Jessica Moore is an author and translator. Her first poetry collection, Everything, Now was published in August 2012 with Brick Books. She is a former Lannan writer-in-residence and winner of a 2008 PEN America Translation Award for her translation of Turkana Boy by Jean-Francois Beauchemin (Talon Books 2012). Her poems and translation have appeared in CV2, The Antigonish Review, Arc, and The New Quarterly. She also writes music: her band, Charms, released their self-titled album in 2010, and her first solo album, Beautiful in Red, appeared in May 2013.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Technically, my translation of Turkana Boy was my first book, published with Talonbooks this April [2012], and its appearance was a joy and an affirmation, allowing me to travel for my work as I had only done for residencies before. But in many ways Everything, now (my book of poems which came out with Brick in July [2012]) feels like my true first book - and this makes it that much more of a joyful affirmative happening. It is a great feeling to hold the object for the first time!

Everything, now and Turkana Boy share similar currents of wonder, longing, and magic; but they are quite different in terms of intimacy. I could say that Turkana Boy demands contemplation (of the reader) where Everything, now asks for deep feeling.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I suppose it was just there, in me, from a very early stage. I looked at the world and thought in verse or line breaks or reflective fragments. Fragments or observations rather than narratives. I think that is at the heart of my inclination towards poetry before fiction or non-fiction (though I've recently become quite smitten with the essay as writing form).

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 of the slow tribe of writing, I think - this particular book began in 2005 and didn't appear until this year, though the bulk of the writing happened over a period of about a year and a half. There is, of course, that sweet stream that happens sometimes, when poems (or songs) appear nearly whole the first time round. But that is rare and special. I often spend a lot of time editing a piece - and part of this time includes leaving the piece alone for long stretches, so I can return to it with fresh eyes and mind - this is one of the most fruitful editing practices I've found.

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 definitely love short pieces, and find myself drawn to works (like those of Jean-François Beauchemin, or Eduardo Galeano, or Anne Carson) that are given in fragments. Poetry generally lends itself beautifully to this sensibility. There is something very pleasing about short, containable pieces for me. But in the process of writing Everything, now I was always writing a longer work composed of connected pieces.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings, very much, and consider them to be, rather than a creative act, an act of culmination - I am not creating new work out of readings, but I am honouring the work that has been done, delivering it into the world, giving it voice, embodying it.

Something I find immensely satisfying (and that often happens without my conscious effort) is memorizing my own work. I once recited rather than read a poem during a formal reading, and loved the feeling of that - saying it aloud, from memory, is, like Walter Benjamin says of translation, an act that seems to give 'continued life,' in an embodied way, to written work.

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?
In this particular work especially, but in several other pieces also, I am curious about spirit - about our relationship is with something beyond the physical; about how to live most fully engaged with the sensual world and each other; and about how we carry the memory of those who have died, and whether / how a continued relationship with them is possible.

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?
In considering this question I feel the role of the writer is one of gathering, and of opening - gathering observation and sensation, and opening thoughts (her own and the reader's) onto new arenas, new avenues. I'm thinking of this mainly in an expansive sense of ideas.

I have always wanted for there to be a designated role in society for the one who feels. Just recently I expressed this to a friend, who reminded me that this is exactly what artists and poets do - so quite possibly I am in the right vocation.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! My own process of working with editors on this book was both difficult and deeply satisfying. I feel very open to hearing response and suggestions from editors I trust, and I love the light of that close attention and how it can help hone and shape my work. Because decision-making is a continual challenge for me, there were times in both the editing and copy-editing processes which I found very difficult - it was a relief to me, in those times of lack of clarity, when my editor had a strong opinion. I nearly always took that direction gratefully.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"No matter how cold the water is, you just dive right in!"

And, 'write your way to towards what you have to say.' In other words, you don't have to know from the beginning what it is you will create.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to songwriting)? What do you see as the appeal?
The process of writing songs is quite different for me from the process of writing poems, though I could say that both often begin with a rhythm - a thought rhythm, or a felt rhythm, such as when I'm traveling by train. Though I do mine my journals and poems for song lyrics, the shape of a song is quite different from the shape of a poem for me - more tied to rhyme, and sometimes more simple or direct. Moving between the two is usually just a question of what I am intending, or what is trying to come through, when I sit down to write.

For me, having different directions, different pursuits (writing, songwriting, translating) is always helpful - either just to help shift me into a new frame of mind, or to help infuse each area with something new. There are definite reciprocal influences. I'm in the exciting final stages of mixing my first solo album right now, and one of the songs on it bears the same title as my book, Everything, now.

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 try to keep a routine of beginning the day with a few stretches, a cup of tea, and forty minutes of writing. Over the past month there have been no typical days, however! I'm just getting back into it now.

My favourite way to begin - in the times when I've been lucky enough to live near a lake, or river, or forest - is with my cup of tea and a walk, followed by those forty minutes to an hour of writing. I may come back to my desk later in the day for another session, or a few. I work best in short sittings.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Walking helps greatly. Traveling in general is great fuel for my writing.

I definitely turn to natural settings. Lakes are good, and rivers are best.

Shifting between disciplines or pursuits also helps, as I mentioned earlier.

Sometimes when I'm feeling stalled, I will take that opportunity to go through old notebooks until I find something I can work on. And when stalled with songwriting in 2010, I struck up a 'song a week' pact with a fellow songwriter, Abigail Lapell - we agreed to meet once a week for six weeks and each present a new song, in whatever shape it was in. This was an incredibly fruitful process, and several of the songs on my duo album, Charms, were written during that time.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The mix of sun, pine, pink granite of the shield, and the dark sweet water of Ontario lakes.

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?
Definitely the wild.

I also love the idea of works co-inspiring each other, and so am drawn to the concept of projects that combine two or more disciplines - for example, a writer and a visual artist corresponding in their respective media, responding to each others' pieces. This has been done with writing and translation, such as in the case of E.D. Blodgett and Jacques Brault, who did reciprocal translations of each others' work, by correspondence, adding to and elaborating on the poems as they did, so it became a process of both translation and writing.

In my case, similarly, translation was great fuel for my own writing - many of the pieces in Everything, now were written in a process that I called 'resonant response' - taking a phrase or paragraph from my translation of Turkana Boy as a departure point, and adding to and elaborating on the images and themes found there.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Anne Carson. Annie Dillard. W.G. Sebald. John Berger (especially a certain paragraph in And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos). Rebecca Solnit. Ursula Le Guin - the Earthsea trilogy. Alison Pick. Anne Michaels. Pablo Neruda. Eduardo Galeano. Michael Ondaatje. Jean-François Beauchemin.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Trace a river to its source.

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 am currently fulfilling a number of career paths at once - translating, writing, playing music, and teaching yoga. When I was little I wanted to be either a rock star or a waitress - and both were equally glamorous. I have thought at times of pursuing a healing profession, too (my mother is a Naturopathic Doctor, so I grew up being quite familiar with alternative health practices).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always knew I would. Writing was just something that came and nudged me to do it. Perhaps it had something to do with being encouraged to read, and to examine language in a playful way. But what made me write? I suppose having feelings or observations occur to me in precise words - that made me want to express them on the page.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. And three recent movies: a great, understated documentary called Vernon, Florida; a narrative film called Pincus; and Sarah Polley's new documentary, Stories We Tell.

20 - What are you currently working on?
As I mentioned, I'm in the final stages with my solo album, which will likely be released this winter. I'm also seeking a publisher for my translation of a French novel about the construction of a bridge in a fictional city in California. And I'm waiting for the current of a new writing project to sweep me up. It may take the form of essays.

September 2012

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

November 15-17, 2013, Université de Montréal

Keynote Speaker: Patricia T. Clough (CUNY, New York)

Invited Speakers:

· Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand (Ghent University, Belgium).

