12 or 20 questions: with Susan Tichy

Susan Tichy’s most recent book, Gallowglass(Ahsahta, 2010), takes its title from an Anglicized form of the Gaelic gal-óglac, a foreign soldier or mercenary. Her 2007 book, Bone Pagoda, is an extended meditation on Vietnam—the country, the war, and the moral catastrophe now signified by this word. Both books are underwritten by her experience as a war protester and as the wife of a combat veteran. Tichy’s first book, The Hands in Exile (Random House, 1983), centered on time spent working on the Golan Heights, was selected for the National Poetry Series and also received the Eugene Kayden Award for Poetry. Her second book, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day (Wesleyan University Pr, 1988), resulted from research into human rights abuse in the Philippines during the Marcos years and her subsequent discovery of a family connection to comparable practices during the Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. Her poems have appeared widely in the US and Britain, and have been recognized by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and numerous other awards. Since 1988 she has taught in the Graduate Writing Program at George Mason University. When not teaching, she lives in a ghost town in the Colorado Rockies.

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


My outward life was most changed by the second book, A Smell of Burning Starts the Day, because that’s when I started teaching. When my first book, The Hands in Exile, came out I was living in a high mountain cabin with a hand pump in the yard, an outhouse, and no electricity or telephone—except on the occasions when we ran out of money, in which case I was living in a motel room 75 miles away, working an office job. A few months after the book came out, I received, at that motel room, a letter from Yehuda Amichai, whose poems had been a great influence. I hadn’t had the nerve to send him the book, but someone had given him a copy. He wrote: “So we have met and we go on meeting,” an affirmation only publication made possible.

My newer work has found a form to embody a certain kind of largeness I had earlier sought almost exclusively at the level of content. These last two books—Bone Pagoda and Gallowglass--have brought me in contact with a lot of younger poets whose work I admire.

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

My ear was brought first to poetry by recordings of Scottish and American traditional ballads, and then by reading a lot of adult poems I couldn’t understand but could always hear. In Jr. High, I wrote (in a series of spiral notebooks) a serialized novel about sex, drugs, and angst, which was avidly consumed by my classmates as fast as I could churn it out. Exhilarating, but the public aspect was far too weird.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?


A few poems come quickly, in a shape near final, but most of my work is slow. Some days are rapid—lots of lines appearing with what feels like little effort—but the poem or series as a whole will typically take a year, sometimes more. I think I have always been a gradual writer, because I sometimes come upon early drafts and have a hard time recognizing which poems those words became.

4 - 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?


All my books have included research in combination with personal experience, and I do my best work within the frame of a book concept. However, individual poems can start anywhere, from anything. When I’m in the groove, everything sounds like a line of poetry—with the result that I am generally surrounded by reams of notes, quotes, rhymes, puns, rocks, and tea stains, all trying to find their way into poems. Ideas are the magnets that draw these bits into alignment.

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

The sound of a poem is central, and I read aloud constantly while composing, so reading to an audience seems both a natural and a slightly surreal extension of that process. And of course I like meeting other poets and readers: I am full of gratitude and admiration for those who curate reading series, and bring us all out and about into each other’s company. The whole endeavor is draining, though, and time-consuming: something to be rationed.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?


I am interested in collage as a practice that draws its material from the environment, from which its material identity never entirely separates. This alters the claims of imagination away from individual creation toward acts of perception and collection, but not away from the idea of individual experience. Beyond found text, collage composition is a way of thinking, retaining respect for the thingness of things as well as the thingness of words-as-sounds. Abstraction is an essential act of mind, but I want it to take place the same way it takes place in experience—not in the diction of the poem, which remains concrete, but in perception as it crosses the great or small distances between phrases, images, sounds. I link this to Taoist ideas of the ten-thousand-things, whose ever-moving relationships constitute and reveal the essential un-thingness of reality.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?


Poetry resists the degradation of language to mere utility, which is part of the larger (and constant) struggle against dehumanization. It can also serve certain documentary functions—by which I don’t mean “documentary poetry,” per se, but inscription of consciousness, both collective and individual. This is inherent resistance to both oppression and triviality.  I am not very interested, personally, in the writer’s role in culture where culture means the culture industry.

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


Ahsahta is my third press, my first “small press,” and the only place I’ve actually had an editor who performed a role deserving of the title. Having Janet Holmes as one of my key readers is an honor and it keeps me on my toes. Because she is also a poet, she’s a poet-centric editor, of course, which makes all the difference.

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


I have two favorites. One: be brave. Two: if you don’t do the last 5% of work required to finish a piece of writing, you’ve wasted your time on the other 95%.

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?


When teaching, I set aside a couple blocks of time each week, though not always the same time or day. When not teaching, I write most days from nine-ish till one or two. That’s if I have a project going. When I don’t, I muddle about this way and that, accomplishing nothing. In either case, the day begins with tea and reading, then a walk or some other exercise, then the work.

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


To everything mentioned above: tea, traditional music, walking, reading, piles of scrap paper covered with scribbles. I make tea moons, listen to the birds. Or turn on the radio and get mad about something.

12 - If there was a fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?


I’ve never had a fire, but I’ve had a wildfire evacuation, and what I learned is that when the day actually comes you don’t grab all the things you thought you’d grab. I had a list, but some things on it seemed terrifically unimportant. After the obvious photographs, laptop, manuscripts, and Chinese tea, I took a few precious books, four pieces of art from Vietnam, my late husband’s writing, and a few things that had belonged to my mother and grandmother. Then I packed my tent and sleeping bag, in case I wound up living in them the rest of the summer.

