Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 342

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mia You

Mia You was born in Seoul, South Korea; grew up in Northern California; and currently lives in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She is completing her PhD in English at UC Berkeley, and she recently quit her job at Poetry International Rotterdam. With Chloe Garcia Roberts, she is the founder/editor of A. BRADSTREET (which publishes reviews, essays and interviews related to poetry and motherhood). She is also a contributing editor at The Critical Flame and Perdu , a literary podium in Amsterdam. Her poetry has been published as a chapbook, Objective Practice (Achiote Press), and is forthcoming as a book, I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press).
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 was incredibly spoiled by publishing my chapbook with Achiote Press. There is a welcoming community at UC Berkeley for PhD students who want to write poetry. During my first semester, I took a poetry workshop with Lyn Hejinian – my classmates included Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Hillary Gravendyk, Megan Pugh, Charles Legere, Javier Huerta, Jennifer Reimer. Lisa Robertson was the visiting Holloway professor, and she also participated. Jasper Bernes wasn’t in the workshop, but he was one of the first people I met and exchanged poems with in my department.
At the time, Jennifer Reimer was editing Achiote Press with Craig Santos Perez, and after a reading (where I opened for Bob Perelman), they approached me about publishing a chapbook. I mean, could anyone have been luckier than me?
But then years went by. I moved away. I didn’t write. I became a mother. More years. Still there was this chapbook. I had that. There was a time I was a poet, when a press thought I was worth publishing. I started lurking around Harvard events, where no one really cared to talk with me unless I mentioned my partner was a professor. But I did meet Chloe Garcia Roberts. Chloe knew Craig, Craig had even sent Chloe my chapbook, Chloe also just had a baby, and sometimes friends happen like miracles. Chloe suggested I write reviews and start translating again. She signed me up for a Zoland Poetryreview and a weekly translation group. I started writing again. Whenever I had a few hours of childcare, I snuck into the library of Harvard’s education school, where I knew no one, and instead of writing my dissertation, I wrote poems.
It was a tremendous gift, what Craig and Jenn had given me, and what all these poets – Chloe and Lyn, of course, but also Hillary, Megan, Jasper – had given me. A steadfast anchor. A “yes!” A “you are one of us, of course you are.” It’s what Sandra Doller of 1913 Press gave me, when she wrote, “I'm truly haunted – in a great way – by yr work!” And now what I see that my five-year-old son – who loves nothing more than sitting with me thinking up rhymes, playing with words – gives me.
It’s not a publication that makes me a poet, but the people that have said to me, “you are many things, but still you are one of us, of course you are.” My new book of poetry is about poetry. (Yeah, sorry!) It’s about why I need it. There’s a lot of struggle and loneliness in the book, but I hope it ends with this gratitude.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?I had a series of teachers (from elementary school onward) who loved poetry and made me read more poetry. I had a second grade teacher named Mrs. Jenkins who recommended me for a special poetry workshop. I wrote my first poem there after learning about alliteration, all about amazing aardvarks. Then there was Pat Keplinger in middle school; Nan Cohen and Eavan Boland at Stanford; Lyn Hejinan at Berkeley. All those people I mentioned for question #1.
I did once apply for an intermediate fiction writing class with Tobias Wolff at Stanford and was rejected. Not even on the waitlist! The now-famous Korean rapper Tablo (then known as Dan Lee) got into that class. So I can’t blame Tobias Wolff for not seeing my star potential.
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?Becoming a mother made me a believer of drafts. I jot down notes everywhere, anytime something strikes me, and I usually lose them. But still, I’ve come to realize that whenever I have an idea, I need to write it down, in the pockets of time and possibility I have.
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?Short pieces make me anxious. My life motto comes from Gertrude Stein: “Successions of words are so agreeable.” Everything is a project, or a book, or a series, or a life...
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I spend a full day wanting to throw up before a reading. I go to the bathroom every five minutes. But still, I think readings are necessary, a gift, and should be developed in the same way a piece of writing is. It’s a performance. It’s an art form. It’s a mode of sociability. There are all these people here, in this space, to see me. I tell myself, “Wear something nice, try to be interesting, and make your writing something it couldn’t be 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? “Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?”
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 role of the writer: everything. Everything is spectacle. The producer and interpreter of spectacle: writers. I sound like some crazy dude standing on a bucket on a Berkeley street corner. Crazy dudes aren’t always wrong. The writer should make us face what’s illegible.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?Essential. Not difficult. You can always ignore your editor, and if you really can’t, then you can pull your piece, right? It’s not worth publishing something if you’re not going to believe in it. But often I need someone else’s help to create something I believe in. The difficulty, really, is finding someone who wants to be that editor!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?“When someone tells you who they are, believe them,” told to me by Benjamin Moser, quoting Maya Angelou.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?I’m the kind of person that if you say, “You are this or that,” I get uncomfortable and need to prove you wrong. I want to belong, but not to anything. I grew up within two cultures, two languages, and now live amidst a third. I know that what “I” means changes between all of them. Moving between genres is natural, even necessary.
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?You have a toddler, so you’ll understand: I tend to write late at night, sitting on my sofa. There’s some wine involved. A typical day for me doesn’t begin very eagerly.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?http://www.laineygossip.comhttp://allkpop.com
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Wet fur. Belonging to a dog or children.
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?At the moment I’m becoming interested in dance and architecture. I know nothing about them. But I’m interested in how systems of signification arise from and contain different bodies, and how poetic language participates in this, so I want to know more.
I’m a student of modernism, and what I appreciate about it is the explicit imperative to think about how aesthetics play out across differing media and art forms.
But I think the most important form influencing my writing is the collective, the group. I’ve been involved in this volunteer-run literary podium in Amsterdam, Perdu, for the past year. As an editor, you have to conceptualize programs, invite performers, clean the toilets, count the money, serve drinks at the bar. It takes a lot of teamwork. I’m also part of a reading group, based at the art space Cascoin Utrecht, on revolutionary feminism. These interactions and conversations have been influencing me a lot. I’m not being idealistic here: it’s been difficult too. I’m still an outsider, an American, a Korean, etc. But the challenges and conflicts are meaningful. I’m less interested in what I/we produce than howwe do it.
I’m a feminist who is part of a family – as a mother and a wife. Maybe this is why I’ve started to see the structure of a group as a kind of medium or art form, or at least as a space with the potential for innovation and experimentation.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?Hugo van der Velden, author of The Donor’s Image: Gerard Loyet and the Votive Portraits of Charles the Bold .
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Learn to sew a button.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?I would have enjoyed being a film editor. I once took an introductory video-making class and learned to use Final Cut Pro. I didn’t like filming stuff, but I loved the editing. There is something very satisfying about joining scenes, slicing off milliseconds, all in pursuit of the perfect rhythm.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?During my first week of college (Stanford, 1998), I walked out of my dorm and saw some people sitting at a table, which had a sign taped onto it: “Work for Google.” And my only thought was, “Hey, they’re giving out free pencils!”
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Book: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian. Film: Frozen, which is on play at our house at least twice a week.
20 - What are you currently working on?Everything I’m working on right now is collaboration. With Lyn Hejinian, I’ve been taking monthly, vicarious, transcontinental 15-minute walks for the past year – timed on the hour, at each hour – and exchanging our accounts.
I’m also creating an international “book of contracts” with Maarten van der Graaff – a multilingual anthology/art book filled with writers we admire. Do you want to write a contract for us?
The Dutch artist Elena Beelaertsand I are great friends, we’re both mothers, and we decided we should collaborate. At the moment we’re kind of dancing around each other, pursuing our own projects but looking for intersections. She has been making these exquisite and uncanny drawings of quotidian objects. I’ve been working on a text about pregnancy, passivity, personhood, and I’m in a rut. The things I encounter about how the bodies of pregnant women and new mothers, particularly of women of color and working class women, are treated in America – by our medical system, our insufficient laws, the hate speech of our politicians – is more absurd and gruesome than anything figured by Bosch. Elena’s work is always complex and imaginative, but it is also often light, funny, controlled. I think her “voice” will be my way out.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Alice Burdick, Book of Short Sentences

