Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1

Impersonation doesn’t mean what you think. This is the introduction to this book, my introduction, my lyrical sexology. Lyric Sexology. This is one of the things you need to get straight. This is another, you there in your later age, your so-called 21^st century: I am not a transsexual. Or an intersexual, or a hermaphrodite. (Hermaphrorditus can write her own damn book.) I am not any of those things you have words for now. You don’t have words for what I am. What I was was this:

I was a dude.

Then I was a chick.

Then I was a dude again.

Hah. You didn’t think we said “dude” or “chick” in what you call ancient Greece, Hellas of the Hellenes, etc. Think again.

Here is what you don’t have words for: What is a seer? What is beyond knowing? How can I write you now, a now impossibly out of joint with your own, knowing you will read this? Knowing you? Or what is a sex in time? Without?

You do not have a word for snakes or gods or sexes. You only think you do.

You do not have a word for the meeting of snake sex god in one word’s divided knowing, a knowing one divided word.

Seven years is what I was as beyond, a beyond, and inside too. So, impersonation doesn’t begin to describe it, but suppose it did. Suppose

I began to describe you. (“Tiresias, impersonated.”)

I’ve long been curious about the work of Kingston poet, fiction writer and critic Trish Salah, a name I first heard during those early 1990s Montreal days of Corey Frost and Colin Christie’s ga press. Salah’s latest release is Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Montreal QC: Metonymy Press, 2017), the first Canadian edition of a title originally published in 2014 by New York publisher Roof Books. The author of a previous title – Wanting in Arabic (TSAR, 2002; 2013) – Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 suggests the opening salvo of what will continue, at least to a second volume, if not further. There are elements here that read as memoir, something she plays with as she writes through the legendary Greek character Tiresias, and one can make a rather obvious comparison to Anne Carson writing the Ancient Greek figure Griffin in her Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998). In Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, Salah composes her own blend of book-length lyric essay and long poem on metamorphosis, gender and expectation, and one that includes references to Ovid, Glee, Ed Wood, Atlantis, high heels, mythologies, National Geographic, Gail Scott’s Heroine and the October Crisis.

Salah’s essay-poem Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is an ambitious work that combines the lyric with the narrative, writing out poems that wind their individual ways around and through each other; writing out, even beyond gender, the potential elusiveness of identity itself. Through the voice and character of Tiresias, “a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.” (Wikipedia), a character mentioned in numerous works by Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid, Salah is able to explore and articulate an identity that was never fixed, but one that evolved as Tiresias did, and as his/her own situations required. As Salah writes in the poem “Godtears”: “Her break with form was primarily intelligible as wanting the impropriety of your hand / in me, sous la table, the exquisite corpse giving way to hewn simply exercises / (spoonerisms) in French or Greek.” In an interview conducted for CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts by Morgan M Page/Odofemi, Salah writes:

Viviane Namaste talks about the autobiographical imperative, arguing that when non-trans folks approach trans people, not only are they only interested in hearing our autobiographies, but they feel free to discount everything we might have to say that isn’t about autobiography. And on CBC this morning, Janet Mock remarked that the media’s treatment of trans people hasn’t changed significantly since the early 1950s press coverage of Christine Jorgenson. Mock framed her own memoir and media interventions as attempts to push back against the narrowness and othering that has come of treating trans people as if we are solely defined by our transness (as opposed to other aspects of our identities, histories, experience, expertise and interests), and also as if we are curiosities to be known about as opposed to being people one might engage with.  This relates to a point Julia Serano and Talia Bettcher make, that cis folks feel entitled to especially scrutinize and doubt trans folks’ self representations, positioning us paradigmatically as imposters or deceivers. In autobiography we appear as singular beings, at best as exceptional individuals who have triumphed over adversity to actualize ourselves, but more often as curiosities, outliers among humankind, who confirm the normalcy of the non-trans reader.

All that said, yes, it is a problem that there has not been either a critical apparatus or a broader public for our creative work, and that is tied in some ways to Viviane’s critique of the idea that the only or primary reason we might possibly have for writing is to satisfy the curiosity of, and/or educate, a non-trans public.

In a review of the prior edition at Tripwire, Zoe Tuck opens: “Trans women poets: raise your hands if you have written poems about or in the voice of Tiresias? Although I’m not sure if there are enough trans poets AND trans poets who have written Tiresias poems to call them a commonplace, I will cop to having written a few. The figure of Tiresias looms over the search for precedent.” Tuck continues:

The wit masks a real concern that has dogged transgender history and queer history before it: who can we claim, either in the past, or across cultural boundaries, as being  one of us? Put another way: is there a universal category of gender?

Through writing a whole volume through and around Tiresias, Salah is able to write out beyond the purely physical, and beyond the initial, and somewhat expected, poems that Tuck suggests have already been composed; by composing nearly two hundred pages of this first volume of Lyric Sexology, Salah manages to write through Tiresias, as well as utilize the legendary Greek figure, as a way to explore the very nature of fluidity, concerning gender, sexuality and the core root of self, bringing in all the cultural expectation, uncertainty and complications that come along with such shifting.

