12 or 20 questions: with Ray Robertson

Ray Robertson graduated from the University of Toronto with High Distinction with a B.A. in philosophy and later gained an M.F.A. in creative writing from Southwest Texas State University.

He is the author of the novels Home Movies, Heroes, Moody Food, Gently Down the Stream, and What Happened Later, as well as a collection of non-fiction, Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing.

He is a contributing book reviewer to the Toronto Globe and Mail, appears regularly CBC’s Talking Books, and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

The fame, the money, the women--it was all too much too soon, it almost killed me. But with the help of the Lord and Zoloft, I made it.

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

Except for the four years in the mid-90's I'm not entirely comfortable talking about without a lawyer present, I've made Toronto my home since 1985. I find that being a dead, white male limits my work, but, alas, this is the hand I've been dealt.

3 - Where does a 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 wait for God to speak to me directly and then simply take notes. I believe this is called the New Criticism or the Intentional Fallacy orTourette's Syndrone, I forget which.

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

Any chance to appear in public without my "handlers" is a very welcome occasion.

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 want people to feel more alive when they read my novels. And no refunds, all sales final.

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

Editors are like the police: they're necessary, but you feel better when they're not 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?

Semi-hard, but, then, I've had a few drinks.

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

A pear of what?

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

Eat a lot, sleep a lot, brush them like crazy. Run a lot, do a lot, never be lazy.

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

Novels are why I live; reviews are one of the ways I stay alive. Or maybe it's the other way around.

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?

Hangover, apologies, regret, delusions, lunch, work, alchohol and loud music, repeat.

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

Good prose, cheap wine, lasting music.

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

As opposed to What Happened Later, my latest novel, my previous one was called Gently Down the Stream.

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?

Sad songs, shouts in the street, non-refundable daydreams.

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

The ones who made me want to be a writer: Thomas McGuane, Barry Hannah, Kerouac, Virigina Woolf's non-fiction, anyone who can sing and dance and make me want to join in.

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

Finish answering these questions.

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?

Daycare worker.

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

Writing is the ultimate DIY art form--all you need is a pen and some paper.

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

There is only one great film, Withnail and I; as for books, if it exists, I haven't read it yet.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Heineken and pain killers.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Glen Sorestad

Glen Sorestad was born in Vancouver in 1937. His parents moved back to Saskatchewan in 1947 and he went to a rural school in east-central Saskatchewan near Buchanan and graduated from Sturgis Composite High School. After a year working in a bank, he spent a year as a study-supervisor in a one-roomed school near the Alberta border and the following year attended Saskatoon Teachers College. He began his teaching career in Yorkton in 1957. In 1960 he married Sonia Talpash and he taught school in Brooks, Alberta for a year. The following year he entered the University of Saskatchewan, graduating with his B.Ed(with honors) in 1963. He taught once again in Yorkton from 1963 until 1967 when he and his family moved to Saskatoon. There he taught at Alvin Buckwold School for two years before joining the English Department of Evan Hardy Collegiate in 1969. He served as English Program Co-ordinator for a number of years at Evan Hardy and established the Creative Writing program there. He was a key figure in organizing the ground-breaking Prairie Writers Conference at Evan Hardy Collegiate and during his teaching career was responsible for bringing many notable Canadian writers into Evan Hardy classrooms.

In 1981 Sorestad decided to quit teaching in order to devote more time to his writing career which had, over the years, seen him establish a national reputation as a poet, fiction writer, editor and publisher. He continues to live in Saskatoon and earn his living as a writer, editor, anthologist and public speaker. His career has taken him all over North America and to various countries of Europe. He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, many short stories, and he is the co-editor of many well known anthologies. He has given well over three hundred public readings of his poetry in every province of Canada, in many parts of the United States, and in Europe (including at a reception held in his honour at the residence of the Canadian Ambassador in Oslo and broadcast on Norway’s public radio network). In 2001 he was one of a small number of poets invited to read at an international poetry reading in Lahti, Finland. In September of 2002 he was the only Canadian poet invited to the Vilenica Writers’ festival in Slovenia and read his poetry before the President of that country in Ljubljana Castle.

Sorestad has been an active member of the Saskatchewan Writers Guild since it was formed in 1970 and was given a Founders' Award by the Guild in 1990. He is also an active member of the Writers Union of Canada and in 1998 was honoured with Life Member status in the League of Canadian Poets.

In 1975 Sorestad and his wife, Sonia, co-founded the literary publishing house, Thistledown Press, in Saskatoon. Over the years Thistledown became known as one of the finest literary publishers in Canada. Sorestad retired as President in January 2000 after 25 years and over 200 literary titles published, many of which were translated and published in different foreign countries.

In November of 2000 Sorestad was appointed the first Poet Laureate of Saskatchewan at the Sask. Book Awards gala evening in Regina.

In November of 2001 he received the Saskatoon Book Award for his poetry book, Leaving Holds Me Here.

In February 2003 Sorestad was awarded the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Commemorative Medal at Government House in Regina.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

My first book was a chapbook of poems and I think just seeing it with my name on it was enough to convince me that this was what I wanted to do with my life, perhaps what I was intended to do with my life. I knew I was a poet and there was no escaping.

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

I've lived in Saskatoon over 40 years now, but interestingly, the urban geography does not seem as significant to my writing as the overall rural geography, and more specifically the geography of east-central Saskatchewan which was the geography of childhood for me. The landscape and geography of the Saskatchewan prairies is so much a part of who I am, of what has formed me and my view of things, that my writing must necessarily reflect this in many different ways, no doubt some of which I do not even see. I never think of race or gender in connection with my writing, but since every writer brings to that writing his/her own background and experiences, I should imagine that some of my poems will inevitably reflect aspects of my ethnicity and my gender. How can we escape who we are? And why would we want to?

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?

A poem for me may begin with a single word, a sound or combination of sounds, an image, a line that forms in the subconscious, an overheard fragment of story, a photo, someone else's poem, an e-mail, a memory, a dream. Sometimes I quite frankly have no idea where the poem has come from. It just emerges from somewhere in the inner consciousness and wants out. Mostly I work on individual poems, each poem being its own whole or unit. But sometimes, one poem leads naturally to another and a sequence like the poems of Language of Horse, an online chapbook, or The Grass at Batoche, may emerge over a relatively short period of time during which little else is written. Occasionally, as with Some Things of Your Father, a manuscript I'm still working on, I knew from the outset that it would be a book in and of itself. I began writing with that expectation. Many books of poems of mine are "gatherings". But I have learned that even "gatherings" can take their own shape and become organic wholes.

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

Yes, even if I know that reading is a performance act and that it involvesanother part of my creative psyche - being in front of people and trying to communicate with an audience - I still think of the actual reading as an opportunity to test new work on listeners to gauge the poem's impact as much as I can assess it. I often discover, in public reading, revisions that need to be done - unnecessary words, flabby expressions, discordant sound combinations - and in that sense, the resultant rewriting is part of my creative process. However, some poems don't lend themselves at all to being read aloud, so public readings can only be part of my own ongoing creative process for those poems I choose to read in public.

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

Essentially I leave the theoretical concerns about poetry to the poetry theorists and academics. I try to keep the aforementioned Adrian Mitchell's view in mind as I write and rewrite. I would hope that what all of my poetry is concerned with is what it is like to be a Canadian born towards the latter part of the 20th century's Great Depression, living through the last half of the century and into the new millennium, responding to his chaotic and teetering world as intelligently as he can.

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

I enjoy working with editors - at least so far - and every editor I've had has made positive contributions to my writing. A few very good editors have even provided me with insights into my own work and I've learned by working with every editor. Every book of mine that has had an editor is the better for it.

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

I usually don't think "book" until some point in the writing or the gathering that a book concept begins to form. For me, the hardest part of the process seems to be the switch from writing individual poems to the mode of thinking in terms of book. I love the process of just writing individual poems and for me, that is where my primary satisfaction as a writer comes. I can't really say that book-making has become harder with the accumulation of books published, but I can't say that it has become any easier. I can say that I don't spend much time worrying about it and I don't lose any sleep over it. My natural optimism governs my writing life by assuring me that eventually a book will emerge.

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

Last Thursday I poached several Bosc pears in a lovely Okanagan white wine and served the poached pear pieces on a banana nut loaf slices, drizzled with a hot chocolate sauce and topped with some whipped cream. It was a sensory cornucopia, decadent and sensuous as all hell.

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

I don't know where the saying originated, maybe in China, but "Life is a journey, not a destination" has always appealed to me as a life theme worth hanging one's hat on; and Adrian Mitchell's words about poetry have always appealed to me: "Most people ignore poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

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

I began writing short fiction and then became attracted to poetry, but over the years I have felt the need at various times to move between poetry and prose forms like fiction, familiar essay and memoir/essay. Some stories, some ideas, need a different shape and voice than poetry can give them.

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've always been a morning person, so my working day typically begins with coffee, breakfast, a brisk 30 to 40 minute walk, then getting cleaned up and ready for work. I write (poetry, prose, correspondence) from 8:30 or 9:00 until sometime in the early afternoon usually.

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

I've been fortunate in never having had to endure extended periods of writers' block, so I can only sympathize with those who have to deal with it as a regular affliction. I tend to be a "streak" writer, like a streak hitter in baseball. When I'm "seeing the ball really good", I write a great deal in a relatively short period of time. Then I may go for a period of time when I am not writing much new work at all, but instead am rewriting and reworking my accumulated writing, shaping manuscripts, reading, corresponding, rooting through my journals for ideas and the like.

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

My last two published works were chapbooks, one traditional print and the other online. Halo of Morning came out of the immediacy of my regular morning walks in the neighbourhood where I live; on the other hand, Language of Horse is more reflective and concerns childhood memories. Both chapbooks feel like extended poem sequences.

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?

My writing is influenced by whatever form I may be particularly taken with at any period of my life, but music and art have always informed my work, quite regularly and at various stages of my writing life. However, the natural world has been a constant in my writing life from my first book to my most recent. If there is one dominant shaping influence for my life's work, then the natural world would be it. I may have written more bird poems than Don McKay or Allan Safarik.

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

Frost and Sandburg among early American poets were important at the outset. Then Canadian poets like Nowlan and Newlove and Purdy, all for different reasons. William Stafford became a mentor, friend and important influence. Contemporary Norwegian poet Arne Ruste has been a friend and mentor.

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

The whole notion of writing a novel just scares hell out of me; yet that same notion, much as I attempt to stifle it in its infancy, is still there somewhere in the back of my consciousness and unless I find a way to kill it for good, I may be forced to take it on. If it just sweeps me away for the ride, I'll go with the flow and see where it takes me.

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 think I would have liked, at some time earlier in my life, to have studied to become a wine maker. If I had not ended up a writer, I may very well have ended up a "burn-out case" in the high school system. I walked away from teaching before it could do me irreparable harm.

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

It may have been the desire, or perhaps the need, or both, to tell a story. All I knew is that I had to do it and that I would not be satisfied until I had unburdened myself of the stories. I believe this still drives me. From the time I was in grade twelve in high school and through my university years I had various people tell me I should consider creative writing. It took me quite a long time to accept this counsel.

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

Ian McEwan's Atonement is a beautifully written and mesmerizing novel and Cormac McCarthy's The Road is gruesome and shocking in its apocalyptic vision while at the same time telling a powerful emotional father/son story with such achingly beautiful prose. Both are my most memorable reads in recent years. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada surprised hell out of me as a movie because it was so under-rated, yet proved to be a powerful story told with an exquisite film touch. Tommy Lee Jones both directed and starred in Jones' directorial debut and somehow the movie was overlooked - I know not why.

20 - What are you currently working on?

True to my usual practice, I am working on four or five different manuscripts, or potential manuscripts. One is the aforementioned poem/prose Some Things of Your Father; another is a manuscript of essay/memoirs; a third is a collection of narrative poems entitled The Story Never Ends; another is a manuscript called Walleye Meditations, another prose/poetry combination.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Peter Culley

[photo: Roy Arden]

Peter Culley was born in 1958. His books are Twenty-one Oolichan 198o, Fruit Dots Tsunami 1986, Natural History Cleave Editions 1987, The Climax Forest Leech Books 1995, Hammertown New Star 2003 & from New Star the forthcoming The Age of Briggs & Stratton: Hammertown Book Two. His writings on Vancouver art have appeared in numerous magazines & catalogues.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I thought the hard part was now over, and that a shelf of books would then pretty much write & publish themselves.

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

I've been in Nanaimo--except for some spells in the 8o's--since 1972. Geography--in the broadest possible sense--has always been a central concern of my work. As a teenager I knew about Paterson & The Maximus Poems so early on in my writing I knew that writing a town was an appropriate activity for a poet. And there were numerous local examples, from Daphne Marlatt's [see her 12 or 20 here] Steveston to Brian Fawcett's Cottonwood Canyon, from George Stanley's Terrace to Gerry Gilbert's Vancouver. Robert Smithson's Monuments of Passaic New Jersey was also crucial in helping me figure out that attending to the "local" could open a lot of unexpected things up.

Perhaps race and gender as aspects of class? I certainly strive to be aware at all times of my privileged position.

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?

For a long time I would try and compose in my head not writing anything down until it was almost complete. I probably lost about twenty books that way--somehow I convinced myself that I had a wonderful memory. Since I got a little wiser to myself I proceed "serially" which just means coming to some sort of outside arrangement, like standing at the bus stop waiting for Totoro to show up. You just have to be a little patient.

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

Often a reading is the first place that I can see both what I'm doing over time in real time and how the reader might be brought along--you can learn a lot. The showbiz aspects I love, coming from a long line of cockney showboats.

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?

My relationship with theory is a pretty mercenary one--if it helps me to work or understand things better I'll use it, whether I've fully absorbed it or not. Spicer's "radio" makes as much sense as anything else.

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

Rolf Maurer, my editor at New Star, is remarkably free of publisher/editor vanity, so his very occasional and poetry suggestions carry great weight. In prose a good editor is essential for everyone but very hard to find and an insufficiently honored calling. The world needs patient editors much more than it needs bright new talent.

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

The past two or three years have been the first of my life where I didn't feel completely blocked all the time. I think I just outlived my own preciousness.

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

Never touch 'em, but our yard has a decently fruiting if precarious old tree which I have saved from the axe.

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

"There's no such thing as an old kitten", spoken to me in a dream by George Jones. George Stanley once told me that you never make any money as a poet, but can usually count on at least one good dinner a year.

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

It's easier now that I've let the boundaries slip a bit. And I've always liked the idea of having two mutually exclusive audiences, though that's not as true as it was.

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'm usually up very early surfing the web, keeping half an eye out for items for my weblog. I'll often start a piece of writing in our little shed in the back yard, away from the computer, stereo & TV. Lately I've taken to using green index cards

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

No one mentions liquor, coffee or drugs here, so I won't! Wallace Stevens or Sunflower Splendor can sometimes help get me "in the mood." A walk. A dictionary.

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

Unlike my other books, which were gathered over very long periods of time, The Age of Briggs & Stratton represents a continuous fairly short period of composition, and all the poems were published to my blog as I wrote them. I've been trying to make my writing simpler & cruder.

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?

All of those things are certainly as or more important to my work as other writing.

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

OED, The Bible, Lee Ann Brown, Walter Benjamin, William Blake, Hugh MacDiarmid, Mina Loy, Clark Coolidge, Bernadette Mayer, Gerry Gilbert, John Clare, John Wieners, Susan Howe, Ted Berrigan, James Thomson, Margaret Avison, James Schuyler, William Cowper, William Hazlitt, Charlotte Mew, Edward Lear, Jack Spicer, Thomas Bewick, Emily Dickinson, Basil Bunting, Arthur Mee's Children's Enyclopedia &c. My blog "mosses from an old manse" is a pretty good index of my likes.

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

Spend a winter north of the Arctic Circle, travel around the world on freighters & trains.

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?

The all-night DJ on a 500 watt FM station. I did get to do that at Vancouver's CITR with Lary Bremner in the 8o's--one night we played Sandanista! all the way through...Night manager at a slightly rundown but respectable residential hotel.

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

I don't ever remember seriously entertaining the idea of any other kind of life. I've been very lucky.

