Categories
Reading

Poetry Reading – Monty Reid & Dvora Levin

Host and poet Wendy Morton introduced poets Monty Reid from Ottawa and Dvora Levin at the weekly Planet Earth Poetry readings at the Black Stilt cafe in Victoria. An open mike reading preceded the two main readers.  A special guest who read during the open mike and then came back to read last was sidewalk artist and storyteller Ian Morris.

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Host Wendy Morton

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Ian Morris

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Ian Morris

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Ottawa poet Monty Reid

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Monty Reid and audience at the Black Stilt Cafe

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Dvora Levin reads with backing from duo Kouskous, Amber Woods and Gary Cohen

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Dvora Levin

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Books by Monty Reid and Dvora Levin

Categories
Canadian Interview

Nicole Markotic – Interview

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LP: You have a novel coming out shortly? What can you tell us about it?

NM: OK, I’m not the greatest at speaking about my own books, but I’ll give this a whirl… Here’s what we came up with for the back blurb: Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot is a narrative of longing for self-creation, but also for self-destruction, restlessly twisting and turning through triangular friendships, teenage delinquents, Nazi killing hospitals for the disabled, the inane ex-boyfriend, a dying father’s sudden conversion to parenting, and fantastic tales of the Mormon Angel Moroni on estrogen.

It’s called Scrapbook of My Years as a Zealot, partly because I liked the contrast between staunch zealotry and a cluttered scrapbook. But I also gave it that title to encompass the non-linear nature of the novel. The narrator goes through a childhood with European parents and indulges in her best friend’s Mormon religion as a way of feeling more North American. She ends up dating a “Jack” Mormon because, like her, he knows what it’s like to be involved with the church but also to leave it. As a grownup, she works with delinquent teenagers; and she has a complicated relationship with her mother, an atheist, and with two friends who never knew her as a Mormon but who find her a bit uptight because of her background. Now, everything I’ve said so far is just plot, though. Much of the book is about how the story doesn’t unfold from A to Z, but that scenes from different timelines appear next to each other. She tells the entire story, but still manages to present versions of what’s happening with other characters. So, for example, she longs to be closer to her mother, but only tries to get her mother to understand her; meanwhile, her mother has a tragic secret from which she wishes to shield her daughter. How characters related to each other, what they do or do not tell each other, was the focus of many of the scenes. On the one hand, I’m fascinated by religion and how believers fit themselves into the “rules” of their faith; on the other hand, I’m in love with the kind of language that accompanies wonder and obsession.

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LP: This is your second novel. What changes did you notice in writing the second as compared to the first?

NM: When I wrote Yellow Pages, I couldn’t believe how much of the “story” I had to leave out, in order to properly get that story onto the page. For this novel, I used the idea of surreptitious lives and past secrets to put pressure on the idea that you can ever tell the “entire” story. In my first novel, I was trying to “expose” Alexander Graham Bell as the antagonist of Deaf culture. At the same time, I was gripped by the language of how one can try to tell a non-verbal story. So one of the biggest changes in Scrapbook is actual dialogue tags! But even though this book wasn’t written around a historical figure, I still had to do an enormous amount of research into the 70s and 80s. I didn’t just want to drop in a Madonna song, to easily signal where (or when) readers should understand the story now is); but rather, I turned to less famous, but possibly equally relevant details. So, for example, I mention Eddie the Eagle in one chapter. Partly to remind readers about the time of the 1988 Calgary Olympics, but also because he’s a figure that really captured Canadian’s hearts when he participated in the ski jump. Not because he won (and not even, I think, because he came last), but because he took on the spirit of competition for the sake of the sport, not the result.

LP: Much of your career has been devoted to poetry. Is there a big shift for you, in terms of writing, to go from poems to a novel?

NM: More like a constant shift! I’ve been alternating poetry and fiction since I started writing (and now squeeze in essays and formal talks and even a few web write-ups). And then when I do write a book in particular genre (I’m thinking of my first novel, Yellow Pages), readers claim it’s prose poetry (or that my poetry is narrative). But I hear your question: it is, always a shift to move between the kind of writing that develops characters or sets a scene or emotion to the kind of writing that zings the senses without necessarily presenting a story. I love how poetry can work at a dozen levels at once, prick the readers’ ears and sight and intellect. But I also love how fiction can get readers caught up in the narrative push, in the dynamics between characters and conflict and the materiality of the word and story. I guess I find it hard to settle in any one genre because I’m so passionate about all genres as a reader. I’m the type of reader who has several books going at once. I’ll read a poem for a while, then turn to a short story, and then delve into a literary essay. And then, of course, dive right into a film!

