12 or 20 (second series) questions with Frances Peck

Frances Peck (North Vancouver) is a long-time editor, ghostwriter, and instructor. She’s the author of Peck’s English Pointers, an online grammar and writing resource; a co-author of the HyperGrammar website; and an occasional essayist and blogger. She wrote fiction and poetry until her early twenties, when she stopped (ironically) to earn a living from words. Now she’s rediscovering the magic of making things up. Her debut novel is The Broken Places (NeWest Press, April 2022). Connect with Frances on Twitter (@FrancesLPeck) or visit her website (francespeck.com).

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

Confusingly, the first novel I wrote, Uncontrolled Flight, will be the second one published, in fall 2023; the second novel I wrote, The Broken Places, is the first to hit the shelves. Regardless, to have a novel, any novel—first, second, fifth—published, with my actual name on it (not ghostwritten) is the realization of my oldest, most secret dream. Oldest because I started cranking out the beginning chapters of novels around age nine. And most secret because until recently I couldn’t admit to anyone that I wanted to write a novel. It felt like something I could never do, that I wasn’t worthy of. Other people wrote novels. Not me.

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

It was a kind of imprinting. In grade three, the teacher gave several of us who were easily bored these story prompts to work from. They were all about—at least, this is how I remember it—dustballs or hairballs or furballs. Something slightly nasty and clumpy and not quite human. We were to write stories about these balls as if they were people. It was the most stimulating thing I’d done up to that point, apart from reading and cutting pictures out of catalogues. For the next fifteen years, I wrote a steady stream of short stories, novel chapters, comic strips, magazines, school newspaper articles, plays, and poems. I kept coming back to poetry. I had a couple of poems published in my university’s literary magazine. But I was a terrible poet. Everything sounded like fake Yeats. (That sounds like a band name: Fake Yeats.)

After that, I made a career from writing and editing non-fiction, or what nowadays we’d call “content”: reports, marketing material, training manuals, essays, web copy, and so forth. All the while, the word “novel” kept sounding in my head. As a young writer I’d made many stabs at novels, but I’d never finished one. I desperately wanted to finish one.

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?

I’m a slow starter. The image that precipitated my first novel, the one that will be published second, haunted me for years before I started to write. There’s always something more pressing, and frankly more appealing, to do than churn out that painful first draft. But once the draft is done, the editing can begin. After years of being an editor and teaching editors, I feel great relief when I get to that stage. The two novels I’ve finished so far have needed heaps of reshaping, because I’m a pantser all the way. It’s inefficient, but I don’t care. For whatever reason, rigorous outlining kills the magic for me.

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

Leaving aside my freelance work, which has usually involved shorter pieces, my projects are always books. Novels are all I’m interested in writing just now. I wish it were otherwise. At one point I tried to convince myself to write a short story, just for the satisfaction of finishing something in less than, say, two years. But stories don’t come to me. Novels do.

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

Ask me in a year! At the time of writing, with my book officially out under a month ago, I’ve done a grand total of three readings: two online, one in person. Though it’s scary to say my own words out loud to a crowd, I suspect I’ll learn to enjoy readings. In my family we were made to read aloud, and to memorize poems and recite them for unsuspecting visitors. I did stuff like debating and drama and deejaying on campus radio, and I’ve been an instructor and presenter alongside my writing and editing career. I’m pretty comfortable with public speaking. There’s a spark you get from a live audience that’s unlike anything else.

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?

All I want to do is write books about interesting characters doing interesting and at times unexpected things. That’s it, really.

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?

Again, this isn’t something I think about, at least not in connection with myself. No question, there are writers out there doing influential, world-changing things with their work—interrogating culture, dismantling stereotypes, posing key political and philosophical questions, amplifying stories and voices that have historically been stifled. I’m not one of them. I’d just like to write stories that keep people reading and that make them feel something.

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

Editors are my tribe. I adore working with them; they are like ER doctors for manuscripts. My editor at NeWest Press, Leslie Vermeer, and I co-wrote a blog post about what it’s like for one editor to be edited by another. Outside editors are indispensable. It’s the interior editor, the one battling the writer inside my head, that’s the troublemaker.

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

BIC: bum in chair. Writer, instructor, and retreat organizer Ruth E. Walker handed me that nugget years ago. Get your bum in the chair, and do it regularly. That’s most of the battle. Once you’re there, the writing will come.

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

I usually set weekly and daily goals, but they vary a lot depending on what else is going on in life. Right now I’m aiming for three one-hour sessions a week on my new novel. In the past, I’ve set page quotas. A few months back I did adopt one routine, which is to do accountability check-ins with another writer. All we do is message one another to say “did my first session,” “did my second,” etc. There are many, many days when I wouldn’t write a word if not for that arrangement.

