Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 34

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Alex Cuff

Alex Cuff is learning to metabolize grief into a presence that keeps her in relationship to herself and community. A public school educator, and an editor of the Brooklyn-based poetry magazine No, Dear , she is the author of Family, a Natural Wonder (Reality Beach) and I Try Out A Sentence to See Whether I Believe (Ghost Proposal). Her first full-length collection, Common Amnesias , was published by Ugly Duckling Presse on May Day in 2024. She lives in Flatbush, Lenapehoking, with her partner, and feline extended family: Karl, Kuma and Medb.

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?
When I first encountered this question my instinctual response was, it didn’t change my life. I’m referring to my first book since it’s the most recent first for me. But over the past couple months that the book has been out, and having read from it several times, I’m realizing that I do feel a shift, a subtle change in life, with regard to my relationship to myself as a writer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the publication of Common Amnesias has given me a sense of accomplishment. I received an email from Dan Owens of Ugly Duckling Presse letting me know they wanted to publish the book just after a field trip with high school students to the Whitney to see no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria. It was December 23rd and had just begun to snow, and I was walking the High Line to visit my partner at work. I was used to so much rejection by then and had sort of steeled my heart in a way that I hadn’t expected to have room for the small joy of a YES. Between that moment and the publication in May 2024, the shine of the yes flickered but the shift was that no matter how awful anything writing-related seemed, I knew that an intelligent & generous group of people were taking care of a collection of my poems and preparing them into a beautiful object that I could share with friends. At the moment of answering this question–5 months from publication–I feel a sense of gratitude. I’m a person with many unfinished projects and I’m still amazed that I wrote poems, organized them into a manuscript, shared them with other people and asked for feedback, and sent them out to many presses and contests. The other shift that I didn’t expect is a deepened intimacy with the body of poems. A sense of relief that came with the acceptance of the book for publication was a feeling of getting to cut the umbilical cord from these fucking poems I’ve been looking at for a long time. But now that I’m reading from the book, and having to select which poems to read in a given amount of time in a particular sequence to an audience who has heard or not heard the poems has forced us—me and the poems--to say heyyyy more often than I expected. And reading the same poems again and again with different people receiving them, and different types of responses, has helped me gain some tenderness and perspective toward poems I thought I was tired of. It’s hard to say how my most recent work compares to previous because much writing that made it into Common Amnesias has been written over the past ten years ago. I think I’ll need a lot more distance from my writing to be able to look back and know what has changed.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I think that keeping a journal led me to poetry. I started keeping a journal when I was 8 years old – I only know this because I still have the journal–and journaling has been the most consistent writing I’ve done in the almost forty years since. I think that the type of writing that is journaling for me–jotting down notes and fragments–most lends itself to becoming the form of writing that we call poetry. I don’t remember reading any poetry before college though I’m sure I did in high school. I do recall I appreciating what felt like opacity in poems I first encountered. First perhaps because it matched how I felt moving through the world—a sort of heaviness and confusion—but also because it was a genre where adults seems to say it was okay to not understand, and I encountered not understanding many things I read, but poetry was like something it was okay to say we didn’t get.

I’ve never had any desire to write fiction. I enjoy reading it but would never have the stamina, or the planning capability or interest that goes into what I imagine a fiction writer needs to do, to create fiction. I don’t know if I can hold onto a beginning, middle and end at the same time in my head. I have written non-fiction – a couple of essays about teaching that I worked on with the support of an amazing editor and writer, Matthew Burgess, and both were painful experiences that I could not have done without an editor. I simply would have talked myself out of the necessity of the piece. The stamina I have is to return to what’s been written as opposed to the stamina to write one sentence after another sentence and have them together move towards some meaning.

I relate 100% to how Tonya Lailey answered this same question for you: “And I’ve also always been a day dreamer, space-cadet as we called it when I was a kid. I think poetry is kinder to dreamers than fiction might be.”

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?
Nothing writing wise ever comes quickly for me. There are two poems that I can think of that remain close to their first drafts. One is a poem titled “Noun Noun” which is basically a transcription of a series of text messages between me and my dad. The other is titled “Desire” half of which is a recounting of giving myself an enema, and the other half is a list of catalog items I read about while encountering the aftermath of the enema. I journaled about the experience afterwards and that’s basically the poem.

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?
I dreamt once that a friend, the painter Jamie Chan, told me that if one can create the perfect sculpture then there’s no reason to write poems. I don’t agree with this because I don’t know if I can separate the process of sculpting or writing poems from the more or less finished piece that a reader experiences. But I like thinking of poems as sculptures and in that analogy, my process is less like creating a sculpture from a mass of material, and more like piecing found objects together into some sort of whole that constellates like a group of magnets that snap together once they are placed in each other’s orbit. I’m definitely, in your words, “an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project.” There is a project I’m working on now in which the idea precedes the writing, which is new for me, and I’m understanding that even in that case, the writing is stringy and fragmented and has not yet found its form.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I appreciate this question because I’ve never thought of public readings as either part of or counter to my creative process. While public readings definitely cause a good bit of anxiety for me, which at the time leading up to the reading absolutely feels counter-everything, I have to say that reading end up nurturing my creative process because they help bring to focus which poems feel most necessary to share in a particular time and place. Preparing for any reading ends up inscribing the sounds and articulations of the poems into my body. I get super nervous at readings and rely on muscle memory to deliver the poems – if the poems aren’t embodied, my brain will be elsewhere during the reading and I get lost in the language. Additionally, I inevitably end up continuing to revise the poems that I practice for a reading – even poems from Common Amnesias have changed over the past few months of reading from the book.

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?
This is a difficult question for me because I really do not think of my writing as trying to answer questions. My relationship to writing is so fraught that it’s hard for me to zoom out to that level of thinking! I feel like this is a bad answer though. So hmm what is immediately present for me when I sit down to write a line, or revisit some lines I have written, is the question of whether I can communicate tenderness and thinking at the same time--the poignant feeling I walk through the world with, one that makes it both gorgeous and terrible to be in a body, in a way that others can relate to, and in a way that isn’t unbearably cliché. I am also curious about the question of whether the speaker of any poem I write can be separate me as an author, from my own subjectivity.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think there’s space for all sorts of writers having different roles in the larger culture. I’m grateful for the writers thinkers artists activists journalists who are currently putting energy into bringing attention the genocide in Palestine, and organizing to change systems that normalize genocide and war. I know there are particular people who identify as writers (as they should!) but I also think it is difficult to distinguish the writer from anyone else who is creating and communicating in our world. But yes to people who write and create: wake us up, make us feel, help us think, make us realize that we aren’t alone. I can’t speak for others but in this moment I am believing that my role (as a writer, as a teacher, as a friend, and community member) is to stop dissociating long enough to overcome fear and lethargy in order to act in a way that interrupts the harm caused by systems that only give a shit about wealth + power + land accumulation.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! I think collaboration in general to be essential, and in the few times I’ve worked with an editor, my writing got a push that I don’t think I could have achieved on my own. I’m grateful to Kyra Simone and Lee Norton from UDP for their editorial guidance over the few months of preparing Common Amnesias for publication—from the macro level of structure, to a few lines or words that I can spiral for hours wondering if I should cut. And for the years before that, many friends had read through the manuscript and contributed to its evolution. Nope I couldn’t imagine being a writer without editors!

