bill bissett Photo by Joy Masuhara bill bissett born on lunaria sum 4oo yeers ago approximatelee in lunarian time was sent 2 erth on first childrns shuttul from th at that time trubuld planet landid in halifax moovd 2 vancouvr at 17 moovd 2 london wher i was part uv luddites alternativ rock band thn toronto wher ium poet in residens at workman arts & recording with pete dako wanting alwayze 2 xploor words n sounds n image in th writing n painting showing paintings at th secret handshake art galleree toronto most recent book novel from talonbooks rusty talk with bill bissett I asked bill bissett these questions about his writing process:
He responded by email over the month of September 2012: dere kathryn th first 2 qwestyuns 4 rustee talk mor as it cums in th first creativ work i remembr was in grade 3 or 4 b4 going in2 th hospital 4 a coupul uv yeers was a pome i wrote abt sail boats in th watr n th feeling in my brain n heart was veree thrilling 4 me an elixr reelee thn a littul whil latr aftr mor thn a few operaysyuns i was in th oxygen tent n realizing i wud nevr b a dansr n or a figur skatr my first reel ambishyuns i cud write n paint i thot n that way feel th line mooving thru space n that way as well feeling th taktilitee uv life being physikal th enhansment from th abstraksyuns uv th skripts we wer ar all living thru i wrote my first storee thn in th oxygen tent wher i was deliting 2 drink orange crush n see th brite orange liquid cumming out uv my bodee immediatelee thru mor tubes i lovd that n that orange runway made me laff n feel veree poignant as well as my home planet lunaria was veree orange b4 all us childrn were remoovd from that troubuld planet n sent 2 erth my first storee wch i wrote in th oxygen tent was abt a boy who didint want 2 follow rules n wantid 2 find his own way n swam out past th undrtow wch oftn was both a physikal risk n a metaphor 4 sew manee othr things in nova scotia n at great dangr he ovrcame th fors from th watr n made it 2 shore n thn vowd he wud dew it agen n agen sirtinlee if life wer as friabul as it seemd sew definitlee 2 b why not take th risk my fathr had th storee typd out in several mor copees that was my first publishd work i feel veree warm abt him now in ths moment that he did dew that 4 me n evn tho i didint reelee start writing agen until aftr my mothr went 2 spirit evn a few yeers aftr that 16 n reelee agen full time until i got 2 vancouvr 17 my yerning 2 b always writing evr sins i was in th oxygen tent at 10or 11 has nevr left me influenses medium genre hungree throat mor as it cums in th subjekt 4 me is th genre n th genre is th subjekt iuv alwayze wantid 2 put books 2gethr that hold or contain diffrent genres as iuv also writtn pomes that contain difrent genres iuv oftn calld such pomes fusyun pomes my most recent work novel my first novel made me mor aware uv th medium is th genre n th genre is th medium n th medium slash subjekt is th genre mor aware thn evr how we write is can b what we ar writing abt mor thn an approach 2 mor thn creating th nuans uv it is th uv in my first novel calld novel abt 2 yeers ago brout out by talonbooks its a collagist work prob also calld post modernist in that th linear flow storee line is part uv th whol work is not th whol work th whole work inklewds th modernist storee line th serch 4 a trew love elements uv gangstr espionage n th serch n what happns evn tho veree labyrinthean also inklewds essays sum abt peopul we know in th known fakshul world introdusing ideas uv ficksyun fakt identitee dew we reelee know them can we n wch them is it a fact n pomes also like th essays hiliting theems that ar in th storee line th charaktrs mooving thru space n time n situaysyuns n thr is a hi degree uv th elements uv randomness wch th strukshur uv th work novel conveys inklewds n is conveying my first biggest n still biggest influens is gertrude stein who showsd n shows me espeshulee in stanzas in meditaysyuns that words need not onlee 2 represent but ar in themselvs konstrukts wch fold unfold n refiliing fold in2 n out uv each othr ar in fakt puzzuls made uv each othr sew they can b on theyr own not representing bcumming n being what whats dew our grammars cum from our emosyuns n or dew our emosyuns mostlee reelee cum from our binaree based grammar thees unsolvabul qwestyuns prsist n ar oftn endlesslee interesting yes othr huge erlee influenses allen ginsberg robert duncan denise levrtov bob cobbing diane di prima sew manee infinitlee manee d.a. levy bpNichol martina clinton maxine gadd judith copithorne influences with also sew manee n now 2day peopul othr poets i dew reedings with sew impressd with adeena karasick kai kellough sheri- d wilson ivan coyote richard van de camp david bateman naomi laufer jill mcginn toshio ushiroguchi-pigott chadwick juriansz ar names uv amayzing poets that jump 2 mind helen posno hungree throat my nu book my second novel is mor a novel in meditaysyun 2 charaktrs alredee found each othr trying 2 let each othr farthr n furthr in wun afrayd uv intimasee from his memoreez being 2 chargd n not let go uv how hard that is getting ovr trauma his bad memoree attacks drag him away from whom he loves evn from himself in th present n ths collagist post modernist work tho not as much prhaps as novel inklewds essays pomes seeminglee unrelatid help th reedr n th work 2 reflekt on all th key issews in ths work that cum in2 wun whil reeding hungree throat thees 2 books ar sew importnat 2 me kathryn n i wud reelee like what yu dew with what ium sending yu 2 focus on hungree throat as it is cumming out in th spring 2013 from talonbooks n th nu book ium working on now is in no way a novel sew thees 2 books ar my 2 novels se far altho th charaktrs ar diffrent peopul thees 2 books cud complement each othr th collagist form works veree well 4 me with th way uv working that can inklewd randomness qwestyuning identitee fact ficksyun 4 me thrs an interesting bredth n spekulaysyun in ths kind uv working th tropes n trajsktoreez longings changes growing n ungrowing lyrik n diffikulteez n treetment uv th konstruktiv urges what we konstrukt what is konstruktid what we can build 2gethr n what we can build n how what we build is building us othr important 2 me writrs hart crane e.e. cummings latelee ium reeding davisadora by michael ondaatje his comeing thru slaughter is wun uv my all time favorit books evr p.d.james nu book death comes to pemberley man about town by mark merlis have yu red anne carsons autobiography of red anothr uv my all time most adord books also among th erlier listings touchd on heer erleer in my life that is john rechy city uv night also colm toibin wrote an amayzing book i red coupul yeers ago almost that same titul as john rechy s brilyant city of night colm toibin s book titul is the story of the night camus sartre debeauvoir gide wer huge influenses on me as i was growing in my erlee teens n issac singer shirley ann grau truman capote tenessee williams william inge eugene oneil diane di prima this kind uv bird flies backwards shakespere in school th first sound poetree recording i herd was edith sitwell facade blew me away helpd start me out fr sure as did n dew all thees peopul n sew manee mor sew hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun th meditaysyun is abt letting go letting go uv attachment 2 traumatik memoreez n how can yu moov on or 4ward if yu ar klingnig 2 solv or whatevr bad n or haunting memoreez uv th past in wuns life how thees 2 peopul try 2 love each othr thru th dilemma they ar living n what happns intrspersd thru ths meditayshyun discussyuns conver saysyuns pledges collapses n regroupings ar pomes song essays its not a book uv doom but it contains sum doom n like all us writrs have n dew talk abt thru th ages how hard 2 love 2 find it n follow thru with it its politiks n sankshuaree part n parts uv th way my throat is hungree 4 breething my throat is hungree 4 eeting my throat is hungree 4 singing my throat is hungree 4 yu wrap up qwestyuns n answrs 4 rusty talk hope evreethings great w yu Kathryn maybe 2 wrap up heer 4 th rusty 4 now aneeway from th beginning i always wantid 2 b writing reelee in approx 7 approaches 2 writing poetree my main wuns being sound n vizual words spred all ovr th page using th space uv th page as whol blank canvas not onlee using a porsyun uv that availabul space as square or rektangul th shape n size uv th copee size n th book size th ekonomeez uv n othr considraysuns have brout th writing in2 lettr size 81/2 x 11 inches drastikalee n finding th wayze thru th availabul transmitting vehikuls n xpanding wuns repertoire 4 inspiraysyun i follow th vois es uv th work at hand or th writing godesses n gods who i sew beleev in guide me 2 write with novel whol passages wer literalee diktatid 2 me sumtimes thrs a lot uv editing as in th pome 4 hart crane in time sumtimes thrs almost no editing th tiny librarians pome in novel went thru seemd ike manee rewrites othr parts uv novel came instantlee