Faded Paper Project

Little Fiction.: Little (flash) Fiction.

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 13:39:14 -0400

Little Fiction.: Little (flash) Fiction.:

A little something-something I’m part of.

Fourteen stories.
Nearly two hundred submissions.

It took as a while, but we have our stories chosen for Little (flash) Fiction.

The compilation will be available on our site (as a free download, of course) on September 5th. And here’s what you can expect: stories about drownings, body…

For my Toronto friends.

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 21:44:59 -0400

Okay. So. Here’s the deal.

My mother’s attending a food bloggers’ conference at the Harbourfront Centre, so my hours in Toronto are between 10:00 AM and 5:00 PM.

The incomparable Dan Perry will be meeting me at the Second Cup near the Harbourfront Centre/Queen’s Quay Terminal, and we’ll be heading out to explore the city from there.

That’s about all I have for concrete plans so far.

You can join me at any time. Just shoot me a text or a tweet to see where I’m at. If you don’t have my number, you can request it via Twitter DM ( http://twitter.com/BraydonBeaulieu ) or via email ( braydon.beaulieu@gmail.com ).

What I’ll probably do during the late afternoon — until I have to book it — is find a cool restaurant to chill, and everyone who hasn’t seen me yet can come and go as they please. That said, I have no idea what’s good in Toronto, especially around the Queen’s Quay area.

So, any recommendations for places to eat? things to see? etc.?

How to make yourself a more resilient writer.

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:36:01 -0400

I’ve gotten used to seeing excellent stuff coming from the Twitter account of Hayden’s Ferry Review, but a link they shared earlier today is pure gold. The Stoneslide Corrective’s Rejection Generator Project emails out rejection letters, which (they claim) “helps writers take the pain out of rejection.” Here’s their logic:

The Rejection Generator is designed for all writers. Emerging writers can utilize it to remember life before their first break. Writers well-established in their careers can use it for balance: no matter how successful a writer is, each year there are Pulitzers to lose, as well as National Book Awards, PENs, and Nobels to not be selected for; maintaining a sharp sense of rejection as award announcements approach is important. And, of course, beginning writers not used to or only barely used to the sheer weight of rejection that lies ahead can use the Generator to get ready for the future.

I signed up for an email in each rejection category, and loved my results. You can find them below, in all their depressing, insulting, world-shattering glory.

The Thumper:

Dear Writer,
Ease up on the anti-depressants.
The Editors

Tantalus’ Apple:

Dear Writer,
We know the feeling of hope with which any writer opens a message from a publisher, expecting a new breakthrough, a new recognition. That is a good feeling, and you deserve to feel good. Savor it. Maybe jot down a few sentences describing your dizzy near-elation at this moment. It’s about to end.
Your piece is not for us.Regards,
The Editors

Ego Shredder:

Dear Writer,
We regret that we cannot use your piece. We want to reassure you that we are respectful of all writers who take a chance and submit work. We have given the piece our utmost attention and read it carefully from beginning to end. That’s why we’re rejecting it.
The Editors

The Southern Gentleman:

Dear Sir or Madame, Miss, or Ms.,Life is a peculiar thing. Victory goes not always to the swiftest, as we are taught when very young. But there is always a good bit of wisdom to be found. We regret that we will not be able to publish the piece you submitted at this time.
We remain, as always, yours & etc.,
The Editors

Big Chakra Dosing Agent:

Dear Writer,
Energy is what it’s all about.
Save yours.Sincerely,
The Editors

The Civil Gesture:

Dear Writer,
This piece is amazing. We were utterly blown away reading it. We laughed and cried at the same time, creating a strange gasping noise that went on so long our neighbors called an ambulance. That’s how powerful your writing is.
We’d just like to see one change: Could you make the narrator an eighty-year-old grandmother who hears about the story while waiting for gall bladder surgery via a phone call from her goddaughter who only speaks Dutch and Mandarin? That would really pull it all together.Regards,
The Editors

Destroy! Destroy! Destroy!:

Dear Writer,
If we had the budget, we would hire one of the crews that cleans up toxic Superfund sites to visit your office and expunge all evidence of your attempts at writing. Perhaps we will apply for a federal grant. We’ll let you know.
Regards,
The Editors

A quote from Roberta Seelinger Trites.

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:18:58 -0400

Adults need to remember that children’s literature should be read as literature—where embedded meanings and symbolic representations have powerful influences on readers and listeners. Rather than banning books or censoring stereotypes, adults should take on the role of mediating the text.

Roberta Seelinger Trites

In Review: Dani Couture's Algoma

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:10:15 -0400

Review_-_Algoma.doc Download this file

Congratulations to Suzette Mayr and Coach House Books!

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:19:41 -0500

This morning, Coach House Books received word that Suzette Mayr’s Monoceros is a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Congratulations, Prof. Mayr and the staff at Coach House, for nomination for this stellar award!

