S2E4 Stan Dragland’s Puddle-Jumping Mind

Stan Dragland, 1942 to 2022, was an amazing writer, songwriter, teacher, literary critic, editor and publisher. The founder of Brick magazine and Brick books, a mentor to many many many writers, huge supporter of the arts, a lover of Newfoundland, writing and culture, and our dear much missed friend. Our focus on Stan in episodes 12,13 and 14 will be on his brilliance as a bricoleur, a personal practice of bricolage, which was expressed in all these creative activities. We will explore some of these activities and touch on all of them. We hope these oddcasts conversations will serve both as an introduction to his thinking and art, and as our own homemade memorial. We begin with Stan’s discovered bricoleur as a handy term for his way of working with things, words and people.

Simon Dragland’s portrait of his Father, Stan.

The Bricoleur and His Sentences

Below. One: Stan’s illustration of text from his Depot Creek song; two: the shed in Champney’s East; three: shed interior before bricolage: four: shed as it is now.

Odd things” : a few of Stan’s creations and some of Doug Penney’s stone creatures

View of Doug Penney’s rock sculptures and a close-up of one like a sculpin, a common fish here in NL.

Stan constructed personalized messages using scrabble tiles. This one celebrates the retirement of Don and himself from Brick Books. Many people received such constructions often in concert with other found items to showcase the words.