Call for submissions: Irving Layton Reloaded

LAYTON RELOADED

In conjunction with “Whatever Else": An Irving Layton Symposium, to be held at the University of Ottawa May 3-5, 2013, and in recognition of the centenary of Layton’s birth, we invite writers to respond—whether by way of homage, parody, retort, homolinguistic translation, or any other dialectical form (glossa, travesty, echo poem, etc.)—to a Layton poem of their choice. Our favorites will be published on the symposium website (www.canlit-symposium.ca), and we are exploring the possibility of other forms of publication as well. Please send your response, along with the title of the original poem, to Robert Stacey at rstacey@uottawa.ca or Cameron Anstee at cameron.anstee@gmail.com under the subject heading “Layton Reloaded.”

Deadline: April 1, 2013.

12 or 20 (second series) with Vincent Lam

Dr. Vincent Lam is from the expatriate Chinese community of Vietnam, and was born in Canada. Dr. Lam did his medical training in Toronto, and is an emergency physician in Toronto. He is a Lecturer with the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. He has also worked in international air evacuation and expedition medicine on Arctic and Antarctic ships.

Dr. Lam's first book, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, won the 2006 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has recently been adapted for television and broadcast on HBO Canada. Dr. Lam co-authored The Flu Pandemic And You, a non-fiction guide to influenza pandemics.

The Headmaster's Wager, Dr. Lam's first novel, about a Chinese compulsive gambler and headmaster of an English school in Saigon during the Vietnam War, is published by Doubleday Canada. Dr. Lam's biography of Tommy Douglas is published by Penguin Canada as part of Extraordinary Canadians series.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

* Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and became very popular. This changed some external aspects of my life, because I became a well-known Canadian writer. This meant that I had new opportunities to talk to people about the book, and to publish abroad. These are all very good things. However, at a core internal level some things did not change –  I am a physician and a writer. The work of practicing medicine and the work of writing are both deeply meaningful to me at a human level, and this is unchanged.

How does your most  recent work compare to your previous?

In writing Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, I had great knowledge of the specificity of setting – this is because it was set in a medical school, in hospitals, and in  clinics, and I am a doctor. Writing with this knowledge, I was able to elicit the emotional core of the book and represent it with details that were accessible to me. I could sort of pluck the knowledge of doctors off the shelves of my life to use in my writing. In writing The Headmaster’s Wager, I began with a deep understanding of the emotional core, and not much else. I knew what the book should ‘feel’ like. But as it turned out, I didn’t know nearly enough about Vietnam to do it initially, so I had to go out and learn all of that. This initiated my research phase, which I’ve already mentioned.

How does it feel different?

* Every book is a world into itself.

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

* That is like asking why my ears are the particular size that you see them to be!

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?

* Writing for me is very slow. It takes only a fraction of a second to start. That’s not the difficulty. The difficulty is getting through it and finishing. I edit extensively and repeatedly. Almost all pages receive fifteen to twenty rounds of editing in my hands. This is slow.

To write a novel set during a significant time in my family’s history required a variety of types of engagement between myself and the subject. I needed to understand as much as I could about what that era meant to me emotionally, and this has grown over two decades of personal contemplation. I amassed as much sensory and historical information as I could about that time. I wanted to understand the story of Indochina, the mentality of that land, the Vietnam War, the sensations of daily life in Saigon and Cholon, the patterns in which people interacted, and the concerns of the Chinese in Vietnam, with enough detail and depth to write it as if I had lived it. But beyond all that I had to let the story be free and true. I had to allow for its own vitality. It had to inhabit a space of truth where it was not my family stories at all, and it was not a documentation of my historical knowledge, but where it could become its own story.
 

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you?

* With obsession, with a deep aching haunting.

Are you an  author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

* I have always written projects that were meant to be ‘books’. Even Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures was always meant to be a collection of linked short stories and a cohesive book.

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

* They are neither. They are separate, a supplemental way to communicate. The real creation, the writing is all very private, but the reading can be part of a way to communicate the creation.