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I’ll never forget taking a workshop with Isaac Jarnot–we must have been reading excerpts from The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson–and I introduced the poem I had written and was gonna share as having been written “after Charles Olson’s Maximus to Himself”–a poem I fell in love with upon first reading and still am enchanted by–and Isaac said fuck Olson. And I was like yeah!? Yeah! And I guess the advice I turned that experience into is that my poems don’t have to be like the poems I love of other poets. Or, that if I try to make my poems act like other poet’s poems, I could be strangling them to death. Also in a conversation with Jesse Pearson on the Apology podcast, CAConrad says something along the lines of dropping everything when they hear a poem arrive that needs to be written down. That’s advice I want to one day follow. Currently, I’m more like Mitch Hedberg’s joke: “I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that's funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain't funny.”

I also hold near, “trust the people and the people become trustworthy” from adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. There’s so much mistrust and cynicism in our world and I know this has seeped into me, and I know that for me, mistrust means no community and no community is death. So I practice extending it to others, knowing that it is a practice to extend to myself as well—of trusting myself—and this feels very connected to writing and staying with the process.

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?
It’s rare for me to wake up without being totally soaked in dream images. A typical non-work day begins with coffee asap and then I sit at my kitchen window and write my dreams down. The only other writing routine I consistently keep is journaling in the morning. I do this on the bus to work or at one of the windows in my apartment if I’m not rushing off to work. My partner knows to not strike up conversation during these early moments. Really the only other times I tend to writing, to poetry!, is when I’m enrolled in a writing workshop. So I try to do that yearly.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Once I had a dream featuring a scroll unrolling to reveal yards and yards of text. About 95% of the text was in an unremarkable font, but every now and then I’d see a word or phrase glowing yellow as if it was burned into the scroll and glowing like coals. In the dream, I realized that my unconscious was revealing my writing process to me. The scroll represented all of my language – not necessarily everything that I'd written down, but all of the language that lives through me and in me and arrives through dreams. What I learned was that my writing process isn’t linear at all and in some ways, I need to trust that it is accumulative if I keep jotting it down when I can. So when I’m stuck, if I have energy, I search past scrolls aka google docs. Otherwise I move on with my day.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The ocean. A Catholic church. A pizza place.

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?
I don’t think there’s anything that doesn’t influence my work. But I don’t work with a particular form to inspire writing. At this point, I’d say dreams and relationships with other humans have most influenced the poems I’ve written.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
This question is what makes me feel like a fake writer. I started reading contemporary poetry around age thirty so since then I’ve felt like I’m in catch up mode so I there are few books I’ve read more than once. Every writer I read and love, every book or poem, gets filed into my waxy brain as important. I will say though that Dorothy Allison was the first writer I recall reading and thinking about the person behind the book. I thought they were so brave to be writing about shame.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I think it would be cool to write a long poem or a chapbook over the course of a couple weeks. My writing practice is so sporadic and collage-like that I can’t imagine showing up to the same piece of writing daily for several weeks and have it like a dysfunctional family stick together in one poem.

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?
My occupation really is more educator than a writer. I spend way more time in my life as a teacher of reading and writing than as a writer of poems. But my alternative callings are: herbalist, caretaker at an animal sanctuary, farmer, seamstress, arborist, paid non-competitive swimmer, film-maker (once there is technology that allows us to download our dreams into film).

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
LOL I do almost everything else instead of writing on a daily basis.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
This is a hard question but I’ll do it. Not that I believe in a strong line between what we call genres but…for non-fiction, Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger. For poetry, Saretta Morgan’s Alt Nature. For fiction, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I just rewatched all of the Alien films so gotta say Alien .

19 - What are you currently working on?
Answering these questions!

Bigger picture: A few years ago I dreamt that I was in a basement rummaging through stacks and piles looking for anything of value, and I found a desk I knew to be my uncle’s, and I found a stack of poems he’d written and realized, in the dream, that he had been a poet. A few weeks later IRL my partner and I were helping my parents clean out their basement and I found a suitcase full of hundreds of letters that this uncle had written to my grandmother while he was in seminary, studying to become a Catholic priest, in Rome, Italy, during the early 1960s. I’ve been working with those letters on and off for the past couple of years. In fact I’m waiting for emily brandt to host another Docupoetics workshop so that I can get back to that project.

I also have so many dreams written down and have been inspired to shape years of dreams into a book along the lines of Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata and The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void by Jackie Wang. I’d love to collaborate on this with a visual artist!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes, mid-November 2024: Margo LaPierre, Geoffrey Young + Clint Burnham,

Youare coming out to the 30TH ANNIVERSARY of the ottawa small pressbook fair today, yes? And you heard that Christine and I are reading in Kingston tomorrow night, and Calgary next week? Check the link here for various reading details and updates.

Toronto/Ottawa ON: Oh, it is good to see anew chapbook by Ottawa poet Margo LaPierre, In Violet (Toronto ON:Anstruther Press, 2024), following a small handful of publications, includingchapbooks, both solo and collaborative, and a full-length poetry collection (theauthor biography on her website does mention both a collection of short storiesand a novel in-progress). An assemblage of ten poems, In Violet givesthe impression of a catch-all, as the author explores elements of structure andvisual form, attempting to stretch out the possibilities of what poems mightdo, seek or look like. Working through trauma and its aftermath, writingmemory, recollection, placement, rage and symphony, her lyric narratives extendout as a series of points that accumulate, moment to moment, that allow for avisual field of space across the page. “Hysteresis is the name / for a systemof stress,” she writes, to open the poem “Hysteresis,” “in an organism          or an object / when effects of / thestressor / lag [.]”

Surf Lessons

It was a sprouted need,this plant with teeth,
true Venus. Fuck the ragethat eats us.

This is a healing spell:bream green,
and foam dries in lippedpetals

delicate as theconversations
with the ones we’ve hurt.

Great Barrington MA: Another chapbook bylegendary poet, artist, curator and former publisher (The Figures) Geoffrey Young [see my interview with him here] is always a delight, so I’m pleased tosee a copy of his LOOK WHO’S TALKING (Great Barrington MA: ALL SALESFINAL, 2024), a title that features art by Mel Bochner. Young has long favouredvariations on the sonnet as his preferred lyric structure, offering a straightforwardnesscomparable to Canadian poet Ken Norris [see my latest review of his work here],if I may, for that straight line capable of bending or twisting when required. Thestraightforward manner provides, as well, a deceptiveness, almost a sheen,hiding deeper elements underneath in twists and twangs, a New England parlanceof lyric with Berkeley underlay. “Is a pleasure to be indulged in,” he writes,to close the poem “LONG’S DRUGSTORE,” “When the nothingness of normalitygrabs you.” He writes of memory, offering reference layered upon reference,playing expectation against itself and you, the reader. “The pope when he blessesthe poor. / I’d rather be a sea-bird anyway,” he writes, to close “WHAT GOESINTO THE SHREDDER IS YOUR BUSINESS,” “Squawking meaningless gibberish /Because we both know // That everything depends upon landing / On the beach fora nice long walk.”

