essays in the face of uncertainties

May 2, 2020, 5:31 am

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) might be Milan Kundera’s best-known novel, but I was always partial to Immortality (1990). This is a book, of course, I can’t locate in my library. I know I still have it around, although it might still live in our storage unit, two-plus kilometres east; a storage remnant of our two years’ past basement flood and extensive downstairs reconstruction. I remember first reading Immortality when I was twenty-four years old, and I told myself for some time that the novel ‘changed my life,’ although I can’t remember exactly how. That was nearly thirty years ago, after all. Since those days, I’ve admired Kundera’s ability to equally blend elements of the political, philosophical and the intimate, a goalpost I’ve worked to reach in my own fiction. It’s hard to do well, and easier to see when it misses the mark, and Kundera managed to articulate novels from within a period of turbulence, writing of political and social upheaval. I read a debut novel some twenty years ago that went back and forth between a political thread and a romantic thread, but only one of those threads was compelling, which meant the other lay fallow. At the end of my paperback copy of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he closes an interview conducted by Philip Roth with this:

I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

While he remains one of the great writers of the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring, and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, certain elements of Kundera’s work don’t exactly age well. His depictions of women, for example. And yet, his an example of living, breathing and writing through the midst of great crisis. Writing as a way of thinking, of documenting. Of processing. How does one write in a crisis?

And crisis is relative, of course. There were those on both sides of Quebec’s language debate in the Bill-101 years that Mordecai Richler wrote about in his non-fiction blend of politics and satire, OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! (1992), that saw themselves as the victims of unrelenting crisis. One could also begin to finally ask, also, why there have been water advisories in certain communities, predominantly aboriginal communities, in Canada at all, let alone some lasting four decades or more? How do we allow such conditions to continue, especially those we’ve the ability to change? I dread to think of how hard some of these communities could be hit, through this crisis, in part due to their lack of basic necessities, even before any potential access to masks, gloves and ventilators. How does one write in a crisis?

In the introduction to Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (2019), editor Nyla Matuk writes: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” She continues:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

I think of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019), where he writes: “Let us undertake an ethnomusicology of tears. I am after the frequency of NDN grievability. My hunch is that the pitch interrogates itself, like a hymn.” I think of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), writing: “But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated / boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us / anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is ever truly attached to emptiness whatever it is / I feel now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better / stated as a form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference; [.]”

I might ask how one writes in a crisis, but to many, the very question broadcasts my lack of awareness of the larger world in which we live. To some, crisis has been here for hundreds of years. None of this is new.

essays in the face of uncertainties

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Todd Dillard

May 3, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: my (small press) writing day : new essays + ongoing submission call,

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Todd Dillard'swork has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Superstition Review, Split Lip Magazine, Booth, and The Boiler Journal. His debut book of poetry Ways We Vanish (2020) is available from Okay Donkey Press. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter and works as a writer in a hospital.

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

This book has been a goal of mine for over twenty years… and I took a bit of a detour to get here, so I wasn’t sure I’d ever even have a book. It’s a tremendous relief. It’s also… how do I say this? It’s cleared the way for the other work I need to do. Publishing a book has taught me that the work is never done. I anticipated this somewhat, but I didn’t think it would be one of the main feelings I have about the book—joy, relief, even triumph, yes… but also: I have more to write! I don’t have time to stop!

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

A 7th grade teacher assigned a poetry prompt to my class to attach sensory elements to a feeling—“mellow is the yellow of cigarette smoke” I think I wrote. My 8th grade English teacher made us submit work to a writing contest, and I, as a lazy student, submitted the poems I’d written the year before and did really well. In this way, I stumbled into realizing I don’t quite think the way other people think, and that mode of thinking lends itself to writing poetry.

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?

My book Ways We Vanish spans about 15 years of writing. I’d say I write quickly and can start projects quickly, but most of the time I stop because I lose interest or steam or something else comes along. My poems sometimes come out similar to how they will end, or sometimes they go through radical changes. It’s different for each poem; this I know is a broad answer.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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 just kind of write whatever I want and then, when I see themes develop among my work, I note that. I don’t try to create toward those themes, but I try to be sensitive to them if they appear in what I write. In this way I build a collection that I then shape into a book—at least, that’s what I did for my book.

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

I love doing readings! They have nothing to do with my process.

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?

My book isn’t interested in interrogating literary theory—which is the kind of theory I think is implied in your question. I think the book’s big question is: How Does One Build a Life? But the construction of building a book around questions suggests there’s investment in answering them too, which there isn’t. My book explores grief and moving on and fatherhood. That’s a vast country. I’m not looking to stake a flag into it, I’m looking to reach its edge and peer over it.

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?

Writers don’t have roles! This suggests something nebulous to me, or, worse, something prescriptive, or, even worse, something moralistic about what writers *do* or *should* do. I don’t know what writers should do. We’re weird and feel things and see things in weird ways and sometimes we write them down, perhaps less often than we want to. The things writers should do are the things everyone should do: floss, sleep more, learn to swim, practice kindness, pet a dog, etc.

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

I didn’t have any difficulty working with my editors at Okay Donkey—it’s one of the pleasures of the book experience, having editors who both get your work and are excited to get your work into the hands of others who get your work. I’m pretty laid back about the whole thing, which means if someone else has a comment about a piece, I’ll consider it, even implement it to see what they’re seeing, and if it works great! And if not I’ll say no thanks. I think there’s a sense that perfectionists are combative, but I’m a perfectionist who finds great humor and joy in breaking and rebuilding work, and having someone alongside me to do it with is thrilling. It helps to have someone who’ll watch you blow up and poem and laugh and say “Let’s try it again a different way!” and also laugh when that explodes too.

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

Just say it. Obscurity is not originality. Poems live by exploring truths and die by clever turns of phrases.

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

I studied prose poetry, so when I write flash it’s often just me writing a prose poem that needs something more—a series of escalations, or something that resembles plot to make it work. That’s my flash fiction, basically prose poems in trench coats and fedoras. This is pretty easy for me to do and quite satisfying, as flash fiction frees me up to go wild in a way I don’t feel I can in a poem. So, that’s the appeal of (flash) fiction to me. Poetry is appealing because sometimes you can sneak in a rhyming couplet at the end.

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?

For this book, I’d read new poems and do some editing before bed, read/edit on the bus/subway to work, write during lunch, read/edit between meetings at work, read/write/edit during the evenings between hanging out with my kid or my wife, read while going to the gym… every spare moment I was asking myself if I needed to dedicate time to my writing. It’s slacked off a bit since the book came out, and I’ve been mostly editing the poems that I like that didn’t make it into the book.

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

For some reason I read this question as if my writing was a horse being put in a stall—which I think would be good for my writing. I’d love to know I could also saddle it up sometime and go somewhere. Unfortunately my writing is a pterodactyl. It doesn’t get stalled so much as stops to nest for a bit before flying off. When it’s unreachable I just read stuff I like, or, if I’m just exhausted, I’ll go back and revisit some cherished books. They always recharge me.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine and sunscreen and sautéed garlic and bread and chocolate chip cookies in the oven.

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?

My poems are very interested in prosody, I think in part because I enjoy childhood fables and the cadences therein, and in part because I played clarinet from middle school through college. The music is there in my work, though I’m less interested in overt lyrical performance than I am in taking quotidian rhythms of speech and using register, alliteration, and assonance to elevate or suppress certain narrative moments. Also I tend to write in imagistic sequences similar to comic books—my family co-owned a comic book store when I was growing up and they were a very important part of my life until I moved away from TX and to NY.

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

I’ve benefitted from a glut of some of America’s best writers: Jericho Brown, Marie Howe, Vijay Seshadri, Claudia Rankine, Matthea Harvey, Dennis Nurkse, Suzanne Gardinier, and Tom Lux have all been my instructors. I’m over 10 years removed from their instruction, but their lessons remain with me. I’m also lucky to have some amazing beta readers: Ben Kline, Niina Pollari, Lee Potts, Cyndie Randall, Madeleine Corley, Teo Mungaray, and Peter H. Michaels are all people I can reach out to for comments and advice, and I’ve flourished under their intelligence and creativity and guidance.

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

I would love to write a series of Avatar: the Last Airbender fanfiction about the fall of the Turtle Cities and an earthbender who must combat waterbender using their waterbending arts to spread a plague throughout the world. Sometimes I’m happy knowing, though, that this story remains in my head. In general I’d love to write a novel, but I’ve tried and am awful at them.

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?

Oh I would love to do hospital operations. Not the kind that involve opening patients, the kind that involve opening clinics. Had I not been a writer I would’ve been a band director and remained in Texas, probably.

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

In college, when I was split between being a music major or pursuing creative writing, I had to decide what I wanted out of my life… and I could kind of see the trajectory I would have had if I had been a band director. I was a happy, normal-ish life I think, but I wanted more. Writing led me to a crazy life in New York, and now I work as a writer for a major teaching hospital in Philadelphia. I love the experiences I’ve had, the life I’ve lived, even if some years I was more surviving than living. I think with other pursuits, I kind of had an idea of who I would have been had I chose that path, but I didn’t know who I’d be if I chose writing. And now, many years later, I can’t imagine being any happier.

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

Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser for poetry and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders for prose. I don’t watch movies! Except with my kid. I quite liked Frozen 2.

20 - What are you currently working on?

You know, I have this big project idea, which I submitted as my NEA application… but really, I’m just working on decompressing. Getting a book out in the world, then trying to stump for it, then waiting to see how people react to it, then figuring out what a reading/book tour would look like during a pandemic… it’s a lot. In the way I needed time to write toward the book and sort myself out throughout my twenties, I feel like I need some time to write myself away from the book too. So I’m working on that, working on finding my way back to writing the kind of poems that wouldn’t go in this book. It’s done, it doesn’t need a B Sides. I need newness, and so I’m working on discovering that newness. For now.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

my (small press) writing day : new essays + ongoing submission call,

May 4, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jean Marc Ah-Sen

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So, I had been curious for some time about The Guardian’s occasional feature “My Writing Day,” and thought it would be interesting to do a blog of the same, “for those of us who might never make it into The Guardian.”

[note: this isn’t a dig at The Guardian; I just thought it might be fun to play with the format]

So, in September 2017, I started a new blog: my (small press) writing day.

