Kate Greenstreet, Young Tambling

May 22, 2013, 6:01 am

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It was in the mountains.

She got hit my lightning, and wandered for a while.

Only one thing disappeared.

– Do you think of poetry as useful?

– Yes, it has been to me.

– Tell me some of the ways it has been useful to you personally.

The only words on the back cover of American poet Kate Greenstreet’s third poetry collection, Young Tambling (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2013), are “Based on a true story.” In Young Tambling, Greenstreet plays with the facts of facts, and the narratives built and broken out of things that might have once been true. Poems emerge from the building blocks of experience, language, accident and craft, and Greenstreet’s back cover line suggests all that and more. The book takes its name from the Tam Lin, a character from a Scottish Ballad, who is saved by his true love from the Queen of the Fairies. According to Wikipedia, the first recorded version of this song dates back to 1849 Scotland, but the author is good enough to include a few pages of notes at the end of the collection for the sake of illumination. Her notes read not as a pure addendum, but as an extension of the poem itself, seven pages worth of notes that begin:

Dear reader, in case you want to know a little more—for instance about page 3 In her essay “Tam Lin, Fair Janet, and the Sexual Revolution,” Martha P. Hixton notes that three motifs listed in Seth Thompson’s Motif Index of Folk Literature are present in the ballad “Tam Lin,” the first being “Girl summons fairy lover by picking flowers.” Citing Barre Toelken, she states that plucking a rose is a basic metaphorical image for sexual activity in ballads, and points out that Janet/Margaret calls Tam Lin by plucking a rose (or two or three) in every variant. “Janet has power over Tam Lin in that, seemingly at least, he cannot appear until she summons him and this summons (picking the roses) is one he must obey.” Hixton’s essay is in Marvels & Tales (Wayne State University Press, 2004), 67-92. // In most variants, Margaret/Janet is warned not to go into these woods because of the presence of Tam Lin. But in the Anne Briggs version, there is no warning.

Blending lyric with folk with prose, merging memoir with invention, Young Tambling is a series of impulses in six sections, each of which emerge from the dismantling of opening quotes by others: Narrative, Act, Memory, Forbidden, Sung and We. Using the myth as her framing, Greenstreet opens the collection by retelling the story as well as a couple of variations:

They say you’re a headstrong girl. You run into the woods and pull a double rose. This is later thought to be symbolic. But today, you just pick the flower and he appears, as though called. If you were warned not to come here, he’s the reason why. He pulls you down. Is it wrong? When it’s done, according to the song, you turn “to ask your true love’s name.” But he’s gone, and the woods grow dim.

The characters are introduced. A situation that begins to demand a set of changes. The ballad is named for him, although he is not the hero: Tam Lin, Tom Line, Tamlane, Young Tambling. There are many variations. Is he elven or human—is he trapped between worlds? He was enough in your world to leave you pregnant. A servant suggests an herb that will invite miscarriage. Traditional ballad narratives are episodic, relying on dialogue and action. Back to the woods, your father’s woods, to pick the bitter herb and suddenly he’s there again, saying: why do that when you could have the baby, and me, and a whole new life.

Seems like some people are born waiting for something—always listening, or looking, feeling toward the future. Other people—it just happens and they don’t know what hit them.

Young Tambling is a deeply complex book, structured through lyrical threads of memoir, a tightly packed musical language and a myriad of narrative directions. Her collection has something of the accumulative, combining a kind of collage structure with an innate precision, and every line, every page, is an absolute delight. Later on in the collection, she writes her own take on the myth in a poem, writing:

The wood belongs to the father.

I have the feeling that he set to work.

It took him years. What is experimental?

No blood,

just cooking. Same as you.

I miss the sun. The sound

of their voices.

Which has been covered with a white cloth.

My shadow, his shadow, his

hand’s shadow.

“You got a visitor, baby.”

Even further on, in a small narrative on suicide, another line that strikes: “Art as we knew it (he said) was just designed to get us through our twenties. After that, you’re on your own.” On her own website, she refers to the book as, among other things, “experimental memoir,” and in part of her endnotes, writing: “Although I was thinking in two-page spreads, at some point I realized that I wasn’t actually (physically) making a book. I was making a big rectangular piece of temporary art.” What strikes is the word “temporary,” suggestion, perhaps, that her compositional form wasn’t the book at all, but the way she laid out the pages on her studio wall? Is Young Tambling, then, presented in a form secondary to the way it was actually constructed?

The picture should be looked at. In the dream it’s you and me and a lot of other people. We’re performing a long and complicated vocal piece and I love you in the dream.

I think it lasts about … twenty minutes. Then they have to use the hack saws. To get it off. Can we recognize a pattern?

You seemed to need me but—when you put those big hooves in my lap? How can I recognize the real thing? Sometimes the tiniest breeze will set it off. People don’t get over it. Women, never. This is the devil’s work, this mirror.

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Daniel Zomparelli, Davie Street Translations

May 23, 2013, 6:01 am

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My short review of Daniel Zomparelli's Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks) is now online at Bywords.ca

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Gridley

May 24, 2013, 6:01 am

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Sarah Gridleyis the author of three books of poetry: Weather Eye Open (2005) and Green is the Orator (2010), both published by the University of California Press, and Loom(2013), published by Omnidawn. She is an assistant professor of English at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Weather Eye Open, my first book of poems, was published in 2005, when I was 37. Pragmatically speaking, my first book changed my life by opening the door to an academic career. Goethe is said to have cautioned, “Be careful what you wish for in youth, because you will get it in middle life.” I am grateful for the opportunities that came with the book, but it is good to remember that (and speculate how) things might have turned out otherwise. If you let it, academia can seal you up in its own strange wordy world. I have always been drawn to other forms of work, mostly physical ones, and farming and gardening in particular. Currently I am satisfying a need to be more in the material world by taking a ceramics class (inspired by the writings of M.C. Richards, for whom clay and poetry were mutually explicating mediums).

I hope my work is evolving in the direction of greater openness, silence, and simplicity, but I know I have a long way yet to go. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called my work in Green is the Orator“always a bit of a challenge” and a recent PWreviewer of Loom said my language can be “showy” and “labored.” These assessments sting, which says they are probably hitting a mark, if not the mark. When I was working on my MFA thesis, one of my advisors wrote on the draft, “You don’t have to flash your trash so much, Gridley.” This is a really good point. Just because you can make what Dan Chiasson (in One Kind of Everything) helpfully calls filigreed language, doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That said, Dylan Thomas was my first love in poetry, and it is hard to expel the Celtic filigrees he put in my heart and lungs and ears. I just looked, and filigree comes from filum (thread) + granum (seed). A filigree is a grain-thread. This is another thing that maybe makes my language feel difficult: I took Latin for six years and am enamored of the idea Thoreau has of its tawny grammar (he pirates this from Spanish, grammatica parda) In this vision of language, words are not tools but living transplants, re-grounded in the page “with earth adhering to their roots.” I write poetry this way, with this desire for linguistic dirt. Does that make my work difficult? Maybe, but I’d prefer to think it makes it solemn, in the sense of ceremonial. Like any word ending in “mn”—hymn, damn, autumn, column, limn—the word solemnis a little spooky. The silent presence of the “n,” visible though inaudible, is a shade from another language, not alive, exactly, in English, but not quite vanished, either. Words are, as Emerson says, fossil poetry.  

After the so-called “linguistic turn,” we are no longer supposed to think of language this way, as having anything natural (or essential) about it. Language is convention, arbitrary convention. Meaning slips kaleidoscopically through shifting signs. But as process theologian Catherine Keller suggests, we can appreciate and even process the intervention of postructuralist thought without having to abandon the idea of ground, without sealing ourselves up in text. In what she calls “eartheology,” ground is understood as something other than foundation or essence. Ground is understood as ground, i.e., as dirt, the “black, organic stuff of soil that gives birth to all life,” whose molecular structure exhibits “fractal self-similarity with no self-sameness.” “At every scale,” she writes in Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth, “life is the story of complex emergence within a ground shot through with quantum indeterminacies and chaotic nonlinearities, composed of cosmic instabilities braided into tensely persistent orders…These orders can be called open-system stabilities.” That sounds difficult, but also exciting to me, and real to me. Ann Lauterbach recently published a wonderful book called The Given and the Chosen. In it she says that form emerges as a third term between Eros and Thanatos. I believe in a very earthy sense of composition and decomposition. I believe in worms, snakes, dragons, and other chthonic helpers.

 I do not set out to make difficult poems but that is often the label attached to my work. People can get aggravated—even enraged—by poetry that is perceived to be purposively difficult. One reviewer on Amazon is very enraged by Green is the Orator: “This collection of poems, probably considered "difficult" by the author, is mostly the gibberish that seems to be in vogue in academic poetry circles… I know my academic friends will say good poetry doesn't have to have clear, concise meaning or even beautiful language if it's ‘experimental.’ To this I reply ‘Emperor Ashbery and his acolytes have no clothes.’” I am sorry to get someone so agitated and defensive about poetry. I do not imagine John Ashbery sets out to make people angry, either. Though I do not identify myself with Ashbery, or consider myself his “acolyte,” I do enjoy his work. As my colleague, Michael Clune, brilliantly argues in “’Whatever Charms is Alien: John Ashbery’s Everything,’” the poet’s effort is not to alienate, but to bring the alien into familiar orbits. Whether you like that effort or not, it is not done to pain or alienate anyone. It is experimental, yes, in the sense that it is trying to see what language can do and be. Can language bring the alien home? I admire someone who can work on that question. I guess I work on that question, too, but where “alien” takes on a theological orientation.

Difficulty is certainly not my intended effect. That said, I do not sit down to make poems for effects, good or bad. I do not make poems for approval. I sit down to make them as methods of inquiry and acts of awareness. At present I still have a skipping-stone brain, but I hope as I age and concentrate I will have more of a big gray boulder brain.  

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry was there in first words, first memories, first books. I loved Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I loved the sound of blueberries hitting the pail in Blueberries for Sal. I would come home from a school vocabulary lesson repeating the word lugubrious ad nauseam. Certain words were like tootsie rolls, taking up all of my sensory attention.

