THE (NOT SO) NICE ITALIAN GIRLS & FRIENDS
talk about our fascination with dolls
Thursday June 10th, 7pm
Lola’s Commissary, 634 Church Street
Featuring:
Diane Bracuk
Beatriz Hausner
Lian Medaglia
Giovanna Riccio
Michelle Alfano as emcee
and music by Tom Garrett
For more info: notsoniceitaliangirls.blogspot.com
Posted in Events, General, Michelle Alfano
You’ve heard us talk about NOW HEAR THIS!, the literacy outreach program administered by the Descant Arts & Letters Foundation, before. The program connects professional authors with community groups, students and aspiring writers in order to promote Canadian literature and encourage self-expression, critical thinking and empowerment through literacy education.
All throughout the fourth year of the S.W.A.T. (Students, Writers and Teachers) Creative Residencies Program (which has been running in TCDSB classrooms from February to May), NHT! has been interviewing their writers-in-residence team to give us a chance to get to know their talented writers.
Below, we’ve pulled the interview links from the NHT! blog to share with you here: just click on the names to read up on the inspirations and events that led these writers to NHT! today:
To find out more information on Now Hear This! The official website is linked here —
Posted in Authors, General, NHT!, NOW HEAR THIS! News
Once a month we at Descant have our ‘reading session’ when we try, like a dog and his tail, to catch-up with our submissions. We receive about a thousand envelopes a year, packed with poems, fiction, essays, photographs and lots of hope. Unlike many other literary periodicals, our submission guidelines are barebones. Thus, writers sometimes feel less inhibited with creative and innovative ways to stand out from the pile. Some of the efforts are humorous but off-putting. Though we pride ourselves on being an open-minded bunch, we are only human. Some gimmicks challenge us at the start to remain unbiased even before we have read the submissions. Here our a few missteps that a submitter may wish to avoid.
1)   Size Matters. My personal pet-peeve is when I pick up an envelope and its weight causes me to groan. Many magazines impose a cap on word length for submissions, but at Descant we do not. Once I chanced upon a submission for a ‘short’ story that was fifty-four pages long. While there is a place for longer short fiction, normally periodicals prefer more concise pieces. In the early stages of the writing process there is a phase that I call verbal diarrhea, wherein the writer needs to let out everything he can relating to his story. As the piece is refined in subsequent drafts, details get embedded into the story in more subtle ways and chunks of the early verbiage are edited out. When I see a submission that is generous with its pages, I fear that the writer has sent an early draft. I will read it though, just incase I am wrong. Perhaps it is a very engaging story that does require fifty pages to tell. Though I have yet to see such a brilliant submission.
2)Â Â Â Double-sided submission. While printing on both sides of the paper is environmentally friendly and laudable, it confuses readers. The standard for submission in the publishing world is single-sided only and any departure from that norm risks the reader missing alternative pages.
3)   Fancy Fonts. Poets are sometimes guilty of this. It reeks of desperation and puts the reader on the defensive.
4)   Bold Author’s Name. Occasionally a writer will try to catch our attention by placing his name above everything in a font that is double the size of the main text. It reads like a warning sign: Fragile Author Ego at Work, Beware.
5)Â Â Â Once I opened a submission envelope and a barrage of cut-out stars and glitter hearts fell out across the desk. While it gave me a chuckle, it was an effort to clean up the mess and the text of the submission had to work that much harder to win me back.
6)   Submitting too often. There is a proverb in English that says ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. There is some truth in that. While persistence and tenacity in a writer are admirable, essential even, submitting too often can make the readers apathetic toward the submission. In this internet age many magazines around the world accept online submissions. Take advantage of this globalization, spread your stories upon fresh new fields.
7)   Obvious grammatical; and spelling errorrs. Such as the two here. While work that needs copy-editing is not a deal-breaker, it makes the text difficult to read and interferes with the flow. Always try to send copy with minimal errors. If you are submitting outside of Canada, set your spell-check for the country that you are submitting to. Americans think ‘color’ is correct but the Brits will think you are a sloppy speller.
