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Jun 112017
 

 

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On ‘stress leave’ from the Afghanistan, Canadian soldier Elias Triffanis has recently arrived on the politically-divided island of Cyprus. In this opening scene, a doctor interviews Elias about the troubling after effects of a recent combat mission that went horribly wrong.  Elias’s troubles, however, are just beginning. —Richard Farrell 

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PAPHOS, CYPRUS, 26 OCTOBER

“How long is it, then, since you have slept?” the doctor asked.

Elias looked up at the ceiling, trying to recall. The blades of the fan turned listlessly—in fact, they seemed to be slowing, as if the power had just cut out again.

“Surely you’ve slept a little since we last met?”

“It was yesterday, right?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Okay.”

“About thirty hours ago,” the doctor said.

“I’ve passed out a couple of times, for a while. I tried not to.”

“So, you did not remain asleep? You had the dream again?”

“Yes.”

“You wish to describe it again, or the incident itself?”

“They’re almost the same. It’s not really a dream. More like a video of an atrocity.”

“As I said, this is typical of your condition—diagnostic, actually. However—”

“And, no, I don’t.”

“Pardon me?”

“Want to describe it again.”

Drops of sweat glistened on the raw-looking scalp under the doctor’s blond comb-over. Thick glasses magnified his colourless, pink-rimmed eyes, which blinked often. “Avoiding sleep, however,” he said. “It’s understandable, but I fear that such a—such a practice can only make the matter worse.”

“I’ve never needed much sleep.”

“Men of your kind often boast of how little sleep they need.”

“You’re not meant to mock your patients, are you?”

“You do look tired,” the doctor said, as if he hadn’t heard, “though in fact you seem somewhat improved today. Still, I apologize—”

“Frankly, I don’t feel that bad, I feel relieved, because I’m awake now, not asleep and reliving things. Insomnia is a fucking joy in comparison to that.”

“Self-inflicted sleep deprivation—not insomnia.”

“What did you mean by men of my kind?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because I have no idea myself anymore.”

“Large men, robust. Metamorphic. Pardon me, mesomorphic.”

Elias Trifannis looked out the window over the doctor’s shoulder: a white pebble beach, the calm Mediterranean pixelated with sunlight. The army was using this former student residence on the west coast of Cyprus to treat personnel on stress leave from the war. Last night, while Elias silently performed yet another set of push-ups on the cold cement floor of his room, trying to hold off sleep, the patient in the next room screamed catastrophically. That was helpful: a few extra hours of adrenalized alertness.

“It’s funny how people think they can look at your body and know your soul,” Elias said.

That magnified blinking again. In a faster, fainter voice the doctor said, “Ah, mais oui, you are quite right, one should never assume a correlation between, between . . . how could I put it . . .”

Elias yawned helplessly, gapingly, a pathological yawn that convulsed his whole body. “Sorry, Dr. Boudreau,” he said at last. “I really do enjoy talking to you.”

“Perhaps you will be able to sleep better on your weekend away? I hope so. You are going across the island, to visit family?”

“Distant relatives.”

“How is your Greek now?”

“Etsi ki etsi. If you don’t mind my saying, you look really tired yourself.”

“Yes.” The doctor’s blinking made it seem he was trying to communicate something in a sort of binary code, words he couldn’t bring himself to say. “It’s not simply this heat wave. Normally, one grows used to working with the—the traumatized, yet I seem to find it increasingly . . . But what am I saying? I must not say such things!”

The fan still gave the illusion of perpetually slowing without ever stopping.

“In any case, Master Corporal—I wish you a peaceful weekend.”

“Don’t call me that, okay?”

“And, please, don’t speak of what happened in Kandahar.”

“I wouldn’t know how to speak about it.”

“And bear in mind, it was not your fault! Not anyone’s fault!”

The doctor subdued his twitching by closing his eyes for a second, then opening them wide. “It was simply . . .”

“An accident. I know.”

“And don’t forget your medication.”

“No way. I love my medication.”

Dizzy, seeing double, Elias tried to focus his gaze. Out the window in the distance a sunburned figure in a swimsuit—who seemed impossibly to be the doctor—appeared on the shore and walked into the sea.

— Steven Heighton

Excerpted from The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep by Steven Heighton. Copyright © 2017 by Steven Heighton. Published by Hamish Hamilton Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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Steven Heighton is the author of fourteen books, including three short story collections, three novels and six poetry collections, including he Waking Comes Late (2016),  The Dead Are More Visible (2012), Every Lost Country (2010), and Afterlands (2005) 

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Jun 112017
 

In The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, Heighton mashes up the best parts of the geo-political thriller, the historical narrative, an in-depth character study, lashing all these elements together with lyric prose and breathtaking design. — Richard Farrell

The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep
Steven Heighton
PenguinUSA, 2017
352 pages, $18.00

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We are a species hellbent on escaping circumstance, deterministic nomads, forever obedient to the belief that ‘better’ exists ‘elsewhere.’ Utopian societies hold a special appeal in literature. From Eden to Plato’s Republic to Swift’s Lilliput, the allure of alternate reality has long captured the imagination of writers and readers alike. And while post-modern versions tend toward the dystopian—one thinks of Orwell, Huxley, and later Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood—the temptation to enter other worlds remains just as strong.

Steven Heighton’s latest novel, The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, takes place in the war-ravaged ruins of a Mediterranean ghost town, effectively blending utopian elements into a dystopian village. On the politically divided island of Cyprus, lies Varosha. Once a thriving Riviera resort, this now-shuttered city on the U.N. Green Line was abandoned in the aftermath of the 1974 fighting between Greece and Turkey. Some 20,000 citizens of Varosha fled the bombs, leaving behind parked cars, tables at sidewalk cafés, and shops still filled with clothing.

Block by block Varosha too seems more unreal, if increasingly visible. The moon has risen behind him, over the sea, and though not yet clear of the beachfront towers, it lends an indirect glow. Where vines and creepers have not engulfed the signage he can read the names of businesses, in Greek, English, both—a bakery, a steam laundry, a small nightclub, a café whose heavy tables still line the street although the chairs have vanished—and he can tell the makes of the occasional cars melting into the pavement.

Inside Varosha, however, a hidden community survives. Heighton’s ragtag band of misfits, idealists, exiles, and castoffs have built a secret but sustainable commerce-free zone, where orchards of almond, cherry, and pistachio trees thrive in the Mediterranean sunshine. Snare traps catch rabbits, fig trees drop fruit, and what the village cannot produce, they trade for with the friendly Turkish officer in charge of an adjacent military outpost.

Into this secret world stumbles the battle-weary, Greek-Canadian solider, Elias Trifannis. Dispatched to Cyprus for R&R, Elias is haunted by battlefield nightmares. While drinking in a bar, he meets Eylül Sahin, a beautiful Turkish journalist. The two talk, flirt, and fend off hostile attention from a group of Turkish soldiers. Later, after an amorous coupling on the beach (a sex scene replete with turtle hatchlings scurrying seaward in starlight) those same soldiers reappear, drunker, angrier, and armed. Shots are fired. Eylül falls in the crossfire. Thinking she’s dead, Elias—injured and dazed himself—escapes through a hole in the fence, and slips into the hidden world of Varosha.

Outside the fence, an investigation begins. With a Turkish journalist shot, a Greek-Canadian solider missing, and a tenuous peace between rival nations in the balance, the political ramifications of the incident reverberate far and wide. Before lapsing into a coma, the gravely wounded Eylül overhears her attackers hastily concoct a cover story: “The Greek attacked her, we tried to help, the Greek attacked me, you tried to shoot him, you hit her. Simple enough?”

The next morning, these events are reported to the commanding officer of the adjacent, Turkish military garrison. Colonel Erkan Kaya immediately doubts his soldiers’ tale, but also knows “this was a story that would have to disappear.” Suspecting that Elias may have escaped into Varosha, Kaya wants no part of an on-going investigation that could topple his cushy command. “Things right themselves—they always do,” is more than just Kaya’s motto, it is the man’s pervasive ethos. He declares Elias dead, tosses his phone into the water, and reports that the man’s body washed out to sea.

Kaya is a remarkable construct of Heighton’s imagination. The colonel is so likable, so enigmatically decent, that you root for him despite his bumbling attempts to keep secrets. A military officer cut from the mold of Jeff Lebowski rather than Rambo, Kaya’s idyllic life mirrors that of the Varoshans. He lounges at the officers’ club, beds exotic women, and quaffs on mouthwatering lunches of figs, olives, lamb, and raki. His primary struggle is not war, but a stalwart defense of the status quo.

In a sense, two idealistic worlds exist, one inside Varosha, and one at Kaya’s officers’ club. But reality constantly encroaches, and in Heighton’s world, that reality has a name: Captain Polat.

If good stories work through compelling opposition, then Kaya and Polat are wonderfully paired opponents. From the moment he first appears, in a wonderfully taut, almost comedic tennis match, Polat seems determined to defy his boss. Where Kaya is a gentleman of leisure, Polat exemplifies the ambitious, career-minded soldier. Suspecting Elias has slipped away, the young adjutant wants to enter Varosha and unearth its secrets. “Allow me to lead a—sir, I would be honoured to lead a platoon in there—immediately.”

Meanwhile, inside Varosha, Elias recovers from his wounds and two perilous escape attempts that set back his recovery. Part prisoner, part refugee, Elias struggles with his fate. Should he remain in this village, free from the demands of commerce, war, and corruption? Or should he escape, fulfil his duty, and tell the truth about what happened?

In some ways he will be almost sorry to leave. This pocket in the ruins of a dead city seems more like a singularity outside of time, so that past events out there beyond the mouth of the wormhole are coming to feel, by light of day, like hallucinations. Another few months and they might seem to belong in the bio or obituary of a stranger—though by then he will be back out there and dealing with the fallout of the real events.

Heighton’s spellbinding world is under constant threat. The inhabitants are aging. Even the most recalcitrant villagers recognize the half-life of their exile. And the longer Elias remains, the more entangled he becomes in the lives of these villagers. What happens if the obsessed Polat returns? What happens when Kaya is eventually transferred? Though Varosha has existed for more than 40 years, it is a world on the edge.

Months pass. A love affair develops between Elias and Kaiti, the mother of twins, who is poised to abandon the village. Kaya transfers Polat to combat duty in Syria, where he becomes a combat hero. Elias attempts to escape again, and nearly drowns. Kaya’s children visit Cyprus, and his teenage son develops a fixation on weapons and exploring Varosha. Kaiti gets pregnant. And then Polat returns, even more singularly obsessed with searching the village and unlocking its secrets.

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War and its horrors tremble at the margins of this story, in Elias’s memories of a grisly raid in Afghanistan, in the escalation of fighting between the Turks and the Syrians, and in the tension of soldiers willing to kill simply because the guy in the bar wears the wrong uniform. Heighton mostly keeps combat off-stage, but it haunts, a constant bell that chimes. Contemporary violence accretes atop ancient scars, the way wars always must.

Again and again, Heighton doubles his themes, uncovers linkages between his imagery, loops back on history and story. War and peace. Love and loss. Home and exile. Freedom and servitude. On both a macro and micro level, parallel patterns abound, creating wonderful paradoxes, rich layers of detail, and story puzzles to delight.

Heighton delivers another stunner in this his 15th book, and fourth novel. Winner of the 2016 Governor-General Prize for Poetry (The Waking Comes Late) Heighton has never shied away from formidable themes or complex plots. In The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep, Heighton mashes up the best parts of the geo-political thriller, the historical narrative, an in-depth character study, lashing all these elements together with lyric prose and breathtaking design. I found myself thinking of Robert Stone’s Damascus Gate, Shirley Hazard’s The Great Fire, and John Fowles’ The Magus.

In fact, Heighton has always reminded me a bit of John Fowles. Both writers are serious craftsmen and rigorous thinkers, with a profound respect for history, nature, and culture. Both populate their stories with strange but fully rendered characters. And both men dazzle their readers with depictions of mesmerizing worlds, elegant storylines, and serious themes. And like Fowles, Heighton is a writer who interrogates notions of reality, examining the borderlands between commerce and community, between mere existence and a deeper, sacred sense of being.

In his compact but brilliant book of writing advice, Work Book: Memos & Dispatches on Writing, Heighton describes the act of reading this way:

Vertical resonance means a downward echoing, the potential for soundings into a textual subconscious, the swimmer’s thrilling sense, when crossing a mountain lake, of unmeasured depths in the dark below the thermocline.

The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep is an invigorating swim into such unmeasured depths.

—Richard Farrell

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[updated bio requested]

Oct 262016
 

captureClick on the image to go to the Canada Council site.

Congratulations and felicitations to Steven Heighton for winning this year’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry. Steven has been a friend of the magazine since very early in its history. I have always admired and supported his work. He’s the real thing. And now he has the endorsement of official public acclaim. Truly well deserved.

You can check out Steven’s work (poetry, translation, aphorism, and fiction) on the magazine here:

The Devil’s Dictionary for Writers

Herself, Revised

Four Approximations of Horace

from Every Lost Country

A Right like Yours

 

And here is the NC interview with Steven:

Bushwacked by Inspiration: An Interview with Steven Heighton — Richard Farrell

 

 

Sep 052012
 

“I simply wrote stories whenever I got bushwhacked by inspiration and kept my fingers crossed in hopes that in the end they would somehow cohere…” — Steven Heighton

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“The writing life, like life in general, has a sacramental and a secretarial side,” Steven Heighton writes.  “As years pass and debts and duties accrue, the secretarial, clerical mode spreads like a lymphoma and starts to squeeze life from the sacramental, creative side.” Heighton’s own writing stands in defiance of this clerical mode. Prolific and diverse, he has published more than a dozen books, inlcuding collections of poetry, short stories and essays as well as four novels. He is a writer hell-bent on summoning the sacramental in his ever-expanding body of work, yet one dedicated and disciplined enough to sustain a steady output of consistently superior writing.

Heighton works and lives in Kingston, Ontario. His most recent book is a collection of short stories, The Dead Are More Visible (read my review at Numéro Cinq). In 2011, Heighton released Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing, a lively, eclectic gathering of aphorisms and memos about writing and art. I first encountered his work in the essay “The Admen Move on Lhasa”  (from a collection of essays with the same title). This essay remains one of the finest I’ve read on writing and the process of making art.

