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 TANIS RIDEOUT
Tanis Rideout’s work has appeared in numerous publications and has been shortlisted for several prizes, including the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the CBC Literary Awards. Born in Belgium, she grew up in Bermuda and in Kingston, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. Above All Things is her first novel.
Tom Cull: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Tanis Rideout: I didn’t really start writing, at least as far as I remember, until quite late. I wrote for classes, of course, terrible poems for assignments, but I didn’t write for myself.
I have very early memories of reading on long road trips out to the east coast, curled up in the trunk of our hatchback, something that I’m sure is very illegal now, but not writing.
Rather when I was little I would play at being a scientist. I had a lab in my closet. I probably wrote some lab reports. Maybe that counts.
TC: You are both a novelist and poet. Does each format require a different ways of thinking? Do your habits of mind or process change depending on whether you are writing poetry or prose?
TR: I’m not sure that they so much require different ways of thinking, as they have slightly different foci. I use a lot of the same tools in both though. Language—the sound of it, the rhythm of it—is of fundamental importance to me in both realms, using it as the building block of voice, POV and the like. I think I bring that from the poetry world to the prose. I think voice and arc are things that I bring from the prose world and use them in different ways in poetry.
What I will say is that I cannot write poetry if I’m not reading it. I think more in prose than in poetry for sure.
TC: What is the best piece of writing advice that you’ve been given? Have you been given any bad advice?
TR: The best advice—keep going. I sort of feel like the poster child for stick-to-it-ness sometimes.
And for me, keeping going isn’t just about perseverance in general, but also about trying to keep pushing at the work, not letting it stand, but editing, changing, keep making it better, stronger both on specific projects and in the broader sense.
The other really good piece of advice I got was from Joseph Boyden just as my novel was about to come out. He said, "You’re not one book. You better already be thinking about the next thing."
Bad advice--maybe I just ignored it, or I had good teachers, because nothing is really coming to mind. Rather, I think I tend to know whether or not something will work for me, and if it won’t I don’t follow it.
TC: Both your novel and your poetry collection are built on the architecture of historical fact—George Mallory’s third attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest inspires Above All Things, while Arguments with the Lake draws on the history of Marilyn Bell and Shirley Campbell, two teenage distance swimmers who rose to fame in their attempts to swim Lake Ontario in the 1950s. What is it that attracts you to history as a jumping off point for fiction?
TR: I love history. I love historical fiction. I certainly think when I started writing, it was easier for me to see the drama in something far removed from me, from my immediate world, and I think there’s a component of fantasy in that kind of writing for me—exploring different times, thinking of who people might have been in those times. And they’re both such great stories: the possibilities they provided were exciting to me.
I think with both those stories it was the character as much as the circumstances and setting that drew me in.
TC: Both Above All Things, and Arguments with the Lake, are built on early-to-mid nineteenth-century tales of human attempts to triumph over nature. What do you find compelling about these narratives? Is the work of a writer analogous to the tasks your heroes set for themselves?
TR: I think in some ways there is some comparison amongst swimming long distance, climbing, writing a novel. They’re all decisions that you have to keep making. You don’t decide to just do it and that’s it. You have to make the decision each day, with each stroke, each step. And I like how that’s also really what life is too—deciding each day, who you want to be, how you want to live. It’s all micro decisions.
I think these human versus nature stories really appeal to me because they terrify me. Movies like K2 or Touching the Void—those are my horror movies. They scare me far more than zombies or haunted houses or what have you. How we pit ourselves against the world or try and live in it, whether we try to conquer it or embrace it, there’s something endlessly interesting about that. How powerless we are in the face of nature, and how deep that can make people dig.
TC: In both of your books, geological entities (Everest, Lake Ontario) are more than simple features of the landscape—they become entities with whom your characters form intimate relationships. In the first pages of Above All Things, Ruth says to George, “tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.” Likewise, in Arguments with the Lake, we learn that Marilyn retires from competitive swimming, telling the papers that “there’s no room in a marriage for a lake.” How, in your work, does nature triangulate human relationships?
TR: We’re intimately connected to place. It’s something I continue to think about. I lived in a number of landscapes growing up and I’m really interested in how those things inform us personally, artistically.
And I think that we really only begin to understand ourselves and the world when we engage with landscape—this thing that is bigger than us, but that we’re a part of. I think narrative is connected to place and it’s the way I’m best able to understand landscape and environment. I’m not sure I can separate them out.
TC: Your stories of nineteenth-century triumph over nature seem uncannily premonitory. I cannot, for example, think of the legacy of Mallory without also thinking about contemporary images of Everest as strewn with garbage and besieged by long lineups of rich thrill-seekers waiting for their chance to plant their flag. How do you understand these nineteenth-century narratives from our current moment of environmental collapse?
TR: For me the past landscape and its treatment are absolutely connected to what they are today. You can see in the initial attempts on Everest these precursors to what it has become. Even at the time these were well-to-do men, who could take time away from work, pay most, if not all, of their own way to the mountain, etc. The notion of conquering, of owning, or taking over, is part of what I hope we’re starting to examine in terms of environmental consciousness now. I certainly was thinking about the current state of the mountain, or the lake, while I was writing, and wanted the work to hopefully gesture to that without being anachronistic, without spelling it out. But the men leave their trash there. The mountain is already becoming ugly and scarred by them. The remains of those expeditions still occasionally show up.
TC: You do environmental justice work around Great Lakes water protection and preservation. How does this work inform your writing?
TR: I’ve been doing work with Lake Ontario Waterkeeper for several years now. Arguments grew out of my relationship with them, with how they asked me to start thinking about the lake, to start taking ownership of it, responsibility for it. It’s something I think about a lot now, when travelling, when reading. It’s been a new lens through which I view how we interact with much of the natural world—where we live, how we build, who we create.
I’m not entirely sure how this will continue to come out in my writing, other than to say that it’s something that is generally there in the back of my head and so inevitably percolates in some ways.
TC: You are writer-in-residence at Western this year which entails, among other things, working with many young writers who learning writing fundamentals. Has helping these students made you reflect on your own writing? If so, how?
TR: Writing is writing is writing. The tools are always the same. It’s actually been really fantastic to read other people’s work on a weekly basis. Regardless of skill level, when I read someone’s work closely and then sit to talk with them about where it could go, what might make it stronger, it’s then something that returns to me when I approach my own work.
If I talk with someone about how their character needs to want something, I then realize, well, so should mine. Or if I’ve just chatted with someone about POV or tense or something, it’s then something I’m thinking about very specifically when I sit down again.
TC: What are you currently working on?
TR: I’m working on a new novel. There are no mountains or lakes in it. Well, not really. So far.
Tanis Rideout: I didn’t really start writing, at least as far as I remember, until quite late. I wrote for classes, of course, terrible poems for assignments, but I didn’t write for myself.
I have very early memories of reading on long road trips out to the east coast, curled up in the trunk of our hatchback, something that I’m sure is very illegal now, but not writing.
Rather when I was little I would play at being a scientist. I had a lab in my closet. I probably wrote some lab reports. Maybe that counts.
TC: You are both a novelist and poet. Does each format require a different ways of thinking? Do your habits of mind or process change depending on whether you are writing poetry or prose?
