12 or 20 questions: with Rachel Zolf

[photo credit: Sharon Harris]

Rachel Zolf’s newest full-length collection of poetry, Human Resources, was released in spring 2007 by Coach House Books and recently shortlisted for a Lambda award. Her previous collections are Masque (The Mercury Press, 2004), which was shortlisted for the 2005 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks, 1999), which was a finalist in the CBC Literary Competition and will be reprinted as a new edition this fall with a foreword by M. NourbeSe Philip. New York’s Belladonna books published a chaplet of Zolf's poetry in 2005 entitled from Human Resources and she has a new chapbook, Shoot and Weep, just released from Nomados Literary Publishers. Her work appears in the anthology Shift & Switch: New Canadian Poetry and a forthcoming Coach House anthology of innovative Canadian women poets. She has published and performed her poetry across Canada and the U.S., and her critical essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, West Coast Line and Open Letter. She was the founding poetry editor of The Walrus magazine and has edited books such as Betsy Warland’s only this blue (The Mercury Press, 2005).

1 - How did your first book change your life?
I don’t know if I let it much, unfortunately. It’s taken me a long time to allow myself to be a writer. But yes, at the risk of sounding essentialist it gave me access to a medium of communication that I really really needed.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?
I’ve lived in Toronto too long – I think 36 years or so. Certainly the polvocality of the city has a huge impact on my writing.

3 - Where does a poem 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?
I tend to work in long forms, conceptual sequences.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
They are in the sense that I don’t necessarily wait until a poem is perfectly finished (as if it ever is) until I read it in public. I like trying new work out in a reading, seeing what kind of responses it generates. There is a performative sound element that keeps coming up in my work and those poems are particularly interesting to play with in front of an audience.

And in fact reading can change the way both the reader and I perceive the book. I read from Human Resources very fast, for example, to enact the kind of information overload you experience in the text. but when you actually sit down to read it privately, you have to read it very slowly to tease out its associative strands.

5 - 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 don’t think you can separate theory from writing. All my work poses questions, many unanswerable, about knowledge, ethics, mastery, disaster.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had mixed experiences with editors, but working with a good editor is definitely a useful process, a gift in fact. Working with an inexperienced editor or one too heavy-handed in attempting to impose their own will can be a real pain.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?
I definitely found my most recent book an easier process than previous ones. Hope that trajectory will continue!

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?
I think someone like me is supposed to say she prefers peaches.

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

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’m trying to develop one but things get in the way.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?
I try to write in my office but it isn’t heated so I’m spread out on the dining room table waiting for spring.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Ha, inspiration. I guess you could say I turn to research because most of my writing comes directly from the research I collect.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?
Every book is different. My most recent work is this chapbook, Shoot and Weep, and I think there are only three lines in it that come from “me.” This is a definite shift for me that I’m liking.

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?
Film techniques: montage, assemblage – documentary assemblage in particular – associative research practices, work with documents, found materials, etc.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writers I look to depend on the project I’m working on. Lately, I’ve been reading folks like Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Achille Mbembe, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Wendy Brown, Ella Shohat.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write every day. Live by water. Feel good most of the time.

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?
I’m done attempting other occupations.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
The urge to inscribe.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Battle of Algiers is definitely the last great film I’ve seen. I recently really liked reading Renee Gladman’s The Activist and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A book on competing knowledges in Palestine-Israel. Shoot and Weep is the first part of it.


12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Myrna Kostash

Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Myrna Kostash is a full time writer, author of All of Baba’s Children (1978); Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980); No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987); Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993); The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir (1997); The Next Canada: Looking for the Future Nation (2000); Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River (2005). Memoirs of Byzantium is a work-in-progress.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

OH BOY, GOT AN HOUR OR TWO? ALL OF BABA'S CHILDREN WAS PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 1978 AND REMAINS THE BOOK MOST PEOPLE KNOW ME BY EVEN IF THEY HAVEN'T READ IT. I WORKED ON IT WHILE TAKING A SABBATICAL FROM THE TORONTO FREELANCE RUNAROUND. BUT HERE I STILL AM IN EDMONTON 30 YEARS LATER. ONE OF THE REASONS FOR THIS REROOTING IN MY HOME TOWN IS PRECISELY THE RADICAL CHANGE IN MY LIFE THAT BABA'S CHILDREN PRODUCED, NAMELY THAT THE UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN COMMUNITY 'NAMED' ME ONE OF THEIRS AND EVENTUALLY I ACCEPTED THE NAME OF UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN WRITER - WITH AN ATTITUDE, TO BE SURE - ALONG WITH MY OTHER LITERARY IDENTITIES SUCH AS NON-FICTION, FEMINIST, NEW LEFTIST AND WESTERNER, AND EMBRACED THE IDEA OF LIVING A UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN LIFE IN EDMONTON (FOR EXAMPLE, 17 YEARS IN THE UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN SOCIALIST FEMINIST HOUSING CO-OP, "HROMADA"). OVER THE DECADES THIS IDENTITY KEPT GETTING MORE COMPLEX AS I TOOK ON HISTORICAL, CULTURAL AND POLITICAL BAGGAGE FROM EASTERN EUROPE AND, MOST RECENTLY, SPIRITUAL INHERITANCE FROM BYZANTIUM. AND IT ALL STARTED FROM A MOTEL IN TWO HILLS, ALBERTA, IN THE SUMMER OF 1975.

2 - How long have you lived in Edmonton, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing?

I WAS BORN IN EDMONTON IN 1944, LEFT IT IN 1965, RETURNED IN 1975 AND AM STILL HERE, ALBEIT WITH FREQUENT ABSENCES OR GETAWAYS AS WRITER-IN-RESIDENCE OR VISITING LECTURER IN OTHER PARTS OF CANADA OR ON LENGTHY SELF-FINANCED RETREATS ABROAD. UNTIL A COUPLEOF YEARS AGO I WOULD HAVE SAID THAT LANDSCAPE HAS NO IMPACT ON MY WRITING, IN THAT I HAD NEVER ADDRESSED IT AS A SUBJECT OF MY WRITING (EXCEPT FOR ONE BRAVURA LITTLE ESSAY ABOUT MONTANA) NOR BELIEVED IT HAD ANY IMPACT ON MY STYLE OR TECHNIQUE. THIS HAS CHANGED SOMEWHAT. DURING THE COURSE OF THE LAST 10 YEARS IN WHICH I HAVE IMMERSED MYSELF IN THE STUDY OF BYZANTIUM, I HAVE COME UP FOR AIR IN MY OWN TIME, AS IT WERE, BY ALSO WORKING ON RADIO DOCUMENTARIES AND ANTHOLOGIES ABOUT WESTERN CANADIAN HISTORY, AS FOR EXAMPLE MY MOST RECENT BOOK, READING THE RIVER: A TRAVELLER'S COMPANION TO THE NORTH SASKTACHEWAN RIVER. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE ON THE NORTH SASKATCHEWAN, I TOOK AN INTEREST IN THE RICH HISTORY AND LITERATURE ASSOCIATED WITH IT, AND NOW I'M A TOTAL PARKLAND PATRIOT (NOTE: NOT THE PRAIRIE). HOWEVER,THIS PATRIOTISM WAS SEVERELY CHALLENGED RECENTLY WHEN I SPENT SEVERAL MONTHS IN CAMPBELL RIVER ON VANCOUVER ISLAND WHOSE GEOGRAPHY LET ME SWOONING.

Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

RACE HAS HAD A CONSIDERABLE IMPACT IN THAT, ONCE THE CULTURE WARS REDUCED ALL EURO-CANADIAN IDENTITIES TO 'WHITENESS,' LONG-LABOURED-OVER POLITICS AROUND UKRAINIAN-CANADIAN ETHNICITY BECAME IRRELEVANT IF NOT UNWELCOME. (SEE MY PERSONAL ESSAY IN BOOKS IN CANADA LAST NOVEMBER, "HOW I LOST MY HYPHEN AND FOUND MY GROOVE.") AS FOR GENDER, AS A NONFICTION WRITER I'VE HAD MANY MANY OCCASIONS TO ADDRESS THE SUBJECT DIRECTLY AS A FEMINIST. AS A CREATIVE NONFICTION WRITER, MOREOVER, I TOOK IT OVER THE EDGE IN A SERIES OF NONFICTION TALES ABOUT THE INTERTWININGS OF HISTORY, POLITICS, ETHNICITY AND HETEROSEXUAL LUST, IN MY BOOK, THE DOOMED BRIDGEGROOM.