DO THE THING

These days
the momentous minutiae
of life and events
distract me from all

the stuff I must getdone.
so if I don’t do thething
I think needs doing
at the exact moment

I think of it
or very shortly thereafter,
within ten seconds, say,
I might as well

forget it
because I already have.

Vancouver BC/Cobourg ON: I’m amused and intriguedby this reprint that Stuart Ross produced earlier this year through his ProperTales Press, Vancouver poet Clint Burnham’s TED BERRIGAN AND STUART ROSS(2024), a title originally “printed in a manuscript edition of 10 / August 9,1993.” I would be curious to have seen a new write-up by the author as to whatthe story was surrounding this small manuscript that opens with glowing lettersfrom Ontario Arts Council/Conseil des arts de l’Ontario and Thomas Fisher RareBooks Collection, Robarts Library, University of Toronto, offering glowing critiqueson the project, on the merits of “the works of the eminent Canadian writer StuartRoss.”

Asthe letter purportedly from the Ontario Arts Council writes: “In accordancewith your wishes, we have also evaluated the important role that Mr. Ross hasplayed as a small press publisher and self-publisher. It is now our conclusionthat the major arts funding groups of the world have been wrong to focus almostexclusively on mainstream and for-profit publishers: henceforth, the OntarioArts Council will focus exclusively on small press publishing andself-publishing; the five trillion dollar grant annually allocated to Mc[C]lellandand Stewart will also forthwith be turned over to Mr. Ross.” If only that hadbeen so.

HOW TED BERRIGAN WOULD’VE
WRITTEN THIS POEM

First all, you’d have toinclude whether
he wrote it
in Chicago
or NYC

Maybe he just got somegrand and
went to a cheque-cashingagency
so he’d have the money
to carry around

Sartre liked to do that,too

carry money around, I mean

and then there’d be the
obligatory reference

to a friend
he likes, in the

poem, a writer, perhaps

and, Hey! it’s thatsimple

Thisis a delightfully odd little collection (I say little because the collectionincludes five short poems and these two letters), as the best collections are, Imust say. What was the original prompt for these pieces? Were these pieces inhomage, attempting to echo the work of Ted Berrigan (1934-1983) and Stuart Rossby a then thirty-one year old Toronto-based Burnham? Writing a reference to the“Canadian / Forces / Base / Cold / Lake” in his poem “THE RED WAGGON,” as Burnhamwrites: “and at least / one famous / Canadian writer / used to teach / juniorhigh / there at / Athabasca / j.h., / where I went / and outside it / I heardsome / one / say goldbricking / bake in [.]”

Mercedes Eng, Cop City Swagger

 

I feel like I’m takingcrazy pills but am not surprised when a mayoral
candidate says that 100new police will make The City

            safe

I am taking crazy pillsand I live in a brown body so I know 100 new
cops will not make TheCity

            safe

because people of colourwith mental illnesses are not safe from the
police who hurt and killus, who do not leave us

intact, unharmed, in goodhealth, still alive

Thelatest from Vancouver poet and curator Mercedes Eng is Cop City Swagger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), following my yt mama (Talonbooks,2020) [see my review of such here], Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Mercenary English (VancouverBC: CUE Books, 2013; Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], furthering her ongoing trajectory of poeticinvestigations of racism and colonialism in Canada. Eng spotlights a blend ofarchival and first-person commentaries on police action, police violence, inand across Vancouver, and the foundations of violence that extend out from theoffice of the mayor. Set in nine poem-sections—“Core Values,” “CorporateValues,” “Coporate Values,” “Tent City Citizens’ Safety,” “Public SchoolSafety,” “Public Safety Budget,” “Workplace Safety,” “Indigenous Women, Girls,Nonbinary, and / Two Spirit Peoples’ Safety” and “Chinatown Public Safety”—Eng composesa book-length suite of critiques on perpetual state violence on and across vulnerablecommunities, and the very question of who and what, exactly, is being served. “Itake the alley,” she writes, as part of the second sequence, “which I shouldn’t.It’s one of the last public spaces people who use drugs have left and I amtaking up room. Several people are using, a woman’s hand is swollen from an abscess,and little hunks of meat are littered on the ground. In Chinatown there areseveral butcher shops as well as dumpster foragers so refuse spilled in the alleywaysis common but I see red meat cleaving from bone and cartilage for days. When I getto the church the police tape is gone and I can see blood on the sidewalkcracks.”

Insharp bursts of prose lyric, Eng employs elements of the long poem into preciseaction, perhaps not far from what Dorothy Livesay originally intended for the “documentarylong poem,” a form she employed across her own blend of politics and poetics.Eng writes an extended lyric through the official records and officialresponses of the mayor and the police chief, articulating a lyric from theground level of police violence, not in a way of glorifying, but to documentwhat she sees. Hers is a direct and urgent lyric, composed through archive,gesture and appeal through class and poverty, and the ongoing assaults uponboth. Offering this “Content Note” at the offset, she writes:

This book is about thepolice which means this book is about violence. This book is about theVancouver Police Department’s violence against women. Black and IndigenousPeople and People of Colour, people who are mentally ill, and people who areunhoused and low-income. Readers will encounter evidence of the VPD’sexcessive, sometimes deadly, use of force, racism and racial profiling, sexualassault, extortion, harassment of female civilians and officers, which led anofficer to suicide, and their continuous failure of duty of care in regard toMissing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and Two Spirit People.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Rebecca Hirsch Garcia lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

An O. Henry Award winner, her short stories have been published in The Threepenny Review, PRISM international, The Dark and elsewhere. Her debut collection The Girl Who Cried Diamonds & Other Stories was the runner-up for  the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award.

Other Evolutions, her debut novel, is forthcoming from ECW press.

She can be found on Twitter or Instagram @rhirschgarcia

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 Girl Who Cried Diamonds is my first (and so far only) published book. A lot of people asked me if I was excited when it was published but I wasn't. I just felt this sense of calmness. I always wanted to be a writer and it was like finally, the book is here, it exists.

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

The world makes more sense to me in a fictionalized context and always has. I'm not interested in a world bound by possibility but worlds that are, currently, impossible. I find it so much easier to get to the truth of a matter when inventing the circumstances around it, something only possible through fiction.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I've talked to other writers and they kind of seem appalled by my process because I tend to vomit drafts out really quickly and there is more cleanup than editing involved in my work. But that's really because I spend a lot of time thinking. Years, decades sometimes. I'm sure I lose a lot of good work this way but I don't move until I'm ready. Even then, the writing often surprises me.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

A work of fiction is usually the merger of two ideas I've been puzzling over in my head. There are lots of ideas that I think over but usually when I add some strange second thought that's when I know I have something worth exploring.

