I hate that there are more writers in this country than people who know grammar.
—Attila Bartis, Tranquility
Sep 262013
Sep 242013
My inaugural reading as Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick is this Thursday at 8pm in the East Gallery at Memorial Hall. I’ll be reading from Savage Love. This time I get to stretch it out a bit. The readings last week were all pretty short, fifteen minutes or so. I’ve been reading “Light Trending to Dark” and nothing else. Might have time for the amputation scene from “Tristiana” or some such delight. Someone put in a request for “Little Things.”
A special note to my NC supporters: Please do not consume alcohol before or during the performance, also no fireworks, no flaming lighters (remember what happened last time), no throwing footballs, no water balloons, try not to clog the toilets on the chartered buses, someone keep an eye on Rich.
dg
Sep 232013
DG was interviewed for Shannon Webb-Campbell’s piece on the UNB writing program in the weekend Telegraph-Journal Salon.
The University of New Brunswick’s current writer-in-residence Douglas Glover, who studied at the Writers’ Workshop with Jarman, now lives in Vermont and edits and publishes the online magazine Numero Cinq, dubbed Fredericton as one of the centres of the writing world.
Glover is the winner of 2006 Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Timothy Findley Award, as well as a Governor General Literary Award winner, and finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His latest book Savage Love was just released with Goose Lane. The Fredericton publisher has published, or republished, almost all of his work.
Given that the university has the longest continuous writers-in-residence program in Canada, this is Glover’s second stint. The last time he was writer-in-residence was 1988.
Over the years, he has spent a lot of time in New Brunswick, having taught philosophy in the early ’70s at the university’s Saint John campus, and worked as a reporter at the Evening Times-Globe and Telegraph-Journal. He also befriended Alden Nowlan.
While Glover is in town he is available to graduate students and the community to talk about writing and publication; this time, the students get to witness him in the midst of promoting his new book.
“Fredericton is a surprisingly central place in my writing life,” says Glover. “It’s a heady and vivid town for writers.”
Sep 232013
Moonlight illuminates the dancers
and the whitewashed concrete birdbath by the standpipe
and coiled green garden hose and the liquid amber gum tree
and the tree nursery under the chicken-wire frame
that keeps out rabbits and deer.
— from “Dancers at the Dawn” in Savage Love
Here is a picture of the birdbath that appears in Savage Love. You can’t see the standpipe, and the tree nursery is gone, but the liquid amber gum is behind the birdbath. I’ve probably said this before: the farm is in southern Ontario, about 20 miles north of Lake Erie just outside a little town called Waterford.
From the garden.
Red dogwood osier
Sign of fall coming.
Hives are brought onto the farm during the growing season.
Field tomatoes, note the wastage, a fact of modern agriculture — many of these are perfectly good tomatoes that can’t be sold in the current market.
Cherry tomatoes
—dg
Sep 222013
DG @ Bryan Prince Bookseller in Hamilton
Stayed at the farm Wednesday: NC poet Butane Anvil (aka Amber Homeniuk) drove us to Hamilton for the Bryan Prince Bookseller event. Scotch at the Snooty Fox first, then reading.
DG at Words Worth Books in Waterloo
The excellent publicity person at Goose Lane Editions, Colleen Kitts (bless her heart) sent DG a bottle of Scotch for the Words Worth event in Waterloo. Somehow the Scotch briefly resided in a bin of childrens’ books but was subsequently rescued and put to proper use. David Worsley, co-owner of the bookstore, gave the best bookstore introduction DG has ever heard and then proceeded to ask acute and intelligent questions in the aftermath. Jonah was there with friends and housemates. Also NC playwright Dwight Storring and Kim Jernigan, former editor of The New Quarterly, and Pamela Mulloy, the current editor. Prior to the reading, DG partook of Barking Squirrel beer at the Works next door. After, there was more Barking Squirrel. A good time was had by all.