LP: You grew up in Calgary, and until very recently, were teaching at the University of Calgary. You’re now at the University of Windsor. As a writer what are the differences between the two cities/regions?

NM: I’ve been in southern Ontario now for two and a half years, and I seriously am still getting used to a different way of thinking. Not worse or better, but definitely different. For one thing, Windsor is across the river from Detroit, which not only makes it a border city, it also makes it a small city that is physically linked to a large city. People hear listen to US radio stations and watch US local television shows. This may not be so unusual in other parts of the country, but Calgary – despite being represented often as a pro-US city – is pretty physically isolated. And there’s so much going on in the history of this city! Just last week, I had a great conversation with my Creative Writing students about setting their fiction in Windsor. I was dismayed to hear that none of them thought Windsor was “interesting” enough to hold the interest of readers not from here. Meanwhile, I’ve been taking notes like crazy every since I moved here, because most of what I’ve learned is so fascinating: the first stop in Canada on the underground railroad, the origin of Canadian Club, the place where Michigan teenagers go to drink two years before they’re legal in the US, the booze runs across the river during prohibition, etc. etc. This is a fairly working class town, and one that’s been reliant on the auto industry for most employment. Meanwhile, people here are unbelievably optimistic about the future. And teaching at the University here makes me more and more aware of how much students want to learn and how much their parents want them to get a “higher” education.

LP: You’ve just spent a summer in Vancouver. Was the decision to spend time there strictly personal or was there a connection to your writing?

NM: Both. I find that I really spend all my hours from September until May on my teaching, as do most of my colleagues across the country. So getting into another city is one of the ways to make a sharp divide between teaching or administrative work and the writing I’m always trying to get to. But I also love the West and love getting back to the kind of city where you can buy all your fruits and vegetables organic (and I’m not even a health nut!), where you can read in a coffee shop at every block, where you can walk around and not have to own a car. Just as I can’t settle on one-only genre, I can’t seem to settle in any one place, without longing to be where I’m not. When I’m in Windsor, I miss the prairies and the coast, and when I’m in Vancouver, I miss Victoria and Ontario and Montréal. I’m not satisfied, ever, but in what I hope is a generative way, that makes me pay attention to what I’m missing and why. Pay attention to the friends I get to see in the now, and to remember that when I’m no longer with them.

LP: You rented the house of a well-known poet who was away from Vancouver for the summer, did you discover any new favourite books in his bookshelves?

NM: Both Fred Wah and Pauline Butling have enough books to last my lifetime, though that didn’t stop me from also making a trip to the public library every week! I reread a lot of George Bowering while I was there, as well as quite a few other Vancouver writers, such as Roy Miki and Sharon Thesen, and more recently emerged writers such as Jacqueline Turner and Nikki Reimer. It’s funny, I was heavily focused on prose last summer (finishing Scrapbook and getting a draft done of my next novel), but spent most of my time reading poetry…

LP: At one point you had your own press, publishing poetry chapbooks. Are you still doing that?

NM: Sort of. Not the best answer, I know, but as truthful as I can be. Maintaining a chapbook press through grad school was incredibly overwhelming, and I’m happy we managed that, but once I got a permanent job, that kind of editing got constantly pushed to the side. Then, right before I left Calgary (and to commemorate Fred Wah’s retirement from UofC), I published broadside of one poem. That got me all excited about small-press publishing again, and last year I put out a card-sized poem by Chus Pato, translated by Erin Mouré. My idea now is to produce a chapbook once a year, and if I get some momentum, then maybe even increase the number to two or three a year. I adore the publishing end of writing (when it’s other people’s poetry), and miss the excitement of producing some that’s just finished. As well, it’s so hard for newer writers to get published these days, I feel that a small press offers writers (and readers) avenues that don’t need the entire publishing and marketing system behind it.

LP: Are you doing any editing these days?

NM: Besides the above newish publishing venture, and besides editing for various writers who hand me complete manuscripts, I’m doing a lot of editing of graduate students who have chosen to write a book-length manuscript for their MA thesis, and editing for the undergraduate students in my Creative Writing classes.

LP: If you were to recommend books for your students to read (aside from what’s required for their courses with you) what would they be?

