John Lavery

John Lavery passed away yesterday (Sunday, May 8, 2011). See also rob mclennan's tribute.

Sandra Beck
by John Lavery
Anansi, 2010

You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off
by John Lavery
ECW Press, 2004

Very Good Butter
by John Lavery
ECW, 2000

And an interview with John Lavery, first published in The Danforth Review.

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I have been contemplating writing about Sandra Beck for a couple of weeks. I had imagined that I would begin with a line like, "John Lavery is Canada's Nabokov." The Quill & Quire obituary quotes Lavery's Anansi editor, Melanie Little, saying the writer "had this almost maniacal base of fans." Well, count me among them. Ever since I read his first book, a decade ago, I've been wanting to elevate him to the head of the pantheon.

The interview I did with him for The Danforth Review in 2005 was among my favourites. Reading that interview again tonight I am reminded anew of a brilliant man:

I, however, only started to gain an inkling into human nature, and therefore to say things worth saying, after I had children. With people of our own age, give or take, we are always giving and taking, always on the make and trying to mask it. It's vital, yes, but it's a distraction, an entertainment, however human. To observe, as a parent, how the self-interest of children operates in the open has been a revelation to me. There is really very little difference between children and adults. Children are childlike. Adults are childish.

And it is his children whom I am thinking of tonight.

So there is no hope here of this being an objective review. I tried to read this book skeptically, but John populated the novel with astonishing events, language, and characters. I'll say it again: He was our Nabokov.

Which doesn't mean that this isn't a tres unusual novel; one that demands a lot of the reader. Little told Q&Q: "It was really refreshing to work with someone with the level of confidence in his voice that John had." Yes! John pushed fiction into new shapes. And he dared his readers to keep up.

Sandra Beck is a novel about a woman named Sandra Beck. The back cover blurb says Sandra is "present and absent on every page." Sure, okay. But she is present more on some and less so on others.

The novel is also broken into three sections. Roughly the first third is narrated by Sandra's daughter, and roughly two-thirds is narrated by Sandra's policeman husband, P.F.; the remainder of the book is a 5-page episode that is like an out-take from the main movie, like a DVD extra. A cute and funny moment between P.F. and Sandra.

The plot? There isn't much of one. I'd like to write more about Sandra Beck, but I'm not going to be able to do it, here, now. So instead, I'm going paste in a bit of the 2005 interview I did with John. It sums up better than I ever could the essence of his work:

I'm not sure if that's the right way of saying it. We're all in a state of becoming, never arriving, might be a more optimistic phrasing. I want to ask you about that idea generally: Do you agree?

Well now that’s a good question. Doesn’t Lydia have a line, “Every step we leave to arrive again to leave again to arrive. Every step.”? My mother used to accuse me, in a friendly way, of never knowing whether I was coming or going. She was right of course. She could have saved a little breath by simply accusing me, in a friendly way, of becoming.

Ambiguity. I had an architecture professor once who liked to ask whether architecture was the creation of solid forms, or the creation of the space they encompass. And we could answer Heidegger’s famous question about why is it ‘something’ that exists, rather than ‘nothing,’ by simply saying that it is ‘nothing’ that exists, the ‘something’ being so staggeringly infinitesimal by comparison as to be negligible. I mean by this that ambiguity is everything and everywhere. Human relationships are wiltingly, joyously, ambiguous. Always. Find me a writer who doesn't get a lot of mileage out of ambiguity. Especially George Orwell who, I believe, got it wrong: doublethink not only does not entail a restriction of individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary for the individual to flourish, to doubt itself, to allow itself to be convinced.

Conversation. I don’t know if there’s that much conversation per se in my stuff. On the other hand, it is aural, vocal, from first word to last, it has all been read out loud. Many times. In his fabulosisimo story “The Bear,” Faulkner has the principal character say that story-telling is “the best of all possible talking.” Yes, yes, a hundred times, yes. Writing, while always literary, is, for me, a kind of talking.

*

[Review first published in The Danforth Review]

John Lavery is the author of a previous short story collection, Very Good Butter (ECW, 2000). Now he's back with You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off. Put frankly, this is one of the best books of 2004, IMHO. It also has one of the strangest titles. A collection of linked short stories (eight in 209 pages), You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off integrates traditionalist excellence with inspired innovation and creates something unique in the process.

In TDR's review of Very Good Butter, I noted that "the instability of meaning ... [is] one of Lavery's strongest themes." That theme continues in this new collection, whose protagonist may be the Kwaznievski of the title, or it may be the one who speaks the title phase, a police officer in Montreal, Detective Inspector PF. Late in the book, PF says: "People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut." As an officer of the law, PF is charged with helping to maintain order, but order doesn't want to be maintained -- as Thomas Pynchon reminded us decades ago, entropy rules (see the story "Entropy" in Slow Learner). Life is crumbling towards heat-death, but there are forces pushing against it: fear, paranoia, the law, the media, your Aunt Matilda. Detective Inspector PF pushes against death, too; at least on his good days, of which there seem to be fewer and fewer.

("People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut" could be the mantra of fiction writers, too, who would have nothing to say were it not for the slings and arrows of outrageous human drama.

This is a book with many italicized passages. They add to the narrative's polyphonic presentation.)

What makes You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off so remarkable, to me, are the layers of story Lavery integrates into an operatic whole. Some stories move the reader along by following a single protagonist through a series of changes, or crises, or along a thought-process. .... You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off does all of those things and more; it is literature that it is truly symphonic.

(I keep reaching for music metaphors -- "operatic," "symphonic" -- because I'm not sure how else to describe this book. Like a Van Gogh painting filtered through Jackson Pollack? Like Eminem jamming with Pink Floyd?

What's the plot, you say? Detective Inspector PF is a Montreal cop. He is 20-odd years into his career. His wife has died. He is something of a celebrity because he appears on a local television show. He is obsessed with a woman -- Kwaznievski -- who appears to be homeless and who claims to have found a large bundle of cash by the side of the road. The different stories take numerous detours along with way, showing similar characters from dis-similar angles.

Any weaknesses in this book? Some readers will find an emphasis on the thought-processes of characters detracts from the forward thumping motion of the plot. Some readers might say: "Too much philosophizing." For those readers, there are many other books out there to please them. Personally, I wouldn't ask Lavery to change a word.)

On the back cover, Lee Henderson says: "Lavery's stories are today's great laughless comedies." And Mark Anthony Jarman calls Lavery "a dolphin of a writer, jumping through the waves with glee." What I want to add is that Lavery's stories are serious and ambitious in a way that most books in Canada are not. Publishers complain that short story collections don't sell -- as if sales were the sole criterion for publishing decisions. You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off will not be the next Da Vinci Code, but no matter -- it is the kind of book that ought to be winning all of the high-falutin literary prizes -- both in Canada, and abroad.

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[Review first published in The Danforth Review.]

Very Good Butter is a great name for a book (it is metaphoric, suggestive, tasty), and Very Good Butter is worthy of its moniker. This collection of short stories is the first book by John Lavery, a Quebecer with an international and varied education. He puts both qualities to good use.

Butter - which by itself is little more than fat - is what we add to food to give it extra flavour, even to make it palatable. The image on the cover of someone chomping on toast is a perfect example. Just looking at that photograph is enough to make one salivate. Is Lavery suggesting his stories add a little extra to life? Are his tales about the spices that make existence palatable? Such speculation is interesting, but not rewarding. Which is a little like butter, too - it tastes good, but offers little nutritional value.

The ten stories that make up Lavery's strong first collection contain many first-book joys and concerns. Lavery's voice is fresh. His stories are sprightly and provocative. They do not settle for the easy conventions of lost love, small town isolation, or urban alienation. For example, one of the strongest stories - "The Premier's New Pajamas" - follows the ordeal of one provincial premier's speech writer, who assists his boss escape from student protesters by driving the premier out of town to his mother's. Once there, the premier lays on some heavy homoerotic innuendo and then disappears. The strongest element of the story is its narrative voice, which moves quickly and refuses to allow the reader to settle on any singular narrative track for long - the instability of meaning being one of Lavery's strongest themes.

The strength of this theme, on the other hand, contributes to one of the concerns about the book. Namely, it falls into a common first-book trap - the one-note syndrome - as the stories strike a similar tone again and again. But this failure is more than forgivable, as Lavery has demonstrated an original calling and vision, which if it borrows from anywhere, it borrows from fabulists like Terry Southern or Italo Calvino - who are part of a constellation in the literary universe Canadian writers, and readers, could do worse than visit more often.

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INTERVIEW WITH JOHN LAVERY (2005)

http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/danforth/2009/no27/features/interviews/john_lavery.htm

Could you provide a brief background of who you are -- and your journey as a writer, up to and including the most recent book.

I grew up in Montreal.

A grade 5 friend of mine, Dudley Smith his name was, had the ability to sit at his desk and read, without so much as dipping his head, books hidden inside bigger books. Dudley got very high marks, teachers left him alone, and he could go through the better part of a Hardy Boys book in a single morning. He read at least twenty of them in Grade 5. I had a young boy’s admiration for Dudley, who was left-handed and exceptionally good in sports, and I was utterly captivated by his ability to read so quickly and still keep track of what was going on in class.

Because I, for my part, read with laborious slowness, listening to every word as I pronounced it silently to myself, going back over any passages that I missed because my attention wandered, looking up every word I didn’t know in the dictionary. It took me ten days to get through The Sign of the Crooked Arrow, which, despite my admiration for Dudley, I could not convince myself that I really liked. I never read another Hardy Boys book.

I didn’t read quickly, but I read all the time. Brits mostly: A A Milne, Enid Blyton, Hugh Lofting (Doctor Dolittle), G A Henty. A forgotten Canadian, John F Hayes, Rebels Ride at Night, Treason at York. I read Sports Illustrated from cover to cover. Sports journalism remains the most engagingly written form of journalism.

In High School it was Dickens, Austen and Shakespeare, every year, and I never bitched, although you were supposed to. And, thanks to my friend Walter Gordon, I was getting into Hesse, Sartre, Camus, Anouilh, Kant, Kerouac, Steinbeck, the Dylans, Thomas and Bob, Ezra Eliot and T S Pound. You have to read a gazillion books. But the ones you read when you're young are the ones that matter most.

