Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 399

Profile of Arc Poetry Magazine, with a few questions,

My profile of Arc Poetry Magazine (and their collaboration with Cordite Poetry Review ) featuring interview questions answered by Monty Reid, Frances Boyle and Shane Rhodes (among others) is now online at Open Book: Ontario.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Binnie Brennan

Toronto-born Binnie Brennan is the author of three books of fiction, Harbour View and A Certain Grace (Quattro Books). Her novel, Like Any Other Monday , was published in September 2014 by Gaspereau Press.

Co-winner of the 2009 Ken Klonsky Novella Contest, Binnie has also been published in several Canadian and American literary journals. Her novella, Harbour View, was shortlisted for an Atlantic Book Award and longlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award. Binnie is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers, where she was mentored by M.G.Vassanji and Alistair MacLeod.

Since 1989 Binnie has lived in Halifax where she plays the viola with Symphony Nova Scotia.

www.binniebooks.com

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The publication of Harbour View was certainly one of the great thrills of my life. It was a solid nudge that I was on the right track as a writer, which propelled me to complete my short story collection (A Certain Grace).

I’d say my most recent work, Like Any Other Monday, is the one that’s most changed my life – my writing life, anyway. Writing from history wasn’t something I’d considered, nor was writing a fictional portrait of Buster Keaton ever part of my plan. It’s taken me places I never thought I’d see, such as the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, and I’ve absorbed a great deal about two extinct art forms, vaudeville and silent film comedy, which I hadn’t much thought about before now.

Until Monday came along, I’d thought of myself mainly as a short story writer. I love the short form for its distillation of ideas and images, and never really thought I’d be able to cope with the larger canvas of a novel.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’ve been reading fiction for as long as I can remember. I’m most at home reading and writing fiction, although with the work I’ve been doing on Buster Keaton I have extended my reach towards non-fiction in the way of essay-writing, and some prose-poetry pieces inspired by his two-reel movies.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The first draft is always hard work, sometimes a painful slog. It takes a lot of revising and polishing before I’m happy with it. One of my twenty-page short stories took nine months of continuous writing and rewriting before I had the plot nailed down. However, Like Any Other Monday came in a rush following eighteen months of deep research, copious note-taking (ten filled notebooks) and various writing efforts (see #2). The first draft of the novel took six weeks to write, and I wrote nonstop, night and day. Does that mean it took six weeks, or 19-1/2 months? However you look at it, this was a completely new approach to writing for me. I just wanted to get the words down and sort it out later. It took a lot longer to revise and clean it up than to write the first draft, but the overall shape is the same.

4 - Where does fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
A lot of my short stories come from newspaper articles, overheard conversations, and in some cases, remembered events that I’ve appropriated and then altered to suit the story. With A Certain Grace I didn’t have a book in mind; I’d written the stories over a six-year period. Harbour View began as linked short stories I sort of got on a roll writing, and then decided to put them together as a novella.

Like Any Other Monday had its beginning as an experimental short story that left me scratching my head, wondering who are these people, and how did they come to be breaking in a new act together on the vaudeville stage? And then what happened? The short story grew longer and longer until finally I realized it would probably turn into a novel.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy them. Readings are one of the best ways writers have to connect with readers, and I love to read aloud, something I’ve always enjoyed doing. I prepare for readings as I would for a musical performance. I rehearse like crazy, and I underline certain words, add crescendos and breath marks and dynamic markings as I do musical scores. I read aloud to my cat until he’s so bored he leaves the room. And then I do it again. There’s no substitute for being prepared, for having the rhythm set and the words ready in your mouth. It’s not to say I’m spared the butterflies and wobbly knees, but I love the connection between story, writer, and reader, and for me the story is the most important thing in the room.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
None, really. I’m more of an intuitive writer, and each story brings with it a load of doubt – did this work? Can I get away with it? When I’m writing I don’t think about theoretical matters, form, structure; usually that sort of thing takes care of itself. I’m just happy to get the story down, and I enjoy making stuff up.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m not so sure about the role of the writer in larger culture, other than to supply the stories that allow people a chance at time-travel and escapism, and do it well.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had such good experiences working with Andrew Steeves and Gaspereau Press, and with John Calabro, the fiction editor at Quattro Books. In both cases we were simply after making the stories as good and authentic as possible. This involves leaving the ego at the door and knowing when to try the editor’s suggestions, or when to dig your heels in.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Keep your options open.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short story to novel)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’ve only made the move from short stories to novel successfully once, and it wasn’t intentional – the novel came from a short story. I’ve never thought in terms of “graduating” from short stories to longer fiction, of aspiring to write a novel once I got the hang of short stories. For me the art of short fiction lies in the compression of ideas, the economy of style.