iuv nevr xperiensd a writrs blok i cant imagine evn how painful that wud b i just finishd proof reeding RUSH what fuckan theory a book on theory i wrote n publishd in 72 wch is now being refreshd n reissewd by book thug in toronto my second novel hungree throat will b out in spring 13 n what ium reelee working on now is my nu book mostlee dewing a lot uv lettr texting in it yu can find a wide range uv my work in you tube n also my web site th offishul bill bissett web site www.billbissett.com oh thr ar mor thn a few cds out uv my work chek th cv in th website th most recent cd is nothing will hurt with pete dako xtraordinaree musician n arrangr n composr n gary shenkman n ambrose pottie cest sa i gess thats all 4 now thanks sew much 4 yr interest thees intrviews ar kinduv hard 2 dew sumtimes a prson dusint want 2 bcum 2 self conscious but they reelee help me as well thanks veree much hungree throat veree recentlee compleetid out spring 2013 hungree throat is a novel in meditaysyun 2 peopul getting 2gethr wun afrayd uv continuing intimasee bcoz uv what has happend 2 him th othr not bewilderd n anxious is eagr 4 nu xperiences with his nu partnr th meditaysyun is partlee abt letting go how hard that is n sumtimez how seminglee eezee th struggul letting go can b owing 2 th obsessing paralyzing n shaping burdns uv our pasts th obstakuls that trauma creates 4 our presents n futurs layrs n layrs ficksyuns n realiteez wch ar peopuls throats ar hungree 4 breething 4 speeking digesting saying singing eeting tasting giving kissing sew much uv th worlds throats ar hungree not onlee 4 evreething also 4 food watr air wun uv th last stages b4 passing uv peopul with parkinsons is whn th throat no longr swallows millyuns uv peopul with sleep apnea sleep with masheens pushing air in2 theyr throats all nite long 2 prevent closure th throat chakra being well is a condishyun uv our life th throat is hungree also 4 acceptans uv what is n what has bin n what is beleevablee possibul thru song sound poetree narrativ n non narrativ analysis meditaysun words n meenings oftn dissolving hungree throat looks at all thees dynamiks 2 share greev celebrate uplift love n moov 4words play with th word growing its parts sylabuls n th mouth n throat shaping each in our times gr ow wo ing wing s bill bissett's MOST RECENT BOOK hungree throat by bill bissett, Talonbooks, 2013 Description from the Publisher: Written in his non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, bill bissett’s second novel-poem, hungree throat, recounts the relationship of two men – one bold and unafraid, the other burdened by terrible memories and unable to trust. In this uplifting “novel in meditaysyun” about love, in which we witness ten years of a shared life, we are reminded of the overlapping, sometimes conflicting multitude of “hungers” common to us all: all our throats r hungree 4 breething being sing ing eeting digesting speeking saying food kissing watr love air ficksyun fakt memoree th present what is nu all ovr lapping imbuing change th throat chakra being well is a condishyn 4 life Nadia Litz Nadia Litz is an award-winning Canadian actress and director. After her debut at Cannes in the award-winning film The Five Senses, Maclean’s magazine voted her “One to Watch” for the new millennium. She played Sam Shepard’s daughter in 2002’s After The Harvest and was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Actress for that role. In 2007 she won the Vancouver’s Critics Award for her role in Reg Harkema’s Monkey Warfare. Her 2010 short film, How To Rid Your Lover Of A Negative Emotion Caused By You!, produced by the Canadian Film Centre where she was a director-in- residence, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010, has played over a dozen film festivals throughout the US, Canadian and internationally, including out-of-competition at the Cannes Court Metrage, winning best short at Austin’s Fantastic Fest 2011. In 2012 Litz was featured on the prestigious Wholphin anthology, alongside Jay Duplass (Jeff Who Lives At Home) and Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene). Recently Litz completed an experimental short doc on Canada’s revered and controversial Right Honorable Adrienne Clarkson, which makes its world premiere at VIFF in September 2012. Her first feature Hotel Congress, a comedy-of manners that takes place in a Tucson hotel is in post-production. While her second feature, a love story that takes place in a suicide forest in Japan, goes to camera in 2013. You can follow her on Twitter. RUSTY TALK WITH NADIA LITZ Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Nadia Litz: In grade school we had to choose a story of a historical figure, do research on the figure, and then make a book on that figure. We had to write it, illustrate it, and even bind the book ourselves. My dad had taken me to go and see Milos Forman's Amadeus and I became obsessed with it and subsequently Mozart, so I chose to write my "book" on him. I called it "Wolfie". KM: When did you first start directing and writing for film? NL: I tend to do a lot of "research" before I try something. I read screenwriting books and had taken classes, and I had been aimlessly writing pretend scripts and treatments for a while—maybe 10 years. But, it wasn't until my last year of university studying Cinema Studies that I directed. It was a 3-minute experimental short that was an assignment in a directing for non-majors class. It landed me a spot as a director-in-residence at the Canadian Film Center months later. That was in 2009. Which proves I'm a noobie and you should probably stop reading this. KM: How do you think your acting background influences or affects your directing and writing? NL: I think it does but it is hard to articulate how. I suppose I trust what good actors can bring to a moment, so when I was first writing, I tended to underwrite (according to producers and story editors). I continue to learn the balance of what should be on the page and what shouldn't be. I was just re-reading Allan Ball's American Beauty, and in the script he writes a stage direction for the character Carolyn: "Even when she slept she had a look of determination on her face." That kind of writing is gold for an actor. As an actor if I read that one line, I would understand the character, so I try to be mindful of things like that when I write and when I direct. The script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is also full of stage direction like that. Simple editorial clues that will be an anchor for an actor, without force feeding it. I don't mind breaking what might be considered screenwriting convention in order to make a script come alive for an actor; however, I do believe in a firm structure as a base. KM: What inspires the stories you tell? NL: I have noticed that locations seem to inspire the first grain of an idea for me. However, I hope that whatever inspires me at a given time will evolve as I do as a writer. I think the first few stories we tell tend to have a personal element. Filmmakers can seem like we want our trajectory to be the indie personal story root because when we are first starting out, we have budgetary constraints that lend themselves to personal stories. I love including personal elements in my stories, little nods to my life, but I have yet to ever want to tell the truth about my life on film. My preference is to look around me. I also like emotionalizing things that are "concepts". Also, I get a bunch of ideas via the Sunday Times. Too many, really, it's shameful. KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you? NL: Kurt Vonnegut was the first great literary writer I read as a teenager. He had those naive drawings in a few of his novels, which always seemed subversive to high art literature and cinematic to me for some reason. His voice resonates with me still. He is wry and detached but wholly emotional to me. His satire is never mean. He points out the meanness of the world because his heart is broken that it is like that. That's how I see him. I relate to that way of thinking. His voice/tone is highly original. The list is too long for filmmakers. However most of the films I love tend to be some form of comedy-of-manners in a broad stroke way. I think a lot of Kubrick's films, for example, are comedy-of-manners so I have a broad idea about that genre. Bunuel, Oshima, Ozu, Rhomer, Kubrick, Cohen Brothers, Whit Stillman, Coppola (Sofia)—usual suspects. KM: When you are directing films that you didn't write—what is the process like? Do you have any advice about what screenwriters can expect when working with a director? NL: I love the process of directing others' work. It's a whole other ballgame then directing your own work, and both are equally satisfying for different reasons. In directing another screenwriter's script you have to find clever ways of making it meaningful to you. It's a challenge to have one more person you need to satisfy. It can be exciting