TR: I’m not sure that they so much require different ways of thinking, as they have slightly different foci. I use a lot of the same tools in both though. Language—the sound of it, the rhythm of it—is of fundamental importance to me in both realms, using it as the building block of voice, POV and the like. I think I bring that from the poetry world to the prose. I think voice and arc are things that I bring from the prose world and use them in different ways in poetry.
What I will say is that I cannot write poetry if I’m not reading it. I think more in prose than in poetry for sure.
TC: What is the best piece of writing advice that you’ve been given? Have you been given any bad advice?
TR: The best advice—keep going. I sort of feel like the poster child for stick-to-it-ness sometimes.
And for me, keeping going isn’t just about perseverance in general, but also about trying to keep pushing at the work, not letting it stand, but editing, changing, keep making it better, stronger both on specific projects and in the broader sense.
The other really good piece of advice I got was from Joseph Boyden just as my novel was about to come out. He said, "You’re not one book. You better already be thinking about the next thing."
Bad advice--maybe I just ignored it, or I had good teachers, because nothing is really coming to mind. Rather, I think I tend to know whether or not something will work for me, and if it won’t I don’t follow it.
TC: Both your novel and your poetry collection are built on the architecture of historical fact—George Mallory’s third attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest inspires Above All Things, while Arguments with the Lake draws on the history of Marilyn Bell and Shirley Campbell, two teenage distance swimmers who rose to fame in their attempts to swim Lake Ontario in the 1950s. What is it that attracts you to history as a jumping off point for fiction?
TR: I love history. I love historical fiction. I certainly think when I started writing, it was easier for me to see the drama in something far removed from me, from my immediate world, and I think there’s a component of fantasy in that kind of writing for me—exploring different times, thinking of who people might have been in those times. And they’re both such great stories: the possibilities they provided were exciting to me.
I think with both those stories it was the character as much as the circumstances and setting that drew me in.
TC: Both Above All Things, and Arguments with the Lake, are built on early-to-mid nineteenth-century tales of human attempts to triumph over nature. What do you find compelling about these narratives? Is the work of a writer analogous to the tasks your heroes set for themselves?
TR: I think in some ways there is some comparison amongst swimming long distance, climbing, writing a novel. They’re all decisions that you have to keep making. You don’t decide to just do it and that’s it. You have to make the decision each day, with each stroke, each step. And I like how that’s also really what life is too—deciding each day, who you want to be, how you want to live. It’s all micro decisions.
I think these human versus nature stories really appeal to me because they terrify me. Movies like K2 or Touching the Void—those are my horror movies. They scare me far more than zombies or haunted houses or what have you. How we pit ourselves against the world or try and live in it, whether we try to conquer it or embrace it, there’s something endlessly interesting about that. How powerless we are in the face of nature, and how deep that can make people dig.
TC: In both of your books, geological entities (Everest, Lake Ontario) are more than simple features of the landscape—they become entities with whom your characters form intimate relationships. In the first pages of Above All Things, Ruth says to George, “tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.” Likewise, in Arguments with the Lake, we learn that Marilyn retires from competitive swimming, telling the papers that “there’s no room in a marriage for a lake.” How, in your work, does nature triangulate human relationships?
TR: We’re intimately connected to place. It’s something I continue to think about. I lived in a number of landscapes growing up and I’m really interested in how those things inform us personally, artistically.
And I think that we really only begin to understand ourselves and the world when we engage with landscape—this thing that is bigger than us, but that we’re a part of. I think narrative is connected to place and it’s the way I’m best able to understand landscape and environment. I’m not sure I can separate them out.
TC: Your stories of nineteenth-century triumph over nature seem uncannily premonitory. I cannot, for example, think of the legacy of Mallory without also thinking about contemporary images of Everest as strewn with garbage and besieged by long lineups of rich thrill-seekers waiting for their chance to plant their flag. How do you understand these nineteenth-century narratives from our current moment of environmental collapse?
TR: For me the past landscape and its treatment are absolutely connected to what they are today. You can see in the initial attempts on Everest these precursors to what it has become. Even at the time these were well-to-do men, who could take time away from work, pay most, if not all, of their own way to the mountain, etc. The notion of conquering, of owning, or taking over, is part of what I hope we’re starting to examine in terms of environmental consciousness now. I certainly was thinking about the current state of the mountain, or the lake, while I was writing, and wanted the work to hopefully gesture to that without being anachronistic, without spelling it out. But the men leave their trash there. The mountain is already becoming ugly and scarred by them. The remains of those expeditions still occasionally show up.
TC: You do environmental justice work around Great Lakes water protection and preservation. How does this work inform your writing?
TR: I’ve been doing work with Lake Ontario Waterkeeper for several years now. Arguments grew out of my relationship with them, with how they asked me to start thinking about the lake, to start taking ownership of it, responsibility for it. It’s something I think about a lot now, when travelling, when reading. It’s been a new lens through which I view how we interact with much of the natural world—where we live, how we build, who we create.
I’m not entirely sure how this will continue to come out in my writing, other than to say that it’s something that is generally there in the back of my head and so inevitably percolates in some ways.
TC: You are writer-in-residence at Western this year which entails, among other things, working with many young writers who learning writing fundamentals. Has helping these students made you reflect on your own writing? If so, how?
TR: Writing is writing is writing. The tools are always the same. It’s actually been really fantastic to read other people’s work on a weekly basis. Regardless of skill level, when I read someone’s work closely and then sit to talk with them about where it could go, what might make it stronger, it’s then something that returns to me when I approach my own work.
If I talk with someone about how their character needs to want something, I then realize, well, so should mine. Or if I’ve just chatted with someone about POV or tense or something, it’s then something I’m thinking about very specifically when I sit down again.
TC: What are you currently working on?
TR: I’m working on a new novel. There are no mountains or lakes in it. Well, not really. So far.
TANIS RIDEOUT'S MOST RECENT BOOKS
ARGUMENTS WITH A LAKE
WOLSAK AND WYNN, 2013
Description from the publisher:
In 1954, at the age of sixteen, Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. It brought her fame and adulation; her life seemed charmed. Enter Shirley Campbell, another young swimmer whose accomplishments were poised to rival Bell’s, but in falling short in her own attempts to cross the Great Lake, she found herself spiralling out of control into a life of addiction, petty crime, and personal tragedies.
Tanis Rideout weaves the tales of these two remarkable women together in a series of stunning, lyrical poems. It is a story of courage and triumph, but also one of adversity and redemption. This is an exhilarating book of poetry, at once tender and terrifying; like a cold dip in Lake Ontario, it will engulf you and leave you breathless. Arguments with the Lake confirms Rideout’s arrival as a major new talent in Canadian letters.
In 1954, at the age of sixteen, Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. It brought her fame and adulation; her life seemed charmed. Enter Shirley Campbell, another young swimmer whose accomplishments were poised to rival Bell’s, but in falling short in her own attempts to cross the Great Lake, she found herself spiralling out of control into a life of addiction, petty crime, and personal tragedies.
Tanis Rideout weaves the tales of these two remarkable women together in a series of stunning, lyrical poems. It is a story of courage and triumph, but also one of adversity and redemption. This is an exhilarating book of poetry, at once tender and terrifying; like a cold dip in Lake Ontario, it will engulf you and leave you breathless. Arguments with the Lake confirms Rideout’s arrival as a major new talent in Canadian letters.
