RUSTY TALK WITH JACOB WREN
Print Screen is a fascinating series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center that pairs acclaimed authors with films that have influenced them. This Spring they feature Jacob Wren talking about director Abbas Kiarostami’s seminal work Close-Up. Wren’s new book Rich And Poor (Bookthug) travels through the mind of a disenfranchised man who decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. The book is told through both the eyes of the assassin and the rich man. Kiarostami’s Close-Up is a fictional film about actual events with the people who experienced the events, thus. Both Wren's book and Kiarostami's film are driven by unreliable characters and events that ultimately play upon the idea of what is art and what is truth in art. I recently had the chance to talk about his new book, art, politics, literary cliques, and film. —Jacqueline Valencia Jacqueline Valencia: I literally just finished reading Rich And Poor and re-watched Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up as well. What brought you to do this for the Lincoln Center? Jacob Wren : Rachel Rakes invited me to be part of this series I’ve never seen, but seems really awesome. JV: There is an unreliable narrator in the movie and in your book. What I enjoyed about that is that the man pretending to be the filmmaker and in turn the filmmaker making a movie about that it’s a duality seen in your book, Rich And Poor. These two works explore duality. JW: It was only when I finished Rich And Poor that it became so clear to me that there were two unreliable narrators. I went back and forth between them. But I do think there is some sense in which all my writing is about paradox or embodies many paradoxes of living that makes it clear that there can’t be a reliable narrator. We’re all unreliable narrators of our own lives. Philosophizing and trying to theorize about life is a kind of unreliable activity. Rich And Poor is a book about many things, but one of the things it’s about is what we do about capitalism. How can we change it in some way, or can we or is there any possibility, or what are the possibilities? Capitalism seems so overwhelming. Any idea you have to change it or defeat it one can’t be sure it will work. Also, capitalism seems to be able to absorb so much of the opposition. It takes that opposition and makes it a part of capitalism and you can feel it’s hopeless. I think this puts us in a position of being unreliable, or unknowing, or unsure. JV: It’s a pretty circular thing because once you make a call to action it gets easily appropriated without one realizing it until it may be too late. JW: Yeah or it might change things, but not exactly the things you want to change. You’re entering a very unpredictable space. JV: I noticed the line: “Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum from these streets.” It’s from one of my favourite films, Taxi Driver. JW: * laughs * Yeah. JV: What inspired you to write Rich And Poor besides the idea of capitalism because this reads a lot like the characters in Taxi Driver (Travis Bickel, the disenfranchised taxi driver and Palantine, the politician). JW: I would say that the origins of Rich And Poor were reading David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years and a lot of the discourse around Occupy Wall Street and this refocusing of leftist attention on the one percent. Also, how capitalism became less of an abstract. I was raised to think that capitalism was this abstract post-modern machine, in that Foucault sense, invaded all of our discourse and our ways of understanding the world totally. Capitalism may be that, but it’s also rich people getting richer. And refocusing capitalism on the idea of rich people getting richer and well with all the rich people I was thinking, why don’t we just kill them? It’s probably just a few hundred or a few thousand people. Why not the French Revolution? This unnamed protagonist who decides to kill one specific billionaire—it’s a classic cinematic image for the loner who wants to do something good in the world, but maybe where we question him is in Roberto DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Jacqueline: There are many layers in watching a film. We have the film that is presented to the viewer and the film that continues playing in the viewer’s brain after they’ve left the theatre. This is one of things that really got me about Kiarostami’s Close-Up. I forgot who says it, but the line that stuck with me was: “Spite is a veil to conceal art.” Some of the passages in your book also stand out in much the same way. My point is, I wonder if Kiarostami had that in mind, the idea of the film as an extended part in a viewer’s mind. JW: Yes. Close-Up is such a film about art and what power it has in the world or what power it doesn’t have in the world. And the way art is or isn’t a lie or is or isn’t truth. It’s a Tolstoy quote: “Ill will is the veil that covers art.” JV: The unnamed billionaire in Rich And Poor starts a poetry foundation. He forms it as a kind of conceit or way for him to find out what poetry or art is. And sometimes he gets it and sometimes he doesn’t, especially when it comes to activism. It’s really interesting especially with current controversies within the poetry community. What did you want to explore in including that? JW: I would say all of my books are somehow about the relationship between art and politics. There are positive and negative relationships there. This is one cynical relationship between art and politics. JV: How about art and politics within Close-Up? JW: That’s fascinating because you have the con man who is somehow using the power of art to gain something. He’s trying to gain symbolically a sense of self in the world and a sense of power. Then there is the financial aspect to it too where he’s trying to get money. JV: Do you really think he was trying to get money though? JW: No, I mean, he probably wasn’t out to get money. He does need money. He’s using everything at his disposal. And he is an autodidact and I’m also an autodidact. The politics in Close-Up are very complex and very paradoxical. JV: That’s why it leaves you still thinking after you’ve left the film. This goes back to your book. I think that after a reader reads a book, like a viewer finishes a film, there’s another book inside the readers brain. So as I read your book and I do a bit of activism, it seeps in there and resonates. There’s a big aspect of activism in your book. What do you think will be the next activist wave in poetry or literary culture? JW: I’m really bad at predicting the future. Whenever I try and predict the future I am always wrong. Definitely we are living in a kind of golden age of protest in the moment. There’s been an enormous degree of powerful effective protest all around the world in the past ten years. Not quite sure when it started. This protest also connected to the fact that the injustices, let’s say economic inequality, are not only becoming greater but more visible and more obvious. I grew up in the eighties and I think of shows like Lifestyles of The Rich And Famous where this kind of wealth was cast in a positive way. Maybe that can still happen now, but I think people would be more disgusted about it now than they were then when it was romanticized or sensationalized and made for pure entertainment. JV: I think that nowadays people aren’t listening to the people who are doing the real work out there. I think poetry is very political by nature, but through all the cliques and the award-world spectacle, we don’t hear or get to read beyond what is told to us. There are so many writers that don’t get heard for various reasons (racism and sexism). That’s my biggest problem with the world of literature. JW: I always think the art institutions, the publishers, maybe who are now called the gatekeepers ... what am I trying to say? The most political work is often not the most successful, sadly. JV: I guess what I’m trying to say is that we romanticize what we do get to hear, but don’t hear the rest of the people out there. Not everyone is getting their say. JW: There’s a lot of people out there with a vested interest in keeping the status quo in place. When you have a desire to change the status quo and you don’t see a change, you’re pushing uphill. That’s why it’s so important and that’s why it’s so difficult. JV: Do you think Rich And Poor is a political work? JW: Yeah. I mean, almost to a fault. It’s very obviously about politics in complex ways. JV: It feels and reads like an activist work or a manifesto of sorts, which I enjoy and why I mention whether you think it is political or an activist work. JW: I hope so, but there’s a danger in activist art to become simplistic. I struggle so much to do something that is both activist and political, but still full of paradox resonance, questions, and being unsure and see if you can have both at the same time. JACOB WREN'S MOST RECENT BOOK |
 | Rich and Poor is a novel of a man who washes dishes for a living and decides to kill a billionaire as a political act. It is literature as political theory and theory as pure literary pleasure—a spiralling, fast-paced parable of joyous, overly self-aware, mischievous class warfare. As his plan proceeds and becomes more feasible, the story cuts back and forth between his and the billionaire’s perspectives, gradually revealing how easily the poisons of ambition, wealth and revolutionary violence can become entangled. A fable of not knowing how to change the world and perhaps learning how to do so in the process. |
April 18: Print Screen: Jacob Wren and Close-up
Occasioned by the release of Rich and Poor (BookThug), a rare work of literary fiction that cuts into the psychology of politics in off-kilter ways, Jacob Wren joins us to introduce Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up—a masterful exploration of the nature of truth and cinematic illusion, with a distinctly offbeat sense of humor—followed by a discussion and book signing.
Occasioned by the release of Rich and Poor (BookThug), a rare work of literary fiction that cuts into the psychology of politics in off-kilter ways, Jacob Wren joins us to introduce Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up—a masterful exploration of the nature of truth and cinematic illusion, with a distinctly offbeat sense of humor—followed by a discussion and book signing.
Jacqueline Valencia is a Toronto-based poet and critic. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There Is No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press May 2016.
RUSTY TALK WITH GARY BARWIN
GARY BARWIN is a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of 18 books of poetry and fiction as well as books for kids. His most recent collection is Moon Baboon Canoe (poetry, Mansfield Press, 2014.) Forthcoming books include Yiddish for Pirates (novel, Random House Canada, 2016), I, Dr Greenblatt, Orthdontist, 251-1457 (fiction, Anvil 2015) and Sonosyntactics: Selected and New Poetry of Paul Dutton (WLUP, 2015).
Other recent books include Franzlations (with Hugh Thomas; New Star), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug) and The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House.) He was Young Voices eWriter-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library in Fall of 2013 and he is Writer-in-Residence at Western University in 2014-2015. Barwin received a PhD (music composition) from SUNY at Buffalo.
Barwin is winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition, the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award, the KM Hunter Artist Award, and the President’s Prize for Poetry (York University). His young adult fiction has been shortlisted for both the Canadian Library Association YA Book of the Year and the Arthur Ellis Award. He has received major grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for his work. Recordings of his work can be found at PennSound.org and on his YouTube channel. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com.
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Gary Barwin: I was a single cell. There was a flurry of macromolecules—DNA, RNA, a wad of proteins—and then I wrote another cell into being and I became two cells. I kept writing until I was millions. This was my mother tongue before I had a tongue. There was no editing, until my father cut my nails.
Unless, my first creative writing memory was when I was 6 and writing on little cue cards, making up a writing system that seemed to hold the largeness, the numinosity of what could be said. I wrote a bunch of strange little sentences that were spells or poems in this made-up script that didn’t “mean” anything. And I do remember writing “Cosmic Herbert and the Pencil Forest” a short story in Grade 5 and publishing it to sell at the school “White Elephant” sale. My first publication.
KM: You are probably one of the most diverse writers in this country. You are a poet, a fiction writer, a children’s author, a performer, an artist, and a musician—is there an art form that you have not tried but want or plan to? And how do you decide what genre or form a project will take?
GB: There are so many things I’d like to try. I can’t help wanting to try my hand at a variety of things. I feel that there are so many exciting and inspiring ways to imagine writing, how could I just settle on one?
I see a continuum of approaches to creative work. On one extreme, there are writers like Samuel Beckett who worked his entire long career on narrowing the focus of his writing until he arrived at the laser-like minimalism of his later work. And then there are the writers who explore many different modes of creation, all part of one big messy creative ecosystem. bpNichol was one of these. The composer/writer/visual artist/performer John Cage was another.
As for me, I am currently working on a multimedia piece that will involve sound poetry, spoken text, computer processing, live music, recorded music, video, visual poetry and dancing giraffes. Ok, I’m lying about the giraffes. They won’t be dancing. Unless, of course, they want to.
The whole shebang is inspired by the work of iconic Canadian writer of “borderblur,” bpNichol and uses archival recordings of his performances. So I guess the answer is, I’d like to explore ways to further combine my various interests. I’m also also really interested in exploring film. I’ve made a few short videos by myself and in collaboration and I’ve found it very inspiring. And I’d like to work with various kinds of computer processing of text—I mean beyond spell check. There are so many fascinating things that can be done with even simple programming tools to create interesting texts or interactive text-experiences. I’ve done a few, but I’d like to explore this more. I find these kinds of projects really amazing and attractive.
I’m also planning an art exhibition of my visual poetry work, which is something I’ve wanted to do since crayons.
In terms of how I decide what genre or form a project takes, it is like cell division. I start with one tiny bit of something and then try to follow what it wants to develop into, trying to be open to what it might be. Or sometimes, I consider a form or a genre and think, “Hmm. I wonder what I could do with that? What possibilities does it offer? How would it make me create something that would surprise me or take me away from myself and my usual way of doing things?”
KM: You’ve been very involved in the small press and chapbook scene as a writer and publisher. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved and how that community impacted your writing and publishing life?
GB: It’s probably terribly gauche to do this, but I’m going to shamelessly plagiarize an answer to this question that I gave in an interview with the writer/scholar Alex Porco a few years ago in OpenBookToronto.com. I could, like a student once told me he did with stolen essays, run it through Google translator, first changing into Chinese, then Urdu, then back to English so that it becomes an “entirely new essay,”—actually I do do that with some poems to see what interesting changes occur—but here’s my original answer in the original language, rejigged just a little bit:
I’ve been involved in the small press since 1985. In a creative writing class at York University, our professor, the brilliantly laconic and insightful Frank Davey [who then went on to teach at Western], told us about this event downtown called "Meet the Presses", a gathering of small presses devised by Stuart Ross and Nicholas Power. He encouraged us to create books and get a table. I did, and ended up attending both Meet the Presses and independent book fairs for the next thirty years publishing a series of broadsheets, chapbooks, and various ephemera for each event. Stuart, Nick, plus some others of us, re-formed Meet the Presses several years ago in order to create the Indie Literary Market. These kind of community-based writer/publisher events, along with readings and the online world have been a constant and important part of my writing and cultural life. They’ve really contributed significantly to my development as a writer and have been responsible for introducing me to many writers, publishers, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and readers, and much writing which has been important to me. All of which made my last thirty years of engagement in the literary scene inspiring, collegial, pleasant, welcoming, intellectually engaging, and fun.
I see small press publishing and related events like the [Toronto] Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market as responding to, and facilitating community around literature and publishing. The technology of the book is not one merely of information technology, but interactive technology. Readers, writers, and publishers come together to share their joie de livre in a context that is outside the strictures of predominantly market-driven publishing. In the small press, we can turn on a dime because we don’t need thousands of dollars to continue. Our share-holders are people who share in our work by holding our publications in their hands, and share our mutual appreciation of independent literature and publishing.
Publishing is not a neutral act. It is implicitly political and aesthetic. The publishing is part of the aesthetic of the work, in terms of its look, its distribution, and how the audience interacts with the work, both in terms of reading it, engaging with its writers and publishers, and in how it finds its audience. In the small press, there is a reason, a conscious decision, to publish the works in the way that they do. The presses choose to publish in this form not because they have to, but because they want to. In this kind of publishing, success is defined as an authentic interaction between engaged writing, publishers, and readers. It’s good to be reminded that we can choose to shape how our writing is and not only be driven by market-, media-, or other social forces. And we don’t have to wait for these outside forces in order to begin to publish and create audience and to make the writing and the community that we wish to see.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
GB: bpNichol (who I’ve now mentioned several times) told us in writing class, “to keep writing.” I think that’s wise. Implicit in this, though, is to keep being curious and exploratory in one’s writing. Not to keep writing the same thing or the same way, but to keep trying to get better, to keep actively considering what makes writing exciting and interesting, what works and what is possible. And one can’t write without being an active and engaged reader, and, for most of us, unless we’re Emily Dickinson, an active participant in a literary community. I also remember asking Lillian Necakov, the first one of my friends to have a book published, how she did it. She said, “You write one page and then you write another until you have a hundred pages. Then you have a book.” Also good advice!
KM: Collaboration seems to be a big part of your writing and creative life. You’ve collaborated with Craig Conley, Hugh Thomas, Gregory Betts, Derek Beaulieu, Stuart Ross and others. What draws you to collaborative writing? I’m sure it depends on the project, but how do you approach it?
GB: I first make it clear that I’m the better, more experienced part of the collaboration and that everyone should take their cues from me. And bring me coffee. Also, I’ve got this itch just an inch below my right shoulder blade and …
But, really, the excitement and fun of collaboration is being open to doing something different, to this strange hybrid, hydra-headed process that is collaboration. It is both and neither of the participants’ work. It is very freeing. It is my work, but it isn’t, so I feel even more empowered to try things, to go with the process, to go outside my own sense of self, or my sense of my identity as a writer or even, my sense of what works as a writer. I try to trust the process that happens between me and my collaborators. And the great secret of writing is that you can always change things—tweak, modify, revise.
Sometimes collaborations involve some planning ahead by discussing what the project will be; sometimes, it involves just jumping in and seeing what results. Sometimes, it is like playing tennis. One person serves up something that the other has to return. This can be a line, a paragraph or something else. Then the other person answers it. The answer may involve reframing the entire question, surprising, challenging, or confounding the collaborator. Sometimes we proceed line by line, stanza by stanza, or paragraph by paragraph. Sometimes each of us goes back and changes what has been written before. One thing I love about collaboration is that the act of collaboration (the ‘rules of engagement’) are created collaboratively and can change at any time.
KM: In addition to being one of the most diverse writers in Canada, you are also one of the most prolific. In 2014 you published the poetry collection moon baboon canoe with Mansfield Press, you have collection of short fiction, I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1447 coming out in 2015 with Anvil Press, and you have a novel Yiddish for Pirates forthcoming in 2016 with Random House. How are you able to write so much? Can you give us a sense of your process and how you move between so many different projects?
GB: I was going to write a self-help book “Making Procrastination Work for You!” wherein I describe how one can harness the power of avoiding working on one project by working on another, but I didn’t get around to writing it ...
I do find that I get energy from jumping from one kind of writing to another. Prose reminds me what poetry can do and vice versa. Sometimes, though, I do need to burrow deeply into something to give it time to develop—this was certainly was the case with the novel—but then after a long writing session, or sometimes intermittently in the middle of one, I’d write something else as a palate cleanser, on a lark as a diversion, or as a kind of footnote to the main project.
I think I write a lot because writing serves many purposes for me. It is a way of figuring things out, a way of working through things, a way of knowing, of experiencing things, of exploring. It is an entertainment, an obsession, a mode of social engagement, of doodling, of spiritual practice, of trying to become a “better” (more thoughtful? more compassionate? more observant?) person, a way of creating, experiencing, and responding the energy and possibility around me and in language.
In terms of process, I don’t know that I have a single mode of creation. Often it is the slow accumulation of work, chipping away at ideas or larger forms. I don’t know where I’m going. I have a place where I start writing, but I always consider that the writing knows more than me so I trust the process of writing itself and where it is taking me rather than my ideas for the project. I try to listen to where it is going. I means lots of revision and recalculating.
For example, I had some ideas about the novel and where it might go. I even had charts! But they were flexible. I’d head to where seemed the most promising direction. Then when I got there, I looked around to see where next: which was the most interesting direction from this new perspective. And so I kept moving forward. You know that nursery rhyme, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain to See What He Could See?” That’s how I imagined it. I’d walk to the mountain to see what I could see. And then when I got there, I’d look to see if I could see the next mountain from where I’d be able to see what I could see. Until 115,000 words later, I felt I was done.
KM: For readers who are first introducing themselves to your work, moon baboon canoe might be a good place to start because it’s a great example of the scope of your writing. The poems in this collection are humorous, nonsensical, profound, personal, absurd, political, and experimental. It’s a goodie bag of poems where each one offers a new surprise. How did this collection come together? Was it written over a long or short time span?
GB: Thanks for your kind words. Though I do like books organized around a central idea or theme, I also like books that are, as the pirates say, a salmagundi, a mish-mash. In moon baboon canoe, I hope that the various kinds of poems offer an energetic and/or supportive contrast.
I had lots of different kinds of poems kicking around, but Stuart Ross, the editor, and I discussed what kind of a book this might be and so I gathered the appropriate poems together. I shaped the book into sections so that it wasn’t just a big blob of stuff, but rather several smaller more shapely blobs. (That’s like choosing what clothes to wear…) It is a bit like creating set-lists for a band. You shape each set so that it has variety, coherence, and a certain shape or direction. And then you smash all the instruments and jump into the audience. And destroy your hotel room. Oh sorry. That was only when I was in that string quartet.