that your only way to tell the story is visually/emotionally. With the short “How To Rid Your Lover of a Negative Emotion Caused By You!” it was a case of having two very strong voices in the mix—the writer Ryan Cavan and mine as a director. It's successful because both visions were honored. KM: When writing your own scripts what is the writing process like for you? How do you approach revision? NL: I love to write. It is a joy. I don't feel bogged down by it. If I hit a block, it's a challenge and I like challenge. The thing that gets me down is when I lose interest in something that I have been working on for some time. Do you try to revive the interest or do you let it go? That's an obstacle for sure. For revisions I like to have a plan. I'll start with strengthening the peripheral characters and work my way towards the protagonist. I just read these great tips from James Schamus, who had some harebrained ideas for revisions I think I might try. Revisions are a drag, but he had these thoughts about standing a draft on its head that seemed very smart. KM: When getting notes from producers—what do you do when you get a note that you don't like or agree with on your script? NL: Only take good ideas and only from people you respect. You know your script and characters better than anyone. People will try to convince to take their note by saying things like "you're too close to the script". I say, "yes!" It is a good thing to be very close to your script. Also, when you are starting out people will tell you are suppose to consider all producer notes, because you are new. Like it is a manners thing. This is what I think: your script is the thing you are the expert on. Have the conversation, if only as a way to articulate why you don't agree with their note, but ultimately you make the choice. You are the CEO of your script and a CEO needs to believe in the company and lead it. No one calls a CEO 'precious' when they believe in their company, so don't let words like that deter you...Now, if you're a bad CEO, your company will fail and the public will let you know quite quickly and you won't be allowed to be CEO anymore! So, you have to be a good CEO! But, ultimately I'm all for screenwriters, respectfully, standing up for a choice. Most producers in the real world respect people who can articulate and communicate a vision. It is your responsibility to instill trust in your producers and funders about that choice, however. Also, that was a really long CEO metaphor. I hope it was clear...Also, if you are a gun-for-hire, it's a totally different thing. Then you apply the note and you find your way into the note. Case closed. KM: What are you working on now? NL: I just finished shooting my first feature called Hotel Congress. I had been in development on what was suppose to be my first feature The People Garden when this opportunity to make a film for no money presented itself. Hotel Congress is a film full of things I swore I would never do. I wrote it in 12 days. Very little revisions. Very talky. We shot the film in 40 hours. I star in it. I co-produced it. I co-directed it with Michel Kandinsky. Did I mention we shot the entire feature in 40 hours? We shot it on location in Tucson Arizona in a hotel called Hotel Congress. It is a romantic comedy-of-manners that we shot in 40 hours. We're in the edit now. We don't know if we're crazy, but so far we love it and think it's quite charming, actually. It was made with so much drive and love by an insular team of my favorite co-horts. It would be impossible not to love a feature film. That you shot. In forty hours. In the desert. I hope to make my film The People Garden next year. With a smidge more time. HOTEL CONGRESS Feature Film, 2012 Hotel Congress Trailer from Sofia Francis on Vimeo. Nadia Litz and Michel Kandinsky – Directors’ Statement “Instead of bashfully wearing its microscopic budget as a badge of honor, Nadia Litz and Michel Kandinsky’s HOTEL CONGRESS aims for a genuine economy of craft. Ironically, in a project devised and executed in the shadows of the Canadian production stream, it’s a combination of old fashion virtues – a resonant location, clever camera placement, and a worthily wordy screenplay – that elevates Litz and Kandinsky’s first feature debut beyond a novelty item.” –Adam Nayman (Cinema Scope, The Grid) Hotel Congress is a tender comedy-of-manners about two people who meet in a hotel famous for its nefarious associations to Depression era bank robber John Dillinger. Sofia and Francis try not to have an affair, while trying to find true love. The film comically deals with ethics in an unethical situation and could aptly be re-titled “What Happens When Cynics Try To Care.” Or “Why John Dillinger is Not A Bad Guy.” The film was Shot for a $1000, in under 40 hours at the historic Hotel Congress in Tucson Arizona. Litz had been to the hotel 7 years prior to see the post-punk band Interpol play a show in the parking lot. She was struck by the dichotomous feeling of isolation and warmth the hotel had. The way the hotel felt stuck in time. Nadia Litz (writer, co-director, co-producer, actress): This film was under ‘willing duress’ from the start. I say willing because we wanted to prove a point in this very competitive market: you just need some smarts and an air tight work ethic to make an interesting film. Film at its best is about ideas and relatable emotion. Let that be the end of budget and time constraints. When you start to think of what you can do for $1000, you quickly realize the script can save you. In writing this particular project, I focused on films that we all deeply admired the dialogue of (because dialogue doesn’t need lighting!) and why those films work. Obviously we love Mamet and Woody Allen and Hal Hartley and of recent years Lena Dunham comes to mind. We were going through a major Sturges period – hence the 4:3 - his films are simply shot, but beautifully romantic yet not at all ‘twee’….But, Whit Stillman is still the quintessential dialogue screenwriter for me. His characters are satirical, but his films are tender in a way that sneaks up on you. Could the Chris Eigeman character be more of a jerk, that you ultimately feel for, because a) he is truly stuck in his own jerk-ness and b)he’s the least hypocritical character in the Stillman world. I had him in mind for my character Sofia. Stillman’s ideas and his modern philosophy (or philosophy of modernity) are what you care about in his films. Ideas and philosophies don’t inherently cost money so they bode well for indie filmmaking. That seemed like the highest bar to work towards. I’m not into improvisation, shooting everything and finding the film in the edit for indie filmmaking. I think you need to be more meticulous and disciplined in the basics of the craft as an indie filmmaker I wrote the film round the clock in twelve days. We were shooting three weeks later. Every word we said is in the original script. It felt mischievous to do it that way, to not belabor the process with second-guessing and rewrites. Just write it and shoot it. When you don’t try to fit into a preconceived mold, the mode of storytelling becomes more interesting. You feel uncensored. Michel Kandinsky: (co-director, co-producer) For me, the film is about two people trapped by their own erudite, iconoclast self-awareness. They know what to say at the appropriate moment and how to say it in a clever way but this knowledge keeps them from feeling as deeply as they could. I approach film as an intuitive medium, one in which too much thought gets in the way when time on set is spent trusting your intuition. It’s the opposite of what the characters in the film are doing, until they do it…And then once they trust in it they become the kind of love they aspire to, without even realizing it. This was the first time I had co-directed anything. The remarkably short amount of time that we had to shoot this film kept us from too much discussion once we were on set. We simply didn’t have the ability to talk things out once we started shooting. We had to trust the script and our base instincts, keep out the temptation to over-think. I think that comes through in the finished product. There’s an energy there that I find very empowering. We knew we had to just start. Starring Nadia Litz Philip Riccio Director Nadia Litz Michel Kandinsky Writer Nadia Litz Producer Nadia Litz Michel Kandinsky Philip Riccio & Daniel Bekerman Exec Producer Ingrid Veninger Stacey Donen Cinematographer Daniel Grant Editor Jonathan Eagan Sound Editing Gabe Knox Song by Paul Banks HOW TO RID YOUR LOVER OF A NEGATIVE EMOTION CAUSED BY YOU! Short Film, 2010 Produced by the Canadian Film Centre Directed By: Nadia Litz Starring: Sarah Allen & Joe Cobden Screenplay By: Ryan Cavan Produced By: Heather K. Dahlstrom & Daniel Bekerman Edited By: Alexandre-Nicholas Giffard Director of Photography: Daniel Grant Production Design By: Nazgol Goshtasbpour Description Love can make us do weird