With a new award under his belt, and a new book under his arm, one of Prince George's best known writers is back in the bookstore spotlight.
Jeremy Stewart is a busy musician, just co-founded the Dreamland School of the Arts and is the new general manager of the Prince George Symphony Orchestra, so he demonstrates nothing to do with the word "hidden" these days, but his new volume of poetry is called Hidden City and he helps the public find it with a reading and public discussion next week.
The new trophy he's won is the prestigious Robert Kroetsch Innovative Poetry Award. It is presented each year to an emerging writer (two books or fewer) for an unpublished book-length manuscript of non-mainstream poetry. Past winners include Toronto's Natalie Zina Walschots, Saskatchewan's Sarah Dowling, the Okanagan's Jake Kennedy, Ottawa's Pearl Pirie, and one of the judges (each year one judge assesses the poems blind to author identification) was Prince George's Elizabeth Bachinsky.
This year's lone judge was celebrated writer Ken Babstock.
"I've been shortlisted for this award three times, with other manuscripts," said Stewart. "I was just determined to win one day. Hidden City did it for me, finally."
Hidden City is Stewart's first book in five years but it's not that his pen was unmoved.
"I've written a half-dozen books in that time that are gathering dust in my house, waiting for their opportunity," he said.
This one broke through the publishing curtain because of the win of the award. Top prize includes a printing contract with Invisible Publishing, which Stewart hopes will link into further titles in the future.
"They have been great to deal with. The design was great, the boss was always very available, the manuscript went through three phases of editing [his wife and fellow writer/performer Erin Stewart, Kimmy Beach and John Paul Fiorentino who, like Stewart, happens to be a former student of UNBC professor Rob Budde] that I think helped the final results, and I want to keep this up. I'd like to be a good thing they've got going, and they are so far a good thing I've got going. They have been excellent to me."
Invisible Publishing showcased Stewart's content in this book with some targeted questions.
"How does a place get in your bones? How do you become the bones of a place? Hidden City unearths memories that don't want to be found," the publisher said.
Stewart describes it more literally.
"It's definitely me waxing lyrical. It definitely, unlike most lyrics, is very disjunctive and it flirts with narrative. It has a sort of dream quality to it. It is a long poem cycle. Each part is numbered as a separate poem, 58 pieces in all, but it works as one larger whole piece."
For someone so steeped in folk music, with its definitive lyrical connections between player and audience, this surrealist form of poetry seems out of character, but Stewart said he has always been a follower of the unconventional mental path to get through life's questions and potential answers. He is also the founder of the city's only Experimental Music Festival, after all, so even in music he is searching for more than four chords and a hook-line.
"[Russian-American writer] Vladimir Nabokov once said writing was like a pilot light over which the writer can warm his hands at later times," Stewart said.
"He did not believe in reader accessibility to the writing, necessarily. I don't really share that feeling but I find it fascinating. I tend to think of my work as addressed to the people it was written to, I just don't know who they are. Those who know, know. Those who get it understand its value. It is a view of life - a version of existentialism - but in the end about appreciating our lives. It means something whether we know it or not, but knowing, that is something, even if we're wrong."
The obscured and the revealed of Hidden City get some personal illumination from Stewart at the book's debut,
Oct. 18 at Cafe Voltaire inside Books and Company. His discussion commences at 7:30 p.m. and admission is free.
