs] These are proofs. — He observed the small— the seashell crucifix and a broach he had not noticed the first time: a silver fawn curled up as nature had never planned. A boneless fawn. Squinting, Madam DuPell peered at the old dung-coloured Gaullist-era file.\n00:53:33\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe put her hand over a page, as though Grippes were trying to read upside down, and said, “It has all got to be paid back”. “I was seriously misinformed!” Grippes intended to answer. Willing to see Poche disgraced, ruined, jailed. “I followed instructions. I am innocent!” But Poche had vanished leaving Grippes with a lunatic exemption, three black market income-bearing apartments he had recently unsuccessfully tried to sell, and a heavy reputation for male-oriented, left feeling, right thinking books. This reputation Grippes thought he could no longer sustain. A socialist government was, at last, in place. Hence his hurry about unloading the flats and his difficulty in finding takers. He wondered about the new file covers. Pink? Too fragile. Look what happened with the mottled peach. Strong denim blue, the shade standing for giovinezza workers overalls. It was no time for a joke, not even a private one. No one could guess what would be wanted now in the way of literary entertainment.\n00:54:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tThe fitfulness of voters is such that having got the government they wanted, they were now reading nothing but the right-wing press. Perhaps it’s steady right-wing heartbeat ought to set the cadence for a left-wing outlook, with a complex bravely conservative heroine contained within the slippery, but unyielding walls of left-wings style. He would have to come to terms with the rightest way of considering female characters. There seemed to be two methods, neither of which suited Grippes’ temperament. Treat her disgustingly, then cry all over the page, or admire and respect her. She is the equal at least of a horse. The only woman his imagination offered with some insistence, was no use to him. She moved quietly on a winter evening to St. Nicolai du Chardonnay, the rebel church at the lower end of Boulevarde St. Germaine —that is the conservative-led church— where services were still conducted in Latin.\n00:55:58\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe wore a hat ornamented with an ivory arrow, and a plain gray coat, tubular in shape, and a narrow fur collar. Kid gloves were tucked under the handle of her sturdy leather purse. She had never heard of video games, push button telephones, dishwashers, frozen fileted sole, computer horoscopes. She entered the church and knelt down and brought out her rosary, oval pearls strung on thin gold. Nobody saw rosaries anymore. They were not even in the windows of the traditional venue across the square from the tax bureau. Believers went in for different articles now. Cherub candles, quick prayers, and plastic cards. Her iron meekness resisted change. She prayed constantly into the past. Grippes knew that one view of the past is just as misleading as speculation about the future. It was one of the few beliefs he would’ve gone to the stake for.\n00:56:55\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe was praying to a mist, to mist-shrouded figures. She persisted in seeing clearly. He could see the woman, but he could not approach her. Perhaps he could get away with dealing with her from a distance. All that was really needed for a sturdy right-wing novel was its pessimistic rhythm. And then, and then, and then, and death. Grippes had that rhythm. It was in his footsteps coming up the stairs after the departure of the police van, turning the key in his triple- bolted front door. And then, and then, the cats padding and mewing, not giving Grippes time to take off his coat as they made for their empty dishes on the kitchen floor. Behind the gas stove, a beleaguered garrison of cockroaches got ready for the evening sortie. Grippes would be waiting, his face half-veiled with a checked scarf. In St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, the woman shut her missal got off—off her knees scorning to brush her coat.\n00:57:59\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tShe went out to the street, proud of the dust marks, letting the world know she still prayed the old way. She escaped him. He had no idea what she had on besides the hat and coat. Nobody else wore a hat with an ivory arrow or tubular coat or a scarf that looked like a weasel biting its tail. He could not see what happened when she took the hat and coat off, what her hair was like. If she hung the coat in a whole closet that also contained umbrellas, a carpet sweeper, and a pile of old magazines. If she put the hat in a box and a shelf. She moved off in a gray blur. There was a streaming window between them Grippes could not wipe clean. Probably, she entered a dark dining room, fake Henri Quatre buffet — [Aside] that means something especially hideous —bottles of pills next to the oil and vinegar cruets.\n00:58:49\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tLace tablecloth folded over the back of a chair, just oil cloth spread for the family meal. What could he do with such a woman? He could not tell who was waiting for her or what she would eat for supper. He could not even guess her name. She revealed nothing, would never help. Grippes expelled the cats, shut the kitchen window, and dealt with the advanced guard from behind the stove. What he needed now was despair and excitement, a new cat and mouse chase. What good was a computer that never caught anyone out. After airing the kitchen and clearing it of poison, Grippes let the cats in. He swept up the bodies of his victims and set them down the ancient cast-iron shoot. He began to talk to himself as he often did now. First he said a few sensible things, then he heard his voice with a new elderly quaver to it, virtuousand mean. “After all it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.”\n00:59:51\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984:\tNow that was untrue. And he had no reason to say it. Is that what I’m going to be like now? He wondered. Is this the new era Grippes? Pinch-mouthed? It was exactly the sort of thing that a woman in the dining room might say. The best thing that could happen to him would be shock. A siege of terror. A knock at the door. A registered letter with fearful news. It would sharpen his humour, strengthen his own private, eccentric heart. It would keep him from making remarks in his solitude that were meaningless and false. He could perhaps write an anonymous letter saying that the famous author Henri Grippes was guilty of tax evasion of the most repulsive kind. He was moreover a callous landlord who had never been known to replace a door knob. Fortunately, he saw he was not yet that mad. Nor did he really need to be scared and obsessed. He had got the woman from church to the dining room and he would keep her there, trapped, cornered, threatened, watched until she yielded to Grippes and told her name. As in his several incarnations good Poche had always done. [Audience Applause] [Begin Music: Accordion]\n01:01:18\tKate Moffatt:\t[Begin Music: Piano and Strings] In the June episode of this podcast, we’ll be returning to Mavis Gallant’s reading of this story in an attempt to reconstruct this event from the surviving archival and textual materials, as well as the fallible recesses of human memory. This episode had us thinking about the many connections visible in the archival recording of the reading between the story itself and Gallant’s storytelling, between Gallant’s voice and the clarity of the recording and the hands that shaped it during the recording, editing, and archival processes. In June, we’ll be thinking about these connections in terms of what they can tell us about the event itself. We’d love to hear from our listeners about what caught your attention and what questions you have about Gallant’s reading on February 14th, 1984 at Simon Fraser University.\n01:02:17\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n01:02:16\tHannah McGregor:\tSpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University archives and records management department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. To find out more about SpokenWeb [Music Begins: Theme Music] visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for shortcuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod mini stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.4930656},{"id":"9289","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E9, Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU, 7 June 2021, Moffatt, Levy, and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Michelle Levy","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/701010c0-9bb5-412c-acb0-2e48a249ca09/audio/792ab3ed-977c-43e3-9e55-a10c09f5495d/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:45:10\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"43,362,594 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s2e9-mavisgallantpart2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/mavis-gallant-part-2/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-06-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Coe, Jonathan. “The Life of Henri Grippes.” London Review of Books. Vol. 19, no. 18, 18 September 1997.\\n\\nGallant, Mavis. “Grippes and Poche.” The New Yorker, 29 November 1982, p. 42.\\n\\nvladnegrila. “Flipping through pages 2.” Freesound, 22 April 2017, https://freesound.org/people/vladnegrila/sounds/388870/.\\n\\n“Delamine.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39295.\\n\\n“Silver Lanyard.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 18 May 2021. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/39298.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549506490368,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the March 2021 episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented the first episode of a two-part series: “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU,” which included a full-length recording of Mavis Gallant’s reading of her New Yorker short story at Simon Fraser University in 1984. In the second episode of this series, we dive into what we are calling the “paratexts” of the reading: the material and contextual circumstances that informed Gallant’s performance, including an unrecorded and unarchived event that took place the day before; the audience; the theatre; and the physical tape itself.\n\nThis episode features our efforts to understand how these paratexts may have informed not only the experience of attending the event in 1984, but also our own experiences listening to the recording of the reading now, in 2021, and our interactions with the surviving archival materials. This investigation led Kate, Kandice, and Michelle to interview Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who attended and contributed to the organization of the two events, and talk to Grazia Merler, a professor in the Department of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the time of the reading. Their contributions provided both memories and facts not captured by the archival remains of the reading.\n\nWith additional archival materials available in a supplementary gallery, this episode takes us beyond the bounds of an ‘audio edition’ to instead consider how the ‘paratexts’ of this reading deepen our understanding of the recording and bring to life the reading of the story by acclaimed Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voices] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the spoken web podcast: stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. There’s a kind of magic to finding an old recording and listening to the sounds of the past. When researchers listes to archival recordings, each sonic literary record comes with silent questions: who is speaking and who is recording? Where was this recording made? And, what are those background sounds? How are we listening to and interpreting the recording in the present and how might people have listened differently at the time the recording was made? How can we preserve this physical tape so it’s protected for future listeners? In March of this year, SpokenWeb researchers, Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy brought us a full audio edition of Mavis Gallant, reading her short story ‘Grippes and Poche’ at Simon Fraser University in 1984.\n \n\n01:44\tHannah McGregor:\tNow we bring you part two of the series, an exploration of the questions that surround this recording of Mavis Gallant. Kate, Kandice, and Michelle refer to these as the ‘paratexts’ of the recording. And their illuminating investigation takes us back to the year 1984 and the days surrounding Galant’s presence at the SFU podium. The stories that they uncovered are surprising and often delightful, and they help us listen to Gallant’s reading with fuller awareness of the realities that surrounded the event. Here are Kate, Kandice and Michelle with episode nine of the SpokenWeb Podcast, “Mavis Gallant Part Two [Start Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] The ‘Paratexts’ of “Grippes and Poche” at SFU. [End Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat]\n \n\n02:34\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown, so we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10!” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office.” So anyway, [Accordian/French interlude music] it was one of those ones…\n \n\n02:58\tKate Moffat:\tOn March, 2021. We – Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy presented Mavis Gallant reading of her New Yorker short story ‘Grippes and Poches; as an episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast – [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tI’m a fetishist. That’s why the watch has to be there and not there. And you see that’s …\n \n\n03:15\tMichelle Levy:\t[Clips of audio layered] …at the time of this SFU reading Gallant….\n \n\n03:17\tKate Moffat:\t…the recording provides us with an offering…\n \n\n03:19\tKandice Sharren:\t… the audio cassette containing this recording is housed in…\n \n\n03:21\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tCan you all hear me? [Sound Effect: Opening Tape Recorder]\n \n\n03:24\tKate Moffat:\tWhile we were preparing our last episode, we used our grounding in book history methodologies to think about the recording as an unofficial audio edition of “Grippes and Poche”, in which Gallant’s explanatory asides take on a role similar to that of footnotes or endnotes. In our last episode, we noted, however, that unlike footnotes or endnotes, listening to Gallant’s asides were not optional, but integrated into the text. Something paratextual became textual, so to speak [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n03:51\tKandice Sharren:\tWhile putting together the second episode, we were curious about exploring the relationship between the text and the paratexts of the reading further. Paratext was coined by Gérard Genette to describe everything that surrounds a text, including the material form the text takes, contextual information about the author, and even book reviews and interviews. Genette talks about paratexts as “thresholds of interpretation”, that is to say that they fundamentally shape how we approach, encounter and engage with the text. For the original print version of “Grippes and Poche” in the New Yorker, it’s paratextual material would include the cartoons interspersed throughout the text, other articles that appeared alongside it, and even the magazine’s signature font. These paratexts established Gallant’s story as a self-consciously literary work, one that carries with it a certain amount of prestige. In dealing with an audio recording of a text, we had to expand our idea of what a paratext might be. In the case of Gallant’s reading, the paratexts include the audible and inaudible contexts that surround the event and inflect how we interpret the story. The circumstances that surrounded Gallant’s visit, the planning that went into the reading, Gallant’s delivery, the audience, and even the tape that holds the recording.\n \n\n05:12\tMichelle Levy:\tInterested in supplementing the archival materials we found with human memory to reconstruct the event and its paratexts, we sought to make these paratexts visible by talking to Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate, who worked in the liberal studies department at SFU and were involved in organizing the Mavis Gallant events during her visit. I also spoke at length with Grazia Merler, a friend of Gallant’s who worked in SFU’s Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics at the time of the event. [Start Music: Piano] From these investigations, we have assembled a series of conversations and artifacts to contextualize the audio recording of the reading you heard in the first part of this two-part series. To establish the paratext of this reading, we asked the following questions, which structure this episode.\n \n\n06:03\tKandice Sharren:\tFirst, what were the circumstances of Gallant’s visit to SFU in 1984? Second?\n \n\n06:10\tKate Moffat:\tWhat do we know of the reading the day before otherwise known as the fiasco?\n \n\n06:16\tMichelle Levy:\tThird, how do we place Gallant’s accent and understand her pronunciation choices?\n \n\n06:21\tKate Moffat:\tFourth, who are the unseen, but audible audience members for the reading?\n \n\n06:27\tMichelle Levy:\tFifth, why did she select ‘Grippes and Poche’ to read to this academic audience?\n \n\n06:32\tKandice Sharren:\tAnd finally sixth, what physical artifacts of the events survive and what do they tell us about the event?\n \n\n06:39\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter One: The Visit, in which Michelle talks to Grazia Merler and Gallant’s reason for visiting Vancouver becomes clear.\n \n\n06:54\tKate Moffat:\tFollowing our close listening to the recording of Gallant’s reading for our last episode, we were curious about the circumstances that brought Gallant to Vancouver in 1984, given that she lived in France for most of her life. In addition to chatting with Ann and Carolyn, Michelle was able to connect with one of Gallant’s old friends,\n \n\n07:10\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant was invited to SFU by Grazia Merler, then an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literature, and Linguistics on the recommendation of her supervisor, Merler had met Gallant while researching her PhD on Stendhal In Paris in the early 1960s. Merle told me about how she was invited to Gallant’s apartment at [French addresss] in Paris for tea. Upon arriving on a frigid day in the middle of winter, Gallant asked Merler if she wished for tea or something stronger. Merler agreed that something stronger would be welcomed. They hit it off immediately and remained friends until Gallant’s death in 2014,. Gallant lived in the same apartment in the sixth arrondissement for over four decades, from 1961 or 62 until her death. Merler told me that Golan came to visit her when SFU was first being built, and she references this first visit in her introduction for Gallant at the Burnaby event.