Friday, May 03, 2024

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Allie Duff

Allie Duff is a multidisciplinary artist from St. John’s, NL whose writing has been published in various Canadian literary magazines. Allie also performs stand-up comedy and was featured on 2023’s Just For Laughs album Stand-Up Atlantic: The Icicle Bicycle. Her first book of poetry — I Dreamed I Was an Afterthought — appeared May 1, 2024 with Guernica Editions.

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

Publishing a book was a goal that I had from a very young age. Now that I’ve accomplished that goal, I have no idea what to do next! The logical thing would be to publish another book, I suppose…

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

My friend told me a story about how, when they were a kid, their sisters would always read their diary. In an attempt to conceal secrets they started writing their diary entries in ‘code.’ Their theory was that this led to writing poetry. This rang true to me as well – I also wrote in a secret ‘code’ in my early diary entries.

Also my dad is a musician so I was always surrounded by lyrics and cadence.  

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially 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?

It’s so slow. I do a lot of research and take a lot of notes. I walk around the city a lot, probably talking to myself without realizing it. I also have countless unfinished projects, thanks to my ADHD.

4 - Where does a poem 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?

Usually it’s a mix of both. There are plenty of poems that come to me as single pieces and they don’t belong to a larger work. For projects with a particular theme, though, I’ll end up writing a bunch of poems that are part of a whole (and sometimes short pieces end up melding into long poems.)

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

I think public readings are great. There’s nothing quite like reading a poem aloud to figure out what is and isn’t working in the piece. Being on stage is also fun for me.

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?

Apparently my writing is very millennial, which I feel is unavoidable because that’s my generation. I’m always trying to fight the despair of living a dystopic late-capitalist life.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think right now writers play a role in keeping people’s empathy alive. We’re all so overwhelmed with info from social media – there’s so much content that it’s easy to burn out and tune out.

A poem that went viral on social media recently, called there’s laundry to do and a genocide to stop” by Vinay Krishnan, is evidence, I think, that poets are still influential. Maybe we’ve got to go viral to be heard, but poetry certainly isn’t dead, and it has some of the greatest ability to move people and spread awareness.

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

Before I sent my manuscript to publishers, I asked my editor friend David Pitt to look over the poems for me. It was incredibly helpful! Then with Guernica I got to work with their First Poet’s Series editor, Elana Wolff; I can’t thank her enough for her careful eye and general poetic wisdom.

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

Get used to rejection. I started sending poems to literary magazines right after high school, and I had no idea back then how many times (countless times, even) that I’d be rejected before I’d start getting accepted more regularly. I’m not a very prolific writer, so I only submit maybe 5 or 6 times a year. Essentially that means I might go a whole year without publishing anything. So yeah, don’t let rejection bother you.

This advice is also applicable to people over 30 on dating apps…

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

The biggest difficulty is trying to dedicate enough time to each craft (there’s never enough time). I find it hard to set one discipline aside so that I can focus on the others. If I do, I end up feeling guilty. Music has fallen to the side lately, but stand-up comedy is thankfully more of a hobby so I perform whenever it feels like it’ll be fun.

And being multidisciplinary gives so much space for experimentation. Sometimes I sneak jokes from my comedy set into my poems (and vice versa). A lot of my songs started as poems.

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 have no routines! I’ve tried every possible technique to build some kind of habit around writing, but thanks to my ADHD nothing ever sticks. So I gave up on routine and decided to write whenever I feel like it. That might mean once a week, multiple times a day, or even as little as once a month. It’s sort of terrifying to accept that I’m unable to keep a level of productivity that is seen as acceptable – I’ve spent years dealing with deep anxiety that I’m not productive or disciplined enough (thanks, capitalism).

After getting my diagnosis I spent a lot of time researching how to be productive with ADHD, but then I realized that all of those methods were counterintuitive to my natural creative style. I could keep expending copious amounts of energy trying to be (neurotypically) productive and STILL not develop ‘healthy’ habits. Instead, I decided to surrender to the chaos and see what happens. 

