the genealogy book : (a new work-in-progress,

Nearly a year ago, I started a substack for the sake of prompting a particular writing project, and have just started posting from the most recent work-in-progress, "the genealogy book," the first two of which are now available here and here. Since my teens, I've been the self-designated genealogist for my family, and spent years working through a variety of archives to piece together innumerable threads of genealogy. Through this, I've been fully aware that I was adopted, and had other threads as well, but I've only been learning them over the past few years, and am now pushing further to explore those threads, and what that potentially means, through a non-fiction project. If I self-identified so heavily through one set of threads, only to be presented with a whole slew of alternate threads, how does that fit in with my consideration of self? What does it all mean?

Through the substack, I'm aiming to post weekly, with every third or fourth post for paid subscribers only (I mean, I have to give some incentive to sign up with money). The substack originally started to prompt my non-fiction "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay on literature, small press, community and responsibility, so there's a bunch of pieces on there for that. The weekly prompt I originally gave myself for posting sections on this blog of the manuscript-in-progress that eventually became my pandemic-era memoir, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), worked out pretty well, after all. As well, I was posting fragments of a forty-ish page essay I had worked on, "A river runs through it: a writing diary," composed during the months that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were actively working on our collaborative poetry call-and-response. Other threads via the substack include a two-part essay on above/ground press, a variety of self-contained short stories, and the sprinklings of a journal project from 2019-2020 around genealogical discovery, Christine's health and my father's illness and eventual death, "the blue year." I've also been posting self-contained essays on fiction writers as part of an ongoing series titled "reading in the margins: a writing diary," with some new pieces forthcoming, hopefully, on Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Lavery and  Dany Laferrière, among others. Since starting, I've tried to treat the substack as a kind of weekly column, and the trickling of support from such has been helpful, although the big push is really to get me writing further and deeper into these ongoing prose explorations. Why not sign up? Who knows what might come next? And I'm completely fine with folk signing up gratis; the working-class farm lad in me always thinks that lack of finances should never be a hurdle to engaging with literature, after all.

Arc: A magazine of poetry and poetry criticism #1 (spring 1978)

My short write-up on the first issue of Arc: A magazine of poetry and poetry criticism (spring 1978) is now online at the Arc Poetry Magazine website, as part of the celebrations around Arc Poetry Magazine #100!

the state of my desk :

 

The stacks upon my desk are perpetual, with layerings of books, chapbooks, journals, unread newspapers, manuscript pages, correspondence and other ephemeral literary sediment across weeks, months and even years, depending on how far down one might attempt to excavate.

The desk itself is handed-down, inherited from Christine’s brother Michael when we took over his apartment on McLeod Street, back in 2011. I had an office that sat above a maple that turned orange and red in the autumn, a neighbour’s backyard skating rink for an array of grandchildren. Two years later, we transported the desk and all else here to Alta Vista, where it has remained. It is strange to think of this as only my third writing desk across fifty-some years. This replaced a 1980s particleboard IKEA structure that my parents picked up during my high school days, a desk scuffed and loosened with every move across a variety of Ottawa neighbourhoods and living situations, from the original homestead to Ottawa’s Heron Road and Flora Street, Pretoria Avenue to Fifth Avenue, Rochester Street to Somerset Street West. By the end, the desk was barely holding together, and Michael’s offer was as good a reason as any to let it, finally, go. Upon leaving my eleven years of terrible one-room apartment along that stretch of street-level Chinatown, that old desk was one of a number of items dismantled, pulled apart and left at the curb. Where any of it ended up next became a story for someone else.

My original desk, of course, handmade and handpainted white by my father, a desk with Mickey Mouse stickers on either side, gifted around the time I was five. The desk sat in the upstairs hall of the farmhouse, by the north-facing window. I remember preschool afternoons watching the rain as I sat and worked on my colouring, or flipped through my Dr. Seuss volumes, gifted from one of my grandmothers as a monthly subscription. The books sat on the desk, along with crayons and coloured paper. I suspect the desk was eventually inherited by my younger sister, although I have no further recollection of it. I haven’t even a photograph.

This current desk, now a dozen years benenth my fingertips, is entirely straightforward: black wood and solid with three sides, no drawer. I’ve slipped smaller shelving beneath for files, outgoing correspondence, comic books and other items to be close-at-hand. A plastic milk crate on its side to my left, to hold letters, postcards, scraps and other detritus. My lamp and Lego figures atop, along with a cow-shaped Holstein award retrieved from the top of my father’s desk as we dismantled the house, an award presented him in 1954, most likely as part of his 4-H club membership. A stack of trade comics underneath to the right, just by a tin garbage can I’ve had since before I can recall, set in my homestead bedroom before I landed, thus becoming one of my touchstones. It is strange, the things we decide to carry with us as we go. Sometimes we get to choose, and other times, less so.