\n \n\n08:07\tAudio Recording, Gratzia Merla:\n \n\nI talk a little bit louder. Can you hear me now?\n \n\n08:09\tAudio Recording, Audience Member:\tThat’s fine. Thank you.\n \n\n08:11\tGratzia Merla:\tIn 1965, before Simon Fraser University opened, I took a friend to the top of this mountain to show her a striking piece of architecture and the awesome site or this architecture. At that time, we both decided that we should come back to see the development of what seemed at that time a master temple. I kept my promise about 15 years ago. Mavis Gallant was the other part in the promise, and she’s keeping her part of the bargain today.\n \n\n08:56\tKate Moffat:\tAs we know from the recording of ‘Grippes and Poche’, Gallant visited SFU again in 1984, to give her reading on February 14th. The poster for the reading tells us that Gallant was, at the time of the event, writer in residence at the University of Toronto. She likely took advantage of her relative proximity to Vancouver to make good on her promise to return.\n \n\n09:15\tMichelle Levy:\tMerler told me that during this period Gallant came regularly to North America. She was being paid well for her New Yorker stories and could afford to visit friends in Montreal, as well as her editor, William Maxwell, in New York. From what we’ve been able to gather, it seems Gallant gave a number of readings at universities in Canada during this time. In addition to the SFU reading of Grippes and Poche in 1984, she also gave a reading of the same story in June of that same year at the University of Toronto, a reading of her story ‘Virus X’ at the University of Alberta in 1975, and reading at the University of Victoria, although we haven’t been able to track down a date or the story she read for that event. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano][Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages]\n \n\n10:00\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Two: The Fiasco. In which attendees and organizers Ann Cowan-Buitenhuis and Carolyn Tate meet Mavis Gallant, and an event goes terribly wrong.\n \n\n10:13\tMichelle Levy:\tI was hoping that you could each just introduce yourself briefly and maybe tell us a little bit about where you are now and where you were in 1984. Carolyn, do you want to start?\n \n\n10:24\tCarolyn Tate:\tSure. Well, right now, I’m in my dining room in Toronto, Ontario in the Bloor West Village. I’ve lived in this house for about 20 years. At the time Mavis was in Vancouver I was the director of Liberal Studies – the Liberal Studies program for Continuing Studies, and I was the person who was responsible for organizing the downtown part of her visit. And as we’ll discover, it was complete fiasco. But really my main reason I’m here is I’ve been a tremendous fan of Mavis Gallant for many years. And maybe I should add that since Continuing Studies, I went to law school and I practiced intellectual property law for 20 years.\n \n\n11:10\tMichelle Levy:\tWonderful! Well, thank you so much. Ann, do you want to tell us a little bit about you now and where you were?\n \n\n11:17\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, now I’m sitting in my study in Vancouver. I live in the West End near Stanley Park and I’ve lived here for a while. But in 1984, I was in Continuing Studies at Simon Fraser and Carolyn came to join us. I think she came a couple of years after I did, and we became great friends. And we had babies together. I had one, she had one, I had one, she had one. So we – the same maternity clothes were floating around the office for almost five years, which drove everybody nuts. But anyway, so we’d been friends all these years. I did my BA at U of T in English – English Language and Literature it was called then. And then I did a Master’s degree in Carlton because I was married to – at that time a physiology professor who had a job at the University of Ottawa. But then I fell in love with Peter Buitenhuis and moved to Vancouver and started working at SFU about a year after that. So – and Peter was the chair of the English department at the time that this recording was made…\n \n\n12:35\tKandice Sharren:\tIt was through our conversation with ann and Carolyn that we learned that Mavis Gallant’s visit to SFU actually included two events: the reading of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU Burnaby at Images Theater at 11:30 in the morning of February 14th, which we have a recording of, and a mid day reading downtown the day before for which we have no archival material whatsoever. In fact, we were unaware of the event on February 13th until we had the opportunity to chat with Ann and Carolyn about their experiences organizing and attending these events.\n \n\n13:09\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, first of all, you’re quite right. There was an event downtown. It was the day before the event on campus. And it was in quite a small room because we were at 549 Howe in those days and we didn’t have any large rooms. So we did – as Carolyn said, she organized the downtown talk and neither of us can remember what story she read downtown. It was not the same one as she read on campus. But I think Carolyn should tell you a little bit about that event because some of the behaviour of Mavis in the recording of the second event, I think stems from her experiences downtown. So maybe Carolyn would talk a little bit more, because you were really in charge of that event. And I certainly remember the room being full of very enthusiastic people.\n \n\n14:00\tCarolyn Tate:\tI’m happy to talk about the downtown event and Mavis. It was a fiasco, frankly. I didn’t think that there would be very many people and we had this little free room down there and somebody set up the mic and I thought, well fine. You know, 20 people will come or something like that. Well, more like 50 or so people came and the room was very crowded and we didn’t have the technician – he had set it up, but then it didn’t work. So it was really quite miserable for everybody, but especially for Mavis. She was very, very put out by it. And in truth, I was a little bit put out by how put out she was. I expected her to be this kind of, I don’t know, nothing would phase me sort of person. And really, she wasn’t that at all.\n \n\n14:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tShe was very proper. She was very neatly dressed in a very good French suit. She’d come on the airplane and she told us that she had a terrible time because she didn’t want to ask somebody to help her get her suitcase down from the bin. And you know, you couldn’t just ask somebody to help you – didn’t you know? And frankly, I didn’t know that [Laughs]. I thought – I really thought she was a bit precious. I have to say. [Laughs] But, notwithstanding that, she came along and we were going to do the talk and there was no mic. So she had to shout the whole time, and she did. And she finished, she gave her reading and people heard her. I have to say – I was so fritzed by that time that I didn’t, I didn’t know – I have no idea what story she read. I have no memory of her actual talking, which was why I was so thrilled with the recording that you have because I think she is a brilliant speaker.\n \n\n16:04\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell she was a little grumpy, I have to say. And she – not only was she grumpy, she told everybody to ask Carolyn for their money back, which was $10. The event on campus was free, but we were supposed to be making money downtown. So we charged everybody $10 and I came out of the room and I said, “Carolyn, she just told everybody that you’d give them back their $10.” And Carolyn said something like, “Well, I don’t have it. I took it down to the office”. So anyway, it was one of those moments. But the reason I mentioned that is that the next day, you’ll notice, she says several times on the recording, “can everyone hear me? Can everyone hear me?” And the thing is that she wasn’t a very large person and she had a not particularly strong voice. So I think that having exercised her voice to the max the day before she was a little bit overly nervous on that recording about how well she was being heard and so on. And she was fussing if you remember, at the beginning, she was fussing about the microphone and so on. And I I think she was nervous about technology in the same way that both Carolyn and I are. So, we have to forgive her that. [Start Music: Upbeat Piano]\n \n\n17:24\tKandice Sharren:\t[Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Three: Mavis Speaks, in which we try to pin down Gallant’s accent.\n \n\n17:31\tKate Moffat:\tDespite Ann’s memories of Mavis being somewhat grumpy and nervous about her delivery, we all agreed upon listening to the recording that it was rather brilliantly done. She’s an engaging and dynamic speaker and one who is perhaps more self-conscious or aware of the unique elements of her delivery than her audience. In the short question period following the reading, someone in the audience asks a question, barely audible on the recording. Gallant’s response indicates she heard him mention a mistake, and contextualizes her various pronunciations of Grippes and Poches throughout the reading, which she clearly considers as slips of the tongue.\n \n\n18:02\t   Audio Recording,   Audience Member:\tBut in this context, you committed the best kind of blunder, which revealed a bit of your personality to us.\n \n\n18:08\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tWhat kind of blunder?\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording,   Audience Member:\n \n\nRevealing your personality.\n \n\n18:12\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tOh! I thought you were talking about pronunciation because when I’m reading in English in English, it’s almost impossible for me to pronounce French names in French because you have to change the pitch of your voice, you know, and it’s a different pitch, the two languages, and it interrupts the reading. And that’s why I say Grippes, Grip, Grips, just as it comes most easily, I thought you meant that [Laughs].\n \n\n18:35\tMichelle Levy:\tGallant’s remarks on her uneven pronunciation of characters’ names reveals her position between English and French and between Canada and France, not just in her adult life. All of us had strong responses to Gallant’s accent, which we struggled to place until Ann and Carolyn compared it to that of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who also grew up bilingual in Canada during the 1920s and thirties. Like the New Yorker’s font, Gallant’s accent conveys particular contextual information about her and her place in history.\n \n\n19:08\tCarolyn Tate:\tI wanted to ask you what you thought of Mavis’ accent, if you had any, do you have any reaction to that? Because I found her accent quite amazing, sort of mid Atlantic. It didn’t sound totally Canadian. It didn’t sound British. It’s kind of, she kind of reminded me a bit of the way Pierre Trudeau talked, it was just its own thing. And I don’t know whether you had a reaction to that or not.\n \n\n19:42\tMichelle Levy:\tI think we had trouble –I had trouble placing it. And I remember discussing that with Kandice and Kate. I asked my husband about it [Laughs], I was like, “where is this voice coming from?” It did seem really unusual. Lovely. One of my favourite stories of hers called ‘Specs Idea’, which is from around the same time, it was in that same volume, and it’s about an art dealer. There’s this woman that owns the art that her husband has left her, and her voice is described as like trilling bells. And I always feel like that to me, that’s almost like Mavis’ voice. It’s – I thought it was beautiful. But the accent, I just, I had no idea.\n \n\n20:25\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tWell, it’s –I think that you mentioned that she was educated in French, but her English became the language of literature for her. So I’m wondering if, as Carolyn said, Pierre Trudeau had a bilingual early childhood as well. And I’m wondering if that’s a West Mount Montreal or [French word] accent or something like that.\n \n\n20:51\tCarolyn Tate:\tI think so. I mean, that’s what I thought. I mean, his mother was –Trudeau’s mother was an Anglophone and of course, Mavis’ parents were Anglophones too, but she had this French education. [Start Music: Piano]\n21:04\tKate Moffat:\tChapter Four, The Unseen Audience. In which we learn about bums in seats, how many there were, where they sat, how they laughed. [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Our listening to the recording and our reactions to what we could hear of the event, the story, and her voice, and accent were necessarily mediated by the recording and our own personal circumstances listening to it, which differ greatly from the live experience that the audience of the reading had. Ann realized while listening to our last episode, that she could hear her husband in the audience during the reading.\n \n\n21:37\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd it was really kind of spooky for me because when I listened to the recording, I could hear Peter laughing. And I haven’t heard it for so long.\n \n\n21:50\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tNo action chapter to the abstract essence of risk. [Audience member laughs] The professor, one.\n \n\n21:57\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tOne of the wonderful things about Peter was that he always laughed very loudly and the kids would always say their school plays went better on the days when he was there, cause he would laugh at all the jokes.\n \n\n22:08\tKate Moffat:\tListening to the recording, we have no information about the audience except what we can hear. With Ann’s input, We know Peter Buitenhuis, chair of the English department at the time, was in attendance, and also the longer personal history of his laugh. And this prompted a general curiosity about the audience, including how many people attended, and thus how full the very large Images Theater might have been, which isn’t something recorded in the archives.\n22:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah, I think that the Burnaby audience was not bad. I think we probably– that theater is good. I think we persuaded people to sit near the front and to kind of group, but I think that the theater would have been three quarters full. And I think that theater holds over 200 people.\n \n\n22:51\tKate Moffat:\tIn asking about and considering both our own reactions to the reading and the audience, we wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed or not from that of the individuals attending the event, who we hear occasional rumbles of laughter from\n \n\n23:04\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t…Anglo-Saxon commercial English [Audience Laughter] shared with some cats he had already tried to claim as dependents [Audience Laughter] He showed…\n \n\n23:16\tMichelle Levy:\tNow from the talk itself you mentioned, Ann, that there were, that Mavis was asking questions at lunch about how you felt it went, and I’m wondering how you felt it went during the talk itself. I mean, it sounded again from the recording, which we’ve all heard, like it was crystal clear. So it sounds like the –some of the issues that happened the day before didn’t happen, but did you get a sense people were laughing, people were getting the jokes, people were enjoying it?\n \n\n23:49\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tYes, I certainly did. And, I was listening to the responses as the talk went on. I think the story was a bit long, quite frankly. I think –there’s a point where she tells you she’s reading from proofs and that her editor had a query. I mean, is he thinking, is this in his head or is that actually happening? So – and I had had the same thought myself, like, wait a minute, is this in this guy’s head? Or is he actually having this conversation? Or what have you. And I realized that I had drifted off, listening to the recording, and my recollection in the talk itself was that it was quite a long story. I felt at the time. And I think – but I do think people got it and there was still enthusiasm. But my recollection also is that the university classes were programmed in such a way in those days. The scheduling was done in such a way that there was a certain period of time in the middle of the day that you could fill with an event and people would have to go to class if it went too long. So I remember having a little bit of anxiety because I figured having observed her behavior the day before, if people stood up and started leaving, she was not going to be happy. So, I think I had a certain amount of nervousness about how long it was and – no concern about people’s lack of interest – but just a little bit of event planner angst I guess.\n \n\n25:21\tMichelle Levy:\tThat people would have to leave. [Laughs] Yeah.\n \n\n25:23\tKandice Sharren:\t[Start Music: Upbeat Piano] [Sound Effect: Flipping Through Pages] Chapter Five: Choosing ‘Grippes and Poche’, in which we reconsider Gallant’s story in light of the audience she performed to and are deeply unimpressed with Henri Grippes.\n \n\n25:45\tMichelle Levy:\tOne of the things that I find most fascinating about paratexts is that they don’t just work one way. Artistic choices are made anticipating a certain format of publication. When we’re talking about print, it can be hard to pin down how involved an author was in the design of, say their book. Although we do know that Gallant wrote many of her stories specifically for the New Yorker, meaning that she would have been aware of the format her stories would be published in. Again, down to the font, although probably not the cartoons.\n \n\n26:15\tKandice Sharren:\tIn the case of a reading though, it’s a lot easier to see how a writer might be responding to their immediate context, which led us to ask: why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984? As you may recall, in her introduction to the reading, Gallant describes her story as a “gentle send-up” or satiric commentary.\n \n\n26:37\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHenri Grippes is an imaginary French Parisian writer who has occupied four or five stories that I have published with his friend, the British writer, Victor Prism. They’re entirely imaginary. They’re not based on anyone in particular. It was just a very gentle send-up.\n \n\n26:59\tKandice Sharren:\tShe may have chosen the story for its delicate comedy, as she sends up French bureaucracy, as we meet the hapless and misinformed tax agent, O. Poche and Henri Grippes with his secret apartments and tax evasion. The main object of her send-up seems to us to be Grippes as writer. As Jonathan Coe noted in the London Review of Books in 1997, “Grippes is one of her most memorable characters, a shallow opportunistic writer who nevertheless, somehow manages to elicit the reader sympathy by virtue of his rotten luck and his chronic unpopularity with the book buying public. There’s a mordant redeeming humor here, which has given free rein then in Gallant’s weightier stories.”