January 19 – Road stories and body parts

There’s not that many Art Bar nights where you get full-costume reading and Hawaiian music played on a saw. It was also a night of sex, scatololgy, cheap hotels and the trashy side of civics.

But for some reason things kept coming back to road stories, which ranged from street vending to bus trips. Obviously, what happens on the road, doesn’t always stay on the road. Not when people write it down.

- Stephen Humphrey

Richard Greene is not related to author, playwright and literary critic Graham Greene but he nonetheless traveled across the United States by train and bus on a pilgrimage to learn about the author for his biography, Graham Greene: A Life in Letters.  What Richard did not expect was to come back with a lot of strange travel stories about Greyhound bus rides and low-end hotels. He read from the resulting road epic about cheap, dirty, uncomfortable places where gut-level humanity is on display.

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For Cathy Petch, city streets are the home or shitty jobs, the human body and relationships are two things to dissect and music is something to be played on a saw. Eleven visits to Graceland… really?

About her own writing, Cathy says, Kurt Vonnegut‘s views on writing have always influenced my own. He strove to write so that anyone could access it. I write simply, openly, autobiographically, and comedically . I write to perform. I write to entertain and bring insight.

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David Bateman knows how to make an entrance. And how to give props. His reading paid tribute to King Tut, P.K. Page, Kate McGarrigle, the brutalist architecture of Yonge-Dundas Square, the statue of buttock-inspecting magistrate Alexander Wood and a talking trash can. Despite proclaiming he only writes about himself, Bateman managed to insert social commentary about the environment, homophobia and war. Talking trash can be a complex thing for this poet.

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