What books have changed your life?

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson saved me when I was young. As did anything by Flannery O’Connor. This is such a great question, but a difficult one to answer as so many books affected me at different times in my life. Two years after travelling to India, I read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, and it changed how I looked at my photos. Djuna Barnes and Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale also affected me deeply.

The one book you always recommend is…

The Bone People by Keri Hulme and The Year of the Flood by Atwood.

Where is your favourite place to crack open a book in Vancouver?

I could say Turk’s, Delaney’s on Denman, Rhizome, but mostly cozy-mo in bed ;)

What’s next on your reading list?

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

I’ve been lucky to have had so many: Keith Maillard, Alison Acheson, Steven Galloway, Elizabeth Harvor, and Jack Hodgins. And Jack’s book, Passion for Narrative, is insanely helpful for a writer.

Do you have a favourite story with Vancouver connections?

Sophie by Emily Carr

How do you like your books served up best – audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader…

I am still a compulsive buyer and used buyer/library loaner. I still love to go to events and buy the book from the actual writer–I think that’s so important if you can. To meet that person and have them sign their baby, and then go read it–my fave thing to do!

Photographs courtesy of Cathleen With.

Who is your favourite Vancouver/Lower Mainland writer?

We have so many amazing writers here on the West Coast that it’s hard to keep up! I’m going to stay safe and say that recently I’ve enjoyed work from Nikki Reimer and Micheal Christie. I’m looking forward to new work from Nancy Lee, Claudia Casper, and Shaena Lambert.

What are you currently reading? Your thoughts on it?
After hearing little snippets about it from various people over a number of years, I am finally reading Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. The writing is very quirky, sometimes hilariously profound, and steeped in the essence of ’70s hippie counterculture. I must admit I often have a silly, paranoid, personal-standards-of-political-correctness-gauging mental commentator while I’m reading, but since reasoning with said commentator (“Consider when this was written, my dear!” “Get over yourself a little bit!”), I have found Even Cowgirls Get the Blues to be extremely entertaining.

Photo courtesy of Olivia B.

How do you like your books served up best – audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader…?
Argh! Anything but e-readers! I guess I’m one of those bad environmentalists who don’t believe in replacements for having a real, solid book in one’s hands. In certain circumstances I’ll go for an audio book, but for the most part I’m hopelessly devoted to tangible, delicious, ink-and-paper-wasting literature. Mmm.

What book or story impressed you as a child?  Were you obsessed with any particular ones?
I was completely obsessed with Harriet the Spy, along with Louise Fitzhugh’s other stories. Wherever I went, I brought a composition notebook and pencil with me so I could pretend to be Harriet and write down observations–okay, fine, lies–about everyone I came across. Always a sucker for classic fiction, I was also pretty enamoured of anything by E. Nesbit or Edward Eager.

What books have changed your life?
Don’t laugh at me, but I’m going to state the obvious answer for my entire generation here and say “Harry Potter”. Harry Potter is my past, present, and future!

Others are The Time of the Ghost by Diana Wynne Jones, which is a childhood favourite that has somehow leeched onto my heart; A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs; 1984 by George Orwell; and, to be honest, The Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

I might add that pretty much every book I read changes my life to some degree, even if that’s just because I mess up my sleeping schedule by staying up all night reading…

Favourite Vancouver/Lower Mainland writer?
I don’t know if I have a “favourite”, but right now I’m really excited about lisa b., who is a spoken word poet I discovered through the Van slam scene. I find Lisa’s writing to be very thought-provoking, image-rich, and poignant. I’m a fan.

The one book you always recommend is…
Paper Towns by John Green!

What’s next on your reading list?
Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Your life story is published tomorrow. What’s the title?
Hopefully something incredibly convoluted, abstract and confusing like: Here Lies Olivia B: A Ninja and Pirate of a Gentleman Who Saved a Few Lives During the Zombie Apocalypse and Stuck with Harry Until the Very End.

Photo courtesy of Olivia B.

Room magazine is “Canada’s oldest literary journal by and about women”. The first issue came out under the name A Room of One’s Own, a pull quote from Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay by the same name, and the famous quote, “It is necessary to have five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry” is still found on each issue’s cover.

Entering its 35th year in publication, Room  has come a long way from its roots as “A Feminist Journal of Literature and Criticism” to its current, more inclusive, “A Space of Your Own” where their loyal readers find the finest emerging women’s writing 4 times a year.  Clélie Rich knows Room because over the past two decades she’s twice been a member of the Growing Room Collective, the group of volunteers who handle all the editorial, production, and administration of Room.  I spoke with Clélie about the benefits of working in a collective, the editing process, and how Room has changed over the years.

Photos by C. Kwan

Can you tell me something about Room’s history?

We started up in 1975 which was the first international women’s year and it was started up by a group of women out of UBC, I think.  When they started the magazine, they started it as “A Room of One’s Own” because at that point, there wasn’t really a place for women in publishing and in its beginnings, it was very feminist.  The great thing about the magazine is that as women joined and left the collective, the tenure of the magazine changes because it’s a result of what the collective members want.  So Room magazine went through a very political era, but now we are now morphed to what is more like good writing on any topic.  It’s still feminist but it doesn’t have to be so aggressive.  When I joined the first time, it was quite aggressively, politically feminist and it’s not like that anymore.  It’s much more of gentle take on feminism, primarily focusing on what is good women’s writing more than having a political agenda.  Our agenda is to publish the best writing we can get.