I waited a long time before writing. It’ s a tough job, you have to know a lot of stuff, and I was terrified, the word is not too strong, of not being good at it. In 1989 or ’ 90, when I was living in Fredericton, I entered a little fiction contest organized by the New Brunswick Writers’ Association. Douglas Glover was the judge that year. I said to myself that there were barely half a million anglophones in New Brunswick, that if I couldn’t win a such a dinky little contest, there would be no point in ever trying to write another story.

To this day I love to watch people who read fluently. I am still a poor reader, slow, sleepy, I have to understand everything, I have to hear it all. I’m really better off writing. And I still write for the fluent readers, like Dudley. To keep them reading. When they should be doing something else.

What was the story that won the contest?

Actually, I submitted two stories. And although I appreciated Mr. Glover's writing 'first' in big letters over the title of one of them, I was even more winged off at him for not giving the other story, which was ten times better, a second place at the very least. Neither story was worthy of publication. I never tried, and never will.

To me, your writing -- at least the two short story collections I've read -- seems quite unlike what else is going on in Canadian letters. I wonder if you could say a bit about your literary influences and maybe how you think what your doing relates to what others are doing.

Influences. Wow. Everybody. Everything.

The summer after Grade 10, much to the horror of my mother, I read Crime and Punishment. A big, red hardcover edition with gruesome, line-drawn illustrations. I mortgaged the book over the entire summer and probably read it more than twice by the time I got it finished.

A little later on I read William Faulkner’s A Fable. I thought it was a little forced, a little artificial, but I was taken by the majestic sentences, so I decided to go for The Sound and the Fury. After that, I read a big part of the entire Faulkner canon. 13 straight novels. It took me a long time to recover, of course, but the idea had definitely germinated in my brain that I would like to trade places with Bill, let him do the listening, and me do the composing.

I also had the immense privilege of a second linguistic childhood, in my thirties. In French this time. And this time, instead of Faulkner, it was Colette. A marvelous portraitist and a pure writer, difficult to appreciate in English translations which often make her sound distortedly patrician. It is certainly not without significance, as far as my development is concerned, that Colette is so rich where Faulkner is, at times, so embarrassingly inadequate. In the areas, that is, of sensuality and the feminine personality.

I don't have the slightest impression of being technically innovative, or of doing things that many other writers aren't doing or haven't done. I do try to engage the reader, to get him or her surrounded. I wish books came in earphones. I'm a playful little fucker, speaking seriously.

Let's turn to your new story collection, _You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off_. In my review of it, I mentioned that one of the main characters (a police officer) says at one point, "People fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut." I thought that writers are sort of the same way. Without drama, we're got nothing to say. I thought that line nailed something central about the book. Maybe it's not fair to ask you about one line, so how about I step back and ask about the genesis of the book. What's the book about for you?

Actually, the seed for You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off was the title itself, although I did not immediately find a name with the right rhythm. Kwaznievski is a Polish name, not particularly common, but not rare either. The current President of Poland is Aleksander Kwasniewski, in fact. I altered the spelling of the name to avoid the last part being pronounced "ooski," and discovered recently, much to my delight, that it means "sour-faced."

Out of the name grew, gradually, the talkative character of Lydia and her alter ego, Jane Bing. Or is it Lydia who is the altered ego?

The immense popularity of crime fiction is based on two rather comforting premises: one, that crimes are clearly defined acts, and two, that those who commit them yield, ultimately, to the ratiocination, to use Poe's term, the ability to analyse and think clearly, of the non-criminal. Both premises are perfectly false. A great many criminal acts can never be adequately reconstructed, nor can the motives for committing them, or their degree of criminality, be convincingly assessed. And the truth is, that the vast majority of crimes are never solved.

So I set out deliberately to find a context for Lydia by writing stories in which the crimes committed would be elusive. Some would be inconsequential, some would even work out well, some would be purely imaginary, some would be committed by mere happenstance. And few, if any, would be solved. Along the way, I discovered the character of Inspector PF, the "chocolate dick," who seems to be developing into my own alter ego.

It is true that PF's line "people fuck up, they always will, and I take my cut," might be taken to fairly well sum up the book. It would help, though, if we had a clear idea of what fucking-up means.

Drama, on the other hand, results when human beings come in contact, whether they fuck up or not, although fucking up can speed the process and simplify things for the story-maker. Writing, however, is above all the art of language, of verbal expression. I've been through page after marvellous page of Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust (in French! he comes across as a verbose prig in English), Lewis Carroll certainly, Beckett even (sticking to stars of yesteryear), and not a fuck up in sight.

That's an excellent answer. It makes me think the next question should be: There's a lot of conversation in _You, Kwaznievski, You Piss Me Off_, and as you noted above, also a quite a bit of doubt about identity. Characters aren't quite sure who they are, who they were, or who they're becoming. Your stories get a lot of mileage out of ambiguities. I'm not sure if that's the right way of saying it. We're all in a state of becoming, never arriving, might be a more optimistic phrasing. I want to ask you about that idea generally: Do you agree?

Well now that’s a good question. Doesn’t Lydia have a line, “Every step we leave to arrive again to leave again to arrive. Every step.”? My mother used to accuse me, in a friendly way, of never knowing whether I was coming or going. She was right of course. She could have saved a little breath by simply accusing me, in a friendly way, of becoming.

Ambiguity. I had an architecture professor once who liked to ask whether architecture was the creation of solid forms, or the creation of the space they encompass. And we could answer Heidegger’s famous question about why is it ‘something’ that exists, rather than ‘nothing,’ by simply saying that it is ‘nothing’ that exists, the ‘something’ being so staggeringly infinitesimal by comparison as to be negligible. I mean by this that ambiguity is everything and everywhere. Human relationships are wiltingly, joyously, ambiguous. Always. Find me a writer who doesn't get a lot of mileage out of ambiguity. Especially George Orwell who, I believe, got it wrong: doublethink not only does not entail a restriction of individual freedom, it is absolutely necessary for the individual to flourish, to doubt itself, to allow itself to be convinced.

Conversation. I don’t know if there’s that much conversation per se in my stuff. On the other hand, it is aural, vocal, from first word to last, it has all been read out loud. Many times. In his fabulosisimo story “The Bear,” Faulkner has the principal character say that story-telling is “the best of all possible talking.” Yes, yes, a hundred times, yes. Writing, while always literary, is, for me, a kind of talking.

How does being a Quebec-based writer affect your work?

As a writer, I am Quebec-based, but as a person I am simply a Quebecer. It is true that the Saint Lawrence is treacherous between Montreal and Quebec City. I've been at the helm going down it, actually, so I know. But below Quebec, it's a strong, majestic river. Montmagny, La Pocatière, Charlevoix. Lovely names. My Quebec is as much outside as inside the big cities.

Socially, it's a bit tricky, and the social aspect of writing is important. When Very Good Butter came out, I knew exactly nobody in the English-speaking writing world. Nobody. Now, though, I have some really good friends, in Ottawa and in Toronto. Without them, I might very well have let Kwaznievski choke in my PC's memory.

Linguistically, the importance of being in Quebec is immeasurable. I'm not really bilingual. I speak a single bi-systemic language. More than once, I've found myself blabbing away to someone and wondering why they look as though they don't understand what I'm saying, until it has dawned on me that I haven't been speaking the language I thought I was. The influence of French, and not only French, on my English is, of course, very strong, but you are likely a better judge of that than I am.

I might add that I read almost exclusively in French. Even Auster and JC Oates. Weird, uh? A habit. That insulates me from a natural tendency towards mimicry. And protects me from being constantly reminded of how many people are writing so fabulously well in English.

What's the question you thought I'd ask you, but haven't yet? (How would you answer it?)

I might have expected a question about style, mine being distinctive apparently. I don't think I'll answer it though, except to say that I have, at my work station, I just counted them, sixteen dictionaries in four languages. There are others kicking around the house. I do think of myself as a sort of publicity agent for English. I want to use all the English I can, but I'm always nervous about going over the top. Michael Holmes, my editor, wisely made me replace "cervine" with "deer-like," but he kept all the other uncommon and nonce words. All the fucks and shits too, obviously. You can hardly paint the sky without blue in your palette.

I would, though, like to say something about fitting writing into the one life you've been given to live. Frankly, I admire the ability to finance a writing life more than I admire the ability to write itself. Having children is generally not even a consideration for most writers, and understandably so. I, however, only started to gain an inkling into human nature, and therefore to say things worth saying, after I had children. With people of our own age, give or take, we are always giving and taking, always on the make and trying to mask it. It's vital, yes, but it's a distraction, an entertainment, however human. To observe, as a parent, how the self-interest of children operates in the open has been a revelation to me. There is really very little difference between children and adults. Children are childlike. Adults are childish.

I'd like to add that I've enjoyed doing this interview, which, being written, has allowed me the time to give some thought to the answers. A useful exercise. I've learned something. Thanks.

http://thenewcanlit.blogspot.com/

Evelyn Lau

I met Evelyn Lau 15 years ago at a hotel in Toronto to interview her for the profile below, first published in 1995 in Id Magazine. The review I wrote of her then current novel, OTHER WOMEN, was never published. It is also below.

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Sex had always been a measure of power or abuse before we met, a way of hurting myself and, sometimes, my mother.
-- Evelyn Lau, OTHER WOMEN

With a look of concern on her face, Evelyn Lau, the 24-year-old Vancouver-based writer, leans forward to listen to my first question. Random House of Canada has just released her sixth book and first novel, OTHER WOMEN, the tale of a younger woman's romantic obsession for a married older man.

How does she feel, I ask her, about the fact that for many people OTHER WOMEN will be their introduction to her.

The concern disappears as a smile spreads across her face.

"Great," she says, enthusiastically.

A young writer with a troubled past, Lau is eager for a fresh start. Another one. Her first new beginning came ten years ago, when she ran away from home at 14-years-old with $10 in her pocket and a grade nine education. The horrors and eventual triumph of that period became the content of her first book, RUNAWAY: DIARY OF A STREET KID. Published in 1989, the book was later turned into a made-for-TV movie by the CBC starring Sandra Oh.

Three books of poetry and a collection of short stories have followed.

For this interview, we are seated in the lobby of one of Toronto's lakefront hotels. Lau sips from a glass of water and tells me how eager she was to do something different.

"I hope for many people this is the first time they are reading me," she says.

It is obvious that she feels strongly that OTHER WOMEN, which began as a series of short stories, is a separation from her earlier work.

"I wanted to focus more on desire, which I don't think I've ever dealt with," she says. "I've always dealth with sex in such a negative, pain-filled way, and I wanted to explore love."

