Ottawa's VERSeFest 2013 schedule now online: March 12-17

The schedule for Ottawa's third annual poetry festival VERSeFest is now online! Running from March 12-17, 2013, it features readings by some of the best Canadian and international contemporary poets, including Emile Zoey Baker, Susan Glickman, Steven Price, Stuart Ross, Mark Tredinnick, Rob Winger, Christine McNair, A.F. Moritz, Anita Lahey, Anne Simpson, Catherine Owen, Chris Jennings, Don McKay, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Eric Lindner, Ewan Whyte, Ken Babstock, Luna Allison and plenty, plenty more.

The Factory Reading Series this year features lectures by Gil McElroy and Nicole Markotić, curated and lovingly hosted by rob mclennan. A number of previous lectures, by Monty Reid, Marcus McCann, Barry McKinnon have appeared online in seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, with pieces by Pearl Pirie and Cameron Anstee forthcoming.

Find the entire VERSeFest 2013 schedule at http://www.versefest.ca

William Hawkins and Greg "Ritalin" Frankson become the first two inductees into the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour, during a ceremony on March 17.

And there are but days left in our Indiegogo Campaign. Lots of items still available!
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/versefest-13?website_name=versefest

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Seth Landman

Seth Landman lives in Massachusetts, and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press collective. Recent poems have appeared in Ghost Town, jubilat, Jellyfish, io, Lit, and other places. He has published a few chapbooks, most recently A Note on the Text (above/ground press, 2012), and collaborates with the poet Seth Parker on Tyoyeu (@tyoyeu and www.tyoyeu.blogspot.com). His first trade poetry collection, Sign You Were Mistaken, appeared in January with Factory Hollow Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
In many ways, the title of the book itself, Sign You Were Mistaken (SYWM), changed the way I went about writing poems. I used to worry a great deal about the quality of my poems, but when SYWM came to me—not as a collection of poems, but as a phrase repeating in my head over the course of a great deal of time—it coincided with a realization that not only would it be impossible for me to ever feel like I got a poem “right,” but that no such thing as “right” existed in the first place. This was extremely liberating, as I’ve never been much of an editor.

The title does not come from the first line of Paul Simon’s song, “American Tune,” but is helped along by that line in retrospect. “Many is the time I’ve been mistaken.” What a great place to start! That’s where I want to begin everything, really. My preferred rhetorical situation is one in which I am already apologizing. For what, I can’t begin to explain.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t know. I’ve always been a far more voracious reader of prose. My favorite books are mostly novels. Also, autobiographies by people like Larry Bird. The first poem that ever stopped me in my tracks was T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” As I’m answering this, I have a vague sense that the writing I like most makes me feel as though time is flying by and I can’t catch it. Or rather that the writing engages with that feeling in a way that feels honest to me. I don’t have a good answer for this question, even though I think about it quite a bit.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I hesitate to say this, but generally I do write quickly, and the writing does resemble the finished product pretty much. My 10thgrade English teacher, Mr. Murray, reminded us one day, “It’s easy to hit the target if you use a machine gun,” and while it’s a troubling metaphor, and he meant it as an argument for concision, I like to think of it in another way. I’m interested in the scatter—all the weird crap I need to say to get at a target I didn’t know I had in the first place. After a reading I did recently from a long poem, Heather Christle told me (I hope I’m getting this right!) that she felt like the poem was made up of episodes, and that sometimes it felt like I was saying, “And now for a very special episode of…” I like that. They can’t all be special episodes. I’m not interested in showing you a bunch of special episodes.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Poems begin when I get the urge to write them, usually starting with a line or a few words. I never have much sense of what is going to happen to them, but more and more I find myself settling into forms over time. When I’m finding myself writing lots of poems in a particular form, writing feels so easy. Other times, it’s excruciating. The best is when I’ve gotten familiar enough with a pattern of thinking that I can write a whole poem alongside a thought I’m having in such a way that the poem itself feels like a scale-model of a moment of my thinking. Those poems are life-savers. I mean that in the most serious way possible.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t know how to answer this. I’ll say that for a few years now, I seem to be getting worse at reading my poems with each subsequent reading. It’s not a skill I’m improving. I’m getting more nervous, to the point that I’m legitimately worried that I’m going to pass out or worse one of these days. At the same time, I love that this is true. For a long time, I wasn’t sure exactly how much I gave a shit about my own poems, and I’m learning that I give a shit big time. When I am reading, I am having a highly emotional, overwhelming experience from which it takes me a lot of time to recover. I’m kind of glad to be able to say that, even if it’s difficult.

