This page is devoted to hard to categorize work, “B-Sides” or material that’s been out of print for some time and, like Lazarus, desperately in need of resurrection.
In the coming months I intend to have all of my work included on this site, so keep coming by for updates and additions. Read it, download it…all for absolutely nothing (under the terms of Creative Commons).
**New**
“The Break: 10 The Hard Way”–ten dramatic monologues on the theme of breaking up. Written a number of years back; performed at the Refinery Theatre in Saskatoon with Josh Beaudry starring. Portions were also aired on CBC Radio’s “Sound XChange”, produced by Kelley Jo Burke.
Click here for your free PDF copy of The Break
“The Innocent Moon”–the best unproduced radio play you’ll ever read. A celebration of the trip to the moon, space, science fiction…and wonder. Here’s the text to it; sci fi geeks and film/trivia buffs will love the references and assorted “samples” from movies, songs and archive news broadcasts. I love radio drama, it’s one of my favorite mediums and I think it shows. Read on…
Click here for your free PDF copy of InnocentMoon
And yet MORE radio drama:
Here’s the extended version of my radio play “The First Room”, which aired nationally on CBC Radio’s OutFront program back in February. A highly personal look at “one writer’s beginnings” (with apologies to Eudora Welty).
Intense, confessional, cathartic…and I hope this short drama will offer some insights into why I write like I do…and a quick glance behind the Wizard’s concealing curtain.
Click here for your free PDF copy of The First Room
That First, Wound-Bearing Layer
While suffering through a lengthy writer’s block, I came across the surrealist notion of “automatic writing”, just putting your pen to paper without pre-planning, bypassing the critical part of the mind and plugging directly into the un/subconscious. What happened next was astonishing and somewhat unnerving. Words, sentences, stanzas erupted out of nowhere. This chapbook was originally published by a tiny Canadian press (Greensleeve Editions) back in 1992. I’ve done a few touchups but this version is almost identical to the original. Take a look:
Click here to get your free PDF copy…wound-bearing-layer
Genuinely Inspired Primitive
Originally published by a small U.S. press in 1993. The title is derived from a review I read that used just those words to describe Neil Young’s guitar playing technique. Zang! Perfect! The prose bits in Primitive tend to be longer than those in Wound-Bearing Layer, still highly personal, intense, surreal. Short, sharp shocks. There’s humor but it’s dark–have to admit reading these two early chapbooks is troubling, even for their author. At times, it’s hard not to avert my eyes. There’s a lot of me in these prose poems and often I don’t like what I see. Some of these offerings are twenty years old now so, obviously, I’m not the same person. But I’m still prone to some of the fears and insecurities so starkly presented here. I regret that this format doesn’t allow me to reprint the collage-style illustrations Sherron created for the book. But at least you’ll have a reproduction of her original cover. Working with her is always a delight; she’s artful and intuitive, the best possible collaborator you could ask for.
Click here to get your free PDF copy…primitive-2008
Voiceworks: Monologues and Spoken Words, 1987-2006
A selection of some of the short prose pieces and monologues I assembled from 20 years’ worth of material. There’s quite a diversity of voices represented here, characters from all ages and backgrounds. I have a few copies I printed up for sale on my “Book Store” page, so if you’d like a “dead tree” edition that includes all of my voice pieces, there are about 10 available for purchase.
Click here to get your free PDF copy…voiceworks
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I’m not a great poet or even a good one…but I’m pretty good and that will have to suffice. Apocalyptic, filled with dread and fury and yearning, my poetry is the most personal of all my writings. I rarely submit it for publication and when I do, the responses I receive range from indifference to bafflement. The editor of one major Canadian litmag wrote that “while the writing is very good, I didn’t understand your poetry”. Yet another reason why I think most editors and publishers should be fed, feet-first, into a wood-chipper.
violins in the void is my first poetry collection, originally published through my Black Dog Press imprint back in 1996. I limited the print run to 200 and was astonished at how quickly copies were snapped up. Ten years worth of verse, distilled down to about seventy pages. The concluding section features some of my favorite prose poems. Most of these works were composed while we were living on Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. I was a new father, living in one of the ugliest, most barren locales imaginable. The mood was bleak…and it shows.
