12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michelle Winters

Michelle Winters is a writer, painter, and translator born and raised in Saint John, NB. Her debut novel, I Am a Truck, was shortlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is the translator of Kiss the Undertow and Daniil and Vanya by Marie-Hélène Larochelle. She lives in Toronto. 

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 my first book made me a writer; getting it shortlisted for the Giller made me a suddenly popular writer, an experience at once glorious, terrifying, wonderful, and fraught with self-doubt. Hair for Men is a more assured book than I Am a Truck; the concepts are stronger and better argued, the writing is more fluid... I used to worry about I Am a Truck out there in the world with its wobbly little legs; Hair for Men can handle anything.

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

I’ve always been a sucker for character and narrative. I love a story that develops as a result of the way a person is. It’s an otherworldly kind of fun.

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?

I won’t spend too much time planning, because I find the idea only develops while I’m actively writing. This means that I discover the story as I go, and it changes a lot, but it gets written!

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

I keep a lot of observations, episodes, character studies, etc. tucked away in a Notes folder. There are Big Notes for novels and Small Notes for short stories. I usually know whether a note is Big or Small, but it tends to be a particularly compelling character that pushes a note into the Big folder and sets a novel in motion. I watched a man on a flight the other day close all the overhead compartments before takeoff, not in order to help the flight attendants, but because he seemed to think he’d do a better job. Then he stood in the aisle and talked about himself to anyone who would listen for the whole five-hour flight. That guy was a Big Note.

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

I love doing readings. I only consider my own work complete once I’ve read it out loud - very important for flow and pacing. I studied theatre, so delivery is important. Hair for Men is written in such a way that you should be able to read it out loud, in character, as Louise.

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?

I like to think I’m turning over a number of rocks, taking a look at what’s underneath, and seeing how it responds to the light of day. I’m more an asker than an answerer, and the question I’m always asking is “Why this??”

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?

The writer is there to reveal humanity to itself.

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

I find it essential. My structure is absolutely everywhere.

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

Write for the top 5% of your audience.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres? What do you see as the appeal?

I write, translate fiction, and paint. Translation is wonderful practice for my own writing; it’s expression without the strain of creation and is deeply satisfying. Painting clears the whole slate, returning me to my factory settings - but I can ruminate on a story/character idea while I’m painting, which is a refreshing way to get there. All the arty activities feed one another in a nice symbiosis.

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 still work a regular job, so when I’m not doing that, I’m cramming the rest of my moments with creative things. I do get a few full, glorious days a week where I can just write. Those days start with coffee (obviously) and proceed with as little interruption as possible. After dinner, I’ll jam in another couple of hours. Then a sensible hour of prestige television. Time is so precious.

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

Walking helps, and a good, long stretch, but also picking up any book from the shelf and reading a few pages reminds me that anything can be written. My idea is as good as any other. Sometimes, I listen to The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come for Free. It’s like an electronica hip/hop operetta about the mundane events surrounding a guy misplacing a thousand quid. Again, it reminds you that you can write anything.   

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of the Bay of Fundy at the Market Square docks in Saint John. The scent of a shipping port will always bring me home.

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?

Oh man, music, film, visual art – but I also love sitting quietly, watching my fellow humans. The things we do…

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

Martin Amis – for better or worse - has influenced me heavily my whole reading/writing life. I’m aware of his difficulties, but no one was more generous with humour – plotting it out bit by bit, laying his little trap, until he delivers the punchline, and you realize just how much work he was doing all that time - what subtle, devious work - in the pursuit of your amusement. I loved Mart.

I aspire to the brisk, no bullshit style of Patricia Highsmith, I seek guidance from Lynn Coady, Lorrie Moore, Lydia Davis, and the superhuman Jennifer Egan. Also, George Saunders, Barbara Gowdy, and Raymond Carver, of course.

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

I toy with a one-person performance – where I’m the person. Or maybe a musical...

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?

There’s a chance I’d have ended up back in jail.

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

The first word of fiction I ever set down was borne of anger and frustration, and writing felt like the only option. I paint when I’m happy. When something needs conquering, I write.