Marilyn, mid-lake
Pigeons make their way by magnetic, the trigeminal nerve,
Branched in their brains makes ninety degree turns, orients
by atmospheric odor.
The lake’s skin smells of a father’s garage: gasoline, aftershave
and repeating Sunday leftovers. A refrain on the tongue
pasted with pablum and honey: North.
Swim north and I’ll find you. But there’s no moon, no
line where the city, meets the sky, meets the offing.
The body is an astrolabe, the pull of home in her skull.
Branched in their brains makes ninety degree turns, orients
by atmospheric odor.
The lake’s skin smells of a father’s garage: gasoline, aftershave
and repeating Sunday leftovers. A refrain on the tongue
pasted with pablum and honey: North.
Swim north and I’ll find you. But there’s no moon, no
line where the city, meets the sky, meets the offing.
The body is an astrolabe, the pull of home in her skull.
Tom Cull teaches creative writing in the English and Writing Studies Program at Western University. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013 by Baseline Press.
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.
Ania SzadoPhoto by Katrina Afonso
Ania Szado's acclaimed second novel, Studio Saint-Ex (Viking Canada/Knopf USA) has been sold to five countries. Her debut novel Beginning of Was (Penguin Canada) was regionally shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book. Her short fiction has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologized in All Sleek and Skimming (Orca, ed. Lisa Heggum). Ania's nonfiction has appeared in the Globe & Mail and Flare Magazine. She lives in Toronto and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of British Columbia and an AOCA from Ontario College of Art. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter: @AniaSzado.
RUSTY TALK WITH ANIA SZADO
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Ania Szado: I remember writing the copy for a "Best of the West" newspaper that covered the goings-on of the cowboy action figures that my brother and I played with when we were little... but my strongest early memory is less pleasant. I wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. It must have been pretty good. My teacher insisted that I had to have plagiarized it, though I hadn't. That soured me on writing for a while.
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
AS: I had been doing visual art, but I'd always wanted to write. It took me a while to get up the courage—I was a voracious reader and was pretty much in awe of writers; I didn't dare imagine I could be capable of being one myself. When I finally made the decision to swallow my insecurities and hone my writing skills, I found that I was more creative and committed as a writer than I was with paint. I found my direction and voice slowly, but right from the start, the work I was producing seemed to have more potential than anything I'd produced as a visual artist, and the act of writing was intensely satisfying.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
AS: It wasn't advice so much as a description of a way of working. I took a novel class with Catherine Bush when I was doing my MFA, and she mentioned that she sometimes leaves the manuscript, and just sits on the sofa with a notebook, asking and answering questions about the work-in-progress. That opened the door for me to adjust my own process along similar lines, and I think it has helped my writing immensely.
KM: Can you describe your writing process?
AS: The one thing that is consistent in my writing process is that I have to get away, now and then, to completely immerse myself in my work. I do writing retreats of between a week and a month. I'll write for minimum 15 hours a day; my longest stretch was 22 hours. Most days I don't step outside. I eat simple foods, the same thing every day. No radio or TV or music or news. I think of nothing but the story world; I don't even leave it when I'm asleep. I've done this for first drafts and I've done it for rewrites. I'm always anxious before I begin, but I set up immediately and start working right away, and then it's just the bliss of intense, satisfying work and creative intellectual challenge. When I'm not on retreat, I might write several hours a day or not at all—it depends on the stage I'm at in a novel and whether there are other pressing demands on my time. When I'm working, I shift between writing on the laptop and working things out in a notebook.
KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
AS: What springs to mind is one of the coincidences that came up during the writing of Studio Saint-Ex. A character in the novel, Saint-Exupéry's real-life friend Bernard Lamotte, had his painting studio on East 52nd Street in NYC in the 1040s; there's a plaque on the building to commemorate Saint-Ex's working on The Little Prince there. I created a social club for the city's French expats, called it the Alliance Française, and placed it across the street from Lamotte's studio—in what is actually the Cartier building. Some time later, I queried a contact at today's Alliance Française about the history of the organization. She told me that the organization was itinerant in the early '40s; they borrowed space as they needed it. When she went into the files, she discovered that one of the buildings they used in the early '40s was actually the Cartier building. What's more, the modern-day Alliance had, until recently, owned a Lamotte mural. The woman told me she herself had been responsible for auctioning it off. She'd had no idea Lamotte and Saint-Exupéry had been friends.
KM: Tell us about your new novel Studio Saint-Ex?
AS: Studio Saint-Ex tells the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writing The Little Prince in early 1940s Manhattan, through the eyes of two women vying to win his heart and save him from his inevitable fate while also grappling to achieve status and success of their own. One is a young fashion designer; the other is his fiery estranged wife. The Little Prince runs throughout the book as a symbol of passion, love and destruction.
KM: How did you approach the research for this project?
AS: I began by researching Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first by reading one after another of his many biographies. I read or reread his novels and other writing, including his letters. I was most interested in his NYC years, when he was writing The Little Prince, and eventually I pieced together the other elements of the story I wanted to tell. That led to research on WWII New York, the beginnings of American haute couture, the French expat community in Manhattan, and numerous other side roads. I had a great resource in a Saint-Exupéry scholar who took me on tireless walking tours of Saint-Ex's NYC locales and sent me packages of useful material. I had the insights of my seamstress mother and designer sister to draw on to supplement my research into sewing, fabrics, and the fashion industry. All the while, I was writing, working out the story—and revising it as the research revealed new possibilities or roadblocks.
KM: What are you working on now?
AS: I'm in the early stages of exploring two very different ideas for the next novel. One involves two artists. The other has to do with a lost—and found—child.
RUSTY TALK WITH ANIA SZADO
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Ania Szado: I remember writing the copy for a "Best of the West" newspaper that covered the goings-on of the cowboy action figures that my brother and I played with when we were little... but my strongest early memory is less pleasant. I wrote a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. It must have been pretty good. My teacher insisted that I had to have plagiarized it, though I hadn't. That soured me on writing for a while.
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
AS: I had been doing visual art, but I'd always wanted to write. It took me a while to get up the courage—I was a voracious reader and was pretty much in awe of writers; I didn't dare imagine I could be capable of being one myself. When I finally made the decision to swallow my insecurities and hone my writing skills, I found that I was more creative and committed as a writer than I was with paint. I found my direction and voice slowly, but right from the start, the work I was producing seemed to have more potential than anything I'd produced as a visual artist, and the act of writing was intensely satisfying.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
AS: It wasn't advice so much as a description of a way of working. I took a novel class with Catherine Bush when I was doing my MFA, and she mentioned that she sometimes leaves the manuscript, and just sits on the sofa with a notebook, asking and answering questions about the work-in-progress. That opened the door for me to adjust my own process along similar lines, and I think it has helped my writing immensely.
KM: Can you describe your writing process?