The list of published and forthcoming essays include an enormous amount of short essays on writing and possibility, including pieces by Amish Trivedi, Colin Morton, rob mclennan, Sonia Saikaley, Amanda Earl, Jean Van Loon, Karl E. Jirgens, Lisa Pasold, Robert Martin Evans, Jennifer Pederson, Carla Hartsfield, Jason Christie, Eleni Zisimatos, Christian McPherson, Chris Johnson, Eileen R. Tabios, Joshua Corey, Claudia Radmore, Oscar Martens, Sacha Archer, Larkin Higgins, Kristina Drake, Kate Siklosi, Jared Schickling, Karen Smythe, Yanara Friedland, Paul Carlucci, Catherine Owen, j/j hastain, Gil McElroy, Adele Graf, Angela Lopes, Adam Thomlison, Brenda Schmidt, Michael Blouin, Jeanette Lynes, Keegan Lester, Jeremy Stewart, Zoë Landale, Jacqueline Valencia, Michael Dennis, Emily Sanford, Jennifer Baker, Aaron Tucker, Chris Galvin, K.I. Press, Nathaniel G. Moore, April Ford, Lily Gontard, Paola Ferrante, Alan Sondheim, Bänoo Zan, Emily Saso, Annick MacAskill, Ian LeTourneau, Jessica Hiemstra, Jessica Sequeira, Teri Vlassopoulos, Matt Jones, Sofia Mostaghimi, Joshua Weiner, Anita Dolman, Alex Manley, Joseph Cassidy-Skof, Ronna Bloom, Doris Fiszer, Maia Elgin, Cora Siré, Ken Sparling, Heather Sweeney, Sarah Crookall, Manahil Bandukwala, Dale Smith, Sara Renee Marshall, Sarah Burgoyne, Suzanna Derewicz, Jenna Jarvis, Missy Marston, Anna Maxymiw, Nicole McCarthy, Tim Mook Sang, Richard Harrison, Barbara Tomash, Nisa Malli, Steven Ross Smith, Frances Boyle, Sean Braune, Conyer Clayton, Ralph Kolewe, Noah Falck, Sharon McCartney, Dara Wier, Geof Huth, Brenda Brooks, David Bradford, Bola Opaleke, Robert Keith, Carl Watts, Shannon Quinn, Charmaine Cadeau, Micheline Maylor, Violetta Leigh, Torin Jensen, Isabella Wang, Erin Bedford, Ellie Sawatzky, Síle Englert, Donna Fleischer, Eva Gonzalez, Thomas L. Winters, Allison Armstrong, Jonathan Taylor, Bruce Geddes, Jónína Kirton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Darren C. Demaree, Michael Sikkema, Kate Heartfield, JL Jacobs, Luke Bradford, Buck Downs, Brian Mihok, Jake Syersak, Genevieve Kaplan, Carrie Hunter, Erin Emily Ann Vance, Emma Bolden, Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt, Wren Hanks, Terry Doyle, Stephan Delbos, Lucy Dawkins, Winston Le, Amy LeBlanc, Catherine Graham, Christine Fischer Guy, Timothy Otte, Aja Moore, Dessa Bayrock, Basma Kavanagh, Joshua Young, Shriram Sivaramakrishnan, JC Bouchard, Lindsay Zier-Vogel, Kyle Flemmer, Tanis MacDonald, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Anne-Marie Kinney, Colin Mylrea, Vineetha Mokkil, Lauren Brazeal, Janet Barkhouse, Rupert Loydell, Haley Jenkins, Jennifer Firestone, Honey Novick, Linda Besner, Elaine Feeney, Lauren Korn, Martin Stannard, stephanie roberts, Kristin George Bagdanov, Sarah Venart, Mike Ferguson, Sam Smith, Sarah Law, Carol Bruneau, Brooke Carter, Lawrence Freiesleben, Ken Norris, Mugabi Byenkya, Vicky Grut, Elizabeth Ross, Hannah Stephenson, Leslie Greentree, Emilia Nielsen, Yolande House, Rax King, Emily Osborne, Dan Crawley, Erika Thorkelson, Jordan Moffatt, Leonarda Carranza, Joe Hall, Henk Rossouw, J.I. Kleinberg, Susan Haldane, Blaine Marchand, Paul Hawkins, Sonia Di Placido, J.B. Stone, Jane Shi, Teresa Stenson, Jude Marr, Clarissa Aykroyd, Holly Flauto Salmon, Hannah Gordon, Sarah Anne Strickley, Linda Trinh, L.N. Holmes, Julian Day, Justin Evans, Kristin Garth, Angela Caravan, G. E. Schwartz, Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Eric Andrew Newman, Sarah Cave, Zane Koss, Dean Garlick, Gale Marie Thompson, Lina Lau, Gordon Phinn, Dale Tracy, Anthony Michael Morena, Linda Ryynänen, Lois Lorimer, Nisha Bhakoo, Tamara Jong, Jacalyn den Haan, Cati Porter, Rebecca Anne Banks, Suzanne Chiasson, Ben Niespodziany, Joshua Gillingham, Ann Y.K. Choi, Jennifer Wortman, Brianna Ferguson, Kasia van Schaik, Shelly Harder, V.C. McCabe, Tianna G. Hansen, Jessica Cuello, Victoria Hetherington, sophie anne edwards, Irene Sanchez, SJ Bradley, Caroline Grand-Clement, Kevin Spenst, Jessica Evans, Bobbi Lurie, Elizabeth Onusko, M.W. Jaeggle, Caroline Shea, Evan Gray, Carlie Blume, Gilles Latour, Trevor Abes, Stephen Collis, Barton Smock, Stephanie Bolster, Michael Akuchie, Trevor Ketner, Meagan Masterman, Pearl Pirie, Anton Pooles, Jason Purcell, Helen Hajnoczky, Tom Snarsky, Rachel Small, Timothy Duffy, Stefan Mohamed, Hege A. Jakobsen Lepri, Anita Goveas, John Wall Barger, Aaron Schneider, Sarah James, Anthony Etherin, Richard Weiser, Chad Sweeney, Toby Altman, Isabel Sobral Campos, Lisa Young, Emma Tilley, Wayne Mason, Bronwen Keyes-Bevan, Brandon Teigland, Claire Rudy Foster, Mary Byrne, Ariel Dawn, Kimberly Campanello, Andrea Lambert, James Roome, Richard Tattoni, Margaret Sweatman, Cooper Wilhelm, Jaclyn Desforges, Catherine Pikula, David W. Pritchard, Andrew Field, Adam Hampton, Margaryta Golovchenko, Joanna Streetly, Rebecca Higgins, Dimitra Xidous, Shannon Webb-Campbell, Anna Veprinska, Alexander Dickow, Amanda Bell, Sarah Shields, Megan Cole, Natasha Ramoutar, Nagmeh Phelan, Ben Robinson, Claire Trevien, Christine H. Tran, Andrew W. French, S. Brook Corfman, Deirdre Maultsaid, Cassie Young, Erin Russell, Germán Sierra, Caroljean Gavin, Ed Seaward, Adra Raine, Dawn Hurley-Chapman, Nathanael O’Reilly, katie o’brien, Lisa Fishman, Kasey Jueds, Sean Johnston, kjmunro, Hannah Kezema, Anne Casey, Tanya Holtland, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Sarah Priscus, Holly Pelesky, Constance Schultz, Razielle Aigen, Paul Laughlin, Esteban Rodríguez, Carol Ciavonne, Nora Pace, James Knight, Elizabeth Robinson, Sarah Gregory, Vasiliki Katsarou, Qurat Dar, Douglas Luman, Brandon Freels, Tracey Waddleton, Danny McLaren, Carolyn Bennett, Amanda McLeod, Emily Kellogg, Nancy Campbell, Mark Russell, Torben Robertson, Jade Wallace, Debra Martens, Susie Campbell, Syd Lazarus, Rick White, KA Rees, Stephanie Chang, Natalie Lim, Natalee Caple, Kelly Krumrie, Juliette Sebock, Laura Cok, Karen Quevillon, Julene Tripp Weaver, Kersten Christianson, Mikayla Ruppe, Catherine Lewis, Maria Meindl, Hokis, Laurel Miram, Susannah M. Smith, Alicia Wright, David Kloepfer, Michael Edwards, Nazli Karabıyıkoğlu, Larissa Shmailo, Jessica Drake-Thomas, Samantha Garner, Vanessa Saunders, Mitchell Toews, Martha Warren, Kenneth M Cale, Russell Carisse, Sheldon Lee Compton, Anne Leigh Parrish, Maryam Gowralli, Neil Laurenson, Robin Sinclair, Steve Lambert, A. L. Bishop, Francine Cunningham, Christian Fink-Jensen, Noah C Lekas, Amanda Hale, David Epstein, Rose Maloukis, Shannon McLaughlin, Joe Linker, Twila Newey, Jenny Justice, Candace de Taeye, Lynne Sargent, Tyler Pufpaff, Woogee Bae, Lituo Huang, Lisa McCabe, Amanda Auerbach, Matthew M. C. Smith, Ethan Vilu, Andrew Velzian, Kyra Simone and Lizzie Derksen. And submissions are very welcome...
 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jean Marc Ah-Sen

May 5, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Douglas Ian McLennan (June 26, 1941-May 1, 2020)

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Jean Marc Ah-Senwas born in East York, Ontario, in 1987. He comes from a family of Mauritian winemakers and was a frequent contributor to the Innis Herald, a University of Toronto newspaper. He lives in Toronto with his wife and son. Grand Menteuris his first novel and it was chosen as a Top 100 Book of 2015 by The Globe and Mail. Find Ah-Sen on Facebook or Twitter @jeanmarcahsen.

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

It didn’t. No doors magically opened for me. In many ways selling my second book was just as hard (if not harder) than with Grand Menteur, my first novel. In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness) is coming out with Nightwood and is a loose sequel to GM, so the two books are intimately linked. I would say my prose style has veered further into abstraction.  

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

I think with fiction you can make a spectacle of yourself and no one bats an eyelid; it’s expected that the readership is a little indulgent of whatever extremes come about through the vehicle of fiction writing. Authors are accepted, celebrated even, as purveyors of lies. Grandiosity or a certain hyperbolic inclination in non-fiction is greeted with resistance though; readers are more inclined to be suspicious of a life lived a little too well, becoming in the process doctrinaire about their expectations. Look at the receptions of Kinski’s All I Need is Love, London’s John Barleycorn, and more recently, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Not to put too fine a point on it, but who gives a shit if it was written well? I tried my hand at poetry, but was very strongly rebuffed. I think the gist of it was “You have no business doing this.” Maybe they were right. I love poetry, but I also don’t think I have the temperament to endure the viciousness that younger poets today have to go through from its ”gatekeepers.”  

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

I'm a malingerer, so I start a lot of projects... and get to them when I can. What I have to do is set external, impractical deadlines, run my mouth a bit, and if an editor seems interested, I go into high gear. My drafts usually survive the culling process. Editors tend to pare down my "floridity," while asking for more chapters—they’re focus pulling. 

4 - Where does a work of fiction 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’ve worked both ways. I think the phenomenon of short stories becoming full blown novels is an unfortunate symptom of the state of publishing: the old bugbear of economics dictating form. There’s inherited wisdom that collections don’t sell, that there is no appreciable demand for them, and at the same time that not for love nor money will a debut from someone without publishing credentials—usually through shorter pieces in literary publications—ever happen. It’s like the riddle of the Sphinx, but instead of getting into Thebes, writers are granted permission to crawl up their own behinds and die on a vaguely uncomfortable hill.

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

I’m grateful to be asked and I seek them out sometimes—the money and exposure can be good. It’s nice that readings are part of the lifespan of a book, can give it sea legs in a manner of speaking, but I am surprised there is an appetite for them. To me they seem like an out of body experience… for everyone involved.  

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?

My stuff is like Charles Dickens impersonating Rudy Wurlitzer impersonating Dickens; I’m marrying influences from the 18^th and 19^thcenturies with Modernist and Post-Modernist ones.

One pressing question as I see it is whether the novel has to offer social commentary to be relatable. Prevailing opinion answers in the affirmative, and I agree to a point. People look to the arts as an extension of their friend circle—opacity in intention doesn’t get to come to dinner. A lot of readers can’t conceive of the novel as anything but a social realist document born of the world it is about; and believe me, I get it—who wants to read sympathetic depictions of bankers? But the result has been a kind of inescapable politicization of a lot of fiction, which has cheapened both works that do and do not engage along this dimension—like a suburban melodrama making perfunctory judgements about homelessness. Not every book has to be The Road to Wigan Pier. The idea that a work only has value if it is morally instructive is outdated—I doubt publishers are looking for the next Samuel Richardson. It smacks of dilettantism to me. This is how you get bourgeois writers sympathetically talking about the working class by throwing their politics around like they’re returning a glass of wine. I would much rather see a text be unabashedly apolitical without peppering platitudes about in a bid to be relevant.

There is a representation problem that the arts is contending with, but I think it goes beyond getting our books on shelves. It’s also tied up with conceptions of what writers of colour are “allowed” to be publishing in order to meet the demand of what is understood to be our audience. The “authenticity” question often rears its head. Not having the bona fides used to bar entry; now, if a film about ice skating is a hit and you’ve written a novel about the same subject, you might be about to win the lottery. I don’t have a problem with that as long as opportunities continue to grow for everyone. More generally, writers contend with the question of whether their work is superfluous; “surplus fiction” is fine as long as it acknowledges its history. There’s nothing more tawdry than a writer who is not well read.   

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

The best writers still partake in a tradition of being ahead of culture, steering it towards some undetermined social terminus—usually some conception of liberation. The worst writers are conformists, trying to keep skin in the game by aping trends and conventions and patting themselves on the backs while they’re at it. It’s not surprising, considering we’re all social climbers and there’s less money in publishing than ever before. That being said, I still firmly believe that writers should be anything they want to be—shills, peacocks, pseudo-philosophers, lamebrains, egomaniacs; the modus operandi should still be a liberatory framework, and within that I believe it’s still possible to have ethics and be accountable without necessarily asking for permission to have an opinion. I like authors that stay hungry throughout their careers, are glamorous, uncompromising, unbearable, emotionally ravenous, intellectually liberated—basically anyone who would exhaust my patience in my personal life.

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

Essential, no question. A good editor is your greatest advocate to whoever is holding the bag of money. The best ones are snake-charmers and risks-takers, because not only do they get you to do a song and dance for your audience, but they convince you to rip your own work to shreds in the pursuit of glory and perfection. I married a former editor—love at first revision.

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

"There are no new ideas, only unusual ways of forgetting." I am reasonably certain I might have said that.

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

It boils down to working when my children allow me to; when they are asleep or at school. It’s a very delicate balancing act. I feel like I am one novel away from being so engrossed in writing that I’ll raise a score-settling Salinger child in the process.

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

I think the distinction between participating in culture and consuming it is helpful. When I get stalled, I turn to books or films, and try to switch off the generative part of my brain. My writing is almost always a direct response to existing texts, so I specifically turn to them. The novel I’m working on is equal parts W.H. Davies trampology and rock and roll memoir, so I’m filling the tank with books like that.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

At the moment dirty diapers. Maybe a mercaptan leak.

13 - 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?

Silver age comic books, rock journalism, conduct literature, eavesdropping, Daily Mail comments sections, Instagram, gossip-mongering, Classical Hollywood cinema—I turn it all to good account.   

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

My main influences are Edith Sitwell, Blaise Cendrars, Tobias Smollett, Voltaire, Anthony Burgess, André Maurois, Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O’Brien, Italo Calvino, Thomas Pynchon, Gillian Freeman, G.V. Desani, Robert Walser, and Michel Leiris. I derive a lot of emotional sustenance and resources from my friends in the business as well: Naben Ruthnum, Paul Pope, Adnan Khan, André Forget, Paul Barrett, Barry Hertz; people that have hoed the road bigger and better than I have and made a career out of writing, helping me along the way. 

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

Write exclusively for a living.

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

I’d be a writer making questionable music or a musician making questionable novels.

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

 My inability to play nicely with others.

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

Paris Vagabond by Jean-Pierre Clébertor An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting by Jane Collier. Pasolini’s Teoremaor Lubitsch’s Cluny Brown for film.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I wrote an omnibus novel/anthology with Lee Henderson, Devon Code, and Emily Anglin called Parametrics of Purity. It’s like a Can-Lit band, or Ro.Go.Pa.G., the omnibus film Rossellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Gregoretti made in the sixties at the height of their powers. I’ve just started a new novel called Kilworthy Tanner, a kind of pseudobiography.

           

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Douglas Ian McLennan (June 26, 1941-May 1, 2020)

May 6, 2020, 5:31 am

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My father died peacefully on Friday evening, around 10:45pm, some fifteen months after he’d been diagnosed with als, and nearly a decade after my mother [see my obituary for her here]. Never mind the prior colon cancer surgeries, or the triple bypass; the diabetes, sleep apnea or even the prior diagnoses of multiple sclerosis. I’d always figured his laundry-list of health issues over the past decade or so would have meant he’d finally die of something completely unrelated, such as a meteor, or sink-hole. But he showed me, I suppose. As his official obituary reads:

Peacefully surrounded by his family on Friday, May 1, 2020. Douglas Ian McLennan of Maxville; age 78 years.  Beloved husband of the late Joanne Irene McLennan (nee Page).  Loving father of Rob McLennan (Christine McNair) of Ottawa, and Kathy McLennan (Corey Derochie) of Maxville.  Cherished grandfather of Kate Seguin-McLennan, Emma, Rory and Duncan Derochie, and Rose and Aoife McLennan.  Dear son of the late John Duncan and Ellen McLennan (nee Campbell).

