12 or 20 (second series) questions with Erik Rasmussen

Erik Rasmussen is the Editor-In-Chief of At Large magazine, and the former Deputy Editor at MAN of the WORLD. His articles, essays, interviews and photographs have appeared in numerous magazines and websites. He’s written for Lexus, J.Crew, Hermes, Glenfiddich, Santoni, Zegna, and other brands. His only literary award was a grant to Long Island’s prestigious Lutheran High School for an essay about his father, My Unsung Hero—a true story with a false premise and how he learned fiction’s meaning and value. A Diet Of Worms is his first novel.

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

Writers have to set goals. I promised myself that if I hadn’t finished a novel by the time I was 33-years-old I’d quit writing. That wasn’t a random age, Christ was 33 when he was purportedly crucified. My burden seemed more bearable. There are 33 chapters in the book. And the title, A Diet Of Worms, while meant to evoke an existential nausea, is also an obvious reference to the Protestant Reformation. I started the book when I was 31 and finished it in under a year. I may be an atheist, by Jesus confirmed me as a writer.

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

I started writing short stories with my grandmother—a poet—when I was a kid. I hadn’t done anything yet, so I had to make it up. Fiction comes naturally to children.

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?

The ideas come quickly, and usually in paragraphs. I don’t know what they mean, or how they fit together, but I know how they feel. I know what they mean to say. I begin writing those paragraphs. Then I look for how and where and why they connect. Then the full story emerges. The first draft looks nothing like the final. If the final draft is a David Rockwell building (propped up on stilts), the first draft is the beer cans littering the vacant lot it was built on.

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

My first intention is a short story. But the story won’t end. It goes on and on. That’s why it took me so long to begin publishing. I never finished anything. A Diet of Worms is essentially 33 short stories. The book I’m writing now is publishing one chapter at a time, short story by short story.

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

Nope. A Diet’s narrator, Larry Morvan, is 17-years-old. I’m forty. I sound ridiculous reading him. I’d like to hire an actor. He’d have to be over 18 though. The material is pretty dicey at points.

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?

When I was younger I developed a “theory” called bombardment, and it pretty much stated that the story wasn’t the story. The story was the experience of reading. The theory demanded that the reader’s senses be as stimulated as they are in real life, that they be bombarded (see?) with as much quick description as possible in order to simulate the environment in which the (less essential) story is set. Of course, people tune out 99% of their perceivable environment—the traffic’s reving cylinders and passing fenced-in yards with bikes and buckets strewn and the way their shirt rubs their shoulders as they walk and the sweet toothpaste residue in their molars and the post-rain petrichor and sapling buds opening fresh on a breeze and the scents all mixed with their face lotion’s fragrance … You couldn’t live that way, hyper aware. You’d go insane, existing like a wild rabbit, as prey. Could you imagine the anxiety? So much for theories.

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 writer’s job is to inform and entertain. You can unfold each category into never ending subsets, but there you have it.

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

Essential.

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

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

Nothing is easy. But switching genres is as good as a break. I’d rather turn to writing an article from fiction than just not write for a while. Taking pictures? Even better. In the end you’re solving the same problems: what do I add, what do I eliminate? What tells the story most clearly without boring? It’s the information’s source that’s different. David Foster Wallace, describing the difference between fiction and non-fiction, said this: “Both [genres] feel like they’re executed on tightropes, over abysses—it’s the abysses that are different. Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.”

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?

Walk the dog, coffee, news. From there it’s less routine. I need to be left alone. Unbothered. I go and find a place. Then I’ll set a goal. Sometimes that goal is to reach a plot point in a story. Most recently that meant getting a character to arm wrestle a drug dealer for a dime bag. More often the goal is to net 750 words. That means writing 2K or more and tweaking and whittling down and daydreaming then wishing I’d never tried writing then hitting save finally and, if I’d been lucky, feeling damn good.

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

Silence or music.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Vacuum cleaner exhaust.

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?

Photography has helped. The editing process is similar. So is the problem solving. When a photo isn’t working it’s usually better to remove something. Subtraction rather than addition is the solution photo wise. Same for a written scene.

