Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 372

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ewa Chrusciel

Ewa Chrusciel has two books in English, Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn Press, 2014) and Strata (Emergency Press, 2011) and two books in Polish: Furkot and Sopilki. Her poems were featured in Jubilat, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Aufgabe among others. She translated Jack London, Joseph Conrad, I.B. Singer as well as Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, Cole Swensen and other American poets into Polish. She is an associate professor at Colby-Sawyer College. For more information, go to her website: www.echrusciel.net

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 made me consider poetry more closely and made me slowly realize I am a poet. I had a certain resistance to accept the fact that I might be a poet.  That book was written in Polish and I was already in the U.S. doing my Ph.D. when it came out. It got some good reviews, so my colleagues in the USA asked me to translate some poems into English. Afterward, I sent some of them for publication, but only one got accepted. Also, while translating I discovered how boring I found self-translation, so I started to play with mistranslation and realized that it is much more fun to write new poems in English (or a “third language” – a hybrid of Polish and English) rather than translate from Polish to English. My recent work in English is completely different from my initial work in Polish. It is, perhaps, more baroque and more tentative.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I was fascinated in high-school by Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Cyprian Norwid. That may have been my first influence.

I came to writing poetry through my passion about poetry. And it also felt like some kind of tiger wanting to jump out of me. Some kind of inner voice was dictating the first lines. My first poetry came out of necessity, rather than craft or deliberation. It was measured by suffering.

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 usually have notes and lines. The notebook comes first. In Polish the process was much faster than in English. I did not write that many drafts. It was in English that I learned to revise continually. English, for me, is much more provisional and tentative than Polish. It is foreign, so I do not take anything for granted. I even revise poems that have already been published in books. My first book in English, Strata, took around 5 years of revising. My last book, Contraband of Hoopoe, took me around 4 years. (Writing it took a year, revising it took nearly 3 additional years.)

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?
Mostly, I have notes and pieces scattered in my numerous notebooks (some of them lost). The last book, however, became a book right from the beginning, because the overarching themes emerged quickly.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy doing readings to bring witness and validation to what I do. It is hard to say whether the readings are part of my creative process. Maybe they are more a crowning of the creative process and a break from writing. So a public reading is usually an in-between stage. Usually to write new stuff, I need to stay in my room or travel to new places (but not to readings).

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
The question of transgressing the linguistic and theoretical borders. The desire for more spacious form, which embraces both poetry & non-fiction, as well as prose. So the question of transgression interests me. The so-called linguistic, semantic, or ontological contraband.

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?
To give witness to existence, whether it is the existence of suffering, wonder, joy or sadness (usually an amalgam of all these). To give witness to human desire. To connect readers with Mystery. To establish relationship with Mystery.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. The most serious editorial work I have engaged in was with Omnidawn Press and I loved every minute of it. My poems have undergone major revisions, if not transformations.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I think the best and most difficult advice I have heard was from Jorie Graham: not to have an agenda for a poem, but instead let yourself be led where the poem wants to take you.

“When you hear that silence after the words cease: well, that is what the poem wants to get to: that silence: that new world which would not have existed had the action of the poem not taken place...”

“Go "around" experience, rather than "through it"…to truly be taken to the source of what it going on.  

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
Because I write in a non-native language, I am more aware of the constant mapping and remapping of images in my mind. It is interesting that both translation and metaphor have the same etymological root: “to carry across.” In that sense we could claim it has something to do with smuggling – sneaking objects/sounds that belong to a different world through Customs. Words are multilingual migrants and they cross-pollinate constantly. In the 12th Century, the word “translation” meant a holy theft—removing relics from one monastery and taking them to another.

Personally, I switch from writing to translation constantly. They inform and inspire each other.

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?
No writing routine…I hope to develop one and observe it….

So far either deadlines or travels most consistently inspire me to write.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Mostly to reading and translation, or travels, if I can afford them.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The fragrance of a snowflake in the Tatra Mountains. The harsh, robust, sturdy language of an oak. The Black Madonna’s smile from the Jasna Gora Monastery in Poland.

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?
Mostly nature and paintings.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Flannery O’Connor. I think of her as a saint of short story writing.

She always stresses the importance of grace in writing. She also emphasizes that meaning in writing should not be a fixed entity, but it should, instead, expand and linger in us. Her stories are transformative.

Other writers:
Elizabeth Bishop

Emily Dickinson

Wallace Stevens

Czeszław Miłosz

Zbigniew Herbert

I also refer to paintings for constant inspiration and sense of wonder: Pierro Della Francesca (I adore Madonna dell Parto), Giotto, Hieronymus Bosch and many others. Recently I have been struck by Jean-François Millet. His paintings are a prayer. I have a reproduction of his Angelus (a couple praying Angelus in the fields) in my kitchen.

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

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?
Ornithologist or ethologist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
A tiger that kept jumping out of me onto a page.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book:
Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork (highly recommend it)

Film:
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

20 - What are you currently working on?
Some new poems, and starting to revise my manuscript, The Dybbuk of Angelus, which wrote simultaneously with Contraband of Hoopoe.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

summer sandwich : Chaudiere Books’ month-long sale!