Check out my guest review of Monoceros on bookgaga: http://bookgaga.posterous.com/monoceros-by-suzette-mayr

Dani Couture reading at the University of Windsor.

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:57:07 -0400

Dani Couture. University of Windsor’s Freed Orman Centre. Wednesday, November 2 at 4:30 p.m. Be there.

Dani_Couture_-_November_2.pdf Download this file

Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game ruins a young writer's life.

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 11:17:26 -0400

The first line in De Niro’s Game (House of Anansi, 2006) ruined my life. And by “ruined” I mean pulled me into one of the most visceral, war-torn, disturbing roller-coaster rides of my literary life.

Hage’s hallucinatory poetic style is the first thing I noticed reading this novel. Reminiscent of the poetry of Lebanese author Kahlil Gibran, Hage’s prose fuses concrete imagery with limitless intangibilities. While creative writing students might cringe at the thought of anything they can’t touch or taste or smell, they needn’t worry about being pulled away from the moment in De Niro’s Game. Not only are abstract concepts grounded so skilfully in sensory detail that one can smell the stench of the “sewer that carried our collective sins,” but the first-person narrator is so intriguing that we forgive him his cosmic musings because we understand that they come from his own tortured mind, and not by any flaw of Hage’s craft.

This is where De Niro’s Game excels in ways that the majority of books could only hope to: even given his attention to stylistic innovation, Hage doesn’t let the poetry of his text detract from the gripping tale it tells. Here is a book that anyone can enjoy; casual readers and critical bookhounds alike. Given the balancing act between excellent style and exhilarating story, it’s really no wonder that De Niro’s Game won Rawi Hage the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, among other accolades.

The story is of Bassam and George, best friends who grew up and live in Lebanon. Their country is shattered by war and the two find themselves irresistibly drawn into its conflicts, and they must choose to live as soldiers, or flee the only homes they know. The book is divided into three sections: Roma, Beirut, and Paris. Each section begins with destruction and ends with devastation, usually for Bassam. Holding the text together is the mantra of “ten thousand,” which Bassam uses to describe the number of bombs falling in Lebanon, of times he was hit during torture, of soldiers’ coffins buried in the dirt, of kisses he lays on his girlfriend’s body. Each repetition of “ten thousand” is laced with loss; every time Bassam repeats something, it’s usually to communicate the death and hopelessness by which he is constantly surrounded.

Hage’s choice to exclude quotation marks from De Niro’s Game plays significantly into the construction of the narrator. As Bassam’s mind begins to deteriorate under the pressure of war, torture and the loss of his loved ones, it becomes less and less clear when he is actually speaking. This is, for a writer, a dangerous line to walk. Thankfully, Hage doesn’t overdo it. The lack of signalling for verbal exchanges lends an even more hallucinatory and chaotic tone to the novel. Given the poetic voice of the narrator and the subject matter of the novel, this proves to be fitting.

This focus on narrative devices brings us to the most striking thing about De Niro’s Game: Bassam’s voice. Seemingly disconnected from the world, Bassam lives as much inside his head as on the blasted sands of Lebanon and the filthy streets of Paris. He reports everything he sees, smells and hears in astounding detail, cataloguing his experience without preaching against the injustices of civil war. This is his life, and he accepts it. His unemotional dictation carries us through the entire story, remaining detached and observant even in the most distressing situations we can imagine. The death of his mother, his torture at the hands of Rambo, his betrayal by George; all are narrated to us by a man who doesn’t understand that he could possibly be anything more than an empty shell, a man who cannot even cry at his own mother’s funeral.

Reading De Niro’s Game as a reader is a breathtaking and harrowing experience, but reading it as a writer-in-progress is a lesson in what prose should be. Flawlessly balancing style and story, Rawi Hage manages to pull off the novel that thousands before him would kill to have written, including myself. From reading this gem of a novel, I’ve learned that no subject is too difficult to tackle, no story too wild or dramatic, as long as you have the solid language skills to support it. I hope to one day write a book as skilfully riveting as De Niro’s Game.

Shameless self-promotion.

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 14:36:29 -0400

I’ve recently picked up a couple publications in online literary magazines.

Check out my very short story “Sutton Wind” in Twitter-based literary journal Seven By Twenty.

Then check out my dirty, blasphemous poem “Lesser Light to Govern the Night” on page 76 of the not-for-profit art collective Steel Bananas, issue 28. I’ve embedded the journal below — for easy access — and opened it to my page. Please check out the rest of the journal, too. My good friend Kate Hargreaves has a poetry suite in this issue, starting on page 40. Steel Bananas is, by the way, accepting submissions now for its twenty-ninth issue, the theme for which is: austerity.

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Happy reading!

A message from: Braydon Beaulieu

For class tomorrow (Monday, October 3).

