[{"id":"9614","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 S3E1, Podcasting Literary Sound: Revisiting ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart’, 4 October 2021, Bloom"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/"],"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, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Myra Bloom"],"creator_names_search":["Myra Bloom"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/79174225341311352865\",\"name\":\"Myra Bloom\",\"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/373cabca-0ad8-4c98-a73d-97905d0a3b23/audio/4f64fdd9-c42b-40c8-ac20-6eff2555de43/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:09\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,340,674 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e1-revisitingelizabethsmart\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/podcasting-literary-sound-revisiting-the-agony-and-the-ecstasy-of-elizabeth-smart/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-10-04\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/23334883\",\"venue\":\"York University Glendon Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6\",\"latitude\":\"43.72824305\",\"longitude\":\"-79.37750288670469\"}]"],"Address":["2275 Bayview Avenue, North York, ON, M4N 3M6"],"Venue":["York University Glendon Campus"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Warwick Archive (2019, Nov). Elizabeth Smart – English Writers at Warwick Archive. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/archive/writers/smartelizabeth/280182.\\n\\nMUN Archive Video Collection. (pre 1994). Elizabeth Smart: Canadian Writer. http://collections.mun.ca/cdm/ref/collection/extension/id/2981.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549699428352,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Today, we are welcoming you to Season 3 by reintroducing and replaying an episode that exemplifies what our podcast is all about. In January 2020, we released the episode “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” created by researcher and producer Myra Bloom. To kick off this season, Hannah and Myra sat down for a new introductory conversation that puts Myra’s past episode in the context of the SpokenWeb project’s values and Myra’s forthcoming podcast series. Then, we invite you to listen to the voice of Elizabeth Smart again, or for the first time, and consider what caring for and sharing the sounds of literary archives means to you. \n\nOver the years, Elizabeth Smart’s 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept has risen from obscurity to cult classic. The book, which details an ill-fated love affair between an unnamed narrator and her married lover, is celebrated for its lyricism, passionate intensity, and its basis in Elizabeth’s real-life relationship with the poet George Barker. After publishing By Grand Central Station, Smart lapsed into a thirty-year creative silence during which time she worked as an advertising copywriter and single-parented four children. In this poetic reflection, Myra Bloom weaves together archival audio with first-person narration and interviews to examine both the great passion that fueled By Grand Central Station and the obstacles that prevented Elizabeth from recreating its brilliance.\n\nFeatured in this episode are Sina Queyras, a poet and teacher currently working on an academic project about Elizabeth; Maya Gallus, a celebrated documentarian whose first film, On the Side of the Angels, was about Elizabeth; Kim Echlin, author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity; and Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth’s biographer. This episode also features archival audio of Elizabeth in conversation at Memorial University (1983) and reading at Warwick University in England (1982).\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\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. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music.]\n \n\n00:35\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.\n \n\n00:50\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to Season Three of the SpokenWeb Podcast. We are so excited to bring you another season of the podcast, featuring the research and ideas of the SpokenWeb community and a few special guests. We hope this podcast is a source of joy, inspiration, and learning for you. It certainly is for us.\n \n\n01:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWe want to open Season Three with an invitation to collectively reflect on the sounds we’ve been listening to. And the questions we’ve been exploring – beginning with a conversation about sonic literary research with episode producer Myra Bloom, followed by a replaying of Myra’s Season One episode: “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. Myra and I go back to her episode to ask: how does listening to archival audio shift our relationship to the authors we’re studying or reading?\n \n\n01:40\tHannah McGregor:\tThis question is at the heart of the SpokenWeb project, which is dedicated to the discovery and preservation of recordings that have captured the literary events of the past. Writers and artists have been avidly documenting their performances of literary works, events, and conversations since portable tape recording technologies became available in the 1960s. Yet, most of these audio archives remain inaccessible or in danger of imminent decay. Even those that are digitized are often hard to discover, siloed on different institutional websites. Our goal is to help researchers and the public engage with these sonic literary artifacts today. [Start Music: Instrumental Jazz] Now you might be asking, why should we care about decaying old recordings? In the very first episode of our podcast, ShortCuts producer Katherine McLeod interviewed SpokenWeb researchers about how they got interested in literary sound and the SpokenWeb project. [Sound Effect: Tape Being Put in a Recorder. Beep of Recording Starting]\n \n\n02:41\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Michael O’Driscoll:\tArchives are how we build community, archives are aspirational. They –we only put things in boxes and save them because we imagine a future for them.\n \n\n02:51\tAudio Recording, S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Annie Murray:\tWhat we were really interested in was how a lot of these poets were going on reading tours [Audio Recording: Overlapping Voices Performing Poetry]. We were imagining these sort of traveling poets leaving behind a trail of recordings. Where [Audio Recording: Audience Applause] did all these readings end up and could we ever access them in all the places poets would have read?\n \n\n03:11\tAudio Recording,  S1E1 “Stories of SpokenWeb”, Jason Camlot:\tI was an undergraduate at this institution at which I now teach. And the first time that I heard an early sound recording was in my Victorian literature class, played to me by my professor, John Miller. And he played to this class a barely audible recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” [Audio Clip: Muffled Recording of Tennyson receiting “The Charge of the Light Brigade]\n \n\n03:37\tHannah McGregor:\tWe’ve discovered that once we make old tapes listenable again, the results are powerful –\n \n\n03:43\tAudio Recording, S2E6 “Mavis Gallant reads ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”,  Mavis Gallant:\tThis is a story called Grippes and Poche.\n \n\n03:45\tHannah McGregor:\t[Audio Recording of Mavis Gallant continues] –like the voice of Mavis Gallant, inspiring producers, Kate, Kandice, and Michelle, to ask new research questions about her life and literary work.\n \n\n03:55\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\t[Sound Effect: Beep of Recording Starting] Why did Gallant select this story to read to her SFU audience in 1984?\n04:00\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kate Moffat:\tWe wondered how our reception of it might’ve differed, or not, from that of the individuals attending the event.\n \n\n04:05\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Kandice Sharren:\tIt was actually an edited copy of what had most likely been a reel-to-reel recording.\n \n\n04:11\tAudio Recording, S2E69 “Mavis Gallant Part 2”, Michelle Levy:\tIt’s like, where is this voice coming from? It did seem really unusual.\n \n\n04:17\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] Actually hearing an author reminds us that literary works can have a presence beyond the page. Like this moment that Katherine McLeod documents in a series of ShortCuts minisodes about Muriel Rukeyser – [Audio Recording of Muriel Rukeyser Begins] a moment of author and audience sharing a literary experience.\n \n\n04:36\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Muriel Rukeyser:\tYou know, this part of the story.\n \n\n04:38\tAudio Recording, ShortCuts S2E4 “You Are Here”, Katherine McLeod:\tI can see by your nods. You know this part of the story. By this point, the audience is with her and thanks to her describing their nodding heads we know that they are.\n \n\n04:52\tHannah McGregor:\t[Sound Effect: Tape Stopping] The sounds of literature are embodied and emotional – they resonate within us. As the SpokenWeb Podcast begins its third season, we’re continuing to reflect on our mission asking ourselves questions like: how do we ethically manage and share old recordings with care? What can literary scholars learn from studies? What is present and absent from the sonic archive? And how does gathering sounds of the past change the way literary research happens in the present?\n \n\n05:27\tHannah McGregor:\tNow that I’ve set the scene, I’m delighted to bring Myra Bloom into the conversation. Myra is an assistant professor of English at York University, and was the producer of our Season One episode, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart”. In this episode, Myra used archival audio, her own narrative reflections, and interviews to examine the great passion behind Smart’s famous work By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept – and the obstacles that impacted Smart’s literary career.\n \n\n05:56\tHannah McGregor:\tCould you start off by telling us a little bit about what the process was like for you of making this episode originally?\n \n\n06:03\tMyra Bloom:\tSo I –as anyone who knows me knows, I love Elizabeth Smart and I love By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and I had been thinking for a while about doing some kind of project about it. I’ve written about it before, I wanted to do a critical edition of that book, but for issues of obtaining the rights, I was a bit thwarted from that project. But I still had it in my mind that I wanted to do a lot of kind of archival research and primary research. I had done a lot actually. And I talked to some of the people already who were important players in Smarts, kind of afterlife, her biographers. I’d talked to Kim Echlin, I talked to Rosemary Sullivan, and I wanted –I loved the way that they spoke about her. And so I knew in my mind as I was conceiving of the piece that I wanted to bring in other voices, other women in particular, who had been inspired by Elizabeth Smart. And then it suddenly occurred to me that even though I’d spent some time in the archives looking at various documents, I’d actually never heard her voice. And so I decided – I looked around and tried to find if there were any archives of her actually reading. And I found two pieces that I ended up including in the episode, one of which was a video that I harvested the audio from, the other of which was an audio recording of a reading. And that’s kind of where the piece began to take shape for me.\n \n\n07:32\tHannah McGregor:\tSo what was it like for you hearing her voice for the first time? How did that shift your relationship to the work?\n \n\n07:37\tMyra Bloom:\tIt was very jarring, to be honest with you. Many of us have this image in our minds of Elizabeth Smart as this passionate young, beautiful, intense, almost tragic heroine figure. At least that was sort of the image that I always carried with me. I think that book is so powerful and transcendent and youthful and it’s spirit and language. It’s very accomplished, but it’s the passionate intensity of a young person. And as I say in the piece, those are feelings I really had related to as a 19- 20 year old encountering it for the first time, full of that kind of passionate intensity. But the thing about Smart that’s kind of interesting for Canadians is that we only really encountered her later in life. She came to Canada as a writer in residence in 1982 and she died in 1986.\n \n\n08:29\tHannah McGregor:\tWow.\n \n\n08:30\tMyra Bloom:\tSo, yeah. And so that’s really kind of the Elizabeth Smart that Canadians knew. And it was this feeling of belatedness – a lot of people spoke about this at the time that we kind of discovered her too late. And that was really the feeling that I had almost listening to the audio, not just that it was too late, but sort of the poignancy of the fact that Smart as an older woman was sort of reanimating this work from her earlier life. But the texture of her voice – this is a woman who drank a lot and smoked a lot and led a pretty Bohemian life. And you can hear that in the grain of her voice. So hearing her read that audio, I was really connecting with the older Smart, as opposed to the younger Smart I thought I had set out to encounter.\n \n\n09:20\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah. Which really sort of contextualizes the whole sense of what that book means differently.\n \n\n09:26\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And you know, she’s a fascinating figure as well because that book is such a magnum opus and it presages such amazing things. And then she sort of had lifelong writer’s block, a lot of the works that came after The Assumption of the Roads and the Rascals –her other novella – is good, but it’s not the same level of good. And her poetry in my mind is not quite as accomplished as the novellas. And so, there’s a way in which she sort of lived on the laurels of that work and was kind of forced to re-encounter it again and again.\n \n\n10:04\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd there’s always this sort of element of, I don’t know, maybe regret or a feeling of not having achieved what she could have achieved potentially. So the disappointment –there’s a sense of disappointment I always hear in the reading. In fact, in some of those archives, she reads a poem twice because she starts out reading it at the beginning of the reading and then it gets a good reception. And then she says, I think I’m just going to read that one again. And you can really feel her kind of like soaking up the attention, which was, which was really denied to her for so much of her life when she was raising her children and kind of wallowing and obscurity [Laughs] – not obscurity that’s the wrong way to put it because she was a very successful copywriter. She just was never heralded as the great modernist that she really was.\n \n\n10:48\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s remarkable to be able to hear that in the recording too, the sense that your encounter with this voice in the archive is also a sort of re-encounter that what you are hearing is a sort of much later articulation of a relationship to this work. And it is this reminder of the way that author’s own relationships to their work transforms over time. And often you can only hear that in the audio record.\n \n\n11:15\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. And I think, if she had gone on to write consistently throughout her career, maybe she would offer something in her late style and then throw in a hit or two from her juvenilia, which By Grand Central Station would have been at that point. But because she never – she was kind of a one hit wonder – not exactly, and again, as I say, I don’t mean to diminish the rest of her output, which was considerable. I read somewhere that she was the first person to use sexy in an ad, the word sexy, although I have to independently verify that fact, because if that’s true, it’s amazing.\n \n\n11:47\tHannah McGregor:\tAmazing.\n \n\n11:47\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah, it’s amazing. But yeah, but she kind of had to figure out what work was going to mean to her for the entire rest of her life over and over after the George Barker of that work.\n \n\n11:59\tMyra Bloom:\tI mean, not again – my interests are very much in severing biographical readings of texts from the text itself. I think that’s too facile a conflation, but certainly George Barker, her lover, was a kind of animating inspiration for the love affair we see depicted in that book. And by the time she’s reading in Canada – their relationship, they had produced four children, it had completely fallen apart. They were friends and then they were frenemies and then they weren’t speaking. And this is like having to summon the passion of a relationship that has – is decades exhausted. So it’s interesting in that sense too.