Line of Inquiry: Sandra Birdsell

Sandra Birdsell was born in Winnipeg, the fifth of eleven children, to a Dutch-Mennonite mother and a French-speaking Métis father.

Among her nine fiction titles are The Two-Headed Calf, The Chrome Suite, The Russländer, and Children of the Day.

Along with several Manitoba and Saskatchewan book awards, Birdsell’s work has been recognized with the WH Smith Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Marian Engel Award, as well as nominations for two Governor General’s Awards and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

In 1996, Birdsell moved from Winnipeg to Saskatchewan, a relocation that is mirrored in her new novel, Waiting for Joe (Random House).
She lives in Regina.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

When I read from my work it is a chance for me to "hear" it as readers' might be hearing it as they read. I have within me the impulse and emotion of what the characters are thinking, saying and doing and I think that comes out during a reading.

2) What do you want people to know about Waiting for Joe?

Waiting for Joe was 4 years in the making and behind it is a lot of reading about the roots of his boyhood faith.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

Winnipeg is my second home. I lived there for decades, and Westminster Avenue, the elms, still has a strong pull.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I'm in a book club and reading for that right now. I've begun writing what I think could be a short story.

5) The majority of the action in The Russlander took place in 1910. The Children of the Day is set in 1953. After spending so much time fictionally in other eras, what is it like writing something so contemporary?

Writing something so contemporary is really not much different than writing Historical fiction. People are moved and changed by the same things regardless of the time period.

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Sandra Birdsell will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 22 - Mainstage, with Sharon McCartney, Uma Parameswaran, Craig Francis Power, Michael Wex.
September 23 - Nooner.
September 23 - Rural Tour, Portage la Prairie.

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Ariel Gordon has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Line of Inquiry: Sharon McCartney

Sharon McCartney has an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a law degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia.

She has published several poetry collections, including Under the Abdominal Wall, which was selected for the BC 2000 Book Awards Program, and The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder, which won the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry.

Her new collection is For & Against (Goose Lane).

A former resident of Victoria, she now works as a legal editor in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and is a member of the editorial staff of The Fiddlehead.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I really enjoy readings. A reading is a chance to connect with real people, with an audience. Though I write for myself, in order to understand and interpret the world and my own position in it, the audience is always in mind, that need to connect with other people. So, the reading is an opportunity to do that. Plus, readings can be great fun, particularly if you're reading with other writers and there's a lively crowd. I'm happiest if I get a few laughs and maybe a few questions. I have been heckled: in a bar in Victoria, a guy yelled out, "Ah, get over it!" I kind of loved that. It's like getting a bad review--a response, even a negative one, is better than indifference.

2) What do you want people to know about For & Against?

Despite its potentially-negative subject matter (divorce, illness, confoundment, rage), For and Against was a lot of fun to write. I worked really hard on language in those poems, on sound and rhythm, in addition to metaphor and imagery. While I hope that people connect with the subject matter (and some have already), I also hope that people notice that it's poetry. Reviews tend to focus on the subject matter, which is fine, but I am a writer and language is uppermost in my mind.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I spent one night in a motel in Winnipeg ten years ago when my family was relocating from Victoria to Fredericton. We drove across the country in a van (three kids and two cats and my husband and me). Our house deal in Fredericton was closing as we drove, but the guy at the bank in Fredericton neglected to have us sign one essential document. There were frantic phone calls and we got into a CIBC somewhere in Winnipeg at 7 a.m. the next morning to sign the document and then left Winnipeg. I look forward to a more pleasant stay this time. I've heard that it's a wonderfully cosmopolitan city and I look forward to wandering around, but I also hope to find a gym and get in a good workout too!

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Right now, I'm reading James Hillman, The Soul's Code. I've been reading Jungian psychological works lately and getting a lot out of them. I'm working on a new manuscript called "Gravitas" which will have nothing to do with marriage, divorce or relationships. It's all about the relationship with one's self and the need to explore that. It's also about bodybuilding - I work out a lot and spend a lot of time in gyms and am having fun with all of the metaphoric opportunity that the gym presents (redefining one's self, getting strong and lean, etc.).

5) You seem almost fearless in your writing on your childhood and the end of your marriage. How do you negotiate the divide between your life and your writing and your writing life?

I don't know how to divide writing from life and I don't know what else to write about. I have relied on the dramatic monologue quite often to facilitate writing, but even when I'm using someone else's voice, it's still me. I'm happiest when I'm actively writing, when the notebook is always at my side and I've always got a few drafts on the go. That makes life easier. So, I don't think that there's a need to divide writing from life. The overlap can be hard on other people though. When I'm writing stuff that involves other people (e.g. ex-husband and other ex-partners), being honest and respectful is essential. If I'm blaming, I try not to let myself off the hook. I'm lucky in that my ex-husband is also a writer who understands that your material is your material. As a writer, I'm responsible first to myself, to be honest and as "true" as possible. And, in that, I hope that I am honest and true to other people too, even if what I say is not always pleasant.

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Sharon McCartney will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 22 - Afternoon Book Chat, with Craig Francis Power
September 22 - Mainstage, with Sandra Birdsell, Uma Parameswaran, Craig Francis Power, Michael Wex.

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Ariel Gordon has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Line of Inquiry: Michael Lista

Michael Lista is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in The Walrus, Maisonneuve, The Malahat Review, Arc, Descant, Canadian Literature, and Border Crossings, as well as in the companion book to Guy Maddin’s film, My Winnipeg.

He has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award, the Arc Poem of the Year Prize, The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, and the Descant/Winston Collins Prize, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Pushcart Prize.