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?


Everyone says books come from books, because they do. The hardest part of seeking formal influence from other sources is avoiding using books as mediators. If you want to write walking poems, for example (as I have recently), you think you have to (first or also) read all the literature on walking. I have spent more time than most people out on trails on my own two feet, and have not yet found a path around this problem. I am skeptical when others seem to have found one, because the tracks of their reading are often so visible.

Speaking more pragmatically, Scottish ballads prefigure the aesthetics of collage and the shifting, impersonal “I” in interesting ways, and that intersection fueled both Bone Pagoda and Gallowglass. “Nature” is the world, from which language is derived, not extracted. I try to spend a lot of time there, but can’t say I’ve found a form in language that arises in any specific way from, say, walking a rocky trail.

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

I’m a magpie, so it’s a long list… I’ll just name some: Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Marianne Moore, Lorine Niedecker, Susan Howe, George Oppen, Czeslaw Milosz, Yehuda Amichai, Semezdin Mehmedinovich, John Ruskin, early Gary Snyder, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Alec Finlay, the walking artist Hamish Fulton, the ethnohistorian Francis Jennings, the draft resister David Harris, researchers into birdsong, writers of trail guides. I first misread this question as “important for your work, or simplify your life”—the Tao De Ching fits that description.

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


Finish a book I began in 1994.

Improve my book-arts skills to a point the results stop embarrassing me.

Make a tour of Britain based on installations by the two Finlays, Andy Goldsworthy, et. al.

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?


Without poetry, I would have ended up in community services or human rights work.

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


Whatever else I was doing, I felt compelled to bring it back to the page. Form and play are serious business.

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


3 recent favorite books: Kazim Ali’s Bright Felon, Alec Finlay’s Mesostic Remedy, M. Nourbese Philip’s Zong!

Movies? Many are good, few are great. I’ll name The Reader, Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I (thanks to Mel Nichols for giving me that), and an undying favorite—Kurosawa’s Siberian epic, Dersu Uzala.

19 - What are you currently working on?

That book from 1994: Trafficke: An Autobiography ...which is not an autobiography, but a mixed-genre work whose various parts radiate from the life of my ancestor, Alexander Magruder. A transported prisoner of war, he was born 1610 in Perthshire, Scotland, died 1676 in Maryland, the owner of 1200 acres of Indian land, four indentured servants, and one African slave. There followed 300 years of silence. I have been working on that silence.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Andy Weaver introduction for the TREE Reading Series

Here is the introduction I read to present Toronto poet Andy Weaver at last night’s TREE Reading Series:

In a brief introduction to his section in the anthology evergreen: six new poets (Black Moss Press, 2002), Andy Weaver wrote:

I’m not even certain that I write anymore. It feels more like I just cobble together lines that I’ve put down in the little book that I keep in my right pocket. Which feels better, in a weird way, than when I was naive enough to believe all that crap about inspiration and genius and whatnot. To misquote Frost, which is fine ‘cause he’s dead, one could do worse than be a cobbler of words.

This is a sentiment shared by the late John Newlove, who kept found lines on organized stacks of blue file cards, for him to later include in his own poems, even going so far as to write about that theft between stolen lines in the poem “White Philharmonic Novels” from his collection The Night the Dog Smiled (ECW Press, 1986):

Look, nobody gets wise writing
Now I must be making
pretty manners
at you
It’s necessary to realize that all these phrases
are stolen. The arrangement is all.

Some of us waited years for a first collection from Andy Weaver to appear, finally published by Edmonton’s NeWest Press in spring 2005 as the collection Were the Bees. A former editor at The Fiddlehead, and founder of both Fredericton’s QWERTY magazine and Edmonton’s Olive chapbook and reading series, there were a few years when I considered Andy Weaver to be the best poet in Canada without a trade book. Weaver’s poems are almost a bridge between the prairie horizons of Robert Kroetsch, the more traditional metaphor-driven lyric pastoral of Don McKay and Jan Zwicky, and the explorations of the avant-garde. His poems explore the ghazal, influenced by Canadian models John Thompson, Phyllis Webb and Douglas Barbour (as well as Barbour’s breath-line), the metaphysical threads of San Francisco Renaissance poet Robert Duncan, and the pastiche of how seemingly-arbitrary lines collide into each other, much like, for example, Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (2001).

Before hearing him read from his “Were the Bees” sequence in Edmonton in spring 2004, I had considered his poem “Three Ghazals to the constellation Corvus (The Crow)” to be his strongest work. Since east coast resident John Thompson’s posthumous collection Stilt Jack (House of Anansi, 1978) appeared, bringing the ghazal, an ancient Persian form, into Canadian poetry, the prominence of the form exploded through the publication of Phyllis Webb’s Sunday Water: Thirteen Anti Ghazals (1982), Douglas Barbour’s more recent Breath Takes (2001), and younger poets, such as Eric Folsom, Rob Winger, Catherine Owen and Weaver and, unlike so many others, bringing new life to the form; exploring fields of disconnect through couplets.

