Sylvie Hill

Ottawa XPress & The Hour Montreal, Shotgun, August 19, 2004

I have a nice tuque with a patch embroidered on the front. The patch is a twirling middle finger salute. It’s a Wilco tuque and it’s a deep red, the colour I was seeing when I was flipping off Mother Nature in early August, seething that I had to miss Wilco playing a SOLD OUT show at the Capital City Music Hall because of some badass PMS.

That’s right. The Woman’s Curse. Maybe that’s why there are so many men in rock ‘n’ roll: more rock and less talk about Kotex moments, man.

Speaking of talking, everyone around me on Wilco night was making big plans for the show. What to wear? What songs would Wilco sing? As for me, the only question I was asking was “WHY ME?!”

I risked getting a knock-me-on-my-ass-for-three-days migraine if I trekked out, so I sold my $40 ticket and went to bed at 7:30 p.m. with the only consolation being that a) I wasn’t pregnant and b) I’d be able to make it in to work the next day in good health.

How very rock ‘n’ roll.

But then I learned from a local Wilco correspondent, (we’ll call him “Agent DT”), that the lead singer of Wilco, Jeff Tweedy, suffers seriously from severe migraines too! Could it explain the egg theme on the band’s latest album cover? But supposedly, Tweedy hasn’t gotten his period since his fertile mind recently gave birth to a ghost…

In the past, Tweedy was reported to have overmedicated on painkillers ’cause his head was so bad at times. I suppose if I had gone to the A Ghost is Born tour, I would have been in good company. Plus, the concert was guaranteed to blow my head right off anyways, said the Agent.

Bye-bye migraine.

This whole unfortunate experience got me to thinking about some of the greatest shows in Ottawa that I’ve hit or had to miss and about Ottawa concert culture this summer overall.

It’s so exciting how this town offers such a variety of venues and fantastic festivals from which to choose. For me, it all starts with Tulipfest, then Westfest, then Jazzfest, Bluesfest, Ladyfest, Chamber Music fest and then I have No More Money fest.

Actually, I lied. I have never been to Jazzfest. I don’t even have one of those fancy lawn chairs. And I don’t go to the Chamber music one because I’m not sure if they’ll let me in with my tuque.

But I did take in the majority of the Tulip festival shows this year, for an easy $20. My friend and I saw everyone from Hawksley Workman to Trooper. Crowds changed from preteen Billy Talent punks in black hoodies and piercings to pot-smoking, middle-aged drunks at the Honeymoon Suite gig.

And parents worry about their kids at punk shows.

In fact, the happiest and safest concerts to be at this summer was probably Bluesfest with its impressive democratic vibes. I didn’t buy a pass this year, but was very welcome to use Bluesfest porta-johns just outside of the grounds. Also, the non-paying public shared space with the homeless campers stationed at the Human Rights monument to catch a lot of the Birdman Sound Stage shows.

Something I noticed during evening summer concerts nowadays is that lighters, historically held high during slow, cheesy songs, have been replaced with a swaying sea of blue lights from the screens of cellphones. And cellphones by the way are a much better way of navigating your friends through a crowd than the landmarked picnic table near the shwarma stand to the left of the chipwagon.

Concert T-shirts are also more appealing. Gone are those oversized ones that girls could only wear to bed.

In addition to the festivals, for all the venues that exist in the downtown, including Capital City Music Hall, Barrymore’s, Babylon, Dominion, Aloha and Zaphod’s, some things remain the same. Drinks are still expensive, doormen are still checking ID, but the shows, thanks to PRS Concerts, are getting better.

Over the years, Ottawa has given us some good ones: The Cult, Soundgarden, Face to Face, NOFX, SNFU, National Velvet, Lowest of the Low, Sarah McLachlan, Rheostatics, Radiohead, Beth Orton, Joseph Arthur, Peter Elkas, Nash the Slash, Kathleen Edwards, Hawksley Workman, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, All Systems Go, Danny Michel, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Neil Halstead, Daniel Lanois, Sarah Slean, Ron Sexsmith, Trans Am, Sloan, Dr. John, Platinum Blonde, The EELs, Soft Canyon, Stereophonics, Englebert Humperdink, Julie Doiron, GOMEZ, Sonic Youth, soon the Pixies.

So what that I missed Wilco? Missing Jeff Buckley playing Zaphod’s to about five people in ’93, now that’s something to have a good cry about.

Listen, some of us won’t be able to go to shows this year because of exams, or work, or a wedding, or a death, or a Sens-Habs game, or menstrual cramps. But, when you do have to miss that great concert or festival, for whatever reason, you just think of my red Wilco tuque. It is a solid reminder that we all just have to learn to say “fuck you” to fate sometimes and just settle for listening to our CDs, curled up in a fetal position in anticipation of the next big show we can make.

Let my tuque be as a beacon unto you, lighting the way like an old fashioned Bic at a John Waite gig.

