 Rachel Zolf Photo by Brian Adams Rachel Zolf’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth book of poetry is Neighbour Procedure (Coach House, 2010). Human Resources (Coach House, 2007) won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Zolf recently wrote a screenplay for a film that New York artist Josiah McElheny will show at the 2012 Miami/Basel Art Fair. She is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary.
RUSTY TALK WITH RACHEL ZOLF
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Rachel Zolf: I wrote my first poem at a workshop with Di Brandt in Winnipeg in 1990 or thereabouts. Everyone else brought poetry and I brought a failed essay on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that stopped short at the moment Christian became a travailer. The travailer part stuck, though. The point not to get somewhere, but to keep slogging.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
RZ: My dad hit me with his foolscap when I was a kid.
KM: What influences your work the most?
RZ: My menstrual cycle.
KM: Could you describe your writing/artistic process?
RZ: I read. I think. I gather things. I make.
KM: In your recent Jacket2 article you mentioned that your work is included in a conceptual writing anthology by women but you don’t consider yourself a part of the contemporary conceptual writing movement. How would you describe your artistic or writing practice or how would you attempt to define it?
RZ: Someone called me a conceptual-materialist, which may be mutually exclusive, or not. Like Lisa Robertson, I am a feminist writer, which encompasses a fair bit, but not everything. The label never fits.
KM: You often work with pre-existing or found texts. What draws you to creating work in this way? And is it ever a problem in terms of copyright and, if so, how do you get around that?
RZ: I am a gleaner (e.g., see Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I), just am. Libel law has scared me more than copyright law so far.
KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
RZ: I make work from what I read, and it is a different constellation for each book. I don’t want to name names here because the list is always exclusionary. But I do name a lot of names in my books.
KM: What is the funniest moment that you've experienced as a writer or in the literary world?
RZ: The poetry world is unfortunately not that funny. It could do with a dose of levity.
KM: What are you working on now?
RZ: A book of poetry that looks at ongoing colonization in Canada, and a book of essays on philosophy and poetry and the poetics of witness.
 RACHEL ZOLF'S MOST RECENT BOOK
Neighbour Procedure, Coach House Books, 2010
Description from Coach House Books:
Rachel Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media and public texts, Neighbour Procedure sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humour and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics.
Rachel Zolf and Judith Butler read "Jews in Space" (from Neighbour Procedure)
 Bob Kerr
Photo by Craig Brown Comedian, actor, and writer, Bob Kerr is currently a writer on CBC's award-winning This Hour Has 22 Minutes which earned him a Gemini nomination. He was a founding member of the 12-man sketch troupe The Sketchersons which earned three consecutive nominations for the Canadian Comedy Award. He has written for Cream of Comedy (Comedy Network), a segment for CBC Newsworld Live (CBC), Comedy Inc. (CTV), Nikki Payne's Funtime Show! (Comedy Network Special), and Hotbox (Comedy Network). Bob also co-wrote and performed in the short film, The Funeral, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival and CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival in 2008. In 2011, Bob participated in the CFC/Telefilm Comedy Lab for a horror-comedy feature film script that he co-wrote entitled The House They Screamed In. You can follow Bob on Twitter.
RUSTY TALK WITH BOB KERR
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Bob Kerr: As a fan of Letterman, I would write my own Top Ten Lists and read them to my fellow kids at the back of the bus. I also wrote stories that were a direct inspiration of movies I was into. I wrote a story that was about a baseball team that was trapped within a (Jurassic Park-type) jungle and the star pitcher was bitten by a "gypsy hamster" that turned him into a (Pet Sematary 2-style) zombie. Really dumb.
KM: When did you first start writing for film/TV and how did you get into it?
BK: I was a member of a comedy troupe called The Sketchersons, and we did a weekly show called Sunday Night Live which heavily borrowed from the format of Saturday Night Live. I had done the Weekend Update part of the show for a large part of the time. Producers who saw the show asked me to submit things. My first writing gig was a for a late-night talk show pilot that didn't go anywhere and that was followed by my first trial run at This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you?
BK: It was mainly performers, actually. David Letterman and Conan O'Brien were big influences. They do what they want to do. And a lot of it's really weird, and I like weird things.
KM: How does the writing room work for This Hour Has 22 Minutes?
BK: Early in the week, we pitch sketches and spend the whole day and night writing them. After the table read, sketches are picked and then the following days are focused more on copy jokes (a.k.a. news jokes...y'know, the set-up-punch stuff) and things called ledes, which is writing jokes around actual news footage. We sometimes pair up on sketches, but there's a lot of independent writing. My favourite days are writing copy jokes because we have table reads of those jokes amongst the writers and we have a couple laughs. Sometimes even more.
KM: For someone looking to get into TV or comedy writing, a writing room—especially a comedy room—can seem intimidating. Do you have any advice for how to get over feeling like an idiot if your joke fails or no one likes your ideas in the room?
BK: Trust me, I know what it's like to feel like an idiot. I've had plenty of stuff bomb in the room. An important thing to remember is that you're in good company; everybody bombs. Bombing is a very key part of the writing process. Because you learn from it. Mainly what works and what doesn't. So ultimately, don't dwell on feeling like an idiot. Because you will miss the bomb lesson. It's not about you! Get over yourself! Move on! (I feel like I'm talking to myself now.)