In Weaver's “Three Ghazals to the constellation Corvus (The Crow),” every couplet is punctuated, clipped with a wry ironic sense, tongue planted firmly in cheek, as he references Crow, a trickster creation god along the lines of Coyote, or Raven. Every line evokes more than it has space to tell, but tells enough, from youth writing, bad luck and injury to drunken hope and hopelessness, turning the poem in on itself by the very end, a mixture of wit and education, and the kinds of learning that only the bars of Edmonton’s Whyte Avenue can provide, between lines of Duncan; between lines of Mina Loy. Born in Saint John, New Brunswick and raised in various places, including rural Alberta and Carleton Place, just outside of Ottawa, he took his BA at Carleton University, with a creative writing workshop with Seymour Mayne at the University of Ottawa, took his MA at the University of New Brunswick, and his PhD at the University of Alberta, finally achieving an assistant professor job at York, and its still my theory that he is hoping, eventually, to personally influence every university in the country.

The biggest reason I chose Andy Weaver to read, apart from the fact that he remains one of my favourite people, was simply the fact that I haven’t seen or heard a word of his writing since his first trade collection appeared, despite rumours of a forthcoming second; I want to know what the hell he’s been up to.

Margaret Christakos, Welling

After numerous other poetry collections moving through other explorations, including riffs off Montreal and Glengarry County in her Not Egypt (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1989) to her later College Street-neighbourhood backyard and family in books such as wipe.under.a.love. (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2000), Excessive Love Prostheses (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002) to What Stirs (Coach House Books, 2008), Toronto writer and editor Margaret Christakos goes home again in Welling (Sudbury ON: Your Scrivener Press, 2010). Not just home for the writing but the locale of the publisher too, writing her hometown of Sudbury, as her bio says, Christakos “grew up in Sudbury on Wellington Heights and at her family’s Ramsey Lake (north shore) property. At 17, she headed south. She remains strongly attached to these spaces, scents and signposts.”

My friend’s friend died if struck by,

received by, sky. My love
sparks for an instant

& I feel colour singe me.

That’s how paragraphs go,
on the balls of their pink feel directly

into traffic. In these circumstances

any single thing becomes smeared &
anything can be beauteous. (“Gulls”)

In seven sections – “Barrel,” “Motional,” “Prelude,” “Evolution,” “Gulls,” “The problem of confessionality” and “Wellington” – Welling moves out from her adopted city into her previous landscape and then deeper, starting with “Toronto’s metal skin immaculate, masking / a thrombosis of the senses.” and, further on in the same poem, (“Fortune”) to:

We used to get pulled from small towns;
Metropolitan promises magnetic
in neon, how lovely boys seemed
to exist on every bench of the Eaton
Centre, perfect lips & the right Lee
jeans, buttocks you could kiss
without debasement. You forgot secret
bonfires on Laurentian Beach, whole
bottles of gin disgorged, teenagers from the other
highschool too near the black water
at 2 a.m. so drinken-stoned they can’t smell
drowning. Drowning
sniffed their presences, though,
salivating.

The poem ending, with “Who / would leave such a place?”

This becomes the question of the entire book, exploring a return, exploring home and reasons for returning, reasons for originally leaving, and knowing the difference. Knowing the differences, and coming, slowly, to terms with such; its different, returning to the spaces of youth as an adult, and this is a collection that centres itself, as much of her work does, around relationships, specifically the family; writing Sudbury, where her family came from, and where some of it remains, as in this first section of the poem “Motional”:

I cannot pass the chance to design
your motional face in an orange moon. If you
are coming, whistle the way a night-
bird thinks of its mate, out pulling worms
so the babies, wormish enough themselves,
will be less so, & gladder than silence.

This black camp is profuse with pitched sounds
of a solo key, that now, turning its lock, makes
of landfall: family.

It’s as though there is a slightly different flavour to this collection; if her previous works of poetry bounce off each other in a linear thread between volumes, expanding, reworking and furthering, this collection seems almost a sidestep, writing concerns more contained, in the way that perhaps Moure’s Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001) presented concerns that didn’t fully repeat, return or respond in her own writing for another few collections. It’s only the final section, “Wellington,” that resonates with some of the echoes of her most recent work, almost as though the deeper she goes, the closer she is to her own self, back in Toronto. Her experiments have shifted in this collection, as Christakos explores subjects of home, location and dislocation, the nature of the individual versus that of the family; how one can’t exist without other.

Sandra Ridley, Fallout

Funereal

First time the Officer rides in high style is four days after he dies.

His hearse is polished spotless, screw-you dignified,
reflecting the casualty he leaves behind.

She wears navy blue to spite him. No one looks at the lines she cut
into her hands. His affair’s denial stays unopened
in a clutch of his letters.

She presses a bouquet of tiger-lilies to her side.
Never given.
He said, flowers are for funerals.

The driver stumbles, fiddles with the latch on the hearse’s back-door.
She steps left to let the coffin slide out.

For a moment,
nothing else seems to happen,
but oh, does she miss him and regret.

There are some of us that have been waiting years for the quiet reserve, the long thoughtful lines of Ottawa poet and Saskatchewan exile Sandra Ridley to appear in trade book form, after chapbook publication through Jack Pine Press, with the bpNichol Award co-winner Lift: Ghazals for C. (2008) and more recent Rest Cure (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2009). We finally got our wish through the publication of her Fallout (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2010). For those keeping score, a previous version of this book, titled “Downwinders,” won the 2008 Alfred G. Baily Prize, and a subsequent manuscript, “Post-Apothecary,” was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. There is something in Ridley’s work of the small moment stretched out in long lines, much like former Alberta, former Saskatchewan poet Monty Reid, but more lyric, more like a drifting long prairie wind, and the dust that it leaves.