8)   Stale-dated themed submissions. Descant routinely puts out calls for themed submissions on our website. Pay close attention to the deadline. We sometimes get submissions for themed issues months after the deadline when the text is at the copy-editing stage. We try to be flexible and the one question the editor of the themed issues will always ask is: “Is it brilliant?†In order for her to squeeze in your late submission it would have to be genius to make the editor reshuffle her careful work.
9)   Suspect publishing history. Many readers do not bother with the author’s cover letter, they go straight to the submission. But some readers will read the cover letter knowing that, like all resumes, there will be embellishments. I recall seeing a cover letter once where the author went on for a page and half listing her movie reviews on rottentomatoes.com. Anyone may write in a terse sentence and it will be published (‘This film sucked’). Descant co-editors are savvy enough to know a con. We’ll still read the submission, but with suspicion.
10)Â Â Â A plethora of poems. We have a rule that we cannot publish anymore than a sweep of five poems by the same authors in one issue. Sometimes poets, because the work is so concise, will send us batches of a dozen or more. It is left to us to read them all and decide which five are the best of the bunch. Again, it puts the reader on the defensive.
The best way to get our attention is with fresh, crisp, crackling writing that gets us excited and eager to share our discovery with fellow co-editors.
The first sight anyone sailing into Copenhagen catches is the statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale character The Little Mermaid. For visitors from North America, this stone tribute to a fictional character is particularly beguiling. Copenhagen’s main thoroughfare is named after the author and it is clear everywhere in this city that Danish identity is defined by its artists.
Not only in Denmark, but all across Northern Europe, there are monuments and tributes to writers, composers, poets. At the centre of Helsinki is Sibelius Park, with a sculpture of composer Jean Sibelius.
London is full of plaques recording former residences of Novelists and free-thinkers.
Stockholm’s Nobel Museum reminded me that every year Swedes honor six areas of human achievements: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Economics, Peace and Literature. How wonderful to be in place where the output of a pen-pushing poet or dramatist is considered as valuable as say the decoding of the human genome or the discovery of black holes.
Even places with long and rich histories seem to define themselves by their writers. St Petersburg has a suburb called Pushkin Village, named for the 19th century author Alexander Pushkin. This suburb was once known as Tsar’s Village but during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1918, the Russian people decided they did not want to define themselves by the deeds of the aristocracy. Nor did they want to align their national character with any religion. And so the Russians decided upon enduring works of literature, music and dance as definitive of the national soul. Although Northern Europe had no such revolution, most of the Scandinavian countries were only Christianized as late as the 12 to 13th centuries. Maybe that is the reason they also chose art as national culture.
Even a historically blessed nation like France has gone to great expense in preserving the garden built and painted by Claude Monet in Giveny. Flowers are meticulously replanted so that garden still resemblances his famous Water Lilies or Les Nympheas murals. Why do the French, who have cathedrals and palaces galore, make this monumental conservation effort? Is it perhaps because art can make visible the inner aesthetic of a nation in a way obvious to everyone?
I returned to Canada just before the Canada Day celebrations in downtown Toronto were cancelled. I realize that in Canada the issue of a national identity crisis is a bit of a cliché but I could not help reflecting on what I had witnessed in Europe. Unlike many parts of the world where cultural identity is intrinsically linked to religion Canada is only nominally a Christian country. Recent polls show that only 28% of Canadians consider religion to be important to them. Nor does Canada owe any debt to blood-thirsty lineages of kings and queens. We have few local politicians of distinction yet our street names pay homage to them: Bloor, Dundas, Yonge, Dufferin, etc. And Canada, particularly Toronto, continues to name cultural institutions after corporations and benefactors, even when the buildings are mainly constructed with public funds. Our symphony hall does not honor Glenn Gould but a fellow named Roy Thomson. And why is it the Walter Carsen Ballet Centre and not the Karen Kain Ballet Centre? I am no jock but even I would prefer to see the A.C.C renamed the Wayne Gretzky Hockey Arena.
