Wednesday, March 26, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Stacey May Fowles

Photo Credit: Kelly Clipperton

Stacey May Fowles' written work has been published in various online and print magazines, including Kiss Machine, The Absinthe Literary Review, and subTERRAIN. Her non-fiction has been anthologized in the widely acclaimed Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and First Person Queer. Her first novel, Be Good, was published with Tightrope Books in November 2007, and Quill & Quire called it "a thoughtful examination of sexuality, relationships, and what it means to tell the truth."

Her next book, Fear of Fighting, is a graphic novel collaboration with artist Marlena Zuber (http://www.marlenazuber.com/) and will be released with Invisible Publishing in fall 2008. She has work forthcoming in the anthologies IV Lounge Nights (Tightrope Books) and TOK3 (Diaspora Dialogues). Fowles currently lives in Toronto where she is the publisher of Shameless Magazine.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

When I was a teenager I genuinely thought publishing a book would change my life, but if I'm honest it hasn't really. Don't get me wrong, I do think it's a fantastic process, but you have these teenage daydreams about glamorous book signings and parties with champagne all around, and it's very rarely like that. Thankfully, it's a job like any other. Having said that, I don't think I was fully prepared for that sudden feeling of being exposed and that has changed me—writing is such a solitary act and then all of a sudden you're sharing it all with grandma, your fifth grade teacher, and many more people you've never met. It's surprising how much anxiety that can create, but after a while life just continues on the same way it did before. You learn not to take it all to seriously. I'm still exactly the same person I always was, only now with a box of books with my name on them in my living room. It's hard not to get caught up in the drama and romance of "the novel" and "published author," so it's really best to step back and enjoy it for what it is. If anything it's just helped me be more confident as a professional writer.

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 was born in Scarborough and left for Montreal as soon as I finished high school. After a brief stint in Vancouver I came back to Toronto when I was 25 and have been here ever since. I've always been very interested in the kinds of characters urban environments create. In Be Good I really wanted to focus on place as a character so really investigating geography was imperative to that. After all the lonely city living I've experience I've become mildly obsessed with what the urban landscape can do to a person. I suppose one day when I become a suburban soccer mom in the suburbs I'll write about gated communities, cookie baking and the PTA instead.

As for gender, I'm the publisher at Shameless Magazine so it's very hard not to see everything through that particular lens. I also really feel that there are very few books depicting women in their twenties that don't treat them like they're boy-crazy, vapid morons, so in some ways it's important to me to create literature for young women that is genuine and that they can identify with. When Sex in the City is the only thing young, urban women can vaguely relate to, there's a real problem.

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'm a pretty messy writer—a cliched notes on napkins and receipts type. I tend to write whenever and whatever comes and worry about cleaning up and weaving together a narrative later. There's a lot of constant rearranging, editing and piecing together involved, and of course, a lot of cutting. Sometimes short stories decide they want to be novels and vice versa, and sometimes a character from one piece decides she wants to wants to end up in another piece. I have this grey and white tailless cat that repeatedly ends up in my stories. I try not to do much planning or have too many expectations beforehand— I find I'm more productive and much less neurotic that way. If you give yourself permission to write crap you'll get rid of later, you'll likely come out with something good, whereas if you restrict yourself via perfection and a stringent plan you'll likely just get frustrated.

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

I used to be terrified of reading in public. It's legendary. I actually chickened out of the first reading I ever signed up to do. Since then I've vomited a couple of times beforehand and armed myself with some homeopathic remedies in order to get myself on stage. I wouldn't say that readings are part of the creative process for me (I certainly don't write with the intention of reading it to a crowd) but I do think readings are integral part of connecting to readers. Performance is the dynamic and communal part of an often reclusive activity, and after a while readings become exhilarating. The trick is to keep 'em short and swear at least once. The f-word works well. And vodka—vodka helps.

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'm always trying to write things that readers can identify with, which I think can be easy if you write in an honest way. That's probably why I'll never write about civil war love affairs or alien invasions. I'd rather just write about fucked up girls who like Led Zeppelin and Jager shots because that's all way more interesting than aliens anyway. For me the most satisfying and elusive comment from a reader is "it's like you were inside my head."

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

Absolutely essential. I have the pleasure of working with a fantastic editor, Ari Berger, who refuses to coddle me or placate me, and my writing is so much better for it. If you spend too much time with a piece you tend to become blind to its flaws, whereas a really good editor can weed them out and in some ways reveal to you what you really meant to say. I tend not to be very emotional about the editing process and I think having an editor that I trust is key to that. Someone who writes chapter ideas on placemats at restaurants really needs a good editor and I've been blessed in that regard.

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

Me and my partner received a juicer last Christmas that we're currently obsessed with, so I consume pears regularly. Almost daily. It's my way of tricking my pervasive hypochondria into believing I'm healthy. I often think the juicer is an icon of how boring I have become in my old(er) age, but I try not to dwell on that.

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

In the months leading up to the publication of my first book I was desperate for words of wisdom from more seasoned writers. One let me know I should "get a therapist immediately," but the best advice I received overall was as follows: "Float above it all a little and play the game, keep the rest of it for yourself. All will be well." Since then I've been living by "the perfect is the enemy of the good." That one works well for letting go of typo anxiety.

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

I am so much more relaxed about writing non-fiction. It feels like a safer place for me in some ways, but perhaps that's because I'm not as emotionally tied to the end product. I can write a non-fiction piece, publish it and move on to the next piece quite easily, while I'll lie in bed at night and think of all of the things I could have done differently with a short story. Despite my different feelings on each, one definitely helps to other. I've said before that writing fiction is simply a process of writing, re-writing and reassembling real life.

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 working on a larger manuscript I tend to (or rather try to) be really disciplined about it. I set daily goals and try to keep a realistic schedule. I give myself an "office" (a pro-loitering coffee shop with wifi) and go there in the morning and stay there until six, five days a week. Because I usually have a variety of freelance projects on the go prioritizing is usually a challenge, but I much prefer it to "writing in-between your day job."

The hardest part about not going to a job every day is convincing people I'm actually working—because i don't have a "real job" to go to it's hard for people in my life who are not writers to wrap their head around the fact that I'm actually working. That means that when someone has a day off they're always trying to drag me into a shopping trip or martini lunch, which can be unbelievably tempting.

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

I always try to be a reader, instead of a writer, for a little while. I enjoy other people's work from the perspective of a person who loves books and not just someone who's trying to make them—although the two don't need to be mutually exclusive. Experiencing those little scenes and lines when a book is truly fantastic can really re- energize your own work.

