12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Detorie

Michelle Detorie lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she edits Hex Presse and coordinates the Writing Center at Santa Barbara City College. She is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. In 2007, Michelle was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and in 2010 she won a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave, appeared from Ahsahta Press in September. Her current project, The Sin in Wilderness, is a book-length erasure project about love, animals, and affective geography.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m really excited and happy about After-Cave. & I love this book. It isn’t the first book I’ve written -- it’s probably the third or fourth, but it is the first that is being put out into the world as a published book-object, so in that way it is a “first book.”

That said, I am glad that this book is the first book. It came out of my bones. I pulled out what was already there. This is of course a type of making, but much of my earlier work was more consciously crafted to look or sound a certain way and do a certain thing. With After-Cave, my work was to have the language and the shapes they made on the page honor the way the words had already grown inside my body. This required crafting and intention, but some of that was to make room for a type of risk-taking where my relationship to the language and page space was open and messy, because the way the language coalesced and sytancitically constellated and unfurled in my body-swamp was open and messy. And plastic. How do you put things that are alive and moving on that page? For the past several years I have been very preoccupied with the notion of ferality, and how feral creatures and organisms trouble and adapt . In this way, I feel like After-Cave is a feral type of writing. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t know that I came to it first, and I’m less and less attached to describing my work as being a specific genre (but of course I feel that language can self-identify as a specific genre!), BUT the thing people call poetry is the thing that I have spent the most time learning about and making. That said, I do make things that could be called fiction and nonfiction. I also make visual poems and poetry objects and time-based poetry.

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?
My process tends to be eclectic: rhizomatic, trance-based, palmipsest-y. I write a lot. Obsessions and inquiries emerge and reach and converge. I make chunks of language and arrange and re-arrange, juxtapose and shuffle, erase and repeat. Some chunks or lines come out a way and stay that way. This mostly has to do with my state of consciousness while writing. Sometimes I come back with things more intact. Other times I bring back pieces and work to discover or intuit or create ways for them to go together. 

4 - Where does a poem 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?
It begins in the murk. Some things are short, but lately every single thing is part of a bigger thing. I seem to have a preference for the space of 20-40 pages.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings. I read around in my work, sometimes reading one or two lines from a section and skipping ahead and coming back. I like reading for 15 to 20 minutes. If it’s longer than that, it feels less like a reading and more like a cultivation of a ambient, verbal atmosphere. A way of filling up the air with language and space where I’m not expecting people to listen or hear every word but rather to just experience it as a sort of affective or sensory mist. This is perhaps because I myself have ADD and have experienced this at longer readings and have found it very pleasurable.
    
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?
How can we live without cruelty? Who has power? Who benefits?

I have for several years been conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of feminism, human/animal studies, and radical poetics. This research centers on the question of ferality and the feral, and searches out links between human writing practices and animal aesthetics -- what I call a “feral poetics,” a continuing project that meditates upon the politics of interspecies affiliations, affinities, and alliances. As a feminist, I am often concerned by the tacit acceptance of a pastoral frame in writing about nature. In my work as a poet, I have experimented with a feral poetics as way to trouble pastoralism’s duplicitous and highly gendered fantasies of nature as "wild," “pure,” “unpopulated,” and outside of historical and political time.  A feral poetics destabilizes these fantasies, and feral texts articulate and recover the subjects otherwise contained or made invisible by pastoralism’s narratives of nature, nation, state, and species. Ferality is a process, not a state of being: one cannot be born feral. A creature or poetics becomes feral because it has to or because it wants to. Also, feral is not another word for “wild.”

Most of this work also somehow connects or intersects with an interest in emancipatory social projects, creating new resources in literary interventions against state violence and war, critical pedagogy, and public art.

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?
The roles other writers play for me varies, so I don’t think there is any one answer. The writers for whom I have the deepest attachment are those who help me learn and feel, whose work documents or questions how we live in a way that helps me understand it or see it differently.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The editors with whom I’ve have the opportunity to collaborate have all been very light touch. I always appreciate it when someone shares their experience of reading my work with me, and editors can ask really good questions that help you re-think or re-see what the language is doing. With After-Cave, there is a narrator, so in some instances when there were questions it helped me wonder about whether or not the speaker would say it that way. I found that useful.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I would like to write more fiction and essays, but when I sit down to write I always just feel like writing poetry. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I prefer thinking about putting words together outside the concept of genre. I’ve begun thinking of my erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness, as an experimental novel. & my diary/reading notes can be very essay-ish.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My routine is that I make notes when I can. I work full-time, so I take off one or two weeks to work on my writing in a concentrated way in January and August.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The outdoors, conversations, art, books, daydreams, dreams, my dog, trance, meditation, divination. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine, magnolias, wood smoke

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?
Definitely. Artists who’ve inspired me include Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martin, Lorna Simpson, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, John Cage, M.I.A., Kathleen Hanna, Chris Marker, David Lynch. 

