Soliloquies Anthology

Ashley Opheim: Where did you write this poem and what kind of frame of mind were you in when you wrote it?

Alex Manley: I wrote this poem in my small apartment, on my twin-sized bed, on my laptop, around 4:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, about five hours after the shift ended. At the time, I was usually working the Saturday opening shift and afternoon shifts during the week, so it had been a while since I’d been there until 11:00. It’s a bit of a different crowd at night, but it can also be nice and peaceful and comparatively empty for these long stretches. I guess I wanted to sort of represent that duality—sometimes you’re at the mercy of intimidating people, and sometimes it’s quite slow and pleasant. Anyway, it felt like an “eventful” evening, and I wanted to capture it in my memory before it slipped into nothingness like so much sand in an hourglass. I think it worked on that level.

AO: Your writing this year has been largely inspired by the magazine shop you work at. Is this a conscious intent on your behalf, or does it just happen to be a rich source of inspiration for you?

AM:  It’s not conscious, or at least, it was less conscious than it is now when I wrote “Sunday Night Shift,” but you’re right: I submitted pieces about my day job to all three workshops I was in this year. It’s an interesting place, and it serves up a lot of life experiences I wouldn’t have expected, going in. In theory it’s a magazine and newspaper store, but given the decline in revenue/profitability in the print industry, it sells a lot of other stuff to get by, and some of that stuff (drug paraphernalia, knives) attracts a certain clientele. In any case, everyone seems to be addicted to something—porn, cigarettes, soft drinks, whatever. I’ve been there for about two years now, and every now and then I think I want to compile all the writing I’ve done about it into something bigger.

AO: These work-focused pieces often deal with strangers. I find this interesting in the sense that we never really get to know them on an intimate level, but we get to know them on a level of either conversation or consumption. What is it about a stranger or customer that inspires you?

AM: It’s hard not to see people for brief snippets of time over and over without developing an idea about them, putting them in a certain box, but sometimes you realize that your perception is totally based on context. I appreciate some of my regulars because they’re quiet and they always buy the same cigarettes and they don’t hassle me, but every now and then I realize that they’re probably people that I would never get along with or like in any other situation, and sometimes someone will reveal himself to be a nasty, conservative old man who hates immigrants or something. It’s interesting, seeing the sides of people they’re willing to expose to a corner store clerk. There are a lot of lonely people downtown with no real opportunities for conversation, I guess, and often you’ll get these snapshots of someone’s personality or character that you tend not to get from strangers. So that’s really interesting, from the perspective of a writer, being able to see these details of these lives you’d otherwise never get a peek into.

AO: It has always perplexed me that you write (for the most part) simplistic poetry, as there seems to be a lot left unsaid in the poem. Your poetry, in this way, seems to come from a place of restraint. I find this interesting because, knowing your experience in journalism (aside from opinions-based writing), I would think that poetry would be a medium that you would utilize to free yourself from any restraint you feel in journalism. Could you speak to how your journalism and poetry differ or complement one another?

AM: I feel like my poetry has always been a place where I’m afraid of being too free-flowing. I think I instinctively seek out constraints; without a container to hold me, I don’t know what shape I am. The journalistic pieces I write are easier, because I’m supposed to use the constraints of journalism. I can write an opinions piece, or a review of something, or a feature, and it’s important—valued, even—to be able to copy aspects of the genre. In that sense, a good journalistic piece will act as a copy in many ways of the pieces that have come before it. Whereas with poetry, I’m trying to be original; I don’t want to use specific constraints of past poems. So I have to come up with my own, and I think I often over-compensate. That’s something I’m working on now: de-constraining myself. Often I’ll end up making new constraints as I’m working to make the poem freer, but working in that instinct towards freedom is important, I think.

AO: I know that the term flaneur is thrown around a lot in literary circles, but I do find your writing deals consistently with societal observation that is so characteristic of that style. I guess I wonder if you are a conscious observer, or is it something that comes naturally to you?

AM: I don’t consider myself actively a flaneur, although I don’t mind being considered (or not) in that tradition. I think flaneurs are cool, but I think having a job probably precludes me a bit from being one, too. I feel like my observer status and my outsider status are sort of a snake eating its own tail, inside of an egg, which may or may not have come before a chicken. I’ve always felt like one or the other, I think, but who knows which grew out of which.

AO: What, if any, literary traditions are you drawn to?

AM: I guess I’m primarily drawn to the literary tradition of white men writing about their feelings, especially their feelings with regards to women. I don’t know if there’s a specific term for that.

AO: What have you been reading lately?

AM: I haven’t been reading much fiction or poetry lately, unfortunately. I’m pretty swamped by my job and extracurricular projects. I do read a lot of stuff in magazines at work, though; Paul Theroux’s “Our Raccoon Year” in Harper’s, Jonathan Lethem’s “The Porn Critic” in The New Yorker, and Johanna Skibsrud’s “The Homesickness of Astronauts” in Maisonneuve are all bits of short fiction I’ve read in the past month that stayed with me long after my shift was over. Also, the latest issue of The Void—which, admittedly, I got published in—had a lot of compelling stuff in it. It’s free, so if you’re around Concordia you should try to pick up a copy.

