12 or 20 (second series) questions with Wanda John-Kehewin

Wanda John-Kehewin (she, her, hers; photo credit: Tammi Quin) is a Cree writer who uses her work to understand and respond to the near destruction of First Nations cultures, languages, and traditions. When she first arrived in Vancouver on a Greyhound bus, she was a nineteen-year-old carrying her first child, a bag of chips, a bottle of pop, thirty dollars, and a bit of hope. After many years of travelling (well, mostly stumbling) along her healing journey, she shares her personal life experiences with others to shed light on the effects of trauma and how to break free from the "monkeys in the brain."

Now a published poet, fiction author, and film scriptwriter, she writes to stand in her truth and to share that truth openly. She is the author of the Dreams series of graphic novels. Hopeless in Hope is her first novel for young adults.

Wanda is the mother of five children, two dogs, two cats, three tiger barbs (fish), and grandmother to one super-cute granddog. She calls Coquitlam home until the summertime, when she treks to the Alberta prairies to visit family and learn more about herself and Cree culture, as well as to continuously think and write about what it means to be Indigenous in today's times. How do we heal from a place of forgiveness?

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 very first book helped me feel like I was a writer. I did think after one book, it was easy street from there (Not). Now that I am on my 9^th book (two were grade one and two readers) it feels like I am a writer. I am still not on easy street but I love what I do!

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

It was such an easy form for me to write about trauma or things that were traumatic because to a point I could hide behind details and make inferences to things and not actually say the traumatic thing or event.

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 think my work or any work for that matter comes out when it needs to come out. My writing is sort of a conspiracy between the ancestors and the universe! I think I am lead to write what it is I am supposed to write about. Sometimes the writing comes quickly and other times, not so much. My work comes out in bursts with a lot of help from my editors. Editors are so wonderful. Without them, that is what it would be, bursts of ideas!

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?

I work on poems first and collect one-liners and then it takes shape later on. It comes to fruition when there is a container for it. I do not start with a container, it sort of reveals itself afterwards.

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

I do like readings. I also like to share and I think it is a big part of teaching about Indigeneity on a micro level, I believe when we get to know people, and when people get to know me, we can get past stereotypes and stigmas and perhaps even have our biases challenged.

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 think the biggest thing I do with my work is stand in my truth which, I believe helps others who come from trauma to stand in theirs as well. When we stand in our truth and aren’t ashamed of it, we can begin to heal.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This is a big question and I am sure has many avenues but to me, the role of the writer in larger culture depends on genre. I can only answer thoroughly from a poet's perspective, YA, and perhaps graphic form but the answer will be different each time. I think the role of the writer is to tell a relatable story in whatever genre it is meant to be in in order to reach the largest audience. It also depends on what the author’s intent is with it, my poetry, I would say is to help others stand in their truth, and my YA is to help others understand and offer some answers to those in the process with similar experiences as my character.

On a macro level, the role of the writer should be alongside what we as humans need. Some will be fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, YA, graphic form, plays etc. I would say there is not one way to tell a story but the different ways we tell it will attract the different audiences.

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

I find it essential, their name is on the line as well. Editing is their livelihood and so they are going to do the best they can as well.

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

Stand in your truth, Vera Manuel.

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

Thankfully, I have had some great editors who have helped make that transition smooth and very informative. I am a better writer because of them.

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?

Lately, I only write for two hours\ on Sundays to finish the 3^rd part of the Graphic Novel, Dream series. It will look different as things change, for sure. Change is the only thing I can depend on and I have to find ways to adapt.

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

My children

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Strawberry Jam

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 experiences, memories, feelings and connection to spiritual self and ancestors are also places books come from.

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

Vera Manuel was someone who started me on my writing path to actually believing that I could share my poems and stories without crying and grieving and that one day, it would be possible for me.

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

Write a memoir

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 be a philosopher! Or a spiritualist! But still a writer!

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

Writing was done as a way to make sense of colonial history within the Indigenous communities. I needed to understand it and poetry gave me the ability to process and to think critically.

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

Last great book I read? Jessica Johns, Bad Cree. The last great film? Bones of Crow by Marie Clements.

20 - What are you currently working on?

The third and last part of my graphic novel series, Visions from Spirit.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair (part one : Stuart Ross + Pearl Pirie,

In case you didn’t catch, we had another small press book fair not long back (the event is now twenty-nine years old!), at the Tom Brown Arena in Hintonberg! The new location went better than expected, so I’m thinking of not returning to Jack Purcell as originally planned, but perhaps remaining here. It’s a larger space, and better parking, for one thing. There were other perks as well. What do you think?

