[{"id":"8690","cataloger_name":["Cole,Mash"],"partnerInstitution":["Concordia University"],"collection_source_collection":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"source_collection_label":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"collection_contributing_unit":["Project Archives"],"source_collection_uri":[""],"collection_image_url":[""],"collection_source_collection_id":[""],"persistent_url":[""],"item_title":["Words and Music Show at the Spoken Web Sound Institute on Zoom, 2020"],"item_title_source":["Cataloguer "],"item_title_note":["SSI 2020 SpokenWeb Words and Music Show_2020-07-19 19.56.29 Jason Camelot's Personal Meeting Room "],"item_series_title":["SpokenWeb Archive of the Present"],"item_identifiers":["[]"],"creator_names":["Ian Ferrier","Ali Barillaro","Klara du Plessis","Cole Mash","Katherine McLeod","Jason Derbyland","Felicity Tayler","Faith Paré","Nick Beauchesne","Jason Camlot","Michael O'Driscoll"],"creator_names_search":["Ian Ferrier","Ali Barillaro","Klara du Plessis","Cole Mash","Katherine McLeod","Jason Derbyland","Felicity Tayler","Faith Paré","Nick Beauchesne","Jason Camlot","Michael O'Driscoll"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\" http://viaf.org/viaf/91437046\",\"name\":\"Ian Ferrier\",\"dates\":\"1954-2023\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Series organizer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ali Barillaro\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/124151352052252602758\",\"name\":\"Klara du Plessis\",\"dates\":\"1988-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\" http://viaf.org/viaf/1163088288994540947\",\"name\":\"Cole Mash\",\"dates\":\"1990-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\" http://viaf.org/viaf/44156495389117561605\",\"name\":\"Katherine McLeod\",\"dates\":\"1981\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Jason Derbyland \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Felicity Tayler \",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Faith Paré\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Performer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Reader\"]},{\"url\":\" http://viaf.org/viaf/4607231\",\"name\":\"Michael O'Driscoll\",\"dates\":\"1964-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Presenter\"]}]"],"contributors_names":["Jason Camlot"],"contributors_names_search":["Jason Camlot"],"contributors":["[{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/90740324\",\"name\":\"Jason Camlot\",\"dates\":\"1967-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Speaker\"]}]"],"Speaker_name":["Jason Camlot"],"Performance_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"\",\"file_path\":\"https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1Vibbrb92zyYNfed3-cJXCvB7aYrq7IW1\",\"filename\":\"zoom_0.mp4\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"\",\"duration\":\"\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"title\":\"\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Video Recording\",\"featured\":\"Yes\",\"public_access_url\":\"\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-07-19\",\"type\":\"Performance Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"Digital file path \"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"Zoom\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"\",\"latitude\":\"\",\"longitude\":\"\"}]"],"Venue":["Zoom"],"contents":["This special edition of the Words and Music show takes place at the 2020 edition of the Spoken Web Sound Institute, and features readings from Ali Barillaro, Klara Duplessis and more. "],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[]"],"_version_":1853670549345009667,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","score":4.3938217},{"id":"9279","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 S2E3, Sounds of Trance Formation: An Interview with Penn Kemp, 7 December 2020, Beauchesne and Kemp"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/"],"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":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creator_names_search":["Nick Beauchesne","Penn Kemp"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/43083879\",\"name\":\"Penn Kemp\",\"dates\":\"1944-\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]}]"],"contributors":["[]"],"Publication_Date":[2020],"material_description":["[]"],"digital_description":["[{\"file_url\":\"https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/28a9da1f-8cca-410c-b5d7-8165a73f9394/episodes/bbda2b6f-992a-45a6-bbee-f3074a8ccfd2/audio/919f9dbb-30d9-4851-ae29-ef6b52f23820/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"default_tc.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:54:29\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"52,299,694 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"default_tc\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/sounds-of-trance-formation-an-interview-with-penn-kemp/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2020-12-07\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta Humanities Centre\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"53.5269794\",\"longitude\":\"-113.51915593663469\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive NW, Edmonton, AB, T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta Humanities Centre"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Print References:\\n\\nPenn Kemp’s Pandemic Poems originally published in: Belanger, Joe. “It’s time to embrace London’s poet laureate, Penn Kemp, and all artists.” London Free Press. 11 Apr. 2020. https://lfpress.com/opinion/columnists/belanger-its-time-to-embrace-londons-poet-laureate-penn-kemp-and-all-artists. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “PENN KEMP – Home.” Weebly. http://pennkemp.weebly.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp: Penn, poet/playwright/performer.” WordPress. https://pennkemp.wordpress.com/. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. From the Lunar Plexus. Pendas Productions, 2001.\\n\\nKemp, Penn, and Bill Gilliam. “Night Orchestra.” Barbaric Cultural Practice, Quatrro Books, 2017.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Form. Soft Press and Pendas Productions (reprint), 2006.\\n\\nRecordings:\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “[Night Orchestra] Barbaric Cultural Practice.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/sets/barbaric-cultural-practice. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “Penn Kemp – Trance Form, Live at U of A, February 18, 1977 (1).” Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/penn-kemp-trance-form-live-at-u-of-a-february-18-1977-1. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. Trance Dance Form, Pendas Productions, 2006.\\n\\nKemp, Penn. “When the Heart Parts – Sound Opera.”  Soundcloud, https://soundcloud.com/penn-kemp/when-the-heart-parts. Accessed 17 Nov. 2020.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549478178816,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:53.966Z","contents":["For Penn Kemp, poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied, and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects, while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us, as listeners?\n\nThrough conversation with poet Penn Kemp and SpokenWeb Researcher Nick Beauchesne, this episode invites us to explore these questions by tracing the threads of magical practice from Kemp’s early career to the present day. A clip from her performance of Trance Form at the University of Alberta (1977) is brought into conversation with more recent material from When the Heart Parts (2007) and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017). The episode concludes with a live reading from Kemp’s brand-new Pandemic Poems (2020). \n\n00:03\tIntro Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do.\n \n\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will be here if we listen to the archive? Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories about how literature sounds. [Music Fades] 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. How often do you think of your own voice as sonic art? What happens when you speak poetry aloud? What effects can voices in the air produce? For sound poet Penn Kemp, poetry is something more than the written word — words must be lifted off the page into the air and sculpted in sound. Her voice is her poetic instrument and sound becomes a verb — the transporting and trance-forming act of “sounding”. In this episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast, Penn weaves us through her creative practice with SpokenWeb researcher Nick Beauchesne. Exploring the magical effects of literary sound to transport us, transform us and entrance us, Penn and Nick take us on a journey through Penn’s illustrious decades-long career discussing archival performances of Tranceform (1977), When the Heart Parts (2007), and Barbaric Cultural Practice (2017), plus two brand new poems from Penn Kemp shared in this episode. Penn Kemp has published 30 books of poetry and drama, and had six plays, 10 CDs, and several award-winning video poems produced. A former poet Laureate of London, Ontario, and League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Artist of the Year, Penn has been giving creativity workshops, teaching, and performing her poetry since 1966. Here is Nick Beauchesne with honored guest Penn Kemp in episode three of The SpokenWeb Podcast: Stories of Trance Formation. [Theme Music]\n \n\n02:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tGood day, audio lovers. Welcome to a very special episode of the SpokenWeb Podcast. My name is Nick Beauchesne, PhD candidate at the University of Alberta department of English and Film studies and a research assistant on the SpokenWeb Edmonton team. Today we’ll have an interview with a very distinguished Canadian sound poet in Penn Kemp. For Penn Kemp poetry is magic made manifest. While her subjects are varied and her interests and approaches have evolved over the years, Kemp has always understood the power of spoken word to evoke emotion, shift consciousness, and shape the world. Drawing on a syncretic blend of spiritual philosophy, informed by Buddhist, Hindu, and Celtic wisdom traditions, Kemp’s work is imminent and transcendent, embodied and cerebral. The words on the page produce certain effects while the voices in the air produce others altogether. How do these effects complement and contradict one another? How does literary sound produce bodily effects and altered states of consciousness? Where will the trance take us as listeners? Thank you very much for joining us, Penn. How are you today?\n \n\n03:45\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s a pleasure to be here. I’m well and happy to join you.\n \n\n03:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, I’m broadcasting here from Kamloops, British Columbia, and here you are in London, Ontario coming together over Zoom in these very strange pandemic times.\n \n\n04:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s true. It’s a lovely September day here full of long light approaching Equinox, a balance time.\n \n\n04:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe world has seemed so out of balance in many ways. So perhaps we can look forward to that as some sort of omen.\n \n\n04:15\tPenn Kemp:\tIt’s the seasonal transition from summer to fall. And the Celtic new year is coming up.\n \n\n04:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll get into these topics as we go, because a lot of what drew me to your work was your involvement with the mystical, the magical to some extent the alchemical — although it seems you’ve moved away from that in recent years — but you still have that very strong, magical thread that works through all your work and the way that you use sound as a tool for change and for expanding consciousness. Your website lists you as a performance poet, activist and playwright. And you have a reputation as one of Canada’s foremost sound poets. What does that category of “sound poet” mean to you?\n \n\n05:00\tPenn Kemp:\tIt means that I can do anything I like in performing a piece and how it wants to lift off the page.\n \n\n05:11\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, what do you mean by “lift off the page”?\n \n\n05:14\tPenn Kemp:\tInto sound, into performance. So, basically, I separate the written word into various categories and if the sound is predominant in the poem, in the original poem, then I lift it into a chant or various ways of expressing it beyond English language.\n \n\n05:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is it that ability to, to get beyond language that, do you find that that’s what distinguishes your sound poetry from, from other types of poetry —which all do have a component of sound built into it —but how and why do you emphasize sound? What is it about sound that so draws you?\n \n\n06:03\tPenn Kemp:\tSound is both the first and the last sense. [Low chant begins, steadily increasing in volume] Hearing, as we know in the dead, in the dying, is the last sense to disappear. And it’s the sound that we —it’s sound that we first hear in our mother’s womb. McLuhan once said something that the Catholic religion lost its sense of mystery when they moved from the Latin in resounding through the cathedral, through the natural sounds of the cathedral. And when that was replaced by a microphone, it lost the resonance. It lost being inside the cavity of the mother’s womb, where sound is transmitted through the permeable membrane of the stomach. [Low chant ends] And so, I really believe that sound is transporting. It takes you back to primeval experience to first— before —it’s the closest we get to a kind of synesthesia where before sound before, excuse me, the senses are divided into five or 5,000. I think sound is the basic basis of all that.