!!! Short Prose COMPETITION !!!

Short Prose

$3,500 Prize

Winner and finalists will have their stories submitted to three Canadian magazine publishers for consideration.

Entry Fee: $200 per entry.  by PAYPAL

Nonfiction and fiction prose; up to 2,500 words, English language

Not previously published in any format

Multiple submissions are welcome

More details soon !
 

Book review

The Art of Losing

• Lynn Crosbie (Author)
  Life Is About Losing Everything. House of Anansi Press (purchase at Amazon.ca)
• Heather Birrell (Author)
  Mad Hope. Coach House Books (purchase at Amazon.ca)
• Anakana Schofield (Author)
  Malarky. Biblioasis (purchase at Amazon.ca)

Reviewed by Lorraine York

 

These three books span generic categories, from Heather Birrell’s short stories, to Anakana Schofield’s novel, to Lynn Crosbie’s ficto-memoir. But what they all meditate upon, in some fashion or other, is, in Crosbie’s words, the art of losing everything. And they are all, willingly or not, inheritors of that paean to loss: Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, not only in the thematic sense, but in the ways in which they—to differing degrees—play fast and loose with more recognizable, canonized literary treatments of loss.
This is least the case with Birrell’s eleven stories in Mad Hope. Technically speaking, these are tightly focused miniatures: taut, controlled, economical. They almost all revolve around a traumatic incident of some kind: a neighbourhood child murdered, a student pleading with her teacher to help her arrange an abortion, the murder of a gay teenager. As studies of human relationships under duress, they present themselves with a remarkable clarity. We see these characters living beyond the ending, as it were: carrying trauma into the everyday, or at least wondering how to do so, or struggling not to. The obvious drawback to this fictional structure is that the traumatic incident itself comes to seem a predictable given. But when looked at as experimentation, as a multi-faceted study of human beings in radically wrenched, bizarrely altered situations, these stories begin to look more edgy than their initial, miniature gem-like quality would suggest. At times, the writing, like the traumatic central incidents, loses surprise: What Jerome said delighted Geraldine absolutely—its insouciance and lack of logic. So far so very, very good. But Birrell takes us too far into explication: Every now and then, she thought, you bumped into somebody who showed you a different way of living, a fierce commitment to a life that you could never claim as your own. What would the future hold for them both? There was no way of knowing. True enough. But in this story of a middle-aged white woman’s meeting with a black teenager in a cancer clinic, the different way of living, the fierce commitment are gradually revealed through the nicely observed contrasts of generational speech, among other devices, and so they do not arguably need to be so fully rehearsed here. But elsewhere in the stories, this kind of exposition sparkles; in Impossible to Die in Your Dreams, an increasingly drunken Samantha thinks of the young man she meets at a wedding that works in marketing: Samantha knows next to nothing about marketing and considers this a fault. Enough people seem to do it, all day, for days on end; there must be something molten and mesmeric at its core. The geologic metaphors surprise and amuse: Mad Men meets The Nature of Things.
In Anakana Schofield’s novel Malarky, by contrast, dark trauma and domestic drudgery become barely extricable. Set in Ireland, and experimental in its shifting perspectives, Malarky follows the depressive down-spiralling of the never-named Our Woman: a working-class woman whose life is derailed by her husband’s apparent infidelity (as bizarrely confessed by a woman she dubs Red the Twit, who confronts Our Woman in a teashop), her husband’s death, her discovery of her son’s gayness, and her son’s death in Afghanistan. Anger and denial vie for dominance in her responses, though these seismic shifts in her domestic world have the effect of also unleashing her own sexuality. Our Woman proceeds, as does Schofield, experimentally, transgressing the very mores that she has seemed to uphold, by initiating erotic play with a Syrian immigrant who works as a security guard in an Irish department store: someone whose hold on cultural legitimacy is shakier by far than hers. He obsessively traverses her body in search of the maternal, as though in search of that denied national legitimacy, whereas she uses his body to explore the nature of her son’s gay sex. Schofield is also sure in her intertwining of the psychological and the political; it is not surprising that Our Woman’s son, spurned by his parents but especially his father, who rejects him and cuts off his college funds, is left to perform masculinity in a self-destructive rather than erotically creative way: he enlists, is sent to war, and dies. As Our Woman descends further into grief, Schofield’s experimentally fragmented style intensifies, and we are left with an indictment of a domestic ordinariness that is cruelly punishing of transgression, whether sexual, cultural, class, or psychic. I had a husband and a son and they were both taken from me suddenly, reflects Our Woman, and what have I learned from this? I have learned no answers. I’ve learned to act rather than wonder. I’ve learnt only how to misbehave. But what is also impressive about Schofield’s achievement is the persistence of her wicked humour amid the depths of grief. When her husband, aghast at her apparent psychological wanderings, takes her to the hospital, Our Woman’s voice provides a mordantly funny gloss on his concerns: There! Whamble! He has it! A Syrian has done this to her… .Them foreigners if we let them near our old ladies, sure the wards start filling up is what my husband is trying to tell them. And when he stupidly informs the hospital staff that he has only noticed of late that his wife has stopped eating eggs, and that she has seemed concerned about buying a horse, she rejoices, An egg! An egg! Surely to God an egg would fix the woman! An egg would heal this mad equine concerned woman! Malarky, a recent and notable addition to the growing field of mad studies—the exploration of oppressive practices directed against those deemed mad—explores the uses of humour to unveil and counteract that oppression.
If one is comparing these three books and the challenges of treating grief and extreme loss in fictional form, Lynn Crosbie’s Life Is About Losing Everything forms an apogee of sorts, an extended keening and outraged howl set up against all that falls away: youth, lovers, friendships, trust, vitality. Like Schofield, Crosbie works with the fragmentary and the episodic; this ficto-memoir is divided into short, stabbing sections of prose, many of which painfully capture a betrayal, a loss, an indignity. And whereas this repetition could have the effect of desensitization or routinization (a risk that Birrell runs at moments), it oddly concentrates this volume into a fictional version of a choral dirge. Beloved people and animals pass in and out of Crosbie’s ficto-memoir: a frieze of loss. But as with Schofield’s Malarky, to sum up Crosbie’s Life Is About Losing Everything as a portrait of an unrelieved psychic inferno would be to overlook its devastatingly dark comedy. Readers with some familiarity of the Canadian literary world will derive some caustic pleasure at the moments of sardonic roman-a-clef play. In And Then He Kissed Me, Lynn describes a literary agent’s comments scrawled on her manuscripts: My, aren’t we moody? or Well! This will never play with the book ladies. Lynn, thinking about pleasing these particular consumers, pictures arriving at an airport on her way to a literary festival, being picked up by a woman who asks, hopefully if I was, possibly, Aritha van Herk? only to lapse into a morose silence when Crosbie reveals her identity.
In one of Crosbie’s many laments for a lost friend, Blue Thunder, she hears the news of his death as if hearing blue thunder in a dark sky, warning me of other jolts of lightning to come. The description, with its lovely and terrifying synaesthesia, captures the fragmentary, stormy method of Life Is About Losing Everything. It also brings to mind the grim comedy of Elizabeth Bishop’s brilliant study of loss, the villanelle One Art. (And here it seems fitting that Crosbie published Villain Elle, a collection of poems, in 1994.) Though Bishop’s speaker initially dismisses her grief, lightly joking that the art of losing isn’t hard to master, her closing stanza drops us, with her, over the edge into naked loss:

Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
Though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Write it! Bishop’s inner poet insists, pushing us through the domestic comedy of missing objects, to face unflinchingly the greater loss that domestic comedy discloses. Birrell, Schofield, Crosbie, and the beautiful losers who populate their books look unflinchingly into the face of domestic comedy; they (Write it!) like disaster.
 from canlit

"THE HORNBOOKS OF RITA K" review by Tanja Cvetkovic

TRACES OF THE MISSING POET: THE HORNBOOKS OF RITA K

 BY ROBERT KROETSCH

 

With The Hornbooks of Rita K (2001), Robert Kroetsch continues his long tradition of long poems after his famous The Ledger (1975), The Stone Hammer Poems (1976), Seed Catalogue (1977), the collection of long poems Field Notes (1981). Kroetsch releases his poetic energy through meditations on everyday objects like the stone hammer, the ledger, the seed catalogue, the hornbook.

In The Hornbooks, Kroetsch focuses his attention on the hornbook. The explanations of the term hornbook set us on the journey of discovering the meaning of the fragments, the function of the poet and the poem, the role of us as  readers of the fragments ordered with no order. The play with opposites, with different multiple meanings and functions in the poems, the juxtaposition of terms is something that underlines Kroetsch’s literary talent as postmodern.

In the epigraph of the book Kroetsch offers several definitions of the term hornbook: as “a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, etc., mounted on a wooden tablet with a handle, and protected by a thin plate of horn” or as “a treatise on the rudiments of a subject: a primer.” Rita Kleinhart, the prairie poet, writes hornbooks that are primers with vague meanings left for the readers to understand. In hornbook #4, Rita’s lover, Raymond, meditates on the term as a “book one page in length”¹  that “says its say”² opposing  what Rita’s poems fail to provide: “the clarity of the exact and solitary and visible page”³. Raymond, the poet too and the editor, sorts out through hornbooks in Rita’s prairie farmhouse trying to make sense of what’s left behind.