3 -Where does a piece of non-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?

I WRITE BOTH SHORT AND LONG ARTICLES AND ESSAYS AS WELL AS BOOKS AND RADIO DOCUMENTARIES. THEY HAVE ALL BEEN DISCRETE PROJECTS, I.E. I SEEM TO SENSE INSTINCTIVELY WHETHER I HAVE A BIG, MEDIUM OR SMALL SUBJECT. HAVING SAID THAT, MY BIG SUBJECTS TEND TO BECOME MONUMENTAL - A PROJECT TO WRITE ABOUT THE LIFE OF A BYZANTINE SAINT, FOR EXAMPLE, BECAME A SHORT COURSE IN BYZANTINE STUDIES, AND THEN A LIFE-CHANGING PILGRIMAGE BEFORE IT SETTLED DOWN INTO A LITERARY NONFICTION COMBINING TRAVELOGUE AND MEMOIR. MY MEDIUM-SIZED SUBJECTS ALSO TEND TO BECOME MORE AMBITIOUS AS I KEEP ON RESEARCHING AND READING. FOR INSTANCE, A ONE-HOUR CBC "IDEAS" DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE FROG LAKE MASSACRE OF 1885 HAS BECOME A COUPLE OF HUNDRED OF PAGES OF A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to yourcreative process?

THEY ARE PART OF THE POST-CREATIVE PROCESS I.E. THEY ARE PERFORMANCES OF WORK I'VE ALREADY COMPLETED. I VERY MUCH ENJOY DOING THEM BUT IT DID TAKE SOME TIME TO FIGURE OUT WHAT KIND OF NONFICTION WORKS FOR A READING. IT BETTER HAVE A STORY ATTACHED! FOR THIS REASON, I'VE LEARNED TO COMBINE AD LIBBED CONVERSATION AND ANECDOTE WITH THE FORMAL READING. I'VE BEEN TOLD THAT YOU CAN HOLD THE ATTENTION OF THE AVERAGE LISTENER FOR 7 MINUTES BEFORE THEY DRIFT OFF.

5 - 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 BEGAN LIFE AS A PUBLISHED WRITER WHEN THE NEW JOURNALISM [THERE MUST BE A HOT LINK YOU CAN INSERT HERE] WAS AT ITS PEAK, IN THE EARLY 1970S. BUT I DIDN'T QUITE REALIZE THAT THAT WAS WHAT I WAS WRITING UNTIL I CAME FACE TO FACE WITH THE SNOBBERY OF THE ENGLISH-CANADIAN LITERARY ELITE TOWARD THE GENRE OF NONFICTION AND DECIDED, ALONG WITH OTHER NF WRITERS, TO FIGHT BACK. WE HAVEN'T ACTUALLY 'THEORIZED' OUR GENRE AS HISTORICIZED IT AND GRADUALLY MADE THE CASE FOR THE LITERARY VALUE OF THE BEAST-KNOWN-AS-CREATIVE-NONFICTION. THIS HAS OPENED A WHOLE NEW CAN OF WORMS ABOUT THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN GENRES AND HOW MUCH CREATIVE LYING NONFICTION CAN GET AWAY WITH, AS WITNESS THE CURRENT KERFUFFLE IN THE U.S. ABOUT FAKED MEMOIRS. (CURIOUSLY THIS VIRUS DOESN'T SEEM TO HAVE INFECTED CANADIAN NF; I CAN ONLY THINK OF ONE HISTORICAL EXAMPLE - THE MEMOIRS OF GREY OWL - AND ONE CONTEMPORARY INSTANCE OF IFFY NF -FARLEY MOWAT'S EARLY WRITING ABOUT THE NORTH.)

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

AS A YOUNG MAGAZINE WRITER I WAS BLESSED WITH TWO OUTSTANDING EDITORS WHO HELPED ME GROW: ROBERT FULFORD AT SATURDAY NIGHT, WHO ALWAYS SENT MY "FINAL" DRAFT BACK FOR A REWRITE AND THUS GOT THE BEST OUT OF ME, FINALLY; AND DORIS ANDERSON AT CHATELAINE, WHO GAVE ME THE CHANCE TO WRITE STUFF THAT MATTERED TO ORDINARY PEOPLE. AS A BOOK WRITER, I HAVE NEVER PARTICIPATED IN WORKSHOPS AND, UNTIL MY FOURTH BOOK, BLOODLINES: A JOURNEY INTO EASTERN EUROPE, NEVER HAD AN EDITOR WHO EDITED FOR STYLE, FORM, STRUCTURE, VOICE ETC AS WELL AS FOR ACCURACY. IT WAS A REVELATION, AND THE WOMAN WAS A GENIUS: SHE REALLY REALLY UNDERSTOOD CREATIVE NONFICTION. SINCE THEN I HAVE DISCOVERED THAT MOST CANADIAN PUBLISHERS SIMPLY WILL NOT PROVIDE THAT KIND OF EDITING, AT LEAST FOR NONFICTION, AND SO I DEPEND ON FINDING JUST THE RIGHT FREELANCE EDITOR TO COLLABORATE WITH. IN MY EXPERIENCE, THIS COLLABORATION IS MOST FRUITFUL WHEN WORKING ON A FINAL DRAFT; EDITORIAL INTERVENTION IN EARLIER VERSIONS HAS SIMPLY LED TO CROSSED PURPOSES.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

IT HAS NEVER BECOME 'EASIER.' EACH NEW BOOK IS A KIND OF FIRST BOOK, IN THAT YOU HAVEN'T WRITTEN THIS ONE YET. AND EACH ONE PRESENTS ITS OWN SET OF DIFFICULTIES. ALSO, THE OLDER YOU GET, THE MORE SELF-CONSCIOUS YOU BECOME ABOUT HOW YOUR WORK FITS INTO THE GENERAL SCHEME OF WRITING AND PUBLISHING IN YOUR COMMUNITY; YOU CAN ANTICIPATE THE CRITICS; YOU'RE AWARE OF WHAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE ACCOMPLISHED; YOU APPROACH AND THEN SURPASS THAT DREADED 'MID-CAREER' DOLDRUMS. YET SOMEHOW YOU KEEP ON WANTING TO WRITE ANOTHER BOOK EVEN THOUGH YOU SENSE YOUR SHIP IS NEVER GOING TO COME IN.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

TWO DAYS AGO AT BREAKFAST, A NOT VERY SUCCESSFUL PEAR I'M AFRAID. YET I LOVE A CHILLED PEAR IN ITS PERFECT STATE, JUICY AND TENDER-FLESHED, AND I'VE DISCOVERED A BREAKFAST RECIPE OF BULGAR, PEAR NECTAR, PEAR AND VANILLA YOGURT. YUM. AND I REMEMBER A DENTIST WHO CHATTED ABOUT FOOD WHILE WORKING ON MY TEETH; THE PERFECT DESSERT, HE SAID, IS ROQUEFORT CHEESE AND A CHILLED PEAR...AND IN SLOVENIA I DISCOVERED VILIAMOVKA, PEAR SCHNAPPES. YUM YUM.

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

IN A PUB IN WINNIPEG, WHEN I WAS DOWN IN THE DUMPS ABOUT EVER FINDING A WAY TO WRITE WHAT WOULD BECOME BLOODLINES, I WONDERED OUT LOUD WITH ROBERT KROETSCH WHETHER I NEEDED TO WRITE THE DAMN THING AT ALL. HE SAID SOMETHING LIKE: WRITING A BOOK IS ONLY ONE WAY OF BEING IN THE WORLD. THERE WAS MORE BUT THAT'S THE PART THAT STRUCK AND STUCK: WRITING MY BOOKS IS NO MORE OR LESS VITAL A PARTICIPATION IN LIFE THAN IS CULTIVATING TOMATOES, RAISING A CHILD, FIXING CARBUETORS OR (KROETSCH'S EXAMPLE) RUNNING A BUTTON SHOP. LIBERATED, I WAS ABLE IMMEDIATELY TO RETURN TO THE MS.