We exchanged a series of emails over the course of several weeks in preparation for this interview.  I confess to some initial nervousness. How often do we get to talk with the people whose work we truly admire?  But Heighton was both generous with his time and personable in our exchanges. He asked me about San Diego, about my family and my writing.  He confessed to a ‘minor’ bike accident which he described using the term cheese-grater in reference to the skin on right side of his body.  He talked about camping with his daughter, about finding a way to earn a living as a writer, about the blazing summer heat and the long, uncertain process of books being optioned to films. (Two of his novels have been optioned recently, Afterlands and Every Lost Country).

This sort of informal formality bleeds over into his writing as well. His stories are accessible but carefully crafted. They are filled with recognizable, often working class characters but written with a meticulous detail for language—a poet’s ear for melody combined with a prose writer’s eye for drama, a sort of genre-bending, cross-pollination of  W.S. Merwin and Raymond Carver, Ann Carson and Alice Munro.

Talking to Heighton, I feel myself in the presence of an affable high priest, a hardworking visionary whose polite chit chat is really just clearing the way for what he does best, which turns out to be two distinct things: both writing and talking about writing. The former is obvious; but the latter—the ability to articulate the process, to demystify the act of creativity, is a much rarer thing. Not every succesful and talented writer is able or willing to do this. At times, and especially in Workbook, it feels as if Heighton is lowering a rope ladder down from the Elysian fields and inviting others up. He offers no schmaltzy shortcuts, no write-your-novel-in-a-weekend workshops here. “Interest is never enough. If it doesn’t haunt you, you’ll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you into writing may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.”  Haunted is a good word to describe his stories, poems and essays. To read Heighton is to intuit the effort that goes into the creation of something important and lasting. It is to “gape and loiter” in the sacramental, and all the while wonder what it means.

—Richard Farrell

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Richard Farrell: Your latest collection of short stories, The Dead Are More Visible, contains eleven stories. Can you talk a bit about how long it took you to gather that collection?

Steven Heigthon: I wrote the eleven stories over a period of six years—2006 to the end of 2011—but during that time I also worked on other things: a novel, a book of poems, and a book of aphorisms & fragmentary essays.  I wrote a few other stories as well—stories that my editor, Amanda Lewis, suggested we cull from The Dead Are More Visible on the grounds that they didn’t fit the book tonally.  In the end I agreed with her.  I’m hoping those orphaned stories will fit into some future collection.

RF: Does making a collection of stories influence the way you write the individual stories? In other words, do you have a thematic sense of where the collection is going before you start, or do you cobble together the book after the stories are written?

SH: In the ’90s I published a book called Flight Paths of the Emperor—a collection of linked stories that use Japan as a point of thematic reference and departure.  At a certain point in that book’s making, I did start writing stories with a view to filling in thematic gaps, filling out a larger project.  Not so with The Dead Are More Visible.  I simply wrote stories whenever I got bushwhacked by inspiration and kept my fingers crossed in hopes that in the end they would somehow cohere, not in an overtly “linked” fashion but through loose tonal kinships imposed by my voice, my angle of vision, the particular mannerisms and mechanisms of my writing.

RF: In “A Right Like Yours,” a female boxer falls in love with her sparring partner.  I daresay it’s a love story with a happy ending.  I might make an argument that a few other stories in the book have happy endings, or at least resolutions that favor the protagonists. Are happy endings harder to write?

SH: Like any romantic, I have to keep an eye on myself.  I want to avoid lapsing into sentiment, avoid poeticizing or aestheticizing the world.  So I’ve trained myself to avoid positive endings, or at least prettified endings.  With “A Right Like Yours” I took a different approach.  I decided to tune out my captious, critical faculty and allow myself to end on a slightly sentimental note.  I’m glad I did.  It felt like a reprieve, a remission, for me as much as for the main character.  There’s a simple sweetness to her voice and I decided not to mute or undercut it at the end.

RF: By contrast, “Journeyman” and “Heart & Arrow” strike me both as particularly sad stories. I’m wondering if the process is different for you.

SH: The female boxer in “A Right Like Yours” is very young.  Like anyone, she has experienced a certain amount of loss, but not nearly to the extent that a middle-aged person has.  The protagonists of “Journeyman” and “Heart & Arrow” are, respectively, in late and early middle-age—and the tone and point of view of those stories are, in contrast to “A Right Like Yours,” retrospective, elegiac.  They’re stories about loss and how we decide what to do with it.  But does the writing process differ—is writing a comedy (“comedy” in the classical sense: a story that ends with a wedding instead of a funeral) fundamentally different from writing tragedy?  It’s a good question.  I guess I’d have to say the process doesn’t differ, if only because the technical demands of writing a story are always the same: keeping it tight, choosing the right words so that each word resounds forward and backward through the text, nailing each physical detail, somehow defibrillating those characters who won’t come to life.

But on second thought: in a “comedy” you can get away with caricatured secondary characters, which makes the process of creation a touch less demanding, and maybe you can also have a bit more fun in writing certain scenes, certain passages of dialogue.  But it’s still going to be hard to get the thing right and fictionally true.

RF: Do you ever abandon stories?  If so, do those stories haunt you or do you let them go?

SH: I do abandon stories.  Do they haunt me after the fact?  Rarely.  They failed because their material didn’t haunt and obsess me enough during the process of composition.  They failed because they lacked the power to haunt in the first place.  So I move on to new work and forget them.

But the essence of one jettisoned story stayed with me for years.  Around 1992 I started something I called “Nearing the Sea, Superior” and over several drafts it bloated up to thirty pages, and I kept adding more, trying to make it work—like an engineer trying to fix a flying machine that’s too heavy to fly by adding more and more heavy parts.  In the end I threw up my hands.  Then, a few years ago, I thought I’d take another run at the basic narrative concept—or what I remembered of it.  So I searched for a print-out of the original version.  Couldn’t find it, and I believe that was a lucky break, because if I’d read that original I might have mined it for a few good details, or lazily used the whole story as a platform for the new version and its protagonist.  Instead, I had to take a fresh run at the whole thing.  It’s just ten pages long now and, published in The Dead Are More Visible, I think it finally works.

RF: You write novels, stories, poems, essays, and reviews.  Do you write all these forms during the same period or do you compartmentalize your writing brains?

SH: During the same period, yes, but usually not on the same day.  If the things I’m working on are alive, molten, inclined to flow toward their natural culmination, I can walk away and write something different for a week—say, a review for which I have a deadline—then return to the abandoned thing and, within an hour or two, be back inside the vortex.  Partly it’s a matter of sheer curiosity.  I never know how my poems or stories will end—I want to write toward my endings with the same interest and excitement I hope readers will feel, reading toward them—so my curiosity about where things will end up helps draw me back into whatever I’m writing.

RF: I recently completed your novel Afterlands, which was terrific. In many ways, it felt like a 400 page poem, yet it was fully articulated as a dramatic story too. Are you a poet who writes novels or a novelist who writes poems? 

SH: I think of myself as a writer who channels his narrative impulses into fiction and lyrical impulses into poetry—I don’t write typical “poet’s novels” and I don’t write narrative poetry—but there’s definitely some spillover on the level of language.  The thing is, poets like me who also write fiction are saddled with a sensitivity to verbal acoustics.  They can’t help lugging their poet’s tool belt into the atelier where they build their stories.  So, unlike pure fiction writers, who work stylistically at the level of the sentence, the poet/fiction writer works at the level of the word, even the syllableWorse, they habitually, helplessly use poetry’s staple technique, re-enactive writing (i.e., the orchestration of verbal rhythm, sound, level of diction, punctuation etc. so that the writing embodies and becomes the action or sensation being described).  Bummer.  There are ten thousand syllables in the average story and a few hundred thousand in the average novel.

Come to think of it, one of the reasons I’m more and more drawn to narratives that involve physical action and overt dramatic momentum—as with Afterlands—is because I’m hoping those traits will balance the prosodic density of the writing.  I don’t want to create 400-page blocks of static, preeningly poetic prose.  I’m not writing “re-enactively” to show off—I’m just trying to make my narratives more vivid and vital.  So, yes, the poetry is there, but in service to the narrative and the characters.

RF: Is there a style (genre) of writing that feels most natural to you? 

SH: Depends on the day.  Honestly.  Some days I’m a poet, pure and simple.  Other days I want to tell a story.

RF: A friend of mine recently told me that she often tries to quietly do ‘beautiful things as an act of defiance.”  You quote a Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, who says, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” You’ve indicated that you see the making of art as a defiant or subversive act. Could you expound a bit on this?

SH: Making something slowly and conscientiously, the way you have to build a poem, story or novel, is subversive in the context of a hyperkinetic culture that promotes haste and speciousness—speed and loudness over slowness and quiet, surface over substance.  On the other hand, as that second quote suggests, Nhat Hahn extols the importance of sometimes doing no work at all—or at least no material, external work.  He too wants people to defy our culture’s manic forward momentum, but by simply sitting, breathing and smiling—“being”—rather than getting too caught up in doing and achieving.

RF: In Workbook you write, “If it doesn’t haunt you, you’ll never write it well.”  Do you remember the moment when you first felt haunted? 

SH: The truth is I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel haunted—haunted in the sense of inspired to try to make meaningful things: first drawings and paintings, then poems and stories, and for a while, in my last year of high school and throughout my twenties, songs.

An interesting point about the songwriting.  I’ve probably written about a hundred songs and they’re all bad or mediocre except for one, which is pretty good.  One good song in three decades.  At this rate I’ll have a solid album in about three hundred years.

RF: You bang the drum loudly for the purity of art, for art as a haven apart from the corrupting influences of capitalism and advertising, schlock. But how do you encourage a young writer starting out, who has to pay the bills and feed the kids? How do you advise her or him to stay true to this calling?

SH: Cultivate low material aspirations; you’re going to need them.  Remember you can live on a lot less money than consumer culture would have you believe.  Abolish all bourgeois vanities about the source and branding of your clothes and other stuff; you can dress yourself decently at a thrift store.  Try to find jobs that leave you time to write, real time, three to five hours a day (waiting on tables at night is perfect: decent and quick money, good exercise, and your days stay free).  Don’t marry anyone who cares a lot about material comforts and possessions, or who has high ambitions for you.  Never marry anyone who doesn’t see your calling as worth a lifetime of effort—and deep down, you know how he or she feels.

[Sheepish addendum: If you have a strong enough constitution, you can produce a stream of books by writing, say, from five to eight every morning before going out to earn a conventional nine-to-five living.  I doubt I could do it—manage a tandem twelve-fourteen hour workday on five or six hours’ sleep a night, and with no idling time—but there are people who can.  Famously, Laurence Durrell wrote The Alexandria Quartet on the small-hours shift (and I mean small hours—he got up and started writing at three a.m.) before going off to teach schoolchildren.  He also managed to make time in that crushing schedule for committed boozing.  Stephen Henighan (people are always mixing up our names) is a tenured academic and works on his fiction and non-fiction books in the very early morning, every morning, before going off to teach at the University of Guelph.  So that approach is an option for the athletic, the heroic, or persons of Paleolithic toughness.]

RF: I’ve been travelling a bit this summer, and I pay attention to what people are reading.  And people are still reading, but sadly, it seems like many people are reading the same few books.  (This summer, in particular, it seems the majority of people I’ve seen buried in a book were reading Fifty Shades of Gray.)  In Workbook you call lazy readers narcissists.  Do you suppose there’s any redeeming value in such group think?  From reading anything as opposed to just watching television?

SH: It’s a great question.  I guess I’ll say that reading is always different, less passive than TV, more interactive, collaborative, even if you’re reading trafe.  And who can blame people for reading trafe?  We’re all stressed and scared, one way or another.  I fully understand why most readers would prefer an unchallenging, escapist book to The Golden Bowl.  (Actually, I think I might find the Shades of Gray series an enormous challenge—which is my way of admitting I haven’t read a word and shouldn’t be commenting on it.)

To get back to that quotation from Workbook.  It was part of a three-part “memo” in a section called “On Reading.”  I argued in the first part that “Lazy readers are unwilling or unable to empathize with characters different from themselves.  Seeking some kind of personal corroboration, they want to read about versions of themselves.”  I added that lazy readers are unable to love a work of fiction—or even respect it—if they don’t love the protagonist.  Hence my charge of narcissism.  I could as easily have accused lazy readers of a failure of empathy, a narrowness of sympathy.

In your question I think you’re addressing a different kind of laziness: the simple need for escape and diversion, which we all share to some extent.  Frankly, escapist readers don’t bother me compared to those readers who think of themselves as literary but nevertheless read in the narcissistic way I describe in Workbook.  They want to have it both ways.  They want to associate themselves with books that look and smellliterary—just as they want to have jazz records, modern paintings, and a decent wine cellar in their home—but they don’t want to read things that actually confront, wobble, even upend their tidy haute-bourgeois vision.

RF: I would use the word prolific to describe you as a writer and the oeuvre of your work.  Could you talk about diligence and persistence in terms of your success as a writer?

SH: The prospect of the poorhouse—of failing to support myself and my daughter, then ending up in a rooming house eating Puss ‘n Boots—is a potent creative motivator.  I simply lack the luxury of suffering from writer’s block.

RF: In “Heart & Arrow” (which is an absolutely heartbreaking story, lovely, true, haunted), you play with memory as a structural device in the story. The themes of faulty memory appear in Afterlands as well. How important are your memories, both of the real and of the literary variety?

SH: Flannery O’Connor once said (roughly: I’m going on memory here, speaking of memory) that anyone who has reached the age of twelve has enough material to fuel a lifetime of writing.  I doubt I was nearly as attentive a child as O’Connor, so probably I didn’t hit that threshold until twenty or so, but I think the point is essentially right.  I know that if I concentrate now and revisit some part of my life I haven’t thought of for a while, I’ll quickly locate riches—not because my life has been exceptionally rich in experience or adventure, but because significant stuff is happening to all of us, all the time.

A key thing about the memories we draw on is that time and compound mental revisions have corrupted them—and that’s a good thing for a fiction writer.  I travelled through Tibet in 1986 but didn’t start writing about it till twenty years later (in my novel Every Lost Country).  Friends asked if I planned to go back, revisit the country, do some on-site research, and I told them no, I couldn’t bear to see how the Chinese occupation had changed Tibet.  My rationale was only true to a point.  Mainly, I didn’t want my contaminated memories of the place and people to be jarred, readjusted by reality.  I was embarking on a novel, not a non-fiction project, and for better or worse the Tibet of my book had to be my version and vision of the place.

