Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 373

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;

a new chapbook (and how to order) + The Sawdust Reading Series (reminder,

In case you've forgotten, I'm featuring at The Sawdust Reading Series on Wednesday, August 19, 2015 at 7pm (see the link here for further information). I've produced a wee chapbook through Apostrophe Press as a handout for such, but if you wish for a copy (while supplies last) and can't make the event, paypal me $4 via the donate button on the sidebar, and I'll mail you a copy. That work?

(another) weekend in old glengarry (+ the glengarry highland games,

We spent the weekend in Old Glengarry again, for the sake of the 68th edition of the Glengarry Highland Games on Saturday, and my sister's fifteenth annual afternoon pot-luck on Sunday [see last year's entry here; the previous year's entry here].

Saturday, August 1, 2015: Kate, Christine, Rose and I left Ottawa first(ish) thing in the morning, and arrived just in time to participate in the Clan parade, alongside my sister and her three children, which bulked up the representatives behind our banner (which the other participants were quite pleased for). Unfortunately, they mis-announced our Clan name ("McLellan"), which annoyed, but they were quickly corrected. I mean, weren't we carrying a big damned banner ahead of us as we walked?

I didn't realize we have a "new" plaque; given we hadn't a Clan Chief for some three hundred and fifty years until 1976, a new one was produced around that time. Apparently we have the old one, with three heart nails. I took a picture of the new one, just to know what it looks like (I prefer the old one).

My sister, Kathy, was there for the sake of her middle child, Rory, dancing as part of the morning's festivities. We sat in the heat and took many photos. Oh, what a warm day to be wearing such outfits.

We spent the day wandering, to see what and who we could see. Neither Christine, Kathy nor Kate could get their cellphones to work, which made us wonder why the Highland Games (incidentally, said to be the largest highland games outside of Scotland) even bothered having a hashtag. They really need to get the space properly set up for wi-fi. And perhaps provide a bit more information on their website. And yet, the event certainly doesn't suffer a lack of crowd...

We wandered; Rose ran around a bit, and even played in the gravel (she was removed against her wishes). Kathy's wee children complained. And I visited with a couple of people there and here I hadn't seen in some time.

Usually, some of the daytime musical entertainments can be, ahem, varied in their quality, but we caught The Brigadoons just before we left, which was quite nice. Rose and I danced a bit, as Kathy and I used up the last of our beer tokens.


The day was long; we were home around 5pm or so, but it meant that we'd been walking for about six or more hours, which explained how we were all exhausted by the end of it.

Once we arrived at the homestead, Rose sat awhile in Gran'pa's chair.

Sunday, August 2, 2015: After a breakfast at the local truck stop, Rose, Kate and I wandered off having adventures for the morning, allowing Christine some quiet time to get some work done. Our pal Clare Latremouille and her husband recently purchased a farm nearby, so we spent the morning with her, getting a lay of the land, and the strange space of land they now get to figure out.

The house was absolutely lovely! And Clare and Bryan regaled us with tales of the previous owner, who frightened the neighbours with his strange leavings, creations and pathways, including mirrors (facing in) replacing every window in the house. Rose was enormously happy, given she was immediately given an orange popsickle, and a variety of other foods while we were there. She wandered around the house, dribbling and sticky and laughing. Clare even let her leave with two stuffed toys, including an Ernie.

The house and the surrounding buildings are impressive, and have an enormous amount of potential. Despite wishing never to move ever again, I was quite jealous of what they've managed to find, and the work they've been putting into it (they're very good at that kind of renovation work, which I haven't a clue about).

Once home, we gathered Christine and headed up to my sister's house for her annual bbq, yard-party, whatever it is they call it now (they haven't roasted a pig in years). Rose swam in the pool a bit with her cousins, and spent the remainder of the day running, running, running and running, most of the time calling for her cousin, Emma.

Occasionally, she would even stop to colour.

