some of our christmas etcetera

Rose reading, given we had to move much of their room into ours for the sake of painting

I'll admit I've felt breathless the past year or so, given some of our circumstances. Christine's health, for example, which have had her off work for months (she returns, slowly, beginning next week) and my father's February ALS diagnosis, which has had me caregiving various weekends. I am behind and I am behind and I am perpetually behind. But we persevere. We push through.

Why do we fall sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.

Although it feels a bit selfish to suggest anything along those lines. I am not the one sick.

At home, we are here. Rose and Aoife now have a bunk bed, finally. It was Rose's request, although we had to confirm that she understood that it meant neither of us could lay down with her at bedtime anymore. She understood. Yes, yes. She did, she said.

When Aoife saw it, a yell we could hear through the house: I LOVE IT!

And I'm sure you've already seen my report on December 28th reading at the Carleton Tavern, our annual Peter F. Yacht Club Christmas party/reading/regatta?

And you saw last year's Christmas post, with accompanying children-elf-Christmas-card pictures?

This year, for the weekend prior to Christmas, we did our usual Montebello jaunt with father in law and his wife, heading the hour or so east into Quebec for our young ladies to run around and to run around (this is where we were as our handyman painted the girls' room and put together said bunk beds).

We also managed to catch that new Star Wars flick, just before the school break; we'd scheduled for noon on the last Friday of school, but Aoife home sick (fortunately, mother-in-law was able to watch her while we went to see it, home in just enough time to collect Rose from school).

Montebello: we sat by the fire, we had drinks, the children explored. We saw Michael Blouin and his family, quite randomly. There for a few days as well.

The young ladies spent some goodly time, and we were even allowed a solo dinner, once the children were fed, and Aoife asleep (father in law watched a sleeping Aoife in our room, and Teri kept Rose, who was wired for some reason; Rose decided she was staying the night in their room, which was fine).

We even wandered outside for a while, including through the curling rink, where Blouin had been for a bit. Should we attempt this next year?

The next morning: Christine and the girls swam in the pool as I read, or attempted to. At least managed a few things flipped through. The introductions to this new Bob Kaufman volume, which is pretty interesting. Have you seen this?

The young ladies, awash in their lifejackets.

And then we home without incident (which is always nice).

father sorting his mail (and breathing), Christine knitting, Rose colouring and Huey the dog clamouring for attention

The next morning, Christmas Eve-Eve, we made for the farm for two nights, which included allowing my sister a break from caregiving our father, as well as a respite from having to host Christmas dinner, which we always do on Christmas Eve.

Everything on the farm went far better than expected, although none of us really slept properly (I rarely sleep properly on the farm, wishing to remain alert in case required, as I sleep with the baby monitor to listen for him). Kate wasn't able to make it this year, which was a bit frustrating (caught up in the schedule of a new job), but we managed.

It did feel as though the young ladies were in constant motion.

Christmas morning: we couldn't even remember the last time my father would have witnessed children tearing through stockings. Kathy's children? Or Kate, before Kathy had her first child? We don't even know. Some time, at least. They were up early, but we kept them in the kitchen until he awoke, and his medical assistance got him out of bed and up.

I told the girls they had it lucky: when we were young, Kathy and I not only had to wait for him to come in from the morning milking, but then for him to eat breakfast, before we were allowed into the living room. It was the only time we were allowed down the back stairs (from the master bedroom down to the kitchen). And he always took forever.

Mid-morning on Christmas day, we made for home for a couple of hours for the children to tear through further presents, before ending up at mother-in-law's house for dinner. The children ran around some more, put on costumes, opened up presents. Were hilarious (of course).

And for the following two days: we slept, (or at least, tried to: until the onset of our Peter F. Yacht Club event).

Ploughshares : an interview with Michael Blouin

I'm a monthly blogger over at the Ploughshares blog! And my fifteenth post is now up: an interview with Ottawa-area poet and fiction writer Michael Blouin, author of a novel out this fall with Talonbooks, and another next spring with Anvil Press!

You can see links to all of my Ploughshares posts here, including interviews with Erín Moure on translation, Montreal writer Jacob Wren, Toronto poet Marcus McCann, founder/editor Robin Richardson on Minola Review: a journal of women's writing, Toronto poet Emily Izsak, Ottawa poet Faizal Deen, Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Elliott Clarke, editor/critic Erin Wunker, Arc Poetry Magazine Poetry Editor Rhonda Douglas, editor/publisher Leigh Nash on Invisible Publishing, Cobourg, Ontario poet, editor, fiction writer and small press publisher Stuart Ross, Toronto novelist Ken Sparling, Kingston writer Diane Schoemperlen and Toronto poet Soraya Peerbaye.