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?
Not sure what the questions are, but I’m sure I don’t have the answers. I’m trying to express myself. I can’t think of anything else to say about this that would be true.

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?
It would be convenient to imagine that by expressing myself, I am like a small-town cable access show. Maybe it matters to a few people; probably I already know them. My ambition, certainly, doesn’t go beyond that. Sometimes, I’m trying to explain something to someone, and by the time I’m effectively communicating anything, the whole exercise seems so stupid and pointless. Other times, I’m doing something mindless and/or mundane, and it feels imbued with heavy, almost religious importance. What can I possibly make of these moods? And yet, as a writer, when it works, I feel like something is actually communicated. Something gets across. It’s a total fucking privilege, and I’m afraid that giving a shape to the role could just explain it away.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Difficult sometimes, but with SYWM it has been so wonderful. Emily Pettit edited the book, and she had so many great suggestions about the sequence of the poems. She really took the time to consider my hang-ups and ride out my fleeting moments of bullshit. The book she helped me make—I’m more proud of it than the book I would have made otherwise. I feel like editors often try to change shit just to justify the protocol. There was none of that going on here. It was all essential, and all focused on enhancing the poems as my poems, with all of their problems and warts retained, and not on making them more likeable or something ridiculous/impossible like that.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Shut up.” (I’ve heard it many times.)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (solo to collaborative)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’ve done a lot of collaborative writing, and for a while it felt really easy to flip back-and-forth between my own writing and collaborative writing. More recently, I think my writing has gotten a bit more honest. As a result, it’s harder to feel engaged in shared products. On the other hand, I love the experience itself of writing with another person, so long as the finished product is unimportant. I love the recklessness of writing the best poem ever and not even writing it down, and I would never, ever have the guts to do that all by myself.

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; I’m a slave to whim. I always start the day with a shower ASAP.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Moby Dick, mainly. Failing that, I’ll go to music—Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, stuff like that. The truth is that when my writing stalls, I’m usually pretty content to just turn elsewhere for a while—I watch a ton of sports—and not worry about it.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I can’t think of one. My brain keeps going right to light and color. My mother is a quilter—she makes quilted wall-hangings. Here is a write-up of an exhibit she had a couple of years ago in Danvers, MA. It includes a photograph of a quilt she made for me on the living room wall in my parents’ house. Turn down the lighting a little in this photo, and it smells like home.

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?
Oh, I think all of these things do.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
First and foremost are my friends who are poets, but there’s too much work to list. Melville’s Moby Dick. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. A whole lot of James Schuyler, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles. A stranger—but no less important—influence is Mike Gorman, the TV play-by-play man for the Boston Celtics for my entire life so far. He has this amazing musicality to the way he calls the game. He sounds effortless, but I know he’s not. One time, when I was a kid, we were playing the Bulls, and Gorman—just in the middle of all this chaos—goes, “Tough shot, won’t go down; Pippen’s there for the rebound.” It’s a gorgeous sentence, and he pretty much sang it, and I remember it, like, a thousand years later. You can’t beat that. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to travel to Finnish Lakeland.

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 couldn’t honestly call “being a writer” my occupation, unless I was referring to the freelance writing I do about basketball. Even then, it doesn’t really ring true. I write poems, but there’s nothing occupational about that. That’s answering the letter of the question, but if I’m going to answer the spirit, I don’t know. Maybe a basketball coach? I haven’t figured this out yet. There’s a Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin suggests that he could be a caveman. That sounds pretty good.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
First, I liked writing for whatever reason, and I also loved reading. Later, I wrote enough to become confident in the act itself. Now, when I have an inspired thought, it is instinct to go write it down, and since there’s no way of exactly doing that, I end up writing poems.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just re-read Housekeeping, which I’ve done probably once a year for the past decade. It’s a perfect book, and during this most recent reading I was particularly tuned in to notions of the afterlife. Lately, I don’t feel so stupid hoping there is one. On the other hand, the last great movie I watched was The Virgin Suicides. I hadn’t seen it since it came out on video. Such a beautiful, weird movie! Now that I think about it, both of these works deal with family and loss in some pretty profound ways. Can whatever is broken ever be fixed? Fixed is the wrong word, of course, and certainly there are harms done from which there is no recovering. Not to go too far off on a tangent here, but it seems to me that one of the things we should be learning from science is that our questions matter! Where have we looked, and what have we noticed, and what do we already think before we begin looking, asking, wondering? I’m trying to make a habit out of reminding myself that no one knows anything. I’ll go out on a limb though and suggest that we should probably be nicer to each other.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m finishing up two book-length poems. They go on a bit, and they’re messy, but I really like them. At the end of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau talks about an “unwritten sequel,” and in Moby Dick, Ishmael says, “God keep me from ever completing anything.” I’m not sure how smart it is to embrace this stuff, but I’m writing with it in mind. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