\n \n\n27:41\tMichelle Levy:\tDoes he elicit the reader’s sympathy though? I have to say, as someone who rents in Vancouver, I am hard pressed to want to spend time looking for a slumlord’s redeeming qualities, especially when it’s paired with literary opportunism. I really found myself hoping that Poche would catch him out by the end. So hearing Ann and Carolyn discuss the reading really struck a chord with me in part, because I kind of agreed with Carolyn’s assessment of the story.\n \n\n28:09\tCarolyn Tate:\tYeah. I’m kind of surprised, ann, that you say that people received the story well, and that they laughed and whatnot because I found the story of a bit dismal. I think of it, she mentions Flaubert, as I was saying to Kate at some point during the story, and I feel that this was her kind of her Flaubertian moment or something. And it kind of reminded me of that novel the [French book title] by Flaubert where he has the ex-bureaucrat and somebody else doing all of this extremely grotesque kind of pseudo literary stuff. And I found that when I read the story, it dragged quite a lot and I didn’t find it all that amusing. And I think of it also as sort of the beginning of the end of her North American kind of– well, maybe I’m wrong about this because I think that North American readers were fascinated and gripped by these expats that she wrote about. I don’t think they were so interested in French bureaucrats and you know, French literary life and who is this English writer anyway, you know? Anyway, as I say, I don’t think it’s her best moment. Although because of this literary aspect of things, I’m going to read the other Henri Grippes stories and see whether, you know, they kind of interest me more now that I thought a little more of a take on this kind of this world.\n \n\n29:38\tMichelle Levy:\tCarolyn, if you read the rest of the Grippes story, you will indeed find much more on this kind of the French literary scene – corruption may be a bit strong, but there’s a really hilarious whole story about this attempt to write an encyclopedia of French authors that drags on for decades because they’re constantly changing who they think is important and who should be included, and the editors keep fighting with each other.[Laughs] It’s really funny. So there’s definitely more of that in that series of stories about the writer.\n \n\n30:13\tCarolyn Tate:\tI did read them sometime, but that’s very Flaubertian too. That’s what this –I don’t know whether you’ve ever read this, [French book title], it’s a terrible thing actually, but this is their whole thing too. They’re trying to be more and more kind of literary and correct, and all the rest of it. And it’s a complete balls up, frankly. [Laughs] I think Henri, he’s sort of in that frame somewhere.\n \n\n30:44\tMichelle Levy:\tThat said, and in Carolyn’s discussion of the literary trends of the 1970s and 80s,, a period that I didn’t live through and haven’t paid much attention to either academically or in terms of its literary culture, but one that ‘Grippes and Poche’ engages with did help me appreciate what exactly this story was doing.\n \n\n31:04\tKandice Sharren:\tI was struck by the sexual politics of the story, and particularly Gallant’s deadpan, imagining of a very capital P problematic male writer. Grippes regrets that in his American novel, he resorted to the stale male teacher, female student pattern. Could this failed attempt to write a novel about an academic romance be the reason for her choice?\n \n\n31:27\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\t… female student pattern in the novel. He should have turned it around, identified himself with a brilliant and cynical woman teacher. Unfortunately, unlike Flaubert with his academic stocking horse, he could not put himself in a woman’s place, probably because he thought it an absolutely terrible place to be. [Audience Laughs]\n \n\n31:48\tKandice Sharren:\tThis line elicits a knowing laugh from the audience. In fact, Gallant had been one of the first to write about a real life female teacher, male student affair between a 32 year old Gabriel Roussier and her 16 year old pupil for the New Yorker in 1971. It was a story that scandalized France, when it broke in 1967, as the parents of the boy brought legal proceedings against Roussier, that resulted her in her imprisonment, and that brought about her suicide in 1969. As Gallant dryly points out in her article about the affair, the story was an old one rife with the double standard, reflecting what Gallant calls “a prevailing belief that Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis.” ‘Grippes and Poche’ ends on a note of implicit violence as Gallant relates Grippes storytelling as a process of stocking and confining one of his female characters. In her reading, she slows down to relate his menacing attempt to invent a female character.\n \n\n32:57\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe had got the woman from church to dining room and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, and watched until she yielded to Grippe and told her name.\n \n\n33:08\tKandice Sharren:\tThus ending the story on a more ominous note than the gentle send-up with which it begins.\n \n\n33:14\tMichelle Levy:\tThe story is commentary on sexual politics in a campus environment, complimented her location and audience. In our conversation with Carolyn and ann, they speculated that the academic satire within Grippes and Poche, maybe one of the reasons why Gallant selected this story for her on-campus reading.\n \n\n33:32\tCarolyn Tate:\tDon’t you think she was a brilliant reader on campus?\n \n\n33:36\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI do. And I was thinking about the context of that story: 1984. And I kind of – I was thinking, what else was being published at the time? And it was interesting that she was sending up the campus drama, the campus romance, the professor who falls in love with the student – and remember he had written a failed novel. It wasn’t quite good enough in that genre. And so I was thinking who was writing in that genre that time? And I remember David Lodge’s trilogy – do you remember? And they were so good. They were so good. And so I think, she was sort of sending up professors and sort of commenting a little bit on David Lodge’s three books, which were Changing Places in 1975, Small World – an academic romance in 1984 – and Nice Work in 1988.\n34:33\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tAnd the other thing too I found was – as Carolyn said earlier –just the vagaries of literary tastes. People going in and out of fashion and suddenly being reinvented as somebody who’s okay with women, at a time when, when suddenly we’re worrying about whether or not somebody has the right feminist credentials to be read by the students in women’s studies, et cetera. So I think that there was certainly a memory for me of literary tastes and fashions and so on that I found quite interesting hearing the story again. None of this occurred to me particularly at the time.\n \n\n35:19\tKandice Sharren:\tIt’s something that testament to these vagaries of literary trends that I had actually never heard of David Lodge before. Apparently this shocked Michelle who asked me if I was sure I wanted to admit to this publicly. When I think of campus novels, I think of on the one hand, Dorothy Sayers Gaudy Night published before the outbreak of the Second World War, or on the other hand, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and Sally Rooney’s Normal People. But I haven’t really read any written between the Second World War and the early 2000s, perhaps because the sexual politics of novels written in that period speak to a very different historical moment, and one that isn’t the subject of nostalgia, the way something like Sayers book is.\n \n\n36:05\tMichelle Levy:\tThe literary context of this story are only part of it’s satire though. Grippes refashions the dull civil servant in an attempt to keep up with literary fashion, but also with the winds of political change. The beginning of the story is set in 1964 and ends in the early 1980s, thus tracking both the progress of Grippes writing career and that of the fifth Republic itself.\n \n\n36:29\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tThe other thing though, I thought that was interesting about the story was how she talked about the change in government and this story spans 20 years or something. And so you have those [French phrase] coloured folders and you have the Charles DeGaulle coloured folders and so on. And the poor old tax guy gets his baby face gets sterner, and he got some little bald spot in his curls and so on. And so there’s a sense of a time passing. To me that sort of Proustian, and maybe that was a kind of melange of that as well. I really haven’t thought too much about what she might’ve been trying to accomplish in terms of her own oeuvre, but she had published that some years before she read that story. So it certainly wasn’t new work she was reading. But I have a feeling she kind of hauled out something that she thought might appeal to an academic audience. And the question that you asked…\n \n\n37:34\tMichelle Levy:\tDespite the literary and political moments that Gallant’sstory is in conversation with, her language has a strikingly timeless quality, precisely descriptive, but with a wry restraint that ironically captures the rhythms of Grippes thoughts.\n \n\n37:47\tKandice Sharren:\tIn writing about a writer, Henri Grippes, Gallant celebrates his flights of imagination, but also wryly observes his limitations. The meta-fictional elements of the story are both profound and comic as we are treated to a description of Grippes entire oeuvre, and also to his inability to recognize himself in his characters. On contemplating the protagonists of his books, Gallant dryly explains that…\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant:\tHe was like a father gazing around the breakfast table, suddenly realizing none of the children are his.\n \n\n38:18\tKandice Sharren:\tThis was something that Ann commented on too.\n \n\n38:21\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI thought she had some wonderful metaphors and some wonderful sentences. I mean she talks about the shoreline of the 80s at one point –and talking about the rise to acclaim as this man’s career is a little bit rejuvenated at the end of the 80s. And she had just lovely, lovely metaphors from time to time and quite extended – she’d spin it out in kind of interesting and droll ways. And so I really admired her as a wordsmith in this story. And– as I said earlier, I did feel it was a rather long story, but I felt that her language – I had forgotten what a fine craftsman she was. [Start Music: Piano] She really, she really does write in a very original and refreshing way\n \n\n39:26\tKandice Sharren:\tChapter six: Grippes and Poche in the archive, in which Ann remembers the reel-to-reel machine at the reading and a hunch is confirmed. [End Music: Piano] Listening to Gallant’s original and refreshing language in her own voice is only possible through the archival remains of the event, especially their high-quality. In the March 2021 episode we talked about how these archival materials –in this case, the tape that holds Gallants reading – reveals the hands that manipulated it. The clean break between sides one and two had us convinced that despite the fact that the tape said “master” on it, it was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n40:11\tKate Moffat:\tWe were delighted to hear Ann confirm some of what we questioned and hypothesized in the first episode surrounding Curtis Vanel’s involvement. In a subsequent email, she shared with us that “the sound technician was set up on the right side, facing the stage and had a desk with reel-to-reel recorder. I always paid to have the technician there. Otherwise someone else had to make sure the record button was pushed and that the thing was at the right level. The technician also made sure the audio levels were good. I have a vision of Curtis walking up to the mic, turning it on and checking, and then adjusting the height for Mavis, and then sitting down. He would have done the same for Grazia.” She even recalled that Vanel was particularly interested in generations of recordings. His master tape was the one that other generations were created from.\n \n\n40:55\tAnn Cowan-Buitenhuis:\tI remember having many conversations with Doug about first and second generations. I mean, this is before things were digitized. So, he used to make a master cassette that would come from the reel-to-reel stuff that he did. And it would be very clean, whereas the reels would not be – I mean, he was a master at fixing things, getting rid of all the ums and ahs and whatever. And so he probably then had a master cassette from which copies would be made, but he would always hold onto the master because every copy was another generation. So that was the way he thought about it.\n \n\n41:40\tKate Moffat:\tAs far as we, and the folks in the SFU archives have been able to determine, we no longer have the original reel to reel for this reading evidence of its existence lies only in evidence of editing hands on the cassette tape, recording. [Start Music: Accordion]\n \n\n42:01\tKandice Sharren:\tOur interview with Ann and Carolyn, and Michelle’s conversation with Grazia Merla was a reminder that while the archives can provide records and a certain amount of contextual information, particularly when you pay sustained attention to your materials, they cannot capture everything. Ann’s recollection that Images Theater was three quarters full for the reading is information we would never have been able to track down otherwise, as it wasn’t recorded anywhere. Gallant’s fussing over the microphone at her reading in Images Theater is informed by the technical difficulties the day before. And that day before the event downtown uncaptured on audio doesn’t seem to exist in the archive at all, only in fickle human memory.\n \n\n42:56\tMichelle Levy:\tWe want to end by connecting our conversations about the reading with the larger paratextual paper record, including the label on the cassette, the poster used to advertise the event, and the proofs Gallant was reading from. In addition to these materials, we were also fortunate to obtain a copy of proofs of photos, taken of Gallant by Bruno Schlumberger on November 1st, 1990, during another visit to Canada. These photos taken near the Rideau canal in Ottawa offer a wonderful glimpse of Gallant, charming, exuberant, but still well-dressed and put together. Kate, Kandice and I were not fortunate enough to have met Gallant or heard her read in person, but with these photos and the recording and our interviews with Ann, Carolyn, and Grazia, yet we are able to conjure a distinct portrait of this most entrancing and provocative writer. [End Music: Accordion]\n \n\n44:06\tHannah McGregor:\t[Music: Piano Overlaid With Distorted Beat] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb contributors, Kate Moffat, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy, with additional audio courtesy of the Simon Fraser University Archives and Records Management Department. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. To find out more about SpokeWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada., Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts, a brand new take on audio of the month with Katherine McLeod, mini-stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.4930656},{"id":"9597","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E6, Revisiting “Mountain Many Voices: The Archival Sounds of Fred Wah”, 3 April 2023, Shipton and Brock"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creator_names_search":["Don Shipton","Teddie Brock"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Don Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Teddie Brock\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/0bf2a7c7-ddac-40e7-8106-659d4438a7d5/audio/55dfa8f4-b0b8-4048-bc33-a1f90eed0fdb/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e6.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:39:47\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"38,194,826 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e6\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/revisiting-mountain-many-voices-the-archival-sounds-of-fred-wah/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-04-03\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Makarova, Liza. “The Night of the Living Archive.” Season 4, Episode 2, The SpokenWeb Podcast, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-night-of-the-living-archive/.\\n\\nArchival Audio:\\n\\n“Ed Dorn reading in Albuquerque on October 30, 1963 Side 1 #109b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Lionel Kearns, Mike Matthews, and Fred Wah reading poetry at UBC #258.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Charles Olson on August 14, 1963 #48.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Louis Zukofsky reading at Library of Congress on November 3 and 4, 1960 Tape 1 of 2 #260a.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, and Levertov on August 7, 1963 #45.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“UBC Poetry Festival: Avison, Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Ginsberg, Whalen, and Levertov on August 9, 1963 #46b.” Special Collections and Rare Books, Simon Fraser University.\\n\\n“Around New Sound Daily Means: Selected Poems by Larry Eigner and Gary Snyder, Tape 1 of 3 #500a.”\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549538996224,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["In the summer of 2022, research assistants Don Shipton and Teddie Brock took part in a roundtable discussion that explored the archival work of student researchers involved with the audio archives of Canadian poet, Fred Wah. Alongside his literary and academic work, Wah has had a longstanding practice of recording poetry readings, lectures, and conversations, documenting key moments in North American poetry.\n\nThis sonic-archival meditation highlights the impact of recording technology on the trajectory of poetic circulation and composition, as it brings together the ‘many voices’ that constituted Wah’s listening and recording practices as a young poet. The first part of this episode will revisit a recording of Wah’s conversation with Deanna Fong, co-director of the Fred Wah Digital Archive, in which Wah reflects on the significance of portable tape recording to literary community-building and the development of a poetic ‘voice.’ The episode will also present a selection of archival clips documenting the poets whose recorded voices Wah encountered throughout the 1960s, including Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn, among others.\n\nSpecial thanks to Kate Moffatt and Miranda Eastwood for their production support in the making of this episode, and to Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books for hosting the “Mountain Many Voices” roundtable event.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:18)\tKatherine McLeod\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb podcast, stories about how literature sounds.