Poet Donald Hall invents three mythic characters, or tutelary spirits, to account for the psychic origins of our pleasure in poetic form: Goatfoot (a muscle pleasure, a delight in beats); Milktongue (a mouth pleasure, a pleasure in vowels and consonants); and Twinbird (the pleasure of match-mismatch, rhyme, image, metaphor). These characters were a vivid part of my childhood from as early as I can remember.

As a child I loved fiction, too, and nonfiction. I remember being very attached to a nonfiction book about an otter called Ring of Bright Water. I remember reading books chosen randomly from my parents’ or my grandmothers’ bookshelves. I came from a verbally rich home that encouraged me to read peripatetically. Early on, I don’t think there was any conscious discrimination among genres. And I think my love of poetry is still very much caught up in, cross-pollinated by, my love of fiction and nonfiction. I resist purist attitudes toward genre. Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

            I am a slow writer, and a compulsive re-drafter. I keep a notebook whose entries then become starting points for translation. It’s transcription (from handwriting to computer typing), but it’s also translation. There is an interesting translation process that takes place between notebook-thinking and poem-thinking. I like that span, because it keeps the open-ended, the en plein air, in touch with the finding and making of form.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I am never working on a book from the beginning. I think that approach would be a disaster for me. Books are bullies. To let a book into the playground of a poem would be like asking for a black eye. The poem as a mode of inquiry, which is the only kind of poem I am able to write, would run for the hills if the book’s shadow cast itself across the playground. After a certain number of poems are written, after they have started to play together, as it were, then the book is allowed in. Then the book has lost its power to bully.

As to where the poems begins? In silence. In disequilibrium. In curiosity. In wonder. In praise. In superstition. In faith. In disbelief. In accusation. In solemnity. In improvisation. To quote Dylan Thomas:

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied: "I'd be a damn' fool if I didn't!" These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

            Because I myself prefer to meet poems on the page, in a space of solitude and with the opportunity for re-reading, spacing out, annotating, walking around, drinking ginger ale, sitting down, copying out, reading aloud, etc., I feel ambivalent about reading my poetry in a public setting where people are pretty much compelled to keep seated and pretend uninterrupted attention. For me, public readings feel like a certain kind of punishment fitting a certain kind of crime. The crime would be making material of introversion. The punishment would be requiring extroversion from an introvert.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I have a lot of theoretical concerns behind my writing, some of which may have already leaked out here in preceding answers. Besides literature, the two fields I raid regularly for theoretical frameworks are philosophy and religion. Theorists like Levinas and Bataille, who theorized often in the intersection of these fields, interest me a lot. William James is a persistent influence on my work. And feminist theory, particularly of an ecofeminist stripe, is hugely important to me. The current questions have to be ecological. I can’t see how they can be otherwise. They have to be political, whether you conceive of political in macro or micro forms.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

            I think that depends on the writer. I think we need writers who can be public activists, who have the ability to be polemical without degrading poetry to propaganda, and I think we need writers whose gestures are not so explicitly political, who work to make language as humane as it is has the capacity to be, even in its smallest gestures.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

            I love working with editors. It is such a privilege to have someone look at your work with such care and skill. I’ve had the good fortune to work closely with both Cal Bedientand Rusty Morrison, both of whom taught me things about my work I wasn’t prepared to see on my own. I love collaboration in general, and to my mind, working with an editor comes under that rubric.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“If you start something, finish it.” This is a piece of advice the man I love repeatedly gives to me when he sees me flitting from one activity to another and completing none of them. He is a stonemason. In his trade, this advice has obvious importance, and in mine line of work (what he calls “my trade”), it has importance, too. I think this is part of what I’m after when I talked earlier about skipping stone brain evolving into big gray boulder brain. I want to work on the virtues of slowness, quietness, and stick-to-it-ness.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

Not easy! As my skipping stone brain metaphor suggests, I do not identify with discursive thinking. I am trying to be better about that, while also keeping in mind that maybe my mind is not made for that. I very much admire the discipline of my scholarly colleagues. Scholarly thinking and writing is an art form, too. Very recently I turned in a 20-page term paper for a Religious Studies course I took while on pre-tenure leave. It is always a great learning experience to write in critical prose as opposed to poetry. A spirit of inquiry energizes both forms of writing, but in channeling that energy they make different kinds of turns and gestures. I think it was Charles Olson who said poems should be more like essays and essays should be more like poems. An essay is a different animal, though, than critical prose. What I value and admire about scholars, which I hope will school the kind of poetry I write in the future, is the skepticism they exercise on their projects. They are always asking what they are contributing in relation to what has come before. They are always stepping into the conversation carefully, never with the assumption that they have free reign to blah blah blah. I like and admire this sense of the word, discipline. It reminds me of Quaker meeting.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I do not fit the model of a scheduled writer. My typical day begins with coffee (in spring and summer) and with tea (in fall and winter). After that, it’s fairly up in the air.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Walking is the best form of inspiration for me. See Gary Snyder (from The Practice of the Wild):

Walking is the great adventure, the first mediation, a practice of heartiness and soul primary to humankind. Walking is the exact balance of spirit and humility. Out walking, one notices where there is food. And there are firsthand true stories of ‘Your ass is somebody else’s meal’—a blunt way of saying interdependence, interconnection, ‘ecology,’ on the level of what counts, also a teaching of mindfulness and preparedness.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I love this question! It reminds me of reading Remembrance of Things Past as an undergraduate. I think it is in The Road to Combray where Proust says something about “the lingering scent of invisible lilacs.” Maybe because of this passage and Whitman’s poem, lilacs betoken nostalgia for me. But nostalgia is different than home. Nostalgia is a home-pang, pain associated with a home that cannot be fully reclaimed. But I am at home right now and my home itself smells like daffodils. Spring is the season when I feel most at home, and daffodils communicate the mounting energy of spring with funny subtlety. They remind me of something James Dickey wrote, “Wild hope can always spring from tended strength.” Home should be a place of tended strength, and the daffodil, a bulb flower, feels like an emblem for that.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I think most of my books come from outside books. There is in fact an outside the text. There are classes in clay, there are paintings by Samuel Palmer, there are dinners with elders, there is mowing the grass, there is holding a cat who has just been lying in the sun, there are the voices of Sam Cooke, and Mama Cass, and Buddy Holly, there is mixing mortar, there is visiting a baby girl born last month on Shakespeare’s birthday, there are chives coming up, and conversations to be had. All of these things come into my work. Work, as Dylan Thomas suggests above, is an act of praise. The world is full of horrors and blessings. Work is a response to both, but it is a necessary cleaving, for me, to the thanksgiving side. What I call the Starbuck side. And I don’t mean a latte. I mean Starbuck in Moby Dick. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Emerson

William James

Georgia O’Keefe

M.C. Richards

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Build a tree house and sit in it.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Well, I have known occupations other than writing. I have worked on a produce farm, in an apple orchard, on the landscaping staff of a seaside hotel in Maine, in an insurance company, in a bakery and in a library. My occupations have been various. That’s what’s a little disorienting about being an academic at times.

If I could go back and do something else, I would go back and be an arborist. A really good tree doctor.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Some combination of accident and perseverance and capability and word-obsession and luck. I write when I get the chance. I do not think of myself in light of the identity we call “writer.” I do not assume it as a consistent or durable status. Every day I either write, or I don’t. Maybe I will go outside and rake leaves or plant something. Maybe I will make some time to talk with a friend who is having a problem. Maybe I will volunteer at a local park. 

I do not put all my faith in writing. I have a lot of anxieties and skepticism about it, particularly when I attend writing conferences. When I stand back from writing it can too often seem like an occupation soaked in vanity, self-absorption, self-promotion, etc.   

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

            Book:   William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience

           

            Film:    Poetry(in Korean, 시)

20 - What are you currently working on?

            A retaining wall. A religious studies term paper (just finished!). A sweater for my nephew. Ceramics. A vegetable garden. Piecing my first quilt. Being healthy. Being kind. Saying no when it is necessary. Patience. Poetry. Saying thank you. Starting things and finishing them.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Eric Baus, Scared Text

May 25, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Ongoing notes: late May, 2013

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My review of Eric Baus' Scared Text (The Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University, 2011) is now online at Galatea Resurrects #20.

Ongoing notes: late May, 2013

May 26, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) with Marguerite Pigeon

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While digging through boxes to prepare further archive for the University of Calgary, I found this note from the late Jane Rule, with the best line about John Newlove: "He bit me at a party a century ago, but I remember him fondly for other reasons." She and I judged a first book competition for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild in 1999, the timing of which meant I was touring, and ended up calling her from various bars all over Alberta. She was horrified on my behalf at the thought of anyone touring, and nearly didn't believe me when I told her it was even my idea.

In other news, we’re gearing up for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, and the pre-fair reading the night before, happening June 14 and 15, 2013. And don’t forget WESTfest the weekend before, where I’m even performing on the main stage (if you can believe it), as a tenth anniversary WESTfest special. Is there anything else I need to mention?

Zurich, Switzerland: As part of her participation in the 2013 dusie kollektiv [see the above/ground press publications by myself and Kaia Sand here, for same] as part of this year’s AWP, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski [see her Tuesday poem here; see her 12 or 20 question here] produced This Place (dusie, 2013). The poems in this small chapbook (with one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen on a chapbook in quite some time, done and designed by Lauren Schimming) works an exploration of geographies, both physical and sensual, writing poems such as “Arrival (warm and damp),” “This Place,” “Driving” and the extended travel-poem “Classified.”

The cloud forest

Cloud coats us—shoulders hands

and arms at higher altitude

trees do not grow tall

no trunk-creak in the evening

nor afternoon shadows across field

            lava-lined riverbed in the valley

ohias flowering red from lichen-dripped

branches calling bird-song closer

The poems in this small collection are constructed around physicality, managing abstract and concrete foundations in each, held down enough so as not to free-float away.