pallaksch. pallaksch. : a poetry journal

In his 1846 account of a visit to Friedrich Hölderlin, Christoph Theodor Schwab documents the poet’s use of a nonsense phrase, ‘pallaksch, pallaksch’, in conversation with those seeking audience and answer from the once pre-eminent, now mad poet of the tower. The idiom served the aphasic Hölderlin as a mode of disengagement, a refusal to refuse or countenance the petitions of a world at once admiring and pitying in its affects. For Celan this amphibology—this ‘Wahnsinnswort’ or ‘madness-word’, to borrow a description from his speech in acceptance of the Büchner Prize—is the inceptive posture of one who would mediate between logos and ethos, structure and praxis—the effulgent babble of a prophetic countenance turned to face this time, always here and now. Hölderlin had attempted such a pose, his eyes “spoken blind,” the poem states, “by their ‘a riddle is the purely originated’”, and it left him in precisely the madness that inaugurates Celan’s poetical stance—not a poetics of absence, as some would have it, but rather of a presence in defiance, in retreat.

            The idea for this magazine came out of a series of discussions on the most general of poetical concerns between myself and Elizabeth Robinson. During these exchanges, it became increasingly clear that Elizabeth and I shared something in our approaches to both the decipherment and composition of such work. The commonalities of perspective did not run along usual lines; a general appreciation for lyrical elements, perhaps—for the materiality of poetical discourse, as it were—but not for any style of experiment or assemblage made manifest thereby. We appeared, rather, to be focusing on a vector in the character of discourse, to use Spicer’s term, a directionality variable in its aim, but particular in its attempts to ground the externalities of reference in a question—the portent of the Seinsfrage, in Heideggerian language, a ceaseless movement towards that’s no less proffered as complete. We’ve conceived it as an annual affair, recognizing that some inclination otherwise may come upon us in time. Both well-established and relatively unknown poets are represented, each given enough space (perhaps rope) to stake a claim, or reach an end, as the case may be. We’ve made a point of selecting work of divergent style and approach, with hopes that in collection there appears some sort of reason, if not precisely rhyme. And so caparisoned with ambiguities too numerous to name, we point our fingers at the real, and…

S. J. Seidenberg, San Francisco

July 25, 2012

With that weighty introduction comes the first issue of the annual pallaksch. pallaksch.: a poetry journal (2012), edited by Steven Seidenberg and Elisabeth Robinson and published by Instance Press, somewhere between San Francisco and Boulder. Building issues through solicitation only, this first contains works by Bridget Carson, Beverly Dahlen, Lew Ellington, Kevin Killian, Colleen Lookingbill, Kimberly Lyons, David Mutschlecner, Steven Seidenberg and Martin Corless Smith. Despite the number of writers working on longer forms, length in literary journals is more a rarity than one might imagine, but for the rare journal such as Buffalo’s P-QUEUE, The Malahat Review’s long poem competition, or George Bowering’s long-late IMAGO carving out space for longer forms. Sometimes, discovering individual poems in scattered journals simply aren’t enough to get a sense of what any particular writer might be working on. Still, I’m slightly frustrated by the lack of bios in their pallaksch. pallaksch. : a poetry journal; I know we have the internet now, but just who are some of these writers?

A Victorian Poem

                        For EB

Yes, dear papa, Oscar Wilde came to tea

And his lips were, what was it,

A liver dissembled? Even though, I

Sat on the lawn at his hem

And wondered at the things he said

And the way he played all around us

With his lazy crazy words and hands

Like something white underwater.

