Get Ya Tenda Buttons Heah!

Tender Buttons now available in my Etsy Store.

Or directly here!

Hot Off The Press

These twenty tender booklets are all buttoned up, ready to go off to some publishers in the hopes that someone will help me to make more of these little Tender Buttons.  They each have their own individual dust vest - not quite a jacket.  I am very happy with how they turned out.  Thanks to everyone for your support.

Two Women

My 100 word story that will be featured in the upcoming collection 100X100, published by LA's Marco Polo Arts Magazine.  

Two Women: 

They met working in the Margarine Factory – Irene worked there from 1975 to 1990 and Helen from 1967 to 1992. They both loved The Family Circus cartoons so they became friendly.  Helen’s biggest pet peeve was when people rode their bicycles on the sidewalk and would come swooping up behind them when they walked home at night and would nearly give them their death of fright.  Irene was very honest and considered even sarcasm to be lying. For the sake of economy they shared an apartment together until in 1992 when Helen died as a flower does: petal by petal.  

More New Collages!

"Women in Print", for Tender Buttons, 2012

"Mother", for Tender Buttons, 2012.

 "Anna Nicole Smith", for Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Mad Love at ValuMart" in the inaugural issue of fuss magazine

There's a great new indie/arts/culture magazine in Waterloo called Fuss Magazine!

You can pick it up at all the KW cool stops, or read it online HERE.  My short fiction "Mad Love at ValuMart" is on page 7.  Mad props to Lisa Olsen for the great new mag!!

For Betty

You died as a flower does:

petal by petal.  

When my body returns to clay 

I hope to feel your fur once again

with my celestial hand. 

My hand is not unlike your paw.

Your paw is not unlike a gentle budding branch.

Betty Anglin, 1998 - 2012.

May you rest peacefully, you were the delight of my heart and days.

On The Iran-Contra Affair, On Contraception

On the Iran-Contra Affair:  

I ran, contra – clockwise to the bar to get out of a conversation about this at my last lunch meeting.

Doing a tequila shot by yourself is depressing. The ritual of the salt lick and the lemon is really meant to be a social thing. I just love doing shots. I love the Lil Jon feat. LMFAO song “Shots”.

A co-worker gave me the nickname Shotsy.  I wonder if by doing so he’s subtly casting doubt on my professionalism but it’s worth it to me because having a nick name makes me feel like one of the gang.  And sometimes at lunch meetings now my co-workers buy shots for me as a gag. 

On Contraception:

Lezzzbians don’t need contraception but I still hope for an accident. I’d cut out the crack dope smack coke pills thrills chills AAAAAAND frills if I conceived. Do you think it would still be considered an immaculate conception if it was the result of finger banging and muff diving? 

Tender Buttons, Snipperdoodles 2012

"Build the City of God", 201

"Homo", 2012

"horses?", 2008

"By Itself", 2012.

"Kill all Artists", 2010.

"Keep Parkdale Weird", 2012.

"HER FACE", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Sunday Night Button Party" from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Storm Approaches", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Colours", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"My Life with Biscuits", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Please", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Reaching", from Tender Buttons, 2012. 

"Stage Life", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"God Speaks to Me", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Healed", from Tender Buttons, 2012. 

"GED", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Mistress of Her Domain", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Anything is Bearable", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Cat Fancy", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Covetousness", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"Aloe", from Tender Buttons, 2012.

"For Britney Spears 1", 2008 - 2012.

"For Britney Spears 2", 2008 - 2012.

A scan of the lock of my hair that I buried with Betty, 2012.

Difficult Days Produce All Sorts of Art

So I learned to use technology to alter my collages. But do you like them less knowing that?  I like the way it looks.

"Aand What" - now with rounded edges.

a sad and stained little note card, 2012.

"Horses Are Prancing" - I admit although I love animals I didn't realize this was a mule and not a horse when I  first collaged this (probably six years ago).  I DO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE VERY DISTINCTLY NOW.  Horses are monumental, beautiful and dignified, donkeys are smaller, adorable, fluffy, with longer eyelashes.  

I am very happy to announce that my collage "Toothvalanche" will be included in an up-coming issue of The Hart House Review. 

New pages from Tender Buttons

"Fluid"

"HER FACE"

"Reaching, Reaching!"

Queer Parking

Leigh Bowery

Leigh Bowery

QUEER PARKING

An evening of art and booze for queers

and our lovers.

Phillip Cairns

Regina the Gentlelady

Fluffy Souffle

DJ Max Mohenu

DJ TBD

Friday, March 16th, 2012 

The Parkdale Drink - 1292 Queen West

Dress-Up Encouraged

Regarding Construction.

March 7, 2012

For the Attention of:

Councillor Diane McArthur, Ward 8

Office of the Mayor and Council

Kitchener City Hall

200 King Street West

Kitchener, Ontario

Canada, N2G 4G7

Dear Councillor McArthur,

I am writing to you concerning the construction of the Bauer Lofts behind my family home, from the year 2003 to 2008. 

As you know, Councillor, the soiled roots of our sister-cities resisted gentrification by any means at their disposal, and their tactics proved highly effective. 

