12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.

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

Certainly, Boy with Thorn changed my life. It suddenly thrust me onto a kind of national stage and lead to pivotal moments in my life, such as traveling to Palestine in 2016 for the Palestine Festival of Literature. When I leaf back thru that book, I notice an orderly, “tight,” well-workshopped book that explores the pain of not “fitting” with one’s body, if they did fit a queer & black identity, and the possibility of yet claiming that body in future. This diverges from Death of the First Idea—a bigger, and in some ways messier project about embarking on that reclamation. In some ways, I feel as if I’ve been on a Dantean trilogy: where I was “lost in a wood,” traveled thru a hellscape, banked in Purgatory—and am now contemplating what Paradise means for a black, trans woman. I italicized that word only to call attention to the fact that, prior to transitioning, I had no word: neither “man” nor even “non-binary” much made sense to me and the communities I interact with. And it does seem important to remind us all that Gender isn’t only a personal revelation, but a social contract of sorts: otherwise, the desires for correct pronoun-usage by others  wouldn’t have as much significance or sting. My second book explores this terrain, along a backdrop of the archaic and the future. I have new questions for the lyric like—“Why be tight?” “What is being held back, potentially, or denied a voice given such conscription?”

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?

I take handsomely from anywhere, and am constantly anticipating my next dive thru a Wiki rabbit-hole. I collect a lot of scraps of language. Sometimes for how a thing’s been said, after which I perform a sort of autopsy on that language to figure out, grammatically, how it works & succeeds; sometimes other times for what’s been said. I don’t have a conscious—or at least haven’t yet—had a fully aware idea that I was preparing a book thru most of both my first two books, but I assume this might less and less be the reality. As you write & publish more books, one grows ever more conscious she is publishing books. That’s also to say, one grows aware that a readership for their work exists and a readership who will arrive with some degree of expectation. For a long time, doubt courses thru my body at this acknowledgment; but now—now that I’ve written the messy book—I feel more courageous. I feel permitted to explore the lengths of my poetics.

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

Sure, public readings matter to me and the work. It wasn’t always this way. A naturally shy, bookish kid, I remember dreading the arrival of readings while at the same time recognizing its value. The value is community. And I recognize an early lesson: that to place ourselves in deliberately uncomfortable situations can encourage eventual ease, even familiarity. It’s been a while now since I was fully in the swing of readings, but I am looking forward to them. It’s important to me my work succeeds on the page & in the air—I even say so directly in one poem. Our art is to, first, to make, then to share.

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

I’ve longed for an editor, a real editorial relationship, since I discovered they exist. And I feel lucky now to have found one in my editor at Knopf. I personally believe more editors, at the level of journals, should engage revisionally with poems. It’s often that we can’t see our own brilliance, and that should make sense as to state directly in any light hurts the eye. An outside reader, but one with authority, offers that glimpse at the traveling photon; it may even see, before the light is exactly perceivable, the genius yet to come. I find myself particularly good at reading the work of others for a critical revision; it’s one of my happy services.

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

Toni Morrison is famous for saying, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” She was a genius who understood the seduction of what I’ll just call the social world & all its ills, and how it drives the writer into unnecessary apologia, uncritical explanations. “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being,” she continued. “Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” Bu

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

Years ago, a poetry professor, Suzanne Gardinier, assigned us to an essay with the instructions “not to forget we are poets.” I took that directive, like a liquor, physically, in. Because for me the lyric balances an expression of beauty (thru line, sound, collision) with a rigorous analytic (thru idea, question, contradiction), it’s been relatively easy for me to move between the genres while recalling I’m a poet. In any genre, writing asks you to press on the sentence until that sentence exposes its fresh concept and in a voice that meets it. If I can recall to do this, whether across liberation or captured in a paragraph, I find I can be permitted to write into and thru any genre, where language matters.

typical day (for you) begin?

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?

Recently, science & its interactions with the esoteric has played a more crucial role in my poetics. I’m just as fascinated with the old myths—the previous thought that, say, rays of light be emitted from the eye, which accomplishes sight—-as I am the new scientific theories & laws. Now we know rays react with our eye, coming from outside it, to drive the images of the world up into our neurological perception. Quantum physics, in particular, to my mind, feels like the meeting of all these disciplines, and my next thoughts consider how the lyric might comb its ideas. For centuries, the light fascinated poets. Can it again? 

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 fantasize about being a psychologist or psychoanalyst, if you would believe it. I went to Sarah Lawrence College & received a pretty great education across the many disciplines, but none in the hard sciences. It was deliberate although today I find myself wishing it had been otherwise. I’m curious, being neurodivergent, specifically schizoaffective myself, about how the brain works and not only on its own, usual terms but at times of crisis and times of pleasure. Years ago, I corralled a group of writers around the question “What occurs to you during penetration?” It was a provocative question that lead to much insight. Today I still wonder the question, if it’s less sexual as intellectual. What penetrates, or is allowed to, our very minds?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Liz Harmer

Liz Harmer is the author of The Amateurs (Knopf Canada, April 2018). Her essays and stories have been published widely, in such places as The New Quarterly, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, and The Malahat Review. She has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards, one of which she won.

Website: www.lizharmer.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/lizharmer

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

How (and whether) my first book changes my life remains to be seen. I will let you know.

Across my work I seem to be preoccupied with many of the same questions. The Amateurs, the novel to be released this year, has speculative elements that most of my other fiction does not. It has portals! Even so, in all my work I’m interested in questions of how we put society together (on which principles), and when to hold fast to commitments and when to be open to change. In all of my work I’m interested in how we know what’s real, what’s right, what’s true (if we can), and so I’m always circling back to topics like mental illness and religious belief. This comes out in The Amateurs in lucid dreams, hallucinations, memory loss, and a variety of other ways.

