12 or 20 (second series) questions with Peter Unwin

Peter Unwin [photo credit: Deborah Clipperton] is the author of The Infinite Park (Cormorant Books, 2021) and eight previous books, as well as many short stories, essays, and poems. His short story collection Life Without Death was shortlisted for the 2014 Trillium Book Award, and his poetry collection When We Were Old, was a Relit Award finalist. He is currently completing a PhD in the Humanities at York University.

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 was a collection of short stories The Rock Farmers, and the publisher mailed a copy to me to pick up at the post office in a small town in Renfrew County where I happened to be staying. I still have the envelope. Back then, an author’s first book had some authority, prestige even, for being your first book. That book in particular was widely reviewed. In those days there were newspapers and print, a print culture that included a love of print, and also included “book reviews.” I actually received an invitation to join Canada’s Who’s Who, based on that one book.

There is no book more delightful to hold in your hand than the first one. The last one feels good, as well.  And yes, in fact, my first book did change my life. It closed the door on my being anything else but an author. I am now more or less unemployable.

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

I was open to all of it from the start. I wrote plays as well, and produced them. Poetry is the highest form, always has been. I’ve always thought that poetry is to literature what golf is to professional athletes: the purest thing, and what everyone wants to do, no matter what sport they play.

The short form was always friendly to me. It catered to my strengths and interests as a stylist. The novel requires a lot of effort doing mundane things, like moving one character out of her chair, and getting her into a car, or on to the back of a toboggan, etc. This legwork does not exist in poetry, just the flame, the thought, the word, the moment, all at once. 

Prose, in my novels in particular, and in my non-fiction, allowed for me to explore history, to take my time, to come to know the land that had produced me, and that I was re-producing in my work. The short story is much closer to poetry than it is to a novel. Raymond Carver was the first writer I encountered who understood this.

The truth is, as an author, a creator, I feel no difference whatsoever between writing poems, short stories, novels, essays, or even tweets or Facebook posts.  Even academic writing. I recently wrote my doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of a committee of scholars, the experience for me was no different from writing poetry or novels, or books of non-fiction.

Increasingly, I think non-fiction is where the real power lies. There is something not quite right about fiction and novels, about the need to make things up, to try and convince people it’s real. Fiction too often turns into fakery. My wife calls what I do (i.e writing) “making shit up.” But I don’t really. I don’t like to do that. If it is in my books, that means it happened. In Written In Stone, there is an old fishing boat up on Lake Superior that Marilyn Monroe is thought to have taken several rides in. I would never make that up, that is to say, fictionalize it. Why bother? Being a fiction writer doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make things up.  There’s always plenty to work with.

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?

Twenty years seems a good rule of thumb for me. Usually I have a half dozen manuscripts on the go, and after twenty years, they are all done. Then I forget to publish them, and then I remember. That takes a couple of years as well.

For The  Wolf’s Head  I spent a few years travelling around Lake Superior, and writing. Those would be call notes, I guess. But really they were the pages of the book, I was writing them straight off, by pen, in notebooks. But I’m not a note taker. There are no rules, thank God. I think the real function of notes is so that later on, you can lose them.

4 - Where does a poem or work 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?

The urge to write for me, always comes after excellent reading. I read something good, a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, any poem by her, something by Frederick Seidel, until I can’t stand it anymore, then I have to jump up and start writing.  I need to drink that blood, to get in while it’s gushing. John Ashbery was like catnip to me.  I could never get more than two lines into his poems without jumping up and starting to write. It is quite possible that I have never actually finished a John Ashbery poem, for that reason.

 My novels are books first, all that is missing are the words. Poetry is different, fragments, dreams, lost things, things that are found. A poem is never a book, but books are often poetry, and strangely, I have found it a little bit easier to get my books of poetry published, than say, any individual poems. 

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

I once gave a reading while standing on a public bench in Coronation Park, to a bunch of baseball players who did not have faintest idea what I was doing.  They looked at me with a mixture, of pity, contempt, and pure hatred. That poem I read is now published in The Infinite Park, a baseball poem. I gave an outdoor reading at an amphitheater in Provincial Park on the coast of Lake Superior, the wind was gusting so hard that

I had to stand with my back to the audience, for the entire show, to keep the gale out of my microphone. I went from reading to a full house at Harbourfront to a reading a northern library where no one showed up at all. I ate all the donuts with the staff and had a great time. There was a wolf in town, it had attacked two joggers, people weren’t going out.

Readings have nothing to do with authorship, and that’s a good thing. I once listened to Saul Bellow read, it was excruciating, very painful to be around. I stopped after that. Recently I been performing my work with musicians. That’s better. It connects you to a tradition that goes back to Homer. 

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?

