On Writing #82 : Jacqueline Valencia

On Writing

Jacqueline Valencia

For me to talk about writing, I’d have to explain my obsession with James Joyce.

I was in my second year of doing my undergrad at the University of Toronto. I had hit a hectic time of exams and essay writing and two hour commute from home to my campus garnered me time to study and complete my class readings. During this time, I was tackling Ulysses for my Post-Modernism class. On little sleep I found myself in the middle of a pub scene in the chapter called Cyclops whereupon a character called The Citizen (an Irish nationalist) goes on a xenophobic rant against our protagonist & simple hero, Leopold Bloom. I fell asleep on the train and lucidly dreamed of the events I had just read. When I woke up, I hit my head on the windowsill and something happened. It’s something that I’ve tried to capture since then. It was a fleeting moment; an epiphany. It hard to put into words, but everything felt so clear and could think many things at once. It could also have been a psychotic break due insomnia. I don’t really know. What I do know is that my heart raced so fast and having missed my stopped. I clung tightly to my book just to get some grounding. It wasn’t panic I was feeling, but rather it was an extraordinary sense of elation.

Since that fraction of a millisecond I’ve read Ulysses too many times to count. I find new things in it and learn many interpretations from others who have digested it as well. I’ve gone on to type his first work The Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man in its entirety online and I am currently transcribing Ulysses by hand, a work that is also online through scans of these books.

* * *

Think of a seed that takes root in freshly poured concrete. It has death written all over it. Sometimes, in defiance of its predicament, the seed bursts open out of the dried concrete and wriggles its way out into the open. Suddenly a schoolyard, a parking lot, and a subway station wall all have sprouts and seedlings growing out of them. In concrete, a budding flower from any garden becomes a weed

My ideas can be impossibly ambitious or ridiculous useless. Once in a while, a concept plants itself like the seed mentioned above though and it will take root. It won’t budge. It doesn’t matter how idiotic or over my head the thought is, it keeps nagging at me until I let it out.

“You’re going to write me now,” it says.

“No, I think it’s best that I don’t. You need time,” I reply.

“What’s the worst that could happen? You say nothing? Pffft. Write me!” it demands.

“Ok, but it doesn’t mean I’m going to anyone see you.”

I write it and instantly feel relief. Before I knew it, without editing it, I’d post it, and run away to do errands. It’s too scary to look back and cringe at what might have come out of my head. I’d discombobulated myself.

Honestly, those are the moments when I have my most fearful and satisfying times as a writer. The Ulysses-ean epiphany exists there.

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” – James Joyce, Ulysses

* * *

James Joyce lived most of his life in a self-imposed exile. This nomadic state spilled over to his work and he was obsessed with collecting words, learning many languages, and recording as much of the world as he could. The great trauma of not living in his homeland caused him to hoard the world of words. His passion for interpreting the real world, the daylight hours in Ulysses and the nighttime dreams in Finnegans Wake, were his way of trying to translate the reality of human existence. Writing is like exploring a mystery and recovering the known. A dedicated lover of literature faces the hard task poetic interpretation utilizing the very limited sphere of language. Individual emotions and the filigree in their personal experiences are as numerous as the stars in the sky.

From Eveline, a short story in Joyce’s first collection, The Dubliners:

“She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.”

From Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s last novel:

“And whowasit youwasit propped the pot in the yard and whatinthe nameofsen lukeareyou rubbinthe sideofthe flureofthe lobbywith Shite! will you have a plateful? Tak.” 

Joyce was a master of language. He claimed to be at the end of language and felt compelled to break it. He lived, worked and breathed in the rapidly advancing time of industrialization. The assembly line, electricity, technology changed the world every day. Joyce felt like he needed to translate his here and now via a new way of writing to catch up with it. It could be said that Finnegans Wake was one of the first works to showcase prose and poetry in a technologically advanced way. He created a word assembly out of notes and text detritus to write the undecipherable in the best way he could.

