Jen Sookfong Lee, The Shadow List

 

THIRD PERSON INTIMATE

Your poor protagonist, face up
to watch the meteor shower symbolically
arcing across the August sky.
She never really had a chance.

You are used to writing novels,
to placing a human in the middle
of a slowly unwinding nighttime dilemma,
darkness hiding her indecisive, rock-heavy feet.

Your psychologist would say, You write
the choices you’re afraid to make. The women
in your books are bad mothers. They leave
their children, sit with regret in their lap

as if it were an overfed cat sharpening its claws
on the arm of the living room chair. They leave, rent
small apartments where silence is everywhere, like mould.
You have never. You would never. And yet.

The author of five books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as four books for children, Vancouver writer Jen Sookfong Lee’s full-length poetry debut is The Shadow List (Hamilton ON: Buckrider Books/Wolsak and Wynn, 2021). There are far fewer examples of writers effectively moving from novels into poetry I can point to than examples of those working in the other direction (although Robert Kroetsch would be an example). I don’t even want to think about the times I’ve seen poetry titles by fiction writers that appear as little more than examples of prose broken into arbitrary line-breaks, but Lee clearly understands the form she’s working in, perhaps far better than many who claim such as their preferred form of composition.

The Shadow List is an assemblage of raw, first-person lyric narratives that explore the complications of human interaction, pop culture and anxiety, from parents, parenting, texting and dating to teenaged diary entries, Harry Styles, sleepless nights and traumas, past and present. She writes very much in a confessional mode, one that interplays dark thoughts with humour and pop culture. One could say that her work exists with a clear affinity to work by others in her immediate vicinity, including Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli, her current and former co-hosts of the Canadian literature podcast Can’t Lit. Lee’s poetry is unafraid of exploring any aspects of anger, sadness, fear or regret, as the opening sequence, “INTRODUCTION,” offers from the offset: “This is what you’ll need to understand: // Cameron Crowe is to blame for everything. / Sunshine is an insult. / You may never learn to swim but so what? / A dog is the love of your life. / The pretty poems are dead inside.”

Lee’s poems explore how life is lived, and even negotiated, on a very immediate level. “Lining the sidewalk,” she writes, to end the short poem “COMMUNITY GARDEN,” “invasive / creeping charlie and not / your mother complimenting / your ex-husband’s new wife.” Later on, in the poem “YESTERDAY, YOU HAD THE BEST / OF INTENTIONS,” she writes: “There are secrets, indecent and jagged like a stranger’s teeth / biting the thin line of your clavicle. You could whisper / them now and he would not hear you. But no. / You should wait. Nighttime lulls. That soft, enabling dark.” She writes of hopes and shadows, muscle memory, intimacy and frustration, and possibilities that might not always be possible. “The hurt will fuck you up,” she writes, to end the opening sequence, “but you will appear fine and this, / above all else, is your gift.” What is interesting is in the realization that Lee’s poems don’t necessarily exist to fully exorcise dark content, but, sometimes, as repeated loops; the goal of writing out such dark thoughts isn’t to remove them from play but to set them into the light. This is one step in a sequence, not an end. Either way, debut or not, this is a compelling collection, one that explores realms so often presented as unseemly or unfitting of contemplation, let alone as the property of exploration through poetry. As she responds in a recent interview with Rob Taylor for Canadian Notes and Queries:

I always think of these poems as being secrets, the ugly thoughts and unspoken desires we give space to in our heads when we are awake in the night. I learned very young that good Chinese girls didn’t ever allow those wants to be spoken, and it was only alone, when everyone else was asleep, that I let my brain circle around the thoughts that I felt were shameful. In a way, The Shadow List is a tribute to those moments when sex or drama or visceral things were what your body ached for, even if they were never allowed to see the light of day.

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine

Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Incomplete in several languages, I grow heartened in the places I rub against the edges of different tongues. The world’s languages push against this English I write, they work their way in, ingeniously trespass. Writing, I imagine my text will become a conduit for illegal traffic, a body to incubate a different type of future—fractured, polyphonic, cacophonous, but sutured with silence, with all that remains impossible to put into words.

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe, most experiences are unsayable. They happen in a space that no word has ever entered and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Another library, endless rows, enough space: the shelves are populated with volumes of complicated questions phrased with uncommon beauty. (Najwa Ali, “Writing, In Transit”)

Edited by Meghan Bell and the “Growing Room Collective” and co-produced through and by Vancouver’s Room Magazine and Caitlin Press is the anthology Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (2017), an impressive four hundred pages plus of poetry, fiction, essays, translations and interviews covering the first four decades of a journal dedicated to publishing, supporting and promoting a series of diverse voices of Canadian writers. Sectioned into decades, part of what is fascinating about this volume is the way in which each section opens with an interview with an editor from that period, from co-founder Gayla Reid (“The First Decade (1975-1987)”), editor Mary Schendlinger (“The Second Decade (1988-1997”), editor Lana Okerlund (“The Third Decade (1998-2007)”) and former Managing Editor Rachel Thompson (“The Fourth Decade (2008-2016)”). The interviews provide an essential context for not only the journal and its activities, but the surrounding culture and communities. As co-founder Gayla Reid responds in her interview:

We felt very much that we belonged in the feminist landscape. High time that women had their own space to write about whatever we wanted. Women’s voices needed to be heard. Silent no more. There was no requirement that submissions should explicitly address sexism. We wanted to publish writing by women that was good writing, and we were convinced that there would be a lot of it around—and there was. At the time, writers typically got started by publishing in a little literary magazine (usually edited by men). So, Room would be a place where women could get started. Our voices could be heard, we could emerge, develop, blossom—all those growing images.

