Coyote book calling

Having moved on from an intense season of eco-art, straw-bale building, and storytelling, then capped it with a brief holiday up on the Bruce Peninsula (guest of a long-time storyteller who also manages the Bruce Peninsula Bird Sanctuary), I came back to the Big City and began the meltdown of starting to organize my massive book holdings.

Books -- those reformulated trees garnished with ink and glue -- are not, for me at least, simply household objects like pots and pans and furniture that are separate from my embodied self. It is not possible to pick up a book to catalogue it on LibraryThing without reading it and so reentering it and when reentering it, knowing that it might be the same physical item, but a completely different "river". The text is fluid, as I was reminded earlier today when I came across the copy of an article that was passed on to me by a friend who is a poet and editor from one of her friends who is a poet and editor/publisher, about the way a poetry book's organization affects the reader. The essay is "Dynamic Design: the Structure of Books of Poems" by Natasha Saje, from The Iowa Review (Fall 2005). Caught up in the significance of the phrase "how structure complicates meaning" has real bearing on my involvement with the books I gravitate towards whether they be poetry books or books about Buddhist ecology or desert landscapes. The reader enters the book as much as the words and pictures of the book enter the reader. It is a mutual process, it changes each time the book is opened to be read and the reader is open to the act of reading.

And the entire process leads to the reader writing her own book, spurred by the reading or readings.

All the above my excuse for not posting to this or my other blogs of late, since the writing that takes place has not been happening on this (or these) sites.

There is nonetheless a relevance to ecology, call it human ecology, because I eschew the word "environment": the concept of the human as somehow separate from the environment is much the same as the reader apart from the book.

More musing on this later, since I'm determined to head out to an exhibit of handmade books by the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild, at York Quay on Toronto's Harbourfront. The exhibit closes day after tomorrow, and I want to see how book artists have transformed what we so crudely call "nature" into books.