Grant Wilkins likes letters, words, ink, paper and sounds,
and combinations thereof. http://www.grungepapers.com/
Q: How did Murderous
Signs first start?
A: Murderous
Signs began life as a personal side project that I started while publishing
The Canadian Journal of Contemporary
Literary Stuff with Tamara Fairchild. The economics and logistics of trying
to put out a “real” magazine – as Stuff
was intended to be – meant that it was a very slow, laborious and expensive
beast to put together and publish, so I saw MS
as a chance to do something in the same vein, but faster, cheaper and with a
more personal bent to it.
As we were trying to do with Stuff, my aim was to put out good
literary work, but to do it with a sharper editorial viewpoint than most of
what I saw in the literary landscape around me. There were quite a lot of
little literary zines and poetry mags floating around the Ottawa scene back
then, most of which followed a fairly standard poetry/prose/reviews-at-the-end
format, with little sense of a point of view beyond the work printed, and
minimal effort to comment on or otherwise engage with the wider cultural world.
It seemed to me even then that the arts in
general needed to engage with the larger culture if it actually wanted to be a
living part of that culture, so this notion of MS as being at least partly a vehicle for a broader editorial or
cultural comment was part of its conception. To that end, most issues ended up
being three part affairs, wherein I’d publish work from two other writers – usually
some combination of poetry and prose – and then I’d either write an editorial
piece, or I’d dig up an essay that I thought had something useful to say. This
format became more variable as the issues went on, but that’s basically the way
it worked through the 15 issues of the run.
Q: I like the idea of attempting a journal that
incorporated as what you saw as the next logical step, ie: attempting to
“engage with the larger culture.” How well do you feel you accomplished that,
and what kind of feedback did you receive, if any?
A: The responses that I got back were generally
pretty positive, and to the extent that I got feedback from outside my
immediate community, it always seemed to be quite encouraging.
Ultimately though, I think MS was too fully situated in the literary world for it to really do
what I wanted it to do or be what I wanted it to be. The mission statement that
I ran in each issue insisted that Murderous
Signs was “a literary zine dedicated
to presenting comment, prose, poetry and perspective on subjects literary and
cultural, and to the notion that the printed word, well crafted and aimed, can
be used as a weapon.” I didn’t seem to have too much trouble finding
literary work that I liked – poetry or short prose – but I didn’t have much luck
attracting writing that could be considered comment or cultural perspective in
any broader sense. It just didn’t seem to be the sort of thing that was being
written in the part of the literary world that the zine inhabited.
The end result of this was that MS often seemed a little bit
schizophrenic, with me writing an editorial about the media coverage of the G-8
meetings, or ranting about how Chapters decides what books to carry, or finding
an essay by CGD Roberts about modernism – which was followed by a suite of
poetry and a short story of the sort that you’d find in any standard issue
litzine.
I did manage to bridge the gap between comment
and content a couple of times. Issue #5 had several letters by jwcurry to the
McMaster University Library about how they were (or weren’t) collecting
Canadian concrete & visual poetry, while issue #10 had poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis – both of whom contributed work that seemed
to explicitly look outward at and have something to say about the world around
them.
Aside from that though, most issues of MS seemed to have this slightly
split-personality feel to them that I never quite managed to get a grip on.
Q: In hindsight, how do you think you might
have changed your readership, ie. beyond the immediate of the literary
community?
A: Practically speaking, I don’t think there
was any way that I could have significantly changed the demographic that was
reading MS. In however peripheral a
way, I was an inhabitant of the local small press/literary world, and I’d set MS up to be a literary organ that
functioned in that world. Short of metaphorically packing my bags and wandering
off to find some other niche or community on the cultural spectrum in which to
hang my hat, Murderous Signs was
always going to have to be largely aimed at what I perceived as being my corner
of the litverse.
I did make some sporadic efforts to find people
and places beyond my immediate world who might be interested in Signs. Mostly this entailed mailing
copies out to an ever-evolving list of addresses – university english
departments, libraries, writers groups, poetry readings, writers, other
magazines, etc etc. Still a literary audience, just a little broader, and
further afield.
Mostly though, MS’s readership was largely determined by the fact that I’d always
intended its distribution to be done by hand. I’d set MS up to be a print vehicle – it was very much in the standard
photocopied/folded/pamphlet-stapled form – which made it easy and inexpensive
to make, and which meant that I could give it away for free at small press
fairs or mail it out pretty cheaply. The fact that I was only doing it as a
biannual meant that it was never going to cost me a huge amount, which I liked,
and it meant that I could time the publication for the spring and fall small
press fair seasons, which I variously attended here, in Toronto and Montreal.
So yeah, MS
started out as at least mostly a literary creature, and thusly always had to be
aimed at mostly a literary audience. By about half way through the run I’d come
to realize that the slightly bifurcated approach of the zine was a little
problematic, and so I began more consciously trying to write or to find
editorial/commentary content that was more directly related to the literary
world. As I said before though, I never really ironed that part of it out.
Q: Is this something you’ve attempted to
reattempt through any other means since? Meaning: have you written any
non-fiction pieces for other media since the end of Murderous Signs?
