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New WONK Event in the WONK

WONK has good news! Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst is coming to read in Wetaskiwin on October 26 at the Pipestone Food Co. Things will get rolling around 7:30.

 

Who: Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst (go to this link to see some artwork www.hiemstra-vanderhorst.com)

What: Visual artist and writer Jessica Hiemstra-van der Horst will be reading from her brilliant “Apologetic for Joy”.

Where: Pipestone Food Co. 4911-51 street, Wetaskiwin, AB T9A – 2A4

When: Oct. 26, 2011 – 7:30 pm

Why: Because it will be awesome!

 

 

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Call for Submissions for WONK8 (and beyond)

Momentum is an funny thing. In strictly physical terms, it is simply a measurement of the velocity of an object multiplied by its mass. Applying this definition to WONK of late makes us realize that, because of how rapidly we lost our momentum, we are neither very heavy or very fast. We hope to change all of this with our upcoming issue (W8), aiming to, once again, gather a mass and velocity that is representative of the great artists and writers that have graced our publication thus far.

The only way we know how to do this is to put out another great issue, and the only way to do that is to get great stories, poems, and pictures from you. Right now we are flirting with a handwritten issue. This would see all of the poems and prose written in the authors own hand. Of course, and as usual, we don’t expect you (or us) to be hemmed in by themes: if you have a great submission that is typed, please send it in and we will fold it in our arms with as much love as a themed submission.

If you are a writer and are interested in submitting to Wonk, please see the submissions page for details. Happy writing!

WONK

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Glen Sorestad on Writing in Nature and the Nature of Writing: an Interview

Back in October, WONK had the privilege of hosting a poetry reading with two fantastic poets and orators, Jenna Butler and Glen Sorestad. The night of poetry was well attended and all were glowing with the embers thrown by Jenna and Glen’s reading. Shortly before the event, WONK’s Jonathan Meakin gave us an in depth interview with Jenna Butler where we learned about Jenna’s processes, as both a writer and a publisher. Recently, WONK caught up with Glen Sorestad with hopes of learning a bit about the things that impact his poetry and how, in turn, his  poetry impacts the world.

Glen Sorestad is a Saskatoon based poet with a large body of work, spanning several decades. His poetry has been translated widely and is enjoyed in many languages, throughout the world. Glen has been a recipient of many awards for his poetry, the most recent being his investment in the Order of Canada. Like Butler, Sorestad has been engaged in both the writing and publishing end of poetry, the latter through his establishment of Thistledown Press, which he and his wife, Sonia, ran until about ten years ago when they passed on a  twenty-five year legacy of ground-breaking  publishing, one that continues today. WONK caught up with Glen via email and he was kind enough to provide insightful answers to the following questions.

WONK: As I was reading What We Miss (Thistledown Press), I often found myself  feeling as though I was taking a long walk through the seasons of a year, each interval with its own unique sense of description. Does your poetry move with the seasons? Is it inclined, like many northern dwellers, to undergo mood swings from season to season? How do seasonal changes affect your writing and habits, are they part of the process of writing or are they, as for many of us, simply obstacles in the way of getting on with life?

GS: Yes, in many respects my poetry is definitely in tune with the seasons and that is because the natural world has always been a very important part of my life, especially since I grew up from age ten in a rural area of east-central Saskatchewan.  Being attuned to nature has always been important to me and I would imagine that anyone who reads through the entirety of my poetry would very likely suggest that the mood or tone of the writing is often affected by the seasons. I am not at all convinced that my writing habits change greatly during certain seasons, but I do know that I find writing comes more easily and more frequently whenever I am away from home and especially if I am in a more natural setting – in the mountains, at the seashore, at a lake writing colony. In the dead of winter, I seldom write very much new work (unless I’m somewhere else), but instead choose to work on the rewriting and revising process. Winter, it seems, is for hibernation. Or escape.

WONK: Your latest collection of poems, What We Miss, is one of over twenty that you have had published. With so much writing experience, is there anything about writing poetry that still surprises you? Does anything ever leap onto the page and catch you off guard? If so, what types of ideas or images are they, and what do you do with them?

GS: One of the joys of the writing process for me is that the element of surprise is never very far away.  Sometimes I think it is a genuine surprise, right at the beginning, that the poems still come up from that mysterious well of remembered images, voices, tales, impressions. The unexpected word or phrase that leaps onto the page and catches me entirely off-guard, the suddenly remembered image (now where did that come from?), the phrase that reaches back to childhood, anything that seems to appear as if by some mysterious and unheard calling, something unbidden that offers itself to the poem and finds its way into the flow of the lines. Surprise keeps me writing. If the day should come when I am no longer surprised by things I write, then I expect that will be the signal to quit writing altogether. When I write something new, I want and expect to be surprised by the unexpected. I anticipate it and I’m disappointed if it doesn’t happen.

WONK: As we are — beautifully and sometimes hilariously– reminded in Road Apples (Rubicon Press), you and your wife travel extensively. During those trips, have you ever come upon a place that threatens to pull you from Saskatoon permanently? If such a place exists, what type of place is it? What is it about it that beckons you? What is it about home that makes you stay?

