[{"id":"9285","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast S2E7, Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word, 5 April 2021, Fong and O'Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast Season 2"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Deanna Fong","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/102855198\",\"name\":\"Deanna Fong\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2021],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/1856e0ce-b7c4-459b-a647-fda358f5396a/audio/784305a8-060a-4ebe-8a56-4876884a0869/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:58:49\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"56,532,367 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"sw-s2ep7-ethical-listening\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-ethically-to-the-spoken-word/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2021-04-05\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"The following are Creative Commons attribution licenses\\n\\nTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray (Old phonograph “Cabaret”)\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_Various_Artists/Antique_Phonograph_Music_Program_05052009/Take_Me_to_the_Cabaret\\n\\nNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Kevin_MacLeod/Jazz_Sampler/Night_on_the_Docks_-_Sax\\n\\nBlur the World by Tagirijus\\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/Manuel_Senfft/Easy_2018/manuel_senfft_-_blur_the_world\\n\\nQueer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta \\n\\nhttps://freemusicarchive.org/music/isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta/unlikely_objects/07_-_isabel_nogueira_e_luciano_zanatta_-_unlikely_objects_objetos_improvveis_-_queer_noise\\n\\nThe following are spoken word performance clips\\n\\nMathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, courtesy of recordist.\\n\\n“Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen, courtesy of Radiofreerainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books. \\n\\nHartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, courtesy of The People and the Text, \\n\\nT.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at Edgy Women Festival, courtesy of performer.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549498101760,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["This episode is a series of interviews with Humanities scholars Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L. Cowan about their approaches to the ethics of listening in their own research. We join Deanna Fong and Mike O’Driscoll as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them.\n\nThis episode was created by SpokenWeb contributors Deanna Fong (Concordia University) and Michael O’Driscoll (University of Alberta), with additional audio courtesy of the radiofreerainforest Fonds at Simon Fraser University’s Special Collections; the Hartmut Lutz Collection, made digitally available by the SSHRC-funded People and the Text project (https://thepeopleandthetext.ca/); and support from Jason Camlot, Hannah McGregor, Stacey Copeland, and Judith Burr. Special thanks to Deanna Reder and Alix Shield of The People and the Text Project, and to Mathieu Aubin, bill bissett, Hartmut Lutz, Maria Campbell, and T.L. Cowan for permission to share interview and performance audio. \n\n\n00:00\tHannah McGregor:\tHi! Hannah McGregor here. Before we get into our episode today, I want to tell you about our new partner podcast [Start Music] , New Aural Cultures: The Podcast Studies Podcast. If you like the sound studies episodes of SpokenWeb, you’ll love this in-depth but accessible take on podcasting culture with hosts, Dr. Dario Linares, featuring interviews with internationally renowned podcast producers, academics, and critics, New Aural Cultures delves into the medium in all its complexity. New Aural Cultures is also a distribution network for one-off podcasts, ongoing series, and sound-based projects of all kinds. If you have a sound based project or idea that you think would lend itself to becoming a podcast, reach out on Twitter @NewAural, that’s aural as in A-U-R-A-L. To listen to the show, head over to anchor.fm/NewAuralCultures or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll even hear episodes featuring SpokenWeb members like Stacey Copeland, Jason Camlot, and me! And now onto our episode. [End Music]\n \n\n01:30\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped with High-Pitched Voice Begins] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n \n\n01:30\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWord Podcast: stories about how literature sounds. My name is Hannah McGregor, and each month I’ll be bringing you different stories of Canadian literary history and our contemporary responses to it created by scholars, poets, students, and artists from across Canada. What does ethical mean to you? Perhaps you took an ethics course in school where they taught you about Aristotle or Kant, about ethics as a system of rules or theories concerned with what is good for individuals in society. O.r perhaps ethical is something tied more to the way you live each day, your interactions with loved ones and strangers, your choices in what food to buy or political cause to support. But how does ethics apply to the way we listen? And in particular, the way we listen to the spoken word? Poet Robert Duncan once described himself as a poet who “listens as his poetry pictures his listening”. A reminder that poetry is, in its first instance, a record of sonic performance, an artistic practice that takes place as much on the stage in front of a listening audience, as on the page. What’s more, poetic performance is at its heart about attunement and attention. About a response, or a responsibility, to the world enacted through sound. We can think of listening as ethics or “po-ethics”, as the composer John Cage often said. In this episode, we joined SpokenWeb contributors, Deanna Fong, and Mike O’Driscoll, as they step back to listen to the ethical practices of expert listeners. They’ll guide us through the production, collection, preservation, and reception of spoken word performances, as we hear from a performance artist, an oral historian, a curator, and a cultural analyst on what ethical listening means to them. Here is Deanna and Mike [Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals] with “Listening Ethically to the Spoken Word.” [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Vocals]\n \n\n04:01\tMusic:\t“Take Me to the Cabaret” by Billy Murray\n04:16\tDeanna Fong:\t[Continue Music] Hi, I’m Deanna Fong.\n \n\n04:16\tMike O’Driscoll:\tAnd I’m Mike O’Driscoll. In her book The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, Gemma Corradi Fiumara remarks that genuine listening creates ever new spaces in the very place it is carried out. We’d add, it’s a site for the emergence of something radically new. [End Music] New forms of care, new ways of relating to our environments and to each other. Like her, we believe that listening is a revolutionary activity.\n \n\n04:48\tDeanna Fong:\tOver the next hour, we will introduce you to four speakers who cultivate that creative space of listening in their practice: T.L. Cowan, Mathieu Aubin, Treena Chambers, and Clint Burnham. Each introduces us to a sound recording that is important to their work and takes us through what attentive, ethical listening means to them. As you listen to this podcast, we invite you to be attuned to your own listening by considering the following questions. What are you listening for in the space of this podcast? At what points is your attention fixed and at what points does it wander? What is the material situation of your listening? Where does it take place? What else is going on? How does listening feel in your body?\n \n\n05:30\tMike O’Driscoll:\tBy giving special attention to these cues, we hope that this episode will prompt you to reflect on your own ethics of listening by considering how you listen and what is important to you when encountering the spoken word and other sounds.\n \n\n05:47\tDeanna Fong:\tI’m going to guess that when most of us imagine what listening sounds like, we imagine nothing at all. Silence. But for queer cabaret performer and professional spokeslady Trixie Cane, also known as Professor T.L. Cowan, it sounds a lot more like this.\n \n\n06:02\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tIt’s not too late. You can [Audience Laughter] eat me today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n06:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tHi T.L. Thanks for joining us today. Can you begin by telling us a bit more about that clip and why it’s important to you?\n \n\n06:38\tT.L Cowan:\tSure. Thanks. And thanks for having me. This is just fabulous. This was my performance at the final cabaret of the Edgy Women Festival, which was a festival of feminist performance –performance art that was organized and curated by a really awesome person named Miriam Zenith GA in Montreal from 1994 to 2016. So a 22 year run of this feminist performance festival. And so this was the very last show of that festival and it was called Left Fe and the cabaret was hosted by Edgy Women superstars, Dana McLeod and Natalie Clode, and the festival or the cabaret itself was a kind of funeral awake and a celebration of life of The Edgy Women Festival. And Natalie and Dana as the hosts took us through the stages of grief. So I was invited and commissioned –invited to perform, commissioned to make a piece.\n \n\n07:35\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so I was performing as my alter ego, Mrs. Trixie Cane. And Mrs. Trixie Cane is –she’s a character who I perform in drag. And she is a professional spokeslady, and I was performing alongside my partner Jazz Rock, who is a very good cello player. And Jazz and I play together as a duo called Mrs. Trixie Cane and Her Handsome Cellist. And it was called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. That was the title of the performance. But what you’re listening to now is the very end of that performance. And this was happening at the Leon D’or Cabaret in Montreal.\n \n\n08:20\tAudio Recording, T.L. Cowan performance of Mrs. Trixie Cane at the Edgy Women Festival:\tHi. [Audience Laughter] I’m Trixie King. [Audience Laughter] I’m here tonight to talk to you about an exciting new fundraising initiative called the Edgy Women Memorial Institute for Long Feminist Performance Art Programming That Goes On and On Forever, Forever into Eternity. [Audience Laughter] Or, “EW-MILF-PAPT-GO-OFFE.” [Audience Laughter]\n \n\n09:06\tT.L Cowan:\tSo that clip is important to me because I have been a performer for many, many years, and I’ve performed in lots of different kinds of venues, but, the thing that I have found the most remarkable about a performance life is when it feels like the audience is just really picking up what you’re putting down and that they’re like, they’re in it, they’re listening, they’re following along. They get all of the stuff that you’re trying to do with your look, with your gestures, with your texts, with your movement, with your sexy cellist – all of those kinds of things. And when you’re a feminist performance artist, it’s not that often in the world that you feel “gotten” that you feel like people really get what you’re doing. Usually, in my professional life, I always kind of joke that I feel like I’m the fire-breathing lesbian in every in every professional meeting, for example.