12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jason Emde

Jason Emde is a teacher, writer, undefeated amateur boxer, Prince enthusiast, and podcaster with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. A finalist for the CBC Creative Nonfiction literary award, Jason is also the author of My Hand’s Tired & My Heart Aches (Kalamalka Press, 2005) and little bit die (Bolero Bird, 2023). Focused on roving, expatriation, pilgrimage, loss, and systematic derangement of the senses, his work has appeared in Ariel, The Malahat Review, Prometheus Dreaming, OxMag, Soliloquies Anthology, Ulalume Lighthouse, PopMatters, The Watershed Review, Brush Talks, The Closed Eye Open, Short Writings from Bulawayo III, and Who Lies Beautifully: The Kalamalka Anthology, as well as featuring in Orange Lamphouse’s Post-a-Poem project. Emde lives in Japan with his wife, Maho, and their typhoon sons, Joe and Sasha.

How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book changed my life by changing nothing at all. I fully expected it to vault me to the toppermost of the poppermost in no time flat and after it sold about twenty-seven copies I realized the world, literary and otherwise, wasn’t lining up to pat me on the back and reward me or even notice me at all. Which was a very useful lesson. As for my most recent work, I like to think it’s less indecently solipsistic than my previous stuff. It’s still often about me, but it’s also about where I am, about landscape and place. I’ve learned to notice not just the thing—me—but the things around the thing, too. At least a little bit, anyway.

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

I came to plagiarism first. My first “book”—created in elementary school, grade three or thereabouts—was a truncated rewrite of The Tower Treasure by Franklin W. Dixon, the first Hardy Boys adventure. I stole the characters, the plot, some dialogue, copied a couple of the illustrations, and added a few little mysterious touches of my own. I got to poetry a little later, around 15 or so, scribbling graceless, awkward lines in little notebooks, and probably still plagiarizing—if slightly less obviously—the poets and lyricists I was into at the time. I read a lot of fiction when I was a kid—almost only fiction, actually—but I think I was drawn to poetry because it seemed both easier and sexier. I was wrong about that, of course. Or half-wrong, maybe.

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?

It depends. If I’ve got a non-fiction piece in mind, I tend to let it brew and transude and filtrate for a while, and take it for walks, and make little notes, so that when I sit down to actually write it I’ve done a lot of work already and the basic structure tends to be more or less intact. After that it’s minor fixes and incremental improvements and linking up the connections. When I’m writing poetry I tend to be a little more spontaneous, or in any case try to be. That means a lot of my notebook scribbling turns out to be unusable crap, but occasionally I dash off something workable and there it is, almost ready to go. Susan Musgrave said, “Mystery, unknowing, is energy.” For me the quickest way to access that energy is to go in not really knowing what’s going to happen or where I’m going or anything. Being comfortable with unknowing and then not being afraid to tread all over the place.

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?

Robert Frost once wrote, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a lovesickness. It is a reaching out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment.” That’s more or less how things begin with me. A throb, a wisp, a hint, a clue. And I’ve worked on projects in both directions: assembling little pieces that start, somehow, to click together until a bigger possibility, a bigger idea, begins to show itself, and also sitting down and writing the first sentence of what I know is a book. Depends on the project. Depends on the particular homesickness and lovesickness, too.

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

I used to do readings quite a bit in college, and always dug them in an egomaniacal way. I’ve always wanted to be a rock star, to be Prince or Michael Stipe or Ace Frehley or Lucinda Williams, or rather Prince and Michael Stipe and Ace Frehley and Lucinda Williams, and wear cool clothes and crazy make-up on stage in front of tons of rapturous fans and lots of women with exotic tastes. Doing readings was the closest I ever got. And the best compliment I ever got after a reading was overheard by a friend of mine: “You know that guy who looks like Michael Stipe? He read a poem about his penis!” Don’t think I’ve done a reading in Japan, or at least nothing public. The foreign community where I live is very small, and the slice of that community that’s interested in poetry or even reading at all is even smaller. Everything is Twinkle Panda video games you play on your phone. Nobody cares about my dopey little poems except for a few tender and very intelligent friends.

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 current question is the same it’s always been: how to get through the day without doing too much damage to your dignity or damaging anybody else’s. That’s about it.

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?

