Ploughshares : an interview with Ken Sparling

Until the end of 2016, I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my third post is now up: an interview with Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, author of the new novel This poem is a house (Coach House Books, 2016). You can read my interview with Ken Sparling, here. My second post, an interview with award-winning Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen, author of the new memoir This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications (HarperCollins, 2016), is still online here; and my first post, an interview with award-winning Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye, author of Tell: poems for a girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015), is still online here.

Erika Staiti, The Undying Present

I haven’t consulted the map. I didn’t know there was a map until after they returned to the car at the beginning and spread it over their laps. I know I am trying to get to the magnified view as indicated. I will have to go through many rooms. In some cases I might have to stay overnight. It all depends.

Oakland, California writer Erika Staiti’s striking first full-length book, The Undying Present (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), exists in the nebulous space between prose poetry and novel. Constructed as a collage-work, The Undying Present is a pastiche of scene-sections, including scenes presented from multiple perspectives, a set of semi-travel narratives, multiple examples of overlap, deliberate obfuscation and occasional contradition. Writing out a series of movements without specific details, the narrative allows itself to not be limited by a single trajectory or reading. As Ariel Goldberg and Rachel Levitsky wrote in their “Conversation about Erika Staiti’s ‘The Undying Present,’” as part of their “Social reading” series in Jacket2: “Under erasure, constant revision: questions left by Staiti’s outlines and silhouettes must only be answered in multiples, of bodies, desires, expirations hiding from each other, revealed in the reading, by the readers: for how long can a hand be held?” They continue:

In a narrative that is about an underground replete with unspoken dynamics that are probably sado-masochistic, the open field of the mystery is significant. The narrative is not master of its own mystery. The narrator is not in control.

“False harmony warms the network. Secrets eat through the spaces between bodies.”

There is something going on in The Undying Present but it’s a secret. There is a necessity of uncovering the mystery, the structural body of the scene that can’t be addressed singularly by the author who is included in it. How are we going to be asked to question the surface? To get to the matter, when intimacy lapses. The reader is being asked to help.

Narrative, one might argue, is as arbitrary as any other idea upon which to hang a story. Staiti’s narrator is not in control, they write, and yet, it takes a remarkable amount of control to allow such a space for the narrator to drift so artfully, highlighting a comparison and difference between this and, say, Richard Brautigan’s novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), in which narrator, narrative and, supposedly, author erode simultaneously. Staiti’s montage of prose-sections accumulate in such a way that are reminiscent of the novels of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, yet writing out longer scenes than his novels often include. Both writers, somehow, manage to create full-length prose-works that suggest that the order of the sections aren’t fixed, but simply one way of reading; might The Undying Present be equally readable if the sections were re-ordered? Would it make for an entirely different, yet equally satisfying, experience?

Staiti is also the author of the chapbooks Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press, 2010) and Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series, 2014), and in an interview conduced by Ariel Goldberg, Staiti discusses In the Stitches in a way that seems to connect to this current work: “There is some kind of world in which this language is existing but I don’t really know what it is. It’s partly an imagined/fantasized world but it steals objects and ideas from our world. I don’t feel so literate in this world at all. I feel pretty removed from it. In the earliest version, I was trying to write lines that would negate themselves. I wanted to see what something looked like if it could be itself and also its own negation. I was writing longhand, which I almost never do. As the piece over time transformed into this thing, I realized that something kind of ambient but real came out in the attempt to negate. I thought a lot about ambience. I wanted to see a world in which ambience dominated. It’s interesting about the different voices you mentioned because I’ve been hearing it as un-voiced, as a humming or something.” In remarkably precise prose, Staiti appears very much to be creating a world through halved information, presenting just enough to create an incomplete portrait, and make the reader aware of what might be missing. One might say that this new work is just as much ambient than setting or narrative, suggesting what another writer would have fleshed out more fully, yet most likely lessening the effect.

I walk through the City of Margins. Tall angular buildings shimmer in the sun. Dozens of people move past me walking in straight lines with conviction. I am moving in this way too. The streets push us to our destinations efficiently. We push ourselves there.

A narrow alleyway appears. I turn and walk down the torn street. I reach an empty parking lot. I feel the Second City beneath me. The shell of a burned out car sits at the edge of the frame. An abandoned and deteriorating building sags into the ground. This is where we enter.

