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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am seriously reconsidering this argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rubicon Press' [Edmonton] Second Annual Midwinter Chapbook Competition

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

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

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

All entries should be sent to the following address:

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

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

12 or 20 questions: with Andrew Pyper


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


1 - How did your first book change your life?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can it be both?

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

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

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

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

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

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

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

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

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

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

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

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

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

20 - What are you currently working on?

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


12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Lynn Coady

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


1 - How did your first book change your life?


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?


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


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


Both.


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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


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


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


14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?


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


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


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


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


Learn another language.


17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?


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


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


I'm not good at anything else in particular.


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


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


20 - What are you currently working on?


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


12 or 20 questions archive

sick notes;

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

But enough about me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 or 20 questions: with Karl Jirgens
KARL JIRGENS, B.A. Hons (Toronto), M.A., Ph.D. (Distinction) (York), is a specialist in contemporary literature with a focus on Canadian. He is the author of Bill Bissett and His Works (ECW), Christopher Dewdney and His Works (ECW), Strappado (Coach House Press), and A Measure of Time (Mercury Press) and has edited a book on Canadian painter, Jack Bush (Coach House) and another on poet, Christopher Dewdney (Wilfrid Laurier University Press). His scholarly articles on postmodern/ postcolonial literature appear in international journals such as La Revista Canaria de Etudio Ingleses (Spain), Q/W/E/R/T/Y (France), Open Letter (Canada), and World Literature Today (USA). He wrote the entry on Jacques Lacan for the Dictionary of Literary Biography edition on Twentieth Century European Cultural Theorists. His fiction and poetry appear in Canadian journals such as The Tamarack Review, Only Paper Today, Impulse, Descant, The Journal of Canadian Fiction, Inter, Filling Station, and internationally in The Ontario Review (USA), Tyuonyi (USA), UNIverse (Germany), Essex (USA), the International Symposia of Concrete & Visual Poetry (Australia), and Offerte Speciale (Italy), among others. His fictional works have been anthologized by Coach House Press, Black Moss Press, and Mercury Press. Jirgens is a grand-master of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do. His theatre / performance works have been presented nationally and internationally including at the Ultimatum Fest in Montreal and at the INTER-Festival in Quebec City. Karl Jirgens has edited Rampike, the international literary journal of post-modern art and writing, since 1979, and he is currently Head of the Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor (Canada).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Before I answer that question, I’d like to say that you're doing great work with this interview series and it is energy like this that is really fundamental to the grass roots of writing in Canada. One time when I interviewed Clark Blaise he said to me that it's through independent editors and small presses that good stuff like this happens. Unless someone like you has the gumption to get the info out there, it remains half-submerged. So, kudos to you and thanks for doing this series!

As for how my first book changed my life, the answer is "modestly." I had some strong reviews in the Globe and Mail, Books in Canada, Quill & Quire, the usual places. All very affirmative. Sales for Strappado (Coach House) were good, but collections of short stories don’t really make or break careers, especially in Canada. Still, it put me on the map and I was able to tour around and do readings across the country, and that was great fun, thanks largely to the Canada Council for the Arts.

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

I’ve only been working at the University of Windsor for 4 years now. I’m the Head of the English and Creative Writing department. Before that I had a teaching gig up in Sault Ste. Marie with Laurentian University, and before that I taught at Guelph U, York U and University of Toronto. I was one of the literary denizens of Toronto, where I was born and raised, and where I lived most of my misspent youth.

3 - Where does a poem/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?

I like to conceive of an over-riding concept for a book. I’ve been working primarily in short fiction but like to link up stories in suites so that they can be read in a series and still make sense, kind of like an Aleph (as Borges called it). That is, my stories are different facets offering related perspectives onto a primary topic. I like to think of them as “novel” collections of short stories (pun intended). In Strappado I was interested in the periodical chart of valences, atomic structures of atoms, and the elements as they permeate quotidian life. In A Measure for Time (Mercury Press), the common element was time as it affects our lives. That book had one central character recurring through the suite of stories. I’ve also written scholarly studies of other authors including bill bissett and Christopher Dewdney (ECW Press). Their biographies, the critical responses to their writing, and their literary works themselves become the focus. I’ve also edited some books including one on Canadian painter Jack Bush. I studied at the Ontario College of Art and have a strong sense of visual art. Actually, I began Rampike at OCAD. On the other hand, sometimes I’ll produce individual chapbooks which become conceptual works of art where, the concept, medium, execution, and subject are all inter-related to the scope and manner in which the book is produced. One of these chapbooks includes my Shirt Cantata which is an encomium on the aesthetics of a variety of shirts and employs the lexis of sartoria. Or, another chapbook, titled Vortext, involves a series of words spinning out of an actual physical hole punched in the middle of the publication. As one flips through the pages, words spin out in ever greater volume. It is about centripetal and centrifugal linguistic movements. These latter approaches are connected to the conceptual art movement, but I like to think that the words themselves sustain reader engagement as well. So, for me, concept and structure need to be integrated. That’s why I initially published Rampike magazine in its tall format (6 inches wide by 17 inches tall) because it permitted long hunks of text to be read without interruption. And it fit neatly on the back of a toilet seat in one’s private “library.” But recently the major chains refused that format claiming it was too difficult to handle so they forced me to switch to a more conventional shape or they’d refuse to carry it. In many ways business and creativity can find themselves at odds. I guess one of the challenges facing any artist is to resolve that oddity.

