OTTAWA BOOK LAUNCH: rob mclennan’s On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press) : Sept 25, 2024 :

Wednesday, September 25, 2024 : 7pm (opens at 6pm if you want to have dinner first,
The Royal Oak, 1 Beechwood Avenue (upstairs), Ottawa
lovingly hosted by Rhonda Douglas,

a Q&A with the author will follow a reading from the collection; copies of the book (as well as copies of prior works) will be available (cash or e-transfer); or order direct through the publisher

“rob mclennan’s On Beauty is an astonishing work of literary panache, a collection of brief, elliptical stories that make a virtue of their brevity, terse words carved out of the white space of the page, glowing with wit, startling juxtaposition, crashing sadness, and sly comedy. For each story there is an emotional core, the thing of the story, an ordinary human thing involving birth, death, marriage, and parenthood, around which mclennan elaborates swirling arabesques of language, image, and thought. Figure and ground, object and mystery. Author as a lone skater on a pristine sheet of ice, unscrolling his mind. mclennan’s sentences are elegantly dramatic and precise. He is a master of the sapient aphorism, the exquisite detail, and cascading sequences of word associations that are pure poetry. Two things to notice especially in this regard: the stories are grounded in place (Ottawa and the Valley landscape streaming by), but there are a dozen very short texts all entitled “On Beauty,” together to be read as part of mclennan’s strategy of contrasting and alternating figure and ground. The real, the human, and the Canadian are set inside the frame of beauty. Beauty insists. All this life is beautiful, the author says.” Douglas Glover, author of Elle and Savage Love

“Though I am often mistrustful of literary notions of Beauty, I am not being ironic when I say this book of stories On Beauty is in fact Beautiful. It’s a beauty attributable, in part, to the author’s response to wide philosophical and literary readings over time, little threads of which wind comfortably through these almost conversational tales of everyday life in a city called Ottawa. rob mclennan, the critic, is also a thoughtful reader of poetry. It is not surprising, then, that his sentences are written with the ear of a poet, forging the painful dramas and small pleasures of the everyday lives of generations, of neighbours, in ordinary neighbourhood contexts, into an episodic suite that has the depth and complexity of a good novel. Above all, I am struck by the descriptive accuracy of the prose, the hot Ottawa streets, for example, that I also remember from childhood. The details of a certain Scottish heritage. The portrait of a city almost empty in the middle [save for the Parliament]. The relations of son to Mother, Father, children. On Beauty underscores once more that it takes a good reader to make good writing.” Gail Scott, author of Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012]

On Beauty is a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.

IF YOU CAN'T WAIT AND WANT A COPY FROM ME: the book itself is $25 + shipping ($5.40 for Canada; $12 for United States); either paypal/e-transfer to rob_mclennan (at) hotmail (dot) com

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). The Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Blog Hop: what the stories make of us,

The lovely and talented Montreal writer Tess Fragoulis (who we really don’t hear enough from) tagged me in this “Blog Hop” meme [her answers to the same questions are posted here]. I agreed to participate before I realized that I had already done such, under a different title, earlier in the year. Given that I answered such on my current poetry work-in-progress (our wee babe adds much, but slows all projects down, as you might imagine), I thought it might be worth going through the process again (especially since I’d already said yes) for the sake of my current fiction work-in-progress.

[Photo of myself on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 4, 2014, taken by Stephen Brockwell]

What are you working on?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been accumulating a collection of short stories tentatively titled “On Beauty.” I’m not entirely convinced by the title, but have set such considerations aside for a while, allowing myself to focus on the stories themselves.

The collection is made up of roughly eighteen short stories, each constructed to be roughly three manuscript pages in length (I suspect the manuscript is nowhere near long enough yet). What appeals to me is in a compact exploration of character and situation, attempting to say an enormous amount in a very small space in the most compact language possible. What appeals are those small or large moments of a character’s life or consideration that have enormous repercussions later on, even if that character might not be aware of the whats and the whys of those triggers. We are such complex creations, and so little of what we do, what decisions we make and why are really understood, even in the midst of our actions. My fiction appears to focus quite heavily on that, for reasons I, myself, have yet to determine.