The simplest equations are subtraction.

A “dog never loses its savour.” Arab slavers.

Fawn smear from the mouth, eye sockets

Tell me about your history, the one to come. (“Tiresias as Cuir (on the run)”)

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jacqueline Valencia

Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based poet and critic. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There's No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I think it was 2008 when I decided to gather up some of the poems I'd written for the past few years and self-publish a chapbook with them. I called it Tristise. I'd say it changed my life because before then I'd sporadically submitted poems, but the rejection got to me and then I suffered many years of writer's block. The time came where I felt like I needed to shake myself into action.

I'd say it changed my life because I haven't stopped writing and/or submitting every day since then. It's been a long road to getting my work out there in publications, but it's been worth it. My new book, There's No Escape Out Of Time (Insomniac Press, 2016) will be my first full poetry collection. It's comparable to Tristise because it is back towards feeling rather than technique, but it feels more raw because I'm writing about very confessional stuff in it.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Most of the women in my mother's family write or have written poetry. My grandmother Ruby is constantly reciting new things whenever I visit her. As in, "Grandma! We're just watching television. Can we just watch the show without you praising how miraculous the sky look in it right now? Geez."

I'm kidding. I don't stop her because she is my grandmother after all.

My mother's greatest gift to me has been a library card. My first trip was to the library-mobile and I took out a Raggedy Ann and Andy book and a  book interpretation of Disney's Alice In Wonderland. My mom's English was still a bit rusty so she'd read a bit of it and expand upon it by retelling parts of the movie. Eventually she had me read the whole to her and I remember one night writing some of my thoughts down on how I wanted to be Alice. They were in point form, but from that I created my first poem without knowing it. School rhymes and songs always stuck with me and I'd write them down and make my own versions.

Fiction feels like an extension of that though. I'm still trying to parse what the difference is between poetry and fiction in my writing.

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 procrastinate a lot. I drink too much coffee. Also, I probably drink too much, but I don't think it helps. Booze, while not a muter of truths, it isn't a motivator.

I actually have several things due right now. They'll get done, I swear.

The only time I really put my foot down is when I have deadline or when inspiration takes me over. I find my greatest strengths for pushing myself are when I'm working through a crisis or need to react out loud in some way. I'm a horrible editor of my own work. I have no patience with myself.

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?
Usually an event or something I've seen provokes a poem in me. It will also ferment for a while in my mind before I set it down to paper and when I do, it's in my moleskine without any context whatsoever.

I work from smaller ideas and build a book, poem, or essay from there. I once wrote a poem about erotic clowning just because I wrote "There was a clown and a lobster. Erotic?" Don't ask. I don't even know. Pass the coffee.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I used to hate readings, but for some reason or another my readings have taken on a stand up comedian format. Sometimes I introduce props. Andy Kaufman is huge influence on me when it comes to public speaking in any way. His ability to take an audience somewhere completely unexpected is something I hope to cultivate and acquire. I guess, it has to do with the defense mechanism whereupon I'd rather self-deprecate than elucidate anything to do with the poem itself.

I currently looking for a good mime routine to bring to my repertoire.

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 struggle with the idea that language is unique to everyone, that colours look different to everyone, therefore there aren't enough words out there to describe the universal experience of every day. That and the fact that I'm using and thinking in a language by my ancestor's colonizers is a huge concern for me. I rarely think in Spanish and even Spanish is a colonizing language to the people my parents' came from.

Right now I'm trying to learn some of the methods the people in my parents' family have used language and what was there evolution with the Spanish language and how my brain processes Spanish versus English.

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 role of the writer is to report. No matter what a writer writes about, they are journalist of sorts first and foremost. You can be a reporter of your own ideas and your own expressions, but even our minds are foreign to us. Using language is like have a universal translator like in Star Trek. We don't know exactly how it works, but we use oral and written language everyday as if it was a part of us since birth. Was it? Where did the rest of our expressions go when we started writing? What are our hands doing? What are our faces doing?

Oral and written language are translators of the inner workings of brain. The current job of the writer is to strip it to the basics and figure out how the hell we can get to the root of those inner workings.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love every editor I've ever worked with. I wish book publishers or journal publishers would put the name of the editor on the front of the book or on the article beside the author's. They're part of a collective voice in how we transmit our voices to the world.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Liz Worth once said to me, "Write your truth. Write it now and don't edit it until it's done." I know it sounds cliché, but it works. Liz is a good friends and one of the most important writers in Toronto, if not the world, that I read and listen to.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I love writing about film and books. I love finding connections because if you meditate on two things long enough, you'll find everything connects somehow. Everything is always influencing everything else, especially in art. Poetry is no different than critical prose because it's a commentary on expression or on situations. You can separate a work from an analysis of it, but you can not keep poetry from being ingested and analyzed. That's what it's there for.