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

I was always writing the kind of stuff I was reading, and I got into an early habit of narrating my own movements and thoughts. I was writing fiction as a young kid, then I wrote loads of poetry as a teenager, and moved into nonfiction and fiction again in my twenties. I think it’s a mimetic tendency, and it has to do with what makes me feel free. I have heard that many people find writing to be torture—“I like having written” is how the quote goes I think—but I don’t find fiction writing to be torturous in this way. I do find writing poetry to be difficult, like pushing muscles to exhaustion in a workout.

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

My writing comes relatively quickly, but the process is different all the time. For The Amateurs I had been writing around the ideas for a while. I had written a whimsical time travel story about heartbreak and loss, about two characters named Marie and Jason that feature prominently in the novel. I think I even tried to write it as a play at a certain point. I am decidedly not an outliner, so drafts, which often come quickly, end up being like outlines. I have to endlessly revise and rewrite and wriggle around in my drafts. I write many many many words. I’m not shy about starting things. Feeling finished is harder.

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Several of the other projects I’m working on are always on my mind—sometimes I sit down and write sections of them in a surge, or I’m reading around them and thinking about them. For instance, the novel I’m working on now has characters in it and situations I’ve been writing for maybe nine years, but I didn’t start working on it as a novel in earnest until three years ago. But I have another long project I’ve been working on for years and years, producing and publishing the odd essay, finishing poems, doing lots of research, and I still have no idea what form it will finally take.

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

I get very nervous doing readings, but I enjoy the thrill. I like being out in the world and meeting other people, and I haven’t noticed an effect on my creative process. For good or for ill, I like to splash my personality around, to paraphrase a character in The Golden Notebook.

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?

One thing I’m obsessed by is a question of how to live. It comes out of an anxiety about how little can be known about where to put one’s faith and about the future. I love Jane Austen for this reason—it feels like she’s testing out ways of living (prudence or daring, for example)—and I’m obsessed by what an Austen scholar named Marcia McClintock Folsom, writing about Emma, calls the epistemological problem of daily life—“we often feel that we do not understand what is going on.” I guess I’d put this even more strongly: most of the time we have no idea what is going on. So: how to live, what we know—these are my current obsessions. Going along with them are questions of commitment in domains of love and religious faith, questions of mental health and illness, ordinary morality as a worthwhile subject.

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 too much self-doubt for this question! But I guess that I have found in my life that the arts, the literary arts especially, are a great and often primary consolation. I am soothed by beauty and ambiguity and careful thinking and introspection and observation—perhaps it is shallow to need soothing, but I don’t think so. Other lifelong readers I’m sure can relate to the fact that everything you read has a part in shaping one’s views and even, I think, one’s behavior. And the impulse to write comes out of that desire to be part of that long conversation about what it means to be human and to be living in the world—it is a religious impulse, somewhat. The role is crucial but small, because the writer must be one voice among many, and must never be overpowering.

Does the writer have a role outside of their writing? I guess I would want to believe that writers can live up to the gifts bestowed on them by their imagination. I want them to be great empaths and careful thinkers all the time. But of course writers are flawed and sometimes myopic and petty and disappointing, like everybody else.

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

Essential, definitely. I’m too proud and it’s no good for me to be too isolated. It’s a tough balance, but another muscle to work—do you find this, too?—to know how to hear and take criticism. Same problem I always face. But with The Amateurs I worked with two brilliant editors at Knopf with tons of experience—Lynn Henry and Amanda Lewis—as well as working with a mentor and listening to feedback from my good friend Seyward Goodhand and my husband Adam Harmer. I had very smart eyes on my work, which, if you can stand it, is a gift. Adam used to sit through me reading drafts of my novel aloud (okay, he still does this) and I could tell by his body language or the faces he was making whether something was working or making him cringe, and he has been helping me desentimentalize my sentences for years.

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

The most useful advice is from Richard Bausch, who advises young writers to train themselves to write anywhere. For an example, he talked about writing while a child napped on his chest. I took this to heart, or I’d never get anything done. I am not superstitious about my routine. Sometimes I write in a corner of the living room while the kids are running around. I have written with a baby sleeping on me.

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

The appeal for switching between genres is a desire for novelty, I think. I find it hard to be totally and exclusively devoted to a very long project, and while I’m working on a novel it is a relief for me to work on shorter pieces. Takes the pressure off. I’m not monogamous in my work. It has been said many times before, but the expansion of the novel feels very different than the contraction of a story. They are different mental spaces, just as the space of essay—that always feels to me like pushing at a boundary—is different again. A novel never flows out of me the way a story does; stories don’t torment me the way novels do. Essays give me a chance to explore ideas using my own voice, which makes them much less ironizing or distancing then my stories might try to be.

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?

A typical writing day: walk the kids to school and come home to write from 8:30 until noon. Try not to get distracted by email, social media, self-doubt. Find gaps to write in: when the kids are distracted, when I’m waiting for class to start. Sometimes I get up early on weekends to write between 6 and 8 a.m. Most days are not straightforward like this, but I am reading, writing, or revising something every single day. Always feeding the work.

