 Ania Szado
Photo by Katrina Afonso Ania Szado's acclaimed second novel, Studio Saint-Ex (Viking Canada/Knopf USA) has been sold to five countries. Her debut novel Beginning of Was (Penguin Canada) was regionally shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book. Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologized in All Sleek and Skimming (Orca, ed. Lisa Heggum). Ania's nonfiction has appeared in the Globe & Mail and Flare Magazine. She lives in Toronto and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia and an AOCA from Ontario College of Art. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter: @AniaSzado.
RUSTY TALK WITH ANIA SZADO Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Ania Szado: I remember writing the copy for a "Best of the West" newspaper that covered the goings-on of the cowboy action figures that my brother and I played with when we were little... but my strongest early memory is less pleasant. I wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. It must have been pretty good. My teacher insisted that I had to have plagiarized it, though I hadn't. That soured me on writing for a while.
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
AS: I had been doing visual art, but I'd always wanted to write. It took me a while to get up the courage—I was a voracious reader and was pretty much in awe of writers; I didn't dare imagine I could be capable of being one myself. When I finally made the decision to swallow my insecurities and hone my writing skills, I found that I was more creative and committed as a writer than I was with paint. I found my direction and voice slowly, but right from the start, the work I was producing seemed to have more potential than anything I'd produced as a visual artist, and the act of writing was intensely satisfying.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
AS: It wasn't advice so much as a description of a way of working. I took a novel class with Catherine Bush when I was doing my MFA, and she mentioned that she sometimes leaves the manuscript, and just sits on the sofa with a notebook, asking and answering questions about the work-in-progress. That opened the door for me to adjust my own process along similar lines, and I think it has helped my writing immensely.
KM: Can you describe your writing process?
AS: The one thing that is consistent in my writing process is that I have to get away, now and then, to completely immerse myself in my work. I do writing retreats of between a week and a month. I'll write for minimum 15 hours a day; my longest stretch was 22 hours. Most days I don't step outside. I eat simple foods, the same thing every day. No radio or TV or music or news. I think of nothing but the story world; I don't even leave it when I'm asleep. I've done this for first drafts and I've done it for rewrites. I'm always anxious before I begin, but I set up immediately and start working right away, and then it's just the bliss of intense, satisfying work and creative intellectual challenge. When I'm not on retreat, I might write several hours a day or not at all—it depends on the stage I'm at in a novel and whether there are other pressing demands on my time. When I'm working, I shift between writing on the laptop and working things out in a notebook.
KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
AS: What springs to mind is one of the coincidences that came up during the writing of Studio Saint-Ex. A character in the novel, Saint-Exupéry's real-life friend Bernard Lamotte, had his painting studio on East 52nd Street in NYC in the 1040s; there's a plaque on the building to commemorate Saint-Ex's working on The Little Prince there. I created a social club for the city's French expats, called it the Alliance Française, and placed it across the street from Lamotte's studio—in what is actually the Cartier building. Some time later, I queried a contact at today's Alliance Française about the history of the organization. She told me that the organization was itinerant in the early '40s; they borrowed space as they needed it. When she went into the files, she discovered that one of the buildings they used in the early '40s was actually the Cartier building. What's more, the modern-day Alliance had, until recently, owned a Lamotte mural. The woman told me she herself had been responsible for auctioning it off. She'd had no idea Lamotte and Saint-Exupéry had been friends.
KM: Tell us about your new novel Studio Saint-Ex?
AS: Studio Saint-Ex tells the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writing The Little Prince in early 1940s Manhattan, through the eyes of two women vying to win his heart and save him from his inevitable fate while also grappling to achieve status and success of their own. One is a young fashion designer; the other is his fiery estranged wife. The Little Prince runs throughout the book as a symbol of passion, love and destruction.
KM: How did you approach the research for this project?
AS: I began by researching Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first by reading one after another of his many biographies. I read or reread his novels and other writing, including his letters. I was most interested in his NYC years, when he was writing The Little Prince, and eventually I pieced together the other elements of the story I wanted to tell. That led to research on WWII New York, the beginnings of American haute couture, the French expat community in Manhattan, and numerous other side roads. I had a great resource in a Saint-Exupéry scholar who took me on tireless walking tours of Saint-Ex's NYC locales and sent me packages of useful material. I had the insights of my seamstress mother and designer sister to draw on to supplement my research into sewing, fabrics, and the fashion industry. All the while, I was writing, working out the story—and revising it as the research revealed new possibilities or roadblocks.
KM: What are you working on now?
AS: I'm in the early stages of exploring two very different ideas for the next novel. One involves two artists. The other has to do with a lost—and found—child.
 ANIA SZADO'S RECENT NOVEL
Studio Saint-Ex, Penguin Canada, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
In the glittering world of Manhattan's French expats and 1942 Quebec, a twenty-two-year-old fashion designer on the cusp of launching her career is swept away by the charms of French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ... and enmeshed in the schemes of his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife, who is determined to win back her husband—at all costs and seductions.
With Paris under occupation by Hitler's troops, New York's Mayor LaGuardia vows to turn his city into the new fashion capital of the world—and Mig Lachapelle leaves Montreal for New York to make her name. She finds herself pulled into a fiery romantic triangle in which ambitions, creativity, and passions catch a literary giant between two talented, mesmerizing women and imperil the fate of his work-in-progress, The Little Prince—a poignant tale of a young boy's loneliness and love among the stars, one of the best selling and most beloved novels of all time.Read an excerpt here.
 Linda Svendsen
Photo by Michael O'Shea Linda Svendsen's linked collection, Marine Life, was published in Canada, the United States and Germany and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Saturday Night, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best Canadian Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Marine Life was nominated for the LA Times First Book Award and released as a feature film. Svendsen’s TV writing credits include adaptations of The Diviners, At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story, and she co-produced and co-wrote the miniseries Human Cargo, which garnered seven Gemini Awards and a George Foster Peabody Award. She received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. Svendsen is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia.
RUSTY TALK WITH LINDA SVENDSEN
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Linda Svendsen: In Grade 2, we were asked to write a rhyming poem and I had so much fun doing it that I went on for a dozen stanzas. Building on this major breakthrough, in Grade 3 I tried to write a sequel to Tom Sawyer in which Becky and Tom married (roughly 6 pages of careful heartfelt printing).
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
LS: I don't think I ever decided to become a writer; it's happened by default and I still wonder how it's all going to turn out. All I know is that I really enjoy writing fiction and for screen and that it allows me to pursue all the other activities I considered such as acting, directing, producing, social work, anthropology, history, etc.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
LS: Nancy Packer, fiction writer (and mother of New Yorker writer George Packer and novelist Ann Packer) told me to take my characters to the cliff. And push them over.
KM: Your new novel, Sussex Drive, is a political satire offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at Canadian politics. Why did you decide to take on this subject matter? What do you hope readers take away from it?