The main difference, I suppose, between Europe and Canada is that we are a relatively young country. And like many adolescents we are easily seduced by money. Thus our new opera house is named after a hotel chain. The home of the Blue Jays, the Skydome, is now renamed so that the very venue itself has become a commercial for a broadcasting corporation. Perhaps we just need time to mature as a nation. After all, the works of European artists have endured through time. They are great because successive generations have found universal and timeless messages in the books of Tolstoy, Dickens, and Hugo. Perhaps in another hundred years Toronto may see a statute of Atwood’s Handmaiden at Harbourfront. I hope so.
Posted in Authors, Events, Fiction, General, Industry News, News and Notes, Pradeep Solanki
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Dana Gioia thus described the current state of poets. As promised, responses to my glib but earnest query—does the audience make the art form?
I was surprised and heartened by these cris de cœur, for all the good, wrenching, soulful, necessary nothing that poetry makes happen. Below, some thoughts on how or whether poetry survives, within and without the valley of its own making…
“Yes, it matters that someone reads me.  While it may be the uns
ayable that I’m ultimately after, the fact that I can actually connect with another human being through these frail words means a great deal to me.  But it’s not why I write.  I write because it’s the way I’ve learned to engage with things, to respond to all the mysteries.  If the sum of poetry readers in the world were suddenly wiped out, I’d still write; I’d miss them, of course, but it wouldn’t stop me from wading into the language and getting thoroughly soaked.â€Â ~  Barry Dempster
“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I care. I wouldn’t publish if I didn’t.â€Â   ~ Karen Solie
“Oh yes, I think we care passionately about having an audience.  Maybe we’d all secretly like to be read widely, but for most poets that’s not going to happen, so we cultivate indifference, or at least try to have a thick skin when we give a reading and five people show up. If we don’t care about an audience, who are we talking to, and more importantly, why are we ‘talking’ at all? I’m happy to have a few intelligent, responsive readers scattered across the country—readers whom I’ve never met.†~ Liz Philips
“I’ve turned my attention almost completely away from poetry and the poetry scene and have been concentrating for the last year on the political world. Maybe one day I’ll get back to the noble art but meanwhile it strikes me as something of a frivolity. The world is coming apart around us and I just can’t in good conscience continue to live inside the iridescent bubble of the poem or the mosh pit of the poetry community, which makes so little happen. Auden was almost right. And besides, the hundred thousand and more immediate readers I hit with every article strikes me as an improvement on the six people who read my poetry anyway. I miss the strenuous comfort of writing poetry, but there it is.†~ David Solway
“I think we all write in a bit of a vacuum and are surprised that anyone reads our work. It’s always rewarding, even moving, when someone seems to have.†~ Anonymous Canadian Poet
“Of course we do. Poetry is a form of communication. Not everyone may understand a particular poem, not everyone will want to even read that poem, but my goal as a poet is for my poems is to connect with readers / listeners. People turn to poetry, music and other forms of the arts during key times for solace, inspiration, understanding—in death, marriage, at times of crisis. The words of Karl Paulnack in his address given to a freshman class at the Boston Conservatory apply both to music and poetry.†~ Fiona Lam
“I do care that my poems are read—at least read by those who read with attention, appreciation, and some fellow-feeling.  …  Just this morning I received an e-mail from [reviewer] John [Herbert Cunningham], telling me how much he enjoyed reading my first book and writing This has had the effect on me of bringing that book back to life, a book I was beginning to dismiss as nothing more than my juvenilia, a rattle I cut my teeth on.†~ Ruth Roach Pierson
“For several years in the late 90s when I was working on my PhD thesis, I didn’t send poems out to periodicals. I was still writing, but truly for those years, my readership didn’t go beyond my workshop group. That was it. Nowadays, and since my first book was published in 2002, I seem to assume that only people I know read me. So it’s always a great shock to have strangers come up and comment on some aspect of one of my books. A joy, but a shock. People read poetry. People I don’t know read me. How terribly unexpected. It shouldn’t be, but it is. So, I don’t equate quality with readership. I write the best poems I can, and hopefully they will find a home in print some day. Even if they don’t, they’re still the best poems I knew how to write when I wrote them.