RF: You are going to be marooned for the rest of your life on a desert island. You can only take 1 book.  What will you take?

SH: You’re not going to let me take a big fat anthology, right?  Or the collected works of Shakespeare?  Or Proust’s magnum opus, which is really a number of books, a roman fleuve?  Fair enough.  You want to make it hard for me.  I get just one book.  So let me spend the next year or two pinning down an answer, because that’s how long it’s going to take me to narrow my longlist of seventy or eighty favourites.

RF: What are you working on now?

SH: For the past year I’ve been working on new poems and stories.  Last month I finally got started on a novel, as I have to, since realistically the novel is the only form that can put bread on the table.  I think I’ve just finished the first chapter.  Now I’ll turn my back on it and work on other things for a few days.  When I return to that opening it will either hook me, haul me in and surprise me, in a good way, or leave me cold.  If I detect no vital signs, I won’t go on tinkering endlessly the way I used to—a process I now compare to doing chest compressions on an Inca mummy. Nowadays, I just tag the toe and start over.

Thanks for your careful reading and your questions.

— Steven Heighton & Richard Farrell

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Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, which has appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best book of the year selection in ten publications in Canada, the US, and the UK; and has been optioned for film.  His first novel, The Shadow Boxer, was a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers’ Weekly book of the year for 2002.  Heighton’s fiction and poetry are translated into ten languages; have appeared in London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, Brick, London Magazine, TLR, Agni, Numéro Cinq, and Revue Europe; have been internationally anthologised (Best English Stories, Best American Poetry, The Minerva Book of Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, Modern Canadian Poets); and have been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.  He has received the Gerald Lampert Prize, the P.K. Page Award, and four gold National Magazine Awards for fiction.  He writes occasional  reviews for the New York Times Book Review and in 2013 will be the Mordecai Richler Writer-in-Residence at McGill University.

*Author photo credits: Mary Huggard & Michale Lea

 

 

Sep 032012
 

With a Heighton story, only the essential is conjured. There’s an efficiency in his writing, along with a sign posted at the door: No shaggy dogs allowed. But to call a writer efficient these days might imply some mechanical coldness—the latest anointed hipster, brimming with pocketfuls of detached irony and urbane wit. Heighton’s efficiency, however, is anything but sparing. His prose is lush, melodic and carefully cadenced. —Richard Farrell

The Dead Are More Visible (Stories)
By Steven Heighton
Alfred A. Knopf, Canada
ISBN 978-0-307-39741-6

“The virtue of good prose,” writes Steven Heighton in Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing, his meditative collection of aphorisms and memos on art and writing published in 2011, “lies mainly in this dishabituation: it triggers conceptual stammers in the mind, momentarily rerouting hard-set neural circuits, even laying the ground for new ones.” These conceptual stammers, echoes of what the Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky called defamiliarizaton, lie at the center of Heighton’s latest collection of stories, The Dead Are More Visible.

From wrathful lesbians to lonely widows, from aging track stars to angsty teen-agers, Heighton pulls off a literary hat trick: he tells spellbinding stories in aching, melodic voices that demand to be read again and again. A female boxer falls in love with her sparring partner; a heroic fireman rushes back into a burning building to rescue a bag of snakes; a recovering drug addict wanders the Sonoran Desert pursued by a mythical, oxycontin peddling hallucination; these are just some of the stammering citizens of Heighton’s fictional universe.

Heighton is a prolific novelist, essayist and poet. With a dozen books already published, it should come as no surprise that his short stories resist easy labels. In his fiction, Heighton interrogates the liminal borderlands of prose and poetry, walking the fine line between lyrical richness and good old-fashioned yarns. Yet never do the intricate textures of his language get in the way of clear-minded, narrative straight-forwardness, a linearity born not of simplistic formulas but out of a long and careful examination of form and structure.

The Dead Are More Visible contains sad stories with happy endings, simple stories with complex themes, and ineffable mysteries of being told from the perspective and language of common folk.

One of the more heartbreaking stories in this collection is “Heart & Arrow,” a twenty-four page, third person story that hinges on the fallibility of memory. On the occasion of his sister’s fortieth birthday party, Merrick thinks back to when he was ten and he would drink alone in his parents’ long-neglected basement bar. He remembers the loneliness of that bar with its “kidney-shaped counter of faux marble with a brown buttoned vinyl fronting, set at the head of a low, half-finished rec room.” His parents drink upstairs and his sister, Laurel, is almost always out with her friends. Desperately isolated, Merrick tries to act grown up by mimicking them. He wants to recreate an imaginary social life with booze and stale mixers. Instead, he creates his own personal hell.

And now he reminds her of that ironic reversal, to encourage her, he thinks, to cheer her up. Or is it to punish her instead? And what is it that’s pushing him to guide her back down that long-demolished stairway into their childhood rec room, the basement bar where he first tried to drown his childhood self and play the hardened, hard-drinking grown-up, while she already seemed set to inherit the only earth that mattered then: a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high. Stoners, they were called, nobody sure if that honorific referred to the state they were always said to be in or to the flooded limestone quarry where they hung out and smoked up and chugged beer and threw themselves naked off the cliffs.

Condensed into a series of tangible objects imperfectly recalled, this paragraph works like a narrative map. Every image counts. The rec room and dope, the cliffs and quarry, the drinking, sex, and partying—none of these are throwaways. Neither is the reliability of memory itself. Like Chekhov’s gun, each image carries weight. All repeat again and again throughout the pages that follow, forming rich and complex visual and acoustic layers which grow and harmonize as the story progresses. Heighton is thrumming along, patterning images and splintering them off only to bring them back. And the reader is lost in a wonderful miasma of sight and sound, fully captivated and awake.

With a Heighton story, only the essential is conjured. There’s an efficiency in his writing, along with a sign posted at the door: No shaggy dogs allowed. But to call a writer efficient these days might imply some mechanical coldness—the latest anointed hipster, brimming with pocketfuls of detached irony and urbane wit. Heighton’s efficiency, however, is anything but sparing. His prose is lush, melodic and carefully cadenced. Note the alliteration in the above passage, the internal rhymes and the precise pacing of Merrick’s memory of his sister’s social life: “a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high.” Yet the musical quality of the words balances with abundant, honest and empathetic characters. The stories in The Dead Are More Visible operate with the efficiency of nature, like the recycling of energy and matter in ecosystems, a churning, vital antidote to the sleek, mechanistic packaging of our entertainment culture.

She came from a side of town where most women thickened dramatically in their thirties and before long outweighed their men. The men thinned to sinew, their faces got a wrinkled, redly scoured look as if the skin had been worked with sandpaper, their eyes grew raw and haunted. Ellen had been spared the puffy moon face of her older sisters, only to see her features grow meaty and masculine while her body consolidated, almost doubling itself, like a hard-working farm wife of another era.

In “The Dead Are More Visible,” the lonely Ellen works the night shift, flooding a local park in order to form an ice skating rink. Nearby, a deranged man stares at a twenty-five foot obelisk and channels the dead—once buried there but moved to make way for the park. One night, a menacing group of three men approach. “They had the Grim Reaper look—slumpy, faceless, in layers of dark, baggy hooded sweatshirts.” The men begin to harass, first the deranged man, then Ellen. One of them, Shane, is strikingly handsome, something that Ellen notices in spite of the danger. He casts insults and threats, but she stands her ground. They want to rob her, possibly rape her, and she knows it, but she continues to provoke them. When Shane lunges at her with ice picks, Ellen defends herself with the only weapon available, the hose head in her hand, “a half foot of steel tapered to a flanged hole an inch and a half in diameter.” Ellen impales Shane with the hose head, and rips out his eye. The rest of the story becomes a farcical search for the de-socketed eyeball on the ice rink.

But what happens after such a violent set up is quite remarkable, and I’ll not spoil the ending, except to say that a simple compassion returns to offset the gore. Along the way, Heighton reveals the hardscrabble reality of life in a modern big city, invites the reader to experience a lonely woman’s heroic stance, and, just for good measure, he treats us to the strange, quasi-mystical figure of the deranged man and the obelisk.

It is this deranged man, a seemingly irrelevant character (he has no agency, really, on the page) who serves as the story’s deeper consciousness. “The dead are more visible than we are,” the deranged man tells Ellen, referring not just to the literal dead—the displaced graves once buried below the park—but also to our own existences run down by mortality, progress and the inevitable sweep of time. His voice provides the story its chilling resonance. The reader perceives that this story is about more than just violence and a lonely woman flooding an ice rink. In Workbook, Heighton describes this layering effect as vertical resonance.

Vertical resonance means a downward echoing, the potential for soundings into a textual subconscious, the swimmer’s thrilling sense, when crossing a mountain lake, of unmeasured depths in the dark below the thermocline.

Like the swimmer crossing the lake, we feel only the forward narrative movement, the stroke-and-kick, what-happens-next stimulus of plot. But what differentiates literature from schlock is precisely this deeper, textual subconsciousness. We read along and enjoy the surface story, but something else is happening. The reader slowly becomes aware of a chilling depth, an awareness of the gap between the habituated, day-to-day routines and the deeper, more meaningful qualities of life. The well written story bewitches us this way, deriving power from its ability to wake us up, to shake us out of an automated existence. Or, as Shklovsky once wrote, it makes the stones feel stony again. When it works, and it works quite often within Heighton’s stories, we submit to what John Gardner described as the vivid continuous dream, that phantasmagorical wonder that is reading a well made book. Plot becomes story. Metaphor becomes meaning. We become, in Heighton’s own words, more intensely alive.

Perhaps Heighton’s greatest gift as a writer is a relentless commitment to variety. His readers need never fear boredom. In the collection’s eleven stories, Heighton employs first, second and third person points of view. He has female and male narrators, old and young, innocent and experienced. From sprawling, almost-novella length tales to compact, twelve page stories, Heighton shifts often. Don’t look for thematic unity here. Don’t look for simple structures or stereotypes. Instead, expect to be pulled and pushed in ways that will baffle and befuddle but never fail to satisfy.

The last story in the book, “Swallow,” swells to almost 50 pages, yet it reads—thanks to tight pacing and careful construction—like a story half that length. A Greek-Canadian woman, Roddy, breaks up with her boyfriend, loses her waitressing job and refuses to move home again. To earn money, she signs up for a weeklong human drug trial. The drug she will be taking is an unnamed sedative.

The clinic is a hangar-like structure, cinderblocks and green corrugated siding, on the edge of an industrial park in the wind-scavenged steppes of outer Scarborough. At the park’s entrance the bus drops you along with two women in matching peach parkas over grey sweats. A sunny sub-arctic afternoon. No sidewalks. Snowless lawns hard as Astroturf. Up the middle of the road the matched pals tow dark, wheeled suitcases as big as wolfhounds. You have only a daypack, yet they edge ahead, their trainers flashing, heads down, shoulders high and tight—the slapstick, puffin shuffle of Canadians in winter. You don’t mind the wind’s bee-sting assault on your skin. You haven’t felt so awake in weeks. Neither do you mind the industrial park, finding something here that mirrors your inert inner world, so that for now—for a change—you don’t feel out of place.

Suburban Ontario transforms into a kind of wasteland, yet somehow stays homey too. The puffin shuffle, peach parkas, the wheeled suitcases like wolfhounds, these details accrete. What should be cold and arresting becomes an object of curiosity. The reader, while filled with trepidation, is also called forward.

Bleak and dismal, with drug trials and female subjects locked inside a forbidding building, it’s reasonable to expect Solzhenitsyn, or at least some sort of Orwellian dystopia. But in “Swallow” the mood remains more tantalizing than terrifying. Through a series of drug-induced scenes, we grow closer to Roddy. (The use of a second person narrator is rarely done this well.) We come to feel a community forming between the other women and the providers in this strange place. A sort of humanity arises despite the setting and the fact that these women are being poked and prodded and filled with poisons.

Once again, the conceptual stammers begin to fire. Heighton plays against the expected. Rather than sedating, the experimental sedatives become portals into Roddy’s world. The grim setting and the unusual concept create opportunities for a rich, meaningful experience. It is, in many ways, a sort of cockeyed celebration, a party of misfits who seem somehow enlarged by their very entanglement. This is not what the reader might expect.

But then each of the eleven stories in this collection surprises and delights. Heighton blends structural complexities with a linguistic opulence into a dazzling array of styles. The Dead Are More Visible is a master performance of art and storytelling from a significant writer who has honed his skills to a sharp edge. “[A] yen for transcendence,” Heighton advises himself in Workbook, calling upon the younger writer he once was (and, perhaps, by extension, other writers and readers) “to surmount one’s inborn pettiness and laziness, to be worthy of life’s wonder and better able to frame it in the right words, rightly arranged.” Thankfully, he follows his own advice. The dead are indeed more visible here. The right words are rightly arranged. With neural circuits rewired, habitual concepts stammered, deep lakes crossed and soundings taken, the reader surmounts pettiness and gazes anew at life’s wonder.

—Richard Farrell

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Richard Farrell is  the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and as a Navy pilot. He is a graduate from the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories. His work, including fiction, memoir, craft essays, and book reviews, has been published at Hunger Mountain, Numéro Cinq, and A Year in Ink anthology. His essay “Accidental Pugilism” (which first appeared on Numéro Cinq in a slightly different form) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  He lives in San Diego with his wife and children.

Nov 112011
 

The author skating two miles from the Lake Ontario shore.

This is a chapter from Steven Heighton‘s Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing (just published by ECW Press)—amazingly enough, a book of aphorisms (epigrams, whatever–short, pungent thingies). Many of you will recall that ages ago, when dg had the energy for such, NC used to have aphorism contests. It was mentioned then that, in fact, people, real writers, often wrote aphorisms and published them in books. It is an astonishing form, little taught in the creative writing schools, and here is living proof of its exuberant viability.

DG had the devil (yes) of a time picking from the book. Every section is deft, dry and delightful. There is a section in which Steven writes to himself as a younger writer.

Let failure be your workshop.  See it for what it is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition.

There is a gorgeous section on inspiration (& boredom).

