12 or 20 questions: with Ariel Gordon

Ariel Gordon is the Winnipeg-based author of two recent small press poetry chapbooks. She is a regular contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press' books section and, each September, is Blogger-in-Chief of HOT AIR, the official blog of THIN AIR (i.e. the Winnipeg International Writers Festival). Her first full collection of poetry is slated for publication with Palimpsest Press in spring 2010.

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

By the time my first chapbook came out – The navel gaze, 2008, Palimpsest Press – I was already a dozen years into the writing life, by which I mean attending retreats/workshops/conferences, doing readings at magazine launches, volunteering for local writing organizations, etc. etc.

So publishing the chapbook wasn’t a life-changing event, per se. But ask me again after the full collection comes out next year!

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

I actually came to fiction first, spending long hours composing a fantasy novel in the basement on my father’s ‘work’ computer when I was a pre-teen. He never used it, so I was able to spread out over the rudimentary hard drive, though I must say that it was heaps better than our first computer, a Vic 20.

I don’t quite remember when I started writing poetry, but by the time I started university I had settled into the habit of carrying a notebook with me wherever I went and, most importantly, scribbling madly in it.

Though poetry has been my dominant mode for years and years now, I still think of myself as writer rather than a poet. I’m not sure what that means, precisely, but that’s my negotiation.

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

It depends on the project. Right now, I’m working on two projects: what I’m calling the how-to poems, which are based on articles derived from the wikiHow widget and family poems for a manuscript focused on absent parents.

Some of the individual poems have jumped the fences, in that some of the how-to poems have revealed themselves as family poems and vice-versa, but it’s been sort of interesting to write both completely occasional poems (the occasion being that I want to write a poem) and completely focused, manuscript-driven poems. When it gets too emotionally difficult to continue working on the family poems, I can turn to the how-tos and when it gets boring writing one-offs, I can dive back into the manuscript.

Neither series relies on what I would call inspiration, when I’m driven to the notebook by an image/idea from out in the world. Writing how-to poems is, actually, a useful exercize in quite deliberately beckoning the imagination. It doesn’t always appear – twice now it’s made an appearance while I was driving to pick up my daughter from childcare after a day of trying and failing to come up with anything – but it’s nice to know that I can write okay poetry without the whiz-bang of inspiration behind it.

Another interesting aspect to writing the how-to poems is that when I first started using it as a device last spring, the poems that emerged were sort of funny (How to Effectively Water Your Lawn and How to Sew a Button). Then I did a bunch of work on the family project, and when I returned to the how-tos, they weren’t funny any more. I’m not sure how to force myself to ‘write funny’ when the mood has passed, but I’ve learned two things about this writing life. One, wait long enough and everything will cycle back again and two, you can’t re-create a moment.

Working on what appears to be a tightly themed project also works around inspiration in interesting ways. I find I can work on it in bursts – it takes time to read and think my way in and I only have a limited time inside the project before my concentration breaks or the world intrudes. I had a period this spring where I was inside the project for two full weeks. And part of me was mourning even while in the midst of it because I had other writing obligations (nevermind the rest: house, child, job) that were taking me away from the family poems and I knew I wouldn’t get to stay there for very long.

Besides the age-old complaint of not enough time, when I’m editing the pieces that emerge I find that they accrue a kind of energy together and in my thinking of them that closely resembles inspiration. That feeling doesn’t necessarily help me write new poems but it does help me with the confidence needed to keep going, to know that there will be a next time inside the project, if I read and write and stay still long enough.

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?

I think I blithered on about all of this in my last answer….

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

I organize events at a bookstore for money, so I’m obviously pro-reading. I don’t love every reading that I go to, but I love enough of them to want to fit as many as I can into my schedule.

I’m sort of a wobbly reader in that sometimes I’m perfectly comfortable and even reasonably assured and other times my knees jiggle uncontrollably. But I like the idea that someone’s listening, that my voice can do things with the words that the page maybe can’t do, so I’m striving to be more consistent in my performance.

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?

Why are such different roles and different expectations assigned to men and women, especially around parenting? Why is being an absent parent so gendered? What does it mean that writing about absent parents means absenting myself, at least to some degree, from my daughter’s life?

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’m going to loosely paraphrase a section from Rutting Season, a recent poetry + conversation anthology from Montreal’s Buffalo Runs Press that I’m in by saying that I believe that poets and other writers present people with ways of being and feeling in the world, with choices, with conversation. And I’m all for conversation, even if it’s a limited and stuttering conversation, with many uncomfortable silences. I also believe that as writers we tell ourselves stories as much as we tell other people stories. That that comfort is there for us as writers, even if the material itself isn't comforting…

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

I’m just about to start editing my first full collection and have to say that working with an editor is the part of the process I’m most looking forward to…

Basically, I see the manuscript as a drum and I’m so looking forward to having someone pick it up and give it a good goddamn bang. I want to see what falls out, but most of all, I want to see how it sounds to someone whose ear I trust.

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

I hate advice, but my favourite northern mining-town gothic poet (i.e. Brenda Schmidt) keeps giving it. The most simple and direct and therefore the most effective so far has been: “Good grief! Get to work!”

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

I’ve been writing fiction reviews for the local daily for several years. A four-to-six-hundred word review is a cunning little puzzle, a chance to both stretch and to be ruthless with myself while writing.

I haven’t written fiction in a long time but have recently contemplated returning to the half-finished novel I wrote before Anna was born. Realistically, it’ll have to wait until after she’s in school, because I don’t currently have blocks of time in which to immerse myself in it.

I see the reviews as exercizes. The fiction and poetry are wildly different modes of communicating, but at the bottom, they both attempt to convey thinking and feeling, some record of human endeavour.

