Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 359

Christmas! Merry! etc.

Best, to and for whatever it is you do or do not celebrate. From all of our household to all of yours.

Just think: after today, you don't have to hear carols again for another eleven months.

And yes: this is how we are all dressed today. Merrying.

Grove Avenue Press (1996-2010): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted over email in December 2015 as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here
Ottawa writer and editor Colin Morton is the author of numerous poetry books and chapbooks, including In Transit (Thistledown Press, 1981), This Won’t Last Forever (Longspoon Press, 1985), The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems (Quarry Press, 1987), How to Be Born Again (Quarry Press, 1991), Coastlines of the Archipelago (BuschekBooks, 2000), Dance, Misery (Seraphim Editions, 2003), The Cabbage of Paradise (Seraphim Editions, 2007), The Local Cluster (Pecan Grove Press, 2008), The Hundred Cuts (BuschekBooks, 2009), and Winds and Strings (BuschekBooks, 2013)—as well as the novel Oceans Apart (Quarry Press, 1995).
Morton grew up in Alberta, and moved to Ottawa soon after completing an MA in English at the University of Alberta in 1979. He has performed and recorded his poetry with First Draft and other music poetry groups, and his collaboration with Ed Ackerman, the animated film Primiti Too Taa (1988), based on Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate (Sonata in primitive sounds), led to a Genie nomination, a Bronze Apple, and other international film awards. He has been writer-in-residence at Concordia College (Moorhead, MN, 1995-6) and Connecticut College (New London, CT, 1997).
From 1982 to 1989, he was editor and publisher of Ouroboros [see the 2015 bibliography and interview with him here], an Ottawa-based publishing house that produced books, chapbooks and ephemera, producing works by himself, as well as a number of poets around him at the time, including Susan McMaster, Chris Wind, Robert Eady, Margaret Dyment and John Bell, and culminated in the anthology Capital Poets, which included work by Nadine McInnis, John Barton, Christopher Levenson and John Newlove. He is currently one of the organizers of The TREE Reading Series.
Q: Given your history with Ouroboros, I’m curious about the way you started Grove Avenue Press as a much smaller series of publications. What was the original impulse for producing chapbooks, and how did your experience with Ouroboros impact upon the form of the new press?
A: As with Ouroboros, which came about because I had written “Poem without Shame” and could imagine a format for it, Grove Avenue Press began as a DIY publication for Mood Indigo, the series of jazz-inspired lyrics I had written while listening to CDs borrowed from the public library. It’s essentially a craft project. I’d upgraded to a laser printer and, with an outsized stapler, I had all I needed to make books at home. I did an edition of 26 copies numbered A to Z, slapped on some clip art of a saxophone and had myself a reading script for any number of suites I performed with my friends Alrick Huebener on bass, Gavin McClintock on sax, and Jennifer Giles on keyboards. I liked the result and put out a notice in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter and elsewhere that I’d like to do some more chapbooks, all in limited editions of 26 copies. You spotted that, rob and a few nights later handed me the MS of a history of trains at a reading at Carleton U. I liked the evocation of your rural roots in those poems, and I liked the blue-denim cover paper and the clip art I found for the cover. There’s the satisfaction of making something, even if it’s desktop publishing.
Ultimately, though, it was the limits of my technical capabilities that made me lose interest in the chapbooks. I was taking new technology and using it to make a barely adequate facsimile of a real hand-made, artist-made book.
Q: What was the initial response to the chapbooks? How were they distributed?
A: With a print run of 26, distribution was simple. Half went to the author, half stayed with me and were shown/given to people who might be impressed. The initial response – that is, the response from the authors – was good. For both Maxianne Berger in Montreal (Crossing Lines) and Rachel Loden in California (My Domain), my chapbook call came as a challenge to get a long-contemplated first collection together. My Domain came out right around the same time as Loden’s chapbook The Last Campaign from Slapering Hol Press. That’s a beautifully produced piece of art, and the contrast with my humble Grove Avenue product helped convince me that my little DIY project was never going to be remembered for treating fine words with the respect they deserve. When I did Wendy Battin’s chapbook Lucid Dreaming, I just took the cover image and the poems from her website. So I was creating a hand-to-hand copy of an original work that was already available to anyone on the Internet. That might have seemed like a novelty in 1997, but it wasn’t then, and today I’m even more skeptical about what I was doing. It’s a beautiful thing to hold a fine book in your hands, it’s true. But I didn’t have the skills or inclination for that. Having produced a gift item for a few friends, I let the project go. Of course, writers when they’re starting out love to have a book, however small. Years later, when Mary Lee Bragg pulled her growing pile of poems together into a collection, I guided it through the press and resurrected the name Grove Avenue Press.
Q: How were authors originally selected? How did you first come across the work of American poet Rachel Loden, for example?
A: Rachel Loden’s a fascinating writer. At age 16 she flew across the country to attend the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965. I think, rob, you reviewed her brilliant teenage notes and observations on the poets she met there, Kulchur Girl. She has made a name since with Dick of the Dead and Hotel Imperium, and her language is fired by a peculiarly American outrage. Her personal animus against Richard Nixon goes back to the McCarthy anti-Communist hearings, where Nixon prosecuted her close family members, and the injustice has been feeding her poetry ever since. Back in the nineties she was just coming out with this work and quietly getting involved on the Net with a listserve community I was active on back then – CreWrt-L, an online collection of creative writing teachers and former students who shared their drafts and aspirations. Other chapbooks from Wendy Battin in Connecticut and Maxianne Berger in Montreal also came through that listserve. So the one call for submissions gave me some good material and enough experience to know that using a computer to print leaflets was, even then, so last-year.
Q: I wouldn’t entirely agree that the form is exclusively past-tense. But, at the same time, has that prompted any consideration on your part to update the ways in which you produce works?
A: The Internet is a great way to reach into the isolated corners of the culture and connect with people of similar interests you wouldn’t otherwise encounter. I’m sure it has had an influence on the way writers produce texts too – not just search and copy, mix and spin. But in that respect I’m a 20th century writer. Sincerity means something to me. Even meaning. Ironically, it was in the 70s and 80s that my ideas, though mostly derived from earlier generations’ radicals, pushed the boundaries of my technical abilities. Cassette tapes survive, but barely. A new tool, like a computer, may be seized upon for a multitude of applications. Later, as the technology matures, we learn what it is good at, what is not so much worth the effort.
Q: One thing that strikes as a difference between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press is in how much the former was tied geographically to the local, and the latter was far more wide-ranging, with Rachel Loden from San Francisco, Wendy Battin from Connecticut and Maxianne Berger from Montreal. Was this something you deliberately wanted for the press, or was it simply the result of timing: the expansion of the internet between Ouroboros and when you started producing Grove Avenue Press chapbooks?
A: Both with Ouroboros and Grove Avenue, I drew initially on my close contacts, those I was talking to about writing regularly. I did reach out with Ouroboros, publishing pieces by Richard Kostelanetz in New York and Nancy Corson Carter in Florida. By the mid-nineties, there was a sort of stone-age facebook helping people connect on the Internet. A notice from John Oughton in the League of Canadian Poets newsletter tipped me off to the CreWrt-L listserve, which was active long before the League’s listserve. Through CreWrt I made friends with Rachel Loden and Wendy Battin as well as other American and Canadian writers and others. Scott Olson invited me to be writer-in-residence at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and while I was there he acquired the long-running literary magazine Ascent, now an online magazine. Wendy Battin’s partner Charles O.Hartman recruited me for a term as writer-in-residence at Connecticut College. Poet and publisher H. Palmer Hall edited anthologies and eventually a volume of my poems for his Pecan Grove Press in Texas. It was possible to make such contacts before the Net, even without Jack Kerouac on amphetamines behind the wheel. Ouroboros did help me make such contacts, but it was a slower, less creative process.
Q: How different was the literary landscape in Ottawa between Ouroboros and Grove Avenue Press? Do you feel as though Grove Avenue was engaged in any different kinds of conversations than Ouroboros?
A: The literary landscape does shift, but I think the landmarks haven’t changed that much in, say, the century since Pound resorted to self-publishing and Poetry was a start-up little mag from Chicago. Of course, between the 80s and the 90s, I had gotten older, more “established” as they say in my own writing. But with Grove Avenue Press, as with Ouroboros, I encouraged people working toward their first book and generally saw poetry in the context of the gift economy. As a private printer, Grove Avenue wasn’t so much about developing an audience. I printed enough copies to give to friends or to display at one or two readings. Then they were gone, almost like snow sculptures. They are more like memorabilia than articles of trade. Interesting artworks pop up all the time in this sort of fugitive way, and they will continue to do so. Most of them will disappear and then be forgotten, but they all contribute to the creative atmosphere of a place.
Q: You’d mentioned that you see Grove Avenue as a press more in hibernation than one that has completely stopped. What might prompt a return to producing chapbooks?
A: As you know, rob, there’s a particular satisfaction in seeing something like this take shape. To be in control of the means of production, to be able to decide what to create, how, and when – that’s a creator’s dream. The business side doesn’t interest me as much. So if I were to produce chapbooks again it would be, as before, in small numbers to be given away at an event. Or else as a collectible object – something beautifully produced with fine quality materials. I started Grove Avenue Press because I thought I could do handmade work at home with my new tools. The result didn’t live up to my hopes, despite the excellent poetry the chapbooks contain. It would take something special, in every way, to tempt me to try again.
Grove Avenue Press Bibliography
Laser printed in editions of 26 numbered A to Z
Colin Morton. Mood Indigo. 1996.
Wendy Battin. Lucid Dreaming. 1997.
rob mclennan. a history of trains. 1997.
Maxianne Berger. Crossing the Line. 1998.
Rachel Loden. My Domain. 2000.
Photocopied in printings of 150 and 100
Mary Lee Bragg. How Women Work. 2010. Cover art by Susan Brison.