\n \n\n07:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s such a fascinating connection there between the mother’s womb and the womb of the cathedral space. Before we get into looking at some specific pieces of your work, I did want to kind of ask about that role of place. And it seems like you naturally tied into that in terms of, you know, since sound is so important for you, what are some of the coolest places you’ve been and hearing your voice in a raw environment and the different ways that that sound kind of affects it?\n \n\n08:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYes, I was —as I was talking about the cathedral, I remember performing in the ’80s at the cathedral of St. John the Divine along with a hundred conches that were led by Charlie Morrow. And that was a very interesting way of the voice resonating with the cathedral. And I’ve also done a lot of sounding in the center of standing stones in Scotland and Exmoor. And at the temple of Asclepius in Greece, you stand at the center in the hollow of that temple and the sound reverberates. You can whisper and the sound reaches the outer limits of the amphitheater. But the most amazing place to sound was being in the third pyramids at Giza. I was sat there for a night in absolute darkness, so dark that my mind started to create visual images and oral images. [low chanting begins] And I spent the night sounding. But there’s just another story. I was also invited to lie down in the sarcophagus at the King’s chamber at Giza — first in Cheops’ pyramid. And I had a very expensive Sony recorder at the time, and I was recording myself chanting in that sarcophagus. And when I came out, the recorder had blown a gasket. All the batteries had exploded with the energy. [Sound, ends]\n \n\n09:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tOoooooh.\n \n\n10:01\tPenn Kemp:\tIt was a very expensive lesson in power.\n \n\n10:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhat an amazing location to be able to experiment with sound. And then it’s such a strange phenomenon to have your piece of technology just disintegrate like that. Perhaps that sound was too sacred for this world, Penn.\n \n\n10:21\tPenn Kemp:\tI think so. Well, it is very interesting to have a kind of — my way of perceiving the world is, is very Celtic, very old, ancient, and yet to work with technology in a way that acknowledges its power is, has been a very interesting journey for me.\n \n\n10:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis podcast will proceed with basically a conversation built around four clips that I selected. I enjoy these clips because they give the listener a broad selection of material from across your lengthy career, beginning with an excerpt from “Bone Poems” which was published in Trance Form. And that recording took place in 1977. I also have clips from When the Heart Parts, two clips from the year 2007, and then the final clip we’ll be playing is from Night Orchestra in 2017. So, it’s something quite recent. And once our conversation around these pieces of sound has been completed, we’ll conclude the podcast with a special reading live by Penn Kemp from two new poems from your collection of pandemic poems. So, looking forward to getting to that material. The first excerpt I’ll play is from “Bone Poems” which is part of Trance Form. [Ambient Music starts] This clip was recorded at the U of A, from the department of English and Film Studies on February 18th, 1977. And this was how I was first exposed to your work, being a research assistant. It was my job to do a close listening of all this raw material and to then try to identify poem titles, collect timestamps, and all that. And so, over the course of listening to maybe 50 of these tapes from the EFS collection at U of A, I heard all sorts of different clips, and I’m always listening for components featuring mysticism, the supernatural, magic as poetic themes. And I identified that immediately in your work. And it’s something we’ve kind of talked about in our kind of private conversations. So, after kind of hearing this and then doing a listening practice back in June, where you joined as our guest, we put together this podcast where I wanted to pursue that strand of sound as a form of magical practice, as well as poetic practice. I’m going to play this clip. It’s about six minutes long. It’ll kind of form the — a good backbone (poem) of the rest of the interview. So, we’ll just listen to this clip and we’ll return with some questions. [Ambient Music ends.]\n \n\n12:59\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAhhhhhhhhh. Oracle. The last section we can do together. This —my voice is running out and I’m sure you’ve got [Cough] a cough. It’s “Bone Poems.” It’s like getting down to the — it’s the last bone we wear that covers our essential emptiness. All you have to do is say, chant: “bone poems.” For those of you with books, you can follow the “bone poem” line along on page. For those of you who don’t have books, you can say “bonepoembonepoembonepoem.” And we’ll start at that. And then I’ll read the the “Bone Poems” supposedly over top of your loud “bonepoembonepoem.” You’re the bass section. Can I hear you please? Bonepoembonepoem…. [Audience chanting] If you want to get into varieties, you can. There’s quite a few. [Cough] Bonepoembonepoem. [Water pouring] You’ve died out. You have to keep it going for the next 10 pages. [Audience laughs] All right. Take a deep breath and then go. [Inhale] Hmmmmmmmm. [Audience chanting begins]\nSkin. A breeze. Hmmmmmmm. Green. Saw. Blue.\nWords. Breathe. Shed their skin. Skin to bone.\nOne bone under. Sun shine, some sun, some,\nsome sunshine, some shine. Hmmmmmmm.\nHmmmmmmm. Sa-sa-sa-hum-sa.\n\nOne bone sunshine shed skin. One bone over,\none bone under. Sun shine. Over under, over under,\nover under. Some. Cloud. Bone be nimble. Bone be\nquick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. Bone\nbe quick. Bone be quick. Bone be quick. Bone be\nover, under, over, under, over under. Bone be nimble,\nbone be quick. Do. These. Bones. Live? Bone be quick,\nbone be quick. Jump over. Quick dry, quick dry, quick\ndry quick, these be quick, bone be quick, bone be quick,\nquick, quick, quick, quick. Bone be nimble, bone be quick.\n\n[Audience chanting ending]. Music to my ears! [Audience: “ it’s hard work!”]\n\n16:39\tAudio Recording,\nBone Poems, 1977:\tAnybody want a glass of water? [Audience chanting returns]\nSweet marrow sweet morrow, all fleshes as grasses as\ngrasses as whistling down wind, is whistling down wind.\nBare. Root. White. Grow. Tomorrow, tomorrow. Bare. Rock.\nBone. Root. Of fleshes as grass is as grass grows over, grows\nunder. These. Those. These. Bare. Bone. Grope. White. Flesh\nis as grass is. Sweet morrow, sweet marrow. Cell in skull, skull\nin cell. Desert father’s memento mori. Bone shards endure\nwhen soft flesh withers. Slower bone retains our image. As\nby jaw or femur, they determined what we were. What we\nbecome. Our final trance formation. Slow. Bone. Soft flesh.\nTo marrow, tomorrow. Conjure our story. Become the thing\nwe divine.\n\nCome on, don’t get tired! I’ve been reading for an hour. You can’t be tired!\n\nFrame us erect. Base, bed, rock, mountain, tree. Axis\nof our bloodline, pole on which was strung and hung\nour nine-day lives. Oh spine, oh sacred virtue spreads\nher branches as our limbs. Her white, our white. Play us,\nwe are your instrument. Tibia, flute, femur, during, enduring.\n\n[string of high pitched sounds]\n\nHold the femur by its polished leather knuckle. Clang! Clang-inggggggg. Dangling. [Audience chanting ending]\n\n19:16\tNick Beauchesne:\tWow. That was quite something there. Kind of a blast from the past for you, Penn.\n \n\n19:22\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s for sure. It’s interesting how I have continued to use certain techniques or habits of speech or habits of sounding like the rising ‘ing’. I’ve done a lot of that, of playing with the varieties of sound that can be produced.\n \n\n19:46\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat’s one of the things that really drew me to your work is there’s not a lot of singing in the EFS collection of the SpokenWeb tapes. So that was one of the, well, it was certainly the first, occasion of singing I heard in the collection, although there is another one or there’s another few of them out there. But not something that I’ve heard a lot of in our collection, anyways. So, it’s something that immediately got my attention, you know, being a vocalist and performance artist myself. I just wanted to ask about just that that pun of transform, you know, not with the Tran “N S” but with the, the “C E” of a kind of pond on forming a trance. And, you know, we can hear all sorts of, you can hear the, you know, the crowd gasping for air and, and laughing. And just also the way that the chanting is kind of known to change the brain state, you know, to like a delta or gamma brain state. So just the way that, that sound and chanting, not only like the sound itself, but also through like the breath, the breathwork, as well as a kind of tool of consciousness transformation. So, yeah, I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of how you use sound, both not only in your own, but also in the kind of audience participation or interaction forming that trance.\n \n\n21:06\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. I believe that a poem must be transporting or at its best is transporting you to, not — certainly to an altered state, not a higher state, but a more spacious state of consciousness, where there are more possibilities. For example, we know that a baby [vocal drone begins] by the time it’s a year old has made every sound that it’s possible for a human being to make. But then by the age of 10, the child has — the child’s mouth has condensed, hardened. So that say the African —some click language can’t be, can’t be pronounced properly after a certain age. So, as a person fascinated by travel and languages, I was really interested in reaching beyond English, which is such a lovely mongrel language of many sounds, but into, you know, the more guttural sounds of German, for example, or how, how language is placed in the mouth. The way French has right at the top of the lips, right at the front. And that — or Russian is way back in the throat. That sort of thing really intrigued me. But it was basically listening to how my children at the —as infants developed language. And that’s where the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What that’s where the repetition came in of what in Buddhism or Hinduism we call “seed syllables.” And so, I was very interested as well in the power of seed syllables.\n \n\n22:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd there’s something powerful in the sense of the participation about sound poetry as well, because even you said, you know, “you can feel free to follow along if, and if you have no books, you can just go, bonepoebonepoembonepoem.”\n \n\n23:09\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah. Yes.\n \n\n23:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, it’s —so even people who don’t have the book or have never heard the poem before are able to participate in the village chant. So, so maybe we can call it.\n \n\n23:19\tPenn Kemp:\tSo, it becomes a participatory — all my sound poetry is participatory because then the experience is reenacted in the audience’s body as a collective. And that’s a joyous thing to get beyond the mind, the ego, into an experience that is so spacious.\n \n\n23:45\tNick Beauchesne:\tThey got into that in the “bone poem” section, but I wish a few of them were more adventurous to try some of those variations to, to hear more [trill sound].\n \n\n23:56\tPenn Kemp:\tIf I had a little more time to do a sound workshop with them.\n \n\n23:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYes. Yes.\n \n\n23:59\tPenn Kemp:\tBut I think Doug Barbour had invited me to do that reading and he very kindly had the kids, students buy the books. So, they had these — the cover is of a bare-breasted, beautiful woman caught in a slant light in a very bright yellow cover. And here they were turning the pages. And at the end they corrected me and asked why I had changed the words in “Bone Poem” because they were following it exactly. And I —I was everything I do is ad lib and improvised and I wasn’t synchronized to what the page was saying. So, they felt it necessary to correct me.\n \n\n24:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tTo inform you that you read your own poem incorrectly.\n \n\n24:51\tPenn Kemp:\tWrong!\n \n\n24:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, if the students commented on where the poem is going and how it should be delivered…Penn, where do poems come from?\n \n\n25:03\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, they have many choices, but for me, the most powerful poems come from sound. But I also write a lot from a translation or a transliteration from visual fields. So, I dream vividly. And for example, after you had sent me the possibility of the podcast, I dreamt, I wrote a poem about that dream. And for me, the dream poems that are astonishing. I’ve got a whole collection called Dream Sequins, but they’re not as powerful as poems that lead me on the way through sound. So, I like poems to lead me, to take me to places rather than translating images that already exist. But let me read you this poem and it’s dedicated to you and you can make up your own mind.