Lau felt that by not focusing on sex in OTHER WOMEN, there would be more desire, "though not sexual desire; it's a desire for connection, closeness, or love."

This division, however, is a subtle one. Lau insists that the book is not about sex because Fiona and Raymond, OTHER WOMEN's main characters, do not consummate their 18-month affair. The characters are sexual, however. Raymond nibbles on Fiona's breasts, and Fiona administers fellatio. So the distinction, while obviously important to Lau, is one that is bound to be missed by many readers -- and critics.

NOW's Ted Mumford, for example, wrote that Lau "is working to put the hooker-turned-writer label behind her. Problem is, she keeps writing about sex."

It seems as if the confusion over Lau's earlier work has never really ended. In previous interviews, for example, Lau worked hard to clarify the dark sexual metaphors of her writing. And following the publication of her short story collection, FRESH GIRLS, she was dismissive of labelling her work "erotica." Her main theme is power, not sex, she has said. Sex may be the playground of her narratives, but it is not the reason for them. What is important to her is illuminating the destructive power that works in relationships, particularly in the bedroom.

Just as it has been difficult for Lau to escape her notoriety as a "former lady of the night," as NOW so ungraciously called her when it announced her September 12 appearance at the Harbourfront Reading Series, so too will it be hard for her win arguments that OTHER WOMEN is about an emotional process, not a hormonal one.

In the novel, Fiona first meets Raymond at an arts function. Though he is married, lives in a distant city and is only able to see her sporatically, she falls in love with him. The novel opens with their final conversation. Fiona's heart breaks as Raymond closes the door on her for the last time. She spends the rest of the novel replaying their relationship and trying to put back together the fragments of her life.

The book is no pot boiler, but Lau, still uses a typewriter to produce her work, entered life as a poet. It's the strength of her style that carries the reader through troubled waters. Lau's style here is more affiliated with the poetic prose of Elizabeth Smart than anything by, say, Charles Dickens.

When she is on, there are few better at snapping off a string of sharp metaphors. Unfortunately, the emotional intensity needed to sustain a book of so few incidents through so many pages wanes, and the limited plot doesn't help.

"I didn't want a traditional beginning, middle and end," says Lau, adding she's unsure if there's a character growth through the course of the novel.

"Plot is not one of my strengths," she says.

Though she admints that there may be a certain impotency in the book, she stresses that she wanted to slow down time and focus on the characters' feelings. She also didn't want to write a book that would be easily picked up by Hollywood.

"Though the money would be nice," she agrees.

She says the novel is about Fiona's internal process to come to terms with her powerful feelings for Raymond. She learns that it's possible for her to have such feelings.

"Fiona is frantically thinking and feeling, but nothing happens," says Lau.

Fiona is also searching to come to terms with the fact that she'll never know how a relationship with Raymond might have turned out.

"It would have been an explosive relationship, or nothing," says Lau. "But Fiona doesn't know. She's fascinated with why Raymond decides to stay with his wife. It's something she doesn't understand."

Lau says men and women have reacted differently to her new book. Men have been supportive, she says, while women have been hostile.

"Women are impatient with women [like Fiona] who allow themselves to be victimized," she says, "though there are lots of women who are suseptible to the sorts of relationships she finds herself in and who suffer the way that she does.

"Older women were put off by [Fiona's] obsessive listing of older women's appearences," says Lau.

Men, on the other hand, have admitted a feeling of empathy for Fiona. They admit to having felt for another woman as she does for Raymond. Lau says she finds these admissions interesting, and rewarding.

"I was afraid that this was going to be a women's book because it was so emotional and internal," she says.

Lau herself admits "to being half in love with John Updike," to whom she dedicated OTHER WOMEN. She admires Updike as a writer with a clarity of observation.

"He's not afraid to write about anything," says Lau, who no one could argue is a shy writer herself.

"My strength is in my feelings and my ability to instantly identify them," she says. "Sometimes I'm quite driven by my feelings, more so than by my head. My writing is driven by emotion. I envy writers who write more from their intellect, or who have a happy balance."

Lau is the past winner of the Milton Acron Memorial People's Poetry Award and the youngest person ever nominated for the Governor General's Award, Canada's highest literary honour. She says for the first time in a long time her next literary project is undecided.

"I'm waiting to see how people respond to this book before I decide what to write in the future," she says.

Don't listen to the critics, Evelyn. Do it your own way. You always have.

*

Review previously unpublished.

Other Women
by Evelyn Lau
Random House, 1995

A few years ago David Gilmour wrote a book called HOW BOYS SEE GIRLS about a middle-aged man's affair with a younger woman. Now we have Evelyn Lau's new book, which tells the story from the other side of the bed.

The contrast between the books is intriguing, and perhaps suggestive of the reasons men and women enter relationships in the first place. While Gilmour's book is essentially a mastabatory fantasy (older man falls for beautiful young women; she invites him to bed; she kicks him out, invites him back, kicks him out again), Lau's book is a poetic wail of emotional need.

Are the clichés true? Is men's first interest sex? Is women's first interest emotional support?

Fiona meets Raymond at an arts function. Over the course of their 18-month affair, which is never consummated, she falls in love with him, forcing him to choose between her and his wife. The novel opens with their final conversation. Fiona's heart breaks as Raymond closes the door on her for the last time. She spends the rest of the novel replaying their relationship and trying to put back together the fragments of her life.

The book is no pot boiler, but Lau (who has yet to see the far side of 25) entered life as a poet, and it's the strength of her style that carries the reader through troubled waters.

Lau's first novel is more affiliated with the poetic prose of Elizabeth Smart than anything by, say, Charles Dickens. When she is on, there are few better at snapping off a string of sharp metaphors; unfortunately the emotional intensity needed to sustain a book of so few incidents through so many pages often wanes.

Measured against the high water mark of Smart's masterpiece, BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I SAT DOWN AND WEPT, Lau's wail approaches a low moan. It is a heartfelt moan, however, and one few others could have pulled off. Readers should pay particular attention to images of pain, grief and violence ("edged," "sharp," "sliced," "flick") and note their relationship to desire.

These images continue the metaphorical cycle that Lau began in her short story collection, FRESH GIRLS AND OTHER STORIES, and in her poetry. Images of mirrors and identity also figure prominently. OTHER WOMEN will introduce new readers to Lau's growing stable of work and help carry her away from her unfortunate reputation as "prostitute turned writer."

Lau's first published work was her diary of life as a teenaged runaway on the streets of Vancouver. Three books of poetry have followed; one was nominated for the country's top literary award, making her the youngest writer ever nominated. She continues to be a young writer to watch (and read!), fulfilling every promise that her best work is still ahead of her.

Carrie Snyder

The following is a short interview I did with Carrie Snyder in 2004. It was first published in The Danforth Review after the publication of Snyder's short story collection, Hair Hat (Penguin).

In blogger world, she is Obscure Canlit Mama.

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The biography of you in your book says you grew up in Ohio, Nicaragua and Ontario. Did that seem like a lot of moving around? Have you always thought of yourself as a writer (or wanted to be a writer)? Give us some basic facts on who you are.

We did move a lot. But for a child, whatever is happening seems normal, and I remember the moves as being adventures. I was 9 when we moved from Ohio to Nicaragua (my parents worked for an organization called Witness for Peace), and we were sent first to the American school, where the wealthy Nicaraguan and the foreign bureaucrats sent their children and the classes were in English, and then to the Colegio Bauptista which was not quite a public school, although it wouldn't fit our Canadian idea of a private school.

I was put into a grade four class with close to eighty students in one room. There were no schoolbooks. The teacher wrote the lessons on the chalkboard and we copied them into notebooks. Everything was in Spanish and I was quite lost and lonely, though my Spanish improved as time went by. At school, in my notebook, I wrote a lot of stories when I was supposed to be copying something else. Some of them were epic, most were about horses. I remember sending a letter, while in Nicaragua, to the author of the Encyclopedia Brown series, asking how I could become a writer. The publisher kindly sent me a large package of brand-new books. No advice, however.

We moved to Canada when I was 10, to Waterloo. We also spent several years renting a farmhouse on a working farm. I studied English at the University of Waterloo, and then at the University of Toronto where I earned an MA in English Literature. I always hoped to become a writer. I wrote for the pleasure of it, just like I read for the pleasure of it.

TDR published one of your poems in our inaugural edition (Sept. 1999). You've just published a short story collection and you're working on getting a novel published. Are you equally comfortable in all genres? Can you express different parts of yourself in different genres? Any thoughts about dis/connections between the different types of writing you do?

Each genre requires something different from me. I like the individual challenges. In my teens and early twenties, I wrote poems almost every night before bed, almost like writing in a journal. It was my way of finishing the day. I would close my eyes and just type. Poems, for me, are intimate and personal and hardest to share. Stories are satisfying because they can be completed in a relatively short period of time, and the characters can be drawn in glances so you don't have to like them quite so much. Novels require long-term commitment, but there's much more room to play. There is so much that is written and then discarded in a novel, because as you write, you discover what you're really writing about, and most likely it's not about what you thought it was. Stumbling onto that solid path through the novel is a deeply rewarding moment.

If I'm in a poetry mood, like I was all last fall, there is no point in trying to write something else. All fall I craved the intimacy, I craved the sealed little jars of thought that poems are. Right now I'm in the mood for a novel, a big juicy exploratory adventure. Stories hit me at odd hours. I often write down ideas for stories which I'll turn to later, when I'm neither in a poetry mood or a novel mood. I always want to be writing something.

Okay. HAIR HAT. This is a collection of stories linked by a character common to all of them. The character has hair shaped like a hat. What's the deal with that?

I saw a man wearing a large, flamboyant hat, which may or may not have been made out of hair. I didn't get a second glance. But the picture of him stuck in my imagination. In the first hair hat story I ever wrote, he appeared completely out of the blue. That was for a creative writing class and I never finished it. More than two years later, I came across the story again. Mostly I wondered who this man was. I wrote another hair hat story. I remember reading it to my husband and saying, What is going on with this hair hat man? Is it just too peculiar? I didn't really care. I was too curious. I learned about him as I continued to write more stories. I feel like I didn't invent him, but that he was given to me, he appeared, he arrived.

He walks a fine line between being a figure of fun, a visual joke, and being almost tragic. I think to those characters who really see him, he is dignified despite the hair, they accept him, they recognize him. He is himself.

To tell you the truth, I love the hair hat man. There are some days I wish he would appear to me and lift me up by the elbow, offer some small magical gift.

