12 or 20 (small press) questions: Christophe Casamassima on Furniture Press

1 – When did Furniture Press first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Furniture Press began publishing chapbooks, pamphlets and poetry-related ephemera in 2003 with the pressing of the first issue of Ambit: Journal of Poetry & Poetics, which included work by mostly friends.

My initial goals were developed out of a distaste for what some might call a lack of plurality in the business and teaching of poetry. It was a grand illusion, of course, for me, that poetry could only be taught (and understood, whatever that means!) by professionals and scholars who read and studied the major poets and the canon. Then I met Kevin Varrone and Pattie McCarthy. They introduced me (in word and in life) to poets like Cole Swensen, Clark Coolidge, Heather Ramsdell, Gregg Biglieri, Barbara Cole, Aaron Keily, Rod Smith, and Mark Wallace. The illusion disappeared. I understood that poetry was manifold, manifest, plural, eternally evolving—not on the page, where the canon is conceived, but in the dialogues between poets and their audience, between people and their lot, power structures and privileges. Of course, it also had to do with my love of language games and irony, but that is a personal aesthetic. In truth, it was the similarities of my and others’ aesthetics and practices that enticed me to begin publishing: as a dialogue between what can be said, how it is said, and how it can be disseminated to the world. I wanted to introduce the world, those like me who understood nothing of the plurality of the practice, that poetry was possibility.

Learning—not to sound trite, but learning is a continuum of praxis and terror: we try, we fail, we adapt, we fail with flair. That is poetry. I have learned to read (into) poetry as the ecstatic peace that language exhibits because it knows (it does, and that is the irony, the punch line) that it is never going to be successful in communicating an absolute. It entices us with the possibility, but then pulls away as we get closer.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

I hope I spelled that out above. Sheer anxiety. The endless expressivity of failure and its derivatives. 1+1=3.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

There are two responsibilities that the small press adheres to: the distribution and promotion of works from a marginalized community of poets and writers, and the dissolution of the privileges of trite, academic, status quo works of art that define great literature by standards of commodity and profit. This is another reason why I started Furniture Press. I was (still am) interested in publishing great works of unknown art that have gone by the wayside of big publishers, that will never stand the chance of reaching the canon because it cannot turn a profit, a profit for someone who does not practice the art him/herself. We don’t necessarily “sell” books and make a profit. Instead, we publish books in small runs, and distribute them, trade them, give them away. Money comes in, yes, but only enough to sustain our operation. Small press is about zeroing out by zeroing in.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

In current years our sensibilities have shifted in the direction of intertextuality and appropriation. Granted, poetry is first and foremost an intertext, that which is informed by more than just language and human expression. It takes into account its surroundings, be it culture, politics, art, biology, etc. But appropriation: I don’t see many publishers who have invested so much time into releasing works of art that are a result of other texts, that work through other texts, whose object relies on the existence of other texts. In some cases I translate this as a critique: since there is no much information out there already, why bother creating more? Why not use what there is (plunder, appropriate, borrow, steal, etc.) and compose with the fragments? See? I say compose rather than write. Collage? Granted, these new works of art ARE more information. But it is this tuning that redeems not only the possibility of poetry, but its sustainability. I believe this is eco-poetics: not about a physical environment, but its dissolution and reintegration, a s text and nothing more.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new publications out into the world?

The most effective way, and I can’t stress this enough, is by treating the object like a gift, to be given away without exchange, without the hope of ever generating revenue beyond what is necessary for its dissemination. Once it becomes a commodity, the object is made secondary to its output, and it is no longer poetry.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

I am an avid collaborator. When a writer sends me work, I choose the writer as a co-editor. I do not like to impose a vision upon a work of art. This could only mean one thing: the press defines the image of the book, its content, its author, so that the logo becomes obese, possessive, enduring, and the work of art becomes branded. On the contrary: the individual works of art define a press, so that the image of the press is a reflection of the works of art that make up the press, a collage, so to speak, which constantly adds new pieces to its ever-evolving canvas. The writer has just as much say in the final object as an editor.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

For pamphlets and chapbooks, 50 to 100 copies. For full-length collections, between 100 and 200 copies. This is more about sustainability than turning a profit. Small runs guarantee that we know exactly who our books are going to. Yes, this sounds at first like an exclusionary tactic—that the press decides who can and can’t own our books. No. Our small runs go straight into the hands of the people with which we have fostered relationships, who care in the work enough to engage both the writers and the editors. We hate that so many readers create a distance between themselves, a press and their writers. If we are to achieve plurality, if we are to sustain a perpetual dialogue, if we are to foster engagement with the possibility of nurturing future poets…

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

The press dissolved for a few years, between 2005 and 2009. It consisted of myself, as editor and bookmaker, and an art director, who handled all facets of the visual aspects of a book. But in the past two years I have been collaborating with a friend, Douglas Mowbray, who edits and publishes twentythreebooks. He is not an editor, so to speak, more like a professional collaborator, on events, strategic planning, distribution, promotion, building a library of independent books, etc. I have recently been blessed with the artistic merits of Jodi Hoover, a printmaker and designer, who will, starting with Jennifer Hill’s “Fragmentirety,” take on all the responsibilities of book design. It’s true that I like working alone. It prevents too much confusion in the production process. But I don’t treat it like a business, where a hierarchy exists. I trust the aesthetics and expertise of all those who are, or ever were involved with the press, because this too means that the press is a representation, not only of its writers, but its collaborators.

