Multiplicanda Ah Um in SDR

Now and then in my life I have been aware of a shift in my writing. Right now I am finishing the final draft of my latest novel, The Whole Show, and I need to finish it before classes start in the fall, and I think I can. In the meantime I procrastinate a little by reading, and by revising poems and stories to send them out. During the semester I rarely have the time for the sustained period of attention the novel requires, so I write stories. 

I can't always locate the shift in my writing, and sometimes it seems false years later, but the latest two stories I've been able to publish seem like the beginning of a new phase. One, called "Another New Story," will come out in The Fiddlehead sometime in the next year, and this one, called "Multiplicanda Ah Um," is in the latest issue of South Dakota Review.

There is always a struggle between two poles, and this summer I have been caught between wanting to read essays and wanting to read graphic novels and memoirs, a genre that is completely new to me. So since I have a messy office and any picture I take of this beautiful new journal (cover photo by Lee Ann Roripaugh and design by duncan b. barlow) will take in some of that, I have two -- on one my stack of graphic novels and one beside another stack.

The shift in my own work might be located quite simply in the birth of my first daughter, but that was four years ago this December, and this story, "Multiplicanda Ah Um" is the first story in this new phase maybe, but I wrote it during the past year. Just before she was born I was listening to lots of instrumental jazz, because I knew nothing about it and it seemed perfect for writing my novel. No words to get in the way. Since then, I have fallen in love with many jazz albums, but of course Mingus Ah Um is where this title came from.

The two poles I have been trying to work between are simplicity and experimentation. My experimentation is in elision maybe at the plot level, maybe at the background level, and never at the level of syntax, yet I am always surprised by my work's inaccessibility. Both poles seem important--simplicity as in clarity that seems absolutely aligned with realism somehow & experimentation that acknowledges the lie in realism because it someone accepts the world right here right now as natural and unchangeable.

I saw Geddy Lee interviewed once and he described making Rush's breakthrough album 2112 -- they had decided the public and the record company didn't buy it anyway when they tried to anticipate the public's taste, so who cares, they would just make the album most like them that they could.

The desire to become what one should be is simple and strong, but its expression is complex. This story in SDR is about that.

The Shadow Government

I meant to be able to post some kind of list of bet of last year, but cannot. Time is so odd to me now, since the children are born. The days seem to move so slowly and you just try to make it to bed time alive, but the weeks and months just speed by somehow.

However, back to work again after parental leave and there are many things to be excited about. Rediscovering the work of Judith Pond and Chris Levenson, discovering the work of Shane Nielson, through a submission to Ryga then reading his memoir Gunmetal Blue, and beginning to read his poetry. We're really excited to be publishing a chapbook by him as well. David Harsent's book, Night, is also something I'm reading a lot.

For fiction, I just started Les Plasko's novel No Stopping Train. What a horribly sad story his is, at least at the end. From the intro to the book, published posthumously after his suicide, it seems his life was good as he lived it -- committed to his art and within a community of like-minded people.

The story touches me for many reasons, because he was human, but one of the main reasons is that his case is not a solitary one. There is great work out there being ignored in favour of the latest historical romance or zombie novel, or whatever agents and publishers think may make a good movie or book club selection. Instead of elevating tastes and championing good writing, it seems easier to pander to the lowest level of reading sophistication and then try to elevate the poor writing that copies the last season's bestsellers, or genre writing, to the level of literature in the minds of arts commentators and prize juries. It's working, and I suppose there is nothing to be done about it, in a negative sense -- I mean I understand Grisham writes good stories, but I can't get through 3 pages in a row of that horrible writing.

So instead I have decided to start writing reviews and trying to bring attention to books I think deserve it. When I talk about writing with friends whose opinions matter to me, we are never talking about the books in the newspapers, when talking about writing that changes us, hurts us, or shakes us. It is always about other writers, whose texts live in some other space, forming a kind of shadow government, working against the sloganeering establishment that lives in the sunshine. Anyway, I will try it. That's why no real comments about these texts right now.

How Easy It All Is

Good news. I just saw a FB posting for a writing class offered by someone in the community. The outline of the course shows 6 classes, and here is the good news: It only takes 2 of those classes to get through the writing and then the 4 last classes are all about publishing and marketing.

And actually, you cover the "basics of writing" in the first class and the second class is all about "staying inspired."

I think what we should do is have musicians forgo learning their instruments as well, and skip right to costumes and makeup and the pose of the tortured artist for the twitter pics.

Anyway, I thought that was pretty stupid, but then the comments about it were all so sycophantic and ridiculous I had to follow it a little bit. I found one person who commented had recently posted on FB that she was excited about a new short story she was publishing through Amazon and to illustrate something (how excited she was probably, though I think it was implied this actually illustrated her commitment), she added she'd been working on it all morning!

To be fair, she might have meant the layout or the cover design, or many other things, but I kind of think she didn't.

It struck me as quite odd, of course, but then I realized it's not that different from how some writers who publish traditionally talk about themselves, too, and it recalled for me a bit from A Moveable Feast, where Hemingway wrote something like it made him sick to talk about writing. I understand that, because unless you're talking about a specific work then you are talking about "being" a writer, and that's ridiculous because so many people, talented and otherwise, claim that title, and then chatter about writing constantly, instead of writing.

And these are grownups, too, not the people I knew back in my undergrad who would introduce themselves as "poets" and then write inane and obvious observations about the world 6 inches in front of their face and how just observing it made them suffer so. Now, when they are grownups, it's pretty similar, but they write touristy things -- for instance, they are academics, writing 6 poems in 6 days because they went to a new location for a conference and must describe the injustices to everyone else in this world.