Success is a bit more vexed. It depends on how you define it: is success making a living as a poet? Being accepted into the community (the “tribe” as Shelley put it) of poets? Being hired to teach creative writing? Having a book out, or 10 pieces published (that is to say, being eligible for Canada Council funding)? Being able to hold your own in a conversation about poetics? There’s external success, measured by all those things listed above. And there’s internal success; writing poems as well as you can. Of course, I woul say that the latter is more important than the former. But of course, the former has a material and conceptual influence on the latter. It’s nice to be well-regarded by your peers. It’s nice to get some income, some publication to reinforce this unrealist activity of writing poetry. It’s nice. But it isn’t necessary.†~ Kathy Mac
“Of course I care if anyone reads (or listens to) the work. It is before an audience that the work comes into its full being or is fully realized, and without the audience it is a dormant thing. Writing to me is in part about participating in a collective community and so readers or listeners are crucial. How can thought be exchanged without them? Though I am not overly concerned about numbers, about how many readers the work has, because I do think that each person is a whole world and to affect one person is extraordinarily powerful.â€Â ~ Oana Avasilichioaei
“Years ago I read an interview with Sharon Thesen in the Malahat, in which she said that the audience for each poet might be something like 50 people (I’m really badly paraphrasing here)—most of them friends, other poets & a handful of academics. At the time, I thought that sounded about right, but now I’m not so sure.  Seems like poetry readers are mushrooming all over the place. I don’t believe that we write only for ourselves.  If that were the case, we wouldn’t need to put it on paper but could instead just stare at it in our minds & congratulate ourselves on our brilliance & have another glass of
sherry. When it comes down to it, I think that I do care if anyone reads me, but I’m only writing to one person at a time. I only worry about one person at a time—that seems to be the only way poetry really works for me, on a one-to-one basis. So I worry about you reading me.  And I worry about my students reading me.  And so on & so on to the power of Breck shampoo. But I can only think of it as one person at a time, reading one poem at a time.â€Â ~ Mitch Parry
“Of course I care if I’m read, and yet when I’m writing, I can’t care. Lately I’ve been caring, and that’s been getting in the way. When I suspend those concerns and write what comes, I generate a lot of dreck but also leave open the possibility of surprising myself. Caring about the reader, if it happens at all, happens for me well before I sit down to write (as I ask myself, How can I write something I haven’t written before, something that won’t bore or merely satisfy those who know my work), and / or at the revision stage. I feel that I’ve been writing more interesting poems, poems that are more true to who I am, that are more urgent, that are less interested in impressing and more interested in exploring. There is, clearly, a price to be paid for that: poems written with, however subtly, an intention of impressing may actually do that, and if they do, that sells books. But if I really wanted to sell books, I wouldn’t be writing poetry. I’m writing poetry because it helps me to understand the world and myself—it’s how I think and feel—and if others, through listening in, better understand the world and themselves, that’s all for the good. When I’m honest with myself, I must admit that if I hadn’t had any publishing success early on, I would probably not be writing now. At certain points in one’s life, it seems essential to have a connection with readers acknowledged. Short answer: yes, I care, but I don’t care, beyond a certain point, how many people read me. Would I have any time to write at all if I were read by millions?†~Stephanie Bolster
“My ambivalent answer: no and yes. Some reasons for no: when I start a poem, I’m doing it because I have something I want to explore, say, discuss through language, form, rhythm—every poem is like a little private experiment. I could experiment indefinitely without the prospect of publication. Some reasons for yes: after you write some of these things, there is something to be said for putting them out someplace where they’ll
have readers. Having readers can create a movement around poems that doesn’t exist if the pieces don’t have an audience.  I don’t think this sort of discussion and movement determines the ‘poetic quality’ of a piece.  But maybe it opens up more potential for a poem as a mode of discussion.