LS: Sussex Drive was inspired by Canada's federal prorogue-a-palooza in 2008 and 2009. It's about a Conservative Prime Minister's wife and a left-wing Governor General and what happens when they can no longer play "Follow the Leader." I was very intrigued by the Governor General's role and decision-making in December 2008—would she or wouldn't she allow the Harper government to fall and the coalition to take power? Also, as Canadians, we're immersed in the entertainment/propaganda of the U.S. and U.K. (and their political figures with The King's Speech, The Queen, Game Change) and our own turf seemed rich and virtually unexplored. And it's chick lit, too, for canuckleheads.
KM: Sussex Drive reads like it’s written by a political insider. How did you approach the research for this project? Can you tell us about the process of writing this book?
LS: Sussex started out as a short story after December 2008 and headed toward novella length. After the 2009 prorogation, it became a novel and I visited Ottawa—the Parliament Buildings, Rideau Hall, Gatineau Lake, Museum of Civilization, the War Museum, and Rockcliffe Park. I happened to be in London in April 2009 during the G-20 and found it fascinating that the Canadians seemed to be invisible to the British press. Random House Canada bought the novel in October 2011 when I had 140 pages written; I wrote from January to June 2012 (my editors were amazing!) and it was published last October. Tight deadline!
KM: Many reviewers have commented on the sharp dialogue in Sussex Drive. In addition to writing fiction, you’re also an awarding-winning screenwriter. Do you plan on adapting Sussex Drive for film or television? If so, how do you plan on approaching the adaptation?
LS: I'm trying to talk my husband into producing Sussex Drive, but he's busy with other projects right now. 6 x 1 hour or a TV movie...fingers crossed!
KM: What are you working on now?
LS: Right now I'm deciding what novel I'm writing next. Great space to be in.
 LINDA SVENDSEN'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
Sussex Drive, Random House Canada, 2012
DESCRIPTION FROM THE PUBLISHERA startingly funny and deeply satisfying satirical novel that makes the Canadian political scene accessible from the female perspective, behind the scenes at the top of the hill.
Torn from the headlines, Sussex Drive is a rollicking, cheeky, alternate history of big-ticket political items in Canada told from the perspectives of Becky Leggatt (the sublimely capable and manipulative wife of a hard-right Conservative prime minister) and just a wink away at Rideau Hall, Lise Lavoie (the wildly exotic and unlikely immigrant Governor General)—two wives and mothers living their private lives in public.Set in recent history, when the biggest House on their turf is shuttered not once, not twice, but three times, Becky and Lise engage in a fight to the death in a battle that involves Canada’s relationship to the United States, Afghanistan and Africa. The rest of the time, the women are driving their kids. From Linda Svendsen’s sharp and wicked imagination comes a distaff Ottawa like no other ever created by a Canadian writer, of women manoeuvring in a political world gone more than a little mad, hosting world leaders, dealing with the challenges of minority government, and worrying about teen pregnancies and their own marriages. As they juggle these competing interests, Becky and Lise are forced to question what they thought were their politics, and make difficult choices about their families and their futures—federal and otherwise.EXCERPT FROM SUSSEX DRIVE
 bill bissett
Photo by Joy Masuhara bill bissett born on lunaria sum 4oo yeers ago approximatelee in lunarian
time was sent 2 erth on first childrns shuttul from th at that time
trubuld planet landid in halifax moovd 2 vancouvr at 17 moovd
2 london wher i was part uv luddites alternativ rock band thn
toronto wher ium poet in residens at workman arts & recording
with pete dako wanting alwayze 2 xploor words n sounds n
image in th writing n painting showing paintings at th secret
handshake art galleree toronto most recent book novel from talonbooks
rusty talk with bill bissett
I asked bill bissett these questions about his writing process:
- What is your first memory of being creative—in terms of writing creatively or making art or music?
- Why did you become a writer and artist? What writers/poets/artists were influential to you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
- Can you describe your writing process?
- Have you ever experienced a creative block and what did you do to get out of it?
- You work in a variety of genres and mediums, and your work has been described, among other things, as defying genre. How do you see your relationship between medium and genre in your work? Does the subject dictate the genre or vice versa? Or does it develop naturally?
- What are you working on now?
He responded by email over the month of September 2012: dere kathryn th first 2 qwestyuns 4 rustee talk mor as it cums in
th first creativ work i remembr was in grade 3 or 4 b4 going in2 th hospital 4 a coupul uv yeers was a pome i wrote abt sail boats in th watr n th feeling in my brain n heart was veree thrilling 4 me an elixr reelee thn a littul whil latr aftr mor thn a few operaysyuns i was in th oxygen tent n realizing i wud nevr b a dansr n or a figur skatr my first reel ambishyuns i cud write n paint i thot n that way feel th line mooving thru space n that way as well feeling th taktilitee uv life being physikal th enhansment from th abstraksyuns uv th skripts we wer ar all living thru i wrote my first storee thn in th oxygen tent wher i was deliting 2 drink orange crush n see th brite orange liquid cumming out uv my bodee immediatelee thru mor tubes i lovd that n that orange runway made me laff n feel veree poignant as well as my home planet lunaria was veree orange b4 all us childrn were remoovd from that troubuld planet n sent 2 erth
my first storee wch i wrote in th oxygen tent was abt a boy who didint want 2 follow rules n wantid 2 find his own way n swam out past th undrtow wch oftn was both a physikal risk n a metaphor 4 sew manee othr things in nova scotia n at great dangr he ovrcame th fors from th watr n made it 2 shore n thn vowd he wud dew it agen n agen sirtinlee if life wer as friabul as it seemd sew definitlee 2 b why not take th risk
my fathr had th storee typd out in several mor copees that was my first publishd work i feel veree warm abt him now in ths moment that he did dew that 4 me n evn tho i didint reelee start writing agen until aftr my mothr went 2 spirit evn a few yeers aftr that 16 n reelee agen full time until i got 2 vancouvr 17 my yerning 2 b always writing evr sins i was in th oxygen tent at 10or 11 has nevr left me
influenses medium genre hungree throat mor as it cums in
th subjekt 4 me is th genre n th genre is th subjekt iuv alwayze wantid 2 put books 2gethr that hold or contain diffrent genres as iuv also writtn pomes that contain difrent genres iuv oftn calld such pomes fusyun pomes my most recent work novel my first novel made me mor aware uv th medium is th genre n th genre is th medium n th medium slash subjekt is th genre mor aware thn evr how we write is can b what we ar writing abt mor thn an approach 2 mor thn creating th nuans uv it is th uv in my first novel calld novel abt 2 yeers ago brout out by talonbooks its a collagist work prob also calld post modernist in that th linear flow storee line is part uv th whol work is not th whol work th whole work inklewds th modernist storee line th serch 4 a trew love elements uv gangstr espionage n th serch n what happns evn tho veree labyrinthean also inklewds essays sum abt peopul we know in th known fakshul world introdusing ideas uv ficksyun fakt identitee dew we reelee know them can we n wch them is it a fact n pomes also like th essays hiliting theems that ar in th storee line th charaktrs mooving thru space n time n situaysyuns n thr is a hi degree uv th elements uv randomness wch th strukshur uv th work novel conveys inklewds n is conveying
my first biggest n still biggest influens is gertrude stein who showsd n shows me espeshulee in stanzas in meditaysyuns that words need not onlee 2 represent but ar in themselvs konstrukts wch fold unfold n refiliing fold in2 n out uv each othr ar in fakt puzzuls made uv each othr sew they can b on theyr own not representing bcumming n being what whats dew our grammars cum from our emosyuns n or dew our emosyuns mostlee reelee cum from our binaree based grammar thees unsolvabul qwestyuns prsist n ar oftn endlesslee interesting yes
