Recent reads: "The Calgary Renaissance"

The Calgary Renaissance

Edited by derek beaulieu & rob mclennan

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2016.

One of the first things I noticed about The Calgary Renaissance, a collection of experimental fiction and poetry, is that Alberta’s biggest city – the connective tissue that binds these authors – is rarely relevant thematically. As an Ontario reader living on the outskirts of Toronto’s cultural vacuum, I don’t gain much of an impression about the region’s pulse or how authors interact with their shared environment. But that isn’t the book’s mission. Instead, The Calgary Renaissance earns its bold title by forgoing geographical appraisals in favour of juxtaposing many of its radiant and diverse voices in a direct bid for national recognition.

It’s long overdue. And in recognizing more of the thirty-two authors than expected, I suspect The Calgary Renaissance doubles as a consolidation of co-editor rob mclennan’s efforts to showcase westward writers through his above/ground press (from which I credit much of my exposure). For co-editor derek beaulieu, this book serves as an extension of the role he has played as Calgary’s Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2016 and, unofficially, before and since.

It’s an impressive roster eclipsed by the quality of its content. Unfamiliar authors make strong bids for my attention while familiar ones posit new sides of their writing. Starting with the former camp, I enjoyed Susan Holbrook’s “What Is Poetry” and “What Is Prose”, twin pillars of tongue-in-cheek onomatopoeia that break open form for effect, not dissection. Here, the latter piece:

What Is Prose

Prose has wit,

war, hot spies,

pirate shows.

It has powers.

A swisher top,

wiser pathos,

towers, a ship,

parishes. Two

IHOPs. Waters

whose traps I

sap, so whiter

whites. Spa or

showier taps

spew hot airs:

“Poet wash, Sir?”

Posh waiters

tow Sharpies,

shower pitas,

pestos awhir,

pastries, how!

How it spears

trophies, was

tops, was heir

to Sears. “Whip

Thor, asswipe!

Swap heros!” it

whispers to a

hipster. Aw. So

worship a set.

Another late discovery for me is Braydon Beauleau, whose “In The Aurora” suite coaxes a mercurial identity from an expanse of rich, natural imagery. The sense of momentum and discovery in this poem is masterful, evolving at such a pace that its cryptic meaning gets outshone by the chaos of its transformation. (Although I do wonder: what happened to sections iii and v?) 

Eschewing Beauleau’s densely figurative constructions, Natalee Caple’s trio of poems entice with their casual, shorn immediacy. “Packing for the Weekend (For Natalie Walschots)” is literally a list of things to pack, but the items – some commonplace and tangible (“my boxing gloves”), others absurd and impossible (“my piano-limbed internet trolls”) – accumulate in ways that beg of the reader: what kind of weekend is this, and what do we all carry around as metaphorical baggage? Alternately, her poem “For Nicole Markotic” achieves a curious tension, her language primitive in its directness but unencumbered by emotion or punctuation.

For Nicole Markotic

In August it rains and rains

I slosh more wine into my brains

until I breathe wine

You lick the back of my knees

I touch your fingers

propose we build a bridge

be minotaurs in alphabets

sew triangles over scars

knit hymens for all kinds of birds

I will write you a slim letter

Someday

The poem itself functions as that slim letter, simultaneously heavy and floating, intimate but noncommittal.

Aside from the surprise of reading new talents, the fun thing about literary collections (whether they tackle a single author’s output or an entire scene’s) is the freedom to browse the Table of Contents and choose your own launch-point. In the case of The Calgary Renaissance, I started with Jason Christie’s incendiary “This Poem Is a Ski Mask”, a thoughtful dismantling of privilege and hypocrisy. Next up was Emily Ursuliak’s “Removing the Shoe” which, despite its disjointed lines, retains the absorbing narrative details of her prose. Afterwards I flipped to Sandy Pool’s “On Anatomical Procedures”, a witty summary of clinical trials conducted on her acquaintances that judge whether Pool is a good person, with variables like social events and alcohol factored in. A skillful but lightweight palate cleanser after the gutting Undark: An Oratorio (Nightwood Editions). Such maneuvers felt akin to grazing from a delectable hors d’oeuvres table.

