Ongoing notes: mid-June, 2018

Before he sold it, Jake Kennedy lived in a little wooden house, built in 1948 or 1949. It was typical of the older homes in Kelowna, British Columbia, a small but booming city amid the lakes and mountains of the Okanagan Valley. While a contemporary suburban neighbourhood had grown up around it, the house was just a few blocks from the beach, and it felt a lot like a cottage. Behind wild shrubs, the yard sheltered inflatable pool toys, a kid’s bike with flat tires, spiderwebs. A possum used to come in through the cat door until it was jammed shut with a piece of cardboard. Sure, the house was a bit rundown, but it had everything you needed. And I understand why Jake wouldn’t spend money updating faucets, sanding floorboards, or laying sod. That stuff is just aesthetic—and whose aesthetic is it? It wasn’t his. Instead of a Christmas tree, Jake and his daughter piled his vast collection of books into a pyramid.

I don’t think I’ve felt the need previously to review a review, but Aaron Giovannone’s review of Jake Kennedy’s Merz Structure No. 2: Burnt by Children at Play (BookThug, 2015) [see my own review of such here] is just a beautiful piece of writing, and alone worth the cover price for issue #101 of Brick: A Literary Journal. There are other great parts to the issue as well, as there always is (I’ve been a happy and loyal subscriber to Brick for years now), but Giovannone’s review really is something else (which makes me realize I clearly need to be paying better attention to his prose).

[images: The Adventures of Milt the Morph in Colour by bpNichol and Barbara Caruso (Toronto: Seripress, 1972), currently hanging on the first floor of the Ottawa Heart Institute (thanks to the Canada Council Art Bank; see their link to such here), where my father recently had triple bypass + valve replacement surgery; he is still in ICU, but improving, slowly]

Brooklyn NY: I am fascinated by Brooklyn poet and artist Simone Kearney’s poetry chapbook My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), an exploration and perhaps even poetic study of Gertrude Stein’s infamous Ida: A Novel (1941):

Dear Ida,

I want to unwrite because writing is a

piling

up on a piling up.

To occupy instead that delay that

writing hollows

out, clears a space for.

With a title that plays off, one suspects, Susan Howe’s seminal My Emily Dickinson (1985), Kearney’s My Ida continues and furthers the blurring of identity and twinning, shifting from I to Ida, furthering Stein’s work even as she digs deeper into the work. As she writes: “How does one make the wound move? How can one hurry it along?” As the online press release offers: “A sequence of meditations on the strange and relentless nature of our longing for completion, My Ida is an elegy to our incompletion. Drawing from Gertrude Stein’s novel Ida, Kearney’s own Ida is both a real and imagined other: a borrowing, a projection, a decoy. Here, the theatre of longing is a theatre of language, where the distances embedded in our relationships, not only with others, but with ourselves, circle around and proliferate a wound.”

I put my face into the jeans of Ida.

I always knew

it would end like this. A cool trail of smoke

coming out from between Ida’s teeth.

One of Ida’s teeth are rotting,

I think to myself. Or is it “is” rotting?

I didn’t know if I wanted to press

my face into the jeans any further. The cerulean

from the jeans made me think

of the other day. I wanted to know

what the cerulean meant.

I just had to push my face deeper into the cerulean.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laurie D Graham

Laurie D Graham grew up in Sherwood Park, Alberta, and now lives in London, Ontario, where she is a writer, teacher, reviewer, and editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. Her first book of poetry, Rove, came out with Hagios Press this past fall.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
It lends a tiny whiff of legitimacy. It’s a concrete thing that vouches for me. It took me to Edmonton, Regina, and Victoria to read. It makes my bio easier to write. It also brought with it the daunting expectation of a second book.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m told I was one of those freaky infants that bopped to the rhythm of a song on the radio before she could walk or talk. I spent my whole childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood dancing and playing music and every once in a while writing something down, and more often than not what ended up on the page was poem-like. It seems to me now that all these modes of expression and interpretation that I was engaged in as a young person were of a piece. They all involved bopping to the rhythm.

