Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 363

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Farzana Doctor

Farzana Doctor is a Toronto-based author of three novels: Stealing Nasreen , Six Metres of Pavement (which won a Lambda Literary Award in and was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award) and the recently released All Inclusive . Farzana was named as one of CBC Books’ “Ten Canadian Women Writers You Need to Read Now” and was the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Grant (2011). She curates the Brockton Writers Series. www.farzanadoctor.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, Stealing Nasreen, permitted me to call myself an author. Eight years have passed between it and All Inclusive, my third novel. I now spend much more time on edits, revision and getting feedback. I pay much more attention to craft, whereas with the first novel, the focus was on completion.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
My first love, as a child, was playwriting (I wrote, directed and performed my first play in Grade 7). Soon after, I joined the Whitby Little Theatre and my high school productions, and as an adult, was part of Saheli Theatre Troupe, a South Asian group that wrote and performed our own work in the mid-90’s. During those years (and now too) I wrote poetry, on and off. I came to fiction about fifteen years ago, after taking Ray Robertson’s U of T Cont. Ed course “Writing the Novel”.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
My first two novels “arrived” linearly, with little need for revision, over a couple of years. My third novel came in fits and starts, required major revisions (throwing out characters and plotlines and inserting others). I wrote copious notes and fretted and became increasingly confused. I wondered where my earlier ease with writing had gone. I took a break. And then clarity came one day, and I was able to complete the novel within two months.

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?
When I’m writing a novel, the work always begins with a notion that feels obsessive. When I write poetry, the kernel idea or thought usually feels like a fragment that I want to explore and express.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy readings and meeting readers. However, I do find this performative work draining, and that makes it hard for me to write while I’m in promotion mode. I’ve learned to takes some time off after a new book’s release to focus on readings, rather than on new writing.

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’d say that the questions are more emotional. For example, in Stealing Nasreen, I was asking questions about home, identity and community. In Six Metres of Pavement, my central question was “how do you get over the worst mistake of your life?”. All Inclusive queries the impact of inherited tragedy.

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?
Our job is to help readers learn what it is to be human, and to build empathy and compassion for other humans. That’s why I read and write.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love and require feedback. It’s really easy to get lost within one’s own work. I ask friends and writer colleagues to read early drafts and to offer editorial support. I’ve worked with Shannon Whibbs at Dundurn for the last two books and very much appreciate her substantive/structural edits.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Ray Robertson told a story in class about a writer who worked full-time and was a new parent (in other words, very busy) who wrote his novel in three forty-five minute spurts each week. I followed this example to write my first novel. For those of us with other paid work, writing is about creative time management.

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?
My favourite routine is to write in the morning, then walk the dog, then write a little more. I try to do this most of the time, but I have a private psychotherapy practice, so sometimes that schedule gets interrupted. I try to go with the flow.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I believe that most of my best ideas come from some sort of spiritual source (the ether? Spirit guides? Ghosts?), so when I’m stalled, I need to get quiet and calm and listen. When that doesn’t work, I read fiction and poetry for courage (if they could do it, I can too!). Sometimes I’ll edit if I don’t feel like new words are coming.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Oil of Olay face cream. My mom used to wear it. Now I do too.

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’ll often find teeny kernels of inspiration in plays, paintings, films and songs. The Fugitives’ song, “Snail Shell” made me imagine the shared-wall experience of two characters in All Inclusive who live next to one another. http://music.cbc.ca/#!/artists/Fugitives

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read as much as a can, and learn from them all (even books I didn’t like much).  I also am part of a large writers’ community, including folks who come through the Brockton Writers Series (a series a curate), The Writers Union of Canada, and the Toronto-based Salonistas. We all feed, promote and help one another.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to present at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

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 done what I’m doing now—psychotherapy—but full-time. I might have burnt out by now, if I hadn’t had the creative expression to complement it. But who knows? I can’t imagine life without some form of art, so perhaps I might have returned to the French horn, which I gave up in high school!

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Before I took the Cont. Ed course with Ray Robertson, I enrolled a hip-hop dance class. I realized that I am very uncoordinated.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved The Moor’s Account, by Laila Lalami. It’s about a Moroccan slave who survives a Spanish conquistador expedition through North America.  I recently saw Wajda , a film about a Saudi girl who finds a way to get herself a bike, despite restrictive and sexist norms that forbid it.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m in promotion mode right now, so  I’m dreaming about (rather than writing--see question #5) Novel #4, which I think will be about the Dawoodi Bohras (a subsect of Shia Islam) the community to which I belong.      
      