9 – How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

It hasn’t. The opposite is true, though. It is my writing that influences my editorial decisions. When I write, I think in terms of the larger project: the book. When I choose works for Furniture Press, I ask myself, “Is this project a series of disparate poems? Or is this a unifying gesture? How prevalent is the slow easing out of thinking in this work?” I like to evidence thinking through a problem. These are the works that fascinate me. This is how I write and publish.

10 – How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

I did this in the beginning, publish my own work under Furniture Press. It was natural: my aesthetics and publishing principles were in sync. But now I create chapbooks and pamphlets without any connection to a press. Instead, I make each one an art object: I use random cuts of unused paper, cardstock, inks, etc. and build a house around a text that somehow embodied the purpose and ideas in the text. I also see this as practice in book-making. Instead of experimenting with styles, fonts, binding techniques, I practice with my own texts. The result is both a self-published object and a model/blueprint for some future project.

11 – How do you see the press evolving?

We have recently introduced full-length texts to our catalogue, published as trade paperback books. I decided to forego the idea that smaller is purer. It’s great to work with a small constituency of writers and readers, but we also owe it to our writers by promoting and distributing their work to a wider, more geographically diverse audience. At first we published books, art objects, in which we dressed a text in a unique costume that suited its aesthetics and poetics. But in order to live up to the efforts to make works part of the plurality, it is also necessary to represent and promote our writers as extensively as possible.

12 – What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

One accomplishment I can completely say I am proud of… bringing together people who, in other circumstances, would never have met, would never had collaborated outside of the press, would never have developed relationships as an extension of the press’ objectives. In other words, living the goals and objectives we set up in 2003. The biggest frustration, I think, is the lack of time and energy some of us have succumbed to because we cannot make this our full-time project. Distribution, of course, is difficult because we cannot travel and promote the books in person. But this is also a blessing, when the time creeps in and books are made and projects are finalized, events have been planned, relationships forged…

13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

I did not have models to copy or steal ideas from. The best help I ever received was from David Kirchenbaum, who taught me about the tools of handmade books: the saddle stapler, the bone folder, the paper cutter. Everything I did in the beginning was by pure intuition and imagination.

14 – How does Furniture Press engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see your books in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

In all honesty, I have somewhat distanced myself from succumbing to the pressures of locality. I am totally invested in publishing and promoting works that transcend space, locale, environment. My aesthetics regard one center: the total and complete manufacture of works that develop from close readings and relationships with text. Our immediate literary community: I think this is an odd circumstance for us. It is anyone, any text, that is made available to us, from which we may begin seeking new texts, new dialogues. I assume you’re reading into the paradox here: how does one foster human relationships or community when the community is secondary to the work of art? That’s just it. Community is not locale; it is common investment, interest. This transcends human relationships by making human relationships not based in mutual aid, but mutual critique. When our fight is common, when our cause is common, our goals are common. Communit, then, is extra-human, a work of the mind, an extension of the human, the text.

I struggle with the distinctions of art and life, that both are one and the same, because we’re missing a very important aspect of this dichotomy: the spirit. Not religion, so to speak, but the individual him or herself. Most times I feel like the community subsumes or absorbs the individual and the individual must conform to the standards of a particular community. To stress once again our objective: the show the spirit of a collective known as Furniture Press by stressing the parts and not the whole.

15 – Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

Important is not the right word. Crucial. Essential. This is where dialogue begins. This is the human face of art making. This proves that publisher, writer and audience are not disparate entities but a network, an infrastructure of life and art and spirit. Take one away, and it is no longer a functioning organism. That’s the word: organism. I dreamed recently of an organ that was also an organism. It is itself because it is everything else.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

The internet plays a positive role because it is faster than print media. I use the internet to search for new journals, new writers, events, ideas, by slowly filtering the overload from the unique. But it is also more confusing and convoluted. This is why I try not to rely too heavily on promoting our catalogue using the internet. I’d rather seek an audience at readings, events, conferences. One must play the internet by knowing what one seeks.

17 – Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

I don’t know what I’m looking for until I see it. If I held fast to an exclusive editorial stance or aesthetic, I would publish the same texts over and over again. I like to be surprised. I think all editors want to be surprised. This is a secret all writers should know when shopping for a press: surprise your editor.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Our first full-length title, Emily Carr’s Directions for Flying, won the 2009 Furniture Press Poetry Prize. This title is special, obviously, because it is our first full-length collection and our first paperback collection. Most importantly, though, it is this title that won my heart when working through the prize submissions. It works more wholly and deeply, and across a wider span of writers and texts than anything I have seen previously come my way. IT is both expansive and detailed, and the narrative is clear, cohesive and engaging. This is the work I aspire for. This is the work that defines our poetics.

Our second “new” book is Chris McCreary’s Undone: A Fakebook. Emily openly appropriates texts, strategies and stances, but Chris’ work infiltrates and critiques (as well as appropriates) popular culture and mannerisms. One is a result of the perils of domesticity; the other, the over-domestication of culture. I published Chris’ work in the second volume of Ambit: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, and was impressed with his knowledge of music and literature, but more enthralled with the unique way his poems became lyrics to the music that gets stuck in our heads when we don’t want it. He plays upon this, finding crevices of kitsch to elaborate on the futility of branding. His is a music of the misheard, the second-take, that makes us aware that even the obvious, the granted, holds mysteries.