AO: If you were to re-write this poem in one sentence, what would the sentence say?

AM: I edited the poem a bunch after deciding on a final version with you guys; I got rid of some of the guiding constraints and made it much more free-flowing, and re-introduced my friend Sara, who was there in the original version. I like one of the sentences from that new edit; it feels like a fractal of the larger poem. It goes, “For stretches here and there, the city leaves us alone to converse.” Do you know about fractals? Michael Crichton describes them in Jurassic Park. “A big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope—it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain.” I think poems might sometimes work the same way.

AO: What is, or what should be, the purpose of poetry in 2012?

AM: To give people the experience of reading poetry, which is important, I think.

Alex Manley is a Creative Writing major at Concordia University. He was born and bred on the island of Montreal. He is left-handed. Despite this natural handicap, he won Concordia’s 2012 Irving Layton Award for Fiction. His work has also been published by The Void, Ribbon Pig, and the Scrivener Creative Review.

Matthew Dunleavy sits, or so he would have me paint the picture for us all, picturesquely, holding a glass of scotch and smoking a very large cigar, which only seems to make his English accent all the more appropriate (in actuality he’s drinking PBR on a balcony/fire escape—he does have the accent, though). He also prefaces the interview, because it was originally recorded, that when recorded his voice sounds like Grimace. Yes, Grimace the large, purple, blob-like thing from McDonald’s (I had to clarify myself).

Liv Albert: So, Matthew, how about we start with the basics and you provide a little background as to how you got introduced to photography?

Matthew Dunleavy: My dad used to be into photography, pre-the birth of Matthew Dunleavy, and basically his camera went to the depths of a cupboard somewhere for years because the way he puts it to me now is that he had the choice between rolls of film and nappies. I luckily had nappies instead of him having rolls of film.

I was into art growing up, drawing, painting a lot, eventually just talking to my dad about his photography when he was younger and finding some old photos of his. He let me have his old camera to use, but it had a broken light metre. It was relatively old, like early eighties. So because of this what I had to do was carry around a little notepad and write down the settings I used and then when I got them printed up, match the different settings—the different aperture and shutter speed. I wasn’t brought into it in the digital world; I have an appreciation for the actual method of photography.

Then I started working as a photo restorer, doing Photoshop work. I started editing my photos and playing around with the different things I could do, not Instagram kind of stuff. Basically it was then costing me a lot of money because I was developing the film, having it scanned to CD, then printing off the edits again. I eventually bought a used Nikon D70S, which I very much enjoyed. But then I started doing model and wedding photography, so I upgraded to a D300. I actually got one of the first twenty in Canada. I got it before it was released because I worked for a photography company, and that’s what I use now. I still like using film but it’s so costly now.

LA: Your photo “Kerouac”; I think the title is pretty self-explanatory for the subject matter, but where exactly was this taken? Were you just struck by the particular scene before you? Is there a story behind the photo?

MD: I actually chose that name just for the submission to Soliloquies. I never name my photographs because there’s no reason unless you’re printing them and displaying them or something.

That’s one of my favourite photographs because it’s one of my oldest. When I was in that transition from film to digital, I was working at the photography studio at the time and we were able to borrow cameras, which was very nice. It was an official thing; they wanted the staff to know the cameras. Before I got the used D70S, I borrowed a D50 one night. I went out for a drive, so this was between the store’s closing at nine and then I had to have it back by the morning. So I went for a drive just outside the town I moved to when I emigrated, which was Ajax. It’s like most of the GTA east of Toronto, so close to nice countryside. I went for a drive around; it was the middle of the night and completely dead. So I got out into the middle of the road to take the picture, and I just like it because I don’t do scenery usually; I’m especially not a flower guy, things like that. But that scene I liked because it felt very North American, you know what I mean? Like in England we have countryside but it’s all winding roads. This was a massive stretch of tarmac which you just imagine as the road trip kind of thing, and then just the fields. I liked that.

LA: The photo is in black and white; is there a reason for that?

MD: That photo was my test photo, when I was doing all my Photoshop edits, practicing for restoration work, testing things I could do for customers. So that photo, I have so many of them; I have natural colouring which is nice because it’s a really blue sky. I have ones where it’s different monochromes, but I ended up just really liking the black and white. And especially when you get into the road trip mentality. Road trip photos should be in black and white. I don’t know why any time I think of a road trip I think of On the Road, and I think that it was just at the beginning of colour photography, so if Kerouac was carrying around photos on his trip, they would be in black and white.

LA: The current idea of black and white photography as a whole is a funny thing. I hope we all can appreciate my quoting Community (I know for a fact, Matthew, you will) when I say, “just because something is in black and white, doesn’t mean it’s good.” How do you feel about using black and white? Obviously it is appropriate in many cases; it can often add to the effect the photograph has on its viewer that its natural colour would have lacked. But I think that nowadays it means the photo has to have a little extra something that is able to push it beyond its black and white status. You’ve already told me why you chose it for this particular photo, but of the style in general, what do you think?