I always know the form of things before I start working on them. I come from a theatre background too so I always have a feel for whether something is a play or a script, a short piece of prose or something book length. I think this comes from naturally being someone who writes "short". If I want to write a novella or something longer there has to be intentionality behind it. If left to my own devices a piece will be a short story.

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

Public readings are totally unrelated to my process and I view them as entirely divorced from writing or creating.

I don't mind doing readings. My mother  put me in drama when I was a child and then I went to a performing arts school. Those years of training mean that I am comfortable around large audiences.
 
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 always asking questions in my work and mostly it's about human behaviour which is so varied and strange and mystifying to me.

Reading back The Girl Who Cried Diamonds during editing I think my predominant question was What happens to the people who don't get survive? I think as humans it's so much more comforting to read stories about people who go through bad times and come out stronger but I'm interested in the untold stories of the people who are still trapped in their nightmares.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Quite cynically before my book came out I thought no one really cares about writers. Especially ones from small presses like me.

But then I've found that as I've been introducing myself to people as a writer they get so excited for me, even if they've never heard of my book. So I think there is, still, a huge respect for writers in the culture. I'm almost treated like someone who can perform magic. It's humbling.

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

I've been lucky to always have quite good, very respectful, editors and I think the best ones are the ones who call you on your bullshit. They'll sense the weaknesses in my own writing that I think I'm getting away with and say, No, it's not working. I love that kind of ruthlessness. It's the short story writer in me but I love to cut.

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

Take what you need and leave the rest.

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 tend to write at night because I am a night owl and that's when I'm sharpest but I don't stick to strict word counts or outlines or times. Sometimes my process is just lots and lots of reading and I'm okay with that.

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

I have too many ideas to ever get stalled and I think it's because I'm constantly reading. That's my advice to any writers who are stalled. Read everything! And I do mean everything: outside your genre, outside your medium. I've found inspiration reading fanfic written by preteens who are too afraid of the writing process to even read back what they've written. The tenses skip around and there are spelling mistakes galore and somehow in the midst of this there's still one knock out sentence. They're so raw and pure. It just reminds me that as writers we're all trying and we never really stop.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I'll let you know when I've found it.

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?

I find visual things really stimulating whether that be visual art or movies or even objects. I have this story in my collection, "Mother," that came to me when I was looking at a silver Tiffany baby comb and wondering what kind of person would own a silver Tiffany baby comb. The comb in the story isn't silver and the story has almost nothing to do with that. I think anyone reading it would be puzzled that that's where that thought experiment led me but there you go.

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

I really love André Alexis' work. I've read other Ottawa writers but he's the first one where I thought that we were experiencing the city in the same way. Asylum was such a revelation to me. That was a book where I thought it almost could have exactly been written for me.

For my work I love reading older books and by that I mean ones written in the 1800s or older. I love the Victorians. Their language and thoughts were so different from how we express ourselves today. That difference in language always sets off some spark in my own mind. I'm not sure what it is, but it never fails.

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

I want to learn how to fire a gun.

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 would have loved to be a film director. I always loved movies but as a kid I thought I wanted to be an actress and by the time I realized that what I actually loved was creating stories I felt like it was too late.

I suppose it's not but if people think publishing is hard the barriers to creating a film are incredible.

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

It was never an option not to do this. My family likes to joke I was writing before I was writing: in kindergarten before I could write I would dictate my stories to the teaching assistants.

I was writing before anyone was publishing my work. I'll write after.

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

The last great book I read was Seven Surrenders by Ada Palmer. It's harder scifi than I typically read and I was kind of iffy on the first book but the second book was where all the hard work of the first one paid off. It's brilliant. She's a genius.

I also want to shout out Camilla Grudova's The Doll's Alphabet. It's short stories and very eerie. It reminds me of the thoughts I used to have as a child.

19 - What are you currently working on?

My debut novel, Other Evolutions, which is coming out from ECW press.

But I've also been working on short stories. Everyone tells writers not to write short stories; no one reads them and publishers don't want them, but I can't help it. Every now and then I write one and I think, that's not bad actually. Maybe they'll find their way into the world one day.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #103 : Ellen Chang-Richardson

The one hundred and third in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Ellen Chang-Richardson [photo credit: Jessica Beauplat], an award-winning poet of Taiwanese and Chinese Cambodian descent .

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn and North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson.
 
The whole series can be found online here .

The Anstruther Reader, ed. Jim Johnstone

 

The pragmatism of a girlentering a room, drying her hands
the eroticism of a girldrying her hair, head bent

Contrary to commonbelief, hair cannot get wet.
I wash with my head bentforward beneath the faucet
sweeping forward into thestream, abstracting  the nape to a line.
The lines of my hair allsingular.
Collectively immersed inwater, there is a wetness,
but still each hair,taken separate, is solid.
Solids dissolve, do notlet water pass through them.
It is the divisionbetween strands then, which is wet,
and creates the illusionof drench.
Same with a shirt. It is thespaces between the threads I clean. (Klara du Plessis)

Iam deeply pleased to see the two hundred and seventy-two pages of the anthology The Anstruther Reader (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), edited by Toronto poet and editor Jim Johnstone, who co-founded the chapbook publisher Anstruther Press back in 2014 with his wife, designer Erica Smith. Subtitled “Ten years ofPoems, Broadsides, and Manifestoes,” The Anstruther Reader dips in andthrough a selection of work across the first decade of chapbook-making across apress that has produced work by a wealth of poets across Canada, from Klara duPlessis to Jenna Lyn Albert to Manahil Bandukwala to Shazia Hafiz Ramji to Fawn Parker to Tolu Oloruntoba to Cassidy McFadzean to Shane Neilson to Michael Prior. One could see Johnstone’s thick and thorough introduction to this volumeas an extension of the work he did through his critical volume Write Print Fold and Staple: On Poetry and Micropress in Canada (Kentville NS:Gaspereau Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], as he speaks of working toexpand the boundaries of the press, deliberately attempting to mentor young poetsand produce numerous debuts, and assembling an editorial board of young writersfrom various corners of the country to assist with editorial selection, to allowfor a broader range of writing to appear through the press. As he writes:

When I published TheNext Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry in 2018,I characterized the group of Canadian poets selected to appear in the book asthe selfie generation. This cohort had published three books or less at thetime, and were adept at bridging the digital divide by synthesizing multiplepoetic styles simultaneously. Self-referential and self-assured, their poemsmoved quickly, as if they employed hyperlinks, “harnessing the echo chamber ofthe internet into a malleable, impressionistic music.” These characteristicsstill stand in The Anstruther Reader, though the poets are different. Readon and you’ll find representative samples from sixty Anstruther authors, selectedto present the story of the press through the voices that have come to defineit.