To make space for our upcoming fall titles (Andy Weaver, Jennifer Londry and Chris Turnbull), we’re running a summer sale! From August long weekend through to the end of Labour Day.
Summer sandwich: pick your toppings! Pick a bundle from our 2007-2014 backstock titles,
3 for $40 plus $10 mailing5 for $60 plus $15 mailing10 for $135 plus $20 mailing
OR: our entire backlist (18 titles; up to and including 2014 titles) for $300
Kiki, by Amanda Earl (poetry, 2014)Singular Plurals, by Roland Prevost (poetry, 2014)Garden, by Monty Reid (poetry, 2014)The Uncertainty Principle: stories, by rob mclennan (fiction, 2014)Ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, ed. rob mclennan (poetry, 2013)Casemate Poems (Collected), by Joe Blades (poetry, 2011)The Lizard and Other Stories, by Michael Bryson (short stories, 2010)Been Shed Bore, by Pearl Pirie (poetry, 2010)Soft Where, by Marcus McCann (poetry, 2009)A Long Continual Argument: The Selected Poems of John Newlove (poetry, 2007)Old Winter, by Anne Le Dressay (poetry, 2007)The Ottawa City Project, by rob mclennan (poetry, 2007)Decalogue 2: ten Ottawa fiction writers(2007)Everything is Movies, by Nicholas Lea (poetry, 2007)The Desmond Road Book of the Dead, by Clare Latremouille (novel, 2006)Disappointment Island, by Monty Reid (poetry, 2006)movement in jars, by Meghan Jackson (poetry, 2006)Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets(2006)
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Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever—you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn’t belong to her.
You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.
American poet Claudia Rankine’s remarkable Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2014) is part memoir, part prose poem lyric, part film script/collaboration and part essay, exploring the subtleties, complexities and ugliness of racism in America. Her prose employs the strength of a punch and the subtleties of lyric, and often both at once, through allowing numerous brutal examples of racism exist without editorial or commentary. Set in a small handful of sections, Rankine’s fifth published poetry collection moves from lyric observation via the prose poem to aan essay on Serena Williams, and film scripts on and around Trayvon Martin, Hurricane Katrina and James Craig Anderson, writing out systematic and deeply held antagonisms and prejudices throughout a country attempting to properly engage with a series of ongoing cultural collisions. Rankine moves through the result of a hundred thousand paper cuts to outright brutality, constantly questioning and citing a series of abuses that come with being a black citizen of the United States in the early twenty-first century. Since the publication of this book last year, there have been dozens of widely-publicized aggressions, attacks and deaths due to a deeply held racist undertone across the United States, including the brutal murder of nine churchgoers in South Carolina and resulting battle over the Confederate flag, to the recent arrest and death of Sarah Bland (and, as I write this, I am fully aware that I live in a country guilty of its own crimes in that regard, including the third world conditions that many of our northern First Nations communities continue to live in).



Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.
For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.
Given this is the first work I’ve read by Rankine, I’m curious as to how this work connects, both structurally and in terms of content, with her earlier books, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2004), and what her specific thoughts are in terms of what “lyric” actually means. As well, Rankine’s Citizen is part of a growing number of poetry works focused on the human costs and responsibilities of living in the world, and living in a multitude of overlapping, overlaying cultures, including Erín Moure’s trilogy— O Cidadán (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2002), Little Theatres (Anansi, 2005) and O Cadoiro, poems (Anansi, 2007)—to Larissa Lai and Rita Wong’s collaborative Sybil Unrest (Vancouver BC: LineBooks, 2008; New Star Books, 2013) and Aaron Shurin’s more recent Citizen (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2012). In her preface to her O Cidadán, Mouré wrote:
To intersect a word: citizen. To find out what could intend/distend it, today. O cidadán. A word we recognize though we know not its language. It can’t be found in French, Spanish, Portuguese dictionaries. It seems inflected “masculine.” And, as such, it has a feminine supplement. Yet if I said “a cidadá” I would only be speaking of 52% of the world, and it’s the remainder that inflects the generic, the cidadán. How can a woman then inhabit the general (visibly and semantically skewing it)? How can she speak from the generic at all, without vanishing behind its screen of transcendent value? In this book, I decided, I will step into it just by a move in discourse. I, a woman: o cidadán. As if “citizen” in our time can only be dislodged when spoken from a “minor” tongue, one historically persistent despite external and internal pressures, and by a woman who bears ― as lesbian in a civic frame ― a policed sexuality. Unha cidadán: a semantic pandemonium. If a name’s force or power is “a historicity … a sedimentation, a repetition that congeals,” (Butler) can the name be reinvested or infested, fenestrated … set in motion again? Unmoored? Her semblance? Upsetting the structure/stricture even momentarily. To en(in)dure, perdure.
Whereas Lai and Wong composed their poems as “trace movement through the long now and constitute evidence of some hopeful reaching towards friendly coexistence of multiple tactics/perspectives,” Rankine’s Citizenis an exposé, forcing an examination of what it really means to be a black citizen, specifically in the United States of America. Citizen does not exist to provide answers, but instead, focuses on forcing the reader/viewer to acknowledge that the problem exists at all, the implications of what that means, and how broadly felt and deeply ingrained it really is. For those of us on the outside of the experiences she writes about, one hopes that it forces an awareness of our own actions, whether active or passive, and responsibilities therein.

Sainte-Adèle (August,

Why is it taking us so long to get away these days? This past weekend we finally managed to get to mother-in-law's cottage, an idea rarer now than once was [see my post on last year's adventuring here]. We were there last August, for example, and have barely managed anything since.

Rose, now running full-tilt, enjoyed the expansive lawn. She ran, she contemplated, she explored.


There were the moments inside, there were the moments she covered the entire boundary of lawn, there were the moments watching and chasing giant soap bubbles at the front step of the porch. More bubbles, she chirped. More bubbles?





















