12 or 20 (small press) questions: Lary Bremner (Timewell) on Obvious Epiphanies Press

A former member of Vancouver's Kootenay School of Writing, Lary Bremner was an early editor of the late 1980s and early 90s Tsunami Editions, and now lives in Japan. He has published a number of titles under the name Lary Timewell, including two new chapbooks from Obvious Epiphanies.

1 – When did Obvious Epiphanies 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?

Just started some months ago. I was making a handmade book for photographer friend Lorraine Gilbert & remembered how much I liked the process. Around the same time, I discovered that American poets Norma Cole, Ted Greenwald, and others were using online services to publish chapbooks. I got the bug again.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Peter Culley, Gerald Creede, & Arni Runar Haraldsson & I met in the 80's to talk about writing. We never talked about writing, but Tsunami Editons, Vancouver, got started.

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

To represent those who, for whatever reason, aren't in 'big' publishing.

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

Publishing Canadians & Americans, but doing it from Japan?

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

Online, the web, online publishing, e-books, pdfs, blogs.

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

I trust the writer to know what s/he wants, means, intends. I get more hands-on with design.

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

Lulu.com advertises. rob mclennan promotes. Printed on demand.

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?

O Solo mio, my own worst enemy.

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

Reminds me I should get back to it.

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?

Question irrelevant; aversions personal. Me, I'd much rather have someone else publish my work, but in the internet age it really does not actually matter.

11 – How do you see obvious epiphanies evolving?

Primarily, as an outlet for young &/or unpublished poets. Then I'd like to create a parallel press, as wide as possible, graphic books, novels, kids books, Japanese books, photography books.

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?

Just started. Proud to have overcome the software.

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

Our old Tsunamis. The Tuumba series.

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

Question too grand for me, but the poetry community is international, in any case. The web certainly is.

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

Readings are the best way to create a local community. I live in Japan... come over & read your book at the local issakaya.

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

100 per cent.

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

For the moment I will seek out certain writers on my inclination & the advice of friends, but anticipate taking submissions in 2011.

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

rob mclennan's 52 flowers (or, a perth ledge) & two small chapbooks of my own, because that's the entire output so far!

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

fwd; job posting, arc poetry magazine;

The Arc Poetry Society seeks applications for the part-time contract position of Editor of Arc Poetry Magazine commencing April 1, 2011. Reporting to the Board of Directors, Arc’s editor will ensure that the content of Arc Poetry Magazine is selected and presented to maintain a consistently high standard for the publication.

Requirements:

■      Previous magazine editorial experience, including planning and assigning content; editing content; and taking issues to press

■      Ability to build on the magazine’s distinct aesthetic with input and guidance from an Editorial Board

■      Previous project planning and scheduling experience, combined with attention to detail and follow-through

■      Flexibility, excellent interpersonal skills and a high level of professionalism

■      Must reside within the National Capital Region, or within a two hour drive of same.  We will consider applicants willing to relocate.

■      Familiarity with copyright issues

Assets:

■         Previous experience working in some capacity with a literary magazine

■         Strong knowledge of contemporary Canadian poetry and the national literary community

The Editor will work in consultation and liaison with the Editorial Board, and with the support and administrative assistance of the Managing Editor.  Duties include

■      generating content and themes for issues, including reviews, essays, interviews and explorations of issues, ideas and trends in poetry, with input and guidance from the editorial board

■      managing the editorial process from conception and assignment to production and press

■      making final decisions on submitted content based on feedback from the Editorial board

■      maintaining and raising the profile of the magazine

■      maintaining an active presence and fostering relationships in the literary community

■      providing updates and contributions to Arc’s website

■      recruiting reviewers and contributors to the magazine

■      liaison with writers including deadlines, fees, permissions, rights, etc

■      editing all content, and requesting changes and rewrites where necessary

■      writing an editor’s note for each issue of the magazine;

■      contributing to visual art selection activities

■      working with managing editor, art director and layout contractor on production of each issue

■      ensuring that all rights, permissions, and other consents are secured with respect to all magazine content

■      relaying all necessary information to the Managing Editor to allow for accurate and timely payment of all contracts, writers’ fees, and other obligations pertaining to production

■      attending Editorial Board Meetings

■      attending occasional seminars, conferences and trade fairs

■      attendance at all magazine events, including launch and awards events

This is an annual renewable contract position, and compensation is based on a flat fee of $5,000 per issue.  Arc currently publishes three times per year (2 regular issues, plus a themed “annual”) subject to funding.

Applications must include:

■      cover letter

■      cv

■      non-fiction writing sample (no more than 1000 words)

Please submit questions or complete applications to:

managingeditor@arcpoetry.ca

APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 15, 2011

Helen Hajnoczky, Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising

Love Wears a Diamond

Love is lasing and true and unforgettable…

Just like a diamond ring.