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

I loved Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlon. The last great film is (and perhaps always will be) Border – the 2018 Swedish one, written by John Ajvide Lindqvist. Utterly transforming. Oh, but I also just watched Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which changed my whole cellular makeup. Hoo!

20 - What are you currently working on?

Paintings. Big, defiantly joyful ones. I also have some of a novel started, currently concerning a factory and an accidental murder. I’ll know when it’s time to jump in and write the thing, but for now I scribble bits and let them simmer while I paint and listen to true crime podcasts.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has landed!

the anthology groundwork: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 has officially landed! (pictured here with copies of the first two volumes); you can pick up a copy via Invisible Publishing (who also has copies of the second volume, ground rules: the best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013, originally published by myself and Christine McNair, who designed it also, through Chaudiere Books), or this weekend, as part of the ottawa small press book fair pre-fair reading on Friday and/or Saturday fair [note different location: Tom Brown Arena]! Thanks brilliantly much to Invisible publisher Norm Nehmetallah and designer Megan Fildes for their incredible work to bring this project to life!

pre-order! groundwork: The best of the third decade of above/ground press: 2013–2023 (Invisible Publishing,

Celebrating thirty years of continuous activity with well over twelve hundred publications to date, groundwork celebrates the third decade of rob mclennan’s Ottawa-based above/ground press, publisher of lyric, innovative, and experimental writing across a wealth of chapbooks, broadsides and multiple simultaneous journals, including Touch the Donkey, The Peter F. Yacht Club and G U E S T [a journal of guest editors]. Following on the heels of the anthologies GROUNDSWELL, best of above/ground press, 1993-2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003) and Ground Rules: the Best of the second decade of above/ground press 2003-2013 (Chaudiere Books, 2013), groundwork pushes against the short-lived and the ephemeral of small and micro press publishing. Firmly situated in his home base of Ottawa, above/ground press revels in the possibility of expansive conversations between writers, writing and readership, and groundwork works to acknowledge mclennan’s deep and ongoing dedication to the work of hundreds of contemporary writers across North America and beyond. See link here to pre-order!

Contributors:

Jordan Abel
Jennifer Baker
Gregory Betts
Alice Burdick
Allison Cardon
Kimberly Campanello
Norma Cole
Julia Drescher
Kristjana Gunnars
Natalie Hanna
Brenda Iijima
Emily Izsak
N.W. Lea
damian lopes
Natalie Lyalin
Rob Manery
rob mclennan
Christine McNair
Allyson Paty
Julia Polyck-O’Neill
Shazia Hafiz Ramji
Stuart Ross
Kate Siklosi
George Stanley
Hugh Thomas
Chris Turnbull

Kate Siklosi, SELVAGE

 

my nagypapa was an immigrant and immigrant children without a mother are dangerous. they had settled in a small oil town and he started to build a small house with his own hands. all i know of that night is that it was dark and there was screaming. i’m drinking tea when my aunt recalls looking back on her father falling to his knees. she was old enough then to know that the axis of their lives and those to come had shifted. an inverted arch crouching in concavity. each child a coordinate clinging to a dead line. one took his life one destroyed others. the rest have done their best to keep grounded. the fact of the matter is they all grew up against a backdrop of negative space. each a stellar burst a collapsed star in a hellbent universe. notwithstanding, here. i. (“reasonable grounds”)

Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi’s second full-length collection, following the stunning visuals of leavings (Malmö, Sweden: Timglaset Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], is SELVAGE (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023). Set in four sections of stitch and carve, Siklosi writes of new motherhood against intergenerational trauma, leaves and immigration, edges and a blurred centre. Whereas leavings focused on images of physical objects set with text, SELVAGE focuses instead on the text itself, while still offering an extension of the visuals and visual elements presented in that full-length debut. She writes of stitch and vein, a blend of images (including full colour), offering text on seeds and leaves, and weaving in elements of language from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms through examining a family history of devastating losses and their rippling effects. “leafing through the charter,” she writes, as part of the opening sequence-section, “i am a loss. when things shall be deemed it can both protect and threaten at once.” As the press release offers: “Kate Siklosi grew up in a family shrouded in a veil of mystery of how they came to be: the scant facts about her grandparents and how they came to live in Canada after escaping Hungary under the Iron Curtain in 1956; her nagymama (grandmother) dying in childbirth; her nagypapa’s (grandfather’s) grief at finding himself alone without his family in this new country (subsequently taking out his grief by setting fire to the Children’s Aid building and then dying in jail); the mysterious ‘neighbour’ who sexually abused Kate’s brother and cousins.”