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?
Oh I can start things no problem. I’m just full of starts. Middles and ends take an awfully long time, however.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Writing starts small, a few words at a time. “Accretion” is the best word I can think of for how I write. And things form into pieces, yes, before they form into wholes. My ideas for things to write, though, are big, seemingly complete, sometimes book-sized ideas.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings quite a lot, but they’re odd things. They depend on so much. Wind direction, aura comingling, what shoes you and the people in the room all wear that day, the mood that the room and the people end up making. I’m used to performing, and I like the challenge of grabbing a person’s attention, but reading is its own creative process, and for me it’s a different thing than writing.

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 think I’m always writing about how we’re still at the very beginning of understanding the move on this continent from colonial theft to nation-state, and how it might yet unmake us all. And how that act of theft reproduces in everything the non-native inhabitant does, and how little we really know, and want to know, about ourselves and our transplanted home. And how we’re too slow and the earth moves much quicker.

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 have no clue. I think you could listen to Eleanor Wachtel’s interviews on the CBC or read them in Brick magazine and get a sense of what the writer’s role in the culture might be. So many interviews with writers end up framing the writer as an expert in the subjects her books cover, so that might teach us something about what people want from writers or think writers are good for, but I don’t know if every writer can reliably be considered an expert on much of anything besides maybe writing. I find Wachtel to be one of the few who asks a writer about writing, who sticks to what her interviewee knows best, and the result is really gripping and thought-provoking and entertaining.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both, but I hope you mean difficult in a good way. Harold Rhenisch, who was my editor for Rove, was the king of the wild suggestion, and I tried all of them. I very rarely said No. Saying Yes to his wild suggestions brought the book into its own, whether or not we ended up using everything he suggested.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Just ignore them and they’ll go away.” —Mom

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I find it relatively easy to make that shift. You’re using different parts of yourself for each, and I find it nice to give one a break and use another for a while. It ends up helping both.

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’ve tried and tried, but I can’t do a routine, or rather I can’t keep to one indefinitely. I eventually, inevitably revolt. So I aim to do some sort of writing every day, or nearly every day—that’s the extent of my routine. Sometimes I work for hours and hours and hours, and sometimes I just mince and read and jot words down. The “Sit your ass at your desk and write” school of thought or the “You will write X number of words every day, goddamn you” school is my recipe for a most perfect failure.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go outside, go for a walk, get the body moving. I read or play the accordion or paint something. I tend to plants or wash the dishes. I sit/fret/lament.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Mowed grass, exhaust, frying onions, a watered garden, ozone, tar, canola.

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?
Yes. Not anything as a rule (besides books, actually). Nature, probably most of all. Photographs, the sounds of people’s voices, archives.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I had a few talisfolk while Rove was coming together: Andrew Suknaski’s Wood Mountain Poems, Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Jan Zwicky’s Robinson’s Crossing, Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. Myrna Kostash is big for me. Dionne Brand, Tim Lilburn. I’m awfully Canadian in my tastes in terms of writers that are important to my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
a) Start a literary journal. b) Publish a second book. c) Travel down the west coast, BC to California.

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?
Dream jobs: arborist, session drummer, market gardener. Had I not gotten into writing I would have no doubt occupied myself with some other means of creative expression. I’ve never been without that in all my life.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I write and I do other stuff; it has always been that way, out of necessities of various sorts. But I need writing differently than I need anything else. I care about it differently than I care about anything else.

