The Factory Reading Series: A reading/talk with Janice Williamson,‏

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:
The Factory Reading Series
 

A reading/talk by Janice Williamson (Edmonton)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan

mother tongue books, 1067 Bank Street (at Sunnyside), Ottawa ON
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
doors 7pm, reading 7:30

link to facebook event here; 


Janice Williamson: mothers a teenager, writes, and teaches at the University of Alberta's Department of English and Film Studies, latitude 53, Edmonton, Alberta.

Her blog/website: the pomegranate (http://pomegranatewomenwriting.wordpress.com) is devoted to Canadian women writing nonfiction and issues of equity.

She is at work on a series of linked creative nonfiction essays. Her story "Fu: the turning point" about adoptive mothering was published in Dropped Threads 3. "The Turquoise Sea,"an essay about suicide and mourning, was originally published in AlbertaViews Jan/Feb 2010. The essay won a Silver Medal in the 2011 National Magazine Awards and was a finalist for the Jon Whyte Essay Prize in Alberta.

She is completing an interdisciplinary and multi-genre anthology about the case of Omar Khadr (see http://omarkhadranthology.wordpress.com). This explores human rights, torture, Canadian domestic and foreign policy, writing in a state of exception, the limits of tolerance, anti-racism, Islamophobia and the culture of fear.

Two of her five books are image/text works. Through family photography and memory work, a memoir Crybaby! investigates trauma, infertility, and a father's suicide. Tell Tale Signs used found images and engravings to tell cryptic stories. Her chapbook a boy: named won the national bpNichol Chapbook Award.

Over almost three decades, she lectured widely and published innovative essays on: mothering and adoption; twentieth-century Canadian women's writing including hybrid genre-blurring work; feminist cultural studies (women's trauma narratives, feminist performance and women's film); nonviolent civil disobedience & peace activism; and popular culture including written and video readings of West Edmonton Mall.

WRITING: WHAT MATTERS ; University of Alberta

On Thursday, I was able to go to a panel discussion at the University of Alberta called “Writing: What Matters,” chaired by Janice Williamson, with brief talks by Lynn Coady (Writer in Residence, English & Film Studies), Kevin Kerr (Playwright in Residence, Drama), Rita Espeschit (Writer in Exile, Edmonton) and Derek Walcott (Nobel Laureate, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Arts). U of A has been pretty lucky to have Walcott around the past little bit, giving talks, being available and otherwise, including even doing a poetry workshop with various writers taking classes throughout the English & Film Studies Department, and he even gave a reading to a packed hall last fall, perhaps but the beginning of this longer-termed arrangement.

Lynn Coady, this year’s writer-in-residence, started her talk referencing how she found it difficult not to take Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments against artists personally, suggesting any argument against was “whining” and/or “self-absorbed bullshit,” and suggesting artists aren’t ordinary Canadians, which make their concerns somehow diminished. She talked about writing as her way to address the question of “what matters,” and to “engage the world.” Writing is, she said, what she’s best at doing and like doing most, but how is it that culture at large says its irrelevant? Rita Espeschit, a writer who immigrated to Canada from Brazil in 2001, and the author of fourteen books, talked about how she originally heard that Canada was “like the United States but colder.” She was very pleased and surprised to learn, soon after arriving, that she was wrong (“but not about the colder,” she said). Unlike Coady who read from a pre-prepared speech (call it the writer in her, I would have done the same thing), Espeschit spoke informally of how writing shapes who we are (as Canadians) and is a reflection, showing us to ourselves and to different generations and parts of the country. She wondered if much of this conversation had to do with us having an aggressive neighbour with the same language; when you have an aggressive neighbour with a different language, she said, you have a gate between you. She referenced, too, something Prime Minister Harper said about Canada not having a culture, but a series of regions. Perhaps he should have talked to John Ralston Saul, who recently talked about Canada as a Metis nation, forming ourselves through the fact that we have a range of diversity. Can we simply not see “Canadian culture” because there is no single “one” culture, but a range of cultures? Such ideas become far harder to reduce, and thus grasp onto, by someone willfully working to pay little or no attention.

