Parataxis event: Taking Taxi! back to the street for Workers Day, May 1, 2011

Hey Waitress featured in Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit.

A copy of Helen Potrebenko's short story collection Hey Waitress is currently included in the WE: Vancouver exhibit installed at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

(listen up literary canon!)

Exciting Taxi! event happening for Workers Day May 1st.

Major news for Taxi! readers. Mark your calendar for Parataxis: The Ride.

On May 1st, 2011 we will meet at Pigeon Park at 12 noon and undertake the first walking tour where we interface the text in Taxi! with the places and spaces it refers to.

Come on out for this intervention and participate.

Bring your copy of Taxi! or buy one from our cart for $10.00.

This event is taking place as part of La Commune de Vancouver: Paris Commune celebrations.

Author Helen Potrebenko @ Taxi! Intervention

Helen with new Taxi! reader at Taxi! intervention @ Not Sent Letters event Vancouver, BC (Jan. 14, 2011)

Taxi! Performance Art interventions

A new era and direction in the Taxi! revival has dawned.

Through a series of transactions and experiments Taxi! will be returned to her readers.

The first intervention took place last night to a great response in Vancouver, BC. Thank you so much to Lori Weidenhammer for her generous collaboration and to the readers for engaging with us at the Taxi! rank.

Here are some photos of last night's piece: keep your eye out for an intervention on your street corner soon. (To order a Taxi! transaction event contact mrsokana@gmail.com hurry there can only be 50 such events based on last night's research)

New Taxi readers we want to hear from you! Organise your own Taxi! event

Taxi! has gathered new readers in recent months and we want to hear from you!

Share some thoughts on the book and what reading or rereading it meant to you or anything you wish to remark on about the book and we'll try publish it here.

Also I did start a group on facebook called have you read Taxi!? We could use a wikipedia page if someone wanted to make one about Helen's work.

There also needs to be more events to celebrate the book especially in other parts of Canada. St John's, Halifax, Campbell River, Edmonton, Rio, Kashmir, Ballina, where are you? Get a bunch of people together to read Taxi! aloud, add a bit of music and voila you'll all feel Good & Strong. I'll be happy to share the successful format of our recent event at the Vancouver Public Library if you drop me a line.

Map appeal encore

I still wish someone would map the locations mention in Taxi! somehow, either on google maps or some other map interface. Map them as they are described in the book, then take a wander and snap what they've become.

One day I promise to go on a wander and try to see what semblance of the city was and is now in Taxi!

Up for the task? Want to do a chapter? email the results to mrsokana@gmail.com

Taxi event at VPL astonishing success: big love from Taxi! readers

The Taxi! event at the Vancouver Public Library was an astonishing night. Thank you so much to Taxi! readers old and new for coming out and showing such big love to our event. The attendance was very high, the participation was lovely and the readers: Bryant Ibbitson, Annabel Lyon, Penny Goldsmith, Clint Burnham, Julie Okot Bitek and Marina Roy were astonishing. The event's musical compositions by Cuan Isamu will be uploaded to the blog very shortly.

Helen described the night as "wonderful, a very special kind of evening".

We all agreed the prose was stronger than ever. Taxi! is a great book, give a copy to a friend, spread the word, organize your own event. I will be happy to supply our original Taxi! music composed by Cuan.

If you attended the event please send your descriptions and comments to mrsokana@gmail.com and we can upload them here.

Taxi! in National Post

Deserves not to be forgotten: Writers hail Helen Potrebenkos Taxi!

Deserves not to be forgotten': Writers hail Helen Potrebenko's 'Taxi!'

Posted: April 28, 2010, 12:30 PM by Brad Frenette

Events, Novels, Annabel Lyon, MIchael Turner, Helen Potrebenko, Taxi!

Alberta-born author Helen Potrebenko published her first novel, Taxi!, in 1975. The book, published shortly after her move to Vancouver from Alberta, told of the struggles of a female cab driver making her way in B.C.'s largest city.

35 years after it hit shelves, Anakana Schofield, another Vancouver writer, is organizing an event to bring some attention to the book, which has fallen off CanLit's radar.

"It's part of a "recovery project," says Schofield, "and perhaps a post-Olympian reclaim your city prod. As in - here is your long forgot city literature, take it, possess it, it's yours."

The event takes place in Vancouver tomorrow night, and will feature contributions and readings from Annabel Lyon,. Michael Turner, Clint Burnham and several others, as well as a Q&A with the author.