As expressions of sympathy Memorial Donations to the ALS Society would be appreciated by the family.  As a Memorial to Douglas a tree will be planted in a Memory Woods.  Condolences may be made online at www.munromorris.com

He aimed to die in the farmhouse, but actually died at the neighbour’s house, given the furnace in the farmhouse literally exploded two weeks’ prior. There was an evacuation and a professional service come through to clean every inch of every single thing in the house (which means the farmhouse is the cleanest it might ever have been), and they were only given the ‘all clear’ from the insurance company to move back in on the day he died. He was close enough, I think. And he enjoyed, I was told, finding out how fast his new wheelchair could go when they moved him and his equipment (the hospital bed on the front end loader of the tractor) next door. Apparently he really opened up that chair once he got to the road. Given our current pandemic, there couldn’t be much of an in-person service, but there will be an online component as part of it, for all of those unable to attend. Here are the notes I put together for the Thursday morning service (which will be live-streamed via YouTube link, apparently), which of course will be be cut down considerably for time:

November 1941

Our father, Douglas Ian McLennan, was born in the log house on the hill along McDonald’s Grove, Concession 8, Roxborough, at 4:10am on June 26th, 1941. He was our grandparents’ second child, born eighteen months after an unnamed daughter who died within a day. The Ottawa Citizen printed a one-line obituary for “Baby Girl McLennan,” September 1939, and our father always claimed no knowledge of her. Our great-aunt Jesse said it was the only time she ever saw our grandfather cry.

Given the loss, our father might have been both miracle and a relief to our grandparents, Johnny and Ellen. John Duncan, or “Johnny,” was the youngest of four boys and three girls, so when he married in 1935, he moved from the McLennan homestead where he and his siblings were born. Our grandparents moved directly across the road from the McLennan property, a dairy farm that he still operated with his brother Scott, into the log house on the hill, a property of 160 acres that Johnny and Scott had purchased in 1934.

When our father was eight months old, Johnny moved his small family to the farm next to the original McLennan homestead, and this is where my father would spend the rest of his life. This is the only house he’s ever known, although one could say he knew a couple of neighbouring houses nearly as well. Growing up, he was surrounded by family, with uncles and aunts within walking distance, and some older cousins, whether Weldon and Eileen on Cameron Road, or Jule and Audrey, who regularly made visits with their parents from their home in Ottawa. He was the baby of his small cluster of cousins. He worked with his father. He rode his bicycle along the dirt roads. He had a dog that, due to an accident, had only three legs, still bounding happily across the fields and over machinery. By Dad’s teenaged years, the Jensens had purchased the original McLennan farm, and he found a life-long friend in Kris, the two boys taking turns slipping through the opening in the fence between their farmhouses.

Our parents met in 1965. She was a townie, living with her family in the south end of Alta Vista, then still a relatively-new Ottawa suburb. This was in the days before Highway 417 was completed, back when the drive from the farm to the city would have been three and a half hours. His mother didn’t drive, which meant he spent much of his twenties accompanying his father into the Ottawa Civic for radiation treatments. All of this, I’m sure, done without a single complaint.

Our parents met through friends as part of Bible Camp. Kris Jensen was engaged to a girl from Ottawa, and his fiancé was, and still is, best friends with my mother’s younger sister, Pam. It was a three-and-a-half hour drive for my father to court my mother. There is a story I heard from before they were married, of my father assisting the Page family on Christmas Eve. He helped my mother at her family home, assembling toys for my cousins to wake up to as part of their stockings, before finally driving back to the farm late enough that he made it just in time to do morning chores.

leaving her parents' house on their wedding day

At some point, my mother caught scarlet fever while babysitting, which had begun to affect her kidneys. By 1967, she was told she had three months to two years to live, prompting Dad to respond that he loved her, and was going to marry her anyway. I can’t imagine him saying any of that aloud. I can barely imagine him thinking it. They married in 1967, and she managed twenty-two years on dialysis before her third kidney transplant in 2000, which allowed her another decade, outliving her original prognosis by more than forty years.

A three and a half hour drive.

Once our parents were married, his parents moved to a bungalow on Highland Road, just north of St. Elmo. Dad said it didn’t matter where his parents lived, his father still came over every day. They were unable to have children of their own, due to Mum’s ongoing medical issues, which led to my arrival in January 1971, at ten months old, and Kathy’s arrival in June 1976, at two months.

at the extended mclennan family reunion, 1974

He was considerate, but inattentive. Our parents had two children, but he didn’t know when our birthdays were. After Mum died, Dad told me that between Kathy and I, he knew one of us was in March, and the other in April, but he had no idea which.

He provided an example of self-motivation, organization and self-discipline. He rose before dawn every morning to begin the work that needed to be done, as daily, monthly and seasonal demands of the farm required, milking between thirty and forty head of Holstein, and maintaining three hundred and ninety-five acres of land. He provided an example of being the best there was at what he did, including constructing his own buildings and machinery as needed, and providing assistance to anyone who might have required it. And knowing the difference between what he could do, and what you hire someone else to do. He was presented with a leadership award in the early 1970s for his years in 4-H, and spent the whole of his life donating money to a variety of charities, more than I could count. He was active in the church, and in his community. And yet, his lessons, at least to me, were never straightforward. If he were attempting to teach you how to do something, he would either lose patience and do it himself, or micromanage, something I was reminded of repeatedly over his last six or eight months. I remember responding to one of the neighbours when I was four years old that I had no intention of farming, but I wonder how much of a factor might also have been our inability to approach each other. And yet, how I do what I do now, from the approach to work and the considerations of community, is so deeply rooted in the example he presented.

at seventy-one, with Kathy

To learn from him, one often had to take a step back, and pay attention to the bigger picture. He was the first to offer a neighbour assistance, just as they were realizing they might have needed it, although never with pressure or presumption. He plowed multiple driveways every winter, and was always receiving friends in our yard who sought his expertise to fix some broken part or another. When Cameron McGregor was no longer able to take in his own hay in the later 1980s, it was our father who took it on, along with his hired man and myself, with Cameron doing whatever he could, despite his eighty-odd years. During the ice storm of 1998, our father hooked the generator up to the tractor and the Hydro line, providing three weeks’ worth of electricity my parents’ wouldn’t have had otherwise (for her dialysis machine and the milking equipment). He’d owned it for years, and apparently Mum had teased him for it. She stopped bothering him about it then. And throughout the days of blackout, he moved from neighbour-to-neighbour with the tractor and generator, providing a couple of hours each for heat and a hot meal before he moved to the next house, finally making it home in time for his evening chores. His was an example of the glue that helped keep a community together. If you could do something, you offered it. If you required the help, there would always be someone nearby who knew how, and could help in their way.

with his father

They spent $1,500 on fuel to keep that generator running during those three weeks immediately following the ice storm. Our mother’s only inconvenience during those three weeks, which she did complain about, was having to sleep on the other side of the house, given the tractor was running all night outside their bedroom window.

He was easygoing, but it often took some doing to prompt him to laugh, speak or get angry. Going through dozens of photographs of him after he’d died, it was nearly impossible find one where he wasn’t looking away from the camera, whether down or to the side. The photograph included in the obituary is from 2012, as I prepared to get married. We were still an hour or two from the ceremony, as my piper, best man and I were gathering, captured by our official photographer. I think I’d finally chastised him for not actually looking happy, or at the camera, which made him chuckle. Oh, for god’s sake, Dad. He was someone who was quietly, steadfastly there, not wishing to announce himself or be in the way. He was strong in his beliefs, but humble in their application. Our father emerged from a strong willed mother to marry a strong willed wife, yet he didn’t care for direct conflict. It would take an awful lot for him to be pushed to complain, or step in. During one of his hospital stays last year, it even took some convincing from us to inform the nurses that if he complained of pain at all, it was because the pain was quite bad, and he required painkillers.

September 2012, prior to our wedding

2019, driving through the back fields

After he sold the farm, he offered sizeable amounts of money to both Kathy and myself without as much as a further word, whether a suggestion of how to spend it, or any question of how we had. He could offer it – so he did. It was a sign of trust. He didn’t interfere, or prod. I always found him confusing to interact with, playing his cards so close to the chest that you couldn’t even tell if he was participating, or how much he took in, until he spoke. I suspect I overthought it. Who he was he always kept in plain view; one simply had to be attentive.

Fifteen months ago, he was handed a diagnoses of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, after already having gone through surgery for colon cancer, a triple bypass and a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis that he had most likely already endured for more than a decade. Earlier on, he developed sleep apnea and diabetes, both of which forced him to move from dairy farming to cash crop in 2000, before he was unable to even do that anymore. He was used to doing everything himself at his own speed in his own way, but managed to handle all of these difficulties with grace. After his ALS diagnosis, his only insistence was that he die at home, refusing to go into hospital. I don’t think he really understood how much of that was even possible without the enormous amount of work Kathy put into his care. He occasionally told me just how much he appreciated her, and how great her kids—Emma, Rory and Duncan—were to him, but in hindsight, I suspect he didn’t say much to her about this. I don’t know if he could. He wasn’t exactly one to emote his feelings, and I suspect our mother spoke enough that it allowed him his silence, where he may have been most comfortable.

from their honeymoon : the botanical gardens, hamilton

There were multiple times over the past couple of years that doctors had told us to go in to say goodbye to him and he’d somehow reemerge, albeit a bit weaker each time. Acting as though nothing had happened. A few weeks before he’d died, his bowel nearly ruptured. His doctor expected it within a day or so of seeing him, and yet, he made it through, and was back in his chair in the living room, poking at his tablet and in front of the television, as though nothing had occurred. He was where he wished to be, and was able to be.

He was a consummate gardener, much like his mother. When Christine and I were married in 2012, he grew all our flowers, and refused anything in return. He took photographs of rainbows, including the occasional double-rainbow over the property. He would get excited about rainbows. He maintained birdfeeders for multiple birds, able to watch for hummingbirds by the front step, and blue jays, cardinals and orioles by the back porch, through the kitchen window. He was a good man, and a fair man: the first things anyone would say about him. He cared deeply about his family. I shall miss his quiet, distracted, resoluteness. I am wishing I had paid better attention.

periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics

May 7, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Spotlight series #49 : Erin Emily Ann Vance

≪ Previous: Douglas Ian McLennan (June 26, 1941-May 1, 2020)

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edited and lovingly maintained by rob mclennan
built as a curious extension of above/ground press
https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/

There has been an enormous amount of material posted at periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics since lock-down began, the new online journal I founded pre-lockdown (and completely unrelated to lockdown). new material posts over the first few days of every month, so either follow along via twitter (https://twitter.com/PeriodicityJ) or facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/251533219212824/?ref=group_header) for updates!

periodicities is open to submissions of previously unpublished poetry-related reviews, interviews and essays. Please send submissions as .doc with author biography to periodicityjournal@gmail.com

For the time being, submissions of previously unpublished poetry will be by solicitation-only, with the exception of translated works (which you should very much send along).

Be aware also: submissions are currently open for tributes to poets Peter Ganick and Joe Blades (see the folio on Ken Belford to get a sense of how those might look: https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2020/04/folio-ken-belford-1946-2020_4.html)

POSTED MATERIAL SO FAR INCLUDES: Dale Tracy : On Jenn Cole’s “Stepdancing the asinig (rocks) with pierogies” ; Dessa Bayrock : Razielle Aigen and the inside, the outside ; Phil Hall : Homage to Jamie Reid ; Henri Michaux : Five translations by Hugh Thomas ; Leah Horlick : Two poems ; Michael Sikkema : An interview with Nate Logan ; Pam Brown : Notes from the Field : Sydney, Australia ; Kim Fahner : We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite, by Conyer Clayton ; Russell Carisse : this mud, a word, by Simon Brown ; Rosmarie Waldrop : A COMPLICATION OF GRAVITY ; Razielle Aigen : LIGHT WAVES THE LEAVES, poems by Razielle Aigen ; Jérôme Melançon : Port of Being, by Shazia Hafiz Ramji ; rob mclennan : An interview with George Stanley ; Amanda Earl : AngelHousePress: from ragged edges to advocacy ; Genevieve Kaplan : a ringing, by Melanie Noel ; emilie kneifel : ekphrasis ; Lance La Rocque : Four poems ; Devon Marsh : Generating Verse ; Melissa Eleftherion : nonlinear, with hot plate ; Khashayar Mohammadi : These are not the potatoes of my youth, by Matthew Walsh ; Wren Hanks : Three poems ; Anthony Etherin : Thaumaturgy, by Anthony Etherin ; Dessa Bayrock : Conyer Clayton and the Voice of Apocalypse ; Kim Fahner : Notes from the Field : Northern Ontario ; Kate Siklosi : Writing & Witnessing & Loving in Covidian Times ; Amanda Earl : The Dysgraphxst, a poem by Canisia Lubrin ; Adrienne Fitzpatrick : Ken Belford ; Fred Wah : Ken Belford ; Elee Kraljii Gardiner : Thinking about Ken Belford ; Donna Kane : Ken Belford ; Larissa Lai : A few words to remember Ken Belford ; Rob Budde : A letter to Ken Belford ; Rita Wong: Ken Belford ; Michael Turner : Five poems ; Adam Mohamed : Strategies of the Pre-Aesthetic in Shelly Harder’s remnants ; Sacha Archer : Simulacrum Press: Intention & Chance ; Shazia Hafiz Ramji : Poetry Is Where My Heart Lives: An Interview with Francine Cunningham ; Amy Parkes : One poem ; Heather Sweeney : New Sutras, by Suzanne Stein ; Michael Sikkema : An interview with Jennifer MacBain-Stephens ; K.B. Thors : Three poems ; Klara du Plessis : DEEP CURATION FACTORY LECTURE SERIES, VERSEFEST, 30 MARCH 2019 ; Julian Day: Unlucky Fours, by Ellen Chang-Richardson ; D.A. Lockhart : The Algonquin Park Experiments, by Brittany Renaud ; George Stanley : Four poems ;