In the future, we’ll be publishing M. Magnus’ Heraclitean Pride, out third full-length book. M and I share a fascination with classical texts. But where I merely bring to life the gestures of ancient rhetorics and styles with playful language, M adjusts our ears and our sensibilities to the tune of centuries past by blurring the lines between critique, philosophy, theatre, music and investigation. His book is a re-tuning of Heraclitus’ fragments for modern ears, tracking back to make us understand the work as inevitable and perpetual flux. Ultimately, modern and classical ears are one and the same, except that modern ears do not have the “attention span” or the patience for slow observation. In the end, his work has no end, like Finnegan’s Wake. It brings us into the middle, because it is middle, it is all genres and histories and legends carried by the winds.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

12 or 20 questions: with Keith Kumasen Abbott

Keith Kumasen Abbott was born in Tacoma, Washington, grew up in the Northwest, lived in California for 28 years and now resides with his wife Lani in Longmont, Colorado. Currently he is on the faculty of the Writing and Poetics Department & Visual Arts Department at Naropa University, where he teaches MFA workshops and Asian calligraphy.

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

My first modest chapbook was poetry and that made me a published writer. I put “writer” on my United States passport. And declared myself such whenever it seemed likely to aid that moment. My latest publication, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan continued my meditation on my friend Richard and our shared life and times. The subjects didn’t change all that much, from poetry to prose: celebration of the sensual life, loyalty, friendship and love via comedy and clarity and how to maintain those qualities in the face of oppression and despair. At Naropa University I now teach writing workshops that engage such issues and so I have another outlet for that practice. Big difference now with publishing is doing blog interviews for Downstream publicity. Before that outlet I’d learned how to work the publishing and newspaper industry, the reading circuit and old fashion literary word of mouth around San Francisco to promote my writing.

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

Yes. Poetry was so insistent in my life it seemed easier to write because my life was saturated with songs, via radio. I started writing both poetry and plots for drawing comics early on, influenced by EC, DC and Mad comics. Songs were poetry for dancing. I played in the middle school band, so I learned to read a little music. Also my older sister Judy took me to an Alan Freed style rhythm and blues revue around 1957 in the Temple Theater of Tacoma, Washington. The show possibly featuring Fats Domino, The Drifters, Clyde McPhatter, Frankie Lymon, Buddy Holly, Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers.

The two artists I remembered best were LaVern Baker and Chuck Berry. Baker because she and her backups were wearing fishtail dresses so tight that they had to be lifted straight up on stage by some big guys, something the ladies seemed to enjoy. Also she sang “Jim Dandy (To The Rescue)” which gave me the lovely idea that I might have a bright future with like-minded women. Berry closed the show and literally had the teenage girls falling out of their seats to get at him, a confirmation that young women felt similar sensations that I did about the music and about the music of our hormonal systems. And logically, what songs or poems were good for and why I might want to write poems and learn to dance good.

I didn’t get to go with my sister to the Elvis Presley concert at Stadium High. I believe this event was captured on a B & W film by the way, much broadcast over the years. But my sister’s girlfriends seemed to dote on his music, too and needed partners for dance practice and that helped me learn to dance. So social advantages to poetry were obvious.

Then I read The Dharma Bums in 1958. There I learned about Gary Snyder who wrote poems set in the Northwest, including places that I knew. My family worked and played outdoors, and I learned fishing and camping skills early on. My life was lived mostly in the natural world of the Northwest, on a “stump” ranch with patches of forests nearby for exploration. Those skills connected me to The Dharma Bums. From that book’s use of Han Shan, I bought The White Pony, an anthology of Chinese poetry and embarked on my life with Zen also. Zen seemed clear because it dealt with the world that I knew outside my door, so those Buddhist concerns didn’t seem particularly exotic, but common sense. Also the Seattle Art Museum featured Asian culture. I related to that because its art showed the world of misty pines outside my attic bedroom window. Solitude I was very, very familiar with, as I liked to roam in the NW woods by myself. I erected camps in trees and built lean-tos on uprooted tree root-wads. Chinese and Japanese poetry got connected to my deep pleasure in nature early on.

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

For me poetry comes from spoken rhythms and/or rhythmic images. The power of those sources often determines how many drafts it takes to get a poem done, both negatively and positively. Some are too powerful and lead me astray via too many possibilities. Others lead me right to where they end. I write poetry by hand. I wrote quickly until I was about 23. About then I was dissatisfied with my drafts. I was ruining my works somehow by revision—perhaps too many college lit courses—so I embarked on a visualization regime. I made a deal with myself not to write down anything until it was set in my mind. So for a year I revised poems mentally until they felt done. Before this, I was writing 4-6 adequate poems a year. For that year I wrote 4-6 poems that worked, but they were much different than my previous work. That work started getting published. So I continued to do mental rehearsals, gaining skills for watching my mind’s arrangements.

