Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 345

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Vanesa Pacheco and T.A. Noonan : On Translation and Erasure

As my tenure as interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the ninth interview is now online:  a conversation between Vanesa Pacheco [picutred] and T.A. Noonan, "On Translation and Erasure," existing as an extension of Jessica Smith's The Women in Visual Poetry: The Bechdel Test, produced via Essay Press. Other interviews from my tenure include: an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost, an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Drew Shannon and Nathan Page, also conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham, an interview with Ann Tweedy conducted by Mary Kasimor, an interview with Katherine Osborne, conducted by Niina Pollari, and an interview with Catch Business, conducted by Jon-Michael Frank.

Further interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include conversations with Claire Farley on Canthius, Dale Smith on Slow Poetry in America, Allison Green, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way,  check out my "about submissions" write-up at Queen Mob's ; you can contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Lynn Coady (2008-9)

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, as well as information on the anniversary event, here]. See the link to the entire series of interviews (updating weekly) here.
Lynn Coady is an award-winning author of six works of fiction. Her first novel, Strange Heaven , was nominated for a Governor General’s Award, and in 2011, her novel The Antagonist was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, an award she won in 2013 for her short story collection Hellgoing . Her work has been published in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, France and Holland. Coady lives in Toronto, where she writes for television.
She was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2008-9 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for about ten years. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: Oh this was a while ago, 2008-9. I was just starting The Antagonist and really looking forward to the residency because I was staying in a friend’s apartment. Being in another person’s space is a great way to begin a new project. It’s just you and your computer in a room that’s completely devoid of context and meaning, therefore no subconscious static happening in the background. And the routine of going to the university a few times a week broke up that solitude nicely. It was ideal for starting a new book—a quiet, routinized life with very few distractions.
Q: Was this your first residency?
A: No my first was at Green College at UBC and after that I did shorter ones at places like UBC Okanagan.
Q: How did your experience at University of Alberta compare to those other residencies?
A: I felt a lot more “embedded”—it was much longer than any of the others. The Green College one was just a semester I think. So I felt like I became a part of the U of A English department, somewhat—or at the very least a part of that community. It had an intensity to it as well—different people from all walks of life showing up at my office at various time to talk about their secret, hitherto private writing passions.
Q: Given the fact that you aren’t an Alberta writer, were you influenced at all by the landscape, or the writing or writers you interacted with while in Edmonton? What was your sense of the literary community?
A: It’s actually a bit hard to talk about my experience in Edmonton with particular respect to my residency at U of A, because I spent a lot of time in Edmonton before and after that. I was there from 2005-2007, and then when I came back for the residency in 2008, I ended up getting married and hanging around for another seven years. But Edmonton and Alberta definitely had an impact on my writing. I can’t really quantify it except to refer to some of the work I produced around it—sections of The Antagonist are set in Alberta, and my story The Natural Elements is a real psychic distillation of my time there. I also wrote a story called Finset in Edmonton that's coming out in a UK anthology pretty soon. There is something shocking about the Albertan landscape to a coastal person like me—it’s sort of terrifying to be so far from the ocean. And the winters feel like nature has a grudge against you personally. But at the same time, as a maritimer, I found something comforting in the people and culture—in Edmonton’s underdog, working class attitude. Vancouver was very alienating for me when I lived there because the people all seemed so healthy and well-adjusted.
But it’s kind of impossible to talk about how a place might have influenced your work without talking about how it influenced your life, and my time Edmonton, both inside and outside of the U of A residency, has influenced my life immeasurably.
Q: What do you feel your time as writer-in-residence at University of Alberta allowed you to explore in your work? You mention starting to work on The Antagonist; was your initial goal to explore the possibility of another novel, or did you see it more of an opportunity to expand your repertoire?
A: Yes, I just wanted to use the time to make a start on a new novel.
Q: How did you engage with students and the community during your residency? Were there any encounters that stood out?
A: There were some odd ones that stood out, which maybe I won’t go into—every residency involves its share of wild cards as I’m sure you know. But I worked with some really interesting people. There was a woman in Fort MacMurray who I would talk to on the phone every week or so about a memoir she wanted to write about growing up in an outport of Newfoundland—it sounded like a fantastic story. There were people from all over the city, secret writers with regular lives and day jobs, who came out of the woodwork. And only the occasional creative writing student from the department. You would think the students would be the main ones stopping by, but I saw far more people from around town. I liked that—that a job in an english department ended up taking me outside the world of english academia to such a degree. U of A does a good job of getting the word out, reaching out to the community. Feels like the kind of thing universities should be facilitating, so I was pleased to be a part of that.
Q: Looking back on the experience now, how do you think it impacted upon your work?
A: Well the residency definitely helped me make a start on my novel. I had the focus and the routine and the peace and quiet and big, empty office that I needed. And it brought me to Edmonton for the next few years of my life, so, insofar as Edmonton and Alberta has impacted on my work (as discussed above) the residency did as well.

