the autumn 2012 ottawa international writers festival schedule is now online!

the ottawa international writers festival
October 24-30, 2012

Check the schedule here, with authors including Linda Spalding, Christine Poutney, M.G. Vassanji, Shauna Singh Baldwin, Annabel Lyon, David Bergen, Lloyd Robertson, rob mclennan, Chris Alexander, Robert Fowler, Maureen Jennings, Peter Robinson, Michael Petrou, Pasha Malla, Missy Marston, Sarah Dearing, Ayad Akhtar, Shani Boianjiu, Anton Piatigorsky, Spencer Gordon, Barry Webster, Tim Ward, Amanda Lang, Nyla Matuk, Jonathan Goldstein, Nadine McInnis, Miranda Hill, Steven Heighton, Matthew Tierney and Marcus McCann (among others), and the Ottawa premiere of Midnight's Children screening and on-stage conversation with Deepa Mehta.

Brenda Hillman: Pieces of Air in the Epic and Practical Water

Something about breathing

The air inside a war

As they approached the capital

We couldn’t see what was breathing from the back

Calves’ horns a-swizzle

Ten thousand years of instruments

Decent amounts of free forevers

Horizons emphatically lifted in them

As they approached the place

The size of B

Saw the exhalation of an “enemy”

Breath being thought of

It had a kind of lining in it

You believed in the tuneless yes

Believed in the O very tunelessness

As they approached the capital

With dusty signs and needs

All blendy breathing

There

There is

A river that would drink water

An earth that would walk dirt

A fire that would singe flame

In that air (“Nine Untitled Epyllions,” Pieces of Air in the Epic)

I recently acquired the second and third in a proposed tetrology of poetry collections by American poet Brenda Hillman, her Pieces of Air in the Epic (Middletown CT: Wesleyan, 2005) and Practical Water (Middletown CT: Wesleyan, 2009). Obviously this means a fire collection is in the works; why does so much end in fire? Her two most recent trade poetry titles follow up her sixth poetry collection, the earth-centred Cascadia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan, 2001). Writing through the essences of the four elements—earth, air, water and fire—Hillman allows her poetry an open canvas of great magnitude, and achieves rare rhythms and cadences, each book written out as an exploration of space itself, and reads like one of the most dangerous kinds of writers: one who pays the closest of attention. In “An Interview With Poet Brenda Hillman” on the Poets & Writers website, conducted by Kevin Larimer, she talks of the “gathering of materials” for the first volume of her foursome, Cascadia:

“Place” of course is and isn't metaphoric. When I need a snack a place isn't a metaphor, it's a refrigerator. Except in rare transcendental times, shifting internal geographies must be managed in relation to external ones. The question of place takes us automatically to the problems of reality and the ideal. During this writing I felt part of a collective enterprise that seems less local than a movement, say, or group of styles; that enterprise has to do with using an individual or personal mythology and an awareness of the purely abstract functions of language together, to recontextualize experience of several different kinds-in the case of this book, the mind's movement, the earth's movement, the movements of cultural knowledge. Much of the contemporary poetry of interest owes a debt to a felicitous combination of what could be metaphorically called "geological" forces: various kinds of early twentieth century avant-garde writing (Stein, Futurism) and some older impulses of revolutionary Worthsworthian unfolding lyric bumping up against the symbolist and late modernist and then postmodernist tragic play and self cancellation. Space and time work this way. Poetry that has been systemized by single ideologies is boring, so I hope the book seems uncategorizable. The geology is of course in the poems themselves. The book Cascadia seems granitic in that it was written under various kinds of emotional pressure. It is conglomerate and metamorphic in that it seems like a gathering of materials about change.

Hillman composes air and water through a structure of politically-charged and lyric urgency in a pair of works that are remarkable in their breadth, structurally, politically and lyrically challenging without being obtuse. Particularly striking in her Pieces of Air in the Epic is the sequence “Nine Untitled Epyllions,” writing “tiny epics” that include such striking lines as the couplet “I am a seamstress. // I have no country.”

Near The Great Arch

There, in the same

spot as the annihilation

of the world, love

of existence stood. We

walked along. In boulevard

windows: plates, hatlike napkins

set for an imaginary

meal. Each act of

revenge has love as

a twin, but could

art convey this without

violence? In this parabola,

i recalled the little

dragon in the painting,

that high, curly arch

of its tail like

a syntax being inaugurated.

Polka-dogs on emerald wings.

The knight stabbed it;

maybe the vertical princess

prayed for it to live.

This was the end

of time. Dread had

not returned to listen. (Practical Water)

In this pair of poetry collections, her pieces explore the objects of air and water, composing poems as simple as description that are never simple description. What does it mean to be a poet attempting to record and respond to the world through lyric? In the piece “Reportorial Poetry, Trance & Activism” from Practical Water, she writes:

I recorded notes in Washington while attending hearings & participating in actions to make the record collective & personal. Working with trance while sitting in Congressional hearings i recorded details into a notebook.

If bees can detect ultraviolet rays, there are surely more possibilities in language & government. The possible is boundless.