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;

Michael Blouin, I Don’t Know How To Behave: A Fiction

We are floating up a steep scrubby slope towards what appears to be a huge cement ramp leading nowhere. The camera moves haphazardly as if being carried by someone who has forgotten that it is there. We hear a voice gently singing “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” from a cheap distant speaker, a car radio, and a distinctive, affable, male voice – Bruce McDonald’s, perhaps:

VOICE-OVER: This is it see? Right there. Not all of it. See? The car was meant to come right up here, take off the hell up that ramp, there was more of it then. Take off like a rocket.

We top the ramp and the vastness of the St. Lawrence River stretches out before us. Sun glints off the water and the camera turns back to the speaker’s face.

BRUCE MCDONALD: They call Los Angeles the City of Angels. Paris the City of Lights. Morrisburg – that’s the City of Dreams.

The camera pans back over the water and down river to the town of Morrisburg. (zoom, blur focus)

BRUCE: This is it, see? Right there. Not small-town Ontario like it looks. City of Dreams.

INT. – MCINTOSH COUNTRY INN – MORRISBURG

It is lake, the room is dark save for the light from the television. We are tracking looking down over the bed where lie a fortyish man in boxer shorts and a young Asian woman in T-shirt and panties. They are asleep.

VOICE-OVER: Now this story I’m about to unfold…

Let’s just say… it’s personal.

This overview will begin to acquaint you with the screenplay format writing rules and screenwriting etiquette you’ll need to know about.

Kemptville, Ontario author Michael Blouin’s fourth trade book and second novel is I Don’t Know How To Behave: A Fiction (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013), a book centred in Morrisburg, Ontario, through alternating points of time. The first of these two alternating narratives is “Mid-Night All Night,” which writes the fictional story of the real-life “World’s Greatest Daredevil,” Ken Carter from the mid to late 1970s, with the second, “He Grabbed Her Suddenly, Held Her To Himself And Kissed Her Hard Like In A Hollywood Movie,” which fictionalizes “Renowned Canadian Film Director” Bruce McDonald and “Poet” Gillian Sze (why doesn’t Sze get her own prefatory complimentary description? her fictional depiction here seems, admittedly, thin) in 1999. As a thread also running underneath the main body of the text, italicized, is an essay-thread on the history of film, specifically Canadian film, and screenplays, and the book itself can be seen as far closer to a film-script than a traditional novel, with a structure heavily influenced, one might presume, from Vancouver writer Michael Turner, specifically his Hard Core Logo (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993) or American Whiskey Bar (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). The linkages become that much more obvious when one considers that it was Bruce McDonald himself who turned Turner’s poetry collection into a feature film back in 1996. Moving from his award-winning first novel, Chase and Haven (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008) to this current work, it is as though Blouin took the lessons learned through composing that book, and combined it with lessons learned composing his poetry titles and playwriting, and the result is an incredibly smooth work that plays off all three without sacrificing any coherence as a novel.

I Don’t Know How To Behave: A Fiction is an accumulation of short bursts and scenes that evolve into a series of narratives that increasingly wrap around each other, and Blouin is best at being able to quickly establish a tone. Through his accumulation of short sections, he composes a pretty wide canvas, and one can’t necessarily see or even speculate the entire portrait even by the mid-way point. Where is he going with this? Through his books so far, Blouin seems to favour a kind of rural lyric, writing conversational novels about those on the outside attempting to look in, and writing out what really happens, how it might be seen, how it is depicted, and who might be in control of the differences.

there’s more ways of getting lost than not having a map

fast chrome mirrored sun off

hard glint St. Lawrence waves a sudden skip in the clouds

this was always going to have a cost

careful

now uncareful

rain in the air my

grave will be unmarked.

The ramp and its runway were located in a field just west of Hanes Road, south of County Road 2 in Morrisburg, Ontario, Canada. The ramp has since been demolished, but the concrete runway still exists though it is overgrown.

You will not find it unless you know it’s there.