This place

This place        not belonging not mine not

any place belonging     the longing place the land

belonging me to it to longing and green and

green fields calling green      and not naming not

knowing not names nor place nor origin     asking at

market given names and dates and given market

which like butterscotch given market to place

given to memory displaced     to morning sky blue

skied given to blue and placement above and

cloud given to shadow over place sheltering place

place sheltering misplaced memory of belonging

and not    not naming this place not given to place

to shelter to memory to sky to butterscotch to blue

Montreal QC: Where have all the student journals disappeared to? It’s been, admittedly, a number of years since I picked up a copy of Scrivener creative review, produced through the Department of English Students’ Association and the Arts Undergraduate Society at McGill University. Originally founded in 1980, the new issue of Scrivener, issue number thirty-eight, features an intriguing interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti. Conducted by fiction editors Julie Mannell and Gavin Thomson, the interview focuses on Heti’s third novel, How Should a Person Be (2010) [see my review of such here; see another recent interviewwith Heti on same here]:

JM: I also found the critique very gendered. In the article I’m working on for The Huffington PostI sort of draw parallels between some of the criticism you received along with the criticism Lena Dunham received, along with the criticism that even people like Roseanne [Barr] have received: If men talk about art, there’s a seriousness to it, but when women talk about it, it’s flighty and it’s frivolous and it seems as though almost no women has the right to speak about art or even art for women.

SH: Yeah, or herself, and that somehow talking about being a woman is not talking about being a human, but talking about being a man is talking about being a human.

JM: [The criticism of] Virginia Woolf is startling similar to the criticism that you’ve received, and at the crux of the criticism, Q.D. Leavis was trying to say that, because she wasn’t a mother, Virginia Woolf could not articulate the experience of being a woman or being a human being properly.

SH: Well, I don’t think there’s anything frivolous to talk about if you’re writing a book. Like I was just reading Jane Austen and she’s considered one of the greatest English writers and it’s all about gossip and who that men in going to choose and if you think life is frivolous, then, you know.

The interview is illuminating, slightly scattered, and endearing in part for its honest questioning, as the two interviews attempt to understand Heti’s perspective on life and writing. There were some interesting pieces of fiction and fantastic artworks by Stefanie Kuzmiski, Mary McCulloch and Amy Goh, but another highlight of the issue was the poem, “from News of Andrea,” a somewhat uneven collaborative sequence with intriguing lines by Eliot D’Silva and Nausicaa Renner. Despite the unevenness, the poem intrigues. The first of the nine sections opens:

Lovely Andrea, the great explorer, sails

into the walls at Berlin.

She does not know the correct phrase for

unexpected error.

She imagines that her heart is starting to crack.

Lovely Andrea, the great explorer, imagines

that her voice is starting to crack.

She cannot see the run time error.

All she ever hears about it

Bruce Lee.

She imagines that her heart

is divided by zero.

She sails into the lake at

Chicago, Illinois.

Lovely Andrea is divided by

a machine error.

12 or 20 (second series) with Marguerite Pigeon

May 27, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Yoko’s Dogs, Whisk

≪ Previous: Ongoing notes: late May, 2013

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Marguerite Pigeon is a writer of fiction and poetry. Her first book, a poetry collection called Inventory (Anvil Press 2009), was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her first novel, Open Pit appeared in spring 2013 with NeWest Press. Originally from Blind River, Northern Ontario, she currently lives in Vancouver, where she works as a freelance editor.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, a poetry collection, made me feel like a real writer. I continue to be unashamed of it, which is all a writer can hope for. My second book is a novel. It took longer to write, and I felt that I had less facility for extended narrative, so it was harder, scarier, more confidence-shaking. All in all, a worse experience. But now I feel like, ‘Damn! Look at that! I didn’t give up!”

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poems in my 20s. I didn’t know it then, but I’m sure I took it up as a counter to my then-life as a journalist working in daily news—the salt mines of non-fiction. I was very shy about writing (my own work), so composing poems and submitting them in secret to journals felt plausible, like taking small steps.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I think I’m too junior to have a process yet. But I want one. I would say, however, that I am fast rather than slow. With my two current projects—more poetry and another novel—I’m trying to put the brakes on and think before I write. This coincides nicely with new constraints on my time, so maybe it’s just me making myself feel better. But I used to throw a lot of stuff out there that was half-baked and I’d prefer not to do that anymore. All of my writing goes through dozens of iterations, in part because of that throwing-myself-in tendency. I have no idea what I’m doing in a first—or fifth—draft. Maybe that’s why I’ve always made a lot of notes. Stupid amounts of notes.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I am amazed by friends who write a short story and find that they love one of the characters enough to build a whole novel around them. This is a depth of connection I have not experienced. My short stories feel alive, but only within themselves. The new poetry project I’m undertaking is intended to be a book-length poem. And the new novel, which exists mostly in my head, began as a novel. So I guess I’m leaning towards “books.”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like public speaking, so I’ve always enjoyed reading for others—and especially overcoming the odds by not boring every single person present. When I do read, I’m often startled to find that my work could be tighter, shorter and more dynamic. I usually edit down whatever passage I’m delivering if it’s fiction, so I guess that does tie reading to the writing process. I am also a convert to readings as an audience member. I used to poo-poo them, but I think I only cared about my own work back then. Now I go regularly and I feel like it feeds me hugely. I’m in debt to anyone who runs a reading series. I like to sit and think about the relationship between the speaker and the work. Of course, there are a lot of bad readings. But there’s a lot of bad everything.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
While I have an overriding concern with the position of women, specific questions vary book to book. With Open Pit, it took years to articulate these. I finally realized that I wanted to think about how we reckon with an unhappy past, especially when it feels like others would like to see it erased. Second, I wondered what it meant to live through a major historical shift—in this case, a revolutionary 1980s overlaid by neoliberalism. I suppose a third question was how to write about heavy political issues without making readers want to run away screaming. My newer questions probably seem slight: this book of poetry I’m writing is about fashion, which has always interested me. But I hope the book will be as much about self-fashioning, especially on the part of women, as it is about clothes.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The category of ‘writer’ is changing with self-publishing, blogs, etc., so it’s hard to pinpoint a central role. I hope I’m open-minded about what writing can do, and who can do it. But my favourite writers all get down and dirty with politics, which is risky and sometimes dangerous. I want to become that kind of writer. I went to a panel of very famous young American writers a couple of years ago and I nearly wept when they all agreed that there was little room for explicit politics in fiction. They thought that that kind of writing was an artefact of the 20th century and its various civil rights movements. This view blew my mind—in a bad way. I hope some of them have changed their tunes.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
As a lowly editor of non-creative writing—that’s how I earn my living—I’m absolutely convinced of the necessity of the editor’s role. But because so much creative writing happens in isolation, it’s easy for writers of fiction or poetry to sign up to the romantic notion of the single voice in the wilderness and one person’s power to convey Ultimate Truths that should never be messed with. This is so bad for the world. Every time a close reader or editor takes the time to read your work, you should send them flowers—or money. They allow the writing to live. They bring their intelligence to it. And they can see in it the gaps and problems that you cannot. As the writer, your privilege is to take it or leave it, but never without considering their point of view.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I like this question because I have an answer: Greg Hollingshead, who was running the Banff Centre when I did a residency there, once told me that it didn’t matter what genre or topic I was writing in/about as long as the project was hard, because otherwise, I would get bored. Not me personally. He didn’t know me. He just didn’t want to see any younger writer take on a full-length project just to watch the energy seep away. It was was probably an off-hand remark for him, but that’s basically the day I decided to write my novel. No joke.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s not easy to shift genres—not for me, at least. It’s like speaking two languages. Whenever I speak French for any length of time, I develop a hilarious francophone accent that I’m sure people think is fake. But my brain doesn’t have that swiftness to switch without transposing one set of stylings over another. I do this with writing. And yet, being from a town of 3,000 where, literally, everyone does two things—the mayor runs a bar; my mom the nurse taught aerobics—I have a healthy scepticism of specialization.  Why shouldn’t a person take more than one form of writing seriously? But it comes with a cost. People get good at things they do often, and you need to read a lot in any genre you write in, so there’s a real time limitation to how deep you can go. Also, granting agencies give people with more books in one genre more money. I think maybe it’s because multi-genre writers are perceived as dabbling. I am certainly shocked at the frequency with which I encounter fiction writers who say they “hate” or “don’t get” poetry, and poets who think fiction writers are shallow or in it for the money (!!!). None of that makes sense to me.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
How I wish I could say that I get up, make coffee, and sit down to my computer for a long session of writing before taking a walk out of my stately home to feed the ducks. In reality, I have to steal writing time, and I’m not a very clever thief. That said, when I am writing, I am not a procrastinator. I’m too much of a goody-goody, as we used to say in grade school. I like to write a lot, for sustained hours, and then smugly review my progress. So it’s weird: I don’t put writing off, but because of external constraints on my time, I don’t get to it as often as I’d like. I do prefer to write in the morning. And I really do like to take walks and see the ducks, which helps me think.  

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
In fiction, at least with straight-ahead narrative, you often get stuck on plot, on whether a character is behaving in a way that’s true to who they are, or on the quality of the writing itself. For the first two issues, I return to my notes and then make more notes. I go so crazy note-taking that I sometimes have a sleeping fit, where I will barely make it to my bed before I conk out for fifteen minutes: my brain can’t handle all those hard questions. With regards to the quality of the writing, I turn to my idols, whose finished works are impossibly good, and the writing incredibly easy or funny or devastating. I am also a big fan of research, so sometimes it helps just to go back to that supporting literature. A new idea can pop up that opens the door for me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My best friend from childhood says my house always smelled like chicken. Which is a compliment, I think. Beyond that, my spiritual home, Northern Ontario, often smells like earth warming up while the snow melts away, maybe mixed with exhaust from trucks and snowmobiles. I can really get there, just thinking about those smells!

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Film has influenced me directly. I once saw a Bunuel film that literally made me run to my computer to write. I wanted so much for my work to be that weird and beautiful and smart. Oh, how I came up short!