· Belén Martín-Lucas (University of Vigo, Spain)

· Catherine Mavrikakis (Author, Université de Montréal, QC)

· Gail Scott (Author, Université de Montréal, QC)

· Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta, AB)

Organizing Committee:

Marie Carrière, Dir. of the Canadian Literature Centre (U. of Alberta)

Libe García Zarranz, 2010 Trudeau Scholar/ English and Film Studies (U. of Alberta)

Simon Harel, 2009 Trudeau Fellow/ Dir. du département de littérature comparée (U. de Montréal)

Daniel Laforest, Modern Languages and Cultural Studies (U. of Alberta)

Following the success of the first international conference on "Women’s Writing in Canada & Québec Today" celebrated in Banff last October 2012, the organizing committee is now seeking papers for a second bilingual event that will take place in Montreal in the fall of 2013. Focusing on the first decade of the 21st century, this conference will look at points of intersection between contemporary Canadian and Québécois women's writing and Affect Studies, an interdisciplinary field that has grown popularity across the Humanities and the Social Sciences in the last two decades (Berlant 2011; Clough 2007; Stewart 2007; Sedgwick 2003; Massumi 2002). Sharing the urge expressed by many theorists of affect, this conference aims to expose the multiple directions in which contemporary Canadian and Québécois women writers are contributing to the transformation of affect into an ethical, aesthetic, and political matter. Affect theorists have insisted on interrogating not what affect is but what affect does. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) and her "model of sociality of emotions," Sara Ahmed claims that "emotions are not simply something ‘I’ or ‘we’ have. Rather, it is though emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces or boundaries are made: the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others" (10). Affects then are not property; they are not owned or possessed by subjects but circulate between bodies constantly generating new encounters through spatial and temporal processes of approximation, disorientation, and reorientation (Ahmed 2004). Significantly, discussions of affective spatialities and temporalities occupy a central position in the field of literature.

By urging participants to address Canadian and Québécois women's writing in light of recent interventions in the field of Affect Studies, this conference ultimately attempts to provide some tentative answers to the following two questions: How does contemporary women's writing in Canada and Québec mobilize feelings and emotions to transform social realms? In which ways are these women writers contributing to the transformation of affect into an ethical and political matter?

Proposals, submitted in English or in French, may address any form of contemporary writing by women in Québec or Canada, and focus on (but are not limited to) the following:

· Contemporary turns in the Humanities:

 - the affective turn

 - the ethical turn

 - the material turn

· Affective communities

· Ordinary affects

· Ugly feelings

· Affective spaces and encounters

· Circuits of shame

· Loss and trauma

· Affecting temporality

· Cruel optimism

· The politics and poetics of touch

· Ethical choices and practices

· Rethinking subjectivity and agency through affect

· Affecting queer writing

· The body politic

· Economies of affect

· Corporeality and embodiment

· Interdisciplinary pedagogies

· Social movements and women's writing

· Feminism(s) today meet affect theory

We particularly welcome submissions in the following formats: 3-4 people panels, 10-minute individual papers, posters, or pecha kucha presentations.

Please send a 200 word proposal and a 75 word bio to cqww@ualberta.ca by August 1, 2013. A selection of papers will be considered for publication.

Ten Canadian Poets

►◄

edited by rob mclennan

: Rob Budde
: Stephen Cain
: Margaret Christakos
: Trisia Eddy
: Jon Paul Fiorentino
: Phil Hall
: Marilyn Irwin
: Meredith Quartermain
: Nicole Markotić
: Andy Weaver


The thirty-first volume of the poetry annual New American Writing is now available, with a section of “Ten Canadian Poets” edited by yours truly, following on the heels of other selections of Canadian poetry I’ve attempted to showcase outside our borders, including the Canadian issue of Swiss online pdf journal dusie, or the three sections I edited for Jacket magazine(on Douglas Barbour, on George Bowering and on new Canadian poetries), as well as a thread that exists in the midst of the new “Tuesday poem” feature I’ve been curating, over at the dusie blog. I’ve actually been wanting to edit an anthology of twenty-four Canadian poets for a non-Canadian publisher for years, but haven’t yet managed to convince a publisher.

When soliciting for this small section of “New Canadian Writing,” I attempted a cross-section of some of the writers I’ve been keeping my eye on, the ones from various corners of the country that excite me. They range from the well-established to the other end of emerging; they range from the experimental to the more lyric narrative. The differences between our two countries are small, stark, obvious, nebulous and often impossible to articulate. There is no single difference. We look and sound like you, but after a while, subtle difference come up, that you hadn’t quite noticed before.

There have certainly been improvements over the past decade, but on the whole, writing doesn’t cross the Canadian/American border easily, and most international publishers that produce poetry works don’t often publish the works of Canadians, leaving us aware of works by American, British and other international writers, but predominantly as a one-way system. Online journals such as Jacket magazine, Jacket2 and Lemonhound have certainly worked to improve the conversations between countries, as well as the Canadian poets now with author pages on the American Electronic Poetry Center website, but there is always room for improvement. I hope that this small engagement might provide some further interest in what some truly amazing Canadian poets have been up to, lately.

Thanks so much to Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff for allowing me this space in their journal.

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which was shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil and named 2nd finalist for the 2011 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. She is the creative director at The Lit Pub. 

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, We Take Me Apart, changed everything for me. Suddenly I had a book! I could hold it in my hands! My name was on the cover! It was magical, transformational—I had left home at fifteen to go to an arts school that I graduated from with a vocational degree in Creative Writing, I was an English major in college, got an MA in fiction from UC. I had devoted so much of my adolescent and YA life to writing that when WTMA came out I finally felt as if I had accomplished something, as if I had met my secret, unwhisperable goal.

My most recent work, Ogie: A Ghost Story, is the immediate sequel to WTMA and book two of the longer series. The narrative voices are similar (mother narrates WTMA, daughter narrates Ogie), but the books feel like different genres to me. I feel as if WTMA was a poetry project and that Ogie is more of a fiction project. But that’s just me overanalyzing things. The books’ forms are nearly identical, so all I can really say to back that up is that the language of Ogie is not as “poetic” as it was in WTMA. There’s more meat in Ogie.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t. I studied fiction for years—at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, then at the University of Redlands for a few years, then with Brock Clarke and Michael Griffith at the University of Cincinnati. On my own, outside the academy, I began to gravitate toward writers like Kathy Fish, Claudia Smith, Kim Chinquee. They were/are writing in these gorgeous, distilled forms. My own writing began to shrink. I started publishing flash fictions and prose poems. I thought I should learn more about the line if I was going to go around calling myself a poet, and I got my MFA in poetry from George Mason University. And now I’ve written a book called Ogie that I think feels more like a fiction project than anything I’ve ever written. Go figure.

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 don’t know, honestly. After WTMA came out, I felt a lot of pressure to finish the next book, whatever book that might be. But then one day it hit me: I wouldn’t let other people make me feel bad about myself, so why would I do it to myself? I adopted the philosophy that I would not feel guilty for not writing, I would not feel the pressure to write every day. I would go out there and tend to the tasks of my life and when the next book came I would be willing and ready to receive it. WTMA was written in April 2009. Ogie didn’t come until April 2013. For those four years in between, I’ve just been tending other tasks—guilt free, not writing.

In terms of process, both books spilled out quickly. I think a hundred pages of poems might take a poet a much longer time to finesse, but I have that fiction background and it powers me through my first drafts. I also fully embrace something Stephen King said, which was a draft must be written in a season—if it takes any longer it will stall out and fail. With Ogie I seem to have confirmed at least to myself a theory that began with WTMA—that I am a spring writer, and not just a spring writer but an April writer.

The final product closely resembles the draft as it becomes what it needs to be. Both books’ first 50 pages were heading toward becoming different books entirely, but then I essentially started over both times—taking into account what I knew of the characters, their voices, their situations—and revised and rewrote drafts that very closely led into their final products.

I think it helps me immensely when I am writing—only when I am writing—to fill pages and pages of journals every night and every morning. At night I journal about the work I did that day, what went wrong, what went right, what I hope to accomplish the next day. Then I sleep on all that. And in the morning before returning to the manuscript I journal where I think I went wrong the night before, and where I think I was on to something, and detail precisely what I hope to accomplish over the next several hours. The journal is a living document, and I even take notes during the writing. (e.g. The last three manuscript pages took twice as long to write today as three ms. pages yesterday. Maybe because this scene was more difficult to write. I guess it’s not really getting at the heart of things, it’s not doing the work it needs to be doing. I think I’ll cut the first two pages and start rewriting after the third. If what I’m trying to say is that it’s difficult to be a ghost in this world, unable to access the living except with the help of the narrator, then the narrator has to find a way to communicate this. She should touch the ghost, or try to. Let her philosophize about what it is to be a ghost, untouchable, and what it is to be among the living, untouched. Begin with an attempt at touching, the sadness of pretending to be touched.)