Sixtyauthors representing the press is an enormous heft of activity, and Johnstoneeven includes a complete checklist/bibliography of publications at the back ofthe collection, which is marvellous. Publications are listed by year and, onewould presume, in order of publication, although the checklist leaves out printruns or any more specific dating (I’m aware that certain titles were producedin initial runs of thirty or forty, while other publications went throughmultiple print-runs). In my review of The Next Wave, I wrote of how Icompared Johnstone’s editorial work—from his chapbooks through Anstruther Pressto trade titles through Palimpsest Press—to that of fiction editor JohnMetcalf: you might not be interested in everything they might be offering, andthe work will have a distinct flavour to it, but much of it will be of a highenough quality to impress. As editors, I trust their judgement, even if I mightnot care for the work of every writer or title in their roster. I still hold tothis rather general overview, although I have to acknowledge that the core ofJohnstone’s interest, the highly crafted first-person metaphor-drive narrativelyric poem, does occasionally expand to include more experimental approaches (workby Derek Beaulieu, Dani Spinosa and Gary Barwin appear in this collection, forexample). Either way, the quality of the work in each of the Anstruther titles I’veseen are rigorously high, and publication through Anstruther has providednumerous authors the push into subsequent full-length publication. The work andcareers of numerous of the authors listed here have flourished since the publicationsof their Anstruther titles, in no small part thanks to Johnstone and Smith’songoing work.

Near the Garden (of Eden)

The sky looks mean. I getinside
to perk coffee to drinkon-deck,
waiting for the storm’sadmonishment,
its precaution. The toads
and crickets puncture thegrassy
lot with their calls—I’mnot jaded,
but I think of Him, howHe
could’ve intervened moreby now.
The air seems swollen. Everything
is suspended. Last timethe weather
failed, a gale pushedthrough,
leaning our bracedsaplings over
as the rain curtaincrossed
the intersection. Here,lightning strikes
the sky with a quick,forked tongue. (Shawn Adrian)

There’ssomething wonderfully archival about a collection such as this, assembling aportrait of a range of activity, specifically small press chapbook production,that might otherwise appear quite ephemeral, even geographically localized (as mostchapbook presses usually are, although Anstruther does seem to have a ratherbroad geographic reach). A collection such as this, produced through PalimpsestPress, offers the benefit of bookstore distribution, something nearly andcompletely impossible across chapbook production. One can point to othercollections over the years attempting to assemble a larger, single portrait ofpublishing activity, from bill bissett’s infamous the last blewointmentanthology, vols. 1 and 2 (Toronto ON: Nightwood Editions, 1985/86) to StanDragland’s New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books at 25 (London ON: BrickBooks, 2000) or the two-volumes produced to celebrate the first decade of GaspereauPress: Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of the Blessed Tenth Year, Vol.1: Poetry(Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2007) and Gaspereau Gloriatur: Book of theBlessed Tenth Year, Vol. 2: Prose (Gaspereau Press, 2007), both of whichwere edited Michael deBeyer and Kate Kennedy. None, one might note, wereproduced to collect or document chapbook presses (although one might argueblewointment leaned that way with much of their publishing history, andGaspereau has had a lengthy history of chapbook production alongside tradevolumes), and all I can recall across Canada for such activity, beyond thethree anthologies I edited to celebrate decade-markers through above/groundpress—GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (FrederictonNB: Broken Jaw Press/cauldron books, 2003), Ground Rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Ottawa ON: Chaudiere Books,2013) and groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023)—would be Hammer andTongs: A Smoking Lung Anthology (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999),edited by Brad Cran, acknowledging the chapbook publishing he did in Victoria,and later, Vancouver, across the 1990s with Smoking Lung Press. Why aren’t therefurther collections around chapbook presses? I would love to see something ofthe four-plus decades of Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press, or even had a presssuch as Very Stone House collaborated on a volume of their 1960s and 70s work. Whynot housepress, or pink dog or Rahila’s Ghost Press? Too much of this activitygets lost, overlooked. It happened, is happening; this is important, even ifyou aren’t paying attention. You should be paying attention.

World War II : Philip Service Cassidy (1863-1930)

I’vebeen working for some time [as part of my work-in-progress, the genealogy book: see my piece around his daughter, my great-grandmother, here] to research the details of my second greatgrandfather, Philip Service Cassidy, including why he moved from Grenville,Ontario into the American Dakotas, where he married a local girl, and they hadthe first four of their eventual mound of children. They moved back to CarletonCounty after a while and had at least eight more children. Philip later signedup to fight in the Second World War, a war record I couldn’t quite figure outhow to read.

Thanksto an assist from Marjorie Stintzi, I’m able to discern that the birthdate heoffers when registering to join the 156th Overseas BattalionCanadian Expedition Force, having previously served as part of theKemptville-local 56th Lisgar Rifles, is actually false. Apparentlyhe was beyond the age for enlisting, claiming his birthdate as May 6, 1871 inRichmond, Ontario, which would have put him at forty-five years old instead offifty-three. I knew there would have been an age minimum, but hadn’t realized amaximum, and I hear from multiple people that they knew of relatives pretendingto be younger than they were. He apparently suffered a hernia while movingboxes later that same year, refused surgery, and was found at the medicalexamination to be overage, which even Stintzi suggests might have allowed him away out.

Whatbecomes frustrating: various sources on Ancestry and otherwise replicatePhilip’s deception, instead of what the 1901 census offers as his birthdate: May9, 1863. Ten years earlier, a further census lists his birthday as “about1865,” but the 1881 census returns to the correct year, if nothing else, whichputs him precisely at fifty-three during that 1916 paperwork. Apparently hisreward for fudging his age was a truss, as he sent home to Kemptville. Completelyunable to find a birth record or notice for him, I actually can’t find a deathnotice or obituary for him, either. He died somewhere either in BritishColumbia or Saskatchewan in 1930, having moved out that way, most likely, tolive with one of his grown, married daughters. His story an enigma I’ve yet tofully discern.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allie Rigby

Allie Rigby has roots in the chaparral and deserts of California. She is the authorof Moonscapefor a Child (Bored Wolves, 2024), and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship toRomania where she taught at Ovidius University. Her poetry appears in Livingon Earth Radio, Equatorial Literary Magazine, Parentheses Journal,Manzano Mountain Review, and more.

Additional honors includea William Dickey Fellowship, contribution to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, aPushcart Prize nomination, and a Best of the Net nomination. She has a master’sdegree in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, andhas taught creative writing for Ovidius University, Point Reyes Institute, TheLoft Literary Center, and the US–Romanian Embassy. She’s currently an editorfor The SEEfest Review.

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

Having a book out feelslike I get to connect with people in ways feel special. When someone says, “heyI read that poem about your Dad,” it feels bizarre at first. But it’s alsospecial.

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

Poetry has always been asource of medicine for me. When writing it, I’m drawn by the challenge to tapinto a new thought or idea, or even, a new audio-visual connection that Ihadn’t consciously considered before. Its endlessly inspiring and challenging.