MD: I used to shoot in black and white film as well, so it’s not like, “oh this photo isn’t good on its own, I’m just going to hit the black and white button.” I don’t do the desaturate on Photoshop, you know? I do manual adjustments to choose how the black and white looks. If it were in a dark room I would choose how it looked: do I want it really contrasty, or do I want the subtle grey shades?

But I think this idea that was brought up very well by Community; it’s great that there’s an access to photography for everyone now, especially because, like I mentioned, my dad [had[ to give up photography for family. Basically it’s that the access is there but people misuse it. You can pick up a Digital SLR and use it for high quality photos, but people think that they should just put it on auto, don’t take it off auto, click it around and then hit the black and white button.

Then you have the issue that started with Facebook and Picnik, or whatever that was called. I remember doing a photo shoot, because I used to do weddings and things, and somebody took my family portraits and Picniked them, and I was so offended, so offended. And then there’s the Instagram thing. It’s amazing that the iPhone has the camera that it has but it’s become, “let’s just instagram this and make it hip and retro.” You can tell that it’s more of a gimmicky thing because Facebook bought it.

LA: They did, and for a billion dollars! When it makes no money. What a symbol of its reach.

MD: And that guy’s laughing because he’s taken the basics from a system like Photoshop and made them just buttons, and there you go.

I remember, during the transition to digital, I was in high school and doing photos for the yearbook and they gave me a digital camera not to keep but just to have as mine. And I used to have to carry around two packs of six floppy disks because that’s what the camera took. I could get two photos to a floppy disk and had to carry them all around with me with this massive camera.

LA: Okay, Matthew, you seem to be dating yourself, and incorrectly I imagine, because there must have been better cameras out there then, when you were in high school. You must have just had the worst camera in the school.

MD: Well, I was from not a really small town but just now a really good high school. But that was what I had.

LA: I didn’t even know those existed! But I guess it’s given you a good grasp on the variety of camera technologies.

MD: They were in a really small period, because before that they had disks; Kodak’s first one used disks. Then you had these floppy disks for a while; the whole back of the camera was this floppy disk spot. And then you had the compact flash cards.

LA: The other photograph you have published in Soliloquies is “Gale Ferris, Jr.”, which I think is particularly “trippy”  (I’m not sure I’ve ever used that word before now) [Matthew then suggests the use of “radical”]. Now, call me a photography amateur, but that effect comes from leaving the shutter on your camera open for a particular amount of time, doesn’t it? What made you decide to try that and did/do you do it often? The effect it gives to the photograph is pretty incredible. I think it really captures the moment; the excitement of a fair and the effect of a Ferris wheel in general.

MD: Yes that is how you do it, with the shutter. And it was a period which I don’t think I’ve left behind fully, but it was a period where I did a lot of nighttime photography because I was working all the time during the day. I really experimented with long-exposure photography. I did try the long exposure like, say, the night scenes, like that perfect landscape of the nighttime with the stars, but I’m so impatient that I couldn’t do that. When I say long exposure I’m talking thirty seconds to a minute; like I think that one was a minute.

I would drive around with a friend who didn’t do photography himself but enjoyed the experience of being involved with the process and seeing the finished product. So he would drive me around and I would hang out the window doing long exposure trying to get the lights of the night going by, so I have a lot of these really trippy ones. Or I’d purposely leave the house while I was really drunk to do long exposure while I’m walking. There’s this one where everything’s really shaken up, but because I must have been swaying the same way as this tree in the wind I kept on level with it, so the world is really fucked up but the tree isn’t.

Anyway, there was this little carnival; you know the ones in the Wal-Mart parking lots? It wasn’t even a real fair but I went there to take photos, but I feel like when you do a long exposure and capture the moment of the ride you sort of get that experience of being there. Because when you’re walking around even in a shitty Wal-Mart fair there’s just so much going on that you never really get anything, there’s just a blur.

So I did it with all the rides but I have so many of the Ferris wheel ’cause I was experimenting with the changes that would come with just a little switch in the shutter speed. I have some that are just blurs of light and some that have a little trickle in and you can still see it as stable. This photo was middle ground: you haven’t lost the Ferris wheel but you’ve still gained the motion. I have a lot of them. I also have a couple photos where I did do regular photos as well so it’s half; half of it is going and the other half is stable.

LA: So of all these photos of the rides you took, why the Ferris wheel over any others?

MD: The reason I picked the Ferris wheel instead of the other rides is because this carny, carnival man, whatever is politically correct, came over to me while I was taking the photos and tried to take my camera. I asked him, “what are you doing?” and he says [putting on some sort of “carnivalesque” accent], “you’ve been out here with your tripod and whatever this thing is.” So he basically started getting on me like I’ve been taking photos of the carnival people trying to capture them. So I went through all of my photos with this guy trying to prove that because they’re long exposure you can’t see anybody. I remember him leaving and he was still trying to be all tough and he just says, “well, they’re pretty good.”