By dusk, there was the annual fire, and the eventual fireworks. Rose ran until she couldn't anymore, and Christine convinced her into one of her carriers, where she fell asleep (somewhere around 10 or 10:30pm) on the walk back to the homestead.

Erika Staiti, The Undying Present

I haven’t consulted the map. I didn’t know there was a map until after they returned to the car at the beginning and spread it over their laps. I know I am trying to get to the magnified view as indicated. I will have to go through many rooms. In some cases I might have to stay overnight. It all depends.
Oakland, California writer Erika Staiti’s striking first full-length book, The Undying Present (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), exists in the nebulous space between prose poetry and novel. Constructed as a collage-work, The Undying Presentis a pastiche of scene-sections, including scenes presented from multiple perspectives, a set of semi-travel narratives, multiple examples of overlap, deliberate obfuscation and occasional contradition. Writing out a series of movements without specific details, the narrative allows itself to not be limited by a single trajectory or reading. As Ariel Goldberg and Rachel Levitsky wrote in their “Conversation about Erika Staiti’s ‘The Undying Present,’” as part of their “Social reading” series in Jacket2: “Under erasure, constant revision: questions left by Staiti’s outlines and silhouettes must only be answered in multiples, of bodies, desires, expirations hiding from each other, revealed in the reading, by the readers: for how long can a hand be held?” They continue:
In a narrative that is about an underground replete with unspoken dynamics that are probably sado-masochistic, the open field of the mystery is significant. The narrative is not master of its own mystery. The narrator is not in control.
“False harmony warms the network. Secrets eat through the spaces between bodies.”
There is something going on in The Undying Present but it’s a secret. There is a necessity of uncovering the mystery, the structural body of the scene that can’t be addressed singularly by the author who is included in it. How are we going to be asked to question the surface? To get to the matter, when intimacy lapses. The reader is being asked to help.
Narrative, one might argue, is as arbitrary as any other idea upon which to hang a story. Staiti’s narrator is not in control, they write, and yet, it takes a remarkable amount of control to allow such a space for the narrator to drift so artfully, highlighting a comparison and difference between this and, say, Richard Brautigan’s novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), in which narrator, narrative and, supposedly, author erode simultaneously. Staiti’s montage of prose-sections accumulate in such a way that are reminiscent of the novels of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, yet writing out longer scenes than his novels often include. Both writers, somehow, manage to create full-length prose-works that suggest that the order of the sections aren’t fixed, but simply one way of reading; might The Undying Present be equally readable if the sections were re-ordered? Would it make for an entirely different, yet equally satisfying, experience?
Staiti is also the author of the chapbooks Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press, 2010) andBetween the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series, 2014), and in an interview conduced by Ariel Goldberg, Staiti discusses In the Stitches in a way that seems to connect to this current work: “There is some kind of world in which this language is existing but I don’t really know what it is. It’s partly an imagined/fantasized world but it steals objects and ideas from our world. I don’t feel so literate in this world at all. I feel pretty removed from it. In the earliest version, I was trying to write lines that would negate themselves. I wanted to see what something looked like if it could be itself and also its own negation. I was writing longhand, which I almost never do. As the piece over time transformed into this thing, I realized that something kind of ambient but real came out in the attempt to negate. I thought a lot about ambience. I wanted to see a world in which ambience dominated. It’s interesting about the different voices you mentioned because I’ve been hearing it as un-voiced, as a humming or something.” In remarkably precise prose, Staiti appears very much to be creating a world through halved information, presenting just enough to create an incomplete portrait, and make the reader aware of what might be missing. One might say that this new work is just as much ambient than setting or narrative, suggesting what another writer would have fleshed out more fully, yet most likely lessening the effect.
I walk through the City of Margins. Tall angular buildings shimmer in the sun. Dozens of people move past me walking in straight lines with conviction. I am moving in this way too. The streets push us to our destinations efficiently. We push ourselves there.
A narrow alleyway appears. I turn and walk down the torn street. I reach an empty parking lot. I feel the Second City beneath me. The shell of a burned out car sits at the edge of the frame. An abandoned and deteriorating building sags into the ground. This is where we enter.
I open the doors of the building and walk around peering in each room. The rooms hold remnants of the past, forgotten objects slathered in dust and rodent feces. I climb the stairs dragging knobby fingers over a dusty banister. A young woman is crumpled in the corner at the end of the hallway. Her body is a mouth, a dark open hole telling a story. Speaking not speaking.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Leslie Vryenhoek