Imaginary Friends

She will confess. She had three. They made sense at the time.
What about you?

Will you confide your twin didn’t make it?
Your mother insisted: you were the only one.

When your parents left town, they wouldn’t let her into the car.
Her bag was packed and she stood waiting.

They sped off as you cried,
face pressed to the dusty back window.

The strength of her poems, the strength of the collection comes from the extensions, the poems that pull, stretch further. There is so much happening that Ridley packs into these lines and pull dangerously apart, in sequences such as “Base Camp Memory,” “Broadcast: July 16, 1945” or the magnificent poem “The Atlas E Missile Complex”:

The corner of your eye is more sensitive to light.

Here, there is none.

You climb down a metal ladder and disturb a conspiracy of wings,
find a rag doll with a gas mask, but I don’t care –

poisoned water instils more fear.

The poems in Fallout work through what is left, after the nuclear age of the 1950s and beyond, a line to the past constantly pulling on the present day. This is Ridley working through grief, and other elements of wind, exploring the remnants of this questionable dust, including the final section, the twelve poem “Lift: Ghazals for C.,” as the notes write, “for my sister Carolyn who died in 1958, two weeks before her second birthday.”

xii.

How much detail should we give in our answer?
How many children are playing in the field?

We do not see stars but the echoes of light.
The stars that are out there move farther away.

& we do not want to look up.
We want to turn green glass back to sand.

A tear drops & a tear drops & a tear drops
& a light sleep comes & she is grateful.

Dear C., small mercies are never given.
There are nine children. There are eight.

12 or 20 questions: with Billie Livingston

Billie Livingston [photo credit: Braden Haggerty] is a fiction writer, poet, and sometime essayist. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, she grew up in Toronto and Vancouver, and has since lived in Tokyo, Hamburg, Munich, Los Angeles and London, England. Her first employment was filling the dairy coolers in a Macs Milk. She went on to work varying lengths of time as a file clerk, receptionist, cocktail waitress, model, actor, chocolate sampler, and booth host at a plumber's convention. She lives with her husband in Vancouver.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
With my first novel, Going Down Swinging, I’d been slogging away for so many years—six or seven, trying to figure out what I was doing and where I was going with it—that I felt as though I must seem like the crazy cat lady down the road, covered in loose fur and kitty litter. I didn’t want to call myself a writer for fear people would think it was just an affectation. When the book was accepted for publication I felt vindicated, as if I could finally say it out loud without embarrassment. Publishing also introduced me to some interesting and terrific people whom I never would have otherwise met. It put me into completely unfamiliar situations, and forced me to rise to the occasion, which is always, ah… character-building.

The new book, Greedy Little Eyes, is a short fiction collection. This will be my fourth book and I have no more certainty now than I did with the first. You never know what’s going to happen when a new book comes out.


2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Though my poetry collection was published after my first novel, I did write poetry first. My poems were sort of micro-fictions. I suppose I wrote poetry as a way to understand characters and the impact of situations that may seem like fleeting moments. Many of the early poems later expanded and became Going Down Swinging.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s been different with each book. The writing initially comes quickly because I don’t want to impose much in the way of self-editing on a first draft. I try to write from the gut. No one’s going to see my first draft so I allow myself the weird and foolish and just hurl it all out on the page. Then I go back and pull and twist and rewrite. It’s unusual for my first draft to look close to its final shape.

4 - Where does a poem or prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Usually it comes from hearing a voice in my head. Especially with short stories, I start to feel a little like Sybil. I try to write down everything the voice says and then I reread it later and sort out the story. Usually it combines with something I saw or overheard. One of the stories in Greedy Little Eyes, for instance, sprang from a day at work (my rent-paying job) when one of the guys came back from lunch looking particularly shaken. He’d just received a call informing him that one of his close friends was dead. Her boyfriend had shot her in a cabin on Vancouver Island. They had no phone so she bled to death. My work friend couldn’t make sense of it. He asked me if I’d write something for him, a poem or a story. He felt, I guess, as though he wanted someone to transform it into something he could get his head around.

Each book has happened a little differently. With the novel I’m working on now, I’ve been writing short chunks, experimenting with voice until I really know the characters.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have a huge dread when it comes to public readings and find it hard to write on a day that I know that I’ll have to read. It’s a bit crazy because I often enjoy reading in public as I’m doing it but I get terrible anxiety beforehand.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I don’t begin a story with a theme in mind or a question per se. But they do crop up. Often the questions involve judgment. Who, in a particular situation, has the final say on normal and abnormal, worthy and unworthy, what is sacred and what is profane?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of the writer depends on what the writer wants it to be. Some authors want to bring comfort to readers, some want to amuse them, or frighten them. Some want to provoke them to think in ways I just mentioned. I guess I personally want to provoke thought while being as emotionally truthful as possible. As the preacher said, “Just because it’s a myth doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Working with a good editor can be both exhilarating and terribly humbling.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The only way to get anything written is the AIC method. (Ass In Chair)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I guess it’s happened naturally. One form inspires another. I write whatever I’m drawn to write, though sometimes, writing itself feels like trying to yank veins out of my arm.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
It depends on whether I’m working at my rent-money job on a particular day. I could be there 12 to 14 hours so there’s no time for anything else. If I’m at home, my usual routine is: wake up, wander to the kitchen and throw the kettle on. I bring my laptop back to bed, drink tea and read the online papers and answer mail for a while. Then I go for a long walk, come home and somewhere between eating breakfast and saying goodnight, I force myself to do a minimum of two pages worth of AIC.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Long walks help. And reading. Sometimes when I stall, I just need to read and read and I don’t care if the book I’ve got in my hands is highbrow, lowbrow or deep fried brow. Reading just about anything can suddenly trigger my brain to start firing again in a way that I need in order to get back to work.