Both genres have their appeal. With a short story you can hold the entire thing in your head without too much effort during the writing of it. I might make a few pages of notes or sketches and take it from there. Novels are obviously on a much bigger scale. Once I realized I was writing one, I had to make about a thousand decisions and keep detailed notes just to make sure I stayed on track and didn’t lose anything. The novel allowed me a wide-open space I’d never occupied before, and I enjoyed being there. Still, I found myself economizing, distilling things, and I’m not sure if that was a conscious choice. I don’t think it was.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t have a set routine; it depends on what I’m writing and on my work schedule. With Like Any Other Monday I was up at least five times a night making notes as ideas flooded in, and in the morning I’d try to make sense of them. I hit the ground running (writing) every single day and couldn’t wait to see what the next night’s notes would bring. This went on for weeks, much of it during Nutcracker season. My Symphony colleagues got used to my frantic note scribbling in the pit between pieces, and after the rehearsals or concerts I’d rush home and write some more.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read better fiction than I could hope to write, sometimes a single short story of Alistair MacLeod’s. I take photographs. Look at movies – usually silent movies, where every gesture tells the story. Lately I’ve been reading biographies. One of my favourites is a collection of essays on obscure silent film comedians called Clown Princes and Court Jesters, by James Lahue. One of the comedians, Billie Ritchie, died of injuries sustained on the set of an animal comedy after he was attacked by the ostriches. This was so shocking to me, but also perversely hilarious (what a way for a comedian to go!), that it surprised me into writing a short story.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pipe tobacco takes me back to my childhood home. It’s a rare thing to find these days.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’ve absorbed much in the way of expression through my musical life – phrasing, structure, pacing.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I first read Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners when I was twelve years old. She showed me that it was possible to tell stories about ordinary people, and tell them beautifully. Alistair MacLeod and Helen Humphreys have been great influences during my writing life.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sing jazz standards with a smoking hot trio in a nightclub.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Title writer during the silent movie era. They were paid not so much for the number of words they wrote as for the number of words they didn’t write, all the while still telling a story. Talk about distillation and economy!

(Okay, so that’s still within the writing profession...)

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I did something else: I became a professional musician. Some years later I became a writer. And now I do both.

When I was in high school I was torn between the two, writing and playing the viola. I was a serious music student at the time, but I was also writing a lot, and I loved doing both. A wise person pointed out that I hadn’t really lived enough of a life yet to write anything interesting, so why not pursue music for a while and live a little, and then try my hand at writing? And that’s what I did.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Recently I read Wayne Grady’s Emancipation Day, which I enjoyed very much. I’d say the last great movie I watched was Buster Keaton’s 1924 feature film, Sherlock, Jr. which is a beautifully crafted example of a lost art form.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve got a few things on the go, including a series of short stories inspired by the early, primitive days of silent movies. But the one that has my attention these days is a novel that has nothing to do with silent movies or vaudeville.

12 o 20 (second series) questions;

fw: a poetry project from brenda liefso:

I've been thinking about how to get readers and writers of poetry more connected and engaged for a while now, but recently, this essay from a GG nominated poet sparked me into action:  http://cwila.com/reading-the-evidence/ .

So, I've begun matching poets with readers, and it works like this: The poet sends a poem to the reader via Canada Post using lovely stationary, a coconut, whatever they so wish, and the reader responds with apoem in kind, or a prose letter, or an art piece. That's it -- the reader/writer can choose if they would like to keep corresponding after that.

I'd love for this to become a funded project, and will work on it, but for now, it's just for connection and for joy. I would also love for the poet and reader to let me know what it meant for them.

So, if you are interested in being either a poet or a reader/responder in this project, please email me your address and whether you'd like to be a poet or a reader at brenda@littleplumcreative.com OR send me a note with your name and address and preference as to poet/reader to:

Brenda Leifso
487 King St W
Kingston, ON
K7L 2X7.