I spend a lot of time at the beach. Before I injured my back in 2010, I volunteered for three years rescuing starved, injured, and oiled seabirds through the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. A lot of what I experienced and learned in that work comes into my writing. It is also the subject of one my pamphlets with eohippus labs, How Hate Got Hand.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Notley, Claudia Rankine, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Boyer, Fanny Howe, Donna Haraway, Paolo Friere, bell hooks, Jessica Smith, Julia Drescher, CJ Martin, Kurt Newman

This isn’t a complete list (all lists are inherently incomplete).

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
experience the auroras and the midnight sun

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?
Probably something with wildlife rescue or habitat restoration.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It made sense to me. I enjoyed it.  I received encouragement at key moments.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog

20 - What are you currently working on?
Scanning and photo editing pages from my book length erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness. Writing bitchy ghost and dragon poems. The feral poetics project. and my public art project, The Poetry Booth.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

An Interview with George Stanley : The Conversant,

My interview with Vancouver poet George Stanley, author of the new North of California St. (New Star Books, 2014), is now online at The Conversant.

Pte. Swain, J.J

Along the lines of what I posted last year on my great-grandfather, Joseph Joe Swain (my mother's maternal grandfather), and the year prior, a WWI-era letter to my great-grandmother, Mamie Swain, from her brother, I present more memorabilia discovered in two tins that remain of the Kemptville, Ontario Swains, and my great-grandfather, who not only fought in the First World War, but survived a mustard gas attack.

Joe (as he was known) was but one of an array of family from that corner that fought in the War, along with possibly two of his wife's brothers, and his wife's father. I am still working out the whos and the whats of that particular branch.

ryan fitzpatrick, Fortified Castles

SNOWFLAKE CHILDREN

Using this technique, two children can be

separated at birth without any emotions.

So why does the allegory survive while the

soulless creep still walks the streets?

Near the tops of the trees, you could nearly

make out with the ice crystals on the branches.

Some might object to a woman carrying a

mystery child, but we need the freezer space.

So she knew about the safe haven, but would

rather shoot herself right in the stomach.

Generally, we find it beneficial to the state

to allow individuals to disassemble themselves.

When I reach a finality near the ground, will I

lose some of the individual momentum I’ve gained?

Some print outlets might bury ice storms deep

on the weather page choosing a new forecast.

These are striking and radical portraits of shot

leaders defying a Jacobin sense of liberty.

During the past decade, Walmart has begun

to sell do-it-yourself exorcism kits.

Republicanism emerges as a nostalgic quest for

a return to the feudal times of purest liberty.

He was highly ethical in salvaging the tinkering

spirit of the wacky antics of embryonic cells.

Vancouver poet ryan fitzpatrick’s second trade collection, Fortified Castles (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014), follows his Fake Math (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007) after a space of more than half a decade, and a move from Calgary to Vancouver. After his years involved in the poetics and literary community of Calgary, he’s been immersed in a new community of writers for some time now, and the shift of poetic comes through in this new collection. In Fortified Castles, fitzpatrick’s poetry has evolved into a blend of Calgary’s language-poetics and Vancouver’s social and political engagements, as he writes to open the poem “I Hope to See You Soon”: “I was a scapegoat for the government when all / I wanted was to wish you a safe trip. I greeted / my new friends with a smile. I broke something / here that can be fixed in another neighbourhood.” Through Fortified Castles, fitzpatrick utilizes a kind of collage/cut-up method of accumulation to engage elements of the Occupy Movement, confusion, social interactions, financial anxieties, political uncertainties, ambiguous sentences and an endless series of phrases, consequences and histories, managing to capture an enormous amount of activity in such compact spaces. As he writes to open the poem “Golden Parachutes”: “What is the maximum number of words that can / be spoken by a decapitated head on a pike?” Asked about his new work in an interview forthcoming on the Touch the Donkey blog, fitzpatrick writes: 

My second book, Fortified Castles, came directly out of a couple one offs where I began to feed I-statements into Google (“I am so frightened” and “I fell asleep last night” were the first couple, I think), working with the search results. I liked the kind of material that came out so I stuck with it, playing with the shape of the poems themselves as I went. Working into a project from the ground up means that I work from a series of compositional problems or questions – questions that don’t emerge without the experimentation at the centre of doing something that doesn’t fit in a bigger project.