It’s very weird to care deeply about scribbling in notebooks and blackening pages and reading all the time and buying too many books and hosting a podcast about writing and being interested in what your friends are reading and writing and sending actual letters and postcards to people and agreeing with Morrissey when he sings “There’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more” and then finding yourself talking to some guy in an airport bar and the guy says, “Why read books? I haven’t read a book since high school” and he’s proud of it. I’m all for whatever gets you through the night—and for me it’s books, it’s always been books—but for most people, and more and more, it seems to be other stuff. If people want to spend their time playing Shiny Bubblegum Princess games on their phone that’s up to them, but it doesn’t give me any pleasure. The writer’s role is clearly much diminished. But all that really means is that if you still feel compelled to write, knowing nobody gives a shit, it means you’re really a writer. It also means you’re free to write whatever the hell you want. Not having a role, or having a role so small it amounts to the same thing, means spirit is free to play where it will. And maybe that then becomes the role. The more people who are free, on whatever level, to do what they love, creatively, the more energy must be injected into the larger culture. In any case it’s very pretty to think so.

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

Essential. There’ll always be stuff I miss, either mistakes or connections. I’m always all parts grateful when somebody points them out to me. I’ll take all the help I can get my hands on.

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

The best advice I ever heard is in Gary Snyder’s poem “Stories in the Night”:

I try to remember machinery can
always be fixed - but be ready to
give up the plans that were made
for the day - go back to the
manual - call up friends who know
more - make some tea - relax with
your tools and your problems, start
enjoying the day.

I don’t think of poems as machinery, but this is beautiful advice for life and writing.

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

Because I lack imagination, I’ve always mined my own life for material, which means I’ve written very little fiction. I took exactly one fiction class when I was doing my Master’s and got my lowest grade. It was a bit of a struggle, frankly. Recently I’ve started reading more and more fiction—Paul Lynch’s Grace got me started again, because it’s brilliant and beautiful—but I’m still not particularly interested in writing any. I lack the strength and skills for such adventures. As for moving between non-fiction and poetry, it’s never been difficult, which probably means I’m more interested in journalism than beauty. But we all have our crosses to bear.

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Apart from trying to write something—anything—every day, I don’t really have a routine. I keep trying to implement one but I never manage to stick to anything.

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

Long walks. Nothing else works half as well.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

Somebody smoking outside when it’s really cold out always reminds me of Canada, because my best pal Stan and I started smoking in a serious way in the fall and winter of 1988, on long walks around town. As for my home now, there’s a certain type of incense that I burn a lot. I burn so much of it that when I took some paperbacks to the foreign book exchange corner in the Bier Hall here in Gifu and my pal Tom picked one of them up sometime later, he immediately knew it had been mine because of the smell. The whole book smelled like home. My home.

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?

Definitely music. I’ve probably been more influenced by my favourite singer-songwriters than everything else combined. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Michael Stipe, Joni Mitchell, and Morrissey all had, and have, a tremendous impact on my work.

I met David McFadden once, and asked him what question he always hoped somebody would ask him but no one ever did. He said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

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

There are some writers who just make me feel better, who help me get through the night, who make me love being alive, who make me excited to go outside and look around and talk to people. Jack Kerouac, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, William Faulkner, Susan Musgrave, Paul Lynch, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, Lucia Berlin, John McPhee, Ottessa Moshfegh, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Dazai Osamu, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Amis, Walt Whitman, Janet Malcolm. Loveliness.

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

Get rich from writing. Like, megastrophically rich.

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 think I’d like to be a criminal mastermind with a sinister master plan.

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

I don’t really know; maybe it’s like what Adam Gopnick writes in The Real Work: “There was no primitive trauma in history that made mankind as it is any more than there is a primal trauma in childhood that made us as we are. We are this way because it’s the way it happened.” In other words it came to pass as most like it was. But I’d imagine that growing up in a house full of books, with two parents who were great readers, and having had one or two very encouraging teachers early on had something important to do with it. And it’s a great privilege to have a part, now, no matter how small, in the world of books. A very great privilege indeed.

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

Last great novel: Ian McEwan’s Lessons. Last great book of poetry: Susan Musgrave’s Exculpatory Lilies. Last great piece of non-fiction: Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild. Last great film: Barton Fink. I watched Barton Fink with my dad only yesterday, actually. It was great. He’d never seen it.

What are you currently working on?