3 - How long does it taketo start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially comequickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to theirfinal shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Startingis the easy part for me­–finishing a project is what is challenging. I try tostay in “listening and experimenting” mode for as long as possible, at first. In2021, while in graduate school, I had over 100 poems, but not all of them werecohesive or strong. By the time I expanded certain ideas and poems, and cutothers, I had a rough, 60-page selection–and that eventually became a chunk of myfirst book, Moonscape for a Child.

Bythen, I had been “at it” for three years, and only then was recognizing the bigquestion in the book: Whatdoes it mean to live with purpose in a world on fire?

4 - Where does a poemusually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combininginto a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the verybeginning?

Until I have at least 20poems, I don’t really know yet what I’m tapping into, thematically, acrosspoems. At that point, I begin to realize the question I’m actually asking,and try to generate poems that do (and don’t) answer these mysteries.

5 - Are public readingspart of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer whoenjoys doing readings?

It depends on the seasonand my mood. Half the time, reading out loud and attending readings helps mycreative process, plus the break in routine can be good. And there’s thecommunity aspect. But sometimes, I just need to withdraw a bit, especially infall and winter.

6 - Do you have anytheoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are youtrying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questionsare?

I like the idea that goodpoems–and poetry collections­–clarify the question, even if they don’t answerthe question. Plus, reading a preachy collection can feel abrasive, for me.It’s a fine balance of wanting poems that provide solace and some answers, butnot too many.

Current questions for meare: How do we slow down and why can’t we? How do we stay as present aspossible? How do we contribute to a less violent world? How do we not sink intodespair?

The questions evolve witheach poem.

7 – What do you see thecurrent role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? Whatdo you think the role of the writer should be?

I think they do have arole, but that doesn’t mean that all writers fulfill that role. It feelshypocritical to me, to do otherwise, as in, to believe in the power of words(to whatever extent) and not speak to larger cultural moments that needattention, advocacy, and change. This doesn’t mean that all writers need towrite about the exact same thing at the exact same time, as much as use theirvoice to advocate for pressing issues that affect everyone.

For example, I’m inspiredby writers like those in the Writers Against the War in Gaza (WAWOG), who have spoken openly and advocated for a return of hostages andan immediate ceasefire in Palestine.

I think writers have aduty to choose what matters to them and express it. We can’t have opinionsabout everything, sure, but we can acknowledge violence where we see it,always.

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

Essential! That saideditors are people with subjective taste, so I think it is important to chooseyour editors carefully, if you can. I was lucky that my editor at BoredWolves was Stefan Lorenzutti,who would let me have the final say if I felt strongly about a particular wordor phrase.

I edit for my “day job”with Sunlight Editing, so I fullybelieve that you need to work with an editor who understands your vision.

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

Be patient with yourself. Nothingblooms all year.

10 - How easy has it beenfor you to move between genres (poetry to reviews)? What do you see as theappeal?

Quite difficult! Reviewsrequire a different part of my brain. I tend to approach them from a highlystructured approach, where I aim to be as coherent as possible. I also feelmore pressure, in some ways, while writing a review, because I want to articulateexactly how the book resonated, why the book matters now, specifically, andwhat distinguishes it from others.

11 - What kind of writingroutine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day(for you) begin?

I don’t pressure myself towrite daily, mainly because I’m too “Type A” as it is, and then I getfrustrated if I don’t meet my “write every day” goals. Now, I’m trying to writeone poem a week, without getting too stuck on if the poem is “any good” or not.J

Each day begins withcoffee with my partner, Petruț. It’s a routine we both really look forward to. Then we usually need towork until 5p.m. or so. Somewhere in that window, when I have a spare 30minutes or hour, I try to sneak in some writing time.

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

I take a break. Go for awalk. Look away from any screens. It’s hard, but I also try to accept blockswhen they happen. I know “writer’s block” is controversial in not everyonebelieves it exists. Paul Hoover, as one of my professors in graduate school, toldme that to help writer’s block, I needed to lower my expectations of mywriting. That helped a lot.

I don’t’ think it’srealistic to write all the time, or to write/work on a project all the time, atleast. Breaks are important, and healthy.

I’m always reading alot, block or no block, and eventually, all that reading needs to beprocessed in some form of writing, for my own sake if anything.

13 - What fragrancereminds you of home?

California sagebrush.Black sage. Persimmon pulp. Lawn. Chlorine. Orange blossoms.

14 - David W. McFaddenonce said that books come from books, but are there any other forms thatinfluence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Absolutely. So much of mypoems come from the landscapes I consciously spend my time in, as well as thedreamscapes and memories I subconsciously explore, or even share with others inthe forms of character archetypes and myths.

I don’t play music duringthe later revisions of a poem, but if I am feeling stuck, I’ll play a lot ofmusic and inevitably, the themes from the lyrics may drip into the poems. Theymight not stay for all iterations of the draft, but they will emerge anddisappear throughout the editing process.

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

I am immensely gratefulfor the On Being podcast with KristaTippett, as well as TheSlowdown with Major Jackson. Asfar as more writers, I have massive respect for the writing and teachings of Brenda Hillman, Gabrielle Bates, Chris La Tray, Katia Aoun Hage, Blas Falconer, andMatthew Zapruder.

Outside of “my work,” I’dbe lost without my extended community and friends. It’s better to be losttogether.

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

I would like to live withmore compassion for myself and other people. To advocate more for climatesolutions. To hike sections of the Appalachian Trail with a few friends. Toignore emails on weekends.

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

I would have loved to be aprofessional dancer. Or a kickass lawyer.

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

Always been drawn to it.Always felt endlessly fascinated by the ways each draft or entry comes close,but never fully hits the nail on the head. I like the idea that every poem isan iteration of every other poem you’ve tried to write–we’re just constantlytrying to re-explain something to ourselves or to our readers, something wecan’t quite figure out.

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

I’m reading Becoming Little Shell right now, a memoir byChris La Tray. It’s incredible. As I said earlier, when poets write nonfiction,it tends to be some of the best writing. I’m not finished yet, but I can say sofar it’s a really emotionally moving story.

On a very different vibe,as far as films, I just saw was Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Theworldbuilding was as nostalgic, weird, and fun as the first.

20 - What are youcurrently working on?

I am trying toexperiment with new poetic forms, even some traditional ones like sonnets.There’s also a memoir starting to nag at me. I’m terrified of writing thememoir though. I can still hide behind a metaphor in a poem, if I want to. Non-fictiondoesn’t let you do that. 

12 or 20 (second series)questions;

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

VERSeFest (mini) festival, Fall Into VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival : Nov 28-30, 2024 : schedule now online!

readings and performances by Manahil Bandukwala, Alice Burdick, Stuart Ross, V é ronique Sylvain, Sergio Guerra aka Cheko7even, Apollo the Child, Playto aka Panos, Stephen Collis, Chuqiao Yang, Faith Paré [pictured], Armand Garnet Ruffo, Erik Lindner and Chimwemwe Undi, and an in-person afternoon workshop with Alice Burdick! Urban Legends! Plan99!