		How long have you been a volunteer with Room magazine?
		This is my second time on the collective, and this time, I think I came back in what would be Volume 30, so that’s 4 years ago, so say 2006.  I joined in the ‘90s, in about ‘95 and left again in 2000.  So all together I’ve got 10 years, divided up.
		What drew you to Room?
		The first time, the very first time I joined, I had just become a freelance editor, and I was taking courses from the Editor’s Association of Canada, and they said go get some experience. And I was in a proofreading course, I think, and one of the women stood up at the end and said, “We need volunteers for our magazine, and it’s good volunteer experience.” So at that point, I joined. And that was just for work experience.And then when I came back in the 2000s, it was because I missed it. I liked the magazine a good deal and other things would come up like work, and it would intervene and all that kind of thing, and we had gotten the magazine to a good place, so it was fairly good to leave it, so I just left it. And then when I had the opportunity to come back, I thought ok, I’ll just e-mail them and see if they need any volunteers and they did, so I came back.

How many volunteers at a time, or does that change?

It varies.  Right now, we have 18, of whom 5 live outside the Lower Mainland and cannot attend meetings.  We have some quite far flung, one in Toronto, and one is out of the country on sabbatical.  But since all we do is electronic, of course, those particular Roomies can do what they do from far away.

You call them Roomies? blank We do (laughing).  Roomies! Yes, yes. blank Who is your readership? blank Almost exclusively women, but not exclusively women. We do have some male readers. They are all adults and they have some form of university education. A lot of our readers are writers themselves or artists in some way – so mostly creative, adult women with some university education. And I would say that 90% of our readers are in Canada and of that 30% is in BC. It pleases the BC Arts Council. blank What is the mandate of your publication? blank Part of our mandate, other than surviving [as] a magazine, is to encourage professionals in the publishing industry. For us, we have Roomies who want to be issue editors; they want to learn the process. So what we have is a group of three or four of us that act as mentors for those who haven’t done it before. The issue editor will have an assistant that will either have someone that is learning from her, or her mentor. In other words, a new person will always have an accomplished editor working with her.  There always has to be someone experienced helping.

What’s involved in the process of coming up with an issue? Do you work with a theme?

The one that I am doing at the moment is called “Journey” and it is the first from our 35th anniversary issues. All the stuff that I am receiving and looking at is on the theme of “Journey” and I’ve picked an interview that matches that theme very well, and my commissioned writer is actually Vancouver’s new Poet Laureate, Evelyn Lau. She’s done poems on aging, which is an aspect of the journey and travel, so everything contributes together.

My cover art is an image by Landon Mackenzie, one of Canada’s well-known painters. It’s a map of Saskatchewan; she’s a cartographic artist and it makes a phenomenal cover.What is the mandate of your publication?

How much would you say of Room’s content is Vancouver-based?

That varies from magazine to magazine. It’s hard to say, because we don’t have to stats that are Vancouver-wide, except when we apply for a BC Arts Council Grant and they have this statistical section where they want to know who is from your neighbourhood, who is from your city, who is from BC, who is from outside BC.  From a funding point of view, there is a certain amount that the Canadian Council insists on and I believe that is 80% of Canadian content, but I would say we are more than that, about 90%.  We do try to include one or two locally because we like to have readings.

How often do you host readings?

About once per year.  Last year, we did a reading at Joy Kogawa House for International Women’s Day.  Huge success.  Standing room only; the readings were amazing.  We are hoping to do it again for next year.  We have done other readings at PRISM, and other small venues, but somewhere like the Joy Kogawa House is actually ideal for us, because it is about Canadian women so we fit very nicely into their mandate and they fit very nicely into ours.

Photo by C. Kwan

Do you participate in any other events in the local literary community?

We do Word on the Street every year. We’ve also done the Main Street Magazine Tour.  We do readings, and we occasionally do a little panel.  Right now, we are in the middle of a series of events where we go into writing and publishing schools.   We did one recently at Douglas College for their Print Futures program and before that we did one with subTerrain magazine at Betsy Warland’s The Writer’s Studio.  We both just sit down and talk about the importance of literary magazines for writers and what we want for our respective magazines and then they can ask us any questions.

Room is published every quarter in Vancouver, BC. Check it out: www.roommagazine.com

What books have changed your life?

Probably T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems (faber & faber), which was my first encounter with a poetry I could love. Then Harry Partch’s Genesis of a Music, which is a very eloquent introduction to how music can be let out of its box, by a former hobo and outsider musician.

Rowan at Shakespeare and Co.  Photo Courtesy of Rowan Coupland.

Where is your favourite place to crack open a book in Vancouver?

Stanley Park, maybe by Beaver Lake. When it’s not raining.

What writer would you love to see read their work?

Walt Whitman!

What is the most cherished item in your library?

Probably a hundred and something year-old copy of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with an inscription by the original owner: ‘if you wish my name to see, turn to page 93.’

The one book you always recommend is…

The Waves By Virginia Woolf -nothing in the entire novel is said, but everything is said. Friends grow up and die like moths and waves. It’s beautiful.

How do you like your books served up best–audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader…

Used paperbacks, maybe with inscriptions from the original reader.

What books make you feel like a kid again?

Tintin-The Prisoners of the Sun

Sunday January 22 – Book Launch: David Spaner’s Shoot it!

Former Vancouver Province film critic David Spaner, has just released his second book, Shoot It!: Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film and Arsenal Pulp Press is holding a book launch at People’s Co-op Bookstore. The location of the launch is fitting as the first half of Spaner’s book looks at the history of the the Hollywood movie studio system including the clashes, often physical and violent, between studios and union members.

The second half of the book is a look at the history of independent film scenes in seven different countries (including Canada, of course).

David Spaner will give a brief talk about his new book and take questions; book signing and refreshments to follow!

When: Sunday Jan. 22 • 2 – 5 pm
Where: People’s Co-op Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Dr., Vancouver
www.davidspaner.com
www.arsenalpulp.com

Tuesday January 24 – W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ Series

	Sean Cranbury & Co. are at it again, this time celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ Series with a stellar line-up of established and up-and-coming writers.
	Featuring: Angie Abdou Zsuzsi Gartner David Lester Arley McNeney Garry Thomas Morse Jen Neale Ayelet Tsabari
	Books for sale by author. All proceeds go to the writers. Cash bar. Music. Live streaming. Conviviality. Jokes. Hosted by Sean Cranbury and Dina Del Bucchia
	If the last big literary event held at the W2 Performance Space (Giller Light Vancouver) was any indication, this is sure to be a great evening. And on a Tuesday!

