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Born to an Armenian father and an Anglo-Indian mother, Keith Garebian holds a doctorate in Canadian and Commonwealth Literature from Queen's University. The author of sixteen books and a chapbook, he is a widely-published writer. His reviews and articles have appeared in over eighty newspapers, journals, magazines, and anthologies. In 2000, he became the first critic-at-large to be appointed by a public library, when he was contracted to post theatre and book reviews for three years on the website for the Mississauga Public Library. His poetry has been published in Impulse, Echo, Inscape, The Antigonish Review, Literary Review of Canada, Exile, Quarry, Grain, The Malahat Review, and various anthologies. The winner of the 2000 and 2008 Mississauga Arts Award for Writing, he has also won writing grants from the Ontario Arts Council and top prizes for free verse and haiku from the Ontario Poetry Society and the Scarborough Arts Council/Lakeshore Arts Council. A member of the League of Canadian Poets and The Writers’ Union of Canada, he is available for public readings and symposia.



MY NEXT READING

Sat. April  4, 2008 8-10PM
Glad Day Bookshop / 598A Yonge St
Readings by three terrific writers, Elizabeth Ruth, RM Vaughan and Keith Garebian, musical performances by Ezekiel Ledesma and Omel Masalunga.

Visit www.proustandcompany.com for full details.

 What the critics have said:

*William Hutt: A Theatre Portrait (1988)
“Garebian eschews the biographical mode that would leave Hutt pinned in a display case, offering instead his elusive character, tantalizing us, taunting us to follow him in his life and performances if we have a mind for the task.” (Michael John Nimchuk, Toronto Star)

“William Hutt: A Theatre Portrait is a substantial, penetrating study of a major theatre artist.” (Alexander Legatt, Quill & Quire)

*A Well-Bred Muse: Selected Theatre Writings 1978-1988 (1991)
“the lone (albeit well-modulated, beautifully projected) voice of sanity in this wilderness of mediocrity…an informative and perhaps necessary read for practitioners who see the theatre as an art form and not exclusively as a forum for sociology.” (Colin Taylor, Quill & Quire)

“There are few critics around who describe acting nuances as closely and articulately as does Garebian, and he is also a sensitive observer of directorial conceptions.” (Craig Stewart Walker, Journal of Canadian Studies)

*George Bernard Shaw and Christopher Newton: Explorations in Shavian Theatre (1993)
“He looks at the pairing of Shaw and Newton with a cheerful curiosity, a scholarly rigour and a whole-hearted enthusiasm for the theatre.” (Shirley Knott, Globe and Mail)

“Garebian does an excellent and thorough job. There would have been fewer shocks to the body academic had we had something like this book earlier…” (R.F. Dietrich, The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, Vol. 15)

*The Making of ‘My Fair Lady’ (1994)
“He has packed the book with fascinating backstage stories: bizarre, hilarious, dramatic.” (David Mayerovitch, Globe and Mail)

*The Making of ‘Cabaret’  (1999)
“anecdote-rich book…” (Kevin Burns, Quill & Quire)

“a fascinating [history], and Garebian recounts it with enthusiasm and intelligence.” (Tamara Jones, Canadian Book Review Annual)

*The Making of... series (2005)
“These books by Keith Garebian are golden. Not only are they full of great insider anecdotes and hilarious stories, they also show you firsthand that musicals are an evolutionary art and ‘classics’ don't happen overnight.” (Blogway Baby)

*Pain: Journeys Around My Parents (2000)
“a howl of anguish…a searing examination of his relationship with his parents and his Armenian roots. Garebian uses narrative, poetry, and allusive, aphoristic meditation to lay bare the flayed body of his emotions, and the reader who goes along for this journey into dysfunction will find a kind of uneasy understanding of the past, but no simple redemption.” (Antanas Sileika, Globe and Mail)

“Some critics have called Garebian's memoir post-modern because of the broken and fractured nature of the narrative. Postmodern texts call attention to their artifice and construction as an overt refusal of authoritative realism. Truth is problematized and reduced to points of view. Not so in this memoir. Inherent in the painful journeys Garebian has undertaken is the belief that words can explore and reveal truth.” (Lorne Shirinian, Books In Canada)

*The Making of ‘Guys and Dolls’ (2003)
“In The Making of ‘Guys and Dolls’ Garebian clearly has been able to fuse genesis, evolution and after-life—his own description of his goals in writing the series—with some crisp and engaging writing, a style that suits the flavor of the material itself and has an economy that would have delighted Runyon.” (Jeniva Berger, Books in Canada)

“In this delightful and eminently readable book, Garebian's enthusiasm for his subject shines through.” (David E. Kemp, Canadian Book Review Annual)

*Reservoir of Ancestors (poems) (2003)
“Garebian offers no cathartic resolution to the events he unfolds, only the open-ended anguish that cries out of so many untold, and now untellable, stories.” (Heather Fitzgerald, Quill & Quire)

“Garebian employs a gritty yet lyrical tone...This notably elegiac collection of poems demonstrates the author's strong connection to the past and his equally strong engagement with the present.” (Lydia Forssander-Song, Canadian Book Review Annual 2004)