"Taxi! was the first work of fiction I read that was set in Vancouver and the first from the perspective of a working class woman", says Michael Turner. "Although I recognized the city I grew up in, I was (through the eyes of Potrebenko's female protagonist) taken to places in an order I was not familiar with, in ways I had not yet imagined. As a man, I could walk through walls to get what I wanted. Potrebenko reminded me that not all narrators are men, and that for a woman to negotiate her way through civic space requires many more fares than her masculine counterpart."

"I was struck by the intelligence and the humour and the sass of Taxi!." says Annabel Lyon. "And because my partner drives a cab, so much of it hit close to home. It's a sharp, edgy book, pure Vancouver, and deserves not to be forgotten."

Aside from a one night fete for the book, Schofield hopes to get it back into the CanLit canon: "Taxi! is both a vital Vancouver novel and a unique working class literary work that we hope to see taught in universities and schools again and acknowledged for it's contribution to the Canadian literary canon rather than forgotten about."

• "Taxi! @ 35" takes place on Thursday April 29, at 7:30 p.m. at Vancouver's The Central Library (350 West Georgia Street). Admission is free. For more information visit Anakana Schofield's blog.

Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/afterword/archive/2010/04/28/deserves-not-to-be-forgotten-writers-hail-helen-potrebenko-s-taxi.aspx#ixzz0mqFUj1oG

Taxi! Event VPL : Good and Strong: Taxi! @ 35

There will be an event at The Vancouver Public Library (CENTRAL BRANCH) - Thurs April 29, 2010. 7.30pm - 9pm in the downstairs Alice McKay room:

Good and Strong: Taxi! @ 35

Local writers will read extracts from the novel Taxi! and there will be a Q&A with author Helen Potrebenko.

More details to come.

Mark your calendars, please come and join us and share your experience of reading Taxi! or come and become revved up on a classic Vancouver novel.

French Taxi

Due to unprecented interest from French Taxi readers, a translation of Taxi! Buried Treasure article has now been uploaded here.

http://mrsokana.wordpress.com/lecteur-la-grele-cette-voiture-taxi-par-helen-potrebenko/


Corrections and improvements welcome! Would Shannon become Simone or Sylvie?

Joe le taxi to follow.

Taxi tunes

A recently submitted list of music being listened to in the taxi of Taxi! revivalism.

Billie Holiday
Billy Bragg
Bob Dylan
Dixie Chicks
Dolly Parton
Ella Fitzgerald
Hazel and Alice
Joan Baez
K.D. Lang
Leonard Cohen
Mildred Bailey
The New Seekers
Nina Simone
Odetta
Paul Robeson
Pete Seeger
Rita Coolidge
Rita McNeil
Roy Forbes
Stan Rogers

Breaking news! Taxi! Author Gets Gold!

Major buzz for Taxi readers! Author of Taxi Helen Potrebenko wins gold in slo-pitch softball final of womens 62 + BC Seniors Olympics. Taxi! readers proud and delighted for women with bats. Team pic to follow.

Readerly pose encore: page turning feet

Even more so, this alert, post softball playing active reader feet mirror something of the turning of the page in their particular arrangement captured here.

Feet in readerly poses

This is the first set of Taxi! feet captured while actively reading Taxi! There is a pensive engaged quality to these feet.

Vancouver male Taxi! reader bucket feet

This Vancouver reader had his hands full when he seized the opportunity to embrace a copy of Taxi! Taxi! readers don't hang about, they rush off to get revved. They have very good jokes. Sometimes.

Vancouver male malheureusement foot

This Taxi! reader found Taxi! at a time he has an opportunity, to digest it.

Vancouver mapping Taxi!

Taxi! readers let's map some of the locations mentioned in Taxi! in the present day. (and past if you've snaps from 75)

Bring your camera out in the street. Snaps needed. List will be gradually compiled and uploaded. Google maps what about ya?

If you don't live in Vancouver, you too can be involved in mapping. Just find a similiar/invented/inappropriate location and or non mapping related image whereever you are and submit your snaps to haveyoureadtaxi@gmail.com

Globe and Mail embraces Taxi!

What a co-incidence the good auld medja waking up to Taxi! greatness right on time, on target! Would you credit it?!

BOOKS

Buried Treasures

Reader, hail that cab!

Helen Potrebenko is a cherished Vancouver writer. Her '70s novel of a woman taxi driver in that city is funny, confrontational and brilliantly proletarian

Read the whole article here

Rare! Male stripy Taxi! foot floating above Vancouver street

A rarity! The male foot is outnumbered in the gallery. Come on lads. Come on Vancouver readers. Edmonton is dwarfing us. Note the convenient air holes this Taxi! reader's shoe contains. His feet will be still and ventilated as he's immersed in Taxi!