Ongoing notes: late December, 2015

Another year, nearly done; where does it all go?
Don’t forget our Peter F. Yacht Club annual Christmas party/reading/regatta on December 28th, including a brand-new issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club [see my recent write-up on such here]. There might even be cookies as well…
Toronto ON: From one of the COUGH regulars [see my review of the latest issue here] comes Toronto poet Emily Izsak’s Stickup (Toronto ON: shuffaloff / Eternal Network, 2015), a collection predominantly made up of short, quirky, observational lyrics. The shuffaloff / Eternal Network coupling (otherwise known as the collaboration between Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman’s small publishing enterprises) has been producing an intriguing number of chapbooks over the past couple of years, with nearly a dozen titles, including a couple of first chapbooks, by poets such as John Clarke, Victor Coleman, Michael Boughn, Robert Duncan, David Peter Clark, Ed Dorn and Oliver La Carerna Cusimano [see my review of such here]. Part of what appeals about first chapbooks (or, close to first; there is no biographical information to know if she published anything prior to this) is knowing that, most likely, they showcase the best of everything that particular author has composed up to that point, and Izsak’s Stickup feels very much like that kind of collection.
5 ATTEMPTS TO WRITE ABOUT RACHEL
I. Why.
II.I am not her tender eyed sister,second choice first fucked.Her fingertips are creased with miltless lust.She is not your vestal lamb pure of
III.I imagine you grinned at herleopard print undergarmentsand I can’t
            i can’t.
IV.For all of my suspicion,how did I missher candy lipson your computer screen?
V.You don’t need to make anyonefeel lovelybut me.
The appeal, also, comes through that very same variety, utilizing different shapes and structures as exploratory, some of which is quite strong, and some of which is less so, but somehow all imbibed with a vibrant energy. At some forty pages of material, the diversity of styles somehow cohere as a unit, with some really striking lines, such as to end the short poem, “ON WALKING THROUGH ALLAN GARDENS,” where she writes: “This exhibitionist greenhouse / flashes a German shepherd.” Or, the end of the poem “POW!” that brings out the more gymnastic elements of her language and cadence: “Call it ornithophilia, / I am smitten by your umlaut crowned / spit curl. Come now, / let’s dodge radioactive chondrules / till we’re dry lipped and sick with soroche, / too hypoxic for the kettledrum clatter. // Lady, you’ll say, / you looking dazzling in my leotard.”
A POSTMORTEM NOTE FROM RANDLE P.McMURPHY TO LENNIE SMALL
Shot in the head like a three-legged horse,what a way to go.Hey man, did you ever get to, you know, “pet the rabbit”before you kicked it?The bucket that is.Let me tell ya, I know a coupl’a girls up here—blunt force trauma, nothing infectious,not that it matters now, I guess.Did it hurt?Not the bullet, I mean the part where you feel like leave youlike a goddamn puff of smokeafter you’ve held it in your lungs so long your eyes tear up.He kinda reminds me of you,that gum chewing Chief,anyway, his hands are as big as yours,big as my face,which sorta worked out for us.But you gotta be careful.Keep those mitts in your lap or something‘cause I don’t want nothin’ else to end upcrushed.
Brooklyn NY: From Brooklyn’s Ugly Duckling Presse comes a new chapbook by American poet (and Toronto resident) Hoa Nguyen [see my profile on her here], her TELLS OF THE CRACKLING (2015). Given her most recent poetry collection was a selected/collected poems, Red Juice: Poems 1998 – 2008 (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014) [see my review of such here], it has been three years since the appearance of a collection of new work, after her As Long As Trees Last (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2012) [see my review of such here]. Three years might not be seen as a long time between publications, but Nguyen appears to release work slowly, meaning three years between publications could be considered the speed of light (and we are enormously grateful for the speed, by the by).
DREAM IN OCTOBER
Dream of childhood friend Wendycasually exiting my apartment windowto jump to the roof-top deckso we can perch and talk with cityviews           but she is too casual                and I see her missthe landing       not jumpingfar enough       an absolute plungeten stories down
    Her yelling regretscry out       Stop           o no   o no
I cover my ears so as not to hear the impact
Not to refer to widow          or wantTo mention the dream screamFrantic 9-1-1 dialing       I can barely