othr huge erlee influenses allen ginsberg robert duncan denise levrtov bob cobbing diane di prima sew manee infinitlee manee d.a. levy bpNichol martina clinton maxine gadd judith copithorne influences with also sew manee n now 2day peopul othr poets i dew reedings with sew impressd with adeena karasick kai kellough sheri- d wilson ivan coyote richard van de camp david bateman naomi laufer jill mcginn toshio ushiroguchi-pigott chadwick juriansz ar names uv amayzing poets that jump 2 mind helen posno
hungree throat my nu book my second novel is mor a novel in meditaysyun 2 charaktrs alredee found each othr trying 2 let each othr farthr n furthr in wun afrayd uv intimasee from his memoreez being 2 chargd n not let go uv how hard that is getting ovr trauma his bad memoree attacks drag him away from whom he loves evn from himself in th present n ths collagist post modernist work tho not as much prhaps as novel inklewds essays pomes seeminglee unrelatid help th reedr n th work 2 reflekt on all th key issews in ths work that cum in2 wun whil reeding hungree throat
thees 2 books ar sew importnat 2 me kathryn n i wud reelee like what yu dew with what ium sending yu 2 focus on hungree throat as it is cumming out in th spring 2013 from talonbooks n th nu book ium working on now is in no way a novel sew thees 2 books ar my 2 novels se far altho th charaktrs ar diffrent peopul thees 2 books cud complement each othr th collagist form works veree well 4 me with th way uv working that can inklewd randomness qwestyuning identitee fact ficksyun 4 me thrs an interesting bredth n spekulaysyun in ths kind uv working th tropes n trajsktoreez longings changes growing n ungrowing lyrik n diffikulteez n treetment uv th konstruktiv urges what we konstrukt what is konstruktid what we can build 2gethr n what we can build n how what we build is building us othr important 2 me writrs hart crane e.e. cummings
latelee ium reeding davisadora by michael ondaatje his comeing thru slaughter is wun uv my all time favorit books
evr p.d.james nu book death comes to pemberley man about town by mark merlis have yu red anne carsons autobiography of red anothr uv my all time most adord books also among th erlier listings touchd on heer erleer in my life that is john rechy city uv night also colm toibin wrote an amayzing book i red coupul yeers ago almost that same titul as john rechy s brilyant city of night colm toibin s book titul is the story of the night camus sartre debeauvoir gide wer huge influenses on me as i was growing in my erlee teens n issac singer shirley ann grau truman capote tenessee williams william inge eugene oneil diane di prima this kind uv bird flies backwards shakespere in school th first sound poetree recording i herd was edith sitwell facade blew me away helpd start me out fr sure as did n dew all thees peopul n sew manee mor
sew hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun th meditaysyun is abt letting go letting go uv attachment 2 traumatik memoreez n how can yu moov on or 4ward if yu ar klingnig 2 solv or whatevr bad n or haunting memoreez uv th past in wuns life how thees 2 peopul try 2 love each othr thru th dilemma they ar living n what happns
intrspersd thru ths meditayshyun discussyuns conver
saysyuns pledges collapses n regroupings ar pomes song essays its not a book uv doom but it contains sum doom n like all us writrs have n dew talk abt thru th ages how hard 2 love 2 find it n follow thru with it its politiks n sankshuaree part n parts uv th way my throat is hungree 4 breething my throat is hungree 4 eeting my throat is hungree 4 singing my throat is hungree 4 yu
wrap up qwestyuns n answrs 4 rusty talk hope evreethings great w yu Kathryn
maybe 2 wrap up heer 4 th rusty 4 now aneeway from th beginning i always wantid 2 b writing reelee in approx 7 approaches 2 writing poetree my main wuns being sound n vizual words spred all ovr th page using th space uv th page as whol blank canvas not onlee using a porsyun uv that availabul space as square or rektangul th shape n size uv th copee size n th book size th ekonomeez uv n othr considraysuns have brout th writing in2 lettr size 81/2 x 11 inches drastikalee n finding th wayze thru th availabul transmitting vehikuls n xpanding wuns repertoire 4 inspiraysyun i follow th vois es uv th work at hand or th writing godesses n gods who i sew beleev in guide me 2 write with novel whol passages wer literalee diktatid 2 me sumtimes thrs a lot uv editing as in th pome 4 hart crane in time sumtimes thrs almost no editing th tiny librarians pome in novel went thru seemd ike manee rewrites othr parts uv novel came instantlee iuv nevr xperiensd a writrs blok i cant imagine evn how painful that wud b
i just finishd proof reeding RUSH what fuckan theory a book on theory i wrote n publishd in 72 wch is now being refreshd n reissewd by book thug in toronto my second novel hungree throat will b out in spring 13 n what ium reelee working on now is my nu book mostlee dewing a lot uv lettr texting in it
yu can find a wide range uv my work in you tube n also my web site th offishul bill bissett web site www.billbissett.com
oh thr ar mor thn a few cds out uv my work chek th cv in th website th most recent cd is nothing will hurt with pete dako xtraordinaree musician n arrangr n composr n gary shenkman n ambrose pottie
cest sa i gess thats all 4 now thanks sew much 4 yr interest thees intrviews ar kinduv hard 2 dew sumtimes a prson dusint want 2 bcum 2 self conscious but they reelee help me as well thanks veree much
hungree throat veree recentlee compleetid out spring 2013 hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun 2 peopul getting 2gethr wun afrayd uv continuing intimasee bcoz uv what has happend 2 him th othr not bewilderd n anxious is eagr 4 nu xperiences with his nu partnr th meditaysyun is partlee abt letting go how hard that is n sumtimez how seminglee eezee th struggul letting go can b owing 2 th obsessing paralyzing n shaping burdns uv our pasts th obstakuls that trauma creates 4 our presents n futurs layrs n layrs ficksyuns n realiteez wch ar peopuls throats ar hungree 4 breething 4 speeking digesting saying singing eeting tasting giving kissing sew much uv th worlds throats ar hungree not onlee 4 evreething also 4 food watr air wun uv th last stages b4 passing uv peopul with parkinsons is whn th throat no longr swallows millyuns uv peopul with sleep apnea sleep with masheens pushing air in2 theyr throats all nite long 2 prevent closure th throat chakra being well is a condishyun uv our life th throat is hungree also 4 acceptans uv what is n what has bin n what is beleevablee possibul thru song sound poetree narrativ n non narrativ analysis meditaysun words n meenings oftn dissolving hungree throat looks at all thees dynamiks 2 share greev celebrate uplift love n moov 4words play with th word growing its parts sylabuls n th mouth n throat shaping each in our times gr ow wo ing wing s
 bill bissett's MOST RECENT BOOK
hungree throat by bill bissett, Talonbooks, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
Written in his non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. In this uplifting “novel in meditaysyun” about love, in which we witness ten years of a shared life, we are reminded of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting multitude of “hungers” common to us all: all our throatsr hungree 4 breething being sing
ing eeting digesting speeking
saying food kissing watr love
air ficksyun fakt memoree
th present what is nu all ovr
lapping imbuing change
th throat chakra being well
is a condishyn 4 life
 Lynne Tillman
Photo by Julia Jackson Lynne Tillman's latest book is Someday This Will Be Funny, a collection of short stories, published by Red Lemonade Press (2012). Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy, published by Soft Skull. She is the fiction editor at Fence Magazine and Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.RUSTY TALK WITH LYNNE TILLMAN
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Lynne Tillman: When I was eight, I wrote a composition about Charlemagne. My class was asked to write just one. But I got carried away, and wrote two. That thrill, rush, gave me a sense of power, freedom, pleasure—an eight year old's version.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
LT: I don't know why. I could give you reasons, but I really don't know other than to say that, when I was eight and wrote those little compositions, I loved it. I felt I was good at it, and decided right then to be a writer.