When: Tuesday January 24, 7 – 10 pm
Where: W2 Media Café, 111 W. Hastings St., Vancouver (enter through the Woodwards Atrium)
Cost: $5 (no one turned away for lack of funds)

Real Vancouver Writers’ Series is 100% volunteer-driven. All proceeds go toward supporting future W2 programming and the writers who participate.

Friday January 27 – Mashed Poetics: Gordon

Mashed Poetics is back! An evening of music and poetry as selected writers read the results of the musical influence of a particular song. This time ’round sees The Barenaked Ladies’ album Gordon acting as muse.

BNL cover band ENID will be playing all of the songs on the album GORDON, interspersed with very cool poems by 15 different and talented writers.

Poets and their songs include…

1. “Hello City” -Matt Hogan
2. “Enid” -Laurie Bricker-Cherry
3. “Grade 9″ -Roger Blenman
4. “Brian Wilson” -Chris Gilpin
5. “Be My Yoko Ono” -Diane Tucker
6. “Wrap Your Arms Around Me” -Magpie Ulysses
7. “What a Good Boy” -Chris Masson
8. “The King of Bedside Manor” -RC Weslowski

Intermission

9. “Box Set” -Duncan Shields
10. “I Love You” -Wilhelmina Salmi
11. “New Kid (On the Block)” -Sean McGarragle
12. “Blame It on Me” -Johnny Scoop
13. “The Flag” -Alberto Cristoffanini
14. “If I Had $1000000″ -Sonja Littlejohn
15. “Crazy” -Laurel Albina

When: Friday January 27,  8 – 11 pm
Where: The Kozmik Zoo, 53 W. Broadway
Cost: $10 at the door.
Doors at 8:00 Show at 8:30

Saturday January 28 – VBC Live: An Intimate Chat with Charlotte Gill

Come join us, Vancouver is Awesome’s very own Vancouver Book Club, for an afternoon with Charlotte Gill, author of Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe. We (that is, us and you) will be chatting with Charlotte about the book and her experiences.

This book has been getting a lot of buzz over the past few months and was recently shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Read our review of Eating Dirt and visit the Event page.

When: Saturday February 28, 2-4 pm (doors at 1:30 pm)
Where: Project Space, 222 E. Georgia St., Vancouver

There will be books and refreshments for sale.

www.charlottegill.com
www.dmpibooks.com
www.projectspace.ca

During last year’s Heart of the City Festival, I found myself at the InterUrban Gallery for “Writing Our Stories,” an event that brought together participants from three Downtown Eastside writing groups: the Megaphone Magazine Writing Group, Intrepid Pens and the DTES Studio Society. While I had previously read a few issues of Megaphone, hearing the writers read their work was a powerful experience, and I was compelled to find out more about the magazine. A little while later I got together with Sean Condon, Megaphone‘s Executive Director, and we talked about the magazine’s beginnings, its writers program, and its importance as a vehicle for empowerment.

How did Megaphone start?
It’s actually kind of got a long history, but I’ll try not to make it too long. So, the idea of a street paper first actually started in New York City and it was done in the late ’80s, early ’90s. And from there it just exploded around the world. And now there are probably more than, say, 115 street papers around the world. Different sizes, different styles,  but all the same concept of selling a paper at a cost to a homeless or low-income vendor who then sells it for profit on the street.

Vancouver’s first street paper started in 1992 and was know as Spare Change. And it was pretty well known and it did well, but when the founding publisher/editor left, it changed hands a few times, it changed names. It was known as Street Corner and it definitely diminished. Amazingly there was this core of 5 to 6 vendors who kept it going with some support and were still going out and selling it. At that point there was two [papers] and one of them was Street Corner and it was literally a couple of photocopied papers stapled together.

So that’s where I got involved and there was a need to jump in and help out. I’d been introduced to it and I’d learned a little bit about it through some journalism work so we started to build it back up. We saw that it was a project that had once been really successful in Vancouver and there was clearly a ton of examples of it being successful around the world. You could definitely see the impact solely by the fact that there were these core vendors. It had been so transformative in their lives that they needed it still and they wanted it to keep going. So we said “We’re on to something here, we’ve got to bring this back up.”

So what year was this?
2006. And at that time it was just something part-time I did. I was working at a the Westender and Adbusters, and so we just kind of did it at nights and when we could and I got lots of help from everybody involved. A lot more people got involved. We changed the name to Megaphone in 2008. That’s where we’ve been at. We just keep trying to grow, trying to get more people to learn about it, trying to get more vendors.

The vendors have grown from, when I got involved there were about 5 or 6 and now there are about 30-35.

Are the vendors pretty constant or do some change from month-to-month depending life circumstances?
Yeah, we have a core of about 10-15 I’d say who are really pretty constant, and I’d say there is another 20-30 that pop in and out. Usually how it works is on any given issue there are about 30. And that’s okay. That’s what it’s about. It’s what we call “low threshold employment.” It’s meant to always be there for them if they need it and meet them at their level. And if they’re not able to work for whatever reason, that’s okay. It’s here for them when they get back. They’re not going to get fired.

For a lot of people with challenges, keeping a steady job is difficult because there is the fear of being fired if they have to take time off.
Yeah, they’re afraid that they won’t be allowed to come back, and certainly we try to encourage and build up the vendors as much as possible so they are as consistent as possible because that helps improve their sales, but, you know, this is their reality and that’s okay. Sometimes we’ve had vendors who started off really consistently but….They always had this thing they could look to. They knew it would be there and that was encouraging for them. Each time they connect with Megaphone the longer it would be, to the point that they were more stable.

