Ed Lyons

Ed Lyons has been writing in different styles and different subjects for over 40 years. He is a regular contributor to Poems from the Heron Clan, and has appeared in Albatross, A New Ulster, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. Ed lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA.

What book(s) are you reading right now?

Well, when I have inventory I can't sell, I might donate some to the many little libraries that we have here in Winston-Salem. Free books for neighbours who can't afford them. Well, the last time I did this I lucked into three banned books. We've had a controversy about that in America. I got All Quiet of the Western Front (banned in Nazi Germany), The Gulag Archipelago (banned in the Soviet Union) and Fifty Shades of Gray (inappropriate). I'm working through the second right now. The Gulag Archipelago is an an attempt to recover an erased history, and not a novel.

A book you have read more than once.

I'll talk about On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. It's about his transcontinental travels in the US and Mexico, often with his friend, the real life Neal Cassidy. He writes about numerous other friends as well, adding up to a portrait of the beginning of the Beat Movement. They were at first a group of college Rimbaudians and after that, just plain free spirits, and it is always a rush to read about their high and low times. Kerouac invented a famous technique for storytelling which he called "spontaneous prose." He would set his typewriter up, eat Benzedrine, and type at the speed of thought for days on end. On the Road was written on a teletype roll in three weeks, but this only after years of trial and error.

What is a book you loved reading as a child?

I had some pocket books on meteorology and astronomy. I taught myself to predict weather and find the constellations and planets. I could identify clouds and track hurricanes. I was also interested in aviation and could identify anything at the airport, as well as explain to a first officer how to fly his plane. I thought I would do something scientific with my life, but I had trouble with math.

A book yet-to-be-released which you are looking forward to reading.

The yet-to-be released book I look forward to reading is Anne McMaster's collection of poems in Ulster Scots. I pressed her for an example of the language and she showed me a poem that was simply stunning. She really stole from the ancients! Anne explained the language to me. It's based on Northumbrian dialect Old English while the English language is based on Mercia dialect Old English. That's why I can read Ulster Scots pretty well, while having to work many lessons to get anywhere in Irish.

A book that you feel is underrated and deserves more attention.

An underrated book that is dear to me is Look Homeward, Angel, by North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe. The novel is about growing up in Altamont, which in real life is the mountain city of Asheville. North Carolina is never named, and it's towns and cities have aliases. Winston-Salem is not named at all, but it's such a distinctive city it's plain where it's described.

The protagonist, Eugene Gant, grows up in Altamont around the turn of the last century. The descriptions of the city and environs, its inhabitants, and the boy's own family dynamics, are vivid and the people are real, and often signalled by some personal quirk or tic. Time unfolds slowly, as in a dream many times, as prose approaches the condition.

Professors tend to shy away from Look Homeward, Angel, because it's long and dense and hard to fit in with the American canon. It is all that, but the alert reader will note that the style is working off Joyce. Because it deals with the same subjects as Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses. Only in a different city. Jack Kerouac thought Look Homeward, Angel the Great American novel, and modelled his first attempt on it. Which didn't work. Kerouac had to find his own voice.

P.W. Bridgman

Canadian writer P.W. Bridgman’s third and fourth books—Idiolect (poetry) and The Four-Faced Liar (short fiction)—were published in 2021 by Ekstasis Editions. His writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in, among others, Moth Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Glasgow Review of Books, Grain, The Honest Ulsterman, The Galway Review, The High Window, The Maynard and Skylight 47. Bridgman has given live readings in Vancouver, Victoria, Belfast, Dublin, Glasgow and Melbourne.


Website: www.pwbridgman.ca
Twitter: @PWB_writer1

What book(s) are you reading right now?

As always, I have at least two books on the go at any given time. Usually this means a book of fiction and a book of poems. My reading always takes me to both realms and, if anything, poetry has lately overtaken fiction. Writers from Canada (where I live) and writers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK (to which I have ancestral ties) generally tend to dominate and this is no different at the present.

I have just finished reading Louise Kennedy’s brilliant novel, Trespasses, published this past April. It lingers persistently and pleasingly in my mind. The stock of superlatives available to reviewers and commentators is badly depleted (like an overdrawn line of credit) thanks to Kennedy’s fine writing in Trespasses. One is thus challenged to find a way to praise the book that sounds even remotely original. Let me just say that the novel offers a very vivid, credible and nuanced treatment of a relationship that develops, inconveniently, in a small town near Belfast in the heat of the Troubles. Cushla is a Catholic teacher of young children and part-time barmaid; Michael is a prominent Protestant barrister who makes himself unpopular with unionists and the British security apparatus by representing some clients, mainly youth from the nationalist side, who are charged with terrorist offences. (Some parallels between Michael and the murdered solicitor, Patrick Finucane, can be discerned.) Against the backdrop of the violence of the time and the political, religious and sectarian divisions that fuelled it, this fraught relationship provides Kennedy with plenty to work with in developing both character and plot. Her writing is artful and carefully nuanced. The tender humanity that Cushla displays toward the family of one of her pupils “caught in the middle” is cast in stark relief against some of the harsh and unforgiving tribalism displayed by other characters in the novel who are blessed with little humanity and distressingly unsubtle minds. The writing in this regard is uplifting without being marred by sentimentality. Alas, kindness toward the hapless family that Cushla takes under her wing is, ultimately, her undoing. I will stop there and say no more for fear of adding more “spoilers” to the many that have, regrettably, already been set loose in some of the reviews of Trespasses that have recently been published. Factional conflict of varying kinds plagues our world and so any contemporary explorations of richly human but fraught relationships contextualised by such conflicts seem not only relevant but necessary reading. My guess is that when I cast my eye back over fiction published in 2022, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses will remain securely at the top of my list and be my “novel of the year”.