When fiction writer Annabel Lyon was in Ottawa this week, reading through the Ottawa International Writers Festival, she talked about the realization of writing works that “matter,” wondering exactly how her short stories were helping the world, and rethinking her creative life as of September 12, 2001. Her response was to work into the novel, writing out what she possibly couldn’t through the form of the short story, and responding more directly to such as considerations of war, war trauma and disabilities, composing her much-celebrated novel The Golden Mean (2009) and YA novels All-Season Edie (2009) and Encore Edie (2010) as disguised political and social commentary through a veil of fiction. Hillman’s Practical Water almost responds in some of the same way, making references that would have previously been more subtle the central point, with poems such as “Ballad at the State Capital,” “International Dateline,” “In a Senate Armed Services Hearing,”  “In a House Subcommittee on Electronic Surveillance” or “Request to the Berkeley City Council Concerning Strawberry Creek.” What makes these pieces great is not in just the rare materials she manages to bring together to form pieces of writing, but the thoughtfulness she brings to difficult material, never letting the material overtake the poems. A particular highlight of her water collection is the third section, subtitled “(of the months when you work / & the months when you can’t)” that include a sequence of twin moon poems, pairing echoes of smallness upon smallness, the attention of two side by side per page, including this poem, a first to sequentially-next twin, “February Moon”:

February Dawn

The near woke

to a not-near

& in the heart’s brief Vermont

A fricative thaw—

(The spirits were being

extra quiet

so fear could finish

its satin chasm);

out the window:

ice-insects in a sequence

& children starting for the woods

without their violins—

12 or 20 questions: with Annabel Lyon

Annabel Lyon is the author of Oxygen (stories), The Best Thing for You (novellas), and All-Season Edie (juvenile novel). Her first novel for adults, The Golden Mean, about the relationship between Aristotle and the teenaged Alexander the Great, will be published by Random House in August 2009. She lives in New Westminster with her husband and two children.


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


After Oxygen was published I got teaching gigs, reviewing gigs, etc. So I was able (barely) to make a living as a writer, whereas before I had to have other jobs. The Golden Mean doesn’t quite have the stylised prose that Oxygen has—I’m not sure I could have sustained that for a novel. But it definitely has more story, more range and depth. My joke about Oxygen was always that it had just one story: a girl and her dad watching TV. The Golden Mean has Aristotle and Alexander the Great.

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


I do write non-fiction too (journalism), but really it wasn’t something I ever thought much about. It’s just the way I process the world. I think in terms of fiction.

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

I tend to have just one idea at a time, and work very slowly. With stories, I usually write a super-slow first draft that comes out pretty close to the finished thing; with longer works and definitely with the novel it was much more a process of multiple revisions.

4 - Where does a piece 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?

Short stories start in tiny moments: a bit of overheard dialogue, a perfect description, an interesting piece of clothing…. Longer stories usually start with a character facing some kind of problem. The Golden Mean started with me reading a thumbnail bio of Aristotle and thinking, that’s interesting, how would you structure a novel around that? Then sketching an outline, almost for fun, and then realizing when I turned to other things that the idea kept nagging me, and I had to work on it some more. And then some more. And then for a few years more.

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


They’re kind of like doing the laundry. I don’t enjoy them or not enjoy them; they’re part of the job, so I do them. I’m not a natural performer but I don’t get too nervous either.

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 subscribe to Martha Nussbaum’s view of literature as essentially an exercise in ethics: you’re putting out an ethical world-view, challenging your own and your readers’ ethical preconceptions. That doesn’t mean you’re resolving things necessarily, but you’re opening people’s minds to all the shades of grey. It’s not so much “is abortion wrong?” as “what does it mean to live a good life?”.

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


I don’t know how to answer this one. I write what I’m able to, to the best of my abilities. I never really feel like I choose my subject matter; it’s just what I’m capable of at that time. So I’m not consciously forging a role for myself in the larger culture. I can’t speak for anyone else.

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


Both. When I’m in the middle of working on something, everyone is an idiot but me. Then, when I’ve had a chance to get a bit of distance from the thing, I almost always take suggestions from my editors really well, and work to incorporate them. I decided early on to keep my inner diva in.

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

Write each book as though it will be your last; don’t try to keep anything back for the next book. Someone I know once got advice to this effect from Richard Ford.

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?


I used to love to write in the morning, but I have two kids now and they usually have other plans for me. These days my writing time tends to be in the afternoons when my husband’s off work and can keep the kids out of my hair. And I can work while they’re napping, after they’re in bed, etc. I’ve got to the point where I can focus pretty quickly and get small but substantive things done in small amounts of time.

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


If something gets stuck I put it away for a while, and come back to it when I’m feeling less frustrated. That’s about it.

12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?

I was a kid! I don’t remember! Ask me another quirky one! I can be quirky!

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?


No, I think McFadden has it right (for me, anyway).

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


The writers I read and reread are Joy Williams, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, William Trevor, John Updike…. I read the New Yorker religiously and get really upset when someone takes it in the bathroom and gets it damp.

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


Run a marathon in less than four hours.

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?


Sometimes I fantasize about taking a PhD in law and having an academic career. I wouldn’t have made a good lawyer but I like thinking and reading and writing about ethics. I’ve done a fair bit of teaching of one sort or another and I think I could have done that.

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


I don’t know. It’s just something that’s always been there. Before I could read, I dictated stories to my mom and then drew pictures around what she’d written. I always knew writing stories was going to be my thing.

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


I sat on the Rogers Writers’ Trust jury last year and got to read pretty much everything published in Canada in 2007/8. So I read lots of good stuff. Memorably, Miriam Toews The Flying Troutmans, Lee Henderson The Man Game, Stan Dragland The Drowned Lands, Rivka Galchen Atmospheric Disturbances, Ahmad Saidullah Happiness and Other Disorders, Craig Boyko Blackouts.

Last great movie would be The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I rented it a few months ago.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a sequel to my kids book, All-Season Edie, tentatively entitled Encore Edie. I’m also thinking about a sequel to The Golden Mean, but haven’t started writing it yet.


12 or 20 questions archive (second series);