rob mclennan's Ottawa poetry workshops: September-December, 2010‏

If anyone is interested, I've just booked a series of dates for my new seasonal poetry workshops at Collected Works Bookstore, Wellington & Holland, Ottawa, happening on Wednesday nights: September 22, 29; October 6, 13 & 27; November 3, 24 & December 1.

$200 for 8 sessions.
7pm to 9pm.

for information, contact rob mclennan at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com or 613 239 0337;

an eight week poetry workshop (spread out a little, for the sake of scheduling), the course will focus on workshopping writing of the participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers, both Canadian & American. participants should be prepared to have a handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be workshopped (roughly ten pages.

Previous participants include: Amanda Earl, Roland Prevost, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Marilyn Irwin, Rachel Zavitz, Janice Tokar, Nicholas Lea & Marcus McCann.

Born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections gifts
(Talonbooks), a compact of words (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), wild horses (University of Alberta Press) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds), The Garneau Review (ottawater.com/garneaureview) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as
writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

The Peter F. Yacht Club: a miscellany,

The Peter F. Yacht Club writing group, if you can even call it a proper group, came out of informal gatherings that occasionally became a bit more formal, before dissolving altogether, starting four or five years before the first issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club appeared in August, 2003 (accidentally ten years to the month after above/ground press’ first official publication). Does a group even still exist? It does, but as a scattering of social interactions and individual connections, but for the pages of the publication itself, over a dozen issues long.

By the mid-1990s, into the adjacent years, Ottawa writing seemed in flux; Rob Manery and Louis Cabri, so active through the previous decade, had left, taking hole magazine, hole books, Manx’s N400 Reading Series and The Transparency Machine with them, in 1994 and 96, respectively. Toronto’s jwcurry landed in 1996, but was still on the sidelines; the writers festival had been invented, but its true influence hadn’t quite solidified. Stephanie Bolster arrived in 1995 from Burnaby, published a first book in 1998, won the Governor General’s Award and, by 2000, had left for Montreal, to teach at Concordia. On January 1, 1999, b stephen harding and I formally handed over Ottawa’s TREE Reading Series, the third longest continuing reading series in Canada, to others, thus ending two and four-and-a-half year long tenures, respectively.

Christopher Levenson ran his Ottawa Poetry Group in one direction, clinging to a set of fixed formal ideas, and where were the rest of us to turn? William Hawkins and Michael Dennis, once enormously active in the 1960s and 1970s and 80s, respectively, in and around the Ottawa literary communities, skimmed the margins, well back from publishing and public events. John Newlove as well, head down in his daily paths between home, work and Patrick McGahern’s Books. There were first poetry collections by myself, David O’Meara, Michelle Desbarats, Ian Roy; return to a life of poetry by former Montrealer Stephen Brockwell after nearly a decade, and Monty Reid had quietly arrived from Drumheller, landing in Luskville, Quebec, but had not really let any of us know about it, yet. After degrees at the University of Victoria and University of Alberta, Mark Robertson had returned after an Ottawa hiatus with a new energy, a stack of writing and a new moniker, Max Middle. Within a couple years of publication, two-thirds of the nine writers included in Shadowy Technicians: New Ottawa Poets (Fredericton NB: Broken Jaw Press, 2000) had moved away, or simply vanished. This was not any engine by which to sustain a community.

Originally, my idea for regular meetings was a kind of informal sharing of writing, a support group, in this odd thing we did, writing poems and sending them out to journals. Could spouses, partners, parents, co-workers really understand? The first meetings were disorganized, rambling events at my shared house at 96 Rochester Street attended by b stephen harding, Clare Latremouille (who had only recently returned from a decade around British Columbia), Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, James Moran, jwcurry, Jennifer Mulligan and a sixteen-year-old Laurie Fuhr. Could Max Middle have been there as well? We read new work both finished and unfinished, talked about what we had recently sent out, had accepted, turned down; books we were working on. We drank too much, and stayed up far too late. Laurie looked afraid, but stayed. curry grumbled. Clare and I conspired. Eventually meetings also included Melanie Little and Peter Norman, recent arrivals from Vancouver, and Vivian Vavassis, who had arrived from London, by way of Western; or was it Montreal?

It’s as though The Peter F. Yacht Club is more in line with what the 1970s Montreal group the Vehicule Poets were, a grouping of writers who originally formed through defining themselves and their group by what they weren’t. Seven Montreal poets, including Endre Farkas, Ken Norris and Artie Gold, who, for whatever else they accomplished, originally came together through not being a part of the poetic of such as Michael Harris and David Solway.

One thing I’ve always found frustrating about any history of Ottawa literature, and poetry specifically, is a lack of continuity; once a group has dispersed and gone, it’s as though it never existed, and there’s very little in place to let you know it had even been. Do you remember Sparks? Oroboros? Northern Comfort? The Carleton Arts Review? Anthos magazine and Anthos Books? Back when Mark Frutkin and Riley Tench collaborated as sound poets. Were you aware of the infamous 24-hour poetry reading at SAW Gallery circa 1981 that included Robert Craig, Seymour Mayne, Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier? Jane Jordan, who ran poetry readings at Pestelozzi College (Ottawa’s own Rochdale) in the early 1970s, or William Hawkins who ran readings and musical performance at his infamous Le Hibou, years before? That series of poetry cassettes produced by Gallery 101 in the 1980s, during the tenure of artistic director Dennis Tourbin, back when Ottawa still had a poet laureate? Once gone, they appear to be completely gone. You should have seen the stuff, for example, Gallery 101 and SAW Gallery were getting rid of during dumps of their archive. Three copies of the first edition of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970) for fifty cents each (considered a $600 book, at least) during one of their “garage sales,” left over from when he launched the collection in Ottawa the same year.

