Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 134

new from above/ground press: G U E S T [a journal of guest editors] #21 : guest-edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples

NOW AVAILABLE: G U E S T #21
produced also as CASTLE GRAYSKULL 1.5
directed by Skeletor
edited by Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples

see here for Micah Ballard and Garrett Caples’ introduction and biographies 

featuring new work by:

Colter Jacobsen (as Teela)
Anne Waldman
Brian Lucas
Carrie Hunter
Roberto Harrison
Neeli Cherkovski
Raymond Foye and Bob Flanagan
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Tamas Panitz
Gregory Corso

$5 + postage / + $1 for Canadian orders; + $2 for US; + $6 outside of North America

Canadian/American/International rates (including shipping Canadian orders $6.00 CAD American orders $7.00 CAD International orders $11.00 CAD

Author biographies:

Neeli Cherkovskilives in San Francisco and has published many books of poetry and prose. His most recent poetry collection is ABC (Spuyten Duvyil).

Gregory Corso (1930–2002) was a revolutionary poet of the spirit. He was the author of over a dozen books of poetry and one novel, in addition to posthumously published collections of plays, interviews, and correspondence.

Bob Flanagan (1952–1996) was a poet, musician, and performance artist, famous for exploring themes of sado-masochism. He was published by Dennis Cooper’s Little Caesar magazine, David Trinidad’s Sherwood Press, and Hanuman Books.

Raymond Foye is a curator, publisher, writer and editor. He is currently editing the Collected Poems of Rene Ricard.

Roberto Harrison’smost recent book of poetry is Tropical Lung: exi(s)t(s)(Omnidawn, 2021). He was Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2017–2019 and is also a visual artist.

Carrie Hunterreceived her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and for 11 years, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She has published around 15 chapbooks and has two books out with Black Radish Books, The Incompossible and Orphan Machines, and a third full-length, Vibratory Milieu, out with Nightboat Books. She lives in San Francisco and teaches ESL.

Colter Jacobsensplits his time between Ukiah (Haiku spelled backwards) and Surprise Valley, both in California. Besides being an artist and musician and living with 16 animals (30,016 if you count the bees), he DJs as Coco, once a month for Nomadic Nightcap, KZYX community radio.

Tatiana Luboviski-Acostais a Nicaragüense Jewish Californian artist and poet. They are the author of The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light) & the forthcoming La Movida (Nightboat Books). Tatiana grew up east of the Los Angeles River, and has lived in the Ramaytush Ohlone village of Yelamu for the past decade.

Brian Lucas’s most recent publications are Lost Comets(Two-Way Mirror Books, 2021) and Eclipse Babel (Impart Ink/Bootstrap Press, 2015). He lives in Oakland, CA where he also paints and makes music under the Old Million Eye moniker.

Tamas Panitz is the author of Toad’s Sanctuary (Ornithopter Press, 2021), and The House of the Devil (Lunar Chandelier Collective, 2020). A book of poems, The Country Passing By,is forthcoming from Model City, as is a book of his interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson, called Conversazione,from Autonomedia. Tamas Panitz is also a painter, whose paintings and stray poems can be found on instagram,@tamaspanitz.

Anne Waldman: Recent projects include album SCIAMACHY. Levy-Gorvy & Fast Speaking Music (with William Parker, Laurie Anderson, Guru Moe & others) 2020, Goslings to Prophecy with Emma Gomis (Lune, 2021), Perdu Podcast: HAFEZ .2021,I Wanted To Tell You About My Meditations on Jupiter, Fast Speaking Music, Mexico City 2022. The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics Summer Writing Program at Naropa opening in June 2022. Forthcoming: New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive, Nightboat 2022 and BARD,KINETIC,Essays, Poems, Memoir, Coffee House Press 2022.

Rodrigo Toscano, The Charm & The Dread

 

Coding

The Pandemic is no longer an external event, rather
it is an interiority in search of an externality.

The George Floyd protests are no longer an externality,
they are an internality seeking an externality.

Both the pandemic and the protests form a singularity;
the New Event, as a code, is seeking hosts.

I’m a host, you’re a host, unshielded and waiting. Isolated,
we’re all watching The Code do its thing. Symptoms vary.