I can’t remember the last time I cleared off this particular desk, although I might have attempted a fraction of such last year, when the new printer landed. It took a whole day, and the box of books set aside still sits where it lay. Papers and manuscripts and books and journals and chapbooks replenish like lichen, or morning glory. I marvel at the outcrop. I hack at the runners.

from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

As part of my recent substack, I’ve started posting (among other things) sections of this particular and lengthy essay-in-fragments, and thought it would be worth including a section here as well, to catch your attention. The essay is some forty-ish manuscript pages, and is currently out at a potential publisher for consideration. It reads real nice as a whole unit. Hopefully these fragment-sections read well also.

 

* * * * * *

 

On November 26, Julie emails an extended version of her “River,” writing: “It’s US thanksgiving - Already making pies.” Our thanksgiving, of course, sat a month earlier. We have American President Abraham Lincoln to thank for the original holiday, crafting a bit of sentimental acknowledgment and historic inaccuracy from Of Plymouth Plantation, the memoir/journal composed by Yorkshire-born Puritan William Bradford (1590-1657), founder of the Plymouth Colony after landing via the Mayflower. Bradford was known neither for his pies, nor for his easy relationships with the aboriginal peoples. He barely made it out alive, his soul far less intact than he himself might have hoped. Or even wished to admit.

She adds a half-page further to her original poem, shifting where I thought this might go. I had presumed, somehow, that her second “response” would be another stand-alone section, roughly the length of the first she’d sent along. The new sections include:

I give over to you. or could.

and then the phone alarms : a photo of a little girl in orange who is ours:

for we, they, she                        is legion, feathery and promiscuous and

 

            *

light. I woke to the snow how it paints

                the top sides of sturdy limbs

           and draws the soft boughs down

 

 

wanting to fall

toward the something that is new.

Where does her river flow? I spend a day shaping, reshaping my own response. My “estuaries : two” includes:

these small mercies                              , nest
                                                            and shelter,

our two girls on their tablets,
                        a morning        of personalized moments,
wrinkled pajamas,
                                    a paint

of seawater,      fresh                I woke
            to the snow,

*

sunroom:                     pressurized bursts
                        of carbonated cans of ice,

            three season space:                   , a snowy
                                    bricolage
                                                of flavoured slush,

I’ve always favoured writing that exudes breath; writing that moves through the lyric with the understanding that language includes both music and breath. Akin to a flow of water, perhaps. One should spend a certain amount of time learning to listen to the water.

To state what might seem obvious: poems are constructed out of words, of language; before subject, tone or biographical elements. Before sentences, or any potential narrative or story. Writing is built out of words, and the words themselves, an evolution of agreed-upon sound and meaning. These are the block with which we build our houses. The houses in which we build, and choose to live.

To paraphrase Meredith Quartermain: “What the language poets miss is that words can’t help but mean.” The material of language and the elements of domestic, reference and collage.

Nepal and China have just announced that Mount Everest is taller than it used to be. How might I be able to use that in a poem?

reading in the margins: Kristjana Gunnars

I’m appreciating the reminder of how important Kristjana Gunnars’ novels were to shaping my early thinking on writing, thanks to The Scent of Light (2022), a reissue of her five novels—The Prowler (1989), Zero Hour (1991), The Substance of Forgetting (1992), The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996) and Night Train to Nykøbing (1998)—in a single volume, offered with a stunning introduction by American poet and critic Kazim Ali. “Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said,” Gunnars wrote, to open The Prowler, “but it is the only book I am able to write.” I most likely picked up second-hand copies of those first three novels somewhere in my early twenties, possibly from the now-defunct Richard Fitzpatrick Books, a store that sat somewhere along Ottawa’s Dalhousie Street. Returning to these novels, I’m startled by how deeply some of these sentences resonated, and became foundational for my thinking of, and approach to, composing fiction. The very notion that we write the books we do and in the ways that we do, in large part, because we simply haven’t the ability to write them in any other way. How did you do that, someone might ask. Practice, intuition, judgement. The question becomes unanswerable, beyond what might otherwise sound flippant. Experience.