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

I give up on whatever I’m working on that’s stalled and work on something else. Or I start the thing from scratch without referring to the previous version. Another thing to do is to read as a palate cleanser: I read across many styles and eras so that I can pick something up and read it and that will charge me up. I use prompts from a writer friend. Going out and having cultural experiences—galleries, talks with artistic or inspiring friends, films—can work to fill me, too. I am rarely stalled for significant lengths of time, maybe because I have been doing this long enough that I know such feelings to be temporary.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Good question! I don’t know what home is anymore. The smell of jasmine is becoming associated with living in California. Whenever I smell strong pine sap smells I feel nostalgia for Ontario and New York State. My mom’s speculaas squares baking in an oven—a mix of ginger, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves—will probably have me crying like a baby.

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?

Visual art and music offer moods and something deeper than what words can often get at for me, and intuitions. Watching films often makes me feel ready to make art. I try to be enriched by many things. Certain natural spaces, kinds of weather, and the awe I feel at the immensity of the universe, all these make me want to make art. Writing is my mode of response to beauty and terror and tragedy and love and the rest of the human experience, but that other kinds of responses to beauty and terror and tragedy and love and the rest feed my writing.

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

My forever answers are Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen. Virginia Woolf’s writing offered an early model for how to live unapologetically, and I have been moved deeply by both her fiction and her nonfiction. Jane Austen, via my father, was a part of my moral education. The stories and language of the Bible are always weaving into my thinking, as does Shakespeare and certain poems. I try to read everything Zadie Smith publishes. Other contemporary writers I feel invested in are Rachel Cusk, Heather O’Neill, and Elena Ferrante.

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

A thousand things. I want to learn more languages. I want to act in a play and learn new art forms. I want to absorb myself deeply in a big research project. I want to get better at writing poetry.

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’m am interested in so many kinds of lives, and have contemplated many occupations. I have come closest to academic work, teaching, librarianship, journalism, publishing. I have considered becoming a doctor or a midwife (I like the energy around hospitals and around births). I love visual arts, galleries—thought I’d like to be an artist or art historian. Briefly I thought I would become a minister or a nun. Or an entrepreneur. I have dreamed of working at airports. I have dreamed of homesteading.

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

When I am feeling dark, I sometimes worry that I am ill-suited to anything else: too moody, too difficult. But really, I was just always wanting to do it since I was a little kid. I was the kind of kid writing “novels” in my spare time at age 8. When I started a PhD, I started writing a novel on the side to cope with stress. It took me quite a while to figure out how to make writing a career or a life—how to train myself or find my way in. I spent quite a bit of time being in love and having children…these are my excuses for why it has taken me a relatively long time to publish my first book, since I have always seen myself as a writer.

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

Book: I will say that Sina Queyras’s My Ariel, a book of poetry that engages with Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, was full of gifts for me as a parent-writer-woman-etc. It’s so smart and so well done that I feel inspired to do better.

Film: I just watched Call Me By Your Name, which is breathtaking, and Lady Bird, which had me both laughing and sobbing. Timothée Chalamet is in both these films, incidentally.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I have finished a draft of a second novel (a social realist novel) and I’m working on a third (a love & doom story along the lines of Alice Munro or Madame Bovary). I’ve also been amassing research and working on portions of a long project that is probably nonfiction about my family history of mental illness. I think it is also about faith and marriage (as is the second novel). I have been working on some oddball stories as well, that involved animal metaphors of courtship behavior. Too many projects!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jen Sookfong Lee

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, where she now lives with her son. Her books include The Conjoined (forthcoming in Fall 2016), The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, and Shelter, a novel for young adults. Her poetry, fiction and articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Elle Canada, Hazlitt and Event. A popular radio personality, Jen was the voice behind CBC Radio One’s weekly writing column, Westcoast Words, for three years. She appears regularly as a contributor on The Next Chapter and is a frequent co-host of the Studio One Book Club. Jen teaches writing in the Continuing Studies departments at both Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was a novel, The End of East, and it completely changed my life in all ways. I was exclusively a poet before, and The End of East was the first piece of fiction I had ever written, apart from school assignments. So, the development of that book rewired my brain. Also, its reception in the big bad world was really positive, which meant that I was suddenly A REAL WRITER, and being invited to festivals and being interviewed and drinking free wine. And it led to my secondary career in broadcasting.

The novel that will be published in 2016, The Conjoined, is so different from my other books, which were largely written around character and theme. The Conjoined is plot-based, and messes with the conventions of crime fiction. The writing of it was hugely freeing for me, because I think readers have come to expect a certain amount of sad lyricism from me, and this book is far more gritty and, let’s face it, gross. I’ve come to realize that I really enjoy grossing people out.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction second, and started in poetry, and had a few things published in literary magazines before I started writing The End of East. Oddly, The End of East began its life as a long poem, but at some point, when the long poem was getting unwieldy, I made the decision to turn it into a novel. I was 24 at the time, and my youthful fearlessness had me convinced it would all be fine. And it was, but that novel took seven years.

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?
For novels, my first drafts take between six months to a year, which is probably an average amount of time. I do a fair amount of planning and initial research, but I do it concurrently, while I’m writing the first scenes. It’s important to me to have a sense of the tone of the book before I can really create an outline or make any notes at all. But I do need to plan and plan carefully, because I like to write toward a destination, and to have a sense of how the narrative should develop. This is not to say, of course, that the outlines don’t change as I discover new threads during the writing.

My first drafts are horror shows! They are so, so different from the final versions. I have a habit of tearing novels apart structurally and putting them back together again, which is a process that feels really essential to me. Each book contains an element that is consistent throughout the seven or eight drafts I usually write. The End of East kept one main character intact. The Better Mother’s narrative arc was set very early on. And the first chapters of The Conjoined haven’t changed at all.

