Monday, March 29th, 2010
Last year, I had the privilege of reading with Eric Siblin at the Prince Edward County Authors’ Festival. A few months later I found myself on a Quebec Writers’ Federation jury; his book, The Cello Suites, was nominated for the McAuslan First Book Prize and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction – and won both. It was also shortlisted for a Governor General’s Award, the BC Award for Canadian Nonfiction, and a Writers’ Trust Prize. Not bad for an inaugural effort.
In The Cello Suites, Eric sets out to solve the simple riddle of a missing manuscript. Instead, he finds himself pondering the deeper enigma of how a piece of music penned by a royalist, conservative composer could, in the twentieth century, become the signature and rallying cry of a liberal, humanist musician, and how that same piece of music could continue to speak so powerfully to musicians and music-lovers of so many persuasions today. Part biography, part music history and part music appreciation, The Cello Suites is an ambitious, carefully researched, and inventively constructed book written with clarity and verve.
Photo: Marcie Richstone
Q: The structure of The Cello Suites, with three interwoven narratives broken into sections much like movements in music, echoes the Suites themselves. I loved this device; it added texture and tension to each story. How did you come up with the idea to compose the book this way?
A: Thanks, Susan. The idea to structure the book according to the music came to me early on. On a superficial level I just liked the sound of putting musical titles like sarabande, courante, and gigue on the page. But I very much wanted the book to mirror the music so it seemed like an obvious thing to do. The idea of the book quickly became a sort of mosaic encompassing suites one through six with each suite broken down into those six lyrical movements. Each suite had a persona of its own in musical terms and each suite (or so I imagined) seemed to link up in a greater narrative whole. I also benefited from the structure because the music itself provided narrative signposts for a writer searching for a storyline.
Q: In writing this book you conducted research of every conceivable type. You travelled, interviewed people both face-to-face and by email, searched the archives, studied scores. You immersed yourself in the Bach community and learned to play the cello (at least a little). Did you know what you were in for when you began the project? What research tips can you offer other writers of creative nonfiction?
A: I had no idea what I was in for at the start. I began in a pretty naïve and idealistic way and mostly just followed by nose trying to piece together the story. In retrospect I was lucky – it added up to a story. But if we make our own luck as nonfiction writers it is with the heavy lifting of research. I think that by researching as much as possible you open up avenues that give your writing maximum flexibility and mobility, allowing you to pick and choose the most promising raw materials, map out trajectories and get around dead ends.
I would urge first-time nonfiction authors to pick up the phone, call experts and pick their brains. I should have done more of this at the outset – next time I will be less shy. The Internet is of course a fabulous tool, but I wouldn’t abandon the library. Many discoveries take place in the stacks.
Q: There’s a real warmth in your approach to Bach and Casals; I got the impression that you came to care about both men, and you’d be sorry to leave them. It made me sorry to leave them, too. Thoughts?
© Perren Barberini, Zermatt
A: I think I became attached more to the story than to the characters of Bach or Casals. I was sorry to see Bach go because he left with so many unanswered questions for future biographers. But he was born in 1685 so I couldn’t expect him to hang around forever. Casals lived to the respectable age of ninety-six. And the end of both their lives came in Suite No. 6 of the book, the last suite, the suite that has everything to do with transcendence, so it made perfect sense to say my goodbyes at that point. Besides, I wanted to get on to other projects.
Q: This is a first book. Who or what were your models or inspirations? Who are some of your favourite nonfiction writers?
A: One of the things that motivated me to write this book is that I wasn’t aware of any particular model and was under the impression, true or not, that this sort of thing hadn’t been done before in quite the same way. So the absence of models spurred me on. As for nonfiction writers, I always have time for Simon Winchester, Alex Ross, Christopher Hitchens, and A. J. Liebling.
Q: What was your biggest challenge in completing the book?
A: My biggest challenge was probably keeping the musical structure of the book intact while keeping the narrative ball moving in a good way. I shuffled the constituent parts around a bit, trying to figure out where best to place the Bach, Casals and first-person strands. For a long time I was overambitious, trying for example to make every sarabande, which is the saddest sounding dance movement of every suite, correspond with a sad part of the story. Trying to tailor the narrative to the musical structure in every respect turned out to be overly rigid and ultimately untenable. So I relaxed the structural grip, tried to let the narrative breathe more freely, and things seemed to improve.
Q: What was the biggest reward?
A: Actually getting published.
Q: What are you reading now?
A: I just finished Doctor Olaf Van Schuler’s Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson, a very intriguing multi-generational sequence of fictional stories centering on a family of physicians from the 17th century to the present day. And I thoroughly enjoyed a slim book by John McPhee, Levels of the Game, about a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Now I’m on to The Anthologist, a quirky musing about poetry by Nicholson Baker.
Q: What is your next project?
A: I’m trying to write two things, fiction and nonfiction, but it’s early days.
Eric Siblin is a Montreal-based journalist and documentary filmmaker. He studied at Concordia University in Montreal, receiving an M.A. in History, before coming of age journalistically at The Glengarry News in Alexandria, Ont., and the Standard Freeholder, in Cornwall, Ont. He then worked as a reporter/editor at the Montreal bureau of The Canadian Press (CP) from 1989 to 1996 when he joined The Montreal Gazette as a staff reporter, including a stint as the newspaper’s pop music critic. He made the transition to television in 2002 with the documentary Word Slingers, which explores the curious subculture of competitive Scrabble tournaments. The film was broadcast in Canada and the U.S., and won a Jury Award at the Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival. He also co-directed the documentaryIn Search of Sleep, and has written for a wide variety of magazines. The Cello Suites is his first book. Here is his website.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Interviews
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Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Mary Soderstrom’s The Walkable City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs’ Streets and Beyond asks what makes a city “walkable” – and hence, liveable – and in an attempt to solve this riddle, takes the contrasting theories of two of the modern world’s greatest thinkers on the city and puts them to the practical test. An original idea, gracefully executed, The Walkable City compels us to think harder about our own neighbourhoods and what we expect and hope from them. I talked with Mary by email about this book and her latest projects.
