Jonathan Ball's Blog, page 65

P.K. Page biography review

The Winnipeg Free Press features my review of a recent biography of poet/artist P.K. Page.

Haiku Horoscopes in the Winnipeg Free Press

My column “Haiku Horoscopes” has migrated from the now-defunct Uptown to the Winnipeg Free Press insert that is the new incarnation of Uptown. So every Thursday, you can check them out in print and online through the Winnipeg Free Press!

Matrix “Conceptual Writings” issue

The latest issue of Matrix, which includes a dossier on “Conceptual Writings,” also includes my contribution, “No Results Found For ‘I Hate Conceptual Poetry.’” A great issue, with work by derek beaulieu, Vanessa Place, Robert Fitterman, a rawlings, kevin mcpherson eckhoff, and others.

Interview at Open Book Toronto about The Politics of Knives

Open Book Toronto posted an interview with me about writing The Politics of Knives. An excerpt:

OB:

What does “the violence of language” mean to you?

JB:

In his book Violence, Žižek wonders “What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak?” and notes that “there is something violent in the very symbolization of a thing, which equals its mortification.” Of course, this symbolization occurs through language: “When we name gold “gold,” we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.”

I think a further violence, a more personal and political violence, occurs when we use language to develop narrative. Even the simple story of our day invalidates other viewpoints on the external events, which are meaningless in themselves, and forces them into a sensible order. We use language, and narrative, to impose upon the world an order that suits us, and we use violence for this same purpose.

October 2012 Poetry Reviews (Winnipeg Free Press)

My poetry review column is online at the Winnipeg Free Press. This month:

* The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things (Lorna Crozier)

* 50 American Plays (Matthew and Michael Dickman)

* Bent at the Spine (Nicole Markotic)

* Amphetamine Heart (Liz Worth)

What are you working on right now, Shawna Lemay?

It’s an interesting question, isn’t it, because there are so many answers for it, depending on the person asking. But rather worse is when no one asks. When family or non-artist friends ask, it can be awkward, especially when you’re writing poetry or obscure, mainly unpublishable fiction. One senses that they’re always a bit hopeful you’ve switched over to writing mysteries or thrillers. Something respectable. When you’ve been writing for 20ish years, the question just becomes increasingly awkward.

And then when the question is asked by a fellow writer, especially one to whom you’re quite close, there’s a shorthand that develops. You’ve been through several books together on each side, say. You’ve lived through each others’ acceptances, rejections. The many times you’ve been passed over, ignored, or sometimes, worse, noticed. Your friendship exists (for other reasons, too) because of this question. Because, amid the interruptions, you can keep bringing each other back to the question, back to the work, back to the dream of immersion in the work. The question, what are you working on right now? is meant to plunge you back into it, it is meant to be a dagger, it is meant to be the prompt, the snap of the fingers, to awaken you from a trance. The question is asked, not so much for an answer, but for company.

Because I don’t really like talking about what I’m working on with anyone other than a few close friends, I have a lot of fake answers at the ready. Or maybe not so much fake as they are superficial. I’m working on a prose work right now called “Transactions with Beauty” which is based partly on my blog Calm Things. I’m also working on getting a recent work of poetry published, and this one is titled, “Asking.” As well, my latest project is a website called Canadian Poetries which is slowly coming together. I work part time at the Edmonton Public Library, do odd bits of work for my partner, Robert Lemay, and am the mother of a teenager.

Thank you for asking.

Shawna Lemay is the author of five books of poetry and one book of essays. Most recently, she has written an experimental novel titled, Hive: A Forgery, which is about the possibility of the existence of a woman art forger.

What are you working on right now, Victor Enns?

Reading www.victorenns.ca takes time, but references my current projects in the reading and writing headings. My current priority is finishing Music for Men Over Fifty, which I described to Prairie Books Now as poems about “dejection, depression, drinking and decrepitude leavened with love.” Taking off where Lucky Man (Hagios, 2005) left off, the poems take a hard look at aging and love, especially in the title sequence, which, as you would expect, feature many musical references including a visit to The Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago for example.

I am also learning to write fiction, and have sent my first complete short story to Joan Thomas, the Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Often my initial conceits are outrageously ambitious and my current plan is too learn, practice, and become competent at the craft of fiction writing by writing 26 stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, most about men – who are not me. I am finding this quite liberating, but at the moment it’s all practice, which I plan to complete in the next four years.