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

Definitely part of the creative process. My texts, including my short fictions have a performative edge. For example, my short story “Watch. Watching.” (recently, anthologized in The Closets of Time edited by Richard Truhlar and Bev Daurio, Mercury Press), is based on the way we become our own fictions through the interventions of memory distortion and time. When I present that piece, I offer a minimalist performative edge in the form of a stop watch connected to the microphone as a read. The watch stops three seconds after the narrative stops. Simple, but effective. It was a big hit at the Wilfrid Laurier Poetry Festival, last fall. My recent critical writing is related to inter-media performance which is an area that I worked in for years and continue to develop. I’ve done inter-media performance pieces at major international festivals such as the Ultimatum Fest in Montreal and the on-going INTER Fest in Quebec City. I’ve also done shows in other Canadian cities including my former home town of Toronto, as well as in the U.S. For example, one piece (“Performance for Solo Rider” is based on the last chapter of A Measure of Time and incorporates elements such as a rider on a stationary bicycle, semaphore, second performer executing choreographed martial art movements, rapid changes of costume, plus television imagery, slide imagery of the R34 Dirigible crossing a crescent moon, audio-tape narration, whistling water-kettle on a hot-plate and coffee pot with Melitta filter. It helps that I hold an advanced black belt in martial arts when executing the physical movements. The performance inter-relates the flux of anti-matter particles in the universe, to the Brady-cardial response and the act of making a cup of coffee, featuring audio-taped tour-de-force language play integrated as a satire on the nostalgia associated with commodity culture. I like to work with electronic media in some of my linguistically oriented performance events. I’ve also collaborated with musicians, dancers and visual artists, most recently to create a piece on the Equinox with the In-Fuse inter-media music and performance group. We presented that collaborative piece on the evening of the autumnal Equinox in Windsor.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Well, for me the main question that has always mattered is that of the medium of writing itself. Co-related to this, I have a strong sense of literary form and structure going back to ancient world cultures (Greco-Roman, Nordic, Asian, etc), with reference to the integration of myth and form. But, I am more interested in writing as a medium. In that sense, I’m coming out of a tradition that aligns itself, in modern times, with movements such as Dadaism, the Bauhaus, or Abstract Expressionism, or Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art in particular has strong resonances for me. I’m quite aware of the various avant-garde movements of the past century or so, including ’Pataphysics, Futurism, Cubism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Vorticism, and later movements such as Black Mountain, the Automatistes, Fluxus, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Toronto Research Group (Nichol/McCaffery) Oulipist, but for me most of them are still looking at the same basic question which McLuhan expressed as, “the medium is the message.” So, I like the fact that thinkers like Bakhtin consider the novel, for example, as an infinitely expandable form with endless possibilities. When I worked with McLuhan and later on, interviewed thinkers such as Derrida and Kristeva for Rampike I was noted how much the medium itself remained as the question that most interested me. I like the work of performance related writers such as Robert Lepage, but I am equally impressed with those who are exploring the limits of visual constructions on the page, such as Fernando Aguiar, Reed Altemus, Christian Burgaud, or Carol Stetser among others, or audio compositions by masters such Bob Cobbing, Henri Chopin, or more recently, Jaap Blonk, or Paul Dutton. Conceptual writers such as Christian Bök, Kenny Goldsmith, Darren Wershler-Henry, are interesting to me. But, I also love post-modern fictions that explore the limits of how a story can be told. Along this latter tangent, albeit in a more conventional but sophisticated and subtle ways, earlier authors such as Gertrude Stein, Sheila Watson, Rudy Wiebe and Nicole Brossard have considered many of these sorts of questions. The question for me involves a precise integration of what you’re saying with how you’re saying it. Subject and structure synergized. I like things that cross borders, that bend genres, that open up the space somehow. I guess it’s better to show than tell, in this regard. I really like inter-media expression with a strong conceptual factor, but there has to be something in it that engages the audience too, something that fascinates. My question to myself is, how to integrate all of that stuff into a synchronized statement?

