Jacob McArthur Mooney is the author of The New Layman's Almanac (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) and Folk (M&S, 2011), the latter of which was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and named to best-of-2011 lists by The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and his mother. RUSTY TALK WITH JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Jacob McArthur Mooney: I feel like there's a level at which this is a question about lying. Telling fibs is a proto form of creative writing. And I've been doing that for some time. But if you mean, Writing Things that were Untrue with the Intention of Sharing Them as Untruths, then maybe that's later. I don't remember writing much as a kid. College maybe? College, with a handful of moments and phases beforehand. But mostly college. KM: What keeps you going as a poet or why do you write? JMM: I always hear "what keeps you going" as a very wishy-washy, very weak-of-soul question. Not that you're wishy or washy to ask it. I feel your asking is a test, and I'd be wishy and washy if I failed the test by answering it ironically. What do we mean: What keeps me going? Is poetry arduous? Is it a chore? Really? I suspect that people who think poetry is hard have lives that are too easy. It’s a fun, freeing, extrapolation on your life. Consider it thusly and you won’t let yourself think about “keeping going” anymore. It's a challenge to do it well, but the challenge is always enjoyable. Almost always, anyway. The challenge is enjoyable during the majority of its lifespan. What keeps me going? Liking it. I like doing it, and so I do it more. Positive feedback loop. The cycle continues. Hamster; jogging. Response, reward. That being said, maybe if I thought it had stopped being fun, I’d stop. Maybe, one day, that’ll happen. I can’t predict the future, but for now: I’m kept going by momentum and the lack of objects in my path. Like a spy satellite. KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.) JMM: Not every day. Most days, maybe. I've definitely had stretches where I write every day for several months, but also stretches where I go pretty barren for a long time. Dennis Lee once told me he's the owner of multiple 6-month long "No New Poetry" stretches. Having heard that, I've started to embrace my own. If I don't seem to be writing new stuff, I edit. And really, I edit, juggle, rework and pester a lot more than I write new stuff. Anything less than an 80:1 ratio of Time Spent Tinkering: Time Spent writing that First Draft, and you're likely not a very good poet. Or at least, not the kind of poet you could be. I like to stay as mobile as possible, and as unencumbered by superstition. I keep notes everywhere. Usually there's a notebook in my pocket when I leave the house. I use my work computer, my phone, my home computer, whatever. Bits of paper and receipts. And this is really for the 1, not for the 80, in that previously-mentioned ratio. The 80 is more private. I can sometimes stomach being in a cafe or something, but for the most part my reworking process happens at home. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop poets before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? JMM: It's going to happen. Everyone gets rejected. It doesn't mean you suck. Sometimes, it means they suck. KM: How would you describe writer/editor relationship? What can novice writers expect? JMM: First off, the novice writer should consider themselves lucky that they get to work with an editor in the first place. The true "editor", for poetry especially, is going extinct. Most journals staff out editorial work to undergrads and they are only there to accept/reject, not edit in any true sense of the word. They aren't going to make your work better than it was when you submitted it. It's not as bad when you're talking books, most Poetry Editors at presses will help you along to some degree. I've been really lucky in my poetry life to have good editors. Stan Dragland and Molly Peacock and Anita Chong at M&S. And, more casually than that, all my friends and mentors along the way that have gotten their hands into my manuscripts. An ideal relationship between a writer and an editor consists of equal parts friction and ease. They should, broadly speaking, see the work like you see it, be able to slip into your vocabulary and your rhythms. But they're also there to be a separate set of eyes, so they should be distinct enough to question what you're doing, within that general context of "getting it". Genetically speaking, an ideal editor is your cousin, but not your identical twin. KM: What poets are you reading now? JMM: I have a cycle with JH Prynne where I have to re-read his collected work every year or so, and am doing so now. Participating in the Irving Layton gig at Harbourfront last week has renewed my interest in Layton, also. I was away for the second half of 2011, first as the Pierre Berton Resident in Dawson City YT and then as a sort of travelling hobo with a European Rail pass, so I missed a lot of good books. I liked the new Stefanie Bolster and Mark Callanan titles quite a bit. I read with Don McKay in Halifax last month and managed to pocket his new one, too. Everything that dude does is perfect. It's like he's challenging himself now with progressively less interesting source material: from birds to, now, rocks, and he's still coming up with invigorating, completely exciting, work. I'm on a non-fiction kick now, too. I've been digesting works of economic history, some surveys but other more specific titles in areas like the development of international finance, and Mergers & Acquisitions. This is in part for my day-job, but I'd do it for kicks, anyway. The vocabulary is so rich; big tasty Latinate everywhere. Maybe I end up using this stuff in my poetry, maybe not. Either way....you stick it in your cheeks and save it for a cold day, because you never know. KM: Your funniest literary moment, if you have one. JMM: Oh man. What if I didn't have any? What would that say about me? My time at the Guelph MFA program is rich with lost nights full of long, barely-remembered, and completely inexcusable stories. But what's college for if not the indexing of a catalogue of inexcusable stories? KM: What are you working on now? JMM: I continue to try and roll a novel uphill, only to have it coast back down the other side on me. I've been working away at it for several years now. I don't know if it's closer to finished than it was in 2010. Novels are hard. If I had put this time into trying to become a professional baseball shortstop instead of a novelist, I wonder if I'd be any further along. I'm writing some new poems. I think that the three-year gap between books 1 and 2 will be eclipsed, easily, by the gap between books 2 and 3. I'll write what comes, I