The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Larissa Lai

Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance (Chaudiere Books, 2016) highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.

Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a Thousand and Salt Fish Girl; two books of poetry, sybil unrest (with Rita Wong) andAutomaton Biographies; a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement; and most recently, a critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. A new novel, The Tiger Flu, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press in Fall 2018. A recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers' Award, she has been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism. She holds a Canada Research Chair II in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary and directs The Insurgent Architects' House for Creative Writing there. In Fall 2018, Arsenal Pulp Press will publish her new novel, The Tiger Flu.

Q: How long have you been in Calgary, and what first took you there?

On the most recent pass, I've been in Calgary for three years, to take up a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary. However, I first came in 1997, to take up a position then called the Markin-Flanagan Canadian Writer-in-Residence (now called The University of Calgary Writer-in-Residence), on the basis of the success of my first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, which came out in 1995. I found the writing community here to be supportive and progressive, and enjoyed my time so much that I returned in 2001 to do a PhD here. So, altogether, I have lived in Calgary for eight years, broken up by stints living in BC and England. 

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

I've written since I was little. Hong Kong (where my family is from) is a pretty cosmopolitan place, but also a colonial one. I think there is a concern about language built into the culture. When I was growing up in Newfoundland, under (the first) Trudeau, there was pressure on English language for reasons of assimilation. So for me, from a young age, writing (English) has always been a source of both anxiety and pleasure. I took a couple of creative writing courses from George McWhirter at UBC, when I was an undergraduate there in the mid-80s. I met Jim Wong-Chu through him and became involved with the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop at that time. My first publication was an essay (co-authored with Jean Lum) about Asian Canadian contemporary media, published in the catalogue for the 1991 film, video and photo-based art exhibition Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, curated by Paul Wong. I also worked as curatorial assistant on that show. Shortly after that I met a whole crew of folks who have remained important friends, peers and mentors to me at the Writers'-Union-sponsored conference The Appropriate Voice in Orillia in 1992. This was where I first met Roy Miki, Fred Wah, Althea Prince, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, Daniel David Moses, Rita Wong, Hiromi Goto, Ashok Mathur, Tamai Kobayashi, Ajmer Rode, Sadhu Binning, and many others. By that time I was doing a lot of art writing and book reviews for small papers and journals. Kinesis: The Newspaper of the Vancouver Status of Women and Fuse Magazine were really important to me as publication venues through the 1990s. I had my first Canada Council grant in 1993 for the project that became the novel When Fox Is a Thousand. Officially, I became involved in the Calgary writing community when I had the Canadian Writer-in-Residence position at the University of Calgary in 1997, as I just mentioned. However, unofficially, the conference It's a Cultural Thing and the work of the Minquon Panchayat here in 1993 was my first point of contact. Though I didn't attend, I paid close attention to what was happening because that work parallelled in important ways the work I was involved with during Yellow Peril: Reconsidered and later, the conference Writing Thru Race. I was in close conversation with several Calgary writers-- people like Ashok Mathur, Aruna Srivastava, Shamina Senaratne and Sharron Proulx-Turner-- as well as attendees from other parts of the country as that conference unfolded. My close friendships with the novelist  Hiromi Goto and the poet Rita Wong stem from that time. Both Hiromi and Rita have Calgary roots. (Monika Kin Gagnon's book Other Conundrums offers lots of analysis and history on this period, as does Carol Tator, Frances Henry and Winston Mattis's Challenging Racism in the Arts. I also write extensively about this period in Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s.)

Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Calgary provide, or allow?

Calgary has been an important hub for experimental poetry and fiction for many many years. For a long time it was also a hub for women's life writing-- to a certain extent it still is. For me, it's astonishing and wonderful how long-standing these communities are. In spite of the fact that the actual members of the community have shifted quite a lot of over the years, there is a spirit here that keeps on going. It has, of course, been nurtured by the Creative Writing Program in the English Department over the years. Different faculty-- from Chris Wiseman to Fred Wah to Aritha Van Herk to Nicole Markotić to Suzette Mayr to Tom Wayman to Robert Majzels to Christian Bok—have supported it and impacted it in different ways, as have numerous talented graduate students. There's a reverberant relationship between the community in town and the community at the university. Certain bookstores have also been important. I think especially of Pages in Kensington, McNally-Robinson (no longer around), and Shelf Life Books. I attend lots of writing events here on a fairly regular basis-- from the Flywheel Series to regular events at Shelflife Books as well as WordFest events. The Calgary Distinguished Writers' Program remains important to me for its regular support of both Canadian and international writers.

