12 or 20 questions: with Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk's books and chapbooks include Oral Tragedy (Tsunami Editions), Redactive (Talonbooks), Volume Delays (Sprang Texts), Sleek Vinyl Drill (Thuja) and Ogress Oblige (Krupskaya).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Completely, in that I now had an identity not appended to father, husband, boyfriend or gay male best friend and that it could be verified by reading the cover and body of the book. I had been one of those disposable young women of weak social and class position that are there on sufferance and are casually punted off the field.


2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

a) Since I was twenty-one with a 2½ year hiatus in Italy, Berlin and Hogtown, then nine months in Fort Saint John. I had lived in Victoria the year before moving to Vancouver and had spent my year of Grade 10 out in the Fraser Valley. I was born in the Ottawa Valley (Deep River), lived on the Quebec side of the river (where my father was from) for a few years, thence to Ottawa. My forefather had been a Presbyterian minister who came over from Ireland in 1820. Rob Manery tells me that Luskville is now a dragstrip. My mother’s maternal family came north to Chatham, Ontario from the States and apart from a day trip out with Alex Varty and Kevin Davies to explore the Elora Gorge, I’ve never had the chance to visit the area. It’s definitely in my imagination and my heart’s eye. I greatly admire writers such as James Lee Burke and Peter Culley who can write such atmospheric peculiarity but although I can recognize it, I can’t seem to produce it but in teeny spurts. I have a visual overview of real places in my mind at all times, moving, as though I am flying. The Lower Mainland of British Columbia, the Gatineau Parkway, camp Fortune, Old Chelsea, hills somewhere around Renfrew, the highway west of Toronto, the Elora Gorge, my Uncle Ira’s house below the forest fire tower in Parry Sound—it’s pretty continuous, all these real places. I tried to write about my immediate neighbourhood, False Creek South, for Jacqueline Turner’s and Meredith Quartermain’s The News, but I couldn’t seem to get very far, in the sense of a sustained composition. The first book was riddled with gnomic elisions of geographical specificity. I got less gnomic.

b) Yes, in working with emotional reality; subjectivities and power; exclusion and politically biased gatekeeping strategies.

3 - 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?

Earlier on, poems emerged somewhat compact and discrete. I shifted into continuing in the same concentration at a longer stretch. I now make scads of notes, sporadically, and my partner, Aaron Vidaver, nags and goads me towards realization of poems and books including my last one, Ogress Oblige. So book from the start composed of edited bits.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Hearing other people read is a good spur. One can become invigourated and find more points of departure and connection. Lee Ann Brown writes at other people’s readings. When she did it at my first reading in New York, my feelings were crushed but she told me years later that she does it a lot and wanted to give writer’s workshops on writing at readings. As well, I rely on my listeners and readers to be friends who don’t let friends publish that which sucks and reading aloud before an audience can show that which needs further work.

5 - 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?

Read theory. A lot. Not behind. Within. I’m the one with the questions rather than answers. My writing is a complex of interrogation and assertion not resolution. I don’t even think I have any idea what the current questions are.


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

Fiction writers have a harder time holding their ground with editors than do poets. Newspaper writers get it in the neck. Douglas Coupland has said that editors are there to remove any trace of character or personality from newspaper journalism but that they foster it in magazine writing. Editors hired by publishers to put the book together can sometimes distort the shape of the work from how the poet will have imagined it. Most small poetry magazines don’t try to edit at all, in my experience, and if you want editorial help they are reluctant to give it, as I’ve found also to be the case with art criticism. I’ve been chastened by another writer with whom I was working collectively, for even suggesting that a mutual friend’s work was not quite yet ready and that friends don’t let friends publish prematurely. She told me she would never presume to tell another writer how to write but I find that I need others to read my work and am very grateful for their attention. Having said that, I have also had portions of work excised because the editor did not share an interest in a particular theoretical analysis and thereby found the vocabulary and construct uninteresting and detracting from the way the piece could be read, in his view. One can be easily bamboozled or made meek when in the (as perceived) vulnerable position of pre-published, yes, but pigheadedness is not either any great virtue.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Totally easier, in terms of not being so overly attached or over identified with the writing and the book. It also helps that I have a partner who is of tremendous intelligence and discernment and knowledge of the book making process.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Roger Farr made a lovely vegan supper for us last month including a crisp pear in the salad.

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

“Be like the great men: smoke many cigarettes.” Charles Olson to Black Mountain painting not writing student Paul Alexander.


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 no longer have any sort of work routine. I write when I can. Everything changed with parenthood, necessarily. Before this, I would write through the night when getting back from my job as a photo-conceptualist’s studio assistant or being out at openings and art bars. The writing helped me process the art natter out of my psyche. Or any of the material of my life that was outraging me or giving me ongoing vexation. I especially enjoyed getting up early, before having any external language interactions and getting in a few hours of close and rapidly concentrated work.

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

Read a lot. Read a lot out loud.


12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

It feels, and I think it reads, as less interwoven and less emotionally cathartic.


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?

Music. Instrumental—never vocal—music unless I want verbatim chunks making up building blocks of the poem, which at times I have done.


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

Wonderful Margaret Avison just died. I’ve been off my reading game for several years of family crisis so there is a backlog of books to read and books that I don’t even know have been written yet from many of the writers that have been important to me earlier on. Within my immediate social frame are Melissa Wolsak, Aaron Vidaver, Roger Farr, Maxine Gadd [see her 12 or 20 questions here] and Reg Johanson. So I have close at hand access to their work. I have to wait for Peter Culley’s books the same as everyone else now but his work is of immeasurable importance to me, as is Ken Belford’s and Kevin Davies’. Rita Wong has a new book out and Maxine Gadd has another coming out from New Star. I’m greatly looking forward to (Winnipeg writer) Colin Smith’s upcoming book from Krupskaya. Fiction writers Pete Hautman and Phil Rickman. Chris Turnbull’s work that I get to see when she sends off care packages to Aaron. Louis Cabri. Judith Goldman’s terrific recent book Deathstar/ricochet. Marie Annharte Baker is back in Winnipeg but we talk about writing among other things at least every week.


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

Swim.

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?

Bicycle repairwoman. Or, alternately, history scholar. In my ignorance, I thought the life of a student was monastic and unhectored. I would never have succeeded in the modern academy.