guess. And tinker with the rest. JACOB MCARTHUR MOONEY'S MOST RECENT COLLECTION Folk, McClelland & Stewart, 2011 Description from McClelland & Stewart The two sections in Jacob McArthur Mooney’s virtuoso collection – one rural in orientation, one urban – open an intricate conversation. Taking as its inciting incident the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, before moving to the neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, Folkis an elaborately composed inquiry into the human need for frames, edges, borders, and a passionate probe of contemporary challenges to identity, whether of individual, neighbourhood, city, or nation. Mooney examines the fraught desire to align where we live with who we are, and asks how we can be at home on the compromised earth. This is poetry that poses crucial questions and refuses easy answers, as it builds a shimmering verbal structure that ventures “beyond ownership or thought.” Mooney’s distinctive voice is seriously unsettling, deeply appealing, and answerable to our difficult times. Elizabeth Bachinsky Photo by David Ellingsen Elizabeth Bachinsky is the author of three collections of poetry, CURIO (BookThug, 2005), HOME OF SUDDEN SERVICE (Nightwood Editions, 2006), and GOD OF MISSED CONNECTIONS (Nightwood Editions, 2009). Her work has been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award (2010), the Kobzar Literary Award (2010), The George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature (2010) the Governor General's Award for Poetry (2006), and the Bronwen Wallace Award (2004) and has appeared in literary journals, anthologies, and on film in Canada, the United States, France, Ireland, England, China, and Lebanon. She lives in Vancouver where she is an instructor of creative writing and the Editor of EVENT magazine. RUSTY TALK WITH ELIZABETH BACHINSKY Sara Jane Strickland: What is your first memory of being creative? Elizabeth Bachinsky: I pretended I was a small woodland creature, like a squirrel or a bunny in a burrow, late at night under the covers in my princess bed in Prince George B.C., circa 1980. SJS: How would you describe your writing process? EB: Intermittent. Furious. Private. Hurray! Writing is one of my favorite things to do. No, it is my favorite because, when I’m writing, that means I’m also reading and watching movies and going for walks and talking with friends or making new friends. It also means I have plenty of time to relax and be by myself. Also, I try not to pay too much attention to what I’m writing until I have a big pile of material to shuffle through. So, I guess I kind of try and sneak up on myself so as not to scare myself away. It can be a daunting idea to try and write a book. So, I just write a little whenever I can. Some of what I write happens by hand in notebooks and some it happens on the computers or on my phone. Eventually I get this feeling that something is cooking. Then I type and print everything out and take a look at what’s going on. If nothing comes clear, I just keep writing. But, usually, some fascination of mine comes to the fore and I’m off. I can start to give the thing a shape. All of my books, so far, have happened this way. SJS: What is the revision process like for you? EB: The trick, for me, is to think of revision as sculpting: best to start off with a lot of material and take away and take away until the thing reveals itself. Luckily, writers don’t work in stone. We can put stuff back where it was. Or add new material where it’s needed. That can be fun. And there’s nothing like the feeling of lopping off giant hunks of your book. Best not to get precious. Poems tell me what they need and don’t need, if I pay attention. SJS: Rejection can stop new writers before they start. How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? EB: I try to ignore it. But, when I can’t, I celebrate. Rejection means you’re in the game, baby. You’ve got ambition and you’re not sitting back on your laurels. I celebrate rejection and move on. SJS: What is the best thing about being a writer and the worst thing? EB: For me, the best thing about being a writer is that I get to meet all kinds of people from all over the world and get to travel to places I never thought I would go. Let’s hear it for hospitality suites and hotel shower caps. And some of my poems get to travel even farther than I do. There is my little poem in Beirut! And there it is again in Mainland China! That is super cool. The worst thing? Well… if there was a worst thing, I wouldn’t do it, OK? I have a very low tolerance for agony. Basically, I’m a poet. And there is very little incentive for anyone to write poetry, ever. So, the only reason to do it is because it gives you pleasure or it ignites some curiosity in you somewhere that you simply can’t do without. The moment it becomes laborious or agonizing or whatever, I think I’ll stop writing poetry and do something else. SJS: What are you working on right now? EB: My new book is called The Hottest Summer in Recorded History. It will be out in the Spring of 2013 with Nightwood Editions. ELIZABETH BACHINSKY'S MOST RECENT POETRY BOOK God of Missed Connections, Nightwood Editions, 2009 Description from Nightwood Editions: Written in the near absence of creative works by Ukrainian Canadians of her generation, God of Missed Connections is a breakthrough collection by one of Canada's leading young poets. This book is profound, devastating, and draws on Ukraine's brave and bloody history as a means to explore the author’s place in the contemporary world. "This book explores a century of cultural assimilation in the West, an experience that is not unique to a Ukrainian-Canadian sensibility. In this book, I wanted to capture the sense of what it feels like to not know where you're from, to be looking for connections, and to come up with ghosts. God of Missed Connections is just the way I've gone about sifting through my own cultural detritus. What makes it through time, what doesn’t? That's what interests me." —Elizabeth Bachinsky 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 _ David Groulx was raised in the Northern Ontario mining community of Elliot Lake. He studied creative writing at the En’owkin Centre, BC, where he won the Simon J. Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry, and was a co-winner at Harbourfront Centre’s 2011 Poetry NOW competition. He has written two previous books of poetry – Night in the Exude and The Long Dance – and has another forthcoming in 2011, Until The Bullets Rose. RUSTY TALK WITH DAVID GROULX Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? David Groulx: My first memory of writing is probably scribbling on the title pages of the books that were around the house. My home as a child was always full of books, and they were full of amazement for me; later on when I learned to read, I remember my father buying a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, leather bound gold leaf, and I used to read them, hang out at the one book store in town, and the library. I was so geeky. Writing I discovered in grade school, one to two pages stories I’d make up. I remember writing a parody of Little House On The Prairie, ‘cause I hated that show and I had to watch because my sister loved it. I remember it getting a lot of laughs. Mostly what I wrote were funny stories and then moving on to sappy pubescent love poetry. KM: What keeps you going as a poet? Or why do you write? DG: That’s a difficult question, a very difficult question, and sometimes I’ve asked myself many times ‘why torture yourself like this?’ My answers are never entirely satisfactory. For me to write poetry it is almost otherworldly, an ethereal experience. You have to be stubborn to write poetry, anything. I believe through poetry we can understand the heart, we can understand our brokenness. KM: What is the revision process like for you? DG: Really, the revision process is never ending. I mean there comes a point where you have to set down a piece and say ‘ok this is good, this is the best, I can do right here, right now.’ Otherwise I would probably still be revising. I still go back to books I’ve published and change things. My own copy is all marked in red and green ink. I suppose you could revise something until it’s crappy again. I wouldn’t call it coming full circle but twisted. I think the best tool for revising is reading it aloud to yourself. I write in the early mornings, lay it aside. The first step is to get something down, lots. I’ll put it aside and go back to it later, maybe a few weeks. And then I’ll put it aside again and maybe a few weeks after that I’ll do it again. Sometimes it’s just tweaking, sometimes it’s arm-twisting, a no-holds-barred cage fit. KM: Sometimes new writers can become discouraged by rejection or criticism of their work. How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? DG: Man, I feel like I’m still, just starting out. I believe in what I’m doing, I don’t think publishing should be a pissing contest, the poetry I write is my own journey and that may not be someone else’s idea of poetry. You got to have endurance. I believe poets and drunks only have one thing in common besides being drunks and that’s endurance. KM: Is there a writer that had a significant impact or influence on your writing? DG: I still recall Jeff Bien and his book America & Other Poems really touched me and Elias Leteier-Ruz’s Silence. Someone who also had an impact is a poet from Madagascar, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo. I don’t read much poetry. KM: What poets are you reading right now? DG: I’m reading some of the poetry of the Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz. And a book by the Australian writer, Anita M. Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala To Talk Straight. KM: Do you have a piece of advice for aspiring poets? DG: The muses are wild and wily bitches and to tame them with only words, a dictionary and maybe a thesaurus; you must be a bit crazy, I suppose. And don’t take yourself too seriously, that’s a life lesson. KM: Your funniest literary moment? DG: This one actually has to do with question four: three rejection letters in one day—one from Germany—one from England—one from the States. “Never let the bastards wear you down.” KM: What are you working on now? DG: Right now I’m reworking two manuscripts. One is tentatively called, In The Silhouette Of Your Moon I Am Dreaming and the other Chant Terra Indigenia. _DAVID GROULX'S MOST RECENT POETRY BOOK Rising with a Distant Dawn, Bookland Press, 2011 Description from Bookland Press: Rising with a Distant Dawn is a powerful and moving poetry collection, which stretches across the boundaries of skin colour, language, and religion to give voice to the lives and experiences of ordinary Aboriginal Canadians. The poems embrace anguish, pride, and hope. They come from the woodlands and the plains, they speak of love, of war, and of the known and the mysterious, they strike with wisdom, joy, and sadness, bringing us closer than ever before to the heart of urban Aboriginal life. The book captures timely personal and cultural challenges, and ultimately shares subtle insight and compassion. Sharon McCartney Photo by Gabriel Jarman _Sharon McCartney is the author of For and Against (2010, Goose Lane Editions), The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007, Nightwood Editions), Karenin Sings the Blues (2003, Goose Lane Editions), and Under the Abdominal Wall (1999, Anvil Press). In 2008, she received the Acorn/Plantos People's Prize for poetry for The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Poems from her current manuscript, Gravitas, were longlisted for the 2010 CBC Literary Awards. She lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick. RUSTY TALK WITH SHARON MCCARTNEY Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Sharon McCartney: My first memory of writing creatively goes back to grade 6 at May Scott Marcy Elementary School in San Diego. We were doing a poetry project, a collection of poems for the class. I was a “horse girl” and I wrote a poem about a horse. The teacher, Mrs. Tatus, asked me to help some of the other kids who were having trouble with the assignment. I was shy, quiet, awkward, full of self-doubt and a little lonely. Writing seemed like something that I could do and perhaps do well and also something that gave me a way to connect with other people. I'm still shy, quiet, awkward, full of self-doubt, and a little lonely and writing is still a way to manage that. KM: What keeps you going as a poet? Or why do you write? SM: I think that I write mostly to figure out how I feel about what's going on in my life. I enjoy writing the most when I discover something new about myself through it. For example, in an early poem about my first night with the man who became my husband, which was basically a “one night stand,” I discovered that I felt committed to him (and loved him) even then. That kind of unearthing happens with poems occasionally. It's a way not of solving problems, most of which are unsolveable anyway, but of finding clarity. A way of ordering thoughts and focusing the brain chatter that goes on all the time. But I also write because it's fun! I hate it when it's not going well and sometimes wish that I enjoyed anything else (like plumbing, perhaps?), but when it works and I end up with a piece that seems complete and alive, nothing feels better. KM: What is the revision process like for you? SM: I find it impossible to separate “writing” from “revision.” To me, they are the same thing. I start out in long hand in a simple spiral