What is your circulation?
We print 2000 copies. We’re pretty small to other street papers. I think when we first started the circulation was just about a few hundred, so we’ve just gone from there.

Do most issues sell out? Are the vendors pretty successful in selling the amounts that they’ve got?
Yeah, that does them pretty good.

So every month it’s putting about $5000 into the vendors’ pockets?
Yeah, it’s good. And it’s definitely and importantly a crucial thing for some people. Vancouver is a really expensive city, getting by….For some of our vendors this is their sole source of income. They may be on disability and they’re able to earn a little bit of cash to have a better standard of living. The impact that has on their health, their mental health, not just their standard of living, is huge.

How is the magazine financed?
The 75¢ that we sell to the vendor basically covers our printing costs. The rest of the funding comes through donations and grants. There are some ads. They’re not really a revenue generator, yet, partly because our circulation is a bit lower so it’s hard to go around to companies and say “Advertise in a publication with a distribution of 2000.” And also because people don’t yet understand. I’ve had so many conversations with companies and they think it’s only distributed in the DTES because low-income people are selling, only low-income people are buying it. There’s a lot of stereotypes that we also have to constantly work on on all sides. So one of them is that, yeah.

But we’re getting a little bit more support. We got Save-on-Meats to come on as an advertiser for a year.

You mentioned the stereotype about where Megaphone is sold and who buys it. How wide is the distrubtion?
We have vendors up in Kerrisdale, Kitsilano, Point Grey. We had a vendor up in the UBC area one time. Cambie Village. Commercial Drive, we have a couple of guys who go to Commercial Drive.

Do the vendors themselves decide to go to these areas and see if someone will buy the magazine?
Some of them, definitely, go out there and try to see where they’re comfortable and try to find spots that they think is going to have a good mix of traffic. Usually it has to be some place that’s not too busy. We have guys downtown, too, still. And that’s one of the things we do, we try to help them out with where we think good spots are and  we have maps and ideas and hot spots that we suggest.

What’s the production schedule like?
It’s 24 pages, so there’s a lot to fill, and we have a really incredible team of volunteer editors and writers and designers that put the magazine together. So usually the next issue starts at least a week before. It’s a matter of having a news editor who looks at trying to always get some good copy about current events and stuff, so issues focussed around the downtown eastside or issues that affect marginalized people. It’s having someone in charge of arts, so we can have some arts stories and arts blurbs. We make sure we always have a strong feature to anchor it up, to anchor the issue.

And then bringing in what is such an important component, what you saw at the Interurban, making sure we have those pieces that come from writers from the Downtown Eastside, marginalised voices, vendors, and ensuring that their stories and voices are represented in each as well. So to do that we have to coordinate with our writing workshop facilitators. Right now we have 8 classes that we do, and it’s fluctuated, but right now we have 8. And so they’ll work with their writers on a weekly basis and then they submit content from that to the editor, and then the editor works on that, picks and chooses. That is actually probably the toughest job because we have just a mountain of submissions of some beautiful, wonderful pieces and we can’t fit them all in. And we want to give everyone a chance and opportunity, so that’s always the tricky bit. But it’s such an important component.

So on average how much content is contributed through writing programs?
We dedicate on average about 4 pages out of the 24, and a few pages are just the masthead and the cover and some ads, so roughly about a quarter to a third of each issue has content from our vendors and people in the writing programs. And that has been an intersting development becuase when we started, we had maybe a couple of vendors contributing stuff and it was always the piece that we were really missing at first. Once the writing workshop program started it just started to snowball and  from there it just grew.  We really started to be able to tap into this amazing pool of talented people and voices, something that we felt was so essential to be a street paper and what our mission and values were. That’s been an incredible aspect of the magazine that has changed over time and that we make sure to entrench in the magazine.

The people who volunteer to do the editorial stuff, what are their backgrounds, where are they coming from?
For the most part, it’s journalism backgrounds. My experience when I was doing journalism was that I would do a lot of stories about homelessness and those were important, I felt they were important, and it was great, but I felt that there was something missing. Because you would do a story about the homelessness crisis and put it out there, someone might read it and then you just felt they would turn the page and then what happens? I think a lot of journalists connect with this [volunteering at Megaphone] because this is a way for them to use their craft to directly help a homeless, low-income person. I know my story will now have this other purpose to it as well, on top of also informing people. And it wonderfully connects the two becuase the issues in the paper go back to the seller and the issues they’re facing.

So, yeah, generally we’ve been really lucky to have journalists from Langara and UBC schools of journalism that have come in to volunteer.

I studied journalism at two different schools and while at both we pasted up the newspaper by hand it was only at the second that there was attention paid to making sure things were straight.
(Sean laughs) That was our first priority, too. When we took over the street paper we said “Okay, first order of business is to make everything look straight. Keep the lines straight and let’s not steal stories off the Internet anymore.” That’s one of the things street papers do is just grabbing articles and turning around and printing them.
Sean Condon at his bare bones desk inside The Blueberry Building, a space shared by Megaphone Magazine, PIVOT Legal Society, and the Hope in Shadows Project, in East Vancouver.

I was surprised and disappointed that there were so few people in the audience at the InterUrban event. There’s still a stigma. And I guess it’s the same trying to get people to come to a reading. You say “It’s at the Interurban, which is across the street from Pigeon Park. And they say…”

“Yeah, uh, no thanks.”

Slowly but surely we’ll chip away and start to spread the word and more people will come out. It’s good. It’s something that takes time. You know.

I think people still have a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions about the neighbourhood. But time and time again I constantly encounter these situations where as soon as they actually sit down and take the time and read, then they’re absolutely blown away. “This was really powerful and amazing and not what I expected.”

