June 2: Reading! ! ! !

Literature is a donkey braying over a wall. Or is it a writer communicating with a donkey? Is literature the deep green of a field, a stone fence, trees, leaves, or is literature the photograph itself? Maybe writing is the photographer? Or the manifold possibility of pixels ready to signal to the rods and cones of the eyes. We are are here, the pixels say. We are also here, the eyes say. And somewhere, maybe on a planet, scudding behind an exploding star, literature unwraps its little sandwich, sits down on the girder high up on the scaffolding of a construction site and has lunch. "You know," it finally says, "June LitLive looks fantastic. You should see the amazing writers that we have. Just look below.  Come to the reading and I'll share my baloney sandwich with you. And you'll hear some great writing."

Marilyn Gear Pilling lives in Hamilton, Ontario and has roots in Huron County. She is the author of two collections of short fiction and four of poetry. A finalist for the CBC Literary Awards and the Western Magazine Awards, she has won nine Hamilton and Region Arts Council awards for her poetry and short fiction. Most recently, one of her poems won Descant’s “Best Canadian Poem” Winston Collins Award and appeared in Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2010. Pilling has read her work in many venues, including Eden Mills, Harbourfront, the Banff Centre in Alberta, and at the historic Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, France.

  

Beatriz Hausner started writing about Raccoon long before it was established that Toronto was host to the largest population of raccoons in the world. Hausner has written about other creatures also, mostly in verse, which she has published as poetry collections and chapbooks. When not writing or translating surrealist literature, she edits journals, publishes books for others and works full-time as a public librarian in Toronto.

Jay MillAr is author of the several collections of poetry including his most recent Other Poems (2010). He is also the author of many chapbooks and privately published editions such as Woods|Pages and Lack Lyrics, which tied to win the 2008 bpNichol Chapbook Award. In 2006 he published Double Helix, a collaborative “novel” written with Stephen Cain. In addition, MillAr is also an editor, publisher, teacher and the shadowy figure behind BookThug, an independent publishing house dedicated to exploratory work by well-known and emerging North American writers. MillAr teaches creative writing and poetics at George Brown College and Toronto New School of writing.

Stephen Gill, Poet Laureate of Ansted University, has authored more than twenty books, including collections of poems, fiction and literary criticism. Once in a while, he writes poetry in Urdu, Hindi, and Panjabi. His works have appeared in more than five hundred publications. He works as a freelance English/Urdu interpreter and examines doctoral dissertations for universities in India. He was born in Panjab.

Ian Williams is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the 2011 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC. Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and works as an English professor.

M. E. Csamer is widely published in Canadian literary magazines. Her books include Paper Moon (watershedBooks, 1998), Light is What We Live In (Artful Codger Press, 2005), and A Month Without Snow (Hidden Brook Press, 2007). Presently, she serves on the Council of The League of Canadian Poets. Csamer lives on a small bay near Kingston, Ontario.