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 used to have no writing routine, but lately I've setting aside time in the day. I've felt it necessary for novel writing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Conceptual writing or rewriting texts. They could be anything, like a receipt, a piece of mail, a book (hi James Joyce), or a poem. From there I'll find myself cutting it up or using a word or phrase and I get unblocked that way. Experimental writing moves me to create something if my mind is blank.

Of course, I find conceptual writing to be like any other type of writing, and in the right and now, it is very necessary for experimentation to be a part of a poet's work. Even with the continual controversies in poetry with lyric versus conceptual, it's all experimental. It's how you use it to decolonize or reveal truths that is important.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Blue Power laundry bar soap. My mom used to scrub stuff before putting it in the laundry and the scent is huge in the outdoor laundry patios in Colombia. I keep a bar in the bathroom for stains and such.

And petrichor. I learned that word the other day. Petrichor is the smell of earth after rain. It reminds me of love for some reason and there's not greater home than 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?
Music influences my writing a lot. My dad used to be a dj and after that I became a dj and I play music constantly at home. Nature inspires me as well during my runs or cycling. Riding or running through Leslie Spit at 6am to watch the sunrise over the lake is probably one of the greatest things someone in Toronto can do to get inspired.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
James Joyce is huge, but I talk and write about him all the time. As well as, Anne Sexton and Mary Shelley. Science fiction fantasy has been an escape for me in the past, but it's only recently I've tried my hand at writing it. Robert E. Howard's Conan The Barbarian series and Larry Niven's Ringworld series have both been high up there for me in terms of importance. Oh and comic books. Too many to list.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Complete the novel I'm currently writing and getting it published. Climb Mount Everest, which I would never attempt to do because I have kids and can't die. I love watching documentaries or films on Everest climbers. I might go to the base camp one day though. I'd also like to do indoor skydiving because I've always wanted to fly to Superman or surf like the Silver Surfer.

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?
a) A spy.

b) An international spy.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Reading. I've been writing in my journal since I was a kid because of reading and don't know how to think in anything, but words.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I've felt speechless about Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts for a while now. When I finished reading it I was just so impressed I couldn't find the words to say how good it was. There's reading-writing modes: either you read something so good you want to write an essay on it, or you read something so good, and wonder if there's someone else who has read it so you could just rejoice in the afterglow of it.

As for film, there are lot of films that I've thought were pretty good this year, but nothing that has blown me away. I think the latest has been Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson's Anomalisa. It's a short animated film that hit me right in the gut. I mean, Kaufman has a way of articulating the embarrassing parts of our psyche, especially as a depressive. Some of us live entire worlds inside our brains and Kaufman captures that sense of disconnect and isolation like very few directors out there. The fact that the film animated gets forgotten and even in the middle of the most despairing moments in the film, there is a tiny sense of hope to grab onto.

I love when artists hold no bars back when it comes to the black dog. Kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight, as the Bruce Cockburn song goes.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm putting together the Toronto Poetry Talks: Racism and Sexism in the Craft (http://torontopoetrytalks.wordpress.com) and I'm writing my first novel set in Toronto. It's a fantasy occult feminist future of sorts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Reviewers on Reviewing: mclennan, Webb-Campbell, Marchand, Zomparelli + Del Bucchia

At Erin Wunker's request, I recently wrote a short blurb on why reviewing matters for the CWILA site, posted this week alongside similar pieces by Shannon Webb-Campbell, Philip Marchand, Jonathan Ball and Daniel Zomparelli and Dina Del Bucchia.

As Wunker writes over at Facebook:

Reviewing as feral practice, as the strike-out and slow carve. Reviewing as necessary in a world where books seem to matter less and less. Reviewing as joyful dissent and a refusal to be 'boring as fuck.' Check out what Shannon Webb-Campbell, rob mclennan, Jonathan Ball, Daniel Zomparelli & Dina Del Bucchia, and Phillip Marchand have to say about why book reviews matter.

Have thoughts of your own? Send me a message and we can get your views on why you review up at CWILA's Reviewers on Reviewing site!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Shannon Webb-Campbell

Shannon Webb-Campbell [photo credit: Meghan Tansey Whitton] is an award-winning poet, writer, and journalist of mixed Aboriginal ancestry. She is the inaugural winner of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award and was the Canadian Women in Literary Arts 2014 critic-in-residence. Still No Word (Breakwater Books) is her first collection of poems. She lives in Halifax.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Still No Word just came out yesterday, so it’s hard to say how it’s changed my life. It feels like encountering something extraordinary and peculiar, like swimming backwards inside of a whale.

These past few weeks leading up to the release, I was met with an unexpected storm of anxiety. I oscillated from wanting to throw up, to collecting rocks to fill my pockets for my farewell walk into the cold sea. I searched for escape routes, faraway places where I could reinvent, change name, become another. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, drink myself blind.