All novels seem like they take forever to write. Come on now.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
With the exception of my first novel, I always know what I’m writing before I start. My ideas are very genre-specific; I have novel ideas, or poetry ideas, or short fiction ideas, or cultural criticism ideas. Fiction ideas can come from anywhere—news stories, other art forms, something you overhear in a conversation. I’m never at a loss for ideas. But I often fail at the execution.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t like the actual reading part. It’s more fun for me to be on a panel, or have a discussion on stage with other people or the audience. I like the performance aspect of it, but standing at a podium and reading from my books feels musty and creaky. I would rather make jokes and talk about writing.

Meeting people and being out in the world always fuels my creativity. I always say that my books would be the most boring things in the world if I wasn’t a social person. I am relentlessly social and an obnoxious ham, but this is how I observe humanity, and I keep those observations in my head for my next project.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My umbrella goal is always to create a narrative that attempts to give shape to the mess of our lives. It’s a universal compulsion for all writers, I think. More specifically, I like to explore expectations, meaning the expectations we place on ourselves, or expectations that are placed on women and their bodies, or people of colour and their positions in majority culture, or those who live in poverty. All of my novels have been set in and around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which is very much a neighbourhood of density, both in terms of population and human experience. And it’s a neighbourhood that holds a lot of meaning for me personally. It’s where my family began their journey in Canada, and I am firmly committed to its health and the lives of its residents.

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?
Sweet cracker sandwich, I have no idea! Writers are the ones who create stories and the world will always need stories, in evolving forms, of course. I suppose our job is to reflect humanity; we’re the ones who remind you of your past, and who give space to your experiences. And I think the main job for writers is to create narratives that resonate, that make readers feel less alone. A big reason I read books at all is so that I can have that aha moment. You know the one.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love editors. All of my editors have genuinely wanted to help make my books the best that they could possibly be. And that’s never a bad thing. I like to be challenged, and I like it when someone forces me to consider my choices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To expect nothing but celebrate everything. This should be tattooed on every writer’s arm.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (literary journalism to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It hasn’t been difficult. I used to work in magazines and small press publishing, so was always used to writing different things for different audiences. The key has always been to write something I deeply care about, whether it’s gender politics or pop culture or poems about dying relationships. I do think writing in different genres helps every genre you tackle, in the same way that playing more than one instrument will give you a better understanding of music in general.

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?
Right now, I write at night, after my son has gone to bed. It’s exhausting, but that’s all the time I have! When he goes to school full-time, I’m very much looking forward to not living like a vampire. I work in bed, surrounded by books, while my dog snores beside me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I just write through the pain. I’m a bulldozer like that. I always say that even if you write 2,000 words of garbage, if even one line or one idea is worth keeping, then your time was still well-spent.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Simmering chicken stock.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’ve been influenced by photography specifically, partly because there have been so many brilliant photographers from Vancouver who have used the city’s idiosyncrasies to create images that are both intimate and epic. Fred Herzog has played a big role in both The End of East and The Better Mother, and I kept going back to Jeff Wall’s images over and over again during the writing of The Conjoined. Theodore Wan’s photographs have also highly influenced my writing,

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I was always a Canlit nerd and I love Margaret Laurence more than any other Canadian fiction writer. I find her books comforting, like a cushy armchair. The poems of John Thompson slay me every time I read them. Donna Tartt and Junot Diaz are my favourite contemporary fiction writers. And a friend of mine recently introduced me to Kim Addonizio’s poems and I think she very well might be my spirit animal.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love to publish a poetry collection. After many years away from poems, I’ve been writing them again lately. And I love it.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would really like to make pies. I have this idea that I should be driving a vintage truck and delivering pies to happy people. Because who doesn’t love pie?
 
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think I had a choice. I am tenacious as a writer and have never had a back-up plan. There is nothing else I can or should do.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Birdie by Tracey Lindberg. I don’t think I’ve seen a great film in years. Seriously. I have really bad taste in movies sometimes.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on finishing up the edits for The Conjoined, and I’m also writing a book about the Gus Van Sant film, My Own Private Idaho. And I’m chipping away at that elusive poetry collection.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority – of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too. I will not forget my excitement at discovering that the earliest recorded poem in the English language was composed by a herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 (‘Caedmon’s Hymn’) when St Hilda was the abbess of Whitby Abbey.

            Imagine it…a woman in charge and an illiterate cowhand making a poem of such beauty that educated monks wrote it down and told it to visitors and pilgrims.

            It is a lovely story – Caedmon would rather be with the cows than with people, and he doesn’t know any poetry or songs, and so at the end of the feasts in the abbey, when all are invited to sing or recite, Caedmon always rushes back to the cows where he can be on his own. But that night, an angel comes and tells him to sing – if he can sing to the cows, he can sing to the angel. Caedmon says sadly that he doesn’t know any songs, but the angel tells him to sing one anyway – about the creation of the world. And Caedmon opens his mouth and there is the song. (Have a look at an early account of this in Bede: History of the English Church and Peoples.)

For years now, one of my favourite fiction writers has been British writer Jeanette Winterson, author of the infamous first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and subsequent Written on the Body (1993). Of her books, some of my favourites include more recent works, such as Lighthousekeeping (2004) and Weight (2005). I was less taken with The Stone Gods (2007), despite enjoying some passages, and even enjoying the connections to one of her earlier works, Boating for Beginners (1985) (which is a very neat book to compare to, say, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage). After numerous works of fiction, as well as children’s books and screenplays, comes a memoir of growing up, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011). Named for a phrase her adoptive mother, a Pentacostal, said to her, this is an odd, unsettling and frank memoir. Through the memoir, Winterson attempts to come to terms with the brutal way she was treated by her parents, including being shunned for her sexuality, diminished for being adopted, having her books burned, and regularly being locked out of the house. She writes of working to come to terms with her parents, and even her birth mother, once she is finally able to begin the emotionally and bureaucratically difficult process of seeking her out. She writes of her adoptive mother’s faith warped into madness, and the abilities she developed early on to protect herself, from secretly reading books from the library, to her first romantic stirrings. How does one learn to develop after such deep betrayals from not only one mother, but seemingly two? The first betrayal is the hardest to fathom, and the most difficult to transcend, especially from that person to whom our first bonds are forged.