Lea Graham, This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch

On Crows
Last Thursday, the light at the ridge above that bend in the Hudson spread like Dreamsicles in July. Crows valentined dumpsters. Earth called cadence below. Lamps floated stem-less, sturgeon moons in a month of wolf whistles & Route 9’s chemical taste. Was it Williams who said “the hardest thing to do is see”? (Or was that just my gynecologist?) As a kid, my mother caged a crow believing one day it would sing “Hello, Dolly.” She faithfully fed it pork chops under a sycamore tree. Instead, it ate her spelling bee ring. She often said: Crows love the shiny things. Beware.
There aren’t that many poets from Arkansas composing poems influenced by Canadian prairie poet Robert Kroetsch, with the notable exception of Lea Graham (who, herself,was recently shortlisted for the 2016 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry), through her new chapbook This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Ottawa ON: Apt 9 Press, 2016). The author of the poetry collection Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011) [see my review of such here] and the collaborative chapbook Metric (above/ground press, 2011) and Calendar Girls (above/ground press, 2006), Graham writes in her acknowledgements that “These poems were written in dialogue with many of Robert Kroetsch’s texts,” including Excerpts from the Real World (Oolichan Books, 1986), The Completed Field Notes (The University of Alberta Press, 2000), The Crow Journals (NeWest Press, 1980), The Hornbooks of Rita K (The University of Alberta Press, 2001), The Lovely Treachery of Words (Oxford University Press, 1989), The Sad Phoenician (Coach House Press, 1979), Too Bad (The University of Alberta Press, 2006) and What the Crow Said (General Publishing Company, 1978), as well as Andrew Suknaski’s The Ghosts Call You Poor (Macmillan of Canada, 1978) and Ken Jennings’ Maphead: The Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (Scribner Books, 2011). In an interview forthcoming at Touch the Donkey , she discusses some of her connections to prairie poetry (and poets) in Canada:
I think that being from Arkansas, I have both a good sense of humour about place, but also a sense of the underdog in me. I think that maybe that’s a sense of the west, what you are up against, a sense of the isolated or rural. I grew up partially on my grandparents working farm in Greenland, Arkansas where I had an acute feeling of how isolated I was from the rest of the world (meaning: the world of books). But also, I had these young uncles and an aunt who worked in my grandfather’s dairy barn and chicken houses—and who were always playing jokes on me and my brothers and on each other. They used to leave messages to each other written in soap on the bathroom mirrors. There was a toolbox of arrowheads, fish hooks, grinding stones and Civil War cannon balls under the sink in the bathroom. I have written of that image over and over again. The sense of the humorous and fleeting, but of the tactile and enduring, too. When I read cooley and Kroetsch, it felt like I was reading at least a part of my own family, but in the most intellectual and tricky ways. And to be geographically connective about it, my maternal grandmother was from the Dakotas and later Montana. Her mother was from Norway and had been a homesteader.  She—Dagmar Zacharias—is the only one of my great-grandparents who was from the old country—everyone else was “American.” In any case, my maternal grandmother met my grandfather when he was an itinerant worker from Northwest Arkansas during the Depression and had worked his way up to Billings, Montana where he worked part of the week in a bakery and another part in a dairy. The bakery was in a basement, but had a window onto the street where you could only see people’s legs. He picked out her legs of all the young nurses on their way to school. This family story (or maybe the way I tell it), doesn’t seem far from the Canadian narratives I’ve read.
Robert Kroetsch infamously called literature a conversation, and the epistolary poems in Graham’s This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch do read as missives directed to the late Alberta poet, composed directly from where she is to wherever it is that he is, or was, and her ten poem collection opens with a quote from Kroetsch’s Excerpts from the Real World: “Perhaps if I call you forever you’ll hear me toward the end.” Kroetsch famously wrote poems that spoke of repeatedly returning to the beginning; through composing “the end,” is Graham attempting to circumvent Kroetsch’s continuous delay, or is she simply responding in kind, composing the yang to his ying? Is she, through her title, admitting that she can actually hear him, and could the entire time? In the poem “After Irene,” written after a hurricane, she writes: “You’ve written that our job is to uninvent the world. To unconceal. To make visible again.” Later on in the same piece, ending:
You’ve said it yourself: we can never leave home, never escape the skiffle bands & buttermilk, the avocado seed suspended on windowsills. You with your buffalo wallow & tipi ring. So long Binghamtop dreams! Me with my Civil War cannonballs, knucklebones under the sink. Our storm’s core cages us like a story. Like a thousand sea birds, bewildered, becalmed, trapped in eye’s past.
Her poems are prose-thick with information and references, collaged narratives composed in furious, passionate bursts, each in their own way searching for ways in which to make sense of the chaos, all of which is directed beyond the immediate chaos and back into “Bob” (all of which makes me hope she comes to Ottawa next spring for the rumoured Robert Kroetsch conference, so she can speak to him further). “You sing on the other side of the Wailing Wall,” she writes, to end her poem “Excerpts from This End of the World”: “words I wish I could take back / from the Coro desert or the post-industrial town / I am doomed to & that promise / of milk, honey.” Her poems evoke much of Kroetsch’s work for their shared questioning, their passions, from friends, food, travel and lovers, and the occasional drunken revelry and crude passing remark. Throughout these poems there is a searching, a seeking, as she looks to the work of Robert Kroetsch for advice, and direction, almost as though the lyrics of Lea Graham are repeatedly asking Robert Kroetsch: Why does the heart want what it wants? As she opens the poem “On the Mystery of the Vanishing Phoenician from 110 Mill Street”: “Bob, / I am writing this from the old millstream where your Sad Phoenicianvanishes. I bring it with me to sit on the ledge when I need the rush, an eyeful of swoosh. Just when I’m fixed on a bright flip-flop or stroller wheel, I realize it’s skedaddled.” Later on in the same piece, writing:
Last month it disappeared to a dance in Smuts. All the way to Wood Mountain, can you believe it? That bit from cooley, who said it had been seen with Suknaski’s ghosts. They snuck into an old Métis church with their beer breath & dialect, telling stories of Duck Lake, sex in mangers. It drug in a few days later, stone-roasted, announcing its retirement to Assiniboia. Boy oh boy, Bob, did you raise it to act like this? Even crazy mclennan swears it Skypes him late every fourth Tuesday, repeating pornographers & poets enjoy large viewsnine times before clicking end. He & his lady shake & drink & claim they’ll start banning its mention from the Mercury Lounge. It late-nights, inventing toponomies for Medicine Hat. Can’t shut up about the onomastics of ex-lovers (the woman from Nanaimo, et al). How do I exist with a book that goes on like this?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Murray

