![]() Photo by Julia Jackson Lynne Tillman's latest book is Someday This Will Be Funny, a collection of short stories, published by Red Lemonade Press (2012). Her most recent novel is American Genius, A Comedy, published by Soft Skull. She is the fiction editor at Fence Magazine and Professor/Writer-in-Residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany. RUSTY TALK WITH LYNNE TILLMAN Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Lynne Tillman: When I was eight, I wrote a composition about Charlemagne. My class was asked to write just one. But I got carried away, and wrote two. That thrill, rush, gave me a sense of power, freedom, pleasure—an eight year old's version. KM: Why did you become a writer? LT: I don't know why. I could give you reasons, but I really don't know other than to say that, when I was eight and wrote those little compositions, I loved it. I felt I was good at it, and decided right then to be a writer. KM: Could you describe your writing process? LT: I'm erratic. I don't have an everyday practice, except when I want to do it, want to write it, whatever it is. Then I become compulsive, and sit at my desk, at the computer, for hours without moving. Except for getting a cup of tea. But I can forget to eat, and begin to feel heady, dizzy. This is not great for the body, but I love that intensity, concentration, being inside what I'm writing. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? LT: Rejection is different from criticism. Constructive criticism can help, but sometimes it's hard to handle, especially when you're just beginning to show your work. Rejection can be hell. Writers have to know that. But it's always miserable. I have no advice other than to say we all go through it, and if you can't get through it, you can't show your writing to others for publication. KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? LT: Most important is how you read as a writer, not what you read. Reading crap is just boring. There are many good writers, fewer great ones; but if a writer reads critically, she can learn how it's done, and what she likes or doesn't and why. It aids in making choices if you know there are choices. KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use? LT: "Take your reader by the hand." My older sister told me that when I was 12. KM: Your favourite literary moment, if you have one. LT: Maybe my favourite moment was when the great writer Harry Mathews read aloud a piece I had written anonymously, because I was so insecure, to an audience at St. Mark's Poetry Project. I was astonished, surprised, happy, embarrassed; but it got some laughs, and gave me some courage. KM: What are you working on now? LT: A novel, my sixth, if I ever finish it. Right now I'm calling it Clouds and Apparitions, but Clouds may go. Not sure yet. LYNNE TILLMAN'S MOST RECENT BOOK Someday This Will Be Funny, Red Lemonade, 2011 ![]() LYNNE TILLMAN AS AUTHOR PHOTO The black-and-white pencil drawing on the reverse of Someday This Will Be Funny shows a woman with a long, oval face, a thin nose, a strong chin, and a cloud of apparently blonde, curly hair. The black-and-white photograph on the flyleaf of the story collection Absence Makes the Heart shows the same woman, twenty-one years ago—the same thin lips, the same elegantly elongated nose. The woman looks like Glenn Close. She looks so much like Glenn Close, especially Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest–era Glenn Close, that I spend at least fifteen minutes comparing results in Google image search. In color everything is clearer. The woman is Lynne Tillman. It’s funny that for a second I saw Alex Forrest—powerfully, primally, dangerously sexual, a female menace—one of those synaptic errors that later make a sort of sense, a tired brain conflating a time period, a radically direct portrayal of female sexuality, an aureole of hair. Or an error that later will simply be funny. Someday this will be funny. From The Literary Review, "Ruth Curry A Collection of Thoughts on Lynne Tillman, on the Occasion of the Publication of Her Twelfth Book, Someday This Will Be Funny" Lynne Tillman's characters inhabit language the way others live in rooms and cities. It's not that they are made only of words—all literary characters are—or that they don't have their own versions of material longings, needs, attachments, and obstructions. What's different is that they are attuned to language. They fraternize with words even when they are not talking. They treasure clichés and ready-made phrases as if they were messages or hints, turning them over to find their wisdom, or at least the joke wrapped inside them. In her collection This Is Not It (2002), when a woman makes a "last-minute decision," she very soon wonders what a "first-minute decision" would look like. There is an echo of this thought in Tillman's new story collection, Someday This Will Be Funny: "The decisive moment was an indecisive one for her." We instantly start adding up our own moments of that sort, finding far too many. From Bookforum, "Words to Live By: Comic stories interrogate reality, history, and language itself" by Michael Wood Despite the claim of the title, “Someday This Will Be Funny,” you wouldn’t want to reach for Lynne Tillman’s new book just for a good howl. In fact, that “someday” the title promises may never come. Tillman’s stories are too piercing, the obsessions of her characters too connected to their psychic wounds, for them to be considered exactly “funny.” In any case, it isn’t “someday” but rather “meantime” that counts for readers. And in the meantime, Tillman’s fictions tend to be (to steal a line from one of her stories) as “outrageously ineffable, obdurate and evasive” as the forms of desire they describe. Gorgeously at ease and technically virtuosic, the stories are ever on point — on point, that is, if the point of your reading has more to do with psychological nuance and bravura performances of language than with conventional story lines. From The New York Times Sunday Book Review, "Lynne Tillman’s Innovative Stories" by Forrest Gander RUSTY TALK WITH EMILY SCHULTZ![]() Photo by Brian Joseph Davis Emily Schultz's first book, Black Coffee Night, was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award, while her second, Joyland, received rave reviews. Her most recent novel, Heaven is Small, was a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Award alongside Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Ian Brown, and Anne Michaels. Her writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Eye Weekly, The Walrus Magazine, and several anthologies. Schultz also edits an influential website called "Joyland," which publishes short fiction and commentary from across North America. For this work, she was named one of Canada's digital innovators by Quill & Quire magazine. Schultz lives in Toronto and New York. Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Emily Schultz: When I was in second grade I penned two “books” with hand-drawn covers. I took them in to my schoolteacher and demanded that she read them aloud to the class. One was called The Adventures of Molly Mouse, the other Hemp the Horse. I’m not sure where I’d heard that word, but I thought it made a good name. I guess you could say I started off as a DIY author. KM: Why did you become a writer? ES: I really didn’t feel I had a choice. For example, see above. KM: What influences your writing the most? ES: It varies from book to book. With The Blondes, I guess the contemporary media-scape: the noise of news, disaster, and TV shows like She Survived That … Pregnant?! KM: Could you describe your writing process? (Do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision.) ES: With this book, I wrote the first draft fast, consciously changing my process, which is normally slow and meticulous, weighing every line. My husband and I holed up in a desert cabin for several weeks without internet and that is where I did the bulk of the first draft, writing every day from 9 ‘til 4 while staring out the window at the mountains and desert scrub bush. Strangely, writing quickly I had less structural questions to attack in later drafts, and the characters—although they still needed work—were more consistent. There wasn’t time for self-doubt. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? ES: Everyone gets rejected. As you become more successful you’re only going to face more or bigger rejections, so you have to get used to it and learn not to obsess. Have a cry, have a drink, watch something stupid on YouTube, and then fuhgeddaboudit. KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? ES: I think you have to find your own writers. I remember when I was young people would tell me, “Oh you simply must read … It will change your life!” and I never seemed to relate to any of those books. I wondered what was wrong with me. And so, although I found writers I related to later, when I was first starting out I tended to write in reaction to work I didn’t care for. I knew more what I didn’t want to be than what I did—but knowing that part actually helped me immensely. KM: What is the best literary advice you've been given that you actually use? ES: Every story must have a beginning, middle, and end—from Aristotle, and my sixth grade teacher. KM: Your funniest or favourite moment that you've experienced as a writer or in the literary world. ES: It doesn’t get any more Canadian than this story. I was in Halifax at a Broken Social Scene concert when a young woman approached me in the crowd. She asked if I was Emily Schultz. She’d read my book and recognized me from a newspaper photo. This was about ten years ago, and it was the one and only time anyone ever recognized me at a non-literary event. I felt like a star. KM: Can you tell us about your new book The Blondes? ES: If this were a Hollywood pitch meeting, my one line would be: Blondes, with rabies. But this isn’t a Hollywood pitch meeting, so I’ll see if I can give a bit more of an impression. Plot-wise, it’s about a grad student who finds out she is pregnant from an on-and-off-again relationship with her married thesis advisor. She’s exploring all these feelings of being bewilderment, not knowing how she feels about him, about her own actions, or if she should keep or terminate the pregnancy, when an epidemic (a virus affecting only blonde women) forces her actions and her fate. I wanted to explore how women both threaten and relate to one another, and at the same time work again in the satirical form. I also wanted the book to be an action-adventure novel for women. KM: What are you working on now? ES: My next novel is still too early to talk about. But I’m doing some screenwriting with my husband Brian Joseph Davis. It’s a TV show about life at an alternative weekly. ![]() EMILY SCHULTZ'S MOST RECENT NOVEL The Blondes, Random House, 2012 Description from the publisher A breakout novel for a young writer whose last book was shortlisted for the Trillium Prize alongside Anne Michaels and Margaret Atwood, and whom the Toronto Star called a "force of nature." Hazel Hayes is a grad student living in New York City. As the novel opens, she learns she is pregnant (from an affair with her married professor) at an apocalyptically bad time: random but deadly attacks on passers-by, all by blonde women, are terrorizing New Yorkers. Soon it becomes clear that the attacks are symptoms of a strange illness that is transforming blondes--whether CEOs, flight attendants, skateboarders or accountants--into rabid killers. Hazel, vulnerable because of her pregnancy, decides to flee the city--but finds that the epidemic has spread and that the world outside New York is even stranger than she imagined. She sets out on a trip across a paralyzed America to find the one woman--perhaps blonde, perhaps not--who might be able to help her. Emily Schultz's beautifully realized novel is a mix of satire, thriller, and serious literary work. With echoes of Blindness and The Handmaid's Tale amplified by a biting satiric wit, The Blondes is at once an examination of the complex relationships between women, and a merciless but giddily enjoyable portrait of what happens in a world where beauty is--literally--deadly. Kathryn Mockler is the publisher of The Rusty Toque.
![]() Photo by David Ellingsen Michael V. Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown teaching creative writing in the interdisciplinary program of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC's Okanagan campus in BC's Interior. He is the author of the novels Progress (Cormorant Books 2011) and Cumberland (Cormorant Books, 2002) which was nominated for the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award. In recent years, Smith won Vancouver's Community Hero of the Year Award and the inaugural Dayne Ogilvie Award for Emerging Gay Writers. He's also won a Western Magazine Award for Fiction, scooped two short film prize categories at Toronto's Inside Out festival, and was nominated for the Journey Prize. His videos have played around the world, in cities such as Milan, Dublin, Turin, London, New York, Toronto, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Glasgow, Lisbon, Beirut, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, SF, LA and Bombay. Smith is an MFA grad from UBC’s Creative Writing program. Vancouver Magazine has considered him one of its city's 25 most influential gay citizens whereas Loop Magazine named him one of Vancouver’s Most Dangerous People... His first book of poetry is What You Can’t Have (Signature Editions, 2006), short-listed for the ReLit Prize. In 2008, he published a hybrid book of concrete poems/photographs, Body of Text (BookThug), created with David Ellingsen. RUSTY TALK WITH MICHAEL V. SMITH Kathryn Mockler: What keeps you going as a writer? Michael V. Smith: I’ve always loved a puzzle. My novels have felt like long complicated puzzles that I tried to figure out. Really, every book is a mystery novel, right? You read to the end to find out the whodunnit, in whatever shape that takes. How is this book going to end? Even, how is the poem going to end? How does it work? So writing is the best way to enjoy making puzzles (long ones like novels, short ones like a poem) and still get paid. Okay, I use teaching to get paid. What keeps me going is a fine alchemy of things. There are many pleasures in creating: simple ego-stroking, the thrill of feeling like I’m discovering something, a satisfaction in accomplishment, being generous with myself, the feeling that I’m creating a conversation with someone about a collection of ideas (or characters) I’m very fond of, and the pleasure that comes from being engaged with the world. I’ve never thought of writing as a solitary act. I don’t know where that idea comes from. Writing is a very long one-sided conversation, but I’m always aware that eventually an audience will hear it, and listen, and join in. Kathryn Mockler: What is the revision process like for you? Michael V. Smith: With novels, after I have a first draft, I take out all the parts of the flab that aren’t plot. Just cut it all away. If there are bits of information I particularly like, or can’t do without, then I find somewhere to slip that back in. Usually, that first draft, cleaned up, is a solid skeleton. Then I do drafts that look at fixing specific things: I go through the whole manuscript, for example, and look at tying the events more closely together, so that one event is the cause of what comes next, or I do an edit to ‘psychologize’ the characters, meaning I add in some of the unwritten emotional life of the character, or flush out a bit of background, to fill out our sense of character. It’s a great way to edit for me, because it gives me focus on a particular skill. I always do other work at the same time, of course. One type of change triggers five others. But if I’m just approaching the novel as a whole, it’s overwhelming, and hard to see it clearly, so I love going in there with a tool in hand and digging around, which makes the whole process more manageable. Kathryn Mockler: How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? Michael V. Smith: Rejection is all part of the business, so if you aren’t rejected, you aren’t in the business. I take rejections as a good sign—I’m being a writer. Kathryn Mockler: What are you working on now? Michael V. Smith: I'm working on two projects: a series of tribute videos to friends and family who are ill, and a collection of essays titled Men. ![]() MICHAEL V. SMITH'S MOST RECENT NOVEL Progress, Cormorant Books, 2011 Description Since her fiancé’s death