13 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?
I was The Devil. I had on a red dress and an old nun’s cape. I wore a black bobbed wig with a pair of red horns. My friend was a country singer who had sold her soul to me. She wore a blonde wig and a cowboy hat and called herself Lola the Goodtime Girl. The guy who showed up as Christ on the Cross looked deeply concerned.

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?
It’s hard not to be affected by what you surround yourself with. I’m influenced by the storytelling of friends, by walks through the supermarket or the park, by newspapers, television, road trips, music, radio, podcasts, museums, graffiti — that’s why I think it’s important to pay attention to one’s surroundings, to feed your brain with more than fluff.


15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
That would be an endless list. Sometimes it’s really corny, commercial fiction that ends up triggering something. Sometimes it’s dark and beautiful poetry, philosophy, or a brain book about neuroplasticity, the book of Proverbs, a cookbook, The Globe and Mail, The New York Post… I’ve got eclectic taste.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to see Italy — and Ireland, and Russian and Costa Rica, Kenya, Australia… I’d like to try out being independently wealthy.

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?
When I was a kid I wanted to be a veterinarian. Later I wanted to be a lawyer. I wish I had the knowledge that would be needed for either of those vocations.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I always wrote. When I was doing other things I still wrote. Especially while I was employed in the most mind-numbing of vocations, writing kept me sane. The surprise came when someone actually wanted to publish the writing.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Books: Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair was devastating. Barry Callaghan’s Between Trains had some beautiful, gripping stories. I loved the road essays in Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible By Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet.

Film: I just watched Sunset Blvd again. It’s disturbing and hilarious and astute. The Squid and the Whale was brilliant for similar reasons. I also loved Up—and yes, I cried.


20 - What are you currently working on?
Patience. Discipline. And another novel.


12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Antonio D'Alfonso on Guernica Editions

1 – When did Guernica Editions first start? How have your original goals as a publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned through the process?

Guernica started years ago, in 1973, but did not crystallize itself till 1977. I self- published a first collection in 1973, and then published in 1979 our first two official Guernica titles. Guernica is 33 years old. I passed Guernica on to Michael Mirolla and Connie Mcparland in 2010. It would be improper from me to speak of the new Guernica, so I will speak only of the Guernica I am responsible for, though I remain a poetry and translation editor with Guernica.

What I believed in in 1973 only confirmed itself later on. Perhaps the perspective was flawed in the first place, we can only see through the eyes we are born with, nevertheless I had a vision and that vision became reality. 

Publishing was, is and remains the work of rich patrons. Without one’s personal wealth, there can be no serious publishing. Many have been the presses and magazines I have encountered in my career, and if they passed away it is because the owners were not wealthy or there vision was flawed in the first place. I was not wealthy, but the vision was right. 

I tried to sustain the work via grants, but grants are never an assured source of income. One can’t stay in business if the source of steady income is not assured. Sales are never enough. Grants help but the industry is made up of many evil and selfish people who do not see art in the same way. I had to quarrel with many people who tried to destroy Guernica and its authors in every way possible.

If I made it up to 2010 it is because I invested close to 400,000$ of personal money in literature. I am not exaggerating, I am paying this debt on the 25 June 2010 to the bank. No, this is not money the new owners paid me for Guernica. What they are paying me is helping me keep my head out of the rapids in which I would have drowned if I had not sold Guernica. My position remains firm. Publishing is for the rich. A recent award for poetry with all that money for a simgle person proves it.

We cannot change the way the ruling class thinks of the arts. The only thing I can hope for is that all of the 500 books we published will make it through another decade and not vanishing in oblivion.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

I wanted to contribute to social and cultural change. I am born in Montreal, but I am of Italian extraction. That means, in other terms, that I had to decide very quickly, probably before the age of six, if I was going to become an English Canadian or a French Quebecois. I was a stubborn child, and so I chose to become neither. I wanted to participate in the creation of the Italian North American person. All of this might have been highly unconscious as a child, but it was there, in me, at home, among my handful of friends. I was the Italian kid in the block. It was much later, when I met other kids of Italian origin, that something moved up in my own consciousness and in the collective awareness. Publishing was very much tinged with this sense of otherness. I am glad to say that I contributed much in what today people call multiculturalism. I prefer the term pluriculturalism which I have dealt extensively with in my essays, novels, poetry, films.

3 – What do you consider the role and responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

The role of any publishing press is the creation of a cultural centre. I do not know what small publishing means. For printers, authors, banks, the dollar is the dollar. There is no such thing has a small dollar or a large dollar. It is a dollar. So I refuse the epithet of small press. It is degrading, derogatory, basically a lie. Another form of racism and cultural intolerance.

There is no such thing as the A league or B league in culture. Every citizen is a full citizen, and every citizen participates in the creation of culture of his or her country. To speak of small press inevitably entails class distinctions. What sort of person can distinguish between a self-published poetry that alters the century and the poetry book published by a “large press” (sic) that will be completely forgotten five years after its publication?

