The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Weyman Chan

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.

Weyman Chan’s second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for poetry and the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award. His fifth book of poetry, Human Tissue—a primer for Not Knowing was published in 2016 by Talonbooks.

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

A: I did my post-secondary schooling here (U of C), and while taking creative writing courses (Aritha van Herk /fiction; Chris Wiseman & Fred Wah/poetry). Getting a job in health care kept me in Calgary.

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

A: I became aware of the writing scene here in the 1980s: Calgary Creative Reading Series (hosted by Cecelia Frey) that happened monthly at the National Film Board room at the downtown Federal Building; and participation through Dandelion Literary Society, which put out Dandelion Magazine 4 times a year. There was also a literary mag called Blue Buffalo back then, but I wasn’t a part of that scene. Over the years, while Dandelion struggled, Filling Station evolved to take a central place in the literary scene here. Various bookstores came and went: Canterbury’s in Penny Lane Mall; as well as Bollum’s Books and McNally Robinson Bookstore, Sandpiper Books, and the only two left standing from this group, Pages In Kensington and Owls Nest Books. Literary readings became a staple of all of these bookstores.

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: Because I had taken creative writing in university, I had a peer group of writers from those writing classes, very few of whom stayed in Calgary, and even fewer who continued to write... I continued to meet casually with them for about 4 years after I finished university. It was good to keep in contact to those who would continue to motivate my writing, but then working fulltime and raising a family took time away from writing. It wasn’t until my youngest daughter was 4 that I had more time to devote to my craft. I started going out to literary readings again. Then in 2001, Frontenac House in Calgary accepted my first completed poetry manuscript. This city allowed me the financial stability, and the support of other writers in all their varying interests & pursuits, to keep me motivated.

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

A: This city, at its best, has an inclusive writing scene where academic poets & street poets find common ground and do not try to privilege their esthetic practice over another’s. All cities to one degree or another, allow for this, so that’s not unique. I do think that the boom/bust economics which impact arts funding & livelihoods in Alberta, generally make anyone pursuing the creative arts very aware of the limited resources... it may cause writers here, especially if their sole livelihood depends on their writing, to become strategic in positioning their writing skillset so they remain marketable... again, to any and all degrees, you find that in other cities as well. What Calgary does have is Wordfest, the international literary festival, & (up until a year ago) The Calgary Spoken Word Festival. Calgary’s poetry scene is particularly strong, with at least 5 ongoing open mic reading series that take place at various coffee shops/pubs/bookstores nearly year round.

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

A: Individual poems in my 5 books of poetry do take place in Calgary, but generally, my poetry rises out of ideas and arguments that do not float a particular place... often in the space of one line, I’ll be shifting forward and back in place and time.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: In April I launched my fifth book of poetry, Human Tissue—a primer for Not Knowing— ... now I’m between projects and not working on any one thing in particular. Just one-offs & occasional poems... I wrote one just last week about Donald Trump’s toupee dissing global warming.

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Louis Cabri

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.

Louis Cabri’s [photo credit: Roy Miki] stuff includes Posh Lust (New Star Books), Poetryworld (Capilano University Editions), The Mood Embosser (Coach House Books), and thingies like Poems (Olive), What Is Venice? (Wrinkle), —that can’t (Nomados), and Curdles (housepress). Curated projects he’s done include the poets’ talk series Projector Verse (with Listen Chen and Cecily Nicholson) for the Kootenay School of Writing, the poets’ exchange PhillyTalks (with Aaron Levy), a sound and poetry issue for ESC: English Studies in Canada (with Peter Quartermain), open letters to/from poets for Open Letter (with Nicole Markotić), and hole magazine and books (with Rob Manery). He’s written on poetry of Catriona Strang, Lissa Wolsak, Jackson Mac Low, Roy Miki, Bruce Andrews, Fred Wah, among others, and teaches modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, literary theory, and creative writing at the University of Windsor.

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

A: I flew from Ottawa to Calgary in August 1994, my first trip there, and stayed until Aug 1996. I’d fly back regularly and returned in 1998 or ‘99 and stayed until late summer 2005. I went to Calgary to do an MA with Fred Wah and to hang out with Jeff Derksen who was also at the university.

Q: You were already involved with a number of literary communities and activities prior to your arrival, such as through The Transparency Machine and hole magazine with Rob Manery in Ottawa. What was your experience upon arriving in Calgary? What sort of communities were you involved with during those periods, and how did they differ from what you were aware of in other cities?

