Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category
Monday, May 31st, 2010
I’ve just come back from the annual Prince Edward County Authors’ Festival, where I hosted a panel discussion with Dani Couture, Colin Frizzell, Sarah Selecky, and Paul Vermeersch. We’d been asked to talk about the writing life, so our conversation ranged widely, from questions about genre, to thoughts about revision (including Sarah Selecky’s interesting idea about revision as translation), to Paul Vermeersch’s eerily exact Al Purdy imitation.
As editor of the Al Purdy A-Frame Anthology, Paul also spoke to the audience about the Purdy A-Frame Trust. Spearheaded by the indefatigable Jean Baird, the Trust aims to purchase, restore and preserve the poet’s house on Roblin Lake as a permanent writers’ retreat. For more information, see Marnie Woodrow’s piece about this in The County Grapevine.
The PEC festival must be one of the best small-town festivals in Canada. Audiences are enthusiastic and well-informed, the venue is spacious, yet intimate, organizers are exceptionally welcoming, and the setting is spectacular. Yesterday, I heard brilliant readings by Steven Heighton, Sarah Selecky, Mariann Ackerman, and Cordelia Strube as well as Catherine Gildiner and Helen Humphreys. What a pleasure to be exposed to new work by these authors and to talk with several fine poets and fiction writers about their process.
Tags: Anthologies, Appearances
Posted in Anthologies, Appearances, Poetry | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
When I met Anne Simpson in 2008 at the Vancouver International Writers Festival, she mentioned to me that she was working on a book of essays. So when a chance to review the book presented itself, I was delighted. (My review is here, at Prairie Fire.) The Marram Grass is a deeply thoughtful and richly textured book - both metaphorically, and literally, thanks to Gaspereau’s beautiful design. Here are some of Anne’s thoughts on writing it.
Q: You’re well-known as a poet and novelist; The Marram Grass is your first book of essays. What attracted you to the form? What, in particular, distinguishes the essay, as a genre, for you? What can it offer to a writer, and to readers?
A: I had questions that I kept circling around, and these questions were complex, and layered with other things that interested me, which is also how my poetry works, I think. To answer the questions, I had to find a way to ground myself, literally, by using the ground of the places near where I live.
And I don’t know if I was attracted to the form of the essay: it was more that the form chose me. And then it invited me to move around, so I could explore various avenues. But I don’t know if I understand what distinguishes the essay. Everyone who writes an essay reveals something different; its magic is that it is so flexible a form. A person can fool around within it.
But all I know is that my questions wouldn’t leave me alone—and, of course, I’m not done with the questions just because I finished the book. The curious thing is that I didn’t structure this book: I didn’t have an idea that one essay would lead to another essay. It was as if the questions kept leading me and leading me, until, finally, I came to the issue of empathy at the end. Every writer comes to this idea, I think, in one way or another. What I didn’t know is that the book was forming itself unbeknownst to me, and that, in fact, this was exactly where it was supposed to end up. The book opened out into the idea of community.
What can the essay offer to a reader? Well, I don’t know, exactly, but I know the writing of an essay is a way of thinking something through, and so the reading of an essay must be a similar process. However the writer expresses his or her ideas in an essay, it is an invitation to the reader to accompany the writer. It’s the beginning of a conversation.
Q: The range of reference in these essays is extremely wide and rich. Can you tell us something about the reading you did? Was it different from or similar to the kind of reading you do when you’re writing poetry or fiction?
A: The reading for this book was very different than it has been for other books I’ve written. When I do research for fiction or poetry, I’m something of a scavenger (I need to know one or two things and go back to writing, and then I surface again, and find out another couple of things, and so on). In the case of Marram Grass, I not only read widely to try to figure out my answers, which were never really answers, I also audited a course – one term in length – through which I could study the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. At a deeper level, though, I was still living with questions that had come up in two colloquia held at St. Peter’s Abbey in Saskatchewan – on Nature Writing and Wilderness Thought – in which I’d participated. Because the conversations had been so deep and thoughtful in those colloquia, I wanted to respond in kind.
I think if I write another such book – possibly one on creative communities – I may not include as many references to secondary sources. But this book simply voiced itself this way.
Q: The essays in The Marram Grass frequently juxtapose concrete descriptions of nature against more abstract passages of philosophical speculation. Reading them, I felt invited to participate in a sort of balancing that reinforced the central premise of the book – that metaphor schools us in the ability to hover between apparent binaries, to tolerate ambiguity and the unresolved, and in doing so, to deepen our understanding of “the other.” Thoughts?