A book published by any publishers has one and only one market. No matter who produces the book, he or she must and will gradually help the book make its way into the hands of its reader. Because the “large presses” of this continent know this simple fact that there is no book fair open to the public in North America. They fear competiton. Why would they share the same room with a “small press” that did not dish out 750,000$ advance?

It is interesting, no, that the English-speaking public is refused the possibility of seeing in one hall, even for an entrance fee, what is available, as books, in this continent, on a yearly basis. All book shows are trade shows, closed off to the public. Where else can the book reader every gain access to what is being done in terms of books if not in a Salon du livre?

The mentality that labels some presses small is responsible for the absence of an English-language book fair. We don’t want socialism in art, now do we? We must keep the market value of art up there. Away from the dirty hands of the illiterate.

4 – What do you see your press doing that no one else is?

A press faciliates the publishing of new voices. What use is a press that publishes the same authors that another press publishes? Does this mean that the second press does not have ideas of its own? Yes, this is precisely what it means. The job of a press is difficult, because it gambles on literary choices. When one invests thousands and thousands of dollars in one new author, it is because the publisher believes in this author. The most difficult aspect of this business is in keeping that author with your press. Beware of leech-presses without authors of their own who stand there with a lot of money to tangle in front of the eyes of the innocent and the naive.

The role of any press is straight forward: the creation of a fragment of the culture of one’s ethnic community. This phrases obviously sounds anarchistic, but if I had written it is the “creation of a fragment of the culture of our country” I would not have encompassed the aspects of this country, which is more than just English-speaking or French-speaking.

5 – What do you see as the most effective way to get new books out into the world?

There is only one way to get a book out there: it is by word of mouth. All of the rest is angel-dust. No matter how much money a publisher invests in promotion it does nothing serious to the life of the book. Promotion creates stars, and culture is not about stars. It included in part stars but culture is also about success and failure. Culture is about the addition of what cannot be added to one’s normal equation. Openness to otherness means also this: to be able to alter one’s perception of the cultural equation.

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

Every book I have published, that is paid for, was totally reorganized. It is only much later, in the twenty-fifth year that I opened up to the work of guest editors, whose job was to edit the book of any one author.

The work of a publisher: to publish the edited work of an author. There is no such thing as a perfect manuscript. I don’t recall any single title whose original title, say, was respected. Words, verses, titles, art cover, the concept of the book is raw material for the final product.

A book at Guernica has always been the work of group activity.

7 – How do your books get distributed? What are your usual print runs?

Our books get distributed worldwide via personal and professional organizations. Distributors, salesreps, word of mouth, conferences, readings, meetings, bars, bedrooms. Books are made to be offered to people who want books. You can’t sale a racist book to an African American. You can’t sell a book promoting the denial of the Holocaust to a person who is Jewish. You can’t sale a book on multiculturalism to a nationalist. You can’t sale a book on communism to a rabid capitalist.

Print runs have varied, depending on the book and the laws that govern that institutions that give out grants. In other words, a print run is never the sole act of the publisher’s decision. A print run is highly political.

Yes, we have reprinted most of the books we have published. That is, when I was able to do so financially speaking. Which is another question altogether. What books get reprinted? And what are the policies for reprinting books in this country? Publishing is the creation of a cultural centre, and reprinting books is very much part of publishing. One could say, reprinting books might be, perhaps, more important that simply publishing books. Keeping certain books alive has been a very important aspect of my job. As well as translation, which is another form of reprinting books.

8 – How many other people are involved with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

I have always worked with about 13 people at a time, for any one book. Publishing a book is always the work of a collective. A book is like film, music, painting, sculpture, achitecture, photography. Nothing in art is the work of a single person. The entire idea of authorhood is very much an uncertain concept. When one thinks of, say, Leonardo, we immediately get confused. Who did what in his paintings? The same is true of poetry or a novel or a collection of essay. Books are the work of dozens of people, if not hundreds.

9– How has being an editor/publisher changed the way you think about your own writing?

If I had not been a publisher I would never gone beyond my first poetry book. There is no place in culture for vanity or navel-gazing. The job of any single writer is to find his or her position in his community. If your job is to be the town’s fool, so be it. Every single person has something special to contribute to the community he or she belongs to. I learnt this by being a publisher.

 

10– How do you approach the idea of publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the whole question as irrelevant?

Gary Geddes probably had another reason for not publishing himself. Of course, a press must publish its contributors. It is sheer madness to think otherwise. We are part of the centre. Why should we exclude its members from gaining access to what they themselves have developed? Again, those who are against such a practice only the prove that leech-presses that have no idea of why they are doing.

11– How do you see Guernica Editions evolving?

The greatest joy of a parent is to let go of his or her child. The first major change at Guernica was my stepping down from being its owner. It is time Guernica walk on its own. She is old enough, wouldn’t you agree? I am the happiest person on earth for being able to see the press moving along with other people. Connie Mcparland and Michael Mirolla will do what they want to do. I am there to contribute with my experience. As a guide, I offer advice. But I will not stop them from doing what they wish to do. Eventually Guernica will have children of its own. Hopefully I was a good parent.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your publications? What is your biggest frustration?

I am very honored to have been involved in a radical way in the fight against cultural denegration. Guernica enabled many to see that there is life outside of assimilation and cultural effacement. What book I thought was forgotten is now being studied in China or Estonia or India or Brazil. I believe in every one book I published. I am only saddened by the selfishness of certain authors, a most unfortunate aspect of the industry. To have helped and not to be thanked for the possibility given, sad.