For the sake of brevity, I’ve omitted mention of many contributions here. But I’ve omitted several more because, frankly, I didn’t respond to them – and that isn’t a bad thing. Such an anthology welcomes us into Calgary’s talent pool but it also allows fair-weather experimental poetry readers like myself to gauge and advance our comfort zones. Most of the authors I’ve discussed take moderate leaps without (in my eyes) abandoning form or narrative altogether. But as I revisit this collection from time to time, it stands to reason The Calgary Renaissance will further reward my interest in the experimental spectrum.

Recent Reads: "Kiki" by Amanda Earl

Kiki by Amanda Earl (ChaudiereBooks, 2014)

The brave new world in Amanda Earl’s first trade book, Kiki, happened almost one hundred years ago. In the bohemian villages of Paris and between the wars, when surrealism, modernism and hedonism were surging, the belief in true art seemed impervious to irony, self-doubt or marketplace considerations. If that go-for-broke artistic freedom feels a tad futuristic, it’s because most utopias are. And although nostalgia plays its part in waxing the contours of a seemingly flawless community (see: Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris), Earl channels the era’s inventiveness by testing character studies of Alice Ernestine Prin, better known to history as Kiki, and Paris itself against the erosions of excess.

Earl expounds on each historical narrative in that order (the “Alice” sequence comes before “Tales of Montparnasse”) without trying to extricate the micro from the macro, or vice versa. That is, Kiki and Paris are interdependent, with neither capable of instilling the liberal freedoms of 1920s France without the other, and Earl’s commitment to that incidental partnership makes a titan of Kiki. It helps that Alice Prin was already an enormously brave and complex personality, asserting the independence of women well ahead of her time. But the “Alice” sequence makes a bid to explain that individuality, mapping a trajectory of honesty into empowerment that parallels Kiki’s unapologetic appetite for artistic and sexual expression alongside the creative approach taken up by modernist friends like Hemingway – in essence, a reaction to the traditionalism of previous generations in order to innovate (or, as Ezra Pound incited, “make it new”.) As a result, “Alice” captivates not because the title character is otherworldly, but because she is relatable, humanized.

These are the men between the wars that come to Paris and

expect to find… what? Life? This is too big a word. I sit in

their laps and they feed me, give me pearls. Shiny pure white

pearls. I devour these men and their brilliance. White pearls.

An Egyptian black cat. Stroke me. In these arms, salvation.

I’ll rock you to sleep, bebe. Mama will cradle you.

I tell all the boys: Tzara, Soupault, Aragon, Breton. They’re

nattering again to Man.  (“Alice”, pg. 24)

The above anecdote illustrates the ground rules for Kiki’s empowerment: that the pleasures of men should never come at the expense of her own. I shouldn’t feel compelled to explain that, nor pontificate on just how progressive such a mentality was, practiced openly in the 1920s, but alas, there is a fraction of men in the world — I will not venture how big or small that fraction is — that would no doubt share vitriol and condemnation based on the above passage. Some men remain intimidated by an empowered, sexualized femininity and it’s because of that population, often visible and yet anonymous in the comments section of articles about gender equality, rape culture or issues pertaining to the female body, that Kiki is a timely work of poetry. 

Beyond my own surface commentary, however, the above excerpt also hints at the strain of Kiki’s stature among mostly male artistes. She’s intelligent and passionate about Dadaist developments in her midst but often relegated to the role of Man Ray’s accessory — a cheerleader out of bounds.

This is Alice. This is fucked up. Cowboys and Indians square

off on the walls of le Jockey. Men with wild west dreams

spoil for a brawl. The tables are nailed down. Dark suits

rub against dancehall floozies while I belt out “Les Filles de

Camaret se disent toutes vierges.” Pimps and goons hunch

over banquettes, chatting up wallflowers, their future

whores. I pass hookers on cobblestones beneath streetlamp.