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

I second guessed my sketchbook notes at art school into what I unlaughingly called immaculate conceptualism. I theorized the life and possibility out of every single idea that could have become art. From this disappointment came the apprehension of language’s supple polyvalency and the ability to interrogate that which remained restrictive in visual/conceptual art.


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

Colin’s Big Thing by Bruce Serafin. Billy Elliott on late night broadcast.


19 - What are you currently working on?

Short pieces in a pidgin of Latin, Old English and modern Occidental-ish that I make up and forget as I go along. See the inaugural issue of PARSER, the second issue of Model Homes, the next issue of ottawater and another chapbook this spring from Thuja Books called Volume Delays II. All of these pieces are part of DECORUM.


12 or 20 questions archive

house: a (tiny) memoir

There was the winter when everything froze; Christmas Eve, and the whole yard was ice. I remember, because of how it crunched when I stepped, depending on how much below was soft snow, a coating of sheer ice over buildings and trees, across driveway and lawn. We kept close to the house, if we went out at all, and as much as I liked it, I didn’t envy him the walk to the barn, whether he wanted or not.

He was always worried the pipes would freeze, and sometimes they did, cutting water off from the house; the well just behind the barn, and pipes that came in through the underground from one end of the yard to the next.


house: a (tiny) memoir

house: a (tiny) memoir

When he remodeled the kitchen, removing wood stove and adding new cupboards, he turned large kitchen into smaller with office and laundry room, a space to leave boots. I remember it as the time that my mother would let me eat cereal in the living room, so I could watch my cartoons uninterrupted. This was 1974, and my mother and I on a Saturday morning watching cartoons as my father and hired man tore through the kitchen, and I tore through my multiple bowls of Count Chocula.

She would let me do that, or Boo Berry or Trix, but drew the line always at Cap’n Crunch; just what was the difference? The cereal I could only get at her own mother’s house, up in Ottawa.

I always wanted the toys in the box, but she never let me order away, and didn’t always pay attention to just what I was missing (the pan-flute, individual flutes in the boxes you could line up in a row; I had only the longest one, yellow, and shortest one, red. How can you make any song up with those?). I had to wait for my twenties to order away, when I could write my own cheques.

The kitchen, when I was still two years away from a sister. At that point, she wasn’t even a glint.

house: a (tiny) memoir

some new titles from above/ground press;

Dirty Work by Natalie Simpson, ALBERTA SERIES #4


The Peter F. Yacht Club #9, edited by Jesse Patrick Ferguson
(the Fredericton issue!)


FYRE by Catherine Owen, ALBERTA SERIES #5


subscribers rec' a complimentary copy of each (a large above/ground press mailout happening this month; watch for it!); 2008 subscriptions still available;

house: a (tiny) memoir

The circle of grass that made up a part of the yard, as the lane followed down from dirt road into lower case “b,” curving between house and garage, shed, barnyard and barn, gas pump and shed, before turning back. Where he used to snowblow the yard in a mound and a mountain sometimes two storeys tall, if the snow was enough. It was perfect for snowforts and sliding, toddler sister in pink snowsuit bulk and I throwing snowballs at whoever came by, whether neighbour or hired man. Cold so cold cutting eyebrows like hot knives and dropping chimney smoke low to the rolling ground, and the end of a day always hot chocolate thick marshmallows, waiting.


house: a (tiny) memoir

The Shovel by Colin Browne

history

something nosing about in the dry arbutus leaves at dawn
something trying to get through the fence

Vancouver writer and documentary filmmaker Colin Browne’s most recent publication is the large and magnificent The Shovel (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007). A continuation of book-projects that have included Abraham (London ON: Brick Books, 1997) and the Governor-General’s Award shortlisted title Ground Water (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2002), Browne seems to work less a series of books as whole units of compositions than as containers that everything gets placed in; each book is certainly built and conceived as a single unit, but one that ends up encompassing poetry, fiction and theory. These don’t seem like books he could work on concurrently; there is too much of everything included.

A Square Sonnet

A square is what I long to see on miles
and miles of dark road. Mirrored window, eye
to eye or eyed from patches of dark blue glass,
the light pulls (yanks) me forward. Silk is a liquid
mirror suspended from ice. Don’t you yearn for
pain to rouze your senses?
The song she took the high road on is not
a cricket’s song; my lover’s lips are sweeter
and sadder. What if the world is tuned to plum
or quince? A heaven on earth, and sweet at night
beneath the moon? I fall upon the grasses,
old songs abide, I’m possessed. Roots
redden in me. I approach,
trailing lilac, and fall to my knees.
I thee kiss, my earth, my beloved.

Browne’s work follows a poetics that are influenced by those of Robin Blaser [see my note on him here], George Bowering [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Fred Wah, as well as through his early editorial work during some of the first years of Vancouver’s The Capilano Review. The most wonderful part of The Shovel isn’t the fact that it, like his two previous books are a combination of poetry (despite all three titles living in that single category), fiction and essays, but exist somehow beyond the confinement of genre, into books of writing, somehow freed of the constraints of genre with an ease that diminishes any argument of boundary between genres. The Shovel is some near-two hundred pages of writing that is not so much thinking as actual thought, including the marvellous non-fiction (or, perhaps, fiction?) piece, “Roland Barthes in the Kootenays,” written for the Fred Wah/Pauline Butling conference at the University of Calgary a few years back [see my note on such here], talking about the famous thinker wandering through the interior. Imagine, Roland Barthes travelling the country with a copy of Fred Wah’s Pictograms from the Interior of B.C. (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1975) with him, no less.

So, I got into my car and drove out to the Cranbrook airport. There had been a terrible accident there, if you remember, a scheduled flight had plunged into the runway a few months earlier. I was already imagining the headlines: ROLAND BARTHES DIES IN FIERY CRASH AT CRANBROOK AIRPORT! The name might not have been featured so prominently in the Cranbrook Daily Townsman, but somewhere else it would have. And as I drove out past the little farms and the clumps of spindly larch, I wondered—how would recognize him? How will I know it’s him when I see Roland Barthes in the Cranbrook Airport? I got there early and I was waiting, I was marking student essays, and I guess I had become preoccupied with the novel contractions of that region because it was a surprise to find a shortish man suddenly standing before me wearing a grey suit and a clear plastic raincoat. I must have given him a startled look.