at eighteen, Helen Massey has spent her life avoiding it. Change comes when her town is only months away from being thirty feet under water. A government agency, The Power Authority, is relocating the entirety of her hometown to make way for a power dam project. What can’t be moved will be torn down. Even the cemetery is to be dug up and reinterred nearby. While visiting her lover’s grave, Helen witnesses a man fall to his death on the power dam worksite. “He fell like a sack, straight down, with one arm waving in circles. He fell past the other workman strapped into a harness who must have been surprised to see him pass. Mocking the air. It seemed he fell without a sound.” That same day, her brother returns unannounced after a fifteen-year absence. Robert Massey was a runaway. The construction made his homecoming a “now or never” decision, he tells his sister. “I didn’t want to have to come back in a boat to see the family home.” When Robert discovers his parents kept the reasons for his departure a secret—too little has changed—he confesses, hoping his sister might bury the past. So begins their transformations. The siblings must negotiate their shared history, and their differences, if they are to find themselves a future. In his essay, "A Memoir of Progress," Matthew Rader offers a brief memoir about his experiences with Michael V. Smith's latest novel Progress. This essay is published by AngelHousePress. Read an excerpt of Cumberland. For more information about Michael V. Smith go to his website. ![]() Photo by Matt Chamberlain Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2), for which she won the 2008 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her first novel, THREATS, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, McSweeney's, and DIAGRAM, among others. Find more at ameliagray.com or on Twitter @grayamelia. Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Amelia Gray: My mom let me use her typewriter and I typed a story about Snoopy. I must have been 5 or 6. The story was heavily illustrated. I can't remember for sure, but I think some pretty bad shit happens to Snoopy. KM: Why did you become a writer? AG: It made me feel better when I was feeling low. KM: What influences your writing the most? AG: It's a toss-up between men, god and the internet. KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.) AG: I generally write in the morning, at my computer, in my little windowless office, in a WordPad file. I like to write every day, though sometimes when I don't have any projects going, I'll take some time off or stare at something in the morning or afternoon with the intention of revising it. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? AG: Develop an ugly, unstoppable ego. KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? AG: Barry Hannah, Flannery O'Connor, David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, Vanessa Place, Russell Edson, Sylvia Plath, James Tate, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Denis Johnson, Shirley Jackson. KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use? AG: Denis Johnson says you should write ten minutes a day. KM: What are you working on now? AG: Collecting short stories. Some other things. ![]() AMELIA GRAY'S MOST RECENT BOOK THREATS, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 Description from Farrar, Straus and Giroux David’s wife is dead. At least, he thinks she’s dead. But he can’t figure out what killed her or why she had to die, and his efforts to sort out what’s happened have been interrupted by his discovery of a series of elaborate and escalating threats hidden in strange places around his home—one buried in the sugar bag, another carved into the side of his television. These disturbing threats may be the best clues to his wife’s death: CURL UP ON MY LAP. LET ME BRUSH YOUR HAIR WITH MY FINGERS. I AM SINGING YOU A LULLABY. I AM TESTING FOR STRUCTURAL WEAKNESS IN YOUR SKULL. Detective Chico is also on the case, and is intent on asking David questions he doesn’t know the answers to and introducing him to people who don’t appear to have David’s or his wife’s best interests in mind. With no one to trust, David is forced to rely on his own memories and faculties—but they too are proving unreliable. In THREATS, Amelia Gray builds a world that is bizarre yet familiar, violent yet tender. It is an electrifying story of love and loss that grabs you on the first page and never loosens its grip. Read a new short story by Amelia Gray here and more short stories here. ![]() Rick Moody Photo by Thatcher Keats Rick Moody's acclaimed and prizewinning books include the novels Garden State, The Ice Storm, Purple America, The Diviners and The Four Fingers of Death. He has received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn. RUSTY TALK WITH RICK MOODY Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Rick Moody: As opposed to writing non-creatively? I remember attempting to start a novel in 6th grade. Didn't get very far. And there was a poem, in 7th grade, with the same syllabification and rhyme scheme as "Jabberwocky." (Lewis Carroll had just struck a chord with me.) I'm sure there were earlier examples of "creative writing," but I'm not always sure I know what that means. In some ways, all early writing is creative. It's precisely education that teaches us how NOT to write creatively. KM: Why did you become a writer? RM: I got fired from a lot of other jobs. KM: Could you describe your writing process? RM: How I have worked varies from project to project and from decade to decade. Right now, my process is: wait for the semester to end, then write like a maniac, as many hours of the day as are physically possible, bearing in mind the occasional social obligation or need to interact with my daughter. Otherwise: eat and sleep writing and writing-related projects. I don't do it in the same places all the time. I don't do it in the same way from day to day. So there is no science. Be alert to the possibility of language. Follow the language. And revise as much as you can until someone shouts at you that they need the assignment. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop new writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? RM: Always be working on the next thing. KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? RM: Melville Hawthorne Thoreau Joyce Beckett Wolff Faulkner Nabokov Paley Gaddis Barthelme KM: What is the best literary advice you've gotten that you actually use? RM: The only important part is the work. Pay no attention to any part but the work. If you can be content with that part of the job, you will never be disappointed. KM: What are you working on now? RM: A new novel, some stories, a few more essays on music, a poem, and so on. ![]() RICK MOODY'S MOST RECENT BOOK On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening, Hachette Book Group, 2012 Description from Hachette Book Group Rick Moody has been writing about music as long as he has been writing, and this book provides an ample selection from that output. His anatomy of the word cool reminds us that, in the postwar 40s, it was infused with the feeling of jazz music but is now merely a synonym for neat. "On Celestial Music," which was included in Best American Essays, 2008, begins with a lament for the loss in recent music of the vulnerability expressed by Otis Redding's masterpiece, "Try a Little Tenderness;" moves on to Moody's infatuation with the ecstatic music of the Velvet Underground; and ends with an appreciation of Arvo Part and Purcell, close as they are to nature, "the music of the spheres." Contemporary groups covered include Magnetic Fields (their love songs), Wilco (the band's and Jeff Tweedy's evolution), Danielson Famile (an evangelical rock band), The Pogues (Shane McGowan's problems with addiction), The Lounge Lizards (John Lurie's brilliance), and Meredith Monk, who once recorded a song inspired by Rick Moody's story "Boys." Always both incisive and personable, these pieces inspire us to dive as deeply into the music that enhances our lives as Moody has done--and introduces us to wonderful sounds we may not know. Read an excerpt of On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening. ![]() Richard Melo Richard Melo is a novelist in Portland, Oregon and