Fear Not: the fan letter

I got a late start to the festivities due to a sudden cold, so I didn't make it to my first event until last night. I went to Bloodlines at The Mainstage, where my poet crush, Maurice Mierau read from new book Fear Not.

I didn't have my volunteer schwag yet, so I swung by the hospitality suite in a vain attempt to pick up my golden ticket (i.e. name tag) in time for Bloodlines. Of course, no one was there except for the volunteer host, Adrian Michael Kelly. Adrian and I chatted for a bit over cheese and crackers, and I learned that he just moved to Winnipeg from Calgary. It turns out, the one Calgary writer I've talked to, Adrian knows as well. Or maybe just met him. Once. At some point.

Adrian convinced me to try to talk my way into Bloodlines. "I'm blogging about this event," I said at the door.

Too easy.

By the time I got in, Joan Thomas had just finished. But like I said, I was there for Mr. Mierau. I fell into literary lust when I first saw him read a few months back at the launch of Prairie Fire's Home Place 2. One of the poems he read at Bloodlines was "How to be a man," which there's actually a clip of him reading at a different event on youtube:



He cemented my adoration last night with "Friends Fail," a poem about my favourite reality TV show, America's Next Top Model. Mr. Mierau provided footnotes for the audience, but I'm actually so obsessed with this show that I would have been able to pin-point which season he had been watching. I liked that he assumed the audience was too cultured to know anything about this show, and suggested that they may even be too cultured to know who Tyra Banks is.

An index is provided in the back of Fear Not, because "poetry should be more friendly." So how many poems about ANTM are there in this book?

I'm still swooning, but unfortunately Bloodlines was Mr. Mierau's only reading at Thin Air. So until his official book launch on October 16, I'll get to work on a crafting perfect fan letter (or e-letter). Something sweet, but not aggressive—and genuine!

Mr. Mierau, if you're reading this, the current season of ANTM features a contestant that was born biologically male in the absence of Janice Dickinson's fake tits. Surely, some discourse in that...

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Ashley Sy is a Winnipeg born and bred freelance writer specializing in arts, music, and culture. She has written for Stylus, The Manitoban, and MyWinnipeg.com, and has begun copywriting for the Regina-based firm Benchmark PR. Currently, Ashley is working on getting her short fiction published—she fully embraces the classification of emerging writer. You can hear Ashley every Saturday night on 101.5 UMFM, on her pop-punk nostalgia show, Parking Lot Rock.