Lisa Lubasch, So I Began

Starts like a summit or a vowel. There inside it. She cannot go anywhere. Out. Is out of the question. Elsewhere. Out of the question. She cannot swear. Besides. It doesn’t help anymore. She cannot speak. Their answers. What they want. Is obvious. Is it not. It’s raining. It is summer. It is warm, like hands. Possible sketch of the future, of maturity?
And when it happens there is no explanation. It keeps going on like days in the. Foolishly waits. For someone’s words. Foolishly waits. For a time or a task. Another to begin. The first one. Is that what you are waiting for?
Resuscitated as a kind of unrest. Blade. Slowly. Blown slowly. Over it. It is not anyone. It isn’t you. Someone in the hardened room suspends a deaf recitation. You are alone, but someone inquires. Have you been through the [exit]?
New York poet Lisa Lubasch’s fifth poetry collection, the first I’ve seen of her work, is So I Began (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2014), a multi-layered lyric suite of beginnings, openings and fragmented, stuttered description. Lubasch’s collage-effect of phrases, fragments and rich lyric passages accumulate as a sequence of layered steps. The poems are lean, as Catherine Wagner suggests on the back cover blurb: lean and sometimes fierce; abstract enough to float, and strong enough to strike with the precision of a needle. As Lubasch writes to open the poem “The Situation/Evidence”: “Open hangs his head and begins to mumble. / I am not quite at that point, but in a moment I could be / mumbling too. / I notice three things about this place. / The first is that Open inhabits it. / The second thing I notice is that I—I— / The third thing develops as the light moves down the / tumbling place…. / The tumbling place is my name for—[.]” Hers are nervous and downright restless poems, endlessly moving and morphing their meditative ways through a long thread. How does one maintain and contain such restless anxiety in such a precise and measured package?





A sounding at the ear.      And a ringing at the doorstep.      Look,she said, a sounding at my hair, and a laughing in the footsteps.A terrible laughing.     Certainly is terrible, and certainly ishonorable.     Better to be honorable than eligible.     Orperhaps not eligible at all.     The name fell twice.     It was (thesubstance of the name she heard).     (The substance or the distancefrom it.)     Redundant knocking.     A drift, a birch, throughdaylight, lost.     Drifting, drifting, into stalwart down.     Weare measuring its aperture.     Deep rose, written into English.Written into daylight.     One by one.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Detorie

Michelle Detorie lives in Santa Barbara, CA, where she edits Hex Presse and coordinates the Writing Center at Santa Barbara City College. She is the author of numerous chapbooks including Fur Birds (Insert Press), How Hate Got Hand (eohippus labs), and Bellum Letters (Dusie). She also makes visual poems, poetry objects, and time-based poetry. In 2007, Michelle was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and in 2010 she won a direct-to-artist grant from the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative for her public art project, The Poetry Booth. Her first full-length collection, After-Cave , appeared from Ahsahta Press in September. Her current project, The Sin in Wilderness, is a book-length erasure project about love, animals, and affective geography.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I’m really excited and happy about After-Cave. & I love this book. It isn’t the first book I’ve written -- it’s probably the third or fourth, but it is the first that is being put out into the world as a published book-object, so in that way it is a “first book.”

That said, I am glad that this book is the first book. It came out of my bones. I pulled out what was already there. This is of course a type of making, but much of my earlier work was more consciously crafted to look or sound a certain way and do a certain thing. With After-Cave, my work was to have the language and the shapes they made on the page honor the way the words had already grown inside my body. This required crafting and intention, but some of that was to make room for a type of risk-taking where my relationship to the language and page space was open and messy, because the way the language coalesced and sytancitically constellated and unfurled in my body-swamp was open and messy. And plastic. How do you put things that are alive and moving on that page? For the past several years I have been very preoccupied with the notion of ferality, and how feral creatures and organisms trouble and adapt . In this way, I feel like After-Cave is a feral type of writing. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I don’t know that I came to it first, and I’m less and less attached to describing my work as being a specific genre (but of course I feel that language can self-identify as a specific genre!), BUT the thing people call poetry is the thing that I have spent the most time learning about and making. That said, I do make things that could be called fiction and nonfiction. I also make visual poems and poetry objects and time-based poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My process tends to be eclectic: rhizomatic, trance-based, palmipsest-y. I write a lot. Obsessions and inquiries emerge and reach and converge. I make chunks of language and arrange and re-arrange, juxtapose and shuffle, erase and repeat. Some chunks or lines come out a way and stay that way. This mostly has to do with my state of consciousness while writing. Sometimes I come back with things more intact. Other times I bring back pieces and work to discover or intuit or create ways for them to go together. 

