Entries in kelley jo burke (61)

Saturday
Apr012023

Kelley Jo Burke wins City of Regina Writing Award for new play "Rigby"

For the fourth time, KJB win the CRWA--here's the judges' comments re her work in progress "Rigby." 

“Rigby,” a play about pain, disability, the measure of a life, the measure of death, is strange, sharp, and surprising. Its transformations of set and character are like live-action animation on stage as it takes a fantastical premise and renders it plausible through its assured voice and characterization. Its marvelous premise introduces the banshees who operate in the small pocket between life and death. It consistently offers wit and humour expressed through the offbeat but richly imagined characters as it philosophizes on the relationships between bodies, disability, and narratives."
The jury consisted of Canadian writers Anne Fleming and Yusuf Saadi:
Anne Fleming is the author of five books of fiction and poetry including Gay Dwarves of America, poemw, and The Goat, a novel for children. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award, the Journey Prize, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. The Goat was named one of the ten best children’s books of the year by The Wall Street Journal and the New York Public Library. She teaches at UBC’s Okanagan Campus.
Yusuf Saadi’s first collection Pluviophile was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in literary journals including The Malahat Review, Vallum, Brick, and Best Canadian Poetry. He currently resides in Montreal.
I will be presented with this year’s City of Regina Writing Award event on Thursday May 11, 2023 at 7:00 pm at Wascana Place (2900 Wascana Drive) in Regina, Sask. This will be a free event open to the public.

Wednesday
Sep142022

Please please please.....

This message from my beloved Dancing Sky Theatre"

 

In 2020 we planned to do a show called THE CURST by Kelley Jo Burke. But 2020 didn’t go as planned and it was cancelled. Now THE CURST is back on our schedule for 2023 Fingers crossed đŸ€ž things go right this season!
#dancingskytheatre #thecurst #hopeful #pandorasbox

 

May be an image of 6 people, people sitting, people playing musical instruments, guitar and indoor

 

Wednesday
Sep142022

KJB wins first for fiction in Wine Country Writers' Festival Contest. 

Image: Live Author Readings at Wine Country Writers' Festival Tickets ...

https://images.app.goo.gl/4GBbx4MofoGZS4598
I had forgotten that the Wine 
Country Writing Festival competition was open to anyone working in English . I will be an anthology with people from the United States , the UK and all over Canada . So cool!