A: I know I do this in my long poems: I have to move between one thing and another, and this oscillation is the way I find out what I’m trying to say. So, too, with Marram Grass, I guess.
And I’ve been influenced by Jan Zwicky’s Wisdom & Metaphor. The very form of her book is married to its content. Throughout that book, the left page of the text poses a challenge to the right page of the text. It’s not that the right page answers to the left page, it’s that meaning springs between the pages as the reader reads. Zwicky is actually giving evidence of the metaphor at work. But I didn’t know I had done something similar until you asked me this question.
I think that I also wanted to show that the operation of metaphor reflects the possible, and that this can indeed operate in the world: we can open our imaginations, foster empathy, and develop and enrich community. So I wanted to move back and forth between fiction and reality, as in the essay, “The Dark Side of Fiction’s Moon,” in order to reveal this.
Q: The line drawings in the book are fresh and lovely. For me, they echoed and reinforced its arguments and are integral to the whole. At what point did you decide to include them?
simpson1 [Note: if you press the link, you'll see one of Anne's images.]
A: I suggested to Andrew Steeves, one of the publishers at Gaspereau Press, that I could do some drawings back at the beginning of this project. Then I promptly forgot that I had to deliver! So while I had some of the drawings in a little sketch book from times that I’d been away – at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS, for instance – I had to scurry around and do some more right sketches at the last minute. It was a challenge. But Gaspereau is such a wonderful small press: they do a brilliant job of solving design issues, like the incorporation of the drawings with the text.
simpson22
Q: Who were your inspirations or models for this book (if you had inspirations)? What essayists do you admire?
A: Actually, some of them are Gaspereau Press writers. I’ve mentioned Jan Zwicky. And, of course, Don McKay’s essays are very fine. Tim Lilburn. Anne Carson. Robert Bringhurst. Trevor Herriot. I could go on…
Q: What was the biggest challenge in completing the book?
A: Writing to a deadline is always a big challenge for me. Thinking doesn’t fit a schedule. On the other hand, I usually work to a deadline quite well; something about the pressure seems to help me finish a manuscript.
Q: What was the biggest reward?
A: I wrote this book as a kind of homage to my adopted province of Nova Scotia. It has been home for me and for my family, for over twenty years. So it was a labour of love.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: I just finished Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And I’ve been dipping into Averno, by Louise Glück, along with How to Read a Poem, by Edward Hirsch. I’ve also been doing a little research for a new novel, so I’m reading Les Stroud’s Survive! Essential Skills and Tactics to Get You Out of Anywhere – Alive. I’m never entirely happy unless I have a novel, a book of non-fiction, and a couple of poetry collections on the bedside table.
Q: What is your next project?
A: A novel. But oh—the projects I’d like to do! I think writers all need about nine lives, don’t you?
A winner of the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for her second poetry collection, Loop, Anne Simpson has also been nominated for the Governor-General’s Award. Four of her six books have been selected as Globe & Mail Best Books. Her second novel, Falling, won the Dartmouth Fiction Award and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublic Literary Award. She teaches part-time at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, NS.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Interviews, Nature Writing, Poetry, Women and Writing
Posted in Creative Nonfiction, Essayists, Essays, Interviews, Memorable Lines, Nature Writing, Poetry, Women and Writing | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Lorna Crozier and I shared a stage at the Kingston WritersFest last fall, and I can’t imagine a more generous or engaging co-presenter. Her warmth, wit, and humour were the talk of the festival. Recently, I invited her to answer a few questions about her book for the blog, and once again, she surpassed all expectations. Along with her thoughtful answers, she has forwarded new work. Enjoy.
Q: You’ve been a poet for many years. What sparked the leap (or the fall?) into prose.
A: I’ll never lose my fascination with poetry, even though I’ve now written 15 books and have another manuscript almost ready to go. There’s just so much a poem can do in its very limited space. Some of the material that has appreared in my poems (that is, autobiographical anecdotes about my family) is in the memoir. Having said that, I started falling in love with the way the mind moves when you’re writing an essay. At first it almost feels like writing a poem—there’s a strong first-person voice that begins to speak but doesn’t know where it’s going. But an essay allows more room for arguments with the self and for a longer story to be told with its necessary information, the kind of explication and digression that a poem would just as soon spit out. I’m going to contradict myself here and say that essays often want to spit that out, too, but even though I pared down early drafts of prose, the pieces were still more accepting of longer descriptions and more direct statements of feeling than a poem might have been. Poems love to say as much as they can through metaphor and succinct, cut-to-the-chase imagery. Although metaphors and imagery are part of good prose, in essays they become a means to ground the writer’s thinking, which, on the page, has more room to show its many convolutions. I don’t know if this is making any sense. I haven’t quite worked out what the two forms do differently from one another, but I do know that, as a poet, I feel an affinity for nonfiction that I’ve never felt for fiction.