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

It feels like it has a greater potential to haunt me. That and it's heavier and taking up much more room in my apartment.

13 - 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 can't write unless I'm listening to music on my headphones. At first I thought it was a way to block out background noise, but I actually noticed that whatever I was listening to would become an automatic soundtrack. If I want to write a scene in which a couple begins to break up, I need only throw on Kate Nash's Foundations and all of a sudden they hate each other. It's a pretty good system.

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


This question is so funny because in the book I'm working on right now the main character creates a list of authors pretentious people put on their list of favourites, and right now I'm trying desperately not to include any of those. It's making me want to go back and rewrite the chapter.

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

I really want to take boxing lessons but am slightly insecure about my status as a weakling. I'd also like to go to a whisky tasting, take my unruly dog to obedience classes, and finally learn how to knit. It's kind of appalling that I'm the publisher of a feminist teen magazine and I don't know how to knit.

16 - 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 always wanted to be a hairdresser. The freedom and independence was always really attractive to me, along with days of talking to strangers about their lives while making them happy and attractive.

For a brief time in University I actually studied to be a high school teacher, which, if I had not abandoned that idea, would have been a real disaster for everyone involved.

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

I never really considered doing anything thing else other than writing, I just assumed I'd always have to do something else in addition in order to eat. I had these brief dreams of having a "career" other than writing but quickly realized that the best job a writer can have is one that doesn't detract from their work. I'd vote for a job I hated over a full fledged time-consuming career. I fell into magazine business development quite by accident and I find that works really well—I get to be involved in the world of publishing, but because circulation enhancement initiatives have so little to do with writing the two never detract from each other. Doing an excel spreadsheet is certainly a good break from a major work-in-proress.

Lately I've been able to do more and more writing and that transition has been an interesting one. Sometimes feel kind of guilty that I get to spend my days doing what I love. I forget that I'm not actually goofing off—this is my actual job now. I feel like someone is going to come up to me and say "just kidding" and send me back to some awful desk job and make me do data entry.

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

I don't have cable so I watch a lot of television on DVD and recently became completely obsessed with Battlestar Galactica. I realize it's not a film, but it certainly has so many filmic (and for that matter, literary) qualities. I never in a million years thought I would become so invested in Sci-Fi, but I am officially addicted and wonder why it didn't happen sooner—I can watch six episodes in a row easily. Love does strange things to you, and my love for a web geek means my general appreciation for sci-fi has certainly increased in the last three years we've been together.

As for books, hands down Allan Carr's Easy Way To Quit Smoking because thanks to Mr. Carr (may he rest in peace,) I finally quit smoking. After that I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately; books on anxiety like A Brief History of Anxiety by Patricia Pearson and books on fetish culture like The Pleasure's All Mine by Joan Kelly. I actually just read a book about pregnancy and childbirth called From the Hips to see if I might be ready to have a baby, and evidently I'm not.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I'm just finishing up the manuscript for a collaborative book project I'm doing with artist Marlena Zuber called Fear of Fighting. In fact, if all goes well, it should go into editing tomorrow. It's due out with Invisible Publishing in fall 2008 and there are no alien invasions in it.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Beth Follett

Beth Follett is the one-woman show behind the Canadian literary publishing house, Pedlar Press. Her first novel, Tell It Slant, was published by Coach House Books in 2001. She was born and raised in Toronto, spent her adolescence and young adult life in Winnipeg, and returned to Toronto in 1985.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Publishing the novel was wonderful. It deepened my understanding of the cost of writing to a writer's psyche. One doesn't necessarily have to be tough to be a writer, but certainly will do better if brave and realistic.

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 lived in Toronto off and on for 28 years. I love the big city, crashing energy next to perfect peace. I get up very early, usually, when the city is quiet. Then the buses start up, the traffic, the mechanical noises. The kids' shouts. Birdsong. Dog barks. The city has its rhythms, much like an individual human. Studying Toronto's character has assisted my thinking about character.
I grew up within feminist thought, and I live in the most multicultural city in the world. I am interested in psychology, how gender and place and race and ability and class affect thinking and behaviour and desire. My world view is deeply affected by the 'what' of me, but I know it doesn't end there. Shame is something that interests me. Also gullibility. I think shame limits us more than we know or can with any clarity describe. Shame belongs to all of us, regardless of race or gender.

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 started Tell It Slant in fragments, bits and pieces. It stayed fragmentary. The new novel I'm working on has been a book from the outset, begun at page one.

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

I love to read aloud to others, whether one other or one hundred. Reading other people's work out loud is phenomenal. Reading my own work, no. I think one's own work doesn't allow for much distance, or perspective. I cannot see mine. I'd love to be regularly invited to read from wonderful works by authors I admire.

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?

Many theoretical concerns, yes, of course. I am fascinated by questions of identity, questions about mind and how mind attaches to its thoughts, or doesn't. I am also interested in questions of leadership and power. I have had a long-standing interest in the power of group mind.

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

Editors are essential, but one has to stand strong in one's own convictions, even if wrong. How else do we learn? I'm very fond of my old clunkers.

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

Last August, warm, with soft Stilton cheese, at a lake.

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

"Sweat the details."

9 - How easy has it been for you to move between being editor/publisher of Pedlar Press and working on your own writing? What do you see as the appeal?

Trickster walks the line between these acts that I perform. Sometimes, working with a Pedlar author is unbelievably holy, and I am ready to give up my own writing in sheer exuberance for the fact of this other writer's existence. At other times, O, the greed, the envy, the wish that I could write full time! Pedlar Press activity has its cycles and rhythms, and there are times in a year when I can take three or four or five days in a row to concentrate exclusively on my own work. Maybe four or five times a year. The thing is, Pedlar Press activity demands perpetual thinking about writing and the writing life. Thinking is a pleasure that is also a necessity where the business is concerned; it enriches my writing. Publishing is a pleasure: it's the best way I have found to put beans on the table. I'm pretty realistic about how much time will be afforded to me for writing.

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, I get to the work immediately on rising. I make a good coffee and begin. I will write for eight hours, sometimes more. I write longhand. I complete at least two edits before transcribing my work onto the laptop. I drink a lot of water in those eight hours.

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

I read when I get stalled. Poetry often, also essays.

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

I think I am a very different woman from the one who wrote Tell It Slant. This new work feels more compassionate. It seems to contain my longing more fully. It's also much much harder to write.

13 - 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 would say architecture influences my writing. How one moves in built spaces or in cities. Nature, as well, is an influence. Wind. And photography. The light upon the earth.