I’d write even if I knew everything I was going to write in my lifetime was going to end up in a big pile in the corner of my office and never see the light of day.  But I’d probably rather have some readers, at least for some of my work.†~ Holly Luhning
“It matters a lot if nobody reads us, and I’d suspect any poets who say otherwise of lying through their teeth. It should trouble us, frankly. Here’s a comparison: classical music is often regarded as elitist, unpopular, etc., but I’d wager that a single orchestral concert at Roy Thomson Hall or Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier packs in more people than the number who buy the best-selling collection of poems published in Canada each year. Yet the act of poetry is incomplete unless and until a poem reaches, touches, moves other people. I think a lack of readers has some subtle as well as some obvious effects—e.g., far too much weight ends up getting placed on awards and reviews because, in the absence of readers, they appear to offer both justification and power.â€Â ~ Mark Abley
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Posted in Authors, General, Katia Grubisic, Poetry
Writing workshops open up many fears for new writers. One of them is submitting copies of original work to complete strangers. I have been in workshops where not all students handed back a critiqued manuscript of my work. Did it end up as recycled paper or something more nefarious? With the advent of cyberspace, the threat of bits of ourselves being turning viral is even more plausable. We all want to believe our work is unique and plagiarism-worthy, but I am reminded time and again that no human thought is original.
According to Christopher Booker there are only seven basic plotlines within the canon of human literature, authors merely rework them is new ways. Slumdog Millionaire, based on a novel, Q & A, by Vikas Swaroop has won accolades. Critics have devoted columns to the narrative of the ‘new India’. While the culture of the story was alien to movie-goers (including most Indians), the spine of the story, a popular US game show, was relatable. Amid the hype what was overlooked was that the Cinderella plot was ancient and intimately familiar.
For the last two decades commonwealth writers in Diaspora have enjoyed an interest in their work. For a century we endured colonials like Kipling and Forrester writing about India. Now, as Salman Rushdie put it, “The empire writes back.†We are told that the most original stories in the UK, Canada and the US are coming from the immigrant experience. But wait, isn’t ‘the stranger coming to town’ motif a tried and trusted one? Wasn’t the normalcy of the Bennet household in Pride and Prejudice disrupted by the arrival the stranger, Mr. Darcy? Wasn’t Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire a stranger to New Orleans? It is a good way to introduce the reader to a world he may not be familiar with. Or a familiar world can be critiqued with fresh eyes.
The only aspect of literature that is unique is the author’s voice. Weak writers imitate others’ voices, strong writers cultivate their own. Editors are always on the lookout for an original voice because they know an original plot is impossible.
Perhaps because of this very fact, no copyright law exists in Canada to protect writers from stealing ideas. Sarah Sheard’s novel Almost Japanese (about a young girl’s obsession with a Japanese musician) came out almost at the same time as her friend and neighbor Ann Ireland’s, A Certain Mr. Takahashi (about a young girl’s obsession with a Japanese pianist). Co-incidence? Legally speaking, yes.
Sometimes when reading works of fiction I am stunned by the similarities between one of the characters and myself. Mostly this speaks to the author’s talent for touching upon universal truths. But when the writer is a friend, the resemblance feels more suspicious than empathetic. “Every author steals from others,†says Wayson Choy. “But make sure you only steal from the best.†Wayson maintains that as long as we are personalizing whatever incident, sentence or detail we borrow, we are not plagiarizing. What is being handed down is a template, from one generation to another, from guru to disciple.
What if we recognize specific details about ourselves in a fictional character who is none too flattering? One American non-fiction author laughed, “Aw, Honey, I’ve been sued so many times I’ve lost count.†I was surprised to learn that anyone, even Mel the plumber, may sue a writer for “defamation of character†if he is portrayed in an unflattering light. This applies to fiction also. Despite the disclaimer at the start of the book—this is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to living persons is purely co-incidental—a person who recognizes specific and indentifying details in works of fiction may sue the author. When Seinfeld became popular, a man claiming to be the real George Costanza sued (and lost) Jerry for $100 million.
Then there is the prickly issue of quoting others’ works. In my writing group recently I submitted a story where I quote a few lines of song lyrics. One of the group expressed concern of the legality of this. I investigated and found the legalese to be beyond my comprehension. The only part that made sense to me was:-
Copyright protection exists from the moment a work is created in fixed—or tangible—form, and authors automatically hold the copyright to their material (authors may thereafter transfer their rights to other parties, as they commonly do in publishing contracts). Protection, however, exists only for the particular expression of ideas, not for the ideas themselves, so only verbatim use of copyrighted material need be cleared. Yet authors are free to quote even verbatim small amounts of copyrighted published material under the doctrine of “fair use.â€
…Although there is no precise definition of the concept of fair use, there are some informal quantitative rules of thumb that we can apply: it is inadvisable to use more than three or four lines of poetry or song lyrics without permission. If the material quoted—poetry or prose—represents a significant portion of a work, permission must be secured regardless of the total number of words.