Once I moved out of that shared house in 2001, more formal workshop conversations were held at Anita’s apartment on McLeod at Elgin Streets, and at Melanie and Peter’s on Bronson, a door or two south of the intersection at Somerset. It was in Anita’s lobby I first found the pair of purple pillows that currently adorn the back of my couch, decorated with The Peter F. Yacht Club logo emblazoned centre-squared on each. Where did these pillows come from? A recently-deceased resident of her building, and their belongings waiting for disposal in the lobby (I offered one to Anita, who politely returned it). As Clare asked at the time, what if it were the pillows that killed them? What the hell is the Peter F. Yacht Club, then? So far just us. Internet searches have so far come up cold.

A support group. Created to achieve, at least, the support to continue. To have conversation about what we were doing, trying and reading. The movement of the group can be seen best through the pages of the publication itself, something I originally based on Vancouver’s TADS, an informal Friday night group that had each issue edited by a different member, moving through George Bowering, Jamie Reid and Jason Le Heup. Ours, it seems, have predominantly been edited/published by myself, but others have joined in as well, each with the guidelines of inviting all from the group, and able to put in some others that might appeal to them as well. Part of that appeal, Max Middle would certainly have a different group of outsiders than, say, Laurie Fuhr or Jesse Patrick Ferguson, and who wants a journal only to read yourself? Good conversations happen with a good foundation, and then it’s important to see who else might have a say.

Issues were often distributed informally, with a couple of copies each to contributors, fifty more to the editor to disseminate as they saw fit. Another sixty to eighty were sent out to subscribers of above/ground press, not only scattered across Canada but into the United States, including library collections at Simon Fraser University and SUNY-Buffalo, with the occasional distribution point of the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair. The fourth issue was even produced in a run of five hundred copies for free distribution at the fall 2005 ottawa international writers festival, including writers scheduled to appear, such as George Bowering, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos and Susan Musgrave. Without regular meetings, the ongoing conversation of new writing continued through the open set of the TREE Reading Series, a place where many Ottawa writers over the past three decades often managed their first or second public readings, with regular open sets filled with much of the group, as well as other Ottawa writers—Shane Rhodes, David O’Meara, Michelle Desberats and Peter Richardson—an ongoing conversation that, at least in that form, unfortunately seems to have fallen by the wayside.

[photo by John W. MacDonald] As issues progressed, other “regulars” were brought into the fold, including Amanda Earl, Marcus McCann, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Nicholas Lea, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Wanda O’Connor, Roland Prevost, Janice Tokar, Cameron Anstee, Monty Reid and Lainna Lane El Jabi. We even held a few launches, often held as “office Christmas parties” at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market (and even an Edmonton launch, in the fall of 2007). Keeping with our nautical theme, calling our launch reading “regattas,” one even included a captain’s hat. Still, part of the success of these initial connections have been in watching the evolution of the individual writers, and the inevitable offshoots, from Norman and Brockwell’s magnificent collaborative sonnet-essay, Wild Clover Honey and The Beehive, 28 Sonnets on the Sonnet (Ottawa ON: The Rideau Review Press, 2004), Norman and Fuhr’s voice-work with jwcurry, Max Middle’s AB Series, which has featured a number of Yacht Clubbers, Fuhr’s help in publishing more than a few in the pages of filling Station, eventual above/ground press publications by Brockwell, Dolman, Ridley, Earl, curry, Mulligan, Fuhr, Norman, Reid, Middle, Anstee, Lea, Ferguson, McCann, Pirie and Prevost, or even Mulligan and I founding Chaudiere Books, home to the work of a number of the same.

A camaraderie, but one I admit to missing in person, now that so many have moved on: Peter and Melanie went west for her writer in residence position at the University of Calgary, then east and finally Toronto, where she is currently senior fiction editor at the House of Anansi Press and he, author of a first poetry collection and a forthcoming novel; Laurie moved west and west again, landing in Calgary, where she runs filling Station magazine; Wanda moved to Montreal to attend Concordia University; Jesse headed further to Fredericton, to the University of New Brunswick, publishing a first poetry collection as well; and James and Anita moved to the east end of Ottawa with their new-third, now a toddler. Who has any time?

Issue #1, August 2003, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, James Moran, Peter Norman, Artie Gold, Suzanne Zelazo & Rob Budde. back cover image by Tom Fowler.

Issue #2, April 2004, edited by Anita Dolman (out of print); 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Peter Norman, Vivian Vavassis, Wes Smiderle & Zachary Houle. Distributed free.

Issue #3, October 2004, edited by Peter Norman and Melanie Little; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, jwcurry, Anita Dolman, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Melanie Little, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Peter Norman, Vivian Vavassis, Amanda Earl & Wanda O’Connor.

Issue #4, September 2005, edited by rob mclennan; 500 copies. Contributors: George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Suzanne Buffam, Stephen Cain, Margaret Christakos, Anita Dolman, Gwendolyn Guth, William Hawkins, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, Susan Musgrave, Wanda O'Connor, Sandra Ridley & Vivian Vavassis. Produced as a handout for the ottawa international writers festival, September/October 2005. Otherwise, sold for $5.

two-by-two on that oversized lifeboat, A Peter F. Yacht Club special, December 2005, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Jesse Ferguson, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Jennifer Mulligan & Monty Reid. produced "for the first ever Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas Party, Saturday December 17rh, 7:30pm until forever, at the Carleton Tavern, Parkdale Market, Ottawa (hosted by rob mclennan & Clare Latremouille). (thanks to Laurie Fuhr for providing an accidental title)." isbn 1-897224-10-9.

Issue #5, April 2006, edited by Max Middle; 200 copies. Contributors: Gary Barwin, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, John Lavery, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Jennifer Mulligan, a. rawlings, Sandra Ridley, Vivian Vavassis & Rachel Zavitz.

