Friday, November 21, 2014
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Happy First Birthday, Rose!
Today is our dear Rose's first birthday. Can you imagine a year has passed since she emerged? We hosted a small gathering of immediate family and what-not for her over the past weekend (our house was very crowded), in which she gently mangled a carrot cake of her very own (a separate cake was prepared for "everyone else"). Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins (including both cousins Duncan) and big sister Kate were all in attendance. What do you think of her magnificent crown?
.JPG)
.JPG)
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Blake
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This is my first book so I feel like it’s constantly changing my life right now. I’m scheduling readings and making travel plans. It’s completely different from, let’s say, the last year spent mostly at home, writing, submitting, and taking care of my son.
My more recent poems are starting to appear in journals and they are very different from the first book. Mr. West was a very difficult book to write. It involved a lot of research and a lot of emotional investment that kept surprising me as the years of writing went on. The recent poems had to be a big departure for me. They’re more personal in terms of how they confront interiority and they’re more narrative.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I did a poetry unit in 5th grade and have been writing poems ever since. It has always made sense to me and I love it.
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 don’t really think of anything as starting. Maybe that helps. I keep writing and I see if anything is taking shape on a large scale a good ways into the process. My writing happens in batches where it comes quickly and then breaks where it doesn’t happen at all. First drafts appear looking close to their final shape but not final version. Big chunks leave. New parts come. They often get longer. But the shape often follows the first few lines or stanzas (based on the length of the poem). I trust those opening impulses when the inspiration is clear.
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?
A poem usually begins in an image for me. I feel like it’s my job to spring forward from there. For this book, I was an author of short and long pieces that combined into a larger project. I don’t like to think of a “book” until the end. What became difficult for me was to compile the book, send it out, and then to break into it again after it had been accepted to make it the best book it could be.
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. I’ve read at high schools, universities, cafes, bookstores, and I can’t wait to read at more! And I often catch edits I want to make while reading.
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 not to think of concerns and questions while I’m writing, but every year or so, I gather what I’ve been writing and I try to think critically about what they’re doing and what they could be doing. Those questions go into my revisions, but they also are in the back of my head when I write in the future. They don’t apply pressure to my writing life but they definitely have an effect that I’m very grateful for. I don’t think I’m ever writing to answer a question directly. I guess I’m not asking those sorts of questions.
My most common questions are: How can poetry be important? How can a poet make poetry a valuable life to have lived? How can I move poetry forward? And then many, many thematic questions that often circle around what it means to be a person in today’s world—a caring person, a happy person, a person trying to be happy.
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?
It’s strange how I immediately think, writer or poet? There are definitely roles a writer can play (I’m thinking of Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, and a few other writers that have pierced the bubble that leads into larger culture). But I’m not so sure about a poet. Not the way things are now in American culture. But that’s not to say the roles a poet can play in smaller cultures aren’t valuable. I think a poet should be a member of any community that’s worthwhile to them. Teach, mentor, read, review, talk, write, continue, continue. I think about all the poets that have touched my life, and I’m so grateful.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. Mostly it’s not difficult either, but sometimes an editor comes in that I’m not used to working with. That starts out difficult, but also ends up essential to the work.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
These aren’t the exact words, but basically: Write the hard stuff. You have a worthwhile voice from which to write the hard stuff.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I don’t do much genre switching, so I guess, not that easy!
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 sometimes fall into a routine for a month or so (writing at night when my son’s asleep), but mostly I don’t have one. I do write a lot though, just not in a structured way. A typical day begins with my son waking me up.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
For this book, I turned to research. I read more and more articles until something struck me. Now, if I really feel like I need to write, I open up a book of poetry. Reading poems online don’t affect me as much as opening up a collection from my shelves.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I have a lot of allergies, so maybe a lack of fragrance reminds me of home!
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?
This book is filled with music, media, pop culture, history, and much more. My more recent poems turn a bit more to nature and science. (Like I said before, I needed a major shift.) I really love bringing all these different things to my work.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lately I’ve been rereading Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Maurice Manning, and Lucille Clifton. I also think about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina all the time.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a villanelle. Go to Ireland. The list goes on for days.
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?
A scientist. A civil engineer. A diplomat. I was a math major in college, and I love almost every subject. But I just kept writing and it took over.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
At the end of college, I told myself I’d keep writing as long as it supported me. It hasn’t stopped yet. I feel very lucky for that.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire by Brenda Hillman. And Pacific Rim. (It should be noted I see about 3 films per year, but I still stand by Pacific Rim.)
20 - What are you currently working on?