‘For transparency,’ he said, and smiled broadly.

With his previous poetry collection up for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, hopefully this new book will also get some of the attention that Browne’s work deserves. So much of Browne’s writing manages to think of poetry in different ways and numerous directions, including this piece, both riffing off and dedicated, again, to Wah.

thinking
it is my
mother’s

voice
I hear,
clear,

lonely
music at
the heart of

a shy
and
fugitive

love
that cracked
a lion’s heart. (“Carlyle Square”)

house: a (tiny) memoir

I remember our dog Heather. She was pregnant, a black lab mix that our two other dogs brought home around 1972; Snoopy, the mutt, and Sandy, our Collie. My mother used to tell stories of hating Snoopy, because he kept peeing in the kitchen, even after she’d felt sorry for him and finally let him back in from the cold. We had no idea where she came from, just appeared with the others and stayed. My father suggested someone had probably driven her out into the country and released her, as we were just a couple of miles south of the 417 highway.

Just what we needed, a pregnant stray pooch, but somehow we kept her. I think he’s always had a soft spot for dogs, keeping a single black lab most of the years since. She had her puppies in the barn, all given away when they could (apparently three dogs at once was enough). Within a year or so, three would go down to her one, and she would poke her right eye purple with a stick, permanently blinding her.

I don’t remember what happened to the two other dogs; they simply removed themselves from my memory.


house: a (tiny) memoir

Ken Norris’ Going Home

MONTREAL WINTER, 1982

Snow was falling. Snow was always falling.
I was looking out the window,
watching it fall. In my head
I was still dreaming of South Seas islands,
my new spiritual home.
If I didn’t get out of that room soon
the snow would erase me.
In a while I’d hop on a bus
and ride into town down to Clark Street,
for another night of not knowing
what was happening at all, another cold night
of sleeping on Ruthie’s couch.
But the snow was persistently falling,
and the islands were far away,
calling to me, calling my name.

The poems in Ken Norris’ [see his 12 or 20 questions here] most recent poetry collection, Going Home (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2007), remind me of the poems of Ottawa writer Michael Dennis [see his 12 or 20 questions here], both of them writing as though their best days are long behind them. Norris, for a long time the historian of the 1970s poetry group The Vehicule Poets, has always been an interesting writer, but it has been Talonbooks editor/publisher Karl Seigler who has managed to always bring out the best of Norris’ writing over the past decade or so.

It’s interesting that Ken Norris has continued, in his poems, his conversation with his late mentor Louis Dudek (he also continues conversations with the rest of his Vehicule gang—Endre Farkas, Artie Gold, Claudia Lapp, Stephen Morrissey, Tom Konyves and John McAuley); Norris once talked about how he, even years after Dudek’s death, is still continuing to learn from the conversations they started some thirty years ago, and continues his side of it to this day. Norris, who considers himself more post- than modernist, is still writing plainspeaking poems about subjects and ideas, writing straightforward lyrics with, as the back cover suggests, barely a form to hold between them.

TO LOUIS

I’m the one
sitting on the steps
just out of the sunshine,

listening
to that woodpecker
carry on.

I guess it’s the bugs
they go for,
strange

if that pecking
were a mere
compulsion.

A bee busses
somewhere nearby,
perhaps

inside my shirt
but
probably not.

The lilacs
are coming on,
and who will I

come on to
tomorrow?
The sky’s blue,

just the way
you would remember it.
It’s all

still here, yet
you’ve departed,
our conversation

is terminated,
at least for now.
The birds sing

as always,
the grass greens,
and even I

press my pen
to the page
to make these lines.

You probably
told me
once

what I am
coming to know
now—

that life
is cruel
in the extreme,

and insistent.
We all die
and the world

goes on.

In the poems in this collection, Norris (who has been teaching at the University of Maine in Orono since 1985) returns to New York (where he was born), and to Montreal (where he spent his formative poetry years and still considers home), alongside poems that make reference to a very post-9/11 consideration, referencing the wars in the middle east.

MORNING IN MONTREAL

It’s good to get out from under
the CNN flood of information,
the flood of propaganda.

After a while
you start to mistake that shit
for reality.

It’s good to see Norris write outside of himself and his immediate world, and his increasing past, as one of the 1970s Vehicule Poets. Norris keeps moving his poems through various of his concerns, from the geographies of home and history, to his annual trek to the south seas (one of his strongest collections is about such a trip, his 1984 Coach House Press book, edited by bpNichol, The Better Part of Heaven), his daughters and poems for ex-girlfriends and ex-wives, long fallen by the wayside. But still, there are even a series of poems that almost don’t need to write themselves, boiled down to the two lines of the poem “JOURNEY THROUGH THE PAST,” that writes “They tore that building down / years ago. It belongs / to a Montreal that no longer exists.” (p 143), or the short piece “POEM,” saying a variant of what the whole of the collection is saying:

POEM

You can’t go home again,
you can’t go back to the arms
of the women who loved you.
One or two of them still might take you in,
but that would be nostalgia, not romance.

The future is unknown, and memory
is a nice blanket to wrap yourself up in
in winter. But mostly you need
to look ahead, to look out
the window, to see what is
and isn’t there.

This is Ken Norris’ fifth poetry collection with Talonbooks (including the publication of a selected poems, Hotel Montreal), and perhaps one of the strongest collections he’s published in some time, despite the occasional piece that reworks versions of the same Ken Norris ground. Still, what makes this collection is the way the book is ordered, moving from poems on politics to personal and back again, from Montreal to New York and the South Seas, almost as a kind of collage-work.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Fifty years old
and totally responsible.
Which means

everyone sends me the bills,
for everything that needs
fixing, or paying off.

Braces, and school fees,
every daughters’ new dress,
the essential and the fanciful

all come circling
my wallet
like piranha.

