Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part four, : Neil Surkan + Beverley Daurio,

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here; see my third post here]. Might we see you later today at the ottawa small press book fair? We’ve been doing this for more than thirty years now, if you can imagine.

Toronto ON/Nanaimo BC: From Nanaimo-based poet Neil Surkan, following the full-length poetry collections On High (2018) and Unbecoming (2021) [see my review of such here], both from McGill-Queen’s University Press, as well as the chapbooks Super, Natural (Anstruther Press, 2017), Their Queer Tenderness (Toronto ON: knife|fork|book, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Die Workbook (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2024) [see my review of such here] is Ruin (knife|fork|book, 2023), a title I clearly missed when it first appeared. One might think, with at least two chapbooks I’m aware of over the past couple of years, might a new full-length collection be on the horizon? These are short, rather tight, first-person lyrics that run through meditation, reflection and family, whether working a long, extended, poem-long sentence-thought or compact lyric. I’m curious to see how the poems here might fit with his work from, for example, Die Workbook, what the shape of that potential full-length might be.

Reflection

I’ve come to the mirror and seen
myself for the first time 

in years, not as I fear
others judge me mid-chore 

or with love, but as
a creature who peers 

frankly, knowing neither shame
nor the threat of heaven.

Toronto ON: I’m very pleased that Toronto writer Cary Fagan has been producing a series of reprints and reissues as part of his chapbook press, Found Object, with one of the more recent titles by Toronto writer, editor and publisher (of the late and legendary press The Mercury Press) Beverley Daurio, A Broken Cup (2025). A Broken Cup is excerpted from her full-length poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 1987), a book, obviously, long out of print. I’m curious if this particular selection exists as a kind of “selected poems,” akin to a “best” of what that particular full-length had to offer, nearly four decades on, or if an assemblage of poems salvaged into a form that felt self-contained (or a bit of both, really). Without knowing the source, it all becomes speculation. “I am a slow writer; the poems in A Broken Cup were composed over several years,” Daurio writes in her short introduction, “Thoughts from a 505 Dundas Streetcar,” “within this newly electric and alive city. These poems may not seem political, but their very existence felt to me incredibly daring. I love Basho and Hopkins and Thomas and Plath, but I was hungry for writing that breathed the air of this place and time.” Further on, she offers:

Re-reading these poems, I am reminded of these times with fondness, of the living and charmed world created by so many caring, brilliant, open-minded people, and the unwavering light that shines from the lanterns they carried.

Before this re-issue, I actually hadn’t been aware that Daurio wrote poems, far more aware of her as the author of fiction (and one of the finest editors of same, through her time as a publisher). The poems have a timeless quality to them, both of their time and immediately fresh, offering clipped narratives across distances, pointed phrases and descriptive patter. I keep hoping from further prose from her, aware that it has been years since she’s released any new work, and this appearance of a reissue does make me hope that there might be further work possible What other gems might be hiding in Beverley Daurio’s files?

driving into winter 

dear mom: just a note to tell you i missed you
by a few hours, went through stop signs,
cranked up the radio, but when i got in
there were three cars in the driveway
and dad was in the hall closet with his face
in your coats, he was hugging your coats.
the whole way up i was driving into winter,
not a slow or subtle winter, there’s just
snow
suddenly. 

not the heart of winter either though
the highway’s rather like a spike
and you can fancy somehow driving it
that there is such a thing as control. 

steven and gregg had eaten and nana poured me a brandy
which i didn’t spill, thanks to the shape of the glass.
the green walls were hung with your
natures mortes, also the painting of the empty
café. nothing really dead in any of them,
no acknowledgement of withered apples lying
useful on the grass, no presumption
of comparison.

dad said the nurses sat you up in bed and
combed your hair. i wish i had a picture
of that. otherwise, it’s so easy to pretend
otherwise.

Profile of Teksteditions, with a few questions, at Open Book: Ontario

My profile of Bev Daurio and Richard Truhlar's Teksteditions is now up at Open Book: Ontario.

the power to bend spoons; interviews with Canadian novelists, ed. Bev Daurio

At the Mercury Press launch earlier this week, I was able to pick up a copy of the power to bend spoons; interviews with Canadian novelists, ed. Bev Daurio (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 1998). An interesting companion piece to the Dream Elevators book they did two years later, interviewing Canadian poets (both of which were on the book table at the event, but no-one actually purchased), there simply aren’t enough opportunities for good interviews out there in Canadian literature anymore; am I just looking in the wrong places? In this collection, the interviews collected come from the now-defunct Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review that Daurio used to publish, with reviews, essays and fiction by, and interviews with, Canadian writers (at one point even edited by the infamous Daniel Jones), with contributions by Jeannette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Carole Corbeil, Frank Davey, Timothy Findley, Douglas Glover, Janette Turner Hospital, Joy Kogawa, Steve McCaffery, Michael Ondaatje, Althea Prince, Nino Ricci, Mordecai Richler, Veronica Ross, Gail Scott, Makeda Silvera, Audrey Thomas, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Jane Urquhart and M.G. Vassanji. As editor Daurio writes in her introduction:

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK is borrowed from the title of the first piece in culture critic Frank Davey’s essay collection, Canadian Literary Power. Davey, in turn, was quoting bpNichol:

… all we have is the power to bend spoons…

which presents a complicated, metaphysical view of what writing can do. Is fiction an illusion, a complex of insiders’ prestidigitory tricks? Or is writing actually a strange, dirigible force, the focus of winds of ideas and emotions that must be reckoned with in the real world? Here is Frederick Philip Grove, one of Canada’s most mysterious modernist novelists, describing quite definitely what he believes about fiction:

