12 or 20 questions: with Stephen Cain

Stephen Cain is the author of the poetry collections dyslexicon (Coach House, 1998), Torontology (ECW, 2001) and American Standard/ Canada Dry (Coach House, 2005). His first collection of micro-fiction was written with Jay MillAr and appeared as Double Helix (Mercury, 2006).

He was the literary editor of the Queen Street Quarterly from 1998-2005 and a fiction editor at Insomniac Press (2001-2006).

His academic writing has appeared in the journals Open Letter, Studies in Canadian Literature, and Canadian Literature, and as chapters in The Canadian Modernists Meet, Sound as Sense, and State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto. With Tim Conley he is the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages (Greenwood, 2006)

He spends far too much time commuting from High Park to York University, where he teaches Canadian and avant-garde literature.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

To be honest, there were several other things in my life that I’d anticipated for many years before they actually happened that were more rewarding. But yeah, it feels great to see your first book roll off the press and (in the case of dyslexicon) to trim and bind it yourself. Mostly what it showed me was that there’s more to the writing game than getting a book out—there’s waiting for the reviews, doing the promotion and tours, and dealing psychologically with the collective indifference that poetry is met with in our culture.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

About 15 years now, broken by a return residency in Kingston from 1999-2000.

I’ve written a book (ironically) titled Torontology, contributed to the uTOpia series, and have always found the city a huge inspiration.

Uh, yeah… but rob, this is crazy, why do you ask about race and gender within a question on geography?

3 - Where does a poem or piece of 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?

A poem usually begins with a title and a general idea of the form. Titles, for sure… I’ve still got a huge list of titles for poems that I’ve named, but haven’t written. I usually write in sequences, and usually with ten parts. Once two or three sequences have been composed I start thinking of them as being part of a book project, and consequently start shaping subsequent pieces with that in mind.

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

Definitely part. Almost all of my poems get their trial run at public readings, and I listen closely for audience reaction to help determine whether to keep or kill a piece or sequence.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

Absolutely.

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

I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to be read closely by an intelligent editor and, with all of my books, I’ve been lucky enough to work with several. That being said, I do find it silly to fight about “house style” issues, or debate about whether “a typical reader” (whoever that may be) will “get” a reference or need more explication of form/ process.

7 - After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Mid-career kinda sucks. No longer the new kid, and decades away from grey power. The writing may be better, and you may have more confidence, but it gets harder to generate excitement among whatever readership you may have with each new publication unless you’re doing something radically different. Hence my attempt to shift towards a poetics of engagement, as well as narrative prose, in the last while.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Easily my most hated fruit. Great if you want a pack of sugar with a mouthful of sand. I think I accidentally ate a piece of one about seven years ago when some chichi restaurant decided it would go well hidden in a grilled cheese sandwich.

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

Read more than you write. Write more than you publish.

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

Moving from criticism to poetry and back happens quite often—they really do feed into each other. Fiction, on the other hand, is a huge challenge, and I continually find I am deeply skeptical of narrative.

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 reserve the hours after 11 p.m. for writing. I usually carry a notebook throughout the day to jot down lines and ideas which gets pulled out at night.

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

In vino veritas.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? Howdoes it feel different?

My last two books were collaborations. So it feels nice to relinquish some hubris. Sharing the launch of a book with someone else is surprisingly fun—some pressure is taken away, and there’s someone you can commiserate with immediately.

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?

Did Dave really say that? I thought it was Barthes… maybe Kristeva?

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

bpNichol, Gertrude Stein, Chris Dewdney, Mina Loy, Jeff Derksen, Karen Mac Cormack, Ezra Pound, Nicole Brossard, Andre Alexis, Erin Moure, Kenny Goldsmith, Lisa Robertson, David McFadden, Lynn Crosbie, Steve McCaffery, Sharon Harris, Apollinaire, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Christian Bok, Virginia Woolf, bill bissett, Suzanne Zelazo, Robert Kroetsch, H.D., Bruce Andrews, Daphne Marlatt, James Joyce, Gail Scott, Guy Debord, Marjorie Perloff, Fred Wah.

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

Visit France. And Ireland too.

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 younot been a writer?

I don’t have the steadiest of hands, hate giving other people orders, dislike narrative, and almost never watch movies, yet, despite all that, I think I would have been a decent film director in a different life.

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

I think I often do something else than write.

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

Lately it’s more theory and criticism that excite me. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air by Marshall Berman was inspiring, and perhaps the best critical work I’ve read since Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible.

As I mentioned above, I almost never watch films. The last one I saw was about six months ago: Winterbottom’s adaptation of Tristram Shandy. I thought it was a noble enterprise and a pleasure to watch, although I don’t know if it qualifies as “great.”

20 - What are you currently working on?

A second draft of my novel. A new collection of poetry that I’m calling Post. A pataphysical anthology of early Canadian avant-garde poetry entitled Mortar, and a series of Situationist-style children’s poems called I Can Say Interpellation.

12 or 20 questions archive

Victor Coleman’s ICON TACT: Poems 1984 – 2001

With twelve years between his last trade collection and this one, you would perhaps think that the publication of a new book by Toronto poet and editor Victor Coleman would be more of an event, with the appearance of his ICON TACT: Poems 1984 – 2001 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2006). Largely run over and misunderstood by the literary powers that be, Coleman has certainly been involved with literary activity over the past near-decade and a half since his last major poetry collection, LAPSED W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978-89 (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 1994), including as coordinator of The Toronto Small Press Fair, founding editor of the revived Coach House Books in the late 1990s, and smaller publications through Coach House Books, above/ground press and BookThug, among other wisps of ephemera, and publication in various small magazines, anthologies and journals. For someone so active during the 1960s through the 1980s and beyond, as one of the original editors of the original Coach House Press, and silent editor of Raymond Souster’s New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (Toronto ON: Contact Press, 1966) to all the other things he ended up doing, one could easily ask, where has Victor Coleman been?

One of Canada’s essential cultural workers, it is almost as though the collapse of his involvement with the first Coach House seriously began to curtail his literary activities, and just at the point when he was about to embark in the most interesting work of his career so far, including publications such as Honeymoon Suite (Toronto ON: Underwhich Editions, 1990), The day they stole the Coach House Press (Toronto ON: Eternal Network, 1994), Icon Tact (Toronto ON: The Eternal Network, 1996), LETTER DROP (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1999), Eulogistics (published as STANZAS #20; Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999), Moon Over Viagra (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2002) and MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2005), and even an earlier version of the collection that appeared as ICON TACT [POEMS 1985-94] by InstaBook in 2002.