Matthew Dunleavy started taking photos when his Dad allowed him the use of his Praktica that he had eyed since childhood. Due to this particular camera being broken he was forced to learn the tools of the trade in the most difficult way. Matthew uses his interest in drawing and painting to influence the way he captures images; from balanced, traditional scenes to abstract light paintings his subject differs as much as his style. His photos were published in Soliloquies 16.1.

Jeff Blackman
 co-founded The Moose and Pussy, Canada’s premiere sex-lit mag, with his partner Kate Maxfield and award-winning writers Jeremy Hanson-Finger and Rachael Simpson. Jeff was recently featured by the In/Words reading series and VERSeFest, Ottawa’s multi-genre poetry bash. He’s been banging out poems about maturity and Super Mario Bros. 3 for a project tentatively titled, “Oh, Thank Heavens I’m Back To My Old Self Again!”

John Wall Barger’s second book, Hummingbird, is forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in Spring 2012. Barger divides his year between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Tampere, Finland.

Dylan Riley: The first things that jump out from your bio are the divergent locations — but maybe that’s two questions.

First, what’s Finland like? What brought, or continues to bring you, there?

John Barger: I fell in love with a Finnish woman! This summer we lived together in Tampere, in the south, for four months. The whole country is eerie and gorgeous. So much dark. So much light. We visited a birch forest in Lapland, in the Arctic Circle, with five others in a cabin beside a frozen lake. It took two days to heat it. We chopped a hole in the lake for water, cut wood, had saunas at night. One night there were northern lights that looked like green flamenco fingers. The eternals (Väinämöinen, the eternal singer) and demons (Hiisi, the goblin who drowns children in lakes) you read about seem very close up there.

DR: I’m from the Maritimes myself, and I noticed a bit of a pattern. Young people seem to move from an obscure, small, Maritime city to Halifax, then from Halifax on to Montreal, Toronto, or Vancouver. How do you feel about this, and do you plan on living permanently in Halifax?

JB: I did that: moved to Vancouver at twenty. I love Halifax, but I’ve always felt separate from it. I’m envious of “regional” writers like Faulkner or Margaret Laurence, who can write about a community and have it stand for the world. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere. My first book, Pain-proof Men, mostly takes place in Halifax, but my next book, Hummingbird, does not have a single poem set there.

DR: But do you feel regionalism can be a trap sometimes, that in a way you’re better off as a writer without it?

JB: Maybe it’s a case of the grass always being greener — because I lack it, I want it. But I love [Charles] Olson’s Maximus poems, and his connection with Gloucester, Massachusetts. It seems like knowing where you are from is a beginning point, rather than an end. Like, once you have place, then you can jump off into the cosmos. I know most of the world lacks this sense of place these days — I’m not unique for this.

DR: “Beautiful Rodney” strikes me as a prose poem. Is this a form you think highly of? One you use often?

JB: I don’t mind if it’s prose or not, if it works. I love some prose poems, like Charles Simic’s The World Doesn’t End. I like to try to disarm the reader by presenting an accessible (maybe non-academic?) voice and form and (sometimes) narrative. Then once you are inside the poem — feeling comfortable and at home — something shifts.

DR: I like that. Sometimes you do have to trick a reader into reading something.

JB: Do you know James Tate, the American poet?

DR:  I don’t, but fill me in.

JB:  I found reading him really liberating. Return to the City of White Donkeys is an amazing book. He writes poems that don’t seem to worry about metaphors or line breaks, a bit like short stories, like micro-novels…you enter one of his poems, and feel lulled by the familiar voice, and then the scene shifts, like a dream. Like, you’re driving on the highway, getting sleepy, when the roadkill suddenly open their eyes, and you don’t know when it all changed.

DR: Do you have any new writing — or other projects — on the go?

JB: After visiting Cambodia this last winter and being blown away at the effects of the Khmer Rouge on that culture, I’ve been writing little hegemonic allegories, like dioramas of imaginary colonized villages. Truthfully, I don’t know how to write about the world falling apart without being zeitgeist or didactic or boring. A revolution seems to occur somewhere in the middle of each poem. At least one is called “Year Zero.”

DR: Are you following the Republican nomination?

JB: I would vote for Michele Bachmann as head of the Shark Eyes Coalition.

DR: Perry or Romney?

JB: I’ve wondered — why do people vote for Republicans? I mean regular, smart, non-rich people. Then it came to me: the Republicans are the fantasy party. We vote for them if we want to join in the fantasy that the American dream is still possible and relevant. That is, the illusion that we can all get as rich as Schwarzenegger; that consumerism works; that this democracy doesn’t guarantee a certain part of the population must be out of work and destitute; that the environment is not falling apart; that everything is all right.

DR: I guess we’ve lost your vote. But who are you reading right now?