Let’s let it at this
Take the riskDon’t DieImpactChildren
The thirty-some pages of short lyrics in TELLS OF THE CRACKLING continue Nguyen’s work in the small, personal moment, presenting a series of narratives presented in halting breaths, pauses and precise descriptions. Her cadences are marvellous, and constructed entirely for the sake of attention. I haven’t yet heard her read, but, reading these poems, I am reminded, yet again, that I would very much like to.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Lacey

Claire Lacey currently lives in the UK. She holds an MA in English from the University of Calgary and a BA from York University. Her first book, Twin Tongues , won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her work has also appeared in Dandelion, The Windsor Review, and Filling Station .

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
As my first book was a seven year project that I started as an undergraduate student. It was my way of discoursing with ideas and texts that I came into contact with during that time - from online forums discussing racism and sexism to poetry to academic texts on second language pedagogy and sociology. I felt that in many ways these texts that were occupying separate spheres were asking to be in direct conversation with one another, and poetry was my way of seeing those conversations unfold. While my first book is a way of understanding my own role and implication in colonialism, my more recent work deals with my own experience of a concussion - a traumatic brain injury that has caused me to change the way I interact and relate with and to the world. I still am exploring questions of identity and trauma, but now I am performing the work of my own healing.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I recently moved, and I came across a notebook from when I was 10 or so. I found protest poems about saving the environment. I have always been drawn to language, seen it as a set of Lego to play with. I think poetry lets me play more with language and sound, and lets me dig into the gaps between genres (like digging ants out from the cracks in the sidewalk). I also write fiction, and science writing was how I earned my living for quite some time.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The very unsatisfying answer is: it depends. Some of my writing happens very quickly, and sometimes it's a laborious process to get it where I want. Sometimes a first draft is pretty close to the finished product, and other times it is hardly recognizable between draft one and draft twenty-five. I don't have a reliable process of writing because I need lots of time to think and process precisely what it is I am trying to say. I do take lots of notes, particularly when I am in the midst of a project, and I return to my notes often. My notes tend to meander between what I am currently reading, watching, interesting conversations I overhear, and what I am writing. Usually, the most productive moments come from the junctions between subjects, between seemingly disparate materials.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A poem usually begins aloud. I talk to myself, often as I am walking. If it sticks, I write it down. Sometimes these little bits coalesce into a piece. I tend to start with short bits that start circling around a theme then grow into a larger project; I was lucky in that this happened before I hit the grant-writing/university processes that want to fund projects.

With Twin Tongues I realized I was working on a book after about a year. Other times I have set out to write a book only to become entirely dissatisfied and throw out the manuscript. For me, I think when I am trying to produce a book I get too caught up with trying to write a book, while the real and interesting work is happening almost behind my own back.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I really enjoy doing readings and performances. It is another type of creative process for me, and often an opportunity for collaboration with other writers and performers. In fact, my current project is built out of an audio diary I kept during the early stages of recovery from a serious concussion. Readings can give a new texture to work, providing new layers to a written piece or giving voice to a provisional, site-specific experience. I think it is as important to produce temporary artwork as something published, which we tend to think of as more permanent. 

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?
Yes, Twin Tongues draws heavily from a number of different theoretical concerns around language, colonization, race, privilege, appropriation, and the politics of pedagogy. On a very fundamental level, it is looking at how history interacts with identity, and how good intentions can still result in harmful practices. The ethics of language, and even of being, are unresolved, and constantly in transition. How do I live and inhabit an identity that is inherently intertwined with a colonial culture? How do I find my language beautiful and simultaneously know that it is a tool for oppression? Twin Tongues was always doomed to failure, because it tries to answer questions about language and appropriation from a perspective that, even though I have done my best to resist, engages in appropriation and comes from a position of privilege. It is a book written about Papua New Guinea by a white, middle class Canadian woman. I struggled with the question of whether I should even finish the text at times, but to me, documenting this negotiation was more important than trying to create a book that contained any answers. 

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?
Writers are always necessarily immersed in their own culture. I think the best writers reveal facets of culture that have not been thoroughly interrogated, and provoke questions about whether or not those facets are still relevant or worthwhile. In this way, writers, like other artists, can help us understand how we live, and question whether or not it is right to live that way. Writers don't have the answers more or less than anyone else does, but they are like the slow motion replay on a hockey game - it sure can help determine whether or not the puck has crossed the line.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I have been very lucky in my editors. Twin Tongues was my Master's thesis, and so I had the benefit of defending it to a thesis committee, and receiving the feedback of two amazing writers and one visual artist before I even submitted for publication. My friend kevin mcpherson eckhoff also did a thorough and insightful edit for me, and then Jon Paul Fiorentino was a generous editor. An outside editor provides eyes that are fresh, that can determine whether or not the text is working the way it should...sometimes after being so involved in a poem for years it can be hard to see the big picture, or your mind remembers something that was removed a few drafts ago. So working with an outside editor, for me, is an essential and enjoyable part of the process.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Think of the trees. It is a piece of advice that Robert Majzels gives his creative writing students. So now I think before I print: is this worth killing a tree for?