\n \n\n26:11\tPenn Kemp:\t\nLiteralizing the metaphor\n\nFor Nix Nihil\n\nThe host asks me to do a Zoom podcast, live in BC. I’m to record\n\non a cloud some metres above ground. The ladder up to the cloud\n\nseems precarious, even with gold underlining and heavenly chords.\n\n \n\nI’m afraid of falling through watery vapour, afraid of heights, afraid\n\nthat my voice will be tremulous. But once embarked upon the cloud,\n\nthe local Indigenous elder teaches me her healing heartbeat chant,\n\n“la-Doe, la-Doe”. She repeats the resounding phrase as I join in.\n\n \n\nSo the recording goes well. As BC is my last stop on tour, I have\n\nrun out of books to sell. A shame, since audiences here buy more\n\nthan anywhere else. My host gladly accepts my last copy as a gift.\n\n \n\nI return to home ground, empty of baggage and replete, complete,\n\nand ready to begin again, earthed.\n\n \n\n27:27\tPenn Kemp:\tNow, if I were developing that poem as a sound poem, I would be playing with “replete, complete, and ready to begin again. Earthed.” I would be playing with “I’m afraid of falling throooooooough.” Wherever the sound takes me. I would play further.\n \n\n27:47\tNick Beauchesne:\tI can also imagine some lah-dot, lah-dot, lah, dot persisting in the background. [Sound: Echo of “lah-dot”]\n \n\n27:52\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah! Well, for sure.\n \n\n27:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell I don’t know what else to say, but “aww shucks!”\n \n\n28:00\tPenn Kemp:\tOh, I expect the sound poem in return.\n \n\n28:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tWell, I’ll have to return the favor. No doubt. The next audio clip that I’d like to play is from a sound opera composed in 2007, called When the Heart Parts. Written in honor of your departing father, Jim Kemp.\n \n\n28:24\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tWhen the heart parts. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wha-wha-wha-why? why? why? [interspersed sounds] When. When. When. When. When. When the heart. When the heart. When the heart. Hearts, heart, heart, heart, heart, heart, parts, heart, parts, when the heart parts company, heart parts company company, our heart stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-wh- when the company, when the company, when the company parts, when the company parts. Art. Stops. Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-when the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts. When the company parts from the hearth. When the company parts from the hearth. Company from the hearth. The heart does not stop.\n \n\n29:29\tNick Beauchesne:\tThat was a clip from When the Heart Parts. That was the first minute of the sound opera. Quite a lot of layers, quite a lot of voices. What’s going on in that opening clip?\n \n\n29:42\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, I’m trying to recreate the experience of driving through snow with the knowledge that I was going to witness my father’s dying. And coming into the hospital, to the room, hearing all the different electronic sounds that were so pervasive, trying to keep him alive. And my voice is asking, “Why? Why? Why? Why?” You know. And so, I was trying to express the immensity of all the emotions through sound.\n \n\n30:30\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, there’s the sound – The sound of like the male voice is doing like a “lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.” So, is that like the heart? The heart sounds there?\n \n\n30:37\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s John Magyar the producer. And then, Ann Anglin, the actor is performing with me the various machine sounds and the sounds of “why” taking the form of my voice and my mother’s voice as we’re in the room.\n \n\n30:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd when you were saying, “company” —I just heard this now. And I don’t know if I, if this was intentional, but— were you attending to say Penny, like your, your name is a child?\n \n\n31:07\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Yep.\n \n\n31:07\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, “come, Penny.” So, younger Penny in there as well. And, just like the, not with sound poetry in general, but with you as well, the importance of homonyms, homophones, and puns. So, you go from heart, you know, the organ to a hearth, like a space in a home, to art, like the art that comes from the heart and then parting and leaving. So, you have all these related sounds and these kinds of concepts, in a stream of consciousness, kind of interwoven in there —\n \n\n31:37\tPenn Kemp:\tI’m trying to get whatever works to get below the mental process into a deeper experience of the sound of language. And that comes again from a love of different languages.\n \n\n31:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tThe next clip takes place about 17 minutes into the opera, which is about 45 minutes or so long. It’s about two-and-a-half minutes long, but it really dramatizes that magical power of sound and that instinctive supra, or maybe sub rational power of sound that it goes beyond mind and into direct connection and intuition. So, it was a very powerful moment where you almost succeed in resurrecting your father, just for a moment too, to have this final kind of moment of connection. And so, it struck me as a very powerful moment in the poem, not only in the message and the words, but also the way that you self-consciously use sound to try to connect with your father while he’s deep in his kind of sleep state. Here’s a clip of the sonic resurrection.\n \n\n32:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tIn love and ceremony [Bells Ring] he crowns Mom with a Tibetan headdress. Magenta. Magnificent. Something significant has been accomplished. When Jamie and I come home from supper, Penny stays to read Jim the Tibetan Book of the Dead. He asked her to,  ages ago, if he were ever…When she gets home, we know something has happened. I never saw anyone look so worn out. She has worked so hard doing something.\nMy commitment to Dad is to read him the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The old words are meant to appease the fear and confusion of the dying.\n\nDo not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted by other noises or pictures. They are all projections of your mind. Keep to what is happening here. Now, do not let your attention wander. Keep to the clear light. Do not be distracted. Traditionally, this reading is a guide in the process of dying. Do not be distracted. Keep to the clear light. The ear is the last sense to go. But who knows if Dad is listening? They are all projections of your mind. To conjure these peaceable realms, pure lands, at least calms and clears by own anguish. It is true. You are dying. It is true. You are dying. We are not pretending anything else. We are not pretending anything else. We are not holding anything back from you. We know you can hear. Your family is gathered around you. Know this is happening to you, now. To the light. Keep to the light. I whisper close into Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive. Remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest typological level of the mind. I call his name in three tones of voice. In between each phrase, I pause to the count of four. Jim Kemp [Tapping] Jim Kemp, Jim Kemp. And then my father flutters his eyes, startled. Squeezes my hand tight. He tries to focus, stares, and sees me.\n\n35:20\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, a very powerful moment there. And earlier in the clip you say, “in love and ceremony, he crowns my Mom with a Tibetan headdress.” And it seems significant in a kind of a meta level, in a sense, that through the poem you in turn are “through love and ceremony” crowning your own father. So, what about this poem is ceremonial to you, or how is this poem a ceremony?\n \n\n35:44\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, dying is such a time of transition. It’s the opposite of our two great transitions, birth and death. So, for me, yes, it’s important to honor these transitions through ritual. Dad and I were both received — took initiation as Buddhists in 1974. And so, we had studied Tibetan Buddhism and The Book of the Dead. And I had offered to read him The Book of the Dead when he was dying. So, this was a prepared act. My Mom was not part of that. She was much more of a rationalist. So, the dream was such a welcoming of her into the ceremony, which at the point of his dying, she embraced. The moment that I read his name and he came to, it was just before the doctors were to pull the plug, which would mean that he would die, of course. And because he was being kept alive by these instruments. And it meant that he then lingered on [Musical tones begin] for 10 more days. I don’t know whether that was a good thing or not because they’d brought him back six times with pounding his heart and all that. So, it was very painful, but nonetheless, he was there. But when I read to him and when I said his name —.\n \n\n37:31\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:31\tPenn Kemp:\t— he responded by not only opening his eyes for the first time —.\n \n\n37:36\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:36\tPenn Kemp:\t— but lifting his hand, his index finger —.\n \n\n37:40\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:40\tPenn Kemp:\t— on his right hand as a gesture of —.\n \n\n37:45\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n37:45\tPenn Kemp:\t— I don’t know, admonition or instruction. I never have been able to figure that one out. But extraordinarily powerful.\n \n\n37:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd from your subjective position there, it must have certainly seemed almost like a, like a spell to wake the sleeper for a final farewell.\n \n\n38:06\tPenn Kemp:\tAbsolutely.\n \n\n38:08\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo just to call attention to, again, the idea of sound as a kind of magical technique, but also as a scientific technique as well: “I whisper close into my Dad’s left ear because I hope his right brain might be more receptive, remembering a super learning technique to reach the deepest hypnagogic level of the mind I call his name —.\n \n\n38:27\tAudio Recording,\nWhen the Heart Parts:\tJim Kemp.\t\n38:27\tNick Beauchesne:\t— in three tones of voice.” So how old were you when that happened? And did you know that technique at the time? Have you used that since in your poetry?\n \n\n38:36\tPenn Kemp:\tI was 39. It was 1983. And super learning was, there was a book called Superlearning that I think the Russians had developed these —I haven’t heard much about it since, so — I think the technique was so powerful that I’ve never used it again. I didn’t dare.\n \n\n38:59\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Sometimes those maybe when something like that happens that’s so powerful once is enough.\n \n\n39:08\tPenn Kemp:\tThank you, Nick, for noticing that moment, because it’s, for me, the pivotal moment of the piece. It was also produced by Theatre Passe Muraille as a play: What the Ear Hears Last. Appropriately enough. And you’re the first person that has, aside from the actors, noticed that absolutely pivotal moment of transition.\n \n\n39:38\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, we’ll go to another night, maybe not necessarily a night of the soul, but “Night Orchestra” is the next clip. So, this is from 2017 from your Barbaric Cultural Practices. Maybe, before I play it, can you explain what this clip is doing?\n \n\n39:57\tPenn Kemp:\tYes. Again, I’m in the midst of an aural field. This time, it’s a hot summer’s night in the Toronto beaches. And I have my windows open because I don’t have air conditioning, but the flat next door has very loud air conditioning. And so, I make a sound poem out of the experience.\n \n\n40:25\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd that experience was “Night Orchestra”.\n \n\n40:29\tAudio Recording,\nNight Orchestra:\tDeep, deep, deep, deep, deep, beep,\ndeep, deep, deep in, deep in, deep in.\nDeep in summer stillnessan electric hum of air conditioner in B flat.\nStill hum, still hum. Flat. Flat.\nMonotone entrains my body. Monotonous. [Low chant]\nproduced to cool my neighbors thrums the outside air,\nheats up our collective night. Sleepless in the beaches,\nI resist the single roar — sleepless, sleepless, sleepless —\nas Blake deplores single vision. And Newton’s sleep.The sound of the perpetual 20th century colonized our\nfuture with a dominant beep sales pitch for comfort. Con-\nvenience, reliance on the pliance. The pity is not that\nthe century has wound to a close, but that it’s whining\non and on. Mechanical multitudes self-replicate in chorus.Relentless fridge and clock. The only spell-breaker is a tape\nof Tibetan chant. [Tibetan chant] Deep harmonic overtones\nconjure a resonance, disturb the soundwaves. Somewhere\nbeyond the pervasive rattle, waves break on the shore.\nSpecies diversify. Night. Orchestra.