Given that his previous book, the poetry collection Wore Down Trust (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2011) [see my review of such here], writes alternating scenes of Johnny Cash and the late Canadian poet Alden Nowlan, centred around the two meeting backstage at a Cash concert in Fredericton, New Brunswick, one can see Blouin’s interest in fictionalizing the lives of artists (including Canadian poets). Blouin seems to enjoy playing off a particular expectation of character, and making characters who we think we’re familiar with do both expected and unexpected things. Both books, too, swirl a fiction around one central point: where Wore Down Trust wrote around the central point of a meeting between the two central characters, I Don’t Know How To Behave: A Fiction begins with Morrisburg, Ontario as its central point, but as the novel makes clear, it is Ken Carter’s infamous attempt to jump the river in 1979 that he is really writing around, working the fictional Carter up to the attempt, and the fictional McDonald and Sze arriving to contemplate an attempt at a feature-length film depicting the event. Further in the novel, Blouin writes out a fictional interview with McDonald in the Morrisburg Leader, “Toronto film director Bruce McDonald is visiting Morrisburg and scouting locations for a film he says he intends to produce about the ill-fated 1979 ‘Super Jump’ attempted over the St. Lawrence River just west of Morrisburg by daredevil Ken Carter.” Through this interview, is this the fictional McDonald or the writer Blouin speaking?

ML: This is a little different than the films you’ve done to date?

BM: Yeah. Well, I don’t know. I like characters who pursue dreams which may not be what most people would choose – outsiders and outlaws. And people who aren’t afraid to kind of go to a couple of dark places. So I think it was that kind of feeling that drew me to this story. I like the idea of working with history – manipulating it as a material.

I Don’t Know How To Behave: A Fiction is a playful work exploring character and expectation, filmmaking and risk, and characters who become trapped in the histories of their failures. And yet, through their failures, Blouin’s characters remain optimistic, or at least moving forward, until they disappear entirely, immune to the reasons why, without even knowing the difference.

On Writing : an occasional series

Back in April, I happened to catch (thanks to Sarah Mangold) the website for the NPM Daily, and absolutely loved the short essays presented on a variety of subjects surrounding the nebulous idea of “on writing.” I would highly recommend you wander through the site to see the pieces posted there.

Inspired by those pieces, I decided to curate an occasional series of the same over at the ottawa poetry newsletter, and have since posted five short essays by Ottawa writers on the nebulous subject of “On writing,” with a new essay scheduled to appear every week or so. Given the nature of the ottawa poetry newsletter, I’ve been focusing on poets who are either current or former residents of the City of Ottawa, but am open to considering further pieces. Over the next couple of weeks, watch for new essays in the series by Faizel Deen, Pearl Pirie and Colin Morton.

Here are links to the first five, already posted:

On Writing #5 : Who knew?
Michael Dennis

On Writing #4 : On Process
Michael Blouin

On Writing #3 : On writing (and not writing)
rob mclennan

On Writing #2 : Community
Amanda Earl

On Writing #1 : A little less inspiration, please
(Or, What ever happened to patrons, anyway?)
Anita Dolman

Glengarry is shortlisted for the 2012 Archibald Lampman Award!

From the Arc poetry magazine website:

Congratulations to the 2012 finalists for the Archibald Lampman Award

Arc Poetry Magazine is proud to present—drumroll—the 2012 Lampman shortlist!

Each year, Arc Poetry Magazine honours Ottawa poets. Arc is proud to present the four 2012 finalists for the Archibald Lampman Award for best book of poetry by a National-Capital author.

The award is named in honour of Archibald Lampman (1861 – 1899), one of Canada’s finest nineteenth-century poets. Lampman moved to Ottawa in 1882, and much of his metaphysical nature poetry was inspired by the National Capital region.

Michael Blouin  Wore Down Trust (Toronto; Pedlar Press, 2011)

rob mclennan  Glengarry (Vancouver: TalonBooks, 2011)

Thelma Poirier  Rock Creek Blues (Regina: Coteau Books, 2011)

Sandra Ridley  Post-Apothecary (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2011)

The award will be presented on October 24, 2012 at the Ottawa Book Awards.

Congratulations to all four finalists and their publishers, and many thanks to our 2012 judges.

new from above/ground press: Armantrout, Blouin/Ranier, McKinnon + mclennan

Four new above/ground press items:

Custom
Four new poems by Rae Armantrout
$4
to launch as part of Ottawa’s second annual VERSeFest poetry festival, March 3,

let lie/
an excerpt from a collaborative work
by Michael Blouin and Elizabeth Ranier
$4
to launch as part of The Factory Reading Series, February 17,

Into the Blind World
by Barry McKinnon
$4
to launch as part of Ottawa’s second annual VERSeFest poetry festival, March 4,

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep
by rob mclennan
$4

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January 2012
a/g subscribers receive complimentary copies

with forthcoming titles by j/j hastain, kemeny babineau, Sarah Mangold, Fenn Stewart, Phil Hall and Andrew Burke, Kathryn MacLeod, Rob Manery + others, as well as a VERSeFest special issue of The Peter F. Yacht Club!