– Sylvie Hill

Ottawa XPress & The Hour Montreal, August 12, 2004

The boundary between sexy and sleazy is as faint as the panty line on the tight ass of a taut preteen. Sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t.

Admit it, one of the first things you did when you hooked up your Internet was check out the porn sites. I did. My sex education had so far been limited to the pornos my first boyfriend and me rented from the Mac’s Milk movie dispenser in Vanier. We weren’t discerning connoisseurs.

Those videos were pretty typical: a buxom blond playing secretary to some stud boss holding her legs apart in an aerial “V”; that Ron Jeremy guy dressed up as a Devil forcing a helpless lady to lick his ballsack; and greasy cum-shot scenes that made me dry hurl in my lover’s lap.

Years later with my new computer and new Internet access ready to booty, I checked out the new world of Internet Porn. Being unable to relate to the big-boobied beasts in the movies I had seen, I typed in, “small tits” to land a site that best represented girls that looked like me.

My search brought me to sites featuring close-up images of dazed nymphs with glazed faces liquored in semen, gripping veiny penises with tiny hands. And they all looked so drugged out.

And still, this turned me on.

After the euphoria came the confusion and shame. Orgasms can really make a girl hungry too, so I hit the kitchen, made a sandwich and settled down at the table to write a mental letter:

“Dear Naked Lady on the website: How come you do this? Don’t you know that you can be ‘cool’ without having to spread your legs for some gross dudes? I hear it’s pretty easy to get a job at Walmart.”

Since it would have been hard to get in touch with the girl, why not start a conversation about pornography closer to home?

An old boyfriend told me that when he looks at porn, he envisions that he is the man on screen sharing the encounter with the lady in the action. Potentially a sore point for us girlfriends or wives who likely don’t look anything like a porn star.

Melanie, who works at Rixxx Video (2839 St. Joseph Boulevard and 256 Bank Street) in Orleans, told me I had it right when I said I think women get aroused by the couple goin’ at it, and then use that energy to fuel a fantasy about themselves and their lover in a more mutually satisfying and genuine real-time exchange.

“It explains why you rarely see a guy’s face in the shot. Guys don’t want to be looking at other guys,” Melanie says. “Men like it straight up because they’re ‘visual’ creatures.”

What it all comes down to really, is we use pornography to get us off. To quote sexologist Leonore Tiefer from her book, Sex Is Not a Natural Act, “The debate about pornography is in large part a debate about masturbation.” And Sallie Tisdale in her essay, “A woman’s taste for pornography”, echoes this, saying: “Sex awakens my unconscious; pornography gives it a face.”

But is it fair that I’m using the cum-smeared faces of exploited young teenage chicks as masturbatory fodder? Tiefer gives me a hand:

“Pornography is about fantasy and identification with characters in stories as symbols. It cannot really be understood just on a literal level. And if pornography is suppressed, women will not learn things about themselves and their imaginations that they can learn through experimenting with and reflecting upon their reactions to pornography.”

So what of the girls in the movies?

By communicating my discomfort with the drugged-out appearance of the actresses, their pained faces and apparent abuse, I inevitably invited discussion about the working conditions for these ladies and was receptive to a suggestion by Melanie to check out Seymore Butts’ line of videos. Butts does not tolerate drugs or alcohol on his sets and because his production company is more established, the working conditions are less exploitive than most places in the porno industry.

Consider Montreal’s, Lara Roxx. In March this year, this stripper and prostitute went to Los Angeles and filmed 18 scenes without using protection – this can fetch stars as much as $1,000 U.S. a day. Actors are routinely checked for disease, but “naively” writes The Montreal Gazette, “she believed the testing regime meant that the work environment was safe.”

A month later, she was diagnosed with HIV.

The popular argument today is that if you decriminalize illegal or “antisocial” practices, they will cease to be corrupt and marginalized. If you say “no” to porn, you are in fact advocating its descent into a darker underground where working conditions for the actors risk becoming even more deplorable.

The best thing you can do for women like Montreal’s Lara Roxx, is buy or rent the videos. Hell, the best thing you can do for yourself or your relationship is to, at some point, simply interact with the damn shit so you get educated about what’s really going on out there. (If hardcore isn’t your thing, visit www.libidomag.com, where the sexy is a little less sleazy.)

Just do your part and masturbate. Help make Ottawa more sex-positive.

– Sylvie Hill

The Ottawa XPress | May 20, 2004
BOOK REVIEW

Emily Pohl-Weary’s edited anthology: Girls Who Bite Back (Sumach Press, 332 pp.)

Girls Who Bite Back unrolls the female roll model: Superchick Anthology takes on feminist pop icons

“Everything I know about feminism I learned from pop culture.”
~Sophie Levy, Manifesto for the Bitten

The notion of inequality between the sexes is underlined by indisputable facts: in the ’80s there was only one Smurfette; She-Ra didn’t get as much airplay as He-Man; and Herc! Herc!’s Helena was a fucking idiot.