Structurally, its curious how fitzpatrick has composed two sections of poems composed in couplet form that bookend a lengthy section of poems structured in the form of sonnets, adding another layer of structural complication to a compositional process of stitching together Google search results. Part of what makes fitzpatrick’s poems so compelling is in the collage affect of his lines, forcing the full attention of the casual listener, and allowing the careful reader to experience multiple threads heading off in a variety of directions. As he writes to open the poem “I Want To Break Things”: “A closed door is music to me. My apartment is / in my name. I tense my face against the screen. / My backyard is my sanctuary. My dentist sends / me postcard reminders. I built this fence myself.” Given some of the subject matter the book explores, keeping the reader slightly off-balance might be entirely the point. Given some of the subject matter, it would seem strange to attempt to craft poems that didn’t unsettle. Perhaps we should be far more unsettled than we are.

I FAINT WHEN SURPRISED

The city is large and confusing and is the only

judge I have to answer to. The problem is with

my headphones and their immoral, bleached-out

hucksterism. I overnight hype on the spill I took.

Have you read the YouTube comments? I hit my

head on the upper bunk and my muscles lock up.

It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you. I push

and pull at the hinges of the improvised door.

I wake to fading stars across my jaw. A question

mark follows my email subject line. It’s human

rights for everyone and there’s no difference. I mean

he wasn’t playing around. I crossed a threshold.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Germanacos

Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls, was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute, published by Rescue Press, appears in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first book allowed me to call myself, publicly, a writer, though I'd spent the previous forty years writing daily. With Tribute, the conversation with my readers has gained intensity and complexity. Together, we're examining the line between language and (the body's) silence. It's a fascinating, compelling conversation, one that's offering rich nourishment.

I'm not sure whether a book can be said to exist without a reader. I'm so grateful to the people who've engaged deeply with my words, giving them life.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’m not sure that I did come first to fiction. But the voice that first emerged was the most natural extension of my internal voice. My most recent book won’t be easily pigeon-holed. In fact, it goes against categorization, stylistically and in terms of genre.

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?
My projects are ongoing and continual. It’s only once I’ve written something that I attempt to become aware of what it is I might have written. Writing is both slow and quick. It arrives quickly but may not be fully discernible to me as a particular thing for months.

A story, essay or poem is made up of words that were in the original draft, though only a fraction of them. New words rarely make their way in.

4 - Where does a story 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 most definitely begin with a pea.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings! It’s the fulfillment of the drama that’s been playing in one’s head for years and sometimes decades: an audience! A listener! Someone to hear what’s had to remain private in its long incubation.

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?
In attempting to answer the question—Where can one go with language?—I come upon its twin: Where can one go without it?

I break it down into the constituent parts: words/silence.

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?
Is anyone solely a writer? It’s the combination of things one does in the world that add up to a place in it. One conveys thought and feeling through different actions in one’s life. Writing is one of them.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No editor has ever fundamentally changed my work, so I can’t say that it’s been either. Having said that, it’s my present editor who recognized my work—in the sense of understanding it—and the fact that she did so has been utterly essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Take your time.”

Michelle Obama said it to my goddaughter at the last White House Chanuka party.

It has application everywhere and goes against the current grain.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The risk of moving between genres, playing with them (damaging them?) is the appeal!

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?
There are days that contain moments of writing, wedged between other activities—some thoughtful, some social and physical. There are days when everything else is lodged against the greater, larger (temporal) surface of writing. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I look to be uninspired, that is to unyoke myself from the task.

I turn away, letting myself be taken by something—anything else.

That click of being taken, absorbed by something outside myself assures a future.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sage for the specifics of Greece. Lavender for the idea of home, including its very possibility.

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?
I’d prefer not to pigeon-hole. Books come from life, no?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Adam Phillips. Roberto Calasso. W.G. Sebald. Lewis Hyde. Avivah Zornberg. Geoff Dyer. Richard Rodriguez. Isaac Babel. David Markson.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Combine music, paint, sculpture, bodies, film. With language.