Flash forward to 2007 and I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.

            I was writing a novel called The Stone Gods. It is set in the future, though the second section is set in the past. It imagines our world in its protean state being discovered by an advanced but destructive civilisation whose own planet is dying. A mission is sent to Planet Blue. The mission does not return.

            Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as memory and warning.

            The Passion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’

            Written on the Body: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’

            The PowerBook: ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.’

            Weight: ‘The free man never thinks of escape.’

            The Stone Gods: ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.’

            In my previous novel, Lighthousekeeping, I had been working with the idea of a fossil record. Now I was there again – the sense of something written over, yes, but still distinct. The colours and forms revealed under ultraviolet light. The ghost in the machine that breaks through into the new recording.

            What was the ‘imprint’?

Winterson writes of her difficulties with her mother, and the loss she felt at being adopted, raised in a working-class industrial town would be able to escape at all, let alone through the salve of reading that turned into writing, and forced to leave home at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. What else to say? This is a striking, and brutally honest work that struck deep, even as I work on my own work-in-progress dealing with my own mother [see a link to such here]. When I originally read an excerpt of the book in The Guardian, I was struck by this passage:

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.

Now that I’ve gone through the book as a whole, another passage strikes, also:

But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body.

            And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?

12 or 20 (second series) questions: with Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews [photo credit: Carol Loewen] is the author of five novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck; A Boy of Good Breeding, the Governor General Award-winning, Canada Reads-winning, much loved bestselling novel A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, which won the Rogers Writers Trust Award for fiction, and, most recently, Irma Voth. The author also penned one work of non-fiction: Swing Low: A Life. She lives in Toronto.


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

My first book was Summer of my Amazing Luck, which I wrote in my late twenties and which was published in 1996. I wouldn't call it my best book but getting the letter in the mail informing me that it would be published was probably one of the most exciting moments in my so-called career. I find it difficult to compare my books because they all seem to be different pieces of some continuous query. I like to think that with each book I get a little closer to some emotional truth, but that's a moving target anyway.

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

I was actually working as a freelance journalist before I started to write fiction. I was making radio documentaries and eventually it occurred to me that I was more interested in making things up than in sticking with the facts. Again, it was a question of being able to develop characters and get closer to some essential truth which is, in my opinion, just as often accomplished through fiction.

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 take a lot of notes for months and months, maybe even years, before I sit down to write a book. When I look back at my notes I can see themes developing, ideas and obsessions that I've been circling around and around and trying to understand. Then when I do start writing it comes pretty quickly. The first draft isn't dramatically different from the final book, usually, but of course there are changes and additions and subtractions.

4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

Yes, I work on a "book" from the very beginning. I take everything and throw it into one large pot, rather than um...several smaller dishes. Sorry for the lame cooking metaphor.


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

I do enjoy them. It feels good to get feedback from readers and to make that actual tangible connection.


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?

That's such a hard question! The only answer I have is, you know, just the meaning of life and all that jazz. Seriously, I want to know how to survive in this dark place, and maybe not just survive but to somehow achieve a type of grace, moments of joy, clarity, connection with others...how to love, how to think, how to be happy...that fine line between staring, clear-eyed, into the abyss and acknowledging that the world is a cruel and absurd place and stepping back, walking away and embracing it anyway.

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 take the reader by the hand (or throat, depending on what kind of a writer you are) and lead them from one place to another. It's not easy.

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

It's absolutely essential to work with an editor, and if you have a trusting relationship it's a beautiful thing, just seeing your book get better, tighter, pared down to its essence or beefed up to its potential...

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

Write as honestly and intelligently as you can. Make every sentence in your book as good as the best one.

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

I prefer to write fiction. I only wrote the one non-fiction book, about my father, but that was very necessary for me to do. A novel is a free and often messy enterprise that suits me best.

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 get up pretty early, drink coffee and read the newspaper, tell myself not to start the sudoku, wrestle with myself in every way and eventually convince myself to get to work. Then I work for a few hours which is all my brain can handle.


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

Well, there's a dark, womb-like bar on my corner which I have a habit of returning to time and again. Seriously, I give myself pep talks, I talk with other writers about the agony of being blocked, take comfort from knowing I'm not alone, I make some notes...I read the type of books I'd like to write, or the very opposite so I'm not struck in the face with my own short-comings...I don't know. Writers block is a form of hell, what can I say. It requires oceans of patience and faith to move through. I'd rather walk barefoot on broken glass.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?

What?! Halloween is a sin in my culture. Okay, well I think I was a suitcase or something. Kinda conceptual though...I'm not good at costumes.


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, all of those things, mightily, everything in life, and films!...with all due respect to David W. McFadden.

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

There are so many. I don't know where to begin. Like every other writer I read constantly... everything. Well, not everything. I've been travelling a lot lately, doing book stuff, and have begun to wake up in a cold sweat with this recurring nightmare...that I'm on a plane, a long trip like five or six hours, and I don't have a book to read. Somehow I forgot to pack one and I run wildly up and down the aisles asking everybody for a book, any book, and nobody has one...they're not sympathetic either. They turn away mumbling, embarrassed for me and afraid I'll storm the cockpit and take everyone down. Eventually I'm restrained and gagged and told to shut up about the books already or I'll be arrested when we land.