Fiction takes strong visualization and memorization skills plus an ear for dialogue. Luckily I grew up among storytellers. Perhaps due to my teenage writing and drawing Mad magazine imitations in panels, I favor discrete scenes, so I usually produce units that can be reworked without damaging the whole short story or chapter. No prose ever is done in first draft. If I have told part of a story over and over to buddies then the first drafts are easier. If I am assembling a life from many lives and from imaginative improvs on those assembled lives, then the task is to test and select the best, most direct ways to present aspects of that character/scene.

For a memoir like Downstream I assembled my own anecdotes and letters about Brautigan first, interviewed mutual friends, and then mined the Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and other media coverage for materials about his life that I did not know. For novels I often build Character Files for each person. List how they talk, look, live, social class issues, family, friends, etc. I visualize where they live, how they move, etc. That’s the fun part. Nothing has to fit any particular plot, but these lists give me confidence. I get to know each person in random ways. The lists are used mostly because I tend to rewrite each draft for each person in the scene. How kind or how cruel they may be, parameters like that. Their habitual, intentional and impulsive actions form in my mind. Names are so important to me that I have alumni bulletins and directories to find the right names and social class strata: Yale, Baylor, etc. For The First Thing Coming, Northwest stories set around Tacoma, I found a 1957 Tacoma city directory, a 1963 yellow pages, yearbooks, maps, etc. for that time and place. In one story I wrote, I alternated actual Tacoma drive-in restaurant names with fake ones, just to amuse myself.

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?

In the 1970s I wrote an autobiographical book called The Second Time I Saw Pete but never published it, despite an offer to do so. I don’t handle first person that well for various reasons. So Pete dissatisfied me. Lucky for me I didn’t publish, because I ended up creating several books from its contents: short story collections The First Thing Coming, Harum Scarum and The French Girl, the novels Mordecai of Monterey and Racer, and the non-fiction Downstream from Trout Fishing in America, among other works. Each time I saw some episode in Pete “had legs”: then I knew that that writing could be expanded into novels, short stories or memoirs.

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

For the Bay Area, San Francisco and Berkeley, a young writer had to do readings and be a good reader and performer. I worked hard on reading to an audience. For preparation I employed a handwritten notation system for pauses, emphasis, accents, and speed of phrasing for my prose manuscripts. Later I taped practice runs and listened to myself to improve delivery to aid revision. I also employed actors to read and tape some dialogue or monologues.

For fiction I learned early to mark changes of intonation and hard to say passages, especially pauses where the audience got time to react. During the pauses I learned to monitor the audience for any reactions. Also marked any “breakpoints” in my work while performing. Breakpoints were places where something else might happen or where some other material may be generated in revisions. Tryouts of ms. were invaluable, to judge if the audience was tuned into my reading. I don’t enjoy readings as much any more, though recently I did a long reading for a Jazz Festival in Davis, California. For that I practiced a careful playlist of fiction, memoir and poetry selected for pacing and tone, mostly. It was very successful because the audience was there to listen and enjoy, due to the collaborations of music and texts that preceded my performance.


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 make art by perceptions, not questions. My work has always engaged a contemplative aspect. My college major in western philosophy and logic gave me many structures and pattern recognition for thought, but then so did my studies in Chinese philosophy, too (Chuang Tzu became a yearly read for me). From that time on I enjoyed reading Wittgenstein and I built up a good library of his works at one time. As I grew older, I only enjoyed reading him perhaps 10% of my reading time, but I compare those adventures to whetting a blade. He sharpens my mind for perceptions of certain designs and for learning new configurations of thought. Taoism, Mahayana Buddhism and Zen supplied the most active and available insights for my writing early on; the world that those people experienced was the world I lived in. Eihei Dogen supplied intense observations of the worlds we all live in and he displays a remarkably subtle and supple spirit. One result was that late in my life, Kobun Chino Roshi ordained me as a lay monk in Dogen’s Soto Zen lineage.

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?

Where each perception is now and what each perception is now.

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

When I find good editors I treasure and cultivate them. Recently for Downstream, I had the pleasure of working with Duncan B. Barlow at Astrophil Press who much improved that memoir. I try to model those editors to my student writers and demonstrate for them what those editors have shown me. I worked in journalism and was fortunate that some excellent editors trained me. I cultivated my first readers for my ms. carefully and I’ve had some excellent ones. Creative editorial practices are really specific to my work and while teaching at Naropa University I lend them out for anyone who wishes to experiment.

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

One best piece of advice was an old standard from Arnold Saint Subber, a comedy producer who I worked with: your audience/readers are always ahead of you. With his help I figured out why: because you are in love with your works and therefore blind, and your audience and readers are not in love with them, at least not instantly and they are never as totally blind as you.

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

All dramatic writing is terribly difficult to do well. I managed to co-write a screenplay adaptation of my long short story, Spanish Castle. The screenwriter and producer Ozzie Cheek patiently guided and mentored me. I wrote the first draft from memory, alone. I did not consult my original text. I had been teaching the story for several years so I thought I was familiar with its characters. But I eliminated completely one character without noticing that I did the surgery at all. Turned out that guy was not necessary for the story in screenplay form. Rewrites with Ozzie were excellent training.

The appeal of adapting a story to screenplay is the intense scrutiny each scene receives so that moment may be distilled down to one line of dialogue or one shot to create the same or stronger effects as an entire fictional scene. Like fiction, the screenwriters have to know everything possible about the entire scene and characters, but only chose the right elements in the right order to deliver a point. Conventional but useful wisdoms are to tell a story in the cuts between the scenes. Get into the scene late, leave the scene early. Let the viewer participate by supplying the connections that the cut implies.

