Line of Inquiry: Lorna Jackson

After a decade singing in saloons, Lorna Jackson decided to study writing with Jack Hodgins and Mark Anthony Jarman. She has published a collection of short stories, Dressing for Hope, and a novel, A Game to Play on the Tracks.

Now an exacting university writing teacher by day, Lorna Jackson is a raucous hockey aficionado by night, and two recent biblioasis titles are hard evidence of that. Cold-Cocked has been called “absolutely one of the best hockey books of our era.” Her other new title, Flirt: The Interviews, is a cheeky collection of fake interviews with real famous people—including several notable hockey players.

Lorna Jackson lives on Vancouver Island.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I spent many years as a saloon singer in some pretty rough BC bars and learned to call that performance and convince myself that I was getting something out of it. So reading and engaging with readers at public events feels incredibly civilized and genteel, compared to, say, that one grim Halloween, 1981, at the Blackstone Hotel in Vancouver.

I've also been teaching for about 15 years, so I'm relatively calm with a bunch of folks looking at me and expecting something to happen. Even so, the transition from that "time spent alone" you mention, to "time spent entertaining strangers" can be jarring, even mortifying. At least when we're at our desks, deep inside our own imaginations, even if we're filled with self-doubt, we seem whole and unified. But when we're on a stage and reading our work (also, self-doubting), the risk is a weird sort of fragmentation, or maybe disassociation when we're back at our desks. Who was that woman? Who does she think she is?

2) What do you want people to know about Cold-Cocked / Flirt?

Both books are intentionally irreverent. Cold-Cocked: On Hockey reads the game - and certain players - and celebrates unofficial explanations as to why we watch and cheer. While I wouldn't say it looks at hockey through a woman's eyes, I think it looks at the game through the eyes of a literate, sensitive, aging and funny woman who happens to learn a great deal about herself through an unexpected obsession. I was determined to say something new about hockey, and to say something artful.

Flirt: The Interviews is essentially comic, although the stories – each takes the form of an interview with a famous person - are pretty dark and cover some unsettling topics: suicide, addiction, regret, grief, the role of the artist in an increasingly contemptuous culture. The interviewer is desperate to use her time with these people -athletes and musicians and writers who treat her with patience and even kindness - to unearth her own past and its tragedies.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

This is my first time, yes, and I've heard from writers that Thin Air is their favourite festival, that the audiences are fantastic. Of course I have a deep fondness for Winnipeg as not only the home of the Manitoba Moose, but as the only legitimate next home for an NHL team.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I've just finished Bill Gaston's wonderful, The Order of Good Cheer, Haruki Murakami's elegant little book on running and novel-writing, and my current fave writer, Tim Winton's novel, Breath, about a coupla surfer dudes growing up badly in Australia. I am full of their wonderful work.

As for writing, I'm into a novel, a collection of stories, and just gearing up for hockey season and the blogging I'll be doing.

5) Your most recent book is Flirt, a "cheeky collection of fake interviews with real famous people." How do I know this interview isn't fake?

How do you know the ones in Flirt are?! Pour me another glass of ginger ale, take this cat off my lap, and ask me something else. Ask me about that time at the Blackstone Hotel.

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Lorna Jackson will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 26 - Rural Tour, Selkirk, with Cara Hedley and Randall Maggs.
September 27 - Afternoon Mainstage, with Cara Hedley, Randall Maggs, and Paul Quarrington.

Line of Inquiry: Charles Wilkins

For writer and magazine journalist Charles Wilkins, research has no limits.

Among his dozen books are Walk to New York, which chronicles his 2,200 km journey—on foot—from Thunder Bay to Manhattan, and A Wilderness Called Home, which features Canadians coast to coast whose lives connect with the wild.

In The Circus at the Edge of the Earth, shortlisted for the Rogers/Viacom Non-Fiction Prize, he travels with the Great Wallenda Circus. His new book, In the Land of Long Fingernails (Penguin), is a hilarious memoir of his stint as a grave-digger.