Tickets now available for Thurs via RedBird! https://www.verseottawa.ca/en/versefest

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Vanessa Saunders

Vanessa Saunders is a professor of practice at Loyola University NewOrleans. Her feminist, experimental novel, The Flat Woman, won theRonald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize with Fiction Collective 2 and ispublished by University of Alabama Press. Her hybrid work, fiction, and poetryhas appeared in Seneca Review, Los Angeles Review, SycamoreReview, Passages North, and [PANK] among others. Born andraised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she received her MFA from Louisiana StateUniversity. 

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

When apublisher says yes to your project for the first time, it is an incrediblefeeling. Everything before that feels tentative and uncertain. I knew that Iwas a person who wrote, but I did not really feel like I could publicly callmyself a writer until I had a book on contract. Being an artist during thepandemic was really agonizing and scary, especially since that was the periodwhen I happened to finish my book. So I was getting all these rejections andhonestly, questioning my choices to try to make this academic/ writer lifework. Writers have to be emotionally strong and handle rejection well becauseit’s pretty constant. 

When Igot the email, it was at the end of a very long day. But I can still rememberjumping up and down in my living room and just feeling very happy. My husbandwas in the room with me and he did not understand what was happening atfirst. 

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

So,actually, I would say I came to poetry first. I was originally planning to be afiction writer when I was a young person. But when my first story wasworkshopped in my first creative writing class in San Francisco, it went reallybadly. It was a huge class, so we were split up into groups of five or four,with no professor present. I turned in a bad short story about a tragicromantic relationship I was in at the time. My small group absolutelyobliterated my story. I can still remember a male student, wearing a waist coatand a fedora, telling me my story was “a loaf of bread that needed to become acasserole.” 

Inshort, they tore me apart. The guy in the waist-coat was pretty vicious. I camehome and cried about it. From then on, I had this idea that I was a bad fictionwriter.

But later, in poetry workshops, I got good feedback. People liked my poetry. SoI listened to other people instead of myself, and I wrote poetry for years. Mybook, The Flat Woman, was actually initially conceived as a novel-in-verse andrelied more on poetic conventions. It was only after that the poetry version ofthe project was rejected a number of times that I thought about turning back tofiction. My agent at the time suggested to me that writing my book as a novelwould help it find a home. It ended up being a blend of fiction and poetry,though it has been officially marketed as fiction. 

Sincethen, I have been focused on writing fiction. Studying poetry for as long as Idid has made me a better writer, but I had to go back to my roots and realizethat I wanted to write about people. I like people and I think they areinteresting. I knew what I wanted to write all along, but as a young person,it’s easy to ignore your own intuitions and feel focused on what other people’sopinions of you. Now that I’m older, I can see how important it is to trustyour own judgment. And to realize people’s opinions of you often have nothingto do with you. You don’t need to worry about what everything else thinks.Although I do agree the short story I turned in for workshop back in 2009 wasprobably really, really bad. So the guy in the waistcoat was probablyright. 

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writingproject? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Dofirst drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work comeout of copious notes?

Myprojects take forever. In the case of The Flat Woman, I was trying to writeabout disengagement from the climate crisis. It took me at least two years toget the major bones of the story in place: women are being blamed for climatechange. Our main character starts dating an environmental activist, which makesher question her own inaction.

It tookme another three years to figure out what genre I was writing in (fiction, notpoetry). And then another two years making it a novel instead of a book ofpoetry. This mostly meant developing interiority, narrative tension, and addingin elements of magical realism. 

I amhoping my second novel does not take as long as my first. 

4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Areyou an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, orare you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I am abook-length project person. I usually start with a question or a theme or aline of thought I want to interrogate, and then I spend years trying to makethe characters, the conflict, voice, and the style speak to what I’m trying towrite about. After the project coalesces, I then spend years trying to makesure the writing is nice and that every part of the story has heat. The FlatWoman is a story that relies a lot on strangeness as a narrative engine, andthat took some time to perfect. 

But,usually, I’m thinking through an idea and using the space of the entire book towork it out. There is usually an element of the unexpected in my process, whichis why I hate talking about projects before they’re complete.

For example: The Flat Woman was originally intended as a project aboutwomen’s issues and feminism. It was a total surprise to see all theseenvironmental themes emerge. Of course, now those themes are a huge part of thebook. But they were never part of my original plan. I think one of the thingsthat makes me successful as a writer is allowing things to happen. Going withthe flow. I am good at going with the flow in real life but I had to learn howto let things happen on the page and let the happy accidents materialize. In thepast, I was too focused on narrative control, and that hampered myprocess. 

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

No, Idon’t enjoy doing readings. But I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t hatethem. I don’t enjoy listening to writing read aloud, I am not an audiobookperson, so maybe I just don’t see the point. I think the point is to minglewith your community. But I’ve found personal happiness in separating my jobfrom my personal life, which means maybe I’m not as connected with my writerscommunity as I could be. That is something I’ve tried to work on during thelast year. I will say, the writerly community in New Orleans is amazing andvery welcoming. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind yourwriting? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? Whatdo you even think the current questions are?

I thinkeach project has its own concerns. With The Flat Woman, I was thinking aboutpersonal responsibility in the context of mass disaster. 

As anartist, I like to create thought-driven conflicts that probe areas of moralambiguity. All of my work is driven by my own strong sense of ethics as itcontrasts with a world that puts me at odds with my values. Sometimes, life inAmerica feels really complicated. There’s a lot of toxic harm all around us. Ilike to write about ordinary people who have complex relationships to good andevil.

Lately I’ve wondered if this point of view had anything to do with growing upin the Bay Area. There is a really high homeless population living next tocommunities of extreme wealth and privilege. Living in San Francisco andOakland, I would be confronted with people begging for money all the time. Ithappened multiple times a day. The people who ask you for money are reallystruggling, have visible signs of their struggle in their body and demeanor.So, what do you do? A good person would give up some of their money, but whatif you can’t afford to do this again and again? What if the money you give themis used to feed their addiction and so just makes things worse? The superuncomfortable ethical questions of how to behave in this type of situation isat the center of my work. That kind of confrontation with one’s own privilegeand one’s apathy towards suffering is incredibly uncomfortable.  I think alot of people in the bay just learn to just ignore the people begging and noteven say anything. I do think in America, we’ve become really numb to oneanother. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being inlarger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writershould be?

I don’t believe in art as an object of emotional catharsis. For that reason, Idon’t write about my personal life in my work, and I have not for a long time.I’m unable to write about personal things well because I lack emotionaldistance from the subject, so I don’t do it very well in my opinion. 

I don’tbelieve in one single interpretation to this question of the role of art or thewriter’s role in the world. But I do have an individual philosophy thatdictates how I write. And let me be clear here that I write literary fiction. Ilike to incorporate genre elements into my work, but I write for a literaryaudience.