Thankfully the ’90s gave us Buffy, Xena, Lara Croft and Yoshimi (she battles the pink robots). This year, welcome Toronto’s Emily Pohl-Weary, the writer-editor of Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks (Sumach Press).

Noticing the lack of strong, intelligent girls in television, movies, comics and video games, and questioning who we can look up to as we age and pass beyond the Buffy years, Pohl-Weary made like Jem, assembled over two dozen holograms and launched her mission to spy on these pop culture female role models.

And Ka-POW! The result is this stellar collection of essays, fiction, poems, comic strips and artwork on female superheroes. It’s 332 pages of stories and vignettes (varying from three to 15 pages), by women and men, about superchicks in a multitude of contexts ranging from domestic prowess (Crisis Girl in Spring Rolls) to depression (Ready to be Strong?).

This is a young woman’s Bible and a (wo)Man’s Guide to Survival with females of our times. It encourages the reader to appreciate feminine brawn and offers alternatives to Britney Spears or Strawberry Shortcake.

If this is a feminist manifesto, then it’s a very fair one. It does not kick the balls of our male compadres and even holds some women accountable for sullying the image of girl power. Poet-artist Sonja Ahlers describes in one of her poems how irritating it is when female assertiveness goes over the top: “A machine gun of a girl shooting out the words Girl Power was the stupidest thing I ever saw … CRINGE CENTRAL MOLARS WITH FILLINGS CHEWING ALUMINUM FOIL. & another Super Bitch is born … TOTALLY TEDIOUS.”

Others consider race in their discussion of girl power. Candra K. Gill wrote ‘Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets it First, which explores the dynamic of race in Buffy. And Ottawa artist Eliza Griffiths plays with sexiness in Karate Girls by painting her fighters half naked.

Girls Who Bite Back redefines women beyond the traditional view of the female as helpless princess waiting to be rescued by a male hero. If you’ve ever been called a “princess” you’ll know what a slayer feels like when she wants to drive a stake through the heart of a soul-sucking vampire. And hey, why be princess anyway, when you can be Queen?

Killer instinct is pretty hot. But as Lisa Rundle cautions, “superbabes are stereotypical heterosexual male sex fantasies writ large and as much as they kick ass, they wiggle it.”

Though, given the choice of being a porn star or a comic book heroine, if they’re the same in sex appeal, I’ll pick the ass-kickin’ telepathic ninja fighter slayer chick, any day.

– Sylvie Hill

The Ottawa XPress – March 4, 2004
By: Matthew Firth

Poet Faces Off for Victory

Ottawa’s Sylvie Hill will be one of 70 Canadian poets vying for victory when CBC Radio’s Poetry Face-Off starts next week. The competition for a national champion kicks off in 14 Canadian cities with five poets in each making words work before a live, voting audience. Each poet will read on the theme Belonging. The audience chooses the winner. Ottawa’s champ will move on to battle poets from Toronto, Moncton, Edmonton, Victoria, and the other cities. These 14 finalists will read on air on CBC Radio One’s Sounds Like Canada April 19-22. Listeners will vote by phone and through the CBC website to crown a grand champion, to be announced April 30.

In Ottawa, Hill is up against Garmamie Sideau, Wanda O’Connor, Segun Akinlolu and John Akpata – all experienced and accomplished poets/spoken-word artists. They will face-off Monday, March 8, with the winning performance airing the next day on CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning. Hill is the author of Hoxton Square Circles: Starfucking Tales of Sexless One-Night Stands, a visceral collection of poems that kicks you right where it counts, to use an old, schoolyard phrase. But it’s apt because Hill’s poetry doesn’t back down, whether ranting about lost love, blow jobs, Elgin Street racists, or “the perversity with which life rubbed me the wrong way.” Direct, honest, opinionated, occasionally upbeat, but never sugar-coated, she packs tonnes of raw emotion into her short book.

Hill is fired up about Face-Off and will be “reading a piece with plenty of punch,” she said, consistent with the poetry in her book. She also wants her reading to be comedic, because, she said, making an audience laugh–even at poetry–is a good way to engage listeners. Look to Hill and the other poets to throw down their stuff with verve.

CBC POETRY FACE-OFF MONDAY, MARCH 8, 7:30 P.M., $5 NATIONAL ARTS CENTRE

Centretown Buzz – April 11, 2003, Vol. 8, No. 9

Come to Where I’m From: shelter residents paint their space in art.

The Mission Hospice in Ottawa is unique to North America in that it happens to be attached to a shelter for the homeless. The Hospice makes it possible for vulnerable individuals in our community to find comfort and care in the last days of their lives.

When it was built, the intention was to create a “place to call home,” an environment that was both lively and comforting for their clients, and by their clients. While the men and women who fill the 14 beds of the hospice do not have long to live, the goal was, in the meantime, to have them live extremely well and in dignity.