Kevin Kerr [above, talking to Edmonton poet/publisher Trisia Eddy], playwright, who is actually in the second year of a two-year term (I would have loved a two-year term) and husband of poet Marita Dachsel, took another point of view, taking the “what matters” of writing into his own specific process, and talking specifically how he got into the five year project that turned into the play Skydive, currently being performed in Calgary. Worked through with Vancouver’s Realwheels, a theatre company that writes pieces around and with disabilities, this is the second production Kerr has worked on with them. He talked about the idea of the Frankenstein monster, the “spark of life” as metaphor for theatre, with a final production made up of a series of disparate body parts sewn together, searching for that spark that always evades answers, as in, what makes a project work, what makes a project live? Although he made a point to say that the playwright wasn’t the doctor, but perhaps the head, with the actors as arms and legs (he did keep going with the metaphor, but I stopped taking notes after the first bit).[above: Rita talking with Janice Williamson] Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, an award-winning poet, playwright and visual artist from St. Lucia (he currently divides his time between New York, Trinidad & Tobago and St. Lucia), started out by saying that, as a Nobel Laureate, he gets asked to talk all around the world, from Mexico to Brazil to Italy, to and with writers, and always about this subject of how and what writing matters. He sees it as a repeated question, where is the centre? He talked about how culture demeans, misunderstands and misrepresents artists through monetary reward as being a mark of success, and that centres such as New York, Paris and London by themselves do not produce great work. Money is not a measure, he said, and he was increasingly disturbed by this, that the notion of craft gets overtaken by career and financial competition. Unlike what the “centre” of what is usually spoken of, his centre is, as he called it, a semi-literature island, and talked about measuring criteria that have nothing to do with the craft. This has been said before, he said, this is not new. He cited examples of obscure geography creating genius away from any idea of “centre,” including Joyce, turning Dublin into a village and he the village explainer, Faulker and Marquez. Who would have thought about the blasphemous hymns, he said of Emily Dickinson, of a spinster recluse out in the country? He ended by saying that the comments made by the Prime Minister were profoundly scary and ridiculous, and about how it is insulting to “ordinary Canadians” that their Prime Minister presumes them not smart enough to engage with it, instead forcing the dumbing down of such works. He ended with these magnificent lines:

Those who presume to speak for the common man demean him.

And then I got lost on the way to the reception, and ended up somewhere else entirely.

Edmonton’s Mark McCawley, Urban Graffiti and greensleeve editions

I met up with Edmonton writer and publisher Mark McCawley [see his recent 12 or 20 interview here], and traded a pile of his publications over the years with some of mine. His is a name I’ve heard for years, usually associated with other post-realist working class fiction Canadian writers such as Matthew Firth, Daniel Jones or even Grant Shipway (think, too, of the anthology Hal Niedzvieki edited for McClelland and Stewart in 1998, Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada). An active poet and fiction writer, he edits and publishes chapbooks through his greensleeve editions, as well as the litzine URBAN GRAFFITI , all of which have been on hiatus for the past couple of years. Some of what he gave me included chapbooks of his own work, The Length of Distance (greensleeve publishing, 1989), the deadman’s dance (greensleeve editions, 1989), Last Minute Instructions (Toronto ON: Unfinished Monument Press, 1989), Thorns Without the Rose and Other Stories (greensleeve editions, 1991) and Voices From Earth, Selected Poems by Ronald Kurt and Mark McCawley (Calgary AB: The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Number 13, 1990), as well as a whole stack of work by others he’s been producing in Alberta for nearly twenty years:

Neil Scotten, Blue (greensleeve editions, 1990)
Ken Rivard, Working Stiffs (greensleeve editions, 1990)
Richard Stevenson, DICK AND JANE HAVE SEX (greensleeve editions, 1990)
Andrew Thompson, sd edwards and Faye Francis’ collaborative Everybody Does It! (greensleeve editions, 1990)
Michael C. McPherson, A Backward Climb Up The Stairs, four fictions (greensleeve editions, 1991)
Giovanni Testa, inscapes (greensleeve editions, 1991)
Beth Jankola, One Sided Journey Through Politics (greensleeve editions, 1991)
Janice Williamson, excerpts from the journals of Alberta Borges (greensleeve editions, 1991)
Beth Jankola, Voices in the Night (greensleeve editions, 1992)
Shannon Sampert, Secret Sisterhood (greensleeve editions, 1992)
alan demeule, Flesh Temple (Edmonton AB: perimeter press, 1992)
Daniel Jones, The Job After the One Before, Stories (greensleeve editions, second revised edition, 1993)
James Thurgood, Icemen Stoneghosts (greensleeve editions, 1993)
Carolyn Zonailo, Letters of the Alphabet (greensleeve editions, 1992)
Stephen Morrissey, The Divining Rod (greensleeve editions, 1993)
Beth Jankola, The Sunflower Poems (greensleeve editions, 1994)