" Congratulation to all the entrants in this years WCWF Writing Contest. We're so proud of each and every one of you. Always keep in mind that though you may not have won, you've still got a story that needs to find a home. It only takes one yes. Don't stop trying. Good Luck.AND THE WINNERS ARE...
Poetry
Honourable Mention: Reaching
by
Kisti Ornellas of Lanesborough, Massachusetts
~~~
Third Place: Little Girl World
by
Madeline Medensky of Kitchener, Ontario 
~~~
Second Place: A Vernal Vision
by 
Daniel Moreschi of West Glamorgan, 
South Wales UK
~~~
First Place: The Moment in Which I Love Her
by 
Lesley-Anne Evans or Kelowna, B.C. 
Nonfiction
Honourable Mention: Paris Attacks
by 
Cherie Hanson, Kelowna, B.C.
~~~
Honourable Mention: Roller Magic
by 
Ryan Murphy of Staten Island, New York
~~~
Third Place: Tentacles
by 
Heather MacDonald of Penticton, B.C.
~~~
Second Place: From Rats to Monks: A Needed Tune-up
by 
Rosemary Potter of Hartland, Wisconsin
~~~
First Place: Cabin Seizure 
by 
Marilyn Kriete of Kelowna, B.C.
~~~
Fiction
Honourable Mention: Birthday Camel
by 
Jay Royston of Coldstream, B.C.
~~~
Third Place: Time Capsule
by 
Kim Bigelow of Edmond, Oklahoma
~~~
Second Place: Liebert's Report
by
Brian Davidson of Surrey, B.C.
~~~
First Place: Everything's got a moral only if you can find it.
by 
Kelley Jo Burke of Regina, Saskatchewan"
https://images.app.goo.gl/4GBbx4MofoGZS4598I had forgotten that the Wine Country Writing Festival competition was open to anyone working in English . I will be an anthology with people from the United States , the UK and all over Canada . So cool!" Congratulation to all the entrants in this years WCWF Writing Contest. We're so proud of each and every one of you. Always keep in mind that though you may not have won, you've still got a story that needs to find a home. It only takes one yes. Don't stop trying. Good Luck.AND THE WINNERS ARE...PoetryHonourable Mention: ReachingbyKisti Ornellas of Lanesborough, Massachusetts~~~Third Place: Little Girl WorldbyMadeline Medensky of Kitchener, Ontario ~~~Second Place: A Vernal Visionby Daniel Moreschi of West Glamorgan, South Wales UK~~~First Place: The Moment in Which I Love Herby Lesley-Anne Evans or Kelowna, B.C. NonfictionHonourable Mention: Paris Attacksby Cherie Hanson, Kelowna, B.C.~~~Honourable Mention: Roller Magicby Ryan Murphy of Staten Island, New York~~~Third Place: Tentaclesby Heather MacDonald of Penticton, B.C.~~~Second Place: From Rats to Monks: A Needed Tune-upby Rosemary Potter of Hartland, Wisconsin~~~First Place: Cabin Seizure by Marilyn Kriete of Kelowna, B.C.~~~FictionHonourable Mention: Birthday Camelby Jay Royston of Coldstream, B.C.~~~Third Place: Time Capsuleby Kim Bigelow of Edmond, Oklahoma~~~Second Place: Liebert's ReportbyBrian Davidson of Surrey, B.C.~~~First Place: Everything's got a moral only if you can find it.by Kelley Jo Burke of Regina, Saskatchewan"

Wednesday
Sep142022

And another from Susan Haley at the Fiddlehead

Here;s another from the great Fiddlehead magaize

With Earmarks of Memoir: A Review by Susan Haley of Kelley Jo Burke's "Wreck" and Michelle Porter's "Approaching Fire"

With Earmarks of Memoir

Wreck, a very anxious memoir, Kelley Jo Burke. radiant press, 2021.

Approaching Fire, Michelle Porter. Breakwater, 2020.

I used to ask my creative writing class on the first day, “Are you interested in writing fiction or memoir?” But I gradually came to realize that there is no real difference, that the same bag of tricks is used in both, dramatic irony, dialogue, characterization, switching temporal order. The question is only how much truth you want to stir into the mix — or perhaps I should say, how much you dare. These two books take two very different approaches to what we seem nowadays to be calling “creative non-fiction.”

Is Wreck a memoir or is it a novel? Or somewhere in between? In the riddling “About the Author” that serves as the preface Kelley Jo Burke says she is a liar, a recovering liar.

 

The rather wonderful author bio on the last page (160 — this is a short book), which says she has been a CBC producer, playwright, author of four books, winner of numerous prestigious awards muddies the waters even further. Can this accomplished writer really be the wreck of the title?

This does not seem at first to be a particularly tightly written book. It circles and circles back around the author’s early childhood memories of her grandparents’ cottage “at the lighthouse,” the Nubble, a famous lighthouse on the New England coast, perched upon a small island.

It is the grandparents whom the nostalgia — or is it instead a kind of terror — focusses upon, the gentle anxious grandmother, Teen, and the irascible violent grandfather. When she grows up, she pays this cottage two visits. In 1996, she throws her recently deceased grandmother’s collection of whale figurines off the rocks into the ocean, in a symbolic gesture of — what? We are not sure.

The early parts of the book are in a way the biography of the author’s anxiety.

          I am going to feel like this most of my life: full of hanging on. Full of fear the way I am full of blood. Anxiety doesn’t mean being                        worried. It means your body knowing that you, or someone you love, will die in the next moment. It will be decades before I                            understand that not everyone is like this. That most of you don’t walk into a room and instantly run a mental movie of everything upon            which you could impale yourself before reaching the couch.

She is groping to find the origins of this anxiety in her (quite conventional) upbringing, her father one of the American academics who migrated to Canada, her mother’s family, buttoned-up old New England stock, who look down upon the Irish in her father.

Kelley Jo depicts her family as “the Addams family” of Winnipeg. “Odd, that’s how I remember us.”

They were violent children.

          Torment my brother and you’d be on your ass, head-butted by me, clothes-lined by Jess. Look at my sister wrong, and Steve would                smile and say, “I will end you. (And mean it . . .)

Kelley Jo’s father dies of a brain tumour in what was evidently a protracted and very difficult time for the family. Her brother dies while still in his 40s.

