rob mclennan's blog

Monday, January 27, 2025

the above/ground press postal increase sale,

above/ground press (b. 1993) doesn’t usually offer any sales during this time of the year, but with the thirty percent increase recently via Canada Post, and a couple of substantial printing increases over the past three years, it puts the press at even more of a loss, so I thought it would be worth offering a series of discounted bundles from the wealth of the above/ground press backlist/frontlist to help with cashflow:

ANY FOUR TITLES FOR $20 (postage included)
ANY TEN TITLES FOR $40 + shipping / Canada add $25 / US add $30 / International add $32
ANY TWENTY-FOUR TITLES FOR $80 + shipping / Canada add $30 / US add $33 / International add $35
ANY FORTY-FIVE TITLES FOR $160 (postage included)
/ all prices in Canadian dollars ; “any” is subject to availability,

normally single author chapbooks (mostly poetry but some prose) titles are $5 each (with issues of G U E ST [a journal of guest editors] $6 each and issues of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] $8 each and copies of the Report from the Society festschrift series anywhere from $6 to $8). 2025 subscriptions, also, are still available as well [$75 Canadian in Canada/$75 US in United States; further info here], in case that appeals instead (I might have to actually increase my subscription rates for next year, but it is too late for 2025). I’ll keep this sale going until July 9, 2025 [which will be above/ground press’ thirty-second birthday, by the way]. I mean, if it helps get further books out into the hands of interested readers, this is a good thing. and remember, above/ground press is entirely unfunded, but for sales and subscriptions and sheer optimism (and my own pocket). there isn’t funding available for this kind of activity.

Make your own bundles! Many authors even have multiple titles across the press, with the link below to their most recent (and links within to their prior). Want all four titles by Amish Trivedi, for example, or a handful of Amanda Earl chapbooks? Why not both natalie hanna offerings, or two of three chapbooks by Julia Polyck-O’Neill? Other authors with multiple titles in print include Jessica Smith, Pearl Pirie, Gil McElroy, Stephen Collis, Brenda Iijima, Jason Christie, Rae Armantrout, Kyle Flemmer, rob mclennan, Stephanie Gray, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Hugh Thomas, Jérôme Melançon, Alice Burdick, Melissa Eleftherion, Ben Robinson, MLA Chernoff, Grant Wilkins, Leesa Dean, Nathanael O’Reilly, Sacha Archer, Lori Anderson Moseman, Ken Norris, Emily Izsak, ryan fitzpatrick and a whole stack of others. Maybe you want a stack of Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] issues? Maybe you want a whole slew of the prose series, issues of G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] or the Report from the Society festschrift titles? Try me! If I still have copies, it totally works. While supplies last on individual titles, obviously.

To order, send cheques to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com ; questions? shoot me an email,

Sunday, January 26, 2025

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alice Fitzpatrick

Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma. Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of the setting of the Meredith Island Mystery series. She was a third of the way through the first draft of Secrets in the Water, the first book in the series, when she realized this story of lost family history was inspired by her own family. Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast. To learn more about Alice and her writing, please visit her website at http://www.alicefitzpatrick.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?

I always imagined if I ever became a published writer, I would spend my days writing, but I underestimated the amount of marketing I have to do to get my name, my book, and my series out there. Because I live in Canada but write a aeries that’s set in Wales, I have to promote to three geographical areas: Canada, the US, and the UK. Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’ve learnt to push myself. While I’m getting more and more comfortable with it all, I still wish I had time to write.

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

My first publication was in an anthology of high school poetry edited by Canadian poet George Bowering. Buoyed by this success, I decided to become the youngest poet to win the Governor General’s award, until I realized I wasn’t a poet. I need space to tell my stories, and so I moved on to short fiction and later the novel.

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

It’s relatively easy for me to come up with ideas by asking “what if this happens?” I don’t normally do an outline for my books, but I do make notes on the characters, their relationships to each other, and their secrets. Before I begin to write, I have to know the identity of the first victim, their killer, and the motive. This gets me through the first seventy or so pages. When I’m writing, I need to know what’s happening in the next few scenes so I don’t get stuck.

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?