Novel[s]… deal with socially significant things from the main stream of life… both characters and happenings must be more or less typical for a given society. They must be normal, natural growth of given conditions actually existing in our midst. In reading them, we must be living the lives depicted as if they were our own.
[emphasis in original] (“The Novel,” It Needs to be Said, 1929)

Trends and attitudes may dive and flutter, but a country’s literature is built, layer by layer, over time. The Canadian novel, from its beginnings in the disguised-identity story Wacousta (1832), trudges across the landscape of a fairly dreary hundred-and-twenty years until it meets the magic of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), the novel that dug out the last roots from the colonial tree and liberated Canadian fiction, at last, to begin to become itself. Although the Canadian novel wobbled in the interim, from the wonderous (Sharon Riis’ The True Story of Ida Johnson, for example) to the unambiguously stilted and tenebrous (Auntie High Over the Barley Mow, a scraggly fat volume from the 1970s McClelland and Stewart lists is surely down with the lows of this period), it was around 1990 that the Canadian novel seemed to solidify in presence and strength. Suddenly, a selection of powerful, varied novels was being published every year. (pp 7-8)

To look back over the past ten or twenty years of Canadian publishing, especially for literature not entirely in the mainstream, is to realize just what kind of effort and effect Mercury editor/publisher Bev Daurio has been making since merging with Glynn Davies’ Aya Press (founded in 1978) in 1985, and has provided some rare lines of continuity that don’t often appear in small Canadian publishing, especially for a “small” literary publisher (Karl Siegler at Talonbooks since 1972 providing a rare exception), and even to look at simply the anthologies that Daurio herself has edited over the years seem to provide an impressive list of books that help to build a kind of infrastructure around the culture of the individual book and further into the conversation of writing and books, from Love and Hunger: New Fiction (1987), Ink and Strawberries: Quebec Women’s Fiction (with Luise von Flotow, 1988), Vivid: Stories by Five Women (1989), Sex: An Anthology (with Anna Rumley; 2000) to the brand-new The Closets of Time: A New Fiction Anthology (with Richard Truhlar; The Mercury Press, 2007). Although with only three titles of her own over the years, from her Justice: Fictions & Prose Poems (ST. Catharines ON: Moonstone Press, 1988), Hell & Other Novels (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1990) and single poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 1987), will we ever seem more writing out of Bev Daurio?

One of the interviews I found particularly interesting was with Toronto writer Michael Ondaatje, that appeared in Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review in 1990, putting it almost directly between his In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992). Considering my own personal interest in working the lyric novel, as well as my preference for Ondaatje’s earlier works (pre-The English Patient), I find it extremely compelling to hear the uncertainty in his voice, given the strengths of his books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1970), Coming Through Slaughter (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1976), Running in the Family (1982) and In the Skin of a Lion.

CARY FAGAN: Looking back at the novels, it’s possible to see a progression in the use of historical material. Billy the Kid is a collage, but that same kind of material gets more and more assimilated into the books by the time of In the Skin of a Lion.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE: Yeah, with each book I’ve felt more confident with how I’ve put everything into the text. In the first book I had no concept of form. I wrote poetry. I wrote prose. I had photographs. I was very involved with the shaping of the thing, but that came later. What happened with In the Skin of a Lion was that I had enough of a voice to incorporate all the bits and pieces. It’s not a feeling of assurance because I don’t really have that. I felt very nervous and tentative when I was shaping the book. In In the Skin of a Lion I wanted a kind of seamlessness, because there are so many shifts and characters, a voice to reach over the gaps. And partly because it’s more historically set around us, as opposed to a fantasy or something like that. It had to be more believable.

Another fragment that gave me pause was at the beginning of the interview Janieta Eyre conducted with Marie-Claire Blais, originally published in 1995:

EYRE: I’m curious to know what your feelings are about Quebec-Canada relations. Do you consider yourself a separatist?

BLAIS: As an artist, I’m wary of any kind of fanaticism. I think we have to be careful not to become too nationalistic, as this is often our problem. If independence is the democratic wish, it will have to be so. My real concern, however, is the fate of our artists. Will we take care of them? This worries me a great deal because at the moment much-needed funds for all kinds of cultural activities are being cut. And as a writer, I think we need writers, painters, and musicians in the same way we need food. I think it’s important to recognize that it is artists who are making the future, although the only people we talk about are our politicians. Politicians are not that interesting. They make too much money, they don’t care about the poor or about the ethnic preoccupations of this country. Which is why it would be tragic if artists were stripped of their voices. In the time of Mr. Lévesque, we had a voice. He thought we were interesting. In the time of Mr. Trudeau, we had a voice. He thought that artists were important to this country. But now there is this indifference being shown towards the culture of our country.

EYRE: But hasn’t this disinterest in culture always been true of Canada? Culture has never been important to Canadians and their sense of identity.

BLAIS: I was at a Canadian Studies conference in Italy a few weeks ago with some other writers from Quebec and Canada. Many Canadian artists were thinking as I do, that we are in the background. But they thought also that it has always been like that. It is often when we go abroad that we really complain about this. In Venice, it was interesting to see that the Italian public was very interested in Timothy Findley, Susan Swan, and the rest of us. Many people came out to our readings, listened to us and indicated they wanted to translate our work. It’s all around that we see this interest in our culture, and I think it’s important to take pride in it. A writer is a kind of ambassador, a poor one but one with a great vision, great insight. It’s strange
that in Europe they understand this, but we don’t here yet.

related notes: Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson; poets talk, conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy;