12 or 20 questions: with David Helwig

David Helwig was born in Toronto in 1938 and lived there for most of his first ten years, then moved with his parents to Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario where his father ran a small business repairing and refinishing furniture and buying and selling antiques. He attended the University of Toronto and the University of Liverpool. His first daughter was born in England and the second in Kingston where he taught at Queen's University. He published his first stories, in Canadian Forum and The Montrealer, while still an undergraduate. For two summers he worked in summer stock with the Straw Hat Players, mostly as a business manager and technician, working with such actors as Gordon Pinsent, Jackie Burroughs, William B. Davis and Timothy Findley.

While he taught at Queen's University, he did some informal teaching in Collins Bay Penitentiary and he wrote A Book about Billie with a former inmate. In 1974, John Hirsch hired him as literary manager of CBC television drama, and he spent two years in this position, supervising the work of story editors and the department's relations with writers. From 1976 to 1980, he taught part time at Queen's while doing a great deal of freelance work, and in 1980, he gave up teaching and became a full-time freelance writer.

He has from the beginning written both fiction and poetry as well as a wide range of radio, television and journalism.

One of his daughters is a writer and political activist. The other is a chemist and art conservator. He has three grandchildren.

Vocal music was for many years his avocation. After abandoning this for some years, he returned to it in his forties and sang with a number of choirs in Kingston, Montreal and Charlottetown. He appeared as bass soloist in Handel's Messiah, Bach's St Matthew Passion, and Mozart's Requiem.

He currently lives in an old house in the village of Eldon in Prince Edward Island.

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

Did my first book change my life? Yes, I suppose it gave me an increased sense that it was possible to be a writer. I was thirty years old, not young for a first book, but it was a period when Canadian poetry was fashionable, and the book sold quite a few copies. It included three plays, and I suppose it encouraged me to be inclusive, not rigourously selective.

As to the difference of my new work, well the poetry is more often written in fairly strict rhymed forms. I began with strict forms, then moved into free verse, but my own free verse and that of most other mostly bores me now. Perhaps I lack the urgency felt by the young and need the struggle of tight forms to lift the level of energy.

What I've just written applies, of course, mostly to poetry. As to fiction it has on the whole grown "louder, faster and funnier" to quote the old theatrical joke. Douglas Glover pointed out that I am loudest, fastest and funniest in the (imaginary) first person.

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

I didn't come to poetry first. I started out in high school trying to write both poems and stories. For a while in the Sixties I found it easier to publish poetry than fiction, and that led me to write more poetry. Still, at the time my first poetry book was accepted I also won a Belmont Award for a short story that appeared in Saturday Night magazine.

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 believe, in general, that especially in fiction I write best when I write fastest. Once an idea has taken on some life (how does this happen? who knows?) things move on very quickly. I take some notes, but sometimes they turn out to be only modestly relevant to what creates itself on the page. As an example I have notes from the spring of 1968, notes begun in Paris, for something that meant to be a novel taking place perhaps in the nineteenth century, with some relation to the history of art. But missing from the notes is the leap by which the supposed novel became a set of lectures in the novella The Stand-In. Once I am in flight the final shape is usually there, though much detail may get revised.

4 - Where does a poem or piece 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?

Fiction most commonly begins with a voice. Or maybe more voices than one. I don't writes bits and pieces. I write stories, the narrative impulse and the voice somehow coming together. Poetry begins in overexcitement, often visual.

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

Public readings have nothing to do with creation. I have done a bit of acting and a lot of singing and I have some natural impulse to perform, but it has little to do with the invention of stories or the creation of poems.

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 am allergic to generalizations.

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?

See above. A writer is a citizen, but mostly in his time off. Though there was a time when I suppose I thought it was my duty to create, alongside others, a Canadian verbal reality.

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

I have had some useful connections with editors, though mostly at a word by word level. Punctuation. I always greatly enjoyed collaborative work, in theatre, radio, television, but that it a joint project from the beginning.

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

"We are in a whorehouse here, and people are getting fucked, and you can't just sit and listen to the blind piano player."

John Hirsch in a CBC Drama Department meeting. Maybe only the most memorable.