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don't have a routine. When I have a deadline, I tend to set dates with myself so I have 3-4 hour chunks of time to think and work, but that could be at home, at the library, at a cafe, wherever.

Right now my typical day begins slowly, because I have a number of mental focus and neck rehab exercises I do at the beginning of every day. I don't tend to really get going until 10am...which makes me feel really old sometimes as I go to bed around 10 each night as well.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
When I get stuck, I shower. It allows me to step away and get physically grounded. If that's not enough, a walk outside will do the trick. I find that returning to my own body tends to renew my mental energy, and pull me away from the glitches of abstraction that can stop the writing process.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lemon pledge.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My work tends to reflect whatever influences are in my environment. When I worked for a neurosurgeon, my work was fed by the processes of science and medicine that surrounded me. When I worked in a gym, I started to pull from anatomical language. I draw a lot from the city and landscape that I inhabit as well.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
NourbeSe Philip and Dionne Brand both have huge influences on my work, and they are writers I often return to. Margaret Christakos and her Influency salon in many ways shaped the poet I am today. Then there are the poets that I play with: Kathleen Brown, Indra Singh, keven mcpherson eckhoff, jake kennedy, Stephanie Davis, and others...people who keep my thinking and writing fresh and vital and joyous.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a science fiction novel. Write dialogue for a video game. Write music.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I'd really like to try voice acting. I think it would be really interesting to be the voice of an animated character. I also think I would be pretty good at reading audio books.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have done a lot of other things. I had a career as a strength and conditioning coach, I was a roller derby athlete. No matter what else I do, I also write. It suits my tendencies to overthink everything and allows me to exercise my staircase wit.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I am reading a lot of science fiction and horror right now, and I've been into Octavia Butler and Philip K Dick. I also recently finished Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis, which is striking and heartbreaking and politically relevant.

Before I left Canada (and gave away all my books) I reread Shannon Maguire's fur(l) parachute, which I think is a stunning book, the kind of book I almost wish I had written first, except then I wouldn't have had the pleasure of reading it.

I tend to run behind the times on films, but I saw Luc Besson's Angel-A a few weeks ago, and I appreciated it for its meditation on self-worth and self-respect, even as I question whether or not I agree with its take on love and sacrifice...

19 - What are you currently working on?
I am accumulating material and thought around my concussion and healing. Right now I am deciding whether it wants to be poetry or fiction or non-fiction or an entirely performative text. It hasn't entirely settled into a shape that feels right, because I have not yet settled into a shape that feels like myself.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

FW: Arc Poetry Magazine Poem-of-the-Year competition‏

Arc Poetry Magazine is pleased to announce its 20th annual Poem-of-the-Year contest is open to all poets. The grand prize is $5000. The deadline is February 1,2016.

Arc’s annual competition, among the richest in the country, has gotten a little richer with the addition of a $500 award for the poem selected as Honourable Mention. There are other changes. The shortlist has been reduced from 25 to 10, but shortlisted poems will be published in Arc’s print magazine as well as online, and paid the regular publication fee. The popular People’s Choice award will continue.

The entry fee, which allows two poems and includes a subscription to Arc, has been raised slightly to $35. However, earlybird entries, submitted before January 1st, can enter a third poem at no additional cost. Arc encourages online entries, but will continue to accept mail submissions for 2015-16.

Arc’s Poem-of-the-Year contest started in 1995 and attracts submissions from around the world. Previous winners have included Patricia Young, Shane Neilson, Jacob MacArthur Mooney, Bren Simmers and many others.

For complete contest details, visit our website at arcpoetry.ca or contact managingeditor@arcpoetry.ca​.

Queen Mob's Teahouse: Lyndsay Kirkham interviews Jacqueline Valencia,

As my tenure of interviews editor at Queen Mob's Teahouse continues, the second interview is now online: an interview with Toronto poet Jacqueline Valencia, conducted by Lyndsay Kirkham . The first was an interview with poet, curator and art critic Gil McElroy, conducted by Ottawa poet Roland Prevost.

Some of the interviews I've conducted myself over at Queen Mob's Teahouse include conversations with Allison Green, Andy Weaver, N.W Lea and Rachel Loden.

If you are interested in sending a pitch for an interview my way, contact me via rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

The Capilano Review 3.27

I Didn’t Know
I didn’t know my milk      could return     racing
to save the orphan babythis morning with ghosts
         minor men     and shookthe tricky omnivorous bandit
before it could bite againTruck exhaust enters the house
One hydrangea flower     and leaves gust in the wind
on “my” side of the fence      (stolen)The smooth cup is upheld by a brown
hand as if to say     Today is the 70th anniversary
of the bombing of Hiroshima (Hoa Nguyen)
After being nearly upended when Capilano College decided to pull the plug on their support of The Capilano Review , I’m sure I’m not the only one relieved to see a new issue on the shelves (3.27; fall 2015). This issue, produced by an all-new editorial staff, including incoming editor Andrea Actis, is poetry-heavy, with an array of works by a variety of authors, including Tim Terhaar, Natalie Knight, William Kentridge (illustrations) and Ingrid de Kok (poem fragments), Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Colin Smith, Clint Burnham, Cam Scott, Ada Smailbegović, George Elliott Clarke, Natalie Helberg, Cecily Nicholson, Gustave Mortin, Emma Villazón, Andrés Ajens, Gracie Leavitt, Cole Swensen, Chris Nealon and Hoa Nguyen, and short reviews by Alex Muir, Lyana Patrick, Sarah Dowling, Steffanie Ling and Adam Seelig, as well as and stunning artworks by Myfanwy MacLeod, Ruth Cuthand and David Ogilvie. Given the ongoing disappearance of reviews from a variety of media over the past decade or so, the inclusion of a review section is thrilling to behold. And did you see that they’re now producing, separately to the journal, a new chapbook per month as free download on their website? Check out their “SMALL CAPS” over at their ever-expanding presence; I don’t think too many journals return from the near-dead (or at least, wounded) so quickly, and so well.
it was a print, Alex Colville’s Horse and Train