In Man’s bed he wants to know why I’m always so hungry. (“Alice”, pg. 32)

With Ray’s oblivious remark, the male gaze again flits into view, shrugging off a dimension to Kiki that Earl commits great attention to: the realities of being poor and perpetually in character. Chronicling a day-to-day survivor, “Alice”’s diary avoids the steady arc of a biography (burdened as those often are by hindsight) and instead swings between the subconscious perspectives of Kiki and Alice. Her duality is abridged in the opening sentences of many entries — “This is Alice. This is fucked up.” — with Kiki’s agency contrasting Alice’s passive bewilderment. In a glance, one could see these alternating personalities as a convenient turn of cheek, letting vivacious desire overrun a soft-spoken moral center. But with so many entries mired in the hardships of poverty — whether that’s having her tightly wound corset stuffed with cotton in order to sell more shallots, or numbing herself with cocaine in order to make money for her ailing mother — the dual synergy of Kiki and Alice forms a survival instinct. Eventually, Kiki’s moments of clarity accumulate to a startling realization:

I am tethered by ribbon and iron hooks.

The men of Montparnasse. A not so tender trap?

I am common glass.

I am the broken fragments.

I am ugly, a nightmare kaleidoscope.

I am mad. I am naked. I don’t know what I am. (“Alice”, pg. 46)

Although previous passages I’ve excerpted were intended to augment Earl’s character study, they are just as notable for relaying the frenetic pulse of a Parisian nightlife that will not subside into background imagery. “Tales of Montparnasse” serves to further populate the character of place that supported Kiki’s joie-de-vivre by stitching together thematically linked texts Earl has cut up and selected at random. The resulting piece, ripe with the mention of famous avant-garde artists, displays a cultural zeitgeist through cracked panes, whereby each dislocated stanza presents a scene of abstract busyness.

Champagne Dadaists pout

for Tristan Tzara and Philippe Soupault.

The Great Gatsby

tames cool bones

cracking to hurry.

The Saturday Evening Post

is serious as a death-mask.

Kisling and O’Keefe

rise like angels with horses. (“Tales of Montparnasse”, pg. 53)

Given Earl’s surrealist cues of construction, I trust that losing my coordinates in “Tales of Montparnasse” is at least partially by design. But without Kiki as my guide, or at least her degree of separation, I strain to uncover some hidden context here. (In a moment of panic, I even Googled unfamiliar names, hoping their art or biographies might unlock some subversive purpose to these experiments.) Ultimately a sensory re-read is more fulfilling and something Earl seems to encourage, signaling a gradual disassociation throughout the latter half of Kiki.

This downward spiral is engineered by tapping into the not-so-subtle drug-use that permeated the period’s devil-may-care spirit. Beyond its role in transcending logic and embracing surrealist ideas, ‘getting high’ provides a clever lens for Earl to forge ahead on, remaining true to Kiki’s challenges while linking two of the text’s most jarring transitions – “Opium” and “In which K meets B in a dream” – in a muddy state of consciousness. Utilizing source texts of Jean Cocteau alongside Earl’s own impressions, “Opium” wrestles self-assessment — a bed-ridden process of discovery, ecstasy and muted horror — through an hallucinatory lens.

I am the woman with the long black gloves. My eyes are dark.

I am the statue. I am the ox with harp and globe.

I am a smokestack. I am demolition. I collapse into rubble.

If a storm comes, Paris, the beautiful voyeur, will rub itself all over me.

I have written my name on a tree. Trees are better than marble because you

can see your name grow. (“Opium”, pg. 66-67)

“Opium” at first advances with the unerring slide of a bad trip: an early buzz of metamorphosis, that moment’s doubt, and then a cascade of self-destructive beliefs. Yet the tail-end, excerpted above, feels laced with resolution, at peace with the demise of identity in a way that “Alice”, with its confused and sober finale, couldn’t muster.

“In which K meets B in a dream”, another cut-up experiment (this one featuring text from William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch), formulates a conversation between Kiki and Burroughs. The pairing maintains Kiki’s theme of excess by comparing various drugs and, on an unspoken level, draws out the mindset that binds outsiders: coping with and trying to find their scene, their people, amidst the constraints of a square community.