Conspiracy Northwest, ed. McCawley (greensleeve publishing, 1989), Aaron Bushkowsky, Beth Goobie, Margaret Greene, Barry Hammond, Ronald Kurt, John Lane, Mark McCawley, Ky Perraun
Keeper of the Conscience: an anthology of social/political poetry, eds. Ronald Kurt and Mark McCawley (greensleeve publishing, 1990), Mark McCawley, Chris Faiers, Allan Sarafino, Katherine Kostyniuk, Ronald Kurt, Clifton Whiten, Alan Demeule, Jones and Joan Brown.

URBAN GRAFFITI #2 (July 1994), #3 (February 1995), #7 (Autumn 1999), #8 (February 2001) and #9 (September 2002).

McCawley emerged during the 1980s, a period when parts of Canada were rife with young and younger writers starting to produce their own works, including Joe Blades starting his Broken Jaw Press for chapbooks and, later, trade books in Halifax (since moved to Fredericton). Toronto being Toronto, they had a slew of small and smaller publishers emerge during the same period, including Stuart Ross (Proper Tales Press), Daniel Jones (Streetcar Editions), jwcurry (1cent), Kevin Connolly (Pink Dog/WHAT Magazine) and Gary Barwin (Serif of Nottingham), among others (what else might have been happening in other corners?).

Alberta Uncovers a Humanist Plot

Hang up the telephones of small men. A radical fringe
group of intellectuals form a liberal humanist splinter
group to protest tower shortages. Transmission lines
tremble with memos; baseball memories shimmer short
stops. Miami Man holes up in his provincial office
facing north to the river. Passionate outbursts from
smokers plot to overthrow the government, rail against
“those corrosive artsy crafty lefties.” The word sailboat
blinks off/on in small circles before their eyes. (Alberta
and Frank caucus and muse: “Will spring nourish this
insurrection or find it nodding off in March?” (Janice Williamson, excerpts from the journals of Alberta Borges)

It many ways, it’s amazing that this guy could have fallen off the radar the way he has; there are probably very few publications by the late small press legend Daniel Jones still available, including his mind-blowing poetry collection The Brave Never Write Poetry (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1985), but for this small publication by McCawley, and a trade collection produced a number of years ago by The Mercury Press. What other chapbooks (and there were a few) are even still out there?

THE LENGTH OF DISTANCE

Nineteen minutes and twenty-one miles
out of Edmonton, tracks begin to click
like a primitive clock, counting distance
between switching yards and abandoned stations,
click, click, a perpetual morse code.
In picture windows prairie pauses,
each view exacting as the last
with only the occasional sun sight
to remind us of motion.

Remembering once when origins
and destinations didn’t matter, only
the space between here and there
and time passing in backwater towns,
travels of legendary drifters
who rode the rails like buffalo
into an uneasy extinction.

We chase the sun all day
towards a horizon we hope to find
darkened by mountains and granite slabs
still stained with human blood,
measuring the length of distance
by the weight of silver wheels
pounding ground’s bleached geography.

If we’d listen, we’d hear
decades grind beneath boxcars,
the strain and pull
as the engine heaves ahead,
its destination a future
we may or may not traverse.