Calgary is beginning to get its stuff together around Indigenous cultures, much of it initiated by Indigenous peoples themselves. The film/play The Making of Treaty Seven has been really important for me in terms of understanding my treaty obligations here, especially coming from the West Coast, which is for the most part unceded territory.

What is great about Calgary is that its creative communities are mutually supportive-- everyone attends everyone else's stuff. You don't get the kinds of polarization that are possible in larger arts ecologies like those of Toronto or Vancouver.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements there? How did the city and its community, if at all, change the way you approached your work?

The Insurgents Architects' House for Creative Writing is a project that doesn't so much respond to an engagement here as make one. I'm particularly interested in the intersection of conversations about social justice and contemporary form. Since inception there have been a couple of major scandals around issues of gender and power in Canadian writing communities, and so we've run two "Paper Hearts" events to address those issues, aiming to represent people from across the range of communities affected by sexual violence. Doreen Spence, a Cree elder who works on this territory opened the first one, Anita Eagle Bear (Blackfoot) opened the second. Their presences and prayers have been really important to set the tone. I find that when an elder opens, people are their best and deepest selves and you get a lot of less that bad, defensive kneejerking/troll behaviour that seems to mark so much of, for instance, US partisan politics these days. If I had my way, the world would be run by a council of grandmothers, and so much of the horror of our present would just vanish. After their openings, I facilitated to the best of my facilitating ability-- the secret ingredient is listening. I learned in the aftermath that the younger generations don't practice these modes of community building as a matter of course. One fairly senior poet of the next generation told me that she had never done such an exercise before, which I could not believe. It showed me the need for the work for sure. We've had other ones-- on creative writing as social justice, on Asian/Indigenous relations, on innovative writing as it attaches to the social, and on the uses and abuses of creative writing programs. All of them have included readings and performances, as well as focussed discussion in both critical and creative modes. There's a sense in which these facilitated symposia are their own art form. I hope they've contributed to the Calgary conversation in productive ways.

This kind of work is made possible for me by a very unusual university culture that is open, not just to new poetic or narrative forms, but also to new forms of social, critical and pedagogical practice. Here in Calgary, where idea of "innovation" has a curious hold at the level of both the university and at the level of city culture, there is room for progressive social forms. I try not to think about Calgary in terms of right and left, and attend instead to the spirit of positivity, community and openness. This city has those things in spades, and good things happen when they are called to.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have just completed a novel called The Tiger Flu, about a disease that disproportionately affects men, a community of pathenogenic women at the end of the world, and a doctor who has to seek medical help from her oppressors if the parthenogenes are going to survive. It's very primal and very operatic. I'm reading all the great second wave feminist speculative fiction writers and reimagining their worlds.

I'm working on a long poem called FROG DIAGRAM that thinks of the acupuncture points as history sinkholes, as well as finishing up a critical book on Asian/Indigenous relation.

Ryan Pratt reviews The Calgary Renaissance

Ryan Pratt was good enough to provide a new review of our anthology, The Calgary Renaissance (2016), over at the ottawa poetry newsletter. Thanks so much! You can see Pratt's full review, here. This is the second review of the book, after Douglas Barbour was good enough to discuss such, here. And of course, copies of the anthology are still very much available.

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Andrew Wedderburn

Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further (ongoing) interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.

Andrew Wedderburn attended the Alberta College of Art and the University of Calgary between 1995 and 2001, dropping out of the former and graduating from the latter after studying creative writing. His stories have been published by filling Station and Alberta Views magazines. His debut novel, The Milk Chicken Bomb, was published by Coach House Books in 2007. In 2008 it was a finalist for the Amazon / Books in Canada First Novel Award, and long-listed for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. As a musician (guitar, shouting) Wedderburn has written, recorded and toured extensively as a member of the groups Hot Little Rocket and Night Committee, releasing 7 full-length albums over the last two decades. After 20 years living in Calgary, Wedderburn recently moved back to the farm north of Okotoks, Alberta, where he grew up. He now spends most of his time stuck in traffic on McLeod Trail.

Q: How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?

A: I was born in Calgary and grew up outside what used to be a small town called Okotoks, just south of the city. When I was eighteen I moved into the city for school. I did a year at the Alberta College of Art (they hadn’t added Design to the name yet at that point) and sort of fumbled around. Realized that it wasn’t the place for me and moved over to the University of Calgary. So Calgary has always been part of my life in one way or another.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

A: I wanted to write and “be a writer” from about the time I started reading. My mom had published stories in magazines, and I’d grown up watching her work at the craft – dedicating time, chipping away at drafts, working from an idea through to a text. So I grew up knowing that it was possible and with a rough idea of where to start.

