In conjunction with the PuSh Festival and the play Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, Faith Moosang will speak on the act of collecting vernacular photography and the myriad reasons why one might be obsessed by such a fruitless endeavour.

Faith Moosang is a photographic artist who has amassed a large collection of vernacular photography that includes photo albums numbering in the hundreds, numerous home movies, slide collections and other ephemera related to the domestic sphere and the remembrance of family. She is currently creating a work about the empire of media, dirty money and the amassing of classical statuary which is based on a slide collection created by an unknown tourist who visited Hearst Castle in the 1960s.

Moosang is offering a money-back guarantee that you will be fascinated by her talk.

Performance Works, Granville Island
Saturday February 2, 2008
2:30 p.m.
Free admission, satisfaction guaranteed

The talk precedes the matinee performance of Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut, a play based on found photographs.

 

Stephen Osborne’s Letters to Subscribers are now available online.

• Read the infamous summer fiction rant.
• Learn how photos can trigger memory.
• Find out how Geist’s original name went down the toilet.

To catch up on what you’ve missed or reread your favourites, click here.

The Squamish Chief and the Squamish Writers Group invite entries to the 2008 Sea to Sky Literary Contest in any of five categories. Entries should involve the Sea to Sky region in some way—recreation, history, natural beauty, etc.

Contest is open to residents of B.C.
Deadline June 1, 2008.
Cash prizes and publication awarded.

For more information, click here.

Call for Submissions
to a forthcoming Anthology of Short Fiction from Invisible Publishing
www.invisiblepublishing.com

INFRASTRUCTURE

“Make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers.”
—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

A story is a collection of words—old, used words, chewed over by a million million mouths—that a man somehow uses to lay down a foundation of what is particular only to him. Networks, neighbourhoods, relationships, language. How do existing structures—material, social, psychological, imagined—allow for things to take place? How do we use them? What does it mean to live nested within systems that were not created by you, or even for you to use? A woman rides her bike the wrong way down a one-way street—is it resistance? rebellion? careless habit? A story.

Created spaces encourage certain activities and repel others: the city of Seattle created a water-staircase so spawning salmon could follow uninhibited the maps laid out in their fish-brains. In Montreal indigent people are banned from public parks after midnight. Large areas of urban Detroit are reverting to prairie. We are looking for short fiction and creative nonfiction that addresses and works with these ideas of built systems—telephones, plumbing, gossip, suburbs—and the practices that take place within their grasp. Pieces that experiment with text and language as an infrastructure are encouraged, but “traditional” fiction is also warmly welcomed. Up to 5,000 words.

INVISIBLE PUBLISHING is committed to working with writers who might not ordinarily be published and distributed commercially. All submissions will be considered. Chosen writers will be compensated for their pieces.

Submissions must be postmarked December 31st, 2007.
Send Word files to anna@invisiblepublishing.com , or mail to
Invisible/Infrastructure
c/o #3-765 Champagneur
Montreal, QC H2V 3P9

Selected from over 1, 300 magazines, newsletters and journals, Geist has been nominated for the 19th Annual Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing. Other Best Writing nominees include: The Believer, Maisonneuve, The New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

Click here for a complete list of this year’s nominees.

Winners will be announced in the January-February 2008 issue of the Utne Reader, so stay tuned!

 

Vancouver memory collective

announces the
L A U N C H
of the

Memory Festival

An ongoing festival of events and exhibitions
that share a central focus: memory
and the questions that memory provokes.

at the

LISTEL HOTEL, 1300 Robson Street, Vancouver

November 11, 2007, 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Co-sponsored by the Listel Hotel

SFU Writing and Publishing Program, Harbour Centre

The Geist Foundation (Geist magazine)

Rumble Theatre Productions

 

After a year of brainstorming, debating, tweaking and tinkering, the all-new geist.com has leapt into the cyberworld. Hats off to Dave Egan for direction and programming, Bay Dodd for design and redesign, and to Sarah Maitland, C. E. Coughlan, Patty Osborne, Carra Simpson and Laura Potter for content-wrangling. The Geist Foundation, noted for putting the North back into North America since 1990, welcomes you to a site where you can always expect a salubrious mix of ideas and culture, 100% made in Canada.

Geist is the only Canadian magazine that publishes the writing of internationally renowned writer, translator and reader, Alberto Manguel, and we’re happy to announce that many of Alberto Manguel’s Geist columns are now available at geist.com. Click here to read and enjoy!