There is a quite surreal and hilarious episode where she renounces her American citizenship. The disbelief of the American authorities is the centrepiece in this vignette: “Sugar, once you calm down we both know you’ll change your mind.”

          America seemed to see my Canadian citizenship as an act of treason when I was dealing with the minions of Bush Jr. This time I’ve              not only said yes to Canada, I’ve said piss-off to the U.S.

Kelley has a patient loving husband, Eric, who is really there for her, in spite of her disbelief that this could be so, her crippling anxiety. It is he who goes with her in 2018, back to the cottage at the lighthouse, where she finally comes to terms with her memory of her grandfather.

Up to this return and final visit, the book has all the earmarks of a memoir: a meditation upon events of the past, not necessarily in temporal order, but as they come up for the author, and a kind of “warts and all” self-description, through which they are filtered.

But the last part of the book begins to have some of the dynamics of a novel. How did it really work out in 1996, when Kelley visited her grandfather after the grandmother’s death? He was already in the grips of some form of dementia.

Did he ask: “Could I come up they’uh and live with you?” Did she take him home with her, and look after him till he died?

          He’s a pissing, mean horrorshow, but everyone knows what you have to do when you have a sick old man alone and howling.

She makes three stabs at telling what happened here. And then comes the story she has been withholding all along, the way the beloved grandmother died.

I liked this book better and better as I read along, as I began to see where the author was taking me, that it was not just an exercise in self-absorption. (This is, after all, a criticism that could be levelled at any memoir.) But I think I should offer a kind of trigger alert: “Some readers may find this material disturbing,” or some such formula. The no holds barred approach she takes to her personal attributes and her sex life may offer more information than many readers are able to tolerate.

Approaching Fire is also a kind of memoir, but takes a very different approach. This book has more of the modern creative nonfiction piece than the novel about it. Michelle Porter is tracking down the musical career of her great grandfather, Robert Goulet, a Métis fiddler who was a performer and recording artist in the 1930s.

          Curiosity started it all. All my life, I wanted to know why you — great grandfather, Pépé, Bob — moved away from Manitoba. It was                where your music was born; it was where all your relations lived. . . . I couldn’t understand it.

Porter begins looking for Bob Goulet, through the fragmentary bits and pieces that remain, a few old programs, newspaper pieces, the record labels and the records she is able to retrieve, memories of him preserved by her aunts (and she comes to realize how much material was disastrously burned by a great aunt.) There is a very effective use of some of this material to illustrate the text.

But almost with the very first pages we realize from some of the clippings she has to exhibit that the search for Robert Goulet is going to take her into the very dark place for the Métis after the Riel rebellion, when the Canadian West was settled by hordes of newcomers buying up land from unscrupulous developers.

          DISTRIBUTION OF HALF-BREED SCRIP
          HALF-BREED SCRIP FOR SALE

          The author’s poetic comment upon this:

          Some say the Métis

          Live between
          two worlds . . .

          That’s the story about Métis
          that was convenient

          for stealing the land.

This brings her to the terrible story of Robert Goulet’s uncle, her great grand uncle, Eléazar. At the behest of a military expedition sent by Ottawa he was chased into the Red River by a band of vigilantes and drowned, after being knocked unconscious by the stones that were thrown at him as he tried desperately to swim away.

Why did Robert Goulet abandon his career as a musician in Winnipeg, the place where the music came from, and take his wife and family to live on a homestead in British Columbia, never to perform again. Possibly in old age he even sold off his fiddles, or someone did.

The author herself begins to ask, why am I not there now too? Why do I live in St. John’s, very far away from my roots? Why didn’t I know my own family history? And why am I finding it in only these few fragmentary pieces.

Michelle reads an article in a magazine about a scientist named Kira Hoffman, who is researching the ecology of fire. And she begins to bring this together with diary entries from another ancestor, her great great grandfather’s brother Louis, who was buffalo hunting on the prairies in 1868, in one of the last Métis buffalo hunts. There’s a grass fire which eventually surrounds them and they have to drive their wagons into the muskeg to try to wait it out, making a hair-raising escape.

As we now know, the native people of North America used fire as a way of managing their environment for millennia, and this is part of the heritage of the Métis too. The vast buffalo plains were partly created by fire, and maintained and managed by the human use of fire, just as certain forests could not exist but for the fire heat that germinates the seeds. And as we have discovered, our prevention of forest fire in the interests of conservation has made us much more vulnerable to fire — the giant fires of our time.

I found the material presented in this book interesting and touching — sometimes also, as in the story of Eléazar — truly horrifying. I liked the approach, especially in the beginning: the presentation of the fragmentary historical materials relating to Robert Goulet’s career, together with the ominous repetition of the advertisements for the sale of Métis scrip. The poetry sometimes worked as poetry and sometimes did not, but it functioned as a good shorthand way for the author to remove herself from direct storytelling and make her own comments.