things. Sadie does a weird thing. She does it to her boyfriend Dennis. Keep in mind she only wants what's best for both of them—a perfect relationship. It could be the perfect relationship, too, as long as nobody bleeds to death. Sachiko Murakami Sachiko Murakami is the author of the poetry collections The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008), a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011). She has been a literary worker for numerous presses, journals, and organizations, and is Poetry Editor for Insomniac Press. She is the initiator of the online collaborative poetry projects Project Rebuild and PowellStreetHenko.ca. She lives in Toronto. RUSTY TALK WITH SACHIKO MURAKAMI Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Sachiko Murakami: I would write fake diary entries about what me and my friends did after school. I would write these after school alone in my room (often hiding behind a piece of furniture), as I had no friends. KM: Why did you become a poet? SM: Um. See: friendless and hiding behind furniture, above. Clearly I was not going to be a professional soccer player. KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.) SM: Step 1: Find something that hooks a thought into a line. Most often I find this happens while walking in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, reading a poem, waking in the middle of the night, etc. Step 2: Scribble line down (usually on a smudgy receipt, as I am rather bad at keeping notebooks on hand). Step 3: Bring line to page. Step 4: Keep going. Step 5: Revision is an evolutionary process. I wrestle around with the poem for a while, take a break, return, repeat. Then I bring the poem to someone else and watch as they politely break its beautiful legs. Then I begin again. KM: Rejection or criticism can often stop writers before they start. Do you have any advice on how to deal with rejection? SM: Stay open! Prepare yourself for the gifts criticism and rejection are going to give you: resilience, yes, but also a curiosity about your work, and better writing. Invite in editors who will politely break your poem's limbs (the key word being politely). Take a workshop. Start a writing group. Get used to criticism, and use criticism. Listen to the questions that are being asked of your poems. Take the serious questions seriously. Rejection from publishers and literary journals is, for the most part, a numbers game. When I read for literary magazines, there would be a hundred poems submitted for every one page available. If publication is your goal, then try your best to write publishable material. If writing is your goal, then keep writing. KM: You used to co-host the Pivot Readings at The Press Club in Toronto. Do you have any advice or tips for new writers about performing their work in front of audience? SM: Don't: pre-explain your poems, get drunk beforehand, or go over your allotted time. Do: Talk to your audience. Look at them. Invite them in to your poems. Go under time. Then thank your hosts and the bar. KM: From your perspectives as an editor and poet, how would you describe the writer/editor relationship? What should a new writer expect once his or her manuscript is accepted by a publisher? SM: See above re: breaking of limbs, asking serious questions. As an editor, I think I develop a stronger relationship with the manuscript than with the writer. In terms of the publishing process, a first-book author can expect to develop the quality of patience. A manuscript passes through many busy hands before it becomes a book. KM: Can you tell us about your collaborative poetry projects? What got you interested in collaborative poetry? What has the response been? SM: ProjectRebuild.ca began when I invited some poets into a poem about a Vancouver Special (a type of house in Vancouver). I was interested in seeing how they would interpret my invitation to renovate it as they saw fit. I then had a friend, Starkaður Barkarson, create a website in which any of the poems can be "moved into" and "renovated". There has been a tremendous response to this project—over 200 poems on the site from contributors across the world. The source poem, "Vancouver Special", resides in my second collection, Rebuild. PowellStreetHenko.ca is an online renga commissioned by the 2012 Powell Street Festival. A renga is a collaborative Japanese form in which each stanza is written by a new person. This renga expands outwards, as you can respond to every stanza in the poem (not just the last one written, as in a traditional renga). Powell Street Festival is a Japanese-Canadian festival held in Vancouver. They asked me to create something like Project Rebuild for them, and this is what I came up with (along with Starkaður). I travelled to Vancouver this summer to launch the project at the festival, and since then the poem has slowly grown as people reflect on change ("henko"), the theme of the poem. Why do this? I like the idea of putting writing out there that can be taken and messed around with and misinterpreted and reused and repurposed. I like the discomfort it brings. I like prying my writing from my ego's fist. I like conversations. KM: What is your funniest or favourite literary moment that you've experienced. SM: Jacob McArthur Mooney leaving the stage during his reading at Pivot to buy the audience cotton candy from the street vendor passing by on Dundas. No wonder he's the new host. KM: What are you working on now? SM: Poems about airports/the struggle to stay present. A novel about fake orphans. SACHIKO MURAKAMI'S RECENT WORKS Rebuild, Talonbooks, 2011 Description from the publisher: In a city ironically famous for its natural setting, the roving subject’s gaze naturally turns upward, past the condo towers which frame the protected “view corridors” at the heart of Vancouver’s municipally- guaranteed development plan. But look for the city, and one encounters “a kind of standing wave of historical vertigo, where nothing ever stops or grounds one’s feet in free-fall.” Murakami approaches the urban centre through its inhabitants’ greatest passion: real estate, where the drive to own is coupled with the practice of tearing down and rebuilding. Like Dubai, where the marina looks remarkably like False Creek, Vancouver has become as much a city of cranes and excavation sites as it is of ocean and landscape. Rebuild engraves itself on the absence at the city’s centre, with its vacant civic square and its bulldozed public spaces. The poems crumble in the time it takes to turn the page, words flaking from the line like the rain-damaged stucco of a leaky condominium. The city’s “native” residential housing style now troubles the eye with its plainness, its flaunting of restraint, its ubiquity. What does it mean to inhabit and yet despise the “Vancouver Special”; to attempt to build poems in its style, when a lyric is supposed to be preciously unique, but similar, in its stanzas or “rooms,” to other lyric poems? What does it mean to wake from a dream in which one buys a presale in a condo development—and is disappointed to have awoken? In the book’s final section, the poems turn inward, to the legacy left by Murakami’s father, who carried to his death the burden of the displaced and disinherited: the house seized by the government during WWII, having previously seized the land from its native inhabitants—a “mortgage” from which his family has never truly recovered. The Invisibility Exhibit, Talonbooks, 2008 Description from the publisher: These poems were written in the political and emotional wake of the “Missing Women” of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Although women had been going missing from the neighbourhood since the late 1970s, police efforts were not coordinated into a full-scale investigation until the issue was given widespread public visibility by Lori Culbert, Lindsay Kines and Kim Bolan’s 2001 “Missing Women” series in the Vancouver Sun. This media coverage, combined with the efforts of activists in political and cultural sectors, finally resulted in increased official investigative efforts, which have so far led to the arrest of Robert Pickton, on whose property the remains of twenty-seven of the sixty-eight listed women were found. In December 2007, Pickton was convicted of six counts of second-degree murder in what had become one the highest-profile criminal cases to take place in B.C.’s history; yet this is not the focus of this book. As the title suggests, the concern of this project is an investigation of the troubled relationship between this specific marginalized neighbourhood, its “invisible” populations both past and present, and the wealthy, healthy city that surrounds it. These poems interrogate the comfortable distance from which the public consumes the sensationalist news story by turning their focus toward the normative audience, the equally invisible public. In the speaker’s examination of this subject, assumptions and delineations of community, identity