12 or 20 questions: with Jessica Smith

Jessica Smith is the editor of Outside Voices Press and Foursquare Magazine. Her first book, Organic Furniture Cellar, was released in 2006. Chapbooks include bird-book (House Press, republished by Detumescence), The Plasticity of Poetry and Telling Time (No Press), Shifting Landscapes (above/ground press), butterflies (Big Game Books) and What the Fortune-Teller Said (a+bend press) (Full bio: http://looktouch.wordpress.com/about-the-author/). Photo credit: K. Lorraine Graham

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

First off, I have only one book: Organic Furniture Cellar. I published it in 2006.


When OFC came out, there was a lot of excitement and support and a lot of backlash and bile. Since I saw (and outlined in the introduction) a specific aesthetic/social place for OFC in the poetics community, I didn't expect the kind of backlash I got. It was disturbing. OFC was weirdly polarizing, even within a community that considers itself experimental. I didn't like feeling like my work and I were a battleground for various peoples' little wars. OFC was idealistic. Poetry is petty.


After OFC, I haven't wanted to publish or engage with that wider poetry community. Instead, I keep to a small group of friend-poets who support me and my work and who inspire me to keep trying new things. I hardly ever write anymore, but when I do, it is for them, not for a wider audience.

 

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

I didn't come to poetry first. In elementary school I wrote stories and plays. I came to poetry in junior high and it proved a more challenging medium for me. I continue to write poetry because I don't feel "done" with poetry as a medium. It's so flexible. I don't feel the same need to write in other genres, nor do I find them as malleable to my need to make things look (or feel or smell) certain ways. Visual art would probably be the next medium for me if I switched from poetry-- not another literary 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?

I outline and draft first-- I have an idea for a project, I outline the poems that will fit with the project, and then I wait to see how the poems take shape. With some projects the poems just need to literally "take shape"-- I get an image of the shape of the poem in my head and try to replicate it. It usually shifts somewhat between the draft and the computerized version, and then it usually shifts a bit more during editing. With the project I'm mentally working on now, there are no shapes (the poems are narrative webs) so it's more like weaving together threads of stories. I'm not sure what all the stories are yet or how they interact, and I'm not good about putting things down on paper until I'm pretty sure of them, so the project is perpetually stalled. I've been working on this project-- mentally-- for probably 3 years, but have only written 12 finalized pages of it.

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?

I work on a book or chapbook as a set of poems from the beginning. I don't believe in suturing chapbooks together to make a book unless the chapbooks (published separately as chapbooks) were initially conceived as parts of the book (rather than as unique projects). A book is a book. A chapbook is a chapbook. An individual poem is an individual poem. Each thing has its own necessary length and character. None of these things is better than the other. It's not necessary to write "books." Personally, I like the chapbook form best-- a collection of related poems or a serial project under 30 pages. I feel like I can do "tighter" work by focusing on one particular subject or project and that it's usually a short project (not to be confused with a short poem). I think my best works have been condensed works (bird-book, butterflies, blueberries).   

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

I enjoy the social mixing that happens at readings, whether I am reading or listening to someone else, but I dislike poetry readings as such (http://www.looktouch.com/poetics/silent.pdf). I dislike the politics of poet-audience interaction where the poet is a "man speaking to men" at a podium. I dislike it when poets read over time and have obviously not timed themselves and have no respect for the audience's time. I dislike listening to poetry without seeing it. I don't, say, download podcasts of poetry readings. The social gathering element of a poetry reading is the most appealing part for me.


I enjoy doing readings that are more interactive (with the audience or other readers) or where I have the equipment to show my poems as I read them (as I feel that reading visual poetry aloud without showing it is a terrible disservice to the poem-on-the-page).  

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?

This question might be better addressed by my interview in Area Sneaks (http://areasneaks.com/index.php?id=34). 

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 can't speak for the role of "the writer" in general.


Writing Organic Furniture Cellar, I felt that my role as a poet was to change language and perception in order to instigate larger social change-- a continuation of Language poetics. At this point, I don't feel like my job as a poet takes place within a larger sociopolitical realm. Instead, I feel like my job is to comfort or inspire one reader. Just one. I don't know who it is, or if they're even alive yet, or if they've been dead for centuries and I missed them. But if I wrote one poem that one person connected with, that would be enough. So I have started writing single poems addressed to specific people, like correspondence or like valentines. This isn't publishable work; it doesn't necessarily appeal to an audience greater than one. But it's satisfying to write a line directly to someone else. 

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

Both. Although I self-published Organic Furniture Cellar, the feedback I got from other editors was essential.  It went through five editors and changed significantly over the process-- becoming more mature, full, and daring, rather than what one might expect, which is for an edited book to become less daring in the way that MFA workshop poems are often watered-down to appeal to a wider but less courageous audience.  To be "difficult" is not a bad thing. 

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

Do not accept work (for magazines, publications) from writers who are not also editors. This advice wasn't given in so many words nor do I follow it, but I think it's good advice. Poets who aren't also editors do not understand how much work goes into publishing their poetry and often act like divas. It's unacceptable. 

A similarly good piece of advice is "publish your friends," because publishing is a big investment of time and money and you don't want to do it for some jerk. Luckily, we are often friends with people whose work we like or identify with. Honestly, most publishers follow this advice even if they don't admit to it, and hundreds of poets go around thinking that their work isn't any good, when they just haven't made friends with the right people or have been brainwashed into thinking that they can't self-publish. That's silly. Someone needs to pull back the curtain-- the wizard is just some energetic poet with a bit of cash and the patience to publish other peoples' work. There's no magic. Anyone could do it.  

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

I don't have one. I try to handle some poetry business every day (editorial correspondence, of which there is a lot, layout/design, mailings, etc.) but that quickly eats up any time I'm able to carve out for poetry. I am eager to cease all editorial projects and focus on my own work again.  I don't know how people (ehem, rob) are able to have jobs, write poetry, and be editors all at the same time.

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

I wish I knew the answer to this question.  My work has been stalled for years and I am not sure where to turn to make it actually happen. It's not that I'm not inspired or that I don't know what I want to write about. I have outlines and diagrams and some words for my next book-length project, I just don't have the time and clarity of mind to sit down and do it.  

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lavender! (I just blogged about this) (http://looktouch.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/elisas-parfumerie-part-1-lavenders-blue/) 

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?