Leslie Vryenhoek is the acclaimed author of  Scrabble Lessons  (short fiction) and Gulf (poetry). Her first novel,  Ledger of the Open Hand , published in May 2015, looks at how our relationship with money colours how we relate to our loved ones, and how we come to treat love as a balance sheet. Leslie’s work has been published and broadcast across Canada and internationally, winning awards across genres. As a communications specialist, Leslie has worked in advanced education, international development, emergency response, and the arts. A former Manitoban now based in St. John’s, Newfoundland, she is the founding director of Piper’s Frith: Writing at Kilmory. There’s more at www.leslievryenhoek.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, Scrabble Lessons (short stories), changed my life by disabusing me of the notion that publishing a book would change my life. Other things, like deciding to change my life, have been much more effective. 
Writing those stories, I wasn’t part of a “writing community” yet. I had such confidence in my voice and my ability and felt really comfortable inside the skin of the stories. By the time Scrabble Lessons was published, I’d moved across the country and in with another writer, and I was suddenly surrounded by writers whose own first books had garnered big acclaim, catapulting them into hot careers. My experience was different—and my confidence took a beating. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.
So when I began Ledger of the Open Hand, I allowed external advice to rule and dismissed my instincts. It took me a long time to come back to my own voice and intent. Ultimately, though, I think the circuitous journey made me a better writer and produced a better book.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?I didn’t come to fiction—or any genre—first. I came to words first—words, and the desire to arrange them in ways that created an understanding, a different way of seeing, both for me and for the reader or listener.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?It’s very changeable, project to project. Some things arrive whole in my head—so immediate, so just there that I can’t scribble fast enough to get them down. Those are the best experiences—and usually the best pieces.
More often, whatever I’m writing will emerge as I’m writing it, unspooling just far enough out in front to keep me moving, the way an unfamiliar highway does when you drive it at night. The trick, I find, is to not to speed up and overdrive the headlights.
I jot notes when I’m conceiving a larger project, before it’s gelled enough to start typing. But I end up ignoring most of them. I go back to writing out notes when I’m editing, redrafting, rethinking—that for me is where the best creative work happens, and those notes prove far more useful.
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?There’s always some seed—some idea or character I want to get inside, so I have to find the best way to get at it. It’s intuitive. Usually I know quickly if it’s a poem or a short story, an essay or a novel. I’ve never started anything thinking it would be short and then had it develop into something longer—a story that became a novel, for example—but I’ve sure embarked on long narratives, only to realize I didn’t have that much to say after all.
What it’s all to become is often less obvious. Stories and poems often begin as discrete, and then I realize there’s something larger evolving, some vein I’m mining.
5 – Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?I love reading. I love microphones. Maybe I love being the centre of attention. I’m the sort who needs to be disciplined about a time limit (and I am) because I could stand up there and read the whole damn book as long as I thought people were (even politely) listening. The magic of it is in seeing how the audience responds—because you rarely get to hang over someone’s shoulder while they’re reading your stuff.
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?When another writer said to me, “We all have some core issue we return to in different ways, hoping to resolve it,” I realized my thing might be “But it’s not fair.” I’m not sure that actually qualifies as a theoretical concern so much as my inner four-year-old’s lament, but the imbalance of give and take in life—certainly in relationships—seems to keep coming up. I suppose the question behind it that interests me is just how much luck, good and bad, plays in the average life, how much is what we’re dealt and how much is what we choose. In Ledger, the uneven distribution of life’s rewards, of good fortune and good feelings, love and money, are undercurrents throughout the novel. In a small way, in a microscopic way, I’m trying to interrogate the larger issues about inherent inequity in the way the world works.
I also return, over and over, to the concept of belonging. The poetry in Gulf was concerned with how to define home. A new project that’s hovering in my peripheral vision and just starting to coalesce is focused on what it means to belong to a place—who gets to claim it and whether it’s granted externally or found within.  
