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The Small Walker Press addresses the research and creative interests of faculty members at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University, and engages with authors, artists and academics alike to produce small, innovative publications.

Recent Submissions

  • (Im)mobilités

    Parayre, Catherine; Serfas, Shawn; Savoie, Paul; Cozea, Angela; Ayouti, Thomas; Christie, Alexander; Hauck, Nicholas (small walker press, 2023)
    Five authors of fiction-criticism – Paul Savoie, Angela Cozea, Thomas Ayouti, Alexander Christie, and Nicholas Hauck – explore motifs – urban life, travel, seascapes, illness – developed in a creative-writing piece by Catherine Parayre. The book illustrations show artworks from a series titled Pseudo-fiction by Canadian artist Shawn Serfas and Catherine Parayre. Editor: Nicholas Hauck. In French.
  • On a Summer Trip

    Knight, Derek; Parayre, Catherine; Serfas, Shawn (2022-12-19)
    Someone dies. Three friends meet; one travels from the West, another comes back to Canada, the third one welcomes them in his garden.
  • Cloud

    Szőke, Donna (small walker press, 2022)
    “Cloud” (10 Oct. 2015–17 Jan. 2016) and “Satellite” (19 Oct.–28 Nov. 2015) were two parallel exhibitions by artist Donna Szőke, held respectively at Rodman Hall Art Centre and, on the other bank of Twelve Mile Creek, at the Art Gallery of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University. Curated by Stuart Reid, they echoed each other, but were also conceived as two independent projects. The present catalogue focuses on “Cloud,” an exhibition whose apparent simplicity or incongruity elicits an adroit treatment of complex facts. Includes essays by Stuart Reid and Emily Rosamond. Edited by Catherine Parayre.
  • Rethinking property in c\a\n\a\d\a

    Blackwell, Adrian; Devine, Bonnie; Kaewan Dang, Tiffany; Fortin, David; reid stewart, luugigyoo patrick (Small Walker Press and Salon für Kunstbuch, 2021-11-10)
    Indigenous and settler architects and urbanists reimagine Canadian cities and discuss property division as the hinge between settler colonialism and architecture/urban form. The conversation is informed by the issue 12-13 of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture / Landscape / Political Economy titled c\a\n\a\d\a: delineating nation state capitalism edited by David Fortin and Adrian Blackwell. Rethinking property in c\a\n\a\d\a transcribes a virtual round table conversation co-hosted by the Research Centre in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Culture (Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University) and the Salon für Kunstbuch (Vienna, Austria) on 10 November 2021.
  • Engaging with Digital Texts/Images in Literatures and the Arts

    Colella, Carmela; El-Hoss, Tamara; Parayre, Catherine (small walker press, 2021)
    Les nouveaux outils numériques continuent de transformer la pensée des artistes et auteur.es, ainsi que leur façon de s’engager dans la création. Au cours des dernières décennies, les avancées technologiques ont permis de concevoir et de développer de nouvelles pratiques en littérature et dans les arts, avec pour résultat d’innombrables créations innovantes. Les outils numériques rendent possible un meilleur accès aux textes littéraires et facilitent des interactions complexes entre la littérature et les autres arts. De même, les arts visuels et autres ont conçu de nouvelles intégrations du texte dans leurs réalisations. Ces nouvelles pratiques ont changé notre discours visuel et textuel. New digital tools continue to transform the way artists and writers think about, engage with, and create works. In the last decades, advances in technology have facilitated the design and writing process, allowing the creation of countless virtual renditions of concepts or works. Digital tools have impacted the traditional literary world, opening access to a variety of digitized texts and enabling increased interactions with other art forms. In turn, visual and other creative arts have conceived new integrations of text within their medium, all of which has impacted and changed our visual and written discourse.
  • Im/migrant Passages: Crossing Visual, Spatial and Textual Boundaries - Im/migrations : passages visuels, spatiaux et textuels