Now I was just going to write "They are heroes, really," but one problem these days is how to read things these days, how to find sincerity, how not to be bullied by a writer who appears instantly due to contemporary technology and whose uniform changes daily, one who responds to any sort of critique or engagement with contempt, implying the reader has mistaken satire for sincerity. So, we cop out all the time.

What all of this leads to is the notion that all writing is equal. There is another guy I know who is described sometimes as a journalist, though he does not investigate, or research, or discover new information -- all he does is write stuff that is meant to inspire. I suppose it is honest, but it's meant to inspire in the same way a motivational speaker does, or Jack Handy. He's not a journalist.

I was asked in the fall to read at the local library with some other local authors. It was pretty odd, because when I looked into it I realized that none of the authors aspired to write literature, and none of them had anything in common (aside from the fact that 2 or 3 were self-published). I asked the librarian who asked me to do it what his rationale was. He said he hadn't looked at any of the work by the authors. How does a librarian become a librarian without a bit of an aptitude for research, or even a tiny bit of curiosity? Anyway, he seemed annoyed that I did not want to be on a panel including self-published authors of self-help books, investment advice books, and books of religious inspirational stories.

Anyway, the message is you spend the morning writing, then publish it in the afternoon so you have time to market it the rest of the week, I guess.

Launching We Don't Listen to Them

I've read a couple of times this fall, and they both felt pretty good. I was down in South Dakota, returning to the school where I got my last degree, and it was a great time, meeting and talking to so many bright and committed writers, including the director of creative writing there, Lee Ann Roripaugh. (Of course I was not meeting her; Lee was one of the main people I learned from while I was getting my degree, and she turned me on to many great writers and also helped me put together my first collection of poetry. And just before I went down there, I received her latest book, which I had preordered what seemed like months before. The book is called Dandarians, and I was lucky enough to read much of it prior to its publication. What amazes me about Lee is the density of her work, and how the syntactic complexity and combination of diction from such a variety of registers always seems effortless--though that's probably the wrong word.) I read with Geoff Schmidt and got to know a little bit about him from dinners and drinks and so on, and his craft talk, which, as these things sometimes work, will help me a bit on my next novel, where I will use his geo-narrative ideas (or have one character use them . . . ) Then when I got home I was able to read Geoff's book of short fiction, Out of Time, which won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. There are so many things to admire in that book, but the first story especially really sticks with me: "Man in Gorilla Suit by Midnight." It's one of those great stories where the external oddities entertain and amuse, and that amusement leaves a kind of space at the end where the reader is suddenly more open to the universal human relations at the heart of the story.

I came home with a few new writers to check out, including Brian Evenson. whose collection the Wavering Knife I am reading right now, and Laird Hunt, whose novel the Exquisite, I got in the mail last week. There is too little time to read right now, especially with all the new books, which seem to create an extra pressure so I skip from book to book without actually reading. Then I read with Karen Hoffman as part of the UBC Okanagan reading series and was especially grateful for the former students who came out in Kelowna. It seemed like a really great crowd, great energy. One of the highlights was meeting up with my former student Ryan the night before, and hearing about the work he's doing now and how his life is going. It reminds me, and I need reminding sometimes, that life is more than just reading and writing (though it sometimes isn't, of course) and feel a little less guilty about my lack of production while I am on leave with my second daughter.

Anyway, this all brings me to my next reading: Thursday, November 20th, at 7 pm. I am reading at the Bohemian Cafe in downtown Kelowna, with a friend of mine, John Lent. He's a poet, novelist, scholar, and singer-songwriter. It's a pretty humbling thing to think of all that has happened to me in the last 10 years, when I quit my job as a construction surveyor and went down to South Dakota to get my PhD, then was hired by Okanagan College and met John Lent, who has been instrumental in my recent development (who knows how much of this is visible in the work itself, but it's obvious to me; the conversations with John and with my colleague Jake about the writing that matters to them, and the writing that matters little, sustains me emotionally, that's for sure, but intellectually it is amazing to always be shown there is more to learn).

All this to say it will be a great pleasure to read with John and to hear him speak again about writing, and (I hope) hear from the work he is at now, which we have often spoke of, but which I have yet to read or to hear.

Another Award

I was really happy to learn that my first poetry professor, Christopher Levenson, is on the short list for the Governor General's Award for poetry. It's his book Night Vision, which I have yet to read.

I kind of didn't know there was such a thing as a creative writing class when I saw Chris's introductory workshop in poetry among the offerings at Carleton while I was there studying Journalism in the first half of the 90s. It was a class that changed my life in many ways, like a great workshop should, and like I hope some of my own classes do. Some of that has nothing to do with the teacher, really -- the kind of engagement you get from the students and how they work together and continue to work together after the workshop is over, that's often luck. But you had to submit a portfolio to get into Chris's class, which I don't think anyone does anymore at the level.

However it happened, there were a number of people in that class who would push me and encourage me and give me new poets to admire from their own group of books (that's the thing that was marvelous, really -- that all these people read on their own, outside of courses, and found poets to love and to hate and sometimes to imitate and then reject later).

Though Chris was above us in ability and erudition, he was like us in that his enthusiasm had not dampened, it seemed. This stuff, even in an undergraduate introductory class, mattered to him. I remember visiting his office and being encouraged by the clutter and amazed that he could pull a photocopy of a poem relevant to our discussion immediately from a stack of papers somehow.

He started me taking my work seriously and then I fell in with a great group of people and I can't remember all of their names, but Craig Carpenter, Jim Larwill, Warren Fulton, Malcolm Todd, and Rocco, I remember. I think they're all still working and reading,

Then suddenly one time in Vancouver he appeared at a reading I gave from my first book of poetry, and joined me for a drink with a J-School friend who now works as an editor, and one of my first creative writing students from Vernon, who studies now at SFU, I think.