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Probably the genre that most influences me daily is news writing. I take in a lot of it—and not all high-brow stuff either; I’m not picky when it comes to news. I would then put fiction and poetry in a tie as my second-biggest influences.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to translate a long-form narrative—probably a novel—from French to English and do a good job of it. I would also like to participate in a writers’ festival somewhere out there in the big world, so I could meet and share work with writers outside of North America.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I was a journalist first, and maybe I’ll be one again. Other than that, I could see myself working for a social justice organization again—hopefully one like Rights Action, the awesome group through which I originally went to Central America.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My path has been uneven. In my twenties I had several “real jobs” as a journalist. Then I spent time working in the international social justice movement. These days, I take my editing work seriously. So, there’s a pattern: I’ll likely always do other things while I write. But I feel more at home writing, and I see it as the biggest commitment in my life along with my family and friends.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Embarrassingly, even though it’s been three years since someone asked me a similar question, I still have the same answer: Proust. I’m on Volume 4 of In Search of Lost Time. It’s the best and most influential work of creative writing that I have ever come across. I fear it ending, but luckily, I’m going super slow and will probably reach age 50 before that happens. Film-wise, I recently watched Spike Lee’s 4-part documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke. It’s very straight and unadorned, but the stories don’t need embellishment. I was stunned. Mad as hell.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My ‘fashion project’ is a book-length poem in which I’m trying to figure out why I’ve always cared about fashion, how to reconcile the contradictions in fashion—ie, the freedoms and pleasures that consumerism has allowed for women vs. the low-paid labour, performed mostly by women, behind a century of garment-making—and, on a more basic level, how modernity allows self-fashioning and at what cost. My ‘prison project’ is a novel about two childhood friends from Northern Ontario who encounter one another later in life on either side of the women’s penal system: one teaching creative writing to a group of inmates, and one living life as an inmate.

[Marguerite Pigeon reads with Ottawa poets Chris McPherson, Chris Jennings and Shane Rhodes on Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 7pm at Raw Sugar Cafe]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Yoko’s Dogs, Whisk

May 28, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) with Marguerite Pigeon

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TEA CEREMONY

wipers sluice pollen

from the windshield—

tea ceremony

the porch lights up

bats return to the barn

moon my companion

on the road

heading home

in the house I left last night

people are brushing their teeth

I’m always intrigued by the notion of the poetic collaboration. When it’s done well, it manages to highlight a way of writing not individually possible by any of the writers involved. This new small collection, Whisk(St. John’s NF: Pedlar Press, 2013) is composed by “Yoko’s Dogs,” a writing group founded in 2006 by the Canadian poets Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis and Jane Munro, each of whom have been producing their own individual works for some time. Given that the four of them might share the same writing space and space on the page, the narrative disconnect is one that anyone might expect, and their own individual more narrative works blend together into a form that might be seen as akin to the North American ghazal, or even the English forms of the haiku. In these poems, the four-become-one seem to favour highlighting narrative smallness, extending the small moments of the English-language haiku, and the tangentical leaps of the ghazal. Through these moments, the finest of the poems shine through, but when the lines attempt to connect too much on the narrative level is when the pieces break apart.

SMALL SONG

a cricket stops singing –

that really is Prince Andrei

home and alive

wren at the window

I move, it’s gone

the girl practices trumpet –

coyotes

in the canola

rain is my shower

I share a bed with field mice

Why fight to artificially connect what might be entirely impossible? It’s as though the collaborative fifth that is emerging from the mix is one that distrusts the narrative impulse, and yet, the group hasn’t yet learned to trust that voice, and their own intuition, instead fighting against the very thing they are attempting to create. The strength of the poems in this collection come through the disconnection itself, four voices merging into one, and through this, the best of the poems come. The tension between their own individual voices and that of the collaborative fifth is compelling, but that tension doesn’t necessarily make the best poems. Instead, it highlights the fact that this is a collaboration-in-progress, yet something that reads as far more lively than similar works by Pain-Not-Bread. The book reads as an interesting experiment, and one they should certainly further, but perhaps an idea that hasn’t quite solidified.

NOT AVERSE TO FLOWERING

the rambling rose

is not averse to flowering

among yellow leaves

Pearl gets her hair done once a week

at the salon downstairs

watch dog or barred owl

whuuu hu whoos

in the woods out back

misses the rabbit on the second try

that bobcat

Profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

May 29, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynn Xu

≪ Previous: Yoko’s Dogs, Whisk

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My profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency Salon, with a few questions, is now online at Open Book: Ontario. Photos by Ralph Kolewe.

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynn Xu

May 30, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Mary Austin Speaker, Ceremony

≪ Previous: Profile of Margaret Christakos' Influency, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

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Lynn Xu was born in Shanghai.  She is the author of Debts & Lessons(Omnidawn, 2013) and June (a chapbook from Corollary Press, 2006).  Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Critical Quarterly, Octopus, Poor Claudia and others.  She co-edits Canarium Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life?  How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

It both does and does not, of course, on a very basic level, it must be both.  It does, because for a lot of people ‘writing poems’ does not become ‘poetry’ until it is published, so based on this logic, having a book gives my poems permission to be: poetry.  But this engine of ‘affirmation’ is almost entirely outside of me and my relationship to writing.  I say ‘almost’ because it has, without a doubt, been a positive reinforcement for my self-esteem, especially when I find myself struggling elsewhere.  However, life remains a self-reckoning, and ‘having a book’ (unfortunately) is not a magical handkerchief I can wave in front of it and make the various pains of psychic life go away.  Put another way, it does not make writing itself any easier.   

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I am a terrible storyteller.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?  Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?  Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I’m not sure I can distribute writing into “projects,” although I use the word to give thinking a sense of time.  I am a very slow thinker and slow writer.  I need to live with something for a long time (in reading and in writing) before I can sift, crab-like, through the sediment.  In this way, re-writing is my primary mode of writing. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you?  Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Writing begins where understanding is weak and desire is strong.  By “understanding” I mean: constitutive knowledge.  And by “desire” I mean: a proleptic sentience. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are a part of my practice.  Subsequently, I find it strange that it is an unquestioned part of the poet’s work, as if it is an easy (or worse: natural) extension of the work itself, which it is not.  For reasons which threaten self-possession, public readings remain a sphere foreclosed from criticism.  But clearly the “reading” aims to offer a different experience from reading in private, to oneself and in silence.  Poets should not be expected to be performers as well.  But if one does take on the task, I think more should be made to offer different ways of listening and attention. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I like formal problems, because they are problems of history. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Today, maybe, the writer fights against the becoming-obsolescence of her craft—against the giant wave of multi-media displays and screens—so seeks to change it, to meet the demands of changed-experience.  The temporality of consumption is so fast and just getting-faster—and the appetite for ‘the next best thing’ is always on the tip of our tongues.  We are dissolute, completely useless, mediating mediated media.  I think of poets (and makers of creative work in general) as an “active culture” (the things advertised in yogurt or in Kombucha)—which tries to metabolize existing culture, because it cannot but completely internalize the gathering debris of its own unsuccess.   

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I loved working with Rusty Morrison.  She was essential. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

There is no reason to be mean.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

For me this is very difficult.  I need several weeks (even months) to transition from critical prose back into poetry.  It is easier the other way around. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I do not have one.  Sometimes I do not write for months.  I have not written for months.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I sleep.  I shower.  I wash my hands.  If I really want to get something done and cannot, I get erratic and buzz around like a self-distorting rock. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Funnily, the smell of plastic rain jackets in the rain.  This is not a Proustian madeleine, because it is not associated with nostalgia, but rather dissonance and a kind of nausea. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I suspect that the most powerful “influences” are ones that remain unconscious—or, cannot be delineated as a material presence as such. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Nietzsche. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to learn how to swim.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?  Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

Filmmaker, no question.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t know.  I came to poetry through visual art, so I am quite attached to the image-making faculties of language—these can be metaphor or the simple accretion of affect over time, hardening into a material presence you can and cannot touch. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The opening sections of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or blew me away.  I feel the same way about the first five chapters in Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone.  As for the film, Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublevlives with me like a strange crater.     

20 - What are you currently working on?

Friendships, and catching up on sleep.  

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Mary Austin Speaker, Ceremony

May 31, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (seccond series) questions with Mary Hagey

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynn Xu

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ORIGIN STORY

It began with a walk in the woods.

The weather became us.

We came to find the owls

who became trees.

Feathers whitened

the corners of our room

which became our winter habits.

So we invented songs

which became the animals

who abided unseen

in a house that reason left

every time we travelled

into ourselves. When we awoke

our arms were crossed

over our chests like bats.

Dreaming became us.

Only the movies delivered us

from a winter of no color.

We turned on the snow.

We turned on no.

Yes became us

like forever and sunsmell

like patterns and lace

not ever about whether

the world was good or bad

because it was only both.

This is why

we followed the animals

and the animals

followed us back.

Introduced by Matthea Harvey, Iowa City poet Mary Austin Speaker’s first trade poetry collection, Ceremony(Slope, 2013), is an exploration of celebration and ritual, and the poetics of physical and metaphysical space. Opening with short couplets of endless variety and smallness, Speaker’s poems are built through the accrual of phrases, such as the poem “The Talking that Places Make,” that begins: “As awkwardly as / always this city // will grow / after I and everyone // leave it / get taller.” Each poem exists nearly as an endless, single threaded line, broken up into phrases for the possibilities of further meanings to enter. The book is structured in four sections: “The Field of Unspeakable Color,” “To Inhabit,” “You Can Have It All” and “Numerousness.” The short phrase-lines of the poems in the second section, the twenty-part section/sequence “To Inhabit,” is reminiscent of the smallness of Robert Creeley’s poems, sans the stanza breaks. Each section flows with the stagger and slight interruption of line breaks, but without pause, and intrigue for how they might be read aloud—with a regulated slowness or a rushing speed? The first poem in the sequence reads:

this seductive calm

belies a fire

roiling there

in the darker

quiet we have

no calm no

symmetry

a legion

of fecund

reasons and

two shoulders

squaring to

protect this

gentle paradox

we’ve yet

to name

Even with stanza breaks, such as the poems in the other sections, there is an urgency to Speaker’s lines, her poem-sentences pushing deeper into her dreamy wisdom. In her introduction, Harvey writes:

How to talk about a book that delves into mystery head-on? Maybe by tacking how it bewilders (indeed, there is a poem titled “Bewilderment.”) Speaker’s short, sometimes unpunctuated lines allow you to track her myriad transformations, thing we couldn’t see without the poet’s magnifying glass: “this too / is exhaling: particles moving off / in their tiny boats, violet and charged // toward each pole…” Her lyrics revel in the personification of the natural world (trees have wrists “whitened with wind”) and words (“a flood of yes”), but also the reverse: “Our fingers grew restless // and skittered over tabletops, like mice.”