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
It begins in the murk. Some things are short, but lately every single thing is part of a bigger thing. I seem to have a preference for the space of 20-40 pages.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love giving readings. I read around in my work, sometimes reading one or two lines from a section and skipping ahead and coming back. I like reading for 15 to 20 minutes. If it’s longer than that, it feels less like a reading and more like a cultivation of a ambient, verbal atmosphere. A way of filling up the air with language and space where I’m not expecting people to listen or hear every word but rather to just experience it as a sort of affective or sensory mist. This is perhaps because I myself have ADD and have experienced this at longer readings and have found it very pleasurable.
    
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
How can we live without cruelty? Who has power? Who benefits?

I have for several years been conducting interdisciplinary research at the intersection of feminism, human/animal studies, and radical poetics. This research centers on the question of ferality and the feral, and searches out links between human writing practices and animal aesthetics -- what I call a “feral poetics,” a continuing project that meditates upon the politics of interspecies affiliations, affinities, and alliances. As a feminist, I am often concerned by the tacit acceptance of a pastoral frame in writing about nature. In my work as a poet, I have experimented with a feral poetics as way to trouble pastoralism’s duplicitous and highly gendered fantasies of nature as "wild," “pure,” “unpopulated,” and outside of historical and political time.  A feral poetics destabilizes these fantasies, and feral texts articulate and recover the subjects otherwise contained or made invisible by pastoralism’s narratives of nature, nation, state, and species. Ferality is a process, not a state of being: one cannot be born feral. A creature or poetics becomes feral because it has to or because it wants to. Also, feral is not another word for “wild.”

Most of this work also somehow connects or intersects with an interest in emancipatory social projects, creating new resources in literary interventions against state violence and war, critical pedagogy, and public art.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The roles other writers play for me varies, so I don’t think there is any one answer. The writers for whom I have the deepest attachment are those who help me learn and feel, whose work documents or questions how we live in a way that helps me understand it or see it differently.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
The editors with whom I’ve have the opportunity to collaborate have all been very light touch. I always appreciate it when someone shares their experience of reading my work with me, and editors can ask really good questions that help you re-think or re-see what the language is doing. With After-Cave, there is a narrator, so in some instances when there were questions it helped me wonder about whether or not the speaker would say it that way. I found that useful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Do the work.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I would like to write more fiction and essays, but when I sit down to write I always just feel like writing poetry. Perhaps that is one of the reasons I prefer thinking about putting words together outside the concept of genre. I’ve begun thinking of my erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness, as an experimental novel. & my diary/reading notes can be very essay-ish.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
My routine is that I make notes when I can. I work full-time, so I take off one or two weeks to work on my writing in a concentrated way in January and August.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The outdoors, conversations, art, books, daydreams, dreams, my dog, trance, meditation, divination. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine, magnolias, wood smoke

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Definitely. Artists who’ve inspired me include Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martin, Lorna Simpson, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, John Cage, M.I.A., Kathleen Hanna, Chris Marker, David Lynch. 

I spend a lot of time at the beach. Before I injured my back in 2010, I volunteered for three years rescuing starved, injured, and oiled seabirds through the Santa Barbara Wildlife Care Network. A lot of what I experienced and learned in that work comes into my writing. It is also the subject of one my pamphlets with eohippus labs, How Hate Got Hand.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Notley, Claudia Rankine, Emily Dickinson, Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Boyer, Fanny Howe, Donna Haraway, Paolo Friere, bell hooks, Jessica Smith, Julia Drescher, CJ Martin, Kurt Newman

This isn’t a complete list (all lists are inherently incomplete).

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
experience the auroras and the midnight sun

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Probably something with wildlife rescue or habitat restoration.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It made sense to me. I enjoyed it.  I received encouragement at key moments.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog

20 - What are you currently working on?
Scanning and photo editing pages from my book length erasure project, The Sin in Wilderness. Writing bitchy ghost and dragon poems. The feral poetics project. and my public art project, The Poetry Booth.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

An Interview with George Stanley : The Conversant,

My interview with Vancouver poet George Stanley, author of the new North of California St. (New Star Books, 2014), is now online at The Conversant.