We got this wonderful and kind of funny review in the Vancouver Sun about our Voices of the Street issue and it was unfortunate that [the review] came a few months later but it’s kind of telling to think of what a lot of the stereotypes are. So when we launched [Voices in the Street] we sent out our press packages and somehow I guess this issue landed on the desk of the, I think it’s the online editor of the Sun and I can’t remember his name, [Kevin Griffin] but he wrote this wonderful review  but not until like, and we sent this out in April, not until June. And he admits in the story that it had been sitting on his desk for months and he was really reluctant to read it because he thought it was going to be full of all these really earnest and, probably what he was thinking were crappy, articles and stuff like that that were just going to be sad and predictible.  And so he didn’t read it and then finally three months later he picks it up and he was blown away. And he wrote this beautiful review about it and he totally got it. He got where these wrtiers are coming from, their styles and the stories that they’re telling, but you can still see it takes a while.

One of your writers that read at the Interurban, Henry, read a piece of his that was published in Geist. How did that come about?
Through workshops. We were really lucky. Our writing workshops coordinator Daniel Zomparelli is the publisher at Poetry is Dead and he volunteereed at Geist. So Henry would come down every Friday and talk to Daniel and Daniel would just help work with him. Henry also participates in our workshop called “Thursday’s Collective” at the Carngie, which is different. They have an amazing facilitator there.

And it’s just the evolution of these writers, writers who have so much talent. When they start you can see that there is this reservation, there’s this lack of confidence in their abilities and just working with them, getting them published first and foremost, you can see the transformation that happens because suddenly it validates everything and it gives them that credibility and it shows them that they are incredible writers, that they have incredible talents and this is a beatutiful and wonderful piece that anyone and everyone should read. Then with the workshops we can just keep working with them and say “Not only can we help you get stuff in Megaphone, which is great, but if you are looking for stuff to go beyond we are here to help out with that as well.”

So, that was a great natural evolution and a credit to Henry’s talents and just trying to help him access the different media.

Jim Rider who was the second guy [who read at Interurban], when we first met him he was just so frustrated. He gave us a USB stick of something like 300 poems. And he was just “I’ve been writing for so long and nobody will publish my stuff.” And we were “Jim, we’ll publish your stuff,” but he really didn’t believe it at first, but when he finally saw it, wow.

And since then we often get published in other literary issues, like White Rabbit Quarterly. We’re trying to hopefully, for some of these guys, be a springboard to getting published, because the more that other people can read their stuff the greater it is for those individual writers, the greater it is, I think, for the message from the community.

For so many people, just getting published is such a barrier. Getting access to who to contact, how to contact them, how to submit your stuff, is such a huge barrier. The language and the means are not very accessible for a  lot of low-income and marginalized people, and so because of that they get dismissed, they get ignored. So hopefully what Megaphone can do, partly, is to be, again, a springboard for those voices and show that “Yeah, we’ll publish that for you, we’re honoured to publish that, and how can we help you get published elsewhere.” How can we help our artist writers get publsihed across the city and across the country.

With the magazine, that’s one of the things in terms of stereotypes. We don’t just publish anyone and everyone, right? We make sure that we’re always maintaining a high level of quality, and there’s been NO problem down here. We’ve never had a problem with the amount of quality, of amazing work, but still we need to enforce that because people are going to judge Megaphone more harshly, they are going to judge these writers more harshly. They’re going to assume they’re not talented and so we have to work extra hard to validate these voices and to show  that not only are these voices we need to listen to, to give everybody the opportunity to be have a voice, but in fact these are incredible writers that everyone should be listening to and everyone can enjoy and appreciate, and respect.

Megaphone Issue 95 was published on January 13, 2012 and focuses on the vendors, and their resolutions for the new year. It also includes articles by Katie Hyslop, David Suzuki, and Crawford Killian, and poetry by Henry Doyle.

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. It’s an interesting book. A kind of elegant, fantastic fable based around a magical carnival. There’s dueling magicians and acrobats, contortionists, big tops, apple cider, etc. The book has generally received raving reviews – emphasis on the raving more than the review – and I hope that it finishes as the triumph that it is setting itself up to achieve.  Though I have a suspicion that the book is over 100 pages too long.

How do you like your lit served – audio books, graphic novels, used paperbacks, library loaner, e-reader, other?

Paper and ink is the preferred method of transference. It’s more durable, travels through time better, doesn’t suffer outages, battery drain, digital hindrances. Audio is also great. It delivers the voice and the cadence, which can be important. Second hand stores are crucial to the survival of literature and should not be underestimated, same goes for libraries.  e-Readers are a temporary distraction provided by a confused industry. Their greatest legacies will be to choke countless landfills with their meaningless obsolete dead touch screen technologies, the memory of e-ink, and the false promise of convenience.

What publication could you not live without?

Bidoun Magazine, the Believer, Grantland, Fader Magazine.

Where is your favourite place to crack open a book in Vancouver?

The W2 Media Cafe.

What books have changed your life/influenced you the most?

The stories and novels of Vladimir Nabokov were very influential for me. Martin Amis’ London Fields. Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects, among others by her, were also really important. I’m sure that I’m forgetting more than a few.

The B’s: Bukowksi, Baudelaire, Burroughs.

It’s a bit of a sausage party. I’m trying to change that.

What is the most cherished item in your library?

The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson. 1st Edition slip-cased. Mint condition.

The one book you always recommend is…

If you haven’t read Lolita, you must.

Your life story is published tomorrow, the title is…

Never Not Now: Reliable Advice for Time Travelers.

Photographs courtesy of Sean Cranbury.

The next W2 Real Vancouver Writers’ event is Tuesday, January 24 at 7 pm at W2 Media Cafe.

This past week local author JJ Lee was announced as a finalist for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Nikki Reimer takes the measure of Lee’s book.

JJ Lee at Modernize Tailors. Photo by Simon Hayter for National Post (C).

