Robin Richardson, Sit How You Want

SUCH AN UGLY LITTLE DUCK

This morning’s pink ass. Last night’s sadist.

    Suppose he came to know me as he wrote

in Sharpie on my belly: whore, or heroine,

    or both. I’m no good at sleeping. High-strung

in a hurricane of public access broadcasts

    while the city’s men parade their bulges

on the F train waiting to be licked

    back into living. This is how a book begins:

protagonist unburdened by her husband

    blunders through the belly of a whale.

One day she’ll emerge dismantled, all decked

    out in Swarovski Crystal halos. Imperfect,

picturesque as childhood hallucinations.

There is a sharpness and a confidence to the first person monologues in Toronto writer Robin Richardson’s third full-length poetry collection, Sit How You Want (Vehicule Press, 2018), even as the poems explore trauma, terror and powerlessness, and the ways in which one might finally emerge. In an interview conducted by Madeleine Wattenberg, posted at So To Speak, Richardson speaks of “unsympathetic poems,” an idea I found quite fascinating:

The sympathetic poem is crafted in service of the author. It makes one look intelligent or innovative, or, in the case of this “universal” notion you put forth, which I can’t get out of my head now, it makes one seem a masculine sort of authority. I think of all these poems written by white men about the strife of the third world and so on. It comes secondhand and from a sense of the author’s own importance and “seriousness.” It puts nothing on the line, offers up no vulnerability, and does nothing to actually portray the truth of its subject matter, because only the subject, speaking for herself, could provide the “truth” of her experience. It’s somewhat colonial to me, and difficult to digest.

In contrast to this, the unsympathetic writer puts herself on the line, risking vulnerability and exposure of the unflattering angles the sympathetic writer dodges with skill and preoccupation with externals. So, in a world where only the flattering photos are posted, and the easy to digest stories shared, it is a crucial service to one’s fellow to expose the ugly, the sad, the unflattering. It’s in this sharing that we begin to feel less alone.

This is where isolation ends, and empathy, solidarity even, begins. I could go on for pages about the illuminating and healing power of sharing true stories but I’ll stop here with the urge to start listening and asking questions; to start sharing the things that make you feel most unlovable.

While Sit How You Want isn’t, specifically, a collection of “unsympathetic poems,” the idea is one not unrelated to the poems at hand, in which the narrator/s speak of love and damage, depression and regret, and fearlessness versus fear. As she writes, both in a kind of mocking self-dismissal as well as declaration of being and purpose, in the poem “ABOUT THE SPEAKER”: “I am built of myth and girly bits.” These are poems pushing to break free from abusive relationships, both familial and romantic; poems composed via a narrator (or narrators) that has survived, although not without scars, such as the gloriously-titled “EARTHQUAKES ARE MY FAVOURITE WAY / TO MAKE ISLANDS,” that begins: “We ignored the cries of the carbon monoxide / detector, coitussed in a pose like Pompeii / corpses while the cabbies grew irate outside. / This is the last day of our lives, until tomorrow. / When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy [.]”

BLUEBEARD FOR BEGINNERS

It was love at gunpoint. It was cuffed, diamond-studded-ball-gagged,

    that I found my strength. You follow? Break to rebuild better

like the hero in a DC comic’s bludgeoned to the point of brilliance.

    Blood’s the best incentive, said the dove, slayed, laying in the hooks

of her beloved. Bellevue mid-march making plans with our hallucinations.

    We were stylish in our shared delusion; rings were not enough

we went for ink and more. I can’t complain. It is the thrill of ruination

    makes us innovative. I do my drugs, my lovers, with the discipline

of Kung-fu film star choreography.