notebook. Usually, I'm reading and writing at the same time. I scrawl out bits and pieces and gradually put them together. Right now, I have drafts of 14 poems on the go in my notebook. I'll go back and look over them and make changes here and there. I wait as long as I can before actually typing them up and printing them out because that really changes the process. They're more fluid and malleable for me when they're in script in my notebook. Once they're typed up, I spend more time on each individual word. I have a lot of fun with that stage of the writing process, but it's more like tinkering than the initial writing/revising phase. And if I move to the tinkering phase too early, it's death to the poem. KM: How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? SM: I learned early on to look forward to the rejection slip because it meant that you could send that work somewhere else. Of course, an acceptance is way more fun, but rejection, particularly in the early stages, is unavoidable and necessary. Rejection slips, like bruises and scars, are badges of honour. At first, I collected the rejection slips in an envelope and, when I started teaching, would simply pass the envelope (which got quite heavy) around to the students, who would always laugh when they felt the heft. My favourite rejection slip was from Michael Cuddihy at Ironwood (an American mag). It was simply a tiny one-inch square piece of loose leaf with the word “no” written on it. Imagine him sitting at a desk writing out the word “no” over and over on loose leaf and then cutting up the little rejections slips and dropping them into envelopes. I love it! (and I still have it). But the most important thing about rejection slips is to never take them personally. It's like reviews—there are good ones and bad ones and, in a good world, you can learn from both. KM: How would you describe the writer/editor relationship? SM: I am very very grateful to have editors! A good editor is your best protection against making a complete fool of yourself (at least in writing). Marlene Cookshaw at the Malahat Review caught some very egregious mistakes of mine. A damned fine editor! John Barton, Brian Kaufman, Ross Leckie, and Shane Neilson have all also challenged me creatively and intellectually in their editorial comments on my work. What a luxury to have smart people take the time to read and comment on your work. Sometimes, I have disagreed with editors, but a good writer/editor relationship is one where the two of you can agree to disagree. Ross and I definitely have that kind of a relationship (god love him). Sometimes it's more like we agree to not strangle each other! KM: What are you working on now? SM: My new manuscript is called “Gravitas.” I've got 26 semi-completed poems and, as I said, another 14 in the works in my notebook, but I think that it will be a few years, if ever, before this thing emerges. Many of the poems have to do with bodybuilding, weightlifting, that kind of stuff, which I've been doing for a few years. I love the metaphoric opportunities of the gym. How we get stronger through challenges—big muscles are scar tissue after all. But, in the last few weeks, I've switched to a Crossfit program that's quite different from bodybuilding. There's still lots of weightlifting (squats, deadlifts, presses, etc.), but it's a more whole body kind of approach rather than the isolation exercises that you do in bodybuilding. I'm unsure how that is going to affect my writing, but my god it has affected my body (sore all over). Also, with this manuscript, I'm trying to stay away from dramatic monologues, a form that has become a crutch for me, and from poems about romantic relationships, which can get tiresome for the reader. But, inevitably, that stuff creeps into the poems. I can't help it. SHARON MCCARTNEY'S MOST RECENT POETRY BOOK For and Against, Goose Lane Editions, 2010 Description from Goose Lane Editions: Heart-corroding sex with a tin woodman. The encapsulation of a foundering marriage in the state of a cat on the brink of death, whose health cannot be restored, but still manages to purr. Sharon McCartney’s visceral exploration of relationships — how they begin and end, the tenuous threads that hold people together, and the events that can tear them apart is unstintingly, eyes-wide-open aware. Beginnings, endings, transitions — none elude the sometimes sardonic but always sensitive, sinuous, and frank language of McCartney’s finely wrought poems. Shedding wilful blindness in favour of life-affirming humour, McCartney pushes language from absolute rawness to moments of intimate retrospection, revealing a delicate tension between anger and calm, past and present, denial and acceptance. Reviews "You don't read these poems, you feel them: Hammer in the head, shod foot on the throat, stiletto in the heart. It's those combos of wild, piercing insights (or unusual but poignant images); yep, that's what makes it good for you - or kills you, laughing." George Elliott Clarke, author of I & I "Darkly obsessive, For and Against documents the rolling flux of life - the raw wounds of relationships in moments that are, in turn, anguished, edgy, droll, and affectionate. McCartney's poems are an extreme sport - one well worth playing." Jeanette Lynes, author of The New Blue Distance "McCartney is tough. She doesn’t feel the obligation to rise above a heart-wrenching experience, to find a bright side, or to soften her bitterness . . . These are poems for feeling bad and liking it; not for regretting the vile things you’ve said and done, but for regretting that you now, alas, know better than to say or do them." Abby Paige, The Rover "McCartney has shown a delightful felicity in previous books with stapling phrases into the memory. For and Against expands this strength with different material, and it’s a testament to her talent that rawness isn’t diminished by an attention to fluency." Brian Palmu Vanessa Place is a writer, a lawyer, and co-director of Les Figues Press. She is author of Dies: A Sentence (2006), La Medusa (Fiction Collective 2, 2008), Notes on Conceptualisms, co-authored with Robert Fitterman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009), The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality and Law (2010), a book of conceptual poetry, Statement of Facts (éditions è®e, as Exposé des Faits), and a trilogy of conceptual work, Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument (Blanc Press). Her Factory-type chapbook series is available via oodpress (Brazil). Place is also a regular contributor to X-tra Art Quarterly, and has lectured and performed internationally. RUSTY TALK WITH VANESSA PLACE Kathryn Mockler: How did you first come to writing? Vanessa Place: Cautiously. KM: How would you describe conceptual writing to someone unfamiliar with the genre? VP: Conceptual writing is writing that does not direct its reception. It may not be written by the purported author, it may not be read by the supposed reader, though it should be thought thoroughly through by all players. KM: How did you get interested and involved with it? VP: Robert Fitterman introduced us, and oversaw our first dates. KM: What writers would you recommended to someone aspiring to be a conceptual writer? VP: Look at Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Against Expression. Read Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing and Marjorie Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius. Pay attention to Kim Rosenfield and do not neglect the canon. KM: Do you have a piece of advice for those entering the genre? VP: Remember it’s not personal. KM: What are you working on now? VP: My Êtant Donnés. _ _A RECENT PROJECT BY VANESSA PLACE Statement of Facts, Blanc Press, 2010 _