[…]

Speaker’s work offers so many delights—tiny tide pools of rhyme, the abstract made concrete, the concrete made uncertain. In “Origin Story” she writes, “Dreaming became us,” and the doubled nature of that statement is exactly what this book enacts. We enjoy how dreaming makes us look, but also how it makes us look.

12 or 20 (seccond series) questions with Mary Hagey

June 1, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Jen Currin, The Ends

≪ Previous: Mary Austin Speaker, Ceremony

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Mary Hagey grew up on a dairy farm in Southern Ontario near Cambridge and Kitchener-Waterloo. A long-time resident of Montreal, she attended Concordia University, majoring in studio art with a minor in creative writing. She has worked as a personal support worker, a housepainter, a clerk in retail books, a copywriter for a mail-order house, an English composition instructor at Concordia and an art instructor at McGill’s summer school for gifted children. She received her M.A. in English in 1994 while employed as a travel companion, a job that allowed her to see the world. Her work has been published PRISM International, Matrix, Grain, The New Quarterly, Room of One’s Own, Descant, and Rhubarb. Her writing has been nominated for the Journey Prize, the National Magazine Award, The Western Magazine Award, and a work of creative non-fiction was short-listed for the CBC Literary Award.

Her first collection of short stories is Castles In The Air (Signature Editions, 2012).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My recent book, Castles In The Air, is my first book. I’d been living a fairly quiet life and there’s definitely been an increase in events to attend. It’s really gratifying to be able to consider a block of my work finished. I’m a chronic tinkerer so it’s good to have fewer to fiddle with--for now anyway.

2 - How did you come to short fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I had no intention of writing anything of any kind. I was majoring in studio art but when I took a qualifying course, English Composition, the prof told me I really ought to consider writing, so I signed up for a creative writing course and everyone was writing short fiction and that’s what I fell into. I took a poetry course and enjoyed it, but I was more attracted to stories.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Very few stories have come easily. I generally start off with very little--a single character, something someone said, a vague idea--and I have to find out what the story is, and then develop and nurture it along, and even then it can turn out that it’s been playing me for a fool. 

4 - Where does a story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning?
I generally aim to write stories of about ten to twelve pages because, more and more, literary journals have maximum word stipulations. Unfortunately, once the stories get a life of their own they tend to grow to about double that. I don’t plan a book as such. The possibility of a collection one day is always there.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I consider myself to be a writer of stories, not a stand-up entertainer, but there’s no denying that we live in a time when artists of every ilk are required to do what they do, PLUS become dancing bears. Some writers clearly enjoy stepping into the limelight. So far that’s not me, but I have the slippers and tutu and will do my best.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There’s a saying that goes something like, Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden. It has ever been thus. Everyone is burdened whether they appear so or not, and I try to address the burden. Literature has always been essentially about the human condition, and a writer simply responds to the view from where he/she is.

7 - What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does she/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
When I was growing up I was dragged off to church every Sunday and for the most part this was an agonizing way to kill a morning. However, every once in a blue moon the pastor’s sermon was a story that, without being preachy, stirred some part of me and made me aware of the power behind the careful arrangement of words. I think the writer’s role is to take the reader inside the circumstances of others, offer a reader the sense of a larger world and their place in it.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The stories I’ve had published in journals had very little, if any, editorial input, so my only real experience with an editor was with my recent book, and it was a positive one. I’d tried to really polish the manuscript before sending it out, and apparently it was comparatively well prepared, still there were a few typos, repeated words, and even some areas that required some clarifying or development. Writers can become blind to their work after a time. It’s normal. I appreciated the comments and feel the changes improved the book. My only difficulty was working with a very real time constraint, because I’d grown accustomed to having none at all.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Hmm, can’t think of anything offhand, beyond the basics one is told early on: write what you know, show don’t tell, everything should either remark on character or move the story forward.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short story to non-fiction/memoir)?
I’ve published a couple of non-fiction pieces--in Matrix and Descant--and I can’t say I had a problem. I found non-fiction easier in that there weren’t so many options. Not that any writing is easy.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
When I started out writing I still had kids at home and was either working or attending school, and sometimes both, so writing was something I tried to fit in somewhere. But since retiring I tend to write between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. I feel something isn’t quite right when I neglect this aspect of my life--which I do sometimes.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
There’s nothing like a good long walk. For me it’s not about seeking inspiration, it’s about opening myself up to alternative ways of looking at whatever problem I’ve encountered. I live by the Rideau River and have easy access to the paths.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I grew up on a dairy farm: cow manure or fresh-cut hay. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Nature, music, science, and visual art all enrich my life, but more than anything I’m influenced by what I observe of human interaction. Bus rides around town can set me in motion creatively.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside your work?
There are a lot of good short story writers--Jhumpa Lahiri, Bernard MacLaverty would be two favourites. The writer for whom I have the most enduring admiration and gratitude would be Flannery O’Connor. The story “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is one I read and reread. I seldom read novels. I do turn to books other than short story collections, mostly in the realm of science. Jared Diamond knows a lot about humans.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?
At sixty-six there’s not a whole lot I haven’t done--of the things I find appealing, and given my limitations. I’m not ever going to master the guitar or even the French language, though I’ve made some attempt at both. A road trip through the States is something I’ve always had a mind to do, writing about the experience. I like stories of early America. Thomas Jefferson--now there was a guy with vision who had a great vocabulary and knew how to build sentences.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’ve worn a lot of hats. I’ve been a teacher, a personal support worker, a clerk in retail books, a copywriter, a travel companion, a house painter... I cannot imagine having a lifelong career. Even one that is pleasantly challenging. There have been times though when I feel spoiled rotten living as most of us do in Canada, and think that next time ‘round I’ll do the right thing and participate in Third World development.  

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve never regarded writing as an alternative to something else because until recently I’ve always done something else. Writing is an enrichment and allows me to orchestrate a small world, insert some meaning into it and me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film you saw?
The last great story I read was “Victory Lap”, the first story in Tenth Of December by George Saunders. The last pretty damn good book was Second Nature: The Inner Life Of Animals, by Jonathan Balcombe. The last great film I saw was an old one I got from the Ottawa Public Library, Kes, directed by Ken Loach.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I have a second collection of stories more or less complete but there’s polishing to do, and in the process I invariably find areas that aren’t quite right yet. But it’s coming along.

[Mary Hagey is currently touring east as one of the Fictionistas, appearing in Toronto, Kingston, Ottawa and Montreal between June 1-4, 2013]
12 or 20 (second series) question;

Jen Currin, The Ends

June 2, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stella Harvey

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (seccond series) questions with Mary Hagey

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Distance

You tell me she was shaved

& the saints don’t mind.

This is another poem about a wall.

Ambiguous as well-water,

your notes on dusk &

flexible speculations.

Pretty as theory. Like you

I’m soaking it up.

Repeat after me:

I am my biography.

I am.

The anger burns out &

alone on a beach

you’re never naked enough.

Your parents met in college,

divorced in the woods.

When all the theaters were closed—

When all the girls casual—

Who is close enough

to talk like this—

Who drowned, & who wanted

to.

Vancouver poet Jen Currin’s latest work, The Ends (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2013), is a chapbook structured in two sections that explores grief and the aftermath of loss, writing of “Who drowned, & who wanted / to.” and “Afternoon hurts—I can’t stop.” Her short lyric poems are entirely physical, pushing up and against pain from a core of confessional (at least, from the narrator’s perspective) as blunt force, punching and tearing  through the complicated emotions of grief. The rawness of the poems in the first section are underscored, also, by the numbness that emerges in the second section, as though the line between the two sections, however artificially drawn, is a line required for the sake of crossing, to attempt to leave the worst behind. The author of the trade collections The Sleep of Four Cities(Vancouver BC: Anvil, 2005), Hagiography(Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) and The Inquisition Yours (Coach House Books, 2010), The Ends weaves through perception, memory and forgetting, composed not necessarily as conclusion but the frayed ends of something torn away. “For forgetfulness we will. / We will be difficult. / As pity shrinks with thinking.” she writes, in “Capable.” Further on, in the poem “Sugar for Schoolchildren,” she writes “Water drinks water // and we refuse to listen.” In the end, The Ends are what one needs to go through, if one wishes to emerge through to the other side.

On Peace Street

It started snowing. I wanted to pour us glasses of wine and go out into the snow, to feel it melt on our faces. The first snow of the year. I told you I didn’t think the military should exist and kissed you. You said you couldn’t think of anyone but him. The snow was wet; it slipped off windshields and slushed the stairs. A city of bolted kale glowed whitely in the front yard. The black cats from upstairs slipped past our legs. The moon was falling slowly. You looked away and I lifted my glass.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stella Harvey

June 3, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 14, 2013: Artelle, Worth, Dawson, Sinaee + Casteels,

≪ Previous: Jen Currin, The Ends

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Stella Leventoyannis Harvey was born in Cairo, Egypt and moved to Calgary as a child with her family. In 2001, Stella founded the Whistler Writers Group, also known as the Vicious Circle, which each year produces the Whistler Writers Festival under her direction. Stella is a fiction writer whose short stories have appeared in The Literary Leanings Anthology, The New Orphic Review, Emerge Magazine and The Dalhousie Review. Her short story, Step 5 was long-listed in the 2013 CBC short story contest. Her non-fiction has appeared in Pique Newsmagazine, The Question and the Globe and Mail. She currently lives with her husband in Whistler, but visits her many relatives in Greece often, indulging her love of Greek food and culture and honing her fluency in the language. Nicolai’s Daughters is her first published novel.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? Interesting question. I don't know that my book changed my life except I did learn more about the tragedy of Kalavryta in WWII and was able to use this long forgotten event to inform the heart of my novel and to remind people of the great sacrifices Greeks made during that war. I began the novel with the premise that tragedies such as this impact a family (which is really where war is felt, suffered) even as they try to rebuild or start new lives. And I believe that impact is felt in each subsequent generation of the family until they are able to finally come to terms with the sacrifices and comprises made to survive. Most people I meet at readings have never heard about Kalavryta. Some 700 Greeks from Kalavryta (the men and all boys over the age of 13) were massacred by the Nazis in December 1943 in what the Germans called, Operation Kalavryta, and what was considered later to be one of the worst atrocities Greece suffered during the war. In Vancouver at one of the events to promote Nicolai's Daughters, I met a man who lost his uncle in Kalavryta. He knew the details and had visited Kalavryta, but said that his aunt didn't talk about this tragedy very much. He appreciated that someone was writing about Kalavryta. Greeks suffered greatly during WWII because right from the start they were part of the Allied Forces and while this is only one part of my novel's story, it does shed some light into why my three main characters do what they do, why my minor characters do what they do, and hopefully helps the reader understand how this long ago event still impacts Greeks today particularly given the current recession and what some Greeks see as Germany's insistence on austerity measures. Greek animosity today may have some of its roots in Kalavryta and other WWII atrocities.