The Globe and Mail reviewer of your book seemed to think that the hair hat trope was almost irrelevant. I don't want to give too much away to any potential readers, but I think it's fair to say that the stories in HAIR HAT are linked in a subtle, almost tenuous way. Perhaps too tenuous for the Globe's reviewers. However, the sensibility of your book reminded me of the light touch Sophia Coppola demonstrated in LOST IN TRANSLATION. I wonder if you could say something about the tension between linking the stories and what seems to be your preference for the subtleties of narrative.

I saw "Lost in Translation" in the theatre last fall and loved it. I'm glad Hair Hat reminded you of that movie, which was structured as a series of vignettes, taking the viewer through many small (but not small) emotional revelations, all the while building toward something. Hair Hat works in a similar way, I think.

The links between the Hair Hat stories are often subtle, glancing. When I arranged them into the final order, I had two things in mind: one was that I was revealing through these stories the larger story of the hair hat man, and there was a kind of teleological sense to them, working towards an end; but I also thought about interior links between the stories, and how each story's particular flavour of sadness, discovery, joy, fear, desire to know, desire not to know, fit with the flavour of the stories before and after it. I hope those links resonate.

The Globe and Mail reviewer did wonder whether the hair hat became irrelevant in the end - I actually found that perspective quite interesting. It wasn't what I was thinking about when shaping the stories, but I did intend for the reader to become familiar with the hair hat, and perhaps familiarity makes the hair hat seem less peculiar, so that in the end the man wearing the hat becomes a person too, he steps outside of the hat's boundaries. That's how I read the reviewer's comment.

The same reviewer also suggested that there would be a variety of individual responses to the stories. That's what I hope for. I hope that Hair Hat will involve readers in a very personal way. I hope that the book is ultimately larger than the sum of its parts, that the subtlety leaves room for layers of experience and meaning.

I'm going to use LOST IN TRANSLATION in this question, too. Someone said to me that she liked LOST IN TRANSLATION because it depicted well that lost, searching feeling many women have when they're in their twenties. HAIR HAT is a book about growing up, in many ways as well. While many of the stories are snapshots in time, and thus don't really "go anywhere," there is a forward narrative through the collection about a teenaged girl who disappeared. This disappearance is never fully resolved, and it left me with a haunted feeling at the end of the book. Similarly, the story in LOST IN TRANSLATION is never fully resolved. As are many relationships in life. Maybe this is just another way of asking the previous question. Thoughts?

Your previous question got me thinking about what I thought I was attempting to do when writing the stories. My original intention was simple, almost basic: to tell the hair hat man's story through the eyes of people meeting him at random. This was the only way I seemed able to meet him and that had become very important to me.

But somehow in the writing of the stories, there seemed to be a certain kind of character who would be likely to see a hair hat man (not everyone in the book does see him, after all), and ultimately it is those characters - and the hair hat man himself - who give the book its haunting flavour. There is such a divide between what the characters mean to say and what they actually say, what they mean to do and what they actually do. That's my experience in life, too. But the hair hat man stands in opposition to that, I think. He is what he is, he does what he does.

Maybe what's haunting about human relationships in general is that they are governed by forces within us and without us, and we think we should have control over them, but we rarely do. Or maybe we're not brave enough. Maybe we don't want to risk standing out like the hair hat man does. But there is beauty and hope to be found in our relationships, no matter how fractured. Actually, those fractures are what is beautiful, to me. That haunting feeling is linked, too, to hope.

Also, I do think the stories go somewhere - there is a sense of searching for and discovering in each, a moment of change. Like most change, it's fleeting, almost ungraspable, almost indefinable, but sweet with potential. But it doesn't matter to me whether that potential is ever realized and maybe that's why the stories seem like snapshots. And like snapshots, the stories can be returned to - I hope readers want to return to them - like moments in our own lives that we want to look at again and again, wondering about, wondering what we did wrong or right, maybe wishing we could enter that moment and experience it again.

Without meaning to, without setting out to, I think in Hair Hat I created another world, sadder, braver, better, than my regular one. That's why I return, even now, to these stories and these characters.

Usually we end with a question: What are you working on now? But I also wanted to ask you about work/life balance. You and your husband have two children. How do you find time to write?

Short answer: I have help. Frankly, if I were alone full-time with a three-year-old and an 18-month-old, I would be writing poetic grocery lists and little else. We moved back to Waterloo last summer to be nearer to my parents. My mother has become a major part of my writing life. She babysits two hours a day, every weekday. And I put that time to good use.

If I'm working intensely on a project, like I was recently, my husband spends as much time as possible getting the kids out of the house (evenings, weekends) while I write like I'm possessed.

I just completed a solid draft of a new novel, so I'm re-entering normal life again. It's almost impossible to concentrate on anything else when I get to a certain stage in the novel. It's like I'm living in another world and everything else - ie. real life! - is an irritation. Which is completely unfair to everyone around me - and they deserve so much better! In that final push, I feel extremely conflicted and guilt-ridden and wonder whether I'm out of my mind to be sacrificing my children's babyhood to these characters who don't actually exist.

Thankfully, it's a brief phase. And I think without that other world to escape to, I might go a little bit crazy. Everyone needs a break from full-time parenting. Writing is mine.

Interview: T.F. Rigelhof

T.F. Rigelhof is the author of Hooked on Candian Books (Cormorant, 2010). Gordon Lockheed has called it "a new, better way to read Canada's novels" (at least that's the headline over at Dooney's Cafe).

I interviewed Rigelhof by email in June 2010. We discussed his book (over two decades in the making), what he calls "OurLit," and many other rich topics.

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Some choice quotations:

• Why would I want to write a book that is easily classifiable when our literature isn’t?  
• Despite the smug, hipper-than-thou, self-aggrandizing, socially irresponsible, intellectually vacuous posturings of such mischief-makers and petit-monsters of self-entitlement as Douglas Coupland, Russell Smith, and Stephen Marche, OurLit is more youth-oriented, urban-centric, racially and sexually diverse, socially complicated and outright comic than they seem to realize. And more deeply rooted in multiple strands of modernism.
• Ressentiment is not simply resentment. It’s what Sartre called it “bad faith.” There’s a stinking heap of it in the continuing argument about who is and who isn’t, what is and what isn’t Canadian, who gives and who gets prizes in OurLit.
• Literary culture—the processes by which books get written and read—is a dialogue, a co-operation between writers and readers who are working towards common purposes in good faith with mutual respect. Literary culture is, before all else, an exercise in civics.
• My book is enthusiastic but not particularly optimistic. Novels are the best painkillers mankind has created, as James says, and as long as we’re alive and sentient, they’ll continue to do their work.
• We’ll all need to elevate our pain thresholds enormously to find any kind of personal satisfaction in living through the wrenching changes of the next two decades as the world’s centers of population shift in more dramatic ways than the collapse of the Soviet Union has pre-figured. I’m convinced Canada will be in the foreground of the most crucial of those changes.

Some choice references:

• Serafin’s Stardust: Losing the best Canadian writer no one knows about by Brian Fawcett
• Rick Rofihe ("the third Canadian – Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant – to have signed a “first right of refusal contract” with The New Yorker")
• On the NY Times list of top American novels, 2000-2005
• G&M review of Hooked on Canadian Books
• 3 links on Philip Roth's prediction of the end of the literary novel (1) (2) (3)
• Mordecai Richler

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See also Rigelfhof responding to comments by Stan Persky.

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Your new book is Hooked on Canadian Books and subtitled "the good, the better and the best Canadian novels since 1984." I wonder if you could give us a quick introduction to your project - and how it came about.

When W.J. Keith published Canadian Literature in English in 1985, I thought (and still think) that he was right-minded in most of his critical judgments but wrong-headed in the narrowness of his approach to novels – he simply tracked the trajectory of a few “major” careers.

If you want to know what’s still worth reading in the works of the dozen novelists he analyzed in detail then (and the updates he provides in his revised edition of 2006), read him. He’s a very good critic, probably the most life-affirming one we’ve ever had in our academic world. He hasn’t had much competition – none since the death of George Woodcock.

In 1984, when I started keeping notes for what has become Hooked on Canadian Books, I wanted to cast a wider, more inclusive net than Professor Keith. I’d started publishing fiction in 1981 and by the time my first novel, The Education of JJ Pass, appeared in ’83, some very good novels were beginning to get published by previously unknown writers and taken seriously on their individual merits (rather than on the posturings and careerist ambitions of their authors) by non-academics.

This had much to do with the arrival in Canada of the literary agent Lucinda Varley, the man-of-letters Alberto Manguel, the promotional success of Jack McClelland’s Seal Books First Novel Award, and the start-up of The International Fiction List by the publisher Louise Dennys when she joined the firm of Lester & Orpen.

My own method of notetaking was directly influenced by 99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939: A Personal Choice by Anthony Burgess in 1984. This is the slow, dry introduction to Hooked.

The quick and dirty backstory is this: after several strokes and seizures at the end of 2007, I junked the book I’d been working toward for twenty-three years and started weeding my bookcases and notes in search of the novels I wanted to reread and write about while waiting for what ultimately became an eight-and-a-half hour craniotomy (to cauterize multiple vascular malformations) in November 2009.

Because the team assigned to me at the Montreal Neuro first attempted a less invasive procedure that failed and the actual operation took a lot longer to plan than originally anticipated (whatever becomes of my literary reputation, I’m guaranteed footnote status in neurosurgical history), I added to my program by reading novels published since an earlier stroke in 2002 that I hadn’t really noticed sufficiently.

Ultimately, I stopped counting. I’m probably three or four short of one hundred and fifty novels. Anyone who feels left out can say, “Oh, my masterpiece just slipped through one of the larger holes in his memory” except for a couple of writers who made it perfectly clear to me that they wished to be excluded: even though I admire their works, I’m not enough of a sycophant for their tastes. Fair enough.

A television interviewer told me she counted 88 individual novelists. I like that number since it’s the same as the number of keys on a piano. (I actually think I included about a dozen more than she’d counted: some authors are noted only en passant.)

If I were to classify your book, I'm not sure what I would call it. It contains pieces I'd call book reviews, others I'd call essays, also bits of memoir, as well as lists and lesson plans. The G&M review noted that yours isn't a "map-making" book, as if there were something lacking it taking an encylopediacal approach.