The latest from New Orleans, Louisiana poet Rodrigo Toscano is The Charm & The Dread (Hudson NY: Fence Books, 2021), a further example of pandemic-era writing landing into print (I’ve been seeing a flurry of such appear on my doorstep, recently). More overtly political on our current era of lockdowns than what I’ve seen so far via the lyric, Toscano’s poems are unflinching, catching the eye and the ear and holding on, responding to a variety of contemporary markers, from politics and the pandemic to social justice, neoliberalism and the rise of white supremacy, globalization and cross-border North American politics. “back to town this town,” he writes, as part of “The Zone,” “your town’s local admin’s / intensely responsive / tempered by Northern Zone / general imperatives / takes the wind out of / tiki torch supremacist / carnivals and ‘anti-racist’ / corporate peddlers in / permanent Westphalian / mode of inclusion into / neoliberal tribalism of / the 1% (actually less) [.[” His is a lyric that includes loops, swirls and echoes, whether through the poem “Brown Lives” or “The Tango,” the second of which writes: “The tango / you can’t / get between / gotta watch / your feet // Again not / inflection point / material / potential/ for all // But tango / white/black / checkerboard / dance floor / all over […].” There is such a music to his cadence, and a calm insistence running through his lyric, writing on borders, history and barricades, lines that demarcate, many of which are never fully understood or agreed-upon. As well, there is an echo of shared structural considerations, including an approach to a socially and politically engaged lyric directness, that Toscano shares with Vancouver poet Stephen Collis. He writes not as a polemic, but as a sequence of conversations, concerns and observations, and not allowing language to interfere with argument, as the poem “Barricades” writes:

He’s fond of peppering in
“on this side of the barricades”
when speaking political
meaning, his critique of
changes at hand
isn’t coming from the right
meaning, don’t purity spiral
peeps, be stout
allow room for growth
don’t be a gendarmeof
revolution, be a
full actor, unafraid
aware that the barricades
can pop up anywhere
in front and back

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mary Fairhurst Breen

Mary Fairhurst Breen grew up in the suburbs of Toronto and raised her kids in an artsy, slightly gritty part of the city. A translator by training, she spent thirty years in the not-for-profit sector, managing small organizations with big social-change mandates. She also launched her own arts business, indulging her passion for hand-making, which was a colossally enjoyable and unprofitable venture. Its demise gave her the time and impetus to write her family history for her daughters. She began to publish autobiographical stories, and wound up with her first book, Any Kind of Luck at All .

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Any Kind of Luck at All is my first book. It comes out in October [ed. note: this interview was conducted in mid-2021], so I can only hope that it does what I want it to do, namely to contribute to the destigmatization of mental illness and addiction by telling the stories of my family members in all their complexity. Writing it has already changed me a great deal, because it was only through the long process of retracing my steps on paper that I was able to see patterns, figure out why events transpired as they did, and begin to forge a way forward with more compassion for the many people in my life whose choices seem regrettable, including myself.

2 - How did you come to non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, fiction or poetry?

I’m creative but perhaps not as imaginative as I once was. I’m very practical. So for me, non-fiction makes sense. I have an insatiable curiosity about how other people live, so I love to read biographies and autobiographies (and watch documentaries). I can escape into a novel, but I don’t know if I could write one.

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?

Forgive the imagery, but the first very raw draft of this book spewed out of me over the course of a week, 7 years ago now. Then it sat and waited for me to be ready to write it properly. It came apart into separate stories, then back together again to form a whole. It went through multiple edits until I thought it might be something, then another overhaul after the most devastating loss of my life changed the narrative and, to some degree, the purpose of making it public.

By contrast, when I write an article for publication, I am fast. I know what I want to say, and so far I have enjoyed a rapid flow of words. I always let the piece sit for a while though, because improvements inevitably come to me at random moments in the days or weeks following the first draft’s completion.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?

With this book, I had no idea what I was writing when I began. I only anticipated an audience of my own family members. As I am a (rather old) emerging writer, this is my first published work apart from a few magazine and newspaper articles and a radio essay. My next book, for young readers, has a fairly precise format that I had to think up in order to apply for arts funding.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I guess I’ll find out as pandemic restrictions lift! I always get a lot out of hearing authors read, and I am very fond of storytelling and the spoken word, so I will prepare by reading aloud to myself to identify passages that I think I can “perform” well. I have always enjoyed public speaking, though reading from this book will be emotionally draining because it’s about my life. I think I’ll choose excerpts that my editor calls “chipper.”

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?