And then, of course, the realization that these have to exist in ALL the stores, simply to make her happy.

She pounded on the plastic horn, even as she yelled: beep, beep!








There was some work, some bits of work. After months of attempting to further my manuscript of short fiction, I managed to poke at a poem or three, and even complete two of them by the time we returned home.

The stories, I hope, will progress again soon. I think I've done all I can with what I have, and need to generate some further ones to round out the manuscript. Lately, I've had a couple of folk even going through the 60-plus pages of stories to see what they might see, and have received some generous and worthy feedback.
There was work, but there was mostly tearing around with Rose on the lawn, down to the park, and even for ice cream (you can't even speak it out loud around her without her presuming she can have some right now; to do otherwise is only to court her disappointment).

We're hoping to get back sometime in September, but is that even possible? A weekend away, returning home Monday morning for the sake of Christine's carpal tunnel surgery on Monday afternoon, opening up the beginning of two weeks of painkillers and home-from-work, which Rose is enjoying enormously, but Christine is finding rather achy.

"City of words" : a new poem,

My poem "City of words" is now online at Empty Mirror.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Giles Benaway

Giles Benaway is of Odawa/Potawatomi, Cherokee, Métis and European descent. A descendant of women from three Indigenous nations, French and Scottish voyageurs and original Mayflower immigrants, he represents a unique voice in the field of Indigenous writing. An emerging Queer / Two-Spirited poet, he has often been described as the spiritual love child of Truman Capote and Thompson Highway. His first collection of poetry, Ceremonies for the Dead , was published by Kegedonce Press in 2013.  His poetry can also be found in Muskrat Magazine, Arc Magazine, Prairie Fire, Matrix Magazine and scrawled within bathroom stalls at truck stops across Ontario. In 2015, he was the recipient of the inaugural Speaker’s Award for a Young Author from the Speaker of the House for the Ontario Legislative.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wouldn’t say my first book changed my life in any major way. I suppose people have this idea that becoming a published author suddenly transforms your life, but it’s not like that at all. It changes things, because it brings you new experiences and challenges.  It’s not a large change, but a number of small shifts which create a gradual pressure in your life. It moves you forward, but not overnight.

If anything, the biggest impact of being published is in how I approach my craft. I’m more aware of other poets and their work, more tapped into the collective poetic conscious, so I approach my work with a much greater skepticism than I did before. There’s a heightened level of anxiety around my craft now which I didn’t have when writing the first book. There was an optimism and energy that I approached my first collection with which has changed over time into wariness. Let’s just I have more “What the hell am I doing?” conversation with myself about my writing now.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, my wariness about my craft. It means that I fight for my poetry in a way I didn’t have to before. I climb over myself and my fears to get into my poetry. I have to wage battle with my desires, what I want my craft to be and achieve, to come to a place of “this is where my work is right now” and admit that it’s not perfect. It’s so easy to get trapped in feeling bad about your craft, that you don’t have an MFA and you’re not writing those perfect sparse lines. I try to look through my work and admit the deficiencies, but also acknowledge the achievements. At the end of the day, there aren’t many poets writing in Canada from the place I’m writing from: Queer, Indigenous, abuse survivor, exile, and young.

And one thing I always say to myself is something that Shane Rhodes said to me, which is “Hey, no one is reading poetry anymore, so really, we can do whatever we want!”. That’s a liberating realization. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I love poetry. It’s the perfect medium for me and from the very beginning; I was writing and reading poetry. For me, poetry is exactly like my taste in men: brief, intense, and ruptured with meaning and beauty. It’s the quickest and most direct route for imagery. It’s like injecting drugs vs popping a pill. It goes right to the brain, sudden and sharp.

When it goes right, poetry is also an oracle. It divines the universe, unlocks truth. Each poem is it’s own universe, but connected to the greater whole. And through an individual poem, you can move through imagery to find yourself at an unexpected destination within yourself. It reminds me of ceremony. In my culture, ceremony is how you bring something to life and move between different states. But ceremony is just the vessel which takes you there, not the end game. For me, that’s the same as poetry. It’s a construct which takes you somewhere else.

What I love about poetry is finding lines which snap into my mind and change how I see the world. For example, from Maureen Harris, in Drowning Lessons, she has this line “sometimes we don’t ask enough of desire, that loss, like birth, moves us into some unknown and unsought country” and I think about that poem and those lines at least twice a week. Because she said something true, something which divined exactly how I feel about desire and grief, and it’s so powerful that it stays with you. It’s like prayer or a mantra almost.

That’s why I’ve stuck with poetry, I guess.

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 think about my work for a very long time before I ever sit down to write. When I write, I write intensely and in high volumes. It’s often pieces which I’ve been working out in my mind for months, lines which I’ve been rubbing together in my head while at the gym or something. So in that sense, I’m a very methodical poet. I map everything out first. The thematic content, and the individual lines to some extent.

But when I write, it’s intuitive. I just toss myself in and try to follow the threads I’ve laid out before and try to get myself to an ending which rings true. It doesn’t always work. My first drafts are often strong starters with weak endings. I spend most of my editorial time trying to sew up the endings. I can write 50 to 60 poems in a weekend, but most of them will just trail off incoherently, so then I have to spend months trying to piece together what the heck I was getting at.