These two domineering personalities play off each other as one might expect, with playful jabs and blunt opinions keeping the imaginary exchange sharp, but it would close the book as a curious diversion if not for our awareness of Earl as mediator. Throughout its four sections, Kiki’s experimental demeanour reaches further into Earl’s own subconscious. And with Kiki and Burroughs trading barbs as vapours of place and perspective, it’s the author who rises — a virtual stranger in these pages — to the station of torch-bearing innovator. Alice Prin’s life-story in Paris isn’t rewritten so much as relived through a variety of Dadaist and drug-fueled experiments. Much like the surrealist works of Dali or Ray, Kiki connects best when introducing the reader to his or her own confusion.

Given the close relationship that Earl has forged with the memory of Kiki over the years — visible through her website and Twitter handle — not to mention her own reputation as a self-proclaimed “writer of smut” and “pornographer”, it’s almost a shame that this appropriation of the avant-garde mantle doesn't include Earl’s own place and perspective in Ottawa. Maybe next time.

  

Writer's note: My thanks to Ted Nolan, who offered editorial advice on this essay in the fall of 2015. Due to a lapse in computer software, I was stuck with the program Pages and unable to see his Microsoft Word critiques for months. The opportunity to work together passed, but I credit several small clarifications in the overall readability of this review to him.

Recent Reads: Garden by Monty Reid

Garden by Monty Reid (Chaudiere Books, 2014)

I first read Garden in late October, about an hour or so before news broke that a soldier had been shot in front of the War Memorial, that Parliament Hill was under siege. Besides my concern for innocent folks living in Ottawa — among them, Monty Reid and the Chaudiere Books team — the timing of my reading felt noteworthy because of social media’s responses to the unfolding tragedy. As citizens and pundits began probing how such an event could manifest at the government’s front door, their questions were framed by cultivation and lawlessness, peace and war, order and disorder, good and evil — binaries and impulses I’d just been studying in Monty Reid’s plot of space. 

Comprised of twelve “units”, each named after a month and previously published by a variety of presses, Garden predominantly investigates bounty and decay as gleaned in the backyard. The stanzas inside each monthly unit are also ordered sequentially by month. Taken literally or linearly, all of Garden’s Januarys, Februarys, etc. would span twelve years. And while that extensive timeframe would fit the author’s methodical approach, it’s Reid’s themes that dictate one unit from the next, backing the more likely hypothesis that his raw notes were gathered over one or two years and then parsed as each chapbook narrowed its particular sights.

Perhaps because Reid lays out the project’s rigid timetable in advance, Garden quickly slides into a laissez-faire rhythm befitting its muse. The book feels like a natural marriage of concept and author — the pleasure principle of gardening matched with Reid’s steady, simplified verse.

The old black walnut stump in the corner of the garden

nurses its lichen, its beetles, its ants.

Someone cut the tree down

long before I was here.

The subjects of interest are long gone.

I don’t know who.

Just someone. (“sept unit, August”)

Clear language outlines the landscape as a domain for bit (or bite-sized) players. His tone is conversational but precise. At its most affecting, Reid’s concision creates an echo stanza — space to reflect upon some gently grazed, existential notion. That lucidity, something of a trademark in Reid’s recent work, allows heady concepts to flourish around the consciousness of plant-life — which is best defined here by what it outwardly lacks, a sense of humanity — and how that entangled community functions. Reid invokes the pitfalls of dualistic thinking, distorting the boundaries between domestic and exotic, inhabited and wild, confined and sprawling, etc., as a means of indulging political and personal commentary. 

The systems theorists prefer the system

to be people-free

so it’s good to have a friend, here in the garden.

Language has gotten restless, it’s true

but that doesn’t mean it wants you to stop

pulling at its edges.

The dirt doesn’t need a memory

but it has one anyway. (“nov unit, June”)

Well beyond the sensory perks of appearance or taste, Reid’s garden is presented as a self-regulating system and compared as such to market economics and bureaucracy. Strong roots strangle weaker vegetables, predatory bugs and birds feed on the living and yet there’s a palpable sense of order in disorder, a blameless understanding that what happens in the natural world just happens. By the way, that “friend” Reid mentions in the above excerpt is “Jack the pumpkin”, whose decomposition is recorded over November unit’s lifespan. Jack is but one of many characters Reid personifies, both for creative speculation and dry, self-deprecating reflection. Whether he’s getting reports from the sunflowers about neighbours suntanning topless over the fence or merely internalizing Jack’s hollowed out grin, Reid’s good humour offsets the precariousness of life.