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:36:03 -0400

Remember how I’d hinted that there might be things to print off for tomorrow, and that you should all check back tonight for links and/or documents tongiht?

Don’t worry about it.

All you’ll need to bring to class tomorrow are:

your thinking caps.
your Writing in the Works textbook (I’m planning on using this, but may drop this part of the lesson plan depending on how other things go, so bring it just in case).
your laptops, which will come in handy for our research activities tomorrow.

See you all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.

Getting lost inside Dandelion Magazine 37.1: The Mapping Issue.

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:25:01 -0400

Dandelion Magazine sent me their Mapping Issue for a review.

It’s hard to know where to start.

I guess I could talk about the sheer volume of this text. It’s a freaking book. With a DVD included. The issue contains work from almost fifty authors who spread their work over nearly two hundred pages and over fifty minutes of material on disc.

So, naturally, it would be a book-length project in itself to review each piece in Dandelion Magazine 37.1. But it’s not necessary to map out my reactions to each piece when I can give a sort of lightly theoretically informed impression of the whole dang shabang.

When in doubt, retreat to theory and stuff.

The first thing to note about The Mapping Issue is the degree to which mapping saturates the text. Even the table of contents is a map. I mean, a table of contents is always a map, but this one’s a colorful one with vectors and whatnot. Each author in the issue interprets the journal’s theme in a unique way. For instance, in his piece Local Colour,derek beaulieu (to whom I’m not related, if you’re wondering) maps out the narrative of Paul Auster’s Ghosts through the use of black and blue colour blocks (and possibly white ones that are invisible on the page, given his quick summary of Ghosts). No words, just blue and black rectangles.

One of my favourite pieces in the issue is Nikki Reimer’s ”benevolent despot,” which seems to map birth and death records in such a fashion that the two literally bleed and blur together and become unnavigable. Kristian Carlsson’s “Ahead of Directions” maps language before removing language entirely from the map with two beard maps. Jérôme Ruby’s “Cités Voraces” illustration suite maps the intertextual nature of the urban/rural tension, displaying the consumerism that even the natural world has now taken as standard. Andreas Rutkauskas’ excerpt from “Caché” is a film documentation of the shaping of a mountainous topography.

Why am I going on like this? Because the diversity of texts published in Dandelion Magazine 37.1 points to an important social phenomenon; not only does mapping saturate this issue, it saturates our lives. Canada and the United States of America are mapping-obsessed cultures. In fact, most of the world is. This is not a new phenomenon, as anyone with any ounce of historical education knows. We map our lives through birth and death records, our bodies, our level of success, our possessions, our land. And boy, do we map our land. Did you know you can creep Tiger Woods’ backyard on Google Earth?

The sheer size of The Mapping Issue and the diversity of texts within indicates that each individual negotiates mapping processes in a different way. Mapping, then (whether you’re making maps or reading them), is a subjective experience. In the summer of 2009, what was a precise and indispensible navigational handbook to me in the French countryside was total gibberish to my travel mates. This issue of Dandelion Magazine, then, is an important literary text. Is brings those subjective experiences to the artistic individual and says, “Here, interpret these.” Reading the products that those individuals have come up with is a second process of interpretation (and one which I, admittedly, fell short from with several of the pieces). Dandelion Magazine’s Mapping Issue is a reminder that as much as we attempt to log and trace our lives, everyone negotiates their space within the world—both literally and figuratively—in a different way. And the results are often beautiful.

Interview with a dreamer: Rebecca Rosenblum

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:25:11 -0400

Braydon Beaulieu: Your upcoming collection of short fiction is called The Big Dream (Biblioasis, 2011). But you already knew that. What, for you, is the Big Dream?

Rebecca Rosenblum: I think the big dream for me is just what you want out of life, the situation that will make you happy. It’s different for everyone, of course, but there is a very stock image of that in our society, and it includes a successful career at something both fascinating and lucrative. Many people—most people?—don’t get exactly that, and then they have to either personalize the stock dream to suit themselves, their values and limitations, or they have to resign themselves to unhappiness. I’d say the book is about that negotiation.

BB: And for your characters?

RR: They don’t always know what they want, often because so much of their focus is getting sucked into the here-and-now, getting by, getting through, not screwing up either work or personal stuff, and then surviving when they do screw up. And it depends on what story we’re talking about, too. Some of the characters are mainly bound up in their work, and some are really looking at work as just a thing to fund their real lives elsewhere—with their family, or with their art, or whatever they think of next. Their dreams are really various, which I suppose is my point.

BB: Seems like your characters are very preoccupied with their work lives.