The fact of motherhood, the fact of children, the body that became multiple. There was the muscle that begat muscles, the sensitive skin and drained surface. Core too. Milk breath and pores constrained, relax. Of the heart. I am not interested in fashion, but I wanted to change myself. I can pick up the ceiling that just fell down. But you can too. Don’t give me that doobie-doobie something. (“All the voices do it”)
Nova Scotia poet and bookseller Alice Burdick’s fourth trade poetry collection is Book of Short Sentences (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2016), following her prior collections Simple Master (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2002), Flutter (Mansfield Press, 2008) and Holler (Mansfield Press, 2012). Set in three untitled sections of short, surreal lyrics, as well as the occasional prose poem, Burdick’s Book of Short Sentences , part of Stuart Ross’ ongoing editorial work through Mansfield Press, is a book thick with curiosity, “deeply imbued with the landscape of Nova Scotia’s south shore, as well as her own inner landscape, and the landscape of family.” Hers are poems that attempt to comprehend matters both internal and external, resulting in a variety of unexpected connections—from the surreal to the concrete, personal to cultural, spiritual to the mundane—as she ends the three-stanza poem “Annoyance chart,” writing: “The things I don’t know exist / could fill books, and a magazine— / and they do, it does—it’s a mail-order / situation to purchase eternal necessities.”
The poems in Book of Short Sentences focus on small, often personal concerns, of head, heart and hearth, composing immediate pieces from an ongoing, internal dialogue. Elements of some of those internal dialogues are reminiscent of Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie’s own surreal, thought-journeys, as she writes to open the poem “Entropy”: “We are stuck with our old brains, / these grey globes that know / we can’t learn anything new / without breaking the old brain’s flow.” Burdick’s “short sentences” carry an enormous weight, and her poems in this collection are contemplative, thoughtful and slow, and even, occasionally, appearing without a specific direction in mind (but comfortably, and even purposefully, so), allowing for the potential for incredible discovery. Some poems, such as “Holy smoke” and “Smoke day” are more overt in giving the sense of having been composed while walking the landscape of her Nova Scotia, akin to Meredith Quartermain’s west coast walking poems, Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005), but with less external history than internal landscape:



Smoke day
Each smoke trail saysthe day was here,it was alive and it burnt.There’s this visual thing,What you like to call a memory.rock digs into the back of my ankle.One day the books will closeand show their ideasin an explicit way.Water over paperMelts the paper.rocks scrape it up into filamentsof ideas—good grief is the expression—grief as the good gasp,last eyes open.