as well as one hundred videos of contemporary poets reading from their work as part of the virtual reading series, a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space; including: Nicole Raziya Fong, Julie Joosten, Joanna Lilley, Jules Arita Koostachin, Sarah Ens, Rob Manery, Eléna Rivera, Beatriz Hausner, Peter Midgley, Lydia Unsworth, Shaindel Beers, Mari-Lou Rowley, Grant Loveys, Amanda Deutch, Adrienne Gruber, Isabel Sobral Campos, Sommer Browning, Sonia Di Placido, Tunchai Redvers, Erin Emily Ann Vance, Carrie Olivia Adams, Cynthia Cruz, Wendy McGrath, Niina Pollari, Franklin Bruno, natalie hanna, Chris Banks, Kayla Czaga, David Koehn, Melissa Eleftherion, Noah Eli Gordon, Arielle Greenberg, Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Eleonore Schönmaier, Julia Polyck-O’Neill, Aaron Tucker, Claire Kelly, Su Croll, Jacob McArthur Mooney, Kim Fahner, Claire Caldwell, Monty Reid + Curis Emery, Razielle Aigen, Fred Schmalz, Chris Nealon, Matthew Rohrer, Noelle Kocot (read by Matthew Rohrer), derek beaulieu, Orchid Tierney, Catriona Strang, Simon Brown, Laura K. McRae, Rebecca Rustin, Forrest Gander, Shane Rhodes, Johannes Göransson, Ellen Chang-Richardson, Megan Burns, Jacqueline Valencia, Sadiqa de Meijer, Heather Sweeney, Hailey Higdon, Emily Izsak, Adam Clay, émilie kneifel, Chris Johnson, Natalee Caple, Adeena Karasick, Pearl Pirie, Paul Brookes, Manahil Bandukwala, Margo LaPierre, Gil McElroy, Conyer Clayton, K.I. Press, Gary Barwin, IAN MARTIN, Amish Trivedi, Khashayar Mohammadi, Amanda Earl, Isabella Wang and rob mclennan.

BE NOT DISHEARTENED, MY GOOD PEOPLE! we will get through this,

Spotlight series #49 : Erin Emily Ann Vance

May 8, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: essays in the face of uncertainties

≪ Previous: periodicities : a journal of poetry and poetics

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The forty-ninth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala,Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff and Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith

The whole series can be found online here.

essays in the face of uncertainties

May 9, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Chin

≪ Previous: Spotlight series #49 : Erin Emily Ann Vance

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In response to the self-isolations, my friend, Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell has instigated a series of 35mm portraits of poets through windows. He stands outside, as his subjects remain safe in their houses. He wishes, as he writes me over email, “to document in physical, material ways the Coronavirus.” He asks: do we get evening or morning light?

Our front window faces west, and the backyard, east. Late March: our yard is still a variety of snow, ice and water, so I suggest the front window, pushing his opportunities into the afternoon.

Today is warm, and the sun is out. Soon, he stands in our driveway, headset attached to his cellphone, speaking to us in real time. Christine puts him on speakerphone, so we can all hear. A half-second delay between watching and hearing him speak. From within our living room, the girls mug at the front window; Stephen requests we lean in for the sake of proper light, and framing.

He catches us all, but within days is forced to abandon the project, given stricter directives around social distancing, and remaining home. We all remain home.

Stephen has been engaged with photography the entire time twenty-plus years that I’ve known him; he prefers the results of film over digital, for the sake of texture, of depth. Through preparation for this project, he told me that he came upon a whole array of photographs he took of us in 2002, during a reading tour we did of Ireland. A photograph of myself, brooding, in front of Yeats’ Tower, Thoor Ballylee, the 15^th century Hiberno-Norman tower house in County Galway, once owned and inhabited by the poet William Butler Yeats. “What shall I do with this absurdity, / O heart, O troubled heart —” Yeats wrote, opening the title poem to The Tower (1923), writing on age and experience and hard-won truths. More recently, Ottawa-born American poet Paul Legault reworked his own translelation of Yeats to compose his own volume, The Tower(2020), overwriting Yeats’ lines to seek his own discoveries. A transelation, as Erín Moure coined it, from her own exploration of creating new work through translating, Pessoa-esqe, within the language. As Legault wrote the first lines of his own title poem: “How will I do being old when I’m old – / having to use this same heart in its place.”

What I recall of that day, driving though Galway, was the amount of time he would take to set up his tripod each time, staring down into the top of his camera to set up each shot. As we travelled across Ireland, multiple stops at ruins, churches and fields where as he set up his camera. He had a whole sequence of photographs from that trip. I did also, deciding to take snapshots with my digital camera of Stephen from behind, as he set up his camera and tripod, although with only Stephen in view. My joke was that it looked from his stance that he wasn’t taking photos, but peeing. My photo-sequence of Stephen Brockwell, seemingly peeing at important sites all over the country.

What I recall of that day: the tears in his eyes as we pulled up to the Tower.

Does peace, in truth, come dropping slow?

 essays in the face of uncertainties

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Chin

May 10, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Ongoing (isolation) notes: early May, 2020: Ballantyne + SOME

≪ Previous: essays in the face of uncertainties

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Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He is the author of three full-length short story collections: You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue from Duck Lake Books, Circus Folk from Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, and most recently The Long Way Homefrom Cowboy Jamboree Press. Chin won the 2017-2018 Jean Leiby Chapbook Award from The Florida Review and Bayou Magazine’s 2014 James Knudsen Prize for Fiction. Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.

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?

Functionally, I don't know that my first book or first chapbook changed my life, but I will say that each felt like a validation of what I'd been doing. Particularly for my first full-length book, You Might Forget the Sky was Ever Blue, I'd been submitting versions of the manuscript pretty aggressively for about two and a half years before Duck Lake Books took a chance on it, and it felt like a weight off to have it in the world and validate the time and effort that had gone into it.

That first book is largely a collection of traditionally structured short stories (albeit with a few more experimental pieces, and a few stories with overlapping characters in there); projects since have tended to play more with links and writing around cohesive  themes, in some cases like my second book Circus Folk, bordering on a novel-in-stories format.

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

I learned how to read fiction before other genres--both literally as the form of literature that I think most of us encounter first, and in the sense that I spent many years thinking that I simply didn't get poetry, and CNF wasn't so much on my radar. I think I've always enjoyed the elements of imagination of content unique to fiction, though, from my earliest attempts that tended to rely a bit too heavily on pre-plotting to evolving into writing in a more character-driven form. (All that is with the admission that I now find genre lines pretty fluid, and even teach a college seminar about how blurry the lines are between fiction and non-fiction in particular!)

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 depends, but I'd say it's usually a really good sign for a project when the beginning goes quickly, which often includes a few days to a few weeks of emailing myself copious notes as they come to me, and then getting rolling on a draft. I think my greatest strength as a writer is probably being a prolific writer of first drafts; I'm more sluggish and often not as good at revision. My first drafts are hardly ever good enough that I'd consider submitting them for publication, though, and I'd say most projects require a bare minimum of three passes in terms of more substantive revision, followed by polishing at more of a sentence level. It's not an exact rule, though I'd suggest for me that I tend to wrap up shorter pieces after fewer stages of revision, while full-fledged short stories and projects longer than that tend to take quite a few more iterations and quite a bit more time.

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?

I tend start writing a singular piece, though I've had the good fortune a number of times for one piece to feel like it spurs on others. I'm resistant to our contemporary culture around sequels and making everything a series, but I do feel there's something to be said for telling a story and realizing I'm not done with those characters, that setting, or that situation, and picking up on it for another piece.

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

I do like readings. In general, I've found them supportive, and I think it's encouraging to access other people engaged with a similar type of creative work. I tend not to read from unpublished work if I can help it, though, as I find that sharing from a project too early can sabotage the project for creating the illusion it's more complete, or at least more fixed, than it ought to be, or feeling as though it's now subject to other people's reactions before  I was done tinkering myself.

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?

A lot of my work bends toward speculative elements, including magical realism or playing with concepts like ghosts. I also write a fair amount of sex into my work. I think that one of my big subtextual concerns is exploring the taboo and trying to uncover why something might make us uncomfortable, and what truths we might arrive at when we interrogate that space.

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 feel every writer is a product of their context. I hit a rough patch with my writing in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election for feeling a lot of (self-imposed) pressure to write more politically and ideologically. I find I'm a much better writer when I don't feel beholden to such explicit responsibilities, and that I'll often write my way back around to issues I care about when I'm not consciously trying to foreground them. So, in a nutshell, I think that's a writer's role--to say something that matters to them based on the world they live in.

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

I feel there's real merit in knowing when to show a project to someone else--be it because I'm stuck, or because I've taken it as far as I can on my own, or perhaps most particularly when I feel a piece is great, because it's usually not, and having a more objective outside opinion can help bring me back down to earth and recognize the issues I still need to work on.

All that said, I also feel there are some projects for which calling in an editor, advisor, or workshop isn't appropriate, especially for very short work. I have pet projects for which I'm happy with what I've got--if I know I'm not going to be receptive to criticism, then there's little point in going through the motions.

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

I spent a semester years back studying under Phil LaMarche and he relayed an anecdote I always took to heart about persistence and its value. The story goes that a student asked his teacher, "Do you think I have what it takes to be a writer?" The teacher asked in return, "Do you think you could keep writing, even when you're busy, even after your work keeps getting rejected, even if you don't make a dime?" The student said, "Maybe." The teacher said, "Then maybe you have what it takes."

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to flash fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I'm definitely a fiction writer at heart, if only for sheer amount of time spent on the craft. I don't have much trouble transitioning between short stories and flash--to me a story is generally going to run as long as it is, and the concern only comes into play if, for example, a piece is 1,007 words long, and I see value in trimming off seven words so I can submit it as flash.

It's a massive over-simplification, but I generally find, it's fiction or non-fiction if I'm focused on the narrative at hand, and it's poetry if I'm more focused on isolated moment or image. I tend to write fiction on the regular and only dip into the world of poetry more sporadically.

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 make a good faith effort to write every day--I would roughly estimate that that results in writing about 300 days out of the year. I tend to be time or word count driven, in either case trying to squeeze in a half hour or 500 words or so per day to keep "in shape" and maintain some kind of momentum, especially on longer projects.

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

I'm a big believer in reading to to break out of creative slumps. I have a bank of ideas that I doubt I'll ever fully exhaust (I tend to add to it at much more aggressive pace than I finish things), so when I do get stalled it's usually more of a matter of grasping for words or feeling tired than not having ideas, and I find that reading good, diverse work can do a lot in terms of rediscovering a rhythm.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

When I get questions about home, I tend to revert to my childhood home. It's probably not the most romantic answer, but I'll say dust. We tended to have a lot of dust.

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

I'm inclined to agree with McFadden that books feed books better than anything else. That said, I do listen to music a lot and consume some television or movies most days, and find that it all feeds in in different ways--sometimes more consciously than others.

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

There are probably too many to name, but in for relatively recent influences and favorites, I really like Carmen Maria Machado, Maggie Nelson, Don Lee, and Alexander Chee's work. Steven Moore's The Longer We Were There is probably the best book I've read in the last couple months.

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

In terms of writing and publishing, I would like to see a novel through to publication (I've drafted quite a few, but my books to date are all collections of short fiction). I also have a vague interest that I may or may not ever fully follow up on in writing something for a YA audience.

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 think it's likely I would have wound up teaching something no matter what path I took; it's hard to imagine in not being writing or literature, but who knows if I had gone a different path? It's a tough business to crack into, but I also like to think that I would have been good at writing for professional wrestling.

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

There are a lot of things I've tried or that I'd like to have done, but I would suggest that when I started settling into adulthood a few years out of college, I settled on the idea that it was better to focus on a few things I really enjoyed and/or was good at than squandering time and effort on things I never would enjoy or thrive in. So, for example, I've half-heartedly tried to pick up the guitar a few times in my life, but it doesn't organically, instinctually make any sense to me.

Writing--writing makes sense to me.

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

I cited Steven Moore's The Longer We Were There already, but I'll add to that Alexander Chee's Edinburgh, Benjamin Drevlow's Ina-Baby, and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House. For a film, I'll go with Horse Girl (and, though you didn't ask, I'll also add the new Netflix series Locke & Key to a list of recommended media--not quite as good as the graphic novels its based on, but I nonetheless really enjoyed the first season).

20 - What are you currently working on?

I don't like to comment too much on works in progress, but I'll say it's a collection of flash fiction pieces, rooted around someone working at a video store.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing (isolation) notes: early May, 2020: Ballantyne + SOME

May 11, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: JoAnna Novak, Abeyance, North America

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Are you keeping safe where you are? Are you washing your hands?

A few days ago, our young ladies decided to pick all the dandelions from our front yard for some reason. They filled up my pockets.