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

By and large poetry, fiction and critical prose come as quite different kinds of approach or inspiration, different kinds of jobs, bringing their own techniques with them. A story that fails doesn't become a poem; it just remains a failed story. And vice versa.

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 am mostly a morning writer. With age I'm slowing down a little, but traditionally I got up and set to work five mornings a week. This is particularly true with long forms, novellas, novels, or The Year One. Sometimes I go back later in the day, and afternoons, when I was doing more free-lance work, were for reviews and such things.

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

I used to sometimes run or swim, but mostly it doesn't get stalled. I stare out the window and go back to work. If it fails it fails.

13 - What do you really want?

To be read with pleasure by as many people as possible. Or maybe I only want to get up in the morning and make something out of words, something that persuades me and keeps my mind occupied.

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?

Northrop Frye said the same thing. The answer is, as the joke goes, all of the above.

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

Many different ones at different times. Hemingway first, later Lawrence and Simenon, later still Nabokov. Jane Austen, John Donne. Maybe Hugh MacLennan.

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

I'd be happy just to keep going.

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?

In another world I might have been a singer (see The Year One, p 29). I can't imagine not being a writer. Aging and melodramatic I'm tempted to say I would have been mad without it. Though that probably isn't quite true.

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

It was what I wanted to do. It was what was there demanding to be done.

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

As it happens I recently reread Great Expectations. That is an good as they come. Also recently translated some Chekhov. Same comment. Movies? Maybe L'avventura, or Bergman's Persona. Or Fanny and Alexander.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Something that might become a sequence of poems--three written. Reading around an idea for a novella, but it might or might not work. I've just finished a book of connected stories all in dialogue.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

fwd – Black Bile Press Media Release –

New From Black Bile Press

One-offs Chapbooks Series Three, featuring:

Tony O’Neill

Julie McArthur

& Nathaniel G. Moore

Black Bile Press is back with its third series of one-off, single story chapbooks by three of the literary underground’s hardest hitters.

Tony O’Neill is an internationally-renowned writer of salty fiction. His novels include Digging the Vein (Contemporary Press) and Down and Out on Murder Mile (Harper Perennial). Now Black Bile Press has the honour of publishing his chapbook Bill Bailey, a hilarious story about a man, a hirsute woman and an unlucky, yappy dog. This is a unique opportunity to own a limited edition O’Neill publication that will sell out quickly and never be reprinted.

Julie McArthur is a rising literary gem from Toronto. Her chapbook Men and the Drink centres on a woman’s survival strategy for dealing with men in her life. Told in McArthur’s deadpan, succinct style, the story blends humour and panache just so.

Nathaniel G. Moore is a well-known and respected writer of irreverent short fiction and the perfect fit for a Black Bile Press chapbook. His book “Sensational Sherri” is a ribald tale that mingles wrestling, pornography, booze, obsession and nostalgia like only Mr. Moore can.

This threesome of writers and their books represent the best of the best when it comes to fierce and fiery short fiction. Each story is published as a limited edition, single story chapbook, carefully assembled but anything but precious.

Order all three books for only $10.00 (plus $2.00 postage), for a ridiculously good final price of $12.00 for all three books. Or order one chapbook (please specify the title) for $6.00 ($5.00 for the book, plus $1.00 postage).

Order by sending a cheque (made payable to M. Firth) to:

Matthew Firth

Black Bile Press

573 Gainsborough Avenue

Ottawa, Ontario

K2A 2Y6

CANADA

Queries: firth@istar.ca

Penned: Zoo Poems, eds. Stephanie Bolster, Katia Grubisic and Simon Reader

This anthology began with an idea—the human examines, and makes art of, already-examined and already-shaped nature—and with the grand ambitions and the naiveté of first-time anthologists: this would be a collection about not only zoos but gardens, with prose as well as poetry, with writing from the earliest known instances of collecting and exhibiting animals and plants, from countries that no longer existed, written in languages that we couldn’t read.

Gardens were the first to go. That anthology would be a different one, its concerns less charged; though there is must to be written about botanical imperialism, for example, it takes considerable imagination to lament a geranium’s pot-bound existence.