Pte. Swain, J.J

Along the lines of what I posted last year on my great-grandfather, Joseph Joe Swain (my mother's maternal grandfather), and the year prior, a WWI-era letter to my great-grandmother, Mamie Swain, from her brother, I present more memorabilia discovered in two tins that remain of the Kemptville, Ontario Swains, and my great-grandfather, who not only fought in the First World War, but survived a mustard gas attack.

Joe (as he was known) was but one of an array of family from that corner that fought in the War, along with possibly two of his wife's brothers, and his wife's father. I am still working out the whos and the whats of that particular branch.

ryan fitzpatrick, Fortified Castles

SNOWFLAKE CHILDREN
Using this technique, two children can beseparated at birth without any emotions.
So why does the allegory survive while thesoulless creep still walks the streets?
Near the tops of the trees, you could nearlymake out with the ice crystals on the branches.
Some might object to a woman carrying a mystery child, but we need the freezer space.
So she knew about the safe haven, but wouldrather shoot herself right in the stomach.
Generally, we find it beneficial to the stateto allow individuals to disassemble themselves.
When I reach a finality near the ground, will Ilose some of the individual momentum I’ve gained?
Some print outlets might bury ice storms deepon the weather page choosing a new forecast.
These are striking and radical portraits of shotleaders defying a Jacobin sense of liberty.
During the past decade, Walmart has begunto sell do-it-yourself exorcism kits.
Republicanism emerges as a nostalgic quest fora return to the feudal times of purest liberty.
He was highly ethical in salvaging the tinkeringspirit of the wacky antics of embryonic cells.
Vancouver poet ryan fitzpatrick’s second trade collection, Fortified Castles (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014), follows his Fake Math (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007) after a space of more than half a decade, and a move from Calgary to Vancouver. After his years involved in the poetics and literary community of Calgary, he’s been immersed in a new community of writers for some time now, and the shift of poetic comes through in this new collection. In Fortified Castles, fitzpatrick’s poetry has evolved into a blend of Calgary’s language-poetics and Vancouver’s social and political engagements, as he writes to open the poem “I Hope to See You Soon”: “I was a scapegoat for the government when all / I wanted was to wish you a safe trip. I greeted / my new friends with a smile. I broke something / here that can be fixed in another neighbourhood.” Through Fortified Castles, fitzpatrick utilizes a kind of collage/cut-up method of accumulation to engage elements of the Occupy Movement, confusion, social interactions, financial anxieties, political uncertainties, ambiguous sentences and an endless series of phrases, consequences and histories, managing to capture an enormous amount of activity in such compact spaces. As he writes to open the poem “Golden Parachutes”: “What is the maximum number of words that can / be spoken by a decapitated head on a pike?” Asked about his new work in an interview forthcoming on the Touch the Donkey blog, fitzpatrick writes: 



My second book, Fortified Castles, came directly out of a couple one offs where I began to feed I-statements into Google (“I am so frightened” and “I fell asleep last night” were the first couple, I think), working with the search results. I liked the kind of material that came out so I stuck with it, playing with the shape of the poems themselves as I went. Working into a project from the ground up means that I work from a series of compositional problems or questions – questions that don’t emerge without the experimentation at the centre of doing something that doesn’t fit in a bigger project.
Structurally, its curious how fitzpatrick has composed two sections of poems composed in couplet form that bookend a lengthy section of poems structured in the form of sonnets, adding another layer of structural complication to a compositional process of stitching together Google search results. Part of what makes fitzpatrick’s poems so compelling is in the collage affect of his lines, forcing the full attention of the casual listener, and allowing the careful reader to experience multiple threads heading off in a variety of directions. As he writes to open the poem “I Want To Break Things”: “A closed door is music to me. My apartment is / in my name. I tense my face against the screen. / My backyard is my sanctuary. My dentist sends / me postcard reminders. I built this fence myself.” Given some of the subject matter the book explores, keeping the reader slightly off-balance might be entirely the point. Given some of the subject matter, it would seem strange to attempt to craft poems that didn’t unsettle. Perhaps we should be far more unsettled than we are.
I FAINT WHEN SURPRISED
The city is large and confusing and is the onlyjudge I have to answer to. The problem is withmy headphones and their immoral, bleached-outhucksterism. I overnight hype on the spill I took.
Have you read the YouTube comments? I hit myhead on the upper bunk and my muscles lock up.It’s weird and sucks that I robbed you. I pushand pull at the hinges of the improvised door.
I wake to fading stars across my jaw. A questionmark follows my email subject line. It’s humanrights for everyone and there’s no difference. I meanhe wasn’t playing around. I crossed a threshold.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anne Germanacos