The title originally came from picking up a copy of the Zadie Smith book of the same name; I’d read a piece by her in Brick: A Literary Journal a few years back and been extremely impressed [I even wrote about that here], so when I saw such at a used bookstore in Perth, Ontario (the former BackBeat Books and Music, when Christine McNair and I did a reading there), I had to pick it up. I have to admit, the book didn’t strike me—I suppose it wasn’t whatever it was I thought I expected (I know this is my issue and not hers); I was surprised by the information overload Smith was providing, and I felt that however skilled the work, there was just too much in the way of what I wanted from the story (I’ve since gone through a collection of her essays, and the book was spectacular).

I am interested in the small moments, and in brevity, wishing to include only the information that is essential to the story. I am not interested in providing needless physical description, for example. So much can be suggested through so very little; and so much of it distracts, and has nothing to do with the goings-on of the action (or, inaction) itself.

So far, I’ve had stories from the manuscript appearing in a few venues, including online at Numero Cinq, matchbook lit, Control Lit Mag and The Puritan, in print at Grain magazine, Matrix magazine and Atlas Review, and one forthcoming this month in The New Quarterly.

There was a period I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before the baby arrived, but that didn’t happen; then I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before Christine’s maternity leave ends in November, but I don’t really see that happening either. Now I’ve got my eyes set upon spring. Optimistically.

It might not be moving as quickly as I might like, but I’m still pretty pleased about it, overall. It feels as though I am accomplishing something that is really moving my work forward in a very positive direction.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I would think the lyric density alone might be enough to differentiate my work from the work of others in the same genre. I also tend to steer clear of dialogue.

I also tend to focus on particular moments, often leaping over a whole slew of action sequences: the moments of my fiction appear to either work up to a particular action, or away from a particular action, exploring the results of such. There is so much more to explore after the effects of an action, as opposed to the action itself.

I admired very much an episode of Mad Men that, instead of focusing on a particular wedding (which, narratively, wasn’t terribly important), decided to focus on what happened around and after that wedding. So many television programs would have focused on the wrong thing: a wedding episode. There is something about well-written television and film (such as Mad Men, or the film Smoke) that have prompted my fiction for quite some time. How does one tell a story without giving anything away, and yet, leaving enough space to suggest what hasn’t been shown?

Of course, also, the decade-long swath Brian Michael Bendis recently finished carving through The Avengers over at Marvel Comics (he’s currently working his way through an impressive run at All-New X-Men) is a display on how long-form storytelling is constructed: magnificent.

Why do I write what I do?

I think anyone writes the way they do because it is the only way they know how. Throughout my twenties, during my first few attempts at fiction, it took me far too long to abandon ideas of what I thought fiction was supposed to be and look like, instead of attempting to discover exactly the form that worked best for my own writing, and my own processes. Once I finally managed to clear that hurdle, it was far easier to continue and complete manuscripts that I was happy with.

We do what we do because we can’t do it any other way. And yet, experimentation and exploration are (obviously) essential to any writer’s craft and development. But I could never be able to (even if I wished to) compose a straightforward literary work akin to, say, David Adams Richards or Guy Vanderhaeghe. Even as a reader, the form simply doesn’t appeal.

When it comes to fiction, I’m difficult to impress: I often consider literary fiction to be far too long and wordy, and overly and unnecessarily descriptive, and so the amount of books of fiction I deliberately stop reading mid-way through are endless. Fortunately, I have been enormously impressed by recent works of fiction by Tessa Mellas, Marie-Helene Bertino, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, Lynn Crosbie, Ken Sparling, Michael Blouin, Jim Shepard and Douglas Glover (for example). It does happen; I just wish it would happen more often.