\n[SpokenWeb Theme music ends]\n\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it, created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. For each episode of the SpokenWeb podcast, the producers and production team are always thinking about recording; the microphones, zoom recorders, sound quality, from voiceover to interview to archival audio clips. And this month’s episode is all about recording and how recording shapes the way we encounter sound, particularly poetry.\n\nThe poet at the center of it all, Fred Wah, is known for both his poetry and also for his recording. Did you know that the sound recordings of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference were thanks to Fred Wah being the guy who carried the tape recorder around? And let’s remember that tape recorders were not easy to carry around back then. And because he had the tape recorder, he was able to have it running during so many of the sessions, and there ends up being an audio archive of that now famous event in Canadian poetry.\n\nSo keeping that in mind, let’s jump to another event in 2022, when Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted an event called Mountain Many Voices: the archival sounds of Fred Wah. That event was a round table discussion with Fred Wah himself, student researchers working on Wah archival materials, both from SFU and from Concordia, and moderated by Dr. Deanna Fong.\n\nBy the way, Fong leads the Fred Wah Digital Archive Project, which you can hear more about by listening to the episode “Night of the Living Archive” produced by Liza Makarova and aired on the SpokenWeb Podcast in November, 2022. And yes, Liza is also part of this round table discussion Mountain Many Voices. In this month’s episode, Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, two of SFU’s research assistants, who also contributed to that round table revisit the event and they revisit its many voices along with recordings of Wah speaking about what he calls “the materialism of the voice”.\n\nYou’ll also hear recordings of other poets referenced during the event, such as Charles Olson, Louis Zukofsky, Denise Levertov, and Ed Dorn. When making this episode, Teddie and Don were inspired by live radio, and this episode has our producers becoming hosts themselves, curating, introducing, and sharing a rich selection of archival audio. Here’s the sixth episode of season four, Revisiting Mountain Mini Voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah.\n\n[SpokenWen Podcast theme music begins and fades]\n\n(03:28)\tTeddie\t[Sound effect of static swells and fades]\nIn June of 2022, Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books hosted a round table event titled Mountain Many Voices, which centered on the audio archive of Canadian poet Fred Wah.\n\n(03:42)\tDon\tIn the following recording an excerpted conversation between Fred Wah and post-doctoral researcher Deanna Fong, you’ll hear the story of Wah’s first encounter with portable tape recording and how the social and technical practices associated with emergent audio technologies in turn shaped his own relationship to the reading, writing, and listening of contemporary poetry.\n(04:03)\tTeddie\tNext, we will play a selection of archival recordings, bringing together the sounds of the many voices of Wah’s personal literary history.\n(04:24)\tTeddie, Don, Deanna Fong, and Fred Wah all talking as they set up for the interview:\t[Somber string music plays while indistinguishable voices talking to one another.]\n(04:56)\tDeanna Fong\tI think we’re just gonna go in alphabetical order… Fred and I will have a little quick introduction here first. So I think the reason for our gathering is that we’ve all sort of been encountering Fred’s many voices through the archive through these many years of recordings that are held at different institutions which are being collected digitally in Fred Wah’s Digital Archive. I’m here at Special Collections, Simon Fraser University. So given that you’re the voice and your voice is kind of the reason for us gathering for today in that we’ve all done some work with your archival voice in one way or another. I thought we could just start off by having a quick discussion about your recording practice and how there came to be so many tapes [all laugh].\nBut in terms of, you know, just having a quick discussion about recording, I just wanted to start by asking you, so when did recording come into your life and when was the first time you saw a portable recording device? [Don laughs] And when was the first experience of hearing your own recorded voice?\n\n(05:56)\tFred Wah\tUh, yes. Let me contextualize my interest in recording, which is back around 1962. The poetry that we were involved with then with the Tish Group in Vancouver was this whole movement in poetry towards working around Charles Olson’s project first for us. And, the whole notion of the head by way, the ear to the syllable, the heart by way of the line to the breast or the breast to the line. So the formality, the materialism of the voice was very much a new thing then. Most of us had grown up with poetry on the page, and  with a silent experience, kind of conversation with oneself silently. So this was new. So the whole notion of making something oral was exciting to me. And, I was primarily a musician or was interested in music, so sound was prominent. And Robert Creeley showed up at UBC as a new American poet, and he at one point brought out his tape recorder.\nWow, what’s that? You know, it’s a machine and it was a kind of stainless steel machine. It’s a Wollensak Reel-to-Reel. And he had tapes that he had made of radio interviews he had done for a radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he lived and worked. And so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky and Ritter Binner, Ed Dorn.\n\n[Low electronic string music begins to play]\n\nI was fascinated by Ed Dorn’s poetry and I heard Ed Dorn’s voice. In those days, that was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading on the, off the page. [Low electronic string music ends] So I traded in my Marimba vibes and my trumpet for a Wollensak tape recorder [All laugh]. The first time I heard my own voice, I think, was a reading I did with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews at UBC, a Noon Hour Reading.\n\nAnd I must have taped it cuz I have the tape.\n\n[All laugh] I can’t remember doing it. And then, so I heard my voice that way, but we weren’t interested in necessarily recording everything. Like I don’t, I have no tapes of the Tish Poets reading or George or Frank or any one of those people reading. And then in 1963 we had the Vancouver Poetry, so-called Vancouver Poetry Conference, which was in the summer of 1963 out at UBC. And Warren Tallman, his father-in-law, gave him this beautiful big console tape recorder. And so he wanted to record the whole conference and he was really interested in recordings.\n\nAnd he asked me, because I knew a little bit about, was learning about tape recordings. He said, could you learn to run this and do that? So I did. But one of the very first sessions we had in the 63 conference, the take up reel broke.\n\n[Sound effect of tape breaking and falling on the floor] It broke down. So I sat there through the whole meeting winding, [All laugh] taking up, taking up the tape, and then I ended up using my own recorder, the Wollensak, to record the rest of the conference.\n\nSo I got into recording and I really enjoyed the notion of not so much documenting, but having the voices of these poets who, you know, a lot of us were interested in, sort of around and available. And they became kind of, it’s a kind of a precious thing and it, and it kind of melded with the whole notion, the whole technology that was going on there. Cuz Reel-to-Reel tape recording was relatively new in the late fifties, early sixties in North America. And eventually it led to other tape recorders and other forms and, and it’s gone on ever since. And I’ve always used tape recording as a, or audio recording as a way of registering more accurately the oral nature of how poetry is being made. [Light piano music begins to play]\n\nAnd I studied linguistics. I was really interested in the kind of nitty gritty of how language is its rhythm and stress is, is there. [Piano music fades and ends]\n\n(10:16)\tDeanna Fong\tI find that such a fascinating response because I think like one of the follow up questions I had was this question of, you know, what this sort of impetus to record was and in the way that you speak of it, and not necessarily a documentary sense, like not as a kind of living proof that you were there or whatever, but more thinking about it as a sort of tool that aids or at least says something about, you know, the affective register of the voice and, and a sort of tool towards composition, it seems like. Is that what you’re talking about?\n(10:47)\tFred Wah\tYeah, I think that recording was a way to sustain the notion of poetry as oral. It just helped. I know I didn’t necessarily know what I was doing. I wasn’t doing it for any specific, other than to collect the ‘63 conference, was basically documenting that. And I remember when we finished, UBC said they owned the tapes, so we gave them a set of the tapes and within a few months they had lost them [Deanna laughs]. And, and I said, do you want another set? No, we’re not, no nevermind. Just don’t bother [Fred laughs]. So it was kind of, you know, it’s kind of a disregard for what we had done in terms of the poetry.\n(11:34)\tDeanna Fong\tHmm. And it also sounds like it becomes a means of circulating poetry that you might not otherwise have access to, or at least not like certainly in oral form. Right?\n(11:45)\tFred Wah\tThat too. And it became, as you know, a way of sharing poetry and voices all over. So you could, you know, like the notion of pen sound or spoken word, all these efforts to get the voices out there has changed, I think, the context for making poetry, because it’s so shared, if you want to. You know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. [All laugh] [Soft piano music begins to play]\nThat was just so, it was so different and so new. So poetry was made new in us, at least for myself and, I think, made others because of the voice. [Piano music ends]\n\n(12:36)\tDeanna Fong\tAnd also I was, cuz I know that you found a home for the Reel- to-Reel recordings, which include the original 1960s poetry conference recordings at Karis Shearer’s UBCO AMP Lab. And she mentioned that in that collection there’s also a tape that’s like an audio letter, which is either to you or from you, [Deanna laughs]  from Gladys Hindmarch.\n(12:59)\tFred Wah\tI think it’s from her. Okay. I haven’t listened to it because my tape, I didn’t have the tape. I don’t have a tape recording, so I asked Terrace to transcribe it. You know, the technology shifted. So we were able to get portable tape recorders that we had this small tape recorder that did small, could do small three inch reels. Right? And so we shared some letters with our friend Gladys Hindmarch, and, and I don’t know how much we did that with others. Actually, Louis Cabri was with me in Calgary when his friend Aaron [inaudible] from Philadelphia came up. We, Aaron came up and sat and recorded or transferred those old seven inch reels, which by then were 45 years old into mini disks [All laugh]. Right?\nAnd he sat there for a week doing all these transcripts, not transcriptions, but transferring into, into digital format. And luckily the tapes, because they had just been put away in a basement, were still okay. And in fact, I listened to some before I gave them to Karis, that they still seemed to be okay.\n\n(14:14)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. Because sometimes we really only get the one shot. Hey?\n(14:16)\tFred Wah\tYeah.\n(14:16)\tDeanna Fong\t[Deanna laughs] So when you, when you were recording these things, did you have a sense of a future audience in mind?\n(14:25)\tFred Wah\tNo, not particularly. I was interested in recording, I guess for academic reasons. All through my tenure as a teacher, I would record visiting poets as a way of replaying them for students in classes and that, and I found being able to play recordings of someone reading something that they had read in a book was a valuable experience for students.\nSo pedagogically, they were useful. I didn’t have any other sense of where they might, [Fred laughs] what might happen to them or I, there was a kind of, they were valuable, they were precious things, these tapes. And when I put together these boxes of cassettes to give to Tony that, you know, to deposit up here in the archives there’re just hundreds of, I don’t know how many of there are, but there are a lot of cassette tapes of readings of, you know, particularly Canadian poets that came to Selkirk College or the University of Calgary area, or at least 300, I think.\n\nAnd, you know, so a lot of them probably aren’t of great quality. Just sticking a, I remember the ‘63 conference, we had one microphone. So we have a panel of, you know, six people and this one little Wollensack microphone and the cord wouldn’t reach that long [ All laugh], so people like Robert Dun would grab the whole machine and bring it so he could speak. [All laugh] But distant people sitting at the table, you know, like Phil Win, sitting at the table, you can’t even quite hear him.Things like that.\n\n(16:11)\tDeanna Fong\tYeah. So, what does that mean as like, maybe as a final question, what does that mean as a reader slash listener slash amateur of poetry? That all of these things are all of a sudden just kind of right available at our, our fingertips, our eardrums?\n(16:27)\tFred Wah\t[Somber electronic music begins to play]\nI think it grounds them a little bit more. It makes them, the materiality of them, brings them sort of closer to a different understanding of the event of the poem.\n\n(16:46)\tDon\tDuring their conversation, Fred Wah mentions numerous authors whose voices were instrumental in the development of his own. First among these writers is Charles Olson. From memory, Wah quotes a line from Olson’s now famous essay “Projective Verse”.\n(17:01)\tFred Wah\t“The head, by way, the ear to the syllable of the heart. By way of the rest of the line.”\n(17:06)\tDon\tThis idea of breath, providing the foundation for one’s poetry was influential to many poets writing throughout the 1960s, including a young Fred Wah. [Electronic music ends]\nWe’re gonna play Charles Olson reading “Maximus from Dogtown 2,” recorded at the so-called 1963 poetry conference. But before we do that, let’s begin with that UBC noon hour reading that Fred Wah gave with Lionel Kearns and Mike Matthews. The recording he cited as the first time he heard his own voice.\n\n(17:44)\tTeddie\t[Electronic music begins, interspersed with the sound of radio waves]\nYou are listening to “Revisiting Mountain Many Voices”, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. [Sound effect of a tape being put into a tape player and beginning to play]\n\n(18:04)\tArchival Audio of Fred Wah\tNo particular poetics today, except that I think you’ll probably hear the voices of Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Robert Creedey and Robert Kelly. That whole Black Mountain group coming in as I don’t think I’ve found my voice yet.\nThe cold and brisk breeze whipped today the cold and brisk breeze whipped today. But no snow comes such ardor, pure and freeze the muddy water on the streets. Me and my love, seraphic pride walked windward, smiling faces. A quiet morning, early morning and fog my darling, you are sleeping warm with sleep. Cold floor stretches in the dark boulevard and headlights past the glass, the start of day, eggs, coffee, cigarette. I walked before you already in the tired morning, no beginning, but our sleep and love, deep rhythms in our breathings. [Electronic music plays and fades]\n\n  (19:30)\tArchival Audio of Charles Olson\t“Maximus from Dogtown number 2”, or December 5th, 1959. Which I will open with.\nThe sea. Turn your back on the sea, go inland to Dogtown, the harbor, the shore, the city, are now shitty as the nation is, the world tomorrow. Unless the princes of the husting, the sons who refuse to be denied the demon. If Madea kills herself, Madea is a Phoenician wench, also daughter of the terror as Jason Johnson Hines son, hindsight. Charles John Hines, whole son, the Atlantic Mediterranean Black Sea. Time is done in Dun for gone. Jack Hammond put a stop to surface underwater galaxy, time. There is no sky, space or sea left. Earth is interesting. Ice is interesting, stone is interesting. Flowers are carbon. Carbon is Carboniferous, Pennsylvania age under Dogtown, the stone, the watered rock, carbon flowers, rills Aquarium time after fish, fish was Christ. Oh Christ picked the seeds out of your teeth. How handsome the dead dog lies horror X the migma is where the seeds Christ was supposed to pick out.\n\nW sh wunk grapevine Hok, the Dutch and the Norse. And Algonquins. He with a house in his head. She who lusted after the snake in the pond, Dogtown berry smell as the grub beaten fish. Take the smell out of the air. A you’re the tar of Dogtown, the tar matas. Here is the angel matter not to come until R 3000. We will carry water up the hill, the water, the water to make the flower hot. Jack and Jill will up Dogtown Hill on top. One day the vertical American thing will show from heaven. The latter come down to the earth of us all the many who know there is one, one mother, one son, one daughter, and each the father of him self. The genetic is ma the morphic is pa, the city is Mother Polish. The child made man, woman is Mary’s son Elizabeth Mangen the mangen in collagen in collagen time leap onto the leap onto the lamb.\n\nThe aquarium time. The greater the water you add, the greater the decomposition. So long as the agent is protein, the carbon of four is the corners in stately motion to sing in high voice the fables of wood and stone and man and woman love and loving in the snow and sun. The weather on Dogtown is protonic, but the other side of heaven is ocean filled in the flower, the weather on Dogtown. The other side of heaven is ocean Dogtown. The under vault heaven is carbon ocean Quam Dogtown. The under vault, the mother rock, the diamond coal, the Pennsylvanian age, the soft coal love age, the soft coal love hung up burning under the city. Thet is heart to be turned. Black stone, the black cri is the throne of creation. Ocean is the black gold flower.\n\n(23:32)\tTeddie\tNext you’re going to hear poems by Larry Eigner, Louis Zukovski and Ed Dorn. As well as a short clip of Robert Creeley from a panel at the UBC Poetry Conference. Each of these poets, while a part of their own literary coterie were associated with schools and states, were included in the 1960 anthology, the New American poetry edited by Donald Allen. It was this work which Wah referenced earlier when he mentioned the new American poets.\n(24:01)\tFred Wah\t[Echoing sound effect is added to Fred’s voice]\nYou know, to be able to hear Larry Eigner after reading him carefully was just [Fred laughs]. My mind was blown. That was just so, it was so different and so and so new. So poetry was made new in that sense.