GS: I love to travel and explore different places with their different landscapes and features and there are times when I am in another land when I can very well believe for a moment that I could live happily in that very different place. Besides, I am of Nordic stock and people of my heritage seem to be able to make their homes quite happily anywhere – and do. But this feeling doesn’t last very long for me. The prairies have been my home now for over 60 years and I need this particular landscape to nourish me and to keep me on an even keel.  In the end, I can’t imagine leaving Saskatoon, other than winter reprieves, for it has grown around me like a comfortable jacket or sweater. It holds me. Friends, long established relationships – they hold me, too.

Having said that, I find New Mexico an intriguing place because in so many ways it feels comfortable to me when I’m there and I’ve been visiting it on an almost yearly basis for close to 30 years. It is part of the Great Plains and may have many geographical differences, but it has a familiar feel like an old glove. When I am among New Mexicans, it feels very close to being among prairie folk from Saskatchewan or Alberta. It seems to me that we share similar worldviews and attitudes influenced by the great openness and the distances, that huge sky, the incredible play of light and landscape.

WONK: Your poetry has been translated into several different languages and is enjoyed all over the world. Does this international readership surprise you in any way? What do you think draws a reader in Norway or Slovenia to poems that were conceived, born, and raised on the Canadian prairies?

GS: No, I cannot say I am surprised to have an international readership because most of my poetry is about people and place, along with the natural world — something to which all readers can relate. Walking my morning round through the seasons in Lakewood Park is not much different from someone walking a familiar neighbourhood route through the seasons anywhere else in the world, be it across the heathered hills of Scotland, or along a fjord-side path in Norway, or through Central Park in New York.

Of course, there will be a few things that would clearly identify my poems as Canadian, but some purely Canadian or localized references are not going to stand in the way of a reader’s enjoyment of the poem. Part of our understanding of the landscapes and features of other countries has come to us through our reading of poems by poets like Burns or Wordsworth or Yeats or Yevtushenko. We have often carried our “imagined” visuals of certain places before we ever come to visit them

WONK: In June you were appointed to and in November invested in the Order of Canada. Although this is far from the first award you have received, how does, if at all, such an award affect the way you write? Do you feel any added pressure to be more or less of anything in your writing when you are given such a formal reminder of the impact that your writing has?

GS: While any form of award is always appreciated by any writer as a form of recognition and affirmation, I don’t believe that it has, nor should it have, any effect whatsoever on one’s writing. Awards have to do with the public individual and writing has to do with the private individual. The Order of Canada will not change the way I write or what I write in any way, shape or form, nor should it cause me to second-guess anything that I choose to write, or that chooses to be written. It is strictly a public designation that has nothing to do with the creative process.

WONK: Over the years of your literary career, what has changed the most about your writing? On the other hand, what has stayed constant throughout this same time, what are the things you have been unwilling to let go of or to revise? What would you like to change, but have been unable to.

GS: I am probably not the best judge of how my poetry may have changed over the forty-some years I have been writing. I’m sure there are many obvious changes, such as my tendency to use more traditional stanzaic forms more often now than the free-flowing and loose line structures that were part of my earliest writing. I also have tended to take a more traditional approach to the punctuating of poems, as well as the use of capitalization, as I wrote more and learned more about my craft. I would hope that an objective reader would see the changes as being for the better.

What has stayed constant for me are the main themes or concerns of my writing. I am still writing about what interests me and that is people — the always-fascinating interactions of humans trying to understand one another and themselves. I am still responding to the natural world as I did in my earliest poems and have been doing ever since because that world of nature and the turn of the seasons continues to seize my attention and my interest.

I don’t know how to answer the rather intriguing question of what I may have been unwilling to let go of or to revise. I am a tireless reviser and rewriter and so I just accept that anything I write will have to go through the process of assiduous, ongoing revision until I’m satisfied. I won’t let go of a poem until I’m ready, but I haven’t held anything back for a reason other than that I didn’t think it was good enough. Some poems just aren’t meant to be – and I accept that. I just move on to another poem.

What would I like to change? There are many published poems that I have been sorely tempted to rewrite entirely and in my last Selected Poems (Leaving Holds Me Here) I did make some changes in earlier poems. But I am beginning to feel that perhaps earlier poems ought to stand as a measure of what and how I wrote at that time because I am afraid that to alter poems after 40 years is to impose an entirely different set of poetic values on the earlier me. I think I’ll just let them be whatever they are.

WONK: Thank you

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The Condiment Queen by Becca Dextraze

Story by Becca Dextraze | Illustration by Brittany Nelson


I am the Condiment Queen. I love mustard. I love mayonnaise. But most of all I love ketchup.

One Saturday morning, as usual, my father asked me if I would like to go to Tim Horton’s for breakfast. Immediately my mind traveled to the past visits we had to Timmy’s.

We would walk in, order two sausage breakfast sandwiches, a medium black coffee and a small ice cap. Occasionally we order a hash brown or two and lots of ketchup. We collect the food and sit down in my favorite section in the coffee shop. My father will take a few packages of ketchup from me before I use them all. I apply a packet of ketchup to every layer in the sandwich and place a bit of ketchup on the napkin to dip into. By this time my father is already half finished his sandwich. It is not that he is a fast eater, I am just quite slow in preparing mine. I begin to eat. All too soon all the ketchup is gone. I smile at dad and he smiles back knowingly as I stand up and take a few steps toward the pick up counter.

The reason I have a favorite section in the shop is because it is so close to the counter. I stand there till one of the employees notice me and ask me what I would like. I ask them for about five more ketchups.