Charles Wilkins lives in Thunder Bay with his wife and three children.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I approach performance with the attitude that I’m going to give the listener the most theatrical and memorable time that I can (by which I mean the most laughs, the shrillest screams, the deepest heart palpitations, the reddest sunsets, the most despicable politicians, the bloodiest revolutions, the scariest basements, the sweetest summers, the sharpest pointy things, the sexiest writers, and of course the bounciest mattresses).

What I get out of it is the somewhat ambivalent thrill of watching the audience howl with laughter, weep with rage, etc.

2) What do you want people to know about In the Land of Long Fingernails?

I want them to know that it’s a memoir about a summer I spent working in a big corporate cemetery in the east end of Toronto when I was 19 years old. And that parts of it are seditious to the point that, for fear of getting sued, or worse, I had to change the names of the people and cemetery, etc.

I want them to know, too, that there really was a guy who stole the watches off dead orthodontists, and that on occasion the management really did dig up untended graves, throw the bones into a common pit, and resell the plots.

I should add that the book is also about mortality, longing, and so on… and about some pretty strange people, as well as personal and literary matters too complicated to get into at this moment.

I’ve been told it’s all quite funny, although it would be presumptuous for me to mention it in the context of this interview.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I lived in Winnipeg for ten years (mid-70s to mid-80s), started my writing career in the city, and still tend to think of it as a kind of crucible for my imagination at that time. I love the place to this day but don’t want to die there.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I have just finished reading (for the second time) James Elroy’s memoir, My Dark Places, about the unsolved murder of Elroy’s mother in Los Angeles in the 1950s and Elroy’s attempts forty years after the fact to find the killer...and am half way through Luc Sante’s Low Life, a detailed, dream-like book about New York City in the 19th century.

As for writing, I am finishing a book of essays on my adventures in the Canadian north, entitled High on the Big Stone Heart, and am revising In the Land of Long Fingernails for publication in the U.S. next spring.

5) You joined the circus for a book. You walked half-way across the continent for a book. Is there anything you wouldn't do for a book?

I joined the circus and walked across half a continent not just to write about the experiences but because I believed such travels would be worthy and distinctive explorations both of the world around me and of myself...and would stimulating both to the senses and imagination. Which they were. For purposes of writing, I wouldn’t do anything that didn’t interest me in some profound personal way (and might add that I have turned down some invitations to adventure that would undoubtedly have been somebody’s idea of the makings of a good book… e.g. the exploration of the Titanic some 20 years ago, which struck me as somebody else’s story, but not mine...at least not at that time).

* * *

Charles Wilkins will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 26 - The Nooner, Millennium Library.
September 26 - Mainstage, with Andre Alexis, Austin Clarke, and Maggie Helwig.

Line of Inquiry: Steven Galloway

Steven Galloway is the author of three novels. His first, Finnie Walsh, was nominated for the 2000 Amazon.com/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His second, Ascension, confirmed Galloway’s promise as a writer. His most recent book, The Cellist of Sarajevo (Knopf, 2008) is an international best-seller, praised widely for its clarity and courage.

His work has been translated into over twenty languages and optioned for film. He is currently the Cliff Writer-in-Residence at the UBC Creative Writing Program, and the fiction mentor at the Writer’s Studio at SFU.

Galloway lives with his wife and two young daughters in New Westminster, British Columbia.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

There’s two ways to approach it. One is to be grumpy about having to find a way to take what is essentially a solitary act and turn it into a public act, and the other is to view it as an opportunity to bring a text alive for a group of people who may not be familiar with it. My natural inclinations are typically grumpy, but in this case I’m very pleased that people are willing to sit and listen to a bit of the story. If you can do a reading properly you can create an experience that is similar to that of reading the story. It’s a skill, and I’m still working on it.

2) What do you want people to know about The Cellist of Sarajevo?