A decade back, I was amazed to finally read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (despite finding many of his non-fiction opinions rather annoying); it was one of the first books over two hundred pages I’d read that I couldn’t see to excise a single word.

I’m currently in the midst of the new Diane Schoemperlen collection, and am duly impressed (as I suspected I would be—I love her work).

How does my writing process work?

Slowly, and accumulatively. I begin with longhand, and once I’ve exhausted such, I enter fragments, sections, sentences and paragraphs into the computer. I then print out the story-in-progress and spend time scribbling on the page, adding and subtracting, and composing additional fragments via longhand in my notebook to then return to the computer and go through the process again. Some of the stories in the manuscript-so-far have gone through this process daily for many months. Some have taken nearly three years to complete, and others I haven’t quite decided on yet. There is still much to do.

For further interviews, I tag thee: Cameron Anstee; Aaron Tucker; Ryan Eckes;

A Short Film About My Father -- new short fiction,

I've a new short story, "A Short Film About My Father," now up at Numero Cinq.

FENCE magazine v 15, no 2: winter 2012-13

WOLVEN

After they made love the first time, things got strange. He peeped out through the window blinds, shook himself like a dog, and muttered something about the moon. Then he said, “You must chain me in the closet. Whatever happens, don’t let me out. Lock the door. There’s a deadbolt.” She was drunk and naked and limbic, not thinking with her forebrain. “Then what?” she asked flirtatiously. (Douglas Glover)

After some five years of hoping and trying, I finally managed to get some work into an issue of New York State journal Fence magazine, newly arrived in my mailbox. It’s quite thrilling to have a poem alongside new work by Douglas Glover, Rusty Morrison, Noah Eli Gordon, Karen Garthe, Natalie Shapiro, Catherine Wagner, Sarah Fox, Graham Foust, Stephanie Ford and so many others. As well as the issue itself, this issue also features a “Fiction ebook supplement,” with new writing from Chanelle Benz, Alfred Brown, Lydia Davis, David Gordon, Gabriel Heller, Jay Caspian Kang and Rachel Levy (that admittedly, I haven’t had a chance to get into). Generally, I’ve been impressed by the breadth and the quality of each issue of Fence, and every issue contains a surprise, and there are more than a couple within. I’m intrigued by Graham Foust’s poem “Collected Poems,” that begins:

Names for poems—why do I, on Earth, bother?

Some untitled verse is out there just waiting

to be used, like a life vest or a rifle

or an almost impossibly large number,

my noise-only memory’s noise-only ghost.

Emily Pettit, with her poem “Water I Have Seen A Duck,” is slowly becoming a favourite, and there is some remarkable work by a number of other poets, both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I’m attracted to the oddness of Brandon Downing’s poem “DICK CARLA ASTRO,” a four part sequence that begins: “Her breasts shot right out her shirt. / I have one of the things instantly // In my jaw. Both her hands drop / Down—[…].” I’ve seen fragments of Noah Eli Gordon’s work-in-progress “The Problem” in a few places now, and the ten pieces included in this issue of Fence are just stunning. I’m amazed by these prose-poems, each with the same title. I’m amazed by their sharpness, and variety. I’m envious, even. When is this finally to appear in book form? Part of the strength of this work comes from the accumulation of short pieces, each a stand-alone problem.

The Problem

The video she wants to watch takes an exorbitantly long time to load, so she opens a new window to watch a different video while waiting, which also takes an exorbitantly long time to load, so she opens a new window to watch a different video while waiting. As though stuck forever between Dante and Beatrice, sometimes the problem is this transparent.

Through Gordon’s work so far, some half dozen trade collections or so, each work exists as a stand-alone project, something I’ve long been attracted to, and with each title, his work becomes sharper. Already I’ve seen a notice for a new title of his to appear in 2013; but what, I ask again, about this one?

