Cat Kidd profile picture

Cat Kidd

About Me


Human Fish, by Cat Kidd

Add to My Profile | More Videos
Catherine Kidd is a Montreal-based writer/performer, and author of Missing the Ark [her first novel, formerly Bestial Rooms; conundrum press, 2007]. Her cd/book of performed stories Sea Peach [conundrum] was launched as a solo show in 2002, and won the MECCA for Best New Text 2003. Described as “an adult blend of Dr. Seuss and Aesop’s Fables.” Sea Peach travelled to storytelling festivals in Whitehorse, Yellowknife, New York, and Oslo. Kidd has performed at Festival Voix D’Ameriques and Festival Metropolis Bleu; from the Edinburgh Fringe to Toronto’s World Stage 2005 to the ARENA Fest in Bavaria. Her short-story Green-Eyed Bean, excerpted from her first novel, was nominated a Journey prize, while her voice can be heard narrating two documentaries on women’s pro sports, a cinematic lip-gloss rap, Cirque du Soleil promos, and Air Safety messages. Her dvd/book bipolar bear [conundrum press, 2006] includes live performance video in Singapore. She performed at Spier Arts Poetry Festival in Cape Town, South Africa, in Spring 2007.
Catherine Kidd's reviews on GoodreadsSea Peach
reviews: 1
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)
Missing the Ark
reviews: 1
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)
Bipolar Bear
reviews: 1
ratings: 1 (avg rating 4.00)
--------------------------------------------------
AUDIO MP3s:
Downward Facing Dog (8m45s)
Happy, the Three-Legged Ghost Hamster (13m23s)
Sea Peach (7m43s)
Visit my homepage: catkidd.com
Read the Montreal Review of Books review of my new novel, "Missing the Ark"
i used to live with a four-foot, free-range iguana called Bumpy, she liked green beans and sunshine. she died and i miss her.
othertimes, i like to travel about with my show, which i'll tell you about later
my mom was a farmer's daughter from rural Quebec, my dad from Scotland. when i was a kid i lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, then Vancouver. Around 18 I started travelling a lot, lived in India for a couple of years in my mid-twenties which is when i started writing. my show Sea Peach was first launched in an abandoned swimming pool, which we built a stage in. That was 2002, then I kept touring new versions of the show for the next few years -- adding new bits, taking out old bits, letting it evolve through its contact with different audiences.
my dad used to go into trances and speak in tongues, when I was a kid. i thought that was really weird back then, but i don't think it's so weird anymore.
The mp3's above are story-soundscapes from the cd/book SEA PEACH, also from the live solo show of the same name. They all focus on the character Agnes Underhill as she goes about her adventures. The first story Downward Facing Dog is a loss of virginity story ending in an escalating incantation.
In the second story, Happy the 3-Legged Ghost Hamster, she discovers her father's old typewriter in a broom closet, and learns how to misspell.
The third story is the title track Sea Peach, about a sea creature who much resembles a human heart living on the ocean floor. Agnes finds metaphors for love in its quiet and constant giving and taking of breath and wants to be one when she grows up.
Bibliography:
Missing the Ark . novel. conundrum press, 2007.
the portable conundrum. Anthology of conundrum press creators. Edited & Published by Andy Brown. Story: Niagara Falls. Montreal: conundrum press, 2006
The Journey Prize Stories. Selected by James Grainger & Nancy Lee. Story: Green-Eyed Beans. Originally published in Matrix magazine. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005.
Bipolar Bear. Book/DVD. Prose and performance-poetry. Music by Jack Beets and David Cronkite. Montreal: conundrum press, 2005
Inspired Lives. Article The Origami of Found Objects, p. 263. Originally published in Ascent magazine. Toronto: Timeless publications, 2005.
Ascent Magazine. Article Bumpy Passages. Issue &035;26, Summer. Montreal: 2005.
Sea Peach. Seven performance-stories with cd. Music by Jack Beets. Montreal: conundrum press, 2002.
Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry. Todd Swift & Philip Norton, edit. Intro. by Hal Niedzviecki. Poem: Tale of the Horse Leech, p. 207. New York: Rattapallax Press, 2002.
side/lines: A New Canadian Poetics. Rob McLennan, edit. Story Happy the Ghost Boy. Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2002.
Ribsauce: a cd/anthology of words by women. Taien Ng-Chan edit. Alex Boutros & Kaarla Sundström, sound edit. Performance-poem Tale of the Horse Leech. Montreal: Véhicule Press & Wired on Words, 2001
Impure: Reinventing the Word. Victoria Stanton & Vincent Tinguely, edit. The theory, practice, and oral history of ‘spoken word’ artists in Montreal: conundrum press, 2001.
This Magazine. Short-story Aeroplane Bones. Mar-Apr Issue, Volume 33 No. 5. Toronto: Red Maple Foundation, 2000.
psitticine flute. Single-story chapbook. Montreal: conundrum press, 2000.
Meltwater: Fiction and Poetry from the Banff Centre. Edna Alford, Don McKay, Rhea Tregebov, and Rachel Wyatt edit. Short-story Tympanic Membrance. Banff Centre Press: 1998.
Moosehead Anthology &035;6. R.E.N. Allen and Grant Loewen, edit. Poems Eros & Pathos and Scales of an Orange. Montreal: DC Books, 1997.
everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy. Chapbook of performance/stories with cassette. Montreal: conundrum press, 1996.
CLICK ON THE BOOKS COVERS FOR MORE INFO