It’s only in the percolating phase right now, but I want to write something—I don’t even know what, yet—about my neighbourhood here in Japan. The few blocks around my house, the little postage stamp of land where I live. Deep focus on a small area. Intense focus on where I am. Robert Frost again: “Locality gives art.” I’m only now learning what John Lent tried to teach me a long time ago: where you are is interesting. You don’t have to go to New York or Paris to find a place to write about, there are enough interesting blunders and fiascos and little bits of beauty and all kinds of fascinations all over the place and the trick is to believe in the dignity and worth of your own experience and be right in your body right in the middle of it all, noticing. It’s like I’m constantly telling my son, when his mind wanders to what might happen in thirty minutes or what the next thing is going to be, in the future where it’s bound to be better and more interesting than it is here, at this moment: be where you are. Be here now. It took me a long time to even begin to understand that that’s the real work, and I want to see what I can do with it in my notebook. One of my notebooks. I’ve got quite a few.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Susan Buis

Susan Buis completed her MFA in Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach.  Her poems and nonfiction stories have been published in many literary journals, most recently Poetry is Dead, and have won several awards. Her writing has also been longlisted for CBC Canada Writes. A chapbook Sugar for Shock, winner of the John Lent Prize, is available from Kalamalka Press, and the collection Gatecrasher from Invisible Publishing. She teaches communications at Thompson Rivers University and lives near Kamloops / Tk’emlúps BC.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

There’s a special gratification that comes from holding a physical book, this concrete thing that has weight and presence, when for so long you’ve been holding your book as an abstraction.

My chapbook sugar for shock won the John Lent Poetry /Prose Award with the best part of that being associated with the venerable John Lent, who I met recently at a reading of his new collection A Matins Flywheel. A wonderful poet, mentor and human.

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

I was studying at Cal State University Long Beach where my husband was on faculty, with the thought of working towards an English Literature or Art History degree. I got into a 4^th year creative writing poetry class, somehow, because I couldn’t get into the non-fiction one. But turned out I just loved poetry and started writing a lot in my backyard under the avocado tree, overlooking the concrete LA River. I applied to that university’s Creative Writing MFA in Poetry, and was accepted with just that one class. I was unprepared for the MFA program though, with so little background in poetry’s practice or theory, and knew nothing about American poetry. I had to work very hard. 

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?

Oh it’s a slow, slow process. Early mornings I encourage intuitive drafts and hypnogogic ramblings to get me started, but then I usually have to leave it to go to my job. Later I will dig into those notes to pick out phrases of interest and then use them to outline a sketch or an underpainting that I will fill in with research and craft. It’s an enjoyable process really, though every stage gets more painstaking. I can relate to stories about Elizabeth Bishop who sometimes took decades to finish a poem. 

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?  

So much is at work unconsciously, but a poem often begins with the title, a phrase or word that runs through my mind for a day or so, and later developed. My poems are loosely connected through themes and preoccupations, but I don’t set out to write a book with a pre-determined narrative.

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

In a strange way I enjoy public readings, strange for an introvert.  As a university instructor, I have to face and speak to a crowd of people with varying levels of interest in what I have to say, and it’s quite draining to do so. It’s refreshing to read to an audience that wants to be present and listen, and to receive energy from their attention.  

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 love to read about the perceiving body, phenomenology, which leads to thing theory and how bodies relate to the material things in our lives. This shows up in my writing; I don’t consciously set out to write about theory in poetry, though it does flavour the work.

The questions that concern me are how to live ethically in this world, how to be a good steward and minimize my impact, and how to confront my privilege and to better listen.

The current questions are very troubling. So troubling I can barely consider them…the loss of life forms and the vitality of the world, and this is where intolerance and violence rushes in…to fill this loss. I hold a constant ache about it.  

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? 

With so many dishonest and manipulative voices in the political sphere and in social media content, it is crucial for writers of fiction and non-fiction to be fearless and honest.  I’m thinking about authors I most recently read: Alicia Elliott, Vivek Shraya and Gwen Benaway, among others. I learn much from them and admire their integrity.

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

Outside editors rescue me from the whirlpools of my own head and tell me what the text is like for them. They are essential for me, and I honestly love working with them.  I find it’s best to edit with a cold, cold heart, not that editors have those…. but they lack the sentimental attachment to a piece that can get me into trouble.

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

Anne Carson’s interviews about writing are really inspiring and funny; I love listening to her speak.  And I always experience Carson with pencil in hand as I scribble quotes on my notebook covers. My current favorite is: “Edit ferociously and with joy; it is very fun to delete stuff”.

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

As a poet, I work on finding the right visual form for the content, trying out different shapes and sequences. Usually it’s quite easy for me to take text and move it around in a plastic way. I take this visual and tactile quality of the text and apply it to genre as well. Can this poem run across the page and live as prose? Can this essay be cut up with line breaks and work as poetry?  A text may go back and forth between genres before settling. I have to try things out, can’t preconceive them. When I write non-fiction it tends to have a lot of poetry within it.

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?

Anything significant will happen in early morning. That’s why I show up at the table then with coffee.  First drafts and content creation happen in morning, but the work of research and editing can happen at any time of day.