and ultimately citizenship are called into question. Projects such as Lincoln Clarkes’ controversial Heroines photographic series and subsequent book (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2002), news stories, and even the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Winter Games circulate intertextually in this manuscript, while Pickton’s trial is intentionally absent. Irritated by complacency, troubled by determinate narrative and the relationship between struggle and the artistic representation of struggle, Murakami is a poet bewildered by her city’s indifference to the neglect of its inhabitants. Iain MacLeod Iain MacLeod is a film and TV writer from Nova Scotia. Educated at York University and the Canadian Film Centre, where he was captain of the soccer team, Iain’s first TV gig was writing sketch on CBC’s Street Cents. Later he spent six seasons on Showcase’s Trailer Park Boys as story editor and the last four of those as one of the writers too. Since then he has consulted on various shows in development, done some teaching and mentoring and also spent a lot of time thinking about joining the Navy. Most recently his co-written feature comedy Beat Down was produced and will be released in theatres this fall. RUSTY TALK WITH IAIN MACLEOD Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Iain MacLeod: I grew up in rural Nova Scotia, and I can remember playing in the woods a lot and pretending to be a soldier in WW2. I’d make up characters and little story lines. In terms of actual writing-it-down-writing though, I guess that would be writing stories in elementary school. A teacher said to me once I could be a writer. Foolishly I listened to her. KM: When did you first start writing for film/TV? IM: As far back as grade twelve I’d fooled around with video but nothing serious. Then when I finished university I somehow convinced my Mum to loan me a lot of money to make a 48-minute film. That was in 1996 and afterwards I made a few more shorts before getting a job at CBC’s Street Cents in 1999. KM: What inspires the stories you tell? IM: I think it’s a combination of my neurotic brain and the weird area I grew up, New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, which is literally the worst town in Canada (seriously there’s a list and it’s finished last, two years in a row…don’t get too cocky though Toronto you were 47 this year). There’s always something strange going on there and I just love that. So my inspiration is crazy people, myself included? Does that make me bad? It might. I just love people and the nonsense they get up to. Worst species ever…but I love us. KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you? IM: All kinds really though I’m not quite sure how each person did. My favourite writer for example is Jane Austen (who is the greatest writer in the history of the English-language and I will fist-fight anybody who disagrees) but I don’t think anyone would see her influence in my writing. Should I just say Quentin Tarantino? KM: What is the writing process like for you when working on your own projects? IM: I love to write but I also hate it…a lot. It isn’t always that much fun and (I hope) like a lot of writers I avoid it as much as possible. If I’m writing a script there’s usually a long drawn out period of making notes, thinking about structure, and so on. Then there’s an outline and that should be followed by a treatment but often isn’t. Finally, I write the script and that can actually happen fairly quickly if I get on a roll. I find a lot of the process is about waiting, staring at the ceiling, searching Wikipedia etc. Not fun. KM: How do you approach revision? IM: With terror. To be fair sometimes it’s not that bad and can even be fun, but I also often feel like “that’s it, I’m done, it’s perfect” when I finish a first draft. And by often I mean always. You have to revise though. I guess? KM: What was the co-writing process like on your feature film Beat Down? IM: My co-writer, Deanne Foley, and I have a very similar sensibility (I don’t know if we’re really funny or not but we find each other hilarious) so for the most part the writing went smoothly. It can be a bit complicated to distribute scenes, acts etc. fairly between two people, but there was a lot of talking things through and knowing where we were going first. It ended up taking 2-3 years in the end, and I think that was both a good thing and a bad thing. On the whole though, it was a great experience. I’ve done co-writing where it’s been wonderful and where it’s been an absolute unbearable hell. Writing Beat Down was the former. KM: What is the biggest difference between writing for film and writing for TV? IM: Other than the paycheque you mean? I guess it’s that a movie ends but you have to keep coming up with new stories for a TV show. That sounds obvious but it is a really hard thing to do (watch The Beachcombers Season 15 for example). Not all show concepts can sustain that. When I pitch TV series I often hear “that’s a movie” so I guess I haven’t really mastered it myself. Another thing is that, at least in Canada, there are far more people weighing in with notes for TV than with film and not always in a good way. KM: When getting notes from producers or story editors, what do you do when you get a note that you don’t like or agree with on your script? IM: I smile and think they’re idiots. That’s actually true. But then if the note’s any good or I respect the person giving it I do seriously consider it, which is something I never used to do when I was younger. Maybe I’m growing up. Ultimately, if you’re getting paid and these are the people who will, hopefully, get your thing made you have to listen. It’s a balancing act though, fighting for your vision on the one hand and hearing different views on the other. It takes a long time to figure that out and given the nature of this business I don’t know that anyone ever does completely. As a general rule though, if you’re getting the same note from different people they’re probably right. Idiots! KM: Do you have any advice for someone aspiring to write for television? What is the best way to break in? IM: I don’t have children but whenever I’m asked this question I feel like that’s what it would be like if I did and they asked me about Santa Claus. I genuinely want to be encouraging, but at the same time the simple truth, which is rarely stated unfortunately, is that writing for TV is highly, even brutally, competitive. And not only is it competitive, but also there isn’t a prescribed path to take to break in. It’s not like being a doctor or a welder or a taxi driver or whatever, where as long as you do certain things it will happen. TV is just so unpredictable. One of the things that’s hurt me (and it is possible I just suck too) is it took me a long time to get my head around that. I was trying to apply my small-town Presbyterian worldview to the industry and it wasn’t adding up. Anyway by all means immerse yourself in TV, try to write a brilliant spec script, talk to as many people as you can who are already in the business and so on but my biggest piece of advice is simply, understand just how unpredictable and ridiculous this business is. It’s probably going to be hard no matter what, but if you don’t have that perspective I’m talking about, it will be much harder. And you’ll probably go completely insane (that isn’t a joke). Of course everything I just said only applies to people who aren’t scumbags. For those of you who are, my advice is much simpler, just keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll go far. I’m totally serious by the way—they have a much better shot. Lucky bastards. KM: What is your favourite moment that you’ve experienced as a writer or filmmaker? IM: I was in a bar in my hometown once talking with some people a buddy of mine knew. They asked me what I did and I told them and one of them quoted his favourite Trailer Park Boys line, a line I’d written. So that’s probably the best moment. Not quite saving the world but I’ll take it. KM: What are you working on now? IM: I have a couple features in development. One of my own, called Soccer Punch, and another with co-writer Ed McNamara, Brobots. I have a few more in pre-development (which is code for I’m not getting paid), and I have some TV pitches I’m working on too. I’m also fooling around with a novel fragment that I wrote when I was in my mid-20s and finally decided to work on again. It’s called Leftovers and is about my hometown (I’m also toying with calling it The Worst Town In Canada). IAIN MACLEOD'S MOST RECENT FILM