Delicately fashioned, this ring forms a truly unique memento.

It’s almost as breathtaking as falling in love.

The superbly beautiful engagement ring is beautifully fashioned

To delight the heart of any young modern homemaker.

For your peace of mind,

We insure your diamond for a full year against loss, fire, and theft.

Polish gives your diamond more brilliance.

More brilliance leaves you breathless.

After an array of previous publications, including the chapbooks tea cosy (Armstrong BC: bytheskinofmeteeth, 2008), Brocade Light (Montreal QC: Tente, 2009) and A history of button collecting (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2010), its interesting to finally see a first trade collection by Helen Hajnoczky, her Poets and Killers: A Life in Advertising (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010). A former Calgary poet now residing in Montreal, Hajnoczky’s poetry so far has been a series of self-contained projects, and this new one is no different, albeit larger, writing a semi-narrative poem through the language of advertising. As she writes in her afterward:

Drawing on the precedent of Robert Fitterman’s Metropolis XXX and Ryan Fitzpatrick’s Fake Math, Poets and Killers demonstrates how we can talk back to advertising by using its diction to undermine its messages. By using the language of advertising to create something as unmarketable and useless as the story of a fallible human life expressed through experimental poetry, Poets and Killers shows that despite the pervasiveness of advertising and its tendency to rob us of the ability to express ourselves without commodifying ourselves, we can still speak. Of course, in publishing Poets and Killers, this text too has become a commodity. However, this text was not published just to generate profit by forcing another product on consumers, but instead, to contribute to the ongoing literary criticism surrounding the use of language in popular culture. The small scale, volunteer-based operation of Snare Books, the press’s numerous titles that critique mainstream capitalist diction, and Snare’s dedication to publishing new and diverse Canadian writers, I hope, also minimizes the irony of charging for a text that criticizes commercialism.

There have been a number of writers in recent memory working poetry collections with the language of other systems (apart from the examples she was more immediately influenced by), whether Lisa Robertson use of the scientific language of weather in The Weather (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2001), Michael Holmes using professional wrestling diction in his Parts Unknown (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2004), Rachel Zolf exploring the dehumanizing language of office-speak in her Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007) or M. NourbeSe Philip writing out legal language to humanize an inhuman story in Zong! (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 2008). For Hajnoczky, it seems as though the story is almost sidebar to her attempt to re-humanize a dehumanized language, and one told only elliptically, but through moments that are immediate, lyric, and strong.

Put Your Monty Where Your Heart Is

More than money,

A real bargain is one that keeps your family safest.

Until recently, that kind of bargain could cost a lot of money.

Now that’s changed.

What do you think it should cost?

Different families will have different answers to this question.

To assure economy for families of all incomes,

We’ll protect them even more.

As much as I enjoyed the ideas surrounding this small collection, there are other works of hers I have enjoyed far more, various chapbooks that have appeared surreptitiously over the past few years, watching her explore various systems of text and texture, exploring the prose poem, the lyric poem and the visual poem, and make me wonder if she might eventually compile a collection of such, much like Toronto poet Kevin Connolly, who did the same for his first poetry collection (even now, still my favourite of his works), his Asphalt Cigar (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1995). There are many things she’s learned over the years, little explorations into various systems; perhaps this collection might have been stronger had it been shorter? Was this simply an idea that couldn’t bring itself together into a full collection? Was the ellipsis of her narrative simply too elliptical? At least with her other publications under her belt, its obvious to see that she is capable of far, far better. It’s just a matter of time.

Dinosaur Porn, eds. Gordon, Faulkner, Nash

Downloading Pornsaurus Rex Instead

Of Downloading You

Nathaniel G. Moore

Goodbye and goodnight cave girl extreme

Your club asleep at cave mouth, your mouth

Diligent, lean.

I clean the barrel of my mischief.

Can it be you that I hear snoozing

In the Dino Mart staff lounge in leopard print

Tart wear? Let me view you, then,

Sleeping with terror broom, terribly constructed

Standing as when I drew near to the pile of dry leaves

And twigs where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original nightmare blouse.

Or is it only the trees, and their dutiful chemistry in its twitchy night

Scratching at my cave door?

Dusty kisses travelling across the mulch and oh my manners.

You being ever so consigned to itemized profit sharing employee

Discount debate, heard no more of my poetry.

Thus I; cave slammed hard, leaves around me crying and pouting,

Wind a sore oozing cream across my chest, my nostrils delighted in thorns

And the pornography calling.