KM: Could you describe your writing process?
LT: I'm erratic. I don't have an everyday practice, except when I want to do it, want to write it, whatever it is. Then I become compulsive, and sit at my desk, at the computer, for hours without moving. Except for getting a cup of tea. But I can forget to eat, and begin to feel heady, dizzy. This is not great for the body, but I love that intensity, concentration, being inside what I'm writing.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection?
LT: Rejection is different from criticism. Constructive criticism can help, but sometimes it's hard to handle, especially when you're just beginning to show your work. Rejection can be hell. Writers have to know that. But it's always miserable. I have no advice other than to say we all go through it, and if you can't get through it, you can't show your writing to others for publication.
KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
LT: Most important is how you read as a writer, not what you read. Reading crap is just boring. There are many good writers, fewer great ones; but if a writer reads critically, she can learn how it's done, and what she likes or doesn't and why. It aids in making choices if you know there are choices.
KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use?
LT: "Take your reader by the hand." My older sister told me that when I was 12.
KM: Your favourite literary moment, if you have one.
LT: Maybe my favourite moment was when the great writer Harry Mathews read aloud a piece I had written anonymously, because I was so insecure, to an audience at St. Mark's Poetry Project. I was astonished, surprised, happy, embarrassed; but it got some laughs, and gave me some courage.
KM: What are you working on now?
LT: A novel, my sixth, if I ever finish it. Right now I'm calling it Clouds and Apparitions, but Clouds may go. Not sure yet.
LYNNE TILLMAN'S MOST RECENT BOOK
Someday This Will Be Funny, Red Lemonade, 2011  LYNNE TILLMAN AS AUTHOR PHOTO
The black-and-white pencil drawing on the reverse of Someday This Will Be Funny shows a woman with a long, oval face, a thin nose, a strong chin, and a cloud of apparently blonde, curly hair. The black-and-white photograph on the flyleaf of the story collection Absence Makes the Heart shows the same woman, twenty-one years ago—the same thin lips, the same elegantly elongated nose. The woman looks like Glenn Close. She looks so much like Glenn Close, especially Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest–era Glenn Close, that I spend at least fifteen minutes comparing results in Google image search. In color everything is clearer. The woman is Lynne Tillman. It’s funny that for a second I saw Alex Forrest—powerfully, primally, dangerously sexual, a female menace—one of those synaptic errors that later make a sort of sense, a tired brain conflating a time period, a radically direct portrayal of female sexuality, an aureole of hair. Or an error that later will simply be funny. Someday this will be funny. Read More
From The Literary Review, "Ruth Curry A Collection of Thoughts on Lynne Tillman, on the Occasion of the Publication of Her Twelfth Book, Someday This Will Be Funny"
Lynne Tillman's characters inhabit language the way others live in rooms and cities. It's not that they are made only of words—all literary characters are—or that they don't have their own versions of material longings, needs, attachments, and obstructions. What's different is that they are attuned to language. They fraternize with words even when they are not talking. They treasure clichés and ready-made phrases as if they were messages or hints, turning them over to find their wisdom, or at least the joke wrapped inside them. In her collection This Is Not It (2002), when a woman makes a "last-minute decision," she very soon wonders what a "first-minute decision" would look like. There is an echo of this thought in Tillman's new story collection, Someday This Will Be Funny: "The decisive moment was an indecisive one for her." We instantly start adding up our own moments of that sort, finding far too many. Read More
From Bookforum, "Words to Live By: Comic stories interrogate reality, history, and language itself" by Michael Wood
Despite the claim of the title, “Someday This Will Be Funny,” you wouldn’t want to reach for Lynne Tillman’s new book just for a good howl. In fact, that “someday” the title promises may never come. Tillman’s stories are too piercing, the obsessions of her characters too connected to their psychic wounds, for them to be considered exactly “funny.” In any case, it isn’t “someday” but rather “meantime” that counts for readers. And in the meantime, Tillman’s fictions tend to be (to steal a line from one of her stories) as “outrageously ineffable, obdurate and evasive” as the forms of desire they describe. Gorgeously at ease and technically virtuosic, the stories are ever on point — on point, that is, if the point of your reading has more to do with psychological nuance and bravura performances of language than with conventional story lines. Read More
From The New York Times Sunday Book Review, "Lynne Tillman’s Innovative Stories" by Forrest Gander
 Emily Schultz
Photo by Brian Joseph Davis Emily Schultz's first book, Black Coffee Night, was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award, while her second, Joyland, received rave reviews. Her most recent novel, Heaven is Small, was a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Award alongside Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Ian Brown, and Anne Michaels. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Eye Weekly, The Walrus Magazine, and several anthologies. Schultz also edits an influential website called "Joyland," which publishes short fiction and commentary from across North America. For this work, she was named one of Canada's digital innovators by Quill & Quire magazine. Schultz lives in Toronto and New York.
RUSTY TALK WITH EMILY SCHULTZ
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Emily Schultz: When I was in second grade I penned two “books” with hand-drawn covers. I took them in to my schoolteacher and demanded that she read them aloud to the class. One was called The Adventures of Molly Mouse, the other Hemp the Horse. I’m not sure where I’d heard that word, but I thought it made a good name. I guess you could say I started off as a DIY author.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
ES: I really didn’t feel I had a choice. For example, see above.
KM: What influences your writing the most?
ES: It varies from book to book. With The Blondes, I guess the contemporary media-scape: the noise of news, disaster, and TV shows like She Survived That…Pregnant?!
KM: Could you describe your writing process? (Do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision.)
ES: With this book, I wrote the first draft fast, consciously changing my process, which is normally slow and meticulous, weighing every line. My husband and I holed up in a desert cabin for several weeks without internet and that is where I did the bulk of the first draft, writing every day from 9 ‘til 4 while staring out the window at the mountains and desert scrub bush. Strangely, writing quickly I had less structural questions to attack in later drafts, and the characters—although they still needed work—were more consistent. There wasn’t time for self-doubt.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection?
ES: Everyone gets rejected. As you become more successful you’re only going to face more or bigger rejections, so you have to get used to it and learn not to obsess. Have a cry, have a drink, watch something stupid on YouTube, and then fuhgeddaboudit.
KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
ES: I think you have to find your own writers. I remember when I was young people would tell me, “Oh you simply must read…It will change your life!” and I never seemed to relate to any of those books. I wondered what was wrong with me. And so, although I found writers I related to later, when I was first starting out I tended to write in reaction to work I didn’t care for. I knew more what I didn’t want to be than what I did—but knowing that part actually helped me immensely.
KM: What is the best literary advice you've been given that you actually use?
ES: Every story must have a beginning, middle, and end—from Aristotle, and my sixth grade teacher.
KM: Your funniest or favourite moment that you've experienced as a writer or in the literary world.
ES: It doesn’t get any more Canadian than this story. I was in Halifax at a Broken Social Scene concert when a young woman approached me in the crowd. She asked if I was Emily Schultz. She’d read my book and recognized me from a newspaper photo. This was about ten years ago, and it was the one and only time anyone ever recognized me at a non-literary event. I felt like a star.
KM: Can you tell us about your new book The Blondes?
ES: If this were a Hollywood pitch meeting, my one line would be: Blondes, with rabies. But this isn’t a Hollywood pitch meeting, so I’ll see if I can give a bit more of an impression. Plot-wise, it’s about a grad student who finds out she is pregnant from an on-and-off-again relationship with her married thesis advisor. She’s exploring all these feelings of being bewilderment, not knowing how she feels about him, about her own actions, or if she should keep or terminate the pregnancy, when an epidemic (a virus affecting only blonde women) forces her actions and her fate. I wanted to explore how women both threaten and relate to one another, and at the same time work again in the satirical form. I also wanted the book to be an action-adventure novel for women.
KM: What are you working on now?
ES: My next novel is still too early to talk about. But I’m doing some screenwriting with my husband Brian Joseph Davis. It’s a TV show about life at an alternative weekly.
 EMILY SCHULTZ'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
The Blondes, Random House, 2012
Description from the publisherA breakout novel for a young writer whose last book was shortlisted for the Trillium Prize alongside Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood, and whom the Toronto Star called a "force of nature."
Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passers-by, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers. Soon it becomes clear that the attacks are symptoms of a strange illness that is transforming blondes--whether CEOs, flight attendants, skateboarders or accountants--into rabid killers.
Hazel, vulnerable because of her pregnancy, decides to flee the city--but finds that the epidemic has spread and that the world outside New York is even stranger than she imagined. She sets out on a trip across a paralyzed America to find the one woman--perhaps blonde, perhaps not--who might be able to help her. Emily Schultz's beautifully realized novel is a mix of satire, thriller, and serious literary work. With echoes of Blindness and The Handmaid's Tale amplified by a biting satiric wit, The Blondes is at once an examination of the complex relationships between women, and a merciless but giddily enjoyable portrait of what happens in a world where beauty is--literally--deadly.Browse The Blondes:
 Michael V. Smith
Photo by David Ellingsen Michael V. Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown teaching creative writing in the interdisciplinary program of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC's Okanagan campus in BC's Interior. He is the author of the novels Progress (Cormorant Books 2011) and Cumberland (Cormorant Books, 2002) which was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award.
In recent years, Smith won Vancouver's Community Hero of the Year Award and the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers. He's also won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, scooped two short film prize categories at Toronto's Inside Out festival, and was nominated for the Journey Prize.
His videos have played around the world, in cities such as Milan, Dublin, Turin, London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Glasgow, Lisbon, Beirut, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, SF, LA and Bombay. Smith is an MFA grad from UBC’s Creative Writing program.
Vancouver Magazine has considered him one of its city's 25 most influential gay citizens whereas Loop Magazine named him one of Vancouver’s Most Dangerous People...
His first book of poetry is What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006), short-listed for the ReLit Prize. In 2008, he published a hybrid book of concrete poems/photographs, Body of Text (BookThug), created with David Ellingsen.
RUSTY TALK WITH MICHAEL V. SMITH
Kathryn Mockler: What keeps you going as a writer?
Michael V. Smith: I’ve always loved a puzzle. My novels have felt like long complicated puzzles that I tried to figure out. Really, every book is a mystery novel, right? You read to the end to find out the whodunnit, in whatever shape that takes. How is this book going to end? Even, how is the poem going to end? How does it work? So writing is the best way to enjoy making puzzles (long ones like novels, short ones like a poem) and still get paid. Okay, I use teaching to get paid. What keeps me going is a fine alchemy of things. There are many pleasures in creating: simple ego-stroking, the thrill of feeling like I’m discovering something, a satisfaction in accomplishment, being generous with myself, the feeling that I’m creating a conversation with someone about a collection of ideas (or characters) I’m very fond of, and the pleasure that comes from being engaged with the world. I’ve never thought of writing as a solitary act. I don’t know where that idea comes from. Writing is a very long one-sided conversation, but I’m always aware that eventually an audience will hear it, and listen, and join in.
Kathryn Mockler: What is the revision process like for you?
Michael V. Smith: With novels, after I have a first draft, I take out all the parts of the flab that aren’t plot. Just cut it all away. If there are bits of information I particularly like, or can’t do without, then I find somewhere to slip that back in. Usually, that first draft, cleaned up, is a solid skeleton. Then I do drafts that look at fixing specific things: I go through the whole manuscript, for example, and look at tying the events more closely together, so that one event is the cause of what comes next, or I do an edit to ‘psychologize’ the characters, meaning I add in some of the unwritten emotional life of the character, or flush out a bit of background, to fill out our sense of character. It’s a great way to edit for me, because it gives me focus on a particular skill. I always do other work at the same time, of course. One type of change triggers five others. But if I’m just approaching the novel as a whole, it’s overwhelming, and hard to see it clearly, so I love going in there with a tool in hand and digging around, which makes the whole process more manageable.
Kathryn Mockler: How did you deal with rejection when you first started out?
Michael V. Smith: Rejection is all part of the business, so if you aren’t rejected, you aren’t in the business. I take rejections as a good sign—I’m being a writer.
Kathryn Mockler: What are you working on now?
Michael V. Smith: I'm working on two projects: a series of tribute videos to friends and family who are ill, and a collection of essays titled Men.
 MICHAEL V. SMITH'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
Progress, Cormorant Books, 2011
Description
Since her fiancé’s death at eighteen, Helen Massey has spent her life avoiding it. Change comes when her town is only months away from being thirty feet under water. A government agency, The Power Authority, is relocating the entirety of her hometown to make way for a power dam project. What can’t be moved will be torn down. Even the cemetery is to be dug up and reinterred nearby.
While visiting her lover’s grave, Helen witnesses a man fall to his death on the power dam worksite. “He fell like a sack, straight down, with one arm waving in circles. He fell past the other workman strapped into a harness who must have been surprised to see him pass. Mocking the air. It seemed he fell without a sound.”
That same day, her brother returns unannounced after a fifteen-year absence. Robert Massey was a runaway. The construction made his homecoming a “now or never” decision, he tells his sister. “I didn’t want to have to come back in a boat to see the family home.”