Issue #6 (mis-numbered Calgary special), February 2007, edited by Laurie Fuhr; 200 copies. Contributors: Jonathan Ball, Derek Beaulieu, Ryan Bird, Stephen Brockwell, Weyman Chan, Anita Dolman, Jesse Ferguson, ryan fitzpatrick, Richard Gorecki, Jocelyn Grosse, Joy Hendrickson-Turner, Nicholas Lea, Laurie Fuhr, Melanie Little, David McGimpsey, rob mclennan, Max Middle, James Moran, Tom Muir, Jennifer Mulligan, Peter Norman, Sharron Proulx-Turner, Stuart Ross, Wes Smiderle, Joanne Underwood, Vivian Vavassis, Yvonne Werkman & Garth Whelan.

Issue #7, April 2007, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: John Barton, George Bowering, Stephen Brockwell, Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Phil Hall, Nicolas Lea, Clare Latremouille, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Wanda O'Connor, Roland Prevost, Sandra Ridley & Wes Smiderle.

Issue #8, October 2007, “Edmonton issue,” produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Marita Dachsel, Amanda Earl, Jesse Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Clare Latremouille, Nicholas Lea, Roland Prevost, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Jonathan Meakin, Max Middle, Carla Milo, Paul Pearson, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley & Christine Stewart

Issue #9, January 2008, edited by Jesse Patrick Ferguson in “The Poets’ Corner” (Fredericton, New Brunswick), and produced at the University of Alberta; 200 copies. Contributors: derek beaulieu, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Nicholas Lea, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid & Hugh Thomas.

Issue #10, March 2008, produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan, “in by one, out by four” special; 200 copies. Contributors: Jeff Carpenter, Trisia Eddy, Lainna Lane (El Jabi) and rob mclennan.

Issue #11, May 2008, “Edmonton issue the second,” produced at the University of Alberta, edited by rob mclennan; 200 copies. Contributors: Douglas Barbour, Jenna Butler, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Laurie Fuhr, Lea Graham, William Hawkins, Karen Massey, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Max Middle, Sean Moreland, Jennifer Mulligan, Catherine Owen, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Wes Smiderle & Janice Tokar.

Issue #12, September 2009, edited by Amanda Earl, “Fifth anniversary issue: Anarchy, Apocalypse, & Madness.” 200 copies Contributors: Stephen Brockwell, Anita Dolman, Amanda Earl, Jesse Patrick Ferguson, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley, Janice Tokar, Christian S. Aluas, Cameron Anstee, Jamie Bradley, Caleb JW Brasset, Patrick Edwards-Dougherty, F.C. Estrella, Jose Fernandez, Warren Dean Fulton, John Gilles, Csaba Andras Kertész, Joseph Kuchar, Ben Ladouceur, Leopold, Stephen Rowntree & Robert Williams.

Issue #13, July 2009, edited by rob mclennan, “lucky thirteen – the white album.” 200 copies Contributors: Cameron Anstee, Stephanie Bolster, Amanda Earl, Lea Graham, Gwendolyn Guth, Lainna Lane El Jabi, Marcus McCann, rob mclennan, Sean Moreland, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Sandra Ridley and Janice Tokar.

Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005

We have here a body of work at home in its own elusiveness. Language sculpture? That’s one possible, though unlikely, name for what we find here, about which it can be said: it carves into time, as if, in the actual time of writing, poetic process had incised directly into “time matter,” cutting through to undisclosed layers of undertime. Or, from another angle of experience: once inside this elusive work, this unfolding language substance—feeling its attractions (some strange, all at least partly not-yet-known)—one senses a multidirectional crossflow: so much is happening from moment to moment, so much is coming through, one hardly knows where to stand. Quite clearly the poet has chosen her words at a level resistant to immediate thought, no doubt in part for their musics, their senses, and their sensualitites. (“Introduction,” by George Quasha with Charles Stein)

There is no central form, the introduction tell us, to Vancouver poet Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994-2005 (Barrytown NY: Station Hill, 2010). There aren’t that many poets of Lissa Wolsak’s generation the author of a published “Collected.” Some older Canadian poets have their versions, from the almost-selected of (up to that point) Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes (1989; 2001) and Barry McKinnon’s The Centre: Poems 1970-2000(2004), or Peter Van Toorn’s Mountain Tea (1984; 2004). Much like some other Vancouver poets I could think about, such as Christine Stewart, Susan Clark or Maxine Gadd, Wolsak has published furtively over the years, from The Garcia Family Co-Mercy (Vancouver BC: Tsunami Editions, 1994) and An Heuristic Prolusion (Vancouver BC: Friends of Runcible Mountain, Documents in Poetics, 2000) to Pen Chants or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences (New York NY: Roof Books, 2000), A Defence of Being, First Ana (Hereford UK: Spanner, 2002) and A Defence of Being, Second Ana (Bray Ireland: Wild Honey Press, 2005), all of which appear in this singular volume of some two hundred and fifty-plus pages. How can a reader catch anything when the author refuses to stand still?

as essential to her task

as teeth or hands

how often, did

by walking the Camino

it is cried to them

to play on the posed hole

of the asp (“Pen Chants”)

There is no central form, instead Wolsak’s extended works embrace an expansiveness, writing directly out a field of fragments, narrative lines and lines of thought; Wolsak writes a precision scattered, deliberate. Calling her work (and the work of Susan Clark, Kathryn MacLeod and Dan Farrell) “both excessive and minimal” in his “Empty and Full Speech: A Lacanian Reading of the Kootenay School” in the recent Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, Number 3, summer 2010 [see my review of such here], Vancouver writer and critic Clint Burnham goes on to say that “this is writing that refuses reference [.]” Reviewing Pen Chants or nth or 12 Spirit-like Impermanences for Rain Taxi, Jen Hofer wrote that:

In Pen Chants, Lissa Wolsak’s practice is not to “eliminate stress,” but rather to place stress accurately—to highlight, illuminate, suggest, declare, question, celebrate, disparage, chant—not through “blindfolding,” but rather through its opposite: an unfolding and enfolding of language that is in Wolsak’s poetic world the sharpest form of expression, through such sharpness—being slick, beautiful, edgy, pointed—entails, appropriately, more difficulty than ease.