\n \n\n10:09\tT.L Cowan:\tAnd so, usually the way –our ways of being in the world are kind of at a weird raw angle to a kind of mainstream straight non-feminists way of doing things. And so, when we bring our performance selves into these spaces and get that kind of applause, it’s like the best mental health medicine ever. Because it’s a moment where you feel seen and heard, understood and that you share a sense of set of references and that you share a set of aesthetics and understandings [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] and that people get what you’re doing.\n \n\n10:54\tDeanna Fong:\tThis reminds me of your recent article on the avidly channel of the LA Review of Books, which is a great series, right? It’s writing with intense eagerness [Laughs] and that essay, “Holding for Applause: On Queer Cabaret in Pandemic Times”, you wrote –there’s a quote here: “Applause is necessary. It makes us feel seen and arguably safe, loved. Applause is the audio equivalent of the sweaty crush upon crush, a bodily affirmation that you can hear. ” And I love that implication of like the sonic importance of applause there. So – how does applause and all of the other sort of like audio accoutrement of heckling and cheering and callback and all these sorts of things – how in your mind does that relate to an ethics of listening in the context of live cabaret performance?\n \n\n11:43\tT.L Cowan:\tWell kind of coming back to what I was saying earlier about the applause that I got for that – my Edgy Woman performance in 2016, I would say that that kind of applause indicates that the audience was paying attention. And that you have not been ignored. You’ve not been dismissed, you’ve not been overshadowed, you’ve not been written off as the kind of flamey queer in the room. Or as I said earlier, that like kind of fire-breathing lesbian in the room, or the angry feminist or whatever it is. But instead by bringing those elements to the stage, and bringing them into that trans feminist performance scene that you are –and telling your stories – that you’re taking a risk to a certain extent, right? That you are hoping that the audience will love what you’re doing, that they will pick up what you’re putting down.\n \n\n12:41\tT.L Cowan:\tBut you never really know. So it’s always a risk. You’re always making yourself vulnerable. And trans, feminist, and queer people know the experience of vulnerability and risk so well because almost anytime that we are ourselves, that we’re not kind of a muted down version of ourselves, in the ways that we need to mute ourselves to generally survive in our everyday lives – that by bringing the kind of full self, the flamboyant self into the space, and then for the audience to be like, “Yeah, that was amazing. I see what you’re doing!” That means that you’re being paid attention to and that not only that, but that what you have to offer is needed, not just tolerated. And so that what you’re bringing into that space is something that people need and want. And that when people give you that kind of applause back, it’s a kind of building a relationship of that kind of intensity that kind of need that kind of caregiving. So a performer giving that kind of performance is a way of caring for her or their, or his community. And for audiences to give back with that amount of attention and love, I think is a kind of ethical engagement with not just the work, but in building these spaces where these stories can be told in a way where they’re going to be supported and appreciated and attended to, and not met with a kind of like cool indifference or or derision or anything like that. But that, that you really are going to feel like your work is needed and loved, and that you are not going to be judged in a way that leaves you feeling like shit – sorry – about yourself afterwards. That you’re going to end up feeling like, “Oh yeah, I can bring my – I can bring what I’ve got here. I don’t have to tone it down.” [Start Music: Take Me to the Cabaret] And so when audiences also don’t tone it down, then that produces a kind of reciprocity of a queer fabulousness and flamboyance and over-the-top-ness that many of us need to thrive and survive, but don’t get in our everyday lives.\n \n\n14:47\tMusic:\tTake Me to the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n15:16\tMusic:\tNight on the Docks by Kevin McLeod\n \n\n15:16\tDeanna Fong:\tT.L Cowan reminds us that an audience’s response, applause, cheering, and other forms of vocal affirmation are not only acts of listening, they’re also acts of care. But how does that care extend beyond the live space of the performance, into the collection and interpretation of participants’ memories of those events? To put it differently, how can historical listening also enact an ethics of care? To answer this question, we turn to our next guest, Mathieu Aubin.\n \n\n15:43\tMike O’Driscoll:\tMathieu Aubin is a scholar of print and performance cultures in Canada. He’s working towards recuperating queer people’s contributions to Canadian literary culture, and his work on queerness and literary communities in Vancouver has been published in the Journal Canadian Literature. Here’s Mathieu at work interviewing legendary poet, bill bissett.\n \n\n16:11\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tI was so grateful for Warren’s support of me. There was a television station then I think called CKVU.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOkay.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nI think –\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWas that a local Vancouver station?\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\n \n\nYeah.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tOk.\n \n\n16:22\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\tAnd I did a reading on it and Robin Blaser was there supporting me and saying wonderful things about me. And I lived in secret and I was, everything was kind of very bizarre and wonderful, the possibilities of things getting better. And then after that, like my phone number was listed. And after that I had death threats about five times a day –.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, Mathieu Aubin:\tWow.\n \n\n16:56\tAudio Recording, Mathieu Aubin interviews bill bissett, bill bissett:\t– just from that TV appearance, I was only chanting. It’s like, people are, it’s like still, I mean, Trump mobilizes those kinds of people. They’re so addicted to everything being the same. And that’s not a judgment at them. They get that way probably because they haven’t read enough books. They’re not informed enough. They hadn’t had an education. Maybe they’ve been very frightened when their children, by something awful that happened to them. And now they can’t handle anything. And it was only musical chanting that I was doing. It was based on the honey chant. And maybe I read a couple of love poems, you know? [Music Begins: Night on the Docks – Sax] And everyone in the house I was living in, they all knew that I was living there secretly, they came down in the apartment, we all watched it together. They thought it was fine [Laughs] but not everyone.  [Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n17:49\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThanks for being here with us today, Mathieu. To begin, can you give us a bit of context about the clip that we just heard?\n \n\n17:59\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this clip is from an interview that I conducted with bill bissett in April, 2019 in Vancouver, British Columbia. And at the time I was really interested [Music Ends: Night on the Docks – Sax] in this reading series called The Writing and Our Time reading series that happened in 1979. And so I had the chance to meet with him in Kitsilano, a neighborhood of Vancouver. And we had met a few times beforehand, so we already had some rapport and we’ve been working together a few years. But the main interest was really about the series and thinking about perhaps its role as a form of queer cultural activism. The reason why I was thinking about that is because the series was started as a way of organizing people together and getting them to raise funds for bill bissett who’s press, blewointment press, Canada Council funding had been cut. And as you know, small presses definitely depend on that money to be able to survive.\n18:56\tMathieu Aubin:\tSo the issue, in part, was a result of accusations in the House of Commons in the year prior and the year before that – so ’70, ’77, ’78 – that we’re calling poetry by bill bissett as well as that by Bertrand Lachance pornographic. So the issue really was that there was this huge debate that led to a lot of backlash. And when I was asking you about the role of homophobia in those events and the House of Commons, as well as the sort of galvanizing movement around challenging what I thought was homophobia with the reading series, he told me about a CKUTV reading, and that happened in ’78 –September ’78, – that was organized by Juan Tolman and attended by many other poets. And so, what you hear in the recording here is basically him describing what happened – [Start Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod] obviously the excitement of the event, but also the kind of negative backlash that happened afterwards.\n \n\n20:06\tDeanna Fong:\tSo I know a lot of your research and also your pedagogical interests revolve around something that you’ve called listening queerly or queer listening. And I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the techniques and practices of queer listening?\n \n\n20:21\tMathieu Aubin:\tYeah. So this is something that I’ve been working on for a few years now, even more closely as a postdoc at Concordia. And to me, queer listening entails basically attending to how LGBTQ+ people interpret or articulate their lives. And that means like friendships, family, intimacy, politics, artistic expression, really all different kinds of facets, but from a queer position. And so, what I’m often listening for and where I’m listening for is often audio recordings of literary events or conversations, but also in oral history interviews. But when I’m thinking about old recordings, I’m mostly interested in thinking about how they’re articulating queer codes, and how they’re connecting with other LGBTQ+ writers in the room, people who are presenting an audience members, or how they also introduced their works, discuss the works and even just the works themselves, obviously, it seems like the most obvious point, but it’s not just about the work itself, but also around it. And how is it actually shaping what we’re listening for?\n21:31\tMathieu Aubin:\tAnd with a quick reference to the clip that I shared with you just before we started recording, there’s one moment I – it makes me smile now listening back again, because – not the condition that he had to go through, but like when he says “living in secrecy” I know what that means, but somebody who might not quite understand the context would not be able to understand the resonances of that. And so for me, it’s thinking, okay, well, 1978-79, bill bissett gay poet, who is under the – has been targeted by the Canada parliament, excuse me, Canadian parliament – I wass going to say the Canada Council, but that wasn’t the case. And then, and also getting death threats. And so living in secrecy for him meant survival at a time when homophobia, wasn’t just something that people were like, “Oh, we’re homophobic, but we hide it.”\n \n\n22:24\tMathieu Aubin:\tIt’s like this was public and overt. And for him it meant survival. So living in secrecy – if he is mentioning something like that – is speaking much louder from a queer positionality, if you’re listening and attending to those concerns. Or another thing could be him reading a poem about RCMP surveillance. Sure, he was arrested for possession of cannabis, but he was also surveilled for other reasons. And part of that was his own sexual identity. So, when he reads a poem about queer surveillance and the RCMP, you know that means more than simply just police state. So, what does that mean about that time period? And what does it mean to be able to share that in that moment to a public audience?