Most of the poems in moon baboon canoe were written in the few years preceding the book and then intensely revised, both before I submitted the book and after consulting with Stuart. Knowing that it would be Stuart who would be looking at the book gave me ideas about revision. I could internalize some of what I thought he might say which enabled me to see the poems with fresh eyes. And then, of course, when he did actually did see it, he did have some comments and suggestions that I hadn’t thought of. I actually love the process of working with a good editor. It is a productive dialogue and a chance to not only fix problems, but to learn of opportunities to make the writing do more. I didn’t always take Stuart’s exact suggestions, but I did listened carefully when he pointed out weaknesses or flabby bits which I could rework, revise, and generally improve.
As I said, most of the poems were written in the last few years, however, there are a couple that come from a long time before that. One of them I wrote as an 18-year-old undergrad. I was quite chuffed at the retroactive validation, that, at least, as far as that poem went, I wasn’t as entirely clueless as I thought I was back then.
KM: One of the things I enjoy most about your poetry is your sense of humour. In the poem “inside” which starts with the lines “inside Stephen Harper / there’s a little dog” you marry humour and politics into a thematically satisfying and entertaining poem. Poetry often has a reputation as a serious art form. When I talk to writers and readers new to poetry, they are surprised when poetry is funny. Can you discuss your thoughts on humour and poetry? Who are some of your influences?
GB: I don’t know why poetry and humour should be thought of as antithetical. Or why humour and “profundity” or depth should be thought of like oil and waiter, Angelina Jolie and Don Cherry, or iPhones and the duodenum. I think of humour as one of the great resources of communication. To surprise, confound, reconfigure, challenge assumptions, to enable lateral thinking, and more complex perspectives. Many traditions recognize this. For example, the spiritual masters who wrote Zen koans, Sufi parables, or Three Stooges shtick. And English: what a delightful narrative of confounding syntactic jokes, slippery orthographic pratfalls, and historic and lexical legerdemain.
two roads diverged in a yellow wood
I took one
it doesn't matter which
I'm not giving it back
Thinking specifically about humour in poetry, my influences from contemporary poetry include David W. McFadden, James Tate, Stuart Ross, Ron Padgett, Lisa Jarnot, Mark Strand, Steve McCaffery, and I’m going to have to mention bpNichol again (and here, I’m thinking of his sly visual work.) I think I’d also have to include John Cage and Wallace Stevens, More recent influences would include Anne Carson, Gabriel Gudding, Mary Ruefle (do you know her amazing lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey?) Heather Christle, and Dorothea Lasky.
KM: You’re the 2014-15 Writer-in-Residence at Western University. You’ve been very present on campus with various initiatives such as Flashbang—a speed-editing event and Reclaiming the Corridor of Excellence: A Public Performance in which you will be exhibiting curated works in the new Arts and Humanities building. What have you got planned for your second term?
GB: I plan to sleep in my office under a pelt made from actual Irving Layton. Unless it’s Naugahyde. And then, I’m doing a few readings including at the London Open Mic, another Flashbang event at the Weldon library which will involve text performance and music, and a multi-media event in conjunction with Josh Lambier’s Poetry Lab.
I’ll also do another Flashbang speed-editing event (like last time, with student-writer-in-residence Steven Slowka), and some kind of live performance as part of the Corridor of Excellence project, though I haven’t figured out exactly what yet. As part of the London Public library part of the residency, I’ll also be doing a speed-editing event there, and workshops for seniors, for street-involved youth, and at the London Writers Group. This is in addition to visiting various classes and holding individual consultations during non-Layton-coated office hours.
KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
GB: When one of my sons was about three (N.B. Ryan: don’t worry I won’t say which son), I took him with me to a reading that I was giving. As I went up to the podium and opened my mouth to read, he ran up, grabbed all of my papers and threw them across the room. Then he exclaimed, “No. I am the writer!” After I gathered my papers, I began to read again. Then he squatted in the corner and shouted, “I HAVE TO POO!” I actually thought the whole thing was quite funny. Why? Was it my Dadaist-Fluxus-anarchist son destabilizing the conventions of the bourgeois reading via a Freudian intervention, or just whacky madness that reminded me not to take things so seriously? Either way, the mostly university-age non-parents were pretty shocked, though the parents thought, “Oh yes, just another Thursday night.” I didn’t bring my son along to another reading until he was much older. Now he’s a musician in Toronto, but I haven’t staged a similar intervention during one of his performances … yet … my son and I have performed together quite a lot in a variety of situations, both literary and musical.
And then there was that time that I was driving across the border to read in Buffalo and the border guard, on hearing that I was a poet, read me her (really awful) poetry for ten minutes as the cars lined up for miles behind me.
Thanks very much for the questions. I really appreciate it.
For our London, Ontario readers who would like to make an appointment with Gary Barwin at Western (between now and April 2015) contact Vivian Fogloton in the Department of English and Writing Studies.
Other recent books include Franzlations (with Hugh Thomas; New Star), The Obvious Flap (with Gregory Betts; BookThug) and The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House.) He was Young Voices eWriter-in-Residence at the Toronto Public Library in Fall of 2013 and he is Writer-in-Residence at Western University in 2014-2015. Barwin received a PhD (music composition) from SUNY at Buffalo.
Barwin is winner of the 2013 City of Hamilton Arts Award (Writing), the Hamilton Poetry Book of the Year 2011, and co-winner of 2011 Harbourfront Poetry NOW competition, the 2010 bpNichol chapbook award, the KM Hunter Artist Award, and the President’s Prize for Poetry (York University). His young adult fiction has been shortlisted for both the Canadian Library Association YA Book of the Year and the Arthur Ellis Award. He has received major grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for his work. Recordings of his work can be found at PennSound.org and on his YouTube channel. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and at garybarwin.com.
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Gary Barwin: I was a single cell. There was a flurry of macromolecules—DNA, RNA, a wad of proteins—and then I wrote another cell into being and I became two cells. I kept writing until I was millions. This was my mother tongue before I had a tongue. There was no editing, until my father cut my nails.
Unless, my first creative writing memory was when I was 6 and writing on little cue cards, making up a writing system that seemed to hold the largeness, the numinosity of what could be said. I wrote a bunch of strange little sentences that were spells or poems in this made-up script that didn’t “mean” anything. And I do remember writing “Cosmic Herbert and the Pencil Forest” a short story in Grade 5 and publishing it to sell at the school “White Elephant” sale. My first publication.
KM: You are probably one of the most diverse writers in this country. You are a poet, a fiction writer, a children’s author, a performer, an artist, and a musician—is there an art form that you have not tried but want or plan to? And how do you decide what genre or form a project will take?
GB: There are so many things I’d like to try. I can’t help wanting to try my hand at a variety of things. I feel that there are so many exciting and inspiring ways to imagine writing, how could I just settle on one?
I see a continuum of approaches to creative work. On one extreme, there are writers like Samuel Beckett who worked his entire long career on narrowing the focus of his writing until he arrived at the laser-like minimalism of his later work. And then there are the writers who explore many different modes of creation, all part of one big messy creative ecosystem. bpNichol was one of these. The composer/writer/visual artist/performer John Cage was another.
As for me, I am currently working on a multimedia piece that will involve sound poetry, spoken text, computer processing, live music, recorded music, video, visual poetry and dancing giraffes. Ok, I’m lying about the giraffes. They won’t be dancing. Unless, of course, they want to.
The whole shebang is inspired by the work of iconic Canadian writer of “borderblur,” bpNichol and uses archival recordings of his performances. So I guess the answer is, I’d like to explore ways to further combine my various interests. I’m also also really interested in exploring film. I’ve made a few short videos by myself and in collaboration and I’ve found it very inspiring. And I’d like to work with various kinds of computer processing of text—I mean beyond spell check. There are so many fascinating things that can be done with even simple programming tools to create interesting texts or interactive text-experiences. I’ve done a few, but I’d like to explore this more. I find these kinds of projects really amazing and attractive.
I’m also planning an art exhibition of my visual poetry work, which is something I’ve wanted to do since crayons.
In terms of how I decide what genre or form a project takes, it is like cell division. I start with one tiny bit of something and then try to follow what it wants to develop into, trying to be open to what it might be. Or sometimes, I consider a form or a genre and think, “Hmm. I wonder what I could do with that? What possibilities does it offer? How would it make me create something that would surprise me or take me away from myself and my usual way of doing things?”
KM: You’ve been very involved in the small press and chapbook scene as a writer and publisher. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved and how that community impacted your writing and publishing life?
GB: It’s probably terribly gauche to do this, but I’m going to shamelessly plagiarize an answer to this question that I gave in an interview with the writer/scholar Alex Porco a few years ago in OpenBookToronto.com. I could, like a student once told me he did with stolen essays, run it through Google translator, first changing into Chinese, then Urdu, then back to English so that it becomes an “entirely new essay,”—actually I do do that with some poems to see what interesting changes occur—but here’s my original answer in the original language, rejigged just a little bit:
I’ve been involved in the small press since 1985. In a creative writing class at York University, our professor, the brilliantly laconic and insightful Frank Davey [who then went on to teach at Western], told us about this event downtown called "Meet the Presses", a gathering of small presses devised by Stuart Ross and Nicholas Power. He encouraged us to create books and get a table. I did, and ended up attending both Meet the Presses and independent book fairs for the next thirty years publishing a series of broadsheets, chapbooks, and various ephemera for each event. Stuart, Nick, plus some others of us, re-formed Meet the Presses several years ago in order to create the Indie Literary Market. These kind of community-based writer/publisher events, along with readings and the online world have been a constant and important part of my writing and cultural life. They’ve really contributed significantly to my development as a writer and have been responsible for introducing me to many writers, publishers, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and readers, and much writing which has been important to me. All of which made my last thirty years of engagement in the literary scene inspiring, collegial, pleasant, welcoming, intellectually engaging, and fun.
I see small press publishing and related events like the [Toronto] Meet the Presses Indie Literary Market as responding to, and facilitating community around literature and publishing. The technology of the book is not one merely of information technology, but interactive technology. Readers, writers, and publishers come together to share their joie de livre in a context that is outside the strictures of predominantly market-driven publishing. In the small press, we can turn on a dime because we don’t need thousands of dollars to continue. Our share-holders are people who share in our work by holding our publications in their hands, and share our mutual appreciation of independent literature and publishing.
Publishing is not a neutral act. It is implicitly political and aesthetic. The publishing is part of the aesthetic of the work, in terms of its look, its distribution, and how the audience interacts with the work, both in terms of reading it, engaging with its writers and publishers, and in how it finds its audience. In the small press, there is a reason, a conscious decision, to publish the works in the way that they do. The presses choose to publish in this form not because they have to, but because they want to. In this kind of publishing, success is defined as an authentic interaction between engaged writing, publishers, and readers. It’s good to be reminded that we can choose to shape how our writing is and not only be driven by market-, media-, or other social forces. And we don’t have to wait for these outside forces in order to begin to publish and create audience and to make the writing and the community that we wish to see.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
GB: bpNichol (who I’ve now mentioned several times) told us in writing class, “to keep writing.” I think that’s wise. Implicit in this, though, is to keep being curious and exploratory in one’s writing. Not to keep writing the same thing or the same way, but to keep trying to get better, to keep actively considering what makes writing exciting and interesting, what works and what is possible. And one can’t write without being an active and engaged reader, and, for most of us, unless we’re Emily Dickinson, an active participant in a literary community. I also remember asking Lillian Necakov, the first one of my friends to have a book published, how she did it. She said, “You write one page and then you write another until you have a hundred pages. Then you have a book.” Also good advice!
KM: Collaboration seems to be a big part of your writing and creative life. You’ve collaborated with Craig Conley, Hugh Thomas, Gregory Betts, Derek Beaulieu, Stuart Ross and others. What draws you to collaborative writing? I’m sure it depends on the project, but how do you approach it?
GB: I first make it clear that I’m the better, more experienced part of the collaboration and that everyone should take their cues from me. And bring me coffee. Also, I’ve got this itch just an inch below my right shoulder blade and …
But, really, the excitement and fun of collaboration is being open to doing something different, to this strange hybrid, hydra-headed process that is collaboration. It is both and neither of the participants’ work. It is very freeing. It is my work, but it isn’t, so I feel even more empowered to try things, to go with the process, to go outside my own sense of self, or my sense of my identity as a writer or even, my sense of what works as a writer. I try to trust the process that happens between me and my collaborators. And the great secret of writing is that you can always change things—tweak, modify, revise.
Sometimes collaborations involve some planning ahead by discussing what the project will be; sometimes, it involves just jumping in and seeing what results. Sometimes, it is like playing tennis. One person serves up something that the other has to return. This can be a line, a paragraph or something else. Then the other person answers it. The answer may involve reframing the entire question, surprising, challenging, or confounding the collaborator. Sometimes we proceed line by line, stanza by stanza, or paragraph by paragraph. Sometimes each of us goes back and changes what has been written before. One thing I love about collaboration is that the act of collaboration (the ‘rules of engagement’) are created collaboratively and can change at any time.
KM: In addition to being one of the most diverse writers in Canada, you are also one of the most prolific. In 2014 you published the poetry collection moon baboon canoe with Mansfield Press, you have collection of short fiction, I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251-1447 coming out in 2015 with Anvil Press, and you have a novel Yiddish for Pirates forthcoming in 2016 with Random House. How are you able to write so much? Can you give us a sense of your process and how you move between so many different projects?
GB: I was going to write a self-help book “Making Procrastination Work for You!” wherein I describe how one can harness the power of avoiding working on one project by working on another, but I didn’t get around to writing it ...
I do find that I get energy from jumping from one kind of writing to another. Prose reminds me what poetry can do and vice versa. Sometimes, though, I do need to burrow deeply into something to give it time to develop—this was certainly was the case with the novel—but then after a long writing session, or sometimes intermittently in the middle of one, I’d write something else as a palate cleanser, on a lark as a diversion, or as a kind of footnote to the main project.
I think I write a lot because writing serves many purposes for me. It is a way of figuring things out, a way of working through things, a way of knowing, of experiencing things, of exploring. It is an entertainment, an obsession, a mode of social engagement, of doodling, of spiritual practice, of trying to become a “better” (more thoughtful? more compassionate? more observant?) person, a way of creating, experiencing, and responding the energy and possibility around me and in language.
In terms of process, I don’t know that I have a single mode of creation. Often it is the slow accumulation of work, chipping away at ideas or larger forms. I don’t know where I’m going. I have a place where I start writing, but I always consider that the writing knows more than me so I trust the process of writing itself and where it is taking me rather than my ideas for the project. I try to listen to where it is going. I means lots of revision and recalculating.
For example, I had some ideas about the novel and where it might go. I even had charts! But they were flexible. I’d head to where seemed the most promising direction. Then when I got there, I looked around to see where next: which was the most interesting direction from this new perspective. And so I kept moving forward. You know that nursery rhyme, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain to See What He Could See?” That’s how I imagined it. I’d walk to the mountain to see what I could see. And then when I got there, I’d look to see if I could see the next mountain from where I’d be able to see what I could see. Until 115,000 words later, I felt I was done.
KM: For readers who are first introducing themselves to your work, moon baboon canoe might be a good place to start because it’s a great example of the scope of your writing. The poems in this collection are humorous, nonsensical, profound, personal, absurd, political, and experimental. It’s a goodie bag of poems where each one offers a new surprise. How did this collection come together? Was it written over a long or short time span?
GB: Thanks for your kind words. Though I do like books organized around a central idea or theme, I also like books that are, as the pirates say, a salmagundi, a mish-mash. In moon baboon canoe, I hope that the various kinds of poems offer an energetic and/or supportive contrast.
I had lots of different kinds of poems kicking around, but Stuart Ross, the editor, and I discussed what kind of a book this might be and so I gathered the appropriate poems together. I shaped the book into sections so that it wasn’t just a big blob of stuff, but rather several smaller more shapely blobs. (That’s like choosing what clothes to wear…) It is a bit like creating set-lists for a band. You shape each set so that it has variety, coherence, and a certain shape or direction. And then you smash all the instruments and jump into the audience. And destroy your hotel room. Oh sorry. That was only when I was in that string quartet.
Most of the poems in moon baboon canoe were written in the few years preceding the book and then intensely revised, both before I submitted the book and after consulting with Stuart. Knowing that it would be Stuart who would be looking at the book gave me ideas about revision. I could internalize some of what I thought he might say which enabled me to see the poems with fresh eyes. And then, of course, when he did actually did see it, he did have some comments and suggestions that I hadn’t thought of. I actually love the process of working with a good editor. It is a productive dialogue and a chance to not only fix problems, but to learn of opportunities to make the writing do more. I didn’t always take Stuart’s exact suggestions, but I did listened carefully when he pointed out weaknesses or flabby bits which I could rework, revise, and generally improve.
As I said, most of the poems were written in the last few years, however, there are a couple that come from a long time before that. One of them I wrote as an 18-year-old undergrad. I was quite chuffed at the retroactive validation, that, at least, as far as that poem went, I wasn’t as entirely clueless as I thought I was back then.
KM: One of the things I enjoy most about your poetry is your sense of humour. In the poem “inside” which starts with the lines “inside Stephen Harper / there’s a little dog” you marry humour and politics into a thematically satisfying and entertaining poem. Poetry often has a reputation as a serious art form. When I talk to writers and readers new to poetry, they are surprised when poetry is funny. Can you discuss your thoughts on humour and poetry? Who are some of your influences?
GB: I don’t know why poetry and humour should be thought of as antithetical. Or why humour and “profundity” or depth should be thought of like oil and waiter, Angelina Jolie and Don Cherry, or iPhones and the duodenum. I think of humour as one of the great resources of communication. To surprise, confound, reconfigure, challenge assumptions, to enable lateral thinking, and more complex perspectives. Many traditions recognize this. For example, the spiritual masters who wrote Zen koans, Sufi parables, or Three Stooges shtick. And English: what a delightful narrative of confounding syntactic jokes, slippery orthographic pratfalls, and historic and lexical legerdemain.
two roads diverged in a yellow wood
I took one
it doesn't matter which
I'm not giving it back
Thinking specifically about humour in poetry, my influences from contemporary poetry include David W. McFadden, James Tate, Stuart Ross, Ron Padgett, Lisa Jarnot, Mark Strand, Steve McCaffery, and I’m going to have to mention bpNichol again (and here, I’m thinking of his sly visual work.) I think I’d also have to include John Cage and Wallace Stevens, More recent influences would include Anne Carson, Gabriel Gudding, Mary Ruefle (do you know her amazing lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey?) Heather Christle, and Dorothea Lasky.
KM: You’re the 2014-15 Writer-in-Residence at Western University. You’ve been very present on campus with various initiatives such as Flashbang—a speed-editing event and Reclaiming the Corridor of Excellence: A Public Performance in which you will be exhibiting curated works in the new Arts and Humanities building. What have you got planned for your second term?
GB: I plan to sleep in my office under a pelt made from actual Irving Layton. Unless it’s Naugahyde. And then, I’m doing a few readings including at the London Open Mic, another Flashbang event at the Weldon library which will involve text performance and music, and a multi-media event in conjunction with Josh Lambier’s Poetry Lab.
I’ll also do another Flashbang speed-editing event (like last time, with student-writer-in-residence Steven Slowka), and some kind of live performance as part of the Corridor of Excellence project, though I haven’t figured out exactly what yet. As part of the London Public library part of the residency, I’ll also be doing a speed-editing event there, and workshops for seniors, for street-involved youth, and at the London Writers Group. This is in addition to visiting various classes and holding individual consultations during non-Layton-coated office hours.
KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
GB: When one of my sons was about three (N.B. Ryan: don’t worry I won’t say which son), I took him with me to a reading that I was giving. As I went up to the podium and opened my mouth to read, he ran up, grabbed all of my papers and threw them across the room. Then he exclaimed, “No. I am the writer!” After I gathered my papers, I began to read again. Then he squatted in the corner and shouted, “I HAVE TO POO!” I actually thought the whole thing was quite funny. Why? Was it my Dadaist-Fluxus-anarchist son destabilizing the conventions of the bourgeois reading via a Freudian intervention, or just whacky madness that reminded me not to take things so seriously? Either way, the mostly university-age non-parents were pretty shocked, though the parents thought, “Oh yes, just another Thursday night.” I didn’t bring my son along to another reading until he was much older. Now he’s a musician in Toronto, but I haven’t staged a similar intervention during one of his performances … yet … my son and I have performed together quite a lot in a variety of situations, both literary and musical.
And then there was that time that I was driving across the border to read in Buffalo and the border guard, on hearing that I was a poet, read me her (really awful) poetry for ten minutes as the cars lined up for miles behind me.
Thanks very much for the questions. I really appreciate it.
For our London, Ontario readers who would like to make an appointment with Gary Barwin at Western (between now and April 2015) contact Vivian Fogloton in the Department of English and Writing Studies.
GARY BARWIN'S MOST RECENT POETRY BOOK
MOON BABOON CANOE
MANSFIELD PRESS, A STUART ROSS BOOK. 2014
Description from the publisher:
A follow-up to his acclaimed The Porcupinity of the Stars, Moon Baboon Canoe is filled with Gary Barwin’s trademark humour, invention, musicality and craft. These witty and surprising poems confront subjects as diverse as time machines, elves, hummingbirds, birth and cows, yet manage to explore the perennial themes of poetry: delight, mortality, childhood, love, the natural world and squirrels. It is a moon-guided, baboon-paddled canoe of a book, and around each bend in the river we find the sources of our strength: consolation, goofiness and joy.
A follow-up to his acclaimed The Porcupinity of the Stars, Moon Baboon Canoe is filled with Gary Barwin’s trademark humour, invention, musicality and craft. These witty and surprising poems confront subjects as diverse as time machines, elves, hummingbirds, birth and cows, yet manage to explore the perennial themes of poetry: delight, mortality, childhood, love, the natural world and squirrels. It is a moon-guided, baboon-paddled canoe of a book, and around each bend in the river we find the sources of our strength: consolation, goofiness and joy.
Kathryn Mockler is the publisher of The Rusty Toque.
RUSTY TALK WITH MATT LENNOX
Matt LennoxPhoto by John Brisbane
Born in Orillia, Ontario, MATT LENNOX first pursued a military career, becoming a captain in the Canadian army, where he was posted to Afghanistan between 2008 and 2009. He wrote many of the stories in his first collection,Men of Salt, Men of Earth, there. It was published in 2009 and was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award (the title story had been previously published in Best Canadian Stories in 2006).
Alex Carey: What’s your first memory of being creative?
Matt Lennox: I don’t really know. I guess being creative—however you might define that—has been a steady-state as long as I can remember, so I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t. There was never a lightbulb moment or anything like that. I was always a bit of a dreamer. I didn’t do well on the peewee tee-ball team because I was more interested in the different shapes the clouds resembled.
AC: You originally studied film, but you’ve since published a short story collection, Men of Salt, Men of Earth (Oberon Press, 2009) and a novel, The Carpenter (HarperCollins, 2011) What necessitated the switch the prose?
ML: I guess filmmaking necessitated too much teamwork for my kind of creative expression. And there were too many technical aspects to the craft. With writing all you really need is a piece of paper and a pen. But I was grateful for having studied film, regardless, because it helped to form the visual way I think when I’m telling a story.
AC: A couple stories from Men of Salt, Men of Earth follow travelling experiences. How influential is travel or adventure to your work?
ML: I’ve been fortunate to have done a fair amount of globetrotting in my life. Other than the specific travel stories I’ve written, I suppose that travelling has opened my eyes up to the width of the world and the people who inhabit it. Although at the same time, I’ve been continuously amazed to see the same little concerns and hopes and failures and victories, for the most part, wherever I’ve gone. People are people.
AC: Could you describe your writing process? Do you write every day? Where? When? How do you approach revision?
ML: I try to write every day. I think you have to be a bit of a hard-ass about it, while also giving yourself the occasional break. I don’t have a really formal process. Just pen to paper, repeat, and from time to time step back to see what kind of story is taking shape. I do know, a lot of the time, where the story seems to be going, so I write a lot of jot notes first. But I also stay open to a story evolving and going in different directions. That’s a vital consideration, I think. Approaching revision takes discipline, too. It also takes a special balance between sticking to your guns on things you know are true to the story, and checking your ego on things that are just junk writing or story-telling. That’s why a good, honest second set of eyes are pretty goddamn vital. I also never share anything before it’s ready, either. No sample chapters.
AC: Your novel, The Carpenter, is set in small town Ontario, in the early 1980’s; the narrative seems deliberately vague on its exact location. What roles do place and time have in creating compelling narrative?
ML: I like the disconnectedness of earlier (but still modern) times. People today aren’t so isolated as they used to be—we’re all a buttonclick away from each other now. Using that isolation was a deliberate choice I made for the world of The Carpenter. In terms of the story’s location, I wanted it to be identifiable to people from all over this province— if not all over this country—which was why I did leave it vague. Time and place are—or can be—characters in themselves, and they deserve their due consideration. But like everything else, they have to serve the story.
AC: Which writers first inspired you to create your own work? Has your view on their work changed over time? Where do you currently find inspiration?
ML: I’ve read a lot of the usual suspects for a writer like me—Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, David Adams Richards. I wish Harper Lee had written more than she did. For the most part, my view on these writers and the others I really admire hasn’t changed that much over the years—I still feel inept beside them. But I’ve tried to broaden my reading horizons a great deal as well. Where I currently draw inspiration, to be frank, is from the new generation of writers in Canada these days. We’ve got a really exciting literary scene lately, and I’m very grateful to know a few of the best voices going.
AC: What are you working on now?
ML: I have a new novel in the works, tentatively set for publication in early 2015. It’s called Knucklehead. Bouncers, steroids, methamphetamine, good guys, bad guys—all the kinds of things I dig. If Daniel Woodrell’s thing is country noir, I’m shooting for white trash noir.
Alex Carey: What’s your first memory of being creative?
Matt Lennox: I don’t really know. I guess being creative—however you might define that—has been a steady-state as long as I can remember, so I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t. There was never a lightbulb moment or anything like that. I was always a bit of a dreamer. I didn’t do well on the peewee tee-ball team because I was more interested in the different shapes the clouds resembled.
AC: You originally studied film, but you’ve since published a short story collection, Men of Salt, Men of Earth (Oberon Press, 2009) and a novel, The Carpenter (HarperCollins, 2011) What necessitated the switch the prose?
ML: I guess filmmaking necessitated too much teamwork for my kind of creative expression. And there were too many technical aspects to the craft. With writing all you really need is a piece of paper and a pen. But I was grateful for having studied film, regardless, because it helped to form the visual way I think when I’m telling a story.
AC: A couple stories from Men of Salt, Men of Earth follow travelling experiences. How influential is travel or adventure to your work?
ML: I’ve been fortunate to have done a fair amount of globetrotting in my life. Other than the specific travel stories I’ve written, I suppose that travelling has opened my eyes up to the width of the world and the people who inhabit it. Although at the same time, I’ve been continuously amazed to see the same little concerns and hopes and failures and victories, for the most part, wherever I’ve gone. People are people.
AC: Could you describe your writing process? Do you write every day? Where? When? How do you approach revision?
ML: I try to write every day. I think you have to be a bit of a hard-ass about it, while also giving yourself the occasional break. I don’t have a really formal process. Just pen to paper, repeat, and from time to time step back to see what kind of story is taking shape. I do know, a lot of the time, where the story seems to be going, so I write a lot of jot notes first. But I also stay open to a story evolving and going in different directions. That’s a vital consideration, I think. Approaching revision takes discipline, too. It also takes a special balance between sticking to your guns on things you know are true to the story, and checking your ego on things that are just junk writing or story-telling. That’s why a good, honest second set of eyes are pretty goddamn vital. I also never share anything before it’s ready, either. No sample chapters.
AC: Your novel, The Carpenter, is set in small town Ontario, in the early 1980’s; the narrative seems deliberately vague on its exact location. What roles do place and time have in creating compelling narrative?
ML: I like the disconnectedness of earlier (but still modern) times. People today aren’t so isolated as they used to be—we’re all a buttonclick away from each other now. Using that isolation was a deliberate choice I made for the world of The Carpenter. In terms of the story’s location, I wanted it to be identifiable to people from all over this province— if not all over this country—which was why I did leave it vague. Time and place are—or can be—characters in themselves, and they deserve their due consideration. But like everything else, they have to serve the story.
AC: Which writers first inspired you to create your own work? Has your view on their work changed over time? Where do you currently find inspiration?
ML: I’ve read a lot of the usual suspects for a writer like me—Cormac McCarthy, Hemingway, Raymond Carver, David Adams Richards. I wish Harper Lee had written more than she did. For the most part, my view on these writers and the others I really admire hasn’t changed that much over the years—I still feel inept beside them. But I’ve tried to broaden my reading horizons a great deal as well. Where I currently draw inspiration, to be frank, is from the new generation of writers in Canada these days. We’ve got a really exciting literary scene lately, and I’m very grateful to know a few of the best voices going.
AC: What are you working on now?
ML: I have a new novel in the works, tentatively set for publication in early 2015. It’s called Knucklehead. Bouncers, steroids, methamphetamine, good guys, bad guys—all the kinds of things I dig. If Daniel Woodrell’s thing is country noir, I’m shooting for white trash noir.
MATT LENNOX'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
THE CARPENTER
HARPERCOLLINS, MARCH 2012
Description from the publisher:
The Carpenter is set in a God-fearing small Ontario town in the 1980s, a town rife with secrets, grudges passed through the generations and an undercurrent of criminal behaviour. Lee King, the carpenter, is returning after a lengthy stay in maximum-security prison to a community that still recalls his horrendous crime. His mother is dying, and he wants to see her and his sister Donna after so many years. But things are still not quite right in the town as Stan Maitland, the retired cop, knows. Not only does he vividly remember Lee’s unexplained violence from years before, he is also caught up in a mysterious new death. He has just found the body of a young woman, Judy Lacroix, in a car at the abandoned drive-in on the edge of town. Stan can’t help getting involved, though his policing days are long over. And what about Lee King—will he ever understand where his violent streak comes from? When Lee finally faces who he is, the lives of his family are once again overturned.
A suspenseful, darkly humorous, emotionally engaging work, The Carpenter is a powerful debut novel. Like Dennis Lehane, Matt Lennox is completely at home in the back alleys and dark corners of small-town life—and of the human heart.
Alex Carey is a contributor to The Rusty Toque.
The Carpenter is set in a God-fearing small Ontario town in the 1980s, a town rife with secrets, grudges passed through the generations and an undercurrent of criminal behaviour. Lee King, the carpenter, is returning after a lengthy stay in maximum-security prison to a community that still recalls his horrendous crime. His mother is dying, and he wants to see her and his sister Donna after so many years. But things are still not quite right in the town as Stan Maitland, the retired cop, knows. Not only does he vividly remember Lee’s unexplained violence from years before, he is also caught up in a mysterious new death. He has just found the body of a young woman, Judy Lacroix, in a car at the abandoned drive-in on the edge of town. Stan can’t help getting involved, though his policing days are long over. And what about Lee King—will he ever understand where his violent streak comes from? When Lee finally faces who he is, the lives of his family are once again overturned.
A suspenseful, darkly humorous, emotionally engaging work, The Carpenter is a powerful debut novel. Like Dennis Lehane, Matt Lennox is completely at home in the back alleys and dark corners of small-town life—and of the human heart.
Alex Carey is a contributor to The Rusty Toque.
Glenn PattersonPhoto by Belfast City Council
GLENN PATTERSON is the author of eight previous novels, the most recent of which, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, was the 2012 One City One Book choice for Belfast. He is the co-writer of Good Vibrations (BBC Films/The Works), an award-winning movie based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley. He is currently at work on a novel set in the DeLorean motor plant in the early 1980’s; a related screenplay has already been commissioned. He lives in Belfast.
RUSTY TALK WITH GLENN PATTERSON
Catherine Graham: You recently completed a writer-in-residence post at the University of Toronto Celtic Studies department. During your public reading at St. Michael’s College, you mentioned the influence poets have had on your writing, poets like Seamus Heaney and Louis MacNeice, for example. Can you tell us more about the influence of poetry/poets on your work? Have you ever thought of writing poetry?
Glenn Patterson: Something happened to me the day (I was in school) I first read ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice. I won’t say it changed my life, but it definitely changed my posture. I sat up straight in my seat (I was a notorious sloucher). I said to the teacher, ‘I get it’–I think we were peeling and portioning the tangerine and spitting the pips, feeling the drunkenness of things being various–‘I really get it’. I didn’t mean, or only mean, the lines themselves, I meant the whole poem, the purpose of poetry, even. I fancied for a few years afterwards this meant I was destined to be a poet myself and modelled myself on Dylan Thomas, or at least on the photo of him of another book we had at school, the Dent edition of the Selected Poems. Mainly I modelled myself on his hand holding a cigarette. I told everyone–between puffs–I was a poet, I told them I was starting a poetry magazine–the Alternative Duck– but the only thing I wrote was a poem that still another teacher suggested I show to the poet Frank Ormsby, who did edit a magazine–The Honest Ulsterman–and who told me that whatever else I was going to be I wasn’t on this evidence going to be a poet myself. There was one further poem–twenty years later–about the Christmas lights in Cork. I’m still working up the courage to show it to Frank.
CG: Belfast has played centre stage in your writing, from your first book, the coming-of-age novel, Burning Your Own, to your most recent publication, a historical novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. You’ve also been quoted as saying, “Belfast is my city … where my imagination is most alive.” What is it about Belfast that inspires you?
GP: It’s curious, it doesn’t strike me as at all controversial, or even exceptional, that a writer who has spent the larger part of his life living in a particular place should choose to set most of his fiction there, but maybe that’s me protecting myself from the truth that my imagination is too dull to produce stories set elsewhere. Even when I went to EuroDisney with one novel (Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain) I took a Belfast character with me. When I went to Hiroshima for another one (The Third Party) I took two. I take the bus a lot here. I look out the window. I daydream, I tell myself stories about the people I see. There is a political point to it too, a phrase I object to, much used by politicians here (and elsewhere, I am sure): ‘the reality is’. No it fucking isn’t.
CG: Did writing a historical novel pose new challenges for you as a writer?
GP: I stumbled into writing The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. I came across an inn of that name in a history of Belfast and realised the woman who ran it in the early 1830s, Peggy Barclay, had been prominent in the life of the town (as it was then) thirty years earlier at the time of what was known as the United Irishmen’s Rebellion. I did the thing that all of us–writers and non-writers– naturally do: I tried to imagine her journey from one stage of her life to the other, and before I knew it I was finding other fragments of story that seemed to fit with it. The only thing that made me hesitate before saying, even to myself, that this was a novel I was beginning to write was the voice. I couldn’t work out how to ‘do’ the 1830s, or rather work out how not to overdo them. In the end I adopted the model of the text where I had first read the inn’s name, which was the recollections of an elderly man looking back from the end of the century to his childhood and youth. My own grandparents, on my father’s side, were born in the 1890s. My other grandmother, born in 1911, was still alive when I started the book and used phrases that she had got from her parents, born in the 1880s … It was only a hop, skip and a very small jump away. That gave me the confidence I needed. That gave me Gilbert Rice.
CG: Your books often come out within a few years of each other. Do you work on multiple projects at the same time or stick to one project until it’s complete?
GP: The most recent book, The Rest Just Follows, was published here in the UK and Ireland in February. That was my tenth (one was a memoir) in twenty-six years, so they come about once every two or three years. I write best in the early months of the year–best of all in January–a hangover perhaps from my days teaching full time at Queen’s University, when I tried to cram in as much writing as possible between the end of the first semester’s teaching and the start of the second. Nowadays I only teach part-time, supervising Creative Writing PhD students, but one of the reasons behind that move was to try to give myself time to write screenplays, which I had started to do, and which, with writing novels and teaching, felt like one job too many. So I teach less, write more, and still find myself devoting the same amount of time to the novels., although where possible, when I sit down at my desk in the morning it is the novel-in-progress that I sit down to. I have one particularly gloomy writer friend who is in the habit of saying of the onset of the summer holidays ‘the year might as well be over now’, and I sort of know what he means. Even as I am booking flights I am thinking about January again.
CG: What is the best piece of writing advice you've been given that you use?
GP: Aside from Frank Ormsby’s? I collect–store away–other writers’ thoughts and reflections on their craft. I remember a few years ago reading an interview with Eoin McNamee, a contemporary and friend, in which he said that there was no corner you could write yourself into that you couldn’t write yourself out of again. That’s one I try to bear in mind on those days when I feel like hitting my head against the desk.
CG: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment?
GP: A writer walks into a bar … Every twenty seconds, somewhere in the world: a writer walks into a bar …
CG: Your next novel will be appearing soon. Could you tell us more about this work?
GP: The Rest Just Follows takes its title from a line in Tracey Thorn’s memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen to the effect that when you are growing up in ‘somewhat limited circumstances’ the people you meet are just the people you happen to meet and all the rest follows. It captures perfectly the idea I had for the book that it would take three characters, coming to adolescence, and awareness, in 1970s Belfast and see what followed as a result of their happening to meet in the particular limited circumstances of that place and time. In many ways their lives are no different to someone like Tracey Thorn’s, growing up twenty miles north of London: they yearn for experience, to be wherever the centre is … and then, stuff happens.
_____I should be a salesman: ‘stuff happens’.
_____Stuff does, though. Stuff tends to. Stuff of life.
_____Then you’re fifty, which is where the book leaves these three. Not young, but not old, not to themselves. And still here.
RUSTY TALK WITH GLENN PATTERSON
Catherine Graham: You recently completed a writer-in-residence post at the University of Toronto Celtic Studies department. During your public reading at St. Michael’s College, you mentioned the influence poets have had on your writing, poets like Seamus Heaney and Louis MacNeice, for example. Can you tell us more about the influence of poetry/poets on your work? Have you ever thought of writing poetry?
Glenn Patterson: Something happened to me the day (I was in school) I first read ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice. I won’t say it changed my life, but it definitely changed my posture. I sat up straight in my seat (I was a notorious sloucher). I said to the teacher, ‘I get it’–I think we were peeling and portioning the tangerine and spitting the pips, feeling the drunkenness of things being various–‘I really get it’. I didn’t mean, or only mean, the lines themselves, I meant the whole poem, the purpose of poetry, even. I fancied for a few years afterwards this meant I was destined to be a poet myself and modelled myself on Dylan Thomas, or at least on the photo of him of another book we had at school, the Dent edition of the Selected Poems. Mainly I modelled myself on his hand holding a cigarette. I told everyone–between puffs–I was a poet, I told them I was starting a poetry magazine–the Alternative Duck– but the only thing I wrote was a poem that still another teacher suggested I show to the poet Frank Ormsby, who did edit a magazine–The Honest Ulsterman–and who told me that whatever else I was going to be I wasn’t on this evidence going to be a poet myself. There was one further poem–twenty years later–about the Christmas lights in Cork. I’m still working up the courage to show it to Frank.