With the generous support of the The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation, The Mission turned to the local arts community to help transform the entrance of their new Hospice into something warm and inviting. With the help of local artists, Pao Quang Yeh and Sandra Abi-Aad, the hallway has now become an interesting walk-thru of colour, powerful images and inspiration.

Yeh and Abi-Aad, both graduates of the University of Ottawa Fine Arts program, facilitated the creation of five photographic images (25″ x 35″) with The Mission clients over an eight-week period. Art classes with clients were based on respect and creativity to help enable the five Hospice/LifeSkills members to explore their own personal landscape through art.

The LifeSkills Program has been running for 10 years at The Mission and treats 15 participants to six months of rehabilitation for drug, alcohol and gambling addictions. The eightweek art classes introduced into the program are a first of their kind for The Mission.

Art Process
Yeh and Abi-Aad used a variety of free-flow and word-association exercises to encourage the men to think about their own personal spaces. Each of the five students then crafted a landscape using art supplies donated by the artists themselves and through the generous support of The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation grant.

With paint and coloured pencils, The Mission students created landscape backdrops of fiery sunsets, bright yellow skies and dark blue celestial universes. Next, they positioned tiny objects such as army figurines, animals, felt teepees, and in one instance, a miniature bedroom suite against the backdrops. This created three-dimensional maquettes or models of Vietnam war scenes, nature and native settlements, farms and a bedroom setting. They were then photographed by Yeh and Abi-Aad and framed.

Janet St. Jean, Director of Development at The Mission, attributed much of the project’s success to the professionalism and flexibility of the arts facilitators. St. Jean beams with enthusiasm and appreciation when she thinks of local artists Yeh and Abi-Aad, and their belief and interest in the project.

When asked to describe the experience Pao Quang Yeh stressed: “this was not art therapy. We were there to provide tools and share skills with them. It wasn’t instructional. If you wanted your apple to be purple, that’s ok, make it purple!” It explains why horses have big white eyes and skies are a bright yellow!

Trudging Through the Landscape
The Hospice with its palliative care unit as well as the Mission serve the needs of homeless men, women and children. Knowing that The Mission clients travel from one place to another, Yeh also knew each must carry with them some story that should be told. At the onset of the project, Yeh and Abi-Aad spent time walking through the buildings and talking to some guests. Both were compelled to ask the question, “what does it mean to be in a space?”

Pao Quang Yeh expressed that the objective was to get these men to reflect upon their own space and translate those feelings and thoughts in any way they wanted to through art. In one case, instead of painting scenery, one gentleman named Robert Mercer wrote out his feelings in a most powerful testimony that was moving in its honesty and touching in its humility.

It read: “My name is Robert Mercer and I am feeling inbarrassed do to the fact I can’t do whats required of me, I don’t mine being here, but I don’t know where I stand has far has having talent, I do believe there is something there, but ‘I’ always seem to get in the way ”¦”

Yeh admits the work can be taxing emotionally and there is a lot to juggle. Not all participants stick with the program and so it takes the help of a very dedicated facilitator and visual artist like Abi-Aad to make it happen, says Yeh.

Local Arts Programs
Pao Quang Yeh, who works as a Facilitator and Visual Artist for the City of Ottawa’s Community Arts Program, explains that local arts programs offered by the City emerged in the last 4 years. The idea was to link professional artists with the community and make art accessible to everyone of any socio-economic status and ability.

City of Ottawa arts programs are many and varied, he explains, ranging from getting well known writers to read at community centres and involving individuals with special needs or disabilities in modern dance explorations of the self to guiding and facilitating groups in art and drama. “Art should be for everyone,” he says.

An extension of his day job with the City of Ottawa, Yeh admits that The Mission Art Project was a personal project outside, and on top of his 9 to 5 duties. This dedication and drive has seen many other art initiatives succeed in countries such as the
UK.

As part of UK Accents in 1999, the British Council invited a Welsh Community Arts group to Ottawa to introduce their “Rock School” to the Nation’s Capital. In Wales, the group brings music to disadvantaged and under-privileged youth by visiting local council estate housing projects. Musical instruments are donated to the youth to use over the course of a weekend.

Their efforts are then showcased in the form of a rock concert at the end of the weekend. The question posed to the Welsh group about follow up work to community arts projects applies equally to The Mission Art Project as well. Now that the hospice entrance is beautifully decorated with quality art, what next?

Maybe it’s enough to note that some shelter clients are already referring to the Hospice hallway with the 5 colour photographs as “The Mission Art Gallery.” In all 5 cases there has been strong interest in purchasing the art, but some like James express their strong allegiance to The Mission and insist that their artistic oeuvres remain always at the Ottawa shelter they call home.

This permanent display at The Mission Hospice entrance reflects the unique expression of five individuals who have lived varied lives. Janet St. Jean smiles thoughtfully: “the art allows us to have an inside look at them.”

And while the Hospice hallway is not open to the public, the opportunity to volunteer or support The Mission is always there. More, it is Yeh’s hope is that this project will spark further interest in making the arts accessible to all in the community.