Through his references to old poet-friends (whether in the poems or acknowledgements), Coleman ties himself to the past, but somehow his work isn’t necessarily tied to that past (working the tact of his own iconography), as in this poem for the late poet Paul Haines (father of musician Emily, from the band Metric, editor Stuart Broomer recently put together an edition of Haines’ works as the collection Secret Carnival Workers: Paul Haines):

FOR PAUL HAINES

Tapes, like notebooks
have no taboos

no Network executive interference
just the honest crackle

of state-of-the-home equipment
in a little Ontario town

where French
is taught by Paul.

Women inspire me!
But they don’t let me write.

It costs more
to call Kingston

than to call
New York, New Jersey & New Haven

Mercy! Whatever happened
to the distance crossed?

Fenelon Falls
but the Fall Assizes.

The collection also includes his infamous (and often-reprinted) piece “The Day They Stole The Coach House Press,” that came out of the shifting of the press in the 1980s, a shift that eventually meant a departure from the “old-style” collective, as well as the Press becoming a separate unit from Stan Bevington’s Coach House Printing (once the “Press” died, a new company continuing the values of the old emerged back at the old Coach House behind Huron Street into Coach House Books, thanks to Bevington and Coleman, among others). The poem itself includes the emotionally-wrought stanza:

The order of the day was ‘cut your origins,’
or ‘remove the dead wood of the past,’
a lasting legacy that wouldn’t go away
even when part of it died. Complicit,
the elixir of greed had crept under the skin
of the interlopers, some of whom
had come on board to make careers.

There is no mistaking the intent in a poem that includes “The enemies of poetry stole the Coach House Press” or the heartbreakingly raw couplet, “Nothing could be more empty / than the body: poetry.” As well as that poem, the collection includes Coleman’s “Moon Over Viagra,” as well as the “Eulogistics” series that originally appeared as a whole in STANZAS magazine (reprinted in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993-2003). Another extremely strong sequence (a form Coleman seems to favour), it pairs up the living with the dead, such as in a poem for Greg Curnoe, referencing his widow, Sheila, Daniel Jones, referencing Nicky Drumbolis, Gwendolyn MacEwen, referencing Rosemary Sullivan, or this one for Frank Zappa, referencing Ottawa poet/publisher (and Zappa fan/collector) jwcurry:

A WAKE FOR ZAPPA

dear jw

O’Hara is dying in the dunes
Guitar the axe of apes
Tropes assigned their millennia
Billions of dollars in debt
Florid pillars of regret
Big boogies behind the weather
Following the head that cried melody
Or calling the siblings dirty names
Carving a mythology of sonic boomers
Including both waffle and vacuum
Into whom won’t two go?
There’s a seam in seamless
and it’s always crooked
From walking that way to the bank
Of the River of No Return

Written in couplets, with much the same feeling as the poems in Eulogistics, I am disappointed that the poems that make up LETTER DROP (originally published with a series of drawings by painter David Bolduc) and MI SING: LETTER DROP 2 didn’t make it into this collection, and wonder at the reasons why; is it simply a matter of space, attention or something further? With the poems in this collection, it’s obvious that Coleman is interested in the twist and the pun, working language in that “serious play” that bpNichol so often talked about, but what is it about the “I/eye” that keeps coming up in Coleman’s pieces? From his 1960s poetry journal Is (or, “eyes”), to the obvious penis reference from his first book one/eye/love (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1967)? (We won’t even begin to discuss the ejaculation blurry close-up shot inside his Stranger collection from 1974, or all the penis artwork otherwise in the collection.)

It does become interesting that Coleman has an ongoing interest in structuring his collections through these notions of time, as opposed to highlighting some of the other structures he has worked over the years, telling us in the title what years the poems were worked on, from his Old Friends’ Ghosts: Poems 1963-68 (Toronto ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to From the Dark Wood (poems, 1977-83) (Toronto ON: Underwhich Editions, 1985), his LAPSED W.A.S.P.: Poems 1978-89 and even his Open Letter issue, Seventh Series, No. 4: Winter 1988-89, “Victor Coleman: a selection of art writing and literary commentary 1966-83,” edited by bpNichol. Whatever else you might think or have thought of his poetry (Coleman has the distinct honour of being the only poet removed from Gary Geddes’ infamous 15 Canadian Poets series), is the openness of his work, the open-ended seriality of where Coleman’s poems go that give them their strength; Coleman’s poems have never been afraid to look you directly in the eye, and managed to bore a hole through both individuals, the watcher and the watched. Not about the “I” as such, but about the singular gaze.

related post: Victor Coleman's "12 or 20" interview

the power to bend spoons; interviews with Canadian novelists, ed. Bev Daurio

At the Mercury Press launch earlier this week, I was able to pick up a copy of the power to bend spoons; interviews with Canadian novelists, ed. Bev Daurio (Toronto ON: The Mercury Press, 1998). An interesting companion piece to the Dream Elevators book they did two years later, interviewing Canadian poets (both of which were on the book table at the event, but no-one actually purchased), there simply aren’t enough opportunities for good interviews out there in Canadian literature anymore; am I just looking in the wrong places? In this collection, the interviews collected come from the now-defunct Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review that Daurio used to publish, with reviews, essays and fiction by, and interviews with, Canadian writers (at one point even edited by the infamous Daniel Jones), with contributions by Jeannette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, Dionne Brand, Nicole Brossard, Carole Corbeil, Frank Davey, Timothy Findley, Douglas Glover, Janette Turner Hospital, Joy Kogawa, Steve McCaffery, Michael Ondaatje, Althea Prince, Nino Ricci, Mordecai Richler, Veronica Ross, Gail Scott, Makeda Silvera, Audrey Thomas, Lola Lemire Tostevin, Jane Urquhart and M.G. Vassanji. As editor Daurio writes in her introduction:

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK is borrowed from the title of the first piece in culture critic Frank Davey’s essay collection, Canadian Literary Power. Davey, in turn, was quoting bpNichol:

… all we have is the power to bend spoons…

which presents a complicated, metaphysical view of what writing can do. Is fiction an illusion, a complex of insiders’ prestidigitory tricks? Or is writing actually a strange, dirigible force, the focus of winds of ideas and emotions that must be reckoned with in the real world? Here is Frederick Philip Grove, one of Canada’s most mysterious modernist novelists, describing quite definitely what he believes about fiction:

Novel[s]… deal with socially significant things from the main stream of life… both characters and happenings must be more or less typical for a given society. They must be normal, natural growth of given conditions actually existing in our midst. In reading them, we must be living the lives depicted as if they were our own.
[emphasis in original] (“The Novel,” It Needs to be Said, 1929)