I believe that art should help the reader view the world differently. I wasvery influenced by an interview with Ben Lerner and the Believer where he said,“The libindal should be harnessed by the political.” Specifically he says, “Ithink that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or thestream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thickenbefore music starts—all these things have to be harnessed by the political.”

That is to say, writing should interrogate the relationship between individualsand the wider systems that affect their experience of the world. These can beliteral systems– such as the health care system– or abstract systems– such asthe wider question of human goodness. 

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

No, Ilove feedback. I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m not super preciousabout my work. Anyone who is investing their time into helping you improveshould be cherished. 

Writingis an interesting balance of ignoring other people’s opinions and usingpeople’s opinions to help you elevate your shit. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (notnecessarily given to you directly)?

Successas a writer is not about talent. It is a question of persistence. 

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

Studyingpoetry made me a better writer of prose. It helped me understand that eachnovel has its own style, and the voice of the piece should be carefully curatedaccording to the theme and topic. Of course, my decisions on this front areoften more intuitive. 

But Ithink the whole point of poetry is to find the perfect form for the topicyou’re writing about. And so I apply that to fiction. This means I don’t haveone static style, but I do have a style for each of my specific projects.People have said that I have a lot of range for that reason. I’ve also read alot, which helps me have a flexible approach to writing. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, ordo you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

Duringthe academic semester, I usually spend about two hours writing every day, andthen an hour reading. Then I spend the rest of the day on my teaching duties,which often involves more reading. 

Thischanges in the summer when I have more time to write. As you can see, I spend alot of time writing. But reading is just as important as writing. It helps mehave more insight into my own form. 
For example, reading Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson inspired me to writeThe Flat Woman.

ReadingGet In Trouble by Kelly Link helped me figure out how to finish it. 

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

I don’tget stalled very often. I’ve had some personal things happen in life thatsometimes impact my relationship to what I’m working on. If something isuncomfortable, I try to write into the space of the discomfort. Or incorporatethat discomfort into the plot. 

If Ihave questions about what I’m working on, I try to read people who I think willhelp me figure it out. My current project is steeped in historical research, sosometimes I’ll have questions about practical historical things that trip meup. Researching helps me answer those questions and allows me to better imaginethe world of my book.

Sometimes, you just need some space away from the project. Distance iseverything. It can be hard to let yourself have a break if you’re focused on adeadline. But what my first book did is teach me how to have patience. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Probablythe smell of dry dirt or the smell of the ocean. I’m from northern Californiaand I grew up about forty-five minutes from the beach. I come from a veryecologically conscious place in the world, and growing up, I spent a lot oftime outdoors in nature. Its not a surprise that the environment is such a hugepresence in The Flat Woman. But The Flat Woman is an expression of my anxietyabout the condition of the planet. In this book, the environment is decaying,rotting, and is quite disgusting. In the second half of the book, The FlatWoman leans into a more ecological horror element, which is a reflection of ownclimate anxiety. 

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come frombooks, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature,music, science or visual art?

Idefinitely am a television and movie person. My work uses a lot of visualinspiration from the stories I watch on the screen. The Flat Woman is a storythat relies on imagery heavily to make meaning. Right now, I am actuallyworking on a television pilot of The Flat Woman, and it’s beeninteresting to me how easily the story can be adapted to a different mode.Maybe that novel was always meant to be written as a television show. But Isuppose speculative fiction relies on memorable visuals to build the world–just like the red cloaks in Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. So maybespeculative stories generally convert well to film. 

Backwhen I was writing more poetry than I am now, I used to find inspiration in alltypes of texts: questionnaires, brochures, diary entries, emails, etc. I usedto be pretty obsessed with form and using friction between different forms asan engine. But now I think more about stories: conflict, scenes, and risingtension. I never thought I would be a person who works on traditional stories.But the novel I’m working on is structurally a pumpkin spice latte, which is tosay it’s pretty basic. The book of poetry I’m working on is very experimental,but that project is hard to talk about.

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

I wouldsay the writers who I think about the most are: Anne Carson, Kelly Link, andToni Morrison. Kelly Link combines genres and tropes from high and low culturein a way that fascinates me. Anne Carson uses hybridity and poetic forms totell stories in a way that fascinates me. And Toni Morrison helped meunderstand that novels can have all the beauty and precision of language aspoetry. She also wrote novels that were incredibly important and filled animportant niche in American literature. 

There isa story about Toni Morrison’s life I often think about. Her landlord set fireto her family home, while her family was at home, because her parents could notafford to pay rent. Instead of becoming angry, they just laughed in his face.For me, she represents elegance and integrity in a world that tries to strip aperson of those virtues. She is a model of feminine strength, wisdom, andholding onto your own self worth. 

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

VisitSouth Africa. Visit Asia. Visit Argentina. 

As awriter, I’m pretty nomadic in the sense that I flit between genres. But I’malso a nomadic person in general. I love to see new places and experiencedifferent parts of the world. In my twenties, I spent a few months living inthe Dominican Republic, and about three years living in the United Kingdom, sofor a while, people would look at my resume and have no idea where I wasactually from. I have been living in south Louisiana for ten years, which isthe longest place I’ve lived anywhere besides California. Anyway, I’ve investeda lot of my time and money into traveling. It’s probably my favorite thing todo besides write and spend time with loved ones. 

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

I amultimately good with language and for that reason, I find language interesting.So I would probably be someone who writes speeches or public policy. At the endof the day, I want my jobs to be meaningful and give me purpose along withmoney. So I suppose I would’ve tried to use my skills to help other people. Ifnot in writing then in some type of humanitarian role. All that being, being awriter and a professor is a perfect job for me. I know these types of positionsare shrinking every year, and I’m very grateful to do the work that I do. I tryto be very intentional with how I use the classroom space, and so I try tomodel ethical behavior and not waste anyone’s time. 

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

I alwayswanted to be a writer. Ever since I was a kid. But I got really serious when Iwas twenty. That was when I started to have a serious writing practice. Thatwas also the time I started studying creative writing at San Francisco StateUniversity. I focus well if it’s a subject I’m interested in, and I think mydiscipline is why I’ve been successful. As James Baldwin said, “Talent isinsignificant.”

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

Irecently read Tar Baby by Toni Morrison. I am convinced she is the best prosewriter of her time. Reading her always makes me want to push myself. 

Not afilm exactly, but I find myself thinking back to Station Eleven a lot.It’s the same writer and showrunner as The Leftovers. I love the way thatwriter uses metaphysical themes in his work. I always think about the scenes inStation Eleven where the characters in the film are performing scenesfrom plays like Shakespeare. But the scenes they are performing have aninteresting overlap to the conflict in real life. I felt that juxtaposition wasreally clever. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a novel ofWeird fiction, a book-length prose poem, and a television adaptation of TheFlat Woman. But, mostly, at the moment, I’m mostly doing interviews andother marketing stuff to prepare for my book launch in two months.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;