A few things. A long poem. A screenplay turned into poems. And many other poems that don’t quite fit anywhere yet.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Sarah Dowling, Down
What could make this
aesthetics. Would could make me feel that. Make me many. Make me better. What could
make me sexless and sexual. Make me better. What could make me sexless and
sexual. Make me feel we. Make me feel made. Make me feel us. Make me feel
matter. Make me feel this, for one. What could make me feel this commotion,
this relationship to energy. What could make me feel this way. (“Sunshine Honey”)
Canadian poet Sarah Dowling’s third poetry collection—following Security Posture (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010) and Birds & Bees (Troll Thread, 2012)—is
the newly-released Down (Toronto ON:
Coach House Books, 2014), a collection that shakes and shimmys, utilizing repetition
and a lyric ebb and flow that stretches out across the entire book. What compels
about Down is the sheer vibrancy and
velocity her poems radiate, managing to break and rebuild expectation and lyric
structure. As she opens the poem “I’ve Got To Tell You”: “Can you Can you Can
you Can / I promise If we talk and you know / But see / I don’t know if I / shouldn’t
tell but if / I let you can’t I’m
talking Are you / I’m not lonely just Say yes[.]” Hers is a sonic density of
lyric and language, one that plays with narrative logic, the fragment, and
space on the page. Her coda, “The Process Notes,” that closes the collection, opens:
I’ve been working on DOWN since 2009. It began as different
project, Hinterland B. For years, I was
writing about a big, bare field. There was a body in it. The newspapers said
that someone was gone. The newspapers said that someone had been found. These were
not the same person. The TV kept on chattering, people lost interest, the cycle
moved on. I was thinking about this field as secondary: not Hinterland A, but
Hinterland B.
I thought that the hinterlands were the most rural and
remote places. Turns out, this is not true. A hinterland is more familiar; the
waste fields around ports and airports are hinterlands. A hinterland serves as
a buffer between sanctioned spaces for living and working and the trade hubs
where we are not supposed to go. They are the regions between the everyday and
the truly rural lands that we too often imagine as depopulated.
[…]
At the same time that I
was working on Hinterland B, I was
also working on performance writing using song lyrics. I liked how the repetitions
structuring chorus and verse shifted when stripped of their melodic
accompaniment. Gertrude Stein said she was inclined to believe that there is no
such thing as repetition, only insistence. Frank O’Hara said that what was
happening to him went into his poems. This was insistence but with more
anxiety.
As
she herself writes, she worked to compose poems with the mutability, sincerity
and lyric throwaway of pop songs, managing to create an impressive collection
of poems that exude a soundless music and stylized lyric flow blended with a
series of complex, staggered rhythms, an exploration of the public versus
private, and what exactly remoteness means.
but his Yes,
his
saw he says
friend had face as little cop
, had was fresh soon friend
had bloodied handcuffed blood as
friend, face up. and on I
in to cut His bleeding
his saw
the the
boy in , him
backseat window his was across there
and face full back his
was
he
was blood. gash
yelling across
me (“Starlight Tours”)
Monday, November 17, 2014
Profile of Arc Poetry Magazine, with a few questions,
Sunday, November 16, 2014
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Binnie Brennan
Co-winner of the 2009 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest, Binnie has also been published in several Canadian and American literary journals. Her novella, Harbour View, was shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award and longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award. Binnie is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, where she was mentored by M.G.Vassanji and Alistair MacLeod.
Since 1989 Binnie has lived in Halifax where she plays the viola with Symphony Nova Scotia.
www.binniebooks.com
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The publication of Harbour View was certainly one of the great thrills of my life. It was a solid nudge that I was on the right track as a writer, which propelled me to complete my short story collection (A Certain Grace).
I’d say my most recent work, Like Any Other Monday, is the one that’s most changed my life – my writing life, anyway. Writing from history wasn’t something I’d considered, nor was writing a fictional portrait of Buster Keaton ever part of my plan. It’s taken me places I never thought I’d see, such as the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, and I’ve absorbed a great deal about two extinct art forms, vaudeville and silent film comedy, which I hadn’t much thought about before now.
Until Monday came along, I’d thought of myself mainly as a short story writer. I love the short form for its distillation of ideas and images, and never really thought I’d be able to cope with the larger canvas of a novel.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’ve been reading fiction for as long as I can remember. I’m most at home reading and writing fiction, although with the work I’ve been doing on Buster Keaton I have extended my reach towards non-fiction in the way of essay-writing, and some prose-poetry pieces inspired by his two-reel movies.
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?