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

Both, I guess, but it depends on the editor. Some are quite wonderful and sensitive.

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

Both. It is easier in that nowadays I think I know more about what I’m doing, but harder because now that I think I know what I’m doing, I’m a lot tougher on what I allow to get into the public eye. I guess, it is important to take chances on the one hand, but on the other hand to keep an open creative flow happening. It’s a pretty tough balance – kind of like walking the sine-wave shaped line between the “yin” and the “yang” on the ancient Chinese symbol. As a grandmaster in the martial-arts, I have learned that the sine-wave path involves a fine sense of balance in the mental, physical and spiritual dimensions, and has been variously called the “dragon’s path,” or “the way of the warrior” or the “do.” So, there is a Zen like aspect to the creative process.

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

The last time was not the last time, but it was when the pear trees in my backyard dropped crisp golden orbs onto the waiting autumn lawn.

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

Hmm. You mean like, “Never wisen up a sucker, never give a sucker an even break and you can’t cheat an honest man?” I guess I’d say;

“To thine own self be true, but, if you can’t exactly be true, then make up a good excuse and try for weekend visits with flowers and maybe a good bottle of shiraz.”

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

I’ve had pretty good success in fiction, poetry, and performance. Each has its own peculiar requirements, and requires different forms of discipline and attention. I generally work the other way around. I begin with an idea, and then I ask myself which medium it might be best suited for, and if the medium happens to be writing, then I next ask which form it is best suited for (i.e.; poetry, performance, fiction, etc.). In the past, I’ve also had success in creating video-art, sculpture, visual art, graphics, and so on. So, the form of the expression often depends on what fits the concept.

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 find that I move in irregular patterns ranging from routine to non-routine. Sometimes I’ll get in a flow where I work for a certain number of hours a day on a project and can sustain that for up to a year or so. Other times, I’ll have a burst of energy and work day and night until the initial draft is done (that sometimes happens when I’m working on a short story). Other times, I’ll work in bits and pieces, or simply accumulate ideas until I hit the next critical mass when there is another outpouring. But, I find it important to listen when my unconscious starts speaking to me. If I don’t listen, then the unconscious gets frustrated and grumpy and becomes inconsistent in cooking up new ideas.

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

You mean apart from the usual “sex and drugs and rock and roll?” Well, there’s the old trick of writing about the writing block itself. That usually works for most people. Rest, exercise, and good health, are important. Uninterrupted sleep is important if one is stressed out. Travel or time away is also very good. But, I figure either you’ve got it or you don’t. If not, then wait. Why force it? What’s the big rush in producing mediocre works just because one feels under some imagined pressure to do so. When hungry eat. When tired sleep. If the creativity is there, then spill the wine, if not, then hang a fire, or make up your own list of clichés to see if they’ll lead to some archetype.

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

I’ll let the critics answer that one. Both had very good reviews. But to be precise, the first book (Strappado, Coach House) is 91 pages long and has a black cover and features the periodical valence chart for Zinc on the cover as a visual pun (because I used “zee ink to write zee book”). And the first book of fiction was written before the second book of fiction. And the second book of fiction (A Measure of Time, Mercury Press) is one centimeter taller, but exactly the same width, although it is 158 pages long and has a blue and red and white cover with a flying fish on it (which I drew myself and am rather proud of), and has a higher list price, although the first book, which is now out of print might be worth more by now, because it is a collector’s item. But I also wrote a couple of books in between which have non-descript grayish-beige covers and were published by ECW Press and were also fine books. And Strappado is dead-pan funny, while A Measure of Time has a trippy kind of postmodern insouciance, but the book I’m working on now! Well, just ask me about that after it comes out!

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?

David is right of course and is part of a long tradition of thinkers who have discovered this important truth including Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, and more recently, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, and Jean François Lyotard, among many others. I like the sciences, nuclear physics and quantum mechanics, fractal theory, chaos theory, and studies in human perception. Related to all of this are co-related movements in the visual arts such as conceptual art, or movements in music including jazz. I’m also influenced by Zen Buddhism as well as Aboriginal or First Nations world views, particularly Ojibwe perceptions of nature which recognize the planet, including the water, rocks, air as being sacred and “alive” in a very real sense. I guess it was Toynbee who spoke of the undifferentiated unity of any metaphysical experience, and it is interesting, that nuclear physicists are talking about roughly the same thing that ancient mystics have recognized for millennia, and that is that all of space-time may be a simultaneous singularity.

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

I like to look at advertising, politics, environmental issues, pop culture, advertising, garbage, recent developments in science, world history throughout many periods, pretty much everything that’s out there, really. If something seizes on my imagination, then I like to respond to it.

