soozi schlanger story

Narrative has always fuelled my artistic life as a painter and musician. In these ways I have always been a storyteller.

As a story teller I still paint and sing - shaping and crafting words to paint my canvas - propelling my story forward with rhythms and rhymes as I would in a song.

Festival of Oral Literature, workshop performance at the OWL cafe in Toronto.
'Drowning is Fun…once you get used to it'
...It’s 1959. I am a child of war refugees growing up in a Bloor Street fish store. Huge carp, ready for slaughter, are my pets. A kookie ‘bag lady’ is my nanny, and a near drowning at Christie Pits becomes sublime oneness with the colour turquoise…..I stare deeply into the sunset behind the sailor on a discarded Players cigarette package. Beautiful pinks and oranges pose a glowingly incongruent backdrop for the music at play in my mind - my mother’s sad Yiddish ballads drowned out by the painfully percussive sounds of live fish struggling on the chopping block...”