A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario has been published serially since the late seventies and was collected in book form for the first time last year by ECW Press; the time, now, has come for the emergence of an audio version. Created by Steve Venright, this two-and-a-half-hour-long sonic interpretation consists of over five hundred original recordings, made at locations specific to the text and woven into a reading of the entire four-book poem by the author. Venright takes Dewdney's masterpiece to a new realm of experience to create one of the most ambitious soundscapes ever made, a hyperlucid, sometimes hallucinatory exploration that spans several geological eras of the geography and countless creatures of Southwestern Ontario. Primal, erotic, cerebral and exalted, A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario will envelop you in the visionary landscape of Canada's most adventurous poet.

Christopher Dewdney has served as writer-in-residence at Trent, Western, and York universities. Featured in Ron Mann’s film Poetry in Motion with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Ondaatje, and Tom Waits, Dewdney has presented his groundbreaking poetics across North America and Europe. He also creates acoustic and visual art, along with incisive arts commentary for print, radio, and television.

Karl E. Jirgens, head of the Department of English at the University of Windsor, has taught at the universities of Toronto, York, Guelph, and Laurentian. Since 1979, he has served as editor-in-chief of Rampike, a critically acclaimed international journal of art and writing. Jirgens’s fiction, performance works, poetry, and scholarly articles are published worldwide.

Christopher Dewdney's profile page

As well as being an author, Steve Venright is a visual and sound artist whose Torpor Vigil Industries record label has released such remarkable cds as Songs of Elsewhere by Samuel Andreyev and an album of spoken dreams called The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor. He was born in Sarnia in 1961 and now resides in a large consensual reality domain called Toronto, Ontario.

Steve Venright's profile page