Apparently, this is all normal behavior of first timers, typical of vulnerability even. The book has been unleashed into the world, and I am still here. Now I’m more worried about the whale.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I began as a poet. I’ll die as a poet.

Though, I’ve previously published several creative non-fiction pieces, letters, poems and fictions in anthologies, including:  Where The Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets (Goose Lane 2015), Out Proud: Stories of Courage, Pride, and Social Justice (Breakwater Books 2014), MESS: The Hospital Anthology (Tightrope Books 2014), She’s Shameless Women Write About Growing Up, Rocking Out and Fighting Back (Tightrope Books 2009) and GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (Tightrope Books 2009). 

My next piece is a non-fiction story of rape and isolation set in Malta published in This Place A Stranger: Canadian Women Travelling Alone (Caitlin Press 2015).

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 start by circling myself. I stare out the window. I question my fate. I discourage myself before I even begin. And these are good days.

Often words and lines come when I’m not thinking about writing. This morning, shuffling around like an out of shape ballerina on Halifax’s iced-laced sidewalks, a stanza came. I can be at yoga, making lunch, or driving down the highway. Poetry has its own time clock; it never punches in or out.

Many lines come after crawling into bed, the time we’re most adrift, somewhere between worlds. Rarely do I cough up a poem. They all start unexpectedly. Most go through several drafts, weather systems, moods, and typically begin or end around the first libation of the day.

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?
Poems happen. My job is to keep the channel open, to listen, witness, and document. I didn’t know the poems in Still No Word would ever become a book; they were orphans who needed a home.

I’m thankful Breakwater Books gave my poems a roof over their heads, and food in their bellies. These poems belong to Newfoundland. I suspect the next book will be written with a different intention, from another vantage point.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Astrologically, I embody Gemini, so duplicity is a constant state. I crave solitude and wildness. Poetry befits this calling. I enjoy the tucked-in nature of my work, spending hours, days, seasons playing with words, but I struggle with the solitary aspect. Many days, it goes against my nature.

Readings are a wonderful excuse for poets to gather, honour craft and community. We need to hear one another’s voices in order to find our own. We need an excuse to get outside ourselves, and witness one another’s tragedies and belly laughs. We need our tribe.

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 live my life close to the bone, sucking on its marrow. Sometimes I’m on the brink, other times looking over. All I know, I’m a seeker. Poetry is both call and answer. It saves my life over and over.

Many of my questions reel around identity, ancestry, belonging, that constant nagging notion of home, rivers of grief, fragments of abuse, sexuality, and longing. I think we’re all poems.

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 offer cardinal direction, we are the compass of a culture. Some of us are mythmakers, mapmakers, others schemers. Call us documentarians, or even translators, but we’re all witnesses here in the universe’s grand symphony.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love the editorial process. Susan Musgrave catcalled me, created a safe space both dangerous enough for poetry and an incubator for a closeted poet. My editor James Langer at Breakwater was rough, yet insightful. He wanted more of a fight, but we both got our way in the end.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it,” Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille.

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

Last year, as Canadian Women In Literary Arts critic-in-residence 2014, I was given a platform to examine how poetry informs criticism, and how criticism informs poetry.

I wrote several book reviews, examining works from Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (Arsenal Pulp) to Sylvia D. Hamilton’s I Alone Escaped To Tell You (Gaspereau Press). I labored over critical essays, which led to attending the Scotiabank Giller Prize Gala in Toronto, and published An Incomplete Manifesto for CWILA. Criticism relies on analysis, close reading, and creative nerve. So does poetry.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I wish there were hours allotted, strict routines, and diligent follow through. But I’m more of a wildcard. Mostly, I write when I force myself to. Most days begin with coffee, a notebook, and eventually, I open my computer. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I let go, and stop forcing myself. In stepping away from the words, I return to the living. Eventually, I exhaust myself with life’s carousel, and wash ashore, find myself back on land, looking out to sea, ready to write.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Cigarette smoke on fresh laundry (the smell of my grandmother).

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?
Atlantic Canada is instrumental in my work, whether it’s the harsh, rugged coastlines, or the vast, merciless ocean. Everything is hardship and endurance, the essentials. It’s my ancestral lands. I often threaten to move away due to weather extremes, yet never stray long enough to lose my place.