Of course! In fact, poetry hardly ever inspires me to write poetry. Nature does, certainly-- especially highly organized nature (guidebooks to birds, flowers, etc.; botanical gardens with their little labels for everything).  And art: painting, sculpture, installation art, performance art, folk arts, fabric arts, book arts. Four things appeal to me in art and nature: detail, collection, repetition and craft. I enjoy seeing collections of things, like Robert Morris's 1968 "Untitled" collection of threads (http://flickr.com/photos/looktouch/tags/robertmorris/). I love impossible detail and craft, as is demonstrated in folk arts like quilting and embroidery or in works like Itchiku Kubota's Landscape Kimonos (http://subclassz.wordpress.com/2010/04/18/the-textile-art-of-itchiku-kubota/). And I love repetition, especially things that seem to happen organically, as in Tara Donovan's work (http://www.acegallery.net/artistmenu.php?Artist=8) or Katie Sehr's (http://www.katiesehr.com/) 

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

This changes-- when I wrote Organic Furniture Cellar I'd say Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, Steve McCaffery, and my undergraduate friends Ric Royer and Chris Fritton. But that was a highly theoretical work, and I'm more interested in community, empathy, and the handmade or unique book-object now. There's a group of female poets whose compassion, support, poetry, and inspired use of materials keeps me going: Michelle Detorie, K. Lorraine Graham, Gillian Devereux, Elisa Gabbert, Maureen Thorson, Katy Henriksen, Hoa Nguyen, Robin Brox, Dorothea Lasky, Alixandra Bamford, Kathryn Pringle. I like the work of Robert Grenier, Alice Notley, and Stephen Ratcliffe these days. 

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

Write a second book. 

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

I would like to be an installation artist, but I don't have the training or the financing. If I'd gone to school for that and had time and funding to begin a life in that field, instead of going to school for poetry, I might feel more comfortable spending a few hundred bucks on materials and making something, but at this point I don't feel comfortable enough with my skills to make the investment. Instead, I think of poetry as sculptural and as installation-- I install words on the page with care. I also make small installations involving words, like Veils (http://krikri.be/festivals/infusoria/jessicasmith.html).

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

It's cheaper. Anyone can get a bit of paper and a pen or pencil. You don't need any special materials. It's like why so much of the world plays soccer-- all you need is a ball. 

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

There are two "last great books": Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (finally got around to this after years of having it recommended to me, and got to it at an interesting time in my life) and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which was recommended to me by my friend Maureen Thorson (Big Game Books editor and DC poet) and is one of the best novels I've read in years.  As for films, I haven't had the time or peace of mind to sit down and get lost in one for awhile.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I just graduated from my second Master's program (in library science) and am in the middle of looking for a job and moving. For me, poetry is something that I do when I have time-- when I can pay my bills, when I don't have a thousand other things to do. It seems like a frivolous art, so it's certainly on the back burner for me right now.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

(another) very short story;

The term "fantasy baseball league," he discovered, has absolutely nothing to do with "imaginary baseball league." He always presumed it was like his sister's book club, a social excuse for distraction, complaint and white wine, but even his sister would argue. "We read serious books," she snapped. Perhaps all his ideas were imaginary, his accumulation of life-long presumptions equally flawed. Where did this come from? His girlfriend mentioned that couples break up most over money. Depending on how you were raised, you were either spender or saver. He knows he a saver, but could he trust her judgment any more than his own?

12 or 20 questions: with Sasha Fletcher

Sasha Fletcher's novella WHEN ALL OUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED MARCHING BANDS WILL FILL THE STREETS AND WE WILL NOT HEAR THEM BECAUSE WE WILL BE UPSTAIRS IN THE CLOUDS is out now from ml press. He is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Columbia University in the city of New York.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
So far I honestly have no idea. I check goodreads a little more compulsively and wait for google alerts.

In actuality, the novella is the second book I finished. The first is a book of linked prose poems that was a finalist for octopus. I feel like the novella occupies a space between the first book and whatever book these poems I'm working on now become.

The novella was me trying to push the form more. Writing fragments that sort of went together was one thing, but I wanted to see if I could build something larger page by page.

The new poems are generally much longer than I used to write. The prose poems are all about 1.5-2 pages [where they used to average around 120 words or so] and I'm using line breaks, which I usually never did. In terms of actually talking about the work, I think a lot of it involved trying to raise the stakes, and to push things. There's still a lot of familiar stuff. The sky crashes down, bones get up and walk out of your body, there are birds, there are notes coming from unknown places saying things very loudly and lots of things get set on fire. There's still a lot of domesticity. There are boats. There is drowning. But I feel like I'm doing all these things in a different way right now.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
Well I came to fiction first because I hated poetry, then I quit fiction because poetry was a thing I could actually do [in that for years I could start stories and never manage to care enough to finish them, and suddenly when I started writing poems I could care enough to finish them].

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It really depends. The novella ended up being written in about six weeks. Then it went through five rounds of final edits over about a month. The book of poems I have took two years. I have absolutely no idea how long this current book will take, but either way I need to turn in a version of it next August to graduate.

The writing tends to come quickly some of the time, but a lot of it is crap. If it's not actually crap it may just be that it sounds crap, as the sound and rhythm of a piece tend to be as important as what's being said. We are saying that how a thing is said and what is being said should generally be reflective of the other.

I have a few pieces that came out as-is. Aside from a few adjustments for rhythm or word-choice, they just fell right out of me. I have a bunch of poems right now, some of which I've been working on since October, but all of them have these brackets where important parts are missing and unwritten. Sometimes the brackets are full of notes and plans. Sometimes I need to hold the idea in my head and go over how to deal with it. Other times the solution just appears.

I guess I am saying it varies, but that I work a lot and sometimes that gets me somewhere.


4 - Where does 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?
It completely depends. With the book of poems, I set out to try to write a ten poem chapbook where all the poems went together and functioned as a body of work. I wanted to create a body of work. I started that in June 2008 and I think by that October I'd titled the book and started sequencing it and from there on everything was written in a big old .doc with EVERYTHING HERE IS OK in 72 pt Times New Roman on the first page.

With the novella, I'd written three longer prose pieces that I had no idea if they were poems of fiction and no idea what to do with them in a larger context, but they were all written one after another and in the same voice. J.A. Tyler had seen the poetry book and said he would be interested if I had a novella. So I sat down, wrote those three pieces together and then went from there.

Recently I've been freaking out a bit about this whole writing another book thing. Generally after three or four months I can figure out the direction of the work and sit down and just focus on the book. But I've been trying so hard to just to write really good poems that I haven't thought at all about how they'll go together. Reading over them recently I know they will. Some of them will. They all fit somehow. But I don't know how. I've been working on whatever these poems are since August 2009. Most of them are in completely different forms. But I guess, to answer it, I generally am trying to work on a book from near the beginning, or at least with one in mind, and right now I'm not, and it's been weird. I am just now, in the last two weeks, becoming really OK with not knowing everything in advance, or having some over-arching plan for things.


5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading out loud and it is a very big part of figuring out if a thing is working or not.


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?
I don't know. I am, personally, not a very big fan of theory or theoretical concerns. On the other hand, in terms of questions, I can talk about concerns I used to have, and then why I don't bother as much with them anymore. So. 1) I used to be really concerned with the idea of dealing with the fantastic and absurd, what is generally regarded as the surreal, in an everyday sort of way. It seemed really important to me that when bringing in these elements they were described exactly how the voice in the piece would describe brushing their teeth or filling out taxes or sitting on the bus to work. That nothing ever, in my mind, succeeded by calling attention to itself, but by sneaking in unannounced. Once I got OK at doing that, I decided to then work on more fantastic pieces that folded in elements of the everyday, and then tried write with the two encroaching on each other.