DG, Catherine Bush, & co-owner David Worsley @ Words Worth
Sep 212013
Photos of the Toronto launch Tuesday evening at This Is Not A Reading Series in the Gladstone Hotel, hosted by Marc Glassman. Melissa Fisher (photos and essays on NC) took the first two photos with her camera, former NC Contributor Cheryl Cowdy took the last two. Packed house, SRO. DG did an impromptu aphorism contest and gave away a free copy of Savage Love. Catherine Bush showed her book trailer and conducted an Accusation Chorale. In the last two photos: Mark Medley, Book Page Editor at the National Post, Catherine Bush and the inimitable DG, being, well, er, inimitable. After: pleasant painfulness in the wrist from signing books.
There were lots of NC people including Contributing Editor Ann Ireland, Contributor Eric Foley, Michael Bryson, Stephen Henighan, Karen Mulhallen, Melissa Fisher and Cheryl Cowdy (have I forgotten anyone?).
dg
Sep 202013
Fredericton Airport, Monday morning
Detroit from the Windsor side of the Detroit River
Local Colour
Dan Wells, Publisher at Biblioasis
DG started his Savage Love book-launch reading tour (along with his co-launch touring partner Catherine Bush) at the Biblioasis Bookstore in Walkerville, the historic Windsor, Ontario, distillery district, still thriving, the air full of the yeasty smell of rye whisky in the making (delightful miasma). The bookstore is at the corner of Gladstone and Wyandotte, the Biblioasis publishing house offices in the basement, the Lorelei Bistro next door (dinner was Lake Erie perch caught off Wheatley — for the sake of tradition, I always order Lake Erie perch when near the lake). Two blocks down Gladstone you come to the riverside park and a vision of America’s largest and most famous bankrupt city. You will recall that Biblioasis published my last book, Attack of the Copula Spiders. I hadn’t seen inimitable Dan Wells, the publisher, since our launch at the AWP Conference in Chicago the year before.
Marty Gervais, whose poems we published in the current issue, was there. Also André Narbonne, whom I included in one of the Best Canadian Stories collections I edited. And Karl Jirgens who edits Rampike Magazine. Also my mother’s neighbours from years ago, the Greenslades, whom she still phones now and then for advice about chickens.
The talk at dinner was about how Detroit is contemplating selling off the trove of paintings at the Institute of Arts to cover its debts. In the past, the only reason I went to Detroit was to look at the art, driving through blocks and blocks of devastated urbanscape to get there. There is a huge Diego Rivera mural. We were wondering how they were going to move that sucker.
Great, responsive crowd at the reading including the guy in the front row at my feet who got so into the RHYTHM of what I was reading that he clearly started to laugh about a second BEFORE the punch lines.
dg
Sep 182013
1. I live in a virtual world outside my real country and in a place where I get my mail addressed to another place entirely. For lack of a literary community, I invented one: the online magazine Numéro Cinq. It started out as a student blog for a class I taught, then it became a literary blog, then it became a magazine. It keeps shedding its skin. It’s a community. I have re-found old friends, formed new friendships, become a patron for new writers, resuscitated the forgotten, changed people’s lives for the better and made myself a very busy person.
Read the rest via Five Things Literary: The Virtual Literary World, with Douglas Glover | Open Book: Ontario.
Sep 142013
A Note from the Hosts: Why We ♥ Doug
Douglas Glover—who manages to be both prolific and consistently excellent at once—is the author of five short story collections, four novels, two books of essays, and a critical work on Don Quixote. He’s the recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award for best mid-career writer (2007), the Governor General’s Award for fiction for his novel Elle (also shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Award), and he was the subject of a critical documentary called The Writing Life. He’s been hailed by The Wall Street Journal as “a master of narrative structure,” and by Maclean’s Magazine as “the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive” (!). We were delighted to publish one of his critical books last year (Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis 2012), and we’re very much looking forward to reading the collection of short stories he’ll be sharing with us in a few weeks’ time.