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

Elizabeth Bishop is a constant companion. And Penelope Fitzgerald. Also Marie-Louise von Franz. Italo Calvino. Linda Gregg, her brilliant work, The Sacraments of Desire. Does anyone turn a sentence more perfectly than Jose Saramago, I wonder?

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

Make Gâteau à l'Orange, a recipe in the cookbook, Paris Bistro Cooking.

16 - 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 wanted to be a modern dancer, but I don't have the body type for it. I was a clinical social worker and therapist for many years. Actually, "full time writer" is the occupation I secretly want to attempt.

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

I had to. Everything to me is story, and this has been true since I was very young. I simply wanted to participate in story, and to be a good story teller. I wanted to overcome my original shyness, my muteness. I have imagined containing in one sentence the world's greatest stories. Now that's telling.

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

The Outlander by Gil Adamson is a marvel of a book.

In the same week I saw two movies, There Will Be Blood and The Lives of Others. In both cases the idea to sit through the film a second time crossed my mind. This hasn't happened since seeing Bertolucci's 1900 at a repertory cinema in Winnipeg in 1978.

19 - What are you currently working on?

The new novel is getting my attention right now. Recently, a poem and a short non-fiction piece got it.

Monday, March 24, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Michael Bryson

Born in Toronto in 1968, Michael Bryson turns 40 this year, the age at which life starts over, or so John Lennon sang. Michael attended public school in East York and later earned English degrees from the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto. He spent two years in Saskatoon in the mid-1990s and has worked for most of the past decade for the Ontario government.

Michael’s books are THIRTEEN SHADES OF BLACK AND WHITE (Turnstone Press, 1999) and ONLY A LOWER PARADISE AND OTHER STORIES (Boheme Press, 2000). He has a chapbook, FLIGHT (Mercutio Press, 2006) and his story “Six Million Million Miles” was included in 05: BEST CANADIAN STORIES (Oberon Press, 2005), selected by Douglas Glover.

Michael’s latest short story collection is tentatively titled THE LIZARD AND OTHER STORIES. It is scheduled for publication by Chaudiere Books in 2009.

Michael’s fiction probes hearts in conflict – following William Faulkner’s advice that literature is about “the human heart in conflict with itself.” The stories showcase absurdity and humour and trace the connections between tragedy and hope. Love and the frailties of existence are his obsessions.

Michael is also the founding editor and publisher of THE DANFORTH REVIEW (http://www.danforthreview.com/). Since 1999, the online journal has published 22 issues of short fiction, interviewed over 100 authors and published dozens of book reviews and other features. The primary focus of the magazine is the Canadian small press scene. Work published in the magazine has been included in Oberon’s BEST CANADIAN STORIES series (2006) and a Best of the Web anthology (2008).

Michael lives in Toronto with his wife and step-children.

His website is http://www.michaelbryson.com/

*

1 - How did your first book change your life?

It made me very happy. It was a tremendous validation. Of course it was also a tremendous disappointment because I hoped more people would read it. At the time (1999), I thought, Oh, well, at least things will get easier from here. I thought I would just keep writing and publishing books. That hasn't happened. I've kept writing, but it's been slow and laborious, and publishers haven't been exactly keen on what I'm doing.

At the same time, I have met many people because that first book. A friend who teaches high school English used one of my stories in his class. His students wrote essays on it. I met a number of these students later, and they were probably my most passionate readers.

I've always seen THIRTEEN SHADES OF BLACK AND WHITE as a book "about growing up." My sense is that the book resonates with teenage readers really well. Unfortunately, teenagers aren't the market for literary fiction in this country.

(Though, incidentally, I try to keep that eager teenage reader in mind when I post content to www.danforthreview.com. Too often the literary culture just seems to be speaking to itself. I think it should be always inviting others into the tent.)

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 was born in Toronto. I’ve lived here 40 years minus the years I was away at university and two years in mid-1990s when I was in Saskatoon.

The urban landscape is the geography of my imagination. However, it’s more of a mental landscape than a physical one. I've always wanted to capture my experience of Toronto in my writing, but I don't think I've managed it yet. The specifics elude me. So - from that point of view - geography has impacted my writing: I have produced many failed attempts at capturing my Toronto.

I should probably add that my Toronto is the east-end. Geography in Toronto is neighbourhood by neighbourhood. My public school had dozens of ethnicities in its student population. I'm WASP, but my whole school experience was influenced by multicultural immigration. I haven't written about this. I haven't figured out how.

Race and gender? Sure, my writing is influenced by them. By class, too. I'm aware that I haven't addressed race much in my writing. As per above, I haven't figured out how to write about the multiplicity of race that was my experience. Race is often captured as a binary issue: white versus other, or other versus white. My experience is race is a rainbow issue. I had kids in my classes who were refugees from Vietnam and Romania, Lebanon, many working-class Italians, Greeks, blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans. You name it. How do you capture that?

My writing tends to illustrate conflicts of emotion or psyche (internal conflicts). I’m interested in conflicts of perception: How each of us filters the world, creates our own worlds, and yet we interact with others and experience their worlds, too. Mental health issues and additions are two themes that recur in my work. Not exactly sure why.

I'm not an "identity writer”; I don’t think identity is fixed or fixable; life is too topsy-turvy for that! My stories tend to be about men trying to sort out the chaos of existence. When I read Raymond Carver many years ago, I said: A-ha, that's what I'm trying to do. I tended to write stories within which nothing happened. I read Carver and found out that "making something happen" isn't what makes a story interesting.

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?

Short stories begin with an image or a character or a single line. The first book was just a collection of the different stories I had. Since then, I've tried to imagine the larger whole of the book as I'm in the process of working on individual pieces. But the "book" keeps changing. Currently, I'm working on a novel which is whole unto itself. Though it, too, keeps changing course on me. I don’t know any anyone can plot out in advance. It’s never worked for me. I find writing an intense battle between planning and spontaneity.

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

Not part of. Not counter to. They are a separate solar system.

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 have any theoretical concerns, in the sense that I understand "theoretical concerns." I've read some Derrida, et al, but I don't think about any of that when I'm writing. I try to write a good sentence, then a good paragraph. I try to be an honest witness and make it interesting.

My work integrates realist and absurdist traditions. The work of J.G. Ballard and Terry Southern were influential in showing me how to integrate two impulses that tend to be characterized as opposites. Douglas Glover's work was helpful too. "Theory" too often creates camps of writers who view each other with suspicion. I prefer to read everybody and borrow the best that I find, wherever I find it.

