Edited
by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher
Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance (Chaudiere Books, 2016) highlights some
of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged
out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some
of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the
country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.
For
further interviews with contributors to The
Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.
Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a
Thousand and Salt Fish Girl; two books of
poetry, sybil unrest (with Rita Wong) andAutomaton
Biographies; a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement; and
most recently, a critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian
Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. A new
novel, The Tiger Flu, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press
in Fall 2018. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award, she
has been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree
Award, the Sunburst Award, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, the
bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ACQL Gabrielle Roy
Prize for Literary Criticism. She holds a Canada Research Chair II in Creative
Writing at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects'
House for Creative Writing there. In Fall 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press will publish
her new novel, The Tiger Flu.
Q: How long have you been in Calgary, and what first took
you there?
On the most recent pass, I've
been in Calgary for three years, to take up a Canada Research Chair in Creative
Writing at the University of Calgary. However, I first came in 1997, to take up
a position then called the Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence (now
called The University of Calgary Writer-in-Residence), on the basis of the
success of my first novel, When Fox Is a
Thousand, which came out in 1995. I found the writing community here to be
supportive and progressive, and enjoyed my time so much that I returned in 2001
to do a PhD here. So, altogether, I have lived in Calgary for eight years,
broken up by stints living in BC and England.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and
subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?
I've written since I was
little. Hong Kong (where my family is from) is a pretty cosmopolitan place, but
also a colonial one. I think there is a concern about language built into the
culture. When I was growing up in Newfoundland, under (the first) Trudeau,
there was pressure on English language for reasons of assimilation. So for me,
from a young age, writing (English) has always been a source of both anxiety
and pleasure. I took a couple of creative writing courses from George McWhirter
at UBC, when I was an undergraduate there in the mid-80s. I met Jim Wong-Chu
through him and became involved with the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop at
that time. My first publication was an essay (co-authored with Jean
Lum) about Asian Canadian contemporary media, published in the catalogue
for the 1991 film, video and photo-based art exhibition Yellow Peril:
Reconsidered, curated by Paul Wong. I also worked as curatorial assistant on
that show. Shortly after that I met a whole crew of folks who have remained
important friends, peers and mentors to me at the
Writers'-Union-sponsored conference The Appropriate Voice in Orillia in
1992. This was where I first met Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Althea Prince, Lenore
Keeshig-Tobias, Daniel David Moses, Rita Wong, Hiromi Goto, Ashok Mathur, Tamai
Kobayashi, Ajmer Rode, Sadhu Binning, and many others. By that time I was doing
a lot of art writing and book reviews for small papers and journals. Kinesis: The Newspaper of the Vancouver
Status of Women and Fuse Magazine
were really important to me as publication venues through the 1990s. I had my
first Canada Council grant in 1993 for the project that became the novel When Fox Is a Thousand. Officially, I
became involved in the Calgary writing community when I had the Canadian
Writer-in-Residence position at the University of Calgary in 1997, as I just
mentioned. However, unofficially, the conference It's a Cultural Thing and the
work of the Minquon Panchayat here in 1993 was my first point of contact.
Though I didn't attend, I paid close attention to what was happening because
that work parallelled in important ways the work I was involved with during
Yellow Peril: Reconsidered and later, the conference Writing Thru Race. I was
in close conversation with several Calgary writers-- people like Ashok Mathur,
Aruna Srivastava, Shamina Senaratne and Sharron Proulx-Turner-- as well as
attendees from other parts of the country as that conference unfolded. My close
friendships with the novelist Hiromi
Goto and the poet Rita Wong stem from that time. Both Hiromi and Rita have
Calgary roots. (Monika Kin Gagnon's book Other
Conundrums offers lots of analysis and history on this period, as does
Carol Tator, Frances Henry and Winston Mattis's Challenging Racism in the Arts. I also write extensively about this
period in Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian
Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s.)
Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that
you don’t see anywhere else? What does Calgary provide, or allow?