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Fence magazine #30 (Winter/Spring 2015)

Vienna
You keep your citiesin the water. In the wood
stand islands and clearings.You are running
with the jewel box by water.Your dreams
provide the key. Your oceanawaits. It waters your dreams.
Enter the thatch you oldsuck-a-thumbs. Enter
the boat. Wake up. Eatthis shattering pastry,
exotic unreachablehysterical girl.
A girl, a plan, a canal:Vienna (Melissa Ginsburg)
I’m always gratified to see the new issue of Fence magazine . The latest issue of the semi-annual poetry and fiction journal Fence is issue #30 (Winter/Spring 2015), and has so much writing in it that poems are included on the front and back cover, and the author biographies are only available through either scanning the code through your phone or writing the journal directly (which I understand, logically, but simply find annoying as a reader). Either way, it is remarkable to see a journal inventive enough to include the two poems by John Ashbery on their front and back cover instead of inside the issue, thus solving the frustration of lack of space. I really can’t think of another journal that has done such, although I know that the text of the late Vancouver poet Gerry Gilbert’s Moby Jane (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987; Coach House Books, 2004) [see my review of such here] was constructed (and produced) to begin on the front cover, and end on the back cover.
One thing I’ve always appreciated about Fenceis their adherence to publishing the work of any writer only once over a two year period; coupled with their strong editorial mandate, this has meant that one of Fence’s ongoing strengths is the ability to introduce even their long-standing readers to a wide variety of new writers. Some of what leapt out at me included the unapologetically open-heart cadences of Tina Brown Celona’s three poems (“now to sing / so that even you // will stop to listen / in the moonlight // we walk in / I’ve never seen such whiteness // where poetry is the only language / and the only speech we hear”), or the striking staccato of Wong May’s three poems, that include:
How could I cross you      The only way you would go?
      You shall take my hand& I will close my eyes,   assisted      Or assistingWe shall step   —   like so,Into the traffic.            Thank Heaven,You are not blind. (“Cold Heaven”)
And have you read Mary Flanagan? Oh my:
Desire is Rarely Fulfilled
The fur of gorilla is as misunderstoodAs a mistaken desire
The palms that are gorilla palmsAre not of fire
The woman standing near the gorillaIs there by accident
The stairs behind and above do notEnable gorilla transcendence
Scratches made by the nailsMark the rolling wine barrel
Blah blahBlah       peril
As usual, there is far too much to discuss in detail, but the new issue includes some familiar names included as well, including Chris Martin, Carla Harryman, Bin Ramke, Joshua Ware, Seth Abramson, Andrea Actis, Ben Doller, Maureen Seaton, Jeff Hilson (I haven’t seen work from Hilson in quite a long time) and Rick Moody, as well as an extended section of Julie Carr’s remarkable “REAL LIFE: AN INSTALLATION” (a work-in-progress she discussed last year at Touch the Donkey), that includes:
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Consider for a moment images of the divine, and the ban placed upon them. Since in what I’ll call my tradition there are no such images we depend entirely on language and the body. This means there are many songs, many prayers, some rocking, and much ritual. Children are at once glad and annoyed by this. If we were to construct an image, what would it be? A mother? A goat? A tree? Impossibly, we’d have to have all three, which would return us to something that precedes us, throw us back to fathers who never once knew we were truly theirs and so fed us reluctantly, counting our morsels. Everything we’ve forgotten how to do, any ritual unpracticed or unknown, remains like a residue on the table. Stroking the wood, we retrieve these forgotten things.

rob mclennan's poetry workshops: January-March, in our wee house,

After a successful fall session, I return once again to offering poetry workshops. Originally held at Collected Works Bookstore and Coffeebar, this session will be held at our wee house on Alta Vista Drive (just south of Randall Avenue). Address and directions to be provided.

The workshops are scheduled for Wednesday nights: January 13, 20, 27; February 3, 10, 17, 24 and March 9.

$200 for 8 sessions.

for information, contact rob mclennan at rob_mclennan@hotmail.com or 613 239 0337;

An eight week poetry workshop, the course will focus on workshopping writing of the participants, as well as reading various works by contemporary writers, both Canadian and American. Participants should be prepared to have a handful of work completed before the beginning of the first class, to be workshopped (roughly ten pages).