I think the novella was actually a pretty good synthesis of that, of having everything just there together, seeming like it all belongs. At least to me.

But so 2) I've found with my current work that maybe these questions would be helpful to start posing again, but that my genuine fear of models such as that are that they promote laziness. That by having a question to answer, rather than having to just make it all up and hold it all together, that you might not allow the piece to move how it needs to. That you'll limit it. And that you might not worry about anything other than your concerns. I find that idea terrifying. I am very much afraid of being lazy in my writing. I think it's safe to say that I sometimes have a problem with not cleaning the house enough and cluttering up my desk and I am wary of things I guess.

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 have no idea.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It completely depends on the editor. At this point my girlfriend edits everything, and she is really good at it. I think what you need in an editor is someone who is willing to see the work only for what it is trying to do [as opposed to what they would do] and who can see the ways in which to help you do it better. It's hard. Most of us want to talk about how we'd do it or would like to see it done, but that isn't a thing that's helpful, because it's about our vision and not theirs. Any single person that can look at what you have done, see what it is trying to do, and help you to do that better, any single person that can do that is probably the best fucking person you will ever meet.

Which also doesn't mean, I think, that you should ever be at a point where you need someone else in order to tell if your work is good or not. Or maybe. I want to take that back. I think whatever helps you to write better is whatever helps you to write better and writing better is a very good thing. That is what I think.

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

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I get up, I check my email, I have a shower, I make some breakfast, I dick around on the internet, I eat some lunch, I do some reading, I go for a walk, I read over what I'm working on, I read over it some more, I sit and think, I do some writing, I eat some dinner, I write some more, I go to bed, I maybe have sex.

During the semester is a bit different. Last semester I was turning in two assignment based poems a week. So I was doing that and also trying to do my own work and doing the readings for class and also reading the things that I thought would help me, so I am sort of taking it a little easier right now.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I go for a walk. I watch TV. I take in a movie. I bother my girlfriend. I call my dad. I put it away. I give it some space. I get a little mad. I try harder not to.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Clean laundry. Dryer Sheets.

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?
Yes. I listen to music constantly when I work, with the intention of having the tone of the music dictate the tone of the work. I have shit tons of mixes titled after pieces or after sections of books.

The film You, The Living by Roy Anderrson probably had more of an effect on me and my work and how I think and process information than anything else.

I still sometimes draw and I find it helpful to get me thinking about things in different ways. About depiction in different ways.

I spent a bit doing poems based on things I saw in Marcel Dzama Drawings. I think about how Jasper Johns does things a lot and how I can try to do that. I spend a lot of time sitting and looking at the sky. Often from one side of a window.


14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Right now: Josh Bell, Richard Siken, Emily Pettit, Rachel B Glaser, Objects for a Fog Death by Julie Doxsee, Bob Hicok, Ken Sparling, Ben Mirov.

In general: Donald Barthelme, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You by Frank Stanford, Frank O'Hara, David Berman, Amy Hempel, Zachary Schomburg, Padgett Powell, James Tate and David Foster Wallace.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
 Sell more books? Get a teaching gig? Get married? Buy a house? Have some kids?


16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I really liked gutting fish. It was a good job. Alternately, I have no idea. I try real hard to worry mostly about the things I can actually deal with. That other shit just keeps me up at night and I like sleeping when I can.


17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I knew how to do two things moderately well. Draw and Write. When it came down to the jobs I could get with a BFA in Ceramics and the time that would be involved with getting better at something, I ended up picking the one that cost less to do.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Pee on Water by Rachel B Glaser and it is incredible. I saw Micmacs the other week and that was pretty awesome. Before that I saw Altman's The Long Goodbye and I really really loved that. 


19 - What are you currently working on?
A bunch of poems that will be a book of poems. A lot of them have to do with the end of the world. As like a regular occurrence. Or something like that. Floods, the sky falling, various things being set on fire, people having trouble sleeping and making up stories to pass the time, rivers doing things they wouldn't normally do, like pretending to be kids, or being ominous. Stuff like that.


12 or 20 (small press) questions;

Ongoing notes: the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2010;

Of course, since I already posted a Toronto version of same, it just seemed fair that I do one for our own local. Otherwise, did you see what Judith Fitzgerald was nice enough to write up in the Globe & Mail books blog about my guest-edited Dusie 10?

Here are some things I picked up at this most recent spring fair.

Ottawa ON: I’ve been intrigued by Amanda Earl’s ongoing “Kiki” project, writing out Man Ray’s infamous subject, Kiki of Montparnasse, in a sequence of poems (there was even a series of photographs of Earl taken by her husband, photographer Charles Earl, that echoed Man Ray’s own). Kiki, otherwise known as Alice Ernestine Prin (1901-1953), helped define Paris culture of the 1920s, but somehow is known predominantly for her visage in photographs by Man Ray, otherwise known as her lover. Amanda Earl’s first large poetic project, part of watching her create such a work is also watching Earl, who has been producing increasingly interesting work the past few years, also learn how to create such a work, with this new fragment Kiki (LaurelReedBooks, 2010). Earl has been slowly working her way up into longer projects, including her The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008) which riffed (obviously) off of Robert Kroetsch’s Sad Phoenician (1982), later included in his Completed Field Notes (1989; 2002). An intriguing selection of prose, I wonder how, in the end, this might compare to another Canadian poet who wrote on another famous subject from roughly the same period, Susan Elmslie’s I, Nadja and Other Poems (2006)?

This is Alice. This is fucked up. This is opium. This is the drug I share with Cocteau, his gold brocade jacket in Achille S’s back room, blinding. We paint; we compose in opera and I am Kiki. I wear pearls. I drink red wine and sing love songs to old reprobates in the boîtes. Kiki in a box.

Man Ray oh Man Ray of light. Yankie mama’s boy with pidgin French like a toddler learning his A B Cs. Satie, Foujita, like them. I think, of the possibilities for good meals. A good strong vin de table. man gives me a hat to make me his lady and later his bedroom gutter slut. I sing when he plays me. He inks cello markings into my bad, brands me, but the ink runs, stains his lily white tapis. His hands. I can feel them now, stroking. I am untameable. My chum, my petite amie, Mady, the panther. We slink along in the night and roar on rooftops. Hemingway should set us up in Africa, abandon the little woman and Bumby.

Ottawa ON: The small moments like tributaries that make up Toronto poet Leigh Nash’s Landforms (Apt.9 Press, 2010) each pull her poems up to the point just before the end, leaving the small moment open, and slightly stretched. Like a point on a map, where the small moments end and begin in Nash’s poems become nearly irrelevant, and impossible to know; they simply exist. And what is this in the back, that she has a first trade collection forthcoming with Mansfield?

Valley

Bony shoulders in a crowd,

low and striking loose. Change renders

aloof sidewalks alluvial. A depression lurks, low

hanging and widespread.

