With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversation with Anita Rau Badami, Lorna Goodison, and Diane Schoemperlen: A Mutually Reinforcing Cycle

My whole life I've been interested in connecting things that don't appear to belong together. I wanted to create something out of the details and objects jostling around in my mind, to ring words out of my visually intense environment. Visual art always seemed the natural response when I strained at articulation. I was introduced to collage early on in elementary school and was compelled to arrange images to convey my desired meaning. Eventually I began oscillating between image and text, prompting an interest in how the visual and verbal function together.

Reading through The Kingston WritersFest program a few weeks before the festival, I came upon With Brush and Pen, Readings and Conversations with Lorna Goodison, Anita Rau Badami, and Diane Schoemperlen, all writers who have a parallel practice as visual artists. I can't describe how excited I was to be in attendance at this event.

All of the writers agreed there's something visually present in all language, a feeling under words. Anita suggested that “ all writing should be painterly,” and that there is a, “mutually beneficial dialogue between literature and painting.” It is interesting to observe how each writer came to this dialogue between image and text: Anita recently returned to school to study fine arts, while Lorna Goodison started out as a visual artist and studied in New York at the Art Students League, and Diane Schoemperlen is self taught and has been making collages for many years. Their different approaches at different times seems to be evidence for the flexibility of experience and creation. These writers have taken up the invisible dialogue between the visual and verbal, and incorporated it into their work. It is a process of capturing, internalizing and expressing.

A member of the audience asked, “ what do you want people to look at first, the illustration or the text?” Each writer agreed it doesn't matter. It is not the approach that matters but the affect. I'd further this by acknowledging that one art does not consume the other— it is a movement. The Roman poet Horace wrote in his Ars Poetica (13 B.C) the dictum “Ut pictura poesis”— “as is painting, so is poetry.” I think he is describing the movement of artistic composition, the performance of singular parts acting as a whole in the absence of a frame. The edges may not align exactly, but we can scissor them to meet in ways that expand our understanding of creation.

International Marquee with J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster: “The Miraculous Strangeness of Being

A few years ago Paul Auster sent J.M. Coetzee a letter proposing they correspond to each other in an open ended dialogue on subjects that interested them, “ let's strike sparks off each other,” he said. And so, a few years later here I am sitting in the balcony of the Grand Theatre in Kingston watching as Coetzee and Auster take the stage. They each sit in their respective arm chairs, Auster puts his glasses on as Coetzee smoothly removes his own spectacles and places them on the table.

Lord Byron wrote, “letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.” Surely this describes the sampling of work Coetzee and Auster read. The first subject they explored during their reading was friendship. Coetzee observes, “male friends tend not to talk to each other about how they feel. If you do not tell your friends how you feel, how can they know? Friends can exist in this ambiguous state for years.” Paul responds by sharing his experience of moving away from a boyhood friend. And how when he talked to his little friend on the phone, he felt what he could only compare to the way he felt speaking to girls he liked as a young man. He continues, “Before our erotic lives are formed we do not make the distinction between love and friendship..” Paul says that he believes that, “we always loose the friendship of those who loose our esteem, and the best and most lasting friendships stand on admiration.” Coetzee then introduces marriage and relationships with is observation that, “ A man takes a woman to bed to be friends with each other. A man cannot be friends first because there's too much unspoken in the air.” With the introduction of women Auster offers that friendship outside of marriage is too static and polite. Marriage is above all a conversation, a continual work in progress.

Coetzee introduces a new letter on the “fittingness or unfittingness of names.” He relates, “Your name is your destiny; your name speaks your destiny. Only on your deathbed will you know what it is to be your name.” Auster responds that like a number, a name can evoke a whole archaeology of your past. There is so much in this discussion that I admire, namely their stark honesty. Their words enveloped like a tight embrace, allowing me as a listener to slow into contemplation.

Their collaboration investigates the apparitional relationship we have with others and our customs. They delve into the regular movement of our lives, of our memories and brings their ideas and discourse to a wider audience. Their enquiry cuts deep into the things that most define us, and the ways in which we seek to define ourselves in relation to others. Coetzee and Auster have created a volume of work that establishes letter writing as genre unto itself, like poetry or novel writing.