Clear? Don’t quote me on it though.
Posted in Authors, Events, Fiction, General, Industry News, Pradeep Solanki
For outcry, there’s been a Facebook Group, a petition to download, pass around and snail-mail in, a handful of blog posts (here, and other ambiguous rhetorical contortions) and some print reporting since Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore‘s February 17 announcement that periodical funding under the new, merged Canada Periodical Fund could be reserved for magazines with an annual circulation above 5,000.
Like John Barton, editor of the Malahat Review, captain of the Facebook Coaltion and all-around excellent guy, we all know that “the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary, arts, and scholarly magazine, large and small, is below 5,000.” Large or small is not the point.
We read them, lend them, buy them, subscribe to them, and attend their awesome annual fiestas; they publish our work, tell us what far-flung writers are doing, and regale us with clever little postcards to pin above our desks; we argue with them, we inadvertently water-damage them, and they forgive us… … . But I preach to the converted, I know.
So, converted, listen up: Captain John is gathering petitions to ensure Moore’s off-the-cuff circ cap doesn’t run any of us aground. The petitions must be mailed in to the Malahat by June 8, to be gathered and forwarded to the goobernment. “Every signature counts,” says Barton, “every letter or email to a member of parliament counts,” and, lest we forget, “every subscription counts.”
Posted in General, Industry News, Katia Grubisic
If you loved Descant 143 – Cats, you may be interested in an upcoming event at Sunday Bazaar: On Sunday, June 7th from 12-6 pm a special cat-themed Sunday Bazaar will be taking place. There will be all sorts of “cat related art consumables” for you to check out. For more information about All Things Cat and other upcoming Artists’ Open Market events, check out the Sunday Bazaar Calendar or their main site.
Posted in Descant News, Events, General, News and Notes, Rachel Hopwood, Visual Art
Colleen Murphy is an award-winning playwright, an actor, editor, director and an opera librettist. Somehow, she manages to find time to teach the art of scriptwriting. I sat down with Colleen for a discussion about the similarities and differences between fiction and drama.
Litguru: At first glance, playwriting seems simpler than fiction because the writer needs to work only on dialogue. But then that is harder that it seems.
Colleen: It is harder than it seems because the dialogue must contain the character, the action, the subtext, as well as highlight what is not spoken. In drama the notion of action does not necessarily mean characters running around on stage, but rather it is the intention of a character and what that character wants from another character whose intention may be entirely different. Drama is action and re-action on an emotional, psychological and physical plane…and that action lives in the dialogue and in the silence between the dialogues. Drama creates collisions and collisions create conflict, which is the most important feature of drama.
Litguru: The ‘show don’t tell’ applies to both genres but in plays, the showing is through the dialogue. Correct?
Colleen: Yes and no. The showing is through the action of the language and how the action affects another character. I believe good drama allows an audience to watch characters make decisions and often audiences are party to why the characters made those decisions. That process invites us, the audience, to experience something of the human condition.
The ‘showing’ is also done through structure. How a dramatist shapes the container that expresses the play is extremely important to the ‘showing’.
Litguru: Can an argument be made that in good fiction also the dialogue shows rather than tells?
Colleen: Absolutely. Reading good fiction puts the reader inside the action and into the middle of the conflict. I read a lot of fiction and often feel that I am inside the story with the characters and do not want to leave them. The same is true of good drama. Even though I sit in the audience I still feel I am in the middle of the conflict and if it gets disturbing or unbearable, I may want to leave but am riveted to my seat because I want to know what is going to happen.
‘Telling’ distances readers and audiences, whereas ‘showing’ invites readers and audiences into the story. If a writer tells me something rather than lets me experience it, I feel cheated. The same applies to drama.