Other changes to my life: I've been lucky to meet more people, hear their views about Nicolai's Daughters, talk about Greece, a country I love. In case it doesn't show, I like talking, exchanging ideas, being around people. A lot!

In my writing I'm always trying to understand the personal experience, again why people do what they do. In doing so, I hope to understand a little more about the world around me. I hope all my writing informs, entertains, and makes people think. In this way, Nicolai's Daughters is very much like my short fiction, except I've spent a lot longer with these characters in my life. Six years to be exact. But who's counting?

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction? Well, in my previous life I used to write business plans, strategic plans and change management plans (some might consider these works of fiction too). And in a previous, previous life, I wrote pre-sentence reports as a probation officer and casework reports as a caseworker in a young offender centre. But, I've always wanted to write fiction. But, I have never had time to do it. I wrote an outline for a previous novel and then was transferred to Europe for work so while it came with me, I didn't work on it until I returned to Canada three years later. It was at that point I took a look at that outline and began to write fiction. My first novel, which now sits in my drawer, was where I started to experiment with fiction. I learned a great deal about story telling. Actually, I think I relearned what I already knew about story telling, the skills that were beaten out of me in my various jobs in government and later in the private sector. I like fiction because it gives me the freedom to create characters and share some of my wildest thoughts, insecurities through my characters and their situations. I like it when my characters are talking to me, nagging me and pushing me to get their stories right. There is one part in Nicolai's Daughters that is incredibly sad for me. It has to do with Nicolai and his regrets. Even when I read this part now (and I never read that section out loud in public), I break down in a way that feels as though my heart is breaking. During one of these times, my husband found me in my office at my desk. He asked me what was wrong. I explained what had happened to Nicolai. My husband gave me that look of his that I've come to like (not that that was an easy thing to do) and asked me if I knew that my book was a work of fiction. I nodded. Then he reminded me that I was the writer and I could change it. Through loud sniffles, I said I didn't think I could. This is how it was supposed to be. I know it sounds strange, but the characters I create come to life for me and even when I don't like what they're doing, like a parent, I have to let them go and do what they need to do. Crazy, I know. But it seems to make sense to me and that's what I love about fiction, I.e., how real it is.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? Every writing project is different. Sometimes I wake up with a voice in my head as I did with a short story I wrote about a female Chechnyan suicide bomber. I could hear her accent, see her mannerisms, feel her anger and indecisiveness. And she wouldn't let me go until I got her story down. Other times, I have an idea and go looking for my characters. I feel that all my stories come to life when I come to know my characters intimately. I write many drafts and with each, I get a different view, another layer of detail, more information and as a result more insight.

4 - Where does a story usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? My stories, novels come from notes, short pieces that take a life of their own, people I meet, voices I hear both in my head or at a coffee shop. I am constantly wondering about my own motivations and the motivations of others. And when I wonder, a story isn't too far behind.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I love doing readings, going to book clubs, getting feedback both good and bad, hearing how my stories have touched others. I love people and I have to say I'm a very social person and someone who naturally likes to be engaged and on the go. I also think that I get lots of ideas from living my life, being in touch with what is going on in the world around me. Because I'm not a naturally quiet person (does it show?), I have to be incredibly quiet in order to create. It is when I am quiet that I enter the world of my characters, see them, experience what they are experiencing and get it down on paper. So as a result I'm usually up before 5. I like the dark, the stillness both in the world and in myself. It feels as though I have permission to enter another world during these times. I'm most productive between about 5 a.m., and about 9 a.m., but I usually push it to 11 a.m., if I can and then I'm spent.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? I know I will sound Poly Anna, but I believe man is basically good. I believe that people do dastardly things for reasons and I want to know what those reasons are. I want to understand them. I'm also obsessed with loss, the impact of loss, how loss informs someone's life. It seems to be a theme in all my work and one day I may use a psychoanalyst's couch to figure out why that is or maybe a story will come along that makes it clear to me. How do any of us know what the current questions are? I don't. I see the things that happen around me and in the world and I try to find some meaning for it. I do this through my writing and through discussion. I love talking, in case it doesn't show. Or perhaps I've already said that once or twice.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? To shine a light on various topics, take the personal experience and inform the big picture, tell us something about ourselves that might make us act or do something bold either for ourselves or for others.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? I loved (God, is there anything I don't love? Well, yes. Arrogance, self-righteousness, a few other things) working with my editor, particularly because she understood what I was trying to accomplish with Nicolai's Daughters. And when we disagreed, we discussed and discussed again. She was incredibly respectful of my point of view and I hope she feels that I was respectful of hers. Sometimes she agreed with me, other times, she didn't, but in the end Nicolai's Daughters has touched its readers because of  my editor's commitment to make this work the best it could be. I'm also a big believer in critique groups as a good source of caring readers/editors who can provide solid feedback and critique early on and throughout the process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? Author Caroline Adderson said to me once (I was tired and in tears at the time) that it took a lot more than talent to write and finish a book. It took drive, determination and focus. I was complaining at the time that I had no business writing fiction because I had no talent or at least I wasn't as talented as any of my other classmates in SFU's Creative Writing Certificate Program. Her wisdom made me find my determination and energy again to continue with my project. The second piece of advice came from author, Lawrence Hill who said that if I continued to fix my first three chapters, I would never finish my novel. He told me to keep going, to fix things later. I now give this advice and Caroline's advice to other writers. And sometimes when I catch myself taking out the same comma one too many times, I remind myself of the advice I was lucky enough to receive.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short story to novel to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal? I like working in short and long fiction although the latter is my preference. I've also been writing more non-fiction through my blog. It feels like I'm writing a different essay once a week. I like working in all three areas and move between them fairly easily. I learn something new with every piece of writing so whatever I'm working on helps all my other writing projects.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? My day starts at about 5 a.m.. When I'm good, I don't turn on email, or look at the news headlines. I sit down and begin work, so I can get right into my story and make some progress before my husband and the rest of the world wakes up. I write until about 11 and if it's been a good morning, I'm usually spent. I then work out or run, have lunch, work in my garden, answer emails, get to my other job (organizing the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival) and if I have any time left over, I read in the afternoon. It always feels like a packed day. I try not to work on weekends and usually use this time to catch up on other things I've left undone.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? I'm an angry gardener (and a bit of a compulsive one too) so sometimes I go outside and hack at the weeds and in that mindlessness, I find my way back to my story. Sometimes I go for a walk. Other times, I go back to the character sketches I've drafted for each of my main characters and reread them, try to add some further details, find some hint of what my character wants. Still other times I reread a previous chapter or two, try to find the thread of the story again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? Where is home? I'm not exactly sure. I love the smell of a pine forest that reminds me of my home now in Whistler. I love the smell of jasmine, lavender and wisteria that reminds me of Greece, which is the home I've missed my whole life growing up in Canada. I love (oh, God that word) smells of baklava, lamb, lentils, spinach that remind me of my parent's home and waking up Sunday morning to my mother's cooking.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? The only time I experimented with music and writing was with a piece of classical music. I can't remember where it was from, but I found that my writing took a dark, or should I say darker turn. I felt the music and my own written word in my chest thumping and exploding. I can't say I liked the feeling very much. Oh, and back to my story about the female terrorist I told you about earlier, a friend sent me a piece of music after he read the story and it really made my story come to life. That piece of music helped me edit the story further and include some of the angry bits the music brought out in me. The song was Tender Mercies by folk singer, Eliza Gilkyson. Here is the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0pXAGvjNs0

This is going to sound weird but the last piece of music I downloaded was a Greek singer (George Dalaras) singing about Greek independence in Greek. I wanted to listen to the lyrics and that moan in Greek folk music as a way to get close to the voices I was trying to find in my Greek characters in my novel.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? Life is important to my work as is reading. I love Cormac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Margaret Atwood, Alistair Macleod, Alice Munro, Nikos Kazanzakis, among so many others. I like writing that tells me something about myself and about the world. I like what I call political writing, writing that feels significant, that I will remember, recommend and reread and that I feel somewhere inside of me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Gee, how much time do you have? Live in Europe again for six months to a year, specifically in Greece, become fluent in Greek, finish a draft of my next novel, see Australia and hike in New Zealand, go back to South America, go back to Italy where I lived for two years, visit Japan, get over my fear of downhill skiing. I have doubts about this last one.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? I've been lucky enough to have lots of occupations or as my husband puts it, I had trouble holding down a job. I am a social worker by training and I've parlayed those degrees into work that had me in the prison system (as an employee, not a client), and in the corporate boardroom. I loved every job and career I've had. I like organizing (or as my husband says, pushing people around) so I think I have finally found my place with my dual working life as writer and festival organizer for the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, that I founded twelve years ago. And despite the lack of funds, the festival keeps going and gets bigger and better every year. It is hard to let go of this work that gives so much to so many others.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I did something else first. In high school, my teachers thought I was going to be a journalist. I wrote a great deal. But the chance to help others was an important focus for me so I went into social work instead. Don't regret it one bit. Met a lot of people and had a lot of experiences that will forever remain in my heart. I'm glad I found my way back to writing though. On good days, I wonder why I just didn't do it right off the bat. On bad days, I wonder if it would have been easier if I had started at it earlier in life and stuck to it. Every single day, I feel lucky that I get to do it.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? I loved Alistair Macleod's Island, a collection of short stories. I read a different story every day to savour them, think about them, understand them. Do they make great films these days? Sorry, I saw a documentary on CBC about men who travel to Thailand to marry Thai women that was very interesting. I liked The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The King's Speech, No Country for Old Men, and Silver Linings Playbook. Yes, I'm driven by characters and story, rather than action.