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

Film--Killer of Sheep Charles Burnett

Book--An Irish History of Civilization Donald Akenson

20 - What are you currently working on?

Parkway, the third book of Hammertown. A big picture book on dogs.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Elise Levine

Elise Levine’s novel Requests and Dedications was published in 2003 by McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, ON). Also in 2003, McClelland & Stewart reissued her story collection Driving Men Mad (named one of the “Best Books of the Year, 1995” by Quill & Quire magazine). In addition to her books, Levine’s fiction, poems, personal essays, and critical reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, The National Post, the Toronto Star, Books in Canada, Malahat Review, Gargoyle, and Prairie Schooner, and have been translated and published in Italy. She has been awarded a Canadian National Magazine Award, Honorable Mention for Fiction; a host of awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Council for the Arts; and residency fellowships at Yaddo (where she was an Eli Cantor Fellow) and the MacDowell Colony, to name but two. Her fiction has been aired nationally on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (the CBC), and in 2003 she was highlighted by Margaret Atwood as one of Canada’s most important women writers. Originally from Toronto, Levine currently lives in Baltimore, MD, where she teaches at the University of Baltimore.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I began to see myself as a real writer. Getting reviewed, seeing the book in bookstores made me feel that I’d been heading in the right direction. I vowed from that point on to do whatever I could to keep on going and not look back.

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

I lived in Chicago for eleven years. Last summer I moved to Baltimore. During the time I was in Chicago, most though not all of the fiction I was writing took place in the Toronto area, where I’m originally from. Now I’m starting to set some of my writing in the States – Chicago, parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Florida – as well as Toronto. Not that I’m interested in specific locale per se. I think I’ve always written about various characters’ sense of place – especially the sense of mis-placement, exile – as part of my interest in the psychology of those who see themselves as marginalized, estranged, self-estranged.

While not often explicit, race and gender (and class) are intrinsic to my writing, which is character-driven, concerned with the mutable ways in which we think of ourselves.

3 - Where does a 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?

A piece of fiction usually begins for me with lines, language – sometimes not very much, but loaded, charged with a compressed sense of character and situation, the possibility of what it all might mean. Definitely with a novel I ‘start large’, knowing that that’s what I’m in for. But even with a collection of short fiction, by the time I have maybe three stories I’m thinking ‘book’.

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

Readings sharpen my writing, especially if the work isn’t yet published as a book. In which case preparing for the reading means revising, revising. If I have to stand up there in front of people, the last thing I want to see is that I’m boring them.

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 view identity as a construct, so I’m probably more poststructuralist than anything else, cautiously attracted to the meta side of fiction. Because I’m instinctively a character-driven writer, I tend to find identity theory of interest. But mostly I spend my writing time trying to pretty much figure out the nuts and bolts of things like pacing, structure, nailing the nature of the characters’ relationships.

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

Writing is difficult -- solitary, crazy-making, painstaking. A good editor gets right inside there with you, and enlarges that imaginative space.

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

Two books only so far (alas). I write at a snail’s pace, which is why getting both out felt so hard. Currently I’m close to finishing what I hope will be a third, a new novel. Also I’m four stories into what could be a new story collection, and I’ve begun collecting lines and ideas for yet another novel. Overall, that’s a fat-load of ideas. Problem is, takes me forever to really get at them, develop and shape them. I guess certain aspects of fiction writing seem easier, the elements of craft and technique. But each piece – a story, a novel -- feels so different, and uncovering what each is truly about and how best to express that truth seems to take forever. I’m not naturally a patient person so I tend to chafe under the yoke.

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

Please don’t remind me, I’m trying to forget. I’m pear-averse. The flesh is gritty. Bumpy. Like tiny teeth in the throat.

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

“Be sure to strut your stuff.” Editor-Provocateur John Metcalf said this to me once. And I was like, Thank you!

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

First thing in the morning -- the earlier the better – double espresso then write. Sometimes I can go all day, with breaks, if I’m revising and am pretty far along with the novel.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

I have a home office. Bliss.

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

Other fiction writers’ work, or poetry.

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

This new novel is in third-person-close point of view, which I’ve never sustained for so long in previous work. It also makes a number of leaps in time and place, which I want to come across as pieces of a puzzle, or cogs in a neatly ticking wheel. I’ve always paid a lot of attention to structure, but this feels like a further step, handling a significantly greater number of parts than I have before. As well, this novel necessarily has to convey a fair amount of technical information to explain the world of the characters to the reader – a huge challenge to not let the exposition burden the narrative.

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?

Music, certainly. Opera, especially Baroque opera, which can seem so postmodern these days. Something about the self-consciously performative, the focus on voice, staging, display. I listen to a lot of what’s called ‘new music’ – contemporary/experimental art music, for example Gyorgy Ligeti, Toru Takemitsu, Kaija Sariaaho – fascinated by the combination of rigor, discipline, innovation, expressive capacity. Also I like Trip Hop, Massive Attack in particular. And Alt country -- Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch. PJ Harvey I simply place in the Genius category.

Visual art really excites me too, as a corollary to the written. Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer (his dresses! his lead books! not to mention all his other gorgeous works), Bill Viola are some faves. When I see something that really strikes me, I try to think, what would be the equivalent of this in fiction? A work by Joyce Wieland – Cooling Room II, in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in Ottawa – kind of got me going on my new novel.

The strongest influence on my writing – what goes most directly into the fiction as material – is the experience of being in various environments. Their textures, all the sensory stuff but also the ideas or ideals, the thought-contexts, that inform our thinking about such environments. What people say, how they present themselves, what they reveal and seem to want to conceal. I love driving, walking, flying (I used to spend a lot of time underwater, scuba diving, so swimming would count as well) – I love the sense of transport, movement. Probably because I spend so much time alone, in my little room, at my desk.

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

Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Mavis Gallant, Lisa Moore. Conrad, Woolf. Some specific books: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Ian McEwen’s Amsterdam and The Comfort of Strangers, Jennifer Egan’s The Keep, Susan Choi’s American Woman, Peter Carey’s Theft.

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

Travel more. Also I’d like to find the time to do more critical writing.

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’d be a poet. Or a literary critic. I worked as an editor for several years -- I was miserable doing it, but I could well have gotten stuck there. Otherwise I might have become an alcoholic/drug-addict lawyer.

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

No idea. I just know that many of my earliest, most acute memories are of being attracted to words, language, of having the desire to describe, to invent. Lots of things fascinate me, for a time, but then I’ll drop them completely. Writing’s the one activity to which I’ve always remained obsessively, passionately attached.

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

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road scared the wits out of me. What a combo of stark moral vision and mastery over words and form. I recognize, I think, a similar austerity and artistry in Austrian Michael Haneke’s disturbing film Cache.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Like I said, I’m almost finished a new novel. I have some new stories toward a new story collection. Squirreling away lines and ideas for yet another novel. Plus teaching English lit. at the University of Baltimore. I love the teaching thing. It’s so intense. A pure joy to wave around a dry-erase pen as if it’s a magic wand and say hey, let’s see how this story works.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett was born in Northern California and grew up in New Mexico. In 2005, she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. She was editor of Saint Elizabeth Street for five years. Her first collection, Derivative of the Moving Image, was published in 2007 by UNM Press. She currently resides in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with the writer Jim Stewart and their son, Jeffrey.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Derivative changed my life pretty significantly. I was writing poetry for 18 years before the book came out. The oldest poem was written when I was twenty; I am now 38. ‘Birthing’ the book was an enormous lesson in patience and persistence. It didn’t go into production until four years after it was accepted by UNM Press, and, as with any book, the production process was grueling despite the fact that I worked with genius editors and designers.

The day I received the book, I thought I would be full of anxiety and unmet expectations. Just the opposite, I felt completely at peace. It was as if my life had been missing something for a long time and it was finally complete. Ideally, shouldn’t work this way, but the book also made me feel like I’d finally gained validity as an artist. People are beginning to take my work seriously.

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

I have lived in New York for eight years. This geography does not have much impact on my work. My work is largely internal. The external environs of my new work have to do with the natural world – specifically ‘other homes,’ Oregon and New Mexico. Even when New York is a backdrop for the work, it’s about what’s under the urban system. I have written poems that reflect Central Park and the American Museum of Natural History. But, my work is largely about humanity and how people do and do not fit together. I guess this does describe my city on some level!

I don’t write about race. I’m a boring white girl. Gender has come into my new work as I am writing (in an oblique way) about motherhood and all the difficulties and contradictions that come with that. My new work isn’t about the stereotypical idea of the child as the ‘perfect fulfillment.’ It’s more about the messiness and grotesqueness that comes with motherhood. The splitting of the consciousness that derives from having a child; what Alice Notley referred to as a Doubling.

I also am exploring the idea of alternate movement and the body, as I have cerebral palsy. How the world perceives one’s identity -- or body - - versus our true identity.

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?

This has changed. I used to write long poems. Derivative definitely has themes, but it’s pretty much just organization of these separate works. (a) lullaby without any music, for whatever reason, was written as a complete ‘book.’ It just came to me this way. Most of the pieces are very short, and might be awkward standing alone. For the future, who knows? At this point, I just hope I CAN write another poem!

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

Public readings are the first time that I hear my work aloud. That helps me in tweaking it or locating typos. I work for weeks/months on poems and usually do not read ‘fresh’ work at a reading.

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 don’t think of questions as theoretical, but urgent. How do I deal with my different body and people’s ridiculous reactions to it? How do I deal with the constraints of domesticity? How do I keep myself psychologically and spiritually afloat? Also, how do poets deal with the terrible state of the world? These questions are too serious to take in an academic way. That is why I want people outside of academia to read my work – and every poet’s work!

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

I prefer to have my work ‘done’ before anyone, including my husband, sees it. I went to undergraduate school for poetry. I got an MFA. I spent years bouncing work off my friends and working in groups. I finally feel like I’m in a space where I need to be self-sufficient.

As far as magazines, I actually don’t believe in editing poems. I say this as an editor and a poet. I think a poem is a fine-tuned thing, and an editor should be prepared to take a poem ‘as is’ or not at all. The problem with workshops, editing, and all this is that poets, teachers, and students have a hard time seeing the work on its own terms. Ultimately, poet/teacher/editor organically may want to ‘fix’ the poem in the way they would write it. This makes teaching and editing complicated.

Books are more complicated. Of course, a good editor can make suggestions of poem order and such. But, I still think person has to be deeply invested and intimate with a poet in order to make good changes to her poems. My best editor is my father. As scary as it sounds, he can get inside my head. He can change a word or a comma, and I think, “Yes! That is what I meant!”

7 - Where is your favourite place to write?

The same as my favorite places in life: bed and museums.

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

I don’t like pears.

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

Don’t try to fit in, wait for the crowd to come to you.

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

I can’t write fiction to save my life, but I do write prose pretty cohesively. I love writing essays, and I worked for a while a writer. This confidence has made it comfortable and enjoyable for me to teach my composition classes.

I keep a pretty comprehensive blog. In the tradition of Amy King [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Ron Silliman, and the Poetry Foundation blogs, I try to stick to short essays. I find prose writing a way to release thoughts – about disability, teaching, and the world – that I can’t quite make concrete in my poetry. In poetry, language, image, music, and sound have to be primary. This limits me. The excess flows into the prose. I have more room to bitch and moan about perceived -- or real – injustices. I can’t bring myself to say something like 75% of people with disabilities are unfairly unemployed or I want to kill myself because none of my college students know who Jack Keroauc is in a poem. It needs to be said, but poetry is not the place. Thank God for ‘the blog.’

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 do not have a writing routine. I struggled with this when I was young. I believed that one should write for x number of hours at x time. One should ‘go to work’ as if going to the factory. I still idealize this method and envy people who can do it. I can’t. I just soak the world in and wait and wait. When it comes, I have no choice but to write it. It becomes urgent.

To tell a secret, I am flooded with anxiety when I wake up. I’m not a ‘morning person.’ My husband leaves very early, and getting my kid to school is always a struggle. After that, I fall into my routine. I teach two days a week and work at home the others.

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

When I am stalled, I write prose or don’t write. I don’t push it.

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

The two books are actually very different. Derivative is about coping with not getting what you want. (a) lullaby is about coping with getting what you want. (a) lullaby is a much more mature book. I’ve been told that my lyricism has deepened in a real way.

Derivative was written when I was a baby. Now, I’m an old lady!

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 this question. I am very interested in film. photography, and painting. All of these played an extensive part in my first book, Derivative of the Moving Image. I worked in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and dated a filmmaker during the years when many of the poems were written. Visual art is the framework for most of the poems. Some influences are Diane Arbus, Joseph Cornell, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Francesco Clemente, Lucian Freud, and Andy Warhol. In film, I love Fellini and Olivier Assayas, and Woody Allen, but it’s more of the technical process of a film – of a story told through light – that finds its way into the first book.

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

This list might be endless, but I would say, mainly poetry: Michael Palmer, Nathaniel Tarn, Brenda Hillman, Rachel Zucher [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Muriel Rukeyser, Denise Levertov, Jorie Graham, Lisa Jarnot [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Maryrose Larkin, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Fanny Howe, Robert Hass, Anna Akhmatova, and on and on.

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

I’m pretty proactive person, so I’ve accomplished most of what I need. Last year was huge because I realized three big goals: my book, learning how to ride a bicycle, and getting an adjunct position. But, a list of undones might include living in Oregon, visiting St. Petersburg, donating more money, learning how to swim, and having dinner at Per Se. A large, unreachable goal is to make a film of Another Country by James Baldwin with a soundtrack by Rufus Wainwright.

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 never wanted to be anything but a poet and a teacher. One day, I would like to teach poetry, but it’s not a primary goal.

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

My father, Lee Bartlett, is a well-known writer and critic. William Everson was my sister’s godfather. It’s in the blood.

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

I recently read The Awakening and Howl because I’m teaching them. I also was reading To the Lighthouse, but there is a transition in the second part where the book becomes very, very sad, so I put it aside. I think Woolf is the best prose writer to ever live. I told my husband that she killed herself because she was too talented to live in society.

Strangely, the last ‘great film’ I saw was Short Bus. I really resisted seeing it, but relented for my husband. I haven’t seen anything in such a long time that exposed and studied the human condition in such a true, poetic way. AND it featured the Hungary Marching Band. What more could you ask for?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have been trying to be a good mother to Derivative, doing readings and such. Meanwhile, I did a guest editorial for How2 on poetry and mentorship, which should be published in March 2008. My second manuscript, (a) lullaby without any music, is being considered by a significant poetry press.

I am working on a collection of essays, I’m with the DJ, about disability, poetics, and teaching. I’m also considering including the interviews I did for Saint Elizabeth Street with Andrea Baker, Kate Greenstreet, Bruce Covey, and others. I’m trying also to be a good daughter/friend/citizen/wife/professor/mother/poet and find a house to live in for summer in Oregon and do the family taxes. I’m a busy woman!

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Lisa Jarnot

Lisa Jarnot's fourth collection of poems, Night Scenes, will be available from Flood Editions this spring. She is the owner and operator of Catskill Organics Farm.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I wouldn't say that it changed my life. It more simply entered into the trajectory of the work that I do as a poet. I'm not really fond of the idea of publishing as a gauge of what one does as a writer— when I teach in MFA programs I have a lot of students who come to me with the burning question "Where should I send my manuscript?" I think the real question should be "What is my relation to my craft?"

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

I've lived in New York for 14 years and yes, New York is in the poems, but more importantly the influence of the New York School is in my poems. I came to New York to be close to two of my favorite writers, Bernadette Mayer and Allen Ginsberg. There are other writers of the Lower East Side who are masters as well: I think John Godfrey is one of the great American poets. People maybe don't know his work as much as they should/could. And David Henderson who started out as an editor of Umbra magazine and part of the Black Arts Movement. So I do feel very lucky to have spent time with some of these folks. As for race and gender, that feels like a question that needs to be answered by a critic rather than a poet. I think of poetry in Robert Creeley's terms, that it's an expression of the Human Condition plain and simple. When I hear words like race and gender I feel like I'm in a classroom.

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?

The poem usually begins with a musical phrase. I don't think in terms of books.

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

Part of. The articulation of the language is part of the creative work for me, though I don't think it has to be for everyone. (I think of Emily Dickinson who never gave a poetry reading. She didn't suffer for it.)

