Kate Story | A writer who insists on performing

ReLit Awards likely at their end

NEWS: I just found out that my short story collection ‘Ferry Back the Gifts’ (Exile Writers) was on the ReLit short list! I found out because the Writers’ Union of Canada sent me a lovely congratulations card (thank you to The Writers’ Union of Canada). It may seem strange that I didn’t know – and it is – but, due to the vagaries of the publishing world, one doesn’t always get relevant news about one’s own work. Or at least I don’t.

I am honoured – but also very sad, because this year marks the probable end of the very important ReLits. “Our three years of applications to funding agencies were unsuccessful, while other funding opportunities did not present themselves. We have been operating as volunteers, more or less … this has become impossible.” Another vital arts group is likely biting the dust. With gratitude and humility and a lot of simmering rage, I say: Canada, get your shit together and restart funding the arts. Thank you.

And: Congratulations to the ReLit winners! Go get yourself some good art, my friends, while you still can.

http://www.relitawards.com/

NQ and Riddle Fence reviews

I have just returned from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, where I grew up and where I have just had the privilege of presenting my performance work “Anxiety” as part of the fabulous Festival of New Dance. On the go for 32 years, this festival presents a wide range of contemporary performance, which is how a piece where the performer gabs on for 1 hour and 20 solid minutes can be presented in a dance festival.

Huge thank yous to festival movers and shakers Calla LaChance and Candice Pike; Robyn Breen; Victor Tilley; and the absolutely stellar crew including Bob Stamp, Reg Hoskins, Jeff Panting, Sheldon Downey. We have rarely felt so taken care of. And the audiences! Wonderful.

And thank you to Joan Sullivan of the Newfoundland Quarterly, and Nina Wolf of Riddle Fence for these preview/reviews!

I don’t know what will happen next for ‘Anxiety,’ but I do know I’d love to get it out there to more audiences. Ideas for presentation? Bring ’em on! But whatever comes, I am full of gratitude for being able to share this work – dodging between Beowulf, the current rise of white supremacy and online misinformation, violence and shame, and my own life and family legacy – with as many people as I have. May peace and justice come to the human world. We have to keep hoping and working for it, no matter how hard or how against the current that may appear to be.

http://nqonline.ca/article/i-realized-that-i-had-a-job-of-work-to-do-as-an-artist-kate-story-on-ancient-tales-and-modern-angst/

Anxiety: A Review and Reaction

Many thanks to Jeffrey Round for this wonderful review!

Urchin is a bold and visionary tale that breaks as many rules as it follows.

https://pinkplaymags.com/2023/07/urchin-is-a-bold-and-visionary-tale-that-breaks-as-many-rules-as-it-follows/

Super excited to announce that Animate is coming to Montreal, fresh from a pan-European tour! I’ll be there. https://montreal.mutek.org/en/animate

“How radio angered the faeries in Urchin.” Thank you to Jeremy Hull for this interview! https://atlanticbooks.ca/stories/books-by-heart-how-radio-angered-the-faeries-in-urchin-by-kate-story/

Urchin is available as an e-book through the wonderful Books by Heart program, an initiative to help humanize Nova Scotia hospital care, with a curated collection of ebooks and audiobooks available for free to patients, families, and staff. The reading platform and program are being tested out first at the University of King’s College, and they’ve enlisted some King’s student reviewers to help promote more engagement with the collection within the King’s community. Find out more about the project (and read this book for free if you’re a member of the King’s community!) at BooksByHeartKings.ca

Such a huge pleasure to appear on a panel with the formidable Cherie Dimaline, moderated by Ursula Pflug! Thanks too to Exile for publishing my first short story collection “Ferry Back the Gifts”, and all the people who work so hard to make Word on the Street the resounding success that it is!

Many thanks to Chris Laurie, outreach librarian at Winnipeg Public Library in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for this lovely review!

https://www.cmreviews.ca/node/3315

I never thought I’d see the day when a book featuring a misfit genderqueer kid from the Southside Road would be a finalist for a big award. So many people got this book to where it is, especially Marnie Parsons of the heroic Running the Goat Books and Broadsides. My heart overflows.

https://ggbooks.ca/#finalists

And thank you to regional journalists kawarthaNOW for this thoughtful article! (Which also plugs my upcoming one-person show “Anxiety,” about Beowulf, the English language, growing up the daughter of a Newfoundland lexicographer, and the rise of white supremacy. But it’s cheerful. In scattered places. And I am excited to perform it.) Independent artists are always doing the next thing. It’s how we roll.

But in the meantime, I am taking deep breaths of gratitude for the recognition Urchin has garnered, and for all those who have read it.

https://kawarthanow.com/2022/10/16/peterborough-writer-kate-storys-book-urchin-a-finalist-for-the-2022-governor-generals-literary-awards/

A few years ago, editor and award-winning prolific poet and educator Bruce Meyer saw something in a short story of mine. He published “Animate” in CliFi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change (Exile Editions). A couple of years later, out of the blue, a person named Chris Salter contacted me:

“My name is Chris Salter. I work on large scale technology-based installations involving the senses and have training in theater directing/dramatic criticism and computer music.I discovered your wonderful short story Animate this past weekend (I especially like the Tarkovsky-esque quality of it) and would be interested to know if you might be interested in turning it into a theatrical script. The reason is that I’m working with the Kunstfest in Weimar Germany. This would be a rather unusual theater performance – it would be done using mixed reality (MR) techniques. I would like to commission you to write a short, paired down script adapted from Animate that we could then record with actors (in both English and German) and then use like a radio play for the live performance. The audience, two at a time, would move from one space to the next, simulating the journey that the two characters of Daniel and Laurie undertake. These technologies are all extremely new but we have development partners who are working on AR in Germany and Montreal and have the experience to do something with these new devices.”

Friends, it’s happening! In a few days I go to Germany to experience this short story as a radio play in three languages (and more to come, apparently); and as an ambitious immersive mixed-reality performance. I am beyond excited. The process of adaptation has been fascinating. I am very grateful to have a theatre background! Huge thank yous to director Ryan Kerr, theatre workshop actors Daniel Smith, Lindsay Unterlander, and Joe Davies, to my brother Simon Story and Mark O’Neill for capturing footage of the stunning landscape of Newfoundland’s Tablelands in Gros Morne Park, and of course, to Chris and the Animate team.

See you in Germany at the Kiunstfest Weimar! https://www.kunstfest-weimar.de/en/program?full=0&tx_jokunstfest_pi5%5Bcontroller%5D=Elements&tx_jokunstfest_pi5%5BjoDetailUid%5D=653&tx_jokunstfest_pi5%5BjoDetailView%5D=1&tx_jokunstfest_pi5%5BjoModeOverride%5D=1&cHash=048aa9694510295fbdfafd36eb338eba

“…an original, interwoven story, present yet historic, realist yet fantastic, which feels so fractured and whole that its resonance with this fractured yet whole Covid-19 day and age will not disappear. This is not a book which will have only a year’s relevance. It feels so rooted in history and present in the soul that I think it has staying power. And I feel so grateful to have read it at a moment like this, when I needed someone to echo my own feelings: “What is this world? Where are we? Is my house talking around my ears?””

https://childrensbookroom.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/urchin/