there once were as many horses as people
two and half million pounds of shit shoveled daily
horses walking in giant wheels
once ever motor was a horse
horses whose job it was to walk in a circle
horses who did everything
horse flu shut down the economy
sixty percent of them died
imagine sixty percent of our engines
stopping right now and only half of them starting again (Cecily Nicholson, “summer barrels past”)
There is also an interview with Dorothy Trujillo Lusk conducted by Danielle LaFrance, and an interview with Gustave Morin [see the link to his new book here] conducted by Mike Borkent, both essential in terms of exploring deeper works by two poets who really aren’t discussed often enough. I mean, between their new financial normal and the strength of the current issue (as their issues are), this is something that should be purchased by more. We were fortunate enough to have Dorothy Trujillo Lusk in Ottawa a while back (she’s originally from the Ottawa area; Luskville is, quite literally, named after one of her ancestors) reading from a variety of published and unpublished works; I just wish there could be more of her work available in print. As the interview with Lusk reads:
DTL: I wasn’t a part of the heyday of the feminist writing of KSW; I actually felt excluded from it. I didn’t feel like I was entirely welcome. But at that time I was fragile and was probably just being paranoid. When Nancy Shaw died she was writing about my work. It’s my own problem, really, that stems from insecurities. The collectives that I felt were important and anchored me were Vultures (aka Vancouver Women’s Research Group) and About a Bicycle. Also Red Queen, early on, when I wasn’t yet identifying as a writer but worked on posters for readings ‘n’ shit.
DL: With whom and what do you consider yourself in dialogue while you write? I’m asking specifically of the material and bodies you circuitously approach but nevertheless meet head-on in your poetry. Maybe it’s because you’ve referred to the subject in your work as a “moving target” that I’m thinking of tactical maneuvers in poems.
DTL: Mostly I’m in dialogue with memory, possibility, and the thwarted possibility of conventional communication or “dialogue.” But memory doesn’t go away to be recovered. It’s just there, is impetus. It’s not a repressed history—not even close. My first book was called Redactive, right, and it involved the activity of knowing that some things are veiled and concealed in various ways. But even though it’s never going to be a straight-on communicative approach in my writing, I’m not actually trying to conceal anything. It’s material and I am working with it.
It is good to see, also, in the interview with Gustave Morin, him give Ottawa poet jwcurry [see my Jacket2 piece on him here] his due, responding that “Not only is jwcurry important to Canadian letters, as far as I’m concerned he’s one of the greatest Canadians of all time, period. What he has done since about 1975, with almost no money, has, in the words of Nicky Drumbolis (yet another unsung giant!), ‘changed the world.’”
MB: You talk about “making” through the “muck” of life as a potentially (if illusory) transcendent act. I think this is a great statement about both creativity and practice, which for me is about particular orientations towards materials and actions. Could you elaborate on how “muck”-iness plays into your poetry? Do you mean that the collage and xerox manipulations, for instance, explore or draw into focus the muckiness of those technologies, or do you mean that your poems engage with the senses and materialities of life in some other way?

GM: The muck—the swirl that inchoate works find themselves trapped in, a half-clairvoyant, semi-amorphous state that is neither “art” nor “not art.” There are different stages to the creation of every individual work of art, but every single one of these works somehow comes up from the muck. The “muck” is just a semaphore for the store that I go to when I’m ready to buy some new poetry to foist on the unsuspecting world.            As for the muck of “xerox manipulations” as text: these are stored in a little corridor off by itself that I call the “plastic poetries.” Both a psychowestern(2010) and 79 little explosions and q-bert stranded on a smouldering mosquitocoil frozen to a space formerly occupied by language (2009) are books that manifest these tendencies to good effect. It’s proper for a concrete poet to dabble in plastic poetry now and again, provided they don’t go assuming that every little thing they do is a concrete poem.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sara Sutterlin

Sara Sutterlin's most recent book is  Baveuse .  Published by Electric Cereal.  She's on twitter @pissbb.  Her website is here.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? It felt nice to be ackowledged by publishers. I wrote  I Wanted To Be The Knife  when I was in love and being very performative about it, but it still has a certain darkness. People use the word sharp a lot when writing about it, whatever that means.  Baveuse  is different in that I hope it acheives something a little more refined. It's a little more grown up.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? There's a freedom to poetry that you just do not have with fiction and non-fiction. There are too many guidelines with that kind of writing. I have written some fiction, short stories mostly, which I like and want to publish someday, but feel drastically less confident about than my poetry. Poetry is something that demands to be played with and that's why I love it.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? It depends. Again, because it's poetry, I think it moves a lot faster. My writing process is fairly simple. I usually collect notes, going over and editing them but it's not a drawn out process where I'm agonizing over a poem for days and days. I have written poems in minutes, and that's the beauty of poetry, that it happens in an instant and you can write it and then be done with it. There's a lot of small re-births I think, which I like. I like distancing myself from what I write moments after writing it.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?  It depends, but mostly out of short pieces, or even just certain words. I've also worked from screenshots and notes I've taken on movies, certain color schemes or mundane details (Charlotte York from SATC flipping perfectly cooked eggs in a blue kitchen).
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I generally dislike them. I have a habit of reading in a voice that's slightly different than my own (either lower, or higher) to distance myself from the audience and my work. 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? I don't think I do, not questions, anyway. I have themes I like to explore. I write about sex and the relation between sex and death. Also, class, marriage.
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 the writer should write, release, write. That's it. That's the cycle. Have a voice, cultivate it, work on it, speak it. I think anything beyond that is masturbatory.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? Both.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? I hate this question, I'm sorry.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?  I write everyday, sometimes it's just note taking on my iphone, sometimes I finish a poem.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? I listen to women talk.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? Coffee, onions cooking, cigarettes.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? Yes, absolutely. Architecture, houses, spaces in which we live, suburbia inspire and influence my work greatly. I'm also very influenced by porn culture, and celebrity culture. Basketball, too, for some reason.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? I could, but I don't want to. There are a lot. There. That's vaguely generous.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Write erotica. Write a thriller. 
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? I have always thought that being a detective, and I don't mean a cop detective, I mean a rogue, tough, independent detective is the sexiest and coolest job in the world. I think I could do it. I think about it a lot.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I wrote, illustrated and put together a book when I was six. I don't know, some shit you can't help.  I am too mentally ill and crippled by a self involved need to write to do anything else.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Everyone lies when answering this question and I am too tired to lie right now. Pass.
19 - What are you currently working on? I'm working on a third book, but that's still in the earliest stages possible.  Molly Soda  and I are also curating, I guess is the word, a book of artists covering other artist's work in their own medium, which is a big project I'm pretty excited about. 
12or 20 (second series) questions;