Little Comrades Book Launch: “The Rough Voyage of Childhood”

The June 26, 2012 launch of Laurie Lewis's Little Comrades was, hands down, one of the largest turn-outs I have witnessed for a book launch. The room was packed; there wasn't even space to stand, so people collected outside in the lobby of Kingston's Marine Museum. This memoir, the first of several, details Laurie's unique childhood growing up in a Communist prairie family and her experiences moving alone with her mother to New York during America's anti-Communist postwar years.

Despite coming from a family of writers, for many years Laurie didn't write. At least not until she took some creative writing courses with Carolyn Smart. After receiving positive feedback from students and Carolyn alike, Laurie found herself scribbling away.

Laurie's publishing debut at the age of 80 reminds me of something Annie Dillard said while discussing the craft of memoir, “The rushing of time wakes you...It rages beside you, down its swollen banks, and when it wakes you you're so startled you fall in. When you wake up, you notice that you're here.” Time, like a raging river, can swell beyond its banks, and certainly with age comes a multitude of life stories impatiently waiting to be told.

You can find great things when entering someone's historical landscape. For me, reading a good memoir generates the realization that we are all history makers; when we entered this world, life was already ongoing and out entrance will shape what happens next.

Laurie mentioned that she hopes her book will provide a window into a historical period, and surely this honest, fiercely intelligent narrative does. André Malraux suggested,“It could be that one of the most important functions of art is to make men [and women] aware of the greatness they do not know they have in themselves.” Laurie's story is bursting at the seams with greatness, and I'm looking forward to reading more.

(This post, now modified, first appeared on the Kingston WritersFest website in 2011)

Interview with Poet Sarah Tsiang: “Everything, He Said, is a Way of Remembering”

Yi-Mei Tsiang (also known as Sarah Tsiang) was kind enough to answer some questions about her debut book of poetry, Sweet Devilry. I first read it a few months ago, and I find it is a book I often go back to while writing.

Tsiang has compiled poems that make the reader want to live more intensely, with a greater awareness of life. The variety of ways in which the poems struggle free of convention and simple reformulation is impressive. With an emphasis on individual experience, this collection speaks to a world wider than it creates, to a world whose coherence can only be approached through man made gestures: poetry, an experience beyond thought.

Can you tell me a little about your new book of poetry?

It’s called Sweet Devilry and it covers a range of subjects, from motherhood to dealing with death. I don’t know why I find this question so hard—sometimes each poem seems so separate it’s hard to find the common thread that runs through it all. Whenever I think of what I’d like to do though, I think of Susan Musgrave urging her students to write with tenderness. That’s what I’ve tried for.

Can you tell me a bit about your editorial process? How important is a writing group to the process?

My husband is almost always my first reader, and he’s the best, most intense reader I’ve ever had. I’ve grown as a writer at the same time that he’s grown as an editor and so we waste no time on niceties. He may be my harshest critic, but he’s also my greatest support and my biggest fan.

My writing group is my lifeline to sanity. When I first moved to Kingston, not knowing anyone, I decided that I could really use a writing group. So I made up some posters and stuck them in the public library. That was 5 years ago, and my writing group has now flourished into an amazing tight-knit group of great writers (and fantastic editors). The group, christened The Villanelles, doesn’t hesitate to have a ten minute discussion on an individual word in a poem. There’s no cosseting or false praise, but the group is very supportive and always aims to help the writer find a way into the poem they were trying to write. I have poems I never would have written if not for the deadlines of my writing group. We hold each other to account and that’s a great thing; it’s rare to find this kind of mixture of love and no-holds-barred critic outside of a family unit.

Your work seems to suggest a strong engagement with your environment rather than uphold the Romantic notion of the solitary writer. Is the reciprocal movement in your poetry attempting to address certain persons or a community?

I’d like to think that poetry is more dialogue than soliloquy, though I don’t know how true that is. When I first fell in love with poetry I had that sense of recognition, the tingle you get when you meet someone and you know you’ll be good friends. There’s this great poem by Roo Borson in which she’s arguing with George Bowering about why she loves a poem by his dad.

"...after dinner we all went over to the reading, where George read a wonderful poem about his father and a bowl of tomato soup. When I told him I loved the poem he said everyone has memories of a father eating something, even if not tomato soup: that is, the poem could be lovable only if people made their own substitutions...whereupon deep inside me a miniature person stood up and shouted No! -- not so loud as to disturb anyone, mind you, but No! -- because love won't abide substitutions, and what the poem made me love was his father, not to mention tomato soup." -- "George Bowering" By Roo Borson

So in that way, I think, most of us writers are trying to reach out and connect with others through our own experiences; experiences which are simultaneously shared and unique.