Minola Review: A Journal of Women’s Writing, an anthology edited by Robin Richardson

Doubt is dead, yet evil is out bedeviling the bars of this country, bearded and growing fat with paranoia. I slept beside it for all those years, woke and made the sweat-wet bed each morning. My project is atonement. Come inside me while I bleed and let our humours runnel my legs and let that be like raising a daughter together. I anoint myself twice a day. You angels, please bed for me in your hall. The fires of purification melt iron that beads from my pores. I have lied to every one of you, in small ways and large. I have used every detail for my own purposes. Yes, I have walked into unlocked rooms and executed the men who waited for me there. I have soothed evil in its night terrors. I abase myself. I beg you. Lead pours from my mouth. My project is reconciliation. (Paige Cooper, “VAZOVA ON LOVE”)

In the introduction to Minola Review: A Journal of Women’s Writing, a newly-released print anthology compiled as a ‘best-of’ her online journal, editor/publisher Robin Richardson speaks of the need for a separate space in which to work and present work, one that doesn’t come with experiences such as, she recounts, being shamed for dancing at a dance party at thirteen. As she writes: “What if I could create a space where my girlfriends and I could dance however we want? Where we wouldn’t worry about coming across too sexy or too unsexy, too goofy or unhinged. We could have the freedom simply to move.” Using an argument similar to those made for Vancouver’s Room Magazine from the anthology Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (Caitlin Press, 2017) [see my review of such here], Richardson continues:

Minola Review is my no-boys-allowed dance party. I created Minola—named after the shrew who is arguably broken, or perhaps forced to play at being broken for the sake of survival, at the hands of her father and husband in Taming of the Shrew—as an online magazine for writing by women, femme-identifying, and non-binary writers. In the past few years, the realities of gender disparity in literature, and in North American culture at large, have come to the forefront. Groups like VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and CWILA (Canadian Women in the Literary Arts) have worked to calculate and share the numbers regarding men and women in print and review. Both organizations have made one thing clear: men maintain a majority in almost all arenas. There are more male editors and reviewers, and more books by men being published and reviewed.

The colophon the collection offers the added information that this print anthology was compiled as the first in a potential series of annuals, which seems highly ambitious, something I greatly admire and look forward to seeing (I wonder if she might find a distributor for such, or if these books are meant to exist deliberately in shorter runs and smaller distributions, produced in part for the sake of the journal’s Patreon page). There is some very strong work collected here. And, while any new project might be expected to take a certain amout of time to work out the kinks, I was a bit surprised to see the typos throughout her acknowledgments. So then, this first volume of Minola Review: A Journal of Women’s Writing includes poetry and fiction that originally appeared in the online journal over the previous year by an impressive array of Canadian writers, including Lauren Hilger, Adèle Barclay, Cassidy McFadzean, T Kira Madden, Lisa Locascio, Shannon Bramer, Melanie Janisse-Barlow, Jessica Hiemstra, Erica McKeen, Paige Cooper, Toti O’Brien, Alina Stafanescu, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Shannon Hardwick, Aja Moore, Alice Burdick, Catherine Graham, Madeleine Wattenberg, Madeleine Maillet, Marcis Bianco, N. Michelle AuBuchon, Kristie Betts Letter, Yen Ha, Violetta Leigh, Cade Leebron, Lauren Turner, Joanna C. Valente, Alana Dakin, Kara Vernor, Meghan Bell, Laura Page, Suzanna Derewicz, Kathryn Mockler, Klara du Plessis, Brandi Spaethe, Julie Mannell, Leah Umansky, kerry rawlinson, Brianna Ferguson, Jessica Van de Kemp, Tara Burke, Caitlin Pryor, Rebecca Salazar, Meaghan Rondeau, Jaime Forsythe, Kailey Tedesco and Kayla Czaga. Part of what appeals about an anthology such as this is how it focuses so heavily on emerging writers, showcasing multiple writers who haven’t yet published a trade book, or have published only one or two. There are exceptions, of course, but the bulk of the collection appears to focus on emerging writers, such as Vancouver writer Violetta Leigh, who opens her short story “BLESS OUR TEENAGE HEAT” writing:

Alison Yale watched it happen every morning. The rush of blood to his extremities erupted before the bell for first break. Whatever caused it kept her up at night—an extra pulse of his heart? A subtle tightening in the whorls of his brain? His hands always snapped to his face before it happened. He felt the minute tremor—the internal liquefaction—the same way an animal senses a coming earthquake.