NM: That’s a tricky question. Not because I don’t have an answer, but because the answer changes with every single student who asks me the question! I often give students specific books to read because of what they’re handing in, or to expand on the kind of writing they’re interested in but don’t yet have a handle on. Often students protest that they don’t want to read anything that relates to what they’re writing because they don’t want to be unduly influence! I explain to them that they’re already influenced, and what the need is a wider knowledge of their subject matter and writing impact. So: the list is infinite and specific to who’s interested in what, and why. Having said that, there are certain books I love forever, and constantly tell all sorts of people to read – such as Zsuzsi Gartner’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth, Tom King’s Green Grass, Running Water, Robert Kroetsch’s Completed Field Notes, Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum, Rosemary Nixon’s Cock’s Egg, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Aritha van Herk’s Restlessness, and Fred Wah’s Waiting for Saskatchwan.

LP: Last, the old standby, what are you reading yourself right now?

NM: That’s always the worst question because, as a Creative Writing teacher, I’m mostly reading student manuscript drafts! But the books I have on the go right now include: Sentenced to Light by Fred Wah (an amazing collection of his collaborative poetry projects), Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Hesser (a fabulous YA novel about a girl with OCD), Gerbil Mother by Dawn Bryan (an exquisitely demented “tall-tale” narrative told from the point-of-view of a nasty-spirited, foetus), a book of essays about the role of fairytales in contemporary culture, The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble, Blindsight by poet Rosemarie Waldrop, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which is either a picture book or a graphic novel, depending who you talk to (I’m finding the lack of any text whatsoever deliciously troubling).

Categories
Interview

Theresa Kishkan – Red Laredo Boots and Phantom Limb – Interview

LP: You’ve had two books of essays published Red Laredo Boots ( New Star Books ) and Phantom Limb ( Thistledown Press ). What is it about the essay form that interests you as a writer?

tk: I have a curious and undisciplined mind. I’m interested in the details of a place, a time, the layers that make up a particular history – geological, regional, human, natural; and how they fit together. I’m interested in long meditative lines that I somehow couldn’t make work in poetry, lines that take their inspiration from roads, the shape of hills against a wide sky, how a formation of sandhill cranes scribbles its name over Nicola Lake on a late September day. And the essay form is generous and flexible, capacious enough to hold everything that comes to mind, to heart.

LP: How do you these pieces start, do you keep detailed journals/notes?

tk:  Something will agitate for my attention – a fragment of song, a building, a phrase, a moment in which I sense a particular potency.  And then I follow this to wherever it might lead. Often I’m not sure exactly what it is I’m looking for but I know when I’ve found it.  A name might speak from a page, a plant will appear with the most evocative family tree, or a photograph will show me a place, or a family, or a moment in history, and then I’ll get out my maps, my field-guides, and try to put something together to give a shape to what has until then been a series of notations, maybe, that I hope will accumulate until I have the critical mass that acts as a first draft. I used to keep journals but don’t any longer. I always have a notebook, though, and use it to make little cryptic notes that I have trouble deciphering afterwards.

LP: Many of the essays have history and historical events woven into them. Do you have to do much research for those pieces or that information?

tk: I am devoted to research, though as I confessed in my answer to your first question, I am not very disciplined. I think I begin with the best of intentions and am sidetracked by interesting details, like a magpie taking bright objects back to its nest. I do build my work from an accurate or actual ground, though, and think of this as a kind of anchor, or ballast. And we find ourselves in history, don’t we? We see aspects of ourselves as the past shifts slightly to accommodate our presence there. Reading letters in an archival collection, we suddenly hear our story. Or looking intently at old photographs, we see a familiar cheekbone, the ghost of a smile.

LP: While the writing in both books covers everything from travel to personal reflection ultimately they form a personal history of your family. We see your children grow etc.  Any thoughts on that?

tk:  Years ago I read something by Annie Dillard that has served almost as a raison d’être for me.  Writing about her journals and notebooks, she said that when looking at them, she has the sense that time has not simply passed but rather it has accumulated. I think of my essays in the same way. Although they can’t be read exactly as a precise record of our lives here on the Sechelt Peninsula, they contain much of what has been significant – the shifting seasons, the passages, our pleasures, and some of the sorrows too. The other day John and I were walking over by Ruby Creek and we saw the dark forms of fish in the water. These are one of only two known fall-spawning populations of cutthroat trout on the Coast. One year our older son conducted a census of the spawning trout as a science fair project – he was 12 that year – and every day for about a month we’d go over to the creek after school and count fish. So of course the shadow of that boy was present at the creek the other day, the shadows of those earlier days, when we were accompanied by a dog now long dead. And that boy is now about to defend his PhD dissertation in Canadian History so how time does accumulate!