Write something in multiple languages, in diverse alphabets.

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?
When I was quite young, I wanted to be a rabbi. A little later, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. For a short while, I wanted to be a surgeon—someone who gets to slice and look inside. There was a time when I wanted to be a midwife. A writer trades in all these.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It started when I was nine or ten. Hardly a choice.

I had a good serve and a very decent throwing arm and a fantastic baseball card collection, but there was no Title IX. I used to chase the tennis balls rejected by famous women players but that kind of competition was not for me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
(Great? Who says?)

Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook took me by surprise, offering me more than I had known I wanted.

Wes Anderson’s recent one, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was very pleasurable, but his Moonrise Kingdom will stay with me far longer, I think.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Buckets of peas.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

short story: Opening, via The New Quarterly,

My short story "Opening" is now online at The New Quarterly, as a preview for issue #132! See the direct link to the story here. (The issue also includes an interview Claire Tacon conducted with myself and Christine McNair (and baby Rose) on our new works, as well as the Chaudiere Books relaunch!)

Profile of Pearl Pirie's phafours, with a few questions,

My profile of Pearl Pirie's phafours (with a few questions), which will be exhibiting at both this weekend's ottawa small press book fair and the upcoming Meet the Presses' 2014 Indie Market, is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

Redell Olsen, Film Poems

My short review of Redell Olsen's Film Poems (Los Angeles, CA: Les Figues, 2014) is now online at The Small Press Book Review.

70 Canadian Poets, ed. Gary Geddes

My review of 70 Canadian Poets (Oxford, 2014), ed. Gary Geddes, is now online at Cordite Poetry Review.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Shalan Joudry

Shalan Joudry is a writer, performance artist and storyteller whose poetry has appeared in The Nashwaak Review and Mi’kmaq Anthology II. She works as a cultural interpreter and community ecologist at Bear River First Nation, Nova Scotia, where she lives with her two daughters. Generations Re-merging (Gaspereau Press, 2014) is her first book.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
A printed/published book is different to my usual oral storytelling and spoken word/reading poetry that i do. There is a kind of comfort in that oral tradition. Something this permanent was nerve-wracking, but poetry is so very dear to my heart and was my first artistic medium as a child. Publishing a book was a fantastic phase for me. My life changed in that i made that commitment of sharing so open and public. i no longer have control over who experiences my art as it is no longer within a certain setting and me performing live. With that are both positive feelings and challenges. Above it all, i published with purpose:  to share messages, stories, and art. i want other Mi'kmaq to know that we are welcomed in the world of poetry and literature. i feel blessed and honoured to have this book. i have a renewed sense of place.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
i say that poetry was first, although now that i look back, fiction was almost there as well. i was a shy child and found it difficult to find kin friends. With many moves (father in the military), i ended up finding my own comfort in reading and writing in the school yard instead of running around the playground with the others. i had this non-stop imagination and crafted fiction in my mind. But the day i wanted to write, i chose poetry because it appealed to the even more artistic place i could go. In poetry i had to choose my words so very precise and meaningful. i had to find the rhythm so very precise in my own intention. i wove meanings and artifacts from my worlds around me. i fell in love with the power and challenge of one page.

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?
For poetry, i have a few various modes i work under. My favourite mode and the majority of the poems in this collection are from when an analogy or moment fills my head in words. i have it then. Almost entirely. i have to find paper quickly to gather the inspiration. (These are usually moments after digesting an event in the community or my life, or from experiencing a wonderful experience on the land.) Editing takes a year off and on to chisel away at a few lines or word choices, making sure that i used the best fit. The majority of my pieces, though, are partial ideas or concepts that i must work on in quiet bits of time over the course of 6 months to complete.

i must have silence to write. Which, with two young children, it means that more crafting is done late at night. A full collection will take a few years to compile if i continue this way.

4 - Where does a poem 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?
My pieces are separate things. i am working on other writing that are more connected purposefully. However, most poetry i write are separate pieces and not linked as a book until i feel they are ready to be joined in a certain order, and only certain pieces that have a way of telling a larger story by the end.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Reading poetry is so new to me! As an oral storyteller i very much need that listener engagement as i craft edits or new stories. With my poetry i write in silence and edit them in silence, whereas public readings are not silent places and it just doesn't sound "right" to me. But as people enjoy hearing my tone and expression to better connect to the pieces, i will continue to read for them.