Canadian authors are traditionally mired in privilege, and the failure to address that privilege is the failure of the country, which is also a failure of our literature. Those are the current questions to me. Also Canada is an indigenous country. So the question becomes, “as a Canadian author, how does the Native impact your work?” If it doesn’t, why not? What’s your excuse? If you say “well I’m just a good old fashioned settler colonial white author who pays no attention to the Indigenous backbone of the country,” then you are contributing to the same literary ‘disappearing’ that we have come to take for granted, and that constitutes so much of Kanlit. 

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?

A writer is just someone who finds it more difficult to write than anybody else. Celebrity has penetrated so deep into the culture industries, that there really is no room for what I do, or what I have always thought was admirable in authorship, that is; anonymity. Auden said it; the role of the author is to be anonymous. The pure unrecognized, anonymity of authorship. I love it. These days you are supposed to be a celebrity, or you are supposed to want to be one. Has absolutely nothing to do with writing, but seems to be baked into the contemporary understanding of author-hood.

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

The editing process as run by an editor, is largely a North American thing. I don’t think it has caught on much in Europe....The truth is if you are in the literary game, or the book biz, the ground is shifting so fast under our feet, even as we speak, that it’s impossible to actually know whether there will be editors tomorrow. Look what happened to agents, and book reviewers! And book stores. I watched a standard trade book contract in Canada drop from $30,000 to $500 almost overnight, so the occupation of editor is here to day perhaps but not tomorrow. Who knows?

I’ve worked with good editors and bad editors. When it comes to editors, the best editors are the ones who will give you twenty bucks when you’ve got nothing to eat. Or let you sleep on their sofa when you are homeless. I know such an editor and admire him greatly.

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

Please remember that no one forced you to be a writer. You can quit any time. Mordecai Richler told me that when I was nineteen. 

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

I don’t see genres when I write. For me writing is just writing, there is no difference between any of it.  As has been noted, the only difference between prose and poetry is that the poet, not the typesetter (or typesetting code) gets to decide where the line comes to an end. This is a massive power in poetry, no other literary form has it. I think the great seduction of poetry, if you are writer, is the power of enjambment, that remarkable power that comes from

breaking the line
where you want , not
where the layout code software
forces it to end but
where you
want it to end.

This power lies outside the range of any other literary form.

11 - 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?

Writing comes from reading, at least for me. Play, athletics, sports, games, these things are crucial to my writing, I tend to view language as one of the great sports that for a few years on this planet, we are allowed play. Musicality, the cadence of the line, its metric, prose or poetry, these are also crucial to me

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

It has changed over the years. It you are an author of my generation, male, and white, you had to pass through Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there was no way around it. It was not a bad start. If there is such a thing as perfect novel, I guess it’s The Great Gatsby. Around the sixth or seventh time through, it really becomes clear that a certain perfection is going on here. Jean Rhys was very important to me, that sulky, defiant style, I read every word she wrote. For a decade, Lowry’s Under the Volcano dominated my comprehension of what it meant to be an author, and what writing needed to be like. I’ve read it seven times and am reluctant to read it again, out of fear I might not be so taken by it.

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

I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at having a job. I think that would be cool. A little far-fetched maybe, but having a job must be amazing. I can only imagine. I’m told that if you have a job you get money, and everything. So that would be great.

14 - 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?

As a teenager I was briefly scouted as a baseball pitcher, but I had no conception of any life beyond that of an author, and would have turned the scout down flat. “Sorry bud, I’m an author.” Baseball seemed a good life but not as good as authoring. I just assumed I would graduate and enter a book writing factory. Which is more or less what happened.

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

I think I began to write because I knew I was not being understood as a child. Nothing has changed that way.  I write to determine if my incomprehension in any way resembles your incomprehension, if our mutual incomprehensions can approach a type of human triumph, and community.  

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

Dora Bruder, is the last great book I have read, and maybe the last great book I had read in decades. In the near past I spent a great deal of time in awe of W.G. Sebald, but on a recent re-read, the magic was not quite there for me.

 Ideally, I would get rid of “great” books, that sort of veneration does no good for anyone. The best writer is always someone you’ve never read, or is not even published yet. And besides, there is only one book, we are all writing, and always have been. There is very little difference between the reader and the writer, The book, as a communication technology, is four thousand years old. The notion of putting an author’s name on a book is a very modern one, even post Gutenberg. I don’t think it has accomplished very much, except vanity, and embarrassing situations.

17 - What are you currently working on?

I am putting the finishing touches on Playing Hard, a memoir of life and death, sports, play, and war. It is a book about my father’s life and death, and our relationship as interpreted through sport and games, and in his case, war. Its a book that has allowed me to combine a love of literature, and language, and all forms of play, and to really range back and forth across Canada, from the Arctic, to the Niagara escarpment.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;