(It’s the Buddhist teacher and writer Thich Naht Hahn who says instead, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” A small act of subversion in a society that has no use for stillness, silence, inward vision—that extols speed, productivity, the manic pursuit of things that by their nature can never be caught and retained.)

This book is an embarrassment of riches. In the end, dg chose the chapter of definitions (the definition is one of the ancient forms of the aphorism).

Steven Heighton’s most recent books are Workbook: memos & dispatches on writing and the novel Every Lost Country.  His 2005 novel, Afterlands, appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice; was a best of year choice in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK; and has been optioned for film.  His poems and stories have appeared in many publications—including London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, The Walrus, and Best English Stories—and have received four gold National Magazine Awards.  He has also been nominated for the Governor General’s Award and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.  In 2012 Knopf Canada will publish The Dead Are More Visible, a collection of short stories including “A Right Like Yours,” which appeared in Numéro Cinq.

See also this little interview with the author. And Steven’s earlier appearances on these pages: A Right Like Yours, Four Approximations of Horace, from Every Lost Country, and Herself, Revised.

dg

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If God is in the details, the Devil is in the definitions

AMBITIOUS: writer more successful than oneself.

BUZZ: ignorant consensus of readers who have not yet read the book in question and for the most part never will.

COMPLAINT: not actually a form of criticism, though often mistaken as such by reviewers.

DEADLINE: date by which writer must perfect excuses for not delivering in time.

FAILURE: phenomenon that allows writers to retain their friends.

FRIENDSHIPS, OF YOUNG WRITERS: akin to the urgent, insecure alliances of small countries in times of war.

GOOD FICTION: a collaborative confidence trick.

GOSSIP: weapon in the ancient, unconscious war waged by the group against the individual.

HIGH INFANT MORTALITY: problem endemic to literary novels, a low percentage of which survive their first two years.

HUMOUR, WIT: for some reason a proof to many readers, and critics, that a writer lacks aesthetic seriousness (hence, a failure to recognize the seriousness of play).

LITERATURE: an education in complexity.

MEMO: the musing of a harmless drudge.

NEGATIVE CRITICISM: art of creating, out of an instinctive hostility towards work that tests or spurns one’s vision, a calm, orderly argument.

Thus, NEGATIVE CRITIC:  writer in the business of disguising a club-wielding caveman in civilized tweed.

PROMISING YOUNG WRITER: middle-aged writer whose work is finally gaining notice.

PROMISING YOUNGER WRITER: late middle-aged writer whose work is finally etc.

ROYALTY: foreign celebrities who earn more in daily investment income than most writers earn in a lifetime.

WRITER: someone trying to extend childhood—its exuberant creativity, its capacity for timeless absorption—all the way to death, thus bypassing adulthood altogether.

WRITER’S WRITER: one who lives at or below the poverty line.

—Steven Heighton

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Oct 302010
 

Herewith a startling and idiosyncratically romantic Steven Heighton short story “A Right Like Yours.” Many of you know Steven from previous appearances on the pages of Numéro Cinq, including his lovely poem “Herself, Revised” (very popular here), his novel excerpt from Every Lost Country, his book of essays The Admen Move on Lhasa, which Rich Farrell wrote about here, and his handful of Horace odes in translation, which you really ought to take a second look at for their grace and intricacy. Of these odes, David Helwig wrote to me in an email: “They seem to me technically brilliant. And therefore moving.” (Remind me to ask him if I can quote him.)

dg

A RIGHT LIKE YOURS

By Steven Heighton

 

He is short but he has shoulders and I think he wears the flattest shoes going, cheap sneakers of some kind, and that is attractive, that he doesn’t try to elevate himself in any way. His look is shy though, maybe cold, with green eyes that don’t meet your eyes but look at your mouth or chin in the same way as, when you’re in the ring, the other girl will stare a little below your eyes. So maybe he does it to practice. Always be in the ring, Webb Renton tells us.

I choose to think he is just somewhat shy.

It started because I was training for my fifth fight and my sparring partner had hurt that ligament in the knee that’s called, I think, cruciate but we just say crucial because that’s what it is. The other girls at the club are either on the little or the huge size and Trav is about the same weight as me, though he is shorter, and toward the end of a workout Webb yelled at him to get in there and give me a couple rounds. Trav’s face then—like someone told him to throw himself on a grenade. People started gathering ringside. Like I said, it was the end of the night, and I would have been interested too. I don’t think the coach had ever put a girl and guy in to spar that way.

Continue reading »

Oct 062010
 

author-u6-a53Herewith a sequence of poems from Steven Heighton‘s book Patient Frame. Numéro Cinq readers will (or may not) recall Steven from two earlier appearances on these pages (here and here). He is an old friend, a hurting hockey player, father of a daughter, and he published a book of poems and a novel this year, which is more than I have (probably you, too). He sent me “A Strange Fashion horaceof Forsaking…” months ago for fun and it’s been biting at the back of my brain ever since, not the least because he refashions Horace after Thomas Wyatt, one of my favourite poets. I leave it to Steven to introduce Horace and these translations—which he prefers to call “approximations”—in his own words.

dg

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Horace, or Quintus Horatius Flaccus, was a Roman poet. During his lifetime (65 BCE – 8 BCE) he served briefly as a military officer, as a functionary in the Roman treasury, and as a writer, producing satires, epodes, epistles, literary criticism, and poems. He was a highly versatile poet, both formally and thematically; his Odes comprise work ranging from personal lyrics to moralistic verse, and from private, occasional poems to public, ceremonial verse. Horace’s words survive not only in Classics departments and in translation (David Ferry’s The Odes of Horace is deservedly respected and widely read), but in common parlance: the phrase carpe diem ­comes from one of his poems.

In approaching these four odes of Horace I’ve stuck with my usual practice as an amateur translator, giving myself the freedom to make each approximation as “free” or as “faithful” as the original inspires me to be. So “Pyrrha” sticks close to the untitled original in its structure, imagery and level of diction, while “Chloe” has morphed from an unrhymed twelve line poem into a short-lined sonnet. “A Strange Fashion of Forsaking” is inflected and re-gendered by way of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s famous poem “They Flee from Me”, while “Noon on Earth!” has gone from a linguistically formal eight lines to a highly colloquial seventeen.

Robert Kroetsch once observed that every poem is a failed translation. What a translation can’t afford to be is a failed poem—or at least an uninteresting one. My aim in approximating a poem that I love is, of course, to make a compelling counterpart in English—something to entertain you, startle you, pry you open—while in the process entertaining myself: sitting up, by candlelight, with dictionaries and a glass of Douro red, the house silent, even the bats in our walls asleep; reciting the original lines aloud, in some cases two thousand years after their conception; weighing how best to re-conceive those cadences in English; serving as a kind of stenographer to the dead, a medium at a prosodic séance, an avid collaborator, an apprentice always learning from the work. And for me, the most mysterious, engrossing work lies in finding a way into old or ancient poems and making them young again. Hence Horace.

I’ll conclude by quoting the middle section of a poem I translated several years ago—a poem by the contemporary Italian writer Valerio Magrelli, which suggests some of the addictive bustle and exertion of the translator’s work. (The unquoted opening lines introduce the metaphor of the translator as a one-man or –woman moving company.)

I too move something—words—
to a new building, words
not mine, setting hands to things
I don’t quite know, not quite
comprehending what I move.
Myself I move—translate
pasts to presents, to presence, that
travels sealed up, packed in pages
or in crates . . .

The final unpacking, of course, is the task of the reader.

—SH, Kingston, Ontario



Pyrra (i:5)

What slender elegant youth, perfumed
among roses, is urging himself on you,
Pyrrha, in the fragrant grotto? Have you
bound your yellow hair so gracefully

for him? How many times he’ll weep because
faith is fickle, as the gods are, how often
will the black, sea-disquieting winds
astonish him, although for now

credulous, grasping at fool’s gold, he enjoys you,
hopes you’ll always be calm water, always
this easy to love. Unconscious of the wind’s wiles
he’s helpless, still tempted

by your gleaming seas. But high on the temple wall
I’ve set this votive tablet, and in thanks
to the god for rescue have hung
my sea-drenched mantle there.


Chloe ( i, 23)

You flee from me, Chloe, a young deer
urgently in search of mother, lost
in lonely, high forests
tremulous with fear

at the mountain’s slimmest breeze, or
springtime’s delicate revealing
of leaves, or a leafgreen lizard’s spring
from thickets. (What terrors seize

the fawn then!). But Chloe, I’m neither
a tiger nor a lion, intent
on savage appetites, or upon

causing you any pain. Forget
looking back for your mother
now, woman:
it’s time to love a man.



“A Strange Fashion of Forsaking . . .”
(i, 25: via Thomas Wyatt)

The wilder girls hardly bother anymore
to rattle your shuttered window with fists, or
pitch stones, shatter your dreamfree sleep, while your door,
once oiled and swinging,

nimbly hinged, hangs dead with rust. Less and less
you wake now to ex-lovers crying, “Thomas,
you bastard, how can you sleep?—I’m dying for us
to do it again.”

Seems to me your turn’s long overdue—solo
nightshift when, like some codger in a cul-
de-sac, you’ll moan for all the women (scornful
now) who one time sought you.

The cold will be what finds you then—northeasters
whining down in the gloom of the moon, and lust
in riddled guts twisting you like a stud in must
who has to stand watching

his old mares mounted. You’ll know then, the desire
of girls is for greener goods—such dry sticks
and wiltwood, blown only by the cold, they just figure
who has the time for.

.

Noon on Earth!
(starting from i, 11)

Why trouble wondering how long
breath will last, how long your eyes
will still bask in the heavenshed
lucence of noon on earth. Horoscopes,
palmistry, the séance gild pockets
but confide nothing sure. We have to take it—
the future’s shrugged whatever, that weather
of uncertainty—unknowing whether gods
will grant us the grey of further
winters that’ll churn the sea until the sea
gnaws, noses into the littoral
of our lives, eroding whatever is
so far unclaimed.
Enough.
Better open the red, pitch the cork, toast
our moment—tomorrow’s an idle
nevering, ghost of a god
unworth such wasted faith.

—Translated by Steven Heighton

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Steven Heighton, born in 1961, is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Afterlands. His poetry and fiction have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including the London Review of Books, Poetry (Chicago), Europe, Tin House, Agni, The Independent, the Walrus, and Best English Stories. His work has been widely translated, has received a number of prizes, and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.

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May 052010
 

I’m pleased here to present the first  few pages of Steven Heighton’s new novel Every Lost Country, published just yesterday (really! May 4) by Random House in Canada. Many Numéro Cinq readers will already be familiar with Steven, having read his poem “Herself,  Revised” published here a couple of weeks ago. The poem is from his recently published collection Patient Frame. It is not my intention to flood the market with Steven Heighton prose and poetry, but the man is a walking definition of the word “prolific” and ambidextrous and a compatriot and his words are good companions in the long summer evenings.

dg

from Every Lost Country

Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic.  Dulling the mind, it dulls distinctions, slurs the border between abstractions—right and wrong—or apparent opposites—dead and alive, past and present, you and him.  The brain, rationing oxygen, quiets to a murmur, like a fine-print clause or codicil.  You’re at high altitude for the first time and this mental twilight is a surprise as rewarding as the scenery.  This recess from judgement, sedation of the conscience.  How your sleep here seems too shallow for the nightmares that await you at a certain depth.  You and the rest of the party are basically drunk.  Till now you’ve had to treat others for minor problems only, small cuts and contusions, headaches, insomnia, so this intoxication remains a luxury, not a medical challenge.  Or a moral one.

To you, right and wrong are not abstractions.

Still, think of the freedom of those summit squads dreamily bypassing climbers fallen in the Death Zone—the strange luxury of that.  What Lawson himself has done.  You might have thought twice about joining his expedition as doctor, and bringing along your  daughter, if you’d known his story when you signed the contract.  But at this altitude your numbed mind has to wonder.  Camp One.  Put yourself in his boots if you can.  Now say for certain what you’d have done, or will do.


September 20, 2006, 4: 17 p.m.

She sees the trouble coming because she knows her father.

Sophie sits where she has sat for the last few afternoons, on the flat top of a concrete cylinder rebarred into the glacier, her backside in Nepal and her boots in China—Tibet.  The seat of her favourite ripped jeans covers the line of Chinese characters inscribed in the concrete.  Beside her stands a lightweight aluminum flagpole not much taller than she is and skewed some degrees off vertical.  The breeze cooling her back can’t stir the small Chinese flag, because monsoon winds or, more likely, mischievous Sherpas like Kaljang and Tashi have spooled and tangled the flag tightly to the pole.  Come to think of it—and the notion pleases her on a number of grounds, playful, political—she is likely seated a dozen steps or more inside China now.  Chinese border patrols have to hike up the glacier and adjust the markers from time to time.  A week ago, she and her father and Kaljang and Amaris stood at the edge of base camp and watched the Chinese set up a device on a tripod and take readings and untangle and lower the flag and remove the flagstaff and pry out the marker and roll it laboriously upslope and core new holes in the ice and slot it in.  Some of the men were in blue coveralls and black toques like a SWAT team, others in olive down vests over camouflage gear.  They trudged from chore to chore and said little.  They ignored their audience, though one of the men in camouflage, maybe eighteen or so, waved shyly and blew kisses to her and Amaris.  Amaris ignored him.  Sophie waved back.  Beside her, Kaljang’s eyes narrowed merrily in his brown face and he showed his nicotine teeth.  She snuck a glance at her father on her other side, but he too seemed tickled by the scene, rubbing his salt and pepper stubble, shaking his head affably.  He seemed almost himself again up here.

Read the rest!

Apr 212010
 

Herewith, a lovely poem by my friend Steven Heighton from his new book (his fifth poetry collection) Patient Frame. Steve is also a prolific novelist, story writer and essayist. He has a fourteen-year-old daughter and recently took up hockey–has been trying to lure me into a comeback (not going to happen). Read him and look up his other books. Something here not to be missed.

dg

—-

HERSELF, REVISED

There’s a final bedtime when the father reads
to his daughter under the half-moon lamp.
The wolf-eyed dog sits guard on the snowy
quilt at their feet—ears pricked, head upright
like a dragon on its hoard—while the daughter’s
new clock ticks on the dresser.  When the father
shuts the book, neither feels in the cool sigh
cast from its pages a breath of the end—
and how can it be that this ritual
will not recur?  True, this latest story
is over, Treasure Island, which held them
a dozen nights, but “the end” has arrived
this way often before.  Maybe she’s tired
of the rite, or waking to a sense of herself
revised?  Maybe he’s temporarily bored,
or unmoored, reading by duty or rote,
turning deeper inside his own concerns.