* * *

Today some writers parse their words or remix them the words of others.  This is constantly happening in social media and the digital world of writing. We all have opinions and we must share them. We all have objectives and we must collaborate them. Writers can pick and chose from many mediums to sculpt worlds and create situations. There are perpetual epiphanies within this kind of experimentation.

It’s a frightful, but provocative world to write in nowadays. Real and digital worlds are built out of words. People bargain, deal, and navigate the universe through speech and written text. It is assumed that everything has been written and that all a writer is doing now is rearranging the alphabet. What would James Joyce do?

“Shut your eyes and see.” – James Joyce

He’d probably tell us to write from the outside in and then from inside out. Joyce was a man more concerned with how to say something than saying it all. Shut our eyes to see the best way to put it down and make the world clearer for everyone. If a seed of an idea implants itself in your brain, no matter how absurd it is, go for it. The mind is a universe of unknown obscurities and there is connection there if we let it all out. The seed becomes a weed in the concrete, but some of those seeds become giant oaks despite the soil they break out of.

All of these tiny seeding epiphanies form unique algorithms to become a meditative grain, to become a part of the writer’s consciousness, to become a biting thought, and eventually become part of a written page. Ideas are all different buds formed through various patterns in the mind of the writer. It is in the process of writing and the world behind the words where the real reason for writing dwells. We write to reveal ourselves.

Language is a virus because it exists to make ideas solid. The computer I’m writing on now was once just a dream. Now I type on it. The possibilities in this are terrifying. All the dreams have the possibility of seeing the light of day. Look what it did to James Joyce? Try reading Finnegans Wake or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses. As a writer, I am trying to give birth to dreams and I’m having the time of my life navigating that realm. All because I hit my head while reading a book.

Writing isn’t a condition or an affliction. It helps me escape and offers me relief. Writing is human nature.

Jacqueline Valencia is a poet and film/literary critic. She has written for Broken Pencil Magazine, Lemon Hound, Next Projection, subTerrain magazine, and Notebook Mubi among others. Jacqueline is a senior literary editor of The Rusty Toque and a CWILA board member. Her debut collection There’s No Escape Out Of Time will be out with Insomniac Press Spring 2016. She lives in Toronto.

On Writing #81 : Kevin Killian

Writing the Anthropocene
KEVIN KILLIAN

      Like many writers, I came to San Francisco from graduate school, without any real training in doing anything, and I took a series of temp jobs.  This will date me, I remember the temp agency asking me what office machines I was familiar with, well, I had never actually been in an office, but I said, flatly, “all of them.”  “Do you know the ten-key machine?”  “Of course,” I said, rather coldly.  I wonder if many of you now know what a ten-key machine is . . . it’s like this accounting thing—but I didn’t know it then.  They sent me to this job downtown, I think for Pillsbury, and placed me in a room with a ten key machine and about a million pages of documents.  I walked out and said to the woman in charge, “I don’t know how to use that thing.”  My agency called and said, “You swore you knew how to use a ten key machine,” well it all came out that I thought they were referring to—you know, those touch-tone phones, with the ten keys, which I knew quite well.

      We are at a crossroads now in which previous conceptions of history seem to be collapsing like houses of cards.  Poetry must have been based on the idea of history as progression, not just the eternal cycle on Finnegans Wake that Vico posited, that civilizations all accrete and then dissipate as does the human body.  At least I think so, for it’s hard to imagine the act of writing poetry without imagining that people will read it in the future.  Was it Osip Mandelstam who had that piece satirizing a friend who dedicated all his poetry to posterity, saying that the future is a ghost and what we write today won’t be anything a ghost can relate to?  The truth is we don’t know how to write to death, though some poets have tried.