Buenos Aires, Argentina/Cobourg: I recently picked up a copy of Stuart Ross’ Sos una sola persona (Buenos Aires: Socios Fundadores, 2020), a bilingual ‘selected poems’ chapbook of his, with pieces translated into Spanish (and presumably selected as well) by Sarah Moses and Tomás Downey. The selection of poems offer considerations of place, of settlement; poems on fathers and sons; and elements of voice, akin to, say, the work of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell (although Ross works his narratives quite differently, offering anxiety, uncertainty and a surreal unsteadiness, instead of simply occupying a variation on scene and narrative character study). Honestly, it would be interesting if someone Spanish speaking from Argentina, otherwise completely unaware of Stuart Ross and his work prior to this small collection, to work through a review of these poems; I suspect they might catch something that I, a reader and reviewer of Ross’ work since the 1990s, might simply not catch. Maybe? Perhaps the elements of surrealism would find more familiar readers on that end, unconfused with approaching poems such as “RAZOVSKY AT PEACE” (the title poem of his 2001 collection with ECW that I reviewed for The Antigonish Review; the review is long disappeared from the internet) that includes: “Razovsky becomes / part of the ground. The chip bag  become a butterfly, as ordained / by nature; it struggles from its / cocoon, bats its wings, / tugs frantically, / but still it is lodged / between the rocks. Razovsky / is not surprised.”

It is a curious selection, and apart from Brooklyn poet and editor Jordan Davis’ ongoing work through Subpress Collective/CCCP Chapbooks, I don’t see anyone else putting together chapbook-sized selected poem collections. Given he had a selected poems some twenty years back, Hey, Crumbling Balcony! Poems New & Selected (ECW Press, 2003), a book that still appears available on the ECW Press website, one might think that perhaps a new selection should be put together of Ross’ work. How many trade collections and chapbooks has he produced since then?

Ottawa ON: The latest from Pearl Pirie is the chapbook We Scrawl our Likenesses (phafours, 2023), a small title of poems built out of elements of the work of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall. As she writes in her acknowledgments: “In these poems I wrote not a word, only cobbled. Some capitalization changed. Each line is quilted, that is, the form is a cento of his poems and interviews.” This isn’t the first time Pirie has worked such a form, assembling a variation on the same through some of my own work through her rob, plunder, gift (Ottawa ON: battleaxe press, 2018). Pirie’s poems over the years has evolved into a poetics of declarations, observations and examination, first-person meanderings that accumulate into curious collage-movements, most of which ebb and flow across thought and language, and there is much in her work to compare to that of Phil Hall’s own work. And yet, using Hall’s language, these poems are unmistakably, delightfully, hers.

a title is not a pitch, it is a commitment

there are too many Wordsworths
shoving the fields

& them running   slapping their heads
to make progress happen by making poems be tools

wearing a giant dollar-bill costume
their minds like stumps    in raw clearings

& fenced with their own charred stumps

This is what you have made carefully—tear it down

but what would that prove
& I can only pretend to help

anti-perfection. I seek words to embellish my flaws.
the needed music un-preplanned forms

a chickadee embeds itself in the fog

but I insisted

 

Donna Stonecipher, The Ruins of Nostalgia

 

THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 2

We had been to the secret service museum, to the shredded-documents-being-pieced-back-together museum, to the museum of the wealthy family’s Biedermeier house from 1830, to the museum of the worker family’s apartment from 1905, to the museum of the country that no longer exists, to the museum of the history of the post office, to the museum of the history of clocks. We had seen the bracelets made of the beloved’s hair, the Kaiserpanorama, the pneumatic tubes, the hourglasses, the shreds, the microphones hidden in the toupees, the ticking, the gilded mirrors reflecting our faces, the two rooms eight people lived in, the eight rooms two people lived in, the shreds, the trays of frangible butterflies carrying freight, the silvery clepsydras, the ticking, the simulacra, the shreds, the vitrines, the velvet ropes, the idealized portraits of the powerful, the ticking, the pink façades, the upward mobility, the shreds, the plunging fortunes, the downward spirals, the ticking, the ticking, the shreds, the shreds. We had been to the museum of the ruins of nostalgia.