How does the end enter?  There’s a hinging
like a book’s sewn spine in the raw matter
of time—that coded text, illegible—
and stretched too far, it goes.  An innocent
break, the father off one weekend or the child
sleeping at a friend’s, followed by a night
or two she wants to read alone, or write,
for a change, in her new padlock journal.
She has no idea what has changed.  She
can’t know that the enlargement of her life
demands small death after death, and this one,
the latest, is far from last.  She will not
notice this death, being so intent on life—
so implied in its stretching crewelwork
of seconds.
Some nights later, suddenly,
writing cheques or checking email, he might
notice and wonder at the change.  In a sense
such minor passings pre-enact his own.
For a moment he might lay down his pen,
forget the figures, peer over the roofline
and find she was right—Orion, rising,
is more blueprint of butterfly, or bird,
than hunter.  How does it enter, through what rift
or flaw?  Maybe it doesn’t enter at all.
It was there in every sentence: the end.

–Steven Heighton

May 292017
 

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I watched Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander the other night and was touched again by the gentle, passionate attachment the family has for its theatre, which is both a central symbol (everyone is an actor) and a thematic sourcebook (Shakespeare and Strindberg). In that wonderful speech backstage after the Christmas pageant, the soon-to-be-dead brother talks about the little room of the theatre where the actors and actresses produce their art. It’s mostly for their own pleasure in a sense, but it will sometimes bring joy to their audience, and sometimes it will even reach beyond, into the larger world.

I think of the magazine that way. It’s first a community of authors, artists, translators and editors, and we do this for ourselves, for our own pleasure. And then there is the extended community of readers and watchers. And beyond that the larger world that sometimes takes notice, is mildly diverted or surprised, perhaps even changed a little. You don’t find beauty and intelligence framed this way in everyday life. It’s a special place, a little room.

We have a sweet, exceptional issue coming out in June, including Victoria Best’s gorgeous double interview (with painter Miranda Boulton and poet Kaddy Benyon) on the nature and progress of creativity, Trinie Dalton’s memoir “Ripper,” a wonderfully realized “Childhood” essay by Mark Foss, an amazingly accomplished short story by a fresh, new writer Tom Howard, and a lovely appreciation by Domenic Stansberry of the Brooklyn novelist Jay Neugeboren. But there is more! — poems by Darren Bifford, Clint McCown, and a young new writer from Arizona, Erin Lillo, and Jane Clarke (Irish, the latest in our Irish lit series). And besides the Miranda Boulton paintings that accompany the Victoria Best interviews, we have a selection of beautiful paintings by the incomparable Katie DeGroot, who has appeared on these pages before. The ambidextrous poet Cynthia Huntington turns her hand to nonfiction, passionate and wild. Russell Working does a little turn as a literary analyst, comparing stories by James Joyce and Alice Munro. And we have a short fiction piece by the Fernando Aramburu translated from Spanish by Brendan Riley (who is by way of being a regular at NC).

Jason DeYoung, our book review editor, has pulled together a cadre of whip-smart reviewers who pick the most incandescent books to write about. This month Daniel Green, new to the magazine, reviews Robert Coover’s Huck Out West; Contributing Editor Jason Lucarelli reviews The Sarah Book by Scott McLanahan; Rohan Maitzen (also a newcomer) reviews Sarah Moss’s Lost Children; Mike Carson reviews Josh Emmon’s A Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales (and, Lo!, we have a story from the book to go with the review); Rich Farrell, a former senior editor, returns to review Steven Heighton’s The Nightingale Won’t Let You Sleep ; and Dorian Stuber reviews Hans Keilson’s 1944 Diary.

And, as usual, there is MORE!

2017

 
Vol. VIII, No. 8, August 2017 (the final issue)
Vol VIII, No. 7, July 2017

Vol VIII, No. 6, June 2017

Vol VIII, No. 5, May 2017
Vol VIII, No. 4, April 2017

Vol. VIII, No. 3, March 2017

Vol. VIII, No. 2, February 2017

Vol. VIII, No. 1, January 2017

 Comments Off on 2017
Oct 042016
 

capture

capture2

captureThe GG Poetry Finalists for 2016 (Click on the image to go to the announcement page.)

A nice bit of news. Two of our authors have been shortlisted for this year’s Governor-General’s Award in Poetry, Steven Heighton and Garry Thomas Morse. (Click on their names to see what they published here.)  Steven, of course, has appeared several times in the magazine, aphorisms, fiction, and translation as well as poetry. He started with us very early in the magazine’s career.

But, ahem, just another proof of the quality at NC.

2012

 

Vol. III, No. 12, December 2012

Vol. III, No. 11, November 2012

Vol. III, No. 10, October 2012

Vol. III, No. 9, September  2012

Vol. III, No. 8, August 2012

Vol. III, No. 7, July  2012

Vol. III, No. 6, June 2012

Vol. III, No. 5, May 2012

Vol. III, No. 4, April 2012

Vol. III, No. 3, March 2012

Vol. III, No. 2, February 2012

Vol. III, No. 1, January 2012

2010

 

Vol. I, No. 11, December 2010

Vol. I, No. 10, November 2010

Vol. I, No. 9, October 2010

Vol. 1, No. 8, September 2010

Vol. I, No. 7, August 2010

Vol. I, No. 6, July 2010

Vol. I, No. 5, June 2010

Vol. 1, No. 4, May 2010

Vol. I, No. 3, April 2010

Vol. I, No. 2, March 2010

Vol. I, No. 1, February 2010

2011

 

Vol. II, No. 12, December 2011

Vol. II, No. 11, November 2011

Vol. II, No. 10, October 2011

Vol. II, No. 9. September 2011

Vol. II, No. 8, August 2011

Vol. II, No. 7, July 2011

Vol. II, No. 6, June 2011

Vol. II, No. 5, May 2011

Vol. II, No. 4, April 2011

Vol. II, No. 3, March 2011

Vol. II, No. 2, February 2011

Vol. II, No. 1, January 2011

Jul 092014
 

Robert GalRóbert Gál photo by Karel Cudlín

Herewith a selection of aphorisms from the Slovak writer Róbert Gál. Provocative, terse and paradoxical. They are thought crystallized in balanced contrasts, one of our favourite forms on Numéro Cinq (see earlier examples from Steven Heighton and Yahia Lababidi). Naked thought.  Gál writes: “The obvious blinds.” and “To give life meaning means to make something of it deliberately — and thereby go against it.” Think about them; they unfold and refold like intricate origami birds.

dg

.

Awareness held back by experience baulks at discovery. ‘Expect nothing’ is the watchword of the condition in which to endure means to weather the onslaught of evolution. What else — unless we are contemplating suicide — can ‘die young’ mean?

§

The obvious blinds.

§

To give life meaning means to make something of it deliberately — and thereby go against it.

§

Unhancing.

§

Bear life like offspring.

§

Memory — not the attribute, but the disposition — is the basic difference between one who thinks and one who is ‘having fun’.

§

Affinity confines.

§

Tragic facts do not exist.

§

The ideal is what is ideal about something that is not itself ideal.

§

The creativity of the Devil, or God’s loyalty to what He has created?

§

Aptitude for an action depends on the aptness of the act.

§

We neither enter the past nor exit the future.

§

Love with experimental elements is not love. An experiment with amorous elements is not an experiment.

§

Having no content, they seek form, and that makes them insatiable.

§

Borne down by the weight of wings.

§

When can we assert that this or that boomerang will still come back, and when do boomerangs merely come back?

§

Playing with fire is dangerous for the fire.

§

Going round in circles induces the sense of a circle even where there isn’t one.

§

Which comes first? The fall or the abyss?

 

Róbert Gál , Translated from the Slovak by David Short

 

Róbert Gál was born in 1968 in Bratislava, Slovakia. He now lives in Prague, after having resided in numerous cities around the world, including New York and Jerusalem. He is the author of several books of aphorisms and philosophical fragments, one of which, Signs & Symptoms, is available in English translation.

 

Feb 142014
 

I am always trying to push the envelope in regard to author artist/photos. I loathe the refined, posed, airbrushed glamor head-and-shoulders shots publishers seem to prefer. The author as inhuman, noble object of adulation. NC has always had a subversive edge. And I have been thinking for a while of honouring some of our more adventurous and outlandish spirits for their efforts toward having a bit of personality in their images. I don’t know if I have all the best ones here. If you have a favourite that you remember, remind me in the comments.

I cheated a little bit. bill hayward’s photo of Gordon Lish wasn’t taken especially for NC, but bill has invented a brilliant style of artist/author portrait and we did get to show the photo on NC. But check out bill’s wonderful book of images Bad Behavior for inspiration. Also Jonah’s photo wasn’t his author photo; it’s a self-portrait of sorts. Sometimes I tell authors to at least get a child or a dog in the photo. Horses and goats will do…  André Marois went for bees.

dg

ferryiguana_h_0David Ferry

Steven HeightonSteven Heighton

Andre MaroisAndré Marois

IMG_6257Sharon McCartney

sl, bird dog pete and sharptail, MontanaSydney Lea

IMGP2885Phil Hall

Amber HomeniukAmber Homeniuk

Betsy book pics 2013 - 236Betsy Sholl

Julie Bruck3Julie Bruck

DW-Ark_CodexDerek White

BRiannaBrianna Berbenuik

Michael BrysonMichael Bryson

Julie LariosJulie Larios

Steven AxelrodSteven Axelrod

Gordon-LishGordon Lish photographed by bill hayward

The AuthorJonah Glover

Taiaiake-001Taiaiake Alfred & Sons

Alexander MacLeodAlexander MacLeod

Diane Schoemperlen

Diane Schoemperlen

David Jauss and grandson GalenDavid Jauss & Grandson Galen

Savage Love

 

Savage Love Cover

.

“I, your admiring reader, report myself ever again restored to find in hand the company of your righteous sentences, shout hooray, shout hooray, even splendid, splendid, splendid (borrowing from the great poet Jack Gilbert), like loins, he wrote, like Rome, he wrote . . . .”

— Gordon Lish, a.k.a. Captain Fiction, author of What I Know So Far

“What unifies this collection is the characteristic excellence of Douglas Glover’s prose. Otherwise the book is hugely, even shockingly varied in its narrative strategies, its settings, its tones, and its characters, who range from broadly comic figures to a killer so warped by war that he makes the psychotic Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian look benign. This book is urgent, ardent, obsessive, and remarkable.”

— Steven Heighton, author of The Dead Are More Visible

Savage Love provides more evidence: nobody alive constructs more perfect stories than Douglas Glover. His art is exquisite, conclusive, stainless — but also wide-awake and breathing. That is to say, he’s no mere craftsman. In Savage Love, he manages somehow to be both Geppetto and the magic life-giving kiss.”

— Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life

————–

Book News, Reviews, Orders

Pre-Order Savage Love

The Publisher’s Book Page

———–

July 2013

DG in the Quill & Quire fall preview:

Quill and Quire

Mar 152013
 

Russell Smith photo by jowita bydlowskaAuthor photo by Jowita Bydlowska

Here is a brief jeu d’esprit from the Toronto writer and fashionista Russell Smith whom I met at the now legendary Wild Writers We Have Known conference put on by The New Quarterly in Stratford, Ontario, in September, 2000. I remember it as a gilded occasion: Mark Anthony Jarman was there, as well as Steven Heighton, Elise Levine, Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, Leon Rooke and Diane Schoemperlen, all of whom have appeared in Numéro Cinq. John Haney took photographs.[1] And Russell Smith is wild: Among his several works of fiction is the pornographic novel Diana, A Diary in the Second Person which was first published under the pseudonym Diane Savage by Gutter Press and subsequently reprinted by Biblioasis under the author’s own name. He’s also written a book on men’s fashion, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress (2005).

“The Ossington Bus” is an all too brief introduction to Russell Smith’s precise, elegant prose style. Please do stop over the sentences and appraise their condensed, fluid motions. E.g. “We have looked at our watches, looked at our watches and prayed, wept and prayed and looked at our watches.” The story itself is a small gem of an ever so slightly parodic magic realism planted in Toronto’s Little Portugal wherein the oft missing Toronto Transit Commission’s Ossington Avenue bus takes on legendary qualities. I also thought of E. M. Forster and his story “The Celestial Omnibus” when I first read this — Forster’s nostalgia for the magical, especially in his stories, is often overlooked. Russell Smith is careful and charming: his irony never becomes arch and the language, alternating between irony and belief, builds a momentum that magically gives that bus wings at the story’s close.

dg

Why do we wait for the Ossington bus? It never comes. We jam our hands in our pockets, turn up our collars, lean out over the tracks of slush and peer down the hill, and all the way down to the mental hospital is nothing but a wide expanse of empty street. We think that we will see a bus lumbering around the corner from Queen. The wind whips along Dundas and the cars stop and start, grunting. Brass music from the fish shop, twisted by wind.

Inside the cafe on the corner, men sit on metal chairs with their ski-jackets on, drinking beer and looking at the soccer game hanging overhead, the only square of brightness in this window. We imagine that they look out at us stamping our feet and stepping into the traffic to gaze down the empty hill, and they say to one another, “I remember the last time the Ossington bus was seen. My father, just after he arrived from the Azores in 1974, saw it twice. At least he claims he did. It used to come more often then. There was an old man on Shaw, Armando Gomez’s father, who says he saw it three times, as a child, but no-one believes him.”

“I saw it myself,” says an old-timer with a fedora from 1955, a hat he has worn like a sign of conscience every day of his life, a sign of resistance. He is sitting alone. No-one has noticed him. But now everyone turns to look at him. Some of the younger men, at the bar, roll their eyes at each other. He speaks very slowly, in the quiet. He says, “Nineteen eighty-five. I saw it with my own eyes. Clear as day. It came chugging up Ossington, stopped at Dundas. Then it went through the lights. And it stopped at that stop, right outside. People got on. And it took them away.”

There is a silence as the eyes inside the cafe turn to the grimy window, to our dark coats outside, waiting.