When Robert discovers his parents kept the reasons for his departure a secret—too little has changed—he confesses, hoping his sister might bury the past. So begins their transformations. The siblings must negotiate their shared history, and their differences, if they are to find themselves a future. In his essay, "A Memoir of Progress," Matthew Rader offers a brief memoir about his experiences with Michael V. Smith's latest novel Progress. This essay is published by AngelHousePress.Read an excerpt of Cumberland.
For more information about Michael V. Smith go to his website.
 Ameila Gray
Photo by Matt Chamberlain Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2), for which she won the 2008 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her first novel, THREATS, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, and DIAGRAM, among others. Find more at ameliagray.com or on Twitter @grayamelia.Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Amelia Gray: My mom let me use her typewriter and I typed a story about Snoopy. I must have been 5 or 6. The story was heavily illustrated. I can't remember for sure, but I think some pretty bad shit happens to Snoopy.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
AG: It made me feel better when I was feeling low.
KM: What influences your writing the most?
AG: It's a toss-up between men, god and the internet.
KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.)
AG: I generally write in the morning, at my computer, in my little windowless office, in a WordPad file. I like to write every day, though sometimes when I don't have any projects going, I'll take some time off or stare at something in the morning or afternoon with the intention of revising it.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection?
AG: Develop an ugly, unstoppable ego.
KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
AG: Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Connor, David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, Vanessa Place, Russell Edson, Sylvia Plath, James Tate, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, Shirley Jackson.
KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use?
AG: Denis Johnson says you should write ten minutes a day.
KM: What are you working on now?
AG: Collecting short stories. Some other things.
 AMELIA GRAY'S MOST RECENT BOOK
THREATS, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012
Description from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
David’s wife is dead. At least, he thinks she’s dead. But he can’t figure out what killed her or why she had to die, and his efforts to sort out what’s happened have been interrupted by his discovery of a series of elaborate and escalating threats hidden in strange places around his home—one buried in the sugar bag, another carved into the side of his television. These disturbing threats may be the best clues to his wife’s death:
CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL.
Detective Chico is also on the case, and is intent on asking David questions he doesn’t know the answers to and introducing him to people who don’t appear to have David’s or his wife’s best interests in mind. With no one to trust, David is forced to rely on his own memories and faculties—but they too are proving unreliable.
In THREATS, Amelia Gray builds a world that is bizarre yet familiar, violent yet tender. It is an electrifying story of love and loss that grabs you on the first page and never loosens its grip.
Read an excerpt from THREATS here.Read a new short story by Amelia Gray here and more short stories here.
 Rick Moody
Photo by Thatcher Keats Rick Moody's acclaimed and prizewinning books include the novels Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, The Diviners and The Four Fingers of Death. He has received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn.
RUSTY TALK WITH RICK MOODY
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Rick Moody: As opposed to writing non-creatively? I remember attempting to start a novel in 6th grade. Didn't get very far. And there was a poem, in 7th grade, with the same syllabification and rhyme scheme as "Jabberwocky." (Lewis Carroll had just struck a chord with me.) I'm sure there were earlier examples of "creative writing," but I'm not always sure I know what that means. In some ways, all early writing is creative. It's precisely education that teaches us how NOT to write creatively.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
RM: I got fired from a lot of other jobs.
KM: Could you describe your writing process?
RM: How I have worked varies from project to project and from decade to decade. Right now, my process is: wait for the semester to end, then write like a maniac, as many hours of the day as are physically possible, bearing in mind the occasional social obligation or need to interact with my daughter. Otherwise: eat and sleep writing and writing-related projects. I don't do it in the same places all the time. I don't do it in the same way from day to day. So there is no science. Be alert to the possibility of language. Follow the language. And revise as much as you can until someone shouts at you that they need the assignment.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection?
RM: Always be working on the next thing.
KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
RM:
Melville
Hawthorne
Thoreau
Joyce
Beckett
Wolff
Faulkner
Nabokov
Paley
Gaddis
Barthelme
KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use?
RM: The only important part is the work. Pay no attention to any part but the work. If you can be content with that part of the job, you will never be disappointed.
KM: What are you working on now?
RM: A new novel, some stories, a few more essays on music, a poem, and so on.
 RICK MOODY'S MOST RECENT BOOK
On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening,
Hachette Book Group, 2012
Description from Hachette Book Group
Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. "On Celestial Music," which was included in Best American Essays, 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in recent music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding's masterpiece, "Try a Little Tenderness;" moves on to Moody's infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, "the music of the spheres."
Contemporary groups covered include Magnetic Fields (their love songs), Wilco (the band's and Jeff Tweedy's evolution), Danielson Famile (an evangelical rock band), The Pogues (Shane McGowan's problems with addiction), The Lounge Lizards (John Lurie's brilliance), and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody's story "Boys." Always both incisive and personable, these pieces inspire us to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done--and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know.
Read an excerpt of On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening.
 Richard Melo Richard Melo is a novelist in Portland, Oregon and the author of Happy Talk (Red Lemonade) and Jokerman 8 (Soft Skull Press). A graduate of San Francisco State University, he is also a book critic with reviews appearing in The Believer, Publishers Weekly, and the Oregonian.
RUSTY TALK WITH RICHARD MELO
Kathryn Mockler: When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer?
Richard Melo: Part of my inspiration to become a writer comes from a false memory. I have a vivid recollection of my parents taking me to a poetry festival in in Oregon during the early 1970s when I was maybe five, and introducing me to Ken Kesey who was an acquaintance of theirs. When I asked my parents about it long after that encounter helped inspire me to become a writer, they could neither remember the festival nor ever knowing Kesey.
In second grade, I wrote stories about dog astronauts and the Keystone Cops for our grade school lit mag called The Doggy Bag. I was astonished to rediscover them a while back and see that my writing style and sense of humor haven’t changed that much in the years since. Maybe I knew all along this was what I wanted to do.
I made up my mind once and for all to become a writer my sophomore year in college at San Francisco State University. I was a film major who couldn’t get my act together. I made a stark self-realization and decided that my personality didn’t fit the film major mold. So I switched to creative writing. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
KM: What keeps you going as a writer or why do you write?
RM: I believe there are two approaches to becoming a writer of fiction. Some writers do it because they want to think of themselves as writers, want others to think of them as writers, and perhaps even (gasp!) want to make money as a writer. There’s a second camp who write because they have stories they are dying to tell and, of course, writing is the way to tell them. It’s good to question what your motivation is in becoming a writer.
If you belong to the second camp, it’s easy to love what you do and tough to burn out. In the second camp, the only thing more painful than repeated rejection is the thought of not writing anymore. When you’re young, you don’t always feel like you’ve experienced enough life to have stories of your own. That’s how I felt when I was 19 and starting my first novel. The book I finished several years later is filled with stories I heard people tell that I remembered, wrote down, mixed with other stories, and revised so much that they became my own creation. These days, I am never at a loss for story ideas, as I have more than 20 years of notebooks filled with story ideas waiting for me to find the time to take them out for a spin.