Ottawa ON: I’ve been excited by Pearl Pirie’s ongoing experiments (along with Marcus McCann and Roland Prevost) with meaning and sound, the most recent example of which is her lovely poetry chapbook over my dead corpus (AngelHousePress, 2010). A collection of experiments boiled down to see where they might end up, she writes in the chapbook’s back:

The main source corpus is over 500 pages of scrap notes that served as fodder for recombinance. Words or phrases were scraped for letter sequences within syllable or that broke across syllable or word. The other corpus is incidental word combinations from scrabble strung in the mind’s insistence for meaning or sound.

But as much as I marvel at her poetry, I am frustrated by her prose, caught somewhere between what she thinks prose should sound like and struggling to discover her own voice, her own form, caught in the ambles amid confidences. she has been coming into a soundscape of difficult meaning for her poetry over such an extended period, I can only hope and wait, knowing she will eventually arrive in her own time, in a prose currently made of magnificent lines surrounded by uncertainty and her usual chaos, which, at its best, holds itself between meaning and unmeaning. It’s already there in her poetry; where else can she possibly go? I look forward to finding out.

corpus up sleeve: 26

take measures for

what exacerbates anklets and necklace of

red embrace, walk away, more

ungraceful preface, gag faces, double-spaced

lace of discomfort, the race to china, wild geese

and above a psalm above a spasm and a pond skewed by

drops, the water level from mashup crops of

tightly surfaced shoelace trace

atkins, my glasses placed in the alphabet

my absence hasn’t paced on at the same rate.

in my face is someplace I’ll never be

and in a race of no fixed gender

uncountable this and that

space, face and what lodges in you

Toronto ON: Just so you don’t get the wrong idea, there were worthy out-of-town publications there too, including The Coming Envelope: issue 1 summer 2010 (BookThug, 2010), edited/curated by Malcolm Sutton, with fiction by Jacob Wren (previously known as Death Waits), Sheila Heti, Lily Hoang / Debra Di Blasi, John Goldbach and Lee Henderson. I can only hope that, once one gets into another of these new publications of occasional journals, it might have a further life beyond the first issue or two, unlike the seemingly-disappeared Syd & Shirley and BafterC. There are the most wonderful little fictions happening in this journal, and it would be a shame to see something as rare as a publication of witty, wise and engaging fiction fall by the wayside. There are far too many examples of dull, ordinary prose.

At the door of Kafka’s castle you cannot haggle. At the Walmart and gas station you cannot haggle. But in the marketplace, the dirty marketplace of ‘early capitalism,’ my romantic misconception of a marketplace before the hard shock of industrial production, there was still an always shock of industrial production, there was still an always present one-to-one potential for give-and-take. What would that marketplace look like without a king, without a church, growing out of some improvised combination of barter and local currencies? (Jacob Wren, “The Energy of the Market”)

And it’s an ongoing joy to see anything from Toronto writer Sheila Heti, a writer I revel in seeing more often lately in the most unlikely of places (and some have been extremely unlikely, including an art monthly to the National Post). It took me a while to really get into her writing, but now I’m a devoted fan; is a third book, finally, forthcoming?

today is jwcurry's birthday

and its too hot to blog today; but someone else posted this picture of one of curry's scarves; here's a picture I even took of the lad, just after our last ottawa small press book fair;

12 or 20 questions: with Dorothea Lasky

Dorothea Lasky is the author of Black Life (Wave Books, 2010) and AWE (Wave Books, 2007). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including Poetry is Not a Project (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and The Laurel Review, among other places. Currently, she researches creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania.

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

My first book changed my life, because it made me think of my poems as actually being read by real-life humans. I think until I could conceive of a reader as a real person, it was hard to think the effect a poem I had written might have in the world. For some reason, books do this more than other forms poems can be published in. Plus what a trip—seeing a thing out there and knowing you are the author of it and then seeing that thing in print, being multiplied everywhere!

My recent work has just come out in the form of my second book. It was released this April from Wave Books and it is called Black Life. I think this book is different than my first book, AWE, because it is stranger and darker. It also very specifically documents a sad time in my life, whereas AWE was more a collection of poems from different time periods.

I don’t think the books are that dissimilar, however. Black Life is a continuation of AWE.

The poems I am working on now feel sort of like a continuation, although they both might be different than Black Life and AWE, because some of the poems are more abstract, more conceptual, more detached.

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

I am not sure that I had a choice exactly. I just started writing poems one day when I was a little girl. I couldn’t make the story of how poetry came into my life any more romantic than the reality—I just started writing poems and never was able to stop. Although I’d love to write fiction or non-fiction, I really can’t ever take a form up like the way poetry exists in me. I naturally think and feel in the space of a poem.

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 writing comes quickly and my first drafts are very similar to the final shape of my poems. Collections of poems are a slower process. I’ll have an idea of a theme after certain themes emerge from groups of poems. Sometimes I’ll think a long time on these themes to make sure they have staying power.

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?

I am not sure if it is either of these two options. I write poems and then from time to time see what ideas are there that might be “book-like.” Sometimes though, the idea behind a book affects the words I use in subsequent poems that become part of collections or the poems I choose with corresponding themes. For example, with Black Life, once I realized that this was going to be the book’s title, I used the color black more in later drafts of the poems. Once emerged, I let the theme (and phrase) shape all the loose edges in the poems. I also incorporated the word ‘awe’ into Black Life for a similar reason. There are places where I mention awe in Black Life, because I liked the idea of a sense of unity between the two books. I’d love to do this with all the books I write in my life—have them speak to each other. They are all part of a piece (me) after all.

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

I absolutely love giving readings. I especially love talking to people I visit with while giving readings, and especially the students I meet along the way.

I wouldn’t say that readings are part of or counter to my creative process. I think ideally, if circumstances could become right, I would lead a life in which I taught a lot and had the freedom to travel widely for readings. I could see such travel as influencing my creative process more.

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?

I think there are a lot of questions I am trying to answer all the time. I don’t know if I think of poems or collections of poems as answers to questions though. I guess in the old idea of inquiry––scientific inquiry (which I see as an act of exploration)––I am answering questions with my poems. In this vein, a fundamental, overarching question I am asking in my poems is: What is the purpose of being alive? Other questions are: 1. What is our relationship, as humans, to the universe? 2. What is the universe? 3. What is death? 4. Is the spiritual world real? 5. What is love? 6. Why are things beautiful?

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 think ideally writers would be valued as a role within the culture that equals any other. I think in America there are various kinds of writers who are valued, like journalists. For journalists, being a writer is a pretty respectable role. I’ve been glad to see how quickly the role of bloggers has been key in the newsmedia. However, I think that certain kinds of writers, poets especially, are maligned within American society. Why I think this is that there is no clear employment pipeline for them. Being a poet for a lot of people is a side job. The same goes for lots of artists. I don’t think it should be this way, as being a poet is an asset for a lot of societal roles. If I were in charge of the way things go, it wouldn’t be like this. I’d create opportunities for artists that valued their strengths.