In this collection of poems, Kroetsch further explores his innovative and experimental approach to poetry. The Hornbooks consists of 99 poetical fragments about Rita K, who disappears mysteriously one day, on Kroetsch’s 65^th birthday, from the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art. The author of the book is Raymond who lives on the prairies and who traces  the life of his beloved Rita by way of the fragments she had left. Both Rita and Raymond appear as doubles of Robert Kroetsch, the poet and the scholar. Rita is both like and unlike Kroetsch. Like him, she travels all around the world lecturing and trying to write „an autobiography in which I do not appear“⁴. Unlike Kroetsch, she lives on a ranch in the Battle River Valley in Alberta. The book becomes Kroetsch’s attempt to imagine himself as a poet and what might have been if he had not left his home. But like the missing Rita K or the missing poet from the text, this book of poetical fragments is about what is not rather than about what is. Or it is both about presence and absence. By tracing Rita’s life, Raymond faces the dilemma:

„The question is always the question of trace,

  What remains of what does not remain?“⁵

 

 

According to Raymond, Rita disappeared in the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art while viewing “a framed painting”⁶, “Twilight Arch” by James Turrell. Her contemplation on the minimalist and conceptualist “absence of an image”⁷ corresponds to our contemplation on her poems on which we cast a new light of awaraness as readers. “Poetry is a changing of the light”⁸ which we use to enlighten our perception of the world.

The problem of the disappearing female figure is one of Kroetsch’s obsessions in poetry. The missing woman, the lost love object, signify the absent mother for Kroetsch and as he says:

“I kept the mother figures, especially, very silent at the center of the writing, partly because my own relationship with my mother was so painful, that I’ve only recently even put it into print at all. … I think some of the female presence in my book is almost a parody of the absence which is really what the book is about”⁹.

Raymond tells Rita of the loss of the mother in the book. The loss was replaced by language, words, poems. Poetry comes at the expense of the female presence:

“The day they brought my mother’s body home to our

house for the wake, I went up the low hill behind our

house. Rita, I wanted to tell you this. I went to a hollow

beside a large round rock, and I curled up in that hollow

and I cried until I had cried out my life. After that I was

empty enough to be a poet”¹⁰.

By transgressing gender, Kroetsch makes Rita Kleinhart his alter ego, his ideal female persona, whom he conceives as one of his many doubles in this book of fragments.

Raymond is Rita’s lover, reader, archivist, who exchanges places with Rita, occupying her abandoned house, determining the relationship between self and other,  poet and  poem,  reader and poem.

„We have made a small trade, you and I. I occupy your

abandoned house. Therefore, by your crystal logic, it is

who am missing from the world, not you. But surely it is,

always, the poet who is absent from the terrors of

existence, not the reader“¹¹.

 

By addressing „you“ and „I“, Raymond addresses the absent Rita both as the writer and the reader of his text. He also addresses us readers, who occupy the „abandoned house“ of a poem which the poet had left behind.

In The Hornbooks,  mediating on the function of art and poetry,  the poet asks: „What’s the poetic function of the hand?“¹²  and answers by asking another question: „Is not poetry a questing after place, a will to locate?“¹³ Kroetsch connects the function of poetry to a sense of place. His long poems The Ledger and  Seed Catalogue  are also attempts to recreate his native place and home.

For Kroetsch, the poem is stored in memory. What we think and read and write is the memory of what was never made present or seen. The memory is the memory of trace, a fragment which makes poetry possible, the very possibility of life, for „to take poetry into one’s hands is to take one’s own life into one’s hands“¹⁴. The possibility could be the trace of a ’dream of origins’  or a ’local pride’, or the narrative of origins which Raymond as the inventor of the text on Rita K tries to compile, or it could be the erasure and the absence because erasure constitutes the trace as trace, makes it like the snow that Rita admired, „disappear in its appearance“¹⁵, „disappear into art“¹⁶. The poet explains in The Hornbooks:

„We turn to speak and confront an absence. Thus we

become, all of us, poets“¹⁷.

 

The poet’s attempt to decreate and recreate the life of Rita K, the missing object of desire, is related to the memory of what had been and what had remained. His long poems and fiction comprise a kind of biographical and textual traces of the place and the narrative of origin associated with the prairie where he grew up. His poems and stories are his memories about the home that had been and that can only exist in the present moment of memory, experience, and text.