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

Grow old gracefully.

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?

Some day I'd like to drive a cab. It's similar to writing, getting people from one place to another, including myself. I don't know what I would have ended up doing if not writing...I don't want to think about it. Probably something unhealthy and short-lived.


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

Overhead is very cheap. I can't dance. I don't mean to be flip but you know the answer already, I think. The thing that every writer says over and over...something about making sense of the world, re-ordering the world...it might have something to do with being a control freak, although we don't say that so much. It's a need, a black hole that needs filling...it's not pretty. It's not a noble pursuit.


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

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and Ten by Abbas Kiarostami.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 questions: with Steven Heighton

Steven Heighton's most recent books are the novel Every Lost Country (May 2010) and the poetry collection Patient Frame (April 2010). He is also the author of the novel Afterlands, which appeared in six countries, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and was a "best of year" selection in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK. The book has recently been optioned for film. He has also published The Shadow Boxer—a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers’ Weekly Book of the Year for 2002—which appeared in five countries. His other fiction books are the story collections Flight Paths of the Emperor and On earth as it is, while his poetry collections include The Ecstasy of Skeptics and The Address Book.

His fiction and poetry have been translated into ten languages, have appeared in London Review of Books, Tin House, Poetry, Brick, The Independent, London Magazine, Malahat Review, Agni, The Walrus, Poetry London and Revue Europe, have been internationally anthologised (Best English Stories, Best of Best English Stories, The Minerva Book of Stories and others) and have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. Heighton has received the Gerald Lampert Award, the 2010 K.M. Hunter Award (literature), The Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, and gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards. He has been the writer-in-residence at Concordia University; at Massey College, U of T; at McArthur College, Queen's University; at the University of Ottawa; and at CMR/RMC. He has also taught at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, and in the writing program of the Banff School of Fine Arts. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.

1 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn't. I've written poetry and fiction concurrently all along. Both felt necessary from the start and both still do.

2 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It takes a while to start, and then it spills out fast, and then, in the final stages, things slow down again. As for my first drafts, they're a catastrophe.

3 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first book ratified something, for sure, but it didn't change my life. I already considered myself a writer. Maybe that was arrogant, but if so, who cares? Sometimes it's useful for a young writer to be a touch arrogant, if only to drown out the voice of self-doubt--to coach and coax and goad oneself on, to keep writing.

I'm not sure how my recent work compares to my earlier work--it would take a reader or a critic to say for sure.

4 - Where does a poem or prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
In general, both poems and fiction start with a strong, clear impulse, or image, or line, or scene, then flow off into the unknown while I try to follow. In other words, I have a beginning, but I never have an end. I have to write my way towards the end, and create/discover it in the act of writing.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like doing readings in the same way I love teaching: once in a while but not constantly. Like most writers (I guess) I'm an introvert and used to spending my days alone, writing. Reading or teaching are exciting and stimulating, yes, but ultimately they're draining, so before long I want to retreat to my bomb-shelter and get on with the work.

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?
The problem with allowing theories or ideologies to understrap your creative work is that they prescribe answers that you unconsciously (or consciously) write towards. Which is death, I think, for any creative enterprise. But of course there are ideological, or at least moral, questions I'm posing to myself when I write. (Questions but no clear answers.) These days as a writer I seem to be circling issues of ethical intervention: when is it right to intervene in a situation and when does it make matters worse? Can you even tell beforehand? I guess basically now I'm writing to try to understand how to be a good person. That sounds banal, I know, but there it is.

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?
Same as ever: speaking truth to power on the one hand, celebrating what's good in the world on the other, and making art out of the effort.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No, I love it. And a good editor is only "outside" initially. Before long, he or she slips into the text and inhabits it with you--which makes the process a touch less lonely in the latter stages. A good editor can always help you make a book better; I have no patience with divo and diva writers who won't let editors touch their work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
"Locate your material" (Norman Levine). In other words, stop drilling for oil in the seabed when you're the sort of writer who should be mining mica in the woods. It's awful to think how many good books have never been written because the writers were writing the wrong stuff--trying to be something they weren't. And who knows? Maybe that's what I'm doing myself. It's so hard to know, from inside a life.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
My poetry and fiction are really distinct--I feed my lyric impulses into poetry and my narrative into fiction, without a lot of overlap--and one reason I like moving between genres is that each provides a true refuge, or break, from the other. Like a musician switching between instruments, or a visual artist moving between media, the change refreshes me, shakes things up, keeps me from going into default mode and repeating myself--always a danger for a writer who has been doing it for over twenty years.

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 got a family now and so I follow a more conventional schedule than I once did. My average writing day now runs from 9 or 10 till 4 or 5. But it's not all writing, unfortunately. There's a lot of clerical/secretarial work mixed in there--email, above all.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I just keep hacking away at the problem till it yields, or until I can convince myself it has.

13 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
I tried to dress up as James Dean, or as Marlon Brando in The Wild One--you know, jeans with the hems rolled, black leather jacket, a black leather cap--but everyone thought I was supposed to be one of the Village People.

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, absolutely, all of the above. But McFadden is right too. There's a sort of layered template of other books behind every book you write. We're all apprentices--as were our masters.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I couldn't begin to answer this one. I can tell you, though, that these days I read more newspapers and news blogs (and the commenting posts) than anything else. In fact, the poem I'm working on right now is a response to a news story I encountered online.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Learn to dance salsa and sing harmony onstage with Emmy Lou Harris (not at the same time).