Though, to keep with McFadden’s insight, several poems in my book have kinfolk poems, including “Last View of Bell Island,” a sister to a suite of poems by Sue Sinclair and her various views of Bell Island. “Wintering,” gives nod to Rainer Maria Rilke, and my poem “Doubles,” is a sibling poem to a stanza in Sue Goyette’s “Psychic,” from her stunning book, Undone (Brick Books).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Sylvia Plath’s work, especially her poems and journals, though The Bell Jar has a forever place in my being. Winter after winter, I return to Mary Oliver, especially when the living doesn’t go so easy. Writers like Simone de Beauvoir, Leonard Cohen, Zoe Whittall, Brian Brett, Lisa Moore, all the Susan’s (Musgrave, Goyette, Sinclair), Elizabeth Bishop, Shalan Joudry, Joseph Boyden, Anne Carson, Ivan Coyote, Anna Camilleri, Amber Dawn and Jeanette Winterson all call out.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to go for a hot air balloon ride. Visit Greece. Learn another language, especially Mi’kmaq. Live in a foreign country. Write a novel. Swim with mermaids. Sing a duet. Sail around the world. Maybe visit the moon.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’ve worn many hats. I’ve been a photographer, a bookseller, shopkeeper, camera sales person, barista, art teacher, and nanny. Some days, I think I’d like to be a synchronized swimmer, own a dress shop, become a chef, or a milliner. My deepest aspirations are to teach creative writing at a college or university, so perhaps, in my own way, I can become all these things.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The writing made me write. I blame the words.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve just finished reading Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: A Memoir (Hawthorne Books & Literary Arts), where she writes, “ In water, like in books – you can leave your life.” Words to live by.

Sarah Mian’s debut novel, When The Saints (Harper Collins), could be my favourite book out of Atlantic Canada this year.

As for the last great film, I’m still basking in the glow of Bruno Barreto’s Reaching For The Moon, the love story of Elizabeth Bishop and Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares. I can’t even admit here how many times I’ve re-watched it.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am working on a collection of linked stories, and attempting to write my first play for Queer Acts Theatre Festival. The odd poem, letter or fragment seems to intervene.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

fwd: CWILA Call for Essays by Indigenous Writers

CWILA Call for Essays by Indigenous Writers

Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA) is actively seeking essays by female or two-spirit Indigenous Canadian writers. Essays may be on any topic related to the literary arts, including the critical reception of Indigenous writing in Canada, gender issues within the Indigenous writing community, resistance to the colonisation of Indigenous literature, or any other literary issue of concern, whether directly related to Indigenous identity or not.

CWILA is interested in creative non-fiction, literary criticism, book or other reviews, and interdisciplinary studies. Also encouraged are innovations within these genres, including the collaborative essay, the dramatic or dialogic essay, the polyphonic essay, the long poem as essay, the meditative essay, the personal essay as witness, and the visual essay.

The aim of this initiative is to hear the voices of female and two-spirit Indigenous Canadian writers, storytellers, scholars, and activists within the Canadian literary community.

Acceptance includes publication on the cwila.com website and payment of a $150 honorarium. Submissions may also be considered for a potential print anthology of CWILA essays.

Submissions should include a short bio (50 words) and the completed essay (maximum 4,000 words), both as Word documents (.doc). Submissions must be original work not accepted for paid publication elsewhere.

Submissions can be sent to essays@cwila.com. We are open to submissions any time but would be especially delighted to receive your essay by January 15, 2015.

fwd : the 2013 CWILA Count

This essay by Erin Wunker is posted here on behalf of CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts

Public + Women = Risky

Introduction to the 2013 CWILA Count

“Écrire: je suis une femme est plein de conséquences.” (Nicole Brossard L’Amér, 45)

“This question of publicness can’t be underestimated, particularly, as my blog posts attest, for women.” (Sina Queyras Unleashed, 8)

Framing Thoughts on “Public,” “Women,” and “Risk”

In her 1977 publication L’Amér, Nicole Brossard wrote “écrire: je suis un femme est plein de conséquences.” Barbara Godard, a bilingual feminist critic, translated this as “to write: I am a woman is full of consequences” (These our mothers, 45). Writing, women, risk, consequences. These things are at the core of the mandate for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Begun as a grassroots feminist organization aimed at bringing discussions of gender, race, and sexuality into public forums, CWILA is now an incorporated organization with more than five hundred members. We have been conducting “The Count”—an annual audit of gender equity in Canada’s reviewing culture—for three years now. This our new third Count, which covers reviews published in 2013, continues to demonstrate a marked imbalance in whose books are getting reviewed, as well as in who is doing that review work. Why?

The “W” at the core of CWILA is always a contested space. In other words, as Brossard wrote in 1977, to write the word “woman” is to take a risk. Look at Brossard’s sentence. While it is tempting to read it without the colon (to write I am a woman is full of consequences) the punctuation is in fact a gatekeeper. Granted, the colon keeps the gate grammatically ajar, propelling the reader forward into fact. With a simple act of punctuation Brossard has shifted the category of “woman” into a direct relation with the work of writing. Writing is full of consequences, gendered categories are full of consequences, and writing about marginalized genders is full of consequence—be it in this introduction to the 2013 numbers, in a review, or in a blog post. And yet, the gate is ajar.