Starting from his early meditation on the task of the poet in his essay “Unhiding the Hidden”, Kroetsch claims that

“At one time I considered it the task of the Canadian writer to give the name to his experience, to be the namer. I now suspect that on the contrary, it is his task to un-name”¹⁸.

Kroetsch further elaborates on his notion of un-naming and decreation and asks through Raymond in The Hornbooks:

“What is poetry but a resistance to its own urgency?

The body is. The body does.

The rest is all a vague because.”¹⁹

This notion of poetry encompasses that every poem is “a casting out, an abandonment”²⁰, “the poem as vacated crypt. As wound. As pothole”²¹.  The poem is a puzzle left on the page to be turned into another reality and possibility for “what after all is a poem but a longing for a possible reality?” ²²asks Kroetsch in the book.

The poet is much more trivial and related to the real world. He is dependent on the petty technological innovations:

“As poets we attribute to ourselves the poems we record on

paper. The presumption of the poet is one of technology’s

petty tripumphs.” ²³

The poet’s advice for a young poet is to focus on something as substantial as breakfast can be and then reflect on it:

“Have bacon (four strips,

preferably) and eggs (two, sunnyside up),

 

hash browns with ketchup,

toast (white) with real strawberry jam,

 

a glass of orange juice (small will do),

and three cups of black coffee;

 

then mark one of the following

(please, not with an X):” ²⁴

The reflection on the trivial turned into sublime by the poet who leaves the poem as “an empty house” leaves the space for the reader to assert his presence and to decrypt the poem. The opposites once again touch themselves at poignant junctures.

But who is the poet in The Hornbooks? Or how many poets are there? And who is the missing poet?  Unlike Rita, Raymond is the editor, archivist, and archaeologist who collects the fragments, other people’s documents and scraps trying to compose the meaningful whole. Rita K is definitely the poet who is present through her art. Rita is the “goner” who erases her presence from the literary scene recreating the world into another possibility of language:

“We recognize in these unlikely lines her wish to erase

herself from the literary scene. She is, here, as good as

gone. A goner. She abjures sense as we think we know it.

She tells us there is another possibility in language and she

is on her way to asking what it is. She adds on a postcard

apparently intended for herself but never mailed. Some

days poetry is a dialogue with nobody.” ²⁵

For Raymond, Rita, the poet, “must return”²⁶  and he seeks to make her reappear in his writing. Kroetsch, who has his doubles Rita and Raymond in the book, is the absent poet who escaped “from the terrors of existence”.

The dispersal of the self within the text by adopting different names, opposite gender positions, roles, Kroetsch’s many alter egos, is a central element of his poetics. Raymond who delivers “confidential documents from place to place”²⁷ is one of his protean-trickster figures and his poetical alter ego. Like his favorite Hermes figure in the poems, Raymond is a thief and a creator, and by trying to sketch Rita’s life and writing, he is concerned both with the originality of the text and the authenticity of the poet. He asks:”Did Rita write those exquisite lines, or did I?”²⁸, and tells Rita “that a poem is a fractal”²⁹, the notion he resents by trying to recreate Rita’s poetics out of traces. Rita is an ideal female figure and persona of Robert Kroetsch too. In “The Kyoto Mound” fragment, there appears another of Kroetsch’s alter egos, a character named Robert, Rita’s friend in Japan. While reflecting on the nature of Japanese poetry, Kroetsch exchanges his position with the Japanese poet Ryokan, his partner Teishin, and the Chinese artists Li Po and Tu Fu.

Apart from his many identities as textual creations, game is an important part of Kroetsch’s creative process too. The free combination of poetical fragments, the play with many personas, is the invitation for the reader to participate actively in decoding of disguised traces and to search and invent the author of the text. Each fragment is its own story,  a poem in itself, and, as he explains in “For Play and Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem” (1980), they are “poems in which archaeology supplants history; an archaeology that challenges the authenticity of history by saying there can be no joined story, only abrupt guesswork, juxtaposition, flashes of insight”³⁰.

 

Canadian Writers in Person Lecture Series

 

Hear from some of Canada's finest

Get up close and personal with an eclectic group of authors while earning course credit through LA&PS' Canadian Writers in Person (AP/CLTR 1953 6.0A) course. You'll explore the contemporary work of renowned authors, while having the unique opportunity to engage with them in a dialogue about their work.
Members of the York community not enrolled in the course can also enjoy the readings, which are free and open to the public.
All readings are held Tuesdays at 7-10 pm
Location: 206 Accolade West Building

This year's lineup consists of a unique selection of emerging and established Canadian writers, whose writing explores a broad range of topics and geographical and cultural landscapes. Featuring poets, playwright and prolific fiction writers, the series highlights Canada's ever-growing literary talent.

