"POET / SINGER Born in Matapedia, Quebec, Heather Haley was drawing, singing and composing songs and stories by the age of six. She attended church in order to participate in the choir ”usually catching a well-deserved nap during mass”and read voraciously, often under the covers. Thusly, the night has always been her friend and she has grown weary of people characterizing her work as dark. "If you don't laugh, you'll cry. . ." PERFORMER Haley is an accomplished performer, both as a spoken word artist and musician. She has taken her act to cities around the world and shared her poetry with audiences at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, Vancouver Public Library, Word on the Street Festival, the Western Front, Thundering Word Heard, Bukowski's, West Coast Poetry Festival and Vancouver City Hall. She has appeared on CBC and Book Television. Haley sang and wrote songs for a series of groups, including an all-girl punk band, then the .45s (with Randy Rampage of DOA, Brad Kent of the Avengers and Karla Duplantier, ex-Controllers ) and HH”Heather Haley & the Zellots”praised by music critic Craig Lee as one of "Ten Great LA Bands". She has played the Smiling Buddha Cabaret, Mabuhay Gardens and Geary Street Theatre (People's Temple) in San Francisco, the Hong Kong Cafe, the Palomino Club, Blackies, Club 88, Club Lingerie and the John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles. Upon her return to Vancouver, Haley worked the streets as an official BC Transit busker. In 2004, she teamed up with guitarist/sound designer and dj Roderick Shoolbraid to produce a series of live shows RECORDING ARTIST and an audio CD of song and spoken word called "Surfing Season." More recently, she has appeared at Crush Champagne Lounge, the Lamplighter pub, Rime on Commercial Drive, Telling Tales on Bowen Island, the Red Schoolhouse Poetry Festival in Kingston, the Art Bar in Toronto, Words & Music in Montreal, the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf in Las Vegas, Red Sky Poetry Theatre in Seattle and Shakespeare & Sons in Prague.
WRITER During a decade-long stint as an expatriate, Haley was employed as a staff writer, editor and arts reviewer for the LA Weekly. Spoken word was her beat and she published many of the city's finest poets in her own section of the popular, alternative journal. Haley's poetry has appeared in numerous North American periodicals: the Antigonish Review, Northern Lights, the Literary Storefront, On The Bus, Heresies, High Performance, Medusa, Verb, Arts Vancouver and the Manic D Press anthology, The Verdict Is In. Anvil Press published a collection of verse entitled Sideways in 2003. "Heather Haley's poetry is tough, irreverent, and in-your-face. She asks all the questions that a nice girl's not supposed to ask. Down back roads and highways, her characters long to possess the past and harness the future. Cowboys, car accidents, broken hearts, dead lovers-and potential violence-hover like heat on the horizon. Whether they're gangsta girls or riot grrrls, roaming the range or pacing the mall, Haley's women are always in the forefront, in the driver's seat, crankin' the wheel in their direction. Like wild horses bustin' loose, or an explosion in the kitchen, Haley's women know how heady power is, how it lathers beneath a mount. Her characters bite life on the neck and take what they need, and just when they think it's gone, meaning happens. This is brawny and uncompromising language from a voice that demands to be reckoned with."-Brian Kaufman. The BC Publishers Association selected the book's Europa for their Poetry in Transit program. Digital publications include e-poets.net, the University of Manitoba's e-zine, Treeline, Tales of Slacker Bonding and Assemblage-The Women's New Media Gallery. She recently completed a residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts' Wired Writing Studio working with Karen Solie under the directorship of Greg Hollingshead and Fred Stenson. Her new book, Window Seat, is due in the spring. She will also launch Two Redheads, a podcast, and a new cd, Princess Nut, both produced by composer/sound designer, Roderick Shoolbraid. One of Haley's primary goals is to find and/or establish niche marketing and distribution for poetry, in all its guises.
MEDIA ARTIST In 2003, Haley's videopoem, Dying for the Pleasure, premiered at Pacific Cinematheque. Employing a poem-as-script strategy, it is a blackly humorous, kaleidoscopic trip down Memory Lane, the car a metaphor for power, an extension of desire. Once behind the wheel, we are transformed into cyborgs, driven to deliverance. Set at the intersection of flesh and metal, beyond road rage and autoeroticism, Dying for the Pleasure explores a woman's dread of, and terrible infatuation with, the car and car culture. Lyle Neff, in a review for The Westender, characterized it as "suitably hair raising. One of Haley's themes is the high price we eagerly pay for technological advances. She locates this idea where it really belongs, which is not in the malleable, debatable imagery of cyberspace, but in the mundanely high-impact world of automobiles. That's where we really pay the price for our cool machines." In 2005, Dying for the Pleasure screened at the International ArtExpo in Milan, Italy, the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Kalingrad, Russia and the Gene Siskal Film Centre/Chicago Art Institute. Her new videopoem, Purple Lipstick, is touring the festival circuit and has garnered many kudos, having been selected by VideoBardo Festival in Buenos Aires, the Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin and the NFB sponsored Female Eye Festival in Toronto, a memorial of the Montreal Polytechnique Massacre.