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

Finish this interview. Oh, but by the time you read this it’ll be done. So, then I’ll have to think of something else that I haven’t done. Maybe that will be to think of an answer this question. Oh, but by then I’ll have done that too. I think I’d like to play mini-putt golf with the Dalai Llama if he gave me a decent handicap and it was a nice day. Oops. Played mini-put with the DL the day after I sent in this interview in to you. Tough question. Hmm.

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?

Architect; but it’s really the same thing.

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

In grade 3, my teacher, Mrs. Danelchenko, said that until I finished my writing assignment, I couldn’t go home.

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

Well, rob, of course, there’s your recent novel, White (Mercury). I’ve also been reading Nicole Brossard’s latest book Picture Theory (Guernica) translated by Barbara Godard. That book is a partial response to the theoretical views of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Brossard is brilliant in her command of structure and language and the translation is quite excellent. Oh, and as for a recent greatest film, well, I don’t know if “great” is the best modifier, but, does Pirates of the Carribean III count? The crab and maelstrom scenes are quite something. But, apart from pop-culture, I was struck by Big Bad Love which is a superb low-budget work of art about a struggling writer. Quite marvelous.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel on the Cold War. Can’t say much about it, or it’ll jinx it. I can say that it will have an ironic form that may make readers cry at some parts and laugh out loud in others. In fact, I’ve got to get back to that right now. Thanks for this opportunity, rob!

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Laisha Rosnau

Laisha Rosnau’s first novel, The Sudden Weight of Snow (McClelland & Stewart 2002), was an honourable mention for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her debut collection of poetry, Notes on Leaving (Nightwood 2004), won the Acorn-Plantos Poetry Award in 2005 and Greenboathouse Books published a lovely little limited edition chapbook of her poems, getaway girl, in 2002. Laisha has an MFA from the University of British Columbia, where she was the Executive Editor of PRISM international. She has taught fiction and poetry classes at UBC, SFU, Vancouver Film School, and conferences and arts programs across BC. Laisha lives in Prince George BC with her husband and infant son. When she can, she is currently working on a third novel, after abandoning the second, and a new collection of poems.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Just before my first novel was published I was working as an administrative assistant in an office. One coffee break, I drank from a cup with a rainbow embossed on it along with the words “Live Your Dreams” and I started to cry. Even though my first novel was weeks, maybe even days, from being published, being in an office lunchroom, drinking reheated coffee from a stained cup, hours of data processing ahead of me, I was not living my dreams. Since publishing my first book, I am happy to say I haven’t done any data entry. I now have the street cred to teach writing classes, which I love (though I’m currently taking a break for baby-rearin’). My first book also put me on the other side of the curtain – out of the audience and in the complimentary lounge at some book events, which is very fun.

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

I moved to Pee Gee in April 2005, almost three years ago, though I find that hard to fathom. I still feel like an outsider. I moved here after seven years in Vancouver. While there, I don’t think the geography of the Lower Mainland impacted my writing much. I wrote about other places – the Okanagan, Vancouver Island, the Yukon – that had infected me, got into my blood. Though I feel like an outsider here, the landscape is insidious. It creeps into my work, especially my poetry. I have quite a few poems about pine beetles chewing through trees, rivers and the confluences of rivers. No poem yet about the current ice jam at the confluence of the Fraser and Nechako but I feel it building like so much jammed ice.

Up until I had a baby, I didn’t think gender impacted my work much. The biological ability to carry and birth a baby falls more under “sex” then “gender” but the whole staying home to be the primary caregiver for the buckaroo, that’s gender. It’s a choice I made wholeheartedly. I had heard all about women who had “put their career on hold to raise children,” yada yada – who hasn’t? Somehow, I didn’t think it applied to artists as much as to doctors, lawyers, accountants. I was already used to being at home bit and had golden-hued visions of writing chapters of novels during naptime. Ha! While I am able to write a bit on the edges of my days, huge swathes of my days are consumed by either baby care or thinking about the baby. Right now, I think about him as much as I used to think about my characters and he is infinitely more rewarding day-to-day, so fiction gets the short-shrift now but that feels right for me for now.

I wouldn’t say race impacts my work much but my ethnic background does. I’m of German and Ukrainian descent. The German side of my family has been in Canada longer and the German-ness seems like more of a personality quirk than an ethnic identity. The Ukrainian side, on the other hand, has that “formerly oppressed, against all odds, we cleared the land with our bare hands & now we’re going to sing and dance and eat perogies and be proud of who we are and where we came from, would you like some vodka?” thing going on. My first novel had a Ukrainian element to it and the one I’m currently cooking up in my mind has one as well.

3 - 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?