Trends and attitudes may dive and flutter, but a country’s literature is built, layer by layer, over time. The Canadian novel, from its beginnings in the disguised-identity story Wacousta (1832), trudges across the landscape of a fairly dreary hundred-and-twenty years until it meets the magic of Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), the novel that dug out the last roots from the colonial tree and liberated Canadian fiction, at last, to begin to become itself. Although the Canadian novel wobbled in the interim, from the wonderous (Sharon Riis’ The True Story of Ida Johnson, for example) to the unambiguously stilted and tenebrous (Auntie High Over the Barley Mow, a scraggly fat volume from the 1970s McClelland and Stewart lists is surely down with the lows of this period), it was around 1990 that the Canadian novel seemed to solidify in presence and strength. Suddenly, a selection of powerful, varied novels was being published every year. (pp 7-8)

To look back over the past ten or twenty years of Canadian publishing, especially for literature not entirely in the mainstream, is to realize just what kind of effort and effect Mercury editor/publisher Bev Daurio has been making since merging with Glynn Davies’ Aya Press (founded in 1978) in 1985, and has provided some rare lines of continuity that don’t often appear in small Canadian publishing, especially for a “small” literary publisher (Karl Siegler at Talonbooks since 1972 providing a rare exception), and even to look at simply the anthologies that Daurio herself has edited over the years seem to provide an impressive list of books that help to build a kind of infrastructure around the culture of the individual book and further into the conversation of writing and books, from Love and Hunger: New Fiction (1987), Ink and Strawberries: Quebec Women’s Fiction (with Luise von Flotow, 1988), Vivid: Stories by Five Women (1989), Sex: An Anthology (with Anna Rumley; 2000) to the brand-new The Closets of Time: A New Fiction Anthology (with Richard Truhlar; The Mercury Press, 2007). Although with only three titles of her own over the years, from her Justice: Fictions & Prose Poems (ST. Catharines ON: Moonstone Press, 1988), Hell & Other Novels (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1990) and single poetry collection If Summer Had a Knife (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 1987), will we ever seem more writing out of Bev Daurio?

One of the interviews I found particularly interesting was with Toronto writer Michael Ondaatje, that appeared in Paragraph: The Canadian Fiction Review in 1990, putting it almost directly between his In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and The English Patient (1992). Considering my own personal interest in working the lyric novel, as well as my preference for Ondaatje’s earlier works (pre-The English Patient), I find it extremely compelling to hear the uncertainty in his voice, given the strengths of his books The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1970), Coming Through Slaughter (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1976), Running in the Family (1982) and In the Skin of a Lion.

CARY FAGAN: Looking back at the novels, it’s possible to see a progression in the use of historical material. Billy the Kid is a collage, but that same kind of material gets more and more assimilated into the books by the time of In the Skin of a Lion.

MICHAEL ONDAATJE: Yeah, with each book I’ve felt more confident with how I’ve put everything into the text. In the first book I had no concept of form. I wrote poetry. I wrote prose. I had photographs. I was very involved with the shaping of the thing, but that came later. What happened with In the Skin of a Lion was that I had enough of a voice to incorporate all the bits and pieces. It’s not a feeling of assurance because I don’t really have that. I felt very nervous and tentative when I was shaping the book. In In the Skin of a Lion I wanted a kind of seamlessness, because there are so many shifts and characters, a voice to reach over the gaps. And partly because it’s more historically set around us, as opposed to a fantasy or something like that. It had to be more believable.

Another fragment that gave me pause was at the beginning of the interview Janieta Eyre conducted with Marie-Claire Blais, originally published in 1995:

EYRE: I’m curious to know what your feelings are about Quebec-Canada relations. Do you consider yourself a separatist?

BLAIS: As an artist, I’m wary of any kind of fanaticism. I think we have to be careful not to become too nationalistic, as this is often our problem. If independence is the democratic wish, it will have to be so. My real concern, however, is the fate of our artists. Will we take care of them? This worries me a great deal because at the moment much-needed funds for all kinds of cultural activities are being cut. And as a writer, I think we need writers, painters, and musicians in the same way we need food. I think it’s important to recognize that it is artists who are making the future, although the only people we talk about are our politicians. Politicians are not that interesting. They make too much money, they don’t care about the poor or about the ethnic preoccupations of this country. Which is why it would be tragic if artists were stripped of their voices. In the time of Mr. Lévesque, we had a voice. He thought we were interesting. In the time of Mr. Trudeau, we had a voice. He thought that artists were important to this country. But now there is this indifference being shown towards the culture of our country.

EYRE: But hasn’t this disinterest in culture always been true of Canada? Culture has never been important to Canadians and their sense of identity.

BLAIS: I was at a Canadian Studies conference in Italy a few weeks ago with some other writers from Quebec and Canada. Many Canadian artists were thinking as I do, that we are in the background. But they thought also that it has always been like that. It is often when we go abroad that we really complain about this. In Venice, it was interesting to see that the Italian public was very interested in Timothy Findley, Susan Swan, and the rest of us. Many people came out to our readings, listened to us and indicated they wanted to translate our work. It’s all around that we see this interest in our culture, and I think it’s important to take pride in it. A writer is a kind of ambassador, a poor one but one with a great vision, great insight. It’s strange
that in Europe they understand this, but we don’t here yet.

related notes: Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers by Janice Williamson; poets talk, conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy;

some brief thoughts about the short novel

I’ve been thinking more about the short novel lately, especially since I’ve got one coming out in a few days, and part of what I want to accomplish during my tenure at this University of Alberta is a) working on my “big” novel (a hundred single-spaced pages if I’m lucky) and b) re-conceptualizing another shorter novel for editor/publisher Bev Daurio at Mercury Press to consider (or, re-consider). One thing I’ve gone through lately is Kristjana Gunnars' [see her 12 or 20 interview here] essay “On Writing Short Books” from her Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2004). I’m quite a fan of her lyric novels and really think she should write more (I think the same of Aritha Van Herk, down in Calgary), and take great comfort in the fact that her examples of what great fiction is (or at least, fiction that for whatever reason I keep returning to) has a number of the writers I would include on a similar list (Milan Kundera, Robert Kroetsch, Elizabeth Smart and Paul Auster, for example, as well as Alessandro Baricco’s brilliant novel Silk). She writes:

Robert Kroetsch approaches the idea of the novel as something that “can” be done when talking about Margaret Lawrence’s long novel The Diviners to illustrate something similar to what Stoppard is suggesting. The novel starts off with Morag the novelist going to her typewriter to write a long novel, only to find that her daughter Pique has run away from home and typed a goodbye note on the blank sheet of paper in the typewriter. Pique has written one paragraph. After receiving this paragraph, Morag writes a long novel responding to her daughter’s departure. To Kroetsch, however, it is Pique’s paragraph that is the real novel. Morag, instead, is really writing a long footnote, which could, as footnotes go, be without end (Kroetsch 148-56). Everything the mother goes on to say has already been implied in the daughter’s one-paragraph “novel.”