I have a tic, which I think developed when I first became immersed in novel writing. Whenever I feel a powerful emotion, whether it’s from life or a movie or song or piece of someone else’s writing, a signal goes off in my head and asks, ‘How can I use this in a novel?’ It’s not as much about copying the source of the emotion as it is trying to reproduce the emotion’s effect through a narrative of my own. To me, it doesn’t matter if I write every day or finish pieces on a regular schedule. Writing is something that happens in my head all the time, and when I find time to sit down with a pen and notebook, it’s more like transcription, a mechanical process, that will then need heavy revision before I have a piece that’s ready to show.
KM: How would you describe your writing process and how does revision fit into that process?
RM: I break down my novel writing process into three steps. The first involves coming up with ideas in a haphazard way and writing them down on any available scrap of paper (most often, though, in notebooks). At this point, the book seems perfect to me, though I have nothing to show for it. The second step is the mechanical typing of ideas into the form of something that looks like a novel. For me, this is a painful and boring process, and the end result is anything but perfect. The last step is to revise what I’ve typed. I print out a copy and make handwritten changes on it. Then I read it again and make more changes. I keep working over the printed manuscript until the paper starts falling apart. Then I go back, retype, reprint, and start the process over.
I work hard to be an indifferent and ruthless self-editor as I want to answer the major editorial questions before an editor ever sees the manuscript. Revision is less about creating a perfect manuscript than it is continuously perfecting it until you are satisfied even with its flaws.
We live in a fast-paced world, with texts of all kinds produced at speeds that can make the head spin. Long-form fiction has a hard time fitting in. Literature likes to move slow. I am reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 right now, and it will take me more than a month to finish. Writing a novel takes considerably more time, often years and sometimes decades. Fiction is an area where hurrying rarely helps. I’m a proponent of giving projects time, growing with them, letting the writing season. For me, this is a key to writers producing their best possible work.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop writers before they start. How did you deal with rejection when you first started out?
RM: I didn’t do well with criticism when I was younger but do better now. It’s important to think of yourself not just as an artist but as a professional who can separate emotional attachment to the work during the review process. Plus, it’s rare someone else will give criticism more harsh than the criticism I have already given myself.
Sometimes, a reader might nail a significant issue in your writing and give you insight into revision. Other times, feedback might come from someone who didn’t read your piece closely and is providing feedback just for the sake of providing feedback. It’s important to develop your writer instincts, to know what criticism is valid, and to look at your own work with brutal honesty.
There are so many people involved in the publishing industry (and other fields) who started out with the intention of becoming a writer, and even though they still love writing and books, they never became writers. Those who do become writers were the ones who learned not only to handle criticism and rejection but also to use it to become more dedicated to their writing.
KM: Are there any writers that had a significant impact on your literary life? What authors or books would you recommend to someone aspiring to be a writer?
RM: When I was writing my first novel, I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t until I was several years into the process when I read Tristram Shandy, which is often regarded as the first post-modern novel even though it was written in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy bore no resemblance the book I was writing, but I was able to see how to use it as a shell to structure my book. TS begins with the narrator starting at the beginning, his birth, but then realizing the story actually begins well before his birth. I thought this was an excellent way to begin a book, so I transplanted the idea to my own novel and filled in the structure with my own characters and stories. TS has jokes that unfold over several chapters, and the reader doesn’t realize that it’s even a joke until the punch line. That was another idea that helped me organize the shapeless story notes I had been keeping. I’m not suggesting that all writers go and read Tristram Shandy, but I am a proponent of finding a book to use as an blueprint for using your own random story and character ideas to build a novel.
KM: Do you have a piece of literary advice for new or aspiring writers?
RM: I’ve had a long, strange journey when it comes to writing advice. When I was younger, I took an anti-authoritarian stance, and thought, “Whenever you hear writing advice, do the opposite.” After realizing that didn’t work as well as I thought, I modified it to, “Write how you like, just make it work.”
Writing advice is valuable, as it’s a way for writer’s to talk to each other and share what they’ve learned through experience.
It’s also worth being wary of writers dispensing advice. Something I learned from my experience as a parent is that there are well meaning people out there giving quite a bit of parenting advice, but it doesn’t mean what worked for them will work with you. There is also a subset of parenting advice givers who want (and this seems really odd to me) to control how other people go about their parenting. The same can be true of advice on writing. The more dogmatic writing advice sounds, the more scrutiny you should give it.
That said, I do have one piece of writing to share: Put the reader first. When you put a piece of writing out there, it’s no longer about you or about the writing itself. It’s about the reader’s experience. Fiction writing is about creating an experience, while writing a narrative, personal essay is about sharing an experience. In both cases, it’s the experience that counts. Reading is almost always a voluntary act (except in the case of students), and the things you do to heighten a reader’s engagement with your writing can make a huge difference. I’m not suggesting pandering to an audience, but I do think that thoughtful revision and an underlying attitude of appreciation to those willing to take the time to read your work can help a writer build an audience.
KM: What is the best thing about being a writer and the worst thing?
RM: One of the reasons I wanted to become a writer is that it’s one of the rare art forms where you can flourish as an introvert. (Visual arts like painting and sculpture are others.) It doesn’t take highly developed social skills and performance talent in order to be able to write well. However, once you get work out there and need to market it, you need to flip that extrovert switch and become a self-confident attention grabber. Writing is often marketed around the writer’s personality, which seems like a cruel fate to a writer’s who’s shy. As much as I love writing, book marketing wears me out.
KM: What are you working on now?
RM: I’m working in a third novel that mixes up stories of dissenters (from New Left radicals through the Occupy movement), hypnotists (cult leaders), and rock ‘n’ roll (and its many reinventions). From that description, it might not be easy to imagine what that novel might look like, but I like how it’s coming together, am enjoying the research and source material, and am looking forward to completing a first draft maybe by the end of the year.
 RICHARD MELOS'S MOST RECENT BOOK
Happy Talk, Red Lemonade, 2012
Description from Red Lemonade:
Happy Talk imagines a star-crossed love affair in the Haiti of 1955 under the auspices of a U.S. Government plot to re-create Haiti as the next Hawaii. Gun-slinging American student nurses and boozy-NYC-playwrights-turned-educational-filmmakers can't wait to get off the Magic Island, while their directive to create a film short promoting tourism turns into a fiasco. All the while, voodoo is in the air, manifested as ghostly drumming in the distance. Front and center
are Culprit Clutch, hero of anti-heroes, who appears mostly through rumor and innuendo, and whose intrepid adventures lead him to strange encounters with people not acting like themselves and Josie, his ghostly paramour with a morphine habit and who may or may not have voodoo spirits flowing through her. The cast of characters includes a Scandinavian zombie, an ancient Egyptian phantom, a power-mad doctor channeling Baron Samedi and bent on Culprit's destruction, and Culprit's black sidekick who sees through it all (including his role as sidekick). The novel’s cascading epilogues include a legendary car race down the length of Mexico; street theatre in Golden Gate park, circa 1968; a Skylab mutiny; origins of the musical comedy Godspell; and cameos by the Nation of Islam and early followers of Jim Jones. Written in the style of a 60s-era post-modern novel and driven by its Catch-22 style dialogue and Rice Krispies atmosphere, Happy Talk is a novel as picaresque as it is picturesque, knotty as it is naughty, scathing in its satire while loving at its core, lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilarious.