So, I about a decade ago, I started writing essays. And Rob Sanders, the editor of Greystone Press, who read them in various anthologies, asked me for a book. I initially resisted, but he kept on phoning me, and I finally discovered that I had enough published, commissioned essays to pull together a manuscript. I sent it off and immediately received a contract. After I’d signed it and he revised it to meet my few demands, including a request for Barbara Pulling as the editor, I found out that it wasn’t the book he wanted. He and Barbara persuaded me that a better book would focus on the pieces about my life in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, a small part of the original manuscript. Agreeing with them meant that my “book,” the manuscript I’d submitted, disappeared. Although I could use some of it, I had to start from scratch and try to shape my past into a coherent and interesting work of nonfiction.
Q: What was your greatest challenge?
A: I was terrified when I dared to look at what was ahead of me. A poet, remember, is used to saying everything that needs to be said in one or two pages, sometimes in only a few lines. The fact that I had to write a whole book, not just one poem after another, overwhelmed me. I was also worried about the tone. I told Barbara in our initial meeting that I didn’t want the book to be another “Little House on the Prairies.” I feared lapsing into nostalgia or sentimentality. She comforted me by saying that my family did not fit into the little-house genre and that sentimentality had not been a problem for me in poetry. Why did I fear it now? she asked.
For weeks I lived inside Alice Munro’s question: who do you think you are? Can any memoirist not worry about that? What was it about my life, I kept wondering, that deserved telling? Why would anyone be interested? It was only after the book was written and I was driving to an interview that I thought, “Of course, “memoir” has two “me’s” in it, the English followed by the French! No wonder I was worried about being self-centered.
As well, I was torn, as surely every memoirist must be, by the great ethical question: how much of the truth could I tell? I worried about hurting my mother, who was still alive when I began the book. In fact, I was in therapy, discussing the issue with a counselor. I knew anything less than the truth would make the writing vague and weak, and even I would lose interest in it. Part of the joy of writing a memoir is finding our what you really want/need to say. The content makes demands about the form and memories unfold as you write. Things you’d long ago forgotten recreate themselves on the page. Sometimes, they’re painful but there’s a glory in their discovery when you get the words right.
I had to be true to myself, to language, and to the goings-on in my family, seen through my perspective, of course. Otherwise, why write? As a poet, I’ve never allowed myself to hide in words, even if I end up looking bad. I knew I’d have to write the story as close to the bone as I could, and then after the work was done, decide what I wanted to do about publishing it. Was this a way of tricking myself? Probably, but if I’d let a censor sit on my shoulder, the pages would have remained blank or worse, been gutted of anything necessary and true. My mother died before the book was finished. Though I mourned her death, I was freed from my worries about wounding her.
Q: The book includes short narratives of life in Swift Current interspersed with prose-poem like sections that you call “First Causes.” Why structure the book this way?
A: Maybe because I’m so used to working in a short form, I saw the book, right from the start, as a compilation of pieces, a mosaic of sorts, rather than a coherent text with a linear, narrative movement. There are other reasons, too, for the form I chose. Memory, at least mine, doesn’t arrive as a big, well-wrapped package with sections bearing labels such as “The first ten years,” “Adolescence,” etc. Memories startle the brain with lightning flashes that reveal brief crucial scenes, one building on the other. Even their significance isn’t obvious and the link that draws them together, I think, is subterranean at the start, there only at a subconscious level.
This way of working—of perfecting small passages that I felt were self-contained before moving on to the next—pleased me greatly. I saw each chapter as something that could stand alone yet carry with it, like memory, tones or images or feelings from the previous chapter and, at the same time, endow what followed with a deeper meaning. I wanted the chapters to function as single pieces that contained little hooks that attached to what was said before and what would follow. I hoped the chapters would throw off the kind of prickly grass seeds that catch in your socks as you move forward down the path. Sometimes the hooks are images and sometimes pieces of narrative that connect to the previous and next chapters. The challenge for me was to write a narrative that would pull the reader through the book, but also to achieve another of my purposes—to build in a stillness to each section so that there’s a tension between what-will-happen-next and let’s-just-sit-here-for-a-moment-and-feel-this. I’d like a reader to be drawn forward but content to sit in this one place for a while.