I once went to a lecture by a brilliant graphic designer for computers with a very savvy friend, George Mattingly, who ran Blue Wind Press, the publisher of three of my books. I knew a modest amount of design elements, but this designer was so sharp, that I lost track about a third of the way in. Because this designer often paused and considered what he’d say next, during one gap, I quickly asked George if he was following this. He said, “Yes, he’s amazing. He’s skipping all the obvious points we all know and telling us just the new ideas.” That’s how lively drama and film works, too.

Short stories I was taught in college largely bored me. That was the era of grey academic sludge college anthologies. I reverted back to my teenage loves in short stories, but didn’t study them and how they worked, because I was in love with Gogol, Twain, Turgenev, Chekov, Anderson, Hemingway, Algren, Chandler, mostly guys, except for of course Flannery O’Conner. Brautigan literally loaned me Babel, but I couldn’t assimilate Babel’s techniques despite my admiration. I was concentrating on novels. From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s I was in love with Magical Realists: Jorge Amado, Cortazar, etc. Then in the late 1970s I saw new American stories that went back to Chekov etc. Bobbie Ann Mason, Carver, Beatty, etc. However, these were structured more like poetry, open-ended and energized with life rather than narcotized by ideas. Then I understood how hard it was to write a good story (like a lyric poem is hard to write) but possible for me. I set myself the task of doing my Northwest stories in that form, as a challenge.

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Raised on a farm, feeding the livestock, so my habit is up at 5 or 5:30 a.m.. Top grade coffee or tea essential. Brief breakfast. Meditate enough to get clear about what’s up in the old bean that morning. Get to work immediately as possible. Research, outlines, rewrites, new works. Also, living with a wife and daughter a large part of my life, in suburban or urban areas, mornings were quiet then. My wife says it is almost impossible to reach me at these times. I used to take breaks at 10 a.m. for printing out or marking up drafts. Break rewards originally were serious dark french roast coffee with one row of high-test dark chocolate from a Lindt bar. Now, I drink really fine green tea for a break, dark chocolate for afterwards. Sit and think over what has come up that morning. Rewrite, outline or edit until my concentration fades. Then get out fast and go do something physical immediately. Garden, housework, Tai Chi, walk the dog, truck or landscape work, etc. For me physical activity essential for mental health.


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

I never rely on inspiration. Welcome it at the right time. I fear it sometimes. I an enthusiastic as much as possible, rather than inspired. Now, because my energy patterns are so morning bound, I don’t like to get inspired in the evening, as I can’t follow through. Recently, house-sitting in Inverness, California where my bedroom had multiple vintage photographs of Northwest life, I got a flash around 7 or 8 p.m. and wrote a Northwest story draft. A year and a half and 28 drafts later, I’ve almost got that in shape. If I’d waited until morning and wrote in a calmer state of mind, I know that the result would have been a much better first draft.

As I said, I keep character files for my longer fiction. I review them. For manuscript revision I blow up printouts in different fonts and sizes to alter shapes of paragraphs, then I red line edits and markup paragraphs etc. Poems the same, if typed out. I test lines by removing them, shuffling them around. I test rhythms a great deal. Mostly for poetry I’ve been writing haiku no renga, or renku linked verse, with three friends, Pat Nolan, Maureen Owen, Michel Sowl. Transitions are vital in renku and great training for fiction. I generate large supplies of one, two and three lined stanzas. If stuck and I can’t find a renku link, I cut and paste old lines or stanzas randomly without looking at the screen to produce different strange combinations. So for both prose and poetry I use my prep work to restart or service current projects and/or start new ones.

What did your favourite teacher teach you?

Too many teachers to name. Concentrated relaxation during action came with Tai Chi and that was a gift. In San Francisco and Berkeley Lenzie Williams and his teacher Ben Pang Lo taught relaxed concentration, relaxed breath and not disturbing the air with any actions. All these three are totally impossible to do except when they happen. Then you wonder “Why can’t I do this all the time?” Lenzie gave one lecture a year and told us, “If you don’t understand what I’m saying, put it in your puzzle kit and take it out from time to time.” Sure enough, I didn’t understand anything from his first lecture, but later, something he said came vividly true during my practice. And I paid close attention to him from then on and used that idea for writing. Ben was a Chinese Marine drill sergeant: impossible to please but inspirational because he modeled everything he asked you to do. Plus Ben did those magical Tai Chi demos that defy physics.

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 as I said above. Visual art: my wife Lani’s keen trained eye for art has been a joy all my life. She has been a great teacher. We go to new cities and “march for art.” I’ve been to some of the greatest museums in the world with her and benefited from her keen and lovely perspectives of artists and art. I especially enjoy how paintings are structured; how your eye enters and leaves a painting, etc. Cezanne and Bada Shanren are two I study whenever I can. For me Bada’s work inspires poetry; Cezanne provides poetic organization for stories.

Since 1972 I’ve studied and practiced Italic and Brush calligraphy, especially profited from the deep and precise practice of watching my teacher, Kobun Chino Roshi, paint. Zen art is a passion for me and brush art is integral to my meditation practice. I have a long row of art books devoted to that, and take great pleasure in experiencing it first hand. Also the superb brush calligraphic work by my other main teacher and friend at Naropa, Harrison Xinshi Tu. Harrison is a joyous master of that art. I visit his work at the Denver Art Museum and whenever he has a show locally.