I always appreciate being introduced to the work of writers I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read, and I was quite taken with the prose of Kara Vernor and Madeleine Maillet, two further writers I hadn’t yet heard of. Editor/publisher Richardson’s interests clearly lean toward a relatively straightforward lyric narrative, with much of the work collected here existing in that vein, with the occasional prose piece with an added extra music, such as Vernor’s striking “IF YOU’RE WITH A GIRL AND YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE SEX WITH ANOTHER GIRL, BUT YOU’RE ON YOUR PERIOD AND YOU’RE WEARING A TAMPON, CAN YOU STILL? DO PEOPLE EVER DO THAT?,” a piece that really does seem to (apart from being an entertaining piece willing to laugh at itself) roll to an entirely different kind of music.

Still, given the focus on emerging writers, I do wonder why the anthology exists sans author bios. Are we expected to move through google for further information, or does the anthology exist, quite literally, as an extension of the web journal that we’re to look through for such information?

FLIGHT-MAPS

A coin falls into a piggy bank

and a girl draws flowers

with a pen.

A father, home

from work, places

a comic

on her desk. Richie Rich, Archie,

Casper the Ghost. She hears

the revving silence

of the Singer.

Outside birds play house:

find the right mate; find

the right tree. Flight-maps

in air, traffic of matter.

There before

and there thereafter

They’ve stolen the song

from a mother’s mouth. (Catherine Graham)

Ploughshares : an interview with Robin Richardson on Minola Review

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my eleventh post is now up: an interview with founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing.

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : f o u r _ r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've now twelve essays posted! Our most recent include:

Robin Richardson on Anne Frank

Elee Kraljii Gardiner on Betsy Warland

Jane Eaton Hamilton on Ntozake Shange

Jennifer LoveGrove on Libby Scheier

Please check out our submissions page for more information.

Forthcoming essays include: Doyali Islam on Sylvia Legris, Adrienne Gruber on Brecken Hancock, Dorothy Palmer on Stella Young, Ian Whistle on Judith Copithorne, Dawn Promislow on Nadine Gordimer and A.H. Reaume on Virginia Woolf.

Natalie Zina Walschots, the National Post and The Vida Scale: some notes in response,

Over the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion around reviewing, including a recent post by Natalie Zina Walschots (which is a must-read) on the strange and troubling discrepancy in Canadian poetry titles reviewed by women against those by men. I completely agree that there is a different consideration to be put in place when talking of someone who posts reviews to their own site against someone who reviews regularly for a national newspaper, which means that for Toronto writer Michael Lista, who Walschots discusses, it actually is his job to be aware of balances such as gender, geography and other factors. The current poetry reviewer for the National Post, Lista appears to do the bulk, if not the entirety, of their poetry reviews, which means his position demands that his reviewing responsibilities and considerations be far broader in scope than his own personal boundaries (I’ve made the same arguments about the review pages of Arc Poetry Magazine). As Walschots writes, “Only 2 of the 14 books of poetry that the National Post has reviewed in the last year in a half were written by women. 2 in 14. I was expecting some discrepancy, from what I had just passively noticed, but nothing like this.”

But then again, as Robin Richardson wisely points out in her comments underneath Walschots’ post, making Michael Lista the poster child for this issue would be reductive, if not counter-productive. I have no idea if such an oversight is deliberate, and would most likely suspect it isn’t, yet Lista’s choice of response, as told by Walschots, is just baffling.