I take the jacket off and hold it to my face. After all the steam and tears and cuts and pricked fingers and knotted loose threads, the scent lingers, if only in my imagination—cigarettes, sweat, vanilla, him.

Lee, 284.

Today I am wearing a vintage black-with-white-polka-dot polyester blouse. Two buttons fasten tightly at the wrist. Wide pointed collar. The shirt is genuine 1970s vintage and doesn’t really breathe, though I appreciate the way it fits me better than most modern dress shirts: it’s more fitted in the underarms, bust and waist and more generous in the hips. (They don’t make clothes for pear-shaped girls like they used to.)

Hipster bonus points: like nearly half of my current wardrobe, the blouse belonged to my dead grandmother. Though I’ve washed it countless times since it came into my possession in the late 1990s (she died in 2008), I still sense—or imagine I sense—her aroma: Anais Anais cut with cigarettes and musk. When I wear her clothes I am also wearing her. Kids, take note: clothing, and scent memories, are powerful, heady stuff. To put on somebody else’s clothes is to engage in homage, revision, reinvention, necromancy.

JJ Lee, local fashion critic, true gentleman and stylish man-about-town explores the black art of inherited clothing in his recent non-fiction work, the GG-nominated and Charles Taylor shortlisted The Measure Of A Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (McLelland & Stewart, 2010) with wit and humility.

Part biofiction, part historical survey of the modern suit, The Measure Of A Man traces Lee’s journey from childhood to manhood in the shadow of an imperfect father. It begins with the story of his parents’ courtship and marriage, continues through his childhood and adolescence—full of tumult due to the mercurial fortunes and mercurial moods of Lee senior—into early adulthood and an apprenticeship at Chinatown’s renowned Modernize Tailors; and ends in the present day where Lee himself is the father to young twin boys. Throughout this journey he watches his father, wanting-and-not-wanting to be his father’s kind of man, wanting-and-not-wanting to don the same kind of suit with the same flashy masculine presence.

Lee traces his biofiction against explorations of tailors past and present and the story of suiting: the one particular cloth garment inherited by Lee after his father dies, and the suit, the modern day suit of armor in all of its adaptations from the original suit of the knight into the suit worn by nice guys and sharks alike in our postmodern corporate era. Lee’s drawings of figures such as Beau Brummel, the late eighteenth century London fashion critic who made ultra-tight pants and dandyism respectable, sprinkle the book with charm.

Tie sketch by JJ Lee

I found the story eminently relatable, entertaining, informative and moving, sometimes for very personal reasons: my personal style icon was my grandmother, a demanding woman who was sometimes hard to love, and I share Lee’s passion—though not his expertise—for the inherent romantic power of clothes. He stitches a good tale together from the layered threads of personal narrative and historical fact—reading it reminded me of watching Baba lay out a pattern on tracing paper. I am quiet, and I watch, and though I don’t learn a damn thing about how to thread a needle or make a piece of clothing, despite her best efforts to teach me, I do learn that clothes are so much more than simple garments to cover the naked body. Clothes are about art, emotion, gender, sex, status and power: who we are and who we want to be.

-by Nikki Reimer

This week we look at Anvil Press and talk to Founder & Publisher Brian Kaufman and Marketing Coordinator Karen Green about Anvil’s beginnings, their 20th birthday and the Vancouver literary scene. Plus, the love not lost between Brian and the e-book.

In 1991 Brian Kaufman received a slim volume on waste called A Toilet Paper, or, A Treatise on Four Fundamental Words Referring to Gaseous and Solid Wastes Together with Their Point of Origin. At the time he was publishing subTerrain, which he had founded in 1988, and this little book was the opportunity the magazine had been looking for. Anvil Press had been formed to publish subTerrain but they hoped to become fuller supporters of literary up and comers; specifically, “contemporary Canadian literature with a distinctly urban twist.”

What was the impetus for starting Anvil Press?

Brian: I formed Anvil as the publishing company of subTerrain magazine – I wanted to do books but I didn’t know how that was going to happen. Once I found out how magazines were funded, I thought we have to make subTerrain a non-profit organization and we separated the two [in the '90s]. I wanted to do a magazine that had a little more edge, a little more grit, a little more from the street than a lot of the magazines and their tenor that I encountered at the time that were mostly university and college journals. They’ve morphed a lot over the years too, but they used to seem to me very incestuous in the fact that they published a lot of the people that taught there or other profs, and it was hard for younger writers to get into those venues. So that was the initial idea, the play on the word “subterrain,” it was a little underground.

Karen: Plus, you couldn’t find a job in publishing.

The book that started it all (left) and Vancouver Noir (right), one of Anvil Press’s most recent offerings.

B: It’s funny, we share offices with Talon now, I remember going to Talon’s old offices on Cordova, down by the sugar refinery in an old warehouse, and talking to them and really things haven’t changed much: Karl [Siegler, Talon's recently retired president and publisher] was there and Mary Schedlinger was editing there at the time. They didn’t have any openings, they said, “we kind of have to do everything in house, there aren’t any jobs.”

I went to Pulp [Arsenal Pulp Press], I actually volunteered with Pulp for a very short time and it was kinda the same thing. Brian Lam was just starting there and, like, two other people.… So that’s the choices you have. If there’s no jobs or no way to get into it, what are you going to do? And that’s how a lot of [small presses] have started up, over the years, is usually a group of writers getting together and saying “screw it, let’s just to it.”

 Thus the Anvil symbol?

B: Yeah, sort of. It was a worker symbol, right, for forging something into being, a proletarian. I can’t say more…sounds good too, especially when you hit it. I didn’t know at the time, there’s another Anvil in England [Anvil Press Poetry].

K: We get emails for them all the time.

B: I don’t know why people don’t find them, they find us so much easier.

K: They probably get emails for us too occasionally I’m sure.