As a teenager, I wrote stories and shared the manuscript copies with friends. Half-finished comic books and at least one play that we put on at my high school. But I didn’t really have any peers who were doing the same kind of thing, or any concept of how to reach beyond my circle of friends for an audience.

Then when I moved to the city I got exposed to this world of people who took the matters of creation, distribution and community into their own hands – published zines, put out records on their own labels, booked and organized shows for bands, held readings in community halls. Punk rock kids who sat on the boards of artist run centres. I remember going to a joint launch party for filling Station and dANDelion magazines at the Carpenter’s Union Hall in Kensington. I had my mind blown in two ways: the fact that people were creating and publishing on their own, and then what that they were creating. All these ideas about experimentation, about play and testing – seeing all that acted out from a podium was pretty amazing and inspiring.

As time went on I moved into the Creative Writing program at the U of C – fiction with Aritha van Herk, who has this monumental influence on several generations of Calgary fiction writers now. And then at the same time I was going to more and more events, where you had a lot of cross contact with poets, who had grown up under Fred Wah and Nicole Markotić. I worked at a cooperative bookstore on 17^th Avenue as well called Books n Books, and we sold a lot of local zines and chapbooks, the creators of which were in and out, so I got to sit in a few different creative communities. All of it was really inspiring and wonderful.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?

A: I learned new kinds of goals and outcomes to focus my interest and attention towards. Engaging with the reader, leaving them more space, playing with them. Balancing detail and ambiguity. As opposed to This happened And then This happened And then, finally, This. I learned about effects and timing: now’s the time for slapstick and now’s the time for silence. And how the practice and the care and the recital and the showmanship are all equal players. There were all these people tinkering in their various garages and then pulling up to the Show and Shine and I learned mechanics and preparation and performance.

What Calgary provided was this enthusiastic space where you were invited to Do It Yourself. There’s this unfair idea of Calgary as an indifferent suburban wasteland – and I mean, in a lot of ways there’s good reason people have that picture. But deep in the yolk of the city, especially back then, you had this passionate population of people deep into artistic production and distribution. In the eighties and nineties and even into the early two thousands Calgary was still relatively off the beaten path. “Culture” wasn’t going to show up in its tour bus from the Metropole, so whatever you were into – from concrete poetry to surf rock to contemporary dance – you’d have to do your goddamn self. Which we did, and we built this really self-contained, energetic culture. A reaction against the vacuum. CJSW radio, One Yellow Rabbit, the music scenes around the east village Multicultural Centre, the Carpenters Union Hall, the Night Gallery – all of these were thriving and very, very Calgarian. And the literary scenes, whether that was experimental writing or spoken word, were some of the strongest forces for that.

I toured Canada for ten years in a rock band. Before I started, I thought of Calgary as an indifferent suburban wasteland. Then you start driving to Vancouver or Toronto or Ottawa or Halifax, or Kamloops and Kitchener and St John, and – I don’t want to say there isn’t great stuff going on in those places, because there is. But I realized just how vibrant and self-made and self-sustaining the artistic culture in Calgary at that time really was. And that was really inspiring, and made me really proud to be a little part of.

Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else?

A: Really it’s about a unique environment of influence and interests that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. Which individuals have had the most influence on writers in our city? Robert Kroetsch, Aritha van Herk, Fred Wah. Nowhere else in the world do you get that answer to that question. And that’s just one particular current – there’s a whole spoken word scene where someone like Sheri-D Wilson is tremendously influential and even if you’re not involved in that mode, it’s a vibrant part of the community that you engage and interact with.  So you have people responding to those unique people and their ideas over generations, in the particular environment and climate of Calgary, which itself is different from anywhere else. Calgary is weird. Decades of weird, idiosyncratic prairie conservatism to respond to and react to. Earnest Manning. And then the actual environment is weird. You go to the Banff Centre and the first thing they tell you is “If you feel weird or can’t sleep, it’s the altitude. The altitude has a physical effect and don’t discount it.” We get Chinooks and half the city gets a headache and can’t think straight. All of this stews together and makes for a really unique situation to grow, learn, create and work in.

Q: What prompted your move away, and what kind of effect has the shift made in your work?