Usually I don’t have to do so because on Saturdays our favorite employee is there, Elaine. When she sees me at the counter she immediately goes to the ketchup stash located at the sandwich table and brings me a good 10 ketchup. Finally, after my father begins commenting on how we should be leaving, I finish, dispose of the garbage and wave at Elaine.

My mind returned to the present. I smiled at my dad and said we should take Elise. I thought about how there never really seemed to be enough ketchup as I was getting ready to leave. And then it came to me.

I ran down the stairs past my dad and opened the fridge. And there it was. Shining, beautifully full to the brim and radiating joy. I reached in and carefully took it out. I was going to bring my own bottle of ketchup so there wouldn’t be any need to get up and ask for more.

My father notices the bottle once we are in the truck and laughs his deep, contagious laugh. Elise and I join in. We reach Timmy’s and order the usual. Elaine spots me and the ketchup bottle and begins to laugh. We go sit at our table and find Uncle David and his boss at the table next to us. He also begins to tease me when he sees what I have brought. For the first time in all my history with Tim Horton’s there was enough ketchup on my beloved breakfast sandwich. Still Elaine teases me about it and Uncle David too.

Rebecca “Joe” Dextraze (story) resides in The Awesome Town, more commonly known as Wetaskiwin. She is thirteen and in grade 8 with the School Of Hope CyberSchool. She dances at DanceFX (aka the most amazing dance studio on earth), and wrote this epic story in grade 7. She was born on an island, Grand Cayman, and likes pickles. Consequently, she is one of the most amazing children on earth.

Brittany Nelson (illustration) is an aspiring artist slash massage therapist slash banker living in Wetaskiwin, Alberta.

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Field Work: An interview with Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980, but has spent most of her life on the prairies of Western Canada.  Her work has garnered a number of awards, including the James Patrick Folinsbee Prize, and has been produced by the CBC. Her poetry has appeared a number of books, anthologies and periodicals.  Butler is the author of three short collections of poetry, Forcing Bloom, weather, and Winter Ballast, in addition to a new trade collection from NeWest Press, Aphelion.

Butler’s work will also be featured in the upcoming WONK7 and in person as she reads with fellow poet Glen Sorestad in Wetaskiwin on October 7. In anticipation of this occasion, WONK’s Jonathan Meakin talked to Jenna about poetry, publishing and the challenges of doing both in rural Alberta.

WONK: Writer, editor, publisher, scholar, instructor – clearly, there is much that keeps you busy. Do you see these roles as complementary and/or interrelated?

JB: Most definitely interrelated. I’m very fortunate to be able to teach within my discipline, creative writing; I’ve taught English for several years at high school and university levels, but there’s something about teaching creative writing specifically that allows me to bring the enthusiasm I feel, as a writer experimenting in her craft, to the classroom. I’m finding the teaching and practice of creative writing mutually enriching.

I’ll also happily admit to being what they call a professional student. I find I am most excited about teaching when I am concurrently learning something new. I’m very close to completing my PhD, and after I’ve given myself a bit of downtime following the defense, I’ve got some further courses picked out that I want to run with! (Nothing to do with literature; I want to spend some time learning about herbal medicine.) But I don’t think I could function quite right as a teacher if I wasn’t simultaneously being pushed as a student. I’m in that same actively engaged mindset (and I’m also more aware of the time stresses that students experience).

As an editor, I feel very privileged to have worked with a huge range of poets from around the world. That’s exposed me to a vast pool of very diverse writing, and just as that impacts the scope of the little poetry press I run, it’s certainly impacted me as a writer. It’s an honor to read such a variety of manuscripts. Yes, some aren’t quite as polished as they need to be, but there are a lot of gems out there, too. That’s reaffirming as both a writer and an editor. I love to encounter new work, as a poet, that absorbs and challenges me. If I have the chance to act as editor for such a collection, well, that’s the icing on the cake, and I get to have fantastic, in-depth discussions with poets whose work I really admire.

WONK: With three chapbooks (Forcing Bloom, weather, and Winter Ballast) already to your credit, your first trade collection, Aphelion, was published by NeWest this year. How have you enjoyed these different modes of publishing? Have the expectations – yours? the publishers? the literary community? – been different?

JB: I really love the chapbook format — the “taster” nature of it, the immediacy. You get to leave your readers (all going well!) wanting more. It’s a perfect format for learning how to refine a series, to polish and cut until the bones are where they need to be and there’s no unnecessary excess. There’s no room for poems that aren’t quite working with the rest of the series. In many ways, the chapbook experience was invaluable in the creation of the manuscript for NeWest; I was a great deal more aware of how tight I needed to make the collection and how I wanted to structure it. And the first book experience was amazing. That’s thanks in no small part to the folk at NeWest, who have been fabulous from day one. I’ve been really happy just to learn what I can as I go along, about both the publication and promotion processes, and to take up experiences and opportunities as they’re offered. For instance, I was absolutely honored to launch Aphelion with Robert Kroetsch, as he celebrated the launch of his latest collection Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. I was also invited to read with the wonderful Bert Almon, and now there’s the WONK reading/launch with Glen Sorestad, another poet I have long read and admired. There have been these gifts all the way through the first book process. It’s been about staying open to experiences and being grateful for the support of the literary community around me.

WONK: You are also the founding editor of Rubicon Press. Do you view your work as a chapbook publisher as an expression of your artistic practice or something else entirely? (And feel free to trouble that easy recourse to an either/or binary.)