B: I met [the founder] at a book fair once and he seemed slightly miffed; “Oh yeah you.”

Can you give us a taste of Anvil in the beginning? A story of a publisher starting out?

B: When you’re starting something you should be optimistic and a bit of a dreamer, but we purchased a printing press…

K: I don’t think I’ve even heard this story.

B: …and thought, we’ll print the poetry books ourselves and that will save a lot of money. They weigh a tonne and you have to know what you’re doing – we actually did know a printer who could do it. It’s a nightmare story of trying to get the thing into the truck and moved in the pouring rain. Just a nightmare – the thing’s top heavy, [we had] fears of someone getting their legs chopped off…. It seemed good in the plan, but you have to keep a press running regularly. If they sit there then everything slips out of position and someone has to tune it up. We did do two issues of the magazine, but they weren’t the greatest quality…. Where did that wind up? At Tom Snyder’s? I think he owes us a couple hundred dollars.

Anvil Press founder and publisher Brian Kaufman. Photo by Maegan Thomas

As a more mature press, have you been able to maintain that focus on up and coming writers, that underground flavour? How do you survive?

B: For the most part. The more you work in any business, it’s fine tuning and developing and especially in the cultural industry, I think, you have to find ways of surviving. So to be a purist, and some are, it’s much harder if you say “I’m going to do the hard experimental literary stuff and I’m not going to do anything else because that’s what I think is important.” But that’s a hard sell, or just doing strictly poetry is a hard sell. If you look closely at all the publisher’s catalogues you’ll see the balance they’re trying to work out. An example, in Toronto, is ECW press: they started out purely literary and now they’ve got a whole line of sports books and celebrity biographies and books on the wrestling craze.

K: But they still do the literary books too.

B: It’s a way of generating revenue so you can do the strange, experimental [works].

K: Sometimes you can make money on those books, and sometimes you can make money on the literary ones too.

B: There’s no guarantee [the non-literary] books will sell either.

K: There’s no guarantee on any of them. That’s one I thing I find: you try to guess which ones will be the big sellers and 75% of the time you’re wrong. It’s something that you didn’t even think was going to take off does and the one we were so sure about doesn’t get the traction. Which makes it exciting.

What are some big surprises you’ve had?

B: We had one this year that was like that, a non-fiction book about a woman, a memoir, The House with the Broken Two [by Myrl Coulter]. It’s about giving up her first child at the age of 16 for adoption and then 30 years later tracking down her son and finding him. And that’s not an uncommon story, or odd, but there’s a lot of people would be interested in it. So we thought it would do alright…

K. And it’s doing amazing for a first book, it’s doing really well. And she’s been getting invited to festivals and things, while other authors that have been around a long time may have trouble getting invites to festivals. It makes it exciting – you just don’t know how the public or the media or the festivals are going to react. Or if they are going to react at all. [laughs]

B: And Tony Burgess’ novella [Ravenna Gets], that we published, is a strange little book. He won the ReLit award in the short fiction category. That probably doesn’t result in a lot of sales, but it’s the kinda book that people could have just said, oh that’s weird, and that would be the end of it.

K: It’s not a mainstream book.

B: But that’s the stuff we wanna do, that’s important for either what they are doing with form, or writing or the voice…

K: Or they’re going to an uncomfortable place that a lot of people don’t want to go.

B: So over the years, we started off just doing or wanting to do that kinda stuff and having to look at making a little bit of money over the years – we haven’t gone as far, no wrestling, no cookbooks. It’s more in the non-fiction where we are doing what we didn’t before, interesting cultural books.

K: That are still within the mandate…

B: Yeah. Most of our non-fiction is about Vancouver. I’m a Vancouverite, I have an interest in the history of Vancouver.

Some of Anvil’s most recently acclaimed books

Anvil Press recently celebrated their 20th anniversary. What’s your overall feeling on your twenty years? Oh, and how was the party?

Brian: It is great to have made it to twenty in an industry that is fraught with challenges, change and upheaval. It has been a roller coaster ride and we are rocketing forward and ready for another twenty! There are so many people to thank – the authors, the folks that have helped out along the way – and many of them were there at the 20th anniversary party and that was amazing. Old and new friends, it was a great night.

Karen: It’s wild to be twenty. Although, [it's different being] out of our teens. “You can’t be twenty on Sugar Mountain.”  Many new and old friends were at the Anvil 20th party, as well as many Anvil authors: Dennis E. Bolen, Teresa McWhirter, Jim Oaten, Janis Harper, Bryan Wade, Catherine Owen, Jenn Farrell, Bob Robertson, John Belshaw, Diane Purvey, Calvin Wharton, and Michael Barnholden. The two who made it to the very end were Jamie Reid and Calvin Wharton, poets of course! (Jenn Farrell and Rob Hughes were a close second.)

How is Anvil Press participating in the e-book movement?

K: It’s not our high priority but…

B: We’ve digitized about half our back list.

K: There’s a project through the ACP [Association of Canadian Publishers] that made it a lot easier to do that, it’s a group project. I don’t think we would have done anything if we were by ourselves. But they help us and get [the digital copies] placed. And there was a subsidy. We haven’t touched poetry; some people have, but we haven’t because of line breaks etc. Nor our highly illustrated texts. It’s just fiction and straight text non-fiction.

B: Plus, I’m not a big advocate of the e-book. It’s not “book.”

K: As the person who works on the marketing side, I feel much more passion for the actual book than the e-thing, but if our readers, if some of them want it that way, we’re gonna give it to them that way. I do think there’s going to be a market for the actual book.

B: Consumers will decide.

K: The kind of press that we are, I don’t see the book version disappearing. The bigger publishers that do a lot more mass market stuff will be more affected.

B: It could look okay on a reader once they get to a point…what bothers me most about current readers is that they can’t maintain the aesthetic of the actual typesetting.

What are your impressions of the Vancouver literary community?

