four recent (short) essays: Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross + Christine McNair,

As part of a work-in-process, "reading in the margins: a writing diary," I've been posting short essays on the works of prose writers on my enormously clever substack for a while now, with recent pieces posted over the past couple of months on the work of Canadian writers Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, and Christine McNair. Part of the thinking of these pieces was a way to explore prose writers who have affected my own thinking, and my own writing. While I've a small handful of further essays currently in-progress, you can also check out prior pieces in the same series, on the work of Jean McKay, Gail Scott, Joy Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Kristjana Gunnars. Where might it go next? It is one of but a handful of threads I've been exploring through substack, which I've been attempting to treat like a kind of weekly column: "the genealogy book," a non-fiction book-length genealogical project exploring some of these newly-discovered biological threads, counterpointed with the genealogical threads I was raised into; "the green notebook," a kind of day-book of writing and thinking; "little arguments: stories," a sequence of short short stories, possibly as a follow-up to The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014); and an ongoing flurry of short stories, including what might be a follow-up to my new collection, On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). There are also a couple of other projects/threads in there, but I won't give away everything here (this is where the curious might explore the site to see what might be, across the last two years of my weekly postings). It is free to follow me there, although I'm posting every third or fourth piece for paid-members only.

The Capilano Review 3.22 / Winter 2014

TB: How Should a Person Be? is very much a novel that deals with the idea of contemporaneity, making visible your present place in the world. We can look at the question, How should a person be? in relation to a number of themes in the book: sex, being a young woman, an artist, a moral person, but the idea of being contemporary seems to encompass all of that. The two themes I picked up early on in your prologue are themes of ugliness and of fame. And again, that made me think of Stein who said contemporary art always looks ugly at first and then it becomes beautiful over time. So could you speak about that preoccupation with ugly art in relation to being contemporary?

SH: I thought a lot about that quote. I thought it was Picasso but maybe they both said it in different ways. I know that Picasso said an original work of art is always ugly at first to its creator. So I guess they were both thinking a lot about that, and I was thinking a lot about that when I wrote this book: how you have to sometimes break down your ideas of what beauty is in order to have some air flowing through your process. If you’re just trying to make something beautiful, which we all are—beauty is compelling—you’re going to go towards a certain shape, let’s say, or towards a certain narrative structure. You’re trying to do something well. But the only way you can do something well, I think, is if at first you have some model in your mind of what the good is. To do something that doesn’t move towards this picture that you have in your head of what you want the work to be, that’s a very difficult thing to do. And you kind of have to trick yourself, and be vigilant. I mean all editing is always in the direction of greater clarity, towards communicating in a more precise way that’s related to beauty. To try to edit, not in the direction of beauty is really hard. But all of that felt really necessary for me because, I mean it seems crazy to say that this is true of somebody so young, but I felt that I’d reached a dead end. When I was working on Ticknor I was really trying to make something absolutely perfect and I knew that I couldn’t do that again. I felt it would be dead if I tried to do that again. In truth, How Should a Person Be? isn’t the book of mine that I like the most. I prefer Ticknor or even The Middle Stories. How Should a Person Be? is very much against my innate aesthetic. It makes me uncomfortable to have put out something that isn’t, in my mind, beautiful or perfect, even though this book has had the biggest response. So I think there is something to be said for making yourself uncomfortable, and for questioning your instinct to please some internalized aesthetic criteria. Maybe there’s something lifeless about that, on some level.

One of the most compelling interviews I’ve read in some time has to be Thea Bowering’s interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti, “’a portrait of thinking’: Sheila Heti and Thea Bowering on the phone,” in the new issue of The Capilano Review (3.22 / Winter 2014) (an excerpt of which exists on their website). What fascinates about Heti’s work generally is a sense of innate curiosity, one so wide that one never entirely knows just what she might end up producing next, and her books (I reviewed her third title, here) end up showcasing a curiosity as well as an incredible fearlessness—moving in directions that might not immediately make sense, or read like anything previous she might have produced.