The diary entries relating to the fire around the muskeg were very gripping, and I wondered why we didn’t learn more about Louis Goulet. But the fire that nearly kills Louis is a prairie wildfire, and its relation to the rest of the book, even to the subject of Métis fire management, is tangential.

If I have a criticism of this book, it is that I didn’t think that Michelle brought all this material together with complete success. It’s possible that this is because she doesn’t take direct personal possession of the storyline. Unlike the memoir presented by Wreck, where the author opens up the Pandora’s box of her neuroses, in Approaching Fire we don’t really get a feel for who Michelle is herself.

This is the challenge of this type of non-fiction, to develop a persona who is portrayed deeply enough to engage us and then to induce us to follow the wandering thought processes, the self-discoveries, and epiphanies. The stars in this firmament, like Rebecca Solnit and Peter Mathiessen, can put together any group of disparate things and we will fly with them wherever they want to take us. Neither of these books reaches that supersonic achievement, but they are both certainly well worth reading.

— Susan Haley
is attempting to write a book in this genre.

Friday
May062022

Wonderful review of Wreck by Kate Kennedy in The Malahat review

The Malahat Review
Nonfiction Review by Kate Kennedy
Kelley Jo Burke, Wreck: A Very Anxious Memoir (Regina: Radiant Press, 2021). Paperbound, 168 pp., $22.
Wreck: The first chapter of Regina playwright Kelley Jo Burke’s memoir is an “About the Author” that begins: “You know those memoirs that people write after they’ve chatted everything over with those concerned and made sure everybody’s good with it, and they just want the writer to feel free to speak their whole truth? This is not that.”
It’s the first of many reminders that this is not a tidy telling, and the author is well aware. What it is, in part, is an on‐the‐fly schooling in the thought patterns characteristic of diagnosed anxiety. If messiness is off‐putting to you, I would suggest sticking around anyway, because amid the chaos (itself often slyly charming) is a great deal of grace. Other memoirs attempt to pinpoint home or investigate questions of inheritance, but the book that leapt first to mind as I read Wreck was Lucy Ellmann’s gigantic 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport. As unlike as the two are in volume, they share a dedication to consciousness, relaying the interruptions and old hang‐ups and refrains that muddle linear narrative into something much more interesting.
Wreck centres on a lighthouse, a spiritual and literal beacon. Burke’s is located on a little piece of land called the Nubble, just north of York Beach, Maine, where her grandparents’ cottage is and where she has spent happy times in her childhood. The image of it has always been a source of calm for her, but as an adult far away in the Canadian prairies, her claim on it has become increasingly tenuous, as has her connection to her extended family on both sides, old New England families (the Burkes and the Adamses) with very different ideas of themselves.
When Burke is six, her dad takes a job at the University of Manitoba. At a physical remove from the duelling Burke/Adams lineage, the family coalesces into a more unified identity, a dark, quirky brand of not‐Canadian that Burke calls “Addams Family North.” The family’s arrival in Canada is one of my favourite parts of the book. During their bitterly cold first winter in Winnipeg, dumped outside in snowmobile suits, Kelley Jo and her brother, Steve, seem more reminiscent of Gashlycrumb Tinies than wholesome newcomers. Alone together, the family revels in their antique furniture and off‐kilter sensibilities. “We lived in the shadows, spoke like renaissance gentlemen, and would have worked well in black and white.”
But the move sticks, and decades later, living in Regina with her husband and children, Burke even elects to renounce her American citizenship altogether. This is recounted in another of my favourite scenes, a bureaucratic caper at the American embassy in Calgary that reads something like a version of Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” (“and they all moved away from me on the bench”).
Burke makes two noteworthy trips back to the Nubble as an adult, one in 1996, the year after her grandmother Teen’s death. Her grandfather, culpable insofar as he brought Teen home to the cottage when he knew she could not live outside the hospital, is now himself in ill health, both mental and physical. Then in 2018, Burke secures a writing grant to return to Maine to write the memoir we hold in our hands. Having made arrangements with the new owners to stay in the cottage, and accompanied by her husband, Eric, Burke recounts how she meets head‐on her expectations for the trip. These scenes are painful and, as one might expect by this point in the book, also very funny.
Wreck is about testing theories of memory, questioning well‐meaning attempts at tidiness. In one of the book’s last chapters, having mocked her own project at laying claim to the Nubble and to being of the sea, Burke concludes: “My goodness that is all a sloppy bit of curation.” As her Auntie Pam puts it elsewhere: “Sweetie, you write it any way you want. But it didn’t happen.” Sometimes the things we repeat to ourselves turn out to be the least true, but repetition serves this book well and feels of a piece with anxiousness, the moments of resolve that turn out to be very much temporary. Among others there are the twin refrains of Teen’s sometimes delusional‐seeming satisfaction with her life at the cottage (“We are so happy here.”) and Grampa’s request to be taken care of, finally: “Could I come up thay’uh and live with you?” When he does move up to Regina, it is, naturally, quite chaotic.
Wreck will resound with anyone who has seen a beloved family property sold, made a pilgrimage only to find the destination less than expected, or tried to reconcile two sides of their lineage with the person that they are—wanting it to make more sense than it possibly can. And if Burke’s scattershot style is at times frustrating, you can almost always hear her saying, “Yeah, tell me about it.”
—Kate Kennedy
As in The Malahat Review, 217, winter 2021