 
Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

* Yes. I do enjoy them, as I like to meet readers. I also like to be able to offer them something of my actual spoken voice. In the case of many writers whom I admire, once I have heard them speak, I always subsequently hear their voices in my mind when I read their work and this adds to the richness of the experience.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?

* Yes, I’m sure I do. But if they start to occur to me, I try to think of them as little as I possibly can. I do think about stylistic issues. My key stylistic goal is that I want the writing to acquire a sort of transparent quality, hoping that the reader can almost stop noticing that they are reading, so deeply have they entered the story.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

* I am mostly trying to answer subconscious questions.

What do you even think the current questions are?

* I like the questions to be subconscious, so I allow them to float beneath the surface and emerge in the plot and the characters. As such, they are hard to articulate.

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

* I believe that the role of the writer should be to distill in a deeply reflective and contemplative manner the emotional forces of our time, and to distill these into works that engulf the reader into an experience of the book. 

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

* I have a fantastic editor, Martha Kanya Forstner, and one of the most wonderful things about my writing process is working with my editor. It is difficult and essential work, but we work together very agreeably. The difficulties are to do with the text and its problems, not to do with any sort of problem in the editorial relationship. I would note: what truly good types of work are there in this world that are not both difficult and essential?

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

* Learn how to take advice. I’ve never heard this is a direct way, but it’s the best advice out there.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short fiction to novel to medical prose)?

* Every book is hard. Part of writing is sometimes to be pushing boundaries. This is where the writer grows.

What do you see as the appeal?

* The appeal is always story.

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?

* My main routine is that I schedule the time to write. I’m very busy, so I have to schedule the time if I’m going to have the time. I prefer the early part of the day.

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

* I return to the deep emotional fibres that animate the project. At a certain point, it is possible to turn to the characters, but it takes a long time to get there.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

* The smell of my wife.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

* All of that, surely. Books also come from life and history. These are big forces for me.

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

In no special order, a random and incomplete conjectural list…

Nick Adams Stories, Ernest Hemingway

Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis

Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Running In The Family, Michael Ondaatje

Gift of Stones, Jim Crace

Dream Stuff, David Malouf

Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels

Nine Stories, JD Salinger

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Michael Chabon

Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell

The Book of Secrets, MG Vassanji

Sunstroke and Other Stories, Tessa Hadley

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

Runaway, Alice Munro

The Sorrow of War, Bao Ninh

From a Chinese City, Gontran de Poncins

Blindness, Jose Saramago

The Lover, Marguerite Duras

Our Town, Thornton Wilder

The Fat Man in History, Peter Carey

Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa

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

* Helicopter powder skiing.

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?

* If I wasn’t a writer, I would be a physician!

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

* Story.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

* In The Orchard, The Swallows, Peter Hobbs

What was the last great film?

* Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog

20 - What are you currently working on?

There is something… but I cannot say more.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Olive Reading Series: season twelve

With the opening of their thirteenth season, I recently received an envelope of chapbooks from Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series, a series that runs the course of the school year, each of the monthly readings usually features a single poet, and a publication produced as give-away at the event. Oh, to have a complete collection of these; there are so many I’m still missing! Here are the three chapbooks I’ve seen so far from season twelve [see my post on season eleven here]. I look forward to seeing the rest, as well as lucky season thirteen.

September 13, 2011: Oana Avasilichioaei, Songs. Part of her since-published third trade poetry collection, We, Beasts (Wolsak & Wynn, 2012). On the back cover of the small chapbook, the poems in Songs are described as “transformations (effervescences) of the lexicon and music of poems by Galacian poet Álvaro Conqueiro in Herba aquí ou acolá, Galaxia, 1991.” Much of Avasilichioaei’s work so far has been exploring the idea of the translation, ranging from the relatively straight translation to the creative or even mis-translation, exploring what can appear through accident or even deliberate mis-reading and mis-understanding, using the translation itself as a device to open the door for new works.