KM: What is your writing process like for your other projects—other collaborations or solo projects?
BK: Typical; go to coffee shop, order an Americano and stare at my computer screen. Collaborations can be fun if you're doing it with the right person. Someone that you feel comfortable bouncing ideas with.
KM: What is the biggest difference between writing for film and writing for TV?
BK: You spend way more time with a film script than a TV script. There's pros and cons to both. With TV, you don't have all the time in the world to make "the perfect script", so there's not much time for rewrites. You are also forced to write a lot and quickly and that kind of pressure is good. I think you get better stuff from that. Plus, there's a whole writing room that will punch up your ho-hum material. Again, it's not about you.
KM: When getting notes from producers/story editors/show runners—what do you do when you get a note that you don't like or don't agree with on your script?
BK: Well, there's two ways to go about it. You either don't make the change and pray they don't notice (which they usually do), or you talk it out with said note-giver. That being said, pick your battles. One thing I've learned in TV is that I can't be too precious with anything I write. With 22, there's not a lot of time, because I'm most likely onto something else. Plus, it's hard to feel precious about something I've worked on for a couple of hours the night before as opposed to something I've been working on for weeks or months.
KM: Do you have any advice for someone aspiring to write for television? What is the best way to break in?
BK: I don't know what the best way is. I only know my way. I was tenacious and I wrote a lot of stuff. I was out there performing with a great troupe every week on top of doing stand-up and I was getting myself seen. It's a lot of work to get a job. There's also the standard advice: Write spec scripts, get an agent, write more spec scripts.
KM: What are you working on now?
BK: I'm going to be returning to Halifax for the 20th season of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I'm currently working on a spec pilot as well. I'm also trying to think of a funny tweet.
 Semi Chellas
Photo by Kate Ware Semi Chellas is a writer and supervising producer on the sixth season of TV’s Mad Men. She is nominated for two Emmys (with Matt Weiner) for her episodes in season five, “Far Away Places” and “The Other Woman”. She is also adapting Dr. Jill Bolte Talyor's best-selling My Stroke of Insight for Imagine Entertainment. Semi was the Executive Producer and Co-Creator of Canadian prime-time network drama THE ELEVENTH HOUR, two-time Canadian Academy of Cinema and Television winner for Best Series. The show ran three seasons and was nominated for 38 awards by the Canadian Academy, winning 9; Semi herself won for Best Writing (with Tassie Cameron). As a director, she's had three short films premiere at The Toronto International Film Festival: Green Door (written by Barbara Gowdy); Trouser Accidents (included in the Best Canadian Short Films Showcase) and Three Stories From the End of Everything (nominated by the Canadian Academy for best live-action short).
RUSTY TALK WITH SEMI CHELLAS
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Semi Chellas: I wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew what that was. My mom was a freelance journalist and she had set up a little desk for me next to her desk. I must have been five or younger, and I had her taking dictation for this book I was working on that involved a lot of puns. When I was 7, I wrote a novel in twenty 3 by 5 spiral notebooks—it was the story of a girl with a tail who lived in a country where people with tails were enslaved. And basically she was trying to get Han Solo to smuggle her out of there. I submitted a story to The New Yorker when I was 16 and got a hand-written rejection. Later I think it became a liability for me. I had to get rid of the romantic ideas I had about being a writer and actually learn to write. The best advice I ever heard about writing was “get dressed every day”.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
SC: It’s a bit of a cliché I think, but there is no why. I just always wrote.
KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker or screenwriter that had a big impact on you and your writing?
SC: When I was a kid, in the ‘70s, my grandfather and his wife lived next door to Ann Beattie in Connecticut. I just read that during that decade she had 35 stories in The New Yorker. She was an original and had invented a whole new style. Plus she was tall and funny and had long swingy hair and I loved her. My grandfather, to my mortification, told her I was writing stories. And she asked to read one of mine, and there was a dog in it. She read it very gravely and asked me questions instead of giving me false praise, or acting like it was cute that I’d written it. Then she gave me a copy of her latest collection, Distortions, and she had inscribed it to me and ticked off in pencil all the stories with dogs in them. And I felt like she was treating me like a fellow writer—that we were actually having an interaction that was beyond just me being a little kid who was in awe of her. Of course I was completely deluded. But I read every story in that collection a hundred times and tried to understand how they were so good, and that was an enormous influence on my writing.
KM: What is writing process like for you when you write alone? How do you approach revision?
SC: I like to have big chunks of time when I write but that always used to lead to a lot of procrastinating, because I’d think, Well, it’s almost noon and I haven’t written anything so what’s the point of starting? Then I was at a dinner party with a famous fiction writer who was talking about how her daughter, a graduate student, had finished her dissertation after reading a book called How To Finish Your Dissertation. And this book was written by a brain specialist whose whole thing was that creativity comes in 90-minute bursts. After that, the brain needs to rest for 30 minutes. And two or three of these bursts was a good day’s work for a creative person; if you’re spending eight hours at the computer in the day, it’s really only two hour and a half periods that count. This changed my life. I started working in 90 minute windows, where I would completely block everything out—no phone, no text, no Googling or internet, no changing the music. And I started doing this with friends—we’d go somewhere and sit across from each other and work for 90 minutes and then take a break for a half an hour. And it’s incredibly effective. Then one of my friends asked about this book and we went looking for it and I swear it doesn’t exist. I don’t know if the writer made it up, or her daughter made it up, or something, but there is no truth to that 90-minute theory. But I guess it imposed discipline on me that I needed. I still do it.