LP: The details of the natural world really jump out in the work. Do you feel particularly close to the environment/landscape?

tk: I’m enraptured by the natural world, constantly in thrall to what I find there. It’s important to me to be able to “read” the landscape, its intricate narratives. And those change, as anything changes; new versions or idioms emerge just as older ones surface too. I’ve become fascinated by the fossils of the Tranquille Shale, between Kamloops and Cache Creek, and the amazing stories that are told in those layers. Tiny pre-salmon, sequoias, maple samara: the quotidian details of a lake bed 51 million years old!

LP: A few of the essays, especially those dealing with death, The Road to Bella Coola and Phantom Limb, are intensely personal. They must have been difficult to write and possibly even more difficult for you to re-read.

tk: Language and form allow us to shape our grief and lend a formality to what might otherwise be wild and chaotic. “The Road To Bella Coola” has as its epigraph a line from a poem by Stanley Kunitz: “How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?” That’s the central paradox, isn’t it? That we are nourished in some deep way by the rituals and ceremonies associated with death. It’s the way human beings can attend their dead with respect and dignity.

LP: You also write about the loss of things, Erasing The Maps (places) and Autumn Coho In Haskins Creek (salmon) are two that come to mind. Do you think writing is a way to make sure those things don’t disappear completely?

tk:  Writing is an act of commemoration. Think of what we know because someone has written it down! So I try to pay an attention to what matters to me and to explore it, adore it, praise it. And sometimes that attention takes the form of elegy, I suppose, or threnody. It conspires to remember. Memory itself is such a complicated entity. I’ve been reading Cicero with reference to his Method of Loci and am intrigued by his system for the ordering of memory. In some ways I think of my work in this way — the attachment of a particular body of imagery to a specific locus as a way of remembering.

LP:  Are the essays something you work on all the time or do you write a series all at once?

tk: I’ve always written essays along with other things. While working on a novel, I might find myself wanting to explore something that I’ve come across in research or on a trip or as a result of reading or some unresolved personal issue. It’s a wonderful luxury to break away from an extended work, a novel, to write an essay.  (I’m reminded of the pleasure of taking an unexpected side-road while travelling!) I usually have several in various stages of completion and some of them never really find their true shape, remaining as drafts for years. Working with an editor tends to help me identify particular thematic connections and so I’ll shape a manuscript by concentrating on a specific group of pieces, leaving others out. I’m currently at work on a book-length series of connected essays. Right now each one is discrete, devoted to a particular set of materials. When I’ve finished the whole series, I may in fact decide to create a kind of connective tissue to draw them together into a single body. I’m not sure yet and don’t want to second guess not only myself but the material I’m immersed in by predicting the final form this work will take.

LP: You’ve had several books of poetry (six) and two novels published. Can we look forward to a new book in either of those genres soon?

tk: I’ve recently completed a novel, The Age of Water Lilies, which I hope will be published next year. It’s set partly in the community of Walhachin on the Thompson River just before the Great War and partly in Victoria in the years just after. And I’m at work on a memoir called Mnemonic: A Book of Trees. I’d love to write poetry again but haven’t been able to find that voice, that concentrated sense of language, for some years.

LP: You operate High Ground Press with your husband, the poet John Pass. Can you tell us about that endeavor?

tk: John and I bought a late 19th c. Chandler and Price platen press in 1980 and we use it to print mostly poetry broadsides. This is letterpress printing in which we hand-set the work and then print in very limited editions. We’re presently working our third series of broadsheets; this one we call the Companions Series. We’ve asked a number of Canadian poets to respond to another poem – preferably one for which we don’t need to get permission to reprint – and we print the two poems on a single sheet. So far we’ve printed work by Bill New (responding to John Clare), Maleea Acker and Wallace Stevens, Sue Wheeler and Don McKay, Joe Denham and John Thompson, a version I did of a recently discovered poem by Sappho,  George McWhirter and John Donne, Russell Thornton’s bow to Juan Ramon Jimenez, and John is just setting Chris Patton’s response to a passage of Ezra Pound. Several more are planned for this series. We’ve also printed a couple of chapbooks over the years as well as ephemera – Christmas cards, keepsakes for the Alcuin Society Wayzgoose, etc. To be honest, John does most of the work because when we began to learn to print, we had a baby, quickly followed by two more, so he was able to go out to the print shop – it’s a building of its own, away from the house – more than I could. But we plan the projects together and design them together and I think we both see the work as a congenial adjunct to our writing lives.