What I like is how her essay deals with the often-suggestion of the short novel as being some sort of “failure.” I have always preferred the short novel; not just as a writer but as a reader. There is something about the English tradition of the wordy and massive novel that just doesn’t sit right with me, the physically-descriptive tome that simply doesn’t appeal. I know what a tree looks like; do I need an author to describe a tree to me, unless it is actually essential to the story? No one walks down the street saying to themselves: “My hair is brown. I am wearing green pants.” So then, why would it be added in as description?

The only longer novel I can even think of that I actually thought every word and every page was absolutely essential was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. I couldn’t imagine reducing it by even a single word. Further in the essay, Gunnars goes on to write:

What these comments on the short book by various writers suggests is that the short book, regardless of its overt “genre,” tends toward the fragmented, the poetic, and the theoretical. The brevity of the work, if it is not more than a hundred and fifty pages, for example, creates a pressure on its author to make each page worthwhile. The silence itself, which occurs between fragments, needs to become eloquent. For many, it is the eloquence of everything, from the sentences to the margins to the spaces between paragraphs, that constitutes the challenge and the appeal of the short book. The short book has in common with poetry that it can be read more than once and, in fact, is meant to be read again. Unlike the very long novel, which can be very long only if each word is not too intense, the short book does not need to be “consumed” as a consumer item. So the shelf life of the short book ought to be much longer. When publishers and bookstores and distributors treat the brief, intensely written narrative as if it were a novel, they are depriving the short book of its essential benefit. It is difficult, for example, to think of Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, which is an example of the brief, intensely written, poetic narrative I am talking about here, as having any kind
of “shelf life” in a market economy. Such a book has to be lived with rather than simply read and put aside for the next one.

Further into more general considerations of the novel, last night (at the Garneau Pub; where else?) reading Philip Roth’s interview with Milan Kundera, circa 1980, from his Shop Talk: A Writer and his Colleagues and their Work (New York NY: Vintage, 1991):

Kundera: As far as my own quite personal aesthetic judgment goes, it really is a novel, but I have no wish to force this opinion on anyone. There is enormous freedom latent within the novelistic form. It is a mistake to regard a certain stereotyped structure as the inviolable essence of the novel.

Roth: Yet surely there is something that makes a novel a novel and that limits this
freedom.

Kundera: A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. By the term synthetic I have in mind the novelist’s desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness. Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historical fact, flight of fantasy—the synthetic power of the novel is capable of combining everything into a unified whole like the voices of polyphonic music. The unity of a book need not stem from the plot but can be provided by the theme. In my latest book there are two such themes: laughter and forgetting.

But these are all just brief notes, written on the fly. Hopefully, when I have more time, I can sit down and write further on this.

related notes: three novels: on writing fiction ; anything from Kate Sutherland's blog

readings in edmonton (again); the past few days

Part of what I’m really enjoying about my time in Edmonton is the fact that author readings are happening pretty regularly, and usually just a floor above my office, where I seem to spend most of my time.

Tuesday, October 30; Elizabeth Bachinsky

It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard Vancouver poet Elizabeth Bachinsky read [see my review of her book; see my review of her second book]; part of her trip to Edmonton was to interact with Jars Balan and Myrna Kostash [see my note on Myrna Kostash here], to do research and ask questions about a non-fiction project she’s working on regarding her Ukrainian background. She read from both her published collections and some new work as well, which was pretty entertaining, and talked about working her poems within constraint, whether the structural procedures from her bookthug collection, or the more traditionally formal models from her nightwood edition book.

And then we had dinner and talked about absolutely everything (but I couldn’t get her to come out to the Garneau Pub after).

Tuesday, November 6; Gary Geddes

When I was seventeen years old, growing up in that old Glengarry, Gary Geddes was the first “real writer” I’d ever met, and now, here I am, writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta some thirty years after he did the same (he was the second, after Matt Cohen). It was very good, admittedly, to see him again, since he was quite good to me in my late teens and early twenties, back before I knew what the hell was going on (now I’m pretty sure I have no idea; back then, I still thought I could figure it all out).

While here, Geddes read from his new collection falsework (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2007), a “documentary poem” about a bridge disaster in Vancouver in 1958, when the “Second Narrows Bridge collapsed while under construction.” Geddes’ book writes the story of the ironworkers who were killed, and of those who were left behind to deal with the mess.

Widow’s Talk

Saints, onions, synaptic leaps, the expression
of grief impossible. Accusatory looks.

I disappear into the woodwork, incapable
of playing the stricken widow. Anger

looks back at me from the bathroom
mirror, a patina of toothpaste, tiny

food particles. Bastard, how dare you?
You’re not Christ, you can’t walk

on water. I’m at the counter peeling onions,
asking the blessed Virgin, my hand

shaking, to forgive me. Male bonding,
shit! Beers at the Cecil. I’d rather

be married to a live plumber than a dead
ironworker. Freckles, halo, summer.

After the reading, I asked him why, since he seems to like narrative, story and doing research, he hasn’t written fiction or more non-fiction (the book was even performed by actors around the time it was released)? He talked about how he doesn’t understand why writers keep wanting to remove story from the poem; it wasn’t like that for the epic poems of Chaucer!

I bit my tongue, knowing I had plenty of things to say about that; Chaucer certainly didn’t have CNN, fiction, non-fiction, daily newspapers, all the outlets that now provide for what used to all be part of and the function of poetry. With all those things stripped away, poetry must do something else; I mean, how could it not be otherwise?

Tuesday, November 6; Paul Pearson, Marita Dachsel, Jonathan Meakin + Christine A. Stewart

You know you missed a good reading, the first in a series of events I’ve got planned at the “underdog,” the space underneath The Black Dog on Whyte Avenue. Scheduled as the Edmonton launch of the newest issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club, each reader managed to give the audience something that they might not have otherwise been expecting [see Marita’s 12 or 20 interview here; see my review of her first book]. Pearson gave a couple of pieces for his late mother and his late mother-in-law, and the first one was magnificent (even if he read it a bit too quickly); there was something there I wanted to savour. And I’m amazed at the almost matter-of-fact deliberateness of Christine Stewart’s poems [see her 12 or 20 here]. As she said, her poems have moved from definition to description, and the poems she read, come out of her daily commute through the Mill Creek Ravine, were utterly magnificent. She reads again, apparently, at the Olive Reading Series on December 11th at Hulbert’s.

