Announcing The Liar’s Club: a monthly reading series -- and occasional mentoring series -- the brainchild of Sky Gilbert!
The first appearance of The Liars Club will be on Valentines Day, Tuesday, February 14, 2023 at Supermarket Bar and Variety, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto from 7:30-8:30 pm. All are invited, and each will have 7 minutes to read their work. Admission is free. Hopefully informal classes will grow out of The Liar’s Club — these classes will be for those who want some advice from Sky on ‘how to lie.’ (Sky is an ancient, inveterate liar.)
Why The Liar’s Club?
Picasso said “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.” Picasso’s statement does not reflect the present state of cultural affairs. Today we assume that artists utilize their work to express their personal opinions about the state of the world, or life (or death) — decorated with their chosen ‘style.’ The job of the critic has become to discern the artist’s message and affirm its rightness — or challenge its heresy — to, in effect, agree or disagree with a work of art. But we have forgotten what art is; a message from the unconscious, one that — though it may be crafted — ultimately cannot be controlled, or translated into ordinary, denotative language.The only artists who are not welcome at The Liar’s Club are those who believe that creative writers are obligated to transmit specific, literal, definable, immutable truths; writers who wish to be congratulated — not on the quality of their art — but on the ‘rightness’ of their ideas. We celebrate lies and liars here, and the ability to create strange, well crafted, impossible/horrifying/funny/sexy/beautiful worlds with words.
A quote from Shakespeare Lied (Sky’s upcoming book with Guernica Editions):
“When the playwright Bertolt Brecht was accused of being a Communist on the witness stand of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, his plays were read aloud in court. But Brecht carefully differentiated his own opinions from the ideas expressed by characters in his plays. A writer employs a rhetorical technique (meaning a style, or a character voice) to persuade readers, and manipulate them into considering many sides of an issue. The artist — even when writing a poem — is assuming a fictional voice and hiding behind the rhetoric of the poem. The artist does not hide in order to be found.The artist hides in order to beguile you.”
Sky’s Lie for the Day:
I don’t know who I am, and feel quite like I am wandering in the miasma of my own self. Strange to be so old, and yet so young. “Who am I, what am I, where am I?” — to quote Lucille Ball in the I LOVE LUCY show where she pretended she was having a nervous breakdown to guilt Ricky into letting her appear in his show at the Tropicana. She faked amnesia, then imagined she was Tallulah Bankhead, and then imitated a regression into childhood. Sometimes I think I AM Lucille Ball; dizzy, scheming, and feminine — after all, I AM happiest when I MAKE people laugh. I have a new friend; he has decided he is Rhoda Morgenstern, and I, of course, therefore, am, by default, Mary Richards. It’s not because I’m prettier (I’m not) but because Mary Tyler Moore had the imposter syndrome, and thought she didn’t deserve to be America’s sweetheart. If I am able to struggle through my present miasma of self-doubt I will send you a letter. It will be addressed to ‘Those Who Will Listen” and in it I will implore you to tell me who I am. Does that mean you and I might become co-dependent? I do hope so. Or maybe, we already are?
**********If you are interested in reading at the first Liar’s Club please send an email to Sky Gilbert, at the following address —
sky@uoguelph.ca
N.B.
The Liars Club Agreement: all those who attend— for the hour they attend The Liars Club — must believe that ALL writing is a lie, but that creative writing is more noble, because it is an INTENTIONAL LIE.
Dr. Sky Gilbert is Professor Emeritus at University of Guelph