Special thank you to the following organizations for their generous donations and support:

The Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Family Foundation
City of Ottawa, Community Arts Program
Eurocopies & Printing
Calabria Restaurant & Pizzeria
Emerald Bakery
The Manx
Boko Bakery
Sanjay Mohanta

– Sylvie Hill

Writer’s Block Magazine – Winter 2002
By: Lorie Boucher

erotica: n. intentionally erotic literature or art

~Canadian Oxford Dictionary

The reader’s noble quest for dirty knowledge ends thusly in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary; searching for sexual desire is fruitless. It’s not as though valuable dictionary real estate cannot afford one more compound word related to sexuality – the COD includes definitions for sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, sexual interference, and sexually transmitted disease. If one were in the habit of highlighting coincidental omissions to suit his or her own theses and had no aversion to non-scientific, correlative deductions, one might wonder whether the absent definition for sexual desire is deliberate. As the Canadian language authority, is the COD making a statement about the Canadian sexual consciousness by circumscribing the points of reference to abuse, assault, harassment, interference, and disease?

Luckily, the COD does not have the last word on Canadian sex language. A new body of writing is emerging and exploring all of the corners of Canadian sexual expression, and contributing to a growing genre that was born outside of our borders but that is flourishing within them – erotica.

Set to Defrost

In the late 1990s, Carellin Brooks and Brett Josef Grubisic presented their paper “Rapacity and Remorse: In/de-ferring Heteroglossic Homoeroticism in Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush” to an unsmiling CanLit: Conversion, Inversion, Subversion panel in Los Angeles. Theirs was the only paper to discuss sex, which did not come as a surprise to their host, a former-Canadianist-cum-L.A.-script writer. The treatment of sex in CanLit, he argued, has an abysmal history. From Susanna Moodie (“that bloody Victorian iceberg”) to Sinclair Ross, Hugh MacLennan, Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley, Mavis Gallant, and Alice Munro, this raunch-free roster is an embarrassment to Canadian literature. If sex is mentioned, he continued, it usually carries dire, destructive consequences: “God forbid anyone has a decent orgasm without losing an eye.”

And so, motivated by equal parts defensiveness and curiosity, Brooks and Grubisic solicited erotic fiction submissions from Canadian writers. Surely, they hypothesized, sexually liberated Canadian writers born during and after the 1960s would not shy away from visceral, fleshly prose. The resulting anthology, Carnal Nation: Brave New Sex Fictions, hit the shelves in 2000. Unfortunately, this first collection of Canadian erotic writing did not shatter preconceptions of our collective frigidity.

Most reviewers of the anthology agreed that the stories are good; some are even excellent. Without the preface however, it would not be clear to the reader that these are erotic stories. They are well-written, provocative stories that explore ideas about sex, its social influences, and its consequences, but erotic? With a few shining exceptions, these are serious and often disturbing stories to be admired, reflected upon, learned from – not stories to be photocopied and sent to your lover, highlighting the dirty bits and scribbling cartoons enacting them in the margins. Many a Carnal Nation reader has certainly been reduced to flipping through the pages, scanning the text for sex like a ten-year-old flipping through a dictionary for the swears.

Literary commentary on the collection encapsulates the tone of the anthology more clearly than can be extracted from one story:

Moreover, the stories collected in Carnal Nation rewrite the heteronormative impulses of mainstream representations of sex in radical and often socially challenging ways. In doing so, the writers not only acknowledge the centrality of sex to Canadian identity overall but also engage in a radical rewriting of the Canadian subject itself, locating its origins and influences not in narratives of nation, geography, history, capitalism, or other ideologies but in narratives of sex.

– Peter Darbyshire, “Sexing the Beaver: Sex, Nation, and Identity in Carnal Nation,” Essays on Canadian Writing, Fall 2001.

Unless you’re a holed-up CanLit PhD candidate, there is nothing sexy about heteronormative impulses. If you read carefully, you can almost tell Darbyshire is talking about sex. And so it is with Carnal Nation. Call me a filth-loving harlot, but I don’t want to squint to find sex in sex writing.

A less than victorious first battle, Carnal Nation does not thwart a revolution. Thankfully though, erotica is gradually integrating into the Canadian litscape in other publications and venues, through other voices. Undeniably, the boundaries are edging slowly outward.

Ottawa: The Other Big O
The best way to measure the progress of CanLit’s slow thaw is to stick a thermometer up the tight end of what is perceived to be one of Canada’s most clenched, conservative cities: Ottawa. Remarkably, things are heating up in the capital city. In the last two years, Ottawa has hosted the launch of an erotica anthology and an erotica reading series, and in early 2003, the city will become the site of a new series of women’s erotica-writing workshops hosted by a local sex store.