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?
Maybe a doctor with MSF or some other outfit of that kind. Yes, I think so (see above, answer # 6).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I liked it, I was good at it, and there were no other things I could think of doing for the rest of my life that I liked enough and was also good at. Plus, I never wanted to have a boss. I wanted to be able to work at home, in my boxer shorts or pyjamas, with my dog on the rug beside me. And I'm lucky to be doing that.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
George Orwell's HOMAGE TO CATALONIA (or maybe Paul Celan's SELECTED POEMS, translated by Michael Hamburger).

Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD (or maybe Theodore Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC).

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book of stories, which Knopf will publish next year or the year after. It's two-thirds (I think) done. Most of the stories are from the POV of women. I'm loving the change and the challenge.

Thanks for your questions.


12 or 20 (second series) questions;

ongoing notes: mid-June, 2008
THIS BLOG IS NOW FIVE YEARS OLD [which makes it five years older than my new nephew, Duncan Ian Derochie (above), born at the tail end of May]; What to say after five years? As Amanda Earl reminded me recently, this clever blog of mine turns five years old this month, originally created as a space to post poetry book reviews after my four+ years of writing three weekly reviews for the Ottawa X-Press; I would rather, I told myself at the time, put the energy into writing new pieces than find out-of-date homes for what I've already written. Since then, the blog has become a kind of catch-all, for writing, reviews, essays, interviews and notices; what will the next five years entail?

Obviously, then, I'm home now; will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair, and/or the reading the night before at the Carleton Tavern? The "12 or 20 questions" series will be ending soon, be sure to check around the time of the book fair to see the last interview or two, and even a note on the entire process.

Edmonton AB: Trisia Eddy's new Red Nettle Press had its first chapbook launch at the tail end of May in Edmonton, launching a number of small publications by various authors, including Michael Gravel, Patti Sinclair (also an editor for the press), Jeff Carpenter, Layne L'Heureux as well as a collaboration between myself and Eddy. The creator of a series of lovely little chapbooks published in editions of 100 copies, Eddy is also the new coordinator of The Factory (West) Reading Series, and even a descendant of one of Ottawa's early lumber pioneers, E.B. Eddy (the match factory is mere blocks away from my little Chinatown apartment).

Walking the Dog on Sunday

Red sun in the
hitchpost sky,
red-green fields
stretched out limp,
my feet, hot stumps rasping
in the non-breeze,
my goldenred dog
streaking across the grass,
liquid canine power,
fire-red collar going for the sun,
running over school field
scabs of children,
beside the melting backstop,
back of the ghost rink,
through red dirt of the infield
(like the bloody dew of Utah).
It's a long way up here,
a long way from red,
a long way longer
than the red dog tail. (Michael Gravel, The Fast Places)

One of the most interesting in this first batch (apart from the first title by the press, being Eddy's own, a few months ago [see my review of such here]) has to be Edmonton poet and Olive Reading Series co-organizer Jeff Carpenter's malachi on foot (2008), a short, tight ghazal sequence playing not only off of the late John Thompson's posthumous collection of ghazals, Stiltjack (1976), but off the direct influence of Thompson, citing this line from W.B. Yeats, "Malachi Stilt-Jack am I, whatever I learned has run / wild," as precursor to Thomson's own. Here is the opening poem from Carpenter's seventeen poem sequence:

there are the streets of edmonton old
strathcona there are

city-town-hamlet pearls
dribbled under country

shadow border retreating
sundogs of circumpolarity

compasses swagger & point
as I span map

smoke inhalation my back turns
on book cinders & gutted abode

abide my lumbering lapped by the shine
sun-moon-algol-et al antewest

meridian & crooked archery to glance
off sky skin moon find a d

find a distant relative in a new
glasgow graveyard when we rise around

There are far too many people who have written and published ghazals over the past few decades in Canada, but these are some of the few (along with Andy Weaver [see my note on a ghazal of his here], Douglas Barbour, Eric Folsom, Matthew Holmes [see my review of his book here; see my mention of a ghazal of his here] and some rare others) that really strike. At the back of the collection, Carpenter (who appeared in a recent issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club) also writes:

Put two words together…

…likely, John Thompson stood agape between the contingency of naming and the fixity of a name while he wrote his Stilt Jack. Do you have days like that, when random events feel as incontrovertible as the geometry of the Pyramids, when we are neither capable of integrating ugly accidents into our worldview nor capable of avoiding them. The apparent lack of sequence between couplets of the ghazal—the disintegration of homely form—strives to induce an essence out of an accident in the reader's mind. This is the most productive sort of naming a poet can commit. Gazing into chaos, he chooses to bring back some artifact rather than be seduced into oblivion. Naming makes it so; it cannot make it go away. My name is Jeff Carpenter.

It's interesting that he mentions naming, returning to the subject of a talk that expat-Canadian poet Nathalie Stephens [see her 12 or 20 questions here] did at the University of Alberta a few months ago (the paper she delivered apparently comes out this fall in an edition by BookThug), referring to naming as being something that reduces as opposed to making larger or better. I think Carpenter might have been the only person at the talk who really understood what she was talking about, and managed to take that ball and run.

Ottawa ON: For the upcoming ottawa small press book fair, Ottawa poet Marcus McCann has published a new chapbook, petty illness leaflet (The Onion Union, 2008) in a lovely edition of thirty copies. After various chapbooks over the past couple of years, including one by my own above/ground press, and one forthcoming this fall with Jenna Butler's Rubicon Press out of Edmonton, McCann has been managing to write exquisite little poems that twist in on themselves, managing to trouble the language and lay it out fresh, to be heard as much as meant to exist on the page.