I first heard of the Vida Scale through the SUNY-Buffalo Poetics listserve, and heard some troubling statistics about the wide gap between poetry books by American men against poetry books by American women reviewed in various of their national forums, as realized and publicised by writers such as Amy King and Ana Božiĉević. Some have suggested that the wide margin is due in part to the fact that fewer women than men do the reviewing, which even on the surface sounds ridiculous. Do reviewers automatically favour their own gender when selecting titles?

Since I’ve been active as an editor/publisher (twenty years next August), I’ve noticed the discrepancy of male against female writers. Male writers appear to have far more confidence, and the female writers, far more polish. It usually meant I’d receive ten manuscripts by male writers (most of which I’d reject) compared to one or two by a woman (more often than not, astonishing work that I had to wait months to receive, if not have to beg out of a writer’s hands). What does this mean, and where does this come from?

When I wrote a weekly book column in The Ottawa X-Press from mid-1994 through the end of 1998, I worked hard to be aware of a variety of balances, including gender, geography, style and genre. It was my job to talk about a selection of books wider than my immediate likes, especially when I realized that mine might be the only review for a particular title between Montreal and Toronto.

I went through my own blog, arbitrary going through the entirety of 2011 to see what my results were (which also include posts/links to my outside pieces for Prairie Fire, The Antigonish Review and Open Book: Toronto/Ontario, among other venues). I think I did pretty well on the Vida, myself (I obviously favour non-Canadian women poets to non-Canadian men). I pay attention to writing that strikes, from a variety of sources. And some publishers I request books from don’t even respond as quickly as I’d like, if at all, which alters the numbers as well. One small Canadian press went so far as to recently declare to me that they don’t send review copies to blogs, focusing instead on print media such as newspapers. They told me I’d understand (for the record, I find this outdated, considering how few newspapers bother with books at all, let alone poetry).

Is the answer for better reviewing in Canada a matter of finding more reviewers? I’ve been years (mostly unsuccessfully) attempting to get further reviewers for the ottawa poetry newsletter blog. Compared to the reviewing space it allotted throughout the 1980s, journals such as CV2 are but shadows of their former selves.

Walschots argument is a worrisome one. It’s hard enough to get books reviewed at all, with poetry even less so, without even further hurtles being put up in place. Exactly what makes for such a wide discrepancy?

Canadian poetry books reviewed: 33

Titles by men: 12

Titles by women: 21

Canadian poetry chapbooks reviewed: 17

Titles by men: 11

Titles by women: 6

Canadian books of fiction reviewed: 4

Titles by men: 3

Titles by women: 1

Canadian books of non-fiction/essays reviewed: 6

Titles by men: 4

Titles by women: 2

Canadian writers interviewed: 40

Interviews with men: 22

Interviews with women: 18

Non-Canadian poetry books reviewed: 22

Titles by men: 5

Titles by women: 17

Non-Canadian poetry chapbooks reviewed: 39

Titles by men: 12

Titles by women: 27

Non-Canadian books of fiction reviewed: 1

Titles by men: 1

Titles by women: 0

Non-Canadian books of non-fiction/essays reviewed: 2

Titles by men: 0

Titles by women: 2

Non-Canadian writers interviewed: 33

Interviews with men: 13

Interviews with women: 20

Profiles with individual writers: 4

Profiles on men: 1

Profiles on women: 2

Literary journals reviewed: 17

12 or 20 questions (second series) with Robin Richardson

Robin Richardson is a Toronto native pursuing her MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence in New York. Her work has appeared in many Canadian and international journals including Cv2, The Puritan, filling Station, Dandelion Magazine, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and The Westchester Review. Her first full-length collection of poems, Grunt of the Minotaur, has just been released with Insomniac Press

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 is launching later this week, so can't say much yet about what it feels like to have a book officially out in the world. What I can say is that having a publishing contract really increases the resources that are available to you as a writer. I'm now eligible for many grants, retreats and other perks that I intend to take full advantage of. I'm pretty sure this is going to make life that much more fun and is going to make it that much easier to work on other projects.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually didn't come to poetry first. In grade two that I decided I was going to be a writer and for the next fifteen years or so, I was pretty sure that meant writing novels. I'd never given poetry much thought until I was forced to write poems for creative writing class I took while going my undergrad in design at OCAD. Something about it clicked and I've written poetry almost daily ever since. I'd still like to write a novel or two at some point but for now poetry is my main preoccupation.