And afterwards Mama, we had taffy

And suet and horribly nice biscuits that

Sank in the sea. Good-bye,

Parasols. My neck itches and so

Does my waist.

I will go read a book and roam.

I will unbutton my throat

And perform on the pianoforte

Something like a march

But that falls apart farther on

Into ribbons of brown split sound

Of a late, fly-driven afternoon. (Kimberly Lyons)

The range here is particularly interesting, from the more visually-attuned poems of Colleen Lookingbill and the stunning stretches of Bridget Carson, to the semi-autobiographical poetics of Kevin Killian and collage-hesitations of David Mutschlecner. Somehow, even with the longer sections, each intrigues enough to make me want to see more. Literary annuals don’t last as long as they should or could, and yet, New American Writing has managed more than three decades so far; any new literary venture is both brave and foolhardy, and I look forward to seeing how this journal develops.

from my window

lumps of clouds and buildings through the pine branches as always

gray rough the news. eating through the seed in the feeder the finches

the street sparrows, a pair of young white-crowns

and the buildings green

gray the towers

the Bank of America a golem a thing

we here spread out along the streets below

a thing that runs through us that makes us quiet or angry

the doves coooooo (rising note) coooo space coo

ding dong bell.

soft fluffy things

the myth of narcissus (Beverly Dahlen, “from A Reading”)

Susan Howe, Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker

I was originally asked to contribute an essay for a collection called Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, edited by Charles Warren, with an Introduction by Stanley Cavell, because of a book I once wrote about Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Although this seemed a strange reason to assume I could write about nonfiction film, I was drawn to the project because of the fact of my husband’s death and my wish to find a way to document his life and work.

Recently, New York publisher New Directions announced the return of a “reincarnated version of the ‘Poet of the Month’ and ‘Poets of the Year’ series James Laughlin published in the 1940s” through the return of a reincarnated version of their “Poetry Pamphlets” series. The first in the series to appear is Susan Howe’s Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker. The following three, released concurrently, are Lydia Davis and Eliot Weinberger’s Two American Scenes, Bernadette Mayer’s The Helens of Troy, NY, and Sylvia Legris’ Pneumatic Antiphonal, in addition to forthcoming works by Nathaniel Tarn, Alejandra Pizarnik, H.D. and Forrest Gander. American poet and scholar Susan Howe’s entire oeuvre, one could argue, is entirely focused on and around the fact of documents, whether archival or otherwise. Her poetry and her non-fiction/critical prose circles around and centres upon the document, from the creating of documents, to questioning to the dismantling of documents, and even into the marginalia. “Some of my earliest memories are film memories confused with facts.” she writes, in section “VIII.” In the passage quoted above, Howe’s opening paragraph, she immediately connects this work to some of her earlier books, referencing her infamous My Emily Dickinson (1985; reissued 2007) and her previous trade work, That This (New Directions, 2010), which was an extended series of prose and poem fragments that made up a work of mourning, “an essay about Howe’s husband’s sudden death.” Through her opening paragraph, she connects her Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker to That This nearly to the suggestion that the new work is an extension of the previous. Her late husband, David Von Schlegell (1920-1992), an American abstract artist and sculptor, enters the text quietly, on more than a couple of occasions. As she writes, “Since David died I can look at photographs of him, though I still haven’t been able to look at the video copy of a home movie his daughter sent us in 1991. […] Because the camera operates at sixteen frames per second for old home movies, and speed is silent. Because your moving image would rupture the suture of sound projection.”

A mark is the face of a fact. A letter is naked matter breaking from form from meaning. An anagram defies linear logic. Any letter of the alphabet may contain its particular in-dwelling spirit. A mark is a dynamic cut. Dynamic cutting is a highly stylized form of editing. Sequences get magpie together from optical surprises, invisible but omnipresent verbal flashes, flashes of facts. A documentary work is an attempt to recapture someone something somewhere looking back. Looking back, Orpheus was the first known documentarist: Orpheus, or Lot’s wife.

