Poetry Dispatches from Truck

Ottawa is HQ this March for the nomadic poetry anthology Truck

(at www.halvard-johnson.blogspot.com), which travels the information highway bearing new poetry cargoes, dispatched by different guest editors each month. For March 2014, there’s a tandem team behind the wheel, in Ottawa poets Colin Morton and Mary Lee Bragg. No distracted driving, we hope. 

   At the rate of one poet a day, the guest editors expect to see a diverse and personal anthology appear online this month at Truck, and the poems will stay at the site, archived for those of us who like to reread.

     The month’s convoy has begun with poems by Kingston’s Steven Heighton on March 1 and Edmonton’s Jannie Edwards March 2, and by month’s end the joy ride will have taken readers to three continents and delivered trailers full of poetic styles and forms. But followers will notice a solid core of Ottawa poets bringing us transports – beginning Tuesday, March 4, with Pearl Pirie behind the wheel of Truck.

On Writing #22 : Matthew Firth

How I write

Matthew Firth

I haven’t written anything good for a long time. The last meaningful piece of writing I finished was a eulogy – for my father. I’m not sure if there’s a connection between what poured out of me writing and delivering that eulogy and my subsequent literary silence or not. Maybe; maybe not. Hard to say.

I’ve always been a feast or famine type of writer. I have been at this 20+ years and I have learned that it can’t be forced. Writing is not opening a jar of spaghetti sauce. It requires some muscle and brute force, yes, but more than anything it takes patience. I’m a proponent of waiting for it to happen. And it doesn’t always happen. It rarely happens, at least for me, especially lately.

While I’m a disciplined person on many fronts (I sometimes go through runs where I do insane amounts of push-ups day after day after day), I am not a writer who writes every day. I admire those folks, the ones who feel they have to throw down 500 or 1000 or 2000 words a day to justify their existence. I haven’t written 500 words of decent literary expression in the last year. Yet here I am, subject of this column. Maybe I’m relying on my reputation too much. Like a former NHL 50-goal scorer, I’ve had some good seasons in the past that gives me credibility, but, even in the world of literature, you gotta produce. But I don’t shoot pucks (well, actually I do, every Monday night with some other old farts, some of whom are even writers). To the point: I call myself a writer and I write. I can produce. And here’s how.

I don’t keep notes anywhere but in my head. I write short stories and they always start conceptually by visualizing places, characters, things, smells, sounds, etc. I toss the ideas for stories around in my head when my mind is otherwise turned off. For me, this happens two places: on my bicycle riding to/from work or on the bus riding to/from work, depending on the time of year here in Ottawa (I’m not one of those nutty, twelve-months-a-year cyclists). I sometimes even “write” a sentence or two in my head on my bike. I usually don’t write it down first time around, as I rarely trust my first instincts. Instead, the sentences and the ideas ferment in my brain for a couple of weeks until I convince myself that the brewing literary intoxicant is worth bottling – i.e., putting down on paper. And that’s usually what I do: I handwrite the first paragraph of a story on paper and then input it to the computer later. The act of typing already-written stuff into the computer usually generates momentum. From there, I write straight into the computer; just building on that first hand-written paragraph. I’ll have ideas in my head about where the story is going but it is almost never thought through fully. I don’t plot stories from start to finish. I let the act of writing the story take it where it goes.

The other thing is that I write with urgency. I’ve always worked full-time, for the most part, for the past 25 years or so. I’ve got a family, a wife, a mortgage, groceries to buy, kids to take here and there, and many other interests outside of literature. I have also run a micro press (Black Bile Press) for 20 years. My writing often takes a backseat to this other stuff. But when the engines are firing, I squeeze in time to write and then make the most of it. After thinking through a story for a month, writing a few lines in my head, I can sit down at a computer and hammer out a 2000 word story in an hour and a half, largely because that’s all the time I have. Not always but sometimes I write a complete story from start to finish and then go back and edit and pick it over until I think it’s done. I rarely write more than one story at a time. I’m task oriented. Gotta get one done before working on another.  

I have a publisher (Anvil Press) that asks me what I’m writing. I give vague replies. I don’t think about a new book of short stories until about 90 per cent of the work is done and I’m happy with it. I don’t write huge volumes of stuff. I put a book out about every five years. And I don’t write many stories that don’t end up in books. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m efficient with what I write. I might write 15-20 stories over five years and 12-15 of those will end up in a book.