The Distant Song

 

-- To the crow we give bread, give river

-- What longing, friend, longing for you

-- To the crow we cast the lighthouse, cast sky

-- What distance, friend, distance from you

-- To the crow we gather seed in summer

-- What longing, friend, longing for you

-- To the crow we disrobe the towers of winter

-- What distance, friend, distance from you

-- To the crow we wind the wisteria, the sob

-- What longing, friend, longing for you

Birds, their own servants, bird us the longing

of landscapes, orating distance, milled years

November 8, 2011: Nico Rogers, My Wife’s New Lover / Sean Garritty, The Lie Nearest Truth. An interesting pairing of more narrative works, I’m curious of the reasoning for the co-authored chapbook between Nico Rogers [see his 12 or 20 questions here] and Sean Garritty. I mean, why them, specifically, paired? Was it an issue of timing or the particular connections between their works?

Not Lost in Translation

the mine manager’s daughter

walked up to me while I painted

the gate, one gold leaf at a time,

and then stood next to my squatted

body and said, “bonjour monsieur

le forger. comment vas-tu aujoud’

hui. il fait beau, n’est-ce pas?” without

moving her lips. I asked her how she did it.

she showed me her phone and

said I can speak French but called

it an app. I asked her to type in

“amour et tendresse” but already

knew what the app would say. (Nico Rogers)

Not that the two have much more in common, really, than the penchant for straighter lines than usually feature in the Olive series. Both hold to poetry more as a storyteller’s art, with Rogers self-describing his poetry collection, The Fetch (London ON: Brick Books, 2010) as “a collection of short poetic fiction based in outport Newfoundland.” Sean Garritty, on the other hand, is more nuanced and abstract in the elements of his storytelling, with tales disguised as both lies and truth, whichever one might sound the best (the ending to the poem “The Lie Nearest Truth” is quite lovely). A graduate of Olga Costopoulos’ University of Alberta Write 494 class (with group publication in a previous Olive chapbook), he also (according to his bio) had a full-length poetry collection appear after this reading, Lie Nearest Truth (New York NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2011).

THE LIE NEAREST TRUTH

This is living—but too, too convincing,

the humdrum spectacular

leaving some bar, head wombed,

floating along with the aural flotsam

with hands held in a sticky promise

not like the handjob in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

In a dream there is a naked teenager surrounded

by sketch men all for beauty and ugliness.

Morning’s enigma machinery: what’s it mean but again

silkscreen, unique yet exactly the same,

it take so much to mine the infrathin allowance—

the prescriptions of post-minor surgery

better a stiff drink, or a little courage—

weightlessly delicate in its off-putting celibacy.

There is no truth, so we must lie. Near

as the boy under your skin like a terrible infant

the loathe platitude of figuring it out,

as unconvincing as a life already lived,

an awake state at that specious hour:

when is it late, when is it early? (Sean Garritty)

January 10, 2012: Marilyn Dumont, The Pemmican Eaters. I’m fascinated by Marilyn Dumont’s explorations in Métis history, language and culture [see her 12 or 20 questions here], working a poetry entirely between two languages and cultures. Her biography in the small chapbook says that she is “working on her fourth poetry manuscript in which she explores Métis history, politics and identity through the life and times of her ancestor, Gabriel Dumont.” Given that there is so little is published of Canadian aboriginal histories, writers such as Dumont (and Ottawa’s Armand Ruffo, who wrote of the Englishman Archie Belaney, who became Grey Owl through interaction with Ruffo’s own ancestors) become essential for their perspectives. Unlike Ruffo, Dumont moves much more with the language between, nearly as Canadian poet Nathalie Stephens, otherwise known as Nathanaël, who has made a career out of in-between. And this is some damned fine writing.