JB: Joshua Trotter’s All This Could Be Yours, and Gabe Foreman’s A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People. The Best American Poetry 2011. And King Lear, to teach.

DR: What are you avoiding right now?

JB: I’m tempted to say I’ve been avoiding nothing, but the truth might be that I’ve been avoiding tranquility. I’ve been in a confrontational phase, as if I’m wearing a small sign around my neck saying, “LET’S FIGHT ABOUT BS!”

DR: What are you avoiding reading right now?

JB: Novels. DeLillo’s Underworld. The second book in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

DR: I know the feeling — I read the overture to Swann’s Way and now I talk about it like I’ve read the whole thing. Have you read much DeLillo, or any of the other postmodernists? Is this something that could come up later in your poetry?

JB: I think I’ve read every DeLillo besides Underworld. His characters sometimes have a kind of clairvoyance, or second sight, which is fascinating.

I’ve spent years trying to shake off the postmodern cleverness I learned at university. Now I think that a poem should involve heart, or empathy — not just speak in codes that only academics and other writers could understand.

DR:  How do you feel about David Foster Wallace? He seemed to genuinely try to bridge the postmodern cleverness/heart gap.

JB:  I’ll keep that in mind. I haven’t got to him yet. Although, Julian Barnes goes too far, I think. And Jeanette Winterson. John Fowles tries to bridge that gap, too. And Joyce tries, too. Proust is the shit.

DR:  I guess it’s a hard thing to do; to be honest but also keep up a self-reflexive stance.

JB:  I think the self-reflexiveness will not last — a footnote in 20th-century literature.

DR: Any final thoughts?

JB: If anyone is able to use the phrase, “Nights like this always make the neighbors come around,” in a poem, I’d be very grateful.

CASUAL ENCOUNTER – WALLACE, IDAHO

The one night stand stood up- or rather, didn’t.
Hadn’t stood at attention much since ‘Nam

but Cialis and a triple bypass are worse-suited
bedmates than Ed and Fifty

whom, when he called on her at her home
and, it should be noted,

after a red-cheeked redirection to the in-law suite,
he might very generously have described as sixty and sagging.

Her taste for chintz was unpalatable- every surface, herself included,
subjected to a diarrheal splattering of mismatched floral.

Still, Ed had always been good with numbers-
figured, rightly-

that internet literacy had not yet reached pandemic proportions
with the mature women of Wallace, Idaho.

He’d cruised Spokane’s Casual Encounters daily on dialup
and posted biweekly,

indefatigable in his conviction that there had to be at least one
silver fox in the silver capital of the world,

one other senior with a hotmail account and a desire
for contact in their contactivity.

Ed’s family had left the Yorkshire coal mines
for the glamour of the Silver Valley in ’22-

his native British patience, coupled with
an acquired American persistence, paid off.

Here was his sole fluke,
a self-described fifty and fit,

sixty and sagging in faded
Laura Ashley with a whiff of napthalene,

seventy-one in ungirdled truth
on the scratchy Pepto-pink bedspread.

She was as rousing to Ed as the thought
of Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold night.

(Also, it must be noted, that night hers was colder
than the Baroness’ Milk-Snatcher must be.)

Ed’s already doubtful tumescence
was decidedly less rigid

than even the most liberal constitution.
He asked permission to smoke, shuddered to think that

were his Parliament a cigar and
were his tastes more licentious,

he’d have been hard-pressed to wet it
in the preferred fashion of a certain philandering president.

Instead, with his ash grown long
as Churchill’s during speeches, he took his wordless leave-

thinking the while on the prospects of old age,
Had I known, I’d have sooner served in Normandy.

“Casual Encounters – Wallace, Idaho” is a counterpoint piece to “Casual Encounters – Vancouver, British Columbia” which will appear in Soliloquies 15.

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Paula Wilson asks Candice Maddy 5 Questions:

PW: Why poetry?

CM:  Brevity.

Actually, I held brevity against poetry for a while. I was on team prose for a long time — about as long as it took me to find a good shrink. I’d been curating sadness for as far back as I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and it was easier to justify length with prose. At the same time, I had the brutal-beauty handicap. I wanted it raw, I wanted it perfect. I tried on every confessional tone I came across. The more honest it sounded, the less it was. I spent a long time writing the sort of poetry I thought looked right, like dressing to trend. There was a pivot, where I stopped looking for a voice that sounded like what I was reading, what I was seeing. That’s where it started getting honest, when I realized the poetry I was interested in writing was nothing like what I enjoyed reading. My native tone wasn’t confessional, it was playful. I’d been fighting against form to find an honest-sounding vernacular, but I kept itching to coin a neologism, to disrupt the surface, to stage-wink at the reader. I stopped stopping myself. When the pressure of aestheticized catharsis came out of the equation, the words had room to stretch. Poetry welcomes the language elastic, because it offsets the formal canon. It’s always better to be a troublemaker in the company of rules. I had way more fun acting like a clown when I was taught by nuns than when I went to circus camp (both true, unfortunately). The tension is addictive.