the author of Happy Talk (Red Lemonade) and Jokerman 8 (Soft Skull Press). A graduate of San Francisco State University, he is also a book critic with reviews appearing in The Believer, Publishers Weekly, and the Oregonian. RUSTY TALK WITH RICHARD MELO Kathryn Mockler: When did you first decide you wanted to be a writer? Richard Melo: Part of my inspiration to become a writer comes from a false memory. I have a vivid recollection of my parents taking me to a poetry festival in in Oregon during the early 1970s when I was maybe five, and introducing me to Ken Kesey who was an acquaintance of theirs. When I asked my parents about it long after that encounter helped inspire me to become a writer, they could neither remember the festival nor ever knowing Kesey. In second grade, I wrote stories about dog astronauts and the Keystone Cops for our grade school lit mag called The Doggy Bag. I was astonished to rediscover them a while back and see that my writing style and sense of humor haven’t changed that much in the years since. Maybe I knew all along this was what I wanted to do. I made up my mind once and for all to become a writer my sophomore year in college at San Francisco State University. I was a film major who couldn’t get my act together. I made a stark self-realization and decided that my personality didn’t fit the film major mold. So I switched to creative writing. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. KM: What keeps you going as a writer or why do you write? RM: I believe there are two approaches to becoming a writer of fiction. Some writers do it because they want to think of themselves as writers, want others to think of them as writers, and perhaps even (gasp!) want to make money as a writer. There’s a second camp who write because they have stories they are dying to tell and, of course, writing is the way to tell them. It’s good to question what your motivation is in becoming a writer. If you belong to the second camp, it’s easy to love what you do and tough to burn out. In the second camp, the only thing more painful than repeated rejection is the thought of not writing anymore. When you’re young, you don’t always feel like you’ve experienced enough life to have stories of your own. That’s how I felt when I was 19 and starting my first novel. The book I finished several years later is filled with stories I heard people tell that I remembered, wrote down, mixed with other stories, and revised so much that they became my own creation. These days, I am never at a loss for story ideas, as I have more than 20 years of notebooks filled with story ideas waiting for me to find the time to take them out for a spin. I have a tic, which I think developed when I first became immersed in novel writing. Whenever I feel a powerful emotion, whether it’s from life or a movie or song or piece of someone else’s writing, a signal goes off in my head and asks, ‘How can I use this in a novel?’ It’s not as much about copying the source of the emotion as it is trying to reproduce the emotion’s effect through a narrative of my own. To me, it doesn’t matter if I write every day or finish pieces on a regular schedule. Writing is something that happens in my head all the time, and when I find time to sit down with a pen and notebook, it’s more like transcription, a mechanical process, that will then need heavy revision before I have a piece that’s ready to show. KM: How would you describe your writing process and how does revision fit into that process? RM: I break down my novel writing process into three steps. The first involves coming up with ideas in a haphazard way and writing them down on any available scrap of paper (most often, though, in notebooks). At this point, the book seems perfect to me, though I have nothing to show for it. The second step is the mechanical typing of ideas into the form of something that looks like a novel. For me, this is a painful and boring process, and the end result is anything but perfect. The last step is to revise what I’ve typed. I print out a copy and make handwritten changes on it. Then I read it again and make more changes. I keep working over the printed manuscript until the paper starts falling apart. Then I go back, retype, reprint, and start the process over. I work hard to be an indifferent and ruthless self-editor as I want to answer the major editorial questions before an editor ever sees the manuscript. Revision is less about creating a perfect manuscript than it is continuously perfecting it until you are satisfied even with its flaws. We live in a fast-paced world, with texts of all kinds produced at speeds that can make the head spin. Long-form fiction has a hard time fitting in. Literature likes to move slow. I am reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 right now, and it will take me more than a month to finish. Writing a novel takes considerably more time, often years and sometimes decades. Fiction is an area where hurrying rarely helps. I’m a proponent of giving projects time, growing with them, letting the writing season. For me, this is a key to writers producing their best possible work. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop writers before they start. How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? RM: I didn’t do well with criticism when I was younger but do better now. It’s important to think of yourself not just as an artist but as a professional who can separate emotional attachment to the work during the review process. Plus, it’s rare someone else will give criticism more harsh than the criticism I have already given myself. Sometimes, a reader might nail a significant issue in your writing and give you insight into revision. Other times, feedback might come from someone who didn’t read your piece closely and is providing feedback just for the sake of providing feedback. It’s important to develop your writer instincts, to know what criticism is valid, and to look at your own work with brutal honesty. There are so many people involved in the publishing industry (and other fields) who started out with the intention of becoming a writer, and even though they still love writing and books, they never became writers. Those who do become writers were the ones who learned not only to handle criticism and rejection but also to use it to become more dedicated to their writing. KM: Are there any writers that had a significant impact on your literary life? What authors or books would you recommend to someone aspiring to be a writer? RM: When I was writing my first novel, I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t until I was several years into the process when I read Tristram Shandy, which is often regarded as the first post-modern novel even though it was written in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy bore no resemblance the book I was writing, but I was able to see how to use it as a shell to structure my book. TS begins with the narrator starting at the beginning, his birth, but then realizing the story actually begins well before his birth. I thought this was an excellent way to begin a book, so I transplanted the idea to my own novel and filled in the structure with my own characters and stories. TS has jokes that unfold over several chapters, and the reader doesn’t realize that it’s even a joke until the punch line. That was another idea that helped me organize the shapeless story notes I had been keeping. I’m not suggesting that all writers go and read Tristram Shandy, but I am a proponent of finding a book to use as an blueprint for using your own random story and character ideas to build a novel. KM: Do you have a piece of literary advice for new or aspiring writers? RM: I’ve had a long, strange journey when it comes to writing advice. When I was younger, I took an anti-authoritarian stance, and thought, “Whenever you hear writing advice, do the opposite.” After realizing that didn’t work as well as I thought, I modified it to, “Write how you like, just make it work.” Writing advice is valuable, as it’s a way for writer’s to talk to each other and share what they’ve learned through experience. It’s also worth being wary of writers dispensing advice. Something I learned from my experience as a parent is that there are well meaning people out there giving quite a bit