4 - Where does a poem or 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 used to write short pieces. I don’t anymore. Now, when I am writing, I am always working on a book from the very beginning. The only exception is for solicitations. If someone asks for a short piece I’ll try to write one.

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

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’m interested in form. I’m always interested in having the work lead to questions about the function of white space. I’ve been reading some YA verse novels and cannot honestly understand the decisions behind the line breaks in some of the most successful bestselling ones out there. I hate to say it, but the books feel lazy to me. I wanted to fall in love with those books. I hope people don’t read my verse novels and think I’m being lazy. I take seriously the prose poem’s mission to be subversive to prose, subversive to poetry. Likewise, I hope the verse novel is subversive to verse and subversive to the novel and what it should/could/can be. I hope I am disrupting the expectations we have when we come to something that is labeled “verse novel,” but that at the same time I also deliver some pleasurable rewards for the risks I am taking. That doesn’t seem to be happening in so many of the other ones out there. Which, I’ll just add, is fine because what they do seem to be doing, that I don’t care a hoot about, is creating these YA characters with realistic YA problems and giving these YA readers these books with a whole lot of white space to help them just read read read and flip flip flip the pages. When I was a YA, all I ever wanted to do was read and flip pages. I didn’t care about “literature,” I just wanted a character I could relate to. So I get it, you know?

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 write, right?

I don’t really get the question. And I really don’t want to attempt to answer it. It’ll just make me sound foolish.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. God bless editors everywhere.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Michael Griffith told me once that any thing that appears in a story, any thing that gets a physical description or even the merest mention, can be made stronger by giving it some emotional reason for exiting—so that the thing does double duty in the work.

(e.g., from a chapbook of mine called Portrait of a Modern Family: The coat was fur and belonged to her mother. It might have been raccoon. She wasn’t sure. One of her mother’s lovers gifted the coat and killed the furred things himself. Her mother liked manly men. Most hunted. All wore a uniform of some kind. Official men her mother liked. Men who wore flannel on weekends. The teacher was the opposite. She liked a man with a sensitive side. Whose job required no uniform. She would never let a man who took the lives of animals with his hands touch her with his hands. She was a vegetarian. Wore the coat because it was her mother’s and because it was warm and made her uncomfortable. All of it. The raccoon skins. The thought of men’s hands on her mother. The thought of men’s hands on her. Her mother’s many lovers. Her own lack of lovers of late. The warmth of the coat. Yet she delighted in the discomfort. At the comedy event she would laugh it off.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It’s all the same, isn’t it? It’s just words and an attempt at communicating some thing. People who don’t get this, don’t get that writing is writing, whether poem, story, essay, Tweet, love letter, or whatever, are trouble in my mind. Why the need to separate, block off, enclose? Carole Maso says it best: “Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves. . . . I love most what the novel might be, and not what it all too often is.”

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?
Coffee, email, as much sitting in the sunshine as I can get, reading, and then whatever else there is that actually needs to be done.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m either writing or not writing. When I am not writing I am simply just not writing. I have no need for inspiration. When I am writing, there is no excuse for stalling. I turn to the journal and work it out fast.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fog for my first home. Freshly mown grass for my second home. The ocean for my home away from home and where my heart is.

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?
Probably?

Music more than anything else I think.

This is a hard question. When I’m not writing I’m probably feeling and absorbing all the influences of all the life that is happening around me. When I am writing I am basically only writing, or journaling while trying to make time to eat and sleep, and balancing in whatever work actually needs to be done (job, etc.).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
All of them. Let me read all of them. They are all important, always, at all times.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Live in a home from which I can see and hear both mountains and ocean.

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?
Dancer while physically able, then choreographer.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The need to communicate. I had no other way.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Madame Bovary, Lydia Davis translation. Life of Pi.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Nothing. Ogie is done. I’m back in a not-writing period and I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

I've three little (connected) essays, "On writing (and not writing)," now online, the first at Open Book: Ontario, the second, at the ottawa poetry newsletter as the third in the "On Writing" series, and the third, again, over at Open Book: Ontario.

seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics #7

Victor Coleman
from Miserable Singers

Jennifer K Dick
Invisible Collisions: Considering Susan Howe’s Reform of the Poetic, Critical and Autobiographical Essay

Nicole Markotić
ds / junct: in/accessible poetry & the problem body
    (originally presented at VERSeFest 2013)

Gil McElroy
Chance and necessity
    (originally presented at VERSeFest 2013)

rob mclennan
Some notes on Mark Truscott’s Form: A Series

Sandra Ridley
Testamonium


seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics comes out as the natural extension of the eight issues of Poetics.ca edited by rob mclennan and Stephen Brockwell. Highlighting the diversity of voice, style, practice and politic, seventeen seconds continues the resolve to provide a forum for dialogue on contemporary poetics, with a focus on Canadian writing. Over the past two decades, the amount of critical writing published in print literary journals on Canadian poetry, specifically, seems to have decreased dramatically, but slowly returned through a number of online journals. seventeen seconds simply wishes to help strengthen the dialogue and the ongoing conversation about writing through publishing new writing, and conversation about new writing. How else are we supposed to learn anything, unless we keep talking?

rob mclennan: editor

roland prevost: founding managing editor

mdesnoyers : design & (re)compiler

Mathias Svalina is the author of three books, most recently The Explosions from Subito. He is part of Team Octopus.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
My immediate impulse was to say something pat & self-deprecating: it made me responsible for the death of more trees; it made me tangibly complicit in the grandly entitling & pacifying self-satisfaction of the American left. And while those are both true & things I think, my friend Jake died two days ago & I don’t feel so insistent on my own glibness right now.

Jake wasn’t an easy person for me to get to know deeply, but I have always felt deeply that he was a good guy. He always wanted to help, to support, to instruct, to extend. He was a smart & omnivorous editor, generously supporting writers of a wide variety of aesthetics. His poetry, in my opinion, was the beacon for what Southern narrative could do in the 21st century. It returned to history, but always from the present tense. It demanded presence of history. It demanded scope from a reader. The civil rights movement was present in the moment of reading that poem, not as in a documentary, but as in a scalding. He was devoted to this weird shit we do that so often feels to me like a mass-willful-delusion, as if everyone is publishing their poems, editing their journals while checking out the person next to them from the corner of their eye just to see if she or he is actually joking. Jake was not joking. His work was a moral commitment. I admire his poems & I love many of them. I’m sad & I miss him, not because he was so close to me that the loss of him actively disrupts my life, but because his voice was something I had, without being aware of it, come to count on. He, along with countless others, helped me to invent a sense to endure the inherent senselessness of the fact.

And while I met Jake before I had a book out, I never would have met him if I hadn’t devoted myself to poetry. The publication of my first book did not change my life. Sure, I must have briefly felt more validated to have a tangible product, but it didn’t solve or satisfy anything. It resulted in invitations to read at events to which I wouldn’t have otherwise been invited, which is awesome & I appreciate. But the joy of these events to me is not the buoying of me or my work, it’s the experiences we share in them, the pleasure of spending time with so many wonderful people, hearing their work, understanding their different-from-my-own vision of the world just a bit more clearly.

Perhaps the most rewarding effect of having books out in the world is that occasionally people will contact me out of the blue & we’ll become friends. Some people often think they’re clever in maligning poetry as a self-satisfying scene of poets writing for other poets, but I write for my friends. I write for Zach & Josh & Noah & Sommer & Heather & Sara & Julia & Danielle & Dave & Oren & Julie & Robert & Jon & others. I presume that anyone who likes my writing would probably be a friend. Recently this writer Eric emailed me out of the blue & we got to chatting & I ended up reading with him in Providence & having an amazing time & immediately thinking of him & me as part of the same team now. It was kind of cool for a while to have a fan, but now it is better to have a new friend. Having my voice out there, connecting to other people in this way, it’s my tourniquet.