Because this book is a memoir, and my other published pieces have also been autobiographical, my main concern is honesty. Memory is an exceedingly tricky thing, and I know I can only portray the past as I experienced and remember it, which will not match how others perceived or recall the same events. I always try to make it clear that my position and privilege as a white, formerly middle-class Canadian settler impact every aspect of my life and give me a great deal of protection, regardless of how much pain I may feel. I have resources others do not, and especially in this time of (overdue) reckoning, I think it’s critical to examine what that means.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

The role of the writer has never been as important as it is now, in the information/disinformation age. It may be harder to discern what to read, but it’s vital for a society in such flux and turmoil to have access to intelligent and diverse voices, expressed through every artistic medium. Future generations (hoping there are some) will need today’s writers to reflect and interpret what the hell was going on in the world in the first decades of this millennium.

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

Let me state unequivocally that I love my editor at Second Story Press. And my experience working with newspaper, magazine and radio editors has been nothing but positive. These are the people who will save you from terrible embarrassment.

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

You should stop using the word shouldwhen making decisions (my mother). Always leave a party when you’re still having a good time (also my mother). I think this second one applies to a good many relationships, jobs and other endeavours too.

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?

The next year will present my first opportunity (and obligation) to dedicate time to writing. I am a morning person, and very disciplined (if not a bit rigid), so I look forward to the luxury of writing daily for the first time in my life.

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

I give it a time out. I walk away from it and let it think about how uncooperative it has been, then come back to it when it’s ready to behave.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The scent of my mother’s face powder was a comforting fragrance from my original home, and it lingered on her things for a long time after she died. The scent of the homes I have made is fresh baking.

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?

Everything influences my work, from podcasts to theatre to visual art. Stand-up comedy too - I’ve done it and I think it’s an underrated art form. A comedian has to deliver the goods with a minimum of words, and my objective is to do the same.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I read a lot of Canadian books, with a particular focus of late on Indigenous writers. I really appreciate the way Thomas King, Leanne Betasamosake Simpsonand Eden Robinson, among many others, slip humour so gracefully and generously into difficult subject matter. It’s what I try to do in my writing, and as my main tactic for staying sane.  I am a huge fan of Emma Donoghue, David Chariandy, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Barbara Kingsolver… A saving grace of the pandemic was all the extra reading time.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Nearly everything! Cross Canada in an RV, swim with dolphins, visit Iceland. And also smash the patriarchy.

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 a degree in translation but didn’t use it, and I think I might have succeeded as a literary translator. I would have made a good radio producer, perhaps. Instead, I worked most of my life in the nonprofit sector, and am just now, at the age of 58, embarking on a writing career. It may be 4 pm, but there is plenty of day left. 

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I did something else until I ran out of things to do for money, and then I wrote about that.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Book: How to Pronounce Knife. Film: Nomadland.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I have a picture book coming out this fall with Anchorless Press, inspired by the last year spent caring for my two-year old granddaughter. I did the story and artwork. My next project (funded by the Canada Council, whoopee!) is to write the first in a series of biographies for children ages 8 - 12.  It will be based on oral history interviews with all kinds of Canadian women who have done fascinating things.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Sara Lefsyk, We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds

 

I TOLD THIS SMALL MAN: if I had a mule, a parachute and long, flowing locks, I would jump out of this plane, put you in my shopping cart and push you to Brazil where we would change our names, cut our hair, and join the local militia. After that, we would lead a small army of chickens to the sea and, after many days of floating, I would catch a small fish and name it Pavlov. Then we would all jump into the sea and swim until we reached the largest island in Europe, where we would start a mariachi band with my birth family and yours and the sun would set and we would all drink sugar water and go to sleep beneath a large curtain of black air.

Thanks to the author, I recently acquired a copy of Ethel Zine maven Sara Lefsyk’s full-length debut, We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds (New York NY: Black Lawrence Press, 2018), a book-length suite of prose poems writing (according to Jeff Friedman’s back cover blurb) “a small ward in a hospital the size of a universe, Heidigger, Kant, a small man who speaks in parables, numerous messiahs, hundreds of birds and animals, a strange doctor and his son, birds that need watering, and ‘pharmacological pancakes.’” Going through my files, it is curious to realize that a selection of the poems included here appeared previously in her chapbook A SMALL MAN LOOKED AT ME (Little Red Leaves, 2014), a title I reviewed (and very much enjoyed) soon after it appeared.