Andrea Brady, Cut from the Rushes

HONESTY
Only one head, not without its problems.
Shuffled sleep, waking the shouldersomewhat better, quill of bone lies more quietlyagainst its blade. Spotted chests of a pairlook in here, into the escape pod, refernarrowed like catseye catchingscent of expirations. Still oneprepared head, in which una cordapedal strikes home two rubberised wires.
Between extra-nice and distant a shagpile on, no little intensity, thicken personality.With one head takes this one rest. Joltof pain on the intake, like a piercedkidney, pinkish scapula. Ichor dripsdown her acrylic claw. She tucks,her hair, in the neck-brace, buntedlip-shaped marks of foundation, then liesdown to wait for the next expansionof the plastic diaphragm. Only onewill be coming.
The anthology Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets , ed. Carrie Etter (Exeter, England: Shearsman Books, 2010), which includes a handful of poems from American/British poet (born in Philadelphia in 1974, she has lived in the UK since 1996) Andrea Brady’sfifth book of poems, Cut from the Rushes (Hastings UK: Reality Street, 2013), also includes this statement by the author:
The first poem I wrote, in 1982, was prayerful heroic couplets about the Lebanese hostage crisis. As a teenager the poems I most loved were oracles of transport; writing was a means of testifying charismatically to the perfectability of things. It was a tribute to the unachieved, its billowing references blowing around the outside of the feeling that was all beginning. Poetic language, like love, has always been a kind of bounty, correlating to something that wells up and is no speech: an infinity of opportunities to be exact.            And that was the risk; all those opportunities might be spent at the fuzzy edges of exactitude. I might forget to mention the apparatus, the movements and characters of most days. Though I work the facts hard my radicalism does not feel very modern to me. I wish I could be funnier. I admire my contemporaries who polish off the superfluity of things, who inventory all the commercial vehicles for the average life; but the economy of my poetry can’t manage that, even if it lives off the same flow of cheap credit. Where I make use of the personal it is as a dialect of the present. My poems plot the contour lines of international argument as ripples and distortions of the local. And they have a weakness for ornament, which I try to keep in check. Though I have always lived in cities I grow tight without the beautiful air.            But the anger, what is its relation to this bounty? As the impulse to begin in poems, to make an image of the perfectability which comes on like a trance, weakens, I shunt my desire for freedom into poems: and mourn there, and organize there, the lost worlds. But what comes first for any of us? Is critique grafted onto something more rootless, a turn in character? For a long time I wished that the world were better, as good as art. Now I am learning to write about happiness.            My infant daughter has begun to sing. Her body is flooded with the desire to participate in the comedy of communication: from her curled tongue to her bucking feet she is electrified with the joy of sounding. Her better capacity reveals the really possible infinity of speech itself, which renews itself at any time, without effort or commiseration.
Whereas I’ve known of Andrea Brady for some time now, I haven’t been terribly familiar with her work. The short narrative lyrics in Cut from the Rushes contain a curious blend of cadences, from British and American poetry both, set in a series of rushes, accumulations and breaks of line, thought and breath. Set in two sections—“EMBRACE” and “PRESENTING”—Brady’s poems are observational and immediate, engaging the personal, domestic and political across a broad spectrum of deceptively-straightforward meditations, brief narratives, warnings and calls-to-action. As she writes in the poem “SIGHT UNSEEN”: “The future claws into sight. Gets the all clear.”