The first draft is always hard work, sometimes a painful slog. It takes a lot of revising and polishing before I’m happy with it. One of my twenty-page short stories took nine months of continuous writing and rewriting before I had the plot nailed down. However, Like Any Other Monday came in a rush following eighteen months of deep research, copious note-taking (ten filled notebooks) and various writing efforts (see #2). The first draft of the novel took six weeks to write, and I wrote nonstop, night and day. Does that mean it took six weeks, or 19-1/2 months? However you look at it, this was a completely new approach to writing for me. I just wanted to get the words down and sort it out later. It took a lot longer to revise and clean it up than to write the first draft, but the overall shape is the same.
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?
A lot of my short stories come from newspaper articles, overheard conversations, and in some cases, remembered events that I’ve appropriated and then altered to suit the story. With A Certain Grace I didn’t have a book in mind; I’d written the stories over a six-year period. Harbour View began as linked short stories I sort of got on a roll writing, and then decided to put them together as a novella.
Like Any Other Monday had its beginning as an experimental short story that left me scratching my head, wondering who are these people, and how did they come to be breaking in a new act together on the vaudeville stage? And then what happened? The short story grew longer and longer until finally I realized it would probably turn into a novel.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy them. Readings are one of the best ways writers have to connect with readers, and I love to read aloud, something I’ve always enjoyed doing. I prepare for readings as I would for a musical performance. I rehearse like crazy, and I underline certain words, add crescendos and breath marks and dynamic markings as I do musical scores. I read aloud to my cat until he’s so bored he leaves the room. And then I do it again. There’s no substitute for being prepared, for having the rhythm set and the words ready in your mouth. It’s not to say I’m spared the butterflies and wobbly knees, but I love the connection between story, writer, and reader, and for me the story is the most important thing in the room.
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?
None, really. I’m more of an intuitive writer, and each story brings with it a load of doubt – did this work? Can I get away with it? When I’m writing I don’t think about theoretical matters, form, structure; usually that sort of thing takes care of itself. I’m just happy to get the story down, and I enjoy making stuff up.
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’m not so sure about the role of the writer in larger culture, other than to supply the stories that allow people a chance at time-travel and escapism, and do it well.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had such good experiences working with Andrew Steeves and Gaspereau Press, and with John Calabro, the fiction editor at Quattro Books. In both cases we were simply after making the stories as good and authentic as possible. This involves leaving the ego at the door and knowing when to try the editor’s suggestions, or when to dig your heels in.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Keep your options open.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short story to novel)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’ve only made the move from short stories to novel successfully once, and it wasn’t intentional – the novel came from a short story. I’ve never thought in terms of “graduating” from short stories to longer fiction, of aspiring to write a novel once I got the hang of short stories. For me the art of short fiction lies in the compression of ideas, the economy of style.
Both genres have their appeal. With a short story you can hold the entire thing in your head without too much effort during the writing of it. I might make a few pages of notes or sketches and take it from there. Novels are obviously on a much bigger scale. Once I realized I was writing one, I had to make about a thousand decisions and keep detailed notes just to make sure I stayed on track and didn’t lose anything. The novel allowed me a wide-open space I’d never occupied before, and I enjoyed being there. Still, I found myself economizing, distilling things, and I’m not sure if that was a conscious choice. I don’t think it was.
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 don’t have a set routine; it depends on what I’m writing and on my work schedule. With Like Any Other Monday I was up at least five times a night making notes as ideas flooded in, and in the morning I’d try to make sense of them. I hit the ground running (writing) every single day and couldn’t wait to see what the next night’s notes would bring. This went on for weeks, much of it during Nutcracker season. My Symphony colleagues got used to my frantic note scribbling in the pit between pieces, and after the rehearsals or concerts I’d rush home and write some more.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read better fiction than I could hope to write, sometimes a single short story of Alistair MacLeod’s. I take photographs. Look at movies – usually silent movies, where every gesture tells the story. Lately I’ve been reading biographies. One of my favourites is a collection of essays on obscure silent film comedians called Clown Princes and Court Jesters, by James Lahue. One of the comedians, Billie Ritchie, died of injuries sustained on the set of an animal comedy after he was attacked by the ostriches. This was so shocking to me, but also perversely hilarious (what a way for a comedian to go!), that it surprised me into writing a short story.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pipe tobacco takes me back to my childhood home. It’s a rare thing to find these days.
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’ve absorbed much in the way of expression through my musical life – phrasing, structure, pacing. Buster Keaton’s movies from the 1920s have been a revelation in style, simplicity, and economy of storytelling. Visual art inspires me, especially talking to my mum about paintings, art history, and her process as an artist.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I first read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners when I was twelve years old. She showed me that it was possible to tell stories about ordinary people, and tell them beautifully. Alistair MacLeod and Helen Humphreys have been great influences during my writing life.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sing jazz standards with a smoking hot trio in a nightclub.