I finally received a copy of Dinosaur Porn (2010), edited by Spencer Gordon, Andrew Faulkner and Leigh Nash as a co-presentation between their two small Toronto publishing houses, Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit. This is an anthology that asked potential contributors to submit poetry and/or fiction on the theme of “dinosaur porn,” and was published with the following warning at the beginning, seemingly in lieu of an introduction:

WARNING: This anthology contains sexually explicit material and/or fossils. In order to excavate this anthology you must certify to the following:

Under the governing law of my continent, I have reach the epoch of majority and the epoch required to excavate sexually explicit material and/or fossils (i.e., at least the Lias Epoch). I am excavating this anthology from a location where sexually explicit material and/or fossils are legal and permitted. Furthermore, I will not permit any person or hatchling to excavate this anthology if said person or hatchling is not legally permitted to do so.

I would presume so much of this anthology, even to them, is either self-explanatory, or like a joke one doesn’t get, making it impossible to explain. What does that mean, exactly? Responses vary, but highlights included work by Nathaniel G. Moore, Gary Barwin, Andrew Faulkner, Louise Bak, Leigh Nash, Carey Toane, and Shannon Rayne, such as this piece, the first of her three in the small collection:

Primitive

Shannon Rayne

Therizinosaurus: This odd dinosaur had immensely long muscular arms (2.5m) that ended in three-fingered hands with huge 60cm long scythe shaped claws. Some experts suggest that it behaved like a giant ground sloth, sitting on its haunches to feed.

Douglas Palmer,

Dinosaurs

There is no much thing as an unflattering position. Bellies slap, hips tilt back. Thighs part just wide enough to expose our sex, our most vulnerable parts. Butterfly and lotus poses are nothing more than glossy labels given to sell books. Think downward dog, think bucking bull, primitive and raw squatting over cock as bellies roll and breasts flop. Make plenty of noise. Squeal, grunt, scream. Burrow your nails into your lover’s chest, bite down, reveal your teeth.

Beautifully produced in a numbered edition of two hundred copies, there are few anthologies of Canadian writing this odd, and with a variety of interesting work as well. But where the hell did they get the idea? Why do I suspect that the lack of introduction simply confirms that this was an anthology originally conceived over too many drinks?

Drink up, I say, dear editors. I, for one, would like to see what else you might imagine.

a new poetry collection by rob mclennan: 52 flowers (or, a perth edge) -- an essay on phil hall --

newly published by Lary Bremner's Obvious Epiphanies Press (Japan):


52 flowers (or, a perth edge)
-- an essay on Phil Hall --
by rob mclennan


52 flowers (or, a perth edge) exists as an essay-in-poems, a sequence responding to the "Ontario Gothic" poetry of Perth, Ontario poet Phil Hall, focusing on the Griffin-nominated An Oak Hunch (Brick, 2005). If the best response to a poem, as Margaret Atwood once said, is another poem, then this, in fact, is the finest response.

Born in Ottawa, Canada's glorious capital city, where he currently lives, rob mclennan is the author of nearly two dozen trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, including the novel missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), the poetry collections Glengarry (Talonbooks, 2011) and Poems for Lainna (BuschekBooks, 2011), and subverting the lyric: essays (ECW Press, 2008). A prolific editor, publisher and reviewr, he blogs regularly at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Ongoing notes: early December, 2010

Do you remember when I used to do these? I’ve almost lost track. Watch for the seventh issue of ottawater come January, with a launch to (possibly) happen around the third or fourth week of the month; and even earlier, our Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas party/reading on December 30, 7pm at the Carleton Tavern. Later in March, a reading at the Carleton Tavern with Aurian Haller (with a second (finally) poetry collection) and tba. Watch, too, for various new above/ground press publications over the next couple of months, including new chapbooks by Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Monty Reid, Ken Norris and Ross Brighton, among others. Isn't it about time you subscribed?

And terrible to realize, I've far more grey hair now than I did even four months ago; will this month be any different?

Hastings, East Sussex, England: How can anyone not read the poems of Fanny Howe and fall completely in love? A sequence of emergences, Emergence (Reality Street, 2010), exists as a scant selected of sorts, pulling a particular thread of ghazal-like wraps that come out through three more recent of her twenty-plus collections of poetry, picking pieces from The Vineyard (Lost Roads, 1988), The End (Littoral Books, 1992) and One Crossed Out (Graywolf Press, 1997). 

Part of the intrigue of Howe's work is in just how easily one piece fits into the other, even over a distance of years, and other books, connecting without any sense of uniformity. This small collection almost reads as a lovely (and even charming) Fanny Howe British sampler; is this a matter of titles not making their proper way across large bodies of water?

grow higher together. The approach

to February, this way always.

The Hancock building

contains the Hancock building,

the way the world appears complete,

and all sins hidden.