We started CWILA in part, as a concrete way to address concerns about whether or not Canada’s literary culture had representational justice. Representational justice—that is, the deliberate mechanisms that ensure marginalized groups are represented in a given context—is a starting point. Counting gender representation alone cannot ensure a just and robust literary culture, nor can it eradicate the micro- and macro-aggressions of sexism, racism, cis privilege, or homophobia. The numbers do one thing: they provide a place to start a public discussion. And let us not forget that public discussions that rattle the bars of the status quo are risky. The second epigraph that introduces this essay was written by Sina Queyras in her 2009 introduction to Unleashed, a selection of her blog posts composed between 2005 and 2008. The blog quickly evolved into a public facet of her writerly practice: it was a way of exploring, experimenting, and coming to terms with the ever-increasing relevance of the Internet in a literary life. The blog, Lemon Hound, also became a tool for asking why women writers are still disproportionately under-represented in critical dialogues about their work.

Here is the thing: blogging about inequity is risky. Writing about or as a woman is risky. Taking up public space to write about or as a woman is risky. The risks are multiple and they are polarized: you may be attacked or you may be ignored. Queyras’s blog is one site where these risks were taken up and reflected upon. Writing is a private act, until, that is, it is not. Blogging, as Queyras observes, makes this risk of public writing clear. The minute one hits “publish” on a post those heavy consequences are waiting at the gate. The CWILA Count is a public attempt to append hard numbers to the more general feeling that male writers and reviewers get the most representation in Canadian literary culture. This public attempt is not without its risks, but the possibility of representational justice is always worth the risk.

The location of the first part of our equation—public + women—is risky in part because it is an equation that is always contentious. What do we mean when we say “public” in relation to the literary arts? Indeed, what do we mean when we say “women,” and what can we mean if we are more expansive in our understanding of the outsider status of the term? For CWILA, the book review is one key place to press the equation of public + gender, and, by extension, of equitable representation.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf speculated about what histories and knowledges have been lost by leaving women out of literary history. That was in 1929. We have a responsibility to expand Woolf’s focus. We have a responsibility to ask whose knowledges and histories are lost, hidden, or actively marginalized when there is not representational justice in a living literary culture, let alone literary history. CWILA maintains that literary culture is one concrete place to work to consciously and ethically take into account the multiplicity of gendered identities, nationalities, and languages that comprise this country. And while CWILA does not yet have the labour power to ethically track statistics based not just on gender, but on racial and ethnic identity, sexuality, class, and ability, we are beginning to develop a set of apparatuses to track these trends. The Count is imperfect, but the trends of inequity which we track suggest that it is necessary and it is a means of asking questions about equality in public. Primarily, what the new Count data shows is that despite the often-positive reception of CWILA’s Count and the organization as a whole, there is still a significant gap in terms of equitable gender representation in literary reviews. In other words, despite much strong support from editors and publishers for CWILA’s project after the numbers are released inequity remains. Moreover, there’s been backlash. Public + Women = Risky, yes. But asking pressing questions representational justice is a necessary risk to take if we are to significantly and generatively shift Canadian literary culture.

The 2013 Numbers

A thumbnail sketch of the 2013 Number can be summed up like this: regression.

Overall, 37% of the review space counted by CWILA volunteers went to women, 57% of it went to men.

While it is a truism to suggest that the numbers speak for themselves, the aim here is to sustain public discussion about representational justice in Canada’s literary culture. We need to unpack the stories that the numbers tell.

As Count Director Judith Scholes outlines in her essay detailing our methodology, the Count is not comprehensive. It does not count every single book published in Canada. What the Count provides each year is an evolving data set that allows us to begin tracking trends over time. This year, with the indispensable labour of more than forty volunteers, we were able to expand the Count in significant ways. For example, in the Count of the 2012 numbers, CWILA began to nuance the language we use to adequately represent gender—from male/female binaries towards a more accurate male/female/non-binary representation of writers in the Canadian context—and we have continued to refine that language in the Count of the 2013 numbers.

We were able to expand the quantity of publications we counted from 25 to 31. For the first time we have the linguistic capacity to include French language publications (Le Devoir, Lettres Québecoises, Nuit Blanche, Liberté: Arts et Politiques), and we had the volunteer capacity to add three metropolitan newspapers (The Toronto Star, The Chronicle Herald, Le Devoir).

We increased the total numbers of reviews counted from 3,092 in 2012 to 5,613 in 2013. That is an 82% increase in the scope of our Count.

Thanks to our volunteers’ efforts and our Count Director’s expertise we are now able to offer a broader regional representation and begin to take into consideration the culture of critical reviews in both English and French Canada. These new numbers reiterate old stories and tell some new ones too. Put simply, there’s still a gap.

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When is the last time you read a book review? Look closer at the byline of the review—who wrote it? Are you reading it online, or in a print publication? Now take a moment and look at the other books reviewed in that publication in the last month. Are they reviewed by the same people? Can you see any trends? Why did you read the reviews section? The answers to such questions, in broad terms, can tell us something about the ways in which we engage in the culture of literary economies; they can also contribute to larger, complicated narratives about equity and representation.