That it’s not really about a cellist, or even Sarajevo. The book follows the lives of three ordinary people who are trying to survive a war, and looks at how they’re tested and inspired by a cellist who plays in the street after a massacre. Though the book is set in Sarajevo, I think that what happens applies to any number of places, from Iraq to Palestine to Georgia.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

This will indeed be my first time to Winnipeg. I’ve heard there are mosquitoes the size of houses, that the winter is colder than Jupiter, and real estate is reasonably priced. Much of this book was written while listening to The Weakerthans, who are quite possibly my favourite band, and I’m a huge fan of Miriam Toews and Daria Salamon. I was sad when the Jets left, but I follow the Manitoba Moose closely as they’re the Canucks’ farm team. I’m looking forward to the trip.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I’m currently reading Tim Winton’s Breath and Lee Henderson’s The Man Game. Both are excellent. I’m not writing much right now, but I’m trying to sit quietly and think about what I might write someday. Thinking is underrated, I believe.

5) In three novels, you covered small town hockey, circus life, and the war in the Balkans. What's your process when it comes to researching a topic for fictional use?

I do a lot of quiet thinking and planning. I’ll read and watch whatever material I can find on the subject, think and plan some more, talk to people who know the subject better than I do, think and plan some more, and then write a draft, throw it out because it’s bad, start again. It’s probably not the best way to do things, but it seems to work for me, more or less.

* * *

Steven Galloway will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 25 - Campus Program, University of Manitoba, with Gerald Hill.
September 26 - Mainstage, with Andre Alexis, Austin Clarke, and Maggie Helwig.

Line of Inquiry: Saleema Nawaz

Saleema Nawaz has published fiction in Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and PRISM International, and she is an alumnus of the Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts.

She studied creative writing at the University of Manitoba, where her M.A. thesis received the inaugural Robert Kroetsch Award for Best Creative Thesis. Some of that work appears in her new debut collection of short fiction, Mother Superior (Freehand). Warren Cariou writes that “her observations are pitch-perfect, and her prose scintillates.”

Saleema Nawaz was born in Ottawa and lives now in Montreal where she is at work on her first novel.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

To be honest, I haven't done much performance as a writer. As of right now, I've only read for an audience four times, though that number will have doubled by the time I get to Winnipeg. By then, I might have more of a handle on what I can get out of it — and, with any luck, what I can bring to it! In general, though, I find it helpful to read my writing aloud: I can often be found muttering sentences in front of my computer to see if they have the right rhythm.


2) What do you want people to know about Mother Superior?

Well, without getting into the stories, I can say with great enthusiasm and complete modesty that, regardless of the contents, it's a beautiful object. Gorgeous cover, lovely fonts, guaranteed to attract notice on your bookshelves and earn the envy and esteem of your peers. Something in the fullness of its golden hue will even enhance the appearance of your other books, bringing them into an attractive harmony. (From below: See? Pretty!) Frankly speaking, it'll tie your whole bookcase together. Or maybe even the whole room — it's just that nice.

But the contents, too, I think are pretty good.

3) Will this be your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I lived in Winnipeg for three years from 2002-2004, and about half of the stories in the book were written or started there. I moved to Winnipeg sight unseen, knowing almost nothing about it, and since then, I've developed rabid antennae for anyone uttering its name within a hundred yards. (More often, though, it seems like I'm the one talking about it.) It's a unique city. There's nothing like a Winnipeg winter — or spring! Or summer for that matter. And I miss my Winnipeg friends.

This will be my third time back since I moved to Montreal, and like the last trip, it will be much too short. I'm entertaining wildly unrealistic notions of what I can manage to squeeze into about a day and a half.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I'm just finishing Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a book most people I know read years and years ago and which is just as hilarious as I've been led to believe. I'm also reading Horse Latitudes by Paul Muldoon because I'm trying to become civilized and read more poetry. The last book I read and loved was The Darren Effect by Libby Creelman.