Again, I come to the garden

and find no one

except the pumpkin

still weighted with snow and its face caved in.

It has nothing to say

yet its laughter continues

in whatever I still think I might be. (“nov unit, March”)

A book so attuned to the passing seasons requires a writer who’s sensitive to aging, and Reid carries that weight with grace. The garden communicates with its groomer in playful stanzas but also harsh glances, as if asking its creator: why are you still at this?

My garden is there to be eaten.

Eaten.

Not Eden.

All writing is about something. (“feb unit, January”)

Month by month, that “something” finds new vantage points of addressing cultivation and conservation — in the home and mind, as much as in the garden. The steps between these temples often feels illusory, in part because the garden’s agency allows Reid to watch from an unspecified distance. But January unit maps out these emotional ties, laying bare the expectations Reid's green-space was intended to fulfill. Here the garden, already a substandard Eden, takes on the metaphor of parenthood, with Reid and his partner acting as guardians jaded by the promise of inner salvation. The effects of assigning self-worth onto nature — trying to make it something other than what is — creates suffering, not to mention a welcome tension in the text.

Not all units leave such ponderous impact craters and, in those cases, I suspect Reid’s subtle nuances either drifted by me undetected or failed to meet his allusion halfway. After so many calendar months spent toiling in soil and grubs, Reid’s theory-based whimsy becomes the chute upon which chapbook-length stretches depend; when it doesn’t develop, the whole unit tends to putter about, awaiting for another to bud. July unit reads this way, obsessed with the man-hours put in and restless to discover new limits. What comes after the garden?

There is an idea in the hollow of the garden.

Is just a theory the garden generates on the other side

of the garden.

All ideas are the same idea.

There is always another one that explains it better.

How then will one explain another garden? (“july unit, April”)

There’s some juicy potential in the theorizing reprinted above but it’s better demonstrated in earlier portions of Garden than written out as such. There are signs of fatigue too, symptomatic of any hobby that tries to manipulate the cycles of nature. One cannot garden forever; there’ll always be more work to do. And maybe Garden’s homestretch is hijacked by the habit of keeping minutes; measuring that pervasive now that keeps neighbours on edge and cities bandied in perpetual bustle. At times disillusioned, often clairvoyant and clocking his share of months in-between, Reid turns his backyard into a microcosm for the collective dysfunction of our hopes and denials, through which all of Ottawa, Canada and the world manages to persevere, together even when we feel apart. 

Recent Reads: "The Uncertainty Principle: stories," by rob mclennan

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, by rob mclennan

Published by Chaudiere Books, 2014.

ISBN 978-0-9783428-8-3

Two springs ago I was listening to a talk on contemporary poetry when a fellow enthusiast asked rob mclennan what inspires him. “I don’t wait for inspiration,” he responded. “My father didn’t wait for inspiration. He milked the cows every day because he had to”. That no-frills answer sprung to mind midway through The Uncertainty Principle: stories,, an eclectic compendium of pocket-sized tales crafted from 2008 to 2011. The brevity and randomness of each story makes it tempting to view these as the crème de la crème of one of mclennan’s daily writing exercises. However these individual pieces transformed into a working manuscript – whether they were organized from the start or encountered a “eureka” moment along the way – mclennan’s bounty of ideas repeatedly underpins that day-in-day-out discipline.

Uncertainty plays a crucial part in the flow of so many mini-narratives. mclennan forgoes anchoring his characters with names and ambitions, instead letting pronouns contribute to a foggy tapestry of shared thoughts and concerns. Common themes converse and accumulate throughout, binding playful and contemplative experiences into a lifetime’s knowledge, some vague, communal whole. Recurring subjects in first person obviously lean toward the autobiographical, such as memories of one’s mother or fleeting moments around familiar Ottawa landmarks, while others belong firmly in the speculative.