Murderous Signs (2000-2007): bibliography, and an interview

this interview was conducted over email from November to December 2015 as part of a project to document Ottawa literary publishing. see my bibliography-in-progress of Ottawa literary publications, past and present here
Grant Wilkins likes letters, words, ink, paper and sounds, and combinations thereof. http://www.grungepapers.com/
Q: How did Murderous Signs first start?
A: Murderous Signs began life as a personal side project that I started while publishing The Canadian Journal of Contemporary Literary Stuff with Tamara Fairchild. The economics and logistics of trying to put out a “real” magazine – as Stuffwas intended to be – meant that it was a very slow, laborious and expensive beast to put together and publish, so I saw MSas a chance to do something in the same vein, but faster, cheaper and with a more personal bent to it.
As we were trying to do with Stuff, my aim was to put out good literary work, but to do it with a sharper editorial viewpoint than most of what I saw in the literary landscape around me. There were quite a lot of little literary zines and poetry mags floating around the Ottawa scene back then, most of which followed a fairly standard poetry/prose/reviews-at-the-end format, with little sense of a point of view beyond the work printed, and minimal effort to comment on or otherwise engage with the wider cultural world.
It seemed to me even then that the arts in general needed to engage with the larger culture if it actually wanted to be a living part of that culture, so this notion of MS as being at least partly a vehicle for a broader editorial or cultural comment was part of its conception. To that end, most issues ended up being three part affairs, wherein I’d publish work from two other writers – usually some combination of poetry and prose – and then I’d either write an editorial piece, or I’d dig up an essay that I thought had something useful to say. This format became more variable as the issues went on, but that’s basically the way it worked through the 15 issues of the run.
Q: I like the idea of attempting a journal that incorporated as what you saw as the next logical step, ie: attempting to “engage with the larger culture.” How well do you feel you accomplished that, and what kind of feedback did you receive, if any?
A: The responses that I got back were generally pretty positive, and to the extent that I got feedback from outside my immediate community, it always seemed to be quite encouraging.
Ultimately though, I think MS was too fully situated in the literary world for it to really do what I wanted it to do or be what I wanted it to be. The mission statement that I ran in each issue insisted that Murderous Signs was “a literary zine dedicated to presenting comment, prose, poetry and perspective on subjects literary and cultural, and to the notion that the printed word, well crafted and aimed, can be used as a weapon.” I didn’t seem to have too much trouble finding literary work that I liked – poetry or short prose – but I didn’t have much luck attracting writing that could be considered comment or cultural perspective in any broader sense. It just didn’t seem to be the sort of thing that was being written in the part of the literary world that the zine inhabited.
The end result of this was that MS often seemed a little bit schizophrenic, with me writing an editorial about the media coverage of the G-8 meetings, or ranting about how Chapters decides what books to carry, or finding an essay by CGD Roberts about modernism – which was followed by a suite of poetry and a short story of the sort that you’d find in any standard issue litzine.
I did manage to bridge the gap between comment and content a couple of times. Issue #5 had several letters by jwcurry to the McMaster University Library about how they were (or weren’t) collecting Canadian concrete & visual poetry, while issue #10 had poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis – both of whom contributed work that seemed to explicitly look outward at and have something to say about the world around them.
Aside from that though, most issues of MS seemed to have this slightly split-personality feel to them that I never quite managed to get a grip on.
Q: In hindsight, how do you think you might have changed your readership, ie. beyond the immediate of the literary community?
A: Practically speaking, I don’t think there was any way that I could have significantly changed the demographic that was reading MS. In however peripheral a way, I was an inhabitant of the local small press/literary world, and I’d set MS up to be a literary organ that functioned in that world. Short of metaphorically packing my bags and wandering off to find some other niche or community on the cultural spectrum in which to hang my hat, Murderous Signs was always going to have to be largely aimed at what I perceived as being my corner of the litverse.
I did make some sporadic efforts to find people and places beyond my immediate world who might be interested in Signs. Mostly this entailed mailing copies out to an ever-evolving list of addresses – university english departments, libraries, writers groups, poetry readings, writers, other magazines, etc etc. Still a literary audience, just a little broader, and further afield.
Mostly though, MS’s readership was largely determined by the fact that I’d always intended its distribution to be done by hand. I’d set MS up to be a print vehicle – it was very much in the standard photocopied/folded/pamphlet-stapled form – which made it easy and inexpensive to make, and which meant that I could give it away for free at small press fairs or mail it out pretty cheaply. The fact that I was only doing it as a biannual meant that it was never going to cost me a huge amount, which I liked, and it meant that I could time the publication for the spring and fall small press fair seasons, which I variously attended here, in Toronto and Montreal.
So yeah, MSstarted out as at least mostly a literary creature, and thusly always had to be aimed at mostly a literary audience. By about half way through the run I’d come to realize that the slightly bifurcated approach of the zine was a little problematic, and so I began more consciously trying to write or to find editorial/commentary content that was more directly related to the literary world. As I said before though, I never really ironed that part of it out.
Q: Is this something you’ve attempted to reattempt through any other means since? Meaning: have you written any non-fiction pieces for other media since the end of Murderous Signs?
A: Not as such, no. I hadn’t started Signs with the intent or desire to write content for every issue – it had been a long time since I’d had any particular aspiration to write – so by the time it ended I kind of felt like I’d had my say, and that that was enough.
By that time too I had developed a fairly generalized dislike of most kinds of linear or narratival writing – non-fiction, fiction or poetic. Partly this came out of what I was reading in the literary world around me, and partly it came out of the submissions piles I’d been wading through for years with Signs, Stuff, and MPD before that. It often seemed like mostly the same sort of people were writing mostly the same sort of thing mostly the same sort of way – and it didn’t really matter if it was poetry or prose or fiction or not, it was just mostly really uninteresting to me.
My solution was to start exploring more actively in the concrete, visual, sound & process-based poetry worlds. Eventually I started to do some experimenting in these sorts of writing myself, and ran a couple of reconfigurations of Archibald Lampman poems in the last few issues of Signs. To the extent that I’ve done any writing since Signsthat qualifies as non-fiction, it would probably be this sort of thing.
(Amusingly, I’m realizing that what was probably only my second ever piece of process writing – the second of my “2ND H@” series – was created out of a program for a literary conference at Ottawa U that you gave me).
Q: I’ve always been intrigued by your fascination with the Confederation Poets – Archibald Lampman, et al – in your publishing, even to the extent of publishing contemporary poetry alongside essays by the Confederation Poets in various issues of Murderous Signs. What is it about their work that you find so compelling?
A: I’ve got a degree in History and Classical Civilization, as well as a degree in English, so I think my interest is partly just a function of these things sitting at the point where my different enthusiasms intersect. There is in some way a feeling of real physical proximity to my interest too, as I’ve been living no more than four blocks away from one or other of Archibald Lampman’s old addresses since the late 1980s.
In that vein, I was also a member of Steve Artelle’s “Ottawa Literary Heritage Society” in its early stages of lobbying for what became “The Poets Pathway,” and I spent some time a few years back rooting through documents and microfiches at the Ottawa Public Library and at Library and Archives looking for information on Ottawa’s printing and publishing industries in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Ultimately, Lampman, the Confederation Poets and Canadian literary history are all just part of the spectrum of things that I’m interested in – so it isn’t really a surprise that some of it has shown up in my various publishing ventures.
Also, frankly, I’ve always been kind of appalled at how little attention we seem to pay to our history as a culture, and how little there is of it left around to engage with. Even here in Ottawa – a place that does have some historical significance – we physically don’t really have much more than a handful of buildings and a canal that go back past the early 20th century – we’ve knocked the rest of our history down, built over it, and now most of us aren’t even aware that it was there in the first place.
Our arts culture works the same way too, and when you combine that dynamic with the short shift arts and literature have been getting in our educational system in recent years, the end result often seems to be a generation – maybe a couple of generations now – of writers and artists who are largely unaware of the writing and art that came before them. I’ve been going to poetry readings for more than 20 years now, and reading submissions to literary magazines off and on for almost as long, and it’s deeply depressing to see and hear work by people who appear to be struggling mightily to reinvent the wheel – apparently oblivious to the fact that not only has it been done before, but that there was actually a very strong local tradition of the doing of it.
So yeah, I reprinted – and continue to reprint – that sort of work as the opportunity allowed and allows, in large part because I’m really quite interested in it, but also because I can really be pretty pedantic.
Q: One of my favourite issues had to be the one that included the correspondence between jwcurry and McMaster. How did the issue come together, and what was the response?
A: To be honest, I can’t really recall how that one came about. I think it must have developed out of the conversations john and I would occasionally have at the Ottawa small press fair or at readings. At that point I’d known him for a few years and known of him for a few years more, and of course I’d have been happy to publish anything from him – but this was just issue #5 of Signs, and I hadn’t yet gotten to where I was brave enough to actually go out and directly solicit work from people.
Anyway, what he gave me was a sequence of letters that he’d written to Carl Spadoni at the McMaster University Library. McMaster had seemed to be interested in the work curry was creating & publishing, and had bought some of it from him previously. Things had recently gone silent though, so john had written these letters in an attempt to see what was up and elicit some sort of explanation as to what their interests and intentions were or weren’t.
Not surprisingly, the letters were very interesting, being partly a general history of the institutional neglect of the corner of the literary world that john inhabits, partly an attempt to determine McMaster’s interests on the basis of their previous purchases, and partly an essay on the value and valueing of the sort of work that john produces, publishes and is otherwise interested in. The only reply he managed to get from Spadoni was a very short and very belated note to the effect that McMaster was not going to be collecting any Canadian poetry published after 1999, thank you very much. Apparently they had more important things to spend their money on than books of poetry.
The response to the issue and especially to the letters was as positive as these sorts of things get, and I was giving away copies fast enough that I quickly had to print a second run of it. Several people and institutions that I wouldn’t expect to pay attention to something like Murderous Signs – or even be aware of its existence – ended up contacting me for copies or subscribing. I did mail a couple of copies to McMaster too, though without generating any response.
Q: What was behind the decision to finally suspend the journal?
A: It was a combination of things, as these decisions usually are. Partly it was a matter of time, and my being about to have a lot less of it, as I was going to back to school for at least a couple of years. I’d done the full-time job & part-time school thing before, and knew that it would be hard to fit Signsinto that, especially if I had ambitions of doing anything else.
In addition to that, my interest in the project was waning. Fairly early on in the run of SignsI’d taken a weekend workshop in papermaking, and immediately fallen in love with the process. This in turn led me to letterpress printing, about which I became even more enthusiastic. It took a while for these new interests to chrystalize into a coherent practice, but as the years went on my enthusiasm for the book arts (as these kinds of arts & crafts get labelled) simply overtook my enthusiasm for small press publishing of the sort that I’d been doing – so when I was put in a position of needing to wind down at least one of these things for the sake of my sanity, Murderous Signs was the thing I dropped.
In the end, I didn’t really feel too bad about it. I’d been involved in running zines and magazines more or less continuously for about 14 years at that point – Signs, Stuff before that, and MPD before that – so the more I thought about it, the more a change of pace and focus appealed. And that was that.
Q: Given your move deeper, as you say, into the book arts, do you see yourself returning to any kind of small press publishing, or even a blending of the two?
A: For the last few years all of my publishing has been in the “book arts” vein – handmade paper, letterpress printing, hand binding, combinations thereof – and has mostly involved the reprinting of what I think of as classic work from the “old dead Canadians” (the Confederation Poets, Pauline Johnson) and the “old dead Brits” (Shakespeare, Sidney, etc). I have printed a little bit of my own work along the way – in my mind letterpress seems to lend itself to the sorts of process/chance/indeterminant forms of writing that I’ve come to focus on in my own still very minimal writing practice – but aside from that I don’t think I’ve yet printed the work of anyone who’s been alive to complain about the typography.
It is a kind of vaguely held, long-term goal to eventually get back into printing some contemporary work (other than my own). I don’t think I’m quite there yet as a printer though, and I’m certainly not set up to do the sort of ambitious book work that some of my letterpress friends do – so I think that the fulfilment of this ambition is still a ways off. Having left behind the need for deadlines, mailing lists, submission piles and the like – and having no interest in going back to them – I expect that my re-entry into the printing of contemporary work will be a very small scale thing when it happens, and I’ll be fine with that.