The First Causes were my way of dropping into the family stories, pieces that are densely lyrical and poetic but still written in prose. While the other chapters have, I hope, a sense of movement through time, though not strictly linear, I wanted these to be plotless. They are still points, like lacuna but strange ones because the gaps are filled with words. I imagined their structure to be like glass bells, the ones that hold taxidermy and samples of plants. The function of the First Causes, like those transparent bells, is to focus the reader’s attention and to hold the reader’s mind in a state of deep engagement and wonder. I wanted them to be timeless, to have the quality of myth. I’m not saying I was successful in achieving any of this, but that’s what I was after. Whatever else they achieve, they represent the landscape—the origins and holiness of its essential elements—which shape the characters who live there. That of course includes me and my parents.
The idea of the First Causes also comforted me because I knew I had the tools to write them—they are, after all as close to poems as they can be while still being written in prose—but I wasn’t sure about the rest of the book and its demands. I’d take a break from the other writing and go into that deep place where poetry takes you and meditate on the sky or insects or gravel. Then I’d go back to the stories where the challenge was different.
Q: What was your greatest reward, with this book?
A: Whatever the book ends up meaning to others, this is really a life work for me. I don’t mean it will be the last thing I ever write, I hope not, but it’s about questions and concerns I’ve been living with since I became conscious of my thoughts. I’m pleased that between the pages of a book I’ve explored the place that is in my blood and bones. Saskatchewan, particularly the small city of Swift Current, is one of the memoir’s central characters. I’ve always been intrigued by Northrop Frye’s revision of the question, “Who am I?” into “Where is here?” That question has been central to me. I never tire of thinking about it. And I probably won’t tire of writing about it because in writing about place, I am writing about myself and my ancestors.
Also, it’s rare to find poor working people like my mother and father between the pages of a book. Being able to recreate my mother as a character, to give her a literary significance, pleases me. The book, in some ways, feels like my gift to her although she wouldn’t have wanted me to reveal so many secrets about my father. His alcoholism and our poverty was never talked about outside the family, for instance.
And finally, I feel good that I’ve written a book of prose, a whole book with real covers, a title page, chapter headings, etc. It sits there on my shelf beside my books of poetry, and I think it feels at home there.
Q: Can you name some memoirists you admire?
A: I wouldn’t have written this book if I’d not read Wallace Stegner’s Wolfwillow. I came to it years ago but I’ve reread it countless times. It’s set in Eastend, Saskatchewan, though he gives the town another name. I don’t think any other nonfiction book set on the prairies comes close to its profundity, exactness, and elegance of style. When I was a young writer, it gave me permission to write about my own lost place and to believe that such writing could matter to people who wouldn’t even know where Swift Current was.
John Berger’s Here Is Where We Meet, which came out in 2005, led me to write the final chapter in my book. After reading him, I wrote about speaking to my mother after her death. A passage from his book remains close by me when I write, as a kind of ars poetica. It’s part of a conversation between the narrator of Here Is Where We Meet and the stubborn, lively ghost of his mother. The narrator, whom we assume is Berger, is speaking first:
I risk to write nonsense these days.
Just write down what you find.
I’ll never know what I’ve found.
No, you’ll never know. All you’ll have to know is whether you’re lying,
or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake
about that distinction any longer.
That passage is hard to beat. It’s so important to the book and the central character that it appears twice. I believe in what it says and it gives me courage to try to tell the truth.
Finally, I am overwhelmed with the linguistic beauty of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It’s a wonderfully strange book that is both a memoir and a novel but transgresses the conventions of both. It’s fragmented, dense, poetic, and challenges any ideas of fixed forms. Another of my favourite writers is Dermot Healy who’s written stunningly in every form: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Every nonfiction writer should read the first page of his autobiography.
Q: What are you reading now? And what might you tell aspiring writers to read?
A: Perhaps because I’ve just come out of writing prose and because the idea and form of the First Causes continue to tantalize me, I’m now working on a series based on objects (I’ve included one on doorknobs, below). For inspiration I’ve returned to Francis Ponge, a brilliant writer of prose poems about things. His book that I have on my desk right now is Selected Poems, edited by Margaret Guiton. I also just bought the Best Science Essays of 2009, but haven’t had a chance to open the book yet. I’d encourage aspiring writers to pick up some essay anthologies, like that one, find the essayists who engage, enrage and tantalize them and then go out and find their books. And read everything that John Berger has written. I adore his And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos because it can’t be categorized and has sublime passages of beauty in its prose.