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?
At any given time I've got about ten poems on the go, each at its own stage of completion. It can take anywhere from a week to a three months, sometimes longer, for a poem to feel finished for me... even then it could probably use some revision.

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?
For me a poem almost always begins with a sound; a word, or short phrase. I carry a notebook with me at all times, in which I jot down interesting sounding combinations of words, bonus if that combination happens to have an evocative notion or metaphor attached to it. In the morning when I start writing, I take one of these word combinations, rewrite it, and let the sounds dictate what words will follow. Usually once I've got a line or two out of this, a narrative or idea will begin to materialize and I'll run with it. I rarely know what a poem is about until it's about half way through. 

I don't really think about the book as a whole while I'm writing. I just figure once I have seventy or eighty poems I feel really good about I'll pare them down and edit them into something like a manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public reading is an unavoidable part of being a poet. I enjoy doing reading primarily because it's an excuse to get out of the house and mingle (drink) with my peers. Writing is a very solitary act and it's easy to forget to interact with other human beings, especially when you're deep into a project, so any excuse for writers to get out and socialize is a good thing.

As for the act of reading out loud, I think it really helps with my writing. Knowing that I will be performing a poem makes me focus that much more on making sure it sounds good and is, in some way, entertaining and engaging. There's nothing worse than getting up to perform a poem that you feel is weak in any way.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don't answer questions. I have no answers. 

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 think the most important thing a writer can do is indulge his or her messiest self. Expose uncertainty, bewilderment, weakness, perversion, etc... with as little restraint as possible. Everything else is boring.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with an outside editor is very important. No matter how many times I go over a poem there is always something I've missed. Having an editor who understands your aesthetic and believes in your work is an indispensible asset.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The more I write poetry, the stronger my writing becomes when I attempt fiction and non-fiction. Granted it takes me longer to write in these other forms as I tend to get caught up on the sounds and structures of the words on a small scale. That being said, I'm very excited to begin working on a piece of long fiction in the near future.

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 have a pretty strict writing routine. Each morning I head out first thing to a nearby cafe to work for one to three hours. I bring my notebook, laptop, and two or three books for reference or inspiration. Sometimes I'll write non-stop while I'm there, sometimes just read and make notes. It varies quite a bit, but is always productive. After this I may or may not write again later in the day depending on how I feel.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When my writing gets stalled I take it as a sign to quit for a while and get outside. I make social plans, watch films, go for long walks, visit museums etc. After about a week of this stuff I'm generally refreshed and revved up enough to start writing again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Steak and cigarette smoke.

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?
Film, music, television, visual art and design, overheard conversations, You Tube, long walks, cityscapes, landscapes, faces, documentaries, clothing, cartoons, newspapers, lectures, train rides, architecture, iconography, typography, scents, sentiments...

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Cormac McCarthy, John Berryman, Virginia Woolf, Milton, Harlan Ellison, Frederick Seidel, Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, Dean Young, John Fowles, Graham Greene, James Dickey. That’s the list right now. It’s always changing.

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

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?
Palaeontologist or ballerina.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It's the only thing I really ever wanted to do. Never felt like there was a choice.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter.

Film: Drive directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling. I saw this in this theater expecting a typical action flick. I was pleasantly surprised to find out I was wrong… There is nothing typical or expected about this film, very tight and innovative at the same time. Made me feel good again about contemporary film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm a third of the way through a second collection of poetry and am beginning to lay down the groundwork for a poetic gothic romance novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;