12 or 20 (second series) questions with Monroe Lawrence
Monroe Lawrence (he/they) is a Canadianwriter. He is author of the poetry book About to Be Young and thechapbook Nice,. Winner of the Robin Blaser Prize for ExperimentalWriting and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award, he has published writing in TheCapilano Review, Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, Black Sun Lit,The Brooklyn Review, Prelude, Flag + Void, and BestAmerican Experimental Writing, among other places. They hold an MFA inPoetry from Brown University and are a PhD candidate in Literary Arts at theUniversity of Denver. They were born on Vancouver Island and grew up inSquamish on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw land.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does yourmost recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The process of writing that first book was very fulfilling.It was eight years ago, and I was a mere child! When it was published fiveyears later—almost by accident—I think I finally felt that I’d contributed to aconversation I cared a lot about, one I’d been listening to for years but not yetreally participated in. I think, too, that some of the art for art’s sakearmor I’d built up (you don’t need to publish, you do this for the love of thework itself, etc.) was swiftly demolished by the sheer joy of having, myself,produced one of those objects that, since I can remember, fascinated me somuch—a book. My second poetry manuscript Gravity Siren is made of thesame “material” as About to Be Young, I’d say, but twists thatmaterial into different shapes—bigger ones!
In my current fiction work, I’m interested in the distinctlanguage pressures of prose, the regimes of cliché that make fiction happen.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say,fiction or non-fiction?
Maybe acknowledging a certain pretension is due: poets justseemed smartest. They were interested in talking “about” what they were doing,about art and language and philosophy and hybridity, whereas fiction was a lotmore—in some ways—hermetic. Or a lot less academic. I don’t mind the academic. Thisis ironic because fiction actually wants to talk to regular people, whilepoetry builds a little indentured community for itself. (“Poetry is the scholar’s art” – Stevens.) The poets were more articulate at producingdiscourse about what they were up to, it seemed, so that’s one answer. And thatdid matter to me. Another answer is that poetry is an extremely portable, practicaltechnology for a person. The catharsis is reliable and swiftly delivered. I remembergrowing fascinated, though, with the rich, expansive world of experimentalpoetry, how the community self-interrogated and worked through its issues, suchas the crises of Conceptualism.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writingproject? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Dofirst drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work comeout of copious notes?
I like sitting down and writing. I write a lot. But myprocess is . . . inefficient. Only .01% of the words I type make it into a publishablepiece of writing. I like to think this is because I set a really high standardfor myself and don’t settle for my lesser creations, but maybe I’m just stupid.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you anauthor of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are youworking on a “book” from the very beginning?
Generally, I am thinking about books from the beginning,these days. Aim high, or something . . . It’s an interesting question, though,because I have little interest in writing single, titled poems. I want to builda world, a landscape. I want a poem to feel like a droplet of microorganismswas placed on a page-slide, and the reader is observing a fascinating, like,plant that grew—but is perhaps not finished growing—up from the seed state, andeach page is a different instance of such a process.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creativeprocess? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I think the poets that matter to me are almost visualartists—sculpting text and flecks of letter, which nevertheless enregistervectors of mental sound. Reading those poems aloud can produce appreciablederivatives of the visual form, but it’s less interesting. I started out writingSLAM poetry in high school, and I think those experiences with writing designedto be heard, designed to be appreciated on first listen, led me to suspectnon-SLAM poems of being sort of ill-suited to being read aloud. Muchcontemporary poetry resembles SLAM poetry now, but I think it is still thevisual encounter that matters to me. One exception would be the talk poems ofDavid Antin.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind yourwriting? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? Whatdo you even think the current questions are?
In fiction, I’m frequently trying to achieve conceptualpurchase on something that happened in the past. In poetry, I’m trying to builda pleasing, fondleable object out of words for a like-minded community. From amore scholarly perspective, I’m interested in what I’ve called “aesthetic pain”in poetry, poetry with language that enacts rather than merely describes shameby producing tears in the seemliness of the language. In essays on prose, I havebeen elaborating a term called “fictional pedagogy” to refer to depictions ofteaching, and I’ve been writing about speculative pedagogies. I like doing thatwork. But I rarely think of it while I’m writing poetry or fiction; they’re moreretrospective descriptions of finished thought.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being inlarger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writershould be?