The Problem

The entry for fetus in the dictionary given to her by her mother reads, simply: see embryo. Because there is no entry for embryo, the problem refuses further development. It just sits there expectantly, sort of moving, but not really. Well, maybe a little.

The issue also includes a selection of poems in translation, as Kevin M. F. Platt describes in his introduction to the short section, “Poetry as Global Project,” writing:

The five poems assembled below illustrate how poetry, aided by an internet infrastructure, is crossing borders as never before—not only geographical but also linguistic ones. In March, 2011 twenty or so Russian and American poets, scholars, and translators assembled virtually—via document cloud—to work on new translations from across the Eastern seaboard of the US and from locations in Russia stretching from Kaliningrad, Russia’s outpost in Eastern Europe, to Novosibirsk in Russia’s Asian expanses.

            Two months later, with drafts of some fifty poems in our virtual hands, this group gathered physically in Philadelphia to polish translations at a symposium sponsored by CEC Artslink and the University of Philadelphia entitled “Your Language—My Ear." The results are far more extensive than anything that could have come about without the internet run-up to the symposium, and they are far more refined than what could have been produced by translators working in isolation.

Here is the opening to Polina Barskova’s “BATTLE / (CLEMENT JANEQUIN, LA GUERRE, 1528) / FREE TRANSLATION & WILLFUL REARRANGEMENT,” translated by Stephanie Sandler and Polina Barskova:

Escoutez escoutez

Listen listen

My comrades in these adventures

Bons compaignons!

What do you hear when nothing is heard

Not a tram not a truck not the bark of a dog

Not a child crying out for its toy

Not gossip not whining

Not the smell of blood

Not the barest shifting of phlegm

In the dark

Nothing we hear nothing

Nothing we can’t we don’t want to hear

Ongoing notes: West Coast Line + The New Quarterly

Vancouver BC: I’ve been recently going through West Coast Line 63 (vol. 43, no. 3, fall 2009), and focusing on the work of a few, from Vancouver writer and critic Donato Mancini’s “If Violence (Hey You),” Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s “Gangson” and Vancouver writer and critic Kim Minkus’ “Billboards.” Minkus’ series continues a thread of city-specific works that Vancouver poets have been producing for years, from writers such as George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, George Stanley and Michael Turner to Stephen Collis, Oana Avasilichioaei, Sachiko Murakami, Wayde Compton and so many more. I don’t know any other Canadian city so richly and deeply explored through language poetry and other experimental forms of writing than Vancouver. Just what is it about Vacouver?

A COUPLE A CITY

cities are about theatre

and their crooked additions

she counts cracks and thinks about her current coordinates. of money and needles

on her way down she trips over refuse

he said he would meet me here

he has chosen an impossible location and when he calls out each name

magnolia forsythia hyacinth

he is reminded of something

they have been caught up in stalled identities for decades

products, clothes, dishes

swag

where the fuck is he

she rambles herself into a store

fondling merchandise

touching bills in her wallet

fingering furs

she fuels her frustration in circular disputes

then continues to drown herself

Waterloo ON: For The New Quarterly 115 (summer 2010), Stan Dragland’s essay on the work of the late Margaret Avison, “Unsettled With Margaret Avison,” is worth the price of admission alone, and compares favourably to the absolute best of his writing over the years. Does this mean we might not have much longer to wait for a new book to follow the work he started in Journeys Through Bookland (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984) and continued through Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: NeWest/writer as critic: IX, 2003)? What has drawn me increasingly to The New Quarterly over the past few years, apart from the immediacy of the relatively new format, has been the captivating and insightful quality of the non-fiction pieces. This issue also featuring an essay by Douglas Glover on his great-grandfather, John Brock, and the events that led up to his death, and the impossibilities that history sometimes provides, as well as unanswerable questions. His piece begins:

My great-grandfather John Brock killed himself with an overdose of laudanum in St. Williams on the North Shore of Lake Erie in March, 1914, the day before he was to appear in court to answer a charge of alienation of affection and criminal conversation. This was in an era when marital rights yet bore the flavour of property rights. Alienation of affection and criminal conversation referred to actions that deprived someone of his spousal relationship. In practice, the phrases meant anything from merely counseling a wife to leave her husband to seduction and adultery.