Participants over the past few years have included: Amanda Earl, Frances Boyle, Chris Johnson, Roland Prevost, Christine McNair, Pearl Pirie, Sandra Ridley, Marilyn Irwin, Rachel Zavitz, Janice Tokar, Dean Steadman, N.W. Lea, David Blaikie, James Irwin, Claire Farley, Barbara Myers and Marcus McCann.

For those unable to participate, I still offer my ongoing editorial service of poetry manuscript reading, editing and evaluation.
http://www.robmclennan.blogspot.ca/2014/07/robs-ongoing-editing-service-poetry.html

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa with his brilliantly talented wife, the poet, editor and bookbinder Christine McNair, and their daughter, Rose. The author of nearly thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles include notes and dispatches: essays (Insomniac press, 2014), The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014) and the poetry collection If suppose we are a fragment (BuschekBooks, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Christine McNair), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He also curates the weekly “Tuesday poem” series at the dusie blog, and the “On Writing” series at the ottawa poetry newsletter. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He currently spends his days full-time with toddler Rose (with a new one come April), writing entirely at the whims of her nap-schedule.

Anne Cecelia Holmes, The Jitters

ODE
None of this concerns you butsometimes it’s better to pretend closeness
than live in fear of rejection. Things I know:car sickness, the Mall of America, all-night
murder dreams. Childhood was a joke.Slinging imaginary rifles over my shoulder,
falling out of trees for negative attention.Now I talk to you like I have nothing
to lose, no grip whatsoever. I sneak intothe neighbor’s basement just to be the criminal.
I call you in the middle of the night to sayI’m not a ghost yet. It’s funny because
in Chicago I have a real brother but whata boring story. Things I don’t know:
portion control, easing depression,the optimal gesture.
Nothing I say will make you love meand there’s real honor in that.
The author of two poetry chapbooks, Massachusetts poet Anne Cecelia Holmes’ first trade collection is The Jitters (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). Built as a collection of compact lyrics, the poems in The Jitters are fearless, vulnerable and razor-sharp. These poems revel in even the smallest miracles, attempt to comprehend the darkness, and take no shit from anyone. As she writes to open the poem “WORLD’S TINEST EARTHQUAKE,” “I’d like to say what’s been said / and say it better. Break // accountability exactly open. / When faced with an ultimatum // I choose the most destructive force, / haul everyone onto the lawn just // to get tough. Please trust me.” These are poems born of a quick, dry wit, composed as a series of observations, critiques and direct statements that take no prisoners. “When nothing changes I finally love myself,” she writes, in the poem “MEMORY BRICKS.”
SOME RELICS
All of this hurts the facial expression.I’m sick of watching you fall overthe television like you’re the oneinside it, and more than everI feel like a tugboat in that scene.Don’t blame me for yourbad cartography. I can’t bean acrobat becausemy heart isn’t ripe.You said this trampolinemakes you dream of chairsbut to me the backyardis a butcher shop.Bring me a bag of rocksand I’ll carpet you in them.I’m going to bean admiral in all this.
I’ve been increasingly aware over the past few years of a particular strain of American poetry: poets, predominantly female poets, composing very striking lyric poems that combine savage wit, subversion, distraction and use of the straight phrase, blending lightness against dark subject matter. If I were to attempt any kind of list of examples, it would include Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Anne Boyer and the late Hillary Gravendyk, and now, Anne Cecilia Holmes. What connects the writers on this list is the way they each compose tight lyric bursts that slightly unsettle, managing to utilize both light and dark humour, and push to shake at the core of expectation, discomfort and the otherwise-unspoken. There is something about how each of these authors, including Holmes, have embraced elements of the confessional mode through a compact lyric that can be used to voice flashes of anger, annoyance, frustrations, loneliness and violence, and even conversations on evil, as Holmes writes in the final poem in the collection:
POEM FOR WHAT I’M NOT ALLOWED
Ode to the murderer I imaginein every band of trees. Tomy blood cells, to well-ordered systems,to my head absolutely thickwith disease. Ode to the dress I slept inand wore the next day, to the cilantroI planted in all the wrong weather.Ode to the fucking cosmos. Ode to my faceagainst your face, to poems that want tolike us but don’t. Ode to beingthe bloodless one, the neurotic one,the one ignoring your spiritual journey.To your clothes in my basementcovered in ink. To I wore this whenwe first met, to I want to hurt you like thisand then like this. Ode to quitting my jobto stay excited, to exposing myselfto my neighbors, to embedding so manyrocks in my chest. Ode to Tulsa.Ode to the 900-foot Jesus, to keepingmy hands in my pockets most of the time.To my brothers and sisters, to all myenemies, to imagining every wayto die in every possible scenario.Ode to crying when I can’t find my shoes,to feeling like god will punish me forsins I don’t believe in. Ode to takingpictures in front of strangers’ houses.Ode to my jacket covered in yellow.Ode to how I wish you were builtout of wood panels. Ode to staringout the window in the worstof the house. Ode to your age,to my age, to how I react improperlywhen reenacting your fate. Ode toso few phenomenons. Ode toabsolving myself of everything.To singing what I’m doing, to arguingwhat counts as “artifact” and “alive.”Ode to my wandering pacemaker.Ode to my big fat heart. Ode topretending I’ve never been whereI used to live. Ode to hoping you’rea goner. Ode to grieving nothingeach time a villain is born.