13– Who were your early publishing models when starting out?

Britian of the 1920s. France of the 1930s. Quebec of the 1950s. Italy of the 1960s.

Pocket size books. I hate hard covers and large format books. I travel a lot and want books that fit in my pocket. All the major books that have changed my life were pocket size books.

14– How does Guernica Editions work to engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What journals or presses do you see Guernica Editions in dialogue with? How important do you see those dialogues, those conversations?

“Engage with” translates in French as engagement. Political commitment.

I have worked with many English-Canadian presses in thirty-three years.

I have produced many co-editions with foreign presses.

I have encouraged many translations for Guernica and other presses.

Without such dialogue there is only monologue and culture is about dialogue.

15– Do you hold regular or occasional readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other events?

As a publisher I encourage readings and launches. As a writer I try to give a conference a month worldwide. As a poet I try to give a reading a month. As a translator I try to translate something every day.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?

Without the internet I would be nowhere.

17– Do you take submissions? If so, what aren’t you looking for?

I sollicite manuscripts. Submissions, very rarely. Usually future authors we want to publish make their ways to our doors or we to theirs. As it should be. I am not much for blind-dates.

18– Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.

Every title I publish is special to me so I refuse to mention any single new title. It would hurt the others. Which parent would single out one child over the others? One is fine about music, a second about politics, a third about same-sex love.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

The Griffin Poetry Prize, 2010;

On June 2, Lainna and I went to the reading for the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist; the tenth for them, the first for us, with magnificent readings by all involved. But how the hell did she manage to get us front row centre?

And do you think Solie gets to keep such a magnificent banner with her picture on it? I think I'd want to own such a thing (whether or not I'd want to display it in my home might be a different matter; special occasions, perhaps).

We got caught in the rain, we heard magnificent readings from a weighty stage that included the shortlist themselves, Dionne Brand, and judge Anne Carson, who I think easily won for best outfit (orange socks, well done. Is there anything this woman can't do?). We saw friends old and new alike, including Andy Weaver, Priscila Uppal and Christopher Doda, Don McKay, Erin Knight and Adam Dickinson, Lisa Pasold, Matthew Tierney, etc.

Congrats to Karen Solie, well done and well deserved. Maybe if I move to Toronto I can start getting on lists?

And did I mention that founder/host Scott Griffin is a class act? Class act, sir.

Here's the press release that the Griffins sent out today:

TORONTO, June 3, 2010 - Eilean Chuilleanein's The Sun-fish and Karen Solie's Pigeon are the International and Canadian winners of the tenth annual Griffin Poetry Prize.

The Griffin Poetry Prize was founded in 2000 to serve and encourage excellence in poetry. The prize is for first edition books of poetry written in, or translated into, English, and submitted from anywhere in the world. In celebration of the prize's tenth anniversary, The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry doubled the annual prize money to a cumulative amount of $200,000 (which includes $10,000 for each of the shortlisted poets who participated in the Readings).

International Winner
--------------------
Book: The Sun-fish
Poet: Eilean Chuilleanein
Publisher: The Gallery Press
http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2010.php?t=3D6

Canadian Winner

---------------
Book: Pigeon
Poet: Karen Solie
Publisher: House of Anansi Press
http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2010.php?t=3D3

The awards ceremony, attended by some 400 invited guests, was held in the Fermenting Cellar at the Stone Distillery and hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize, and Trustees Margaret Atwood, Carolyn Forche, Robert Haas, Michael Ondaatje, Robin Robertson and David Young.

Celebrated poet Glyn Maxwell was the evening's featured speaker.

[l-r: Hall, Solie, Carson...] Judges for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize are the distinguished writers and poets Anne Carson (Canada), Kathleen Jamie (Scotland) and Carl Phillips (United States). They read almost 400 books of poetry, including 12 translations, received from 12 countries around the globe.

The judges are selected on an annual basis by the Trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry.

On the previous evening, the shortlisted poets read excerpts from their books at a sold-out event for more than 1,000 people at The Royal Conservatory, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, Koerner Hall.

The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist features collections by three Canadian poets - Kate Hall's The Certainty Dream, published by Coach House Books; Coal and Roses by the late P. K. Page (a selection of which was read by Toronto Poet Laureate and 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poet Dionne Brand), published by The Porcupine's Quill and Pigeon by Karen Solie, published by House of Anansi Press; and four international poets - John Glenday's Grain, published by Picador; Louise Gluck's A Village Life, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Eilean Chuilleanein's The Sun-fish, published by The Gallery Press and Susan Wick's translation of Cold Spring in Winter by Valerie Rouzeau, published by Arc Publications.

[Andy Weaver, staring back at us in our front row seats] Also that evening, renowned American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was honoured with the 2010 Lifetime Achievement Award. Trustee Carolyn Forche paid tribute to Rich and presented her with her award.

http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/lifetime-recognition.php?t=3D6

Trustee David Young presented each poet with a leather-bound edition of their book.

The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology: A Selection of the 2010 Shortlist, edited by A. F. Moritz and published by House of Anansi Press, is now available at most retail bookstores. Royalties generated from the anthologies, published annually, are donated to UNESCO's World Poetry Day. As in past years, copies of the submitted poetry books are being donated to Corrections Canada.