I always know what form a story will take. Obviously some ideas lend themselves to a shorter focussed format while others need the space of a novel. Having said that, the idea for Secrets in the Water came from a forty-page story I’d written decades before about the Welsh seaside resort where I spent my childhood summers. At that point, my protagonist, Kate, was a fourteen-year-old investigating her aunt’s death. When I decided to turn the story into a full-length novel, I made Kate a retired English teacher who wrote historical novels and gave her a sidekick.

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

I enjoy public readings. As a teacher, I’m quite comfortable standing in front of people and sharing my work with them. However, I get nervous if I’m recorded reading or being interviewed. I fear any mistakes I make will exist forever, whereas an in-person reading is ephemeral and quickly fades from memory.

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?

As someone who writes genre rather than literary fiction, I don’t feel my work offers any insight into deep philosophical issues, but I do have themes for each book beyond solving the mystery. Secrets examines different kinds of love and what we’re prepared to do for that love. It’s also about recovering family history, the fragility of memory, and how we tend to mythologize people who have disappeared from our lives. This makes Kate’s job of solving the fifty-year-old murder of her aunt all the harder. Whereas other authors might write crime fiction because it allows them to set the world straight, to provide justice to victims, and bring order to chaos, for me it’s the need to understand what happened and why. I’m intrigued by what makes seemingly ordinary people commit murder.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

In times of distress and uncertainty, we all need an escape. During the Depression, people flocked to movie houses, and the movie musical was born. The world of Meredith Island is one of community and support, and these days we need that more than ever.

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

I don’t have beta readers or belong to a writing group, so I value my publisher’s objective eye. When my edits arrive, I’m always nervous in case I’ve got things so wrong that the book can’t be saved.

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

My favourite piece of advice comes from Darcy Pattison: “The first draft of a story is to tell you what the story is. The next drafts are a search for the best way to tell this story.”

As a perfectionist—and what writer isn’t or doesn’t aspire to be—I would get hung up on getting the first draft as good as I could. In the past, this would often stop me in my tracks as I edited and re-edited what I’d already written, often afraid to go on. Pattison’s advice gives me permission to let go of expectations of immediate perfection. Wandering off the path is a valuable part of the process.

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

I started my career writing literary short stories. Secrets took me so long to write because I had to learn not only how to write a full-length novel, but the requirements of crime fiction. At the first Bloody Words conference I attended, an established crime writer gave me feedback on an early version of my first chapter. She observed there was very little description. When I told her I was a short story writer, she smiled and said, “Oh, that explains it.”

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

I’m awake at eight, read for an hour, and then check my emails and social media—just in case there’s something important that has to be dealt with right away. There never is, although I tell myself this will free me to write uninterrupted for the rest of the day. While I’m eating my breakfast of oatmeal and tea, I watch one crime TV show which I rationalize as research and to kickstart the little grey mystery-writing cells. By now it’s noon, guilt is setting in, and I can’t put off writing any longer. This is when I drag myself up to my office and start to write—after checking my emails and social media one more time. The good news is that once I get started, I usually keep going until six, seven, or even eight o’clock.

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

My writing only gets stalled when I don’t know what the characters will do next. That’s usually because I’ve started writing before fully understanding who they are and what motivates them. At that point, I have to take the time to flesh out their backstory.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Because I spent my summers at my aunt and uncle’s hotel on the Welsh coast, home is the yeasty smell of beer coming from open doors of pubs, the greasy odour of fish and chips from cafes, and of course seaweed and salt water. All of these have found their way into my books.

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?

When I was younger, I would listened to classical music and imagine that my writing would create the same deep emotional feelings in the reader that music brought out in me. However, music touches a place deep in the soul, bypassing the analytic brain. Words can’t do that. They need our brains to decode their meanings.

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

When I first started writing my series, I discovered Jasper Fforde, a Welsh fantasy crime writer, whose books opened my mind to a new world of possibilities, giving me permission to create quirky characters and to ask my readers to suspend more than a little disbelief.

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

I would like to travel to Ireland and other parts of the UK. Ultimately I’d love to buy a seaside cottage in Wales.

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?