CG: Belfast has played centre stage in your writing, from your first book, the coming-of-age novel, Burning Your Own, to your most recent publication, a historical novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. You’ve also been quoted as saying, “Belfast is my city … where my imagination is most alive.” What is it about Belfast that inspires you?
GP: It’s curious, it doesn’t strike me as at all controversial, or even exceptional, that a writer who has spent the larger part of his life living in a particular place should choose to set most of his fiction there, but maybe that’s me protecting myself from the truth that my imagination is too dull to produce stories set elsewhere. Even when I went to EuroDisney with one novel (Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain) I took a Belfast character with me. When I went to Hiroshima for another one (The Third Party) I took two. I take the bus a lot here. I look out the window. I daydream, I tell myself stories about the people I see. There is a political point to it too, a phrase I object to, much used by politicians here (and elsewhere, I am sure): ‘the reality is’. No it fucking isn’t.
CG: Did writing a historical novel pose new challenges for you as a writer?
GP: I stumbled into writing The Mill for Grinding Old People Young. I came across an inn of that name in a history of Belfast and realised the woman who ran it in the early 1830s, Peggy Barclay, had been prominent in the life of the town (as it was then) thirty years earlier at the time of what was known as the United Irishmen’s Rebellion. I did the thing that all of us–writers and non-writers– naturally do: I tried to imagine her journey from one stage of her life to the other, and before I knew it I was finding other fragments of story that seemed to fit with it. The only thing that made me hesitate before saying, even to myself, that this was a novel I was beginning to write was the voice. I couldn’t work out how to ‘do’ the 1830s, or rather work out how not to overdo them. In the end I adopted the model of the text where I had first read the inn’s name, which was the recollections of an elderly man looking back from the end of the century to his childhood and youth. My own grandparents, on my father’s side, were born in the 1890s. My other grandmother, born in 1911, was still alive when I started the book and used phrases that she had got from her parents, born in the 1880s … It was only a hop, skip and a very small jump away. That gave me the confidence I needed. That gave me Gilbert Rice.
CG: Your books often come out within a few years of each other. Do you work on multiple projects at the same time or stick to one project until it’s complete?
GP: The most recent book, The Rest Just Follows, was published here in the UK and Ireland in February. That was my tenth (one was a memoir) in twenty-six years, so they come about once every two or three years. I write best in the early months of the year–best of all in January–a hangover perhaps from my days teaching full time at Queen’s University, when I tried to cram in as much writing as possible between the end of the first semester’s teaching and the start of the second. Nowadays I only teach part-time, supervising Creative Writing PhD students, but one of the reasons behind that move was to try to give myself time to write screenplays, which I had started to do, and which, with writing novels and teaching, felt like one job too many. So I teach less, write more, and still find myself devoting the same amount of time to the novels., although where possible, when I sit down at my desk in the morning it is the novel-in-progress that I sit down to. I have one particularly gloomy writer friend who is in the habit of saying of the onset of the summer holidays ‘the year might as well be over now’, and I sort of know what he means. Even as I am booking flights I am thinking about January again.
CG: What is the best piece of writing advice you've been given that you use?
GP: Aside from Frank Ormsby’s? I collect–store away–other writers’ thoughts and reflections on their craft. I remember a few years ago reading an interview with Eoin McNamee, a contemporary and friend, in which he said that there was no corner you could write yourself into that you couldn’t write yourself out of again. That’s one I try to bear in mind on those days when I feel like hitting my head against the desk.
CG: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment?
GP: A writer walks into a bar … Every twenty seconds, somewhere in the world: a writer walks into a bar …
CG: Your next novel will be appearing soon. Could you tell us more about this work?
GP: The Rest Just Follows takes its title from a line in Tracey Thorn’s memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen to the effect that when you are growing up in ‘somewhat limited circumstances’ the people you meet are just the people you happen to meet and all the rest follows. It captures perfectly the idea I had for the book that it would take three characters, coming to adolescence, and awareness, in 1970s Belfast and see what followed as a result of their happening to meet in the particular limited circumstances of that place and time. In many ways their lives are no different to someone like Tracey Thorn’s, growing up twenty miles north of London: they yearn for experience, to be wherever the centre is … and then, stuff happens.
_____I should be a salesman: ‘stuff happens’.
_____Stuff does, though. Stuff tends to. Stuff of life.
_____Then you’re fifty, which is where the book leaves these three. Not young, but not old, not to themselves. And still here.
GLENN PATTERSON'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
The Rest Just Follows, Faber and Faber, 2014
Description from the publisher:
A charming coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Belfast, from the writer Will Self calls ‘Northern Ireland’s prose laureate.’ Glenn was nominated for a 2014 BAFTA (Outstanding Debut) for Good Vibrations, a screenplay co-written with Colin Carberry.
First of September 1974. Craig Robinson is starting secondary school. Instinct tells him he needs to keep his head down. The last thing he needs, therefore, is someone carrying the name St John Nimmo to be sent to sit beside him, but that is what he gets. Across town Maxine Neill is starting her own new school, convinced that she shouldn’t be there at all. She should be where Craig and St John are. Not that she has met either of them yet. Though meet them she will, and more. Their lives and hers–and the lives of the entire Nimmo family–become entwined as pre-teens turn to teens, turn to twenties and thirties, turn inevitably to the eff decades and they go about the business of filling the spaces vacated by the generations that went before. It’s called growing up, never mind that most of the time it feels like making it up as they go along, and sometimes like fucking up completely. Around them meanwhile the world happens: to be specific Belfast happens, for good or occasionally very ill indeed. These are the circumstances life has contrived for them. What are they to do but deal with it?
‘A subtle and compassionate look at the people and places that shape us, and the moments that can alter the course of a life, or lives, forever.’
–Lucy Caldwell
The Rest Just Follows, Faber and Faber, 2014
Description from the publisher:
A charming coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Belfast, from the writer Will Self calls ‘Northern Ireland’s prose laureate.’ Glenn was nominated for a 2014 BAFTA (Outstanding Debut) for Good Vibrations, a screenplay co-written with Colin Carberry.
First of September 1974. Craig Robinson is starting secondary school. Instinct tells him he needs to keep his head down. The last thing he needs, therefore, is someone carrying the name St John Nimmo to be sent to sit beside him, but that is what he gets. Across town Maxine Neill is starting her own new school, convinced that she shouldn’t be there at all. She should be where Craig and St John are. Not that she has met either of them yet. Though meet them she will, and more. Their lives and hers–and the lives of the entire Nimmo family–become entwined as pre-teens turn to teens, turn to twenties and thirties, turn inevitably to the eff decades and they go about the business of filling the spaces vacated by the generations that went before. It’s called growing up, never mind that most of the time it feels like making it up as they go along, and sometimes like fucking up completely. Around them meanwhile the world happens: to be specific Belfast happens, for good or occasionally very ill indeed. These are the circumstances life has contrived for them. What are they to do but deal with it?
‘A subtle and compassionate look at the people and places that shape us, and the moments that can alter the course of a life, or lives, forever.’
–Lucy Caldwell
EXCERPT FROM THE REST JUST FOLLOWS
1
From ever he could remember Craig had had the feeling that his life was somehow being watched and weighed. Nothing happened by chance. That woman who sat down across the aisle from you on the bus and started talking to your mum about the holidays and were you getting away anywhere nice yourself was not a random stranger but a spy. The conductor too: ‘How old is the wee lad? Over five?
That’s a half then.’
When people he did not know turned up at the door–and there being no phone in the house in those years people had a habit of just turning up: second cousins once removed, old neighbours of his parents, returned from Canada or Australia, or so they said–Craig would hide in his room, sometimes under his bed.
‘He’s a wee bit shy,’ his mum said and he was happy to let her think it.
There was a programme on the TV, the Christmas after he turned seven, bigger boys and girls talking about school and pocket money and what they wanted to be when they were older, all stuff like that. It showed them too when they were the same age as him and it was strange that some of the things they said back then seemed to know the teenagers they would turn out to be, almost like the second bit had come before the first.
It was hard to explain.
Craig’s mum tutted. His dad put down the paper. ‘What?’
‘Listen to those voices.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘What’s wrong with them?’ That was the way his mum and dad talked: one said something and the other said it back and added something of their own. ‘They’re all English.’
‘So?’
‘So you’d think sometimes we didn’t exist. No one ever comes near us.’
‘Do they not?’ His dad said it like he knew the answer and it wasn’t one his mum thought.
His mum tutted. Craig wondered. About women on buses and second cousins once removed and whether one day it would be him sitting there in the box in the corner of the living room, bigger and uglier as his granddad would say, plucking at his trousers, trying to account for himself.
‘Quiet boy,’ his teacher wrote on his end-of-year report.
‘You would hardly know he was there.’
***
Maxine Neill’s teachers vied with one another year on year to sing her praises. ‘A joy to teach . . . sets the standard for others to aspire to.’
Mr Jackson who had her in P5 and who had taught Victor and Tommy before her told her, between him her and the gatepost, that it was easy to see who had got the brains in the family.
The headmaster had had to cane Tommy one time in front of the whole school for writing a bad word on the door of a cubicle in the boys’ toilets. Tommy said it wasn’t him, swear on the Holy Bible, but nobody believed him. Nobody ever believed Tommy. He had one of those faces.
Maxine was only in P1 then. She wasn’t able to see because of the heads in front of her, but she heard the swish of the cane–one, two, three, four, five, six times.
Tommy came into the box room that night after she had had her tuck-in and told her she wasn’t to listen to what anybody said, he didn’t cry. All right?
He didn’t cry.
Maxine looked out from under the covers into that face of his. Said nothing.
1
From ever he could remember Craig had had the feeling that his life was somehow being watched and weighed. Nothing happened by chance. That woman who sat down across the aisle from you on the bus and started talking to your mum about the holidays and were you getting away anywhere nice yourself was not a random stranger but a spy. The conductor too: ‘How old is the wee lad? Over five?
That’s a half then.’
When people he did not know turned up at the door–and there being no phone in the house in those years people had a habit of just turning up: second cousins once removed, old neighbours of his parents, returned from Canada or Australia, or so they said–Craig would hide in his room, sometimes under his bed.
‘He’s a wee bit shy,’ his mum said and he was happy to let her think it.
There was a programme on the TV, the Christmas after he turned seven, bigger boys and girls talking about school and pocket money and what they wanted to be when they were older, all stuff like that. It showed them too when they were the same age as him and it was strange that some of the things they said back then seemed to know the teenagers they would turn out to be, almost like the second bit had come before the first.
It was hard to explain.
Craig’s mum tutted. His dad put down the paper. ‘What?’
‘Listen to those voices.’
‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘What’s wrong with them?’ That was the way his mum and dad talked: one said something and the other said it back and added something of their own. ‘They’re all English.’
‘So?’
‘So you’d think sometimes we didn’t exist. No one ever comes near us.’
‘Do they not?’ His dad said it like he knew the answer and it wasn’t one his mum thought.
His mum tutted. Craig wondered. About women on buses and second cousins once removed and whether one day it would be him sitting there in the box in the corner of the living room, bigger and uglier as his granddad would say, plucking at his trousers, trying to account for himself.
‘Quiet boy,’ his teacher wrote on his end-of-year report.
‘You would hardly know he was there.’
***
Maxine Neill’s teachers vied with one another year on year to sing her praises. ‘A joy to teach . . . sets the standard for others to aspire to.’
Mr Jackson who had her in P5 and who had taught Victor and Tommy before her told her, between him her and the gatepost, that it was easy to see who had got the brains in the family.
The headmaster had had to cane Tommy one time in front of the whole school for writing a bad word on the door of a cubicle in the boys’ toilets. Tommy said it wasn’t him, swear on the Holy Bible, but nobody believed him. Nobody ever believed Tommy. He had one of those faces.
Maxine was only in P1 then. She wasn’t able to see because of the heads in front of her, but she heard the swish of the cane–one, two, three, four, five, six times.
Tommy came into the box room that night after she had had her tuck-in and told her she wasn’t to listen to what anybody said, he didn’t cry. All right?
He didn’t cry.
Maxine looked out from under the covers into that face of his. Said nothing.
Richard Fulco RICHARD FULCO received an MFA in Playwriting from Brooklyn College. His plays have been either presented or developed at The New York International Fringe Festival, The Playwrights’ Center, The Flea, Here Arts Center, Chicago Dramatists and the Dramatists Guild. His stories, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Failbetter, Front Porch, Bound Off, The Rusty Toque, Full of Crow, Nth Position, the Daily Vault and American Songwriter. He is the founder of the online music magazine Riffraf. There Is No End to This Slope is his first novel.
RUSTY TALK WITH RICHARD FULCO
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Richard Fulco: Five-years-old, sitting on a swing, singing silly lyrics that I wrote: “Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. I play my guitar sitting on a bench. I play my guitar with a wrench.”
Those brilliant lyrics were overshadowed a few years later when I co-wrote a salacious song with my best friend: “Ain’t she sweet, see her walking down the street. Flipping her girdle, licking her tongue, making faces at you, singing ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’.” Licking her tongue. Genius.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
RF: I never gave it any thought really. It’s not like I sat my parents down and told them I was going to become a writer. It’s something I’ve always done. And as you can see by my prolific lyric writing, I had quite the future in prose.
KM: What writers would you recommend to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
RF: Read everything you get your hands on. If your wife tells you that you have to read this memoir by so-and-so, then read it. If you haven’t read anything before 1980, try it on for size. See what the old-timers were doing before Ted Talks and Netflix.
KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use?
RF: Finish the fucking thing. No matter what it is—a poem, short story, essay or screenplay— just complete it. Chances are it’s shit, but at least you have something under your belt, something you can learn from, something you can build upon.
KM: How do you approach revision?
RF: Revising isn’t easy—I’d choose a colonoscopy over revision every time—but my method is fairly easy. It’s primitive but it works for me. Whatever I don’t like I cut. A word. A phrase. A character. A scene. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. I’m not attached to anything I write. Everything is under severe scrutiny. The death of good writing is falling in love with your own words. If I can be critical of Faulkner or McCarthy, hell I have to be even more critical of my writing. Right?
KM: You founded the online music magazine Riffraf. Can you tell us about the site and how you got it started?
RF: I really wish that I were a musician. I played in bands for a while and let’s face it, it’s a lot more fun than sitting in a coffee shop or at your desk by yourself, staring into a computer screen, fucking up your eyes, drinking too much coffee and reliving the shit that you experienced as a child. My wife urged me to write about music, so I started Riffraf four years ago. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about blogging. Still don’t.
KM: Your first novel There Is No End to this Slope, which is coming out in March 2014 by Wampus Multimedia, is about an aspiring writer who has difficulty living in the present because of his obsession with the past. How did you come up with idea for this novel? And what was the writing process like for you?
RF: In his “Note To The Reader” in Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life…we are the sum of all the moments of our lives—all that is ours is in them; we cannot escape or conceal it.”
KM: Were there any writers that influenced There Is No End to This Slope?
RF: Here’s a partial list of works that influenced the writing of There Is No End to This Slope: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Samuel Bekett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Castle, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Joshua Ferris’ Until We Came to the End, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Robert Desnos, the songs of Lennon and McCartney, George Harrison, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Jagger and Richards, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and Lou Reed.
KM: What is your favourite literary moment, if you have one.
RF: I wrote one play, submitted it to Brooklyn College’s MFA program in Playwriting, and the next thing I knew I was sitting around a table with aspiring playwrights. I think it was the biggest act of fraud ever perpetrated. On myself (that is).
KM: What are you working on now?
RF: I’m working on a rock and roll novel that is based on Pink Floyd’s founder Syd Barrett. I can’t wait until it’s done so I can go out and hear some live music.
RUSTY TALK WITH RICHARD FULCO
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Richard Fulco: Five-years-old, sitting on a swing, singing silly lyrics that I wrote: “Guitar. Guitar. Guitar. I play my guitar sitting on a bench. I play my guitar with a wrench.”
Those brilliant lyrics were overshadowed a few years later when I co-wrote a salacious song with my best friend: “Ain’t she sweet, see her walking down the street. Flipping her girdle, licking her tongue, making faces at you, singing ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’.” Licking her tongue. Genius.
KM: Why did you become a writer?
RF: I never gave it any thought really. It’s not like I sat my parents down and told them I was going to become a writer. It’s something I’ve always done. And as you can see by my prolific lyric writing, I had quite the future in prose.
KM: What writers would you recommend to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
RF: Read everything you get your hands on. If your wife tells you that you have to read this memoir by so-and-so, then read it. If you haven’t read anything before 1980, try it on for size. See what the old-timers were doing before Ted Talks and Netflix.
KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use?
RF: Finish the fucking thing. No matter what it is—a poem, short story, essay or screenplay— just complete it. Chances are it’s shit, but at least you have something under your belt, something you can learn from, something you can build upon.
KM: How do you approach revision?
RF: Revising isn’t easy—I’d choose a colonoscopy over revision every time—but my method is fairly easy. It’s primitive but it works for me. Whatever I don’t like I cut. A word. A phrase. A character. A scene. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. I’m not attached to anything I write. Everything is under severe scrutiny. The death of good writing is falling in love with your own words. If I can be critical of Faulkner or McCarthy, hell I have to be even more critical of my writing. Right?
KM: You founded the online music magazine Riffraf. Can you tell us about the site and how you got it started?
RF: I really wish that I were a musician. I played in bands for a while and let’s face it, it’s a lot more fun than sitting in a coffee shop or at your desk by yourself, staring into a computer screen, fucking up your eyes, drinking too much coffee and reliving the shit that you experienced as a child. My wife urged me to write about music, so I started Riffraf four years ago. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about blogging. Still don’t.
KM: Your first novel There Is No End to this Slope, which is coming out in March 2014 by Wampus Multimedia, is about an aspiring writer who has difficulty living in the present because of his obsession with the past. How did you come up with idea for this novel? And what was the writing process like for you?
RF: In his “Note To The Reader” in Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe wrote, “This is a first book, and in it the author has written of experience which is now far and lost, but which was once part of the fabric of his life…we are the sum of all the moments of our lives—all that is ours is in them; we cannot escape or conceal it.”
KM: Were there any writers that influenced There Is No End to This Slope?
RF: Here’s a partial list of works that influenced the writing of There Is No End to This Slope: Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Michael Thomas’ Man Gone Down, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting For the Barbarians, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Samuel Bekett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Harold Pinter’s Birthday Party, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and The Castle, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, Joshua Ferris’ Until We Came to the End, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the poetry of Robert Desnos, the songs of Lennon and McCartney, George Harrison, Jeff Tweedy, Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Jagger and Richards, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder and Lou Reed.
KM: What is your favourite literary moment, if you have one.
RF: I wrote one play, submitted it to Brooklyn College’s MFA program in Playwriting, and the next thing I knew I was sitting around a table with aspiring playwrights. I think it was the biggest act of fraud ever perpetrated. On myself (that is).
KM: What are you working on now?
RF: I’m working on a rock and roll novel that is based on Pink Floyd’s founder Syd Barrett. I can’t wait until it’s done so I can go out and hear some live music.