19 - What was the last great book you read?
Two great books I read/re-read recently: James Baldwin’s Nobody Knows My Name and Stephen Reid’s A Crowbar in the Buddhist Garden. Both books of essays. Both astounding at numerous points. Carolyn Smart read in London a little while ago and I’ve just started her book Hooked and I quite like what she’s doing in it, the voice(s) in it.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A thing based on the Northwest Resistance. I have no idea where it’s going right now, but it’s poetry. I’m also working on a shorter thing about being edge-of-life broke—also poetry. I’ve got a short story and a few essays I’m trying to make exist. I’ve got a novel that I keep chipping away at. There’s plenty.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Brick: A Literary Journal #92

            So. Why has Harriet Martineau become so little known? It’s even more of a mystery when you begin to examine the life and work of Harriet Martineau, by which I mean simply to skim the surface, like I’ve been doing these past few months, lift the corner of the beginnings of what there is to know about this writer and find this versatility: campaigner, autobiographer, biographer, translator, philosopher, novelist, political economist, travel writer, world’s first writer of a how-to book, world’s first female journalist to be retained by a paper as one of its key writers—for she wrote nigh on two thousand anonymous leaders for the London paper the Daily News, particularly making use of contacts she’d made on trips to the United States when it came to covering the American Civil War. (Ali Smith, “The Hour and the Woman”)

Reading might be a tricky thing these days (given the invention of baby), but I’ve been slowly going through the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#92, winter 2014). The issue opens with a piece by Ali Smith, “The Hour and the Woman,” on the writer Harriet Martineau (1780-1877), and presented as “The inaugural Harriet Martineau lecture, in celebration of Norwich, UNESCO City of Literature.” One of my favourite prose writers for some time, Smith explores the life, influence and legacy of Norwich-born Martineau, writing that “When Virginia Woolf makes a speech about professions for women to the National Society for Women’s Service in January 1931, she lists the names of the women who’ve ‘made the path smooth’ for her, not only smooth but possible at all, as a woman whose profession is literature. ‘For the road was cut many years ago,’ she says, ‘by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot.’” I’ve always been partial, myself, to seeking out the disappeared, given that the reasons for disappearance are always so slight, so random, and forgetfulness is far easier than you might imagine. It would seem a clear oversight that any writer on such a list would have fallen by the wayside to by nearly completely forgotten, especially given the breath, volume and influence of the works published by Martineau throughout her lifetime. Smith continues: “This ‘irrepressibility’ might be one of the reasons she’s not read as much as she might be now. Her writing is, shall we say, fountainous. Another reason might be that the changes of which she’s the vanguard have all happened; we take them for granted.”

Brick: A Literary Journal has long been one of my favourite Canadian literary journals, providing insight into the familiar and the unfamiliar, usually showcasing international writers and works I hadn’t previously had any awareness of, and this issue features an interview by Brick regular Eleanor Wachtel with writer Richard Sennett, an interview by Forrest Gander with Eikoh Hosoe, and essays by Donald Richie, Simon Loftus, Tim Lilburn and Baziju (the collaborative author made up of poets Kim Maltman and Roo Borson). Ottawa writer and translator Mark Fried includes an essay on Severo Sarduy, to accompany a short story by the same writer, translated by Fried. So many of the pieces collected in each issue, whether non-fiction, interviews, fiction, photography, correspondence and even the occasional poem, are wrapped around ideas of small, detailed moments, memory and deep attention. We need to pay attention.

Everything was agitation amidships, hither-thither, hurry-hurry. The crewmen, half-naked, desiccated, and feverish, ran to the bridge and contemplated the city jubilantly; they pointed at the yellowed and twisted features of the palatial buildings as if these were mirages from their deliria during the passage, or as if they recognized them and were confirming the accuracy of the engravings they had been shown in the mother country to beguile them with the pageantry of America. Then they turned the other way, toward the pink towers of the churches and the light green crowns of the royal palms that swayed like cool sprouting grass the length of the port’s boulevard. They ran singing and whistling back to their cabins and tossed bucketfuls of water at one another, swabbing their pale sopping hides now that they no longer had to go even without drinking to make the water last. (“It’s Going to Snow,” Severo Sarduy, trans. Mark Fried)

And of course, I’ve only space to even mention less than half of what lives inside the nearly two hundred pages of issue number ninety-two. One of the really highlights of the issue is a piece by Victoria fiction writer Yasuko Thanh, who writes elegantly and memorably on photography and memory in her piece “Memento Mori,” that includes:

            I came across an artist on YouTube, Michael David, who’d built a greenhouse out of glass daguerreotypes because the story, mythologized in a few seconds in a documentary film on the Civil War, haunted him so. Linda Bierds wrote a series of poems about glass-plate greenhouses for her book The Profile Makers. Collage artist Michael Oatman recreated the structure with a group of architectural students.