First it was the K-W Lifers who came in with guns blazing -  hollering at city council suits that they’d lived there since before WWII when Kitchener was still Berlin and (darn it) if all these ritzy new buildings started popping up, she just wouldn’t be the same city! 

Then Secret Societies of Dirt took up the resistance against the building. Asbestos vined its way towards God between steel girders and damp drywall. Mould splatted its spores like Pollock's paints, feeding on blank canvas. 

The ghosts of our proletariat past put up a good fight too: the old mattress factory out of which the lofts were to be built spat out a young labourer fourteen stories down – back-breaking on the main drag – all for trying to transform it into luxury lofts for the Young Urban Professional. 

Yes. The soiled roots of Kitchener-Waterloo resisted at every step, but progress and economy stepped on also.  Still, it took them eight long, expensive years of stumbling through a jungle of red tape to erect that beautiful behemoth. 

At twenty-nine, I watched from my bedroom in my parent’s ancient house as the lofts came to dwarf us, and the city I grew up in became foreign to me.  The buildings and landmarks of a city anchor us in time, and my anchor was losing its hold. Each trendy new boutique or café that popped up pasted itself over part of my past.

Councillor, I used to be somebody in this town. For instance, I never had to fill out those little slips at the karaoke bar. They knew I would sing “Life Is A Highway” – a Canadian classic – every time.

Now the karaoke bar is a highfalutin jazz club.

I’m not too proud to admit that I tried going back to that club once, but I just kept fumbling with the zipper of my raincoat and then I made the waitress mad at me by asking if they still sold pizza fingers.

I couldn’t get my hood up and slink out of there fast enough. On my millionth walk home down King Street in the rain dropping night I could hear music wafting from the buildings that I passed and I didn’t recognize a single song.  

I guess it’s really gone. I guess all that remains of that rocking 1980’s ghost-city of my teenage years (the bowling alley, the ashtrays, M’s clear nail polish, the smell of mattress factory fire, D whistling Hotel California, the Dollar Store, the train tracks) are Memories. Can’t I at least keep these? 

But oh, how they evaporate! See them float skyward like cottonseed caught in the wind! See them take flight from us like unsecured helium balloons!  And see me – shamelessly – leap! jump! and snatch! them to my body in a desperate dance of recovery. 

And as I see D turn his chair toward shadows, see him retreat within to contemplate the corners of his mind, I dance myself into vapor not to resist change, but to stop time.

I stop time too by looking backwards.  As part of this backwards-looking project at some point I became obsessed with my own family history.

With a crowbar and might I prised open a trunk in our attic at night and the family secrets – wound tightly for decades in disquietude and dyspepsia - unfurled from it like streamers shot from a novelty party canon.

Those dim and burnished corridors of our descent - unending like an anvil that falls but does not drop –inhabited by geometric faces and cut glass minds! Names encased in crystal, embedded in space and time, revolve slowly and twinkle in the spectral dust of ancestral ghosts.

Crests, Medals, Portraits!  Iron, Copper, Lyme! And the letters! These are the proof I’ve needed!

I want everyone to know! He was once that turbine the sun that spins forever!  He too is the iron blanket of winter that rusts over time.  He is fading to shadow now but I want them to know: D wrote letters and told jokes and collected coins once.

My new genealogy pet project seamlessly replaces my loft-protesting pet project and this forces me to concede that it is not this new set-design of a city that I find so repugnant. And outrage and resistance just take too much energy these days anyway.  Just between you and me I was drunk and melancholy at the Residents Association Action Meeting and it kind of soured me on the whole community involvement thing.

I just wish, I just so wish! – against reason, against hope - that this city would always stay the way it was when M & D were young and healthy and so fully alive in it - when D could write books and give lectures and M fairly waltzed. 

M made me join a support group for adult children.  At first I felt like I didn’t fit in there, but then I came to love this group of middle aged women helping their parents to die.  They are beginning to convince me that, in the end, resistance is no match for entropy. Nor are draftsmen, nor money, nor architects, nor mortar. Even your Young Urban Professionals are but soft-headed souls like me, who too will make memories and forget to keep them. 

Still, I had to write this letter because it did get pretty lonely living among construction for eight years. 

But there was this one day that I saw the sunset squeal through the gaping metal mouths of the new lofts, and I felt the giant crane loom its make-shift cross over the city, and for a minute I felt its arms connect the cracked sidewalks between my present and my past. 

I thought you should know.

Sincerely,

Susan Knox. 

Tender Buttons: Sneak Peek

Hoi Gois, Please check out this sneeeeky peek at some of the pages I've done on my up-coming book, Tender Buttons.  Let me know what you think because I still have a lot of pages to do!  Thank you.

Cover

Frontispiece

(Note: the letters that I'm using are from a 19th century children's science book!  How precious!  When they are printed they won't have the same shadow, nor will the individual snipperdoodles. ie the line around the flies won't be visible)

Page 2: "Staggering Gems"

Page 12 "it's too hard"

Whodunnit?

I can't remember who wrote this one!  I think it was my BFF, Meagan Snyder.  One of my fave lines from all of SoMM. Just genius.