AS: The one thing that is consistent in my writing process is that I have to get away, now and then, to completely immerse myself in my work. I do writing retreats of between a week and a month. I'll write for minimum 15 hours a day; my longest stretch was 22 hours. Most days I don't step outside. I eat simple foods, the same thing every day. No radio or TV or music or news. I think of nothing but the story world; I don't even leave it when I'm asleep. I've done this for first drafts and I've done it for rewrites. I'm always anxious before I begin, but I set up immediately and start working right away, and then it's just the bliss of intense, satisfying work and creative intellectual challenge. When I'm not on retreat, I might write several hours a day or not at all—it depends on the stage I'm at in a novel and whether there are other pressing demands on my time. When I'm working, I shift between writing on the laptop and working things out in a notebook.
KM: What is your favourite or funniest literary moment, if you have one?
AS: What springs to mind is one of the coincidences that came up during the writing of Studio Saint-Ex. A character in the novel, Saint-Exupéry's real-life friend Bernard Lamotte, had his painting studio on East 52nd Street in NYC in the 1040s; there's a plaque on the building to commemorate Saint-Ex's working on The Little Prince there. I created a social club for the city's French expats, called it the Alliance Française, and placed it across the street from Lamotte's studio—in what is actually the Cartier building. Some time later, I queried a contact at today's Alliance Française about the history of the organization. She told me that the organization was itinerant in the early '40s; they borrowed space as they needed it. When she went into the files, she discovered that one of the buildings they used in the early '40s was actually the Cartier building. What's more, the modern-day Alliance had, until recently, owned a Lamotte mural. The woman told me she herself had been responsible for auctioning it off. She'd had no idea Lamotte and Saint-Exupéry had been friends.
KM: Tell us about your new novel Studio Saint-Ex?
AS: Studio Saint-Ex tells the story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writing The Little Prince in early 1940s Manhattan, through the eyes of two women vying to win his heart and save him from his inevitable fate while also grappling to achieve status and success of their own. One is a young fashion designer; the other is his fiery estranged wife. The Little Prince runs throughout the book as a symbol of passion, love and destruction.
KM: How did you approach the research for this project?
AS: I began by researching Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, first by reading one after another of his many biographies. I read or reread his novels and other writing, including his letters. I was most interested in his NYC years, when he was writing The Little Prince, and eventually I pieced together the other elements of the story I wanted to tell. That led to research on WWII New York, the beginnings of American haute couture, the French expat community in Manhattan, and numerous other side roads. I had a great resource in a Saint-Exupéry scholar who took me on tireless walking tours of Saint-Ex's NYC locales and sent me packages of useful material. I had the insights of my seamstress mother and designer sister to draw on to supplement my research into sewing, fabrics, and the fashion industry. All the while, I was writing, working out the story—and revising it as the research revealed new possibilities or roadblocks.
KM: What are you working on now?
AS: I'm in the early stages of exploring two very different ideas for the next novel. One involves two artists. The other has to do with a lost—and found—child.
ANIA SZADO'S RECENT NOVEL
Studio Saint-Ex, Penguin Canada, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
In the glittering world of Manhattan's French expats and 1942 Quebec, a twenty-two-year-old fashion designer on the cusp of launching her career is swept away by the charms of French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ... and enmeshed in the schemes of his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife, who is determined to win back her husband—at all costs and seductions.
With Paris under occupation by Hitler's troops, New York's Mayor LaGuardia vows to turn his city into the new fashion capital of the world—and Mig Lachapelle leaves Montreal for New York to make her name. She finds herself pulled into a fiery romantic triangle in which ambitions, creativity, and passions catch a literary giant between two talented, mesmerizing women and imperil the fate of his work-in-progress, The Little Prince—a poignant tale of a young boy's loneliness and love among the stars, one of the best selling and most beloved novels of all time.
Read an excerpt here.
Studio Saint-Ex, Penguin Canada, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
In the glittering world of Manhattan's French expats and 1942 Quebec, a twenty-two-year-old fashion designer on the cusp of launching her career is swept away by the charms of French writer and war pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ... and enmeshed in the schemes of his beautiful, estranged Salvadoran wife, who is determined to win back her husband—at all costs and seductions.
With Paris under occupation by Hitler's troops, New York's Mayor LaGuardia vows to turn his city into the new fashion capital of the world—and Mig Lachapelle leaves Montreal for New York to make her name. She finds herself pulled into a fiery romantic triangle in which ambitions, creativity, and passions catch a literary giant between two talented, mesmerizing women and imperil the fate of his work-in-progress, The Little Prince—a poignant tale of a young boy's loneliness and love among the stars, one of the best selling and most beloved novels of all time.
Read an excerpt here.
Linda Svendsen
Photo by Michael O'Shea
Photo by Michael O'Shea
Linda Svendsen's linked collection, Marine Life, was published in Canada, the United States and Germany and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Saturday Night, O. Henry Prize Stories, Best Canadian Stories and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Marine Life was nominated for the LA Times First Book Award and released as a feature film. Svendsen’s TV writing credits include adaptations of The Diviners, At the End of the Day: The Sue Rodriguez Story, and she co-produced and co-wrote the miniseries Human Cargo, which garnered seven Gemini Awards and a George Foster Peabody Award. She received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. Svendsen is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia.
RUSTY TALK WITH LINDA SVENDSEN
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Linda Svendsen: In Grade 2, we were asked to write a rhyming poem and I had so much fun doing it that I went on for a dozen stanzas. Building on this major breakthrough, in Grade 3 I tried to write a sequel to Tom Sawyer in which Becky and Tom married (roughly 6 pages of careful heartfelt printing).
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
LS: I don't think I ever decided to become a writer; it's happened by default and I still wonder how it's all going to turn out. All I know is that I really enjoy writing fiction and for screen and that it allows me to pursue all the other activities I considered such as acting, directing, producing, social work, anthropology, history, etc.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
LS: Nancy Packer, fiction writer (and mother of New Yorker writer George Packer and novelist Ann Packer) told me to take my characters to the cliff. And push them over.
KM: Your new novel, Sussex Drive, is a political satire offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at Canadian politics. Why did you decide to take on this subject matter? What do you hope readers take away from it?
LS: Sussex Drive was inspired by Canada's federal prorogue-a-palooza in 2008 and 2009. It's about a Conservative Prime Minister's wife and a left-wing Governor General and what happens when they can no longer play "Follow the Leader." I was very intrigued by the Governor General's role and decision-making in December 2008—would she or wouldn't she allow the Harper government to fall and the coalition to take power? Also, as Canadians, we're immersed in the entertainment/propaganda of the U.S. and U.K. (and their political figures with The King's Speech, The Queen, Game Change) and our own turf seemed rich and virtually unexplored. And it's chick lit, too, for canuckleheads.
KM: Sussex Drive reads like it’s written by a political insider. How did you approach the research for this project? Can you tell us about the process of writing this book?
LS: Sussex started out as a short story after December 2008 and headed toward novella length. After the 2009 prorogation, it became a novel and I visited Ottawa—the Parliament Buildings, Rideau Hall, Gatineau Lake, Museum of Civilization, the War Museum, and Rockcliffe Park. I happened to be in London in April 2009 during the G-20 and found it fascinating that the Canadians seemed to be invisible to the British press. Random House Canada bought the novel in October 2011 when I had 140 pages written; I wrote from January to June 2012 (my editors were amazing!) and it was published last October. Tight deadline!
KM: Many reviewers have commented on the sharp dialogue in Sussex Drive. In addition to writing fiction, you’re also an awarding-winning screenwriter. Do you plan on adapting Sussex Drive for film or television? If so, how do you plan on approaching the adaptation?