\n\n(24:28)\tArchival Audio of Larry Eigner\tLanguage is temporary king poetry, the mask on everyday life. What time of the day is it land? What have you to do with or gotten done? Love to poems, the unexpected, the magnetic power. The speed, the ocean drop, dry drop. If there were time they go drawn after us. The city is music is human in the events. The seas drag light in the earth. The greatest thing is orchestra. With men, the wind and the waves are fixed. Open road. You look in hundreds in the night sky, any place the drone would this time enough new each day. Bruce is enough of the old, the dying of oppos to the present contact communication. Explanation. Enough not we keep on.\n(26:31)\tFred Wah\tAnd so he had tapes there of Louis Zukovsky.\n(26:38)\tArchival Audio of Louis Zukovsky reading\tSong Three from 55 poems, compute leaf points water with slight dropped sounds. Turn coat sheet facts say for the springs, blooms fall the trees trunk has set the circling horn branch to cipher each drop the eye shot and the rain around. So cheated well let the fallen bloom wet clutter down and into and the heart fact hold Nothing. Desire is no excess. The eye points each leaf. The brain desire the ray, she recites their brief song. 13 in that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow had came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed. A wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales, the water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor. In that this happening is not unkind. It put to shame every kindness mind mouths their words. People put sorrow on its body before sorrow. It came. And before every kindness happening, for every sorrow before every kindness Song 18, the mirror oval sabers playing the chips in the room next door. The voices behind the wall will be lit by highlights in the morning, in bed, a wall between continuing voices, chips stacking instead of bales. The water sounds extending a harbor, one sleepless, one sleeper on the fourth floor.\n(29:39)\tArchival Audio 5\tHow can you be other than where you are?\n(29:45)\tFred Wah\tI was fascinated by Ed’s poetry and I heard Ed’s voice in those days. That was really a surprise to be able to hear the voice of a poet who you had been reading off the page.\n(30:02)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tI sure never tried to do this without smoking [audience laughs]. This one is called Hawthorne. End of March, 1962. That day was dark fog fell down our mountain. The snows were wet patches and around the legs laid as like and around the barn, dark red shadows the day he died. The slow quiet break. What an odd person to die beside. Franklin Pierce never go to the mountains. Near the end, the air is spoken for. I thought how just Americans still love morality. With many preliminary question, he was fierce for the slight connection back to what there was. This poem is, uh, completely abstract, as far as I know. It’s called an inauguration poem. And I wrote it during the last inauguration. Unasked, of Course, [Audience laughs] Out of the zone of interior armies, the Nebraska of our terror flies pro gating the statistical laws of our starvation, where on the spinning habitation men’s eyes see the regiments of vegetation. And one man is the mouth of all and a narrowing harrowing rib in Denmark that dope delivered country is not starker than the staple deprived herdsman of the African. Who’s it? Out of the zone of interior armies come the advocates of nations where none can breathe outside the given crush, forsaking even established ignorance. Promo gating desire born against the honed knife of one secretary or another. Out of the zone of interior armies. The trains of El Presidente shoot laden with food for no destination anyone has charted because in a storage bin in the Midwest was held the grand conference on the grammar of scarcity. And the farmer stands beside the senseless soil and mumbles that this far starvation is named parody. Out of the interior skulls of our rulers stepped slim hygienic elegance of patrons of painted walls and bushman’s haircut, gut full with the art of wishing rice upon the multitude to make marriage of new nations to be ridiculed by coronets of old jazz. Like, don’t have too many babies unless you have the viles.\n(32:53)\tDon\tThat was Larry Eigner, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, and Ed Dorn. Next you’re going to hear a conversation between Denise Labov and Margaret Avison taken from a panel at the 1963 Poetry conference before coming back to that first tape of Fred Wah.\n(33:15)\tDenise Labov\tWell, I I think that if you’re, if you’re worrying about whether you are communicating while you’re writing it’s absolutely undermining. Well, to whom are you communicating? Are you communicating to, to someone you know who who who has, who’s who, whom you know to be your peer? Are you communicating to your landlady who isn’t gonna read it anyway? Are communicating on what level are you communicating? So you can’t possibly think about Tom about communication while you’re writing forth. But if you think about precision, if you really try to be absolutely accurate to what you know then chances are that you will communicate. Cause there seems to be a level of of, of communication that that comes about through through precision to one’s own knowledge.\n(34:10)\tMargaret Avison\tI used the word conversation earlier about the early stage of writing when you imitate. And I think that is a real communication of poetry you’re reading and it possesses you in a sense and you murmur back at it. You don’t do it intentionally. You usually feel bad when you discover you’ve done it. But I think most writers, at least when they’re 12 and 15 and so are doing that, aren’t they? And then you get away from that kind of communicating as you begin to find, yes, I have a voice.\n(34:55)\tArchival Audio of Ed Dorn\tOne last poem I’m going to sing in this one. So laugh if you want to. My voice is very good. But this is with lots of voices. Pound and especially Duncan Olson coming in. I can’t get away from it. But here it is a poem appealing for a life of pla passion and a place on earth where poetry is wanted are variations on a voice from Duncan. And if I live, I live for love of you. All things come together. So they say, and the way which one will show us which time it is in place of memory. I live for love of you. My life becomes the pin through the nude. Kneeling and worship becomes my wall. My white PHUs becomes light, strikes the beat. Time takes up making up remembrances. I call out ahead into the dark. Who is it? Who would love me? On the mountain side, the snow still falls and her glowing cheeks hang low ahead of me. The tracks are filling. I follow unanswered with the snow falling in my dream of love. And stay this place a while. Press her hanging to my breast. The lovers test, fragments of music ripple in my head. Unsteady notes in the lake light fall themselves into my eyes. Vow glides of water. Sing. Sleep. Sleep. Peel of poem from my memory. Sleep. Sleep. And if I live hold, let me live. Which also calls this place of passion speaks as it is poetry to me. And make it new reader. Strike out new you become old. In remembering, recall, I reproached you two summers ago at your excretions. I could only look at you that way. I can only speak to you now with your pants down. Those first few words are still as costly to my passion. Who would make life new when love grows old? Oh, show me the way to the next listener’s ear. Oh, don’t ask why. Oh, don’t ask. Why for I must find the next listener’s ear for if I don’t find the next listener’s ear. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, we must die. I tell you, I tell you. I tell you we must die. And if I live, he’ll let me live and sing. My poems a spool of passion. Ill let me live. We’re loved ones, but I reach with the hand for the new moon. And if I live, they’ll let me live in love of you. The song still sings And further on, that’s time King, queen of the Summer, throne of love in the sand stained the pins in tired, she floats backside in the lake water ripples in smooth furs about her nipples, breaking the sleek moon surface that summer night. And if I live, I’ve lived for love in full time. The beat strikes on time dances the memory to the full tune. Thank you.\n(38:19)\tTeddie\tThis has been Revisiting Mountain Many voices, the archival sounds of Fred Wah. If you want to hear more from Fred Waugh’s audio archive, check out the episode “Night of the Living Archive by” Liza Makarova.\n(38:48)\tKatherine McLeod\tThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are Teddie Brock and Donald Shipton, MA students at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer and audio engineer is Miranda Eastwood. And our transcriptionist is Zoe Mix. To find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca. Subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media at SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for Shortcuts, with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds."],"score":2.4930656},{"id":"9598","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4E7, Audiobooks in the Classroom, 1 May 2023, Levy and Schwartz"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Levy","Maya Schwartz"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20010042\",\"name\":\"Michelle Levy\",\"dates\":\"1968-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Maya Schwartz\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2023],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/58cbf262-da12-45e9-9dd7-822f98fa2de2/audio/819beef1-71ae-494f-8194-25b545bae90c/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4e7.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:52\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,667,080 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4e7\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/audiobooks-in-the-classroom/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2023-05-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Baron, Naomi S. How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. Oxford University Press, 2021, https://academic-oup-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/book/41098.\\n\\nCarrigan, Mark. “An audible university? The emerging role of podcasts, audiobooks and text to speech technology in research should be taken seriously.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, 2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2021/12/17/an-audible-university-the-emerging-role-of-podcasts-audiobooks-and-text-to-speech-technology-in-research-should-be-taken-seriously/.\\n\\nHarrison, K. C. “Talking books, Toni Morrison, and the Transformation of Narrative Authority.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011, p. 143.\\n\\nSarah Kozloff, “Audio Books in a Visual Culture.” Journal of American Culture, vo. 18, no. 4, 1995, pp. 83–95, 92.\\n\\nMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.\\n\\nPergadia, Samantha. “Finding Your ‘Voice’: Author-Read Audiobooks.” Public Books, 2023, https://www.publicbooks.org/finding-your-voice-author-read-audiobooks/.\\n\\nRubery, Matthew. “Introduction: Talking Books.” Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies, edited by Matthew Rubery, Taylor and Francis Group, 2011.\\n\\n–––. The Untold Story of the Talking Book. Harvard University Press, 2016.\\n\\nTennyson, Alfred. “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” 1890, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/kiosk/cabinet_kiosk_16_march_2021_rubery_matthew_audio_002.mp3.\\n\\n \"}]"],"_version_":1853670549542141952,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["What does it mean to “read” an audiobook? What happens when we teach literary audio in the university classroom? How can we prepare our students for success in reading and listening to audio literature?\n\nFeaturing a round-table conversation with graduate students Ghislaine Comeau, Andy Perluzzo, Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris at Concordia University and an interview with Dr. Jentery Sayers from the University of Victoria, this episode, hosted by Dr. Michelle Levy and SFU graduate student Maya Schwartz, thinks through the challenges and opportunities of inviting audiobooks into the literary classroom.\n\n\n(00:04)\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n(00:19)\tKatherine McLeod\t[Music fades] What does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the Spoken Web podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [Music ends]\nMy name is Katherine McLeod, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. Imagine sitting down to read a book for your literature class. When I said that, you probably pictured yourself opening a book, maybe a Toni Morrison novel, or a poetry anthology. But what if reading a book for your class looked like putting on headphones and pressing play? What happens if we consider the audio book pedagogically? What does the medium of the audiobook allow for in the classroom? How do students respond to listening to books?\n\nIn this episode, styled like an audio essay, producers Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz ask these very questions, putting current scholarship and personal reflection in conversation with interviews with professors and students alike in order to think through how literature sounds when it comes to audiobooks. Put on those headphones and turn up those speakers. Here is episode 7 of season 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Audiobooks in the Classroom. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music begins to play and quickly fades]\n\n(02:01)\tVoices Overlapping\tIt’s like, listen, ear skimming-\nYou kind of just like-\n\nBlank Out listening-\n\nIs attention by treating-\n\n-artifact myself-\n\n-Oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the books, so it must be a quarter of—–\n\nThe way the author enters the room. And I often, uh, when I’m teaching…\n\n(02:17)\tAI Generated Voice\tYou’re listening to “Audiobooks in the Classroom” by Michelle Levy, narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz.\n(02:28)\tMichelle\tThis podcast asks a seemingly simple question; how are we harnessing new audio forms to teach literature in the university classroom? According to Casey Harrison writing in 2011, “there is a dearth of scholarly literature on the medium of the audiobook.”\nFrom this, she concludes that this widely popular form is not being taken seriously by the academic establishment. With some important exceptions, the lack of research on the audiobook persists, even though as Harrison writes, “academics and avid readers happily avow their enjoyment and appreciation of recorded books.”\n\n[Light electronic music begins to play]\n\nAs you will hear throughout this episode, we are getting a lot of dishes washed with all of our listening. But are we taking advantage of the pedagogical potential of literary audio? This episode addresses the challenges both real and imagined that are shaping both the use of and the resistance to the incorporation of literary audio in teaching. [Electronic music ends]\n\nIt explores some of the ways in which college instructors are taking advantage of the wealth of literary audio now available to us.\n\nIt also offers reflections from students about how they are experiencing these experiments with literary audio. Ultimately, this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast seeks to offer some practical guidance to instructors and to elucidate how the use of literary audio can enhance connection, understanding, and enjoyment for our students. [Quiet string music begins to play]\n\nTo address these issues from the perspective of both the instructor and the student.\n\nThis podcast will interweave my own commentary with that of Professor Jentery Sayers of the University of Victoria, an expert in sound media and literary history, who Maya interviewed for this podcast. You will also hear an interview conducted with four graduate students from Concordia University who have recently taken a course with Professor Jason Camlot, that centered audio literature PhD students, Ghislaine Comeau and Andy Perluzzo, and MA students Ella Jando-Saul and Maia Harris were asked to set up questions similar to the ones I asked Jentery, and I’m delighted to include their responses to provide a range of student perspectives on the use of audio literature.\n\nI’m also joined by Maya Schwartz, an MA student at SFU, who helped to produce this podcast episode and who joins me in voicing some of the narrative commentary in this episode. [String music ends]\n\nAs an avid listener of literary audiobooks and podcasts for over a decade, it was the pandemic that finally prompted me to teach audiobooks. Jentery had decided to take the plunge before Covid.\n\n(05:07)\tJentery\tIf I recall correctly, I think I proposed it prior to the shift online for the pandemic. We shifted in March, 2020. But what I did as I was preparing it is I took advantage of some aspects of that dynamic. The fact that, I think, increasingly people were listening to podcasts, people were listening to literature, and, you know, a lot of people were inside for [Jentery laughs] doing a lot of their work.\nSo I taught, I ended up teaching the seminar online, and doing what I can or doing what I could to integrate audio into the teaching, into the dynamic that way. And I think on the whole, it worked out quite well. It was a joy to teach.\n\n(05:45)\tMichelle\t[Low string music begins to play]\nAs Jentery says, the shift to online teaching during the pandemic meant that students were receiving their instruction through audio and video, and apart from others in their home, which seemed to support the incorporation of literary audio into our courses. When teaching audiobooks and literary audio as instructors, we face a number of practical considerations.\n\nShould we require students to buy both the audiobook and a print copy of the book? Assuming the audiobook is not freely available, will they need a print copy of the book for their assignments? And if we require them to purchase both, can we justify the cost, particularly given that audible.ca unaccountably fails to offer a student membership? Could we assume that every student had a device from which they could access an audiobook or a podcast?\n\nThere were also questions about which audiobook or podcast to select and how much performance and accessibility should drive our selection. In some cases, such as canonical novels like those by Charles Dickens or Jane Austen, there may be dozens of audiobook versions to choose from, and much like the decision about which print edition to ask our students to purchase, selecting an audiobook requires thoughtful deliberation of the various options. Accessibility also plays a role. Most of our students have spent their academic careers silently reading. How do we prepare them to listen? [String music ends]\n\nOne of the audiobooks I have assigned, Anna Burns’ novel Milkman, is narrated by a character known only as “middle sister”. It is performed by Belfast actor Brid Brennan in a thick northern Irish accent. For me, the voicing brought the novel vividly to life. It also helped me to make sense of the stream of consciousness narration and the disorientation that comes from none of the characters being assigned proper names. [Quiet electronic music begins to play]\n\nBut some of my students struggled to hear the words and the story through the accent. Thus, a feature of the voicing that enhanced the story for me was a barrier to some. I begin, however, with one of the most fundamental questions that has vexed the use of audiobooks for teaching and research; whether listening is reading.