Books are a form of capital in our inverted economy, sure, blah-blah-blah. And I can pay what bills I can pay because I’ve published books. Yes. But the books, the poems even, are a means to an end. I don’t care what a poem I write does for me & I don’t care what a poem does for the writer. I don’t give a shit if I’m reading a poem out of the Chicago Review or a hand-stapled chapbook. I am sharing an experience with a world that is objectively outside me, an experience that would not have existed without that act of reading that poem, without that object of that poem. And having a book out allows me to extend this into my daily life. I mean, I am given the honor of working with writers at Universities as they struggle to figure out their own worlds & minds through & with writing, with bits of toner burnt onto pulped trees, with the expelled pollutants that fuel the servers & batteries of these computers. I’ve spent the last sixteen weeks with eight of the most interesting, thoughtful, committed writers I’ve ever met. They have allowed me to rethink, to further-think, to test & resist my understanding of not only the product of poetry but the ideological, emotional & ontological process of choosing writing to occupy one’s time with while alive. And I feel that the trade-off I made every day with them, the trade-off between me & the world that I fuck up simply by being alive as me, I feel it is somehow worth it. Like, fuck! Christ! Shit! Thank you, Michael Dumanis, for publishing my first book & allowing me to do the things I do. This is how I make a meaning of my life.

By which I mean, I wouldn’t have met Zach if not for poetry & he's exponentially bettered my life simply by being my friend. I wouldn't have met Julia, who has been the most important person in my life. I wouldn't have met Jake, Josh & Noah on a weekend in Lincoln, Nebraska when the temperature dropped below negative ten, when the pipes in my shitty apartment froze, when those three came to town & read poems for a bunch of strangers for no money & only because it was a gift & a gift they wanted to give, when about forty people packed into the Tugboat Gallery & had that otherwise-impossible & indelible experience.

By which I mean, I would not miss what I miss now that Jake is dead. And I would not be able to keep his voice with me as I remain alive.

1.5 - How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, I feel a little weird following up with something pragmatic, but here goes. Destruction Mythset up a form of serial poetry that I continue to work in. I write in another mode that is more open & metaphor-driven—the long poem in my new book, “Above the Fold,” is in this mode, as is a manuscript I’m working on called The Wine-Dark Sea.

So a lot of my work continues in this little absurdist narrative strain, people installing McDonalds into their bellies & whatnot. Readers & editors seem to like this style & it’s easy to write this way. I can write like five or ten of them a day when I’m having a good day. It’s easier than staying awake. But I hate this ease & consequently I keep trying to make it more taxing. Right now, the way I think about it is that I want to be embarrassed by every poem I write. It should reveal too much, attempt too much, be too nonce, too stupid. I love Edson & this obviously shows in my writing. I love his work’s commitment to its goal, that you can put a poem of his from last year next to one from thirty years ago & they seem of a piece. But I feel like I would not warrant continuing if I were to continue to write the same entertainments. So maybe my first book set a base-line & thereby a way to measure myself against that.

It also set up a fear in me that people would only be interested in reading my poems to the extent that they are entertaining & candied. In The Explosions, my new book, I have poems that are goofy & (I hope) entertaining, but I also have a 70-page poem that is (I hope) demanding. I wonder if people will be all “Why would I turn to you for this kind of stuff, Mathias?” Mostly because I don’t feel like I would turn to me for that kind of stuff. I guess I’m simply wondering if people only accept me to the extent that I service them.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I was that pretentious high school student scribbling away in composition notebooks, wanting to read you a poem while we were all drinking Mickey’s Big-Mouths. I can’t honestly recall what appeal it had for me, but I always remember writing poems. I can speculate that it must have had some sort of emotional satisfaction for me. Perhaps coming out of a deep faith in Catholicism the song of poetry appealed to my desire for prayers. Perhaps my mind wanted something that was beyond my understanding. But probably it was that I thought “writer guy” seemed like a kind of cool that I thought I could, as a fat, unattractive kid with no self-confidence, actually accomplish. And, of course, poems are easier to write than stories.

As a kid I was a fantasy novel freak, checking out like a dozen books from the library each week, anything with elves n shit, anything with hazy paintings of big-boobed women in revealing fur cloaks. I kind of wonder why I never tried to write something like those. Maybe it wouldn’t have the same level of escapism if it came out of my mind. Maybe that those worlds are comforting for exactly their ideal formalism, with Tolkien being the originating perfect sonnet, & I’m not comfortable in writing mere obedience. 

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 tend to write quickly & copiously. I have a line in a poem that says my problem is that I’ve never not been able to write. First drafts usually look roughly similar to final drafts. More than transformative revision of individual poems I tend to overwrite in a series & then edit out poems. For instance in a manuscript I’m working on called The Wine-Dark Sea, I wrote 200 pages with the goal of cutting down to 88 pages by the end of the process. That seems to be my process of late.

And project ideas (I want to say “project” as often as possible to register my disagreement with Dotty’s Poetry is Not a Project pamphlet from Ugly Duckling, love her work, adore her vision, adore her, disagree with how she says most of what she says in that) come up pretty frequently for me. If I can finish this one I’m working on in the next week or two then I will have finished six manuscripts this year & I have oneother one I’m working on & another planned out. Projects start usually from jokes with friends that I want to keep joking within or things about which I am inchoate.

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?

“Book.” I like having a project because it allows for far more freedom than discrete poems, in which I have to establish their own rhetoric & function every time. So all I have to do is sit down at my computer & begin writing.

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 have anything to do with my creative process. I like doing readings, more for the chance to be around people who care about writing, which ties into what I’ve said above. And I’m a fan of public rituals. I love the concert, the protest. I love the rhetoric of a classroom. I was raised Catholic & part of the importance of mass is getting the incense smoke in your hair, in your clothes & part of it is checking out all the other people in the church. 

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 don’t see how the current questions could be different than the past questions or the future questions, other than in gradations of implementation. There is a finite set of things that humans do. And anyway I don’t think the writing of poems answers any question worth asking of a poem. If Dickinson had answered anything, why would she have written the same two or three poems over & over again a thousand times?

The reading provides answers. Theory is a reading practice & one can find the latest hip thinking in the Marie de France or Aesop or the Eddas as readily as in the poems of some self-styled vanguardist. Which is not to belittle theory & contemporary philosophy, but to belittle the air of gloating self-importance that habitually accompanies its use, whether Pinker or Baidou, by writerly types. I get as bored of people who think the Sokol hoax was interesting as those who think it was wrong.

I have theoretical concerns & urges to my writing. They matter deeply to me. But it feels boring to talk about these things. Why would people care what I think of my work? I’m an idiot.

Beyond mere writing, though, I believe in absurdism as a guidance for social presence, in giving equal authority to the shoe hanging from the telephone wire as to the mailman as to the dead root below the dirt below the asphalt. Which means I disagree with everything I believe; so I try to believe as much as possible. But like inconsistency, believing is hard work. You have to accept that you’re not smarter than everyone else. This seems difficult for people who get into the arts, academia, & other cultural hierarchies.

Disagreement is a kind of belief, via respect. Like I’m an atheist but I respect religiosity. I don’t agree with liberalism or conservatism, but I respect them both. Disrespecting another’s intellectual practice is an act of supremacy, of presuming that the bullshit electricity in your mind is inherently superior to the bullshit electricity in another’s mind. But then again, recognizing when another’s practice is supremacy is supremacy as well & I’m all for that. So I don’t know. I’m probably all wrong, but maybe wrong like that early Skrewdriver song where he sings “You’re so dump.” At the very least I am certain I’m not right. 

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 don’t see the role or responsibility of a writer as being any different from a non-writer: try not to fuck up the world, don’t impose violence, resist supremacy, be self-aware. I pretty much fail at all of these, but roles should be ideals.

This is not quite the answer to the question you’re asking, but I feel it’s one implied: in my opinion a writer has no inherent metaphysical, spiritual, political, etc-al difference from a non-writer. Any time I hear someone in a Q&A say “as a writer I” I think about how people don’t say “as a plumber I,” or “as a bus driver I”; writing requires a set of skills, some inherent & some learned, just like any other vocation. I love Shelley intensely, but that unacknowledged legislator stuff makes me want to punch him in the dick.