\n \n\n23:13\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut in an oral history interview, queer listing, for me entails something not quite the same, but quite similar at the same time. And it’s about how that person, how they –they would probably identify as LGBTQ+ – how they’re interpreting whatever facet of their lives from a queer positionality and how that might resonate differently for queer listeners. So it’s not just about listening to the past, but it’s thinking about how are they interpreting that time in their life today. And that’s why I think like that moment of secrecy – living in secret system. Okay. Well, what does it mean? And maybe along the person to unpack that a little bit, or even just keeping it at that. Not letting it just be a queer code. [Transition Music: Night on the Docks – Sax]\n \n\n24:07\tDeanna Fong:\tAnd so, what sort of ethical considerations have been important in your work – especially as you say that you’re listening for the articulation of these kinds of queer codes, connections between members of communities, perhaps intergenerationally, especially when queer subjects had been the target of so much censure and violence? And I guess maybe one more, very specific question is: in that case, do you feel that there is an ethical impetus to make those codes legible outside of a queer community? Is that part of your task as an oral historian or is there a different kind of ethics that those sorts of artifacts and conversations demand?\n \n\n24:57\tMathieu Aubin:\tI think your questions are right on point. They’re important things that I’m thinking about at the moment. Some of my ways of thinking about this have been – two key ethical principles have been one – and we talked about this last week– which is non extractive listening where things like Dylan Robinsons work – but here more in the queer context because with the measure of the RCMP using tape recorders to literally record people who would be identified as queer today to incriminate them or blackmail them, how do you today listen to this from a position of white privilege and power at the institutions that we work with, and not reproduce that kind of violence? So how do you listen, not extractively but listen with or hopefully from a respectful position. And I think that part of that work – like you’re saying –is thinking about it for me through the queer context, through works that have been written about that period by people who are reflected by that time period.\n \n\n26:07\tMathieu Aubin:\tBut, “who is this for?” is a question that I keep asking myself. Am I writing this to inform the general public, or is this for the communities themselves? And I think it’s a bit of both, but always first and foremost, the queer community itself, because if you’re doing the work for others, how are they going to benefit whatsoever from listening and interpretation and oral history telling. But I think that the general public also needs to know when there’s a lack – like when they don’t understand what it is – the experiences of queer people over the last 50 years, let’s say.\n \n\n26:47\tMathieu Aubin:\tWhat’s interesting to me is when I share these kinds of historical events with people who would identify as maybe an ally or who would try to not be homophobic [Begin Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod], they’re always – they’re often surprised by the stuff that I document for them, about this time period and share with them. So, I think that’s like – the ethics is like how do you do that in a way that’s not just meant to like reproduce the power structures? [End Music: Night on the Docks by Kevin McLeod]\n \n\n27:26\tMike O’Driscoll:\tListening, much like the language we listen to and for can be structured by uneven relations across social forms, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and cultural background. Mathieu shows us how queer codes land differently for different listeners, depending on their position in relation to heteronormative power structures. For our next guest Métis writer, scholar, and organizer, Treena Chambers, language offers us a vantage to critique and dismantle structures of colonial power, and also to heal through storytelling and deep listening. [Music start: Blur the World] Thanks again, Treena, for agreeing to meet with us. You’ve worked extensively with the Hartmut Lutz’s collection of interviews with Indigenous writers, which has been made available on the People and the Text site, listening to them, cataloging them, digitizing them, and even traveling to Germany to work with the collection. It seems that so many stories about the archive begin by encountering a box of tapes. Can you tell us that story and what that encounter was like for you?\n \n\n28:47\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah, I’m happy to. So, I was working with Dr. Deanna Reader and she had some money and was trying to go through Dr. Hartmut Lutz’s library. So, she found myself and Rachel Thomas and Thompson, and sent us to Germany [End Music:  Blur the World by Tagirijus] to go through his archives because he was getting ready to retire. And, in going through all his books and all his paraphernalia, we came across this box of tapes and low and behold, open it up, and there are interviews with all sorts of people. Howard Adams, Maria Campbell, Thompson Highway, there was just so many. And so we looked at these and immediately tried to figure out how we can save them– because very quickly, looking at the box– when you pull out a box from the 1960s and 1970s, you’re like, “Uh-Oh!” [Laughs]. Technology has changed, tapes degrade, all of that.\n \n\n29:46\tTreena Chambers:\tSo immediately we’re like, how do we, as quickly as possible get these into some sort of format that we can use? And the only thing we could do at that point was get them back to Canada and hopefully work with the library. So I packed them into a backpack and carried them through Germany and through Portugal because I was making a stop. And then back to Vancouver.\n \n\n30:10\tMike O’Driscoll…:\tHow did it feel, the first moment you got to start listening to them? What did – what was that like for you?\n \n\n30:18\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. I grew up outside of a strong Indigenous community. I had a very strong Indigenous family who understood its self as Indigenous inside those sort of walls of our home. But we grew up in a very white, small town in Canada that was proud of its mining roots and settler roots. And so there was always a conflict with how you understood being Indigenous within that context. And so sitting down and going through those tapes, was a really interesting exercise for me to think through who I was and the sort of dichotomy that I lived within. And so the tapes were really – yeah I just loved hearing [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] these people, these thinkers that I had heard at the kitchen table being heard in a larger context. [End Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n31:23\tTreena Chambers:\tOur goal was to bring them back to Canada. As soon as we saw what they were, we really wanted people to be able to hear the voice of Indigenous thinkers, Indigenous writers, and to hear them here on our shore and to give them the respect that a German scholar gave them, but nobody in Canada had given them in the past. So to bring them home, preserve what we could, document what we could, and make them available for Indigenous scholars, for settler scholars, and to bring them back to the land that they spoke of.\n \n\n32:01\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. And so I think you mentioned that you’ve listened to about 25% of this quite large collection of interviews is that right?\n \n\n32:08\tTreena Chambers:\tYeah. Yeah. It’s been a really interesting project. I mean, we were really lucky that once we got them back to Canada, there were so many other people who were willing to help us digitize them, willing to help us work towards transcripts and that. So a lot of my job became, connecting all of those different groups. So I really got to listen to just the ones that drew me [Laughs] into everything.\n \n\n32:37\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah, of course among those is Maria Campbell’s interview with Hartmut Lutz, which you’ve selected an excerpt for us to listen to today. So, would you mind giving us a little bit of context about that choice and why that tape spoke to you?\n \n\n32:51\tTreena Chambers:\tIt was really interesting. So, I was lucky enough–doing the work of preserving them, that I was able to put them on my phone and listen to them as I was commuting back and forth back pre COVID days where we had to commute further than our bedroom to our living room. And so I was commuting from Burnaby to downtown Vancouver. I was doing my Master’s in –or am still doing my Master’s in public policy at SFU. And, there’s nothing quite as colonial as public policy school. And so having these – the Maria Campbell in particular interview in my ears as I was going to school was a really interesting experience, to hear her talk about her experiences in Canada, and to understand her as a strong Métis woman who really defined community for so many years for so many of us. Yeah, so it was a beautiful moment to think through what she was saying about how we tell stories, and the obligation of stories, and the work that stories do before I would go into a school that started to talk about, “Oh, we’re all neutral and we’re data driven” and I’d be like, [Laughs] I know you’re not! And I heard someone tell me that on the way to school!\n \n\n34:13\tDeanna Fong:\tNo language is neutral. No data is neutral.\n \n\n34:18\tTreena Chambers:\tExactly.\n \n\n34:18\tDeanna Fong:\tSo why don’t I play? I’ll play the clip for us here. I’ll just share my screen.\n \n\n34:24\tAudio Recording, Hartmut Lutz interviews Maria Campbell, Maria Campbell:\tSo one of the things that’s very difficult for me is I don’t, I don’t think of myself as a writer. My work is in the community. Writing is just one of the moves that I use in my work as an organizer. If I think that something else will work better than I’ll, you know, so I’m, it’s multimedia kinds of things. I do video, I do film and I do oral storytelling. I do a lot of teaching. Well, I don’t like calling it teaching, but it’s facilitating. And, I work a lot with elders, so it’s not like I’m a writer and I’m bopping around all over reading and talking about the great literature or anything. I’m not a – I don’t think of myself as an authority on –in fact, I get quite embarrassed when I – if I have to speak from the point of view of a writer, because I really don’t know what that is. I know what a storyteller is. And a storyteller is a community healer and teacher. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n35:40\tDeanna Fong:\tYeah. So fantastic recording and so much to talk about. Can we just start by asking you why this particular recording or this particular excerpt of this recording is important to you?