I’m deeply behind on the work of American-expat Berlin-based poet Donna Stonecipher [although we did hang out that one time in Berlin], having gone through her Transaction Histories (University of Iowa Press, 2018) [see my review of such here], but not yet seeing copies of her books such as The Reservoir (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Souvenir de Constantinople (Instance Press, 2007), The Cosmopolitan (Coffee House Press, 2008), Model City (Shearsman, 2015) or Prose Poetry and the City (Parlor Press, 2017). At least I’m able to get my hands on her latest, The Ruins of Nostalgia (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2023), an unfolding of sixty-four numbered self-contained prose poem blocks, each sharing a title. As the cover flap offers: “Sparked by the East German concept of Ostalgic (nostalgia for the East) and written while living through unsettling socio-economic change in both Berlin, Stonecipher’s adopted home, and Seattle, her hometown, the poems mount a multifaceted reconsideration of nostalgia. Invented as a diagnosis by a Swiss medical student in 1688, over time nostalgia came to mean the notorious backward glance into golden pasts that never existed.” Stonecipher composes her sequence of prose poems as a weaving of lyric, essay and image, examining the very act of remembering the past, focusing on periods and geographies in the midst of change, ranging from the intimate to the large scale. “It was before the city built traffic circles at every intersection to prevent accidents,” the piece “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 21” begins, “like the one she’d heard one Sunday afternoon that sounded like someone shoving her parents’ stereo to the floor, but she’d run downstairs to find the stereo intact, her brother in front of it as usual, practicing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the guitar, headphones on.” Her prose lines extend and connect to further lines and threads held together, end to seeming end. “Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had enabled the holes to remain holes,” she writes, as part of “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 7,” “to be grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remain holes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened to the ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table. And thought idly of one’s own surpluses and deficits.”

The notion of the repeated title is one I’m fascinated by, something utilized by a string of poets over the recent years, from Peter Burghardt, through his full-length debut (no subject) (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2022) [see my review of such here] to the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon’s Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here] and Johannes Göransson’s SUMMER (Grafton VT: Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. There is something compelling about working this particular kind of thread, attempting to push beyond the obvious across those first few poems under a shared title, into an array of what else might come. As well, Stonecipher’s line “the ruins of nostalgia” repeats at the end of poems akin to a mantra or chorus, running through the foundations of the sequence like a kind of tether, stringing her essay-poems together in a singular line of thought. It almost reminds of how Richard Brautigan used language as an accumulative jumble into the final phrase of In Watermelon Sugar (1968), a novel that ended with the name of the book itself; or the nostalgia of Midnight in Paris (2011), a recollection that sought a recollection of a recollection, folding in and repeating, endlessly rushing backwards. As with nostalgia, the phrase is repeated often enough throughout that it moves into pure sound and rhythm and away from meaning; to look too far and too deep into an imagined recollection, one glimpsed repeatedly and uncritically, is to lose the present moment. It is, by its very nature, to become ruin. As “THE RUINS OF NOSTALGIA 11” writes:

We were able to be nostalgic both for certain cultural phenomena that had vanished, and for the time before the cultural phenomena had appeared, as if every world we lived in hid another world behind it, like stage scenery of a city hiding stage scenery of tiered meadows hiding stage scenery of ancient Illyria. For example it wasn’t answering machines, or the lack of answering machines, or the sight of tiny answering-machine tape cassettes that triggered our nostalgia, but the realization that our lives had transcended the brief life of the answering machine, had preceded and succeeded it, encompassed it, swallowed it whole, which meant we had to understand ourselves not as contained entities, but as planes intersecting with other planes, planes of time, technology, culture, desire. One plane had waited by the phone for our best friend’s phone call before answering machines, and then one plane had recorded outgoing messages on the answering machine over and over, trying and trying to sound blithe. How many tiny tape cassettes still stored pieces of our voices like pale-blue fragments of Plexiglas shattered into attics and basements across any number of states? We still owned a tape cassette with the voice of our first beloved on it, or a version of it, and remembered the version of the girl who kept rewinding his message over and over, under an analogue wedge of black sky and endlessly delayed stars. She was listening and listening for answers the answering machine could not provide. When we felt our material planes sliding to intersect with immaterial planes, or vice versa, we bowed our heads and submitted to the pile-up of the ruins of nostalgia.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sean Dixon

Sean Dixon grew up in a family of 12, including his 8 siblings, parents and a grandmother, through several Ontario towns, predisposing him to tell stories about groups of people thrown together in common cause. His debut novel, The Girls Who Saw Everything, was named one of Quill & Quire’s best of the year. His previous books include The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn, The Feathered Cloak, and the plays Orphan Song and the Governor General’s Award nominated A God In Need of Help. A recent children’s picture book, The Family Tree, was inspired by his experience of creating a family through adoption with his wife, the documentarian Kat Cizek.

