Welcome!

Welcome to Pig Squash Press! You have arrived at the cyber-home, alter ego, publishing imprint and creative conduit connecting me – Kim Goldberg – to the rest of the planet (and possibly beyond).  My latest books are:

RED ZONE, a graffiti-strewn poem diary of homelessness in Nanaimo, BC, where I live. RED ZONE has been taught in university literature courses. Reviewers have compared it to the writings of Allen Ginsberg, Marge Piercy, and John Steinbeck.

and Ride Backwards on Dragon: a poet’s journey through Liuhebafa – finalist for Canada’s Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. A collection of 66 linked poems following the 66-move sequence of the ancient martial art of Liuhebafa on a mythic quest for internal alchemy and immortality. Visit my Liuhebafagirl blog for deets on the book as well as my Pen & Dragon: Kung Fu for Writers workshops combining martial arts with creative writing exercises.

My current project: REFUGIUM: Wi-Fi Exiles and the Coming Electroplague.

Make yourself comfy, have a boo at my blog postings about upcoming literary happenings and other current events, leave a comment, walk your dog, follow me on Twitter @KimPigSquash

May the metaphors be with you!

Kim Goldberg
goldberg@ncf.ca

Bullgarita Rhapsody

An exquisite corpse composed by Paul Nelson, Kim Goldberg, Kim Clark, Ursula Vaira, Mary Ann Moore, Amy Falkenberg, Yvonne Blomer and Leanne Boschman entirely on location at Acme Food Co. in beautiful downtown Nanaimo, British Columbia on June 11, 2013.

 

Start w/a Bullgarita.

It’s a long line of queens

 

who never admitted

 

to say it would

be enough

 

but

a poet kills sparrows in Victoria

invasive

colonoscopy

 

as if  a straw were

pinched, tickled pink spill

ink of a white wine

sangria night

 

* Bullgarita: a Red Bull Margarita 

Photo: Wordstorm Prize Winners May 2013

Kim Goldberg, Winona Baker, Mary Ann Moore
Photo © David Fraser

Here we are… blinded by the lights of our own fame and glory. The 3 Wordstorm prize winners from Tuesday night at Demeter’s Coffee Vault in downtown Nanaimo: Kim Goldberg (2nd prize), Winona Baker (3rd prize), Mary Ann Moore (1st prize).

Thanks to David Fraser for taking the photo and for organizing Wordstorm all these years! This was the last Wordstorm of the season. Wordstorm will return in September on the last Tuesday of each month at The Vault. Deets here: http://www.wordstorm.ca/

World Haiku Anthology on War

After years of work, Kamesan’s World Haiku Anthology on War, Violence and Human Rights Violation, from Kamesan Books, is now available on amazon.com for $29. Click here to purchase.

Dimitar Anakiev (Kamesan)

This monumental anthology features 900 poems from 420 poets in 45 countries (on 6 continents!), and spanning 33 languages. The book has been compiled and edited by poet and filmmaker Dimitar Anakiev (Kamesan), with illustrations and graphic design by Kuniharu Shimizu.

This landmark collection, interweaving hundreds of poetic voices from around the world, creates a powerful statement for peace and against war. I have never stood in a minefield, or toted a gun on my shoulder, or watched bombs bursting in the night sky over my city—at least not until I read this book.

The sparseness of haiku leaves no room for illusion, no separation between reader and the scene described. Our comfort zone is stripped away poem after poem until we have no choice but to confront the full sweep of war and all its consequences. And in so doing, we end up defining our humanity more sharply. We become keenly aware of what we truly value. The American composer Leonard Bernstein once remarked “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” Kamesan’s World Haiku Anthology on War, Violence and Human Rights Violation is a potent example of that strategy at work. Changing the world one poem at a time.

Here are my own three haiku in this anthology—all referencing Canada’s indigenous population:

tuberculosis

diabetes and polio sewn

to red skin

~

sunny schoolroom—

bright needles pierce the tongue

of a child speaking her language

~

broken yarrow stalk

the only marker on a Native

child’s grave

~

© Kim Goldberg 2013

My Garden in the Rain Right Now

Images © Kim Goldberg, 2013

Crab Dock (Poem)

Crab Dock

by Kim Goldberg

cold bites my mittens with pincushion puppy teeth gnawing

my fingertips

       stubble-face men fumble in sacks, lash slippery

chicken breasts into crab traps

twist and…

sploosh!

gulls shriek like grannies, leap from the sea, float

in the air, return

to their rocking chairs

and wait

~

(text and image © Kim Goldberg)

“Crab Dock” was originally published in The New Quarterly in 2005, and subsequently appeared in my 2007 collection Ride Backwards on Dragon. This poem was one of the first poems I ever wrote. And it was the first poem of mine to be accepted and published by a literary magazine. Thank you, TNQ! I blogged about that here.

How to build your own website for free and with no skills

By Kim Goldberg

© Kim Goldberg 2013

 

Well okay, for the nitpickers out there let’s say: almost for free and almost no skills.

If you know how to compose text in a Word document and attach a photo to your email, then believe me—you’ve got all the skills you need to make yourself a sharp-looking and (nearly) free website.