When you are gone, I go on

but when you return, I’m full of

questions, as if

I didn’t understand anything. (“Emergence”)

Toronto ON: It’s hard not to feel strange while reading Paul Quarrington’s posthumously-published memoir, Cigar Box Banjo: Notes on Music and Life (Greystone, 2010). Only the third or fourth book of his I’ve read, possibly the first since I’d been able to spend time with him, including a couple of Ottawa festivals and an Eden Mills, before lung cancer finally caught up. Quarrington, whose non-fiction I’ve always favoured over his fiction, writes in such a comfortable voice it’s impossible to not get caught up inside, hearing him talk about childhood musical influences, years of songwriting and touring, and the thread through the book of his final year, starting from a weekend spent in Ottawa, when he realized something was terribly, terribly wrong. Quarrington talks about the process of his illness, his years of performing, working up into songwriting and fiction, recording and touring as part of Joe Hall and the Continental Drift, various histories of music, and being produced by a very young Daniel and Bob Lanois, two brothers who ran a studio in their mother’s Hamilton, Ontario basement.

What comes through very clearly is Quarrington's human voice, one that suits his non-fiction far better than his fiction (admittedly, I have yet to read his Whale Music). And how could I not adore a posthumous memoir that mentions me in its opening chapter?

I made it through my address—I had to clip quite a few sentences, chop them up into tiny aspirated phrases—then went to the hospitality suite of the Ottawa Writers Festival. Hey, it was in my hotel. I stayed quite late and got drunk with festival fun-guy rob mclennan and some of his colleagues, sound poets jw curry, Max Middle, and Carmel Purkis. The poets performed some of their stuff in the wee hours of the morning, emitting strange inhuman noises.

a deer, or an occurrence

what’s most important; lake,

the water lies

sharp, measured heart

he listens to her

growl, scream; black wet

her fingers lick; of meaning

we move in dimness, courtyard

& its hours, sun

can’t see the waves

for enormous lake, the shore

a relative line

retaining walls; a stream against the grey

new review of my wild horses; Library Bookwatch, June 2010

Library Bookwatch, June 2010

With countless works published under his name, rob mclennan brings readers wild horses. The Ottawa native uses his endless expertise in the field of writing to craft moving and lyrical verse which will bring much in unique perspective for readers. Fascinating and well thought out, "wild horses" is a core addition to poetry collections. "wild horses": she, says get a horse go out/where the foothills//if any else sunlight in, given//by the side an hour lost, the blue/shifting sands of the northern lights//if spirited, to speak at a time/across one hundred & fortieth//twenty minute north where need/& in the wrong//direction.

12 or 20 (small press) questions: Rolf Maurer on New Star Books;

New Star is a small Vancouver-based press issuing 6-7 books a year. Two-point-x people. We publish in a few broad areas: non-fiction with a social issues / politics focus; non-fiction books about BC history & culture, many of them under the Transmontanus imprint; poetry, and prose literature, which might be fiction, or non-fiction, or about literature.

1 – When did New Star 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?

New Star began circa 1970 as a spin-off of the Georgia Straight, the free weekly entertainment giveaway that started out, believe it or not, as an underground newspaper. Specifically, for a few months in about 1969, a group of writers and editors produced something called the Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, and this evolved into a series of books by local writers called the Georgia Straight Writing Series. The GSWS crew was aligned with a group within the Straight that eventually split off to form the Grape, and at that time the name of GSWS was changed to Vancouver Community Press. That would have been around 1971. In 1974, VCP was renamed New Star Books.

Along with the name change came a change in focus: much of the literature, and all of the formally interesting stuff was dropped from the list, which came to be dominated by increasingly tendentious non-fiction political books, if not tracts. The focus on serious political non-fiction continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, albeit the really tendentious stuff fell off the list in the late 1970s.

After I bought the press from Lanny Beckman in 1990, I brought literature back onto the New Star list.

2 – What first brought you to publishing?

Chance.

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

The "small" follows directly from the decision to publish books that are of little or no interest to larger commercial outfits --- either because their overheads are such that they can't take on anything that forecloses a mass audience and concommitant sales, or because their editors simply cannot recognize as worthwhile anything that doesn't resemble something that sold lots of copies last year.

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

We publish both books and writers that in one way or another are doing things not being done, or not being done in quite that way, that we nevertheless think are interesting and likely to have an audience.

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

Edit them well; design them well; print and bind them; ship them out to whoever we can interest in them.

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

This depends entirely on the book I'm working on. At one extreme, I'll be part of the conceptualization of the book, with suggestions about the content and structure of the book (much more common in non-fiction). I'm less likely to be involved at that level in a literary work, where the editing is more likely to consist of a line-edit. An extreme example is Captivity Tales by Elizabeth Hay, where it seems that the only change I made to her perfectly polished manuscript was to inadvertently insert a typo in the first para. (That's a great, great book incidentally, by far the best thing that Liz has done, and I don't understand -- although I do -- why it's never talked about, and why instead she's known as the author of Late Nights On Air, or whatever.)

For prose, substantive editing and copy-editing are best done by different people, and ideally you'll have a third person (apart from the author) to proofread as well.