\t\n42:56\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnother hypnotic sound collage there. The line that really jumped out to me is, “The only spell-breaker is the sound of a Tibetan chant”, which to me is almost ironic. The chanting in this track kind of constitutes part of the spell. I didn’t really comment on the past track as well, which also had a low, deep Tibetan-sounding chant. [Tibetan Chant Begins] So, it seems that the, this Tibetan chant and this influence persists through your work and probably in other poems as well, that I haven’t heard. [Tibetan Chant Ends] You mentioned you were initiated with your father. How else has this Tibetan chant kind of worked its way into your corpus?\n \n\n43:35\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, specifically in this piece, the “deep deep, deep, deep” was the actual sound or my replication of the sound of the air conditioner from the neighbors. And as a sort of dueling banjo, I set up my own CD of Tibetan chants. So, it was very specific and very actual in that I was trying to go — it’s like going onto an airplane and rising with the airplane, as it takes off. I convert the sound of the noise of the airplane into an ‘ommmmm’. It’s the same resonance. So, it converts the mechanical into the spiritual.\n \n\n44:23\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo, is that a technique you kind of frequently use in your everyday life whenever you hear obnoxious, ambient sounds? Is this an inner way in the inner monologue to overcode them with something of your own meaning to claim your head space, I guess?\n \n\n44:38\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right. For example, the frog, there’s a bull frog in my pond, and if he hears a certain truck, if he hears a certain sound of a large truck, he starts croaking, as in kind of setting up his territory, that this truck will not compete with. So, I think it’s very —a basic technique from the animal kingdom up.\n \n\n45:09\tNick Beauchesne:\tYeah. Laying your claim —.\n \n\n45:10\tPenn Kemp:\tYep.\n \n\n45:10\tNick Beauchesne:\tStaking your sonic territory.\n \n\n45:13\tPenn Kemp:\tYeah.\n \n\n45:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you for commenting on some of these pieces that I selected. I did notice that sound as an instrument of will, and an instrument of change, an instrument of consciousness has persisted through your work for decades. So, I appreciate you joining me for this interview to comment on some of those strands and to help, you know, theorize about, you know, the bones of poetry and the transformational power of sound and how sound can form the trance and change the world. So, thank you very much. Before we end off, I understand you’ve written some new material to document your experience relating to this 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.\n \n\n46:02\tPenn Kemp:\tThat’s right.\n \n\n46:02\tNick Beauchesne:\tSo why don’t you —\n \n\n46:05\tPenn Kemp:\tI’ll read them for you.\n \n\n46:05\tNick Beauchesne:\t— why don’t you talk about that?\n \n\n46:06\tPenn Kemp:\tWell, first of all, I want to thank you Nick, for asking those very astute questions that helped me articulate the process because I usually work without conscious intent until I get to the editing phase. And you helped me articulate what I was doing at articulating the process. So, that’s really fun and useful. [Musical tone begins] These two pandemic poems were published in the Free Press or London Free Press, and the first one was contemplating what we’ll remember. It comes from the spring of this year. “What We’ll Remember.” I think the only thing I’d like to say about it is that — I was saying earlier that poems for me come from either sound or a vision, a visual inspiration, and these two poems come from the visual field. Necessarily they include sound.\n \n\n47:17\tPenn Kemp:\tWhat We’ll Remember\nHow first scylla sky shimmers\n\nagainst the tundra swan’s flight\n\nwest and north, north north west.\n\n \n\nHow many are leaving the planet and yet\n\nare with us, still and still forever.\n\n \n\nHow they linger,\n\nthe lost, the bewildered, the wild ones!\n\n \n\nThough tears come easily these days,\n\nwe too hover over the greening land\n\n \n\nas spring springs brighter than ever\n\nsince stacks are stilled and the pipe\n\nlines piping down.\n\n \n\nWhen the peace pipe is lit\n\nand sweetgrass replaces\n\nsmog— when the fog of pollution\n\nlifts and channels clear—\n\n \n\nEarth take a long breath\n\nand stretches over aeons to come\n\nand aeons past.\n\n48:29\tPenn Kemp:\tThe second poem came from a vision I had of, I call it, les revenants, those who have come before. Those spirits that seem to me to be brought back to a kind of half life from the influenza of 2000- excuse me – 1819. So this is a spell for them to return to their abode.\n \n\n49:05\tPenn Kemp:\tNo Reruns, No Returns\nfor les revenants\n\nThose who died once from influenza\n\na century ago, who now are pulled to\n\n \n\na hell realm of eternal return—are you\n\nrepeating, reliving the hex of time as if\n\n \n\ndoomed to replicate the old story you\n\nalready lived through? Once is enough.\n\n \n\nNo need to hover. You have suffered\n\nplenty. You’ve loved and lost all there\n\n \n\nis to lose. You have won. You’re one\n\nwith all that is. Retreat now to your own\n\n \n\nabode. Return home, spirits. You’re no\n\nlonger needed here. You are no longer.\n\n \n\nAlthough we honour you and thank\n\nyou and remember you each and all,\n\n \n\nall those who’ve been called back, called\n\nup from dimensions we can only guess at—\n\n \n\ncaught in the Great War and carried away\n\nor carried off in the aftermath of influenza—\n\n \n\nby this spell, we tell you to go back to\n\nyour own time, out of time. Just in time.\n\n \n\nMay you depart. We don’t know, how can\n\nwe tell? where your home is. It’s not here.\n\n \n\nKnow this virus is not yours. Know this\n\nwar is not yours. You are here in our era\n\n \n\nby error, by slippage, a rip. You’ve mis-\n\ntaken the signage, the spelling in wrong\n\n \n\nturns. Now return, by this charm, retreat.\n\nYou are dispelled, dismissed, dismantled,\n\n \n\nreleased to soar free from the trance of time.\n\nMay you travel well. May you fly free.\n\n51:50\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Finger Snaps] There’s my finger-snapping of appreciation.\n \n\n51:57\tPenn Kemp:\tWell I couldn’t hear it.\n \n\n51:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tThank you very much for sharing your new work with us here on the podcast.\n \n\n52:05\tPenn Kemp:\tYou’re the first to hear it.\n \n\n52:05\tNick Beauchesne:\tOh, I’m honored. Thank you very much, Penn, for joining us. Thanks to SpokenWeb for allowing me the opportunity to do this podcast. Thanks also to my friend and former bandmate, Adam Whitaker-Wilson for providing the tech support and the studio gear and space on my end here. Anyone seeking to learn more about Penn — she has a blog. Just google Penn Kemp at WordPress, and she also has a Weebly page, W-E-E-B-L-Y for further information as well.\n \n\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpoooooooo –\t\n52:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Ambient Noise Begins]. Thanks. You. Audience. For. Your. Time.\t\n52:39\tPenn Kemp:\tSpo-ken. Spo-ken.\t\n52:42\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpo-ken. Web. Spo-ken. Web. Web of life web.\t\n52:55\tPenn Kemp:\tWeb. Web.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tWeb of time.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tSpokennnn Webbbbb.\t\n52:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd then we’ll “fade out: music.”\n \n\n53:14\tHannah McGregor:\t[Theme Music] 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, Nick Beauchesne from the University of Alberta with guest collaborator and Canadian poet Penn Kemp. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Stacey Copeland. Assistant producer and outreach manager is Judee Burr. A special thanks to Adam Whitaker-Wilson, Douglas Barbour, Ann Anglin, Bill Gilliam, and John Magyar for their contributions to this episode. To find out more about SpokenWeb visit spokenweb.ca and subscribe to the SpokenWeb Podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may listen. If you love us, let us know. Rate us and leave a comment on Apple podcasts or say hi on our social media as @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.\t\n"],"score":4.3938217},{"id":"9623","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 S3E8, Academics on Air, 2 May 2022, Kroon, Beauchesne and Miya"],"item_title_source":["SpokenWeb Podcast web page."],"item_title_note":["https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/"],"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 3"],"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":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creator_names_search":["Ariel Kroon","Nick Beauchesne","Chelsea Miya"],"creators":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Ariel Kroon\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"\",\"name\":\"Nick Beauchesne\",\"dates\":\"\",\"notes\":\"\",\"nation\":[],\"role\":[\"Producer\"]},{\"url\":\"http://viaf.org/viaf/9162060349751401864\",\"name\":\"Chelsea Miya\",\"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/4d8a0871-f27e-4d7f-825d-1b9962330239/audio/5c6123d8-1c4b-451b-941a-8b331156eb91/default_tc.mp3\",\"file_path\":\"\",\"filename\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair.mp3\",\"channel_field\":\"\",\"sample_rate\":\"44.1 kHz\",\"duration\":\"00:50:55\",\"precision\":\"\",\"size\":\"48,954,349 bytes\",\"bitrate\":\"\",\"encoding\":\"\",\"contents\":\"\",\"notes\":\"MP3 audio\",\"title\":\"swp-s3e8-academicsonair\",\"credit\":\"\",\"caption\":\"\",\"content_type\":\"Sound Recording\",\"featured\":\"\",\"public_access_url\":\"https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/academics-on-air/\"}]"],"Dates":["[{\"date\":\"2022-05-02\",\"type\":\"Publication Date\",\"notes\":\"\",\"source\":\"\"}]"],"Location":["[{\"url\":\"https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10238561\",\"venue\":\"University of Alberta\",\"notes\":\"\",\"address\":\"11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5\",\"latitude\":\"\\t53.52682\",\"longitude\":\"-113.5244937350756\"}]"],"Address":["11121 Saskatchewan Drive, North West Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E5"],"Venue":["University of Alberta"],"City":["Edmonton, Alberta"],"Note":["[]"],"Related_works":["[{\"url\":\"\",\"citation\":\"Sound FX/Music\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Communications – Greenwich Time Signal, post January 1st 1972.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07042099.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Doors: House – House Door: Interior, Larder, Open and Close.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07027090.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Footsteps Down Metal Stairs – Footsteps Down Metal Stairs, Man, Slow, Departing.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07037171.\\n\\nBBC Sound Effects. “Industry: Printing: Presses – Electric Printing Press operating.” BBC Sound Effects, https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=07041078.\\n\\nBertrof. “Audio Cassette Tape Open Close Play Stop.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/351567/.\\n\\nConstructabeat. “Stop Start Tape. Player.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/constructabeat/sounds/258392/.\\n\\nCoral Island Studios. “28 Cardboard Box Open” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Coral_Island_Studios/sounds/459436/.\\n\\nGis_sweden. “Electronic Minute No 97 – Multiple Atonal Melodies.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/gis_sweden/sounds/429808/.\\n\\nGJOS. “PaperShuffling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/GJOS/sounds/128847/.\\n\\nIESP. “Cage Rattling.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/IESP/sounds/339999/.\\n\\nInspectorJ. “Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/398160/.\\n\\nJohntrap. “Tubes ooTi en Vrak.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/johntrap/sounds/528291/.\\n\\nKern PKL. “Limoncello.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/browse/track/104864.\\n\\nKyles. “University Campus Downtown Distant Traffic and Nearby Students Hanging Out Spanish +Some People and Groups Walk by Steps Cusco, Peru, South America.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/kyles/sounds/413951/.\\n\\nLillehammer. “Arbinac.” Blue Dot Sessions, https://app.sessions.blue/album/9f32a891-6782-4a63-8796-cafa323b711e.\\n\\nMichaelvelo. “Packing Tape Pull.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Michaelvelo/sounds/366836/.\\n\\nNix Nihil. “Vocal Windstorm.” Psyoptic Enterprises, 2016.\\n\\nOymaldonado. “70’s southern rock mix loop for movie.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/oymaldonado/sounds/507242/.\\n\\nPsyoptic. “Forest of Discovery.” Thought Music. Psyoptic Enterprises, 2006.\\n\\nSagetyrtle. “Cassette.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/sagetyrtle/sounds/40164/.\\n\\nSuso_Ramallo. “Binaural Catholic Gregorian Chant Mass Liturgy.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/people/Suso_Ramallo/sounds/320530/.\\n\\ntonywhitmore. “Opening Cardboard Box.” Freesound, https://freesound.org/s/110948/.\\n\\nZiegfeld Follies of 1921. “Second hand Rose” [restored version]. George Blood, LP. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/78_second-hand-rose_fanny-brice-grant-clarke-james-f-hanley_gbia0055858a/Second+Hand+Rose+-+Fanny+Brice+-+Grant+Clarke-restored.flac\\n\\n \\n\\nArchival Audio\\n\\nCarlin, George. “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” Indecent Exposure. Little David Records, 1978.\\n\\n“Dorothy Livesay.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 Feb. 1984.\\n\\n“Douglas Barbour.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 10 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Margaret Atwood.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 12 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Marian Engel.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 Jan. 1984.\\n\\n“Linguistic Taboos and Censorship in Literature.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 8 April 1983.\\n\\n“Phyllis Webb.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 16 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Poetry: The Sullen Craft or Art.” Paper Tygers. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 1 Jan. 1982.\\n\\n“Robert Kroetsch.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 23 Nov. 1983.\\n\\n“Rudy Wiebe.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 21 March 1984.\\n\\n“Stephen Scobie.” Celebrations. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 26 Oct. 1983.\\n\\n“Women’s Language and Literature: A Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 4 March 1981.\\n\\n“Speech and Its Characteristics.” Voiceprint. Dept. of Radio and Television and CKUA, 18 March 1981.\\n\\n \\n\\nWorks Cited\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nBashwell, Peace. “Weird and Wonderful Scenes from the Bardfest.” The Gateway, November 10, 1981, pg. 13. Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/newspapers/GAT/1981/11/10/13/.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “CKUA-AM.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/listing_and_histories/radio/ckua-am.\\n\\nFauteux, Brian. “The Canadian Campus Radio Sector Takes Shape.” Music in Range: The Culture of Canadian Campus Radio. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2015, pp. 37-64.\\n\\nKostash, Myrna. “Book View.” The Edmonton Journal, 17 Jan. 1981.\\n\\nKirkman, Jean. “CKUA: Fifty years of growth for the university’s own station.” University of Alberta Alumni Association: History Trails, March 1978, https://sites.ualberta.ca/ALUMNI/history/affiliate/78winCKUA.htm.\\n\\nRemington, Bob. “Banning of Radio Show Called Cowardly.” The Edmonton Journal, 26 May 1983.\\n\\n \\n\\nFurther Reading\\n\\nArmstrong, Robert. “History of Canadian Broadcasting Policy, 1968–1991.” Broadcasting Policy in Canada, Second Edition. University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 41-56.\\n\\nThe Canadian Communications Foundation (CCF). “A Brief History of Educational Broadcasting in Canada.” History of Canadian Broadcasting, https://broadcasting-history.com/in-depth/brief-history-educational-broadcasting-canada.\\n\\nDeshaye, Joel. The Metaphor of Celebrity : Canadian Poetry and the Public, 1955-1980. University of Toronto Press; 2013.\\n\\nGil, Alex. “The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make” [blog post]. Minimal Computing, 21 May 2015, https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.\\n\\nMacLennan, Anne F. “Canadian Community/Campus Radio: Struggling and Coping on the Cusp of Change.” Radio’s Second Century: Perspectives on the Past, Present and Future, edited by John Allen Hendricks, Rutgers University Press, 2020, pp. 193-206.\\n\\nRubin, Nick. “‘College Radio’: The Development of a Trope in US Student Broadcasting.” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 47–64.\\n\\nWalters, Marylu. CKUA: Radio Worth Fighting For. University of Alberta Press, 2002.\"}]"],"_version_":1853670549718302721,"timestamp":"2026-01-07T14:59:54.290Z","contents":["In the early 1980s, the University of Alberta funded a series of experimental literary radio programs, which were broadcast across the province on the CKUA community radio network. At the time, CKUA station had just been resurrected through a deal with ACCESS and was eager for educational programming. Enter host and producer Jars Balan – then a masters student in the English department with limited radio experience. For five years, Balan produced three radio series, Voiceprint, Celebrations, and Paper Tygers, which explored the intersection of language, literature, and culture, and he interviewed some of the biggest names in the Canadian literary scene, including Margaret Atwood, Maria Campbell, Robert Kroetsch, Robertson Davies, and many others.\n\nThis episode is framed as a “celebration” of those heady days of college radio in the early 80s. In it, clips from Jars’s radio programs, recovered from the University of Alberta Archives, supplement interviews with Balan and audio engineer Terri Wynnyk. Special tribute will be given to the recently departed Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb through the inclusion of their in-studio performances recorded for Balan’s own Celebrations series. By looking back on the pioneering days of campus radio, this episode sheds light on the current moment in scholarly podcasting and how the genre is being resurrected and reimagined by a new generation of “academics on air.”\n\nSpecial thanks to Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections, and to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrison, who worked behind the scenes on this episode.\n\n00:06\tSpokenWeb Podcast Theme Music:\t[Instrumental Overlapped With Feminine Voice] Can you hear me? I don’t know how much projection to do here.\n00:18\tHannah McGregor:\tWhat does literature sound like? What stories will we hear if we listen to the archive? Welcome to The SpokenWeb 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. \nVoiceprint. Celebrations. Paper Tygers. These are the names of three campus radio shows produced in the late 70s and early 80s at the University of Alberta, and broadcast province-wide. All three explored how literature, culture, and politics intersect: Voiceprint was the first and longest-running of the three, about poetics, speech, and communications theory; “Celebrations” celebrated the 75th anniversary of the University of Alberta in 1983; and “Paper Tygers” was about the practical ins-and-outs of being a writer. They were created by University of Alberta Masters student Jars Balan, and had production teams and guests that ranged from other students—like the show’s audio engineer and production assistant, Terri Wynnyck—to librarians, professors, and writers. \n\nIn today’s episode, SpokenWeb contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya celebrate and share the history of these three campus radio shows they found preserved in the University of Alberta archives. As Jars himself says in this episode, campus radio was an opportunity to share the kinds of thinking and conversations happening inside the university with those outside of it, too. But where were these campus radio shows produced, and how? What, exactly, were the circumstances of their creation? How were they received? And what echoes of campus radio do we hear in scholarly podcasting today? Featuring interviews with producer Jars Balan and audio engineer Terry Wynnyck, and archival audio of Western Canadian poets Doug Barbour and Phyllis Webb, Ariel, Nick, and Chelsea dive into the rich history of campus radio, from conception and script-writing to the physical cutting and editing of tape. \n\nWe invite you to listen to this episode with us and celebrate those early campus radio shows, and the people who made them. Here are Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya with Episode 8 of our third season of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “Academics on Air”. [Music Interlude: SpokenWeb Podcast Theme Song]\n\n02:55\tJars Balan\tHello and welcome to “Celebrations”. [Trumpet Fanfare]\n03:33\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tEvery great Spoken Web story starts with a box of something or other…\n03:37\tChelsea Miya:\tIt’s June, 2021. The Spoken Web Alberta team has gathered together over Zoom. We’re here to witness the unboxing of the archive. Michael O’Driscoll, director of Spoken Web U Alberta, is sitting next to a cardboard box.\n03:52\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tI got these by the way, directly from Jars. I had to drive by his house and picked them up from his front porch and we had a nice socially distanced talk about things. I have been very well behaved. I haven’t even peeked. I have no idea. Ooh, what is in here? And they’ve been sitting here in my office next to me for a, for weeks now. And I, and I have resisted the urge to check.\n04:16\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is me Ariel.\n04:19\tChelsea Miya:\tAnd this is me Chelsea.\n04:21\tNick Beauchesne:\tThis is Nick reporting.\n04:23\tAriel Kroon:\tThe three of us are the producers of this SpokenWeb Podcast episode. We’re also researchers at the University of Alberta where we’ve been digitizing the “Voiceprint” series. Over hours of listening, we feel like we’ve gotten to know this forgotten campus radio show, and its host Jars, pretty well. We’re fans.\n04:41\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tIt makes it feel more…\n04:45\tArielKroon, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible?\n04:45\tChelsea Miya, Zoom, [21 June 2021]:\tTangible, yeah. And I think it’ll give us a sense of the amount of work but also that the chaos and energy that went into this. [Laughter]\n04:53\tAriel Kroon:\tMichael peels back the cardboard flaps and reaches inside [Sound Effect: Box Opening, Papers Shuffling] He pulls out a stack of tapes.\n04:58\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\tSo these are cassette recordings [Papers Shuffling] I would assume of some of the voice of nine different “Voiceprint” broadcasts, some of which we currently have a record of and some of which are entirely new.\n05:15\tAriel Kroon:\tHe also finds stacks of brown manila folders, which resemble case files. Scribbled across each folder is the name of a different episode. And they are stuffed with material.\n05:28\tMichael O’Driscoll, Zoom, 21 June 2021:\t[Papers Shuffling Throughout] So these are clearly the background research papers that were being used to develop ideas and the concepts for the different “Voiceprint” issues that Jars was developing at the time. So there’s a lot here in terms of the context for the developmental stuff, which I think is pretty interesting. Some library reference materials, some background on the history of the printed word, cognitive relations to the printed word. So, all kinds of interesting things, for sure. What else do we have in here? And some time codes for the materials that he was working with… a handwritten set of interview questions for Phyllis Webb [Unknown Voice: Oh that’s cool!] [Pause] –Wow.\n06:25\tAriel Kroon:\t[Start Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music] When we first stumbled upon this archive, or rather were handed it in a cardboard box, we thought the celebrity guests were the coup. We had hours of interviews and performances from Canadian literary stars like Phyllis Webb. These recordings hadn’t been played in decades and hardly anyone knew about their existence. But as we listened to the tapes, we realized that Jars, the host of the show, was himself a fascinating character. Rather than centring on the poets, our episode looks back on the heyday of campus radio culture… and tells the story of how students like Jars and radio aide Terri Wynnyck broke ground by experimenting with radio as a form of public scholarship. [End Music: Ambient Atmospheric Music]\n07:17\tChelsea Miya:\t[Audio Clip: Digital Musical Notes] [Audio Clip: Students Walking, Chatting] There are about 80 different college and university-affiliated campus radio stations across Canada. And each of these stations has their own unique story and history. CKUA radio is Canada’s first public broadcaster. [Start Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] It’s story begins on the University of Alberta campus in 1927. The school received a grant from the province to start its own radio station setting up shop in the Department of Extension.Over the next fifty years, CKUA became more than just a campus radio station. From the beginning, they experimented with new formats: radio dramas, square-dancing lessons, even an Alcoholics Anonymous program. The station broadcasts to remote areas, reaching everyone from farmers to fur trappers. But even as listenership expanded, CKUA still maintained close ties with the University. [End Music: Fanny Brice’s “Second Hand Rose”] Brian Fauteux, Professor of Music at UAlberta, explains…\n08:18\tAudio Recording, Brian Fauteux, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tThe university still maintains a couple hours a week for programming, maintaining that sort of focus on radio talks and lectures as well as what they were calling good music, classical music often. This idea that they were uplifting listeners or passing on something that was the domain of the university. So it’s a very unique station in that sense. It’s sort of education as framed by showcasing arts and culture that maybe you wouldn’t hear on commercial radio.