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

Getting out into the world is the best inspiration for me. I close the laptop, close the books, and go to a music show, hang out with friends, or go for a walk. I have a poet friend who operates the same way and we have a theory that there are ‘reader’ poets and there are ‘experience’ poets. In other words there are people who gain more inspiration from sitting and researching and imagining, and there are those of us who have to go out and experience things and get inspired to copy down (or exaggerate) what we perceive. I’m sure most writers are a mix of the two types, but I tend to really need to get out of my own head regularly.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cigarette smoke, lol. 

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 influences my work quite a bit. Or, at least, listening to music can really help get the writing going. I tend to visualise scenes while listening to music. When I was a kid I always made up music videos to my favourite songs. That turned into imagining stories, poems, etc.

Science is also a pretty neat way to get inspired. One of the first songs I ever wrote was about the law of falling bodies.

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

Anne Carson is one of my favourites. I return to her work quite a bit.

Any and all writing is important to me, though. Sometimes I read a news article and end up writing a poem about it. Or I might obsess over a comic book as a way to chill out after too much intellectual work.

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

In writing? I wanna write a novel and a full-length screenplay.

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?

Recently I’ve been working on my career in the film industry. I think this is a common story for writers: we supplement our income through various other jobs. Vocationally, writing always calls me back, though. It’s also nice that music and comedy scratch my ‘writing itch’ when I’m not actively working on poetry. 

And I think the next occupation I’ll attempt will be something in the social work or psychology realm.

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

In school, people always told me I was good at writing, and teachers encouraged me. Ironically, people also loved to tell me not to pursue writing as a career since “you can’t make money doing that!” Even cab drivers, upon hearing that I was studying English in university, would say, “So you’re going to be an English teacher?” and when I would answer, “No, a writer,” they would laugh at me.

This friction between what I was good at and what I was ‘expected’ to do for money was frustrating but also made me very stubborn about accomplishing my writing goals.

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

I read No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz and it was kinda life-changing.

And I’ve watched a lot of great films recently so it’s hard to choose. I think Aftersun (dir. Charlotte Wells) is a masterpiece, though; I was messed up for a whole week after watching it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m writing a manuscript of poems about childfree women. It’s sort of transforming into a book about nonconformity and cognitive dissonance. I’m letting the poems take me where they wanna go…

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Thursday, May 02, 2024

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Dereliction

 

Non-Careerist

tread lightly
everything holds weight

grows wider
through dreamtime

steady coaxing
fuels rotation

each birthing
a cycle

uncalculated
in its avoidance

a vessel
to drive

riding higher                )
on repentance

so often
no meaning

assigned
for our sake

a ripple of truth
curling

It took a while, but I’m just now getting to Great Lakes poet Gabrielle Octavia Rucker’s full-length poetry debut, Dereliction (The Song Cave, 2022), a collection of poems composed in two equal halves that fit together perfectly. The first section/half is the extended sequence “Murmurs,” a poem composed with such a delicate and light such across nearly fifty pages of short, sharp declarations, observations and meditations. The lines are nearly whispered, none of which reduce their force. As she writes, early on: “I’ve been giving to mourning my gifts, / faithfully aiding in deception of self, seeding forgery, / a ritual of fictitious charm thrown against me, stuck / to the nape of the neck, barely visible, little lime green ticks.” Through these pieces, short sketches resonate one per page that thread across the distance, she composes thought as much as silence, an afterlife as much as presence. Further on: “There is no formal, no one familiar body.” The second section, “Dereliction,” offers a gathering of some forty pages of self-contained, first person narrative lyrics. There is something interesting in how the collection generally, and this section, specifically, works to place the narrative itself in context, attempting to find and place the narrator, the self. “I got older,” she writes, as part of “Practice for My Birthday,” “I remembered / a lot. Still remember / a lot. Everything / began to make more sense, / less too as the glass dome fell / reflecting off the distant moving / of the blurry Otherside.” The subtlely of her work is divine, and I am very much looking forward to seeing what she publishes next.

