some christmas, glengarry etc

After our Christmas weekend in Montebello with father-in-law and his wife, we had a few more Christmassy things to engage in [see last year's post here].

December 24: We made our usual, annual jaunt to the farm for the sake of my father, sister and her brood, which are getting big enough that the eldest child is almost an adult (it would seem). Unfortunately, my daughter Kate wasn't able to make it this year due to work (she couldn't last year either, for similar reasons). When we first arrived, the girls ran around the yard in the snow, until they decided it was simply too cold.

Imagine: when I was small, that circle of snow in our yard (a driveway that circles to meet all the buildings, from shed to barn to shed to house) was where my father once put all the snow with the snowblower, making it a mound at least a storey high, which we then played upon. It hasn't been the same since he stopped doing that.

As we prepared for dinner, I amused myself by discovering a Hallowe'en cup in the cupboard (while attempting to find drinking cups for the girls) that actually held two dead spiders. God sakes.

Aoife in her red dress, who spent a great deal of time pointing at the dog and saying "dog," repeatedly. She hasn't really spent much time around dogs, but is less fearful than Rose (who doesn't care for dogs at all, up close).

In the downstairs hall of the farmhouse, a ledger of "guests" from the St. Elmo Church gifted in 1939, that included my grandfather's signature (among many other family members, on both sides of my father's family, from McLennans to Campbells and beyond). I would like to spend further time going through the slim volume, if possible.

There were a lot to pack into the homestead's kitchen, but easier than trying to get us all into Kathy's house (which we've done also). Since we have a house, we've been taking turns with our Christmasses (given our house-chaos from basement flood, I'm glad we're next year and not this; our sunroom is still packed with boxes and furniture). Aoife had been feeling better after her fever the night prior, but by mid-afternoon was pretty much conked out, either adrift on my lap or Christine's (she went back and forth for some time). After some gifting post-dinner, we dosed her with medicine and tossed kit-and-kaboodle into the car for the ride home, where the sleeping-girls were both put to bed. Rose wore her Nutcracker Suite pajamas, and Aoife wore he reindeer pajamas, but I couldn't get photos of either of them.

I still find it strange how quickly the home-Christmas moves: I suppose I'm still used to so many years of going home for a few days or a week, instead of the half-day we currently do. It goes by so quickly. But then again, we've multiple Christmases now, so it pretty much evens out, except with more travel.

December 25: We awoke in our wee house, where we set the children loose to explore their stockings, and open the presents under the tree, managing to completely forget to feed them (or anyone) breakfast (they didn't notice either). They tore through stockings and presents, and ran around enjoying a variety of new items, as well as pulling items from the day prior from the box we'd left in the living room. Rose was quick to notice that Santa had, indeed, finished the milk and the cookies we'd left on the mantle (something we did before leaving for the farm, in case Rose was asleep when we returned).

The girls were given princess dresses that they were both VERY pleased with: Rose is all about dresses and princesses, and we think Aoife just wants to be like Rose. Princess (Disney) dresses and fairy wands. As we prepared to head over to Oma's (mother-in-law's) for brunch, they wanted to bring half the house with them, it seemed. We attempted to reduce that as best we could.

At Oma's house, they had cousins to play with, as Christine's brother Michael and his family live but a few blocks away. We were there first, by an hour or so, which allowed a bit of quiet(ish), as the girls ran around, between bites of cereal Oma had for them. Michael's mother-in-law, Darlene, was also there, admiring the girls in their new dresses. We had brunch and the children played and opened presents, before Michael and his family went home for the afternoon, for the sake of children naps; I napped upstairs with Aoife. And then dinner and the cousins returning and chaos again, before everyone began to pumpkin again, and we made it home with children asleep, once more, slipped into bed.

We would clean the wrapping paper and scattered toys from the floor, we said, tomorrow. Christine went out for a bit on Boxing Day, but the rest of us didn't leave the house.

Ploughshares : an interview with book designer Kate Hargreaves

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my latest post is now up: an interview with literary book designer Kate Hargreaves.

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with Montreal poet Susan Elmslie, Ottawa-area poet and fiction writer Michael Blouin, Erín Moure on translation, Montreal writer Jacob Wren, Toronto poet Marcus McCann, founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing, Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Brooke Ellsworth

Brooke Ellsworth is author of Serenade (Octopus Books, 2017).  She lives and writes in Peekskill, NY.

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?

Most of Serenade was written in a frenzy during the late summer of 2014.  In many ways, it was more of me working out the tangles from my first two chapbooks, Thrown and Mud.  I press upon a lot of history of feminine brutality and eco-disaster, do a lot of urgent lineation around flood zones.  Serenade became some metacognition of me listening to water, while realizing this was a self-eroding reflection.  Serenade changed everything, because I let the editing process chip away at the poems’ temporality.  I was doing a lot of hiking around the tidal estuary surrounding Indian Point Energy Center.        

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

I’m not sure.  I lineated my journals as a kid, which felt like the most personal and direct and private I could be.  My mom is a nurse.  As a kid I’d go to the hospital after school and type out occasional poems on their nurse’s station computer and tape them to the door.  