What I am practicing for is the writing of three novels, when I leave government and have more time and a better grasp on what I need to do to best realize the stories I want to tell. The novels on the drawing board are Susann and/or Against the Grain loosely based on my mother’s struggle for freedom and independence in a hostile conservative Mennonite family and southern Manitoba rural society. I took my first crack at this in The Dead Mother which I wrote for the Three-Day Novel contest, modeled on Barthleme’s The Dead Father. Both my mother and father are dead, committed to the earth, and to poetry in Lucky Man.

The second is starting out with the rather flat title Mill Road, a riches to rags story based loosely on the family who owned the mill and all the homes on the street next to it in a small southern Msanitoba town with some resemblance to the one in which I grew up. Preacher’s Kids would be the last following a coeterie of high school friends from 1969 to 1999.

Working is the right word, but I also have a full time job, so am trying not to get frustrated with lack of time and presence of pain – all expected to change in the next four years. I still have two unplaced manuscripts (excerpts on my website) to which I would return should I be fortunate enough to find a publisher.

Victor Enns is the author of Jimmy Bang Poems (Turnstone, 1979), Correct in this Culture (5th House, 1985), Lucky Man (Hagios, 2005), and boy (Hagios, 2012). He is employed by the Province of Manitoba as Publishing and Arts Consultant in the Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

Guy Maddin and George Toles interviewed about writing The Saddest Music in the World

Originally published online in scr(i)pt magazine, c. 2004. Co-authored by Jonathan Ball and David Navratil

No Sob Story: Director Guy Maddin and Screenwriter George Toles on Collaboration The Saddest Music in the World

Filmmaking is about collaboration. Unless you’re writing, directing, lighting, shooting, funding, editing, and somehow acting in your own film, other people have to bring their talents to bear on a project in order for it to reach completion. Any screenwriter who wants to see his or her work produced has to, at some point, hand the script over to somebody else and trust that person not to tear it into pieces. The original writer is almost never the person with ultimate authority over the script, but sometimes if that writer is lucky he or she gets to work with that authority figure, be it an actor, director, producer, or another writer. Sometimes friendships are founded upon the pages of a script, and rare collaborative teams can develop which produce consistently strong and engaging work.

Guy Maddin has an international reputation as one of the most original and respected directors in the world today. The youngest person ever to be honored with the Telluride Medal for Lifetime Achievement (and this in 1995, when the director had only three features under his belt), Maddin’s films have met constant critical acclaim, including a 2002 Emmy win for the feature-length silent dance film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. Though he has yet to achieve the commercial success of Canadian contemporaries like Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg, Maddin’s latest feature The Saddest Music in the World seems to be the horse that everyone is betting on these days. The film stars Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet, Fearless), Maria de Medeiros (Pulp Fiction) and Mark McKinney (Kids in the Hall, Saturday Night Live), in a depression-era epic about a contest held in Winnipeg to determine which country has the saddest music in the world.

Like most of Maddin’s features, The Saddest Music in the World was written with longtime friend and collaborator George Toles. This time around, the comfortable working arrangement between the two was complicated by the addition of author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was made into a successful film. Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay for Saddest Music, and held control over the material when Maddin and Toles became interested in the project.

scr(i)pt: How did you get involved with The Saddest Music in the World?

GUY MADDIN: Another producer I had on a different project held the option for the Ishiguro script. It had been sitting on their desk since 1985. The problem is that I hate reading scripts, something that the readers of scr(i)pt are going to love to hear. There wasn’t anything that immediately drew me to this script. So it sat on my kitchen table for several months before they really started hounding me to see if I liked it.

GEORGE TOLES: Why did he suddenly decide that now was the time to hound you about this 17-year-old script?

MADDIN: This script, I had run sort of a forensics test on it. It sort of felt like this poor thing had been passed around in the bushes like a big bottle of cheap wine, from Atom Egoyan to Don McKellar to Bruce McDonald, and so forth. The pages had been degraded and besmirched by other two-bit directors. The cover page especially was marked up with the breath of bad Canadian filmmakers.

TOLES: None of the directors who’ve been mentioned, of course.

MADDIN: No, no, no. But after good people breathed on it — Egoyan, McKellar, etc. — a bunch of bad Canadian filmmakers breathed on it. So it didn’t really strike me as a great honor that I was getting it. I think it had most recently been in Egoyan’s hands, and he had decided to make his labor of love, Ararat. That had happened very recently. I also know that Don McKellar had something to do with it too, because every time I mentioned it around him, he started nodding knowingly. Just like someone I know used to after he slept with my girlfriend. It was hard to get my mouth watering over this thing. So I handed it to George, like I do with so many things, to get his opinion. And I don’t even know if George read it.