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?

My writing is simply what it is. The concerns are actual rather than theoretical-- I think of poetry as part of the process of living. Again, I'll leave the theoretical for the critics.

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

I've never worked with an outside 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?

Each book is different. I've never thought of them in terms of level of difficulty.

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

I write in whatever form the work takes naturally. Again, I wouldn't say it's a question of level of difficulty. Some things need to be expressed as essay, others as poems, others as letters to the editor, etc.

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 don't have a writing routine. Occasionally an opening line of a poem will come into my head and I'll write it down. If I'm lucky I have ten or twelve new poems a year. But most of my time is spent doing other things: reading, running, cooking, knitting, gardening. I start the day with coffee and a jog and I read the UK Guardian online. I'm always a poet, but I'm not always thinking about writing poems.

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

I don't try to force writing, so I don't seek inspiration. I simply write poems when they are present to be written. Other times I do other things. Those other things (see above) may create sparks of inspiration, and the breaks/stalls/blocks/gathering periods may be necessary. I think that looking for the poem is a bad way to go about it.

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

My work is all really part of a continuum. I think of writing as a process, so each book is part of a bigger constellation of what I do as a writer. Each book feeds off the last. Again, I'd be very happy to let other people hash out comparisons of my 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?

Everything. I don't think that books necessarily come from books— or rather that seems like a very limiting way to think about book-writing. I think the spoons and forks in the silverware drawer can be just as interesting as War and Peace.

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

Really everything I read is important to my work and to my life. I'm a horticulturalist, so there is a lot of green reading material in my life. Paleoanthropology, astronomy, biology, filmmaking, rock and roll, radical politics, liberal politics (the new york times), etc. It's all there.

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

Everything I haven't done yet. Really.

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 am now entering into work as a horticulturist and organic farmer. If I have time I'd also like to become a classics scholar, psychoanalyst, karate black belt, architect, doctor, and geologist.

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

I was good at it.

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

This is pretty impossible to answer. The greatest great book I've read (and re-read) is Finnegans Wake, but Ulysses is up there too.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A translation of the Iliad.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Michael Blouin

Mike Blouin has published in many Canadian literary magazines including Descant, Arc, Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Event, The New Quarterly, Grain, Queen's Quarterly, In/Words, Variations, Ottawater and has a collected poetry I’m not going to lie to you out with Toronto's Pedlar Press as well as a novel Chase and Haven with Coach House Books in Fall 2008. He has been the recipient of Arc Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize for Poetry as well as the Lillian I. Found prize for Poetry from Carleton University. He can be contacted at luckyus@sympatico.ca as well as on facebook and at http://minor-poet.blogspot.com/

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I think that in a very real way it legitimized things for me as a writer. There was always a certain part of the process for me that was about producing books as opposed to shorter pieces in magazines. For me it was twenty seven years between picking up the pencil and the first book launch so that’s a lot of late nights to be spending if you’re not at some point achieving the goal you’ve set for yourself. I wanted to be able to hold something in my hands and have it represent my writing. It was also the point at which people I’d never met started to approach me and acknowledge what I do. That’s a nice pay off for twenty seven years of lost sleep. The time a woman said to me that her uncle thought I was a great writer and I didn’t know either of them personally. Or when people start quoting your work back to you. When people you’ve never met take the money they’ve worked to earn and use it to buy your work. My first book completed a long process and started another.

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

There’s the impact of all three to varying degrees. We’ve been at several houses in this area for seven or eight years and both of my novels ( one due with Coach House Books in Fall of 2008 tentatively titled “Haven and Chase” ) take place here in the early 1970’s. I’m not a writer who can research a place they haven’t been and then produce it in fiction. Of course any physical location in fiction is an amalgamation of the actual place, the place in the writer’s mind and the place in the reader’s mind. These three locations join together to make the setting but for me I like to be able to touch the place that this hypothetical location has sprung from. I daily walk and drive the locations in my books which allows me to live in them physically as well as emotionally and intellectually. That’s important to me. Race and gender are inescapable. They are very much a part of my voice as a poet since my voice as a poet is an only slightly modified version of my own. Often not modified at all. As a novelist I write from several character voices at a time. I love the task of assembling a story from a variety of viewpoints and seeing how they come together to produce the narrative arc. Many of these voices of mine are adolescent and fully half of them are female so it is easy for me to move around gender lines and, I think, do it convincingly. I don’t think I would presume to write from the voice of a race other than my own. That would feel presumptuous to me. At least I don’t see how I could assure myself that I was getting it right.

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?

Aside from my first poetry collection everything else is part of a book project. Poems start from lines, individual lines which attach themselves usually to real life events and combine with other lines which seem unrelated at the time they arrive but eventually they find their ways together into one piece. It is quite seldom that I see the end of a poem from its beginning. I’ve just completed a poetry manuscript that traces the lives of Canadian poet Alden Nowlan and American singer Johnny Cash. That was a book from the get go. All the poetry is targeted now towards larger projects.

My novels all begin with a single image that appears and then has some staying power in my head and manages to stay put and return even though it faces strong competition. For my first novel this image was a young girl standing in a nightdress in the middle of a lawn covered with hundreds of dead and dying frogs. I had no idea at the time who the girl was or what was happening but the image would not go away and eventually it was two hundred pages. The novel I’m finishing now started with two boys carrying a cardboard box across a field. In many ways the writing of that story had to do with figuring out what they had in that box and where they were going with it. I didn’t know the answer to that until fully a third of the way through the book. Turns out it’s pretty interesting what they’ve got in there the buggers.

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

I enjoy them. It’s an alternate way of getting the stuff out to the audience and I have received some very useful feedback from doing readings. Reading to large audiences is tremendous because you can feel the response in the room and it becomes like playing an instrument ( or what I imagine that must be like ) and having the audience respond in a visceral way. Plus it is a huge ego rush of course and there’s not a lot of that when you’re alone with the light of a laptop at two in the morning so it’s a nice change of pace.

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?

My current questions are:

How do you write so that each word absolutely has to be there – the book would suffer from the loss of just one?

How do you write a book that makes the life of the reader in some way more tolerable?

How do you write a novel that is post modern, experimental and innovative and still have it rip the emotional heart out of the reader and leave it lying there on the floor?

What is the book that is a collaborative process between author and reader and where can I get my hands on that version of my work? That’s what I’d like to read.

Just how perverse is the process we call memory?

I think a big and ongoing question is the validity of the novel. I think the answer is yes. But I’d like to see more evidence of that on shelves and I don’t usually.

( though that thing White was pretty good)

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

I’ve had the great good fortune of working with extremely fine editors both in magazine work and on my bigger projects ( Alana Wilcox at Coach House, Beth Follett and Emily Schultz at Pedlar Press, Mary Newberry from Descant with help on everything…). Maybe it stems from my work as a teacher but I’m very excited about collaborating on my work with someone who’s very good at doing that. To work with someone you trust and be able to see this thing you’ve worked for so long through someone else’s eyes and see it get better – that’s just really exciting.

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

Harder.

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

I’d prefer to answer as to the last time I didn’t eat a pear. That was just today in fact. In fact I don’t eat pears. Now that I’m with a big time publisher I have the services of an excellent publicist. I’d prefer to refer any further pear questions his way.

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

It goes something like: the best ending to a story is a half open door you can only see part way out of

That was Michael Ondaatje, not personally to me, but very true.

The other ( you asked for two didn’t you? ) was:

Keep writing it and mailing it out. That was Timothy Findley personally to me I’m happy to say and I have it on paper stored away. It was great advice because it kept me writing through ten years of zero publication.

Also don’t mix your alcohol and be respectful to your elders. Those are good ones.

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

Canvas size. I’ve always written both. My first published piece was a short story about a guy writing a poem. It was the first good fiction I’d written and the poem was the first poem good or otherwise ( it wasn’t very ). It was the first thing I ever mailed out and it got picked up by Queen’s Quarterly. That wrecked me for a while.

The appeal of the poem is you can get it done pretty quickly. The appeal of the novel is you can spend a long time with it. Although I’ve almost died or been killed seven times now so I’m always worried that I won’t get time to finish the novel.

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?

A typical day begins at 5:00 a.m. in a house with a wife, three teenaged kids a dog and a cat. So writing happens somewhere down the line. I write where, when and whenever I can. For the last several years I write every time I sit down at the keyboard. I’m really very grateful for that. I like to write to music. Most of the time it’s Miles Davis. Sometimes it’s Matt Good. Usually it’s the same song over and over and over. I used to dream of having a place to write. I never have had one though. So I just go ahead where I am. And of course I get a lot done by avoiding writing.

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

It doesn’t get stalled. But I don’t talk about that for fear that it will. In fact I’d better just say that it does. I eat a lot of pears.

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

My most recent book is a novel I’m completing which plays with ideas of structuring a narrative but in slightly different ways that my first. Also it’s predominantly in a male voice where the first was predominantly female so in many ways it seems a lot easier. Plus there’s a gunfight and an explosion and a really bad guy so it’s kind of fun to write. And it’s not as dark as my first book. Only half dark.

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 certainly agree that books come from books but certainly jazz influences my work as well. I get tired easily of most music but Miles Davis, Matthew Good and Buck 65 I could hear over and over from now ‘till I’m a mall walker. Miles more than any one musician in the choices that he makes. He plays the way that I like to think that I write. John Ford westerns. That’s rhythm and pacing. Old war movies where the boys are pinned down and there’s no way out. Most things in Modern Painters magazine.

People ( the people, not the magazine ).

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

Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter and Billy The Kid. Should be required reading for anyone who wants to write. Or read. Or breathe. Tintin comics. Joyce. Kin Platt. Lolita.

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

Eat a pear.

Live in peace.

Right now.

Also when I signed a contract with Coach House I realized I had to come up with a new Big Picture game plan. That one went on for 27 years. Haven’t quite formulated the new one yet.

I’d like to see my kids become fulfilled adults. That would be very nice.

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 high school. Aside from writing, my marriage and my children it’s the best thing that I do. I teach at a great school with great kids and I get up every morning and look forward to doing it. I’m very lucky that way.

I also would have liked to have an office around an area like the Market say. A modern office in an old building with a nice big window and a really nice desk with just a few things on it. And I’d have a few art objects and maybe some obscure cartoon figurines. But I have no idea what I’d actually do there. Go out for coffee I suppose.

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

I was never presented with the option of not writing. I worked in film production for a while and found there was too much of the extraneous about it. I worked in visual arts a bit. But I wasn’t any good at it so there you go. When I’m writing I’m often achieving exactly what I want.

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

Well this is a well timed question since I happen to be reading Ulysses for the third time and the Bible for the fourth. Two books that really stand the test of time for me.

I just saw the French film Angela. Very good. And Juno. I liked that just like everyone else. And I just saw Babel. Apparently I’m only watching films with one word titles.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m almost finished my second novel. I have finished the poetry manuscript about Cash and Nowlan that I mentioned and I’m quite hopeful that someone might publish it. I’m also working with Coach House on the edits for that novel as well as cover designs etc. I’m really working hard on appreciating my blessings. That’s a good project.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Mary Borsky

Mary Borsky, author of short story collections, Influence of the Moon and Cobalt Blue, is equally in love with the Prairies and the Canadian Shield. Borsky is lives in Ottawa where she writes, teaches writing, rides her bike and skates. She is the author of the Benny Bensky children's books.

How did your first book change your life? I don’t think it did, though writing has. I accumulated those stories one by one, never knowing whether I’d be able to pull off another one, but eventually I had enough for a book.

How has writing changed my life? Hard to answer. I think writing helps me enter aspects of my experience more deeply, and think about things I might never have thought about otherwise. (William Stafford says that a writer is a person who would not have written what they wrote if they hadn’t started out to write it. I’ve always liked that quotation.)

How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography impact on your writing? I’ve been in Ottawa for a long time now, thirty years, I think. It took me a long time to relate emotionally to the eastern landscape. I used to see colour more vividly in the west, for example. But at some point I began to see eastern landscapes in colour too. The colours in the east are more subtle, the lines finer and more small scale. If I were a painter, I would paint eastern landscapes in water colour, western landscapes in oil.

Does race or gender make any impact on you? Race strikes me as a red herring. Class, however, is extremely interesting. Saying that, I’m not sure I’ve ever written about social class. I would like to though.

Most of my stories are about women, but only because I am used to seeing the world from that angle. I have occasionally written from a male point of view, and some of the books I most admire have male protagonists - Disgrace by Coetzee, for example, or Blue Angel by Francine Prose.

Where does a piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you a writer of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a “book” from the very beginning? A story can begin almost anywhere for me, from an image, (“Myna” began from my memory of the water dripping from the water wagon), or from the pragmatic desire to write a story (I think “The Ukrainian Shirt” began this way, by me casting my memory back over my life until I snagged on something I thought might be interesting. I remembered the eavestrough project, then tried to write about it. I hadn’t realized at the outset that I would be writing about marriage, etc.)

It strikes me now that one other way I might come up with a story is to think of trips or visits. A friend of mine (who was likely quoting someone else) said there are only two stories in the world. A person goes on a trip. Or a stranger comes to the village.

I’m always working on a story, not on a book. I was at a writing retreat in Saskatchewan and when there was a falling star, all the writers would call out “book!”, “book!”. I would be calling out, “story! story!” This is not to say, of course, that I don’t care about writing a book, because I do, but for some reason I keep my eye on the story.

Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? To write, I have to enter my own dream world, and public readings don’t intersect a whole lot with that. I do remember, however, looking up in a public reading to see a woman look completely engaged with the story (“Viewfinder”) I was reading. I found that very encouraging. It helped me think of the story as a story worth telling. I had some doubt about that at the time.

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What questions are you trying to answer with your work? I don’t have theoretical concerns. My concerns are about how to get a particular experience on the page, or how to stand back and let a particular situation deepen, how to get out of the way and let the characters interact.

Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult, essential, or both? I welcome working with a good editor. I’ve found that a good outside eye can help me a great deal. Often I experience resistance to a suggestion, but I’ve learned to try suggestions, for sometimes what initially sounds like a bad suggestion is really a good suggestion!

After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier? I wish I could say I found it easier, but I don’t.

When was the last time you ate a pear? I haven’t had a pear for months! Maybe tomorrow!

What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard? Mavis Gallant once said that the most important thing about a story is whether it is alive or whether it is dead. This has often helped me hang in with a difficult story, for if I feel the life in it, I want to hang in and make it work.

Another piece of advice I often return to is from Alice Munro. She said she had only two suggestions for stalled stories. One was to start again. The other was to pull yourself closer to the story. I find pulling myself closer can help a lot.

How easy has it been for you to move between genres (children’s lit to adult fiction)? What is the appeal? If I’d started writing sooner, I may have written more children’s books, but I didn’t begin until my youngest child was eight. I wrote Benny Bensky and the Perogy Palace for her, then have done two others with the same cast of characters.

I enjoyed writing for my daughter (who was a perfect audience at the time), but I also had a secret agenda. I thought I might discover how a novel worked. I’m not sure it helped me with that!

What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep? I work in the mornings, the earlier the better. Which depends, unfortunately, on getting to bed the night before.

When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? Reading what I really love is good. Moving even microscopically closer to the story I’m working on is good too.

How does your most recent book compare to your previous work. How does it feel different? Influence of the Moon and Cobalt Blue are both collections of stories, but the stories are set in the 50’s and linked in the first book I was writing from a child’s consciousness in the first book as well. I think I’ve felt freer to write as I like in the second book.

David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but is there any other form that influences your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? I love reading pop-science articles about black holes and quantum physics and that kind of thing, usually newspaper articles. Needless to say, the articles have to be extremely low level to be comprehensible to me! In a subliminal way these likely influence my way of seeing the world.

What other writers or writings are important for your work? My list of favourites changes month to month, but some have been on the list for a long time: Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore, Norman Levine, J.M. Coetzee. I’m the kind of reader who could, in a pinch, whittle down my collection to 50 books and keep reading the same books over and over for the rest of my life. I’d rather keep an open-ended collection though!

What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done? In terms of writing? Another story?