\n \n\n12:37\tHannah McGregor:\tYeah, that is really interesting. So to follow up on that, your interest in severing the biographical tie in particularly women’s writing. We know this is something that haunts women writers in particular that while male writers are generally allowed to be making art, women are always read as operating in the autobiographical mode. This is like the great Sylvia Plath conundrum. How is that relationship complicated by encountering this work read, but in the authors’ voices?\n \n\n13:12\tMyra Bloom:\tElizabeth Smart was really canny about how she herself framed this work. So when it originally came out, sometimes she and George Barker would appear at readings together and sort of play up the biographical elements of the work. Sometimes she would say, “Oh, this is, this is about a great love affair.” She would really emphasize that aspect. Other times she would lie about its composition. She would say, “Oh, I sat down for two hours crying and writing this book”, which is not true. It evolved over a number of years. So she would make it sound like it was an outpouring, but the moment that kind of biographical reading would get applied to her, like when they tried to do an adaptation for, I think for film ,where the characters were named George and Elizabeth, she totally freaked out and completely recanted that biographical conflation.\n \n\n14:03\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd so I think that– I was aware going into it that she herself had played in that gray zone between the biography and the art. I think for me hearing it read in the voice of an older woman, it was no longer about George Barker and Elizabeth Smart. It was much more about an older woman’s relationship to her younger self. And to me that’s so fascinating because what draws many of us to this book is the sort of cult of youth and beauty and passion and all these transcendent emotions. But, anyone who’s heard this piece or will hear this piece that I ended up producing knows that it’s really much more about a kind of – it’s a more reflective piece. It has a more – I tried to take a more reflective tone and just to kind of open it up to a broader rumination on art making and the things that impede women from art making. I opted for a more sober, reflective tone to the piece, ultimately.\n \n\n15:02\tHannah McGregor:\tAnd so, I know that you have recently gotten funding to do a whole podcast series. Can you talk to us a little bit about sort of what inspired you to propose that in the first place and what that series is going to take up?\n \n\n15:17\tMyra Bloom:\tYeah. Thanks for the opportunity to talk about it. I am currently writing a book whose provisional title is Evasive Maneuvers. And the book is all about the ways that certain contemporary Canadian writers subversively inhabit the confessional mode, which historically has always been a powerful mode for women. It’s – we wrote in letters and diaries and journals before we could access the publishing sphere and certainly confessional poetry and the United States and the 60s was a very powerful mode. And I should say that obviously persists to this day where confession is a very popular internet, social media, these kinds of first person narrative mode for women. But historically at every moment, the confession has also held out a kind of trap or a snare for women in that the moment you use it, you get accused of being overly effusive, of being not a serious writer, of being kind of compelled by your hysterical passions, right?\n \n\n16:16\tMyra Bloom:\tFeeding into these stereotypes of who women are and what forces they’re animated by. And in the internet, a lot of women try to use first person writing as a way to become published and then kind of immediately had those doors slammed on them when they were subsequently perceived as non-serious writers, precisely because they were writing about “I found a hair ball in my vagina” or something like that. Anyways. So keeping in mind all of this, this backdrop, I was interested in how women find ways to negotiate these confessional aporias or confessional problems in their work. And I’m really interested in kind of auto fiction or hybrid genre works, or the insertion of autobiographical content into poetry, or all these unexpected venues where the confessional kind of wells up in this ambiguous subversive way. So I’m working on the book, but I also realized it would be so powerful and interesting to hear women talking about these things in their own voice and to have the chance to actually do some interviews.\n \n\n17:16\tMyra Bloom:\tI was thinking today about how within the discourse of CanLit, social media and the internet has come to play such an important role and identity politics are really triangulating a number of these issues in a very, very personal way. So I thought, oh, well, maybe I could talk to some of the people who have tweeted very personal things about their experience that have gone on to factor prominently in the so-called CanLit dumpster fire. So I just realized there’s a lot of possibilities for talking to people that open up when you do something in a forum, like a podcast, rather than a book and different modes of scholarship, modes of engagement, modes of approaching an issue. And I am a huge, huge podcast listener. I have a very active podcast listening practice, and this was my first experience producing a podcast myself, for SpokenWeb. And I enjoyed the experience so much, I thought, okay, now I’m ready to really take on something at a larger scale. So yeah, so ultimately the SSHRC insight development project that I’m doing is going to be this multi episode engagement with this question of how contemporary Canadian writers and maybe even scholars are using confessional modes.\n \n\n18:21\tHannah McGregor:\tThat’s very exciting. Okay. One last question. And that is, if anybody who is listening right now is an academic who wants to dip their toe into the world of podcasting, but is hesitant to do so, do you have any advice as somebody who went from a first time podcaster to now a passionate podcaster?\n \n\n18:42\tMyra Bloom:\tAbsolutely. Yeah. So my advice is the same advice that I would give to anyone who wants to be a writer or wants to practice any skill. The first thing you have to do, if you want to be a writer, is be a reader. And the first thing you have to do, if you want to be a broadcaster, is listen to podcasts. Just start listening to the medium and get a sense of what you want to do and what you like, and then just try it. It’s great. It’s very rewarding.\n \n\n19:03\tHannah McGregor:\tThanks again for joining us. Myra. Now here is Myra Bloom in our January, 2020 episode [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] “The Agony and Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n19:19\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n19:31\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI thought, if it’s agreeable with you, that I’d read a chapter book I wrote called By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. And this is about a couple of people, in case you haven’t read it. Well, I fall in love and they’re dashing away across America, madly in love.\n \n\n19:55\tMyra Bloom:\tI first encountered the writer Elizabeth Smart in a time of great passion. I was 19 and reading her masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept for an undergraduate class. Her description of a transcendent, debilitating obsession captured what I was going through at the time: the beautiful harrowing torment of first love. By Grand Central Station details a love affair that comes to an end as hyperbolically as it began. As the title implies, it ends with the narrator pregnant, bereft, and crying out to her lover who by this point has returned to his wife. I would soon come to relate to these darker feelings too, as my own relationship combusted, albeit under less salacious circumstances. I’m pretty sure there’s a direct line between my feelings about this novel and my decision to teach literature for a living. I wanted to talk to other women who had been similarly affected by the novel. I sought out writers and filmmakers who had written or made films about Elizabeth, or were planning to do so to ask them what drew them to her. I expected that their stories would sound similar to mine, that they would tell me tales of great loves, loved and lost. I was planning an anthropological study of female passion, but those weren’t the stories they told me.\n \n\n21:28\tSina Queyras:\tIt was on Vancouver Island and I was living in the rainforest and they had a cabin and I could see through the walls and it would just rain and rain and rain and rain. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n21:36\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is poet and professor Sina Queyras.\n \n\n21:40\tSina Queyras:\tAnd I was sitting there reading this – somebody sent it to me, my friend Rita whos a fellow from creative writing, sent me this book and that had been, I mean the reason she sent it to me was I loved Marguerite Duras’ A Lover and they’re sister books, right? They’re totally sister books. But the surprising thing about the Smart was that there’s just no Canadian voice that’s anywhere near the depth of feeling and just the intellectual precariousness, like she’s so present but also vulnerable and self propelled. There’s just nothing –I mean, I guess Margaret Lawrence, but that’s not ecstatic like By Grand Central Station is just so ecstatic. So I know that going forward it was like, it’s like Sappho, it’s like Sappho wrote a novel.\n \n\n22:57\tMusic\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n22:58\tKim Echlin:\tMy name is Kim Echlin. I’m the author of Elizabeth Smart: A Fuge Essay on Women and Creativity, and I was drawn to Elizabeth Smart first because of her great passionate love affair with George Barker. But then that quickly led me down to a much more complex story and it is the story of her as exile in England, as writer, as mother, and as a single woman earning a living. Romantic love is by definition irrational. It means sexual passion, the love of beauty, the potential for destruction, the taste of immortality. It is obsessive. Sometimes it flickers briefly, deliciously. [End Music: Jazz Instrumental] Sometimes it lasts a lifetime. Its destructiveness evident even to the lovers themselves. Yet, lovers are loath to give up romantic love. Lovers believe they are most alive and it’s embrace. With strange pleasure we watch ill-matched lovers devour each other. They believe that their love is their very life force.\n \n\n24:01\tKim Echlin:\tI think about passionate, romantic love when I consider Bluebird’s Castle or some of John Donne’s poetry or Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or such novels as Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. I think of a different kind of love, one that still has no name, when I think of some of Samuel Beckett’s characters and of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Rosalind ironically and wittily says to the object of her desire, “love is merely a madness and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as mad man do, and the reason why there are not so punished and cured is the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” Elizabeth wrote this ordinary lunacy in By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but her telling is extraordinary. Just as Rosalind tells love in a fresh way from a woman’s point of view disguised as a boy, the narrator of By Grand Central Station tells love in a fresh way from the point of view of an unmarried pregnant woman. But before Elizabeth wrote it, she had to live it. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n25:17\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tBy Grand Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face. Sleep tries to seduce me by promising a more reasonable tomorrow, but I will not be betrayed by such a Judas of fallacy: it betrays everyone, It leads them into death. Everyone acquiesces, everyone compromises. They say, as we grow older, we embrace resignation, but oh, they totter into it blind and unprotesting and from their sin, the sin of accepting such a pimp to death, there’s no redemption. It’s the sin of damnation. What except morphine can weave bearable nets around the tiger shark that tears my mind to shreds, seeking escape on every impossible side. The senses deliver the unbearable into sleep. And it ceases, except that it appears gruesomely at the edges of my dreams making ghastly signs, which wear away peace, but which I cannot understand. The pain was unbearable, but I did not want it to end, it had operatic grandeur. It lit up Grand Central Station, like a Judgment Day. It was more iron muscle than Samson in his moment of revelation. It might’ve shown me all Dante’s dream, but there was no way to endure.\n \n\n26:53\tMyra Bloom:\tAnd what did it mean for you for Elizabeth Smart to be the subject of your first film? Is that important to you?\n \n\n27:00\tMaya Gallus:\tIt was important to me. My mother was an artist and I saw her struggle as an artist and a mother, also a single parent. [End Music: Instrumental Jazz]\n \n\n27:10\tMyra Bloom:\tDocumentary filmmaker, Maya Gallus.\n \n\n27:13\tMaya Gallus:\tSo I think that Elizabeth represented some of those elements for me as well, because I was trying to figure out how to be a woman and an artist in the world. And it seemed to me that women of my mother’s generation and previously of Elizabeth’s generation really had this conflict and dilemma about being able to stake their claim in what is largely a male dominated world. And also then the additional challenges of being a mother. So I was kind of figuring all of that out and Elizabeth’s writings really spoke to me because she really went into the nub of that in a lot of her work and her poems. A poem like “The Muse: His and Hers”, I still find is a very relevant, in many ways. I mean, we still are living in a male dominated world and people are speaking about it a little more openly now than before. And perhaps people are more willing to listen to what women have to say and recognize that actually women have something important to say about life and art and love. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n28:33\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tNow, I would like to read you a little poem that most amazingly I wrote last week. It just sort of popped out and lo and behold, it’s a feminist poem. I hope this won’t give any offense. [Audience Member: Why worry?] I’m not worried. Anyhow, it’s called “The Muse: His and Hers”. His pampered Muse / Knew no veto. / Hers lived / In a female ghetto. / When his Muse cried / He replied / Loud and clear / Yes! Yes! I’m waiting here. / Her Muse screamed / But children louder. / Then which strength / Made her prouder? / Neither. Either / Pushed and shoved / With the strength of the loved / and the, unloved, / Clashed rebuked. / All was wrong. / (Can you put opposites / into the song?) / Kettles boiling! /Cobwebs coiling! / Doorbells ringing! / Needs haranguing! / Her Muse called / In her crowded ear / She heard but had / Her dirty house to clear. / Guilt drove him on. / Guilt held her down. / (She hadn’t a wife / to lean upon.) The dichotomy was killing me.\n \n\n29:58\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tShe said till old age came to assuage. /Now Muse, now you can have your way. Now, what was it I want him to say? /And used, abused and not amused. The mind’s gone blank./ Is it life you have to thank?/ Stevie, the Emily’s, Mrs. Woolf bypass the womb and kept the self/ But she said, try and see if it’s true and without cheating. My muse can do./ Can women do? Can women make? /When the womb rests animus awake./ Pale at my space starved and thin, /like hibernating bear too weak to begin./ To roar with authority, poems in the spring./ So late in the autumn of their suffering./ Those gaps. It’s decades of lying low./ Earthquakes, deep frozen mind askew./ Is it too late at 68?/ Oh fragile, fresh reanimate./ Oh flabby, teetering, body concentrate./ Astute, true woman, any late profligacy squandered on the loving of people and other irrelevancy/ useful in the dark in articulacy./ But drop it like poison now if you want poetry./ Let the doorbell ring, let the fireman put out the fire or light it up again./ Sheepish and shamefaced at 9:00 AM/ till the Muse commands her ritual hymn./ See lucky man, get off his knee./ And here now his roar of authority./ This test case woman could also be,/ just in time for a small cacophony/ A meaningful scream between folded womb and grave./ A brief, respite from the enclave.\n \n\n32:09\tRosemary Sullivan:\tI remember one wonderful moment when Elizabeth and I went to this reading.\n \n\n32:15\tMyra Bloom:\tThis is Rosemary Sullivan, Elizabeth Smart’s biographer.