Sunday, January 31, 2021

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jael Richardson

Jael Richardson is the author of The Stone Thrower, a book columnist on CBC’s q and the founder and the Executive Director for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD). Her debut novel, Gutter Child, arrived January 26, 2021.

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 Stone Thrower is really special to me. Maybe first books always feel special in that way, but writing my father’s story feels like a particular kind of gift to me and to my family. When I started writing The Stone Thrower, I didn’t plan to keep writing, not seriously at least. That was never my intent. And yet, here I am, debuting a novel eight years later, discovering my passion and my purpose as I moved through my 30s.

Gutter Child is rooted in that same passion for storytelling that I enjoyed while working on the memoir. But it feels really different too because it’s mine in every way. I made it up. I wrote it out, and with the help of a great editor and some excellent readers, it became a story from a place I imagined and created. This book showed me something I didn’t really know I was capable of – that I can imagine amazing worlds and tackle tough subjects in ways that are really exciting to write and to read.

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

Technically, I started in theatre. I studied acting in university, so my first work was in playwriting. I started to write plays because there weren’t enough monologues for me as a Black actor. I wrote plays because I had to, and my first play, my upside-down black face, was about an actor facing those frustrations. I came to prose because I wanted to write my father’s story, and it was working on my father’s story that really showed me that writing was something I loved to do outside of theatre. I think I chose fiction in the end, or for now, because I like to create and imagine. I’m not as interested in being fixed in a story that’s already been figuratively written. I want to ask questions and imagine possible outcomes and answers through interesting characters.

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?

New projects seem to start the day after I submit the final draft for the story that came before it. I don’t really take a break and I tend not to work on more than one project at a time. But aside from that, the process for writing each book has been different. I’m quite organized in general when it comes to professional work. You might say, I’m a little obsessed with efficiency. And that applies to my writing as well.  I typically plan out the frame work of the story, and then I work from beginning to end on the plot, editing again and again from start to finish in layers. The first draft is short and terrible, like a detailed outline. The next layer is about filling in details and making decisions. It’s not until the fourth or fifth draft that I’ve got something worth reading (longer if I’m not sure what I’m doing, which happened with Gutter Child). By the time I submit a manuscript I’ve worked through the whole thing about fifteen times. Minimum.

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?

I’m always working on a book. I find short pieces really stressful. I don’t know how to focus. I don’t know how to make it about just one thing. There’s always multiple things happening for me in a book.

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

I started in theatre, so I’m one of those strange writers who loves readings and public events. I’m also an extrovert, so the hardest part of the writing process for me is actually all of the quiet, detailed focus. I love connecting with readers. It’s one of my favourite things about the writing cycle.

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?

Gutter Child is very much about colonization and the experiences of Black folks and those who face systemic oppression. The final product – the ending – really came about at the late stages of editing, so one of my major concerns is how Black readers will see the book and the characters. I can’t please everyone and I don’t write books to do that, but when you’re a member of a marginalized community, it’s common to be concerned about how your community will see your work. One of my deep seeded questions is often about how to remain true to my story without doing damage. I don’t think you can really know if you’re successful at that until the work comes out and reaches people you don’t know. So my current question is definitely about the effect it will have on Black readers in particular.

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 are storytellers. Our job is to tell the stories that have been gifted to us in the best way that we can. I think with any role, you should have some morals and convictions that guide you – for me, I’m certainly thinking about things with a social justice lens. But I’m not operating to change readers with my books, and I’m not sure that’s a good approach to writing.

I’m writing about things that I’m curious about and I’m passionate about, but in the end, I’m telling stories. And once those stories are with the readers, my job is done. I hope my books make people think. I hope my books change the way people interact with one another for the better. I hope my books have a practical impact. But my goal is to tell stories that get people to question what they see. That’s all I’m trying to do as a writer.

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

The editing process is one of my favourite parts of the writing process. Editors see your book with fresh eyes, and they have a skilled way of seeing gaps and identifying opportunities. I love working with an editor. It’s the copyediting that breaks me a little bit because it’s about breaking apart what you’ve done and defending it against “rules”. It can often veer into a place that feels less about storytelling and more about language of law and order, and I feel inherently resistant to systems and processes like that.