Where is the difficulty, and where is the ease, and how is it possible, here, to separate them? As she writes to open her “_______An Heuristic Prolusion_______”:

~ I speak as one silenced. Transhumance, as understood and utilized in late 12^th C., early 13^th C. France, was an agricultural motion or migration, a seasonal moving of livestock and the people who tend them….but transhumance also was a possible personal~social act of symmetry, reciprocity and redistribution. Co-mercy, the art of harmlessness, equivocating sexual/theological, fiat, fiat lux .. to lay the supremely ambiguous, phantomatic faces .. to let, to kneel, along the place of the abyss, to linger as long as possible .. where the same relation may be observed throughout the whole universe, where significance “bleeds into an unconstrainable chain.”

What lies beneath my copy of eternity?

What coils up..in spoken space?

How does one engage with an writing that “refuses reference,” other than being as completely open to the possibilities as possible? But I’ll end with her own words, her last paragraph of an interview at the back of the volume, conducted by poet Pete Smith:

LW: I have an antipathy toward flatland embrittlements within normative sentence making because I have not often enough experienced the truth of their/my constructions. Moreover, the mind is non-local and undermines my smooth to the eye approaches. I choose, rather, to activate consciousness, and to keep a loose hold on the smoky, beguiling and sometime fatuous muse of controlled meaning, but not to exclude the genuinely intended or navigable. I am more a receiver of shape and form than an architect of same. By its very fracture, I write to surprise myself.

12 or 20 questions: with Hank Lazer

Hank Lazer has published 15 books of poetry, most recently Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009), The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Author of Opposing Poetries (Northwestern, criticism), his poems & essays appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review (which awarded him the Balch Prize in poetry). The New Spirit was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Elegies & Vacations was nominated for the Forward Prize. In 2008, Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008 was published by Omnidawn. Lazer has given readings and talks throughout the US and in China, the Canary Islands, Spain, Canada, and France. Audio and video recordings – including readings from the new book Portions and an interview for Art International Radio – can be found at Lazer’s PennSound website: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lazer.html.

Lazer’s poems and essays have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Serbian, and Chinese. His poetry has been reviewed and written about by a wide range of poets and critics including Donald Revell, Rachel Back, Marjorie Perloff, Romana Huk, Norman Fischer, Elizabeth Robinson, and Cynthia Hogue. Over the past few years, Lazer has collaborated with jazz musicians Tom Wolfe and Chris Kozak on some jazz & poetry improvisations and with outsider artist Pak on a series of poem-paintings. He is currently working with animation artist Janeann Dill on a poetry-video installation project.

Hank Lazer is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama where he is also an administrator serving as the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and the Executive Director of the Creative Campus initiative.

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’ve had an odd publishing history (as perhaps every poet has?). I published a fine press chapbook in 1976, when I was 26, and did not publish a first “real” book of poetry until 1992, when I published a chapbook, INTER(IR)RUPTIONS (a series of ten collage poems, photocopied, stapled; Generator Press), and a big book, Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (Segue; 192 pages). My response to your question really focuses on Doublespace. It did change things, or at least I thought it did. The book did receive some significant reviews, including a long review in Poetry Flash, and the book made it much easier for me to get some readings and to have a public existence as a poet.

My most recent work has an affinity with Doublespace in the sense that throughout my writing life poetry has been a heuristic process: a deliberately changing approach to how to write, what is a poem, etc. My current work – the Notebooks – is handwritten, shaped-poems, each page different from the next, each page in partnership with the dimensions of the particular notebook. I’m nearly 1,000 pages (and 15 notebooks) into the project.

As to how the writing feels different – I guess that after forty plus years of writing poetry, I’m no longer wondering whether it’s an activity that I will continue. I’m still, though, a restless writer who continues to think about other ways to approach the activity. That restlessness was fairly obvious in Doublespace – a book that opens from two different directions and has deliberately conflicting modes of writing back-to-back. Book Two of Doublespace, Made from Concentrate, consists of three radically different poem-cycles, from the collage-found Law-Poems (incorporating verbatim sections of the Alabama Legal Code) to the numbers-driven Compositions to the more lyrical Placements.

So, though the writing from my first book to my most recent is recognizably different, that restlessness, experimentation, and the need to call into question what a poem might be and how best to proceed make the first book and my most recent writing all of a piece.

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

In many ways, it surprises me that I came to poetry at all. English was my weakest subject through high school. I was a somewhat avid reader, but I did not really pick up poetry until my senior year in high school. My cousin Ben, a year younger than I, had me reading Allen Ginsberg’s early work, and it did engage me. My early interests were in mathematics and the sciences, and in college I began as a math major and drifted through pre-med before ending up in English. I did not take a poetry workshop until I was about to exit college. That workshop was with Thom Gunn, and it was a wonderful experience, though, as in my first years of graduate school, my writing was pretty bad.

As for why poetry: it suits my desire for intensity (which perhaps is linked to brevity?). I’ve tried fiction on occasion, and my attention span and work habits are not suited to that genre. I do write non-fiction, if that’s a label you’ll accept for essay-writing. I’ve always experienced critical writing – essays – as overlapping and continuous with the activity of writing poetry.

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?