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?God, that’s the question that’ll keep me up all night. I don’t have anything close to a solid answer, so allow me to equivocate. I think there are as many roles as there are writers. There’s room for entertaining, and there’s room (sometimes in the same house) for the hard reality of deep journalism. Most of us, writing in any genre, are trying to reveal something, small or large, about the world in which we find ourselves. 
But we are at a very tricky place in our evolution—as a nation, as a global community—and a century or two from now, people are going to scour what we’re creating today for some understanding about how we got here and how we responded, and I’m hoping there are a few good writers who will last to shed some honest light on the early part of the 21st century.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? Utterly essential, once the work is far enough along. It’s like having someone come into your new house after you’ve arranged the furniture and say, “You know, if you just moved that there and turned it sideways, you’d open up the whole space.” What a different brain can see always amazes me.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?Annie Dillard—and I’m very much paraphrasing—said something like, “Don’t hoard the best stuff. Use it and trust more good stuff will come.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?It’s easy across a long span of time, though when I’m working in a particular genre I stay there. Usually for months. I can switch gears between two prose pieces, but I can’t write a poem in the morning and a story in the evening. I wish I could, because poetry opens up channels for using language and emphasizes potency and brevity in a way that is very good for my prose.
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 tend to have a lot of obligations—contract and volunteer work, family responsibilities, online Scrabble games—so my routines are always changing. As a result, I write in big, concentrated blocks, quite obsessively for days at a time when the world isn’t pulling on my sleeve. I would love to be able to write a few hours each morning, but when I get going I have trouble stopping. So I like to clear my schedule and then write like mad.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?Much depends on the nature of the stall. A long, fast walk if I’m just jammed. Our old country house in a small Newfoundland outport if I’m utterly lost. Vodka if I’ve just lost my nerve.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?My head went straight to: Home? Please define your terms. My gut went straight to lilacs. Lilacs and Ozonal.
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?Conversations, whether they involve me or not. Eavesdropping, especially when I have to fill in the blanks. Also news stories that leave something to the imagination. Much like Daneen in Ledger, I pilfer other people’s juicy details, plunder their screwed up families.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?My husband is a writer, and a fantastic cook. He feeds me, which I find essential to my work.  Also, sometimes other writers invite us over and feed us. Very important. Especially if they let something slip about their screwed up families over the main course.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?1. Write a screenplay. 2. Hike by myself through the southwestern US—Utah, Nevada, New Mexico. I’m certain there’s something waiting for me there, though I have no idea what. Death by tarantula, perhaps.
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?For many years I worked in communications—public relations, all that—which is part writing, but also the opposite of writing in the sense we’re talking about here.  And I loved it: loved honing the message, loved managing crises, loved deflecting the heat in heated interviews. The desire to focus on my own writing took me away from that career, but I might go back to it yet if the right opportunity presents itself.
My other fantasy career: house painter (interiors only and get to pick the colours).
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?I did do something else. And then something else and something else again, all in a vain attempt not to write. But the writing kept banging on my door, so I let it in and then bam, next thing I knew I got used to not having to leave the house every morning—and to asserting ideas that were actually my own.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill recently blew me away. Gorgeous, evocative, gutting. The last great film I saw was probably a television series: Scott & Bailey comes immediately to mind. I’m enamoured of the TV that’s happening these days, especially in Britain and Scandinavia. Sharp writing, complex characters, and no pat answers.
20 - What are you currently working on?I have a pretty solid idea for another novel that I’ve just started about interconnectivity—in nature, among people, and through the internet—and the near impossibility of escaping the past. But just now I’m longing to write something short and saucy, so I might detour into short stories to satisfy that craving.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;