LS: I'm trying to talk my husband into producing Sussex Drive, but he's busy with other projects right now. 6 x 1 hour or a TV movie...fingers crossed!
KM: What are you working on now?
LS: Right now I'm deciding what novel I'm writing next. Great space to be in.
RUSTY TALK WITH LINDA SVENDSEN
Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Linda Svendsen: In Grade 2, we were asked to write a rhyming poem and I had so much fun doing it that I went on for a dozen stanzas. Building on this major breakthrough, in Grade 3 I tried to write a sequel to Tom Sawyer in which Becky and Tom married (roughly 6 pages of careful heartfelt printing).
KM: Why did you decide to become a writer?
LS: I don't think I ever decided to become a writer; it's happened by default and I still wonder how it's all going to turn out. All I know is that I really enjoy writing fiction and for screen and that it allows me to pursue all the other activities I considered such as acting, directing, producing, social work, anthropology, history, etc.
KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
LS: Nancy Packer, fiction writer (and mother of New Yorker writer George Packer and novelist Ann Packer) told me to take my characters to the cliff. And push them over.
KM: Your new novel, Sussex Drive, is a political satire offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at Canadian politics. Why did you decide to take on this subject matter? What do you hope readers take away from it?
LS: Sussex Drive was inspired by Canada's federal prorogue-a-palooza in 2008 and 2009. It's about a Conservative Prime Minister's wife and a left-wing Governor General and what happens when they can no longer play "Follow the Leader." I was very intrigued by the Governor General's role and decision-making in December 2008—would she or wouldn't she allow the Harper government to fall and the coalition to take power? Also, as Canadians, we're immersed in the entertainment/propaganda of the U.S. and U.K. (and their political figures with The King's Speech, The Queen, Game Change) and our own turf seemed rich and virtually unexplored. And it's chick lit, too, for canuckleheads.
KM: Sussex Drive reads like it’s written by a political insider. How did you approach the research for this project? Can you tell us about the process of writing this book?
LS: Sussex started out as a short story after December 2008 and headed toward novella length. After the 2009 prorogation, it became a novel and I visited Ottawa—the Parliament Buildings, Rideau Hall, Gatineau Lake, Museum of Civilization, the War Museum, and Rockcliffe Park. I happened to be in London in April 2009 during the G-20 and found it fascinating that the Canadians seemed to be invisible to the British press. Random House Canada bought the novel in October 2011 when I had 140 pages written; I wrote from January to June 2012 (my editors were amazing!) and it was published last October. Tight deadline!
KM: Many reviewers have commented on the sharp dialogue in Sussex Drive. In addition to writing fiction, you’re also an awarding-winning screenwriter. Do you plan on adapting Sussex Drive for film or television? If so, how do you plan on approaching the adaptation?
LS: I'm trying to talk my husband into producing Sussex Drive, but he's busy with other projects right now. 6 x 1 hour or a TV movie...fingers crossed!
KM: What are you working on now?
LS: Right now I'm deciding what novel I'm writing next. Great space to be in.
LINDA SVENDSEN'S MOST RECENT NOVEL
Sussex Drive, Random House Canada, 2012
DESCRIPTION FROM THE PUBLISHER
A startingly funny and deeply satisfying satirical novel that makes the Canadian political scene accessible from the female perspective, behind the scenes at the top of the hill.
Torn from the headlines, Sussex Drive is a rollicking, cheeky, alternate history of big-ticket political items in Canada told from the perspectives of Becky Leggatt (the sublimely capable and manipulative wife of a hard-right Conservative prime minister) and just a wink away at Rideau Hall, Lise Lavoie (the wildly exotic and unlikely immigrant Governor General)—two wives and mothers living their private lives in public.Set in recent history, when the biggest House on their turf is shuttered not once, not twice, but three times, Becky and Lise engage in a fight to the death in a battle that involves Canada’s relationship to the United States, Afghanistan and Africa. The rest of the time, the women are driving their kids. From Linda Svendsen’s sharp and wicked imagination comes a distaff Ottawa like no other ever created by a Canadian writer, of women manoeuvring in a political world gone more than a little mad, hosting world leaders, dealing with the challenges of minority government, and worrying about teen pregnancies and their own marriages. As they juggle these competing interests, Becky and Lise are forced to question what they thought were their politics, and make difficult choices about their families and their futures—federal and otherwise.
EXCERPT FROM SUSSEX DRIVE
Sussex Drive, Random House Canada, 2012
DESCRIPTION FROM THE PUBLISHER
A startingly funny and deeply satisfying satirical novel that makes the Canadian political scene accessible from the female perspective, behind the scenes at the top of the hill.
Torn from the headlines, Sussex Drive is a rollicking, cheeky, alternate history of big-ticket political items in Canada told from the perspectives of Becky Leggatt (the sublimely capable and manipulative wife of a hard-right Conservative prime minister) and just a wink away at Rideau Hall, Lise Lavoie (the wildly exotic and unlikely immigrant Governor General)—two wives and mothers living their private lives in public.Set in recent history, when the biggest House on their turf is shuttered not once, not twice, but three times, Becky and Lise engage in a fight to the death in a battle that involves Canada’s relationship to the United States, Afghanistan and Africa. The rest of the time, the women are driving their kids. From Linda Svendsen’s sharp and wicked imagination comes a distaff Ottawa like no other ever created by a Canadian writer, of women manoeuvring in a political world gone more than a little mad, hosting world leaders, dealing with the challenges of minority government, and worrying about teen pregnancies and their own marriages. As they juggle these competing interests, Becky and Lise are forced to question what they thought were their politics, and make difficult choices about their families and their futures—federal and otherwise.