With poetry, I rarely do much in the way of line editing: I look for typos, hyphens that should be em-dashes, &c., and leave the suggestions on the level of each line to the other poets that the author is generally showing their manuscript to. However, with poetry, I've been known to have ideas about the content of the book as a whole, and the sequence of poems within that book. That isn't author-specific either: I've edited a book by George Stanley where I was deeply involved in deciding the sequence of the poems, and another where book's form was completely determined by the time the manuscript reached me. It really does depend on the book.

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

New Star handles its own fulfillment. We do what everybody else who distributes books, their own or others', does: send out bibliographic data about the books; solicit orders; fill them and ship them from our Vancouver office. That said, "distribution" is one of the most mal-understood concepts in the book trade.

Our print runs typically range from 600 to 1000 for poetry titles, 800 to 1200 for literary prose, 1000 to 2000 for non-fiction titles.

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?

Usually a couple of different editors will be involved, and the typesetter and another person, who is not the typesetter but who might be the substantive editor or the copy editor, are involved at the production stage. We work with one freelance editor who does a lot of our non-fiction, and occasionally we've used other freelancers, mostly for non-fiction. Fiction and poetry we tend to edit in-house.

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

N/A. I'm not a writer, even on the side.

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?

N/A.

11 – How do you see New Star evolving?

I'm less and less inclined, as I get older, to make pronouncements about what to expect. How New Star evolves depends for instance on how Canada's literary culture evolves. Apart from the work of a handful of presses and a few dozen writers, for the past couple of decades it's mostly been devolving, it seems to me. Whether Canadians have the same cultural optimism and appetite for the work of their own writers &c. as they did in 1967 is an open question: if our political leadership is any indication, and if the leadership of our arts councils over the past decade is any indication, we may have become sick of ourselves, or complacent / taking it all for granted.

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?

The space I've made for certain writers, whose work is now more broadly accepted than it was ten or twenty years ago, is what I'm proudest of. Writers like Lisa Robertson and Terry Glavin come to mind. I'm still working on making Donato Mancini somewhat less obscure. (He's doing a lot more about this than I have been able to.) Peter Culley, George Stanley, but I was hardly their first or first-ish publisher, and they still aren't household names either.

I remember clearly people shaking their heads at my decision to publish Debbie: An Epic, and I remember one of my Ontario sales reps telling me, the year Glavin's This Ragged Place was a GG finalist, about a bookseller who cited it as an example of the irrelevance the GG's had fallen into: "Look, they've shortlisted a writer that nobody's ever heard of!" This was not long after the GGs were moved to the fall, to coincide with big publishers' marketing plans.

I am very proud of our poetry list in general, not just Lisa's work. I think it's become one of the most interesting lists in the country. I am proud of the Transmontanus series, short books about various more-or-less arcane aspects of BC culture & history.

Biggest frustration? Gosh, so many to choose from. I guess my biggest frustration is the pusillanimity of my colleagues, almost all of the Good Germans who are reluctant to risk their meagre positions by either standing up to forces hostile to a healthy literary culture, or by publishing somebody, or something, that hasn't been previously published. There are exceptions. They know who they are. They might not be the people you think of first.

13 – Who were your early publishing models when starting out?
One of the great advantages of being in the first wave of modern Canadian publishing and writing, which I date from approximately centennial year, is that there were no real models; we had to make it all up as we went along. I came into the trade at what I now see as the very tail end of that era, the early 1980s; but I did not, and still do not, have any specific models that I try to emulate.  In any case, concepts like "Penguin" or "New Directions" or even "Coach House" or "Talon" have a completely different meaning than they did a generation ago.

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

Well, publishing is an eminently social act. And terms like "the financial community" have, over the years, blunted my appetite for this particular term. Are the readers of a particular book or writer a "community"? So, on one level, I'm not so much interacting with a literary community, but a community of citizens --- the "at large" (which contradicts the original meaning of community, which is the opposite of "at large"), some of whom identify as readers and some more of whom from time to time read a book, and thus might be interested in what a given writer has to say, a given book has to offer.

There are certainly communities of writers, and KSW would qualify. New Star's poetry list certainly responds to the interests and concerns of that particular community: as an editor and publisher, my reading habits and my taste have been heavily influenced by the various poetics that have been associated with the KSW, or with writers associated with KSW. And that includes the ideas about writing that circulate among other local writing communities that have in their turn influenced the KSW gang: communities in San Francisco / Oakland, in New York, in Buffalo, Philadelphia, even Toronto.

I'm a member of the KSW board, where I don't (have to) do very much. I'm also a member of the board of the People's Co-op Bookstore, where I am somewhat more active. For instance, I have been one of the people working to embed the store more directly in the community by making it a venue for readings, discussions, launches, &c. During the month of November, the People's Co-op hosted the 2010 version of Respondency West, which was itself inspired by the Influency series in Toronto a year or two back.