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

I’ve worked with Joshua Beckman for both of my poetry books and the experience has been essential and pretty easy. Joshua is an excellent editor for my poems, as he works extremely hard to understand not only my aesthetic, but also the subtle feelings of each particular book. It has been a great gift to work with him.

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

My dad always told me to “stay loose.” I always knew what he meant: to keep yourself open and never be static in your beliefs or actions. It’s been good advice for me so far.

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

I’ve never had a writing routine, but I long for one. Sometimes my days are hectic with meetings and obligations and other days I have a million things to do, but I can make my own schedule. If I could make my day any way I’d want to, it would go like this: wake up at 6, drink coffee, go running, read and write poems until 9, work in a governmental office from 10-5, teach a night class from 7-9, go to a play from 9-11, and then go to sleep. Another ideal day would be wandering around a museum for 12 hours and then taking a night walk. That last option is my best writing routine, when it happens. I wish those two descriptions were my weekdays and then weekends (in the museum).

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

I go to a museum or I make something. Changing my visual world always gets me out of any sort of thinking rut. Color especially punches me in the face and then cleanses my old thoughts. Also, listening to people talk about their relationships (personal, professional, secretive) inspires me because it incites my emotions. So, I really like to talk to people.

12 - What was your most recent Hallowe'en costume?

Mermaid. Old standby.

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?

Everything else you list influences my work in addition to books. For me the list of influences (most to least) would go like so: 1. Music 2. Nature 3. Visual art 4. Science 5. Other books. Actually, the order there can fluctuate, but all of those elements are always important.

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

Most of my friends are poets. My social life tends to revolve around poetry, which I find to be a good thing. If I know someone, anything he or she writes is important to my life, whether or not I agree or disagree with it. I’d say the most important writings I’ve ever read were: Ariel (Sylvia Plath), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), Fear and Trembling (Soren Kierkegaard), Break it Down (Lydia Davis), Beauty and Sadness (Yasunari Kawabata), Three Lives (Gertrude Stein), and Three Tales (Gustave Flaubert).

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

I’d like to go to Japan one day. I’d especially like to hike many mountains in Japan. Also, I’d like to publish a series of children’s books.

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

I would have loved to have been a dancer and an actress, and later, a politician. Perhaps I still have time for some of those things.

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

Probably because as a child I spent 90% of my time alone in my room, I was doomed to hone my poetry skills. Not that I want to make generalities here, because there are all kinds of children who turn into poets. But I was a brooding, lonely child and I think that made me a likely poet. I think had I been outside more, or more exposed to training in other forms of expression, I would have been an actress or something more public. I definitely don’t think I would ever chosen poetry rationally, if given the chance to at birth.

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

The last great book I read was The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art by Eileen Myles. The last great film I saw was 3 Women by Robert Altman.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently working on a new book of poems. I am also working on a play, or a set of plays, although all of that is still kind of mulling around in my mind. I am also finishing up a set of case studies of teachers, which will be my dissertation for a doctorate I am finishing. Something I am going to work on once all of this is finished, or at least under control, is a giant felt quilt, which could be the backdrop for my plays. Or at the very least could be something someone might appreciate as a wall blanket.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Robin Blaser, by Stan Persky and Brian Fawcett

My first encounter with Robin Blaser’s poetry was in 1960. I was a nineteen-year-old sailor stationed at the American naval air base at Capodichino, Italy, just outside Naples. Harold and Dora Dull, a couple from the San Francisco poetry scene, whom I’d met the year before at Sunday afternoon poets’ meetings there, had arrived for a sojourn in Europe and were staying in a small fishing village, Amalfitano, along the Amalfi coast just south of the bay of Naples. On Friday afternoons, I left the military base and took the bus from Naples to spend the weekend with them. […] The first weekend I arrived at the eyrie they’d rented above the sea, Harold handed me a copy of a recently written poem that he’d brought from San Francisco. It was by Robin Blaser, a San Francisco poet who had been living in Boston and working as a librarian at Harvard, and whom I knew of only from talk in San Francisco that placed him as one of a literary threesome that included Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. They had all been classmates at the University of California in Berkeley at the end of World War II. The poem Harold handed me was called Cups and was Blaser’s first “serial” poem, the form Jack Spicer had invented a couple of years earlier in his book After Lorca. (Stan Persky)

In the new book, Robin Blaser (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2010), Vancouver writer Stan Persky and Toronto writer Brian Fawcett each write lengthy essays on Blaser [see my obit for him here] the writer, the mentor and influence, from their own perspectives, going back well into the 1960s. Written in homage to the late Vancouver poet, mentor, teacher, composer, intellectual and friend Robin Blaser, who was the last surviving member of the trio of poets that made up the San Francisco Renaissance of Blaser, Robert Duncanand Jack Spicer. It’s interesting that both came to Blaser first through the poetry to become poets themselves, turning finally to non-fiction as their eventual and individual forms, and the two pieces, Persky’s “Reading Robin Blaser,” a more personal piece that delves specifically into Blaser’s own poetry, and Fawcett’s “Robin And Me: The New American Poetry and Us,” writing Blaser in the context of “the New American Poetry” and the failures of such, provide unique counterpoints to Blaser’s place in the world, and the two authors as well. What comes across best (the two essays sandwiching a series of black and white photos of Blaser over the years, which are quite lovely) is the level at which Blaser demanded, by example, that those who paid any attention to him become thoroughly engaged with multiple facets of the world, questioning whatever came across their path, and Persky and Fawcett, in different ways through their works, have certainly done that. With the Jack Spicer biography already in print, and the perpetually-forthcoming Robert Duncan biography by Lisa Jarnot, Robin Blaser reads as an intriguing opening into, perhaps, the most modest yet most accomplished of the three, and one can only hope that Blaser’s own work can achieve further consideration. Will there be a biography, eventually, here as well?

Unfortunately, this lovely little folio, for reasons that haven’t been explained to me, is something that the Chapters chain of bookstores is refusing to carry, despite the range of awards and accolades between the authors and subject (Blaser won a special Griffin Poetry Prize not long before he won for his reissued The Holy Forest, and Persky won a Lietenant-Governor’s Medal from British Columbia and the Governor-Generals’ Award, for example). If this can’t get through the membrane of books that those-that-hold-power tell us we should read, what chance have the rest of us?

But still, how interesting is it that these two, who learned how to question the world, be interested in everything and explore critically through Blaser’s influence, both started with writing and publishing poetry but neither publish such anymore (Fawcett claims to still compose, but not send out unless asked, and even then)? Brian Fawcett starts his piece with talking about walking into his first class during the first year of Simon Fraser University in 1966, which also happened to be Blaser’s first class as well:

The Writer was Robin Blaser, and there was something about him that convinced me, even though the very idea was preposterous, that he really had met Jack Kerouac. He was also, it turned out, on a first-name basis with nearly all the contemporary poets I’d been reading since I was sixteen or seventeen, the most important of these being Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, and Gary Snyder. All were part of a movement called the New American Poetry, a group of poets assembled and categorized by Donald Allen’s 1960 Grove Press anthology of the same name. I was carrying a much-pored-over copy of that anthology when I arrived at Simon Fraser, and it is hard to describe the intensity of my excitement when I found Blaser’s name in its table of contents along with those of my heroes.