Ideas and influences for writing come from everywhere: from stuff I hear on the bus, to a song that conjures a memory that leads to fiction, to a conversation with a teammate over a beer after a lacrosse game and on and on. Everything is fodder for fiction. Nothing is sacred. It all goes into the blender of my brain and then sometimes re-emerges and gets heated, bent and twisted into a story. Nobody really makes anything up. That’s bullshit. I didn’t make this up.

This is how it happens, or, how it used to happen before my dad died and I wrote that damned eulogy …   

Matthew Firth was born and grew up in Hamilton but has lived in Ottawa since 2000. He is the author of four collections of short fiction, most recently Shag Carpet Action. Selected stories from all four of these books was collected, translated into French, and then published in 2013 as Made in Canada by Paris’ 13E Note Editions. He is co-editor of the fiction magazine Front&Centre and founder of Black Bile Press.

McNair & Avasilichioaei in A B Series

A B Series Presents 

Christine McNair and Oana Avasilichioaei

Readings + a multimedia presentation!

8pm

Thursday, February 13, 2014

Ottawa Art Gallery

Arts Court

2 Daly Ave.

Ottawa, Ont.

Free

A hat will be passed.

More info: abseries.org

Oana Avasilichioaei’s We, Beasts (Wolsak and Wynn, 2012) won the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry in 2012. In We, Beasts, textual architecture, orality and multilingualism are covered. In her book, feria: a poempark (Wolsak and Wynn, 2008), geography and public space are explored. And in Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009) co-authored with Erín Moure, Avasilichioaei engages with translation and collaborative performance. Avasilichioaei has also translated two volumes of poetry: one from Romanian by Nichita Stănescu, Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006) and one from French by Louise Cotnoir, The Islands (Wolsak and Wynn, 2011).

Christine McNair's first book Conflict (Book Thug 2012) was shortlisted for the ReLit award, as well as the Archibald Lampman award, and the City of Ottawa Book Award. She has previously been shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She works as a book doctor in Ottawa.

Recent Reads: The State In Which by Hailey Higdon

The State In Which by Hailey Higdon

Published by above/ground press, 2013.

Recent generations have formed the habit of looking back at the industrious past – when people married at eighteen, when the word “career” suggested a life’s work and wouldn’t dream of being pluralized – and expecting that stability to settle in their own lives. Stories about our parents, grandparents and so on have inadvertently staked these signposts of adulthood in our minds. Yet the recognition that childish impulses and mature accomplishments don’t meet and reconcile at a certain age has only recently been acknowledged on a cultural level. Besides enabling a slew of dysfunctional sitcom and reality TV premises, this awareness that everything isn’t always okay has opened the door, a crack, for discussing mental health issues.

Repelling the comedic surface, Hailey Higdon takes on doubts surrounding self-identity and aging by dissecting common fears with idiosyncratic detail. As an open letter to the anxieties that accompany rites of passage we’re expected to cross cleanly, The State In Which wanders through ignominious aftermaths, month by month. From “January”:

“That song about what a bad

impression you made

today is stuck

growing older in you

making choices with you singing along.”

What begins as a steadfast rut proceeds to seesaw, plumbing indecision through darker soils. The milder “April” and “May” provide an escape from Higdon’s suffocating doubts but they’re easily bruised in the outdoors. From the former:

“I thought I saw Abbi in Nashville today, the lady

scratched her nose with her finger in a way that could only be

my friend Abbi, Abbi, but it wasn’t. Abbi and the gesture had been

taken by somebody else – stolen, and someone that looked like Abbi

too, what gives?

What a rottenly remarkable thing to take – I cried like a baby about it.

Could it be possible that I am growing my feelings in reverse?”

Regardless of whether The State In Which is a convincing character study or something more personal, Higdon’s diary-like minutia will instantly divide her readership into camps. (Discarding the merits of mental illness is a privilege for those of healthy mind, so let’s exclude that group of would-be readers right off the bat!) By “camps”, I refer more to those who, in reading the above excerpt, detect a subtle black comedy at work, and then those who don’t. My interest in which poems those two groups might react to, and whether those reactions ever intermix, reflects the understated strength of Higdon’s unstable text: there’s no clearheaded way to get through this. We experience Higdon’s psychological hiccups on a continuous evolution and respond by utilizing empathy or understanding from experiences within our own private headspace.

If the passing months often feel like stand-ins through which our protagonist passively connects with the greater world, her entire calendar paces conditionally on the person watching it, advancing superficially only to round a circle of doubt. The same can be said for the many destinations she researches, grasping at foreign straws that might cure or transform her.