A: Not as such, no. I hadn’t started Signs with the intent or desire to write
content for every issue – it had been a long time since I’d had any particular
aspiration to write – so by the time it ended I kind of felt like I’d had my
say, and that that was enough.
By that time too I had developed a fairly
generalized dislike of most kinds of linear or narratival writing –
non-fiction, fiction or poetic. Partly this came out of what I was reading in
the literary world around me, and partly it came out of the submissions piles
I’d been wading through for years with Signs,
Stuff, and MPD before that. It often seemed like mostly the same sort of
people were writing mostly the same sort of thing mostly the same sort of way –
and it didn’t really matter if it was poetry or prose or fiction or not, it was
just mostly really uninteresting to me.
My solution was to start exploring more
actively in the concrete, visual, sound & process-based poetry worlds.
Eventually I started to do some experimenting in these sorts of writing myself,
and ran a couple of reconfigurations of Archibald Lampman poems in the last few
issues of Signs. To the extent that
I’ve done any writing since Signs
that qualifies as non-fiction, it would probably be this sort of thing.
(Amusingly, I’m realizing that what was
probably only my second ever piece of process writing – the second of my “2ND
H@” series – was created out of a program for a literary conference at Ottawa U
that you gave me).
Q: I’ve always been intrigued by your
fascination with the Confederation Poets – Archibald Lampman, et al – in your
publishing, even to the extent of publishing contemporary poetry alongside
essays by the Confederation Poets in various issues of Murderous Signs. What is it about their work that you find so
compelling?
A: I’ve got a degree in History and Classical
Civilization, as well as a degree in English, so I think my interest is partly
just a function of these things sitting at the point where my different enthusiasms
intersect. There is in some way a feeling of real physical proximity to my
interest too, as I’ve been living no more than four blocks away from one or
other of Archibald Lampman’s old addresses since the late 1980s.
In that vein, I was also a member of Steve
Artelle’s “Ottawa Literary Heritage Society” in its early stages of lobbying
for what became “The Poets Pathway,” and I spent some time a few years back
rooting through documents and microfiches at the Ottawa Public Library and at
Library and Archives looking for information on Ottawa’s printing and
publishing industries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ultimately,
Lampman, the Confederation Poets and Canadian literary history are all just
part of the spectrum of things that I’m interested in – so it isn’t really a
surprise that some of it has shown up in my various publishing ventures.
Also, frankly, I’ve always been kind of
appalled at how little attention we seem to pay to our history as a culture,
and how little there is of it left around to engage with. Even here in Ottawa –
a place that does have some historical significance – we physically don’t
really have much more than a handful of buildings and a canal that go back past
the early 20th century – we’ve knocked the rest of our history down, built over
it, and now most of us aren’t even aware that it was there in the first place.
Our arts culture works the same way too, and
when you combine that dynamic with the short shift arts and literature have
been getting in our educational system in recent years, the end result often
seems to be a generation – maybe a couple of generations now – of writers and
artists who are largely unaware of the writing and art that came before them.
I’ve been going to poetry readings for more than 20 years now, and reading
submissions to literary magazines off and on for almost as long, and it’s
deeply depressing to see and hear work by people who appear to be struggling
mightily to reinvent the wheel – apparently oblivious to the fact that not only
has it been done before, but that there was actually a very strong local
tradition of the doing of it.
So yeah, I reprinted – and continue to reprint
– that sort of work as the opportunity allowed and allows, in large part
because I’m really quite interested in it, but also because I can really be
pretty pedantic.
Q: One of my favourite issues had to be the one
that included the correspondence between jwcurry and McMaster. How did the
issue come together, and what was the response?
A: To be honest, I can’t really recall how that
one came about. I think it must have developed out of the conversations john
and I would occasionally have at the Ottawa small press fair or at readings. At
that point I’d known him for a few years and known of him for a few years more,
and of course I’d have been happy to publish anything from him – but this was
just issue #5 of Signs, and I hadn’t
yet gotten to where I was brave enough to actually go out and directly solicit
work from people.
Anyway, what he gave me was a sequence of
letters that he’d written to Carl Spadoni at the McMaster University Library.
McMaster had seemed to be interested in the work curry was creating &
publishing, and had bought some of it from him previously. Things had recently
gone silent though, so john had written these letters in an attempt to see what
was up and elicit some sort of explanation as to what their interests and
intentions were or weren’t.
Not surprisingly, the letters were very
interesting, being partly a general history of the institutional neglect of the
corner of the literary world that john inhabits, partly an attempt to determine
McMaster’s interests on the basis of their previous purchases, and partly an
essay on the value and valueing of the sort of work that john produces,
publishes and is otherwise interested in. The only reply he managed to get from
Spadoni was a very short and very belated note to the effect that McMaster was
not going to be collecting any Canadian poetry published after 1999, thank you
very much. Apparently they had more important things to spend their money on
than books of poetry.