JB: Glad you said it, because I’m going to land squarely in the middle of the binary here. Part of what I founded Rubicon Press to do was to work with the poets I publish to create the books the poets had in mind when they wrote their respective manuscripts. We all do that — we all imagine how we’d like things laid out, images that have influenced our manuscripts, colours, textures, etc. I work with poets to make these ideas a reality. That can mean discussing the nitty-gritties of paper texture, colour, weight, font, ink type, etc. It can also mean working one-on-one with a photographer or artist who has donated images for the chapbook. So it’s not really all my own artistic practice. Sure, I bring my own ideas to the table, but it’s not about me.  I want to engage in a dialogue with the poets I work with, the back-and-forth of creating something meaningful together. There’s a great dynamic in that.

WONK: Although your family emigrated from England when you were a child, you have remained active in literary, academic, and publishing communities on both sides of the Atlantic. What fuels your efforts to maintain and deepen your connection to both Canada and England?

JB: Many things. As a small-press editor, there’s so much good poetry out there. There are a number of writers in Europe doing fabulous things, and I want to immerse myself in their work. Kathleen Jamie. Matthew Hollis. Denise Riley. So many more. I want to read additional work like theirs and eventually get into publishing more of it, if I can.

My time at the University of East Anglia, during the year my husband and I lived in Norwich while I was completing my MA, introduced me to a very supportive and innovative academic community. I didn’t want to lose touch with that UK community when I moved back home to Edmonton, and so I’ve striven to maintain contact in terms of taking part in both conferences and readings overseas. I’ll be back in England again in the spring.

I’ll always choose to live in Canada, though. I love the literary scene in Alberta; in Edmonton especially — it’s deeply supportive and encourages writers from a number of different genres and groups to get together and form community.

Finally, my husband and I run a small organic farm here in Alberta during the summers, and much of my writing comes down to a deep connection to the landscapes that ground me. I might live away from the people and places that are home to me for short periods of time, but I’ll never choose to move permanently.

WONK: Aphelion offers two groups of poems under the headings ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’. Would you like to comment on these groupings as a structural or thematic principle?

JB: Each section was written in the opposite place: I wrote the ‘North America’ section while living in Norwich and the ‘Europe’ section once I’d returned to Canada. I found the old saying true: it’s much easier to see clearly at a remove. Trying to write about a place while living in it didn’t work for me, but writing about it in absentia was very generative.

The poems in ‘North America’ are different from the ‘Europe’ section in both structure and content, though all the poems in the book, in some way, connect to the theme of finding/building home. The poems in ‘North America’ abstain from a recognizable rhyme scheme and flirt with breath and form — in particular, the anti-ghazal, à la Phyllis Webb. There’s a great receptivity in Canada to poetry that plays with form and sound, and the ‘North America’ section of the book reflects this openness.

In contrast, the ‘Europe’ section contains more internal rhyme, a gesture back to the centuries of literary tradition that ground poetry there. This section makes reference to Greek myth and legend and connects to the varied landscapes of Europe that I feel I am just beginning to know.

WONK: There are many resonant images and ideas throughout Aphelion. The close of “Salt Spring Island”, a poem dedicated to the memory of Lilo Berliner and Wilson Duff, still haunts me with its evocation of a paradoxical form of sight:

i begin to see you
less clearly     more truly

Does this perspective inform your recovery of the lives of women featured in your new sequence, “Lepidopterists”?

JB: Absolutely. So much of my writing is focused on the little-known story, the tale forgotten or buried. In “Salt Spring Island,” I am referring both to the way in which we oversimplify our perceptions of others, and the far too simple view of suicide as an unvoicing (Lilo Berliner killed herself by walking into the sea, but challenged this concept of suicide as silence by leaving her correspondence between her and her friend, a previous suicide, on Phyllis Webb’s doorstep). Thus, the oversimplified view as untrue, as too easy.

In “Lepidopterists,” I look at a number of women in Western Canada whose stories are either relatively little known by the general public or completely buried in time. During the writing process, the more I read and listened to the stories of these women, the more I realized that there were layers upon layers there in the telling. There were women whose traditional ways of life were being destroyed, whose entire sense of identity was being rewritten by an incoming patriarchal settler culture. There were immigrant women who were expected to create “home” for their husbands and families, but who struggled bitterly with what “home” meant when all property was in the man’s name and it was often the man who was acknowledged as having a deeper and more visible connection to the land he was working. So many paths, so many stories, overwriting each other, layering each other out.

WONK: I have the impression that considerable research in areas as diverse as botany, ecology, geology, entomology, etc. informs your work. Is this research a conscious activity? Or is it simply a matter of voracious reading and a hunger to understand and represent the physical, cultural, and political landscapes to which you are drawn coming together as an unconscious activity?

JB: It’s a bit of both. I read a lot, and widely, across a number of genres and subjects. I’ve loved being outdoors since I was a child, and between years of backcountry hiking, camping, gardening, and now the farm, I’ve devoured many hundreds of texts on diverse elements of the outdoors. My grandfather made his living as a gardener and a great deal of his interest in the outdoors rubbed off on me: the studies of botany and ecology are second nature. I’d been perking on the idea of writing something like the “Lepidopterists” series for years, ever since reading Nabokov’s Butterflies and beginning to understand how Nabokov perceived himself as a lepidopterist first and a writer second; as attached to the natural world first, and as a recorder of that connection second. So many of the stories in that book are tied to his own childhood in Russia — I began to imagine how that connection to lepidoptery and the sense of “opening a landscape” through the capture of specimens for study might be different on the Canadian prairies; might apply to women. And so there was research involved there to connect the different species of butterfly from the various prairie zones to the corresponding prairie women who lived approximately during the same era as each butterfly’s discovery. In that case, research came before writing — it had to, to correctly inform the poems.