12 or 20 questions: Sarah Selecky

Sarah Selecky's stories have been published in Geist Magazine, Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Event and The Journey Prize Anthology. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia and has been teaching creative writing workshops in her living room for the past ten years. Her short story collection, This Cake Is for the Party, was released by Thomas Allen Publishers this year.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I remember John Gould telling me once, when I was living and writing (anonymously, pre-publication) in Victoria, that the best time to write is before your first book comes out, because nobody is listening, nobody has any expectations, and you can experiment. You can write what you want, at your own pace. He was right. Now that my book is out, I am plagued with more doubts then ever before. When I sit down to write, I have to turn off way more taps. Publication has created new thought-faucets, and they pour out more complicated criticism now. It's a challenge.

The other thing that changed is that I've had to learn about self-promotion. When you're sending stories out to editors and magazines, you're also trying to convince people to invest in your writing, but in a different way. Promoting your book to bookstores and readers takes a great deal of time and energy. I don't have as much time to write as I'd like. I have to be more protective of my time, and learn how to prevent exhaustion. I'm figuring out the balance.


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

I write what I want to read. I'm a short fiction reader - I'm pretty obsessive about the form. I acquired the taste at a young age - probably from reading stories in magazines like Sassy and Seventeen - and I never gave it up. But I have been diving into non-fiction - Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Annie Dillard - and I notice my voice is shifting, and that I now feel drawn to the essay form. It really is about what I'm reading. It's not a conscious choice.

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

I am not a quick and prolific writer. My book of stories was written over the better part of 8 years. I write skimpy and ridiculous first drafts that need a lot of development before they are worth reading. I have to collect a big bed of notes - small scratches, impressions, lines of dialogue, images - before I feel secure enough to attempt a first draft of anything. This is partly why I find it so difficult to write first drafts - it's  so humbling. Many of the stories in my book have been rewritten over 10 times. And the changes are extensive. I have all of these notebooks around the house - shelves of them - with bits and pieces from different stories, developments that were built over the years, worked out on paper, and then transcribed and worked into the final version. It's a mysterious and labour-intensive process. And I give myself swaths of non-writing time, too - I think this is crucial - where I let characters simmer without looking at them for weeks or months, so I can get some perspective.

4 - Where does 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?

Fiction usually begins with a question or a problem that I'm trying to work out. I find ways to act it out on the page, with imaginary people and places, so I can make sure that I really understand all sides of the problem by the end of the story. I might not answer the question in the end, but by the end of the story, I need to be sure that I understand everything I can about the question itself.

Right now I have this interesting thing happening with three characters, three situations - I thought that the project was about weaving these three people together, but now I'm looking at it and wondering, is it all the same thing? Is my mind just trying to figure out the same problem in three different ways? Do I need to just find the right one, and follow it through? We'll see what happens.

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

Public readings are so much fun. I enjoy them most of the time (it depends on the listeners, of course, and whether they get my sense of humour).  But I don't consider readings part of my creative process. By the time I read a story aloud, it's finished. Which means that I'm not really a part of it anymore - I'm giving it away. It's creative in the way having fun wrapping a present beautifully can be creative. But it's not generative for me.

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?

I try to keep theory out of it when I'm writing. That kind of abstract critical thought about literature really turns me on, and I love to do it with other people's work. I love it when people tell me their theories about what they think my stories are doing, what questions they're posing, etc. A reviewer once said something about my stories that was so well-observed, so smart, I now quote her when people ask me about what my book is about.

But my work as a writer is different. I want to use language to articulate what can't be put into words. That's an embodied process for me - I have to get out of my head in order to get to a place where I can do that.

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?

Of course writers have a role. They're writing our world as we live it. There's this great line I just read in Sheila Heti's story (in Darwin's Bastards), "There Is No Time in Waterloo." A character says, "No future can exist until it exists, since we are all creating reality together in a radically flexible present." Writers are creating reality. We all understand who we are through the stories we tell ourselves. Writers have a powerful cultural role.

Garrison Keillor said that the writer's job is to observe. A writer pays attention to everything. Writers are vigilant observers: that's their role in society. I agree with him.

I visited a book club once, and one of the participants told me that after reading my book, she felt that everything in her life was imbued with meaning - the dish soap on the counter, the curtain tie, the keys and how they hang on the little hook. Everything felt more important, she said. Everything was significant. That was such a powerful comment. I don't know if she knew how much that comment validated the work that I do!

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

Essential. If you can find an editor who gets what you're doing, respects it, sees your limitations and your strengths clearly, understands where your work can join the conversation that is happening in contemporary literature, and can articulate all of those things to you, you're a fortunate writer. A good editor is better than anything - better than publication, better than money, better than a good review, better than a prize.  I can't say enough about this. I was very lucky to work with Zsuzsi Gartner for many years - she knew what I was capable of doing, and when I was taking shortcuts. She could see the sparkle of gold in my work when I could only see dirt, and she could see the gravel in there too, when I was trying to pass it off as precious metal.

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

You cannot know your story until you have written it first. Many people have said this in different ways. I can't remember where I read this lately, but it's worth repeating. It's kind of like that line in Sheila Heti's story (above) - maybe that's why I liked that line so much, actually!

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

Writing non-fiction is like skinny dipping. At first you feel so exposed and vulnerable! Then, once you're in the water, it feels just amazing.

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?

Roughly, it's like this: Wake up, make tea. Read a short story by someone great, like Amy Hempel or Lisa Moore or Deborah Eisenberg or Lee Henderson. Get inspired. Then start writing, with a timer to keep track. When I'm in between projects, I just write for at least 10 minutes before moving on to the rest of the day. When I'm in the middle of a project, and there is work to be done, I write from 9 - 11. When I'm revising/editing, I have more stamina - I work from 8 - 12.


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

I go outside. The natural world has everything I need in it - metaphor is everywhere. For example, sometimes just seeing the way bare tree limbs move in the wind can bring me back. Because the branches look so much like roots. And they look so much like the lines in the leaves. And these all look so much like capillaries. When I see that connection, it can snap me back to awe, which is where I need to be when I'm writing.

It can be hard to get there - when I'm stuck, it's usually because I'm caught in some old patterns and responses, and I don't know how to reconnect with awe right away. If I'm not too far gone, I'll read Annie Dillard for help. But if I'm really stuck, I can't read, either. Sometimes reading makes me nauseous when I'm stuck. Then I go elsewhere: the art gallery. Live concerts. Theatre. That can be a powerful way to get unstuck, too - find places where creativity is happening, become still enough to be receptive to it, and then put yourself there in the field. We're like little radios - we can tune into inspiration. It's a frequency.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lily of the valley.

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?