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

Mark Twain, L.F. Céline, Hemmingway, Vonnegut, Bukowski, Orwell, Miller, Roth. Hmm. Alice Miller’s Thou Shalt Not Be Aware was big for me, and so was The Drama of the Gifted Child. Same for A Brief History of Time, The God Delusion, War Is A Racket, St. Paul’s letters, a particular thread on a certain website about opioid and heroin addiction and their treatment, the third chapter to Johnny Got His Gun, the American Constitution, Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms especially as they concern pessimism, and the newer pieces that’ll occur to me after I’ve answered here.

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

Earn a black belt in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu

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?

Work with my hands.

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

Lack of imagination.

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

My girlfriend kept insisting I read a self-help book called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. I’d never read a self-help book and had always looked down on them. Then we rented a cabin in Woodstock for the weekend. It rained and poured. There were loads of books on the shelves and one of them happened to be Big Magic. To appease her, I read the first chapter. Then the second. Then I couldn’t put it down. I’m not sure why I’m embarrassed to admit that I read the whole book in one fantastic gulp. I had a similar experience reading Dan Brown’s Davinci Code. In Paris for fuck’s sake. Maybe neither will join the ranks of great books, but I had a great time reading them. I saw Hereditary at an iPic theatre last week. Recommended.  

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on my second novel, Further From Home (working title). It tells stories about addiction from opposite sides of the disease; the congenital and the acquired. You can read some chapters on Statorec.com right now, each a short story. I’m also producing At Large magazine No. 11, on newsstands in September.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lucian Mattison, Reaper’s Milonga

Gin Gang Milonga

It follows the slug of bell tongue,

rattle against the apple

of an ox throat. Hoof after

hoof, breath cluffed,

is this how we are all yoked?

Death steps a tight circle

maintains the image of moving

forward, always pulling in

closer to the center

of this ancient structure,

lugging the rotation

of our hearts. It pulls in worship,

interminable ring of filling

its own fresh hoofprints, lifetime

spent dancing atop hay rot –

palpably wet, overwhelming.

DC-based Argentinean-US poet and translator Lucian Mattison’s second poetry title—after Peregrine Nation (Dynamo Verlag, 2017)—is Reaper’s Milonga (YesYes Books, 2018), a collection of performative, even theatrical, first-person narrative lyric poems. Taking its title from the “Milonga,” an Argentinian musical/dance style considered, among other things, a more relaxed version of the tango, the poems in Mattison’s Reaper’s Milonga explore cultural divides, politics, art and love, composed in the blur between commentary, lyric and essay-poem. As he writes as part of the poem “Election Day,” subtitled “Cordoba, Argentina”:

The shopkeeper sells beef milanesa

by the yard, our neighbors

son pisses on his lover’s bed

and for the third time

blames the dog. Tio Carlos

keeps saying, honesty

is a jail cell, crooks the wardens,

as election ads preen television screens

with images of grandmothers,

rolling Pampa.

There is the occasional poem that falls a bit flat, such as “Homunculus” or “Death in Venice,” but on the whole, Reaper’s Milonga is filled with vibrant commentaries on culture, living and being, writing out a series of joyful, lively and precise poems that are highly astute, existing between and amid two powerful world cultures. As he writes in the poem “Circumambient”: “I still have yet to break / from this world of watching, // how the expanse in front of me / is actually the distending of my own chest, // distance between people more / a measurement of how small our worlds are.”

what we did on our summer vacation:

Someone asked recently what we did over the summer. That's a good question; what have we done? We've been around, mostly. My father has been in the hospital since the beginning of June, so that's been a bit distracting (he's doing far better now).

A weekend in Picton with father-in-law, a weekend on the farm etc [which I wrote about here]. Mostly, the same. The children were in three mornings a week up the street (the preschool ran a summer program which included slightly older children as well), so I could continue my attempts at work (which seemed to be mostly reviews and other housekeeping things, and not nearly as much writing as I might have preferred, but there you go).

The fall, at least, begins Aoife in five mornings a week of preschool, and Rose begins full-time school again, entering Senior Kindergarten. I want to get back into fiction. I have a poetry manuscript or two rolling around in my head (including one that I think I started last week).