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 pay for one or two writing days a week and manage the odd evening, depending on what else is going on. I read constantly but miss the solid hour and a half I got every day when my daughter still napped…

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

For me, stalling isn’t a problem. It’s the stop and start of a day here, a day there and the odd evening that’s a problem. I often think wistfully forward to the day my daughter starts school…

13 - What fairy tale character do you resonate with most?

I’m the troll under the bridge.

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?

Most everything influences my work. Working in a used bookstore. Going for walks in the woods and peering at mushrooms. Writing reviews. Coming from frumpy, grumpy, faded-at-the-knees Winnipeg.

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

I’ve been fortunate to come away from the workshops/conferences/retreats I’ve been to with some great writer/friends: the aforementioned Brenda Schmidt at Sage Hill and through her, Regina’s Tracy Hamon. And at the Banff Centre I met BC poets Gillian Wigmore and Anna Swanson. Having them in my everyday writing life means that I’m not as reliant on the community in Winnipeg as I might otherwise be…

In terms of writings, I’ve been reading quite a bit of what Tanis MacDonald recently dubbed historiographic metafiction of late: Jeanette Lynes’ It's Hard Being Queen: The Dusty Springfield Poems, Rob Winger's Muybridge's Horse, and Steven Price's Anatomy of Keys. Next up is Linda Frank’s Kahlo: The World Split Open.

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

I’m at a loss as to how to answer this because there’s really nothing (I mean, I’d like to get a writer-in-residence gig at some point, but what working writer doesn’t?). Being bad at waiting has its benefits…

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?

If I hadn’t been so determined to be a writer, I would have probably followed my mother into science. The original compromise was to be a science journalist. But six months after finishing J-school, I discovered that if I spent my days writing stories I couldn’t go home and write stories. So I had to choose.

It strikes me, at a distance of ten years from that decision, that writing poetry and writing journalism and being a scientist are all about having a good long look at the underpinnings of things, so maybe I’m still on plan.

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

Arranging words is pretty thrilling.

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

I’m really quite bad at naming favourites, but I read Maggie Helwig’s Girls Fall Down (Coach House, 2008) recently and quite liked that. (And, after seeing her perform a section of it at the last THIN AIR, I can I also still hear her…)

I also found the last couple of writer/mother anthologies – specifically, Double Lives: Writing and Motherhood (MQUP, 2008) and Great Expectations: Twenty-Four True Stories about Childbirth (Anansi, 2008) – quite useful.

I’m blanking on my last great film. Blankety-blank.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m about to start editing my first collection, which is mostly composed of pregnancy and mothering poems. Which will be a side-trip from the absent parents manuscript I’m writing right now. Which involves my parents and my parenting and the story of Thomas Edison and his eldest daughter Marion “Dot” Edison. Speaking of which, I got the best present the other day: a workable working title! Tracy Hamon, gave it to me: Our Boy.

I’m also thinking of putting together an anthology of work generated for/through the May Day Poetry Project, an on-line writing space that’s in its fifth year.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

12 or 20 questions: with Saleema Nawaz

Saleema Nawaz’s short fiction has appeared in such literary journals as Prairie Fire, PRISM international, Grain, and The New Quarterly. Her first collection of stories, Mother Superior, was published in Fall 2008 by Freehand Books and was a finalist for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s McAuslan First Book Prize. She was the winner of the 2008 Writers’ Trust of Canada/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize for her story “My Three Girls.”

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

The best thing that happened with the publication of my short-story collection was the sudden freedom I felt to describe myself to other people as a writer. The project I’m working on now is a novel, so it feels very different in scope from other things I’ve written, even though I’m working with some of the same characters I’ve written about before. It’s a little more unwieldy.

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

Fiction has always made up the bulk of what I read, though I’ve been trying to broaden my horizons. But at this point, fiction is what I know.

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’m a slow writer, usually, but it means first drafts aren’t too far off from the final version.
Sometimes a few paragraphs or pages will come quickly and it feels like magic.

4 - 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?

Everything I’ve written so far has begun in a different way: a line of dialogue, an image, a strange fact I want to mention — and then I follow the story until it feels over. In the case of Mother Superior, I didn’t initially write the stories with the idea of putting them together, so in that sense they combined into a larger project, but it isn’t a linked collection. With the novel I’m working on, I knew at the outset I wanted to write something longer.

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

I enjoy the aftermath of readings: meeting readers and other writers, talking to people one-on-one. I’m on the shy side, so I tend to find readings themselves fairly stressful.

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?

While I’m writing, the theoretical concerns are mostly working in the background. I find I get bogged down if I have too specific of an agenda and I end up straying from the characters. Likely the questions I might cite aren’t the ones that are necessarily coming across anyway!

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 writers inhabit all sorts of different roles. There are so many different kinds of writing and writers. In literature, we expect writers to tell the truth, and the best writing will show us ourselves and the world in a new way...or in a way we knew but didn’t understand until we read it.

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

A good editor is essential, and the process of working with such a one is an invaluable learning experience.

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

Don’t worry, be happy? Also: avoid adverbs.

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

I like to try and work in the morning. Not in the early morning, but just to get up and start writing without wandering into the internet too much and even without having coffee at first. There’s something about that state of writing where it even becomes half dozing where I think my inner editor is still asleep and I can get productive while she’s looking the other way.

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

Other people’s writing.

12 - If there was a fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?

My Bleak House first edition. And my laptop, since I’d probably be working on it at the time.

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

For me, books really do come from books. But movies and art and music can help generate ideas or moods or settings for a story.

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

I have a lot of favourite books and writers, most of them Canadian, but these days I’m trying to force myself out of my comfort zone a little and read new things. I’ve read four new (that is, new-to-me) writers over the past two months or so, and I enjoyed all of the books tremendously. I’d like to say I have a life outside of my work (in which life I imagine myself reading Dickens endlessly, and girls’ mystery stories), but at this point that would be a lie.