Check here for information on 2012 subscriptions, still available!

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 402 McLeod St #3, Ottawa ON K2P 1A6 or paypal button (above);

the dusie blog: rob mclennan's Top Eleven (Canadian) Poetry Books of 2011

As requested, I did a lengthy write-up of my "Top Eleven (Canadian) Poetry Books of 2011" for Susanna Gardner's Dusie blog. You should see who I included.

A short interview with Michael Blouin

Here's a short interview I did recently with writer Michael Blouin [photo by Tara Rutherford-Blouin], now posted at Open Book Toronto.

Michael Blouin, Wore Down Trust

I can't walk past a church if there's music playing. I remember one particularly hard morning in Memphis and a sky full of teeth bearing down on me. It was cold like only a March morning can be cold and if it hadn't been for the First Baptist Church and the choir bleeding out into the street and the girl taking the lead and her voice sounding like there was a light coming out of it... and there was. If it hadn't been for that and so many other things now that I see were pointing me along the way. I've always felt most comfortable around people who know where they're going. Where they're bound. I've felt privileged to be around them and for a time to call myself one.

[Michael Blouin launching Wore Down Trust as part of the ottawa international writers festival, April 27, 2011; check out the YouTube link here] Writing through a fictional version of himself-as-author, the late east coast poet Alden Nowlan, and the late American myth, Johnny Cash, in his third trade book and second poetry collection, is Ottawa-area writer Michael Blouin's Wore Down Trust (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2011), subtitled “a blues in three lives,” is a book about and built around voice. How could it not be? We listen to all three of the book's characters talk, external and internal voices weaving through the possibilities of their stories, threading fact with fiction, and the possibilities of where these stories meet, or may have. Wore Down Trust blends biographical fact with other facts not exactly facts, but, as the author writes, no less true.

ON THE POEMS AND PLAYERS

Except where obvious or as indicated as excerpts

of personal letters, songs or poems, the voices here are imagined.

But hopefully none the less real for that.

Most things border the truth.

The book as a whole works up to one central fact, that Cash and Nowlan met “in Fredericton in May of 1975.” What does this even mean, this tenuous connection, and one that the book even admits, contains no recorded information, no recorded conversation? In Wore Down Trust, Blouin has chosen two nearly-mythological artists known for their bodies of work, their excesses, their dark, popular, working-class country blues-not-blues, and the women that saved them from self-destruction. For both, he writes: “He died sooner than many would have preferred, leaving behind a rich body of work.” Structured in two sections – “Johnny” and “Alden” – the fragments of poetry and prose collect themselves, accumulating into a kind of documentary on the personal and more interior lives of the two men, collecting a kind of story that couldn't be told any other way. This is a book you can dip into at any point, any page, to read, and suddenly be in the middle of an already-existing story, even if you were to start at the beginning.

When you're almost killed a number of times it lends a certain perspective. When it happens eight times, well, it lends a sense of peace. And urgency too. I drove out this evening to the NAPA store and bought a new shift knob for the Jeep. It's an eight ball. If I some day have a son I'll pass it on to him. And I'd tell him why. It would be important for him to know why.

He could keep the eight ball. Put it away in a box in a closet. Someday put it in a car of his own. I don't have much of value to pass on. There's an old Rolex that doesn't work anymore. There's the Jeep, I own that outright now. There are these stories of mine. There's the eight ball, shining and black. What a thing to give.

I'm intrigued by Michael Blouin's use of voice in this collection, something done more overtly here than, say, his first poetry collection, I'm not going to lie to you (Toronto ON: Pedlar Press, 2007), or his award-winning novel Chase & Haven (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008). In Wore Down Trust, Blouin constructs the voices of Johnny Cash and Alden Nowlan with the author blended, nearly slipped in, deliberately obscured, hidden amid these two men in black. It's tempting to focus on Blouin's fictionalized version of himself, wondering if this is, in fact, simply three facets of his imagined or fantasized fictional self. Are Cash and Nowlan simply smokescreen for something more personal, more complex? The “author,” Blouin writes: “The author was born. Most things end in darkness. Not everything. Not everything dies.”

Late into the afternoon and more drunk than you have a right to be for the time of day and wondering now how you'll possibly survive the night at this rate. And then you stop worrying and let the swirl of discussion take you again. The storm clattering at the window.

And later – her question about love:

what are you doing?

whatever you'll let me