12 or 20 questions: with Jon Paul Fiorentino

Jon Paul Fiorentino's most recent book of poetry is The Theory of the Loser Class (Coach House Books, 2006). He is the author of the poetry book Hello Serotonin (Coach House Books, 2004) and the humour book Asthmatica (Insomniac Press, 2005). He has recently completed his first novel, Stripmalling. He lives in Montreal where he teaches writing at Concordia University and is the Editor of Matrix and Snare Books.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Well, I guess I felt somewhat respectable when it was published. My first trade book was Transcona Fragments. I was lucky enough to have Clive Holden as an editor and a publisher. He was kind and thoughtful about every aspect of making that book. I was shocked to find out that the book meant something to people. And even more shocked to find out that it got shortlisted for the Carol Shields Award. I look at the book today, and I know there are poems I would not write today, but I remain so very proud of that book. The whole process gave me a sense of permission to go further with my practice and to grow as a poet.

2 - How long have you lived in Montreal, and how does geography, if at all,impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Montreal has been home for 7-8 years. I went back to Winnipeg in 2003 to teach at the University of Winnipeg. Right now I am living in Montreal and dying in Winnipeg. The anxiety of geography is one of the major themes of my work. I am heavily influenced by writers who deal with race and gender. I have always had an affection for the work of Nicole Brossard, for instance. Gender is of particular interest to me. The anxieties of geography, gender...

3 - Where does a poem or piece 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'm not always working on a "book" but I am always working from a title. A kind of condensed, ideal version of what the poem or story should be. I don't think contemporary writers pay enough attention to their titles. Canadian writing is flooded with remarkably bad titles: The Impossible Weight of Bees. Stuff like that.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Some times you have to sound out a poem in front of people. But I am no performer. People sometimes mistake me for a performer but that's because my nervous energy can sometimes work to my advantage. Honestly, the stress of being in front of people can be a little overwhelming. But you kind of have to suck it up and do it anyways, right? For the work.

5 - 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?

Of course I have theoretical concerns behind my writing. I have questions regarding genre and the professionalization of writing. I have other questions regarding the expectations of linear narrative and the drive toward the emblem in poetry. I am suspicious of the "craft-heavy" type of writing. Which isn't to say I don't have formal concerns. I like to catch myself in those moments when I rely on the more conventional tricks. And that's when I get self-injurious. The most important questions I can think of right now are: 1) Is 3 pm too late to wake up? 2) Is 3:30pm too early to start drinking hard liquor?

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Absolutely essential. It's only difficult to those who are too precious about their work. Of course, I have had amazing editors in my life. They know who they are,

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

It's always the same ghastly experience.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

I don't believe in eating pears. I don't believe in imagery.

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

"Jon Paul, get over yourself. You're not that special. And don't forget: you owe me fifty dollars, you stupid mook."-- My mother, 2007

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Fairly easy because there are things I save for my fiction, like lame jokes, and there are things I save for my poetry, like prairie angst.

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 write late at night and when people start their daily trudge toward their work, it puts me to sleep. I wake up in the afternoon and read and go to the Matrix office and drink a diet Red Bull and work on Matrix and Snare.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I'm fine. Don't worry about me.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

My most recent book is a completed novel manuscript called Stripmalling. It's a comedic romp through the life of a young man named Jonny, who sells drugs to kids in a strip mall in WInnipeg, and then grows up to be a man and gets a job as a university professor who sells drugs to kids. It's the typical Canadian prairie narrative and it's exactly like all my other books.

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?

I love that McFadden quote. I think books come from nature books, music books, science books, visual art books...I am influenced by the perfect pop song. Like "Beat on the Brat" by the Ramones. That's not a joke, but no doubt people will assume it is...

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Robert Allen, Stevie Smith, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Adrienne Rich, Nicole Brossard, David Sedaris, Jonathan Ames, Morrissey, Robert Kroetsch, Catherine Hunter, John K. Samson, David McGimpsey, Christian Bok, Darren Wershler-Henry, Jason Camlot, Derek McCormack, erm, Sylvia Plath and many, many others.