Of course. All of the above. I have a friend who recently told me that she was reading physics textbooks for inspiration. Something in the diagrams made her think about the way people work together. Metaphorically. Even though she knows not very much about physics, she was enthralled by the language - it was so different. But because everything is connected, if you're paying attention, you can find stories everywhere.

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

I've mentioned Annie Dillard - she's a big one for me right now.

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

I'd like to write a really tight novel.


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'd probably be a painter. I was a working artist, for a few years - I sold my work at the One of a Kind Show and the Toronto Outdoor Art Show, as well as other places. I sometimes wonder if I would have been a graphic novelist in another life. I still consider chef school.

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

Being an only child had something to do with it. That's why I love reading so much. And reading is the true cause, of course - a deep and profound love for reading. After I learned how to write, I simply wrote. All the time I was writing. I don't remember not writing. I didn't have a lot of friends growing up. But I always had my notebook.

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

Annabel Lyon's A Golden Mean took the top of my head off.
And Fantastic Mr. Fox - Wes Anderson's animated film - is the best thing I've seen on a screen in years.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I'm writing essays, and I'm writing a lot about writing.

I'm also working on this thing with the characters that I mentioned earlier. It might be a book.


12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jandak photography: how this photo came to be

It was a late night Saturday, June 19, hours after post-Toronto Small Press Fair dinner and drinks with the organizers and some others, post-post drinks with Carmel Purkis. I had returned, exhausted, to the post-move High Park apartment of Sharon Harris and Stephen Cain, half into a two-week “residency” that Sharon offered. When I arrived, she told of the photographer upstairs, interested in, as she said, the “poet staying in our apartment.” Would I allow him to take my portrait?

I’d had a photo-shoot or two before, including one in summer 2008 with Ottawa photographer Charles Earl, a session in their Bronson Avenue apartment eventually focusing on what I happened to be wearing, including black jean cut-offs and wool socks, becoming his accidental series, “poets in wool socks.” And so it was, hot enough and exhausted on Quebec Avenue, stripped down to briefs to quickly check email and collapse, as a knock on the door after midnight. I wrapped the closest towel around and answered.

Does that sound creepy? Using the empty room once master bedroom, he used a 1950s box camera and tripod, pulling in one of the kitchen chairs into the empty room, with little but the dusty hardwood, some of Harris’ artwork not yet moved. The next morning, relating the story to Lainna, she shook her head. I think you were tricked, love.

Later on, realizing through his website, Patrik Jandak was Slovakian, and had spent nearly four years for the President of Slovakia, with photography shows in London, Canada and the Vatican. Later on, seeing his cache of female nudes in narrative poses, and realizing how closely aligned my shoot actually was. Brave, she claimed.

I’m intrigued by photographers for the fact of becoming both subject and witness concurrently, silently watching his eyes dart the space, moving and checking light, background, the chair to the left, just a bit. Lift your head. In 2001, my daughter did the same for the images that made up the cover of side/lines: a new Canadian poetics (2002). Before digital became her preferred medium, I watched her an afternoon take up to ten or fifteen minutes to set up individual Polaroid shots along Somerset Street West, preferring to see what she’d done before going further. Her process, even at the bare age of ten, was extremely compelling. And somehow, the staccato of a dozen shutter clicks to capture the accident of a single image is somehow less interesting to me; a whole other process, with alternate goals. After twenty minutes of shooting, in the end, Patrik took seven, nine shots?

see his own write-up on same here;

Ongoing notes: the Toronto Small Press Fair, spring 2010;

[Nathaniel G. Moore at the TSPF; and then he went to the movies.] I don’t understand why the literary community in Toronto still keeps such a wide berth from the semi-annual Toronto Small Press Fair; I mean, I understand why, but the current organizers didn’t even know about the “troubles” the fair had a few years back (one wasn’t even on the continent at the time, and the other wasn’t much closer to the fair). Those involved on both sides don’t even come near, so what I don’t understand, why does everyone else also stay away? The new Meet the Presses fair is a positive thing, but why this insistence on factions? Why can’t we all just get along? I am not interested in factions; here are a couple of the items I picked up at or around the fair this time around. 

Toronto ON: Since discovering Sarah Pinder’s work at the previous Toronto fair, I’ve been quite taken with these small, graceful poetry and fiction chapbooks produced by her Bits of String, including Garden, Gardener: poems by Sarah Pinder (2008). Her poems are odd, quirky things, and her chapbooks are only two or three dollars; how can one not be charmed?

Half-Price Bed and Breakfast

On pilgrimage, I post,
aim and erect.
Missing cotton, velveteen,
a purple bite, a powder-puff,
I make a mini regatta in
crisp paper and set them a-sail
in the trout stream.

There’s something charming, naïve and then not-so in her pieces (I like this one, shades of Richard Brautigan’s surrealism), and even the back page, writing “I made this in Hamilton, ON, listening to my neighbours set off Victoria Day fireworks.” Check out her website for more information.

Toronto ON: Another little chapbook I picked up was Catherine Paquette’s A Theory of Darkness (the unkindness of ravens press, 2010), what appears to be a little sampler from a “larger cross-genre mystery novel” work-in-progress. Why do you, Pacquette, require an introduction at the beginning instead of little essay at the end? As a reader, I’m less interested in the explanation than the work itself, and wish she would have let her readers experience such without preconception. There are some good lines here, in a series of small straight-prose sections, albeit in need of editing: “Time is a formula to hate. Clocks are laughable containers. Like hearts.”

The Funeral Home of Time

A mug shatters. It is like that – the fragmenting. Something breaks into something else. The sun is rising. Breaking out from the darkness and the moon is fading out with the stars. Her breath regains and loses itself unevenly as she steps over the shards. Yes, she has lost. There are deaths all around her. she is grasping for something, but the temporal grope leaves her empty handed. She sits and watches the dark becoming light. The ruins of the night. Invisibly present and invisibly past, weaving in and out of the shifting moment. Now, she is hungry and takes in, chewing. Changes matter into mush and uses it to fuel her now. An empty plate; a broken cup. No, we do not have time to attend all the little funerals.

Ottawa ON: Produced by Ottawa writer Matthew Firth’s Black Bile Press is Toronto writer Nathaniel G. Moore’s “Sensational” Sherri (2009). Just what is it about professional wrestling, between this and his first novel, Bowlbrawl (Montreal QC: Conundrum Press, 2005) that keeps Moore (who once appeared on City TV’s Ed the Sock in a Mexican wrestling mask and subsequent match), and even Michael Holmes, going? “Never mind Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler…” the back cover tells us.

Ricky’s face filling red, voice evaporating. “Hey,” he said. Not sure if his words could be heard, not that if they mattered, just if he was actually speaking or lying down somewhere thinking this was going on and, “So, hey,” shifting the stool closer to the strangers, “But have you, or Carla, do you know?” He was slipping on and off the stool. “Hi … there.” He was using a bad Elvis voice. “Do you, hold on,” [wobbling his ass on the stool]. “So have you, you …” [focusing on one of them, one girl’s bony bare wrist. “S-s-s-sorry; I’m Rick by the way, must be wondering,” [slurrrr slurrrrr]. “Can you sit sit sit, okay, can you sit on on … a white frost cake. I mean, doesn’t goddabe white frost per say, can you sit on a cake for my birthday; it’s in July?”