Description from Blanc Press: A statement of facts is a legal document which sets forward factual information without argument. These documents are used in a variety of legal settings, ranging from appeals to filing vehicle registration paperwork. The goal of a statement of facts is not to put forward an argument, but rather to present factual information in a clear, easy to understand way. That said, many lawyers may make implicit arguments in a statement of facts, using a variety of tricks to sway the reader to one point of view or another. Typically these arguments are designed to paint someone in a favorable light, or to dismiss the reliability of someone else. Tragodía is composed of the three parts of an appellate brief: Statement of Facts, which sets forth, in narrative form, the evidence of the crime as presented at trial; Statement of the Case, which sets forth the procedural history of the case; and Argument, which are the claims of error and (for the defense) the arguments for reversing the judgment. Place’s Statement of Facts project involves reproducing Statements of Facts from some of her appellate briefs and representing them as poetry. “What is a fact? “On February 28, 2005, seventeen-year-old Amanda was living with her mother and her twelve-year-old sister in Lennox.” Yes, that seems like a perfectly neutral factual statement made by Amanda in her police testimony. But next we read, “When Amanda came home about 8:00 p.m., the lights were off and the doors were unlocked.” Are these facts? Not necessarily: Amanda might be inventing the scenario, although these facts can be checked against the testimony of her mother Sandy, who was out at the laundromat when the incident occurred. But by the time we get to “Once inside, Amanda made something to eat, then went to the bedroom, and laid on her mother’s bed to watch a movie,” we’re in the realm of interpretation so that the surreal account of the sexual assault scene that follows is less than factual. Vanessa Place, herself an appellate criminal defense attorney who specializes in sex offenders and sexually violent predators, has assembled a remarkable sequence of narratives, taken almost verbatim from court testimonies she herself reviewed: her cases are entirely “real.” But what is the “real” anyway? What is the difference between fact and the interpretation of fact? Between fact and truth? And what do these “true” stories tell us about the society we live in, and the way we apportion innocence and guilt? Telling it straight turns out to be the most mysterious—and poetic—way of telling it there is. No novelist could invent horror stories as compelling—and puzzling—as these actual case studies. Statement of Facts is a superb piece of conceptual writing.” —Marjorie Perloff You might have supposed that the hallowed technique of cultural appropriation had exhausted itself in the wake of the Duchampian ready-made, the spend-thrift citations of Pop, Burrough’s lapidary cut-ups, or the critical twist given to all this by New York postmodernism in the 80s. But by re-presenting appellate briefs of sexual offense cases, attorney-cum-wordsmith, Vanessa Place has come up with another take on taking. Here the uncanny juggernaut of the Law collides with the excruciating strengths and fragilities of victims, voice is overwritten by context, and morality by salient indignation. In other circumstances we would take our hats off, but given her profession, she deserves a citation. —John Welchman By repurposing legal prosecution and defense documents of violent sexual crimes verbatim, Statement of Facts takes on issues too messy to benefit from further elucidation which only grow more disturbing presented in their purest case material form. For some, what Statement of Facts brings into the public square is salacious, but Place is in effect saying: ‘I move the ball out of this arena and take it into this arena’ in order to pump up the socio political volume on this legal/moral battlefield. Her definition of injustice is sweeping. Statement of Facts does not care what the reader thinks about content and in essence, Place’s relationship to content is like Oprah Winfrey’s to money. It is straightforward, and you are free to project onto it whatever you need to. However you respond to this fierce book, it is indisputable that Statement of Facts has carved out a place for itself as a touchstone of poetic push back. As Pasadena Superior Court Judge Gilbert Alston famously quipped in his dismissal of a 1986 rape case because the victim was a prostitute: ‘A whore is a whore is a whore’--Statement of Facts counters by unflinchingly reminding us ‘a rape is a rape is a rape.’ —Kim Rosenfield Monty Reid Photo by John W. MacDonald Monty Reid was born in Saskatchewan, lived for many years in Alberta, and moved to the Ottawa area in 1999, where he worked, until recently, as Director of Exhibitions at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Among his publications are The Life of Ryley (Thistledown), The Alternate Guide (rdc), Crawlspace (Anansi), Dog Sleeps (NeWest), and The Luskville Reductions (Brick). Chapbooks include Fridays (Sidereal), Six Songs for the Mammoth Steppe (aboveground), Sweetheart of Mine (BookThug) and the recent Site Conditions (Apt 9). Units from his 12-part Garden sequence have been published in Canada, Japan, France, England and the US. He has won numerous awards: 3-time winner of Alberta’s Stephansson Award for Poetry, a national magazine award, 3-time nominee for the Governor-General’s Award for Literature. His first Ottawa book, Disappointment Island (Chaudiere Books, 2006), was shortlisted for the City of Ottawa Book Award and won the city’s Lampman-Scott Award for poetry. He plays guitar and mandolin in the band Call Me Katie and continues to live in Ottawa. RUSTY TALK WITH MONTY REID Kathryn Mockler: How did you first come to writing