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

List is too long to type here. Writers I know and have met. Like Richard Brautigan, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Steve Carey, Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Rexroth, Jane Hirschfield to name West Coast writers. Schuyler, Berrigan, Notley, Kleinzahler, East Coast poets. Those I’ve only read but not met in my career: Apollinaire, Robert Desnos, William Carlos Williams, Kerouac. Whitman, O’Hara, Dickinson, Austin, Twain, Babel, Gogol, Chekov, Munro, Tolstoy: people I reread constantly. And many contemporary prose writers too numerous to name.

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

I’d like to do this moment and then as many more as I am allowed.

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?

Not an option. I wrote a story exploring that issue, “Over and Under” in The First Thing Coming. There I imagined what I would have done if I’d let my lesser talents and lesser social needs dominate me earlier in my life.

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

To apply my concentration and attention to life’s whirlpools in lovely silky ways.

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

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. She stuns me at times. Have no idea if that Happiness is a great book or collection. Way too new. No way to imitate her, but useful to rethink my fascistic Plot Master tendencies due to her mazes and see her new and startling avenues for human lives. Her stories create fissures in my habitual writing practices. I like that sensation.

Film? Hard for me to say “great” re films. I lack any expertise. I’m partial to comedies, and like to think about films or their scenes as teaching aids for my writing workshops. The notion that the Seven Deadly Sins & their matching virtues are the writer’s best friends caused me to use the comedy Intolerable Cruelty in my classes, almost instantly after my first viewing. Terrific teaching tools for scene and character work. A lot of fine dialogue in there, commedia dell’arte, boffo style. But constructed like all good comedies as tight as a Rolex watch. The 400 Blows electrified me as a young man and provided an unattainable model (and a goad) for story writing. For filmed drama, I seem to remember Scofield’s King Lear as an extraordinary experience. Then Kurosawa comes to mind, too, Ran. But great stage performances stay with me more because they are live: Tom Courtney in She Stoops To Conquer, in London. Two Shepard plays: Ed Harris in Fool For Love and Jim Haynie in True West both in San Francisco.

What are you currently working on?

A Fake Memoir, Whack Jobs, about my first year in college as a football scholarship player. I must get back to it this summer.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

a second review of wild horses;

a little review in the Telegraph Journal by Michael Landry (there doesn't seem to be a link to the specific piece, rec'd as a pdf), February 27, 2010:

Written during rob mclennan’s stint as U of A’s writer in residence, wild horses is not just a view of the Ottawa poet’s Western home. It’s an exercise in understanding a new place stripped of verbose, technicolour depiction. Like the titular ‘wild horses’ these poems explore the difficulty of wrangling words to convey the sense of things. With peculiar phrases mclennan translates the thrilling unfamiliarity of new city.

Barbara Godard, 1942-2010

a sad note from Kate Eichhorn: On Sunday evening, literary critic, cultural theorist and translator Dr. Barbara Godard [pictured, left] passed away in Toronto. The author of over 200 articles (some reprinted in her 2008 book, Canadian Literature at the Crossroads of Language and Culture) and editor of several edited collections, Barbara played a major role in creating new critical approaches to Canadian and Quebecois writing, especially innovative women's writing. Barbara was deeply committed to working in collaboration with colleagues and students as well as writers, artists and activists. In 1984, she founded the journal Tessera with Daphne Marlatt, Gail Scott and Kathy Mezei. For many years, she served on the editorial board of Open Letter. In addition to her research and writing, Barbara supervised several generations of Canadian literary critics and cultural studies scholars. She will continue to have a tremendous impact on Canadian literature and culture, both terrains she helped to write.

influency salon second issue now online;

The second issue of Influency Salon: Engaging Conversations with Contemporary Canadian Poetry is now online, with contributions by Michael Boughn, Margaret Christakos, Gary Michael Dault, Chris D'Irio, Sonja Greckol, Joan Guenther, Maureen Scott Harris, Claire Lacey, Margot Lettner, Norma Lundberg, Tanis MacDonald, Lynn McClory, Chantal Perrot, Meredith Quartermain, Jenny Sampirisi, Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker.

Rachel Zucker, museum of accidents

I’d pay a thousand kopeks for a story I wouldn’t believe.

But you can’t do it because I believe everything,
have seen everything labeled and tagged and valued and sold.

Told and retold to a highest bidder.

We’ve kept the children safe. Our
vows. The lush and sunshiny world: we bought it.

Sometimes, at night, I wish I’d married Norman
Mailer and just once would like to make a man
riding by on a bike lose his balance
and die, make Mailer stop, mid-novel, to watch me
walking through Manhattan, buying nothing, not a thing.

Not happiness, not love, not the antidote or formula or trigger.
Not a pair of well-fitting jeans or self-esteem.