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?
Title writer during the silent movie era. They were paid not so much for the number of words they wrote as for the number of words they didn’t write, all the while still telling a story. Talk about distillation and economy!
(Okay, so that’s still within the writing profession...)
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I did something else: I became a professional musician. Some years later I became a writer. And now I do both.
When I was in high school I was torn between the two, writing and playing the viola. I was a serious music student at the time, but I was also writing a lot, and I loved doing both. A wise person pointed out that I hadn’t really lived enough of a life yet to write anything interesting, so why not pursue music for a while and live a little, and then try my hand at writing? And that’s what I did.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Recently I read Wayne Grady’s Emancipation Day, which I enjoyed very much. I’d say the last great movie I watched was Buster Keaton’s 1924 feature film, Sherlock, Jr. which is a beautifully crafted example of a lost art form.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got a few things on the go, including a series of short stories inspired by the early, primitive days of silent movies. But the one that has my attention these days is a novel that has nothing to do with silent movies or vaudeville.
12 o 20 (second series) questions;
Saturday, November 15, 2014
fw: a poetry project from brenda liefso:
I've been thinking about how to get readers and writers of poetry more connected and engaged for a while now, but recently, this essay from a GG nominated poet sparked me into action: http://cwila.com/reading-the-evidence/. So, I've begun matching poets with readers, and it works like this: The poet sends a poem to the reader via Canada Post using lovely stationary, a coconut, whatever they so wish, and the reader responds with apoem in kind, or a prose letter, or an art piece. That's it -- the reader/writer can choose if they would like to keep corresponding after that.
I'd love for this to become a funded project, and will work on it, but for now, it's just for connection and for joy. I would also love for the poet and reader to let me know what it meant for them.
So, if you are interested in being either a poet or a reader/responder in this project, please email me your address and whether you'd like to be a poet or a reader at brenda@littleplumcreative.com OR send me a note with your name and address and preference as to poet/reader to:
Brenda Leifso
487 King St W
Kingston, ON
K7L 2X7.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Lisa Lubasch, So I Began
Starts
like a summit or a vowel. There inside it. She cannot go anywhere. Out. Is out
of the question. Elsewhere. Out of the question. She cannot swear. Besides. It
doesn’t help anymore. She cannot speak. Their answers. What they want. Is
obvious. Is it not. It’s raining. It is summer. It is warm, like hands.
Possible sketch of the future, of maturity?
And
when it happens there is no explanation. It keeps going on like days in the.
Foolishly waits. For someone’s words. Foolishly waits. For a time or a task.
Another to begin. The first one. Is that what you are waiting for?
Resuscitated
as a kind of unrest. Blade. Slowly. Blown slowly. Over it. It is not anyone. It
isn’t you. Someone in the hardened room suspends a deaf recitation. You are
alone, but someone inquires. Have you been through the [exit]?
New York poet Lisa Lubasch’s fifth poetry collection, the first I’ve seen of her work, is So I Began (New York NY:
Solid Objects, 2014), a multi-layered lyric suite of beginnings, openings and
fragmented, stuttered description. Lubasch’s collage-effect of phrases,
fragments and rich lyric passages accumulate as a sequence of layered steps. The poems are lean, as Catherine Wagner suggests on the back cover blurb: lean and
sometimes fierce; abstract enough to float, and strong enough to strike with
the precision of a needle. As Lubasch writes to open the poem “The Situation/Evidence”: “Open hangs his
head and begins to mumble. / I am not quite at that point, but in a moment I
could be / mumbling too. / I notice three things about this place. / The first
is that Open inhabits it. / The second thing I notice is that I—I— / The third
thing develops as the light moves down the / tumbling place…. / The tumbling
place is my name for—[.]” Hers are nervous and downright restless poems,
endlessly moving and morphing their meditative ways through a long thread. How does
one maintain and contain such restless anxiety in such a precise and measured
package?
A
sounding at the ear. And a ringing
at the doorstep. Look,
she
said,
a sounding at my hair, and a laughing in the footsteps.
A
terrible laughing. Certainly is
terrible, and certainly is
honorable. Better to be honorable than eligible. Or
perhaps not eligible at
all. The name fell twice. It was (the
substance
of the name she heard). (The
substance or the distance
from
it.) Redundant knocking. A drift, a birch, through
daylight,
lost. Drifting, drifting, into
stalwart down. We
are
measuring its aperture. Deep rose,
written into English.
Written
into daylight. One by one.
Thursday, November 13, 2014
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Detorie
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;
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