When Michael Murray was a child he could fly. Now that he is a man, a man who cannot grow a beard, he rides a bicycle, as riding a bicycle is the way that people in the city live. Michael is of the city. He has won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest and is so good-natured that he was once mistaken for a missionary while strolling the streets of a small Cuban city.

He currently lives in Toronto where he works as a journalist and creative writer. Michael has many talents, some of which include floor hockey, being a genius ad guy and blogger, as well as totally dominating social media and his fantasy sports leagues.

He has written for the National Post, the Globe and Mail, the Ottawa Citizen, Hazlitt Magazine , CBC Radio, Reader’s Digest, The Grid, The Toast, and thousands of other prestigious publications and companies that pay obscene sums of money.

He has a book coming out in the spring of 2016 called, A Van Full of Girls , published by Insomniac Press.

His Blog has been studied in North Korea and read by Ryan Gosling.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
A Van Full of Girls will be my first published book, and I imagined that this event would envelope me like a beautiful, validating cloud, and lifting me up, I would forever forth float forward through the world, anointed and wonderfully fragrant, but no. It's been nothing like that, more like getting on a bus and taking that bus to another bus stop where there, I wait for another bus, slightly worried that I lost my transfer along the way.

My first novel, which is unpublished for reasons both prosaic and thrilling, was a collaborative work, written during a period when I had cancer, and it was a truly transformative experience. It was falling out of one thing and into another, a wholly immersive experience that was shared—a little bit like binge watching a TV show that only the two of you know about. It was having a great and romantic secret, and it was very validating.

2 - How did you come to journalism first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?
Poetry is hard. It's for scientists and masters. Way too hard for the likes of me. Fiction, the idea of fiction, was vast. Creating a plot? A coherent narrative? Are you kidding me? I wrote in bars to give myself something to do while drinking, but as fate would have it, one day I submitted something—it was on why we watch the Academy Awards—to the Ottawa Citizen and it was accepted. Presto! Just like that! I wrote a few more for them, and eventually a position opened up (TV critic, sort of) and they asked me if I would like to do that, so I did. I have thank Peter Simpson for that, as I had zero journalistic credentials and have never thought of myself as a journalist, as I'm sure nobody else does either.

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 write quickly, like a mongoose strikes. I keep very few notes (I do keep them for journalism or observational pieces), and actually do my thinking as I write. Writing is how I think, I guess, it's how I work things out, and so it always takes place on the page. My first drafts are very, very close to the final draft and I type very loudly, as if I am damn well committed to whatever I am typing. The noise actually makes my wife angry.

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 am very much a writer of short pieces that might become something longer. The truth is, and this applies to film and most any medium, I am not that interested in narrative. I never care who the killer is. You can shower me with spoilers. I am solely interested with how something feels at the time, at the cinema of prose and don't much care about it whether it resolves particular questions or moves the reader from point A to B to C and so on.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I have only done one public reading in my life, beyond clumsy wedding speeches, that is. I felt kind of stupid doing it, although as I am excitable, I also enjoyed talking with my hands.  My feeling would be that readings are more for the author than the audience. They're about creating a tiny aura of celebrity, and they rarely add anything to the experience of poetry or prose, which are designed for the most part, to be read alone. When I'm listening to a reading, I always have a hard time keeping track of what's going on, and after a few poems fatigue has set in. That's a personal tic, though, and I must say, I very much enjoy those who are really good at it and can control a room, but most can't, and so it's usually awkward for everybody concerned, like suddenly seeing one another in a thong.

Ideally, a reading or performance would have nothing to do with the particular work that's being sold. You might all go bowling or sing a Bowie song, something spontaneous and interactive, just about anything that breaks down the reader/audience dynamic. 