As a fiction-writer Doug is known for two things: for the intensity of his attention to prose style, and—again, in an unusual combination—the humanity and warmth of his plots. As a teacher, moreover, he’s famous, if not notorious, for the care he lavishes on student work. When we launched Copula Spiders with Doug last year at the AWP annual convention, at least half-a-dozen former students approached us to say: I’ll never forget him. I would hand him a 5-page story, and a few weeks later he’d hand me my story back, along with TWENTY PAGES OF NOTES. From what we hear his lectures on “How to Write a Novel” and “How to Write a Short Story” are legendary. It’s a real coup to have him in Windsor for a night, and I’d heartily encourage anyone who enjoys creative writing—and especially anyone who has aspirations to one day be a writer—to come out, listen to his stories, and stay and chat with him afterwards. It’s a rare opportunity.
via email : Webview : Live at Biblioasis: Douglas Glover & Catherine Bush.
Sep 132013
Here’s the complete series of short essays I wrote for the National Post as the Guest Editor this week of the Afterward section (edited by Mark Medley). Read them in reverse order as they work in ascending order of complexity, each one building on the previous entries. Mark Medley invited me to write these essays as part of the fanfare for the launch of Savage Love (in bokstores next week).
dg
Click on the link: Douglas Glover
Sep 122013
This is the last in a series of short essays on “building sentences.” I wrote this series for the National Post in Toronto. They all appeared in the online section of the newspapers this week. To get the greatest benefit, it’s best to read them in sequence as they begin simply and increase in elaborative possibilities as you go along: but-constructions, lists, parallel construction and the epigram.
dg
Writers create drama in sentences and paragraphs by using grammatical forms to juxtapose material with different shades of meaning. If you say, “Usually Mel’s mother reminded her of a giraffe, but today she seemed more like an elephant,” you force the reader to compare elephants, giraffes, and mothers and the differences between them. Power lies in the differential relation.
Here is Keats on modern love: “And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up…” – a line of poetry that forces the reader to measure the distance between his idea of love and a dressed up doll. And here is an aphorism from my story “Bad News of the Heart”: “And what is love? An erotic accident prolonged to disaster.”
In his Historie of Serpents (1608), Edward Topsall wrote: “Some learned Writers..haue compared a Scorpion to an Epigram..because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayle, so the force and vertue of an Epigram is in the conclusion.”
Aphorism, epigram and apophthegm are words that refer to roughly the same set of constructs: short, witty statements built around at least one balanced contrast. I taught myself to write them after reading Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Someone called Durrell’s style lapidary; after I looked up the word, I wanted to be lapidary, too. The Greeks wrote epigrams as epitaphs, to be carved on stones over the graves of heroes, hence the term lapidary, words worth being carved in stone for the ages.
The easiest way to teach yourself how to write aphorisms is to collect an assortment from your favourite writers, group them into formal types, and map the types. “Love is an erotic accident prolonged to a disaster” is a definition type. You get a lot that begin: love is, life is, women are, the world is, and so on. “The world is but a school of inquiry.” (Montaigne) “Life is always better under the influence of mild intoxicants.” (Glover, “Woman Gored by Bison Lives”) Here is one I stole from a woman I dated briefly and put into a story: “Love is like the telephone – more than one can use the line.”
The predicate contrasts with the subject of the sentence, or, to be more precise, it contrasts with the common understanding of the term in the subject. Epigrams and aphorisms are always subverting the common understanding and reader expectation; their nature is to be provocative and ironic.
Read the rest at the National Post
Sep 112013
Here’s a teaser to the third in my series of short essays on Building Sentences at the National Post. We are, yes, in the drumroll phase of my book launch for Savage Love. Much appreciation to Mark Medley, the book editor at the National Post, for giving me the opportunity to write these.
dg
Parallel construction was another one of those structures English teachers taught me in high school without also telling why it was in the least useful or beautiful. Drone, drone, eyeballs rolling back in my head; another C- on that test. Later I learned the lesson. Here is an example from Mark Anthony Jarman’s great short story “Burn Man on a Texas Porch.”
“I’m okay, okay, will be fine except I’m hoovering all the oxygen around me, and I’m burning like a circus poster, flames taking more and more of my shape–am I moving or are they? I am hooked into fire, I am hysterical light issuing beast noises in a world of smoke.”