The static realism of the condition Higdon brings to life doesn’t prevent unpredictable jumps along the way. In fact, by the time we reach June and July, the narrative has scattered and overlapped – inaction rendering time virtually undetectable. What initially appears like a fragmented stream-of-conscious reveals a purposeful disorder of pages; there’s logic within Higdon’s rant about decisions to make, places to daydream about and “the mosquito” (constantly threatening to suck life or transmit decay) but we need to spend time with it. There’s a greater message society can take from this process.

With the cooler months comes a decline in Higdon’s need to explain herself. Obstacles remain, as do the occasional pep talks, but as each page submits to increasingly blank passages, there’s a palpable sense of surrender. Dull panic reverts to dependence over “September” and perspective of self gets lost (“what is or is not a response to bad things happening”). Her stanzas, grouped tidily in early months, push away from the left margin and separate into single, isolated phrases by December.

It’s troubling that Higdon’s resolution, acknowledged at the close of The State In Which, goes by without explicit mention. After so much chatter, that one glaring omission cleverly has us deliberating over the previous entries and the nature of depression itself. In a chronicle made all the more haunting through its casual collapse, Higdon touches the nerves of a conversation that includes everyone.

On Writing #21 : Nichole McGill

Daring to write again
Nichole McGill

About a year ago, I decided to stop writing.
    Creative writing, that is. Emails, reports and other officious writing continued. What stopped was the carving out of time at the end of a long day of (enumerated) work, once children were read asleep, to fuel up on caffeine and peck away at the next novel until my frantic mind calculated that four hours of sleep on a weekday was, in the end, not smart.
    Not only would I not write, I would allow myself not to feel guilty for not writing. You writers know what I mean.
    The inner voice that would demand its tithe of focus and time would be condemned to a sound-proof box and I would take the path of “normal ”; the majority of humanity who don’t have to build the world anew every morning but dwell in the structures and the institutions of the world as they exist. Do the 9 to 5. Have hobbies that know their place. Do homework with the kids. Hang out.
    It took me a long time to get there.
    Writing and the creative life had been my bread and butter in my 20s, producing original story ideas for newspapers, magazines and even some television. But that was the 1990s, in that dying era of the paid journalist.
    By 2000, the Web was acknowledged as here to stay and I transitioned to HTML convincing others that the Web was just like other media just with code (and please, don’t leave the actual writing to the webmasters). Interestingly, it was also the beginning of my published literary career and the splitting of my work and creative personas: Web professional by day; story writer by night and “stolen” time.
    I published a book. Had babies. Ran a reading series. Published more and got on the social media wave in that last naive period of the pre-ebook publishing. Then all hell broke loose. Kindles, Kobos, EPUBs, oh my. And what’s an author to give away or keep and what’s a decent ebook royalty, anyway?
    In 2010, my publisher, Key Porter, closed its doors and my experience in the late 2000’s was that other publishers seemed ill-equipped both for the social media revolution, never mind the e-book revolution to shortly come.
    I forged a new path. I self-published my own e-version of novel on Kobo while deciphering open source software, EPUB and BISAC’s. I taught workshops on book marketing and e-publishing. I went to book-tech conferences and sat on panels. I co-developed an EPUB writing software, just. All fascinating projects. All my way of trying to make sense of the current upheaval in book publishing. But no “real” writing. Who has time to write in chaos?
    Now, after living “normally” for a spell, I discover I might just have some extra time in which I can write. More crucially, there have been two creative ideas that keep returning to scratch at my door. Do I dare start to write again?
    Let’s look at state of the writing world.
    Book industry - still pretty much in chaos, although friends are still getting published. In hardcover yet.
    Template for the ebook of the future - still waiting for this.
    Financial reward - not only stagnated but reversed. Decline of the mid-list. Expectation of authors to write for free. Generally, depressing.
    Frustrating writing tools. Remember when the only writing programs were Word and WordPerfect and although both sucked at least they were consistent? For this essay, I had to remember which device it was saved on, whether it was MAC or PC or open source. Do I want a distraction-free interface or a format that my editor can read?
    Yet, if I am to be truly honest, I also stopped writing because it no longer brought me joy. Upon hearing that a complete re-write of my latest manuscript was necessary to make it “sellable”, I thought: “Nuts to this.” I no longer was passionate about the book, indeed, not sure if I ever was. And if I’m going to have to go through all the editing-formatting-marketing-selling-technical effort, there must be something in it for me.
    Joy.
    Yes. That’s a good start. Shut out the rabble and meander to the page. The page is always waiting. And if there is some delight to found there in the act of creating, then continue. Maybe, just maybe, I’m ready.