Meanwhile, the book's dust jacket flap calls it a "conversational survey of all that is good about our nation's literature," but one doesn't need to venture too far into the book before understanding that you also intend to throw some barbs. A lot has changed Canada and the publishing industry since 1984.

What I want to ask you about here is the your sense of how the terms of the conversation about Canlit has changed in that time. The G&M review notes that "there are those who doubt" that a systematic reading of Canlit is possible. I know that's not what you've attempted in your book, but I wonder about your sense of the Canlit conversation. For example, is consensus about what is "good, better, best" more difficult now than ever?

In musical terms, Hooked offers readers tonal variations on six modal sketches. If you listen to the Miles Davis Sextet’s Kind of Blue in any post-1997 re-issue with the bonus track included, you’ll get a fuller sense of how I’m improvising. I don’t mean to obscure my meaning or portentiously whack readers on the ear. It’s simply a fact of my life that I acquired Kind of Blue a couple of weeks before its official the day of its release, August 17, 1959, when I was fifteen and it became the aural wallpaper in my bedroom throughout the rest of my high school years.

If there wasn’t anything else I wanted to listen to, I had it playing in the background as I tried to write stand-up comedy of the kind then current in jazz clubs that I heard on hard to find records – Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Tom Lehrer. I don’t mention Kind of Blue in the book but I do make the same point about the improvisatory nature of my writing with explicit references to Daniel Levitin’s The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008) and another musical double six -- the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).

In my earlier essay collection, This is Our Writing, I talk about indebtedness to Ornette Coleman: he taught me to value spontaneity, following a line freely to find where it goes not where its been. There’s nothing in Hooked that I didn’t urgently want to write. If it seems weirdly constructed, it is weirdly constructed: it eschews chronology, the categories I employ are Levitin’s (but contain counter-intuitions or “ironies”) and it takes some working-out since who and what is not included is simply dissed as “careerist, nihilist, and merdiste.”

Why would I want to write a book that is easily classifiable when our literature isn’t? Or write anything at all about petulant Peter Pans and bumptious Bad Boys. Or, worse, self-inflated highly metaphysical guys who think they’re being really inventive while they solemnly reinvent André Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs or, in English, The Counterfeiters (1926) in which Edouard, the narrator, thinks about writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs that draws heavily from a diary in which he writes about thinking about writing a novel called Les Faux-Monnayeurs.

One last point about Kind of Blue: Jimmy Cobb is a good drummer and Wynton Kelly is a good pianist; Paul Chambers is a better than average bassist and Cannonball Adderley a better than average alto player; Bill Evans is one of the best jazz improvisers of all time. Playing with them brought out the best in Davis and Coltrane. And playing with Davis and Coltrane brought out the better in them.

I go to some lengths to talk about gradations of achievement in the novels discussed. There’s deliberate downplaying and sitting out in what I put together. And a lot of tonguing and more cheekiness than some people expect to find. I don’t know how brilliant or fast I am but some of my readers have been pretty dull and slow in response to what I’m doing. OurLit is robustly comic: it needs to be approached in that spirit more often than it is.

When Leonard Cohen introduces “Ain’t No Cure For Love” on his current world tour, he lists the half dozen mood altering medications he habitually took before he discovered that whatever he was thinking or doing, “Cheerfulness kept breaking through.” Canadians have much to be cheerful about even in the midst of misery and Lynn Coady’s cheekiness as a writer of OurLit isn’t exceptional in this regard – just funnier than the rest.

Canada has always been a strange, unusual place – more so than anyone other than a handful of naturalists noticed through much of its history. Have you read Christoph Irmscher’s essay “Nature Writing” in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2004)?

Irmscher (who is the editor of Audubon’s writings and drawings) marks out the only logical starting point for any discussion of our literature: Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal, on the River Saint Lawrence, through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans; in the years 1789 and 1792, with an Account of the Rise and State of the Fur Trade (1801). If you start with Mackenzie and follow Irmscher’s reading guide, you’ll find no supporting evidence for Northrop Frye’s claim that humans have felt “silently swallowed by an alien continent.” What you will find is a “patiently repeated, genuinely amazed ‘What is here?’” and not “Frye’s puzzled ‘Where is here?’”

The ways in which our best novelists respond to their amazement with the whatness of Canadian experience has grown more interesting decade by decade through the second half of the twentieth century and through the first decade of the twenty-first as Canada is becoming increasingly sui generis among the nations of the world. I state this as fact – not as propaganda. I have immense gratitude for being born in Canada but it also deeply shames me that this country is so ungrateful to the contributions of so many of its citizens.

Starting out, I did try to write more conventionally: I did try to write An Atlas of Canadian Literature but I ended up feeling like an under-muscled Atlas trying to hold a world in place that was undergoing seismic shocks and volcanic eruptions and generally weird weather. What I opted for in the end is a book modeled on The Double Hook Bookstore in the sense that Judy Mappin’s shop occupied several rooms of a Montreal townhouse and different kinds of conversations took place in different areas.

The book is dedicated to Judy and her partners and staff. And also to the memory of Norah Bryant who was Chief Librarian at my local public library in the days when it too was an odd assemblage of spaces and Norah’s office was a wonderful place to discuss Commonwealth literature – her passion. But those were parts of a preliminary model: I added to it my personal eccentricities in shelving my own books according to what I understand from neuroscience about the ways our emotional intelligence is formed/deformed/reformed by the stories we’re told and the stories we tell.

I like the fact that when most people come up to me to talk casually about Hooked while I’m sitting at a neighbourhood cafe, they want to tell me about their favorite novels before they ask about mine. The same thing happens with e-mails. I also enjoy it when readers of my generation want to talk about what I’m doing in my book in relation to Daniel Fader’s famous polemic Hooked on Books and Tom Wolfe’s reprise and enlargement on some of its themes in Hooking Up.

I don’t write about the kind of intellectual impoverishment among the young that they do. We deprive our children of robust futures in different ways in this country than they do in the USA – mostly by giving ours piss poor sense of the country they actually inhabit by rarely assigning any books that speak to their actual condition. Students are regularly expected to read Catcher in the Rye for gods’s sakes and To Kill a Mockingbird. Why aren’t they reading Zoe Whittall’s Bottle Rocket Hearts or George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue or any of a dozen other novels I suggest one place or another in Hooked?

What’s changed in the way we talk about books in the past twenty-five years? Locally, in Montreal it’s now possible to achieve national and international recognition without moving to Toronto. For a very long time, Mordecai Richler was the only English language writer anybody at the CBC had on their Rolodexes – the non-automated Palm Pilots of yesteryear. Writing about Montreal was a very bad career move even if you did it brilliantly. Ask Trevor Ferguson about what happened to Onyx John (1985)! The only newspaper job Carole Corbeil was offered in Montreal was as a telephonist in Classified Ads at the Gazette. It drove her to Toronto – no bad thing in retrospect – because she created Voice-over (1992) out of the tension between the two cities and made great art and some money doing it.

It wasn’t easier for new voices coming from elsewhere in the country – David Adams Richards was consistently misread, Wayne Johnston was barely readl, and Joan Barfoot was read for the wrong reasons when she was read at all. For too many readers, the novelists who counted could be seated comfortably in a Greyhound bus parked at Dundas at Bay with plenty of room left over for the leading poets and dramatists. Now you can barely shoehorn the novelists and short story writers who matter into a Boeing 737. We have more conversations about books and they’re wider-ranging.

Okay, those are the positives. When I say that Canada is increasingly sui generis among the nations of the world, I’m not ignoring the darker side of Canadian experience. We’re not the nice, polite, apologetic aw shucks white folks of Stuart McLean’s Vinyl Café and never have been: and we’re not the flip side of that image either – the narrow-minded, solipsistic, simplistic, one-dimensional, monosyllabic, beer-soaked, lowest-common-denominator nutcases that Don Cherry represents.

Before pushing forward in the direction of what we are, let me clarify what I’m not. Bruce Meyer, the G&M reviewer who describes himself as a professor of English at Georgian College, describes me as a “retired professor of literature from Montreal’s Dawson College.” Doesn’t that sound nice! Another reviewer referred to me as a professor emeritus and don’t that sound just tres grande! What I am is a longtime CEGEP teacher with cognitive disabilities who can no longer control a classroom, has exhausted his disability insurance, and was forced to retire four years earlier than expected to a smaller pension than I was anticipating.

Georgian College offers university-accredited courses; Dawson doesn’t. Meyer may or may not have the right to call himself a professor of English: Dawson College has teachers and that’s all I was in a wide range of courses and programs. And that, as Emmy Lou Harris not so nicely but ever so melodiously sings, is “all I ever wanted to be” as a wage earner – a guy in inner city classrooms teaching immigrants, children of immigrants, grandchildren of immigrants how to read with greater comprehension, write with greater accuracy, and converse in public with greater confidence despite the civil wars, genocides, and neo-imperialisms that have disconnected them from the greater parts of their families.

I did teach university for four years as an Instructor at the beginning of my professional work life and that was more than enough. As were the seven years of university that left me a set of comprehensives and a thesis short of a Ph.D.

The best lessons I learned both about teaching and about writing came out of George Grant’s seminars at McMaster. It’s only in Lament for a Nation that Dr. Grant succeeded (and succeeded brilliantly) in writing the kind of book he urged me to attempt – he realized long before I did that my métier – if and when I ever got my act together – would be to speak colloquially to Canadians of aspects of our national life without importing terms foreign to our political conditions and educational needs.

My academic training is as an historian of ideas (first in Western philosophy, then in Roman Catholic theology and Biblical studies, then in European humanism, then in the dominant post-Vedic cultural values of the Indian sub-continent that reached their apogee with Sidhartha Gautama, the Buddha. I am an accidental authority not an academic one when it comes to the Canadian novel. I do tell the story of how that happened at the beginning of Hooked and the role Judith Mappin’s Double Hook Bookstore played in that process.

Enough about me, more about why I say this country is sui generis. Despite the smug, hipper-than-thou, self-aggrandizing, socially irresponsible, intellectually vacuous posturings of such mischief-makers and petit-monsters of self-entitlement as Douglas Coupland, Russell Smith, and Stephen Marche, OurLit is more youth-oriented, urban-centric, racially and sexually diverse, socially complicated and outright comic than they seem to realize. And more deeply rooted in multiple strands of modernism.