.

We know they are watching us. We look up at the icy sky and close our eyes and try not to think about the time, passing. We have looked at our watches, looked at our watches and prayed, wept and prayed and looked at our watches. We will try not to look at our watches, try not to think about the day elapsing, the day darkening, the businesses closing their doors, the subway we must reach thickening with its red-eyed masses, the women meeting for drinks and coffees in the restaurants below, passing us by while we wait here and watch the old people waddling in and out of the CIBC, walking with canes and walkers. The subway is a mere five stops up, and yet we are as far from it as orbiting moons.

What do we hope for? We know that if the bus comes we will board it and it will smell of heated wet coats, of bags of fried food and the spittle of children, the seats will be stained, runnels of mud will streak the rubber mats, the windows will be sticky. There will be no place to sit. The bus will lurch and sway and rattle, throwing us against the coughing bulk of parkas, slipping on scraps of news. We will be with the lost and hopeless, the lowest. The bus will stop every hundred yards to groan and shift again; it will take too long to get anywhere, it will waste our time.

And yet it will at least take us away from here, lift us up with a hydraulic hiss, higher than the level of the street, flying away. It will advance us to the next place, a completely different place, the next thing we will engage with. It will move us up and on.

We do not know if it will come or not. We wait, flexing up on our toes sometimes to arch our view down the hill, closing our eyes occasionally at the orange sunset over the community centre. Feeling the temperature drop, we wrap our arms, trying to be calm, listening, waiting for its thumping approach, a sound like the beating of wings.

—Russell Smith

———————–

Russell Smith was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and grew up in Halifax, Canada. He writes weekly on the arts in the Globe and Mail. His most recent novel, Girl Crazy (HarperCollins Canada), is set in Toronto, where he lives.

 

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. The proceedings — fiction, criticism, photographs and panel transcripts — were published in The New Quarterly, Volume XXI, Numbers 2 & 3. On page 350 there is a great John Haney photo of Russell Smith and dg.
Nov 262012
 

This year’s edition of Best Canadian Stories (Oberon Press), edited by John Metcalf, just arrived on the doorstep with the afternoon mail. DG’s story “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child,” originally published by Philip Graham in Ninth Letter, is included in a stellar list which also contains an amazing number of Numéro Cinq writers: Lynn Coady, Caroline Adderson & Steven Heighton. That means four out of the ten stories included in Best Canadian Stories this year were written by authors we’ve published on these pages. This tells you something about the quality of the work we’re publishing.

Here’s the opening of the story. You can order the book online from Chapters/Indigo.

dg

———-

The Sun Lord and the Royal Child

By Douglas Glover

.

I went to see my friend Nedlinger after his wife killed herself in that awful and unseemly way, making a public spectacle of herself and their life together, which, no doubt, Nedlinger hated because of his compulsive need for privacy and concealment, a need which seemed to grow more compelling as his fame spread, as success followed success, as the money poured in, so that in later years when he could no longer control or put a stop to his public notoriety, when it seemed, yes, as if his celebrity would eclipse his private life entirely, he himself turned reclusive and misanthropic, sought to erase himself, as it were, and return to the simple life of a nonentity.

You will recall that Nedlinger began his career as a so-called forensic archaeologist specializing in the analysis of prehistoric Iroquoian ossuaries in southwestern Ontario and it was then, just after finishing his doctorate, before lightning struck, as it were, that he met Melusina, at that time a mousy undergraduate studying library science, given to tucking her unruly hair behind her ears and wearing hip-length cardigan sweaters with pockets into which she stuffed used and unused tissues, note cards, pens, odd gloves, sticks of lip balm, hand lotion and her own veiny fists, her chin depressed over her tiny, androgynous breasts–in those days she wore thick flesh coloured stockings and orthopedic shoes to correct a birth defect, syndactyly, I believe it is called. Only Nedlinger, with his forensic mind, could pierce the unpromising surface, the advertising, as it were, to the intelligent, passionate, sensual, fully alive being that hid in the shadows.

— Buy the book, read the rest.

The Richard Farrell NC Archive Page

 

Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell is the Non-Fiction Editor at upstreet and a former Senior Editor at Numéro Cinq (in fact, he is one of the original group of Vermont College of Fine Arts students who helped found the site). A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he has worked as a high school teacher, a defense contractor, and a Navy pilot. He is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work, both fiction and non-fiction, has been published or is forthcoming in Descant, Hunger Mountain, Newfound, Blue Monday, Dig Boston, Contrary, Numéro Cinq, and others. He is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. In 2016, he will be a resident writer at the Ragdale Artist Community in Lake Forest, Illinois. Richard lives with his family in San Diego.
Contact: richardfarrell@old.numerocinqmagazine.com

§

Fiction

Dogfights

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Nonfiction

A Boy Falling out of the Sky: Memoir

First Solo

On Reverence

On A Writer Dying Young

Into the Realm of the Dark

On Courage

Almost Independence Day

About Face: On Class Reunions and Reading Salter


Will, Kate & Osama: Jean Baudrillard on Royal Weddings and the Death of bin Laden

Deforming Form: Outlier Short Stories and How They Work

What It’s Like Living Here [San Diego]

Non-Commencement Commencement Address, January, 2011

Unintentional Pugilism: A Memoir

The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders

Invitation to a Re-shredding: The Top 10 Things I Learned This Semester

Degenerates, Monks and Writers

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Book Reviews

Fever Dreams: Review of R.W. Gray’s Entropic

The Decomposition of Continuous Movement: Review of Juan José Saer’s La Grande

Tin-Penny Miseries and Chickenshit Joys: Review of Lorrie Moore’s Bark

Outside the Known Limit | Review of Victoria Redel’s Make Me Do Things

Laundromats, Lucky Charms and the Labors of Herakles | Review of Anne Carson’s Red Doc>

Ship of Fools: Review of A Thousand Morons by Quim Monzo

Unmeasured Depths: A Review of Steven Heigthon’s The Dead Are More Visible

Desperate Wagers: Review of Scars by Juan José Saer

In Search of the Author, Barthes Be Damned: Review of The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda

Elegant Uncertainty: Review of Juan Jose Saer’s novel The Sixty-Five Years of Washington

.

Interviews

Bushwacked by Inspiration: An Interview with Steven Heighton

Capturing the Equivalences: Interview With Translator Steve Dolph

Manufacturing Dreams: An Interview with Anthony Doerr

Double Exposure: An Interview with Darin Strauss

Making the Little Monsters Walk: Interview with Brad Watson

And Make Mine a Double: Interview with Keith Lee Morris

The Confluence of Rivers: Interview With Tammy Greenwood

Change the Weather/Avoid the Dead: Interview with David Shields

When I’m in the Swamps, I Just Need Questions: Interview with R.W. Gray

Jul 232012
 

The aphorism is an ancient form, much ignored in the world of creative writing courses and commercial publishing but incredibly valuable in a writer’s repertoire of tools for its air of wisdom or arrogance. There is nothing like an aphorism in a piece of prose to nail a theme or a revery, to add wit and vigor. Numéro Cinq is trying to patch up the cultural hole. We have published original aphorisms (from The Devil’s Dictionary for Writers) by Steven Heighton and a collection of Russian aphorisms translated by Alex Cigale. And who can forget our aphorism contests (from the long gone days when we had energy to run contests — perhaps they will resurrect themselves)? Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian-born aphorist, poet and essayist, a self-styled sayer of wise truths and provocative barbs. It’s a huge pleasure to present here a small selection of his oeuvre. See also below a link to an interview/conversation with Alex Stein on writing aphorisms.

dg

 

————

A poem arrives like a hand in the dark.

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The air is dense with stray spirits, swarming for soul.

§

Heart like a minefield, one misstep and…

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Our life is like a long day; it’s easier to fall sleep if we have remained awake.

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Every day we’re offered this world or the next; but one cannot be myopic and farsighted at once.

§

Sometimes presence of mind is to take a leave of absence.

§

Just be yourself, they say.  Which one, I think?

§

Part of the definition of an aphorist is one who spots aphorisms, and loosens them from the prose — the way Michelangelo described his sculpting process as freeing the angel from the marble.

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Artists are parasites. Their independence is a myth tolerated by countless hosts.

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What often strikes us in quotations is ourselves. How these great, dead writers could articulate our innermost longing before us.

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Certain cherished books are like old loves. We didn’t part on bad terms; but it’s complicated, and would require too much effort to resume relations.

§

There is such a thing as spiritual clutter and hoarding, too.

§

Metaphysics: a fury for allegory.

§

Best not flirt with disaster lest she decide to commit.

— Yahia Lababidi
———–

Egyptian-born, Yahia Lababidi is the author of three collections:  Signposts to Elsewhere (aphorisms), Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (essays) and Fever Dreams (poetry). Lababidi’s work has been widely published in US and international journals as well as being translated into several languages, including: Hebrew, Slovak, Spanish, German, and Italian. A juror for the 2012 Neustadt Prize for International Literature, his latest book project is a series of ecstatic, literary dialogues with Alex Stein, titled:  The Artist as Mystic: Conversations with Yahia Lababidi.

Here is a link to a conversation from The Artist as Mystic, where the author discusses how he began writing aphorisms (among other things).

Dec 162011
 

The Irish writer John Banville once said, “Under the artist’s humid scrutiny the object grows warm, it stirs and shies, giving off the blush of verisimilitude; the flash of his relentless gaze strikes and the little monsters rise and walk, their bandages unfurling.”  Brad Watson’s characters come to life thusly, little monsters dreaming through Gulf Coast towns, lazing on the beach, jumping off garage roofs, walking into the path of shotguns, being abducted by aliens or seduced by palm-reading, poolside gypsies. His stories are inhabited by flawed, fascinating and fully realized characters. They come to life in places so heartbreaking and familiar, so thoughtfully imagined, that to read a Brad Watson story is to leave yourself, which is the point, after all.

Watson was born in Meridian, Mississippi in 1955. He now lives in Wyoming and teaches writing and literature at the University of Wyoming. A self-described ‘misanthrope’, Watson was anything but misanthropic over the course of several email exchanges and a phone interview. Warm, affable, funny and blunt, Watson’s personality is a mirror of his writing. What’s most admirable about his stories are their willingness to stare life down, in all of its infinite complexity and messiness. His characters survive, even transcend, the darkest moments of being, and though the journey is often dark, it is also tender, funny and real. They are abundantly human stories,  yet dreamy, wispy things in their rendering.

 Watson has written two collections of short stories. His first, The Last Days of the Dog Men, won the Sue Kaufmann Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives,  was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize in Fiction and the St. Francis College Literary Award.  Two of his stories, “Visitation” and “Alamo Plaza,” were selected as PEN/O’Henry Award winners and included in the 2010 and 2011 PEN /O’Henry anthologies respectively. His novel, The Heaven of Mercury, was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award.

I reach him in his office in Laramie. It is late afternoon, and he has just finished making copies of his students’ theses. Watson speaks softly, with just a hint of a Mississippi drawl, more noticeable in the slow cadence of his words than by any twang in his speech. He asks if can call me back because his son has phoned with a homework problem. His son is a senior in high school and lives in Alabama. Watson apologizes (unnecessarily) for the interruption. We talk for the better part of an hour. At times, I lose track of the fact that I’m trying to takes notes on what he’s saying because I find the conversation so interesting.

—Richard Farrell

 

Making the Little Monsters Walk: An Interview with Brad Watson

 By Richard Farrell

 

Richard Farrell (RF): I’d like to start with a question The Paris Review once asked of Arthur Koestler: What do you dislike most of all?

Brad Watson (BW): (laughing) Rules. Rules and the people who follow rules, who are obsessed with keeping them and enforcing them. Assholes who get uptight and yell at you if you cross the street the wrong way. That kind of bullshit. But you can apply it across the board.

RF: You’ve travelled around a lot.  You’ve grew up in Mississippi and you lived and worked in Alabama, Florida, in Los Angeles and Boston. You’ve lived in Wyoming for the last 6 years. And one of the things that struck me about your writing is how deeply important a sense of place is to your work. I wonder if your sensibility about place in your writing evolved out of so much movement in your personal life.

BW: In a sense, yes. My life and imagination are deeply rooted in Mississippi and Alabama, so my stories still seem to arise from that and there. But being away also intensifies that imaginative connection and even frees it up, somewhat. You’re able to be there in your head, unaffected by the present circumstances of actually being there. So in a way it’s more purely imagined.

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Douglas Glover, Theatre Passe MurailleDouglas Glover’s obscurity is legendary; he is mostly known for being unknown. He has been called “the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive” (Maclean’s Magazine, The National Post). But for sheer over-the-top hyperbole, nothing beats the opening of a recent piece about him in Quill and Quire in Toronto, which elevates his lack of celebrity to the epic: “Certain mysteries abide in this world: the Gordian Knot, the Holy Trinity, and the literary obscurity of Douglas Glover.” Luckily, he owns a dog and is not completely alone in the world. And occasionally someone actually reads what he writes: He has also been called “a master of narrative structure” (Wall Street Journal) and “the mad genius of Can Lit” (Globe and Mail) whose stories are “as radiant and stirring as anything available in contemporary literature” (Los Angeles Review of Books) and whose work “demands comparison to [Cormac] McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Donald Barthelme, William Faulkner” (Music & Literature). A new story collection, Savage Love, was published in 2013.

Glover is the author of five story collections, four novels, three books of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Attack of the Copula Spiders, and The Erotics of Restraint, and The Enamoured Knight, a book about Don Quixote and novel form. His novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was optioned by Isuma Igloolik Productions, makers of Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner. His story book A Guide to Animal Behaviour was a finalist for the 1991 Governor-General’s Award. His stories have been frequently anthologized, notably in The Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and The New Oxford Book of Canadian Stories. He was the subject of a TV documentary in a series called The Writing Life and a collection of critical essays, The Art of Desire, The Fiction of Douglas Glover, edited by Bruce Stone.

Glover has taught at several institutions of high learning but mostly wishes he hadn’t. For two years he produced and hosted The Book Show, a weekly half-hour literary interview program which originated at WAMC in Albany and was syndicated on various public radio stations and around the world on Voice of America. He edited the annual Best Canadian Stories from 1996 to 2006. He has two sons, Jacob and Jonah, who will doubtless turn out better than he did.