RR: I don’t write about my life per se—no story in this collection is even close to autobiography. However, I have worked a lot, at a lot of jobs, all my life, and that definitely makes me interested in how work works. When I’d never had an office job, concepts like “water-coooler banter” were just joke setups or a vague lame idea in my head. When I started working in an office for the first time, I was like, “Whoa, there are no more of those big upside-down water-bottles; the water is just filtered out of the plumbing.” But after you’ve been in these environments a few years, you realize that those little bits of chatter are a really important part of how people connect with their colleagues, or don’t, and a lot more gets said than you’d think. So yes, I’m writing of what I know of working, but no, I’m not writing about my jobs.

BB: Have you ever had a job that’s made wonderful story fodder? Given the choice, would you write books for a living, or continue to work alongside your writing?

RR: This is apropos, because I just had a few months away from work just to write—the first time in my life that happened. Even in grad school, I always worked, usually at multiple jobs. I liked being “just a writer” for a while, but I also found it very overwhelming—no structure, no social interaction, no short-term ego-gratifying successes. I know lot of writers would be horrified, but I found it hard to go without working, and was happy enough to go back to the office. Of course I wrote tonnes in the time off and it’s really hard to scale back and say, I’ll be happy with a couple paragraphs on a Tuesday evening before I pass out for the night. Ideally, if things got a little less financially strained, I’d work less, but from where I sit now, I’d be ok with having some kind of job for a good while in the future.

BB: While we’re on the topic, “writing as labour.” Go.

RR: Seriously? I don’t think of it that way. Writing’s really hard, of course, and sometimes when I write a first draft and realize it’s going to take twice as long again to edit it into something coherent, I feel a little ennui. But I am very conscious of writing as something I choose to do—no one is demanding that next story, no one but me. I only work on projects that interest me, that I enjoy writing, and I go at my own pace. I choose to do challenging things, but only when I want to be challenged, to make myself better. I’m not saying there are no financial or ego-gratifying rewards in writing short fiction, but there are simply not enough of them to keep writing if you aren’t having fun. At least, not for me. So I always try to have fun, at least a little.

BB: You recently put together a tiny movie on Xtranormal. On your blog, you say, “A major criticism of my work might be that there’s too much of people standing around talking to each other, so I thought this site would be perfect for me.” It seems as though you used the Xtranormal movie-maker to complement The Big Dream. Why is it useful for writers to delve into other art forms, like film-making or painting or collaging?

RR: It’s good to get out of your own head, and certain other art forms make visual and concrete what is only words for us writers. That’s fun, and a reminder we’re not doing the only thing—it’s humbling to realize the scope of movie-making, even the simplest form of it.

BB: I saw you reading live from your first collection of short fiction, Once (Biblioasis, 2008), back in the winter of 2008. The way you read your story was what convinced me to read your book in the first place. In your experience, how can hearing a writer read his or her prose or poetry influence your perception of the work?

RR: Well, thanks, Braydon! I did my first “professional” reading (ie., not part of a school class) in December 2006, and I was scared witless. I practiced for days and my voice still shook. Doing decent readings is something I’ve really worked towards, and I think I am decent at it now, except for the occasional off night, though I am never actually calm beforehand. I have about 15 readings coming up this fall (including one in Windsor, October 3!) and I am intimidated but excited. I have noticed that when I see a band live, the excitement of being right there, sharing the moment with the performers and tonnes of other fans, makes me like the music about 20% better than I would if I’d just listened to the album—so it’s a great enticement to buy an album I would not necessarily have wanted just from cruising iTunes clips. I want that to be true of readings, too—that the author’s voice and character interpretations and just enthusiasm makes the experience 20% better than just reading all alone in your head. I know a lot of writers that’s true of, at least for me—you need that 20% to make it worth coming out to listen.

BB: Any inspirational words you’d like to send out to fadedpaperproject readers?

RR: If they are writers, for them to just enjoy themselves and their writing. The first test of a good project is if you enjoy telling yourself the story in your own head, if you are interested/shocked/saddened/thrilled at the right moments. Because we are all our own best readers.

Just kidding. Click here to visit Rebecca’s blog, Rose Coloured, instead.

Angie Abdou's The Canterbury Trail slaloms through characterization and intertext.

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 11:44:24 -0400

Angie Abdou’s novel The Canterbury Trail (Brindle & Glass, 2011) has already received some attention on fadedpaperproject for a relatively unfair review it received at the hands of Leslie Anthony. The problem with Anthony’s review, as you’ll be able to tell by checking out my old post and the comments below it, is that it doesn’t exactly approach the book on its own terms. The Canterbury Trail exists in intertext with Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While I’m no Chaucer expert, I feel that Abdou’s novel should be critiqued according with this in mind, so I’ll do my best for what will be my first public book review.

