Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is available for preorder

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is available for preorder:

https://bookhugpress.ca/shop/author/jacob-wren/dry-your-tears-to-perfect-your-aim-by-jacob-wren/

A brief excerpt:

"I start to think about all the stated reasons for this war and other wars like it. For humanitarian reasons (every time an expensive humanitarian bomb landed on civilians, it was enough to turn even the most optimistic Pollyanna into a hardened cynic). To fight communists. To fight terrorists. To stop the spread of communism or terrorism or extremism or something else. To help people. To improve the lot of women. Because we’re right and they’re wrong. Because: Why do they hate us and why do they hate our way of life? Because war has always existed and will always exist. To increase the quantity of democracy in the world. Because we have a responsibility to the world and to freedom. For freedom. For strategic reasons. To stop a domino from setting off all the other dominoes.

And then I move on to what I think the reasons are for this war and so many others. Because our leaders need therapy. Because a bully needs a victim. Because so-called powerful men are deeply insecure. So politicians in favour of war can get elected or re-elected by voters in favour of war. To make money. To placate the arms industry and their high-priced lobbyists. To justify never-ending increases in the military budget. To distract from rampant domestic problems. To bring certain natural resources and labour into the jurisdiction of the global marketplace. To ensure these resources most benefit the capitalists doing the bombing and least benefit the people being bombed. Because it’s easier to kill people who look or sound different than you. Because hatred takes on a life of its own. To explain to the world that you do it our way or suffer the consequences. Because a protection racket needs to constantly ensure no one steps out of line or seeks protection elsewhere. So they can set up permanent military bases to keep the surrounding countries in line. Because there is no alternative. Because there is only room for one empire at a time."

atmospheric quarterly

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Thank you to the atmospheric quarterly for publishing the opening section from Desire Without Expectation:

https://www.atmosphericquarterly.com/jacob-wren

Here's a short excerpt:

“I understand the desire for revenge. I have felt it, though I have rarely acted on such feelings. Instead I have let the desire for revenge fester within me. And yet, at the same time, I have never felt that if someone who hurt me was hurt in turn, it would make me feel any better. I have felt the desire for revenge but also see such desires as basically pointless. Sometimes I wonder if a sincere apology would make me feel better. Perhaps most of the apologies I have received didn’t quite feel sincere. Or I didn’t know how to take them in. I often find myself apologizing to others. I fear I might have gotten too good at it.”




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To the Giller Foundation: Cut Ties with Genocide

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"We, the undersigned, have made the decision to withdraw our books from consideration for the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and to refuse participation in all programming or promotions associated with the Giller Foundation."

Read the full letter here.

Instagram post here.

You can also read about it in The Globe and Mail, CBC, Toronto Star, Quill and Quire, and LitHub.

For a longer read: How the Giller Prize Became Associated with Genocide

Grateful to be a part of this. And to all the other authors taking a stand.

In one week, 27 authors with books eligible for this year's Giller Prize have pulled their titles from consideration. 2 of the 5 jurors (Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar) have also pulled out.

If you have a book out within the Giller Prize eligibility period (Oct 1 2023 - Sept 30 2024), then you should seriously consider signing this letter as well.

# No Business As Usual In Can Lit

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The table of contents from The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure

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The table of contents from:

The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure
by Geneviève Robichaud

(Perhaps the first chapter on PME-ART written by someone other than me.)

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Excerpt from Things That Insist (in three parts)

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“What first attracted me to making performances was the fact that it was so ephemeral. You had to be in the moment and, if it was going to happen, it had to happen right fucking now. Yet now I’m basically over that aspect of it.

Artistically I lead a double life: half my life spent writing books, the other half spent performing. And more and more I prefer the books side of my life for the simple reason that books last.

Every once in a while, someone writes to me, saying they just read a book I wrote a very long time ago, and I experience these messages almost like a relief: that there is an object out there in the world, with my name on it, doing the work for me. Doing the work in my place.

Yet something similar does sometimes happen with performance. For example, I’ll add someone on social media and they’ll send me a message saying they saw me perform ten years ago, and they still fondly remember the experience.

Why do I find this version of past works entering into the present somehow less satisfying? The performance version less satisfying than the one involving books. Is it only because it occurs less frequently?

In 2018, I attempted to partly solve this dilemma by writing a book that recounted twenty years of my performance work. And, in doing so, I made a kind of small discovery: that the descriptions of the performances recounted in the book almost replaced people’s memories of the performances themselves.

The printed version was sharper, clearer and more recent when compared to the vagueness of memory. And yet, of course, there was another way in which memories were more intense, evocative and personal.

Performance is ephemeral, but the performances we remember also exist because we remember them. The very fact we remember them is a testament to their value.

I have never gone to an archive, any sort of archive, to look up a performance I’ve previously seen. I have only ever looked up performances I didn’t see.

In this way, I might intuit that I value the live experience more than I value any recorded account of it. I don’t want to spoil my fading memory of the performance by consulting an archived account of it.

But enough about me.”