What dark thing, love, have you done to me?
Not dark enough. (“what dark thing”)

There is a formal edge to New York City poet and editor Rachel Zucker’s poetry I have long admired, and a way that she shifts perception, shifts lines, in the first three of her trade collection of poetry that changes in this, her fourth trade collection, museum of accidents (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2009). This is a work pushing a more open form than her previous, and darker as well. Zucker has always skirted the edge of the dark, but these poems seem to have a far better comprehension of what that darkness means, and what the skirting could possibly lead to. In museum of accidents, hers is a more exhaustive joy, citing a litany of those things that can go wrong as we endure, unbeaten. Zucker writes out the best collapses and containments of domestic, even as it all threatens to fall completely apart; the joyous mess of domestic, if you will. museum of accidents is a collection of ordinary madness, a display of things that weren’t meant to happen, perhaps, but did nonetheless and everything still held together, which might sound achingly familiar, I’m sure, to anyone else with a household of three children.

this is my family. mortals on our way to mortality
and around and in and out of accidents.

&

and this is what, just my museum? every country has one.
with rooms of hair and children’s shoes and a woman holding
one child while the tsunami sweeps the other away and a whole city
going underwater and what people eat for breakfast and one place
left on earth without human beings the planet beset with plaque and
a room of women giving birth to babies under anesthesia called
twilight restrained so later they will not appear unsightly – what
medicine was that? accident. and step this way are rooms and rooms
and within these other museums of explosions and planes and fish so
luminous we can’t imagine and words –

&

planes have taken me all over the world
without incident. some brought me
into harm’s way but no harm befell me (“more accidents”)

There is a restraint let loose in these poems, a difference from her previous work, that I very much appreciate; less restraint, but no less thoughtful and carefully made. museum of accidents writes a collection that stretches the boundaries of itself and still holds, wrapping lines around silence and silence around so many lines, as though her writing is transitioning as well. What of the “Long Lines to Stave Off Suicide” (p 12-17), writing, “I couldn’t breathe when I heard it or believe what a good mother / I’ve been just by staying alive” (p 12), or her final piece, “The Death of Everything Even New York City” (p 76). It’s as though this is her 9/11 book, her reaction to the centre of the world as it happened; the book where everything changes, everything changed. Will the first three collections, years from now, be seen as one structural period of her work, with museum of accidents as a transitional, or the beginning of something further? I would say that any and all of her books are worth reading, worth owning, but there’s a dark fear in this collection that is overwhelmingly new; but one, still, held back from taking over completely. At least, there’s that.

12 or 20 questions: with Timothy Quinn

Timothy Quinn's work has appeared in Z Magazine, The New Orleans Review, The Antigonish Review and Whiskey Island Magazine, among others. He currently lives in Toronto.

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

I'd be lying if I said that on the day I finished Octopus Intelligence, the air didn't smell a bit sweeter, the sky seem a bit bluer. And then, of course, about 90 minutes later, my brain stopped producing excess dopamine and I realized I'd need to find something to do for the next 40 years of my life.

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

I suppose I found it harder to write bad prose than bad poetry. Writing bad poetry is surprisingly easy to do. You're likely not even be aware you're doing it. 

As for non-fiction, I've written a handful of essays and have plans for a longer work. I think there's been a great renaissance in book-length non-fiction over the past few years, and I attribute much of it to print journalists pursuing book deals as a hedge against the collapsing news industry. I also think that, for all the misery and corruption that's come of U.S. foreign policy over the past eight years, it's resulted in some excellent journalism.

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?

It's an excruciatingly slow process for me, and not even remotely like Henry & June. 

I do most of my actual writing in Google Docs and Microsoft Word, and then I edit longhand on hard copies, which is environmentally indefensible but frankly the only way I know how to do it. For organizing a book, I switched several years ago from using a sheet of cork board hung on my office wall to using a wiki, which is a lot more portable. Recently, I've also developed a piece of software called Pterotype which is less a collaborative workspace than a place to drop bits of plot and character which I can drag around and think about in different ways.

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

Ideas have weight, and the heavier ones seem to gravitationally clump together in my head until they feel more like a book than a story or an essay. I don't think I've ever had a story unexpectedly blossom into a book, and thankfully I've never started a book that petered out around 15 pages.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 

I find readings a challenge. It's tough finding the right fifteen minutes to perform. I try to choose something that isn't too plot-heavy and isn't all dialogue, because I don't do the voices and I can't do accents. When you're a few feet away from your audience, it's like a John Woo movie where everybody's got a gun to everyone else's head.

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? 

In Octopus Intelligence, I tried to explore what it means to be an individual versus being part of a larger collective. I think there are aspects in which either perspective is both reassuring and horrible. As an atheist, free will and accountability are pretty critical issues for me. I don't have the luxury of just throwing up my hands and saying: sorry, folks, blame the big guy.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think that writers have a responsibility to present the common truth, so I don't have a lot of patience for the notion of an ivory tower intelligentsia. I believe that writers should make every effort to combat the manipulation of public discourse through disinformation. 

That said, I don't think it's a writer's obligation to sacrifice every waking moment fighting the culture wars. A writer should invest in those areas of the public conscience where there's the potential for the greatest injustice, and every writer is obviously going to apply a slightly different calculus to that problem.

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

For Octopus Intelligence, I had an excellent editor named Julie Roorda. She went through the entire manuscript page by page, over and over again, tightening up the language, eliminating redundancies, pointing out discrepancies in tense and timeline; she pulled it apart and then put it back together again without once compromising the story or the voice. Whatever weaknesses remain in the book are entirely mine.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? 