Writing is political how a reality tv show is, how the choice between granite or quartz countertops is: they’re consumption, entertainment. One of entertainment’s implicit arguments is what it means to entertain—how we create hierarchies of importance & meaning. Another concerns what one attends to for entertainment—the self in relation to a socio-political fact. These arguments are obviously political. But arguments are merely one minor political step. I might read about atrocities in Syria & then write poems about atrocities in Syria to entertain myself & others, but this act does not make me more moral, especially if all the while I am participating in a culture & political entity complicit to those atrocities. This kind of entertainment does, though, delineate taste. That taste & how it inspires may allow for action in the world, but a poem is a consumable. Poetry is inherently political, just like how Funyuns are.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Neither, but I find it delightful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Do no harm.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m not a scholar or a very sharp thinker. And that makes critical prose excruciating for me. I can usually write one or two reviews a year. For some reason I can’t write a simple describe-&-assess kind of review. I get all anguishy & emo. 

I wish I could write critical prose with consistency. For selfish reasons, writing critically allows me to understand my own gut reactions on a deeper level. But beyond that I think it is vital to the larger poetry community to have public reactions to work. I mean, those standardized 600-1000-word reviews are fine as a dissemination of the ideas of a book (or a display of the reviewer’s ego) & I read them & am generally happy about them. But I crave deeply invested, personally committed reviews that attempt to push the book as far as a thinker can. It’s an act of love & generosity & bypasses the dull & nostalgic “should there be more negative reviews” argument that pops back up every six months or whenever some mid-career poet wants attention. I like books for the exploration that they allow & every book allows an exploration.

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 don’t have a routine for writing, but I write just about every day. I can write anywhere, at pretty much any time. I don’t got much truck with “inspiration” as a generative device. Writing is a task for me. It is also for me my most effective form of escapism. When I’m working on a poem I escape the crushing pain of existence. I can think I’m awesome. Then I’m done & I remember that I just used a bunch of my time for a work that in no way helps the world. I guess that’s my routine, an addicted vacillation between pleasure & self-loathing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
As I said, I write pretty constantly & have never felt writer’s block. But I do like noise when I’m writing: radio on, record player going, a half-dozen books open within reach, friends in the room also writing & chatting & reading out loud from books on their laps. I like any interruption to my thinking. It is a more accurately me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

None.

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?

It’d be my goal, I guess, to let everything in my life influence my writing: the metal shows, teaching, the mountains, therapy, friendships, alleys. But that’s a bit grandiose.

The paintings of Mattias Gruenwald& Amy Cutler pretty directly influence the more fabulist writing I do. Medieval iconography. Black metal bands like Drudkh, Agalloch& Nightbringer. Julie Mehretu’s sense of cosmopolitan layering guides a lot of my thinking about the social spaces of art. I like the form of my fan.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh man. I’m just going to do the lame-o listing thing here: Dickinson, Celan, Hopkins, The Odyssey, Meister Eckhart, Philip K Dick, Zachary Schomburg, Neidecker, James Tate, Jabes, TR Hummer, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Grimm’s, Larry Levis, Nathaniel Mackey, Duras, Samuel Beckett, Brian Evenson, Stein, Derrick Jensen, Cixous, Levinas, Alice Notley, Shirley Jackson, Countee Cullen, Glissant, Dante’s Paradise, Artaud, Lara Glenum, Mina Loy, Selah Saterstrom, Brandon Shimoda, Inger Christensen, RI Moore, Eco, Baroness Elsa, Bernadette Mayer, Caroline Bergvall, HD, Schopenhauer, Ursula K LeGuin, David Foster Wallace, Tzara, Buber’s collections of Jewish folklore, Cathy Park Hong, Daniil Kharms, Harryette Mullen, Samuel Delaney, Vallejo, Zukofsky, Christina Rossetti, Spenser, Donne, Kafka, Reginald Shepherd, Tan Lin, Russell Edson, Joshua Clover, Myung Mi Kim, Anne Carson, James Schuyler, Roberto Tejada, CS Giscombe, Jay Wright, Mei Mei Bressenbrugge, Hannah Weiner, Mary Ruefle, Mayakovsky, Christian Hawkey, Noah Eli Gordon, CD Wright, Fred Moten, Arthur Sze, Karen Volkman, Brenda Hillman, Elizabeth Willis, Fanny Howe, Ed Robertson, Dan Beachy-Quick, GC Waldrop, Tomaz Salamun, Sawako Nakayasu, Shakespeare, Joshua Wilkinson, Shelley, Allison Titus, Heather Green, Justin Taylor, Heather Christle, Julie Doxsee, Rebecca Farivar, Amy Lawless, Jenny Zhang, Cindy King, James Gendron, Abe Smith, Sara Renee Marshall, Boccaccio, Julie Carr, Eric Baus, Andrea Rexilius, Julia Cohen, James Wright, Robert Penn Warren, John D’Agata, Laura Sims, Roger Zelazny, The Bible, NH Pritchard, Lisa Robertson, Catullus, Auden, Jules Verne, Molly Gaudry, Agamben, Chaucer. I could go on.

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

I would like to chase down & kill a hyena with my bare hands, rip its skin from its flesh & roll around on the carcass until I am covered in hyena blood. But I probably won’t be happy with myself when I do this.

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, my occupation as in job is teacher not writer. Writing is a vocation for me that on occasion renders a little money. I’m pretty happy being a teacher. I love working with students & their writing, from poetry workshops to intro-English composition classes. I think I’m ok at it.

If I hadn’t been a writer? I don’t know. As well as I can remember I’ve always wanted to be a writer. In college for a while I was trying to get on a track for becoming a medievalist, but I’m a terrible scholar & have no knack for languages. After college I worked in marketing for a while & I could have continued along that track & been pretty solidly middle-class at this point. But that was pretty obviously a no-go for me on a personal level. I liked wiring houses with my brother when I did that, but I might have liked it because I never thought it was going to be my life. I’d maybe be working in a library or a bookstore or a public assistance center if I hadn’t become a teacher. Maybe some unidentifiable middle-management position.   

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

Nothing made me. I must have received some sort of validation, either publicly or in my invention of myself, from writing. It must have satisfied some desire. I try to do something elses at times, but by this point in my life I pretty much have no skills other than teaching & writing for a small niche market.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m not sure if books can be “great” for me any more. I try to love what I read. Like Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel Zone One, I read it recently on the plane & it felt like it was dashed off as compared to his other work I’ve read. But I’m not as interested in being able to say it’s no good as I am in trying to find what was beautiful in it. And there are sentences that are glorious & the attempt to understand the nature of the social system as one of self-repression is interesting in relation to the explosion of the id that zombies seem to represent. I don’t think it came to any answers, but why should it? Just because I wanted some?

So recently I’ve read a lot of books I’ve loved: Lilli Carre’s Heads or Tails, The Mabinogion, Jessica Fisher’s Inmost, HD’s Trilogy, Christopher Stackhouse’s Plural, Samuel Delaney’s Babel-17, Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Noah VanScriver’s Hypo, Giovanni Singleton’s Ascension, Lucille Clifton’s Collected Poems, Sylvia Legris’s Nerve Squall, Brandon Shimoda’s O Bon, Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology, Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird, & more, & they are all great. Which is to say that I don’t have a way of defining great other than “I read it.” It is not the book’s job to make me love it. It is my job to figure out how to love the book.

As for film, Jeanne Liotta put on a night of film poetics at the Counterpath Books space recently that was amazing, hilarious, disquieting, & entertaining in a way that satisfied me more fully than a Hollywood movie. But then again I thought Avengers was great & that Red Dawn remake too. I really loved Wreckmeister Harmonies& am looking forward to watching more of Tarr’s films. I found the series Elsewhere great in how it was beautiful, troubling & beautifully self-troubling. I like watching the Inspector Lewis BBC mystery episodes, as it makes me relax in a way that books never make me relax, not even page-turners, & that is great.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Writerly-wise, I’m writing a book called I Was A Teenager, which is about being a teenager. I’m writing a book called Hail Satan, which is about accidental cyborgs. In the new year I’m starting a book that’ll either be called Do You Know Me? or The Gaping Hole, which will be a biography of everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life. I need to edit the manuscripts I completed this year & also a collection of short stories I have called Comedy.