LP:  Did you ever buy yourself a pair of red Laredo boots?

tk: I did. A few months after I’d written the title essay for Red Laredo Boots, I sold a different essay to the Vancouver Sun. The payment was exactly the price of those boots. So the next time I was in the Nicola Valley, I went to the Quilchena Store and bought them. I still love them. There was never any discussion of an author shot for that book. The boots went to Vancouver for their own photo shoot, packed in their box with a coyote yipping at the moon,  and came home with soft blue flannel from someone’s old  shirt (maybe even Gary Fiegehen’s as he was their photographer) tucked into them to give them the demure shape they have on the back cover of the book.

Categories
Book Launch Reading

Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poetry – Reading/Launch

Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary B.C. Poets published by Mother Tongue Publishing had a launch and reading at Victoria’s Bolen Books. The anthology edited by Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch contains poems from 108 contributors from British Columbia.

Posters, books and postcards for the launch.

Publisher and editor Mona Fertig performed MC duties

Kyeren Regehr reads.

Donna Kane reads

Derk Wynand reads

Peter Morin reads

Crowd listens to Maleea Acker

Marilyn Bowering reads

Patricia Young reads

Carla Funk stands, waiting for her turn, she was the final reader of the evening

Audience members follow along in their copies of Rocksalt

Categories
Book Launch Reading

Jailbreaks 99 Canadian Sonnets – Zachariah Wells, Steven Price, Lyle Neff, Alan Wilson – Reading

Jailbreaks 99 Canadian Sonnets (published by Biblioasis) had it’s Victoria launch as part of the weekly Friday night reading series Planet Earth Poetry at the Black Stilt Cafe. Regular host Wendy Morton was out of town so MC duties were handled by Yvonne Blomer. Jailbreaks editor Zach Wells was joined by contributors Lyle Neff, Steven Price and Alan Wilson. All four read their own poem in the book as well as a selection of other sonnets in the book.

Poet Yvonne Blomer handled the MC duties.

Zach Wells reads

The audience at the Black Stilt cafe listens to Zach Wells.

Lyle Neff reads.

Steven Price reads

Alan Wilson reads

Kaleb , being held by mom Rachel Lebowitz, keeps an eye on dad Zach Wells (foreground) and Steven Price

Zach Wells signs a book for writer Harold Hoefle. Hoefle is just back from launching his new novel The Mountain Clinic in Montreal

Categories
Interview

John Barton – Interview

LP: You’ve just started a Writer in Residence gig at the Saskatoon Public Library. How long will you be there?

JOB: The position last nine months from the beginning of September 2008 to the end of May 2009.

LP: Why did you decide to go to Saskatoon?

JOB: I grew up on the prairies, in Calgary, but except for short visits to see members of my family, I have not spent any substantial time here since 1978. I saw coming to Saskatoon as an opportunity to reacquaint myself with prairie life—and, yes, prairie winters—and to live somewhere new. Though I have visited the city several times, I have not been in it since 1990. Also, there is a small ancestral connection, in that my maternal great-grandfather was part of the Northwest Field Force that came west from Ontario to suppress 1885 Rebellion—what they call the “resistance” here—at Batoche, an hour north. I did not realize it at the time I applied, but I think, subconsciously, I wanted to steep myself in my plains origins.

LP: How much time will be devoted to working with local writers?

JOB: Forty percent of my time—or two days per week—will be given to office hours at the library and the rest is for my own writing projects.

LP: As a student you studied with poets Garry Geddes, Robin Skeleton, and others. Is there anything you learned about working or teaching from your teachers that you’ll try to pass along?

JOB: One of the most important lessons any writer learn is how to write for the reader rather than for one’s self. Realizing how someone else reads and comprehends your work enables you to write in anticipation in order to have them more perfectly grasp your intentions. I learned this most fully in Robin Skelton’s classes and especially from my fellow students. Also, too many writers begin by believing that they have messages to impart. I feel that we are engaged in creating aesthetic experiences, where what is conveyed is visceral as well as cognitive, as sensory, emotive, and pleasurable.

LP: What will you be working on personally?

JOB: I have three major projects preoccupying me at present. The first is a book of poems constructed using traditional verse forms. In the same way that poets embraced vers libre a century ago, I want to see how set forms can open up and transform my voice. The second is a complex book-length project about three figures of the New York art world of the mid-twentieth century: Paul Cadmus (a painter), George Platt Lynes (a photographer), and Lincoln Kirstein (impresario and cofounder of the New York City Ballet). All three men were gay and knew each other as part of a loosely knit, emergent “queer” community; my interest is in how their different aesthetic concerns came to conceive of the (male) body. Third, I am also at a watershed moment as a poet in that the copyright of most of my earlier books has been returned to me. I can now more actively pursue putting together a new and selected poems as a retrospective glance back at nearly thirty years of work.