Murderous Signs bibliography:
ISSN: 1499-6006. All issues distributed free. Print run: 150-500+, varying issue by issue.
Issue 1: March 2000. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Huang Di. Short story by Sean van der Lee. Cover art by Esther Deitch. 14 pages.
Issue 2: September 2000. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Jeffrey Mackie. Short story by Jim Larwill. 18 pages.
Issue 3: May 2001. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Stan Rogal & LeRoy Gorman. 18 pages.
Issue 4: October 2001. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Prose by Adam Elliot Segal. Poetry by Giovanni Malito. 18 pages.
Issue 5: June 2002. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by April Severin. Letters from and to jwcurry. 26 pages.
Issue 6: October 2002. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Frances Ward. Short story by Beverley Cook. 26 pages.
Issue 7: May 2003. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry and short story by J.J. Steinfeld. 22 pages.
Issue 8: October 2003. Comment by Archibald Lampman. Poetry by T. Anders Carson and James P. McAuliffe. 26 pages.
Issue 9: May 2004. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Poetry by Becky Alexander. Prose by Bradley Somer. 26 pages.
Issue 10: October 2004. Essay and poetry by Charles G.D. Roberts. Poetry by George Elliott Clarke and Stephen Collis. 26 pages.
Issue 11: May 2005. Essay by Stéphane Mallarmé. Performance documentation by the Max Middle Sound Project. Cover art by George Dunbar. 22 pages.
Issue 12: October 2005. Essay by Frederick Philip Grove. Poetry by Richard Stevenson. Cover art by George Dunbar. 22 pages.
Issue 13: May 2006. Essay by Kyla Dixon-Muir. Poetry by Deborah Schnitzer and rob mclennan. Cover art by George Dunbar. 34 pages.
Issue 14: October 2006. Essay by Frederick Philip Grove. Poetry by Anna Panunto and Archibald Lampman. Cover art by George Dunbar. 34 pages.
Issue 15: May 2007. Editorial by Grant Wilkins. Short story by Edward McDermott. Poetry by Tim Conley and Archibald Lampman. 30 pages.