\n\n(08:01)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter One: Is listening reading? [Electronic music ends]\n(08:07)\tMichelle\tThere is an entrenched suspicion that listening to an audiobook or a podcast is a passive activity, and hence not really reading. Jentery describes how this issue arose in a contemporary American fiction class he taught about a decade ago. One of his students kept referencing, having listened to a novel assigned for the course.\n(08:28)\tJentery\tThere was one student in particular that talked about listening the whole time when answering questions and just having class discussion. And I was fascinated by this. So I just said, do you mean just to be honest, do you mean this literally? Are you, are you listening to the book? Are you using this as a way to talk about the novel as a living text, as language, as discourse? And he’s like, no, no, I’ve listened to audiobook versions. And then, and he is like, is that okay?\nAnd so it became this discussion around the popular student perception, I think, that listening was cheating, right? And so I was like, oh, this is, this is a fascinating topic, but also more important, like it is not, and I want to think through why, for a number of reasons, including accessibility, we might want to, for good reason, debunk the that listening is cheating or that books are not meant to be listened to.\n\n(09:19)\tMichelle\tIn our conversation, this question of whether listening is reading and more pointedly and judgmentally, whether listening is cheating, resonated with Jentery who began to think about how these ingrained biases impacted his scholarly approach to and valuation of literary audio.\n(09:38)\tJentery\tI’ve always been interested in the kind of cultural dimensions of listening, the cultural dimensions of sound, but only recently, like in the last eight years or so, started to think about that in literature. And I think partly because I too had inherited this idea that if I started to do that work in literary studies, I’d be cheating my discipline.\nSo it kind of brushed against the grain of how I had been taught literary studies, how to read text with a capital T as a methodological field, but also, yeah, just plainly the sensory work I was doing and why I was parsing it. Like why was it that when I was listening I was like, oh, this is my media studies work. And why when I was reading, I was like, oh, this is media studies and or literary studies depending on the content.\n\n(10:16)\tMichelle\t[Quiet string music begins to play]\nIn his introduction to the essay collection, Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, Matthew Rubery, an historian of talking books, examines some of the assumptions that feed into assertions that listening as opposed to reading on the page, offers a compromised cognitive experience. According to Rubery, there is a belief that audiobooks do not require the same level of concentration as printed books, or that one can be inattentive while listening to an audiobook. He explains how the very features promoted by audiobook vendors as selling points; their convenience, portability, and supplementary status to other activities are the same ones used by critics to denigrate the format as a diluted version of the printed book.\n\nAudiobooks are chiefly marketed as or conceived to be entertainment, and this is another reason why they’re considered derivative of or subordinate to the printed book. What, however, other than marketing pitches underlies the belief that listening to audiobooks is not the same as reading, and why is it considered even more punitively a form of cheating?\n\nOne possibility relates to what is called, and this is a quotation from Rubery, “the reader’s vocalization of the printed page, which has been taken by many to be a fundamental part of the imaginative apprehension of literature. When we read on the page, it is thought that we voice what we are reading in our head, and thus are more actively involved in meaning making than when a text is read to us.” The implication again is one of listening being passive, that instead of voicing in our minds, we are merely receptors when we listen.\n\n[String music ends]\n\nA similar objection is often made to watching a film version of a book before reading the book. The belief, again, is that it robs us of our imaginative reconstruction of the world the author creates through words alone. Reading on the page, so the theory goes, demands one’s undivided attention and imaginative powers, whereas listening does not because it allows and even invites us to perform other activities. And the fact is that many of us do turn to audiobooks in the hopes that we can accomplish other tasks while listening, but what in fact happens when we listen in order to or because we think we can multitask?\n\n(12:43)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter two: Listening As Overwork\n(12:49)\tMaya\tAs you will hear in the conversations throughout this podcast, many of us turn to audiobooks and podcasts as an attempt to maximize productivity, to fill intellectually the downtime of commuting or driving across the country, of doing chores or other forms of physical labor. Here is Jentery speaking about why he began to listen.\n(13:09)\tJentery\tAnd at first I took this as just basically a way of multitasking. Maybe it was like a form of overwork. If I’m being more reflective about it, I’m like, okay, so I might be going for a walk or I might be gardening or I might be doing the dishes, so I’m gonna put on a podcast that’s about, you know, literary criticism, literary culture or games culture, or I might listen to an audio book.\n(13:29)\tMaya\tMaia, an MA student from Concordia similarly explained that her desire to listen while doing other things was a coping mechanism meant to address overwork.\n(13:39)\tMaia\tI also have a similar experience. It was during my undergrad and I was really overworked, so I thought I’d get, I think it’s called scribd, an account on there. And I downloaded Milton’s Paradise Lost and I thought, this is great, I can do this while I work out. Two birds, one stone, and I, I think I missed about half the novel that way and it was a really unpleasant time.\n(14:00)\tMaya\tPhD students, Andy and Ghislaine also spoke about their experience with audiobooks before the course and how they attempted to listen while working and driving, cleaning and crafting. They also found that they could not concentrate on what they were listening to when doing these other activities and mostly gave up on audio books.\n(14:21)\tAndy\tI started listening to audio books. I got an audible membership to trial because I was working in a warehouse and so I had a lot of time moving my hands, but my brain was idle. So I remember I bought The Brothers Karamazov and I thought that that was gonna be the book and then honestly totally just distracted me. I never listened to audiobooks after that. I found it pretty unpleasant and I couldn’t focus. It was really hard for me to focus. Yeah, otherwise maybe driving. I drove cross country twice last year, so I definitely listened to some audio books, but, same thing, totally zoned out most of the time.\n(15:01)\tGhislaine\tYeah, I have kind of a similar audible trial experience where it’s like, yeah, I’ll try this out. And I downloaded the entire works of Poe and I’m like, yeah, I can listen to this at night or whatever. And after maybe 5, 10 minutes, I couldn’t focus on it, I just fell asleep. So I [Ghislaine laughs] since then, didn’t try to listen to other audiobooks cuz it just didn’t hold my attention.\n(15:29)\tMaya\t[Quite electronic music begins to play]\nEven after the course, the students reported that their ability to multitask while listening almost entirely depended on the content of the audiobook and the nature of the task at hand.\n\n(15:40)\tGhislaine\t[Electronic music ends]\nOn your note, Ella, of listening to non-serious books after the class ended, and it was like winter break and I still had this Audible subscription that I had to renew [laughs] because of the class and I forgot to cancel it. So I’m like, you have one credit. So I got this very unserious book called The Housemaid and all through the break, well not all through because it just took me a couple of days, I listened to it nonstop and I had a really good time listening to it, doing menial tasks, like dishes and, you know, little crafts.\n\nSo not for sleep and not for any serious work and not serious books, I could see myself maybe getting into audio books now, but yeah, I don’t know.\n\n(16:26)\tElla\tYeah, I mean I mostly listen to audio books if I’m walking or doing the dishes, like nothing that takes any more brain power than walking or doing the dishes. There’s a very fine line, like the harder the book, the more specific the task has to be to be like the right task to listen to an audiobook.\n(16:42)\tMaya\tThese conversations challenged the belief that listening is passive. Maia likewise spoke to her surprise at how much attention listening required and how this challenged her assumption about the primacy of the written.\n(16:55)\tMaia\tI wasn’t anticipating, as you’ve said as well, the amount of attention or even treating the audio as an artifact in and of itself. I didn’t realize coming into this class that I thought about it as a secondary modality to like a written form, especially from my past experience of really struggling with the audiobook and more complex wordplay that didn’t really amplify the porosity of what I was reading at all.\n(17:21)\tMaya\tAnd Jentery related that when he attempted to listen while doing chores, those chores often took a very long time.\n(17:28)\tJentery\tTo use one of my everyday examples, I often listen to a podcast while I’m doing the dishes in the evening and it’s always striking to me that there’s something said or something I heard that I will stop and go take a note. I’ll write that down on my phone or I’ll have a notebook next to me and I’ll make a note of it to return to later cuz I’m worried I might forget it, perhaps, just due to age at this point, but I go and I make a note and then I go back and then all of a sudden I’ve been doing dishes for two hours. It’s such a…it’s almost ritual at this point.\n(17:55)\tMaya\tFor Jentery, careful listening did not necessarily lend itself to multitasking, or at least to efficient multitasking. Ella described how even though she had been listening to readings in other courses and thought she was prepared, the reality was very different when confronted with the kind of listening she was asked to do in her Concordia class with Jason.\n(18:16)\tElla\tI was sort of primed for the class. I was like, great, now it’s just official, I’m going to be listening instead of reading. But I guess some of the things that we ended up having to listen to for the course required a lot more attention than I usually gave to my listening. And so I’d have to sit and listen rather than walk or do the dishes and listen, which I find a lot more difficult. I don’t know, I lose track, I lose focus if I’m just sitting and listening.\n(18:42)\tMaya\tAlthough we sometimes turn to an audio version of a book as a time-saving mechanism, thinking we can do chores when listening or as Maia says, “two birds, one stone”. It is not always possible. Often the listening or the chore or both are compromised. Further, we should bear in mind what Mark Kerrigan calls auditory fatigue; the analog to screen fatigue. Which he describes as experiencing a limit to listening, which is increasingly familiar, a sense of being oversaturated and unable to hear myself think.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nIn the conversation with Jentery, he talked about the challenges of asking people to take listening seriously and understanding the obstacles to attentive listening are part of that conversation. But to bring listening more fully into the classroom, we also need a better understanding of the processes of reading on the page. If listening is relentlessly and usually negatively compared to reading, we should first make sure we know what we mean by reading in the first place.\n\n(19:46)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter three, what is reading anyway?\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(19:52)\tMichelle\tI asked Jentery about how dismissals of listening are often informed by idealized notions of reading, particularly reading in print what you read.\n[Audio from interview with Jentery begins]\n\nBut I wanna go back to what you said earlier about often listening while multitasking, and I guess that just strikes me as so interesting and important and I think it is one of the reasons why lots of us do listen to a lot of different things, but I guess what I’m wondering is can we again maybe muddy that and say listening doesn’t just have to be deep or intense or close, that sometimes we don’t listen with that kind of intensity and that’s okay.\n\nSo one thing that has come up with my students and I’ve heard this in the interview with Jason Camlot’s students, is that they kind of go in and out of attention. Certain audio texts are much easier to listen to, some are harder, but I also think that’s what we do when we read.\n\nWe just have this fantasy that when we read, we’re just wrapped and we’re reading every word, and we’re taking it all in. I think that waning of attention is common to both acts.\n\n[Quiet string music begins to play]\n\n[Interview audio ends]\n\nEven though we often treat reading as if it is one thing, it is in fact a multitude of practices and cognitive experiences. Sometimes we read every word, but very often we scan or skim or surf when reading or simply fail to take in the words in front of us due to incomprehension or boredom or fatigue. And the same thing happens to us when we listen. Andy coined the phrase “ear skimming” to describe a similar experience that happens when listening.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(21:22)\tAndy\tYeah. That makes me think of skimming. When you skim readings that you’re not interested in, it’s like, listen, ear skimming [laughs], you kind of just blank out or, you know, distract yourself and then tune in when something picks up your interest.\n(21:38)\tMichelle\tThe contemporary neuroscience of reading as popularized by writers, including Maryanne Wolf and Stanislas Dehaene has shown us the complexity and variety of the neural processes that we designate by the single term reading.\n[String music begins to play]\n\nAnd notwithstanding the strong opinions about listening as compared to reading, there is a surprising lack of empirical research that directly evaluates how modality of presentation impacts comprehension and what little research there is has yielded conflicting results.\n\nNaomi Baron’s 2021 book, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen and Audio, surveys current research and reports that although some studies suggest that comprehension may be improved when texts are read on the page as opposed to heard, these studies are limited and other empirical evidence suggests no difference. Some research, for example, shows that with listening, multitasking and mind wandering may be more prevalent.\n\nHowever, these effects appear to be lessened when what is being listened to is a narrative as opposed to an expository text. Some of the experiments involve listening to textbooks where depending on the subject matter, mind wandering is perhaps not surprising. My takeaway from her book is that the difficulties that are detected with oral comprehension and retention in some of the studies are more likely to be learned rather than innate. This interpretation aligns with research that shows that younger children are more effective listeners and that they lose these skills over time, becoming better readers than listeners.\n\nPerhaps this is because younger children are rewarded for and taught to value listening and this capacity wanes as emphasis on reading written materials intensifies. At the college level, we need to ask whether students put the same mental investment and time into their listening as they do into their reading. Baron helpfully points out some of the specific ways in which audio texts, including podcast and audiobooks, can prove challenging in terms of comprehension and recall.\n\nShe notes that audiobooks often lack certain elements that appear in or are endemic to print and that have been proven to aid learning when reading written texts. Podcasts, she points out, usually present undifferentiated sound and emit what are called signalizing devices such as bold or metallics that emphasize what is particularly important, as well as other visual landmarks such as headings and page breaks that can help readers chunk material into more comprehensible pieces.\n\nAudio texts also do not provide visual aids such as charts or graphs or images, all of which can enhance learning. Finally, annotation of written materials is a practice that has been proven to help readers understand and retain material, but annotation of audio can be more challenging. One of the reasons why the physical book has been such an enduring medium is because it enables annotation, whether in the form of handwritten notes, underlining or highlighting or adding sticky notes.\n\nBut performing any of these tasks with audio is, if not impossible, then less familiar, as our students are usually asked to speak or write about what they have read or heard. And as that is our work as scholars, we need mechanisms for marking audio to help us emphasize and find those passages we wish to return to. When listening to an audiobook or a podcast, we are often compelled to keep notes in a separate medium as Jentery did while listening by taking notes on his phone or notebook. This is one of the challenges we discussed.\n\n[String music ends]\n\n(25:12)\tJentery\tYeah, so the only audiobook I taught in that particular class was The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I recommended getting it in print as well, and I gathered probably somewhere between two thirds and three quarters the students did. So I did not, however, I demonstrated the use of annotation in the online class, like by showing how I annotate my own audio, you know, sharing a screen essentially, but I did not, and I should have, but I did not teach annotating audiobooks or annotating sound more generally.\nIn hindsight, if I had done it again, I would probably do something like that or figure out a way to integrate some kind of software or a mechanism to make it more approachable to students. But it kind of sparks my imagination here and I’m wondering how it is that when students were listening, how it is that they took notes and how that might correspond with and differ from how helped students take notes, say in the print novels that I teach, that would be a fascinating question. I’m sure people have studied this, but it’s not in my wheelhouse.