The prose poems in We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds are curiously built, with each stanza-block existing as a single breath, a single thought, composing a semi-ongoing narrative amid lyric bursts. Through a lyric of surreal narratives, Lefsyk’s poem offer a story that exists in a shimmering dream-state, shifting in and out of focus. “OCCASIONALLY,” she writes, to open a poem early on in the collection, “OUR APARTMENT COMPLEX floats out to sea. As it was, Kant and I had our noses somewhere in the distance. ‘Most likely there is no meaning in things,’ Kant says. ‘Or only in the ultimate logic of certain animal forms and avian noises.’ // For this reason my bones feel like the small broken bones of a very tiny goldfish.” Set in five sections with an opening salvo, a poem-as-dedication “for and after FEDERICO GARCİA LORCA,” her narrator speaks from a ward and of doctors, dentists, husbands and philosophers in poems composed out of a kind of easy-flowing, clear and liquid motion. As well, there is something interesting about the way she writes of the body and the self, the narrator writing from a perspective that verges on primal, seen through a surreal lens. “IF I WERE A WIFE and a mother I would be a wife and a mother.” she writes, mid-way through the collection. “All my children say: ‘Build me,’ but the son takes my pelvis and runs it through the supermarket. // I go into and out of this supermarket whenever I want.” After having gone through this collection, I’m genuinely curious to find out what she’s been working on since.

IF THEY WERE COUNTING us all they were counting us all like they did yesterday only this time they would miss me in the numbers today.

Then they would force us onto our feet and we would pray for there not to be ropes and if there were ropes we would pray.

Arrange yourself.

The dr. himself would kneel before us and stick things places i can’t even talk about

and we won’t even cry a little about it.

They found my t-shirt but not me in it in the prayer room. They found my silence and my t-shirt and i did pray.

Bless me, they found my whole body in some dentist’s apartment and rotated it until they found its brilliance.

My upper jaw cit into my pelvis and i became some good factory.

 

Zane Koss, Harbour Grids

 

From Canadian poet and critic Zane Koss, following a small array of chapbooks, including two with above/ground press, comes the full-length debut, Harbour Grids (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2022), a book of grids and landscapes writing out topographical space as an expansion of virtual space, beginning with the harbour beyond his Brooklyn window. As the cover copy offers, the collection begins “as a phenomenological investigation of the surface of New York Harbor, [as] this long poem radiates outward from Sunset Park in Brooklyn to explore issues of labour, location, history, belonging, and subjectivity.” Harbour Grids is composed as an expansiveness within set boundaries, as each page is a grid of sixteen points, some of which are replaced through staccato, staggered gestures of lyric. “the shipyards      s           set limits,” he writes, early on in the collection. His use of the grid is structurally interesting, reminiscent of the work of the late Edmonton poet Wilfred Watson (husband of novelist Sheila), who worked a lyric exclusively composed via a modernist lyric shaped in grids, or even an early title by George Bowering, his Points on the Grid (1963). Koss’ exploration of visual space on the page is obviously informed in far different ways than Watson’s explorations. “shoreline        s           obsured            by construction,” he writes, two-thirds through the collection. Koss writes out a sequence into the single sentence of the collection, writing in constant, kinetic motion around labour and commerce, and how they in turn shape the landscape, and thusly, its people. He composes a meditation both visual and lyric, pointillist and staccato, accumulative and stretched out as a singular line between regular points.

As part of an interview posted at Touch the Donkey in March, 2020, Koss referenced the project, which was still then very much in-progress:

For example, at the moment I’m working on a manuscript in which I’ve been collecting observations – trying to limit myself to sense impressions and perceptual data only – glimpses, glances, and sounds – no conjectures or conclusions – from my neighbourhood in Brooklyn, particularly sense impressions of the appearance of the surface of New York Harbour. I’ll collect this data for a couple months – much of it fleeting, in passing, minor jottings – and then arrange this data into 4 x 4 grids composed the letter “s” repeated and symmetrically space on a page. And each phrase inserted into the grid has to hang itself off an “s,” so that everything is anchored in space to the grid. It sounds very neurotic now when I describe it. (I use the same form, except with a “v,” in my recent above/ground chapbook, Invermere Grids, btw.) I’ve gotten up to three sets of 32 grids each, so it’s a book-length manuscript now. Of course, the observations sort of get away from pure sensation and into politics and history, because sense comes thru the body which is always political – how our bodies experience (space) depends on what those bodies are or how they’re read by the forms of power that structure life (within that space).