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

We organize public launches for most of our books, and within our limitations (Canada Council gives us $1,500 -- $2,000 a year for author tour promotion; our overall annual budget for that sort of thing is around $8,000, which isn't very much) we do our best to help send our writers on the road. It's not lost on me that for many poets, the royalties are a minor consideration and the real payoff might actually be a trip or two to some exotic realm, almost always one of the aforementioned sites of local communities with interesting poetics.

16 – How do you utilize the internet, if at all, to further your goals?
Well, the internet is just the way we talk about things these days. So we try to use it to make sure people know about our books. Obviously it's affecting what we do, just as television affected how radio worked without actually replacing it, and radio before it affected print without actually replacing it.

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

Of course, although we do have some barriers in place: for instance, we state that we don't accept unsolicited poetry manuscripts. This has the desired effect of encouraging writers with serious submissions to contact me first.

18 – Tell me about three of your most recent titles, and why they’re special.
They're all special, so why don't I just say something about the three most recent titles we've issued.

City of Love and Revolution: Vancouver In the Sixties, by Lawrence Aronsen --- special because it's one of the surprisingly few books so far about the sixties, an era whose importance I would argue for.

Sweet England, a novel by Steve Weiner, a tremendous writer living here in Vancouver and whose first two novels were published by big houses that probably lost a shitload of money on them: great art usually NE great commerce, at least at first.

Caprice, the reissue of George Bowering's novel, because we think George is a great writer and there was something wrong about the fact that his great trilogy of BC historical novels was out of print.

And we're currently steeped in the first of our 2011 books, including new ones by Roy Miki and Donato Mancini.

12 or 20 (small press) questions;

The end of history;

The former icehouse his father moved from one part of the yard into the barnyard, set to house the bull. By the time I arrived, a bare shack caked in dry mud and manure, thin ladder inside to attic cubby. I would sit amid the pigeon-squat, some six, seven years old, and survey. From the back yard of the house pointed east, looking past the garage, underneath a small rainbow.

Two darkened tins, stuffed with envelopes, newspaper clippings, postcards, photographs. My mother’s mother’s parents, two lives boiled down to rust-crumbling paper.

Buried through the homestead like open graves, disappeared and robbed over a series of years. Upstairs hallway cracked linoleum floor replaced at one point, 1980s, underneath browned newspaper archive from the week originally installed, somewhere thirty years or more. Long done, long disappeared, forgotten. A house that if it spoke, so few have listened, recorded.

Grandma McLennan, who taught school in the one-room at Sandringham before she married, Ellen Elizabeth Campbell, born 1905, making seventy-nine years. Who later provided my daughter her middle name. Stained copy of George Eliot’s Silas Mariner (1920) with her script inside, “Ellen E. Campbell, M.C.S.” Whether I came from readers, certainly an array of predecessors who claimed ownership. Almost every book older than a couple of decades another family member writ their name, inscribed along the flyleaf. Mine.

Her husband, John Duncan, my grandfather, the youngest of six, not including a sibling that never survived infancy. Who barely left the property, it might seem. Youngest brother to John, the last McLennan line I could find named so in a stretch; two Johns, side by side; sons of Finley John who in turn, son of John, who in turn, son of John. My grandfather, who attended a one-room schoolhouse that sat on five acres, the corner of our hundred acre wood. Where a couple gnarled apple trees, the remains of the raspberry bushes. In the 1970s, what thorns caught our clothing, my sister and I red fingered, our bucket that never quite filled. Apple trees the result, my father once told, of the refuse from students. Cores tossed out the windows.

The difficulty of stories that can’t be proven. Vernacular. Highlighting that much further how history relates. History relates. This picture taken at Camp Keswick, my father tells me, a Bible camp his parents attended. In Port Carling, Ontario, in the Muskoka Lakes, directly north of Lake Simcoe, the Canadian Keswick Conference Centre, sitting just on Lake Rosseau. My grandparents are standing in front of what once was called Ferndale House, constructed in 1880, destroyed by fire in 1945, and rebuilt with stone, back when it was still centre to an interdenominational Bible Conference Centre. Apparently they went there on more than one occasion.

Would it matter much if I mentioned the centre fell into bankruptcy in 1976, or that the property now sits empty.

Port Carling, named after John Carling, son of the brewer. The Governor-General who also gave name to Carling Avenue, Ottawa, and invented our Experimental Farm, the only working farm situated inside the city limits of a world capital. When it was built, was well on its outskirts.

Back home, this red brick that held safely his boyhood possessions. Until we came along. His stuffed white lamb, his Meccano set, his Tales from the Green Forest, Thornton W. Burgess. From there, along came my Hardy Boys, my Dr. Seuss that passed to my sister, her Nancy Drew volumes. Our swaths of relative excess, of casual destruction. What had once kept to small.