      Marxists must be deflated as the age of the Anthropocene kicks in.  If Marx predicated that the capitalist disaster is predicated on the exigencies of production, there was always an optimism in his thought—for some reason—he is perhaps the most hopeful of philosophers, believing that once we could see the outlines of history clearly, we wouldn’t repeat it.  In the 20th century, George Bataille took  the opposite view, writing that capital is instead managed and fed by the exigencies not of production but of consumption, and so that’s why our news is so bad, overconsumption, nine billion people on a shrinking planet, David Bowie took up the theme forty year ago, closer to Bataille’s time than to ours, “The earth is a bitch, we’ve finished out news, homo sapiens have outgrown their use, all the strangers came today, and it looks as though they’re here to stay.”

      In San Francisco we all practice, rich or poor, a modified version of the famous paradox defined by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”  There we’ve been living in an existential way for a hundred years or more, ever since the big earthquake that leveled the city in 1906.  Nothing’s good for very long, soon we will be swept out the sea, and I think it had given SF poetry a special character, the nearest Americans have gotten to Blanchot’s recipe for the “writing of the disaster.”  In the Bay Area there was a conference at UC Santa Cruz in 2014, and the keynote speaker, Ursula K. LeGuin the science fiction writer, admitted that though she could no longer be, as she had been in her youth, an optimist about the future, she still couldn’t bring herself to the edge of pessimism.  You still have to hope, she said.  I suppose otherwise you’d go mad.  Whenever anyone comes to San Francisco, I tell them that “while you are here you’ll experience an earthquake, hopefully not a devastating one, but you’ll be out walking and you’ll have to crouch down and touch the pavement. “ And maybe that perception of possible danger has kept us honest a little bit.  We’re at the end of the continent and the next stop is the ocean.  We came to it for a reason.  Jack Spicer, the California poet on whom I have written so much, often pictured in his poetry and fiction a post-human society in which everyone has disappeared and only “aimless signals” bounce back and forth between our meaningless satellites and the surface of the ocean.

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

Kevin Killian [photo: Ted Rees], one of the original “New Narrative” writers, has written three novels, a book of memoirs, four books of stories, and three books of poetry.  For the San Francisco Poets Theater Killian has written forty-five plays, and the anthology he compiled with David Brazil—The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater 1945-1985—is the standard book on the subject.  Recent projects include Tagged, Killian’s nude photographs of poets, artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and intellectuals; and forthcoming, with Dodie Bellamy, The Nightboat Anthology of New Narrative Writing 1977-1997.

We Who Are About To Die : bruno neiva

bruno neiva is a text artist and poet. Author of Servant Drone (w/ Paul Hawkins), washing-up, averbaldraftsone&otherstories and dough, amongst other titles.

Some of his work is featured on The PO.EX Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry and in a number of international mags and anthologies.

bruno’s ongoing projects include:

topoi: a collaboration with Canadian poet and artist Chris Turnbull that includes text, visual art and video production, as well as art installations;

The museum of boughs: an ongoing, itinerant museum dedicated to boughs, built on open-ended sets of intermedia installations;

Servant Drone, a collaborative poetry and performance project with poet Paul Hawkins.

website: http://brunoneiva.weebly.com/

Where are you now?
Porto, Portugal.

What are you reading?
Winter Journal, by Paul Auster
Monolingualism of the Other, Or, The Prosthesis of Origin, by Jacques Derrida

Also rereading these:
Contumacy, by Paul Hawkins
Multiple Bippies, by Colin Smith
Means, by Roger Farr.
1000 Proverbs, by SJ Fowler and Tom Jenks
Candid, by Chris Turnbull
The Nude Formalism, by Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee
Collected Minimal Poems, by Aram Saroyan

What have you discovered lately?
p. inman, Sean Bonney, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett, Robyn Hitchcock, etc.

Where do you write?
Mostly in my study, but also in libraries and cafés.

What are you working on?
I’m working on some text art and poetry books, and installations. Some of it is due to the collaborative work I’ve been developing with Chris Turnbull and Paul Hawkins.