KM: Could you describe the journey from your first TV writing job to writing for Mad Men?
SC: A long time ago, I wrote a movie that ended up getting made for television. And it won a lot of awards, so even though I’d never written for television before that, I was approached to develop an idea for a series. So with a producer friend Ilana Frank, I created the show that became The Eleventh Hour, and it got ordered, and then suddenly Ilana and I were running this TV series. And neither of us had done episodic TV at all. It was really like getting thrown in the deep end and learning to dogpaddle to the side—over and over and over every week. The series turned out great, and I’m very proud of it. After that I didn’t want to work on a TV show for a long time. But I always said to my agent that if there was ever an opening on Mad Men, he had to get me the meeting. And then there was, and he did.
KM: How does the writing room work on Mad Men? How does this differ from the other shows you’ve worked on?
SC: Matt Weiner, the creator and showrunner of Mad Men, comes in at the beginning with a vision for the season. He lays out themes, character arcs and the time period. He’ll give us books to read, he’ll read us poems or passages, he’ll show us images. Then we work together as a room on every story—you don’t know if it will be your script until the outline is finished, and it’s an incredibly detailed document. The people in the room are amazing—people who’ve run shows, comedy and drama writers, advertising people from then and now. Writers in their 20s who worked up from being Matt’s assistant. Last season, a writer in his 80s—the late great Frank Pierson, who wrote, among other masterpieces, Dog Day Afternoon.
KM: Writing for TV is a collaborative effort. What is the best way to deal with conflicts when writing with others?
SC: Be professional. Don’t make it about you. Be clear about the chain of command. There are always going to be differences of opinion, but there shouldn’t be conflicts.
KM: When getting notes from producers/editors/showrunners—what do you do when you get a note that you don’t like or agree with?
SC: Look at what the note is addressing. The solution being offered may be wrong. But the problem it’s identifying may exist nonetheless.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
Besides “get dressed every day”? The best piece of writing advice I ever got was from an editor, who said when a scene’s not working, the problem is usually actually in the scene right before it.
KM: What are you reading right now?
The book by my bed is The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor. I read somewhere that Ann Beattie admired him, and I’d never read him. And I like to read publications from the year we’re working in on Mad Men--Time, Life, Newsweek, The New Yorker, the Times, Playboy, Harpers. I read the same magazines I would now but from dates back then.
Clips from Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner's Emmy-nominated Mad Men Episodes:506 (Far Away Places) and 511 (The Other Woman)
 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
 Jeffrey St. Jules Jeffrey St. Jules is a Canadian filmmaker. His films include THE SADNESS OF JOHNSON JOE JANGLES, which won him Best Emerging Filmmaker at the Worldwide Short Film Festival and the Genie-nominated short THE TRAGIC STORY OF NLING, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Both films premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.
He is the first and only Canadian to have been selected for the CANNES FESTIVAL RESIDENCE in Paris. He is currently in development with SCYTHIA FILMS on a musical film entitled BANG BANG BABY. His latest project LET THE DAYLIGHT INTO THE SWAMP is a 3D documentary/fiction that recently had it's premiere at TIFF.RUSTY TALK WITH JEFFREY ST. JULES
Kathryn Mockler: How did you first get into filmmaking?
Jeffrey St. Jules: In high school, we would go to an old fort called York Redoubt in Halifax to smoke pot and think about the craziest things we could put on film. I never actually filmed anything or even took photographs, but for some reason, I thought I could be a good filmmaker. Drugs can do that. There seemed to be so many possibilities inherent in the medium that people never bothered to try, and I wanted to try them. Then in university, I started trying things. I found out that tons of my ideas didn’t work, but occasionally something unique that I thought of worked, and I felt like it hadn’t been done before and that was exciting. I should mention that by the time I started making films, I didn’t even smoke pot anymore.
KM: What is the writing process like for you? What would be involved in a typical writing day for you?
JSJ: If I have the luxury, I like to be a 9-5er, or rather a 9-12er. In the morning my head is the most clear, so I like to write then. I feel I can kickstart inspiration if need be. The best way for me to do this, is to go on the elliptical machine and stare at a blank wall, because my body is occupied but my mind is not.
KM: How do you approach revision?
JSJ: With feedback. I need outside opinions to reshape the way I think about the script. I have a tendency to be lazy and prematurely satisfied if left to my own devices, so I need a trusted person to tell me what sucks. A complete drubbing can often be the most inspiring thing for my writing.
KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you?
JSJ: In my coming-of-age days it was David Lynch and Jack Kerouac. Probably because they made it feel like you could just make stuff that inspired you and you didn’t have to follow rules. They also both operate on an intuitive level, which I have always tried to stay connected to.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received that you actually use?