For now, we jolt and shudder
uncomfortable companions to coal and cattle,
crisscrossing this checkered prairie quilt
of canola, barley and wheat. (Mark McCawley, The Length of Distance)

To find out about available chapbooks and prices (he says he has masters to most if not all of these, so he can theoretically have everything in print) contact him directly at: mccawley64@hotmail.com

Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson

Lately, thanks to a loaner copy from Janice Williamson, I’ve been reading the book of interviews she did some years back, the collection Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (Toronto ON: University of Toronto Press, 1993). A comprehensive series of interviews, her list of interviews include conversations with Jeannette Armstrong, Di Brandt, Nicole Brossard, Elly Danica, Kristjana Gunnars, Claire Harris, Smaro Kamboureli (which reminds me of Kamboureli’s creative work, and makes me wonder if she’s worked anything since her first collection in the second person?) and Lola Lemire Tostevin, Joy Kogawa, Lee Maracle, Daphne Marlatt, Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland, Erin Mouré, M. Nourbese Philip, Gail Scott, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Bronwen Wallace, Betsy Warland and Phyllis Webb. As Williamson writes in her introduction:

While training in English studies encourages us to reread, analyse, and evaluate, the homely craft of the interview is often reduced to a secondary and debased pseudo-journalistic genre. However, in a textual universe where critical work on a limited group of writers can proliferate while others starve for public attention, the interview can make space for the writer’s revenge. Just as the fluid boundaries of women’s conversational gossip can disrupt more authorized forms of knowledge production, the excesses, repetitions, and circuitous routes of these interviews at times explode critical propriety. When I began this interview project, these was little critical work on many of the writers in this book; these interviews were intended to flesh out their textual concerns and provoke positive interference in canonical habits by considering the politics of contemporary Canadian women writing.

The title of these interviews draws together a cluster of meanings around the words sound and resound: ‘to sound,’ according to the OED, can mean to measure a depth or fathom a sea; ‘to resound’ indicates voices which echo and reverberate, or turn celebratory, to ‘extol loudly or wildly.’ The notion of ‘sounding differences’ suggests a process-oriented exploration which unsettles the critic from any mastering seat of authority. To sound ideas and questions with seventeen different women writers whose experiences differ through age, class, ethnicity, race, region, and sexual preference is to hear a welcome noise; silence marks the beginnings of other conversations.

So far, the interview with Erin Mouré has easily been my favourite, saying things in there that I’ve been trying to shape as disperate thoughts for years, and all said so well moons before I even knew where to begin; what I am still trying to learn. Why hasn’t a book of Mouré’s essays (which I know she’s been working on for a few years) come out yet? Why hasn’t there been a Guernica Editions book on her works? Listen to this fragment of an interview, conducted as Mouré served Williamson pancakes:

ERIN: Poetry exists within the same discourse as newspeak, alas. There’s a lot of things written that I don’t even bother to call poetry; it’s just what I call ‘the ego masquerading as the soul.’ Real poetry makes you develop a kind of self-critical relationship with language. You can’t jus use words without thinking of all the cultural and lass forces that are in a language. And even the structure of the language divides objects and processes, makes distinctions in thought possible that aren’t there, really. You end up objectifying things like space and time. I mean time is a noun. Objectified! Phase is a name. But is it an object? Touch is a name. But touch is an action, I mean, it exists in time then stops existing. Naming all these ‘durations’ or ‘movements’ that aren’t objects at all brings thought to a point where it’s co-opted by the public order again. Using language unthinkingly, then, maintains its hierarchial power. Its power to lose off an isolate relationships as things. Separate. Individual, again! [Dishes clattering.] Language organizes things and, like a camera, leaves out so much. As soon as you speak a sentence, you’ve left out every other possible sentence. The organization of structures, whether it’s a social structure, a political structure, or whatever, should evolve according to need, which is why friendship is so interesting because the structure evolves simply according to need. There’s never more structure than is needed. Two people don’t meet and say well who’s gonna be president of the board of directors. That’s jumping from one end of the spectrum to the other, but that’s what you end up with when you create these social and political organizations because language simplifies too much. But we’re afraid. We don’t wanna exist on the edge of confusion where our boundaries might not be distinguishable from the boundaries of this table…

JANICE: Well how do you…

ERIN: They’re only distinguishable because we objectify space and time. Otherwise you could interview this table. It would be fun. You would like it! You could interview this pancake.

JANICE: A morbid prospect.

ERIN: In my job I tell people over and over you have to exist on the edge of confusion, in order to find what we need, instead of deciding what we need in advance and then trying to fit in all our expectations. [Banging.]