The orange crate turned on its end and covered with fabric beside the years my father’s bedside table, holding books, hay flecks caught in pens, a notepad, collection of loose change, what I would occasionally wander up to collect. His reading lamp. The lower shelf the family bible, resting. Rested, a lineage. An archive, resting squarely against an absence. Isn’t this all writing is? Maps that shift, rotate, slower than the moon, or stars. A dream of starry skies. Escape, a loving detail.

writing and reading glengarry county

now up at Open Book Toronto;

edmonton writer myrna kostash in ottawa, december 1, 2010;

Gary Barwin, The Porcupinity of the Stars

Fourteen Beautiful Dogs

the field beside my heart is

filled with ugly deer and one beautiful dog

a poem doesn’t have to have fourteen perfect lines

or else you’re spitting on graves

maybe you’ll slip up and tell a truth

stick your elbow into something

under the moon your tongue hangs out

you’d like to howl but

the horizon grows ever larger

please save my family from complication or sudden death

listen: a small movement in the linden leaves

be brave be brave be brave

and here’s another beautiful dog

sighing sighing sighing

After years of publications through small and smaller presses comes Hamilton writer and musician Gary Barwin’s The Porcupinity of the Stars (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2010). Barwin’s poems and prose poems/fictions are getting sharper, subtler and still leave many readers uncertain as to what, exactly, to do with him. Surreal bents get a bad rap, it seems, slipped alongside humour in poetry that somehow gets dismissed, even with his recent co-win of the bpNichol Chapbook Award for the chapbook Inverting the Deer, itself incorporated into the manuscript that became this current work.

There is an element of Barwin’s writing that, no matter how far and better and sharper his writing gets, much appears an extension of previous work, a continuation, a line. Is this a neutral, positive or drawback? In The Porcupinity of the Stars he speaks of the stars, but seems to have a soft spot for contemplating children, planets, wildlife and even existence itself, writing poems on straightforward and often massive subjects but through a perception that often moves around what we so rarely question, as though a child’s imagination writing with the comprehension and intelligence of an adult. Through a collection of magnificent, sometimes confusing poems, I wonder, where is this Gary Barwin, exactly, heading?

We Are Family

an organism which presses

against the planet

an organism which has hair

(sad, believable hair)

that refuses to believe

which has sensations

sick moves

and an interesting history

an organism which holds up its fingers

how many fingers

(if fingers are what they are)?

an organism with other organisms on it

and upon which it rains

an organism which sleeps

soft as a cloth

a baby in a bed full of babies

and the earth full of babies

12 or 20 questions: with Derek Winkler

Derek Winkler [photo credit: Richard Folgar] is the editor of an obscure trade publication that you have almost certainly never heard of. He also performs any number of dark and arcane tasks for Broken Pencil magazine. He has done just enough freelance journalism to be able to make the claim with a straight face.

His high school English teacher told him in 1987 that he could be a writer of fiction someday, but he has not put this theory to the test until now.

A life-long geek, he is currently sharing his apartment with ten computers (seven functional and three otherwise) and a robotic simulacrum of cultural critic and novelist Hal Niedzviecki. The relationship is strictly platonic.

In April 2010 he got the words "Nihil Sine Labore" tattooed on his left forearm as a reminder to himself to try harder to get things done. So far the effect has been minimal.

His two most-prized possessions are a broken motorcycle and his grandfather's 1926 edition of The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

He owes $20 to jazz singer Holly Cole for reasons he would like to explain to her, should she be reading this. He swears he's good for the money.

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

Well, my first book was an unpublished road trip novel I wrote when I was 19. Aside from convincing me that I could write something long enough to legitimately call a book, it changed my life in no way at all. In comparison, my most recent book has been published, and is, coincidentally, not complete shit. It has changed my life by giving me the chance to hold forth on other people’s websites for two weeks. Other changes may come later, but it’s too soon to tell.

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

Fiction is the first thing I read, so it’s the first thing I wrote. I think that’s really all there was to it. I wrote short stories as a kid, unbearable poetry as a teenager and journalism as an adult. Now I’ve finally got back to fiction. It’s still the most fun.

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 took me years and years to get started on Pitouie. I can chew on an idea like a cow chews on cud. I did way more research than was really necessary, just to put off the writing. I made very detailed notes and then notes on the notes. But once I did get started on the writing, it went along at a fair clip. I’m a firm believer in quantity over quality when it comes to a first draft, so I didn’t sit and agonize over the prose. My first draft was a rough sketch at best, churned out in about three months. By the fourth draft the book was pretty much in its final shape, but it still took two more drafts to get it past a publisher.

4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

With Pitouie I combined two ideas that I had originally intended to write separately, except neither seemed strong enough to stand on their own. I had an idea for a story about a guy going crazy with boredom at a DEW Line station, and I had an idea for strange happenings on a remote island. Once I came up with a way to interlock the two, I knew I had enough for a novel. I think that’s probably the way I’ll continue to work. I’ve got a bunch of not-quite-enough ideas rolling around in my head, just waiting to collide and entangle themselves to the point of critical mass.