About a month ago, I somehow realized that if we drove Christine to work, we could use the car for the day, thus making museums in the city some five minutes after opening, which meant the kids could run around near-empty spaces for an hour or so, able to watch the onset of crowds entering just as we were preparing to leave. We went to the Museum of Nature, Science and Technology (nearly next-door to where Christine works), including their Lego Exhibit (where Aoife refused to enter the Crazy Kitchen), the Aviation Museum and the Agricultural Museum, which we visited along with Monty Reid and his daughter.

Until this summer, I wasn't even sure where the Aviation Museum was. Although, until Christine and I had kids, I'd never actually been to the Agricultural Museum either (I mean, I grew up on a farm; why would I be going to an Agricultural Museum to learn about farming?).

We baked. We spent the occasional afternoon at Christine's cousin's place (they have a pool). They even watched the girls for an afternoon, so I could get a bit more work done. Rose, of course, spent five straight hours in their pool (getting out only once, apparently, to use the washroom). Once she has her lifejacket on, she can do anything.

Rose did a week of forest school (afternoons), a week of Science Camp at Science and Technology (full days), two different weeks of bike camp (afternoons: and she can now ride her bike like a pro).

We went to parks. We went downtown (so I could make chapbook covers). We went for ice cream. We redid our bathroom. We had a new shed built in our backyard. The children played in the wading pool. We went for walks. We baked. We saw my father in the hospital (taking children finally, once he was out of ICU and in one of the proper wards). Aoife has begun standing on tables and doing singing performances. Rose perfects her own ongoing performance as princess.

Currently we're making plans for the UK. Christine doing a bit of writing-research for a couple of days, so we're turning it into a bit of a trip. Child-free, naturally. I'm thinking about my two fall poetry collections (my Spuyten Duyvil book is already out; my Salmon book still forthcoming); I should probably launch those in Ottawa, right? I didn't even get around to launching my New Star title...

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Eve Joseph

Eve Joseph’s two books of poetry, The Startled Heart (Oolichan, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (Brick, 2010) were both nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Award. Her nonfiction book, In the Slender Margin was published by HarperCollins in 2014 and won the Hubert Evans award for nonfiction. The book was named one of the top 100 picks of the year by the Globe and Mail. Her latest book of poetry is Quarrels, new from Anvil Press.

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

I was 51 when my first book of poetry came out. There’s something about seeing that number in print that is shocking! I don’t know what the impact would have been if I’d written my first book in my twenties. Perhaps it would have changed everything, perhaps nothing. To say it changed my life is too big a claim but it let me imagine another life. Similarities? Both my first and my most recent books move by a kind of illogical logic. They are both associative in nature and rely on leaps rather than narrative. I find myself reaching towards the surreal recently, interested in how, when we scratch the surface of our lives and stories, the foundation is often strange and marvelous.

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

I wrote my mother a ten-page poem for her 80^th birthday and got hooked again. Worst poem imaginable. She loved it. I knew nothing about poetry other than I’d loved it when I was young and had written and then stopped for 30 years. I think poetry was dormant in me all that time. When it woke up it was hungry and consumed everything without discrimination.

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 painstakingly slowly. Emphasis on “pain.” My initial drafts, both in poetry and nonfiction bear no resemblance to the final manuscript. I edit as I go along and rewrite numerous, numerous times.

4.     Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

Very much the former. I don’t know I’m working on a book until I’m deep into it. Writing nonfiction, for me, is akin to combing tangles out of one’s hair. I write until I’m snagged and then have to go back and work out the knots. My nonfiction book came out of an essay that I went back into and “blew up” - the way one blows up a balloon - until it was a book. I had to follow a line-of-thought as far as I could and then follow another. There is a point when I become aware that I am working on an actual book and that’s exciting.

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

I dread readings beforehand and then, most often, enjoy them when I’m doing them. I’m always tense the day of a reading. It’s helped to separate myself from the work. My husband, Patrick Friesen, is an amazing reader. He’s taught me to give the words their due. When I’m reading, it’s about the work and not about me. That helps.