poetry? Monty Reid: I first started writing poetry in Grade 10. We had been studying TS Eliot, but mostly I wanted to impress the girl who sat in front of me in English class. It didn't work, and I played hockey instead. It wasn't til half way through university that I realized the courses that really held my attention were literature and philosophy. So I dropped out of law and concentrated on English and soon started writing again. The literary community seemed to be exciting and open, some of my work was published in little magazines (Nodding Onion, White Pelican and others) and folks like Doug Barbour and Bert Almon were very supportive, so it was a positive experience early on and, by and large, it's remained that way. KM: What keeps you going as a poet? Or why do you write? MR: I write against loneliness. I mean that both on individual and social levels. There is so much in our society that works to fragment and isolate and dis-join people, whether it be at the level of personal relationships, or city planning, or global capital, that I think one of the great things writing can do is help build community. Plus, having written gives me a kind of quiet rush that I don't get anywhere else. I play in a band and the rush that musical performance provides is related and certainly more immediate, but it doesn't have the same level of complexity or the same patient development. I like them both, but the one that comes from writing has more endurance. KM: What is the revision process like for you? MR: The revision process is non-systematic for me. Just like I believe there is no one way to write a poem, there is no single way to revise. Different writers find different ways to do it. Some poems I have fiddled with for 30 years and still haven't published them. And there are some, not many, that I have deliberately not revised because I wanted them to be a record of immediate response. There are two things that are fairly typical for me though: once I put a manuscript together for a publisher, it gets a pretty thorough going over and two, I tend to work in sequences and I see every poem in the sequence as a revision, in some, often minor, way, of the poems that precede it. KM: How did you deal with rejection when you first started out? MR: I once tried to get into a fiction class at the University of Alberta, and the prof that ran it looked at my work and said, "...trying to teach you how to write would be like teaching a deaf man how to play the piano." So I wrote poetry. KM: How would you describe the writer/editor relationship? MR: It's a necessary one, if you intend to publish your work. If you're publishing, you obviously want others to read your work, and an editor is there to help that cause. In practice, it can be a fine experience or a frustrating one. In the end though, the writer needs to remain loyal to the work and not to the editor. KM: What authors or books would you recommend to new poets or writers? MR: Many, of course. And every writer needs different things at different times. For new poets, I think they need to start with their contemporaries because the language, the issues, the recognitions there will be most immediate and applicable, and the sense of possible community the strongest. Then find out where your contemporaries came from, and why. Without this, your work will become just a sampler of trends. KM: Is there an author that had a significant impact on your literary life? MR: As above, I've needed different things at different times. I've been influenced by writers as different as Robert Kroetsch and Elizabeth Bishop, bp Nichol, and Yehuda Amichai. But the guy I always return to is William Carlos Williams. I like that he didn't move. KM: A piece of literary advice for new poets? MR: Yes. Read outside your discipline. And I don't mean substitute Elizabethan poetry for the Romantics. Learn something about fluid dynamics or animal husbandry or onions. The world is not a text, and you shouldn't be either. KM: Your funniest literary moment, if you have one. MR: Helping rob mclennan move. He neglected to say he'd moved into the top floor of a three-storey walkup. And he has a lot of books. We almost died. KM: What you are working on now? MR: Always more than one thing at a time. I'm getting some Garden units ready for publication by Red Nettle Press in Edmonton and Corrupt Press in Paris. I'm working on a set of responses for a photography show that goes up at the Society of the Photographic Arts of Ottawa in November. I'm revising a set of translations called After El Gran Zoo. Another sequence called Air Miles is under way. And I'm always looking for gigs for the band. MONTY REID'S MOST RECENT CHAPBOOK Site Conditions, Apt. 9 Press, 2011 Description from Apt. 9 Press: There is no more exciting poet working in extended serial forms in Canada today than Monty Reid. Site Conditions writes the process of construction, and the tools for construction, in a series of twenty brief and deceptively simple poems. Questions of intention, memory, safety and failure are interrogated; “You will have to go / the way you fear the most.” MONTY REID'S MOST RECENT BOOK The Luskville Reductions, Brick Books, 2008 Description from Brick Books: Shortlisted for the 2009 Lampman-Scott Award (for the best book of poetry in the National Capital Region) A book of lyrics, fragmented, extended, and recovered, which read as a single long poem. The Luskville Reductions records a year in the life of a small Quebec town and the marriage that disintegrates there. While a book about loss, it is also a book about the state of becoming that coexists with change, the imbalance that for a time makes everything lucid, all the details adding up to much more than only an "us." The visible goes beyond mere facts in these poems, transformed into the deeply seen - and therefore sacred. Christian Bök Christian Bök is the author not only of Crystallography (Coach House Press, 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. The Utne Reader has recently included Bök in its list of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” Bök teaches English at the University of Calgary. RUSTY TALK WITH CHRISTIAN BÖK Kathryn Mockler: How did you first come to writing? Christian Bök: When I was four years old, I was seated on the knee of Santa Claus at a shopping mall, and when quizzed about what I wanted for Christmas, I requested a typewriter. Even though St. Nick tried to talk me out of this oddball request, I nevertheless insisted—and to the credit of my parents, they bought me a plastic green typewriter, which I used to recopy pages from an encyclopedia of machines (my favourite book at the time...). I could not read, of course, so I hunted and pecked my way through the text, typing out the pages, merely by comparing the symbols in the encyclopedia with the symbols found on the keyboard. To me, this was writing.... KM: How would you describe experimental/conceptual writing to someone unfamiliar with the genre? CB: Works of conceptual literature have primarily responded to the historical precedents set by two disparate movements in the avant-garde: first, the systematic writing of Oulipian pataphysicians (like Queneau, Roubaud, et al.); second, the procedural artwork of American conceptualists (like Kosuth, Huebler, et al.)