Have you anything forthcoming?
Yes, I do.
Servant Drone, a full-length poetry collaboration with Paul Hawkins is coming out this November through Knives Forks and Spoons Press.
in cahoots, the follow-up to washing-up (and second part to binder clip series, a minimal poetry/artist’s book project) will be out some time in 2016 through zimZalla and umaestruturaassimsempudorreedições.
michelin, un poisson (capítulo 2), the second part to an ongoing poetry/artist’s book series in Portuguese is also out in 2016 through umaestruturaassimsempudorreedições.
And some other publications in the pipeline.

What would you rather be doing?
Nought.

On Writing #80 : Mike Spry

On Writing

Mike Spry

Whenever I hear a writer asked about their process I’m reminded of Dennis Miller, who once wrote something like, “The two things I care least about in this world are other people’s dreams and other people’s orgasms.” Sucks to be his wife, I guess. I don’t care about other people’s dreams either; I mean their involuntary occasions of the mind not their aspirations. I like aspirations. But I don’t care about other people’s writing processes. I don’t mean to be dismissive of other writers. I’m sure people who say they get up at 7am, write 2000 words, walk the dog, read some Dostoevsky, write another 2000 words, then don’t watch TV are comfortable in their lies. I’m sure they’re nice people on the inside. It’s just that writing is so personal, and contextual, that to share a process as if it was a universality is folly. To me, anyway.

I suppose I could tell you what I don’t think should be part of your writing process, though that would seem like a long list. Off the top of my head, and for brevity’s sake, I’d suggest to avoid:

·         Posting on social media that you received a grant

·         Sharing your daily word count

·         Using the #amwriting hashtag

·         Listening to other writers’ advice

But, of course, if any of those things work for you, aces. Except the grant thing. Gloating about getting a Canada Council grant is like bragging to the cashier about your scratch-and-win skills after a successful $3 lottery effort.

There are a few things that worked for me. Drinking did, until it didn’t. Smoking did, until it didn’t. Being unhappy did, until it didn’t. Love works, until it doesn’t. Living in Wakefield worked well for my last book, but I live in Amherst, Massachusetts now and that’s working fine too. I always wear shoes when I write. I drink tea as opposed to coffee. I like being in a crowded room where I don’t know anyone. Thesauri are helpful. Dictionaries are overrated. Never underestimate the literary acumen of a good bath.

But, as with the above, my writing process is about avoiding bad habits. But, so is my eating process. And my loving process. And my driving process. And my… you get it.

There are certain things that have greatly helped my process. Good editors are invaluable. Someone you can email a text to and get honest, quick feedback from. Deadlines are helpful. When something needs to be done, the motivation tends to manifest itself. Money. Money is good. I rarely write as well as I do when there’s money at stake. My wife recently bought some houseplants, and I like writing around them. Come to think of it, a wife is good too. Nothing accelerates and informs my process like 5’4” Turkish-Canadian woman yelling at me.

If writing processes could be easily explained, or transferred, or marketed, then there would be no need for university creative writing programs, and then where would all the writers find income? Which reminds me: Income is good. Get one of those.

My process comes and goes. It works and it doesn’t. I like it though. I like that it’s fluid, and that I don’t feel beholden to it. I don’t owe it anything. A writing process is an open marriage. And as anyone who has ever been in an open marriage will tell you: Don’t brag about your Canada Council grants.

Mike Spry has written for numerous publications including The Toronto Star, The National Post, MTV, and TSN. He is the author of JACK, Distillery Songs, and Bourbon & Eventide and has been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and ReLit Award, and nominated for the Journey Prize. He lives in Amherst, MA. www.mikespry.com

Recent Reads: Culls by Roland Prevost

Culls by Roland Prevost (above/ground press, 2015)

Although bookended by poems about a tropical escape, Culls is less preoccupied with contrasting locales than it is balancing an inner conflict: fear of some unknown malady and gratitude for the presence that fear has made possible. The threat posed at the outset of “Seeds, on Rock Again” has no concrete form but Ottawa poet Roland Prevost ensures the stakes feel real: 

"Stand. Stare at the dry ground where

nothing grows. Crossed fingers hide

inside pockets. Last glass bottle of cold

water soothes a final parched throat. Enough

to fuel a desperate play. One meant

to unhinge. Either us, or these locked doors."