They don’t mean ill
by it, the daughters
and the ex-wives—

they just firmly
believe that I
should pay for it all.

house: a (tiny) memoir
I remember my toddler self when small enough to ease between slats around the front verandah, circumventing the baby gate my mother had across the top of the steps. I remember the snow fence around the back yard, and how Snoopy, my dog, had dug a hole under a break to slip free. When I slipped from the porch, small enough to edge across the side to the steps instead of jumping down to the ground, my mother was beside herself. When they finally found me, I was in one of the fields, tending to a cow that was sick, and having difficulty standing. I remember the crunch and the give as the wild grass finally tore, that I pulled from the pasture to pile under her snout.

house: a (tiny) memoir

A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing, eds. Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans

UNTITLED

There it goes again
wafting through my mind
that U.S. Cobra Gunship
guns fully blazing
blasting 7 holes in my rubber duck
and yes I know what happens next
I get shot by the CIA,
so please George
I’ll do anything you want
I’ll get a Stuka Dive Bomber
and bomb whatever you want
the way I Stuka dive my baby
every second night (Patrick O’Connell)

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of regional anthologies; no matter what it is you do in your writing, there really isn’t any way to not be influenced by what is going on in one’s immediate geography (unless one is a complete recluse, which, admittedly, some writers are extremely good at). Adding to a list of impressive books over the past years is the brand-new A/Cross Sections: New Manitoba Writing (Winnipeg MB: Manitoba Writers’ Guild, 2007), edited by Katherine Bitney and Andris Taskans. If you’ve lost track of what some of the other anthologies have been, be sure to check out decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2006), decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2007), Fast Forward: New Saskatchewan Poets (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2007), The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century [see my review here], Post-Prairie: An Anthology of Poetry, Writing the Terrain: Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets, The Winnipeg Connection: Writing Lives at Mid-Century and Language Acts: Anglo-Québec Poetry, 1976 to the 21st Century [see my review of both here]. As I asked in my review of the Saskatchewan anthology, what is it about geography that compels?

Produced as a 25th anniversary celebration of the Manitoba Writers’ Guild, the strength of just what the Guild brings to the province is highlighted through ninety-one contributors (Ontario seems to be the only province in Canada without a provincial writers guild; books and organizations such as these fill me with a certain kind of envy), publishing poetry, fiction and non-fiction by contributors such as Carol Shields, Meira Cook [see my note on her last book here], Patrick Friesen, Margaret Sweatman, Dennis Cooley [see my recent piece on him here], Laurie Block, Sarah Klassen, Ariel Gordon, Smaro Kamboureli and Sylvia Legris [see my note on her last book here].

In which the Writer Reads

If I hadn’t read this line in John Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t read a line of Newlove’s in Erin Moure’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t hauled out my bike and ridden eight kilometres to the library to get out Newlove’s book, I wouldn’t be writing.

If I hadn’t worked in a branch library for five years, I wouldn’t have found this
misshelved Newlove where it was living an uncirculated life among all the Ondaatje
and I wouldn’t be writing.

If all the undergraduates hadn’t gone home to their small towns, if they hung around the library all summer, smoking cigarettes and borrowing all the Newlove, I wouldn’t be writing.

Energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared. Relativity notwithstanding,
this has nothing to do with writing. Newlove says.

If I weren’t such a liar, I would write off any horizon. (Tanis MacDonald)

ongoing notes; early February, 2007

it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, caught up in all sorts of other things; did you see this interview with Kimmy Beach on Shawna Lemay’s blog? Did you see this neat article on the John Newlove selected/documentary by Todd Babiak in the Edmonton Journal? Nice. The Vancouver launch happens soon, and I'm even working on one for Regina (check the Chaudiere Books blog for details; that's where I'll post when I know them...);

Apparently Anne Stone likes my "12 or 20 questions" series, but doesn't know why I call it that; here's an above/ground press mention that came up recently on google alerts; how do entries like this come out with my name (referencing a poem from my fourth collection; Richard Lopez referenced same poem here)? Funny how things happen like that; and Jay MillAr liked my piece on Phil Hall from poetics.ca;

Edmonton AB: Calgary authors Jill Hartman and Brea Burton [see my review of their collaborative book here] recently came up north to read at the Olive Reading Series [Shawna Lemay even wrote a note about it], and Olive published Burton’s her fascination as part of the regular event.

she got the idea from a postcard, from a book, from deep-
water running. her husband did not exist when she was
underwater, bobbing and lunging and holding her breath. she
would go down and stay down, watch legs and arms bend and
distort, a look through old glass.

Because they were touring their collaborative Booty, Burton didn’t read anything from this small publication, which is too bad; I wonder how long we have to wait before a first collection by her?

her fascination with water began when she was a kid living on
an acreage outside of Edmonton near Nisku. not too much
water out there, the occasional slough, but stubble fields had
their own charm and the sky was an endless ocean. she had
always wanted blue eyes.

Montreal QC: Right after Montreal poet Artie Gold died in February 2007 [see my own piece on Artie Gold here], another of the Vehicule Poets, Stephen Morrissey [see his 12 or 20 here], published Remembering Artie Gold (Montreal QC: Coracle Press, 2007), a small essay/memoir about Gold going back through the 1970s, when the Vehicules were enjoying their heyday.

Artie Gold died February 2007, a month after his sixtieth birthday. Artie was passionate about poetry and art, a friend to many people, and a highly intelligent man. My intention here is to offer a portrait of Artie as I remember him, the Artie that I knew and loved as only old friends can remember each other, making allowances for behaviour, and humbled by time and age. I have many memories of Artie Gold. I even remember the first time I met him.

[…]

Artie Gold was a young poet, only three years older than me. I was impressed with everything about Artie from the moment I met him. I was impressed by his study filled with poetry books and poetry magazines like Beatitude and Yugen, and mimeographed poetry newsletters from Cleveland, Vancouver, and Toronto; by his black spring-bound binders filled with hundreds of pages of his poems in manuscript; by his large collection of antique bottles; by his collection of antique tin containers that once contained cocaine and opium from the days when it could be sold legally; by his Chinese porcelain collection, much of it given to him by his father and the stories of his father, who ran an import business and was visiting Peking at that moment; by his art magazines celebrating the life of American artists, including Jackson Pollack and artists who lived in Buck County; by his long play records of music by Charles Ives, Charlie Mingus, Glenn Gould playing Bach, opera, and obscure music I’d never heard of; by his rock collection and information on rocks and semi-precious stones that he had studied while a student in geology in Colorado; and more!

Is it worth putting together a book of these pieces on Artie Gold? He was easily the best of the Vehicule bunch. Has anyone else done any work on A. Gold?