For nearly twenty-five years, I’ve been working in a process I’ve termed “serial heuristics.” (See also “Q & A Poetics,” especially pages 172-176, in Lyric & Spirit.) That is, I develop some new way to proceed – an invented rather than received form? – and work in that format for some pre-determined period (either of time or a number of poems). For example, Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009) represented work done in an invented 54-word form; I wrote in this format (exclusively) for approximately six years. Currently, I’m working on a Notebooks series that involves a radically new shape to each successive handwritten page/poem.

What often comes slowly is this transition from one writing project to the next. For example, it took me nearly 18 months to develop the form for The New Spirit. Typically, once I find a form or methodology that is engaging, the writing comes quickly. The other morning, for example, I wrote five pages/poems in the Notebooks.

First drafts thus are identical to final versions (most of the time). I write much more than will end up in any book or chapbook version of a project, so the fundamental act of revision is a “yes” or “no” that happens once I’ve begun to think more specifically of the dimensions of a book-gathering. I’m under no illusion that because I wrote it that it’s good or that the poem should be included in a magazine or book. Plenty gets said “no” to later in the process, but initially I do not want to interfere with what might be possible. Very much a composition process that is akin to improvisation. I don’t know what I’m writing until it’s written (and even then, not necessarily). I try to bring to bear all of my practice, learning, and concentration in each instance of writing.

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?

Generally, a poem begins for me with a word or series of words that I find engaging, often simply for the sound of the words, with little sense as to where these words might lead. More recently, rather than the acoustical dimension of words as sounds, I’ve had poems begin through a kind of pre-vision of what the page will look like – the shape of the writing, the relationship of writing to the whiteness of the page – with little sense as to what the words might be. I then write the page to become the shape I’ve seen.

I’m actually doing both: writing short pieces and writing a “book,” though I have only a somewhat vague sense as to what that book will be. All of the short pieces are part of that book, part of that book’s becoming the book.

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

I do enjoy giving readings, and they have become part of my process of asking what poetry is and what poetry might be. Particularly with the recent Notebook writings – with their varied shapes and overlapping and intersecting writings – I’ve begun to explore ways to do readings that involve honouring the shape of the poem and the possibility of multiple voices (including audience participation in the turning of the poem into an out loud thing). I’ve also worked with jazz musicians to explore ways of re-casting the poems – principally from The New Spirit and Portions – as semi-improvised jazz suites. We’ve done several such concerts/performances, and I continue to learn from these explorations.

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?

Lots and lots. I experience poetry and theoretical concerns as one and the same. I’m always trying to find out what a poem might be, what modes of meaning-making are possible, what is our relationship to language, how might poetry be a means of embodying our various experiences of being and time, etc. I think that one of the most pressing questions today is where will poetry be located. That is, as we enter into a second Gutenberg revolution, a time when the traditional container of the book is perhaps being replaced by digital modes of containment and representation, how will poetry change and be changed?

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?

First, I don’t think that there is a fixed “role of the writer” – certainly not a version of what a writer should be. A writer’s range of possible roles will, to a significant extent, be determined by cultural, historical, and local conditions.

Personally, and in my own circumstances – living in Alabama, in the US, etc. – I think that as a poet I have an opportunity and an ethical imperative to explore and to advocate for non-utilitarian engagements with language. Poets have an opportunity to critique prevailing cultural assumptions and habits, including those of the various overlapping and separate poetry communities. Poetry, as an activity in a capitalist and consumer society, has the capacity to be a rare form of non-alienated labor. The poet’s role thus becomes an example of choosing work/play/labor that, for the most part, is done for its own sake. In the larger culture, the presence of such persons is a challenge and a provocation, as well as a reminder.

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

For my books and essays of critical prose, I find the feedback of editors quite helpful and essential. I seek out advice and help in improving my writing of critical prose. For poetry, though, I have never wanted such input from an editor. I have a very definite sense of what I’m doing in my poems. I do seek the help of editor/publishers in the construction of the book itself – page size, layout and design (though I do select and design the covers for my books).

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

If you want to be a writer, write. If you’re having trouble writing, read. Blur the boundaries of reading and writing. If you can quit writing, do so.

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

I’ve always experienced the two – writing poetry and critical prose – as one continuous thinking process. I think that certain academic practices – especially the rise of creative writing programs, particularly as they developed in the 1980s when many such programs staked out a position hostile to theory and so-called “abstract thought” – have led some writers to think that it is difficult or not advisable or “dangerous” to move from one to the other. I find the two activities mutually re-enforcing.

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?

Honestly, most days I can’t count on any time to write. My administrative work during the week is fairly demanding, and it’s hard to carve out time to read/write. During the week, if I am able to write, it’s early in the morning or in the last part of evening. I am able to do more writing during the summer (when my work schedule lightens up a little bit), and on the weekends. My weekend ritual, especially on Saturday mornings, is to get up, make coffee, meditate, and begin reading and writing. Some days, I like to alternate between spells of yardwork and reading and writing.

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

I can sometimes get stalled between writing projects when I’ve not yet found a next way to proceed. When that happens, I continue to read, think, and I may turn more attention to writing essays. When I am in the midst of a writing project – as currently with the Notebooks – it’s somewhat rare to feel stalled.

13 - What do you really want?

If I knew, I would try to do it.

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?

Yes, of course. I listen to a good bit of jazz. I went through several years of listening to lots of Coltrane and Monk. That listening can be seen, I hope, in Days and in The New Spirit. Yes, plenty of visual art, conceptual art, performance art, meditation, golf, swimming, walks.

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

George Oppen, Gertrude Stein, John Cage, John Coltrane, Henry David Thoreau, family, golf, meditation, Buddhist texts, Adin Steinsaltz, Jacques Derrida, Emannuel Levinas, Martin Heidegger, dogs (particularly Walt and Emmie), cats (Sonny and Ricky), snorkelling, swimming, walks, yard work, university life, etc.

