"The Blueboys Put An Eye On My Flop”

Mark Abley revels in the Montreal slang of the 1951 pulp novel The Crime on Cote des Neiges, a "noir mystery" reissued in Vehicule's Ricochet Books series:

The narrator, Russell Teed, is an impossibly hard-drinking private eye, and words of his that appear dated today are often the very words that would have made the novel seem fresh and vibrant in its time. Slang doesn’t like to stick around; after a few years, slang prefers to cover its tracks and slink out of town. The words I’m thinking about are mostly nouns. “The blueboys put an eye on my flop.” “Don’t put your stoolies to trail me.” “You saw my yap fall open.” A dead man (the novel is full of them) “had to catch the afternoon flyer.” A flyer was neither an airplane nor an airline passenger, but a fast train. Many of these colloquial nouns are still hanging around the language, although their meanings have moved on with time. When Russell tells a policeman “Don’t pull two boobs in a row,” he’s referring only to blunders. Walking into a pharmacy on Côte Ste. Catherine Rd., he remarks, “The place was inhabited by a soda jerk wearing a white jacket, and a deadpan fountain girl.” Drugstores in those days boasted lunch counters, and the employee who swung the fountain back and forth while adding soda water to flavoured syrup was called a jerk. This had nothing to do—I think—with various other meanings of that word. Montrose was writing when the métro was a faraway dream, and in his narrator’s eyes the pharmacy looked “as modern as the Toronto subway.”

Oatmeal, Not Manna

In his introduction to The Essential Earle Birney, Jim Johnstone makes the case that Birney is not only "one of the finest Canadian poets of the 20th century," but maybe one of the most restless.

In The Creative Writer (1966), a collection of lectures that Birney prepared for the CBC, the poet asserted: "Living art, like anything else, stays alive only by changing." His poetry reflects this statement—Birney made significant edits to many of his most canonized pieces throughout his career, despite criticism. Birney’s Selected Poems (1966) can be seen as something of a sea change in this regard: nearly every poem in the book was reformatted to remove punctuation, with the notable exception of "David." The grammatical and typographical changes that began in Selected Poems were refined further in The Collected Poems of Earle Birney (1975), and it’s from this point forward in Birney’s bibliography that the poems in this volume have been chosen. The transformation of Birney’s work in the 1960s and 1970s was accompanied by a reevaluation of his poetics. He addressed this in the preface to Ghost in the Wheels: Selected Poems (1977), when he wrote: "I should say at the start that I don’t any longer like the words ‘'poet,' 'poems,' etc. They’ve developed pretentious connotations. I prefer 'maker' and 'makings.' They mean the same but the texture’s plainer, oatmeal, not manna."

Sunday Poem

THE APPROACHING CURVE 

You said we could be happy
anywhere. But here?
Scylla’s cavern haunts our map.
You said we could be happy
unlipped, unvoiced; left to clap
along or disappear.
You said we could be happy
anywhere but here.

From Dog Ear (Signal Editions, 2014) by Jim Johnstone

(Painting "Glaucus and Scylla" by  J.M.W. Turner, 1841)

Circus Maximus

Almost from the start, the Griffin Poetry Prize has been dogged by the sense that something about the award just isn’t right. For some, it's the event’s Satyricon-ish vibe. The insane amount of money involved, the circus maximus scale of the operation, the proximity to "power"—a certain derangement sets in. It's as if staff slip something into everyone's drink; fame-amphetamines, maybe. Normal people say and do very strange things (as Richard Sanger and Jason Guriel ably captured in their reports on the annual gala).

More worrisome, for others, is the appearance of excessive cosiness and insiderism. They point to close ties between the trustees and the shortlisted books, and how the process seems to consistently draw jurors—and winners—from the same circles. I know: to even insinuate the Griffin prize is rigged is crazy, except there are odd moments that do give pause. Last year, a juror was about to announce the international winner at the podium when she haltingly admitted she didn’t know who it was. Scott Griffin had to hand her the envelope so she could read the name.