Year	Date	Lecturer
2013	Sept 17	Annabel Lyon - The Sweet Girl
	Oct. 1	Pam Mordecai - Subversive Sonnets
	Oct. 15	Patrick deWitt - The Sisters Brothers
	Oct. 29	Rita - forage
	Nov. 12	Fred Wah - Diamond Grill
	Nov. 26	Wayne Johnston - The Son of a Certain Woman
2014	Jan. 14	Madeleine Thien - Dogs at the Perimeter
	Jan. 28	Safia Fazlul - The Harem
	Feb. 11	Cordelia Strube - Milosz
	Mar. 4	Michael Winter - The Death of Donna Whalen
	Mar. 18	Linda Spalding - The Purchase

Coming...

Soon you'll be able to ead many reviews of famous and wll known writer's, stay with us and find out how Tanja Cvetkovic done review on Robert Kroetsch work, every week new review.

Top 10 Canadian Authors -who have left their mark

10- Margaret Avison

Poet Margaret Avison received accolades for two different poetry collections that received the honours of winning the Governor General’s Award.

 

9- Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen isn’t just an author but he’s also a musician, poet, songwriter, and artist. His most well-known published work is “Beautiful Losers.”

 

8- Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” became an international bestseller.  He’s currently working on another novel, “Generation A,” as well as a biography of Canadian scholar Marshall McLuhan and a new TV show called “Extinction Event.”

 

7- Robert James Sawyer

Science-fiction writer Robert James Sawyer has penned 18 books, one of which, “Flash Forward,” was sold to ABC for a primetime drama. It’s amongst this fall’s line-up of new programs, and premieres on September 24^th.

 

6- Michael Ondaatje

Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje moved to and then became a Canadian citizen in the early ‘60s. His work “The English Patient” not only won the Booker Prize but it was also adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie.

 

5- Farley Mowat

Farley Mowat is known for authoring two types of work – gritty memoirs and children’s literature. His novel “Never Cry Wolf” was adapted into a big-screen flick, and the kid’s book “Lost in the Barrens” won the Governor General’s Award.

 

4- Alice Munro

Fiction writer Alice Munro has racked up three Governor General’s Awards and received the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her literary work.

 

3- Mordecai Richler

Montreal native Mordecai Richler was known for his honest, witty satire, and is the name behind well-known works like “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “Barney’s Version.”

 

2- Robertson Davies

Robertson Davies wore a variety of “hats” – playwright, reporter, teacher, novelist – and in his 82 years, he earned a well-respected literary reputation with an incredible 23 honourary degrees as well as countless literature awards.

 

1- Margaret Atwood

Ottawa-born Margaret Atwood is the most well-known Canadian author, in Canada as well as south of the border. She wrote “The Edible Woman,” “The Blind Assassin,” which won the Booker Prize, and “Oryx and Crake.”

Interview with Tamas Dobozy by Alissa McArthur

Born in Nanaimo, BC, Tamas Dobozy is an associate professor at Wilfrid Laurier University. During his time as a UBC graduate student in the mid to late 1990s, Dobozy worked in the Canadian Literature office as a student assistant. Dobozy is the author of the short story collections When X Equals Marylou (2002), Last Notes (2006), and Siege 13 (2012). Siege 13, which features 13 stories related to the Seige of Budapest during World War II, was awarded the 2012 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was a finalist for the 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award for English-Language Fiction.
In the following interview, conducted over email in February and March 2013 by Alissa McArthur, Dobozy discusses Siege 13, his experience with literary awards, and his time working at Canadian Literature.