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

Go to Israel, Australia, New Zealand. Work more steadily with some jazz musicians on developing a poetry/jazz improve fusion. Work on new media hybrids for poetry.

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?

Each of the following career paths would have been appealing: electric guitarist, medical doctor, lawyer, sports writer.

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

In high school, English was always my worst subject. I was more interested in math and the sciences. I think that I ended up pursuing writing, in part, to do something that others in my family had not done. My uncle was a neurosurgeon; a cousin was a theoretical physicist. I felt drawn to do something different, and in mathematics it became clear to me (during an NSF summer program at Berkeley) that the world of mathematics was sort of like the world of gunslingers. I was good, but I was not the quickest on the draw, and, at some level, I thought it didn’t make sense to enter a field where I would not be the best. Poetry seemed to offer a kind of thinking and developing that had a wonderful imprecision to it, and possibly a lifetime path in that imprecision. Writing also seemed like a realm where a range of my interests – philosophical, spiritual, family history, humor, sports – could all come into play.

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

The Taoteching (or Daodejing) by Lao-Tzu (either translation: Red Pine’s or Thomas Meyer’s – each excellent, each quite different). Koyaanisqatsi.

20 - What are you currently working on?

The Notebooks (of Being & Time). I’ve just begun the sixteenth notebook. The Notebooks are each quite different in page size (and page texture) so that each notebook involves a new collaboration with the physical nature of the book. I’ve tried to make each new page of the project different in appearance/shape from the prior page. The other principal partnership is with an ongoing reading activity. The first ten notebooks were written in conjunction with a reading of Heidegger’s Being & Time. With Notebook #11, after having completed Heidegger’s big work, I turned to the work of Heidegger’s student, Emmanuel Levinas, beginning with Totality & Infinity, and continuing with Otherwise than Being. Ostensibly, all of the notebooks thus involve an ongoing meditation on being and time. (First Draft, Fall 2009, has photos and an essay on the Notebooks project, as does the first issue of Jelly Bucket, 2009.)

I anticipate that the Notebooks project will continue through Notebook #20, and that the raw materials of the Notebooks will lead to multiple chapbook and book publications. I am beginning to see/hear what the next writing project might be. I have some old cassette recordings of my father’s parents recounting their life in Russia and journey to the US in the early twentieth-century. I’d like to transfer these recordings, listen to them, and begin to work with a few sorts of compositions using their specific vocabulary and perhaps their actual voices for a multi-voice composition. We’ll see…

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Creaturely and Other Essays, by Devin Johnston

This little book is largely made up of digressions, departures from a life spent too much indoors. In keeping with etymology of the word digression, I drafted these essays walking around St. Louis and its environs, where I have lived since 2001. As Henry David Thoreau would say, I acted for a time as self-appointed inspector of thunderstorms and starlings, sycamores and squirrels, making my daily rounds. Weedy species and volunteers – common forms of life, opportunists like ourselves – I took as my particular charge. I sought out their local haunts, imagining what they saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt. En route, a poem would often come to mind, my private anthology serving as a wayward field guide to whatever I found. In that sense, the poems quoted here are less objects of study than “equipment for living” (in Kenneth Burke’s phrase).

I like that, in the preface to his Creaturely and Other Essays (New York NY: Turtle Point Press, 2009), Devin Johnston calls his pieces “digressions,” short pieces walking and wandering and thinking, but not self-consciously so. Or, even when he is, through language and poetry, philosophy and just straight out walking with his dog, these eight essays hold the right amount of meandering and deliberate thinking, well read and moving through the spaces of his St. Louis. Lately I’ve been thinking about ideas on the pastoral and just what that means, and these essays provide an interesting sidebar, compelling counterpoint to that ongoing conversation. How does writing, thinking or philosophy relate to the actual world?

I am reminded of a passage in Basil Bunting’s poem “Briggflatts,” subtitled “an autobiography,” in which he enumerates the pleasures of the senses. Taste comes first in the list, followed by sound and touch:

It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,

with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto

on scanty grass under great trees

where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.

The intimacy of taste sympathetically encourages an intimacy in the language, resulting in the apt but unexpected word “cuddle” applied to city fortifications. Yet at the end of this list, sight introduces a gap of self-consciousness that can never be mended:

It looks well on the page, but never

well enough. Something is lost

when wind, sun, sea upbraid

justly an unconvinced deserter.

Looking and writing are sure but distancing, Bunting suggests. We abandon full participation in sensual experience for its representation. According to the poem, “something” lost may be the smell of burning apple-wood or the twitter of a lark; meanwhile, the mason’s chisel “spells a name / naming none, / a man abolished.”

His classical references in these essays are quite exquisite, from Matthew Arnold, William Blake, Basil Bunting, John Clare, Robert Duncan, W.B. Yeats to Robert Burns, but doesn’t Johnston, a poet with three published trade collections of poetry, born the same year as myself, read anything contemporary? Aren’t there any literary references in his immediate temporal surroundings that relate to any of his wanderings at all? Not really a complaint, but more of a confusion. Or perhaps there isn’t anything he’s read from the past couple of decades that jump to his immediate mind. Otherwise, a lovely, worthy book I would certainly enjoy more time wandering around in.

At the edge of domestic life, yet undomesticated, the lives of squirrels glance off our own. There is traffic between us. William Butler Yeats captures this closeness in “To a Squirrel at Kyle-na-no”:

Come play with me;

Why should you run

Through the shaking tree

As though I’d a gun

To strike you dead?

When all I would do

Is scratch your head

And let you go.

The squirrel reacts with comic paranoia, as if every human action holds sinister implications. But gentle Yeats would hardly justify such fears. In his Reveries over Childhood and Youth, he recalls the origin at his dismay at killing animals: “I fished for pike at Castle Dargan and shot at birds with a muzzle-loading pistol until somebody shot a rabbit and I heard it squeal. From that on I would kill nothing but the dumb fish.” After the full rhyme of “head” with “dead,” the final off-rhyme of “go” with “do” carries the force of this conviction. It is a manifestation of letting go.