\n \n\n35:54\tTreena Chambers:\tWell, I think –so in the work that I do, I’m trying to challenge the way we use language within public policy. We often talk about things like Crown land and stuff like that, but we don’t need interrogate what that means. And particularly in British Columbia, there’s no such thing as Crown land really. There’s unceded land and there’s treatied land, but the Crown [End [Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus] has not established a real legal claim to the land here. And so I think often about the work that the story that we tell ourselves both in how we envision the birth of what we call Canada, how we envision our obligations to each other and what story can do. And I think in particular, Maria Campbell has taken that very, very seriously and built story and done story work that has really worked to heal many people’s experiences on the land, but also challenge our assumptions about what words mean, what story does and, how we relate to each other. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]\n \n\n37:13\tTreena Chambers:\tSo most of the listening that I do is done just to experience it. It’s not done with this end goal of, okay, this is my conception of this author, or of the speaker, of this process, or product. Therefore I need to listen specifically for things that relate to that. So when I’m listening, I listen just to listen. And that’s not to say that my own internal biases and my own processes and ideas don’t influence what I hear, but I don’t go into much of what I’m listening to with a specific question in mind. I don’t have a research question that I am exploring. I don’t have a specific understanding of the people that I’m listening to. That influences what I’m listening for. I try and listen just to hear what they have to say. And, for me, that allows me to experience what I’m hearing, but also to maybe hear things differently.\n \n\n38:25\tTreena Chambers:\tI think the interesting thing is when we were listening to the Maria Campbell interview, the types of quotes that people pick out and the moments like the moments that you picked out as important were ones that I’m like, nah, that’s kind of a throw away for me. Because it just wasn’t something I was listening for. The Canadian literature scene is not my scene, particularly. I have lots of friends who are in it and I love being there, but I wasn’t listening to hear Maria Campbell’s critique of, or experience of being in groups of other writers. I was just listening to see what she had to say. And in particular, I guess for me about what she had to say about community. And so that’s one of the beauties of just sort of promiscuous listening, I think, is that you don’t go into it with a preconceived agenda and you can enjoy it for –just for the sake of listening that you don’t have to be made better for it. [Begin Music: Blur the World by Tagirijus]  You don’t have to learn from it. You can just listen and be.\n \n\n39:44\tDeanna Fong:\tWe can listen attuned to the resonances of historical context and the dynamics of power as Mathieu Aubain asks us to do, or we can listen through response as T.L. Cowan invites us as a fundamental practice of careful relationships and community building, or we can listen simply to be fully present and enjoy as Treena Chambers reminds us. But it’s listening always unequivocally a good thing? To address that question. We turn to Clint Burnham, professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and a cultural theorist who brings the writings of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to our conversation on the ethics of listening. [Music: queer noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n40:25\tClint Burnham:\tI want to do two things. First of all, I want to hold that up and think about, or add or critique. I still believe in the idea of critique, the notion, that listening is an unalloyed good. And then secondly, I want to say, listen, if listening is not great, it’s also not, not great. So part one, we’re told in the era of #MeToo that we should listen to women. We were told in the era of reconciliation that we should listen to residential school survivors’ stories. Let me be clear that what I am not saying is that we should not listen to survivors. Yes, should we should read and listen to testimony. You have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We should read and listen to their stories and songs and novels and poems about that horrible continued history of cultural genocide in our settler colonial past and present.\n \n\n41:14\tClint Burnham:\tAnd yes, we should listen to our loved ones, our colleagues, our students, and our public figures when they talk about acts of sexual assault and improprieties. But, I also want us to think more about what listening means, what it entails. I want us to consider how listening is often the activity of the powerful. Think of the judge in a courtroom who listens to testimony, or a priest who listens confession, or a therapist who listens to a patient. The structure of listening actually bequeaths a kind of master position onto the listener, who then decides what to believe, what to do with this knowledge. We put too much trust in listening. We think the listener is a good person. It’s good to listen. We have an entire repertoire of neoliberal, therapeutic listening, active listening. “I hear what you are saying.” Blah, blah, blah.\n \n\n42:12\tClint Burnham:\tSo what am I proposing? So, I’m not proposing to get rid of listening, to stop listening, but I am proposing that listening is not, not great. Lacanian psychoanalysis proposes a different kind of listening. So it’s still based on the idea of the psychoanalyst, but it’s a different sort of modality, Lacan famously combined the words caritas, or love, and trash, or déchets in French, to characterize what the analyst does as decharite, or what was translated into English as “trashitas.” So not caritas, but trashitas, a kind of a sifting through, a listening to garbage. And part of this is because there’s a through line of Lacan talking about his work as garbage. He’ll pun on poubelle-lication – a publication and poubelle, meaning garbage. Or he’ll say his work is only fit for the wastebasket. So he is talking about his own writings as well as about what the analysand, the patient, is saying.\n \n\n43:12\tClint Burnham:\tBut trashitas comes from caritas, so it’s also the love of garbage. An example of listening as trashitas can be found in how I listened to the Radio Free Rainforest archive. So thinking about the archive, sifting through the archive, of looking for that nugget, that gold, the archival jolt, as I think actually Michael O’Driscoll first theorized it. So we’re looking for something in the archive and the rest is– the remainder, is dross, is garbage, is uninteresting to us. [Audio Recording: “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman] And so for me then finding the poem, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman…\n \n\n44:04\tAudio Recording, “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horseman, courtesy of Radio Free Rainforest, Simon Fraser University, Special Collections and Rare Books:\t[Drumming] [Singing] [Drumming] [Singing] [Repeats] [Voices overlapping]. A moment ago, once I was like, this is an interesting thing. Once I was interested in [inaudible] everything. I was talking a moment ago. Everyone’s talking to someone. Nobody’s talking to noone. [Breathing sounds]. [Singing].\n \n\n46:58\tClint Burnham:\t“Mayakovsky”, a sound poem by the sort of Canadian avant-garde sound poetry group, the Four Horsemen, active in the 70’s and the 80’s. This is actually a record that was from a record, their record, Live in the West from 1977, played on Jerry Gilbert’s radio show called Radio Free Rainforest in, I think November, 1990. And that was a show on community radio CFRO in Vancouver. That show ran for 15 or 20 years. And at a certain point after Jerry passed away, his fonds became – were collected by the contemporary literature collection at SFU. And the tapes –he taped all of his shows – I actually have cassettes of when I was on that show in the late 90’s. He would give a cassette to people when they were on the show. And he also kept tapes himself. Larry Bremner for a while was his technician as well, the Case W poet. And so all those tapes ended up at a SFU and through the SpokenWeb team of gremlins, [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] they were digitized and archived and now it’s all up on the SFU library website, which is quite amazing.\n \n\n48:20\tClint Burnham:\tAnd even then, as we just listened to the poem, sound poetry itself as a genre takes these, these kinds of – in this case, mostly with the body, but not necessarily, there’s a drum in there as well –these guttural or breathing or throat singing. There’s a bit of that Tuvan sort of thing going on there. The versions of sound that don’t quite seem to be language, that seemed to be something else that we might think of as being experimental or trashy or garbage, like in a certain kind of way. And of course, even listening for that extraneous stuff, the chatter, the car noises, the needle on the – in the grooves of the vinyl and the dust and the scratches and the vinyl that make for that kind of noise. And finally thinking about the mediation of that sound. We’re listening through a computer – it was a tape that had been digitized from a radio show. There was a record being played – what has to do with the affordances of how we listen, the ear buds, and so on. All of the ways I’ve been thinking about listening to “Mayakovsky” by the Four Horsemen via Radio Free Rainforest, for me, is a form of listening that embodies that kind of trashitas ethics.\n \n\n49:40\tDeanna Fong:\tThat’s great. And you know what immediately comes to mind is, I remember Tony Power, who’s the contemporary literature collections librarian at SFU. When that collection came in, Gerry Gilbert’s fond , it was full of literal trash. It was full of cigarette butts and old birth control packages from the 1970s and paperclips and all sorts of things. So I think actually what you’re proposing here is a different reading of the archive itself too. Not as this elevated site of the arc-on, as we imagine it in other various theoretical texts, but literally the trash heap [Laughs] in many cases. And that’s a way to sort of unravel that archontic kind of power.\n \n\n50:32\tClint Burnham:\tYeah. I mean, both – so, I mean, it’s that trash heap, and something that Lacan rifts off from Joyce as well – a letter, a litter from Finnegan’s Wake probably –that materiality of it is trash, is the sublime is unsorted. But then also that the listening, I think, to talk about listening in terms of the trashitas means – and it’s not to, it’s not to say that what I mean, whether it’s a work of literature or a testimony or something else is trash in the sense that it doesn’t matter, it’s just that– because on the one hand, there’s this love for it, there’s this real desire to hear it– but it’s not treating it as this kind of, that that makes me a better person for having been the person who listens. That ethical call to listen is what I think really has to be, thought about because it puts the listener into this position of the master, of the beautiful soul.\n \n\n51:33\tClint Burnham:\tAnd I’m using master very conscious of the ways in which, with Black Lives Matter over the past six months since the George Floyd uprisings, has really asked us to think about what the signifiers are. And that mastery itself – we can sanitize or cancel language in terms of when – you know, master bedroom or master files and so on. And some of that obviously is very important, but I think I want to retain that idea, that one is put into a master position by the ethics of listening for precisely, for the problem of being a master. That perhaps when we call on others to listen to us, we don’t want to acknowledge the fact that we’re putting them into that powerful position [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta] and we have to think about that.