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

Finish a novel. Visit the Louvre. Learn how to throw a boomerang and do cartwheels. Oh, millions of things.

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

High school Latin teacher seems likely, or librarian, though I’ve also always had kind of a hankering to go to law school. Not in order to become a lawyer, but just to memorize tons of facts and contemplate justice and take really hard exams. I like taking exams. But if I could pick anything at all to do, regardless of talent or temperament, I’d like to be a musician.

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

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in the first grade, and I’ve never seriously entertained any other career ambition. So for me it’s a vocation. I really didn’t feel like I had a choice in the matter.

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

I’m just finishing Nino Ricci’s The Origin of Species, which I’ve been loving. The last film I remember really liking was Three Comrades, a Frank Borzage movie from the thirties. F. Scott Fitzgerald helped adapt the screenplay.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel based on one of the short stories in my collection, in which I pick up with the same characters twenty years later.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

12 or 20 questions: with Nichole McGill

In Girl #3, her first novel for young adults, Ottawa author Nichole McGill tells the tale of a 14-year-old papergirl who finds peace and predators, stalkers and ghosts in a Toronto ravine. Nichole is also the author of 13 Cautionary Tales, the screenwriter for The Waiting Room, which was featured at the Berlin Film festival, and her fiction has been published in numerous journals and anthologies across North America. A veteran of the Ottawa reading series scene, she also curates WESTFEST LIT. She blogs at http://www.nicholemcgill.com/ and tweets @nicholemcgill.

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

I thought that the publication of my first book, 13 Cautionary Tales, would change my life; it didn’t. This gave me Healthy Perspective.

In some ways, my second book is a continuation of the last short story in my short story collection. “Blood & Bubblegum” also deals with bullies in a magic realism fashion.

However, Girl #3 is:

1) a novel,
2) a young adult novel, and
3) plays with time and genre.

The journey for writing this novel was a personal and stylistic challenge for me. I figured out the novel form by wrestling it to the ground. Now that it’s out, I am far more assured in my storytelling ability.

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

I started off in journalism but really, I was pushed into that field, as are most who express a love of story. At university, I fell in love with films and pictures but somehow all stories for me begin with the written word.

My writing career was unintentional. After backpacking in Europe, I was offered a job as a print journalist in Ottawa covering the arts scene on a stop-over between Prague and Vancouver, where I was headed with a notion of working in the film industry. This is how I ended up in Ottawa and two years later, I signed a short story book deal while trying to sell my print columns as a book collection.

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?

A writing project catches fire when it catches fire. I poke at it but if nothing catches, I move on to the project that is speaking to me. I will return to bother the dormant ideas occasionally to see if there’s any spark in it. Once an idea catches, I work best if I dip into the story everyday to keep the flame alive.

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?

All stories for me start with the character’s voice. Once I nail that, the story flies whether I decide it’s a short story or a novel; the length depends on the time I want to invest into that character.

Once I have the voice, I chart out a general course for that character with appropriate twists and turns, write a bit, alter my general course if need be, write some more, etc. My first draft is writing the main “A” storyline down and in subsequent drafts, I determine which of the “B” stories are integral or not.

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

I love, love, love doing readings. It forces me as a writer to confront the story that I’ve written and during a reading, I quickly discern what parts of a story are extraneous and which parts I need to expand upon. Often it renews my enthusiasm in a project.

I have found readings to be particularly valuable as a YA author. The Ottawa International Writers Festival sent me to read and discuss my works in schools as part of their Think Ink literacy program in March. The interaction with students confirmed my instinct that teen readers are a sophisticated audience and if they are invested in a story, they will follow what twists and turns and devices you put in their path, a subject that I’ve addressed in my blog.

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?

Like many writers, I am rethinking the format of the book particularly in light of the social electronic media revolution that we are currently going through. I contribute to a Google group on rethinking the book and am developing Web versions and electronic versions of a book in separate projects with a local Web venture and the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Strategic Innovation Lab.

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?

[ have no response for this one ]

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

This, naturally, depends on the editor. Linda Pruessen of Key Porter Books and Jenny Antilla at Gutter Press were wonderful editors. Then again, they shared my overall vision. That said I crave working with editors who are able to identify those this-almost-works-but-not-quite passages. Both these editors fulfilled that essential role.

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

When you are no longer nervous before a reading or a release of your work, this means you have lost your passion for writing.

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

Too easy; the difficulty is committing to one genre and maintaining one’s interest.

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 lead a somewhat insanely packed life. Currently, I have two preschoolers and I work full-time as an E-Communications Manager. Hence, creative writing is pushed to the evenings, weekends and leaves of absences. When babes go to sleep, I go to a café. By nature, I’m a night owl yet I live in Ottawa where cafes close at 10 p.m. and my preschoolers have not adopted teenage sleeping patterns.

These are my challenges.

I work best when I am focused on one project and I draw up a detailed schedule that will allow me to stay in the zone. I call it “dipping in the well”. You have to enter the world of your story to nurture it. Otherwise, the moment you step out of it, it’s a different story. The sentence you write this moment will not be the same sentence that you write in an hour, or the next day. So when you decide to write, you have to be committed to following through on capturing the story before its shape shifts again.

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

Go to a café. Wait until 10 minutes before close. The muse will wallop you with a motherload and you’ll be furiously writing, cursing that you don’t have another 20 minutes. (Like now – it’s 10 p.m. at Bridgehead and the café’s closing. I will have to return to finish this questionnaire another night.)

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The hair of my children.

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 living life.

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

Writers who confirm that yes, it is possible.

Short list: Joyce Carol Oates, Lynn Crosbie, Evelyn Lau, Deborah Ellis, Laurie Halse Anderson, Neil Gaiman, Dennis Foon, Haruki Murakami, Barbara Gowdy, Angela Carter, Marie Hélène Poitras.