CM: I don’t really have any more Craigslist poems on the agenda, for the time being. The poems I’ve been working on lately have more to do with the art and fashion worlds, in a sort of mock-critical way… great opportunities for wordplay, there.

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 Candice Maddy is a new contributor. By the time Soliloquies 15 goes to print, Candice Maddy  will have graduated in a new dress from Concordia University. She has previously been a  special fx and prosthetics makeup artist, a made-to-measure suit specialist, a French  teacher, and a Jew in a Catholic school. She writes poetry, nearly nonfiction, birthday cards,  and the occasional rap song. Her writing has appeared on paper and elsewhere. Her poems,  ”Casual Encounters – Vancouver, British Columbia” and “A (Mostly) Macaron-Mellifluous Morning,”
 will appear in the forthcoming  Soliloquies  15.

Outside it’s windy. I wonder about how long it’s going to be before the sickness gets here. It could be this breeze or the next one. It could be already here and we’re all already dead. Because I feel like my skin is peeling off most of the time. I feel like my head is going to explode and my flesh is on fire and if someone doesn’t touch me soon and use their fingers to remind me of the outline of my body I’m not going to exist anymore. This breeze or the next one. It could come at the end of this sentence, it could come in the middle of a vowel. I start to think about the letters in Pete’s name, that e that dips in the middle and stretches him into two syllables.

What I want is to get fucked so hard my whole body is a bruise. What I want is to run into Pete afterwards, reeking of semen. I want to ask him why he never calls me, and what the fuck he was thinking leaving his underwear underneath the bed. It’s not your bed anymore. I want to tell him his tattoo is stupid. Who are you to ask me how I’ve been? Who are you to ask me anything?

Not that if you asked me a question again sometime I wouldn’t answer and I wouldn’t try to be funny and charming and cute. Not that if you told me a joke I wouldn’t laugh, even if I didn’t think it was funny.

What I want is for Liam to tell me I’m pretty. He says, you’re pretty and our legs are tangled in the green fleece blanket. He says, you’re so pretty it makes me nervous. You’re the prettiest purple in the world. That’s why I lost my hard on. Not because you’re too hairy or you’re not flexible enough or you have too much cellulite, but because you’re so so pretty. Jeeze Louise you’re gorgeous. I saw God and he told me so. So pretty I can’t even touch you.

How pretty?

Holy mackerel it’s crazy. You’re as pretty as the page in The Great Gatsby where Jay kisses Daisy on a sidewalk in the moonlight. You’re as pretty as a drive through the mountains and the big horned sheep we pull over the car to admire. You’re as pretty as apricot chutney on focaccia bread. The lamb is roasted and the cheese is melted. Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. I look at you and it feels like a Tyrannosaurus Rex is ripping my torso in two, so pretty it hurts, it aches and I think about all the ways in the world I will never deserve you. So pretty the aliens will take one look at you and they’ll take you to their planet and they’ll line up around the block just to catch a glimpse of you. So pretty the sickness can’t even touch you.

from Frankie Barnet’s Giant Lizard King

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Paula Wilson asks Frankie a few questions:

PW: Your forthcoming story in Soliloquies 15 is titled Decarie. How do you feel your move from Edmonton to Montréal has affected your writing?

FB: Probably the most obvious difference between living in Edmonton and Montréal is that I’m going to school here. I guess what is kind of interesting is that for a long time most of my stories were about Edmonton, even after I moved here. Decarie is probably the first story I wrote that is actually set in Montréal, written half way through my second year living in Montréal.

PW: How do you feel you’ve grown or changed as a writer since living here and entering Concordia’s Creative Writing program? Where would you like to go from here?

FB: I think that the program has been great in that it really immerses you in writing, which can be really inspiring. My friends and I have this joke that goes, “I’m in creative writing. Living is my homework.” It is kind of a funny joke and kind of true in that I think there’s a lot that goes into good writing that doesn’t happen in a workshop. That being said, the criticisms and encouragements I’ve gotten from my classmates and professors have been really great. I’m a little sad to be graduating next year and hope to continue on to grad school.

PW: What topics do you find yourself coming back to repeatedly in your writing? What topics would you like to tackle in the future?

FB: I got a lot of flack in class for always talking about sex and being pervy, so I’m trying to move away from that stuff for now. Lately I’ve been interested in the role of setting in a piece, and the dynamics between mental and physical escape. It’s weird, the themes you become fixated on sometimes, most everything I’ve been working on lately deals with the wilderness and the idealistic visions characters project onto such landscapes. Mostly this has been inspired by the documentary Grizzly Man, as Timothy Treadwell struggles to reconcile his romanticized notions of the Alaskan landscape with the dangerous and brutal reality of his surroundings. While such a fantasy is crucial for Treadwell–his relationship with the grizzly bears offers his life meaning–it is ultimately through this necessity that Treadwell meets his death (spoiler alert).