of parenting advice, but it doesn’t mean what worked for them will work with you. There is also a subset of parenting advice givers who want (and this seems really odd to me) to control how other people go about their parenting. The same can be true of advice on writing. The more dogmatic writing advice sounds, the more scrutiny you should give it. That said, I do have one piece of writing to share: Put the reader first. When you put a piece of writing out there, it’s no longer about you or about the writing itself. It’s about the reader’s experience. Fiction writing is about creating an experience, while writing a narrative, personal essay is about sharing an experience. In both cases, it’s the experience that counts. Reading is almost always a voluntary act (except in the case of students), and the things you do to heighten a reader’s engagement with your writing can make a huge difference. I’m not suggesting pandering to an audience, but I do think that thoughtful revision and an underlying attitude of appreciation to those willing to take the time to read your work can help a writer build an audience. KM: What is the best thing about being a writer and the worst thing? RM: One of the reasons I wanted to become a writer is that it’s one of the rare art forms where you can flourish as an introvert. (Visual arts like painting and sculpture are others.) It doesn’t take highly developed social skills and performance talent in order to be able to write well. However, once you get work out there and need to market it, you need to flip that extrovert switch and become a self-confident attention grabber. Writing is often marketed around the writer’s personality, which seems like a cruel fate to a writer’s who’s shy. As much as I love writing, book marketing wears me out. KM: What are you working on now? RM: I’m working in a third novel that mixes up stories of dissenters (from New Left radicals through the Occupy movement), hypnotists (cult leaders), and rock ‘n’ roll (and its many reinventions). From that description, it might not be easy to imagine what that novel might look like, but I like how it’s coming together, am enjoying the research and source material, and am looking forward to completing a first draft maybe by the end of the year. ![]() RICHARD MELOS'S MOST RECENT BOOK Happy Talk, Red Lemonade, 2012 Description from Red Lemonade: Happy Talk imagines a star-crossed love affair in the Haiti of 1955 under the auspices of a U.S. Government plot to re-create Haiti as the next Hawaii. Gun-slinging American student nurses and boozy-NYC-playwrights-turned-educational-filmmakers can't wait to get off the Magic Island, while their directive to create a film short promoting tourism turns into a fiasco. All the while, voodoo is in the air, manifested as ghostly drumming in the distance. Front and center are Culprit Clutch, hero of anti-heroes, who appears mostly through rumor and innuendo, and whose intrepid adventures lead him to strange encounters with people not acting like themselves and Josie, his ghostly paramour with a morphine habit and who may or may not have voodoo spirits flowing through her. The cast of characters includes a Scandinavian zombie, an ancient Egyptian phantom, a power-mad doctor channeling Baron Samedi and bent on Culprit's destruction, and Culprit's black sidekick who sees through it all (including his role as sidekick). The novel’s cascading epilogues include a legendary car race down the length of Mexico; street theatre in Golden Gate park, circa 1968; a Skylab mutiny; origins of the musical comedy Godspell; and cameos by the Nation of Islam and early followers of Jim Jones. Written in the style of a 60s-era post-modern novel and driven by its Catch-22 style dialogue and Rice Krispies atmosphere, Happy Talk is a novel as picaresque as it is picturesque, knotty as it is naughty, scathing in its satire while loving at its core, lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilarious. READ AN EXCERPT OF HAPPY TALK In this brief excerpt from Happy Talk, the untrained students nurses stationed in Haiti during the mid 1950s suddenly find themselves caring for a patient (the survivor of a skywriting accident): With scissors, the Nightingales snip away at the last of his trousers, his undershirt, careful not to cut him, fat chance he would feel it anyway. They photograph him without clothes, hands propping his broken body in various positions to get the shots they need. They poke their fingers in his gizzard, feeling for cancer, not that they know what cancer feels like any more than what a kidney feels like, but figuring that as long as they have him here, they should check him for cancer. All the while, one student nurse holds his hand. They are wearing masks and hats and look the same to him. He can neither tell whose hands are whose nor whose hand is holding his. He thinks it is that one there, but then again, it couldn’t be, because she walks away and the hand is still holding his. They find a blotch and cut off a piece of mottled skin. (—We ought to have that checked.) They snip a fragment of muscle. (—Let’s get that checked, too; we can send it out with the other samples and film.) There is one last bodily sample they need. They roll him over, and a Nightingale sticks a long needle into the base of his spine and draws the milky fluid out. (—If there is anything wrong with you, anything, we’ll find out what it is.) —You’ve come all the way to Haiti, and you still get the best medical care in the world, the same exact care you’d get back home in the U.S.A. We’ve run a battery of tests on you, and we’ll send your samples back to Washington, and when they write back and tell us what’s wrong with you, we’ll know how to treat you. —In the meantime, we’ll set your bones in a plaster cast. It looks like you broke a few. He's unable to reply, nod, or even open his eyes. They can't be sure he's listening. —Samantha Sound says you have 400 bones when 206 are all you need. —Which bones does Samantha say are broken? —I think it’s fair to say they all are, or pretty close. —Let’s set even the unbroken ones for good measure. ![]() Elisabeth Harvor Photo by Andrew Chowmentowski. _Elisabeth Harvor's fiction and poetry have appeared in The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The New Yorker, PRISM international, Best Canadian Stories, and The Best American Short Stories anthologies, and in many other anthologies and periodicals. Her first novel, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, was named one of the ten best books of the year by the Toronto Star in 2000, and her most recent story collection, Let Me Be the One, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award. Her first book of poetry, Fortress of Chairs, won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for 1992. An Open Door in the Landscape, her third book of poetry, was released in September 2010. RUSTY TALK WITH ELISABETH HARVOR Kelli Deeth: How do stories and poems come to you? Elisabeth Harvor: The music of certain lines comes to me—and keeps coming to me—like a line of a song or poem remembered, but it's a beat that isn't consciously from any song or poem I’ve ever read or heard. So this is how a story or poem begins. With poetry, the opening line can sometimes sound like a maxim with self-deprecation in it. Take the beginning of the poem called "I Am A Scientist" which begins with the words Like all paranoids, I am a scientist Dark Cause + x = Predestined Effect, that is, if someone doesn't like someone, namely x and if x = me, then I'm turned into a sleuth in the name of survival... I can't see these lines as the opening of a story, they are too rhythmic, too insistently declarative. Another example of opening lines that feel as if they need to become the beginning of a poem—and only a poem—are the opening lines of "Island of Illness": All winter long this has been lying in wait for you, island of illness, lap of warm waves at your pillow... This doesn't at all sound like the opening of a story to me either, and although I can't swear that I changed the first-person voice into the second-person voice because I didn't want the poem to have too much self-pity in it, it does seem to work best in the second-person voice. And why is this? Because the second-person voice feels, paradoxically, both