Describing himself as an errorist, he spends

his day deliberately misspelling, otherwise the

copy-editor could be out of a job and he never

see her again.

The above example illustrates how mclennan populates the fictional side, using unidentified people as a means to observing poignant or funny sociological traits. This lens expands to feature some insightful pop culture commentary, including theories on Hollywood films, comic books, as well as an eerie parallel between two misfits of nuclear fallout – Godzilla and SpongeBob SquarePants. Broadening the humour, mclennan litters a few entries with the hashtag #IDontHaveFactsToBackThisUp to offset the more intricate accounts.

I recently had a Doctor Who-style dream, set

in early twentieth-century Dublin, with you as

my faithful companion. We found James Joyce

and his house of infinite, hidden rooms, stalked

by some kind of vampire creature. Was this,

we began to suspect, something his own de-

mons had created, dark language made physi-

cal, an altered Nora Barnacle? I don’t recall a

conclusion or resolution. This is often the way

of dreams. Someone suggested I write out

what I can, to reinforce memory, flesh out the

scene. The front door of the house was green-

painted wood, with a peephole large enough to

see Joyce’s face, his round glasses. The foyer

had a soft wood paneling, brown and tan

wainscotting. He had been drafting a letter,

left out on the table. There was something we

wanted not to have known.

This dream recollection bridges the fantastical elements of The Uncertainty Principle with its more somber (but no less intriguing) realities. Besides capturing the fragmentary act of piecing together the unconscious, mclennan’s details settle around an omission that haunts the page. The same can be said for many of the best stories on offer, where an unknowable truth lingers just beyond (or somewhere within) the information made available. Whether oscillating between irreverent and astute or observational and tender, mclennan’s concise anecdotes are remarkable for opening so many doors without betraying their secrets. Here’s a lovely near-poem we can add to the “observational and tender” category:

We were stretched flat on the dark side of the

lawn, opposite the garage light and porch, star-

ing up at the sky. We were counting the stars. I

can’t believe you’ve never seen a shooting star,

she said, as common as goldfish. We remained

for a long time, sweeping our eyes across

Ontario sky, and I looked over, amazed at this

sprout of a child beside me, my ten-year-old

daughter. I was studying the shadowed shapes

of her developing profile, a sparkle in her eye.

There’s one, she pointed. I turned to look. It

had already vanished.

Thanks to mclennan’s discipline, our experience reading The Uncertainty Principle requires none. Organized to accommodate brief interactions (which, like the psychology behind bite-sized chocolate bars, results here in complete overindulgence), the book proves incessantly fresh, taken as a whole or in cursory, page-flipping handfuls. 

The Uncertainty Principle: stories, will officially launch on May 10, 2014 as part of the Plan 99 Reading Series at the Manx Pub in Ottawa. It is now available to buy at Chaudiere Books' website.

12 or 20 questions: with Anita Dolman

Anita Dolman is a writer and editor whose poetry and/or short short fiction has appeared in numerous journals, websites, chapbooks and magazines, and in the anthology Decalogue: ten Ottawa poets (Chaudiere Books, Ottawa, 2006).

1 - How did your first chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first chapbook felt like it validated my efforts as a poet. I had long considered myself a writer, but that chapbook, and the spate of poems accepted for publication in journals around the same time, made me feel that my efforts were warranted, and encouraged me to continue. I would like to think that my work has become subtler, more nuanced since then. I came out of the gate wanting to clobber people with meaning, but now I'm much more interested in the poem as a layered work inviting conversation with the reader, the idea that a single poem, as a single work of art, can, if successful, mean many things to many people.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

In high school and the start of university, I was interested far more in both reading and writing fiction, which was a sort of choice by default. I had been taught by a number of teachers who believed that if their students did not interpret a poem the way the teacher's edition said was the only correct and justifiable interpretation, they had somehow managed to fundamentally get the poem "wrong." Poetry as a test of one's ability to see it through the exact same lens as someone with no doubt a very different perspective and background did not surpisingly completely fail to appeal to me, much as it completely fails to appeal to most other kids whose initial reaction of "Hey, that sounds cool" is almost immediately crushed into the resignation of "Okay, well, I guess I'm just never going to get it" by teaching that will likely keep them from approaching poetry again for most of their lives. I actually had a university English teacher start the poetry section of her curriculum with a warning to the effect that "I never understood poetry, and I imagine you don't either, so I promise to try to get through this section as quickly as possible."