This is CWILA’s third annual Count. The concerns that initiated the organization were deceptively simple: it seemed as though we—readers in Canada—were hearing more about books by men than about books by women. Was this true? Could the hunch be extended to other marginalized groups? And if so, how might one gather compelling data that supported this hunch? Three years and three rounds of data-collection later, the concerns remain while we also work to ask better, more nuanced questions of the data.

For example, building on the mandate to account for, address, and advocate for representational justice in Canada’s literary culture, the Count of the 2012 reviews recorded the number of Canadian and non-Canadian authors counted. As Laura Moss observes in her essay unpacking the context of CWILA’s focus on nationality, the aim was to examine and extend the “C” for very specific reasons. These reasons, as she notes, did not include “tracking Canadian Content” or “measuring the viability of cultural nationalism.” Further, we are not the least bit interested in surveiling or policing citizenship. Rather, CWILA is invested in strengthening Canadian review culture by making it more equitable. As Moss notes, the book industry and book reviews sections in major metropolitan newspapers continues to shrink. If we are going to think about gender in relation to the nation, then we need to “distinguish between the reviews of books in general and reviews of books by Canadian authors in particular.”  Like attempting to track gender representation, counting national representation affords us the opportunity to think beyond individual authors and reviewers. Tracking the “C” in CWILA allows us to think more expansively about national support for the arts in terms of publication venues, publishing houses, and what needs to shift to foster a richer reviews culture. Last year, as Moss states, we found compelling evidence of support for Canadian writers:

In the age of the corporatization of everything, the CWILA 2012 numbers are less a good news story proving vibrant cultural nationalism and more evidence of communal resistance to a weakened literary economy. Reviewers, review editors, and publication boards make choices. They have chosen to support the arts in Canada by allotting space—however dwindling it may be—to work by Canadian writers.

And yet, the conversation about the “C” in CWILA is hardly finished. Rather, the 2012 focus on national representation has inspired the CWILA team to think carefully about how to convey the complexities of national affiliation. The question of what makes an author “Canadian” is hardly new, but thinking publicly on an annual basis about it requires that we continually nuance our terms.

In 2012, 65.5% of reviews counted were of books authored (in whole or part) by Canadian writers, and 33% were of books by non-Canadian authors.

In 2013, 60% of reviews counted were of books authored (in whole or part) by Canadian writers, 39% were of books by non-Canadian writers. The remaining 1% accounts for books by unknown authors or collectives for which nationality could not be determined.

Overall, 33% of reviews counted were of books authored by Canadian men, 24% were of books by non-Canadian men, 25% were of books by Canadian women, and only 12% were of books by non-Canadian women.

Put starkly, a non-Canadian woman writer is just over a third as likely to get review space in a Canadian publication as a Canadian male writer. Our 2012 numbers revealed a similar statistic and so, the inequity that we recognized last year seems to have intensified this year. One of the questions we would do well to ask ourselves is what we can do to ethically address this tendency and to shift it.

Overall, the 2013 Count shows that the majority of books being reviewed are Canadian, but that majority is smaller. Why? Only time, consistent data collection, as well as sustained and active conversation will tell.

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Growing the Count

In the Count of the 2013 reviews we introduced a new focal point—language. A clear limitation of last year’s count was its sole focus on English language reviews. We were criticized, rightly, for failing to count French reviews in our “Canadian” numbers. For us, the “C” in CWILA stands in—or aims to stand in—for all gendered, racial, and socio-economic communities located in the country now called Canada. And yet in practice, as a non-profit organization run almost exclusively by volunteers, we are hampered by our own limitations. Last year we simply did not have the resources to count in both official languages. This year we made it a priority to figure out how to do so. With the labour of our dedicated volunteers and editorial teams we expanded the linguistic content of the Count.

We were able for the first time to count French language publications: Le Devoir, Nuit Blanche, Lettres Québécoises, and Liberté: Art et Politique in addition to counting the French language reviews in Canadian Literature. We added these four new publications based on circulation and numbers of reviews published. This inaugural sample of French language representation in the Count is partial. It cannot give us more than a glimpse into gendered statistics in French language publications. And yet, it allows us to practice our mandate a little more fully. If we are ever to adequately account and advocate for representational justice in Canada’s literary culture then we will continually need to expand our fluency in the languages and the cultures that make up this shared space. In doing so, we have decided to publish essays in both English and French and to consider the results of the Count through first the integrated data you see here, and, next week, with a careful focus on considering the French numbers on their own. Next week’s spotlight will include an essay on the French language context written by Evelyne Ledoux-Beaugrand, with an English translation of her essay by Bronwyn Haslam.

Our initial foray into counting French language publications underscores that talking about representational justice in a public forum, while risky, can effect positive change. Of the 1,259 French language reviews counted, only 27% are on books authored by women, while 62% of the French language reviews we counted are about books written by men.