*these are wintering words

Michif problem family among the nuclear language types     one parent French     the other Cree/Salteaux     wintering words: sliced thin, smoke-dried, pounded fine, folded in fat and berries     pemmican not pidgin or Creole   combining two    grammatical maps     paddle trade routes along waterways     traverse rapids: white and dangerous with Ojibway women a la facon du pays   Metis traders, speak la lawng of double genetic origin     pleasure doubled     twice the language     twice the culture     mixta, not mixed-up, nor muddled     but completely      French, Cree, Ojibway different tongues     buffalo, a delicacy source language     right from the cow’s mouth     mother of all in-group conversation     wintering camps     dispersal     neither Cree, Saulteaux nor French exactly, but something else     not less     not half  not lacking

Roger Farr, IKMQ

The Elements of Fiction

I secured the materials: 5G of mercury, 35ML of concentrated nitric acid, 30ML of ethyl alcohol, two 100ML beakers, a glass rod, an adjustable heat source, a jar of distilled water, some blue litmus paper, a funnel, and a coffee filter. K mixed the 5G of mercury with 35ML of concentrated nitric acid in one of the beakers and stirred it with the glass rod. Then M transferred the solution to the burner and heated until it started to boil. The mixture turned green. the mercury is dissolved, Q said. Next, I poured 30ML of ethyl alcohol into the second beaker, and slowly added the contents of the first beaker to the second. Red fumes rose from the beaker. I looked at K. The fumes are toxic and flammable, I said. K nodded and opened a window. Thirty minutes later, the fumes had turned white. M said white fumes indicated the reaction was near completion. In 10 minutes, M said, Q must add 30ML of distilled water to the solution. 10 minutes later Q followed the instructions exactly. Now filter out the crystals from the solution carefully, I said. K filtered out the crystals. M and Q watched as the crystals emerged. Can the crystals be deployed in a plot now, M said. No, said Q. The crystals must be rinsed several times in distilled water to remove excess acid. Once they have tested neutral on the litmus paper, then they can be deployed in a plot. Besides, this experiment is being carried out solely for entertainment purposes, I said.

The cover image for Vancouver writer and editor Roger Farr’s second trade poetry collection, IKMQ (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2012), shows a 1940s-era adding machine, photoshopped to include the book’s title over where other letters had been. Designated on the back cover as “poetry,” IKMQ is a deceptive book, constructed out of a sequence of page-long prose sections “each involving the characters represented by the letters I, K, M and Q.” It is as though the letters themselves inform the motion of the narrative, inform the reactions of the characters they represent. What and how do letters mean, or react? Reminiscent slightly of a book by another Vancouver writer, Meredith Quartermain’s Recipes from the Red Planet (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), Farr’s IKMQ is far darker, writing a sequence of individual scenes that accumulate themselves into something that exists on the cusp between a sequence of prose-poems and the structure of a novel.

Much has been written of “poet’s prose,” which seem to exist in the long and nebulous gradient between essays, fiction and the prose poem. In Canadian writing, the space of “poet’s prose” includes Lisa Robertson’s recent Nilling to works by Jonathan Ball, Robert Kroetsch, Nicole Brossard, Erin Mouré and Nicole Markotić, among so many others. The uncertainty presented on such a space only seems to highlight the critical lack that exists in those same spaces, existing between the strict boundaries of prose and poetry. Just what is it we are so afraid of?

The Rules

K rose to present the Officer’s Report. The slaughtering and processing of the pig went off without any problems, K said. A document titled “Art as Technique” was passed around the table. M, Q and I read the document while K turned on the projector. The video showed a pig flapping about on the floor before being clubbed unconscious, kicked, and thrown onto a conveyor belt. In the next scene, the neck was cut and the animal was stuck onto a hook, while blood drained into a dirty steel vat. The carcass then was burnt, skinned, and decapitated. K paused the video and asked if there were any questions or comments. Q wanted to know if that was the end of the video. No said, K. The next scene shows the carcass being separated into edible and non-edible parts. That will be enough, M said. Fine, K said. Please note, however, that in the future, a chilling period will be required before the meat can be prepared for final processing, packaging and shipping. This allows the flesh to firm up. I nodded. K sat down. Any further discussion, I asked. There was no discussion. Motion to accept the report. Q moved from H7 to G4. So moved, said M. All in favour. K, M, and Q nodded. It’s unanimous, I said.