    Colella, Carmela; El-Hoss, Tamara; Parayre, Catherine (Small Walker Press, 2020)
    To emigrate is to leave, to immigrate is to arrive and stay, to migrate is to move, often as a result of forced displacement. Most emigrants, immigrants, migrants and/or refugees frequently face difficult, if not heartbreaking decisions when they decide they must settle elsewhere. According to the latest UNHCR estimates, 65.6 million people have been forcibly displaced worldwide by war, poverty, and/or climate change. Many live(d) in refugee/migrant camps where they often face(d) inhumane conditions, discrimination, violence, and racism, while others spend/spent most of their lives in transit camps. Contributions to this volume explore topics in literature, graphic novels, visual arts, film, dance, and education.
  • Composures

    Parayre, Catherine (Small Walker Press, 2020)
    A collection of brief contributions on the theme of care by members of the Research Centre in Interdisciplinary Arts and Creative Culture at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, in the Centre for Studies in Arts and Culture, Brock University. It includes: - Artworks (acrylic and mixed media, 2006-2008) by artist Shawn Serfas; - two short short stories (Derek Knight; Catherine Parayre); - three short essays (Natalee Caple on dialogical art and queer comics; Nicholas Hauck on translation theory; and Alexander Christie on digital prototyping in reference with Mina Loy’s novel Insel, 1991). 2020 will be remembered as the year of the pandemic. On 17 March, the Province of Ontario declared a state of emergency and went into shutdown. What followed was (pleasant) silence, as car traffic almost came to a standstill. Within days we could breathe better and feel the briskness of the air in a way we no longer knew. Over the course of one week, the university adapted to online operation; campus was closed; students left town; and, working from home, we were tasked to reinvent pedagogy and learn new technologies. As researchers, artists, and writers, we were suddenly confronted with the cancellation of scholarly, artistic, and cultural events for an unknown extended period. Again, we had to reinvent, and this time it was ourselves. Composures is a tiny reinvention. It replaces a colloquium initially scheduled for 16 April 2020. As we could no longer meet, we wrote a book. For the theme, we chose a word that is currently on everyone’s lips: care. The topic and a desire for concision were the only constraints given to contributors, and this at a time when constraints were being applied to all aspects of life, interactions were drastically limited, and we were asked to say home. However, “care” is such a broad notion that it can hardly be envisioned as an unyielding guidepost. From art and creative writing to scholarship, the six contributions in this volume bear witness to how constraint can be understood felt as the freedom to share one’s work.
  • Inland

    Serfas, Shawn (Small Walker Press and Salon für Kunstbuch, 2019)
    Shawn Serfas grew up exploring the northern reaches of Saskatchewan’ lakes and river systems Saskatchewan. Although initially drawn to an academic career in the environmental sciences, Serfas pursued Fine Arts and Art History degrees in Saskatchewan as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Alberta. His interests include contemporary painting, drawing and printmaking practices. His work echoes a reflection on relational abstraction, environmental aesthetics, the landscape as well as issues bordering abstraction and representation. Serfas is profoundly aware of human intervention on natural resources and of its devastating consequences. His series Inland and Portrait of a Mark appeared in the 2016 exhibition Inland curated by Stuart Reid at the Rodman Hall Art Centre, Brock University, St. Catharines. Richard Fausset was affected by the passage of Hurricane Katrina over New Orleans, Louisiana and its surroundings in 2005. His piece of creative writing investigates how human life impacts nature in a bayou, and vice-versa. Serfas’ artworks and Fausset’s fictional narrative elicit a dialogue between north and south yet offer two distinct reflections on pollution and the insufficiently controlled use of the environment in North America. Shawn Serfas’ most recent exhibitions include Grid Terrain, Gallery MX, Montreal, Quebec, Alloyed Prairie, Bugera Matheson Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Portrait of a Mark, SOPA Fine Arts Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia in 2018; Pseudo-Fiction, (with Catherine Parayre), Alliance Francaise – Galerie Pierre Léon, Toronto, Ontario in 2017; Cleave and Trench, Bugera Matheson Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta in 2016; Dig, Machine Shop Gallery, Algoma University, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario in 2015; and Out of Sorts, (with William Griffiths), Sopa Fine Arts, Kelowna, British Columbia in 2014.
  • The Quarry