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 that the way people are communicating is changing very rapidly, as is the role of literature. Clinging to the decaying belief that the novel is the greatest, most prestigious expression of artistic achievement is absurd, damaging, even. We communicate in a much more visual, almost hieroglyphic way, digesting things in smaller and smaller installments. All of media are being combined, and I think work should reflect that, that artists should take advantage of it rather then feel confined by whatever the traditional structures of their form were.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think a writer is a canary in a coal mine, an entity that articulates what everybody is thinking or feeling, crystallizing a cultural sentiment, so to speak. How they do it is immaterial. It could be a graphic novel, a poem, a TV show, newspaper column or video game. I mean to say by this, that for me an author is somebody who must work in many media, or at least think in many media. A conceptual artist who works with words?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am horrible at spelling and grammar, so from that point of view I find them essential. However, the editor serves an institution rather than an individual (Well, they try to strike that noble balance), and are looking to best fulfill the duties of their job, not the desires of the author. There will always be that friction. That being said, editors are awfully nice and smart people who see things you wouldn't see, hear things you didn't intend, and can be a tremendous, inconceivable benefit.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When you go out each day, expect to like the people you meet, expect them to like you, and try to create  light rather than consume it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (journalism/non-fiction to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It's very easy for me to move between the realms because I've always combined them. As a journalist I was never reporting fact, but opinion, and I always wanted to couch that opinion in a fictional, quotidian kind of setting. So, I would write about the experience of watching a TV show rather than just the TV show, so the journalism is found within the fictional shell, if that makes any sense.

Journalism, such as it is, is changing like mad, too, and it has never been an objective, flat presentation of an unaltered truth, but has been filtered through many, many lenses. I remember David Eggers writing, “The truth is round, not two-sided,” and this is very important to remember at all times, especially when approaching something of a journalistic nature. Journalism is a curated point of view, and sometimes it's propaganda or advertisement. I trust the distinctive voices and documentary/conversational style of podcast more than I do most of the traditional media forms we grew up with.

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 get up around ten in the morning and sit at my desk looking out the window. I drink green tea because I read somewhere it's healthy. I am mostly wasting time on Facebook playing WordCrack and Lexulous, but I often get some writing done in there. This goes on for an hour or two, and then when Jones (my six-month old boy) and my wife get up from their nap, the day explodes into a million shining directions. I then might write late at night when everybody is back in bed, or in the older days, bars. For whatever reason, perhaps not wanting to appear needy or desperate, bars focused me like nothing else and I always got a tremendous amount of work done there, at least for the first 90 minutes.

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

As if!

I just stop, I think. Move on to something else (unless I am on a deadline in which case it's just grind away), and then return to it several hours or a day later. I find getting out into the world and fleeing social media helps. The world, and the people in it, are crazy, and when you step outside all sorts of weird and lovely and impossible stuff is going to happen to you—it hugely influences everything I write.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Prime rib of beef roasting in the oven.

That's always been my favourite dinner, and when I returned to Ottawa from university to visit my family, they would always cook that for me and it would be the first thing I smelled when I opened their front door—and it was then that I knew I was safe and at 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?
I disagree with David W. McFadden. Books come from everything, and yes, absolutely everything influences what I do. Imagine what a dry and loveless place it would be if literature only came from existing literature. Novels are a niche art form, and it's more appropriate now to say that books come from visual art or virtual reality or the theatre of life. I mean, c'mon!  What a dry and loveless place it would be if books only came from books. I'm all for intermarriage!! Let's strengthen the literary gene pool! And really, everybody knows that books came from drama, right? Didn't everybody's grade 10 English teacher tell them that while waving Shakespeare or Sophocles about?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I am not going to list just writers, because writers are probably not the major influence on my work. Let's say Nick Cave,
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like for the Montreal Expos to return to existence, and I would like my little family to move to Montreal where we had season's tickets and attend every ball game for one magical summer. Also, a blue routes tour through the US, including a visit to Dollywood.

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 very much liked to have been a baseball player, and then later in life a noble detective, like Magnum P.I. If I had not fallen into writing, I would probably be unhappily and bitterly working in the service industry, or unhappily and bitterly trying to finish a PHD which would never, ever be finished.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was drawn to writing at a young age, and I think it became a means of seduction and expression. I could never attract the pretty girl with my looks or tight spiral, so I wrote to her, employing an age old tactic of making the invisible visible.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I haven't read a book since the internet emerged into the world. I'm completely serious by the way. It's been said that reading is a shield we use to protect us against loneliness, which makes some sense to me, and if that is the case, once the internet came along I was never alone. There was always somebody to talk to, some life to participate in or observe, and I began to consume media through that apparatus. Much has been lost through this, but unimaginable gains have been made, too.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a collaborative novel about love and illness, It will change the world.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ken Stange (September 18, 1946 - May 9, 2016)