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 find I become obsessed with a particular phrase or even word. That one bit of writing becomes my expanded focus for an entire collection or series of works. I often will title all of my poems by the same word until the very end, not giving them individual titles because I see all the pieces as one meditation on the same central theme. For example, right now, I’m obsessed with the word “passage” and everything I’m writing is about that core concept. So I translate that to talking about my Mayflower ancestors, my Metis relatives, the formation of Canada, colonization, but also the breakup of a five year relationship, the loss of my parents, discovering sexuality, and this never ending quest of finding yourself. And all of the pieces I’m writing are tied to nautical imagery, to voyage and exploration, to being alone in the “inner country”. 

So that’s my writing process: obsession and filtering everything through a micro focus. I’m into words with dual meanings as well, like passage.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love public readings, because I enjoy hearing my work aloud and seeing an audience’s reaction to it. I also love being on stage. There’s an energy exchange which I really enjoy. It also seems like an important part of the editing process for me. When I read a piece to an audience, it’s almost like encountering it for the first time. I notice new things, good and bad, in my work when I present it to an audience.

At the same time, it can be traumatic. Most of my work is about abuse and violence so I often have reactions from the audience. I have survivors of various forms of abuse and trauma approach me after my readings and engage me about what I’ve written. I think almost all of the reactions have been positive, but it’s a difficult conversation to have at the book sales table.

I’ve had readings where my work was poorly received as well. Being an Indigenous writer, you end up confronting racism and subtle Canadian bigotry in your public appearances. You get weird questions about “sacred Indian stuff” or you get blatant racist reactions like people complaining about the Aboriginal content in your work. When you combine the racism with the fact that my work is very grounded in Two-Spirited/queer culture, I can end with audiences who react to the Aboriginal and Queer content very negatively.

And I think so much of my work is dark and angry, that it turns some audiences off. Everyone wants redemption and reconciliation. I’m not redeemed from the abuse I experienced. I’m still very much damaged. And I’m not reconciled to it. I don’t think I ever will reconcile to what happened to me and my ancestors. I’m angry, I’ve always been angry, and I think that I will be angry twenty years from now.

But I’m more than my anger and if you read my work, I think you get that because that duality is embedded into my writing, the dual nature of anger and compassion. I think that’s a central part of what it means to a survivor, to have that anger and also that gentleness.  On stage, it’s hard to give both of those experiences to an audience, to show them gentleness and your anger. It’s a difficult balance and some nights, I walk off the stage and think “Crap. I was just another angry Indian”. I think I aim to show complexity in my readings, but it’s challenging. Stagecraft is like writing craft, but it’s much more immediate. You can’t edit as much. 

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 huge question, but I’ll try to answer it. My work is focused on three major themes: search for home, grief, and movement/transformation.

For me as an Indigenous writer, my identity and selfhood is wrapped up in history, colonization, the legacy of violence, and a really complex and powerful worldview which is radically different from European conceptions. I’m always working back through the past (Canada’s past and my ancestors) in order to speak to the present. Because of that constant translation, it’s always necessary for me to address the reality of colonization in North America.

So all that to say, any Indigenous writer has to, whether they want to or not, respond to the questions of losing home, of grief, and on the movement past it. It’s the starting place of our current context because of colonization, of the enormous violence leveled against Indigenous communities on a daily basis. And yes, we’re more than our suffering. There is power and hope in our communities, so much vitality in our voices, but we have to speak to the past as well.

And in our communities, the role of a storyteller is an important one. There is a specific set of responsibilities which comes with being one. So your work as an Indigenous writer is more complicated because whatever you write links back to your community and your nation. It’s not just your work, because a part of it belongs to the community. And you’re accountable to them in a way which isn’t the same for non-Indigenous writers. 

So there is really no way, as an Indigenous writer that you can get around responding to the legacy of colonization.

For me, coming from an abusive childhood and being this crazy gay orphan without a family, the themes of home, grief, and movement are so much bigger than they are for other Indigenous writers. And as a queer writer, there is also this legacy of violence and grief (AIDs crisis in the 80s, homophobia) that you’re heir to as a writer (especially as poet). My writing really emerges from this crux of colonial trauma, abuse, queerness, and violence which is very unique. And that’s it’s strength, I think, more than anything else. Because it’s not a dirge or a swan song, it’s really about movement, about passage.

The best thing anyone said about my first collection was it was mistitled. Instead of Ceremonies for the Dead, they said it should be Ceremonies for the Living, because it was all about life. And affirming what it is to be human, searching for some connection. 

The only other thing I would say is that my work is tied to the land. It’s a common trope, Indigenous people and the land, but it’s very true. My poetic landscape is about water, trees, lakes, and forests. Swamp land. Every image, even if it’s about the city, begins from that palette. And when I write a poem, that’s where I begin, in my mind. I see myself on the land and I write from there. I embed myself, mentally, into the land that I know and remember so I can speak to my poetry. Someone said to me, reading my work for the first time, that they knew that I was an Indigenous person from the Great Lakes by my writing. That it spoke to this place (Great Lakes), this collection of attributes, in way that reflects my family’s ties to this landscape.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The role of a writer? I talked about how Indigenous writers have a special role in our communities, as storytellers and keepers of tradition/knowledge. So my answer to this question is the same as before, than Indigenous writers have a very specific role in their communities. For each individual Indigenous nation, it’s different but there’s a central thread of accountability and linkage in each of them.

I remember my elder asking a group of kids what they thought being “Anishinaabe (Ojibway)” meant. They had great answers, like having an awesome culture, art, and a powerful spirituality. But when it came back to him, he just said “To me, being Anishinaabe, means being responsible. Being responsible to my ancestors, my community, my nation”.  And for me, I think that’s what the role of an Indigenous writer is really about. Being responsible.