            Ideas make me think of seed pods. They way they burst and scatter and float and settle and sit and warm to the dirt. Take root, grow too stubborn to pull out.

            In fact, the story isn’t true. The Library of Congress can account for the majority of the glass plates in the Civil War Collection—even broken plates are painstakingly collected, each sliver in its own pocket. No collection is missing enough plates to have built a field of greenhouses.

            But as with most legends, the message about transience is true. It’s what I think about when I think of photographs. We don’t want to be betrayed by time. We want our memories to stick around.

Another highlight is by American poet C.D. Wright, who provides the most thoughtful and exquisite short essay on a poem by Michael Ondaatje, his “Driving with Dominic / in the Southern Province / We See Hints of the Circus” from his collection Handwriting (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1998). She ends her piece with:

There are no grand strategies at work in this poem. There is no sabotage to syntax or sequence in which information is delivered. There is no pronounced rhythm. No ulterior philosophical message. With terrific economy a lush environment is suggested. With characteristic restraint a little world is made. One blogger dismissed the poem as something as easy to write as striking a match and blowing it out. It could well have been so simply bestowed, that effortlessly executed. The poem could be the nucleus of one of the central characters and narratives of a novel to come, Divisadero, for instance. I suggest that it is.

Notes on writing, writing

Sarah Manguso: Exactly. Abstract arguments about genre are boring—and what’s more, those arguments reek of eugenics and fear. No pure forms exist. And I wish everyone would stop telling me about the “new” “hybrid” writing. Everything is already a hybrid. In any case, I think books belong to their authors, not to genres. Many writers get marketed in more than one genre, but readers just think, Look, here is another book by so-and-so, don’t they? (“David Shields in conversation with Sarah Manguso,” The Believer, June 2010)

Lately, I've been awash with questions. What is literature? Is it simply telling a story? Is it the language? Is it in the writer trying to showcase something different, shine a spotlight on something hidden, in a different way? Through reading and writing, I engage with literature in part to learn the world, to push myself further into what I do not yet understand. Picking up years worth of Granta issues, I prefer the non-fiction pieces I otherwise might never know, whether tales of the English fox-hunt, spinster sisters who love the opera and secretly smuggle Jews out of a WWII-era Europe to England, and America, or a journalist who disappears into darkest Africa, marrying a dictator and losing everything, only to lose yet again.

Is it the merging of lyric and fact? There is truth in fiction too; sometimes more, but I’d favour the lyric of essential pieces of information than long drawn-out narratives of incidentals. Who said that line I keep getting caught in my head, we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth? Far too often I find myself skipping passages, wanting the novelist to get back, so to speak, to the point.

Still, I've been finding the engagement with the “McLennan, Alberta” and “Sleeping in Toronto” manuscripts extremely educational, helping to highlight just what the whole craft might really be about – point of view. Not just how we see the world, but how the world is, and its infinite nuance, its infinite variations. It extends to how we relate to each other as well, not just through these books, but socially, politically, interpersonally. We don't need to agree but it becomes essential to try to at least understand. What the hell am I talking about.

Fighting doesn't mean anything at all if we don't comprehend the arguments on both sides; what if, but for semantics, we actually agree? Is this all simply a matter of perspective? Digging around the internet for information on the A-Team, both original series and recent remake (don’t ask), I found this quote by Mr. T, slipped into the stubble of his IMDB page:

I think about my father being called 'boy', my uncle being called 'boy,' my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called 'boy.' So I questioned myself: 'What does a black man have to do before he's given the respect as a man?' So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody's mouth is 'Mr.' That's a sign of respect that my father didn't get, that my brother didn't get, that my mother didn't get.