The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, June 17, 2016: Besserer, Rogal, Fitzgerald, Harness, Black, Carlucci, Johnstone + Laliberte,

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
pre-small press book fair reading
featuring readings by:

Amanda Besserer (Ottawa ON)

Stan Rogal (Toronto ON)
Fitz Fitzgerald (Baltimore MD)
Kyp Harness (Toronto ON)

and, as the first stop on the CAROUSEL Paper Roadshow:

Meagan Black (Ottawa ON)
Paul Carlucci (Ottawa ON)
Jim Johnstone (Toronto ON)
Mark Laliberte (Toronto ON)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, June 17, 2016;
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
The Carleton Tavern,
223 Armstrong Street (at Parkdale; upstairs)

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Jack Purcell Community Centre]

author bios:

Amanda Besserer is from North Bay, Ontario, and now lives in Ottawa. She received her BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Carleton University. While there, she was a contributing editor for In/Words Magazine, and creator and editor-in-chief of Vagina Dentata, a feminist arts journal. Aside from poems, broadsides and a chapbook with In/Words & VD, Amanda's poetry has also appeared in the Loamshire Review (UK), the Steel Chisel (Canada), and The Machinery (India). Her work will be included an upcoming "best of" volume from The Machinery this summer. In the meantime, visit adbesserer.wordpress.com for poetry and prose. She is also the author of a new title from Jeff Blackman's Horsebroke Press .

Stan Rogal has been described by Stuart Ross as a bon vivant and man about town. Judith Fitzgerald referred to him as an intellectual redneck. Hedonist, harsh humourist, philatelist, fatalist, devoted oenophile, punster... whatever... his work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Canada, the US and Europe. He is the author of 20 books, the latest being a novel titled Dog The Moon , from Insomniac Press, spring 2016. He is also produced playwright. He resides in Toronto.

Though his name appeared on Josef Kaplan’s kill list, Fitz Fitzgerald still lives, often uncomfortable in his own skin. His poetry has appeared in Apartment, Octopus, Open Letters Monthly, Hidden City Quarterly, Dusie, Boog City and elsewhere. Furniture Press published Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. 17 Reasons is forthcoming from AngelHouse Press. He has read as part of the Worms series in Baltimore, the Ruthless Grip in Washington D.C., the La Tazza series in Philadelphia and Welcome to Boog City Festival in Brooklyn. He attended New College of California in the late 1990s where he studying with Lyn Hejinian and David Meltzer and participated in “A Night in the Life of San Francisco Writing” at New Langton Arts and read at Canessa Park. He has edited theoretical works by Benjamin Friedlander, Brian Reed, Peter Quartermain, Steve McCaffery, Harryette Mullen among others as part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series curated by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer. He has published poetry reviews in Rain Taxi, First Intensity, Real Pants, Fanzine and elsewhere. He lives on Quaker Hill in Baltimore.

Kyp Harness is a singer-songwriter known for the poetry of his lyrics. He has released twelve independent recordings.  He is also the author of two books: The Art of Laurel and Hardy (2006) and The Art of Charlie Chaplin (2007), both published by McFarland in the US. In March 2016, he released his thirteenth album, Stoplight Moon. In May, his novel, Wigford Rememberies was published by Nightwood Editions.

Meagan Black starts her MFA in Creative Writing this fall and is freaking out. Outside of school, her interests include working for Arc Poetry Magazine and never finishing the edits on her first YA novel. She’s won a couple of awards and been published in a couple of place, including Carousel Magazine and the internet. Visit her on her website at www.actuallyreadbooks.com .

Paul Carlucci's sophomore collection, A Plea for Constant Motion , will be published by House of Anansi in January 2017. The Secret Life of Fission , his debut, won the 2013 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Individually, his stories are forthcoming or have been published in Carousel, filling Station, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Puritan, Little Fiction, subTerrain, The Malahat and others. He lives in Ottawa.

Jim Johnstone [pictured] is a Canadian poet, editor, and critic. He’s the author of four books of poetry: Dog Ear (Véhicule Press, 2014), Sunday, the locusts (Tightrope Books, 2011), Patternicity (Nightwood Editions, 2010) and The Velocity of Escape (Guernica Editions, 2008), and the subject of the critical monograph Proofs & Equational Love: The Poetry of Jim Johnstone by Shane Neilson and Jason Guriel. He’s the winner of several awards including a CBC Literary Award, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine’s LitPop Award and This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Johnstone is the poetry editor at Palimpsest Press, and an associate editor at Representative Poetry Online. He lives in Toronto.

Mark Laliberte is a Toronto-based artist-writer-designer-curator with an MFA from the University of Guelph. He has exhibited extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, curates the online experimental comics site 4panel.ca, and edits the hybrid art/lit mag CAROUSEL. Laliberte was recently awarded a 2016 'Comic Arts — Works-in-Progress' grant from the Ontario Arts Council; he is currently working on two full-sized comic-poetry manuscripts, BalloonCloudBubble and BLKBK. In 2016, he is releasing 3 books: 4PANEL 1 in May (through his own Popnoir Editions imprint); Free For the Taking in August, a collaborative book project with artist Micah Lexier (this is one part of a 3 book series being published by Warby Parker); and, asemanticasymmetry in October (a riso-printed remixing of selected derek beaulieu's letraset works, published by Anstruther Press).