If you could pick any other occupation, what would it be? What do you think you would have ended up doing had you not become a writer? I would choose to have an occupation where my thoughts were my own, as they are when you are a writer. Where would that leave me? As a gardener, a farmer, a micro-film filer? I used to think I would make a good bee farmer. I still hope to do that.

What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Reading made me want to write. Reading about some other person’s journey emboldens me to tell my own story.

What was the last great book you read? I’m reading Falling Man and like it very much.

What are you currently working on? A story.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Zoe Whittall

Zoe Whittall is the author of novel called Bottle Rocket Hearts (Cormorant) named one of the Best Books of 2007 by the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire magazine. Now Magazine awarded her the title of Best Emerging Author of 2007. She published a book of poems in 2001 called The Best Ten Minutes of Your Life (McGilligan Books) and a second volume The Emily Valentine Poems (Snare Books) in 2006. Her poetry was recently made into short illustrated films showcased in Toronto Subway stations for Nuit Blanche. In 2003, she edited the book Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws. She writes book and music reviews for a variety of Canadian mags, teaches writing workshops, and has worked several small press publishing related day jobs. Recently the Globe and Mail called her " THE COCKIEST, BRASHEST, FUNNIEST, TOUGHEST, MOST LIFE-AFFIRMING, ELEGANT, SCRUFFY, NO-HOLDS-BARRED WRITER TO EMERGE FROM MONTREAL SINCE MORDECAI RICHLER." S he was born in South Durham, Quebec and has lived in Toronto since 1997.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It initially gave me tremendous confidence, though it's not my favourite book to re-read now. I met a lot of interesting people, and learned a lot about what to do differently the next time around in terms of both writing and publishing. At the time I thought I was so old and wordly at twenty-five. Now I look back and think, wow, I was a kid. It's a kid's poetry book. But it provided me with a lot of future opportunities.

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

I've lived here since 1997. Geography does impact my writing, particularly because I'm a home-body and don't tend to travel all that much. I'm interested in neighbourhoods, various forms of community and how we inhabit the spaces within those communities. I lived on a farm as a kid, the suburbs as a teenager and the city for my adulthood, and I'm really interested in rural / urban differences. Race and gender – well, I think it's impossible to not be impacted by race, gender, class, sexual orientation – all those things - unless you live in a treehouse in the middle of nowhere, but it would likely come up whenever you ventured into town for Cheerios.

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?

Poems usually originate from single moments and then I try to group them together when I realize I have enough to create a manuscript. Or, I get hooked on experimenting with a certain kind of style, game or form and write a whole bunch of similar pieces. Right now I'm trying to write long poems on a similar theme, and I'm thinking about a book while I'm writing them, but this is unusual for me.

The new novel I'm trying to write started from one imagined event, and then I came up with a timeline and characters around that event, and it's pretty much been a book in my head since those initial drafts. The first novel was all about character for years until I finally had to make things happen to these people I'd grown to love.

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

Both. I love performing. A lot of my poetry comes across much better on stage, or at least, the humour does. It's great to get feedback on works in progress and definitely fun to meet people who respond well. Then there are those moments where you bomb, or the audience really wanted to hear goth poetry or political rants and you left your gothic political rants at home and want to read your nature poems and your friends don't come out to your readings anymore because you read too much and you sit there with a bunch of strangers until you get paid eight bucks. Those readings suck. But generally, I like being on stage and it often rejuvenates the solo writing process.

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?

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

Both. But mostly, it's essential. There are things I just can't possibly see and understand when I'm so close to the work, and quite honestly, there are things I'm still learning as a writer, and I need a focused and experienced guide to tell me when things are working well and when they aren't. Mostly I leave editorial meetings feeling grateful and enthused.

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

It's easier because I'm learning what my boundaries are and understanding how to be practical about my expectations, each time around. What makes it difficult is working in publishing. It's so easy to become cynical and burnt out on the business when you are inside it, as opposed to being just an author. I'd love to be blissfully unaware of the shop-talk, gossip, insider crap that can really make book-making seem like a bizarre little network of the overworked and constantly panicked. It's hard to be around an industry where everyone is always yelling The Ship Is Going Down! I blame the boomers for this.

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

At the Beaver Café where I tend to write a lot. They have a great fruit and cheese plate that comes with fig jam. Fig jam!

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

It's a toss-up between Wayson Choy addressing a group of us with "Editors are not your janitors! Learn to use a comma!". This speaks to me because I'm just terrible with the typos. I take on too many things at once and forget the details. I'm trying to remedy this.

The other best piece of advice was to remember that grant and awards juries are lotteries and a total crap-shoot. My friend Mariko Tamaki told me that after she was on a jury, and I've successfully stopped crying when I receive rejection letters. Now that I've also been on juries, I realize just how much luck is involved in publishing. My first pick could be someone else's last pick. It's like shaking the eight-ball every time and there is no grand arbiter of Perfect Writing, or when you are a kid and you see a teacher at the laundrymat and you realize they are just ordinary shmucks with dirty socks. Those are the people in charge, and some days you get lucky and one of them likes your work.

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

I think one fuels the other for me. I like to write poetic prose. Too bad only 18 people want to read it, generally.

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?

It depends on whether I'm working that day. On a non day-job or school day, I like to wake up around 8:30, drink coffee and chat with the cat, go to the gym and then start writing around 10 or 11. I usually write in a café without wifi so I'm not distracted by email, facebook, domestic things or the phone. Unless I'm broke. Then I tend to watch soap operas, surf facebook, write to-do lists, send panicked pitches to people who might pay me to write something and feel bad about myself until it's permissible to go have a beer with another writer in a similar situation.

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

Mostly when I can't write, I read. There are a few books I re-read that usually do the trick, or I read non-fiction books about science and political or historical non-fiction. For some reason this tends to inspire poetry. I also go to plays when I can, and interview people I find interesting about their lives. I'm currently obsessed with paramedics because I'm dating one, and I'm constantly bugging her and her coworkers for stories. They are just such a fascinating group of weirdos. Like, today I baked muffins and wrote some press releases. Oh yeah? Today I held a severed arm on the side of the 401. Endlessly interesting to me, what they go through, always faced with the things most people spend their lives trying to avoid.

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

It's a novel. I've never written one before. It's about young queer people, and my other poetry books cover some similar thematic terrain, pop culturally speaking. My poetry is more autobio, or fictionalized confessional. Bottle Rockets Hearts is completely imagined.

People – friends, family, readers, critics, the media - treat you differently when you've written a novel compared to poetry books. It's like instant recognition for being a real writer, like poets are just these strange little hobbyists who write for other poets or for academic audiences. People who don't tend to read poetry often look at you like "Oh, you play Dungeons and Dragons?" when you say you write poetry. It seemed to legitimize something for people when I published Bottle Rocket Hearts.

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 photography and lay science books. I love science mags like Seed and illustrated novels.

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

Lisa Foad. Eileen Myles. Gail Scott. Lynn Crosbie. Heather O'Neill. Jonathan Safran Foer. Jeanette Winterson. Marnie Woodrow. Kathy Acker. Douglas Coupland. Mariko Tamaki. Sarah Schulman. Trish Salah. Chandra Mayor.

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

Have a baby, make a full-time living as a writer, become a stand-up comic, write a play, start an alternative school and have a house in the country and be a housewife/at-home-writer. I'm almost 32. I'm hoping I can cross some of the above off my list soon.

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 would attempt being a stand-up comic. I would probably have ended up being a social worker, you know, just live the stereotype.

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

It's the only thing I've ever done with any kind of sustained passion or commitment. I've been wonderfully mediocre at everything else, or simply got bored too quickly. I'm an Aquarius, so I tend to have many, many ideas and zero follow-through. Every year I think, well, it's time to learn a trade and get some RRSPs. I never do it. I'm starting to panic a bit.

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

Well, like everyone, I saw JUNO and loved it. Brilliantly funny. I also quite enjoyed Once and The Motel. I've read a lot of really good books this year – I just finished Late Nights on Air [see Elizabeth Hay's 12 or 20 questions here] and loved it, I enjoyed Karen Solie's Modern and Normal, Brian Joseph Davis' I, Tania, Joey Comeau's It's Too Late to Say I'm Sorry and Eileen Myles Sorry, Tree. I have to say the last book that really blew my mind was Heather O'Neill's Lullabies for Little Criminals. I'm a die-hard fan of anything she writes and am really happy about all the praise it has been getting.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A new novel called Doing Nothing For As Long As Possible. It's about three characters in their mid-twenties living in Parkdale, dealing with various anxieties around death and purpose. One of them is unconscious for most of the book, one is going crazy and the other works in emergency medicine, see above re: medic fascination. It's basically a book about emergencies verses the sometimes banality of everyday life and these disparate characters' relationships to various monumental near-death experiences and how it impacts their ability to grow up or not grow up. Plus, they are all kids (25) who grew up with cell phones and email address and don't know what it's like to be unreachable. They were 20 on Sept. 11th. I want to explore their relationship to technology, security, emergency and purpose. And there's a storyline about Canadian music and the CBC. I'm also obsessed with the CBC and minor Canadian celebrities, like Don McKellar and Tracey Wright. They have a bit part in the book, as does George Strombolopoulous and a fictionalized version of Randy Bachman.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Amy King

Amy King is the author of I'm the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from BlazeVOX Books, and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press). She is the editor-in-chief for the literary arts journal, MiPOesias, an interview correspondent for miPOradio, and the editor of the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania). Amy teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. Please visit http://www.amyking.org/ for more.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Antidotes gave me a release and space to explode poetry more. I no longer felt compelled to write in a mode or for a specific audience, which can be a bit unnecessarily restrictive. Of course, being young and naïve, I put those restrictions on myself. Self-imposed restrictions need a release; a first book is a good start.

I also got invited to do readings, which are usually fun. I love the social aspect of readings, so getting those invites was a great boon brought to me by Antidotes.

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

I moved to NYC about eleven years ago and just this month moved to Long Island, which city-dwellers would declare is certainly not NYC, though I take a train down the street and am in Manhattan in about half an hour.

Living in a city such as NYC can only impact one’s writing. It’s unavoidable. I suppose all geography factors in, since we are not “we” by body alone; environment is the mother-of-us-all. I’m going to take the lazy route though and just say that Walter Benjamin’s essays on Charles Baudelaire and the “flâneur” and Baudelaire’s writing far better explore how a city affects a writer’s words. I can give you an abbreviated version though, if you press me: the multitudes can be exciting, unknown, stifling, and thrilling. They move and they move you, me, us, we. A city’s architecture can do the same: it changes daily, it confuses and supports, it undoes one’s thinking, breaks the line of vision, unsettles all sorts of notions of safety, and forces one to find strengths, within and elsewhere, one might not have explored before. If you’re lucky, the city collapses “within and elsewhere” and becomes an organic body, pleasured and riddled and full of strangers you inhabit.

Coincidentally, I’m in the process of editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School. It’s an exciting project as I’m reaching out to people in lots of different cities as each city provides its own different invitations and articulations.

Gender exploration lines my work. Race also, though not as obviously. Any kind of box sounds a warning gong for me that I revel in handling. I don’t believe a simple anarchistic or destructive tact of those boxes is terribly productive. People subsist on and inside those boxes, and to simply shirk or destroy them alienates. Rather, subversions, of which there are many, go further and range in temperament and styles. I need to broaden my scope in such efforts, for sure.

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 don’t have a book in mind. It seems many poets do. I work backwards, and that mostly makes me feel uncertain as I can’t rattle off a synopsis of a “project” like other writers. Rather, I primarily work through philosophical and societal lenses. I work in uncertainty, and while that makes it difficult for me and others to say what it is I’m doing – and perhaps dismiss my work out of hand – I long for this unknown, and my sincere openness to it, hell, even my lust for it, is the best modus operandi for me. Perhaps that’s the difficult part of what I do – I read to locate a place where I am happily confused on familiar footing, and trembling, try to locate the corner or shadow of some unfamiliar view/understanding/idea—and then I name it.

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

I’ve cut back on readings. They were productive for awhile because you really do stumble and hit in front of an audience when something doesn’t work. I subjected audiences to new poems regularly. But now that I’m focused on writing and teaching at the moment, I simply don’t have the time I did, though I really miss, as earlier mentioned, the social aspect of readings. I love seeing people and chatting after the “serious stuff.”

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?

My theoretical concerns vary, though they generally deal with ontology and culture. I like to see ideology manifest practically. I don’t know the questions, aside what the schools of philosophy and politics continue to proclaim they are. These are tools or pointing fingers that help locate the real questions that enable us to subsist and exist on a moment-by-moment plane. Wittgenstein wrote, “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” That is the question I’m always answering.

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

Editors don’t necessarily edit anymore. They mostly reject or accept. My jury is still out on whether that’s a good or annoying thing. I’m an editor. I have asked people to make changes. I have asked people to re-send because I felt their submission was truly close but not quite. But I have cut back on editing as it is a taxing, and sometimes, thankless work.

On the flip side, the editor of my books at Blazevox, Geoffrey Gatza, has been nothing but encouraging and enthusiastic, a faith which courses through my veins and lymph nodes and makes me confident about publishing.

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

I’m only working on my third full-length now, and ever-so-slowly, but I find it an essential process. I don’t see the writing solely in terms of publishing a book because writing really has become a behavior, much the way people ritually return to churches or yoga or their studies to explore questions and answers, to locate some temporary place that is okay with uncertainty and query and naming what delights, corrupts, and makes us feel … closest to feelings.

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

I just drank peach juice today, which far surpasses the vanity of the pear. I am a Georgia Peach, having eaten many as a child straight outta my grandmother’s backyard.

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

Be quick to forgive.

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

I don’t easily move between the two. I kick and buck. I’m lazy and don’t like explaining myself. I’m resisting this interview right now. I prefer poetry every minute. I rail and bang against the rules of prose, which I also happen to teach. I write in prose because we, as a society, agree this is the easiest, most transparent form of communication, but I’m no good at it and I’m no anarchist. That’s why I like my blog – I can fuck up there and tell anyone who corrects me thanks, but I really don’t care by midnight.

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 when I can. I usually want to write more than I can. Sickness and a busy schedule factor in. I don’t go for long though without putting pen to paper. I lament the seconds in between tasks that my journal isn’t handy. I often write phrases on my hand.

When I do sit down to read, I usually end up setting the book aside after fifteen minutes to scratch words in the sand for another fifteen. I’m good at keeping class schedules, but no good at a rigid writing schedule. I’ve simply turned it into a second nature or habit. Sometimes it’s a life-threatening allergy I can’t ignore. It’s my tic. I love my tic.

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

Tomaz Salamun. Derrida. Contemporary political theory. A range of pinot noirs. Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Various journals – recently, Forklift, Ohio and Hotel Amerika. Old notebooks from grad school. Poetry readings. Audio of Gertrude Stein.

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

Less restricted. More licensed. More sincere. Less concerned with pleasing myself and others. Diaphanous. Leading and misleading. A net. A parachute. Something that is no longer mine. It belongs to the letters “a- m- y k – i – n – g”.

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’m a film buff: Krzysztof Kieslowski and David Lynch. Music: Iron and Wine. CocoRosie. Modest Mouse. Gillian Welch. P.J. Harvey. Chan Marshall. Guided by Voices. Will Oldham. Dixie Chicks. Photography: Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. Too many to name.

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

Antonin Artaud, Bob Hicok, Cesar Vallejo, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Bernstein, Cole Swensen [see her 12 or 20 here], Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O'Hara, Gertrude Stein, Jacques Roubaud, James Tate, Joe Brainard, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Laura Riding Jackson, Linh Dinh, Lucille Clifton, Pierre Reverdy, Ron Padgett, Susan Howe, Tomaz Salamun, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman – again, far too many to list here. Many, many contemporaries omitted-- Insert your name here ________________________.

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

Well, I’ve traveled, but I want to travel more. I must explore the streets of Bangkok, Tokyo, Zagreb, Planet Earth. I’m headed to Italy and Croatia this summer, which is why I’m tackling a double workload this semester.

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 like the idea of being a detective, though you mostly hear seedy things about the real ones. For the moment, a detective.

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

I wanted to be a musician, but I truly lacked the necessary discipline early on. I’m pretty sure I mature at a slower rate than most. Quantifiably, I’m probably about eight to ten years behind most folks. I’m not kidding.