Interview

Alissa McArthur (AM): Firstly, congratulations on the recognition you’ve received for Siege 13, including winning the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Although it’s still quite recent since you’ve received these accolades, could you share some reflections on your experience with the prestige economy of literary prizes?
Tamas Dobozy (TD): This is the first time I’ve heard it described as prestige economy. Sounds like something from Marxist cultural theory. In that regard, I guess it sells a lot of books, which is good for me, though I suppose that makes me a capitalist in some way, deeply and happily embedded in the superstructure, like so many other Marxist scholars, with the added luxury of getting to rail against the system while enjoying its pleasures. Seriously, though, what has amazed me the most about this award is just how many people write to me saying they had no idea that the siege of Budapest had even taken place, never mind the toll taken on soldiers and civilians alike, so in that regard I think it’s been great for casting some light on this corner of history. Beyond that, these awards happen, and there’s a pile of hoopla, and then you’re yesterday’s news. This doesn’t bother me, particularly, since if it continued you’d never have any time to get back to your writing. I’m not sure, in the long run, that it helps your writing endure, necessarily, since frequently very good books don’t get picked for the prize, and these are the ones that have longevity, while the books that won disappear and never reemerge. I think you need chaos theory to sort out why some works are deemed to have value over others. I don’t think any of this really answers your question, unfortunately. I’m really happy I won. I’m happy these prizes are around. I’m happy they bring attention to literature in general. Beyond that, I’m not sure I have much more to say.
AM: I understand that you have a connection with Canadian Literature from when you were a student at UBC. Could you tell us a bit about your time working at the journal? How did your glimpse into this aspect of the Canadian literary and academic world influence you, either as a writer, an academic, or both?
TD: Well, I always loved the reading it put me in touch with. It also gave me a view into the national academic community, which was larger and more varied than I would have imagined. I think the sheer variety of it was an inspiration—all these people working in all those areas, with new ones emerging, it seemed, by the day. When I started, Bill New had just handed over the journal to Laurie [Ricou], who I think ran it in an interim way until Eva-Marie [Kröller] showed up, and then she ran it while I was there. I loved that job, really, just being in the midst of those people, all fanatically dedicated to things I cared, and still care, about quite deeply. You need that as a writer and an academic, that sense of shared passion. It sustains you. Beyond that, I think it represented a cultural work we really need here in Canada, gathering up the shreds of a lot of disparate and sometimes isolated artistic projects and creating a repository or an archive where they come together in dialogue and are preserved for people down the road who’ll be able to glimpse back at our rituals and fixations in order to better understand and manage their own.
AM: I understand that you have a family connection to the Siege of Budapest; your father lived through the siege. I’m wondering how your family’s experience of the siege informed your writing of these stories.
TD: Not directly. The stories were too anecdotal, almost imagistic. I guess they informed it on a structural level, namely, that this is how an event like this is remembered—never as a single overarching narrative, but as isolated moments that don’t seem to connect up. Part of that influenced my choice of the short story cycle as a genre. And I guess the opening left by these anecdotes also influenced me, albeit negatively, so that I wanted to fill up the vacuum they indicated.
AM: Why did you choose the short story form rather than a novel? Or, from another angle, what informs the choice to call a collection of linked short stories a story cycle rather than a novel? What makes a story cycle in opposition to a novel, and is there room for slippage? Is it a matter of marketing, or is it a different writerly mindset?
TD: This answer requires an article. The short story cycle is in fact a very different beast from the novel. The short story cycle instantiates autonomy (of parts) at the same time as it instantiates unity (of the cycle as a whole, which may be linear as in a sequence or circular as in a cycle) at the same time as it instantiates the fragmentary (the gaps between each individual part). Novels can’t do this. In fragmentary novels each fragment either stands only insofar as it is part of the novel as a whole, or by standing alone each fragment prevents the emergence of wholeness; in unified novels you have such total contingency between each chapter that the experience is always of a united whole, even as you’re reading parts of it, none of which can be appreciated in independence from the others. Novels just don’t allow you to have your cake and eat it too in the way a short story cycle does, and thus represent a vastly inferior genre to the short story cycle, which is why all publishers should, right now, start paying more money, let’s say double the money, just to be humble, to people who write short story cycles. It’s the only way. Writing a short story cycle, for reasons above, obviously takes way more skill and talent than writing a novel. Which, again, is why writers like me should be paid more money than novelists, and why publishers should be lining up, eager to publish more of these works.
AM: I’m curious about your process in putting these stories together. I know some of these stories were published elsewhere before appearing in Siege 13. Did you intend for the stories to be linked? How did you map out the ways in which the stories intersect? For instance, did you first come up with a group of interconnected stories, such as those following the Kálmán family?
