Third Place Books welcomes avant-garde Canadian novelist and critic Gail Scott to our Ravenna store! Scott will be discussing her new essay collection, Furniture Music, which chronicles her years in Lower Manhattan during the Obama era, in a community of poets at the junction between formally radical and political art. She will be joined in conversation by Suquamish poet Cedar Sigo. This event is free and open to the public.
For important updates, registration is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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Immersing herself in a New York topography that includes St. Mark’s Poetry Project and the Bowery Poetry Club, Scott writes from a ‘Northern’ awareness that is both immediate and inquisitive, from Obama’s election to Occupy Wall Street and Hurricane Sandy. Here, readers are situated in conversations around citizenship, gender performance, class, race, feminism and what it means to write now. Scott’s project is polyvocal, also resonating with the voices of a host of earlier writers and philosophers, notably, Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Walter Benjamin. The result is a staggering work of insight and hope during a critical time in American politics and art.
Gail Scott’s prose works are laboratories for concocting tales about cities across language/genre/gender boundaries. Her 2021 poetics, Permanent (upside down) Revolution, engaging with radical prose writers across the continent, was short-listed for Le Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. Other acclaimed city novels include the Obituary, a fractalled tale of suppressed diversity in post-millennial Québec, also a Grand Prix finalist; Heroine, about radical art and politics in turbulent 80s Montréal (4th edition); and My Paris, about a sad diarist looking for a lost avant-garde in 90s Paris. Her translation of Michael Delisle’s Le désarroi du matelot was a Governor General finalist. She won major studio grants (Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec) for New York, Paris. She was invited writer at Brown, UCSD, University of Alberta, and Université de Montréal, where she taught Creative Writing for 15 years. Scott lives in Montréal.
Cedar Sigo was raised on the Suquamish Reservation in the Pacific Northwest and studied at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute. He is the author of eight books and pamphlets of poetry, including All This Time (Wave Books, 2021), Language Arts (Wave Books, 2014), Stranger in Town (City Lights, 2010), Expensive Magic (House Press, 2008), two editions of Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003 and 2005) and most recently the Bagley Wright Lecture Series book Guard the Mysteries (Wave Books, 2021). He has taught workshops at St. Mary’s College, Naropa University and University Press Books. He is currently a mentor in the low residency MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives in Lofall, Washington.
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