Here’s an example of the writing I’ve been working on since this summer. Is it poetry or creative nonfiction? Let me know.
DUET
1.
Two things that need each other: the mouth and the ear, the left foot and the right, the wind and the hawk, the doorknob and the hand. Yet the doorknob dreads the human touch. It has a phobia for germs, especially the knobs made of glass common in the 1940s after the war, a touch of class in small stuccoed houses with big radios and ottomans of fake leather. To respect the fears of doorknobs, you should always wear a glove or rub away the invisible bacilli with a chamois. Who has time for that? Anyway you’d be pushed aside by others in a rush. You’d be mocked and laughed at. Best not to think about it. There are whales, after all, and disappearing salmon. Disappearing doorknobs? That’s a laugh. Like rats, they’ve adapted. In fact their population’s gone berserk. Think of every new skyscraper, every condo development eating up the fields and marshes at the edges of the cities. Think of the multitude of doors. Think of all the dread each building holds.
2.
All doorknobs are twins, joined at the centre by a bolt narrow as a pencil, inflexible, un-vertebraed. Though they move as one, they never get to see each other. They are like brothers separated at birth by war, a wall of stone and broken glass. Neither speaks of this. One turns; the other turns. One is outside the room; the other, in. If the door is the entrance to the house, one shimmers with the rain; the other is dull and dry. One is often cold or hot; the other basks in the temperate climate of the thermostat. Does anything pass between them? Does a rumour, a memory, a snatch of song run through the metal spine like an electric shock when the door is opened? Perhaps they desire different things and loathe each other. Each knob wanting, above all else, not to turn in the same direction as its double on the opposite side of the door.
Lorna Crozier, poet and essayist, is a Distinguished Professor and the former Chair of the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Inventing the Hawk received the Governor General’s Award in 1992. She has been awarded two Pat Lowther Awards for the best book by a Canadian woman, the National Magazine Gold Medal, the Canadian Authors’ Association Award and first place in the CBC literary competition. In 2004 she received an Honourary Doctorate from the University of Regina for her contribution to Canadian literature and in 2007, one from the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. The Blue Hour of the Day, Selected Poems came out in 2007. She is also the co-editor of two books of essays, most recently Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast, and two anthologies of young Canadian poets. Her essays have been published in a number of anthologies, including Dropped Threads 1 and 3,, Nobody’s Mother, and My Wedding Dress.
Her poems have been translated into several languages and she has read her work across Canada and in such countries as South Africa, Scotland, Australia, Malaysia, France, Italy, England and Chile. Margaret Laurence called her “a poet to be grateful for.” Books in Canada claimed “she is one of the most original poets writing in English today.” The Ottawa Citizen wrote, “One of Canada’s most read and most honoured poets….[Crozier’s poems] become part of the reader’s permanent memory.” Perspectiva del Gato, a collection of her poems translated into Spanish, was published in Mexico City this June. And a memoir, Small Beneath the Sky, was published by Greystone this fall.
Tags: Interviews, Memoir, Poetry
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Monday, December 28th, 2009
I have four new reviews posted at Prairie Fire Review of Books. Most pertinent for this blog is the review of Anne Simpson’s The Marram Grass: Poetry and Otherness.
“The Marram Grass begins with a precise and lyrical description of a walk that Anne Simpson regularly takes with her dogs. She describes the appearance of the land in all seasons and describes the wildlife she discovers there, including a barred owl that seems to stare through the boundaries of skin and bone into her soul. The subject of boundaries and their permeability reverberates through the six essays that follow, and images of nature, such as the owl, mirror and embody the experiences of mutual recognition and interconnectedness that Simpson sees as the gift of art.”
Also, you can find reviews of Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s Perfecting, Billeh Nickerson’s McPoems, and Matt Rader’s Living Things.
Tags: Essayists, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Reviews
Posted in Essayists, Essays, Ficton, Poetry, Reviews, Women and Writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
rob mclennan has probably done more to put Ottawa on the literary map than anyone else alive. He writes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and literary essays; his clever blog attracts hundreds of readers each week. All this, and he’s also a walking, talking archive of Canadian literature and a tireless promoter of other writers’ work. rob may be best known for his poetry, but today, December 1, he launches his second novel, missing persons. In addition, rob’s currently engaged in two intriguing nonfiction projects. In the selections of these I’ve seen I’m particularly interested in the ways he puts literary history to work, using little-known or sometimes well-known details as springboards for further exploration, looking at place through the lens of its literary past. These manuscripts continue and extend his experimentation in poetry and fiction. I spoke with rob by email between November 5th and 7th, 2009.