Another highlight comes from the features on particular authors, introducing relatively new writers to a larger audience, with new fiction and an interview each. This issue introduces us to the clever, wise and brash work of writer Mariko Tamaki, and Leesa Dean, author of the short story, “Hotel Paris.” As much as I like what Dean might be attempting, why does so much fiction about and by twentysomethings sound so much the same?

Jess pumped up the volume on her iPod to drown out the din of a Greyhound night bus nightmare. The Ramones sang The KKK took my baby away and Jess wished they’d take away the kid screaming behind her, too. he was the token bus brat, and judging by his Mom’s overnight bag and pillow, they’d be stuck with him all the way to Montreal.

Further reading: Friday the thirteenth

1982 was the year when snow barely fell in Toronto. We were entranced by the lack of it.

On the night of December 3rd I was in my office on Markham Street tossing black olive pits out the wide open window into the matching black warmth. It was +20 Celsius. After the olives I ate sunripened dates. Then figs. Anything dark and warm against the thought of snow.

Snow fell on December 20th and melted by Christmas. Christmas eve was the warmest on record, and so was Christmas day. A six year old girl walked around in bare feet looking at Christmas lights.

That year I lived near Marshall McLuhan’s house, a big gray mansion next to a pond, where he dreamed up his ideas about hot and cool, or so I like to think. the house was in Wychwood Park, a hillside retreat founded in 1888 by a spice merchant who came home every night from his Pure Gold Manufacturing Company smelling of cinnamon and thinking of Cathay.

In Toronto we know about cold and long to be warm. McLuhan, for instance, fell in love with a southern accent.

‘Mississippi,’ the neighbour said. ‘I think she’s from Mississippi.’

Listening to his wife did McLuhan think about heat?

The hottest thought I had was New Orleans.

Porous is a word that keeps repeating through Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s first book, Crossing the Snow Line (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1989), a book I recently borrowed from the Ottawa Public Library, and I would similarly describe the book as a whole as the same, unable to specifically clarify it between stories (as the cover would tell us), novel or memoir, working through a lush and direct kind of liquid prose. Where are the divides we would usually expect? It’s part of what attracts me to Hay’s earlier writing, and I admire (and am envious of) the porous nature of this small collection, and the books that followed, from The Only Snow in Havana (1992; Toronto ON: Cormorant Books, 2008) and Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993).

Art should never shift for the sake of public taste, but I’ve always felt a deeper kinship with her earlier works where this porousness exists, before shifting her prose into more traditional fiction, following her first three books with her Governor General’s Award shortlisted collection of stories, Small Change (Erin ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1997), and the three novels that came after that. I even published one of those stories, originally, in Missing Jacket, a writing and visual art magazine I once produced, back in the mid-1990s. What is it about early Elizabeth Hay and the porousness of writing love, geography, Canadianness and snow?

Some people are porous, snow without a crust: everything sinks in, all the visitors, all the noise.

Porous, yet I absorb so little.

Last night I dreamt I was standing in a woods and a caribou with magnificent antlers stepped through the trees. A hunter followed the caribou. When I caught up with them the hunter had wound heavy wire around the caribou’s neck and pushed silver studs into its flesh.

This limbo of not belonging. Worse than not belonging – resistance to belonging. I buy a Spanish newspaper and don’t read it. I just don’t want to.

I told the Bolivians who came to visit about winter in Yellowknife – four hours of
daylight, frostbitten skin, white and hard. The way they listened! ‘Does anything grow?’ they wanted to know.

‘What do you miss?’ I asked them.