The response to the issue and especially to the
letters was as positive as these sorts of things get, and I was giving away
copies fast enough that I quickly had to print a second run of it. Several
people and institutions that I wouldn’t expect to pay attention to something
like Murderous Signs – or even be
aware of its existence – ended up contacting me for copies or subscribing. I
did mail a couple of copies to McMaster too, though without generating any
response.
Q: What was behind the decision to finally
suspend the journal?
A: It was a combination of things, as these
decisions usually are. Partly it was a matter of time, and my being about to
have a lot less of it, as I was going to back to school for at least a couple
of years. I’d done the full-time job & part-time school thing before, and
knew that it would be hard to fit Signs
into that, especially if I had ambitions of doing anything else.
In addition to that, my interest in the project
was waning. Fairly early on in the run of Signs
I’d taken a weekend workshop in papermaking, and immediately fallen in love
with the process. This in turn led me to letterpress printing, about which I
became even more enthusiastic. It took a while for these new interests to
chrystalize into a coherent practice, but as the years went on my enthusiasm for
the book arts (as these kinds of arts & crafts get labelled) simply
overtook my enthusiasm for small press publishing of the sort that I’d been
doing – so when I was put in a position of needing to wind down at least one of
these things for the sake of my sanity, Murderous
Signs was the thing I dropped.
In the end, I didn’t really feel too bad about
it. I’d been involved in running zines and magazines more or less continuously
for about 14 years at that point – Signs,
Stuff before that, and MPD before that – so the more I thought
about it, the more a change of pace and focus appealed. And that was that.
Q: Given your move deeper, as you say, into the
book arts, do you see yourself returning to any kind of small press publishing,
or even a blending of the two?
A: For the last few years all of my publishing
has been in the “book arts” vein – handmade paper, letterpress printing, hand
binding, combinations thereof – and has mostly involved the reprinting of what
I think of as classic work from the “old dead Canadians” (the Confederation
Poets, Pauline Johnson) and the “old dead Brits” (Shakespeare, Sidney, etc). I
have printed a little bit of my own work along the way – in my mind letterpress
seems to lend itself to the sorts of process/chance/indeterminant forms of
writing that I’ve come to focus on in my own still very minimal writing
practice – but aside from that I don’t think I’ve yet printed the work of
anyone who’s been alive to complain about the typography.
It is a kind of vaguely held, long-term goal to
eventually get back into printing some contemporary work (other than my own). I
don’t think I’m quite there yet as a printer though, and I’m certainly not set
up to do the sort of ambitious book work that some of my letterpress friends do
– so I think that the fulfilment of this ambition is still a ways off. Having
left behind the need for deadlines, mailing lists, submission piles and the
like – and having no interest in going back to them – I expect that my re-entry
into the printing of contemporary work will be a very small scale thing when it
happens, and I’ll be fine with that.
Murderous
Signs bibliography:
ISSN: 1499-6006. All issues distributed free. Print
run: 150-500+, varying issue by issue.
Issue 1: March 2000. Editorial by Grant
Wilkins. Poetry by Huang Di. Short story by Sean van der Lee. Cover art by
Esther Deitch. 14 pages.
Issue 2: September 2000. Editorial by Grant
Wilkins. Poetry by Jeffrey Mackie. Short story by Jim Larwill. 18 pages.
Issue 3: May 2001. Editorial by Grant Wilkins.
Poetry by Stan Rogal & LeRoy Gorman. 18 pages.
Issue 4: October 2001. Editorial by Grant
Wilkins. Prose by Adam Elliot Segal. Poetry by Giovanni Malito. 18 pages.
Issue 5: June 2002. Editorial by Grant Wilkins.
Poetry by April Severin. Letters from and to jwcurry. 26 pages.
Issue 6: October 2002. Editorial by Grant
Wilkins. Poetry by Frances Ward. Short story by Beverley Cook. 26 pages.
Issue 7: May 2003. Editorial by Grant Wilkins.
Poetry and short story by J.J. Steinfeld. 22 pages.
Issue 8: October 2003. Comment by Archibald
Lampman. Poetry by T. Anders Carson and James P. McAuliffe. 26 pages.
Issue 9: May 2004. Editorial by Grant Wilkins.
Poetry by Becky Alexander. Prose by Bradley Somer. 26 pages.
Issue 10: October 2004. Essay and poetry by
Charles G.D. Roberts. Poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis. 26
pages.
Issue 11: May 2005. Essay by Stéphane Mallarmé.
Performance documentation by the Max Middle Sound Project. Cover art by George
Dunbar. 22 pages.
Issue 12: October 2005. Essay by Frederick
Philip Grove. Poetry by Richard Stevenson. Cover art by George Dunbar. 22
pages.
Issue 13: May 2006. Essay by Kyla Dixon-Muir.
Poetry by Deborah Schnitzer and rob mclennan. Cover art by George Dunbar. 34
pages.
Issue 14: October 2006. Essay by Frederick
Philip Grove. Poetry by Anna Panunto and Archibald Lampman. Cover art by George
Dunbar. 34 pages.
Issue 15: May 2007. Editorial by Grant Wilkins.
Short story by Edward McDermott. Poetry by Tim Conley and Archibald Lampman. 30
pages.
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