TD: Well, the final book was the fourth in a series of manuscripts. Two manuscripts died on the table (one made it to six chapters of a projected ten, about 120 pages; and the other made it to four of a projected twelve, about 80 pages), another one made it right to the end (400 pages or so), but was then rejected by all the agents and all the publishers I sent it to, and the remarkable consistency of their critique (this book is boring) convinced me they were right, so I ditched it. From these three failed manuscripts I managed to lift six stories (basically all the third-person stuff in Siege 13), and then, over the last three or so years wrote all the first-person stories that rounded out the volume. The previous (complete) manuscript told the story of Jozsef, Sandor and Teleki (all of whom will be recognizable to readers of Siege 13) in chronological order, in eighteen stories (each character got six, but their stories crossed over throughout). With the version that was eventually published I decided to go with thematic rather than narrative links. The present manuscript is therefore a collation, sorting and winnowing of this material. In its final form the book was put together with a certain thematic dialogue in mind, and also a gradual movement of the siege, as memory and legacy, in a positive direction, in which for some characters the trauma it was becomes enabling, helpful, even salvation in a certain sense.
AM: Running through this story cycle is the notion of truths of history being elusive, contested, and contaminated. One striking example of your exploration of this theme is in The Encirclement, where a professor’s public lectures about the siege are consistently interrupted and challenged by a seemingly obsessive follower. However, there are many other examples in Siege 13 where characters are denied authoritative versions of events. Why is it important to question ideas of authenticity in historical (and other) narratives? Why are the characters so consumed by the search for the truth?
TD: I’ll answer the last question first. I don’t think that the characters are consumed by the search for the truth. On the contrary, many of the characters willfully manipulate the historical narrative to their own ends, and this is what occupies a large part of the book—the way in which individual and collective agendas are enabled through storytelling (which includes history, of course). More accurately, you could say that there are historical facts (the communist takeover, World War II, etc.) and history itself (which is the narrative that offers a logical connection between disparate events in a causal way), and that between these two there are entire kingdoms. It’s pretty easy to ascertain facts—Look, here’s a dead body with a gunshot wound to the head—but another thing entirely to say why that body is there, who’s responsible, and the particular effects it had or will have, since there are too many concurrent factors also involved in any causal chain. Storytelling, or developing causal sequences, is one way in which we as human beings survive, quite literally (try and imagine driving anywhere without a pre-emptive narrative of the journey already guiding you through the various stages and probabilities of the trip), and the cycle explores how various storytelling strategies enable various kinds of individual and collective existence. The absolute master of this is Teleki, of course, from The Encirclement, but also Hollő in The Beautician. But The Miracles of Saint Marx is about this to some degree as well, along with Days of Orphans and Strangers, etc. etc. What’s important to the collection is not authenticity itself (as the scholar in The Mugshots of Famous Hungarian Assassins says, That’s so twentieth century, or something like that), but its manufacture.
AM: Several characters in this collection are professors or students, who undertake research to uncover hidden histories. The scholars’ hunt for historical information intersects and overlaps with quests for familial narratives, often with frustrating results. Yet the independent scholar in The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins is able to publish a book based on fraudulent information. This relates to my previous question about authenticity, but also, in what ways are certain types of historical narratives privileged over others? How are academics complicit in this process?
TD: Well, I think I might have answered part of this above. But Mugshots is a story concerned above all else with the making of art, how it falsifies the world in order to bring about greater pleasure (and I use pleasure pretty widely here to also mean a sense of redemption or salvation). I think this is what art has always done, including highbrow art (where part of the pleasure and entertainment it offered was letting the audience think they were participating in a higher order activity—ethically, morally, politically—whereas this was just really part of the fun, and afterwards everyone went back to being fallible and self-centered and sometimes even corrupt). I love eco-criticism, for example, but I drive a car and prefer to fly rather than take the train or boat across countries and continents, and I throw food away, and I often make choices based on what I want rather than what I need, so I often wonder what really motivates me to read and write that stuff. Is it just because it makes me feel better, intellectually and emotionally? So Aces creates a history that he knows is fake, but he loves it, it’s preferable to the real world, and in many ways purer and more decent, at least in terms of the comfort it offers him. I think we’re all complicit in this to a degree in seeking out our intellectual comforts when we compile our histories or scholarship, even if this comfort is nothing more than the belief that we’re exposing the truth, however harsh or damaging it is to the status quo. I’m sure that more than one academic has put him- or herself to sleep at night with exactly that thought. This sounds terribly cynical, which is not what I was trying to do in that story, but rather see these activities through the lenses of compassion and sympathy, as the ways in which we get through life, which even at its best is never really all that great, not to mention when it’s at its worst. And I say that because I also need to get to sleep at night somehow.