Q: You’re an incredibly prolific writer who seems to cross genres with ease. Is it as easy as you make it look? Does one genre feel most “natural” to you than others? What are the challenges?
A: Well, I’d hardly call it easy; my self-education process is both extremely quick and excruciatingly slow. I learn by fumbling around, in not knowing what it is that I’m doing. Like bpNichol working the presses at Coach House Printing, figuring out what do to by not knowing, and exploring the boundaries. The obvious drawback is that the short term becomes more frustrating, but hopefully the longer term becomes richer, deeper. I don’t want to write books that look like everyone else’s.
Before my first novel appeared in print, I’d been over a decade attempting fiction, with numerous manuscripts in various stages of completion, including a few already abandoned. For any genre I work in, it seems, I need a book to fail, before I figure out the process for anything subsequent; I learn by doing. Fail better, said Beckett. Perhaps I should be listening better to this. perhaps I need a larger failure before what follows can transcend itself.
Part of what took me forever into the novel form was figuring out the shape of my own style, after attempts into what I thought a “novel” was supposed to look like. Remember Jack Kerouac’s first published novel? It was completely different from what came after; that first book written, it would seem, in the style he thought a novel was supposed to.
When I was still a teen, I worked in multiples, writing poetry and fiction, playing piano and guitar, drawing, painting and taking photographs. I even attempted a comic book script at one point. My interests have always been multiple, diverse yet frustratingly separate. Part of what I’ve long admired about 1990s English-speaking literary Montreal was the way the younger writers like Corey Frost, Anne Stone, Dana Bath and Catherine Kidd were blending and blurring poetry, fiction and performance, one slipping easily and seamlessly into the next (and almost even a matter of context). It’s what I find fascinating about Vancouver writer Michael Turner as well, exploring alternate shapes of a literary work. Why do these genres have to have such solid barriers between them? Who gets to decide such a thing?
It appears as though Canadian writing is one of the harshest climates, in terms of the barriers between these arbitrary notions of genre, yet we’ve produced some of the most daring when it comes to breaking those same barriers down, including Erín Moure, Phil Hall, Ken Sparling, Sheila Watson, Elizabeth Smart, Nathalie Stephens, Michael Turner, Nicole Brossard, and so many others.
Obviously I’m far more interested in lyric prose, so the form of fiction I’m working is closer to poetry than certain straighter and more narrative kinds of fiction, deceptively called the “poet’s novel” (a term I find needlessly dismissive, without really being descriptive). Whatever else their poems were doing, Elizabeth Smart and Sheila Watson were writing wonderfully lyric books of prose. One does not automatically fall into the other (Smart’s poems, for example, seemed quite traditional, compared to her prose).
My current prose fiction works to explore moments, slowly working out the threads between those moments, and projects that end up weaving a sequence of threads into a particular weave, somewhere between complicated and straightforward. Does that even make sense?
Perhaps, as you ask, not with ease, but with patience over quite a long period.
Q: You’ve currently got (at least) two memoir projects on the go: house, a (tiny) memoir and Sleeping in Toronto. What sparked your desire to write memoir? What are the special joys and challenges of this genre for a writer? For a reader?
A: As far as non-fiction goes, there is a merging of essay, history and memoir I’ve been exploring through projects such as McLennan, Alberta (my Edmonton year as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta) and current Sleeping in Toronto.
Years ago, maybe a decade or so, I started a similar project on my home territory, Glengarry County, eastern Ontario, wanting to mix a memoir of sorts with writing done on the area, as well as working through the county’s rich history. Glengarry County is well documented in poetry and fiction, going back well over a century, including “Ralph Connor” (pseudonym of the Rev. Charles Gordon), who was Canada’s bestselling novelist circa 1900, and his aunt, Margaret M. Robertson, writing novels from the 1860s to the 1880s (Connor’s mother and aunt were classmates of Emily Dickinson at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass.). Being that my family grew out of the Gordon Church, St. Elmo, a building created under the auspices of Rev. Gordon’s own father, writing became geographically local for me at quite a young age; when I was about ten years old, my father pointing out where various scenes of Glengarry School Days (1902), for example, were set.