I open the doors of the building and walk around peering in each room. The rooms hold remnants of the past, forgotten objects slathered in dust and rodent feces. I climb the stairs dragging knobby fingers over a dusty banister. A young woman is crumpled in the corner at the end of the hallway. Her body is a mouth, a dark open hole telling a story. Speaking not speaking.

jwcurry's Room 302 Books offers its first e-list

jwcurry's Room 302 Books offers its first e-list of small press rarities, including works by 1. AYLWARD (David), BALL (Nelson), CRAVAN (Arthur), FOUR HORSEMEN (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, bpNichol), GARNER (Don), HOUÉDARD (Dom Sylvester), KABIN (Marje), LABA (Mark), NICHOL (bp), ONDAATJE (Michael), POWER (Nicholas), SWEDE (George), UU (David), VALOCH (Jiri), ZAPPA (Frank), ALLAND (Sandra), BOOKS (Jennifer), DURR (Pat), FUJINO (David), GILBERT (Gerry), KILODNEY (Crad), LEFLER (Peggy), ROSS (Stuart), TRUHLAR (Richard), ZACHARIN (Noah), BALL (Nelson), COLEMAN (Victor), DEDORA (Brian), EVASON (Greg), FARRANT (M.A.C), HOOD (Wharton), JEWINSKI (Hans), SPARLING (Ken), ZELLER (Ludwig), AGUIAR (Fernando), BISSETT (Bill), CURRY (jw), DEAN (Michael), IRWIN (Marilyn), JOHNSTON (Brain David), LABA (Mark), MORIN (Gustave), NICHOL (bp), ORD (Douglas), PHILLIPS (David), RIDDELL (John), SHANGER (Gio) K, TALLMAN (Warren), MORIN (Gustave) B and WADE (Seth).

For a copy of the price list, email jwcurry directly at jwc3o2 [at] yahoo.com.

You can see previous of his lists here and here, as well as my piece on his archive posted earlier this year at Jacket2.

As he writes:

online picture-list #1 : some standards

this list's a first tester toward putting up a series of online lists through Flickr. since Flickr's not really supposed to be used for blatant advertising, prices must be left off, which is where this document with its accompanying links comes in. if y'r happy with a print list, here it is. if you want illustrations of the fronts of each of these titles (along with all the list text accompanying each image), they can be found at https://www.flickr.com/photos/48593922@N04/collections/72157654809545832

as per usual, orders should be directed to jwcurry & payment sent to our new address at #3o2 – 28 Ladouceur Avenue, Ottawa Canada K1Y 2T1. orders by regular mail accompanied by payment will not suffer a post & packing fee; all other orders will be dinged extra.

hours at the store, though it's still in serious disarray, can accommodate anytime visits; just be sure to call ahead (613 798 2522) to make sure i'm in & up.

Readerby: rob's recommendations,

In which, thanks to Ray Hsu, i am able to further recommend works by Brecken Hancock, Christine McNair, derek beaulieu, Mercedes Eng, Renee Saklikar, Natalie Simpson, Ken Sparling, Nikki Sheppy, Phil Hall + George Stanley.

Blog Hop: what the stories make of us,

The lovely and talented Montreal writer Tess Fragoulis (who we really don’t hear enough from) tagged me in this “Blog Hop” meme [her answers to the same questions are posted here]. I agreed to participate before I realized that I had already done such, under a different title, earlier in the year. Given that I answered such on my current poetry work-in-progress (our wee babe adds much, but slows all projects down, as you might imagine), I thought it might be worth going through the process again (especially since I’d already said yes) for the sake of my current fiction work-in-progress.

[Photo of myself on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 4, 2014, taken by Stephen Brockwell]

What are you working on?

For the past couple of years, I’ve been accumulating a collection of short stories tentatively titled “On Beauty.” I’m not entirely convinced by the title, but have set such considerations aside for a while, allowing myself to focus on the stories themselves.

The collection is made up of roughly eighteen short stories, each constructed to be roughly three manuscript pages in length (I suspect the manuscript is nowhere near long enough yet). What appeals to me is in a compact exploration of character and situation, attempting to say an enormous amount in a very small space in the most compact language possible. What appeals are those small or large moments of a character’s life or consideration that have enormous repercussions later on, even if that character might not be aware of the whats and the whys of those triggers. We are such complex creations, and so little of what we do, what decisions we make and why are really understood, even in the midst of our actions. My fiction appears to focus quite heavily on that, for reasons I, myself, have yet to determine.

The title originally came from picking up a copy of the Zadie Smith book of the same name; I’d read a piece by her in Brick: A Literary Journal a few years back and been extremely impressed [I even wrote about that here], so when I saw such at a used bookstore in Perth, Ontario (the former BackBeat Books and Music, when Christine McNair and I did a reading there), I had to pick it up. I have to admit, the book didn’t strike me—I suppose it wasn’t whatever it was I thought I expected (I know this is my issue and not hers); I was surprised by the information overload Smith was providing, and I felt that however skilled the work, there was just too much in the way of what I wanted from the story (I’ve since gone through a collection of her essays, and the book was spectacular).