more intimate and more universal. The openings of stories or novels, on the other hand, are usually more languid. I can feel the story-telling impulse when I "get" the first lines. Take the opening of a story called “Love Begins with Pity” in Let Me Be the One, a story in which a poet in her thirties falls more than a little in love with a young man who's a student in a series of high school workshops she is leading: "Why are you laughing?" she asked them. She even smiled at them a little although falsely, surely, for she was feeling damp from apprehension. KD: How would you describe your approach to revision? EH: I value it. It's a purge and a freedom and a benevolent addiction. It’s also a second chance. Or a whole series of second chances, and as time goes by, I'm more and more grateful for second chances. But my approach to these second chances? It's often a matter of delete, delete, delete, especially when revising poetry. But it's a question too: Have I made the best emotional use of the space on this page? And also: Have I gone deep enough here? KD: Your work is very honest. Do you think emotional honesty in a story, poem, or novel is absolutely essential? EH: I do, but this conviction doesn't appear to rule out the occasional enjoyment of fictional inventions, fabrications, and lies. As both a writer and a reader, though, I prefer those moments when the surreal enters the real and does it naturally, without show-offy artifice. KD: What other writers inspire you? How do they inspire you? EH: Woolf’s To the Lighthouse for its mesmerizing voice, for its profound understanding of childhood, and for the depth and complexity of its emotion; The Journals of Sylvia Plath for its joie de vivre and its brilliant fury; William Carlos Williams for "The Ivy Crown;" one of the great love poems of all time; Penelope Mortimer for her authentic evocation of depression and the fierce economy of The Pumpkin Eater; Saul Bellow for the deep anguish and comedy of Seize the Day; Bernard Malamud for the inspired comic originality of A New Life; Paulette Jiles for the stomach-dropping drama of "Night Flight to Attawapiskat;" Grace Paley for "A Conversation with my Father," a terrific story about writing a story; Marian Engel’s tender ode to a bear in Bear; Nadine McInnis’s fetching (if frustrated) mother in "Legacy," and almost every poem in Plath’s extraordinary Ariel. As well as the work of so many other writers. KD: What would you say are the rewards and challenges of a writing life? EH: The challenges are a big part of the pleasure of throwing yourself into the work. When I was younger, though, I resented any suggestion that anything I wrote might benefit from revision. I couldn't bear to tamper with what I saw as perfection! Back then, so-called real life also took so much of my attention away from my writing life, but once my children were growing up and my marriage was ending in divorce, I began to see all the ways that those losses could transform themselves into a passion for the work and that’s when the writing life became everything to me. Or almost everything: a calling, a refuge, a liberation. ![]() ELISABETH HARVOR'S MOST RECENT BOOK In An Open Door in the Landscape, Palimpsest Press, 2011 Description from Palimpsest Press _In An Open Door in the Landscape, the real and the surreal exist side by side. Doors open on snow, war, influenza, summer and winter oceans, the efficiency of obsession, and men who can dance. In yet another world, on a hot city morning in our most recent century, the tiny industrial screech of insects in August gardens becomes a backdrop for a lovesick woman waiting on a veranda for the postman to bring her relief “in the last era before e-mail, in the last era before high tech gives short shrift to longing.” Other poems shine out of more fleeting events, each poem radiating with the emotional intensity of its moment. “What a gift Harvor possesses. Few write as intensely precise and gracefully spare works.” —The Toronto Star “Dart-accurate poetic observations...” —The Malahat Review “Harvor takes chances in her writing, breathtaking ones.” —Arc ![]() Sheila Heti Sheila Heti lives in Toronto. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer and is the author of five books: the short story collection, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books); the novel, Ticknor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); How Should a Person Be? (Anansi) which is forthcoming in the U.S. from Henry Holt in the summer of 2012; an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse (McSweeney's McMullins) featuring paintings by Clare Rojas; and a book of conversational philosophy with Misha Glouberman called The Chairs Are Where the People Go (Faber and Faber). Her work has been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Vietnamese and Serbian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, n+1, McSweeney’s, Brick, Geist, Maisonneuve, Bookforum, The Guardian, and other places. She studied playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. RUSTY TALK WITH SHEILA HETI Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Sheila Heti: I don't have a first memory of writing. Or reading. Or speaking! Or hearing words. KM: What keeps your going as a writer or why do you write? SH: Because not much else makes time feel so bottomless. KM: How would you describe your writing process? How does revision figure into your process? SH: I write it first, then I revise it. Sometimes I revise it right then and there, and sometimes I wait a few weeks, months or years. It depends on the piece and how much in a hurry I am. Sometimes I don't know where I want to go with it. Then I leave it alone. There's always something to work on. I used to only work on one thing at a time, but I like having many things to work on, depending on where my mind wants to be. Now I can always be working. I don't have to be in the mood or any particular mood because if you have ten things on the go, at least one of them will be what you're in the mood for. KM: What influences your writing the most? SH: The time I'm at in my life. KM: What authors or books would you recommended to someone aspiring to be an writer? SH: I would mostly just recommend not reading a book to the end if you're not enjoying it. Forget about how it turns out and go find a book you actually like. I can't believe how people waste time this way, finishing books they're not enjoying. The book doesn't care. God doesn't care. Where does this imperative come from to finish a book one has started? Move on! KM: What is the best thing about being a writer and what is the worst thing? SH: The best thing is doing what you want to do with your life (if that is what you want to do--write) and there is no worst thing. Well, maybe the worst thing is that you don't get to mature in a steady way. It's really lumpy. It's sort of dependent on finishing books. Sometimes if a book takes a long time to finish, like you start it when you're 25 and finished when you're 35, then when you turn 35, you feel more like you're 26. It's hard to believe you're actually 35. ![]() A RECENT BOOK BY SHEILA HETI How Should a Person Be?, House of Anansi Press, 2010 Description from House of Anansi From the internationally acclaimed author of The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman -- of two such artists, in fact. For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself. Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer. ![]() Bonnie Bowman Photo by Teressa Fulker Bonnie Bowman’s debut novel, Skin, won the inaugural ReLit Award. Her writing has bee published in The Vancouver Review, subTerrain, Reader’s Digest, and in the anthologies Exact Fare Only I and Body Breakdowns. Bonnie is also a songwriter, journalist, freelance writer and has been a finalist for the Western Magazine Awards. When she’s not writing, she’s singing in the band Tomboyfriend.She was born in Toronto, where she now lives after a longish stint in Vancouver. Spaz is her second novel. RUSTY TALK WITH BONNIE BOWMAN Kathryn Mockler: How did you first come to writing? Bonnie Bowman: I think most people, including myself, don’t come to writing…writing comes to them. It’s something you are basically born to do and likely have done since a very young age. That said, I came to the world of published writing first through journalism because I thought it would be fantastic to actually be PAID to write. Once, while being a reporter in Vancouver, I did a story about the International 3-Day Novel Contest and thought: “What the hell”. I entered, I won, my first book, Skin, got published and went on to win the inaugural ReLit award. So, in my case, despite all the novels and short stories I had written over the decades and hidden away in boxes and drawers, it was a contest and a novel that was written in only three days that started everything. KM: What keeps you going as a writer? BB: Short answer: Espresso. Longer answer: All the glamour and fame and wealth! (obviously not). What keeps me going is when I haven’t written anything for awhile and I start getting all twitchy and feeling like I have scabies. The only cure for this is to write something, anything. KM: What is the revision process like for you? BB: The revision process is not at all onerous for me. In fact, I shouldn’t even admit this, but I don’t revise much at all, compared to most other authors I know. I do not write countless drafts. I do not sit at a desk with zillions of post-it notes plastered to my wall, guiding my characters’ every action. I write one draft, and then I dick around with it. This, I believe, comes from my years in journalism, where I was trained to write quickly and accurately, to bang out a story that you know won’t even have time to be edited. And on the editing front, I was also an editor for years in newspapers, which further honed those chops. However, all that being said, I generally write character-driven stories and don’t have to deal with super-tricky plots and subplots, in which case I might need a post-it note or two. I’d probably suck at writing mysteries. KM: How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? BB: Okay, I almost don’t want to answer this question because I’ve never been rejected (yet). I’d like to say this is because I’m such a fucking brilliant writer, but I’m sure it’s more likely due to the fact that I don’t write hundreds of short stories and then send them all out blindly in a blitz attack to every single literary magazine that exists on the planet. I’m sure if I did that, I would get rejections. I send stuff that I know will be a good fit for a particular magazine, or sometimes I’m asked to contribute to a literary anthology, in which case they pretty much know the style of story they’ll be receiving. In terms of book publishers, because I won the 3-day novel contest and it was sponsored at the time by Anvil Press, I had a ready-made publisher. Everything I’ve published since has been with Anvil. If/when I do get rejected, I’ll probably just deal with it by thinking: “When I win the Giller, YOU’LL BE SORRY!!!!” No, in all seriousness, I usually don’t wallow in disappointment. I just move on. The most important thing is that YOU believe in your book or story. Fuck everyone else. KM: What authors or books would you recommend to new writers? BB: That’s a tough question. If you’re a writer, you’re likely a voracious reader too. You should read what you like, and that’s different for everyone. In general, it’s probably good to have a lot of the classics (dead authors) under your belt (CLICHÉ! DON’T EVER WRITE ‘UNDER YOUR BELT’!), just as it’s good to read your contemporaries. If you’re thinking of publishing with an independent Canadian press, it’s a really, really, really good idea to read their lists. Likewise, if you’re aiming to do genre writing, read everything you can get your hands on in your preferred genre. KM: Is there an author that had a significant impact in your life? BB: There is no single author who had a significant impact on my literary life. Since having been published, there are a lot of Canadian authors I am now fortunate to count among my friends. They have all had an impact in their own ways, whether it’s from me being inspired by their writing, or for just being able to sit around, drink and talk about writing, or the issues faced in publishing, or gleaning valuable information on grants, retreats, agents, readings, events, film options, or anything you, as an author, need to know. And, it should be noted, once this high-minded literary conversation hits the second bottle of wine, it will typically degenerate into a catty bitchfest, which is where all the really valuable information lies. So, drinking with other authors is important. KM: A piece of literary advice for new writers? BB: Some people say, “Write what you know.”I agree with that insofar as, say, you’ve worked in a slaughterhouse once and you want to write a novel set in a slaughterhouse. In that instance, writing what you know about slaughterhouses is entirely useful and relevant. Not so much if you then take it further and the novel ends up being a thinly veiled account about YOUR life in the slaughterhouse and YOUR coworkers and friends. So I guess my advice would be, if you’re going to write like that, and it’s not a memoir, don’t be surprised if you lose some friends. KM: Your funniest literary moment? BB: Perhaps the funniest moment was when I was nominated for the ReLit award and attended the ceremony, which was held on a beach on Vancouver Island. Because I had been nominated for Skin, I was certain that my nasty little 3-day-novel would not win against the other fantastic heavyweight contenders. So, I drank way too much free wine and was peeing in the bushes when I heard my name being called out.I basically ran down the beach, pulling my pants up, spilling my plastic cup of red wine all over myself, and arriving out of breath to discover I’d won and had to make a fucking speech. That brilliant literary moment was, of course, then written up by the media in attendance and I had to re-live it in print the following day. Yay. ![]() BONNIE BOWMANS' MOST RECENT BOOK Spaz, Anvil Press, 2011 Description from publisher Meet Walter Finch, an ungainly kid who survives his cloying suburban childhood to make it only as far as the local mall, where he rises through the ranks to become manager of a shoe store. Unlike his other childhood friends who either flee suburbia or remain as resigned fixtures, Walter is content with his lot and finds the shoe store an ideal environment in which to pursue his grand ambition: designing the perfect woman’s shoe. As he delves further into his passion, alone in his apartment at night, Walter comes to believe that his path will ultimately lead him to the perfect foot to fit his creation. On an all-consuming mission to find his princess, Walter is plunged into a separate reality, his own fairytale. As things spin steadily out of control, Walter’s eventual salvation arrives in an unlikely form, should he choose to recognize and accept it ![]() Illustration by Malcolm Jamison More About Bonnie Bonnie Bowman grew up in Agincourt, Ontario, like Spaz did. When she was in Grade 5, she got a gold star for a story she wrote called: “If I Were A Scrub Brush”. When she was ten years old, she was writing novels about horses with “taut, sweaty flanks” and reading them to her parents at the dinner table. Decades later, in journalism school, she got a “metaphor” assignment handed back to her in magazine class with the words “I refuse to mark this” scrawled across the paper. The story she wrote was called: “Oral Sex in the Barnyard of Life, or, I Bet You Didn’t Eat Broccoli as a Kid Either”. (You can see the progression.) Her biggest fear is being pronounced dead when she’s not really dead, so she wants to be propped up in someone’s apartment until she starts to smell. She actually has people who have agreed to do this for her. She wears black a lot and not because it’s slimming. She despises the colour pink. When she was a restaurant critic in Vancouver, she developed an adult allergy to shellfish, which didn’t stop her from being a restaurant critic. What did stop her was when they implemented a smoking ban in restaurants. She has perfect feet. ![]() Michael Turner is an award-winning writer of fiction, criticism and song. His books include Hard Core Logo, The Pornographer’s Poem and 8x10, and his writing has appeared in journals such as Art Papers, Art on Paper and Modern Painters. A frequent collaborator, he has written scripts with Stan