Anne Germanacos’s collection of short stories, In the Time of the Girls , was published by BOA Editions in 2010. Her novel, Tribute , published by Rescue Press, appears in 2014. Together with her husband, she ran the Ithaka Cultural Study Program in Greece on the islands of Kalymnos and Crete. She runs the Germanacos Foundation in San Francisco.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Having a book allowed me to call myself, publicly, a writer, though I’d spent the previous forty years writing daily. This second book hasn’t officially come out yet, so it’s hard to say. But there’s already been a review!

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I’m not sure that I did come first to fiction. But the voice that first emerged was the most natural extension of my internal voice. My most recent book won’t be easily pigeon-holed. In fact, it goes against categorization, stylistically and in terms of genre.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My projects are ongoing and continual. It’s only once I’ve written something that I attempt to become aware of what it is I might have written. Writing is both slow and quick. It arrives quickly but may not be fully discernible to me as a particular thing for months.

A story, essay or poem is made up of words that were in the original draft, though only a fraction of them. New words rarely make their way in.

4 - Where does a story 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 most definitely begin with a pea.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing readings! It’s the fulfillment of the drama that’s been playing in one’s head for years and sometimes decades: an audience! A listener! Someone to hear what’s had to remain private in its long incubation.

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 attempting to answer the question—Where can one go with language?—I come upon its twin: Where can one go without it?

I break it down into the constituent parts: words/silence.

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?
Is anyone solely a writer? It’s the combination of things one does in the world that add up to a place in it. One conveys thought and feeling through different actions in one’s life. Writing is one of them.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No editor has ever fundamentally changed my work, so I can’t say that it’s been either. Having said that, it’s my present editor who recognized my work—in the sense of understanding it—and the fact that she did so has been utterly essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Take your time.”

Michelle Obama said it to my goddaughter at the last White House Chanuka party.

It has application everywhere and goes against the current grain.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The risk of moving between genres, playing with them (damaging them?) is the appeal!

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?
There are days that contain moments of writing, wedged between other activities—some thoughtful, some social and physical. There are days when everything else is lodged against the greater, larger (temporal) surface of writing. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I look to be uninspired, that is to unyoke myself from the task.

I turn away, letting myself be taken by something—anything else.

That click of being taken, absorbed by something outside myself assures a future.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sage for the specifics of Greece. Lavender for the idea of home, including its very possibility.

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’d prefer not to pigeon-hole. Books come from life, no?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Adam Phillips. Roberto Calasso. W.G. Sebald. Lewis Hyde. Avivah Zornberg. Geoff Dyer. Richard Rodriguez. Isaac Babel. David Markson.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Combine music, paint, sculpture, bodies, film. With language.

Write something in multiple languages, in diverse alphabets.

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?
When I was quite young, I wanted to be a rabbi. A little later, I wanted to be a psychiatrist. For a short while, I wanted to be a surgeon—someone who gets to slice and look inside. There was a time when I wanted to be a midwife. A writer trades in all these.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It started when I was nine or ten. Hardly a choice.

I had a good serve and a very decent throwing arm and a fantastic baseball card collection, but there was no Title IX. I used to chase the tennis balls rejected by famous women players but that kind of competition was not for me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
(Great? Who says?)

Vasily Grossman’s An Armenian Sketchbook took me by surprise, offering me more than I had known I wanted.

Wes Anderson’s recent one, The Grand Budapest Hotel , was very pleasurable, but his Moonrise Kingdom will stay with me far longer, I think.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Buckets of peas.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

short story: Opening, via The New Quarterly,

My short story "Opening" is now online at The New Quarterly , as a preview for issue #132! See the direct link to the story here. (The issue also includes an interview Claire Tacon conducted with myself and Christine McNair (and baby Rose) on our new works, as well as the Chaudiere Books relaunch!)