Litguru: In plays the characters don’t speak like real life. They are allowed or need to speak with a richness and eloquence that we rarely see in fiction.
Colleen: Yes and no. What does ‘real life talk’ sound like? Sometimes it is banal beyond belief, other times it is stunningly strange and poetic. It depends on the situation people find themselves in or characters are placed in. Playwrights usually put a charge under their characters which heightens the way their characters speak. This charge lets characters to speak in metaphor or allows subtext to reveal the powerful unconscious at work. Language is everything in theatre…it is the conjuring stick, conjuring up character, conjuring up action and conjuring up image.
Litguru: In fiction, because the reader does not see which actor is speaking, we have to write dialogue such that the reader knows who is speaking even without a tagline. This need to distinguish character voices, it seems to me, is less important in a play. Comment.
Colleen: Yes and no again. Playwrights have the luxury of live actors living in real time in three dimensional spaces to deliver their words to an audience, and actors contribute hugely to a character’s voice and personality, but all the same, each character should have a distinct voice, or rather a distinct rhythm to their language, and a distinct speech pattern. This enables characters to reveal themselves through their choice of language.
Litguru: The main difference, it seems to me, is that fiction has more flexible with time. We use flashbacks and flash forwards. We use memory and fantasy. We can leap great many years within a story. Plays need immediacy; moment to moment unfolding.
Colleen: The stage is an unlimited, timeless, borderless space. The past can be brutally immediate on stage. Sometime a play can swing from past to present to future in a blink of an eye, or travel backwards in time. That said I believe fiction can accomplish two things that stage cannot; it can stretch time, and it can fully render interior monologue. But theatre can accomplish moment-to-moment, in real time, like no other medium except perhaps dance.
Litguru: You have said that playwriting is as hard an art form as poetry. But poetry is probably the easiest to get published. Most literary magazines have room for poetry, but plays rarely are printed in literary journals.
Is there an editorial bias? Do readers prefer short fiction, essays and poems, photographs but not plays on the printed page?
Colleen:Â There is no editorial bias at all, there is only the reality that poems are short and plays are loooooong. Even one act plays are loooong.
However, all this may change when magazines go digital.
Litguru: At Descant I can only recall once seeing a play submitted in our slushpile. Do playwrights not believe magazines will print excerpts?
Colleen: Magazines, with the exception of those directly catering to theatre like the Canadian Theatre Review, do not normally publish plays or excerpts. Their interested reading public is limited, the plays and even an excerpt are often considered too long, particularly now in the age of one-word communication. A lot of people do not know how to read a play. Generally they see plays in the theatre so it does not occur to them that they can read the play if it has been published.
As past president of the Board of Playwrights Canada Press, a niche house that publishes exclusively Canadian Drama, I believe that a published play is as much a part of the literature of this country as any novel. The Press and other small houses that publish drama are constantly finding new ways to make published plays available to the academic, theatrical and literary communities.
Litguru: In Canada, novels have been turned into operas (Handmaiden’s Tale) but not plays. In the UK they seem to have more crossover. What can we do to encourage a crossover?
Colleen: I know of two Canadian plays that are being adapted into opera and that is encouraging. Operas are very, very expensive to develop and mount and that is a determining factor in terms of what material is chosen. The opera companies in Canada are starting to embrace new work, while smaller, more innovative companies, like Tapestry New Opera Works, continue to stimulate and encourage young composers and librettists.
Litguru: Which works of fiction, in your opinion, have the most potential for a theatrical treatment?
Colleen: Works that have the most potential for theatrical treatment are works that contain character development, conflict, and also contain exterior monologue or dialogue, as well as fiction that does not have much exposition but a lot of emotional action.
Litguru: Would you recommend all fiction writers to study some playwriting?
Colleen: Yes, but only if they are curious or interested in incorporating dramatic elements like tension, into their fiction, or if they wish to work more exclusively with dialogue. Certainly fiction writers should read plays as much as playwrights read novels…and most of the playwrights I know love reading novels.
Litguru: You will be teaching playwriting where in the next few months?