The “dumb fish.” I’m not sure the fish would see it as such. And I wonder, why is it that so much deep, important thinking has to take itself so seriously?

Open Letter 14.3: Kootenay School of Writing

Long overdue, this special issue on the Kootenay School of Writing naturally begins with the old joke and the ongoing problem of situating the now 25-year-old group: they are not based in the Kootenays, they are not a school, and the work they produce disrupts and defamiliarizes recognized kinds of writing. Where and what is the KSW, then, geographically, institutionally, and in relation to literary history and criticism? Working through the name of Canada’s longest-running avant-garde collective provides a few startling points for coming to terms with the kind of paradoxes and problems that have shaped KSW’s poetics, politics, and history.

And so begins the introduction to Open Letter, Fourteenth Series, Number 3, summer 2010 focusing on Vancouver’s Kootenay School of Writing, guest-edited by Gregory Betts and Robert David Stacey. The issue exists as a follow-up, if you will, to the work started in Michael Barnholden and Andrew Klobucar’s anthology Writing Class: The Kootenay School of Writing Anthology (Vancouver BC: New Star, 1999), built as an attempt at a necessary and long-overdue overview of a collective that, often and even deliberately, has defied simple description. If you don’t know anything about the Kootenay School of Writing, the loose-collective of members over the years have included Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Jeff Derksen, Donato Mancini, Michael Barnholden, Kevin Davies, Dan Farrell, Gerald Creede, Peter Culley, Deanna Ferguson, Christine Stewart, Dennis Denisoff, Meredith Quartermain, Colin Browne, Fred Wah, Susan Clark, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Nikki Reimer, Pauline Butling, Stephen Collis, Colin Smith and so many others, with the collective organizing readings, lectures and even a few conferences. Editors Betts and Stacey have compiled a series of essays focusing on members including Robertson, Strang and Derksen, as well as pieces on the history of the collective, and a collaborative piece on the current floating membership as well, including Mancini, Butling, Collis, Barnholden and Reimer, exploring the poetries and multiple histories of a disparate non-group group. Part of the strength of the Kootenay School of Writing, arguably a continuation of some of the aesthetic conversations previously held in Vancouver through the 60’s infamous newsletter TISH, has been the apparent contradictions of its ongoing engagements with the immediate local, and the international avant-gardes of, predominantly, the United States and England, as well as an engagement with social politics, as through the works of Derksen, Culley, Barnholden or Collis. As Clint Burnham writes in his “Empty and Full Speech: A Lacanian Reading of the Kootenay School,” citing a list of “sites of production for Kathryn MacLeod’s work”:

This list spans 13 years and includes magazines that were essentially photocopied typescript, saddle-stitched or stapled at the corner (JAG, early Writing, Motel); those with more polished offset printing in book form (Raddle Moon, The Capilano Review, later Writing), two key Vancouver anthologies (East of Main, Writing Class) and a stand-alone book (mouthpiece). All of these sites were local. Or, more accurately, they were regional. JAG billed itself as a magazine for DTUC émigrés (David Thompson University Centre was the Nelson, B.C. liberal arts college shut down by the provincial government in 1984, as part of the cost-cutting measures that led, on the one hand, to the Solidarity movement of social protest and, on the other hand, to DTUC students and faculty relocating to Vancouver and starting the KSW). Raddle Moon itself had moved over from Vancouver Island to Vancouver (Raddle Moon had its origins as the Uvic student writing magazine From an Island [1978-1981]; the mailing address for Raddle Moon shifted from Sydney, B.C. to Vancouver). Writing, long the house magazine for the KSW, was at first published out of Nelson at DTUC (Writing was saddlestiched for its first 22 issues; it was then perfect bound until the end of its run in 1991). The Capilano Review has been, and continues to be, based at Capilano College (now University) in North Vancouver. East of Main situated itself resolutely, and perhaps controversially, in the eastern half of Vancouver. MacLeod’s work also appeared in American magazines that were, as it were, fellow-travellers of KSW or post-Language poetry: Big Allis (New York), How(ever) (San Francisco), Avec (California), and chain (Buffalo).

This issue reads as an important opening salvo for what should really be so much more, so much further ground to cover; why not pieces on Lusk, Smith, Stewart, Ferguson or Clark, for example? Will someone take the ball these two have started and continue, run with it even further? I would certainly hope so.

One thing that encourages though is that somehow KSW always manages to stay KSW. Joining KSW – even simply collaborating with KSW from the outside (W2) – has always been a process of learning KSW. It takes time – no one sits you down and says “KSW is this and not that: like it or lump it.” But its outlines come into view as you work within it and I’d say this really boils down to its being about collectivity (:Ohhhh…you really mean it isn’t about ME?”). As we’ve all been saying, collectivity is always a struggle – especially under current conditions – but we continue to struggle with it (otherwise we would do something other than KSW). (Stephen Collis, “By the Collective, For the Collective, On the Collective”)

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Meredith Quartermain on Nomados

Nomados is a Vancouver micro-press founded in July 2002 by Peter and Meredith Quartermain. It now has more than 30 books to its credit, including titles from authors well known in English Language avant garde writing (George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, Robin Blaser, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Charles Bernstein, Sharon Thesen and Lisa Robertson). Nomados focuses mainly on chapbooks and occasionally publishes perfect-bound books. The press emphasizes poetry but also publishes essays, plays and fiction.