Nichole McGill is the author of Girl #3. She also oversees the Web presence of the University Ottawa and blogs occasionally about Web, writing and social media at www.nicholemcgill.com.

On Writing #20 : Rob Thomas

Hey, short stuff!: On Writing Kids

Rob Thomas

Because people have asked: Yes, I am constantly shaking sand out of my poems. I spend a large part of my day with two to three kids at some park or other and that stuff gets into everything. Shoes. Underwear. Pant cuffs. Poems.

            Speaking of poems, I write them. I'm as surprised as anyone. It's a recent thing. Yes, I wrote them as a young person. Yes, I've always kept journals. There are volumes and volumes of them. These journals are filled with diary entries, notes, observations, ideas I thought I might massage into something journalistic or otherwise someday, maybe. They are scribble-books packed with typos, doodles and kinda-sorta-stuff.

            But as I began to spend more and more time as a stay-at-home dad [and less and less time in the real world] these journals began to fill up with – yes, sand – and notes about my kids. These included my many minor frustrations, our misadventures… but, mostly, the bizarre observations that only children can make. Kids do not live in the same world that we do. Shadows are appendages. The stars are your friends. The moon follows you everywhere. The sun pokes you in the eye. And, sometimes, the entire sky can be squeezed into a puddle.

            At some point in the summer of 2012, I began to cobble these fragments together into very short poems (I might have even daydreamed of a chapbook: Hey, short stuff!). I did this because they seemed unique and intensely significant and I had no idea what else to do with them. This was just after the birth of my third child. My plan (sleep deprivation may have contributed here) was to write one poem per day for a year. I fell a little behind schedule (hey, a schedules is just a fussy guideline). I’ve probably written 100. About 50 could probably be turned into something interesting – with more time and effort. A dozen or so have been published. Message in the bottles – the poem selected for the 2013 John Newlove Poetry Award  – was one of these poems. I’m thrilled. Writing poetry is hard. I’m lucky to have inexhaustible (really) subjects. It’s really wonderful to feel as though my poetry is improving all the time (wish I felt that as a parent).

            How does a stay-at-home dad of three kids find time to write poetry? Wrong question. What happens when a compulsive writer is immersed in the intense, stressful, joy filled and very surreal world(s) of three toddlers. This. This is what happens. I am so lucky.

Rob Thomas lives in Ottawa. He has poems forthcoming at The Steel Chisel and Bareback Magazine. His work has appeared places such as Broken Pencil, Feathertale Review, subTerrain, Chrysalis Zine, carte blanche, ottawater, Ottawa Arts Review, Jam Jar Words, Barnstormer and In/words. He’s working on his first chapbook.

On Writing #19 : Anik See

On Writing

Anik See

My grade six teacher, Mrs. Wells, sent us home one day with a simple task. Write a story, she said. 

The class was silent. We waited for more details. What about? we asked. Anything, she said. Again, there was silence. How long? we asked. As long as you like, she said. We all looked at each other, confused. Up until then, every school assignment we’d received had been very specific, its goal transparent. Conduct an experiment that demonstrates the effect of light on seeds. Prepare a verbal book report about Harriet the Spy. Write two paragraphs about an animal you know.

We were not prepared for this.

On my way home, I thought about what I might write about. My best friend Wendy, maybe, and how in the winter we would try to walk the whole way home along the tops of the snowbanks, touching the road only at intersections, and how we invented adventurous stories while doing it. We were in the mountains after an avalanche, for example, walking while scanning the sky for a rescue helicopter. Or we were spies, scaling a ring of volcanoes, looking for a colleague who’d fallen in. Every car that passed was the enemy.

But a straight retelling of something I’d already experienced seemed to be missing the point, or at least not taking full advantage of such an open-ended assignment.

I don’t remember the details of the story I wrote, but I know it was about a rocket, and that when I went to my room to write it after dinner, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. Ten foolscap pages. I remember the feeling I had of a complete and absolute freedom – no rules! anything goes! as long as you like! – to put on the page wherever it was my mind was going. And I remember knowing with absolute certainty then that this would be what I would want to do most for the rest of my life.

I went to bed that night charged, tingling. I hardly slept.

I don’t have the story anymore so I can’t tell you if it worked or not, or if it even had a beginning, a middle and an end. But that assignment was critical for my life as a writer. If my teacher hadn’t assigned something so loose, it might have taken me much longer to realize that writing was what I wanted – and needed – to do. Or I might have found out at a moment when that feeling I experienced might have been easier to dismiss. Knowing at such an early age helped set my determination to do it, often sacrificing things my friends and family found essential to their own lives. A house, for example, or a steady, well-paying job to pay for that house. To me, a house could never replace that feeling.