 

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

the ottawa small press book fair, spring 2024 edition: June 22, 2024

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:


   
the ottawa
    small press
    book fair


spring 2024
will be held on Saturday, June 22, 2024 at Tom Brown Arena, 141 Bayview Station Road (NOTE NEW LOCATION).


“once upon a time, way way back in October 1994, rob mclennan and James Spyker invented a two-day event called the ottawa small press book fair, and held the first one at the National Archives of Canada...” Spyker moved to Toronto soon after our original event, but the fair continues, thanks in part to the help of generous volunteers, various writers and publishers, and the public for coming out to participate with alla their love and their dollars.

General info:
the ottawa small press book fair
noon to 5pm (opens at 11:00 for exhibitors)

admission free to the public.

$25 for exhibitors, full tables
$12.50 for half-tables

(payable to rob mclennan, c/o 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9; paypal options also available

Note: for the sake of increased demand, we are now offering half tables.
To be included in the exhibitor catalog:
 please include name of press, address, email, web address, contact person, type of publications, list of publications (with price), if submissions are being considered and any other pertinent info, including upcoming ottawa-area events (if any). Be sure to send by June 3rd if you would like to appear in the exhibitor catalogue.

And hopefully we can still do the pre-fair reading as well! details TBA

BE AWARE: 
given that the spring 2013 was the first to reach capacity (forcing me to say no to at least half a dozen exhibitors), the fair can’t (unfortunately) fit everyone who wishes to participate. The fair is roughly first-come, first-served, although preference will be given to small publishers over self-published authors (being a “small press fair,” after all).

The fair usually contains exhibitors with poetry books, novels, cookbooks, posters, t-shirts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, scraps of paper, gum-ball machines with poems, 2x4s with text, etc, including regular appearances by publishers including above/ground pressBywords.ca, Room 302 Books, Textualis PressArc Poetry MagazineCanthiusThe Ottawa Arts ReviewThe Grunge PapersApt. 9Desert Pets PressIn/Words magazine & press, knife | fork | book, Ottawa Press Gang, Proper Tales Press40-Watt SpotlightPuddles of Sky PressInvisible Publishingshreeking violet pressTouch the DonkeyPhafours Press, etc etc etc.

The ottawa small press fair is held twice a year (apart from these pandemic silences), and was founded in 1994 by rob mclennan and James Spyker. Organized/hosted since by rob mclennan.

Come on by and see some of the best of the small press from Ottawa and beyond!

Free things can be mailed for fair distribution to the same address.
 Unfortunately, we are unable to sell things for publishers who aren’t able to make the event.

Also: please let me know if you are able/willing to poster, move tables or distribute fliers for the event. The more people we all tell, the better the fair!

Contact: rob mclennan at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com for questions, or to sign up for a table

Oh yes, and the fall fair will be held at the same location on Saturday, November 16, 2024, if you need to know that, also.


Tuesday, April 30, 2024

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Matt Rader

Matt Rader lives with his family in Kelowna, BC. He’s the author of six books of poems, a collection of stories, and a work of auto-theory. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His most recent book is Fine (Nightwood Editions 2024).