Here, let me quote myself on Marche who drew considerable attention with “Raging against the tyranny of CanLit” in The Toronto Star on October 20, 2007. My comment on him what irks him is this:

“While it’s the duty of every novelist who believes that novels “that do not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence” are worse than useless (Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, revised edition, 2000), to weigh up existing talent and create a readership for himself (yes, it’s alpha males who rush to these judgments), what’s insulting in Marche’s self-serving are his off-hand colour-blindness and anglophilia (among the old men of the first generation, Austin Clarke is alive and well and flourishing as is Josef Škvorecký), and lack of rudimentary historical perspective. Hasn’t he read at least enough of Coupland (whose views on CanLit 14 months earlier in the New York Times blog—cited above—are paraphrased closely enough to imply some causal relationship) to know that Atwood (and Leon Rooke, Clarke Blaise, Keath Fraser) as well as the other writers he does name are pre-Boomers who have largely given way to an established generation of actual Baby Boom writers (born between 1946 and 1957) that is doing some of its best work under pressure from Coupland’s own excellent-at-innovation Generation X (born between 1958 and 1968) as well as Marche’s Generation Y (born between 1969 and 1980)? And has he read enough Atwood of the early, middle, and later periods to judge her as he does? Her talent remains robust; Michael Ondaatje is the only established author whose career has entered the day-out-of-night of Planet Hollywood where every new book reduces his legacy. Marche takes the cheap shot, the one he knows he can fire off without burning up his own career: Atwood has better things to do than piss on his natterings but Ondaatje’s friends at Brick and elsewhere might just help his career along in some way that’s sweller in his imagination than in reality.

Yes, there are bad Canadian novels. There have always been bad novels everywhere they’re written. And yes, some of them have too much setting and too little plot but this isn’t peculiarly Canadian any more than the limiting of plots to “recovering from historical or familial trauma through the healing power of whatever (most common)” which, for example, might define Twain and Tolstoy; “uncovering historical or family secrets and thereby achieving redemption (close second)” which, for example, might define Dickens and Dostoevsky; “coming of age (distant third place)” which, for example, might define Conrad and Goethe. More than a century ago in “The Future of the Novel,” Henry James complained about the gross quantity of bad American and British novels—stories and characters that lacked both variety and vividness—but blamed the mediocrity of writers, the laxness of readers and the timidity of editors for their proliferation. James bemoaned the aversion to risk-taking on all sides and, specifically, the failure of both Anglo-American writers and readers to embrace adult life and examine sexual relations in straightforward ways. He placed the greatest blame on the timidity of editors who invariably seem to fasten on female adolescents as their “ideal” reader. Female adolescents or the adolescent that remains firmly botoxed in women uncertain of maturity remain the favourite targets of Manhattan’s editors. Such readers are no longer sanctimonious—those who find their way past the Young Adult vampire fantasy sections of Big Boxes of Books and don’t stop at the shopaholic pyramids—devour the less-than-adult sexual relations that Heather O’Neill delivers in Lullabies and Marche attempts to service in his own debut, Raymond and Hannah (2005).

As a critic of our literature, Marche is a pissenlit (dandelion): as a novelist, does he have anything to offer? Raymond and Hannah has a plotless sex scene in an empty apartment that moves a hook-up to a somewhat committed relationship over a cottage weekend setting that are both worth reading: they are fine, compact, lucid short stories shoehorned between a novella about Hannah’s attempt at discover Jewishness by moving to Israel and studying at a yeshiva with a Rabbi who once was a fisherman in Maine that involves a lot of typing of the kind Nino Ricci (see below) does (whenever he forgets he’s a mature married man and not a morose grad student). While Raymond works at a doctoral dissertation in Toronto on—quelle surprise!—Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Hannah comes of age as Raymond doesn’t."

I guess that’s what you mean by one of my barbs! Reading Marche, I fall into some kind of time warp – it’s 1955 and he’s attempting to bestride Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself as a bull-rider without any grip on the other ballbusters in the room. If you want to know what’s happening in our country that makes it (and it's literature) utterly distinctive, you must sit down and read Adderson, Alexis, Bissoondath, Bush, Choy, Austin Clarke, George Elliott Clarke, Coady, Cole, Corbeil, Coupland, Durcan, Endicott, Gowdy, Greer, Hage, Heighton, Highway, Hill, Lai, , Bruce MacDonald, Robin Maharaj, Mootoo, Morrissey, Kevin Patterson, Rau Badami, , Robertson, Eden Robinson, Elizabeth Ruth, Brad Smith, Timothy Taylor, Priscilla Uppal, Vassanji, Whittal, Michael Winter. And that’s only a partial list! Until people do read them and read them as a matter of course, conversations about OurLit won’t shift to the realities upon which reliable critical judgments can be formed. God help us, we'll be stuck in Robertson Daviesville.

In 2006, the NY Times ran a feature about "the best" American novel since 1980. They asked 125 prominent literary figures to pick a single title. I'm going to ask you an unfair question now. If you were to pick a single Canadian novel since 1984 as "the best," what would you pick and why? (I have a guess about what you will choose.)

That’s easy – my own Hooked On Canadian Books: The Good, the Better, and the Best Canadian Novels since 1984! Why? Because it contains “engrams” of all other candidates! I mean “engrams” as Aby Warburg used the term. (I discuss his library and his intellectual ambitions at some length.)

But to take my tongue out of my cheek and propose this seriously, I’d have to be delusional and consider myself as author of Hooked to be entirely imaginary and all the books I discuss to be works of my imagination. I’m not delusional. These books do exist and are as robustly independent-minded, distinctive and distinguished as I say they are. I’m not a one book or even one author sort of reader.

What’s your guess?

I thought the book you would pick was Solomon Gursky Was Here. Ah, well.

That’s a pretty good guess. Today, in fact, I can’t think of a better one unless we’re playing the desert island game. If I could only take one Canadian novel with me to a desert island, which one would it be? There are any number I wouldn’t have to take because I know their particular worlds so well I can think myself back inside them whenever I want even though details elude me.

Solomon Gursky is such a book. Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless is another and what a shame many readers avoided it because of what they thought it might be rather than what it actually is. Maybe now that people are becoming aware of the abductions of children in Haiti after the earthquake by well-intentioned emotional dimwits, it will find a more responsive readership.

The book I can’t carry in my head, the one I’d have to carry into exile with me is Don Akenson’s An Irish History of Civilization. Brian Fawcett says it’s “a global classic, even if no one figures it out for a decade or so” and he’s absolutely right. And if Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy are novels, it’s a novel – all 1524 pages of it.

At the end of my book, in an open letter to a former student, I place Atwood’s Year of the Flood alongside Akenson’s History as large and difficult books. Atwood’s is less than a third the length of Akenson so I obviously mean large in a larger sense. It has had very little impact to date, especially with the Giller jury. Once people read Akenson, maybe they’ll figure Atwood out.

Admirers of Year of the Flood might attribute its spurning by a Giller jury that selected Linden McIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man to what Atwood calls the Tall Poppy Syndrome—the levelling social attitude that cuts down the meritorious as presumptuous, attention seeking, or without genuine achievement. But her metaphor is too botanical, too bloodless even if it was first used by Aristotle (who chose sweet corn to the flowering source of opium).

Benjamin Franklin Fairless, president of United States Steel Corporation, was more Grimm-ish, closer and odder in fellowship to Atwood’s old friend Matt Cohen who liked to quote Fairless: “You cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the leg of a giant.”

I think it goes deeper than that, as did Matt. We both read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard under the guiding hand of George Grant in our McMaster days. I quote both on the subject of ressentiment. Ressentiment is not simply resentment. It’s what Sartre called it “bad faith.” There’s a stinking heap of it in the continuing argument about who is and who isn’t, what is and what isn’t Canadian, who gives and who gets prizes in OurLit.

Values always shift, even the ones someone or other is always wanting to designate “essential” to “national identity.” Fifty years ago, Tommy Douglas—Father of Medicare—was “unCanadian” and the virulently anti-democratic RCMP was ever so Canadian (as long as we weren’t socialists or Native or Métis). Literary culture when it is pursued in good faith is about the processes through which the implicit is made explicit—ugliness is exposed to beauty, falsity is undermined by truth, bad is thwarted by the good.

Literary culture—the processes by which books get written and read—is a dialogue, a co-operation between writers and readers who are working towards common purposes in good faith with mutual respect. Literary culture is, before all else, an exercise in civics.

Okay, I’ve got that out of my system. I’ll put aside the soap box I haul out in a dozen or so mini-essays called “Annals of OurLit” in the book. My own tastes are clearly defined but there’s little that’s definitive about this book. It’s an argument or the start of one. In asserting “this is so about such and such novels and their makers, isn’t it?”, I’m asking for a reaction.

For me, the greatest strength of our literature is that our leading novelists – with very few exceptions – aren’t part of any established hierarchy. They’re outsiders – just think of the amazing array of writers with real world training and occupations (such as medicine) outside the literary world and the academic one – and that outsider status cloisters and protects their work in the way that jazz musicians are cloistered. And that opens up possibilities for them to be various and vital in ways Yanks and Brits no longer are.

Our storytellers can be as spiritual, cerebral, motivating, moving, idealistic, improvisational as they want. Especially, when it comes to detailing what Pico Iyer called “imaginative multiculturalism” in his famous essay “On the Promise of the New Canadian Fiction.”

Iyer defines this as a multiculturalism that can be “known only at the individual level, where people understand that it is only in the imagination that we can begin to penetrate the Other (or to allow the Other to penetrate us)”— it’s multiculturalism based on shared beliefs not shared roots, it’s a defence of the natural order and human nature against ideology and the politics of identity.

Why does this matter? When we read our storytellers like this, it keeps us from blaming “global warming” or “bad politics” for what is happening. We are destroying ourselves by depending on an an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage.

Our writers – at their best – do not submit to this system but to standards raised, though not necessarily made, by themselves. In this, they’re much closer to Cervantes and Shakespeare, the Bible and Homer, Conrad and James – as I repeatedly point out in Hooked and in every review I write these days. I’m not in the habit “of turning up a new Conrad, Faulkner, Thomas Mann, or Henry James around every corner” as some say I am.

What I am doing is showing (whenever possible and wherever it’s apposite) that our best novelists are working out their own resolutions to older problems in new ways but in continuity with the greats of the past.

Steve Heighton, for instance, has figured out in his new novel how the eighteenth century device of multiple points of view (that Conrad re-popularized) serves specific moral purposes and isn’t merely a Creative Writing MFA impress-the-panel thesis project.