It's enough to make a man sentimental. It really is beautiful to see him shortlisted for this award and remember what he started in my own life. His workshop led to my next workshop, one taught by Tom Henighan and Rick Taylor on short fiction, the form that has become my favourite. I met Jeff Ross there, and was introduced to the work of Par Lagkervist and Tobias Wolff.

Jeff and I would argue until closing time at the pub after class, and to meet someone who cares so much about writing and literature to talk so long and so passionately, it was amazing. It was a thing I didn't know would become rare in my life once I left school. I miss it.

Ten Books

There are these things going around on FB and so I thought I would list the 10 books that changed my life here. In no order, and off the top of my head, as, I think, the rules state:

1) Lord Foul's Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson. I was a fantasy fan in my teens and this character Thomas Covenant seemed so real and flawed. It was a revelation and was great for me at the time so I could understand that morality is not simple.

2) The Foundation Trilogy, by Asimov. Not sure why. I feel like Dune and The Empire of the East by Saberhagen changed me too, but back in those days every book or record did, like when the Cult's Love came out.

3) Pastoralia, by George Saunders. This one is just so good. "The Barber's Unhappiness" is one of the best stories ever, so honest and so hard to read at times.

4) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carver. I hadn't read Carver long ago when I started writing short fiction in a class taught by Tom Henighan during my undergrad. He was a model and I didn't know it. I think he'd changed things so much I was copying his copies.

5) Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, by Grace Paley. I still think she is horribly underrated, like she should be mentioned before Carver every time, and before Saunders, and before all of them except maybe Alice Munro (who is not on this list because I don't remember her books, just some stories. I've read her books so many times I feel like her work exists just like short fiction should -- as a life-long collection of discrete stories. Anyway, back to Paley. It was so great to hear her name from Gish Jen when she read with Tobias Wolff at the last AWP.

6) Swarm, by Jorie Graham. For better or worse, changed the way I read and write poetry, and led to my finding her other work, like the poem "At the Cabaret Now."
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7) 60 Stories, by Donald Barthelme. "The Glass Mountain," "The School," "See the Moon?" "City of Churches," "Me and Mrs. Mandible," the one with Paul Klee in the title . . . they are all so good. Somehow he manages to be so clever and so funny without being cold.

8) Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger. I cannot get enough of "For Esme, with Love and Squalor." Every time I read a book about war, or a book where characters try to live after some kind of trauma, I cannot help but think of this story.

9) The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker

10) Coming Through Slaughter, by Michael Ondaatje

Short Fiction from the Car Wash

My new book, We Don't Listen to Them, will be published in a few short weeks.

It's a book that's taken a long while to write. I know some people write collections from the outset, knowing a book will result. I really believe short stories must stand alone, so the timeline of this book's composition is hard to be sure about, but I know have been writing short stories all along, and my first book of stories was published way back in 2002, so that's a while.

I am trying to look at them objectively right now. That's hard, for some reason, until the physical book is in my hands. But it is nice to see this little review.

Also nice was a great review of my previous Thistledown Press book, The Ditch Was Lit Like This, published in the Fiddlehead.

The process of publishing and promoting can be demoralizing in some ways, so the see a one of your books read so attentively years after its publication is a great encouragement.

New Things

"The accurate representation of reality is, for the artist, the highest morality. It is immoral to conceal the way human beings live, or what human beings think." -- HelenVendler

I sometimes feel like a dilettante. I have read only a portion of the books I should read, and though I write poetry, and read poetry, my first love is short fiction, so I am especially behind on poetry. That's okay. It helps me remain open to surprise. I can still discover things. One of them is this book by Helen Vendler, an anthology and intro textbook to poetry.

It makes me want to read Kundera's essay on Francis Bacon for the first time again, or the same with John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, or Rust Hill's book on writing in general and the short story in particular (I think that's the title but not sure) . . . all books that charged me up at some time and made me think this irrelevant work in my small room was important.

Anyway, just reading this, and children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections, by Renee Sarojini Saklikar. I have notes all over this book, and nothing intelligent to say right now, but it's one of those challenging books that changes the way I approach both poetry and narrative, I think. I'm still trying to figure out how it works, but I know it's related to the Vendler quotation above, and also to Kundera's essay.

During the Death Match

Last week's battle in the Broken Pencil Deathmatch ended oddly, too, with one gang of anonymous voters calling the other gang of anonymous voters cheaters. It was really a poor end.

I think the exercise is pretty goofy, but who cares about the votes anyway? It's nice to get a story out there, have it read, and who cares what else happens. There are always people hiding behind the anonymity to say things that they would not say to a person's face.

There is an odd space in which authors exist, except the ones already anointed, deserving or otherwise, and as I have been thinking about this spectacle I think I've come to like at least one thing about it--it makes public the usually silent grumblings that particular people voice about the work of their peers. Interesting in the last round was how the Ottawa independent community came out to defend their competitor's story.

I don't think it should matter if you know a person or not, that's my problem. In fact, that is the problem with all literary communities (small or large): their loyalty and support becomes ridiculously suffocating and incestuous. You must like my work and I must like yours. We pat each other on the back, while hoping that if we praise someone outside of our group that favour will also be returned so that we can move out of our small community and into the larger one, meanwhile the agents and the big publishers look for stuff that looks exactly like the other stuff, supporting Can Lit as if it's a network of vending machines, replacing stale cheese-flavoured snacks with fresh cheese-flavoured snacks, and asking their authors to make more snacks.