    Dickinson, Adam; Bourgeois, Lorène (Small Walker Press and Salon für Kunstbuch, 2019)
    In the Fall of 2018, the Small Walker Press invited poet Adam Dickinson and artist Lorène Bourgeois to walk through a former landfill (1976-2001), the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization Site. Located on the Niagara Escarpment, overlooking the City of St. Catharines, Ontario, it functions today as a public recreation area. Its landscape still resembles a raw, industrialized version of nature, eerie and ominous in its windswept hills. The ground is punctuated by prickly vegetation providing beautiful flowers in the summer months, and rocks, from pebbles and gravel to larger boulders. A constructed landscape, it is perceived as rationally managed nature. Indeed, there is something decidedly unnatural about this carefully designed space where layers of clay and soil have been deposited and vegetation native to the area planted with the aim of naturalizing the landfill. Along the paths, visitors will also notice the small mechanical vents of a gas collection system from which escape acrid odours produced by decomposing waste under the harmonious scenery. As a result of their walk together, Adam Dickinson contributes a poem about childhood reminiscences and the dreamy yet familiar realm where they belong, while Lorène Bourgeois revisits some of her earlier drawings and presents them anew in a sequence whose rhythm is inspired by photographs she made of the Glenridge Quarry. Adam Dickinson’s poetry focuses primarily on intersections between poetry and science as a way of exploring new ecocritical perspectives and alternative modes of poetic composition. He is the author of Cartography and Walking (2002), Kingdom, Phylum (2006), The Polymers (2013), and Anatomic (2018). Lorène Bourgeois’ recent works are large-scale representations of humans, animals, clothing and nakedness. She draws her sources from public archives and museum artefacts, as well as from her contact with the world around her. Her work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally, and is held in numerous collections, including the Canada Council Art Bank, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.
  • Videopoetry = Vidéopoésie

    Dugas, Daniel H.; LeBlanc, Valerie (Small Walker Press, 2020)
    Canadian digital artist and videopoet Valerie LeBlanc and Canadian poet, musician, and videopoet ******** Daniel H. Dugas have been working together since 1990. Daniel H. Dugas was born in Montréal, QC. Poet, videographer, essayist and musician, Dugas has exhibited and participated in exhibitions, festivals and literary events in Canada and internationally. His ninth book of poetry: L’esprit du temps/The Spirit of the Time won the 2016 Antonine-Maillet-Acadie Vie award and the 2018 Éloizes: Artiste de l’année en littérature. daniel.basicbruegel.com | Videos distributed through: vtape.org *********** Pluridisciplinary artist and writer, Valerie LeBlanc was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has worked and presented throughout Canada and internationally. LeBlanc’s first video: Homecoming was collected and screened by the National Gallery of Canada. She is the creator of the MediaPackBoard (MPB), a portable screening / performance device. valerie.basicbruegel.com | Videos distributed through: vtape.org ********** Their specific uniqueness within the videopoetry world also lies in the musicality of speaking two languages. LeBlanc’s first language is English and her second French; and Dugas’ is French with English second. (Sarah Tremlett)
  • Post-Industrial Ephemera: Soundings, Gestures and Poetics (Silo City, Buffalo, NY).

    Parayre, Catherine (2018)
    Parayre, Catherine, ed. Post-Industrial Ephemera: Soundings, Gestures and Poetics (Silo City, Buffalo, NY). St. Catharines: Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts / Brock University, 2018. 33 p. ISBN 978-0-9682851-7-6