laurie macfayden, author of ‘white shirt’

Posted on 1 June 2010by Laurie MacFayden

About Me

I’m an award-winning writer, visual artist and journalist who has lived in Edmonton since 1984. My writing has appeared in The New Quarterly, FreeFall, Queering the Way and Alberta Views. My short story, Haircut, won the Howard O’Hagan prize at the 2017 Alberta Literary Awards. My work has been performed in Edmonton’s Loud & Queer Cabaret, the Skirts Afire Festival, and Calgary’s Q the Arts cultural festival. My latest book, Walking Through Turquoise (Frontenac House, September 2017), continues to explore the flirtations and secrets mined in my first two titles, White Shirt and Kissing Keeps Us Afloat.

Visual arts exhibition highlights include Fighting Normal, a multi-discipline installation with Amy Willans exploring the stigma of mental illness (Winter 2013, Visual Arts Alberta Gallery; September, 2019, St Albert Library) and The Poetry of Water (August 2012; solo exhibition, Kaasa Gallery, Jubilee Auditorium, Edmonton). My paintings have shown in other public spaces in Edmonton including Harcourt House; the Gallery at Milner; Woodcroft Library, Walterdale Playhouse; Enterprise Square; Blue Plate Diner; Grant MacEwan Gray Gallery; and Bohemia Cafe.

Artist Statement

I’m a painter and award-winning writer who’s endlessly fascinated with wordplay and the visual arts. Largely self-taught, I painted in watercolours, oils and acrylics in high school, but set the palette aside for two decades while pursuing a career in print journalism. In the mid-1990s I rediscovered my passion for throwing paint around.

For me, art-making is not merely a process of visual expression but a merging with the divine spark/vibrational energy that is, to me, the creative process. The resulting work is hard to categorize: I paint serene, post-impressionist landscapes and I paint boisterous, abstract-expressionist colour bombs. I paint electric skies and lively, dancing gardens. My urban and inner landscapes are more visceral; I apply paint with a vengeance, using brushes, knives, electric toothbrush, rolling pin … dabbling, flinging, dripping.

Growing up in southern Ontario, I was keenly influenced by nature hikes through the woodlands and marshes of Simcoe County with my father Clifford, a painter and avid birdwatcher. Works by Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro and Mark Rothko make me feel great and small at the same time.

I work mostly in acrylics, and I’ve been told there’s a joyous, unfettered quality to my art that borders on reckless abandon; it pleases me to hear that because I never was very good at staying inside the lines.

Exhibition highlights

Real Straight Talk About Souls
(for life is holy and every moment is precious)
July-October, 2017
Woodcroft Library, Edmonton

Art Unhemmed: Everything Cannot Be True
March 5-8, 2015
Skirts Afire HerArts Festival
Nina Haggerty Centre, Edmonton

Aspects of Self
Dec. 5, 2013-Jan. 31, 2014
Group show featuring Fighting Normal
installation with Amy Willans
Gray Gallery, MacEwan University, Edmonton

Fighting Normal
Jan. 25-March 2, 2013
Multi-discipline installation with poet Amy Willans
exploring the stigma of mental illness
Visual Arts Alberta Gallery, Edmonton

DiverseScapes
April 3-14, 2012
Alberta Society of Artists Group Show
Walterdale Playhouse, Edmonton

The Poetry of Water
June 6-Aug. 15, 2011
Solo Painting Show, Kaasa Gallery, Jubilee Auditorium, Edmonton, AB

Big Bang Oh
Nov. 14, 2010
Solo Show, Mspace Loft Gallery
Edmonton, AB

Prism
March 26-April 23, 2009
Paintings and sculpture with Liz Sullivan and Helen Rogers
VAA Gallery, Edmonton, AB

Fahrenheit 451
Feb. 5-March 19, 2009
Solo Show, Freedom to Read Week
Concordia University College

Dancin’ the Man Rhythm
Nov. 1-Dec. 22, 2008
Solo Show, The Gallery at Milner
7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Edmonton, AB

Diversity 2007
June 21-July 21, 2007
‘Da Capo’ – winner of Viewer’s Choice Award
Visual Arts Alberta annual juried exhibition,
The Works Art & Design Festival
VAA Gallery, Edmonton, AB

Praise For Laurie MacFayden’s Work:

“In MacFayden’s poems love does not always win, passion is not always requited; that’s not the point. It is the celebrations, the joy you remember that gets you through the dark. The promise of joy that brings us to the threshold of another dawn. That Laurie MacFayden, she’s a howler. An Allen Ginsberg howler, celebrating hope and hard love.”

— Michael Dennis

“MacFayden’s poems are bright, colorful splashes of language … boisterous, roughhousing, tomboyish poems. But for all of their energy and muscle-flexing, they have a wonderful, carefully crafted artistry that contains and balances their zesty play on words, zany metaphors and sexual exuberance. … Poetry and humanity both need her lusty, never-give-up, never-stay-down spirit wrapped in masterfully executed poems.”

— Rob Jacques

“when i first heard laurie macfayden read in edmonton, it was obvious she was a cut above the pack of poets waiting for their turn to be heard. she’s a drag queen in a pink limousine, journalist of whyte ave & the two-lane world, an important lady in an important time.”

— c.r. avery, beatbox poet and spoken-word outlaw

“… at home in the canon of Canadian lyricism.”

— The Globe and Mail

“Laurie MacFayden is one of my favourite poets. Her poems vibrate with a sensorial precision that never fails to capture. From a wild date with Jackson Pollock, to poems of longing and desire, to clear-eyed rants on sexuality, she does what all great writers do – that is; she shines her incredible, unique light on what it is to be human. MacFayden pushes at the darkness with her poetry – she titillates, teases, intrigues and entertains – and I hope she keeps doing it for a very, very long time.”

— Thomas Trofimuk, author of Waiting for Columbus

“This is the ‘classic’ hard-drinking, hard-living, gravelly poet’s voice – only it comes from a woman. It’s a bust-out-of-the-closet voice where occasional touchstone rhymes and furious lists score the page. The poems are stripped down, poignant, exact, and as heartily playful as any serious blues. Here is Sappho crossed with the Supremes.”

— Jury, Dektet 2010

About Spatherdab

Spatherdab is an obscure, almost forgotten, old english word meaning chatterer, gossip, scandal-monger; “a woman who goes from house to house dispensing news.”

Since I spent more than 30 years as a sports journalist whose pressbox chatter was dispensed house to house (thanks to another obscure, mostly obsolete entity, the newspaper carrier); and since I use this space for chatter, gossip and scandal-mongering — not to mention rants, limericks, scathing observations, and anything else that explodes out of my curmudgeonly cranium — it seems a more than fitting handle.

For the past 10 years my Spatherdab blog existed as a stand-alone WordPress entity. Now it’s part of my newly-renovated lauriemacfayden.com website. It will continue to house pretty much anything that doesn’t fit under the main categories of Art and Writing.