Most of my poems and fiction begin on a walk for me, with a phrase, a narrative rhythm, an image or a character’s voice. I love to walk. I’ve had a couple of wonderful walking buddies in my life - other writers which is tremendous for conversation - but I do a lot of walking on my own or, most recently, with my son strapped to my back. Somewhere in the rhythm of walking and the ping-ponging of my thoughts bits of poetry and prose emerge. After they’ve bounced around in my mind and on the page for a while, they fall into larger pieces fairly readily.

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

It depends on the day. When I first started writing seriously in my early twenties I took classes with John Lent and Tom Wayman. They both made public readings a requirement so I associated readings as an integral part of the writing process and I learned to enjoy them, despite some wicked attacks of nerves. I went through several years of being in the closet as a writer and not doing any readings. When I emerged, I relished everything literary – workshops, writers’ groups, readings, forums – and they all seem to be on a continuum, from the very private and solitary act of writing to the more public aspects of bringing that work into the public sphere. That said, when I am in the conception and creation stage of my work, I find both attending and giving readings distracting and somewhat counter to my creative process. One of the things I like about being a writer is the great breadth of time devoted to being at home in something resembling pyjamas with books, notebooks & papers strewn about me, the CBC droning somewhere in the background. Getting cleaned up and coherent enough to give a Public Reading, putting on the Public Face of the Writer, seems a bit forced and awkward sometimes but once I’m up there, I generally enjoy it.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My undergrad was in English and I had just enough upper level classes in literary theory to decide I wanted very little to do with it. For me, it was stifling and forced. I remember leaving classes with notions of post-colonial, post-gendered, post-modern badonkadonk swirling round and round my mind, clutching the book in question and thinking, “But, but I thought it was a just really good book…”

The kinds of questions I am trying to answer with my work are: Can we ever really know another person? What is love? Are there any limits to love? Is there such a thing as destiny or fate or is a matter of random choices that leads us to places and people? Is the ice jam at the confluence of two major rivers a metaphor for relationships, an act of God, a random weather event, or all of the above?

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

Both. My first experience working with an editor was with my novel, The Sudden Weight of Snow. My editor was Ellen Seligman, whose reputation as being intense, insightful and thorough preceded her – and was well-deserved. I spent our first few phone calls saying, “Ummm” or “Uh, I’m not entirely sure” or “Can you repeat the question?” It was difficult to work with her because it was both intellectually and emotionally taxing, not because our relationship was difficult. It seemed a bit like psychoanalysis but not for me, for my characters – eg: “But why is she choosing to do this now? What’s changed for her?” We’d have marathon hours-long phone calls that would leave me lying prone on the floor, staring at the ceiling, wondering how I would ever finish the book. That whole experience did seem essential to my novel perhaps because it was the experience I had. My poetry editor, Silas White of Nightwood, had a lighter touch and a great ear for musicality and eye for the line - good in a poetry editor, I think! However, he saw my poetry at a far different stage than Ellen saw my fiction. My poetry sees the light of day a lot more than my fiction. I’ve always appreciated the feedback of other poets and two poets who have remained constant Jennica Harper and Marita Dachsel [see her 12 or 20 here]. They have read and commented on almost every poem I’ve written in the last eight years. In PG, I’ve worked with Gillian Wigmore, Al Rempel, George Sipos and Betsy Trumpener and I’ve exchanged work across the country with Aurian Haller. With fiction, I squirrel it away, spend months then years piling it up and chewing away at it before anyone else sees it. By the time people do, it’s essential – if I lived with it alone any longer I’d grow a tail. Some peer editors who have talked me off the edge during extended bouts of novel writing are Nancy Lee, Charlotte Gill, & Steve Galloway. Thank God for them.

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

Right now, harder. I wrote, sent out for publication consideration, and published my first two books, the novel and the poetry collection, in a state of blissful ignorance and naiveté. It was glorious. I was struck hard by secondnovelitis and, though I wrote innumerable drafts over several years, that novel is currently wrapped in brown paper, sitting in the freezer. I’m not eager to open the package. I think its expiration date may have passed and it might stink.

My life changed immeasurably between the publication of my first book and now. When I started my novel, I was single for the first time in years, I lived in a graduate student’s dorm, and I didn’t even cook my own meals. Time seemed like an expansive and malleable thing and I replaced that lost relationship with a fire of ambition under my ass. I was really happy professionally but I pined for true love, a baby and a house with a yard. Now, I got all those things and I haven’t yet figured out how to write books while feeling grounded and content. That, and my time seems a lot less malleable, or rather someone else is doing the bending and shaping of my time and that someone, though very small and cute, can snap time in half over his wee pudgy knee.

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

I probably have pureed pear smeared on my pants right now. Pears are one of my son’s favourite foods. I brought a box of them back from my parent’s place in the Okanagan. My husband had the wherewithal to puree them and freeze it into cubes, God bless him.