This early stanza, which structurally resembles about half of Culls, marks a notable shift for Prevost, after Singular Plurals (Chaudiere Books, 2014) constantly stretched, tightened and fractured its lines on an impressionistic metric. Here the relative directness affirms a sense of urgency, of basking in each fleeting moment. Prevost engages the natural world for solace and interprets an experience with a dragonfly from two distinct vantage points. From "Grounded to Airborne":

"The sepia colour of memory, too long

from the darkroom bath. A dragonfly close-up, 

my solitary index offered as a perch. Its seeming

friendliness, ad hoc, filled-in. As with all fictions.

Willing fools, we cram every blank space with connection." 

And an excerpt from "Knack to Promise":

"Rust string spun transformer-like round

my bent index anchors your paper flight;

a dragon less tyrannical. Many wishes tax

the voltage of your Talisman powers,

from this place. Mine’s to know what you know.

Minus the pompous tones, I mean. I’m in a mood 

to hear simpler godly things. Hard decades spent

asking, as against your easy millennia. Fruits of this."

In both poems Prevost attempts to reconnect with his mystical state but the natural world is either supplanted (by a photograph) or mechanized (through the “transformer-like” reenactment of a long-gone moment). Progressing from resignation in the former poem to openness in the latter doesn’t necessarily yield new results, but it does see the frustration of unattainable knowledge convert into a calmer, personalized faith. Wisely, that faith — much like the threat that spawned it — is conveyed more through feeling than exposition. And as this excerpt from "Crabdance Lessons" suggests, a change in perspective can be metamorphic:

"When riding on these waves

it's the view not the world
bobbing up & down"


Through doubt, superstition and joy, Prevost's subtle pacing toward self-discovery forms the heart of Culls. By the time a suite called “Five Cuban Poems” completes the chapbook, each a recollection of sun-kissed imagery and weathered textures, Culls has earned its newfound peace. 

Recent Reads: The Destructions by Amish Trivedi

The Destructions by Amish Trivedi (above/ground press, 2015)

It seems paradoxical to describe Amish Trivedi’s The Destructions as both sharp and blunt. Scenes of visual memory flash out from a vague, romantic crisis. Using brevity to skirt what reads like a complicated relationship, these minimal arrangements isolate precise emotions at the expense of any greater context. In some cases this paradox translates into original perspectives of universal themes. In other cases it mystifies.

The “destructions” I find most rewarding tend to be provincial to the self, a portion-taking of agency or ego in favour of some erotic pleasure:


Destructatron

I stepped in
a flood
    for you:
    another
    immolation

decided to be
a cherished sacrifice
    in this moment

feared and rejected.


And yet other instances feel wholly, well, destructive, the loss of agency coupled with heartbreak:


Destructagedon

In another set
of moments,
    in silence
    pretending
    this schism

is burnt and
delusional and
    digestive and

festering.


These groupings may feel rudimentary — like semantics of what it means to be selfless — but Trivedi’s motifs reinforce them: poems that suggest sensual giving are loaded with water imagery whereas poems focused on time denote a wasting away. The “soggy plastic / bags run over / in the parking lot” set the scene for “a pair of / wet excited thighs” in “Destruction (4th time around)”. By contrast, “95th Destruction” confesses: “I’ve been here / four hours / lying on / the ground / pretending to / laugh or / be dying.” The passing of time amid a physical coma creates slow-boil tension.