Rachel Zolf Photo by Brian Adams Rachel Zolf’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity, and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics founders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth book of poetry is Neighbour Procedure (Coach House, 2010). Human Resources (Coach House, 2007) won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. Zolf recently wrote a screenplay for a film that New York artist Josiah McElheny will show at the 2012 Miami/Basel Art Fair. She is an assistant professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. RUSTY TALK WITH RACHEL ZOLF Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Rachel Zolf: I wrote my first poem at a workshop with Di Brandt in Winnipeg in 1990 or thereabouts. Everyone else brought poetry and I brought a failed essay on John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that stopped short at the moment Christian became a travailer. The travailer part stuck, though. The point not to get somewhere, but to keep slogging. KM: Why did you become a writer? RZ: My dad hit me with his foolscap when I was a kid. KM: What influences your work the most? RZ: My menstrual cycle. KM: Could you describe your writing/artistic process? RZ: I read. I think. I gather things. I make. KM: In your recent Jacket2 article you mentioned that your work is included in a conceptual writing anthology by women but you don’t consider yourself a part of the contemporary conceptual writing movement. How would you describe your artistic or writing practice or how would you attempt to define it? RZ: Someone called me a conceptual-materialist, which may be mutually exclusive, or not. Like Lisa Robertson, I am a feminist writer, which encompasses a fair bit, but not everything. The label never fits. KM: You often work with pre-existing or found texts. What draws you to creating work in this way? And is it ever a problem in terms of copyright and, if so, how do you get around that? RZ: I am a gleaner (e.g., see Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners and I), just am. Libel law has scared me more than copyright law so far. KM: What writers would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what writers were influential to you when you first started out? RZ: I make work from what I read, and it is a different constellation for each book. I don’t want to name names here because the list is always exclusionary. But I do name a lot of names in my books. KM: What is the funniest moment that you've experienced as a writer or in the literary world? RZ: The poetry world is unfortunately not that funny. It could do with a dose of levity. KM: What are you working on now? RZ: A book of poetry that looks at ongoing colonization in Canada, and a book of essays on philosophy and poetry and the poetics of witness. RACHEL ZOLF'S MOST RECENT BOOK Neighbour Procedure, Coach House Books, 2010 Description from Coach House Books: Rachel Zolf’s powerful follow-up to the Trillium Award-winning Human Resources is a virtuoso polyvocal correspondence with the daily news, ancient scripture and contemporary theory that puts the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine firmly in the crosshairs. Plucked from a minefield of competing knowledges, media and public texts, Neighbour Procedure sees Zolf assemble an arsenal of poetic procedures and words borrowed from a cast of unlikely neighbours, including Mark Twain, Dadaist Marcel Janco, blogger-poet Ron Silliman and two women at the gym. The result is a dynamic constellation where humour and horror sit poised at the threshold of ethics and politics. Rachel Zolf and Judith Butler read "Jews in Space" (from Neighbour Procedure) Comedian, actor, and writer, Bob Kerr is currently a writer on CBC's award-winning This Hour Has 22 Minutes which earned him a Gemini nomination. He was a founding member of the 12-man sketch troupe The Sketchersons which earned three consecutive nominations for the Canadian Comedy Award. He has written for Cream of Comedy (Comedy Network), a segment for CBC Newsworld Live (CBC), Comedy Inc. (CTV), Nikki Payne's Funtime Show! (Comedy Network Special), and Hotbox (Comedy Network). Bob also co-wrote and performed in the short film, The Funeral, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival and CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival in 2008. In 2011, Bob participated in the CFC/Telefilm Comedy Lab for a horror-comedy feature film script that he co-wrote entitled The House They Screamed In. You can follow Bob on Twitter. RUSTY TALK WITH BOB KERR Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Bob Kerr: As a fan of Letterman, I would write my own Top Ten Lists and read them to my fellow kids at the back of the bus. I also wrote stories that were a direct inspiration of movies I was into. I wrote a story that was about a baseball team that was trapped within a (Jurassic Park-type) jungle and the star pitcher was bitten by a "gypsy hamster" that turned him into a (Pet Sematary 2-style) zombie. Really dumb. KM: When did you first start writing for film/TV and how did you get into it? BK: I was a member of a comedy troupe called The Sketchersons, and we did a weekly show called Sunday Night Live which heavily borrowed from the format of Saturday Night Live. I had done the Weekend Update part of the show for a large part of the time. Producers who saw the show asked me to submit things. My first writing gig was a for a late-night talk show pilot that didn't go anywhere and that was followed by my first trial run at This Hour Has 22 Minutes. KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you? BK: It was mainly performers, actually. David Letterman and Conan O'Brien were big influences. They do what they want to do. And a lot of it's really weird, and I like weird things. KM: How does the writing room work for This Hour Has 22 Minutes? BK: Early in the week, we pitch sketches and spend the whole day and night writing them. After the table read, sketches are picked and then the following days are focused more on copy jokes (a.k.a. news jokes...y'know, the set-up-punch stuff) and things called ledes, which is writing jokes around actual news footage. We sometimes pair up on sketches, but there's a lot of independent writing. My favourite days are writing copy jokes because we have table reads of those jokes amongst the writers and we have a couple laughs. Sometimes even more. KM: For someone looking to get into TV or comedy writing, a writing room—especially a comedy room—can seem intimidating. Do you have any advice for how to get over feeling like an idiot if your joke fails or no one likes your ideas in the room? BK: Trust me, I know what it's like to feel like an idiot. I've had plenty of stuff bomb in the room. An important thing to remember is that you're in good company; everybody bombs. Bombing is a very key part of the writing process. Because you learn from it. Mainly what works and what doesn't. So ultimately, don't dwell on feeling like an idiot. Because you will miss the bomb lesson. It's not about you! Get over yourself! Move on! (I feel like I'm talking to myself now.) KM: What is your writing process like for your other projects—other collaborations or solo projects? BK: Typical; go to coffee shop, order an Americano and stare at my computer screen. Collaborations can be fun if you're doing it with the right person. Someone that you feel comfortable bouncing ideas with. KM: What is the biggest difference between writing for film and writing for TV? BK: You spend way more time with a film script than a TV script. There's pros and cons to both. With TV, you don't have all the time in the world to make "the perfect script", so there's not much time for rewrites. You are also forced to write a lot and quickly and that kind of pressure is good. I think you get better stuff from that. Plus, there's a whole writing room that will punch up your ho-hum material. Again, it's not about you. KM: When getting notes from producers/story editors/show runners—what do you do when you get a note that you don't like or don't agree with on your script? BK: Well, there's two ways to go about it. You either don't make the change and pray they don't notice (which they usually do), or you talk it out with said note-giver. That being said, pick your battles. One thing I've learned in TV is that I can't be too precious with anything I write. With 22, there's not a lot of time, because I'm most likely onto something else. Plus, it's hard to feel precious about something I've worked on for a couple of hours the night before as opposed to something I've been working on for weeks or months. KM: Do you have any advice for someone aspiring to write for television? What is the best way to break in? BK: I don't know what the best way is. I only know my way. I was tenacious and I wrote a lot of stuff. I was out there performing with a great troupe every week on top of doing stand-up and I was getting myself seen. It's a lot of work to get a job. There's also the standard advice: Write spec scripts, get an agent, write more spec scripts. KM: What are you working on now? BK: I'm going to be returning to Halifax for the 20th season of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I'm currently working on a spec pilot as well. I'm also trying to think of a funny tweet.