On the poetry side of the ledger, I have finally gotten down to a deep dive into Canadian poet Kayla Czaga’s 2019 title, Dunk Tank. Czaga burst onto the Canadian poetry scene in 2014 with her first collection, For Your Safety Please Hold On—a bravura literary debut that propelled her quickly to the forefront of the young, new poets to watch in this country. Dunk Tank confirms the depth and breadth of Czaga’s talents. Her poetry is rich with similes and metaphors. People once close to one another gently but inexorably “drift apart like lily pads”. She wrestles with identity, the immigrant experience, early success and the doubts it inevitably spawns, the vexing questions Canadians face in relation to the colonisation of Indigenous peoples—all the big contemporary issues, in other words—but she does so in a strikingly disarming way, viz:

        “I love Superstore. I got
        so happy I nearly died
        at a food court in Honolulu.
        Is that enough affect
        theory for you? Halfway
        through a book gala
        I realized my dress
        was on backwards.

        I am still writing this cliché
        Canadian shit. I am writing
        dogwood and diaspora
        along the lonely shoulders
        of Coastal mountains.
        Sorry I’m so boring.
        Does what sustains me
        have to be invasive
        as blackberries choking
        out native species?
        Does it have to come
        wrapped in so much
        packaging?

Name a book you have given as a gift/recommended to a friend.

That’s easy: Jude Nutter’s 2021 title, Dead Reckoning. I first came upon Jude Nutter’s poetry when I read her intriguingly titled “Disco Jesus and the Wavering Virgins in Berlin, 2011”—a poem that was shortlisted for The Moth Magazine’s Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2015. Some sense of its genius is evidenced by the fact that it was chosen for inclusion in the Forward Book of Poetry, 2022. “Disco Jesus” is one of those poems that will provoke an audible gasp on the first reading. It certainly did for me. A genuine tour de force, it repays repeated readings. “Disco Jesus” set me on a path to find more of Nutter’s work and when I did so I could quickly see that the gifts revealed by my first encounter were at work in her several collections. Dead Reckoning is Jude Nutter’s most recent title. I also think it is her best. I had the pleasure of writing an extensive assessment of the book for The High Window where, earlier this year, Nutter was selected as that journal’s Featured UK Poet. You can access that assessment via this link. Dead Reckoning is this outstanding poet’s strongest and most compelling title to date. You will have to look long and hard to find anyone writing today capable of conjuring lines like this:

        “…the heart, believing it will find
        what it came for, is one step ahead
        of reason…”

I have given copies of Dead Reckoning as gifts to numerous friends and recommended it to many others. I daresay that if you seize the opportunity to read this latest sampling of Nutter’s richly expressive and at times unsettling poems, you will do the same.

Name a book you have read more than once.

That’s also an easy one. I hesitate to mention it, though, because my choice may be seen by some to be snobbish or self-congratulatory. The book is Joyce’s Ulysses.

Many are justly fearful of approaching Ulysses. It is, after all, an intimidating and heavily freighted colossus of a novel. But we ought not shrink from reading it, provided we also understand that we must read Ulysses differently from the way we read most any other prose. The novel is so richly replete with obscure cultural, Biblical, classical, political, linguistic, historical and mythological references—often rendered that much more challenging by Joyce’s endless punning and other expressive gymnastics—that the temptation to try to run each and every one of them to ground must be resisted. (If the temptation is not resisted, the true experience of the novel will be lost and it would take several lifetimes to complete the reading.) What I have learned is that one reads Ulysses for more than just sense. The prose is musical and, in places, almost nothing more. Thus, the ear is as important to the appreciation of Joyce’s idiosyncratic and prosodic writing as is the eye and Wernicke’s area of the cerebral cortex. Indeed, one can safely glide gently over the surface of some of the more challenging passages in Ulysses without doing violence to the overall experience of the novel. To do so enables the preservation of an essential momentum. The book does not require to be understood fully on any reading. Thus, one reads Ulysses humbly but with determination, knowing that on every subsequent reading more will be revealed. I go back to this humbling masterwork every few years and I am greeted with new revelations on each rereading. I also know that however many times I return to Ulysses, much of it will still escape me; this is an inescapable truth that I have taught myself to accept. Ulysses is a bountiful ocean of a novel, rightly praised as a transformative force in modern fictional prose. Its humour, its rich sarcasm, its tenderness, its sometimes-unbridled lasciviousness, above all its joyous abandon and heady celebration of language itself—all  of these things are unparalleled in any other work I have ever encountered. But when tackling it, I do humbly suggest, again, that you do turn off your devices and resist the temptation to make regular detours to Google every few paragraphs. Trust the flow of Joyce’s writing to carry you along and past the shoals. The exhilaration it generates will not be compromised by a failure to disentangle and solve all of its many mysteries.