JANICE: How do you feel about –

ERIN: Embarrassed. [pp 208-9]

Another highlight (so far, that is, as I’m still going through the collection) is the interview with Phyllis Webb, talking about a number of things including her considerations of form, the poetics of failure and the ghazal; Webb, said to have (since) put writing poetry long behind her for the sake of painting.

JANICE: Your own interest in form has led you to break down a number of different poetic forms. Your ‘Imperfect Sestina’ develops a poetics of failure or transgression, where the poem insists on breaking with convention. Your ghazals and anti-ghazals repeat this process.

PHYLLIS: I’m always rather uneasy working with inherited forms, given forms, closed forms, and yet I seem to be tempted and challenged by them. Once I start on the form, there does seem to be this anarchic part of me that wants to disrupt the form and give it a new life or a new focus or shift it in some day so expectations are disrupted and not satisfied, so it’s a challenge to the reader. John Hulcoop has been writing about this disruptive aspect of my personality, that I do not want to conform and am caught between a very conforming personality in some days and an almost childish need to be a revolutionary of some kind, and to disrupt what is given. It is my way into new territory using the old form, which just happens along; it’s handy and I use it. It’s too easy to copy and not very hard to write a sestina. The interesting thing is how to write a sestina and not write a sestina, how to write a ghazal and not write a ghazal. Again, it’s elusive and you invoke all kinds of associations from the past about other poems and how that form has been used; you develop a kind of literary historical shorthand. A sestina in our culture is better known than the ghazal, where I import new subject matter just by importing that form. Middle Eastern politics was on my mind at the time, and a whole new series of images was brought in. With the ghazal, there is a convention of using conventional imagery, but it won’t have the same meaning for us that it has for an Arabic or Urdu writer. It’s simply another rich textual source or cultural inheritance that I use while doing something new with it. It’s not terribly profound, but it is a way of not repeating exactly but repeating with changes. [pp 336-7]

Really good, in-depth books of interviews with Canadian authors always seem few and far between, but there have been some over the years that have been quite impressive, including Beverley Daurio’s Dream Elevators (Mercury Press, 2000; interviews with Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Lorna Crozier, Claire Harris, Michael Harris, Roy Kiyooka, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré , P.K. Page, Libby Scheier, Anne Szumigalski, Fred Wah and Phyllis Webb), R.E.N. Allen and Angela Carr’s The Matrix Interviews: Moosehead Anthology #8 (DC Books, 2001; interviews with Robert Allen, Martin Amis, Nick Bantock, Neil Bissoondath, Marie-Claire Blais, Stephanie Bolster, Anne Carson, Michael Crummey, David Fennario, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Harris, D.G. Jones, Irving Layton, Robert Majzels, Erin Mouré and Gail Scott), Michelle Berry and Natalee Caple’s the notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers (2002, Anchor Canada; interviews with Catherine Bush, Eliza Clark, Lynn Coady, Lynn Crosbie, Steven Heighton, Yann Martel, Derek McCormack, Hal Niedzviecki, Andrew Pyper, Michael Redhill, Eden Robinson, Russell Smith, Esta Spalding, Michael Turner, R.M. Vaughan, Michael Winter and Marnie Woodrow) and the more recent Poets Talk: conversations Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen, and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], among others. I applaud very much her efforts, and wonder why there aren’t more efforts being currently made? Where are all the interviews with the next generation of Canadian writers? I would love to read lengthy in-depth interviews with, for example, Ken Babstock, Marilyn Dumont, a rawlings, Nicole Markotic, Anne Stone, Sylvia Legris, Rachel Zolf and how many others who haven’t properly been dealt with yet (there have been interviews I’ve already seen here and there with Christian Bök, Sina Queyras and Lisa Robertson that have been quite magnificent; but what can be called enough?).

I could easily say the same thing of Janice Williamson herself (one of my goals while in Edmonton is to see she has another book out…), author of various essays as well as the trade books Tell Tale Signs: fictions (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), cry baby ! (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 1998), chapbooks by disOrientation and arsonist auntie press, and editor (with Deborah Gorham) of Up and Doing: Canadian Women and Peace (Toronto ON: The Women’s Press, 1989), but I will leave that for a future entry…