WONK: Would you like to comment on your writing process?  Do you begin with quickly written rough hewn drafts? Or do you do other, more exploratory forms of writing as a way of finding your way in/through/around ideas or images you may be mulling over?

JB: My writing process is erratic. I can’t claim to be one of those disciplined few who sit down to write X number of minutes per day. Having written for years, I find that daily practice isn’t my rhythm, and I don’t produce work I want to keep that way. I spend a lot of time filling up on the things that drive me: being outdoors, working with my hands, listening to music, reading. And then, when I feel that I’m full up and can’t function without sitting down to write, I write. I have to. I make the time.

I always jump right into drafts, and — cardinal sin! — I only write on the computer. I save right over top of old drafts and keep on going. It drives writer friends crazy. But I am fascinated by the concept of writing the “I” out of my work, of creating poems that can stand on their own as literature without needing “me” in there to tell my singular story. If I use “I,” it tends to morph, to become less a definite identity and more an amalgamation of stories I’ve been told, people I’ve met, etc.  And so I write using a keyboard, not a pen and paper — I don’t even want to see my own handwriting when I’m drafting poetry.

Photography is, for me, a form of pre-writing, as is playing music. I noodle my way through ideas and images on the piano quite frequently before sitting down to write. I have synaesthesia, and so sound, colour, and shape are strongly connected to my writing.

WONK: Any reader of your work will likely note your references to Denise Riley. Would you like to discuss your influences and who you are reading now?

JB: Yes, Denise is a good friend and mentor. Until her recent retirement, she was also my PhD supervisor. I deeply respect her work, its layered, imagistic richness and the way in which it accretes, building upon previous works of literature. She is most definitely an influence.

I’m reading now — and always, in cycles — Phyllis Webb, especially the anti-ghazals in Water and Light. Di Brandt — Now You Care and So this is the world and here I am in it. Douglas Barbour, especially the breath ghazals in Breath Takes. Newlove, continually. And the work of my peers! I think there is a tendency to get caught up in experienced writers and to forget or be wary of the writers of one’s own generation. I’m reading Angela Carr and Angela Rawlings — brave, beautiful stuff, gorgeous breath work. Also Gregory Betts’ The Others Raisd in Me. I so respect what he’s done; the sense of play, the sheer scope of the (as he calls it) plunderverse.

And outside poetry! Always, for the balance. A reread of Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm, for the wry humour in it and the love of the land that resonates with me in my own feeling of walking our farm. C. J. Cherryh’s Regenesis; I adore tightly-written sci-fi. And, as of yesterday, Harvest, a new series of short plays by Ken Cameron. Brilliant stuff, and not just the way he’s captured farm life. But that’s darn good, too.

WONK: On October 7, 2010, you will be reading with Glen Sorestad in Wetaskiwin, Alberta. Is it fair to say that poetry as a practice along with poets & poetry readers as communities are more often than not located in and focused on larger urban centres?  Organizations such as the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, for example, have certainly facilitated live readings throughout Alberta, but those have been infrequent. What more can be done to bring poetry readings to rural Alberta? And what, in your view, are the benefits of poetry readings/performance in general?

JB: I think you’re right: generally, poetry events, communities, and readers are most often located in larger urban centres. I think this is a result of accessibility: most of the well-known poets on tour come to the larger cities, and the cities themselves often have greater budgets for hosting literary events.

There is funding available through the various granting, agencies, however, for hosting visiting poets in a wide variety of communities, and I think this is a great opportunity for rural communities or smaller centres to bring in guest writers.

I think the issue is mostly a question of forging connections within Alberta’s writing community. I know of friends, all poets, who have recently read in small towns across the province — just by virtue of knowing people in those particular communities and accepting invitations to come out and read. So connection is really key.

A great number of writers meet and connect through the League of Canadian Poets listserv; it might be neat to see if, at some point, a local listserv of Alberta writers could be created, which would allow for a more focused sense of community connection within the literary scene in this province. A number of writers use the Internet as a tool in their daily practice; it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to use something like a local listserv to discuss current writing issues and practice, inform writers of events or readings across the province, and act as a communication centre where writers can contact other writers to invite them to come into town for readings.

The benefits of poetry readings and performances in general are many and varied. I’m a big believer in poetry readings being an extension of poetic practice: it’s one thing to write the work and hope that people read it in book form and connect with it, but it’s another thing entirely to bring your own work, through a reading, off the page and to life for a roomful of people. We get so close to our own work that we lose the ability to see whether it’s effective or not. A reading in front of a roomful of people will provide that instant feedback; as a writer, you can sense if the audience is with you, is walking along with your words, or not.

And again, readings are a way for diverse communities to access and really forge connections with a writer. You can do a lot through technology to create connections, but being there in person to read, to mingle, to respond to questions? That’s key.

WONK: Thank you, Jenna.