Mundis:

Mundis is abandoning function. Seductive, it does not know. Seen, unseen. It is dream-shit. Dream delicate war repeating actual as event. As if ridiculous. But suffering. Furnish this present, furnish those who murder with place. Research of acceptance in place.
Mundis is flat, unflattened, un-flat. Automatic: an incurious close and worldly work. Mundis is blind release, but familiar. Lovely. Stasis and intimate in Mundis thousands dead and filling. Not minding suffering. Not minding being. In also suffering. Minding. Wanting. (from TAXONOMY)

With Black Dog manager Chad’s help, now toying with doing something potentially monthly down there, which would be pretty cool.

Wednesday, November 7; Cara Hedley + Jessica Westhead

The two Coach House girls are floating around the country doing readings for their first novels (they went to Calgary the following morning); was good to finally hear them both read, especially since they read in Ottawa the same day as the small press book fair! A block away, and I couldn’t hear them read (cuz I was still at the fair); am looking forward to getting into their books. The narratives for both seem pretty straight, but funny in parts.

And then at the bar afterwards on 104th Avenue, to see a photo of Cara Hedleys’ great-great grandfather on the wall? Apparently he was part of the Canadian hockey team outta Winnipeg (made up all of Icelandic immigrants) who ended up winning the first Olympic gold medal for hockey for Canada! How bizarre; how does one drink in a bar under that? Even more that Hedley’s novel was about women’s hockey; in hindsight, everyone agreed it would have been pretty cool to have had her novel launch there instead of at the bookstore…

And now: I’m off to Toronto for my novel launch; will I see you there? Although it means I’ll be missing the Michael Trussler reading here in the department the next day (I’ll still be on an airplane)

ongoing notes -- the ottawa small press book fair

How does one even begin to explain these photographs (courtesy of Jordan Fry)? Let’s just say you missed a damn good small press book fair, and an even better after-party…

Ottawa ON: Being that he was last year’s winner of the John Newlove Poetry Award (as judged by Erin Mouré), Bywords.ca recently launched Roland Prevost’s first chapbook, Metafizz (Ottawa ON: A Bywords Publication). I’ve been enjoying watching Prevost’s poetry develop over the past two years, watching him engage in that “serious play” of writing poems.

precedents

not just the crook but the crime, never apprehended
in human equivalent chrysalis years, sooner charges laid

a wasp’s nest, grey paper long abandoned, on embers flashes
after the flames, a silence as empty, flecks spirals up

tomorrow, we’re told, a slight drizzling rain
will ride in on an unusual south-easter

Here’s what Mouré said about Prevost’s prize-winning poem, “at the pizzeria : 100% real juice”: “a poem that makes its references deft and plays in language in a kind of delight, without complicating thoughts on behalf of the reader or steering the reader or telling the reader what to think… which leaves space for the reader to be delighted too. Tis a poem that is fully realized: intention and execution coincide.” [note that Prevost reads at the Sasquatch Reading Series in Ottawa on November 25]

[l-r (foreground) Colin Martin, jwcurry]

Calgary AB: Now that he lives in Montreal, former Calgarian Colin Martin was able to come visit us during our little fair, and handed me the first three issues of his NōD, fall 2005-spring 2006, produced by the English Literature Student’s Society at the University of Calgary. I’ve only been hearing about this little mag since it was invented, but had never actually seen copies before. An attractive journal, NōD is perfect-bound, and the first three issues include work both text and visual-based by a whole slew of the Calgary crew and beyond, including derek beaulieu, Jonathan Ball, Jordan Nail, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Monique Fournier, Anne Burke, ryan fitzpatrick, Peter Norman, Louise Bak, Myna Wallin, Daniel Scott Tysdal, Ken Kalman, Aaron Giovannone, Brea Burton, Chris Ewart, Christopher Blais, Christian Bök, Melanie Faith and Lawrence Upton. Some of the visual translations are particularly interesting (but I won’t tell you by who, just to be difficult); NōD provides an interesting intersection with what other publications in Calgary have been doing over the past few years, including that dANDelion and filling Station.

Between Cotton and Candy

I hate cigarettes; I like boxes.
Fluffy grain dig botox crosswalk face.

I hate janitors; I like white bread.
Torrid argyle crapshoot candy floss.

I hate pants; I like requirement.
Cracker conduction polio aisle Volvo.

I hate bondage; I like Diet Coke.
Drunk custom vinyl hedonist candy apple.

I hate ethnic; I like orange drink.
Comp boot frosting opaque processed. (ryan fitzpatrick, issue #1)

Apparently they still exist, and you can even subscribe (or submit); write them c/o ELSS, University of Calgary, Department of English, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary AB T2T 1N4 or email them at elss@ucalgary.ca

Crush

Your smile is deaf sweetly.
May ingenious creativity
sprouting out of your hands
tickle oddly muted lusts and perfect stares.
Milk-tantra brownnose
Circum to a riot of pleasure
Cacophony wriggles
beats to the heart pulling tug-of-war
thoughts. (Danielle Arsenault, issue #2)


[Colin Martin]

Toronto ON: For some reason, Nathaniel G. Moore came to the ottawa small press book fair in a black cape, fake black fur cap/ears and face painted like a cat. Why, I asked him? Because I’m on vacation, he said. He sold more books than most of us, and handed out two poems, “Sand People, Single File” and “Elegiac Reaction.” [see my review of his poetry collection here; or his 12 or 20 interview]

SAND PEOPLE, SINGLE FILE

flickers of porcelain in water
alludes to crane of neck
a glistening recession

a mud mask
a flask of hope

someone taps us on the
shore using rustic
love-coloured pebbles

what did they cover those
elephants with anyway
clogging the rest of our
afternoon with rashes

eyelashes, rehabilitate in
the lintless sun, not much to
see out here anyway

I was born here remember
you’re going to die here

convenient you say:

protect pigments nurture figments

embellish the grain, we negotiate
a textured fear, sarlacc because its familiar

force famine suntan over-easy
pigments mint, medium rare,
harvest erotic balm, digestive hum:

fear more than the pit of our stomachs
we do

[l-r; jwcurry's shoulder, NG Moore's flailing, Jennifer Mulligan]