Right now I'm working on a novel based on the characters in "Bloodlines," one of the stories in Mother Superior, only picking up with them eighteen years later. I'm finding it exciting to work on something with such a sense of freedom as to length. (If you call 'sitting in front of the computer for hours on end' exciting ... as I do.)

5) Do you have any advice on writing good sex? (Or even bad sex?)

The Guardian book blog tackled this subject recently. And the novel excerpts on the shortlist for the Bad Sex Awards (discussed and available here) are also hilarious and instructive. The award was set up to discourage "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels."

I'm no expert (sexpert?), but I think the old adage about writing holds true for writing sex: less is more. (Unlike sex itself, I might add.)


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Saleema Nawaz will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 24 - Mainstage, with Mary Swan, Joan Thomas, and Miriam Toews.
September 24 - Campus Program, University of Manitoba

Line of Inquiry: Andrew Hood

Andrew Hood studied in the creative writing program at Concordia in Montreal and won the Irving Layton Award for Undergraduate Fiction there.

His first collection of stories, Pardon Our Monsters (Vehicule Press), won the 2007 Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in English. The Montreal Review of Books called it “a powerhouse of artistry” and the Globe and Mail calls it “uncannily, magnificently good.”

After graduating from Concordia, Hood filtered beer at the McAuslan Brewery, and then returned to his home town of Guelph where he now lives and writes.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

The last step of editing I take - before I consider a final draft "done" - is reading the story out loud, refining the rhythm and diction that way, so I think my prose is generally conducive to performance. And performing a story is certainly more immediately gratifying and constructive, what with your being able to gauge a listening audience's reaction in a way you'll never be able to with a reading audience. When I'm alone and plugging away, I really relish the thought of eventually taking that piece out of that shut off place and into the fresh air. Over the two or so years that I was working on the stories in Pardon Our Monsters I had a lot of chances to perform the work, usually in a rough form, and I think that really helped shape them. At that time in Montreal (and probably still) poetry was fairly ubiquitous and I was often the only story writer on those bills.

The thing with poetry is that there's always something lost in either direction from page to the stage - I find that poetry which works really well on the page often falls flat when done live, and poetry that works well live just doesn't work in a book. Prose yarns, on the other hand, tend to be gangbusters in either medium. So much of reading poetry has to do with rumination over time, whereas fiction relies much more heavily on reaction in time. I find that nothing susses the proof out the pudding better that reading a story for a live audience; it either works or it doesn't, and your listeners will let you know.

2) What do you want people to know about Pardon Our Monsters?

Trying to work out a brief synopsis for the back of the book was all kinds of painful. The thing should speak for itself, hopefully. But if I had to speak on behalf of the book, then I'd probably assure people that, for the most part, the stories in there are all about love. There is plenty of violence, ugliness, confusion, rancor, and cruelty in the stories, sure, and it's easy to dwell and focus on those elements, but maybe more difficult is seeing that all of that bad business comes from want of love, or loss of love, or the stress of love. There's a line in the first story that, for me, sums up those that follow. It goes something like: "It's the hardest fucking thing in the world to love someone who hates themselves so much." The "fucking" might have been edited out, but that's the way it was originally written, and that sentiment is at "the heart" of the book. Probably.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I drove from BC to Montreal this summer. A friend was supposed to join me, though he bowed out on the trip a day or so before. I had planned the trip to get him to Toronto in time for a wedding in Toronto, and I just went ahead and kept that schedule anyway, so instead of taking my time, I blew through the country in five days, driving for as long as I had sun. So I passed through Winnipeg, but was then fairly delirious and pushing for Kenora.