I have no clue what the role of a Canadian writer is. Perhaps listening to CBC radio 1?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like being edited. It’s a wonderful learning chance. It’s hard to find qualified editors for Indigenous writers. Often there is no money in Indigenous publishing to pay for editors, so it’s hard to find skilled editors who can work on your stuff. And passing it over to non-Indigenous editors can help, but sometimes there’s cultural nuances which get missed.

But I’m all for editors. You need to have them. There’s no point writing otherwise.

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

•    Writing is about talent, but it’s also about the hustle. If you can’t hustle, you’re not going to make a good writer~ Neal Mcleod, Cree Poet

•    The dead are more powerful than the living~ Lee Maracle, Stolo Novelist

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 try to write in the evenings, but I don’t have a regular writing practice. I write when I need to, after I’ve worked it out in my head and the next step is to put it on paper. In that sense, I guess I’m always writing mentally, but I don’t get to the physical act of writing it out until weeks or months later. I work a 9-5 so most of my day is spent in other people’s words or writing very different kinds of content. It’s hard to step out of that into my own work without time in between.

And I only write at night. I can’t write during the day. And only on a computer. So it’s between 10pm to 2am during the summer, because if there is any light outside, I’m not writing. I mean, I can force myself, but it’s not the same. For poetry anyway. I can write prose whenever because it’s less demanding.

That’s why I like the winter. More writing time. The dead are closer. Darkness comes early and lingers.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other poets. I read poetry constantly and it always unjars me. I love how poetry makes me feel. It’s like it connects with me in a way that only animals do. I guess, it’s like a puppy to me. A sad puppy, but it’s so immediate that I’m emotionally engaged and responding. I’m very guarded by nature and wary, which is odd because I have a very outgoing and sarcastic personality, but I’m really very discrete about what I’m feeling or experiencing. Except with puppies.  I literally lose my mind when I run into dogs on the street and it’s like with poetry as well. It just unlocks me and I respond freely.

So when I get stuck, I go back to the poets I love. And poetry finds me. Wherever I am, it comes back and plays over in my mind. Words, I guess, lines from strangers I don’t know, but powerful nonetheless. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Reminds me of home or reminds me of my home? I’ll answer both. Home to me smells like rain, lily of the valley, lilacs, and dirt + farmland. Maybe some lemon scented cleaner. That’s the lost home.

My home smells like lavender, cedar, cologne, nag chamapa, herbal scents, Frebreeze, three Glade plugins, sandalwood, faint touch of cigarette smoke, and like a million other scents. Pretty much everything in my house is filled with scent. I’m not good for anyone with allergies.

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?
Not really. Maybe music, because of the link between lyrics and poetry, but I think it’s mostly poetry to poetry for me. I would say conversation influences me as well. Most of my writing is intentionally conversation or tries to copy everyday speech. It’s something that I love, to hear place and gender and position reflected in speech. So I try to translate that to my writing, so it always sounds like I’m speaking to my reader in genuine voice.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Fantasy genre fiction. Half my life is lived in my head, where I’m a high priestess from a remote island nation battling a dark force in a world populated by the descendants of several alien species plus proto-humanity, so I’m a) a huge nerd with no social life and b) addicted to the worst kind of fiction. I read fantasy books constantly. My favourite are Mercedes Lackey, Tanya Huff, Melanie Rawn, and Patricia Briggs.

Poetry? It’s everyone, but especially Lorna Crozier, Karen Solie, Frank O’Hara, Sigfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen, and Gregory Scofield. Mathew Henderson is a poet I’m watching as well.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Find true love? Or at least, a guy I felt was my equal in balls, brawn, and brains. Which is much harder than it sounds and slightly pathetic. I think it’s rooted in the search for home. Being an orphan now by default (family rejection because I’m super gay), I’m fixated on finding someone to fill that “family role” in my life. And I have friends and I’m secure in my life, but for me, finding home (creating home) and family is my central quest. Maybe that’s unhealthy and I want other things, like travel, advancements in my career, to make good art, but at the end of it, I think the scale that I measure my life on will be “was I known and loved”? Was I witnessed? And if the answer is, sorta but not really, then I think I’ll be disappointed with that.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I have a regular full time job beyond being a writer. I’m a fearless policy wonk and a really bitchy admin in one combo package. And it’s partly community advocacy as well. I like having both careers. They both challenge me and bring me joy in differing ways.

I would like to be an earth mage though-if we’re really talking honestly. Or some kind of mystical oracle queen who rules a nation of barbarian gingers who fight with axes. I’ve thought about this a lot.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think I write because of the abuse I experienced as a child. And because I’m alone. Words were always a part of me. I used to read cyclopedias on breaks at school from as early back I can remember. And I was always known for having a very “big” vocabulary, so I think literature and language would have always been important to me.

But the abuse, which was sewn throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, took that capacity for language and gave it purpose. I found that language was a way to escape violence and in some sense, a way to protect against it. I built up words as barriers to what I was experiencing, so that a particular word held the resonance of that violence in a way that let me escape it. Or gave me enough distance to bear it.

And then language became a way to navigate the school system, secure help from teachers, to negotiate with social workers, to survive in hospitals. Writing, in terms of poetry, only really came into my life when I was 13 or 14. It emerged as a way to get attention, win writing contests, and get recognized by my teachers/the people around me. And it was something my family didn’t touch, couldn’t impact. It existed outside of them. Safe.

