Montreal

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was written in January-February 2007 during a six-week residency at Yaddo, where I didn't sleep at all. Thanks everyone at the Yaddo dinner table, for listening to thunks and rattlings of this text coming to life. And thanks CALQ, for helping me get to Yaddo.

The web-iteration of Les huit quartiers du sommeil was created in Montreal in July-August 2007. Thanks Sandra Dametto for the brilliant Google Maps idea. Thanks in advance Google Maps, for having a sense of humour - all the satellite photos are totally copyright you. Thanks Google Images for finding all the other images and thanks photoshop filters for making them look like something I would do. The tapestry obscuring the left side of the main map is lifted from Vermeer's The Art of Painting.

Les huit quartiers du sommeil was published in print in French translation in Le Livre de chevet, an anthology edited by Daniel Canty, published by Le Quartanier, Montreal, QC, Fall 2009. Thanks most of all to Daniel Canty for sending me stumbling into the theme of sleep in the first place.

in absentia is a site-specific web-based writing project which addresses issues of gentrification and its erasures in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, where the author lived for seventeen years. J. R. Carpenter writes, "Faced with imminent eviction, I began to write as if I was no longer there, about a Mile End that was no longer there. I manipulated the Google Maps API to populated "real" satellite images of my neighbourhood with "fictional" characters and events. in absentia is a web "site" haunted by the stories of former residents of Mile End, a slightly fantastical world, a shared memory of the neighbourhood as it never really was but as it could have been. in absentia was created with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. It was presented by DARE-DARE Centre de diffusion d'art multidisciplinaire de Montréal. It launched June 24, 2008. New stories were added over the summer, in English and French. A closing party was held in conjunction with the launch of my novel, Words the Dog Knows, (conundrum press), at Sky Blue Door, November 7, 2008"

Entre Ville was commissioned in 2006 by OBORO, an artist-run centre in Montréal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montréal. J. R. Carpenter writes: "Although I had lived in Montréal for 15 years at the time of the commission, Entre Ville was my first major work about my adopted city. It took me that long to learn the vocabulary. I don’t mean French, or Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Yiddish or any of the other languages spoken in my neighbourhood. I refer, rather, to a visual, tactile, aural, sensorial vocabulary. My home office window opens into a jumbled intimacy of back balconies, yards, gardens and alleyways. Daily my dog and I walk through this interior city sniffing out stories. Poetry is not hard to find between the long lines of peeling-paint fences plastered with notices, spray painted with bright abstractions and draped with trailing vines. Entre Ville is web-based heat-wave poem presented in the vernacular of my neighbourhood, where cooking smells, noisy neighbours and laundry lines criss-cross the alleyway one sentence at a time." Entre Ville was launched at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montreal April 27, 2006.