Heels don’t turn but stay the same way. Heels are bad guys who work with heroes or baby-faces. When a heel becomes good, it’s called a face turn, or turning face.

Toronto ON: I didn’t get this at the fair, but Brian Fawcett handed me a small stack of his THE NORTHERN B.C. RULES with The Regulations for Snipe Hunting (David Mason Books, 2010), a small booklet of lists including “The General Rules,” “Survival in the Bush,” “Surviving in Town” and “The Snipe Hunting Regulations.” You can take the boy out of Prince George… What I enjoy best of all in this unassuming chap is the space at the end, the “several blank pages for additions to these rules. If you would like them to be considered for subsequent editions, please forward them to the publisher or author,” the inside says. Do you think they really would? As the colophon claims:

These rules are designed for physical survival in the Canadian north, which is an area that starts anywhere 100 kilometers north of a major Canadian city and extends to the geographical point at which all-terrain vehicles and skidoos outnumber normal transport, and government officials outnumber human beings (at which point “north” becomes “North” and only idiots are willing to put up with the cold and bugs).”

Fawcett, currently in Toronto but originally from Prince George, British Columbia, has a long history with the north, and about writing creative non-fiction works that could best be described, I suppose, as suggestions on negotiating various aspects of the world, including his work through the ongoing Dooney’s Café. From the first page, here are the first four, for example, general rules:

1.) In the north, rules only work in optimum conditions. Most of the time the rules are frozen solid or fouled with mud like everything else.

2.) Only things designed in the north work in the north. Everything is now designed south of the north.

3.) The most common natural hazard in the north is other people with beer or hard liquor on their breath. Unless you’re actively looking for trouble, bears are down around 17th in the list of things likely to harm you.

4.) All government and corporate megaprojects not only fail to produce promised benefits, they also produce unexpected side effects that eventually make life worse while exponentially increasing the volume of broken down or abandoned vehicles and other non-rustproofed machinery littering the landscape.

Who can argue with the logic of that?

Notes on writing, writing

Sarah Manguso: Exactly. Abstract arguments about genre are boring—and what’s more, those arguments reek of eugenics and fear. No pure forms exist. And I wish everyone would stop telling me about the “new” “hybrid” writing. Everything is already a hybrid. In any case, I think books belong to their authors, not to genres. Many writers get marketed in more than one genre, but readers just think, Look, here is another book by so-and-so, don’t they? (“David Shields in conversation with Sarah Manguso,” The Believer, June 2010)

Lately, I've been awash with questions. What is literature? Is it simply telling a story? Is it the language? Is it in the writer trying to showcase something different, shine a spotlight on something hidden, in a different way? Through reading and writing, I engage with literature in part to learn the world, to push myself further into what I do not yet understand. Picking up years worth of Granta issues, I prefer the non-fiction pieces I otherwise might never know, whether tales of the English fox-hunt, spinster sisters who love the opera and secretly smuggle Jews out of a WWII-era Europe to England, and America, or a journalist who disappears into darkest Africa, marrying a dictator and losing everything, only to lose yet again.

Is it the merging of lyric and fact? There is truth in fiction too; sometimes more, but I’d favour the lyric of essential pieces of information than long drawn-out narratives of incidentals. Who said that line I keep getting caught in my head, we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth? Far too often I find myself skipping passages, wanting the novelist to get back, so to speak, to the point.

Still, I've been finding the engagement with the “McLennan, Alberta” and “Sleeping in Toronto” manuscripts extremely educational, helping to highlight just what the whole craft might really be about – point of view. Not just how we see the world, but how the world is, and its infinite nuance, its infinite variations. It extends to how we relate to each other as well, not just through these books, but socially, politically, interpersonally. We don't need to agree but it becomes essential to try to at least understand. What the hell am I talking about.

Fighting doesn't mean anything at all if we don't comprehend the arguments on both sides; what if, but for semantics, we actually agree? Is this all simply a matter of perspective? Digging around the internet for information on the A-Team, both original series and recent remake (don’t ask), I found this quote by Mr. T, slipped into the stubble of his IMDB page:

I think about my father being called 'boy', my uncle being called 'boy,' my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called 'boy.' So I questioned myself: 'What does a black man have to do before he's given the respect as a man?' So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody's mouth is 'Mr.' That's a sign of respect that my father didn't get, that my brother didn't get, that my mother didn't get.

It reminds of old Cassius Clay, home from winning his Olympic gold, but still unable to eat at certain lunch counters, stay at certain hotels, finally tossing his gold in the river in frustration. Changing his name to Muhammad Ali. How can anyone else understand? In the new issue of Brick: A Literary Journal (#85), an interview Eleanor Wachtel did with British writer Zadie Smith, who said essentially the same. How does one understand?

I don't think it had really dawned on me what it was like to be a black woman—black as my mother is, not mixed as I am—in a white culture. She told me stories about her honeymoon. My parents went to two places, Morocco and Paris, and in Paris they couldn't get a hotel room—they had to come home. Everywhere they went, they were turned away. And even in the early days when they were trying to rent apartments, she said she would phone and ask for a room and be told it was free, and then up and be told it wasn't free. She kept experimenting and making the distance between those two events as short as possible, so she would phone from the end of the road and turn up two minutes later and it would never change: she was always told the room wasn't free.

I didn't grow up in an England that overtly racist so it was a surprise for me to hear those stories. And it made me better understand the connection she felt with black American writers. It seemed to me that we're English and they're American—the history of our communities is so diverse. But there was a connection for my mother in terms of history and, I suppose, humiliation.

And here are the details that flesh out a story, where character is built. How often, history like a stone that gets caught in the shoe, rubbing up against the present, and altering, informing. Refusing to leave. It relates, indirectly, to a short short story I wrote after a story Lainna told about her Beirut-born parents:

She tells a story of her parents, forced to emigrate in the late 1960s for the sake of their marriage, born to separate social classes in a Muslim country. How romantic, I think, how tragic, but I can’t entirely relate, not forced to relocate continents for love. On television, a documentary tells of the troubles there, generations of refugee camps to keep a whole people down. I begin to realize how little I know of the situation, and just how sheltered I’ve been.

More recently, Toronto social geographer and writer Amy Lavender Harris and I talked about identity, as she asked, how far away from point of origin does identity no longer have any claim to real meaning? Her Jewish husband generations-removed, or her own Mohawk grandfather, raised outside aboriginal culture. How faraway does culture and identity still hold, still compel? The comfort I have, knowing I’m Glengarry Scot, not pretending I’m full Scot (there is quite a difference).

Become essential, Brian Fawcett told, from his corner in the former Dooney’s Café. Write something no one else can. The further I explore and discover, the more I feel as though I have accomplished nothing, yet. Yet.

Canada Day, Happy; all about the right kind of cake...