From my response to the dance+words’ Dance Dialogues series. Read the entire piece here: https://www.dancepluswords.ca/artistresponses/jacob-wren



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Excerpt from the work-in-progress Desire Without Expectation

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When the weather is good, we sleep outside, far away from other people. There are enough of us to feel safe. Sometimes, in the morning, we would tell each other our dreams. Sometimes our dreams shared characters, the same characters would leave one dream and enter another. We would talk about these dream people, try to describe them to each other, try to ensure they were actually the same figures. That our dreams were falling into sync. Over time we gave these figures names. We argued playfully about what their names might be:

There was The Slickster, who smoothly entered into any dream situation and worked his way through it and into prominence. Other names for The Slickster that we considered and rejected: Mr. Busy, Hungry Guy, Don’t Like Him and Politician.

There was Lady Fighter, who would stand up against any injustice and hold space for others to do the same. Other names for Lady Fighter that were considered: The Organizer, Public Good, Solidarity 101 and When We Fight We Win.

There was New Romantic, who spent most of each dream explaining various genres of music, and the soundtrack of each dream would shift to correspond, like an in-progress personalized mixed tape. Other names considered: Adam Anti, Fade to Grey, Bron Area and Floppy Haircut.

There was The Quiet One, who was often unnoticeable in the background of a scene until some unexpected moment they suddenly became helpful. Other names: The One Who Knows, Catches Everything, Wallpaper Boy and Easily Forgotten.

There was the Irrepressible Being, a kind of ghostly presence that possessed an omnipotent overview of all that happened and therefore could give startling insights at key moments. Other names quickly rejected: Golden Spirit, Imaginary Figment, Dream Dream Dream Figure and Lost Forever.

And then there was you, the protagonist of your own singular dream. There is almost always you.




[I'm gradually realizing that Desire Without Expectation might be the final part of a planned trilogy based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.]



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An excerpt from Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone)

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The excerpt from Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement, from my text Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone), that I read at the launch:



“With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.

As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.

[…]

What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.”

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[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]



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Lancement de RICHES ET PAUVRES et de LA JOIE CRIMINELLE DES PIRATES

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Le jeudi 20 juin, joignez-vous à nous pour célébrer la parution des deux plus récentes œuvres de Jacob Wren, RICHES ET PAUVRES et LA JOIE CRIMINELLE DES PIRATES, traduits de l’anglais (Canada) par Christophe Bernard.

Plus d'informations ici: https://www.facebook.com/events/7405869036189772

Nous en profiterons pour souligner la sortie en poche de nos titres du printemps dans la collection Écho : MILLE SECRETS MILLE DANGERS d’Alain Farah, TESTAMENT et DRAMA QUEENS de Vickie Gendreau, JARDIN RADIO de Charlotte Biron, ORNITHOLOGIE de M.K. Blais, et MARCHE À VOIX BASSE de Nelly Desmarais.

Des rafraîchissements seront servis. Au plaisir de vous revoir et de trinquer avec vous!

Portrait de Jacob Wren : Justine Latour © Le Quartanier

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The original English versions of these books are Rich and Poor and If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates.

A review in Le Devoir. A review in La Presse. And Jacob Wren's books at Le Quartanier.

Thank you to the translator Christophe Bernard and to everyone else at Le Quartanier.

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Survival Technologies opens May 30th!!!

Survival Technologies
At Festival TransAmériques.
More information here: https://fta.ca/en/event/survival-technologies/

Produced by PME-ART

Creator, Director, Sound Design, Performer: Elena Stoodley
Co-Ideator: Kamissa Ma Koïta

Visual Design: Kamissa Ma Koïta, Elena Stoodley, Bay Dam, Vladimir Cara
Set and Lighting Design: Paul Chambers
Assistant Set and Lights: Jordana Natale
Interactive Art Design: Bay Dam
Performer, Cultural Consultant: Jean Durandisse
Performer, Dance Consultant and Costume Designer: Michèle Jean-Jacques
Performer and Dance Consultant: Sophia Gaspard
Percussionist and Cultural Consultant: Karl-Henry Brézault
Artistic Consultants: Dana Michel + Karla Étienne
Artistic Facilitator, Dramaturgy Assistant: Jacob Wren
Artistic Contribution: Sonia Hughes
Producer: Sylvie Lachance
Technical Director: Vladimir Cara
Assistant Stage Manager: Nicoleta Stoodley
Production Manager: Becks Lefranc

Co-produced by Festival TransAmériques + Forum Freies Theater (Düsseldorf) + Festspillene i Nord-Norge (Harstad)
Developed with the support of National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund (Ottawa)
Presented in association with Agora de la danse + Tangente

Premiered at Festival TransAmériques, on May 30, 2024

Read a review here: https://ruinaacesa.com.br/survival-technologies/




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From 2015: My Apologies

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I wrote this in 2015:

"Guilt is conservative. We are all implicated in more ways than we will ever know but shouldn’t feel guilty. We should be angry, must become open to an anger that experiences possibilities everywhere, that opens towards genuinely other ways of seeing our predicament and where it might first or most crack."



From this novel I started but couldn't finish: My Apologies



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