What becomes interesting, as well, is in beginning to understand, by creating a thoughtfully-edited journal of great writing, just how much Room helped to carve out a real and sustained space for feminist writing and conversation, opening the door to multiple writers, conversations and journals, including more recent publications such as Canthius and Minola Review. As Reid continues, in her interview:

At first we were busy choosing from submitted works. After a few years, we also sought out specific Canadian female writers. The first adventure we had in this area was a special issue on Québécoise feminist writers [4.1], which was tremendously exciting because we did not know their work—very little of it was available in translation

            In terms of literary writing, I’d say we were most often looking for what Doris Lessing called the “small personal voice,” which is what poetry and short fiction writing is particularly good at rendering.

Featuring work by seventy-eight Canadian writers—including Marie Annharte Baker, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Juliane Okot Bitek, Nicole Brossard, Lynn Crosbie, Leona Gom, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Nancy Holmes, Aislinn Hunter, Amy Jones, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jen Sookfong Lee, Erín Moure, Dorothy Livesay, Susan Musgrave, Sina Queyras, Rebecca Rosenblum, Carolyn Smart, Ayelet Tsabari, Betsy Warland and others—Making Room attempts to track some of the shifts in and responses to the culture, from shifts in language to responding to rape culture as well as the Montreal Massacre, conversations around gender issues and multiple other subjects. Just as often, by simply providing a space, Room was at the forefront of some of those conversations, as Vancouver writer and editor Amber Dawn writes to end her introduction, “Overturning Scarcity: Forty Years of Abundant Change”:

Room changed CanLit when Cyndia Cole’s groundbreaking “No Rape No” (p. 24) was first published in the 1970s. Room has shown CanLit that women’s complex bodies are indeed a bit, with fiction like Juliane Okot Bitek’s “The Busuuti and the Bra” (p. 109) and with poems like jia qing wilson-yang’s “trans womanhood, in colour” (p. 376). Room continues to recognize that trans and non-binary gender narratives are an inherent and esteemed part of feminist literature by calling attention to Ivan Coyote’s “My Hero” (p. 195) and Lucas Crawford’s “Failed Séances for Rita MacNeil” (p. 364). By honouring work like Doretta Lau’s “Best Practices for Time Travel” (p. 388) and Eden Robinson’s “Lament” (p. 221, Room challenges tired notions that social justice and Indigenous speculative fiction are anything less than synonymous with great literature.

             As you read this anthology, you will undoubtedly regard it as a timely collection of seventy-eight exceptional literary works. Please also take a moment to marvel at how scarcity and shame have not claimed a single page, not a single line or word of this anthology. You, dear readers, and I, and the seventy-five remarkable contributors are both teaching and learning a new message, right now. Say it with me. There is Room. We do fit.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jen Sookfong Lee

Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, where she now lives with her son. Her books include The Conjoined (forthcoming in Fall 2016), The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, and Shelter, a novel for young adults. Her poetry, fiction and articles have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Elle Canada, Hazlitt and Event. A popular radio personality, Jen was the voice behind CBC Radio One’s weekly writing column, Westcoast Words, for three years. She appears regularly as a contributor on The Next Chapter and is a frequent co-host of the Studio One Book Club. Jen teaches writing in the Continuing Studies departments at both Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book was a novel, The End of East, and it completely changed my life in all ways. I was exclusively a poet before, and The End of East was the first piece of fiction I had ever written, apart from school assignments. So, the development of that book rewired my brain. Also, its reception in the big bad world was really positive, which meant that I was suddenly A REAL WRITER, and being invited to festivals and being interviewed and drinking free wine. And it led to my secondary career in broadcasting.

The novel that will be published in 2016, The Conjoined, is so different from my other books, which were largely written around character and theme. The Conjoined is plot-based, and messes with the conventions of crime fiction. The writing of it was hugely freeing for me, because I think readers have come to expect a certain amount of sad lyricism from me, and this book is far more gritty and, let’s face it, gross. I’ve come to realize that I really enjoy grossing people out.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction second, and started in poetry, and had a few things published in literary magazines before I started writing The End of East. Oddly, The End of East began its life as a long poem, but at some point, when the long poem was getting unwieldy, I made the decision to turn it into a novel. I was 24 at the time, and my youthful fearlessness had me convinced it would all be fine. And it was, but that novel took seven years.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
For novels, my first drafts take between six months to a year, which is probably an average amount of time. I do a fair amount of planning and initial research, but I do it concurrently, while I’m writing the first scenes. It’s important to me to have a sense of the tone of the book before I can really create an outline or make any notes at all. But I do need to plan and plan carefully, because I like to write toward a destination, and to have a sense of how the narrative should develop. This is not to say, of course, that the outlines don’t change as I discover new threads during the writing.