I have friends, such as Zach Wells, who say it’s silly for anyone to act shocked. The Griffin, he argues, is a private enterprise and was clearly set up from the get-go to produce the results it's produced. In 2007—the year Ken Babstock, Don McKay and Priscilla Uppal were on the short-list—Zach noted some uncomfortable coincidences:

The big problem with these prizes isn't that they always go to unworthy winners—although they often do—but that, even when the winner is a good pick, the decision is too often traceable to nepotistic networks. The Griffin Jury consists of Karen Solie (an old friend of Babstock's), Charles Simic (co-editor of the anthology New British Poetry, published and prefaced by Babstock at House of Anansi, and John Burnside, a contributor to said anthology. McKay is also connected to Solie, through Brick Books, Solie's publisher: McKay is a central member of Brick's editorial board. Priscilla Uppal seems to be the sacrificial lamb of the shortlist. It may or may not be significant that, on a list whose favourites are both pale-skinned fellows, she is neither. Call me a cynic, but what I've read of her poetry makes me doubt she was chosen for literary reasons. Back to Babstock, it has also been pointed out that Babstock is not only published by House of Anansi but is also employed by said press, and that House of Anansi is owned by Scott Griffin, founder of the Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. In theory and possibly in fact as well, this should have zero impact on the decision, but added to the mix, it makes the integrity of this prestigious prize pretty easy to doubt, don't it?

But if the Griffin prize was really created to produce certain results, wouldn't it have been easier to design the prize along the lines of the MacArthur fellowship, which accepts no submissions and confers its awards according to the closed-door recommendations of a board? Had they gone that route, the Griffin overlords would not only always get the outcome they wanted, but would have inoculated themselves from criticism. Moreover, to believe accusations of a “fix” one has to overlook the inconvenient fact that past juries have served up plenty of surprises—last year’s short-list, for example, caught many off-guard.

But now readers abroad are starting to notice something amiss. In 2012, PN Review reacted sharply to the news of the winners:

The winners of the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize were announced in Toronto on 7 June. David Harsent, author of Night (Faber & Faber 2011), and Ken Babstock, author of Methodist Hatchet (House of Anansi 2011), each received $65,000 CDN. The shortlist was made-up of three Canadians and four international poets in separate categories. The judges for the prize, Heather McHugh, David O’Meara, and Fiona Sampson, read a staggering ‘481 books of poetry, received from 37 countries around the globe, including 19 translations’. In spite of the variety before them, the judges managed to include among the seven three authors who have previously been finalists for the twelve-year old prize (Babstock, Harsent, and another Canadian, Phil Hall). Judge David O’Meara might have excused himself from the process when discussion around the judicial table turned to Methodist Hatchet: he is thanked in that book’s acknowledgements. In fact, a little digging reveals that O’Meara is thanked in the acknowledgements of three of Babstock’s four collections. In the fourth, Babstock’s debut, Mean (1999), O’Meara is the dedicatee. All four of the books are published by House of Anansi, which was acquired by Scott Griffin, namesake and founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize, in 2002. In what is surely a coincidence, Babstock has served as the house’s poetry editor for a number of years. A practically-minded onlooker suggested, 'The Griffin Foundation might be better served writing cheques directly to House of Anansi's marketing department.'

PN Review is back again this year, suspicions newly aroused:

The 2014 International and Canadian shortlists for the Griffin Poetry Prize have been announced. They include American Brenda Hillman (wife of Griffin Trust Trustee Robert Hass), American Carl Phillips (Griffin Poetry Prize judge 2010), and sometime-Canadian Anne Carson (shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001, judge alongside Phillips in 2010). Judges Robert Bringhurst (Canada), Jo Shapcott (UK) and C.D. Wright (USA) each somehow read 539 books of poetry, from 40 countries, including 24 translations, between the annual deadline for submission to the prize (31 December) and the 8 April press release: approximately five and a half books per day. Winning poets in each category will receive CA$65,000, plus CA$10,000 will be awarded to each shortlisted poet, conditional upon said poet attending and participating in the annual readings event, which will take place in Toronto on Wednesday 4 June. According to the Griffin website, prize founder and entrepreneur Scott Griffin, owner of the House of Anansi Press—which has over fourteen years produced eight shortlisted books and three winners—no longer takes part in the selection of judges: ‘To preserve the integrity of the Griffin Poetry Prize.’ Griffin Trust Trustee Robin Robertson may not own Jonathan Cape Ltd, but he is poetry editor and has published books by both Bringhurst and Carson (including the UK edition of her shortlisted book, Red Doc>). We await further connections between the trust, the judges, the poets, and their publishers with anxious optimism.