—precedents that, in both cases, reduce creativity to a tautological array of preconceived rules, whose logic culminates, not in the mandatory creation of a concrete object, but in the potential argument for some abstract schema. Ideas that we conceive for works now become systemic “axioms,” and the works that we generate from these ideas now become elective “proofs.” The concept for the artwork now absorbs the quality of the artwork itself. The idea for a work supplants the work. The idea renders the genesis of the work optional, if not needless. For the proponents of conceptual literature, a writer no longer cultivates any subjective readerships by writing a text to be read, so much as the writer cultivates a collective “thinkership”—an audience that no longer even has to read the text itself in order to appreciate the importance of its innovation. KM: How did you get interested and involved with it? CB: Darren Wershler and I made a pilgrimage from Toronto to Buffalo in the late 1990s, in order to see a performance at SUNY by the poet Kenneth Goldsmith (whom I wanted to meet after reading his book "No. 111"). We struck up an immediate friendship with him, and all of three of us were very enthusiastic to discover that our poetic output was converging toward a set of shared motifs about the "concept" of poetry itself--and so, over beers at a bar in Buffalo, we decided to found an avant-garde school of writing (which eventually adopted the moniker of Conceptual Literature...). KM: What artists, writers, poets would you recommended to someone aspiring to be an experimental writer? CB:Recommended texts are probably too numerous to mention—so I am just going to cite a few titles by some younger, Canadian poets in the hope that your students might use them as launching platforms into their own exploration of the influences upon many of my peers in the field…. Derek Beaulieu: How to Write Greg Betts: If Language Jeff Derksen: Transnational Muscle Cars Helen Hajnoczky: Poets and Killers Kelly Marks: Important Instructions for Changing the World Lisa Robertson: The Weather Jordan Scott: Blert Sina Queyras: Lemon Hound Darren Wershler: The Tapeworm Foundry Rachel Zolf: Human Resources KM: Do you have a piece of advice for those entering the genre? CB: Poetry is a test of endurance, not of merit. Write in a manner that surprises you. Strive to make, heretofore unknown, pataphysical discoveries about the unexplored potential of language itself. KM: What are you working on now? CB:I am currently striving to address the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing, what I call, a “xenotext”—a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose “alien words” might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life-form. I am striving, in effect, to create an example of “living poetry.” I have written a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I have used a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans (an extremophile, capable of surviving in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space); moreover, I have composed this poem in such a way that, when translated into the gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets “expressed” by the organism, which, in response to the inserted, genetic material, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein—one that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. I am engineering a life-form so that it becomes not only a persistent archive for storing a poem, but also a functional machine for writing a poem—a poem that, I hope, might literally survive forever, existing on the planet until the very day when the sun explodes…. CHRISTIAN BÖK'S MOST RECENT BOOK Eunoia, Coach House Books, 2009, ed. Description from Coach House Books: The word ‘eunoia,’ which literally means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest word in English that contains all five vowels. Directly inspired by the Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a French writers’ group interested in experimenting with different forms of literary constraint, Eunoia is a five-chapter book in which each chapter is a univocal lipogram--the first chapter has A as its only vowel, the second chapter E, etc. Each vowel takes on a distinct personality: the I is egotistical and romantic, the O jocular and obscene, the E elegiac and epic (including a retelling of the Iliad!). Stunning in its implications and masterful in its execution, Eunoia has developed a cult following, garnering extensive praise and winning the Griffin Poetry Prize. The original edition was never released in the U.S., but it has already been a bestseller in Canada and the U.K. (published by Canongate Books), where it was listed as one of the Times’ top ten books of 2008. This new edition features several new but related poems by Christian Bök and an expanded afterword. 'Eunoia is a novel that will drive everybody sane.' – Samuel Delany 'Eunoia takes the lipogram and renders it obsolete.' – Kenneth Goldsmith 'A marvellous, musical texture of rhymes and echoes.' – Harry Mathews 'An exemplary monument for 21st century poetry.' – Charles Bernstein 'Bök's dazzling word games are the literary sensation of the year.' – The Times 'A resounding success ... brilliant.' – The Guardian 'Brilliant ... beautiful and strange.' – Today Programme, BBC Radio 4 'Impressive.' – Sunday Telegraph 'No mere Christmas stocking filler for Countdown fans. Rather, it's an ingenious little novel ... playful and irreverent ... charming.' – Metro 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. Karen Schindler Karen Schindler is the managing director of the Poetry London Reading Series and a contract researcher at UWO’s Faculty of Education. Previous professions include chemical engineer, systems analyst, and high-school teacher. Her poetry and poetry book reviews have been published in literary journals such as The Antigonish Review, the Fiddlehead, the Malahat Review, and The Windsor ReView, and she was shortlisted for the 2008 CBC literary awards and longlisted for Descant's 2011 Winston Collins Prize.She has served as a grant juror for the Ontario Arts Council and a judge for the Hamilton Literary Awards. Her chapbook press, Baseline Press, was launched in the fall of 2011. RUST TALK WITH KAREN SCHINDLER Kathryn Mockler: Why did you decide to