RICHARD FULCO'S NOVEL
There Is No End to This Slope, Wampus, 2014
Description from the publisher:
John Lenza, an aspiring writer from Brooklyn, hasn’t completed a novel, a play, or any other publishable work. His obsession with his part in the death of his best friend Stephanie in high school undermines his confidence and self-esteem. His struggle to reconcile his lingering guilt with the possibilities of the present sets the tone for Richard Fulco’s emotionally charged debut novel, There Is No End to This Slope.
By day, John sells textbooks to New York City schools. Like a 21st century Willy Loman, he drifts through life, letting things happen to him rather than taking charge of his life. On a sales call he meets his future wife, Emma Rue, an impulsive semi-alcoholic. At a “writerly” coffee shop near his new digs in Park Slope he meets Teeny, an overweight gay man, who mines John’s life for his own creative material. A homeless man, Richard, becomes a voice of reason, while Pete the landlord worries about whether John is truly taking “special” care of those beautiful wood floors in the apartment.
At one point John describes himself as intelligent, perhaps too intelligent to do anything. He and many of the other characters find it difficult to navigate the day-to-day while nurturing a sensitive and creative spirit. Should John be tortured by something that happened so long ago? Or is he using an old trauma to sidestep his creative responsibility and potential?
Through deeply wrought characters and scenes, Richard Fulco touches on a fundamental issue that drives great artists to self-destruct. But when John has wrung all he can out of his pained self, it may be the mundane certainties of life that ultimately save him.
THERE IS NO END TO THIS SLOPE EXCERPT
We limped into 2004. I made my customary New Year’s resolution: stay at home and watch the incomparable Dick Clark. I really wanted to be alone, so I had been urging Emma to shack up with Pamela, who had offered her a place to stay until her new apartment was ready, but for some reason she lingered in our place until the insufferable end. At least I tried my best to make the most of our last night together by making dinner and renting our favorite movie, When Harry Met Sally. That’s more than I could say about my soon-to-be-ex-wife, who spent the entire evening packing and getting ready to move out the next morning. It was only fitting that our marriage should dissolve on such a trivial holiday, one that we both despised.
New Year’s Eve is just an excuse to get drunk, stay up all night, do regrettable things, and blame the lure of the evening for any bad behavior. I had spent every New Year’s Eve in New York, thirty-six of them to be exact, but never considered, not even for a second, going to Times Square to watch the ball drop with thousands of screaming, intoxicated tourists. I had also refused to pay an outrageous sum for some below-average prix fixe dinner at a trendy café that felt justified in ripping off its customers because it offered a complimentary glass of cheap champagne.
So there I was, greeting the New Year, bidding the old one good riddance, anticipating my independent life while standing at the threshold of something new and unknown, and that prospect thrilled, overwhelmed and terrified me.
There Is No End to This Slope, Wampus, 2014
Description from the publisher:
John Lenza, an aspiring writer from Brooklyn, hasn’t completed a novel, a play, or any other publishable work. His obsession with his part in the death of his best friend Stephanie in high school undermines his confidence and self-esteem. His struggle to reconcile his lingering guilt with the possibilities of the present sets the tone for Richard Fulco’s emotionally charged debut novel, There Is No End to This Slope.
By day, John sells textbooks to New York City schools. Like a 21st century Willy Loman, he drifts through life, letting things happen to him rather than taking charge of his life. On a sales call he meets his future wife, Emma Rue, an impulsive semi-alcoholic. At a “writerly” coffee shop near his new digs in Park Slope he meets Teeny, an overweight gay man, who mines John’s life for his own creative material. A homeless man, Richard, becomes a voice of reason, while Pete the landlord worries about whether John is truly taking “special” care of those beautiful wood floors in the apartment.
At one point John describes himself as intelligent, perhaps too intelligent to do anything. He and many of the other characters find it difficult to navigate the day-to-day while nurturing a sensitive and creative spirit. Should John be tortured by something that happened so long ago? Or is he using an old trauma to sidestep his creative responsibility and potential?
Through deeply wrought characters and scenes, Richard Fulco touches on a fundamental issue that drives great artists to self-destruct. But when John has wrung all he can out of his pained self, it may be the mundane certainties of life that ultimately save him.
THERE IS NO END TO THIS SLOPE EXCERPT
We limped into 2004. I made my customary New Year’s resolution: stay at home and watch the incomparable Dick Clark. I really wanted to be alone, so I had been urging Emma to shack up with Pamela, who had offered her a place to stay until her new apartment was ready, but for some reason she lingered in our place until the insufferable end. At least I tried my best to make the most of our last night together by making dinner and renting our favorite movie, When Harry Met Sally. That’s more than I could say about my soon-to-be-ex-wife, who spent the entire evening packing and getting ready to move out the next morning. It was only fitting that our marriage should dissolve on such a trivial holiday, one that we both despised.
New Year’s Eve is just an excuse to get drunk, stay up all night, do regrettable things, and blame the lure of the evening for any bad behavior. I had spent every New Year’s Eve in New York, thirty-six of them to be exact, but never considered, not even for a second, going to Times Square to watch the ball drop with thousands of screaming, intoxicated tourists. I had also refused to pay an outrageous sum for some below-average prix fixe dinner at a trendy café that felt justified in ripping off its customers because it offered a complimentary glass of cheap champagne.
So there I was, greeting the New Year, bidding the old one good riddance, anticipating my independent life while standing at the threshold of something new and unknown, and that prospect thrilled, overwhelmed and terrified me.
Craig DavidsonPhoto by Kevin Kelly
CRAIG DAVIDSON was born and grew up in St. Catharines, Ontario, near Niagara Falls. He has published three previous books of literary fiction: Rust and Bone, which was made into an Oscar-nominated feature film of the same name, The Fighter, and Sarah Court. Davidson is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and his articles and journalism have been published in the National Post, Esquire, GQ, The Walrus, and The Washington Post, among other places. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his partner and their child.
RUSTY TALK WITH CRAIG DAVIDSON
Madeline Bassnett: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Craig Davidson: Likely an assignment I did for grade 5 English; my teacher heaped it with praise, which was lovely I suppose, and encouraging, but later, when I was poor and couldn’t publish a thing, I sort of wished she’d said I sucked and ought to set my sights on a plumbing career instead.
MB: You’ve received an MA in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick and an MFA from the acclaimed program at the University of Iowa. How did these different educational experiences contribute to shaping you as a writer?
CD: I think they were ultimately more alike than I’d expected. Which means I likely did one degree too many. But what they did, more than anything, was give me the time to sit down, ass in chair, and get a lot of writing done. I failed a lot, got rejected a lot, failed some more, had some small successes, some more failures, then things got a little better. But of course most writer’s careers are loopy roller-coasters: there will be as many ups as downs.
MB: You’re now a new dad. Has being a father changed your writing and/or your writing process? Has it changed what you’re interested in writing about?
CD: I think primarily it’s solidified the idea that it is, for me, a job. I have to be up and working 5, 6, sometimes 7 days a week. It’s not glamorous. But I have to help provide for my family, as my father and mother provided for me. So it’s a big and sobering responsibility, and the only way I’ll manage to do it, as a writer, is if I’m busting my hump. Every writer I know handles themselves the same way, pretty much. There’s nothing really romantic to it, the way I’d envisioned it in grad school—although being working writer, and all that entails, is a very nice thing … for now. The wheels could spin off at any moment. But, having worked really hard, the only real way to stay in the same spot is to work just as hard. Thankfully I like working hard, and don’t have any of those preconceptions anymore about the glamour or romance of it; I understand that to be a writer, for most of us, means to write and write and write and get rejected and then maybe, if you get lucky, you catch a break. And I have responsibilities now that preclude me from being too precious about any of it—I work, I work, like my father (a banker) and my mother (a nurse) and my fiancée (a social worker) do. It’s a job. A great one, one I’m very lucky to have, but a job nonetheless.
MB: Your first book, Rust and Bone (2006), a collection of short stories, was recently released as a critically acclaimed film (2012). What was it like having your stories transformed into a film? How did they turn these quite different pieces into one narrative?
CD: It was fantastic. I was unbelievably fortunate. The stories were written when I was 25, 26, 27, 28—the stories off the pen of a sort of young man. They were adapted by a director in his fifties, who has a full command of his own craft. He added things to the stories that weren’t there, though he kept the rawness of them, which is likely their strongest quality. As to how they did it—movie magic! No, I think it was more a matter of finding two characters in separate stories and making their stories connect.
MB: You also write horror fiction under a pen name, Patrick Lestewka. And I believe you’re more recently moonlighting as Nick Cutter. Why do you use a pen name for your genre fiction? Why two names?
CD: That’s kind of my agent’s idea. He’s a good agent, I trust him, so I trust his guidance on this. Sometimes writers want a kind of separation between church and state—or in my case, a separation between gooey slime monsters and whatever literary endeavours I may decide to try down the road. I’m not really for that separation, but it is what it is. For my part, I make no real attempt to keep up the charade; it’s pretty easy to figure out that I’m all those guys!
MB: Your recent book, Cataract City, is a novel about male friendship, revenge, and the power of place to shape and control our lives. It was short-listed for the 2013 Giller Prize. How did it feel to be on the short-list, and do you see this honour having any longer-term impact on your writing?
CD: It was a lovely and unexpected experience. It was also tremendously lucky, as I would imagine most shortlisters would say; there’s always books that could take the place of your book, so you just have to count those lucky stars. I don’t think it’ll have an impact in terms of what I write about, no; I’ve always kind of written what I write and never expect to get any awards attention at all. I’m not really expecting to get nominated again, to be frank. It was a Halley’s Comet nomination, never again to be seen in my lifetime, and honestly I’m OK with that.
MB: When I was reading Cataract City, I often thought about your gig writing horror, especially when the two boys, Owen and Duncan, wind up in the woods with their wrestling hero, Bruiser Mahoney. After Mahoney dies, the twelve-year-old boys have to survive an arduous and frightening journey back to civilization. You succeed very well in communicating the visceral horror of the situation. Do you feel that your writing of horror influences your other writing, and vice versa?
CD: Absolutely. My horror book, The Troop, is about a bunch of Boy Scouts stranded on a tiny island off PEI; I wrote it in 5 weeks after finishing Cataract City, because I really enjoyed writing those boyhood sections in the novel and thought it would be good to focus on characters at that age again, except in a more overtly horrific scenario. So one side of things does impact the other, for sure.
MB: As in Rust and Bone and The Fighter, Cataract City’s men are fighters, and not only in the metaphorical sense. Duncan gets involved in brutal bare-knuckle fights, and is dragged into dog-fighting matches. What draws you back to these scenes of male violence and competition?
CD: Oh, good question. I think, to be honest, I’ve glutted myself on that world. The overtly male. But at the time of writing, I guess I felt that … well, listen, we all feel there are areas of human experience that we can map best. So those were mine. But I feel like I’ve mapped that area pretty damn thoroughly now. Maybe in a few years, a decade or two, I may come to some personal reckoning or something to do with my son that asks me to enter that realm again and write on it, but for now I think it’s time to hang up my boxing gloves, wrestling trunks, and so on.
MB: Cataract City is also about a place: Niagara Falls. It’s a fascinating depiction of what lies behind the tourist trap around the Falls. You grew up partly in St. Catharines, just down the road. How does Niagara--and place more generally--influence you and your writing?
CD: Hugely. I never really understood until it dawned that all my books were set in the area. I never considered myself a “place-based” writer, the way David Adams Richards is, for example, so many of his books set in the Miramichi. But clearly, I have that same sense of things. The results bear that out. Every book is set, at least partly, in that area. I used to think it was just because I knew those streets best—and partly, that’s exactly why I set stuff there. But I know those streets and feel comfortable about writing about them, too. And since writing a novel is often a daunting task, you need a few implicit sureties before setting out. Either the plot, or a strong character, or the place where you’re setting it. So I know that place well, and that gives me confidence—and with writing, as with many things, confidence is key.
MB: What are you working on now?
CD: Just being a bum, really. I’m looking after my son while my fiancée gets her Masters of Social Work. So the imagination is laying fallow right now!
RUSTY TALK WITH CRAIG DAVIDSON
Madeline Bassnett: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Craig Davidson: Likely an assignment I did for grade 5 English; my teacher heaped it with praise, which was lovely I suppose, and encouraging, but later, when I was poor and couldn’t publish a thing, I sort of wished she’d said I sucked and ought to set my sights on a plumbing career instead.
MB: You’ve received an MA in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick and an MFA from the acclaimed program at the University of Iowa. How did these different educational experiences contribute to shaping you as a writer?
CD: I think they were ultimately more alike than I’d expected. Which means I likely did one degree too many. But what they did, more than anything, was give me the time to sit down, ass in chair, and get a lot of writing done. I failed a lot, got rejected a lot, failed some more, had some small successes, some more failures, then things got a little better. But of course most writer’s careers are loopy roller-coasters: there will be as many ups as downs.
MB: You’re now a new dad. Has being a father changed your writing and/or your writing process? Has it changed what you’re interested in writing about?
CD: I think primarily it’s solidified the idea that it is, for me, a job. I have to be up and working 5, 6, sometimes 7 days a week. It’s not glamorous. But I have to help provide for my family, as my father and mother provided for me. So it’s a big and sobering responsibility, and the only way I’ll manage to do it, as a writer, is if I’m busting my hump. Every writer I know handles themselves the same way, pretty much. There’s nothing really romantic to it, the way I’d envisioned it in grad school—although being working writer, and all that entails, is a very nice thing … for now. The wheels could spin off at any moment. But, having worked really hard, the only real way to stay in the same spot is to work just as hard. Thankfully I like working hard, and don’t have any of those preconceptions anymore about the glamour or romance of it; I understand that to be a writer, for most of us, means to write and write and write and get rejected and then maybe, if you get lucky, you catch a break. And I have responsibilities now that preclude me from being too precious about any of it—I work, I work, like my father (a banker) and my mother (a nurse) and my fiancée (a social worker) do. It’s a job. A great one, one I’m very lucky to have, but a job nonetheless.
MB: Your first book, Rust and Bone (2006), a collection of short stories, was recently released as a critically acclaimed film (2012). What was it like having your stories transformed into a film? How did they turn these quite different pieces into one narrative?
CD: It was fantastic. I was unbelievably fortunate. The stories were written when I was 25, 26, 27, 28—the stories off the pen of a sort of young man. They were adapted by a director in his fifties, who has a full command of his own craft. He added things to the stories that weren’t there, though he kept the rawness of them, which is likely their strongest quality. As to how they did it—movie magic! No, I think it was more a matter of finding two characters in separate stories and making their stories connect.
MB: You also write horror fiction under a pen name, Patrick Lestewka. And I believe you’re more recently moonlighting as Nick Cutter. Why do you use a pen name for your genre fiction? Why two names?
CD: That’s kind of my agent’s idea. He’s a good agent, I trust him, so I trust his guidance on this. Sometimes writers want a kind of separation between church and state—or in my case, a separation between gooey slime monsters and whatever literary endeavours I may decide to try down the road. I’m not really for that separation, but it is what it is. For my part, I make no real attempt to keep up the charade; it’s pretty easy to figure out that I’m all those guys!
MB: Your recent book, Cataract City, is a novel about male friendship, revenge, and the power of place to shape and control our lives. It was short-listed for the 2013 Giller Prize. How did it feel to be on the short-list, and do you see this honour having any longer-term impact on your writing?
CD: It was a lovely and unexpected experience. It was also tremendously lucky, as I would imagine most shortlisters would say; there’s always books that could take the place of your book, so you just have to count those lucky stars. I don’t think it’ll have an impact in terms of what I write about, no; I’ve always kind of written what I write and never expect to get any awards attention at all. I’m not really expecting to get nominated again, to be frank. It was a Halley’s Comet nomination, never again to be seen in my lifetime, and honestly I’m OK with that.
MB: When I was reading Cataract City, I often thought about your gig writing horror, especially when the two boys, Owen and Duncan, wind up in the woods with their wrestling hero, Bruiser Mahoney. After Mahoney dies, the twelve-year-old boys have to survive an arduous and frightening journey back to civilization. You succeed very well in communicating the visceral horror of the situation. Do you feel that your writing of horror influences your other writing, and vice versa?
CD: Absolutely. My horror book, The Troop, is about a bunch of Boy Scouts stranded on a tiny island off PEI; I wrote it in 5 weeks after finishing Cataract City, because I really enjoyed writing those boyhood sections in the novel and thought it would be good to focus on characters at that age again, except in a more overtly horrific scenario. So one side of things does impact the other, for sure.
MB: As in Rust and Bone and The Fighter, Cataract City’s men are fighters, and not only in the metaphorical sense. Duncan gets involved in brutal bare-knuckle fights, and is dragged into dog-fighting matches. What draws you back to these scenes of male violence and competition?
CD: Oh, good question. I think, to be honest, I’ve glutted myself on that world. The overtly male. But at the time of writing, I guess I felt that … well, listen, we all feel there are areas of human experience that we can map best. So those were mine. But I feel like I’ve mapped that area pretty damn thoroughly now. Maybe in a few years, a decade or two, I may come to some personal reckoning or something to do with my son that asks me to enter that realm again and write on it, but for now I think it’s time to hang up my boxing gloves, wrestling trunks, and so on.
MB: Cataract City is also about a place: Niagara Falls. It’s a fascinating depiction of what lies behind the tourist trap around the Falls. You grew up partly in St. Catharines, just down the road. How does Niagara--and place more generally--influence you and your writing?
CD: Hugely. I never really understood until it dawned that all my books were set in the area. I never considered myself a “place-based” writer, the way David Adams Richards is, for example, so many of his books set in the Miramichi. But clearly, I have that same sense of things. The results bear that out. Every book is set, at least partly, in that area. I used to think it was just because I knew those streets best—and partly, that’s exactly why I set stuff there. But I know those streets and feel comfortable about writing about them, too. And since writing a novel is often a daunting task, you need a few implicit sureties before setting out. Either the plot, or a strong character, or the place where you’re setting it. So I know that place well, and that gives me confidence—and with writing, as with many things, confidence is key.
MB: What are you working on now?
CD: Just being a bum, really. I’m looking after my son while my fiancée gets her Masters of Social Work. So the imagination is laying fallow right now!
CRAIG DAVIDSON’S LATEST BOOK
Cataract City, published by Doubleday Canada, Random House, 2013
Read an excerpt of Cataract City in MACLEAN'S.
Description from the publisher:
Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who've grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls--known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there's more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling.
Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death incident in childhood that sealed their bond. But in adulthood their paths diverge, and as Duncan, the less privileged, falls deep into the town's underworld, he and Owen become reluctant adversaries at opposite ends of the law. At stake is not only survival and escape, but a lifelong friendship that can only be broken at an unthinkable price.
Cataract City, published by Doubleday Canada, Random House, 2013
Read an excerpt of Cataract City in MACLEAN'S.
Description from the publisher:
Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who've grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls--known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there's more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling.
Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death incident in childhood that sealed their bond. But in adulthood their paths diverge, and as Duncan, the less privileged, falls deep into the town's underworld, he and Owen become reluctant adversaries at opposite ends of the law. At stake is not only survival and escape, but a lifelong friendship that can only be broken at an unthinkable price.
RUSTY TALK WITH MATT RADER
Matt RaderPhoto by Ron Pogue
Matt Rader is the author of three collections of poetry, Miraculous Hours, Living Things, and most recently, A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno. His poems have recently appeared in publications in the United States, Romania, the Czech Republic and Canada. He lives on Vancouver Island.
Kerrie McNair: How did you first get into writing?