Now, I think writing is about witnessing. I write to capture a record of my life. There’s no on else who really can or who knows me for longer than 4 years in my life, so I’m the link between all the different versions of myself. And writing connects all the pieces of me and leaves a record behind me. It’s like having family, I suppose. A literary family.

And there’s a line by Judith Butler, which I’m paraphrasing, but it says something like “the moment when violence happens to you, you become responsible for it” and that how I feel about writing. It’s my fault what happened to me or what happened to my people, but it happened, so now I’m responsible for me. I have to answer. There must be a response. So I write. A small voice, but my voice-that matters.

18 – What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading this book called Fangirl ! It’s great. It’s about a narrator who is obsessed with fanfiction, writes slash (gay) porn with fictional characters from mainstream books, has a mentally ill father and no mother, and is in a on and off again relationship with a thin bisexual guy who works at Starbucks. That’s likely a bad description of the book, but it’s worth reading.

Best film? It Follows . Such an amazing American horror film which looks at sexuality and human connection in a brilliant and refreshing way. Ultimately, it’s about adulthood and becoming a person, but in such an understated way. It’s genius.

19 - What are you currently working on?
A new collection of poetry about passage. My passage through life and also literal Northern passages. Also my recent gay divorce. And abuse. And death. And grief. And the loss of culture. And reconnecting to the ancestors. So you know, the same things I always write about.

And a young adult novel about a gay teenage Aboriginal werewolf with Asperger’s syndrome who falls in love with a foster kid who has magical powers in remote BC.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Rod Smith, Touché

Thunder stirs the symbolizedbetween & is transitory—a downspotting, circuitouswild—the househas a learning & the househas a viewfinder—the bestthing in the house thoughis an anklet, or a fish poacher—they have what the skylighthas—which is not what a duct has.
the house in the lakeit is trapped & burdensome,terrifically inert, sandbagged& bubbling up—a blatantcasuistry echoes in thecrawlspace—parietal, jipped,plaster cast, & smarmy—
            house tells & is told            house in the heaving            need—woe house            woe
   ____________

it takes great courageto visit certain homes
   ____________

                        (“The Good House, etc.”)
Subtitled “In Memory of My Theories Vol. 2” is Washington D.C. poet and publisher Rod Smith’s Touché (Wave Books, 2015), a curious follow-up (as he suggests) to his third poetry collection, In Memory of My Theories (O Books, 1996). With Touché, Smith is now the author of twelve poetry collections, from The Boy Poems (Washington, DC: Buck Downs Books, 1994) and Protective Immediacy (New York: Roof, 1999) to Music or Honesty (Roof Books, 2003) and Deed (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007). After a small handful of poetry titles and nearly twenty years between, what does In Memory of My Theories, if anything, have to do with the current title, Touché? In an interview conducted by Patrick F. Durgin, online at r e a d m e #2 (Winter 2000), Smith describes the earlier collection:
One wants a friend in contingency. A kind of contextual gliding I suppose is what is meant by the title In Memory of My Theories which contains work as much as a decade old at the time of publication. Given that span, in the end what’s “isolated” in the book might be only “the impulse.” So the constructing of a book is the compression of a large number of hours of the writer’s (or writers’) experience into a musical event (events) — that would be the impulse that can be shared — not so much an ideological informing as a roving, a perceiving, a “listening in” — which creates an experience rather than reporting it.
Whereas the previous collection, Deed, appeared more streamlined, the poems collected in Touché suggest the same kind of structural and possibly temporal compositional span as he discusses above, allowing these two collections—Touché and In Memory of My Theories —to each exist as a kind of catch-all, held together precisely by the wide variety of pieces included. Given some of the acknowledgements at the back of the collection range in dates from 2002 to more contemporary publications, it suggests that Smith’s two-volume (loosely considered, of course) “In Memory of My Theories” are not only composed of poems outside of his more formal book-length projects, but reminiscent of Denver, Colorado poet Noah Eli Gordon’s recent The Word Kingdom in the Word Kingdom (Brooklyn NY: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] or Toronto poet Jay MillAr’s Other Poems (Nightwood Editions/blewointment, 2010) [see my essay on Jay MillAr's work here], two books that also existed between and around their other book-length poetry projects, becoming book-length considerations of the scattered “occasional.” Given that this is the second volume, this suggests a deeper and more ongoing engagement with how poems connect to each other; that all are part of a larger, ongoing, singular project, contained so far in the space of two trade volumes. Might there be a third down the road, or even a fourth? And where might all this be heading?