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Caroline Wong

Caroline Wong is from a blue-collar immigrant family. A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, she writes fiction and poetry. Her work has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals. Primal Sketches, her first book of poetry, was published (Signature Editions) in the spring of 2021. She lives in Burnaby, BC, with her family.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

When I first started writing, sending my work out, I thought that having my first book published would mysteriously change my life in some way. It hasn’t. After the initial surprise and great excitement, life is once again back to its old routines, allowing me to move on to new writing projects. I always enjoy writing, creating; the only difference is that with one book out there, I now throw myself at the task with more confidence and intention.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I grew up with little nursery songs and simple chants my mother and grandmother taught us when we were living in China, Later in school we recited poems by the Tang poets Li Po, Du Fu, Wang Wei and others. The magic and musicality of words stayed with me. When I started writing, it was poetry I leaned toward, for its power to encapsulate thoughts, feelings and emotions in a heightened language, with an economy of words I find harder to achieve in prose.

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?

Once I am inspired and have an idea for a poem, the initial draft is written fairly quickly as my mind goes into that special place of deep concentration. I do edit a bit as I write, but I’d generally let it sit for a while before I go back to revise it. Usually the first drafts appear pretty close to the shapes they finally appear, but sometimes a poem can end up looking entirely different.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?

For me, a poem always comes from the heart first. Words come to me when I fall into a certain mood. I gather them into lines, into short pieces. My first book is composed of poems I had written and put aside, and poems I had recently generated. I’m now working on a new collection of poems with a “book”in mind. So it’s more focused and integrated.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I’m not a public person, but when I have the opportunity, I do read my work in public as a way to take my work out there. It helps to know that I’m not writing in a vacuum.

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?

The concept of art for art’s sake has always intrigued me. Do I strive to create a kind of pure poetry that solely conveys beauty and gives enjoyment? And if it has a social, humanistic, altruistic purpose, does it lower the poem’s poetic value? Mostly, I follow my own inclinations. If my writing can evoke in the reader the same strong emotions and feelings and passions I have for my subjects I would be more than satisfied.

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 every person has a role in making the world a better place by speaking out against injustice, inequality, bigotry and violence. Through the pen, writers can speak so much more loudly, their messages more likely heard. By advocating tolerance, fairness, empathy and compassion, a writer can contribute toward making a better future for later generations.

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

It was wonderful working with  my editor, Clarise Foster, on Primal Sketches and a great learning experience for me.

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

Never stop learning. The more we learn, the more we know our own ignorance. Each new wisdom gained humbles us a little more. Tolerance for and understanding of others’ faults and differences comes from knowing that no one is born perfect.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?

What I write is mostly motivated by what I read, and other times, by my reflections on the various personal and outside events unfolding around me. Whether I’m writing poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, all three genres allow me to explore subjects that are important to me: family history, our cultural past, memories of my girlhood in China and in Vancouver’s Chinatown.

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?

When I’m working on a project, I tend to keep a fairly regular routine. I’d write four to five hours in the morning each day. Then I’d go out for a walk to clear my head. Often though I find the writing continues in my head: reviewing, editing, even when I’m away from the my desk.

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

I usually re-read what I have written before I continue with more writing. I find this process opens up other possibilities, points to different approaches.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

This may sound strange. The smell of moth balls takes me back to my grandfather’s old desk at home, opening drawers, rummaging through bits of string, old bronze coins, rags, to find a yellowed, string-bound, picture book depicting gruesome tortures that the wicked suffer in Hell. It was the only book I ever came across in the house when I was a child.

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?

Because I spent my early years in a rural setting with open fields, orchards, hills, streams, themes of Nature, memory, journey occupy a large part of Primal Sketches.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Impossible to name the long list of great writers I admire over the years, but all great writings, whether in English or in Chinese, have a great influence on my work. When I’m not writing, I read, hike, garden, lunch with old friends, travel (before Covid-19).

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

Learn to speak Mandarin fluently so that when I travel in China, I would feel less out of place, more at home, if only to fool myself. I know one can never step into the same river twice.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I was at one time working as a Medical Laboratory Technologist.  If I hadn’t become a writer, I would probably have gone back to the lab. I liked the the investigating, testing and analyzing aspects of the work.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing enables me to get my stories out and share them with others, as a way to have my voice heard, and also as a means to discover their underlying significance. What they mean to me. Why I feel they are important to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The Men Who Killed Me. Reading the women’s stories shocked me out of my complacency and narrowness. The world is not getting better and better as I’d thought. Human nature never changes. For the voiceless and defenseless, their stories become a means for them to speak out against violence and abuse, to have their voices heard.