A: I’ve moved away by moving back. We live on a corner of the farm where I grew up, twenty minutes south of the city. I’d lived in and around 17th avenue for fifteen years – anything and everything happening in Calgary was a ten minute walk. Now I spend two hours a day driving in and out of the city to get to work. You get time to think sitting on Deerfoot Trail or Mcleod Trail but the thinking you do driving is different from the thinking you do walking. And then at home, we’re in the middle of nowhere, it’s dark, it’s quiet. There are moose and elk and badgers and skunks. Cows and sometimes kids who live down the road go by on ATVs. I’m adjusting. It’s interesting. It’s different too because I'm back in the landscape where I grew up but it’s all subtly or not subtly different. The town where I went to school – Okotoks – has gone from 4,000 people when I was a kid to over 20,000 now. I drive past my old High School whenever I go into town to go for groceries or to the Canadian Tire. I don’t know what any of it means yet. 

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements there? How did the city and its community, if at all, change the way you approached your work?

A: The Milk Chicken Bomb was in large part an effort on my part to recreate the rural landscape of the Foothills that I’d grown up in from the context of the city I was living in at the time. A lot of my youth was spent driving from one small community to the next – going to curl in High River, to camp outside of Longview, heading to the mountains through Turner Valley and Bragg Creek to avoid driving through the city. As a teenager my favorite thing was to drive out west of Millarville, find roads I’d never seen, and drive down them as far as they went. As a broke twenty something living in the city I had no access to that landscape, so I tried to re-build it from memory. Calgary isn’t in that novel but it had a direct impact on a lot of the decision making and choices involved in the novel.

Now I’m doing the opposite. I’m trying to finish off this way too long in the pot second novel which is actually set in and involved with Calgary, the Beltline Calgary, and I’m trying to get it across the finish line from the other side of a windshield driving in and out of the city.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m in the homestretch on the new novel – the slow sticky part of fixing pacing, cleaning up inconsistencies, patching holes, cutting unproductive stretches and replacing them with things that work. It feels like this has been going on for years and I suppose it has. The funny thing is, the new novel is about driving. I mean, it’s about other things, but it’s about someone largely alone in a vehicle. It was about that when I started it while I was still on foot living a ten-minute walk from everything I needed in the city, and now I'm finishing it up actually living that every day. Maybe that removal will help me finally finish it.

I have a few other ideas germinating in the background that I’m trying not to sink time into until the big project is done, but it’s hard because they're exciting and all still in the “fun to write” stage – the opposite of pace fixing and hole patching. Trying to find time for all of this before and after work, in between time with the baby, around the time it takes for all this driving back into and out of the city. Every other year I try to write a poem, which will never be shared with anybody. Sometimes I write new songs for the band. I’m getting there.

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Sharanpal Ruprai

Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further (ongoing) interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, checkout the link here.

Sharanpal Ruprai is an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg in the Women’s and Gender StudiesDepartment. Her debut poetry collection, Seva, was shortlisted for the Stephen G. Stephansson Award for Poetry by the Alberta Literary Awards in 2015.

Q: How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?

A: I was in Calgary for about four years and then for a few years after I finished my PhD at York University.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

A: When I first moved to Calgary, I got a job at a downtown bookstore and I asked to be “in charge” of the poetry collection. I got to know the names of the local poets and make sure their books were ordered and on our shelves. I applied to be the events coordinator for the bookstore and I got the job. That position gave me a “bird’s eye” view of the whole writing community. I met a lot people in the arts community of Calgary many of whom I still keep in contact with.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?

A: The community of writers is very active and pushing the experimental poetry scene. I am not an experiment poet but I saw how this focus on the experimental shaped the identity of writers from Calgary.

Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else?

A: The writing community is active and entrepreneurial; here I am thinking about Loft 112 and the poet Calgary Poet laureate position. The city and the writing community supports these actives and it seems that when someone has a good idea it catches on and people are willing to support these initiatives.   

Q: What prompted your move away, and what kind of effect has the shift made in your work?

A: Well, a job! I am an academic and I knew that I would have to relocate for a position. As an Assistance Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg I am able to focus on my creative writing as well as my academic work.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am the poetry editor with Jennifer Still for Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing (CV2). I am also working on a second collection of work.

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Paul Zits

Edited by derek beaulieu and rob mclennan, and designed by Chaudiere co-publisher Christine McNair, The Calgary Renaissance highlights some of the diverse and astonishing experimental poetry and fiction that has emerged out of the past two decades of Calgary writing. An essential portrait of some of the most engaged and radical of Canadian writing and writers from one of the country’s most important literary centres. You can order a copy directly, here.

For further (ongoing) interviews with contributors to The Calgary Renaissance, check out the link here.