North Bay poet Ken Stange has died, after a brief illness. Extensive biographical and bibliographical information can be discovered via http://www.kenstange.com.
As poet and critic Gil McElroy posted yesterday on Facebook:
Ken Stange died today. He was the first poet I actually knew. When I left university, I was committed to poetry, but other than reading widely I was a bit lost in terms of what to do now. A friend mentioned that someone teaching at Nipissing University in North Bay was publishing a literary magazine, and maybe I should get in touch with them. That's how I met Ken.
I got involved, and it changed my life. I had focus and something of a direction. Because of Ken. When some of the founders of White Water Gallery invited him to organize readings there, I became involved in artist-run culture and ended up working in it. Because of Ken.
I met his amazing spouse and life-partner Ursula. They made their immense library available to me, letting me explore on my own. I delved into their music collection, and made my first serious forays into classical and jazz. They gave me Nina Simone. I gave them Tom Waits.
My poetry grew and took shape, not all of it in promising ways. Ken took issue with my early austere and almost un-human poetics when I was trying hard not to feel. He was right, of course, but I begrudged him his keen and discerning eye when I began to allow myself to feel again and write myself in a direction that didn't involve terminus in a kind of poetic extinction. We didn't see eye to eye on a lot of stuff, nor really should we have. That's not what mentors do. Ken didn't want me writing a junior version of his own work. He wanted me to inhabit my own skin, and turn that into words. I'd have a been a very different poet without him.
The one I am is because of Ken.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with David James Miller

David James Miller is the author of CANT , and of the chapbooks As Sequence, and Facts & Other Objects. His poetry and critical writing may be found, or is forthcoming in: Jubilat, YellowField, Touch the Donkey, LVNG, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jacket2, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Lawrence, where he edits elis press, and SET , a biennial journal of innovative writing.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My life was already in the middle of major change when I got word that Black Radish wanted to publish CANT—I was literally driving a carload of my family’s belongings across country from the east coast.  That news was an incredibly encouraging confirmation of what’s going on in those pages.  I’m really grateful to the editors for getting behind books with unique poetics, and everyone at Black Radish has been wonderful to work with.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
From writing songs to poetry.  I’ve been a musician for half my life, so playing guitar and singing in high-school indie-rock & punk bands, I had to come up with words for those songs.  I wouldn’t have been able to say it at the time, but I realize now that I most liked song lyrics that were more surreal, and music that was more oblique.  After I began reading poetry, I’ve since realized that I preferred poetry that was more dense and taut in its language.  Now, I think I try to work out these influences in my poetry.  In relation to the writing in CANT—this is maybe something more about affective listening through open constructions & subjectivity. 

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?
Whenever it starts is when it starts.  Lines accumulate over time & in response to connected reflective observations.  I tend to think of things spatially & sonically, so this usually gives me a sense for the need to position the poem in relation to space.  Maybe this makes each ‘project’ more connected to others than they are separate. 

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?
Definitely short pieces—friends have commented on that aspect of my writing for as long as I’ve been writing.  I’m always thinking about how a poem or a piece works with or against others.  Individual pieces often arrive out of particular listening experiences and observations.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love reading.  Though, I’m pretty sure I’ve noticed that some people are uncomfortable with the amount of silence I invite during my readings.  I think about this silence/space a lot when I’m writing—how does reading reflect a concern for the space/s we inhabit, and how we inhabit them?  How does a poem?  Where is there & where should there be room?  How can the poem—and how can I—respect these spaces?

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?
Probably something about affective listening.  It feels strange to admit this but I often feel like I understand the world through listening.  When I’m overwhelmed with sound, however quiet or loud, I start sensing shapes and colors.  Sometimes I notice sounds from the immediate environment that our brains might otherwise tune out—I’ve also got permanent tinnitus, which complicates my listening & hearing experiences.  I want to point out though that I don’t see this as a disability—hearing is a privilege in a lot of ways, & it’s often one that goes unnoticed.  So I’m always aware of how attention to sound and its spatial-relations reflects attention to how language and logic works.  The act of attentive listening is, I think, analogous with social relations, politics, and with our economic and climatic realities.  So, for me, a lot of our contemporary concerns are deeply related to the bodily, attentive, & intentional act of listening.

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?
What I hope to be is someone who understands that my own experiences aren’t universal, especially through listening—& I think I try to work that out in my writing as well. 

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Someone once said something to me about the poem as a real thing in the real world, or at least that’s how I remember it, & I feel like that’s been especially important for me, in terms of thinking about the limits of a poem & of poetry.  Even further back, another poet once encouraged me to keep pushing my writing in terms of its length—which is largely how I came into thinking about poems serially.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like writing critical prose, it’s fiction I’ve always been terrible at.  I love some fiction, & I really respect those writers that can do it well.  Still though, I love the feel & sound of a good poem using language really well. 

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?
Right now, my daily routine consists of getting up, getting myself & then my kids ready, & getting all of us out the door on time for preschool & for my own teaching responsibilities.  If lines come in the middle of all this, then I try to be as ready as I can to write them down.  Usually, this is on my phone, so eventually all these lines add up to something I’ll expand or contract later on.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I tend to read in pieces, so I often find myself returning a lot to my favorite poets—though I’m always trying to explore other poets.  Mostly though, I just wait it out until something comes.  I try to practice patience as a general rule, and of course I fail miserably at that in a lot of ways, but still, I’m not getting good work done if I’m anxious about getting good work done.  It’ll happen eventually, I trust my reading/writing process.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Maybe coffee?  Dust?  Guitar amp tubes warming up?