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

AS A FULLTIME WRITER I DON'T HAVE TO COMPETE WITH A PAID JOB TO FIND TIME TO WRITE. NEVERTHELESS THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS UNFETTERED WRITING TIME. I HAVE TO BE MY OWN MANAGER, ACCOUNTANT, SECRETARY, HOOFER. I LIVE ALONE AND HAVE TO BE MY OWN HOUSEKEEPER, COOK AND GENERAL FACTOTUM. I HAVE AN ELDERLY MOTHER IN EDMONTON. AS A RESULT I WRITE ONLY ON ALTERNATE DAYS. (STAYING ON TOP OF EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE TAKES UP A HUGE AMOUNT OF TIME, AS I'M INVOLVED IN SEVERAL EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES.) JUST TWO MONTHS AGO I MADE THE BIG MOVE TO RENT PART OF AN OFFICE DOWNTOWN WHERE I HAVE NO PHONE. I NOW GO THERE TO WRITE, EVERY SECOND DAY, AND STAY AT HOME TO DO EVERYTHING ELSE. GENERALLY, MY DAY DOESN'T START UNTIL 10:00 AFTER A POT OF TEA AND A COUPLE OF HOURS OF READING NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES. I SUBSCRIBE TO AN INORDINATE NUMBER OF MAGAZINES. (I DON'T HAVE TV BECAUSE I CAN'T IMAGINE WHEN I'D WATCH IT.) WHEN I'M IN FULL-TILT WRITING MODE, I CONSIDER A 4-5 HOUR STRETCH A FULL WORKING DAY. I TRY TO KEEP EVENINGS FREE FOR FUN THINGS OR FOR BEING ALONE AND VERY QUIET. CONTRARY TO THE NOTION THAT WRITING IS A LONELY SORT OF JOB, I FIND THAT, WITH NONFICTION, THE TRICK IS TO GET AWAY FROM PEOPLE.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

IN MY HOME OFFICE, AT A 1930S ARTS-AND-CRAFTS-STYLE DESK THAT BELONGED TO MY FATHER; DOWNTOWN AT A STYLISH WOODEN SURFACE NEXT TO LOTS OF WINDOWS. WHEN I TRAVEL I OFTEN WRITE IN LITTLE NOTEBOOKS WHILE LOITERING IN CAFES AND TAVERNAS.

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

I NEVER FIGHT IT. I WALK AWAY FROM IT. AND FROM ALL LITERARY REMINDERS. THIS IS WHEN I WORK ON MY MUFFIN-BAKING SKILLS OR DO THE PILE OF IRONING WHILE LISTENING TO "IDEAS" OR GO TO CHURCH AND PRAY FOR HELP. EVENTUALLY THE LEFT BRAIN ALWAYS KICKS IN.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I HAVE ALTERNATED BETWEEN 'STRAIGHT' NONFICTION AND 'CREATIVE' NONFICTION FOR SOME YEARS NOW, AND THE MOST RECENT MS - NOT YET A PUBLISHED BOOK - IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE LATTER. HOWEVER, UNLIKE THE EARLIER BOOKS, THIS ONE HAS TAKEN YEARS TO COMPLETE, MAINLY BECAUSE IT TOOK ME TEN YEARS AND FIVE DRAFTS TO FIGURE OUT WHAT IT WAS 'ABOUT.' THAT'S THE TOUGH THING ABOUT NONFICTION: THE 'APPARENT' SUBJECT CAN OFTEN FOOL YOU INTO THINKING IT'S THE REAL ONE.

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?

ALL THOSE FORMS HAVE INFLUENCED ME AS A BEING BUT THE MOST POWERFUL FORMAL INFLUENCE ON MY WORK WAS READING EDUARDO GALEANO'S DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LOVE AND WAR, WHICH GAVE ME PERMISSION TO FOOL AROUND WITH THE BOUNDARIES OF NONFICTION. OR WHAT THE THEORISTS OF OTHER GENRES CALL 'TRANSGRESSION.' WHOOWEE!

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

SEE ABOVE. AND, ALTHOUGH IT IS OFTEN ASSUMED, EVEN BY GOOD FRIENDS, THAT I DO NOT READ FICTION, THIS IS NOT ENTIRELY TRUE. MY LIBRARY IS ORGANIZED ACCORDING TO GENRE, AND I MOVE FROM ONE TO THE OTHER AS I CHOOSE WHAT NEXT TO READ. EVENTUALLY I GET TO THE FICTION SHELVES.... I'M SORRY THAT I DO NOT READ MORE POETRY, THOUGH... AT THE MOMENT I'M READING CLAIRE TOMALIN'S BIOGRAPHY OF PEPYS, A GIFT FROM A FRIEND WHO I WAS VISITING IN LONDON RECENTLY, AN EXCELLENT FUSION OF ERUDITE RESEARCH AND NARRATIVE WRITING CON BRIO. I HAVE THE BAD HABIT OF BUYING BOOKS I DON'T GET AROUND TO READING FOR YEARS, SO IT WAS A BIT OF A RUSH FOR ME TO START IMMEDIATELY READING A BOOK THAT HAD JUST BEEN GIVEN TO ME.

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

I ONCE WROTE CABARET-STYLE THEATRE FOR AN EXTREMELY LOW BUDGET; BUT MY THEATRICAL IDEAS WERE SO INTRIGUING I'D LIKE TO CHANCE TO REMOUNT THEM WITH $$$.

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?

LET ME PUT IT ANOTHER WAY: IF I COULD COME BACK FOR A SECOND LIFE, I'D LIKE TO BE AN ITALIAN OPERA SINGER. HAD I NOT BECOME A WRITER - AN OCCUPATION I DID NOT PREPARE FOR BUT FELL INTO - I WAS BEING GROOMED FOR A PHD IN RUSSIAN LANG AND LIT AND DAYDREAMED OF A DIPLOMATIC CAREER IN MOSCOW AND MARRIAGE TO A FRENCH CHARGE D'AFFAIRES. BUT I QUIT AFTER THE MA AND LIT OUT FOR THE TERRITORY: IN THOSE DAYS OF 1969-1970, THE HITCH-HIKERS' ROUTE IN EUROPE, FROM LONDON TO ISTANBUL. I HAD A COIL-BOUND NOTEBOOK WITH ME AND WROTE A FEW PAGES OF A GREAT CANADIAN NOVEL (HA HA HA) WHILE LYING ON A SPANISH BEACH. THE NEXT TIME I PICKED UP PEN TO WRITE, IT WAS TO WRITE GONZO JOURNALISM FOR SATURDAY NIGHT MAGAZINE. (WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?)

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

MY FATHER BOUGHT ME A LEATHER-BOUND JOURNAL ONE CHRISTMAS WHEN I WAS A TEEN-AGER AND INSCRIBED IT: MAY YOU BE THE SAMUEL PEPYS OF YOUR GENERATION. I REMEMBER WRITING AN IMPASSIONED ENTRY ON HOW LIBERATING IT WOULD BE FOR WOMEN IF BABIES REALLY DID COME FROM TEST TUBES. (I'D JUST FINISHED READING BRAVE NEW WORLD.) YOU CAN SEE RIGHT THERE THAT I WAS GOING TO HAVE PROBLEMS WITH THE IMAGINED RATHER THAN ACTUAL WORLD. LATER, I BECAME A HIPPY WITH AN MA AND DIDN'T WANT A JOB.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

KAREN ARMSTRONG'S THE BATTLE FOR GOD, A 'BROAD CHURCH' OF A BOOK AND ARGUMENT WITH ITS SYMPATHETIC TREATMENT OF THE DEEP GRAMMAR OF SPIRITUAL BELIEF AND ITS CAUTIONARY TALES FOR THE WEST OF THE LOSS OF THE SACRED. FOR SOME REASON, HAVING READ ARMSTRONG, I DON'T FEEL ANY NEED TO READ THE CURRENT CROP OF ATHEISTS...

What was the last great film?

IT WAS A VERY LONG TIME AGO BUT I NEVER GOT OVER THE LAST SCENE OF ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A LONG PERSONAL ESSAY ABOUT THE RE-ENCOUNTER WITH THE MOTHER CULTURE IN ENGLAND AFTER A DECADE 'IN' BYZANTIUM. (I'VE JUST SPENT A MONTH IN LONDON.)