Using digital laser technology, we print in batches of 75, 100 or 150, according to demand, up to 300. The books are printed on 80-lb, acid-free, recycled paper. Funding for the press comes entirely out of our own very small pocket. We try to recover costs but often don’t. We get no grants. Our publicity occurs via launches, poetry readings, email lists, the authors themselves, word of mouth and mail flyers.

We sell our books directly to individuals, libraries and bookstores, offering a 40% discount on orders of 10 or more. We generally ship with an invoice, adding in shipping costs, and we accept Canadian, U.S. and U.K. cheques. No credit cards. You can find us at www.nomados.org/nomados.htm.

Meredith Quartermain's Vancouver Walking won the BC Book Award for Poetry in 2006, and Nightmarker was a finalist for the 2009 Vancouver Book Award. Matter, which came out in 2008, has been described as "prescient, daring." Her work has appeared in magazines across Canada including The Walrus, Canadian Literature, Matrix, The Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Event, Prism International, and other magazines. She taught English Literature and Composition at UBC and Capilano College, and enjoys leading writing workshops at the Naropa Summer Writing Program and the Kootenay School of Writing. She does the typesetting, proofing, most of the liaison with authors and printer, and most of the design for Nomados. Peter Quartermain manages sales & subscriptions, banking, and some editing.

1 – When did Nomados 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?

Nomados was founded in 2002 with the publication of Wanders which included 19 poems by Robin Blaser with 19 response poems by me. In many ways the nomadic idea, taken from Blaser's poem "Nomad," has continued to guide our operations. We wanted to be free to wander through the literary world and publish whatever took hold of our imagination. But it has to be said that the terrain that we wander in is definitely open-form writing – mainly poetry, but we have also published fiction, an essay and a play. I have learned much about other writers' practices and about editing – when to stet and when to nudge. I look forward to further education.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

I was aware of the long tradition of pamphlet and broadside publishing by poets themselves – thinking of people like Robert Duncan and Vancouver's Tish group. Also magazines like HOW(ever) and F(l)ip which grabbed low-budget DIY methods of production and provided a voice and a gathering place in the literary community. Also Peter and I had operated Slug Press, a hand-set letterpress, for many years.

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

To go in whatever direction the publisher likes. To have complete freedom to design and circulate material that they find worthy of sharing in the community.

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

We are publishing poetry and other work that we are drawn to; no one else but us can determine that. Nomados is a reflection of our personal wanderings and explorations. We are not trying to define abstractly what we like ahead of time; rather we are responding to what we come across.

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

The word "effective" suggests mechanisms of capitalist marketing. We are not trying to be mass-market publishers. In our commodity-driven society, we are constantly harangued to buy products based on their supposed ability to keep us in fashion, or keep us from appearing out of the loop, or make us look good in some way. Whereas in fact we don't need most of these objects. Better that our readers should investigate our books because they are curious about the author's work, or they've heard from someone else and the book sounds interesting to them. Often it is the authors themselves who generate sales by reading from the books.

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

My involvement varies with the project. Sometimes I get very involved it the author needs me to do that. Once I arranged for a fabulous editor – Colin Smith in Winnipeg – to do detailed fact-checking etc. However, I don't assume I need to massage the text, and on some projects I've done little other than find typos.

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

Our print runs are from 75 to 150 usually. If the book sells very quickly we occasionally print a second run and we have done as many as 300 in the past. But pressures on my time as well as storage capacity have held us back from that. Our books are sold by several outlets: Woodland Pattern Book Center (Milwaukee); Open Books (Seattle); and Apollinaire's Bookshoppe (Toronto). They are also distributed via our website and through the authors themselves.

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?

Mostly it's just Peter and I doing the editing, but as I mentioned above we have on one occasion had help from the excellent editor Colin Smith, who I believe is now an assistant editor at CV2.

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

I have come to see how valuable editorial help can be in the composition of a piece, but I think this is largely as a result of showing my work to various writers in residence and friends and getting really great suggestions. There's no question that the right editor, someone who really sees what the work is attempting, can often help a writer to add significantly to the work, or to shape the work fruitfully. But it has to be the right editor. The wrong editor can do a lot of damage. So it is a sensitive area.

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?

Apart from the two books of mine I published when we first started Nomados, I have no intentions of publishing my own work via Nomados. I don't think you can make rules on this, though. People's situations differ. I thank the stars that Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf's work. On the other hand, sometimes it makes it too easy for writers to publish less than the best work.

11– How do you see Nomados evolving?

Our approach has always been to follow our interests rather than map out grand schemes. I think we will continue pretty much as we have.

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?

My biggest frustration is not being 2 people so that I could devote one of me to doing more production and marketing work for Nomados. As to what we are proud of, well all of our books, really, but particularly good was to have published two titles by Robin Blaser. It was also really great that Lisa Robertson's book Rousseau's Boat won the bpNichol chapbook award, and that Larissa Lai's book Eggs in the Basement was a finalist for the award.

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

Tish and Robert Duncan as noted above. But on the design side, I remember being impressed with cover designs reproduced in Ralph Maud's edition of Charles Olson's letters to his publisher Don Allen.

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

We organize book launches. We attend literary events looking for people we'd like to publish. We keep aware of people whose work needs to get out but isn't getting out enough.

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

For authors in our home city we hold launches and readings. These are one of the main ways we sell books.

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

Our website is our main marketing tool. www.nomados.org/nomados.htm

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

Because we are wanderers, and we don't want to lock ourselves in to lists way ahead of publication date, we don't take submissions.

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

We submitted all of our last 3 titles for the bpNichol award and one was shortlisted, but all of them are great: Jacqueline Turner's The Ends of the Earth is full of wry wit, taking on politically loaded topics and dealing with them most adroitly; Louis Cabri's highly inventive –that can't torques phonemes with world-shattering punch and refreshing formal verve; and Larissa Lai's Eggs in the Basement uses a nifty procedural key to invade gender-making, war-making subjectivities.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;