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 had a big bereavement when I was a child. I lost my 15-year-old brother when I was ten to a swift, horrible factory accident. It was a defining moment for me and it governed my life choices well into adulthood. Some months after I published The Girls Who Saw Everything — I don’t know how else to describe this — I felt all that grief leave my body. I knew the Epic of Gilgamesh held this kind of power all on its own, and I do believe that’s why I became obsessed with it, but I didn't know that my embodying and retelling of it would have such a life-altering effect on me.

It wasn’t an entirely positive feeling either: I didn't know who I was anymore. I had always loved the unchanging, wise, sad child that had grown up inside of me. I had always felt I had known death and was not afraid of it. Now suddenly, unexpectedly, I was like every other life-loving fool. I was no longer Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal, but rather just the strolling player with his family and his wagon. Faced with grieving people I was just as tongue tied, bewildered and stammery as any normal, well-adjusted person. And, worst of all, I was afraid of dying too. Just like everyone else.

It was awful. I used to have a kind of wisdom. Now it’s gone. Though I will add that the up side of offloading all that wisdom was I was finally able to contemplate raising a child of my own. What happens when you don’t think you’re about to leave all the time.

So I guess the answer is my first book changed my life because it made me less afraid to be a parent.

My daughter asked me to read my latest book to her. So I did. Then she asked me to read my last one — The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn. My impression, reading them back to back, is that my experience reading thousands of words to my daughter out loud over the last several years has paid off, it’s made me a better writer than I used to be. I don’t add unnecessary details anymore. I seem to have a better understanding of what to put in and what to leave out.

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

I was trained as an actor at the National Theatre School. In our second year, my class made a project with a Canadian actor from Denmark’s Odin Teatret named Richard Fowler for which we were asked to create short physical scenes using text and props, etc, where the meaning could be entirely personal and did not have to be communicated to the audience. This was a liberating exercise for us, a particularly shy bunch of acting students.

Then I observed, with great fascination, as Richard took our scenes, ordered them, combined some of them, changed a few details, snipped a few bits, and created something resembling a narrative with them. He called it “a process in search of a meaning.” It gave me insight into how you could generate a practice of creating raw material without necessarily knowing how you were going to use it. Our physical bodies provided the raw material, but I realized that material could have been anything, could have come from anywhere.

When my class graduated, we formed a company, Primus Theatre, and made a collective creation called Dog Day that we had begun in third year, still working with Richard Fowler. While in school, I had written some material for Dog Day in a ‘storyteller’ voice that I wanted to expand beyond the parameters of that creation. While waiting for the Dog Day rehearsals to get underway, I wrote a monologue play called Falling Back Home that ended up being a sort of tragedy about a spinner of tales who suffers from the delusion that every story he dreams up is true, no matter how outlandish. By the time the Primus company got underway, I was feeling the pull of responsibility to the script of Falling Back Home so much that the new company felt like a distraction from my true priorities. So I quit the company. It was an interesting decision: I was leaving behind my best friends, great dinners, the opportunity to travel to Denmark and Italy and meet hundreds of passionate and interesting people because I wanted to have more time to sit in my room and write.

So that’s how I started, but the experience gave me the tools to create a larger work of any kind: plays were just my entry point. My father has always been a big novel-reader, so it was the great desire for me to do that but I was so, so afraid that I never would. When I finally started, adapting my oversized stage play The Girls Who Saw Everything, I spent eight months writing constantly, always fearing that I would quit at any moment. But I had the grid of the story-as-a-play to keep me going.

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 get an idea, an image, and I tell myself it’s never going to happen. (Currently I’m not going to write a modern version of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and I’m definitely not going to write a stage variation of Achilles sulking in his tent, standing in for all the grievances of men.)

I think my first drafts have a real shape. But they’re a mess on the sentence level. I dispute the idea that you have to build a work via one perfect sentence at a time — Donna Tartt writing The Little Friend. I’m more interested — to use an artist analogy — in sketching out the proportions of the full figure and then going back and filling in the details. If you don’t do that, I think it becomes very hard to throw things away, which is a necessary part of writing a larger work, and it can be very hard to tell a full story that feels proportionally satisfying to the reader. You’re reading and you feel you’ve passed the beginning and now you’re moving into the middle, and now you’ve hit the peak and now you’ve passed the peak. To use the artist analogy again: you haven’t committed to a nose too large and a forehead too small.