\n \n\n32:21\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd it was by Mavis Gallant, who of course one admires deeply. And it was amusing to see how jealous Elizabeth was [Laughs] because, she’d written a great book when she was in her late twenties, and then she didn’t write again for 30 years. She used to say, when asked her who she was, she’d say, I’m my son Sebastian, the poet’s mother. And when we talked about this in detail, she did say, and this is quote that she felt that the maestro of the masculine was sitting on her shoulder telling her she could never be good enough. So she had sought out George Barker because he wrote the kind of poetry she wanted to write. And then George, being a poet of his era in the tradition of not T.S Elliot, but Dylan Thomas, kind of knocked her down.\n \n\n33:17\tRosemary Sullivan:\tAnd she said that she needed to be knocked down because she came from this wonderfully arrogant position of a debutante in Ottawa, put forward by her mother hobnobbing with the prime minister’s set, and so on. She said, “I needed to be knocked down a little bit, but not nearly as much as George knocked me down.” Then of course you asked her, well, why did you keep – what was it about George that was so seductive? And she said, “oh God, he had such a sense of humor.” [Laughs] So.. I did meet George.\n \n\n33:55\tMyra Bloom:\tWhat was he like?\n \n\n33:57\tRosemary Sullivan:\tExactly what she said. He was with his last wife, Elsbeth, you know that he had – this could not happen now. He had five wives, two of them legal, 15 children. And then they all adored him, because the creative male was given a kind of permission that he can’t be given today. But here I was at Elsbeth’s and she was lovely. There was a point at which she had tried to get Elizabeth to take George back, she was so fed up with him, but it didn’t work. And she was teaching, she was a Latin teacher, even though she had at one point aspired to be a poet. But again, that was part of the time you –if you wanted to be creative, you were creative vicariously through a man, right?\n \n\n34:44\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\t[Start Music: Jazz Instrumental] Yes. You – in another of your poems you talk about – this is the trying to write one, that you read last night. You talk about it being unfeminine to write.\n \n\n35:00\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes, yes. And somebody asked me last night too, about why I said that love was parallel. You see, I do feel that I’ve always been thinking about that you really have to be ruthless to write. And it isn’t– so it isn’t a loving thing. And of course we all want to be good, perhaps, but they do conflict. If you’re good, you’re not ruthless. You always think somebody else, they want to come in and tell you about their troubles. You’re writing. You don’t say “No, off. I’m busy.” You say, “come in.” And I listen to them.\n \n\n35:31\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tThis is called “Trying To Write”. Why am I so frightened to say I’m me / And publicly acknowledge my small mastery? / Waited for sixty years till the people take out the horses / And draw me to the theatre with triumphant voices? / I know this won’t happen until it’s too late / And the deed done (or not done) so I prevaricate, / Egging them on, and keeping Roads open (just in case) / Go on! Go on and do it in my place! / Giving love to get it (The only way to behave). / But hated and naked could I stand up and say / Fuck off! or, be my slave? / To be in a very unfeminine very unloving state / Is the desperate need / Of anyone trying to write.\n \n\n36:32\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tAnd so in fact, goodness and art are parallel and can never meet. That was my theory.\n \n\n36:39\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tThat it’s egocentric to write.\n \n\n36:42\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tYeah you really have to have a large ego. I felt the mind been rather squashed so that I feel I have to get it back a bit.\n \n\n36:50\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tAnd do you think this is a particularly female problem? That it’s a problem of the woman writer?\n \n\n36:53\tAudio Recording, Elisabeth Smart:\tWell I do because whatever people say, I do think that women are – perhaps it’s a training, I don’t know, but they do want to be more loving and kind and helpful, don’t they? Maybe that’s because they’re in that position.\n \n\n37:10\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tWhen you speak about – it is necessary for a writer to be ruthless. I mean, it does remind me of Virginia Woolf and her, her essay on the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:18\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tThe angel of the house.\n \n\n37:21\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes, that a woman to write successfully had to kill the angel of the house.\n \n\n37:25\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\n \n\nWell that’s it, that’s the same thing.\n \n\n37:26\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tShe could not, no longer be if she was going to write, she couldn’t be responsible in this way or recognize or wait for family in her house or else she would never find time to write.\n \n\n37:35\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd then most with children and the house, I mean, you’re always, you’re fragmented your mind. You think, “Oh dear, we’re out of Vim”. Or “the soap flakes are down” you can’t, you know, these sort of things that are in your mind.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes.\n \n\n37:47\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tAnd you’ve got to remember to go and get this. Well the men, well they are doing it more now, but there was never any question: they wouldn’t notice if you’d run out of lavatory paper or something.\n \n\n37:57\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Yeah.\n \n\n37:59\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tIn fact, George would just tear out a sheet of a book. [Laughs]\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tReally?\n \n\n38:04\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYeah. No respect for literature.\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tNot his own books?\n \n\n38:11\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes! Yes, his own ones. He wouldn’t care.\n \n\n38:13\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tAnd yet, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, I know you’ve written so much more recently and that is all sort of new developments and further thoughts and you may be tired at times of hearing people hark back to the book you wrote many years ago –\n \n\n38:29\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tOh no, I’m delighted to have a little attention so late in the evening.\n \n\n38:31\tAudio Recording, Ann Hart:\tYes. Well, so many people, particularly I think women, do identify with it. It is a love story, which must’ve been very unique, still is unique. But when it was published in 1945, a very moving, very explicit, very passionate description of a love affair. And I think at that time, it must’ve been thought, well this is a bizarre thing. I mean, I think it would be men that had been writing about this sort of thing. I mean, did you get that sort of reaction?\n \n\n39:07\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tYes. I think I mentioned last night that they said “a trivial subject”. Women’s feelings are trivial subjects. And nobody said how shocking to say it’s a trivial subject, they just took that.\n \n\n39:20\tAudio Recording, Rosemary Sullivan:\tWell, does it make you angry when they said that?\n \n\n39:24\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tI didn’t know. One just thinks, that’s the way things are. I don’t really make any judgment. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:34\tMyra Bloom:\tDo you really feel that Elizabeth writer’s block was attributable to the fact that she felt overshadowed by George? You don’t necessarily attribute it to the material circumstances of having to raise four children? [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n39:47\tRosemary Sullivan:\tYou know, I know people who’ve raised four children and continued to write, Judith Thompson is one. So in fact, what’s so interesting is when you look at Elizabeth’s work, she was writing Grand Central before she met George. So he was simply the embodiment of it. After that, I do think that she lost her ego as a writer and it’s easy to – writing is such a fragile activity. I mean, I haven’t written poems for quite a while because I think I need that vertical sledgehammer into time before I can write. Everything’s going horizontally. There’s every reason not to write. And so, it became a habit, not writing. But also Elizabeth would – she had her youngest daughter Rose in a private school, so those children were off during the week and sometimes on the weekend they’d have these crazy so-called uncles taking care of them. So in fact it was – she had a professional life. But some people had managed a professional life with writing at night. But I think Elizabeth lost her nerve. [Start Music: Jazz Instrumental]\n \n\n41:12\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tA warning. This old woman waddles toward love, becomes human, but the Muse does not approve. This going flesh is loved and is forgiven by the generous. But houses the demon. Hello my dear, sit down. I’ll soothe your pain. I’ve known what you’ve known, but won’t again. Though passion is not gone. Merely contracted into a last ditch weapon. A deed, not dead. A mine unexploded and not safe to have near the playground of innocent life. Keep clear of this frail old, harmless person. 50 years fuel of aimed frustration could shatter the calm and scald the soul. And love falls like napalm, over the school.\n \n\n42:13\tMusic:\t[Jazz Instrumental Interlude]\n \n\n42:15\tMaya Gallus:\tOh, I think Elizabeth Smart should always be read. I think she brings an enormous amount of wisdom and life experience to the later work and an enormous amount of passion and literary innovation to the early work. And also some of her poems are really powerful as well. Her poem, “A Bonus” is one that I always think of whenever I finish writing something because she captures so beautifully that feeling of being in a bubble. And as she says, “feeling dirty and roughly dressed” and getting through this difficult thing of finishing something, and then that beautiful feeling of completion.\n \n\n43:06\tMyra Bloom:\t[Reciting Poem] “A Bonus”. That day I finished/ A small piece/ For an obscure magazine/ I popped it in the box // And such a starry elation/ Came over me/ That I got whistled at in the street/ For the first time in a long time// I was dirty and roughly dressed/ And had circles under my eyes/ And far, far from flirtation/ But so full of completion/ Of a deed duly done/ An act of consummation// That the freedom and force it engendered/ Shone and spun/ Out of my old raincoat.// It must’ve looked like love/ Or a fabulous free holiday/ To the young men sauntering/ Down Berwick Street./ I still think this is most mysterious/ For while I was writing it/ It was gritty it felt like self-abuse/ Constipation, desperately unsocial/ But done, done, done/ Everything in the world /Flowed back/ Like a huge bonus.\n \n\n44:20\tMaya Gallus:\tI can’t think of another poem that captures that moment and that feeling as beautifully as that does. So I think Elizabeth is relevant now and we’ll continue to be relevant for continuing generations.\n \n\n44:35\tMyra Bloom:\tI hope so. Okay. Thank you.\n \n\n44:39\tMaya Gallus:\tYou’re welcome.\n \n\n44:46\tAudio Recording, Elizabeth Smart:\tGood morning boss. A cup of coffee and two fried eggs. Look at the idiot boy begot with that knife. He’s all the world that is left. He is American better than love. He is civilization’s heir oh you mob whose actions brought him into bed. He is happier than you, sweetheart. But will he do to fill in these coming thousand years? Well, it’s too late now to complain, my honeydove. Yes. It’s all over. No regrets. No postmortems. You must adjust yourself to conditions as they are. That’s all. You have to learn to be adaptable. I myself prefer Boulder Dam to Chartres Cathedral. I prefer dogs to children. I before in corn cobs to the genitals of the male, everything’s hotsy-totsy, dandy, everything’s OK. It’s in the bag. It can’t miss. My dear, my darling, do you hear me when you sleep? [Audience Applause]\n \n\n45:56\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] 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. The episode we replayed for you today. “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Elizabeth Smart” was originally released on January 6th, 2020 and was produced by Myra Bloom. The new introduction to this episode was produced by Judith Burr and me ,Hannah McGregor, with special thanks to Myra Bloom for coming back to discuss her episode again with us. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our transcriptions are created by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb 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 with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]"],"score":2.4307246},{"id":"9615","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 S3E2, Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive, 1 November 2021, Polyck-O’Neill"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/"],"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":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creator_names_search":["Julia Polyck-O’Neill"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Julia Polyck-O’Neill\",\"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/3d1f947d-a26e-415a-9002-caeecdb1698e/audio/9aee09d9-16e3-4499-b25f-e666c04ae3a4/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:47:38\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"45,801,683 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"s3e2-lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-11-01\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/15396822\",\"venue\":\"York University Keele Campus\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 \",\"latitude\":\"43.77417545\",\"longitude\":\"-79.50474900961275\"}]"],"Address":["4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3 "],"Venue":["York University Keele Campus"],"City":["Toronto, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings. Duke University Press, 2003.\\n\\nFong, Deanna and Karis Shearer. “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” No More Potlucks, 2018, http://nomorepotlucks.org/site/gender-affective-labour-and-community-building-through-literary-audio-artifacts-deanna-fong-and-karis-shearer/. Accessed 1 Dec. 2019. \\n\\nMorra, Linda. Unarrested Archives: Case Studies in Twentieth-Century Women’s Authorship. University of Toronto Press, 2014.\\n\\nRobertson, Lisa. “At the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, 1994: Launch of XEclogue on January 8, 1994.” PennSound, n.d., https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Robertson/Robertson-Lisa_Reading_Kootenay-School_Vancouver_01-%2008-1994.mp3. Accessed 1 Sept. 2021.\\n\\nSingh, Julietta. No Archive Will Restore You. Punctum, 2018.\\n\\nTaylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Duke University Press, 2003.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549701525504,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In this episode, SpokenWeb contributor Julia Polyck-O’Neill shares an archived recording of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson with us and talks us through two interviews she recorded with Robertson. Polyck-O’Neill invites us to consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections in light of the relationships between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. In examining these conceptual, material and immaterial dimensions of the archive within Robertson’s personal narrative history of the Kootenay School of Writing, Polyck-O’Neill points to how creative and feminist approaches to the archive and to archival practice are exist within Robertson’s practice. Polyck-O’Neill shares with us how Robertson’s archives are influencing her research and the ways she approaches the topic of archives and intimacy in her work and her life more broadly.\n\nAddendum: Listening Notes\n\nNancy Shaw (1962-2007), a celebrated curator, poet, writer, and organizer, at times collaborated with Lisa Robertson and also wrote work in dialogue with Robertson’s poetry. Robertson wishes to mention how greatly the absence of her good friends Shaw, Stacy Doris (d. 2012), and Peter Culley (d. 2015) has affected her. Additionally,  XEclogue was, in fact, Robertson’s first book, although she published chapbooks prior; additionally, she does not think of her books as collections, as they are written as single, cohesive works. The new edition of R’s Boat is titled Boat and is being published by Coach House in Spring 2022.\n\n00:03\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:18\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. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n00:35\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. Creating an archive of literary lives and events can be a daunting task. Think about an author you admire – if you want to preserve their legacy in a box of materials, how would you do it? What would you save? How would these materials communicate the realities of the present to those living decades in the future? And how do sound recordings fit into – or even enhance -an archive? Archival collections or fragments of memory – a curated set of materials that has been gathered and preserved to encapsulate a moment, community, or person. Archives preserved at universities, museums, and other places contain all kinds of materials from mundane lists and notes to photographs, to sound recordings – our speciality here at Spoken Web.\n01:33\tHannah McGregor:\tIt might feel counterintuitive to think about the need for archiving today when so much of our lives are ceaselessly recorded. There are many digital outlets that people can use to collect and share moments from our lives and our literary present. But this abundance of material is also a call for curation and intentionality around what to protect and pass on. We can’t save everything and we probably don’t want to. So what should we choose to save? Today, our episode producer Julia Polyck-O’Neill leads us into one archival project: the archive of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. Julia is caring for and studying part of Robertson’s archive as part of her postdoctoral work on the complexity of archiving the lives and works of interdisciplinary artists. In this episode, Julia shares a recording of Robertson from the archive and plays clips of Robertson discussing the challenges of forming her own archive. Julia uses these clips to reflect on creative and feminist approaches to archiving and on her personal connection to Robertson’s life and work. This episode is a fascinating and moving glimpse into the power of sonic archival material and the weight of memory, mortality, and trust in the archival process. Here is Julia Polyck-O’Neil with season three, episode two of the SpokenWeb Podcast, [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] Lisa Robertson and the Feminist Archive. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:18\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Hello, thanks for listening. My name is Julia Polyck-O’Neill and I’m a post-doctoral researcher, theorizing interdisciplinary artists archives, according to feminist and digital epistemologies. This podcast episode, on which I’ve been working for quite some time has recently been re-imagined according to my private emotional responses to two long and surprisingly intimate conversations I recorded with Canadian poet Lisa Robertson, a feminist writer who was a member of the Kootney School of Writing in Vancouver in the 1990s and early 2000s.\n03:55\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI’m considering Robertson’s archive as part of my post-doctoral project. [End Music: Strings Instrumental] My conversations with Robertson and meditations on the connections between her body of work, biography, and her archive form the bridge between my recently completed dissertation work on Vancouver’s critical conceptualism in art and writing and my work re-examining and analyzing the complexity of the archival collections of interdisciplinary artists. Robertson’s work has figured into both projects in a formal way, but now, I wish to consider how her archives, and our collective thinking about her archives, is influencing my research and the ways I approach the topic of archives and intimacy in my work and my life more broadly. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] Listening to our conversation months later invokes all kinds of feelings related to the relationship between archives, memory, affect, and mortality. Archives have an emotional weight – a kind of affective tenor that is challenging to describe accurately with language; objects begin to stand in for complex lives and relationships.\n05:05\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn this episode, I’m going to introduce you to Robertson’s poetry and my research. First, I will share a recording of Robertson reading in 1994. Then, I’ll share clips from an interview I conducted with Robertson earlier this year on Friday, April 16th, 2021, over Zoom with Robertson at home in France and me at my desk in downtown Toronto, months before Robertson’s 60th birthday (in July) and just before the announcement of the shortlist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award in fiction (for which her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal would be nominated on 4 May). Throughout this episode, I will be putting these recordings into the context of my thinking and research on her work.\n05:49\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI consider the significance of Robertson’s intimate archival collections and the reflections she shared with me in light of a creative, conceptualist interest in the archive. I also propose these as aesthetic strategies related to histories of feminist material analysis that reconsider archival practices according to feminist ethical and effective methods, including feminist and affective approaches to audio recordings and the material (and immaterial) histories, they impart as Deanna Fong and Karen Scherer argue in their 2018 essay, “Gender, Affective Labour, and Community-Building Through Literary Audio Artifacts.” [End Music: Strings Instrumental]\n06:29\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tI want to start this episode by listening together to this 20 minute recording of “Eclogue Eight ” at the January 8th, 1994 launch of Robertson’s book, XEclogue, which exemplifies important characteristics of her writing and her work with the Kootenay School of Writing. In this recording from the PennSound archive, you can hear the sounds of community participation. So central to the ethos of the Kootenay School. Of course, we might primarily focus on the poet’s own powerful voice, but I’m also drawn to the other voices we hear: the voices of other members acting as the “Roaring Boys,” an amateurish chorus, and the contributions of poet, artist, and organizer Nancy Shaw. But in this recording, in light of my interviews with Robertson, I’m most drawn to what we overhear in the background, the voices of audience members laughing and reacting in a way that suggests a deep, warm familiarity with the readers. [Start Music: Strings Instrumental] The sounds of community. Part of an archive of community sounds. After we listen, I’ll talk about how this connects with my research, and I’ll share excerpts from my interviews with Robertson. [End Music: Strings Instrumental].\n \n\n07:46\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Eight: Romance. The Roaring Boys fan back.[Footsteps] [Audience Laughter] [Audience Chatter]\n08:01\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe March trees torch the prophetligate sky because I say so. [Audience Member Laughs] A tiny flopping boy with sullen fits drifts like a sheet of golden lust. In this empire of no-tense he bullies the dust. He lends the block street, a gleaming arch. He flaunts his hidden rope burn like defeat. So what about his consummate latinady? He has been moving in the pale night with the urgent authority of a meaning. The flicked fringe of his anger flatters mangled angels. And he weeps like a twin in the heat. The Greenwood never wanted him nor the puckered gully he calls thought. A seabird rises like an angel in the night and shrieks it’s brackish laughter at his dream. The Swains of justice pinch out the lights. A pronoun’s snout is gentle torture dressed in the dust of the jejune Northern sky. He scissored to that pilgrim’s grief. His marble whippets snap at piety; they’re pearly lust encrypted as confession. Under the empires, arches swooning flower chasers confuse scripted infamy with paradise.\n09:25\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey blindly submit to the loutish bonus of roaring boys’ dreams. As if the Greenwood were the room of philosophs. As if their yearning arms were half tree. They had been moving all this time towards a rose of dust in the street, calling it golden, calling it the sodden issue of their belief. They clasp their girlish secrets like tiny, glowing wreaths. In the tender platinum sky, a pronoun gallops, a pronoun shifts, a pronoun shifts. Hey, Venus kick in paradise, revolve outside March trees of piety. Gently the golden whippet snouts of gorgeousness lust in the tragic streets, touch supine forms of girlish hooligans. A bud will clasp its profligate secret rather than submit to gold stiff piety. And the pale jejune week unfolds through the lattice of confusion. Who is not a Pilgrim carrying grief like an image through the Northern sky? Already dressed as a boy, his dream of justice fucked.\n10:41\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tHe had been moving through this adult and gentle world of gentle laughter. Softly he flicks out his wings on the marble steps, the quiet of philosophs peaks in their rooms. Hey Nancy, what’s that colour falling in the heat, like a twin? Like a tiny flapping soft scissor and mistake. The fringe of his wings licks the dust like pearly fingers. Hey, Venus, get dressed in a better latinaty. Wear that salted harness beyond the need for abnegation. He quotes a crumbling dream and dares not say so. These boys are vicious as a burnt lip tongued [Audience Laughter]. The sleek swing of a silk fringe rewrites their project as a failure. One begins to sing. It is an anthem sprung with a quality of flung bits, withdrawn or chastened as rustling tongues and fluent scandal. Reigned with the amusing cruelty of Cupid birched. Caressed by an accent has rubbed for murmurs to the sneaking night sulking as a flipped skirt, cradled in the precise euphoria of a method held in reserve. Dirty per se.\n \n\n12:09\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] [Intermittent Audience Laughter] Rear all you face and wave to the enormous night. Since love’s pure need lures [inaudible] credit through hungers creamy trap well suss a petty sight. Pass floral delight and sip at feeble kisses. Permit us a sip from that gaze quiet tremor. [inaudible] or crop that tricky verb. We’ll either sap or wet Nancy’s sultry transit. Sufficient ardor to us. [inaudible] This time of filming will quote Cupid’s vulgar luck to taste her silly statement. [Laughter and Applause]\n \n\n13:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tBut pathetic lays all that’s left of freedom in the cloistered night. Like a lock of Helen and the dangerous summer having bloomed from the silvered style of an anxious wrist who’s blunt syntax lackers opacity with greed. Yet crushing nothing more than the dampness that moves across the nyloned air with rancid gusts in an age of tawdry indolence that breeds such smear doubles for a calling, for a bruised structure, for a dupe sincerity that flaunts escape. The next pretty boy emerges like a rape from his crisis to find the concept does not need him. A slick whisper weaves across the commodities. Are you looking for fragrance? There is no sea and no forest and no boats passing. It’s eight o’clock. The glass world curves into history, leaving a bear pronoun to bask on the roof of a promise. Read them, audacity’s slim wrists cuffed in elegance, wandering fingers clipped to the pulsing sky by those bannal enchantments of antiquity and authority and consent.\n14:24\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tRead them as mere exitation, pooling products of neglect. Nancy straps the audible sulk of a method to her hips and presses bitter lips against an image. Let’s go down to the water’s edge. Who fished the ineffable from this slick tissue of an absence dripping it’s regret. She spends the loose coins from a lisped purse on important grammar that opens that goes on sheer, a girl-boy’d mirror, a compact Nancy pins them to the glass. Roaring Boy Number One is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of his mind as a great dusty silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he would exude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. He could be said to profoundly resent his inability to control his desire for an impenitent extrovert.\n15:38\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWhen he closes his eyes, he asks, “shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight?” He is skinny and pure as a calling. Roaring Boy Number Two ,boy with the volute heart of a girl names, the faithless toss of an abandoned guest’s exactitude. He gives his thought with the sinews rigor of a cut silk garment. Lives looking at the sky, waiting for the specificity of a pleasure whose deferral is underwritten by a constriction of memory. The violent stammering of a repressed structure. The plains of his face point to the exquisitely even surface of a late antique life. He has begun by setting aside holy dread. Deferral is his darling. Roaring Boy Number Three, rather than submitting to the trial of action, wants deeply to possess an opinion [Audience Laughter] than having to possess, to distribute it with maximum efficiency. Since the spectacle of luxury pleases him and others, he embarks on a gradual, to the point of imperceptibility, inflation of his own verbal style and a concurrent almost compensatory deflation of his person. He is both febrile and duckerish – decorish [Laughs]. [Audience Laughter] A foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis.\n17:29\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tEclogue Nine: History: Knowing memory only bruises the past, Lady M scans the face of a faint document whose ardent stammer she has already echoed than languidly rejected.\n \n\n17:47\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe cannot think tranquility a throne, yet time exceeds is barely tolerable pleasure.\n \n\n17:53\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIt is a crumb in our syntax.\n \n\n17:55\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tWe need not innure ourself to peace and luxury, but our privilege lies in understanding how the senses detect what is not servitude.\n \n\n18:03\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWho then would write the biography of their desires?\n \n\n18:07\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\n \n\nWe ourselves will claim the requisite authority.\n \n\n18:10\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThey wished for lips of red thread, like so many spies. They received through the veil of expression, a heart moved only by etiquette. They wished to experience thought as we would be compelled to remember it. It became a language impossibility. Their heart was lodged in an audible sentence. They wore nervousness on their spine and wrists. Their small soft edgy world was an intoxicant. The superb crumbling of the afternoon, so secret and so intense identified itself as history. The ground shelved gently to the water side, flowing from the flushed pulse of vulnerability under full, soft, hot light. It was a challenged mesh from which our presence had been washed.\n \n\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Nancy Shaw, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tIf we were to imagine that contradiction as a landscape overwritten with vast exhausted melancholy quenched in mauvis tasseled wind, we would only perpetrate the vain in position of a hoax.\n \n\n19:17\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tYet the sea’s novice rhythm seems to reek of freeze. The Roaring Boys drift aimlessly, believing their thoughts imperius. A background ground of shimmering woods fetters our weary gaze. The black brow of a rock parches the trees. Sister of a lynx gert with quiver steps, cunningly and cheats the light. Recall the echoing crags a shore’s lip keeps happiness for itself. The woods breast is pierced with sight. Why may we not clasp the revolving night? The dusky grove bleeds virtue. For we saw two maids clashing with men whom the black storm had scattered. We saw one bear knee break the ghastly dark. We saw a strong hand raise the bow to slash the weird decrepitude time had wrought. Undone by our vision we began to move tirelessly among the wending dwindling paths. Though they appeared with grace, then faded into cruelity without apparent motivation. Slowly, we came to understand how the forest was fraught or thatched with use. Capital had tagged or lurid route. We asked ourselves, will this delicate world of deliquescent charms compel a future? Then answered ,the ground breeds sentiment, but what else is there to walk on? Sullenly we raised our glance, the coy foliage swung open to reveal this Moston scription.\n \n\n20:56\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Multiple Voices of the Roaring Boys Reciting Together] Shirk off the moderate little grace of vain Cupid and grease the silver and lascivious age as livid qualms dope our cool arrival. Rich poems sag like great nuns, arch cheeks, tongues, martyrs.