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

Damn. I don’t read like that. I read lots of books simultaneously. My attention is not short – it’s fragmented. Narrowed down, I’m currently reading The Political Brain by Drew Westen, This is Not Sufficient by Leonard Lawlor, and re-visiting Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

I don’t recall the last time I finished a book. Mind you, those listed might be what you’ll see me holding in a café. I also have loads of poetry books that ride with me and get dipped into for even just five minutes at a time. For example, I’ve just been looking at Sommer Browning’s new chapbook, Vale Tudo, which Jen Tynes generously shipped my way. It’s a timely book for me especially because it “takes place” on Long Island, where I have just transplanted myself. I dig it.

Oh god, films. Forget it. I’ve got The Bicycle Thief and Pandora’s Box sitting by the t.v. They’ll be there until spring break, at least.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A bottle of Benziger Winemaker’s Claret 2004, Amy’s Vegetable Pot Pie, and Tabatchnick’s Wilderness Wild Rice Soup.

I also recently finished an EP for H_NGM_N called, I Want To Make You Safe, which is forthcoming. Otherwise, titles are tucked away until they feel ready. I’m working at it. That’s all any of us can do. It.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Gregory Betts

Gregory Betts is the author of If Language and Haikube, and has edited books of poetry by Lawren Harris, W.W.E. Ross, and Raymond Knister. He has been publishing since '99, when his first poems appeared in a small housepress anthology of translations of translations of bpNichol's translations of Apollinaire's translations. He has published a half-dozen chapbooks, a string of broadsides, and various one-off projects, including sound poetry, visual art, web/digital art, and more. His stories, critical writing, and reviews have appeared in journals across Canada and beyond. Born in Vancouver, he currently lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he teaches Canadian and Avant-Garde literature at Brock University. His work appears in the anthologies Shift & Switch, Outside Voices, Exact Fare Only, Read York, Collected Sex, and TTbpN2: a Tribute to bpNichol.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Like a lot of people, I've been making hand-made books, chapbooks, and 'ephemera' for most of my life, so the question of which book counts as first is somewhat arbitrary. The real first would probably be the staple-bound book of sonnets I wrote to a daisy I was compelled to mow by my family when I was about 9. The book helped me to assuage my guilty, tormented soul. The relief, however, only lasted until my first girlfriend dumped me in grade six.

The first book with an ISBN, however, has made it easier to connect with writers and fellow travellers across broader geographical distances. It's not a secret club, but the book becomes a kind of shorthand for a broader aesthetic that people either dig or duck.

2 - How long have you lived in St. Catharines, and how does geography, if atall, impact on your writing? Does race or gender make any impact on your work?

St. Catharines and I have lived together for a year and a half, but we're still coming to terms. It hasn't appeared in my work, but it hasn't interfered all that much either. I call it a truce with a potential for a general eventual thaw. Some things I doubt/hope I will never come to terms with. This is a city that mocks pedestrians, recoils from cyclists, pities those who would try to use the public transit system. The downtown core is perfectly ringed by big box stores that I call the Grey Belt. The belt pulls tighter constantly, popping urban essentials out into the grey zone -- the downtown general hospital, for instance, just relocated to the other side of a Walmart parking lot. St. Cats lost many rounds with the globo-capital machine but there are underground streams and pockets of resistance that I've been enjoying discovering -- still, everything here comes out slightly skewed, and the city gets giddy at the chance for new and bigger roadways. Recently, a band of hipster urban activists argued theatrically for more downtown parking as a way to revitalize the city. They weren't being ironic. As in many places, people seek to tweak what they have rather than rethink from scratch.Here there be drive-thrus.

I suppose for me geography isn't disconnected from race and gender, politics or economics or technology. Language and writing parenthesize them all, all we know, and there is certainly lots to talk about. As Martin Heidegger wrote, language is the house of being, in which all of it resides,-- constantly impacting, impacted, and impactful.

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 let each project try and assume its most natural form. Sometimes that means a book-length project, sometimes (and more often) a chapbook sized nugget or smaller. Sometimes writing is best served as ephemera, and I have lots of little one-off projects. Sparklers and fireworks. A lot of what I write isn't meant for publication at all -- just trying to see what would happen if.

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

For me, the best thing about public readings is the chance to find something new -- in my own work, sure, occasionally, but mostly in what other writers are doing. I go to readings to find new books or to learn new entrance points into books and authors that I've already read. Really eye-bulging moments happen, but they are admittedly rare. There are special disappointments that come from readings, too: more often then not, good performances make for terrible pages, and vice-versa. The economics of Canadian publishing insists that authors deliver and perform their works, even if their writing or aesthetics are ill suited to the task. Recently, Bob Snider read at the reading series I run here in town and, barely a page into his new book, wasn't happy with how he was connecting with the crowd. He stopped reading and pulled out his guitar and instantly had the audience wrapped around his finger. Most authors can't do that; and indeed, most authors make little to no effort to entertain or connect to their audience -- which is perhaps the reason most literary readings are free or nominal; certainly the reason they are a marginal cultural activity. Consistently, beyond the rare chance of discovery in a performance, the most effective and interesting parts of a reading happen when the PA system is off and the crowd has dwindled to a handful of cultic practitioners; but those moments would happen less frequently between strangers from the tribe without the focalizing event -- let alone the funding to move people between the cities and towns.

In a smaller urban centre, though, readings are even more important. It's kind of like the news -- a window into things for those who find themselves a little adjacent to the world.

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

The word 'theory' comes from 'a view' and 'to see.' I like to look and see. I hope for a nice view.

Current questions: I'm constantly looking for new ways not to mean, I mean, to stumble upon, to find through error, to creatively misread; I'm interested especially in the moments when, in reading, walking, or talking, something outre, uncanny pops up; I'm interested in how that, a fleeting, unintended gem can appear without being invited. I suppose this sounds like the Automatic writing methods of last century, or even found texts of the mid-century, but I'm more interested in sculpting and staging those moments of creative misreadings than in letting go throughout the production of the art. You have to look hard to see well.

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

I have very little experience working with editors on my own writing, certainly little enough to comment. Jay MillAr [see his 12 or 20 here] made a good call to remove unnecessary visual texts placed between the anagrams of If Language. He was right -- so, thanks Jay.

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

Right now, my biggest problem is book finishing. I have no less than 8 works in progress in every direction I can manage.

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

Right before the core.

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

In the words of the poet, 'Chill out, whatcha yellin for? Lay back it's all been done before.'

Morley Callaghan said the writer is one who watches and sees. Margaret Atwood said the writer is the one who writes. John Lennox once told me to write something every day, even -- especially -- if it's not intended to be the final, finished product.

As a grandiose motto, slogan, or bumper sticker, I probably aspire to Blake's axiom more than anything else: 'Every word and every letter is studied, and put into its place. All are necessary to each other.'

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

While I like the separation of genres, I view them more as opportunities to push my writing and thoughts in new directions. I've published poems (lyrics, constraint, formal/traditional, visual, shaped, sound, LANGUAGE, flarf, haiku, occasional, devotional, and so on), stories (fiction and non-fiction), essays, journalism, manifestos, walking tours, letters to the editor, introductions, afterwords, reviews, biography, conscious plagiarisms (see plunderverse for details) and much more. My writing attempts to respond to the inner necessity of a particular piece. As I see it, my job is to transport each bauble I discover to somewhere, anywhere else; just far enough that it becomes self-animated. Every project is different, whereas genre looks for samenesses.

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 don't have a routine, and I have no evidence that routine is helpful for my writing. I write on napkins just as easily as laptops. I have voice recorders, and I have used a pay phone to call in a poem composed while walking and left it on an answering machine knowing I wouldn't have a chance to write it down before it disappeared. I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, and I've even woken up to discover a (disappointing, admittedly,) poem written while asleep. I wrote a short story on the top of a BC mountain, just above the mosquito line. I wrote another story in a vacant squash court below Winnipeg -- just beneath the mosquito line. Perhaps if my schedule were more regular I would solve the problem identified in question 7.

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

Judging by the boxes of works in progress, this has never been a problem that affects me. If I don't feel like writing, I don't write, or just jot down notes, thoughts, random passages. I play guitar, go to the pub whatever, reread John Barlow emails. I'm not hung up on production, but I do get swept away by it.

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

My most recent book project on the shelves is an edition of Lawren Harris' urban poetry and prose. It builds from work I've done before on Canadian modernists and avant-gardists, and international writing and art at the time. Of the book projects on the go, the one I am closest to finishing builds from my work on plunderverse which was started back in 99. These project both build from long trajectories of ideas that have been brewing and stewing for over a decade. As a point of similarity, though one is critical and the other creative, they both exhibit and explore my relationship as reader to other writers and writings.

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

I once went to an energy therapist who located my energy centre about six feet above my body. She told me that I probably wasn't a very good gardener. I'm not.

I like to pursue ideas, and revel in the realization of tightly composed, highly original conceptual projects. This happens in all of the worlds of art, though not all of the time. I work in literature, but I find most things that I read boring or indulgent or decadent. I love a good book -- recent highlights include Freud's The Future of an Illusion, Voaden's Four Plays of Our Time, The Rubaiyat of Amar Khavyyam, and Israel Zingwall's Italian Fantasies -- but no more or less than a good film, meal, song, canvas, urban design, or pretty much anything that requires creativity and thus invites the possibility of an avant-garde transformation. People say that avant-gardism is a non-concept, a bland synonym for innovation. To me, the term is worth pursuing from its original sense (although I'm no militarist) in that avant-garde art is seeking to transform and change the world in which it is made -- is seeking to bring a general populace into a realigned consciousness or space. I'm always interested in artists whose work attempts (most often to fail) this kind of ambition: from Breton to Bok, Borduas to Brand.

Poets are a poem's way of making other poems. I'm interested in the gap moments, when books, poems, language, letters reveal in flashes a capricious structure and the dim glimmer of where outside might be. If I was more paranoid, and I'm close to it, I'd see poets engaged in a battle with Dewdney's language-virus.

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

Spend a year way over yonder in the Yukon and learn the minor key.

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 no longer make things, I'd be happy running a cafe, a bookstore, a restaurant, a bar. My great-great Grandfather used to operate the train from Dundas, Ontario to Hamilton, Ontario, loading the bags, selling the tickets, driving the train and refueling all by himself. I could do that.

I used to spend days upon days researching various inventions (floating cars, solar-powered tanning beds, magnetic trains) that I would draw up in blue-prints and pass to my father, who was an engineer, so I suppose I have a little bit of inventive-engineering in me. In truth, though, I don't think I could last and be happy in any job with strict hours. Regular even ridiculous hours are fine, but they need to be randomly distributed. But if my cynicism ever reaches the point of no return, I'll probably go into politics.

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

I never realized there was an off switch.

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

The last great book, really great book, I read was Boccaccio's The Decameron. The last great film was The Saddest Music in the World.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Overarching direction: I continue to pursue the possibilities of creative misreading (as potential antidote to uncreative writing). Specific manifestations: as mentioned above, I'm just finishing up a plunderverse project that I've been working on for years; I'm editing an edition of Canada's first avant-gardist, Bertram Brooker's manifestos, stories, and essays; I've got a novel in its fourth rewrite; I'm collaborating with Toronto DJ Kent Foran, doing plunderphonic cut-ups and mixes of some of my poems; I'm co-editing PRECIPICe with Adam Dickinson [see his 12 or 20 questions here]; I've just finished a first draft of a collaborative book of poetry with Gary Barwin [see his 12 or 20 questions here]; I'm co-organizing with Catherine Heard a night to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the publication of Refus Global and the ongoing influence of Surrealism in Canada; various essays on the go in various states of array and disarray; and to talk about ongoing lesser projects would require mining the notes and scribbles and messages I've left for myself buried, half-buried, coherent and not.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Rita Donovan

Rita Donovan: Born in Montreal, lives in Ottawa. Has also lived in Edmonton, Germany and Kitchener. Graduate of Concordia University and the University of Alberta. For many years co-editor of Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine, with John Barton [see his 12 or 20 questions here]. Has taught or given seminars in Edmonton, Yellowknife, Rankin Inlet, Iqaluit, Montreal and Ottawa. Has taught in literacy projects in shopping malls, in community centers and on the street. Other interests include cooking, hiking and, inevitably, reading.

Author of seven books, six of them novels. Novel Dark Jewels was first-runner up for the W.S. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and won the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award. Novel Daisy Circus won the Ottawa-Carleton Book Award. Landed won the CAA/Chapters Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award. The Plague Saint was nominated for the James Tiptree Award. River Sky Summer is a young adult novel, and As for the Canadians is a book of historical non-fiction. Latest novel, just published, is Short Candles (Napoleon & Company, 2007.)

1. How much did your first book change your life?

I don't think it changed my entire life, but the publication of Dark Jewels, my first novel, was the kind of validating experience that made sense of the choices I'd made, that all writers make. It was also a relief, as it had been slated for publication a few years earlier, by a press that ran into financial difficulties and pulled out, so I was very pleased when Ragweed published it. The book was up for a national award and won the city writing award so I hope I justified Ragweed's faith in the book.

2. How long have you lived in Ottawa, and how does geography, if at all, impact on your writing? Do race and gender make any impact on your work?

I've lived in Ottawa since about 1985, with one year away in between. I'm from Montreal originally, and I've also lived in Edmonton, in Germany and in Kitchener. Ottawa, though, has been my home for a long time now, and my daughter was born here fifteen years ago. That is what really made a difference. This is her hometown, as Montreal is mine. So we are very attached to the place now.

Where we come from hugely influences how we see not only our immediate surroundings, but how we view the world. "Place" is a character in several of my books. Dark Jewels takes place in Sydney, Cape Breton, during the miners' and steelworkers' strikes of the 1920s. The place and circumstances are essentials of the story. Daisy Circus takes place in Ottawa and in the Cambridge, Massachusetts of the poet e.e. cummings. Landed takes place in Minnesota and in Ottawa, and the actual boundaries of the countries are crucial to the story. The Plague Saint, a speculative-fiction novel, is set in seventeenth-century Florence, and in later twenty-first-century Canada. My latest novel, Short Candles is set in a nameless city that is probably Ottawa. So "place" is very important to me.

Gender and race are significant because they are significant to my characters. I always write from character first, so the issues of gender and race play through my characters (and where I put them in time and place) in the same way that these things influence for all of us.

3. Where does a 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've written short fiction but my preferred medium is the novel, so I guess there is always the potential of the scope of a novel from the moment a character comes to me. I see and hear the character(s). I probably have an idea of the overriding theme, or of an event that gets the thing going, but it is the character, primarily, that informs me. I often have a couple of clear images or scenes that take place later in the book, but I don't know how I will get to them until I begin writing. I've used the phrases "falling into a book" or "falling into a world" to describe the sensation. It is a big commitment, but surprisingly easily to trip headlong into….

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

It's different for novelists than for poets or short story writers. Usually one is reading from a recently published novel. Given the length of the project, it is something that was probably written a couple of years before. Not the same as reading something that was written the previous week.

This also means most novelists are well into a new project (a new world) by the time they are doing readings of the so-called "current" one. All that said, reading along is a great experience. It is nice and less schizophrenic to hear the voices out loud ("oh, you hear that, too?") and it is also a way to connect with the characters away from the page. And, of course, it is a chance to connect with the audience. In this way it does feed the creative atmosphere one needs when writing.

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 think all writers are dealing with the really big questions. The fact that we write at all means we have concerns, observations, remedies? Well, not remedies, maybe. But I think writers care about the world they live in, and about their spiritual and intellectual place in it. They devote a good deal of energy and years trying to show us how the world "is", and how it could be.

My latest novel, Short Candles, concerns itself with whether we can offer our true selves to the world, and about the cost of belonging to it. And the new book I'm writing right now is about the chinks in memory, both personal and collective, and the ways in which we will be remembered, if at all.

Oh, and I told someone once that all of my books are about life, which they are.

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

Both. And it depends on the editor, of course. Their job is often unenviable on a daily basis, but whether I agree or disagree on a certain point, I am aware that we have the same goal, and that helps.

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

Harder or easier? I don't know. Perhaps it is a bit easier in the sense that I know that there will be another book, another story, to come. The first book or two felt so final, as if I'd never write again. Over the years you come to trust that the well will refill.