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

There’s two that I repeat over and over throughout the process of writing that are actually connected, despite coming from two different sources over the last five years. In a writing workshop, author Helen Humphreys once told me, “Everything in service to the reader.” It’s about giving readers what they need to follow the story. For me, this has meant letting go of what sounds good or clever in my writing and moving scenes along so that a reader gets the most authentic story. But it’s also an approach that made me think about who my reader is and that awful question of who you write for. As a Black writer who read a lot of stories growing up that were not for or about Black people – this has been hard to decipher. Did I even know the difference between writing for a mystical white or non-white reader having grown up in a literary system that often fed me the same kinds of stories? Do I even know what the difference is? In an interview I did with Indigenous icon Eden Robinson, Eden said that for every book, she writes to one person – a very specific person she knows. I’ve stolen that approach. Rather than thinking about a collective blur of readers, I now write to serve that one person – that one reader. It’s been the most helpful craft advice I’ve ever received.

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

In The Stone Thrower, there was a scene in each chapter that I fictionalised – where I imagined what could have happened without rooting it in firm research. These were my favourite scenes to write, so I think fiction was a natural transition for me. I love being able to bend and create stories. I’m not particularly interested in re-creating real places in my work post-memoir. And I’ve been wondering of late if my fiction will ever be set in a real place, or if I’ll always want to create cities and places that I can bend to my preferences. Science fiction may just be the exact opposite of non-fiction – in terms of inventing worlds and making everything up. And I love that. I’m very comfortable here.

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?

My best writing days happen when I wake up and start writing at 7am or so and I have until noon to just write. I can usually go 3-5 hours straight pretty easily, but after noon or after any other kind of work the process is a little more fractured. It takes me longer to get into the writing and I’m generally less productive.

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

When I get stuck in my writing it’s usually because I’m torn about the direction it should go or the adjustments that are necessary. I tend to watch stories that are about similar kinds of problems and settings for inspiration. I find watching documentaries and real stories helpful in this regard. Because it’s easy to take a real story and use it as inspiration for your fiction.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Food. Especially homemade pizza. My mom used to make homemade pizza every Friday night, and that particular smell definitely reminds me of home.

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 would say I’m largely influenced by other books. Gutter Child happened because I read Sula by Toni Morrison. I loved that little novel. I loved how it made me think about things. I’m sure nature and other things shape my ideas in ways I should probably think more about, but I am most heavily influenced by the books I read and the tv and movies I watch. I’m most motivated by what I feel is missing or what I think is being overlooked in those places – stories I might be well-suited suited to writing.

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

I heard a writer share this recently and it’s true for me as well. Each of my books has mentors – books that shaped the content and structure and style. For Gutter Child, Sula by Toni Morrison, Brother by David Chariandy, The Break by Katherena Vermette, and The Hunger Games were definite influences. But for my next book, there’s a whole new suite of mentors that are shaping the story.

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

I’d like to have a book turned into a television series or a movie. And not for the book glamour, although that would be nice. I just really want to see that evolution of a story. I’d love to be involved in the writing and to learn how that kind of storytelling works differently than the styles I’ve done before.

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 happen to plan a literary festival, and I love doing that. But I left teaching to do more writing and to plan FOLD, so if I wasn’t doing FOLD and writing, I think I might be a college professor. 

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

I write because I’m compelled to. It really is that simple. I remember when I was in labour, trying to deliver my son. I had been pushing for a while, maybe an hour or more. He was stuck, and the midwife said that on the next contraction I could rest, but the next contraction came and my whole body just needed to push. I realized I couldn’t rest. I had to just do it, just keep working at it. That’s how writing feels. On my tired days or during the worst parts in the writing process, I still hear these characters. I still feel their stories, so it’s best to just hunker down and work. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing, and it’s too hard to fight against a force like that.

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

I could never pick just one, so Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennet, and Indians on Vacation by Thomas King. They hit me for very different reasons, but they affected me as a writer, and for me those are the best kinds of reads – when I’m not just drawn in by the story but by the storytelling as well. The films that are most on my mind these days are the entire Hunger Games Series and the Jumanji series. I know they’re not perhaps what people might expect me to watch or read or be thinking about, but they are relevant to what I’m working on and I think what strikes me about those two series is how each consecutive film brought something new while remaining really rooted to the world established in the initial film.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Well, I think that’s going to have to remain a secret for now. But I think if you read closely about what I’m reading and watching, you might just be able to figure it out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Saturday, January 30, 2021

Paula Mendoza, Play For Time

 

Someone No One Everyone Anyone

and I put all this blood in, but things just get sticky
No one’s a mess anyone

wants to pick up after, so I marched my ass down
to the shack that flashed

LIVE MODELS in red and asked if they needed
someone good with light.

Everyone was bronzed
and someone was covered in glitter.