EXCERPT FROM SUSSEX DRIVE
bill bissett
Photo by Joy Masuhara
Photo by Joy Masuhara
bill bissett born on lunaria sum 4oo yeers ago approximatelee in lunarian
time was sent 2 erth on first childrns shuttul from th at that time
trubuld planet landid in halifax moovd 2 vancouvr at 17 moovd
2 london wher i was part uv luddites alternativ rock band thn
toronto wher ium poet in residens at workman arts & recording
with pete dako wanting alwayze 2 xploor words n sounds n
image in th writing n painting showing paintings at th secret
handshake art galleree toronto most recent book novel from talonbooks
rusty talk with bill bissett
I asked bill bissett these questions about his writing process:
He responded by email over the month of September 2012:
dere kathryn th first 2 qwestyuns 4 rustee talk mor as it cums in
th first creativ work i remembr was in grade 3 or 4 b4 going in2 th hospital 4 a coupul uv yeers was a pome i wrote abt sail boats in th watr n th feeling in my brain n heart was veree thrilling 4 me an elixr reelee
thn a littul whil latr aftr mor thn a few operaysyuns i was in th oxygen tent n realizing i wud nevr b a dansr n or a figur skatr my first reel ambishyuns i cud write n paint i thot n that way feel th line mooving thru space n that way as well feeling th taktilitee uv life being physikal th enhansment from th abstraksyuns uv th skripts we wer ar all living thru i wrote my first storee thn in th oxygen tent wher i was deliting 2 drink orange crush n see th brite orange liquid cumming out uv my bodee immediatelee thru mor tubes i lovd that n that orange runway made me laff n feel veree poignant as well as my home planet lunaria was veree orange b4 all us childrn were remoovd from that troubuld planet n sent 2 erth
my first storee wch i wrote in th oxygen tent was abt a boy who didint want 2 follow rules n wantid 2 find his own way n swam out past th undrtow wch oftn was both a physikal risk n a metaphor 4 sew manee othr things in nova scotia n at great dangr he ovrcame th fors from th watr n made it 2 shore n thn vowd he wud dew it agen n agen sirtinlee if life wer as friabul as it seemd sew definitlee 2 b why not take th risk
my fathr had th storee typd out in several mor copees that was my first publishd work i feel veree warm abt him now in ths moment that he did dew that 4 me n evn tho i didint reelee start writing agen until aftr my mothr went 2 spirit evn a few yeers aftr that 16 n reelee agen full time until i got 2 vancouvr 17 my yerning 2 b always writing evr sins i was in th oxygen tent at 10or 11 has nevr left me
influenses medium genre hungree throat mor as it cums in
th subjekt 4 me is th genre n th genre is th subjekt iuv alwayze wantid 2 put books 2gethr that hold or contain diffrent genres as iuv also writtn pomes that contain difrent genres iuv oftn calld such pomes fusyun pomes my most recent work novel my first novel made me mor aware uv th medium is th genre n th genre is th medium n th medium slash subjekt is th genre mor aware thn evr how we write is can b what we ar writing abt mor thn an approach 2 mor thn creating th nuans uv it is th uv in my first novel calld novel abt 2 yeers ago brout out by talonbooks its a collagist work prob also calld post modernist in that th linear flow storee line is part uv th whol work is not th whol work th whole work inklewds th modernist storee line th serch 4 a trew love elements uv gangstr espionage n th serch n what happns evn tho veree labyrinthean also inklewds essays sum abt peopul we know in th known fakshul world introdusing ideas uv ficksyun fakt identitee dew we reelee know them can we n wch them is it a fact n pomes also like th essays hiliting theems that ar in th storee line th charaktrs mooving thru space n time n situaysyuns n thr is a hi degree uv th elements uv randomness wch th strukshur uv th work novel conveys inklewds n is conveying
my first biggest n still biggest influens is gertrude stein who showsd n shows me espeshulee in stanzas in meditaysyuns that words need not onlee 2 represent but ar in themselvs konstrukts wch fold unfold n refiliing fold in2 n out uv each othr ar in fakt puzzuls made uv each othr sew they can b on theyr own not representing bcumming n being what whats dew our grammars cum from our emosyuns n or dew our emosyuns mostlee reelee cum from our binaree based grammar thees unsolvabul qwestyuns prsist n ar oftn endlesslee interesting yes
othr huge erlee influenses allen ginsberg robert duncan denise levrtov bob cobbing diane di prima sew manee infinitlee manee d.a. levy bpNichol martina clinton maxine gadd judith copithorne influences with also sew manee n now 2day peopul othr poets i dew reedings with
sew impressd with adeena karasick kai kellough sheri- d wilson ivan coyote richard van de camp david bateman naomi laufer jill mcginn toshio ushiroguchi-pigott chadwick juriansz ar names uv amayzing poets that jump 2 mind helen posno
hungree throat my nu book my second novel is mor a novel in meditaysyun 2 charaktrs alredee found each othr trying 2 let each othr farthr n furthr in wun afrayd uv intimasee from his memoreez being 2 chargd n not let go uv how hard that is getting ovr trauma his bad memoree attacks drag him away from whom he loves evn from himself in th present n ths collagist post modernist work tho not as much prhaps as novel inklewds essays pomes seeminglee unrelatid help th reedr n th work 2 reflekt on all th key issews in ths work that cum in2 wun whil reeding hungree throat
thees 2 books ar sew importnat 2 me kathryn n i wud reelee like what yu dew with what ium sending yu 2 focus on hungree throat as it is cumming out in th spring 2013 from talonbooks n th nu book ium working on now is in no way a novel sew thees 2 books ar my 2 novels se far altho th charaktrs ar diffrent peopul thees 2 books cud complement each othr th collagist form works veree well 4 me with th way uv working that can inklewd randomness qwestyuning identitee fact ficksyun 4 me thrs an interesting bredth n spekulaysyun in ths kind uv working th tropes n trajsktoreez longings changes growing n ungrowing lyrik n diffikulteez n treetment uv th konstruktiv urges what we konstrukt what is konstruktid what we can build 2gethr n what we can build n how what we build is building us othr important 2 me writrs hart crane e.e. cummings
latelee ium reeding davisadora by michael ondaatje his comeing thru slaughter is wun uv my all time favorit books
evr p.d.james nu book death comes to pemberley man about town by mark merlis have yu red anne carsons autobiography of red anothr uv my all time most adord books also among th erlier listings touchd on heer erleer in my life that is john rechy city uv night also colm toibin wrote an amayzing book i red coupul yeers ago almost that same titul as john rechy s brilyant city of night colm toibin s book titul is the story of the night camus sartre debeauvoir gide wer huge influenses on me as i was growing in my erlee teens n issac singer shirley ann grau truman capote tenessee williams william inge eugene oneil diane di prima this kind uv bird flies backwards shakespere in school th first sound poetree recording i herd was edith sitwell facade blew me away helpd start me out fr sure as did n dew all thees peopul n sew manee mor
sew hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun th meditaysyun is abt letting go letting go uv attachment 2 traumatik memoreez n how can yu moov on or 4ward if yu ar klingnig 2 solv or whatevr bad n or haunting memoreez uv th past in wuns life how thees 2 peopul try 2 love each othr thru th dilemma they ar living n what happns
intrspersd thru ths meditayshyun discussyuns conver
saysyuns pledges collapses n regroupings ar pomes song essays its not a book uv doom but it contains sum doom n like all us writrs have n dew talk abt thru th ages how hard 2 love 2 find it n follow thru with it its politiks n sankshuaree part n parts uv th way my throat is hungree 4 breething my throat is hungree 4 eeting my throat is
hungree 4 singing my throat is hungree 4 yu
wrap up qwestyuns n answrs 4 rusty talk hope evreethings great w yu Kathryn