I got fifty pages into such a project well before I knew what the hell “creative non-fiction” even was, and the whole manuscript, Reading and Writing Glengarry County (I really need to revisit that title) just felt unwieldly, so I set it aside to return to, later. Heading west in September 2007 and discovering the work of Edmonton writer Myrna Kostash, it was as though simply by existing, she was giving me permission to move into what I had already begun, these forays into “creative non-fiction,” without knowing a shape or understanding the genre. From Kostash, I headed into some other directions, rereading early Elizabeth Hay, and into the non-fiction works of Ted Bishop, Guy Maddin, Monica Kidd, Stan Dragland, Sarah de Leeuw and Brian Fawcett, exploring some of the possibilities of what the form could provide.
I’ve long been interested in the idea of memoir, but uncomfortable with writing a story that’s all about me. I can’t imagine finding anything about me interesting enough to sustain such a project, and much prefer the movement of the creative non-fiction form, exploring a particular idea or geography through its writing and history, using the memoir as its framing, the bare thread that ties the project together.
Once west, I started a project of creative non-fiction, McLennan, Alberta, to explore my nine months in Edmonton, trying to figure out the context in which I’d entered (the project got its name from a town north of the city, which may have been named after a doctor from my Glengarry County who worked for the railroad, Dr. John K. McLennan). After thirty-seven eastern Ontario years, what did it mean to be in Alberta? Over nine months, I wrote pieces centred around the Banff Centre, Whyte Avenue, the University of Alberta and the West Edmonton Mall, exploring the histories and myths of the place, and writing by such as Elizabeth Smart, Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, Eli Mandel, Aritha van Herk, Kristjana Gunnars, Douglas Barbour, Erin Knight, Christine Stewart and Trisia Eddy.
The book even writes of the beginnings of a new relationship, which turned the manuscript into another kind of project, another kind of thread woven in. I admit, I still haven’t decided if the manuscript as a whole even works (I plan on returning to it soon, to complete it, finally), but now that she’s in Toronto doing a Master’s Degree, I’m here too, as much as she’ll let me, making Sleeping in Toronto a loose sequel, writing out what comes next, through the exploration of a brand-new city.
Q: In house: a (tiny) memoir, you’re working from old family photographs, using visual records to piece together what you remember – and don’t remember – of the past. Tell us something about that process.
A: I’d been thinking quite a while on writing from old pictures, and somehow, this project came together during my Edmonton year. What is it about going away that makes you think back to home? It must have been Christmas, heading back to the farm and pilfering that old photo album, getting back to Alberta and picking away at it during the first few weeks of January. I’m hoping the project, once published, can appear with one picture per text, if possible. In many ways, house: a (tiny) memoir was my attempt to reclaim the good parts of my childhood, before my mother got really sick. From the mid-1970s all throughout the 80s were pretty rough, and I know there are stories that, unless I tell, would never be told. Ones my sister (b. 1976) wouldn’t know, or her kids, or mine. It’s a tribute and acknowledgement to a period of time that existed, and my family tells few stories, so would disappear completely, otherwise.
It is a strange process, to work through one’s own history, and one’s own memories. I’m hesitant to check information from my family, to potentially taint or second-guess what I think I know from my own memories, although wonder if the project requires such, once it’s further along. My mother claimed surprise a couple of years ago at some of the things I remember, vivid memories of her mother’s cabin in Quebec, sold by the time I was two and a half. And yet, nothing of my grandfather, who died around the same time. The challenge, really, is to write these pieces in such a way that a potential reader might care to read them. Why should a reader care?
Q: Sleeping in Toronto is in its early stages, but so far, it appears to be constructed in journal-like installments (written during, or of, your visits to Toronto) that don’t entirely resemble journal entries. It’s a voyage around, through, and into Toronto, beginning with a bird’s eye (condo) view of the lake, finding its feet on the Island and waterfront, and then travelling, by way of history, to points west, east, and north, and through poetry – yours and others’ – aiming deeper into the city’s mythologies. It’s memoir in the sense that the narrator’s experience provides a point of departure – but it’s less about the narrator than it is about the narrator’s attempts to understand the place. Thoughts?
A: Sleeping in Toronto starts in her condo by the lakeshore, and then works its way out, which, as I learned into the process, is how the city itself got created, so I really appreciate the happy accident of such. I’d much rather a book about learning Toronto than about me in Toronto. When travelling to any place, it’s impossible not to be aware of myths, thinking of Ernest Hemingway when seeing the Toronto Star building, or Daniel Jones when seeing the CN Tower. How could you not? Alberta was thick with that, the mythology of the landscape. I would like to learn where I am, and where I am headed. My own Glengarry County is rife with history too, to the point, sometimes, that it has almost no present (a joke from my 1980s high school days was that Alexandria had just entered the 1950’s).