Prince George, BC: I’ve been more and more interested in what Prince George “eco-poet” Ken Belford has been doing lately, self-publishing a series of chapbooks the past few years (for those who can’t wait for his next trade book); with two books published in the late 1960s, there was a lag of some thirty-odd years before his next two trade books appeared, Pathways into the Mountains (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 2000) and Ecologue (Madiera Park BC: Harbour Publishing, 2005). The most recent of these [see a review of a previous here and another here], published as “series 14” is seens (Prince George BC: off-set house, 2008).

and that which
they about on

I wish it wasn’t true but I think
People are looking for poems that go away.
Poems are consumed in particular scenes
And part of what is consumed is place
From one holiday to the next. When
The rough working class poets were organized
And reformed (see Persky, 1965), and new forms
Of leisure activity called poetry were published
In the class colonies, (Also see Budde, 1801,
And McKinnon, 2017), many fairs and Saints Days
Were abandoned. Longer breaks were signaled
In the north, and the hours of writing gradually
Became reduced, but when rules of attendance
Were required, poets rented rooms
In the new socially restrictive towns.

I’m always interested when writers have large gaps in their publishing; what were they doing in all that time? Such as John Newlove in the 1970s, Maxine Gadd [see her 12 or 20 questions here] throughout the late 80s until just a few short years ago, Jamie Reid in the 1970s and 80s, or even David Phillips, who hasn’t published a book since 1978 (a selected poems with Coach House Press); what does a writer do? How does one so active suddenly stop? With Belford, it was with Ecologue that he really started finding his way into his voice, a northern BC kind of working class/roughneck eco-poetry, one that has links with but is extremely different than the eco-lyric of such as Adam Dickinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here] or Don McKay [see my piece on McKay here].

many gaze upon
the same now

Travel books destroy rivers.
Undamaged Steelhead are a snob good
Not unlike a good book.
One is good and two is better.
This is about the overcrowded view of water.
All it takes is a split second.
Steelhead are never numerous
And so are caught again and again.
In fishing, as one consumes more, another consumes less.
Wild Steelhead in wild places are scarce
And the guides are the old masters.
Rivers are places of wonder, visited places
Having to do with relational consumption.
Cheap travel means no more undisturbed places
So I left it for the travelers.
I imagine the end of supply.
I didn’t make a good guide
Because I didn’t fit the purpose
And smashed my good future.

He only does runs of 50 copies, and I’m not entirely sure how he distributes, if he offers them for sale, or how he does it; either way, I’m glad I’m somehow on his distribution list… will the rest of you have no option but to wait for his next trade collection? Still, if he’s getting this much work done (he also had a recent chapbook with Vancouver’s Nomados), it shouldn’t be that much longer of a wait.

house: a (tiny) memoir



When my mother wanted to get my father’s attention in the back field, planting or plowing or picking stones, she would put a single white bedsheet on the clothesline in the back yard. It was usually when someone had turned into the front lane, a neighbour, a salesman or otherwise friend, but half the time he had seen the truck pull in, and was already turning into the back lane to return. My mother, herself, caught between answering the front door and putting the sheet on the line. These were the days before cellphones.

Whenever a vehicle that my grandmother didn’t know would turn into our lane, she would call the house wondering who. This would drive my mother crazy, something I wouldn’t fully realize for years. At least when the corn rotated to the front, she wouldn’t be able to see. Where started this insistence to meddle? I don’t think she got over losing her first child. Not ever.

A year and a half before my father, his mother gave birth to a girl that my father claims no knowledge of. There was even a newspaper entry, Baby Girl McLennan, left with clippings in a small wooden box. She lived less a day. Originally, when I was not yet in my teens, my grandmother told me the girl’s name, but I no longer remember it. There isn’t anyone else left alive who would know.

My great-aunt Harriet, a nurse, was there but there was a problem with the delay of the doctor, telling them not to let the baby come until he had arrived. Is this something I remember properly? I think this is something my mother once told me. Who would even have told me?

Later, my father born in the back room of the house my sister now occupies with husband, their children; his father bellowing happily into 1941 phone to his wife’s only sibling. When are you coming over to see my son?


house: a (tiny) memoir

Myrna Kostash’s The Doomed Bridegroom & the state of Canadian creative nonfiction

You were talking of freedom, but I think of the freedom of the body unhinged from intellect, the body unhinged from the church.

You write, “you had to get out, you had to get out, be alone somewhere, be left alone…” Your body resists the distraction of theology and instruction in order to flame, alone and sequestered, in a moment of pure feeling.

With you, though, feeling is embodied. That’s the sensuousness. You want to live in the flesh that is the spirit’s own sinewed arm.

But she wants to get away, melt her flesh down to release her spirit mired in this material much and go join the revolution. You haul down memory into your body. Her body is nothing but.

Didn’t it ever occur to you that, if we danced and sang and fucked, it was to shake ourselves loose of our requisitioned flesh and leap out, free?
— Myrna Kostash, The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir

Yesterday, Myrna Kostash did a magnificent noon-hour reading through the Canadian Literature Centre at the University of Alberta, reading from an essay-in-progress, “Writing Nonfiction in Canada: A Manifesto” (an earlier draft of which exists at Dooney’s Café). Considering that, these days, nonfiction outsells fiction titles, you might wonder exactly why the concern that Canadian non-fiction is not being taken seriously? With some of the work she’s been doing over the years, as well as Janice Williamson, Mark Kingwell, Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett, it’s almost as though the work she’s already done can speak for itself, but the weight of years in the trenches are certainly heavy, as she writes in her essay:

For years I championed the cause of creative nonfiction whenever I could. My point was that, thanks to the New Journalism, nonfiction now had a whole new rhetorical and formal repertoire that should be recognized as something other than “mere” journalism. Call it creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, literary journalism, creative documentary, whatever, the point was that, since the literary establishment turned its nose up at nonfiction as unliterary, then, dammit, we would not be “just” nonfiction writers but creative nonfiction writers who had every right to be treated as equal to fiction writers and poets in the creation of Canadian literature.

I am seriously reconsidering this argument.

She also read from a couple of excerpts from her first book, All of Baba’s Children (1979), Bloodlines: A Journey into Eastern Europe (1993) and The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir (1998), as well as a more recent work in progress, to help make the case from her own works. The whole argument of “creative nonfiction,” from what I can understand, is that the research is done as any research is done, but the author is placed inside the story that is being told; there are even allowances for information to shift, depending on what and where the story is going.