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

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” Isak Dineson

“Don’t come see me until it’s done.” Keith Maillard, my graduate advisor for my thesis, which later became my first novel.

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

Fairly easy in any given month, though less easy day to day or, at times, week to week. There are periods when I move between the two, not effortlessly but manically. Other times, I am in a definite Poetry Period or Prose Period. Generally, when I’m working intensively on either one or the other, I am a single-genre kind of girl. During early drafts, conceptions, generation, etc, I can flit from one to the other, often in fits of fickleness. I love poetry for its ability to capture a moment, an image, or a contradictory feeling in so few lines. I love fiction for its Hugeness, the way it can consume me.

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

Oh, Good Lord. If you’d asked me that question two years ago, I would have been able to outline a very specific, disciplined routine, though I found ways to trick myself into slacking off on a regular basis. If you’d asked me that question last year, I was pregnant, experiencing significant back pain, and had a daily and weekly routine that combined all sorts of physical activity (for the pain) with regimented bouts of poetry (because I could only sit for 15 minutes at a time). Now? I have an eight-month-old. I write when I can. A typical day begins at 6 AM. My son has an internal clock that wakes him almost every morning at that time. Thankfully, I can nurse him and he falls back asleep for 1.5 to 2.5 hours. There was a blessed time in the autumn when I would get up and write while he slept so by the time he woke for the day at about 8 AM, I’d already written for an hour or two. It was lovely but it didn’t last long. A few nights of interrupted sleep and waking every morning at 6 to write wasn’t realistic. I am now going to try to write in the evenings. So far this is theoretical. Right now, instead of writing my own work I am answering these questions, at length apparently. That counts for something, right?

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

I go for walks and I read – anything: novels, short stories, magazines, kid’s books, the back of the cereal box. I put on the CBC, go out and watch people, eavesdrop. I talk to good friends, some who are also writers. I have found that nothing compares to the camaraderie, support, and understanding of other writers, though I suspect a couple of us are a bit co-dependent! (“You’re thinking of throwing your 350 hundred page, twelfth draft, four years in the writing novel in the fire? Go for it, so am I!”)

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

Next question

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?

For me, books come from walking (and, once upon a time in a bike route friendly city, from biking) as well. I don’t consider myself a “nature writer,” whatever that is, but the space and rhythm of moving through the outside world influences my work. I picked up a habit in my undergrad of listening to the same music over and over while I work on a specific project. I listened to three albums while writing The Sudden Weight of Snow. One of them was an Elliott Smith CD. A few years later, a student in one of my classes said to me, “This may sound strange but your novel reminded me of an Elliott Smith album.” I was floored and he got an A (not really; the course was non-credit!) Science is increasingly an influence. The novel that I stuffed in the freezer was about a particle physicist. I’d started to read about physics and everything seemed like a Huge Metaphor to me, still does though that novel is on hold. My husband’s work as a biologist and all the things he tells me about the mating habits of birds and the like have a way of making it into my poetry. But of course, books come from everywhere and everything.

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

I’ve sat here for minutes trying to come up with the perfect list to answer that question. I’m going to stop now and write: too many to list. I’ll leave it at that because I’m obsessive enough that if I listed a few, I’d spend days remembering those that I didn’t mention. (Also, see the answer for question 6 & the name-dropping therein.)

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

I would like to go on a long paddling trip down a river. I’d like to travel to Eastern Europe, which we’re planning on doing this September, and Ukraine, which will have to wait. Some day, I would like to live in a loft with massive windows.

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?

A spy. I know that’s a lame answer because all writers fancy themselves spies; we make the shit up instead of using actual intelligence and tactical manoeuvres. Still, as far as other occupations go, that seems like the only one that would trump being a writer. I used to think I’d like to be a photographer but I have realized, in this era rampant with amateur photographers and surfeit images, that I am not actually as interested in photography as much I thought I was. I spend a lot of time daydreaming and I’m not very observant of the world immediately around me; my eye isn’t sharp enough because it’s turned inward so often.

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

It is the thing I like to do most. The only thing I like as much as writing, perhaps more, is taking care of my little guy. There are other things that I wished I liked as much – I already mentioned photography. Visual art, design, music, cooking…I really wish I was as interested in those as I am in reading and writing but, though I dabble, I also have a really limited attention span for everything that isn’t writing, taking care of my buckaroo, and going on long walks. Boring, but true.

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

The last book that I full-out sobbed during was Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love. I was recently sent an anthology called White Ink: Poems on Motherhood because one of my poems was included, a surprise to me. Because I am in this new mamahood phase of my life, I consumed it, barely coming up for air. The last great film was Charlie Wilson’s War – I’m not sure the film itself is “great” but the context of seeing it was. My parent’s babysat for us on Boxing Day and my husband and I went out for the longest date we had since the baby was born - six hours and part of that was seeing the movie as a late matinee. Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie is brilliant and I could and do read Go Dog Go! over and over – “Do you like my hat?”