I was immediately and fully absorbed by and into this intense and explosive new thing called grad life, hunkering down (to get blown up), but there were many poets in the program, Nicole Markotić, Ashok Mathur, Susan Holbrook, Pearl Luke, Jeff and Fred, some of them from Calgary, and a wild younger bunch had started filling Station magazine, Russ Rickey and Teresa Smalec from that group taking Fred’s yearlong course on The Martyrology with me. My experiences were shaped by the people and the drama connected with the university, except its walls seemed porous enough, with readings, launches, openings, events, parties, all over the place, rarely on campus, which gave me steady glimpses at a lively, larger scene. I guess I kept to organizing poetry stuff where I could, bringing Harryette Mullen and then Bob Perelman to campus for readings and talks (Deanna Ferguson’s BOO magazine picked up the transcript of Harryette’s discussion with Jeff, Fred, Nicole, McCaffery was there, myself and others). I remember Fred brought Miki, Creeley, Blaser, Coleman, Bowering, Thesen (for a panel on difficulty in poetry, on which I was asked to say something too), Strang, the late Nancy Shaw, Darren Wershler, others. Poets passed through, bill bissett and David Fujino among them (probably the filling Station crew’s doing). It was hoppin’. Jeff and I shared an apartment for one year and Karen MacCormack read in it to standing room only, while Steve McCaffery performed a yearlong residency, not in our apartment alas but on campus. There was a sumptuous specialty spread at the (amazing title) Engineered Air Theatre for his hilarius reading of the telephone book. Returning to Calgary some years later and teaching at ACAD I could extend invitations to Lissa Wolsak, British poet and artist Allen Fisher, Christian Bők, Catriona Strang – it was a buoyant place to work in the company of terrific students and writers Suzette Mayr, Pauline Butling, Chris Frey, artists Mireille Peron and Chris Cran among so many (you have to see Chris Cran’s retrospective at the National Gallery if you haven’t already), goldsmith Charles Lewton-Brain so very accommodating and eager for Lissa’s visit to students of his metalsmith workshop. I was still a grad student though, this time in a program at the University of Pennsylvania, which I missed (Philadelphia too) and which kept me busy and anxious. So I felt I was in Calgary and not in Calgary. It’s become a typical state for me, wherever I am. Evidence of that: I think I did at least one PhillyTalks in Calgary, I remember Wayde Compton at it, maybe via Skype? and Aaron Levy (Slought Foundation) came up to spend a week transcoding Fred’s Vancouver ‘63 tapes before they completely dissolved (they’re up now at his website). Fred tried to get an online Calgary Writers House going with derek beaulieu and myself. A board member stint at The New Gallery introduced me to St. Petersburg artist Olga Kisseleva’s incredible sculptural work with the Russian folktale. I regret not getting to know Larissa Lai more, except I’m not sure if she herself was there much! As far as time goes, I didn’t grasp the way Calgary could mix poets transgenerationally until Kroetsch’s residency, the exhibition of Roy Kiyooka’s artwork, and the launch of the Post Prairie anthology when Charles Noble arrived to read and there were some others of his generation present too, Tom Wayman, who was teaching then at UofC, included. Calgary poetry felt young, open, smart, enthusiastic – Ian Samuels, Jonathon Wilcke, Nikki Reimer came out of that. The lauding hoot was the filling Station scene’s memorable social invention performed by its poetry reading audiences.

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

I felt an excitement at being loosely connected through poetry to poets of differing ages and backgrounds and approaches, and as much by poets I knew as by poets I knew by name only—Sheri-D Wilson, for instance, who moved to town at a certain point, was interesting to me as a literary and social fact about the city. Circles of friends would form around projects. ryan fitzpatrick, Jason Christie, Kyle Buckley, Preet Gill, among some less regular attendees, showed up one day and we started a reading group at which I remember Ted Berrigan’s small poem in Bean Spasms about a chocolate wrapper providing a sweet high. I think we mostly read New York (School) poets. Looking back, maybe that was in part reaction to a larger phenomenon. There’s a way money and the signifier (as used to be said of language’s sensitive tip) are enablers of each other’s excesses. An old Potes & Poets anthology from the Language writing 90s picked up on this linkage with the unforgettable title Floating Capital. Calgary felt buoyant, giddy, in a speculation boom. Driving around all night once with Aaron Levy, showing Andrea Strudensky around (we were looking for an all-night diner of course—she’d come from Montreal), I learned that her then partner was a broker of venture capital. What is venture capital? Why is there the internet? It didn’t surprise me that most venture capital was needed by startup internet companies, neither of which I could grasp. So it seemed any of us could be naively reflected in a high finance glow. You could even walk past the Telstar Drugs neon rocketship sign on Kensington at 14^th, erected in the fifties, and feel the glow. There were incongruities for sure, but also a spume of bubbly social goodwill—in anything, found anywhere. There were these beautiful people too, in another era some might have been called tycoons, dabbling in culture as part of their entertainment expenses. Calgary poets were variously aware of and positioned with respect to this shaping influence of oil revenues, which seeped into the university as well. The glow affected us all I believe, regardless of whether we could perceive it in our writing. Language itself began to explore floating states. Flarf is a kind of breezy fluff, on the one hand (I think of my friend the Emersonian Michael Magee and his Combo magazine out of Providence). On the other, contortionistic constraints, lightweight toysomeness. Language writing was finally getting the generational squeeze from new writing, something Ron Silliman had wanted to experience – he likes hugs – since at least his PhillyTalk with Jeff Derksen. At some point I thought about what Olson wrote, how some poets became fixed or fixated in the timeline of their own poetic formation, and dropped off the timeline of the poetic art. Lesson there! I wanted to stay inside the envelope of the living art. That didn’t mean my “critical sense” liked it or agreed with me. “Go fuck myself”? Sort of. But Calgary allowed me a kind of floating space in which up came a bunch of poems from the 90s (and a few from the late 80s) that Nicole helped me shape into a book, The Mood Embosser, a title Jeff gave it from a line. The cover is a photo of an early installation by British artist Cornelia Parker. I’d seen an exhibition of hers at the Philly ICA. This cover photo showed graves made of shadows cast by hundreds of coins she’d suspended from strings a foot above the gallery floor. There are extraordinary social puns in her work, this one a bit dark I suppose.