Alexander Wolcott once wrote excoriatingly, in Vanity Fair, October 1997, about the vogue in memoir, of “dogged” monologues “piddling away” into pointless “passive-aggressive chat.”

In defense of the memoir, Elizabeth Renzetti of the Globe & Mail suggested that it is the “one place in non-fiction where the general reader can find important ideas discussed without being bogged down in the painful jargon of the professional philosopher, psychologist or literary critic.” The one place? I find this a bizarre claim, given the wealth of general non-fiction, literary and journalistic, written in this country about philosophy (Mark Kingwell), economics (Linda McQuaig), information technology (Heather Menzies), queer culture (Stan Persky), art history (Susan Crean), historical trauma (Erna Paris), urban ecologies (Brian Fawcett)…I could go on. I’ve written some of it myself. All of this is writing deeply “connected” to the world outside ourselves as well as resonant with the writer’s voice. It is, I believe, what Wolcott would have us write: “civic journalism for the soul.”

Where would our novelists be without what writer Russell Smith has called “the news,” without “a deep and compulsive curiosity about the contemporary, about politics and technology and culture….It can’t all be about our childhood or our parents’ stories….”

I’m intrigued by Kostash’s work, as well as her arguments; there is certainly more than one way to tell any story, and some stories do not do well in particular forms, so why would “creative nonfiction” not get the recognition it deserves? Her book, The Doomed Bridegroom, for example, uses the framing of an erotic nonfiction, writing about various ex-boyfriends over the years as her way of entering the more highly charged political/revolutionary histories of some of the Ukrainian peoples over the years. This is Kostash entering her subject and placing herself right in the middle, passionately and with intimate knowledge, writing the story of doomed love-affairs, doomed poets and doomed revolutionaries.

It is said that steppe wolves loped into the new villages and onto the thick thatch of the houses where they would peer straight down into the chimney at the hausfrau preparing the evening meal, their squinty-sloping yellow eyes holding upside-down the image of the knife in the breadloaf, the babe in the belly.

Within eight years (1797) sixteen Mennonite villages were established on the right bank of the Dnipro and two on the left. They named this complex the colony of Khortytsia. Perhaps at night they caught a thin whiff of smoke on the down-draught through the chimney that still bore the velvety ash of burned oak and the gamy stink of scorched leather.

This “savage” unbounded openness was in fact the Ukrainian chernozem, prodigiously fertile. When the Mennonites finally met the Ukrainians, they called them “unindustrious.” I can just see them, those Ukrainians, barefooted and
weather-beaten, standing sullen at the fence, while the Germans beat at the bloody clods of the earth on Khortytsia Island with a domestic hoe.

Why did you call this land a wilderness? Your poets were wrong. “This land had never been broken before us, before we came, wild land,” one of them sang. “We could grow anything, fruit and grain, watermelons. We planted forests.”

That indomitable First Lady of the Sich, Olena Apanovych, twenty-three years expelled from the Institute of History in Kyiv, came back with a vengeance in 1990, measuring the volume of toxic discharges wafting over Khortytsia and lamenting the 49,000 oak trees on the island she says were growing in the mother-land when you arrived. She says you chopped down the lot.

related notes: Myrna Kostash's All of Baba's Children (or, "on once not staying at Myrna Kostash's house")

Rubicon Press' [Edmonton] Second Annual Midwinter Chapbook Competition

I have a lot of sympathy for chapbook contests, since I used to run one (my 2 annual winners were Marita Dachsel + Una McDonnell, back in '95-6), something I ran until the League of Canadian Poets started theirs, and my submissions dropped. Hopefully this one won't suffer the same... a good little press worth supporting...

Rubicon Press is thrilled to announce its second annual Midwinter Chapbook Competition. With an amazing number of submissions last year, Joelene Heathcote came out on top with her fantastic new collection entitled Inherit the Earth. The press is now accepting submissions for this year's contest. Manuscripts should be no longer than 30 pages, typed, and a cohesive set rather than an excerpt from a longer collection. The entry fee is $20.00 Canadian per entry (cheques to Rubicon Press). All entrants will receive a copy of the winning collection.

The winning entrant will receive a $100.00 prize, plus a certificate of recognition and twenty copies of his/her chapbook. In addition, the winning collection will be featured on the Rubicon site.

All entries should be sent to the following address:

Rubicon Press
Midwinter Chapbook Competition
#304, 10750-78 Avenue
Edmonton, AB
T6E 1P7
Canada

Closing date for this competition is February 29th, 2008.

12 or 20 questions: with Andrew Pyper


Andrew Pyper is the author of three novels and a collection of short stories, Kiss Me. His first novel, Lost Girls, won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel, was an international bestseller and a Notable Book selection in the New York Times Book Review, London Evening Standard and The Globe and Mail. His follow-up, The Trade Mission, was called “remarkable and compelling” by the Times (UK) and was selected as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by The Toronto Star. His third novel, The Wildfire Season, was a national bestseller and acclaimed in Canada, the US and UK. The Killing Circle is forthcoming internationally in the fall of 2008. He lives in Toronto.


1 - How did your first book change your life?

I recall a whole slew of pleasant post-publication side effects: name in the paper, invitations to give and hear readings, travel to burgs I’d never been to, meeting one’s scattershot readers. More than any of this, though, I think it was the legitimization of my work that the book offered, the turn from hobbyist to professional. Confidence, in short. And in this racket, without confidence – no matter how blind – it’s hard to keep moving forward.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

For me, the idea of “place” as the dominant influence on or way “into” writing is overstated. I’m a first generation Canadian of Northern Irish parents who grew up in a small town, has lived in cities, a college town, in a cabin with a shotgun by the door – yes, this is all me, it’s all indirectly significant, but none of it determines anything in a given novel, story, or sentence. Perhaps this is only because I have never lived in – or through – anything dramatic enough to have had it take over whatever hemisphere of the brain that’s in charge of making things up.

In any case, I see my geography as a psychological landscape first, and a location on a map distantly second.

3 - Where does a 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?