LP: Are there particular writers in Saskatoon that you’re looking forward to meeting or hanging out with?

JOB: The community is very large and I am looking forward to meeting many of the poets there, including Elizabeth Philips, whom I know slightly, and Sylvia LeGris, the new editor of Grain, Saskatchewan’s answer to The Malahat Review.

LP: You’ve been the editor of The Malahat Review now for almost five years. Will you be editing the magazine from Saskatoon or have you given up those duties?

JOB: I am taking a partial leave of absence, in that I will not be involved in the day-to-day editing and management of the magazine. When I left Victoria at the end of August, the fall and winter issues were almost fully in place. However, during the spring of 2009, I will be completing the annual funding applications of various provincial and national arts agencies—or, as Yann Martel said to me recently, the most unpleasant part of the job. I decided to complete them during my leave because I’m the one will have to live with the results of these applications upon my return to Victoria in June 2009. Also, I’m the one on staff most conversant with the application process, having completed such applications every year since 1989.

LP: What’s the best thing about being editor of the Review?

JOB: Before I became editor, I coedited Arc, a poetry journal in Ottawa. The Malahat allows me to work with fiction and creative nonfiction as well, which has expanded my scope. Also, because of the magazine’s reputation, the caliber of the writing I am able to publish is much finer. It’s long been Canada’s iconic literary magazine, and it shows in the writing we receive.

LP: What is coming up in future issues of the Review that we should be looking for?

JOB: In December, we are publishing a theme issue called The Green Imagination, which examines how writers engage aesthetically with environmental issues. It’s a longer issue than normal, 160 rather than 112 pages and shows Canadian writers to be very troubled about the long-term prognosis for the planet. It was originally conceived of as a sesquicentennial tribute to B.C., but is rather more cautionary than celebratory. Apart from this, there is no other theme issues planned. They are important to do on occasion, but I don’t believe that writers benefit from having too many of them on the horizon. General issues offer writers much more scope to publish a wider spectrum of work and are much more emphatically “participatory democracies.” There is nothing more alienating for writers than to be faced with endless back-to-back theme issues on topics that may not be relevant to them. The Malahat’s quartet of general issues in 2009 will nevertheless feature our usual annual contests: Long Poem, Far Horizons, and Creative Non-Fiction. Our preoccupation will remain one of excellence.

LP: You were Poetry Editor at Signature Editions until last spring. Are you continuing with any book editing duties on a freelance basis?

JOB: While I am in Saskatoon, I will not be taking on any freelance projects, but once I am back in Victoria, I will definitely accept any that might come my way. I enjoy this kind of work enormously and believe that I have a talent for it. It’s time-consuming work; on average it takes me about twelve to fifteen hours to work through a poetry manuscript. I charge $60 per hour, which might seem steep, but it is a competitive rate.

LP: As an editor you’re aware of what’s new on the publishing front. What books are you looking forward to seeing?

JOB: I see so much new writing that sometimes I get overwhelmed by it, but new books that I am looking forward to reading are by Ottawa poet, Craig Poile, one of Canada’s technically proficient writers. He’s got a new book coming out with Goose Lane next year. Also, Saskatoon’s Barbara Klar has a new book of poems with Brick called Cypress.

LP: You grew up in Alberta, lived and worked in Ottawa, have been in Victoria for several years and will be living in Saskatchewan for the next year. Any thoughts on how the cities are different for a writer?

JOB: What I liked most about Ottawa when I first moved there in 1986 is that its writing scene seemed entirely free of hierarchy. It was refreshing. Saskatoon reminds me of Ottawa in this regard; it’s the friendliest place that I have ever lived, and the writing community reflects this. Thistledown Press, which is located down the street from where I am living, recently launched four first books of poetry, with an audience of over 150. I cannot think of anywhere else where such a turn-out would occur, especially for first-time writers. A transplanted Vancouver poet whom I have just met told me that she’s had had a better chance to find an audience for her work in Saskatoon than she did in B.C., where she was one among so many writers and where the arts are too compromised by the politics of reputation-building. My experience of being in Victoria has been so coloured by my position as editor of The Malahat Review that I probably don’t have a terribly accurate view of what it is to be a writer there. Certainly, I felt welcomed when I arrived and realize I am in an enviable position—though I have lost count of how many writers across the country have introduced themselves by telling me that the magazine has rejected their work. Maybe a rejection by the Malahat is a mark of distinction or at least a rite of passage.