While it’s clear that my imposed groupings hinge on a break-up — its friction and fatalism are as distinguishable as water and oil — that traumatic separation-point is tough to pinpoint. As such, The Destructions nixes an obvious narrative for a mixed chronology, fitting these poems together like splintered glass. The collection’s a bit of a dead bouquet, in that respect. But for readers coping with their own turmoil, Trivedi’s verse may thread a worthy catharsis.

On Writing #79 : Dina Del Bucchia

OMG. Watch TV!

Dina Del Bucchia

I don’t believe in unsolicited advice. It’s kind of like someone punching you in the face out of the blue. You didn’t ask for it and it probably didn’t feel very good and now everything is uncomfortable and weird and you don’t know what to say.

But a lot of times when people talk about writing they are really telling you what to do. Like, turn off your Wi-Fi while writing or go to a coffee shop at a certain time every single day like you’re going to a boring day job or spend money you don’t have on a desk in some shitty building across town so you can have your own space to write and your own taxing commute. Or what not to do. Like, don’t check social media, don’t read the comments, don’t watch TV. Don’t even think about it!

You’re reading this, so I’m going to assume this advice is solicited. And you can take it or leave it. That’s the kind of thing I’m into. You do you. So, here goes. Keep your Wi-Fi burning up. Look things up online and go down rabbit hole tangent after rabbit hole tangent. Watch videos of otters holding hands and read the comments. Don’t unfriend those gross people who are offending you on Facebook. Stalk them and see what sticks. Study a rom com on Netflix and write a poem about it with a friend. OMG. Watch TV! As much of it as you like. Even if you’re into those shows about building decks that I watch if I need to induce a nap. I still respect you if you’re into that. TV is TV is TV.

Take the advice and ideas that appeal and the others can GTFO of your brain to make room for more and better ideas. And don’t punch people in the face.

Dina Del Bucchia is the author of Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013), Blind Items (Insomniac Press, 2014) and Rom Com (Talonbooks, 2015), written with her Can't Lit podcast co-host Daniel Zomparelli. She is the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series and dress enthusiast who lives in Vancouver.

We Who Are About To Die : Robert Swereda

Robert Swereda is the author of Signature Move (Knives Forks and Spoons 2015) and re: verbs (Bareback editions), as well as four chapbooks: bloom circuits, Capture, chicken scratch and ionlylikeitwhenitrhymes.  His writing appears in Canadian and international literary journals.

Where are you now?
I’ve been in Victoria, BC for 2 years now, though I like to roam around on adventures.

What are you reading?
Crash - J.G. Ballard

Scorch Atlas - Blake Butler

Tres - Roberto Bolaño

Walden & Civil Disobedience -Thoreau

What have you discovered lately?
That I'm not motivated by higher education and working a job is stupid so I'm confused what direction to follow.

Where do you write?
Places quiet and caffeinated
http://wheredoyouwritemylovely.tumblr.com/post/123550073960/robert-swereda

What are you working on?
A 3rd manuscript of poetry. A collection of fiction based in rural Alberta. A collection of visual poetry.

Have you anything forthcoming?
According to Submittable, no.

I just published a digital chapbook though
https://ourteeth.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/swereda-bloom-circuits/

What would you rather be doing?
napping, fapping, smoking, eating. Mostly napping.



.:. albertan bodies

paddle cold elbow elkwater ghost 
whirlpool snaring rocky fiddle battle sylvan muskeg

headwall hidden pembina
saddle spirit westprairie pelican house 
buffalo belly smokey spray

moose peerless pigeon sand
whitemud heart bow panther
badheart sterling rosebud

 wolf meadow primrose skeleton
goose sulphur powder coal sturgeon kananaskis

 driftpile swan
thunder vermilion sunwapta chip
bighorn gull lobstick

birch horse abraham beaver keg
athabasca spruce slave raven clearwater

crowsnest castle
blindman calling cardinal peace jackpine
wolverine pyramid

snake-indian highwood 
hay milk death garden sheep lesserslave redder

 elk baptiste medicine barrier oldman cascade ram redwater