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Curtis Gillespie (2005-6)

For the sake of the fortieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program (the longest lasting of its kind in Canada) at the University of Alberta, I have taken it upon myself to interview as many former University of Alberta writers-in-residence as possible [see the ongoing list of writers here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Curtis Gillespie has written four books, including the memoir Playing Through: A Year of Life and Links Along the Scottish Coast, and the novel Crown Shyness. He has won numerous awards for his fiction and non-fiction, including the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and three National Magazine Awards. His journalism has been widely published, and he is the editor and co-founder of Eighteen Bridges magazine. He lives in Edmonton with his wife and two daughters.
He was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2005-6 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d already published a couple of books. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: I’d published three books by that time, though one was tiny, a collection of short biographies of people with developmental disabilities, so it didn’t really get a ton of notice. But I felt at that time pretty much where I feel I am right now! Which is still learning, still getting better, still digging into both my craft and the meaning of my craft. I was in the middle of working on the novel that became Crown Shynessand so I was in the middle of a phase where I really wasn’t sure if I even had it in me to write a novel…or at least write a publishable novel. I was actually enjoying the phase, but it was also unnerving at times—a lot of groping around in the dark. It was rather ironic at times that I was in the middle of this process while doling out advice to so many writers who came to visit me. But the irony flipped itself over, in that I ended up talking to so many people about things that you might be tempted to describe as “basic” but which too many of us so-called professional writers often forget, which is that readers like to be entertained, readers like to be captivated, readers don’t want to be made to feel stupid, readers are people we need to challenge AND delight. So all the time I spent with emerging writers, particularly in the first half of the residency, actually ended up helping me focus on what I was doing. It gave me some clarity and helped strip away some hindrances, all of which did end up helping me complete the novel I was working on.
The opportunity to be WiR was great in other ways, too. I’d been an undergrad in the English Dept at the U of A, and so I enjoyed every minute of being there as WiR, hanging around the English office, walking the halls, drinking coffee with students. It was great fun. Of course, it was also a nice slice of financial freedom. Mostly, though, it was a kind of affirming nod that I wasn’t utterly hopeless at what I was doing. I was pleasantly surprised to be asked, and automatically assumed they’d exhausted all other avenues, but I said yes immediately so they wouldn’t change their minds. In the end, it was a hugely positive year, in that it gave me time to work on my own writing and really allowed me to encourage writers and writing in the local community. A side benefit that I didn’t really fully understand at the time was that it helped hone my editorial skills, which I have continued to use in editing Eighteen Bridges magazine and in my work at the Banff Centre.
Also, I might add that I did publish in the U of A arts mag, the year after finishing, a Top Ten things to Remember for Future WiRs. You might find it semi-amusing, and of course feel free to use it if you see fit.
Top Ten Pieces of Advice for Future Writers in Residence
10. Practice clairvoyance by staring at ringing telephone. This will assist you at the office in deciding whether to answer (if it’s a promising writer grateful to simply be in the presence of your talent, generosity and good looks) or to not answer (if it’s a rude wannabe who only wants to know the amount of your last advance and an introduction to your agent).
9. Memorize names, numbers, locations and office hours of all other Writers in Residence across the city so you know where to quickly refer rude wannabes should clairvoyance fail you.
8. Despite the odd wannabe, prepare to have your faith in writing and reading reaffirmed on a daily basis – it will happen.
7. Be kind and considerate to the office staff – they will always be there for you when you need them, and you will need them.
6. Be ready to use the phrase (or variations of it), “I suggest you learn the difference between a comma and a period first – you can worry later whether Tom Cruise or Clive Owen should play you in the movie version of your memoir.”
5. Drop the words Writer in Residence at social functions if conversation embarrassingly begins to flag. According to the immutable laws of nature, the question that will follow (“Oh…and what precisely does a writer in residence do?”) will allow you to stammer, fudge, make unwitty witticisms, and generally appear so inarticulate that you will be absolved from having to talk to anyone for the rest of the evening.
4. Learn to enjoy work by elderly citizens of first-generation ethnic heritage about their disorienting arrival to the prairies/Canada/Alberta/Edmonton and their struggle to deal with winter/summer/drought/flooding. Sarcasm aside, learn to enjoy these books because they matter to the people who wrote them, often a great deal more than the work of “professional” writers.
3. Be realistic about how much of your own work you’ll get done. Be conservative, set low expectations, plan on writing almost nothing…and then cut thatnumber in half.
2. Poets must take full and immediate advantage of having a benefit plan, instead of continuing to be on the lookout for a dentist and a pharmacist to be friends with. Get those teeth fixed, and load up on Prozac! Let the good times roll!
1. Smile the first day, the last day, and every day in between – because you’re lucky to have found such a great home for a year.
Q: Was this your first residency?
A: Nope, I’d been WiR at MacEwan College (now Uni) a couple years before…
Q: How does your experience at University of Alberta compare to Grant MacEwan, or any other residencies you’ve done?
A: The U of A experience was longer, in that it was a full academic year, whereas the Mac was just three months. So it really felt as if you were setting up a true home base at the U of A. It also allowed me to interact with many more people, obviously. The Mac experience was wonderful, but the U of A was very special. Here’s an interview with me for the U of A Faculty of Arts that perhaps explains why, which, again, you should feel free to use…if it’s even remotely interesting!
http://www.woablog.com/2014/09/a-way-with-words/
Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?
A: Basically, I engaged a lot! Not as many students as I expected, but much more community involvement. The most memorable meeting was when a guy, maybe about 25, came in and showed me his work and said it was a memoir of his life on the street as a drug dealer...and that he wanted to know what I thought, now, like today, because he was scheduled to report to jail to do his time a couple days later. It was raw and rough, but real, and I stayed in touch with him for a time. I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many faculty came to me. That was enjoyable. None of them ended up in jail, at least not as far I knew.
Q: The bulk of writers-in-residence at the University of Alberta have been writers from outside the province. As an Edmonton-based writer, how did it feel to be acknowledged locally through the position?
A: It was a real pleasure to be a “local” at the U of A. I was born in Edmonton and went to the U of A for undergrad, so I felt like I really understood Edmonton and the U of A. I also had many contacts in the local arts and culture community, so that allowed me to integrate the role and the dept into the community at large. It made it a lot of fun. I think it also acted as an encouraging factor for many local emerging writers to visit me, as perhaps they felt more comfortable around a local. There was certainly a lot more activity and traffic through my office than I expected!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Malcolm Sutton

