Lorna Jackson & Words on the Water

Just received word that Lorna Jackson will be appearing at the Campbell River Words on the Water Fest on Saturday, March 28th. Details can be found here.

Thin Air, Take Two: An Interview with Lorna Jackson

Over at the Thin Air blog, HOT AIR, there's a short and sweet interview with Lorna Jackson about Cold-cocked, Flirt, reading, writing and interviews in general. Another opportunity to plug one of the most enjoyably dark and off-the-wall collections we've had a chance to be part of at Biblioasis (Flirt: The Interviews), and a very fine writer. Flirt should still be available on any bookstore shelf worthy of the name in the country; Cold-cocked may not be quite as easy to find, but as hockey season starts again -- spent Thursday eve watching the Windsor Spitfires, ranked number one at the moment in the country, demolish the Sarnia Sting, with Emerson, and I expect there's a lot more OHL events in our future -- this is certainly worth digging up if you failed to last season.

The interview with Lorna can be found here:

/thinair2008.blogspot.com/2008/09/line-of-inquiry-lorna-jackson.html

Flirt: The Globe Review

A fabulous, smart, funny, moving, convincing, flirtatious review of Jackson's Flirt in the GLOBE this morn. Katia Grubisic: I owe you at least a shot of an (un)reasonable scotch the next time you're either in Emeryville, or I make it back to Montreal! (I know, I know: destined to be the latter.)

Katia-the interviewer-cum-reviewer: "I like the book more each time I read it." Which is what I was saying in yesterday's post. This is a book you read more than once. It keeps drawing me back to it (the last time being yesterday, hence the post), if only for the pleasure of dipping in for a few pages. It's as gratifying, as pleasurable, as a back-rub from Janet Jones Gretzky. Not that I've had one of those. Yet. But an impoverished publisher can dream, can't he?

So, please, go out and buy the damned book before Chapters/Indigo sends them all back.

FICTION

In which I flirt with Lorna

KATIA GRUBISIC

June 14, 2008

FLIRT

The Interviews

By Lorna Jackson

Biblioasis, 93 pages, $16.95

Print Edition - Section Front

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Lorna! Oh. Sorry.

- Mouthful of hair, sorry.

- I'm used to the two-cheek Montreal kiss. Leads to accidental making out when I try it with West-Coasters.

- The West Coast doesn't kiss. Flirting's transgression enough.

- Were you trying to be transgressive with this book, a literary incarnation of flirting?

- Not particularly. Just to show ... Just a coffee for me. This is a great old dive.

- Do you have The Macallan? 15? 21? Thanks.

- This was one of only three that got licences after Prohibition, the other two long gone. Vancouver's reinvented itself 14 times since we played here. "I lived in the city when it meant something, before it meant so little." I say that in the book.

- In Flirt, every short story is a mock-interview - with musicians, athletes, writers - cobbled together from real interviews, research, biographies, but each piece crescendos to reveal the interviewer. Like your first collection and your novel, the primacy of character is what drives the story. The tone is similarly edgy, too; you describe breastfeeding as being stabbed with a chainsaw.

- Alice Munro takes exception to the feasibility of that comparison.

- You've always done violence well, the latent violence of how hard it is to live a hard life well. You strike a risky balance between tenderness and honesty. Your writing revs. Mark Jarman summarized it as Hamlet meets Baywatch.

- Mark's a hoot.

- You wouldn't have wanted to flirt with him in this one? Or Hamlet, for that matter? David Hasselhoff?

- Nah. Flirting with Mark, we'd've ended up eloping to Vegas in robot suits or something. Hamlet's too wordy wordy wordy, and as for the Hass, I don't like men with bigger breasts than mine. Anyway, you're here with Lorna the character. Ask me about the interviews. Lorna the writer is home watching the game.

- Right, yes. The writer is not a tube of toothpaste, sayeth Atwood.

- But I toy with that autobiographical distance.