maybe 2 wrap up heer 4 th rusty 4 now aneeway from th beginning i always wantid 2 b writing reelee in approx 7 approaches 2 writing poetree my main wuns being sound n vizual words spred all ovr th page using th space uv th page as whol blank canvas not onlee using a porsyun uv that availabul space as square or rektangul th shape n size uv th copee size n th book size th ekonomeez uv n othr considraysuns have brout th writing in2 lettr size 81/2 x 11 inches drastikalee n finding th wayze thru th availabul transmitting vehikuls n xpanding wuns repertoire 4 inspiraysyun i follow th vois es uv th work at hand or th writing godesses n gods who i sew beleev in guide me 2 write with novel whol passages wer literalee diktatid 2 me sumtimes thrs a lot uv editing as in th pome 4 hart crane in time sumtimes thrs almost no editing th tiny librarians pome in novel went thru seemd ike manee rewrites othr parts uv novel came instantlee iuv nevr xperiensd a writrs blok i cant imagine evn how painful that wud b
i just finishd proof reeding RUSH what fuckan theory a book on theory i wrote n publishd in 72 wch is now being refreshd n reissewd by book thug in toronto my second novel hungree throat will b out in spring 13 n what ium reelee working on now is my nu book mostlee dewing a lot uv lettr texting in it
yu can find a wide range uv my work in you tube n also my web site th offishul bill bissett web site www.billbissett.com
oh thr ar mor thn a few cds out uv my work chek th cv in th website th most recent cd is nothing will hurt with pete dako xtraordinaree musician n arrangr n composr n gary shenkman n ambrose pottie
cest sa i gess thats all 4 now thanks sew much 4 yr interest thees intrviews ar kinduv hard 2 dew sumtimes a prson dusint want 2 bcum 2 self conscious but they reelee help me as well thanks veree much
hungree throat veree recentlee compleetid out spring 2013
hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun 2 peopul getting 2gethr wun afrayd uv continuing intimasee bcoz uv what has happend 2 him th othr not bewilderd n anxious is eagr 4 nu xperiences with his nu partnr th meditaysyun is partlee abt letting go how hard that is n sumtimez how seminglee eezee th struggul letting go can b owing 2 th obsessing paralyzing n shaping burdns uv our pasts th obstakuls that trauma creates 4 our presents n futurs layrs n layrs ficksyuns n realiteez wch ar peopuls throats ar hungree 4 breething 4 speeking digesting saying singing eeting tasting giving kissing sew much uv th worlds throats ar hungree not onlee 4 evreething also 4 food watr air wun uv th last stages b4 passing uv peopul with parkinsons is whn th throat no longr swallows millyuns uv peopul with sleep apnea sleep with masheens pushing air in2 theyr throats all nite long 2 prevent closure th throat chakra being well is a condishyun uv our life th throat is hungree also 4 acceptans uv what is n what has bin n what is beleevablee possibul thru song sound poetree narrativ n non narrativ analysis meditaysun words n meenings oftn dissolving hungree throat looks at all thees dynamiks 2 share greev celebrate uplift love n moov 4words play with th word growing its parts sylabuls n th mouth n throat shaping each in our times gr ow wo ing wing s
time was sent 2 erth on first childrns shuttul from th at that time
trubuld planet landid in halifax moovd 2 vancouvr at 17 moovd
2 london wher i was part uv luddites alternativ rock band thn
toronto wher ium poet in residens at workman arts & recording
with pete dako wanting alwayze 2 xploor words n sounds n
image in th writing n painting showing paintings at th secret
handshake art galleree toronto most recent book novel from talonbooks
rusty talk with bill bissett
I asked bill bissett these questions about his writing process:
- What is your first memory of being creative—in terms of writing creatively or making art or music?
- Why did you become a writer and artist? What writers/poets/artists were influential to you when you first started out? Who are you reading now?
- Can you describe your writing process?
- Have you ever experienced a creative block and what did you do to get out of it?
- You work in a variety of genres and mediums, and your work has been described, among other things, as defying genre. How do you see your relationship between medium and genre in your work? Does the subject dictate the genre or vice versa? Or does it develop naturally?
- What are you working on now?
He responded by email over the month of September 2012:
dere kathryn th first 2 qwestyuns 4 rustee talk mor as it cums in
th first creativ work i remembr was in grade 3 or 4 b4 going in2 th hospital 4 a coupul uv yeers was a pome i wrote abt sail boats in th watr n th feeling in my brain n heart was veree thrilling 4 me an elixr reelee
thn a littul whil latr aftr mor thn a few operaysyuns i was in th oxygen tent n realizing i wud nevr b a dansr n or a figur skatr my first reel ambishyuns i cud write n paint i thot n that way feel th line mooving thru space n that way as well feeling th taktilitee uv life being physikal th enhansment from th abstraksyuns uv th skripts we wer ar all living thru i wrote my first storee thn in th oxygen tent wher i was deliting 2 drink orange crush n see th brite orange liquid cumming out uv my bodee immediatelee thru mor tubes i lovd that n that orange runway made me laff n feel veree poignant as well as my home planet lunaria was veree orange b4 all us childrn were remoovd from that troubuld planet n sent 2 erth
my first storee wch i wrote in th oxygen tent was abt a boy who didint want 2 follow rules n wantid 2 find his own way n swam out past th undrtow wch oftn was both a physikal risk n a metaphor 4 sew manee othr things in nova scotia n at great dangr he ovrcame th fors from th watr n made it 2 shore n thn vowd he wud dew it agen n agen sirtinlee if life wer as friabul as it seemd sew definitlee 2 b why not take th risk
my fathr had th storee typd out in several mor copees that was my first publishd work i feel veree warm abt him now in ths moment that he did dew that 4 me n evn tho i didint reelee start writing agen until aftr my mothr went 2 spirit evn a few yeers aftr that 16 n reelee agen full time until i got 2 vancouvr 17 my yerning 2 b always writing evr sins i was in th oxygen tent at 10or 11 has nevr left me
influenses medium genre hungree throat mor as it cums in
th subjekt 4 me is th genre n th genre is th subjekt iuv alwayze wantid 2 put books 2gethr that hold or contain diffrent genres as iuv also writtn pomes that contain difrent genres iuv oftn calld such pomes fusyun pomes my most recent work novel my first novel made me mor aware uv th medium is th genre n th genre is th medium n th medium slash subjekt is th genre mor aware thn evr how we write is can b what we ar writing abt mor thn an approach 2 mor thn creating th nuans uv it is th uv in my first novel calld novel abt 2 yeers ago brout out by talonbooks its a collagist work prob also calld post modernist in that th linear flow storee line is part uv th whol work is not th whol work th whole work inklewds th modernist storee line th serch 4 a trew love elements uv gangstr espionage n th serch n what happns evn tho veree labyrinthean also inklewds essays sum abt peopul we know in th known fakshul world introdusing ideas uv ficksyun fakt identitee dew we reelee know them can we n wch them is it a fact n pomes also like th essays hiliting theems that ar in th storee line th charaktrs mooving thru space n time n situaysyuns n thr is a hi degree uv th elements uv randomness wch th strukshur uv th work novel conveys inklewds n is conveying
my first biggest n still biggest influens is gertrude stein who showsd n shows me espeshulee in stanzas in meditaysyuns that words need not onlee 2 represent but ar in themselvs konstrukts wch fold unfold n refiliing fold in2 n out uv each othr ar in fakt puzzuls made uv each othr sew they can b on theyr own not representing bcumming n being what whats dew our grammars cum from our emosyuns n or dew our emosyuns mostlee reelee cum from our binaree based grammar thees unsolvabul qwestyuns prsist n ar oftn endlesslee interesting yes
othr huge erlee influenses allen ginsberg robert duncan denise levrtov bob cobbing diane di prima sew manee infinitlee manee d.a. levy bpNichol martina clinton maxine gadd judith copithorne influences with also sew manee n now 2day peopul othr poets i dew reedings with