Matt Rader: That’s one of those questions of history I’m always tempted to rewrite. I probably have several times. I recall writing in school as a kid. And I recall writing poems with my mum when I was eight or nine. Then I wrote poems all through high school. I took writing classes at the University of Victoria from age 18-21. But I didn’t start seriously until the fall after I graduated from my undergrad. That fall I wrote a poem called “Exodus.” Later that poem became the first poem I published professionally in sub-Terrain magazine.
KM: What poets or writers did you read you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
MR: In those earlier years after my time at UVic, I read Ted Hughes exhaustively. Then I read Seamus Heaney who remains a major influence. Michael Longley was my primary influence for more than half a decade. In the last few years Larry Levis has been hugely important, and most recently I have fallen in love with Mary Ruefle’s poems. Heaney, Longley, Levis, and Ruefle are all currently represented in the Jenga of books on my bedside table. I could also tell this story with Homer, Keats, Hardy, Yeats and Eliot. Or Bishop, Plath, Lowell, Gilbert, and Larkin. Not to mention Babstock, Solie, O’Meara, Thornton, and Bachinsky. The problem with any list like this is that I can’t help but make egregious and unforgivable omissions.
KM: You used to run a literary micro-press out of Vancouver for writers who were marginalized for a variety of reasons including age, content matter, sexuality and ethnicity. Can you describe how you got into literary/cultural activism and how it informs your writing? Are you working on any community projects at the moment?
MR: I was lucky enough to meet a set of young artists and writers, largely centred in Vancouver in the early aughts, who had a desire to share their work with each other. Many of us had grown up in the DIY music and zine culture. Several of us were involved in various queer communities. We were culture makers and pursued that right into our publishing deals and writers festival invitations.
I’ve been involved in several projects lately and there are few more in the works. A year ago I collaborated with my friend Grant Shilling to put on a community storytelling event. We live in a small mountain village on Vancouver Island. The foothills here have been ravaged over the last century and a quarter, first by coal mining and then later by logging. Currently the hills around our village are used both industrially for logging and recreationally as a major mountain biking destination. The event was called Bronco’s Perseverance: Changing Gears in Cumberland. Bronco’s Perseverance is the name of one of the main trails along Perseverance Creek. The trail is named after the long time Cumberland mayor, Bronco Moncrief. Our tagline was “Beer and bullshit.” It was amazing.
This past summer I collaborated with a local designer, Sarah Kerr, to create large poster-sized newspapers modeled on papers from the 1913 that we researched in the Cumberland Archives. There were six pages and they told the story of two young girls during the height of the Great Vancouver Island Coal Strike that was 100 years ago this summer. We put the posters up around town.
I wouldn’t say that my cultural activism informs my writing exactly, but I do think my writing is informed by the same impulses as my cultural activism. I can be didactic about it and try to make a case for aesthetic and moral value, for form and identity, for art as experience, but in the end, those impulses are as known and as mysterious to me as to anyone else.
KM: You’ve been involved in curating several reading series such as the Robson Reading Series. Do you have any advice for new poets or writers on reading their work for an audience?
MR: Read as slowly as you possibly can, then read a little bit slower. Always read less. I believe Mark Twain has a set of rules. Google Mark Twain’s rules.
KM: Can you describe the writing process for your most recent collections of poems, A Doctor Pedaled Her Bicycle over the River Arno, which your publisher describes as unraveling “our layered identities to explore the lyrical fabric of humanity”? Over what length of time were the poems written? Was there a particular catalyst for this project?
MR: The earliest poems in A Doctor were composed alongside the bulk of my previous collection Living Things and I was in the midst of composing the core poems in A Doctor when Living Things came out. All told, it probably took about three years to write.
I was pursuing several things in that book. One was a reintegration of narrative into the poems, something that I felt I’d written out of my poetry in Living Things.
Secondly, I was exploring cultural history in a way that I had explored ecocultures in Living Things. I was particularly looking at my family history on one hand, and the colonial and post-colonial history of coastal British Columbia on the other hand. It wasn’t really an either/or. These histories were more braided than that description suggests.
Thirdly, I had been thinking since Living Things about poetic form and tradition and in A Doctor that became expressed as custom and customs. I was intrigued by the idea that custom and customs (or costumes as Elizabeth Bishop would have it!) can be both the guarantor of civilization and a purveyor of horrific violence.
KM: Many of the poems such as “I Acknowledge: and “History” in A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle over the River Arno detail the lasting presence of history in contemporary life. How did the past motivate your desire to define the present when it came to writing these poems?
MR: John Dewey says “art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reënforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.” I really like how he says, “what now is” instead of “what is now.” I know that I should be more generous and explain what I think this means, but I don’t want to. I tend to see everything relationally, which is to say with a kind of historicity.
KM: Conversely, poems like “Natural Lives” and “Homeowners Manual” address sentiments of devotion. Was it a conscious decision to, at some point, stop looking back?
MR: No. I never did stop looking back. Though I don’t think of the past as being “back there.” Looking at history is looking in the mirror. Looking in the mirror is looking at history.
KM: What is your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one?
MR: When I was a small boy Dennis Lee came to my small island town and gave a reading for children. I remember the bookstore as having creaky old wooden planks for a floor. Everything seemed very dark. He picked me out of the crowd and sat me on his knee and began to recite a poem. To which I promptly ran away crying.
Then, nearly thirty years later, after the launch of my last book in Toronto, I walked out the party and standing in the street at the bottom of the stairs was Dennis Lee. He was holding my book!
I introduced myself and we said kind things to each other and then I told him the story I’ve just related here and he said … well, I can’t tell you what he said, not in print. But if I’m ever in your town you can buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the rest …
KM: What are you working on now?
MR: I have a collection of short stories that’s meant to come out next fall. I’m also working on a new book of poems with a kind of deep hermetic code. They’re largely elegiac. I’m also about to embark on a filmmaking project with a young filmmaker, called Jim Vanderhorst. I have a chapbook of poems coming out with Baseline Press at some point in 2014.
Enjoy an excerpt from Matt Rader's forthcoming chapbook from Baseline Press:
UNSPEAKABLE ACTS IN CARS
It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
Are blue also. How our sun must love blue.
We have beachgrass and bull kelp and lion’s mane
And we love them all because we love the sea
Which is cold and buoyant. Friends now of seasalt
And knotweed, the mountains know all about us
And who we are when we are most ourselves.
But their blue haughty distances are no help.
We are who we are with mock orange and wisteria.
We’ve nothing to bitch about. The high cirrus
Can’t touch us. We been alive just long enough.
originally published in The Fiddlehead 253
DOVE CREEK HALL (FORMERLY SWEDES' HALL)
The children play their fiddles so slowly I am sad
For the old wooden hall among the cow patties.
Who cut the rhodo blooms and set them on the piano?
They bow tiredly through every tune. Even the cows
Have wandered away from the music to the far side
Of the pasture. All the Swedes who built this hall
Are dead now and the women they married are dead
And the pastor who married them and their friends.
But the children do not know this or just how sad
Beauty is on the last day of spring with instruments
And young players making music beneath the rafters.
They play along with mistakes and embarrassment.
Tell me, who hung the hand-stitched stars on the wall?
Who hung the evening light from the windows?
originally published in Arc 67
Kerrie McNair: How did you first get into writing?
Matt Rader: That’s one of those questions of history I’m always tempted to rewrite. I probably have several times. I recall writing in school as a kid. And I recall writing poems with my mum when I was eight or nine. Then I wrote poems all through high school. I took writing classes at the University of Victoria from age 18-21. But I didn’t start seriously until the fall after I graduated from my undergrad. That fall I wrote a poem called “Exodus.” Later that poem became the first poem I published professionally in sub-Terrain magazine.
KM: What poets or writers did you read you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
MR: In those earlier years after my time at UVic, I read Ted Hughes exhaustively. Then I read Seamus Heaney who remains a major influence. Michael Longley was my primary influence for more than half a decade. In the last few years Larry Levis has been hugely important, and most recently I have fallen in love with Mary Ruefle’s poems. Heaney, Longley, Levis, and Ruefle are all currently represented in the Jenga of books on my bedside table. I could also tell this story with Homer, Keats, Hardy, Yeats and Eliot. Or Bishop, Plath, Lowell, Gilbert, and Larkin. Not to mention Babstock, Solie, O’Meara, Thornton, and Bachinsky. The problem with any list like this is that I can’t help but make egregious and unforgivable omissions.
KM: You used to run a literary micro-press out of Vancouver for writers who were marginalized for a variety of reasons including age, content matter, sexuality and ethnicity. Can you describe how you got into literary/cultural activism and how it informs your writing? Are you working on any community projects at the moment?
MR: I was lucky enough to meet a set of young artists and writers, largely centred in Vancouver in the early aughts, who had a desire to share their work with each other. Many of us had grown up in the DIY music and zine culture. Several of us were involved in various queer communities. We were culture makers and pursued that right into our publishing deals and writers festival invitations.
I’ve been involved in several projects lately and there are few more in the works. A year ago I collaborated with my friend Grant Shilling to put on a community storytelling event. We live in a small mountain village on Vancouver Island. The foothills here have been ravaged over the last century and a quarter, first by coal mining and then later by logging. Currently the hills around our village are used both industrially for logging and recreationally as a major mountain biking destination. The event was called Bronco’s Perseverance: Changing Gears in Cumberland. Bronco’s Perseverance is the name of one of the main trails along Perseverance Creek. The trail is named after the long time Cumberland mayor, Bronco Moncrief. Our tagline was “Beer and bullshit.” It was amazing.
This past summer I collaborated with a local designer, Sarah Kerr, to create large poster-sized newspapers modeled on papers from the 1913 that we researched in the Cumberland Archives. There were six pages and they told the story of two young girls during the height of the Great Vancouver Island Coal Strike that was 100 years ago this summer. We put the posters up around town.
I wouldn’t say that my cultural activism informs my writing exactly, but I do think my writing is informed by the same impulses as my cultural activism. I can be didactic about it and try to make a case for aesthetic and moral value, for form and identity, for art as experience, but in the end, those impulses are as known and as mysterious to me as to anyone else.
KM: You’ve been involved in curating several reading series such as the Robson Reading Series. Do you have any advice for new poets or writers on reading their work for an audience?
MR: Read as slowly as you possibly can, then read a little bit slower. Always read less. I believe Mark Twain has a set of rules. Google Mark Twain’s rules.
KM: Can you describe the writing process for your most recent collections of poems, A Doctor Pedaled Her Bicycle over the River Arno, which your publisher describes as unraveling “our layered identities to explore the lyrical fabric of humanity”? Over what length of time were the poems written? Was there a particular catalyst for this project?
MR: The earliest poems in A Doctor were composed alongside the bulk of my previous collection Living Things and I was in the midst of composing the core poems in A Doctor when Living Things came out. All told, it probably took about three years to write.
I was pursuing several things in that book. One was a reintegration of narrative into the poems, something that I felt I’d written out of my poetry in Living Things.
Secondly, I was exploring cultural history in a way that I had explored ecocultures in Living Things. I was particularly looking at my family history on one hand, and the colonial and post-colonial history of coastal British Columbia on the other hand. It wasn’t really an either/or. These histories were more braided than that description suggests.
Thirdly, I had been thinking since Living Things about poetic form and tradition and in A Doctor that became expressed as custom and customs. I was intrigued by the idea that custom and customs (or costumes as Elizabeth Bishop would have it!) can be both the guarantor of civilization and a purveyor of horrific violence.
KM: Many of the poems such as “I Acknowledge: and “History” in A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle over the River Arno detail the lasting presence of history in contemporary life. How did the past motivate your desire to define the present when it came to writing these poems?
MR: John Dewey says “art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reënforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.” I really like how he says, “what now is” instead of “what is now.” I know that I should be more generous and explain what I think this means, but I don’t want to. I tend to see everything relationally, which is to say with a kind of historicity.
KM: Conversely, poems like “Natural Lives” and “Homeowners Manual” address sentiments of devotion. Was it a conscious decision to, at some point, stop looking back?
MR: No. I never did stop looking back. Though I don’t think of the past as being “back there.” Looking at history is looking in the mirror. Looking in the mirror is looking at history.
KM: What is your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one?
MR: When I was a small boy Dennis Lee came to my small island town and gave a reading for children. I remember the bookstore as having creaky old wooden planks for a floor. Everything seemed very dark. He picked me out of the crowd and sat me on his knee and began to recite a poem. To which I promptly ran away crying.
Then, nearly thirty years later, after the launch of my last book in Toronto, I walked out the party and standing in the street at the bottom of the stairs was Dennis Lee. He was holding my book!
I introduced myself and we said kind things to each other and then I told him the story I’ve just related here and he said … well, I can’t tell you what he said, not in print. But if I’m ever in your town you can buy me a beer and I’ll tell you the rest …
KM: What are you working on now?
MR: I have a collection of short stories that’s meant to come out next fall. I’m also working on a new book of poems with a kind of deep hermetic code. They’re largely elegiac. I’m also about to embark on a filmmaking project with a young filmmaker, called Jim Vanderhorst. I have a chapbook of poems coming out with Baseline Press at some point in 2014.
Enjoy an excerpt from Matt Rader's forthcoming chapbook from Baseline Press:
UNSPEAKABLE ACTS IN CARS
It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
Are blue also. How our sun must love blue.
We have beachgrass and bull kelp and lion’s mane
And we love them all because we love the sea
Which is cold and buoyant. Friends now of seasalt
And knotweed, the mountains know all about us
And who we are when we are most ourselves.
But their blue haughty distances are no help.
We are who we are with mock orange and wisteria.
We’ve nothing to bitch about. The high cirrus
Can’t touch us. We been alive just long enough.
originally published in The Fiddlehead 253
DOVE CREEK HALL (FORMERLY SWEDES' HALL)
The children play their fiddles so slowly I am sad
For the old wooden hall among the cow patties.
Who cut the rhodo blooms and set them on the piano?
They bow tiredly through every tune. Even the cows
Have wandered away from the music to the far side
Of the pasture. All the Swedes who built this hall
Are dead now and the women they married are dead
And the pastor who married them and their friends.
But the children do not know this or just how sad
Beauty is on the last day of spring with instruments
And young players making music beneath the rafters.
They play along with mistakes and embarrassment.
Tell me, who hung the hand-stitched stars on the wall?
Who hung the evening light from the windows?
originally published in Arc 67
MATT RADER'S MOST RECENT BOOK OF POETRY
A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno
House of Anansi Press, 2011
Description from publisher:
A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections, Living Things and Miraculous Hours. But it also ascends to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human.
Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives and illness, hostels and hostiles, parenting and the shadowy history of grandparents, war and Renaissance paintings: Matt Rader’s unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive poems show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers—those mapped for us by authority, and the concomitant, interior shadowlines we ourselves draw—in order to test their validity.
A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno
House of Anansi Press, 2011
Description from publisher:
A Doctor Pedalled Her Bicycle Over the River Arno carries within it all the technique, vision, imaginative labour, and razor-sharp precision of Matt Rader’s first two collections, Living Things and Miraculous Hours. But it also ascends to a new and luminous, demanding, particularized realm of the human.
Wildflowers and weeds, newspaper archives and illness, hostels and hostiles, parenting and the shadowy history of grandparents, war and Renaissance paintings: Matt Rader’s unassuming, deeply spirited, and expansive poems show us again how contemporary lyric can go such a long way toward revealing our true homes to us at the moment we find ourselves most nakedly un-housed. Rader seeks out limits, borders, and frontiers—those mapped for us by authority, and the concomitant, interior shadowlines we ourselves draw—in order to test their validity.
Andrew F. Sullivan Andrew F. Sullivan is the author of All We Want is Everything (ARP Books, 2013). His short fiction has been published in places like Grain, EVENT, The New Quarterly and Joyland. Sullivan no longer works in a warehouse.
Andrew Sullivan will be visiting Western University as part of the 2013-14 Creative Writers Series. Everyone is welcome to this free public reading in UC 224A on October 8th, 2013 at 2:30-4pm.
Andrew's short story "Hatchetman" was published in Issue 2 of The Rusty Toque, and it appears in his new collection.
RUSTY TALK WITH ANDREW F. SULLIVAN
Alex Carey: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Andrew F. Sullivan: When I was nine or so, I started rewriting The Lost World starring my friends while I was supposed to be doing work at school. I would read it out loud at lunch or recess before we went to go and play soccer, or whatever. Usually, I would try to kill off one friend a day—by lion, spike pit, alien invaders or velociraptor. Maybe a grizzly bear. They seemed to get a kick out of it—who would I kill off next and how? Everyone’s time would come. It was like some volatile mixture of The Chronicles of Narnia, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, The Hardy Boys and The Neverending Story. Kill your darlings, or at least the people closest to you.
AC: Why or how did you decide to become a writer?
AS: I wanted to do something that made me feel good. I had a compulsion. A selfish compulsion to do what made me feel best. Even on the worst days, writing is what makes sense. I don’t need a studio or a massive budget or other people. I just need me. And that’s what can make it scary, too. You have no one else to blame. I decided to write because I had to write. Because if I didn’t, I’d end up doing something else selfish, with nothing to show for it but a long list of mistakes, debts and hospital visits.
AC: Can you describe your writing process?
AS: Find a library. Sit down with the laptop, headphones, and a bottle of water. Try to parse out the terrible things in my head, the lovely things we want to be true and the place where they meet in between. Take a number of breaks. Listen to the Russians yelling at each other in the newspaper section. Read about a toxic spill, a fallen idol, a country torn around the edges. Avoid getting run over by children. Clip and collage the pieces, the fragments that sound right. Force them into new shapes, uncomfortable shapes. Let it all sit for a couple weeks, let it simmer and grow old. Take a look at the mess a few weeks later and try to pick out the pieces that are still usable, that still make sense. This can take a while.
For something like a novel, it’s pretty much the same deal, but I have to crank up production.
AC: What is the best piece of writing advice you've been given that you use?
AS: “Don’t talk about it, be about it.” – Usher, musical sensation.
That is not a joke. I truly believe it. It’s very easy to talk about writing, to make lists and tips and line them up like they are tools and not suggestions. You need to actually write to write. That’s basically what it comes down to in the end. I can tell you to avoid using certain words, to establish conflict, to line edit every piece, to read aloud, to remove your adverbs, to roll the chicken knuckles, read the tea leaves, swallow the right pill or sacrifice your idols at the altar of taste, but it’s all equally ridiculous. Talking about it goes nowhere. Be about your work. Finish it. Believe in it. Send it out into the world.
AC: You recently published a short story collection—twenty snapshots of decay, loss, violence and beauty—called All We Want is Everything. Your publisher, ARP Books, is based in Winnipeg and co-founded by songwriter John K Samson. How did you get involved with ARP and what was that experience like?
AS: I got involved with ARP when I sent John K. my work just to see what he thought of it. I had a novel and a short story collection, and I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on them. I knew ARP did not really publish a lot of fiction at the time, but they had in the past. I am grateful John found something in my work and decided to pick up the short story collection. Working with a small press is a really great experience in a lot of ways. I was involved in a lot of the decision-making and the process of taking my document and turning it into an actual book. The cover image I had since 2007 ended up working out. Overall, it was just an extremely collaborative and generous process. The fact that it exists at all is a positive for me.
AC: You're also the fiction editor at The Puritan. What it is like be on the other side of the publishing process? As an editor, what do you look for in the work that you publish?