- Lorna-the-writer's last book was about hockey. In Flirt, we see you cruising around with Bobby Orr in his Cadillac, kayaking with your real-life pretend boyfriend Markus Naslund, getting a backrub from Janet Gretzky. What is it about hockey?

- You know, it's the facing opposition, often against the odds, and then someone at last does something. It's not unlike an interview, with a different set of players.

- Constructing the self by confronting the other. And the self is the story? I was concerned initially about the lack of linear plot in Flirt. I was worried too about keeping track of who's saying what. Like in some unattributed dialogue, when you find yourself counting backward to figure out the speaker. But the voices here are clear, just idiosyncratic enough. And the through line is Lorna-the-character's need to tell her stories, the way everybody has stories, plural.

- Yeah. To quote myself quoting Richard Ford, whose answers to the mock interview are lifted from a real interview I did with him.

- But your questions were different?

- The character I construct, her thoughts on writing, art, fatherhood, daughterhood, teenage love and rebellion, all that is elaborated against those real answers, yes.

- What was your favourite mock-terview? The Janet Gretzky is hilarious; she's so self-helpish, repressed. Has abolished the first-person singular pronoun. Says gosh.

- Totally wanted me.

- Totally. And Alice Munro - "Maybe it's flirting you smell, not manure." Your frustration with how she wrote Dance of the Happy Shades while her girls were napping ...

- ... while my daughter wailed, "Come get me, you slut," as soon as I sat down with a pad of paper.

- You have a little crush on Alice Munro. That's probably the most seductive interview, you coyly reminding her of the end of Floating Bridge ...

- Great story; she dances so much so fast, without her "tights getting saggy."

- You seemed sweet on Benjamin Britten, too. By that last piece, the protagonist-cum-interviewer has told her whole story, in subtle bits that emerge organically, if somewhat megalomaniacally, through each conversation: the older sister who died young, the father who ineptly faked his own death, the string of musician boyfriends, the end of alcoholism. What's Britten like?

- Meticulously attentive, even posthumously, waiting for the world to amaze him, wondering what instrument he'll use to mimic the happy hens cavorting roosterless nearby. He held my hands, you know.

- Yeah, I liked that part. It was sincere; the interview rings true, sketches the subject exactly while touching on your own ars poetica.

- So it works, the character of the interviewer?

- Perfect. I like the book more each time I read it. She's a great character, flawed in all the right places, the kind of hard knocks all women would dare to rub up against, and sympathetic because it is hard, but you live it anyway. No self-pity ...

- Gawd no. Suck it up, snarls my Don Cherry-esque alter ego.

- You get the secondary characters, too -- you explain an absent God and do a full portrait of the dead sister in three sentences. A cutlery-coddling husband. Chelios. Thurber the spaniel.

- The story emerges from those details. Storytelling, like interviewing, is about the ability to lead your audience to a different perspective.

- You ask Britten whether "superficial effects are the will of the material, rather than the ego of the artist." Alluding to writing as well as to his Three Divertimenti?

- A writer has to listen to the writing, to the characters, in order to know the story and how to tell it.

- A good listener, in short. Like a musician, like ... You used to be a bassist, right? Good listeners. And bassists are hot.

- Are you flirting with me?

Katia Grubisic bats her eyelashes and drinks reasonable scotch in Montreal. Her first collection of poems, What If Red Ran Out, was published this spring.

Lorna Jackson Flirts with Richard Ford.

I haven't posted enough about this book yet. Available for about two months now, we only got around to launching last weekend in Victoria. There's only been scant coverage thus far -- a rather poor review of it in Q&Q, an article in a Victoria paper -- the Times-Colonist? -- which got many of its facts mixed up. A piece last week or this I have not seen yet in Monday magazine, Victoria's ALt-weekly. There's a Globe review upcoming, and I expect a few others to follow. Not the wide net cast by Lorna's Cold-cocked, but nor did we expect there to be. It's not a hockey book (though several of the pieces deal in some form with the sport), and it's a book which is awfully hard to define. A book which may fall between the cracks.