If my work is trying answer any questions, they're probably existential queries. What are we doing here? I don't think that question ever goes out of style. I may also be a bit old fashioned. I think that rendering experience honestly is a theoretical question. Especially when the theorists are so skeptical about the ability of language to render anything or to refer to anything but itself.

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

Both.

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?

Dunno.

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

Buy low, sell high.

Don't write what you know; write what you're passionate about. Barbara Gowdy said that.

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

It's not hard. It's all part of the same swirl of thinking that goes on in my brain.

Writing reviews helps me to think about what I like and what I don't. It also forces me to justify myself. I think readers are largely impulsive; they know right away whether they like something or not. A reviewer has to justify this impulse. When I'm writing, I need to decide whether to go in one direction or another. I need to trust my impulse, but also minimize bad decisions. It's a harrowing process.

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 tended to write when I "feel inspired." I have a day job, and now a family, so writing time is hard to come by. I've never been highly prolific. Even when I had great gobs of time, I only wrote a little a day. I can write a great deal when I'm in an inspired burst. But I also rely on the passage of time to inform my editing process. Reading something a year later has often led me to new discoveries about a piece and enabled me to improve it, or just finish it. (There are no typical days.)

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

I just wait for the desire to return. It always does. Also, I try to keep life simple. Unsolved problems in life take away time and energy to solve the problems posed by the writing.

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

It feels the same, except I'm getting older.

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 read McLuhan when I was in high school in the 1980s and it's always seemed to me that we're all multi-media. Probably always have been. That said, book culture can be very insular. The literature profs didn't like McLuhan, despite the fact that he was one of their own.

What I'm trying to say here is I'm influenced by everything. But also, a book is a book is a book. Form determines meaning, McLuhan said: medium is message. I'm interested in understanding the form of the short story, but also writing stories that subvert or challenge that form.

For example, a lot of my stories are impressionistic, rather than narrative. Some readers have complained that the stories don’t resolve a central problem of the protagonist. That’s the traditional narrative model and the expectation of many readers. My stories are sometimes like pop songs (this is a stretch, but it will illustrate the point): They present a character and a situation and, hopefully, leave the reader with a powerful image (or hook). I think there are many ways to write a successful short story. I’m trying to investigate as many as I can – and other art forms are helpful to that investigation, yes.

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

Oh, there are too many to mention. I’m just going to name writers that have been good to me over the years, in no particular order. I’ve already names J.G. Ballard, Terry Southern, Raymond Carver and Douglas Glover. Here’s more: Mordecai Richler, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Margaret Lawrence, Flannery O’Connor, Matthew Firth [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Jack Kerouac, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulker, James Joyce, J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Barbara Gowdy, Lynn Coady [see her 12 or 20 questions here], Al Purdy, Alden Nowlan, Ken Sparling, Mark Anthony Jarman, Greg Hollingshead [see his 12 or 20 question], John Lavery [see his 12 or 20 questions here], Leon Rooke, Michael Ondattje, Haruki Murakami, Saul Bellow, Don Delillo, Martin Amis, Nabakov, Salinger. I’m forgetting others… That’s a taste, anyway.

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

Watch the Maples Leafs win the Stanley Cup.

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?

Since I have a day job, I guess my true occupation is bureaucrat, though I write a lot there, too. I think I've "ended up" a bureaucrat, while also continuing my inner calling of writing fiction and attempting literature. This inner calling refuses to be denied and I can't imagine life without it.

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

[See answer to #17 above]

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

Film: There Will Be Blood.
Book: J.M. Coetzee, WAITING FOR BARBARIANS

20 - What are you currently working on?

A novel. It’s in the early stages. The protagonist is a judge. I’m curious about what he has to do: Make decisions, arbitrate “justice,” provide resolution in situations where no resolution is possible. (He’s working on a murder trial.) Again I find myself working on a story about the human heart in conflict with itself. Wanting the impossible. Settling for the best of what’s left.

Michael Bryson – March 24, 2008

Monday, March 10, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch is the author of twenty-one books, including 14 collections of poetry, including Living Will, a translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets into contemporary erotic English. He has published four volumes of creative-nonfiction, including the George Ryga Award-winning The Wolves at Evelyn, and Cross-Country Checkup Book of the Year, Tom Thomson’s Shack. In addition, he is the editor of Robin Skelton’s posthumous poems, Facing the Light, and his new selected poems, In This Poem I Am. He has published one novel, Carnival, and is the English translator of the postmodernist German playwright Stefan Schuetz. He has won the ARC Poem of the Year Prize, the ARC Critic’s Desk Award, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize for both 2005 and 2007, and is the second prize winner for the CBC Literary Prize in Poetry for 2008. A year’s work as editor and cowriter on Chris Harris’s photographic book about the earth’s last intact pristine grasslands, Spirit in the Grass: the Lost Landscape of the Cariboo-Chilcotin, has garnered two B.C. Book Prize nominations. Rhenisch’s Return to Open Water: Selected and New Poems selects from oral pieces spanning the last twenty-nine years, honed during his more than 300 readings during the last decade, across Canada and abroad. An active editor, reviewer, and mentor, he lives in Campbell River, British Columbia, after 15 years on the Cariboo Plateau, and a dozen years in the Similkameen Valley.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

The first book was in an edition of 1, which I made for myself on an old Olympia typewriter. I trimmed the paper with scissors and perfect bound them with some White Lepages Glue from the farm workshop. It took a few days to dry. John Howe did the cover. I showed it to my creative writing teacher, and he took it seriously, because of the effort that had gone not it. That validation changed my life. My first trade book, Winter, got me a toe-hold into the publishing game, which, given that I was in Victoria and far, far outside of the canlit horizon, even as it stood then, was a godsend. Still, the validation of that kind of sacred nature writing did change things. I was working on hyper-realist, trickster poems at the same time — something I put aside for a decade. It could all have started quite differently. Editors have an enormous influence.

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

I write out of place. Like the Secwepemc and Similkameen people themselves, I really am a child of the grassland. I have 4,000 years of grasslands culture behind me. Now, on Vancouver Island, I still have that earth under my feet – except that the stories of the dreamtime don’t take place along the rivers here but underwater and in the intertidal zone. Somehow, from deep knowledge of a small space I’ve found myself a citizen of the earth in the largest sense, across space as well as time. It humbles me. At the same time, it is liberating. When I left the Similkameen Valley in 1992, I was 36 years old. I knew every story for every stone and tree, and was living in a landscape much like the sacred ones of prehistory. When I got to 108 Mile Ranch later in the day, and looked out over the plateau lake in front of my new house, the lake was blue, the trees were brown, and the grass was green, although I knew that this was ridiculous. So I set about teaching myself to see by creating palettes of colour.