TOLES: Guy and I had one of those obscure, not so much quarrels but ‘friendship timeouts,’ for close to two years. Neither of was entirely clear in the aftermath what brought it on, but right before I was given the script we had our first real conciliatory meeting, brought on by Guy inviting me to do the DVD commentary for Careful. Ironically, the theme of the movie is two people navigating warily on alpine eggshells. Guy asked me if I was interested in looking at this ‘weighty thing.’ I was super eager to get working on something again. There was so much rust on whatever screenwriting talent I had, that I felt it would take me months to see if there was anything left. In any event, I was determined — when I got my hands on the script — to find something to warm to. It’s kind of a dishonest starting point. But I did, without trying, love the title. I couldn’t resist something called The Saddest Music in the World.

scr(i)pt: Were you concerned about making changes to someone else’s work?

TOLES: I don’t feel that, as an entity, a script is ever a finished thing. A novel can be finished. A poem can be finished. But even the last, last version of a shooting script is still a draft. I just feel that a script has a funny kind of half-life at the best of times. So I didn’t feel like I was doing a grave injustice to this much honored, Booker prize-winning author. Who has a well-deserved worldwide reputation among serious literary circles. What I honestly liked was the title, the premise and the contest—to determine which country’s music was the saddest. The characters did not immediately emerge for me on the first reading of the script. But the notion of sadness as an entity, something that one could be endlessly false in relation to and competitive about, seemed to me genuinely unusual and something that was right up both of our alleys.

scr(i)pt: Did you call Guy right away?

TOLES: I didn’t want to give myself too much time to do this. I was worried about giving myself pitching apoplexy and paralysis, wondering how I would make the presentation. I felt I had about 15 minutes to honestly win or not win Guy’s attention. And I can usually tell. There are many polite sounds and then there are sounds that move a little closer toward genuine enthusiasm, and laughter — of course — is a good indicator that something’s happening.

scr(i)pt: How did you pitch the idea?

I think — and memory is a corrupting agent — that the centerpiece of the thing was that it’s all sad. So the only way to tell the story is to have someone play against the sadness. The sadness is your given and there’s no need to have a character running in the same direction as that. But there would be a need for a kind of gingerbread man with a Cagney exuberance. And that unkillable, show biz optimism. I wasn’t sure at this time if he [Chester Kent, played by Mark McKinney] would be American or Canadian, but he would certainly have an American moxie. This character with all of that irresistible, do or die, throw something together for an audience attitude. We would put that sincerely into a comedy somehow in relation to sadness. That would enable us to do something in the ’30s, set in Winnipeg. I got about that far before Guy started kicking in with some notions of his own. Anyway, the hook was an obvious one for both of us: a guy repressing sadness.

MADDIN: Yes, as soon as you mentioned a guy repressing sadness, I started thinking about some of the great Kirk Douglas characters — like in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Well, actually any movie with Kirk Douglas. A guy who is overlooking and repressing all the rotten things he’s done, and you get to watch them simmering there on his face until it all boils over in the end. Usually with his character dropping dead somehow, in his own feces — metaphorical feces. Or with him being left alone on an iceberg somewhere, somehow. Then we realized he had to be an American. That you just don’t get protagonists like this in Canadian films, nor should you, necessarily.

TOLES: I think we both envisioned a character like Chester Kent, with some of that Yankee Doodle Dandy-ness. In that film Cagney is just killing himself to be entertaining. Wrapping himself in an American flag, but doing it with a kind of… like he needs to win World War II single-handedly.

scr(i)pt: Were you worried about having an amnesiac character again?

TOLES: The amnesiac is a supporting role [rather than the starring role of the amnesiac Boles in Archangel]. We took the courage from Chester and infused her with life. She seems to gain sustenance from chill, something Guy wanted to do. I just felt there would be something in having a tapeworm as a thing within her, giving her all kinds of happy dispatches on pursuing nymphomania guiltlessly. As much as Chester is pushing sadness calmly to one side, this Narcissa character is not somebody who is dissolving into grief, but is working against it as calmly as Chester. They made almost a vaudeville comedy duo in some ways — cheerful in relation to almost anything. There’s just that one dark page that she has to turn that will change everything. Thankfully, she’s got some time before it has to be turned.

scr(i)pt: Do you often incorporate similar elements from project to project?