Anyway, it's nice then to see some of this stuff in the Death Match. It may not always be great, but it's raw, and the writers are writing it because they are moved to, not because they want a job as a writer.

This Is True

"I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another, in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me--to give the mundane its beautiful due."

Here is John Updike, and I believe him. That's the kind of work I want to do. This is a beautiful part of writing, looking at the world and paying attention. I have never been one of those writers, though, who claim the character just took over. Never. I am not transcribing thoughts or speech from someone who does not exist, although as a young person I sought this, definitely. I'd been reading about the tragic life of Robert E. Howard and some description of him writing the first Conan story quickly and without thought, as if he were taking dictation. I knew he'd lived a hard life and ended it himself, yet I was too young for that prospect to seem close enough to worry about--it was just part of his narrative. So I read this story about his writing and thought it was the proper life, to give yourself to this imaginary world. I thought of him as heroic, and of living a life that defied the impoverished world in which he lived.

I don't think that any more. And I think Updike's quotation above is perfect.

Death Match again

I wasn't born an intellectual, and don't think of myself as one right now, though reading comments on the internet sometimes makes me reconsider that. But I bring it up because there was a time when I read without a program; I was just a young person learning by reading. But I didn't know it. I was a just a young person reading, as far as I knew.

But the reading I did mattered to me often in the same way as music did, though I am not a musician. I remember finding records that were hard to like, and in the end those records became ones that I loved and returned to often. I had to figure out what these people were doing, and it took time, and it brought a kind of pleasure different from the immediate pleasure of a pop song that gets in your head easily. An example is New Day Rising, by Husker Du. It was hard for me to find the melodies there, but I did. It was so different from the hair metal bands I'd loved a few years earlier. Now "Celebrated Summer," "The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill," and "I Apologize," are with me forever.

I read a lot then, and it was in print, about these bands, and Saskatoon had a legitimate independent commercial radio station. That didn't last long. But there were still the university radio shows and you could read their lists of records in the Sheaf, the student newspaper, and you could figure things out. But the beautiful thing was people wrote about these bands, too.

Right now it's a little hard to feel the same thing in literature. I cannot read Notes from Underground for the first time again. I can't get the collected poems of Charles Olson at the Saskatoon Public Library and read them on my own, alone, knowing nothing of this man's background or importance or affiliations. I can't discover him for myself. As a matter of fact it feels like it's impossible to discover anything anymore.

I try to recreate similar experiences for my students, telling them nothing of the book we are to read until they have gotten a substantial way into it. I am not sure if it works since some of this likely doesn't matter to the students, because the classes they take from me are requirements and not their real interests.

Yet I do believe the purpose of art is defamiliarization, a return to some theoretical unmediated perception of reality, so the first response to a difficult text should be feeling in the dark of some unknown room for edges and bits of solidity to be used as references. If you enter with a map in your head the probable outcome is your groping will confirm that map rather than discover a hidden room.

So I made a bit of a retreat from traditional channels of publishing to an internet-based voting contest over at Broken Pencil, the idea being to, I hoped, connect with some people who were at the at DIY stage of life and still finding meaning in literature without having it prescribed before their reading. I like that idea, and it takes me back to my days in Ottawa, when I was hanging out with people who thought what they did was important, and worked at it, and critiqued my work and the works of others with the honest goal of at least working out their own aesthetic. I hung out with people like Jim Larwill, Jeff Ross, Craig Carpenter, and others, and learned from all of them (Jim reinforced the idea that this was work, which for some reason was hard for me to believe because it was also play; Jeff challenged me to consider now and then a plot in my fiction; Craig taught me to be a bit more open to writers I didn't immediately embrace, which was valuable precisely because I didn't realize I was closed to some things).

Anyway, this contest seems like an odd way to do that, but I still think it's a tonne better than a Canada Reads contest where novels are voted in (like a few years back when you get shameless vote-grubbing from authors who could not take the time to acknowledge that, wait a minute, maybe asking other novelists to vote for my mediocre novel as an important Canadian novel 10 times a day via social media, is insulting), or even now, the predetermined champion, which was being hyped before it was published and contains such cliched writing that we should all be embarrassed . . . never mind that it's the typical historical novel aimed at letting us feel better than our ancestors because we are such better people now . . . why not read They Called Me Number One, by Bev Sellars, instead, and remember that the violent legacy of our country's founding is not safely in the past?

So now I am in this contest for which the last round was moderated by a one-named character who fancies himself hard, insulting widely any opposing opinions and presenting it as "truth." I guess I am old. He is what's called a troll, and old guys maybe assume sincerity where they should not, and are baited into responding. That part was fun, though. I think the more you poke those people the more they reveal themselves, and most of the silent people reading are reasonable, I hope.

But prior to that, last week, I had a couple conversations with writers I admire, and it's encouraging; there is this shadow world that the mainstream media does not notice, and in this world real people read the work of challenging writers and share it. It matters more to them than more likes on an author's FB page, say. In this world people read a book by accident, or by wandering and following links in other works, etc. and are transformed by it, and share it, and there are prose works, too, that have the kind of fugitive life that has traditionally been poetry's . . . and I suppose it's not all bad. Alice Munro and Lynn Coady are celebrated, and they are real artists, not book-club authors.

Death Match

The Deathmatch has begun over at Broken Pencil and I am looking forward to my own quarter final round match, which begins on Feb. 10th. I am ambivalent about the whole thing, but with slightly more anticipation than dread.

The dread is not about having people say things about me or my story. First of all, who cares what anybody thinks about me. Second, I am not sure I trust their judgement on fiction--but that's only so far, seeing what's been written about so far in the comments section.