If race has made an impact on my work, it’s because when I started school, half the kids in class were from the reserve south of town. 1 of them graduated from high school 12 years later. In my late teens, I made the transference from European to Native conceptions of land and space. It was not deliberate. It happened. BC history is the result of a marriage between these two cultures. That we have, collectively, chosen to live within the European side of that equation means that we are stuck. We will move forward when we can speak about them both in the same breath.

Gender has had a huge impact on my work. When I graduated from university in 1980, talk was that the only people who’d be hired to teach at universities for the next 15 years would be women, so I decided not to waste $45,000 on grad school, and went farming. So, here I am now, an intellectual writer living in farms and small towns, and knowing the country from the ground up, rather than the top down. What’s more, I gave up that farming, my first passion, and raised my kids, which has been my life for 23 years now. I’ve lived much of my life in the society of women. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, feminism transformed me from a kind of dionysiac metaphysicist into a trickster and a social geographer. The result, most recently, has been my The Wolves at Evelyn, which gets into matriarchy in a big way, and tells the story of women and children, and how they have created this culture I live in in British Columbia. It’s an unusual kind of feminism, sure, but it is one nonetheless.

3 - Where does a poem or piece of prose 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?

It begins with play. Or it begins with a moment of silence. Or both. Time and space are suspended. It’s a fleeting thing. These days I’m writing a lot of poems based upon play, revisions of old stuff, some of it 20 years old or more. From that distance, I can play a lot, because I’m not the same person I was then. My Winging Home, a bird book, is all about play.

Poems can sometimes come out whole. Prose pieces, though, are always cobbled together over long stretches of time. To complete one, I need to reinvent myself. Once I started blogging, and goofing around with pictures, the process of cobbling and re-visioning intensified. It’s a pretty wild ride now. Images are often a better doorway for me than textual passages. But then I was interested in painting long before I became interested in language. Something must have sunk in from moving that paint around.

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

No work is done without being publicly performed. I don’t know what a piece is about or what it does until then. I write for the voice now. Performance has become a touchstone. It keeps me honest. Audiences don’t lie. Younger audiences lie even less.

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 accepted story of literature in the twentieth century needs to be re-envisioned. There is a British Columbia literature which is distinct from Canadian Literature. British Columbia contains numerous unique cultures and histories, without literatures; I have tried to plug a gap. Too much of literature does not integrate non-rational forms of logic; half of what we are as human is at stake. I have inherited certain threads of literature; I wish to pass them on. Poetry has a long nonfiction tradition; I have tried to reintegrate it with prose nonfiction. There are new genres being born in contemporary writing; they are our future. Writing is a vital, contemporary human activity, not an aesthetic diversion. At fifty years of age, I want to support young writers. I want to give them what I can to help them flourish in a post-civilized world. I want to write the successful long poem that Pound failed to write. I want to create long poems that combine criticism, photography, and prose poetry. I want the tradition to be made real and vital, so it doesn’t die.

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

I have worked with good editors, who have allowed me the freedom to follow my vision, while holding me to task, and bad editors, who have either been unable to see any solution to a manuscript’s problems, or who have otherwise channelled my work into dead ends. It seems to be the difference between responding to the work, as a work, and responding to the work as a commodity, to fit within preconceived conceptions. Editors who abuse commas and truncate arguments wind up butchering things. They’re editing literature, not writing. Most of my editors have been great.

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

Oh, it’s much easier to put together a manuscript and make it into a book. It is not easier to find a publisher. For some things, of course, reputation helps. For others, though, in markets that have to do with change or publicity, it’s easier to be new or unknown. In addition, there are more writers chasing down fewer publishers. I’m not convinced, however, the answer lies in books, unless our distribution radically changes. At the moment, our books are amazing manufactured commodities. They are industrial products. I don’t think this is going to last. I think we are going to have to re-imagine the book, completely. I think we need to start now.

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

A couple months ago. Right now they taste like cold storage. What’s more, packing houses are now mixing artificial aromatic esters in with artificial storage atmospheres, to counter blandness. They’re science fiction pears. It’s like eating an asthma puffer or something. It’s better to wait until the pears are in season. I came of age reading Virgil underneath a pear tree while a huge bullsnake rustled through the grass just feet away, hunting in the rising starlight as nighthawks hunted overhead. I can wait.

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

Always draw a knife towards yourself.

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

It’s not about appeal. Some of the genres we write in have not been defined. Good. This allows them to grow. The day will come when they replace the ones that are breaking at the seams today. Poetry is a non-fiction form. As Pound showed, the long poem is a lyric poem blown wide open. When non-fiction writing evolved out of the enlightenment, all the non-Descartian material of the Renaissance was left for the poets to deal with, and erroneously took on an aura of fancy — or fiction. Poetry, however, is a non-fiction form. By moving into non-fiction, a greater sense of language can be gained, a greater elasticity, and the ability to further escape the lyric mode and write in long forms.

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 begins with email, with conversations. These continue all day. Papers and books pile up around me. The phone rings. On it goes. Piles of papers and books collapse. I move them onto the printer when I need the scanner, and onto the scanner when I need the printer. I plow into things until my mind gets cloudy. Then I do something physical. Writing used to be physical. Now it’s electronic. It’s not the same thing at all anymore.

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

I will sidestep that question, thanks. Writing is a gift. I’m grateful. I keep a sense of play. I talk to people. There’s always something to work on. There’s always something new. I teach workshops. I edit manuscripts for people. I learn from them. I build community. Writing gets stalled when it no longer fits a box. I avoid the damn things. I keep breathing. There’s so much to write about. I find song lines. I wait for them. I work in time. Life is short.

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

My most recent book is a manuscript on clowns. It’s a surrealist game that Paul Celan played with his friends in Romania after WWII, which consists of rapid fire questions and answers. It’s fascinating. I love it because it’s poetry that doesn’t take the form of what is called poetry. It’s funny stuff, a combination of linguistic slapstick and trickster work. It’s different because of the formal departure. It’s the same, because I’ve been working with tricksters and clowns for years.

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?

Story–telling and visual art are huge influences. Nothing gets into a prose book that hasn’t been told as a story, usually many times. P.K. Page said that visual art and poetry come from the same place. I agree. Painters are light years ahead of writers. They inspire me continually, daily. When I talk with painters, we’re talking about the same thing. I’d say that as a poet I have as much in common with painters than with most writers. We’re doing the same thing.