4

It breaks

in your hands/ the long break comes cleanly/ splays itself/ before you

some same sake is/ no name at all – the warm up gropes for it/ says

nothing – therein lies the voice/ of things the itch that turning/ softly

sounded page (Mark Goldstein, “Poems for Alice from Medium Point Blues”)

Of course, the issue also includes a whole slew of poetry, fiction, critical work and visual art, including pieces by Mark Goldstein, Lisa Robertson, Lyndl Hall, Cecilia Corrigan, Adam Frank, Deborah Koenker, Paul Nelson and Dorothy Chang, as well as a short story by Sheila Heti, from her collection, The Middle Stories. The issue also includes a tribute to the late Vancouver poet Nancy Shaw, “Reading/Writing for Nancy Shaw,” as friend, Shaw-collaborator and poet Catriona Strang writes:

The late Nancy Shaw, poet, curator, art critic and scholar, was an integral member of the vibrant and influential Vancouver poetry and art scenes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her books include Affordable Tedium, Scoptocratic, Busted, and Light Sweet Crude. She also wrote bracingly on art, dance, and popular culture, and undertook fruitful collaborations with musicians, composers, dancers, and other poets. Her death from cancer in 2007 was a great loss to the Canadian art community; she is still much missed.

            The Vancouver New Music Society’s October 2013 re-mounting of composer Jacqueline Leggatt “Cold Trip,” originally written in 2007 and dedicated to Nancy, was the catalyst for the “Reading for Nancy Shaw,” which took place at The Apartment Gallery in Vancouver on October 20, 2013. Louis Cabri, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Christine Stewart, and Catriona Strang read selections from Nancy’s writing and their own, as well as pieces written for her and in response to her work. Amy’s and Louis’ pieces are published here. All the readings were interspersed with Jacqueline Leggatt’s audio recordings of Nancy reading her own work—a rare chance to hear Nancy’s voice again.

From her own response to Light Sweet Crude, the second section of Amy De’Ath’s “Security Cloak” reads:

A kaleidoscope is a prudent safety hazard

As much as I as much as I can get.

I have pissed, and what I’ve become is tendered.

Effectively constructed myself.

On a period, blazing ruins.

            Nothing extraordinary

            Nothing empirically justified

            Still the affect-bleached, impossible co-star-

I resign from my shelter

absolutely sovereign

very much civil and betrayed I

never saw I never saw it coming.

Otherwise, Toronto writer, designer and publisher Mark Goldstein includes a powerful short essay on the dissolution of book-as-object through digitalization, and the true realization of just what is being lost, as he discusses the gift economy of the chapbook, the Toronto Antiquarian Book Fair and the works of the late Glenn Goluska. Set at the end of the issue in the “see to see—“ section, with works by Clint Burnham, Sonnet L’Abbé, Oana Avasilichioaei, Rebecca Brewer & Tiziana La Melia and Julian Weideman, the opening piece by Tracy Stefanucci, “Making space for artist publishing,” provides a context for the small grouping of essays, writing about Vancouver’s Project Space: “Situated at an intersection of disciplines—namely the visual arts, literary arts and/or graphic design—publication presents a unique space of inquiry that is often complemented by interdisciplinary practice, collaboration, or co-production. With an interest in this particular context, Project Space explores publication as an artistic medium.” There is something magnificent about how this issue brings together a myriad of ideas, disciplines and approaches, all of which provide their own challenges. The best thing any reader (and writer) needs to keep asking themselves: how do we approach text (and writing), and what might we be missing? From the interview with Heti to the essays included at the very end. Goldstein’s piece includes:

            Goluska was a designer and typographer of the highest order (he died in 2011), and in his hands A Change-ringing of the Mind became the perfect marriage of text and texture. The translation is sublime, with Goluska’s artistry and total vision apparent throughout. A work such as this could not survive the digital realm—the pleasure of the letterforms, their special arrangements on the page, the touch of the papers themselves, the subtle echoing of word-stuff would be lost in such transference. A Change-ringing of the Mind best exemplifies the necessity of the small press, one where the difficulty of creation and dissemination is met with vitality.

            Unfortunately, both the work’s beauty and scarcity has pushed it into the rarified air of the antiquarian bookseller. This divide between reader and collector keeps works such as these in private libraries, out of reach of those laboring writers who need them most. It is obvious that A Change-ringing of the Mind was meant to be read and yet, with a $100.00 asking price (a bargain compared to other items at the fair), it is beyond reach

            Yes, a digital version would provide the content of the work but the total power of the book would be lost. The bitter irony here is that Goluska’s superb translation has now been rendered mute.

Ongoing notes: late May, 2013

While digging through boxes to prepare further archive for the University of Calgary, I found this note from the late Jane Rule, with the best line about John Newlove: "He bit me at a party a century ago, but I remember him fondly for other reasons." She and I judged a first book competition for the Saskatchewan Writers Guild in 1999, the timing of which meant I was touring, and ended up calling her from various bars all over Alberta. She was horrified on my behalf at the thought of anyone touring, and nearly didn't believe me when I told her it was even my idea.