What you have here are two sentences built on a series of parallels that invert briefly at the parenthetical em-dash and then modulate into a variant (I’m, I’m, I’m, am I, I am, I am). The simple meaning of the sentence is that the narrator is on fire. But Jarman uses parallels to throw the sentence forward in a series of waves of energy, each surge encoded with another grotesque and moving image of self-incineration. The parallels delay the end of the sentence (as the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky tells us, delay is the first problem in writing a story) and create a passionately dramatic telling. Instead of mere description, the sentences become a poem.
Each new iteration of the parallel creates more of that mysterious thing I call aesthetic space, a blank spot into which the author has to imagine new and surprising words. Form never limits a writer; it creates openings for fresh invention. It also creates an opportunity for what I call narrative yoking, syntactically juxtaposing two or more ideas to create astonishing new connections, or psychological parallelism.
Read the rest at the National Post
Sep 102013
Gordon Lish, known as Captain Fiction in the days when he edited fiction at Esquire Magazine, was my editor for my novel The Life and Times of Captain N. (Knopf, 1993). As I recall, Lish wrote the flap copy for that book, and he sent me to bill hayward to have my picture taken for the cover. Gordon also published a story of mine in The Quarterly, “Swain Corliss, Hero of Malcolm’s Mills (Now Oakland, Ontario), November 6, 1814″ (it’s in my collection 16 Categories of Desire). Both bill and Gordon have now graced the pages of Numéro Cinq, and we’ve published Jason Lucarelli’s astonishing essay on Gordon Lish and his concept of consecution not to mention the radio interview I did with Gordon, yea, these many years ago. Gordon graciously consented to write a cover blurb for my book of stories, Savage Love, just now on the brink of publication. He sent me this page — he doesn’t use email (mostly he sends handwritten messages on blank white USPS postcards). It is typical of Gordon, ebullient, incantatory, celebratory, exotic, and dramatic. It was too long for the book cover, but he was graceful about letting me cut it, despite his admonition to the contrary at the bottom. Here are his words as they appear on Savage Love:
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 . . . .
And here, resplendent in all its glory, is the original, which, in fact, I like much better and for which I am deeply grateful.
dg
Sep 092013
This week, at the National Post in Toronto as part of the build up to the publication of Savage Love, I am writing a series of very short essays on, well, writing. Mostly about writing sentences. Here is a teaser for the first; it was just published this morning.
English was my worst subject (next to Health) in high school right through to my second year of university when I stopped taking English. I’d fallen afoul of the empty rule syndrome. Don’t use the pronoun “I” in an essay; don’t begin sentences with “but” or “because”; write paragraphs to the topic sentence-body text-conclusion pattern (even if it bores you to death to say the same thing three times); vary sentence structure. The trouble with these rules is that no one told me why any of them would be especially useful.
Vary sentence structure was a rule I puzzled over for years. No one explained grammar to me well enough to make a connection. At first I thought, well, I can write long and short sentences, something like Hemingway. Then I practiced emphatic placement of important material (at the beginning or the end of the sentence, I was told) and inversion (writing the sentence backwards — kind of fun). None of this got me anywhere because I could not connect the spirit of a sentence, what emotional and factual impact I intended, with the idea of sentence structure.
I puzzled through instruction books. I discovered the wonderful distinctions between simple, compound and complex sentences and the even more mysterious cumulative and periodic sentences. I practiced writing periodic sentences until I was blue in the face without actually being able to discover how that made them interesting for readers. They weren’t very interesting to me. And my stories did not seem any better for having good topic sentence paragraphs, long and short sentences, and a scattering of lovely periodic sentences.
The rules were still inanimate, void of life. The nexus of intention and form escaped me. Above all the whole idea that you had to know what you were going to write before you wrote it was like a lock on my soul. It made writing drudgery.
Read the rest here: Douglas Glover: Building sentences
Sep 012013
Adam Segal at Whole Beast Rag in Los Angeles read Savage Love in manuscript (how he got the ms. is a story for another time) and emailed me his admiration (always appreciated) and an invitation to do an interview. It turns out to be one of the best interviews I’ve done in ages. Adam gives great prompts; he’s got a literary spirit; I get to say some things that are new even to me — I like it when the long string of arguments that is my mental life take a new turn.
