from the green notebook
When posting new entries in my ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview series, I’m continually reminded of the wide array of reading and writing influence possible, well beyond anything I could have imagined. Writers cite lists of works and artists I’ve never heard of as foundational for their own work, providing whole worlds of possibility—although you’d be amazed at the number of times I have to correct the spellings of names. Is it wrong to expect writers to know how to spell the names of their heroes? Either way: there are so very many ways to approach writing, thinking and publishing, and the reminders of so many of these names, many of whom are previously unknown to me, are entirely welcome.
I’d originally begun the ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview series in September 2007, at the beginning of my University of Alberta writer-in-residence year, thinking that if I could send the same rough grouping of questions to an array of writers and post on my blog every couple of days, it would allow my blog to appear productive, while allowing my attentions to focus deeper into my actual writing. Through my office in the Department of English and Film Studies, I was quite literally living with unlimited internet access for the first time, not having to rely on spending money at internet cafés, rushing to get as much work done in either one or two half-hour sessions before my change ran out. I think I began to craft the questions on the plane heading west, which is entirely possible. It took three days to properly craft that first round, and a few days more to start soliciting responses. This was a project prompted through access, and it opened up glorious possibility. Since September 2007, I’ve posted nearly 1,700 interviews, with only one or two accidental repeats of authors, posting a new interview every three days. Just how far might this go? Just how far might this go before I finally decide to deliberately repeat authors from, say, the first half decade or decade of this ongoing project?
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The site formerly known as Twitter provides a link to a new interview, “On Agency and Writing a Life Lost: A Conversation with Sarah Gerard” conducted by Afton Montgomery for Chicago Review of Books. The interview focuses on Gerard’s book Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable (2024), a book written about and around the tragedy of a friend’s murder, attempting to provide some kind of answers, and, for her friend, a kind of agency.
I was never a reader of true crime, although I did catch elements during my eventual ex-wife’s teenaged years (simultaneous to my own), as she read through stacks of same, what our daughter eventually read on her own during her own teenaged years. Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders (1974), for example, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Twenty years after her mother went through them, our daughter, reading through her mother’s library, her mother’s volumes. From what the interview provides, I can appreciate Gerard wishing to focus her questions around her late friend, allowing her some space for her story:
I still don’t know, with a hundred percent certainty, why this happened, but seeking a “why” gives meaning to an event that otherwise seems totally random and is even more frightening in that regard.
I also think every story worth telling has an unanswerable “why” at the center. Right away everybody who knew Carolyn was asking, “Why this person? She’s a good person. There’s nothing she did to deserve this, so why?” Within twenty-four hours, Render was giving an interview in which he said it wasn’t her fault. So why?
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I’m moving through LEX ICON (2024), the last poetry title by the late Portuguese writer, poet and essayist Salette Tavares (1922-1994), translated by Massachusetts-based poet and translator Isabel Sobral Campos and Kristofer Petersen-Overton and available in English for the first time. Campos was good enough to send me a copy recently for potential review, and then, a week or two later, a package arrived from Brooklyn’s ugly duckling presse, with a further copy along. What might I do with the spare?
All these rich worlds of expression
all this an inverse position of terms.
With the volume of books that land daily on our doorstep, I do tend to receive duplicates fairly regularly, and keep a running stack by my office door of books for give-away, whether hand-gifted at an event, or slipped into an envelope or package to be mailed further afield. Who might be the best reader for this, who might appreciate what is going on with this particular book? There are certain publishers that run banners across covers that scream NOT FOR RESALE – REVIEW COPY ONLY or print as a stamp on the title page, which I consider rather obnoxious. I haven’t even opened the book for review consideration yet, and already I’m branded a thief. I’m already reviewing sans compensation, and you accuse me of this? Do I not at least deserve a proper copy of the book for the work that I’m doing? With the charming production of ugly duckling, I appreciate that they understood not to damage their own books going out.
Spending the 1990s and further scouring used bookstores, I at least understand the concern: repeated fresh titles on used bookstore shelves, most of which include press release. If I’m gifted a book, I always make a point of passing it on, re-selling only that which I’ve purchased. One doesn’t see much in the way of money from resale, either, so it just seems easier to pass it along. Here, read this. This is interesting. And, given any gifted book presumes a recommendation? Any book I don’t like, I tend to hide in a box in our storage, or slip into a local free library when no-one is looking.