The online Merriam-Webster offers that “selvage” refers to “the edge on either side of a woven or flat-knitted fabric so finished as to prevent raveling. specifically : a narrow border often of different or heavier threads than the fabric and sometimes in a different weave. : an edge (as of fabric or paper) meant to be cut off and discarded.” The poems in SELVAGE are stitched together as four sequences of prose blocks, lyric fragments and image—“reasonable grounds,” “field notes,” “lockstitch” and “radicle”—that quilt a larger narrative of crumbles, holds, breaks, language patters and splinters, able to entirely smashed to pieces but held together by thread, across, one might say, that narrow border; of how, near the end of the opening sequence, “drought tolerance is passed / from parent tree to child.” There is something quite fascinating, also, in how Siklosi seeks, through a blend of image and text, to examine a story that begins with her Hungarian grandparents, forced to leave home to emigrate to Canada during the same period as Calgary poet Helen Hajnoczky’s grandparents, something Hajnoczky worked to examine in her own way through the blend of visuals and text of her own second collection, Magyarázni (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2016) [see my review of such here]. Accumulating into a book-length poem, Siklosi’s scraps, threads and fragments pull at those buried elements of family lore, seeking the story to see what pulls apart, simultaneously held together by the determination and a story, notwithstanding. “being is a maze.” she writes, as part of “lockstitch,” “the sky is stitched in. cut the selvage by taking the people upon entry. you can create laws, like that bush and that corner and how high. You can even manage it so it appears like a living thing from space: branches and limbs with people roaming through. the thread is of course the word that holds it together: five hearts searching taxed land held down with pins.” Or, as part of the third section:

Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
what if i told you nothing dropped.
every citizen of Canada has the right to
a landmine made our calves burn with
in time of real or apprehended war,
coming home. handful of roots explode
the right to enter, remain in and leave
into light. skylarks on a pond.
pursue the gaining of a livelihood
look, the year is now gone.
life, liberty, and security of the person.
i have my dad’s waves.
compelled to be a witness in
he made me a constellation to swing from.
law recognized by the community of nations
i don’t have his hands so can’t build myself
not to be tried for it again
a country but i have enough ink to sink
not to be tried or punished for it again
us into a river, bone and mind, and with
time of commission and the time of sentencing,
this i’ll dive in and give you everything but
a witness who testifies
the currents to remain inside his
freedoms shall not be construed as
rattled lungs and mistake
treaty or other rights
his ribs for home.

There is something, of course, quite natural to having one’s first child that prompts a particular look back at one’s history, one’s foundations; to attempt to reconcile particular elements of the past for the sake of being able to move forward. In this way, one could even point to comparable titles, such as Jessica Q. Stark’s recent Buffalo Girl (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here], as Siklosi writes through the limitations and effects of a document, of a story, upon the body, utilizing text and stitch as a way to unfurl both family and archive, stitching one word immediately upon and following another. “as if,” she writes, as part of the fourth and final section, “to survive was a baseline / life blossoms from a wound / how does one escape a cycle?”

ryan fitzpatrick, Sunny Ways

 

No I wasn’t in great shape before I signed the
contract but

no the Frank Slide didn’t happen but

no we may have worked there but

no we never lived there but

no we don’t have to pull out but (“Hibernia Mon Amour”)