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

South Africa experienced its first one-person one-vote election in 1994. The nonprofit I was working for and that was involved with the democratic transition there folded. Going to grad school seemed to represent a ticket to some different kind of future, vague as that future was (my only plans were to finish an MA), though it required a fundamental life change to make happen. Losing my job was the final spur. The Language poets showed by example how you can read theory outside of the academy and their publishing poets’ talks utilizing theory helped me transition to reading and writing about contemporary poetry in the academy, as I’d been intensely reading those poets for years. Knowing that Jeff was already in school doing his PhD made a big difference to me, but I was nervous about going anyway and could not take the stress of applying for a graduate entry scholarship – free money! (I didn’t believe it) – in case I failed, so I didn’t apply for one. The thing about school I liked enormously was that it fed my desire to learn about and read as much poetry as I could. This might have contributed to nudging my poetry toward stylistic parody at times, as a way of accommodating these larger social, theoretical, historical frames on the aesthetic activity, these critical frames I was learning and writing about following institutional protocols.

Q: What are you working on now?

Oh some poems, and some relatively free Théodore de Banville translations, and an essay on Ted Greenwald’s poetry in which I am presently considering Douglas Hofstader’s 1970s executive “fancy phone” as modeling how lines A, B, C, D in a poem might structure repetition:

An executive has a fancy telephone and receives many calls on it. He is talking to A when B calls. To A he says, “Would you mind holding for a moment?” Of course he doesn’t really care if A minds; he just pushes a button, and switches to B. Now C calls. The same deferment happens to B. This could go on indefinitely,  but let us not get too bogged down in our enthusiasm. So let’s say the call with C terminates. Then our executive “pops” back up to B, and continues. Meanwhile, A is sitting at the other end of the line, drumming his fingernails against some table, and listening to some horrible Muzak piped through the phone lines to placate him . . . Now the easiest case is if the call with B simply terminates, and the executive returns to A finally. But it could happen that after the conversation with B is resumed, a new caller—D—calls. B is once again pushed onto the stack of waiting callers, and D is taken care of. After D is done, back to B, then back to A.

Replace the executive with one of the 3 Stooges, and you’d go in one direction; but consider the telephone network itself, of incoming and outgoing phone lines, and of the poet’s function as managing between the lines and voices until they are all satisfied, and you go in a different direction, one, I think, toward Greenwald’s wonderful post-Word of Mouth verse.

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Christian Bök

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.

Christian Bök is the author of Crystallography (Coach House Press 1994), a pataphysical encyclopedia nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and of Eunoia (Coach House Books 2001), a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence. Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has also earned many accolades for his virtuoso performances of sound poetry (particularly the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters). His conceptual artworks (which include books built out of Rubik’s cubes and Lego bricks) have appeared at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City as part of the exhibit Poetry Plastique. Bök is currently a Professor of English at Charles Darwin University. His most recent book is The Xenotext (Book 1) (Coach House Books 2015).

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

A: I have resided in Calgary for 12 years, arriving in 2004 to teach poetry for the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

Q: What was your experience upon arriving in Calgary? What sort of communities did you become involved with, and how did the literary community differ from what you were aware of in other cities?

A: Calgary received me warmly – and I acclimatized myself quickly to the community. Derek Beaulieu introduced me to each important personage among the writers, and I had access to the most creative students because of my teaching at the University of Calgary. I knew that I would feel at home among the poets, since the city had a reputation for the superb merits of its community of experimenters. I think that the city had a more diverse, vibrant scene than any other place in the country at the time.