Tavares was primarily known as a visual poet, and exploring her visual work online, I can see an affinity with the work of Burlington poet Sacha Archer, which is rather interesting. I like the description the translators offer in their note at the end of this particular collection: “Tavares splits words apart and, in doing so, draws out other words nesting within, words that lie in hiding.”
I know my pal Lea Graham down in New York State has been working on English translations of poetry from Spanish for a while now; maybe I’ll send this to her. I’m already building her a package of other things, I can slip into there. What might Tavares have said of such beneficience?
And so art
made everything pass through the bathroom.
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Apparently the Summer Olympics have begun, but I so rarely pay attention to such things. Snoop Dogg as torch-bearer amuses me, nonetheless. No one in the game like him.
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I’m gearing up for a Toronto overnight in a few days, to read as part of Bänoo Zan’s Shab-e She’r series. A train in, with university residence accommodation, and a train home the following morning. I spent half of yesterday incorporating my edits on the short story manuscript from our Picton jaunt for the sake of a fresh manuscript to dig through, while speeding across that Ontario countryside. The lip of Lake Ontario. I’m not quite at packing reading material as yet, but I’ve my eye on some recent uncorrected proofs that landed, neither of which I’ve had a chance to open: Stuart Ross’ The Sky is a Sky in the Sky (2024) and JoAnna Novak’s Domestirexia (2024). There’s also Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying (2024), as well as Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract (2023). I’m still in the midst of my Sheila Heti essay, and my Lydia Davis essay. I’m still in the midst of a handful of other reviews.
I’ve at least one Jacob Wren title on my shelf I’ve been wanting to go through. I should probably bring that as well.
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“Writing,” she says, “is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.” – Edna O’Brien, Paris Review
I’m reading Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s Paris Review interview, conducted by Shusha Guppy for issue 92, summer 1984. The piece has been unlocked from the journal’s digital archive, prompted by the announcement of the author’s death. I’m aware abstractly of O’Brien (1930-2024), but haven’t read any of her work. I recall that my maternal grandmother had a paperback copy of O’Brien’s short stories, A Scandalous Woman (1976) on the bookshelf in her family room. Between the history, non-fiction and cookbooks, it was one of the few works of fiction on my grandmother’s shelf, which itself was worth noting.
I find it interesting, as part of this particular interview, O’Brien’s take suggests that one needs to be removed from the world to write, instead of directly inside it:
So writing, I think, is an interestingly perverse occupation. It is quite sick in the sense of normal human enjoyment of life, because the writer is always removed, the way an actor never is. An actor is with the audience, a writer is not with his readers, and by the time the work appears, he or she is again incarcerated in the next book—or in barrenness.
This is a curious consideration, entirely different from my own approach. In my mind, writing is a way through which to articulate, argue, document and process, none of which require to be specifically removed from action, yet requiring an amount of distance. The interview suggests her comments come from a far deeper complexity than this particular excerpt might provide. There is a darkness, one O’Brien’s responses exist with in tandem, and occasionally, in conflict; and still, here’s a slow moving, serious consideration of art and the writing life. “Nowadays there are too many writers,” she offers:
and I think one of the reasons for the deterioration of language and literature in the last forty years has been the spawning of inferior novels. Everybody writes novels—journalists, broadcasters, tv announcers . . . it is a free-for-all! But writing is a vocation, like being a nun or a priest. I work at my writing as an athlete does at his training, taking it very seriously. Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed. I think a casual or frivolous attitude is pernicious.
Had I remained on the farm I would most likely not have written at all, and hold the irony of being able to articulate that loss of the family farm, a loss prompted in part through my own choice to leave, and to write. Had I simply done as I was told, the farm might still be there. It might not, also. Either way, I was never quite good at doing what I was told.
Someone on social media posts a translation of a quote from the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
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Last night, one of Aoife’s baby teeth fell out. We folded it into a Kleenex for her to slip into a drawer for safekeeping. Today, Rose prompts one of her own wiggly teeth out, staunching the bleeding with toilet paper. These two, in constant competition.
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Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His next poetry collections, Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press) appear in 2025. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.