B: It’s amazingly strong and healthy in Vancouver…. Ultimately we are all trying to promote the health of writing in Vancouver.

K: We’re all on the same team, or should be….I think the publishing community, locally, is a very friendly community that helps each other, but there’s also friendly competition that way. I find the BC publishing community is very nice to each other and shares valuable information. There’s friendly competition over books and authors for sure.

B: I’ve had calls from other publishers saying, “We’re thinking of doing this book from so and so and I know you’ve published her before, do you have a problem with that?” and I’ve done the same thing.

K: We all have our little niches but we cross over. We do sometimes send authors to each other too, because we might get something great but it’s not an Anvil Press book. You should go try so and so and we’ll give that publisher a heads up.

What are your next steps? Any predictions for the Vancouver literary scene in 2012?

B: Well, we have some wonderful books coming out this year: Five Little Bitches, a new novel from local Teresa McWhirter; absurdist, fabulist stories from Nova Scotia writer Elaine McCluskey; new volumes of poetry from Patrick Friesen and Stuart Ross; a follow-up novel from Annette Lapointe and a few surprises we can’t yet talk about!

As to the scene and trends, well…who knows, right? Vancouver has so much literary activity going on that I am always expecting to be surprised and astonished by something/someone new. So, whether you like your words on paper or on a glowing tablet, keep your eyes peeled, for I am sure there will be many splendid works coming our way in 2012.

K: Yikes, it’s always hard to predict, but we had a great 2011 – many accolades for our authors. I would hope for more of the same! …The literary scene in Vancouver seems to get more and more bustling and vibrant each year, not just more writers, but more people interested in organizing writing and publishing events, writing about books, etc. There appears to be a lot of interest in Vancouver’s writers and books as well as guests from afar. It’s uplifting and exciting…. The only negative is the loss of great bookstores in the city. I hope we can support the remaining ones and maybe see new ones emerge, as well as other venues for books.

Read All Over celebrates the bookworm in all of us, showcasing readers in Vancouver and the books they love most.   Vancouver native Alex Leslie’s collection of short stories People Who Disappear will be published by Freehand Books in April and her chapbook of microfictions 20 Objects For The New World was published by Nomado in 2011. She teaches for Megaphone Magazine’s community writing program, which runs workshops in living facilities and drop-in centres in the Downtown Eastside and The West End. She is not twee.You can catch Alex reading at Play Cthonics with bill bissett on Jan. 18.

Lucy the dog is co-writer of Alex Leslie’s short fictions

Who is your favourite Vancouver/Lower Mainland writer?

Naming favourites stresses me out because it implicitly makes everybody else a non-favourite, which leads to my fear of ranking people. Also I like so many different kinds of writing that I can’t answer the question honestly. And also my tastes change quickly, which means I’m either eclectic or fickle. A few local writers whose work I loved this year: Richard Van Camp. This video of one of his poems/stories blows me away:

Richard Van Camp, The Uranium Leaking from Port Radium and Ray Rock Mines is Killing Us

I also loved Garry Thomas Morse‘s poetry collection (or long poem, however you read it) Discovery Passages. And Meredith Quartermain’s collection of microfictions Recipes From The Red Planet, which is playful and ingenious and strange.

Do you have a favourite story set in Vancouver?

I love Eden Robinson’s story Terminal Avenue. One of my favourite short stories, period. Downtown Eastside literature now has a certain cultural capital so I’ve become wary of that niche/trend, but Terminal Avenue is great.

Where is your favourite place to crack open a book in Vancouver?

I read a lot on public transit, while listening to my iPod. I WALK AMONG YOU.

What’s next on your reading list?

Camille Roy’s Sherwood Forest (futurepoem press) just arrived on my doorstep. I want to read Laurie Week’s Zipper Mouth put out by the CUNY Feminist Press. I’ve been meaning to read Amber Dawn’s Sub Rosa for a long time. I want to read Roxane Gay’s first book Aiyiti, which just came out. And Bhanu Kapil’s new book Schizophrene which just came out of Nightboat Books.

What writer excites you right now?

We went to the Indigenous Media Art festival at W2 in the fall and I saw an incredible short film by Chris Bose, who’s based in Kelowna (I think). It was a collage of film, text, historical footage. Chaotic but very planned and moving. That defines “writing” very broadly, but it is art/writing that excites me.

What writer would you love to see read their work?

I don’t know. I tend to stumble across interesting things unexpectedly and the people I think will be good turn out to be boring. I now accept that I have horrible luck/judgment. I’d like to see the writer who I haven’t heard of yet. I don’t mean that in a twee/zen way, I swear to god, she said defensively.

Do you read newspapers and if you do, which one(s), online or print, and why?

I look at rabble online pretty regularly. I read various blogs and they link to news stuff regularly. I look through the print version of The Globe and Mail every couple days, but I’m not a devoted newspaper reader. If I’m interested in a news topic I will internet binge on it until I’ve read every fucking thing out there about it that Google can find. That is basically how I write short stories, incidentally. Ha. Ha.

What magazines/journals can you not live without?

I could live without magazines and journals. Is that a horrible thing to say? But I couldn’t live without books and they’re interrelated economies. Online I like HTMLGIANT, becuase I read about small press American experimental writing I wouldn’t otherwise (although you do have to comb through the tweeness), and Lambda Literary online, which is an incredible resource for reviews of queer books. I also look for book reviews and interviews on The Rumpus sometimes.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

I don’t know if it’s a mentor-type conversation, but I do appreciate Meredith Quartermain’s work in bringing together female writers in Vancouver through her social organizing and her Rhizomatics group and also through Nomados, the press she runs with her partner Peter Quartermain. Many writers are self-involved and Meredith’s a great example of how to be generous with others.

Alex Leslie’s first book of short stories People Who Disappear will be released this spring from Freehand Books

Photos courtesy of Alex Leslie