My first drafts are horror shows! They are so, so different from the final versions. I have a habit of tearing novels apart structurally and putting them back together again, which is a process that feels really essential to me. Each book contains an element that is consistent throughout the seven or eight drafts I usually write. The End of East kept one main character intact. The Better Mother’s narrative arc was set very early on. And the first chapters of The Conjoined haven’t changed at all.

All novels seem like they take forever to write. Come on now.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
With the exception of my first novel, I always know what I’m writing before I start. My ideas are very genre-specific; I have novel ideas, or poetry ideas, or short fiction ideas, or cultural criticism ideas. Fiction ideas can come from anywhere—news stories, other art forms, something you overhear in a conversation. I’m never at a loss for ideas. But I often fail at the execution.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t like the actual reading part. It’s more fun for me to be on a panel, or have a discussion on stage with other people or the audience. I like the performance aspect of it, but standing at a podium and reading from my books feels musty and creaky. I would rather make jokes and talk about writing.

Meeting people and being out in the world always fuels my creativity. I always say that my books would be the most boring things in the world if I wasn’t a social person. I am relentlessly social and an obnoxious ham, but this is how I observe humanity, and I keep those observations in my head for my next project.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My umbrella goal is always to create a narrative that attempts to give shape to the mess of our lives. It’s a universal compulsion for all writers, I think. More specifically, I like to explore expectations, meaning the expectations we place on ourselves, or expectations that are placed on women and their bodies, or people of colour and their positions in majority culture, or those who live in poverty. All of my novels have been set in and around Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, which is very much a neighbourhood of density, both in terms of population and human experience. And it’s a neighbourhood that holds a lot of meaning for me personally. It’s where my family began their journey in Canada, and I am firmly committed to its health and the lives of its residents.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Sweet cracker sandwich, I have no idea! Writers are the ones who create stories and the world will always need stories, in evolving forms, of course. I suppose our job is to reflect humanity; we’re the ones who remind you of your past, and who give space to your experiences. And I think the main job for writers is to create narratives that resonate, that make readers feel less alone. A big reason I read books at all is so that I can have that aha moment. You know the one.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love editors. All of my editors have genuinely wanted to help make my books the best that they could possibly be. And that’s never a bad thing. I like to be challenged, and I like it when someone forces me to consider my choices.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
To expect nothing but celebrate everything. This should be tattooed on every writer’s arm.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (literary journalism to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
It hasn’t been difficult. I used to work in magazines and small press publishing, so was always used to writing different things for different audiences. The key has always been to write something I deeply care about, whether it’s gender politics or pop culture or poems about dying relationships. I do think writing in different genres helps every genre you tackle, in the same way that playing more than one instrument will give you a better understanding of music in general.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Right now, I write at night, after my son has gone to bed. It’s exhausting, but that’s all the time I have! When he goes to school full-time, I’m very much looking forward to not living like a vampire. I work in bed, surrounded by books, while my dog snores beside me.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I just write through the pain. I’m a bulldozer like that. I always say that even if you write 2,000 words of garbage, if even one line or one idea is worth keeping, then your time was still well-spent.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Simmering chicken stock.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I’ve been influenced by photography specifically, partly because there have been so many brilliant photographers from Vancouver who have used the city’s idiosyncrasies to create images that are both intimate and epic. Fred Herzog has played a big role in both The End of East and The Better Mother, and I kept going back to Jeff Wall’s images over and over again during the writing of The Conjoined. Theodore Wan’s photographs have also highly influenced my writing,

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I was always a Canlit nerd and I love Margaret Laurence more than any other Canadian fiction writer. I find her books comforting, like a cushy armchair. The poems of John Thompson slay me every time I read them. Donna Tartt and Junot Diaz are my favourite contemporary fiction writers. And a friend of mine recently introduced me to Kim Addonizio’s poems and I think she very well might be my spirit animal.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would love to publish a poetry collection. After many years away from poems, I’ve been writing them again lately. And I love it.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would really like to make pies. I have this idea that I should be driving a vintage truck and delivering pies to happy people. Because who doesn’t love pie?
 
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t think I had a choice. I am tenacious as a writer and have never had a back-up plan. There is nothing else I can or should do.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book I read was Birdie by Tracey Lindberg. I don’t think I’ve seen a great film in years. Seriously. I have really bad taste in movies sometimes.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on finishing up the edits for The Conjoined, and I’m also writing a book about the Gus Van Sant film, My Own Private Idaho. And I’m chipping away at that elusive poetry collection.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;