PaulZits received his MA in English from the University of Calgary in 2010. Massacre Street (UAP 2013), the product of his creative dissertation, went on to win the 2014 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. In addition to serving two terms as Writer-in-the-Schools at Queen Elizabeth High School in Calgary, teaching creative writing to students in the Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program, Zits is a regular instructor with the WGA’s WordsWorth Camp at Kamp Kiwanis. Zits is currently a teacher with the Calgary Board of Education.

Q: How long were you in Calgary, and what first took you there?

A: I lived in Calgary for ten years (2005-15) and originally came specifically to study creative writing at the University of Calgary. I’ve recently been hired by the Calgary Board of Education, and am looking forward to returning. I’m hoping that the feeling is mutual. It’s a community like none other, and I miss (many of) the people.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community in Calgary?

A: Calgary’s writing community is the community that I cite when asked to locate the context in which my writing emerged. My association became somewhat automatic, through my studies in creative writing at the University of Calgary; however, the community as I saw and understood it initially, seemed quite exclusive, inaccessible. I recall hearing the names of — & attending events featuring — writers like kevin mcpherson eckhoff, Larissa Lai, Jason Christie, Natalie Simpson, Naomi Lewis, Jordan Scott, Sandy Pool, Weyman Chan, Robert Majaels, Suzette Mayr, & Christian Bök & feeling pretty shabby. With time I became attached, & I’m truly fortunate to call many if not all of these people my friends. They’ve personally & artistically (individually & collectively) made a tremendous impact on me and my work.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? What did Calgary provide, or allow?

A: The Calgary community not only shifted my thinking about writing, it gave me the best possible examples of what good writing is and can be.  It has consistently demonstrated to me what a strong community of writers looks like. I think that being channelled through a creative writing department anywhere is really going to alter someones arc as a writer. And I also felt like the program itself became a direct entryway into the larger community. I remember my first introductions to the work of, for instance, Jordan Scott (Blert), Jason Christie (i-Robot), & Natalie Simpson (Accrete and Crumble), and getting the sense that Calgary was producing some writers with really advanced sensibilities with respect to the craft of poetry. It was greatly rewarding to learn from them and to eventually share some of their same spaces. Finally, the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program and places like the Banff Centre have always been strong drivers for the sharing of ideas, making the Calgary community a real centre for artistic growth. I remember fondly being present for readings by poets like Sina Queyras, CA Conrad, Kenneth Goldsmith, & Charles Bernstein (to name but a few) whose influence continues to shape my thinking and writing.

Q: What do you see happening in Calgary that you don’t see anywhere else?

A: From my experience — that is to say from my little experience, comparatively — I would say that Calgary’s community is quite integrated, that the people who are producing the most interesting work are those that happen to be the most invested in the community at large, and seeing that this community remains progressive. These are the people who are collaborating actively, are sharing their work and ideas, are volunteering at literary events, are invariably attending readings and launches, and are supporting both the established and non-established members of the community. I won’t suggest that this is unique to Calgary, but you see it happening there with great force and with purpose. And all of this is happening with a tremendous amount of attention being paid to innovation. Calgary is not a city whose writers are ever really satisfied with the status quo. It is a centre of near constant invention and reinvention.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements there?

A: All of them, without question. My projects respond most often to what I read, and what I read has been and continues to be shaped in large part by the community. This may in fact sound like a more “indirect” engagement, but I assure you, the way that books are shared and circulated throughout the community makes this influence quite direct. That seems almost too redundant to mention. More directly, Massacre Street (University of Alberta Press, 2013), wouldn’t exist in its final iteration without the counsel of my thesis supervisor Christian Bök, someone that I came to Calgary specifically to work with. Leap-seconds (Insomniac Press, 2017) is an amalgam of my influences, everything from, more broadly, Surrealism to Conceptualism, to, more specifically, literary montage to the Nouveau Roman. “Exhibit,” my latest, recently completed manuscript, is shaped by influences as varied as Sina Queyras, CA Conrad, Eileen Myles, and Solmaz Sharif. Sina Queyras was the 2007-08 Canadian Writer-in-Residence with the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program, and made a salient impact on the community during her short stay; while, CA visited the city in 2013 during a month-long residency at The Banff Centre’s Leighton Artists’ Colony. “Exhibit” benefitted greatly from my reading and rereading of CA’s Book of Frank, an influence I connect directly to this visit.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I answer unenthusiastically, only because it feels like I’m being asked to commit to a project at a very early stage. But regardless: I am working both &/or either on a work of ecopoetry (using mistranslated text, cut-ups and montage) or a work of fiction (exploring the relationship between an indifferent educator and a child in a suicide pact).