JSJ: Have at least a little bit of a plan before you start writing a story, or you will have to do a lot more work later in revisions. Sounds obvious, but when you buy into the romanticism of Jack Kerouac early on, you might not think you need to.
KM: Can you describe your National Film Board project Let The Daylight Into the Swamp?
JSJ: It’s a stereoscopic 3D documentary/fiction film about my grandparents. I suppose I would call it an exploration into the unknowability of our family histories.
KM: What are you working on now?
JSJ: A rock-n-roll musical about the hallucinations of a small town girl.
HERE'S A CLIP FROM
JEFFREY ST. JULES LATEST FILM:
LET THE DAYLIGHT INTO THE SWAMP
NFB (2012)
In Let the Daylight into the Swamp, filmmaker Jeffrey St. Jules reconstructs the story of his grandparents and their rugged frontier existence in the logging towns of Northern Ontario. St. Jules' tale unfolds on the bumpy back roads of life, where ultimately his family was dislodged. Blending fiction and documentary, myth and fact, comedy and tragedy, all rendered in 3D, St. Jules stitches together an elusive, fractured family history. Yet the joie de vivre of Franco-Ontarian life tempers the hardship and regret, infusing this visually inventive film with both joy and heartbreak. OTHER SHORT FILMS BY JEFFREY ST. JULES
 Erín Moure
Photo by Karis Shearer Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry plus a volume of essays, My Beloved Wager. She is also a translator from French, Spanish, Galician (galego), and Portuguese, with eleven books translated, of work by poets as diverse as Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Louise Dupré, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize (twice), and was a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Moure holds an honorary doctorate from Brandon University. Her latest works are The Unmemntioable (House of Anansi), an investigation into subjectivity and wartime experience in western Ukraine and the South Peace region of Alberta, and Secession (Zat-So), her fourth translation of internationally acclaimed Galician poet Chus Pato.
RUSTY TALK WITH ERÍN MOURE
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively or being creative ?
Erín Moure: Biting my toe in the crib and finding out that the waving thing was intimately connected to me. Ouch!
KM: Why did you become a poet?
EM: From the time I read Mother Goose when I was 3 or 4, I thought poet was a valid career choice and no one ever really managed to talk me out of it. It interested me more than my next hotly desired direction, which came later: restaurant owner.
KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.)
EM: Hard to describe. I write most days. I write in pencil in notebooks, I move words, I collect words and bits of text from the Web and elsewhere, I translate and use automatic translators, I generate funny sentences, try to write things down before I forget them. I research a lot too: read philosophy, history, buy plane tickets and go to places: Lisbon, rural Galicia, L'viv in Ukraine. Immerse. Usually by myself so I feel utterly lost. Get really lonely. Revise a lot. Move, cadence, check, read aloud, set aside, read again, move. Read a lot of good poetry while I am working and then cut where mine falls short...no mercy, but lots of fun. I write wherever I am but favourite places are while on my bike (I have to stop to scribble), while on trains, while on the roof deck, while at my desk...but anywhere will do really. I change places so that the work can be read differently. Inhabit language and let it inhabit me. I think. Thinking is a kind of writing too.
KM: How did you get interested in translation? How do you view the role of the translator?
EM: I've told this story before...it's because my mother—Ukrainian born but fiercely always an unhyphenated Canadian, her way of coping with history—always told me there were two languages in Canada, French and English. As a tyke in Calgary, I knew we spoke "English" so I thought French was spoken on the north side of the Bow River. I thought my grandparents spoke French. Then I found out they spoke something that was not French. And I knew there were three languages in Canada.
Then I read Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the back there is a three page bilingual dictionary of Ape-English. So I tried to write in Ape. No English-Ape dictionary though, and no connecting words, so it was impossible. I was maybe 7.
The role of the translator? To transfer joy from one idiom to another. Somehow.
KM: What poets would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what poets or writers were influential to you when you first started out?
EM: Read poets in other languages as well as in English: try to read them even if you can't, look intensely at their language. Poets that helped me: Yannis Ritsos, Cesar Vallejo, Federico García Lorca, Clarice Lispector, Nicole Brossard. Early important poets to me: Phyllis Webb, Miriam Waddington, Robin Blaser, Al Purdy, Baudelaire. And Chus Pato, more recently, because, to tell the truth, I am always first starting out.
KM: How do you think the early poet in you would view the later poet? Have you become the writer that you thought you'd be when you first started out in terms of the kind of work you produce, your views, etc.
EM: I am still the early poet! I still love the surprise of exploring in language. I don't know what I've become, to tell the truth. I leave that to other people to define. I am still trying to bite my toe. Though, I guess, early on, I could have never predicted Elisa Sampedrín. Or that I would one day speak Galician.
KM: Your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one.
EM: Don't really have one...most things are funny, if you ask me...My favourite would be reading, just reading, always reading, and the feeling of incredible beauty and joy I get in my mouth and throat and chest when I am reading. And going to Vylkove to the Danube Delta with Chus Pato and Manolo Igrexas and swimming in water salt and fresh at the same time.
KM: What are you working on now?
EM: Am working with monologue and chorus texts that could potentially I hope be staged. Poetry but theatre too...delving deeper into that. It's in English and French at once. And is called Kapusta, which is Ukrainian for cabbage.