Published in the fall of 2002 by Ottawa’s Boheme Press, Grunt and Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex suffers none of the distant, disengaged representations of sex found in Carnal Nation. In his preface, co-editor Matthew Firth narrows the focus of the anthology to the exploration of the connections between work and sex: “We are slaves to work. We are slaves to sex. Payday and the next orgasm: these things gnaw at our brains incessantly.” Grunt and Groan does not self-reflexively set the standard for Canadian erotica; instead, by concentrating on a unique relationship between the elemental driving forces of work and sex, it manages the reader’s expectations, surprises with its insight, and thrills with its visceral detail. Refreshingly, sex is also addressed with humour:

“Have you ever done salmon roses?” she asks me.
I blink, thinking she’s talking about a drug, a sex position, then look down at the plates I’ve been making.
“I don’t think so,” I tell her.
“I’ll show you. We need a hundred and fifty for tonight.”
Her quick fingers lift of a strip of salmon from the waxed paper, roll and twist it until it is a perfect”¦something. A mass of curved petals, pink and fishy.
I can’t help it – I laugh out loud.
“What?” she asks, smiling.
“It looks like”¦you know.”
“I don’t get it. What?”
“Well, what’s the opposite of phallic? Vulvar?”
She looks down and gets it.

– Joy VanNuys, “Spawning”

Readers of Grunt and Groan don’t expect a subversive anti-canon of erotica, and what they get is so much better, anyway: a strong collection of accessible, well-written, down-and-dirty stories with a unifying theme.

Accessibility, style, and humour also figure prominently in another Ottawa-based initiative. The brainchild of local writer Nichole McGill, the Durty Gurls reading series brings erotica to the spotlight of the stage, featuring readings of erotic poetry and fiction by Canadian women writers. An open-mic segment precedes the scheduled performances, giving yet-to-be-famous-but-nonetheless-durty gurls an opportunity to read their own works aloud to a receptive audience. The variety of voices and performance styles featured at the readings reflects the diversity of the genre and the willingness of both writers and their audiences to open the staid gateways of CanLit to literary smuttiness. Reading from her collection of spoken word poetry, Hoxton Square Circles, resident smutter Sylvie Hill brought the energy of spoken word to one Durty Gurls stage:

Looks over. Dreadlocks. Looking like the ideal. Like the precise depiction of the kind of guys that would be good in bed simply for the wad of conversation piece on their heads, right. So. She goes over to him. Says. “Nice hoodie. Wore one exactly like that myself when I was over in Britain.” Met with a dope smile, a nice smile. The kind that says. I’m down and cool with it all. I’ve seen it baby and now I’m gonna show it to you. Right. So. Squishing in between this guy and another. His brother. She orders a drink. He says. I’m Jeff. This is my brother. She gives him the I’m Gonna Burn Your House Down smile. Yeah. Whatever about the brother right. Thinking on this dread-Jeff. On that stud underneath his bottom lip. Like hers. Narcissist.

– From “Conversate,” Hoxton Square Circles, Starfucker Press, 2001

Durty gurls who are less willing to subject their work to the open stage have yet another option: to hone their smutty scriptures in an erotic writing workshop designed for women. Venus Envy, a local sex store “for women and the people who love them,” intends to launch a series of Women Writing Eros workshops beginning in January 2003. With small class sizes of a maximum of 10 students, writers will be invited to participate in erotic writing exercises and to read their own work in an intimate environment.

Stoking the Embers
Carnal Nation might not sweat anyone’s palms, and Ottawa’s new love affair with all things erotic might not signal the dawn of an all-out Canadian sex party, but the introduction of Canadian erotic writing into the literary sphere is neither meek nor localized. Canadian erotica, as a body of literature, is expanding and developing, supported by forward-thinking publishers such as Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp and Toronto’s Gutter Press. Canadian writers have a unique opportunity to shape a valid genre of provocative writing in its early years. As Canadian writers continue to contribute to the erotic genre, Canadian erotica will find its place in the legacy of Canadian literature. It may not be ready to blow up the literary world in high, showy flames, but the development of the genre will benefit from the slow burn.

Lorie Boucher lives and writes in the other Big O. She is a Contributing Editor for Writer’s Block.

Guerilla Magazine, Issue #1
By: Tony Martins

A dialogue about a film > about spoken word poetry > about sex or lack thereof

In the summer of 2001, riding an unprecedented surge in our spoken word poetry scene, Sylvie Hill reigned as Ottawa’s leading indie sex goddess, talking dirty and funny and scary into a live mic at the Step Up Slam reading series.

Hill’s lusty and brazenly honest rants plumbed the depths (both physical and psychological) of her unsatisfying attempts to get lucky. She collected her best stuff and self-published it as Hoxton Square Circles: Starfucking Tales of Sexless One-Night Stands.

Then one brightly lit night in July, it all climaxed. Author and screenwriter Nichole McGill led the filming of Hill’s book launch at the Aloha Room.