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?
Good question!!

For me, i'm trying to answer how we arrived here in certain struggles as Mi'kmaq, part-Mi'kmaq, as Nova Scotias, as humans with issues of unsustainability. And alternately, where i hope we are headed. For example i want to understand which themes Mi'kmaw communities are wrestling with are actually universal themes. If it makes sense that we struggle for identity as throughout ancestral history and around the world, so too struggle in many histories and modern contexts, perhaps these are human struggles. Although it doesn't alleviate these challenges, it might help put focus on what we can do to work through these things. My answer is one of hope,.. holding onto those same teachings of flux and transition, so too are the challenges and the state we're in. These are all temporary. What comes next is up to us.

The pieces and the book are personal stories and not every one addresses directly these questions, but because those are the concerns that fill my mind everyday they come out in my poetry as well as being the reason i want to share them. I'm examining my own life in ways i believe others are examining theirs.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
i was taught many wonderful ideas about the role of the writer/storyteller/poet in a community or culture. Some, like other arts, are the mirrors by which we can see ourselves or each other a bit more fully or with more meaning. Some are prophets or medicine people bringing us visions of the past or the future for us through stories and writing.

Mostly, the writers/storytellers are our teachers, passing along teachings for us to learn and remember through story. With this in mind, many more people should and can embrace storytelling and writing as modes of living in a family in community, even if not professional writers. In some way, we all need to share storytelling. How else can we share such depths of who we are, without arts and without story. Tom King reminds us that perhaps all we are, are stories.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It is usually only my written work that receives an outside editor. And i have always found it helpful. They become the check-point and looking glass for my own self and writing, so that i can be sure that i reviewed the corners and edges from other angles i might have missed. The editors have asked good questions of my intent and use of certain parts of story or phrasing. At the same time, you need an editor who understands various influences your work has and what you need to keep intact to honour your vision. Those editors need to trust my judgement as i theirs. So far so good.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
i remember years ago wise women describing human nature to me, describing the roles and powers of women and they made sure that i understood that when i begin to feel hurt or loss or chaos, that i need to not fight against it, not suffocate it, not ignore it,.. but ride with it. They taught me to trust and to feel the very core of what came. Recovering, staying balanced and true to the human experience are important lessons in life. i usually follow that advice and it has made for such a rich life. i have learned how to collapse without breaking too much of myself,.. how to hold onto inner strength and pick myself back up. And i find inspiration from others who model that for me.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to performance to storytelling)? What do you see as the appeal?
They have been natural mediums for me. i find certain inspiration needs to be told through a short story,.. or a performance,.. or a poem. i find the right fit and tell it. i am also drawn to music and use song at times. This teaches me that i am an auditory learner and artist. Some stories i want to share might need a few different versions and i love playing with that as well.

i naturally think in storytelling. i am addicted to weaving words and stories. i am always crafting,.. constantly,.. every single day. While i wash dishes... while i load my children into the car,..  while i walk the trails looking for rare plants on my fieldwork days,..  while i sip tea late at night by the window,..

However, i cannot grasp visual arts as well. It amazes me to watch painters, sculptors and choreographers, etc, work! 

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 not a good routine person. i write when i need to write. However, most of the time daily work or mother duties trump spontaneous inspiration and it makes me uneasy until i get the chance to write what had been waiting. i mourn all of the stories i never wrote.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Always the woods. Or a stream. From there i imagine our past and our future. There is also the calmness that i need to write, to be able to hear my stories and poetry in my mind.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine and balsam!

Or a salt water breeze.

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?
i wish that i had time for more books, music, science and visual art.  Luckily my ecology work and mothering take me back to nature and provide the time even when i am not writing to capture that influence. i think the other influence is getting to know people better. The deeper i get to understand others, i grow more empathy, purpose and intrigue to human story.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Listening to Elders speak is very important to all of my work.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
i have a very long list. But i'll share one:  live as a hermit.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
i would be a non-writing ecologist. Or an herbalist.

i'm sure i could think of more lives i'd love to live.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
i didn't choose it. it came and i accepted the task.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book:  i've returned to Green Grass Running Water (Tom King).