 ERÍN MOURE'S MOST RECENT BOOK
The Unmemntioable, House of Anansi Press, 2012
Description from House of Anansi
The Unmemntioable joins letters that should not be joined. There is, in this word, an act of force. Of devastation. The unmentionable is love, of course. But in Moure's poems, love is bound to a duty: to comprehend what it was that the immigrants would not speak of. Now they are dead; their children and grandchildren know but an anecdotal pastiche of Ukrainian history. On Saskatoon Mountain in Alberta where they settled, only the chatter of the leaves remains of their presence. What was not spoken is sealed over, unmemntioable. There is no one left to contact in the Old Country. Can the unmemntioable retain its silence, yet be eased into words? Can experience still be spoken?
 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:
 Priscila Uppal
Photo by Daniel Ehrenworth Priscila Uppal is a Toronto poet, fiction writer, and York University professor. Among her publications are seven collections of poetry, most recently Ontological Necessities (2006; shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), Traumatology (2010), and Successful Tragedies: Poems 1998-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, U.K.); and the critically acclaimed novels The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002) and To Whom It May Concern (2009). Her work has been published inter-nationally and translated into numerous languages.RUSTY TALK WITH PRISCILA UPPAL
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Priscila Uppal: I remember writing stories about my neighbours. My goal every day was to get myself invited to other people's houses for dinner. I loved watching other people eat and interact with each other. I loved looking through playbins, drawers, medicine cabinets. I was fascinated by people's parents, what they deemed acceptable behaviour or not, what they made for dinner, what gods they worshipped. I honestly think I became a writer because I was pretty nosy about my neighbours.
KM: Why did you become a poet?
PU: Because I didn't know it was something I could be. I read lots of poems and felt at home inside the language of poetry—metaphor, ambiguity, utterance. Then I started writing them. I wrote poems as a teenager almost every single day, and I haven't really stopped. I went to university because I soon learned that I could actually get scholarship money to read and write poetry and other books all day. That seemed too good to be true—criminal even. So, I took advantage of it. And I suppose I still am.
KM: Could you describe your writing process? (Do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.)
PU: I probably do engage in writing every day but the type varies. I write poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, plays, essays, articles, lectures, even interviews. I tend to write in one form while I am editing another. This kind of cross-pollination, I think, keeps my brain firing in interesting ways. I always work on more than one project at once. That way if I'm stuck or bored, I will switch to another project until I figure a few things out and can return with renewed energy.
KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop poets before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection?
PU: I listen to criticism if it comes from a trusted or intelligent source. I then try to figure out if I think it's fair or valid or something to ponder while I write other work. But I don't listen to rejection. If a magazine or publisher doesn't want my work, that's fine, then it's not the right place for the work. Sometimes the hardest part of publishing is figuring out where a piece will find a home. If you consider that phrase "finding a home," it's apt because if you're someone who knows what it's like to be on your own (I left home at 15, and so know this quite well), then it doesn't seem strange that you might not find the perfect place right away.
KM: What poets or writers would you recommended to an aspiring poets? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out?
PU: I think it's hard to sort through all the stuff out there. Every aspiring poet probably already has some favourite poets, so I might suggest finding out who those poets read and liked and who they were reacting against to get a sense of how a poet works within the world of poetry. I think it's important to read widely and internationally and that if you don't have people in your circle who can recommend writers that might be of particular interest to you in terms of what you might already be writing and reading, then taking a class can help draft a new reading list and bibliography. I discovered lots of writers through taking courses and those teachers recommending more writers to me.
KM: What is the best thing about being a writer and what is the worst thing?
PU: The best thing about being a writer is that I can work almost anywhere. My favourite place to work is beachside in Barbados. I write for hours in the morning, then run on the beach, then make notes and read all afternoon and swim. I can't think of a better life than that.
The worst thing about being a writer is that everyone asks you what you really do for a living. I was hired by the university as a poet. I teach poetry and other arts. I tell people that I might not make all my money through book royalties, but I do indeed make my living as a writer
KM: Your funniest literary moment, if you have one.
PU: One of the funniest was in Sri Lanka at the Galle Literary Festival (a wonderful and warm festival by the way, in a beautiful old Dutch fort town). The opening reception was on this glorious property on a hill and sponsored, in part, by the government of Sri Lanka. As we walked in, young Sri Lankan boys played bagpipes, dressed in Scottish outfits. An orchestra of other young people in elaborate school uniforms played on the grass. Champagne flutes of lime juice were passed around and plates of warm nibbles. At the end of the reception, as we were to talk to the next venue for the evening, further down the hill, a flurry of fireworks exploded. They were so unexpected and near to us that many of us screamed, held our hearts, and tried to steady ourselves as we laughed in both amusement and fear. The fireworks kept coming. Louder. Closer. Bits of fire fell directly in front and behind us the entire time. In order to contain our fear, many of us laughed, and kept laughing. When it was finally over, we writers all looked at each other in relief, trying to figure out if this was the usual welcome for writers for the festival.
KM: What are you working on now?