My novels are fourteen thousand ideas, observations, character tics, must-have scenes, funny bits, notebook metaphors, plot turns, all stitched together (after another twenty-seven thousand other bits have been discarded). These elements arrive slowly over time, usually in the five or so years prior to the day I actually begin to write the thing, before I know that these particles belong to a book. At the same time, however, I know my book before I begin work on it, I’m not one of those find-the-story-as-you-write types. I’m an outliner, a mapmaker. So when all the fourteen thousand bits come together, I essentially have my book before the “Once upon a time…”

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Neither. At best, they’re excuses to meet readers and colleagues and get drunk. At worst, they’re boring.

5 - 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?

A sprawling question, rob. Not sure I can even have a go at it.

What I will say is that, as the books I’ve published slowly pile up, certain patterns – or interests, obsessions even – begin to show themselves. Most of the time I don’t see them, as it takes readers or reviewers to point them out. But the leading themes/preoccupations seem to include the shape morality might take in a post-religious, virtual age (or, more accurately, for a post-religious, virtual generation). What is right, if there is no god to tell us? What is the difference between satisfying our wants, and satisfying our consciences?

A close second to these questions, I think, is the problem of The Real in the context of increasing virtuality. The physical vs. the digital. Experience vs. hypothesis. To demonstrate these conflicts, the novels generally involve a test of some kind, a dramatic pulling of its character(s) out of their protected places and into a context without Escape or Delete keys. To see what happens when they encounter The Real, I have them first encounter fear.

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

Essential, and sometimes difficult. Essential, because over the time it takes to write a book, I become (at least partly) blind to its weak links, its indulgences. A good editor alerts you to these, to the work yet to be done. And I like to get as many editors and readers to have a go at a manuscript as there are volunteers I can entrust with the task. There is a phase in the writing of each book where I become the masochist: “Read it again! Hurt me! Tell me the ending still doesn’t work! And again!” Things have to get pretty dark before you find the one thing – often little more than a line, a dropped paragraph, a revealed secret – that “solves” the whole book.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Can it be both?

Harder, in the sense that there is the same self-doubt, the feeling of fighting a battle alone, of being misunderstood. Harder in that the job of making 300 pages that tell a story that might be of interest to a stranger still seems paralyzingly difficult on Day One.

Easier, perhaps, in that there is a precedent. Look: those books on the shelf there. Those are mine. I can do just one more, can’t I?

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

A part of a pear? Three days ago. I stole a slice from my sixteen month-old.

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

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

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

Over the last few years, I have limited the amount of non-fiction work I’ve taken on. Articles, profiles, essays – they take up a lot of mental space and at-desk time. For the time being, it’s work I can afford to avoid, so I’m really choosy about it. For me, journalism (even in its broadest applications) is simply less pleasurable than made-up storytelling (though it does occassionally offer the bonus of getting me out of the basement on someone else’s coin).

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?

Pull on track pants and t-shirt. Kiss loved ones. Coffee. Basement.

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

Other writers. Quick hits from favourite stylists. Often just a paragraph can do the trick. Amis, Updike, Munro, Roth, DeLillo, Ford, Conrad, Fowles. Pull one of them off the shelf, open randomly, taste, return to keyboard.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

Not that I set out to accomplish this, but I think The Killing Circle is the most flat-out entertaining of all my novels. This is not to say – he hastens to add – that I regard it as less ambitious, less thoughtful or “literary.” I simply mean that the story happened to offer me so many juicy opportunities to do fun things on the page – tell a joke, draw a caricature, pull the rug out, shout “Boo!” – and I was able to leave the best and most organic of these in.

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?

Books come from books, yes. But in a way, this is like saying eggs come from chickens. What remains to be determined: How does the chicken make the egg?

Not to avoid the question, but everything influences me. Conversations I have with cab drivers, barroom revelations, shitty movies, good movies, the madman on the corner screaming “It wasn’t me!” – they have all played their parts.

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

Books that make me wonder “How did she do that?”

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

Write a stage play. One that makes you laugh. Then cry. Then leave the theatre humming a song.

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 honestly have no serious answer to the first question. As to the second: a depressed lawyer or alcoholic waiter.

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

Writing, as hard as it is, gives me immense pleasure.

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

The Road. No Country for Old Men. (Hey, Cormac McCarthy!)

20 - What are you currently working on?

The outline for my next novel. So far, this is what I’ve got: “Small town. A haunted house in which the ghosts are living people.”


12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Lynn Coady

Lynn Coady is the author of Strange Heaven, Play the Monster Blind, Saints of Big Harbour and Mean Boy, as well as the forthcoming Hyperborea. She lives in Toronto.


1 - How did your first book change your life?


A whole lot. To a head-spinning degree actually, because of the GG nomination. I went from being this kind of grungy post-grad student with all the usual issues of insecurity and self-loathing to being invited to literary festivals, interviewed on the CBC, meetings with people I perceived as "big shots" in Toronto, and so forth. This was totally beyond my experience up until that point. My experience of 'being a writer' then was, you know, poetry readings in basement cafes and all-but-empty university classrooms in the afternoons. Sending out countless submissions to countless, tiny, literary magazines and never hearing a word back from them, and so forth. But in the late 90s when Strange Heaven came out, it was a heady time for Canlit in general and if you were young and new onto the publishing scene, you got a lot of attention. It raised some kind of crazy expectations among writers of that generation, but it had an overall positive effect on me because after being told my whole life that it was impractical and foolhardy to devote yourself to writing, I began to perceive it as a real possibility. It was what I had planned on doing anyway, but itwas nice to know it wasn't as much of an interminable hunger strike as it had been portrayed. I was meeting people who were doing it--full-time artists and such like. That was important. I started to realize there were artistic communities out there that weren't subsets of the academy. My horizons broadened and my expectations started to shift.


2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?


I've been here not quite a year. I arrived March 1, 2007. It takes time for a physical environment to have an impact on my work. When I was in New Brunswick, I wrote about Cape Breton. When I was in Vancouver, I wrote about New Brunswick. When I was in Edmonton, I wrote about--not Vancouver exactly, but I fashioned a kind of fictional world that I think was very much influenced by my years in Vancouver and that futuristic 'city of glass' element it has to it.

Race and gender come into play in that I'm often preoccupied with the idea of losers and winners, social hierarchies. The blurry line between the idea of community and that of conformity--how something that is meant to be welcoming and comforting can so quickly turn exclusionary and oppressive if an individual fails to live up to certain standards, or perform the role that's expected of him or her.