The Griffin Trust tried to put it in context:

RT @ww1lit See how many of the #WW1 poets were connected to each other throughout the course of their lives #OER pic.twitter.com/PIlblfRLUG
— Griffin Poetry Prize (@griffinpoetry) April 24, 2014

But not everyone saw it that way:

@griffinpoetry @ww1lit @Carcanet Good thing they weren't all giving each other prizes.
— Evan Jones (@EvanPJones) April 24, 2014

Unintended Interactions

Ed Carson explains the concept behind his book Bird Flock Fish School:

Spurred on by the addition of new words or phrases, the creative direction, diction and syntax of a poem emerge as much from the often unintended interaction of the words as from the more formal and structured planning of the poet. In this sense there is a kind of spontaneous and parallel response in which ideas and actions from multiple origins integrate into the context of the poem. Like the flock itself, the shape and direction of the poem take cues from constantly changing sources. The creation of the poem is both centralized in the poet, as with rhetoric, and decentralized in the emerging interaction of words within the poem; in this sense the poem can be seen as part planned, and part self-organizing.

Gala Signal Editions Launch in Toronto, April 11, 2014

(Left to right) Vincent Colistro, Michael Lista, Jim Johnstone and Jason Guriel.

2014: The Year of Reading Women

by Guillaume Morissette, author of New Tab

We’ve been celebrating the publication of Guillaume Morissette’s debut novel, New Tab (Esplanade Books) these past few days.  Earlier this week, two editors discussed the novel’s merits and Maisonneuve magazine published an excerpt.  Next Thursday, Morissette will launch the novel at Montreal’s Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.  As for today, we hear from the author himself. 

I grew up around women. My childhood was, more or less, four things: 1) being routinely outwitted at videogames or board games by my two older sisters, 2) perceiving my dad as some sort of remote, encrypted, self-absorbed, anger-prone satellite orbiting around my mom, my sisters and me, 3) discussing my problems almost never with my dad, and almost always with my mom, whose life advice was kind and well-meaning but rarely effective, and 4) failing at many things and coping with failure through escapist fantasies and burying myself ostrich-like deep within my imagination.

As a result (or maybe the two situations are completely unrelated, but happen to form a convenient narrative, I don’t know), it seems, to me, that now, as an adult, most of my friends in life are women, which I am okay with. I highly recommend being friends with women who are funny, internet savvy and/or emotionally self-aware. I do have “guy friends,” but for whatever reason, it seems proportionally easier for me to make female rather than male friends. This aspect of my life directly influenced, I feel, material in my new book, a novel called New Tab, which features, among other things, strong, neutral, heterosexual friendship between men/women.

Earlier this year, The Guardian, citing a social media trend, called 2014 “the year of reading women,” which I am also okay with. In support of this, I’ve been meaning, since, I think, January, to compose some sort of blog post highlighting female authors whose work I drew inspiration from for New Tab, in the process maybe reflecting, or trying to reflect, on what it means, to me, to read female writers, or hang out with my female friends.

The following isn’t a comprehensive list of everything I’ve read, just a few mentions, from memory, of writers whose work I’ve read, liked reading, and would recommend looking up on Google.

In no particular order:

Clarice Lispector: I read The Hour Of The Star back in 2009, I think, and really liked it. For a while, I imagined Clarice Lispector as some sort of terminator sent from the future to write sharp, commanding novels filled with intensely lucid individual sentences. Over time, and after reading some of her earlier novels, I was eventually able to visualize her as a human person, just a fascinating one.