\n\n(26:06)\tMichelle\tFortunately, annotation tools for audio do exist. Audible has a bookmark function that saves your place with a timestamp and in the digital file and allows you to enter notes. Tanya Clement, a scholar from the University of Texas, Austin, who is part of the SpokenWeb network, has been working with her team to create Audi Annotate: a web-based open source tool that supports audio and video markup.\nThese tools are needed to enable us to engage with audio in ways that are analogous to how we mark up text and print and now digitally audio annotation tools therefore seek to provide us with a set of options to approximate what we do with a printed book, such as turning down the corner of a page or adding a handwritten note.\n\nAnnotation can also support our spatial sense of where we are in a digital audio file, an aspect of reading that is normalized when we read a physical book, even if we don’t mark it up as we read, we tend to have a sense of what comes where, but this recall can be harder to replicate in an audio file. [Light electronic music begins]\n\nElla similarly reported needing to reference a print edition in order to anchor herself when listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(27:16)\tElla\tSo I ended up having to look at a print version just to anchor myself, you know, I’d look, oh, oh, this is like maybe a quarter of the way through the book, so it must be a quarter of the way through the audiobook. I mean, that was difficult, taking a long form audio piece and being like, somewhere in here I remember listening to a fun thing, now I gotta find where it is. So I would use the print for that, but then I was, again, just using like the free Gutenberg version of that.\n(27:39)\tMichelle\tThe printed book offers us navigational tools and opportunities for annotation that support the comprehension and retention of written texts, but they are not reading per se. As Ella points out, books can also provide images and other formatting and formal features that help us to make sense of the words on the page.\nAudio is in need of tools that help us to anchor ourselves for the reasons mentioned and also because listening almost always takes longer than reading. I noticed that on the syllabus Jentery quantified the length of time students were expected to listen to the material he had assigned. [Light string music begins]\n\nThat was one of the aspects of teaching audiobooks that I struggled with as the audiobook of the novel, Milkman comes in at 14 hours, 11 minutes, and the two other audiobooks I assigned, Cersi by Madeline Miller and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evarist clock in at just over 12 and 11 hours, respectfully.\n\nAs we do not want to encourage our students to listen at faster speeds, and as we must acknowledge that re-listening may be needed, we must factor in the time it takes to listen, which is almost certainly longer than it takes to read on the page. Jentery explained that he had been quantifying expectations for how much prep time students would need to listen since the pandemic. [Electronic music ends]\n\n(28:56)\tJentery\tSince the pandemic, issues related like when, you know, your sense of place and your sense of campus changes, and the campus is kind of in your house now or in your domestic space. I think time management is affected pretty deeply and I gather research supports that assumption. So that was part of it, just making clear and or transparent labor expectations, while noting that mileage may vary.\nBut it also comes actually out of doing a lot of work with digital media and just more generally in digital studies, where in my own training and in my own education, I had gleaned a pretty concrete sense of how long it would take me to read a 200 page novel and I could assign that accordingly and we could talk about that in terms of time.\n\n(29:38)\tMichelle\tWhat I hope these conversations have illuminated are the ways in which we as instructors can help our students. By recognizing that effectively reading written text encompasses a range of practices, we can think about how best to provide a set of comparable supports to enable our students to succeed in listening.\nIn the pedagogical audio we create, such as this very podcast episode, we can enact some of the signalizing devices that readers of printed material are accustomed to and rely on to make sense of what they’re reading, by adding section breaks, as I’ve endeavored to do in this podcast.\n\nAlthough a podcast is in oral media, we can enhance it with visual aids and transcriptions as again is attempted in the blog post that accompanies this podcast. [Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nOne of the other immediate demands of teaching literary audio is providing students with a framework for understanding what they are hearing.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nWhat is an audio book or a podcast anyway? A genre? A medium? According to Jentery, the critical conceptual category is format, and a podcast or an audiobook are both formats within the medium of audio.\n\n(30:52)\tAI Generated Voice\t[Electronic music begins to play]\nChapter four: Format matters.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(30:58)\tMaya\tOne of the most riveting exchanges with Jentery was about the conceptual categories he offered to his students to describe and distinguish between different forms of literary audio, from audiobooks to podcasts to radio dramas. Format occupies the zone between the more abstract category of media, on the one hand, and the more content specific category of genre, on the other. To break down the three conceptual categories, a familiar example may be useful.\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nLet’s take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was first published in London in 1813 in three volumes. We begin with the most abstract category, that of media, which is usually divided into text, audio, video, and image. The medium of the novel’s first public appearance was text, but before its publication it lived in audio form as Austen is said to have read the novel aloud to her family in advance of publication. After its publication, it would’ve continued to be read aloud in countless homes across Britain and abroad, especially after its publication in Philadelphia In 1832.\n\nIn 1833, an illustrated version of the novel was first published, bringing the novel into a visual medium in 1940, just over 100 years later, it entered another medium; video. As we can see, a work like Pride and Prejudice exists in multiple media at the same time, and simply because it was first presented to the public as a text does not mean that that medium should necessarily have primacy.\n\nThe next conceptual layer is that of format, for example, within video there are different formats such as feature length film adaptations and mini-series, as well as many, many others. With the concept of format referring to how our particular media is structured and delivered. We may also create a typology of audio formats in which the novel has been presented, from the handful of amateur readings on Librivox to audiobooks narrated by celebrities.\n\nThe final conceptual category is that of genre, which describes content. Pride and Prejudice is a work of fiction, a novel, and we could historize it further by calling it a domestic novel or a comedy of manners.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\nIn discussions with Jentery, he explained that with his students, he lent heavily into the concept of format, asking students to listen to a variety of audio formats, radio plays, serialized drama, voiceover narration, and first person video games. Using the concept of format to ground their understanding of what they were hearing, historically and technologically.\n\n(33:35)\tJentery\tI think one of the really useful aspects of that approach was that we could, in very kind of concrete ways and in palpable terms, talk about the ways in which audio achieves a context, if you will, and brings material together, brings together, for example, aspects of narrative and story with art and design. And since it’s so much about situation and context, you know, not taking for instance the kind of formalist approach to media where we kind of unmoor it from time and space and talk about it abstractly.\nI think one of the consequences of that was we were also able to look at moments when this work was made and this work was produced. Actually look at the specificity of context in each case and talk about how format, genre, and audio production, just writ large is always kind of grounded in particular situations.\n\n(34:28)\tMaya\tThroughout this podcast episode, we will return to one of Jentery’s key insights that thinking about literary audio through the lens of format helps us to situate it in place and time and allows, as he puts it, for audio to achieve a context.\n[Electronic string music begins to play]\n\nWith all of these efforts needed to support listeners, it might reasonably be asked whether listening is worth it? If we need to provide new media frameworks for students, if listening requires as much, if not more attention than reading on the page, if it takes longer than reading a physical book, if it can induce auditory fatigue, and if in order to write about it, you still need special tools to annotate or a print version anyway, why bother?\n\nAvid listeners of audio books, however, answer this question by noting that they often listen to books that they have already read in physical form, and yet always they hear something that they didn’t see. What are some of the ways in which listening enhances comprehension and enjoyment? What do we hear that we did not see and what questions or insights does listening give rise to that we would not otherwise have from reading the book in written form?\n\n(35:40)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter five: Hearing What We Cannot See.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(35:45)\tMichelle\tMatthew Rubery, author of the foundational history of audio literature, The Untold Story of the Talking Book speaks to the different perceptions that come from listening and reading on the page. [String music begins to play]\nNearly all readers, he writes, report understanding identical texts differently in spoken and silent formats as various elements stand out depending on the mode of reception. He notes that the narrator who performs the story can be especially useful in giving voice to unfamiliar accents, dialects or languages. The vocalization of such distinctively oral text would otherwise be impoverished for many readers poorly equipped to sound out the linguistic effects for themselves.\n\nAn audiobook is a performance, an interpretation of the original text, often accentuated with the narrator adopting different voices for different characters and enhanced with sound effects and music, all of which bring the audiobook closer to theater or film even when it offers absolute fidelity to the written text, as is the case with most unabridged audiobooks. Jentery and I explored the performative aspects of the audiobook he assigned, Toni Morrison’s reading of The Bluest Eye. I asked him whether he attempted with his students to disambiguate the text as written from the text as performed by Morrison.\n\n(37:07)\tJentery\tAnd that, so we tried just that and actually I think it was a bit of a setup because when we went through and listened to it, and in many cases read alongside what we were listening, we did our best to think about the various roles, if you will, that Toni Morrison is playing in that audiobook of The Bluest Eye. So Morrison as author, Morrison as narrator, as reader, as voice actress, even as character voices.\nAnd we went through and tried to mark how we would understand that differently. So I remember this exercise and yeah, and ultimately probably without a shock, we determined it was very obviously difficult to make a clean demarcation between one and the other when it would happen in a sentence and whatnot.\n\n(37:48)\tMichelle\tAs Jentery explains, there are many different rules that Morrison takes on in reading her novel aloud. Rubery distinguishes between different models of audiobook performances. The narration may be read by the author, by a professional voice actor, by a celebrity, or even by an amateur. Characters may be voiced by the narrator, sometimes in different voices or different actors may be cast to play different roles.\nAn extreme example of this is the audiobook version of George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, which is performed by over 160 actors. Toni Morrison reads The Bluest Eye herself, performing the third person narration and also giving voice to different characters in the novel. Morrison also narrates another book that is embedded in the novel, one of the Dick and Jane Reading Primers, a series intended to help new readers first published in America in the 1930s.\n\nThese primers, with their idealized characters living seemingly problem-free lives, are white and middle class, setting up a potent contrast with the character’s Morrison depicts in her novel. Morrison’s novel begins with a Dick and Jane story of about 150 words. The Dick and Jane story is reprinted at the very beginning of the novel and it appears in its entirety three times, each time with different typographical features.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe first time the story is printed, there are spaces between the lines and the words, and the story takes up most of a page. The second time the spacing between lines and words is reduced, shrinking the presentation of the story to half a page with all punctuation removed. The third time the story is printed, all spaces between the words have disappeared with each word bleeding into the next.\n\nTo help you visualize this, please refer to the blog post for this episode on the SpokenWeb website, which includes images taken from these two first pages of the novel. Morrison’s repetition of the story three times in printed form seems to mimic a young child becoming proficient in reading, from one who slowly sounds out each word to one who becomes so fluent that she can run each word into the next, but the blurring of words into one undifferentiated mass has other implications.\n\nAs Morrison reads the three versions of the story in the audiobook, she speeds up the pace of her reading as might be expected, but a more sinister element also presents itself. Here is Morrison reading the first part of the story at three different speeds.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(40:22)\tToni Morrison reading from The Bluest Eye\t[Morrison reads the text slowly]\nHere’s the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They’re very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text again, faster this time] Here is the house, it is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come play with Jane.\n\n[Morrison reads the text even faster]\n\nHere’s the house. Green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family, mother, father, Dick and Jane, live in the green and white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress she wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat? It goes meow, meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane.\n\n(41:46)\tMichelle\t[String music begins to play]\nWhat Morrison’s voicing brings to life is both how the child learns to read, but also how through the rote rehearsal of the story at a speed that renders it mostly unintelligible the white family living in the green and white House becomes internalized as the norm and the ideal.\n\nIn the forward to the printed version, which interestingly becomes an author’s note at the end of the audiobook, Morrison reports that the story originated in a conversation with a friend from elementary school who confided in Morrison that she wished for blue eyes. [Electronic music ends]\n\nWithin the first four minutes of the audiobook, Morrison’s pointed reading of the Dick and Jane story at three different tempos draws out the menace lurking within these stories for Black children; the Dick and Jane stories provide just one potential explanation for a central question the novel poses: How does Morrison’s childhood friend and the character in the novel who asks for the same thing, learn to wish for the bluest eye? What Morrison describes as racial self-loathing.\n\nFor me, the meaning of Morrison’s rendering of the Dick and Jane story in the print novel is enhanced by her performance of them. I might have had an inkling of her meaning by reading it on the page, but it is amplified by her reading as seeing and hearing her translation of the embedded story intensifies and crystallizes her meaning.\n\nAt the same time, any attempt to read authorial intention into the audiobook performance must be interrogated. To return to Jentery’s suggestion that by listening and situating the audio recording within the time and place of its production, audio achieves a context. We might want to ask students to reflect on the fact that Morrison is reading the novel in 2011, more than 40 years after its first publication in 1970. Morrison also makes changes to the presentation of her peratext, moving, as I said, the forward from its position prefacing the printed novel to the end when she reads the novel for the audiobook.\n\nThe reason for this shift seems likely to do with the difference in media and format. Readers can and often do skip preparatory material in print, but this action of skipping ahead is perhaps less natural with an audiobook. Beyond these changes, what does seem consistent over this 40 year period is Morrison’s belief that her books were meant to be heard.\n\nThus, she describes the language she uses in the novel as speakerly, oral, colloquial. And it is perhaps for this reason that her audiobooks are so powerful. Indeed, Morrison performed all of her books as audiobooks, demonstrating her investment in aurality. Sarah Kozloff has argued that audiobooks create a stronger bond than printed books between storyteller and listener by invoicing the narrator, and many listeners in particular enjoy hearing authors perform their own works.\n\nAudiobooks, particularly when read by the author, seem to bring us closer to the source of the words and the story, much in the same way a handwritten manuscript seems to bring us in proximity to the hand and body that inscribed it. Jentery related to me how he found it effective, as he put it, to bring the author into the room in assigning an audiobook read by the author like Morrison’s Bluest Eye and by playing interviews with or speeches by authors.\n\n(45:03)\tJentery\tWell in American fiction courses, I love including videos of James Baldwin’s speeches in a lot of material. I think that’s fascinating to bring the author into the room and I often when I’m teaching primary source, a novel for example, love to include and play in the class podcast interviews with those authors, in a way that allows students to think about the kind of context around the book, but also just kind of what went into the book and some of the motivations for it.