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

Reading poetry. When I read others, it renews my fortitude, and I resolve that yes! it is possible to do this…. I get much joy and vigor from other poets.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I come from generations of people who lived by the sea: fishers, sailors and merchants, from Yorkshire, to New England, to Nova Scotia, so the Atlantic Ocean is the smell of home: a little funky, minerals and ozone. In Nova Scotia where I stay in summer, the ocean also carries the sweet smell of hay and roses on it. The Pacific Ocean smells much different.  

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?

Music, especially in live performance is the juice; recently, Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 2 the Four Seasons, soloist Yolanda Bruno was so astonishing. I was charged for days. That’s a creative state for me to be in.

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

There are so many! To name just a few: Ocean Vuong is thrilling. And Emily Dickinson’s strangely brilliant. Sue Goyette’s Ocean is a frequent source of fascination for me. The poets I’ve read most often for more than twenty years are Federico Garcia Lorca and Dionne Brand.

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

Artistically, I’d like to work on a collection of essays or perhaps long form poems. But I’ve no interest in writing prose fiction though I love to read it.  A dream is to buy a small house in rural Italy, with no internet connection, where I can retreat to just read books and write. Romantic, I know.

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?  

Well, before I was a writer I was an artist and gallery administrator in the artist run system, which I loved, but left that behind to move to California with my husband who was faculty at Long Beach State. I didn’t have a green card though, so studied instead and ended up with an MFA in creative writing. My green card arrived the same day the moving truck did to bring us back to Canada. If I stayed there though I thought I’d be a barista / poet. 

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

I was a painter for some years, but space to work was sometimes a problem. Writing is an activity beautiful in its economy of means: no materials no supplies, you can compose while walking or washing dishes and make this thing, this story, out of nothing become physical on the page.  I find the activity of poetry very similar to that of painting, with their common use of abstractions, illusions and layers of meaning.

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

Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, helped me understand the current situations of African migrants in Germany; I learned so much from that novel about contemporary events, conflict and empathy. A novel can teach me so much more than reading the news can.  Closer to home, Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson was one of those great reads that I finished in a couple of glorious sessions— generally I’m a slow reader. As for film, The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) by Paola Sorrentino, about a writer in Rome, tackles the big topics like beauty, banality, art and desire.

20 - What are you currently working on?  

Poems: animatronics— abject ones.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Helen Hajnoczky, Bloom & Martyr

*

Your vexed and tendril, columbine, each petal forged and broken. Rhododendron my honeyed amber, my raw and borrowed forge me. Blazon my sweet my hurricane your vines each tendril each tender and forge me. You vex me.

*

You make me ritual and incensed, mist or mortal, your conclusion, my cordoned soul. Blessed or my orchid and futile. Vain and fodder, your vein, my florid struggle. You make me steady or petal my pewter my kneeling, make me kneel. Your grip you make me ache or kneeling furrow make me bow.

Quickly on the heels of her second trade poetry collection, Magyarázni (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], comes Calgary poet Helen Hajnoczky’s chapbook, Bloom & Martyr (Kalamalka Press, 2016), a letterpress chapbook in an edition of fifty copies, produced as a result of the chapbook-length manuscript of such (a section from a longer work-in-progress of the same name) being awarded the 2015 John Lent Poetry-Prose Award. The short sequence of poems contained in this chapbook are constructed out of a delightful staccato of gestures, sound and syntax, bouncing across and around the condensed lyric. “Grace you raze me moth and flutter,” she writes, “temperate / and dahlia my joints, your pressure, roots or / twine you entwine me.” Given this is but an excerpt of a far longer work, I am very curious about the eventual final, full-length version. Rich with floral language, in tenor and subject matter, she writes a passion of and through flowers, allowing the language free reign, propelling her text in a far different and more overt way than she has in previous works. In her 2015 interview posted at Touch the Donkey, she spoke of the work-in-progress “Bloom & Martyr,” offering that:

All the poems are in the same style, using a discussion of flowers and gardens as a way to explore desire from a feminist perspective. Writing the manuscript was incredibly fun. At the time I had been tinkering with my then manuscript and now forthcoming book for a while, and I had become a bit forestalled while editing. Then in August 2014 in Calgary I had a chance to read with Natalie Simpson whose work I find enthralling, and she talked about taking an approach to writing where she’d write a lot down in a notebook, and then type up the lines she wanted to keep. It had been a while since I’d written something new and I thought, ‘I used to write that way, why don’t I do that anymore?’ So I went back to Montreal and reread Natalie’s book accrete or crumble which is such a dense, rich, and inspiring book that after reading it I wrote Bloom and Martyr in a week and a half, mostly on my phone on the bus to work, on coffee breaks, etc.