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

Make someone like me.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?

Laundromat attendant.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don't know, rob. I used to go to McNally-Robinson in Winnipeg when I was a kid and look at all the poetry books and fantasize about a life as a poet. I know that seems sad, but it's absolutely true. And I suppose I have always wanted to be a writer. And I suppose my absolute inability to do anything else well sealed the deal. I remember walking into the Zellers staff room when I worked there (I was around 17) and people were talking about me and how I was not good at my job and how I would never "make it." And I was hurt. And then I asked myself, who the hell wants to "make it" in the world of Zellers anyway? From that moment, I promised myself I would waste time trying to thrive in someone else's world. It's kind of lame, but it was important to me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I loved Maya Merrick's new book, The Hole Show. I don't really watch many movies these days.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Thriving in my own world.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Mark McCawley

Mark McCawley is a fiction writer, editor, poet, and small press publisher. Since founding Greensleeve Editions in 1988, he has published over fifty chapbooks. Since 1993, he has edited the litzine Urban Graffiti. From 1986 to 1993, Mark taught poetry and fiction as a creative writing instructor for Continuing Education (now Metro College). He has given readings of his own work across Canada: in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Edmonton. He is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry and short fiction, most recently, Stories For People With Brief Attention Spans (1993) and Just Another Asshole: short stories (1994), both from Greensleeve Editions. His short fiction has also appeared in the anthologies: Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts, edited by Debbie James (Toronto: Rush Hour Revisions, 1998) and Grunt & Groan: The New Fiction Anthology of Work and Sex, edited by Matthew Firth and Max Maccari (Toronto: Boheme Press, 2002). Mark McCawley can be contacted via email: mccawley64@hotmail.com

By Mark McCawley:

Fragile Harvest - Fragile Lives (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1988)

The Deadman's Dance (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1989)

Last Minute Instructions (Toronto: Unfinished Monument Press, 1989)

Voices from earth: selected poems/ with R. Kurt (Calgary: Prairie Journal Press, 1990)

Scars and Other Signatures : prose poems (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1991)

Thorns Without the Rose: fictions & prose poems (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1991)

Stories for People with Brief Attention Spans : fictions (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1992)

Just Another Asshole : short stories (Edmonton: Greensleeve Editions, 1994)

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book was a twenty-four page poetry chapbook entitled, Fragile Harvest--Fragile Lives, which I self-published in July, 1988. It did not 'change' my life, per se, but rather was a decision which altered my writing and publishing future from that point onward. No longer would I alter my writing in any way in order to be published by others, now that I had the means to publish myself (and in this way, I feel my writing has been more free to take risks, as well as the writings of others that I have published over the last nineteen years). To date, all of my collections, both poetry and short fiction, have been small press/micro-press publications.

2 - How long have you lived in Edmonton, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

I am a born and raised Edmontonian. The city is very much an element in my writing. One cannot help but write about where one lives. Especially as a writer, that city becomes your city. In my short fiction, Edmonton is often the setting when not functioning as a character itself. Gender impacts on my work insofar as the majority of my work is told from the male perspective, and often deals with the darker side of male sexual identity.

3 - Where does a poem or piece 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?

For the most part, because my writing is largely autobiographical, it begins with personal experience, moves into the realm of memory where it merges with imagination. This way, all of my writings are connected in a sort of conceptual continuity, each poem and work of fiction and non-fiction blend together into one lifelong work (somewhat akin to Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass'). For this reason, I'm not so much working on a 'book' from the very beginning, but individual episodes and chapters of a life: mine. To this end, the chapbook format has proven ideal.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

That largely depends on the public reading series itself, the venue, and the audience. Reading one's work at a car dealership to an audience that does not appreciate what you are attempting to accomplish is counterproductive. On the other hand, the Canada Council sponsored reading I gave in Toronto in 1990 at the Partisan Gallery, along with the week I spent there with my host, has added much to my growth as a writer. It's important for a writer to step out of their comfort zone and risk everything if they wish to grow and expand. Public readings can help in that regard. Then again, some reading series have the bad habit of becoming insular communities onto themselves.