Teacherly-wise, I’m developing a class built around the rhetoric of guns in America & another built around the rhetoric of contemporary songs.

Personal-wise, I’m trying to be a good person, but that is difficult, as I don’t think I can be.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

I've a new poem, "Origin story:," now online at The Wonder Book, thanks to Andrew Burke.

Melanie Schnellgrew up on a farm in southeastern Saskatchewan and has lived in Regina, Vancouver, Toronto, Boston, Colombia, Thailand, Kenya and Sudan. She spent the better part of one year living in South Sudan in the midst of their civil war, where she did research for While the Sun is Above Us, her first novel. Melanie has written for television, has had her fiction, poetry and non-fiction published, and has won awards for her poetry and fiction. Melanie currently resides under the wide blue skies of Saskatchewan with a rambunctious toddler, where she teaches and writes.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I guess my first novel just let me know that I could actually complete one and get it published! So there is that knowledge, while writing the second one, that there is a chance I can do this again. I am working on my second novel now.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Before my novel was published I had published poetry and had also won an award for poetry. But since I’ve just been working on the long-form novel for some time, I guess I don’t feel like I have time to compose poetry as well. And I miss it. But when I first began writing, I wrote poetry, primarily. This was in my twenties. I think I was engaged more deeply in the world then, or at least I could access a depth that I find harder to access now (except when I’m writing -- ideally). Maybe due to maturity, encroaching cynicism, more responsibility. I don’t know. But I needed to write poetry. I think it balanced my experiences, then.

Writing fiction grew from the desire to expand upon a revelation or thought or idea that was working away at me, and the longer story began to be the only way I could do that. I wanted to give life to the characters speaking to me; it felt like they wanted and needed to come alive on the page in a long story.

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 seems to take forever! An image comes, and then I think about it. And then I write, and then I think some more. And then I study fiction and writing in a similar vein to how I want to tell my story, and then I write some more. And then I study structure and hammer out an outline, and then I write some more. It is a slow process. My work tends to come out of copious, scattered notes and scenes.

4 - Where does a poem or work 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?
It usually begins with an image, and a strong feeling associated with that image. I tend to work on a book from the very beginning --  when that image comes to me, I generally know immediately what form it will take, whether it will be a poem or a book, etc. But while working on a novel, I tend to focus on small sections and then they come together near the end to make a whole book.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy readings. I like that engagement with the public. Readings aren’t part of my process, however; they feel like a separate entity altogether. The interaction with readers and the public is simply an extension of the story after it’s been published. It’s part of the continuing life of the novel. I think stories continue to evolve after their publication, through the interaction with readers. And that part is out of my control. Right now, I’m working on my second novel, and my head is in a totally different sphere than where it was for my first book. And yet I’m still doing promotion for my first book. I think it’s essential for an author to be able to traverse these different worlds in their brains, all the time.

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 don’t know if I’m trying to answer questions so much as explore solutions to all the obvious, hard, constant questions surrounding us. I’m trying to move through difficulty; I’m trying to go to a very deep place and come forward with something transformative, for me and the reader, that has to do with being human within the larger scope of the world and humanity.

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?
Whistleblowers, truthtellers, seekers, explorers. Writers tend to be, and should be, people that make others uncomfortable with their observations and ways of telling, people that irritate and awaken, suggesters of other ways of being and doing and thinking in the world. A writer is someone who makes you think of something you’d never thought of before, who offers a different, transformative human experience.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both. It is always hard, I think, to see the edits once they come back. That is lying-in-bed-and-under-the-covers time. For at least a few minutes. But then you begin to recover, and come to back to it, and see that (hopefully) the editor’s been (mostly) right. A good editor is the very best thing a writer could ever find. Not only do they make the work better, but a good editor is someone you can learn from. I was blessed with excellent editors for While the Sun is Above Us– Don Lepan, Robyn Read, Sarah Ivany.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Dorothea Brande said that a writer must make their unconscious and their conscious become allies. I’m sure this is true of any artist. It’s important for the conscious part to be the elderly protector of the unconscious part. Utilize the unconscious while in the throes of writing; utilize the conscious for editing, decisions, and your workaday life. (This would include reading rejection letters!)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to poetry to non-fiction to writing for television)? What do you see as the appeal?
Though I mostly consider myself a novelist, currently (though I do keep thinking of going back to writing poetry!), I think that everything that comes to me as something that is demanding life on the page has in its embryo a specific, inherent form, and it is up to me as the writer to find out what that form is, whether it be poetry or short fiction or non fiction or what have you. I like the novel because it is deep immersion over a long period of time, so there is room for deep exploration, on so many levels, which I find really exciting, actually.

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 tend to get up very early and write in 30 minute increments with five minute breaks until my son wakes up. This seems to work most mornings, unless I’m so tired I don’t hear my alarm. This morning time includes writing, but also reading, research, outlining.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to the words of the greats (usually via Google!) and see what they have to say about writer’s block, and then hope to find enough solace in their words to begin again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Vanilla. I think it’s because when I was growing up there were often chocolate chip cookies baking in my house. And vanilla reminds me of baking.

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?
Oh, all of it. Conversations with other people or those overheard, paintings, nature, the news, music. Life, basically, all of life and my observations and involvement in life, my relationship to the world, all of it influences everything I write.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Some of my favourite writers are: John Steinbeck, Wade Davis, David Abram, Emma Donoghue, Ernest Hemingway, Chinua Achebe, Camilla Gibb, Tom Robbins, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Findley, Joseph O’Neill, Arundhati Roy, Philip Caputo, Carol Shields, Kiran Desai, Catherine Bush, Lisa Moore, Jan Zwicky, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Butala, Mary Karr, Mary Gaitskill, Norman Rush, Rawi Hage, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anne Enright, A.L. Kennedy, Lewis Desoto. I could name more but I’ll stop there.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel to France with my son and stay there on an extended vacation.

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, right now I’m a teacher and a writer. And I’ve had many different occupations already. If I hadn’t been a writer, and my son had never come into this world, I would probably be some kind of a traveling wanderer. But since I have to stay settled and focused, I would say probably an anthropologist. I went through a long phase where I seriously thought about getting my degree in Anthropology.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I knew I was going to be a writer since I was a little girl, but it took me much longer to commit to it, because I found (and find!) it very hard. So though I wrote a lot privately, I didn’t “commit” to the writing life – and by that I mean having my butt in the chair for hours on end, trying to get published, thinking of myself as a writer -- until my thirties, when I exhausted everything else that was doomed to be exhausted from the beginning, since I should have been writing! And, I just don’t think I have a choice. There is something about the power of words and language that calls to me – that has always called to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. The last great film: this has been the hardest question to answer. I don’t get out to movies and rarely seem to get a chance to watch one at home. I know I’ve seen some very good movies, but I can’t think of any really good ones I’ve seen lately. One of my all time favourites is Immortal Beloved, starring the incredible Gary Oldman and directed by Bernard Rose. And it came out in 1994. Which just goes to show you that I need to watch more movies.

20 - What are you currently working on?
My second novel! And that’s all I can really say about it right now, lest the gods come down and strike me with writer’s block for giving it away prematurely . . .

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

My short review of Robert Swereda's re: verbs (BareBackPress, 2013) is now online at Bywords.ca

*CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS*

*/EMBRASSER:/*/
An international journal of French and English Translation/

will focus on literature from French-speaking diasporas, exploring the many regions and cultures in which French is spoken outside of France. Our first issue will focus on Louisiana culture and language, and be released in Lafayette, Louisiana, Mardi Gras, 2014. The issue’s contents will appear both in English and in Louisiana French. Future issues will focus on French and French-language cultures throughout the world.

For its first issue,/Embrasser/seeks:

*Fiction*and***creative non-fiction*of up to 4,000 words,*poetry*of up to 100 lines, and*plays*and***screenplays*of up to 10 pages by current residents of Louisana, or by anyone writing about the Louisiana experience.

*Criticism*of up to 3,000 words on any work or body of 21^st Century**literary, visual, audiovisual, performance, or musical/aural art published, produced, written, created, or primarily performed in Louisiana. We seek discussions of current work; essays that primarily focus on work created before 2000 will not be considered.