start a chapbook press? KS: Because I was pretty sure I would love it. I’ve spent the last nine years happily becoming more and more immersed in poetry. Doing some writing. Organizing readings. Going to workshops and literary festivals. Picking up some editing and reviewing skills. And reading poetry—books and books of poetry. A friend, Ottawa poet Sandra Ridley, published a chapbook with Jack Pine Press in 2008, and it just blew me away—the book itself. It was such a beautiful thing. A piece of art. I wanted to be involved in the making of something like that. And I saw it as a natural extension of the other poetry-related things I’d been doing. KM: Why is it called Baseline Press? KS: London is home to two Baseline Roads—I’ve lived on one of them for the last 15 years, and I grew up on a side street of the other. Also, a baseline is a starting point--something basic and essential to refer back to. Although running a press is a continuation of the things I’ve been doing, I like to think of it as a taking-off point for me, and hopefully for some of the poets I’ll publish too. KM: Who is in the fall line up? Is there a particular theme for the press or how did you choose your authors? KS: I’m launching three poetry chapbooks this fall--The Black Car by Christine Walde, Sputniks by Andy McGuire, and Cardiogram by Danielle Devereaux. The London launch is Wed. Nov. 2 at Brennan’s Beer & Bistro. And we’re doing a joint launch with Cactus Press in Toronto on Thu. Nov. 3, as part of the Livewords Reading Series. Christine and Andy I’ve known for several years through the Poetry London Reading Series. And Danielle I met two years ago at a poetry festival. They’re all terrific poets on their way to publishing their first full-length collections. The chapbook is the perfect stepping stone towards that. I’m also publishing two single-poem broadsides—by Jeffery Donaldson and Sharon McCartney. As well as helping new writers take that first dip into the publishing pond, I’m looking forward to working with more established poets who I admire. KM: How many books are in each edition? KS: 75 copies of each chapbook, and 50 copies of each broadside. Those numbers may change from year to year, as I figure out demand. KM: How did you approach book design? KS: I did a lot of playing around before I approached any poets—made a few mock-ups using a dozen poems by Wallace Stevens. Pretended it was the real thing—shopped for cover stock and fly-leaf, chose a title, designed a cover, experimented with layout. This gave me an example to present to my prospective authors. Once each poet was on-board, the design was very much a joint effort. Each provided input regarding paper, graphics, etc. I made suggestions they didn’t like, and vice versa. Compromise is a given. KM: What surprised you the most about the process of launching a press? KS: I was overwhelmed by the support of the small-press community. I knew very little about how it all worked—paper suppliers? printing options? poet royalties? A few presses in particular—Cameron Anstee’s Apt. 9 (Ottawa), and Jim Johnstone’s Cactus Press (Toronto)—were over-the-top helpful. Seemed not the least bit bothered by my endless emails and phone calls. Everyone who does this seems to be in it for the love of poetry, and there’s a nice camaraderie between the presses. I’ve seen this at the small-press fairs I’ve attended too. So I’ve never felt stuck at any point this year. Good advice was always an email away. The other surprise was how much I enjoyed the hands-on work—the paper cutting, the folding, the thread binding. It became kind of a meditative thing for me. I bought a terrific German-made rotary paper cutter, which I’ve kind of become addicted to (if anyone has any paper they need cutting…) KM: Did you face any challenges? KS: My first year has involved a tremendous amount of work, that’s for sure. Especially because I don’t yet have the funds to buy publishing and design software that allows for shortcuts. But I was prepared to put some hours into this. One thing that perhaps took me the whole year to figure out (and that I still can’t get my head around) is how much mistake paper I’d go through… KM: Do you have any specific goals for the future? KS: I would love to have access to a letter-press machine at some point. Especially for broadsides. KM: London's had a rich art and literary history. As a poet, reviewer, reading event organizer, and now publisher, can you tell us a little bit about the literary scene in London, Ontario today? KS: The Poetry London Reading Series, started by poet Cornelia Hoogland, is at the top of my list. Over the last seven years we’ve featured some of the country’s best (Lorna Crozier, coming October 19th!) as well as giving local writers a chance to take the stage. The poetry community that has grown around the series and the associated workshops is a dedicated group. And we’re always looking for new poetry aficionados. The series runs out of Landon Library in Wortley Village. And there’s plenty more going on in London. We’re home to a number of excellent writers. Poet Laureate Penn Kemp has done a great job stirring things up this year—with her “Poetry in Motion” bus project, for example. London’s Kitty Lewis, general manager of Brick Books (one of the country’s top publishing houses) is a huge local poetry cheerleader. The London Writers Society is a big support to the city’s writers. And then there are the people you don’t hear so much about, who are doing their thing every day to nurture literature in the community—English teacher Ola Nowosad, who was involved in the Poetry In Voice high school recitation pilot project this year; Kelly Bradley, who facilitates the Grit Uplifted creative writing group for people who are homeless; Amy Van Es, who just launched Writtle Magazine. There are dozens more. Hats off to all of them. KM: Do you have any advice for new writers and aspiring editors or publishers? KS: The piece of advice I keep coming back to, concerning all things creative, was given to me six years ago when I attended a writing program at Banff. I was very new to writing and when I saw the work of some of the other participants, I was convinced that I was only there due to some fluky clerical error. One day one of the faculty, novelist Curtis Gillespie, told me that years earlier, when he himself had attended the program as a student, he had felt the same way. But he kept at it. And he told me that if you took all those intimidating writers he’d been thrown in with, and looked at where they were at today, you’d find that very few of them were still writing and getting published. But he was. Point being, to do something, you don’t have to be the best at it right off the bat. The desire to DO it counts for an awful lot. |
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