PU: I'm just about to leave for London to resume my position as Canadian Athletes Now Poet-in-Residence during the 2012 Olympics and Paralmpics. I'll be writing and publishing two poems per day, one on the Canadian Athletes Now website and one on the Literary Review of Canada website (under Poet's Corner). I will also be posting an article every two days on the LRC website about sports art. This is a project I am very passionate about—encouraging sport and artistic practice, breaking down stereotypes between the sports and arts worlds, and bringing poetry to new audiences in a fun and exciting way. I will be working on the companion to Winter Sport: Poems, called fittingly Summer Sport: Poems, to be published in early 2013.
Follow Priscila Uppal
over at Canadian Athletes Now
where she is the
Poet-in-Residence
during the
2012 Olympics & Paralmpics
 PRISCILA UPPAL'S RECENT POETRY COLLECTION
Winter Sport Poems, Mansfield Press, 2011Description from Mansfield Press
Have you ever wondered what a luge poem or snowboarding poem or hockey poem would look like? In this collection by celebrated poet Priscila Uppal, who was the poet-in-residence for Canadian Athletes Now during the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games, physical and verbal acrobatics meet in a dazzling competition of risky play, inventive movements, and daring heights. Try a speed skating suit on for size, slide down the skeleton track, seek out a date with a curler, make love to a snowboarder, and play hockey with the nation’s best-- experience winter sport fun like never before.
 Rob Sheridan
Photo by Camilla Pucholt Rob Sheridan is an LA-based Canadian writer with extensive credits on both sides of the border. Repped by WME Entertainment in Los Angeles and managed by Meridian Artists in Toronto, Rob’s recent LA writing credits include Mad Love (CBS) (Co-Executive Producer) starring Jason Biggs and Sarah Chalke, and the forthcoming Next Caller (NBC) (Co-EP) starring Dane Cook, and Jeffrey Tambor. This past year Rob also developed two projects for ABC Network with both ABC Studios and Warner Brothers television, including an adaptation of the book Home Game by bestselling author Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The Blind Side). Prior to moving to LA, Rob worked on several top-rated Canadian series including Corner Gas (CTV/Comedy Network), Little Mosque on the Prairie (Co-Executive Producer) (CBC), Less Than Kind (Consulting Producer) (HBO Canada), 18 To Life (CBC) (Co-Producer) Producing Parker (Teletoon), Crash Canyon (Teletoon), Naked Josh (Showcase Television) and The Red Green Show (CBC). RUSTY TALK WITH ROB SHERIDANKathryn Mockler: How did you first get into TV writing?
Rob Sheridan: I was doing some copywriting and working as a publicist, and generally hating it. But I had written a couple of sitcom spec scripts and submitted them to the television writing program at the Canadian Film Centre. I got into the program, and after that things started happening pretty quickly. Steve Smith hired me to write a few scripts for The Red Green Show, and hired me on staff the following year. I was already 30 by the time I went to the CFC, so when I hear a 24-year-old tell me they feel too old to break in to television, I always slap them. Not really. But I think about it.
KM: What is the writing process like for you when you write alone and/or as part of a writing team?
RS: On any sitcom you spend a lot of time in "the room" with a bunch of other writers, generating story ideas, working out the beats, and later doing punch up. It's great fun, very social, and a lot of great material comes out of that. But somewhere in between the writer goes off on his or her own and writes a first, and hopefully a second, draft. Some people hate that part, but I enjoy it. I can discover new things, and jokes and ideas occur to me when I'm alone that don't always come to me in the room. There are some shows that eliminate that step—scripts are "room-written" with everyone working on a draft at the same time with the script projected on a screen. It's not my favorite way of doing things. I think every writer deserves a chance to put his or her personal imprint on a script, if only so the other writers then have a chance to throw it out and re-write it anyway.
KM: How do you approach revision?
RS: The most annoying expression to any writer is "writing is re-writing" because we all want to think we nail it on the first draft, but of course we don't Especially not in TV. A lot of the revising is done, as I mentioned before, in the room. It's not for people with big egos. Stuff gets thrown out, changed, re-written. You have to enjoy that process and trust that it's making it better. Sometimes you lose something you loved but the gains generally outweigh the losses. You can always use your hilarious penis joke another time.
KM: What is the role of the showrunner?
RS: The showrunner is involved in every step of the process. In addition to the writing they have input on casting, costumes, sets, props, editing, the whole thing. And they're often on the floor working with the actors. It's different than features because in TV the showrunner really is boss as opposed to the director. Unfortunately, in my experience, Canada has never really properly embraced the showrunner model, at least in comedy. It's too much creative power in one person's hands. Some of the Canadian creative execs I've worked with fear and hate that. So the showrunner often becomes more of a glorified head writer. It's incredibly frustrating, and one of the major reasons I came down to the U.S.
KM: When should emerging writers approach agents?
RS: When they're absolutely certain their sample material is as good as it can be, and never before. You only get that one shot. It's a cliché, but you really do have to give that script to five or ten people that you trust (and maybe a couple that you don't) and take as much input as possible. You don't have to listen to everyone's advice, but if ten people all tell you your third act is rubbish and the lead character is boring, it means that your third act is rubbish and your lead character is boring. Also, for the love of God, watch the spelling and grammar. If I see someone write "your" when they mean "you're" on page one, I'm out.