Army photos from the Swain/Page archive

I've been curious about these photos I discovered in my great-grandfather's archive a few years back. Set in a loose sequence, they remain unmarked and unremarked.

Archive, of course, is a very loose term for two ancient tins buried in my maternal grandmother's belongings: tins that included her father's war medals in an envelope, a variety of correspondences from my great-grandfather to his wife during the First World War and other artifacts.

I know my great-grandfather fought in the war, as did at least one, if not two or three, of his wife's brothers (see a similar post from last year, with links to the two years' prior), as well as her father. Are these photos relating to the First World War? Something earlier, perhaps? (The pith helmets make for curious speculations.) No one knows. And anyone who could have already known has long died.

The frustration of family photos on my mother's side: being unable to poke through any until my mother had died, and that, a decade after her own mother had passed. Who might be left to even ask?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lucas Crawford

Lucas Crawford is from rural Nova Scotia and is based in Vancouver. Crawford's poetry has been published widely, including in The Literary Review of Canada, The Antigonish Review, Room, PRISM International, and Best Canadian Poetry (2015). Crawford is the R.W.W. Junior Chair of Gender,Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. Sideshow Concessions is Crawford's first poetry book, and it won the 2015 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Transgender Architectonics (2015) is Crawford's book of scholarly essays.
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, Sideshow Concessions , has just been out for a week, so I’ll have a better answer for this next year perhaps. At this point, I can say that the process has helped me reconnect with people and places from my past. It has also brought me a measure of calm, the kind you feel when you have been trying to say something for awhile and finally say it. Even though I’ll be reading these poems publically for awhile yet, I think publishing the book is giving me some release from them. The stuff in the book isn’t just mine anymore. Feels nice (and weird).
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?I don’t have an answer, although I’d say that I have remained with poetry (for the most part) because of its ambiguous relationship to story and character. I think I find continuity and progression – as we normally conceive of them – to be constraints.
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’m not necessarily recommending it, but I write intermittently and rapidly, and the first drafts are usually very close to the final shape. I like to put an idea on the backburner of my mind and let it simmer away for ages. Sometimes an idea needs to find its life in poetry, but just as it often it enters the classroom, or a friendly conversation, or just falls away. Writing is simply a part of my process of thinking and living, not its own “end.”
That said, I am experimenting with a more regular writing habit right now, with prose. I am learning about the different kind of energy and regular practice required to write prose with continuity of plot and character. It’s been fascinating and fun, though I think my mind is more satisfied by the freedom of shorter texts that build a discontinuous narrative through accumulation. I think this is because I wish we were more able to see and enjoy our discontinuities. Poetry can be fleeting relief to the pull of all of those long-term narratives of self that get attached to us, perhaps.
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?Sideshow Concessions was not originally conceived of as a book. I took my whole youthful portfolio and put it in a single document. Then I started writing things that I felt could complement or replace existing pieces. Almost all of the original poems were eventually cut, one by one. Since then, I have been conceiving of things as books, yes. (A poetry book about New York’s High Line Park is forthcoming.) That said, I want pieces to stand on their own, and in the moment of writing, I’m just thinking of that one piece. As for where poems begin, I could never nail it down.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?For many years, I considered readings and performances my main practice and only very rarely did I send anything out. I wrote for readings with particular audiences in mind. These days, readings are a fun part of the process that lets me reflect on what I’d like to share, where, and why. They are important to me because I appreciate the extra chance to connect with an audience and to animate the work in ways that make it “new” to me again.
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?My overarching questions are: what is a body? How do bodies exceed the form of the human self? How can visceral patterns or habits be broken? How does pain leave the body? How is memory material? How do we situate our bodies in spaces – architecturally, domestically, geographically – and to what effect?