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?
Visual art.  Architecture.  Religion.  Politics.  But more than anything else beyond poetry I’d say I’m influenced by music, & maybe some Onkyo musicians in particular—a group of Tokyo-based musicians performing around the turn of the century focused on silence, sound, restraint, performance, & improvisation.  I don’t want to get too academic here so I’ll keep this short: their music especially resonates with my own interests in the political contingencies of environmental concern & attention, acoustic ecology, listening, sociality, presence, being & non-being, among other things.  I won’t get into the extent to which they think through these issues, but I’m definitely interested in how their work & these issues resonate with poetry in particular ways.  CANT is probably most onto this, though maybe not so obviously.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Prynne, Scalapino, the Waldrops, Césaire, Weil, Sobin, Trakl, Borges, Novalis, Reverdy, Celan, Guest, Niedecker, Jabès, Wang Wei…

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish this current project, maybe some short fiction.  To see my kids grow up into genuinely good human beings.

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 did tech stuff for a number of years, before quitting because I hated my life & doing that work—luckily I quit a job in a financial firm’s bloated IT department just as the economy spun out in the early 00s, & took another at a university doing tech stuff.  Also, there was a time when I wanted to ‘make it’ in music.  But really, I’m super happy to be teaching & writing—I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.  Right now I’m at KU, which is a really supportive department, & the faculty here are great.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’d say it was something else that made me write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’ve been reading a lot of Gothic fiction lately—Turn of the Screw, “The Lifted Veil,” etc.  Brenda Iijima’s Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs is a fantastic press—she published two of my favorite chapbooks last year: Tyrone Williams’ Red Between Green & Laura Woltag’s Hush Hyletics.  Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession is fantastic.  I’m looking forward to having enough time to sit down & watch his On the Silver Globe .

20 - What are you currently working on?
The next project I’m working on is (tentatively) titled WOLD.  It’s grounded somewhere in the middle of my ongoing interest in woodcut prints, ekphrasis, water, capital, trees, silence, architecture, the history of pacifism, religious & political radicalism.  We’ll see if which poems alluding to these topics make the final cut.  I’ve got over 100 pages of drafts written at the moment, & I’m only now beginning to send work out.  Luckily, maybe 30 pages of that is already slated for publication.  Really excited to see where this goes.  Doing work now on the next issue of SET, & always reading poets whose work might be new to me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

a new short story,

A new short story, "Seven impossible things," is now online at Synapse.

Susan Holbrook, Throaty Wipes

WITHOUT YOU
I wander lonely as a clodin a bondless ble sky.I’m living in a bbble,the little enginethat cold.
I miss being a nit.
Me and my bigmoth, devoringevery planet y’allwere in. OnlyMars and Earthcan sstain life now.what a clsterfck!
I’ve lost ten ponds.I’ve been hiding in theHose reading The HistoryOf Tom Jones, a Fondling.I need my fond pot back.
I am ardor’s Americanneighbor. At the la,grass skirts hla;I slmp in a mm.
I’m in the Salt.
I know I was sedbt I miss that sing.
The author of the poetry collections misled (Calgary AB: Red Deer, 1999) and Joy Is So Exhausting (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009), as well as the chapbook Good Egg Bad Seed (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2004), Windsor, Ontario poet, editor and critic Susan Holbrook’s latest poetry collection is Throaty Wipes (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016), composed of (as the press release tells us) “her signature fusion of formal innovation and lyricism […]” The poems in Throaty Wipesare composed as a mix of lyric, prose and visuals, as Holbrook explores movement, language, sound and lyric. Structurally, her poems explore different ways of seeing, shaping and sounding, experimenting wildly between and amid forms to show numerous possibilities between “how poetry works” and “how prose works,” or, more specifically, utilizing language poetry to explore the gradient between the lyric, the fragment, and the sentence (with the occasional visual play utilizing letter size and movement thrown in for good measure).
Good guys do not bomb your buzz with an encyclopedic knowledge of ordnances. Good guys are peace buffs. They say Little Girls for Mayor. Sift pink dust into the Sistine stove. Good guys see eye to eye with man-haters, who hate guys. Man-haters are good guys: they may flip bad guys the bird but they do not shoot them in the face for going to school; they are too busy helping women through PTSD in their under-funded offices. If you knew what they knew you’d be a man-hater along with the good guys. If abuse always produced abuse, we’d fear the fang-glitter of little girls. I remind the man-hater I love that there are good guys. (“GOOD GUYS”)
On the surface, Throaty Wipes might appear a gathering of assorted poems linked, if at all, only through a curiosity about and engagement with poetic form (the final poem in the collection, for example, is “WHAT POETRY ISN’T”), and what and how a poem communicates, constructed as a unit as a quilt or collage. While there might be elements of that in Throaty Wipes, any gathering of pieces by the same author over the same stretch of time can’t help but repeat echoes of concerns and considerations. In a 2014 interview posted at Touch the Donkey, Holbrook wrote that “all my poems share some persistent concerns—when writing I think about how we shape and are shaped by language, about how to invite people in to a more intimate relationship with words, how cultural critique can be animated by defamiliarization’s prodding to sensation/awareness.” Through exploring such possibilities, her poems evoke a music akin to the twirls and glottals of Paul Celan, such as the gymnastic features that open “EVEN THE IMPERTURBABLE SPOCK / TREMBLES ON THE EDGE OF A / PLEASED REACTION.”: “In the awkward / silence of outer space, / crickets chirr / on the Enterprise / bridge, whose ambient / sounds of a late March / wetland celebrate / you, Spock, glossiest / blackbird, entering through the / swish basket”