I just tried this myself for my current book project REFUGIUM: Wi-Fi Exiles and the Coming Electroplague. You can see the results here and judge for yourself: http://electroplague.com.

I was so impressed with the result (and that I somehow accomplished this technical feat all by myself!) that I had to blog about it.

My cost for my new Refugium website: $48/year.

Here is the homepage for my new Refugium website. It’s really a free WordPress.com blog. But I designated a static front page as my homepage instead of going with WordPress’s default homepage, which is always the blog.

In a nutshell

The method I used to achieve this result is amazingly simple:

1. I started with a free WordPress.com blog. (The URL I registered for free was http://electroplague.wordpress.com/, but you’ll notice that isn’t what shows when I’m done.)

2. I then set it up as a website instead of a blog by designating a static front page as my homepage (i.e., what the site opens up to when the link is clicked).

WordPress theme Twenty Twelve (free), which is what I used for this experiment, was designed for this purpose: http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/twentytwelve/.

But you can achieve something similar with most of the free WP themes. Full instructions are here: http://en.support.wordpress.com/pages/front-page/ .

(By comparison, the site you are reading this article on—Pig Squash Press—is a WordPress.com blog that HASN’T been altered to look like a website.)

3. At that point, the blog portion of the site with all of my postings (which is the default homepage on any WordPress.com site) simply becomes one of several menu items on my menu bar at top. I chose to name that menu tab “Blog” because people know what that is. But you could call it “News” or “Posts” or “BS Spew” or whatever you want.

Here is a screen shot of the blog portion of my Refugium website. Unlike the homepage shown in the previous illustration, the blog has the typical sidebar filled with various widgets for doing different things. I kept that off my homepage for a cleaner and classier look to further establish the site’s identity as a website rather than a blog.

You can also ditch the sidebar of bloggy-looking widgets for your new static homepage (as I did in the first illustration in this article) by selecting “Front Page Template” in Twenty Twelve or “single column” in other themes for that particular page.

Et voila! A website is born… and all for the grand price of a WordPress blog, which is free, although I chose to pay $30/year to keep ads off the site.

And to completely cement the site’s identity as a website instead of a blog, I paid for the $18/year domain-name upgrade so the link that you see and share is “electroplague.com” and not the underlying “electroplague.wordpress.com”.

So all told, I’m paying $48/year for my Refugium website, which I can easily add to, update, and expand whenever I want and with no special technical skills required.

And by going with WordPress.com (in other words, WordPress.com is hosting my site), I have access to seemingly unlimited free tech support when I do have questions.

Author, Get Thy Website in Order!

If you are an author, then you have been told umpteen times by everyone from your publisher and agent to your next door neighbour that you absolutely MUST have an author website to promote yourself and your books.

Of course, plenty of other folks need or want websites too. But authors today are strafed from all quarters (and with a fury approaching apocalyptic proportions) with edicts to get their ‘brand’ on the cybermap with a sharp-looking website.

The problem, of course, is that most writers (myself included) don’t know how to build a website. Nor do we particularly want to learn. We would rather spend our time, well, you know—writing!

The Money Pit

Consequently, professional-looking websites (and even unprofessional ones, unfortunately) tend to cost money—often lots of money (which is another thing most writers don’t have but do need).

You must pay a web designer to create your site, and a webmaster to maintain it and add new content announcing your activities, and straighten out inevitable problems, incompatibilities, virus attacks, etc.

And then there are the annual fees to the server that hosts your site for you. And even after all that, unless you know how to update your website yourself, you are unable to add or change your own content. You are essentially at the mercy of the specialists you are paying.

I have author colleagues who have spent many thousands of dollars trying to get a functional, professional looking website that operates as intended and isn’t riddled with virus. I have author colleagues who have been locked out of their own websites by unscrupulous webmasters who hold them hostage until they pay outrageous bills to fix glitches that the webmaster created in the first place.

All of these problems disappear with a free WordPress.com blog that you set up to look like a website. Blogs (including blogs that look like websites) are extremely simple. Anyone can set up and maintain a blog without hired help.

No, I don’t work for WordPress. But I gotta say, I’m impressed.

For Rhino in a Shrinking World

Artist: Sally Scott

I just received my copy of this stunning international anthology of eco-poetry, For Rhino in a Shrinking World.

This spectacular large format book (8 ¼” x 10 ½”) was initiated and edited by South African poet Harry Owen (former Poet Laureate of Cheshire, England), and beautifully illustrated inside and out by South African artist Sally Scott.

The collection is filled with ecologically themed poetry from more than 100 poets from around the world. I am honoured to have two poems of my own (“Spawn” and “Mimotype”) included in this important project.

Visit the project website here: http://rhinoanthology.wordpress.com

Order a copy from the Poet’s Printery here: http://www.poetsprintery.co.za/index.php/shop?limitstart=0

All proceeds from the sale of the book go (via the Chipembere Rhino Foundation, www.chipembere.org), to support the work of fighting poaching and protecting Africa’s gravely threatened natural heritage.

Artist: Sally Scott