  Wavering between the profit and the loss

In this brief transit where the dreams cross

—T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday

Even through the weave of an analysis of Russian film, Howe punctuates her points through the introduction of lyric, allowing the prose to resonate across beautiful lines. To write of film, Howe writes about the space of film, which allows and includes personal reminiscences of watching matinees as a child, Russian history, montage, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, to home movies from her late husband’s collection. In the realm of creative non-fiction, Howe’s prose work manages to balance two divergent thoughts at once, blending her essay on non-fiction film and the more personal elements of her life. The two are blended so well as to become difficult to distinguish. Given the way her last couple of trade books have been anchored by pieces such as these, I am very looking forward to seeing the possible longer work that this essay includes.

The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsy often mixed documentary footage with fiction. He scattered professional actors, stagehands, friends, and family members throughout his films just as he arbitrarily blended time periods with international and domestic situations. The project he variously titled, A White, White Day, Atonement, Redemption, Why Are You Standing So Far Away, even Martyrology, was to include fragments of straight interviews between his mother, Maria Ivanova, who had once been an actress, and himself, until he abandoned this early cinema-vérite approach and replaced the interview format with acted scenes. Mirror is partially based on his memories and her memories of life before, during, and after the war. The actress Margarita Terekhova plays both his wife and his mother, while Maria Ivanova is herself and acts her mother. Ignat Daniltsev plays Tarkovsky’s son Ignat (really Andriuska) and Alexi (Andrei himself) as a boy. Olga Yankovsky is the director’s film father, while his real father’s poems are read off-screen by Arseny himself. Real or acting, the characters have the same reflection in whichever mirror serves as camera for the filmmaker for his cinematographer. They can pass back and forth from one to the other but that’s what movie acting is because there are no wings to the screen any soul can be the body.

Distant woods beautiful auspicious morning at evening a sudden west wind soughing through white flowering meadow.

Facts are perceptions of surfaces.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Fleming

Anne Fleming’s latest book is Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar 2012), whose stories netted some nice awards and nominations. She divides her time between Vancouver and Kelowna, where she teaches at UBC’s Okanagan campus.

The photo credit is Fionna Chong, if you put such things up.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
At first, it didn’t change my life. I was proud of the book and very happy it had been published and it brought me some small attention that I appreciated. Then it was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Award (which phone call I initially received assuming it was a friend playing a prank, even though none of my friends are prank-playing sorts) and the next day I was fielding phone calls from agents, which struck me as absurd and funny and lovely and wrong. It was the same book the day before as the day after.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I didn’t come to fiction first, but poetry. My first publication was two poems in Poetry Canada Review. Poetry has this pow that I’m gaga for. But I think maybe I’m not quite smart enough for poetry, or maybe not enough of a philosopher for poetry. Or something. I don’t actually know what it is that poetry editors see or don’t see that causes them to turn my poetry down. (That’s not totally true. I have an inkling. The poetry is too glib or tries to conclude or is all surface or is shiny, something along those lines.) Despite that first publication, I’ve had more success writing fiction than poetry and that tipped the balance for me. Plus my poetry was becoming more and more narrative. I would start things as poems and then see they were best realized as fiction.

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?
No time to start, a long time to finish.

Though I write notes when I am stuck and when I am envisioning where the story will go and how it will progress, notes are never what help me move on. Writing scenes helps me move on. Once scenes exist, I revise and shape and move them. Oddly, though it doesn’t feel that way to me, their final versions are often quite close to what I originally wrote. I have even, when working on long projects, re-written scenes forgetting I’d already written them once, and had them come out almost word for word. Scary.

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?
After I’d written three stories each with completely accidental circus references and noted additionally I was working on a story whose main character was a woman with facial hair, viz., a bearded lady, I knew I was working on a book called Gay Dwarves of America.

The novel I’m working on began when I read a review of a book called Witchcraze.

The stories in Gay Dwarves began this way:

–      when I saw a guy on a unicycle waiting for a light on the UBC campus

–     when I had to write a story for CBC radio in a weekend and was afraid I would not be able to finish one or would not like it so I began three, one that started with the Asian pear on my desk

–     when I read an news item about a parent in Toronto who throttled his kid’s hockey coach

–     when I worked backstock at Mountain Equipment Co-op and thought what an amazing setting for the big opening number of a musical the stockroom would be with its triple banks of fleece and workers running up and down ladders and sliding across the floor on rolling bins

–     when I saw a woman going into SFU’s downtown Vancouver campus who looked exactly the way my aunt, who died the year I was born, would have looked had she lived

–     when I experienced delight happening upon very particular affinity groups on the internet, such as Friends of the Chalet School (http://www.chaletschool.org.uk)

–             

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings. Used to be they were helpful in editing, too. I’d notice an urge to skip lines (boring, unnecessary) in front of an audience that wasn’t there when I read aloud to myself alone. Nowadays I catch those before reading to an audience. Readings are delicious affirmations.