In other news, we’re gearing up for the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair, and the pre-fair reading the night before, happening June 14 and 15, 2013. And don’t forget WESTfest the weekend before, where I’m even performing on the main stage (if you can believe it), as a tenth anniversary WESTfest special. Is there anything else I need to mention?

Zurich, Switzerland: As part of her participation in the 2013 dusie kollektiv [see the above/ground press publications by myself and Kaia Sand here, for same] as part of this year’s AWP, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski [see her Tuesday poem here; see her 12 or 20 question here] produced This Place (dusie, 2013). The poems in this small chapbook (with one of the loveliest covers I’ve seen on a chapbook in quite some time, done and designed by Lauren Schimming) works an exploration of geographies, both physical and sensual, writing poems such as “Arrival (warm and damp),” “This Place,” “Driving” and the extended travel-poem “Classified.”

The cloud forest

Cloud coats us—shoulders hands

and arms at higher altitude

trees do not grow tall

no trunk-creak in the evening

nor afternoon shadows across field

            lava-lined riverbed in the valley

ohias flowering red from lichen-dripped

branches calling bird-song closer

The poems in this small collection are constructed around physicality, managing abstract and concrete foundations in each, held down enough so as not to free-float away.

This place

This place        not belonging not mine not

any place belonging     the longing place the land

belonging me to it to longing and green and

green fields calling green      and not naming not

knowing not names nor place nor origin     asking at

market given names and dates and given market

which like butterscotch given market to place

given to memory displaced     to morning sky blue

skied given to blue and placement above and

cloud given to shadow over place sheltering place

place sheltering misplaced memory of belonging

and not    not naming this place not given to place

to shelter to memory to sky to butterscotch to blue

Montreal QC: Where have all the student journals disappeared to? It’s been, admittedly, a number of years since I picked up a copy of Scrivener creative review, produced through the Department of English Students’ Association and the Arts Undergraduate Society at McGill University. Originally founded in 1980, the new issue of Scrivener, issue number thirty-eight, features an intriguing interview with Toronto writer Sheila Heti. Conducted by fiction editors Julie Mannell and Gavin Thomson, the interview focuses on Heti’s third novel, How Should a Person Be (2010) [see my review of such here; see another recent interviewwith Heti on same here]:

JM: I also found the critique very gendered. In the article I’m working on for The Huffington Post I sort of draw parallels between some of the criticism you received along with the criticism Lena Dunham received, along with the criticism that even people like Roseanne [Barr] have received: If men talk about art, there’s a seriousness to it, but when women talk about it, it’s flighty and it’s frivolous and it seems as though almost no women has the right to speak about art or even art for women.

SH: Yeah, or herself, and that somehow talking about being a woman is not talking about being a human, but talking about being a man is talking about being a human.

JM: [The criticism of] Virginia Woolf is startling similar to the criticism that you’ve received, and at the crux of the criticism, Q.D. Leavis was trying to say that, because she wasn’t a mother, Virginia Woolf could not articulate the experience of being a woman or being a human being properly.

SH: Well, I don’t think there’s anything frivolous to talk about if you’re writing a book. Like I was just reading Jane Austen and she’s considered one of the greatest English writers and it’s all about gossip and who that men in going to choose and if you think life is frivolous, then, you know.

The interview is illuminating, slightly scattered, and endearing in part for its honest questioning, as the two interviews attempt to understand Heti’s perspective on life and writing. There were some interesting pieces of fiction and fantastic artworks by Stefanie Kuzmiski, Mary McCulloch and Amy Goh, but another highlight of the issue was the poem, “from News of Andrea,” a somewhat uneven collaborative sequence with intriguing lines by Eliot D’Silva and Nausicaa Renner. Despite the unevenness, the poem intrigues.

‘The Next Big Thing’ meme-interview with rob mclennan: the blog tour that ran itself

December 5-8, 2012

[photo taken in Paris, France in October 2012 by Christine McNair]

Pearl Pirie tagged me in this series of interviews [see her interview here], originally pointing out an interview by Christine Fischer Guy, who writes:

The blog tour that ran itself: this is ‘the next big thing’ interview that writers in the blogosphere are passing, hand to hand, like a baton. What’s the next big thing we’re working on?