Gravity.Although it takes place 600 kilometers high above Earth, the story’s central theme is very much grounded: a young mother’s journey from grieving for the loss of her daughter to final acceptance.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A collections of elegiac poems on Vancouver’s Chinatown: its scandalous beginning, its heartbreaking decline, personal family history, stories of the girls and women whose lives and mine had briefly commingled in Chinatown.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Paul Cunningham, Fall Garment

 

into magma town i go, a history of fires,
sun-slashed and stranded in high school

it’s amazing how a field can bend

      an already drifting body 

the tendrest branch
of the coldest wrist

how the Ohio River disappears queers,
heavy hangs a school sweater

a fringe of palm, a surf-flinked body,
my friend leaves a bar at 2am alone

and i text them until
i know they’re home

i think about yearbooks, exit ramps, spirals
an all-American body’s innocent smile

            something
            not even most
            mothers
            can love

somehow i was always outside
the principal’s office laughing

somehow i always fell
for a hometown mirage

Georgia poet, editor, translator and publisher Paul Cunningham’s second full-length collection is Fall Garment (London UK: Schism Press, 2022), following a handful of chapbooks and the full-length debut, The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism Press, 2020). Set in three sections—“BOOK I : FACTORY APPETITE,” “BOOK II : SIC ARC” and “BOOK III : FALL GARMENT”—Cunningham’s accumulated triptych of suites together forms a larger lyric around work and industry, geography and gender, sexuality and fashion, elements of which are reminiscent of work by such as Philadelphia poet Ryan Eckes’ ongoing engagement with labour and the short lyric accumulation, or even other explorations around history, labour and specific neighbourhoods, including Brooklyn poet Susan Landers writing Philadephia’s Germantown through Franklinstein (New York NY: Roof Books, 2016) [see my review of such here] or Brooklyn writer and performer Anna Vitale’s Detroit Detroit (Roof Books, 2017) [see my review of such here]. Writing a “linguistic decadence” and long stretches of accumulating lyric poem-sections, Cunningham opens with the factory, connecting clothing as a thread that runs through labour to fashion to queer culture. He writes of factory-spaces converted to bathhouses, the AIDS crisis and an erasure of text and trauma, culture and human lives, pushed aside for the sake of comfort and commodity. As Lindsay Tigue offers as part of her 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize Judge’s Comments: “Paul Cunningham’s “Factory Appetite’ considers the deep history of a place—a part of Pennsylvania where the Anchor Hocking/Phoenix Glass plant is located. The poem includes references to the layered history of naming, of disaster, of environmental impact, and what it is like to be another product of a town that’s become indistinguishable from its industry.”

when you make garments

so perfectly 

there has to be something

that renders them 

a little imperfect

the populous 

their urns

stood in resistance

endeavoured to burn

many coins buried them

underground

iron rings and iron

Caesars

of bulk and bigness

the urns deposited nothing

only more uncertainty

these parts

garrisoned

planted before

the dates of their instruments

Pam Brown, Stasis Shuffle

 

my body will know
what to do
     with the vaccine
in two weeks’ time

whatever happens
don’t read me
           any rumi poems
   at my sick bed

  don’t schmumi me (“(best before)”)

The latest from Sydney, Australian poet and editor Pam Brown is the pandemic response poems of Stasis Shuffle (St. Lucia, Queensland: Hunter Publishers, 2021), her second book to appear last year, after Endings & Spacings (Sydney Australia: Never-Never Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Stasis Shuffle is a book directly responding to the restlessness of uncertainty, health measures and remaining in place. In this way, Stasis Shuffle adds to a growing list of pandemic-response poetry projects, a list that already includes Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and Lisa Samuels’ Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Brown’s poems appear to be composed in the quick-sketch form of the poetic journal, attempting to capture, through the long form of the book-length poem, a particular period of time from her home in Sydney; composed in an accretion of short lines, phrases and quick turns, in a kind of perpetual ongoingness, akin to a lengthier structure of what might be called “Creeleyesque,” after the late American poet Robert Creeley. “the / it’s-interesting / bla-bla,” she writes, near the beginning of the collection, “question is – // is your slowly accreting poem / morphing into a larger cloud yet – // a major poem / ghosting in to sydney / past the heads, / making its way to ashfield // darker & darker / birds swirling around in it – / leaves / rubbish & debris / full of menace & meaning?”

She writes of memory and nostalgia, situating herself and her thinking through an assemblage of playful breaths and breaks, collage and accumulation, phrases and visuals. While the poems here offer an ongoingness, they also provide a sense of a gathering of fragments collected over an extended period, something reminiscent of American poet and translator Joshua Beckman’s Animal Days (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Her poems accumulate, offering a portrait of a space, of a time; and a texture across a singular lyric.