But what can you say about it, when for some reason we celebrate Jodi Picoult-type fiction as literary? It works its way right down to the so-called indie presses, where things are celebrated as "edgy" because there is someone in there drunk or having sex. A long time ago my English teacher in high school told us every generation thinks they invented sex, and I see more and more that he's right.

On the first page of a recent celebrated novel--the first page after the faux-poetic opening--you find this phrase: "the bile of curses that pour from my mouth . . . " This is cliched, empty writing, but we celebrate it. Orwell's advice, maybe every good writer's advice, to avoid phrases you have heard before, would really help this book out. Bile is such an overused word and maybe this use is only new in that it isn't that most cliched use, where the bile rises in the throat, though I expect that phrase occurs later in the novel. Another trick this novel uses is the present tense as a way to make the ordinary seem urgent.

Anyway, I have made an effort to read this book, and the plot seems interesting, but in the end I just cannot care enough to even speed-read it; the letting the overwrought sentences pad the novel and bore me. So when Nicholson Baker's novel Travelling Sprinkler arrived in the mail I switched to that, and am amazed that this book about one contemporary man's mundane life is so much more compelling than this other historical plot-driven text.

It will take a little time to figure that question out. I stayed up and read half of the Baker novel, really enjoying it, but feeling nostalgic for the first novel of this hero, Paul Chowder, the Anthologist, which I loved. So far this one isn't quite as good, but that's just my first, quick, impression.

Mingus and the Deep Dark Woods

When I was younger I loved the year end shows about music, and the lists. In those days we'd have a cassette ready and tape the top 100 of the year from the local station. I can't remember if I questioned the authority behind the list, but I think I didn't. Then later on in my life I came to some great books by reading such lists.

Though I did go on to get some degrees, I began my reading life with no agenda, and I kind of miss that. I read Love in the Time of Cholera simply because I saw it on a list somewhere. I didn't maybe understand the significance of Marquez until I read Barth's essay on his work or maybe when I read 100 Years of Solitude again for a course in grad school, but the books did affect me. I was naively working in what I thought was isolation, but wasn't, of course. Anyway, in those days we loved lists. I remember when my best of lists included mainly heavy metal music, or when Sling Blade came out, or when Barney's Version was the book to read at our house over Christmas, when someone had received it as a gift.

Now I can't remember things as well, and I think I don't really have as strong opinions as I used to--or maybe I have less energy to remember the things I dislike.

This year started in Saskatoon, where I was working on a new novel in the basement of our rented townhouse. It was a long winter, and I knew our daughter would be born (yesterday was her first birthday, and tomorrow is my 47th, so this day seems important too, somehow, though of course it isn't--the ducks on the creek by our house are still ducks, and the snow is falling, but it's soft, and there is no ice on the creek. Abby the dog watches them float from her place on the bank and she's old too--it used to be she's jump in and chase them, but now she knows she has no hope of beating them while swimming and even her approach to getting the ducks who are not in the water has changed; she fancies herself as a cat, and tries to keep the brush, or a tree trunk, in between her and the sitting ducks until her final sprint. But she's slower, and older, and will never catch another bird, if she has ever.) so I had worked madly at my new novel (The Whole Show) and finished the first draft before she was born, though I did get back at it a couple of months after her birth, too.

But down in the basement I played Blues and Roots, by Charles Mingus, over and over as I wrote. It reminded me of years previous when there were 3 cassettes I listened to over and over during my first year at Carleton -- The Future, by Leonard Cohen; Fully Completely, by the Tragically Hip; and Automatic for the People, by REM. That was the first time I went back to school after a few years of working out in the cold, surveying. It was my own warm world in my little room in Ottawa, reading books, feeling warm and dry. It was magical, though some would see it as a squalid existence.

It was the same last year in my makeshift office, with my old thrift-store cd player with purple speakers, listening to Mingus and typing about a guy who's recently quit his job managing a few thrift stores to recapture his youth. The part I was writing about doesn't really related, but maybe. Anyway, this was also the winter when just before our daughter was born I went to see the Deep Dark Woods play at a club in Saskatoon with my brother and his son. It was one of the best shows I have seen in a long while.

I don't have a top-ten music list, but  two stand out, for sure. One is the Mingus record I mention above, the next is Jubilee, by the Deep Dark Woods, which I listen to now.

I read a lot of books but cannot remember many of them, as the years tend to blend together. There are some CanLit ones in there, for sure -- Bobcat and Other Stories, by Rebecca Lee; Cockroach, by Rawi Hage; Hell-Going, by Lynn Coady; children of air india: un/authorized exhibits and interjections, by Renee Sarojini Saklikar; The Family China, by Ann Shin; Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain; Belinda's Rings by Corinna Chong; Underworld by Don Delillo; Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith; Other People, by Peter Campion.

I've also had a busy fall giving readings from my latest book, Listen All You Bullets, and my ambivalence toward such work has not changed. Maybe it has. Maybe it is tipping toward not wanting to do that kind of work, whereas I used to enjoy it a little more. I wrote a small piece about my difficulty with public readings here. The opposite of what Cohen speaks about is in public performance that does what Maggie Nelson describes in the following passage from her book The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning:

The desire to catch an audience unawares and ambush it is a fundamentally terrorizing, Messianic approach to art-making, on that underestimates the capacities and intelligence of most viewers, and overestimates that of most artists. (116)

I don't know what's worse. No, I do. It is worse to have the speaker try to include the whole small audience in a way that is often presented as a democratizing impulse but is really pure ego. I am tired of that, and you never know when it's going to crop up.

Anyway, it is harder to justify the borders between years every day, so this is just my nostalgic attempt to return to a time when I found the borders easily defined.

Stupid Voices

I have a few things to say today. None of my posts are really organized or planned well, so probably there is no need to say this anyway.