— Interview by Jonathan Meakin

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Twitter Project Update

We at wonkWeb thought that we’d be remiss if we were to let another moment pass without an update on our twitter poem project. For the record, the project started out brilliantly. We received two very well crafted lines of the poem from, first, @EcDevGuyRick and then from @linoleumbob. Each seemed to offer a different insight into how social media is changing the way we all interact. It seemed like, to blatantly continue the metaphorical twitter cliché, that the birds were chirping happily on a beautiful spring day. But, then it happened. An unexpected frost. A frost so heavy and complete that all the tweeting stopped. Actually, that’s a little dramatic and, also, not completely true. It’s possible that the truth is that the wonkWeb editor (it seems fruitless to mention names at this point) heading up the twitter poem project neglected to take into consideration the fact that, at the time, @yourwonk only had nine followers (unlike the 23 loyal and discerning followers that we now boast). Given our follower statistics, the turnout for the poem project was actually impressively high (on a percentage basis). If you don’t have a calculator or a grade 4 student near by, I’ll do the math for you: twenty-two percent! With our high ratio of contributions to followers, it seems as though waiting for a few more followers might have been a good idea after all. To put it another way, I guess we could say that we should have put a little more network in our social networking.

It is worth mentioning that, in fairness to the contributors to the poem (as well as wonkWeb’s desperate need to not fail at this), the @yourwonk twitter poem project is not dead. I repeat, THE PROJECT IS ONGOING! Hopefully any of you reading the lines below will be inspired to continue the process. So, without further ado, something beautiful betrayed by a neglectful keeper:

We used to listen to the birds chirp, but then we learned to tweet

and now we can’t hear the person for all the people we meet

Some say we tweet of freedom some say we tweet for fame

yet I feel the tweets are hiding us behind a self-preserving (screen) name

Once again, a big thank you to @EcDevGuyRick and @linoleumbob for bringing the poem as far as it has come. If I failed to mention it before, the project is still a go, so, for the rest of us, feel free to keep the poetry coming and to be the next step in the process of collectively making poetry.

In the mean time, we can all look forward to wonk6 which is (still/finally) in the works. The tentative theme is children’s writing/art. If you are a child who writes, know a child who writes, are a writer who writes about children or any combination of the above, please see the submissions tab for details on having your work published in wonk6.


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Twitter Your Way to Fame (limited) and Fortune (non-monetary).

“Twitter is for kids, it’s only a trend, it won’t last”. These are all things that WONKweb hears almost daily and, who knows, they might be true. Whatever the case (or fate) might be for Twitter, we at WONKweb think that, while it’s still around, Twitter offers a forum for some truly collaborative writing to happen within. As with most things “WONK”, we don’t have a completely clear (any) idea  of where this might go, but we do have a reasonably clear idea of where it might start. At least in this manifestation of the collaborative twitter project, WONK envisions a twitter based poem formed completely from the tweets (directed at WONK’s twitter site) that readers/contributors like yourselves write. While twitter itself limits submissions to 140 characters (their guidelines, not ours), there is every reason that a single contributor should tweet multiple times as they are inspired by those who tweet before and after them. In this way, the twitter poem can be thought of as the project of some strange little writing group except that, instead of simply collaborating to improve our own writing, we are also trying to create something that is distinctly ours out of the process as well. Here’s how such a project might work:

  1. Sign up to follow WONK on twitter http://twitter.com/yourwonk . This is where the action will happen.
  2. Once you have signed up to follow WONK, start tweeting to us your section/s of the poem (who will be brave enough to go first?). This can be done by putting “@yourwonk” (without quotes) in front of your tweet, by using the “mention” option to start your tweet or by simply replying to one of yourwonk’s tweets.
  3. WONK will re-tweet your portion of the poem so that everyone who follows “yourwonk” on twitter will get to see it (this seems more complicated than it is).
  4. Check back often to see how the poem is coming. If you are further inspired by someone else’s writing, add more to the poem; if not, either sit and fume at the direction the poem is taking or get in there and set it straight!
  5. Once the tweets are in, WONKweb will compile and publish the poem in its entirety, right here on yourwonk.com . Barring the incredibly offensive or threatening, the poem will receive very little editorial massaging and anyone who contributed can feel free to tell their friends about the poem they recently had published on WONKweb.

Given that this is an experimental project, we will cap the number of entries to about thirty or so tweets for this first attempt (or the next available natural break in the poem). Provided this first attempt goes well, WONKweb would like to take the experiment a little further and have a handful of poets (particularly those who contribute to the poem) use the same tweets to create entirely different poems through the artful and nuanced rearrangement of the original components (tweets). If there are any of you out there who think this might be something you’d like to be a part of, please let us know.

Obviously, twitter is not for everybody. In fact, WONK isn’t even entirely sure if twitter is for us. Truth be told, WONKweb is a bit fickle: if our readers-cum-contributors take to this project, we’ll probably love twitter. If they do not, it’s very possible that WONK will completely disavow any connection with twitter, tweeting, or birds in general. So for the good of our feathered friends, get tweeting soon.

WONK

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Rachael Lee reads “Grandmother Moon”

EAVB_DUPZZUUAOM

Rachael Lee (and William) was kind enough to come to the park and sit in the wind to read her poem “Grandmother Moon”, featured in the groundbreaking (and currently available) WONK5.