I recently read a passage in Montreal poet Gillian Sze’s quiet night think: poems & essays (2022) that caught my attention: “Why do you write? was a question that I was often asked, and my answer for both weeding and writing was Rilkean: I must. Yes, there was something inherently futile with every weed I pilled, but I did so stubbornly, thinking of what Mordecai Richler said: Each novel is a failure or there would be no compulsion to begin again.” I was struck by Richler’s quote (I would be curious of the context around the original source), one that suggests a difficulty around such an adherence to scale: the massive narrative undertakings of his novels, writing hundreds of pages encompassing such a wide swath of detailed, world-building, narrative prose. The scope of works might be comparable to other Canadian writers of his era such as Margaret Laurence or Robertson Davies. Each novel, Richler said. Well, each novel of his, maybe. As with the example of Gunnars, my own sense of writing is not to encompass the whole world, or even the whole world of a space, but a particular portrait of a scene or a sequence. I don’t agree, I suppose, but it also doesn’t apply. But the difference in approach is interesting.

I spent a great deal of my twenties telling myself that I preferred the French-language aesthetic of writing interior monologues over the English-language aesthetic of the exterior description—pages upon paragraphs to describe every inch of a tree, for example, or what colour a particular character’s hair might be—none of which I considered required unless it is actually essential for the story itself. It took years to realize that my prose didn’t require dialogue, something I didn’t know how to include either way. I wonder now if it was actually through Gunnars that I became interested in novels propelled by language over cinematic scenes, and assembled via a narrative constructed through accumulation. Whatever else a book-length project might be, at least in my thinking, it is less all-encompassing than a kind of lyric, narrative burst, which relate to my early readings of writers such as Kristjana Gunnars, Elizabeth Smart and Dany Laferrière, all of whom also explored the form of the novel as accumulations, and of auto(biographical) fictions. “For eight hours we concentrated,” Gunnars writes, as part of The Substance of Forgetting, “not noticing time passing. Dawn turned to morning. The sun rose and shone on the water. Once we stepped out and watched the blank stillness of the water. The thick forests of the mountainsides mirrored themselves in the lake.”

“I have sometimes thought: it is possible there is no such thing as chronological time. That the past resembles a deck of cards. Certain scenes are given. They are not scenes the rememberer chooses, but simply a deck that is given. The cards are shuffled whenever a game is played.” I held on to this passage of The Prowler for more than a decade. Thinking back on it now, the notion of memory as a deck of cards shifted the foundations of how I saw the construction of narrative prose. A deck of cards, or a photo album: each section imparts the possibilities of the next. The novel I fumbled to compose across the mid-1990s, titled “Place, a novel,” was a collaged-suite of self-contained bursts that attempted to hold itself together across a very loose narrative, akin to how my twentysomething self understood Gunnars’ novels. It didn’t cohere, but it was certainly the narrative structure I furthered across my two published novels—white (2007) and Missing Persons (2009)—as well as my current work-in-progress. As Ali writes as in his introduction to the new edition:

The struggle of the writer to transform or transmute life into literature in a meaningful way may be why in each book there is a fluidity of time (the story as it happens, but also the narrator writing the story) as well as place (Denmark/Iceland, Winnipeg/Portland, BC, Interior and Coast, Trier/Hamburg, and Denmark/Saskatoon/Calgary). The shifts in time and space are required by the core structure of each book: a writer is writing a book. She writes the book and she tells you about what it was like to write the book.

There is such a lovely and lyric interiority to her passages. Gunnars’ novels exist as much through ideas, theory and speculation, writing internal monologues over descriptive scenes, and writing out the ways in which one writes, far beyond simply offering a story told through sentences. As the opening paragraph of The Prowler reads, in full:

Perhaps it is not a good book, he said, James Joyce said, but it is the only book I am able to write. It is not a book I would ever read from. I would never again stand in front of people, reading my own words, pretending I have something to say, humiliated. It is not writing. Not poetry, not prose. I am not a writer. Yet it is, in my throat, stomach, arms. This book that I am not able to write. There are words that insist on silence. Words that betray me. He does not want me to write this book. The words make me sleep. They keep me awake.