Abdou’s writing is clear and sharp, easy to read in most parts but poetic in others. While not the most groundbreaking novel in terms of language use, The Canterbury Trail is intriguing because of its intertextual nature. The characters in this novel are modern-day, skiing versions of Chaucer’s caricature-like pilgrims, characters who set out on a quest for one thing (Chaucer: religion, Abdou: sick powder) and instead end up engaging in debauchery of all kinds. The ironic juxtaposition that Chaucer negotiates in his works remains intact in The Canterbury Trail, in that the stated journey is a pilgrimage (albeit for skiing, rather than religious purposes), but the implied journey is for something else. In Tales, that something else is mostly romance, while things are a bit more complex in Trail. SOR, for example, wants an excuse to smoke weed and hang with his buddies, but he also wants to feel alive. Urbanite journalist Alison is not only working on an article for The Globe and Mail, but is believed to be “here for the dick,” as is hottest-chick-in-town Shanny. And every character abandons his or her personal pilgrimage in one night of drinking, smoking, and garbled attempts to have a storytelling contest. In the words of the maternal character, Janet, they’re all “pretend[ing] to love it all,” when in fact these characters are searching for something other than the skiing tradition almost necessitated by living in Coalton.

But all of this would be futile without strong characters to carry the story. Abdou’s characters are clichés, caricatures of small-town ski-bum communities. Carrying on the Chaucerean tradition, these pilgrims are hyperbolic representations of their place in Coalton’s microcosmic society. Everyone knows everyone in this town, as Rad Chick Shanny remarks, and characters are constantly branding themselves and others. This does not go unnoticed by la Canadienne Claudette, who remarks of Coalton, “People were quick to label others here, and the labels stuck.” We see this process of labelling in action as the characters come together in a tiny hut named Camelot:

They’d be camping out with a bunch of dropout, ski-bum punks. Perfect. The hippies were arriving any second, and the ski bums had already got here. Remembering the snow machine outside, he added redneck to the list. Why not throw everybody into [the] mix? Some lazy, stoned ski-bums, some flakey, tarot-card waving hippies, and some rye-huzzling, oil-burning rednecks. Add Michael—ski bum turned hardcore greedy developer guy—and you had a complete cross-section of Coalton society.

Of course, the reason over-the-top characters often fall flat is because the author sketches them on a two-dimensional plane. While some of Trail’s characters are underdeveloped, most of them are three-dimensional; they extend deeper than their labels. Abdou spends a considerable amount of time building these people, giving each individual his or her own internal dialect and backstory-driven motives for embarking on this pilgrimage. And many of them change in their night together in Camelot, discovering things about themselves and each other that change their perception of community and invidualism. Shanny, for example, undergoes a unexpected change in her sexuality when she spends time with Ella and Cosmos. We learn that Kevin, who is probably the least immediately-likeable character in the mix, is plagued by such inner turmoil and guilt over his father’s condition that we begin to understand his hotheadedness and desire to lash out at other characters. But there are fourteen characters here (not including the dogs), and 277 pages seems like less time than needed to have time to connect with them. Abdou pulls it off, for the most part, through excellent dialogue, but one of my main gripes about this novel was actually that I wanted to know even more about these people, especially Heinz the Hermit, the character who frames (and is possibly imagining) the whole story.

And holy hell, what an ending.

The Canterbury Trail impressed me with strong character development spread across fourteen pilgrims, and was a highly entertaining read. A must-read for anyone interested in Chaucer, winter sports, or solid culture-focused writing.

Interview with a frog princess: Jenny Sampirisi

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:24:30 -0400

Earlier this year, I attended a reading by Jenny Sampirisi, during which she read excerpts from her upcoming poetry collection Croak (Coach House Books, 2011). Enamoured with the words I heard that spring afternoon, I did a little bit of research into Jenny’s work and found her name to be saturating Canada’s writing scene. Between Book Thug, Other Cl/utter and the Toronto New School of Writing, this woman is a wordslinging powerhouse. Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Jenny a few questions about her writing and her work in the literature business.

__________________________________________________________________________

Braydon Beaulieu: Tell us a bit about your upcoming poetry collection from Coach House Books, Croak. Like, why frogs?

Jenny Sampirisi: Oh yes, the frogs, the frogs! I have many reasons for writing about them. First, I suppose I’ll tell you a bit about what the heck this book is. Croak deals with a crisis, or rather a few crises that I felt were already present for myself and others. Namely the environmental crisis, and a gender crisis that I’ve seen evolve over time. It started out as a chapbook called “Hush” that I wrote many years ago. I was working primarily with visual poetry at the time and I was excited by the idea that a comma looked like a tadpole. I started writing “Hush” with the idea that all the “o”s in the text would be replaced by commas, as though an egg had cracked open in the middle of a word. The only review I ever had of it called it “an abuse of punctuation.”

Yep.