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

It’s only now, chipping away at my third novel while promoting my first and getting ready to revise my second, that I’ve begun to feel stalled. How to get going again? Probably I should read the answer to this question in all your other interviews! More and more I’ve been turning to non-verbal inspiration, like music. I’ve listened to Radiohead’s In Rainbows scores of times hoping that the trance it puts me into will result in some number of words on the page. I’m also collecting images that match the time frame of the story I’m struggling with and that make me think of the characters. I use Padlet, a free app that lets you to create a corkboad you can stick pictures on. It’s like Pinterest, but private.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Salt cod. My dad would always have leathery slabs of it soaking in a pail just inside the back door. This was in rural Cape Breton. When we’d come crashing in from the school bus, leaving the fresh air behind, it was often the first thing we’d smell. That and his hand-rolled Player’s cigarettes.

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

Music for sure. There have been times in my life, like back when I deejayed or tinkered with the piano or played (rudimentary) bass in a basement band, when music has meant as much to me as books. Film is a huge influence too. Less now, when movies are all about comic book characters and merchandise, but good films, like gritty 1970s movies or classic screwball comedies or really scary horror flicks—they are hugely inspirational.

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

That is a list I can’t begin to compose. I read all the time, and nearly everything feels important while I’m reading it. I try to read widely. I gravitate toward Canadian books more than anything, but I try to keep up with works from other countries too. Fiction and non-fiction. Well-written literary works and fun genre stories. Books mostly, but magazines as well, and blogs sometimes.

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

Go to England. I did a master’s in English literature, but I’ve never set foot in England. I want to see the moors and the Cornish coast, the hills and dales, all those places I’ve only ever read about.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I’d have given just about anything to sing well. To be a great, belt-it-out singer like Aretha Franklin or maybe Janis Joplin (without the drugs and untimely death). Though that’s not really what you asked. I guess if I hadn’t become a writer and editor, I’d have been a librarian, ideally in a bookmobile. Books would have to be involved.

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

Part of it, probably, was growing up in a rural area where there wasn’t much to do. I remember being bored a lot except for when I was reading, and writing seemed a natural extension of reading. Part of it was having little money. There weren’t going to be lessons of any kind, or entertainment that involved fees. Writing cost nothing and it was absorbing and it gave me a break from reading. It whiled away the endless Sunday afternoons. I wrote stuff from such an early age that I guess it just stuck.

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

I really enjoyed Karen Hofmann’s linked novels What Is Going to Happen Next and A Brief View from the Coastal Suite. And I was transfixed by Deep Water, a 2006 documentary about a sailing race that is more character study than adventure film (though there’s plenty of adventure).

19 - What are you currently working on?

My third novel. It’s coming out in such hiccups (see question 11), but I’m doing my best to keep at it. It’s about childhood friendship and music and betrayal, and about the fallibility of memory, how impossible it is to ever know the truth of things.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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Spotlight series #75 : Jamie Sharpe

The seventy-fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Comox, British Columbia poet Jamie Sharpe.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day and Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

Robert Hogg, APOTHEGMS

 

AT EASE

Turned out
to be

a Haiku
after all

I wasn’t
even trying

 

RLH: Mtn: 2020-04-29

I’ve been fascinated by the way Ottawa-area poet Robert Hogg has re-emerged over the past few years, seemingly out of nowhere with a sequence of poetry chapbooks in relatively-quick succession: Ranch Days (for Ed Dorn) (Ottawa ON: battleaxe press, 2019), Ranch Days – The McIntosh (Kemptville ON: hawkweed press, 2019), A Quiet Affair: Vancouver ’63 (Victoria BC: Trainwreck Press, 2021), From Each Forthcoming (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2021), The Red Menace (Mountain ON: Hogwallow Press, 2021) and APOTHEGMS (Ottawa ON: Apt. 9 Press, 2021). During his first decade or so of publishing, Hogg never appeared to be a writer in a any particular hurry, although he did follow a trajectory of relatively-consistant book-publication from his days completing a PhD on Charles Olson under Robert Creeley at the University of Buffalo, through what ended up as a accumulated thirty-eight years of teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa before retiring: The Connexions (Berkeley CA: Oyes, 1966), Of Light (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1978), Heat Lightning (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 1986) and There Is No Falling (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1993). For a poet who published so regularly across nearly thirty years, it does seem strange to note that his most recent full-length collection appeared twenty-nine years ago. This particular silence was only broken through his post-Carleton slow retirement from organic farming with the emergence of the chapbook from LAMENTATIONS (above/ground press, 2012), a title reprinted through above/ground in a slightly expanded edition in 2016. Otherwise, this period of relative silence was punctuated otherwise with two volumes of editorial work: An English Canadian Poets, The Confederation Poets – Vol. 1 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2009), and the Canadian issue of the Portland, Maine journal The Café Review in April 2019.