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?
Nah. Not really. I am just trying to create an immersive, surprising, delightful, interesting and emotionally satisfying reading experience for another person akin to the ones that have most satisfied me.

I like writing that is playful. I like playfulness that has substance behind it.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think the writer’s role is multiplicitous. What we write is constitutive of our culture. It both comes out of it and creates it. I think writing can effect social change but doesn’t always or even often. There have been several studies lately that affirm what I think writers and readers instinctively know, which is that reading creates empathy and therefore fosters understanding.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Neither.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (novels to short fiction to plays)? What do you see as the appeal?
If I had more material success with any genre other than fiction, I could answer this better. Perhaps this is my answer: I finish fiction. I find ways to finish it and put it out into the world. My plays and screenplays have never got out there. They may yet. Or not. I’m sanguine.

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?
Before I had a kid, I used to work in the evenings. I loved the wide-open feeling of the night stretching before me. There’s a line in a P.K. Page poem “The Stenographers” about how sometimes (in their imaginations?) the stenographers’ pens break free like a sled dog broken free of its traces (I think that’s the image, I haven’t double-checked to see if I remember correctly). Sometimes, at night, I feel like that. Suddenly I am not labouring anymore at pulling the sled, I am scampering off across the snow.

Nowadays I plod along in the time between school drop-off and pick-up and try to eke out some crap that I can later turn into dross and then, you know, like, better stuff. 500 words is good.

I check email too often.

This is when I’m not teaching. When I’m teaching, I can sometimes take one day a week to do the above.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I often turn to another writing project: switch from adult novel to children’s novel, or novel to essay, or novel to poem.

I don’t know if these things help or not:

Playing ukulele.

Knitting.

Swimming.

Weeding the garden.

Household chores.

Reading poetry.

Taking the bus. (Getting out of the house and amongst people.)

They may simply be ways of avoiding writing.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of Toronto’s ravine dirt, which I once defined in a poem as the smell of copper and old poo.

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?
Yeah, no. Not in a direct way. I try to write from life, not books. Although life includes books, so—shrug—I don’t know. I have, upon occasion, recognized a character I’m working on as book character (this happens particularly with mothers), whereupon I have stopped myself and recast from life.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Dickens. Alice Munro. Italo Calvino. Jane Rule. Jane Austen. Nikolai Gogol. Dionne Brand. Lynda Barry. Lorrie Moore. George Saunders. Lydia Davis. Diana Wynne-Jones. Dostoevsky. Virginia Woolf. Dennis Lee. Toni Morrison. Alison Bechdel. Rebecca West. Al Purdy. Margaret Atwood. Susan Holbrook. Jake Kennedy.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Boarding school. By which I mean, maybe, an artists’ retreat. Oh, wait. I have done that. Banff.

I haven’t built a house.

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?
Librarian.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Pleasure twinned with difficulty. The juiciness of words. Recognition.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Antagonist, by Lynn Coady. Note perfect. I read it last month. I haven’t seen a great film in a really, really long time. Like, what, The Triplets of Belleville? That long. Being John Malkovich long.

20 - What are you currently working on?    
I am working on a novel set in 17th century England and maybe Hudson Bay about two children orphaned by plague.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2013 edition: Saturday, June 15

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

    the ottawa
    small press
    book fair

spring 2013 edition
will be happening Saturday, June 15
in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre
(on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

contact rob at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com to sign up for a table, etc.

"once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan & James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada..." Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.

$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6;

send by June 1 if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables. for catalog, exhibitors should send name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered & any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any).