I put “Hush” away but the Frogs stayed with me. The crisis at the centre of Croak came from my research into frog deformity. This is happening all over the world, mostly as a result of the chemicals from pesticides that make their way into the water. Frogs absorb toxins through their skin so they’re a good marker of what we’re doing to the environment. That was the first crisis. From there, I felt that it was necessary for the language to deform along with the characters so I started playing with how that might happen. I became quite interested too, in the history of the frog as a cultural trope. I started to research the ways frogs behaved in literature and realized they’re often asking others (usually women) to compromise their values or are being compromised some way in themselves. This was really exciting for me, so I created the Girl figures to respond to the Frogs. The conversations that they have can be both fun and disturbing for both parties and I think that propelled me to form the book like a play.

BB: Croak contains very kinetic poetry, from girls doing ballet to frogs surviving with missing legs. There is a very strong focus on the body, which seems to be consistent throughout your writing. One of the things I enjoyed the most about your novel, is/was (Insomniac, 2008), was the way my own body reacted to characters’ pain and discomfort. My stomach aches when Eva describes the pain in her abdomen when she gets out of bed. Why is it important to focus on the body in your writing?

JS: You’ve nailed it (and how flattering that your male abdomen would sympathize with a lost womb!). I think this happens all the time. When I read a book where a character does something, a gesture out of the ordinary say, I often find myself “trying it out”. I move my body in the way that the characters do. The writing I love most forces me to inhabit another body and to try out those mannerisms. With Croak, I wondered how we might “feel” a body with more limbs or less. The body for me is so fascinating as a textual presence. Think about your last trip to the doctor. Before the doctor even examines you, she’ll ask “So what’s going on” and you attempt to the best of your linguistic ability to describe what your body feels. Yet you might fail to describe your ailment in the right way. The doctor might prescribe something different depending on what you say and how you construct your body in language. That’s what both is/was and Croak are obsessed with. The disconnect between the body in language and the physical body.

BB: Croak seems self-aware as a product of composition, the result of the process of writing. There are metanarrative poems about writing in a café, and the narrator is sometimes critical of self-criticism. Can you tell us a little bit about this element of self-reflexivity?

JS: This has a lot to do with your previous question. I’m hyper aware at all times of language as a tool for constructing a reality. You pick and choose words, you get them wrong, you get them right but still, it’s not quite true. I couldn’t write without acknowledging this in some way. It feels false for me to ignore that I am, and the characters are, constructing a reality that someone else (the reader) is going to consume. I created The Narrators (a set of characters that comment on the text throughout) as a way of addressing the constructed nature of the text. And, while there are real frogs in the real world who are in dire straights, there are the frogs of our imaginations that sing and dance for us. It felt important to recognize that even in the real world, every thing is coloured by language.

BB: You work as an editor for Book Thug and Other Cl/utter. I could ask you how these experiences have influenced your own writing, but that would be too easy. Instead, I’ll ask: Why is it important for writers to be editors?

JS: Every time I read/edit a book, I get to experience someone else’s process. As an editor, you have to come to the book on its terms, not necessarily your own. It forces you to see that there is no “right” path to writing. I’ve edited writers who have highly structured techniques (yes, spreadsheets that map out the text even) and others who panic and change whole sections of the book at the last minute. The result is generally an exciting dialogue that leads me to consider my own decisions in writing. It also gives me a humble view of my own work as existing in relation to other texts in the world. Writers who are editors tend to be generous souls who think very intensely about a text, whether it be their own or someone else’s. That’s a good quality to have as a writer because at times writing can feel like a very isolated act. Editing also allows you to see criticism as a gift when you get it, rather than as an attack, even if it means you’ve got to kill your darlings. I’ve never met an editor who wanted a writer to produce a bad book. They’re there to make sure it’s your best work. There’s a lot of trust that goes into that relationship and it requires that both parties listen and consider carefully. I love that intimacy with another writer and with a text.

BB: You also co-founded the Toronto New School of Writing, which offers participants a range of activities from one day writing workshops to close readings of poetic movements, from one-on-one manuscript development to full 10-week writing courses. The TNSoW’s a great project, and any writer in Toronto who can get involved should. What can we expect to see from the TNSoW in the future, Jenny?

JS: TNSoW is packed with stuff on the go. I credit many of the classes over the past year with the evolution of Croak. There’s a bpNichol workshop, a workshop on challenging form, a workshop on triptychs, and one on thinking about writing as installation art as well as some craft-based workshops. Every time I get a pitch from a writer for a workshop I get so excited by the diversity of practice in the writing scene. FYI, you don’t have to identify as “a writer” to take these workshops or come in knowing anything about the material. TNSoW is a place to try out new things. That can be frightening for some people who worry about feeling out of their element, but you’d be amazed what risk taking can do for your practice even if you decide, in the end, that it’s not for you. There are so many people in Canada trying out new ideas or playing with established ideas in new ways. TNSoW gives people the opportunity to look in on those practices.

flippingthrough: Very handy – I have been saying several of...

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:42:36 -0400

flippingthrough:

Very handy – I have been saying several of these incorrectly. Now to relearn…

vintageanchor:

How To Correctly Pronounce Authors’ Names.