I am judging three books now for an award, and it's become quite apparent which one will win, though I want to finish it, of course, before I am sure. But this leads me to the idea of awards. I want one, of course. No, more than one. I would like the security it might bring. I get tired, as everyone does, I am sure, of shopping my books around to various publishers. I'd like to write a book knowing from the start it has a publisher.

But I am really curious how these awards are decided, the ones with juries, I mean. Are they mostly a compromise? Looking at the Canada Reads finalists this year makes me wonder how far off its process is from other prizes, despite it not being right now as a bad as it was during its social media voting frenzy a few years back.

The trouble is I see the writers out there at conferences and reading series and it is almost always the ones with the least remarkable things to say, and the least remarkable ways to say them, that talk for the longest. There is a precise mathematical equation that describes this, I am sure.

Or sometimes I have been on juries that create shortlists and found that one book we all dismissed has gone on to not just be short-listed, but also to actually win some other award. Why is this? It cannot be a simply a matter of taste. I remember another time creating a short list and including a book that was maybe sub-par but its subject matter appealed, and it made the list diverse. I felt fine including it in the shortlist but never thought it would win.

Probably the one question that's most difficult to answer is what makes something literary, as opposed to commercial. I think the line is blurred in Canada maybe more than in other countries. You attend readings here, for instance, by writers who have won awards, or who have not, and there are dramatic differences in the audiences to which they speak. Too often there is an evangelical redemption story at the beginning, about how writing has saved the life of the writer. That's bad enough, but then some writers feel the need to perform as if the audience is made up of children.

I am not against that, if the audience is children. As a small aside, one of the great pleasures I have right now is reading to my daughter, who is not yet a year old and who smiles and fidgets with anticipation as I read through her 50-word board book on the activities friends might do together. It's beautiful.

But it's disheartening to hear the volume and the velocity and the tone of the reading voice lauded, or see the gestures that resemble some kind of acting out of the action. I may be alone, but I hope not. I don't want to hear an adult read in a funny voice to me. It's embarrassing. If it's John Cleese, I get it. It's funny. If it's not, it's still funny, and the gravity with which the writer comments between reading sections . . . well, I would rather step outside and get a little fresh air.

Can we assume that even if we are reading traditional realism the audience is at least capable of imagining a voice?

Maybe part of this comes from a sad hypothesis I have, that writers themselves rarely read anymore, that they watch movies and television and write with the primary goal of describing the framed scene and action moving in and out of that frame. The over-writing comes in the desire to give direction to the actors in the future movie. On the page it's annoying enough. On stage it's ridiculous.

I recently read a book in which a character was described as hyperactive in the beginning of the sentence, and her movement was described as "ambling" at the end of the sentence. It's as if there is no word that actually matters, but the author for some reason requires an adjective.

It doesn't instill confidence.

And what's worse is the celebration of award-winning authors simply because of their money. It's funny. You look at some of them and know their last book was horrible. It would never have been published if the previous had not done well, but we fall all over ourselves to praise them, hoping they will be on a jury sometime and remember what we said.

On the positive side, I am teaching some great books next year, so I know they are out there. And Lynn Coady won the Giller, which is great, but should have happened already, when The Antagonist was the best book.

Two great things in Canada for the short story -- Lynn Coady and Alice Munro winning their awards. I hope that results in a new faith in the form on the part of publishers in Canada, for purely selfish reasons, of course. My first book was short fiction, and got some good reviews, but it's take me about 7 years to find a publisher for the next book of short fiction.

Readings in Other Towns

I am not sure what I think about readings in other towns, yet. I've been doing a few, and there are things that are heartening and things that are not. Most of the things that are not are simply a matter of perspective. I wonder if they matter. I wonder if it does result in book sales. I think it does, though sometimes it doesn't seem like it.

What is good, though, is meeting the other people, even for me, who finds social situations difficult often, and many new people at once quite tiring. But the beautiful part is seeing the people who organize these things, like Jordan Fry in St. Catharines, Andrew Hood in Guelph, and all the people of Lit Live in Hamilton. Each of these small communities of writers and readers reminds me of my time back in Ottawa, when I went to Carleton and got involved with a group of writers from Chris Levenson's poetry workshop and would go to the Tree Reading series. Those were big nights for me. I loved them, and I loved to argue about poetry and short stories with equally animated people.

I miss that, and I wish I was a bit better at getting into conversations slowly with people, hanging out at the bar with strangers who I could come to know enough that we would share our real feelings about the writing we loved and the writing we hated.

One of the things that brought home last night was talking to Stan Rogal after we read at Homegrown Hamiltion with Ann Shin, Amanda Jernigan, Chris Pannel and Barbara Fradkin for the LitLive reading series. Stan read long ago in Ottawa, and I remember two things about it. I didn't know his work (everything was new to me then--it was the first time I'd met a like-minded group and shared books with them and learned what other people were loving and were writing at the time; prior to that it was simply aimless wandering in the old Westgate Books in Saskatoon or another little bookstore I forget the name of in Kitchener) and I was really upset I missed the reading because of the night shift at Tim Horton's. I remember a girl whose name I forget, a classmate, raving about Rogal's reading the next time we were all together.

Anyway, who knows? I hope some of the people there last night will remember our readings. I came away with a Brautigan-inspired book of haiku by Rogal (Love's Not the Way To) and Ann Shin's new collection, The Family China. Both look great. I need to find time to read, though.

Closer Than You Think

The title of this post is about my next book, which I have seen, though not held. I am quite taken by it. I love it, which is not a surprise, since it's a Gaspereau book. There were a few different covers considered at various stages and though they all had something in them which I loved, this final one is the best. I will post a picture of the jacket next week, after it's up at Gaspereau's site.