It reminds of old Cassius Clay, home from winning his Olympic gold, but still unable to eat at certain lunch counters, stay at certain hotels, finally tossing his gold in the river in frustration. Changing his name to Muhammad Ali. How can anyone else understand? In the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#85), an interview Eleanor Wachtel did with British writer Zadie Smith, who said essentially the same. How does one understand?

I don't think it had really dawned on me what it was like to be a black woman—black as my mother is, not mixed as I am—in a white culture. She told me stories about her honeymoon. My parents went to two places, Morocco and Paris, and in Paris they couldn't get a hotel room—they had to come home. Everywhere they went, they were turned away. And even in the early days when they were trying to rent apartments, she said she would phone and ask for a room and be told it was free, and then up and be told it wasn't free. She kept experimenting and making the distance between those two events as short as possible, so she would phone from the end of the road and turn up two minutes later and it would never change: she was always told the room wasn't free.

I didn't grow up in an England that overtly racist so it was a surprise for me to hear those stories. And it made me better understand the connection she felt with black American writers. It seemed to me that we're English and they're American—the history of our communities is so diverse. But there was a connection for my mother in terms of history and, I suppose, humiliation.

And here are the details that flesh out a story, where character is built. How often, history like a stone that gets caught in the shoe, rubbing up against the present, and altering, informing. Refusing to leave. It relates, indirectly, to a short short story I wrote after a story Lainna told about her Beirut-born parents:

She tells a story of her parents, forced to emigrate in the late 1960s for the sake of their marriage, born to separate social classes in a Muslim country. How romantic, I think, how tragic, but I can’t entirely relate, not forced to relocate continents for love. On television, a documentary tells of the troubles there, generations of refugee camps to keep a whole people down. I begin to realize how little I know of the situation, and just how sheltered I’ve been.

More recently, Toronto social geographer and writer Amy Lavender Harris and I talked about identity, as she asked, how far away from point of origin does identity no longer have any claim to real meaning? Her Jewish husband generations-removed, or her own Mohawk grandfather, raised outside aboriginal culture. How faraway does culture and identity still hold, still compel? The comfort I have, knowing I’m Glengarry Scot, not pretending I’m full Scot (there is quite a difference).

Become essential, Brian Fawcett told, from his corner in the former Dooney’s Café. Write something no one else can. The further I explore and discover, the more I feel as though I have accomplished nothing, yet. Yet.

ongoing notes: some journals (The New Quarterly & Brick: A Literary Journal)

Here’s a painting by my friend David Cation (his work also graces my poetry collection aubade), as he calls it, the “hotel montreal piece.”

Waterloo ON: Now that I’ve finally found a good magazine store in Edmonton (on Jasper, near 104), I just picked up the new issue of The New Quarterly [see my note on the previous issue here], I’m very much liking this new format, far more than the previous. It makes the content look far less scrunched-up inside the issue, giving it all room to b r e a t h e. The new issue has a pretty interesting interview with and non-fiction piece by Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa [see her 12 or 20 here; see her interview in Poetics.ca; see my review of her chapbook and second book], taking about her magnificently-enviable boiled-down poetic, and writing her poetry collection Found out of her father’s journals. Her comments on her own work, and her own choices, are utterly charming and extremely interesting, especially compared to other works out of various other versions of “family document,” more interested in writing her relationship to the journal than out of the journal itself.

Everything in his scrapbook is written in Laotian. I don’t know how to read or write Laotian but I do know how to speak it. Everything I found and everything in Found is about what I felt, discovered, put together while reading through the scrapbook. I never asked my father to translate or explain anything he put in there. That belongs to him, even the questions themselves. What I wanted most was to protect my parents, to respect and honour their private and personal experience. I wanted to tell our story but not to exploit or polish it or get caught up in the sadness that could have been there. Found is about where I came from and am coming from and what I can do with that. It’s also about what I want from poetry and life itself. How poetry has the capacity to do so much with so little, but more than that, how a life can go far and wide and deep even when given so little. And that’s when it stops being about my father or about me but about all of us.