Vancouver Island BC: Vancouver Island poet and translator Hamish Ballantyne’s chapbook-length debut is the forty-four page IMITATION CRAB (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020). Ballantyne is a poet I’d only first heard of quite recently, via Slow Poetry in America [see my notes on his pamphlet through them here], with this new publication arriving in a package from Toronto that included a small handful of other really lovely titles alongside. IMITATION CRAB is a book of small but densely packed lyric poems, each of which portray and examine the moment. Ballantyne’s meditations simultaneously move at the speed of thought and require a slowness, focusing on each and every essential word. The structure, lyric flow and density of his poems, as I’ve suggested elsewhere recently, are comparable to the work of his good pal and former co-hort Michael Cavuto, but I might also suggest worthy comparisons to some of what Cameron Anstee, Jack Davis and others have been working on over the past few years. There is an enormous amount of activity in Ballantyne’s few lines. There is exactly what he presents to you, also. And that is, gloriously, wonderfully, enough.

AFTERNOON

he is gone

and something wavers

in oak’s few

        hairs

it is a murder

it is not—all is

    still still and

the snow

snow quiet

Vancouver BC: The second issue of Rob Manery’s SOMEhas appeared, with new work by Alan Davies, Nicole Raziya Fong, Nora Collen Fulton, Mark Francis Johnson, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Robert Manery, Gustave Morin and Fred Wah. As Manery has mentioned before, the “SOME” is a play off Wah’s own SUM, a poetry journal “published in Buffalo, NY and Albuquerque, NM from 1963-1965 that ran seven issues.” Given Manery’s previous work as part of a duo, along with Louis Cabri, through the Ottawa-based hole magazine and the chapbook press hole books throughout the first few years of the 1990s, I find it interesting that he has re-emerged as the editor and publisher of a small magazine. It would be interesting to hear some of Manery’s thoughts at some point on what he might see as the difference between putting a journal together then, and putting one together now. Perhaps I should get on that.

I do not speak of why (why (of why)) writing happens.

It is common to speak of the pantheon of questions with reference to some that occur quite frequently – who / what / where / when / why. The first four of these can be answered with reference to our senses – but with the advent of the question why we are thrust securely into the realm of the mind (of thinking).

And I for one find the why question almost stultifying – it leaves me feeling stuck. The reason for this is that when we do answer it we choose from among the many causes only one or a few that seem most salient to us in the circumstances of the moment. But the reality is that everything is the cause of everything else – and it is being thrown again against the wonderment of that unrealizable realization that leaves me speechless (and not unhappily so).

            Alan Davies, “How Writing Happens”

A large part of the appeal of hole magazine was in the realization that it was one of the few Canadian venues publishing work by the writers in and around The Kootenay School of Writing, some of whom didn’t publish much or at all in Canadian journals, especially since the demise of KSW’s own WRITING magazine. Whereas SOME continues along the lines and threads of some of that aesthetic—given Manery’s own interest in such, obviously—the differences over those years mean that other journals are open to publishing such work, and, possibly, this current journal doesn’t require itself to hold to the same kind of boundaries. Perhaps writing itself has evolved from that point thirty years ago, more open to the larger field, and the larger field to it. Either way, there is some remarkable work in this issue that I am very pleased to be able to interact with, and you should pick up a copy of both of the first two issues. How often are new poems by Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, for example, put out into the world? Not nearly enough. As the ending of her two-page poem “Low Function” reads:

Keep Off the Landscape,

sketch a curtsy

within the inherent vice

I retreat into perplex; circumx

Cruder   stupider

Don’t just sit and stare

at anything coming down

Teeth of the wind but lucid interval

Cat gets scared

Inching, continuing

towards the edge

of the nearest pond

—beaver template

not actually thinking

He hasn’t constructed a web page for such, but in a recent email, he mentioned: “Correspondence should be addressed to Some Magazine, c/o Robert Manery, 225 W 18th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V5Y 2A8. Email can be sent to rob.manery@telus.net. Subscriptions are $24 for two issues. Single issues are $12. Please make cheques payable to Robert Manery.”

JoAnna Novak, Abeyance, North America

May 12, 2020, 5:31 am

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So            loneliness is not emptiness,

            not an ambushed field,

            not Cistercian,

            not cloistered

but           concupiscent

    so fragile, full,

            and open to you remembering,

            silverizing

                    oxygen, kissing

                    a little trowel

                            I keep

                        down my dress.

Yes          I do want rauwolfia,

            jasmine, California poppies,

    forget-me-nots, I desire the

                    raw green peppercorns

                        in your noisy toolbox. (“LOS ANGELES → CONTINENT”)

Writer, editor and publisher (founder of the chapbook publisher and online journal Tammy) JoAnna Novak’s second poetry title, after Noirmania (Inside the Castle, 2018), and third published book, is Abeyance, North America (New York/Kingston NY: After Hours Editions, 2020). Abeyance, North America is constructed as a suite of five lyric suites: “LOS ANGELES → CONTINENT,” “BOSTON → BOSTON,” “INTERLUDE: PARADISIAQUE,” “NORTH PACIFIC DRIFT → HOTEL SUITE” and “ABEYANCE → LOFT X.” Novak’s poems are ripe with a confident and sexy swagger, and there is a meditative insistence here that is quite compelling, accumulated through her short-sketched lyrics, one set on top of another. “You are the one I want / and we will examine it / every day. Horrible / carpeting of illegal white / trillium and those cats / and prostitutes for / I was game at Thunder / Bay amethysts and kissing / your cock beautiful.” Her poems articulate movement, awareness, beauty and consequence, each suite-section shifting from one state to another, even if there might be little to do obvious difference between those two states. “Suppose the Virgin River left Zion and replaced / the Harbor.” she writes, to open the prose-sequence “BOSTON → BOSTON”: “Put the edge of my plan in a gorge.”

There is a 2018 interview online with Novak, conducted by Sarah Blake for Chicago Review of Books that I found quite interesting. The interview focused, in part, on some of Novak’s work with formal structure—the Spencerian sonnet, line breaks and Oulipian structures—specifically within her then-newly-published poetry debut, Noirmania. The interview reinforces what Abeyance, North America already provides: the awareness that Novak’s structural considerations are purposeful, as well as highly playful, through a small collection composed across an ambitious space and conceptually-large canvas. How does her abeyance, her suspension, spread itself across an entire continent? As Novak responds as part of that 2018 interview:

I agree that line breaks and enjambment create magic, for sure, and I love when you can be tugged between multiples readings of a line. I write prose, too, and so a lot of the time, when I’m typing a poem, I’m eager to think about the gaps and leaps and aporias I can create by tabbing or spacing. I like the gulps and caesuras a poem splattered with white space can have. And then, too, I think working with the whole page can be an extremely useful editing tool. I’m bolder in what I excise when I write with a lot of white space. Sometimes I’ll work a draft of a poem that way and then bring it back to a more controlled form—I like when language retains that distilled feeling. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anna Vitale

May 13, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #9 (ed. natalie hanna) + #10 (ed. Jenny Penberthy

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Anna Vitale is a poet, a writer, and host of the freeform radio program The Tenderness Junction on WGXC 90.7 FM (formerly on WFMU). She is the author of Detroit Detroit (Roof Books), the pamphlet Our Rimbaud Mask (Ugly Duckling Presse), and other works including Different Worlds (Troll Thread) and Unknown Pleasures(Perfect Lovers). She earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an M.F.A. in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband.

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 wasn’t sure I would ever be able to make a book. Everything felt small or in pieces. I liked having chapbooks and those were easy-ish to write. I could conceive of something that size. It  took me almost 10 years—of having dreams about Detroit, recording them, and transcribing them—to realize I could make a book “about Detroit.” And saying this—that the book is about Detroit—always feels like it’s an insufficient description, which is why I like the title.

Some of my recent work is very much of the present. Several poems from the last couple years are journal poems where I create a sense of order through the repetition of dates and times, and there’s a wildness or looseness to the free-flowing associations and line breaks. I am trying to keep track of something new or, if it’s not new, at least it appears new as a result of the form. Other poems—poems I typed from my journal today (3/7/20)—remain, like the writing in Detroit Detroit, indebted to music, listening to words and their song, and I am dropping the dates so the poems can float, unhinged from the date I composed them.

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

Through poems my mother read to me, songs my mother sang to me, dancing and the phrasing of dance (tap dancing especially), and rap music. My father also plays the piano. So really the short answer is my deep love for music and dance and my parents’ love for these things—they led me to poetry.

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 want to say “all of the above” to this question, and I think that’s because it all feels true. For example, I’ve had in mind for a long time that I want to write a book about my mother. I have probably written half of it, or a little less than half, and I still feel like I haven’t started it at all, which is simply not true. I wrote the first 40-some-odd pages very quickly, and I don’t think I’ll edit them much, but it feels like it’s taking forever and that there’s so much more work to do. I also keep journals, always, and I forget that I write anything of value in them. It’s possible that I have finally realized I can turn what I write when I’m not thinking into poems relatively easily. I wonder if I hold onto an idea that being a writer is really, really hard when, now that I’ve done it for so long, it’s quite easy. Maybe the part that is hard is sharing the work and finding a place for it beyond my journals and files.

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?

With the book about my mom it is clear: I have to write this book. With the poems I’m writing now, I had no idea that anything was coming together, but today—because I was feeling desperate and on the border, once again, of being certain I’m no longer a poet—I found a couple poems that I wrote that I like in my journal. I typed them up and now I see that I could be writing another book, a book of poems, about love, humiliation, wounds, and the desire to forgive.

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

I love doing readings. The poems are most alive for me in performance, in relation to a live audience.

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 curious about what we need to have a good enough life. This phrase “good enough” often comes along with the idea of “the good enough mother” from the psychoanalyst D.W.Winnicott. I’ve read a tiny bit of Winnicott, but I’ve been in a hell of a lot of psychoanalysis in order to figure out how to have a good enough life, and I think poetry helps with that, too.

In my essay “The Tenderness Junction,” published at Full Stop, I write about listening in the context of being a freeform radio DJ and being in psychoanalysis. I’m certain that listening and living a good enough life have something to do with each other and so, again, poetry has something to do with those things, but I don’t think I can say what.

One more thing I can say: how do we enjoy each other’s company without trying to make each other into people we are sure we will like more? Maybe that seems like a crazy question, but if it does, then it is, and that’s what I’ve got: crazy questions.

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 probably have lots of different ideas about this at different times, but since this is the time of writing—now—then my answer is writers have a ton of different roles they can play and as long as we don’t think our job is to hurt people—even though we surely will because there’s no way around that 100%—we can do a lot: educate, play, preach, mirror, expand, contract, hide. I think writers should try to appear as often as they can—whatever that means—and I think that’s really, really hard. Or maybe I just mean “show up.” It’s a writer’s role to show up.

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

I think conversations about my work are essential for me to becoming a more interesting writer and thinker and person. I also know I need a very generous and thoughtful editor.  

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

It’s worth it. (Leslie Scalapino wrote that to me in a letter. She was writing about being a writer.)

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

At first, it was easy because I never felt a distinction between poetry and performance. I was on the youth poetry slam team in Ann Arbor when I was a senior in high school. (I didn’t live in Ann Arbor; Jeff Kass—who’s a well-known teacher in A2—was extraordinary and adventurous. He was our coach. We had so much fun.) Later, it was hard because I felt like no one expected me to think about performance and I was confused. I realized—but have had to keep remembering it—that you have to educate people about your work if they don’t know how to read it or hear it.

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 commute to NYC from the Hudson Valley two days a week to adjunct and my husband Bill Dixon makes me breakfast on Monday morning so I don’t feel like garbage before the long commute. I write in the thin Muji notebooks because they don’t make my pack weigh a lot. I write when I can right now. Suddenly, I’m trying to do so much more personally than I ever was before: be a good partner, buy a house, have a family, start a new career (to get out of adjuncting)—writing is both on my mind a lot but I’d like my mind to be more of writing than on writing.

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

I let the blank page do the talking: what do I see? what do I feel? what’s there? I can start anywhere. (It doesn’t always work, but I go back to that always.) This is, perhaps not surprisingly, very psychoanalytic! And, happily, it often leads to surprises—not like jack-in-the-box surprise, but mild, subtle, informative, and pleasant enough surprises.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Today? Pork chops.

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?

See #2.

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

Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst and writer: he’s very interested in what interests him and he makes a point of conveying how important it is to let ourselves be carried away by what delights us, not what we think should delight us or even the ways in which we can delight ourselves with the lies we tell about what delights us, but what do we actually get pleasure from? Also, I have some very good friends that are writers whom I love who talk to me on the phone and when we talk I think it feels like we are writing our lives together. I am thinking of Lewis (Freedman) and Rob (Halpern) in particular. I love the way they think and write and their courage often renews my own.

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

Finish my book about my mom and write a book with these newer poems. Then, I’d like to write a children’s book. I’d also like to write something with Bill about bridges. Very early in our hanging out, we had an exciting conversation about Marilyn Monroe, Heidegger, and bridges.

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

I’d like to be a modern dance choreographer.

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

My mom got angry and took me out of my dance school.

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

I really enjoyed reading Anne Truitt’s Daybook.She made me want to be with process, made me feel envious, in a good way, of artists with daily practices. She’s always looking at what interests her.