I am interested in the small moments, and in brevity, wishing to include only the information that is essential to the story. I am not interested in providing needless physical description, for example. So much can be suggested through so very little; and so much of it distracts, and has nothing to do with the goings-on of the action (or, inaction) itself.

So far, I’ve had stories from the manuscript appearing in a few venues, including online at Numero Cinq, matchbook lit, Control Lit Mag and The Puritan, in print at Grain magazine, Matrix magazine and Atlas Review, and one forthcoming this month in The New Quarterly.

There was a period I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before the baby arrived, but that didn’t happen; then I’d hoped to complete the manuscript before Christine’s maternity leave ends in November, but I don’t really see that happening either. Now I’ve got my eyes set upon spring. Optimistically.

It might not be moving as quickly as I might like, but I’m still pretty pleased about it, overall. It feels as though I am accomplishing something that is really moving my work forward in a very positive direction.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

I would think the lyric density alone might be enough to differentiate my work from the work of others in the same genre. I also tend to steer clear of dialogue.

I also tend to focus on particular moments, often leaping over a whole slew of action sequences: the moments of my fiction appear to either work up to a particular action, or away from a particular action, exploring the results of such. There is so much more to explore after the effects of an action, as opposed to the action itself.

I admired very much an episode of Mad Men that, instead of focusing on a particular wedding (which, narratively, wasn’t terribly important), decided to focus on what happened around and after that wedding. So many television programs would have focused on the wrong thing: a wedding episode. There is something about well-written television and film (such as Mad Men, or the film Smoke) that have prompted my fiction for quite some time. How does one tell a story without giving anything away, and yet, leaving enough space to suggest what hasn’t been shown?

Of course, also, the decade-long swath Brian Michael Bendis recently finished carving through The Avengers over at Marvel Comics (he’s currently working his way through an impressive run at All-New X-Men) is a display on how long-form storytelling is constructed: magnificent.

Why do I write what I do?

I think anyone writes the way they do because it is the only way they know how. Throughout my twenties, during my first few attempts at fiction, it took me far too long to abandon ideas of what I thought fiction was supposed to be and look like, instead of attempting to discover exactly the form that worked best for my own writing, and my own processes. Once I finally managed to clear that hurdle, it was far easier to continue and complete manuscripts that I was happy with.

We do what we do because we can’t do it any other way. And yet, experimentation and exploration are (obviously) essential to any writer’s craft and development. But I could never be able to (even if I wished to) compose a straightforward literary work akin to, say, David Adams Richards or Guy Vanderhaeghe. Even as a reader, the form simply doesn’t appeal.

When it comes to fiction, I’m difficult to impress: I often consider literary fiction to be far too long and wordy, and overly and unnecessarily descriptive, and so the amount of books of fiction I deliberately stop reading mid-way through are endless. Fortunately, I have been enormously impressed by recent works of fiction by Tessa Mellas, Marie-Helene Bertino, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, Lynn Crosbie, Ken Sparling, Michael Blouin, Jim Shepard and Douglas Glover (for example). It does happen; I just wish it would happen more often.

A decade back, I was amazed to finally read Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (despite finding many of his non-fiction opinions rather annoying); it was one of the first books over two hundred pages I’d read that I couldn’t see to excise a single word.

I’m currently in the midst of the new Diane Schoemperlen collection, and am duly impressed (as I suspected I would be—I love her work).

How does my writing process work?

Slowly, and accumulatively. I begin with longhand, and once I’ve exhausted such, I enter fragments, sections, sentences and paragraphs into the computer. I then print out the story-in-progress and spend time scribbling on the page, adding and subtracting, and composing additional fragments via longhand in my notebook to then return to the computer and go through the process again. Some of the stories in the manuscript-so-far have gone through this process daily for many months. Some have taken nearly three years to complete, and others I haven’t quite decided on yet. There is still much to do.

For further interviews, I tag thee: Cameron Anstee; Aaron Tucker; Ryan Eckes;

‘The Next Big Thing’ meme-interview with rob mclennan: the blog tour that ran itself

December 5-8, 2012

[photo taken in Paris, France in October 2012 by Christine McNair]

Pearl Pirie tagged me in this series of interviews [see her interview here], originally pointing out an interview by Christine Fischer Guy, who writes:

The blog tour that ran itself: this is ‘the next big thing’ interview that writers in the blogosphere are passing, hand to hand, like a baton. What’s the next big thing we’re working on?