AM: Perhaps one reason the characters’ quests for truth are frustrated is because history is not always recorded in institutionally sanctioned or tangible ways. In the stories, we read about different processes to record memory, such as the mythical collection of unbelievable stories in The Miracles of Saint Marx, Lujza’s logbook of sexual encounters in The Society of Friends, and the Russian count that collects experiences in Rosewood Queens. The Museum of Failed Escapes from Sailor’s Mouth seems to be a commentary on this—a collection of failures, of people who would normally fade into obscurity. What might these more abstract ways of recording the past have to offer that official documents and archives may lack?
TD: Well, history records the momentous. Have I said this already? (Sorry, it’s taken me so long to answer this interview that I’ve forgotten where I started, or may have already said.) By the momentous I simply mean that which is worth memorializing, usually because it lends itself ideologically to some state program. What I’m interested in in some ways is what’s not momentous, what is dismissed from the official historical record, because, frankly, recording it all would take too much time, and create a record—à la Borges—that takes as long to read as the actual events it narrates. So the idea of the momentous lends itself pragmatically to the space requirements of a national historical narrative, but of course it creates a very partial story, and in most case leaves out what I think is most interesting about life—how weird and inexplicable it is most of the time. Not all history leaves out weirdness, but there’s way more weirdness than we’re exposed to in our courses on what happened in the past. That’s where fiction jumps in, to the rescue, where it not only questions the very notion of the momentous as a structuring principle in history, but blurs the line between what exactly it is went on, reminding all of us in the process that weirdness is precisely this feeling that things somehow don’t really fit together all that well, and maybe that feeling is worth keeping at the front of any act of memory.
AM: I’m interested in the idea of the of Szécsényi Club, the Hungarian expats’ club in Toronto, which we’re introduced to in The Beautician. This place serves as a storehouse for conflicting memories of Hungary (including some unsavory secrets), both literally in the library, and more intangibly in the stories that circulate. I wonder if you could speak to the idea of a diasporic community negotiating traumatic memories in a contained space such as the club—how does the space affect the ways which the characters process the past?
TD: These questions are really tough! Have I mentioned that? Whatever happened to, What is your normal day of writing like? Do you write with a pen or directly onto a computer? What’s on your bedside stack of reading right now? Let me see if I can sort this out. The Szécsényi Club, at least as I see it, and let me say now that a writer is no more qualified to interpret his or her work than anyone else, is a kind of liminal space, a bit like an embassy, a bit of home ground transposed to an alien territory, both within and without that territory, somehow both and neither Hungary and Canada. In this sense then, and certainly in The Beautician, what we see happening is an intersection of conflicting cultural demands, embodied in this case by the narrator, who can’t quite square the Hungarian or émigré cultural imperatives against a very different way of conceiving the role of the self (as liberated, a free agent, or any of those other Canadian myths). What the space of the club exposes, then—in a way that Hollő ultimately comes to embody and master—is how identity is never fixed but always in a process of being negotiated and renegotiated, and how damaging it is—as in the character of Ilona—to try and force fixity upon it, to place it into the straightjacket of a political or cultural or religious ideology. The damage this does is apparent not only in the narrator’s small relatively inconsequential world, but in the larger course of history, for example with the communists and fascists, who programmatically eliminated undesirables by subordinating their individuality to certain specific and universal characteristics that came from the political ideologies rather than from the people themselves. But of course, the idea of elimination is a horrific program in any case. In addition, what the story is on some level saying is that just because people have experienced suffering and trauma at the hands of an absolutist ideology doesn’t mean they themselves will recognize when they’re doing it themselves, much less wish to stop. Experiencing what they experienced, that kind of historical trauma, doesn’t necessarily make anyone a better person, or unwilling to engage for a variety of reason in the very form of oppression that destroyed their lives. The past is very rarely a form of instruction, which is perhaps the saddest thing of all.
AM: Siege 13 ends with a story, The Homemade Doomsday Machine, that has a slightly different cadence from the rest of the stories. What compelled you to end your collection with a story that seems to playfully parody some of the obsessive quests of the characters in the preceding stories?
TD: That’s interesting that you would read it that way. I suppose it’s valid, though the story was not meant to be a parody. It was just meant to be comic, for the most part, though the long rumination the narrator makes on what Otto Kovacs’s life is like in Toronto is in earnest, even if Kovacs himself is unhinged. The book’s movement as a whole is meant to reflect a waning of the siege as a source of trauma and its waxing as a redemptive narrative, so that story ends on what I think of as the most positive moment in the collection as a whole—a father’s selfless love for his son. Throughout the book characters have been compromised in one way or another, their morality and ethics ambiguous at best, and completely self-centered and megalomaniacal at worst, but here finally is a character whose flaw is simply that he loves his son more than he does himself, perhaps the only character in the whole book who extends that much to another person, and the siege here figures as the cold mechanical hard-edged ideology or intellectual theory that he counters with plain empathy, and then pays the consequences for that in distance and isolation from the thing that gives his life meaning. That’s how I see that particular story. I think, in the end, all obsessive quests are kind of crazy and comic, though they have tragic consequences, and in that respect this story is no different from Miracles of Saint Marx or The Encirclement or any of the others

Taken from canlit.ca