sew impressd with adeena karasick kai kellough sheri- d wilson ivan coyote richard van de camp david bateman naomi laufer jill mcginn toshio ushiroguchi-pigott chadwick juriansz ar names uv amayzing poets that jump 2 mind helen posno
hungree throat my nu book my second novel is mor a novel in meditaysyun 2 charaktrs alredee found each othr trying 2 let each othr farthr n furthr in wun afrayd uv intimasee from his memoreez being 2 chargd n not let go uv how hard that is getting ovr trauma his bad memoree attacks drag him away from whom he loves evn from himself in th present n ths collagist post modernist work tho not as much prhaps as novel inklewds essays pomes seeminglee unrelatid help th reedr n th work 2 reflekt on all th key issews in ths work that cum in2 wun whil reeding hungree throat
thees 2 books ar sew importnat 2 me kathryn n i wud reelee like what yu dew with what ium sending yu 2 focus on hungree throat as it is cumming out in th spring 2013 from talonbooks n th nu book ium working on now is in no way a novel sew thees 2 books ar my 2 novels se far altho th charaktrs ar diffrent peopul thees 2 books cud complement each othr th collagist form works veree well 4 me with th way uv working that can inklewd randomness qwestyuning identitee fact ficksyun 4 me thrs an interesting bredth n spekulaysyun in ths kind uv working th tropes n trajsktoreez longings changes growing n ungrowing lyrik n diffikulteez n treetment uv th konstruktiv urges what we konstrukt what is konstruktid what we can build 2gethr n what we can build n how what we build is building us othr important 2 me writrs hart crane e.e. cummings
latelee ium reeding davisadora by michael ondaatje his comeing thru slaughter is wun uv my all time favorit books
evr p.d.james nu book death comes to pemberley man about town by mark merlis have yu red anne carsons autobiography of red anothr uv my all time most adord books also among th erlier listings touchd on heer erleer in my life that is john rechy city uv night also colm toibin wrote an amayzing book i red coupul yeers ago almost that same titul as john rechy s brilyant city of night colm toibin s book titul is the story of the night camus sartre debeauvoir gide wer huge influenses on me as i was growing in my erlee teens n issac singer shirley ann grau truman capote tenessee williams william inge eugene oneil diane di prima this kind uv bird flies backwards shakespere in school th first sound poetree recording i herd was edith sitwell facade blew me away helpd start me out fr sure as did n dew all thees peopul n sew manee mor
sew hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun th meditaysyun is abt letting go letting go uv attachment 2 traumatik memoreez n how can yu moov on or 4ward if yu ar klingnig 2 solv or whatevr bad n or haunting memoreez uv th past in wuns life how thees 2 peopul try 2 love each othr thru th dilemma they ar living n what happns
intrspersd thru ths meditayshyun discussyuns conver
saysyuns pledges collapses n regroupings ar pomes song essays its not a book uv doom but it contains sum doom n like all us writrs have n dew talk abt thru th ages how hard 2 love 2 find it n follow thru with it its politiks n sankshuaree part n parts uv th way my throat is hungree 4 breething my throat is hungree 4 eeting my throat is
hungree 4 singing my throat is hungree 4 yu
wrap up qwestyuns n answrs 4 rusty talk hope evreethings great w yu Kathryn
maybe 2 wrap up heer 4 th rusty 4 now aneeway from th beginning i always wantid 2 b writing reelee in approx 7 approaches 2 writing poetree my main wuns being sound n vizual words spred all ovr th page using th space uv th page as whol blank canvas not onlee using a porsyun uv that availabul space as square or rektangul th shape n size uv th copee size n th book size th ekonomeez uv n othr considraysuns have brout th writing in2 lettr size 81/2 x 11 inches drastikalee n finding th wayze thru th availabul transmitting vehikuls n xpanding wuns repertoire 4 inspiraysyun i follow th vois es uv th work at hand or th writing godesses n gods who i sew beleev in guide me 2 write with novel whol passages wer literalee diktatid 2 me sumtimes thrs a lot uv editing as in th pome 4 hart crane in time sumtimes thrs almost no editing th tiny librarians pome in novel went thru seemd ike manee rewrites othr parts uv novel came instantlee iuv nevr xperiensd a writrs blok i cant imagine evn how painful that wud b
i just finishd proof reeding RUSH what fuckan theory a book on theory i wrote n publishd in 72 wch is now being refreshd n reissewd by book thug in toronto my second novel hungree throat will b out in spring 13 n what ium reelee working on now is my nu book mostlee dewing a lot uv lettr texting in it
yu can find a wide range uv my work in you tube n also my web site th offishul bill bissett web site www.billbissett.com
oh thr ar mor thn a few cds out uv my work chek th cv in th website th most recent cd is nothing will hurt with pete dako xtraordinaree musician n arrangr n composr n gary shenkman n ambrose pottie
cest sa i gess thats all 4 now thanks sew much 4 yr interest thees intrviews ar kinduv hard 2 dew sumtimes a prson dusint want 2 bcum 2 self conscious but they reelee help me as well thanks veree much
hungree throat veree recentlee compleetid out spring 2013
hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun 2 peopul getting 2gethr wun afrayd uv continuing intimasee bcoz uv what has happend 2 him th othr not bewilderd n anxious is eagr 4 nu xperiences with his nu partnr th meditaysyun is partlee abt letting go how hard that is n sumtimez how seminglee eezee th struggul letting go can b owing 2 th obsessing paralyzing n shaping burdns uv our pasts th obstakuls that trauma creates 4 our presents n futurs layrs n layrs ficksyuns n realiteez wch ar peopuls throats ar hungree 4 breething 4 speeking digesting saying singing eeting tasting giving kissing sew much uv th worlds throats ar hungree not onlee 4 evreething also 4 food watr air wun uv th last stages b4 passing uv peopul with parkinsons is whn th throat no longr swallows millyuns uv peopul with sleep apnea sleep with masheens pushing air in2 theyr throats all nite long 2 prevent closure th throat chakra being well is a condishyun uv our life th throat is hungree also 4 acceptans uv what is n what has bin n what is beleevablee possibul thru song sound poetree narrativ n non narrativ analysis meditaysun words n meenings oftn dissolving hungree throat looks at all thees dynamiks 2 share greev celebrate uplift love n moov 4words play with th word growing its parts sylabuls n th mouth n throat shaping each in our times gr ow wo ing wing s
bill bissett's MOST RECENT BOOK
hungree throat by bill bissett, Talonbooks, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
Written in his non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. In this uplifting “novel in meditaysyun” about love, in which we witness ten years of a shared life, we are reminded of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting multitude of “hungers” common to us all:
all our throats
r hungree 4 breething being sing
ing eeting digesting speeking
saying food kissing watr love
air ficksyun fakt memoree
th present what is nu all ovr
lapping imbuing change
th throat chakra being well
is a condishyn 4 life
hungree throat by bill bissett, Talonbooks, 2013
Description from the Publisher:
Written in his non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. In this uplifting “novel in meditaysyun” about love, in which we witness ten years of a shared life, we are reminded of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting multitude of “hungers” common to us all:
all our throats
r hungree 4 breething being sing
ing eeting digesting speeking
saying food kissing watr love
air ficksyun fakt memoree
th present what is nu all ovr
lapping imbuing change
th throat chakra being well
is a condishyn 4 life
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Rusty Talk Editor:
Adèle Barclay
The Rusty Toque interviews published writers, filmmakers, editors, publishers on writing, inspiration, craft, drafting, revision, editing, publishing, and community.
Unless otherwise stated all interviews are conducted by email.
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