Semi Chellas Photo by Kate Ware Semi Chellas is a writer and supervising producer on the sixth season of TV’s Mad Men. She is nominated for two Emmys (with Matt Weiner) for her episodes in season five, “Far Away Places” and “The Other Woman”. She is also adapting Dr. Jill Bolte Talyor's best-selling My Stroke of Insight for Imagine Entertainment. Semi was the Executive Producer and Co-Creator of Canadian prime-time network drama THE ELEVENTH HOUR, two-time Canadian Academy of Cinema and Television winner for Best Series. The show ran three seasons and was nominated for 38 awards by the Canadian Academy, winning 9; Semi herself won for Best Writing (with Tassie Cameron). As a director, she's had three short films premiere at The Toronto International Film Festival: Green Door (written by Barbara Gowdy); Trouser Accidents (included in the Best Canadian Short Films Showcase) and Three Stories From the End of Everything (nominated by the Canadian Academy for best live-action short). RUSTY TALK WITH SEMI CHELLAS Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively? Semi Chellas: I wanted to be a writer as soon as I knew what that was. My mom was a freelance journalist and she had set up a little desk for me next to her desk. I must have been five or younger, and I had her taking dictation for this book I was working on that involved a lot of puns. When I was 7, I wrote a novel in twenty 3 by 5 spiral notebooks—it was the story of a girl with a tail who lived in a country where people with tails were enslaved. And basically she was trying to get Han Solo to smuggle her out of there. I submitted a story to The New Yorker when I was 16 and got a hand-written rejection. Later I think it became a liability for me. I had to get rid of the romantic ideas I had about being a writer and actually learn to write. The best advice I ever heard about writing was “get dressed every day”. KM: Why did you become a writer? SC: It’s a bit of a cliché I think, but there is no why. I just always wrote. KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker or screenwriter that had a big impact on you and your writing? SC: When I was a kid, in the ‘70s, my grandfather and his wife lived next door to Ann Beattie in Connecticut. I just read that during that decade she had 35 stories in The New Yorker. She was an original and had invented a whole new style. Plus she was tall and funny and had long swingy hair and I loved her. My grandfather, to my mortification, told her I was writing stories. And she asked to read one of mine, and there was a dog in it. She read it very gravely and asked me questions instead of giving me false praise, or acting like it was cute that I’d written it. Then she gave me a copy of her latest collection, Distortions, and she had inscribed it to me and ticked off in pencil all the stories with dogs in them. And I felt like she was treating me like a fellow writer—that we were actually having an interaction that was beyond just me being a little kid who was in awe of her. Of course I was completely deluded. But I read every story in that collection a hundred times and tried to understand how they were so good, and that was an enormous influence on my writing. KM: What is writing process like for you when you write alone? How do you approach revision? SC: I like to have big chunks of time when I write but that always used to lead to a lot of procrastinating, because I’d think, Well, it’s almost noon and I haven’t written anything so what’s the point of starting? Then I was at a dinner party with a famous fiction writer who was talking about how her daughter, a graduate student, had finished her dissertation after reading a book called How To Finish Your Dissertation. And this book was written by a brain specialist whose whole thing was that creativity comes in 90-minute bursts. After that, the brain needs to rest for 30 minutes. And two or three of these bursts was a good day’s work for a creative person; if you’re spending eight hours at the computer in the day, it’s really only two hour and a half periods that count. This changed my life. I started working in 90 minute windows, where I would completely block everything out—no phone, no text, no Googling or internet, no changing the music. And I started doing this with friends—we’d go somewhere and sit across from each other and work for 90 minutes and then take a break for a half an hour. And it’s incredibly effective. Then one of my friends asked about this book and we went looking for it and I swear it doesn’t exist. I don’t know if the writer made it up, or her daughter made it up, or something, but there is no truth to that 90-minute theory. But I guess it imposed discipline on me that I needed. I still do it. KM: Could you describe the journey from your first TV writing job to writing for Mad Men? SC: A long time ago, I wrote a movie that ended up getting made for television. And it won a lot of awards, so even though I’d never written for television before that, I was approached to develop an idea for a series. So with a producer friend Ilana Frank, I created the show that became The Eleventh Hour, and it got ordered, and then suddenly Ilana and I were running this TV series. And neither of us had done episodic TV at all. It was really like getting thrown in the deep end and learning to dogpaddle to the side—over and over and over every week. The series turned out great, and I’m very proud of it. After that I didn’t want to work on a TV show for a long time. But I always said to my agent that if there was ever an opening on Mad Men, he had to get me the meeting. And then there was, and he did. KM: How does the writing room work on Mad Men? How does this differ from the other shows you’ve worked on? SC: Matt Weiner, the creator and showrunner of Mad Men, comes in at the beginning with a vision for the season. He lays out themes, character arcs and the time period. He’ll give us books to read, he’ll read us poems or passages, he’ll show us images. Then we work together as a room on every story—you don’t know if it will be your script until the outline is finished, and it’s an incredibly detailed document. The people in the room are amazing—people who’ve run shows, comedy and drama writers, advertising people from then and now. Writers in their 20s who worked up from being Matt’s assistant. Last season, a writer in his 80s—the late great Frank Pierson, who wrote, among other masterpieces, Dog Day Afternoon. KM: Writing for TV is a collaborative effort. What is the best way to deal with conflicts when writing with others? SC: Be professional. Don’t make it about you. Be clear about the chain of command. There are always going to be differences of opinion, but there shouldn’t be conflicts. KM: When getting notes from producers/editors/showrunners—what do you do when you get a note that you don’t like or agree with? SC: Look at what the note is addressing. The solution being offered may be wrong. But the problem it’s identifying may exist nonetheless. KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use? Besides “get dressed every day”? The best piece of writing advice I ever got was from an editor, who said when a scene’s not working, the problem is usually actually in the scene right before it. KM: What are you reading right now? The book by my bed is The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor. I read somewhere that Ann Beattie admired him, and I’d never read him. And I like to read publications from the year we’re working in on Mad Men--Time, Life, Newsweek, The New Yorker, the Times, Playboy, Harpers. I read the same magazines I would now but from dates back then. Clips from Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner's Emmy-nominated Mad Men Episodes: 506 (Far Away Places) and 511 (The Other Woman)