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

Don’t get me started.

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?

Being a full-time fiction writer might very well be delightful.

In my parallel life, I am a filmmaker (which I may very well get to doing one day). In my third life, I’m an architect building tree houses in the jungle. In a fourth life, I live in a loft in Berlin, am a powerful crone with have no children or commitments to anything but I’m not as sympathetic.

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

The need to exorcise the voices in my head.

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

A confession: I’m not one of those writers who have a favourite book that they prize above all others. I have no idea where to begin with creating a list of favourite books. All books are just parts of an ongoing conversation and storyline, a small part of which has been captured in book form.

Last great film: Pan’s Labyrinth

20 – What are you currently working on?

I’m finishing a draft of my second novel Deadhead Lake to send off to publishers; it’s a YA fantasy horror thriller set at a boy’s summer camp in Muskoka. I am working on an interactive Web literary project for the upcoming website, Ottawa Tonite – the site will officially launch in the fall of 2009, the project TBD – and am developing a short story for a hybrid electronic-print book with OCAD’s Strategic Lab.

Oh yes, and carving out time to write, in general.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

12 or 20 questions: with Mike Spry

Mike Spry is a writer and editor who lives in Montreal. He is currently the Programs Coordinator for Summer Literary Seminars and the Managing Editor of Matrix magazine. He is the author of JACK (Snare Books 2008)

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

My first book (JACK, Snare Books 2008) changed my life in that I no longer felt sheepish to say I was a writer. I had some tangible artefact to back me up in vocation based barroom brawls.

My most recent work differs in that it’s not poetry. I feel like poetry and I are taking a break and are dating other people. I’ve been seeing fiction, and poetry is off at the bar feeling sorry for itself. And some point we’ll end up at the same party, have a few adult beverages, make some mistakes, and perhaps get back together. I guess that’s how it feels different.

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

Poetry just allowed me to get thoughts on paper faster, without expectations of narrative or form. I didn’t know what it was. It just kind of ended up as poetry.

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 have no formula, nor patterns. I tend to binge write, however. I’ll write nothing for several months, and then bang out a whack of pages in a three-day blackout. My writing (at its best, I think) tends to barrel forward, so I revel in the sudden bursts.

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

Poetry tends to be born of the personal, for me. I guess I find it therapeutic to dissolve fact in fiction. My fiction has to come from an absurd thought, or sentence, or idea.5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Readings are a huge part of my process. Huge. My writing leans towards the absurd, so I need to gauge its effectiveness in a crowd. I think readings should be a part of every writers process. I run a reading series with Jon Paul Fiorentino in Montreal called The Pilot, and I’ve seen a positive reading do wonders for the confidence of writers, especially emerging writers.

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

I’m answering nothing, and I have little if any concerns. I’m trying to entertain. It’s all storytelling, at least at its best it is.

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?

The role of the writer is the same as that of the custodian: clean up the shit and pay your rent. Writers have no role, no more than an accountant or a zookeeper or a prostitute has. We do what we do, because that’s what we’ve chosen. If we can eat too, well then good work.

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

I love working with an editor. Dave McGimpsey edited my book, and it was an engaging and organic experience. I’ve worked from the other side as well, in editing peoples work, and I love trying to get the most out of a writer in a one-on-one arrangement. It is more than essential.

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

Vancouver DJ Innis McCourty once told me: “When you’re down to your last twenty bucks, buy food.”

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

I find it easy to move between genres, though I can’t work in more than one at a time. It’s not so much appealing as it is natural.

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. When it’s coming I write, otherwise I find other activities. Like most people I have to make a living, so the typical day (for me) begins by going to work.

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

Ya, inspiration. It’s one of those words, like soul or love or mortgage. I just don’t really know what they are. People are good for fodder. I guess I look for ‘inspiration’ in social constructs and the inherent fallibility of social relationships. I like to record human interaction and then fuck with it. Emil Cioran claimed: "I’ve invented nothing; I’ve simply been the secretary of my sensations." I kinda go with that.

13 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?

Dude, I despise Hallowe’en.

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?

McFadden rawks. I get a lot of influence from music, in that I tend to fill the space around me with music at most times, so it seems natural that it would affect my writing.

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

Writing is very much my life, in that I work for a unique writing program (Summer Literary Seminars) as well as Matrix magazine, and I have an office in the English Department at Concordia University, and so I tend to be surrounded by writers.

I can’t say enough about how my writing community invigorates me. I’m fortunate enough to have friends who are at once peers and mentors; Jon Fiorentino, Dave McGimpsey, Nick McArthur, Mikhail Iossel, Ian Orti, Jeff Parker, Jason Camlot, John Goldbach, Greg Seib, and countless others, these people not only shape my days, but my work as well.

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

Holy shit. Really? Everything, rob. I’d like to do everything I haven’t done yet. Twice and with cocktails.

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 would have liked to try my hand at acting, I think.

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

It just happened.

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

The last great book I read was Edisto by Padgett Powell. The last great film I saw was The Big Lebowski. It may be the last great movie.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m trying to finish a novel (Working up the Bottle), a collection of short stories (30lb Monkey), editing a book (The Taste of Penny by Jeff Parker), and put together the Summer Literary Seminars writing program in Vilnius, Lithuania for late July.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