5 - 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 thinkthe current questions are?

I consider myself a transgressive, post-realist writer. Anti-academic. Working in opposition to the great culture machine (of which academia, the literary establishment, and corporate media are all a part). To paraphrase a piece from Ronald Sukenick's seminal book, Suburban Ambush, 'the form of the Great Narrative is a metaphor for a society that no longer exists.' Myself, and writers like me are providing metaphors for a society that does exist now. Raymond Federman, in his book, Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, gives the best definition I have thus far found for post-realism: 'a kind of writing, a kind of discourse whose shape will be an interrogation, and endless interrogation of what it is doing while it is doing it, and endless denunciation of its fraudulence, of what it really is: an illusion (a fiction).' These are questions I attempt to answer in my work. Only time will tell if I am successful or not.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have run the entire gamut of experiences working with outside editors, from positive to negative. However, the best editors of all are those that remain invisible. It's their job to make the writer look good, not the other way around.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Very little has changed since I first began small press publishing. The great culture machine is still very much alive and well. There are still very few Canadian produced titles I find worth reading, let alone buying. Perhaps three really innovative small presses. There are a handful of fantastic writers emerging now, but if micro-presses didn't publish their work, you'd probably never hear about them. As for the process of chapbook making, it is still a joy.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Do you mean a fresh pear? In season? Hmmmm. I saw a picture of a pear once. On the outside of the can. When was the last time you ate a pear, rob?

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

Shut up.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between writer (poetry to fiction) and publisher? What do you see as the appeal?

Since no one else was about to publish my work, I took it upon myself to do so. A very liberating experience. There is something to be said about following the creative process from its first spark to its final form and having complete control of every step in between. Electronic publishing is just a further step along this continuum.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even haveone? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I've never had a writing routine. I don't have a specific writing time, either. I write whenever I write, eat when I'm hungry, drink when I'm thirsty, sleep when I'm tired. I've never forced it, yet neither have I ever experienced such a thing as writer's block (I've got boxes full of notebooks to attest to that fact). A typical day begins like any other. When I do write, I start with whatever it is that I am working on, then move outward from there to other unfinished works (I'm known to spend years on individual works, while days, or just hours on others).

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

When my writing gets stalled, I simply move on to something else. Very few pieces come 'all at once.' Time and distance have been my greatest allies as a writer. An impatient writer isn't going to last too long.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

If one were to look at all of my published works, they would come to one conclusion: a steady movement and evolution from short poetic works to longer and longer works of fiction. They all, however, are part of the same extended allegory which I try to work into all of my writing (see question #5).

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?

While McFadden's statement is true, it is also true that books come from a multitude of influences and forms, which also influence my work: popular culture, music, performance and visual art, science, multimedia. Writers do not exist in a vacuum.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Various writers and writings have influenced my work at different stages in my writing life (Lowry, Burroughs, Genet, Celine, and Selby Jr.). My present work is most heavily influenced by the writings of the Blank Generation post-realist writers (Dennis Cooper, Gary Indiana, Bob Flanagan, David Wojnarowicz, Cookie Mueller, Bart Plantegna, etc.) and the critical writings of Raymond Federman, Robert Siegel, and Michel Foucault.

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

I would like to extend my small press/micro-press publications onto the internet.

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?

If I could have picked any other occupation besides writing, I would've picked any other occupation. The definition of futility is being a writer in a post-literate age. I write because I have to: it's as necessary as breathing.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Writing is my way of putting order to a chaotic universe, and understanding my place in it. We are the stories we tell.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book: Suburban Pornography by Matthew Firth (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2006). Last great movie: V for Vendetta.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am presently working on several short stories which deal with themes of alcoholism, familial dysfunction, and perceptions of madness. As the publisher of the micro-press Greensleeve Editions, I am in the process of guiding the first issue of the zine, SPLURGE, to publication in 2008.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Dennis Cooley

dennis cooley grew up in saskatchewan, has lived and taught in winnipeg since 1973. part of the literary ferment in winnipeg that led to the formation of the manitoba writers' guild, turnstone press, arts manitoba (now border crossings). has been central to the writing, editing, teaching, and theorizing of prairie literature. next book: correction line from Thistledown in fall of '08.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I suddenly felt legitimate. The world is full of pretenders, the writing world no less than any other, and I had learned to be sceptical about people who called themselves writers, but who never seemed to write. And so I felt awkward myself in that stretch when I was writing but hadn't published a title.