Malcolm Sutton lives in Toronto. His fiction has appeared in Maisonneuve and Joyland , and his writing on art has appeared in C Magazine and Border Crossings. He is the Founding Editor of The Coming Envelope journal of innovative prose, and the Fiction Editor at BookThug Press. Job Shadowing is his debut novel.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Job Shadowing is my first book. I don’t know how it will change my life. So far it has made me realize that there are almost no pictures of me on my digital camera. Author photos are so difficult to come by.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
It was always narrative for me. Even when I was at art school I was making narratives from still photos and videos. I like the tension between narrative and non-narrative. I like the things that narrative forces you to do as a writer, like choose one direction out of so many possible directions. It forces you to play things out, and there is meaning in that.

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?
So slow. It builds somewhat sculpturally, I chip away at sections and return to them again and again until they look like something. The parts of Job Shadowing that I actually recognize as germinal to the final work don’t contain any of the narrative of the final book. They contain ideas of themes, but not the story.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I was just reading an old bio of mine on the Internet, from about 4 years ago, and it said that I was working on a novella about job shadowing. So I suppose I was working on a longer piece from the beginning, but did not expect it to expand into a 200 page novel.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They can help with editing, in that they force you to cut away all of the ideas that you might have misgivings about yet want to keep out of vanity. Before I give a reading, I have the panic of public exposure. So my writing always becomes trimmer. Anything cliché gets cut. Anything weak goes.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
In one sense Job Shadowing was my way of working through feelings toward how Boomers came into employment as compared to my generation (I suppose I’m Gen X, though I feel at the tail end of it). So the book explores what it means to be of a generation, as part of historical change. There are a lot of other theoretical concerns, such as what it means to be a couple. I don’t want to say what conclusions I came to because that is what the book is about. But I was really unsettled by what conclusions arrived at.

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?
There is an old idea that art is in opposition to culture. Most of our media, however, such as newspapers, radio and TV, treat art as culture. Pretty much all popular media lives out the postmodern fantasy of erasing the division between high and low art. There is no distinction for them between Game of Thrones and The Argonauts. I would love to hear more dissent coming out of the mouths of writers (in big media contexts), saying no when everyone wants them to say yes. I don’t know if that is a role, but it’s something.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In one of his books Adorno divides art into convention and expression, where expression is the individual artist’s iteration through a medium’s conventions. I like to think of conventions as the social side of art making – we are able to read someone else’s work because of conventions (or by contrast to conventions). Fiction has a set of conventions and poetry has another set, and literary fiction has a set of conventions and lyric poetry has a set of conventions. The editor’s role is very often to consider the writer’s expression in relation to the medium’s conventions. In other words, the idiosyncrasies of the individual against the more normative social milieu. I’m not suggesting that editors should normalize a piece of writing, but negotiate between the individual and the group. Working with an editor is super important if the editor understands what the writer is trying to do.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Rather than setting up a nursery for your newborn, set up a second bedroom for yourself.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Sometimes I like to think of fictional narratives as essays. A story needs to be doing the same thing as a critical essay. They both need to push through with an idea in a coherent way, with evidence. A theme is a thesis. A conflict is a counterargument. The idea cannot get lost; the thread needs to be held onto.

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?
Over coffee in a café, the first hour of the day. My novel was written mostly in Capital Espresso in Parkdale, Manic Coffee on College, and Café Contra in Seaton Village.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read a lot of theory, and usually ideas that I read spark something and send me forward. While I was writing Job Shadowing I turned a lot to Fredric Jameson and his books The Valences of the Dialectic and Brecht and Method . Other books too. Sometimes it’s worth reading a whole book of theory just for a single idea – for a single sentence even. This was the case with Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. One really amazing idea.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
(skip)

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?
Something I learned from TV shows (I hate to say) is how to leave scenes open. It’s a trick almost all contemporary shows do when they crosscut between multiple narratives: they don’t end a scene with someone answering yes or no to an important plot point, but rather they leave the decision unanswered, so that you keep watching to see which way it goes. When they pick up that narrative line again, the story is fully in motion with whatever decision was made.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
There are so many and they are always changing. Here’s one, though: for many years now I’ve had an ongoing conversation with Jacob Wren about writing, and this has been very important to my thinking about it.

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

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?
Most writers are also educators or have other jobs. I am also a graphic designer and used to teach as well. I like the freedom that I see in my artist friends.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I like writing because of how difficult it is.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
For some reason Andy Warhol’s Philosophy: From A to B and Back sticks out. It was published in the mid-70s, the year I was born, and is made up of the dialogues between Warhol and other people named B. Warhol is just so smart but also sometimes shallow. If he were alive today I doubt that I would like him. Right now I’m reading John Keene’s collection of short fiction called Counternarratives, which is fabulous too.

Holy Motors (a film) by Leos Carax comes up in my head so much. I love how little dialogue there is and how little the audience knows in what is going on. Yet we have faith in the filmmaker as the film unfold in its episodes. And the whole strange thing grows into a narrative. I would like to write a novel like that film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Any day I’ll begin the next novel.
           