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

Hah! A couple of days ago, actually. And I walk by this pear tree near my house. It is sleeping beneath a dense snow blanket right now, and it reminds me of the trees in Oscar Wilde's "A Selfish Giant." I keep hoping it will burst into bloom.

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

My British grandmother used to say, "Pay attention, why don't you? You could burn water."

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

I like creative non-fiction and find that an easy shift from fiction. Regular non-fiction is more of a challenge. But any time you move into another area you stretch yourself and learn new things. I'd like to write a play.

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?

Ideal day: get up, get people out of the way, drink coffee, write.

Real day: get up, people won't get out of the way, drink coffee, try to write.

Before my daughter was born I had a home office and a rented writing studio. Once she came along I had to give up the studio ($$) and my home office was turned into her bedroom. Since then I have begged writing space from friends, I've used study rooms at the National Library (a luxury now discontinued by the library) and, currently, I am using the basement office of a nearby church. So. It is:

Get up, people out, get coffee, walk to church basement and write. (No phone there. No computer either, just me an my writing pad.)

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

I read a lot of poetry. I also suggest to my writing students that they read poetry if they write fiction.

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

This goes back to the 'questions writers ask.' I am continuing to explore the ideas of family (the definition of which shifts depending on the book), the idea of 'home' (as place and as character.) In this particular book, I am looking at 'memory.' The book is told in two different parallel timelines, one in 19th century Britain and Australia and one in present-day Canada.

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?

Books do come from books, but hopefully from many other things as well. Art, music and technology inform a lot of what I currently experience. I'm very interested in technology and literature and I am pursuing that study. And I live in a city with wonderful galleries, museums, etc., as well as excellent drama and music series and venues. I make use of these resources and am grateful for them. But I think the question also reminds me of something a French writer noted once (I have tried to remember who it is, with no luck. Mallarmé? Damn.) He maintained that he was a citizen as well as a writer. And there is that comment by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who made his living as a psychologist. When asked how his work as a psychologist informed his poetry, he responded (I'm doing this from memory, here) with the comment that he wondered why no one ever asked him how his poetry informed his work as a psychologist? All by way of saying that, hopefully, we are creatures that embrace and enfold experience and combine it with our own particular gifts to create something irreducible and unique. I like it best when we can't figure out how something came into being. It seems much more wonderful than to say, "Well, I was reading Lewis Carroll, and this idea for a book about rabbits just popped into mind." (Hopped?)

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

So many. Too many. My reading is not as disciplined as it once was. That is, the focus is wider, probably a sign of expanding interests as well as the general disjointed quality of my daily life. I try to keep up on the books by friends, and I read from among the new international titles (sadly, not all of them.) I have old favourites like Faulkner, Wilde. I am planning on rereading Hawthorne and Dickens. And I will read Donne and cummings again. Oh, and since my daughter is studying them, Virgil and Shakespeare.

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

Funny. This could either be an enormous list, or a very short one, as I am a pretty content person. Some of the things I'd like to do I would like to do in a different time. Hike the Rockies again, but back when it was less developed. I'd like to walk through London about a hundred and fifty years ago. I'd like to take one of those commercial flights into outer space, but I'm a bit claustrophobic. I'd like to be on the boat that sailed from Ireland in 1847 with my five-year-old great-grandmother on it. Or the other boat, with my Polish relatives. Or the other one, with my British family. In the here and now? I have a couple of non-profit projects I'd like to work on.

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?

Most writers have already done a lot of the "other things" in order to write. I have enjoyed some of those things. Currently I teach, and it can be rewarding. But, as I always knew I would be a writer I didn't really want anything else. I could envision any number of other careers for myself, but after five minutes or so, I'd start daydreaming about what my desk would look like, or my clothes, or what I would say when "she" answered the phone. Before I knew it "I" would be in 3rd person, with another name, a better haircut, and a character in my own story.

I have a lot of other interests. I was very interested in film and could have pursued that. I also loved languages and Classics and could have seen myself doing something with that (asking people if they want fries with that in Latin.)

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

I always wrote. My dad was a writer. My uncle was a writer. A couple of my aunts wrote as well. My cousin is a writer. We're a dime a dozen.

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

"Great" is always subjective. I have been doing research lately, so the books are mostly texts of various sorts (not that they aren't good!) But for pleasure I recently read Don Coles' A Dropped Glove in Regent Street, a lovely collection of autobiography, essays and criticism. Thoroughly enjoyable. Films? I love film. Don't get out as often as I might, but my friend Cheryl just gave me a pass for the Bytowne Cinema so I hope that will be the excuse I need to get to more films. I did see the low-budget, big-hearted Irish film, Once recently and loved it. I also saw an old favorite, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (which , for film buffs, is Tom Courtenay's film debut.)

20. What are you currently working on?

Ah, the aforementioned new novel. It's really in process at the moment so I can't say much about it. I'm still getting used to the fact that Short Candles is out, as well. I guess the key. Here, is that writers are always "working on" something. Far cry from the bon-bon-eating, stuffed-pillow reclining activity I'd been led to believe.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Katherine Govier

Katherine Govier is an award winning novelist with a special interest in historical figures who are artists. Her novel, Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003. Her fiction and non fiction has appeared in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, the Commonwealth and in translation in Holland, Italy, Turkey, and Slovenia. She is the winner of Canada's Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career (1997), and the Toronto Book Award (1992).

She is the author of 8 novels and 3 short story collections and the editor of two collections of travel essays.

Katherine has been a visiting lecturer in both Creative Writing and Magazine Journalism at York University (Toronto), Ryerson Polytechnical University, (Toronto), and The University of Leeds (Leeds, England).

Katherine has been instrumental in establishing two innovative writing programs. In 1989, with teacher Trevor Owen, she founded Writers in Electronic Residence, a national online writing program connecting Canadian writers in their homes to high school students in classrooms across Canada from Newfoundland to the Arctic to Vancouver Island. Since 2004 she has been on the Program Advisory Committee for the post-degree certificate program, Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers, at Sheridan College, Oakville, Ontario. a post-degree certificate for immigrant, refugee or exiled writers.

She is currently at work on her ninth novel, about Hokusai's daughter.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It didn't.

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

I lived in Toronto about 30 years with breaks for living in Washington DC (2 Years) and London England (2 Years) and now I live partly in Canmore Alberta.

Geography, race, gender--these are huge questions. Of course they impact the work.

3 - Where does a 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?

A novel is a book. Short stories come individually.

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

They can be a kind of reconnoitering with oneself. Meeting readers can be energizing.

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?

Again- a giant question. Really you need to sit down and talk with other writers to answer this. I do think about the contemporary novel as I am writing. I bring the past into the present; it is what I do. This is not the same as historical fiction, and it is "new" in a sense.

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

I don't know what you mean. To me an editor is a person at a publishing house is charged with getting the book ready for publication. I usually listen to her or him very carefully. It is not often a very long term project-- these are mainly superficial changes.

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

Harder, because I choose harder things to do.

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

Three days ago.

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

I really don't think I've had a lot of advice; I'm not sure people are able to hear it and I think it is mostly wasted. Robert Weaver once told me about the difference between a story of ideas (The Immaculate conception Photography Gallery) and a story of characters, and said people became polarized over the former, which I think is true.

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

I do it and like to do it. Non-fiction is more true to observed experience and sometimes I have a strong urge to communicate that way--also it may be more accessible, expecially these days, as people are losing the ability to read fiction.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?

I write most days, early more than later.

How does a typical day (for you) begin?

At my computer.

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

yoga, tennis, martial arts, --- something physical practised with other people in a room full of daylight.

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

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?

Pictures.

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

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

Spend a year living beside the ocean. Spend three months in India. Be irresponsible.

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

landscape gardening, or psychotherapy.

Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

ditto

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

The fact that I was not good enough to be a dancer. The fact that I loved books.

The fact that I loved words and sentences.

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

Out Stealing Horses. (Per Petterson)

great film? I can think of good ones, not great ones.

20 - What are you currently working on?

a big novel about Hokusai's daughter.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with John Barton

John Barton: I was born in Edmonton and raised in Calgary, and have published eight books of poetry and five chapbooks, including Designs from the Interior (Anansi, 1993), Sweet Ellipsis (ECW, 1998), Hypothesis (Anansi, 2001) and Asymmetries (Frog Hollow, 2004). A bilingual edition of my third book, West of Darkness: Emily Carr, a self-portrait, was published by BuschekBooks in 2006. My ninth collection, Hymn, is forthcoming from Brick in 2009. I co-edited Seminal: The Anthology of Canada’s Gay-Male Poets, which was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2007. My work has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, the Patricia Hackett Prize (University of Western Australia), an Ottawa Book Award, a 2002 CBC Literary Award, and a 2006 National Magazine Award. I was educated at the Universities of Alberta, Calgary, Quebec, and Victoria, as well as at Columbia University in New York, studying poetry with Gary Geddes, Eli Mandel, Robin Skelton, and Joseph Brodsky. In 1986, I received a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Western Ontario and in 1994, studied book editing at the Banff Publishing Centre. Since 1980, my poems have appeared in over twenty-five anthologies and seventy-five magazines (often more than once) across Canada and in the United States, Australia, India, and the United Kingdom. I’ve worked as a librarian and editor for five national museums in Ottawa from 1985 to 2003, where I also co-edited Arc: Canada’s National Poetry Magazine for thirteen years and was editor-in-chief of Vernissage: The Magazine of the National Gallery of Canada for two years. I have been poetry editor for Winnipeg’s Signature Editions since 2005. I live in Victoria since 2004, where I edit The Malahat Review.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It made every book afterwards possible.

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

I have lived in Victoria since 2004, but went to university here between 1978 and 1981, followed by two years of work as a shelver in the university library. Also, my maternal grandmother lived in Oak Bay until I was eleven, and we would visit her over the summer. Consequently, my link to this place is quite layered, if fragmented, as if I were peeling back brittle wallpaper, with several clashing patterns showing. It occurred to me the other day that I have been looking at the Olympic Mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca in Washington for more than half my life.

I suspect that anyone who knows my poetry would feel that I evince a strong connection to geography, but I would prefer to say that I am shaped by geographies. I believe landscape imprints itself upon us from an early age—Highway 1A west from Calgary is my true primordial landscape—but I have now lived in so many places that I have a hard time feeling a strong bond to any particular locale. However, those that I have known persistently creep into my writing these days; I live in on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, but I can find myself writing about Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River valley one day, the nineteenth-century Victorian ambience of old Montreal the next, or the neoclassical facade of the British Museum a month later. It can make me feel very disconnected from where I am.

It would be fruitless to deny that race and gender profoundly impact on my writing. After all, by default I am male and white; god knows what unconscious attitudes are communicated through my work as a result. However, because I write from a gay perspective, I feel I am very self-aware and forthright in my ongoing explorations of orientation. I am very committed to the articulation of a fully gay sensibility.

3 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of shortpieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?

Though poems have come at me from many different angles over the years, I find it hard to isolate a single definitive source of inspiration. I carry many potential poems in my head at any given time; which one gets written often depend upon what other stimulants lure it onto the page. Something I have read, for example, will provide the key that will get the process going, and once I have a few words committed, so to speak, the poem truly starts to take shape. I greatly enjoy research to find details that I will inspire me. The majority of my poems have formed themselves from seemingly disparate elements; the goal of writing them is to find out what those elements have in common. While many of my books are composed of poems that may not have been conceived as belonging together, I have also conceived of large projects that I consciously realized poem by poem from the outset.

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

Like periodical publishing, I see readings as testing grounds, especially of new work, not so much of new books, which are promoted by tours that are marketing-oriented in nature. A lot of experienced writers eschew the open-sets that often open or end the nightly programs of established reading series, but I like to read new poems in them to see how they sound. I also like to put myself on the same stage with the more novice writers who form the backbone of such open sets, reading with them under the same conditions and terms. I recently read a new poem that referred to 9/11 in an open set during Wendy Morton’s Planet Earth Reading Series, here in Victoria. Afterwards, a sociologist came up to me and placed the poem in context of the analysis ongoing among his professional peers about what happened that day, its causes and its aftermath, which led me to make several three small revisions that rid the poem of some irksome rhetoric.

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

I am not sure if I consciously take on “theoretical concerns,” though I am preoccupied with the idea of sensibility. For me the best poems evince a way of being that it is their place to record and preserve.

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

It is both difficult and essential. Once I get over the shock of my editor’s insights, I find the process very enlightening and enriching—and the book or poem improves. I soon get over the narcissistic idea that, by taking in consideration the considered suggestions of an outside reader, I am somehow losing creative control. It’s wonderful to consider other possibilities for meaning.

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

I find it both easier and harder. The former because I am simply more experienced at knowing how to compile a book and the latter because my expectations as to what a book should be becomes ever more exacting and ambitious. I don’t want my books to be too similar to one another—though some similarity is inevitable—so the challenge rests in figuring out how to make each one new or different, at least to me.

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

As far as I remember, at Christmas, at my mother’s in Calgary. Pears make me think of Phyllis Webb’s poem, “Two Pears: A Still Life”:

The pears
fruit, the first idea, seed
into core, into pulp and glowing

skin, love’s
radical contour shines here in stillness
secret, original, a dream of candour.

Though they can fail to ripen or can all of a sudden rot, pears are very pure, life’s ultimate ephemeral fruit.

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

It’s not anything that was told to me, but rather something I read and wrote down when I was a student—and it’s not exactly advice. In a Paris Review interview compiled in the Writers at Work monographic series, Conrad Aiken said: “We isolate, we exile our great men [and women], whether by ignoring them or by praising them stupidly. And perhaps this isolation we offer them is our greatest gift.” From this I took solace—not that I would eventually be a great writer; rather that it didn’t matter whether or not my work was greeted with renown, incomprehension, or passed unnoticed. Any of these eventualities need not hinder my ability to realize, in personal terms, what my true potential was, and is, for it could be something I could pursue alone and in my own terms. In the time since, this has helped me put the reception of my work into a right and proper perspective—especially when it has been ill-informed or negative!

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

When I am writing well, I like to work in the afternoon. The morning is devoted to reading (perhaps in preparation), exercise, or domestic chores, the evening to socializing or solitary relaxation. I like also to think of writing as a weekday activity, with the weekends off. I cut my teeth as an after-hours civil service poet, so it took a grant for me discover that this regimen works best for me. However, when I am in the grip of a poem, I can write at all hours, through the night, and for days on end.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

At my computer, which is a desktop, so I am always cloistered in my apartment when I am writing. I should really get a laptop so I can make the world my office. Because I am very fond of reading in coffee shops, I suspect that I could write well in them as well were I suitably equipped. Blocking out distracting environmental noise helps me focus more narrowly on the task at hand. I haven’t written a poem in longhand in over twenty years, so sitting with a notebook in Starbucks is out of the question; I am very tied to technologies far more sophisticated than the pen. It is the technology keeps me creatively stuck and lonely as a cloud in my office.

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

I place a great deal of faith in the healing, purgative powers of revision. I like to rework poems abandoned long ago as failures, poems that I might not have looked at for a decade or more. I am freed by the fact that I can’t remember what my original intentions were, so can therefore happily pervert or cannibalize them, wrenching them in some new direction. By reworking these poems, I am saved from the agonizing void of the first draft. Similarly, if I get blocked when writing a brand-new poem, I simply write down the first thing that comes into my head, however inane. That random thought often proves crucial to what the final draft turns out to be.

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

It is technically more adventurous than anything I have written so far.

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 derive a great deal of stimulation from the visual arts and also have at different times drawn inspiration from science and the natural world. I greatly enjoy researching ideas as a method of discovering ways into them that might not have otherwise occurred to me had I instead tried to write my poems more naively. I like details to be accurate.

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

I am very interested in understanding what constitutes the gay canon, so I am constantly reading gay writers, past and present, to chart the complexity of a shared sensibility. While, obviously, the majority of what I read has been written in English—Auden, Crane, Isherwood, Ackerley, Forster, Capote, Hollinghurst, Cunningham, Toibin, etc—it does cause me to read much more internationally than I might have otherwise—Gide, Mishima, Genet, Yourcenar. I also try to read the occasional Canadian writer: Ondaatje, Moure [see her 12 or 20 here], Munro, Page, Webb, and Hay [see her 12 or 20 here].