Is my creative non-fiction working to understand place, understand history, and my fiction working to understand story, and people? Perhaps I’m reading too much into myself.
Q: Do you ever adapt the same material for poem (or fiction) and nonfiction?
A: No. I might work around different aspects of themes or ideas in a different form, but never the same material. That said, I’ve put a poem or two of my own into the creative non-fiction, but only inserted as self-quotation. To illustrate a point.
Q: You’ve written many literary essays (and Sleeping in Toronto includes entries that are mini-essays about poetry). What do you like about the essay form?
A: I like the essay because it’s entirely malleable; I enjoy working the form. My essay on Anne Carson looks entirely different than, say, my essay on Phil Hall, or Andrew Suknaski. I like forming the shape based on the subject. My essay on Suknaski took the shape of a series of open letters to him directly, which is how many of his own essays and reviews were written, writing directly to Eli Mandel, for example, or Robert Kroetsch. I would like to think it adds another level of stepping inside an author and their works to write further into such shapes. It seems rather arbitrary, somehow, to write every essay solely in the same singular shape. Arbitrary, and somehow lacking. I mean, I’m not an academic, so there would be something insincere in any attempt to write purely academic pieces. It’s also a form I know I don’t understand, so why not go somewhere else, make the process more interesting?
Look at Phil Hall’s “Essay on Purdy” from An Oak Hunch (2005), or Michael McClure’s essay on Richard Brautigan in Richard Brautigan: Essays on the Writing and Life (2006), moving the form around to suit their subjects. Art, including fiction, poetry and non-fiction, is supposed to be fluid, not static. I’m not interested in writing everything out the same way.
Perhaps there is a sense of freedom here I’ve managed that I haven’t quite yet in my poetry or fiction, who knows. But I am still exploring.
Q: Who are some of your favourite writers of nonfiction, and why?
A: Apart from the list of authors I’ve already given ( I haven’t gone through as much as I should have), I quite liked Robert Kroetsch’s book on Alberta, and Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist. Can we call Dany Laferriere’s books novels or novel-essays? Or what of David W. McFadden’s “Great Lakes Suite”? As far as literary essays, Aritha van Herk and George Bowering have always made the form far more engaging, blending in parts of fiction along the way, or even memoir. Sly traces, one might say. I remember Clint Burnham had some really engaging essays in the mid-1990s out of Vancouver’s old Boo magazine; why haven’t they been collected yet into a single volume?
Q: What would you tell aspiring writers to read?
A: Everything. Read as much as possible and as widely as possible. And every so often, make a point of reading something you know you disagree with; there are still things to be learned.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: I always have a mound of things I’m carrying around, actively or passively reading over various stretches of time, but here is a list of sorts, in no particular order: Hemingway on Fishing, ed. Nick Lyons (New York NY: The Lyons Press, 2000), Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, Bill Willingham (New York NY: DC Comics / Vertigo, 2009), Stitches, a memoir, David Small (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 2009), Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, Ken Sparling (Toronto ON: self-made by author upon request, 1996), Excerpts from the Real World, Robert Kroetsch (Lantzville BC: Oolichan Books, 1986), declining america, rob budde (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2009), Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, eds. Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2009), The False Laws of Narrative: The Poetry of Fred Wah, ed. Louis Cabri (Waterloo ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009), Toronto: The Unknown City, Howard Ackler and Sarah B. Hood (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2003), Barcelona, Robert Hughes (New York NY: Knopf, 1992), Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times, Glenn Patterson (London UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009), Quarter Life Crisis: Only the Good Die Yung, Evan Munday (Toronto ON: self-published, 2009), My Beloved Wager: Essays from a Writing Practice, Erín Moure (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2009), and Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City, Sherry Simon (Montreal QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006).
Born on the Ides of March in Ottawa’s Parkdale neighbourhood in 1970, rob mclennan is an Ottawa-based writer, editor and publisher, and author of more than twenty titles of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in Canada, Ireland, England and the United States, with work appearing in over two hundred journals in fourteen countries. He has published a travel book on Ottawa (Ottawa: The Unknown City) and a collection of literary essays (subverting the lyric: essays). More recently, his second novel is missing persons (The Mercury Press), launches in Toronto on December 1, 2009, and his eighteenth poetry collection, wild horses (University of Alberta Press), is due out in February 2010. He spent the 2007-8 academic year as writer in residence at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and blogs regularly at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Essays, Interviews, Memoir
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