See also “Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’s L’Étranger,” an essay in CNQ:Canadian Notes & Queries; Consciousness & Masturbation: A Note on Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos,” an essay in 3:AM Magazine; “Pedro the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo,” an essay in Biblioasis International Translation Series Online;A Scrupulous Fidelity: Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser,” an essay in The Brooklyn Rail;Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought,” an essay on the history of ideas also in The Brooklyn Rail; and a dozen extremely wise epigrams at Global Brief

 

Senior Editors

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Book Reviews

Jason DeYoungJason DeYoung lives in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has recently appeared in Corium, The Los Angeles Review, The Fiddleback, New Orleans Review, and Numéro Cinq.
Contact: jasondeyoung@old.numerocinqmagazine.com.
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Numéro Cinq at the Movies

R. W. Gray (Numéro Cinq at the Movies) was born and raised on the northwest coast of British Columbia, and received a PhD in Poetry and Psychoanalysis from the University of Alberta in 2003. His most recent book, a short story collection entitled Entropic, won the $25,000 Thomas Raddall Fiction Award in 2016. Additionally, he is the author of Crisp, a short story collection, and two serialized novels in Xtra West magazine and has published poetry in various journals and anthologies, including Arc, Grain, Event, and dANDelion. He also has had ten short screenplays produced, including Alice & Huck and Blink. He currently teaches Film at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton..

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Editor-at-Large

Fernando Sdrigotti is a writer, cultural critic, and recovering musician. He was born in Rosario, Argentina, and now lives and works in London. He is the author of Dysfunctional Males, a story collection, and Shetlag: una novela acentuada. He is a contributing editor at 3am Magazine and the editor-in-chief of Minor Literature[s]. He tweets at @f_sd.

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Translations

WoodardBenjamin Woodard lives in Connecticut. His recent fiction has appeared in Cheap PopdecomP magazinE, Spartan, and Numéro Cinq. His reviews and essays have been featured in, or are forthcoming from, Numéro Cinq, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, and other fine publications. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. You can find him at benjaminjwoodard.com.
Contact bwoodard@old.numerocinqmagazine.com.

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Poetry Editors

aizenberg-thumbnailSusan Aizenberg is the author of three poetry collections: Quiet City (BkMk Press 2015); Muse (Crab Orchard Poetry Series 2002); and Peru in Take Three: 2/AGNI New Poets Series (Graywolf Press 1997) and co-editor with Erin Belieu of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press 2001). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, among them The North American Review, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Connotation Press, Spillway, The Journal, Midwest Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and have been reprinted and are forthcoming in several anthologies, including Ley Lines (Wilfrid Laurier UP) and Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (Etruscan). Her awards include a Crab Orchard Poetry Series Award, the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Levis Prize for Muse, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council, the Mari Sandoz Award from the Nebraska Library Association, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner award. She can be reached through her website, susanaizenberg.com..

gillisSusan Gillis has published three books of poetry, most recently The Rapids (Brick Books, 2012), and several chapbooks, including The Sky These Days (Thee Hellbox Press, 2015) and Twenty Views of the Lachine Rapids (Gaspereau Press, 2012). Volta (Signature Editions, 2002) won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, whose work appears regularly in print and online, and is collected in Rhinoceros (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013). Susan divides her time between Montreal and rural Ontario..

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Managing Editor.

Deirdre thumbnailDeirdre Baker is a freelance web and copy editor living in Toronto. She worked for nearly three decades at the Legislative Assembly of Ontario, most recently as manager of the Legislature’s website and intranet. After years of bills, proceedings, debates, policies, and procedures, she is delighted to finally have something interesting to read for work.

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Chief Technical Officer/Internet Security

Jonah Glover is a twenty-three-year-old human male. Jonah was hired into a technical role despite a long history of shoving chalk into the Glover family VCR. His tenure as CTO is a brazen act of nepotism by DG, so he says. In truth, he has rescued the magazine from malware attacks and hosting issues over and over again. He also designed the logo (many years ago). He works as a software engineer in Seattle and is completing a degree at the University of Waterloo.
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Contributing Editors.

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Riiki DucornetThe author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, Rikki Ducornet has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2008, and El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile, in 2009. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others. Her collected papers including prints and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago Chile, The McMaster University Museum, Ontario, Canada, and The Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.

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Patrick J. Keane is Professor Emeritus of Le Moyne College. Though he has written on a wide range of topics, his areas of special interest have been 19th and 20th-century poetry in the Romantic tradition; Irish literature and history; the interactions of literature with philosophic, religious, and political thinking; the impact of Nietzsche on certain 20th century writers; and, most recently, Transatlantic studies, exploring the influence of German Idealist philosophy and British Romanticism on American writers. His books include William Butler Yeats: Contemporary Studies in Literature (1973), A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves (1980), Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (1987), Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (1988), Coleridge’s Submerged Politics (1994), Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of All Our Day” (2003), and Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (2007).

HeadsJulie Larios is the author of four books for children: On the Stairs (1995), Have You Ever Done That? (named one of Smithsonian Magazine’s Outstanding Children’s Books 2001), Yellow Elephant (a Book Sense Pick and Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book, 2006) and Imaginary Menagerie: A Book of Curious Creatures (shortlisted for the Cybil Award in Poetry, 2008). For five years she was the Poetry Editor for The Cortland Review, and her poetry for adults has been published by The Atlantic Monthly, McSweeney’s, Swink, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Field, and others. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, and a Washington State Arts Commission/Artist Trust Fellowship. Her work has been chosen for The Best American Poetry series by Billy Collins (2006) and Heather McHugh (2007) and was performed as part of the Vox series at the New York City Opera (2010). Recently she collaborated with the composer Dag Gabrielson and other New York musicians, filmmakers and dancers on a cross-discipline project titled 1,2,3. It was selected for showing at the American Dance Festival (International Screendance Festival) and had its premiere at Duke University on July 13th, 2013.

Sydney Lea2Sydney Lea is the former Poet Laureate of Vermont (2011-2015). He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His poetry collection Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000) was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Another collection, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont College of Fine Arts and Middlebury College, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. His selection of literary essays, A Hundred Himalayas, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2012, and Skyhorse Publications  released A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters and Wildlife in 2013. In 2015 he published a non-fiction collection, What’s the Story? Reflections on a Life Grown Long (many of the essays appeared first on Numéro Cinq). His twelfth poetry collection, No Doubt the Nameless, was published this spring by Four Way Books.

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Special Correspondents

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Victoria Best small photoVictoria Best taught at St John’s College, Cambridge for 13 years. Her books include: Critical Subjectivities; Identity and Narrative in the work of Colette and Marguerite Duras (2000), An Introduction to Twentieth Century French Literature (2002) and, with Martin Crowley, The New Pornographies; Explicit Sex in Recent French Fiction and Film (2007). A freelance writer since 2012, she has published essays in Cerise Press and Open Letters Monthly and is currently writing a book on crisis and creativity. She is also co-editor of the quarterly review magazine Shiny New Books (http://shinynewbooks.co.uk).

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Jeff BurseyJeff Bursey is a literary critic and author of the picaresque novel Mirrors on which dust has fallen (Verbivoracious Press, 2015) and the political satire Verbatim: A Novel (Enfield & Wizenty, 2010), both of which take place in the same fictional Canadian province. His forthcoming book, Centring the Margins: Essays and Reviews (Zero Books, July 2016), is a collection of literary criticism that appeared in American Book Review, Books in Canada, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Quarterly Conversation, and The Winnipeg Review, among other places. He’s a Contributing Editor at The Winnipeg Review, an Associate Editor at Lee Thompson’s Galleon, and a Special Correspondent for Numéro Cinq. He makes his home on Prince Edward Island in Canada’s Far East.

Garvin thumbnailGary Garvin lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes and reflects on a thirty-year career teaching English. His short stories and essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Web ConjunctionsFourth Genre, Numéro Cinq, the minnesota reviewNew Novel ReviewConfrontationThe New ReviewThe Santa Clara ReviewThe South Carolina Review, The Berkeley Graduate, and The Crescent Review. He is currently at work on a collection of essays and a novel. His architectural models can be found at Under Construction. A catalog of his writing can be found at Fictions.

Genese Grill

Genese Grill is an artist, translator, writer, and cultural conspirator living in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of The World as Metaphor in Robert Musil’s ‘The Man without Qualities’ (Camden House, 2012) and the translator of a collection of Robert Musil’s short prose, Thought Flights (Contra Mundum, 2015). She is currently working on completing a collection of essays exploring the tension between spirit and matter in contemporary culture and a room-sized, illuminated, accordion book inscribed with one of the essays from the collection, along with many other fanatical projects. You can find Genese online at genesegrill.blogspot.com.

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JasonJason Lucarelli is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His work has appeared in Numéro Cinq, The Literarian, 3:AM Magazine, Litro, Squawk Back, and NANO Fiction.

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Bruce Stone4

Bruce Stone is a Wisconsin native and graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA, 2002). In 2004, he edited a great little book of essays on Douglas Glover’s fiction, The Art of Desire (Oberon Press). His own essays have appeared in MirandaNabokov StudiesReview of Contemporary Fiction, Los Angeles Review of Books, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review and Salon. His fiction has appeared most recently in Straylight and Numéro Cinq. He currently teaches writing at UCLA.
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Trimingham_Julie

Julie Trimingham was born in Montreal and raised semi-nomadically. She trained as a painter at Yale University and as a director at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. Her film work has screened at festivals and been broadcast internationally, and has won or been nominated for a number of awards. Julie taught screenwriting at the Vancouver Film School for several years; she has since focused exclusively on writing fiction. Her online journal, Notes from Elsewhere, features reportage from places real and imagined. Her first novel, Mockingbird, was published in 2013.

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Production Editors

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Alyssa green backgroundAlyssa Colton has a PhD in English with creative dissertation from the University at Albany, State University of New York. Her fiction has been published in The Amaranth Review and Women Writers. Her essays have appeared in Literary Arts Review, Author Magazine, Mothering, Moxie: For Women Who Dare, Iris: A Journal about Women, and on WAMC: Northeast Public Radio. Alyssa has taught classes in writing, literature, and theater at the University at Albany, the College of St. Rose, and Berkshire Community College and blogs about writing at abcwritingediting.
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Nowick GrayNowick Gray writes fiction, essays and creative nonfiction that likes to bend boundaries and confound categories. He also works as a freelance copy editor and enjoys playing African drums. Having survived American suburbs, the Quebec Arctic and the BC wilderness, Nowick is now based in Victoria, frequenting tropical locations in winter months..

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Nic Leigh has had work published in Juked, The Collagist, UNSAID, Atticus Review, Requited, Gobbet, and DIAGRAM. A chapbook, Confidences, won the Cobalt/Thumbnail Flash Fiction contest and is forthcoming from Cobalt Press. Leigh is also a fiction reader for Guernica.

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CaptureKathryn Para is an award-winning, multi-genre writer with a MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in Grain, Room of One’s Own, Geist, Sunstream, and Vancouver Review. She is the 2013 Winner of Mother Tongue Publishing’s Search for the Great BC Novel Contest with, Lucky,  her first novel, which was also shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize in 2014. Her stage play, Honey, debuted in 2004. She has also written, directed and produced short films.

Daniel Davis Wood is a writer based in Birmingham, England. His debut novel, Blood and Bone, won the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize in his native Australia. He is also the author of Frontier Justice, a study of the influence of the nineteenth century frontier on American literature, and the editor of a collection of essays on the African American writer Edward P. Jones. He can be found online at www.danieldaviswood.com..

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Assistant to the Editor

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mary-brindley2Mary Brindley is a Vermont-born copywriter living in Boston. A recent graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, she writes creative nonfiction, performs improv, and is about to move to London.

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Contributors

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Anu2A. Anupama is a U.S.-born, Indian-American poet and translator whose work has appeared in several literary publications, including The Bitter Oleander, Monkeybicycle, The Alembic, Numéro Cinq and decomP magazinE. She received her MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She currently lives and writes in the Hudson River valley of New York, where she blogs about poetic inspiration at seranam.com.

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dylanbrennan-croppedCurrently based in Mexico City, Dylan Brennan writes poetry, essays and memoirs. His debut collection, Blood Oranges, for which he won The Patrick Kavanagh Award runner-up prize, was published by The Dreadful Press in 2014. His co-edited volume of academic essays Rethinking Juan Rulfo’s Creative World: Prose, Photography, Film is available now from Legenda Books (2016). In addition to his work as Mexico Curator for Numéro Cinq, he regularly contributes to the online Mexican literary site Portal de Letras. Twitter: @DylanJBrennan.

jeremy brungerJeremy Brungeroriginally from Tennessee, is a writer attending a graduate program at the University of Chicago. His interests trend toward the Marxian: how capital transforms us, abuses us, mocks us. His writing on philosophy and politics has been featured on Truthout, The Hampton Institute, and 3 AM Magazine and his poetry has appeared in the Chiron Review and Sibling Rivalry Press. He can be contacted at jbrunger@uchicago.edu.
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Michael Carson lives on the Gulf Coast. His non-fiction has appeared at The Daily Beast and Salon, and his fiction in the short story anthology, The Road Ahead: Stories of the Forever War. He helps edit the Wrath-Bearing Tree and is currently working towards an MFA in Fiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Laura Michele Diener author photoLaura Michele Diener teaches medieval history and women’s studies at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. She received her PhD in history from The Ohio State University and has studied at Vassar College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and most recently, Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her creative writing has appeared in The Catholic Worker, Lake Effect, Appalachian Heritage,and Cargo Literary Magazine, and she is a regular contributor to Yes! Magazine..

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Daniel Green is a writer and literary critic whose essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in a variety of publications. He is the author of Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism (2016).

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A gallerist in Saratoga Springs for over 15 years, visual artist & poet Mary Kathryn Jablonski is now an administrative director in holistic healthcare. She is author of the chapbook To the Husband I Have Not Yet Met, and her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Blueline, Home Planet News, Salmagundi, and Slipstream, among others. Her artwork has been widely exhibited throughout the Northeast and is held in private and public collections.
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OgburnCarolyn Ogburn lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina where she takes on a variety of worldly topics from the quiet comfort of her porch. Her writing can be found in the Asheville Poetry Review, the Potomac Review, the Indiana Review, and more. A graduate of Oberlin Conservatory and NC School of the Arts, she writes on literature, autism, music, and disability rights. She is completing an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is at work on her first novel.