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 struggle with this, because it’s great to see writers fulsomely engaged in public discourse, but I also want writers to be able to do so without the pressure to be ultra-utilitarian and realistic at all times. Taking the long view, I think of literature as being the cutting-edge think-tank of culture. To me, it’s where novelty often occurs. (Then, a hundred years later, a highly simplistic and neutralized version of the novel idea seems to be ‘discovered’ by someone in a culturally-valued profession. I suppose I hope for writers who can help us all see that this is often the case – and that reading is therefore very worthwhile!) Another reason I struggle with this question is that while I am excited to help create “visibility” for trans lit, I also wish allies could transfer some of the emphasis on trans author-selves or celebrities into reading trans lit (not to mention rethinking gender in one’s own work and life). What matters most to me is what an author writes. It is already a form of public speech. And the pressure we put on trans authors to be hyper-public and verbose – to be heroic, even – just might not suit all trans authors’ needs.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?I find it easy with the right editor, and I’ve been very lucky in that department. Leigh Nash at Invisible Publishing had great ideas and keen insight into the book as a whole. That said, I once had an editor change every mention of “working class” to “working man.” That one hurt when I saw it in print, as did another editor’s inscrutable interpretation of FTM (Female to Male) as “Female Transgendered Man.” Basically, if an editor knows how to use Google and be a person, I will get along with them famously and thank them forever. Thanks Leigh Nash!
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?These are paraphrases.
Don’t even try to get published; just focus on filling up your rejections folder. (Marco Katz Montiel)
Read your draft, take the best line, and make it the first line in your second draft. (Jeanette Lynes)
WOOF!!! (What my best friend says to motivate me when I’m being pessimistic about life – the meaning is something like, “c’mon, ya big beast!”)
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?Writing scholarly texts is a different animal. Part of the appeal of that genre is reaching a different audience; knowing that students are reading your ideas is rewarding. I also think it is very important to have places where highly complex and non-practical ideas are encouraged, which often requires complex conversations. Don’t get me wrong – there are many drawbacks to academic publishing because the peer review system is inherently conservative, or perhaps preservative. For my forthcoming academic book, I have been lucky to work with the great Meredith Jones and Neil Jordan at Ashgate. (It is called Transgender Architectonics , due out late 2015.) I have written my second poetry book as a public / differently accessible version of the ideas found therein.
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?N/A, but I’m working on it. My day always begin with breakfast, including a truly colossal smoothie.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?I’m with Junot Diaz on this one: the best way for me to be a writer is to try to live a big and thoughtful life, exposed to tons of ideas and people – not to scramble around looking for a muse and treating writing as an ultimate and forced goal. I imagine writers as people who have lived in such a way as to have things that they absolutely must communicate. If and when that urgency isn’t there, I’d rather do something else! Like watch food television, walk around Vancouver, make ugly crafts, or do some work.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?There is a scent at CB: I Hate Perfume (a small amazingly gay Brooklyn perfumery) called Gathering Apples. It has the mackintosh apples, splinter-thin wooden fruit baskets, and (somehow) the crisp air of my home village of Kingston in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia. But I would also name the smells of white pudding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_pudding) and the sea as home-smells. As for my current home in Vancouver, I’m not sure – although when I recently arrived home from a trip, the cloud of pot smoke that marked my entrance into the west end was sort of undeniable, haha!
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?Popular culture, food, and architecture.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?Queer and transgender literature broadly defined; modernist novels; contemporary novelists like Junot Diaz, Paul Auster, Zadie Smith, and Jeanette Winterson (rolling eyes for the fat-phobic parts); food-writing; etc.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Work as a researcher and writer for the El Bulli Foundation in Spain.
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?Food-writer. Still a writer, I guess? Musician or chef then.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?Personal desire.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?I just read a book called 97 Orchard , an impeccable public history of five immigrant families who each lived in a tenement at 97 Orchard Street in Manhattan. It’s the story of the five families as told through their foodways. My tastes in films are lowbrow. Spy is a recent comedy that was very well done, I thought. Long live Melissa McCarthy. Relatedly, I thoroughly enjoyed Dina del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli’s new book Rom Com last week.
20 - What are you currently working on?I am working on some prose about food and Nova Scotia but it’s too early to say much. I’m editing my second poetry book, the one about the High Line Park. I am working on other poems now and then, and on an academic book about the emotional habits of slenderness.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Judith Fitzgerald, Impeccable Regrets