AS: It’s extremely illuminating to work on the other side, to see how the sausage gets made. You learn just how many other people are out there, writing, struggling to get published, just asking for someone to read their work, to recognize their attempt to touch the world outside. You also see how so many people somehow fail to follow directions, to refuse to read the magazines they submit to or ask whether or not the story would suit the publication. You learn to take rejection with a bit more grace. You learn it is not always about you—sometimes there’s just too much good stuff out there. And sometimes there is a drought.
I look for work that will grab me on the first page, work that will make me second guess my assumptions, make me uncomfortable with the world. Clear lines, well-oiled machines with well-drawn characters. I want to be led down a path I would not take on my own. What I don’t need are more narratives that start in bars, that chronicle addiction, that remind us cancer is bad, child abuse is bad, divorce is bad. Stories about discovering oneself, about degrading women, about the one time you went to Europe or Africa and realized you had privilege, stories about manic pixie dream girls, about the one night we all got wasted and one of our friends made a terrible decision, about grad school or the glory of being an atheist—I don’t really have much patience for that anymore. None of this is a decree though—there is always an exception. Every rule needs someone to break it, to expose the maker as a fraud.
AC: Traditionally, short story protagonists experience an epiphany, a sudden realization of their circumstance. You’ve said in other interviews that you prefer ‘reckonings’—an evaluation or judgment of self and place. In “Crows Eat Well” the narrator says, “there is something to salvage. Even now, the crows eat well” (23). Is that a reckoning rather than an epiphany?
AS: What follows in the story is pretty much the definition of a reckoning, but the moment you cite is much more reflective and contemplative, I suppose. If I have to name that moment in one way or another, I guess it still falls under the guise of a reckoning, a return to spoiled land, acknowledging what is left and what can be used. I’m definitely not against epiphanies in all their wonderful shapes and forms, just wary of them. It’s very nice to pretend fiction teaches us something, to assume we have participated in some grand revelation. Usually though, our stories reinforce the values we already hold, the expectations we already have established in the dominant culture. Subverting those values isn’t much better—you still end up acknowledging their power in the process. My idea of reckoning I guess comes down to consequences—those still teach us something, but they are rarely entirely internal. Something has to happen.
AC: Most of your stories are set in real—and pretty bleak—settings: factories, fast-food restaurants, motels, low-income housing. Other stories in your collection like “Towers” and “Cloud” involve menacing natural forces that seem more metaphoric. Was that an intentional deviation? Do you see your work heading in a more absurdist or supernatural direction?
AS: Not so much intentional, more like happenstance. Even in these terrible, surreal environments, I still want my characters to respond and act like people. If the characters and the narrative are strong, the setting will be accepted. To me, there is no difference between a world plagued with sinkholes and our own world. A world where the sky is filled with birds shitting on everything is not too absurd to me; it’s just a deviation from the mean. I really don’t need any more stories about writing professors or failed relationships couched in current comforts. I can just read people bitching about that stuff online.
I welcome realism colliding with something that might be read as surreal or absurd. Our whole existence and the protective nature of our current climate wants things to make sense, for there to be reasons, to fully elaborate on all the mysteries out there in the universe. But sometimes there is just a hole. Sometimes we don’t know. And that’s terrifying and awesome—awe filled with a sense of dread, of being overwhelmed by the world. We control so little. We want a fence to tell us which side is real, but we’re the ones who end up building it. And it isn’t sturdy. And it isn’t stable. And some people are stranded on the other side.
AC: What is your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one?
AS: Whenever somebody thinks it’s a good idea to write a book.
And if we are talking in literature, it’s a bit from Harry Crews’ A Childhood: A Biography of a Place when he writes about the Sears/Roebuck catalogue and growing up as a sharecropper:
“Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”
Andrew Sullivan will be visiting Western University as part of the 2013-14 Creative Writers Series. Everyone is welcome to this free public reading in UC 224A on October 8th, 2013 at 2:30-4pm.
Andrew's short story "Hatchetman" was published in Issue 2 of The Rusty Toque, and it appears in his new collection.
RUSTY TALK WITH ANDREW F. SULLIVAN
Alex Carey: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Andrew F. Sullivan: When I was nine or so, I started rewriting The Lost World starring my friends while I was supposed to be doing work at school. I would read it out loud at lunch or recess before we went to go and play soccer, or whatever. Usually, I would try to kill off one friend a day—by lion, spike pit, alien invaders or velociraptor. Maybe a grizzly bear. They seemed to get a kick out of it—who would I kill off next and how? Everyone’s time would come. It was like some volatile mixture of The Chronicles of Narnia, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, The Hardy Boys and The Neverending Story. Kill your darlings, or at least the people closest to you.
AC: Why or how did you decide to become a writer?
AS: I wanted to do something that made me feel good. I had a compulsion. A selfish compulsion to do what made me feel best. Even on the worst days, writing is what makes sense. I don’t need a studio or a massive budget or other people. I just need me. And that’s what can make it scary, too. You have no one else to blame. I decided to write because I had to write. Because if I didn’t, I’d end up doing something else selfish, with nothing to show for it but a long list of mistakes, debts and hospital visits.
AC: Can you describe your writing process?
AS: Find a library. Sit down with the laptop, headphones, and a bottle of water. Try to parse out the terrible things in my head, the lovely things we want to be true and the place where they meet in between. Take a number of breaks. Listen to the Russians yelling at each other in the newspaper section. Read about a toxic spill, a fallen idol, a country torn around the edges. Avoid getting run over by children. Clip and collage the pieces, the fragments that sound right. Force them into new shapes, uncomfortable shapes. Let it all sit for a couple weeks, let it simmer and grow old. Take a look at the mess a few weeks later and try to pick out the pieces that are still usable, that still make sense. This can take a while.
For something like a novel, it’s pretty much the same deal, but I have to crank up production.
AC: What is the best piece of writing advice you've been given that you use?
AS: “Don’t talk about it, be about it.” – Usher, musical sensation.
That is not a joke. I truly believe it. It’s very easy to talk about writing, to make lists and tips and line them up like they are tools and not suggestions. You need to actually write to write. That’s basically what it comes down to in the end. I can tell you to avoid using certain words, to establish conflict, to line edit every piece, to read aloud, to remove your adverbs, to roll the chicken knuckles, read the tea leaves, swallow the right pill or sacrifice your idols at the altar of taste, but it’s all equally ridiculous. Talking about it goes nowhere. Be about your work. Finish it. Believe in it. Send it out into the world.
AC: You recently published a short story collection—twenty snapshots of decay, loss, violence and beauty—called All We Want is Everything. Your publisher, ARP Books, is based in Winnipeg and co-founded by songwriter John K Samson. How did you get involved with ARP and what was that experience like?
AS: I got involved with ARP when I sent John K. my work just to see what he thought of it. I had a novel and a short story collection, and I wanted to get an outsider’s perspective on them. I knew ARP did not really publish a lot of fiction at the time, but they had in the past. I am grateful John found something in my work and decided to pick up the short story collection. Working with a small press is a really great experience in a lot of ways. I was involved in a lot of the decision-making and the process of taking my document and turning it into an actual book. The cover image I had since 2007 ended up working out. Overall, it was just an extremely collaborative and generous process. The fact that it exists at all is a positive for me.
AC: You're also the fiction editor at The Puritan. What it is like be on the other side of the publishing process? As an editor, what do you look for in the work that you publish?
AS: It’s extremely illuminating to work on the other side, to see how the sausage gets made. You learn just how many other people are out there, writing, struggling to get published, just asking for someone to read their work, to recognize their attempt to touch the world outside. You also see how so many people somehow fail to follow directions, to refuse to read the magazines they submit to or ask whether or not the story would suit the publication. You learn to take rejection with a bit more grace. You learn it is not always about you—sometimes there’s just too much good stuff out there. And sometimes there is a drought.
I look for work that will grab me on the first page, work that will make me second guess my assumptions, make me uncomfortable with the world. Clear lines, well-oiled machines with well-drawn characters. I want to be led down a path I would not take on my own. What I don’t need are more narratives that start in bars, that chronicle addiction, that remind us cancer is bad, child abuse is bad, divorce is bad. Stories about discovering oneself, about degrading women, about the one time you went to Europe or Africa and realized you had privilege, stories about manic pixie dream girls, about the one night we all got wasted and one of our friends made a terrible decision, about grad school or the glory of being an atheist—I don’t really have much patience for that anymore. None of this is a decree though—there is always an exception. Every rule needs someone to break it, to expose the maker as a fraud.
AC: Traditionally, short story protagonists experience an epiphany, a sudden realization of their circumstance. You’ve said in other interviews that you prefer ‘reckonings’—an evaluation or judgment of self and place. In “Crows Eat Well” the narrator says, “there is something to salvage. Even now, the crows eat well” (23). Is that a reckoning rather than an epiphany?
AS: What follows in the story is pretty much the definition of a reckoning, but the moment you cite is much more reflective and contemplative, I suppose. If I have to name that moment in one way or another, I guess it still falls under the guise of a reckoning, a return to spoiled land, acknowledging what is left and what can be used. I’m definitely not against epiphanies in all their wonderful shapes and forms, just wary of them. It’s very nice to pretend fiction teaches us something, to assume we have participated in some grand revelation. Usually though, our stories reinforce the values we already hold, the expectations we already have established in the dominant culture. Subverting those values isn’t much better—you still end up acknowledging their power in the process. My idea of reckoning I guess comes down to consequences—those still teach us something, but they are rarely entirely internal. Something has to happen.
AC: Most of your stories are set in real—and pretty bleak—settings: factories, fast-food restaurants, motels, low-income housing. Other stories in your collection like “Towers” and “Cloud” involve menacing natural forces that seem more metaphoric. Was that an intentional deviation? Do you see your work heading in a more absurdist or supernatural direction?
AS: Not so much intentional, more like happenstance. Even in these terrible, surreal environments, I still want my characters to respond and act like people. If the characters and the narrative are strong, the setting will be accepted. To me, there is no difference between a world plagued with sinkholes and our own world. A world where the sky is filled with birds shitting on everything is not too absurd to me; it’s just a deviation from the mean. I really don’t need any more stories about writing professors or failed relationships couched in current comforts. I can just read people bitching about that stuff online.
I welcome realism colliding with something that might be read as surreal or absurd. Our whole existence and the protective nature of our current climate wants things to make sense, for there to be reasons, to fully elaborate on all the mysteries out there in the universe. But sometimes there is just a hole. Sometimes we don’t know. And that’s terrifying and awesome—awe filled with a sense of dread, of being overwhelmed by the world. We control so little. We want a fence to tell us which side is real, but we’re the ones who end up building it. And it isn’t sturdy. And it isn’t stable. And some people are stranded on the other side.
AC: What is your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one?
AS: Whenever somebody thinks it’s a good idea to write a book.
And if we are talking in literature, it’s a bit from Harry Crews’ A Childhood: A Biography of a Place when he writes about the Sears/Roebuck catalogue and growing up as a sharecropper:
“Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn’t have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.”
ANDREW F. SULLIVAN'S MOST RECENT BOOK
All We Want is Everything, ARP Books, 2013
Description from publisher:
All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark.
Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.
All We Want is Everything, ARP Books, 2013
Description from publisher:
All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessionals; and stories are told and retold, held out by people stumbling towards one another in the dark.
Frightening, hilarious, filled with raging impotence and moments of embattled grace, All We Want is Everything is the advent of a tremendous new literary voice.
M. NourbeSe Philip M. NourbeSe Philip will join us at Western University as the 2013-14 Writer-in-Residence in the Fall term.
Guggenheim fellow, winner of a Toronto Arts Award, poet, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist and lawyer, M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and moved to Canada to attend Western University, where she graduated with a law degree in 1973. After seven years in practice, first at Parkdale Community Services and then in the partnership Jemmott and Philip, Philip left law in 1983 to devote her time to writing.
Philip’s most recent book, Zong! (2008) is a book-length poem based on an eighteenth-century court case, Gregson vs. Gilbert, the only public document related to the lives and deaths of 150 Africans murdered for insurance money aboard the slave ship Zong. Fugal, fragmented, and deeply moving, Zong! has been adapted through multimedia performance, including a dramatized reading at Toronto Harbourfront as part of "rock.paper.sistahz" in April 2006. In 2012, Philip held a seven-hour interactive reading of the complete poem at b current studio space in Toronto while simultaneously, in Blomfontaine, South Africa, another audience held a collective reading.
Philip’s other major works include the young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988), her second novel Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) and the groundbreaking and award-winning poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize in poetry. Author of four collections of essays, three additional collections of poetry, and two plays, Philip’s work spans and interweaves genres, attending to language in particular—her work is often noted for its deconstruction of grammar, while her newest poem engages legal language. Philip takes up themes of colonialism, race, memory, identity, and place, modeling the intersections of politics and poetics with her innovations on form. In her non-fiction work, Philip is a committed social critic, bringing her years of study in economics, political science and law to bear on Canadian social policy. Her poetry is included in the new collection, The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013).
Biography by Nina Budabin McQuown
RUSTY TALK WITH M. NORBESE PHILIP
Scott Beckett: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
M. NourbeSe Philip: My first memory of writing creatively was actually writing a piece about my fear of flying which was sparked by being on a plane with my very young son for the first time. I remember taking him to the washroom and him being so fascinated by the loud sucking noise of the toilet while all I could think of was what was on the other side of the toilet—space, nothingness. It was actually published in a traveller’s magazine whose name I now don’t remember.
SB: How did you decide to become a writer?
NP: The process was very gradual. I come from an island nation that was once a colony of the British Empire and, as a young child, lived through a very exciting time as the island moved towards independence. Part of the change was that for the first time there was universal secondary education and parents wanted what all parents want for their children—the best. This did not include becoming writers. There is an essay I wrote about this process of coming to writing, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy,” in which I talk about reading a lot as a child, and I write something to this effect: “Books for so.” (The Caribbean vernacular for saying there were lots of books.) Other people were writing them, we were reading them. The mindset was that you wanted your child to be a lawyer or a doctor, failing that then a teacher or, perhaps, nurse, and if all else failed then a civil servant. Writing was not an option.
It’s important to understand that for me writing wasn’t on my radar. I began writing poetry while I practised law, and even though I knew I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in law (I think I did law because my father wanted to be a lawyer and never did become one), I still didn’t think I would become a writer. But at some point I remember thinking maybe, just maybe, I’ve got something to say that someone might listen to. It was that tentative, for all those historical and cultural reasons. It certainly wasn’t a sort of Saul-on-the-way-to-Damascus type of epiphanic event.
SB: What is your writing process like? Do you write in a certain place or time? Is it an everyday activity, or is it when the ideas come to you?
NP: I like writing in the mornings and I try to do it—emphasis on the “try”—on a daily basis. I don’t always succeed. Having said that, however, I find myself “scribbling” every day. It might not necessarily be something that I’m thinking will be my next poem or my next novel or next play, but I am always aware that these scribbles could be useful. Periods of time will get more intense, of course, if there’s a project that is formed, or there is a piece of writing I feel I have to do—then it all becomes a lot more conscious and focused. But those “scribbles” are really important because they are scribbles. Often you may think that they’re not important but later on, you realize that they can be very helpful. It is the fact that they are scribbles and “not important” that makes them valuable—the untethered mind in free fall.
SB: Has anything important come from these sessions of “scribbling?”
NP: Yes, I have a sense that I have one more book of poetry and what I have in mind actually is based on those “scribbles.”
SB: So that is what you’re working on right now?
NP: Yes, or not working on, or un-working on.
SB: Is there a piece that you’ve written that you are particularly fond of that you would consider to be your favourite?
NP: It is like asking which of your children you like best. Different pieces for different reasons, but I’ll say Zong! right now, maybe because it is my most recent child, my youngest child. I’m saying that also because it is moving into areas that I have never ever ventured in to. My work has tended to be primarily page bound, as much poetry is, but this work is moving into performance or what I call unperformance or de-performance, and I’m really interested in that.
SB: What is your advice to young writers?
NP: At any point in time, there are at least two poems, two stories, two novels that are there: the one you think you want to write, the other, the one you have to get out of the way of to let it write itself through you. What I’m talking about is getting your ego out of the way to let what has to be written write itself through you. So writing then becomes an act of surrender and revelation to yourself. And ultimately to the reader.
Guggenheim fellow, winner of a Toronto Arts Award, poet, fiction writer, essayist, dramatist and lawyer, M. NourbeSe Philip was born in Tobago and moved to Canada to attend Western University, where she graduated with a law degree in 1973. After seven years in practice, first at Parkdale Community Services and then in the partnership Jemmott and Philip, Philip left law in 1983 to devote her time to writing.
Philip’s most recent book, Zong! (2008) is a book-length poem based on an eighteenth-century court case, Gregson vs. Gilbert, the only public document related to the lives and deaths of 150 Africans murdered for insurance money aboard the slave ship Zong. Fugal, fragmented, and deeply moving, Zong! has been adapted through multimedia performance, including a dramatized reading at Toronto Harbourfront as part of "rock.paper.sistahz" in April 2006. In 2012, Philip held a seven-hour interactive reading of the complete poem at b current studio space in Toronto while simultaneously, in Blomfontaine, South Africa, another audience held a collective reading.
Philip’s other major works include the young adult novel Harriet’s Daughter (1988), her second novel Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) and the groundbreaking and award-winning poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize in poetry. Author of four collections of essays, three additional collections of poetry, and two plays, Philip’s work spans and interweaves genres, attending to language in particular—her work is often noted for its deconstruction of grammar, while her newest poem engages legal language. Philip takes up themes of colonialism, race, memory, identity, and place, modeling the intersections of politics and poetics with her innovations on form. In her non-fiction work, Philip is a committed social critic, bringing her years of study in economics, political science and law to bear on Canadian social policy. Her poetry is included in the new collection, The Great Black North: Contemporary African-Canadian Poetry (Frontenac House, 2013).
Biography by Nina Budabin McQuown
RUSTY TALK WITH M. NORBESE PHILIP
Scott Beckett: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
M. NourbeSe Philip: My first memory of writing creatively was actually writing a piece about my fear of flying which was sparked by being on a plane with my very young son for the first time. I remember taking him to the washroom and him being so fascinated by the loud sucking noise of the toilet while all I could think of was what was on the other side of the toilet—space, nothingness. It was actually published in a traveller’s magazine whose name I now don’t remember.
SB: How did you decide to become a writer?
NP: The process was very gradual. I come from an island nation that was once a colony of the British Empire and, as a young child, lived through a very exciting time as the island moved towards independence. Part of the change was that for the first time there was universal secondary education and parents wanted what all parents want for their children—the best. This did not include becoming writers. There is an essay I wrote about this process of coming to writing, “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy,” in which I talk about reading a lot as a child, and I write something to this effect: “Books for so.” (The Caribbean vernacular for saying there were lots of books.) Other people were writing them, we were reading them. The mindset was that you wanted your child to be a lawyer or a doctor, failing that then a teacher or, perhaps, nurse, and if all else failed then a civil servant. Writing was not an option.
It’s important to understand that for me writing wasn’t on my radar. I began writing poetry while I practised law, and even though I knew I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in law (I think I did law because my father wanted to be a lawyer and never did become one), I still didn’t think I would become a writer. But at some point I remember thinking maybe, just maybe, I’ve got something to say that someone might listen to. It was that tentative, for all those historical and cultural reasons. It certainly wasn’t a sort of Saul-on-the-way-to-Damascus type of epiphanic event.
SB: What is your writing process like? Do you write in a certain place or time? Is it an everyday activity, or is it when the ideas come to you?