lake, nowhere

hard to let it be
i love the lure of language

along your lips
-- Stephen Cain, Torontology

skyline pure of sky; the water, lakes
a nervous lap

my shining errant knight in glitter,
lip-gloss

between envy & the moon, financial districts
, cn tower blooms

in light-show nocturnes; you woke,
discovered stomach cramps & this,

basaltic rock you mention, standing
the circle stain

quick glances down one side

three hundred passing passing ships,
sails like silver, flags

a threadbare ease, a base of trees
at merlot’s end

no one is an island; you are,

*

relief of schooners, slips, come out
of freshwater narrows

to come, a taste of things

a tempest in a teapot, seasons pool
at shallow

late August, trees tint autumn
, leaves along

your mouth carves circles
out patio glass, caress

of bitemarks, hollow

beneath the railing, west swoon of shadows
lower limbs

, sunbathers stretch
certain only of themselves

12 or 20 questions: with Anselm Berrigan

Anselm Berrigan has a book of poems, Free Cell, due out this September from City Lights. Previous books include Some Notes on My Programming, Zero Star Hotel, and Integrity & Dramatic Life, all published by Edge Books. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail (see brooklynrail.org for proof), and a member of the subpress publishing collective, though which he recently published The Selected Poems of Steve Carey (edited by Edmund Berrigan). Anselm, Edmund, and their mother Alice Notley co-edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan, published in 2005 by U. of California, and recently completed a Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan with hopes of future publication. From 2003-2007 he directed The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, where he had previously worked in several other capacities. He currently teaches writing and reading at Pratt Institute and The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, where he is co-chair of Writing. Recent work can be found on-line here: http://puppyflowers.com/11/anselm.html. Readings and other material can be found here: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Berrigan-Anselm.php.

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

Being able to put my poetry into people’s hands was the big thing. I circulated my first book by giving away a few hundred copies to anyone who seemed interested, or anyone I thought should be interested. I’d received a little grant that I used part of to help pay for the book’s publication, and the publisher gave me a very large number of copies as a result. I’d also set up the third section of that book to function secretly as a set of possible writing routes I could take going forward, and though I’m not exactly sure a direct line was formed in any way, I know it gave me a lot of room to work with going forward. Then the next book really changed my life. And the next one. And the chapbooks after that. What’s the point, anyway, if the fact of making this work isn’t changing your life? Books get weirder as they get less relevant. I hate relevance.

The work I’m writing now is hopefully wrong and prone to victory, whereas the previous work is stoic, semi-defeated, and inexorably accurate.

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

I started writing fiction first. Little short stories that tended to end violently. The two I remember most clearly are one about a one-armed junkie who sees God turn into a cockroach and then flings himself off of a roof, and one about a teenager who finds a shark and lets himself be eaten. I really wasn’t so upset as that sounds. Ultimately I was more interested in working with words than coming up with plots. I tend to like telling stories more than writing them.

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 don’t do projects, unless I can run them from a happy hour. All of the above questions otherwise happen simultaneously when I write. Writing comes quickly, it takes awhile, and it often looks like what I write (especially the heavily designed poetry). Maybe the notes part is less to the point. I write in lines. I don’t know what notes are, speaking with deference to notes.

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 in notebooks. I type everything later. Typing is editing. I like to have the computer to fuck around with while I work. I taunt my computer by making poems happen on it and letting it think it has something to do with them. Making a book feels more like making an arrangement, which is occasionally like writing but more like trying not to let myself completely go.

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

I like to read unfinished work at readings in order to find out what’s working. I don’t read the stuff that I know isn’t working, by the way. I am the “enjoys reading” type, and I think this quality in me is fairly obvious. I also like to give readings when no one is around, and I enjoy talking to myself when I walk up the street.

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

I’m not sure theoretical and behind should be in a question together. Anyway that’s the kind of thing somebody else should answer. In relation to my work, I mean. There are at least six billion current questions.

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?

To write. Yes. To write.

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

I’m a better editor on the inside. And I’m extremely difficult to work with. As for others, I don’t know. I have a number of people who look at things for me if I ask, but I actually use reading audiences as a kind of oblivio-communal editor machine often enough. I’m the last big tent poet in New York City.

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

“Don’t be afraid to ask three times.”

and

“Go fuck yourself”

and

“Be the ball.”

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

I only write critical prose or something like it upon request, and only then if I feel like I can actually attend the subject in question with some sensitivity. I’m open to writing such pieces more often, but I’m not very good at coming up with writeable subjects on my own. Writing book reviews had some appeal to me for awhile, but fellas started sending me their books to review without asking, and that looked like the wrong patch of grass to pave over.

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?


Last fall (’08) I wrote every night in order to generate material to work with this past spring, when I knew I’d have a heavier workload at three different jobs. Right now I’m working a bit more during the day, as I have a breather between jobs. I probably have had less of a routine since my daughter was born twenty months ago, but I’m actually writing more often because I’m purposefully not typing any of it up. It’s fair to say that I vary the routine according to the timing of jobs and naps.

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


Inspiration is a wonderful word as far as I’m concerned. I don’t get stalled because I don’t start the car because I never got a license because I don’t want to drive. I’m too leg-locked to do anything but write through the “bad” parts.

13 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?


I don’t do it.

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?


I am influenced by commercials, timing as related to comedy, acting as related to bad screenplay writing, conversation, speech patterns of all kinds (occasionally in songs or other media with pre-recorded verbal matter, but mostly live), and science fiction as found in comic books, graphic novels, cable television, and cinema. I have also made use of hotel buildings, train commutes, zeros and ones, and the forms of numerous visual art works as models for poetic forms, though I tend not to cite the art works involved beyond responding to my experience of them within the poems. I am influenced by nature at all times, most particularly through believing less and less that there are unnatural forms. I am also interested in the structure of expressionism in any media or behavior.

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


Whatever’s in front of me that I am taking seriously. It’s a lot, and not for sale.

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


Travel to Japan, and Vancouver.

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 was heading towards becoming a journalist before I started writing poems. I have developed a habit of being handed responsibilities at the jobs I get, so it’s possible I could have become a boss at something hard to imagine and transformed into a seething tyrant. My friends won’t believe this, but I know.

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


I injured my ankle practicing to make the cross-country running team my first few weeks in college, and consequently took up writing for the newspaper. I had no experience writing anything but school papers and imaginary baseball statistics at that point. I was writing short responses to works like Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” for a class at the same time though, and finding myself very compelled by that work. So there was a combination of activity generated by fucking up my foot. I was interested in political science and possibly psychology my first year in school, and might have gravitated towards one of them more intensely if I hadn’t hooked up with the newspaper.

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


I just finished reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is supposed to be a great book, but I read Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred just a few weeks before, and am certain that’s a great book. The last great film would be Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, and in longer form I recently watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris for the first time and thought it was great, though not as compelling as the novel on the subject of the alien as unknowable.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am slowly editing a rather long piece made of sentences and space that I’m calling “Primitive State”. I’ve used my last few readings as testing grounds for it, and probably have to work on it for a while longer, though it reads well. Its form is that of a list of nearly nine hundred sentences that almost entirely do not refer to one another. The question of arrangement is rather unyielding, and this gives me pleasure.

The other thing that’s happening is I’m keeping a notebook that I’m going to fill up entirely with an odd kind of self-analytical writing that I’m going to refrain from typing until the notebook is full. I have a sense of what it might become, but I want to give the work as much room as possible to develop without my editorial consciousness in heavy rotation.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

the ottawa small press book fair, fall 2009 edition

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

the ottawa
small press
book fair

fall 2009 edition
will be happening Saturday, November 28, 2009
in room 203 of the Jack Purcell Community Centre (on Elgin, at 320 Jack Purcell Lane).

contact rob at az421@freenet.carleton.ca 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 the first one, 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 11:15am (NOTE NEW TIME) for exhibitors)
admission free to the public.

$20 for exhibitors, full tables
$10 for half-tables
(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 858 Somerset St W, main floor, Ottawa Ontario K1R 6R7).

note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables. for catalog, exhibitors should send (on paper, not email 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 reading, usually held the night before at The Carleton Tavern!

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.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, and others.

happens twice a year, founded in 1994 by rob mclennan & James Spyker.
now run by rob mclennan thru span-o.questions, az421@freenet.carleton.ca

free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address. we will not be selling things for folk who cant 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 az421@freenet.carleton.ca

some toronto;

Lainna and I wandering a week of Toronto, seeing what sites there to see, before everything begins: her school (Ryerson), my whatever-else. Wanderings to Toronto Island, a party hosted by Broken Pencil magazine, St. Lawrence Market, etcetera.

My wandering the next few Toronto months working on third novel, and a creative non-fiction follow-up to my McLennan, Alberta, which was a manuscript of pieces working through my Edmonton period; what has changed now that I'm in the Big Smoke?

But still back and forth to Ottawa for various readings, launches, workshops, what-not; second novel out this fall with The Mercury Press, The Toronto Small Press Fair, the ottawa small press book fair and writers festival, so Greyhound, at least, will be getting as much benefit of my travel as anyone else.

here's a small piece I've been noodling, the past few days:

lake nothing (draft)

a skyline pure of sky; the water, lakes
a nervous lap

between envy & the moon, financial districts
the cn tower blooms

in light-show nocturnes; you woke,
discovered stomach cramps & this,

quick glances down one side

basaltic rock you mention, standing
the circle stain

three hundred passing passing ships,
sails like silver, flags

a threadbare ease, a base of trees

12 or 20 questions: with Jacqueline Larson

Though she lives in Toronto now, Jacqueline Larson was born in and formed by Alberta. She received her MA (English) from SFU where she also worked as managing editor of West Coast Line. Her work has been published in a number of journals and shortlisted for the National Magazine award and Hart House Review poetry prize. Her first book, Salt Physic, was published by Pedlar Press in late 2008.

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

Salt Physic launched in mid-November 2008 and the next morning Margaret Christakos invited me to participate in the spring round of Influency, the poetry salon she hosts/stages/three-ring circuses. People’s insights about the book—and their smart difficult questions!—taught me so much about how engaged readers can pull out the things between what is said; how their reading, listening, quickens a book. I’ll let you know later if this changes my life.

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

Poetry came to me first. I remember my mom reading me Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense and Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse—their sounds still ring inside my ears and sternum.

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

It varies. I often overwrite and then pare back, write into and then cut back again.

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

A lot of my poems so far start with some kind of psychological question or knot I’m picking at—typically an emotional or other charge that holds my attention, something I’m trying to understand. But then the emotional puzzle has to involve thinking too, thinking through. The individual pieces came before the book, though a new project just percolating now feels more like a book from square one.

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

Readings can clarify where something is off but the alchemy between reader and audience is idiosyncratic. I’m sure you too have had the experience of reading in one venue where there’s no ear—people are just not connecting with what you’re doing. You can read the exact same material a few days later somewhere else and you’re received like the next bright thing. Neither of these responses should be taken as the truth on the work. That said, I always read aloud at my desk to hear how the thing is going.

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?

Kafka famously described the value of difficult books—the “books that bite and sting us” like this: “If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? …What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make use feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” I’ve had this in my mind for years but when I looked it up to answer your question, I was struck me how aggressive an image it is, how violent. Kafka is talking about reading but I think the same thing can be said for writing. My own work comes nowhere near that “bite and sting” though I’m always on the lookout for what might shake me awake. I hope that an axe isn’t the only way but I guess it depends on how solid things get in the heart.

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’m wary of shoulds. Writers can open doors for readers. See number 6—they can wake us up. Why did Kafka say that getting shaken was like a death or painful misfortune? Tenderness can also break open a heart and make us see clearly.

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

I make my living as an editor so I have to say it’s essential. Beth Follett of Pedlar Press edited this book. She asked difficult questions that made me go back into some texts I thought were long finished and reopen them, rethink them. Difficult and essential.