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kate Schapira, Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out

NEW BEAUTY
I walked with my new beauty out from the circular houses.Its seams ripped and frayed whenever I moved it.New beauty is made of erectile tissuemade to bunch and wear out under the bridgewhere pigeons live, loose-feathered and odorous.Beyond the circular houses and the bridge, construction.The new beauty was a knockoff, scarred together,of a suit damp, flaking and acute.Like a snake, I was glad to have it around memaking me more sensitive to everything.I wore it inside out for extra tremors.Dust drifted in heaps from the construction site.It combined with moisture to engorge my new beauty.The seams and uneven blood flow made a terrible outsidealmost as if they were made from somebody else.My new beauty was the construction site of all feeling.Underneath it, I was becoming different.
There is an anxiety that runs through Providence, Rhode Island poet Kate Schapira’sfifth poetry collection, Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out (Denver CO: Horse Less Press, 2016), one that expresses itself through references to interpersonal relationships, climate change and cultural and community shifts. As she writes to open the prose poem “RED HOUR”: “When the red hour rings everyone falls for it. Everyone loses it. The red hour rips the wet giving-in bag of it, but what is it? What we want, loosened like a screw? The robots in us ring out, pivot thrust and circuit fart in public, tear pseudoskin and fuck wall sockets. We lose ourselves in it.” In a profile for the Brown University website, Nina Markov wrote: “Kate Schapira makes poetry that is both socially engaged and devoted to ‘the swing of a line or sentence.’” Later, in the same piece, Markov adds that “One of Schapira’s central preoccupations, she says, is the relationship between the individual and community.”
For Kate Schapira, poetic practice is a form of social engagement. While she seeks to write poetry that is “rigorously accountable” and “politically and ethically informed,” she aims for “illumination rather than transparency,” Schapira says. To that end, she pays close attention to the “rhythm and sound of language, to the swing of a line or sentence” and never loses sight of poetry’s potential to move, surprise, and inspire wonder.
The author of TOWN (Queens NY: Factory School, 2010) [see my review of such here], The Bounty: Four Addresses (Las Cruces, NM: Noemi Press, 2011), How We Saved the City (Ithica, NY: Stockport Flats, 2012) and The Soft Place (Horse Less Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Schapira’s poetry is one of connectedness, such as her articulations on how the human world interacts with and intersects nature, aware very much how precarious human activity has made numerous natural systems. One could easily argue that Schapira’s connectedness extends structurally as well, from composing poems that speak to each other via suite or sequence to her ongoing engagements through the book as unit of composition, composing book-length suites of lyric poems, fragments and threads to construct a whole cloth, from the overt project-work of her first collection, TOWN, to the threads that hold sequences, sections and, really, the entire length and breadth of this new collection. She works on books, it would seem, and her connections between poems become stronger in their subtlety.
A head without limbs lives by description and emphasis. Hot melon dropping description. Wary, but not cautious. They decide everything together in the hollow theater where the hair is dug in, if you sliced them open you’d see it, tight on the inside, the mischief of it dispersed with a smell like when the straightening iron hits, all behind a bright ad with blue contacts. It would kill them. They mean you to take them literally: put your best head forward. (“WOMAN WITH EXTRA HEADS”)
In Handbook For Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out , Schapira reminds us just how good she is at composing expansive lines that stretch across the page like runners, furthering and furthering a thought into a series of thoughts, such as the opening of the final poem in the collection, “FOOD POEM FOR THE NEW YEAR / (FUNGUS POEM)”: “White negatives of flour on the new baking sheet after the biscuits come / off, like ringworm //// fungus is the abandoned shirt of absence, foxed paper, cheese left out for / flavor furred almost invisibly urging a change of plans. Fresh mushrooms / firm and deliberate under their clingwrap shrug, fall to decomposers of / their own [.]”

Drunken Boat blog "spotlight" series, curated by rob mclennan: Amanda Earl and Elizabeth Robinson

I'm now curating a monthly "spotlight" series over at the Drunken Boat blog, featuring a new poet every month with a short statement and a new poem or two. The first two in the series are now online: Canadian poet Amanda Earl , and American poet Elizabeth Robinson . A new post is scheduled for the first Monday of every month.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rahat Kurd

Rahat Kurd , the author of COSMOPHILIA , a collection of poems published by Talonbooks in 2015, is currently at work on a memoir about the making of Muslim culture in North America. Her poetry sequence “Seven Stones for Jamarat”, published in Exile Literary Quarterly, is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize. Essays and poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The New Quarterly and Event magazines, and online at Guernica and Oscar’s Salon . She was selected as Emerging Artist in the Literary Arts category of the 2013 Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Awards.

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 only have one book of poems out so I can't compare, but the moment when I knew I was going to write my first collection of poems was life-changing. It was a real moment of arrival, which is to say I can remember precisely what it felt like to have the intention to write it arrive in my head. It felt like sunlight flooding a new corner of my brain, and some minutes of marvelling at what that felt like.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
​I came to poetry and non-fiction simultaneously, in my teens. I knew that I needed both, but I wasn't sure why. I still alternate between the two. This used to cause me some self-reproach about not being disciplined, until I realized the two forms always strike useful sparks against each other in my head. 

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 start new things all the time. I carry a notebook everywhere and with poetry I take many, many notes​. I also re-write and re-think a great deal as I go, and this can take a long time, unless I am working to a firm word limit, which can actually help quite a lot with envisioning the final shape.

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 phrase or a striking expression will start re-playing itself in my head, or an image or feeling that has been lurking just subconsciously, will emerge in the full cold light of creative consciousness and demand to be entered into creative process, to be put to work. That is always a thrilling moment.