BROWN DEATH

Hello brown death
I thought you’d be
black as night 

        and here you are
imitating earth
initiating me

  

RLH: Mtn: 2021-03-06

As I’ve articulated prior, I’ve always been fascinated by poets who engage in lengthy publishing silences, irregardless of whether or not they ever return. One could point to Montreal poets Artie Gold and Peter Van Toorn, British Columbia poet David Phillips (who apparently kept writing but simply stopped publishing, unfortunately losing multiple completed unpublished mansucripts during a house flood), Ottawa poet William Hawkins or even Phyllis Webb: poets who simply paused, whether no longer writing or no longer publishing, due to a variety of possible and personal reasons. Why or even how do engaged and otherwise active writers simply stop? Where do they go? Prince George, British Columbia poet Ken Belford published a handful of titles up to 1970, but wouldn’t publish again until 2000, after which he managed to publish multiple books and chapbooks until his death, some twenty years later. Monty Reid published multiple books up to his Flat Side (Red Deer: Red Deer College Press, 1998) from his home base of Alberta, with nothing to follow until he had been nearly a decade in Ottawa, offering his Disappointment Island (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books, 2006) as his first post-Alberta title, and the first of a handful of books that followed. Saskatchewan poet John Newlove spent a decade publishing a book every year or two until the Governor General’s Award-winning Lies (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1972), before an extended silence of new material that included a selected poems, The Fat Man: Selected Poems (1962-1972) (McClelland and Stewart, 1977) and the long poem The Green Plain (Victoria BC: Oolichan Books, 1981) before his final full-length collection of new poems The Night the Dog Smiled (ECW Press, 1986). But for a larger selected poems and his posthumous selected poems, his publishing would only otherwise see a chapbook, THE TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (above/ground press, 1999). Toronto poet Pier Giorgio Di Cicco published books for some fifteen years until The Tough Romances (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 1990), with veritable publishing silence that extended until Living in Paradise (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2001), a book that became the opening to his own return, bookending the time he spent in an Augustinian monastery north of Toronto.

The thirty-two short poems in APOTHEGMS follow Hogg’s more recent trajectory of dating his poems, many of which are reworkings of either finished poems or drafts originally composed during the 1960s, citing both dates of composition. There does seem something quite particular to Hogg for the fact that he does this, citing not only dates, but multiple dates for individual pieces, let alone the fact that he’s returning to much earlier poems, perhaps as a way to jump-start him again into productivity. As he says in a recent interview conducted by Ken Norris, posted online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

I very carefully chose, for my first book, what I felt were the strongest and most cohesive poems from that group. After the book came out, I felt little inclination to publish many of the others, and let them sit uncollected for many years. A lot of these were written for various women I'd had attachments to, and being newly married, I did not see including them in Standing Back when it came out in 1971. So, a quantity of these poems remained in various stages of completion, several not even typed up, and many others revised extensively. I came back to this hoard of material a couple of years ago, and began the long process or revision and resuscitation. I was surprised at how many were salvageable and would make good poems. Others, published in periodicals and Souster's New Wave Canada, did not get collected for the same reasons—too personal, too revealing.

Many poems which were written in Vancouver during my four years there from the fall of 1960 to October 1964 saw only periodical publication, or were also left unpublished. Over the past few years, I worked my way through these drafts also, and they are now collected in a ms called Not to Call it Chaos - the Vancouver Poems. A central poem in this sequence is the recently written A Quiet Affair – Vancouver '63 which came out as a chapbook this spring from Trainwreck Press. It recapitulates my experiences during the summer of '63 and presents the conditions as I experienced them around the Vancouver Poetry Conference. But it ties in with a number of other poems, most of which were written during that early period. The poems are predominantly lyrical in structure, but again, taken as a whole, they represent a kind of bildungsroman in a sequence of poems.

The poems in APOTHEGMS are short, and lean into koans, the short snap of expectation and quiet words placed after another, with an intimacy that allows the dates to become an essential element of small moments that are clearly crafted, while still allowing a sense of immediacy. He writes of time, and the immediacy of it; referencing haiku and the moment in which he is standing, no matter the distance of temporality between thought and composition. Think of the poem “URBANESQUE,” composed from his home-base of Mountain, Ontario “2021-10-04,” that reads: “The tiny / tea bag / plate // in my / cupboard / takes // up more / real / estate // than the / tall / glass // standing / next / to it [.]” In certain ways, the only differences between the accretions of Hogg’s longer poems and these short, near-bursts is a sense of scale: the shorter pieces included here still allowing for a kind of accretion, but one set with a particular kind of boundary. The larger accretion, one might suggest, might be the very assemblage of these poems into a chapbook-length manuscript.

THE GIFT – 2021-06-20

Sending you
an imaginary

bouquet
Dear Bob

Daphne
in an email

What could be
more real

Hogg connects time to the physical, and the physical to the body. There’s a way he’s attentive to both physicality and natural spaces, in part, one would think, through his time as a kid on a farm in the Cariboo, or his decades farming a space just south of Ottawa. With references to poets Lorine Niedecker, H.D. and Daphne Marlatt, Hogg doesn’t have to describe the landscape to allow for its presence; as Creeley attended the immediate, and his sense of the “domestic,” so too with Robert Hogg, attending his immediate, whether memory or at that precise moment, and a “domestic” that concerns the landscape, both internal and external.

At the back of the collection, he offers a list of books “currently in the works for publication,” including “Lamentations; The Cariboo Poems; Postcards, from America; Amber Alert; Not to Call It Chaos – The Vancouver Poems; Oh Yeah—More Poems. In progress are The Offending Temple, and Ill Parodies – O, a selection of satires on various Shibboleths and current affairs.” To even see half of these titles in print would represent a remarkable output.