A guide to names you know but wouldn’t say out loud, like Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Michel Houellebecq, Michael Chabon, etc. No, seriously: It’s SHAY-bahn.

Renovating poetry with Sachiko Murakami's Project Rebuild.

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:45:08 -0400

What is a poem but a rental unit of language?

This is the question at the heart of Sachiko Murakami’s new brainchild, Project Rebuild. An experiment in collaborative composition, Project Rebuild encourages writers to “move into any of the poems on the site, and renovate them as you will.”

The project began with one poem from Murakami’s poetry collection, Rebuild, about the Vancouver Special. What’s a Vancouver Special? Check out what Murakami says about it on her site:

The Vancouver Special is a house particular to Vancouver, and particularly vexing to its residents. Its style is represented in nearly every neighbourhood in Vancouver. Built mostly throughout the 1970s, and designed to maximize usable lot space and to provide a legal and livable ground-floor secondary suite suitable for extended families or mortgage-helping tenants, the Specials are large, plain, and commonly considered ugly in comparison to their mock Tudor, Craftsman, and West Coast Modern neighbours.

By the 1980s, homeowners became so alarmed at the creeping advancement of the Specials into their neighbourhoods that bylaws were enacted to preserve the “authentic” character of neighbourhoods - notably in Shaughnessy, an affluent westside neighbourhood analogous to Toronto’s Forest Hill or Montreal’s Westmount. Design guidelines were drafted at City Hall under pressure from property owners to designate that new houses should “be relatively in proportion to its neighbour, be enriched with interesting detail, texture and colour, and be partially screed from the street in a manner that is characteristic of the area. The massing of the principal building should not overwhelm the site.”

So what’s the deal? Piqued by the persistence and replication of the Vancouver Special - and the community’s response to it - Murakami renovated her own poem several times, then asked other poets to rework it as well. The resultant poems became the first buildings on the block, the first residents of a new poetic community preoccupied not with gossip and lawn maintenance, but with the idea that poetry is a communal activity.

I like the white one, honey.

Renovating someone else’s work seems like a daunting task. How dare you touch Meredith Quartermain’s poem?! Keep your hands off Fred Wah’s imagery! But this isn’t the mindset of Project Rebuild’s community. This is a neighbourhood that encourages writers, no matter what their publication record, to rebuild the work of everyone else. I finally got up the nerve to renovate a poem by Amanda Earl, and post the resultant poem.

Is “Re: novate/hearsal” the best poem I’ve ever written? Certainly not. But it doesn’t matter. In an interview for Canadian Bookshelf, Julie Wilson asked Murakami: “How does the project invite rather than intimidate the reader who wants to play around but isn’t sure if he or she will ‘get it right’?” Murakami answered with:

“Getting it right” is I think a big part of what I’m interested in here. It’s that finality of a Poem, printed on a page, bound in a book, that I want to unsettle. I don’t think that’s particularly new. Think of the cento, a form in which every line is taken from other poems. Think of the convention of the epigraph, where the writer takes another’s line or idea and runs with it. Think of plunderverse, found poetry, flarf etc. Think of the Tradition, the Canon. A professor (Judith Hertz, at Concordia) once said every sonnet written is written in response to every sonnet written before it. And of course, think of performance—the change and surprise that comes with bringing up language up and out through the body. I know in my own experience, I’ve altered poems as I read them in performance, changing a preposition here, skipping a line there, following the line and its breaks, very closely or not at all. Or when you hear a poet cover a poem, how that changes it. Or even when you hear the studio version of the song, and then live in performance, or covered by someone else. All those possibilities are interesting to me.

It all comes back to the question: What is a poem but a rental unit of language?

What makes Project Rebuild so special is that is places the shared history of poetry/poets at its forefront. The impermanence of a poem, the effects of writer-on-writer influence, the changing nature of language, the individuality of a particular writer. These are all themes apparent from spending a bit of time on the site. The question isn’t: “What can I do to make this source poem better?” Rather, poets using the site ask themselves: “What can I do to make this source poem new?”

Renovating a house helps its resident(s) call it home. The idea that I made this room, and now I’m a part of it. It is me, and I am it. The obliteration of something that once was, and the birth of something within the same space, somewhat limited by the structures laid out by construction teams. Do the same thing with poetry. Grab a tool belt and visit Project Rebuild today.

A quote from Dani Couture.

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:35:01 -0400

I write what I fear, and I write what I love. Somehow, bears end up on both sides.

Dani Couture

Just wondering, so in order for you to publish something, like a book, you can't have your works on, say, Tumblr?

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:25:23 -0400

Books are a different breed, because publishers don’t usually require first-time rights to the whole manuscript, especially if you’re writing short fiction or poetry; however, publishers aren’t impressed, generally, with blogs. Why not?