\n \n\n21:14\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tFrom the lip of slavish shade, the guilty land reclines swollen in a thousand livid tents. All around us everything’s humming. In the low valley our futures writ on winking leaves. Texture Brit brushes, drenched texture in a glamorous frizane of wit. The cushioning ground urges us to remeasure our impatience. May we muster sufficient elegance to court this pangs mobility? Sunken moss we dream of the lustrous pitch of a truculent tissue. It means we are traders for we do not accept the idea of the present. We dream we are treading the sloping orthodox street etched with a scammed pride of hunger. It means memory has been defaced, implicated by the effects of poverty. We dream that their desires have become transparent to us so that we may suavely recite. What does Lady M want? To bask in unfathomably strange beauties. Political beauty, liberties, beauty, undeniably gorgeous beauty of a girl’s mind. A wrist’s quivering beauty. Beauty of the skin of boys’ backs. Beauty of burnished hoaxes deepen a clamoring taxi cabs. Appalled beauty of a scholar’s nervous heart. Cleft beauty invaded by splendid lucidity. We dreamed the night as far spent. Inexorable, thick lacquered, private. It means we have mistaken an invitation for permission. Yet still we feign this new erudition. Inappropriate and demeaning. With a movement of tearing we wake and cry out, we are not our own! Then find this freight’s scrap pinned to our sleeve.\n \n\n23:06\tAudio Recording, The Roaring Boys, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tLopsided interpolations following a wrinkled blind eye. Oops.\n \n\n23:13\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\tThe crooning leaves shut around a mercurial ankle. The stir and toss of the stroking breeze begs belief. Through the screen of grief, we glimpse an ear’s profane frill, luminous and insulting. These two have transformed us into what we are: green laurels that lose no leaf. What we call thought is cleft and afternoons olden freeze is cracked and lacking only verisimilitude. We wish to seize the real as a tissue. Leave the milieu of the curious and enter that radiantly tortured grove. Yet we are history’s minions. so again, we draw on the opulent glove of sleep. We dream. We have the will to think with the points of tiny scissors. It means luxury teaches us to dream of luxury. We dream of a barren, unbroken hunger blazing up in wild proportions that we taxi through a wet night on thrumming streets. That a city’s sumptuous edifice wanes like so many abandoned ghosts. That the shock of recognition twists like a blurred salvage, like a roped horizon, like a girl waiting in a car. We see the cradling flowers as taunting apostrophes. Through thick glass, the granular light slats among fronts, the shining mud sucks at thought, the leaves reek of rust. Girls whose memories caused the clamoring see in all names of ease. Quit tossing us such shoddy dreams. We dream we are dilations of banality. It means we are the willing captives of their metaphor. [Pause]\n24:58\tAudio Recording, Lisa Robertson, XEclogue Launch, 1994:\t[Aside to Audience] And I’ll just finish by reading the epilogue. [Returns to reading] I’m afraid I’ll be misunderstood. Asleep and sleeping in the clear, magnificent, misunderstood morning like a dahlia or some other flower with the strong odor of clothing. I am reminded of my conceit by a row of pale scars on the ceiling whose shy origin I shouldn’t identify. Speech bites into my walls. Maybe for that I will never forget the bus. In my dream of an intersection we eat and hear as we relax. We felt this as the cabinet swung open, we felt a strong burst of vitality. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n25:59\tMusic Interlude:\t[String Instrumental]\n \n\n26:08\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Music Continues: String Instrumental] XEclogue was not Robertson’s first collection, but it is among her earliest published books and signals a formative moment, both for her and for the Kootenay School of Writing. The recording we just listened to captures aspects of her writing practice [End Music: String Instrumental] as it developed as a member of the Kooteny School of Writing in Vancouver: the sense of the formation of a feminist subject, and the development of a feminist ethics of care and leadership within the membership and community, which seems to come out in the ways Robertson includes community participation in her reading.\n26:43\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tWhen approaching the corpus of Robertson’s writing in relation to her archive, including these sound recordings, it might be useful to observe that although her writing career began in and was situated in Vancouver when she was in her early thirties, the writing she completed during her moves around North America and relocation to France still bear a solid connection to the physical and emotional site of these beginnings. Importantly, while Robertson’s environment and community in Vancouver influenced her engagement with and conception of the archive, her practice also demonstrates and maintains a personal engagement with feminist, conceptualist thought. Her poetic and artistic networks in the city framed archival practice as a form of creative and political institutional intervention, as well as a method for feminist self-realization and reflection. More pragmatically, the connections between cities and selves are maintained by her generative engagement with her own archive, both as an idea, premised in affective self-reflection, and as a studious method for a form of intuitive, meditative writing.\n27:51\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIn many ways, Robertson takes an ongoing reflexive, relational approach to the institutional concept of the archive in her own fonds. She does so by means of the maintenance of different archives for different purposes: and official archive in Special Collections and Rare Books at Simon Fraser University; and two personal, unofficial, or what literary scholar Linda Morra has named “unarrested” archives. Robertson’s divided fonds demonstrate how her poetics actively engage with the theoretical-ideological, feminist legacies of the KSW and its institutional contexts, while also maintaining a certain emotional engagement not immediately present in the content of her formal writings as they’re published.\n28:38\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRobertson’s methods enact another manifestation of her relational approach to the archive, in the ways she implicates her archive in her work itself. She does so by incorporating regular readings of her personal archival collection, kept with her in her home in France. Doubles of some of these materials are held in her official fonds at SFU, while other more recent items she actively retains, mostly journals, as future contributions that aren’t currently too important to her ongoing work to send away. Yet another small collection is currently under my care – that which I have named her “maternal archive” –which she shared with me after our first interview in 2017 to help me with my early dissertation work. With her consent, I published an article in 2018 titled “Lisa Robertson’s Archive: The Feminist Archive, Singular and Collective,” in the academic journal, English Studies in Canada.\n29:37\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThese archives – that which is housed at SFU, her own, and that which was accumulated by her mother Lynette Mullen, and then passed along temporarily to me – demonstrate how archives, particularly when imagined holistically and beyond the conventional structures of the institution, are anything but static and are inherently distributed and dynamic, expanding and contracting across space and time.\n30:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t“It is a slightly weird thing when one thread of your life becomes an institutional topic,” Robertson said during our conversation in April, reflecting on how her lived and embodied experience differs from published narratives. The recent interview was noticeably more intimate than the first, probably because so much has happened since 2017, and possibly because we communicate from twin spaces of isolation during a global pandemic that unites everyone in indescribable melancholy. It has also possibly because I unwittingly have pulled Robertson into an exercise of thinking through her life by means of archival materials in different ways. When she read my article before submission, she commented on how important her mother’s collection of objects now seemed –admitting that she had felt uncomfortable passing along such an unwieldy unremarkable accumulation, which she may have referred to lightheartedly as “junk”.\n31:09\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tIt is a global pandemic. For the first time, I realize, in a material way, that archives, “the archive,” is a concept entangled with notions of death and dying, and, intrinsic to these extremes survival and trauma. This is an essential, material component of the archive: birth, marriage, and death records, or vital statistics form the basis of national public archival collections. The immaterial memorial aspects of archives have been theorized in several different ways. Feminist theorist Ann Cvetkovich writes about the idea of an archive of feelings as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are included not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception”.\n32:06\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe archive, imagined broadly, brings to the fore not only recorded events, but also the lived experience, the rolling background of the lives that contain them. Critical of conventional archives, scholar Diana Taylor, in her book, The Archive and the Repertoire from 2003, explains that in arguing for the repertoire as an expansion beyond the archive, she “tried to put limit events into conversation with the daily noneventful enactments of embodied practice” in her study, foregrounding the importance of context within memory structures.\n32:46\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tThe feelings and emotions invoked by an archive, by one’s own archive, can be hard to isolate and express, much like an event might be challenging to extract from its lived contexts. In scholar, Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, her 2018 book of creative nonfiction, the narrator’s desire to archive what she describes as sensing “what [movement philosopher] Erin Manning calls the “anarchive,” that strange and stunning “something that catches us in our own becoming”. The narrator goes on to explain the ineffable quality of this realization: “This is the future archive. The archive of alterity. And like yours and mine, this is a body that has gone up in flame. A body that is an excess, that is another world and also this one.” For Taylor, the body is incompatible with the archive, and for Singh, it is inseparable from it.\n33:48\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tFor Robertson, the tensions between texts and embodied experience are embedded in her archive. In our conversation, we meander between themes in a way that draws out these relations Robertson. And I talk about the late Nancy Shaw, one of the original members of the collective in Vancouver who we heard in the previous recording, and Robertson begins to reflect on how so many of her formative relationships are contained in her archival collections, although they likely remain inaccessible, relegated to footnotes or snapshots. In so doing she meditates on the limits of narrative to capture lived reality and how key figures in her memory are omitted from many representations of her life. She observes how this is a fact of habit, of “how we receive and reiterate narratives.” Histories that are intertwined are separated, and textures are smoothed over, she explains, noting how patriarchal structures are internalized. “Feminist, queer, and Marxist working class circulations through KSW were extremely complex from the get go,” she says, and encourages me (again) to look more closely at Shaw in my research. “She was fucking brilliant…and she stood her own at the bar,” she emphasizes.\n35:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\t[Start Music: String Instrumental] We talk about an envelope of photos from parties she recently sent to SFU, and how objects get imbued with new relational significance over time. Listen to Robertson describe her changing relationship to ephemera and her archive in our conversation last April.\n \n\n35:35\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Robertson, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n \n\n39:14\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tRevisiting the archive can be integral to Robertson’s writing practice. She is currently revisiting and writing a companion piece for her 2010 book, R’s Boat, a book that evolved from her 2004 chapbook Rousseau’s Boat, and which will eventually be republished as a new edition by Coach House Press in Toronto. We discuss how she has been using her archives as a starting point for writing or rewriting this work, as what she calls “a programmatic method,” and she remarks that she finds it useful to track how the psychological experience and the emotional experience of gathering material is “putting pressure in a certain way on what is a very avant-garde, constraint driven composing technique without actually entering the poems as content.” For Robertson, this process shapes the poem. Now I’ll play a clip of my interview with Robertson where you’ll hear her describe her process in her own words.\n \n\n40:15\tAudio Recording, Julia Polyck-O’Neill and Lisa Roberston, April 2021:\t[Interview transcript not available]\n44:10\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tNoting her upcoming birthday Robertson observes how the process of reworking the material from her archives [End Music: String Instrumental] has a distinct relationship to reaching a certain point in her life. She explains, ” Language is emotional […] Subjectivity is linguistic. For me, you don’t need to directly refer to emotional content in order for it to be present.”\n44:36\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tAt first, I interpret these words at face value, thinking about the corpus of Robertson’s writing, but then I step back and apply it to the broader context of her archive. I think about the interconnections between her archival collections and her shifting relationship with these objects and records, and how these – the relationships, the objects, the records – are imbued with emotions: hers, and those of many others. I reflect on how these emotional resonances, whether foregrounded in conversation or completely silent in the background, are what have always drawn me to want to spend time wading into the archives as a site of lived history. [Start Music: String Instrumental]\n45:22\tJulia Polyck-O’Neill:\tTo close this episode, I would like to consider how Julietta Singh opens No Archive Will Restore You with a passage that captures the tenor of my last conversation with Robertson and my ongoing relationship to her archives (especially now during the distressing and ongoing quietude of the pandemic). Singh describes the beginning of her graduate studies and her entry into the ambiguous, precarious, but intimidating environment of archival studies. She writes, “We were scrambling toward the archive. We knew it was crucial, but I suspect that few of us know what it meant, or where it was, or what to do with it.” But in contrast with the picture of the grasping desperate graduate students Singh presents in this chapter to give context to her eventual revelations, that archives are much more than the cold, institutional entities whe first encounters, I see the instability of this kind of mystery or unknowing as an invitation for engagement that tests the boundaries between academic and emotional selves. In the context of my conversations with Lisa Robertson, I can now better understand how relationships to the archive, and the collections that constitute archives themselves, can shift and evolve over time and across space. An archive that is in a constant state of transformation is a proposition for new kinds of thinking about relations between methods and modes of representation and lived, embodied experience. [End Music: String Instrumental]\n \n\n47:15\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the spoken web team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producer this month is SpokenWeb contributor, Julia Polyck-O’Neill. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit: SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. And don’t forget to rate us and leave a comment on Apple Podcasts, or say hi on our social media @SpokenWeb Canada. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod:mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n"],"score":2.4307246},{"id":"9616","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 S3E3, Forced Migration, 6 December 2021, Wilson"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/"],"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":["Michelle Wilson"],"creator_names_search":["Michelle Wilson"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michelle Wilson\",\"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/90aa09d2-eddd-4ff8-8ef9-b401cde0a6c6/audio/0eab67ed-3d02-4825-a7f7-3c1d6483e027/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:48:21\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"46,487,554 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"final-swp-s3e3-forced-migration\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/forced-migration/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-12-06\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/161607238\",\"venue\":\"Western University Ontario\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7\",\"latitude\":\"43.00937\",\"longitude\":\"-81.2618335\"}]"],"Address":["1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, N6A 3K7"],"Venue":["Western University Ontario"],"City":["London, Ontario"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"In the Spirit of Atatice:\\nhttps://csktribes.org/more/videos/in-the-spirit-of-atatice/in-the-spirit-of-atatice\\n\\nTo Wood Buffalo, With Love, by Chloe Dragon-Smith and Robert Grandjambe:\\nhttps://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/to-wood-buffalo-national-park-with-love\\n\\nForced Migration:\\nhttps://scalar.usc.edu/works/remnants-wallows-and-outlaws-a-multidisciplinary-exploration-of-bison/forced-migration\\n\\nGardenShip and State at Museum London:\\nhttps://www.gardenship.ca/exhibition\\n\\nBuffalo Treaty:\\nhttps://www.buffalotreaty.com/\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549706768384,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Forced Migration: Bison stories and what they can tell settlers about a past, present, and future on stolen land\n\nAs uninvited guests on Indigenous land, we are continually told that national parks, and our conservation system in general, are a benevolent inheritance from our settler ancestors. The creators of parks and conservation societies crafted archives in the form of magazines and biographies to document the salvation of charismatic species like the bison. In this episode, artist and researcher Michelle Wilson mines these archives to create alternative stories of the bison’s path to conservation. These audio essays reveal how ideologies around capitalism, human exceptionalism, and white supremacy have influenced settler relations to the more-than-human world.\n\nIn this episode, we will hear from poet Síle Englert who helped distill Michelle’s more extended essays into these shorter, affective pieces of prose, and musician and composer Angus Cruikshank whose score enriches Michelle’s audio storytelling.\n\nMichelle’s project seeks to extract narratives from a white supremacist, patriarchal written tradition and play with the immediate and affective possibilities of audio performance and sound design.\n\nThe audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map “Forced Migration”. It is on view at Museum London as part of the GardenShip and State exhibition until January 23rd, 2022.\n\n00:18\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n00:19\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. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music].\n \n\n00:35\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.\n \n\n00:49\tHannah McGregor:\tThere are sounds in the archive, and there are also silences. Here on the podcast, our producers engage closely with what we can hear in archived recordings, but also ask hard questions about the stories behind and around the sounds. When and why was the recording made? Who created this old record, and what story were they trying to tell? How does power function in the archive to uplift some beings and stories, erase others? For everything that we can hear or read in an archive, there are just as many questions about what has not been included, and who has been left out.\n \n\n01:29\tHannah McGregor:\tThe episode we bring you today takes a creative and critical approach to archival records to present a collection of stories about bison, violence, and the history of Canadian conservation. Artist and researcher Michelle Wilson uses archival records to trace what happened to the bison whose descendants ended up on the land now designated as Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta and in most other conservation herds across Turtle Island. Almost all the plains bison in the North American conservation system are descendants from the herds Michelle investigates in her research. With the help of sound designer, Angus Cruickshank and poet Síle Englert, Wilson brings us a collage of critically interpreted and creatively imagined stories. These stories strive to grapple with the impacts of colonialism and to give voice to the more-than-human characters at the heart of the research. Michelle and her collaborators on this episode are special guests from beyond the SpokenWeb network. Their work builds on conversations we have had on this podcast about critically engaging with archival artifacts, the practice of research creation and audio work as a form of scholarship. In addition to appearing here on the podcast, the sound works in this episode are also part of an exhibition called “GardenShip and State” on display at Museum London until late January, 2022. We are delighted to bring you producer Michelle Wilson with Season 3 Episode 3 [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] of the SpokenWeb Podcast: Forced Migration. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music]\n \n\n03:06\tMichelle Wilson:\tHi, my name is Michelle Wilson. I’m an artist, mother and researcher.\n \n\n03:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tBack in 2016, I was lucky enough to be invited to do an artist residency at Riding Mountain National Park. I intended to listen to, record, and learn from bison communication and speak to the people who work with them. It was a thrill to find the bison each day and to sit and watch and listen. I learned so much from those who shared their knowledge about these bison, but just as instructive was what was left unsaid about how they came to be corralled for display at a national park. I have been tracing the story of these bison’s ancestors ever since.\n \n\n03:50\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe audio artworks I’d like to share with you today come together to tell this story; the forced migration of a lineage of bison. I will take you from so-called Saskatchewan to Manitoba, Kansas and Texas, Montana, then Alberta, and finally to Wood Buffalo National Park, which straddles Alberta and the Northwest Territories. This story spans centuries and zooms in and out from microbes on a blade of grass tickling a bisons nose to national policies.\n \n\n04:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tThese short vignettes emerged from a collaboration with poet Síle Englert, who took my 8 to 10-page essays, found their essence, and remixed them into short affective pieces of prose, and Angus Cruickshank, who created layered soundscapes that in a way, bring their own parallel narratives to the pieces. We will hear more from them later.\n \n\n04:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tA note before we listen to these works; I identify as a woman of settler descent, so it was vital for me to tell the story of what settlers did to the bison and their kin. It seemed fitting for me to draw my research from the colonial archive, infuriating as it often was. What I have created here, however, is not a recitation of facts. It is an alternative archive that centers specific and bodied perspectives.\n \n\n05:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tI have found in my research that citing practices did not prevent the transmission of false information and faulty worldviews, so I am taking these stories out of a written tradition. I’m not using the trappings of the academy to give myself authority. My voice as the narrator is never softened by the need to appear objective. On the contrary, it is impassioned and personal. Sometimes I even take on the perspective of a bison. This recentering of the inherited “facts” changes stories of salvation and domination into stories of connection, empathy, and survival.\n \n\n05:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tOur first story takes us to the banks of the north Saskatchewan river in 1873, where the circuitous route to colonial conservation starts.\n \n\n06:08\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] Charles Alloway tried to hold onto a bison bull, to place to anchor them post. But the bull dragged the man, and the rope lacerated his hands, cutting to the bone.\n \n\n06:21\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] Until his dying day, Alloway controlled the myth of how he “saved the buffalo.” His story: the white hero, the repentant slaughterer. His words are the ones that survive in the colonial record.\n \n\n06:33\tMichelle Wilson:\tOne word – half-breed –tried to obscure the body of the Honourable James McKay, Scottish and Cree, trader and guide with the piercing grey eyes.\n \n\n06:45\tMichelle Wilson:\tTogether, McKay and Alloway drove their oxcart down the rutted mud streets and out of Winnipeg to meet a convoy of Métis hunters. Searching for bison to slaughter for hides and pemmican.\n \n\n06:56\tMichelle Wilson:\tA matriarchal band of cows and calves moved through meadows, just emerging from winter’s grip. Grandmothers, aunties, mothers. The bison and must’ve stampeded as the first round of bodies fell. Brown-headed cowbirds took to the sky, their liquid chirps and trills drowned out by hooves and bellows as they abandoned their posts on the bison’s backs.\n \n\n07:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tEncamped at a distance, the women and children heard what they couldn’t see: “a sound deep and moving like a train moving over a bridge… acontinuous deep, steady roar that seems to reach the clouds.”\n \n\n07:36\tMichelle Wilson:\tClose to the carnage, McKay and Alloway felt the guttural calls of anguished mothers resonating in the cavities of their chests. The hunter’s sought cows, their flesh more palatable than the bulls’. Which meant the next generation were in their bellies when they fell.\n \n\n07:54\tMichelle Wilson:\tWomen were brought in to butcher and process the bodies. Calves lingered near their fallen mothers, watching.\n \n\n08:05\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] These “pitiful creatures” were run down or lassoed at McKay’s and Alloway’s command. The partners recognized that the current rate of slaughter could not be maintained.\n \n\n08:16\tMichelle Wilson:\tFive freeborn bison calves were captured, survived, and reproduced, forcibly adopted by domestic cows. But their relationship to the land died.\n \n\n08:28\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn the establishment of Buffalo National Park, Alloway said:\n \n\n08:33\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “The animals will increased under natural conditions of peace contentment. Everyone of them came from my original group three heifers and two bulls.”\n \n\n08:43\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhen the last Canadian bison were being slaughtered in 1878, Alloway sent out a hunter who brought him back 30 bison hides –\n \n\n08:52\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] “We cannot see distant things from the all absorbing present sometimes,”\n \n\n08:56\tMichelle Wilson:\t–he lamented. In trying to anchor the bison bull, Charles Alloway was left with scars on his hands that he carried –\n \n\n09:04\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a low, gravely voice recite simultaneously] –to his grave. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n \n\n09:08\tAngus Cruikshank:\tHi, my name is Angus Cruikshank. I’m a musician and composer. I’m Michelle’s partner as well. I did the score for “Bedson” and all the other tracks to this project and I also did a bit of editing and some of the mixing.\n \n\n09:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tHey Angus, thanks so much for talking to us about your process. Can you speak to the track we’re about to hear, “Bedson” and tell us a bit about what the story means to you and how you approached composing a score for it?\n \n\n09:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think “Bedson” is my favourite track because it’s a very –I don’t know – moving story that has so many different parts to it, and it just comes together so well. And so, I think when I approach the track and listen back to Michelle’s performance of the reading, it’s like this very bittersweet tale of the bison and obviously their relationship to Bedson Stoney Mountain, and the plains in general. And so, I didn’t want to necessarily create like a doom and gloom type sound to it or composition to it, I wanted there to be almost like a pensive reflective type sound where you’re – it is kind of in a minor chord but there are like major chords in it that maybe convey some sort of, not hope but empathy to the story?\n \n\n10:39\tMichelle Wilson:\tI do like how you haven’t made it just a simple minor score because there are moments of lightheartedness in this piece and so I was wondering if you could talk to us about what you were doing with those upper register notes.\n \n\n10:54\tAngus Cruikshank:\tUpper register notes that are just really kind of holding down a beat and so it kind of gives this it – it kind of gives the piece sort of like a galloping feel to it, which I guess you know you could link back to maybe the bison, but also just sort of this running feel. Its like a [Sings] “duhn duhn dat dat dat dat dat”. So I don’t know I just it felt really right and it felt like it really worked for the mood and the theme of the piece.\n \n\n11:25\tMichelle Wilson:\tWhat do you see as the themes in “Bedson” and how did that influence the kind of sonic imagery you came up with?\n \n\n11:32\tAngus Cruikshank:\tI think the theme of the song “Bedson” is one of incarceration and the penitentiary, the structure that still exists today and is still a penitentiary and one of the oldest in Canada if not the oldest. I think a lot of people aren’t aware of that and how it played a role in essentially isolating, confining people who resisted colonization. And kind of the isolation of the penitentiary itself within this vastness. And having lived out there, and sort of seen vastness, that isolation of winter in the prairies, it’s sort of a very beautiful yet morose vibe, because nothing can really survive out there, yet the sun is shining and its 40 below. Yeah, nothing except bison can survive out there and it’s beautiful. And I think it worked really well with, when I picture Stoney Mountain Penitentiary just sort of sitting there alone, or when you listen to it you sort of maybe hear that maybe hopelessness, but maybe frustration, but also like an empathy towards those who are incarcerated there, both human and nonhuman such as the bison. I think musically it works so well, and I think why it is my favourite is because it really captures that vastness I was talking about, the use of delay it’s really just like kind of two chords, and then yeah then a slight variation as the song progresses.\n \n\n13:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tOkay Angus, one last question. We’ve collaborated together for a very long time. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about what it’s like to collaborate by layering on someone else’s words?\n \n\n13:38\tAngus Cruikshank:\tYou’re really interpreting and trying to compliment what is being said, and that can be kind of hard sometimes because the music is there to support the story. You have a lot of leeway, but at the same time it’s really hard to capture the essence of what is being said and it does take time to kind of get that right feeling. Because if you don’t have it then it could distract from the actual story itself, and that is really the most important part.\n \n\n14:13\tMichelle Wilson:\tWell thanks so much Angus, I really do think that you bring life and texture to these pieces and a lot of the empathy that people perceive in them comes from your compositions so thank you, and here is “Bedson”. [Start Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank] It is a testament to how remarkable the sight of bison were, that in 1880, 800 people attended the auction that determined the fate of just 13. Because the bison were once so plentiful here that at a distance, they could have been mistaken for a churning, brownish-black river surging across the plain. The winner of the auction was Samuel L. Bedson, the warden of Stony Mountain Penitentiary. In the early hours of a frigid morning, a tawny bison calf was born onto trembling legs. Still wet with afterbirth, he had barely taken his first tentative steps when his herd, now 14 in number, was roused from slumber by men sent to drive them to their new home.