12 or 20 questions archive

launching bpnichol.ca an online archive (please forward)

Dear all,

After years of planning we are pleased to launch bpNichol.ca, anonline public archive of the works of bpNichol and his collaborators. Here (http://www.bpnichol.ca/) you will find audio, digitized printmaterials, photographs, links and eventually video, critical articles and curated exhibitions - all of which we expect to be tremendously useful for research and teaching.

The site was developed by the Artmob project in collaboration with Ellie Nichol, and is designed as a not-for-profit community initiative.

It is intended as the start of a process, and we encourage everyone to read our submission guidelines if you have material you would like to contribute or an idea for an exhibition of bp's work.

Artmob is a York University-based research project dedicated to building accessible public archives of Canadian art. Over the coming years Artmob will add tools to improve the browsing and cataloguing. It will also provide novel approaches to intellectual property, encouraging contributors to identify themselves and set the terms ofuse for their works. Artmob hopes that a spirit of fair dealing will assist in getting artistic materials out of shoeboxes and filing cabinets and into the world where they belong. bpNichol.ca is Artmob's pilot project.

Once again, if you or your students (undergraduate or graduate) would like to contribute to the site, please get in touch with us. Here are our submission guidelines:
http://www.bpnichol.ca/submission_guidelines

Please explore and enjoy!

http://www.bpnichol.ca/

best, Lori Emerson

related posts: my review of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol reader, eds. Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson

rabbits, rabbits, rabbits (or, April Fool's)


rabbits, rabbits, rabbits; supposedly if that’s the first thing you hear in a month, yr to have a good month; I don’t remember where that came from; do you know?

Here is another side of Groucho.

It’s a dimension of this complex genius that you won’t find anywhere else, and a side of him many people will find surprising. Occasionally you hear admirers of his wit opine that he was probably a cold man, perhaps because wit by itself can be a chilling thing. I can honestly say that even before I got to know him I never shared this impression. Even at the relatively tender age at which I watched “You Bet Your Life” (I caught up with the movies in later life), anyone who didn’t find him funny was off my list; and any witless boob who added, “because he insults people,” received the full blast of my teenage scorn. It seemed clear to me that he was always good-natured and that only those insulated against humor and devoid of perception could take umbrage. [Foreword to Love, Groucho: Letters from Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam, Dick Cavett]

yesterday a book sale downstairs hosted by, I think, the English & Film Studies Department & picked up a copy of Love, Groucho: Letters from Groucho Marx to His Daughter Miriam (1992). a strange coincidence, considering just how much I was going on about that previous book of letters to my lovely daughter Kate in all of my other letters how many months ago; did you know (from the previous book I have in my apartment currently) that he used to correspond regularly with T.S. Eliot? I think that’s pretty bizarre (but hilarious!); here are 2 notes to his daughter that made me think of mine (keep in mind his daughter Miriam was 11 in 1938);

We’re very glad to know that you’re homesick because if you weren’t we’d feel that you were very happy away from us and this way, we know that you miss us. This is a very selfish viewpoint on our part but parents are frequently selfish, too, like children. [August 3, 1938]

Received your note this morning, from the length of it I wouldn’t dignify it by calling it a letter; all I can gather from it is the feeling that you never want to come home. It’s really not safe to allow a child away from home alone, because they get to realize too quickly that they don’t need their parents. [August 4, 1939]

oh, I told the English Department Grad Students selling the books, this will go nicely with my other book of Groucho letters; I mean, what are the odds? the book is warm, wonderful & hilarious, but somehow, all I can think about are the little notes I used to get in the mail from George Bowering; somehow they have the same voice; what’s that all about? I’ve barely started reading the thing & it’s pretty much all I’ve wanted to do the last day or so, read Groucho Marx letters; is that wrong? what the hell is wrong with me.

Dear Pooch,

As you can well understand, things are a little confused, and will probably remain that way for some time. I’m leaving here and will arrive home on the twenty-eighth. That’ll be two weeks from the day this letter is written. I would rather have come home sooner, but I have to play a benefit, called the Night of Stars, on the twenty-sixth, and will leave the day after. So you see, the whole thing comes out even.

Professionally, my plan is to begin almost immediately with Norman, rewriting our play, and should complete that by the first of January. If I do, I’ll get drunk New Year’s. From then in, my plans are up in the air. I probably won’t do much of anything. Perhaps a few radio shots, if I can get them. If not, you know the usual routine. Duke and the bicycle, Winnie and Frances, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Armstrong and Schroeder. [November 14, 1941]

Before that, I spent a few nights reading the entirety of Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2007) [see my note on such here], the texts from the annual CBC Radio Massey Lecture delivered last fall (I missed the Edmonton version, unfortunately, because I was in Ottawa at the writers festival); thinking a lot about how the world is a creation of language, and perhaps, how Groucho’s letters might fit into that thesis?

strange to think I’ll be home in two months & all of this will be behind me, the opportunities for daily conversation around the department, various lectures I get to attend (one last night & another tonight & another on Friday), the all-day internet & computer, the letter-writing, the paycheque; I’ll have to go back to that thing I called a life; how will I survive? yesterday an hour or two with the song “Lydia” in my head (singing bits of it in my office, wondering just how far the sound travels down said hallway…), the one Groucho Marx used to sing;

oddly enough, when I looked for the lyrics to such online I also found this:

Interestingly, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” was the favorite song of Jim Henson and was sung on the very first episode of ”The Muppet Show.” In addition, it was sung by muppet performers at his funeral.

so very sad; did you see that Muppet Show special/Jim Henson biography they did after Jim died? heartbreaking; they mixed stuff from the Muppet Theatre (the muppets wondering who Jim is/was) with clips of Henson’s biography; at one point the muppets think he’s an accountant, because they realize (Kermit, Fozzie & Gonzo) that he signed their cheques; then a whole bunch of accountant muppets dance through the back of the theatre; only at the end of the show do they all realize that he’s died & then the muppets all cry; its gut-wrenching (I saw it when it was on teevee; wouldn’t mind finding it again);

unfortunately I don’t know the song well enough to sing it proper; I’ll have to find it online first & listen;

I'm tomorrow night reading in Lethbridge; will I see you? Or the following night in Calgary?


related notes: just what was i a fool abt last year?

YOU NEED TO PURCHASE BOOKS NOW FROM jwcurry, part two (part one here)

[photo from the last ottawa small press book fair]

Called “the best concrete and visual poet in Canada” as well as the third largest collector of small (& micro) press in Canada, Ottawa writer/editor/publisher/bookseller jwcurry is going through financial straits, so I am posting this list of some (selected) items you can purchase directly from his Room 302 Books; other items available by various writers such as Stuart Ross, bpNichol, Frank Zappa, Nicholas Power, Peggy Lefler, Nelson Ball, David UU, Daniel f. Bradley, Mark Laba, Lillian Necakov [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Steven Smith [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Laurie Fuhr, William Hawkins, Steve McCaffery, issues of Open Letter, The Berkeley Horse and others; check with curry directly for other lists, titles, etcetera. If you want to know more about some of jwcurry’s publications, check out the piece I wrote on him in Open Letter (or wait a few weeks for the same piece to run in my collection of literary essays); he’s an indispensable resource that isn’t taken advantage of nearly enough. Items run from into the hundreds of dollars to mere a penny; annual subscriptions available.