In some contexts, I would probably say that engaging withliterature and the notion of literary value is the most important thing a personcan do. Books and literary writing are tools we use to talk about practicallyall the things that really matter to, at least, me, things people rarely talkabout in other contexts. Again, in SLAM and perhaps poetry more broadly thereis this proselytizing impulse built into the role, like part of your job as awriter is to always encourage and nurture literary art, always encourage peopleto read and write, always be “on the clock” as an advocate for books and poetryand reading. I don’t mind that.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outsideeditor difficult or essential (or both)?
On occasion, I’ve militantly refused to share work withanyone, determining to “do it all myself” and “owe no one anything.” Hah. Butthose moments don’t last. I owe others everything. Like Philip Roth, I ideally wantmy mistakes to “ripen and burst” on their own, but sometimes I get impatientand will just confirm that a revision “is bad” with someone so I can write thenext draft.
The editors I’ve worked with professionally—Broc, Alicia—havebeen lovely and had a light touch.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (notnecessarily given to you directly)?
A mentor once said that the only commonality she’d everobserved between successful art practices was that the artist has to surprisethemself. Given the shortage of such commonalities between successfulpractices, in my experience, that has been really valuable to me. In fiction, onthe other hand, one often does have a goal or plan, so the trick is toaccomplish a task—kill George, build a frame narrative, get Aubrey downtown—whilehaving fun and mixing things up along the way.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, ordo you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
When I sustained a serious back injury four years ago, I decidedto be a little less single-minded about writing. For around a decade, though, Iwould wake up every day and work on writing all day.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn orreturn for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m not sure. I am never stalled! Writing always happens.What doesn’t happen is good writing, and no amount of “inspiration” will changethat. Inspiration is not the common denominator for me. Quite often I’ll write acouple sentences distractedly on my phone on the bus and they’ll be moreinteresting than pages I spent hours on, writing that maybe felt totallymind-blowing and inspired at the time.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Moss.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come frombooks, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature,music, science or visual art?
I like teaching, and draw on pedagogy in the sciences or,say, dance or studio art to inform my teaching. I’ve been interested in filmfor periods. Some of my best memories are sitting around late at night withfriends talking about music. In a way I’m obsessed with talking about prettymuch any art form.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for yourwork, or simply your life outside of your work?
I like how raw and ingenious Anna Mendelssohn is. I like Tan Lin and work that distrusts the writerly. Most sentences in Proust are, for me,smarter than other writers’ entire oeuvres. The novel I recommend most is ViKhi Nao’s Fish in Exile. Incomparable in her vision and lush, sinuouslanguage, her range: Lisa Robertson. Andrea Actis’s Grey All Over was myfavourite book published in the last three years. I’ve been devouringJean-Phillipe Toussaint’s novels in French and am pretty obsessed with theAustralians, Patrick White and Gerald Murnane among others. The poet Alex Walton never publishes anymore but I spend a lot of time staring at his poems. Ilike the absolute political-verbal commitments of Verity Spott and Danny Hayward; I’m really glad they exist. I loved Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini’scareful use of psychoanalysis to express how gender and sexuality are neverfinished in Gender Without Identity. I reviewed late J.H. Prynnerecently here.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write my The Weather.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt,what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended updoing had you not been a writer?
Acting.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing somethingelse?
It’s the best port in the worst storm.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was thelast great film?
Riders in the Chariot byPatrick White. The first film I’m thinking of is, I’ve watched Apichatpong’s Cemeteryof Splendor a lot. I’ve watched it maybe 5 times in different company. Itsatmosphere is this soothingly accurate blend of boredoms, desires and dreads.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Finishing a novel about Squamish and freewheeling inanother about hockey. Putting together some academic essays about findingpedagogy in literature.