At the beginning of The Dyer's Hand, W.H. Auden remarks that he's "never written a line of criticism except in response to a demand;" meanwhile, "all the poems I have written were written for love." As you've already hinted, in Canlit criticism is written more for love than profit. Yet, where are the critics? As you've noted, the past quarter-century has been a rich and lively period in Canadian letters, but decent, engaged critics are few. First, do you have a comment about that? Second, am I missing something? Are there some Canlit critics and titles you'd recommend?

A whole generation of readers and writers has been betrayed by the waxing of Cultural Studies and its practitioners. If you don’t know what I mean by that, read the British critic Terry Eagleton’s later writings, especially After Theory (2003), his indictment of the rejection of any and all “absolutes” in literary studies.

Eagleton asserts – sanely – that each of us lives in a body that cannot be “owned” because nothing was ever done to acquire it and nothing short of suicide can be done to be rid of it. Our bodies and their deaths provide the focus for literary activities or they perish. (His argument for Christianity is delicious – “one of the best reasons for being a Christian, as well as a socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States.

True civilizations do not hold predawn power breakfasts.”) I don’t and won’t read anyone who denies death in order to earn their daily bread – and there’s no greater denial of death than the advocacy of ideological and/or aesthetic purity, is there?

Bruce Serafin, the founding editor of The Vancouver Review and a full time postal worker, grappled with death his entire life and produced two books of literary essays – Colin’s Big Thing (2003) and the posthumous Stardust (2007). Stardust contains a critique of Canada’s literary magazines that’s sharp, funny, devastating, and should be mandatory reading by the magazines section of the Canada Council but evidently isn’t.

Serafin’s work is wildly uneven – at his best, he wrote “passages of the best prose ever written on Canada’s west coast” according to Brian Fawcett who knows west coast writing better than anyone I’ve ever encountered. But Serafin’s gift was not only to write well but to write provocatively and he elicited a piece of criticism by Fawcett “Serafin’s Stardust: Losing the best Canadian writer no one knows about” (posted on Dooneyscafe.com) that’s better than anything written about any Canadian writer than most of us have ever likely read.

I’ve been reading Fawcett more assiduously and arguing more with him (mostly inside my own head) than I have with anybody else since 1984. Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times and Other Impolite Interventions (1991) is still very much worth reading for its insights into Douglas Coupland’s first literary efforts and Margaret Atwood at mid-career. It’s a good starting point for reading your way through his many postings at Dooneyscafe.com.

Most of what I read by way of critiques of Canadian writers I pick up here and there on the internet and you’re right that decent, engaged critics are few and far between. The universities produce such people only by accident, it seems. And our national media give them no room to flourish. For much of my writing life, The Toronto Star was the only newspaper to have a full time book columnist – Philip Marchand. His Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature (1998) is essential reading. As is his book on Marshall McLuhan.

I’d also recommend John Metcalf’s two volumes of literary memoirs – An Aesthetic Underground (2003) and Shut Up He Explained (2007). The latter contains “The Century List” – Metcalf’s selection of The Best Forty Canadian Short Story Collections of the Twentieth Century. I love arguing with it. As Brian Bethune of Maclean’s has said of my own Hooked, “there’s something that makes you want to throw it at a wall.” I shake my head at his exclusion of Rick Rofihe’s Father Must (1991).

Rofihe is the third Canadian – Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant – to have signed a “first right of refusal contract” with The New Yorker. Unfortunately, he fell into a deep pothole on the road to success. (He now publishes exclusively on the internet) but the 16 pieces in Father Must have all the qualities Metcalf teaches us to admire in lesser known, lesser talented writers.

Another book I like a lot because of my own passion for Cervantes is Douglas Glover’s The Enamoured Knight, a book-length meditation on Don Quixote and the formation of the novel.

The future. I know your book is more a reflection on the recent past, but one thing that surprised me is you didn't comment on some of the dramatic technological/market changes that have played havoc and been a powerful shaping tool of Canlit and publishing globally during that time. I thinking of things like the rise of online book selling, the internet generally, the rise of the big box booksellers and the rise of international media megacompanies and the drive to push blockbuster books (almost exclusively some would say).

More recently, the swift dominance of hand-held digital devices and the i-Pad, as a singular and powerful example, may literally push books right off the shelves. Others, like Philip Roth, are saying the end of the literary novel is nigh. Your book, on the other hand, is optimistic. Presumably not just about the Canadian novel but about literature generally. I don't mean to be a death eater, but what are your thoughts? Are we in an End of Culture perfect storm?

I do actually comment on the rise of big box stores, their obliteration of independent booksellers, and Indigo’s reinvention of itself as a Martha Stewart cerebral accessorizing consumer outlet, a Walmart of mental furnishings and the transformation of public libraries into infocenters. My comments are brief, obviously easy to overlook but pointed. I pay considerable attention to Henry James’s thinking about the future of the novel which I think is more accurate than Philip Roth’s in its final prognosis.

Roth is correct in forecasting the end of literary novels as bestsellers and their authors as celebrities but both those phenomena owed a great deal more to Henry Luce’s suborning of American literature to the political aims of his Time-Life empire than Roth, one of the last knights in its end games, considers.

My book is enthusiastic but not particularly optimistic. Novels are the best painkillers mankind has created, as James says, and as long as we’re alive and sentient, they’ll continue to do their work. We’ll all need to elevate our pain thresholds enormously to find any kind of personal satisfaction in living through the wrenching changes of the next two decades as the world’s centers of population shift in more dramatic ways than the collapse of the Soviet Union has pre-figured.

Since I’m convinced Canada will be in the foreground of the most crucial of those changes, I’m enthusiastically promoting those writers who seem to me to be the surest guides to Iyer’s “imaginative multiculturalism” – multiculturalism based on shared beliefs not shared roots, the defence of the natural order and human nature against ideology and the politics of identity, a fully human engagement with the Other.

As far as hand-held digital devices go, I’ve seen enormous changes in delivery systems for every form of communication in my lifetime. The latest system neither thrills nor offends me.

Final question. It was going to be: What do you think of HARRY POTTER? But I decided on something more personal. If I was gonig to pick a single best title from the past twenty-five years, my choice might be Douglas Glover's THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CAPTAIN N. I was really struck by that book, and Glover's work generally, as material that wrestled with familiar Canadian tropes in wholly unexpected ways. Particularly ways that didn't defend a Canadian nationalism, but complicated it, wrestled with it, forced it to confront international pressures, literary theory, philosophical concepts, the whole shebang. So if I had to pinpoint a disappointment with your book, it's that I would have been interested in hearing your take on that book and Glover's work in general. So, in the spirit of conversation, I'm asking: What do you think of Glover's ouevre?

Ooops! I owe Douglas Glover an apology. And you. And other readers. Glover has published three novels in addition to his critique of Cervantes, his essays, his five story collections and even though his first novel, Precious (1981), was on the short list for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and his third, Elle (2005), won the Governor General’s Award, I always think of him as a short story writer and one of the really good ones. And I admire him as a critic as noted above.

In his short stories, he’s at his best, his saddest and funniest when he is most Beckett-like. I should have made it plain in Hooked that Glover like David Carpenter and Audrey Thomas and Alistair MacLeod and Leon Rooke and …. who else am I missing out ? – are all writers whose novels cause problems (generally structural ones) for readers that their stories don’t.

If you reread what I quote Burgess saying about the necessity of a parabola in a novel (at the beginning of Hooked) you might see what I mean even if you disagree. The other, and more critical problem, is that all of theses writers lack restraint and gratify self-indulgence when they write at length and editors let them get away with it, time and again.

But Glover is owed a larger apology than the others because The Life and Times of Captain N. dropped below my radar. Blame fans like you! I’ve bought at least three copies over the years and let students borrow them and they’ve never been returned. I didn’t have a copy at hand and got sidetracked trying to figure out why Elle attracted the attention it did. Obviously, I couldn’t respond to Elle and quite forgot about the virtues of Captain N. You should have the last word. Tell me what do you think of Elle?

I’m tempted to give the last word to my wife (a not uncommon occurrence). I suggested Elle to her and she loved it. Thought it was hilarious. I liked it, but I didn’t admire it as much as The Life and Times of Captain N., which is one of the very few Canadian novels I consider a tour de force. I’d put Solomon Gurksy in that category, too.

But what did I think of Elle? It was an exercise in voice and an elaborately told joke. Elsewhere I’ve called Glover a Canadian dissident. I like the critical undermining of our nationalism – maybe the particular southern Ontario Protestant nationalism (Red Tory, United Empire Loyalism) that is both Glover’s heritage and mine.

I like the playfulness of the language and the historicism of Elle. The reader isn’t locked into history. One passage I remember notes how hundreds of years after the action a highway will pass across the same spot of land. I find that fun to read, and also a good reminder that the reverse it true, too. Where there are now highways, there were once hunting parties and canoes. Taken from a literary point of view, our writing can’t be based on imported tropes; it needs to be indigenous and wild.

I like your OurLit. It is, whatever it is.

Tony Burgess

Maybe you saw the movie. Yes, zombies and all. Or maybe not zombies. The following is quoted from Wikipedia.

At Rue Morgue's 2008 Festival of Fear expo, director Bruce McDonald stressed the victims of the virus detailed in the film were not zombies, calling them "Conversationalists". He described the stages of the disease:

There are three stages to this virus. The first stage is you might begin to repeat a word. Something gets stuck. And usually it's words that are terms of endearment like sweetheart or honey. The second stage is your language becomes scrambled and you can't express yourself properly. The third stage you become so distraught at your condition that the only way out of the situation you feel, as an infected person, is to try and chew your way through the mouth of another person.

One doesn't want to give too much away.

The following review and interview with the author first appeared in The Danforth Review.

*

Pontypool Changes Everything
by Tony Burgess
ECW Press, 1998

Oh, me. Oh, my. What a book we have here. A book about a zombie infestation in southern Ontario circa now, which empties out cities and makes citizens fearful of the language they speak. Pontypool Changes Everything provides yet more evidence that the newest generation of Canadian writers have moved away from the sickly National Project encouraged by arts funding council bureaucrats and post-Expo '67 flagwavers to a rainbow of experimentation of the most rewarding kind.

Burgess displays nary a trace of Northop Frye's "garrison mentality" in his loopy cannibalistic tale, the sequel to his earlier success, The Hellmouths of Bewdley, and second in a trilogy recently completed with the release of Caesarea. The only garrison in this novel is the one Burgess' characters build (physically or mentally) to ward off the flesh eaters and their language-based disease.