See, blogs aren’t peer-reviewed, the way journals and magazines are. You can post whatever you want. There’s no quality barrier. Even if 1000 people read your poetry blog, it’s not an indication of how good that poetry is. (Not to mention that it’s not likely these readers will actually spend money on your work.)

Literary magazines, on the other hand, carefully select works for publication. The editors are usually accomplished writers and/or scholars themselves, which lends credibility to the pieces that a magazine chooses to publish. Book publishers like to see that your work has appeared in these types of publications (whether those pieces are in the book manuscript or not), because it shows that skilled editors have demonstrated enough faith in your writing to include it in their publication.

Now here’s where I get to your question in earnest. Literary magazines usually require First North American Serial Rights to your work. That means that they need to be the very first publishers of that specific work. Your blog counts as a publication.

To illustrate, I have a poem called “A Sestina Composed by Suzanne’s Salad” on Facebook. This poem hasn’t appeared anywhere else. Facebook’s a publication platform. I am no longer able to send “A Sestina Composed by Suzanne’s Salad” to, say, Dandelion Magazine or McSweeney’s or The Danforth Review. If I wanted to, I could include “A Sestina Composed by Suzanne’s Salad” in a book of poetry later on, but might have to acknowledge that the poem appeared on Facebook first. But here’s the thing: telling a publisher that my poem is up on Facebook and I have however many friends is far less likely to be impressive than saying, “Hey, this poem was published in so-and-so literary journal.”

The presence of “A Sestina Composed by Suzanne’s Salad” doesn’t, however, mean I can’t submit other works to journals.

Does that thoroughly address your question?

The death of Chloe Valentine.

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:08:12 -0400

“Where has fadedpaperproject been,” you rage (teal and pastel pink intact, even in speech).

I can almost hear you mumbling curses to yourself as you refresh this page every half-hour daily, waiting with wide, frantic eyes for the next article to appear. Cheetos stain your fingers, dust your keyboard. You haven’t shaved since my last post, July 22. You’ve developed this twitch at the corner of your mouth.

Your relief has finally arrived. But first — and of importance to the content of this post — an explanation. Where have I been? Hard at work on my first book/Master’s thesis, Field Guide to Kleptoparasitism. Some of you will remember the title story from the Broken Pencil Indie Writers’ Deathmatch.

Where truth is laid bare for those who can handle it.

Now, one of the stories from this book (which is either a collection of interconnected short stories or an episodic novel, I’m not sure which yet) is tentatively titled “Origin of Species.” This tale is decidedly the most plot-driven of the bunch, and deals with the death of one Chloe Valentine, the childhood best friend of my main character, Tony. They play at the park, trade hockey cards at recess, snack on homemade pistachio bread.

Last night, I killed Chloe Valentine.

And my reaction to it shocked me: I had to stop writing for grief. When — and how — did I become so attached to this fictional character? Chloe only appears (so far) in this one story. I had only ten pages to get to know her. To sketch her freckles, speak her disdain for Trivial Pursuit, explore her affinity for collecting things like rocks, hockey cards and beer bottle caps.

Her death felt like the loss of a close friend, a real life one. I’ve only cried a few times when reading a book, and I think all of them have been part of the Harry Potter saga. Last night I came close to adding my own work to that list of weepy goodness. But why?

Have an an answer or thought for me? An experience of attachment to a fictional character you’d like to share? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

On the art of writing elsewhere.

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:33:18 -0400

Today, I have a prompt for all of you: Write a story or poem on something that isn’t your computer, your journal, or a regular old sheet of paper. Somewhere impermanent.

On your skin, perhaps?

Why not write a suite of poems on the white space between suits on a deck of playing cards? On the outside of your coffee cup, leaving it for the barrista? On a dry-erase board in the office? (During lunch break, of course. Slacker.)

Words, as you know, are fleeting. You speak them, then they disappear. You forget them, which is why you keep a grocery list. They dart past you while you drive, reach up to you from sidewalks, slam against one another at the bus stop. You pull them apart to make sense of them and run them through the shredder once you understand what they mean. Why not mirror this impermanence physically?

Most writers seldom explore language’s physical temporariness. We think of work in terms of a curriculum vitae bullet, a credit to our personal canon. Afraid that no one will remember your work once it fades, flakes and drifts off in the breeze? Snap a photo, Barney Rubble, this isn’t the Stone Age.

Although troglodytes are famous for their haiku and microfiction. [CPFOS.]

So, your challenge is to write a poem or story that won’t last unless someone catalogues it on film. Pen it on your arms, yell it into the mall’s food court, chalk it on the sidewalk. Sure, your skin will shed and your voice will drown and the chalk will wash away with the next rainfall. But that’s the beauty of creating something transitory. It’s there for just a brief moment, then it’s gone. Only the lucky ones catch it in its original state.