\n \n\n52:28\tMike O’Driscoll:\tSo Clint, I’d like to ask you about modalities or methods of listening then in terms of recognizing that the listener assumes a master position, even while purporting to conduct a kind of ethics of listening. So how can that position of mastery be subject to disruption or to intervention? Is – are there ways that one might imagine listening or not listening, or not assuming that position of mastery that you might imagine?\n \n\n53:06\tClint Burnham:\tThat’s the hard part. I was saying to Deanna earlier, I hadn’t got to the the conclusion. I hadn’t got to the, “what do we do now?” part of the evening. And I think it’s in part what I’m calling for. First of all – what I’m saying and what I’m asking, but also what I’m saying is that we have to think about that power position itself. And being aware of it – of that problem is the first thing. And being aware that when I’m listening to somebody tell me of – give this testimony or talking about their trauma. Let’s just say, let’s just put it in that kind of way, right. That I can’t make the mistake of thinking, or I should be really critical of thinking that this makes me a better person because I’m the one who’s listening. And in a certain kind of way, the problem with the ethics of listening is that it depends on the speaker having this trauma to bring to me. You know, I can only be a good listener if you’re going to tell me about the horrible day you had you know, at the level of an analyst or, you know, about your sin, if I’m a priest or about your crime, if I’m a judge. I can only do those – all those positions depend on that person, bringing that trash to them, bringing those horrible things to them. So my beautiful soul, as Hegel put it, as a listener, depends on the trash in the other person’s soul. And so it’s a very disavowed relation, I think, it’s something that –or a repressed relation perhaps to put it more strongly, that the listener has with what is being brought to them. That what is being brought to them, makes them into a good person. [Begin Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]And just to flip it around as well, when we are saying, “listen to me”, we are elevating that person into a position of power, and do we want to do that? [End Music: Queer Noise by isabel nogueira e luciano zanatta]\n \n\n55:19\tDeanna Fong:\tLike the great variety of sounds that move us in our practices as makers and researchers, so too, are there many modalities of listening each with their own ethical demands. Sometimes listening demands an embodied response where we offer our voices as gifts freely given to a community-based and reciprocal trust. Other times, listening is about generating space. For thoughts, for reflections, for emotions, as they play out in the improvised performance between an interviewer and an interviewee. Sometimes voices ask us to listen otherwise, without the impulse to place demands upon that which we are hearing or to extract what we want to hear toward our own ends. And sometimes, listening asks that we turn the acoustic mirror back on ourselves as listeners to examine our own implications in a social and political forces that structure our listening.\n \n\n56:10\tMike O’Driscoll:\tFor us, the creation of this podcast has been an extended exercise in listening. One that in many ways has placed our own definition of ethics in tension with demands of the podcast genre. That is, what you have heard today represents only a small portion of the conversations we’ve had with friends, colleagues, and interviewees recorded and unrecorded, that themselves comprise a larger scope of listening activities around this final product.\n \n\n56:44\tDeanna Fong:\tIn the spirit of imagining an ethics of listening that is multiple, nuanced, and context-specific, we invite you to listen to the full recordings of these interviews, which have been made available for streaming on the Archive of the Present, ArchiveOfThePresent.SpokenWeb.ca. We also invite questions, comments, and further dialogue by email to Deanna.Fong@Mail.Concordia.ca and MO@ualberta.ca.\n \n\n57:11\tMike O’Driscoll:\tThank you for listening.\n \n\n57:19\tMusic:\tTake Me To the Cabaret by Billy Murray, Old phonograph “Cabaret”\n \n\n57:28\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals] SpokenWeb is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team as part of distributing the audio collected from and created using Canadian literary archival recordings found at universities across Canada. Our producers this month are SpokenWeb team members Deanna Fong of Concordia University, and Michael O’Driscoll from the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland, and our assistant producer and outreach manager is Judith Burr. Thank you to Mathieu Aubin, Clint Burnham, Treena Chambers, and T.L Cohen for their generous contributions to this episode. Special thanks also to Deanna Reader and Alex Shield of the People and the Text project, and to Hartmut Lutz and Maria Campbell for giving their permission to share the audio from their interview here on the show. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit SpokenWeb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media @SpokenWebCanada. From all of us at SpokenWeb, be kind to yourself and one another out there, and we’ll see you back here next month for another episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music, Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Vocals]\n"],"score":4.2402368},{"id":"9986","cataloger_name":["Gloriah,Onyango"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts 3.6, Listening Communities: The Introductions of Douglas Barbour, 21 March 2022, O’Driscoll"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Podcast"],"item_series_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast"],"item_series_description":["Series of podcasts by the SpokenWeb network."],"item_subseries_title":["The SpokenWeb Podcast ShortCuts"],"item_series_wikidata_url":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q117038029"],"item_series_uri":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/spokenweb-podcast/"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution (BY)"],"access":["Streaming and download"],"creator_names":["Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/92fcd7b7-f420-4290-92bb-dc203c24e20e/audio/a0916f80-9412-430b-86c4-bdf060a54182/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"shortcuts3-6-listeningcommunities.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:22:28\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"21,576,865 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"ShortCuts3.6_ListeningCommunities\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/listening-communities-the-introductions-of-douglas-barbour/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-03-21\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"AUDIO\\n\\nAudio played in this ShortCuts is excerpted from the SpokenWeb’s audio collections held by the University of Alberta. The audio is currently being catalogued by SpokenWeb researchers. \\n\\nAudio of Douglas Barbour reading “The Gone Tune” is from the cassette tape recording of The Bards of March (15 March 1986). \\n\\nAudio of Douglas Barbour’s introductions are selected from readings recorded in 1977-1981. The poets introduced are, in order of audio appearance: Tom Wayman, Phyllis Webb, Fred Wah, Maxine Gadd, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, Penn Kemp, Leona Gom, John Newlove, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and bpNichol.\\n\\nRESOURCES\\n\\nNeWest Press: IN MEMORIAM: DOUGLAS BARBOUR (1940-2021),\\nhttps://newestpress.com/news/in-memoriam-douglas-barbour-1940-2021\\n\\nDouglas Barbour (March 21, 1940 – September 25, 2021),\\nhttps://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2021/09/douglas-barbour-march-21-1940-september.html\\n\\n“\\nSounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp.\\n” Produced by Nick Beauchesne & Penn Kemp for\\nThe SpokenWeb Podcast\\nand starts with a clip from the\\nTrance Form\\nreading hosted by Douglas Barbour at the University of Alberta (1977).\\n\\n\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549812674560,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["Our guest-producer this month, Michael O’Driscoll, invites us to listen to the introductions of the late Douglas Barbour\n(March 21, 1940 – Sept 25, 2021)\nfrom readings held at the University of Alberta. What are we listening to when we hear introductory remarks from past readings spliced together? By asking us to listen to remember, this episode remembers Barbour in his element —in sonic performance — and what we hear in the selected recordings is a combination both of poetic sound and sounds of deep care as he welcomes each writer to the microphone. \n\n00:09\tShortCuts Theme Music\t[Piano Overlaid with Distorted Beat]\n \n\n00:09\tHannah McGregor:\tWelcome to SpokenWeb ShortCuts. Each month on alternate fortnights (that’s every second week following the monthly SpokenWeb Podcast episode) you can join me, Hannah McGregor and our minisode host and curator, Katherine McLeod for SpokenWeb’s ShortCuts mini-series. We’ll share with you specially curated audio clips from deep in the SpokenWeb archives to ask: what does it mean to cut and splice digitally? What kinds of new stories and audio criticism can be produced through these short archival clips? ShortCuts is an extension of the ShortCuts blog posts on Spoken Web blog, so if you love what you hear be sure to head over to spokenweb.ca for more. If you’re a researcher with the Spoken Web Project, think about joining Katherine on shortcuts to discuss an archival clip that has impacted your work. Especially if you’re a student who has been digitizing and cataloging recordings, and there’s a sound that stands out to you after all those hours of listening, let Katherine know! Pitch Katherine, your audio by emailing SpokenWebPodcast@gmail.com. Now here is Katherine McLeod with SpokenWeb ShortCuts, mini-stories about how literature sounds. [SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music: Instrumental Overlapped with Feminine Voice]\n \n\n01:28\tKatherine McLeod:\tWelcome back to ShortCuts where we take a deep dive into the archives through a short ‘cut’ [Sound Effect: Scissor Clip] or ‘cuts’ [Sound Effect: Scissor Clip x2] from the sounds of the SpokenWeb audio collections. This month, we have a guest producer, Michael O’Driscoll. He’ll be taking us on a sonic journey into recordings that are part of SpokenWeb’s collections held by the University of Alberta. So I’ll keep my own introduction brief here, but I do want to share the story of how this episode came about because it really does shape what you will hear. Throughout this third season of ShortCuts, I’ve been asking: How does the archive remember? Back in the November episode (and do listen back to it afterwards as it really is a place where many of the questions asked in this episode began) I had just finished making that episode and I was so heartbroken as many of us were to hear the news that writers Phyllis Webb and Lee Maracle had passed away. I happened to be in a SpokenWeb meeting with Michael O’Driscoll the following week and we started talking about what it means to listen to archives as a kind of communal remembrance — for Michael, the writer on his mind was the late Douglas Barbour. And after that meeting, we decided to talk more about ShortCuts as one of many places to explore a kind of listening as remembrance. By the time this episode was made we started to call this “listening to remember.” So here we are now in March 2022 and Michael has created an episode which is both a celebration of the multi-faceted sounds of Barbour’s poetry, and a reflection upon what community and care can sound like in the archives. Let’s listen together to “Listening Communities: The Introductions of Douglas Barbour”.