NP: I like writing in the mornings and I try to do it—emphasis on the “try”—on a daily basis. I don’t always succeed. Having said that, however, I find myself “scribbling” every day. It might not necessarily be something that I’m thinking will be my next poem or my next novel or next play, but I am always aware that these scribbles could be useful. Periods of time will get more intense, of course, if there’s a project that is formed, or there is a piece of writing I feel I have to do—then it all becomes a lot more conscious and focused. But those “scribbles” are really important because they are scribbles. Often you may think that they’re not important but later on, you realize that they can be very helpful. It is the fact that they are scribbles and “not important” that makes them valuable—the untethered mind in free fall.
SB: Has anything important come from these sessions of “scribbling?”
NP: Yes, I have a sense that I have one more book of poetry and what I have in mind actually is based on those “scribbles.”
SB: So that is what you’re working on right now?
NP: Yes, or not working on, or un-working on.
SB: Is there a piece that you’ve written that you are particularly fond of that you would consider to be your favourite?
NP: It is like asking which of your children you like best. Different pieces for different reasons, but I’ll say Zong! right now, maybe because it is my most recent child, my youngest child. I’m saying that also because it is moving into areas that I have never ever ventured in to. My work has tended to be primarily page bound, as much poetry is, but this work is moving into performance or what I call unperformance or de-performance, and I’m really interested in that.
SB: What is your advice to young writers?
NP: At any point in time, there are at least two poems, two stories, two novels that are there: the one you think you want to write, the other, the one you have to get out of the way of to let it write itself through you. What I’m talking about is getting your ego out of the way to let what has to be written write itself through you. So writing then becomes an act of surrender and revelation to yourself. And ultimately to the reader.
M. NORBESE PHILIP'S MOST RECENT BOOK
Zong!, Weslyan University Press and by The Mercury Press in Canada, 2008
Description from the Publisher:
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert--the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves--Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
Information on how to meet with NourbeSe Philip for London and Western folks:
NourbeSe Philip will hold weekly office hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, to offer feedback to, and consultation with, both experienced and novice creative writers from the university and the London community. She will accept works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and drama.
Scott Beckett is Western University's 2013-14 Student Writer-in Residence.
Zong!, Weslyan University Press and by The Mercury Press in Canada, 2008
Description from the Publisher:
In November, 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered that some 150 Africans be murdered by drowning so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance monies. Relying entirely on the words of the legal decision Gregson vs Gilbert--the only extant public document related to the massacre of these African slaves--Zong! tells the story that cannot be told yet must be told. Equal parts song, moan, shout, oath, ululation, curse, and chant, Zong! excavates the legal text. Memory, history, and law collide and metamorphose into the poetics of the fragment. Through the innovative use of fugal and counterpointed repetition, Zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament that stretches the boundaries of the poetic form, haunting the spaces of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.
Information on how to meet with NourbeSe Philip for London and Western folks:
NourbeSe Philip will hold weekly office hours on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, to offer feedback to, and consultation with, both experienced and novice creative writers from the university and the London community. She will accept works of poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and drama.
Scott Beckett is Western University's 2013-14 Student Writer-in Residence.
Jonathan Goldstein
Jonathan Goldstein’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Nerve. He is a columnist for the National Post and a frequent contributor to the PRI’s This American Life. He’s the author of the short story collection Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible! and the novel Lenny Bruce is Dead. His CBC Radio show, WireTap, is now it its ninth season. In his most recent book, I’ll Seize the Day Tomorrow, Goldstein recounts the highs and lows of the last year in his thirties.
RUSTY TALK WITH JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
Melanie Chambers: What is your writing process like?
Jonathan Goldstein: I’m fortunate to have the radio producing aspect of the job to toggle between, so when writing isn’t coming as easily, there’s always other things to do such as cutting tape, hopping in and out of the studio—sometimes they’re welcome. And sometimes they can be distractions. It’s hard to tell when you should just push through or give up and do something else.
Lately, in terms of process, I’m in the middle of writing a monologue to be spoken by a train conductor. The premise is kind of absurd: as the train is pulling into Penn Station, he announces that all the toilets of New York City and the five Burroughs have been shut down by authority of the New York Toilet Authority. The NYTA. It’s a ridiculous premise, but more often than not, the most satisfying part of writing is actually hearing the work performed by the people that we’re getting to do it. For example, this week’s show I wrote a part for a 14-year-old and found this talented boy named Ezra to perform this piece about falling in love and negotiating your friends during that time when you’re a teenager. I just heard the final mix of it yesterday and that was really gratifying because it turned out really nicely; sometimes they don’t turn out as well as when you hear them in your head, but this time it really matched the way I heard it in my head which is really satisfying.
MC: You’re prolific in print and radio. Which do you prefer?
JG: It really depends. Having the opportunity to write for different venues can really help access different parts of your brain and inspire different ideas. Last summer I was given a chance to go to Bali for a travel website, and I had never done anything for them before, and the editor was great in the sense that he liked my writing and pretty much had given me carte blanche to write about whatever I wanted to.
And having that kind of opportunity you want to step up to it. One of the difficult things about writing for WireTap for so many years—and it creeps up on you—is the persona begins to take over. You become very good at writing in a particular kind of voice. I think of that line of Kurt Vonnegut’s about being careful about the things you pretend to be because you become that thing. I know how to write a particular kind of thing well enough to get the job done in a certain context. It’s a great thing, and it’s the benefit of age, but it can also sort of trap you so having the opportunity of writing for another venue and step outside of the persona can really be exciting. It’s sort of like going away on a vacation and then coming home; I always think of the radio show as a kind of coming home.
And I like writing for This American Life too because I love writing for my friends who work there—imagining them reading it and trying to make them laugh and thinking about the things that will make them laugh. It’s kind of like a performance and that can really be fun too.
Writing for print, you can be more digressive, and you can try to do things that maybe on the radio you’d fear. On the radio you’re taking people by the hand and you constantly want to be sensitive to the fact that quite possibly they are multi-tasking: sitting in traffic, doing dishes. You want to keep them on board whereas writing for the page you have someone’s undivided attention. I guess you can attempt different kinds of things because of that.
MC: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
JG: I started writing at a very young age. And I think I was lucky enough to know that was what I liked to do. My first memory is of writing a poem in grade five and having the teacher have me read it out loud in class. What connected me [to that moment], was the actual act of reading it out loud; hand-in-hand with my first experience with writing was performing the writing, if you want to call it that. I think it was the first time I ever felt that kind of specialness. I wasn’t a great student, and I felt like it was the first time that everyone in the class was looking at me but in a positive way and the teacher was singling me out. I remember that feeling of being looked at in that particular kind of way.
That was a new feeling and I think I liked it.
I think it’s also connected to how my mind works: I’m not very good in the moment, and I’m the kind of person who thinks constantly, regretful about the things I should have said. Writing is a way of slowing down time and getting it right in a way—revisiting the past and having the time to pour over a particular moment. And, do it justice in retrospect. As far as being an introvert, when I think about my truest self, which always takes us back to childhood, I think about a kid by himself in his room. Coming into my 40s, I think I enjoy people. I think now I feel freer with people. I feel more comfortable expressing my enjoyment of people. That’s all there is. There is a great quote I remember Tom Wolfe speaking on 60 Minutes. He said: “our soul is our relationship to other people.” I think it’s true. That’s kind of why it’s worth going out into the world.
MC: What do you think about the Internet print medium, and what will it do to print journalism?
JG: The first book I ever published was from Coach House in Toronto; they do small experimental titles. This was back in the 90s, maybe even the mid 90s, and I remember the guy who ran the press, now in retrospect I realize he was quite forward looking, but the Internet was something quite new, and he was discussing the possibility of maybe publishing my book as an e-book. I never even heard of such a thing, and I didn’t know the commerce of it all. They had an authors’ tip jar you could put your credit card in, and I remember thinking, this doesn’t appeal to me. I wanted to get published. I wanted to have a book. It was so synonymous with being out in the world and being published. And I remember he referred to the book as the fetish object known as the book, and it just seemed so far thrown to me and now it doesn’t seem as crazy. And, in fact, I love reading on my iPhone. I don’t have an iPad and I don’t have an e-reader. It’s [iPhone] in my pocket, and I’m obsessed with reading, so this way when I’m on the subway or eating, I can always be reading something.
The last thing I read on my iPhone was The Onion AV Club.
MC: Where did you come up with the idea and why did you decide to write about turning 40?
JG: I guess that was the next thing that was happening and that was an easy pitchable single sentence kind of thing. Had I been turning 30, I don’t think it would have had the same type of gravity. But, the truth is, not much changes. The book starts on that note or sort of how most of the time we’re not thinking about how old we are and we kind of are all ages at once. I think the irony in writing about turning 40, the conclusion that I came to, is that I guess you’re never going to feel as though you’ve arrived. I mean 40 when you’re 20 means a different thing then when you’re at 40. So which definition do you adhere to?
I’m thinking of a particular episode of Taxi, a great show from the 80s. Bobby [a taxi driver] had given himself five years in New York to become an actor and this was the week that the five-year limit was up. So, he goes on a binge of auditions in the hopes of giving it a big push, and at the end of the week, he gets no callbacks and nothing happens. It’s kind of a sad moment, then he picks up his head, and says, “you know what? I’m going to give myself another five years.” You might think, my life isn’t where I thought it would be at the end of my 30s, but life isn’t over and you can give yourself more time—it’s a gift to yourself. No one can count you out as long as you don’t count yourself out. There is a lot of unhappiness brought about thinking you have to be at a certain place.
Look at Michelangelo’s early sculptures verses the later stuff. If you look at an early pieta, like when he’s in his early 20s, it’s like showcasing every single thing that he could do, and it’s incredible. The later stuff is simpler; it’s like he has less to prove. There depth that comes out of that, too.
MC: What is your advice for young writers?
JG: The 20s are a good time for living, and you’re going to be drawing from that later on. You might as well be pursuing your passions and figuring what the hell you want to do so that maybe in your 30s you can get going in some real way, but maybe that’s my experience because I didn’t have a job in the field I wanted to work in until my 30s. Sometimes it’s easy to be dismissive of the things that you’re naturally good at or to undervalue them. And I’m thinking of Edgar Allen Poe. He always wanted to be a poet. He looked at his short stories, a genre that he kind of invented, as just a means to paying the bills. I don’t think he took it as seriously. But, in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter.
And, I also think what separates the pros from the amateurs is being able to write in spite of inspiration—when it doesn’t feel like a hot time and you’re struggling through something. And again, there’s a nice democracy there because I’ve written things that were like pulling teeth that ended up being as okay as say something that I wrote in a moment of inspiration. Sometimes those things that you write in the moment of inspiration are really fun, in and of themselves, to have written them. The experience was great, but it doesn’t really mean they were great. That is a thought that keeps me going because on some days I think, how can I possibly be writing anything of worth when I’m feeling as poorly as I do or just not feeling good about what I am writing? But just knowing that if you put it aside and then look at it some time afterwards, you might be surprised.
RUSTY TALK WITH JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
Melanie Chambers: What is your writing process like?
Jonathan Goldstein: I’m fortunate to have the radio producing aspect of the job to toggle between, so when writing isn’t coming as easily, there’s always other things to do such as cutting tape, hopping in and out of the studio—sometimes they’re welcome. And sometimes they can be distractions. It’s hard to tell when you should just push through or give up and do something else.
Lately, in terms of process, I’m in the middle of writing a monologue to be spoken by a train conductor. The premise is kind of absurd: as the train is pulling into Penn Station, he announces that all the toilets of New York City and the five Burroughs have been shut down by authority of the New York Toilet Authority. The NYTA. It’s a ridiculous premise, but more often than not, the most satisfying part of writing is actually hearing the work performed by the people that we’re getting to do it. For example, this week’s show I wrote a part for a 14-year-old and found this talented boy named Ezra to perform this piece about falling in love and negotiating your friends during that time when you’re a teenager. I just heard the final mix of it yesterday and that was really gratifying because it turned out really nicely; sometimes they don’t turn out as well as when you hear them in your head, but this time it really matched the way I heard it in my head which is really satisfying.
MC: You’re prolific in print and radio. Which do you prefer?
JG: It really depends. Having the opportunity to write for different venues can really help access different parts of your brain and inspire different ideas. Last summer I was given a chance to go to Bali for a travel website, and I had never done anything for them before, and the editor was great in the sense that he liked my writing and pretty much had given me carte blanche to write about whatever I wanted to.
And having that kind of opportunity you want to step up to it. One of the difficult things about writing for WireTap for so many years—and it creeps up on you—is the persona begins to take over. You become very good at writing in a particular kind of voice. I think of that line of Kurt Vonnegut’s about being careful about the things you pretend to be because you become that thing. I know how to write a particular kind of thing well enough to get the job done in a certain context. It’s a great thing, and it’s the benefit of age, but it can also sort of trap you so having the opportunity of writing for another venue and step outside of the persona can really be exciting. It’s sort of like going away on a vacation and then coming home; I always think of the radio show as a kind of coming home.
And I like writing for This American Life too because I love writing for my friends who work there—imagining them reading it and trying to make them laugh and thinking about the things that will make them laugh. It’s kind of like a performance and that can really be fun too.
Writing for print, you can be more digressive, and you can try to do things that maybe on the radio you’d fear. On the radio you’re taking people by the hand and you constantly want to be sensitive to the fact that quite possibly they are multi-tasking: sitting in traffic, doing dishes. You want to keep them on board whereas writing for the page you have someone’s undivided attention. I guess you can attempt different kinds of things because of that.
MC: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
JG: I started writing at a very young age. And I think I was lucky enough to know that was what I liked to do. My first memory is of writing a poem in grade five and having the teacher have me read it out loud in class. What connected me [to that moment], was the actual act of reading it out loud; hand-in-hand with my first experience with writing was performing the writing, if you want to call it that. I think it was the first time I ever felt that kind of specialness. I wasn’t a great student, and I felt like it was the first time that everyone in the class was looking at me but in a positive way and the teacher was singling me out. I remember that feeling of being looked at in that particular kind of way.
That was a new feeling and I think I liked it.
I think it’s also connected to how my mind works: I’m not very good in the moment, and I’m the kind of person who thinks constantly, regretful about the things I should have said. Writing is a way of slowing down time and getting it right in a way—revisiting the past and having the time to pour over a particular moment. And, do it justice in retrospect. As far as being an introvert, when I think about my truest self, which always takes us back to childhood, I think about a kid by himself in his room. Coming into my 40s, I think I enjoy people. I think now I feel freer with people. I feel more comfortable expressing my enjoyment of people. That’s all there is. There is a great quote I remember Tom Wolfe speaking on 60 Minutes. He said: “our soul is our relationship to other people.” I think it’s true. That’s kind of why it’s worth going out into the world.
MC: What do you think about the Internet print medium, and what will it do to print journalism?
JG: The first book I ever published was from Coach House in Toronto; they do small experimental titles. This was back in the 90s, maybe even the mid 90s, and I remember the guy who ran the press, now in retrospect I realize he was quite forward looking, but the Internet was something quite new, and he was discussing the possibility of maybe publishing my book as an e-book. I never even heard of such a thing, and I didn’t know the commerce of it all. They had an authors’ tip jar you could put your credit card in, and I remember thinking, this doesn’t appeal to me. I wanted to get published. I wanted to have a book. It was so synonymous with being out in the world and being published. And I remember he referred to the book as the fetish object known as the book, and it just seemed so far thrown to me and now it doesn’t seem as crazy. And, in fact, I love reading on my iPhone. I don’t have an iPad and I don’t have an e-reader. It’s [iPhone] in my pocket, and I’m obsessed with reading, so this way when I’m on the subway or eating, I can always be reading something.
The last thing I read on my iPhone was The Onion AV Club.
MC: Where did you come up with the idea and why did you decide to write about turning 40?
JG: I guess that was the next thing that was happening and that was an easy pitchable single sentence kind of thing. Had I been turning 30, I don’t think it would have had the same type of gravity. But, the truth is, not much changes. The book starts on that note or sort of how most of the time we’re not thinking about how old we are and we kind of are all ages at once. I think the irony in writing about turning 40, the conclusion that I came to, is that I guess you’re never going to feel as though you’ve arrived. I mean 40 when you’re 20 means a different thing then when you’re at 40. So which definition do you adhere to?
I’m thinking of a particular episode of Taxi, a great show from the 80s. Bobby [a taxi driver] had given himself five years in New York to become an actor and this was the week that the five-year limit was up. So, he goes on a binge of auditions in the hopes of giving it a big push, and at the end of the week, he gets no callbacks and nothing happens. It’s kind of a sad moment, then he picks up his head, and says, “you know what? I’m going to give myself another five years.” You might think, my life isn’t where I thought it would be at the end of my 30s, but life isn’t over and you can give yourself more time—it’s a gift to yourself. No one can count you out as long as you don’t count yourself out. There is a lot of unhappiness brought about thinking you have to be at a certain place.
Look at Michelangelo’s early sculptures verses the later stuff. If you look at an early pieta, like when he’s in his early 20s, it’s like showcasing every single thing that he could do, and it’s incredible. The later stuff is simpler; it’s like he has less to prove. There depth that comes out of that, too.
MC: What is your advice for young writers?
JG: The 20s are a good time for living, and you’re going to be drawing from that later on. You might as well be pursuing your passions and figuring what the hell you want to do so that maybe in your 30s you can get going in some real way, but maybe that’s my experience because I didn’t have a job in the field I wanted to work in until my 30s. Sometimes it’s easy to be dismissive of the things that you’re naturally good at or to undervalue them. And I’m thinking of Edgar Allen Poe. He always wanted to be a poet. He looked at his short stories, a genre that he kind of invented, as just a means to paying the bills. I don’t think he took it as seriously. But, in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter.
And, I also think what separates the pros from the amateurs is being able to write in spite of inspiration—when it doesn’t feel like a hot time and you’re struggling through something. And again, there’s a nice democracy there because I’ve written things that were like pulling teeth that ended up being as okay as say something that I wrote in a moment of inspiration. Sometimes those things that you write in the moment of inspiration are really fun, in and of themselves, to have written them. The experience was great, but it doesn’t really mean they were great. That is a thought that keeps me going because on some days I think, how can I possibly be writing anything of worth when I’m feeling as poorly as I do or just not feeling good about what I am writing? But just knowing that if you put it aside and then look at it some time afterwards, you might be surprised.
JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN'S MOST RECENT BOOK
I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow, Penguin Canada, 2012
Description from the publisher:
I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow is the story of Jonathan Goldstein's journey to find some great truth on his road to forty.
In a series of wonderfully funny stories, the host of CBC's WireTap recounts the highs and lows of his last year in his thirties. Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom can we glean from episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter? His friends and family, many of them known through their appearances on WireTap, weigh in with hilarious results as Goldstein eats, sleeps, and watches bad TV all the way to his date with destiny.
Melanie Chambers is a travel, food, and nonfiction writer and teaches at Western University.
I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow, Penguin Canada, 2012
Description from the publisher:
I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow is the story of Jonathan Goldstein's journey to find some great truth on his road to forty.
In a series of wonderfully funny stories, the host of CBC's WireTap recounts the highs and lows of his last year in his thirties. Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom can we glean from episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter? His friends and family, many of them known through their appearances on WireTap, weigh in with hilarious results as Goldstein eats, sleeps, and watches bad TV all the way to his date with destiny.
Melanie Chambers is a travel, food, and nonfiction writer and teaches at Western University.
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Rusty Talk Editor:
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The Rusty Toque interviews published writers, filmmakers, editors, publishers on writing, inspiration, craft, drafting, revision, editing, publishing, and community.
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