20 - What are you currently working on? A new novel also set in Greece. It deals with the growth of the radical right wing in Greece and the racism that has developed and grown against foreigners because of what I think are the tough economic times in Greece. I currently have four main characters, a Canadian aid worker working in a Roma camp in Athens, her alcoholic son who must come to her rescue because she inexplicably buys a Roma child, the head of the Roma family who sold his child, and the police man who not only has to deal with these people, but also his own family and their economic woes. I'm not sure where it's all going at the moment, but when it finds it's way, it will gain it's own momentum. I'm exploring how Greeks who are typically so generous and hospitable have changed as a result of the recession which I saw first hand when I spent three months in Greece last year. And I'm not saying all Greeks have gone to this darker side, but it did surprise me that even a few did, again particularly since this is the sort of hate and narrow mindedness they fought during WWII. I'm also exploring other themes, the role of the family in shaping ideas, and the relationship between mother and son, among other themes. 

[Stella Harvey reads tonight in Ottawa as part of the fictionistas tour, alongside Sheila Fischman and Faith Johnston, hosted by Mary Hagey]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 14, 2013: Artelle, Worth, Dawson, Sinaee + Casteels,

June 4, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Claude Royet-Journoud, Four Elemental Bodies

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Stella Harvey

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span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading

with readings/launches by:

Steven Artelle (Ottawa)
Liz Worth (Toronto)
Kanina Dawson (Ottawa) [pictured]
Bardia Sinaee (Toronto)
+ Michael Casteels (Kingston)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 14, 2013;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

check here for author bios and links

check here for information on the spring 2013 edition of the ottawa small press book fair, happening from noon to 5pm on Saturday, June 15 at the Jack Purcell Community Centre;

Claude Royet-Journoud, Four Elemental Bodies

June 5, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Allan Safarik, Famous Roadkill

≪ Previous: The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 14, 2013: Artelle, Worth, Dawson, Sinaee + Casteels,

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an air sentence

animals

in locus immobile

which is used to batter history

fear

nothing else

Parisian writer Claude Royet-Journoud’s Four Elemental Bodies (trans. Keith Waldrop; Providence RI: Burning Deck, 2013), collects a tetralogy of four works, the first three of which appeared previously as Reversal (Providence RI: Hellcoal, 1973), The Notion of Obstacle (Windsor VT: Awede, 1985) and Objects Contain the Infinite (Windsor VT: Awede, 1995). Collected as a single unit for the first time, Four Elemental Bodiesis a collection of lyric point-form, poems structured as a series of sketched-out sequences of stripped language. His is an infinite puzzle of impossible fragments that come together to form something whole and yet, like a series of Russian dolls, a single project constructed from a sequence of smaller units, each of which is made up of a further series of smaller units, and so on. In English translation, Royet-Journoud is also the author of “The Maternal Drape” or the Restitution (trans. Charles Bernstein; Windsor VT: Awede, 1985), Theory of Prepositions (trans. Keith Waldrop; Iowa City and Paris: La Presse, 2006) and The Whole of Poetry is Preposition (trans. Keith Waldrop; Iowa City and Paris: La Presse, 2011), the second two I’ve been fortunate enough to read, and each sparked a series of responses, much of which I am still attempting to process.

a sentence abandoned

that’s where they set out from

As the blurb on the back of the cover highlights, Royet-Journoud“is one of the most important contemporary French poets whose one-line manifesto: ‘Shall we escape analogy’ signaled a revolutionary turn away from Surrealism and its lush imagery.” It’s interesting that the publisher highlights this line that opens the fifth section of “Reversal” when the entire four-part suite of combined texts is rich with equally jarring lines, traces of perception and observation, from “silence is a form” and “repossession of the neutral / when the body is a sentence yet to come” to “distance is the place” and “behind the image / there is no further recourse / the inertia of things empties out emotion.” His entire ouvre, it might seem, is rife with phrases, lines and sentences that might spark a change in perception, each placed on the page with a terrifyingly pinpoint accuracy.

silence is a form

            ____

air that he calls imperceptible

no separation

the animal site

            ____

verticality of hunger

mother nearer

            ____

a fistful of blue in the corner

            ____

---

Allan Safarik, Famous Roadkill

June 6, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laurie Duggan

≪ Previous: Claude Royet-Journoud, Four Elemental Bodies

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My short review of Allan Safarik's Famous Roadkill (Hagios Press, 2012) is now online at Arc poetry magazine.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laurie Duggan

June 7, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: new chapbook: Mother Firth's, Gaspereau Press

≪ Previous: Allan Safarik, Famous Roadkill

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Laurie Duggan grew up in Melbourne and over the years has lived in Sydney, Canberra and Brisbane. Since 2006 he has been living in a market town East Kent in the UK and is a regular reader on the London poetry circuit. Works include the documentary poem The Ash Range (2nd ed), Exeter, Shearsman, 2005; and a critical volume Ghost Nation: Imagined Space and Australian Visual Culture 1901-1939, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press, 2001.  His most recent books are Crab & Winkle, Exeter, Shearsman, 2009; The Epigrams of Martial (2nd ed), Boston, Pressed Wafer, 2010; Allotments [1-29], Wendell, Massachusetts, Fewer & Further, 2011; The Pursuit of Happiness, Bristol, Shearsman, 2012; and The Collected Blue Hills, Sydney, Puncher & Wattman 2012.  His blog is at: www.graveneymarsh.blogspot.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I was 27 when my first book (East, 1976) came out. It was a small book and I’d edited out quite a few things that I’d keep if I were doing it now. I’d been writing for a while so it didn’t really change my life much. What did change things a lot was the first reading scene I was involved in, in 1968, at Monash University in Melbourne. The first book tried out a number of styles. I still tend to operate in different modes though I guess the most characteristic work I’ve done dates from my second book. It’s a more open-ended ‘continuous nerve movie’ sort of thing. For a long time I wrote satires and I’ve also written poems ‘including history’. I think I’ve just become more proficient, hopefully without becoming slick.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poems in 1966 but I still didn’t think of myself as a poet. I’d wanted to write fiction (for which I have no talent whatsoever – and these days not much interest either), I’d wanted to be a painter (I wasn’t any good at it), and I’d wanted to be a rock star (like just about every other male of my vintage. I still noodle on a guitar but I wouldn’t kid myself about it). So I sort of blundered into poetry, then everything else fell away and that was what I was.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It varies from work to work. Some things require a great deal of revision, others seem fully formed, but these have usually been percolating away off the page for some time.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I always keep a notebook. Occasionally I’ve worked at projects but the parameters have usually been simple ones. It’s always fascinated me that fragments of ancient poems can seem more interesting and more alive than some completely available things.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t think readings are as essential for me now as they were in the beginning but I like doing them and am a tolerably good performer. Readings are more of a social occasion for people who work in isolation.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I function from doubt, if you could call that a theory. It means I can never satisfactorily justify or even explain what I do. At the same time I know what I don’t like.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I always tend to avoid being grouped as a ‘writer’ with others involved in political actions. I do get involved in political events but as a citizen rather than as a poet. I don’t think poetry gives me (or anyone)any special kind of authority. In this I’m with George Oppen.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
With poetry the only editing done on my work centres on questions of layout and general page design. With any other kind of writing I welcome editorial assistance. Good editors are a rare and wonderful species.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
‘There are a lot of bastards out there’ (William Carlos Williams).

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I do move between these two genres. The relationship is indirect but ultimately fruitful.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Sluggishly. I’m not terribly organised to start off with. But I do keep a notebook and keep it handy. So much of what I write in it is rubbish but if I didn’t do it I wouldn’t get the good things either.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go for a long walk. Take photographs.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Eucalyptus after rain (Australia). Here (in Kent), malt from the local brewery.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Just about every sort of experience enters the work. Including books.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The list would be endless. Williams is always there. Oppen, increasingly so. Then there are my long-time companions (and compatriots) Pam Brown and Ken Bolton. But there are so many others.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Visit Portugal. And Chile.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Everything I’ve done has, more or less, been by accident. I’ve been a number of things: a librarian, an academic, a cleaner, unemployed. It’s hard to say what else I might have done.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Pure chance.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
There are so many great books it’s hard to even begin. Most movies I tend to forget within days. I haven’t forgotten My Winnipeg though.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I won’t know until it’s finished.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

new chapbook: Mother Firth's, Gaspereau Press

June 8, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kanina Dawson

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laurie Duggan

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My new chapbook, Mother Firth's, is now available from Gaspereau Press, number 26 in their "Devil's Whim" occasional chapbook series.

Inside cover image of Mother Firth's/Isaac Firth's Tavern from a larger sketch by Colonel John By, 1830.

Or, you can pick up a copy from me directly. I'll have copies available at the ottawa small press book fair on June 15.