Me’s Wittl Birdy Bong Stowy
I boughted my wittl pairwuketea birdy bong for hims bifday
but it gived him a itty wittle cut on himsbitty wittle beak-wip couldn’t do a bawwel woll
i didn’t know y-cuzi mean it was hims wip not
hims wittle wingys so i sdto hims wittle birdy-wirdy
which was not hims namey-wameythe dawk suwwounds us nummy-wummy googly woo
Hoo’s got a wittle bitty potty mouth?Why you!
In Deirdre Kovac’s review of In Memory of My Theories in Poetry Project Newsletter, she describes the poems as being “both hyper-linguistic (i.e., language pointing to itself, as an object with all the attendant baggage of etymology, linguistics, etc.) and sub-semantic (i.e., symphonic, the direct route described above).” She continues:
This de-dichotomizing is also part of how Smith’s work is structured and moves—motion, if not arrival, being key. He revels in the habits of syntax, and breaks them. The action lies not in the action of event, of verbs, but in that of connection, a linguistic motion—derived from his use of prepositions—of what belongs to what, what suture, what addition. Even the verbs are sometimes made to work like prepositions. “So It Is that / the direction is indented by the dubious double affect of the undone area she / is to be believed to inhabit” (“Sieff”). The motion is made constant also by musical combination, vowel-sound surface progressions and Anglo-Saxon sound patterns within a Latinate (however interrupted) syntax.
Composed around his other works, the poems that make up these two volumes might be his engagement with the mechanics of language, meaning and syntax, and the boundaries of how poems are supposed to be built. The poems in Touché are incredibly playful, straightforward, confusing, highly deliberate and varied, from the more formal lyric to poems that engage directly with sound, collision and accident, to language and flarf works, and poems that twist linguistic expectation, meaning and narrative, as well as the occasional piece that reads as an incredibly dense essay on composition: “either spontaneously / or following a collision,” he writes, to close the poem “Treatise on Consequences.” If his other poetry collections show where he’s been, the poems in Touché might just show where he’s headed.

above/ground press twenty-second anniversary reading and launch: Best, Earl + Thomas,

above/ground press twenty-second anniversary reading and launch
with readings by:

Ashley-Elizabeth Best (Kingston)
Amanda Earl (Ottawa)
+ Hugh Thomas (Montreal)

Thursday, August 27, 2014
7pm door / 7:30pm reading
Raw Sugar Cafe
692 Somerset St W, Ottawa
lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
$5 at the door / includes a copy of a recent above/ground press chapbook, or a copy of Touch the Donkey!

Ashley-Elizabeth Best is from Cobourg, ON. Her work has been published in Fjords, CV2, Berfrois, Grist and Ambit Magazine, among other publications. Recently she was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her first collection of poems, Slow States of Collapse is forthcoming with ECW Press. She lives and writes in Kingston.

She will be launching her chapbook, Now You Have Many Legs To Stand On. This is her first chapbook and second publication with above/ground press, after the "poem" broadside "from Algonquin" (#315, 2012).

Amanda Earl is a troublemaker who haunts the streets & watering holes of Ottawa for inspiration. She is still in love with Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014), her poetry book celebrating the spirit of Montparnasse & hopes that you will be too. Find  her on Twitter @KikiFolle or read about her in secret at AmandaEarl.com .

She will be launching her chapbook, A BOOK OF SAINTS, an excerpt from Saint Ursula’s Commonplace Book. This is Earl’s fourth chapbook with above/ground press, after Sex First & Then A Sandwich (2012), The Sad Phoenician’s Other Woman (2008) and Eleanor (2007).

Hugh Thomas [pictured] is a poet and translator who has just moved to Montreal, where he will be teaching mathematics at UQAM.  His most recent chapbook, Albanian Suite, was published by above/ground press in 2014.  His previous chapbook, Opening the Dictionary, also published by above/ground press, was shortlisted for the 2012 bpNichol chapbook award.

He will be launching a chapbook of "naive translations," Six Swedish Poets. This is his third chapbook with above/ground press, after Albanian Suite (2014) and Opening the Dictionary (2011).

(another) very short story;

The earth didn’t move, exactly. The information in yesterday’s paper was incorrect.








See also: The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (2014)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carellin Brooks

Carellin Brooks (photo credit: James Loewen) was born in Vancouver. She is the author of One Hundred Days of Rain  (BookThug, 2015), fresh hell: motherhood in pieces (Demeter, 2013), Wreck Beach (New Star, 2007), and Every Inch a Woman (UBC Press, 2006). She has edited two volumes, Carnal Nation (Arsenal, 2000) with Brett Josef Grubisic, and Bad Jobs (Arsenal, 1998), and written hundreds of short pieces for books, newspapers, magazines, and websites. She lives in Vancouver, after stints in London, New York, and Ottawa (but never Toronto!). There she attended weekly Catholic mass as a rebellious agnostic teen at the insistence of her Pentecostal foster parents… long story. Waiting for the bus in wintertime, she used to dream of being run over, then picked up by an ambulance with heat.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Oh, gosh. The answer would have to be not at all, because I’d been imagining myself as that person for so long. I wanted to be a writer when I was six. In fact I didn’t just want to be a writer. I caused much tittering when, at ten, I was honoured by having my story laminated, then placed in the school library. I was invited to write a dedication, which I did in all seriousness: “To my grandmother, who is also a writer.” I couldn’t understand why the adults thought it was so funny.

So I haven’t noticed much of a change, except that after forty years or so the world is very slowly coming around to my way of thinking.

My most recent work feels more polished. In the one before that, I was aiming for the frantic, tumbled life of the new mother… and I certainly got that.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always written poetry, the way Cixous says women masturbate: just a little, to take the edge off. That’s how she says they write in general, by the way.

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 have the gift and curse of writing quickly. So I write hundreds of facile, technically correct pages with great ease, but they’re not what I want. So I rewrite. And rewrite. And rewrite. I try it from different points of view. My last book was in second person, this one’s in third person. I’m now up to draft seven on my current project. I wrote draft 6 without looking at drafts one through five. That was a trip.

4 - Where does a poem or 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 when something’s a short story or short piece---I write only a few of those. Same with a poem. Sometimes I’m just writing to see what happens, but usually I have an idea of how much I can get out of it… for instance, if I think a particular idea has more flesh on it, I may not want to squander it on a poem. Oooh, that sounds so calculating.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love readings. I love hearing other writers read their work---it’s the closest I get to meditation. Even reading other people’s work is great; that’s how I got seduced by a girlfriend once, driving around reading Rebecca Brown to each other. I went to a great writer’s book launch, and she said, “I’m not going to do a reading. Nobody wants to hear me read.” I was like, “I do! I do!”