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

I’ve never done a public reading, so I can’t really say. I may or may not be doing my first one in December. Details still hazy. I think it would be fun, but I think readings are part of the marketing process, not the creative process. I try to write to my own standard of quality, and if other people like what I write that’s just a bonus.

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?

Nah. Theory is for academics, and I took a pass on that option a long time ago. The only question I really worry about when I’m writing is, “What happens next?” If a theoretical theoretician gave me a list of the current questions, I doubt I’d be able to answer them.

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?

Damn right a writer has a role in culture. To be a writer is to be a storyteller, and “storyteller” is a gig that has never lost its importance since the days we sat around campfires in the woods. Storytellers tell us what it’s like to be human, in case we can’t figure it out for ourselves. They provide models of every kind of human from the lowest bastard to the most noble hero. They pass along the past, open a window on the present and speculate about the future. Stories are awesome. It’s an honour to add one to the pile.

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

The editing process for Pitouie was amazingly painless. My editor would send me a list of suggested changes, I’d fix maybe a third of them, then I’d send back a note explaining why I didn’t change the others. Honestly, I expected much more of a fight. They let me get away with murder. Even so, the book is much better for having been through the process.

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

Never draw to an inside straight. If you mean advice about writing, it’s this: If you want to write, you have to think of it as a job, even if no one is paying you at the moment. You have to think of it as work, not art. Only way to get it done.

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

Well, if you let me categorize journalism as non-fiction, I’ll freely admit that the main appeal of non-fiction is that it pays the bills. The appeal of fiction is that it’s a lot more fun. Moving between them is easy. I do it every day. Now I’m reporting… now I’m making shit up. If it ever got to the point where I couldn’t keep that straight, I’d have to get myself some heavy medication.

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?

When I’m actually writing, (that is, when I’ve finished chewing the cud and putting things off for as long as possible,) I try to make writing first thing I do when I get up (while I’m still in bed, usually) and the last thing I do before I pack it in. I don’t use a strict schedule like, “I begin work at 8am every morning without fail.” I don’t hold myself to a set number of hours or words per day. I just plug away, and try to move the ball forward a little bit every day until it’s done.

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

Screw inspiration. When inspiration crashes, I just write crap until inspiration reboots. Crap removal is a vital part of the redrafting process.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I cannot give any honest answer to this question. I guess I’m not a scent-oriented person.

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?

Well, yeah. I mean, what can I say? I can’t think of anything in my life that isn’t an influence on my writing. My prose style certainly came from other books more than anywhere else. You don’t get much guidance on sentence structure from contemplating the stars.

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

When I was young, I read nothing but Hardy Boys books. Later I went through a heavy Tolkien phase, including the works of many cheap and shoddy imitators. At university I finally got around to reading a bunch of the Great Books, but none of them changed my life. Cyberpunk books from Gibson, Sterling and Stephenson changed my life. I’m a huge Shakespeare freak and a huge William Burroughs freak. If I could generate a customized writing style from a multiple-choice machine, I’d aim for somewhere on the continuum between Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, with maybe a little Elmore Leonard thrown in for flavour.

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

I’d like to try my hand at a video game. A lot of people are doing very interesting narrative things with the medium, and I think it’s the next frontier. I’ve got a few ideas. What I need is a few years to get my coding skills up to scratch. I’m pretty geeky, but I’m not a pro programmer.

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 sometimes wish I’d gone into one of the hard sciences so I could spend my life digging into the workings of the universe, but I just don’t think I have that kind of brain. I seriously considered becoming an astronomer for a while, but in the end I settled for a backyard telescope. I still do most of my work at night, though.

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

It’s just something I started doing at a very young age and never stopped. There’s great satisfaction to be had from a work of creation, and I seem to be better at creating with words than with any other material I’ve tried. Why would I want to do anything else?

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

Not sure if you mean Great Book or, “Hey that was a great book,” but the most recent novel that really sucked me in was the new William Gibson book, Zero History. The guy doesn’t do cyberpunk anymore, but he still knows how to tell a story. This one is about the world of fashion design, for fucks sake, and I still ran right through it. At the moment I’m reading Hell’s Angels by Hunter S. Thompson, which is a landmark achievement in its own way. Last great film I saw was Wall-E. Yeah, yeah, I know; animated Pixar flick for kids and a couple of years old to boot. But I just saw it recently for the first time and it blew me away. It vaulted straight into my all-time top-five list, right up there with Blade Runner and Brazil.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve got a decent chunk of a new novel sitting on the shelf that I want to get back to as soon as I can. It shares with Pitouie the theme of people injecting interest into their boring lives in unusual ways, but it’s got a larger cast of characters and is more ambitious in general. Lots of work still to do on that one. I’ve also got a smaller online project on the go, just for fun.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;