TOLES: I don’t know why, but we always like to bring everything, physically if possible, into one location and psychologically if possible into one family.

MADDIN: Yeah, it’s just a fear I have that things will get too spread out. I just feel that I can’t shoot something when things are not close together. There’s no reason, necessarily. But it’s just a claustrophobia that I’m comfortable with.

scr(i)pt: How do you navigate through the collaboration process?

MADDIN: Once we had gotten a treatment spoken out on the phone, I wrote down a version of it that had all our favorite elements. And all of them survived in the movie. It still didn’t have an ending, and it had some rough patches. But I got it down quickly so I could fax it to Niv Fichman, who was flying to London to meet Ishiguro. I quit my job at the university so I could get to work on this as quickly as possible. I just remember typing up our conversation so it was an interesting read. Knowing full well that whatever I sent Ishiguro would be a slap in the face, since we had taken the thing and changed it.

sc(i)pt: Did your producer actually own the rights at this point?

TOLES: No, which was actually kind of liberating, since I was certain that we would be turned down. So why not just do whatever the hell we want, since it’s a foregone conclusion Ishiguro will say no. We just couldn’t imagine a writer of his stature allowing two people that he didn’t know to—

MADDIN: To lop the legs off a character that he had never heard of.

TOLES: And to have nothing left but the contest. And even the tone of the contest had changed so completely — what chance did we have?

MADDIN: Yeah, so we were able to tackle it as kind of a big writing exercise. And maybe get published in the university’s student newspaper, The Manitoban. It was fun to write, and we were eager to start a project together again. Anyway, I waited by my phone to hear what Ishiguro thought, knowing it was a one in a million chance. It turns out that Niv never even showed him the treatment. Thus began a very long 18-month period, with Niv flying to London every so often.

sc(i)pt: Was Ishiguro unhappy with your ideas?

MADDIN: Ishiguro had told Niv — sometime over the preceding 17 years — that maybe he could get an auteur that was willing to run with the script. So he was already sort of loosened up a little bit and even told me this. But I don’t really believe it when people tell me they are loosened up.

TOLES: Especially sensitive European authors.

MADDIN: Actually, a lot of the collaboration went between Niv and me. George would talk to me and Niv would talk to Ishiguro, then we would talk to each other. Niv just kept telling me things were about to happen, but I was growing impatient. The truth was, that right up until the moment before he gave permission, Ishiguro didn’t like our treatment. He thought it was terrible.

TOLES: My memory of Guy’s version of that final meeting was that on his way to meet Ishiguro in London, he had decided to blow off the last 18 months and give up. It wasn’t until he saw in Ishiguro’s face that this was going to be a polite kiss-off meeting that he went into reverse gear and decided to charm the pants off of him and get Ishiguro to agree to letting Guy do the project.

sc(i)pt: George, as a screenwriter, what’s it like collaborating with the director?

TOLES: I can’t think at the moment of any disadvantages. The great thing about Guy is that I have enormous basic respect for his taste. And his taste both with respect to comedy and tone, which are hugely important things. He doesn’t make things that embarrass me. And when the joke isn’t flying for me, I am sure it would’ve been torpedoed by him well in advance. It’s a case of having harmonious sensibilities and enough themes in common that there’s no lack of stuff to draw upon. And also this very useful knowledge of what Guy is disposed to like and dislike. Someone else might take years to get to that place where you can know without asking. Communication effortlessness, where you don’t have to second-guess on so many issues. The other thing I love about Guy is that he has never told me ever to be safer in my thinking or storytelling. In fact, it is always the reverse. If I ever get chided or told to rethink, it’s to be bolder still. It’s always the direction of more alarming departure from sensible norms. That’s spoiled me considerably.

What are you working on right now, Sally Ito?

Right now, I’m writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. It’s a great gig, designed to help you write and help other writers write, and is a switch for me from the creative writing teaching I do regularly in the academic year at the Canadian Mennonite University. The pleasure for me in this position is having access to the University’s vast resources including their libraries, their faculty, their state-of-the-art technology and yes, their parking lot. I can’t stress to you how important the free parking is.