Last night, Bill and I watched The Shape of Water, finally! It’s so good. I want more movies about surprising kinds of love.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Trying to learn how to relax. Oh, you mean in terms of writing? Trying to find ways to surprise myself and everyone else.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #9 (ed. natalie hanna) + #10 (ed. Jenny Penberthy

May 14, 2020, 5:31 am

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NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #9
April 2020
edited by natalie hanna
see here for natalie’s introduction
the ninth issue features new work by:

Claire Farley
Shery Alexander Heinis
Anita Dolman
Jennifer Pederson
Natalee Caple
Gwen Benaway
Karen Schindler
Allison Armstrong
Ayesha Chatterjee
Ellen Chang-Richardson
Chuqiao Yang
Diane Finkle Perazzo
Barâa Arar

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #10
May 2020
edited by Jenny Penberthy
see here for Jenny’s introduction
the tenth issue features new work by:

Mallory Amirault
Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek
Junie Désil
Mackenzie Ground
Lida Nosrati
Christopher Tubbs
Ian Williams

$5 (each, plus postage)

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $6) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

essays in the face of uncertainties

May 15, 2020, 5:31 am

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One of the final poems in CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (2009) reads:

Frank is a

young boy

asleep in

ancient

Tibet

what you

thought was

your life is

really his

dream

he may

wake at any

moment

There was something in Neil Gaiman’s expansive The Sandman that spoke in similar directions: the city, and the dream of the city. What might happen to us if our city wakes? Anne Carson once wrote an entire essay on sleep, presented to The League of Canadian Poets as a lecture during their 2004 Annual General Meeting, held that year at a hotel in downtown Montreal. “This lecture will last fifty-eight minutes,” she told us, according to my notes from the time. There were dozens of poets from across Canada around large, circular tables in a Montreal hotel’s banquet hall, held close as Anne Carson spoke to us on sleep. Would to have remained awake through the entire lecture have been compliment or insult? To have drifted away? Later collected in her Decreation (2005) as “EVERY EXIT IS AN ENTRANCE (A Praise of Sleep),” Carson wrote:

The dream of the green living room was my first experience of such strangeness and I find it as uncanny today as I did when I was three. But there was no concept of madness or dementia available to me at that time. So, as far as I can recall, I explained the dream to myself by saying that I had caught the living room sleeping.

Carson suggests that rooms, that houses, might be able to sleep. Her title also suggests that you can always leave the way you came in. Remember that.

Gaiman’s lead character in The Sandman is Morpheus, Dream-Lord of the Endless, so it would be an understatement to say that sleep is an important element of the series. Dreams might be a different reality than the waking world, but that doesn’t make them less real. One of the most striking moments appears early on in the series, as those in the waking world, asleep due to the ‘sleeping sickness,’ are freed from their bonds. Some had been asleep for days, or even weeks, and others, for decades. They were asleep, and as suddenly, they were not. Awake at the flick of a switch, as they say. “And then she woke up.”

It begins to feel as though we’ve been in the house long enough that individual days no longer exist. The edges of each morning shimmers, as each evening falls in on itself. The children have always been. We have always been. We have always been here.

Days alternate snow squalls and sun, each one overtaking the other.

Newly-announced guidelines by the City of Ottawa recommend that, while myself and the girls might be able to go out for walks, Christine is considered high risk, and can’t even do that. I suggest she walk a marathon’s worth in our backyard, or inside our bedroom. She cares not for either suggestion. We remain in the house, even as April begins to shift melted snow into soft ground, the boundaries of grass and of lawn and of yard.

After lunch, Christine heads to the bedroom for a conference call, and our young ladies are packed with boots and coats and set loose in the backyard. Once outside, coats are abandoned, and Rose returns repeatedly to fill a container with water, to wash the caked dirt off their plastic water-table. She climbs their metal play-structure, surveying the yard. Aoife, too small to climb, hangs from the bars. I retreat to my desk and return to Julie Carr’s Sarah – Of Fragments and Lines(2010), a book I found quite remarkable when I first opened it, and still do: “To write in order to leave, for good, the day [.]” If we can leave today, somehow, might a new day begin?

I remember slipping Carson an envelope of poetry chapbooks on the day of the lecture: did I dream that as well?

essays in the face of uncertainties

Simina Banu, POP

May 16, 2020, 5:31 am

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FINALLY, A POEM CLASSY ENOUGH TO BE ‘UNTITLED’

I frantically gulp ketchup.

You fill my room with MLM supplements.

I dunk Tostitos Scoops

to uncharted depths.

Finding the long-coveted Pearl of Pettiness,

I develop a taste for bitters.

Please, the spectators weep, no more,

as I serve them yet more spoonfuls of honey mustard.

My revenge will be sweet

and sour,

I hear myself announce in a dream.

The whistle blows.

I fling salsa con queso.

It sticks to the night sky.

With two chapbooks under her belt (including one by above/ground press), Montreal poet Simina Banu’s full-length debut is the poetry title POP (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), a collection of first-person lyrics and visual structures that allows for the pallor of sketchbook or work-book. Moving through a variety of poem-structures, including more traditional lyric structures, prose poems, drawings and visual poems, Banu becomes the explorer, fearlessly pushing out into the unknown. As she writes in “SHARKEY’S DAY,” “I turn around, it’s fear! / I turn around again, and it’s love!” She isn’t afraid of exposition or exclamation, and there is the energy throughout as though Banu is feeling out where her poems might be going, and with something very much at risk through the process. She writes on earworms, Ariana Grande, cloudbursts, epics and Pringles, writing on love and food, and the intricacies and interrelations between, offering both popular culture and electrical pulses in poetic form as the two sides of her “pop.” “your standup / knocks me / out doors / windows / of course / there is no real harm / your stand / up knocks me / down uproariously” she writes, in the poem “Special.” There are moments I would have liked Banu to go further in certain of the directions she’s started to move in, but this is but opening salvo; I want to see where else her poems might move. I like where she’s headed. In her statement included as part of her January 2020 “Spotlight,” she wrote:

At some point during the last year, I noticed that I had accidentally begun writing a lot about food. In my attempts to convey various emotional peaks and valleys, a Cheeto, or perhaps some kale, would inexplicably spring into a poem. I’ve come to see that they (the poems; I don’t have the foresight to predict their tricks) weaponized food, relied on it to evoke the fitful and ever-changing power dynamics of doomed love. There is a purity associated with certain foods, and an impurity with others. And what does it mean when the communal activity of eating is divided on these lines? What does it mean to choose un-health not out of necessity but out of retaliation, even when all parties know that bag of Lay’s—or that passive aggressive “fine”—isn’t doing anyone any favours? Most importantly: how does one have a true food fight across a page to create maximum mess?

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Henry Wei Leung

May 17, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jon Miller on Osmanthus

≪ Previous: Simina Banu, POP

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Henry Wei Leungearned his BA in English at Stanford and his MFA in Fiction at the University of Michigan, then dropped out of a PhD program in Hawai'i. He is the author of Goddess of Democracy (Omnidawn, 2017), the end result of a Fulbright in Hong Kong during the Umbrella Movement. He is also the translator of Wawa's poems from the Chinese, including Pei Pei the Monkey King (Tinfish, 2016) and a tome-in-progress called Prelapsarian Bloom. Now a JD candidate at Berkeley Law, he was recently named a Fellow for the Salzburg Cutler Program in international law in D.C. He currently works as a judicial extern in federal court.

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 coming out should've been the career-making moment. Instead, it made me confront my long unspoken disappointment with the twin industries of academia and literature. Goddess of Democracy took three years to write, edit, finish, and publish--the same three years it took for the activists and student leaders in the protests I was writing about to be prosecuted, jailed, barred from the legislature, exiled... and none of them will ever read these poems. So I changed course for a JD in law, and decided to apply all that I've learned about language and storytelling to a setting with more material consequences. My recent "work" is therefore very different, whether I'm working on a civil rights or securities case, whether the facts are petty and boring or outrageous and rile me up. The stakes of a poem are held in the next generation, the next century, in language itself. The stakes of legal writing are in a person's one day in court, in their chance to tell their story and set the record straight.

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

There's no first or second or last. Fiction was all I knew as a kid because none of my teachers assigning Shakespeare, Blake, or even Langston Hughes had any idea what they were talking about--or really cared. And the library didn't have much poetry more recent than the Beats. It took a while for me to find poetry because it took a while for me to encounter poets.

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?

The process is only ever consistent when it comes like a strike of lightning. As in "Disobedience," which seems to be the poem of mine that's quoted most often, and about which I never know how to answer questions. In those cases, the poem writes itself in a single draft, in a feverish focus. Sometimes I think the "practice" of writing is no more than that: to get your reflexes ready for when you hear the thunder coming.

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?

Usually a piece doesn't come together until I have the title. That makes me a project writer, I suppose. Same in my legal writing so far: I can't put the facts together in a sequence until I know what the case is about or what it should be about. No content without a meaningful form. No surprise without a structure.

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

I find readings unbearably redundant. Have you ever been to one where the vast majority of the audience were not other writers, editors, and friends or followers of the author? The first reading I ever gave in public was after I won a local poetry contest when I was seventeen. I was invited to read with half a dozen adults. At the end of it, each of the other readers was immediately clustered by a circle of their own people. It was like a private club, and I was the only stranger. Every other reading in the last fifteen years has felt about the same. The only difference is that I've made more friends, who then cluster around me afterward, which has never been the point for me. But I did read once at an independent film screening and panel discussion, which was a wildly different and fruitful encounter; poetry in that case became an unexpected part of the audience's evening. I felt that it came a little closer to being part of the world.

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?

Previously: democracy and addressing the other in the second-person. Now: justice. Because I can tell you what injustice is, in both structural and granular detail, but what justice actually is I honestly do not 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?

My basic expectation is for the writer, by mastering language, to transcend language, and therefore be outside the larger culture, to belong to no time, to be the wilderness. And perhaps, then, to be in a position to give counsel to the times. To guide the species back to its humanity.

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

Essential, but I try to avoid it.

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

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself -- a Black woman warrior poet doing my work -- come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

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

I don't believe in genres. That's a term for agents and markets. When we write, there are only forms or structures, and the appeal is simply what implement works best for the task at hand. Oliver de la Paz said that every book for him means starting over and re-learning poetry, because he has to abandon the form that carried the previous book. I agree with that. Translation is different, though. It feels more tangible, more like a craft with the hands, chiseling at something with a pre-determined form. It's also free of the usual pitfalls of solipsism.

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?

Most days I read on the commute to work and write on the commute home. Some days I catch my breath and see people's faces.

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

I get on with my life. Louise Gluck once went a decade without writing. So did Jack Gilbert. The life is a process of the writing. Recall Rilke's admonition to live forty years to write one good line.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Angel's trumpets.

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

I'm less interested in the school of thought that says beauty multiplies itself, and more interested in the school that says beauty comes out of the devastating moments of beauty's absence: i.e. beauty as emergent necessity, sui generis. In other words, I think books come from the failure of civilization to protect our imaginations; they come from life at its most abysmally ugly moments. I think books come from the failure of books.

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

Simone Weil, tremendously. The Bhagavad Gita. Rumi. And comic books, which I find to be both emptying and life-sustaining.

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

Cook a perfect cast iron ribeye without a thermometer. It's so simple but I can't get it right.

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 would've been a martial arts instructor. It was either stay and do that (or join the military for the cash), or apply for college.

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

Language is everything for a broke immigrant kid in a non-English-speaking household. I had to confront the world as an alien either through the body or through language. In other words, for me: either through martial arts or through literature. Literature seemed to take me down a deeper path at the time.

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

Albert Camus's The First Man (his last and unfinished). Steve Barron's DreamKeeper(2003, originally an ABC miniseries).

20 - What are you currently working on?

Drafting a legal order for something I'm not allowed to talk about. And a novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jon Miller on Osmanthus

May 18, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Kyla Jamieson, Body Count

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Henry Wei Leung

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Osmanthus was formed on a hill sometimes called a mountain in Wuhan, China. Osmanthus intends to publish chapbooks and other objects that lie outside of genre and form. Jon Miller and Euan Kidston founded Osmanthus in Spring 2019, since then Carl Watts has come onboard. Osmanthus' catalogue includes chapbooks in English and bilingual books. Recent chapbooks include Motand Agape by Brian Clifton, and William Atlas by Joshua Rothes. Osmanthus’ most recent release includes Honor Your Speed by James Butler-Gruett and Gabriel Dozal, and a forthcoming release by Candice Wuehle.

Jon Miller is a bicyclist and educator based in Wuhan, China. His writings can be found on A South Broadway Ghost Society (2019) and A Dozen Nothing (2019) with a broadside from Chax Press (2020). Jon Miller is a lecturer at Central China Normal University, where he is constantly clipping branches from the Osmanthus trees. As tea drinker and bicyclist, find him in the Osmanthus branches, or here on Twitter, @yawn_sea

Carl Watts holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University. He teaches at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in Wuhan; due to Covid-19 he is currently calling it in from Hamilton, Ontario. He has published two poetry chapbooks, Reissue (Frog Hollow, 2016) and Originals (Anstruther, 2020), as well as a short monograph, Oblique Identity (Frog Hollow, 2019).

Euan Kidston is a brewer of beer and an amateur slide boarder. He is currently collapsing the wave function (observing, measuring) from his home in Wuhan where he looks after a Pokémon team’s worth of (6) animals. His writings cannot be found in many places yet other than his mind (circa 2010). He tends to the Osmanthus sometimes, tries to keep the website updated with the best clippings, and ensures the whole tree is fully functional

1 – When did Osmanthus Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Osmanthus is still a sapling. We officially started in April 2019, but only as a small-writing group. We met weekly, and I brought books and prompts for us to investigate and go through. To find something that members could take-away, we published an anthology that summer, which coincided with our first reading and open mic. We’ve strayed from the open mic format. It’s nice, but more interesting to organize a reading & performance series.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?  

In December 2018, Charles Alexander gave a lecture at the Chinese-American Poetics Conference held at Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China.His lecture was about the history of Chax and focused on book objects that he first made. Those objects showed me that it is possible for a book to convey information in a different way, other than the linear straightforward way. From there, I bought some bookmaking tools and got into the process. 

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

To have fun. To expect little but give a lot.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?           

That’s tough like if no one else is doing it, then I’m most likely unaware. Maybe Osmanthus’ production side is different. I intend to assemble everything by hand, so basically just printing in my apartment, and saddle-stitching the binding. All our books are hand-assembled, so that seems different. Maybe not though because I see this as in the same lineage as xerox-copied zines. Chapbooks or booklets are basically the same thing with different production qualities.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

Always at poetry events & performances. Most of the sales are from poetry events. We’ve sold some at bookfairs. We’re also trying to find a model that once we’ve sold through an edition that we’ll break even then have enough money to print a second edition, or work on the next book. Ideally I’d like to get a book out every month with publishing eight books a year. To go off of another question too. Osmanthus will likely develop into a subscription service. With like a reader paying something like $50-60, then they’ll receive all the books of that calendar year, or they’ll receive 8 books of their choice.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?        