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

Don’t expect applause. Or even better, from a workshop I took with Lynda Barry: we’re not having an experience in order to write but writing in order to have an experience. We’re not having the experience in order to make an image—we’re making an image in order to have the experience. Lynda Barry is my hero! Her recent book based on that workshop is called What It Is and will benefit many people!

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

There seems to be a theme in how I’m answering here. Much of the writing I value involves a movement away from ignorance. The genres are different paths, equally valuable.

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 still struggle with sustaining a discipline. But when I get to it, discipline is sustaining.

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

Poetry—any number of favourite books I open at random. The meditation cushion. Baking. Going for a run. Open The Essential Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks) at random for a message.

13 - What fairy tale character do you resonate with most?

Can’t say that I’ve thought much about myself in a fairytale but I’ll say Persephone from Homer’s “Hymn to Demeter.” There’s a long poem in the book in her voice. But I hope I’m moving on to something else now. Spending time in the underworld has its down side!

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?

Of course!

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

So many writers are crucial—I’m reluctant to name a few because of what is left out from such a list. Have you had any feedback about how such lists come to signify how cool or uncool the person is in their answers to this question? I always go back to Erín Moure for the life-giving electric zap to the heart and mind that her poetry zings. Many Shambahla Buddhism books sustain me. Lynda Barry!

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

Write a second book. Sing! I’ve also often thought that tap dance could help a person get over themselves.

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?

Like many people I started out as a reader. And I’ve done lots of things that aren’t writing but the desire to write is probably part of what kept me from being entirely neurotic or from career alcoholism. The steadiest and most engaging work has been scholarly editing.

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

Hunger for something else. Hélène Cixous says it well: “There has to be somewhere else, I tell myself. And everyone knows that to go somewhere else there routes, signs, ‘maps’—for an exploration, for a trip. That’s what books are. Everyone knows that a place exists which is not politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repletion, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds” (The Newly Born Woman, p.72). She’s talking about reading and about a young person’s desire here and yes, it’s utopian but I have a tenderness for such aching.

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

I recently copy-edited Erín Moure’s My Beloved Wager which was a wonderful. Phil Hall’s White Porcupine. Carole Maso’s Ava, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red are definitely in the category of great books but there are so many others. Films: Children of Heaven (Majid Majidi); I finally saw Grey Gardens recently (the 1975 documentary version) and loved it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Honestly? I’m sanding and refinishing the floors. And prose narrative is pressing on a nerve.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

Eric Baus, Tuned Droves

THIS IS AN ACCURATE PICTURE OF SPACE

A boy dressing himself in splashes.

The sand is smoke in the scene he comes in from. He erases the air around his mouth.

One name for a child is The Single Drop of Water. Another, The Sand a Single Drop Deflects.

His sound depends on a record skipping. The short song the sun repeats to itself.

A boy becomes related to water. A body recording over waves.

In his second poetry collection, Tuned Droves (Brooklyn NY/Portland OR: Octopus Books, 2009), Eric Baus works the extended lyric, “the elongated lyric,” as Andrew Joron writes on the back, writing eight extended lyrics that exist each as an extension of the other. This is finally a follow-up to his first collection, The To Sound (Verse Press, 2004), selected as that years’ winner of the Verse Prize by Forrest Gander. Even before reading his work, we already know that Baus isn’t in any kind of hurry. There is the loveliest ease in Baus’ poems, and he seems to be part of a series of young American poets working through this extended lyric, elongated lyric, alongside such as Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Rachel Zucker, Dorothea Lasky and Noah Eli Gordon (the last two included at the beginning as dedication in Baus’ new collection). There is the umbrella that envelopes his poems, his series and sequences of direct statements that somehow collage into something unreal, and unbearably concrete through tangents; a collage of lines that slowly and even deceptively connect. This is about slowness. These are poems built out of small stories, half or quarter told.

THE WIRES LED TO A HIVE

This is where I live but these are not my clothes. That is not my voice, a woman says.

She appears as herself. The same someone else.

Think of something quieter. Child-flower, bed-flower, the long pause her name created.

If a singer neglects her title long enough to lose her tone, the first of many eyes emerge.

This is the sign of a perfect listener. The look another not answering has.

Baus appears to be writing, in the end, a single poem that wraps itself up in everything else that came before, much in the same way as others, including bpNichol, Jack Spicer, Fanny Howe, Phil Hall, Robert Kroetsch and Robin Blaser. Baus reminds me of editor Michael Ondaatje quoting Spicer’s Admonitions for the introduction to his Long Poem Anthology (1979), reminding us that “Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can …” And so again, this is about slowness. Slowness, and how the world can’t help but connect.

Wake up, little what, wake up and be still.

Miss said I should not speak because a bee is clearing its wings. This made an image, for a time. And if I did, I would wake up without a throat.

Ding put both bees back and my ears got clear. I woke up a little. Miss put a page in my throat because it was not yet a story.

Wake up a little more, Ding. Be still, and hear a bee breathing.

In his infamous essay on the Canadian long poem, “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem” (The Lovely Treachery of Words, Oxford University Press, 1989), Kroetsch talked about the form as being tantric, writing about the perpetual delay, holding off the ending as far as possible, and Baus seems to have channeled part of this delay, extending and extending as far as the poem can go, working a direct kind of simple, yet complex abstract, as in the poem “SOMETHING ELSE THE MUSIC WAS,” that begins its sequence of fragments with:

A woman leaves a bus and a man feels as if he has just stepped off of a train.

Rain is when you get wet is what he thinks next.

She thinks of orange when he is being quiet. Feeling red when she sees the sun.

Here her singing is speaking too. The sun is hot, I’m singing too.

The sun is orange, he says to himself.

Eric Baus might not be in a hurry, but where is it his poems are going? This is not about endings, or about destinations, but slowing down enough to see just where the poem itself is going. Baus writes and slowly eases through a deliberate series of words that mix a naïve sweetness with an imminent, even dangerous set of truths. If this is where he places poems, what might Baus work with fiction? Writing small prose sections, straight lines that could easily shift into short story, much in the manner of Sarah Manguso, slipping back and forth across an arbitrary border of genre.