If you're wondering what it all means, you're probably asking the wrong question. The best fiction is more than meaningful, it's interesting. Provocative. Quizzical. Threatening to those who refuse to question the assumptions that underlie the quotidian. That is, the everyday.

Pontypool Changes Everything gets beneath those assumptions. It provides a startling new vision of the world that stares out at us from daily newspaper headlines and the bland repertoire of television programming. It is the best kind of novel and a tasty book to read.

*

TDR: In the past number of years, you have published the Pontypool Trilogy and a new short story collection, Fiction for Lovers. Have you always wanted to be a writer? Tell us a little bit about your background and how these books came to be.

TB: So I recognized early that something was wrong, I was definitely not having the same experience as other people around me, which would just be what it was except there was this peculiar making in the middle of it. Is that sensible? I may just be describing a creative impulse or something, however, I remember (and am aware of it still) being terrified. These were the beginnings for me. Being preschool age really, and feeling that the world was flinging itself to pieces but also noticing that it wasn't. I used to draw at this age, horrible violent, busy pictures that my parents would hide from people and worse. So for me all the elements, the project had begun then, later it became extreme lifestyles (hello) and, you know, lots of very, very disorganized living.

Writing these books is a relatively recent thing for me. They have all the elements that I remember clearly from a young age. In fact, I would have to say, I didn't properly come up with what I write, but I have been vigilant about the space where they are produced. It's a primal, rapid and feral place. Very quick, very awake. Scare the shit outta me. That much is true. Whether and how I can make it meaningful to anyone is another question. I can tell you I have failed miserably trying to make myself here at times and have paid direly for trying. I have a duty to ensure that readers don't understand entirely what I write in order to remind me and them that the book isn't really for us in the end.

Later, later you think about what formally you may have done, or who is thinking like you, you work in the family resemblance, you pretend it's behaving like literature cause you are roughly playing in that puddle. But the project hasn't changed at all for, like, ever. It was always this thing exactly. No content to speak of. The content (which includes style; who separated those two anyway?) degrades pretty rapidly, all of the books are phatic noise.

TDR: I was trying to think of an adjective to describe your fiction, and I couldn't think of one that suited. Your work has elements of slasher films, post-apocalyptic nightmares, science fiction, horror, and high-minded literary styling in the vein of William S. Burroughs. In your work, zombies haunt small-town Ontario and the populace is infected by an language-borne virus. I see much of this as a metaphor for frightening unseen forces that may or may not be influencing our lives and our world. There's also much humour; I want to make sure I don't forget to say that. Were you surprised to find yourself writing stuff like this ... or has this always been your modus operandi? (and how do you make sense of it? what are you '"up to"? if that isn't too blunt and reductive a question).

TB: No, no surprise that I write like this. Oh wee. Each of the elements you mention matter to me...except, you mention metaphor in your question and I don't really think in terms of metaphor...it goes to this: metaphor is a device (distracting) for looking at this world, and usually about the experience of being a person. Well, neither of those things are particularly interesting to me. I'm not what you'd properly call a person. When I'm writing I grant myself exceptional powers. Sometimes I want to write in a substandard fashion but have the occulted ambition to physically change the immediate vicinity of the book. Now, you might say "so what? You're fuckin nuts!" but I'm now going to be curious to see what I end up writing. This is partially what I've learned from badly made horror films. There are places that realize the unrealizable. We just don't notice it because it looks like failure.

Do this: rent "Phantasm" or "Tool Box Murders" or something and suspend your disbelief like you never have before. Believe that it is the world, not an incompetent version. (You will, because it matters to you, believe that somewhere along the process you'll meet your world again anyway, right? So don't worry, metaphorization is a stable insidious program.) Then that forks off for me this other question: if I'm not making metaphors, then what exactly am I dragging back here? Here's an intense experience that yes, did happen in the world, but it is alien to the world, so please, what can we do with it? Put it this way: I came by those books I wrote honestly.

TDR: I wonder if you could tell us about a couple of writers whose work makes you howl at the moon and what you like about them. What kind of work do you find yourself drawn to?

TB: The writers who made the biggest impression on me I read as teenager: Jarry, Leautreamont, Apollinaire, Genet, Robbe Grillet, Gide ... I also enjoyed modernist manifestoes, futurist, dadaists etc. I was young enough to hear in them a tall clarion. now I read, really, physics, but only physics that's over my head. I also like occult memory technicians: Ramus, Fuccini, Bruno Lull ... Later on I did a major in semiotics and enjoyed it lots. I think mostly of Genet, though. Everything is in Genet.

Also: Charlotte Bronte: Shirley. Because it starts out so stable then distorts in mysterious ways ... characters vaporize and duplicate, dog bites infect out of the dark, people slip into narcotic winters ... very nice.

TDR: I saw David Cronenberg speak at Ryerson recently. He spoke about how he was fascinated with insects when he was a kid, how complex and strange they were. He said you don't need to go into outer space to find alien life forms. They're right out there in your backyard. He said one of his themes is making the gross seem beautiful (not just "seem" but "be beautiful"). Making people see more of the world immediately around them. This might be a odd lead-up this question, but here goes: What do you think of the photos NASA is beaming back from Mars this week? does it look anything like your backyard?

TB: Of course, the first thing you think looking at those pictures, is well, um ... sorry NASA, but I coulda taken that shit drab picture with a week and winnebago (which is a bit like complaining at the gallery that your four year old coulda painted that Pollock). It's interesting listening to the adjectives, `amazing' `stunning' etc. as if the thing itself must be actualized using terms that are greatly different than the thing we see. It is `dull' so call it `astounding'. keep the distance between these two words growing and we will come to understand it is merely a vast space that makes this meaningful. 3D glasses to view a desert? I’ve attached pictures of my back yard [winter] [summer].

As for making the gross beautiful, yes, there's lot's of reason for doing that ... one is to shake off readers you don't like. It's a good vetting process.

TDR: Do you have a question you'd like me to pose to you?

TB: Ask you questions about the books ... or? gimme a clue.

TDR: I guess I mean, is there something you'd like to talk about in particular? I could ask you a question about [whatever it is] ...

TB: I’m thinking ...

In the meantime, look at this photo of me as a child on an Italian man's small pony in our backyard in Bramalea.

TDR: While you're thinking, maybe I could ask you about that complicated relationship: the book review, the book, the author, Virginia Wolfe's "ideal reader" (or maybe in this case ... the difference between Tony Burgess's ideal reader and Tony Burgess's actual readers). What has been the general reception of your books? How do you feel about the reviews of your work? What's your relationship with your books like once you've handed the manuscript to the publisher for the last time?

TB: Well, there's two exclusive experiences - writing the book then handing the book over (I insist that they are exclusive and they behave so). Writing the book is peculiar, private, hermetic and ... hmmm ... how do I put? ... naive. Handing it over is climbing up into the general desire not to have a bad experience today. Those are two very different things - I assure myself while I’m writing that no reader will ever touch it, and if they do, they will never get the copy I’m writing, they'll get their own smelly book bought copy. The ideal reader is never human. (There are things I insist on and I write to those things. I know insisting doesn't make it so, but it definitely changes the behavior of the book).

When the book goes away from me, it's pretty simple; it kinda ceases to exist...the book I wrote has already been received perfectly, it is already enormously popular and extremely funny to its intended reader (not me) ... so when it goes out, like I said, it's this other thing, this me searching daily for not bad experiences. `Oh, you read my book?' `Can't imagine you liked it' and, then pleasantly I discover they did. If they didn't they're just going to be nice.

Reviews have been a bit surprising. I'm surprised by the people who seemed to enjoy them as much as they do. That helps me terrifically to have a not bad day. If I get a bad review, usually someone saying I'm foolish and offensive, it bothers me less than I expect it to. I probably am foolish and offensive. I remember once being interviewed for Ponty and I was doing this bit at the time about how much I exploited my own incompetence to do all these fantastic things. I had a fairly sound shtick running at the time and was trotting it out with ponies for the fella. When the review-interview came out he said I was an incompetent writer. At first, I'm like, ouch, then I thought, hmm ... ok. That's pretty funny, as I read on, I realized that it was a fairly good review and the jarring use of the word `incompetent' was possibly meant for me to read. It also stood as a critical word, how could it not?

I don't read or look much at the book when it's got covers. Feels a bit alien and there's little I can do about what it does. I look for good conversation and friendly people. I like to think of someone finding the book in a cabin where they're staying, shoved on a small book shelf with five other books. In time, they are forced to read it and when they come back to work they can't forget this unsound little read and finally have to ask somebody, "have you ever heard of this...?" and the somebody says "no" and the person spends weeks trying to privately shake this book that, as time goes by, they're not sure they ever read at all.

TDR: Fiction for Lovers is a slight deviation from your previous work. For one thing, it features you and your family as characters. I enjoyed the new book a lot, by the way. I was curious that your narratives had moved closer to home, if in fact they have. There's some wonderful tender moments in the new book. Tenderness isn't something I remember from the others. Are you becoming more domestic? How do you feel your work is changing? What are you working on now?

TB: Hmmm ... well ... I'd like to oblige, but several of the more homey stories were drafted up before I wrote Pontypool ... All the books to me have always been about first home - that's whole bigger matter that tracks through to this one. Funny you should say that though, because I was thinking that Lovers was the coldest of the books. I'll catch up with this question later.

TDR: Cool. I'm interested you hear you expand on this....

TB: ... I think that this, Fiction for Lovers, is the coldest of the lot ... but I couldn't really say ... The others have themes of strange home, leaving home, trying to return home and making, like Satan, a home out of yourself, but in this one the me is actually at home, so a signal is automatically sent. And that signal is, ok, now we will finally deal with ourselves and it will be good for us, i.e., the stabbing and the feeding of people to dogs.

Also, it is the point in the music where I should say hi to Corm. I'll probably give him a shout later this mornin' ... but I'm sure he'll like the `hello'. Hello Corm! He secretly despises me, but I don't care. In fact, I like his books so much, get this, and this is true, when I went to Wales recently I had him promise that if the terrorists get me, that he'd write a book and publish it under my name. I made him swear and seeing as it's a death wish, he's gotta honor it, right? Doesn't have to be a good book, just get it out fast. So, hey, since you know about the pact, you pressure him to do this when the terrorists get me. In fact, fuck it, he should have one ready to go, don't you think, just in case? You're right. I gotta call Corm.

p.s. Corm is Derek McCormack.