Vancouver BC: Pooka Press publisher Warren Fulton made it out to the second ottawa small press book fair in a row, after an absence of over a decade; do you even want to know what he’s been doing since (some of it include chapbooks, broadsides and film production)? Part of what his Pooka has been participating in has been a series of single-page broadsides, produced in an edition of 100 copies; part of what makes the series fun is that he asks for photo booth photos from the author to include as part of it, and he even produces it in full colour! The most recent one I saw was from Amanda Earl [apparently she, as bywords, and Warren are both participating in this weekend’s Toronto Small Press Book Fair].

tell me the difference
more of us is fools
more of us is angels
known to be angels

crumbs for the city birds
this isn’t avarice it’s realism
pouring through me like holy water
the liquor is strong

sun shadows these pages
where you’ll find the spirit
sitting here the morning after saturday night
i’ve got words & you won’t like ‘em

their eyes try to make beggars of us all
too hot for their hands
fancy cameras Styrofoam cups
why won’t these tourists move

queen of the shopping carts
saint ursula they call me
i can do
just about the most holy thing

drinking guinness on a sunday morning

[l-r; Colin Martin's profile, Warren Fulton's scowl & Montreal writer (& state senator) Jeffrey Mackie]

Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay wins the Giller Prize

Easily one of the nicest writers around (even nicer than Andrew Pyper, if you can imagine), Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay won the Scotiabank Giller Prize last night in Toronto, for her third novel, Late Nights on Air (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2007). Wonderful, and so well deserved! But does this mean, with two GG nominations sans win (so far), and now a Giller under her belt, I can't call her "GiGi" anymore?




See my "12 or 20" interview with Elizabeth Hay here.

12 or 20 questions: with Anne Stone

Anne Stone has taught creative writing at Capilano College and at Concordia University. She is an editor at Matrix Magazine, and has an imprint at Insomniac Press (Wayside Editions) that focuses on publishing first fictions (this month saw the release of Louis Rastelli's debut novel, A Fine Ending). Together with Amber Dean, she's guest editor of the current special issue of the journal West Coast Line on representations of murdered and missing women. Her latest novel, Delible (Insomniac Press, April 2007), tells the story of Melora Sprague, a 15-year-old girl whose sister has gone missing. This novel offers a glimpse into a sustained experience of uncertainty and, in so doing, explores how our identities exist in those traces we leave behind.

Her first novel, jacks (DC Books 1998), is experimental, conveying aspects of the story through the book's design. Part fictional memoir and part fairy-tale, jacks tells the story of a young girl whose fabulated world is an interlacing of myths, rhymes, incantations and memories. Her second novel, Hush (Insomniac Press 1999), is set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. This lyrical narrative traces the intertwined lives of two generations of women at a local hotel in De'ath Sound. In 2005, Hush was the subject of a Masters of Arts in English (Julie Boulanger's "What Language is this: A Study of Abjection in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Anne Stone's Hush").

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It meant a lot to see that project given tangible form. That's something I'll always be grateful to DC Books for (though it did come awful close to having a clown's head on the cover). I consider first books to be small miracles; I think about the way they are produced and it's amazing to me, such work, without any hint (most times) that there is anyone out there listening.

2 - How long have you lived in Vancouver, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Vancouver since 2000. As for geography, it's not landscape so much as the cultural threading of this place that influences my work; the biggest connection, of course, is with absence, with disappearance, and with the shape my theoretical concerns and writing practice has taken these last years (though that work did begin when I was in Montreal). Race and gender make impacts as well, of course, in all of our works, whether we think about how we are positioned or not.

3 - Where does a piece of 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?

I always think in terms of longer projects -- if only because I need to form a kind of theoretical backcloth for the fiction, one which seeps into the surface -- and so far, longer narrative has offered me the scope to do both of these things at once.

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

Other people's readings are part of my creative process, for sure. My own tend to be a distraction, though do I see readings as a moment in which I can understand how the work is received -- and that's a rare experience for a writer -- to watch it taken in.

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

An editor offers a formalization of a certain kind of conversation, I think. I worked with an editor on Delible, with Jon Paul Fiorentino, an amazing writer, organizer, and poet. It was very much of a piece with the conversations I'd had and been having with a small circle of writers with whom I share my writing and writing concerns -- only more instilled, condensed -- so I really appreciated the opportunity to work with Jon. The previous two books were without formal editors (though, with my first book, Robert Majzels was incredibly generous with his time, and gave me an in-depth reading of jacks that really clarified my thinking).

6 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

In certain ways, it's just as hard. You still need to search for the precise form for a given project, and you always start at sum zero. But it's easier in other ways. I've come to accept that, before I find a project, I'll noodle a lot. Too, I now have a sense of the minimum density required for a serious project. That said, at this moment I'm noodling, and while I love the feeling of being onto something you can't quiet articulate yet, I'm already hungry for the feeling of total emersion in something, that filter that announces itself in all of your predilections, what you hunt out to read, to see, to hear.

7 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Years. Years and years. I guess I'm not much of a pear freak.

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

If needed, to create the context for the work to be read, along with the work itself. When reading with other folks, to be gracious enough not to go over your allotted time (nothing worse than listening to someone whose work you like go on for so long you begin to resent them). Too, in the early stages, to protect your project: To write for your first circle, for those real or imagined intimates who, early on, regard your work in a sustaining way.

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

Hmm. Interesting. In my thinking, genres are a means. By this question, I might address moving from poetry to prose, but more relevant to me, I guess, is the movement, between the novels. There have been huge shifts in concerns and for me, that's all about finding a form (perspective, language, etc) that somehow distills the particular kind of knowing that a given novel embodies.

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?

Noodling is, for me, the most undisciplined part of the process (sort of like being a teenager: I follow impulses). As soon as I'm onto something, I always spend the last hour of each day on something related -- rereading draft, reading related works -- feeding, basically. The next morning, I'm up and re-reading the last thing I wrote, combing through until I snag on something, a small space opens up, and that crevice becomes a chapter. Novel writing as fractal process.

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

Everywhere, everything. Visual and auditory arts. The street corner. Voices on the bus. I'm just a giant sponge, ruminating all the time.

12 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

This latest book makes the most feints at straight narrative: It passes for or approaches mainstream fiction, but frustrates expectations when it comes to resolution and movement. Delible is in some ways the most linear and straightforward of my works, less coded. That, for me, felt like a real risk. But an important one.

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?