KM: What are you working on now?
RS: I'm off to New York City this summer to work on a show called Next Caller for NBC. It's somewhat unusual for a sitcom to shoot in New York, though 30 Rock does it and it doesn't seem to have hurt them. The show was created by a writer named Stephen Falk who has written for Weeds for many years. His background in cable is evident in the pilot. It's very smart and funny and subtle where it needs to be...basically a battle of the sexes with two hosts working on a show at a satellite radio station. And it's a very strong cast. Dane Cook, Collette Wolfe, and Jeffrey Tambor, whom I love. I'm really looking forward to it, though I know I'll also be glad to get back to LA at the end of the year. I'm a convert to the constant sunshine. Kurt Vonnegut was right: California really does make you soft.
ROB SHERIDAN'S MOST RECENT TV PROJECT
Next Caller, NBC, 2012
Description from NBC
What happens when a foulmouthed satellite radio DJ-- played by the multi-platinum selling artist and outrageously charming Dane Cook-- is forced to share the mic with a chipper NPR feminist? It's anyone's call in this sharp new comedy from producer Stephen Falk (Weeds) and Emmy-winning director Marc Buckland (Grimm, My Name Is Earl).
It's her first day in New York City, and 26-year-old Stella Hoobler is ready to take on the world. After a stint on public radio, she's been hired to co-host the no-holds-barred show Booty Calls with Cam Dunne. Smart, spunky and passionate, Stella is determined to elevate the show beyond its boys'-club-locker-room humor into a respected debate about men, women and the state of human relationships. But there's a problem: Cam! She's going to find out the hard way that he's got no intention of sharing the spotlight, especially with someone like her. It's going to be a tense fight, but with the station's one rule being "make some noise," Cam and Stella could be a winning combination - as long as they don't knock each other out on their way to success.
Next Caller: Clips
 Penn Kemp
Photo by Wendy Saby London, Ontario performance poet, activist and playwright Penn Kemp is the 40th Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. This year she received the Queen Elizabeth 11 Diamond Jubilee medal for service to the arts. Penn has published twenty-five books of poetry and drama, had six plays and ten CDs produced as well as Canada’s first poetry CD-ROM and several award-winning videopoems. As the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of London, she initiated and judged Poetry in Motion and the National Haiku Competition. As Canada Council Writer-in-Residence for University of Western Ontario for 2009-10, her project was the DVD, Luminous Entrance: a Sound Opera for Climate Change Action, Pendas Productions. RUSTY TALK WITH PENN KEMPKathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Penn Kemp: I remember my own early discovery of and delight in language. As a child, I did not coddle my dolls. I sat them up and read the poems, stories and nursery rhymes my mother had read to me. The words she read would sink into the well of my hearing and become part of me; their rhythms would dance inside my body like northern lights. I ate up those words with a necessity as strong as hunger. Even at first hearing, the words were somehow familiar as if I recognized in them old friends. I remember swelling proudly with the power of words, in learning first to read and then actually to write, to put down the letters so that they made sense to anyone who could read.
I wrote my first poem when I was six, excited and amazed at having created through apparent magic something out of nothing with marks on a page accompanied by a drawing of kids skating. I glimpsed a world in which words had a life of their own, just as toys did. I knew that if I could wake at the right time at night I would catch my toys at play. So too, I felt words could be surprised and brought to life on the page.
Writing that first poem was the first time that I recall consciously feeling that I was doing an adult thing creating something entirely on my own, assuming independence growing up! I felt like the Little Red Hen in the nursery story: "‘I can do it myself,’ said The Little Red Hen, and she did."
KM: What keeps you going as a poet or why do you write?
PK: When I write, I begin an adventure equipped with my writing tools and everything else I know about myself and the world. By the end of the day, everything I knew and thought may be transformed or discarded. It intrigues me that what I know and start off with is the very means for realizing what is unknown.
I write to articulate the moment, to puzzle out feelings or incidents I can't figure out. The best poems come, though, when I follow the language of a striking phrase. Sound leads me.
KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.)
PK: I write every day, in the morning, in the little room that was my childhood bedroom. It looks out on a small greenhouse, a source of inspiration and delight all year. The green throughout the winter keeps me from getting restless and hungry for sun. Often in the morning as I transcribe dreams, they become poems. They're not usually very good poems so they don't see the light of day beyond a file in my computer, but they keep the energy of poetry flowing. The problem I have with them is that they are too narrative and I feel I need to stick to the literal story line that the dream gave me.
I revise constantly, even when I am performing, pencil often in hand. Reading the poem in front of an audience allows me to really hear what works...and what does not.
My first book, Bearing Down, was performed in four voices for a Seattle FM radio show in 1973. That performance opened up the door to possibilities for the spoken word in those early days. I've been lifting the word off the page any way I could since then, most recently in videopoems. But the ear remains my first love. Concentrating on the voice rather than gesture or physical presence in communicating poetry has taught me to listen acutely, and that's had an effect not just on my sound poetry but on all my work. Collaborating with artists of different disciplines is exciting and energizing. And with the Cloud, friends and fans can hear the work in Brazil, in India, in Britain simultaneously!”
KM; What writers were influential to you when you first started out? And what poets are you reading now?