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

I would like to live a long time in another country. I am a Mavis Gallant manqué.

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?

When I was a child, I wanted to be an architect, so I entered university with the long-held intention of becoming one. Early on, however, I got thrown off track by doing badly in calculus, which I stupidly studied in French, a language I had a faulty grasp of then, at Faculté Saint-Jean at the University of Alberta. I was also enrolled in distracting English courses on the main campus. Thirty years later, I am still fascinated by the built environment, a fascination inspired by watching office towers go up in downtown Calgary, the rapidly changing city where I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. Looking back, however, I suspect that had I pursued architecture as a profession, I would have ended up, like most graduates, working on very small projects like the design of cookie-cutter houses for developers in suburban areas. Domestic architecture, kitchens especially, hold absolutely no appeal for me, for my abiding interest has always focused on public architecture: performance halls, museums, libraries, embassies, colleges, hospitals, office buildings, etc., signature projects that would have been exciting to design. However, the architecture of today’s public buildings seems to me to be more in the control of developers whose interest is not aesthetic, but monetary. The number of true artists in the field has always been destined to be very few, and my chances to have been one of them doubtlessly almost non-existent. As a poet, the factors affecting my ability to pursue my vocation are so obviously very few in comparison, and if no one wants to publish what I have on offer, I can still write, if bitterly. Architects (and the kind of architect I would like to have been) depend on the good graces of too many who have vast amounts of power and money. That said, I love mooning vicariously over the architecture magazines at my nearby newsstand, skipping the spreads on designer homes, of course.

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

The one place I can be an authority is in my own work. Therefore, I took a degree in creative writing rather than in English, which would have required me to be an expert—likely a nerve-wracked and ineffectual one—about the work of others.

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

I find it hard single out one book, so I will mention three: André Gide’s The Counterfeiters, originally published in 1925 to controversy for its “frank” depiction of homosexuality (to the present-day reader, it seems quite indirect); Augustín Gómez-Arcos’ The Carnivorous Lamb, which explores an incestuous relationship between two brothers as a form of protest in Franco’s Spain; and J. R. Ackerley’s memoir, My Father and Myself, which documents the life of a homosexual in the first half of twentieth century—which in turn led me to my current book, Martin Taylor’s 1989 anthology, Lads: The Love Poetry of the Trenches, which collects poems written by comrades to one another during World War One, when the relations between men were less scrutinized, because under fire, in the aftermath of the Wilde trials and before theoretical paradigms of psychology became entrenched. A like poetry was not written during World War Two.

As to movies, I will mention the recent French film, Lady Chatterley, which beautifully and accurately captures the Lawrentian spirit, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. The last two especially, I believe, are two of the best films in recent memory, and I am struck that both are based on works of nonfiction. The former a memoir painstakingly dictated by its paralyzed author, the editor of Elle, who can only blink one eye, once for yes, twice for no, to select the letters he needs to form words and express himself ; the latter is a work of creative nonfiction that explores a young man’s disastrous attempt to fully abandon the shallowness of mainstream society.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Actually, at present, I am working on the revision of my next book (which is forthcoming next year from Brick), based on my editor’s rather detailed and excellent report. It’s been enjoyable, almost contemplative work. When I am finished, I will go back to the two books of poems I am writing. One is composed of set forms, which I have never tried before. I have been trying to bend, twist, and even distort them while also researching obscure poetic forms not common in English. A good source for these is Robin Skelton’s posthumous The Shapes of Our Singing. My other writing project is very long-term historical project about three men drawn from a loosely knit group of gay artists and friends that thrived in New York through the middle of the twentieth century and, more crucially, before Stonewall, an era when gay identity was much different than it is today. I am very interested in what the lives of these three men—Paul Cadmus (a painter), George Platt Lynes (a photographer), and Lincoln Kirstein (founder of the New York City Ballet)—suggest about the times they lived in and how their aesthetic concerns came to shape the gay body. These poems are coming very slowly, but I am in no rush. I feel very fortunate that no one hangs on my every word.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Juliana Spahr

photo credit: Katharine Wright

Juliana Spahr's most recent book of poetry is This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (U of California, 2005), a collection of poems that she wrote from November 30, 2002 to March 30, 2003 that chronicled the buildup to the latest US invasion of Iraq. Atelos recently published The Transformation (2007), a book of prose which tells the story of three people who move between Hawai‘i and New York in order to talk about cultural geography, ecology, anticolonialism, queer theory, language politics, the academy, and recent wars. The forthcoming Well Then There Now will collect the essays and poems that Spahr has been writing about the various places where she has lived: the Lower East Side, Honolulu, Waikiki, Brooklyn, and Chillicothe, Ohio. This book reflects her interests in urban geographies and their ecologies as it questions nature poetry, investigates the politics of naming, chronicles the current environmental crises, and mourns species loss. Spahr edited the journal Chain with Jena Osman from 1994-2005. And with nineteen other poets she has been an editor of the collectively edited and collectively funded Subpress.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Not sure it did. Although I say that and of course wonder if I'm lying because I'm sure it has had some impact on getting jobs and getting jobs has had a huge impact on my paying of the rent and my eating of food.

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

I live in Berkeley now. But I lived in Oakland for two and a half years. Geography has tended to be something I write about but I have not written anything that is about the East Bay. And yes, my race and gender impacts me and my work all day long.

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'm a project person. I say to myself, oh I could learn something from thinking more about that. And then I go and start reading and then maybe half a year later start writing something. Or I see someone do something interesting and I think, oh I'd like to be thinking about that also and I do that.

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

Probably neither. I tend to just show up and read work that is already done. I haven't been very inventive with this form. Although often the conversation after readings has really changed my 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?

The questions I'm interested in are always changing. I wrote a lot about the legacies of colonialism. Now I'm thinking a lot about the environment.

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

I love working with people. And co-writing stuff. And things like that. Is that an outside editor? I'm not sure I've had one. Although I've been lucky to have some friends who are willing to read stuff and argue with me about it.

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

Probably the same. It also seems so after the fact and after all the work is done that it feels like busy work more than anything else.

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

Maybe two months ago. I remember going through a stage where I was putting pears into salad. But I bought a few that were too ripe and then stopped doing it. Maybe pear season ended.

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

Oh so many! I once had a dream when I was working on my dissertation where Stephen King came to me and told me I should make more sense. That was helpful.

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

The move has been easy and the two genres feel like they feed each other. But I don't think it has been a good "career" move. Like if I wanted to be a more successful academic--whether a critic or a poet--I think I should have just done one or the other. I like though how when one genre feels tired or played out, I can go think in the other one. And then when that one gets tired or played out, I can go back to the first one.

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 usually am working on something in my spare time. So I'll have something in my backpack and I'll try and work on it when I've got a half hour somewhere.

A typical day right now... At 5 am, Sasha wants to be fed; after feeding him, I put him back to bed. At 7 am, he wants up and starts screaming to let me know. I get up with him and try to deal with household stuff until 9. This involves things like getting Sasha dressed and getting dressed myself, putting dishes away from last night, taking numerous vitamins and supplements, making a strong black tea and drinking some of it, eating some food, pumping breast milk, checking email, washing face and brushing teeth, 15-20 minutes of yoga if possible, etc. At 9 or so Sasha usually goes down for nap. I at that moment go to computer until he wakes up. He usually wakes up at 10 or 10:30. I go get him, change his diaper, feed him. Then we might go out and do something until 1. Today I went to grocery. Then I came home and he sat in the stroller outside while I planted some nemophilia plants I got yesterday in the same time slot. Sometime around 1 or 1:30, I fed him again, changed his diaper, and put him down to sleep. He is still asleep and it is 2:08. I am, thus, working on this email.

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

No where. I usually have this reassuring thought that I might never write anything again and I think about the other sorts of things I could do and how much fun that would be.

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

It is in prose and so it felt like it had a lot of words and the words were out of my control because I couldn't keep them all in my head. It was hard to get the errors out. And I'm sure there are many still in there.

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?

Oh yes. All of those. Plus conversations late at night in the bar. And long walks with friends. And... and... and...

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

I had to write a bio today for some talk I'm doing and I wrote this:

"When asked who her favorite poet might be, on most days this year she has answered Kamau Brathwaite. But in the last few months she has started to say Aimé Césaire some of the time. For many years the answer to this question was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. And before that it was Gertrude Stein."

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

Again, so endless. But when I think, oh answer the question, my first thought is to things like live in the desert for a long time. Or live on a small island in FSM for a long time. Or to move to Mexico for a long time.

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?

Today I'd like to be a botanist. A week of rain just ended and so it is moist and sunny outside the window and the plants are looking happy and I want to know them all more intimately.

If I had not been a writer I guess I would have been a secretary. I seemed to be heading that way until I got insane idea I should write things which I got because I went to this private college for rich kids where one could consider such follies.

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

I think it has a lot to do with how that private college for rich kids didn't really offer any vocational training. So I took writing courses. And there was a really interesting poet there named Robert Kelly and he kept giving me books to read and I liked them.

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

I saw this film Bamako the other night that I loved. I think it will enter my list of all time favorite films.

My first thought about the last great book was to Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance. But again, there are so many.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Oh various things. I just wrote a long piece on Chillicothe, Ohio, where I grew up, that is also an essay on Hannah Weiner's "Radcliffe and Guatemala Women." And then I've been working with Stephanie Young to try and understand what is going on with gender in contemporary poetry. Our latest attempt was recently published in the Chicago Review and is available online at http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/CR_532_Spahr_Young.pdf. And I am trying to talk Bill Luoma into making an API for me for a project I call Frogger which in my fantasy is a map interface that will allow people to post their memories, poems, and photographs of frogs before they disappear altogether because of the global massive die off of amphibians that is happening right now.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Daniel Scott Tysdal

Daniel Scott Tysdal is the author of Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method, winner of the ReLit Award for Poetry, the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award and the John V. Hicks Award. His poetry has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals and has earned him both an honourable mention at the 2003 National Magazine Awards and a place in the finals of the CBC’s 2005 National Poetry Face-Off. Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Daniel is presently finishing his MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. Samples of his writing can be found at http://danielscotttysdal.blogspot.com/

1 - How did your first book change your life?

The Andy Warhol answer: Better parties. The Ludwig Wittgenstein answer: You are doing it wrong.

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

I have only lived in Toronto for a little over a year. Since I was raised on a farm south of Moose Jaw in the 1980s, I would have to say that geography played a big part in shaping how I write and what I write about. On the one hand, there was the geography of the prairie—not only the roads and horizons and blinds and coulees, but the barns filled with a century’s worth of debris, the outdated machines, buried pets and abandoned homesteads. On the other hand, there was the geography of the screen, of the satellite dish—decades old reruns, American paranoia, forgotten monster movies and MTV. Both geographies nurtured different kinds of exploration and both were filled with husks and ghosts and ruins and creatures, but in completely different forms. In the afternoon you could dig chicken heads out of a snow bank and then in the evening watch the world premiere of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

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?

A poem hits with an event, an insight, or a glimpse that unbalances you. For me, the first tingling takes the form of a compound of image and emotion. The image might be an actual image, like a painting or a photo, a glimpse of the lived scenery, or something entirely imagined but in all cases the image provokes a very physical, emotional response, a feeling of intense hope or despair. That’s where the first line—which might end up being the last line or a scrapped line—comes from. As far as the larger project goes, I didn’t have any grand schemes the first time around. When I collected the poems together for Predicting, I saw that half the poems were dramatic/lyric monologues and the other half were elegies and so I organised them that way.

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

Readings are essential to the creative life—to sharing work and getting feedback—and reading aloud is an indispensable component of the creative process, but public readings call for a different kind of creative energy and a different kind of intellectual work so I would say they run counter to the process of writing poetry. Plus I get nervous as hell and I’m basically useless for a few days before and after.

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?

The current concern is the oldest concern: images, images, images. What are they? What do they make of us and what do we make of them? How do they intercede in our relationship with what is horrifying and what is good? Poetry necessarily comes at this from the perspective of subjectivity, but must do so in a way that tests the elasticity of the “I,” explores its stops and starts, its choruses. Because one of the really big questions today goes something like: how is narcissism nurtured and valued with greater and greater vigour in a world whose expanding knowledge makes available, and demands, more and more global modes of identification and action (with the more colloquial, stand-up comic rendering being: “What the fuck, people?”)?

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

Judging from my experience with George Elliott Clarke, I would say working with an outside editor is essential and easy. He improved the manuscript by suggesting changes that made the poems more lively and direct.

7 - After having published a couple of titles over the past few years, whether chapbook or trade book, do you find the process of book-making harder or easier?

Easier in that I’m more aware of my habits and strengths but harder in that my weaknesses (I mean like the almost transcendental, “this is what I’m capable of” limits (the whole “no further than Q” thing in To the Lighthouse)) are so much more legible.

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

December. It was poached in spices.

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

Revise, revise, revise.

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

When I’m really into a project, I’ll get up early and head straight to the coffee shop. I always do my best writing in the morning. I tend to write in big chunks of time. The idea will come and I won’t be able to leave the piece until I have a complete draft. Once I have that initial whole I can get back to a normal (re: other-person filled) existence as I revise.

11 - Where is your favourite place to write?

I like both extremes, public and busy or quiet and secluded, though I usually need a mix of both. I tend to do most of my writing in coffee shops, but find revising in transit—on the streetcar, walking around town—to be productive.

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

Going for a walk usually does the trick. I tend to write in two hour chunks broken up by walks. If I’m really stuck, certain poems tend to get me going again. Ashbery’s “Syringa” is the best at this for some reason. People like Deleuze or Adorno or Žižek are helpful. They give your mind a different kind of system to survey, to react to and pursue.

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

One of the last poems I wrote for Predicting, “How We Know We Are Being Addressed by the Man Who Shot Himself Online,” opened up some formal possibilities and thematic concerns that I wanted to continue exploring. Most of the poems I’ve written for the new manuscript are elegies that look at different forms of mourning, the changing object of mourning and the changing form the elegy takes.

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?

Film and visual art really inform what and how I compose (working with the whole page as a kind of canvas or screen, for example), but television and the internet—channel- and web-surfing as forms of perceptual movement and change—have probably been just as influential. This might be too Ong-y or McLuhan-ish, but when I read my old poems I see the influence of the remote control and the hyperlink in everything from the processes of deferral and displacement that constitute thematic development to the levels of mediation that resonate in the poems through the force of borrowed languages and forms. When I worked with Don McKay at Banff he described the “I” in my poems as working by a kind of “oblique phenomenology,” which I think maybe describes what I’m trying to get at.

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

Browning, Stevens, Pynchon, DeLillo. As far as people I know, Michael Trussler has been a big influence on my work, not only through his writing, but through his lectures, through the writers he has led me to read, and through our conversations. I had the opportunity to read his short fiction and poems before they were published in Encounters and Accidental Animals, respectively, and learned a lot about what it means to attend to the detail.

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

Make a movie.

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 would have been a hermit. Or a geneticist who engineered a waste-free human body truly capable of conceiving of a zero waste society.

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

I think it had a lot to do with developing the habits of a writer and coming to value the labour of writing, its experiences, its products and its potentials.

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

Truly “don’t let it stop” great? Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. “That was great” great? No Country for Old Men. Both the book and the film make violence violent and evil evil, which sounds funny, but is rare, especially at the movies. And both works do so as a way of showing how hope is cherished and preserved and necessary as one era of hopelessness transitions into one that seems even more hopeless. Plus, in light of something like Juno, it was nice to watch a movie that was more than a well-acted music video.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am currently finishing up my second book of poetry.

12 or 20 questions archive

12 or 20 questions: with Betsy Warland

BETSY WARLAND has never enjoyed writing her bio. It brings up an odd collision of feelings ranging from tedium, to anxieties about presentation, to flashes of accomplishment, blush of hidden failures. The form’s requirement to write about oneself in the third person – in order to continue the illusion that an objective someone else, other than ourselves, composes these – is also peculiar. Perhaps to rattle it off fast: ten books, two manuscripts, two plays, editor of 4 books, a number of vocal music compositions based on her poems including a recent CD by Elizabeth Raum, and lots of critical essays (mostly for artist’s show catalogues).