That's the only time I've been to Winnipeg and I haven't heard much about Winnipeg except for that Weakerthans song that goes "I hate Winnipeg." And the people I have known from Manitoba have expressed the same sort of attitude. (On the other side of dour, I've also heard a great deal of good things about the tight, but crazy active art scene there.) But, like any real hate, there has to be a fundament of love. I think you can't help but hate the place you're from. I've moved back to my hometown, Guelph - which is the Corbet in the book - to do some research and some work, and I say every day that I hate it. But nowhere else feels like this place. I don't think you can have any sort of full, round love without a stain of hate somewhere in there. I suspect that we resent most those things that mean the most to us. So I'm sure Winnipeg is lovely.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge blows my hair back; I read it at the beginning of summer and have been coming back over and over again. Just recently I've read Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms along with his Collected Stories. Those two - maybe by dint of their both being Southern - create these amazing children - children characters I mean - kids that are as smart as the Glass kids, but without the intelligence. Besides those, I've been reading a lot about the Russian Mennonites that settled in the prairies, so a lot of Rudy Wiebe and this guy Frank Epp. I just finished Lee Henderson's The Man Game. I enjoyed that.

As for writing, I've been about as distractable as a cat in an aviary this summer, so it's been all over the place--I can't seem to sit still with a story these days. I've been working away at some short stories that I've mentally collected as "Traps and Attractions", the title coming from a novella-in-progress about the vortexes in Sedona, the recreationists in Tombstone, and the notion of "sexual tourism." Alongside those stories, I've been working on some connected historical yarns that I see as, if not a sort of history of Canada, then at least one of Ontario, ranging from the Scots failed attempt to create a colony in Panama, the founding of Guelph by the novelist John Galt, the Great Toronto Fire of 1904, the Mennonite Selbstshutz during the Bolshevik Revolution, and the moon landing, with some diving horses, two headed colts, and decapitated cats thrown in there somewhere. (If it never gets around to being written, then I figure I'll at least have this description of it to remember it by.)

5) How is filtering beer like/unlike writing?

I'm glad you asked. Filtering and editing share many similar qualities, I've found. During the time I was editing the manuscript of POM and finishing up a few final stories for it I was working the 10pm to 6am shift filtering beer, so I had a lot of time to think about the correlations - it's called the graveyard shift because you're basically dead to the world. What it comes down to (or distills to, ha!) is patience. Brewing, filtering, and bottling beer on a rather strict weekly schedule is no easy feat, as you can't do squat with the brew until it decides it's ready. The beer calls the shots. Fermentation time can be predicted and controlled fairly well, but each batch will behave uniquely. Sometimes the beer will ferment quickly, and sometimes the yeast will be sluggish and take forever. When the time comes to filter the beer, the objective is to get all the shit out of there - the yeast is gotten out with a centrifuge, and the proteins with diatomaceous earth. Beer needs time to sit before it's filtered, the yeast that is suspended during fermentation needs to settle, otherwise your filtration will be hell.

Given time to sit, I find that a story sort of edits itself - all the redundant and cockamamie elements fall to the bottom, will separate themselves in time. For me, the best thing I can do from a story is walk away from it for a while, so I can come back to it with a perspective that's a little bit more on the outside, somewhat closer to a reader's perspective. And oftentimes, for me, it is those initial elements of the story, those impetuses and self-prompts, that are necessary to the writing of the story, that are the first to go in editing. The story has used up those activating ingredients, like the yeast eats up the sugar to make the alcohol, and when you've got your story just boozy enough, you need to get out the yeast.

Granted, all that's a bit of a stretch, but it made perfect, clear, sterling sense at the time.

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Andrew Hood will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 23 - Mainstage, with Maurice Mierau, Mary Swan, and Saleema Nawaz.
September 24 - Campus Program, Red River College, with Rosanna Deerchild.

Line of Inquiry: Genni Gunn

Genni Gunn is a writer, musician and translator who has published two novels, two short story collections, two poetry collections, and two translations from the Italian of Dacia Maraini’s poetry. Her work has been recognized with nominations for a host of prizes, including the Commonwealth Prize, the Gerald Lampert Poetry Award, the Journey Prize, the John Glassco Translation Award, and the Premio Internazionale Diego Valeri.

Her most recent projects are the 2007 poetry collection, Faceless (Signature Editions), and an opera libretto, Alternate Visions, produced in Montreal in 2007.