When a boy’s mouth collapses into itself, tiny flames release from his limbs. Although this is a small flash, he is startled by the sudden sun.

Is it less about where the poem, and just how the poem is being? Is this, like the poetry of Fanny Howe, a potentially endless series of individually crafted blocks?

12 or 20 questions: with John Kinsella

John Kinsella's recent poetry books include Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (WW Norton, 2003), The New Arcadia (WW Norton, 2005) and Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (WW Norton, 2008). He has written numerous books of poetry and prose, and edited many others, including The Penguin Anthology of Australian Poetry (Penguin 2009). He has lived and taught in Australia, England, and the USA. He is an environmental activist, a vegan, a pacifist, and an anarchist.

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

I published a chapbook when I was nineteen - my family and a friend got that out and about (a little). Fifty copies. The Frozen Sea typed up on an IBM typewriter, laid out on a kitchen table, and printed at the local printers. I carted a couple of copies around Europe with me and gave one copy to a very old woman who'd been a lover of the linguist Jakobson. My first full book, Night Parrots, had a weird publishing history, which I have written about elsewhere. My mother submitted it to a publisher in an attempt to save me from my world of substance and alcohol degradation. What happened next is a long story. That was in 1986 and the book appeared in 1989. I didn't 'get straight' until 1996.

My most recent book of poetry is The Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography and is a 'distraction' on Dante's Divine Comedy. It is the work I've done that matters most to me, and took a few years to write. My previous work, Shades of the Sublime & Beautiful (some of it written concurrently with the other work, though in the main written before), uses Edmund Burke's treatise re sublimity and beauty as its template and point/s of departure, so there is a similarity in approach there, and the 'place' it explores is the 'same', but they are vastly different works.

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

My mother was a poet. But she was also a short-story writer. I wrote poems and stories from early childhood. I favoured poetry because I could make it do things I couldn't (yet, maybe) make prose do. It was my default setting. I thought in poetry. I heard it every day. My fascination with science as a child and teenager was linked with this - scientific nomenclature was like a poetic language. I write in all 'genres' (see comments further on), but poetry is at the core of all my practice.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially 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 most often write or take notes by hand, then work on a manual typewriter, then onto a computer, though I am going to give the last one up. Sometimes it's direct on to keyboard, but not really that often. Drafts can change a great deal, and go through many versions, but sometimes change little. There is no fixed outcome. When I start, I start. The lead-up time can be agony, though. Days, weeks, months, even years cogitating, but once I start, I am usually 'with it'. And often more than one thread of writing at once.

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

All methodologies seem to have worked or failed for me at some time or another. Sometimes it's an A-Z process, other times it 'composites'. Many of my books were written with the entire book in mind, allowing for derivations, distractions, and tangents. Some are the end result of a cumulative process. I am always open to new ways of approaching 'writing' (though I have problems with this term - it's just a catch-all for textual activity).

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

I have done hundreds of readings but although I really throw myself into them when I do them, I actually loathe the process. I am aiming to end reading in public and am doing fewer and fewer, I am glad to say. I find them quite psychologically destructive. I do like hearing poets read their work, though.

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?

All my concerns are ultimately a congruence of praxis and theory. See my book Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, among others.

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 am an environmental activist. My writing means nothing outside that.

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

I have had some great editors. No problem. I have edited the work of many other poets as well - sometimes it is difficult, sometimes rewarding. No set rules.

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

I think all advice is suspect. Even the best motives for giving it are often dubious.

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

I wrote a 'novel' entitled Genre, which was an unfixing of genre (or an attempt to unfix genre). I love 'genre' fiction - Dick, Highsmith, Tolkien and many others. But I don't actually believe there are genres. There you go - I read them, I talk about them, I write about them, but I don't believe in the categories.

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?

In winter - lighting the fire. In summer - watering the vegetable garden if there's water available to do so. Writing comes at all times.

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

I have no room for stalling. I just move on to another piece of work - such as a review. I have four due in at the moment. Deadlines are missed but in the end they get you. Part of my living.

13 - What did your favourite teacher teach you?

To finish a task within the time allotted.

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?

My writing is a composite of everything I've experienced. Nothing is excluded.

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

Hundreds and hundreds. It's impossible to name them. At the moment? Pushkin, Stendhal, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip K. Dick, Delmore Schwartz, Khlebnikov, Patricia Highsmith, George Eliot, Pynchon...

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

Well, I have done it, but not for twenty-five years. Go back to entirely living without the trappings of capitalist consumer society. That is, everything homegrown, no car, no factory clothes, no electricity, no phone, etc. I have been a vegan anarchist pacifist for almost twenty-five years and that's the path I am continuing down.

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?

Well, by the end of my high-schooling, I was heading in the direction of the sciences, so would have probably ended up a research chemist developing horrendous chemi-luminescent 'organics'. But I didn't keep going that way.

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

Necessity. That's the way I'd learnt to communicate. We all have to communicate - that's my 'speech'.

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

Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks and directed by G. W. Pabst. A silent film - less technology. That appeals to me (if we have to use such technology).

20 - What are you currently working on?

A book of poetry arising out of Thoreau's Walden set at Jam Tree Gully ('our' place). I also have a critical book on activist environmental poetics I am tidying up for publication some time next year. In the long run, I am looking into hand-made paper options. I am trying to encourage my various publishers to do my books on recycled paper. Most use so-called sustainable 'forest products', but there are many contradictory ecological issues connected with these sources. It is a slow process but an important one. Because I will be going offline soon, the printing of books becomes an even more 'relevant' issue to me. I want to know what physically goes into the books I publish.

12 or 20 questions (second series);