Review copies possible, but only from me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kanina Dawson

June 9, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: Brian Teare, Companion Grasses

≪ Previous: new chapbook: Mother Firth's, Gaspereau Press

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Kanina Dawson’swork has appeared in a variety of Canadian literary publications, including Prism International, subTerrain, Descant, The Malahat Review and Event Magazine.  She has been awarded numerous prizes for creative non-fiction and was twice nominated for a National Magazine Award.  Kanina’s first book of poetry, Masham Means Evening, appeared this spring with Coteau Books. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This book – my first book – was like an opening and a closing at the same time.  After plugging away for so long with single submissions, this felt finally like I was opening a big, rusty door and managing to get more than a foot through it.  Being able to finally see my voice on paper, carrying the thoughts and lives and losses of those who experienced Afghanistan, myself included, was both a loss and a relief – a closing out of sorts of a camp we no longer inhabit.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Oddly, I didn’t think my first book would be poetry.  Based on the non-fiction pieces I’d already written, I assumed that any experience I lived would take the same form – but that’s not what happened.  I began writing these poems while still in Afghanistan – I’d jot down lines and words on my field message pad, on maps, inside book covers.  I think partly there was never enough time to write something more fulsome.  But I also think that some things are too hard, too surreal, too compartmentalized, to take the form of anything less than poetry.  For me, a poem is a snapshot of a moment in time and space that defies any other form of articulation – like a heartbeat, or that feeling of having touched something hot.  That’s what Afghanistan was.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m embarrassed at how long it takes me to write something. Starting is rarely the issue – it’s finishing, or making it good.  I write in bursts, usually as an outlet – it’s rarely sketched out in my brain before I start.  Usually I have one key line that things tend to revolve around, at least initially.  I’ll scribble down ideas as they arrive.  I’ll write until the words run out or until I lose momentum.  I’ll leave a ‘finished’ poem or piece of writing for days, maybe weeks – then revisit it to see what sounds wrong.  Typically though – and regardless of what edits I might do – my writing always retains its tone and intent, if not its initial structure.  If it doesn’t retain its tone, then it’s clear to me that I didn’t know what I was feeling when I wrote it – and it’s usually crap.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
For me, a poem always begins with something that gets felt at the gut level – a memory, an event, a key observation or moment that’s been crystallized somehow.  I’m not a meanderer.  I don’t do a whole lot of speculating or philosophizing when I write – something has to trigger it.  With this book, it was a complete vision from the start as I’d had a year’s worth of heartbeat moments in Afghanistan with which to work.  While it wasn’t easy to write, it was easy to compile – to flip from one snapshot to the next of things that had made an impression on me or others.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m so glad you brought this up – I thought it was just me.  No, I hate the idea.  It censors me from being me and it forces a reaction on people.  But there seems to be this unspoken ‘given’ that a writer must read their work.  I write because I don’t want to speak.  I want my snapshots to speak for themselves.  I’m no actor, but I’m going to have to be for some of this stuff and that’s an unhappy thought.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
While I am trying to capture war from a different, more personal perspective, I don’t know if I am answering questions so much as I am simply attempting to paint a picture of what was – what hurt, what didn’t, what I felt, what I saw, what that land tasted and smelled like.  I think the overriding question most people tend to have when it comes to war, is – is it worth it?  Is it right?  My poems don’t – can’t – answer this for anyone but me.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think it’s the job of every writer to document or capture something of the human experience.  The world claims to be such an interconnected place – and in some instances it is – but while commerce and countries might be interconnected, I’m not sure humans truly are.  I think we need stories to do that – and to have stories, you need writers.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both!  This was my first experience working with an editor – Liz Philips, an incredibly insightful and incising individual who skillfully guided me through this lengthy process.  It’s hard to hand over your creative efforts to someone who has not experienced what you’ve experienced or been to the places where you’ve been and yet who now has the unenviable task of telling you – that thing you wrote about that crushed your heart?  Well, you didn’t quite capture it...  But she was absolutely right – I hadn’t in many cases.  I had stopped short of the full story or had gotten so bogged down in my own emotions that it would have been hard for anyone reading the original poems to be able to connect with them.  Liz’s guidance and commentary were absolutely essential for me to be able to pare things down and to build other things up.  Also, I apparently have this weird issue with putting commas in, places where they shouldn’t be.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
As far as writing goes...?  “Does it fit?  Or do you just want it to fit?” 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to journalism)? What do you see as the appeal?
For me they both stem from the truth of a reality that has been lived or experienced – one lends itself more to brevity and the abstract – the other perhaps weaves a more continuous storyline.  Ultimately though, I feel that both take me to the same place – they simply use different forms to get there. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I wish I could say I had a routine, but I haven’t yet reached that amount of stability or diligence with my writing.  I wish I could say I journal.  I note-take.  Pace of life gets in the way, but I’m also cognizant of the fact that it’s very hard to exist in two worlds at once –  I get totally frustrated when I have to drag myself from one to the other, so I tend not to write unless I have a sustained amount of time in which to do it.  When and where I get that time is different from week to week.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to go for a run when things get really stuck.  For me, it’s the equivalent of ‘sleeping on it’.   It kick starts something in my brain – a recall of events or smells or whatever it was I was trying to convey before I got stuck.  I use music a lot too – whatever evokes or reinforces the mood or tone I was initially trying to capture.  I tend not to read the writing of others when I’m working on something as it distracts me too much.  I need my voice to be able to stand on its own.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Smoke.  Rain in the fall.  Brown sugar incense.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Absolutely.  I’m deeply imprinted by my physical surroundings and consistently draw from them to illustrate or contrast the emotion of something.  This was especially true in Afghanistan as the backdrop for every experience was this immensely hard, beautiful, crushing landscape that required the use of all six senses all the time.  It was impossible not to be permeated by it.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
When I’m not writing I love to read works that are rooted in realism or fact, anchored to a geographical landscape and which impart some feeling I recognize but have not been able to identify or articulate for myself.  The first book that did that for me was Timothy Findley’s The Wars.  To be shown something new and yet to have it still resonate with me - that’s what inspires. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Forget.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’d run an orphanage and raise goats.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve always been an avid reader – growing up it was an outlet and a way to escape.  I loved how a mere handful of words could be so powerful.  In high school I had some incredible English teachers that were instrumental in showing me I could provide my own outlet, make my own escape – so I did.  I also think for a lot of writers – myself included – that it’s a matter of record, of being able to say no matter what – that I was here, and this is what I felt and this is what I saw – and it mattered.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman.  I was enthralled by its mystical lyricism, its realism, its militancy.  It made me taste smoke, feel heat and hear feathers.  Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden had the same effect.  Beautiful.  I was easily hooked for a second read.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m wondering that myself.  I have a novel written – sort of written – that is gathering dust, but I haven’t had the time or energy to go back through it and start hacking away at all the parts that need hacking.  Having just finished Masham Means Evening, I am taking a breather and will likely pick things up again in the fall.

[Dawson launches her book in Ottawa on Friday, June 14, 2013, alongside Steven Artelle, Liz Worth, Bardia Sinaee and Michael e. Casteels, as part of the pre-small press book fair reading at The Carleton Tavern]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Brian Teare, Companion Grasses

June 10, 2013, 6:01 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (small press) questions with Bardia Sinaee on Odourless Press

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kanina Dawson

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Rocky, uneven, enclosed by chaparral then opening onto pasture, our sightline belonged solely to path. Deer-track lent color, umber & ochre; rock, light-struck, clips of scintilla; bark, lichen’s mimic signature. It was like having to choose—matter or the look of matter?—& getting lost in the distance before a choice. We walked there, seeing the way scat contains hunger’s evidence & residue—seed, fiber, fur, bone. Thus concentrated, vision became more. (“Atlas Peak”)

The proper use of open space on the page is a rare commodity in poems, and one that runs the entire length of Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fourth trade poetry collection, Companion Grasses (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013). I can only think of a handful of other poets who have properly explored and used the white space of the page, including the lateToronto poet bpNichol and Saskatchewan poet Sylvia Legris. There is something enviable in the open spaces of Teare’s poems, and the way he allows his lines to properly breathe, composing his grounded, meditative stretches across his self-descriptive “bioregion and microclimate” of “California’s chaparral and grasslands.” In Teare’s “TALL FLATSEDGE NOTEBOOK,” subtitled “(Cyperus Eragrostis ),” there are echoes of the Latinae of Legris, but also of poems by Vancouver poet Fred Wah, including “Limestone Lakes Utaniki” of So Far (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1991), for the note-taking lyric stretch, the narrative collage and the exploration of the outdoors. Teare’s poem includes:

A mile’s hike outside the fence-enclosed vista point

we sat hillside so inside experience I wrote the wrong date

down—March twenty-second—noticing no thought

but things : “when I think they animate my interior speech,

they haunt it as the little phrase.” Ocean-tilted, the whole

thing leaning green, coastal prairie poised pre-Spring

a prosody for seeing landscape as aural, ambient trick

to hear the ear’s eye : far bass, near treble, I saw

                                                            I heard

                                                                        low drone wind

                                                            cut by distant cliffs’ sheer fall

Stretching across three sections, the musical quality of Teare’s poems elevate the ‘notebook’ suggestion of original composition, engaging in complex polyphony, a variety of structures and the play of language. As he writes to open the near-pointilist “LITTLE ERRAND,” “I gather the rain // in both noun / & verb. The way // the river banks / its flood, floods / its banks, quiver’s // grammar I carry / noiseless, easy / over my shoulder.” These are poems that exist in conversation with a great many other works, which seems appropriate, given that the opening epigraph is from Robin Blaser, whose work is also known for being a great companion in conversation with other texts. To open the notes at the end of the collection, Teare writes:

Given that the poems in Companion Grasses actively practice what Jed Rasula in This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry calls “wreading”—a “nosing into the compost library”—what follows is largely bibliographic information about the texts that composed the “ecology of mind” from which the poems emerged. Given their composed states, the referenced texts might persist into the poems as either quoted or appropriated passages; whatever traces remain serve as evidence of an active engagement with the originals, which in all cases were inspirational in the sense that they helped the poems to breathe.

I’m fascinated in how his concerns in eco-poetics and/or the pastoral shape not only the subject matter, but in composition and the immediate language of constructing poems, deepening an appreciation of the “pastoral” as something that extends to and from the body and written language, as opposed to being separate from human consideration. As he writes as part of the author interview included with the press release: “It’s my hope that the formal range of the poems in this book bears out the experience I have as a working poet—that poetic form responds equally to content, the historical and literary and autobiographical contexts in which a poem is written, and the process of composition itself.” A particular highlight of the collection has to be the extended “ATLAS PEAK,” composed in homage to his late father, writing “Fatherless //// afternoon, very untitled death, / my father’s voice returns as echo // of my own good-bye, restoring to his absence / all lost, inaccessible inflections [.]” The “field guide” of Teare’s Companion Grasses is composed in a meditative, human language, one that deeply explores large ideas, specific geographies of California, and just what kind of effect writing, living and simply being in the world can have. As he writes in the poem “LARGO”:

Now the rain

Now the seams                        put in evening

Now the tree        seeming shakes out

of felt      unfolds cleanly

If in falling       rain names what it touches

If beneath the tree       a dry radius describes

form     steps forward        wearing its suit      of summer’s dust