I know now that there are rules in writing, but I also know how to bend then, to test them as much as possible, á la Calvino, á la Sebald. Not all of the time, but enough. And when I do, that feeling I had in grade 6 returns. I’d go so far to say that if I’ve written something and the feeling – of freedom, of keeping going, of being sucked into the middle of a magnetic field – hasn’t surfaced, I know what I’m writing isn’t as good as it could be.

I still write longhand. A psychoanalyst might say that I do it because I’m still very attached to that first experience, that it worked for me then and I’m trying to recreate the same conditions for success. And they might be right. But I think my reasons are more practical (but just as psychological). Writing longhand – putting pen to paper, indelible ink, means I’d better be writing something worthwhile. There’s no ‘delete’ key that can cheerfully erase any evidence of words hastily put down. I can still experiment on paper and cross something out if I don’t like it, but it’ll still be there (which comes in handy sometimes) as evidence of struggle, and sometimes triumph. Writing straight to the computer feels like an uncontrollable purge to me, without that feeling attached, or without much thought involved.

I don’t write about rockets anymore, and haven’t since that first time. (Rule: write what you know. Though I prefer to modify it to: begin with what you know. Otherwise, writing about rockets would be the domain of a select few, to the detriment of our collective imagination.) As a writer, I’ve got to at least half-believe that what I’m writing could happen for it to resonate – if it doesn’t resonate with me, it’s unlikely to resonate with the reader.

But these are personal choices. And every writer knows the feeling I’m talking about. I haven’t met a writer yet who hasn’t had it, and who isn’t always in search of it. I can think of worse things to aspire to, and whether one is Alice Munro or a writer most have never heard of, if our literary canon exists in part because of that feeling, who could diminish its importance?

Anik See is a writer based in Amsterdam. Originally from Canada, she moved to The Netherlands in 2005. She is the author of three books: A Fork in the Road (Macmillan, 2000); Saudade: the possibilities of place (Coach House Books, 2008), and postcard and other stories (Freehand Books, 2009). Her fourth book, Cabin Fever, is forthcoming. Her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has been nominated for several awards, and her articles have appeared in many magazines, including The Walrus, Brick and The National Post. She also spent three years as a staff producer at Radio Netherlands Worldwide, where she produced award-winning, internationally syndicated radio.

SHANE RHODES LAUNCHES X: POEMS & ANTI-POEMS

More info abseries.org

Join us as we celebrate the launch of Shane Rhodes' new book, X: Poems & Anti-Poems

8pm

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Ottawa Art Gallery

Arts Court

2 Daly Ave.

Ottawa, Ont.

An A B Series presentation 

With a premiere screening of videopoems by Shane Rhodes!

On January 16, award-winning poet Shane Rhodes launches his latest book of poetry, X, which was inspired by one of Canada’s most unpoetic subjects: Canada’s post-confederation treaties and the recent Idle No More protests. Investigating what the treaties mean today and what art can do with such unpoetic documents, X breaks new ground for Canadian poetry and the results have been published in magazines across Canada, Australia and the United States.

Rhodes states, “Canada’s treaties represent one of the largest colonial land appropriation projects in the world. The documents are still vitally important to understanding Canada today and ongoing settler, First Nations, Inuit and Metis relationships. They are also key to understanding the recent Idle No More protests and the hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence. I wanted to use poetry to show how it is vital that Canadians know about the treaties and what they mean.”

Rhodes has just returned from three months in Brisbane, Australia where he held the prestigious 2013 Arts Queensland Poet in Residence position. As the official Poet-in-Residence, he was paid to travel around Queensland give readings, talk about poetry and host workshops. His treaty poetry and poetry about Idle No More sparked a lot of interest and there will be exhibitions of his visual poems in the coming months in Cairns and Brisbane, Australia.

Shane launches X in A B Series’ first event of 2014. It happens at the Ottawa Art Gallery in Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue, Ottawa) at 8:00 PM on Thursday, January 16. The launch features a screening of visual and video poems that Rhodes created during his Australian residency.
 

Shane Rhodes is the author of five other books of poetry including Err (Nightwood Editions), which was a finalist for the 2012 Ottawa Book Award, and The Wireless Room (NeWest Press), which won the Alberta Book Award for poetry. He is also the recipient of a National Magazine Gold Award and the P. K. Page Founder's Award for Poetry. Rhodes lives in Ottawa, Ontario, where he is the poetry editor for Arc, Canada’s national poetry magazine.