Genni Gunn has a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of British Columbia. She lives in Vancouver.

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1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

Performance, for me, is a natural extension of creation. I say this, because I spent many years as a musician, and in that genre, although the practice and creation of new work took place in solitary confinement so-to-speak, it would have been useless without performance. Does music exist if there’s no one to hear it? When it comes to writing, sometimes in fiction, the performance takes place between the reader and the page. But poetry – a language of rhythms and sounds – begs be read aloud, so that its music can be heard.

2) What do you want people to know about Faceless?

In Faceless, I’m exploring the impulse for the edge, that intriguing attractive place between safety and disaster, and the faces and masks we don while journeying through our lives. I began the title poem when I heard that odd, interesting, ironic story about the woman whose dog clawed her face off, and her subsequent facial transplant. It naturally set me thinking about faces and identity, and the multiple facades and personas we adopt in our dealings with others.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

I’ve been to Winnipeg several times – once earlier this year for a day – and during my musician days on various occasions. I hear it’s a hotbed of art. Many of our finest writers come from Winnipeg, so there must be something in the water or the air. Oh yes, I hear it’s windy too.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I read constantly, so this answer will be out of date within days. However, two books I’ve really loved recently are Damon Galgut’s The Impostor and Daphne Marlatt’s The Given. In terms of my own writing, I’ve just completed a new novel, and I’m working on a collection of stories.

5) You've written both fiction and poetry. Do ideas come pre-packaged as fiction or poetry or do you have to live with them for a while before a form suggests itself?

I keep a journal of ideas, and don’t think about form until those ideas insinuate themselves into my consciousness. Sometimes two disparate ideas come together to suggest a story or a poem. Sometimes an image surfaces. Or a scrap of conversation. There’s no set rule. Whatever sets me off in whatever direction.

* * *

Genni Gunn will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 22 - Campus Program, University of Winnipeg.
September 22 - Mainstage, with Duncan Thornton, Andrew Davidson and Elyse Friedman.

Line of Inquiry: Daria Salamon

Daria Salamon is a freelance writer whose work has been published by the Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press and Uptown Magazine. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction has been shortlisted for the Writers’ Union of Canada’s Emerging Writer Short Fiction Award, the Larry Turner Award for Creative Non-Fiction, and the Canadian Authors Association’s North of 55 Writing Contest.

In 2005, she wrote a monthly humour column on wedding planning for the Winnipeg Free Press called “The Wedding Diaries.”

She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

* * *

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I think that performance is the carrot. Lots of writers I know hate it, but I think it's nice to crawl out of that dark hole after years and years of slogging away on a book and actually talk to people.

I don't really have an approach to performance as this is my first crack at it. Any suggestions? Steven Galloway told me that if I'm feeling like my reading is going badly that I should just lift up my shirt, because boobs can fix pretty much any problem. So that is my back up strategy. Or maybe I should just start that way?


2) What do you want people to know about The Prairie Bridesmaid?

Hmmm. Well, first off - the girl on the cover is not actually me.

I love the cover, but it might be a bit misleading for potential readers. The cover is a bit chicklittish - and while the book is funny it deals with some dark issues such as abuse and mental health. I think that readers are surprised by this (in a good and unexpected way).

Let's see - there is a talking squirrel in the book and a blind baba who is totally crazy and refuses to hand over her gun. Someone recently described it as "a coming of age story about a woman in her early thirties." I like that. Don't we spend our whole lives coming of age?

The book comes with a downloadable soundtrack of really awesome music. It's all explained on the website.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard? (I know, I know, you're FROM Winnipeg, but I figured you could have fun with this one...)

This will be my first time appearing in Winnipeg, sober. I've heard that it's quite a beautiful city when you're not half in the bag. So, I'm going to try it. No promises. But I'll try.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I've never actually read anything by him and now I know why. It's been a while since I've lost sleep over a book - not because I'm reading (that happens all the time), but because I can't stop thinking about it. I'm half way through The Flying Troutmans and I'm loving, loving,loving it. On deck is Joan Thomas' new novel Reading by Lightning.