I often pass along Elmore Leonard's ten rules of writing, particularly the last one: "try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip."

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? 

When I'm on a writing project, I work at it every day. Perhaps for just an hour, but I'm pathological about squeezing in that hour.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When I'm stuck, I get the hell away from whatever I'm working on. I go for a walk; I pick up a different project. The idea is to try to change everything about a situation so that I can see the problem in a slightly different light. 

Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn't. There are problems I've encountered as a writer that I needed to solve by becoming a better writer, and that takes time.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

I remember, growing up, a kind of cookie that I don't think you can get anymore, a type of vanilla wafer. Every once in awhile I'll be walking somewhere at night and I'll smell it. I don't know if someone's cooking with the same kind of shortening or if it's just an olfactory mirage, but it's a strange feeling, like catching a draft in an enclosed room.
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? 

I sometimes use music to get into a character's head. I generally have a pretty good idea of what kinds of music each of my characters like, and I'll listen to that music when I'm trying to figure out how they might react to situations outside their control. In the novel I've just started writing, my main character listens to a dispiriting amount of Pet Shop Boys. I guess this is one of the occupational hazards of being a writer.

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

There are a number of writers I like, and I read their books slowly so that their influence on my work doesn't expire. I dread the day I read my last Cormac McCarthy. 

I try not to talk about writers I don't like, but I've found that I learn almost as much from those writers as I do the writers I most admire.

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

I'd love to show my kids the Serengeti.
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? 

This is a bit of a trick question, because it presumes that I'm one of the roughly three Canadians who make a living writing books. In fact, I make my living in software development, which is a refreshingly left brain activity that frees up my opposite hemisphere to write novels.

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

I seem to have an affinity for solitary endeavors, and writing is about as solitary as you can get without winding up in a monastery or on the far fringes of the penal system.

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

Eggars' Zeitoun. Kaufman's Synecdoche NY. 

I've tagged both of these, I think, on my Twitter playlist.

19 - What are you currently working on? 

A novel. Some essays and stories. A blog about extensible patterns in process management.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

12 or 20 questions: with Renee Rodin

I was born and raised in Montreal and in the late 60's moved to Vancouver where I still live and work. My books are Bread and Salt (Talon) and Ready for Freddy  (Nomados).

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?
It was a huge shock, I had no idea I'd feel so exposed and raw and it took me a while to grow more skin.I still get anxious whenever I put writing out. - even answering these questions. But I get over it faster. It has to do with fear of judgment.

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

I'm not sure what I came to first, probably personal prose.

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?

It takes me forever to start something new until suddenly I'm in it. It's slow and fast, in spurts with long periods between. I'm always re-writing but whatever was at its core to begin with is usually still there, though it may not look the same.


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?
It starts with a strong experience, event,  memory,  something that I can’t contain unless I write about it. So far I’ve  been more concerned with individual pieces, a concept, a line, a word, rather than with a “book”.  But the shapes have to fit when you're putting a book together.
 
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m almost sick with nervousness before every reading I do. Afterwards I'm high that I survived.. If I get any feedback on my work that's a bonus.

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 want to keep it real, on my own terms.  I don't look for answers because I'm not sure what to ask. Basically I think we’re always grappling with the same things. All that’s really different now is the speed with which we can find out about what’s happening all over the world.  But that’s a gigantic change, especially politically.

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?
Susan Sontag talked about the writer as "witness" which I like. Though I don’t try to be objective, on good days I'm a funnel.

And the environment has become a source of great concern and consternation because what corporations are doing to our food, water and air is threatening to change our DNA. Rita Wong is doing important work on that now.

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

An editor who can keep your voice and also be tough is a gift.

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

Karl Siegler once told me to let the work dictate the form.
 
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I like the difference in space, being able to move from one form to another. Poetry takes up less space but it creates more.
 
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 don’t have a routine. Often my best time is shortly after I've awakened and had breakfast and am still slopping around. But I’m erratic.

 

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

I try to make something else when I can’t focus on writing. And try to remember that stalling or stopping is just part of the process. 

13 - Betty or Veronica or Archie or Reggie? Drive or fly (or sail)? Laptop or desktop? 

Veronica was more interesting,  I felt sorry for Betty but she bored me,  I distrusted Reggie and found Archie kind of boring too but wished he’d get it together.

I don’t have a car so I take the bus or walk. Sometimes I bike ride. When I have to go long distances, I fly but if I could afford to, I’d take the train.

I use a laptop so I can move it around in the house.

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? 

Aside from reading,  I like films, television, visual art, music, poetry readings, trees, silence, etc.,  Not necessarily in that order.

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

I’m nuts about engaging novels and  punchy short stories and poetry that hurts to read because it’s so perfect. I never know whats going to take hold in me so it all kind of blends together. Sometimes I’m writing, sometimes I’m not.

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

I’d like to get more focused. Keep going. I don't have a game plan.

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 can’t imagine not writing but also might have been a therapist or a film editor.

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

It was easy, natural, fun. No big deal.

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

There are tons of great books around. I just finished Soucouyant by David Chariandy. The last great film I saw was I've Loved You So Long,

  

20 - What are you currently working on?

Personal stories/ essays, not sure how to label them. It's going to be a book for Talon. 

12 or 20 questions (second series);