Here is Adam’s introduction; click the link beneath to read the interview.
dg
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SPECIAL REPORTING: ADAM SEGAL
I was introduced to the work of Douglas Glover earlier this summer when I was given the unique opportunity to read an early manuscript for Douglas Glover’s forthcoming collection of stories, Savage Love. It’s a gorgeously vivid, inventive, and occasionally brutal collection, steeped in blood, familial affection, and North American history. If you’re a fan of short fiction, it’s not one to ignore.
Glover, who holds a Master of Letters in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, has been writing stories, novels, and essays for over thirty years. He is also the founder of the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq. Douglas Glover is, as Maclean’s Magazine suggested in a review of his 2003 novel Elle, “the most eminent unknown Canadian writer alive.” Indeed, Elle won the Governor General’s award for Fiction, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. But let’s not listen to the awards for a moment, and instead listen to the man himself.
I recently spoke with Glover about the flickering quality of ironic language, about the proper ways of approaching historical fiction, about talking corpses and strangled cats, and finally about the massive importance of human self-delusion. Read on, read on:
Read the rest at DOUGLAS GLOVER — WHOLE BEAST RAG ISSUE #6.
Editor’s Note: The magazine is not defunct, but you can read that issue and the interview here.
Aug 282013
Here’s my little blurb on the Faculty of Arts page. The photo is one taken of me reading at the Eden Mills Festival by the Israeli photographer Danielle Schaub. Connections: Catherine Bush, whose novel is co-launching with my book of stories September 17, is a former WIR. As is Gerry Beirne, who has contributed mightily to NC.
dg
The University of New Brunswick runs a prestigious Writer-in-Residence program. Writers-in-Residence have an office in the Department of English where they meet with students and community members to provide feedback and advice on their creative writing. Over the past decade, the position has been held by Joan Clark, Sue Sinclair, John Barton, Fred Stenson, Gerry Beirne, Patricia Young, Karen Solie, Catherine Bush, Erin Mouré, Ken McGoogan, Anne Simpson, John Steffler, George (Douglas) Featherling, Colleen Wagner, Richard Sanger, Carol Malyon, bill bissett, and Kenneth J. Harvey.
The Writer-in-Residence for 2013-2014 is Douglas Glover.
Douglas Glover is an itinerant Canadian, author of six story collections, four novels, two books of essays, and The Enamoured Knight, a book about Don Quixote and novel form. His bestselling novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2007 he won the Rogers-Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award. His most recent book is the short story collection Savage Love. He edited the annual Best Canadian Stories from 1996 to 2006. Since 2010, he has published and edited the online magazine Numéro Cinq.
via Fredericton | Faculty of Arts | Graduate Programs | English Graduate Program.
Aug 092013
Christ Church Cathedral, Fredericton
Lucy and I are heading to Fredericton, New Brunswick, in September for a gig as Writer in Residence at the University of New Brunswick (I am going to be the writer, Lucy will be the dog in residence). I’ll be there until May more or less. There will be no disruption in service to NC readers, except for the usual disruptions. I will dedicate a page on NC to my activities as WIR, readings, special workshops, parties, masked balls, protests, riots, police arrest reports, and such. No doubt many of you will be chartering jets and buses (bring your passports).
New Brunswick is familiar ground to me. I taught philosophy at the University of New Brunswick in 1971-72. I worked as a reporter at the Evening Times-Globe, a daily newspaper in Saint John, 1972-73, my first (of many) newspaper jobs. I was the Writer in Residence for a year at the university in the the late 1980s. The Saint John River Valley is a beautiful and mysterious place to me. I particularly love walking home down University Avenue late in the evening on a fall night. And I have many friends there. My longtime, loyal, and beloved publisher, Goose Lane Editions, is located in Fredericton. I’ll be living in Mark Anthony Jarman‘s vast warren of a house on Waterloo Row (another denizen is NC Senior Editor R. W. Gray). NC’s famous weight-lifting poet Sharon McCartney also lives in Fredericton. As does Gerard Beirne among others including several contributors to the NC at the Movies slot.
dg