PK: Victor Coleman, the editor at Coach House Press and a neighbour on Toronto Island, was influential and encouraging in introducing me to the poetic community across North America. My first book, Bearing Down, came out from Coach House, 1972. I organized a poetry reading series at A SPACE in Toronto for several years in the early Seventies. I invited poets I admired, like P. K. Page, Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, all of whom became friends and correspondents. In those days, the Canada Council sponsored American poets so I invited heroes like Diane di Prima, Allan Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn, all very influential.
I read avidly and widely as poetry continues to inspire new poems. These days I edit quite a few manuscripts for poets, and I read poets coming to London as well as books for my literary radio show, Gathering Voices. And new books coming out: I particularly like Brick Books.
KM: Your funniest literary moment, if you have one.
PK: The funniest literary moment happened this year on January 11 at 8.30am. As Poet Laureate for the City of London, I was formally addressing 1200 folks at the Mayor's STATE OF THE CITY ADDRESS” at the London Convention Centre. The topic was “Believe…”. Well, I couldn't believe the three very audible interruptions! They turned out to be the complaints of a Russian robot. It was squawking in Russian that its battery was wound down. I kept on talking: you can see the situation on livestream.
KM: What are you working on now?
PK: I wish I could say that I'm finishing a manuscript and I am, slowly, but the times demand I continue as an activist in protesting federal budget cuts.
So I'm organizing a reading Saturday, September 29, 2012, 2-4 pm. "100,000 Poets for Change" Reading for Culture Day. Landon Public Library (downstairs), 167 Wortley Rd., London, ON. Our free afternoon reading will be part of an international event which will take place in many cities, in many villages and in the countryside all over the world, at the same time and date.
The first order of change is for poets to get together to perform, educate and entertain, simultaneously with others around the world, changing how we see our own community and the global community. The host in Toronto who asked me to organize a London reading may be doing some Skype connections with us and other cities, other provinces. Such an event ties in nicely with our national Culture Days happening at the same time. There will be a blog for us on 100,000 Poets for Change. Twenty-three poets are signed up, including Susan McMaster, President of The League of Canadian Poets. Musicians Jennifer White and Robert McMaster as well! Good will? Immeasurable!
And I am writing a book on Jack Layton's support of and interest in the arts in Canada. I'm now collecting anecdotes, reminiscences and opinions or observations about Jack and the arts
Jack in the arts (that guitar, that piano, that revised song!) the role of the arts for him. As Jack would remind me, he was a proud member of the Writers’ Union! I've just collated all his emails to us and they include some interesting discussions. They're bitter-sweetly sad to read now, given all we have lost in Jack...but of course we continue in hope. I’ll also be interviewing folks for my radio show, Gathering Voices.
Olivia Chow endorses the work: "I heartily encourage folks to send Penn your stories of Jack’s relationship with and his support of the arts. This project is a great opportunity to share our stories about how Jack and the NDP celebrated our Canadian cultures and what we must do together to continue this relationship. You know he loved to make music and we loved to dance!"
When Jack Layton died last August, he was given a state funeral. Roy Thompson Hall was packed; the lineup of artists celebrating Jack stellar and the street theatre outside was sublime. I would like to commemorate Jack’s birthday in July and the first anniversary of his death with two e-shorts on Amazon.ca. I believe such pieces would be timely and widely read, given the nation’s outpouring of love and sympathy. Jack Layton's support of and interest in the arts in Canada underlay his politics. In his long municipal and federal political life, he always included and encouraged artists to become activists. My working title is Jack Layton: Art for Action!
On Saturday, August 4, I'm participating in The Summer Soirée Festival of the Arts, Aeolian Performance Hall, London, Ontario. Afternoon workshop Gary Diggins, Jocelyn Drainie and me on The Healing Nature of Sound and then an evening performance, Sonica Hypnotica. Chris Meloche and I will kick off the evening event with new work in progress from The Electric Folklore Machine.
 PENN KEMP'S MOST RECENT BOOK
Helwa!, PigeonBike Press, 2011
Description
PigeonBike Press has launched Penn Kemp's chapbook of Helwa! alongside the release by Pendas Production of Penn Kemp's CD, Night Vision, which includes Helwa!.Since her first book was published by Coach House Press in 1972, she has been pushing textual and aural boundaries, often in participatory performance work. Many of her recent CDs are what Penn terms "Sound Operas": poetic narratives that weave sound, imagery and music in the counterpoint of many voices. Working across a variety of cultural practices to engage her audience, she hosts an eclectic literary show, Gathering Voices, archived on CHRWradio.com/talk/gatheringvoices. Having performed in festivals around the world, most recently in Britain, Brazil and India, Penn lives in London Canada, where she edits poetry for Pendas Productions, a small poetry publisher she and husband Gavin Stairs run. Penn has been heralded by the Writers’ Union as a “one woman literary industry”.
BETWEEN BETWEEN
Between Between is a short film that concerns the process of mourning, translating some of Penn Kemp's performance poetry into visual imagery for a compelling, evocative portrayal of that state. Between Between examines the experience both of the mourner and (perhaps) of the newly dead. A Penn Kemp and Dennis Siren collaboration.
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