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 write in fits, I guess.  I have trouble distinguishing between drafts and new poems.  An ongoing issue I have is re-writing everything, but keeping the same title.  The paradox of Theseus’s ship?  Maybe I should call this a liturgical listening process.  There are sequences of poems in all of my chapbooks and in Serenade under the same title.  I find arguments are most explicit when they’re lineated and slowed down.    

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’m definitely more of a failed essayist than a poet.  I think of Serenade more of as a raging essay than I do a collection of poems.  I fixate on something and develop work in and out of that.  

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

I love audiences, and I love being a part of one.  Friends will tell you, I cry on either side of the stage.

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?

Serenade comes from a feminist/ecopoetic/angry place.  Lara Glenum writes in the introduction to the Gurlesque anthology that the concept of “catharsis” is a homogenizing agent.  All inherited ideas about catharsis = a failure of imagination to conceive of catharsis outside of the mechanics of power and control.  There’s no such thing as purity in art, outside of the modes of social and infrastructural displacement.  There’s nothing pure or timeless we gain access to through art.  This is especially important now, when this country actively neglects populations displaced by weather.  Artists and thinkers who are displaced by canonical narratives.  But do we pretend to forget history?  That in itself is a sad luxury.  

I don’t answer any questions, but I definitely wallow in my obsessions.  The story of Echo shows up in Serenade, for one.  Echo is the main character in my first chapbook, Thrown.  Her inability to express her ecstasy, her sense of catharsis at the sight of Narcissus.  But she is certainly in this state of catharsis?  She communicates through her disability, which is the excess of repetition.  Poems traditionally come at you with a built-in sense of discovery, of some sort of awakening.  Poems like that for me are hand-in-hand with poems who have a project of dominance.  For me, Echo is part of an erotic dynamic conceived outside of the dynamics of control.  Which isn’t separate from her predetermined annihilation.  Derrida really tenderly talks about her story.  About how she subverts Hera’s punishment by making Narcissus’s language her own.

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?

Putting together a book requires physical structure (walls, food, money).  The people I care about want to make books, or not, and keep their capital debt from destroying them.  Or the people I care about discuss carelessness with language and a divestment of literary arts interchangeably.  I’m also using “people” and “poets” interchangeably here.  The poets worth reading, the ones worth paying attention to, activate the complacent, or at least expose them.  

Cecilia Vicuña on a Harriet blog post last year, “Language is Migrant,” writes about living under the Chilean dictator Pinochet: “Complex public conversation goes extinct. Maybe the extinction of playful free speech is related to the extinction of species we are causing as we speak.” Vicuña here matches ecological catastrophe with language. Often it’s thought that pain breaks down language, or that writing and art are in response to suffering. Vicuña inverts the locus of agencies. One cannot say that one catastrophe begets the other; our contemporary catastrophes saturate each other. Language and the material world seep together, annihilating each other through political and ecological catastrophe.  Look at the effort by dominating political forces to neglect flood zones or entire communities devastated by weather events, or colonialist war events (Marshall Islands comes to mind as a horrific intersection of all these things.  Here’s an article that goes into that a little bit).  

By contrast, consider the terra we actively maintenance: the SUPERFUND site under Silicon Valley, where pipes and pumps suck thousands of gallons of contaminated water every hour from vast underground pools, which then gets shipped, treated, and burned in places like Oklahoma and Arizona, discharging waste in small towns and on a Native American reservation—all in the hope of making the water drinkable again and protecting workers of the tech giants such as Google and Symantec from toxic vapors. This toxic trail, like Echo’s (in)articulation, becomes an act of dispersement, a stain that seeps into the water supply that Narcissus gazes helplessly into. We cannot turn away from the reflection, we cannot turn away from language, nor can we turn away from the semantics of industrialized progress.

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

Definitely both.  I’m pretty defensive about my choices, and I really value friends and editors who ask me questions in ways that open up the possibility for other choices.  

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

Don’t eat sand.

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

I personally don’t benefit from their separation.

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 do a lot of writing on my phone on trains.  I can be a typical house cat with my writing structures.  Consistently, in the mornings, in the same spot.

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

I turn back to Pessoa (all of them).  I re-read Hiromi Itō.  Hélène Cixous’ The Book of Promethea.  Everybody should read Brett Walker’s Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease.  Also Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive.    

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Chapstick.  Boat fuel.  The combination of pitch pine and cigarettes.  

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 think it’s useful to know the rules for all these material realities and languages, in order to imagine better ways to build communities.

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

Anna Kavan wrote a book called Ice, which changed the trajectory of a section of Serenade afterwards.  Albert Camus’ American Diaries was a troubling, important read.  For a while, the 2nd section of Serenade bore an epigraph from his diaries (“Endless good weather.”).  It was maybe when I was reading it for the first time, but the way he wrote about his depression went deep for me.  

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

My response to this is a little NSFW.  So I’ll go with visit Lisbon so I can Instagram a picture of me with Pessoa’s statue.    