this list selected from 1 of 3 different catalogues (more to come later):

from list #10A, jwcurry, separate publications

139. JENNIFER BOOKS LTD. Ottawa, privately published, spring95. perhaps as many as 10 copies? 8 ½ x 6, photocopy broadside. a photograph by Stan Bevington retouched by Curry. $5.00
142. LAND IS DOWN. Toronto, Curvd H&, 8apr89 (Curvd H&z #394) 1/75 copies #d & signed. 28 pp/13 printed, rubberstamp. 5 ½ x 3, sewn wrappers. serial concrete & poetry. $125.00
149. (editor) LOG. Catalog Of The Travelling Exhivition 5 November 1994 - ?. 3rd edition, revised. Toronto, Room 302 Books, 10feb95. 1/26 lettered copies. 72 pp/66 printed, photocopy w/ 1 colour photocopy p, 2 rubberstamp, in rubberstamp cover unique to each. 8 ½ x 11, Japanese-sewn card covers w/ shaped colour photograph bound to cover & tucked in photocorners. photography. the contributors are Jennifer Books, Curry, Lance LaRocque, Gustave Morin, Brian Sale, Gio.Sampogna, Kim Thompson. documentation of the ongoing caboose project (all photographs “of or from cabeese” mounted in collage in further such cars), w/ lots of portraiture of the photographers, as well as of Nicky Drumbolis, Chris Kubsch & Pete Tibando. $45.00
151. logical sequence 7: a brief statement on a possibility of a planetary alignment. Toronto, Curvd H&z, 8mar80 (Curvd H&z #51. Pomez A Penny #31. Th Wrecking Ballzark #15) 1/50 copies. 4 pp/3 printed, rubberstamp w/ holograph addition interior. 2 ¾ x 3 1/2 , leaflet. a concrete poem. $5.00
156. (w/ Peggy Lefler) “ metro “. Oakland, Score, nov84 (Scorebroadsides #F) 1/100 copies. 8 ½ x 11, offset broadside. a concrete poem. preceded by its appearance as a poem by Lefler on a broadside in her Different Tenses &, w/ the addition of Curry’s pattern superimposition, as a street poster for – made from an overrun of covers to – David UU’s METROPOLIS. this 3rd edition considerably revises the form of the poem. minorly creased. $10.00
159. Moebuis & A Bottle. Vancouver, Blewointmentpress, 1977. 1/500 copies. 40 pp/32 printed, mimeo in offset cover. 5 ½ x 8 1/2 , stapled wrappers. poetry, w/ 2 graphics by Allan Rosen. $5.00
178. Peggy Lefler : exhibitionist. Toronto, Room 302 Book, 1dec93 (List #9) 1/127 trade copies. 20 pp printed, photocopy. 5 ½ x 8 ½, sewn wrappers. bibliographical sketch, w/ illuss. by Lefler, photoportrait by Curry & correspondence to Lefler by Bob Cobbing. $4.00
209. rubber stamped. Toronto, Room 302 Books, 12feb93 (List #8) 1/26 lettered copies of an edition totaling 27. 20 pp/12 printed, rubberstamp. 5 ½ x 8 ½, sewn wrappers. an examination of 8 works by 8 writers using rubberstamps as a means of composition. $10.00
216. Shant’s hat & other poems. Toronto, Best Copy & Curvd H&z, 23nov94 *Curvd H&z #433) of an edition totaling 115, 1/78 #d trade copies. 16 pp/11 printed, rubberstamp w/ photocopy addition to cover. 6 x 4, sewn wrappers. a poem, cover photography of Shant’s hat by Curry/Ahman Shehab. $7.50
220. (w/ Mark Laba) sinillogical translations volume 4: THE SINO-PARISIAN TRANSLATIONS. Madison, Xexoxial Editions, 1987. 32 pp/26 printed, photocopy. 5 ½ x 8 ½, stapled wrappers, poetry. in an endless series of made-to-order variants, this is, as far as I can tell, the 3rd distinct edition. the 1st is distinguishable by the presence of an eyeless greaseball in the rear, the 2nd replacing it with an enlargement of a photograph by Curry; both issued under the Xerox Sutra Editions imprint. this 3rd edition signals the loss of their battle with the Xerox corporation. cover collages by Miekal And/or Liz Was. in orange covers. $7.50
249. THE JWCURRY EXPERIENCE. interview by Chris Kubsch. Willowdale, Suburban Home(Made)Sick Press, nov94. 1/50 copies. 32 pp/29 printed, photocopy. 8 ½ x 11, side-stapled card covers. w/ a poem introduction by Kubsch, cover photoportrait of Curry by Lance LaRocque. $20.00
254. THE TWEEZE. Toronto, privately published, 17oct91. 1/6 copies #d & signed. 102 pp/44 printed, rubberstamp w/ some holograph additions & letterpress cover device. 4 ½ x 6, Japanese-sewn & glued in wrappers w/ tipped in hair. a letter to David UU w/ a bibliography of private editions, prefaced by an excerpt from a letter by UU. $400.00
257. THIRD TRAC(K)INGS. A Reading. Toronto, Torpor Vigil Industries, 1feb96. 1/58 coipes. 6 x 3 ¾, photocopy broadsheet. a photograph on face of flyer for Curry’s reading at Café Blancmange, 10feb96. a selfportrait. $4.50
279. (editor, w/ Nicholas Power & Steve Venright) VISITATIONS. Toronto, Gesture Press, 29aug84. 1/98 copies. 44 pp/31 printed, offset, mimeo, rubberstamp, typescript & silkscreen. 6 ½ x 9 ½, 12 leaves & variously-bound pamphlets & an acetate card in envelope. poetry & prose anthology issued to accompany a performance on the date of issue at The Groaning Board, Toronto, w/ contributions by the editors, Mark Laba, Steven Smith & George Swede. $40.00
284. (w/ Jennifer Books) !WE REMEMBER!. Ottawa & Toronto, Canadian Small Change Association, 8dec95. of an edition totaling 46, 1/43 signed trade copies. 8 pp printed, colour photocopy & rubberstamp. 5 x 3 ¼, leaflet. photocopy w/ open letter announcement of the impention of the ’95 HitList Variations series of unique books. mostly released in envelopes, stamped, addressed & mailed to the eventual recipients of the HitList, this is 1/13 copies released w/o envelopes. $25.00
286. (w/ George Swede) WHERE EVEN THE FACTORIES HAVE LAWNS. Toronto, Gesture Press, 16apr88. 1/100 cpoies. 32 pp/16 printed, mimeo & photocopy. 4 ½ x 7, stapled wrappers. poetry, cover photograph by Randall Brock.$4.00

write to jwcurry for this and other catalogues:
ROOM 302 BOOKS
#302 – 880 Somerset Street West
Ottawa Canada K1R 6R7
(613) 233 0477

coming soon: selections of List #10C: jwcurry: contributions to periodicals and List #10-D: jwcurry: editorial responsibilies

related notes: Amanda Earl's recent note on curry ; jwcurry in Calgary; jwcurry & Richmond Landing: The Martyrology Books 4 and 5; a bpNichol cerebration: jwcurry reading the entirety of The Martyrology in Toronto; jwcurry reading The Martyrology; an all-weather event

related (other) links: John W. MacDonald on curry; Messagio Galore website;

recent reading: Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words

Despite being the only item on my Christmas wish list, only a few days ago did I finally pick up a copy of Alberto Manguel’s The City of Words (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2007), produced as the 2007 Massey Lecture on CBC Radio and across Canada, including Halifax, Victoria, Edmonton, Montreal and Toronto (and not, apparently, Ottawa, where I was attending the writers festival, missing the Edmonton version). Manguel’s lecture is a conversation of the divisions between people and cultures and some of the reasons for such, telling stories of the other, stories of brothers and many others to weave his narrative of the creative power of words themselves, to build whole cultures and even tear others down.

Language lends voice to the storytellers who try to tell us who we are; language builds out of words our reality and those who inhabit it, within and without the walls; language offers stories that lie and stories that tell the truth. Language changes with us, grows stronger or weaker with us, survives or dies with us. The economic machineries we have built require language to appeal to its consumers, but only on a dogmatic, practical level, deliberately avoiding literature’s constant probing and interrogation. The endless sequence of readings of Gilgamesh or Don Quixote opens realms of meaning on countless subjects – personal identity, relationship to power, social duties and responsibilities, the balance of action – all of which may at some point entail a questioning of power and call for the resolution of injustice. To sustain the run of the machineries, those in office will often attempt to curb and control this multiplicity of readings in many ways: by simply prohibiting the book or, more subtly, by imposing a restricted or distorted vocabulary, by “blunting the language,” as Günter Grass once called it. This censorship (because of course, it is censorship) takes place in many ways, from the most dramatic to the most covert. It may ban a language entirely, it may subvert certain vocabularies, it may distort or empty of meaning certain of words, it may channel language into limp literary productions or limit it to dogmatic use in the realms of politics, commerce, fashion, and, of course, religion. In every case, its aim is to prevent the telling and reading of true stories.

What amazes me about Manguel is the range of references he can pull out to further and continue his argument, from reading Don Quixote, Cassandra and Gilgamesh into recent reactions to the Iraq War, and Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey, bringing them together in such capable and moving insight as to be impossible to imagine in any other way.