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Frankie Barnet is a new contributor, her short story Decarie is forthcoming in Soliloquies 15. Hailing from Edmonton, Alberta, Frankie is a young writer living in Montréal. She studies English Literature and Creative Writing at Concordia University.

Twenty Directions

A paperclip holds me together

Wax traps a whisper in my ear

Dry sand fills my mouth

A single palm tree dips in the distance

The scent of crushed coffee beans creaming

triggers a goosebump caravan up and down my spine

I can see the flavor of her chapstick

in the reflection of Jeremy’s San Diego shades

We’re lost in a forest, surrounded by pine

so we head back south

but Sarah won’t stop QQing about her feet

Nothing happens after something happens
C’est la vie

The stoic tablecloth of faith

is primped across a trio of table tops

Grinning into the opaque compact mirror between her toes

I levitate and tear from myself my soul

(What use is it anyway?)

The Hippie blogs every moment from below

Tomorrow we will regret this

Stapled to the sky a flame licks my insides

eyes seeping caffeine, screaming

“Walk with shoes if you don’t have feet!”

All the while the walnut dances with his wife

the rusty, southern sign points north

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Lizy Mostowski asks Matthew a few questions:

LM: As a young poet, are you consciously going for a certain aesthetic or do you allow your writing to flow freely and instinctually?

MM: I definitely try to allow my poetry to flow freely and instinctually during the initial scratches of pen to paper. Most of my writing hits the page between metro stops or when I’m up late at night unable to sleep. It’s rare that I’ll sit down in front of a computer for the purpose of writing a poem. For me, that step comes when I transcribe to a word processor, where the first conscious edits are made. I live for those moments when a good idea, a line, or even only a few words come to mind and I scramble to get them down on paper.

As I continue to grow as a writer, I find that my work is shrinking, becoming more concise, economical. I find myself trying to say more by writing less—influenced, admittedly, by the restrictive form of Social Media. While my style lends itself more to free verse than traditional modes, I do find pleasure in the occasional haiku. “Memory Key,” which has been selected for Soliloquies 15, is a good example of my use of free verse to express an overall idea and theme in a poem.

LM: You read at the Pilot in November, alongside Dean Garlick, Jacob Wren, David Clink, and Doug Harris. You gave a great, well received reading, in my opinion. Did you feel as though it was a learning experience, as a student, to have read alongside established authors? Is there any advice you would give to your peers? Is there anything you would change or improve on your reading?

MM: Reading at the Pilot Reading Series in November was awesome. I’m grateful for Professor Jon Paul Fiorentino providing my Advanced Creative Writing Poetry class with the opportunity to take part throughout the year. Also, kudos to my classmate, Heather Stewart, for her great reading that night.

As a writing student, any opportunity to take in a live reading by established authors is a learning experience. The lessons vary from technical—How close should I stand to the microphone?—to timing and style—When might be the best time to use a pause for emphasis? My revision process includes reading aloud, so I become aware of the details, the way a poem sounds, and how it all plays into the overall meaning.

When I decided which pieces to read live, I picked ones that served the form best. I suppose my advice to my peers with regards to readings would be: Practice and be comfortable with what you’re reading. You don’t necessarily need to memorize it, but you should memorize how your poem feels from one line to the next. Also, if you can to choose pieces that may actually gain depth from being read aloud, it will be all the better. Even if you’re not scheduled for a reading any time soon, you should prepare as if you were—you never know what you might discover about your own writing in process.

I grew a pretty gnarly handlebar moustache for “Movember” to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer. Being that it was the 29^th of November, my ‘stache was in full force in time for the reading. I think I’ll go with a cleaner look next time around.

LM: What do you plan to do with your Creative Writing degree, anyways?

MM: World domination, definitely. I’m all over place when it comes to writing. My earliest work comes in the form of some (real awful) poems I wrote a decade ago while I was in high school. Later on my writing took the form of articles about the Montreal Canadiens for HabsWorld.net where I served as Editor-in-Chief  for the 2007-2008 season, as well as a collaborator and editor from 2005 to 2009. Before entering the Creative Writing department at Concordia University, I was drawn to screenplays.

While screenwriting is still one of the paths I plan to follow, I have become intrigued by the storytelling potential of the video game medium. I recognize that video games are continuously evolving and have a lot to offer thanks to advances in technology.  Especially here in Montreal, a world leader in the industry, there is an increasing accessibility for a group of people who share a passion for games to get together and get creative. I’m confident the skills I pick up as I complete my Creative Writing degree will allow me the opportunity to find work that I will enjoy doing.

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Matthew Macaskill is a new contributor, his poem Memory Key is forthcoming in Soliloquies 15. He is entering his third year at Concordia University in the Creative Writing program. He’s a born and raised Montrealer who bleeds bleu-blanc-rouge.

Jeremy Hanson-Finger is a new contributor, his short story Black Clouds is forthcoming in Soliloquies 15.