I like reading, but only in front of strangers. I did a reading in front of a bunch of close friends and family recently. It was so embarrassing. I felt like such a poser, and I couldn’t get into my deep, slow reader voice.

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?
Oh, criminy. Everybody who reads me and talks to me about my work calls me a stylist, which I don’t think could be farther from the truth. What---because I’m economical with words? My theoretical concerns are usually some conceit that I thought up to keep my brain busy, like how you describe rain one hundred different ways, or how you replicate in writing the chaos of the first year of motherhood while conveying this horrible crime against humanity, writ singular. But the question has to be very simple. I’m sorry, I like theory, I’m not anti-intellectual in the slightest, but I have that old-fashioned idea that art and theory are deadly enemies, that theory, unless applied at a later stage, kills art. You can’t analyze and create at the same time.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The writer needs to be a public intellectual. I spend a lot of time around writers, which is a privilege, because of volunteering with the Writers’ Union. I can’t think of finer company. Then again, it must be said: some of them are absolutely barking mad. But we’re the last group of people who have the leisure to simply think. That’s not to say we’re the smartest---some of us are only smart at putting words on paper. But we’re economically irrelevant, so nobody bothers with us mostly. We’re a great untapped resource. Don’t think academics are doing it: there publication has become the big driver.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love editors. I’ve been on both sides of that divide, and I love editing too, although I think the process is basically adversarial. I think a lot of writers don’t appreciate the greatness of editors and editing. What I love about editors today, and my editor at BookThug, Malcolm Sutton, especially, is that they think about your book as much as you do. Friends, even if you get married to someone who loves your work, trust me: your editor is the only other person in the world who will ever do that! And then they ask you questions you’ve never even thought about, so you find yourself making up all sorts of answers to satisfy them. And as these words are coming out of your mouth, you’re thinking: is this total bullshit? Because they want a rationale. And I’m obliging, I’ll make one up. Even if I never thought about it at the time.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It would have to be the advice I heard secondhand from a friend who had a book accepted: “It’s wonderful, I love it---now throw it out and start over.” Later, after agonizing over this, she found out her editor said the same thing to every author.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Each subject, or bit, or theme, or what-have-you, seems to demand its own shape. I had a friend who liked to recycle her best images, which I always resisted---“No! You’ve already used that one!” I still can’t figure out which of us had the right idea.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I like to write first thing in the morning, and I only write for about an hour a day. Sometimes I have to do it when everyone’s in the house, which is torture for us all. I’ll either write or edit, but not both. Right now I have the luxury of having a friend, John Harris, who’s going over a novel for me (the aforementioned draft 6) and making changes I can accept, revise, or reject. I stop on weekends and holidays. It’s just not worth the bloodbath, and I find I’m fresher once I’m back at my desk… although stopping for too long makes it difficult to get started again.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I dally. I look at all the old stuff I didn’t do much on, I reread all the fragments, I write up some fragments, little things that have been bothering me---why do all teachers hate marking so much? Why is everyone so unhappy? You know, stuff like that.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Well, I’d like to say lavender, but really, if you took a sniff right now, it’d be slightly rotten cantaloupe.

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?
Gosh, not really. I think I’m just uniquely insensitive to music. And I love art, Jackson Pollock in particular, but I’ve never put any art into my work. Sometimes being in nature gives me the same feeling as writing really well, but that hardly counts, does it?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ve already mentioned Rebecca Brown, a fantastic Seattle writer---and real stylist!---everyone should read. I love my friend Brett Josef Grubisic’s next book, coming out in 2016: From Up River, For One Night Only. It’s this great novel about these small town kids who dream big and… that’s it. Really evocative for those of us who grew up in the era. I love, love, love Michael V Smith’s latest book, My Body is Yours. Beautiful work about the Nineties and how we wanted to start a revolution with sex. At Authors 4 Indies I met this great illustrator, Rebecca Chaperon, who has a whole book of macabre girl paintings, Eerie Dearies. And I recently heard Rachel Rose read some new poetry: superb, as ever.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to spend extended periods in more countries. I’ve lived plenty of places, but there’s a lot more out there. The trouble is I love Vancouver too much to leave.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I teach, which I enjoy immensely, so I guess that’s the easy answer. I like writing so much that journalism seemed like the thing to do, until after the Montreal massacre---I saw up close what reporters did to get the stories from victims’ families. I’d love to be in the courtroom, although of course I’d like to be a judge, not a lawyer---all that deciding. I’m always a little jealous of anyone doing medical stuff.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was never even a question. My mother wrote, and we had hundreds of science-fiction paperbacks lining the walls. And when I was six, we got an IBM Selectric typewriter, and I got to use it. Goodbye cursive.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Friends gave me the first book of My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knaussgard---I’m a reverse snob, so I didn’t want to read it, but it’s as good as everyone says and of course I got hooked. I just burned through Volume 2.

And I saw The Philadelphia Story on a plane. Which is a really shitty way to see a great film. All that fantastic clipped dialogue through a pair of two-dollar headphones that keep falling out, under the roar of jet engines.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on a kind of Rhodes Scholar by day/lesbian sadomasochist by night novel called My Education. Draft seven, here we come. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;