My Interests

Music:

Member Since: 22/09/2007
Band Website: www.catkidd.com
Band Members: Catherine Kidd: writer, performer; DJ Jack Beets: he makuh de beets; David Cronkite: music for Dream of Friends; and others have passed through to help also: Georges Kandalaft, Geoff Agombar, Taien Chan...
Influences: In terms of musical influences I should take this question more seriously so let me get back to you on this, my previous entry was just ranting about wretched East Vancouver in the fucking '80s, but further back than that Aretha was the first voice I heard which made the hair stand up on my arms, when I was about nine or ten, before that I liked the soundtrack from The Entertainer. I wanted to sing and dance and act and play piano and gargle Gershwin all at once.
The first time I heard Tom Waits and understood my destiny (well no, not really) I was in Antigua, Guatemala, when I was travelling with an American journalist named Tom Long, having hitchhiked to Central American from Vancouver, B.C. with a trucker named Tom Weeks in about 1985, Tom waits long weeks?
I was only eighteen too politicized for my own personal safety but there was a march into Ciudad de Guatemala, woman carrying placards with pictures of their husbands and sons and i heard sad sad stories of how much these men were missed. Some feeling is too big to connect to, this is true, but Music is the electrical cable you need to plug the thing in and make it run, even run smoothly and beautifully. .

Dostoyevsky. My friends. Beckett. Iris Murdoch. Joyce. Art & Illusion by E.H.Gombrich. Antjie Krog. Biologist Karl von Frisch. Jungle Capitalism by Peter Chapman. Alice in Wonderland. Edgar Allan Poe. Edward Gorey. Albert Camus. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. Pearl S. Buck. Alice Munro. Grapes of Wrath. bpNichol. Beowulf. Roo Borson. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Hamlet. Guy de Maupassant. Alligator Pie. Eileen Garrett. Dr.Seuss. The Existentialists. Erich Fromm. D.T.Suzuki. David Suzuki. Blake. Burns. The Romantics. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Daphne duMaurier. Joseph Campbell. Sigmund Freud. Upanisads. Kurt Vonnegut. Madame Bovary. Zora Neale Hurston. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Joseph Conrad. Zen poetry. Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson. The Awakening by Kate Chopin. Margaret Lawrence. Charlotte’s web. J.D Salinger.

zoology, canine telepathy, theatre, writing, making things with cut paper, yoga, second-hand clothing, bands, voice/beat, any ocean, ginger, my green dress & pink boa, re-learning everything, goats, clean water, strong belief that there's a point to this.

Anything Hitchcock. Also, just saw The Philedelphia Story, starring Kathryn Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart. I thought King Kong was awe-some because I love to watch a giant gorilla who actually looks like a gorilla. I like large animals, when I was a little girl I had a crush on a bull.

did i just watch three wretched crime dramas in a row? i must be depressed or something. I should try to wash the dishes around 5ish, so i can pretend i'm not watching Dr. Phil and/or Oprah. maybe they can cure me of television.
Come to thing Of it, probably the only reason I ever watch the darn crime dramas is that i used to love to watch Perry Mason. As a defence attorney, he only ever lost one case, the Case of the Terrified Typist. But it was one of those 'Even though he lost the case, he remained the Moral Victor' type situations. Hamilton Burger, the lawyer for the prosecution, couldn't get a single thing right, on the moral scoreboard. But how could he? I mean, with a name like Ham Burger? There's billions served, as they say, but few moral victories are won for their sake.
Anyway I think I had a bit of a crush on the earlier Perry Mason. Not Raymond Burr, mind you, the character. Decent fellow, nice eyes. The update is even better though. No television at all. Amazing how many things a person can do instead of watch television, endless really.
Sounds Like: Catherine Kidd’s performance style makes me think of Dr. Seuss meets Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom meets David Suzuki meets Vaudeville meets Patti Smith. Yeah, it is that good. It’s a musical theatre crash course in punk rock zoology. -- T.L. Cowan for the Calgary International Spoken Word Festival 2006

"Tom Waits dissolved in a lime margarita," Alan Hindle, Only
Record Label: www.conundrumpress.com
Type of Label: Indie

My Blog

The item has been deleted


Posted by on