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m editing a series of poems, gathering them into a book-length manuscript. I’m also at the most fun part of writing a novel, the part when I am daydreaming about the characters and the place that has brought them all together. I am at the notebook and index card phase of the novel, which is far easier than the part when I actually sit down and write the thing. Now, if I can figure out when I will be able to do that…

12 or 20 questions archive

Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity by Kim Echlin

I’m rather frustrated that I’ve only recently heard of, but at least finally read, Toronto writer Kim Echlin’s graceful little book Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity (Toronto ON: Women’s Press, 2004), published as part of their “Women Who Rock” series. Part essay, part memoir, it makes a fine companion to all the other material by and about Ottawa-born and raised Elizabeth Smart, known predominantly for the heartbreaking lyric prose of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Originally published in England in 1945, Smart’s infamous first novel was misunderstood, dismissed, unseen by readers in her home country, and finally went out of print for twenty years, only to be rediscovered in the 1960s in a reissue available to Canadian audiences (it, along with a later title, The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals, remains in print). No matter what else she wrote or produced throughout the rest of her life (she began publishing again after decades of silence in the late 1970s), it was the first novel that she is known for, both for the writing itself, and the situation of what the novel came out of, namely the doomed love affair she had with the married British poet George Barker, with whom she had four children, and received not a speck of support (he eventually had fifteen children with five different women). Echlin’s “fugue essay” writes around Smart as a woman who wanted the two things that didn’t mesh in 1930s and 40s England, let alone Canada—to be both mother and artist—something that caused her not only years of grief and difficulty, but heartbreak.

The great originality of By Grand Central Station is its use of the first-person voice. The voice belongs to a twentieth-century woman who is ironic and passionate, in love with a married man and pregnant. She knows her literary classics and she has a good ear for the advertising jingles and song lyrics of popular culture. It is a classic romantic love story told from a fresh point of view.

Imagine Romeo and Juliet told by Juliet. She might become Rosalind in As You Like It, teach Romeo how to tell his love, and turn her tragedy into a romance. Imagine Tristan and Isolde told from Isolde’s point of view. Or the Persian Layla explaining why she allowed herself to be taken from her lover Majnun. Imagine any of these romantic heroines telling their stories while pregnant. The pregnant female perspective on a romantic love story and adultery was new. There have been few depictions of unmarried, pregnant women in literature.

The narrator of By Grand Central Station is no victim. Her pregnancy is part of the continuum of her love affair. She willingly welcomes the husband’s betrayal of his wife. She feels no empathy for the husband:

How can I pity him even though he lies so vulnerable up there in the stinging winds, when every hole that bleeds me was made by a kiss of his? He is beautiful as allegory. He is beautiful as the legend the imagination washes up on the sand.

For Elizabeth Smart, it is very easy to let her work be overshadowed by her biography, but Echlin works through both sides of Smart’s life in a balanced and interesting way, providing commentary on much of what was published and even unpublished throughout Smart’s career, including detailed commentary on the early work Dig a Grave and Let Us Bury Our Mother, surrounding Smart’s consideration of not only being a mother, but her conflicts with her own mother, which she never quite got over. In a culture that refused to acknowledge single mothers, and women as artists, it was almost as though Smart was incapable of not pursuing both equally, and intertwined, even as the rest of the world around her pushed as hard as it could back, as Echlin writes:

It is important to remember just how unacceptable it was to have a child out of wedlock in Canada in the 1940s. It is equally important to remember just how unacceptable it still is, in certain circumstances and cultures. Birth control and abortion were illegal in Canada until 1969. Our social services are still required to support young women who are estranged from their families because of babies conceived and born outside of marriage. Though we no longer have “homes for unwed mothers” run by religious groups, we continue to need similar services that have evolved from these roots.

It certainly didn’t help that her mother was her harshest critic of all, interfering whenever she could, from as far a distance as possible, including having all the copies that made it into Canada of the 1945 edition of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept seized and destroyed, with the help of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, a family friend. Even when the novel was subsequently reprinted, her mother only responded with the same ugliness that she had brought to the table from the first edition.

The reissue of By Grand Central Station was a joyful event that Elizabeth celebrated with an enormous party at a former train turntable shed called the Round House. She decorated the great, open space with huge candelabra and buckets of cut flowers and invited everyone she knew. But it was also a year of emotional turmoil beginning with her mothers renewed rejection of the book:

Dearest Betty;
It has disturbed me that you should want to re-publish your book By Grand Central Station … in which you hold up your father & mother to public criticism. Your father gave his life as a result of our mistakes which he so loyally kept to himself that it resulted in stomach ulcers & death…
… In spite of some beautiful poetic writing in your book I am inclined to agree with The New Statesman who a few weeks ago spoke of your book & of George’s “Confessions” as being 20 years out of date. Could you tell me why you should want to revive it when you, yourself have travelled so far since you wrote it. You surely can’t have a desire to lower the stature of your father & mother?