But then, once that is done, I think I really need some help from an editor saying now look this sentence here: it’s a mess. And this one, and this one.

4 - Where does a play 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?

I’ve always thought of a play as something I can write to inspire and challenge a group of people — something that would be fun for a little community of people to do. My impression is that most playwrights don’t start from this impulse. With a novel, the impulse is more private. I want to explore this world by myself.

With The Girls Who Saw Everything, I was initially challenged to write a play for the women of a repertory theatre company in Montreal that was concentrating on the classics and so there weren’t a lot of parts for them. All the great parts were for the men. So I set out to create a meaty part for every single one of them.

The younger founder of the company loved the play but the older one decided not to pursue it. I’m not sure, but my theory is that he misconstrued the heightened aspect of my characters for mockery. The play was doomed by that point, too large for Canadian theatres, although it did get a second life as a theatre school exercise.

Then, when I rewrote it as a novel, I dove in to what the Gilgamesh epic meant to me, all the personal stuff that came into my mind while I was working on the play but had no performative outlet. The last third of the novel — when the characters find themselves following the old Nindawayma ferry ship across the world to a scrapyard in the Persian Gulf — is a complete departure from the play, and I suppose it renders the play out of date. It provides a much more satisfying ending, at least. It made me realize that it can take a long time to find a really good ending for a story.

For my most recent novel, I suppose I set out to explore what had thwarted my teenage impulse to make visual art. I wanted to feel again the joy that I had felt when I used to do that kind of work.

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

I love them. I think I’m good at them, but I also think that audiences who go to public readings are so super attentive (compared to theatre audiences, say) that they don’t ascribe a lot of value to whether the reader is a good performer or not. The entertainment value is just a side benefit. So my talent for it doesn't really stand out, it seems to me, except in the eyes of people who really care for that sort of thing. I remember once I tried to behave like a regular, mature writer at a public reading. An old friend admonished me afterwards for trying to behave like everyone else. Ever since then, I’ve stopped worrying about it.

My favourite public reading experience, though, remains a children’s reading at the Ottawa festival, in a packed space. A library, I think? I was promoting The Feathered Cloak, I think. I can’t recall who introduced me but they mentioned that I played the banjo. So all the kids were asking about the banjo. But I had not brought my banjo. I thought that would let me off the hook, but then, during the question period, someone asked me if I would sing a song without the banjo. I sang an old Scottish a Capella ballad called The Blackbird Song and then got mobbed. It was unbelievable. I felt like Taylor Swift.

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 think I’ve always held on to that idea from my youth of the process in search of a meaning. what that idea means to me now, is: I sense that, as a very dull person who only finds depth — gratefully, humbly — when I’m in conversation with a searching, thoughtful, charming, vibrant, observant person that is not me, I have no choice but to try to conjure such voices out of the world that surrounds me when I write. I try to be attentive to serendipities that provide the raw material and can then be sketched lightly into my work, and later hammered home. Perhaps that is gobbledeegook. I look for the questions. I don’t think they’re inside me. It has to be a conversation with the world.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I do think the writer has a responsibility to cultivate alternative points of view. My alt pov has always been a celebration of the imagination, so I can see how that is not as important as explorations of culture and class.

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

Not difficult. Certainly essential. But also: celebratory. I loved working with Liz Johnston on The Abduction of Seven Forgers. I recall a time when I was trying to convey something a little otherworldly, wherein my storyteller was catching a magician in the middle of a mind-boggling sleight of hand. Liz kept writing back that she didn't see it, she didn't get it. I think I rewrote that passage four or five times before I got it right. And I trusted her judgement 100%.

I also like to write about groups of people. My bio addresses that. It can be tricky to keep the reader’s comprehension when you have several names flying around. Liz was instrumental in helping me clarify and distinguish the introduction and follow-through of all those voices.

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

I love the line from The Misanthrope (I think) that got retooled in a French Moliere biopic to be more pointed advice to the writer: “Time has nothing to do with the matter.”

And, along with it: do not hurry, do not wait.

How I interpret these fragments: you might come up with the essence of your work, the rosetta stone, in five minutes — but it’s a burning a nub that will warm your hands through a hundred thousand exploratory words. An image can drop so deep that whole chapters will pour out in joyful plumbing of it. Other times, you might spend days and days just trying to catch something that’s just around the corner. Time has nothing to do with the matter.