\n08:50\tChelsea Miya:\t[Start Music: Rock Music] Then the 70’s arrive. A time of self-expression and rebelling against the man. In Quebec and Alberta, separatism is in the air. The federal and provincial governments clash over broadcasting rights, and CKUA gets caught in the middle. [End Music: Rock Music] At this point, CKUA is operated by Alberta Telephones, which is illegal under federal rules. [Start Music: Instrumental] But just as things are looking dire, ACCESS, The Alberta Educational Communications Corporation, is created. Educational programs have special status under new broadcast regulations. And ACCESS offers CKUA a new license. And so the station was reborn. [End Music: Instrumental]\n09:39\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Radio Signal Test Tone] CKUA was back on air and better than before! Originally, CKUA had only aired on AM frequencies, which transmit farther, but have poorer sound quality and are best suited for talk radio. [Start Music: Electronic Instrumental] Now, CKUA could broadcast with 100,000 watt transmitters, which were 200 times more powerful than what they had before, and the station aired on the higher bandwidth FM frequencies. With these new transmitters, everyone in Alberta could tune into their shows, and every note could be heard, clear and crisp. It was during this period of intense expansion and revitalization that Jars Balan joined the station. [End Music: Electronic Instrumental]\n10:25\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tNow I did my undergraduate work uh in at the University of Toronto. I did an Honours BA in English Literature there. And my plan was to take two or three years off with a friend and fix up his van and drive to the West Coast, work at the sawmill, make a pile of money, go to Mexico, hang out, smoke a lot of pot, party, and then come back and enter an MA program. It all kind of fell through because when we got to BC the forestry industry was in the doldrums, there was no work and we came back here. I ended up working on a farm near the international airport. In the meantime I found out there were a couple of profs in the English department who are very sympatico to my literary interests: Stephen Scobie and Doug Barbour. So I met with them and I decided, well this a good place to do my MA. So I signed up for an MA in ‘77 and entered the MA program in English/Creative Writing.\n11:21\tAriel Kroon:\tThe Executive Producer of the University’s Department of Radio and Television was Roman Onifrijchuck.\n11:26\tArchival Recording, Jars Balan, Voiceprint, 4 Mar 1981:\tThe problem of sexist language is perhaps most frequently encountered by people working in the field of publishing.\n11:32\tArielle Kroon:\tAs it turned out, Jars and Roman were old friends. They had spent several summers working together as camp counselors at a Ukrainian summer camp.\n11:41\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\t[Sound Effect: Children Playing] It was kind of a bunch of us 60’s guys running a camp, a summer camp, the way we thought we should have gone to summer camp and never did at the, you know, it was pretty loosey goosey, but it was very successful and popular, but we became very good friends.\n11:55\tAriel Kroon:\tJars had just entered UAlberta’s masters program in English, when Roman approached him to ask if he had an idea for a show.\n12:02\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tThe whole purpose of CKUA was to produce programming that highlighted and showcased the work of scholars at the U of A. And so I sketched out this concept for a show called “Voiceprint”. Because I was trying to work towards a materialist approach to poetics [Start Music: Instrumental] by which I meant poetics based on a knowledge of linguistics, communications theory, nuts and bolts sort of use of language and communication strategy and how that can be translated into making poetry more effective. And so Voiceprint for me became that working document that enabled me to work out my theories. Roman liked the idea. They gave me 13 half-hour shows. We started with that in ’79 and that was considered successful. So I said, you know, I can do, I really could use an hour. And they agreed to that. And I fleshed it out into what then became 39 one hour shows in the Voiceprint series.\n13:09\tAriel Kroon:\tBefore he knew it, one show became three. Jars also hosted the “Celebrations” series, interviewing the university’s writers-in-residence, authors like Marian Engel and Margaret Atwood. [End Music: Instrumental]\n13:20\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, 1983-84:\t[Sound Effect: Trumpet Fanfare] Our guest tonight is the novelist and short story writer Marian Engel… Robert Kroetsch… Margaret Atwood… Dorothy Livesay… poet Phyllis Webb…\n13:28\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tAnd so we took advantage of the fact that they were on campus in Edmonton for me to be able to interview them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.\n13:37\tAriel Kroon:\tHis third radio show, “Paper Tygers”, was about the ins and outs of being a writer. For example, advice on how to find an agent and land a book deal.\n13:46\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [1 Jan. 1982]\t“Paper Tygers”, a program for creative and working writers.\n13:50\tAriel Kroon:\tWhile completing his masters, Jars was also producing these three radio shows. It was like having another full-time gig.\n13:57\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tI was very lucky. I basically used the shows to pay for my education. I didn’t have to take any tutorials or anything like that. So I wasn’t beholden to my professors for any work. For me it was very important. I wanted to be independent. I was spared the agony of having to mark undergraduate papers which I hated to read and do even though I was an undergraduate once myself. By the time I finished my MA I was supporting myself freelance writing so – I was paid for the Voiceprint, they were $750 bucks a show and I got pretty good at turning out a show a week, which in those dollars was pretty good money and I was able to pay off my student debt and support myself.\n14:41\tAriel Kroon:\t“Voiceprint” was his biggest “hit.” The show was subtitled “Speech, language, communications technology, and the Literary Arts in a Changing World.”\n14:51\tArchival Audio, Jars Balan, [4 March 1981]\t[Digital Musical Notes] “Voiceprint”.\n14:54\tAriel Kroon:\tThe topic seemed to strike a chord with listeners, finding a wider audience outside of the university campus. “Voiceprint” ran for three years on CKUA’s Access Radio station. At its peak, it aired every week on Wednesdays at 7pm. This is prime-time for radio shows.Voiceprint earned a glowing review in the Edmonton Journal. The reviewer, quoting Roman, calls it “Sesame Street for adults.” Voiceprint invited the public to confront the ways in which language, politics, and culture intersect. This radio series was unafraid to tackle controversial subjects, such as the subtleties of sexism in language, with a nuanced, academic perspective. As the critic from the Edmonton Journal put it…\n15:35\tAudio Recording, Re-enactment of Edmonton Journal Review:\t[Sound Effect: Typewriter keys] These programs are most assuredly not straight lectures, not a solitary patrician male voice droning on into the fog of the airwaves. “Voiceprint” is, in the jargon of electronic media, a magazine show. The format is the montage: many voices, recurring theme segments, a bit of music, readings, interviews. Jars Balan, an Edmonton poet and editor, is the producer and host. He asks the questions we want to ask of linguists, anthropologists, doctors, classicists, writers…\n16:07\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWhen you think about it, the concept from the university’s view is a good one! All this work goes on at the university and if you’re not reading academic journals and you aren’t attending lectures, you don’t know what the hell these people are doing. And so this was an attempt to sort of get that out into a wider audience. You’d get somebody, I remember somebody saying, “so I caught your show was driving to Lethbridge from Calgary”… it obviously did reach an audience.\n16:33\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars was the host of “Voiceprint”. But the show was a collaborative effort. At least ten people worked on the production team. Some were students, like Jars. Others were UAlberta staff and professors, whom Jars recruited to produce special segments.\n16:48\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tI took advantage. There were people already involved in producing things in the Department of Radio and Television and I would use them for my program too for voices. So, Anna Altmann, who was a librarian, was somebody who was doing some other recording stuff and I said oh great, would you read these portions of the show, the scripted portions, and did various sound work, narrative work with us.\n17:13\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnna stood out to us, as listeners, because she speaks with a distinct affectation called “received pronunciation.” As heard in this clip, Anna hosted a bibliographic segment, where she would recommended “must-read” books about the different episode topics.\n17:31\tAudio Recording, Anna Altmann, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIf you’d like to learn more about language and problem of sexism, probably the best place to begin reading is a very accessible book, titled Words and Women.\n17:41\tNick Beauchesne:\tIt turns out her mind was as noteworthy as her voice; she went on to become director of UAlberta’s School of Library and Information Science. And then there was Richard Braun who provided the definitions for some key words. Here he is discussing how sexism is ingrained in language.\n18:02\tArchival Record, Roman Onifrijchuck, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tLet’s look at those two words: male and female.\n18:03\tArchival Record, Richard Braun, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMale, female. A very annoying thing that happens in English. An intentional misspelling, mispronunciation, to make it appear that “male” is the basic thing and upon it you add the meaningless “fe.”\n18:20\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRichard Braun was an unusual character that I found in the classics department. He taught classics, but his real passion was etymology and he was great and he was quite eccentric, both looking and just in his manner. But he really enjoyed –I’d give him a list of words that I thought related to the theme of the show and he would look them up, the history of the word and whatever, and talk about it in a very engaging way. I wish I had a picture of him because he looked like a professor [Laughs]. Terri was the person probably I worked most closely with.\n18:57\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri Wynnyk, the Production Assistant, was also a student at UAlberta, and the tech guru of the team.\n19:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Audio of Tape Recording Stopping and Starting Throughout] I think I was the tech guru for Jars because Jars was so technically incompetent. Jars was always living in his head, and he couldn’t figure out how to use a tape recorder.\n19:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tShe remembers the day that she got recruited to work for the campus radio station.\n19:22\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tSo I was studying political science and economics at the University of Alberta. And and one of my sociology classes, the sociology of sex roles, I met this wild and crazy guy named Manfred Loucat who said, “Hey you’ve got to come and work at the university radio station. We’re just opening it up, we’re just opening it up, it’s been closed for a year, It’s been mothballed and we’re going to start it up.” So I ended up being the news director.\n19:49\tNick Beauchesne:\tAnd before she knew it, Terri got promoted.\n19:53\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tThis guy, this bear of a guy with a big beard and wild and crazy hair, cigarettes hanging out of his mouth named Roman Onufrijchuk, showed up one day at CJSR. And said, “Do you want a job? Would you like to freelance for me?” And I said, “Sure, what are you paying?”\n20:17\tNick Beauchesne:\tTerri and Jars worked on multiple shows, spending countless hours in the radio studio, which became like a second home.\n20:28\tChelsea Miya:\t[Sound Effect: Audio Crackling] Today’s podcasts can be recorded anywhere. The three of us who worked on this SpokenWeb episode live in different parts of the country: Kitchener, Calgary, and Kamloops. We worked on this show remotely, conducting interviews from home on Zoom. But in the past, campus radio was very much rooted in a specific sense of place. Jennifer Waits is a campus radio historian and a producer of the Radio Survivor podcast. Like Jars and Terri, Jennifer worked on a campus radio station in the early 80s. Only in her case, she was based at Haverford College outside Philadelphia. Her radio program had a smaller following than CKUA. It only aired during lunch-hour in the cafeteria hall. But she still remembers how excited she was, hearing her shows broadcast over the school speakers…\n21:18\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\tSo I did college radio starting when I was a freshman in college and didn’t really pay any attention to college radio history at the time. But I think what happened was I must have come back to a reunion at some point and had heard sad tales about the radio station falling on hard times… like somebody sold off a bunch of the record collection that I remember being a part of lovingly kind of restoring service from major record labels when I was there in the 80s. And, and so I had this sadness about pieces of the history getting sold off and I think it’s at that point that I got really interested in digging into the history of the radio station. So I kind of embarked on this project and interviewed people from Haverford College’s radio past going as far as the 1940s.