Writing is her dawn & dusk, her teacher.

Now, the “How do you support yourself as a writer?” side.

The list: Director and on faculty of The Writer’s Studio at SFU (love it but very part-time modest pay); runs own individual manuscript consulting service and the 5-month Vancouver Manuscript Intensive; teaches numerous creative writing courses; editing contracts; and able to travel recently (!) with teaching gigs in UK, France, maybe Mexico. http://www.betsywarland.com/

All this she also relishes. It’s just a struggle to get writing time. Where have you heard this before?

1 - How did your first book change your life?

In some surprising ways!

What one anticipates is that it initiates your membership into the literary community. I found this to be true and not true. In retrospect you realize, of course, it’s not that simple. For most of us, acceptance and acknowledgment can take years. As a good visual artist friend of mine says: “We just have to live long enough!”

Prior, most of the readings I gave were group readings, and after my book came out I learned to stand on the ground of solo readings. This was crucial as this is when you really know how well the writing is working: when it is just you, the writing, and the audience.

It certainly drew a line between the public and private in unanticipated ways. In A Gathering Instinct there was a suite of poems about the break-up of my marriage to which my parents reacted violently. My mother informed my brother that she was going to take a razor blade and cut out those first 20 pages – then she would give her sisters my book on the strict condition that they would never mention it to anyone (including their husbands!). When she mentioned her plan to my brother he pointed out that they would notice the book began on page 21. That they would likely imagine much worse things and she relented. After this, I did not mention my subsequent books to my folks: it was too much for them to handle.

Nearly 25 years later, while closing up her mother’s home, a cousin discovered my book hidden beneath the shelf lining of her mother’s underwear door. My cousin had only heard rumours about the book.

Even more contentious was that the book contained several poems that only a discerning reader would have recognized to be lesbian love poems. This was 1981. I was strongly advised as a first-time author to only publish a few non-explicit love poems. Reading those” safe” love poems – sans the context of the deleted, explicit poems – created an odd dynamic for me. After having written the absent erotic into being a present erotic, these poems in the book then became a vehicle for yet another erasure into the “universal.” This is when I began to see that universality is a historically specific concept: it arose out of a small, heterosexual, male-defined homogenous society and in contemporary time must be questioned.

In 1982 Phyllis Webb’s exquisite “Naked Poems” appeared in her book The Vision Tree. Again, these required a discerning reader. Three years later I had to make a different decision with open is broken. These poems were preoccupied with inventing a lesbian erotic language enabled by a greater use of experimental form. This was also true of my partner at the time, Daphne Marlatt’s book, Touch to My Tongue. Our books were the first books of their kind in English Canada. Now it seems astonishing, but we gave co-readings from these books across Canada.

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

I moved to Vancouver in 1981 as a result of a broken heart! As children, all four of my grandparents immigrated to the USA from Norway. Thus, my genetic sensibilities immediately resonated with the landscape of Vancouver mountains and sea.

When I was on a G.G. jury for poetry over a decade ago, I was struck by how different West Coast authored books of poetry were. They were more ethereal, philosophical, meditative, formally experimental, notably less narrative and anecdotal; landscape figured in significantly but remained autonomous and mysterious. It was as if these collections were written in a different country! An on the edge “country” of writing: one with which I resonated.

Race and gender – yes. Phew! Big questions, rod! I am a composite of these, yet of many other things too. I wrote about them more earlier on, as I also interrogated and re-imaged language more early on: those were the years of laying down my foundation as a writer. What I am fascinated by now is consciousness: both what is conditioned and that which seems to exist beyond conditioning.

Recently I have found a name that finally fits: a person of between. Not surprisingly, it is writing of the between that I am most drawn to. Am inspired by. These are often writers of different racial, cultural, country of origin lineages; writers who are in various ways socially “aberrant;” writers who are public intellectuals.

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?

Occasionally a single poem “comes to me” but predominantly it is a territory of linked suites or an extended poetic narrative. These begin with a handful of narrative and formal elements that constellate with a certain surprising intensity. What their relationship is to one another is not evident – this is what drives the writing – this quest. With only this blue, the first suite began with a colour (green), the use of blank space as a resistant-state to printed language, nature as guidance, and the double en-dash.

Not coincidentally, other art forms I am deeply engaged in work in this manner: a visual artist’s series of portraits; a composer’s use of movements or series of related compositions. My preoccupation with betweeness, pattern, synchronicity also suit series and book-length forms.

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

Public readings are crucial for me. Like a composer-musician who must perform their music, poetry is an air-borne art form! I often read from work in progress to I find out what is working well; what is not. And to be totally honest, the reception of my work has been seldom “taken up” in any depth in critical writing, nor are my books (to date) on many course lists. So, readings are where this connection and reception occurs. It is also where the power of poetry is collectively shared. This is paramount. Our disengagement from religious institutions has created an isolating despair; a longing for collective moments of transformation. Poetry readings are needed more than ever.

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 read a lot of theory in the 80s. It was pivotal to my development as a writer. In the 90s I began to read less: it became an area of expertise that I wasn’t inclined to devote myself to acquiring; I began to be more interested in sleuthing my own theories.

My writing is driven by philosophical and spiritual inquiry. For me, thinking involves the whole self – from the odd particularities of one’s lived experience to the proprioceptive and encoded nature of language to cultural patterns of behaviour to core questions such as “How does a life-threatening situation change our perceptions of the ordinary?” (only this blue)

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

Right off I want to say that the editing, revising process is as interesting as the first draft, inscription process. The composition stage (editing & revising) has its own intriguing and creative aspects. As I mentioned above, readings activate my third ear through which I hear the poems more objectively.

I show my work early on to “my first readers.” These are friends who are writers, editors, librarians, visual artists, acute readers – who know what I am after – who will tell me where I’m on & off the scent.

When I first began publishing, editing done by a press was more erratic and I learned to take responsibility for it myself. For my first book, I enlisted two friends with good editing skills (poet Gay Allison, and librarian, lover at the time, Janet Rogers). With open is broken, my partner writer Daphne Marlatt gave me excellent editorial input. I learned a lot from Daphne about editing; she’s a meticulous editor. My third book, serpent (w)rite, was edited by bpNichol and I learned important things about structural shaping from him.

Other editors that were particularly invaluable were Barbara Kuhne (Proper Definitions and InVersions), Beth McAuley (Bloodroot), poet and editor Rachel Zolf (only this blue).

My teaching and consulting sharpened my abilities and I became quite a good editor of my own work and do the most of it myself. It is not unusual for me to fine-tune edit a poem up to a hundred times. I am a “subtractive” writer. I must get it on paper without preconceptions, staying acutely on the scent, and set aside the editor. Once I have the first draft, I begin to take away (like a sculptor); refine; revise. I am an adept substantive and line editor but I would never want to rely on myself for skillful copy-editing!

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

Harder! No doubt about that. Particularly finding of a publisher. The enormous changes still happening in the publishing and bookselling industries are part of it. For example, Chapters-Indigo has recently announced it will no longer sell poetry books. When I did my own research via compiling National Library data in 2002, I found between 1985 and 2001 publication of fiction books increased by 300%; poetry books only increased by 65%. Prior to 1985, the proportion of poetry and fiction published was more similar.

The feminist literary scene also lost its momentum and migrated away from a fairly autonomous production base to an academic setting where only a few feminist writers can be focused on. Ageism also has entered in. Publishers’ central concern is bottom-line: their enthusiasm and respect for a manuscript appears to less and less the decisive factor (I have recently experienced this). And, if you are writer who remains faithful to your narrative quest, the likelihood of falling out of fashion is increased. I think there is also less reception for writing that takes intellectual risks. The unquenchable thirst for entertainment has over-taken us more than we realize..

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

This morning! I was not a pear fan until I lived on Salt Spring and experienced pears right off the tree in our garden. Since then: I’m hooked.

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

I came across it a couple of decades ago in Virginia Woolf A Writer’s Diary, “…when the pen gets on the scent.” This has been my guiding mantra ever since. We can only write incrementally – one word at a time – just as a dog sniffs the trail of a specific animal or person – we must recognize each narrative’s distinct scent. When we are on the scent of the narrative it is a visceral, elating and sometimes terrifying experience. Doubt and confusion drop away. We trust where the narrative’s momentum and trajectory will take us. It’s not that we have it all figured out, but rather that we are wholly inside each idiosyncratic step of how that narrative goes about building itself.

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

Scale. I am drawn to the mystery of how poetry can convey an idea in an astonishing image yet the investigation of ideas is more of a contract between writer and reader in creative non-fiction and I relish this too. The form of creative non-fiction I enjoy the most is lyric prose as it conflates poetic devices and sensibilities, creative non-fiction’s considered thinking, and some of the narrative elements used in fiction.

Many of my books are book-length narratives that shift in & out of poetry & lyric prose (open is broken, Double Negative, The Bat Had Blue Eyes, Two Women in a Birth, only this blue). These narratives required different proximities to convey their complexities of perception.

Because I am intrigued by process and phenomenology, I relish how creative non-fiction requires that the architecture of thought-making be made transparent. Lyric prose writing (memoir and critical essays) really works my brain hard. I can literally feel my left & right hemisphere arcing back & forth! In lyric prose, the discovery (the “subject”) is as much about finding each narrative’s inherent form as it is about finding its content.

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?

Ahh – the question that makes us squirm. It changed dramatically about ten years ago. Prior to that, I had periods of being able to maintain a routine of writing almost every day for a number of hours. Then a series of life circumstances left me with little to often no time to write. I had to learn to write in a different manner. I now write far less frequently, in short bits of time. I have learned how to concentrate quickly, write economically, and “hold” the writing in my mind between inscription times. Book-length manuscripts definitely help maintain the territory. Over time, I find that the way I teach creative writing and do manuscript consults becomes more & more similar to how I write! Also, I’ve learned to bring a similar attention to the composition of work-related writing (critical essays for art catalogues, emails and email interviews) as I do to my own writing. In some respects, this has all made me a better writer.

Typical day: awaken early, meditate, breakfast followed by at least a half an hour of musing with two cups of China Silver-Tipped green tea (in warm weather = outside on my patio/in cold weather = in front of my gas fireplace), and listen mostly to piano –– currently The Impromptus and The Complete Piano Trios by Schubert, and Handel’s Suites for Keyboard – then like an otter, slip into the writing as soon as I feel its force-field. On the majority of the days, however, it’s into my paid work that fortunately, I enjoy.

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

Happily, lots of “places.” Solitude, my Buddhist practice, Jazz and Classical music, my writing about writing (Breathing the Page), teaching creative writing, dance performances, galleries, immersion in nature, attentive interactions with my ten-year son, other authors’ book, film, theatre, and during manuscript consults – deeply engaging with another writer’s manuscript – are all sources. Typically, I am in need of contrast, defamiliarization, “making it new;” alternate “languages.”

When working with another writer’s manuscript, or teaching creative writing, it’s not that I get ideas from what they are writing but rather that it plunges me into that intuitive, perceptual, formal way of encountering the world: its like tuning in to a very particular frequency.

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

In only this blue, I give over to space more than ever before – the uninscribed left hand page shimmers throughout the long poem: the uninscribed what-can-not-be-said given equal presence as the inscribed. Maybe this is why I revise so much – I revise the scored space (“blank” areas) as much as the inscribed (print) areas! It is also a right & left brain book: a long poem and related essay, “Nose to Nose,” on the form of poetry.

This book manifested in a different manner. Due to very demanding life circumstances, I had been only writing creative non-fiction. I had not written poetry for a few years. This had never happened to me before. I feared that I had lost my way into the poem. Perhaps forever.

Then, when I had a rare two days of solitude, the poem returned. I hadn’t realized how deeply I had been grieving its absence until it resurfaced. The gratitude was overwhelming. This made the book unlike any of my previous ones. Also, the book’s design came to me as a whole: I had never experienced this before either. It’s exact dimensions; its uninscribed left hand pages; the photo-shoot idea for the cover image; the precise blue colour-field of the cover of the Montreal early evening November sky.

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?

Other than what I mentioned above, yes, some of my reading about science as well.

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

This is one of those questions in the same category as when someone asks “What do you write about?” My mind always stalls. With books, usually it’s days later when I can suddenly identify which ones are important to me.

Humourously speaking – the question that I’ve encountered is (Stranger) “So, what do you do?” (Betsy) “I’m a writer.” (Stranger) “Oh, how interesting – what kind of horses?”

There are so many writers I could name but I am only going to mention those that, over a long period of time and in a complete manner continue to be solar for me. Writers who persist(ed) in evolving as writers.

Nicole Brossard’s books continue to challenge and elate me. Her writing embraces the philosophical, the emotive, the erotic, an ongoing formal (structural) quests, an almost iconic relationship to language, the political (not abstract but embodied), and the meditative (quietly spiritual) inquiry.

Virginia Woolf is another, and the combination of her novels (still so innovative formally) and her thinking about the formal and political questions of writing in Virginia Woolf A Writer’s Diary are crucial for me. Too, she had the ear of a fine poet.

U.S. (originally from Antigua) author Jamaica Kincaid is another one for me. Kincaid also embodies stunning formal skills (on the level of language, the line, and the book’s structure); her narrators and characters are fiercely embodied; evoke the political implications of our lives in tell-tail details with gripping honesty; and she infuses her writing with unflinching intellectual inquiry.

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

Live in Venice for six months to a year! Anyone want to do a flat exchange?

Some years ago I wrote an operatic play on Vivaldi’s life as a composer and impresario for his operas and papal ban which essentially finished him off. I would love to see play produced. While writing the play l fell in love with Venice.

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?

Be a composer. Formally, I think like a composer and music is an absolutely essential part of my life. Recently, author Anne Stone [see her 12 or 20 here], wrote a “Featured Studio Visit” in Matrix on me, and for my accompanying bio I gleefully abandon the expected and wrote: “Betsy Warland is a could-have-been-composer with a visual artist’s sensibility working in a writer’s medium.”

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

I decided in my early twenties between being a visual artist (painting) and writing. I didn’t consider myself sufficiently endowed to excel in both forms. Also, I was in the U.S. then and had experienced how writing, particularly poetry, taproots the social well-being of a society. During the 50s, 60s, early 70s, feminist, African American, and Beat poetry were clearly shaping social and artistic consciousness: providing social vision. The fact that writing is also a more accessible art form was also a decisive factor: it only requires the “tools” of everyday life. Is very affordable. And one does not have to be prosperous to buy a book (compared to buying a painting).

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

Kincaid’s novel, The Autobiography of My Mother. How she works with the line in that novel is absolutely stunning; riveting. This is no exaggeration: when I read the first sentence of that novel I was nearly blown out of my chair.

Just last night: The Savages featuring two brilliant actors: Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman as sister and brother (a relationship rarely focused on in film). It is a genius film of the small gestures that signal pivotal moments. Moments in which we can either be buoyed up out of our suffering (and do something different) or sink deeper down into our suffering (do the same old). Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed it. I find that films written and directed by the same person can rely far more on their own quirky, inherent coherence and vision.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Breathing the Page: The Writers & State of Consciousness is a manuscript of twenty-three essays on writing. Ten years in the writing: it’s my opus! It is an investigation into the question: Why do talented writer’s with well-crafted, promising narratives of prose or poetry flounder?” Half of the essays establish a language (via concepts) that I have developed to address concerns that underlie the more tangible ones of craft, process, and editing.

The other half of the essays are about our everyday writing materials – their histories and properties – about how it is necessary to invigorate them; not “take them for granted.” In sum, it is about the various states of consciousness we need to bring to writing so that our unexamined habits and assumptions neither stunt us as writers, nor the power of the narratives we write.

At a much earlier stage is a lyric prose manuscript, Oscar – A Story of Failures, that I started about a year ago. It begins with the narrator taking a second proper name (of the opposite gender) and experiencing a pivotal insight about her life while viewing a camouflage exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London. The invention of military camouflage (and subsequent application to our daily lives), Cubism, Relativity, the changes in consciousness in writers during the first half of the century, and the notion of failure and betweeness all figure in.

Signing off,

Thanks, rob, for your provocative and fun questions. One of the best one-sided x 2, one-sided conversations I have had!

Betsy
February 3, 2008

12 or 20 questions archive