I began writing poems in my teens without seeking publication until I was in my later thirties. For Cosmophilia a number of different pieces came together, as you say, for the larger project. My next work, which I started a year ago, is "a book from the very beginning" - thematically definite and singular - I am aiming for it to be a book-length poem or sequence.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
​Yes in moderation. There can be a palpable sense of emotional feedback from a live audience, where you feel the resonance of your lines in their facial responses. I think public readings must have influenced my creative process, too, because of my readings of Urdu poetry and learning about mushairas in literary Urdu-speaking cities. Ghazals for instance are absolutely geared to performance, while not all of my work is really suited to being read out in front of a room full of people. Some of the longer narrative and meditative poems really demand to be alone with the reader. For some poems I even idealize a reader who has taken the time to be alone with them, who would even be ferocious against interruption.

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 the central question I want to always start from is how to make a poem​ effective, how to use language strikingly, to work my ideas and my language up to the potential that the form of poetry offers. It can take a great deal of concentration to remain focused on language, on the really central creative work, however, coming from my community. Peripheral issues around identity, and our current political impasse, being Muslim in the western hemisphere, can move into the centre, so that you can be made to feel you should have some answers for people whose fears arise from - what? Not having done enough reading? Not having talked to their neighbours? The idea that every Muslim has to cite their religious identity or represent their community to their utmost, is one I've come to strongly oppose over the last decade. It has cost us the ability to discern what is an appropriate entry point for discussing any aspect of our work, or what's relevant, and what kinds of questions anyone has the right to ask us. A few years ago, for instance, I heard a radio interview with an Iranian poet in Hamilton, during which the interviewer asked him to comment on the recent-at-the-time Boston Marathon bombings. The question had nothing to do with the poet, his work, or his life, but he rallied the best he could, from sheer politeness. It was supposed to be a show about literature, yet the conversation had to slip sideways into this confrontational, ideologically confined space, which has become a normative way for mainstream media to deal with Muslim voices in North American culture. So guarding my creative and intellectual energies somewhat protectively, to give myself the space to address the questions I want to address - aesthetic and philosophical - has become a kind of theoretical concern. Entry points for conversations about the work have become almost as important as the entry points from which I embark on a work. It's equally important that both arise from the love of language and its possibilities, and for me to be rigorous in demanding this of myself and the people who want to talk to me.

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?
​To keep language alive. To keep words from losing their meaning.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
​Essential.
​
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
​To follow my instincts. Also on the cover of a book I saw on a high bookshelf once in a shop: "Feel the fear and do it anyway". ​

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
​Since first learning to read poetry seriously and to construct prose arguments, in high school, I have continued to feel that I need both.

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?
​Being the parent of a school-aged kid anchors my writing routine from September to June. ​My typical workday begins with cutting fruits and veggies for him, and steeping caffeine for me, and then I dive in as soon as he puts on his backpack and goes out the door. I only stopped walking him to the school bus a few months ago, because he asked. Those four blocks and back in all weathers before 8:30 am was a great way to clear my head, though, so I might tag along with him again when Spring Break is over. I like my summer writing routine best - to head for Kits pool on a late afternoon and wash off hours of sitting at the computer, feels deeply luxurious. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
​I walk. I'm very restless and I've learned to make that work for me instead of resisting it. Also, I buy new notebooks whenever I find one I like, without guilt, and lately the things I write get scattered across different ones, and my handwriting is getting messier. Hunting up old notes - "Where did I hurriedly scribble that one thought I had about this topic while I was out shopping? Is that a w or an r?" - is a fun way to break out of a stall.

​​13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Things being boiled in water: cardamom, and rice.

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?
My work is influenced by art in many forms. I try to go to art shows when I travel and for most of my life I've looked at or read and thought about Islamic art, architecture, and art history in particular, which a lot of the poems in COSMOPHILIA draw upon. Traditional textile art is a thing I've lived with all my life, through my mum and her family. My title poem is about the art of Kashmiri shawl embroidery. I studied film at school, and art history was a component of that, too. There is a strong connection for me between reciting verses from the Quran, which I was taught as a kid, and the way I respond to music and singing, that definitely influenced how I hear poetry and in some cases how I write it. Many hip hop artists from the middle east have said the same thing, for instance, about how the sound of the muezzin calling at prayer time influences their lyrical style. I expect these forms to continue to shape how I think and what I write about. I can also get really intense about fiction in a way I can't explain and don't completely understand. I am trying to persevere in writing about it more. I recently finished writing a piece about an Alice Munro story that, on first reading, filled me with dread and loathing. I get impatient waiting for new books from writers I'm interested in and I hate waiting for people to finish reading the books I've finished and want to talk about, because hardly anyone shares my sense of urgency.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
To write COSMOPHILIA, it was important for me to read Urdu, Persian and Arabic poetry. The poetry of Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001), a Kashmiri-American writing in English, whose books I read over the decade before I began to think about putting my own collection together, served as my main introduction to a few major voices from within those three traditions, especially Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) and Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). Darwish's sequence "Eleven Stars Over Andalusia" as translated by Shahid with Ahmed Dallal has been incredibly important to me. Shahid has definitely been a writer important to my life, and my thinking continues to be enriched by the depth of the multiple literary traditions he draws from, his exuberance and precision of style, and by his emotional fearlessness.

The writers whose work has been really foundational to my life, who showed me what is possible or what I could be capable of doing, are the critics Edward Said and John Berger, and several Muslim feminist scholars and memoirists: Fatima Mernissi, Leila Ahmed, Azar Nafisi, and Sara Suleri Goodyear.

Right now I am reading the mid-century Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad with English translations, and I will need to find time to read more poetry by women writing in Urdu and Farsi later this year. And I am keenly anticipating Amit Majmudar's new collection of poems which is coming out this spring.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to memorize some couplets of Ghalib in Urdu and Hafiz in Persian. I would like to visit Iceland. I would like to experience living in a city where I can go days without speaking English. I would like to learn to practice a formal type of dance. This last thing is not really an achievement, but sheer wishful thinking: I would like (this feels like an outrageous thing to ask for in this city) to have someone make me a perfect cup of coffee because they love me and want me to be happy, not because they need the job to survive in Vancouver.