That book feels, to me, like: Doodling on a restaurant’s paper placemat whose puzzle is the dark maze of everyday life.

Lidia Yuknavitch: I read The Chronology Of Water in 2011 while ridesharing from Montreal to New York, and felt almost annoyed when the driver announced that we were about to arrive in Manhattan, preventing me from finishing this book. Chronology is a memoir that’s frequently beautiful at the sentence level, and reads like a kind of unromanticized conquering of the past.

That book feels, to me, like: A bomb went off but no one noticed.

Anaïs Nin: I bought more or less randomly The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Volume 6) from a used bookstore in the summer of 2012. I had glanced at the opening section, which featured a vivid, creative description of LSD use, and decided to get it, even though it seemed incredibly unlikely, to me, that I would read this book in full, from first page to last. For some reason, I wanted to own it anyway, maybe just to confirm that I wouldn’t finish it. It turned out that I liked reading about Nin’s social life, her descriptions of people, calm lucidity, views on her own work, and that the structure of Nin’s diary, which unfolds in vignettes, was really helpful as an additional reference point for New Tab, which was maybe 40% complete at the time, and also unfolds in fragments of different sizes.

That book feels, to me, like: Tourism in the warzone of the inner self.

Ashley Opheim: Ashley & me both live in Montreal. In maybe late 2010 or early 2011, we exchanged emails for the first time, without having previously met in person. I sent her a short story and she sent me poems that I remember describing to someone else as “very insane” and “kind of awesome.” Since then, she’s become one of my closest friends. She also happens to be, hopefully independent of our friendship, my favorite Canadian poet. Her work seems, to me, privately exciting, and deeply unalike a lot of Canadian poetry. Her poems aren’t academic in nature, or overly sentimental, but rather seem animated by a kind of inner vitality and blissfulness that make them communicative, playful, funny, modern and celebratory.

That book feels, to me, like: What would happen if you were to give Emily Dickinson colored chalk and a yoga mat.

Melissa Broder: I’ve been following Melissa Broder on Twitter and reading some of her poems online since, I think, early 2012. I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of her new collection, Scarecrone, and read it in mostly one sitting, feeling positive and enthusiastic about where she’s trying to take poetry. Her poems are fun, chaotic and entertaining, and some of her lines are powerful and instantly tweetable.

That book feels, to me, like: The abyss taking a selfie with God.

Mary Robison: I first googled Why Did I Ever in late 201o, after reading an interview with Amy Hempel in which she mentioned Mary Robison’s book. It’s a light, quick read that isn’t particularly plot-heavy, but features a seemingly effortless, highly interesting tone/structure. The novel unfolds in 536 short snippets that are often calm, wry, funny and tragic, all at once.

That book feels, to me, like: The exhaustion of trying to make life decisions that aren’t terrible.

Renata Adler: I don’t remember at all how I learned about Speedboat (or it’s pseudo-sequel, Pitch Dark), but after somehow ordering a used copy from Amazon, the book quickly became very useful as a reference point for New Tab. Speedboat is composed of short, seemingly unrelated vignettes about the life of a smart and cultured woman living in an urban center. The book’s approach to plot and timeline can be weird and confusing, but Speedboat offsets this by offering fragments that feel meaningful and borderline complete in themselves.

That book feels, to me, like: My intellectual life is a nightmare.

More authors I wanted to write about, or at least acknowledge: Marie Calloway, Ann Beattie, Lorrie Moore, Lynne Tillman, Amy Hempel, Jean Rhys, Hitomi Kanehara, Ariana Reines, Lucy K Shaw, Laura Broadbent, Gabby Bess, Mira Gonzalez, Diane Williams, Barbara Browning, Gail Scott, Julie Mannell, Frankie Barnet, Gwendoline Riley, Bette Pesetsky, Luna Miguel, Joy Williams, Jeanette Winterson, Iris Murdoch, Kate Zambreno, Sheila Heti.