Light touches are preferable with the approach that a mistake in the work is intentional, or that an unrealized mistake or deviation from standard grammar is an unconscious personal part of the work. I’d rather let that personal flourish stand than impose my ideas on someone else’s work.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?  

Through bookstores and other events. We sell online through our website too. We started off doing runs of 100 but have decided that small runs of 65 are sustainable, and when a second edition is needed then we can always produce more. That’s always changing. Nothing is certain, but for now we’re sticking with 65 copies per edition. It could change though if the book’s format changes like if the time to produce the book would take exponentially longer than producing a typical chapbook.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?         

With Brian’s books, one night I got a bunch of friends together and assigned everyone a task, someone to thread the needles and someone to stitch the books, and then trim the books. It was fun, and when finished we went out and shared some beers. That was fun, but it’s hard to organize the amount of people a second time, so mainly Carl Watts has been a mainstay with production and advising throughout the entire process, not just with the chapbooks, but about directions in which the press has gone. My partner has also been super supportive. She’s my go-to for design advice like she’ll help rope in concepts to something that looks super great.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

Editing has given my writing a more objective take. Recognizing many different styles and personal flourishes.  

10 – How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

Torn on this question. I’ve noticed many presses self-publishing their own work. I do not see anything wrong with self-publishing work on an imprint. Maybe some see it as tasteless, but I think it places more impetus on the writer to really hone the work before putting it out. If the self-published work is not good, then in a way that just delegitimizes the press for some. I’d say go for it. Publish the work, and really a lot of times the form letter is “we didn’t have a good fit for it at this time, but maybe next time.” Why not go out and carve your own space then? Or just leave space for others.

11 – How do you see Osmanthus Press evolving?

That’s a huge question, especially since we’re still in month three of really exhibiting and holding events outside of Wuhan. We’re currently talking with some friends who run a cassette label. A partnership where we’d put out audio recordings of writers, or noise or drone albums to act as soundtracks for the chapbooks. We are also expanding our website to include a digital weekly feature called Clippings from Toad Palace, a name that comes from a Chinese idiom. With that all said it’d just be good to keep things simple and keep putting out chapbooks, keep saddle-stitching away, and to have fun while doing it.

12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?    

Proud of this project. It’s been hanging out inside for the last six years. I helped a friend in the planning stages of a literary magazine back in 2014, but when I left for China, I decided to step away and get into life abroad.

13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

Chax Press. Empty Bowl is a recent discovery when I found some Red Pine translations on their site. Inside the Castleout of Lawrence, KS is doing some rad work. To be honest I’ve been so removed and not paying attention to the writing world for the last six years, that everything seems fresh. Joshua Rothes runs Sublunary Editions, who I discovered after he submitted William Atlas to me. Sublunary does monthly mailers. Matthias Svalina too with the Dream Delivery Service. Other than that, I went to AWP in 2019, which was a good large dose, macro-look into the publishing world.

14 – How does Osmanthus Press work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Osmanthus Press in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

I’d rather just talk to individuals as individuals rather than as some representative of a press. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m keeping the Twitter account personal rather than creating an Osmanthus Press Twitter account. Send me physical mail too rather than digital mail. If you want a mailing label for my Wuhan address, then find me somewhere and I’ll give you one.

With that said, before the coronavirus, I was in conversation with Beijing-based Spittoon. They’re publishing high-quality physical journals of bi-lingual work, so I guess going back to the original idea of shaping publishing methods. I think with them having a nice high-quality physical journal carved out that I wanted to focus on something different and make quality chapbooks, featuring bilingual editions, but also exclusively English editions too. Bilingual chapbooks are important to me, especially given my daily life in China.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?  

Crucial to us. As much as we love publishing chapbooks, our heart is in Wuhan. Regardless of when/if we get back to Wuhan, sharing work and giving attention to writers in the community is super important, especially if the writer’s goals aren’t professionalization in the publishing tracks, but that they’re more hobbyists. It’s still important to legitimize those writers and their work.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?           

Twitter and Instagram, and fighting with the Tyranny of the Screens! I’d love to minimize the digital presence. Euan Kidston our web editor takes care of everything web-related. He’s built out the website, and he’s been involved since the very beginning.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?           

Keep the submissions coming. We have our weekly digital feature called Clippings from Toad Palace. We’re not looking for confessional poetry and we’re not looking for something tame and middle-ground poetry. Robert Frost and Billy Collins, we’d love to publish your work, but other places might be best.

1 8 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Our first three titles William Atlas by Joshua Rothes, and MOT and Agape by Brian Clifton are special because they are diverse in style. Personal aesthetics lean more towards the experimental side, and a really keen interest in prose poems. All three of those books represent the spectrum of forms that we’re searching for at Osmanthus. I’m interested in work that has an ambiguous form, whether that’s individual chapbooks or indicative of books that we publish, we’re going after something ambiguous.

I’m super grateful for them because they’re the first titles with Osmanthus.

I’m also super grateful for Carl Watts and Euan Kidston for their continued support with the project and helping it grow.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

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Kyla Jamieson, Body Count

May 19, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kelly Grace Thomas

≪ Previous: 12 or 20 (small press) questions with Jon Miller on Osmanthus

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she brings me watermelon, a magazine,

ice cream

he brings me a belgian waffle, a mango,

everything for the dinner he makes me

he says,

,

&

/

I’m sick & can’t remember what he said

I wasted the years I could remember

every word on a man who stalked me

when I closed the door of my body

she asks why I call him            my evil ex

I explain & she says, oh.

yeah. (“SEX WAVE MOON NEST”)

I was eager to see Montreal poet Kyla Jamieson’s full-length debut, Body Count(Gibson’s Landing BC: Nightwood Editions, 2020), building upon the poems Kind of Animal (Vancouver BC: Rahlia’s Ghost Press, 2019). Jamieson’s poems are constructed upon a powerful first-person narrative of insistence, resistance and discourse, including critiques of literary and other cultural spaces for their treatment of women. “I’m grading papers & trying not to be biased / against students who objectify women.” she writes, in the second half of the short lyric “CANADIAN WOMEN IN LITERATURE,” “Later, I will realize I’ve inflated their grades.” As Rob Taylor notes in his recent interview with Jamieson at Read Local BC, she and Kayla Czaga each include poems to the other in their new collections, providing a curious kind of mirror-effect in the call-and-response between two peers, between two friends. As Jamieson’s poem responds, “Your Dear Kyla poems / make me feel better / about my name, though it / means lovely & I can’t / relate to femininity. Kayla, / I’m at the bus depot / & I’m so cold.” I am quite fond of the rhythms of these poems, from the prose poem to the accumulated and more traditional short lyric burst. There is also something quite compelling in the way she utilizes accumulation, short lines and even exhaustion in certain of her longer poems, such as the mid-section of the poem “THE BOOKSTORES IN NYC ARE GREAT WOULD BE / A WEIRD THING TO SAY OUT LOUD,” that reads:

I can’t be the only one

who doesn’t have time

for resistance. I didn’t

have to ask about

your flight or the border

b/c nobody stops you

meanwhile executive order

meanwhile frostbite

meanwhile Third Country

& here I am with

my internet & iPhone

& heat & money

in the bank.

Her short lines and line-breaks seem to propel the poem forward, pushing and collapsing against the slowness of her lyric, and the deliberateness of her language. The second half of the collection centres around her experience recovering from a concussion, sketching shorter lyrics through a fog of exile, even from her own thinking. “Last month I counted / the five hundred extra / hours I’ve spent sleeping / in this new state / where sunlight augurs / pain.” she writes, as part of the poem “IN EXILE I DRAW THE TOWER CARD.” I am enjoying the explorations here, the movements through thinking and frustration, and even the ways in which, via her concussion, she attempts to write and claw her way back into being. “Kayla,” she writes, to open the poem “SIZE MATTERS,” “I’ve decided / I don’t want to be small // anymore, but it’s a habit.” One hopes it is a habit that, through the process of writing, she is continuing to break free of.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kelly Grace Thomas

May 20, 2020, 5:31 am

≫ Next: Katie Condon, Praying Naked

≪ Previous: Kyla Jamieson, Body Count

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KELLY GRACE THOMAS is the winner of the 2017 Neil PostmanAward for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, was released by YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Nashville Review, Muzzle, DIAGRAM, and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Director of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. Kelly is a three-time poetry slam championship coach and the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot), currently taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Kelly has received fellowships from Tin House Winter Workshop, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the Kenyon Review Young Writers. Kelly and her sister, Kat Thomas, won Best Feature Length Screenplay at the Portland Comedy Film Festival for their romantic comedy, Magic Little Pills. Kelly lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Omid, and is currently working on her debut novel, a YA thriller, titled Only 10.001. www.kellygracethomas.com 

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

When you “burn your boats,” there is no going back. Moving forward is the only choice. Boat Burned, my debut collection from YesYes Books, examines the metaphor of femininity as boat, and addresses the intergenerational lies women are fed and feed themselves. But even more than that, this collection is about blazing the beliefs that limit you. It’s about burning down what doesn’t serve you and becoming something better, brighter. 

At the poetry nonprofit I work for, Get Lit-Words Ignite, we have a large mural, that reads, “every poem is a love poem.” Each page of Boat Burned contains oceans of sadness, and in swimming these seas, acknowledging that sadness, it became a book of unconventional love poems, a healing, for me as a woman and the women around me: my mother, my grandmothers, my friends. 

I grew up in a household that on the outside was extremely happy, my divorced parents that were best friends, we traveled lots and there was always an adventure, but there was also a lot of  sadness and events (bankruptcy, indfieldity, addictions) that were not talked about or easily expressed. I could feel the sadness of the women around me, even though we never spoke about the pain. I could feel it all. 

I believe in simply speaking something, naming it, looking it in the eye, so the healing can begin. This book, these poems changed my life in the way that it taught me how to love, myself and others. I don’t know if I was capable of true and unconditional love before I wrote these poems.

In terms of writing, my new work feels a little more direct in terms of language. I love writing that is innovative, that turns language inside out. However there are certain situations that I’m writing about now that need to be simply stated, just writing them down is hard enough. 

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

The funny thing is I went to college to study fiction. I used to be a short story writer, I’ve written one novel and am currently  halfway through another one. I work in many genres, I’ve written children's books, essays, and recently won Best Feature Film for the Portland Comedy Film festival for mine and my sisters’ (Kat Thomas) screenplay, Magic Little Pills.

I didn’t come to poetry first, however it has always been the genre that has held me closest and captivated me most. I began writing poetry as a high school teacher. I received a grant to teach Get Lit’s  spoken word curriculum in my classroom. The curriculum, the poetry, the reading, response and performance, completely transformed my students. I saw kids who didn’t care about much before, arrive at school early, engaged, constantly editing, transformed by poetry. They bloomed into a better version of themselves. 

During this time I was battling darkness in my own life. Dealing with some personal trauma, I was on the verge of imploding. Instead of self destructing, I told myself if I just sat down and wrote, I could have what they had. I used poetry as a lighthouse and moved towards creation. I spent a year writing a poem a day, just to process, just to practice. 

After that I met the wonderful poet Tresha Faye Haefner and she offered a scholarship for her classes at the Poetry Salon. The classes were small, supportive close, and offered actionable feedback and steps to further my work.  I learn how to submit, how to edit. Tresha’s class changed my life, introduced me to a whole new world.  I am forever grateful for her guidance and feedback. Now Tresha and I co-teach the Poetry Salon together, along with some other amazing poets.

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?

Honestly, it depends on the project. In terms of Boat Burned, I was working on the manuscript for about three years, however it wasn’t until the poem, “The Boat of my Body” was written that I found the spine of my manuscript. After that I started to understand what it needed to do, it started to stand on its own. The metaphor of woman as boat became a container I couldn’t stop filling. 

When my manuscript was accepted to YesYes Books, one of those Facebook photo reminders popped up on my screen showing me it had been almost three years to that day, that I submitted the collection for the first time. Since then only 30 percent of the same poems remain and it’s had seven different titles. 

I revise constantly as I write. So a rough draft never really feels like a true rough draft. In the time span of 20 minutes I might redraft the poem two to three different times, tightening and tweaking each line, image or word. I don’t take notes rather just write and try to get deeper with each draft.

What’s looking like my second collection is forever changing shape, I spent about six months writing a poem here or there. Then I took one week at my family’s house in Tahoe and created my own writing residency. During that time I wrote 15-20 poems towards the collection. But who knows which will make the cut. Or what the collection will look like, my vision is in constant revision. 

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?

They begin so many places, and some are pretty odd. The poem I mentioned earlier, “The Boat of My Body,” came to me as I was undressing at a Women’s Korean Day Spa in Los Angeles. While taking off my clothes I thought, what if all us women took off our clothes and we were something besides human underneath? 

I said to myself, “I would be a boat.” The idea came so fast, so certain. That there in the day spa, I sat down in my pink robe and wrote “The Boat of my Body.” After that the manuscript knew who she was going to be. I just needed to figure out what she needed to say. 

Many times poems just begin with an overwhelm of language or emotion. Sometimes I soak up so much like a sponge when reading, I see it’s a technique I learned that I want to try and I have to wring myself out. Other times it could be that I am just feeling too much and need to let it out. Need to understand myself better, the world better. 