Click here to get your free PDF copy…violins_manuscript-2008
Redbook (Vol. I) was compiled in the ten years that followed–the atmosphere isn’t as grim and a spiritual component has been introduced. Still, an underlying sense of menace but satire leavens some of the heaviness of the material. We’ve added a neat background so it takes some extra time to download. Be patient, it’s worth the wait:
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Here’s a link to a short film Sherron and I put together awhile back. A visual experiment that turned out very well. Click here to view “Winter Light“. And, oh, what the heck–here are two short animation pieces by my sons (Sam in collaboration with our friend, Annika). “Twilight Kitten” and “Ride Through Mount Terror“.
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There will be other additions to this page, some of the dramas I’ve written over the years, perhaps examples of my visual creations and collages. I go where my Muse leads me, following in faith and humility. You’re welcome to tag along but, as they say, it’s bound to be a long, strange trip.
on Redbook Parts I and II
By no means incomprehensible, but like all worthwhile poetry it is ‘elusive’, springing from that inner well (fecund or arid) we might term the ‘root of personality’. Aye there’s the rub: how to make the personal understandable to others. Assuming Redbook is chronological, then in the first two parts we discover the preliminary honest night-time gropings of one developing an artistic sensibility, who begins to ask the tremulous questions he is afraid to answer, digging below the flesh to see the why and how. Revelatory without mundane explicitness.
Unsolicited Suggestions: Don’t be afraid to write longer poems, further spadework can take one beyond the first strata of discovery. Some of the shorter pieces have related themes and could suggest the possibility of combination into a longer multi-part poem?
Query: Was Sherron the only one who replied to the SWM ad/poem? Or the lucky winner pared down from hundreds of letters?
Cliff,
Your poetry made me very uncomfortable sometimes, and at other times elicited a cynical guffaw.
Some poems , however made me spring back into my state of comfortable denial and scroll on hurriedly, as if a giant had trodden on my lizard’s tail and I , by leaving it behind as a wriggling memento could distract him into ingnoring me whil I fled back into my hole to wait for Godot.
This is great art, which can make this drug-numbed, deaf-mute-blind fool FEEL something real again, even cringe back in fear because I have seen, heard, and spoken to myself and God again in forgotten reaches of the soul.
And I have am induced to “come out” of my shell to write you this.
Welcome to my party. Perhaps we have been celebrating darkness in opposite corners for aeons, but you have turned on the lights of this grand hall long enough for me to acknowledge you, see the banquet that has been laid on, and step back from the brink, breathing a sigh of strange comfort.
I’m not alone in here.
I enjoyed your poetry a lot. There are many interesting ideas raised to be sure, but I am curious; why so dark? Another poster noted a tone of cynicism, which is nice, but after reading all of the poems, I wish there had been something more joyous, more halcyon, even if it was in the minority. The vicissitudes of life call for a treatment of the everyday and the extraordinairy, glimses of hope in despair, and for such a chronologically broad selection, I am suprised there was not more of this. This is just me though; the work was still first class I thought.
Although I agree that some longer work would be excellent (some of my favourite poems were ‘Lon Chaney’ and ‘Lon Chaney Jr.’ the link there really expanded the poems sensations for me) I enjoyed the fragments the most. Are you going to expand on any of these? I would be very interested to hear of anyhting that arises from them; very laconic stuff. I should love to hear a longer poem which could maintain the efficiency and perceptiveness all your shorter works have in such quantity.
Dear Cliff, old buddy, my tiny Canadian micro press (Greensleeve Editions) is far from defunct. I’m still publishing new work by emerging writers, though the mandate of the press has been refined and defined more extensibly since I published that limited edition volume of ‘That First, Wound-Bearing Layer’ by you back in 1992. Still, thanks for allowing my young micro-press to cut it’s publishing teeth on your work. I’m pleased to see you have reprinted it through your own micro-press and are making it available free as a pdf. Technology has finally caught up to our dreams and intentions. All the best with your writing.
Mark McCawley, editor/publisher
Greensleeve Editions/Urban Graffiti
Mark: delighted you’re still around and hope you continue to foist good, ground-breaking authors on the unsuspecting world. Those little chapbooks have become collector’s items, fetching some pretty decent prices. All the best to you, mon!