Killer Freebies

David W. Brown has some advice for any magazine or press thinking of setting up a stall at the next AWP bookfair.

If you are Pank or Carrier Pigeon or The Review Review or Yellow Flag Press or Curbside Splendor Publishing, playing to four-figure audiences at best and hoping to attract new readers from a curious buying public (the final day of the conference allows lay Seattleites free admittance to the book fair), snazzy covers aren’t enough—your best bet is to have killer freebies at your table to attract eyeballs. Items I observed being given away include bookmarks; buttons; tea bags; pocket-sized notebooks; HiLiters; generic highlighters; pens; pens with generic highlighters at one end; Post-It-brand notepads; adhesive notepads (generic); stickers (some of which included such political statements as FREE CASCADIA and I STAND WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD); luggage tags; postcards; pencils (but not with pencil sharpeners); pencils, sharpened; collapsible Frisbees (well, “throwing discs”); rulers; microfiber cloths; eyeglass cleaning cloths; a fortune teller miracle fish (which and this had to be explained to me, you hold in your hand, and depending on how the thin, translucent red fish bends, folds, twists, etc. in reaction to your body heat, perspiration, and/or chi, your fortune is revealed, or at least your mood, really. For the record, I am fickle); the kind of bite-sized candy you get at Halloween—not the cheap stuff but those little Starburst fruit chews, Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, etc.; refrigerator magnets; chocolate bars with book covers printed on the wrappers; bumper stickers; Olivia Newton John-style sweatbands (head); snake key chains in ultra-blue, ultra-green, ultra-orange, ultra-red, and ultra-pink; lead pencils; matchbooks; chewing gum (printed on label: chewing on life, faith & art); rubber bracelets (wide and black, that reminded me of the thick rubber-leather-hybrid bands that engage the roller in old Kirby-brand upright vacuum cleaners and are a general pain to replace); fake tattoos; cupcakes; fitted insulation pouches for 12-ounce beverage cans; licorice discs (which looked exactly, and I mean exactly, like black tar opium); wristbands (the kind they give you at concerts to denote an underage drinker); ingeniously-designed wristbands that double as flash drives; condoms; fortune cookies; oranges; lanyards; bottle openers; lip balm (in egg form and traditional Chap Stik form); coffee mugs; shots of MacNaughton Canadian whiskey (distributed in plastic, disposable Jell-O shot cups); tote bags; cigarettes (like, real cigarettes, both light and full-flavored, in the kind of large wooden presentation box that you'll see in black-and-white films); 2" toy rubber frogs, green; containers of various types of Greek and Lebanese cuisine (though no plates, and so I'm not sure if you were supposed to just eat the stuffed grape leaves with your fingers or what, and notably there was no hand sanitizer to be found in the vicinity); adjustable measuring tablespoons; tape measures with integrated bubble-level; pistachios (in plastic cups, though it was unclear whether you were supposed to take a handful of nuts, or whether you could just take a whole cup, or what); coasters; cookies (diced); Teddy Grahams in a large communal bowl; a chocolate cake (whole, with plates and a knife to just slice yourself a piece); chocolate rocks (which resembled the colorful, glossy rocks processed through a rock tumbler); squeeze balls; cereal bars (blueberry, chocolate chip chewy); and clothes pins (though I don't understand why). This list is inclusive.

How About This?

Genuinely curious: of the negative reviews of Anne Carson's work, is there one written by a critic who is not a dullish white male?
— Michael Nardone (@mdnardone) April 10, 2014

Despite calling the language in Anne Carson's Red Doc> occasionally "stunning," Erin Lyndal Martin feels the book is deeply flawed—an attempted epic whose good moments are "overshadowed by pretension of form and over-reaching of the whole project."

But are these decisions about characters' names, these variations in form, really anything more than self-indulgent stabs at literary immortality? Carson goes to great pains to push the limits of form but fails to give her characters much in the way of individual personalities. Unlike other poets who experiment with form, Carson's experiments fail to pay off or actualise the desire to write a contemporary epic.  