\n \n\n15:22\tMichelle Wilson:\tImagine the wind whipping across a sea of flat, uniform ground on a painfully bright February day. On top of a sudden swell in the land sits a three-story sandy brick building. Dozens of elegant arched windows peer down upon you, the bars not discernable from a distance—that’s what those 14 bison saw. The bison were often corralled in a stone pen near the farm on the prison grounds. This complex was nicknamed “the castle,” and Bedson was its king. He was no great hunter; he was a collector, always trying to domesticate wild animals for the amusement of his family and neighbours. The farm at Stony Mountain housed a collection of wolves, deer, bears, and badgers, but Bedson’s moose were local favourites; a pair had even been trained to pull a handsome sled in the winter.\n \n\n16:17\tMichelle Wilson:\tOn a Christmas afternoon, Bedson tried a similar trick with a two-year-old bison bull. His shaggy brown body was hitched to a toboggan. Eight merry makers loaded on the sled while five or six of the incarcerated men held onto a rope tied around the bison’s neck. Imagine this ludicrous game of inter-species tug-of-war, the free laughing and playing while the prisoners, human and bison, were scared for their lives. A tense calm lasted for about 15 or 20 minutes until suddenly the bull leapt into the air, scattering prisoners and guests into the snow. There was no catching the bull once he had gained his freedom. Months later, Bedson received a letter from North Dakota that a lone young bull had been found grazing with an old rope tied around his neck. Bedson sent a hired man across the border to bring his property back. [End Music: “Bedson” by Angus Cruikshank]\n \n\n17:32\tSíle Englert:\tMy name is Síle Englert. I am a writer, editor, and visual artist, and I feel very grateful to be a small part of this project, in that it was my work to edit in a sort of cut and paste way, like a collage, to take these longer pieces describing the history of the bison and rework them into shorter narratives to be recorded, like storytelling.\n \n\n17:55\tMichelle Wilson:\tSíle, could you tell us a bit about the story you most enjoyed working on?\n \n\n18:00\tSíle Englert:\t“Fight or Flight”, I think is the piece that probably affected me and stayed with me the most. Maybe, because you’ve written it in a first-person perspective from the mind of one of the bison and that means you brought an immediacy to the history. It changed the language you were able to use to describe the experience, allowing human emotions and familial relationships so that the listener completely empathizes with the bison’s and experience. I think the shift to a first-person perspective makes the process of creating this piece, step-by-step even more interesting too. You’ve done an incredible amount of research, collecting historical accounts, stories, and statistics. And collected, the picture that all of this information paints is sad and disturbing, evocative of the horrors and the pointless suffering that humans put these animals through. But in “Fight or Flight” in particular, we hear the story from one of the bison herself. And it’s a sort of magic, I think, to take this pile of numbers and information and create a first person account of some of these moments where you can feel the pain of it right in your chest.\n \n\n19:30\tSíle Englert:\tAnd then you sent the longer story to me and my part I think was another kind of archaeological process: digging through this wealth of matter to find pieces that felt like the essence of the story. And then figuring out how those pieces fit together as a narrative. And there’s there’s an emotional element to the process too. When so much damage was done to both these bison and to the environment that we share, when so much pain was caused, how do you decide what’s most important? What people should hear? I had to make sure I kept enough of the spirit and the experience of the bison as you wrote it, and enough of the horror so that those listening could understand what these creatures went through – and to maintain that organic flow that’s kind of difficult to describe in words that movement you can hear in the story. All of that comes through in the final step, in the recording you’ve done, the sound and the music, these bison, this particular bison comes to life –her wants and needs and experience and pain. I think several steps of distilling this down to its essence from history, to story, from information, to emotion allows those listening to connect with something real, something far beyond numbers and statistics.\n \n\n21:12\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much Síle for that generous and thoughtful reflection. And now here is “Fight or Flight”.\n \n\n \n\n21:22\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental] [Michelle performing ‘Flight or Flight”] We are grazing, hidden in the breaks between sand hills. Always alert, our ears panning for the sounds of men. My body orients toward the wind, waiting for the odour that twangs my fraught nerves and triggers our flight. I don’t want to leave this place. The snow has just melted from the slopes, moistening the thirsty earth below, reviving the scrubby grass after a long winter. There are so few of us, now. So few babies. We cannot let down our guard to breed as we used to. Two lame bulls follow us but they barely have the energy to register when we are in estrus. When we do conceive, our bodies can no longer nourish the unborn. We are haunted by those stolen from us. Mothers who aren’t killed fighting off the snatchers return again and again to the site of their loss. As the night lifts, my body is alive with sensation— rain drizzles, a sweet, pungent balm rises from the earth. I don’t detect them until they are among us. We bolt toward the wind. We cannot stop moving. We might still outrun them. The bulls cannot keep up and drift away, but these predators are not enticed by weakness. Night settles again and they keep pressing us. The sun rises and they are still there. Three nights and days they keep at our heels. Urine, sweat, and dead skin wafts toward me on a breeze exhaled from a canyon mouth. I turn, lead my sisters and their young onto an open prairie. My instincts have betrayed me, betrayed us. I hear the oscillating whistle of a lasso and the desperate, grunting cry of a calf. I hear him fall. A thud, thud, thud, dragging and scraping. The man’s rope finds another of our young and pulls him down. But now we know what he is here for. My sister is a blur of bristled hair as she charges him. There is a crack of thunder, and mushrooming from the deafening sound is the acrid, smoky, rotting smell of water that cannot breathe. My sister staggers a few strides from the source of her pain and sinks to the earth. Disoriented by the sound and smell of death, I barely register the hum of the rope when it strikes out and brings down our last baby. [End Music: Low-pitched String Instrumental]\n \n\n24:14\tMichelle Wilson:\tThis next story runs parallel to the one you just heard. “Fight or Flight” and this story “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” were created from autobiographies of a man named Buffalo Jones. “Fight or Flight” uses his observations to understand the beings he prayed on, while “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name” confronts the attitudes used to justify the hunt.\n \n\n24:41\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Piano and String Instrumental] [Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] Some people would have you believe that Charles Jesse ‘Buffalo’ Jones got his nickname for his conservation efforts. Please don’t believe them. Jones heard God’s call in Genesis 1:26 –.\n \n\n24:54\tVoice Actor:\t[Church Choir Singers Underlaid] “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over all the earth and over everything that creepeth upon the earth.”\n \n\n25:17\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Michelle performing “How Buffalo Jones Got His Name”] – He set out to capture the last remaining remnants of the great southern bison herd, not as some noble conservation effort, but as breeding stock for his own grand experiment. On the first three expeditions, he took only calves. He learned as he went, and the bison he encountered suffered for his mistakes. The calves refused buckets of water and called relentlessly for their mothers. Jones and his men rode out, looking for range cows to forcibly milk, but instead found two of the bison mothers wandering the site of their loss. Jones shot one of them for her meat and milked her dead body. When calves became rare, he resolved not to leave any bison on the plain. Capture myopathy was not identified until 1964, diagnosed in another endangered species. The stress of being captured triggers the creature’s biological defense mechanisms, and the prolonged or intense engagement of these mechanisms causes massive, often fatal system failure. The animal suffers lethargy, muscle weakness, incoordination, rapid breathing, shivering, dark red urine, and hypothermia. Their blood turns to acid. Their muscles suffer necrosis and die as the animal is still struggling for life. This is how the last of the Southern bison died. Jones believed that there was no place for wild bison on their former ranges. Man’s mastery transformed these arid tracts into productive farms “made exceptionally fertile by the manure, bones, and flesh of the millions which lived and died there during centuries past.” With a name like Buffalo Jones, it would be easy to believe that he saved the bison. [End Music: Piano and Strings Instrumental]\n \n\n27:35\tMichelle Wilson:\tAfter Buffalo Jones’ bison schemes went bust, he sold his herd, a mix of bison from the Southern Plains and decedents of the Saskatchewan calves, to two ranchers at the Flathead Reservation in Montana. These two ranchers, Michael Pablo and Charles Allard were adding to their captive herd. But how had these bison come to be protected within the Flathead Valley? Tracking down this history was, for me, a journey through a twisted game of racist telephone. It was really fascinating, in the way that a disaster is fascinating, to see how white authors used quotes and citations in articles and dissertations to give legitimacy to each garbled version of the past. I followed this path until at last, I arrived at a telling shared by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation. In the show notes, we’ve linked to a video produced by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes about the return of the bison and their fight to continue their stewardship and sovereignty over their lands. You will hear the following two stories back-to-back, they share how the bison came to be on the land, and how they were forced from it.\n \n\n28:53\tMichelle Wilson:\tThe search for facts goes in circles. I find a fact and follow it back to its source, only to find every new telling contaminated. [Start Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds] Who first brought the bison back to the Flathead Reservation? A white trader named Charles Aubrey inserted himself into history by recording his story.\n \n\n \n\n29:12\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Reading Charles Aubrey’s words] In the year 1877, I was located at the Marias River and engaged in the Indian trade…Among the Pend d’Oreille Indians… from across the mountains, was (a)… man… whose Christian name was Sam. He was known to the Blackfeet as Short Coyote… A rather comely girl had attracted the attention of Sam… (and) she became his wife. I told him very frankly that he had made a mistake…I said to him; “You are a strong Catholic and your Church does not permit polygamous marriages” He feared he would be punished by the fathers of St. Ignatius Mission…I thought there was still a chance to make peace with the soldier band of his tribe by getting a pardon from the fathers… I then suggested…he rope some buffalo calves…and then give them as a peace offering to the fathers at the mission. Sam herded his buffalo with the milk stock for five days, resting and making arrangements for his trip across the mountains… seven head in all is my recollection of the bunch… I afterward learned… that immediately upon his arrival upon the reservation he was arrested and severely flogged… In the course of time I heard of Sam’s death…passing away peacefully in his lodge…\n \n\n30:24\tMichelle Wilson:\tOther tellings of Sam’s story seep into my consciousness as I wade deeper into newspapers and websites. Racism oozing between every word. They describe Walking Coyote’s meeting with Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, who bought the bison calves. They speak of him “brooding… over gleaming piles of wealth.” They record his death as “a less-than-heroic exit” under a Missoula bridge, resulting from “a drinking spree,” and “one that matched the spirit in which he had lived and captured the calves that were now prospering on the rich grasslands of the Flathead.” The words sit like bile in my mouth. Walking Coyote’s legacy as a drunk, greedy Indian became entrenched in the dominant archive. I wonder if the tendrils of Aubrey’s story have made their way into others. Did interviewers seek out those that would corroborate their stories? Or did the keepers of more profound knowledge withhold it, for fear of contamination? In 1978, when he was 87 years old, Pend d’Oreille Elder and historian Mose Chouteh recorded the story of how bison returned to the Flathead reservation. I will let Mose Chouteh’s words speak for themselves:\n \n\n31:40\tMichelle Wilson, reciting Mose Chouteh:\t[Reading Mose Chouteh’s words] While I was growing up I heard this told by many elders…It is about a man called Ataticeʔ. (While on a hunt several buffalo followed their camp) And so in the evening, (the men) went into the tipi. The chiefs were smoking… Ataticeʔ said, “Hello. I have come to ask you, my chiefs. I think that it would be good if we took these buffalo back to our land to live there.” Some of the chiefs said, “that’s exactly right.” And some chiefs said… if we take them back to our land, we will be tied down… We will not be able to go anywhere. We will just be in one place as we gather our food.” The chiefs disagreed with each other. Half of them said yes and the other half said no. (After three days the council remained at an impasse and out of respect for the tribal need for consensus on major decisions Ataticeʔ withdrew his proposal). As he mounted his horse… He waved at these buffalo, like sending them to different parts of the prairies. Ataticeʔ said to the buffalo… “it will be up to each of us whatever happens to you and whatever happens to me. That is all.” And all these buffalo turned towards the east, the rising sun… They were going away. And Ataticeʔ cried. Ataticeʔ’s son Ɫatatí having the same deep connection to the buffalo as his father, renewed his father’s request to capture calves in the 1870s. The council, seeing the effects of the unchecked settler slaughter of the buffalo, approved Ɫatatí’s plan. Six calves were brought over the mountain range, they soon flourished and became twelve. Ɫatatí’s mother, meanwhile, remarried Samwel Walking Coyote. While Ɫatatí was away, two people went to see Samwel. One was called Charles Allard, and the other man was called Michel Pablo. These two men met with him and told Samwel, “we’ve come to buy your buffalo.” Samwel said, “ok, it will be so…” Ɫatatí returned to his house… all the buffalo were gone… he asked his mother, “where are my buffalo?” And his mother told him, “your stepfather sold them.” And Ɫatatí cried. [End Music: Intermittent Percussion, Tonal Sounds]\n \n\n34:07\tMichelle Wilson:\tMichel Pablo’s bison were sold to the Canadian government in 1907. [Start Music: Xylophone Instrumental] Extraction from the land was violent and rail travel for bison was perilous. I wonder if the removal triggered memories of their previous transfer from Kansas to Montana. The only recorded death during that transfer of bison was a calf who was trampled to death in the stifling, shifting, rattling cars. In my imagination, the calf is still a reddish caramel colour. She is not yet weaned. Was she with her mother? Had her mother been born into captivity or was she dragged by lasso from her own mother’s side? I know that somewhere in her matrilineal line, a cow fought a man to keep her calf and probably died in the process. Did this trampled calf carry that memory in her bones? Did her mother listen to the imperatives of her instincts and keep her calf close? Did her own feet bring her calf’s death? The egg that became my daughter existed in my genetic code when I was an egg inside my mother. What of my mother’s trauma is playing out in my daughter’s body? How does this kind of trauma make its way into genetic material? They say a butterfly has sense memories carried over from its caterpillar self, even though it basically becomes a gooey soup of cells in the chrysalis. I imagine the phantom call of a calf falling under shifting panicked feet, echoing in the body of another cow who died shortly after being loaded onto a wagon train on the Flathead Reservation. Cowboys loaded her into a reinforced wagon without her calf. The calf grunted and called to his mother. The call of her offspring drove her into a frenzy. In desperation she rammed her horns through the two inches of wood that imprisoned her. Her horns became lodged in the wood and in thrashing against it she broke her own neck. She was butchered, and her hide sold. I don’t know what happened to her calf. I know that 19 other bison died in the round up. 708 were shipped off the Flathead Reservation.653 made it to the ill-fated Buffalo National Park. 55 stayed at Elk Island National Park and founded a herd there. The colonial story of bison conservation is one of rescue. The Confederated Salish And Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty, are writing a new and yet ancient story. It is theirs to tell. It is incumbent on us to find it. [End Music: Xylophone Instrumental]\n \n\n37:11\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe now arrive at Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. The archival information around this now-defunct park demonstrates an absolute indifference to the agency of other beings and to the specificity of this place. The result was an ecological and economic disaster. In this piece, I tried to speak with two voices, one that personifies the Parks service’s approach to resource management and another that takes the lives of bison and their kin seriously.