2 - How long have you lived in Winnipeg, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

Been in Winnipeg since 1973, though the geography of the city has not become central to my writing. I tend to be fairly responsive to geography generally, I think, even though it doesn't always enter the writing very much-not in a sustained or overt way at least. I write of yards a bit-at home, at the cottage-more in my early work than elsewhere, but I'm not big on descriptions of landscape as a rule. (I realize your question doesn't necessarily suppose that version of response). Race doesn't enter my writing much, perhaps because I am wary of entering a territory in which I would be out of my depth and apt to get things terribly wrong, so I don't presume (dare?) to address race very much. Gender's a different matter. It's there a lot, in almost everything I write, I think. It's maybe most overt in the endless love poems and muse poems that I write, but it figures all over the place.

3 - 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 have no set methods but I often write toward a book, a gathering of bits around some site. Seeing Red (using Dracula material), Goldfinger (reworking of fairy tales), fielding and Irene (elegies for my father and my mother), country music and the bentleys (set off by Sinclair Ross's As for Me and My House), this only home (space poems), and Bloody Jack (playing with an actual historical figure, Jack Krafchenko)-all were conceived as books and written as books, in some cases over more than a decade, so I do a lot of that kind of work, yes.

4 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

I love them, love sounding poems, finding ways to voice them. And that affects how I write many of them, too. It may be that as a result I write more poems for performance than otherwise I might have. It certainly does mean that in performance I tend to choose poems that I think will "work" for an audience. That means I do fewer pieces that are dense or (for my self-protection) that are highly emotional.

5 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am informed by theory all the time. Not so deliberately, perhaps, as some unsympathetic readers might believe, but always, yes. I'm perennially asking myself what a poem might be. What a reader might be. What shifts in the poem might engage the reader. I'm probably more accommodating of a range of formal possibilities than seems credible or wise to some of the more messianic poets or doctrinaire readers might abide, but I am intrigued by what might be done. I do grow weary rather quickly with some of the more forthrightly orthodox poetry that has been recently championed, and of some of the more language-based writing that has in other camps been promoted. There is something to be said for party politics in poetry, I realize, but they don't interest me. I've never chosen up sides (though I do have my own symathies, admirations, and antipathies) and I think that attempts to enforce orthoxies tend to get in the way. Anything approaching fundamentalism of any kind tends to put me off, and I find myself shrinking from summons to keep the faith or to hunt down infidels.

6 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Actually, I've not had a lot of engagement with editors. In my experience if I've gotten any editorial response it has tended to be brief and minimal. I wouldn't at all mind something more substantial. In fact I've often wished for a reading that would be more thorough, informed, and tuned-in than what so far I've generally found. A lot of editors, I think, are fairly conservative, or they are inclined to respect what you have done and fear doing anything that might be inappropriate, or unwelcome. In those cases, for me at least, their advice wouldn't be particularly helpful. But to have someone who knows what I am trying to do, and why, an editor who knows the precedents and influences, the poetics that are behind my writing, and who reads texts meticulously-well, yes, I'd love to have that kind of editor.

7 - After having published more than a couple of titles over the years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Generally easier, I think, if by easier we are referring to the writing itself. The production of a book is another matter. Its acceptance or refusal at any stage is never untroubling.

8 - When was the last time you ate a pear?

Apparently just the other day. Forgive me, it was so cool and so delicious.