Carson ends on an open note; one that suggests G and Sad could appear again, maybe again under different names and different forms. Despite what often feels like the characters' lack of depth, it would be nice to check in on them again in a few years. Hopefully, by then, Carson will focus on what she does best and leave the pretentious form and confused narrative structure behind. 

Guillaume Morissette's New Tab: A Conversation Between Two Editors

by Dimitri Nasrallah, Esplanade Books Editor

New Tab, the debut novel by Montreal writer Guillaume Morissette, comes out today.  It’s the twentieth Esplanade Books title, and it introduces yet another fresh voice to a fiction line that has had a successful run developing them under founding editor Andrew Steinmetz.  The life of a video-game designer is not something you see too often in fiction, but it rings true for anyone living in Montreal these days, where companies like Ubisoft employ thousands of young people.  It’s a relatively recent phenomenon, a lifestyle entirely lost on previous generations of writers, to whom the option was largely unavailable.

As such, Morissette’s New Tab brings to life a very contemporary Montreal, one that hasn’t really settled into place just yet.  And that’s what makes it so exciting.  Here we see the city as the fluently bilingual, game-sector subsidized home to a generation of post-university youth who spends their twenties frequenting all sorts of illegal venues, going to house parties, swapping cheap apartments, and cultivating deeply complex social networking personas that are increasingly divorced from who they are in real life – whatever that may constitute these days.   Morissette has a talent for capturing this ephemeral phase of being young, both in its cultural trends and its underlying psyche of social anxiety.

New Tab ended up being Andrew Steinmetz’s final book as Esplanade’s fiction editor, as well as the first Esplanade title to see publication during my brief tenure.  As such, I decided to call up Andrew to discuss my impressions with him, seeing as how I ended up becoming one of New Tab's first readers.

DN: When did you first come across the manuscript?

AS: I don’t remember the time or date.  But [Guillaume] submitted and I opened the file, and right away I was struck by certain things.  The title, first of all, which I didn’t catch right away what it meant: New Tab.  The first sentence of the book had this effortless feel.  I thought it was striking and spoke of the now, sounded very contemporary.  It was a very cool first sentence.  Then as I read the first few pages, I understood this whole idea of how the tab, opening a new tab or a browser tab, was a great organizing principle for a book like that, where the main character is immersed in technology and communicating primarily through Facebook and his computer.  I thought it was fabulous.

DN: Seems like he’s working on quite the high-wire balancing act in the book, between the pop culture of the technology and the ultimate gravitas that comes through it.  How do you find he struck that balance?  Was it there the whole time, or was it something you two had to edit toward?

AS:  You mean the balance between the ideas and the book’s culture?

DN: Yes, between the surface of the story and its depth.  Because the surface is definitely a prominent feature, but to me the depth is what really impresses.

AS: The balance was struck from the beginning.  We had a bit of a tug of war over the character, whether he was too self-indulgent or too self-absorbed.  But of course he is, or he’s supposed to be.  The character I liked from the beginning, because he came across as being this androgynous, sexually ambivalent male, which I thought was interesting.  And of course he’s full of angst and self-criticism.  Guillaume built this persona up quite well.  At some points I thought maybe it was too much, and that’s where we ended up having our discussions about the manuscript.  But as a writer, what impressed me about Guillaume was that we always had the conversation going back and forth, and he always gave very rational reasons for keeping what he wanted to keep.  I always believe that, in the end, if the writer listens to you but says no, you have to go with them.

DN: One of the things that intrigues me most about the book is that, not only does Guillaume try to capture the inner soundtrack of someone in their mid-20s, but that he actually nails it so often, and that he does so with such brevity and simplicity.  He’s known these feelings, and he manages to get right to them in a way that’s not labored, but also quite funny.