Colleen: May 9 and 10, 2009: Master Class for Alberta Playwrights Network,
June 30 – July 5, 2009: Great Blue Heron Writing Workshop, St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish
October 22 – 25, 2009: Master Class & Keynote Speaker, Playworks Ink 2009, Calgary
October 15, 2009 – March 4, 2010: Playwriting Master Class, University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies, Toronto
Posted in Authors, Events, Fiction, General, News and Notes, Pradeep Solanki
After some literary carousing a while ago, I got into an argument about so-called difficult poetry, which hinged on whose work was more difficult, Tim Lilburn’s or Al Moritz’s. Tim Lilburn had read that night, both had just published collections, and now Moritz’s Sentinel has been shortlisted for this year’s Griffin.
Moot, I hear you call; perhaps, since no one reads it, etc. (Next, stay tuned for Do We Care if Anybody Reads Us?) And in any case, doesn’t all poetry make some difficult demand on the reader or listener? Oblique and figurative, it requires always more—aural attention, deciphering, meta-knowledge, a listening under or between the words, some good stillness to let that listening happen—than the narrative and linear into which we tune by default.
That night at Mitzi’s Sister, this argument, which ma-ay have been well-watered, stumbled around accessibility. The accessibility of poetry is separate from concerns of its marketability—how many people poetry is reaching—but the two get smushed together, as if a batch of easy-peasy poems would suddenly go all CSI. (Will this question, which arises from a capitalist, market- and readership-based quantified evaluation of art, fade as this recession slows us down to fondue parties and reading E.E. Cummings to each other when we can’t afford the cable bill?)
Billy Collins, posterboy for accessibility, has gotten a fair bit of flak for what a Verse magazine blog entitled “The Trouble With Billy Collins,†which article in fact has very little to do with Collins at all. Collins himself, though his own work is not really cavernous enough to be interesting, is not an advocate of simpleton poetry. His mission with Poetry 180 and the Library of Congress poem-a-day program was to gather “a generous selection of short, clear, contemporary poems which any listener could basically ‘get’ on first hearing—poems whose injection of pleasure is immediate.â€
On the surface, no wrong; after all, Collins’s intention, to get students to enjoy poetry rather than tie verse to a chair and beat it until it confesses its meaning, is superficially laudable. Would that the institutionalisers had been similarly treated! When my little brother came home from his high-school English class with an assignment to find a poem, I eagerly cracked out my library. He brought in Seamus Heaney’s “The Skunkâ€â€”good for teenagers, we figured, short enough, with only one or two dictionary words, a strong speaker, and funny, with its deadpan wife digging about in the lingerie drawer. Alas, poor Seamus was rejected, by the expletive English teacher, presumably for not being sufficiently posthumous or pentametric.
What gets Collins and his ilk into trouble is the very notion that poems should be gettable and pleasurable, that they should open themselves to the reader, rather than the other way around. We suck, as a species, at dwelling in incertitude. Perhaps the problem is that poetry is being shoehorned into the category of communication, which is increasingly one-way (Lloyd Robertson with the sound off—in—or—out—Twittered inanities to which no one need respond). If signs and signifiers are the only ingredients in poetry, then all those who have access to language should also therefore have access to poetry (especially to wr
iting it, though this is a rant for another time). Have the tools overtaken the creation?
The danger, of course, is that defining poetry as opaque by nature can easily become an excuse for poetry that is just muddy, or which results in what Verse blogger Brian Henry calls the “dull cacophony†of banal, unimaginative descriptions of life experience. Aha! So the problem isn’t poetry, or poetry’s inherent difficulty, or poems that are difficult. It’s bad poetry, and poetry that chooses, if it can’t convince us, to confuse us.
I much prefer Jorie Graham’s apologia, during a recent discussion here in Montréal: by its complication, poetry is the genre that more accurately and usefully reflects the human condition. Like Graham’s work, like Lilburn’s career-long apophatic project, like Moritz’s hairpin intellectual ueys and eviscerating lyric aftershocks, even Cummings, he of economic-slowdown melted-cheese accompaniment above, is the opposite of straightforward, but we understand the illogic so deeply that en entire century shivers at his locomotives and roses.
Posted in Authors, Awards, General, Katia Grubisic, Poetry