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 think I would study medicine out of sheer nerdish curiosity.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I just have to write. I've never seriously turned away ​from it. I can't honestly account for my tenacity except it just feels necessary to my survival.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I love this question. I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME ​and Claudia Rankine's CITIZEN, hugely important and inspiring polemical works. I read them both while flying (though on different trips), which I also highly recommend. Two great films I also watched on planes recently and loved were THE END OF THE TOUR which is about several days of compelling conversations about writing between David Foster Wallace and David Lipsky, and, on a flight from Delhi to London I saw the Bollywood classic UMRAO JAAN , which is set in Lucknow during the 1850s, and filled with gorgeous cinematography and Persianate Urdu poetry.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Some prose essays of criticism and an ongoing book about Muslim culture in North America. ​

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

I sign a contract optioning my first novel for film,

To celebrate signing the contract optioning my first novel for (short?) film, I’m offering copies of both of my novels at a discount: white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and missing persons (The Mercury Press, 2009). If anyone is interested in either one, they’re $15 each (postage included; for US orders, $15 US; for international, add $4 for postage) either via my paypal via the donate button above, or by sending cheques to me at: 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. Hooray film!

and of course, copies of my third book of fiction, The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014), are available here.

Emily Carr, Whosoever Has Let A Minotaur Enter Them, Or A Sonnet—

American poet Emily Carr’s [see my 2015 Jacket2 piece on her here] third trade poetry collection, after Directions for Flying, 36 fits: a young wife’s almanac (Furniture Press, 2010) [see my review of such here] and 13 ways of happily (Parlor Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], is Whosoever Has Let A Minotaur Enter Them, Or A Sonnet— (San Francisco CA: McSweeney’s, 2016), a self-described volume of “divorce poems.” Carr’s poems are elegantly carved fragments, composed as scraps and ellipses that collage into something elusive, yet incredibly coherent. Structured in six sections—“drama of the forfeit,” “show & tell,” “scouts across america,” “amateurs,” “cathedral” and “state of grace”—her collection of “divorce poems” revels in compound words and the portmanteau, and a wonderfully striking linguistic density of meaning and sound, as she writes in the opening poem “) A SPLITBRAIN GRACE NOTE”:
imagine it: fleshliness.
leapfrog slingshot see (like eve side-arming apples from the trees.
gravity curls fernstalk, a red wind licks
your elbows. in current downriver singing the ocean grows. smokebellies the flagpole. slim–
ankled oaks dream in the soil.
he goes ahead coatless, lightsoaked. breathing in folds, like a fish. hedeals all his selves (was it a rib or catgut







LIKE THE COROLLAS OF A DYING SUN HOW/ BRILLIANT
Carr is also the author of a number of poetry chapbooks, including & look there goes a sparrow transplanting soil (above/ground press, 2009) (reprinted in full in the anthology Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 ), UP THE SHINBONE SUPERLATIVES (Horse Less Press, 2012), Resurrection Refrains: 22 Tarot Lyrics in the Form of the Yellow Brick Road (Dancing Girl Press, 2013), STAY THIS MOMENT: THE AUTOPSY LYRICS, ACTS 1 & 2 (Little Red Leaves, 2013) and STAY THIS MOMENT: THE AUTOPSY LYRICS,ACTS 3 & 4 (Little Red Leaves, 2015), some of which has appeared since in trade editions, and some, such as “THE AUTOPSY LYRICS,” suggest a further full-length volume. Her poems, much like Toronto poet Margaret Christakos’poetry collections, are constructed out of fractals and fragments and sentence-strands that break, sequence and accumulate into something far larger.
) IN THE BONE MARGIN
gentled on tended lawn, slender neurotic dinosaurs.
pale cows bewildered in the open air.
a greyhound pursued to static. her thin & scarcely believable arms.fishy sounds from sherbet strollers. in the flaming
liturgical distance: souvenir flowers, beer
cans, propeller wings, clipped feathers, tears. railroads
part like children. a suicide swaggers in a garden plot. breaking
this fall, itself






FALLING/                 WHILE BREAKING
As the back cover of Whosoever Has Let A Minotaur Enter Them, Or A Sonnet— offers: “A swiftly moving poetry of love—and divorce—that rips open romance in the age of men who, for all they love you, just don’t know how to love you anymore. These fairytales are for the heartbreakers as much as the heartbroken, for those smitten with wanderlust, who, no matter how hard they try, aren’t at home with themselves or this world—the beauty of that, in a kind of SOS way.” Carr utilizes fairytale and myth to speak of marriage and an eventual break, as in the poem “) STRUGGLING (IN FACT),” that includes: “the grassblades touch & touch in their small distances, the myth / begins: as family life, one lash by lash undreamt— [.]” Marriage is a subject that runs through the length and breadth of her published work, exploring marriage, happiness, expectation, heartbreak and disappointment as a kind of extended, meditative study, akin to the work of Anne Carson or Cole Swensen, attempting to approach the minutiae of the break (via myth) from multiple angles. As the opening of her author biography at the end of the collection tells us:
emily carr writes murder mysteries that turn into love poems that are sometimes (by her mcsweeney’s editors, for example) called divorce poems. some other folks say she’s writing a life-long love poem, & that’s probably true, too. regardless of the form she’s writing in, she’s most interested in experiment, with heart.