20 - What are you currently working on?
Oohh... i'm writing some very fun things. i just haven't decided how long or short and which ones connect to which. They are short stories or a short novel in chapters.... i'm listening, i'm accepting.

wela'lioq
shalan

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose (is a)

Oh, Gertrude Stein. Well, most folk know by now that Christine returns to work today, completing her maternity leave, which means I'm home full-time with our wee Rose (who turns a year old in two and a half weeks).

Which means: my months of intense half-days attempting to complete projects, meet deadlines and various other schemes and scrambles have been building up to this. Which means: I might take slightly more time to complete reviews, answer emails, and other such things. If  you are expecting such, be patient, please.

And shush: Rose and I are reading and re-reading.

Kate Schapira, TOWN

FROM THE DREAMWALL: I dreamed I smashed all the dishes, all the jars. I stood at the factory fire and threw handfuls of corn into it, from the blackness outside it. By the time it’s a story there will be no one to tell it. Mild eyes will make no distinction. Trees and the remnants of houses will grow up through the streets. It’s too late not to think about it. Once the trail roared through with its long golden mane in the dew-soaked morning. War never came here, but change came to thicken the water, to the spheres of flesh inside, tiny possibilities. Who dreams they give birth to the town’s tree-heavy future? Write your dream underneath mine.

FROM THE DREAMWALL: Sometimes I don’t think laws are so bad.

While in the United States recently, I was able to pick up a copy of Kate Schapira’s TOWN (Queens NY: Factory School, 2010). It’s only the second title of hers I’ve read so far (and I think the first I’ve seen from Factory School), after The Soft Place (Horse Less Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], not including her two chapbooks produced through above/ground press. As she writes at the back of the collection, the original materials for TOWN were solicited, compiled and re-worked, and she includes her original solicitation, which includes: “What I’d like you to do is tell me one thing about this town’s past or present. You don’t have to think about it too hard. Just type it in and send it to me. May I suggest that you do it sooner rather than later, for busyness and memory reasons.” Her “About Town” post-script continues:

            As information about the town came in from friends, relations and acquaintances (some of whom are working writers, others not), some of it started to contradict itself (some pieces contradicted others), and since I’d decided that everything people told me about the town was true, I had to revisit my ideas about consensus: how do contradictions mutually and simultaneously exist and what gravity do they exert on one another, without one erasing or swallowing the other?

Composed as a suite of fragments, prose-poems and lyric descriptions, Schapira explores the variety of ways a town can be described, allowing the directions provided to her through solicitation to provide an expansive town portrait, one that becomes richer and deeper through those contradictions she mentions (as every town, just as every person, contains at least one contradiction). From the other trade work I’ve seen of hers—The Soft Place—Schapira appears to be interested in the extended suite, whether the sequence of such for that later collection, or the book-length quilt of poems that accumulates into her TOWN. It makes me curious as to where else her work is capable of heading.

Another element of the book I can’t help but enjoy: the cover artwork by James McShane includes a collage of maps, and a fragment on the left of the front cover not only includes a section of a map of Ottawa, but a swath that runs along the 417/174 Highways, from Heron Road all the way north to the Ottawa River, which means I can see where my lovely wife works (the corner of Innes/St. Laurent), not an eight minute drive from here.

CUSTOM / LAW

FOOD

CHANGES

A family moved into a house on a quiet street. Once they were unpacked they evoked all their neighbor’s doors to invite them over for a watermelon margarita block party. The night of the house only two old women came. As the second entered and was greeted by the couple she shook hands with the other. Both women were widowed. Their houses sat next to each other and each had lived in her own since just after a young marriage. On this night they were introduced.

Hospitality holds its breath as the mixture delivers. Both have grown old and human. To say, “We’re both old,” that age happens not to the other but both, to be part of both in town, to remember the houses they moved from dwindling in memory, becoming matchstick, streets spreading and tiring easily, evening melting in cautious red sips. They were about the changes of which other neighbors were a part, sitting as they’d been taught, two women spreading and diffusing to reenter matter, like soaked gauze, quietly into the fiber of town as streetlights marked out the web of veins filled with isotopes moving weakly.

The couple whose house it was told everyone how sweet it was from the outside, quick coming to tongue, loosening flavor. The sunset looked like a lake of watermelon margaritas.

a new poem, "domestic haibun #1," at small po[r]tions

I've a new poem, "domestic haibun #1," newly posted as part of the third issue of small po[r]tions. Damn that Chris Johnson for getting me rereading the haibun again. Damn him to hell.