I've been thinking a lot about what may happen with this book. I think I am as excited as I was with my first one, and I don't know exactly why. Probably simply a funny thing that happens in the careers of most writers, I think -- the first book got some good reviews and I thought publication would be easier then, though it has not turned out to be. It happened years ago with my first journal publications, too. A couple of short stories in The Malahat Review, and then what? Years before the next stories were published.

Now I have this novel coming out in September and a short story collection coming out next fall, and a novel-in-progress almost complete. It seems like I've done a lot in the last year, but it's much less than it seems. Some of the stories are new, but most of my work has been on the new novel. The short stories were rejected many times prior to finding a publisher, both by agents and by publishers, and that can, obviously, be disheartening, but it's also bracing and invigorating.

I don't want to be one of those people who believes his obscurity is proof of his worth. I don't mean that. I want readers. I would like millions of them, of course. But finding the rewards of the work in the regular effort expended, in the solitude and the empathetic attention to the wounded humans around me (whether in my imagination or at the next table in the doughnut shop) is necessary and whatever readership one happens to find is a byproduct of the pursuit, not its goal. Or should be.

And as high-minded as that sounds (and I do believe it), I have the luxury of having no choice in the matter right now. I must find my rewards in the work itself, because there is no money in it. I am lucky financially in other ways, of course . . . like the job that afforded my a leave to write the next book, like being born where I was born, etc. The accidents of my life have been good to me.

But the best part of it really is the attention that this kind of work requires of me. It doesn't always make it into the books, but the pursuit of rendering some of these human stories overheard into fiction is what fuels everything I write. Last summer, for instance, overhearing an earnest young man having lunch with his mother and grandmother at a Tim Hortons. He reminded me of myself at that age, as they had come into the city from a rural area, and the visits to the city were not frequent. He'd gotten a haircut and liked it, and was trying to figure out how often he could come in to get his hair cut at the same place. His grandmother was large and spoke tersely to him. His mother didn't stay much, and it seemed as if something was troubling her and I wondered if it was the same thing that the grandmother expressed with meanness to the boy.

Even now, as I remember it, I cannot tell how much is made up and how much is not. I took some notes, and I'll get back to it, but how much of the notes are real and how much did I fictionalize as I wrote. I know what made me want to know those characters. The boy reminded me of one of my brothers, the grandmother reminded me of one of my grandmothers, and also of me--I have often reacted with meanness toward undeserving people when I am anxious for other reasons.

But the conversation those characters had at that table made me think also of my own private childhood, when that same brother and I would play The Queen is Dead, by the Smiths, outside in the summer as we threw the Frisbee around. And it was sunny out, and the yard was dusty, and in such a situation why would the lyrics "Another sunny day, and so I meet you at the cemetery gates" resonate? Why would, years later, James Kelman's A Disaffection seem to save me from despair while I inspected the construction of subdivision in a small town in Alberta?

I don't know. But that kind of conversation, overheard, is what keeps me working, I guess. I don't begrudge the writers who need some kind of flash to motivate them, those writers who may decry the use of a coffee shop as a setting for a story, or whatever, but I don't understand them.

Luddites, Permissions, and Reprints

Right now we are preparing to move back to Kelowna. There are the usual anxieties, despite having moved about every year, sometimes every third year--probably every second year, on average--since I left home the first time after high school. I feel like since then I have carted around boxes and boxes of unsorted paper. Stacks of old typewritten poems that thankfully all the editors rejected when they were written, a few dot matrix printouts of my first short stories, also, thankfully, unpublished.

I have no idea why I can't get rid of them. They are a trial to read, but I think I just wonder if there will come a time when I have grown enough that I can see something useful in them, in the same way it's been growth that makes them appalling to read now. I remember the old story of the man who had dementia and would wake up happy each day, eat his breakfast, take his pills, then disappear into his cluttered office to redo the taxes from some distant year. I wouldn't mind being stuck in that kind of loop as long as my aesthetic judgement has deteriorated along with my memory and I am moved by some spark in the work of myself as a child.

The sad part is when I think of that old man working to fix a problem, to prove he didn't owe in some distant tax year decades past.

I think digital copies of things will make this more awful, too. I am compulsive about keeping all my work now that it's digital, too, but if I actually have to work on it I print it out. Imagine trying to make sense, with a failing mind, of 16 copies of one poem or story improperly filed on your computer, encountering the title changes and the same story in different folders from different years and thinking it's new, and then not even being able to sit with it and remember, say, when you had that cheap yellow paper because it was all you could afford and when you sat on the floor with your old typewriter, working on a coffee table in an otherwise empty apartment.

When I was younger the cigarette smoke that was caught in the latest used fantasy or science fiction book I bought from the old Westgate Books, or Donald's Bookstore, made the books seem romantic to me. I romanticized what I didn't know then were marginal figures, those adults who were obsessed with those fantastic worlds I was beginning to discover. I thought the perfect life would be working the most menial job you could find, so your mind might be free and you could afford books and role-playing games and who cared what else?

And just now, while packing, I have found two permission agreements I need to sign and send off, before my next novel comes out. I don't know why four lines of Leonard Cohen cost 30 dollars plus tax, and three lines of Jorie Graham cost 50 dollars, but I guess that's how it goes. I remember that first time I read the Leonard Cohen poem from which I'm quoting. I found the book, a selected poems paperback, in that same Westgate Books. I returned there every chance I got, until it moved to the east side, I guess, when I would find myself back in Saskatoon between years in school, or projects in construction. In those days a book could save my life, it seemed like. I would live in a old and cheap motel in a small town, most of the time, working on a highway job somewhere, and if I picked the right book, the evenings could mean something more than exhausted sleep.