In my third year at the University of Victoria I switched to a writing major. One third of the introductory class was dedicated to poetry, taught by Patrick Lane, and something just clicked for me in that class. I started to read Gwendolyn McEwen, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, to start, and many others after that, with an open approach, thinking more in terms of what the reader brings to a poem to make it the poem that they perceive, rather than dedicating myself to what I still believe to be the largely useless pursuit of trying to figure out what the poet meant to say based on their religion, family situation, house size and what they'd had for breakfast that day. Once I felt that liberation, I was hooked on poetry, on the possibility of it, the infinite opportunity a single poem can hold in a way that fiction, weighed down by its sheer size and need for consistency, can never have.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I usually don't know I've started a writing "project" until I'm well into it. I start dozens of projects that never lead anywhere and I tend to only realize I'm on the right track with one when I notice that I keep coming back to it over and over. Then, I can't leave it alone. I become addicted to it. I worry away at it, compulsively editing and re-editing and then taking that bit out anyway because it obviously wasn't any good in the first place, and then moving on to fight with another bit that isn't doing at all what I want it to. The problem for me is not the writing or the editing, it's knowing when it's done and walking away.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I never start with the idea of "This is going to be a book." I set off down a path and when I look back and notice that it's now covered in poems I think "Huh, well if there are that many of them here, I suppose I ought to see if they want to come live together in a book."

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I love readings. I love to go to them and I love to read at them, although I don't get to go to them nearly as much as I used to. For me, readings inspire and motivate me far more than actually reading poems in books, much as I love the words there, too. There's an energy that comes from a group of people together in one place just wanting so very much to communicate, to be heard, to connect with each other using this fascinating device, that I find it impossible to go home after that and not write, not want to keep that dialogue going.

I used to be immensely shy, both in general and specifically about sharing my work, but you just can't watch other people, especially the ones who don't necessarily have any background in it or the tools they really need, get up there and just give it their all and then allow yourself to not contribute, too.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I don't go into my writing setting out to tackle a certain issue or to approach the work from a particular theoretical perspective or with a certain style in mind. All of these tend to emerge based on what the poem wants to be, what it requires as it begins to take shape, either on the page or in my imagination. The result, though, is often narrative poetry that, for better or worse, has, for wont of a better word, a moral. And those stem from whatever is of concern to me, conciously or subconciously, at the time.

I can't speak to what the current questions are for everyone else, because that depends on individual perspective, the expression of which is the very thing that makes poetry so fascinating to me. My own work lately has been full of the idea of personal happiness and personal responsibility, how these things get lost along the way and how we can get back to them, for our own and for the greater good.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A writer is an interpreter of reality and the voice of possibility. The role of the writer, like the role of any artist, should be, to my mind, to offer up one more perspective through which to view the world, and with this offering, provide one more way that we could move ahead. The artist is the articulator of human imagination, and we as a society can't go anywhere without him, since he's the one holding the map.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

As an editor, I'd say editors are absolutely essential to the writing process, to ensure that the writer doesn't, in knowing so fully the meaning or the sound they meant to articulate, become blind to whether they have actually effectively conveyed it. As a writer, I'd say editors are a scourge on society, the level of irritation they create matched only by an episode of Oprah's book club, classics edition, and their usefulness roughly on par with that of telephone cleaning crews.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Lighten up.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I normally have the approximate attention span of a rabid squirrel, so poetry and postcard-length fiction tend to be more satisfying for me, simply because they're bite-sized. I'm also a compulsive editor; I keep going back to and fiddling with my work, which makes longer fiction a challenge, because the first thing I want to do when I sit down to continue a story is go back to what I wrote last time and spend the whole day tinkering with it instead of moving ahead.