“Here,” I said, “hold
that glow

lower” and motioned to someone
who shone a weird green

light so high
the shadows made everyone’s eyes onstage look

like pulsing suckholes.
Limbs in that angle

seem tentacled with darknesses.
I tsked, “That’s no way to shine a body.”

Selected by Vijay Seshadri as the winner of the 2019 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize is Salt Lake City, Utah-based poet Paula Mendoza’s full-length debut, Play For Time (New York NY: Gaudy Boy, LLC, 2020). According to the notes at the back of the collection, the Gaudy Boy Book Prize “brings literary works by authors of Asian heritage to the attention of an American audience. Established in 2018 as the imprint of the New York City-based literary nonprofit Singapore Unbound, we publish poetry, fiction, and literary non-fiction.” Previous winners of the Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize include Autobiography of Horse by Jennifer Sang Eun Park and The Experiments of the Tropics by Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, with winners of the Gaudy Boy Fiction Prize including The Foley Artist by Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, and Malay Sketches, by Alfian Sa’at.

The short poems that make up Play for Time reveal themselves slowly across a broad lyric, organized together as a loose-suite of poems of exploration, and beginning. “My theory stiffens your discipline. / Slavishly,” Mendoza writes, as part of “Dehelixing Adora: A Colonial Kantá,” “this thought pulverizes love // into something I can breathe. / I can’t breathe.” Mendoza’s poems are full of teeth, of body; animalistic fierceness and the sea, the shore; the flood waters up against the land. Her poems are lyrically narrative and very physical, writing on the purge, colonialism and reclamation. “Because these daughters of mine,” she writes, to end the poem “Lucy, Again,” “risen from the dead white / myth, expect dinner on the table. And meat is meat is meat.”

 

Friday, January 29, 2021

Ongoing notes: late January, 2021 : Pierre, Cortese + Muldoon,

I am hoping everyone is safe and healthy out there in the world. I am home, we are home, we are constantly home. And have you been keeping up with the interviews over at Touch the Donkey, the essays over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, the weekly “Tuesday poem” series over at dusie, or the weekly interviews with current/former Ottawa writers via the Chaudiere Books blog? And you know the new issue of periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics begins to drop on Monday morning, so watch for that, also. Current extra lock-downs throughout Ontario mean I’ve only released three items so far this year through above/ground press, but expect that once my print-shop opens again, I’ll be dropping a mound of new publications off there, immediately. Which means: there is still time to subscribe, yes? I am working on some pretty cool things, including Kirby’s issue of G U E S T [a journal of guest-editors], and new chapbooks by Edward Smallfield, Al Kratz, Adam Thomlison, Valerie Coulton, Anik See, katie o’brien, Khashayar Mohammadi, Jason Christie, Kevin Varrone, N.W. Lea and a whole slew of others.

Toronto ON: Toronto poet and editor Terese Mason Pierre’s chapbook debut, Manifest (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2020), is a collection of eleven poems engaged with the intimacies and responsibilities of being uniquely human. There is a thickness to her short narratives; composed to unfold via a heart that feels both longing and the blood-pulse. Hers is a sequence of lyric of chants and performance, dry humour and truths, storytelling her poems across great swaths of time. “There is no leader,” she writes, to open “Aliens Visit the Caribbean,” “we take them to our women. / They say, ‘Oh, so you have finally joined the / universe,’ and we reply, ‘Careful, there is one / nation still using Fahrenheit.’”

The Study of the Imaginary

A scientist enters a wild church,
steps into robbery and ress,
wood scorched into effigies,

an infant spine underfoot.
With a weak light, she assembles

her whiggish joints. When she stands
at the glass pulpit, a specter

announces her inspiration with song—
she has removed the log out of her

own eye, she has sacrificed her
only child, housed the preternatural

in her lungs forever.

Behind her, she can see grace
unfold into fear and collapse
a diamond tower, the promise of

wholeness wither in a paragon’s vise.
She tries to collect her body,

but her bones will not cooperate,
a wheezing trellis. She holds

all the more impossibility, coos
at the empirical. She settles

into the frame,
becomes human.

Toronto/Thorold ON: Franco Cortese extends his ongoing explorations of structured language and language structure through of faulthers (Toronto ON: Gap Riot Press, 2020), one of a slew of chapbooks he’s had over the past year or two. The pieces in of faulthers format and reformat an assemblage of word shapes, twists and sounds out of the very building blocks of words. Utilizing an array of paired poems, he plays sound off meaning, puns, translation and other shapes and digressions to see an idea through as far as it might go, and even a bit further. There are so many project-driven poetry-based projects that simply do not work because they don’t go far enough, and part of what makes these pieces work so fully, and so well, is Cortese’s ability to keep going. And I say thusly, also: keep going.