new from above/ground press: Robinson + Markotić

Simplified Holy Passage
Elizabeth Robinson
$4
See link here for more information

ins & outs
Nicole Markotić
$4
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
July 2014
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above). Scroll down here to see various backlist titles (many, many things are still in print) or see the sidebar list of names on the above/ground press blog.

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

Forthcoming chapbooks by Amanda Earl, Ashley-Elizabeth Best, Hugh Thomas and Katie L. Price!

and don’t forget about the above/ground press 22nd anniversary reading/launch/party on August 27th!

A short interview with Meredith Quartermain

My short interview with Vancouver writer Meredith Quartermain on her new work of short fiction, I, Bartleby (Talonbooks, 2015), is now online at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

Allison Green, The Ghosts Who Travel With Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan’s America

Brautigan’s books offered more than a bohemian world, where pretty women made their poet lovers paintings and wore nothing under their pretty dresses. His books gave me words and sentences, rhythms, a style. He was the first lyrical writer I’d ever read, the first writer more interested in sentences and words than story. I responded by shrugging into the pajama sleeves of his style.And then, again, there was the sex. In one chapter of Trout, the narrator and his wife have sex in a hot springs. She asks him to pull out early and, Brautigan writes, “My sperm came out into the water, unaccustomed to the light, and instantly it became a misty, stringy kind of thing and swirled out like a falling star.” I’m thirteen, in my aunt and uncle’s postwar house after my cousins have gone to sleep. I read this passage and turn back to the cover of the book, with its black-and-white photograph of Brautigan with an unidentified woman. He is wearing what looks like a felt hat, a pinstriped vest over a paisley shirt, a peacoat, and two strands of beads. She has granny glasses, a lace headband, and a cape over a skirt. They are the kind of people who have sex in hot spring pools and later write about it. They are people I could become.            My little cousins are sleeping, and I’m almost done reading Trout Fishing in America. I haven’t closed the curtains, even as night has fallen. My aunt and uncle’s house is perched on a hill in the Magnolia neighborhood, and if I were to walk to the window I would see the streetlights across the valley, shining in the cold. But instead, I look at myself in the glass and wonder whether his world is one I’ll ever enter.
I admit to being uncertain, yet intrigued, when I first heard of Seattle, Washington writer Allison Green’s [see my recent interview with her here] The Ghosts Who Travel With Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan’s America (Portland OR: Ooligan Press, 2015). There have been dozens of books on the late Beat writer Richard Brautigan, spawning multiple ‘pilgrimage’ titles over the past few decades, yet the handful of titles I’ve seen so far include a wide variety of quality. Given this, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Allison Green, a writer I hadn’t previously heard of.
Since I first read Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 (1972) as a seventeen year old [see my write-up on such here], I’d been hooked. I read every book I could get my hands on, moving eventually from titles by Brautigan to titles on him, from essays, poems, memoirs and travelogues, as well as a very fine memoir by his daughter, Ianthe. It took six months for me to read through the thousand pages of his recent biography, a book absolutely incredible for its attention, scope and detail (I really can’t recommend it enough). The lack of new material on Brautigan, I suspect, drove a number of us to write our own works on Brautigan. My own attempts include a poetry collection, and a fiction work-in-progress.