What am I writing now? Well, as usual, I have my fingers in several different pots of honey, to use a Winnie-the-Pooh metaphor. I’ve been working steadily on a family history which has involved writing and translating work. I spent the last few years translating my late grandfather, Toshiro Saito’s memoir, with the help of various family members and others, and have been publishing sections of it on such on-line journals as The Winnipeg Review, The Tyee and the print journal, The Malahat Review. I’d like to publish the memoir someday and am shopping it around to publishers. Unfortunately, small presses in Canada that are government funded must adhere to a policy whereby a book must be of 50% Canadian creator content and I’ve been told by some publishers that translations do not qualify. As the Canadian translator of this document, I find this policy egregiously colonial and limiting, and welcome any publisher who might challenge it by being the first to offer me a contract!

I write poems whenever the fancy strikes me, and it still does, so I always have a few kicking around that I like to work on or revise as I have time. Sometimes, a short story insinuates itself into the mix, and I’ve started a couple just recently. Where they will go, I have no idea. This summer, I went back to working on an old novel about a Canadian woman who goes to Japan to study paper-making, and have suddenly found myself re-immersed in the wonderful world of Japanese craft. And then I write blog, so to speak. For a few years as a paid blog contributor to the multicultural childrens’ literature blog and website, PaperTigers, I enjoyed writing about what I love – that is, about books, and it’s kind of hard to shake the habit. Well known dance choreographer, Twyla Tharp, has a book out called The Creative Habit where she talks about creativity being a habit that one must cultivate and integrate into one’s daily life. Blogging is my creative habit. I enjoy the diary-like way one can play with words, thoughts and ideas in the brief bubble of text as it were, that constitutes the blog post. I love to write posts and love to read them, too. Having said that, you might check out my new blog gig at the CCWOC blog: Sally Blogs the University.

Sally Ito is a poet and fiction writer. She was born in Taber, Alberta, and currently lives in Winnipeg. She has published three books of poetry, Frogs in the Rain Barrel, A Season of Mercy, and Alert to Glory, as well as a collection of short stories called Floating Shore. Ito has also studied in Japan, and has done translations of contemporary Japanese poetry. She teaches creative writing in Winnipeg and is a former blog contributor to the multicultural children’s literature blog and website, PaperTigers.

What are you working on right now, Catherine Owen?

A shit-ton of things it seems. I hate being bored. Life is brief.

Right now I’m about to head out on the road to tour my book, Trobairitz, from Anvil Press, a collection of poems that fuse medieval forms with my experience of the metal world, mostly from 2002-2009. Currently, I have three books of poems on the go on loss, freaks and the Fraser River, one collection of “sliver fiction” called The Day of the Dead, another one of essays/memoirs surrounding manifestations of grief in art, nature, travel, literature.

I’m revising a book called The Other 23 & a Half Hours: what poets do when they aren’t writing poems, a non-fiction collage-like handbook for newer poets featuring a slew of Canadian poets talking on various aspects like translation, running a reading series and working in uncommon jobs.

It will be out in 2014 from Wolsak & Wynn.

The novella I wrote, Wake, is currently hanging about waiting for a miracle. Got a few kids’ books on the go with a couple of artists too about cats, moths and matadors of shadows. And I’m in the initial stages of thinking through the compilation of a poetry anthology called The Outsider’s Guide to Beauty.

For collaborative projects, over the past year, Warren Dean Fulton & I have been burgeoning a beast we’ve named Above & Beyond Productions. We made a Vancouver Poets’ calendar, a poetry film, and thus far, three chapbooks, including a kids’ book, The Truck Driving Princess. I’m also editing

Joe Rosenblatt’s manuscript called Snake City.

In relation to multimedia stuff — two collaborations with visual artists, one with Sydney Lancaster called NEST and another with Paul Saturley that we’ve dubbed Pandemonium. Also planning a exhibit of art/artifacts by a few Canadian poets dealing with grief. It’s known as Visualelegies and will feature photos, assemblages and ephemera from the lost.

Musically, I’m in a bit of a limbo. Since the demise of Inhuman/Helgrind with my partner Chris Matzigkeit’s death, I’ve been working mostly solo on my blackened doom band Medea. Also been collaborating with a guitarist on experimental poemsongs in the duo The Lyrical Outlaws. But that recently fell apart. As so much tends to, rapidly or eventually. Fortunately there are always subsequent manifestations, renewed hopes.

Catherine Owen is a Vancouver poet, writer, bassist and tutor/editor with two English Literature degrees from SFU. She has been publishing trade books since 1998 and as of 2011 has eight titles out of poetry, one of epistles and an upcoming collection of prose essays/memoirs. Her presses include: Exile Editions, Wolsak & Wynn, Anvil Press, Mansfield Press and Black Moss.