*Samson’s Hair and Other Satirical Fantasies (chapbook) (2004)
“Satire is alive and scintillating in Samson’s Hair. One minute Eve is calling God a snake, the next it’s Dracula sharing his foreplay tips. And that’s just a glimpse of Keith Garebian’s playfully lurid imagination. In a book where both John the Baptist’s head and Monica Lewinsky’s dress have a lot to say, the writing is fevered, funny and venomous, often all at the same time.” (Barry Dempster, Governor General’s Award nominee)

“In his latest collection, Samson's Hair, a chapbook of 17 intelligently irreverent poems that draw on literary and popular subjects as far-flung as Hamlet and Dracula, Salome and Kong, and God and Monica, Keith Garebian is as penetrating in the voice of the other sex as he is in the voice of his own....Satire--a technique which often employs ridicule in the service of censure--and fantasy--a form which entails role-playing--are seemly vehicles for Keith Garebian's aims...”
(Elana Wolff, Surface & Symbol)

*Frida: Paint Me As A Volcano/Frida: Un Volcan de Souffrance (2004)
“Along with hard-edged clarity and succinct imagery, the language in this collection is often surreal and lustrous as befitting its subject matter about a painter's mistress who finds herself defined and given her raison d'etre by her promiscuous artist-lover. ...Garebian's images are plastic and flowing and preeminently visual as the colours in the paintbox that become Diego's medium, and Franciere's translation not only captures the essence of the original work but also preserves much of the energy and lyricism with lively images that pulse and resonate throughout...this amazing series of poems...”
(Gillian Harding-Russell, Event, Vol. 3, No. 2)

“...powerful images...Garebian's words evoke the vivid colours and intense emotions of Kahlo's surreal paintings, which evoke the flora and fauna, folklore and traditions of Mexico. Poetic allusions to actual self-portraits interspersed with brief prose passages express Kahlo's physical pain, her love and admiration for Diego Rivera, and the suffering caused by his affairs.” (Roseanna Dufault, Canadian Literature, Vol. 191, Winter 2006 )

*Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008)
“Keith Garebian has created an innovative introduction to a great filmmaker, his work, and his world.”
(Quentin Mills-Fenn, Uptown Magazine, Winnipeg, May 22, 2008)

NEW!!

“.a beautiful and evocative tribute...Garebian's poetic take on Jarman's life riffs on a variety of influences and inspirations...Graced  by degrees of subtle allusions to other works, Garebian's poetry is, at times, reminiscent of Adrienne Rich's love poetry and Ginsberg's call to America during intense political moments....Garebian's romantic alliterative play...moves this collection beyond beautiful gestures and into a powerful and highly original space...Garebian's work both defies and defines an important poetic canon as he moves through the life of another artist, within another medium, striving for beauty and excellence within a marginalized form, yet simultaneously reaching out toward a world of experience.”
(David Bateman, Xtra!, September 25, 2008)

“He can vivify relatively straightforward realism or abandon it altogether: presenting sensuous tableaux that swirl magically into gymnastic action. He can shift abruptly yet convincingly between the ornate and the coarse, the ethereal and the nightmarish, the wittily cerebral and the violently brutal. A sensibility both filmic and painterly is fully operative, and in passage after passage a sinuous energy joins an uncanny clarity of expression. There's a rare urbane panache and aplomb in scene-setting, in characterization, in narrative drive and in thought....Blue is an outstanding, sustained achievement and takes us places, full-frontally, which most poetry lacks the imaginative and stylistic resources to do more than flirt with.”
(Allan Briesmaster, Letter to the 2008 Mississauga Arts Awards jury)
 

“Graced by degrees of subtle citation...powerful and highly original...”
(The Gay and Lesbian Review, January-February 2009)

“Garebian's virtuoso trick is to only once or twice in the entire collection slip into a description of Jarman's desires not expressed through action....Garebian's skill comes in the activation of the eyes: with this choice he creates the illusion of observed fact rather than speculation and authorial commentary. The 'tension' then between Garebian's subect and the way it is shown has everything to do with the illusion of autonomy he creates for Jarman, the character, from author and reader alike.”
(Matt Rader, Event, 37-3)

“Keith Garebian’s Blue is a haunting elegy to an artist whose films left an indelible mark on queer consciousness, as much because of Jarman’s brashness at a time when we were all battening down the hatches and doing damage control in our own lives, both public and private, because of the onslaught of aids, as well as because of Jarman’s uniquely personal vision as a filmmaker.

The poems reverberate with an intimate and cumulative knowledge of the artist’s work seen in hindsight. At times, they achieve a visionary quality that stems from a critical perception of Jarman’s oeuvre, coupled with Garebian’s personal imagining of the man behind the work. In this way, the poems serve as both biography and critical exegesis of the films. Edward II: A Queer History, for instance, is as much a snapshot of Jarman’s film as of his imagining of the misbegotten monarch who bears its title, while the multi-part Caravaggio serves as a series of vignettes illuminating both the historical artist and his modern-day artist-biographer.

While not lengthy, Blue is a full work. The book is cleverly divided into a biographical Prologue, a critical Corpus, and a final section, Blue, that serves as a meditation on the dying Jarman and his final work, Blue, a non-imagistic “film” that provided a backdrop for Jarman’s ponderings on life, death and art.

These works contain both vibrant imagery and richly imagined drama, and are a pleasure to read. They should be—they were written by a masterly word-artist and inventor who might, had the two met, have mesmerized Jarman with his own creativity.”
(Jeffrey Round, www.jeffreyround.com)