There are a few others I’ve read as well, including Darryl Joel Berger, Ariel Gordon, Tanis Rideout, Laurie D. Graham, Alex Leslie, Jennifer LoveGrove, Gillian Wallace, Sandra Nicholls, Gary Barwin and Lauren B. Davis.

Here are my answers to these questions:

1. What is the working title of your book?

The working title for my current work-in-progress collection of short stories is “On Beauty.” I admit, it’s a title I’m not married to. It was long ago previously called “The Wedding Present,” after a short story that might still be dropped from the whole. For the time being, I’m worrying less about the title of the collection than the stories themselves.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

A singular story dates from February 2010 (a story that, depending on my mood, I regularly consider cutting from the collection entirely), but otherwise, the collection had its initial impulse during a trip we made to Toronto for Christmas/Boxing Week, 2011. We were spending a couple of days with my now-wife’s mother, and ended up spending part of December 27^th [see my post on such here] on Bloor Street West, attempting a few hours of writing. We had wandered through a since-closed location of Book City and picked up a number of things, including a collection of essays by Milan Kundera, an issue of Believer, an issue of Geist, some back issues of Granta and McSweeney’s. I read the most amazing short story by Miranda July, “Majesty,” which immediately generated the beginning sketches of a short story, “Fourteen things you don’t know about Arturus Booth.”

I eventually had to find her collection of short stories, No one belongs here more than you (Scribner, 2007).

But the ideas themselves: sometimes I start with an idea for a story, sometimes a short scene, sometimes only a title. From the anthology Prince of Stories: the Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman (2008), I adapted the idea of the semi-fictional “A Short Film About John Bolton” (2003) to a semi-fictional story set in 1968, “A short film about my father.” Another story in the collection continues one particular thread from my second novel, Missing Persons (2009), because Amanda Earl, quite literally, asked to know more. I have been attempting another piece to further another thread from the same novel, but the story hasn’t quite figured itself out yet.

There is this story as well, that came out of a conversation, and various thoughts I’ve had on the subject of The Matrix Trilogy.

For this collection, I am very much interested in the collage aspect of accumulating short, nearly stand-alone scene-fragments into a coherent, cohesive narrative of some three pages in length. To articulate the essence of a short story, one does not necessarily need to spell out all the facts.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Short stories. Tightly-packed.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Johnny Depp. Or the kid who was in that terrible John Carter flick.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Short, sharp and intensely personal; a large book packed into a small space. And yet, this is entirely incomplete. The work should speak for itself.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m not really interested in self-publishing this collection, and am represented by no agencies of any sort. So far, my fiction has had but a single trade home, which appears to be no longer an option.

I look with envy at works of fiction published by Anansi and Scribner and McSweeney’s and Douglas & McIntyre (even with their recent financial upheavals).

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I am still in the midst of the first draft, and rework many of the stories daily, slowly carving, carving, carving. Over the twelve months I’ve been actively working on this as my main writing project, I’ve got nearly ten finished stories I like, another half-dozen in progress that I think have good potential, and another half-dozen I haven’t decided on yet.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I’m not sure. I would attempt to ascribe my fiction alongside works by Sheila Heti, Ken Sparling, Jean McKay, Etgar Keret, Lydia Davis and Sarah Manguso, but that might all be vanity. It might be wishful thinking on my part.

I’ve composed a couple of short essays over the past year or so on writing short fiction that discuss some of my goals and concerns, including this blog post, and this short essay over at The Puritan.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Living, and writing. Part of what I’ve been enjoying about working in the realm of short fiction is in watching how various unrelated strands – fragments of real life, memory, information gleaned from television, newspapers, overheard tales, works of non-fiction, etcetera – all manage to wrap themselves into a comprehensive narrative weave. I don’t know where it all comes from, but it somehow make sense in the three-page stretch of prose.

I seek inspiration, at times, from other great works. Lately I’ve been reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and re-reading Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I’m hoping the combination of the collection’s sharp brevity and articulation of deeply personal moments are enough to interest anyone.

As per the rules of this series, here are the five writers I’ve tagged for self-interviews of their own:

Stephen Cain ; Natalie Zina Walschots ; Thomas Wharton ; Michael Bryson ; Spencer Gordon

Watch for their interviews. Hopefully they’ll be posting over the next little bit.
(and for the sake of gender-balance: over a period of two weeks, I asked a total of ten female writers and five male writers. This is the list of writers who, for whatever reason, said yes.)

Message for tagged authors:

Rules of the Next Big Thing

***Use this format for your post

***Answer the ten questions about your current WIP (work in progress)

***Tag five other writers/bloggers and add their links so we can hop over and meet them.

Ten Interview Questions for the Next Big Thing:

What is your working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Be sure to line up your five people in advance.