What was the motivation behind the devastatingly beautiful fairytale poems?

Disney. They do such an awful job of removing the philosophical from children’s stories. The original telling of The Little Mermaid, for example, is so much about sacrifice and the promise (or desertion) of the eternal. As a mom, I find myself reading these original tales and then seeing the mangled corpse that Disney movies leave behind. So I think it was part a indignant reaction to Disney and partly just because we’re naturally influenced by what we’re reading. I’m not the first to re-write fairy tales (by a long shot) but I couldn’t resist engaging with the beauty and terror of fairy tales.

What book of poetry do you most often go back to while writing?

I’m going to cheat and name two books: Earth After Rain by Sheri Benning and Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace. They’re books I’ll never get over.

Tell me about some of your current literary influences?

I’ve been exclusively reading poets named Sue. You know, Sue Macleod, Susan Elmslie, Sue Sinclair, Susan Musgrave. I am currently working on putting together an anthology for Oolichan books called “Desperately Seeking Susan (poems)” due out in 2012. I’m passionate about encouraging more people to expand their Sue-based reading.

What role do you think art/poetry plays in a childs development? I ask because you frequently mention how much motherhood has sparked your creativity/desire to write poetry.

I think art, poetry, literature, and bug study are all essential in a child’s development. I often think it’s funny that so many people find poetry inaccessible since we’re weaned on it. Our first introduction to language is in the beautiful lines from Margaret Wise-Brown and Dr. Seuss. Children understand that poetry is meant to be felt before it’s understood. I love that about kids.

You also write children's books. Can you tell us a little about that?

My first published book was A Flock of Shoes with Annick Press. It was actually inspired by a line in the last poem of my collection Sweet Devilry. That seems to be a bit of a pattern because I have another picture book coming out in 2012, Stone Hatchlings which was inspired by a poem from the always brilliant Jason Heroux. Picture books and poetry are inexorably linked for me, they’re simply two sides of the same coin.

I’m launching Dogs Don’t Eat Jam and Other Things Big Kids Know at the WritersFest this year. It’s a book that celebrates the amazing accomplishments of young children, as well as the bond between siblings. I feel very lucky to be paired with the amazingly talented Qin Leng. It’s a strange and wonderful thing to see your thoughts painted for you. I’m really looking forward to the launch because there’s simply nothing better than reading to kids.

Recently your daughter held a fundraiser for famine victims in east Africa. Tell me more!

Abby constantly makes me feel unproductive! She’s 6 and this summer she held an art show/lemonade stand/cookie sale to raise money for famine relief in the horn of Africa. She decided on Doctors Without Borders and got all of her friends (as well as children we didn’t know) to donate art for the show. The people of Kingston were incredibly generous. In a few hours she had raised over $1,500, which was matched by the Federal government. We’re thinking of doing another one next year!

(This post, now modified, first appeared on the Kingston WritersFest website in 2011)

Beckoning Peal of the Blogosphere

“Most experiences are unsayable,” wrote Rainer Marie Rilke in a letter to a young poet.“They come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit.” Yet we continue, as humans always have, to express ourselves through different ways of saying the unsayable.

Until Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, I can only imagine how people communicated. I visualize dirtied peasants shouting from their rooftops; most likely a left over reel somewhere upstairs from Monty Python's The Holy Grail. Apart from songs and stories told around the campfire or the dinner table, there really weren't many options unless you were a part of the privileged elite who had monks spend years tediously recording and preserving documents (a belated thanks from me to them). Luckily we have come a long way in democratizing communication. Not only do we have the printed word but also a digital world with an endless supply of information.

I like to think, indeed I often do, that books and the digital world can coexist peacefully, perhaps even reflect each other in interesting ways. That is where this blog comes into the digital picture. A blog can transform a reader into an active agent— in the same way that book clubs and readings do. So I've decided to blog about the happenings of the Kingston literary scene. So much happens here, including Kingston WritersFests, Thrive reading series hosted by Erin Foley, monthly readings at the Artel hosted by Bruce Kauffman , yearly writer-in-residence at Queen's University, and many fantastic book launches hosted by our local indie book store, Novel Idea. This is also a way to motivate myself to attend more events as I've disappeared recently from most of the excitement.

-Ashley-Elizabeth Best
May 29, 2012

(This post, now modified, first appeared on the Kingston WritersFest website in 2011)