That said, fiction is very attractive to me, because it allows for a greater scope, the opportunity to delve more fully into a multiplicity of perspectives and ideas within one work. I'm starting to move towards fiction now because of that. Much of my poetry to date has been very short, and my fiction tends to be of the under-500-word variety, so I'm setting myself the challenge of just seeing what happens when I pan out a bit and tell the broader story around the story. There's an element in that of giving up my obsession with the perfection of individual lines and words, in exchange for the ability to convey a wider story. Of course, this means buckling my inner squirrel firmly into her seat, hiding all the shiny objects and giving her a good tallking to before I get started each time.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I used to be regimented, and then I got a day job, and then I had a baby, so now I grab writing time where and when I can. My son is just over a year old now, and I'm finally starting to come back to writing with more consistency (so far just a quick writing session at about 6 a.m. on the weekends, before everyone is up, and then again on a week night or two), but I find the return daunting. I feel much more obligated to have something significant to show for the time I've taken away from my family, my chores, my sleep, etc. I feel I need to be accountable for that time.

I've been asked before why there aren't as many publishing female poets, particularly older female poets, as there are male poets (although I'd be curious to know the actual percentages), but I believe it's because women are far quicker to be convinced that the world will end if they don't do the dishes, or the laundry, or the dusting, instead of writing (or painting or entering politics, for that matter) than most men could ever be. As compelling and addictive as writing is for me, I will always feel I'm cheating someone else out of something I should be doing for them (regardless of whether they tell me I'm an idiot for thinking this) by doing something that really isn't for anyone else. Writing is an immensely selfish act. And it takes a significant amount of ego to think that what's in your head is so bloody important that you should stop everything and write it down before the world is forever robbed of your singularly genius observation.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Music, poetry, galleries, readings. Anything that calls me out to play. I used to return to specific favourites (Michael Ondaatje and Anne Sexton, for example, or Nina Simone and Billie Holliday), but any type of art that gets a reaction from me will make me want to grab a pen or my computer and return the favour.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Freesias trigger the strongest childhood memories for me, although they remind me of my grandmother's house in Amersfoort, rather than of my own home. She seemed to have a vase full of them every time we stayed with her, and in my mind's eye they imbued her otherwise dark little house with light as well as fragrance.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music has a deep and motivating effect on me, especially blues and jazz. A few minutes of listening to Nina Simone do her thing and I feel an overwhelming urge to go write something, anything, just to play along.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I've mentioned a few of the poets already, although the list could go on and on. I'm a sponge when it comes to writing and my influences would include everyone from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Michael Ondaatje to e.e.cummings to Atwood, Sexton, Plath, Woolf (now that would be a dinner party!) to Douglas Adams and all stops in between and beyond.

More directly, you, rob, have been endlessly influencial in your encouragement of my work, and inspiring in your constant encouragement of other writers. Stephen Brockwell has been enormously helpful and encouraging to me, as well, as was Patrick Lane when I took his poetry workshops at UVic. jwcurry, too, of course, as well as so many of the poets in Ottawa's writing scene. My husband, fiction writer James Moran, started out as my editor (and I as his) and his support is the main reason I'm still writing today. I have been enormously fortunate in the places and people to which poetry in particular has led me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Learn to let go of things, including my writing. And travel more.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

My other job is as an editor, but if I hadn't become either of these things, I imagine I most likely would have become a real estate developer, or at least someone who refurbishes old buildings. I love building things. If it hadn't been poems and stories, I think it likely would have been actual buildings.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was the first saleable skill I realized I had. Isn't that romantic? Why I kept doing it, though, is an absolute, fundamental need to express the thing that's just behind the thing we normally talk about.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I'm reading and very much enjoying Gore Vidal's Lincoln right now, and I recently read A Room of One's Own for the first time, which was a lot more fun than I would have thought. I've seen a lot of rather awful films recently, but I did like Revolutionary Road, and the new Star Trek. The last film I saw that really stuck with me for a long time after, though, was a Quebec film called C.R.A.Z.Y.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Fiction, which doesn't come as naturally to me but which I'm finding a lot of fun to explore nonetheless.

12 or 20 questions archive (second series);