READ AN EXCERPT OF HAPPY TALK
In this brief excerpt from Happy Talk, the untrained students nurses stationed in Haiti during the mid 1950s suddenly find themselves caring for a patient (the survivor of a skywriting accident):
With scissors, the Nightingales snip away at the last of his trousers, his undershirt, careful not to cut him, fat chance he would feel it anyway. They photograph him without clothes, hands propping his broken body in various positions to get the shots they need. They poke their fingers in his gizzard, feeling for cancer, not that they know what cancer feels like any more than what a kidney feels like, but figuring that as long as they have him here, they should check him for cancer.
All the while, one student nurse holds his hand. They are wearing masks and hats and look the same to him. He can neither tell whose hands are whose nor whose hand is holding his. He thinks it is that
one there, but then again, it couldn’t be, because she walks away and the hand is still holding his.
They find a blotch and cut off a piece of mottled skin. (—We ought to have that checked.) They snip a fragment of muscle. (—Let’s get that checked, too; we can send it out with the other samples and film.)
There is one last bodily sample they need. They roll him over, and a Nightingale sticks a long needle into the base of his spine and draws the milky fluid out. (—If there is anything wrong with you, anything, we’ll find out what it is.)
—You’ve come all the way to Haiti, and you still get the best medical care in the world, the same exact care you’d get back home in the U.S.A. We’ve run a battery of tests on you, and we’ll send your samples back to Washington, and when they write back and tell us what’s wrong with you, we’ll know how to treat you.
—In the meantime, we’ll set your bones in a plaster cast. It looks like you broke a few.
He's unable to reply, nod, or even open his eyes. They can't be sure he's listening.
—Samantha Sound says you have 400 bones when 206 are all you need.
—Which bones does Samantha say are broken?
—I think it’s fair to say they all are, or pretty close.
—Let’s set even the unbroken ones for good measure.
 Elisabeth Harvor
Photo by Andrew Chowmentowski. _Elisabeth Harvor's fiction and poetry have appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The New Yorker, PRISM international, Best Canadian Stories, and The Best American Short Stories anthologies, and in many other anthologies and periodicals.
Her first novel, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Toronto Star in 2000, and her most recent story collection, Let Me Be the One, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Her first book of poetry, Fortress of Chairs, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for 1992. An Open Door in the Landscape, her third book of poetry, was released in September 2010.
RUSTY TALK WITH ELISABETH HARVOR
Kelli Deeth: How do stories and poems come to you?
Elisabeth Harvor: The music of certain lines comes to me—and keeps coming to me—like a line of a song or poem remembered, but it's a beat that isn't consciously from any song or poem I’ve ever read or heard. So this is how a story or poem begins. With poetry, the opening line can sometimes sound like a maxim with self-deprecation in it. Take the beginning of the poem called "I Am A Scientist" which begins with the words
Like all paranoids, I am a scientist
Dark Cause + x = Predestined Effect, that is, if someone doesn't like someone, namely x
and if x = me, then I'm turned into a sleuth in the name of survival...
I can't see these lines as the opening of a story, they are too rhythmic, too insistently declarative.
Another example of opening lines that feel as if they need to become the beginning of a poem—and only a poem—are the opening lines of "Island of Illness":
All winter long this has
been lying in wait for you, island of illness,
lap of warm waves at your pillow...
This doesn't at all sound like the opening of a story to me either, and although I can't swear that I changed the first-person voice into the second-person voice because I didn't want the poem to have too much self-pity in it, it does seem to work best in the second-person voice. And why is this? Because the second-person voice feels, paradoxically, both more intimate and more universal.
The openings of stories or novels, on the other hand, are usually more languid. I can feel the story-telling impulse when I "get" the first lines. Take the opening of a story called “Love Begins with Pity” in Let Me Be the One, a story in which a poet in her thirties falls more than a little in love with a young man who's a student in a series of high school workshops she is leading:
"Why are you laughing?" she asked them. She even smiled at them a little although falsely, surely, for she was feeling damp from apprehension.
KD: How would you describe your approach to revision?
EH: I value it. It's a purge and a freedom and a benevolent addiction. It’s also a second chance. Or a whole series of second chances, and as time goes by, I'm more and more grateful for second chances. But my approach to these second chances? It's often a matter of delete, delete, delete, especially when revising poetry. But it's a question too: Have I made the best emotional use of the space on this page? And also: Have I gone deep enough here?
KD: Your work is very honest. Do you think emotional honesty in a story, poem, or novel is absolutely essential?
EH: I do, but this conviction doesn't appear to rule out the occasional enjoyment of fictional inventions, fabrications, and lies. As both a writer and a reader, though, I prefer those moments when the surreal enters the real and does it naturally, without show-offy artifice.
KD: What other writers inspire you? How do they inspire you?
EH: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for its mesmerizing voice, for its profound understanding of childhood, and for the depth and complexity of its emotion; The Journals of Sylvia Plath for its joie de vivre and its brilliant fury; William Carlos Williams for "The Ivy Crown;" one of the great love poems of all time; Penelope Mortimer for her authentic evocation of depression and the fierce economy of The Pumpkin Eater; Saul Bellow for the deep anguish and comedy of Seize the Day; Bernard Malamud for the inspired comic originality of A New Life; Paulette Jiles for the stomach-dropping drama of "Night Flight to Attawapiskat;" Grace Paley for "A Conversation with my Father," a terrific story about writing a story; Marian Engel’s tender ode to a bear in Bear; Nadine McInnis’s fetching (if frustrated) mother in "Legacy," and almost every poem in Plath’s extraordinary Ariel. As well as the work of so many other writers.
KD: What would you say are the rewards and challenges of a writing life?
EH: The challenges are a big part of the pleasure of throwing yourself into the work. When I was younger, though, I resented any suggestion that anything I wrote might benefit from revision. I couldn't bear to tamper with what I saw as perfection! Back then, so-called real life also took so much of my attention away from my writing life, but once my children were growing up and my marriage was ending in divorce, I began to see all the ways that those losses could transform themselves into a passion for the work and that’s when the writing life became everything to me. Or almost everything: a calling, a refuge, a liberation.
 ELISABETH HARVOR'S MOST RECENT BOOK
In An Open Door in the Landscape, Palimpsest Press, 2011
Description from Palimpsest Press
_In An Open Door in the Landscape, the real and the surreal exist
side by side. Doors open on snow, war, influenza, summer and
winter oceans, the efficiency of obsession, and men who can
dance. In yet another world, on a hot city morning in our most
recent century, the tiny industrial screech of insects in August
gardens becomes a backdrop for a lovesick woman waiting on a
veranda for the postman to bring her relief “in the last era before
e-mail, in the last era before high tech gives short shrift to longing.”
Other poems shine out of more fleeting events, each poem
radiating with the emotional intensity of its moment.
“What a gift Harvor possesses. Few write as intensely precise and gracefully spare works.”
—The Toronto Star
“Dart-accurate poetic observations...”
—The Malahat Review
“Harvor takes chances in her writing, breathtaking ones.”
—Arc
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