Alice Major’s The Office Tower Tales

With her newest poetry collection, The Office Tower Tales (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2008), Edmonton poet Alice Major [see her 12 or 20 questions here] has written her own office tower/downtown Edmonton version of The Canterbury Tales (for those who missed the obvious). Writing a very narrative verse, she writes out seventeen “stories,” all of which have “prologues” and four that even have “epilogues,” as well as an “epilogue” to the collection as a whole, with titles such as “Prologue to the Waitress’ Tale,” “This Great and Complicated Sin,” “The Office Romeo’s Tale” and “The Tale of the CEO’s Daughter.” This large kind of conceptual project (the book sits at 252 pages and rather small print) is unusual and unusually ambitious for Alice Major, who has produced eight previous collections (as well as a YA novel) over the years, predominantly as collections of individual poems or sequences. This new book, The Office Tower Tales, is very much a single project, considered a long poem in the very best kind of way.

Office towers, visible from far
across the prairie in the lengthening days,
are rolling up the lengths of rubber rug
that guard the marble of their foyers
from winter slush.

And down the long glass atrium of Commerce
Place, sun streams on the heads
of office workers – reds and ebonies,
flax, ash and tan. All the flocked shades
of continents

around the globe – a trail of migrant birds
gone native here and bound for coffee break
in the kiosk-bordered market of the food court.
There, in its central parliament, they take
their tables, near

the one at which Pandora, Aphrodite
and Sheherazad are overheard
continuing their long debate. Pandora
stops chewing at her thumbnail with its scarred
and bleeding rim

to snap, A kinder, gentler patriarchy?
Don’t make me laugh. For emphasis, she raps
the cardboard corner of her empty
cigarette pack on the table, takes a drag
of bitter coffee.

What makes this collection is the sheer focus of the project, the quality of the writing in a poetry book nearly novelistic in its approach, taking in her years of living and working in the downtown core of the city. Still, as much as the book holds together as a full unit, some of the individual pieces are better than others, with “The Tale of the CEO’s Daughter,” for example, falling a bit away from the strength of some of the other pieces. Still, a highly ambitious and fully-formed work, this is certainly a break from what Major has done previously.

[Alice Major reads from The Office Tower Tales in Edmonton here, as well as various places across Canada (check this link, too, for her Edmonton launch); the Ottawa launch, hosted by Chaudiere Books, happens April 6 at mother tongue books, with opening readings by Nicholas Lea + Anne Le Dressay]

On Writing

I look at my hands.
They are no longer my own.
They have become my father’s
hands.

What happened last night?
— Robert Kroetsch, The Crow Journals

1.

What does it mean to write? I write because my father rarely spoke to us, and I could feel the silences we shared a growing weight. Is that too easy, or too pessimistic? How does one even begin? But who cares, another writer suggested recently; we write, or we don’t. What does it matter how anyone starts?

2.

Ottawa Valley historian Joan Finnegan used to say that it was easy to get the Irish to talk, just put a bottle of something in front of them, but the Scots… I have probably grotesquely misquoted her. It was why she had so little in the way of Scottish-Canadian Ottawa Valley stories, given such hesitation to speak to each other, let alone outsiders, despite the size, stretch and concentration of our population. What does it mean, then, to write?

3.

My father always carried a small notebook and a series of ball-point pens in his right breast pocket, in green or blue workshirts. I presume he would have scrawled down notes on crops, costs, reminders and balances. How can I speak without evidence? Had he written down anything journalistic or diaristic, it would have contradicted everything else I’ve ever known about him. My mother keeps the same for grocery lists and phone numbers, on the ledge with pen and nail clippers beside her living room chair. Note-taker: the one thing I, I would argue, am not. How I write.

Or what these notebooks by my desk contradict.

4.

My father tells few stories, but I know that he has them. How we the first farm on the dirt road to have electricity, and black-and-white television. As he told me once, watching the moon landing like radio, in black-and-white stills, the day the new furnace in. How his father tried to buy back the property next door, where he and his own father born, a late purchase sealed with a handshake. But then the neighbour got sick, and his wife sold the whole lot to else, not knowing the deal.

This would have been during Canada’s centennial, the year my parents married, and two more before my grandfather died, meaning that he and my grandmother were vacating the house, so my parents could settle themselves in as the main occupants. Where my father has lived since a year. This would have been three before I born, but four before my arrival. A long gestation, perhaps. This is why I have no baby, only toddler, photos.

Why write? they ask. I write because I have no other with which to say.

5.

I am afraid I keep retelling the same stories told before, I feel I have so few.

6.

When I was in high school in Alexandria in the 1980s, there was a joke that the town had just entered the 1950s. It was like a place caught in time, like a fly in alabaster, and somehow still is. I exist in a time-warp just to step into parents car, and allow the ride home, rolling back along years. It’s almost as though none of the intervening time ever happened. It is only my daughter that somehow allows me from being swallowed completely. Just by existing, she intervenes. She somehow, always, saves me.

7.

Why write? It has done little else than to make my life harder. Had I just listened to my parents and taken over the farm, and saved it from the corpse it became; had I just listened to my ex-wife and got myself a proper job and not allowed her to build up the wedge that then pushed us apart. Why write?

Here I sit, nearly forty, and working so hard to record the life that I have and I had and I would have, had only not written at all. By writing, I have created the space in which to mourn what I have, by writing, lost.

8.

In 1989, I arrived in Montreal to take creative writing at Concordia University, but the school wouldn’t take me. I sat what felt hours in the office of Henry Beissel, head of the department, who had already accepted me into the program. On the other end of his phone, an administrator kept telling him no, for my five and not six grade thirteen credits. There was nothing, he said, that any of us could have done. I was not meant for that city of Leonard Cohen and Artie Gold, that city of Nicole Brossard and Dany Laferriere, that city that would have properly taught me to speak French. I instead headed west, to Carleton University, where I spent more time with the mother of our eventual child than going to class; barely lasted a month. I wrote bad poems and pretended I’d never been on a farm.

9.

My ex-wife tells me, she has never met anyone more different than their own family; I am the one at twenty-seven that she wanted at seventeen. It was always too late. I am the Frankenstein Monster she created; she wanted to put me on her taxes as her “idiot son.” I was, in many ways, her creation, saved from what I could have become through our ten years together, from fourteen years old up to twenty-four, with a child, three-and-a-half.

10.

Caught up in his silences and her silences too, from the years my mother was away from home in hospital, starting in the early 1970s, and by mid-decade, starting her twenty-two years of non-working kidneys. It was why they couldn’t have children, and what they already knew from the time they were not yet married, but went ahead, as a cousin once told, for love.

Why write? My mother tells me I told her father stories when I on his knee, made up on the spot. I have no memories of such, he had died when I two. What stories would I have told? Is this something we’re born with, bred in the bone? Did my birth mother and father, still unknown to me, story each other in those months before I?

11.

Why write. I save up my sights and my skills and I scratch them all down, page after now-endless page. Unforgiving. How do penance and crime become same?

12.

My paternal grandmother told some, when I was young, that then drifted away. What was it she was trying to tell me? Just after the Labour Day weekend, as I new in grade nine and she suddenly gone. There was newness there, too. She who taught one-room a school before married and her, and then him.

13.

What he never said, and she, somehow, used to. Read me books and my own before I started my school and could already read. How I could even speak French; far more than I’ve ever known since. There were books and then book and then books. It felt endless and open, taking in.

Always ahead or close second in grade school a contest, distant cousin and I, competing for who would get first into next part of library. A permission to go out, then, further.

14.

Was once the wall I hit stepping through front door, all the silences behind and silences to come, all the way through my twenties and into my thirties. Now that they’re nearly seventy, but thirty ahead, they seem softer now. I write letters home about what I cannot phone, or speak during semi-annual visits. Why write?

15.

Who went from books to comic books and back again, seven thousand Marvel Comics large. Who came from lack of a history and unknown genealogy to being the keeper of family knowledge, genealogist; working to compile what, perhaps, cannot be known.


16.

There is family, and parents, and children. Since Alberta, I have written my daughter dozens of letters that she does not respond to; neither of us good on the phone, and she, neither email nor print. I would rather our weekly conversations in Ottawa, while trolling the Rideau Centre. From here, how I miss it. How I once thrived. How I will once again. What does it mean to write?

17.

And then there is writing itself, that takes its own silence, and develops one, even as the writing develops. The only way to get work done. Be quiet sometimes and just put your head down.