IMPECCABLE REGRET
O, give us this day our daily dearth:My Friend, My Darling of CatastropheEnticing the moon, efficiently learning,Slowly turning away from the gruesomeSpectacle, slyly fading, failing sightline,Exiting through common-ground down;But, should you reconsider, unsunderEvery lie-for-lie truth sadly laid bareOn those ivory keys: Play “Goodbye”;Discover how long you long for the past.
Canadian poet and critic Judith Fitzgerald’s latest poetry title is Impeccable Regret (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2015). The author of some two dozen poetry titles going back more than forty years, from Octave (1970) to the most recent “Adagios Quartet” – published through Oberon Press as Iphigenia’s Song, vol. 1 (2003), Orestes’ Lament, vol. 2 (2004), Electra’s Benison, vol. 3 (2006) and O, Clytaemnestra!, vol. 4 (2007) – Fitzgerald, through multiple award nominations and her ongoing critical work, has been a consistent force in Canadian writing for decades. She has also produced some of my favourite poetry overall; her Lacerating Heartwood (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 1977) remains one of my most reread poetry collections. Her newest collection, Impeccable Regret, is a book of passionate grief, exploring loss at its most heartfelt through a series of short lyric riffs, many of which are composed for friends and loved ones, too many of whom have passed. Her poems move from incantation to sing-song rhyme and chant to ode, as she writes in the opening poem, “Dear Reader”:
O, lavish parade of fresly skin-skimmed foreign aidMilked to the max: Sea roiling, his constangular boilingPoint … And all that which implies, impugns, repo ultra-Glides comblastious. Ascension in bled-red lather. Pax.
As the back cover tells us: “In the words of Arthur Miller, ‘All one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.’” The book opens with an introduction by Thomas Dilworth, “a University of Windsor Killam Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada who specializes in Modernist Literature and Romantic Poetry.” While elements of the introduction are interesting, I feel it might have been more appropriate to end, and not open, the collection, and allow the work to first speak for itself. As Dilworth writes:
            The beauty of this poetry is, in turns and in combinations, delicately exquisite, clunky, multivalent, polyphonic, portmanteau, kenning, punning, colloquial, arcane, gently lyrical, neologistic, allusive, and (pervasively) playful. Her puns and neologisms are themselves mini poems: from one poem, “caligulations,” “regretitude,” “neocoinjoinings” (the latter, alliances of neocons devoted to money). This poetry extends the tradition of rich poetic language flowering in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Joyce in Finnegans Wake, rooted in Keats and Shakespeare. Like Joyce, Fitzgerald sometimes sounds like Hopkins. “Whatsun, donesun … Smokebrick, … scumblight, / Stunsunk, stardark” – words from “Céilidh,” a treasure of lovely, enlivening sound and varying-lovely rhythms, which evokes Hopkins because he was the first ecological poet and this poem concerns the eclipse of nature as “Forest fires smoke city air” in a “human blaze” that is global warming and more.            So these poems are modernist in immediate intrinsic form as well as message (cultural loss), through their intrinsic forms (lyric length, verse-lines, stanzas) are largely conventionally pre-modernist. Many of these poems retain for me unsolved mysteries, an aspect of their vitality, but rereading expands and deepens understanding. To comprehend most of them (you will, if you like me, need to) read each one three times before moving on to the next – so that you can say with her, “we/did time/between/the lines.” Why bother? Because so many of these poems are major.
Perhaps one of the only poetry collections to exist that includes a poem collaboration with Leonard Cohen (the poem “Blood Culture,” composed for the late Robert Kroetsch), as well as another with Ottawa poet Susan McMaster, Fitzgerald’s poetry has long dealth with grief, longing, loss and affairs of the heart, wrapped up in a language and sound gymnastics reminiscent of younger writers such as New York poet (and Canadian expat) Adeena Karasick. Simply to go through the titles of her two dozen poetry collections is to be aware of the binary of her work: “desire,” “rapturous,” “heart,” “wounded” and “paradise.” Fitzgerald’s poems in this new collection are composed as exclamations, proclaiming and exploring grief and love, loss and regret, the most lively of which exist in that space where her language refuses the straight and simple line. Her strength comes from the gymnastic twist, and anything less doesn’t retain the same kind of passion or sharpness. Listen as she opens the poem “REVELATORY IRRUPTIONS / DANS L’ESPIRIT DU TERRORISME”: “Peeling veil, mask, persona, personalization, personification, / dazzling brightness, and necrotic abyss; sky rolled up, a scroll / drawn back, a curtain; there’s a joke, clown, whited polyandrium, / dollop of quicksilver, scudded rubescent and violet clouds falling / from hysterical sky [.]”