Originally out of an idea by Montreal poet and editor Stephanie Bolster, the poetry anthology Penned: Zoo Poems (Montreal QC: Signal/Vehicule Press, 2009) collects poems out of that most Victorian of ideas, the artificial space (gardens, like zoos, weren’t specifically Victorian creations, but they certainly perfected them). Whether gardens or zoos, you can see both throughout Bolster’s own collections of poetry (a fourth is set to appear in 2010), making this collection a continuation of some of her own particular concerns (one of her poetic models, Cole Swensen, recently also did a poetry collection around gardens). I’m fascinated by the construction of this anthology, more for how it speaks to and from Bolster’s own writing than, specifically, the writing included in the collection itself, with pieces by Stephen Burt, Irving Layton, Marianne Moore, E.E. Cummings, Molly Peacock, Allison Calder, Al Purdy, Robert Kroetsch (“The Winnipeg Zoo” is a favourite, I admit), A.A. Milne, Lorna Crozier, David W. McFadden, Susan Howe, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lisa Jarnot, and a host of others.

1206

The Show is not the Show

But they that go—

Menagerie to me

My Neighbor be—

Fair Play—

Both went to see— (Emily Dickinson)

These are poems writing on worse than merely tearing down paradise for the sake of a parking lot, but tearing down paradise, sometimes, for the sake of a simulacrum of paradise on the same spot. How do zoos and gardens fall into such creations? Even as Europe colonized (or attempted) the rest of the world, Victorian elements of the ‘wonders’ were deposited back home, from deepest Africa, for example, or the far east. So far, it reached, eventually, all the way to the west coast of North America, and then back into the interior. Edited by Bolster, along with Katia Grubisic and Simon Reader (who came to the project some time after it had begun), the poems range from contained, controlled to the uncontained, from snow to animal to landscape to man, but so few of these pieces really delve into the zoo as an artificial construct. As they suggest of “geranium’s pot-bound existence” in the introduction, I wonder how the editors were able to wrap their heads around such, unable to artificially produce poems that would surround an otherwise thesis (and could no one produce a poem on the mid-nineteenth century death of Jumbo in Ontario’s own St. Thomas?); is it the fault of the poems or the poets themselves?

34

we are that stuffed cat that guards the hats

in the london haberdasher’s window where

you stood five rainy minutes trying to decipher

us. well, we’re alive, always alive because that’s

what you need us to be, windowsful of exhibits

at the natural history museum, bison, saber-

toothed tiger ready to spring, even poor trigger

in roy roger’s living room. you think it’s

easy, you who were there at the cincinnati zoo

when the earth’s last passenger pigeon bought it?

duty, that’s what: your own dead you can fling

into the earth, but we always have to be with you:

that small pile of bones in the back of the closet

or out of the melting glacier, the unnameable thing. (Alvin Greenberg)

12 or 20 questions: with Maleea Acker

Maleea Acker lives and works on Vancouver Island. He first book of poetry, The Reflecting Pool, appeared with Pedlar Press (Toronto) in Fall 2009. Her poetry and interviews have been published in journals across Canada and in Mexico and in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008 and Rocksalt. She has an MFA from the University of Victoria and teaches writing at Camosun College.

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

Pedlar Press took a sheaf of papers and turned it into a beautiful object (I had nothing to do with the design), and this process, along with the joy I felt the first time I held the book in my hands, has given a greater validity to my work and my life as a writer. I expect this is a pretty common experience, and no less true for me.

My most recent work is part of my second manuscript, so that’s a whole new kettle of fish. I think it reaches further—more experimental, more willing to risk voice and leap. I feel it’s closer to how my brain works. But there are also many pieces in the book that very much feel this way as well—they are the jumping off points for where I’ve come to now in my work. Specifically, perhaps, the Summer’s Variations poems.

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

I think it rather came to me or through me, through the idea of moment or image—as something that needed to be recorded in non-narrative form. I was ten when I first started writing poems (bad ones, I might add!) and I think it was the combination of sitting still, letting something come forward, and also the particularity that could be captured. Whenever I tried to write fiction, and I’ve tried many times, it comes like molasses, because I’m so focused on every word and every image and I’m so unconcerned with plot.