12 or 20 questions: with Suzanne Bowness

Suzanne (Sue) Bowness's first book of poetry, The Days You've Spent, was published in 2010 by Tightrope Books. Her poetry has previously been published in journals like the Literary Review of Canada and Pagitica. Her play The Reading Circle won the Ottawa Little Theatre's National One-Act Playwriting Competition in 2006. She is a freelance writer and editor online at www.codeword.ca and is working on a PhD in English at the University of Ottawa with a focus on nineteenth century Canadian magazines.

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

I'm a fairly private person so putting my creative work out there was difficult. But it has been gratifying to hear positive feedback from family and friends, many of whom are not writers so it is nice to draw their attention to poetry. The collection contains a variety of poems not only inspired by different moments but written at different stages of my writing life so the poems remind me of both past experiences but also about moments in my own writing. In some ways it's funny to see these thoughts that I've lived with for so long out there in print.

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

I've always worked on many projects simultaneously so the poetry manuscript represents the completion of one of those projects. Hurrah! I'm also working on fiction in short stories and plays, as well as non-fiction in my doctoral thesis. I always imagined publishing poetry first as a way to get started in the publishing process.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
This manuscript has been in the works for a while, but individual poems often come fairly quickly. I feel like I carry around an idea for a poem for a while in my head before I go and write it down, so by the time I get it down on paper the idea is fairly formed and it is more a case of working on the expression.

4 - 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?
In this first collection, poems come from moments that I've collected over the years. I realized gradually that they had a shape and theme, and worked on that aspect as I edited them into a collection. I have an idea for a second collection that will be more intentional, more of a "project" that I'd like to develop.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
No. I'm an introvert so I find readings difficult and feel nerves very physically. However I do like attending readings and appreciate when others share so I know I have to learn to share too. Now that my book is out I'm trying to get out there.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Yes and no. The No: I'm doing a PhD right now so through that I'm involved in a community that is always looking to investigate literature, but actually for the most part I try to turn that intellectual side off when I write because I find it sometimes a bit paralyzing to the creative process (although interesting in itself). The Yes: literary projects usually come to me as a way to investigate ideas, for instance my poetry collection thinks about the city, and my play The Reading Circle was a way of thinking about rural alienation.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think writers force us to pause and think about the important things that we might overlook in our everyday lives, or if we are already attuned to them then how to articulate those things. I think writers are essential preservers of culture and zeitgeist and should be supported and encouraged. In my academic work I'm looking at nineteenth century Canadian magazine writers and I'm charmed by how passionate these obscure writers felt about raising issues in their times or reflecting on their world.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like being edited. I am particularly interested in discussion, for instance finding out why an editor thinks something doesn't fit as it helps to get insight into the work. I think working with the right editor who is enthusiastic about your project can really help too, as they can sometimes rally you if your confidence starts to slip.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Recently in a new writing group I joined we were talking about sharing work and people were pointing out how essential it is to make yourself vulnerable and share with the community in order to truly be part of it. I hadn't really thought about it that way before so that made me even gladder to be publishing this poetry book as I am finally participating with a community that I already have gotten a lot from as a reader.

Another piece of advice was from my brother who runs marathons who said that at a point when he is feeling low energy or discouraged he sometimes claps his hands as he is running which causes others along the raceway to clap along with him - he pointed out that people are just looking for an opportunity to cheer you on because it makes them feel like participants as well.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like writing in many genres, if anything I feel like I am experimenting to see which I am good at and which genres suit different ideas. I feel like they each inform each other, for instance I took a screenwriting class and what I learned there about character motivation and structure I transfer over to fiction.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I am a uni-tasker so I tend to look for a big stretch of time to really get into a project like a whole day or a weekend. I am self-employed and a pretty disciplined 9-5er however sometimes I find it difficult to make time for the writing where the payoff is longer term (like fiction).

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Like most writers I read a lot, or sometimes I will work on editing one project if composing one is proving difficult. Sometimes I start something new as a way to think about something old, for instance I was working on a screenplay that was really stalled but had an idea for a second one so started on it just to reconnect with the idea of creating new characters and structure. Now I'm back on track with the original screenplay although it is still a work in progress.


13 - What do you really want?
W hat a question. To do fulfilling work and make the most of my short time on earth?

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?
I have written a lot of poems about art, and took a couple of painting classes for fun that helped me learn a bit more about the painter's process. I have no professional ambitions in that area so I find painting really relaxing. I do a lot of walking and find just absorbing the city very stimulating, same thing with travelling.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I have always been a big reader. Some of my favourite poets include Anne Michaels, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, ee cummings, and my favourite authors include John Steinbeck, Carol Shields, John Hersey.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a play with more than one character. More travelling.

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 not sure, I've always wanted to be writing. I suppose academia which in some ways is sort of like being a professional reader. Maybe that's cheating. If I had to pick something totally different maybe a--nope can't do it.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Even as a kid I was a big reader. When I was younger I wanted to be Gordon Korman.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Difficult questions! I just taught Carol Shields's Larry's Party in my first year undergrad class which I think is a great novel that not enough people have read. I like the fact that she looks at character in such a different way. The class seemed to like it too. I thought A Single Man recently was really great in terms of a step forward in film technique - I loved the way they used colour to make the main character seem washed out when he was feeling disconnected from people and vibrant when he was connecting.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I have lots of literary projects on the go, so it is a case of finishing up more of them. At the moment I'm trying to finish a screenplay, a short story collection, and a novel. The last one is really behind.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;