Fred Wah was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan in 1939 and grew up in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia. He presently lives in Vancouver. He studied music and English literature at the University of British Columbia in the early 1960's where he was one of the founding editors of the poetry newsletter TISH. After graduate work in literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and the State University of New York at Buffalo, he returned to the Kootenays in the late 1960's where he taught at Selkirk College and was the founding coordinator of the writing program at David Thompson University Centre. He also taught at the University of Calgary during the 90's. He has been editorially involved with a number of literary magazines over the years, such as Open Letter and West Coast Line. He has published numerous books of poetry. His book of prose-poems, Waiting For Saskatchewan, received the Governor-General's Award in 1986 and So Far was awarded the Stephanson Award for Poetry in 1992. Diamond Grill, a biofiction about hybridity and growing up in a small-town Chinese-Canadian cafe was published in 1996 and won the Howard O'Hagan Award for Short Fiction. His most recent book, Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity, was awarded the Gabrielle Roy Prize for Writing on Canadian literature.
Books:
Lardeau (Island Press, Toronto, 1965)
Mountain (Audit Press, Buffalo, 1967)
Among (Coach House Press, Toronto, 1972)
Tree (Vancouver Community Press, 1972)
Earth (Institute of Further Studies, Canton, 1974)
Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1975)
Loki is Buried at Smoky Creek: Selected Poetry (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1980)
Owners Manual (Island Writing Series, Lantzville, 1981)
Breathin' My Name With a Sigh (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1981)
http://www.ccca.ca/history/ozz/english/books/
Grasp The Sparrow's Tail (Kyoto, 1982)
Waiting For Saskatchewan (Turnstone Press, Winnipeg, 1985)
Rooftops (Blackberry Books, Maine, 1987 and Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1988)
Music at the Heart of Thinking (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1987)
Limestone Lakes Utaniki (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1989)
So Far (Talonbooks, Vancouver, 1991)
Alley Alley Home Free (Red Deer College Press, Alberta, 1992)
Snap (Pomeflits, Vancouver, 1993)
Diamond Grill (NeWest Press, Edmonton, 1996)
Faking It: Poetics and Hybridity (NeWest Press, Edmonton, 2000)
Isadora Blue (La Mano Izquierda Impressora, Victoria, 2005)
www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wah/
Workshop Description -- One Makes (The) Difference
To say: "I don't understand what this means," is, at least, to recognize that "this" means. The problem is that meaning is not a totality of sameness and predictability, but a totality of difference and surprise. Within each word, each sentence, meaning has slipped a little out of sight and all we have are traces, shadows, still-warm ashes. The meaning available from language (when one either reads or writes it) goes beyond the actual instance of this word, that word. A text is a place where a labyrinth of continually revealing meanings are available, interdependently, a place that offers more possibility than we can be sure we know, sometimes more than we want to know. It isn't a container, static and apparent. Rather, it is noisy, frequently illegible. Writing and reading into meaning starts with a questioning glance, a seemingly obvious doubloon on a mast. The multiplicity can be read, should be read, even performed. But then again, perhaps meaning is intransitive and unreadable, only meant to be made. No sooner do we name meaning than it dissipates. As a sure thing, it eludes us. It arouses us to attempt an understanding, to interpret. But this is usually unsatisfying since whatever direction we approach from only leads us to suspect there is no one direction. No single meaning is the right one because no "right ones" stand still long enough to get caught. But because we do not know does not mean we are lost. Something that is strangely familiar, insistently familiar, a familiar layer or ground, is present. That quick little gasp in the daydream, a sudden sigh of recognition, a little sock of baby breath. Writing or reading into meaning starts at the white page, nothing but intention, finally, one's own irrelevant expectations. This initial blinding clarity needs to be disrupted before we�re tricked into settling for a staged and diluted paradigm of the "real", the good old familiar, inherited, understandable, unmistakable lucidity of phrase that feels safe and sure, a simple sentence, just-like-the-last-time-sentence. One makes (the) difference. Meaning generates and amplifies itself, beyond itself, but never forgets; fragments of its memory and its potency exceed itself with meaning full of desire and can only be found hiding between the words and lines and in a margin large enough for further thought, as we listen to our own music at the heart of thinking.
This short workshop will try to two things. First, the piece of writing you've submitted will be responded to in the context of intention, innovation, and some speculation about its role in terms of your own cultural production. Second, we will consider some literal aspects of the writing's materiality, some of its substantive and particular linguistic possibilities. The usual ambience of the collective "critique" will be available, though, hopefully, we might find ways to intervent some of its predictability.