Montreal QC: I have to admit that I’m always a combination of baffled and impressed that Montreal’s Vallum magazine manages to consistently produce chapbooks by heavy-hitters (alongside their titles by emerging authors)—a list that includes Fanny Howe, Jan Zwicky, John Kinsella, DonMcKay and Bhanu Kapil—especially knowing how these titles seem to fly just under the radar. One of their latest is by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, his The Bannisters (2020), produced as “Vallum Chapbook Series No. 29.” Now, if you are one of those few who aren’t impressed by the fact that Muldoon’s work has won both Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize, and that he held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry (1999-2004), it would be impossible to not be blown away by the fact that he worked collaboratively with the late Warren Zevon. I mean, really.

The six poems that make up The Bannisters are composed as short, sharp, sketches—a blend of portrait and scene—that write on artifacts, mortality, memory and distance. There is a musicality underlying everything, and a wistfulness, perhaps, as a stone hovering for a moment after its final skip, before it sinks down to its final depth.

WAGTAIL

Sometimes, as I turn a corner in County Tyrone, a roof of PVC
or corrugated iron
will scintillate no less persuasively

than an unperturbed stretch of Lower Lough Erne

abutting the lost kingdom from which my family hails.
Primarily a thatcher, my grandfather knew mange
was a complaint to which his Clydesdales

were all too prone, yet may not have recognized dementia

as a trait of the Muldoons. Sometimes as phrase
such as “Hugh had begun to dote”
will weigh as a Clydesdale’s withers would weigh with withies
 

while the pied wagtail crossing freshly turned furrows
is a tiny rowboat
glimpsed now and again in the trough between storm-waves.


Thursday, January 28, 2021

Shelley Feller, Dream Boat

 

the fugacity of life’s pleasures/infatuate, fatty cutlet!

heck yes yer ghost gets hosed au jus
smear of nude glucose & closer
garçon got fat gathered all good

hot on hormonal goo rune
he-man spit dip, lick ich hickey-sigil doh!

dewy-glee today o throne me! crush all
muscle-scruff, organic ultra facial toner, de-

oderant, gas-x, xanax, loose a rude
toot, fruit-of-the-loom hunk snooze

in ruddy bloom, lube up some silicone
props, pop-top & pivot dip anoint

oozing fffffth induce adieu
smock off blithe oil for men prepare

barbican barbasol barbarella, charméd waters burn

Decatur, Georgia poet Shelley Feller’s electrifying full-length poetry debut is Dream Boat (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2020), a polyvocal explosion of fragments, overlapping high-speed accumulations and blurring text. There is an enormous amount of play here, blending visual elements of the text with a rollicking sound gymnastic, reminiscent of works by Canadian poets Adeena Karasick, Louis Cabri, Chris Turnbull and even Marcus McCann. “blotto-blotto        plunder yonder lubber        what err a body weathered seas-me other,” they write, as part of the poem “@melvillestomb.” Feller’s is a collage-lyric of incredible flexibility and maneuverability, moving at the speed of texting in an assemblage of poems that cohere into a uniquely singular, book-length poem. Feller’s Dream Boat utilizes the rhythm of white space and sexual being, a sing-song push to emerge from a restrictive self into an actualized self, writing to remove the self-loathing forced upon through external forces into a more open acceptance. Feller writes negotiating the politics and semantics of gender and transition from the human, guttural body in a musical, magical tenor, and I can’t imagine a better example of Toronto poet bpNichol’s sense of “serious play” than Feller’s Dream Boat. This is a remarkable, rich and powerful collection, debut or otherwise. As the second half of the poem “on our first date he says he’s poz & asks if i’m scared, if i still wanna” reads:

a wormhole opens
& then men who made me

mash—this beasty skin
we species in, stabled

& shorn, blinkered
to moral in ymage’s mold

the past—all plastered cast
cracked, & thru the slit comes

a fist of flowers, flaming sworde
deformed transformed—all muscle

sprung to labor love, the rough
factory of flesh invents itself

a representamen—fetish’d
& hung scum suckers dumb scruff’d

my rude forensics, pluck up
in the frightened zones

of my theater—meat-slung
selves carried off

in shards—all false heads
of beauty’s cooing orphic

anesthetized
a langue lost i

this is a song
& this is too—