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

What you have to know about poets is: they all are vain, and they all are ungrateful.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

The edges have always been permeable for me, especially as I write poetry in the loose or emphatic rhythms of speech. When I write criticism I also like to construct a more folksy voice, and a slightly playful speaker, one who here and there will break into little songs and riffs, small runs of joke and rhyme. I like the energies of those crossings, and I like moves to break down categories and hierachies. The notion that the critic is by definition a lesser figure, and one who clings parasitically to another figure who is honorifically named as poet or creator, is one I do not support. A good reader is creative and will, more often than some might want to admit, from time to time, and then some, exceed in skill and creativity the very subject (poet) about whom s/he is writing.

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?

Few routines that I am aware of. I write whenever I can, though for practical reasons that means that much of it is done early in the morning or later at night, at least during the academic year when I am absorbed in that work. But I dib and dab into manuscripts all the time. Writing poetry enables frequent brief visits more than working on a novel, I suspect, would. It's so easy to pull out a few pages of poetry and fiddle with them.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Crazily, I'm seldom at an impasse, the words just keep coming. I've got hundreds and hundreds of pages underway at various levels of realization, I throw notes constantly onto paper, draft poems all the time. What lies behind that inertia is what I suppose you are asking in a way. And who can say? Inspiration is a good part of it, I'd say, whatever that might mean or wherever that might take us. A love of play-that certainly. The thing is: for me writing is not traumatic or painful, it's virtually always pleasurable, and I suppose that's what keeps me doing it. That and a pathetic, deluded desire to be read and admired.

13 - How does your most recent book compare to your previous work? How does it feel different?

I don't know, really. The other day Robert Kroetsch was saying to me: you're writing has become more dense and more complicated (he had just been re-reading one of my early books, Fielding). I said I'm not sure, and that most of the characteristics in my writing were there, I think, almost from the outset. You can't, of course, write everything at the same time, nor determine the time of its appearance, so inevitably there will be a chronology of composition and of publication. Trouble is that patterning can mask what is going on. In some ways I am tempted by the argument that after a writer has reached a certain level of competence, and confidence, what follows does not necessarily represent an improvement or a gain, so much as a variation on whatever potential the person is working out of, but hasn't yet written. On the other hand, I would have no problems whatsoever with a careful reading which would identify shifts in the writing.

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?

I am utterly indiscriminate and I will (and do) grab whatever catches my eye. Part of that impulse leads to the research that enters virtually all of the books. I am working on the bentley poems and I read oral histories, letters from immigrants, memoirs. I am writing space poems and I dig out books about astronomers and they begin to enter the text. My mother is dying of cancer, my gardening mother, and there is that cold white garden as she is dying at Christmas, and I think of Pluto, and the next thing I'm reading a bunch of material on classical names and narratives. And so on. I latch onto whatever crosses my eyes, or catches my ear, whatever becomes available because of what I am working on.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Many. Many writers have affected my own work. I've offered various lists of names from time to time-the latest being in by word of mouth-and those who are interested could run them down with a little snooping. The list of those "outside" my work would be enormous, and always growing, as it would be, I'd expect, for all writers.

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

Find: a few months of idleness in Portugal, a greater readership.

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?

Were it not for a series of events that fell into place, I probably would have been a highschool teacher in Saskatchewan, teaching literature, and actively involved in the local sports scene.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Multiple reasons, unfathomable reasons. A series of accidents, serrendipities, sheer chance. That and a love of words. A series of things converged. Intensely teaching and reading poetry, editing poetry for Turnstone, meeting a couple of dynamic friends who wanted to be a part of making a new literature on the prairies, some intense personal experiences, the sudden availability of magazines and presses, the wild enthusiasm of students in Canadian literature classes-all this in the 1970s-made writing thinkable for me.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

One of the last, one of my very favourite books of all time: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything. Film I can hardly say. I hardly track films and I'm always at a loss with this kind of question.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Journals, several journals from trips to Europe. Essays, assorted essays, most of which I am going to gather in the next few months toward a book. Several of them are on Kroetsch. Five or six collections of poetry-one of them a medical narrative, another set of metalingual pieces, another on the muse, more poems in love in a dry land. Lots of things.

12 or 20 questions archive