LP: Last question. That old standby. What are you reading now?

JOB: So much of what I read it is determined by the dictates of my Cadmus-Lynes-Kirstein project. Right now I am reading a short biography of George Balanchine, the founding artistic director of the New York City Ballet; a book of essays of Lincoln Kirstein; and George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. I have just finished Lorna Crozier’s The Bones in Their Wings, her lovely book of ghazals, with an explication of the rules of this form, and the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Yesterday, I just started Anne Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees.

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Anonymous Bookshelf Photography

Anonymous Bookshelf #3

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In The Newspapers Uncategorized

Al Purdy House For Sale

The Purdy house on Robin Lake in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, built by Al Purdy and fellow poet Milton Acorn, is being put up for sale by his widow Eurithe. Attempts to have the house preserved as a writers’ retreat have attracted little interest. From the Globe and Mail.

Categories
Interview

Jailbreaks, 99 Canadian Sonnets – An interview with Editor Zacharia Wells

Jailbreaks, 99 Canadian Sonnets, edited by Zacharia Wells

LP: How did Jailbreaks come to be?

ZW: I’ve always been drawn to the sonnet and had read a few recently published international sonnet anthologies. I found them to be not quite international enough, particularly when it came to Canada. I started mentally cataloguing all the Canadian sonnets that I thought were good enough to be included in these books and realized that there might just be a book in it. So I started hauling volumes off my shelves and bookmarking likely candidates. At this point, I still didn’t have a publisher committed to the project, but Dan Wells at Biblioasis, with whom I’d been working on other projects, said he’d publish it, so I set about doing it in earnest, going to the Dalhousie University library and scouring books for suitable sonnets, typing them out, assembling them into a ms., shifting poems in and out, writing notes on the poems, etc. The whole process played out, in fits and starts, over approximately three years.

LP: Why sonnets?

ZW: As I said, I’ve long been fascinated with the form. It’s one of the few traditional forms that is flexible enough to contain a really wide variety of techniques, subjects, tones. It’s kind of a form-that-wouldn’t-be in that regard; an anthology of villanelles, for example, is almost inconceivable because a blur of sameness would inevitably result. I love how a sonnet argues with itself between octave and sestet, how it works things out dialectically, embodying human thought in its very structure. It’s at once compact and expansive. One of the book’s contributors, Wayne Clifford, is publishing, in several volumes, a sequence of over 400 sonnets–and this after publishing a suite of 52 sonnets a couple years ago; small moments that link into a life.

LP: You obviously had to deal with a great many poets and publishers. What was your greatest challenge assembling this book?

ZW: The greatest challenge is one I lost. I was denied permission by Elizabeth Bishop’s publisher to reprint a sonnet of hers, on the grounds that Bishop is not a Canadian poet, so including her in a Canadian anthology would “cause confusion.” Technically, in terms of her citizenship, this is accurate; in more meaningful terms, it’s ridiculous, since Nova Scotia was as much, or more, home as any other place for Bishop. I pled my case to the publisher, but they wouldn’t budge.

LP: You’ve included a Notes on the Poems section following the poetry. They read as though you had a lot of fun analyzing the different approaches to the sonnet. Did you?

ZW: Absolutely. I took my cue from Don Paterson’s anthology 101 Sonnets. I loved his insouciant and often insightful notes on each of the poems in that book and thought it would be a good way to go about things in my own anthology. I had a lot of fun with it.

LP: This collection contains poems and writers from very different eras and parts of the country that, aside from its literary merits, makes it a historical document as well. Any thoughts on that?

ZW: I suppose it is, though as has been pointed out in one review, about half of the book’s poems are ten years old or younger. Which is itself a documentation of a present phenomenon. One of the reasons the book is chronologically top-heavy is that poets have been turning back to the sonnet in droves over the past decade. The 60s-80s were a pretty dry era for the sonnet in Canada, as orthodox thinking was that writing rhyming metrical poems was passé, or too British, that free verse was the thing now, “open field composition,” lines determined by “breath units” instead of metrical feet. A lot of poets who started off writing in traditional forms abandoned them; and younger poets followed in their footsteps, so that learning how to write a sonnet was no longer part of the formative training poets underwent. As a reaction to the great mass of formless broken-prose free verse that eventually resulted, poets have started more and more looking to the past for fresh new ways of writing poems. The sonnet’s been a big part of that.