It almost reads as though this enormously talented women who just about everyone admired, adored and fell in love with, still had those closest to her dismissing her work as both mother and artist, and even ruthlessly and carelessly bringing her down at every opportunity.

The struggle between Elizabeth and George took on a new cruelty in Ireland. He and his brother Kit arrived for a month’s visit in December [1945]. George found Elizabeth’s home claustrophobic. There was no money for candles and they spent their evenings in the dark. Elizabeth wrote to Didy: “As for Love, it’s OVER—As for sex, it’s revolting—As for cosiness, it’s no longer cosy—As for desire IT HAS FAILED.”

The brothers ran up bills in pubs and stores until the entire village cut off their credit. Then they went to neighbouring Galway and did the same thing. They told an old shoemaker that Elizabeth would pay for new soles for their shoes when her money came from America. Elizabeth wrote to Didy: “…I loathe George now & I am absolutely cured of him forever—he has been revolting all this time that we were eating potatoes & the little people were knocking on the door with their bills. He & Kit spent (I discovered last night) £40 this last month in the pubs here—while refusing to pay a single bill—or even give cash for food--& then complaining like mad at the lack of it--& it isn’t as if they’d even been jolly or gay—just abject & selfish … he spent all my monthly allowance in London & my family Allowance & won’t pay anything back but gets furious if I mention money or bills. Thank goodness at last the pubs refused also to give credit or cash cheques—but now he’s got a store in Galway to send stuff & cigarettes and will never pay them. And if there are 4 chops for 8 people he east 2 whole ones—Jessica sent him a letter last week, too, saying she’s been hounded by debt collections & George has spent about £150 on nothing not even any fun. He’s been poverty-stricken the whole time.

It seems timely, in fact, even as I’m still going through Between Interruptions: 30 Women Tell the Truth about Motherhood (Toronto ON: Key Porter, 2007), edited by Cori Howard, writing about the contemporary difficulties with what Elizabeth Smart worked in vain to navigate a half-century earlier, being mother, sole caregiver and sole provider, and working artist, something that would be difficult enough today, but at least with far fewer cultural difficulties. With a list of contributors that include Denise Ryan, Monika Deol, Ami McKay, Rachel Rose, Carrie-Anne Moss, Chantal Kreviazuk and Chandra Mayor, it sounds as though Smart had the same drive that fueled writer, producer and editor Cori Howard, wanting children and a creative/work life, as Howard writes in the introduction to her anthology:

For as long as I can remember, I wanted babies and bottles and the whole motherhood thing. Never mind that “the whole motherhood thing” came with no visual image. It was like a grey Polaroid—underexposed and murky. I wanted babies the way I wanted a new sweater—something to hug and snuggle and keep me warm. The desire was deep, passionate and desperately naïve.

And how, exactly, can any man compare stories to any such as these? I still remember running a household until my daughter was four, running a daycare during the day (three toddlers, ten hours a day, five days a week) as my still-partner schooled during the day, later going to work, even as I went out to a café a few blocks away to write three nights a week (needing a space of my own to think, let alone look at a piece of paper with any kind of usefulness), from seven p.m. to midnight; it compares just as easily as it doesn’t. I can still remember how, of the three-or-four hundred members of the “Ottawa-Carleton Caregivers Association,” only two of the members were male, and the other male lived but a block away. It might just not compare in the least.

Echlin’s magnificent, smart and compelling essay moves through Elizabeth Smart’s writing and biography from the point-of-view of her determination against all that worked against her, to be both mother and artist, something she struggled with throughout the whole of her life. Other titles by Smart include A Bonus (1977), Ten Poems (1981), Eleven Poems (1982), The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals (1982), In the Meantime (1984), Autobiographies (1987, Christina Burridge ed.), Necessary Secrets: The Journals of Elizabeth Smart (1987, Alice Van Wart ed.), Juvenilia: Early Writings of Elizabeth Smart (1987, Alice Van Wart ed.), On the Side of the Angels: The Second Volume of the Journals of Elizabeth Smart (1997, Alice Van Wart ed.) and Elizabeth's Garden: Elizabeth Smart on the Art of Gardening (1989), as well as a documentary, On the Side of the Angels (1994), and an award-winning biography by Toronto writer Rosemary Sullivan, By Heart: Elizabeth Smart, A Life (1991).

It makes me wonder what other books exist in this same series?

related notes: some brief thoughts about the short novel;