Sometimes there only is but to write, to create what then needs to be solved. And endure.


related notes: falling in love, falling in love with poetry; three novels: on writing fiction; a as in Artie, g as in Gold (1947-2007);

12 or 20 questions: with Suzanne Buffam

Suzanne Buffam is the author of Past Imperfect (House of Anansi), which won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award in 2006, and the chapbook Interiors (Delirium Press, 2006). Her poems have appeared in numerous publications in the U.S. and Canada, including The Boston Review, A Public Space, Poetry, Jubilat, The Canary, The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Matrix, and De Maisonneuve as well as the anthologies Breathing Fire: Canada’s New Poets (Harbour, 1996), The New Canon (Signal Editions, 2006), and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007). Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Slovenian, and she has participated in readings and literary festivals across Canada and the U.S., as well as in Mexico and Europe. She won the CBC Canadian Literary Award for poetry in 1998 and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Born and raised in Canada, she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

When I was about four or five, I asked for a book of my own for Christmas—a book I wouldn’t have to share with my brother, that is. My parents gave me Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle. Frankly, I was a little disappointed by the level of the text—and by the moralizing nature of the narrative (a cautionary tale about ambition and greed)—but it did feel good to write my name on the inside cover of that book. If you mean the first book I published myself, well, Proust says that by the time we attain the goals we set for ourselves, they have ceased to be our goals. In my experience, this seems to apply to publication at least as much as to love.

2 - How long have you lived in Chicago, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

At the moment, I’m living in the south of Mexico, in the city of Oaxaca, and though I can’t say for sure how this will ramify for me down the road, the place has definitely made an impression on my sense of human history and my own tiny portion thereof. Oaxaca is a colonial city of about 350,000, large enough to foster a thriving cultural scene (just saw a bunch of Man Ray films last week at an outdoor theatre down the street!), but small enough to get everywhere you need to go on foot—including some of the most fascinating archeological sites in the world. About an hour’s walk from our door is Monte Alban, the oldest known city in Mesoamerica, which dates back to roughly 500BC—about the time the first tragedies were being staged in ancient Greece (a fact which blows my mind in all sorts of ways). Beyond that, the surrounding hills are full of indigenous villages where dialects of thousand-year-old languages I’d never heard of before are being broadcast on local radio waves. So I find myself feeling rather awed a good deal of the time—and more conscious on a daily basis of the past than I've ever felt living among the high-rises and Dunkin' Donut shops at home (wherever that may be, as Elizabeth Bishop says). In the photo above, incidentally, I’m standing in front of what is allegedly the largest living organism on earth—a cedar tree that’s apparently older than Jesus.

But who knows how this will impact my work. I’m not likely to start writing about my life or time here in any particulary direct way. I moved to Chicago from Montreal almost five years ago; to Montreal from Nova Scotia; to Nova Scotia from Iowa; to Iowa from Victoria; to Victoria from Vancouver; to Vancouver from Florida; to Florida from Abidjan (in the Ivory Coast); to Abidjan from Montreal…In between those places I’ve spent several months at a time in various others as well. Probably the main impact these places have had on me is a sense of constantly moving around, of constantly saying goodbye to places and people I love. Which likely has something to do with my tendency to allegorize or otherwise render oblique most aspects of “place” and autobiography in my work…

As for gender and race, I’d say they inform pretty much every aspect of my life—how could they not?— from my perspective on the world to my way of speaking to and within it—again, however obliquely they make their way into my work.

3 - Where does a poem 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?

I'm an erratic poet. At the moment, I'm managing to sustain a routine, in terms of schedule, but from poem to poem things tend to fluctuate wildly. Some poems begin with a single line that strikes me as interesting, funny, or puzzling--or possibly even a just a title--and proceed from there. Others accumulate from bits and pieces that seem to constellate around a vague theme. I keep notebooks where I write down bits of language--my own and others'--images, lines, facts, quotations, etc--and these are indispensible in terms of getting started or working my way through a draft.

As for writing “books,” I’d say it’s too soon to say. So far I’m the author of only one book that selectively collects about ten years’ of work. At the moment I’m working on a longer project—but it, too, consists of a series of fairly short bits.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Probably neither. I do enjoy giving readings, though, so long as I’ve got new material to read. That’s when reading feels usefully scary for me. I find my poems have about a 3-reading limit before I feel utterly bored by them. On the whole, though, writing for me is a fairly solitary pursuit and requires huge amounts of time alone in my room (or, as it so happens these days, alone on the roof)—and I’m enjoying my break from the Poetry World right now. (I had a teacher once who made a distinction between the Poetry World—all that shmoozing and gossiping that seems to be part of any “career” in poetry—and the world of poetry—that other world of hightened attention which Eluard said is “inside this one”). I guess the trick to staying sane is finding the balance that works for you. I’ll let you know when I find it…

5 - 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’d say my concerns are pretty much of the practical sort: how to be a good person in the world; how not to be ruined by envy, bitterness, regret and desire; how to stay open, curious, hopeful in the face of war, certain death, and the eventual annihalation of our solar system....and, of course, how not to take oneself too seriously in the process! I suspect most poets are more interested in questions than in answers—otherwise they’d be scientists or popes. As for the “current” questions, well, it seems to me any really good question should be endlessly renewable, and thus, endlessly current.

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

About ten years ago I met a man in graduate school who, in addition to being a terrific poet, was the best editor I’d ever met. So naturally, I married him. I continue to find this relationship both difficult and essential. I also had the great good fortune to work with Heather McHugh on my first book, and I can’t begin to say enough about her acumen and agility of mind.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Once, many years ago, against my strong inclination, I ate a few slices of a pear to please a man I wanted to impress. I learned the hard way from that disasterous encounter that one might as well be honest from the start about the fruits that one enjoys.

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

There’s a moment in that documentary “Touching the Void” where a mountain climber is stuck deep in a cravasse with the wrong end of a cut rope and a badly broken leg. There’s a thin shaft of light coming down from above and a seemingly bottomless chasm beneath him. (Warning: spoiler ahead). Realizing he can’t possibly climb back up to the surface, he decides instead to take his chances and crawl deeper into the darkness—which, miraculously, eventually leads him back into the light. Apparently, what occurred to him in that darkest hour was the need to keep making decisions. So, besides the overtly spiritual allegory availabe here, that’s one thing that’s really stuck with me: Keep Making Decisions. That piece of advice may save your life.

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

I would like to be the kind of writer who follows a routine. Usually, I lack the self-discipline to do so, and/or circumstances conspire to thwart my best attempts. Luckily? Miraculously? Mercifully?--at the moment my life and my resolve are cooperating and a productive routine has emerged. It helps to have adopted a new puppy, for whom routine is indispensable! For superstitious reasons, though, I think I’d better keep it to myself.

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

I read poetry, philosophy, I leaf through any number of random books I find on my shelves. Also, I like to walk. Something happens in the brain when you’re walking that just doesn’t when you’re sitting at your desk with your head in your hands. And when it doesn’t happen, I’m working on being okay with that too.

11 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

Well, as I mentioned above, at the moment I’m the author of only one book, but I’m nearing what feels like the final stretch of a new manuscript. As far as I can tell the biggest difference so far is that it contains the word “God.”

12 - 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?

All of these things plus other people, fear, longing, self-pity, self-loathing, love, hope, doubt, despair…Do these things count as “forms”?

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

I’ve gone through so many phases it would be tedious to list them here, but I will say that a bunch of weird poems by Dylan Thomas and Shelley and Blake’s “Proverbs from Hell” lit a fire in highschool, and in my twenties, Simone Weil’s Waiting for God opened my mind in a way I would never have thought possible in my younger, fiercely atheist days. Lately I’ve been reading around in eastern philosophy and Greek tragedy. At the moment I’m reading Sophocles and the Tao Te Ching. And I don’t like to travel very far without some Dickinson, Stevens, and a collection of Robert Walser’s short prose. Obviously, I’m leaving out a lot.

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

Develop patience. Housebreak my dog. But it seems these two are one and the same…

15 - 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, my first novel, a comic picaresque chronicling the heroic misadventures of a plucky young girl named Claronette, met with such wild approval by my beloved third grade teacher Mme. Rivere that I’m afraid my course was thenceforward ever set.