Calgary has been an important hub for
experimental poetry and fiction for many many years. For a long time it was
also a hub for women's life writing-- to a certain extent it still is. For me,
it's astonishing and wonderful how long-standing these communities are. In
spite of the fact that the actual members of the community have shifted quite a
lot of over the years, there is a spirit here that keeps on going. It has, of
course, been nurtured by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department
over the years. Different faculty-- from Chris Wiseman to Fred Wah to Aritha
Van Herk to Nicole Markotić to Suzette Mayr to Tom Wayman to Robert Majzels to
Christian Bok—have supported it and impacted it in different ways, as have
numerous talented graduate students. There's a reverberant relationship between
the community in town and the community at the university. Certain bookstores
have also been important. I think especially of Pages in Kensington,
McNally-Robinson (no longer around), and Shelf Life Books. I attend lots of writing events here on a fairly regular basis-- from
the Flywheel Series to regular events at Shelflife Books as well as WordFest
events. The Calgary Distinguished Writers' Program remains important to me for
its regular support of both Canadian and international writers.
Calgary is beginning to get
its stuff together around Indigenous cultures, much of it initiated by
Indigenous peoples themselves. The film/play The Making of Treaty Seven has been really important for me in
terms of understanding my treaty obligations here, especially coming from the
West Coast, which is for the most part unceded territory.
What is great about Calgary is that its
creative communities are mutually supportive-- everyone attends everyone else's
stuff. You don't get the kinds of polarization that are possible in larger arts
ecologies like those of Toronto or Vancouver.
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly
to your engagements there? How did the city and its community, if at all,
change the way you approached your work?
The Insurgents Architects' House for Creative
Writing is a project that doesn't so much respond to an engagement here as make
one. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of conversations about
social justice and contemporary form. Since inception there have been a couple
of major scandals around issues of gender and power in Canadian writing
communities, and so we've run two "Paper Hearts" events to address
those issues, aiming to represent people from across the range of communities
affected by sexual violence. Doreen Spence, a Cree elder who works on this
territory opened the first one, Anita Eagle Bear (Blackfoot) opened the second.
Their presences and prayers have been really important to set the tone. I find
that when an elder opens, people are their best and deepest selves and you get
a lot of less that bad, defensive kneejerking/troll behaviour that seems to
mark so much of, for instance, US partisan politics these days. If I had my
way, the world would be run by a council of grandmothers, and so much of the
horror of our present would just vanish. After their openings, I facilitated to
the best of my facilitating ability-- the secret ingredient is listening. I
learned in the aftermath that the younger generations don't practice these
modes of community building as a matter of course. One fairly senior poet of
the next generation told me that she had never done such an exercise before,
which I could not believe. It showed me the need for the work for sure. We've
had other ones-- on creative writing as social justice, on Asian/Indigenous
relations, on innovative writing as it attaches to the social, and on the uses
and abuses of creative writing programs. All of them have included readings and
performances, as well as focussed discussion in both critical and creative
modes. There's a sense in which these facilitated symposia are their own art
form. I hope they've contributed to the Calgary conversation in productive
ways.
This kind of work is made possible for me by a
very unusual university culture that is open, not just to new poetic or
narrative forms, but also to new forms of social, critical and pedagogical
practice. Here in Calgary, where idea of "innovation" has a curious
hold at the level of both the university and at the level of city culture,
there is room for progressive social forms. I try not to think about Calgary in
terms of right and left, and attend instead to the spirit of positivity,
community and openness. This city has those things in spades, and good things
happen when they are called to.
Q: What are you working on now?
I have just completed a novel called The Tiger Flu, about a disease that
disproportionately affects men, a community of pathenogenic women at the end of
the world, and a doctor who has to seek medical help from her oppressors if the
parthenogenes are going to survive. It's very primal and very operatic. I'm
reading all the great second wave feminist speculative fiction writers and
reimagining their worlds.
I'm working on a long poem called FROG DIAGRAM that thinks of the
acupuncture points as history sinkholes, as well as finishing up a critical
book on Asian/Indigenous relation.