Sara Nicholson, The Living Method

THE END OF TELEVISION
Covet not the sun its honorariumnor authorize the stars their grants to write.
The sojourners spotted a forestadrift with language, but couldn’t make sense of it.
The woods at odds with the usual channelsand those neighboring mountains
didn’t look like pyramids, no matter the scale.Read this part as if the sum of lilac
mattered to you. For love of someone*else’s vortex, toss the luminaries aside.
In lieu of flowers, please donateand in exchange for your sympathy I’ll give you
edits on the level of the line. Poems are to waras are ghosts to the proverbial orchard.
Headstones offer us nothingbut an end to syntax. Microsoft
Word inverts the sea. I readyour manuscript. Reader, I married it.
I fear for the estuaries.They are so small this time of year.
I’m admittedly a bit late to the game on Arkansas poet Sara Nicholson’s first poetry book, The Living Method (New York NY: The Song Cave, 2014). A collection of sharp, stunning lyrics, Nicholson’s poems shift and shimmy through what is known and not known, seen and not seen, shifting perspectives from line to line, writing a meditative abstract through a sequence of direct phrases. Her poems somehow contain multitudes in a unique precision of condensed space and revel in a quick movement between ideas, images and facts. There is such a powerful certainty that comes through such shifts, rolling across the page like a thunderstorm. There is a ferocity that comes through here, as well as a fierce intelligence as she articulates a sequence of moments that describe a state of being. As she writes in the poem “O.E.D.”: “I hate you and I hate / the art of these letters, this language.”
WEEKEND IN ARCADIA EGO
Our skin, beyond recognitionmakes music in the blood.
Yet the thought of thisis enough to me make me count
the numbers that have become uglythis semester. I might get lost
though my blood won’t. My eyes’lldrop their verdict in the leaves.
Methodologies and flowers, little documentswith wings, leave their lesions in the dust.
The lyric is something greater than forestand less than skin. Those that I have loved now sleep
within the quotient of our breathing.Nothing will have the wherewithal
to sound me out. Not the wind,complex among the poplars this season.
Not the occasional email,reminding us of what’s missing:
a field of poppies and a book review,a really good one. Not the wolves.

queen mob's teahouse : seeking interview pitches,

I recently accepted the position of 'interviews editor' for Queen Mob's Teahouse , a literary site located in England, and am currently seeking pitches for interviews with writers, whether of poetry, short fiction or novels (while being open to writers in other genres as well).

Even my own position is unpaid, so, unfortunately, so are the interviews.

I've done a couple of interviews for the journal recently (and will be continuing), including Rachel Loden , Andy Weaver and N.W. Lea .

I'm curious in interviews with writers who haven't properly been dealt with. Who hasn't yet been interviewed?

Query me at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matt Cahill

Matt Cahill is a Toronto writer and psychotherapist. His debut novel, The Society of Experience , was released in October 2015 with Buckrider Books, an imprint of Wolsak & Wynn, and was listed on the Harper’s Bazaar Top 15 Must-Read Books fall list. His short story, Snowshoe, was published in 2014 with Found Press. He previously worked for 20 years behind the scenes of the Canadian film/TV industry.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Well, technically this is my first published novel, but my second book; my previous book was thrown into a virtual fireplace otherwise it would have taken up too many fruitless years. That said, writing the first book was proof that I could write a book, and thus dispense with the annoying adage “anyone has one book in them.” I have two! The book that’s out now (Oct 1) is more mature, but also more complex. Your first book tends to have A LOT OF EMOTION IN IT, DAMMIT. In this book I learned how you can convey the same thing but without excessive sturm und drang.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
By imitation. My brother wrote a double-sided one page short story when I was around 11. I couldn’t believe someone could just create a whole universe like that. I was hooked. That said, I occasionally write poetry.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
There’s usually a main path that comes out without too much difficulty, however the story which ultimately supports that path tends to come with patience and development, and sometimes accident. Sometimes a piece of narrative rebar from an abandoned short story becomes a central turning point for a novel. I don’t like to leave good ideas laying around unused.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I usually know early on if what I’m doing is novel-worthy. You don’t want to stare down five years with something that doesn’t have the sea legs for that kind of adventure.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I kind of like doing readings, and I’m pretty good at bringing life to the words in front of a microphone. That said, public readings take me away from writing more than anything else. They are necessary for promotion - particularly allowing people ready access to the work without them first purchasing it - but readings have nothing to do with writing.