& don't forget the pre-fair reading usually held the night before, info tba! also,

due to the increased demand for table space, exhibitors are asked to confirm far earlier than usual. i.e. -- before, say, the day of the fair (there might be no space left!).

the fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels,cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including (at previous events) Bywords, Dusty Owl, Chaudiere Books, above/ground press, Room 302 Books, The Puritan, The Ottawa Arts Review, Buschek Books, The Grunge Papers, Broken Jaw Press, BookThug, Proper Tales Press, Phafours Press, and others. happens twice a year, founded in 1994 by rob mclennan & James Spyker. now run by rob mclennan thru span-o. questions, rob_mclennan@hotmail.com

free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. we are unable to sell things for folk who can't make it, sorry. also, always looking for volunteers to poster, move tables, that sort of thing. let me know if anyone able to do anything. thanks. for more information, bother rob mclennan.if you're able/willing to distribute posters/fliers for the fair, send me an email at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com and for information on this or other small press book fairs across Canada, be sure to check out http://www.smallpressbookfair.blogspot.com/

http://www.smallpressbookfair.blogspot.ca/2013/01/the-ottawa-small-press-book-fair-spring.html

Public Figures, Jena Osman

Holding a golden sword and an enormous Bible, Jonnie Ring stands on a high pedestal behind the faculty club at Temple University in North Philadelphia. On one side of the pedestal is a long inscription:

Johnnie Ring was the youth whose example in life and heroism in death provided inspiration that led to the founding of Temple University. In the war between the states, he was personal orderly to captain Russell H. Conwell of the 46^th Massachusetts infantry. The moving forces of his life at that time were his religious faith and his devotion to Captain Conwell. When a surprise attack routed Union troops…

whatever he’s covering in there        my only concern is

that child right now      once he gets away I’m good with it

… it was Johnnie Ring who raged across a flaming bridge and through enemy gunfire to retrieve from his commander’s tent the ceremonial sword presented to the captain by the city of Springfield. He brought back the sword, but he died that night of his burns as Conwell knelt by his cot in prayer. the incident turned Conwell to the ministry as a life work and later to the founding of Temple University. He vowed to live a life for Johnnie Ring as well as for himself … eight hours of work a day for Johnnie Ring, Conwell would never have told America the story of the acres of diamonds, nor would he have built the University that enabled multitudes of young men and women to realize the promise of that story.

Like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, Conwell told the story of Johnnie Ring compulsively. However, evidence shows that Ring actually died of tuberculosis six weeks after the attack in question. In addition, on the day of Johnnie’s death, Conwell was under military arrest and in the middle of a court-martial for being completely absent during that attack. He was charged with “shamefully abandoning his command in the face of the enemy.”

Philadelphia poet Jena Osman’s fourth trade poetry title, Public Figures (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), works from a self-described central question: “statues of people in public spaces have eyes, but what are they looking at?” Part lyric poem, part prose-poem and part essay, Public Figures explores the nature of who we make tributes for and of whom, and what stories we claim to be celebrating; it explores the idea of what history remembers and what it forgets, and the knowledge that the hero to one could be villain to another. Does the purpose of statues change as new information on the subjects surface?

Osman might be interested in Ottawa’s own “Indian scout” statute, moved and repurposed more than once to a different part of downtown, or the statue of Samuel de Champlain, infamously and incorrectly depicting the explorer holding his astrolabe upside-down.

Hers is very much a documentary poetics, exploring historical and archival facts to compose poems, akin to works byJuliana Spahr, Pattie McCarthy and Cole Swensen, and even Sarah Mangold’s chapbook Boxer Rebellion (g o n g, 2006), managing to utilize real information in new and creative ways, and using facts to add to a piece, as opposed to simply repurposing as literature. Given the glut of poetry composed with research, most of which manage to do little than regurgitate, writers such as Osman are a rarity, adding to the mix her own queries on what research claims is already known. As the press release tells us, her work explores “the stance of the soldier, the viewer, the reader and the writer.” An architect of complex maps, Osman’s exploration of the multiple point-of-view in Public Figures becomes the central point, and one that is questioned throughout. Through Osman’s explorations, we are reminded of the dangers of reducing history to a series of icons, and forgetting to ask certain questions. The blend of structural threads through the book are interesting, from the prose-sections interspaced with couplets of poetry, run through the collection as a kind of Greek Chorus, predominantly along the bottom of pages to finally pool a dozen pages at the end. The final page reads:

racetrack. fly a bowtie. who operates the ball? the screens

sweep you into the world. you give the customer what he

wants. an aerial stakeout. You get spun up and then called

back. You track the heat signatures and create a narrative.

spark the target in infrared. you’re above the weather.

everything relies on visual confirmation, action no longer

sensation.