I'm working on a second novel, but I can't say that it's going all that well. I'm a bit stuck. I think I'm paralyzed by the fear that maybe I only have one book in me - or one good book and then another really crappy book that only my mother will read.

5) What's it like to perform at the festival, being from Winnipeg?

Honestly, it's really fantastic. Because I've volunteered at it (well, feigned volunteering so that I could access the free booze in the hospitality suite) for so many years and always dreamed of being part of it. That sounds so fucking cheesy, but it's true. And I know that there are lots of volunteers who participate with that same ambition. Perhaps I can serve as proof that it is possible to cross over. I pretty much had to write a book; my gig was up. Charlene and Tavia were onto me.

* * *

Daria Salamon will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 23 - Campus Program, Red River College, with Duncan Thornton.
September 24 - Mainstage, with David Bergen, Nicole Markotic, and Gerald Hill.

Line of Inquiry: Pasha Malla

Pasha Malla has had multiple stories nominated for the Pushcart and Journey prizes, and has contributed to McSweeney’s, The Globe and Mail, Esquire, The Walrus, and CBC Radio’s Definitely Not the Opera.

His debut collection of short fiction, The Withdrawal Method (Anansi), has already generated critical attention. The Vancouver Sun calls his work “splendidly creative.” Matrix magazine calls it “disturbingly credible” and praises him for confronting “complex, irresolvable moral problems.”

Pasha Malla was born in St John’s NL, grew up in London ON, and until recently lived in Toronto.

* * *

1) As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I have to say that I'd much rather just chat with people than read at them from my book. The best thing about festivals and readings is the chance to engage with folks -
whether they like my writing or not. A guy at a reading I did in June got up and attacked me for "writing about nothing" and I thought that was great. Now we email and I'm learning a lot from him - he's a Dachau survivor and war orphan, a really fascinating, inspiring guy. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to meet someone like that hiding in my apartment with my laptop.

2) What do you want people to know about The Withdrawal Method?

Well, it's been compared to stuff by Haruki Murakami, Barbara Gowdy, Neil Smith, Alice Munro, George Saunders, Jim Shepard, David Foster Wallace, and Rick Moody. So I guess if you like those writers, have a look at my book.

3) Will this your first time in Winnipeg? What have you heard?

Yep, first time. I've heard great things. A good friend of mine has lived all over the country and he's settled down in Winnipeg - he says it's his favourite place in Canada. I'm excited to visit. I'm coming early to spend some time exploring the city.

4) What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

I just read two books by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Monsieur and Television, and they both blew my mind. Dalkey Archive is reissuing his first two novels (in English translations) in November and I can't wait. I'm also reading Brenda Shaughnessy's excellent new collection of poetry, Human Dark with Sugar, and, slowly, The Brothers Karamazov; my bedtime reading right now is Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist who spent a lot of time with gangs and crack dealers on the southside of Chicago. Next up: Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher and Voices from the Storm, a collection of first-person essays by Hurricane Katrina survivors.

I'm writing two novels (one is YA), a bunch of freelance stuff, and, in fits and starts, a humour book about Spider Solitaire with my friend Kevin. And emails! Always, always, lots of emails.

5) Tell me what it feels like to have your first book out in the world.

Good. Weird, also. I wrote so many of those stories 5 and 6 years ago it's hard to think of them as my own at this point. Ultimately, I'm proud of the book, but I guess part of the thing about being a writer is that you're always onto the next thing. And that's exciting. I've got a lot of energy for the things I'm working on now, and for projects beyond these ones, and hopefully that'll continue for a long time.

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Pasha Malla will be appearing at THIN AIR, Winnipeg International Writers Festival:

September 24 - Afternoon Book Chat, with Rebecca Rosenblum.
September 24 - Mainstage, with David Bergen, Nicole Markotic, Daria Salamon.