Take a breather

A spigot tricked, a spout lousy,
recovery rebuts a passport by turning
tornadic. Or roundly immobile.
A lockpick hatpinned the apiary

but the drones were drowsy.
The detritus — a lengthening queue
of tasks napping — float, pose, flirt.

Padded flaps recounted, then
recanted, grogginess buried,
blurred. A flurry. Here's your
essay's slushpile, sip tidbits.

Hint: the fitted sheet gave up the ghost,
its elastics don’t react to torture.
Or bed is a blast balance, you're
a live ballast that sleep ape-ends.

With rumours of a first poetry manuscript recently completed, it will be extremely interesting to see where McCann moves himself next. For a copy of the chapbook, the best thing to do would either to show up to the ottawa small press book fair, or email him directly through his own clever blog.

Vernon, BC: Produced as the last of the run of chapbooks by Jason Dewinetz and Aaron Peck's greenboathouse books is Toronto poet/publisher Jay MillAr's WOODS│PAGES (2008). [see my review of their previous chapbook here, by Kate Hall]. MillAr, when he is on, is incredibly on, and recently he managed one of the finest pieces of his career so far with a chapbook out with Vancouver's Nomados [see my review of such here], written, as so many of his works are, in sequence. What makes this small meditation particularly intriguing is just how subtle it sits, how it manages to quietly exist without any fireworks or tricks, but on its own quiet strength.

Only as meaningful and only
so when the senses have been blown through
an acorn the size of a human
brain. Silence is the only theory
a seed to the ear reveals. The sound
doesn’t play in a shell's ocean, but
in the wind. Of pauses held against
contours in a sky the grey matter
makes of itself. A receptacle
as spectacle: a moment of self.

Victoria BC: A very nice edition is the new bound chapbook quase flanders, quase extremadura, 14 poems & wombpoems : 3 papages & one a-part by Andr's Ajens, translations from south to north with notes by Erin Moure (Victoria BC: La Mano Izquierda Impresora, 2008).

ii. thesame given, a chance thrown

all and nothing, written down, or method
of i-dentifying recol-lecture (rips)
swung arm over arm, it bestows
what it does not have, name,
the unpardonably given, gift
from ear to ear, implausible,
wheregoeu, thin nightblooms, if you won't give it,
unthanks from the bottom of what's thrown.

Moure has been doing a number of translations lately [see my note on another of her recent translations here], bringing a polyphony not only through her own writing, but the writing she brings from other writers, other languages; this is a poetry of dialogue, although it might not always be clear who is speaking, or who is being addressed. As Moure writes as her "translator's note on the text,"

And quasi-quebec. The notes are the translator's, and intend to create counter-narratives to run in, through and against the translated texts, troubling them. The work of Ajens itself contains and embeds many counter-narratives that act from within his text. In English, whether Canadian or UK, a translator can't reconvey quite those same reverberations without turning them into explanations of a Chilean culture and trajectory that still seem "distant." Explanations can't really account here. So rather than patiently explaining the ingressions and transgressions of the text (and his hemisphere) to northern, non-american readers (as Ajens did to me, his Canadian reader), I created the note texts. They are traitorous notes. And thus, I believe, are honest.

For further information, write c/o Maleea Acker, 860 Melody Pl RR5, Victoria BC V9E 2A2 or check out their website at http://www.lamanoizquierda.ca/

UK: I recently read UK author Ali Smith's lovely little novel Girl Meets Boy (Knopf, 2008), a part of the same series of international authors reworking fairy tales [see my note on the Margaret Atwood novella here], as the author of various books of fiction such as (such wonderful titles!) Like, Hotel World and Other Stories and Other Stories reworks Ovid's Metamorphosis. As the beginning of the book writes,

Myths are universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives ― they explore our desires, our fears, our longings and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human. The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include: Chinua Achebe, Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Michel Faber, David Grossman, Milton Hatoum, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Victor Pelevin, Donna Tartt, Su Tong and Jeanette Winterson.

This is a lovely and lyrical little love story, and, apart from wanting to read everything in the entire series, I would certainly like to get my hands on more of her work. Listen to this, from the beginning of the last section, "all together now" (it's not really giving anything away to tell the ending of an already-known myth, is it?) that begins:

Reader, I married him/her.

It's the happy ending. Lo and behold.

I don’t mean we had a civil ceremony. I don’t mean we had a civil partnership. I mean we did what's still impossible after all these centuries. I mean we did the still-miraculous, in this day and age. I mean we got married. I mean we here came the bride. I mean we walked down the aisle. I mean we step we gailied, on we went, we Mendelssohned, we epithalamioned, we raised high the roofbeams, like her. We crowned each other bride, o bridegroom, like her. We crowned each other with the garlands of flowers. We stamped on the wine-glasses wrapped in the linen. We jumped the broom-stick. We lit the candles. We crossed the sticks. We circled the table. We circled each other. We fed each other the honey and the walnuts from the silver spoons; we fed each other the tea and the sake and we sweetened the tea for each other; we fed each other borhani beneath the pretty cloth; we fed each other a taste of lemon, vinegar, cayenne and honey, one for each of the four elements. We handfasted, then we asked for the blessing of the air, the fire, the water and the earth; we tied the knot with grass, with ribbon, with silver rope, with a string of shells; we poured water on the ground in the four directions of the wind and we called on the presence of our ancestors as witnesses, so may it be! We gave each other the kola nuts to symbolise commitment, the eggs and the dates and the chestnuts to symbolise righteousness, plenty, fertility, the thirteen gold coins to symbolise constant unselfishness. With these rings we us wedded. (pp 149-150)