So much of my articulations on Gunnars’ work appear in the past tense, although that shouldn’t suggest I’d been absent from thinking about her writing across those intervening years. More recently, I was fortunate enough to produce a chapbook of her poems in 2016, snake charmers : a cycle of twenty poems, for an event we were both participating in through the University of Alberta’s department of English and Film Studies, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their writers-in-residence program. A bit later, I produced a chapbook-length essay of hers as well, a moment in flight: essay on melancholy (2020). “There are fragments of eternity in all passing things.” she writes, as part of that essay, suggesting a clear linkage between those early novels and her current work, although the essay was restructured into a long poem, set as the opening sequence of Ruins of the Heart: Six Longpoems (2022). I’m not sure why the difference in structure, but it does alter the flow, just a bit. I am still looking into it.

i was interviewed in the Kenyon Review, wrote a 'notes from the field' in periodicities, and Michael Edwards reviews some of my poems

It has been a while since I've done a round-up, hasn't it? Well, to begin, then: Ruben Quesada was good enough to allow me to answer some interview questions recently over at the Kenyon Review, which was pretty cool (alongside American poet Travis Chi Wing Lau), which you can totally see here. I did a "Notes from the Field" for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, writing some notes on Ottawa poetry and publishing from our singular vantage point of Alta Vista Drive. Vancouver poet and editor Michael Edwards wrote up some notes on three poems of mine from where is the river (you can see the poems themselves here), and he even did a write-up on 2020, including when Christine and I read out that way back in February--including his regret that he didn't come out to lunch! If you read my report on the event right after it happened, you can completely see why, right? Oh, Michael Edwards. Hmmmm. Was there anything else?

essays in the face of uncertainties

Over at Slate, Vanessa Chang writes of “The Post-Pandemic Style,” reflecting on how previous outbreaks have shifted ideas of architecture and public space. “Just as those scourges scarred and then reshaped cities, so will ours.” She writes:

The flu pandemic killed tens of millions from 1918–20. Six cholera pandemics in the 19th century alone laid waste to hundreds of thousands of lives. Between 1810 and 1815, aggravated by overcrowding and filthy living conditions, tuberculosis was the cause of more than 25 percent of deaths in New York City. Robert Koch’s discovery of the contagious tubercle bacillus in 1882 gave rise to the sanatorium movement in Europe and the United States. Designed to house, treat, and isolate patients, these institutions emphasized strict hygiene and ample exposure to sunlight and air. Before the development of medications for tuberculosis, its treatment was environmental. These clinical environments inspired the new modern architecture. As the Swiss architect Le Corbusier declared, “A house is only habitable when it is full of light and air.”

How will this pandemic shift how we design to move through the world? Already, lines of intervalled-tape at check-outs and bank machines, with plastic coverings protecting cashiers and bank tellers. Vast improvements in air quality have been reported on for weeks, such as The Guardian reported on April 11, with reports “by Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, Rebecca Ratcliffe in Bangkok, Sam Cowie in São Paulo, Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá and Lily Kuo in Beijing.” Photographs highlighting the differences between now and even six months ago are startling, turning a rust-coloured air a bright blue. For example:

In Delhi, air quality index (AQI) levels are usually a severe 200 on a good day (anything above 25 is deemed unsafe by World Health Organization). During peak pollution periods last year they soared well into a life-threatening 900 and sometimes off the measurable scale. But as Delhi’s 11m registered cars were taken off the roads and factories and construction were ground to a halt, AQI levels have regularly fallen below 20. The skies are suddenly a rare, piercing blue. Even the birdsong seems louder.

Once the world begins to re-open, how will these shifts continue to present themselves? How many might remain?

I spend a good part of my morning composing letters. Every time I write a letter now, I am conscious of the trope of letters home from front-line American Civil War soldiers, all of which seem to begin with “Dearest Martha” (Civil War wives, as we all know, were all named Martha). Were there really such letters composed by Civil War-era soldiers? I’ve a half-brother in Florida who finds it baffling I can barely do anything more than use my phone for basic texting, prompting me to seek out parchment paper and a quill so that I might compose him one of these eighteenth-century missives in the appropriate style. Dearest brother, I write, I am far from home and wishing you the best of health.

In an April 17 article in The Tyee, Andrew MacLeod writes:

“It’s really important to recognize we are not at the end of our beginning yet,” Dr. Bonnie Henry, B.C. provincial health officer, said Wednesday.

What does that even mean? Japan apparently braces itself for a Covid-19 second wave. Ebb and flow, akin to a river, running across the whole surface of the planet. Repeatedly, articles and tweets and emails are pointing out how this crisis highlights what should be the focal points of our attentions: climate change, and economic disparities. There are increasing articles on just how much a guaranteed annual income will reduce poverty and actually stimulate economic activity, the opposite of what those who are against the idea seem to be arguing. But what are these arguments?

essays in the face of uncertainties