Q: I loved the central conceit of The Walkable City: The great urban reconstructor, Baron Haussmann, and the independent urban thinker, Jane Jacobs, joined in a sort of ambulatory conversation with author and readers about what makes a city walkable – and, by extension, liveable. How did you hit on this idea?
A: Well, I guess I like mixed-media. What I mean by that is I write non-fiction using narrative techniques, and fiction with a strong dose of concrete observation. My two other non-fiction books (Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens and Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, both from Véhicule Press) use the device of taking the reader various places to consider aspects of the places in order to talk about history, science, philosophy, urban affairs and so on.
But been-there-done that: this time I didn’t want to do the same thing, and when I discovered that Haussmann had written extensive memoirs and that Jane Jacobs from early childhood held imaginary conversations with figures of the past, I began to wonder if I could take their own words and imagine what they might say to each other.
I’m glad you liked the idea, because I do too. But of all the aspects of the book, it is the one that has prompted the most criticism. Apparently you either love the conceit or you loathe it.
Q: The trope of the walk is a common one in the personal essay – as is the imaginary conversation with a respected (or despised) figure from the past. In that sense, The Walkable City is an extended essay, or an essayistic book. Thoughts?
A: That kind of categorizing doesn’t really interest me. The book is what I consider simply creative non-fiction. And that’s a very useful concept.
Q: The Walkable City is also an unusual sort of travel book, showing us sides of glamorous destinations, such as Paris, that we might not have known, and illuminating corners of our own front and back yards. How many kilometres do you think you walked, in researching the book?
A: Lots. I know that on my last trip to Paris where my cousin Cathy Retterer joined my husband and me for two weeks, one morning she said: “Okay, that’s enough. Do you think we could not walk four hours today?”
Q: How does this book build on or expand from your previous work?
A: The book is the direct outgrowth of my previous work. A lot of the traveling was undertaken for my other books. I went to Singapore and Paris originally for Recreating Eden, to East Africa for my novel The Violets of Usambara (Cormorant Book, 2008) and São Paulo, Brazil for Green City. Each of these projects led me deeper into reflection about the relation between humans and their surroundings, both natural and constructed. The Walkable City was the next step in trying to make sense of how we live, and how we ought to live.
Q: What was your biggest challenge in writing the book?
A: I think coming up with a narrative device that would carry the weight of my reflection. This is a book (like all my books) that is designed to entertain an intelligent reader while encouraging him or her to consider some pretty tough questions. A lot of research lies behind it, but I wanted to make it fun to read, so that ordinary folk—not just urban planning wonks – would find it interesting.
Q: What was the biggest joy?
A: Oh dear, oh dear! There were so many! Probably the realization that what I’d been living in Montreal and liking about some other cities all my life had a cause: their organization on a human scale based on what is called these days “active transportation.”
Q: What are you reading now?
A: La Traversée de la ville by Michel Tremblay (part three of his trilogy about his mother), The Mystery of Samba by Hermano Vianna (see below) and The Best American Short Stories of 2009 (not the best year, to my mind, which reflects more on the choice of the editor than the stories available for selection. Alice Sebold is the editor this time around, and her taste is not mine.)
Q: What’s your next project?
A: Well, there are two. One is a novel I’ve just sent to a possible publisher. It’s called River Music, and is about three generations of women: the grandmother is a pianist, the daughter is an engineer and the granddaughter is a harpsichordist. The time runs from 1935 to Dec. 6, 2009, and I hope in addition to a good story, the novel says something about North American women over the last 75 years.
The second, called Making Waves: The Portuguese Adventure, is a direct outgrowth of my three non-fiction projects, although it doesn’t seem so at first glance. During the travel I did for them and for Violets, I kept running into the footprints they left—in Brazil, of course, but also in East Africa, the West coast of India, and Singapore as well as other places. Then I began thinking about the Portuguese kids I grew up with in San Diego, whose families had come from the Azores and Madeira to fish tuna off California, the Portuguese sailing ship we saw in 1972 in St. John’s Newfoundland (one of the last of white fleet cod fishers) and the 40,000 people of Portuguese descent in Montreal. In short, I was bowled over by the worldwide legacy of this small nation on the edge of Europe.
A great deal of research and some more travel followed, and I’m now revising a manuscript for Véhicule Press which is scheduled to publish the book next fall. Although I picked up enough Portuguese on my own to be able to read newspapers, magazine articles and history, I ran into a wall, trying to speak it, so this winter I’ve been taking an intensive course at the Université de Montréal. So I’ll sign off, and get back to the oral presentation on Brazilian singer/songwriter/novelist/dissident Chico Buarque that’s due for Monday.
Mary Soderstrom is a Montreal-based writer of fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of three works of non-fiction, two short story collections, five novels and one children’s book. In addition over the years she has done a wide variety of reporting on science, urbanism, politics and writing.
Her most recent non-fiction book The Walkable City: From Haussmann’s Boulevards to Jane Jacobs’ Streets and Beyond is a follow-up to Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places (both from Véhicule Press) which was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best 100 Books of 2007. Her most recent novel, The Violets of Usambara, which takes place in Burundi and Montreal, was published in Spring 2008 by Cormorant Books. Here’s her blog.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Interviews
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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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