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?

It’s feels politically incorrect to say I do not have theoretical concerns behind my writing. But I don’t. At least not in the sense that I have a cause to champion or elucidate. I think all writers probably have a very few “themes” they return to, or circle, in their writing. My themes are probably grief and wonder.

7.     What do you see the current role of the writer being in the 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 is to be true to the work. Whatever happens after that is out of his/her hands.

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

Absolutely essential. In some ways I trust myself more when I’m editing, and working with an editor, than when I’m writing. Writing is tentative, an exploration. When I’m editing I’m working with a known, trying to make it better. Reaching for what it is I actually want to say.

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

Years ago I read “Instructions to a Writer” by Jane Kenyon in which she said “ask yourself if the work passes the ‘so what’ test.” I apply this test to all of my writing. Funnily enough, when I looked up Kenyon’s instructions just now I couldn’t find the ‘so what’ test anywhere. I may have imagined it but it’s stood me in good stead nonetheless.

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

I love moving between genres. Each genre contains the other…my nonfiction is guided by poetic thinking and my poetry contains the “seeds” of something larger. I have to say I am more and more drawn to prose. I love the room to range that prose provides. I am also really enjoying the containment of prose poetry. Charles Simic describes prose poetry as the place where the impulse for prose and the impulse for poetry collide. I like the collision that takes place…a little of each destroyed and something new created.

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 keep any kind of routine. I’d like to and I’ve tried but it never lasts long. I need to be alone to write so I go away three or four times a year for a few weeks at a time. I like the anonymity of being in a hotel in a city. A rhythm starts to build  when I’m on my own. A sort of a dance will begin between procrastination and finally falling into the work. I get up, go out for coffee, go for long walks, I don’t talk to anyone and over the period of a few days I begin to feel the “pull” towards working and will often end up writing 10-12 hours a day. I have to find my way towards that every time. Once I have found my way into something then I can work at home.

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

When writing eludes me I am convinced it will never return. I go through long periods of circling writing, trying to find my way in. Kenyon (again) has a six line poem called “Not Writing”

A wasp rises to its papery

nest under the eaves

where it daubs

at the gray shape,

but seems unable

to enter its own house.

I often feel like that wasp. Probably the hardest thing about writing is being locked out of one’s house.  My late brother-in-law, Jamie Reid, wrote that poetry came to him in short bursts, punctuated by long dry spells during which he ardently prepared for the moments when poetry was given to him again. That rings deeply true for me as well. The way back in often involves writing really bad poetry or prose in order to feel the point at which the writing takes over and brings me with it.

13.  What fragrance reminds you of home?

Hops. There was a brewery not far from our house in North Vancouver. Certain mornings, the air smelled like popcorn only a bit sweeter and sicklier.

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?

The question makes me think of oral vs. written history. In the west, it makes sense that books come from books. There is a long history of influence and there’s an ongoing conversation that flows out of literature. In this way, books can and do come out of books. But they also come out of stories – the stories we grew up with, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories the world tells us. The oral tradition is the oldest form of storytelling that we have and I am deeply influenced by it.

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

There are just so many wonderful writers. I go back to the classics I loved as a young woman at the same time I find new, and exciting, writers all the time. I’m often guided by the genre I’m working in. Most recently, working on prose poetry, I kept Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Tranströmer, Bly, Follain, Carsten René Nielsen, Rafferty, Simic and others close to me whenever I sat down to write.

16.  What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

I’d like to go deeper into what I’m already doing.

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

Patrick believes that many artists are engaged in their second closest art form because their first is too close. He would have loved to have been a musician. I would have loved to have been an actress even though I have zero talent and was kicked out of acting class when I was 15. Still, it’s another life that I dream of.

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

Without wanting to sound pretentious, I’d say that writing chose me. I didn’t choose it. Writing invites me into the world in ways that nothing else does. I’m enormously grateful for it.

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

 Beloved by Toni Morrison and the New Zealand film The Dark Horse.

20.  What are you currently working on?

I am intrigued by short fiction and am playing around a little with that.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;