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’ve always been a writer.  

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

I mean, here in gig culture, we all do a lot of things to keep afloat.  

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

Although hardly a recent release, I saw Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba for the first time last year.  

20 - What are you currently working on?

The working title to my manuscript-in-progress is Disturbances.  It focuses more on invertebrates and depression.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Queen Mob’s Teahouse: rob mclennan’s ‘best of 2017’

Once again, I've participated in Queen Mob's Teahouse's 'best of' year-end cavalcade, along with Ed Simon, Jessica Sequeira, Nyla Matuk, Scott Manley Hadley, Reb Livingston, Erik Kennedy, Kenyatta JP Garcia, Paul Johnathan, David Hilbert, Judson Hamilton, Jeremy Fernando, Geist Capital and Erin Belieu. So many lists! And of course, given I'm 'interviews editor,' I'm expecting that you should be sending me pitches for literary interviews for such, right? Send! Send!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens lives in Midwest and is the author of three full length poetry collections: Your Best Asset is a White Lace Dress, (Yellow Chair Press, 2016), The Messenger is Already Dead (Stalking Horse Press, March 2017) and We’re Going to Need a Higher Fence, tied for first place in the 2017 Lit Fest Book Competition. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is also the author of nine chapbooks. Her chapbook She Came Out From Under the Bed (Poems Inspired by the Films of Guillermo del Toro) recently came out from Dancing Girl Press. Recent work can be seen at or is forthcoming from Prelude, Cleaver, Kestrel, Yalobusha Review, decomp, and Inter/rupture. Visit: http://jennifermacbainstephens.wordpress.com/

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?

My very first book was my chapbook Every Her Dies (ELJ Publications,) and that changed things for me since that was the first chapbook I ever wrote and I didn’t know anything about the submission process or chapbooks or how one should try to publicize their own work to some extent. So that was a big jumping off point for me.

My second full length poetry book, The Messenger is Already Dead, is different from my earlier work in that I felt comfortable writing more surreal poems and poems inspired by art and films and some of these poems are more experimental in general.

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

I came to poetry when I joined a small writing group when I lived on a mountain in CA. It was a small community and I didn’t know anyone and I was looking to find people that I had something in common with. I lucked out, as I am still friends with these people today, but that is what really started my interest in poetry. Because they were all poets.

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?

Initially I just like to get the work down on the page. It will be messy and unfinished but there might be an idea there. Then ideally I return to it and revise until it feels right to me.

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 finish the poem when it feels done- normally my pieces are pretty short. The longest poem I wrote recently was three pages long. That poem was sort of a surreal story though, about a malevolent force trying to enter a house, a presence to deal with, so it sort of built in suspense I guess?

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

I really enjoy doing readings. I think I learn something about my poems when I read them aloud- when I am practicing for the reading- and I also like how maybe at the last minute you can change up what you were going to read based on the crowd and what the tone of the room is like. I would like to do more readings.

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 just write what is inside me at the moment. It is hard for me to do prompt work at times, though I enjoy it when it works out.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think the role of the writer in our larger culture is to keep getting their voice heard. There seems to be (or I guess it always existed) a negative force that wants to silence people, no matter who they are. So if writers can keep expressing themselves, their truths, that is a win for all of us. I do love it when I read words and it makes me think of new things, or a new way to think about something. I always love that surprise.

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

I think an outside editor can be a great addition- having that extra pair of eyes on your work- can be helpful. As long as there is mutual respect and caring about each other and the work.

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

The best piece of advice I ever got was – just show up. Do the work. Get it down. Don’t judge it. Just get it down. There is time for judging later.

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

I’ve written a few flash fiction pieces and I think two flash non-fiction pieces in my life- so I hope to do more of these things but at the moment I mostly do poetry.

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’m a single, working mom. I try to write a few times each week. I don’t have a set routine at the moment. But even if I can get a draft down in twenty minutes, that feels good to me.

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

I love looking at visual art, or new movies, or poets I love. I will re-read their work. Or just go for a hike.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine reminds me of my father’s house. Because one of his first homes was in the woods in Ohio where there was this creek in the back yard and lots of trees.

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?  

Yes all of these items influence me- it depends on the day. But I’ve probably written poems inspired by all of these things.

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

I really love surrealism whether in fiction, poetry, or other art forms. So I am drawn to this style/these writers in my life.

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

I have some interest in getting my MFA. I am a self-taught writer- so I think about that sometimes.

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 toss out these ideas: modern dancer, because I love how they tell a story without saying anything, an urban planner, because I hate strip malls, and I love seeing how people use space in creative ways, or a fashion designer because I love clothes.

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

Writing just always seemed the best way to get the thoughts from my brain out into the world.

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

The last great book I read was Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. I really enjoyed the horror film Don’t Breathe.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I just finished working on 31 Anne Rice “found poems” for the month of October.  Along with thirty-five other writers, I posted a found poem to my tumblr account and then reposted it to a private Facebook page. Each of us was assigned our own Anne Rice book. It was pretty wild.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;