, from the green notebook

, reading Jen Tynes, Brenda Hillman, Rob Taylor + Joy Williams,




Michiganpoet Jen Tynes posted this excerpt of Brenda Hillman’s “Dear emerging,pre-emerging & post-emerging poets,” to social media earlier today,originally published online via Too Little / Too Hard, a site for“Writers on the intersections of work, time and value”:

When you feel paralysedby the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull and predictable work islauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of theprocess, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one ofthem can be a tree. Never look at your phone while walking downstairs. Do notdestroy your body by self-medicating under poetic stress. Just write new poems& read them to your community. Keep the ego in balance because the egoproject is doomed to fail. If you don’t receive the rewards you deserve from“the outside world”—and you very likely will not—try to celebrate the good workof others; hold love in your heart; work for justice for humans &non-humans & keep writing.

Keep writing, most writerly advice offers. Keepgoing. Easier said than done, we all know. I work like a maniac for acouple of years on a manuscript, six to eight months further pushing the bookonce it’s published, and a royalty cheque a year or two later that won’t evencover a single outing of weekly groceries. It isn’t that difficult to feeldiscouraged, certainly. Keep going, keep moving, keep pushing. What are wedoing, exactly? What is this for?

Tynesherself, from her chapbook Mushrooms Yearly Planner (2021): “We haveevery right / to be here muscle memorized.”

*

Awashin the beach-head of Bank Street traffic, another coffeeshop morning, OttawaSouth. I’m reading through Vancouver poet and editor Rob Taylor’s pandemic-era poetrycollection Weather (2024), his afterword to which includes this curiouscaveat:

Then, in the early daysof the COVID-19 pandemic, which had all of us searching for answers, I stumbledupon mine. Quarantined at home with my wife and two pre-school-aged children inour two-bedroom apartment, I had no choice but to venture outside to work inpeace.

Iunderstand that sentiment, especially from the viewpoint of living in an apartment,which would have provided an entirely different array of human interactionsthan where we’re at: three bedroom house, basement, fenced-in yard. Thebenefits of a particular kind of suburban lot, and the three months’ worth ofnotes across the onset of pandemic lockdown that evolved into my non-fictionhybrid, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022). We managed, if youcan call it thus, fully aware we were in a better position than some. My homeoffice, for example. In the early 1990s, when I lived with partner andpreschooler in a one-bedroom Centretown apartment, the only way I could thinkwas to leave for the coffeeshop, come evening. The stress was real.

Seekinga pandemic-era calm, where I delved into chaos. Peace is a relative term, afterall. And the possibilities of space.

“thespan it takes,” Taylor writes, “to read a poem / we can’t yet see.”

*

Aninteresting new interview with Joy Williams, conducted by Adrienne Westenfeld,lands online at Esquire, speaking to “the decades she spent contributingto Esquire, from the editors who shaped her career to the boxes ofoutraged letters about her most infamous story.” I love the detail thatWestenfeld shares of sending Williams the questions, writing in herintroduction that “Nowadays the eighty-year-old author lives in the Arizonadesert, where she communicates by typewritten correspondence. When we sent overa questionnaire to Williams, what we received in return surprised even us. Onvintage Esquire letterhead emblazoned with Hills’s name [the late RustHills, Esquire’s longtime fiction editor, who was married to Williamsfrom 1974 until his death in 2008], Williams sent back typewritten answers toour questions, all written in the blunt, lucid voice we know and love.”

Interviewssuch as these remind of how early editors in such highly visible positions canbe so essential for a writer’s career, from a young Joy Williams publishingstories in Paris Review and Esquire, to my own knowledge ofinfamous Canadian editor and broadcaster Robert Weaver (1921-2008), from histime as fiction editor of Saturday Night magazine, or his yearsbroadcasting the work of a slew of younger Canadian writers on CBC Radio. Backwhen radio held a larger cultural attention, he created a variety of shows inthe years spanning 1948 to 1985, including Anthology, that featuredearly works and appearances by Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findley,George Bowering, Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen. Many of whom we considerCanadian canon owe their careers to the work of Robert Weaver. Will the same besaid in the future of certain editors at This magazine, Maisonneuveor The Walrus?

Inher Esquire interview, Williams responds to her time and experiencesthrough the magazine, and of being edited by Gordon Lish, his pen strikingthrough whole sentences, paragraphs. She answers: “I learned a lot. I had beengetting a little wordy.” The sent questions and her single responses don’tallow for a back-and-forth, and there are more than a couple of her responsesthat scream for the inclination of follow-up. Still, her responses show athoughtful combination of quickness, intuitive self-awareness and sharpterseness, offering only what is absolutely required. Her response to questionsix, the single, pointed: “No.”