I borrow history 

       robert johnson’s history

my borrowed allegory

playing a vinyl record
     from 1981 –
                    alice gerrard 

1981          her plaintive song
        rips through me

longing
nostalgia
hankering 

I’ve never even been to michigan

I’ve been
               to 1981

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Maegan Poland

Maegan Poland [photo credit: Michael Martin Shea] lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative writing and composition at Drexel University. Her debut short story collection What Makes You Think You’re Awake? was selected by Carmen Maria Machado to win the Bakwin Award and was published in 2021 by Blair Press. Her fiction has been published in Mississippi Review, Pleiades, Beloit Fiction Journal, Juked, Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere. She has received a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology, a Tin House scholarship, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is currently working on a novel. You can find more information on her website at www.maeganpoland.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?

My first book was just published this [past] June (2021), so I’m not sure if I can fully answer this question yet. What I can say is that there is a sense of tremendous relief and excitement that my first collection of short stories has found such a good home (Blair Press) and that I can now focus on moving forward with my other writing projects.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I think I was exposed to more fiction than poetry or nonfiction when I was very little, and that was when I was most impressionable, maybe? The stories I wrote as a child were usually mashups of the fantasy novels I was reading.

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 on the story. Sometimes I feel inspired and can write a story down in just a few sessions. Some stories are a painfully slow and mysterious process, where I’m adding a few lines each day and then deleting as many the next. I tend to revise as I go, so there are many drafts of the beginning of a story, but by the time I get to the final pages, it is close to its final form. There are always exceptions to this. I’ve had drafts that I’ve thrown out and rewritten from memory because I needed to imagine a new structure or shape to the story.

4 - Where does a work of prose 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’m always keeping a notes file full of possible images, moments, lines of dialogue, etc. I’ve been surprised by how many of the notes from that file make it into a story without my consciously deciding to use them. Some stories begin with an image or a moment. Some stories begin with a specific character conflict. I need to find a way to connect with the main character’s inner turmoil to fuel a complete story draft. For my collection, there were a couple stories I wrote before envisioning the final book, but at a certain point, I kept gravitating to similar themes and felt that the stories were coming together as a collection.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I enjoy doing readings. I think I learn about my writing when I see and hear the way people react to my writing. But I can be self-critical, so I need space away from performing my work or from receiving outside criticism when I’m embarking on a draft that is new and uncertain.

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’m often dealing with competing perspectives or the potential unreliability of perspective. How do we navigate these doubts surrounding perspective? How do we cope with the inherent loneliness of the ego?

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 don’t want to declare a monolithic role for all writers. I think different writers can offer different things. Sometimes I aim to create an enhanced sense of awareness or to provoke a particular feeling, for myself and hopefully for the reader. Sometimes I am exploring a complex moral question. Or sometimes I just want to see how a certain personality would respond to certain circumstances. I appreciate writing that interrogates power structures. But that doesn’t mean I’m reading for didacticism. I love nuance, complexity, and contradictions. I like writing that sets the profound contradictions of life in motion. I like reading and writing flawed characters who are living their messy lives, reflecting the world we live in.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’m extremely self-critical so I love to share that burden with an editor. Please, by all means, help me decide what needs revision. I’ve only had lovely experiences with editors. I could imagine how it would be difficult if the editor didn’t share my vision for the work, but that hasn’t happened to me yet.

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

Write a messy first draft. I’m still learning to do this. I keep revising as I go along. But I think it’s important to turn the perfectionist off while creating the overall structure of the story. That structure may change, but you need a starting point.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

I don’t know if I’m equipped to answer this question, since the determination remains to be seen. I’m still working on my first novel. The transition has not been easy, but I think that’s partially due to my subject matter, which has required a lot of research. I did research for a few of my short stories, but I’m currently researching things that are so outside of my previous knowledge base that I’m constantly nervous about whether it is adequately informing my writing. Because of this nervousness, I’ve had to rely a lot on outlining, which is not always my first impulse as a short story writer. I know the outline is a myth. I may have to start over and choose a different structure, but I have to give myself training wheels to keep the forward momentum, because I find the complexity of my current project to be intimidating, to be honest. As far as the appeal? I don’t know if I see an appeal to the novel versus the short story; I love short stories and could focus on them for the rest of my life. I chose to write a novel because I feel the story I currently am trying to tackle requires more narrative threads than a short story can contain.

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?