\n \n\n37:47\tMichelle Wilson:\tNumbers. [Start Music: Atmospheric Instrumental] They transmogrified breathing, eating, shitting, connected bison into numbers. That’s what happens when a being becomes a commodity –\n \n\n37:57\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] 20 to 60 million bison ranged North America before colonial contact.\n \n\n38:03\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Surveyors and homestead inspectors came looking for a home for the government’s newly acquired bison. What they saw was land that had no value because it could not be settled or farmed. It was worthless, but maybe it could be made useful. This place, southwest of Wainwright, Alberta, became Buffalo National Park in 1908. Reducing the bison’s lives to numbers –\n \n\n38:29\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] In 1888 there were 103 wild plains bison in North America.\n \n\n40:13\tMichelle Wilson:\t–The land and the bison had sustained one another. The bison compacted the arid ground, helping it hold on to precious moisture. Cows and bulls felt their way across the grassland, stems and blades tickling their nostrils as soil stirred up by a roving muzzle and probing tongue was inhaled –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] By 1912, 748 bison had arrived at Buffalo National Park from Michel Pablo’s herd.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–There was an intimate interconnection between bison and the thousands of “microbes; fungi, bacteria, and protozoa” populating each square centimetre of forage. These microscopic beings had the enzymes to break down cellulose in the grasses the bison eats. Neither being could live without this symbiotic relationship –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] The government wanted quick and exponential growth. By 1922, 6,780 bison were sharing the park’s limited resources with large deer, moose, and elk populations. The land strained under the pressure of all these mouths and bodies.\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t–Reciprocity and movement had co-evolved over centuries, enabling the dunes and desert-like conditions of the Hills to sustain vast herds over the winter months –\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson + Voice Actor:\t[Michelle and a deep voice recite simultaneously] Over 19,141 bison were slaughtered over the park’s thirty-year existence.With Canada’s involvement in World War II looming, the park was declared a failure. On December 30, 1939, the last bison were shot; untold numbers of deer, moose, and elk followed them to the abattoir. [End Music: Atmospheric Instrumental]\n \n\n40:20\tMichelle Wilson:\t– Just numbers.\n \n\n40:23\tMichelle Wilson:\tWe have been on a journey through space and time. In this final piece, we arrive at Wood Buffalo National Park in the year 2021. I wrote this closing section in response to an article by Chloe Dragon Smith and Robert Grandjambe in Briarpatch magazine. We’ve linked it in the show notes as well. Chloe and Robert live off the land within their ancestral territory, which falls within the bounds of Wood Buffalo. Their article is a missive from the future to their future children. It references an imagined fulsome and personal apology delivered by Parks Canada to the 11 Indigenous nations and councils whose traditional territories the sprawling Wood Buffalo occupies. In this section, I used the archival information around Wood Buffalo to imagine what that apology would need to atone for. This apology felt like the only way to address the ongoing violations at Wood Buffalo, but also not nearly enough. So, for me, it is simply a place to start.\n \n\n41:38\tMichelle Wilson:\t[Start Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound ] I want to speak to you today about what we did— our predecessors— the many branches of the Dominion government and the people who ran them; the treaty negotiators, the Department of the Interior, and Parks Canada. The creation of Wood Buffalo National Park was an act of “ecological imperialism.” From its first inception, the Park was designed to be a place that excluded Indigenous peoples, a place where Canada could extinguish treaty rights. We created a swath of Land where vital relationships between human and non-human have been severed. We saw the bison as an exploitable resource and used their bodies to make money. Our park wardens slaughtered bison one day and persecuted your hunters the next. We turned exercising your rights and sovereignty into a privilege. We used racial dogmas to determine who had hereditary rights within the Park, and we used a politics of purity to drive communities apart. We separated families. We ignored letters pleading to be reunited. We contributed to the residential school system and intentionally engendered dependency instead of acknowledging your right to hunt and practice lifeways on your own lands. We chose to believe that pulling the strand of bison from this web wouldn’t cause it to unravel. We armed police and then wardens to arrest and harass your guardians. We created a policy of surveillance and intimidation. Even when we built abattoirs and killed hundreds a year, still we kept you from the bison. Our attachment to conceptual borders extends to policing the boundaries between Wood Bison and Plains Bison, between pure and hybrid, between contaminated and uncontaminated. Steeped in white supremacy, we did not see how these logics of purity were weaponized against both bison and your people. These imagined borders place bison and Indigenous peoples outside the protective bounds of white and human. This pattern has continued. Our pools of knowledge are shallow, and our spatial and temporal scales are different than yours. Your pools of knowledge are deep and dependent on a connection to place and language. We have come to embrace the term “two-eyed seeing,” as envisaged by Mi’kmaw Elder Dr. Albert Marshall. It is a concept of “learning to see from one eye with the strengths of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and from the other eye with the strengths of mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing, and to use both these eyes together for the benefit of all.” But first, we acknowledge that for nearly a century our laws stripped Indigenous peoples of their treaty rights if they pursued a university education. We tried to outlaw “two-eyed seeing”. We are ashamed that we fought for nearly a century to avoid fulfilling our Treaty commitments to your Nations. We apologize to you. We apologize for making your communities fight for what was theirs. We would like to work with you, the descendants of the dispossessed, to make restitution for these wrongs. To move beyond access and towards true sovereignty on the Land. We recognize that decolonization is not a metaphor. [End Music: Reverberating Tonal Sound]\n \n\n45:37\tMichelle Wilson:\tThank you so much for coming with me on this journey. The audio pieces I have shared with you today have many lives. They can also be experienced as part of an interactive textile map. It will be on view as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition at Museum London, in London, Ontario. We will link to the exhibition and documentation of the piece in the show notes as well. I hope that this collection of stories has illuminated how bison conservation has been a tool of colonization. The sources I have drawn from want us to believe conservation stories are ones of rescue, but as Indigenous literature scholar Pauline Wakeham puts it, conservation narratives attempt “to overwrite colonial violence” and locate it in a distant past. If you are interested in a future where a decolonized relationship with bison exists, please check out the work being done by Dr. Leroy Little Bear, The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, and many other signatories of the Buffalo Treaty. We’ve linked to an excellent site that documents the work of the Buffalo Treaty to get you started on this journey\n \n\n46:57\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music] 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 producer this month is Michelle Wilson. The audio artworks featured in this episode were originally created as part of Michelle’s interactive textile map, “Forced Migration”. It’s on view at Museum London as part of the “GardenShip and State” exhibition until January 23rd, 2020. See the links in the show notes and the image gallery on our episode webpage to engage more deeply with the research and stories behind this episode. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr and our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about SpokenWeb 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 with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. 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Our Trailer, 20 September 2021, Burr and McGregor"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/"],"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":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creator_names_search":["Judith Burr","Hannah McGregor"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Judith Burr\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/20153713810358661443\",\"name\":\"Hannah McGregor\",\"dates\":\"1984-\",\"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/4df61375-c766-4dc5-8d86-ca0f12d5fc53/audio/f79cc9ff-2d57-41a0-a9e2-aaf1fbbc5216/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:02:06\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"2,018,043 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e0-trailer-2021\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/welcome-to-season-3-our-trailer/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-09-20\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/123757617\",\"venue\":\"University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7\",\"latitude\":\"49.94217525\",\"longitude\":\"-119.39902819775307\"}]"],"Address":["3333 University Way, Kelowna, BC V1V 1V7"],"Venue":["University of British Colombia Okanagan AMP Lab"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Clips Featured:\\n\\nKPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from\\nS2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\\n\\nMavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from\\nS2E9 “Mavis Gallant Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\\n\\nMathieu Aubin, in\\nS2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\\n\\n“Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, and Katherine McLeod in\\nS2E8 “Talking about Talking”\\n\\nPenn Kemp, from\\nS2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\\n\\nWisdom Agorde, from\\nS2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1: The Language of Talking Drums”\\n\\nKlara du Plessis, from\\nS2E1 “Deep Curation: Experimenting with the Poetry Reading as Practice”\\n\\nStacey Copeland, from\\nS2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\\n\\nTreena Chambers, from\\nS2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”\\n\\nMusic –\\n“Slapstick” by Moon Juice\\nfrom Blue Dot Sessions\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549762342913,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Another season is upon us! At the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue to bring you episodes that journey into literary history and explore our contemporary responses to it. This season, researchers from across the SpokenWeb community – and a few special guests – produce audio stories that creatively engage with literary recordings in the SpokenWeb archives and put this archival history into context. We will dive deep into clips of preserved sound, reflect on the power of poetic performance, and consider how sound studies can inform our understandings of history and literature. We will look closely at both the individuals and communities that have shaped our literary world. We will consider how our podcast episodes can be a form of scholarship. We will listen closely together.\n\nThis podcast is for everyone who holds a love for literature, sound, archives, or history – and for all those who love learning something new by listening. We hope you’ve enjoyed our past episodes, and we can’t wait to share this new season with you – coming to your podcast feeds on October 4, 2021!\n\nWe would love to hear your reactions and ideas to our stories. If you appreciate the podcast, leave us a rating and a comment on Apple Podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada.\n\n(00:03)\tHannah McGregor\t[Start Music: Upbeat Instrumental] What is it about a voice –.\n(00:07)\tAudio Recording, KPFA recording of Robert Hogg reading at Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965, from S2E10 “Robert Hogg and the Widening Circle of Return”\t…and the voice said, “walk” –.\n(00:07)\t\nHannah McGregor\n– that can bring Canada’s literary past back here into the present?\n(00:13)\nAudio Recording, Mavis Gallant, SFU, 1984, from S2E9 “Mavis Gallant, Part 2: The Paratexts of ‘Grippes and Poche’ at SFU”\n[Sound Effect: Tape Clicking Into Recorder] You see I’m a fetishist, the watch has to be there and not there.\n(00:15)\nHannah McGregor\nWhat might have been forgotten if no one had pressed record or listened to these voices in the archives?\n(00:24)\nMathieu Aubin, in S2E2 “Lesbian Liberation Across Media: A Sonic Screening”\n[Sounds of a printing press] Like a cacaophony of lesbian liberation print sounds.\n(00:27)\nHannah McGregor\nOn the SpokenWeb Podcast, our producer researchers have investigated the stories behind the sounds [Audio Recording: Intake of breath] we’ve saved. [Audio Recording: Intake of breath].\n(00:36)\nAudio Recording, “Listen to Black Womxn”, by jamilah malika, from S2E8 “Talking about talking”\n[Audio Recording: Intake of breath, repeated] Listen to Black women/ As a Black woman.\n(00:39)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve immersed you in the mystique and –\n(00:41)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n[Underlaid sound] [Repetitive non-verbal sounds as sound poem is performed].\n(00:41)\nHannah McGregor\n– joy of Penn Kemp sound poems.\n(00:43)\nPenn Kemp, from S2E3 “Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp”\n–can I hear you please? [End Music: Upbeat strings and cello]\n(00:46)\nHannah McGregor\nWe’ve grappled with questions of sonic communication in our episode, Drum Codes.\n(00:51)\nWisdom Agorde, from S2E4 “Drum Codes Pt 1”\nThe talking drum travels several kilometres. [Audio Recording: Talking Drum] [Start Music:  SpokenWeb Instrumental]\n(00:57)\nHannah McGregor\nWith the deep curation of poetry readings –\n(01:00)\nKlara du Plessis, from S2E1 “Deep Curation”\n[Audio Effect: Voice Echo] I wanted to really curate a poetry reading.\n(01:02)\nHannah McGregor\n– with teaching audible history in “Cylinder Talks”–\n(01:05)\nStacey Copeland, from S2E5 “Cylinder Talks – Pedagogy in Literary Sound Studies”\nInviting students to engage in audio production.\n(01:08)\nHannah McGregor\n– and, with the ethics of listening.\n(01:10)\nTreena Chambers, from S2E7 “Listening Ethically to the SpokenWeb”:\nYou don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for just for the sake of listening.\n(01:19)\nHannah McGregor:\nNow in season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast, we continue this audible research and storytelling. We have new stories to look forward to, more histories of Canadian writers and poets, more on the technologies of talking drums, and more explorations of the places that preserving sonic history can take us as tools of memory, teaching, and wonder. Whether you’re a lover of literature or a sound studies scholar, this podcast has something to share with you. We hope you’ll subscribe and join us for season three of the SpokenWeb Podcast coming to your podcast feeds on October 4th. [End Music: SpokenWeb Instrumental Music]\n "],"score":2.4307246}]