McGill, no slouch herself when it comes to spinning a bawdy tale, captured Hill’s launch performance with her fledgling film company, Niche Productions. The resulting 10-minute documentary, Sylvie Hill: Tales of Sexless One Night Stands, was profiled on local Rogers cable late last year and screened at the Brampton Arts Festival this February.

So to summarize, from spoken word poems there came a book, then a launch, then a film, then a TV show and an arts festival. If you are finding it a challenge to follow all these postmodern layers of reference, fear not. To get to the root of the matter, Guerilla arranged for a virtual ménage à trois: a penetrating and high-speed online interview that would entwine the poet, the filmmaker, and me, the journalist-voyeur. Here’s an up close look at what went down”¦

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Tony: I’ll start with meaty questions posed to both of you. Sylvie, why did you write the poems? Nichole, why did you make the film?

Sylvie: To connect. To get my head sorted. The stories came from experiences I had with lovers or guys (and that one time, a woman) I took home after a night of live music and lots of Jack Daniels. Usually there was longing involved–no one stuck around for too long, and from the longing came a frustration or a need to understand feelings or why you took them home in the first place. Rather than stewing, I’d get feelings down on paper. It was a natural process. The rhymes would just come, not sure if that ‘randomness’ comes thru in the works being untailored or what? But, they’re pretty tight as performance pieces so I guess I was doing something right. It’s nice to get shit down in print form too–I love seeing my shit in print. So, I published the works.

Nichole: The spoken word scene at that time in Ottawa was quite strong–it was more of a phenomenon, a tempo that kept building month after month. And unlike typical literary readings which are dependent upon the oratory skills of authors who often are introverted to begin with, spoken word artists hone their performance skills. Their interaction with with the audience is as important as the words that they are spouting. I wanted to capture a snapshot of this phenomenon; a snippet of this part of Ottawa’s scene. Before it died, which, in one aspect, it did.

Plus, Sylvie had an incredible rapport with the audience. Her work was tragicomedic and that connection was made with the audience who would be laughing their asses off during the performance while simultaneously thinking, “Ouch, I’ve been there.”

Tony: Did the making of the film affect your performance that night, Sylvie?

Sylvie: Yes. Very much so. We had gone to the Aloha Room earlier that day–with my right hand woman, Karen, in tow. Nichole and Rick K were there setting things up and I did a few pieces. I usually do impromptu preambles before all my pieces.

Drew the Drunken Dragon, organizer of the Spoken Word Broken Brushes gigs, said to me last week that I’d get up on stage a “wreck.” So. It explains my nervousness at the beginning of performing a piece, but it was also this nervous energy that propelled me into some brutally honest rants about being nervous–usually I’d be self-deprecating and it’s likely this honesty to which Nichole refers when she said that people could really relate to me. Anyways, the preambles were somewhat planned but it was advised to cut them short.

Chain smoking Belmonts, there I was shitting myself to Karen, wondering how the fuck I was going to alter spontaneity. Rick told me to just do what came naturally, and Karen, having coached my performances before said just to do my thing … and I did know where Nichole was going. I respect Nichole for her diplomacy and she has been, and is, a great talent and an effective, very effective, mentor.

It was hard to know HOW to curb nervousness, really. When the performance time came I just ended up doing my thing. You’ll see in the film, the preamble is cut but the works are intact. It all works.

Also, Nichole had the night totally organized and we all promoted extensively. We were turning people away at the door. Nichole was on top of that, and how did it affect my performance? Well, shit … imagine a camera crew at your bedroom door about to film you having some great sex. You either feel really stupid, or in my case–I felt like a stud.

Nichole: Rick Kaulbars was the cameraman and my co-conspirator. He’s a local comic, screenwriter (“Kevin Spencer”) and also filmed his first feature last summer.

Sylvie: It was awesome and extremely productive having Rick on scene–as a stand up comic, and writer, he knew, it seemed, instinctively what I was going up against, what the night would hold. His winks were reassuring.

Tony: You “felt like a stud,” eh Sylvie? To what extent were your spoken word performances exhibitionistic? Were you inviting an audience into your bedroom and getting a thrill from it?

Sylvie: It’s funny. Not at all. I’m up there talking about giving head or getting it from behind–sounds exhibitionist alright, but it’s not me. There’s a disconnect from writing for me when it comes out and is published. When it’s on the page, it’s no longer me. It’s a scary thing, that. Means you can get up and talk about all kinds of lewd things but you risk the chance of being ill perceived. I think it takes a brain to understand that the Writer is not necessarily the Person.

I had just started a job at the government and my new boss and co-workers were there, as well as some students I taught at Algonquin College. I was worried about what they would think! It was my female boss, at a Christmas party one time, who did the talking for me when, straight-faced, someone asked me: “What do you write about, Sylvie.” Sylvie as the Person was all worried about the impression I would make on people telling them I wrote about cock and ass.