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?
Nope. I mean, I probably do on a less-than-conscious level, but I don’t think I would want to write from a self-directed agenda. In general, I like to poke at the complexity of life and the ways that we end up becoming more accurate reflections of ourselves - for better or worse.

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 one important part we play is to allow anyone in the world to know that they are not alone. We write to share. There are many roles that writers can play. I’m equally happy to entertain, or inform, or challenge.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
In general, an editor is essential because you’re not going to catch everything, especially in a novel where there is more continuity to oversee. A good editor wants what you’ve written to be the best that it can be, knowing that it needs to reflect the strengths and promise of your intent. A bad editor is going to take your pen and go “You should do this [insert something writer wouldn’t write] because I think it works better,” without the opportunity for dialogue.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Paul Vermeersch said to me "Something has to happen in a scene,” which he heard earlier from someone else. It’s easy to write scenes where two people are earnestly talking, but if it’s just dialogue then it just doesn’t read off the page very well - it seems incomplete. It’s easy to forget setting, mood, and story when you’re hyper focused on a shiny bit of character-revealing dialogue. Have someone fixing a clock, or brushing something out of their hair, or thinking about picking up groceries. Something has to happen in a scene.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?
Each serve their purpose. Short stories are a stomping ground of experimentation - I get to play with voice and perspective, sometimes subject matter. Essays allow me to speak personally about something, and back that up with research and reason. Novels are marathons of imagination which require stamina and self-reflection. Writing in these different formats doesn’t automagically make you a “good writer,” but I’ll admit that it certainly contributes to an overall flexibility that I wouldn’t necessarily have if, say, I only wrote novels.

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?
By any means possible. Typically weekends, but sometimes I just grab my notebook or my laptop and leave without care for day or time. You have to carve out the space because no one is going to hand that to you. You have to claim it as yours and fight for it.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
In no particular order: music, film, dance, visual art, newspapers, doing the dishes, long walks.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I moved a lot when I was a kid, so I don’t really have that. Fragrance is extremely evocative. The other day while I was on a morning run, the doors to a local public school were open while people were loading in equipment, and I immediately picked up smells that I haven’t come across in decades: glue, ink, craft paper, cleaning products, arts supplies. A part of me stayed behind and sat on the floor of that school hallway and didn’t want to leave.

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?
Everything. It sounds trite, but life is my notebook. I’m a tourist/alien. I take interest in everything around me. Why wouldn’t you?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My philosophy is “read widely” as opposed to being “well-read”. If all we do is read The Classics - when we don’t really play a part in how that mantle is bestowed - then that brings us closer to monoculture, which is terrible. I read what interests me, even if it’s flawed. Also, more and more I ask myself where my blindspots are. For example, am I reading too many books by white men? Am I only getting North American perspectives?

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to write about the film/TV industry in a way that is both honest and compassionate. Too often it’s Day Of The Locust and Swimming With Sharks, or The Player. Yes, there is bone-headed self-destructive bullshit in that industry…but that doesn’t make it unique. There is depth, too.

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?
Assuming this isn’t my only book or accomplishment as a writer, it will be my third career. I’m perfectly happy with where I am in my life, work wise. My psychotherapy practice offers relief from the very internal, anti-social nature of writing.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A clinical supervisor cautioned me early in my psychotherapy practice about over-pathologizing why people chose the vocations they had. “After all,” she said, “we sit and talk to people for a living - what’s with that?"

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. I’ve seen so many middling films recently, but Force Majeure was very interesting. It’s the sort of movie where you want to have a discussion with whoever is sitting next to you immediately after you see it. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
A sequel to The Society of Experience . Also, a novel about someone cursed with magic. I’m not sure which child will get fed first, but there are worse problems to have.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;