3 - Where does a 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?


Usually the first one. Saints of Big Harbour started as a short story and Mean Boy started as a short story, and, come to think of it, so did my most recent MS. When I begin a short story I'm often suffused with a kind of euphoric creative energy that is addictive. So when the story is finished, I inevitably ask myself: Is that it? Couldn't I take this further? In an effort to recapture that feeling I suppose. But any writer will tell you that first-blush love affair with a piece of writing usually dwindles at around page 150.


4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?


I think neither. Well, they're part of it in the same way anything I experience on a given day ends up being part of it. It's an experience I file away, just like grocery shopping or a given conversation with someone.


5 - 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 realized just yesterday that any time anything makes me feel outraged and confused (it has to be that combination--it can't be just one or the other), I write a book about it. That is, whenever I find myself feeling something very strongly, but am not entirely sure what it is that's upsetting me so much--or even if I have a right to feel that way (that's a big part of it too), I start writing to try and figure it out. For example, that thing about community and conformity I mention above is something I've grappled with a long time--it comes from being a small town girl and coming of age and finding yourself thinking things like: Jesus! Small towns are fucking awful! When all the commonly accepted wisdom tells you they are not awful at all, they are warm, endearing places with a slower pace of life and a generally more humane atmosphere than, say, big cities. And so you get confused, because no one seems to agree with you, even though every braincell you have to rub together is telling you the opposite. So I write a book to figure out where I stand on the matter, and usually the conclusion I come to, no matter what the issue at hand happens to be, is: 'It's complicated.' And that conclusion satisfies me very much.


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


Both.


7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?


Harder. I'm not as arrogant as I was in my youth, and insecurity is thefount of bad writing. So I take a lot more care, and taking care is of course essential, but then you're in danger of being overly self-aware, and over self-awareness is also a fount of bad writing. So then you sit there in front of your computer thinking: Oh no! Am I being too self aware? Thereby becoming even more self-aware. Etc. The upshot: harder.


8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?


This past summer, I bought a couple one day instead of buying apples, on a whim. I'm crazy that way. I couldn't believe how good and non-appley it was.


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


"Don't become the thing you hated." (I don't know if it's the best necessarily, but it's what comes to mind.)


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


I haven't written any book-length non-fiction. I've written some personal essays, and they've been pretty easy, and fun, but I have to say deep down there is something about the form that I despise. All the 'I, me, I, me'. Even doing this interview, all the I-me kind of makes me cringe. I feel on some level that I am capitulating to the reader's voyeuristic impulse with respect to the author, and, while I understand that impulse (I'm a reader, so I have it too), it doesn't quite sit well with me to be indulging it. Also, you know those people who, in conversation, just sit and talk about themselves, and it never occurs to them to ask anyone else any questions because they are so enamored with their own being and experience, and how they make you sick? It feels a bit like I'm doing that, too. So it's hard to imagine ever sitting down to write, say, a book-length memoir.

That said, I love first-person narrative journalism, like Jon Ronson's Them. That kind of work where someone or something else is your focus, but you're still present as narrator, as the reader's way into the story. That I would like to do.


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?


Oh rob. I drink coffee, I read. Feed the cat. Then I check email. Then I force myself to stop with the email. Then if I'm lucky, I write. Zz.


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


When I'm not writing, I wait. I just get other stuff done and don't worry about it. It's like that Buddhist saying about when the student is ready, the teacher appears. I've learned to trust the rhythms of my creative process--that sound airy fairy, but it's just what you do if you're like me and you dislike stress. I know so many writers who walk around completely freaked out if they're not writing anything. And people who force themselves to write even if there's no particular story they want to tell at the moment--just because they feel they should always be writing if they want to call themselves writers. And then they worry because they find the stuff they've forced themselves to write is shit.

Books and music. I wash the dishes while listening to music that inspires me and that usually puts me into a meditative state. I have all my best ideas washing dishes.

(I mentioned this once during a talk I gave with another writer for the Alberta Writer's Guild. There was this woman there who'd been asking really pointed questions about our respective financial situations the whole time, and so when I made this point about washing dishes, she stated, as if to herself, "So you don't have a dishwasher"--looking very perturbed.)


13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?


It is not realism, it is not set in Atlantic Canada and it is not particularly comic. I've been calling it my "right brain" book, as opposed to Mean Boy and Saints, which are both left brain books. Strange Heaven was right brain too. For some reason, my right brain books are the books with female protagonists.


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?


Conversation is a big one. Human interaction, human moments.


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


Oh, lots. Anything I can get my hands on.


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


Learn another language.


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 don't like to think about the latter part of that question, and I can't think of anything else I'd like to be. Part of what I do to make a living is editing, and I love editing, but it feels part and parcel with my life as a writer.


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


I'm not good at anything else in particular.


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


Book: The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen. Flick: No Country for Old Men


20 - What are you currently working on?


A ghostwriting project, purely for eating and rent-paying purposes (to put it another way: I don't own a dishwasher). But I hope to be doing revisions on my new MS shortly.


12 or 20 questions archive

sick notes;

the worst part about being sick (I've been laid out with some damn sinus/lung thing since Tuesday) is not remembering anything about when you weren't sick. ugh. It seems I've been completely useless for anything but dragging my sorry carcass down to the University and checking my email; at least in Ottawa, I can call people and complain (I don't have a home phone here).

But enough about me.

This kid seems to like John Newlove; here too. Will we see you at the Edmonton launch?

Did you know the Black Dog caught fire? Wharton wrote about the last reading. I'm hearing it could be out for about a month or so, which means I'm going to need a new venue for at least the next one.

Ron Silliman was nice enough to give a shout out to my 12 or 20 questions; I wish I could hear Kate Greenstreet read again; apparently I'm #1 in San Francisco; and did you know I'm reading in Calgary soon?

That Pearl Pirie was nice enough to take a couple photos (Rhonda Douglas and Monty Reid) at the ottawater launch I missed.

Apparently (I just got a phone call) I'm now going out for soup, so I "don't get pneumonia" (it's -20-something here today and evil snowing; why did I even come in?);

I'm hoping by tomorrow this will be out of my system; I haven't been able to concentrate on anything all week...