I’ve been very taken with the “Falling in Love with Poetry” pieces that TNQ has been including in various issues over the past little bit [I even wrote my own here], and the one in this issue, “Rink at the Foot of Parnassus,” by Jeffery Donaldson, is no different. Writing about entering writing through hockey, here’s how the short piece ends:

Now that thirty years later I have a library of poetry and not, I don’t think, a single book on hockey, would I be justified in saying that the tables have turned? Not really. For one thing, I think the scenes of childhood show up in our thoughts and behaviours more and more centrally as we age. But I also think that, to judge fairly by some of my recent poems, the game has picked up on the lessons once evinced by those three volumes of Robert Service on the family bookshelf: be patient, give way, and you will abide.

Toronto ON: Brick: A Literary Journal [see my note on a much earlier issue here] is one of the few magazines/journals I can say I truly cherish (when will I ever become brave enough to submit something?). Now with their 80th issue, it features interviews with Mavis Gallant, Barbara Gowdy and Gil Adamson (in conversation with Michael Ondaatje), as well as various other of the usual and unusual features that make Brick such an interesting read. How do they keep finding such magnificent material? New poems by Sharon Olds and Don McKay, some love letters by Graham Greene to his mistress, a short piece by Eleni Sikelianos on a photograph of Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, a strange piece of fiction by Leon Rooke and a piece by Robert Hass celebrating Tomas Tranströmer, among other pieces.

Michael Ondaatje: […] How long did the book take you to write, altogether from when you began?

Gil Adamson: Ten years. I started ten years ago, and that makes it sound like I’m the slowpoke from hell, but I did produce other things in between. I produced a poetry book and I sort of half-wrote another novel, so I would drop this project for periods of time. There was a time when I stopped writing for about two years. I just had no interest in being a writer, but this project was always in the background and it was sort of the fun project that I liked to do. And really, for the last four years, The Outlander has been my only project.

MO: Did that two-year silence help you?

GA: Yes, I loved it. Sometimes you just want to be a normal person, forget it for a while. Once or twice I suspected my life was kind of purposeless. But I was fine with it, I always had faith I’d get back to writing, and when I did it was a pleasure and not a chore. I don’t know how many will admit to that, but I think it happens.

I don’t know how they got it, but this issue includes the most amazing memoir by the late Dr. Gregory Altschuller (d. 1983), writing about being a child in Checkhov’s house. It’s the sort of piece that is easily gone over and over and through multiple times.

I don’t remember Chekhov. I saw him. I was often in his house, but as a child, and my memory does not retain his image. I spent many hours in his house, in fact, many days. When I got measles, it was thought only natural that I should be moved to the Chekhovs’ to keep me away from my brothers; and there, in a big guest room downstairs, with a famous portrait of Pushkin on the wall behind my bed, I spent more than a month under the stern but kind supervision of Chekhov’s sister, Maria Pavlovna. My sister also went promptly to the Chechovs when, in her turn, she got erman measles. The big downstairs guest room must have been occupied, because she slept on the sofa behind Chekhov’s desk.

The first thing I remember vividly is the day my father brought us a book written by Chekhov.

“Children, Anton Pavlovich sends you this book.”

The book, a wonderful dog story, I kept through all the years of my émigré life, and it is now in the possession of my children and grandchildren.

I know so well the world Chekhov lived in during the last years of his life. Not the great world of literature, theatre, and worldwide fame, but the small world of a little provincial town, the now-famous Yalta, and the still smaller circle of the Chekhov family, which was so infinitely close and dear to my father and, through him, me.

Brick: A Literary Journal, Toronto

Another of the few journals I try to pick up regularly is Toronto's BRICK: A LITERARY JOURNAL. If anyone asks, yes, the journal and the press were connected at one time, with the press founded by poet Don McKay (originally under Applegarth Follies (publisher of McKay's Long Sault) (I think there might have been another name in there too), which then merged with Nairn before it became Brick Books), and the journal (originally "a journal of reviews") by Jean McKay (Don's first wife) and Stan Dragland, where they eventually merged for a while, and eventually split again.