U of Alberta writers-in-residence interviews: Myrna Kostash (2003-4)

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.
Born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta, Myrna Kostash is a fulltime writer, author of All of Baba’s Children (1978); Long Way From Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (1980); No Kidding: Inside the World of Teenage Girls (1987); Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993); The Doomed Bridegroom: A Memoir (1997); The Next Canada: Looking for the Future Nation (2000); Reading the River: A Traveller’s Companion to the North Saskatchewan River (2005). The Frog Lake Reader (2009). Prodigal Daughter: A Journey into Byzantium (2010), and The Seven Oaks Reader (2016).
She is at work on The Ghost Notebooks, a public family history and memoir.
Her literary nonfiction, which has appeared in Geist, Prairie Fire, Grain, Brick and Literary Review of Canada, has been widely anthologized.
In 2008 the Writers Guild of Alberta presented Kostash with the Golden Pen Award for lifetime achievement. In 2009 Kostash was inducted into the City of Edmonton’s Cultural Hall of Fame. In 2010, the Writers Trust of Canada named Kostash recipient of the Matt Cohen Award for a Life of Writing.
Kostash is a member of The Writers’ Union ofCanada, Writers’ Guild of Alberta (and a founding member), the Creative Nonfiction Collective (co-founder), and the Alberta Playwrights’ Network. She has served as Chair of TWUC, president of the WGA and president of CNFC. She is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society, is a member of the parish of St Elia Ukrainian Orthodox Church and is a volunteer barista at The Carrot community arts café.
She was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta during the 2003-4 academic year.
Q: When you began your residency, you’d been publishing books for nearly three decades. Where did you feel you were in your writing? What did the opportunity mean to you?
A: I came to the U of A residency straight from a residency at the Saskatoon public library. In Saskatoon, I had begun writing the book, Prodigal Daughter: A Journey to Byzantium, that had already taken a couple of years of research and travel and would not be published until 2010. So these back-to-back residencies were enormously helpful in my staying the course with the book, not to mention providing me a stable income for two whole years. I was also pleased that the U of A had chosen a home-grown writer and a nonfiction writer to boot for the 2003-04 residency. I enjoyed having a regular office routine on campus, which gave me the opportunity to use the library and participate in campus events surrounded by students. (I live on the north side of the North Saskatchewan River and normally consider downtown the real Edmonton.) As for my visitors, my recollection is that overwhelmingly they came from off-campus. I was invited to a few creative writing classes where I had the chance to hold forth at some length about my genre, creative nonfiction, but I don’t recall being approached by the writing students in my capacity as writer-in-res. On the other hand, I have vivid memories of some of the other visitors, notably the poet Pierrette Requier who was wrestling with material about her homeplace in francophone Peace River country; and the late Mowat McIlwraith with his stories about growing up on Frog Lake First Nation, which led me to another literary project that would obsess me, the story of what happened at Frog Lake on April 2, 1885. I did a CBC radio documentary, a book and a play inspired by the events known as the Frog Lake Massacre. And became friends with Mowat’s daughter, the poet Naomi McIlwraith.
Q: Given the fact that you did two residencies back-to-back, how did they compare? What did one allow or provide that the other didn’t?
A: In Saskatoon I worked from a basement office ​ ​with evening hours a couple of times a week to accommodate people who work during the day. This tells you one thing already: a library residency has a civic function that a campus residency ​does not necessarily aspire to. For one thing the campus and the English department are places you have to find your way to – the U of Alberta campus is chock-a-block with buildings and not easy to find your way around - unlike a downtown library as in Saskatoon which is very accessible by public transit and everybody knows where it is. This civic function was brought home sharply to me when library support workers went on strike and big chains locked the doors, to the bewilderment and disappointment of the people I saw come up and rattle the doors, their little kids with them. Because I wouldn’t cross the picket line, I arranged meetings with writers in a nearby cafe. Very parisien! That said, the U of A office I worked in was very comfortable, spacious, and just a few steps away from the HUB mall that teemed with students and professors between classes. It was great to be among so many young people in what was, after all, my alma mater.
But the very fact of my residency on a campus meant that I had all kinds of support from the English department’s office staff (this, I understand is no longer the case, for anybody, “thanks” to draconian budget cuts) when I needed some official business looked after. This was also back in the day when any photocopying had to be scrupulously catalogued as to number of copies, and bibliographical details in order to pay Access Copyright fees to the copyright owners. (I don’t remember doing this at the Saskatoon library.) Now, because the U of A has decided not to renew or renegotiate the agreement with Access Copyright “at this time” (September 2015), following on the Harper government’s “updating” of copyright legislation that in effect deprives Canada’s writers among others from income from copyright permissions, I guess that future writers-in-res will not have to account for their photocopying.
In both cases, Saskatoon and Edmonton the residency allowed for generous amounts of time for me to do my own writing. In Edmonton, while still working on Prodigal Daughter, I started work on Reading the River. I was very grateful for the office space to spread research files all around – and for convenient access to the astonishing holdings of the U of A library. They have items (Byzantiniana) I could not find even in the British Library in London. A public library, of course, does not have that specialist breadth or depth of catalogue or staff.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sarah Bernstein

Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal. Her writing has been appeared in places like The Malahat Review, CV2, Contemporary Women's Writing, Room, Prairie Fire and Numero Cinq, and has been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her first collection, Now Comes the Lightning , was published by Pedlar Press in November 2015. She lives in Edinburgh, where she is writing a PhD, teaching, and working in a library.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don't know that it has. I suppose it's allowed me to take myself more seriously as a writer.

Previously, I'd been writing short stories that relied mostly on dialogue and were quickly paced. I was interested in capturing voices. Also they were funny. Now Comes the Lightning is more precisely located in space and time: Europe between the wars, and the writing was helped along by a variety of cultural histories, newspapers and photographs by people like Brassaï. It's a bit grimmer in its subject matter, moves more thoughtfully, and it's much more visual. I was thinking to a greater extent about the relationship between image and form.  But I think it's also funny at times, especially if you agree with Beckett that there's nothing funnier than unhappiness.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
What I write usually reflects my reading habits. At first I was reading a lot of Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Grace Paley, George Saunders, Beckett -- writers who in their fiction are able to mix hilarity with a sense of the overwhelming awfulness of everything. Once I began reading poetry, and especially poetry that experiments with form, I started writing different kinds of things.

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?
Coming to something new is always a very slow process for me. I edit as I write, though, so not too much changes from the first draft.

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?
It begins with a scene, sometimes with a concept. The piece I'm working on now actually began with an action, which is rare as many of the characters I write don't seem to move around a whole lot, or if they do, you never quite catch them at it. I tend to write shorter pieces in the hope that eventually they'll cohere.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I consider readings to be separate from the writing process. I really enjoy going to readings, but I rarely enjoy giving them because I have a terror of crowds.

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 the first book, I was thinking a lot about the problem of complicity, about how people act in situations they feel are out of their control. I don't, however, see my writing as trying to answer these questions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think most writing engages with the social world, engages with history, in a way that opens them up for examination. What that means will change according to the interests of each writer. Some writing provides specific and intelligible political critique; in other writing it's submerged or else not fully articulated; in still other writing, we see only scraps. But it's always there in some form.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For Now Comes the Lightning, it was essential. Beth Follett is so sharp and always had the wider project in mind.

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
There's a process of synthesis that underlies both creative and critical writing, you know, bringing things together to make sense of them. At the same time, the logic is quite different: the elements of a poem or a piece of fiction need only make sense within the context of the piece. It's self-contained. In critical writing, the logic is exegetical. You wrench meaning out, splay it on the page, rope it to the wider world. I guess there is a kind of brutality in writing critical prose that I find appealing.

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 am a creature of habit. In the mornings, I walk down to the municipal pool and go for a swim. I try not to get too stressed out about my or other people's breaches of lane etiquette, but there is inevitably a brief power struggle of some kind over bench space in the changing room. Then I come home, make coffee, and sit down to write. At the moment, I'm trying to finish my PhD thesis, so other writing projects have been relegated to weekends or when I'm on a train.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other writers. Also the lives of writers and artists. My writing has stalled recently, so in an effort to motivate myself I've been reading literary biographies (two of the most remarkable ones are Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë) and listening to this podcast called Meet the Composer . Finding out how other people think about their practice and how they come to specific pieces has been helpful. And there's nothing quite like the early successes of other people to make you feel inadequate and drive you on.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Bagels and coffee.

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 walk a lot. In the city, and also in the countryside surrounding Edinburgh, and I have found that walking long distances, especially uphill, helps to dislodge ideas. So in that sense, nature does influence my work, even if I don't write about it directly.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I've already mentioned Beckett and Grace Paley. Also, Virginia Woolf, WG Sebald, Anne Carson, Edwidge Danticat, Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Tove Jansson, Rebecca Solnit, Louise Erdrich, Thomas Bernhard...

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Climb all the Munros. Or, you know, even just one.

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?
Well, right now I'm nominally pursuing a career as a university lecturer, so teaching is something I like to do. Ideally I'd like to do something that involves a lot of walking out of doors, so maybe I should have been a forest ranger.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I've always been a text-based learner. I work things out through writing, so writing poetry or fiction is part of my ongoing learning process.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just read Claudia Rankine's Citizen, which is absolutely astonishing.

I don't watch too many films, but I watched Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies again recently, which I like for a number of reasons, but particularly because of the opening scene, which is set in a pub and sees a man moving a group of other men, in varying states of inebriation, into a sort of dance rendering of a total solar eclipse. Also Mihály Vig's score for the film includes a song called "Valuska," which is probably the saddest song in the world.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm working on some fiction about shy women.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;