There are a few others I’ve read as well, including Darryl Joel Berger, Ariel Gordon, Tanis Rideout, Laurie D. Graham, Alex Leslie, Jennifer LoveGrove, Gillian Wallace, Sandra Nicholls, Gary Barwin and Lauren B. Davis.

Here are my answers to these questions:

1. What is the working title of your book?

The working title for my current work-in-progress collection of short stories is “On Beauty.” I admit, it’s a title I’m not married to. It was long ago previously called “The Wedding Present,” after a short story that might still be dropped from the whole. For the time being, I’m worrying less about the title of the collection than the stories themselves.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

A singular story dates from February 2010 (a story that, depending on my mood, I regularly consider cutting from the collection entirely), but otherwise, the collection had its initial impulse during a trip we made to Toronto for Christmas/Boxing Week, 2011. We were spending a couple of days with my now-wife’s mother, and ended up spending part of December 27^th [see my post on such here] on Bloor Street West, attempting a few hours of writing. We had wandered through a since-closed location of Book City and picked up a number of things, including a collection of essays by Milan Kundera, an issue of Believer, an issue of Geist, some back issues of Granta and McSweeney’s. I read the most amazing short story by Miranda July, “Majesty,” which immediately generated the beginning sketches of a short story, “Fourteen things you don’t know about Arturus Booth.”

I eventually had to find her collection of short stories, No one belongs here more than you (Scribner, 2007).

But the ideas themselves: sometimes I start with an idea for a story, sometimes a short scene, sometimes only a title. From the anthology Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (2008), I adapted the idea of the semi-fictional “A Short Film About John Bolton” (2003) to a semi-fictional story set in 1968, “A short film about my father.” Another story in the collection continues one particular thread from my second novel, Missing Persons (2009), because Amanda Earl, quite literally, asked to know more. I have been attempting another piece to further another thread from the same novel, but the story hasn’t quite figured itself out yet.

There is this story as well, that came out of a conversation, and various thoughts I’ve had on the subject of The Matrix Trilogy.

For this collection, I am very much interested in the collage aspect of accumulating short, nearly stand-alone scene-fragments into a coherent, cohesive narrative of some three pages in length. To articulate the essence of a short story, one does not necessarily need to spell out all the facts.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Short stories. Tightly-packed.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Johnny Depp. Or the kid who was in that terrible John Carter flick.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Short, sharp and intensely personal; a large book packed into a small space. And yet, this is entirely incomplete. The work should speak for itself.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m not really interested in self-publishing this collection, and am represented by no agencies of any sort. So far, my fiction has had but a single trade home, which appears to be no longer an option.

I look with envy at works of fiction published by Anansi and Scribner and McSweeney’s and Douglas & McIntyre (even with their recent financial upheavals).

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still in the midst of the first draft, and rework many of the stories daily, slowly carving, carving, carving. Over the twelve months I’ve been actively working on this as my main writing project, I’ve got nearly ten finished stories I like, another half-dozen in progress that I think have good potential, and another half-dozen I haven’t decided on yet.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m not sure. I would attempt to ascribe my fiction alongside works by Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Jean McKay, Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis and Sarah Manguso, but that might all be vanity. It might be wishful thinking on my part.

I’ve composed a couple of short essays over the past year or so on writing short fiction that discuss some of my goals and concerns, including this blog post, and this short essay over at The Puritan.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Living, and writing. Part of what I’ve been enjoying about working in the realm of short fiction is in watching how various unrelated strands – fragments of real life, memory, information gleaned from television, newspapers, overheard tales, works of non-fiction, etcetera – all manage to wrap themselves into a comprehensive narrative weave. I don’t know where it all comes from, but it somehow make sense in the three-page stretch of prose.

I seek inspiration, at times, from other great works. Lately I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and re-reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’m hoping the combination of the collection’s sharp brevity and articulation of deeply personal moments are enough to interest anyone.

As per the rules of this series, here are the five writers I’ve tagged for self-interviews of their own:

Stephen Cain ; Natalie Zina Walschots ; Thomas Wharton ; Michael Bryson ; Spencer Gordon

Watch for their interviews. Hopefully they’ll be posting over the next little bit.
(and for the sake of gender-balance: over a period of two weeks, I asked a total of ten female writers and five male writers. This is the list of writers who, for whatever reason, said yes.)

Message for tagged authors:

Rules of the Next Big Thing

***Use this format for your post

***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)

***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Be sure to line up your five people in advance.