From writing in our time: Canada's Radical Poetries in English (1957-2003) : "Began as Nairn books, edited by Stan Dragland. Don McKay became an editor and co-publisher in 1977; Truus Dragland and Jean McKay also helped with editing and production. Became Brick books in 1981 'to foster interesting, ambitious, and compelling work by Canadian poets, both new and established.'" (p 10-11).

At some point, the reins of the journal were taken over by Linda Spalding, who has been running since with Michael Ondaatje (Linda's partner) along with more recent additions Esta Spalding (Linda's daughter) and current publisher Michael Redhill (no relation), along with the even more recent Michael Helm (they should just change the name of the magazine to Michael). The press, Brick Books, publishing poetry for thirty-some years, is still run by Dragland and Don McKay, with an editorial board made up of five or so regular readers, including the two of them, as well as Jan Zwicky, Gary Draper and Barry Dempster. The day-to-day aspects of the press are run out of London, Ontario by the most lovely Kitty Lewis, Don's sister. (There, are we all caught up now?) (Though I've probably got most of that wrong; I expect I'll get a number of emails correcting me, but at least you get a rough sense of it all.)

Working a journal of reviews international in scope, the most recent issue, #76 (winter 2005) is new in my mailbox over the past week, and includes pieces by Dionne Brand (The sweet science in Toronto), Esta Spalding (An interview with David Sedaris), David Sedaris, Oliver Sacks (A friendship with Thom Gunn), August Kleinzahler (The 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize speech), Geoff Dyer (W. S. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard), Maya Jaggi (An interview with Toni Morrison), Darren Wershler-Henry (A certain type of dog), William Faulkner (Unpublished advice from the master), Fanny Howe (For Robert Creeley), Damian Rogers (Four poems), Eleanor Wachtel (An interview with Tomás Eloy Martinez) and the late Norman Levine (A letter to Brick and an early short story). Brick magazine has always served as an intelligent journal of pieces on writing and writers, an almost general-interest (literary) publication, that holds standards of interesting and compelling writing over fame, and manages to take poetry as serious as it takes fiction. The pieces by Norman Levine are a particularly compelling tribute, as publisher Redhill explains in his introductory note:

"As readers, we always want to do what we can to make an underappreciated writer better know, preferably in his or her lifetime. Norman Levine, the Canadian short-story writer, had always been known as a "writer's writer" but deserved much more. Two issues ago, we published a tribute to him in the form of a couple of drawings by Michael Winter. The drawings lovingly depicted houses Norman had once lived in. We sent him a couple of copies of the magazine, and on June 8, he wrote to us directly saying he had an idea: Would we like to reprint the first short story he ever wrote, something called "A Sabbath Walk," which appeared in 1956 in an Indian literary magazine? We received this letter on June 20, six days after Norman Levine died.

With the co-operation of Levine's daughter Cassie Flint, we have done just what he suggested, and we present in this issue of Brick Norman Levine's first published short story, a work that has all the hallmarks of his later writing: his sense of time and place, his grasp of human nature, and his quiet, understated style. It was the first gesture in a luminous writing career, and we hope that it will inspire our readers to seek out Norman Levine's books ― such as Canada Made Me and Champagne Barn ― and pass them around. We could not write back to him, so this is our reply, with thanks to him for the suggestion." (p 8)

What I've always admired about Brick: A Literary Journal was not only its seriousness, but its range, and its not-so-seriousness, including strange drawings and photographs, and regular pieces by apologist Cecily Möös (real or imagined, she has now apparently moved on to Denmark). The previous issue, for example, had a moving tribute to the late American poet Robert Creeley, as well as one of those irregular but most brilliant personal essays by Toronto writer Kent Nussey (when will someone be brave enough to collect all of these essays, which have been appearing in Brick here and there for years, into a collection?).