For most of my life, I was a high school ESL and English teacher. I taught people—and myself—about language and story-telling structure, and that has served me well. But I would also have loved to have been an archaeologist. My Master’s degree is in social history, and a lot of archaeology is social history. But I don’t have a head for science. So instead, I decided to have some archaeology students come to the island to dig for the remains of an early medieval monk’s cell in the second Meredith Island Mystery, A Dark Death.

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

I’ve been a storyteller ever since I can remember. It’s how I comprehend and interact with the world. While other people arrive late and offer vague references to problems with public transit, I delight in recounting every detail. Before I graduated from high school, I’d received my first rejection letter when I sent Carol Burnett a sketch I’d written, completed my first novel, and was published in a poetry anthology edited by Canadian poet George Bowering.

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

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz both awed and intimidated me, while Thomas King’s CBC Massey Lectures The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative taught me about the power of storytelling. I rarely watch films, but I do watch a lot of British television mysteries such as Midsomer Murder, Father Brown, and Sister Boniface Mysteries.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished the edits for A Dark Death to be released in June, 2025, and am writing The Secret House of Death, the fifth book in the Meredith Island Mystery series. I’m also searching for a publisher for a stand-alone private investigator/police procedural/suspense novel called That Which Was Lost which was inspired by a horrific car accident that killed eight teenagers in my hometown fifty years ago. And if someone would like to make a series or film from the Meredith Island books, I wouldn’t say no.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

If story’s other is narrative, what is lyric’s other? Lyric is so generic that it’s difficult to find a term to contrast with it, unless one moves to another genre, typically epic. Even so, the hegemony of a single-voice, “scenic” lyric, the Vampiric heart of Romantic Ideology, has been contested since Blake, Byron, Swinburne, Poe, Dickinson, and the slave songs, in the nineteenth century, and Stein, Loy, Williams, Pound, Eliot, Tolson, and Riding in the early twentieth. The conventional lyric’s American other in the 1930s was the “objectivist” poem, in the 1950s “Projective Verse” and the “serial poem.” In the 1960s, Antin and Jerome Rothenberg suggested “deep image” and Amiri Baraka and company, “Black Arts.” There was a time in the early 1980s that poets advocated against the scenic lyric with terms such as “analytic lyric” or “transcended lyric.” Ron Silliman’s “new sentence” and David Antin’s “talk poems,” as with “language-centered,” specifically presented themselves against the vanilla lyric.
Not voice, voices; not craft, process; not absorption, artifice; not virtue, irreverence; not figuration, abstraction; not the standard, dialect; not regional, cosmopolitan; not normal, the strange; not emotion, sensation; not expressive, conceptual; not story, narrative; not idealism, materialism.
For binary opposition to intensify their aesthetic engagement, and not become self-parody, it helps if they fall apart, so that you question the difference, confuse one with the other, or understand the distinction as situational, as six is up from five but down from infinity, diction so low its high, solipsism so radical it dissolves into pure realism. (“The Unreliable Lyric”)

The latest from American poet and critic Charles Bernstein is the hefty collection The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2024), an assemblage of talks, essays, lectures, interviews, musings, reviews and speeches presented in a triptych of sections—“Pixellation,” “Kinds” and “Doubletalk”—offered with no introduction, but a preface by his friend, the late New York writer Paul Auster (1947-2024), “Twenty-Five Sentences Containing the Words ‘Charles Bernstein’,” originally offered by Auster as an introduction to a reading Bernstein was doing at Princeton University on March 14, 1990. As Auster spoke, nearly thirty-five years ago this month:

Charles Bernstein is a poet. Charles Bernstein is a critic. Charles Bernstein is a man who talks. And whether he is writing or talking, Charles Bernstein is a trouble-maker. Being fond of trouble-makers myself, I am particular fond of the trouble-maker designated by the words Charles Bernstein.
Charles Bernstein has reintroduced a spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry. in the exhausted atmosphere in which so much of our writing takes place, Charles Bernstein has battled long and hard to make both writers and readers aware of the implications embedded in each and every language act we partake of as citizens of this vast, troubled country. Whether or not you agree with what Charles Bernstein has to say is less important than the fact that it has become more and more important to what he is saying.