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

To summarize: I see playwriting as more of a social impulse and fiction as more of a private impulse. But Daniel Brooks once said that theatre is a young person’s game, and I’m finding this to be more and more the case. I know fewer and fewer people who are making theatre, which means eventually, inevitably, there will be no one left who wants to play with me. So I suspect, if I want to keep writing in a way that feels meaningful, it will have to be from the more private impulse.

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?

Every time I fall in love with a routine, I always mourn it when it’s over and it takes awhile before I realize that I’ve just started a new routine. But I don’t write at all when I’m worried about the basic welfare of my loved ones. And that catatonia can sometimes go on for months, during which time I start thinking I need to become a gardener, or a tree-pruner, or a teacher, or a plumber.

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

Ovid. The Golden Legend. Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A lot of obscure classics like the first poems in English or the Carmina Burana. A series of poetry and photo collections that were published in the 60s and 70s that my educator father acquired, called Voices, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, printed on durable paper. One day I will return to Gilgamesh. Zombie. Troy. Superstition. The first Rickie Lee Jones album never gets old. Get Out of My House from The Dreaming. Running Up That Hill. I aspire to write like those Kate Bush songs, which are rigorous in adhering to their own interior logic. Self-contained. AWOO by the Hidden Cameras. That first album by Joanna Newsom, which I have not heard in awhile because she doesn't stream.

Florence and the Machine. Lhasa. The Waters of March. Halo. Walking in Memphis. Tracy Chapman, HAIM.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Old pee in the panel-board, sadly. And pine needles.

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. The Abduction of Seven Forgers was, for me, a joyful exercise in celebrating the influences of visual art.

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

Is it okay if I link to this essay I wrote?

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

Honestly? I’d like to front a band as a vocalist. No instrument hanging off me. I want to dress up, ostentatiously, Prince-like, and dance and sing. If I woke up tomorrow in the body of a 20 year old, that is what I would do, no question.

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’m often haunted by the fact that I looked into the architecture program at the university of Waterloo while I was a first year theatre student there, and realized that my course list from Grade 13 read like I had planned to enrol. But I was dissuaded by the seven year long program. Well and a theatre colleague of mine had suffered a nervous breakdown while attending that program. That scared me away too. It’s one of the reasons I set out to explore what it means to have a visual imagination as a writer with The Abduction of Seven Forgers.

When I was a kid I loved Farley Mowat and wanted to be a marine biologist. I’m recalling that because I’m currently reading some of his books to my daughter. I was dissuaded from marine biology when I heard you spend most of the time in a laboratory, not in the field. But I’ve come to realize that this is true about everything. As a writer, I spend most of my time in the laboratory too.

But if I were just coming of age right now, though, I suspect I’d want to go fight forest fires. Maybe I’d convince my backup band to fight forest fires with me, while we’re not doing gigs.

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

Being a middle child in a very loud and opinionated family that drowned me out. The thought that ‘brainstorming’ inevitably meant going with someone else’s idea. The fact that my father has always been a voracious reader and always had a book at hand. The fact the my elder brother—five years senior to me, who was my mentor in all things—died when I was ten. I was trying to write a story that morning, before I learned that he had died. An SF story called ‘The Circle’ about a time-traveller who loops back to — well, I don’t even know because I never finished it.

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

I loved Malicroix, by Henri Bosco. I loved The Corner That Held Them and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. I loved Tarka the Otter. I’d like to find another animal novel that consumes me as much as that one did.

I want to read that Canadian book about the forest fire fires. Western writer, yes?

I’m trying to read Pip Adams’ The New Animals. I am bridling against its rigorous realism despite admiring it greatly. What is wrong with me?

I read two blockbusters recently: Cloud Cuckoo Land and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I admired them but did not love them.

I loved the film about the hawk-healers in India — All That Breathes. I am a sucker for the Guardians of the Galaxy movies — all of them, except maybe the one about the starlord’s dad.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I recently asked a local Toronto theatre to reconsider a three-hander from a few years ago that they rejected. The leadership there has changed so I thought I’d give it another shot. They have offered a reading in early Feb. But I’ve had a look at the script and it truly is a mess. So I’m currently trying to use the limitation of the theme and the actors I requested to write something wholly new.

(As of today I’m failing, though, because a 4^th character has suddenly revealed herself, foiling all my plans.)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;