Lynne Tillman'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 Jeffrey St. Jules is a Canadian filmmaker. His films include THE SADNESS OF JOHNSON JOE JANGLES, which won him Best Emerging Filmmaker at the Worldwide Short Film Festival and the Genie-nominated short THE TRAGIC STORY OF NLING, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Both films premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. He is the first and only Canadian to have been selected for the CANNES FESTIVAL RESIDENCE in Paris. He is currently in development with SCYTHIA FILMS on a musical film entitled BANG BANG BABY. His latest project LET THE DAYLIGHT INTO THE SWAMP is a 3D documentary/fiction that recently had it's premiere at TIFF. RUSTY TALK WITH JEFFREY ST. JULES Kathryn Mockler: How did you first get into filmmaking? Jeffrey St. Jules: In high school, we would go to an old fort called York Redoubt in Halifax to smoke pot and think about the craziest things we could put on film. I never actually filmed anything or even took photographs, but for some reason, I thought I could be a good filmmaker. Drugs can do that. There seemed to be so many possibilities inherent in the medium that people never bothered to try, and I wanted to try them. Then in university, I started trying things. I found out that tons of my ideas didn’t work, but occasionally something unique that I thought of worked, and I felt like it hadn’t been done before and that was exciting. I should mention that by the time I started making films, I didn’t even smoke pot anymore. KM: What is the writing process like for you? What would be involved in a typical writing day for you? JSJ: If I have the luxury, I like to be a 9-5er, or rather a 9-12er. In the morning my head is the most clear, so I like to write then. I feel I can kickstart inspiration if need be. The best way for me to do this, is to go on the elliptical machine and stare at a blank wall, because my body is occupied but my mind is not. KM: How do you approach revision? JSJ: With feedback. I need outside opinions to reshape the way I think about the script. I have a tendency to be lazy and prematurely satisfied if left to my own devices, so I need a trusted person to tell me what sucks. A complete drubbing can often be the most inspiring thing for my writing. KM: Was there a writer or filmmaker that had a big impact on you? JSJ: In my coming-of-age days it was David Lynch and Jack Kerouac. Probably because they made it feel like you could just make stuff that inspired you and you didn’t have to follow rules. They also both operate on an intuitive level, which I have always tried to stay connected to. KM: What is the best piece of writing advice you've received that you actually use? JSJ: Have at least a little bit of a plan before you start writing a story, or you will have to do a lot more work later in revisions. Sounds obvious, but when you buy into the romanticism of Jack Kerouac early on, you might not think you need to. KM: Can you describe your National Film Board project Let The Daylight Into the Swamp? JSJ: It’s a stereoscopic 3D documentary/fiction film about my grandparents. I suppose I would call it an exploration into the unknowability of our family histories. KM: What are you working on now? JSJ: A rock-n-roll musical about the hallucinations of a small town girl. HERE'S A CLIP FROM JEFFREY ST. JULES LATEST FILM: LET THE DAYLIGHT INTO THE SWAMP NFB (2012) In Let the Daylight into the Swamp, filmmaker Jeffrey St. Jules reconstructs the story of his grandparents and their rugged frontier existence in the logging towns of Northern Ontario. St. Jules' tale unfolds on the bumpy back roads of life, where ultimately his family was dislodged. Blending fiction and documentary, myth and fact, comedy and tragedy, all rendered in 3D, St. Jules stitches together an elusive, fractured family history. Yet the joie de vivre of Franco-Ontarian life tempers the hardship and regret, infusing this visually inventive film with both joy and heartbreak. OTHER SHORT FILMS BY JEFFREY ST. JULES
Erín Moure Photo by Karis Shearer Montreal poet Erín Moure has published seventeen books of poetry plus a volume of essays, My Beloved Wager. She is also a translator from French, Spanish, Galician (galego), and Portuguese, with eleven books translated, of work by poets as diverse as Nicole Brossard, Andrés Ajens, Louise Dupré, and Fernando Pessoa. Her work has received the Governor General's Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, the A.M. Klein Prize (twice), and was a three-time finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Moure holds an honorary doctorate from Brandon University. Her latest works are The Unmemntioable (House of Anansi), an investigation into subjectivity and wartime experience in western Ukraine and the South Peace region of Alberta, and Secession (Zat-So), her fourth translation of internationally acclaimed Galician poet Chus Pato. RUSTY TALK WITH ERÍN MOURE Kathryn Mockler: What is your first memory of writing creatively or being creative ? Erín Moure: Biting my toe in the crib and finding out that the waving thing was intimately connected to me. Ouch! KM: Why did you become a poet? EM: From the time I read Mother Goose when I was 3 or 4, I thought poet was a valid career choice and no one ever really managed to talk me out of it. It interested me more than my next hotly desired direction, which came later: restaurant owner. KM: Could you describe your writing process? (For example, do you write every day? When? Where? How do you approach revision, etc.) EM: Hard to describe. I write most days. I write in pencil in notebooks, I move words, I collect words and bits of text from the Web and elsewhere, I translate and use automatic translators, I generate funny sentences, try to write things down before I forget them. I research a lot too: read philosophy, history, buy plane tickets and go to places: Lisbon, rural Galicia, L'viv in Ukraine. Immerse. Usually by myself so I feel utterly lost. Get really lonely. Revise a lot. Move, cadence, check, read aloud, set aside, read again, move. Read a lot of good poetry while I am working and then cut where mine falls short...no mercy, but lots of fun. I write wherever I am but favourite places are while on my bike (I have to stop to scribble), while on trains, while on the roof deck, while at my desk...but anywhere will do really. I change places so that the work can be read differently. Inhabit language and let it inhabit me. I think. Thinking is a kind of writing too. KM: How did you get interested in translation? How do you view the role of the translator? EM: I've told this story before...it's because my mother—Ukrainian born but fiercely always an unhyphenated Canadian, her way of coping with history—always told me there were two languages in Canada, French and English. As a tyke in Calgary, I knew we spoke "English" so I thought French was spoken on the north side of the Bow River. I thought my grandparents spoke French. Then I found out they spoke something that was not French. And I knew there were three languages in Canada. Then I read Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the back there is a three page bilingual dictionary of Ape-English. So I tried to write in Ape. No English-Ape dictionary though, and no connecting words, so it was impossible. I was maybe 7. The role of the translator? To transfer joy from one idiom to another. Somehow. KM: What poets would you recommended to an aspiring writer? Or what poets or writers were influential to you when you first started out? EM: Read poets in other languages as well as in English: try to read them even if you can't, look intensely at their language. Poets that helped me: Yannis Ritsos, Cesar Vallejo, Federico García Lorca, Clarice Lispector, Nicole Brossard. Early important poets to me: Phyllis Webb, Miriam Waddington, Robin Blaser, Al Purdy, Baudelaire. And Chus Pato, more recently, because, to tell the truth, I am always first starting out. KM: How do you think the early poet in you would view the later poet? Have you become the writer that you thought you'd be when you first started out in terms of the kind of work you produce, your views, etc. EM: I am still the early poet! I still love the surprise of exploring in language. I don't know what I've become, to tell the truth. I leave that to other people to define. I am still trying to bite my toe. Though, I guess, early on, I could have never predicted Elisa Sampedrín. Or that I would one day speak Galician. KM: Your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one. EM: Don't really have one...most things are funny, if you ask me...My favourite would be reading, just reading, always reading, and the feeling of incredible beauty and joy I get in my mouth and throat and chest when I am reading. And going to Vylkove to the Danube Delta with Chus Pato and Manolo Igrexas and swimming in water salt and fresh at the same time. KM: What are you working on now? EM: Am working with monologue and chorus texts that could potentially I hope be staged. Poetry but theatre too...delving deeper into that. It's in English and French at once. And is called Kapusta, which is Ukrainian for cabbage. ERÍN MOURE'S MOST RECENT BOOK The Unmemntioable, House of Anansi Press, 2012 Description from House of Anansi The Unmemntioable joins letters that should not be joined. There is, in this word, an act of force. Of devastation. The unmentionable is love, of course. But in Moure's poems, love is bound to a duty: to comprehend what it was that the immigrants would not speak of. Now they are dead; their children and grandchildren know but an anecdotal pastiche of Ukrainian history. On Saskatoon Mountain in Alberta where they settled, only the chatter of the leaves remains of their presence. What was not spoken is sealed over, unmemntioable. There is no one left to contact in the Old Country. Can the unmemntioable retain its silence, yet be eased into words? Can experience still be spoken? |
Rusty Talk
Rusty Talk Editor: Archives
November 2017
Categories
All
|