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: Teaching in Calgary improved my pedagogy. Most academics among my peers in Creative Writing encouraged students to imagine themselves, not as geniuses writing alone, but as collaborators, contributing to a vibrant dialogue in a community. We encouraged students to establish little presses and reading series – and we expected our students to share their work freely with each other in an effort to improve such work through conversation. I participated in everything, becoming a reliable attendee at public events.

Q: I’ve had a sense that during your time in Calgary you prompted (and/or helped prompt), encouraged and supported a good amount of literary activity and production. Apart from the obvious NO Press, what other small publishers were active during your time there? Were you ever tempted to produce items as a small publisher?

A: I provided mentorship for lots of work in Calgary (resulting, for example, in Spacecraft Press, produced by Ken Hunt, among other briefer ventures). I have run my own micropresses over the course of my career, but only Chromium Dioxide still persists, producing work infrequently in limited editions. I have, for example, produced a series of books, derived from “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges (a few of which still remain available on Blurb): http://www.blurb.com/user/store/cbok

Q: What prompted your move away? And it is most likely too early to know, but what kind of effect might the shift make, if at all, in your work?

A: I moved from Calgary for a variety of reasons, but mostly to pursue opportunities in Australia out of curiosity, while placing myself nearer to a friend there. I certainly hope that a move to the tropics might improve the “lushness” of the imagery in my writing – and I expect that my current projects might become far more baroque under the hallucinatory sunniness…

The Calgary Renaissance: an interview with Braydon Beaulieu

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.

Braydon Beaulieu is a doctoral candidate at the University of Calgary, where he studies creative writing, poetics, science fiction, and digital games. His chapbook Thin and Pure was published by Chromium Dioxide Press for inclusion in the special edition of Christian Bök’s The Xenotext, Book 1. His most recent chapbook is ERASURE: A Short Story, published earlier this year by above/ground press. He recently relocated from Calgary to Toronto.

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

A: I lived in Calgary for almost four years. I moved there in 2012 to pursue a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, where I planned on studying representations of disability in speculative fiction and magic realism. I ended up going in a different direction after some changes to my research interests, but that’s what got me there.

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

A: Writing has always been a part of my life. When I was growing up I spent a lot of time alone in my room, drawing, reading, and writing. I wrote a lot of fantasy stories about wizards and unicorns and centaurs, and from there I moved on to horror, and then to poetry. By the time I began my undergraduate degree at the University of Windsor, I’d already been writing (albeit badly) for a long time. My BA and MA degrees at the University of Windsor gave me the theoretical tools to complement my practice, which prepared me for my PhD in Calgary, which of course requires lots of research into creative writing theory. But they also showed me that communities of writers exist, and that doing work within a community is integral for the development of writing itself. When I got to Calgary, I immediately had a small community of University of Calgary-affiliated writers into which I was welcomed, but I also became the Nonfiction Editor of filling Station, which allowed me to connect with writers operating separately from academia. I loved my time with filling Station.

Q: Were you involved with the community in and around Windsor while you were there?

A: Not as much as I could have been. I attended a lot of readings and briefly volunteered for BookFest Windsor, but I wish I’d done more to engage with writers outside of my bubble of academically-supported writers. Part of that was that I actually lived in Essex, a small town located about twenty minutes southeast of Windsor, but part of it was definitely a lack of effort on my part. I could have done better.

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 University of Calgary provided me with a great deal of financial support, which, I mean, thank goodness. It allowed me to work on my manuscripts without having to work much outside of my teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and sessional lecturing. As a result I improved, in particular, on form in my poetry, because of my work under Christian Bök, and narrative in my fiction, because of my work under Aritha van Herk. I began to think about the ways in which we categorize processes and aesthetic movements in writing, and how communities that form around these facets of writing can be in-/exclusive. (This was, to be fair, also in large part because of my online writing communities.)

Q: I’m aware of both Christian Bök and Aritha van Herk as having a series of profound influences on the larger community of Calgary writing and writers. When you were in Calgary, what did you see of their effects? What did they each bring to the city?

A: They both work very hard to make Calgary a better place for emerging writers to develop as both craftspersons and community members. Seriously, the work ethic on those two is like nothing I’ve ever seen—they live and breathe writing. It’s inspiring (and a bit intimidating). Of course, they are not the only community leaders. People like derek beaulieu, Dymphny Dronyk, Micheline Maylor, Natalie Simpson, and Sheri-D Wilson are just a few examples of writers who cultivate an incredibly supportive environment for a wide range of writers to develop and share their voices.

Q: In the four years you were there, did you see a shift in your own work?

A: The biggest shift in my writing during my time in Calgary is that I now write science fiction. Maybe there’s something dystopian about the city....

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I’m working on my dissertation: a collection of interconnected short stories about first contact with an alien intelligence. I’m interested in invented languages and the ways in which those languages have lives (and deaths) in science fiction. Embarrassingly enough, I know no Klingon.