\n \n\n03:33\tMichael O’Driscoll:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] Hello, I’m Michael O’Driscoll, and in this ShortCuts episode we’re going to explore a most under-rated audio-textual genre: the introduction to a literary reading. And to do that we’re going to jump into the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection, and listen in on a master of the genre: poet, professor, critic, and publisher Douglas Barbour. [End Music” ShortCuts Theme Music] If you’re familiar with Doug’s creative work, then you probably know him as one of Canada’s great sound poets…\n \n\n04:08\tArchival Recording, Douglas Barbour, The Bards of March, 1986:\tThis is called “That Gone Tune” and it began when I was at the well known and noted Yardbird suite listening to the Dave Holland Quintet. “That Gone Tune”. [Opening clip of Barbour performing the sound poem “That Gone Tune,” starting with nonlinguistic vocalizations ranging in loudness and then settling into utterances that are mostly vowel-sounds.]\n \n\n05:28\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tThat’s Doug performing in 1986 at Edmonton’s Jubilee Auditorium at The Bards of March event, a celebration of NeWest Press. I first heard Doug’s sound poetry one year earlier at the Bookshop Café in Guelph, Ontario. It was, without exaggeration, life changing—as a young undergraduate student, I’d never witnessed anything like it. Over ten minutes time, in exacting, breathtaking, and sometimes humorous detail, Doug performed the words “full” and “moon” by carefully articulating, extending, and distorting the consonants and vowels of each word—teasing out and making so strange a motif that otherwise, so often, has been the subject of much more conventional lyric poetry. Sadly, we don’t have a copy of Doug performing “Full Moon,” but what we do have in the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection are many, many instances of Doug introducing his visiting guests to a local audience. And that’s where I’d like us to pause briefly today.\n \n\n06:42\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Tom Wayman at the University of Alberta, approximately 1978:\tIndeed, a pleasure to introduce Tom Wayman to you today. He is our writer in residence this year and a great fellow to have around. I can tell you, I’ve been enjoying talking to him and listening to him for the past few months and look forward to that in the future. Today, I’m afraid he’s gonna hack and cough his way through a fairly short reading since he’s come down with a very bad cold in the last couple weeks. But, as various of his titles indicate he is the person who likes to communicate to live audiences, Money and Rain, a title I love, Tom Wayman Live is one of his books and always enjoyed him when I listen to him. I hope you will too today, Tom Wayman. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n07:25\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tI eventually came to know Doug when I joined him as a faculty member at the University of Alberta in 1997. Doug, who quickly became a friend, was passionate about many things: he was an inveterate jazz enthusiast, and he was an avid reader and critic of science fiction and fantasy in addition to being astonishingly expert on all things poetic. He was a founding member and President of NeWest Press; he was, along with Stephen Scobie, half of the Re: Sounding performance duo that performed around the world, and he was, at heart, a generous teacher and mentor. I can’t possibly capture his dynamic character in the space of this short account, so I want to focus on one thing: Doug’s cultivation of community. When Doug passed away last September at the age of 81, his life partner Sharon Barbour heard an outpouring of grief and support and memory from hundreds of friends, writers, artists, collaborators, and students from quite literally around the world. So many of us were compelled to express our deep admiration and gratitude for this man with whom we each felt connected. This was, in part, because Doug worked relentlessly to gather together a community of listeners—through collaborative writing and creation—such as the “Continuations” series he wrote with poet Sheila Murphy—by generously sharing and circulating the work of others, in his passionate commitment to teaching and learning, in supporting and nurturing artists near and far, and by opening up their home to visiting writers here in Edmonton. If you search “Barbour” in the University of Alberta’s SpokenWeb collection of literary sound recordings, Doug’s name comes up a couple of dozen times. That’s because year in and year out, there was Doug, pushing the “record” button on a reel to reel or cassette tape recorder, and introducing the authors under his care. Many of my other colleagues shared in the organizing and hospitality that went into building not only UAlberta’s annual reading series, but also what is now the oldest, continuous Writer in Residence program in the country. But as custodians of literary audio, the SpokenWeb collective owes Doug a particular debt of gratitude for helping to capture so many of these moments in creative time. And perhaps nothing better represents Doug’s spirit of hospitality and community building than his introductions to those guests. And that provides us with a unique opportunity to listen to community in the making. Here’s what that sounded like, for Doug.\n \n\n10:22\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Phyllis Webb at the University of Alberta, January 29, 1981:\t[Collage of intros and background audio, sometimes inaudible and ranging in sound quality.] Well, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the first of what I hope will be five readings this term. We haven’t heard from everybody yet, but the next there’ll be two in February and two in March. I have had the pleasure of introducing Phyllis Webb to audiences at U of A before, but my pleasure is really great this time, since she is also our writer in residence this year, something of which I’m very proud. Also for the first time at least here, she’ll be reading, not only from the manuscript for her new book, but from the new book itself, Wilson’s Bowl, which has just been published by Coach House. Alas quick boning around the book store has revealed that it had not yet come in, but it will soon be available in stores in Edmonton. And it’s an incredibly good book indeed. Already available in a very fine book is her selected poems, which is in the bookstore, hither and yawn. Anybody who’s read the journal recently will know I think very highly of Phyllis Webb so I’ll say nothing more than: Phyllis Webb. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n11:26\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Fred Wah at the University of Alberta, March 8, 1979:\t[Tape Click] I’s a real pleasure for me to introduce Fred Wah today, he’s a poet I’ve been reading for a number of years. I actually did read his first work in New Wave Canada in 1966 and although I never did find a copy of lardo or a mountain, which were his first books and are probably very rare by now, I have managed to get hold of his later books published in Canada, Trees, among which is a kind of selected poems from 60s and an amazingly beautiful book from Town Books, pictograms from the interior of BC, which is both very fine poems and a beautiful example of book making, I think. Fred is now working on a book which bpNichol said is easy enough for him to say, but very difficult for people like me and you Doug, because it’s very hard to breathe Nichol or Barbara out that easily, but breathing my name with a sigh is very easy when your name is Fred WAH! So, I look forward to hearing from that book as well as some of his other work today and with no further ado I’ll let Fred Wah read. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n12:39\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\t[Inaudible Sounds] There’s somebody from Vancouver, but Maxine has been putting up very well with frozen cars and everything this morning. She’s published only three books, but she’s been writing for a long time. And as you can see here written a great deal. She doesn’t like to be published. And it seems from what she said to me this morning that the reason two of those books were published… [Recording Drops Out] … grabs some manuscript and ran with it as fast as he could to his blewointment press, uh, those books. However, are guns of the west, the book of Practical Knowledge and how do you pronounce it? Hochelaga?\n \n\n13:07\tArchival Recording Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tHochelaga. Yeah, I published Practical Knowledge myself.\n \n\n13:09\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tAnd, Westerns was published in 1975, a collection of those three books. I’m looking really forward to this reading and I hope you are too, Maxine Gadd.\n \n\n13:18\tArchival Recording Maxine Gadd at the University of Alberta, February 16, 1979:\tThanks.\n \n\n13:18\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing George Bowering at the University of Alberta, February 12, 1980:\tI have George Bowering here today to read to us. He is recently published another [inaudible] but I tend to think of him as the author of A Short Sad Book, Allophanes, and casting backwards a long distance, Touch, and many other works. George was once poet, but now he says he calls himself simply a writer. And he’s a very good writer. I’m glad to have him here. [Audience Applause].\n \n\n13:43\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Roy Kiyooka at the University of Alberta, February 11, 1977:\t…Stood among what I thought were the extraordinarily evocative photographs of his stone gloves and gave a reading at the University of Alberta. He hasn’t been back since, since that time, the book Stone Gloves has been published and last year Talon Books brought out a huge monumental transcanada letters, a book, which is delightful, engaging, and all the things that Roy Kiyooka is, which means multiplex and full of many, many wonders. It is my pleasure to introduce Roy Kiyooka to you today. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:15\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977:\tThey’ll be right up to your feet but that won’t be too bad.\n \n\n14:18\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Penny Chalmers (Penn Kemp) at the University of Alberta, February 18, 1977:\t…Penny is the author of Most Recently Transformed, which is a marvelous looking book, as well as a very, very fine book…\n \n\n14:27\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Leona Gom at the University of Alberta, February 21, 1980:\t[Audience Chatter] …still a bit of… Not much [Audience Laughter]. We’re happy to welcome Leona Gom. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:36\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour, from John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981:\t[Audience Chatter] …there’s your friend. There’s a little bit of room if you wanna sit on the floor here!\n \n\n14:40\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing John Newlove at the University of Alberta, March 19, 1981:\t….Just published a body of poetry, which has been seen to be very, very important to Canadian writing: John Newlove. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n14:50\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Sheila Watson at the University of Alberta, January 28, 1977:\t… I don’t think I have to tell you the pleasure I have in introducing Sheila Watson into this series of readings, so I would just present her with the greatest pleasure I can to you today: Sheila Watson. [Audience Applause]\n \n\n15:03\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing Robert Kroetsch at the University of Alberta, November 23, 1978:\t…approach but I feel that the need for an introduction is less than apparent in an audience like this, but it’s nice to have him back again, alumni of this university and one of the best writers, I think, in Canada today. Robert Kroetsch has written numerous novels, The Words of my Roaring, The Stud Horseman, Going Indian, and his most recent one available right now in your bookstore, What the Crow Said, and many books of poetry, including Seed Catalogue and the Stone Hammer Poems. And I don’t think I need to say anything more except welcome Robert Kroetsch. [Applause]\n \n\n15:40\tArchival Audio, Douglas Barbour introducing bpNichol at the University of Alberta, March 22, 1979:\t[Inaudible] I think I – [Laughs] yeah, those of you who aren’t quite as close to as I am. I wanna say that it’s a great pleasure to have him back at the University of Alberta for a reading today. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1971 for as both an editor, a prose writer, and a poet. And since that time, as well as before, he’s been carrying on in all those areas. He’s a member of the editorial board of Coach House Press, one of the leading little presses in the country. As a prose writer in the past year has seen the publication of Craft Dinner, A Bunch of Proses from 1966 to 1976 collection of his shorter works, including one of the works that helped him win that Governor General’s Award, The True Eventual Story of Billy the Kid. He – as a prose writer he also published this year journal, a long work of great complexity and emotional, hard hitting-ness I suppose I can say. And as a poet, of course, he is known as both a sound poet and a concrete poet – as a sound poet, a concrete poet, and as he likes to put a trad poet. In sound poetry in the past year, I have seen him perform solo in Glasgow and with The Four Horseman at the 11th International Poetry Sound Festival – sound poetry in Toronto. And as a concrete poet he is also known internationally for his work in that field. And as a trad poet so to speak, The Ongoing Martyrology amongst as many other work stands as testament to the incredible amount of work and the value of it, I think to us all. So with that, bpNichol.\n \n\n17:28\tMichael O’Driscoll:\tThose samples come from the years 1977 to 1981. Doug’s style—as always—is exemplary: warm, exuberant, welcoming; but, also, each time he affirms at least three important things: the relationships that bind a network of poets and writers cross Canada; his careful attention to the work of others; and the joy of celebrating a shared community of practice. Little did I know that evening in Guelph, as my friends and I sat and listened, jaws agape, to Doug’s 1985 performance of “Full Moon,” that we were being invited into something very, very special that was already in the making: a community of listeners, and a mode of listening, to each other, to ourselves, and to the world around us\n \n\n18:29\tArchival Recording, Douglas Barbour, The Bards of March, 1986:\t[End of the recording played earlier of Barbour performing “That Gone Tune.” Nonlinguistic and songlike utterances compose most of the poem but these words are heard clearly at the end: “Go with it, go with it! If you’re lucky then you’re sounding, and you’re gone,” with a stretching of the word “gone”.] [Audience Applause] Thank you.\n \n\n22:05\tKatherine McLeod:\t[Start Music: ShortCuts Theme Music] You’ve been listening to ShortCuts. Our guest this month was Michael O’Driscoll. ShortCuts is mixed and mastered by Judith Burr, hosted by Hannah McGregor, transcribed by Kelly Cubbon, and hosted by me, Katherine McLeod. Thanks for listening. [End Music: ShortCuts Theme Music]\n \n\n\n"],"score":4.2402368},{"id":"10043","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Day 2 Digital Preservation: Digitization, Cataloging, Storage, and Access Panel II, The Literary Audio Symposium, 3 December 2016"],"item_title_source":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/literary-audio-symposium"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Classroom recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Lee Hannigan","Michael O’Driscoll","Cecily Devereux"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Lee Hannigan\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31722451\",\"name\":\"Cecily Devereux\",\"dates\":\"1963-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Production_Date":[2016],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/17UrrNMEU4xBIyl6tQT8YFfB3D1xHFpCi\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"LS102518.MP3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"01:48:37\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"260,680,098 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"LS102518\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2016-12-03\",\"type\":\"Production Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792785757887\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549983592448,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["LEE HANNIGAN (U Alberta)\n\n“Not Listening: Preliminary Initiatives for Inventorying and Cataloguing Literary Audio Corpora”\n\nThis presentation will identify the core questions one must ask upon preliminary examination of an audio collection. The University of Alberta (UA) has hosted and recorded regular reading events since the mid-1960s and holds a collection of recorded poetry readings consisting of over 100 media objects (reel-to-reel, cassette tape and digital formats) containing at least as many hours of audio. This collection, in the process of being inventoried, seems to hold a coherent set of recordings of the UA Writer-in-Residence Program (WiR) that has run uninterrupted for forty years, a series of recorded readings held during the “Poet & Critic Conference” of 1969, and an extensive set of reel-to-reel recordings that hold local readings by poets from across North America. The core research questions to be explored pertain to fundamental issues in cataloguing, organization and prioritization of the materials, in relation to questions of available resources for digitization and development and the identification of potential audiences for segments of the collection.\n\nPhD candidate Hannigan earned his MA from Concordia University in 2015, where he worked for two years as a research assistant with the SpokenWeb project. His Master’s Major Research Project, titled “The Critical Archive: A textual analysis of the SpokenWeb project,” considered the possibility of studying the literary reading series as a coherent object. Hannigan’s first academic publication (Al Flamenco and Aurelio Meza), titled “Reading Series Matter: Performing the SpokenWeb Project,” will appear in Making Humanities Matter, part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). His Doctoral dissertation will be the first material, theoretical, and sociopolitical analysis of the characteristics of the concept of removal in late-20th and 21st-century American poetry. His presentation on the University of Alberta audio holdings will provide important case study material for the symposium, allowing him to frame core questions that are at the centre of his Doctoral research.\n\nMICHAEL O’DRISCOLL (U Alberta)\n\n“Audiographic Coding, or, Whose Sound is this Anyway?”\n\nProceeding from both Jacques Derrida’s insight the “archivization produces as much as it records the event” and Jerome McGann’s case for “bibliographic coding,” this presentation will consider the status of the digital artifact that is the remediated spokenword object, with particular attention to the “audiographic coding” of the digital file. How does technology listen? And how, in the UAlberta collection, will that listening condition the work of researchers and students of literary performance? SpokenWest will digitize and make publicly available the rich archive of recorded creative readings held at UAlberta since 1969, featuring readings by many authors of international prominence. This panel will introduce the UAlberta collection, which includes four priority fonds, including fifty-six reel to reel recordings produced 1969-82 and twenty-five cassette recordings dated 1973-86, as well as recordings conducted at several major conferences (1969, 1975, 1978) that highlight presentations by major literary figures.\n\nO’Driscoll is co-lead in the development and implementation of a digitized archive of five decades of creative readings at the University of Alberta, and the collaborative design of portable research methodologies and pedagogical strategies focused on the material production, circulation, reception, and analysis of oral literary performance. His disciplinary expertise in the areas of archive theory, poetry and poetics, and material culture studies are relevant to the successful outcome of this project. He has extensive experience in the design and execution of major collaborative research projects. As former Associate Dean Research, he oversaw the activities of the University of Alberta’s Arts Resource Centre, a team of nine computing and multimedia experts focused on the support of social science and humanities researchers.\n\nCECILY DEVEREUX (U Alberta)\n\n“SpokenWest: Creative Reading Recordings at UAlberta, 1969-1986”\n\nFrom the late 1960s to the 1990s, the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta developed and maintained a collection of cassette recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work. These materials were part of a larger collection of audio cassettes used primarily for teaching. Materially ephemeral and in some cases absolutely unique, the cassettes represent not only an important record from the department that houses the longest-running Writer in Residence program in Canada, they are also part of a much larger national archive of creative communities in the\n\npost-Centennial era in Canada. They thus serve at this time as a compelling case study of non-professional, intermittent, institutionally housed recordings of late twentieth-century author readings in Canada–and, crucially, of the lives of the media on which they have been reproduced. This paper considers the nature and the implications of anachronistic and disintegrating media for the teaching and study of late twentieth-century literary culture in Canada, and makes a case for the importance of digital preservation for public access to cultural histories.\n\nCecily Devereux is Chair of the Research Board of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) and a member of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de Littérature Canadienne at the University of Alberta. She has been working with student research assistants and colleagues in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for more than a decade to catalogue, safely store, and move toward the preservation and digitization of the department’s collection of cassette and reel-to-reel recordings of Canadian writers reading from their work.