Paddy Patrick O’Reilly was raised in Renews, Newfoundland and Labrador, the son of a mechanic and a shop’s clerk. He just graduated from St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, and will begin work on an MFA at the University of Saskatchewan this coming fall. Twice he has won the Robert Clayton Casto Prize for Poetry, the judges describing his poetry as “appealingly direct and unadorned.”

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Frank Richardson lives in Houston where he teaches English and Humanities. He received his MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Mark SampsonMark Sampson has published two novels – Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007) and Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Press, 2014) – and a short story collection, called The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015). He also has a book of poetry, Weathervane, forthcoming from Palimpsest Press in 2016. His stories, poems, essays and book reviews have appeared widely in journals in Canada and the United States. Mark holds a journalism degree from the University of King’s College in Halifax and a master’s degree in English from the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives and writes in Toronto.

Natalia SarkissianNatalia Sarkissian has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was an editor and a contributor at Numéro Cinq from 2010-2017.

 


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Joe SchreiberJoseph Schreiber is a writer and photographer living in Calgary. He maintains a book blog called Rough Ghosts. His writing has also been published at 3:AM, Minor Literature[s] and The Scofield. He tweets @roughghosts.

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captureDorian Stuber teaches at Hendrix College. He has written for Open Letters Monthly, The Scofield, and Words without Borders. He blogs about books at www.eigermonchjungfrau.wordpress.com.

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Authors & Artists of Numéro Cinq

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Ryem Abrahamson • Abdallah Ben Salem d’Aix • Alejandro de Acosta • Caroline Adderson • José Eduardo Agualusa • Susan Aizenberg • Ramón Alejandro • Taiaike Alfred • Gini Alhadeff • Abigail Allen • Steve Almond • Darran Anderson • Trevor Anderson • Jorge Carrera Andrade • Ralph Angel • A. Anupama • Guillaume Apollinaire • Jamaluddin Aram • Fernando Aramburu • Louis Armand • Melissa Armstrong • Tammy Armstrong • Glenn Arnold • Miguel Arteta • Adam Arvidson • Nick Arvin • Kim Aubrey • Shushan Avagyan • Steven Axelrod • Elizabeth Babyn • J. Karl Bogartte • Louise Bak • Bonnie Baker • Sybil Baker • Martin Balgach • Brandon Ballengée • Zsófia Bán • Phyllis Barber • John Banville • Byrna Barclay • Mike Barnes • Stuart Barnes • Kevin Barry • Donald Bartlett • Todd Bartol • John Barton • Sierra Bates • Svetislav Basarav • Charles Baudelaire • Tom Bauer • Melissa Considine Beck • Joshua Beckman • Laura Behr • Gerard Beirne • Amanda Bell • Ian Bell • Madison Smartt Bell • Dodie Bellamy • Joe David Bellamy • Leonard Bellanca • Russell Bennetts • Brianna Berbenuik • Samantha Bernstein • Michelle Berry • Jen Bervin • Victoria Best • Darren Bifford • Nathalie Bikoro • Eula Biss • Susan Sanford Blades • François Blais • Clark Blaise • Denise Blake • Vanessa Blakeslee • Rimas Blekaitis • Liz Blood • Harold Bloom • Ronna Bloom • Michelle Boisseau • Stephanie Bolster • John Bolton • Jody Bolz • Danila Botha • Danny Boyd • Donald Breckenridge • Dylan Brennan • Mary Brindley • Stephen Brockbank • Fleda Brown • Laura Catherine Brown • Nickole Brown • Lynne M. Browne • Julie Bruck • Jeremy Brunger • Michael Bryson • John Bullock •  Bunkong Tuon • Diane Burko • Jeff Bursey • Peter Bush • Jane Buyers • Jowita Bydlowska • Mary Byrne • Agustín Cadena • David Caleb • Chris Campanioni • Jane Campion • J. N. F. M. à Campo • Jared Carney • David Carpenter • Michael Carson •  Mircea Cărtărescu • Ricardo Cázares • Daniela Cascella • Blanca Castellón • Michael Catherwood • Anton Chekhov • David Celone • Corina Martinez Chaudhry • Kelly Cherry • Peter Chiykowski • Linda E. Chown • S. D. Chrostowska • Steven Church • Nicole Chu • Jeanie Chung • Alex Cigale • Sarah Clancy • Jane Clarke • Sheela Clary • Christy Clothier • Carrie Cogan • Ian Colford • Zazil Alaíde Collins • Tim Conley • Christy Ann Conlin • John Connell • Terry Conrad • Allan Cooper • Robert Coover • Cody Copeland • Sean Cotter • Cheryl Cowdy • Mark Cox • Dede Crane • Lynn Crosbie • Elsa Cross • S.D. 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Jun 152011
 

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Here’s the opening of a new Douglas Glover short story, just published in Descant’s amazing 40th anniversary issue entitled Possible Worlds. It’s a fabulous issue, contains work by Steven Heighton (well known to NC readers), Nancy Huston, Josef Skvorecky, Alberto Manguel and Susan Swan among many other notables. Like all dg’s stories this one is autobiographical, nearly a memoir, exposes sidelights of his family life hitherto unrevealed to the reading public. Buy the magazine and read the tawdry remainder.

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Uncle Boris up in a Tree

By Douglas Glover

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The photo was taken just before all hell broke loose. Uncle Boris, always the clown, perches on a tree branch above the family group, making a mockery of the occasion. Jannik, the wastrel, smiles inscrutably. Bjorn, the straight arrow, looks like a man with all the troubles of the world on his shoulders, but he works in a bank in town and can afford a gold watch and fob. His eyes are closed. Gurn, the insane one, his mouth twisted from a horse kick, seems merely confused, innocent, and anxious. And Lisel, the compulsive smoker and Bible reader, has momentarily suppressed her persistent and fatal cough. The three young ones huddle with Ma and Pa: Trig, later executed for murder, only six in the photo and dressed like a girl; Grete who became a great lover; and little Nikolai, the math genius, eight months old. Bjorn’s wife Olga, plain as a pine plank but seething with desire, leans against the tree trunk next to Jannik. Aunt Doreen, flighty, excitable, and dim, stares at the camera warily. Daphne, the family slut, has her hands in her skirt pockets and her head tilted to one side.

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Jan 192011
 

 

“For whatever sedates us is shuffling us off towards the greater sleep of death.  Art, on the other hand, is a persistent wake up call, the setting off of a quiet siren in the heart.”  Steven Heighton

In Reynolds Price’s  introduction to James Salter’s novel, A Sport and A Pastime, Price alludes to the famous Grove Press lawsuit against the NYC postmaster.  In 1959, Grove Press re-published unabridged editions of  D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  The  postmaster was confiscating mailed copies of the books.  Grove won the suit, paving the way for a new freedom with respect to sexual content in American publishing.   Price says this:

While slow degrees of freedom had previously been gained in the manner of sexually candid prose, Grove’s early-1960s victory became a significant milepost for serious American writers.  At last we were free to publish what we wished, or needed to write in the description of human desire and its various enactments”

All hail freedom!  I haven’t read Lawrence in a long time, but what I remember of his sexual prose seemed timid compared to Salter.  (Much less to, say, any episode of reality TV shows.  Paris H., you still have my number, right?)  Salter fills his text with  ‘big C’ words (cock, clitoris and cunt, among many others) but his sexual scenes are hardly pornographic.  They are wonderfully written and full of imaginative drama.  Characters are having graphic sex right there on the page in beautiful, literary images.   Thank the muses that we live in an age of such freedom of expression.  We retain unfettered access to language and the expression of…What?  I can’t say what?  Who is this?  I can’t say clitoris?

Court Merrigan recently forwarded this article to NC about the removal of unabridged copies of The Diary of Anne Frank’from libraries in Virginia.  The offending passages come from the ruminations of the teenaged diarist as she tries to understand the anatomy of her genitalia.  The word ‘clitoris’ apparently upset enough parents of Virginia high school students that libraries began removing copies of the offending books.

The saddest part about posting this article on NC is how common such censorship is today.  Listen to Bill Maher’s humorous take about the new publication of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  In the new editions, the clearly offensive but still artist-intended word, ‘nigger’, is removed from Twain’s original text.  Two-hundred and nineteen times.   (Read a longer article here from the University of Virginia newspaper.)  One wonders what other words will eventually be erased from other books, or how such redactions will trickle into the already entertainment-saturated bloodstream of our sedated, consumerist culture.  A cultural sedation, by the way, which Steven Heighton warns us about in his essay “The Admen Move On Lhasa.”  (Quoted above and referenced several times on NC by yours truly, including here.)

Freedom of expression, sadly, remains as tenuous and threatened today as it was fifty years ago.

In a final, hot-off-the-presses example from today’s (Jan 19th) L.A. times, Smithsonian director, Wayne Clough, has come under fire for issues of censorship.  Clough recently pulled a video by artist David Wojnarowicz (see video at bottom of post) from a gay-themed exhibit set to go on display at the National Portraits Gallery.  Clough relented to governmental pressure over a perceived anti-Christian bias in the work: ants can be seen crawling atop a crucifix.

In spite of the progress artists have made over the centuries, censorship continues to plague the free and honest exploration, exchange and expression of ideas.  From Salman Rushdie to, apparently, Anne Frank.   As publishing houses fall and media conglomerates merge (As we speak, NBC and Comcast are being fused)  it’s hard not to wonder what the future holds for works by the likes of Twain, Lawrence, Frank and Salter.  Or perhaps we should all endeavor just to let go and watch American Idol?  Who needs books anyway?

— Richard Farrell

 

May 272010
 

In the dark days after the humiliating defeat of our villanelle, Paris and I have done some serious soul-searching.  The defeat weighs heavy on her (as it does on the author.)  She remains convinced that the Numero Cinq readership failed to identify the alternating motifs of pathos and love within the poem’s intricate structure.  But alas, as Paris tells me frequently, “Get over yourself.”  (Have truer words ever been spoken?)  We will be back, she vows.

So sex then.  An odd thing happened to me this semester:  almost all of my stories became highly sexualized.  I can’t blame my advisor for this, short of saying that he pressed me to build strong desire/resistance patterns in story structure.  He admonished me to make something happen in my stories, but didn’t say how.  As I reflected back on the stories I wrote this semester, I was surprised to see how I dealt with his guidance: I put a lot of sex in my stories.  This lead me to ponder, why?  I think the answer lies in a deeper, more complex relationship between the mind and the body, a relationship steeped in my culture and history as much as anything personal.

The Canadian poet, Steven Heighton, says that “violence is the sexuality of America.”  In his essay, “Body Found in Reservoir,” he explores how portrayals of violence in North American culture reflect a punishment of the body for its sexuality.  Another Canadian, songwriter Bruce Cockburn, put it this way in his song “Last Night of the World,”: “I learned as a child not to trust in my body//I’ve carried that burden through my life//But there’s a day when we all have to be pried loose.”  I didn’t consciously seek to ‘pry loose’ this mind-body contradiction in my stories this semester.  It arrived because I wanted to add a component of strong desire to my writing, but at what point does a torrid sex scene become, as my wife recently commented on one of my stories, gratuitous?   Heighton says this:

Violence is the sexuality of white North America because violence is all we have left.  The passions demand a physical outlet but in our bones we feel it’s somehow wrong to love the body.  So sex—no matter how aggressively marketed or universally portrayed, no matter how frankly and coolly discussed on talk shows or in the narcotic literature of self-help—remains fraught with an obscure gloom and guilt.”

Hollywood certainly offers up raw sexuality at every turn.  To return to my muse: Paris Hilton embodies this contradiction.   Her sexuality certainly calls attention to her body, but the mind seems a tad empty.  (Sorry P.)  Our culture in general offers the body willingly, with its ubiquitous promises of a perfect, unobtainable model (botox, liposuction, laser hair removal, Hair Club for Men, etc.)  Yet all these ‘cures’ seem to take us further away from the real body and into some hyped-up fantasy of perfection, which constantly implies that such perfection lies tantalizing close but always a hair-breadth out of reach.  Steven Heighton puts it more eloquently:

For the first few hundred years, it (the hiding of the body) worked.  Nowadays, if North Americans are still fundamentally puritanical, they show as much skin as anyone else—though in this seeming casualness there’s a strain of the frantic exhibitionism I mentioned before in regard to porn.  No group of people at peace with their bodies could muster such sad, huddled masses of anorexics and bulimics and the world’s highest per capita rate of abuse of steroids, sleeping pills, sedatives, and laxatives.

So back to my sexual drift this semester:  Did my use of sexuality in creating characters or situations reflect a healing of the mind-body?  Can I continue to write about sex without turning it into soft-porn?  The following sexual motifs appeared in my last four stories:  men masturbating each other in a foxhole, a threesome, oral sex in a parking lot, and S&M scenes between a husband and wife.  None of these stories was explicitly about sex, but these recurring situations gave me some pause.  Clearly a good sex scene ratchets ups the tension in a story, but writing about sex is certainly not daring anymore.  So what am I trying to accomplish with this?  A part of an answer might lie in Nancy Willard’s essay, “What We Write When We Write About Love.”  (Found in The Best Writing on Writing anthology edited by Jack Heffron.)  Willard describes a childhood scene where she is supposed to be watching a group of fraternity brothers serenading her sister as part of a courting ritual.  Instead of watching, she turns her binoculars onto a couple in the back seat of a car, doing what couples do in the backseat of cars.

Writing a love story is a little like finding yourself with a pair of binoculars in your hand, caught between passion and scruples, ceremony and sex.  If you err too far in either direction, you can end up on the side of pornography or romance.  The difference between a love story and a romance is one of intent.  When you write a romance, you carefully follow where many have trod, so that your readers can recognize the genre through its conventions.  But in a love story, you try to show love as if your characters had just invented it.  Follow your characters, and they will give you the story, but you can’t tell ahead of time where they’ll lead you.

What I draw from this is that sexuality becomes a matter of intent, not content.  It becomes a matter of healing, not manipulation.  It arcs toward love, toward the fusion of the mind-body gap.  It should celebrate, not denigrate.   Heighton says, “wherever the flesh is hated, or endangered, love is threatened as well.”

—Richard Farrell