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

Ryzsard Kapuscinski, Sven Lindqvist, Joan Didion, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Theresa Kishkan and Kristjana Gunnars [see her 12 or 20 questions here] inspire me for nonfiction. For fiction, I love the postwar short stories of Heinrich Böll and Siegfried Lenz for their amazing reveals, Raymond Carver for his dialogue, Jim Shepherd for the cinematic tour-de-force of his short story (but not his novel) Nosferatu, Marianne Wiggins and Mark Anthony Jarman for their language, and Birgit Vanderbeke for her absolute mastery of repetitive syntax. For poetry, Ezra Pound, always, as well as Robin Skelton, Charles Wright, and Olena Kalytiak Davis’s Shattered Sonnets Love Cards and Other Off and Back Handed Importunites.

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

I’d love to be a piano player.

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?

It would be cool to be a wine maker.

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

It was possible, as a single individual, to stand outside of a system of lies and tell the truth. Also: words contain the world and manipulate the stuff of the world. How could I pass up on that?

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

The last great book I read was Theresa Kishkan’s Phantom Limb. The last great film I saw was Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m currently seeking a publisher for a book of short stories. I am in love with the form. I am working on a play about the mysterious hanging of six Secwepemc girls as British Columbia became a province and restrictive Indian reserves were being established; a second play about the Goebbels family in Hell; a novel about Shakespeare, living on into the present through possession and repossession; a collection of long poems; two collections of short poems; a series of poems which rejig classical prose texts; my clown book; a book-length elegy for the lost province of British Columbia; a nonfiction book about fruit, and its history, as it has transformed from medicinal plant, to food stuff, to commodity, a nonfiction book about poetry, and another about nonfiction. Well, the last two might must be the same book. Time will tell. Why so many projects? I recently completed an MFA at UBC, online. To do so, I set my other writing aside for two years. The process of catching up is thrilling.

Sunday, March 9, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Elisabeth Harvor

Elisabeth Harvor's work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Saturday Night, The New Yorker, PRISM International, Our Generation Against Nuclear War, Best Canadian Stories, The Best American Short Stories and many other periodicals and anthologies. Her poetry book, Fortress of Chairs, won the Lampert Award for best first book of poetry written by a Canadian writer in 1992, and Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, her first novel, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Toronto Star in 2000. She won the Alden Nowlan Award for Literary Excellence in 2000, the Marian Engel Award for a woman writer in mid-career in 2003, and she is the 2004 winner of The Malahat Novella Prize. Her most recent novel, a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award in 2005, is All Times Have Been Modern, and her most recent story collection, Let Me Be the One, was a 1996 finalist for the Governor General's Award.

Harvor also edited an anthology of new writing titled A Room at The Heart of Things in 1998. It mainly celebrates the work of students and beginning writers whose poems and stories she collected while teaching in writing programs at York University, Concordia University, and the Humber School for Writers. She has also written essays on the work of Sylvia Plath, Doris Lessing and other writers for Our Generation Against Nuclear War, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Ottawa Citizen, and a number of other periodicals. She has two sons and is currently living in Ottawa.

Elisabeth Harvor has been praised by The New York Times Book Review for her "brilliantly patterned revelations" while the reviewer for Paragraph wrote of her work, "Startlingly original... Her writing is marked by surprises, a style that's akin to synapses firing in the brain; there are no concrete bridges, just jolts of energy linking cliff to cliff, idea to idea..."

1 - How did your first book change your life?

I felt very exposed after my first book came out. So much so that when I went into a bookstore and there were copies of it set out on book tables, I had to leave the store. Now of course I want to storm out of bookstores if my book isn't there.

2 - How long have you lived in Ottawa, 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 Ottawa off and on for over thirty years, with a number of years away from here spent being a graduate student (in Montreal), a sessional lecturer and course director at universities in Montreal and Toronto, and a writer-in-residence in Saskatoon, Fredericton, Montreal and (twice) in Ottawa....

Geography? Ottawa is a topographically more complex and beautiful city than most people think, but I intensely miss the Kennebecasis River Valley where I grew up (above all, I miss the ocean), but when I lived out west in 1998-99, the prairie made a huge impact on me too. My parents both emigrated to the prairies (from Denmark) when they were young, then when they married they moved east. There's a moody black and white photo from my east coast childhood on my website at: http://www.elisabeth-harvor.com/

I have since written a few stories with western locations or connections. Part of my novel-in-progress is also set in Vancouver.

As for race and gender being factors in my work, gender certainly has been, but race has been much less of a factor although I come from such a multicultural family that when my mother died 9 months ago she had grandchildren and new grandsons-in-law and granddaughters-in-law in Kenya, Korea, India, Norway, the Seychelles, Nigeria, the US, and Canada.

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

I am never working on just one thing unless it's a poem or a very short story, I have a few things on the go, always. And how do things begin? Sometimes with a phrase, sometimes with a whole idea for a story, sometimes with an image. I also have a vast reservoir of work and it's always in flux. Parts of poems have been spliced into stories while parts of stories have occasionally turned into poems. I go wherever my mood or my need takes me.

For example, "In The Hospital Garden," a poem I wrote in the 1980s about the birth of a baby who's a radiation mutation, I deal with the same material I dealt with a decade earlier in my first book, in a story called "Monster Baby."

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

Not so much either way, although of course it's always great to meet people who feel connected to my work and sometimes an audience will laugh at a line in a poem or a story that I didn't know (until that very moment) was funny, and that is obviously a huge high. I remember reading a scene from a story called "Freakish Vine That I Am" in the Poet and Peasant
Bookstore in St. John's
back in the 1990's, a bookstore that no longer exists, I believe, to one of the best audiences I've ever had---they were all drunk, I think---and there was a great spontaneous roar of laughter before I got to what I considered the final perfect line and so I didn't end up reading my perfect final line because their laughter had made it so redundant....

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'm more interested in eternal questions than in current questions which, in the best of all possible worlds, are also the eternal questions. For me, those questions are fixed on the polar opposites of power and powerlessness, sexuality and sexual shyness, justice and injustice, hypocrisy and a watchful but passionate engagement with the world. Also, up till recently I've always been much more obsessed with style than with plot. Lately, though, both plot and momentum have been of new interest to me.

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

Both. And sometimes the more difficult the editor the more essential the process. Although I hasten to say this doesn't necessarily follow.

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

It depends more on the genre than on the passing of time. Poems and stories are easiest for me, writing novels is the killer, writing a novel can really eat up your life. And to stay with the characters for years is like having house guests who've overstayed theirwelcome for so long that all you want them to do is pack up and go.