Composed in five sections of short, self-contained sections, Green’s creative non-fiction work The Ghosts Who Travel With Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan’s America accumulates much in the way Brautigan’s own prose did, and explores her own love of his writing through a highly entertaining memoir of a series of trips she and her partner took across Brautigan’s geography, taking her map directly from Trout Fishing in America (1967). Composed as a love letter to Brautigan’s writing, she writes of the bucket list she made when she was thirteen, including the wish to meet the author: “Why him? I keep asking myself. Why, of all people, Richard Brautigan?” She writes of, being born in 1963, just missing out on a cultural movement that America had simply moved on from, which kept calling her back. The summer she was twelve, she discovers his work in a library:
            The sentence on the cover was the most beautiful sentence I had ever read: “In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.” Three times the word “done,” like a bell tolling. A life somehow lived in sweet, pink juice, distilled to its essence. I looked up at the librarians, the shelves of books, the men reading newspapers, and said the sentence under my breath, glancing back at the cover until I had it memorized.            The book as an object was itself a distillation of what I perceived to be hippie culture—and this was the mid-1970s, so the culture was waning. Hippies meant plain but beautiful women and earnest, artistic men. The black and white of the photo signaled an authentic aesthetic, simple and true. The design, with the first sentence of the novel on the cover, meant anything could happen. And the book was small and slender, like a poem in my pocket. I took the sixties home with me.
With sections “The Girl from Idaho,” “Generation Jones,” “Richard Brautigan Slept Here,” “Ancestors” and “Mayonnaise,” as well as a short “Epilogue,” the narrative does spend much of the first section warming up, but quickly develops into an impressive combination of memoir, essay, travelogue and unapologetic tribute to Brautigan, as she explores her relationship to that work through travel. As she writes:
By the end of the 1970s, the mood in the United States—at least in my United States—was bleak. Tom Wolfe said the older baby boomers, my heroes, had become obsessed with themselves and were no longer championing the greater good. President Carter was wearing sweaters and telling us to turn down the thermostat if we didn’t like energy prices. And one more thing: disco.            In a cultural and adolescent funk, I took refuge in Brautigan. He inhabited an America of hope and imagination, of surreal but engrossing dreams. And what exactly was the nature of those dreams? That was one of the things I went to Idaho to find out.
The Ghosts Who Travel With Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan’s America is a compelling travelogue, and a worthy addition to the plethora of titles on and around Richard Brautigan, exploring a space and a time in American myth, and how one attempts to live in the present, against all of that history. There might be occasional moments in the book that wane, but overall, Green’s Ghosts are impressive, even including sections that transcend themselves in the most magnificent ways, such as “Abraham, Martin and John” that opens: “Girls at slumber parties have séances. Girls at slumber parties in the early 1970s had séances to raise the spirit of John F. Kennedy.” The three page piece ends:
            Laura opened my orange-and-white plastic record player and set the arm on the 45 record she had brought. By the time the singer asked if we’d seen John, tears streamed down our cheeks. The good died young, and weren’t we good?            But I think we were crying for more than our young selves. I think we had absorbed the sadness of our parents who held us in their arms when the man they’d felt such passion for died. And the despair they felt, five years later, when those other beacons of hope were taken from this earth forever.            Our séances didn’t call forth an assassinated president; our séances called forth our parents’ sorrow.