LP: Further to that question, why no bios on the poets?

ZW: I wanted to place the emphasis firmly on the single poem. Most anthologies are about poets, or generations of poets, with photos and bios and all the trappings of quasi-celebrity. This one’s about single, small poems. And besides, with 100 poets, the bios would take up a ridiculous number of pages!

LP: It’s always a tough question for an editor but any personal favourites in the book?

ZW: You’re right, that is a tough question…

LP: Jailbreaks is a gorgeous book, sporting a matt cover in a dark red with black accents and lettering in both silver and black. Nice paper inside. Was that a conscious decision when you were planning the book, to make it look and feel more upscale? Who was the designer?

ZW: The designer was Dennis Priebe and you’re right, he did do a beautiful job. I have to take some measure of credit for the eventual shape of the book, as I had input on the trim size and the type-setting and turned down an earlier cover design that wasn’t quite working for me. There were some mild arguments between me and Dan Wells over this, but we both agree now, it has worked out well. There wasn’t an aim to make this particular book “look and feel more upscale.” Dan and Dennis and I are just all people who care about the design as well as the content of a book, so the final product reflects that.

LP: You’re a poet yourself, why is there no Z. Wells sonnet in the book?

ZW: Not enough space! Seriously, I disapprove in general of editors including their own work in an anthology. I have my own private opinions about the merits of my own attempts at the sonnet, but Jailbreaks was not the place to air those opinions.

LP: You have your finger in a number of other pies. You’re the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes and Queries. You’ve written a fair bit of journalism. You also work for Via Rail. What do you do for the railroad?

ZW: I work as a host/bartender/guide in the dome car on the train between Vancouver and Winnipeg. I’ve worked a number of other on-train service jobs over the last five years, but that’s been my regular gig the last two summers.

LP: You’ve written about ‘blue collar writers’ in the past. Does your employment have an affect on your writing?

ZW: My book Unsettled is drawn from my experiences working as an airline cargo hand in the Eastern Arctic. For whatever reason, the train work hasn’t translated directly into many poems. It does give me quite a bit of time off in which to read and write, however, which has been crucial to getting things like Jailbreaks done. Though I’m a big fan of several poets who have used their work as subject matter for their writing, I have no special interest in “blue collar” writing as such–like anything else, most of it’s not very good–and my own writing has gone in different directions in recent years.

LP: You do have the obligatory writer’s blog but unlike many you manage to keep it up to date and filled with varied content. It has the wonderful title of Career Limiting Moves. How did that title come about? Do you find the blog useful?

ZW: The name of the blog is a two-pronged joke. When I quit working for the airline up north, I sent a letter to my bosses outlining what I considered to be significant misjudgments on the part of company management. It later got back to me that one of my bosses had called this letter a real “career-limiting move.” This was hilarious to me, since what else would a resignation letter be? The other facet of it is that most of the journalism I do is book reviewing, and if you’re going to review books honestly, which I always try to do, you’re going to piss off people from time to time, so it’s not a great way to get ahead in the literary sphere.

I like having the blog as a place to air opinions, new poems and promotional announcements–or just the odd strange thing that caught my eye. I guess it’s useful, insofar as it keeps me in touch with a readership, but I keep it up because it’s enjoyable.

LP: What’s next for Zachariah Wells?

ZW: Well, as I type this, my wife (writer Rachel Lebowitz) is in the early stages of labour, preparatory to the birth of our first child. I reckon that will take a fair bit of time and energy! A children’s book that Rachel and I co-wrote, illustrated gorgeously by Eric Orchard, will be released by Biblioasis in September. I’ll be doing some promotional stuff for that, as well as for Jailbreaks, over the fall. Next year, I’m supposed to publish a new collection of poems and a collection of critical prose. I’m also editing a couple of books, including a selection of poems by the late Nova Scotia poet Kenneth Leslie. Rachel and I (and baby) will be moving back to Halifax from Vancouver next spring, too, so it’ll be another jam-packed year.

Jailbreaks, 99 Canadian Sonnets is published by BIBLIOASISFront cover of JailbreaksJailbreaks inside pages

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Only Poetry

A story from Crosscut about a Seattle book store that sells only poetry. It is one of only two poetry only bookstores in the USA (The other is in Cambridge, Mass.). The two owners keep costs down by employing only themselves and not computerizing, all sales and inventory are kept track of in a spiral ledger.

And on the subject of poetry Toronto’s Eye Weekly looks at their poetry contest winners.