For the latest, Delible, the visual arts were huge. I looked to the work of Doris Salcedo, her installation "Unland." The hinging of the two tables with human hair, for me, communicated something about the sisters I write about in the novel, something about fragility, and the danger of being approached, of being seen. Or, to invert that, when you come close to Salcedo's work, close enough to really see it, you put her piece at risk. There is something incredibly perceptive and powerful about all of her works, something that speaks forward, from its moment of construction, to the transient moment in which you are, right now, seeing her work.

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

The one thing I really want to see (and hear): the northern lights.

15 - 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 like to be a mathematician.

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

It's something I've always done to make sense of the world, though it never occurred to me that it was my practice: Someone else had to point it out to me. As soon as it was pointed out though, something clicked: I dropped out of law school and started writing a novel. (I had to spend three days considering my life from the perspective of geological eras in order to quit. Good thing U of T law school is so close to the dinousaur exhibit at the ROM).

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

I love the short experimental films of Maya Deren (the ones that are less laden with symbols). The dreamy weightiness articulated through musculature, the repetitions, the craggy breaths. I love the work of Salcedo: Again, the weight of concrete, the sublime 'wrongness' of the images -- a lace blouse 'floating' in concrete, or enmeshed with furniture. Absolutely and beautifully awry. In terms of writing, I am very much about the kinds of questions David Chariandy poses in his first novel, Soucouyant -- about interruption, memory, what we carry there, and absence. For similar reasons, I am excited to see Jenny Sampirisi's first novel in print (it'll be released next September from Insomniac Press).

18 - What are you currently working on?

I've just returned to grad school after 10 years as a teacher. So, I'm taking Criminology at SFU and working on a book length non-fiction project about missing women. At the same time, I am making forays into longer fiction pieces (waiting for one to gather up enough weight to announce that it owns me for the next five to ten years).

12 or 20 questions archive

ongoing notes; notes & more notes

Here's a photo of me in the West Edmonton Mall with David McGimpsey (left) and documentary filmmaker Andrew Bee in 1998 (courtesy of Sean Wilson/the ottawa international writers festival); I don't even want to tell you the rest. Photos forthcoming from my most recent Mall adventures, I swear...

Can you believe that Sina Queyras/lemonhound is up to 1,000 blog entries? Have you seen Edmonton poet Shawna Lemay’s new blog? Australian online mag Jacket has just posted three poems by John Newlove and the afterward by Jeff Derksen from Chaudiere Book’s new John Newlove selected (now available through bookstores and/or directly through me).


The same issue even has a Quebec section, including poems (not necessarily new) by the late Artie Gold, D.G. Jones (I got a letter from him today), Jon Paul Fiorentino, David McGimpsey and Erin Moure.


There’s a new chapbook publisher in Edmonton; looking forward to seeing what she ends up doing with it. Do you see all the stuff I’ve been missing lately in Ottawa, here and here and here? At least there are some other things here in Edmonton to keep me entertained, etcetera, including the Coach House launch this week. Will I see you at the Peter F. Yacht Club event in Edmonton tomorrow night (apparently Gary Geddes is reading around here tomorrow afternoon), or the big Mercury Launch in Toronto a week later (for, among other things, me first novel)?


Or George Bowering reading at the Olive Reading Series a week after that? He'll even have a new chapbook or two, including one from Jenna Butler's Rubicon Press...


And then this guy has been in my Ottawa apartment for over a week...

edmonton: first snow

Today the first snow in Edmonton; waking up to a layer of snow, though less cold than it seemed to be yesterday.

Reading Ottawa-born & raised Elizabeth Smart’s journals from her time in Edmonton as writer-in-residence here [referenced, too, in my “anticipating Alberta” piece]; why did she hate her experience so much? I mean, apart from the fact that her youngest child, Rose, had killed herself six months earlier… is she complaining abt the provincialism of the city or using that as her target, unable to process Rose any other way?

To think! I was going to enrich their lives & I find myself poverty-stricken. A desert within, a desert without. Needing them—if only they’d take pity on—where can I find it—where is it hiding—the passion & the life.

Instead of the garden, what? (I’d hoped for the Wild)

Instead of friends? (Kind acquaintance? very different)

Instead of big resolving tension drinks? ( a civilized sip, stopped before one gets anywhere?)

Why is this Hell--& how shall I get out of it?

These terrible high-rises & fearsome geometry—not the breathtaking arrogance of N.Y. skyscrapers--& the muddy (but dried mud) parking lots--& the dominance of cars & the endless flat pavements, wide uneventful roads.

It stands to reason, there must be a pulsing human life somewhere, here as elsewhere, there must be. Does it take place in their homes—visiting back & forth, tiny exchanges, boring each other for a purpose?

O where for me shall my salvation come, from whence arise? (September 12, 1982)

How different from her By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept; did you ever read that book I told you to?

Last night sitting at the Garneau Pub, I read two paragraphs in Linda Goyette and Carolina Jakeway Roemmich’s Edmonton In Our Own Words (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2004) that explain a bit of the car/mall culture of the city (triggered by yesterday's visit to the mall, my first in nine years), something I’ve been wondering about for a few years:

From the beginning West Edmonton Mall attracted international tourists and startled debate among Canada’s architects and city planners about the evolution of urban space in a materialist culture. Commercial enterprises and their customers began another exodus from the city’s downtown core; homebuyers followed them to the new suburban housing developments in the city’s southwest corner. West Edmonton Mall eventually employed 23,500 people directly and thousands more indirectly in the local hospitality, tourism and construction industries. The mall put an overwhelming commercial stamp on Edmonton’s urban identity. With a reputation as a shoppers’ paradise, the city became a testing ground for North American retailers who built some of the first and largest big-box stores in Edmonton and huge retail parks on acres of asphalt parking lots. Thousands of visitors came only to shop in Edmonton. The local reaction to the phenomenon was definitely mixed. People in Edmonton loved or hated Canada’s largest mall and its concrete offspring, but they soon learned to live with the galumphing elephants in their midst.