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 work very much as a response to a number of things—landscape, philosophy, other poems. When I have time and space to put full effort toward attendance of these things (these days, only when I’m at a residency) poems come, not easily, but they come. I’ve started giving myself permission to let this happen not only at the desk, but on a trail up a mountain, in a kayak or, most recently, in the boathouse at Blue Mountain Center, where I spent October at a residency. Many of the pieces from that month came out whole, like fur balls. I also write from notes and journals, but I think the strongest pieces usually have an immediate shape, in terms of content. Form comes later.

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?

A poem begins for me with a feeling of being let close to the edge of something. Usually this something is landscape or an idea in philosophy. The poem is the recording of the frustration and the joy that come from approaching that uncrossable edge.

My last book was very much a collection of shorter pieces with a variety of landscapes and thoughts. I think it holds together, but I think what I’m working on now has much more of an intrinsic shape, one that came about unconsciously, but that has much more of an arc of thought, a series of related philosophical ideas and ways of relating to the natural world.

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 feel like readings are involved very much in my creative process, but I do enjoy doing them. They appeal to the performer in me. I got the chance to read from a play at Blue Mountain, with the playwright, and found that performance of bringing a play to life very similar to doing a reading of poetry. Similar to poetry itself, as well, strangely, but that’s another story. But I love the feeling of an engaged audience, and the way that voice can bring authority and conviction to a piece. I recently relearned how to read—I knew unconsciously when I was first starting out professionally—and to rediscover my voice has been a true pleasure.

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?

Wow, how much time do you have? I think my work is largely based in philosophical concerns. How to live in the world. How to write adequately about it. What it means, as Rilke says, “to be opposite,” and the ways we have found for dealing with this threshold between ourselves and the world. I love Zwicky’s work on metaphor. I have been immersed in Merleau-Ponty for two years now—his work on the body and perception dogs me and keeps me thinking. And I want to explore more of Levina’s concept of ethics as first philosophy. As for questions, I think they are the same as they have always been. How can we best perceive the world? How translate the lyric/story? How recognize this beauty in front of us? What is adequate response (if any)? What is our responsibility as writers? How do we get past Tranströmer’s wall, or even just close to it?

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 believe we still have an integral role in society—to gather and serve as memory, to inspire, to console, to incite. Poetry has never been more necessary, and I see that in my students, who come to class hungry for something that modern culture is providing less and less of.

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

I worked extensively with Beth Follett of Pedlar on the book, and that was both difficult and essential. Difficult only in the small hurtles I had to get over to see where she was coming from (and mostly realize that she was right). Essential because she offered such rich commentary and such a precise eye, that the pieces were really able to improve. Most of the poems I publish in journals, however, haven’t seen anyone else’s eye. I’ve come to trust my own sense of things, certainly more than I did when in school.

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

Don McKay said to me that walking in the woods, reading field guides and hovering over a bracken pool for hours was called research, and that I should eschew any sense of guilt when doing these things rather than simply chaining myself to my desk. To fill up, to take in, he taught me, is an essential part of the process.

10 - 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 work three jobs, plus writing, when at home, so I have essentially no routine, except to keep things in the mail and complete more of the business end of the game (residencies, grants, etc). If I have small stretches of time, I tend to edit previous work. I also pull off the car and write by the side of the road, on occasion. When I’m at a residency, which is where most of my writing work gets done, I try to walk, get on the water, or sit somewhere outside every day. I journal, I take my books and computer out to the dock and sit. I work late into the night. I immerse myself completely. I look and listen a lot. I try to become small, in order to take things in. I want to disappear, even in personal pieces. All of this not necessarily in that order. Oh, and a good amount of wine and some dancing in the evenings with other artists is also essential.

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

When the difficulty comes, I go back to essential poets—Stevens, Ashbery, Bishop, McKay, Zwicky, Auden, Hejinian—and philosophers, and read. I read and read until the knot comes undone and something is triggered. Running also helps, though I’m a very lazy runner!

12 - What do you really want?

I want to work at poetry full time. By this I mean research, reading, being out in the world and writing. There is nowhere I feel more at the threshold of something and more myself, more alive. O, for the life of the Danish poet, who gets an annual government salary after publishing a certain amount. And I want to make a difference. I want to do justice to the sense of beauty and connection I’ve felt in the various landscapes I’ve fallen in love with.

13 - 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?

Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians comes to mind. Music is a big influence for me. Nature, of course. Science, especially the natural sciences—botany, geography, geology, etc. And visual art I drink up when I’m in cities. Not only exhibits in museums (Joseph Cornell, Rauschenberg, Rodin) but the architecture and feel of a city itself. New York, Seville, Paris. I love to walk, wherever I am, and that gives me a sense of happiness that then bleeds into the work.

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

Trevor Herriot’s Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds is by my bed right now. I inhale The New Yorker and other great non-fiction and journalism. Field guides—it’s mushroom season right now and I’m just beginning to learn about another layer of the forest I live in. All of this contributes in some way.

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

I’d like to start writing more environmental journalism. I’ve dabbled in this a bit, and it feels like a viable way to fight against the onslaught of multi-nationals and the insane, right wing environmental policies that have become the norm in BC in the last eight years. There’s so little time left to save any vestige of this planet; information, into the right hands, will be a prime tool in this battle.

16 - 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?

Environmental lawyer? Botanist? Actor? Bee keeper? Chocolate taster?

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

Compulsion, necessity, sanity. Like many of us, I think, I didn’t have much of a choice. I was ambushed out at sea and dragged away from the possibility of any sustainable sort of career, toward this vocation.

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

Can I be brash and admit I’d never read The Odyssey until last winter? Its beauty floored me. I’m also hooked on Dickens and Lyn Hejinian’s Language of Inquiry. As for films, I tend to loop Wes Anderson and Truffaut films, and I loved I’m Not There, the Bob Dylan tribute.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I'm working on a second book of poetry. At Blue Mountain, I put together a rough sense of the first draft. That was wonderful, as I hadn’t written in a serious way since I was in Spain at residencies in 2007. Now, the painstaking and elated editing process.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

Hush up and listen stinky poo butt, Ken Sparling

“It’s my life. Remember. This is my life. It’s all I’ve got. Little bits and pieces. Nothing organized. You’re so disorganized. You’re a mess. For instance, what went on between that I was sitting on the sidewalk – I might have been five – and all the kids in the neighbourhood were laughing at me, and the next thing you know I’m living in an apartment and Dad’s gone. What happened in between? I don’t know how you could put me in that apartment. It was such a dump. It was hell. You might as well have sent me straight to hell. How could you do that? Why did you have to do a thing like that? Make me live in a place like that? Why couldn’t you put me in a nice place? Not a mansion. That’s not what I’m saying. Just some place decent where the bigger kids don’t throw snowballs at your head in the winter.”

After hearing about it for a couple of years, I finally ordered a copy of Toronto writer Ken Sparling’s hand-made self-publication, the novel Hush up and listen stinky poo butt (made at request, 1996), a story that begins as a series of fragments that them open themselves up into something further, a series of broken memories, centering around a boy and his father, with secondary characters a brother and mother as well. Part of what really makes this book is just how the fragments work as far as the uncertainty of the narrator; the more you know, the less you really know of what’s happening, and even the author/publisher wrapping such in 1940s-era discarded hardcovers increases the uncertainty. This is a book that isn’t sure of itself, a story that isn’t sure of itself. Where is it all going? Sparling, in his novels, has always managed the most with the least, writing not only fragments that work into a whole, but writing allusion, writing the ellipsis of story, tricking the sides of the story and coming to and through it from the best of outside. He writes the way people actually exist, through oddly-shaped experiences, scattered fragments and threads so long, twisted and deep that it becomes impossible sometimes to know or see either end even, sometimes, for the participants. In Hush up and listen stinky poo butt, Sparling writes, seemingly, about events so ordinary they begin to read as a story about nothing at all, and ends up asking some of the most troubling and important questions of existence that have managed to be asked, in a book that deserves not only a larger audience, but repeated readings. If some stories are written, and thus read, for us to understand different shades of ourselves, how different is Ken Sparling from, say, Milan Kundera or Salman Rushdie? Asking all the important questions.

What is the point at which you have to write it all down? When does the inventory of things in your life become such a burden? We see each other. We resist. When does a manual become necessary? Why can’t we just forget? Let’s allow ourselves the luxury of forgetting. Let’s do that right now. Today. Tomorrow we can remember. Again.

He, apparently, already has another novel due out next year. I am looking forward to seeing where he manages next.