by Allison Smith

Each year thousands of chapbooks are published by dozens of small presses across Canada, aiming to distribute the poetry of friends and colleagues to the larger literary community. Falling somewhere between a poetry book and a zine, the chapbook’s popularity comes from the simplicity of the manufacturing process.

One of Ottawa's contributors to the chapbook world is Cameron Anstee, founder of Apt. 9 press. Anstee, a poet, got his start in literary publishing and production while working at In/Words, a student-run literary magazine and press at Carleton University. Anstee started Apt. 9 in 2009 and has to date published 11 titles.

"I spent a year of my M.A. (in literature) playing with designs and binding and all that kind of stuff,” Anstee says. “I knew once I finished school that I wanted to do something in this world."

Something DIY.

“I tear every cover down to the right size,” Anstee states. “I thread every needle. I punch all the holes. And all the printing is done out of my little loft."

Anstee’s homemade books are beautiful and simple, each about the size of a 45 and held together by two simple twine stitches. And tonight, Nov. 25, Apt. 9 will bring those beautiful somethings into the world with a poetry reading and book launch at Raw Sugar Café featuring three of the press’s authors.

The main draw of the event is likely to be the reading by William ‘Bill’ Hawkins, a man Anstee describes as “an absolute legend — In Ottawa poetry, he is the origin of a lot of the modern stuff going on.”

Hawkins is a poet who has spent the majority of his 70 years living and working in Ottawa. He began writing poetry after participating in the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, a fondly remembered event attended by the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen and now regarded as one of the seminal moments of the Canadian poetic avant-garde. Hawkins published numerous books of poetry before retiring from the arts during the 1970s.

Anstee is doing his part to preserve Hawkins’ legacy by publishing what would have been the retired writer’s sixth book of poetry, Sweet & Sour Nothings, in chapbook form. Poems from the book appeared in an Anthos anthology in 1980, but this is the first time they will appear as their own entity.

The Apt. 9 publishing house has also based its first non-fiction title, Wm Hawkins Folio, on the life of Hawkins.

"I wanted to focus on Ottawa's literary history," says Anstee. "It is a folio with a descriptive bibliography of his work and reproductions of the posters he and his artist friends used to make in the '60s and staple to telephone poles in downtown Ottawa."

Other poets scheduled to read this evening are Ottawa's Peter Gibbon and Toronto's Leigh Nash.

Gibbon recently graduated with an M.A. in Canadian Studies from Carleton and will be reading from Eating Thistles, the culmination of six years of work. His poems are elegant creations that manage to tie his Vitamin D-deficient grad-student relationship problems to the proroguing of the Canadian parliament.

Nash, meanwhile, recently released her first trade book Goodbye, Ukulele through Mansfield Press. Tonight’s Apt. 9 event will mark the Ottawa launch of that book as well as the chapbook of the same title.