\n(45:29)\tMichelle\tJentery and I discussed how changes in digital technology make it much easier too, as he put it, bring the author into our classrooms. We have a wealth of freely available audio and video such as the New Yorker Fiction podcast, which makes hundreds of stories from the magazine’s archive and current issues available to listen to, some enhanced by extended conversations about the stories.\nIn addition to improved access to primary source audio material, Jentery also points to how changes in accessibility to technology and equipment for playing and recording audio are transforming what is now pedagogically possible.\n\n[Electronic music begins to play]\n\nThe final section of this episode considers how technological developments have changed both what we and our students can do with audio.\n\n(46:22)\tAI Generated Voice\tChapter Six: Teaching with Audio Now.\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(46:28)\tMaya\tIn the conversation with Jentery, he reflected on how much has changed in just the past decade of teaching audio.\n(46:35)\tJentery\tWhen I was teaching sound studies at the University of Washington and the University of Victoria between like 2010 and 2012, the accessibility of material there, like what I could circulate and what I couldn’t, what I had just to play, say, on a desktop computer in the classroom, but also what students could record and what with, I’m always careful not to assume that students have access to technologies and computers.\nBut I can say just matter of factly, the degree to which they would need to, say, rent or go to the library to acquire an audio recorder has dramatically changed, just given the ubiquity of mobile phones at this point. So there’s that angle, which recording is, I think, on the whole, it’s not universally accessible, but it’s more accessible to students now than it was then. I think just being able to hit “record” is more ready to hand.\n\n(47:17)\tMaya\tRecording equipment and podcasting software also open new forms of assessments. As Jentery explains, when working with sound, it often makes sense to sample the sounds being analyzed and hence an audio essay is often the best way for a student to fully engage with the material.\n(47:35)\tJentery\tA thing that really struck me as compelling and did gain traction among students in the seminar was the idea of composing in such a way, composing an essay, an audio essay if you prefer a podcast, in such a way that makes room for your primary sources to speak and to be dialogic in that sense. So, the inclusion of samples of authors reading their work, of hearing the author’s voice in a way that I think, again, you don’t need to adhere to a metaphysics of presence to find this interesting.\nYou can just think of it in terms of honoring other people’s work and what it means for you to hear other people’s work in your writing and your composition in the production of space and time. And so I liked that too, the threading through other people’s work into your material in a way that might be a little different than reading a block quote or seeing an image on the page.\n\n(48:22)\tMaya\tJason Camlot’s student Ella explained that she chose the podcast format for her final assessment because it seemed more natural and easier than writing and attempting to describe her object of study, which were recordings of poetry readings.\n(48:37)\tElla\tI chose to do the long form. I mean, I simplified in my head the long form. I told myself I’m not gonna do interviews or anything, I’m just going to essentially record myself reading this essay and then insert the sounds I’m talking about because I think this might actually be easier than trying to transcribe those sounds in a way that I can then analyze them in writing.\nIn this case, I could just play the sound for you and you can hear it and then I can talk about my thoughts on it. That seemed like an easier process, actually, because I was going to be working with a bunch of different old recordings and newer recordings and poetry readings and stuff and, it just, I don’t even know how I would’ve approached describing some of this, especially cuz I was working, for instance, with experimental poetry from the eighties and I was working with really old recordings on wax cylinder of Tennyson and like, how do you describe those kinds of experimental or super old degraded sounds to people in order to then really get into a conversation about it? So it just made sense to have people hear them.\n\n(49:36)\tMaya\t[Soft electronic music begins to pla]\nElla’s observations about the need to incorporate the different sounds she was working with,once again return us to Jentery’s idea of audio achieving a context.\n\nIn order to describe and situate 19th century wax cylinder recordings within their particular historical and technological moment, it is necessary to hear them in the same way that we say a picture is worth a thousand words. A short audio clip, here, the Tennyson recording on wax cylinder that Ella refers to is likewise easier to understand when heard.\n\n[An audio clip of Tennyson reading poetry plays]\n\nIn addition, Ella explained her preference for the audio essay format by echoing Jentery’s sense that there might be something more dialogic and open about it.\n\n(50:32)\tElla\tI do think it was faster for me to write for this podcast than it was for me to write what could have been a conference paper because I don’t like the structure of the academic paper where you say your thesis statement in the beginning, prove your thesis statement, and then restate your thesis statement. I prefer a structure where you sort of go from a starting point, like essentially more of like a thought process, like, here’s my starting point and by the end of it you’re like, here’s where I got from that starting point.\nI had the option to do that with the podcast. Whereas usually when you’re writing an academic paper for a class, they don’t give you the option to just run with things. So it just went a lot faster cuz it was a form that made more sense to me.\n\n(51:11)\tMaya\tJentery also spoke about how crafting an audio essay is different than writing for the page and reading it aloud, or even reading a conference paper, which might be designed for oral delivery. An audio essay perhaps because it is modeled on the podcast may be more audience oriented. Maia reflected that having the opportunity to listen to each other’s podcast or audio essay assignment distinguished the course from others she had taken where a student’s writing is primarily directed towards the professor.\n(51:38)\tMaia (51:38)\tIt was also interesting to hear everyone else’s podcasts because in a normal normal class in, a more traditionally like written assignment based class, you don’t read everyone’s essays and get to interact with your classmates like that. And I think, for me, it was a really interesting atmosphere that I don’t know that I’ll ever have again. It was really, really special in the way that we all interacted and I don’t know to what part of that was the sharing in a medium that is more shared, listening of togetherness rather than kind of an individualized personalized reading.\n(52:13)\tMaya\tFor Andy and Ghislaine, the audio essay felt different than in-class presentations, which are to a great extent formalized. By contrast, the audio assignments were diverse, fresh, and engaging.\n(52:27)\tAndy\tEveryone took it in such a different direction. So it was like when you have a presentation, I feel often they follow a similar format and structure, but with this it was completely different in every kind of way. Genres across the board, like kind of there were no limits of what you could really do and I think that’s what for me made it different than just a typical class presentation. [String music begins to play]\n(52:51)\tGhislaine\tRight, that makes sense. So it’s like with regular normal class presentations, it would have been as if, you know, someone came in singing and dancing versus, you know, just with their PowerPoint. [laughs]\n(53:03)\tMaya\tWe will end with Ghislaine’s words, as her comments should inspire both instructors and students to turn to literary audio, both as a source of teaching material and as a form for student work. We believe she speaks to what we all could use in our classrooms. A little more singing and dancing and a little less PowerPoint.\nYou have been listening to “Audiobooks In the Classroom”, a SpokenWeb podcast episode by Michelle Levy and narrated by Michelle Levy and Maya Schwartz. Thanks for listening.\n\n[Electronic music ends]\n\n(53:54)\tKatherine McLeod\t[SpokenWeb theme music begins to play]\nThe SpokenWeb podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada.\n\nOur producers this month are Dr. Michelle Levy and MA student Maya Schwartz, both based at Simon Fraser University. Our supervising producer is Kate Moffatt. Our sound designer is Miranda Eastwood, and our transcription is done by Zoe Mix.\n\nTo find out more about SpokenWeb, visit spokenweb.ca, subscribe to the SpokenWeb podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with me, Katherine McLeod. Short stories about how literature sounds.\n\n[SpokenWeb theme music ends]"],"score":2.4930656},{"id":"9670","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2 Trailer, Season 2 Trailer. We’re Back!, 21 September 2020, McGregor and Copeland"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creator_names_search":["Hannah McGregor","Stacey Copeland"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Stacey Copeland\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/cfd03a52-ba91-41a2-a177-e69003d4427e/audio/a85328c9-9743-4a2d-9c46-079bec3cd2d5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:01:30\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"1,512,638 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s2-teaser-trailer-2020-v2\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/season-2-trailer-were-back/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-09-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"contents":["Get ready for Season 2 of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. We have a brand-new line up of original episodes for you from archives, universities and in these physically distant times, the many spaces and places we call home, all across Canada and beyond.  Whether it’s a deep dive into deep curation poetry, never before heard interviews with Canadian Literature legends or fresh takes on the role of sound in listening in our lives, this season has something for every canlit curiouso, sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, and lifelong learner at heart. Season premiere in your rss feed October 5th, 2020.\n\n\n00:03\tHannah McGregor:\t[Upbeat String Music] Last season on the SpokenWeb Podcast, we brought you stories of early spoken word recordings, etched and wax —\n00:10\tJason Camlot:\t[Instrumental Music] [Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep2 plays: Old sound recordings are weird.] [Inaudible Voice] [Crackling Recording].\n00:19\tHannah McGregor:\t— And the hidden labor behind archiving and caring for literary collections.\n00:23\tKaris Shearer:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 Ep3 plays: I think often we don’t understand or see the labor that is behind that presentation.]\n00:28\tHannah McGregor:\tWe listened together to the arresting words of Dorothy Livesay and Elizabeth Smart —\n00:34\tElizabeth Smart:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E4 plays: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept] —\n00:36\tHannah McGregor:\t— and to the sounds of the changing world around us as the pandemic changed how we work and how we listen.\n00:43\tJason Camlot & Katherine McLeod:\t[Audio, from SpokenWeb Podcast S1 E8 plays: How are you really listening, Catherine? Well, Jason, how am I really listening? Sigh.].\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThis season on the SpokenWeb Podcast we have a brand new lineup of original episodes from archives, universities, and, in these physically distanced times, the many spaces and places we call home all across Canada and beyond. Whether it’s a deep dive into the deep curation of poetry, never before heard interviews with CanLit legends, or explorations of the ethics of listening, season two of the SpokenWeb Podcast has something for every sonic explorer, poetry connoisseur, or lifelong learner at heart. I hope you’ll join us at spokenweb.ca [Musical Tone] or wherever you get your podcasts."],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897344,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":2.4930656},{"id":"9671","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S4 Trailer, Welcome to Season 4!, 19 September 2022, Moffatt, Eastwood, McGregor, McLeod"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 4"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creator_names_search":["Katherine McLeod","Kate Moffatt","Hannah McGregor","Miranda Eastwood"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Miranda Eastwood\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/aa749423-c429-48b9-8aaf-c150b5c0a869/audio/a0e73918-a5b1-4e35-aa6e-320e73a87208/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s4-trailer.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:03:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"3,484,987 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s4-trailer\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-4/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-09-19\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6\",\"latitude\":\"49.276709600000004\",\"longitude\":\"-122.91780296438841\"}]"],"Address":["8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University Maggie Benston Centre"],"City":["Burnaby, British Columbia"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549795897345,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Hello and welcome to another season of The SpokenWeb Podcast! We’re back with a new line-up of exciting episodes created by researchers across the SpokenWeb network. The SpokenWeb Podcast asks, “What does literature sound like? What stories do we hear when we listen to the archive?” In this season, we have episodes that dive into the lives of archival objects—university poetry events—what it means to read an audiobook—and so much more. This season has something for everyone from lovers of literature and history to sound studies scholars, so come and join us as we continue listening to literature and the archives.\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does The SpokenWeb Podcast sound like? [Start Music: Acoustic Strings] In our third season, we revisited Myra Bloom’s episode about Elizabeth Smart from Season 1—\n \n\n00:11\tMyra Bloom, S3E1 “Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’”\tIt suddenly occurred to me that I actually never heard her voice. (Underlaid Archival Audio of Elizabeth Smart: “I thought, if it was agreeable to you, that I’d read a chapter from By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.”\n \n\n00:17\tHannah McGregor:\t— heard the voices of poets and writers across Canada —\n \n\n00:21\tArchival Audio, Phyllis Webb, in S3E10 “‘starry and full of glory’: Phyllis Webb, in Memoriam”:\n \n\n…stars, stars, stars! [Repeats, fading out]\n \n\n00:23\tInterview Excerpt, S3E2 “Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive”:\tIs it the glimpse of mortality that makes you feel a bit differently about it?\nWell, it’s quite literally seeing your friends die.\n\n \n\n00:29\tFaith Paré, S3E5 “The Show Goes On: Words and Music in a Pandemic”:\tThis is not the poem I wanted / It is the poem I could.\n \n\n00:33\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd thought about how we listen.\n \n\n00:36\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we discuss the sounds of human beings\n \n\n00:38\tHannah McGregor:\tWe asked, what does scholarship sound like? and revisited last year’s virtual SpokenWeb Symposium—\n \n\n00:46\tStéphanie Ricci:, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do we listen virtually?\n \n\n00:48\tMathieu Aubin, S3E6: “Listening, Sound, Agency: A Retrospective Listening to the 2021 SpokenWeb Symposium”:\n \n\nHow do you listen virtually to a conference about listening?\n00:52\tHannah McGregor:\t—and the 1983 Women and Words conference held in Vancouver.\n \n\n00:56\tArchival Audio from S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t“[…]our subject this morning is women facing traditional criticism, criticizing criticism.” (Clip continues under Hannah and resurfaces, underlaid with the next clips)\n \n\n01:01\tHannah McGregor:\tWe explored how collaboration and conversation are central to the research and work that we do.\n \n\n01:07\tKelly Cubbon, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\tKelly: Well, the process of transcription sounds like collaboration, like a conversation\n \n\n01:12\tKatherine McLeod, S3E9 “Talking Transcription: Accessibility, Collaboration, and Creativity”:\n \n\nIt is a process that invites access to content through multiple voices and multiple senses.\n01:18\tKate Moffatt, S3E7 “The archive is messy and so are we”:\t[Warped Archival Clip Plays With Some Words Audible] And it’s funny, cuz you can almost hear it. Like you can almost hear something being said.\n \n\n01:26\tHannah McGregor:\tThis past season took us to new places and spaces, from the plains of Northern Alberta–\n \n\n01:32\tMichelle, S3E3 “Forced Migration”:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n01:37\tHannah McGregor:\t–back to the 80s, to the student-run campus radio shows of the CKUA network.\n \n\n01:44\tTerri Wynnyk, S3E8 “Academics on Air”:\n \n\nWe once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches […]\n01:52\tHannah McGregor:\tMy name is Hannah McGregor, and I’ve been the host of the SpokenWeb Podcast since its inception. But I’m stepping out of this role for the next year, and I have the pleasure of passing the mic to this season’s host: Katherine Mcleod.\n \n\n02:08\tKatherine McLeod:\tThank you Hannah! [Music Swells to Atmospheric Chords] My name is Katherine McLeod, and I am so excited to host this new season of the SpokenWeb Podcast. You’ll recognize my voice from ShortCuts – our deep dive into the SpokenWeb archives that you can find right here on the same podcast feed.\n \n\nThis season on the podcast, we have a line-up of episodes that we can’t wait to share: we’re going to hear more about the “Drum Codes” we listened to in Season 2; we’ll be thinking about audiobooks as a literary medium: what is it like to read an audiobook? What is it like to teach with an audiobook in the classroom?\n\n \n\nWe’ll be re-listening to university poetry events, diving into the archives to converse with the archival objects themselves. We’re going to experience environmental sound with an episode on fire and ecopoetics; and we’ll be thinking about literary environmental sound, and even exploring the soundscapes of libraries. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. Subscribe and join us for Season Four of the SpokenWeb Podcast, coming to your podcast feeds on October 3rd."],"score":2.4930656}]