Here are the results:

“Grandmother Moon”

Grandmother moon
enlighten my path
make clean my thoughts
and ease my task

Grandmother moon
generations have grown
from achievement to sacrifice
by the seeds you have sewn

Grandmother moon
though you watch us in silence
my heart breathes your love
and aches for your guidance

Grandmother moon
is thine heart made of stone
we know you are with us
and we be not alone

Grandmother moon
though your eye waxes and wanes
I hold you, revere you
and I remember your name

— Rachael Lee

On the poem, Rachael explains:

In the Cree culture, the moon is significant to women. It is powerful and constant. The lunar cycle rules the womans life, it IS power and literally the life-blood of our women. She is our grandmother, the moon.

This poem also parallels the relationship I had with my own grandmother who I lost four years ago this winter. She was a powerful source of comfort and knowledge. This poem started as an ache in my own heart, but grew into a declaration of love and remembrance.

Our cycle of mourning lasts four years and this poem was a way of letting go of the grief and celebrating what she meant to one of her many many grandchildren.

WONK5 features poems by Camille Martin, Rachael Sylvia Lee and Marita Dachsel; short prose from Thomas Trofimuk and Emily Rush; and artwork from Andrew Topel and Ian Pierce. If you’re in Wetaskiwin, stop by and grab a copy (and a coffee) or subscribe (print or online).

Alright so we’re trying different things here. Frans interviewed MaritaJonathan started to talk about process. Amber and I made a video. I suppose we all will just keep trying. It’s fun. Just let us know if you have any ideas. Or submissions. Or just want to talk.

(The music in the video is by a truly inspiring piece of wax (“don’t sleep in the snow) –

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Marita Dachsel on Poetry, Parenting, Polygamy and Writers Behaving Badly

Marita Dachsel (By: Sheryda Warrener)

The life of a writer and that of a mother intersect in many ways; in some aspects, one has become nearly as central to our definition of humanity as the other and, yet, the process of each remains predominantly entrenched in the private sphere of life. Marita Dachsel is living proof that simply because parenting and poetry tend to happen primarily in the private sphere, one need not come completely at the expense of the other.

In her latest collection, Glossolalia, Dachsel brings to the public, in poetry, the private thoughts of thirty-four different women as she reanimates the wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the church of Latter Day Saints. Preceding Glossolalia, Dachsel’s poetry has been widely published, including the full length collection, All Things Said and Done, which was shortlisted for a ReLit award. Recently WONK had the privilege and fortune to ask Marita a few questions about her latest work and the process of living and writing that helped bring her to it.

WONK: Sometimes when I come home after a long day away, I see spinning within my wife’s eyes all of the chaos that unfolded during her day at home with our two kids. As a self labelled ‘mother of boys’, how does the inevitable chaos of parenthood slip into your poetry and, when it does, is it usually something that you embrace or is it something that tugs at your sleeve, pulling you from your writing, asking for another peanut butter sandwich? How do you balance the world of mother and writer?

Dachsel: So far, the chaos hasn’t entered my writing. The chaos has prevented me from writing many times, but when I have the time and space to write, I don’t let it in.

I’m still in the trenches of early motherhood, so there is no such thing as balance. Time to write is incredibly precious and can feel to be incredibly rare, although that is changing. Before becoming a mother, I was clueless to how much time I had and how I completely squandered it. But once my first son was born, I panicked and feared I’d never write again. Carving out writing time became essential for my sanity, and I’d get it when I could. At times it would simply be revising a poem while nursing. Last year, thanks to the amazing gift that is the Norwood Child and Family Resource Centre, I had two afternoons each week to write. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but a regularly blocked time like that was a godsend.

My husband is very supportive. He’s also a writer and understands not only the need for time and space, but also that the writing process is much more than getting words on paper—staring off into space doesn’t have to be justified. I have been very fortunate that Kevin is able to be so flexible with his work. At times, I’d get a day or two to just write while he parented full-time. If I wasn’t married to a writer, it would have been impossible to attend the Banff Writing Studio last spring for five weeks when my boys were one and three. I wrote more in those five weeks than I had the previous three years. But now that Kevin’s contract at the university is over and I’ve been very fortunate to get a grant, we’ve switched roles. He’s the stay-at-home parent and I get to write. We’re both excited about the change.

WONK: I read an interview from 2007 in which you mentioned that you had yet to become an Edmontonian. Now, two and a half years later, do you feel like you have become a local or are you still somewhere on the outside, looking in? What are the major differences between being a Vancouver poet and being/becoming an Edmonton poet? What is it that defines each experience for you?

Dachsel: Edmonton has been very welcoming. It is a city full of kind and generous people, and I’ve been able to elbow my way into a small place in the poetry community. Despite this, I still don’t feel like a local. It took me about seven years of living in Vancouver before I could confidently call myself a Vancouverite. Edmonton and Vancouver are very different cities, so I don’t think it would take seven years here, but I know I’m not there yet.

Because Edmonton is a smaller city than Vancouver, there is more fluidity between the camps and poets here truly do go to everything despite the type of poetry one writes. I’ve been exposed to much more spoken word, sound and experimental poetry than I had in Vancouver. It’s not that it doesn’t exist there, it’s just that there are so many more events happening in Vancouver that you can be very active in the community and still choose not to attend those events. It was very easy to become complacent.

I was very comfortable in Vancouver. Almost all my friends there were writers or theatre artists, and most of my writer friends I had made through the UBC Creative Writing program. I didn’t have to work to find community or a place in the city. When we moved to Edmonton we didn’t know anyone and I had to seek out like minded people.

