, from the green notebook

, reading Jen Tynes, Brenda Hillman, Rob Taylor + Joy Williams,




Michigan poet Jen Tynes posted this excerpt of Brenda Hillman’s “Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” to social media earlier today, originally published online via Too Little / Too Hard, a site for “Writers on the intersections of work, time and value”:

When you feel paralysed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull and predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree. Never look at your phone while walking downstairs. Do not destroy your body by self-medicating under poetic stress. Just write new poems & read them to your community. Keep the ego in balance because the ego project is doomed to fail. If you don’t receive the rewards you deserve from “the outside world”—and you very likely will not—try to celebrate the good work of others; hold love in your heart; work for justice for humans & non-humans & keep writing.

Keep writing, most writerly advice offers. Keep going. Easier said than done, we all know. I work like a maniac for a couple of years on a manuscript, six to eight months further pushing the book once it’s published, and a royalty cheque a year or two later that won’t even cover a single outing of weekly groceries. It isn’t that difficult to feel discouraged, certainly. Keep going, keep moving, keep pushing. What are we doing, exactly? What is this for?

Tynes herself, from her chapbook Mushrooms Yearly Planner (2021): “We have every right / to be here muscle memorized.”

*

Awash in the beach-head of Bank Street traffic, another coffeeshop morning, Ottawa South. I’m reading through Vancouver poet and editor Rob Taylor’s pandemic-era poetry collection Weather (2024), his afterword to which includes this curious caveat:

Then, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had all of us searching for answers, I stumbled upon mine. Quarantined at home with my wife and two pre-school-aged children in our two-bedroom apartment, I had no choice but to venture outside to work in peace.

I understand that sentiment, especially from the viewpoint of living in an apartment, which would have provided an entirely different array of human interactions than where we’re at: three bedroom house, basement, fenced-in yard. The benefits of a particular kind of suburban lot, and the three months’ worth of notes across the onset of pandemic lockdown that evolved into my non-fiction hybrid, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022). We managed, if you can call it thus, fully aware we were in a better position than some. My home office, for example. In the early 1990s, when I lived with partner and preschooler in a one-bedroom Centretown apartment, the only way I could think was to leave for the coffeeshop, come evening. The stress was real.

Seeking a pandemic-era calm, where I delved into chaos. Peace is a relative term, after all. And the possibilities of space.

“the span it takes,” Taylor writes, “to read a poem / we can’t yet see.”

*

An interesting new interview with Joy Williams, conducted by Adrienne Westenfeld, lands online at Esquire, speaking to “the decades she spent contributing to Esquire, from the editors who shaped her career to the boxes of outraged letters about her most infamous story.” I love the detail that Westenfeld shares of sending Williams the questions, writing in her introduction that “Nowadays the eighty-year-old author lives in the Arizona desert, where she communicates by typewritten correspondence. When we sent over a questionnaire to Williams, what we received in return surprised even us. On vintage Esquire letterhead emblazoned with Hills’s name [the late Rust Hills, Esquire’s longtime fiction editor, who was married to Williams from 1974 until his death in 2008], Williams sent back typewritten answers to our questions, all written in the blunt, lucid voice we know and love.”

Interviews such as these remind of how early editors in such highly visible positions can be so essential for a writer’s career, from a young Joy Williams publishing stories in Paris Review and Esquire, to my own knowledge of infamous Canadian editor and broadcaster Robert Weaver (1921-2008), from his time as fiction editor of Saturday Night magazine, or his years broadcasting the work of a slew of younger Canadian writers on CBC Radio. Back when radio held a larger cultural attention, he created a variety of shows in the years spanning 1948 to 1985, including Anthology, that featured early works and appearances by Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley, George Bowering, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Many of whom we consider Canadian canon owe their careers to the work of Robert Weaver. Will the same be said in the future of certain editors at This magazine, Maisonneuve or The Walrus?

In her Esquire interview, Williams responds to her time and experiences through the magazine, and of being edited by Gordon Lish, his pen striking through whole sentences, paragraphs. She answers: “I learned a lot. I had been getting a little wordy.” The sent questions and her single responses don’t allow for a back-and-forth, and there are more than a couple of her responses that scream for the inclination of follow-up. Still, her responses show a thoughtful combination of quickness, intuitive self-awareness and sharp terseness, offering only what is absolutely required. Her response to question six, the single, pointed: “No.”