**

*Submissions may be in English or any variety of Louisiana French*

If accepted, English submissions will be translated into Louisiana French, and French submissions will be translated into English.Bilingual writers are encouraged to translate their own work and submit in both languages.

/Embrasser/is a traditional print journal. As such, shorter works are more likely to be accepted than long ones.

Each author should feel free to send up to three creative works. Sorry, no previously published nor simultaneous submissions.

*Submissions close September 30**^th **, 2013
*and should be e-mailed toEmbrasser AT CoeurPublishing DOT com embrasser@coeurpublishing.com
>.

**

/Embrasser: An international journal of French and English Translation/is edited by Emily Thibodeaux and Rosalyn Spencer with the advisement of Rikki Ducornet. /Embrasser/is a project of Cœur Publishing. For more information, please visit http://www.coeurpublishing.com/embrasser/or visit our Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/142106645981486/

------------------------------------------------------------------------

*APPEL POUR SOUMISSIONS!*

*EMBRASSER*
*/Un journal international de traduction du francais et de l’anglais/*

«Embrasser» va se concentrer sur la littérature du monde francophone entourant les différentes variantes du français parlées à l’extérieur de la France, en passant par l’histoire et la culture. Notre première publication va célébrer la culture et le français louisianais. C'est d'ailleurs dans le cadre des célébrations du Mardi Gras de 2014 que se déroulera le lancement du journal à Lafayette, en Louisiane. Les textes seront présentés en anglais mais également en français louisianais. Les prochaines publications d'Embrasser auront pour thème le français et les cultures francophones retrouvés autour du monde.

Pour sa première publication, Embrasser est à la recherche de :

*Textes de fiction *et*de non-fiction créative *allant jusqu’à 4000 mots; *de textes de poésie *allant jusqu’à 100 lignes, *de* *pièces de théâtre ou des scénarios,* allant jusqu’à 10 pages. Ces textes peuvent être rédigés par des habitants de la Louisiane ou par quelqu'un qui écrit au sujet de l’expérience louisianaise. De plus, nous acceptons des *textes de critique littéraire* au sujet d’une pièce ou d'une oeuvre littéraire, d’une oeuvre d'art visuel ou une oeuvre audiovisuelle, d'une performance musicale ou orale publiée, produite, écrite, créée ou performée en Louisiane, allant jusqu’à 3000 mots. Pour ces textes, nous recherchons des discussions d'actualité : les oeuvres réalisées avant l'an 2000 ne seront pas considérées.

*Les soumissions devront être rédigées en anglais ou dans l'une des variantes du français louisianais.*

Si acceptées, les soumissions en anglais vont être traduites en français louisianais et celles en français seront traduites en anglais. Les écrivains bilingues sont encouragés de traduire leurs propres textes et de les soumettre dans les deux langues.

Embrasser est un journal d'impression traditionnelle. Donc, nous préférons les textes courts. Chaque auteur peut soumettre jusqu'à trois textes. Toutefois, nous sommes désolés mais nous n’accepterons pas les textes qui ont été déjà publiés ou les publications simultanées.

*Les textes devront être soumis pour le 30 Septembre 2013 et envoyés à : *Embrasser AT CoeurPublishing DOT com embrasser@coeurpublishing.com>.

Embrasser, un journal international de traduction du français et de l’anglais est édité par Emily Thibodeaux et Rosalyn Spencer sous la direction de Rikki Ducornet.

Embrasser est un projet de Cœur Publishing.Pour plus d'information, veuillez visiter http://www.coeurpublishing.com/embrasser/ou visitez notre page Facebook à https://www.facebook.com/groups/142106645981486/

Mark Tardi is from Chicago. He is the author of the books Euclid Shudders and the newly released Airport music. He also has an essay in the recently released volume Theory That Matters: What Practice After Theory edited by Kacper Bartczak and Malgorzata Myk. In 2009, he guest edited a special section devoted to Miron Białoszewski and contemporary Polish poetry for the ninth issue of literary journal Aufgabe. Recent poems can be found in Chicago Review, SERIES, Van Gogh’s Ear, and the anthologies The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Millennium and Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse. In September of 2011 he completed an artist fellowship at the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony for the Arts where he worked on a new manuscript.  Currently, he is a lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Nizwa in Oman and was previously on faculty in the Department of American Literature & Culture at the University of Lodz, Poland.

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 learned a lot from the first book being published, but it was a study in fortitude and contrasts. I sent out Euclid Shudders to more than thirty publishers, and got rejection letters that ran the gamut. Perhaps the lowest point was getting my own query letter sent back to me with a single line scrawled on the bottom: "We're not taking unsolicited manuscripts." And the most confusing rejection was getting a three-page single-spaced reader's report that was the most in-depth and complimentary evaluation of my work I've ever read to this day -- which of course ended the last paragraph by saying the publisher didn't have a place for the book. When I had gotten twenty-eight rejections, I actually thought, "Twenty-eight is a perfect number, which is nice in a way." (A perfect number is a number whose factors add up to itself.) A couple of weeks later, the National Poetry Series notified me the manuscript was a finalist, which shocked me but also reminded me that maybe I'm not totally off-base; and a few months after NPS released their selections and the manuscript was passed over, Litmus Press accepted the manuscript for publication, which was thrilling.

There are no givens in poetry, which is both the promise and at times the problem. Euclid Shudders hadn't even been out a week and my father asked me, "Now that you have this poetry thing out, when are you going to do something real with your life?" A week after that, my cousin rather passive-aggressively wondered, "So . . . what are the sales numbers?" On the other end, I received some very surprising emails from people I had never met who had read the book. It's incredible how books and readers connect, and the chance to get feedback from readers inevitably changes future projects.

As for more recent work compared to older work, I lose feel for the older work after some time. I suspect that the newer work is looser in some ways, contains more mud and splinters and nicks. The line roams and wanders and is OK with its own awkwardness.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As I reader, I came to fiction and nonfiction first. I didn't start reading poetry with any kind of seriousness until high school, and got more immersed in college, where I started writing a few clumsy poems. I had some really wonderful teachers, and they encouraged me to read various things. Lauri Ramey introduced me to writers like Edmond Jabès, Gottfried Benn, Paul Celan, Gertrude Stein, Robert Duncan and Michael Palmer. Jeffrey DeShell had an entire course on Kafka, which was amazing, and it was through him that I encountered Thalia Field's work in an anthology he edited. These writers blew open my sense of what writing could be and could do -- and dared me to take part in that ongoing conversation.

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?
A general or even gestural sense of a project emerges pretty quickly. The writing is probably on the slow side, though much of this has to do with simply having time to write. Maybe a more accurate description would be to say the writing happens in bursts with various gaps in between. The writing itself is a result of copious notes. Some parts may appear more or less similar to final versions; other parts may go through various kinds of surgery.

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?
My first book, Euclid Shudders, was very much thought of as a book pretty much from the beginning. Airport music started as a series of different hinges that seemed to interlock over time. Almost anything I write comes out of a first line. The opening line nags me until the rest gets written. Probably I've absorbed that from Emily Dickinson in some way.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Normally, yes, public readings are a productive part of my creative process. I view language and writing as living organisms, and the chance to share that language with other people is something I'm extremely grateful for. I learn a lot about what works, how poems can bounce and bend, how much silence is useful. Having said that, I haven't given a reading in nearly five years. I lived in Poland for four years, and there was less than zero interest in arranging any readings for my work during the entire time I was there. I moved to Oman last year, and there's not much context for how a poetry reading in North America or Europe typically functions. Poetry is very respected and appreciated in Oman, but there's a different tradition of recitation, which isn't something I have any skill at or training in.

I have a reading in Chicago at Myopic Bookstore in August, which I'm looking forward to -- though I'm also a bit uncharacteristically nervous, since I haven't read in front of an audience in quite some time. And I'm hoping that while I'm in the U.S. this summer, perhaps a couple other readings can get organized. I'm certainly open to them and increasingly aware of how precious the opportunity is.