\n22:07\tChelsea Miya:\tSince then, Jennifer made it her quest to celebrate and preserve campus radio culture. She’s visited hundreds of stations across America, documenting their different stories. As Jennifer explains, the campus radio studio is a sacred space. It has its own distinct aura.\n22:25\tAudio Recording, Jennifer Waits, Interview, [3 Feb 2022]:\t[Start Music: Ambient Electronic] There’s often a community feeling at a college radio station, so you might have a couch that’s been there forever. Sometimes I’ve been warned to not sit on a particular couch because of nefarious things that might have happened on said couch. Often you’ve got layers of history on the walls of radio stations, so you might have stickers from bands and from other radio stations, you might have flyers from concerts that have happened or you know, material that has been sent in with records. So promotional items like glossy photos of bands and posters. So you’ll see stuff all over the walls, you’ll often see cabinets that have stickers all over them. What I love are just sort of funky pop culture artifacts. [Laughs] So there might be a troll doll in the record library or a lava lamp. I’ve seen skulls at a lot of radio stations, I don’t really know why. [End Music: Ambient Electronic]\n23:21\tChelsea Miya:\tLike Jennifer, Jars and Terri also spent a lot of time in their campus radio studio. And as they explained, the studio space became part of university lore.\n23:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tDid Jars tell you physically where we were located? The Department of Radio and Television was two floors below ground in the basement of the biological sciences building.\n23:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWeIl it was a special place come to think of it because it was in the bowels of the biological sciences building and literally in the bowels, not in the basement, but in the second basement or sub basement. [Laughter] So you went right down to the bottom. And I mean, the building itself is this gargantuan building and you know, as all these biological specimens and in display cases on different floors.\n24:06\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tIt was a warren. It was a rabbit’s warren of offices in this nether world. [Sound Effect: Cages Rattle] We once found a boa constrictor that had escaped. Because up above us was all sorts of science labs and buildings and rabbits and cockroaches and we had so much wildlife [Sound Effect: Animal Noises] two floors below ground.\n24:32\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tPeople didn’t know about it. You would really have to know where – people were shocked when they learned about it. When we’d tell ’em to come and I’d have to have a map to explain to them how to get to the studios.\n24:43\tNick Beauchesne:\tWe asked Terri to elaborate on her duties as the resident tech guru and production assistant.\n24:49\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tJars, I think, would edit the programs and he designed them, but my job was to put them together. We had a Uher tape recorder which was rarely used–it was a small, portable recorder. We had a Nagra which is a Swiss built small recorder that took small reels, but it was portable so we could take that out into the field. And I have a really strong memory of going in the dead of winter with my arm in a cast and this heavy tape recorder trudging through the snow from the Biological Sciences building to the Humanities to interview Rudy Wieb and it took me forever to get there and get my parka off and get the reels done. Poor Rudy. But he was such a prince, such a king of a man, you know, he gave me this fantastic interview. And then he helped me pack up and he even zipped me up because I couldn’t zip myself up with my hand. That tape recorder provided the best recording. Then we had two Ampex decks, reel-to-reel decks. The Ampex were used for editing, so we would listen to the interview first once across, make our notes, and then begin editing out what we didn’t want. We would cut on the diagonal, a little metal bar, it had a slot in it for the tape and a sliced whole. And we would use clear splicing tape to put the ends together. [Sound Effect: Stretching Tape, Cutting Tape] And tape them across. And then we had two Revox reel-to-reel players that handled the large ten-inch reels, and we used them for mastering. So once we had our show complete and edited, we would record the master tape from one deck to the other. The problem with the Revoxes were they had light-sensitive heads. So, if a splice was not very well done and you had a gap and the light came through and hit the head that was playing back, the playback head, it would stop, but only the take up reel would stop, not the letting-down reel. So you get this dump of tape. You just sit and babysit those.\n27:40\tNick Beauchesne:\tToday, podcast producers have access to online sound libraries with countless sound effects available at the click of a mouse. But in the heyday of alternative radio, sound design was done by hand. Campus radio producers like Jars and Terri would have to create sound effects themselves in the studio or track down physical recordings and transfer them from a record onto reel-to-reel tapes. The magnetic tape could then be sliced by hand into samples and remixed. We asked Jars and Terry about the eclectic musical stings and sound effects samples used in “Voiceprint”, “Celebrations”, and “Paper Tygers”.\n28:20\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\t[Electronic sound effects]\n28:26\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, 4 Jan 2022]:\tThe sounds we used for the different subheadings of the show, were a collective effort. Some of them were my ideas. I’d go looking for something that I thought would work well there. Roman Onofrijchuk was very good, I think Terri helped out. We decided early on with “Voiceprint” [Music: Funky Electronic Reverberation] it was a funky, technical thing that we were doing to go with the sound effects for that. “Celebrations” was just my choice. I thought, well, okay, so it’s called Celebrations.\n28:49\tArchival audio, “Celebrations” Intro Music, 1983:\t[Trumpet Fanfare]\n28:50\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tA fanfare was perfect, that brassy upbeat. I was a member of the Edmonton public library and you could take out records and so I took a whole bunch of classical records that I thought I might find something on and found that particular fanfare which is identified at the end of the show. It was a combination of talents, I guess, that came in to contribute towards it.\n29:24\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tWe listened to different programming on BBC and NPR. We had a library of albums [Sound: Flipping Through Tapes] at radio and TV and of course I had I sort of had access to the stuff over at CJSR, as well. We had things like tubular bells [Bells Chime]. For “Sacred Circle”, I think we had a lot of really mystical and choral music [Choral Singing].\n29:54\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Choral Singing Continues] “Sacred Circle”, by the way, is another UAlberta radio show that Terri worked on. But that is a story for another podcast episode, another paper.\n30:04\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAnd something would come up from the stuff that was being done at Convocation Hall because, although often they performed –my favourites were the old classics they also performed new music. And new music is very exciting because it could be atonal, [Music: Atonal Sounds] it can be twelve-tone. [Music: Twelve-Tone Sounds] We had a few sound effects albums because now you can get anything you want from the internet. But we actually had a couple of records where you that you could queue up. We got a lot of that. We nearly wore those sound effects albums out using them for every kind of sound we needed. [Music Fades]\n30:55\tNick Beauchesne:\tThese sound effects tapes are probably still gathering dust in the University of Alberta archives. The library’s inventory includes cassettes from 1979, with labels like “English meadow, night in the country,” “ultimate thunderstorm,” and “shell and gun fire.” The experimental sound design of late 1970s campus radio programs also coincides with the rise of the Canadian avant-garde sound poetry scene. The literary guests that Jars invited on air brought their own unique flavours to the show. For instance, as part of the “Celebrations” series, Jars interviewed poets Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour. At the time, Scobie and Barbour were both professors in the English Department. They performed poetry on campus under the shared stage name “Re:Sounding.” And their live shows had quite the reputation. A reviewer for The Gateway student paper describes Scobie and Barbour’s spoken word shows as “unforgettable madness.” The following is my dramatic re-enactment of the performance review:\n32:06\tAudio Recording, Re-enactmnet of The Gateway \t[Sound Effect: Typewriter Clacking] These two English professors think and act primal barbarism (pun intended)… I looked out accompanied by the sound of explosive static in the speakers to find Barbour hopping from one box to another repeatedly yelling something like “B-Bible dible-u,” while Scobie made a long spitting hiss into the microphone… this atavism went on for ten minutes. I was amazed at their vocal stamina… a crude finale to what had been for the most part a tasteful evening.\n32:38\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Sound Effect: Recording Buzz] Here’s a clip from their performance of their poem “What the One Voice” recorded live-in-studio for the “Celebrations” program in 1985.\n32:50\tArchival audio, “What the One Voice,” Stephen Scobie and Douglas Barbour, Re:Sounding, 1983:\t\n[Overlapping Voices] What the one voice affirms the other denies. What the one voice conceals, the other displays. When the one voice says yes the other says no. When the one voice is silent, the other voice cries. What the one voice believes, the other voice doubts. [Repetition, Voices Diverging and Swapping Lines] The voice of the left mind, the voice of the right. The voice of the right mind, the voice of the left. [Repetition, Volume Increasing and Then Dropping to Whispers]\n33:58\tNick Beauchesne:\tWhen we first heard this clip, Chelsea, Ariel and I wondered if Jars had attended Barbour’s live poetry reading series, hosted in the English Department. His answer caught us by surprise!\n34:10\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [28 Mar 2022]:\tI not only watched them perform. I performed at events with them.\n34:14\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars had created a collection of sound poems for his thesis project. Scobie and Barbour were his supervisors. Under their tutelage, he rubbed shoulders with the rock stars of the Canadian sound poetry scene. Jars remembers taking the stage with the Four Horsemen, fronted by bpNichol and Steve McCaffery, who were like the Pink Floyd of avant garde poetry. Jars had invited his family to the event.\n34:40\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 Mar 2021]:\tAll these Ukrainians came, my grandmother among them. And I mean they sat there with their jaws on the floor. [Laughs]They thought these people are crazy! Making these sounds and jumping around on stage and everything like that. Sound poetry explores that area between music vocalizations and literature. I’m interested in these gray areas, I guess, which may be the best way to put it.\n35:06\tNick Beauchesne:\tOne of the great achievements of the “Celebrations” series is a very personal touch to discussing individual authors and poets, their works and their lives – especially as more time passes, and more and more of these people are leaving this world. They leave behind a special “voice print” in the form of Jars’s “Celebrations”. The “Re:Sounding” clip hits that much harder, knowing of Douglas Barbour’s passing in 2021, just a few months before this podcast episode was produced. Another clip from the CKUA archive that touched us was a reading of “Stellar Rhyme,” a poem by the great Phyllis Webb, who also passed in the year 2021.\n35:52\tArchival audio, “Stellar Rhyme,” Phyllis Webb, “Celebrations”, 1983: \t\n[Page Flipping] A ball star, tiny columns and plates falling from very cold air, a quick curve into sky. My surprised winter breath, a snowflake caught midway in your throat.\n36:15\tAriel Kroon:\tJars was also a talented interviewer, and he had a special knack for getting the guests on his shows to open up. He explains that he realized early on that being interviewed for a radio show, even a lesser-known campus show with a studio in the biology basement, could be intimidating. Once he placed a microphone in someone’s face and did a sound check, people would freeze up. So, he took a different approach.\n36:38\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things I learned was how to ease them into the interviews. I would meet them when they came in and help them take off their coat and start chatting with them and stuff. We’d sit down, and I’d click on the microphones. And we’d just keep talking about this, that. You know, their time at the university. General stuff. Get them comfortable talking. And I’d just ask, “So tell me how did you get interested in psycholinguistics?” A light would come on in their heads saying, like, oh wow, the interview has begun! And it made it much more smooth.