Which is a damn shame, as it is certainly the most idiosyncratic book of fiction Biblioasis has published, and perhaps the oddest title that will be published in Canada this year. Is it fiction? Okay, then, short fiction? A strangely arranged novel? A collection of linked riffs? Is it, as we've said in the cover bumpf, a long, comic essay on grief?

It's all of these things, and also brilliant. Comic. Beautifully conceived and written. Every time I look at the book I'm drawn into it, abandon myself to its pages for the pure pleasure of them. It has nothing to do with the interview subjects, Ian Tyson, Bobby Orr, Alice Munro, Janet Jones-Gretzky, Michael Ondaatje, Benjamin Britten. Richard Ford. It is entirely the book's finely crafted sensibility, its humour and sadness, its language and the joy Jackson takes in it. The intelligence and compassion and the absolutely bizarre shape this book takes. So give the damn thing a chance, will you?

As it ahppens, we've put Lorna's Richard Ford interview online on the CNQ website, so you can read it here:

www.notesandqueries.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=85&Itemid=48

Here's an excerpt, which starts with a question from the narrator:

—Do you have anxieties about writing in the first person from the narrative perspective of a guy who has sex with 18 women after his little boy dies, or a guy who thinks Canadians and their sport are boring? Are you afraid friends and family might confuse author and character?

—Absolutely not.

—Is that maturity, or did you never have those anxieties?

—I don’t give a shit.

—And did you never give a shit?

—If I did I made myself quit.

—One more question, Richard, then my time’s up. Who’s writing better short stories than you are?

Cold-cocked: the Blogger's Take & Flirt:The Interviews

After beating the traditional bushes to try and get some play, we sent review copies of Lorna Jackson's Cold-cocked: On Hockey to some of the leading hockey bloggers in the land. Over the last few weeks, several of these have posted reviews. They can be found by following the links below:

On Frozen Blog: http://www.onfrozenblog.com/2008/02/25/cold-cocked-is-a-hot-read/

Hockey Blog in Canada: http://hockey-blog-in-canada.blogspot.com/2008/02/tbc-cold-cocked-on-hockey.html

Scarlett Ice: scarlettice.blogspot.com/2008/02/scarlett-ice-library-cold-cocked-on.html

Untypical Girls: /untypicalgirls.wordpress.com/2008/02/16/book-review-cold-cocked-on-hockey/

Women's Sports Blog: ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports/2008/02/le-book-review.html

There were a couple of others I can't seem to locate right now, but i'll direct them to your attention later. More also quite likely to follow.

Lorna's next book, Flirt: The Interviews should come back from the printer within the next week. There's three hockey-related "interviews" in this collection -- Bobby Orr, Markus Naslund, and Janet Jones-Gretzky -- to go along with Ian Tyson, Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Michael Ondaatje and Benjamin Britten. "Interviews", in quotation marks, because they are, of course, fiction, or a pastiche of fiction, interview, news articles and biographies, and lord knows what else. It's the oddest book we'll be publishing this year, the hardest to define, and perhaps the most enjoyable. A collection of linked fictions in interview form conducted by a woman who would much rather tell her own story than listen to those of her famous subjects, by a woman who simply cannot stop talking about herself. Everything is about her, from Richard Ford's feelings about landscape and Bobby Orr's oft-injured knee, to Ian Tyson's lyrics, Alice Munro's motherhood, Markus Naslund's spirituality. Janet Gretzky's curves. Flirt might be a comic essay on adolescent grief. Or a comic essay on creativity. But perhaps its best to leave it as a collection of linked comic short fictions that mock real interviews and question the sort of information we often find in them.

As I said earlier, the pitching begins. And this is certainly one of our spring books that y'all should make sure you pick up. It's as much fun as you're likely to have between two covers. Which, alas, may say something about those of you who tune into this blog semi-regularly.