LM: Soliloquies, in the past, has been more Concordia-based and has only recently expanded to accepting submissions from all over Canada. Having done your Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa, how did you first hear about us?

JH: I went to high school in Victoria with Andrew Battershill, a previous Soliloquies contributor, and Peggy Hogan, a previous Soliloquies editor. We’ve stayed friends since.

LM: Your thesis is on “dirty bits in postmodern American novels”, what inspired your interest in American postmodern lit in particular? How do you feel that studying it has influenced your writing?

JH: My dad mainly. He was born on Long Island and started university at Rochester in 1967, so he was in an interesting place in a really interesting time. He took a class called “Literature of the Apocalypse” or something like that, which was all Coover and Barthelme and Pynchon and all those guys. So I got really into Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Robbins and Richard Brautigan in late high school on his recommendation, and then moved on to the heavier stuff during university.

My MA thesis was on the politics of carnival imagery and terror in Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow and David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Infinite Jest – Wallace’s novel being in some ways a response to what he saw as the supposed co-optation of the postmodern techniques of Pynchon’s generation by mass media.

Anyway, what I got out of working on that was a really solid understanding of the various theories of transgression in art and literature. The most useful was Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which allowed me to contextualize a lot of the stuff I was getting at in my own writing in terms of ideas about human subjectivity and psychoanalysis. I think for a long time my writing has been about making people uncomfortable, but the academic approach at least gave me one framework for understanding what I was doing and some of the possible reasons why.

LM: Do you believe that it is important for a writer to have an academic background? Do you think that there is a strong relationship between your academics and your creativity?

JH: I don’t think it’s necessary. Some of the greatest writers are great because they didn’t know what writing was supposed to be from the canon. For me, I think it was a good choice, because I’m all about big ideas, and it’s big ideas that get me excited to write something, not narrative. Which means that my major problem is with narrative drive, something I’m still working on. My current inspiration is Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

LM: What inspired you to pursue a Master’s degree?

JH: I originally applied for a few creative writing MFA programs in the last year of my undergrad, but didn’t get in anywhere, just wait-listed at UBC. I had initially planned to just work for a year and try again, but job prospects were not promising in Ottawa at that time.

Basically it was just a, “well, if the economy sucks and I can get a scholarship and a TAship so that I come out more or less even, and I can spend a year studying really interesting stuff, why not?” sort of decision, but I’m really glad I made it. I loved being a TA – I gave the filthiest lecture my prof had ever heard to his third-year American Satire and Utopia class about Gravity’s Rainbow.

I did consider going on to do my PhD, but I was so burnt out by the end of the MA (and my hundred-page thesis on two 1000-page books) that I’m glad I didn’t commit to going straight through.

I might go back at some point, but now I have a job as an editorial assistant with a publishing house in Toronto, which is a really fascinating and useful thing to do for money while I work on creative projects at night.

LM: Can you tell us about the collection of short stories you’re working on, entitled Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women?

JH: My old roommate once pointed out that two things showed up in every single story she’d read of mine – airplanes, and bad things happening to women. So I figured I might as well embrace it. It’s currently 18 stories, ranging from one sentence to a 10,000 word story and a 30,000-word novella. They all combine humour with serious topics, generally focusing on the way in which men and women relate to each other. And airplanes. I guess in that respect it’s very influenced by David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Sort of David Lynch meets David Foster Wallace. 

LM: You’re co-editor of Dragnet Mag, a new online literary journal, launched recently by yourself and Concordia graduate Andrew Battershill. What inspired the creation of Dragnet Mag? What do you hope to see for the future of the journal? Can you tell us more about it?

JH: Andrew and I have always seen eye-to-eye on what sort of writing we like, and we realized that there were no electronic Canadian literary mags who published the kind of stuff we wanted to publish and took advantage of the unique opportunities of digital publishing. So we started Dragnet with the idea that it’d be a journal that published writing that didn’t take itself too seriously, even if it dealt with serious topics, and did so in a format that made it easy for everyone to read no matter what device they used.

As a result, Dragnet can be viewed on the website in columns that fit on one screen (nobody likes reading an endless single column of text), as a print magazine layout on Issuu.com, and as an ebook that works on eReaders and mobile devices. We had stories from Sheila Heti, Jacob Wren, and J.R. Carpenter in the first issue, along with a bunch of new writers, and so far we have something lined up from Susan Musgrave for the new issue, which comes out July 2.

We will have a booth at The Word on the Street literature festival in Toronto in the fall, which will hopefully get a lot of people interested – we will likely be the only digital-only magazine with a booth there. Our long term plan is to approach the government for funding and to get enough web traffic to sell ads, so that we can cover our costs and pay our amazing contributors.

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photo by Jenn Huzera

Jeremy Hanson-Finger attended Carleton University, where he wrote his MA thesis on dirty bits in postmodern American novels. He now lives in Toronto, where he is the co-editor of Dragnet Mag. He is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled Airplanes and Bad Things Happening to Women. Let it be known, however, that he likes women and doesn’t want bad things to happen to them.