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

The poet writes poetry because he is a poet. (Wallace Stevens)
What else is there to do in the time before sunset? (Plato)

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

Book: In Search of Lost Time (Vol 4: Sodom & Gomorrah—only three more volumes to go!). As for films, well, the only genres on offer at the cineplex here in Oaxaca are horror, horror/action, horror/thriller, horror/terror and romantic comedy, so I’ve seen a lot of really bad monster movies in the last few months (I’ll do anything for popcorn). But we managed to rent Kurosawa’s Kagemusha a few weeks ago, and parts of that were terrific.

18 - What are you currently working on?

Sit! Stay! Come!


12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Jaspreet SinghJaspreet Singh is the author of Chef, a novel, and Seventeen Tomatoes, a collection of linked short stories, which was awarded the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize. He recently finished writing Speak Oppenheimer, a play, for Montreal’s Infinite Theatre. He was the 2006-2007 Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at University of Calgary.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

The book didn’t change my life. It changed my death (shall I say). Because of the book I will be ‘remembered’ a couple of years after I die!

2 - How long have you lived in Calgary, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing?

I moved to Calgary to be closer to Banff. The Rockies helped me restore memories of growing up in Kashmir. While writing the ‘glacier scenes’ in Chef (my new novel) I drove to the Athabasca Glacier 11 times to get it right.

3 - Where does a piece 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?

For me a piece of fiction often begins as an image or a sound or a smell. I allow it to take me in any direction. Soon it grows (or rather crystallizes) into a sketch. In the beginning I don’t know whether the sketch has the potential to become a ‘short story’ or a ‘novel’ or a ‘play’.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Both. I love public readings. I find them a distraction. To read in public is a creative act. Sometimes the readings leave me exhausted. Sometimes they inspire new writing.

5 - 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?

The relationship between ‘people who do not matter’ in this world and the ‘people who do matter’?

I am interested in different kinds of ‘power’ relationships. I try to pose questions about power with my writing.

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

The literary quarrels between the editor and the author often benefit the book.

However, I refuse to work with editors who ask me to explain the ‘mysterious’ in the text or to change the first person narrative to third person because of the ‘demands of the market’.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

It doesn’t get easy.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Last week when I visited Kashmir after a gap of five years!

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

One doesn’t know what one knows until one starts writing.

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

A typical ‘writing day’ begins and ends with writing. Generally I am more creative ‘early in the morning’ and ‘late at night’.

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

Cinema. Poetry. Long walks. Travel. Music. Cooking.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

My most recent book is really a ‘dialogue’ with the previous book.

13 - 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?

Cinema, science, and poetry.

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

W.G. Sebald. Thomas Bernhard.

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

Write a book for children.

16 - 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?

Cinema (directing films)

By the way, I moved to writing from engineering. I have a PhD in chemical engineering.

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

I like Orhan Pamuk’s response to this question. Let me quote (from his Nobel Acceptance Speech, My Father’s Suitcase):

“I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live... I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”

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

Book: State of Exception (by Georgio Agamben)

Film: Close-up (by Abbas Kiarostami)

19 - What are you currently working on?

New novel.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Eric FolsomEric Folsom was born naked in late November, 1951, in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin were still in power, but he never met either one personally. As a student, Folsom decamped for Canada during the Vietnam era, writing poetry whilst leading an apparently normal life. Numerous poems appeared in small magazines, he joined the editorial board of Quarry by invitation of Bronwen Wallace, a self-published chapbook (Brewed for Ontario) might have happened, and he printed and edited the small but wiry zine Next Exit. His first legitimate book, Poems for Little Cataraqui (Broken Jaw Press), was published in 1994, then he wrote more poetry. What Kind of Love Did You Have in Mind? (Wolsak and Wynn) appeared in 1997, followed by Icon Driven (Wolsak and Wynn) in 2001, and the chapbook NORTHEASTERN ANTI-GHAZALS (above/ground press) in 2005. Since then he has tried to improve.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Full status in the League of Canadian Poets was pretty nice, also not wondering if I was a poet only in my fantasies, not having to calculate whether my poems in magazines were equivalent to a book when I applied for a grant. On the other hand, the book didn’t change my actual life and a slew of other things at around the same time did.

2 - How long have you lived in Kingston, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I’ve been in Kingston since 1974, lived in Halifax, Montreal, and New England before that. Geography as social geography shapes me and everyone else quite a lot. I imagine myself as a citizen of the cultural complex at the northern end of the Appalachian chain, the country where we tap maples, pick blueberries, bake beans, and shovel snow, regardless of Ottawa, Quebec City, or Washington. Political boundaries strike me as an elaborate fiction of limited use to the majority. Poems for Little Cataraqui covers this in an oblique way.

I think about gender rather more than race, but in both cases the culturally constructed aspect intrigues me. I remember way back when Canadians referred to the “English” and the “French” as “Races”. Why do we say “race” if no one really wins?

3 - Where does a poem 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?

Most of the time I just fool around until a theme becomes unavoidable, then shifting the focus from the short to the long form. Depends on the project really and I’ve done it both ways, also shifting between form and subject as the organizing principal.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Very much part of. I love reading, I rehearse readings, I revise out loud so I can hear the sound of the poem. Print is indispensable but too often provides next to no response, the live audience is immediate and providentially serves as an excellent bullshit detector.

5 - 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?

Theories about writing don’t seem to help me get the writing done, so I tend to be practical on that front. However, big questions about history and science, about power and being less toxic to your family and your planet, about art and the mysterious creation of meaning, can be alluring. Also, can I get the reader interested in such questions? Can I convince them they should care? Can I do it without sounding vain and pompous? Why are you laughing, that wasn’t funny!

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

Oh, essential, if you find a good one. Humility and an outside perspective are hugely valuable. Really good editors are rare these days, most newspapers used to have them, but for poets finding a great editor has always been an accomplishment. The combination of open field composition and knowledge of standard grammar seems to fry the average brain.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Harder of course. If wasn’t harder then you weren’t challenging yourself, you lazy slob. The best book is the next one.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Christmas, the fruit salad had some canned pears. Where am I supposed to get pears in March?

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

Always ignore advice. (Exceptions can be made if the person offering is extremely sexy).

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

Pretty irregular, I’m afraid. I work full time at the public library, so if there’s a deadline looming I’ll start getting up earlier, can’t write worth a damn late at night. If there’s no pressure, I’m pretty lazy. I subscribe to the notion that output requires input, therefore the average day begins with a pot of coffee and a lot of reading.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

The kitchen table if it’s a longhand first draft. The computer in the laundry room/spare bedroom once I’m revising. In summer I might switch to the back bedroom which has a view of the back yard, but I’d rather be in Tatamagouche, or Banff, or Ogunquit.

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

Every blockage has a different character, I have to rummage through the whole toolbox of inspiration. Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I go for a walk in the woods. Read philosophy, meet someone for coffee, break the routine. Ask questions.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I’m not sure which is my most recent book, the one I just finished writing, the last published chapbook, or the full length book from seven years ago. In addition, I haven’t written the works in the order they were published. The manuscript I just finished is my attempt to make poetry read like a novel, a strong narrative driven by action and character. It’s too early for me to say whether I succeeded, but it feels different largely for having taken far too long, requiring skills I didn’t know I lacked, plus mountains of research. Fun but harder than I expected.

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?

Heck yes, all of the above. Input and output. You left out modern dance and small town airports.

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

The great George Bowering was crucial when I was eighteen. I grew up loving the Beats, I still love Robin Blaser and Charlie Olson, I will always love Al Purdy and Bronwen Wallace. I want to be Basho when I grow up.

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

Climb Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Translate the Bible into Haiku.

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?

A depressed alcoholic or a fabric artist hooked on religion, God only knows. So many choices, so few brain cells.

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

I was the nerdiest kid in High School, not a lot of close friends, and for some unexplained reason I thought poetry would make me stand out and get noticed. Never mind that I already stood out for being kind of weird. I read a poem aloud in English class about waiting for the bell to ring at the last period of the day, and the kids loved it. I’ve spent a pathetic life trying to recreate that feeling, drawn to the lonely spotlight and the imagined applause. I also just like writing. In fact I get a buzz off it, loose complete track of time, and forget to make supper. This is why writers need personal servants and The Canada Council ought to look into it.

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

On Violence, Hannah Arendt (1970). Across the Universe, Julie Traymor (2007).

20 - What are you currently working on?

Twenty questions for rob mclennan. I’m almost done.

12 or 20 questions archive