A short interview with Andy Weaver

My short interview with Toronto poet Andy Weaver on his forthcoming third poetry collection, this (Chaudiere Books, 2015), is now online at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

On Writing : an occasional series

We're more than two years and nearly seventy posted essays into the occasional series of "On Writing" essays I've been curating over at the ottawa poetry newsletter blog. I've included an updated list, below, of those pieces posted so far, and the list is becoming quite substantive. Way (way) back in April, 2012, I discovered (thanks to Sarah Mangold) the website for the NPM Daily, and absolutely loved the short essays presented on a variety of subjects surrounding the nebulous idea of “on writing.” I would highly recommend you wander through the NPM Daily site to see the pieces posted there.

Forthcoming: new essays by Jennifer Kronovet, Natalie Simpson, Susannah M. Smith, Rebecca Rosenblum, Renee Rodin, Pam Brown and Sheryda Warrener.

On Writing #67 : George Stanley : Writing Old Age : On Writing #66 : George Fetherling : On Writing : On Writing #65 : Gail Scott : THE ATTACK OF DIFFICULT PROSE : On Writing #64 : Laisha Rosnau : The Long Game ; On Writing #63 : Arjun Basu : Write ; On Writing #62 : Angie Abdou : The Writer & The Bottle ; On Writing #61 : Carolyn Marie Souaid : Lawyers, Liars & Writers ; On Writing #60 : Priscila Uppal : On Creative Health ; On Writing #59 : Sky Gilbert : Yes, They Live ; On Writing #58 : Peter Richardson : Cellar Posting ; On Writing #57 : Catherine Owen : "Bright realms of promise": ON THE POETIC ; On Writing #56 : Sarah Burgoyne : a series of permissions-givings ; On Writing #55 : Anne Fleming : Funny ; On Writing #54 : Julie Joosten : On Haptic Pleasures:  an Avalanche, the Internet, and Handwriting ; On Writing #53 : David Dowker : Micropoetics, or the Decoherence of Connectionism ; On Writing #52 : Renée Sarojini Saklikar : No language exists on the outside. Finders must venture inside. ; On Writing #51 : Ian Roy : On Writing, Slowly ; On Writing #50 : Rob Budde : On Writing ; On Writing #49 : Monica Kidd : On writing and saving lives ; On Writing #48 : Robert Swereda : Why Bother? ; On Writing #47 : Missy Marston : Children vs Writing: CAGE MATCH! ; On Writing #46 : Carla Barkman : Tastes Like Chicken ; On Writing #45 : Asher Ghaffar : The Pen: ; On Writing #44 : Emily Ursuliak : Writing on Transit ; On Writing #43 : Adam Sol : How I Became a Writer ; On Writing #42 : Jason Christie : To Paraphrase ; On Writing #41 : Gary Barwin : ON WRITING ; On Writing #40 : j/j hastain : Infinite Chakras: a Trans-Temporal Mini-Memoir ; On Writing #39 : Peter Norman : Red Pen of Fury! ; On Writing #38 : Rupert Loydell : Intricately Entangled ; On Writing #37 : M.A.C. Farrant : Eternity Delayed ; On Writing #36 : Gil McElroy :  Building a Background ; On Writing #35 : Charmaine Cadeau : Stupid funny. ; On Writing #34 : Beth Follett : Born of That Nothing ; On Writing #33 : Marthe Reed : Drawing Louisiana ; On Writing #32 : Chris Turnbull : Half flings, stridence and visual timber ; On Writing #31 : Kate Schapira : On Writing (Sentences) ; On Writing #30 : Michael Bryson : On Writing ; On Writing #29 : Sara Heinonen : On Writing ; On Writing #28 : Stan Rogal : Writers' Anonymous ; On Writing #27 : Lola Lemire Tostevin : What's in a name? ; On Writing #26 : Kevin Spenst : On Writing ; On Writing #25 : Kate Cayley : An Effort of Attention ; On Writing #24 : Gregory Betts : On Writing ; On Writing #23 : Hailey Higdon : Hiding Places ; On Writing #22 : Matthew Firth : How I write ; On Writing #21 : Nichole McGill : Daring to write again ; On Writing #20 : Rob Thomas : Hey, Short Stuff!: On Writing Kids ; On Writing #19 : Anik See : On Writing ; On Writing #18 : Eric Folsom : On Writing ; On Writing #17 : Edward Smallfield : poetics as space ; On Writing #16 : Sonia Saikaley : Writing Before Dawn to Answer a Curious Calling ; On Writing #15 : Roland Prevost : Ink / Here ; On Writing #14 : Aaron Tucker : On Writing ; On Writing #13 : Sean Johnston : On Writing ; On Writing #12 : Ken Sparling : From some notes for a writing workshop ; On Writing #11 : Abby Paige : On the Invention of Language ; On Writing #10 : Adam Thomlison : On writing less ; On Writing #9 : Christian McPherson : On Writing ; On Writing #8 : Colin Morton : On Writing ; On Writing #7 : Pearl Pirie : Use of Writing ; On Writing #6 : Faizel Deen : Summer, Ottawa. 2013. ; On Writing #5 : Michael Dennis : Who knew? ; On Writing #4 : Michael Blouin : On Process ; On Writing #3 : rob mclennan : On writing (and not writing) ; On Writing #2 : Amanda Earl : Community ; On Writing #1 : Anita Dolman : A little less inspiration, please (Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)