These are not heartening statistics. However, they are familiar. These statistics which, don’t forget, represent our first foray into a French language Count, are strikingly similar to the statistics from our initial Count in 2011 when only 41% of the reviews we counted were about books written by women. In fact, the numbers we have collected from French language reviews are not so terribly different from the 2013 English numbers. One very interesting percentage emerging from the French data, however, is this: 10% of the review space we counted is dedicated to male and female co-authored publications.

Does this suggest that collaborative creative and critical work is being rewarded with review space in Quebec? Perhaps, but only a broader, more sustained Count will provide the data we need to say for certain. What is clear is this: in both French and English Canada, discrepancy and inequity are still the order of the day. Of the total reviews counted (5,613) there were 1100 more reviews of books written by male authors than there were of books written by female authors. That, friends, is a big number.

Here is what our initial data on French language publications suggests:

A French-speaking Canadian female author has half the chance of being reviewed as a French-speaking Canadian male author and less than a non-Canadian male author.

Male authors publishing in French get 2.3 times more review space than female authors publishing in French receive.

French-speaking Canadian male authors receive six times the review space of non-Canadian female authors.

Non-Canadian male authors writing and publishing in French get three times the review space than non-Canadian female authors, and slightly more than Canadian female authors.

And, as in the English language reviews counted, our French data shows that men are still more likely to review male authors than female authors. Why?

It is crucial to underscore that the French language data is in keeping with the initial 2011 results of the English language data. In other words, our numbers show a systemic gender inequity across languages in Canada. What can we do to generatively address this unhealthy imbalance? It is time for a truly intersectional and coalitionary feminist response and call to action. The numbers are a place to begin.

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The CWILA Effect

The numbers are a place to begin asking better questions about representational justice in Canadian literary culture, yes. But if we are truly to foster a sustainable and inclusive literary culture we must also think carefully and publicly about the less-visible stories the numbers begin to tell.

The 2013 Count shows similar trends to the 2012 Count—women are less likely to receive attention in the form of review space, and male reviewers are far more likely to review books written by men than books written by women.

Of the 5,613 reviews counted, 57% cover male-authored books, while 37% cover female-authored books.

Of the female-authored reviews counted, 51% were reviews of books written by women.

Of the male-authored reviews counted, only 25% were reviews of books written by women.

The statistics show that while women tend to review men and women’s books equally, men review men’s books twice as often as they do women’s books. Why is this still the case?

In an interview with Chelsea Novak, Literary Review of Canada editor Bronwyn Drainie noted that women reviewers were more likely to turn down requests to review than men. While being clear that this was her own observation based on ten years of experience (rather than something she had quantified with data), she observed that the reasons women turned down requests to review were different than the reasons cited by men. Namely, the responses Drainie hears are based on being overworked: “I’m just too busy”; “I’m overloaded”; “I can’t take on anything else.” Drainie speculates that she hears these kinds of responses from women because they are, in fact, doing a disproportionate amount of service labour, such as writing reviews. “Everyone wants women to be represented,” says Drainie, “and since there are fewer and fewer of them, more and more gets loaded on their shoulders than on the shoulders of all the men.” Drainie’s observations and speculations are compelling, and they point towards other hidden stories the numbers may tell: stories of workload, gender expectation, and gendered and racial diversity to name a few.

For example, as Ivan E. Coyote suggested in an interview with Tina Northrup in 2014, the “W” in CWILA is a contested space in a multiplicity of ways yet to be adequately considered. Last year, we added the category of “genderqueer” to begin to account for writers and reviewers who do not identify with the gender binary. This year, in consultation with trans women, trans, non-binary, and genderqueer writers and reviewers, we have refined how we present our data. We rely on the self-identification of writers and reviewers as well as the triple checking of pronoun usage to quantify data on writers and reviewers who identify outside the gender binary. And yet, this is only the beginning of the story. CWILA cannot hope to adequately address these issues or cultivate coalitions between woman-centred politics and gender critical politics more generally without writers and reviewers who identify outside the gender binary being actively represented within the organization itself on the board and in editorial positions. This, then, points to more risky and more urgent stories the numbers begin to tell. What will it take to continue to evolve CWILA into the kind of organization in which trans women, non-binary persons, women of colour, Indigenous women, and other severely marginalized groups want to take part? What will it take to feel as though we are truly working with a common purpose?

The story that emerges is this: while the Count will never be comprehensive, it is a crucial starting point for opening up public conversations about representational justice in Canadian literary culture. The Count may never adequately represent the diversity of genders, languages, and racial identities that make up this country’s literary culture. What it can do is get us talking and thinking about who is speaking and why. It can get us talking and thinking about who feels a part of that “us” and who does not. The Count can serve as a starting place for moving discussions about gender inequity and the micro- and macro-aggressions of living in a patriarchal culture into a wider public discourse. That discourse is risky, but it is a risk CWILA feels the responsibility to take.