AS: Very funny, yeah.  That’s what I was getting at, even in that first sentence.  That first sentence tells you so much about the rest of the book, how it’s going to be.  The way Guillaume meshes the character with the technology, the way he thinks effortlessly and succinctly.  Another sentence of his that I really loved goes something like, “I hate using my phone as a phone.”  I thought that was very funny, especially to someone of my generation.  Again and again, I think he nails, as you say, his own generation and how they interact, how they communicate pretty casually, openly, and informally about so many things.

DN: It’s interesting that you bring up the notion of generations.  It doesn’t address your generation, and I found while reading it that I felt a bit old to be living that way too.  But, at the same time, he’s captured something so immediate to his particular age group.

AS: We talked about that point specifically, and I said the reason I liked his book is that it reads like a fossil record of a time.  It’s a great representation of how people communicate ideas.  Coming back to this whole notion of new tabs as this organizing principle, I found it to be a perfect title and principle for the structure, but also for the cognitive mindset of people who relate that way.  New tab: it speaks to this brand of randomness where, as things come up, they can go to a certain depth and then close down as something else opens up.  It’s the multi-tasking of life’s issues.

DN: To me, that was really the universal quality of the book.  Even if you weren’t of that generation or weren’t living in Montreal, you could still walk away understanding something not only of the character, but also of a particular age group that we kind of look at from the outside now. We observe them with a sort of dispassionate marvel.  How different they seem to be in how they go about talking to one another.

AS:  He’s the first author where, for editing, we Skyped. That’s the first time I’ve done that.  We sat there staring at each other.  It was a funny experience, but I thought it was perfect for editing this book.  In the past I’ve done it on the phone or by email.  It worked well that way, but I felt like an old man sitting there, saying, ‘Okay, here’s my Skype handle’.  He was totally comfortable, and I must’ve looked very awkward (laughs).

DN: And apart from this universal quality of generational socialization that the novel handles so well, I found that if you’ve lived in Montreal, it’s got something very particular to say about the city that contrasts its universality.

AS:  Yeah, it’s something about the apartments, which was one of the main themes for me.  It was, how to put it, a reference for me, living in those Montreal apartments and apartments coming up and looking for apartments, which is all very reminiscent of that age and university. But to me it felt unique to Montreal, how people move and move through different apartments.

DN: That part I felt I could readily compare with.  I had lived through that.  It seems like a rite of passage in this city to go through those apartments and to go to those fully bilingual parties.  So by the time you were done editing, the finished novel was pretty close to how it came in?

AS: I think it’s pretty close.  I asked Guillaume to add some scenes.  I really liked the scenes of the character’s workplace, making the video games.  I thought that was a lot of fun and interesting to read.  We thought about adding more of the writing class that the character takes. But in the end, it remains almost a side-issue of the whole book.  Guillaume was against that, and I kinda liked that he didn’t want to turn it in to any level of parody.

DN: I suppose, at that point, it almost begins hitting too close to home for him, given that he was doing both the videogame work and the writing classes. 

AS: Yeah.

Guillaume Morissette will be launching the novel on Thursday, April 24^th, at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.

Sunday Poem

CARP 

Its freedom already won by age, propeller,
or some unseen thing—a cool, white tumour,
small as a grain of rice wedged into meat
or organ. A bloated feathering of scales—
sun-side, bone-dry, and silvering—the carp
looks ready for first and last flight. Tucked
away from bigger water, this fish is an island
of decay bull’s-eyed into a huddle of dike stones.
Bobbing in the wake of yachts cutting across
the bay, it gives the illusion of life. A codex
of pipe taps, footprints after an avalanche,
the false hope wreckage gives. As if something
could still be alive in there. As if, returned to us,
it would still be the same. We task ourselves
with releasing it, but the switch has too much
give, too green for what the job takes. Will not
lift this mass and its clouded eye skyward.
What works: time and a second branch run up
from shore. One stab through the rot, the thing
speared and hauled into open water. That if
we stand together, squint, tilt our heads just right,
we can see how good we are, how we always knew
what was best, what, in the end, could be saved.

From YAW (Mansfield Press, 2014) by Dani Couture