Moving to Edmonton has been incredible for my writing. My writing has improved exponentially and it’s thanks to a cocktail of new opportunities (the arts are blessedly and generously supported here), the isolation of not knowing anyone initially, and being exposed to new artists and ideas. The city has been great to me.

WONK: I have been enjoying several of the interviews from your Motherhood and Writing project and have found so many of the responses to be incredibly honest and complex. With that in mind, I have decided to lift one of your own questions and turn it back on you: Did you always want to be a writer? A mother? How does the reality differ from the fantasy?

Dachsel: Thank you! I’ve really enjoyed it, too. Those women are so smart.

My mother kept a scrapbook type of book that chronicled my public education. Every school year I was to check what I wanted to be when I grew up and almost always I chose “author” (although architect, fireman, and lawyer were also chosen at times). When I was very young, I didn’t know what that really meant. I knew that I loved books and wanted to write books so I wrote stories all the time, but what the actual life of a writer was continued to be a complete mystery until I became an adult.

Similarly, I always knew I’d have a family. When I was young, it was just a given with not much thought behind it. I’d go to university; I’d be a mother. When I became an adult, I never, ever fantasized about babies. I’d imagine a large table with lots of kids around it sharing food and stories, and I’d long for it. I still do. I hope when my boys are older there will be afternoons that live up to that fantasy. I think it’s reachable.

Both writing and motherhood are given a false veneer in society. The writing life is portrayed as glamorous and passionate, when the reality is sitting alone at a desk for a long, long time doubting yourself almost every step of the way. It’s a job with long hours and little reward. Motherhood is supposed to be full of beautiful nurturing moments backlit by golden sunshine with flitting butterflies and chirping birds. In reality there are soiled diapers, meltdowns, sleep depravation, and again, a lot of self-doubt.

WONK: In some of your latest work, including the piece published in WONK, you have showcased and extended the stories of the wives of Joseph Smith, the polygamist founder of the Mormon church. Where did your interest in these women originate and have any of the women’s stories and historical personalities surprised you or taken your poetry in a different direction than you had expected them to? Who was the most influential of Smith’s wives upon your writing and why?

Dachsel: I have always been interested in fringe religions and about six years ago I became quite obsessed with the FLDS in Bountiful, BC. It was apparent that their practice of polygamy kept them apart from the rest of society. Sure, it was easy to be titillated by it or vilify it, but I wanted to move beyond that and understand why it was so important to them. I started researching and soon discovered that polygamy was secretly practiced by Joseph Smith. I wondered about his wives. They didn’t have generations of this tradition ingrained in them. Why did they agree? What did this mean to them? What were their lives like? And of course, I wondered what I would have done if I had been in their situation. I came across a book that had biographies of thirty-three of his wives and another biography of Emma, his first wife. Of some of the women, very little is known, while others ended up being extremely important to early Mormonism with many biographies.

I was often surprised by details of their stories. He married a few sets of sisters, and one mother/daughter pair. Also, about a quarter of his wives were married to other men and continued to be. This still boggles me.

Very early into the process, I knew that I wanted to do a full manuscript—give each wife a chance to voice her story. Just the magnitude of the project forced me to approach the material in different ways. These are women who mostly married Smith between 1840-1843, came from similar backgrounds, had the same belief system. I was very conscious that I didn’t want to be writing the same poem thirty-four times, and really worked on voice. In a way, they are as much monologues as they are poetry. There were some women who I heard instantly and others with whom I’ve struggled immensely. I also wanted to play with form. In a few instances I found texts where the women told their own stories. I had never created poems from found text before but knew it was something I needed to do. They were quite challenging, but I’m happy with how they turned out. Lucy Walker was one where I tried at least ten different forms over three years based on her words. She was such a struggle. But finally, inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets, I found what I hope will continue to feel like the perfect form for Lucy: the blackout. I wanted to throw a parade when it all came together.

I am very close to being done, with just one wife left—Emma, Joseph’s first wife, the only who married him monogamously. I’m having the hardest time with her and I think that’s because she’s the one I feel for the most. She married this man against her family’s wishes and less than three years after their elopement he started the church. She faced hardship after hardship and seemed to struggle between wanting to support her husband by being a dutiful, obedient wife to a self-described prophet and what was best for her and her children. The more I read about her, the more I respect her. I want to write a poem that reflects that struggle, but be as interesting and as engaging as I imagined her to be.

WONK: Of all the people that do insane things, few illicit as much attention as do mothers and few as much romanticism as do writers. Being both a mother and a writer, who do you think has more of a right to act out: the creatively brimming writer or the mother with one (or two, or three) too many kids, and why?

Dachsel: Hands down, give it to the mothers. I’m not a fan of bad behaviour, but I think mothers are restrained to a higher standard than the rest of the population and it’s just not fair. Yes, they are raising our future citizens and leaders, but so are the fathers and we should all be modelling good behaviour.

I have a very hard time with the tortured artist syndrome. Being a writer is not an excuse for wallowing in self-pity, drunken binges, or drugs. It’s a job. I hate the stereotype and I hate even more those who use it as an excuse for being an asshole or a wanker. I have zero patience for those who play this role.

Marita Daschel’s poem “Fanny Young” appears in the now available WONK5. A special, limited edition of her poem “Elvira Cowles Holmes” will also be included in the print subscriber version of WONK5.

— Frans Erickson