Douglas, poems with Geoffrey Farmer and libretto with Andrea Young, as well as catalogue essays on Julia Feyrer, Fred Herzog, Brian Jungen and Ken Lum. RUSTY TALK WITH MICHAEL TURNER Kathryn Mockler: How did you first come to writing? Michael Turner: Like many of us, I came to writing in kindergarten, forcing that thing in my hand—P-E-N-C-I-L—to mimic the letter professionally printed before it. Before that I composed with whatever was lying around the house. Even before we learn to write, we are writing. As I learned to write I wrote for myself and pasted my writings into a scrap book. Because the writings we were reading in elementary school were often accompanied by images, I would paste images above, below or beside my writings. Sometimes I would find a piece of writing in a magazine, cut it out and draw the accompanying image myself. Sometimes I would compose a page with both my own writing and my own drawing; others times "found" writings and "found" drawings. I did not distinguish between my work and the work of others because for me it was about the composed page, the total composition. After a while the page became pages, a sequence. If you look at my first two books, Company Town (1991) and Hard Core Logo (1993), you will see evidence of the child I once was. KM: What keeps you going as a writer or why do you write? MT: For the longest time I would say, I write because I have to write. I still say that, but the more accurate answer is I write because that is what I do, and I feel I am too old to do anything else. KM: How would you describe your writing process? How does revision figure into your process? MT: I write best in the morning, when my mind is fresh. After dinner I return to it, clean it up. The following day I reread it—reading up to where I left off, making further changes. Then I start writing again. When I have completed what I think is a manuscript, I take off for a few days, hole up somewhere and polish it. Then I send it off. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop writers before they start. How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? MT: I did not study Writing at university, though writing was something I knew I wanted to do. If I had the opportunity to do it again, I would give a writing programme greater consideration (than less) because, among other things, writing programmes provide a focused community, and writing, like any art, is most relevant when it comes out of the kinds of conversations a community provides. And that includes sharing in the rejections, as well as the acceptances. I was very much alone when I began reading the literary journals and sending them my work. I am certain that had I a peer group to read and comment on my work as I was writing it, as well as read and comment on the work of others, I would have been more comfortable with rejection, and more humbled by acceptance. KM: You write in a variety of genres and often mix genres. How do you determine the genre for each piece or is it something that happens naturally? MT: It took me a while to understand what I was doing as a writer, how my first two books are related to what I did as a child, and how the writing I wanted to contribute to was based more on sequences than discrete poems or stories. This caused me a lot of frustration in my early writing/publishing years because the poems I wrote were more documentary narrative than interior lyric, where my subjects spoke to the reader in casual tones, like the subjects in Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (who spoke from their graves). Not poems in the way Lorna Crozier wrote poems, nor bpNichol, for that matter, but poems attuned to the rhythms of everyday people, whether cannery workers or touring musicians. Generally speaking, the poets and poetry editors who read my early work never saw my work as poetry. Same with fiction writers and fiction editors, many of whom could not see the narrative sequences for the spoken poems that linked them. Add to that my inclusion of photos, drawings, handwritten notes and other aspects of the material culture that attend life in a cannery town or a touring punk rock band and you get more confusion, a situation that has me describing my earlier works more as collage and montage, and less as books of poetry (even though they were marketed that way). My frustration with a traditional, genre-specific literary culture led me to a study of genre, and from there the idea that genre, as a category, is in itself its own form of content. This is something I took up in American Whiskey Bar (1997) and The Pornographer's Poem (1999), where I use the screenplay as a compositional device. For me, the written screenplay is a powerful form because it implies a transition--in my case, a transition from one genre to another (and how that transition can transform a character), but also the form's material transition into a motion picture and the inflated economy motion pictures are a part of. Indeed, to use a screenplay is to use the ways in which that form is perceived. In American Whiskey Bar (inspired as it was by Nabakov's Pale Fire, with the screenplay replacing the poem), what happens in the screenplay echoes the ostensibly non-fictive elements that encase it—from William Gibson's "Foreword" to my "Preface" to Monika Herendy's "Introduction" to Milena Jagoda's "Afterword". Same in The Pornographers Poem, where the narrator's film projects (his screenplays) and everyday life (rendered as screenplays) meld into one. KM: What authors or books would you recommended to someone aspiring to be an writer? MT: I would recommend the books aspiring writers keep rereading and ask that they consider why, specifically. If it is the prose, then I would suggest writing out those prose passages, allowing their rhythms to seep in, guide the aspiring writer to that which attracts her. Here's an exercise: if, as a reader/writer, you come across a paragraph that excites you, rewrite it, and, once done, keep writing, see where it leads. I did something similar in the Spring 2009 issue of The Capilano Review, where I took three newspaper articles Malcolm Lowry wrote for the Vancouver Province newspaper (December, 1939), evicted the words and, like Lowry did at Dollarton, squatted in the remains, occupying his syntax and grammar with words of my own—words I wrote in response to his articles. KM: Your funniest literary moment, if you have one. MT: Most of these moments are unrepeatable. But one I can relate happened on April 5th, 1994, when I ran the Malcolm Lowry Room, a 99-seat lounge in the North Burnaby Inn. A patron had asked to do a Tribute to Charles Bukowski night, and I said yes. When the date rolled around, it was announced that Kurt Cobain had died, and everyone headed to the bars to talk about it--including mine. So there we were, one half of the room filled with weepy grungers, the other half filled with middle aged men and women in various states of Bukowskian dereliction. When the Bukowskites took the stage, the grungers cried even louder, and an argument ensued, with the grunge choir chanting "Kurt Co-bain!"; their counterparts, "Bu-kow-ski!" KM: What are you working on now? MT: There is always a new book, just as there is always a reason to do other things, other kinds of writing. At this point my writing practice has broadened to include book writing, essays (mostly on the visual arts), a blog, WEBSIT; teaching, ECUAD; curation, Free Concert. That's what I am working on now. ![]() MICHAEL TURNER'S RECENT NOVEL 8 X 10, 2009, Doubleday Canada; Canadian First edition Description from Amazon.ca Fearless in form, Michael Turner’s 8x10 casts aside traditional narrative structure and characterization to delve deeper into the issues gnawing at today’s global society. Through a sequence of possibly intertwined events, Turner creates a challenging portrait of our modern age, drawing solely on the actions of people rather than their appearance—whether advertising executives or soldiers, tailors or doctors—they fall in love, have children, fight in wars, and flee their homes. In 8x10 there are no names, no racial or ethnic characteristics, and only a vague sense of time. Turner’s characters, familiar yet implacable, are both no one and everyone. |
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