Huge shopping malls were the consequence of rapid suburban growth in post-war Edmonton, not the cause of it. More than half of Edmonton’s residents lived in suburban neighbourhoods. Long before the Ghermezians arrived in town [the brothers who originally built the West Edmonton Mall], Edmontonians had embraced Westmount Shopping Park, one of Canada’s first prototype shopping malls, and Southgate Mall, the largest mall west of Toronto when it opened in 1970. The city redesigned itself to serve drivers and their cars, not pedestrians or bus passengers. Public transit did not keep up with suburban growth. Suburban residents became impatient with Edmonton’s limited public transit to their neighbourhoods, not to mention winter waits at outdoor bus stops. They preferred to drive across a wide city to indoor shopping malls where they could park for free. (p 330)

12 or 20 questions: with Steve Venright
Steve Venright's poetry collections include Spiral Agitator (Coach House Books 2000), Straunge Wunder (Tortoiseshell & Black 1996) and The Sleepy Turbine (LyricalMyrical 2003). His new book Floors of Enduring Beauty is being released in November of 2007 by Mansfield Press. Through his TorporVigil Industries CD label he has released several unique recordings, including Songs of Elsewhere by Samuel Andreyev, The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor‹More Outrageous Recordings of the World's Most Renowned Sleeptalker and (in collaboration with Coach House Books) A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario by Christopher Dewdney. As a visual artist, he developed variegraphy, producing psychedelic abstracts using fingerpaint and computers. As founder of Alter Sublime Neurotechnologies, he originated the Hallucinatorium, a travelling retinal sideshow produced by modulated stroboscopic light. Examples of his work, as well as audio selections fromTVI releases, can be found at torporvigil.com.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I swear I'm the same person I was before my meteoric rise to obscurity.

2 - How long have you lived in Toronto, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Toronto for 25 years, 9 months and 27 days. Geography has affected my writing by introducing me to some remarkable inhabitants of this area. It also means that I'm sometimes subject to meteorological conditions that are less than optimal for writing, but I love this part of the world so I'm not really complaining. During the dozen years when I was working intermittently and sometimes intensively on soundscapes and photographic images for the CD release of Christopher Dewdney's A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, I spent a lot of time exploring the wonders of the terrain lying between my birthplace of Sarnia and my adoptive home of Toronto. I don't know how it affects my writing but I do feel I'm a product of this region and, in a broader sense, Canada itself. As for the second question, I find it inspiring to inhabit an urban centre whose citizens represent every known race and possibly every known gender.

3 - Where does a poem or piece of 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?

Both. I'm working on a book from the beginning but don't know what it is until enough of its pieces are written and define the larger project. Where does a poem begin? As far as I can tell, it's the hypothalamus gland, butI'm not sure.

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

Depends who's reading. If it's me, a reading can be part of the creative process by helping me determine when I'm being honest in my writing and when I'm not. By "honest" I mean oblivious to my own bullshit.

5 - 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?

Some of my questions are: What is the nature of reality? What is language? If the world, as Terence McKenna observed, is made of language, how can you use words to change the world? Another current question, addressed only obliquely by my writings, is: When will people stop swallowing the monumental lies that peddle Fascism as Democracy, slaughter as liberation, news as truth, etc.

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

Editors are essential, whether by helping you shape a work or just prompting you to fine-tune your own critical faculties. I enjoy the intimate mental exercise of working on a text I've created with someone whose sensibilities resonate with my own but who won't hold back from telling me when something's crap.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

It's harder than putting a sweater on a dog but easier than dusting venetian blinds with a toothbrush, and that hasn't changed much over the years.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

It must have been a couple months ago, the last time I dared to eat a pear. Thanks for reminding me -- it was fantastic! I'm going to go across the street and buy one right now.

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

Use slip-resistant flooring. Falling with a hot casserole or knife in your hand can have serious consequences. Or do you mean about writing? I often reflect on Henri Michaux's statement that "The mere ambition to create a poem is enough to kill it" -- so much so that I don't even know what it means anymore, but it sounds good!

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

I think the poetry is more like music while the fiction is more like painting. I find it most comfortable to think of everything I write as just "prose" because it almost always takes that form (though I like being associated with poetic traditions). Writing what might be called "fiction" has a different set of demands, though it's been surprisingly liberating: sort of like being able to re-enter a lucid dream and carry on from where you left off. By the way, the Ontario pears I got from the place across the street aren't ripe enough to eat, so I had some dark chocolate instead.

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 used to write at the end of my day, now I prefer the beginning. I find it really difficult to extricate my mind from "the world and all its distractions" (Breton), so I tend to write in any extended way only during those rare stretches when I've freed myself from financial demands and the day-to-day concerns of existence. When I am in a writing phase, solutions to textual impasses frequently come to me as I sleep, sometimes even waking me in the night. Ideally, I tend to work for a few hours or more before getting out of bed. That's when my creative focus and energy seems to be best these days. After breakfast, I might assess what I've done and add a little to it or begin editing. Among the things I've found beneficial to attaining an optimal state for writing are walking, high pressure atmospheric conditions, cranial electro-stimulation, country air (very scarce here in downtownToronto), kinesiology, sensory deprivation, a proximity to fresh water, and being surrounded by the work of others I find inspiring.

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

When my writing gets stalled, I know that I can turn with confidence to psychedelic drugs. Psychedelic drugs such as Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, Dimethyltryptamine and Psilocybin act fast to dissolve boundaries and expand consciousness, allowing me to conquer even the most stubborn literary ruts with ease! (Just kidding -- actually, I've NEVER taken psychedelics, apart from maybe a couple dozen times. But now that I risk being banned from entering the States -- like Andrew Feldmar (http://thetyee.ca/News/2007/04/23/Feldmar/) -- I might as well say this too: 9/11 was an inside job, Wilhelm Reich was pretty cool and Jesus likes hockey more than football.)

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

There are more extended narratives in this one, and almost 300 more spoonerisms. Also, it deals in part with homosexual bestiality -- a subject I had not tackled in any of my previous works.

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

All of the above have been influences, including the great David W. McFadden himself.

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

Now, that's getting a little too personal! (Actually, I started writing something about the various brilliant authors I've been fortunate enough to know in my life whose work is important to me and I just couldn't stand the thought of mentioning some and overlooking others. Still, I'll mention threeI met right around the time I moved to Toronto: Christopher Dewdney, Stuart Ross and Nicky Drumbolis.)

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

Answer the next three questions.

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?

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

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

20 - What are you currently working on?

My new book Floors of Enduring Beauty (edited by Stuart Ross) is coming out any day now through Denis De Klerck's Mansfield Press. Another current project I'm excited about is a film based in part on a CD released by my Torpor Vigil Industries label. Pippa Lambert and I had begun to develop ideas for animated documentary based on the incredible recordings of sleeptalker Dion McGregor (getting so far as shooting some interviews in LA and New York), and now the fabulous folks at Markham Street Films [http://www.markhamstreetfilms.com/] have taken on the production. To read the story of Dion McGregor, whose somniloquies were voluminously recorded by his roommate and songwriting partner Michael Barr, you can visit Phil Milstein's Song-Poem Music website or just drop by TorporVigil.com to read liner notes and hear audio samples of McGregor and other TVI recording stars.

12 or 20 questions archive