When I am writing, I’m writing every day, but I do have periods of not writing. This is usually when I’m between projects and busy teaching. When I’m not actively writing, I still keep notes and I focus on reading fiction and doing research that will inform my writing.

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

When I’m stalled, it’s usually because there is some mood or feeling that I want to convey, but I don’t have the structure of the story that will get me there. When this happens, I like to listen to music and read fiction and watch movies that evoke that particular mood. I then brainstorm different ways to structure the next scene or sequence.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of autumn, when leaves have begun to fall and decompose, and the temperature has dropped. I grew up in Indiana, but I spent most of my adult years in places that didn’t have such a distinct fall fragrance.

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?

Music and film influence my writing all the time. I’m not musical at all now, but I grew up playing violin and I went to film school. If I find a movie or a song that evokes an intense mood, I’ll often use that as inspiration for a scene or story that I want to approximate that mood. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I would not be so bold as to say that I’m writing in the tradition of these great writers, but I’m always inspired by Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. The writers that are important for my work change over time, as the work changes. Different writers have been important to me at different times in my life. So I hate to make a list and suggest it’s comprehensive, because I’ll inevitably omit writers that have been deeply important to me. Lately, I’ve been inspired by Carmen Maria Machado, Shirley Jackson, Ted Chiang, Clarice Lispector, and Laura van den Berg. I also benefit from being friends with quite a few talented writers, many of whom I met during my graduate programs at University of Mississippi and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Their writing inspires me, and my conversations with them about writing help keep me focused and motivated.

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

Finish and publish this novel!

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?

A virologist. Or maybe an epidemiologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I always loved writing and film, but I thought I needed to focus on a career in science. It wasn’t until I saw a brochure for film school that I even considered other possibilities. I recall a possible turning point: I was staying after school and working on a lab for AP Chem, and I remember my lab partner enthusiastically ranting about biochemical pathways and it dawned on me that she was more passionate than I was about the science. I liked narratives about scientists overcoming challenges. So, I decided that I wanted to pursue the art of narrative in some way. It’s funny, because it was such a big yet mercurial decision. Given a different year, a different lab, or a different subfield, maybe I’d have been the one ranting passionately about some scientific concept or principle I’d finally understood. But that’s the way it went for me. I left a different life, a different me, at that fork in the road. I was also lucky to get a scholarship for film school, so that tempted me and allowed me to study writing (especially screenwriting) in college. To be clear, I always knew I wanted to write, but growing up, I didn’t realize I could make it a more central focus of my life.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Real Life by Brandon Taylor. And Midsommar. I was late to the party and I loved it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a novel about artificial intelligence, privacy, and feeling haunted.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Katherine Factor, a sybil society

 

Antediluvian Floozy

Man has it been
a long long time
since we pinched
out the bar Atlantis
into a serious party region
of wicked street buskers
where amused fans first rose
from the barbershop state
dove into cheese regencies
& took a ton of lawn chairs
until our nipple civilization
became a course of ages
overflowing shores
thus at the dart board
a true answer died
leaving in the world
a mess of gardens
now aligning us
my previous cornichons.

I found myself intrigued by the lyric complexities of Iowa poet Katherine Factor’sfull-length poetry debut, a sybil society (Reno/Las Vegas NV: University of Nevada Press, 2022), winner of the 2020 Test Site Poetry Prize. “I ahhhhmaze / you    but if / left pregnant // I create / as all get out,” she writes, as part of “An Ariadne.” There is a swagger to her language, and a gymnastic element. “a language,” as she offers in “The Feisty Disc Discovery,” “open now for hot / deciphers until // ancient puncture [.]” Moving through antiquity, Factor engages with the mystical, writing a range that includes the oracle to the doula. She writes of characters that hold old knowledge, and what may have been long and completely lost. “Bow to appalling instrument,” she writes, as part of “Tripod Lockdown,” “or a plectrum / that makes speech // & applaud earth with gawkers / so I may be upright / on the hyped-up tripod // that emanates herb fumes / the pneuma tithing either / as gas or water.” Through references to Atlantis, Orpheus, the library at Alexandria and Lemuria, Factor writes on myth and ritual, relics and reliquaries, attempting to explore what might otherwise have been completely lost. There is some fascinating movement through her poems, as she writes through a particular texture of dream-time, some of which occasionally falls a bit too deep into the abstract. “I do I do,” she writes, to open “Mistress of Honey,” “live in / dream time // thoughts consumed / by the mystery // wherein the mute / can hear both / a distant noise // & a subsuming / declaration // or any emerging / note [.]”