[{"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":6.8012633},{"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":6.8012633},{"id":"9622","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"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 S3E7, ‘The archive is messy and so are we’: Decoding the Women and Words Collection, 4 April 2022, Mofatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/"],"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 3"],"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","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"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/67ec6133-5296-49c5-9c61-bdd8872657fb/audio/f4d8cb13-a39c-4b77-8445-413a9cfcbfe5/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:46:14\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"44,464,214 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"Mp3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e7-archiveismessy\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-archive-is-messy-and-so-are-we-decoding-the-women-and-words-collection/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-04-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections and Rare Books holds the rich Women and Words Collection, which contains more than one hundred recordings from the Women and Words Conference in 1983, a decade of WestWord writing retreats and workshops, and a number of other readings, meetings, workshops, and events. Although the audio in this collection has a significant paper archive to accompany it, the absence of pre-existing metadata made it difficult to identify the recordings. This episode is framed by how two research assistants, Kandice Sharren and Kate Moffatt, encountered the collection—one physically, in the archive, and the other solely with digitized audio recordings and scanned print materials—and takes us behind-the-scenes of their work to make sense of both its depths and the Women and Words Society’s history.\n\nSpecial thanks to Tony Power, librarian and curator of the Contemporary Literature Collection at Simon Fraser University, and to SFU’s Special Collections and Rare Books.\n\nImage Gallery\nPage 2 of the Women and Words Conference from 1983, containing a note from the organizers. Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nFirst page of a timeline outlining WestWord retreat organization, application, and admittance processes. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPress release for WestWord III from February 1987. Photo credit: taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for the WestWord III public events, readings, and panels, including a reading by Sharon Thesen. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nThe tape holding the Sharon Thesen reading from August 18, 1987 (MsC23-85). Photo credit: courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord V public events, readings, and panels. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\nPoster for WestWord VI public events and readings. Photo credit: Taken by Kandice Sharren, courtesy of SFU Bennett Library Special Collections & Rare Books.\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Beverly, Andrea. “Traces of a Feminist Literary Event.” CanLit Across Media, MQUP, 2019, p. 221, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvscxtkg.15.\\n\\n“Castor Wheel Pivot.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/100713\\n\\n“Dust Digger.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 27 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/99584.\\n\\n“Flipping through a book.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/Zeinel/sounds/483364/\\n\\nHeavenly choir singing sound, “Ahhh.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022. https://freesound.org/people/random_intruder/sounds/392172/\\n\\n“Palms Down.” Blue Dot Sessions. Accessed 15 March 2022. https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/96905\\n\\n“Record Scratch.” Free Sound. Accessed 2 April 2022.  https://freesound.org/people/simkiott/sounds/43404/\\n\\nRooney, Frances. “activist; Gloria Greenfield.” Section15, 22 May 1998. Accessed 31 March 2022. http://section15.ca/features/people/1998/05/22/gloria_greenfield/.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302720,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":6.8012633},{"id":"9628","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"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 S3E11, The WPHP Monthly Mercury Presents “Collected, Catalogued, Counted”, 1 August 2022, Moffatt and Sharren"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/"],"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 3"],"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","Kandice Sharren"],"creator_names_search":["Kate Moffatt","Kandice Sharren"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kate Moffatt\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kandice Sharren\",\"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/6080ec77-e13a-430d-a98b-4ceca70315bb/audio/e49a4567-fbbc-4581-9c84-c312cadf060f/default_tc.mp3?nocache\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e11-mp3.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:23:32\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"80,203,485 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e11-mp3\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/the-wphp-monthly-mercury-presents-collected-catalogued-counted/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-08-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3725404708\",\"venue\":\"Simon Fraser University\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3\",\"latitude\":\"49.2824032\",\"longitude\":\"-123.1085513\"}]"],"Address":["515 West Hastings Street Vancouver, B.C, V6B 5K3"],"Venue":["Simon Fraser University"],"City":["Vancouver, British Columbia"],"contents":["This month on the SpokenWeb Podcast we are excited to share an episode from The WPHP Monthly Mercury, hosted by Kandice Sharren and our very own podcast supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. First aired on July 21, 2021, this episode of The WPHP Monthly Mercury features an interview with Dr. Kirstyn Leuner, director and editor-in-chief of The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing. You can read more about the episode, and about Dr. Leuner’s project, on the Women’s Print History Project website.\n\nThe WPHP Monthly Mercury is the podcast of the Women’s Print History Project, a digital bibliographical database that recovers and discovers women’s print history for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. Inspired by the titles of periodicals of the period, The WPHP Monthly Mercury investigates women’s work as authors and labourers in the book trades.\n\n"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Music by Ignatius Sancho, “Sweetest Bard”, A Collection of New Songs (1769) from https://brycchancarey.com/sancho/bard.jpg, and played by Kandice Sharren\\n\\n*\\n\\nWorks Cited:\\n\\n“Francis Stainforth.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Stainforth, accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Restoring Authority for Women Writers: Name Authority Records as Digital Recovery Scholarship” in Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 84, no. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 13–26.\\n\\nLeuner, Kirstyn. “Dynamic Cross Reference Links in Catalog Browsing.” The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, February 2020, https://stainforth.scu.edu/dynamic-cross-reference-links-in-catalog-browsing/. Accessed 21 July 2021.\\n\\nThe Monument of Matrones. Compiled by Thomas Bentley. London: Henry Denham, 1582.\\n\\nMoss, Celia and Marion. Early Efforts. A Volume of Poems by the Misses Moss, of the Hebrew Nation. Aged 18 and 16. London: 1839.\\n\\nCatalogue of the Extraordinary Library, Unique of its Kind, Formed by the Late Rev. F. J. Stainforth. London: Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge, printed by J. Davy and Sons, 1867. Google Books, https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogues_of_Items_for_Auction_by_Messr/3T5bAAAAQAAJ/.\\n\\nWalker, Cheryl. American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Rutgers UP, 1992.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549730885632,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","score":6.8012633}]