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 don't consciously concern myself with any particular theoretical underpinnings, but theory -- like everything else -- is information, and we're all awash in it, so I'm sure it enters into the equation somehow. In terms of questions, I'm inclined to echo other writers who "think through writing" -- I write towards the questions. Keith Waldrop has a line in a poem "Real answers simply repeat the question," and this has always stuck with me: it renders into language the mathematical concept of something that is finite without boundary. The circularity and rhythm.

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'm paraphrasing slightly, but I think Robert Duncan once wrote something like "Go write yourself a book and put therein what might define a world." I don't think I could state it any better. Of course we're now dealing with the blinding speed of technology, and I know various people have suggested that the Facebook status or the tweet are last new genre to be created. I was an early adopter of Facebook but a few years ago found it more useful to close my account than to "Like" the latest video of a cat farting out the Carmina Burana. I appreciated a certain kind of immediacy from Facebook, but I resented how I would get sucked into political arguments and petty dramas. The cost is that I'm less informed on certain events and flows, but I'm less irritated and read more things I find energizing.

To read is to enter a site of contemplation and inquiry. Don DeLillo seems to worry that writers have lost the ability to shape consciousness while simultaneously admitting he's not sure they ever had that ability in the first place. I trust that reading offers a uniquely intimate experience of time and imagination, and while the forms of presentation are changing, the possibility to offer these experiences, critiques, and differing viewpoints are invaluable. And books presume a certain amount of patience, particularly given the preponderance of stimuli available now.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In poetry, I'm not convinced there is all that much active editing going on compared with fiction and non-fiction, which can be ruthless and brutal in terms of editing and rewrites. I think a better word to describe poetry publications would be curating. Poetry publishers select manuscripts or poems and they appear in the form of books or journals. I've never personally seen or known of anybody that has turned in a poetry manuscript that went through huge and multiple rewrites done under the supervision of a publisher. There might be rewrites, sure, but not massive overhauls. More like nip and tuck.

When I worked at Dalkey Archive Press, I had the privilege to see how active editing can contribute to the success of the book, forcing the writer to defend choices (some of which can be rather flimsy), but also to consider that alternatives exist that simply make the book better. John O'Brien has a knack for seeing flaws in manuscripts and weeding these out; and I have a great deal of respect for Martin Riker's editorial acumen.

As a writer, I rather intensely edit my own work, and somewhat pathologically destroy drafts. Having said that, both publishers of my books -- Litmus Press and Burning Deck -- offered valuable commentary on the manuscripts, which either helped me with some last minute rewrites or prodded me to consider some things in a new way.  It wasn't difficult to work with them -- it was very helpful and insightful. And of course I'm grateful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Avoid debt. It boxes you in and limits options.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I'm not particularly invested in genre distinctions, and both my first book and second blend different genres within them. Critical prose is something that I've done largely out of the necessity of working in academia, though I do find it stimulating and productive to articulate ideas while at the same time trying to frustrate the limits of formula. And this has given me ways to reconsider the page as a two-dimensional plane. Translation is the most demanding thing I've done, and it disturbs my sleep more than anything else. The endless permutations, the relentless detail . . .

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 writing is intimately tied with my reading and note-taking. If I'm not reading, I'm not writing. In terms of routines, I need my notebook, my laptop, a desk, and some music playing. I also need chunks of time to concentrate, so when I'm teaching, most of my writing happens during breaks in the semester. I've also been fortunate to have a couple of artist residencies, which were extremely useful to make progress on manuscripts because residencies are the only situation where I have completely unfettered time and can write just about any time I want without disturbing anyone or having my time split between other demands.

If I'm immersed in writing, I try to have a coffee, look at some pages from the day before, read the news, maybe a bit of a book, and then I sit down to work. I like to have enough space to hang pages on the walls, to really look at them, walk around, let them breathe a bit. I try to work long enough that I'm irked and push myself but not so long that I'm staring at the same line for an hour.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
It depends on the type of stall. If I'm in the middle of a sequence, simply knowing when to stop is important. Just taking a break, going for a run, taking my dog for a walk, watching some TV, playing soccer, having a conversation, all of those things are helpful. With the manuscript I'm working on now, I hit a sort of wall where the beginning is pretty much finished and so is the ending, but the middle evaded me. I made a few passes, but figured out eventually I needed to just leave it alone for awhile, and finally a picture emerged. For me, simply living my life and paying attention to details -- really trying to be present -- is crucial to the writing process.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of freshly cut wood.

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?
Math and numbers are things I've always been intuitively drawn to from a young age. Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, infinite matrices, reading about the Riemann Hypothesis, twin primes . . . these things constantly renew my sense of wonder. Just recently, Yitang Zhang proved the "bounded gaps" conjecture, which was exciting only serves to animate more interest in the beauty of prime numbers, which for me is deeply emotional.

Music and visual art are equally important to me also, the pulse and rhythms. Growing up near Midway Airport in Chicago, my days were soundtracked by the planes flying overhead or the nearby freight-trains tapping their tracks, and these are incredibly measured sounds. There's a great deal of math in music; and a great deal of music in math. And with visual art, I tend to see the sequences of what I write as three-dimensional visual images. I can't really work on a sequence until I know what it looks like, the architecture of it. Sometimes the scale can be expansive, like the paintings of Sean Scully, but other times it can be something small, an amplified detail, like Gerhard Richter's paintings of rolls of toilet paper.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Besides some of the other people I've already mentioned, Anne-Marie Albiach, Cormac McCarthy, Henry James, C.D. Wright, William Blake, Peter Gizzi, Barbara Guest, Miron Bialoszewski, Ivan Angelo, Georges Perec, Martha Ronk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jacques Roubaud, Witold Gombrowicz, Craig Watson. And of course my contemporaries and friends are a fount of energy and encouragement: Justyna Bargielska, Raymond Bianchi, E. Tracy Grinnell, Sarah Lang, Sawako Nakayasu, Kristy Odelius, Martha Oatis, Sarah Ruhl, Larry Sawyer, Stacy Szymaszek, Lina ramona Vitkauskas, Dana Ward, Scott Bryan Wilson, and too many more to count.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
See the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. Travel in South America and Asia. Drink a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle's 23-year.

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?
Since my writing doesn't support me fully, I've had to do other things. I've worked doing landscaping, I've worked in banking, and I've worked in publishing and academia. I've always connected with architecture and visual art, and these are fields I can imagine being involved with. And I sometimes think about being a bartender or a carpenter.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Writing is able to absorb and engage the widest possible range of gestures -- and for me, this was the first and strongest hook. In writing (and reading), time stretches and folds differently; our imaginative and speculative faculties can run at full-steam; the rhythms, images, movements, and ideas from almost anything can be engaged through writing -- and that is both intimate and a public conversation. As I said, the arts and mathematics are very important to me, and I can continually explore this through writing.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last book I read that really left me exhilarated and dizzy and gratefully silent would be Underworld by Don DeLillo, though I read that a few years back. Maybe a bit more recently, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami was a delight. I'm impressed by Murakami's lightness of touch, which reminds me of Italo Calvino in certain respects. And I agree with Calvino that using lightness well and effectively is one of the hardest things to do in writing. The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter was hilarious and depressing in equal proportion. Jennifer Moxley's book of essays There Are Things We Live Among impressed me. And King of Infinite Space by Siobhan Roberts is a fantastic biography of the brilliant geometer Donald Coxeter. I couldn't put it down and flew through it in two days.

As for film, I have to point back to my early comment about not being invested in genre distinctions. I think the fetish for film has taken a real hit since the emergence of cable television. My view would be that a show like Six Feet Under was a five-year episodic film. The first season of Breaking Bad is deeply embedded with references to cinema like Hans Namuth's famous video of Jackson Pollock painting, and very complicated camera sequences, sometimes averaging six different shots in less than five seconds. And again, there's a different relationship to time with more serialized structures and narratives, which appeals to me. Of course I like watching films too. I've enjoyed these films that are a kind of early '80s throwback: Drive and Killing Them Softly, for example. With Drive, it was refreshing to see a film with so little dialogue, such weighted restraint.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm finishing up a hybrid poetry / prose manuscript I've been working on for a few years that centers on horrific violence through the prism of Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. And I've begun work on a series of critical essays on mathematics as narrative, which I hope eventually will make up a book.

I've also begun practicing yoga, which has been very positive.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;