The introduction Auster make then still holds, certainly, although I would have been interested in some kind of framing as to why these particular pieces arranged in this particular way for this particular collection. Trouble-maker, trickster, indeed, that wiley Bernstein, providing just enough for a reader to supply the rest, I suppose. The back cover, at least, offers this paragraph, the first of two, as copy: “For more than four decades, Charles Bernstein has been at the forefront of experimental poetry, ever reaching for a radical poetics that defies schools, periods, and cultural institutions. The Kinds of Poetry I Want is a celebration on aesthetics and literary studies, interviews with other poets, autobiographical sketches, and more.” The pieces collected here are playful, thoughtful and dense, running a length and breadth of American poetry and poetics, including a handful of clusters of shorter critical responses on poets such as Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, David Bromige [see my review of the collected Bromige here], Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Madeline Gins, Rae Armantrout [see my review of her latest here], Rosmarie Waldrop [see my review of her latest here], Johanna Drucker, Tonya Foster [see my review of Foster's debut here] and Pierre Joris, among others, running through the contemporary and historical of American poetics. “It’s funny to have to be brief about Robert Duncan,” the opening section of one of these essays begins, “since there is nothing brief about his work or my responses to it.”

Charles Bernstein’s poetic allows him to respond critically through prose and poetry both, accumulating points across a series of seamless grids. If Vancouver’s George Bowering has been our plainspeaking Canadian troublemaker and critical thinker through lyric and experimental poetry across the decades, responding to the works of those around him since the 1960s, Bernstein is the other side of that same play, but with a far denser approach through academic language. As Bernstein writes on New York poet Tonya Foster: “My comments on Foster are abstract and technical. But Foster’s work doesn’t feel abstruse or conceptual (two qualities I often like in poems). Foster’s work is constructed as a system or environment that explores the emergence and disappearance of identity and place. It’s not a poetry of, or about, fixed points of reference that are described. The sites emerge and submerge in the flickering probes of Foster’s accumulation of voices, her collection of verbal markers and shifting signs.” As well, I particularly enjoyed the opening to his first response in “Groucho and Me,” an interview conducted by Robert Wood, in which Bernstein offers:

I only know what I think when I am in conversation. Conversation’s an art: my thinking comes alive in dialog. I don’t have doctrines or positions, I have modes of engagement, situational rejoinders, reaction deformations. It takes two to tangle, three to rumble, four to do the Brooklyn trot. I want my writing to dance to the changing beats of the house band.

There is an incredible amount of writing, thought, critical detail and response in this collection, assembling notes, longer essays, talks and conversations across some four hundred pages, the density of which cannot be overstated. If you want some of that serious play that the late Toronto poet bpNichol mentioned, this might be what he meant.

rob mclennan's blog

Monday, January 27, 2025

the above/ground press postal increase sale,

Sunday, January 26, 2025

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alice Fitzpatrick

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

happy thirty-third birthday sale, above/ground press! until Sept 1, 2026,

support rob's blog

i have a patreon! and two substacks! what!

edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026) : now available!

above/ground press 2026 subscriptions now available!

upcoming events!

other rob links

Blog Archive

editor/publisher

rob essays/reviews/articles

rob interviews

writer (etc) blogs i often read

other books/sections edited

Cauldron Books (rob mclennan, series editor)

some other lit sites worth reading

rob's audio/video

rob mclennan's blog

Monday, January 27, 2025

the above/ground press postal increase sale,

Sunday, January 26, 2025

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alice Fitzpatrick

Saturday, January 25, 2025

Charles Bernstein, The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays & Comedies

happy thirty-third birthday sale, above/ground press! until Sept 1, 2026,

support rob's blog

i have a patreon! and two substacks! what!

edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026) : now available!

above/ground press 2026 subscriptions now available!

upcoming events!

other rob links

Blog Archive

editor/publisher

rob essays/reviews/articles

subscribe to the weekly "Tuesday poem" email list!

rob interviews

writer (etc) blogs i often read

other books/sections edited

Cauldron Books (rob mclennan, series editor)

some other lit sites worth reading

rob's audio/video