I am also looking at copies of my latest collection of stories, since it's been accepted for publication and will come out in the fall of 2014 (though no contract yet, so anything could happen, but it's 99 per cent sure). I think of an old story I had one paper copy of. It was called "Barn Burning" because I had not read many books in those days. Why can't I find that old story? I think it was quite good.

But in reading books from the catalogues of some of the publishers to which I'd sent the ms., I find odd things, and things that cannot help but hurt your feelings, sort of.  (And here I have to remind myself this is healthy. As the writer Ed Allen once told those of us in his class, probably in response to some criticism of criticism in a workshop class: "It should hurt!")

For instance an old collection of stories recently reprinted and with a foreword by the author. The foreword seems apologetic. It's framed as an attempt to argue for the writer's particular aesthetic, but it comes across as an apology, with nothing but a kind of whiny but I like this kind of writing underpinning the short foreword. There is no need to apologize, but further, any argument for your own writing becomes a kind of apology, because in any explanation is a kind of acknowledgement that what you explain is not normal.

That's stupid. No apologies or explanations necessary. I recently got pretty close to having this next book accepted by a very good publisher, and it hurt when it didn't happen, but the rejection was flattering. One of the comments was that my stories are unCanadian. It was meant as a compliment, and I took it as one. It was in the context of over-explanation, something quite common in CanLit. What's worse, to me, is that the over-explanation often takes the form of tautological constructions that are gauzy and accepted as "poetic" -- a kind of gosh, I don't understand it so it must be deep. They are actually nonsensical and do nothing to further our understanding of the fictive world. They distance us from it.

Far better to leave space for the reader, let the reader inhabit the fictive world, than use obfuscating language to distract the reader from those spaces. Painting flames on a car does not make it fast.

A Few Stories

A little news about my short fiction manuscript, We Don't Celebrate That:

1) I just got the new issue of Grain (40.3), which contains my story "You Didn't have to Tell Him." It's a great looking issue, with some unsettling art by Zachari Logan on the cover and throughout the journal, and great work by Sheri Benning, "Gone." I've long admired the way she writes about Saskatchewan, our common home, especially since I've made my own attempts since I was quite young, and have not quite succeeded, where it seems she does so effortlessly. A line from "Gone," for instance -- "The farm, sold, and our blue spruce, their sleek shadows all we knew of water on skin during those years of drought, are dying too."-- captures somehow everything I know about my own background, the endurance of my relatives, the harsh landscape, and my own necessary leaving.

And again, in a poem called "Saskatchewan," in the same issue, by Bruce Rice, the lines:

Then between this blue and this,
the world went on, creating itself over and over,
a rasping sound, then nothing--

Anyway, I grew up reading Grain, and wanting to be in it. This was when it was smaller and literary journals seemed more rare. It was back in the old days, when we had no cable television out on the farm and so we didn't know anything about the NBA except a few names and our heroes were players on the University of Saskatchewan Huskies, or the teams they played, like UVic. I was a point guard and I wanted to be Eli Pasquale, not Magic Johnson.

It was the same with Grain. I'd find the old issues in the old Westgate Books, when it was on the west side of Saskatoon, with its original owner. I'd find my models in there as I was learning to write.So it's always a great feeling to be published in there.

2) My story "Leave Her Alone" has been accepted by The Fiddlehead.

I've always struggled to reconcile the two competing impulses in my fiction, one toward minimalist realism (as the story in Grain is) and more voice-driven fiction, as this story is. The voice ones seem harder to place in journals, so I am really happy to have this one in The Fiddlehead. I reread it prior to sending off the digital version and it seems like a different mode completely, which makes sense. The novel I've been working on all year is 3rd person and realism. Still, it makes me want to get back to something a little more loose.

I Need a White Board

I would like a white board, but we are about to move, so I won't buy it now. In the meantime, I am sorting through the first draft of my latest novel project and would like a big place to put the scenes and sort them out. I kind of dislike completely linear plots, but I know they have their appeal. The reason I dislike them, I suppose, is you spend so much time making characters get up out of a chair and walk across the room to leave through the door. A lot of stuff seems to happen that doesn't matter, but something has to happen, I know.

Anyway, I just posted a scene, maybe the beginning scene, on my website, here.

Listen All You Bullets

Just working on the proofs for the new book, to be published by Gaspereau in the fall. It's always a welcome relief to return to the work, knowing someone else has read it attentively, and still be happy with it.

I'm not sure how it works for other writers, but I always find odd sentences that may be changed, or should be changed. But the fewer times that happens when you return to a work after some time, the better it is, of course. Right now the big thing for me is getting back in the space of the novel in question. Sometimes I dislike a bit of writing (and actually I should not really be reading it much at this stage; I should be looking for typos and so on) and change it, only to read further and realize it was a bit of parody, and its style meant as an allusion to another author or genre.

It's my last work I'll write, I think, in this mode. That's another reason I worried about disliking it upon my return -- the novel I work on presently, The Whole Show, is realism, with less show, kind of. I like it, too. I suppose I can like both.

And besides, all the writers I admire (without making a list and looking hard for exceptions) have things that recur in all their separate works. I may think I am writing a completely different novel now only to find it's the same exact thing in different colours. Who knows?

Anyway, the next step is figuring out how to read from Listen All You Bullets. It's going to be a bit of a tough fall, but fun. Lots of events planned to promote the book, which will be a lot of fun. But it's not a traditional novel, and if I read from one passage in one style only, perhaps I alienate certain readers . . . . That's okay. I'm not really James Joyce.My voice is in all the pieces somehow, I suppose.