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

I can't remember when I last ate a pear. This is some kind of test for poets that I'm failing?

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

Don't lounge around waiting for the Muse to drop by. And revise, revise, revise. Keep a journal, write in it every day. Bring a notebook with you wherever you go. But do I follow my own advice? No, but I always intend to, at least in relation to the notebooks.

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

Maybe I have Attention Deficit Disorder, but I find it incredibly easy. It comes naturally to me, possibly to a degree that's pathological. And the appeal? It's fun, it feels like a form of play.

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

I have been writing all night every night for the last 11 years. This sounds either totally dedicated or totally mad, but my dedication comes and goes, particularly now that YouTube has come on the scene. I often go there when I am allegedly working...The Police, when they are doing an early video of DON'T STAND SO CLOSE TO ME are so great, I could watch them forever, they were so much better and so much more fun in their 1980 video than they are in the later pyrotechnical versions. Other performances I've visited again and again are Simon
and Garfunkel
singing early versions of THE BOXER and MRS. ROBINSON, Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo singing TRY, Sinead O'Connor singing NOTHING COMPARES 2 U, the mesmerizing Leonard Cohen singing almost every song he has ever written....

And I sleep in the mornings from about seven till noon or early afternoon, then critique the work of my students in the late afternoons and evenings. A typical day begins (as it probably begins for most people in the western world) with checking my emails. Then I have a shower and grab an orange or a coffee and go back to my computer again.

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

I turn to Woolf, Plath, Bernard Malamud, James Salter, Philip Roth, and at least twenty others.

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

In terms of my novels, I'm going after deeper emotions now and more interlocking plots, or so I like to think. But speaking of poetry and speaking technically, I could say that between my first poetry book, Fortress of Chairs, and my second poetry book, The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring, I learned something about line-breaks and quite a lot about white space. I learned that space is as much a mode of communication as words are, even if it is also the background
that allows the poem to "feature" particularly odd or idiosyncratic or memorable arrangements of words. Space can make you ache, at least if you have the right words reaching out into it...

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?

Yes, other writers are very important to me, above all the four writers I just mentioned. But many others. Katherine Mansfield's Journals, Nabokov's SPEAK MEMORY and LOLITA, Hanif Kureishi's INTIMACY, Nadine Gordimer's THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD, the great Russian writers. Especially NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND and ANNA KARENINA. Music and paintings are also strong influences. Nature and weather too.

But science? Not so much. Although one of my more recent poems begins with the words "Like all paranoids, I am a scientist..." and another pits an unexpected pregnancy against images that bloom out of references to DNA.

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

I admire stories by many North American story writers and poems by many Canadian poets and would rather speak in terms of individual poems than speak of poets... A terrific poem by Alden Nowlan about being young and in love and thinking about dying, a brilliant poem by Nadine McInnis [see her 12 or 20 questions here] about a woman poet writing against the moment her little boy will get home from school, Rhea Tregebov's series of breathtaking poems about her son's stay in hospital with extreme asthma...Wonderful fiction by two Ottawa writers: Elizabeth Hay [see her 12 or 20 questions here] and Mary Borsky [see her 12 or 20 questions here]. And the list could go on and on...

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

Live in some warmer place and swim every day.

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 liked to be a midwife. I love birth and babies but, unlike Angelina Jolie, I doubt I would ever have been a serial adopter.

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

I wanted (and apparently needed) to throw my story down before the World Court of Readers.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

SEEK MY FACE, by John Updike, a novella about a woman painter that is really extraordinary. I also admire John Updike's stories (or at least many of them) but I despise his banal poetry.

20. What was the last great film?

I admired many of the actors' performances in THE HOURS, although the script for the movie was mostly awful. And the movie I most want to see soon is THE LIVES OF OTHERS. Movies stretching far back in time that had a big effect onme were, among others, EASY RIDER, THE GRADUATE, BELLE DE JOUR, THE CRYING GAME, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, WILD STRAWBERRIES, THE HUMAN CONDITION, MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, BLOW-UP, THE LAST DETAIL, and NASHVILLE. I was also fascinated, and am still fascinated, by that whole documentary series that began with SEVEN UP.

21. - What are you currently working on?

I'm working on a book of stories that's to come out this August, but in spite of the fact that this is only six months away from now, it doesn't yet have either a title or a cover image. I'm also working on a novel that I hope will come out in 2009. The launch of the story collection will be at the National Library and Archives on Tuesday, September 9th, so as soon as my publisher
gets back from Australia we'll have to come to a few major decisions....

Thursday, March 6, 2008

12 or 20 questions: with Aaron McCollough

Aaron McCollough’s third book of poems, Little Ease, was published by Ahsahta Press in September of 2006. His previous books include Double Venus (Salt, 2003) and Welkin (Ahsahta, 2002). McCollough just completed his PhD in English Language and Literature. His dissertation, Mixed Motions: Protestant Struggles and the Proper Place of Feeling, 1550-1660, focuses on the interplay between indeterminacies in Protestant religious psychology and the early modern poetics of subjectivity. McCollough is the co-editor of Some of These Days: Gullah Community on South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck as Collected by Genevieve W. Chandler, which will be released by the University of South Carolina Press in 2008. His fourth book of poems, No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. He also edits an online poetry journal called GutCult (http://www.gutcult.com/).

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Ultimately, I’d say it changed my life in subtle ways. At first, I was very excited about the fact that it was happening at all, of course. Living with a book being out there over a number of years is different, however, and I’ve come to appreciate that set of pleasures and concerns in a way I wouldn’t have been able to predict. Basically, in the short view, publishing a book helped me continue to establish an already strong sense I had that I really could do work in poetry: that I was what I was trying to be. In the longer view, the first book has continued to be something I’ve had to live with, measure myself against, etc. I imagine it could have been a different book, for example, and I would in turn have evolved as a different writer over the course of the books that followed.

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

Every time I think about it I’m surprised that I’ve been in Michigan for almost eight years. There’s every reason to believe I’ll be here for eight more. I find it hard not to be impressed by the geography of any place, and Michigan is no different. It may be that geography isn’t exactly the word in this case, but something like “landscape” can be overwhelming in this place. Michigan is a place that the last few American economic booms forgot. As such, there is a squalor to the landscape that I identify with. The landscape of my youth was similar. The mountains of Tennessee are beautiful geographically, but in the seventies and eighties, Tennessee was still out of step with the spectacle of prosperousness. Then (as now in Michigan) it looked and felt like it was on the brink of collapse. That feels right to me. That’s where I belong. Race and gender are not foregrounded in my work usually, but they are always on my mind and questions about them do get attention there. When they play a role in the fashioning of soul-as-self and self-as-soul, race and gender become most interesting to me.