\n37:04\tAriel Kroon:\tOne of Jars’ most memorable guests was poet Ann Cameron. He interviewed Cameron for an episode of Voiceprint called “Women’s Language and Literature: a Voice and a Room of One’s Own.” Only a few clips made it into the final episode. But the raw interview file is riveting. They talked for almost an hour. We were captivated by her candid discussion of everything from sexism to motherhood to her contempt for the label of “poetess.”\n37:32\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tDo you object to being identified as a woman writer?\n37:37\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tNo, I am a woman, and I am a writer.\n37:40\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tYou don’t mind having… I mean there are a lot of people who…\n37:43\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tI object to being referred to as a “poetess.”\n37:46\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tMm-hmm\n37:47\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tSomehow a poet, semantically or whatever, a poet has has dignity and pride and has an ability to use words and move people, and a poetess is hung on a hook of iambic pentameter and nobody bothers [Laughs].\n38:12\tArchival audio, Jars Balan, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tWell, it’s the ending is a… the suffix is a… has a diminutive, derivative quality to it.\n38:21\tArchival audio, Ann Cameron, “Voiceprint”, 1981:\tIt…what does really piss me off is when someone comes up and says, “Oh, I read the thing you wrote. My, you write just like a man!” And I used to choke, just choke! And now, I smile demurely and say, “Oh shit, I hope not!” [Laughs].\n38:45\tAriel Kroon:\tThe campus radio shows in the University of Alberta archive are full of gems like these, from Canadian authors who often engage with Jars on a deeply personal level, sharing stories about their work and their lives. These audio artifacts transport us back to a particular moment in the history of Canadian literature, and also a particular moment in the history of alternative radio.\n39:13\tArchival audio, “Voiceprint”, 1983:\t[Sound Effect: Warning Tone] [Announcer Voice] Warning. The following program candidly examples the subject of pornography, censorship, and linguistic taboos. Listener discretion is advised.\n39:23\tArchival audio, Jars Balan,“Voiceprint”, 1983:\tMy name is Jars Balan. And tonight I’ll be exploring the delicate issue of profanity in language and literature. Our guests include several people fascinated by four-letter words, including comedian George Carlin.\n39:36\tChelsea Miya:\tThe final episode of Voiceprint never made it to air. The subject of the episode was “Linguistic Taboos and Censorship”. Ironically, this episode about censorship was what got the show kicked off CKUA. Jars had included a clip from comedian George Carlin’s infamous monologue. You might have heard it. It’s about the “seven words you can’t use in television.”\n39:58\tArchival Audio, \nGeorge Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: \n\nArchival audio, George Carlin, “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” 1978: Bad words! That’s what they told us they were, remember? That’s a bad word! You know: bad words, bad thoughts, bad intentions… and words! You know the seven, don’t you? That you can’t say on television: Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Huh? [Audience Laughter, Applause].\n40:26\tChelsea Miya:\tFor the ACCESS-run CKUA station, remember this is the ACCESS that emphasized “educational programming,” airing the Carlin clip crossed a line. They said Jars had “contravened the station’s policy on obscene language.” The Edmonton Journal criticized CKUA for being “too sensitive” about the whole issue. In the editor’s view, the “program in question was a sober academic discussion.” Jars himself is quoted in the article. And he laments the decision as “truly unfortunate.” “Voiceprint” was, he says, “serious radio” and they’d been “castrated!” Again, Jars’s words, not mine. [Sound Effect: Electronic Beeping]. And so… Voiceprint came to an end. Until, that is, it was rediscovered, four decades later, by the SpokenWeb research team. [Boxes Opening] With a little help from Jars..\n41:22\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tWell I think I got about two bankers boxes’ worth of stuff. Because I’ve got stuff in the shed and I’ve got stuff here. So, I could bring this to campus. [Tape Recording Starting]\n41:32\tAriel Kroon:\tJars gave us additional recordings of “Voiceprint”, and folders upon folders of handwritten production notes. Sifting through this material, we were amazed at the sheer amount of work each participant put into producing these shows, often without knowing who (if anyone) would be listening. Nowadays, the lived reality of campus radio from 40 years ago seems so foreign to those of us working on podcasts. For example, we are able to access listener metrics with the click of a mouse through podcasting hosting platforms, and insert audio very easily without having to cut up the physical recording media.\n42:09\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWe often hear [Laughs] all the different terms like “knowledge mobilization,” getting thrown around as really important. Well, what does that actually look like? If we’re thinking about those kinds of aspects of projects being important, we need to start seriously thinking about how we can change our research into more publicly accessible work.\n42:29\tAriel Kroon:\tThis is Stacey Copeland, one of the producers of the Amplify Podcast Network. One of the Amplify Podcast Network’s goals is to have podcasting recognized by academic institutes as legitimate scholarly work.\n42:43\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhat Amplify is interested in doing is not only bringing scholarly podcasts to light, but thinking about how to make them count as scholarship in more formal ways as well through peer review. So, thinking about the podcast equivalent to a manuscript.\n43:01\tAriel Kroon:\t[Sound Effect: Printing Press Mechanizations] The printed journal or book has long been held up as the gold standard of academic research, how a scholar measured the impact of their research. But these traditional forms of scholarly production can be alienating. As academics, we’re removed from the process of “making knowledge” in a material, hands-on way. Much like Jars and Terri did with campus radio shows like “Celebrations” and “Voiceprint”, today scholars are using podcasting to reconnect with their research and, at the same time, find an audience outside of academia.\n43:35\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tFor me it often means learning how to better articulate my research, in general. If you can’t talk about your research with your grandma [Laughs] then you really need to start rethinking what your scholarship’s bringing to the world and what it’s actually contributing beyond your specific discipline. And, when you start to engage in something like making a podcast, it brings up a lot of those bigger conversations and bigger questions.\n44:03\tAriel Kroon:\tIn addition to her work with the Amplify Podcast Network, Stacey researches the history of queer and feminist radio. She points out how campus and community radio in the 70s and 80s pushed back against the mainstream. In this sense, shows like Voiceprint paved the way for podcasts, as a more experimental alternative to major public and commercial broadcasters.\n44:25\tAudio Recording, Stacey Copeland, Interview, [2 Feb 2022]:\tWhen we’re looking at pre-Internet era, community radio and campus radio in particular played a huge role in creating any sort of space for community and any sort of political discussion that didn’t fit CBC or private commercial radio. So, spaces to have those more local-oriented conversations and also conversations around queer act activism, around racial activism, and politics and movements across different decades in Canada that just didn’t get the airtime on, say, a CBC. And when the Internet didn’t exist, these were the only spaces we could have those conversations.\n45:06\tNick Beauchesne:\t[Start Music: Ambient Music] Jars did not win his battle with ACCESS, and “Voiceprint” was ultimately banned. But he has no regrets. As Jars himself put it, the show “concluded with an exclamation point, which wasn’t necessarily a bad way to go out.” Through ups and downs, highs and lows, Jars still cherishes the memories of his time as a campus radio host. [End Music: Ambient Music]\n45:30\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tRadio is no longer the same thing that it was when these shows were produced. When I think back on the way we edited with a razor blade and tape to do the splicing and how now all of that just done with dials, digitally and you don’t have a tape even is a world of difference. And I enjoyed the tactile thing of of doing the cuts. And I got good at it.\n45:54\tNick Beauchesne:\tFor Jars, campus radio is a chance for academics to connect with the public in a meaningful way, to lend voice to larger social and political conversations which affect us all.\n46:06\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [4 Jan 2022]:\tOne of the things that’s changed about the university is that in an attempt to combat this image of being an ivory tower, academics now realize it’s important to reach out into a wider audience. That if society is going to support universities financially, morally, politically, they need to be able to show the worth of the learning that goes on at the university. And so sharing that knowledge, sharing that experience is very important. And I think more scholars realize that.\n46:35\tNick Beauchesne:\tAfter graduating from UAlberta, Jars continued to write and perform sound poetry. He also went on to teach remote learning courses in Australia. This was before the internet, so Jars would record his lectures on tape, and those tapes would then be mailed to students. To his surprise, being a distance educator was a lot like being a radio host.\n46:59\tAudio Recording, Jars Balan, Interview, [24 May 2021]:\tThe fact that I had to record these in a studio and sit for three hours, they are three-hour lectures, it really helped the fact that I was used to sitting in front of a microphone in a studio [Sound Effect: Recording Sounds] , and I could hold forth. I just make notes, spread them out on the thing, and talk.\n47:15\tNick Beauchesne:\tJars later returned to the University of Alberta where he was hired by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies.\n47:22\tChelsea Miya:\tAs for Terri, she made the leap from radio to film, devoting her life to telling stories about social justice, women’s rights, and the arts.\n47:31\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\tAfter I left radio, I became a documentary filmmaker and I’ve spent my entire career doing that. But I did love radio first and foremost: that was my passion, my heart.\n47:43\tChelsea Miya:\tWe asked Terri if she had any advice for the next generation of aspiring academic podcast.\n47:50\tAudio Recording, Terri Wynnyk, Interview, [7 Jan 2022]:\t[Start Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL] Voiceprint was fun! Voiceprint was so rigorous. The first thing I would pass on is: listen to people, and listen with an open mind. Don’t bring your prejudices to what you’re listening to. Listen with an open mind. And I would say, always speak. Always speak your truth. Be respectful when you speak it, but speak so that you can articulate yourself. Speak so that you can make yourself understood. Speak so that you can express your frustrations in a way that are respected, speak so that you’re not just a dumb human being on this planet, but you contribute to the rest of society. [End Music: “Limoncello” by Kern PKL]\n49:02\tAriel Kroon:\t[Music Starts: “Celebrations” Fanfare] With that, we conclude this brief profile from the campus radio history archives at the University of Alberta. We’d like to thank Arianne Smith-Piquette from CKUA and Marissa Fraser from UAlberta’s Archives and Special Collections. We’d also like to give a special shout out to SpokenWeb Alberta researcher Zachary Morrisson, who worked behind the scenes on this episode. All works cited and contributors can be found in the show notes for this episode. This is myself, Ariel Kroon, on behalf of my colleagues Chelsea Miya, and Nick Beauchesne, bidding you a pleasant good evening. [End Music: “Celebrations” Fanfare]\n49:50\tHannah McGregor:\t[Start Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music] 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 contributors Ariel Kroon, Nick Beauchesne, and Chelsea Miya of the University of Alberta. Our podcast project manager and supervising producer is Judith Burr—and next month, this position will be taken over by our new supervising producer, Kate Moffatt. Our episodes are transcribed by Kelly Cubbon. To find out more about Spokenweb visit: spokenweb.ca and subscribe to The Spokenweb Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you may 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. Stay tuned to your podcast feed later this month for ShortCuts with Katherine McLeod, mini stories about how literature sounds. [End Music: SpokenWeb Theme Music]"],"score":4.3938217}]