Bloom (Anansi) tracks the last days of Louis Slotin, the Winnipeg born physicist who died in a fatal radiation burst at Los Alamos in 1946. Lista lives in Toronto.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

What excites and terrifies me about readings is the way that my work changes the instant I start reading it for people. Sometimes it feels like I can actually hear the chemical reaction in the air as I read a poem for a crowd; you can feel some lines falling and some sticking. It’s easy as a writer — as a poem’s craftsman — to think that your poem arrives at a state of completion, a state of rest, when you publish it. But weird things happen when you let that poem out into a room, and at a reading I have the chance to get a glimpse of the catalyzing effect — sometimes good, sometimes not so good — that a poem can have. 

2) What do you want people to know about Bloom?

It's a collection of poems about one of Winnipeg’'s own sons, Louis Slotin.  He was a Manhattan Project physicist who helped design and hand-build the first atomic bombs, including the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

This’ll be my third trip to Winnipeg. Quick story: In 2007 a poet friend suggested I send some of my Bloom poems to Border Crossings magazine. He had just published a poem with them and said I should give it a shot. So I sent the editor, Meeka Walsh, a clutch of them. About a week later I got a response from Meeka. She was astonished. It turns out that Meeka'’s daughter is married to a man named Louis Ludwig. And he takes his first name from his uncle, Louis Slotin.

The poems, which were the first from Bloom to be published, came out in their fall issue and in November I came to Winnipeg for the first time to meet some of Slotin’s relatives and dig around, do some research. When I was here I met the filmmaker Guy Maddin at a party at Meeka’s house. I came back to Winnipeg about a year later to do some cutting and pasting at one of Guy's collage parties. In January. It was like -40 the whole time. I really do like Winnipeg. I’m so exciting and honoured to be bringing Bloom to Slotin’s city, where he was born, where he is buried. And it'’ll be nice to see a bit of its gentler side come September.  

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I've been going back through Yeats, Frost, and Berryman. The book of the season for me is Don Paterson’'s new collection of poems Rain. It hasn't strayed far from my desk for the past couple of months. I'm trying to read Dante in Italian to mixed results. In April I read Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare and in the chapter on Antony and Cleopatra he says that if he had to choose only one play of Shakespeare'’s to save from oblivion, to the peril of all the others, it’d be A&C. So I'’ve been reading it over and over all summer. Also Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur and Trisan and Iseult.

5) Your first book was published this past spring. What's that been like? Roughly equivalent to handling the core of an atomic bomb with a screwdriver?

Writing the book felt like that. Publishing the book was the irradiating flash: intense and over in an instant. These days feel like the long wait after the accident, anxious of what changes may come. 

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Michael Lista will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 20 - Mainstage, with Carolyn Smart, Joan Thomas, Eva Wiseman, Richard B Wright
September 21 - Afternoon Book Chat, with Michael Lista

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Ariel Gordon has two chapbooks to her credit, The navel gaze (Palimpsest Press) and Guidelines: Malaysia & Indonesia, 1999 (Rubicon Press), and this spring, Palimpsest published her first full-length poetry collection, Hump. She recently won the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer at the Manitoba Book Awards. When not being bookish, Ariel likes tromping through the woods and taking macro photographs of mushrooms.

Line of Inquiry: Richard B. Wright

Richard B Wright published his first novel in 1965, and since then has produced over a dozen titles.

His 1995 novel The Age of Longing was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, but Clara Callan, published in 2001, cemented his reputation by winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and the CBA Libris Awards for Best Book and Author of the Year.

His next novels, Adultery and October, were best-sellers, with October being long-listed for the Giller.

Wright’s new novel is Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard (HarperCollins). He lives in St Catherine’s, Ontario.

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

How do most people who no only work alone but are also reclusive by nature approach performance? Probably with fear and trembling, but I have been reading to audiences for many years now and actually – despite the normal apprehension that accompanies them – I have come to enjoy the experience. There is a buzz attached to engaging an audience through words alone. It doesn’t always happen, but if I am lucky I can see people getting caught up in the story as they listen, and that is very gratifying.

2) What do you want people to know about Mr. Shakespeare’s Bastard?

I want them to know that the novel is set in two time zones of the 17th century: the period in which Shakespeare was living in London, and later in the century following the Civil War. They should know that it’s the story of a young girl who listens to her mother tell of how she went from a village to London and met the poet when he was only 23 and had a child by him. It’s also the story of how that child grew up and at the age of 14 set out for London to find her father.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I have been to Winnipeg several times for readings, but they have been of necessity quick visits, and so I haven’t been able to form any lasting impression of the city. I have heard that it’s very cold in winter. But where in Canada is it not cold in winter? In Toronto you can your freeze your...well never mind, it can be cold.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I have just finished re-reading Martin Amis’s The War Against Cliché and I’ll soon be re-reading Turgenev’s A Sportman’s Notebook. This summer I have also enjoyed Graham Swift’s memoir, Making An Elephant.

5) The prospect of writing from the point of view of a woman would probably give most male writers cramps. After eleven books, is there anything you can't/won't try to write?

I have never thought about such a question, but now that you ask, I don’t think I could or would want to write a science fiction novel or one that includes vampires. I don’t believe it should be that unusual for a man to write from a woman’s point of view. After all, women sometimes write novels from a man’s perspective. The whole point of being a novelist is being able to imagine the lives of others, whatever the gender.

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Richard B. Wright will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 20 - Afternoon Book Chat, with Carolyn Smart
September 20 - Mainstage, with Michael Lista, Carolyn Smart, Joan Thomas, Eva Wiseman
September 21 - Campus Program, U of M.