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?

My process oscillates. I’d say I’ve come to be a person who “writes books,” but that wasn’t true of my first book, and other projects have started in more-or-less discrete ways. I pretty much do whatever presents itself to be done.

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

I wish readings had a bigger place in my world, but they don’t really play a big role. I believe in giving readings for all kinds of reasons, but I’m also an introvert. So, I wouldn’t say it plays a role in my process one way or another. I think it is important, but it also kind of freaks me out.

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’ve always been interested in continental philosophy, and in recent years I’ve become increasingly interested in greek philosophy, reformation theology, and radical democratic political theories. The questions I find most engaging concern relations between materialism and metaphysics. Dividing them has never made sense to me, but trying to talk about or even think about how they work together is very hard. Nevertheless, the classic lyric questions about self and time are still questions about materialist/metaphysical cruxes. If space and time are continuous aspects of one thing (space-time), then it is worth interrogating other aspects of our engagement with that thing for similar marks of binding. Soul-self, or spirit-flesh, etc. Like me, most poets (I think) come from a position on the left and write to an audience on the left. In essence, the right has found a fit between materialism and metaphysics. We on the left are incessantly being squeezed with political pressure in the guise of Christian morality. I’m interested (as a poet and a person) in finding better responses to that pressure and that style of thought.

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

My experience with editors has been very positive. I certainly wouldn’t call it difficult. I don’t know if I’d say it is essential, but then I’m not sure if I understand that part of the question. Essential in regard to what? Does working with an editor enable me creatively? Not really. Does it enable me to get my work into print? Yes. I’ve always had congenial editors, so maybe I’ve just been lucky. I have a powerful aversion to being bullied, so I can certainly imagine circumstances where working with an editor could be uncomfortable for me, but my work with editors has always felt necessary in the way that working together in good faith is always necessary to a good outcome.

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 wouldn’t say easier, exactly, but I would say less nerve-wracking. Early on I felt I had a lot to prove to myself. That was motivating, of course, but it also generated lots of anxiety. The challenges have shifted for me a bit in the last couple of years. These days, I’m more concerned with keeping my focus sharp and seeing my way into new projects with enthusiasm that used to appear almost ex nihilo out of fear or ambition. Still, that doesn’t mean the process is harder now. It’s just different. I prefer the set of working problems I’m currently stuck with to those that came before.

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

Interesting you should ask that. I hate pears intensely. I’m not sure when I last ate one, but it was probably accidental (as part of a fruit cup or something). There is a graininess to the texture of pear meat that I find all wrong in fruit. Also, the skin feels artificial to me. I think pears are a conspiracy.

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

Don’t shit where you eat. Also, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Somewhere in between those two lies the only feasible way.

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 recently finished a dissertation in Renaissance literature. Going into that project, I was pretty concerned that the critical work was going to sap my energy and enthusiasm for writing poetry. Lots of people warned me that this would happen, and I can still see how that is possible. For me, however, the two types of work have really fed one another. When they are not talking to each other, each offers a bit of a break from special frustrations of the other.

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 come in and out of writing routines, I guess. I go on obsessive tears where I write every day for weeks, for one thing (which is kind of a sub-routine). Otherwise, I find that specific projects dictate their own writing processes, which I then follow pretty rigorously. A typical day begins with my getting up and going to campus to teach or (on days I don’t teach) getting up, going to the couch, and reading for a couple hours. If I’m in the middle of a project, I tend to go back and forth between reading and writing. The first few hours of consciousness tend to be most productive for me in any case.

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

I have favorites like George Herbert, George Oppen, Donald Revell, Ezra Pound, Michael Palmer, The Psalms, Charles Olson, Susan Howe. But more often, when hoping for inspiration, I think I look in places I haven’t been before. Much of the time, I’m trying to avoid pastiching my favorite writers, so I need to cut their influence with something new.

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

With Little Ease, I was conscious from a fairly early point that I was writing according to a principle Jed Rasula has called “experiment as the argument of the book.” Welkin and Double Venus included extended serial work, but it wasn’t until the third book that I felt able to open the aperture to encompass the whole thing. Lately, I’ve been working on opening that same aperture even further, beyond the binding of one book.

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?

For a long time I wrote and recorded songs in my basement. I’d like to be doing that now, but doing it has proved a casualty of trying to balance my writing life with my scholarly work. I think that songs and songwriting have had a pretty major influence on the way I think about putting words together. Certainly, sound in and of itself means a lot to me: that is, I trust sound as a signifier, and recorded music (thinking about and feeling how the layers come together and interact) plays a significant role in driving that for me.

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

The Bible (esp. St. Paul and Psalms), Augustine, Deleuze and Guattari, William James, Foucault, Arendt, Herbert, Céline, Sebald, Milton, Charles Olson, Hejinian, Susan Howe, John Calvin, Celan, Deborah Shuger, Gail Kern-Paster, Lacan, Marx, Zizek, Michael Schoenfeldt, Keats, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Thoreau, Whitman, Mandelstam, Oppen, Pound, Denis Johnson, Donne’s Sermons, John Bunyan.

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

Become a father.

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 probably try some sort of counseling. Maybe some form of pastoral counseling. Despite being an introvert, I really like people. My mother runs a mental health clinic in rural Georgia, and I think she does noble work. It is a slow, gradual attempt to improve individual lives, but it is a practical approach. Teaching, of course, has some potential for doing this, also, but the level of need is very different.

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

I never felt like I was much good at anything else. I could do other things, I’m sure, but without much confidence. I certainly have doubts as a writer, but basically I feel (and have pretty much always felt) called to write in the old vocational sense. It made/makes sense for me in a way that nothing else does. That writing (or at least the kind of writing I do) is not profitable in any way is unfortunate but basically irrelevant to me.

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

I recently read a book about Greek tragedy by Ruth Padel called In and Out of the Mind. I thought that was amazing. Last great movie I saw was Videodrome, which I had never seen before. Another recent one that I loved was The Holy Mountain.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve just finished a manuscript called Rough Soul, which comprises short lyrics, mainly. That book is very elegiac. I’m in the preliminary stages of another project on fury, conscience, pollution, and cleansing that grows out of my interest (as pretty much everything I write does) in the materiality, or objective substance, of emotional, cognitive, and spiritual states.