Coach House’s whistle-stop tour

This April, two Coach House Books poets – Jeramy Dodds  and Matthew Tierney – will be riding the rails on a cross-Canada poetry tour sponsored by VIA Rail.
 
According to Coach House publicist Evan Munday, the duo will be getting on a train in Toronto on Apr. 19 and travelling westward. After they arrive in Vancouver, they’ll fly back east to Ottawa, bringing the tour to a close on Apr. 30. Right now, the plan is for Tierney and Dodds to read at a number of local bookstores and festivals along the route. Munday adds that he doesn’t rule out the possibility of impromptu train readings, too.

The tour, which Coach House has branded “2 on a Choo-choo,” was hatched as a way of promoting the authors’ new collections: Dodds’ Crabwise to the Hounds and Tierney’s The Hayflick Limit. “Matthew and Jeramy have known each other for a couple of years,” says Munday. “They like each others’ work and had talked about doing this sort of thing [for awhile].… At first they were talking about doing it by car, but I think we all realized that was a lot of driving and that they would tire out easily.”

So Munday spoke to members of VIA’s publicity department, who “were really interested in doing it,” he says, but under one condition: that the VIA logo be prominently displayed on all of Coach House’s publicity materials. Munday agreed, and consequently both of the poets’ travel expenses are being covered by VIA.

To further maximize the publicity potential, Coach House will be setting up a blog for Dodds and Tierney, which they will use to document their trip.