Then my boss said: “She’s a persona, it’s like she writes in character.” I thought, fucking great point. Bang on. That’s what it is. I’m acting, really. There was no thrill as in, “Wow, people will want to fuck me I’m so great in bed.” The thrill was rather honest”¦ great if I could connect with someone, better if they could relate and connect to me on a more emotional level.

It takes a lot of dedication and volunteering to get things going. Without that interest and selflessness, shit happens and things fall apart.

Nichole: Wasn’t Moms there too, Sylv?

Sylvie: Yeah, ha ha ha.

Tony: What was her reaction? Are you disowned? Are you comfortable discussing the Mom thing?

Sylvie: Not a problem to talk about my mom. Everyone gets a kick out of the fact that I brought her to the Laff for my birthday one year. She’s a very open woman. It was a huge deal for her to be at the Laff since back in the ’50s her own mother, being a woman, wasn’t allowed in. I think Mom finds it rather liberating that her daughter is into this stuff because it gets her thinking about her own body and experiences.

Mom was concerned about all the one night stands I was having, though. I do find a lot of my works and attitudes about the casualness of sexual activity that I was engaging in almost every weekend for years sort of are a reaction against her whole “ladies don’t behave like that” mentality. I said she was open, but I mean she is open to listening to her kid. She won’t judge. That said, she was always concerned about my reputation and virtue and that a guy wouldn’t want me if I talked the way I did and if he found out about how many guys I went with. I hate that double-standard.

Tony: Nichole, what did you mean earlier when you said the Ottawa spoken word scene had “died”?

Nichole: Well, Step Up Slam died and although the spoken word scene has continued in other aspects–i.e., the CBC Face Off annual slam poetry fest, spoken word events held at the Mercury Lounge, my durtygurls series to an extent, other events that take place in the city–but the initial excitement that surrounded Step Up really fuelled the scene. Many slammers had their first start at Step Up.

This was my viewpoint as an outsider; outside the spoken word scene but a part of the literary sphere.

Tony: Do either of you have any thoughts on why Step Up Slam died? Not enough slammers in a town of this size?

Sylvie: Organization. Personalities. Management issues. A large chunk of Step Up went away. Oni, Anthony Bansfield, Nth Degree–that whole contingent had their own thing in the works and it took off for them. Things were already dislocating with Kris Northey stepping down as head.

What we’ve lost and what I miss are the Kris Northeys and the Pierre Ringwalds–the two who started Step Up. We don’t hear much from Matt Peake, but Melanie Noll is still active on the scene. Step Up was an incredibly intense effort to manage. We were lucky and got an amazing graphic designer on board named Tony Szydlik–he was responsible for the whole marketing campaign I guess via posters and little flyers when Step Up moved to Mercury Lounge. His posters and the logo he branded Step Up with made the collective and the gigs clearly identifiable and exceptionally cool. He’d even poster the damned city himself! It takes a lot of dedication and volunteering to get things going. Without that interest and selflessness, shit happens and things fall apart …

Nichole: I can say from experience that putting together a reading series takes a lot of time and effort–much more than you’d think. The people who start series and keep them going on a regular basis, that’s a second life.

Tony: Okay, Nichole, so now you have this film. How did it end up at the Brampton Arts Festival? And what else have you done with it?

Nichole: I sent it to a few places where it ended up in a black hole. Little feedback even with prodding. ZED-TV and other lit channels that will not be named. Then a colleague pointed me to Bramptom where it was accepted. It was also featured as part of Roger’s recent Indie Xposed series on television.

Tony: What has been the reaction to the film thus far?

Nichole: Good. Positive. It’s not a film that wows people but one that makes them say, “Hey, that’s different from what I normally see.” I’m satisfied with the film in that it was “mission accomplished”–our goals were met. Though I’m surprised and disappointed other lit venues didn’t pick it up. I’ll still keep sending it around.

It was my first effort directing something creative. I have worked in the TV industry as a story editor and writer, and I directed edits and camera crews. But it was my first “fun” piece.

Tony: Are there any more Niche Productions in the works? And how’s your novel coming along?

Nichole: I’ve been writing screenplays–one is the screenplay version of the novel I play with. There is also a short film in the works but in nascent stages.

Tony: Sylvie, now that you have appeared in the local CBC Face-Off coming up in March, does this mean you’re “active” again as a spoken work poet? If so, what’re your plans?

Sylvie: Not a clue. We’ll see. I published and performed ’cause I believed I had something important, relevant and thoughtful to say and because there was a perfect venue available for that outlet to be funny and crazy. I don’t see a venue nowadays–not sure how my little sex poems would go over in the hip hop world that is now the spoken word scene in Ottawa. Also, in terms of topic and theme, I think I’ve calmed down. The Muse is a beautiful thing but she’s a bit unsympathetic to monogamy and stability. I’m sure I’ll blast off at some point. I’ll just need a steady diet of Jack Daniels or something.

Tony: Won’t keep you ladies any longer. It’s been great. Much thanks.

Nichole: Night all.

Sylvie: Take care.