Harold’s Blogs

For ten years now, Harold has been exploring the Internet as a home for writing, a place to transform writing into new forms, and as a writing tool in itself. The transformation has been profound and has led Harold into writing as a form of performance space, dramatic space, and walking practice. Click on the titles below to learn more.

  Okanagan Okanogan high2 Over 1100 posts documenting and exploring the Okanagan Valley and the Columbia Plateau. The goal of the project is to create a new paradigm for writing about nature and aiding in the creation of intellectual and practical tools for water conservation, energy production, sustainable agriculture and a union of beauty, science and literature in a new kind of literary practice. The project supported the creation of two texts, “Back to the Interior” and “Atomic Okanagan”, funded by the B.C. Arts Council and the Canada Council, respectively.

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Steam Punk City 11edison.1.600Graffiti as Vernacular Street Art for the Cities of the Future. I’m writing a guide to the future, based on the artistic game played for rule of contemporary streets. It’s not what you think. Words are tricky. To demonstrate, that’s Edison posing like a statue by Rodin to the left. Hi, Thomas!

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P1140209Earth Words English as an Indigenous Language Based on my 2013 Haig Brown Memorial Lecture, this is an exploration of a vocabulary for holistic relationships between humans and the natural world, rooted in Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse, and a lot of observational experience.

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a Sun Rain Wind Stone indianwarriorMeditations on poetry as one civilization ends and shapes the next. The blog began with explorations of Ezra Pound’s legacy, morphed into discussions about Heidegger’s Uncertainty Principle, and evolved into a visual kind of poetry review. Then Harold moved and then he moved again. It is here that he worked out the forms of his approach to online work. Most of the themes developed here are now showing up in his written projects. a a a

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A Farm in Iceland p1530046Harold as a writer in residence in Skriðuklaustur, Iceland. In March and April 2013, Harold was Artist in Residence at the Klaustrid Arts Centre in East Iceland, where he wrote a book of poems and a long creative and critical work about the Iceland writer Gunnar Gunnarsson, who tried to stop World War II (secretely) by writing specially-coded works of literature. Hitler was not amused. It was a profound six weeks. That’s Harold and Gunnar saying their goodbyes to the left there. The poor man needs a hat.

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A Cubic Dictionary creative An experiment in writing poetry as a series of definitions re-framing the world, linked to playful imagery. It was a whole lot of fun, but Harold set it aside when his new Mac wouldn’t run the fonts he needed to pull it off. He’s now in the process of turning them into image files, so he can begin again. Still, the technique was instrumental in creating all his work since. Look for more dictionaries soon.

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Human Nation authorsAs part of a cooperative project with Blue Orange Publishing in London, Harold spent two years working on ideas for presenting the book as a stage, both on the page and in electronic space, as a step towards writing texts for the electronic world. The project went on hiatus because of that nagging font problem mentioned above, and because the software for running the animations translated incredibly poorly when removed from a Macintosh environment. Since then, Harold has been working on finding textual solutions to many of these issues, before working again at bringing the imagery back in. The blog is a small selection from two years of magazines.a

The Flying Trapeze Afghanistan flagMeditations on the Art of Creative Nonfiction. This project developed out of Sun Rain Wind Stone. It was set aside when Harold moved. It is another blog created in the form of a visual university lecture, for a class that he so wanted to teach. a a

4 thoughts on “Harold’s Blogs

  1. HI Harold, I just came across a photo of yours on FRESHSHEET under Ideas worth considering. I’m not sure how I got connected with this site but it’s immensely interesting and up-front current re: world conditions. Patricia Donahue (BC Fed,member Vernon)

  2. Pingback: Into the fire and ash | art by Bill Horne

  3. Pingback: Gardening Words – A Literary Spring Cleaning | Kites Without Strings

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