The latest from Toronto-based and displaced Calgary/Vancouver poet and critic ryan fitzpatrick is Sunny Ways (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023), following an array of chapbooks as well as his full-length collections Fake Math (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007), Fortified Castles (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Constructed out of two extended long poems—the thirteen-page “Hibernia Mon Amour” and eighty-page “Field Guide”—the paired duo critique and examine resource extraction, and rightly savage a corporate ethos simultaneously bathed in blood and oil, and buried deep (as one’s head in the sand), where corporations might pretend that no critique might land. Across a continuous stream of language-lyric, fitzpatrick writes of ecological devastation and depictions, planetary destruction, industry-promoted distractions and outright lies. Composed in 2014, the first sequence, “Hibernia Mon Amour,” as his notes at the back of the collection offer, was “originally commissioned by Daniel Zomparelli and Poetry is Dead magazine to coincide with an exhibition of Edward Burtynsky’s work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. I was struck by the ways Burtynsky’s massively scaled photographs of the Alberta Tar Sands differed from another set of photographs appearing on Instagram at the same time under the hashtag #myhiroshima. The hashtag was used by Fort McMurray residents after Neil Young compared the Alberta Tar Sands to the effects of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima, Japan at the end of World War II. The hashtagged photos shared scenic natural views, keeping any work sites or toxic sinks safely out of frame.” The poem is set as short burst of accumulations, all approached from the level of a refusal of corporate responsilibity, instead issuing what appear no more than a series of corporate excuses and self-justifications:

No we have decades of research that makes us
horny to test at this scale but

no we wont be able to submerge Stanley Park
to a depth of three metres but

no can you do thirty but

no there’s going to be pressure to extract all
of it but

no way we’re fucking waiting for spring melt

fitzpatrick’s work increasingly embraces an aesthetic core shared with what has long been considered a Kootenay School of Writing standard—a left-leaning worker-centred political and social engagement that begins with the immediate local, articulated through language accumulation, touchstones and disjointedness—comparable to the work of Jeff Derksen, Stephen Collis, Christine Leclerc, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Colin Smith and Rita Wong, among others. Whereas most of those poets I’ve listed (being in or around Vancouver, naturally; with the Winnipeg-centred exception of Colin Smith) centre their poetics on more western-specific examples—the trans-mountain pipeline, say—fitzpatrick responds to the specific concerns of his Alberta origins, emerging from a culture and climate that insists on enrichment through mineral extraction even to the point of potential self-annihilation. Offering an explanation to the book’s title, to open his “NOTES” at the end:

Sunny Ways takes its title from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s 2015 election victory speech where he exclaimed to a crowd of true believers: “Sunny ways, my friends! Sunny ways! This is what positive politics can do!” Trudeau references Wilfrid Laurier’s tactical turn away from political sniping and toward a greater spirit of cooperation within government—a hope that the warm rays of the sun will prove more effective than the cold threat of the wind. In an 1895 speech, Laurier asks, “Do you not believe that there is more to be gained by appealing to the heart and soul of men rather than to compel them to do a thing?” There’s a lot of hope in Laurier and Trudeau’s shared appeal to positivity, but the more I turn this sunniness over, I find less to be hopeful about. The political hopefulness espoused by Trudeau feels potent, but can it combat the sunny ways of rising temperatures and smoke-filled cities?

“[…] you sit in the window,” he writes, as part of “Field Guide,” “of whatever Starbucks this is // one frame unfolding // across the scene of another // as the Climate Strike passes // because you can’t take crowds // and have a history of panic attacks […]” Composed as a continuous line, a continuous thread, the ongoing “Field Guide” writes the oil sands but also allows itself as a kind of catch-all, allowing for a multitude of fragments, concerns, complaints and threads, built out of an endless array of lines stacked and run down the length of each page. As page sixty-one of the collection, mid-point through the long poem, reads, in full:

and this time it’s much safer in

listening to the way Kate Bush rhymes

plutonium with every lung

it doesn’t get too hot here

so long as you make friends with the A/C

tuck into your draft

the first heat event of the season

that upswings the temperature

between the cooling stations

laid out on the city’s online map

a continuous path between spray parks

across Metro Toronto

your new mode of urban exploration

looks for the hidden pockets of cold air

folded into the entropies

of the traffic in the street

you canter where you please

teeth on the eve of activity