‘Intimacies,’ they answered. ‘Mexico City is a place that encourages many friendships, few intimacies. It’s so hard to get across the city to visit people.’

I’ve never seen them again.

Another Friday the thirteenth in the space of a month, and I spend most of the day reading, moving through Elizabeth Hay, moving through Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited (New York NY: New Directions, 1986), The Art of Desire: The Fiction of Douglas Glover, ed. Bruce Stone (Ottawa ON: Oberon Press, 2004) and Travels with Virginia Woolf, ed. Jan Morris (London: Pimlico, 1997). Just what is it I’m looking for? Years ago, this was the day that my ex-wife and I had decided our anniversary, another Friday the thirteenth, and coming up faster than I can keep track.

The Woolf book, found second-hand a few days earlier, compiles essays, letters and journal entries into a book of what could otherwise be “travel writing,” thinking about my own journeys forth into further creative non-fiction (McLennan, Alberta), whether back to Edmonton in the bare space of weeks, or an extended upcoming Toronto stay. In a letter to Ethel Smyth from June 26, 1938 (three years to the day before my father was born), for example, Woolf wrote of visiting Hadrian’s Wall:

We were 2 days on the wall: lay on top of it the one hot day; and saw the landscape that to me is the loveliest in the world; miles and miles of lavender coloured loneliness, with one thread white path; dear me, were I a writer, how I could describe that: the immensity and tragedy and the sense of the Romans, and time, and eternity; and then the wild white hawthorn, and the sheep cropping, and 3 little white headed boys playing in a Roman camp.

How she says, were she a writer? As a bookmark, using a postcard the poet Phil Hall sent but a month ago from Bali, on a side-trip from Australia.

Now that I’ve got my second novel off to the publisher (waiting just on her edits), the past few days thinking more about Don Quixote, how my version might work how many other threads of the entire world; working in my own commentary on how cities are made, cities are built, and the city of Ottawa itself, writing:

Every city constructed out of a series of markers, of landmarks, but what happens to a city when it is constantly in danger of losing? What happens to memory when a city is constantly new? There is nothing to hold on to, there are no regulars to keep the rent in your restaurant. There is no heart, no soul, no loyalty. When a city is constantly new, it runs the risk of losing all meaning.

Why is it, no matter where I look, I can’t find a single copy of the original? I picked up the Rexroth because of what he wrote about Don Quixote, including this lovely ending to his little essay:

There are any number of editions of Don Quixote in paperback and hardcover. If the newcomer to the novel only had time and patience enough, he would be well advised to read and compare more than one translation, classic and modern.

There are, indicentally, a number of anthologies of the critical literature on Don Quixote that make fascinating reading, not least for their amazing disparity of interpretation. Were it not that my interpretation would then seem unduly flattering to myself, I would say that every man finds himself in Don Quixote, as Don Quixote finds himself in his adventures and as Sancho Panza is never lost.

I pick up the Rexroth for the same reason as I pick up Glover, working through further what he wrote about the novel himself, and the book-length essay on same I can’t find in my little apartment. Is this all about working to find one’s self, working back from the point of being lost? I am thinking about Toronto, I am thinking about travel. I am thinking about Edmonton. I am thinking about Don Quixote. Or, as Toronto writer Ken Sparling wrote in his For Those Whom God Has Blessed with Fingers:

You can’t go home. I am home. You can’t go home even when you are home. You’re never home. When were you ever home? Home captured you one moment. Maybe when you were little. It got you. This idea of home. And now you know about it because you can’t go there. It’s that place you can’t go to. You can almost go there. You get closest when you’re furthest away. Like calculus. You get further and further close. The other side of the planet. The moon. Finally, the true reason for travelling to the moon. To go back home. To go back. Whatever is back. Maybe abuse is back. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s so much love it becomes abuse. You go back. Breaking free is considered something of an accomplishment. But then, accomplishment. Trap. You get the picture.