In terms of themes and collections, I used to be an author of shorter pieces (related or not) that took form into a larger shape once they sat next to each other. But now I feel like I am directly writing poems towards my next collection, not all of them but most. Collections seem so tightly knit in theme these days. So many poetry collections are project-books. However, I usually write pretty closely to one theme, but my approach to how the poems talk to one another and develop an arc has shifted. I think I look for the change or evolution in collections more than I used to. When I sit down to read I want the speaker to finish the book in a different place than where they started. 

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

I absolutely adore public ratings. Attending them and being a featured poet. Writing is such a lonely process, there’s definitely a sense of community in terms of workshop and revision, but the actual crafting of something, sitting with it, looking in its eyes, is lonely. At least for me. Just you and the poem, and sometimes the poem doesn't want to really talk yet.

It’s so nice to build the connection and share that process at public readings. I love going to readings because poems always stick more when I hear them aloud, straight from the author's mouth. Also backstory, craft and conception is key for me. I adore the behind the scene tales of creativity and contemplation, and try to include them when I read. What a privilege to get a peek into any poet’s process. I love conversation about craft and artistic process, as much as poems themselves.Usually when I read a poem I love over and over, there is a limit to what I can learn from the page. But once I hear an author talk about that piece, its process, it adopts a whole new dimension.

I don’t know if I consider public readings when I’m writing, but I certainly do after the poems are finished (if there’s such a thing as being finished). After I curate them together in a dialogue to think of the communities I might share them with, the conversations they might spark. 

I take preparing for readings pretty seriously. I sit down with my book and create a set list, write notes about the things I want to say about the poem(s) and why it’s important to say them. They don’t always get shared, but I try to include whoever is listening as much as possible. Let them in. I also want the reading to be an act of evolution of a thought, dilemma, or dialogue. The person listening should be taken on a journey, that asks questions, that changes them in some (small or big) way. 

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?

This is a great question, I used to have a lot more concerns about my work than I do now. I don’t know how much of it was theoretical, I think it was just confidence, imposter syndrome, not feeling like I belonged. Which I still suffer from constantly. 

A lot of that is related to how I came to poetry. I came without knowing anyone, without an MFA, as a high school teacher who just read and wrote cause they loved it. Some of the insecurities were simply because I was new to the poetry space, and some of that has changed with the work I’ve done within myself. 

I write what I need to say, I write because it is important. The hardest thing about poetry is not letting too many voices into my head. There were so many for so long: what people think you should write, how you should write, where you should send it. I don’t have those concerns anymore. The only concern would be if I think a poem or something I might write might hurt another person or group, I try to be extremely mindful of that, which is a whole other conversation. 

In the past I was concerned that I was writing too much about the same thing. At a writing conference, another poet told me that Claudia Rankine once said she only thinks about one thing for two to three years. I might be misquoting her, and my apologies if I am, but that gave me permission for my obsessions.  It reminded me that obsession is another word for hunger, that there’s a need for growth or evolution there. This is why I come to the page: because I’m hungry to understand.

I know that not everyone will like my writing or be engaged in the subject matter, and that’s perfectly fine with me.

One of the biggest questions that I ask in my work is why what happens happens and how reactions shape the future and hatch new happenings. 

I’m also extremely interested in the question of why we don’t love ourselves more. How do we begin to love ourselves? Can we be OK with not exactly loving ourselves but trying? I also want to know why certain people hold power.  And why do we  give our power away? What does it mean to possess power in a group or in the self? And lastly a lot of my work questions how we address the body. How can we reach towards tenderness and understanding, ask how can we stop seeing the body as another, something separate then the self? How does this change begin?

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?

Wow that is quite the question. There are books written about this, that still don’t cover it all, but I’ll try to be succinct.

 I think the role of the writer is to be a mirror. They hold up a reflection to whatever we need to look at: the self, politics, the state of love in the world, the budding of a daffodil, their own body. 

As writers we help others see things that deserve to be seen. As writers we help people talk about the things that need to be said.. Whether it’s one person talking or a whole country. 

The job of an artist is to create a call to action, to use art to change a person, in a small or big way. Maybe one of my poems makes someone call their mom, maybe it helps them not cringe when they look in the mirror. Or maybe they thank their thighs for all the places they have taken them. 

My role as a writer is to help others consider, and reconsider.

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

I find working with an outside editor imperative. It is something that I absolutely 100% need. However it’s important they don’t come in too early. I used to really second-guess myself and having too many voices in my head confused the poem. 

Now I wait until the fourth or fifth draft before I show it to anyone. I’ve worked with some really incredible friends mentors and the editors: Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach,Tresha Faye Haefner, Kim Addonizio,Shira Erlichmanand many more. I’ve taken workshops with some of my poetry heroes, (Patricia Smith, Jericho Brown, Ruth Awad)  but what I’ve learned through all of this is that I need to stay true to myself. So while an editor is so wonderful l in helping see the global approach to the poem and where the poem might need to be tightened or expanded.

However, I have finally come to the point where I trust myself more, when getting feedback I can say  (silently to myself) yes absolutely I’ll work on that, or no, I don’t agree with you but I appreciate your insight. 

Being open to feedback in any area of life is how you grow. Being able to recognize what feedback that is valuable and actionable for you to grow into the person and poet you want to be is so necessary. 

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

I approach everything (my work especially)  with the idea that there’s always more to learn. I saw Nikky Finney speak at AWP last year. She shared a mindset of “never arriving, always becoming.” Meaning never get to the place where you say  I know it all, I’ve made it, it’s time to stop learning. Instead watch how you, the world, our language,evolve, into new cells, to new questions, to new aches. One you have yet to engage with. I hope that my work is always attempting to become something new. 

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

I would say that I write different genres and different seasons. I wouldn’t say that I bounce from poetry to screenwriting to fiction on a weekly basis. I usually go to other genres when I need a break from poetry and how self involved my work can be. I use poetry as a tool to figure out my thoughts in the world. And sometimes it’s nice to be in someone else’s head, to build a new world, far away from the one you’re living in. 

Since poetry is my bread and butter it is my day job and my night job I spend the most amount of time, energy and effort on that. It is my goal this year to spend more time with the other genres. I am halfway through writing a YA thriller that I absolutely adore, but the time demands around fiction are a lot different than writing poetry. My sister and I are also starting on a new screenplay, it’s an idea we’ve been kicking around for 10 years and I cannot wait to get started on that.

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 have been trying for the past 20 years to have a concrete writing routine. I always say I’m gonna get up at 6 AM and write for three hours before work. Sometimes it works but most often it doesn’t. I’m usually exhausted. 

I find that for me being in writing workshops and doing things like Ross White’s Grind (where you write a poem a day with a group of people) have been extremely helpful in terms of establishing a writing routine. 

I’m currently taking a poetry class with Kim Addonizio. I also have opportunities to write when I teach workshops for Get Lit - Words Ignite or the Poetry Salon, which is amazing. 

This is something I struggle with writing time. Sometimes  I will make a self-made writing retreat or go to a summer program if I receive a fellowship. Many times I write 25% of what I will write that year during this time. The other 75% is written in between work meetings, in the bubble bath with a glass of wine, at stoplights, at the gym. Tiny ideas that knock at my brain until I am able to sit down and spend 2 to 3 hours to get the poem where it needs to be.

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

I read and read and read some more. I have found lately if poems are not coming to me it’s usually because I’m not feeding myself with other people’s work.  I don’t try to force writing when it doesn’t work, I just start reading d more. 

I would say that the more that I write and read the easier it comes. It’s just like yoga in the first class, it’s hard to touch your toes, but as you practice more and more you’re extremely flexible and can twist into a pretzel on demand. You can get into the poses fairly easily. Poetry is a lot like that when I’m reading and writing every day I can get to where I need to be quickly. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

For me it’s the smell of salt water and sand. The smell of wind whipping over the Pacific, or the oil from my dad’s sailboat engine. I also love the smell of dirt and wet leaves as a hike through the mountains of the bay area. I connect so much with the outdoors. Most of the smells that remind me of home are smells of nature where I’m spending time with people I love. 

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

 Nature is a huge influence. Nature is one of the best listeners I’ve ever met. It rivals the page. When I’m quiet in nature, poems come to me. I think they’re always there. They follow me around like tiny, patient children. But I’m usually too overscheduled or there are too many other things that demand my attention to notice them. In nature I am able to see them, hear them. It's when I step into nature, spend time in quiet, that the poems appear and we can sit down and talk. 

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

Oh wow there are so many that have been a really huge influence in my life. I’m very attracted to writers whose language surprises me. Poets who use words or syntax or parts of parts of speech in a new way that gives urgency and energy to language. 

One of my favorite books of all time is Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. She has forever inspired me to push toward invention and innovation. Also on this list is sam sax, Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith,Shira Erlichman and so many others.

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

In terms of life, I’d like to travel the world, become a parent, write a novel that has some commercial success. 

In terms of writing ,I would like to write a manuscript about a subject outside of myself. Of course, autobiography will always be an influence, but I want to look outward, at an animal or a place and give it it’s own voice. Lean into its story. Sometimes I just get so sick of myself. I would love to take some time to focus on writing where I am not the center, where the “I” might not even be acknowledged. 

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?

Wow! This is such a great question. There’s so many things that I’d like to do besides write, but writing seems like the only thing I could ever do. 

However if it was an alternative life I would’ve like to be a lobsterman, a florist, a lawyer, or a doctor. 

I’m so fascinated with different life forms, the ocean, the body and how we can use language to change history.

 I also think it would be pretty cool to work in a national park or an aquarium to preserve and educate about sea life. I would love to spend my day feeding and talking with otters and sea lions. Anything that has to do with the ocean ultimately makes me very happy. 

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

I think I started writing because I needed to communicate in a way that everyday conversation wasn't in allowing. 

When I was about seven years old, I took to writing letters when I was upset. I would shove them under my mom’s door. They expressed how I was feeling when I wasn’t able to sit down and talk to her about it, yet.  

There is a depth that I can get with the page that I can’t always get in real life. 

My dad helped me appreciate writing through his love of music. My whole family is very big on music. We spent a lot of time on boats. In the middle of the ocean there is not much else to talk to one another, look at the ocean or listen to music. 

My dad would put on an album and point out a great line. He and  I would discuss what made a line so great and why. I think my parents were a huge influence in how I came to writing through expression or appreciation. Then the more I was around poetry, and I saw the effects it had on those around me, helping them heal and discovery, the more I wanted it in my life. I started writing and was hooked

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

I recently read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexi and I was floored at the honesty and depth of the language. The voice of this young Native American teenager,  one with so much commentary about the world, otherness, the need for love, was one of the most honest voices I have heard in awhile. So many human truths, Alexi writes “ used to think that the world was broken down by tribes,” I said. ... The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.” I think about that often.

Last great film I saw, which might sound cheesy, was Amy Runs a Marathon. There is so much wonderful commentary about body image, self-discipline, how our surroundings shape our habits and what we owe to ourselves. It is cutesy film on Amazon about a girl who is decides to run a marathon, but for me it was so much more. There are so few films that talk about our relationship to weight, our relationship to food and how we use it to fill voids .I found it refreshing and honest without being preachy or agenda driven. It was great because of motivation and insight it offered. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on a book about my heartbreaking struggle with infertility. Me and my husband have been trying to get pregnant for a year and a half. We have seen the doctors. We know what the issue is. Still it is an ocean of grief I continue to cross daily. 

There is so much silence around fertility. Even though it is something that affects every single person in this country. Everyone came from someone, yet we hardly talk about it. Especially when our bodies don’t perform the way  they’re designed to. It is the ugliest pain I’ve ever encountered. It is the hardest healing I have been faced with. 

I know I’m not on the other side yet, but this slow acceptance is producing a lot of poems (for now) of  what’s looking like my next book.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Katie Condon, Praying Naked

May 21, 2020, 5:31 am

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Katie Condon, an American, One of the Roughs, a Kosmos in the Flesh.

You have never touched a woman if you haven’t touched me.

I call to you from where I swim near the shore. When I call to you, my

breasts rise from the water so nicely.

Not even you can resist me. There is not a single gray hair on my

soul. Hot soul! Soul of

sweat & lipstick, soul positioned

in truth! Soul cloaked

by my bright body rising now from the river’s clutch. My soul calling you.

            My breasts & heart & hips sidling up in the grass to meet you.

Feel even my cheek against your palm.

Is it my clamor that stalls you? I shout at the sky & claw its ether down so

you might lay me upon it.

When you take my body finally into your mouth, my soul will not return

the love you offer me. I will not thank you for liking the touch of

me.

I know it is good for you to do so.

Atlanta, Georgia poet Katie Condon’s debut, winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, is Praying Naked (Columbus OH: Mad Creek Books, 2020). Where did she come from, and why haven’t I heard of her before this? There is a directness and intimacy to Condon’s lyrics that are reminiscent of some of Sarah Manguso’s long-ago poetry titles (before she shifted her attention to non-fiction), some of Toronto poet Lynn Crosbie’s work, or the more recent work of New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird. “Here I am,” Condon writes, in the poem “Origin,” “in a century that has its eyes // shut tight—don’t I know exactly / why I’m here.” Condon’s first person lyrics offer an openness and, at times, startling directness, offering both vulnerability and swagger, writing on sex, love, desire and the body. Writing in the confessional mode, it doesn’t matter if her poems are telling tales that have happened for them to be considered true, writing of lovers and ex-lovers, god, mothers, death, driving and poetry readings. Her writing is unadorned, but unexpectedly direct, and a smart reader will recognize the power of opening lines such as “At the quarry, where your father / fucked me the first time, campfire ash / coated the flowers. / I am vain // and bottle my grief like perfume.” (“To an Ex-Lover’s Daughter”), but understand that the real power of the poem emerges later, as the narrator responds directly to that ex-lover’s daughter: “What can I offer but a mirror / you might learn from: // I don’t believe myself worthy / of merciful men.” This is an incredibly strong book from a poet worth paying attention to.