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Miraculous Hours, arrived at my door on my 27th birthday. Later that year, my first child was born. My most recent book, Fine, will launch on April 6, the day before my 46th birthday. That kid from 2005 is now completing 2nd year university. It’s probably too neat an analogy to say that the difference between the two books is an entire childhood and adolescence but the difference between the two books is an entire childhood and adolescence.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was a small kid, Dennis Lee bounced me on his knee while he read poems. I ran away crying. Later, I drew a picture of Shel Silverstein’s “The Bear in the Frigidaire” that I felt was really good. My mum helped me write a haiku about the sea when I was about 8. When I went to university, I thought I might be an illustrator. I took a poetry writing class and my teacher, Patrick Lane, looked like my dad who was a long-haul trucker and later a crane operator. Then I thought I’d be a novelist. Then I thought I’d try social work. Meanwhile I kept taking poetry classes with Lorna Crozier. Eventually, I had no choice but to write poems.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially 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?
Any one poem or story or essay might start as if from nothing and come into some wholeness within days or weeks. Other poems—and especially books—might take years or even decades. Sometimes I take many notes, sometimes I don’t. Truthfully, it’s impossible to say definitively what time or note-taking really have to do with the work in its “final” form. Even work that appears to arise from nowhere and come out fully formed also seems to be the product of all the prior living and “work.”  Research and patience might be like dance-steps practiced over and over until some pattern is embodied and then no longer thought about.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose 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?
This depends entirely on the project. With poems and stories, I typically begin with short pieces that at some point suggest a larger scope. However, I’ve also worked with the bigger project or book in mind from the start. Grant writing and academic life have often required that I articulate a larger project or area of research. I tell my graduate students applying for grants and scholarships that they only need to tell a good story about the project they’re going to work on and then ignore that story while they create the work. Inevitably, the final work always bears an interesting resemblance to that story anyway.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’ve been involved in organizing literary readings my entire adult life. Nevertheless, I’ve always had an ambivalent feeling about them. What matters to me about a reading is that it is a moment in which people gather to privilege works of the imagination. I can’t honestly say that I enjoy doing readings, but I can say that taking part in a reading as an organizer, audience member, or reader is something that I value, that I think is a good in this world, and that I often find very moving.

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?
Questions are always being replaced with other questions. For a long time, I asked, How do I expand what I think is beautiful? This has many dimensions and is a deeply political question. I’m still living with that question. Before that question came to me, I wondered for many years how I might live in my own body, and then later in the “body” of the Okanagan Valley (Sylix Territory) in British Columbia, where I’ve made my home for 10 years. More recently, I’ve asked myself how I might talk to the people around me. That might sound like a simple question but the terms “I” and “talk” and “the people” and “around” are all fields of profound consideration. Today the question is, Can I tell the truth?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
For me, at their best, writers—and poets in particular—are people who disturb habits of language and story. Literature makes our lives and our use of language strange and new to us and in this way creates a potential for change. Writing is never neutral.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
If by editor we mean anyone who might offer input on a draft, then I find it necessary (which is perhaps different than essential). In this sense, all my work has at a least a couple of “editors.” Language use is a community event. It’s extremely helpful to seek out the guidance of the community.

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

Don’t fight with pigs. The pigs love it and you get filthy.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?
Stories, essays, and poems all favour different styles of thought. For me, stories privilege narrative. Essays privilege the development of ideas. Poetry privileges sound, image, and graphical representations. Of course, stories can be poetic, essays can tell a story, and poetry can develop an idea, but these areas of privilege are the, for me, the appeal to switching genres. There’s also a productive distinction for me between verse and prose. Because verse privileges changing direction, its relationship to time and idea is often stranger than work in prose.

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?
For much of the last year, my day has begun with exercise. I write in the margins of my day, as it were.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Relationships. Time. Exercise. My body. Music. Only later books.

13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Last year, I went as my dad.

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?
I like a good tautology. McFadden was clearly right in the most basic sense—we can only call something a book because we have a previous example of a book to help conceive of what this new object might be. Everything is an influence though. A book is an entangled cultural product; it’s entangled with all other cultural products and all habits of human being including what we perceive as “natural.” One aspect of my work is to become more and more aware of these influences.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Seamus Heaney’s collection Seeing Things. The poems of Louise Glück. These both have strangely enduring holds on me. A list of the other writers and writings would be too long as to be largely meaningless. Garrett Hongo’s poem “The Legend” is something I return to many times a year. Michael Longley’s “The Linen Industry” is sublime.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Get really old.

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?
A doctor working in an area of functional medicine.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was better at it than drawing or playing guitar.

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

Excluding the great books, I re-read on the regular, the last great book of poetry I read was The White Light of Tomorrow by Russell Thornton. The last film to really move me was Celine Song’s Past Lives.

20 - What are you currently working on?
This questionnaire. Now I’m done. Thank you.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;