\n\nThe Literary Audio Symposium\n\nDigitized spoken-audio archives have proliferated over the past two decades, making a wide range of historically significant analog spoken recordings originally captured in different media formats accessible to listeners and scholars for the first time. Online repositories like PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, have begun to transform previously multi-format collections into a massive resource, the potential of which is just beginning to be realized. Still, many local audio archives with recordings that document literary events remain either inaccessible or, if digitized, largely disconnected from each other. Given the potential usefulness of online audio archives for scholars, teachers and the general public, The Literary Audio Symposium aims to explore possibilities around a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study, digital development and critical and pedagogical engagement with diverse collections of spoken recordings.\n\nThe Symposium emerges from a joint venture of the AMP Lab and TAG Centre, COHDS: Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, and the Concordia University Libraries, all based at Concordia, in collaboration with literary scholars, digital humanists and librarian/archivists from the University of Alberta, University of Calgary, and Simon Fraser University, and local community partners with unique analogue holdings.  Invited participants include colleagues from McGill U, U Victoria, U Texas, Austin, UCSB, and The Canadian Centre for Architecture.\n\nThis symposium will offer a productive scene of discussion and collaboration between academic researchers, librarians and archivists and emerging scholars and students, as well as community-based cultural and literary practitioners.  The primary aims of The Literary Audio Symposium are to share knowledge and provide discussion and debate about\n\n1) new forms of historical and critical scholarly engagement with coherent collections of spoken recordings;\n\n2) digital preservation, aggregation techniques, asset management and infrastructure to support sustainable access to diverse collections of archival spoken audio recordings;\n\n3) techniques and tools for searching and visualizing corpora of spoken audio (for features relevant to humanities research and pedagogy); and\n\n4) innovative ways of mobilizing digitized spoken and literary recordings within pedagogical and public contexts.\n\nThese objectives will be met through a structured set of keynote topic-organizing panels, tool demonstrations, case-study presentations, and collaborative workshop discussions, led by experts from a variety of relevant backgrounds including Literature, Library, Archives and Information Science, Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Computer Science, and Communications and Media History.  Each day of the Symposium will be initiated by a plenary presentation that frames key questions concerning one of the four key symposium themes, to be followed by hands-on presentations of relevant digital platforms and tools, case-study presentations that elaborate upon the day’s theme, followed by collaborative workshop discussion that will debate, reflect upon, and formulate new approaches to engaging with the implications of the day’s materials.\n\nFrom a range of relevant perspectives, The Literary Audio Symposium will enable the collaborative formulation of answers to core questions surrounding the preservation, digital presentation and critical use of humanities-oriented spoken audio materials, and temporal media holdings of cultural significance, in general.  Our work will benefit scholars, students and society by establishing processes for making a generally dispersed corpus of cultural heritage widely available in useful and meaningful ways."],"score":4.2402368},{"id":"10056","cataloger_name":["Ella,Hooper"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb AV"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb AV"],"collection_contributing_unit":["SpokenWeb"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/_nuxt/img/header-img_1000.fd7675f.png"],"collection_source_collection_description":["SpokenWeb Audio Visual Collection"],"collection_source_collection_id":["ArchiveOfThePresent"],"persistent_url":["https://archiveofthepresent.spokenweb.ca/"],"item_title":["SpokenWeb Events AV, Radical Voices and Sonic Memories and Improvising Language, SpokenWeb Symposium 2022: The Sound of Literature in Time, 17 May 2022"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb web page"],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/symposia/#/spokenweb-symposium-2022"],"item_language":["English"],"item_production_context":["Documentary recording"],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Events"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"rights":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"rights_license":["Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike (BY-NC-SA)"],"access":["Closed"],"creator_names":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Jason Camlot","Xiaoxuan Huang","Annie Murray","Michael O’Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Xiaoxuan Huang \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/31170924535890151440\",\"name\":\"Annie Murray\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Michael O’Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors_names_search":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes","Megan Stein","Thade Correa","Donald Shipton"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sophia Magliocca\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Shazia Hafiz Ramji \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Kyle Kinaschuk\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Effy Morris\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Linara Kolosov\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Sarah Cipes \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Megan Stein\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Thade Correa \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Donald Shipton\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Sophia Magliocca","Shazia Hafiz Ramji ","Kyle Kinaschuk","Effy Morris","Linara Kolosov","Sarah Cipes ","Megan Stein","Thade Correa ","Donald Shipton"],"Performance_Date":[2022],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"2022-05-17 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day Two.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"03:48:16\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"768,180,704 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP4 video\",\"title\":\"2022-05-17 SpokenWeb Symposium 2022 - Day Two\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-17\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/22080572\",\"venue\":\"Concordia University McConnell Building\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8\",\"latitude\":\"45.4968036\",\"longitude\":\"-73.57792786\"}]"],"Address":["1400 Boulevard de Maisonneuve O, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8"],"Venue":["Concordia University McConnell Building"],"City":["Montreal, Quebec"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549989883904,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.597Z","contents":["The SpokenWeb Research Network (www.spokenweb.ca) is excited to host an in-person and virtual graduate student symposium (academic conference) at Concordia University in Montreal, 16-17 May 2022, on the theme of “The Sound of Literature in Time.”\n\nIntroduction to Theme:  The concepts of sound, time and literature evoke a wide range of research questions when considered in relation to each other. Together, they may suggest questions about how sound has been represented in literary works from different historical periods, how time has structured the way literary works sound (as with poetic metre), how readings and recitations sound literature across a span of time, and how time is sounded in different literary cultures and communities. Explorations of non-Western temporal frameworks, as in Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time, and a recent special issue on Black Temporality in Times of Crisis edited by Badia Ahad and Habiba Ibrahim, for example, reveal diverse meanings of temporality across cultures. As a concept, sound is always moving through time, and so, descriptions of sound involve the description of time in motion. Even a piece of sound (a sound ‘bite’) must be in motion to be audibly perceptible. As Don Ihde, in his explorations of sound phenomenology observes, “[i]insofar as all sounds are also ‘events,’ all the sounds are within the first approximation, likely to be considered as ‘moving.’” Without motion, sound is rendered silent. This is especially evident in sounds that have been recorded on time-based audio recording media which suggest the possibility of capturing real historical time in mediated form. Media theorists have noticed how the real-time quality of recorded sound, that it puts us into time that has already passed and opens a tunnel connection with the past, triggers what Wolfgang Ernst has called “the drama of time critical media.” An encounter with a recorded sound develops as an experience of real time processing.  It gives the listener the sense that the temporal process one hears is living in the present, replicating the live sonic event, of which it is apparently a real-time reproduction.  Sound recording works on human perception itself, and on our perception of time.  Other sound scholars have noted how the temporal qualities of sound immediately raise questions of historical context. For example, Pierre Schaeffer describes a “sound object” as “something that occurs in a certain place during a particular interval of time” for which questions of “context” apply. Friedrich Kittler’s work on literature and media has insisted that sound recording technology has had a transformative impact upon our relationship to the past. Time itself becomes a variable to be manipulated with technological media (you can speed up, slow down, reverse the direction of the record) suggesting that our capacity to manipulate the media artifact not only enables us to process historical “real time” so that it is experienced as a temporal event in the present, but to transform historical “real time” into events of alternate temporal orders, as well.  Most recently, Mara Mills and Jonathan Sterne have explored the history of listening to literature at accelerated speeds by blind audiobook readers, and the technological history of time shifting in speech-oriented sound media. When we are talking about sound, time, and literature, we are considering the intervolved relationship of something we identify as a literary artifact as a kind of event that suggests possibilities of playing, replaying and creating history. \n\nRadical Voices\n\nChair: Jason Camlot (Concordia U) and Xiaoxuan Huang (UBCO)\n\nSophia, Magliocca [IP] (Concordia) “Discovering Sexual Agency in Caroline Bergvall’s Goan Atom: Linguistic and Bodily Mutation” \n\nShazia Hafiz Ramji [V] (U of Calgary) and Kyle Kinaschuk [V] (U of Toronto), “Sounding the Wind: Acoustic Kinships in Disappearing Moon Cafe” \n\nEffy Morris [IP] (Concordia), “Tone As Tonus: (Un)grammaring Ontology With Kamau Brathwaite’s Nation Language”\n\nSonic Memories\n\nChair: Annie Murray\n\nLinara Kolosov [V] (SFU), “Sixty years of Readings in BC: Access to Memory (AtoM) of the largest SFU sound collection”\n\nSarah Cipes [IP] (UBCO), “Finding Due Balance: Finding Due Balance: Sound Editing as a Feminist Practice in Literary Archives” \n\nImprovising Language \n\nChair: Michael O’Driscoll\n\nMegan Stein [IP] (Concordia), “Tender Records”\n\nThade Correa [IP] (Indiana), “Speech is a Mouth”: Notes on the Musical / Experientialist Poetics of Robert Creeley\n\nDonald Shipton [IP] (SFU), “A Night Out of Synch”: Listening and Performance in bpNichol’s “Hour 15”"],"score":4.2402368}]