Name a book you have started but never finished.

Finnegans Wake. This is a difficult admission. It might be thought that everything I have said above about reading Joyce’s Ulysses would apply equally to the unlocking of Finnegans Wake. Some of it undoubtedly does. But despite several attempts, I have found Finnegans Wake mostly impenetrable. I would like to think that as I mature as a reader, that might change. But the clock is ticking, alas, and this just might be a challenge to which I will never successfully rise. More’s the pity, but there it is.

Name your favourite anthology.

Biblioasis brings out Best Canadian Poetry anthologies annually and in 2019 it published what I consider was the best of these to date. Credit is due largely to editor Rob Taylor for his discerning approach to selection. As it should, the anthology strikes a judicious balance between featuring established and emerging Canadian poets. Indigenous writers are very much in the ascendancy in Canada and it is evident that their writing is now disproportionately enriching the literary landscape. Owing to the pernicious effects of colonialism, such voices have, historically, been denied the attention they deserve. That is changing however, and rapidly, and Indigenous poets have now become a powerful force in contemporary Canadian literature. This reality is reflected in the appearances of writers like Billy-Ray Belcourt and Katherena Vermette (among others) in this prestigious collection. For a fuller account of my thoughts about Best Canadian Poetry, 2019, you can read a review I wrote of it here.

rob mclennan

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Author page: robmclennanauthor.blogspot.com

Twitter: @robmclennanblog

 

What book(s) are you reading right now?

I’m slowly working my way through Sheila Heti’s new novel, Pure Colour (2022) and Joy Williams’ Honored Guest: stories (2004), as well as rereading Kristjana Gunnars’ The Scent of Light (2022), which is a reissue of her five novellas—The Prowler (1989), Zero Hour (1991), The Substance of Forgetting (1992), The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust (1996) and Night Train to Nykøbing (1998)—in a single volume. After a winter and spring of working on poems (and a flurry of reviews), I’ve been attempting lately to re-enter my still-in-progress novel. In part, I’m hoping to absorb some elements of tone, and of sentence, from those particular prompts as I write. Perhaps I should just go back to Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Dany Laferrière’s Why Must a Black Writer Write About Sex? (1994) or even Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959). I mean, with Gunnars’ work already in-hand, perhaps the smart thing would be to return to further of those original early influences I caught during my formative writing years, while attempting to return to long-form prose.

 

A book you loved reading at a child.

Amid the plethora of Marvel Comics, some of what struck me included the Narnia series of novels by by C.S. Lewis. Between myself and my mother, my paperback set was reread enough times that the bindings simply gave way. At some point, my mother simply absorbed the remaining copies into her own collection, and wouldn’t let me have them.

 

A book you have given as a gift / recommended to a friend.

I’ve gone through more than a few copies of Miranda Hill’s Sleeping Funny: stories (2012), and plenty of us are eagerly awaiting her first novel, which is rumoured to be out next year. I’ve also gone through a few copies of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967), if I ever see a copy second-hand. A while back, I gifted my niece, Emma, a copy of Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa’s award-winning short story debut, How to Pronounce Knife (2020), and more recently, I recommended to my pal (and award-winning Ottawa poet) Stephen Brockwell the book On Autumn Lake: The Collected Essays (2022) by American poet and critic Douglas Crase. It really is a remarkable collection.

 

The first and last books on your bookcase/shelf.

To my immediate left (eye-level): Batman: White Knight to Namor: Visionaries, Vol. 1 by John Byrne. To my immediate right (eye-level): William Hawkins, The Madman’s War and Anna Gurton-Wachter’s Utopia Pipe Dream Memory (2019). Various issues of Brick: A Literary Journal, FENCE magazine, The Capilano Review.

 

A book you have read more than once.

There are plenty of those! More often, it is authors I reread over specific, individual titles. Books by George Bowering, Rosmarie Waldrop, John Newlove, Pattie McCarthy, Susan Howe, Robert Kroetsch, bpNichol. Timothy Findley’s Stones (1988). Stan Dragland’s Journeys Through Bookland and Other Passages (1984). Sarah Manguso’s Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007). Joshua Beckman’s Three Talks (2018). Read and read and re-read. This can be pronounced in present or past-tense, simultaneously. Reed and re-reed, red and re-red.

 

 

Diana Rosen

Diana Rosen is an essayist, poet, and flash writer with credits in journals from the U.S., U.K., Australia, India, and Canada. Her first full-length book of poems and flash, "High Stakes & Expectations”, was released in 2022 by www.thetinypublisher.com. She lives in Los Angeles where she works as a content provider for all things tea, and has published 13 nonfiction books. To read her work, please visit

www.authory.com/dianarosen.

What book(s) are you reading right now?

I’m apparently a follower of tsunduko, the Japanese concept of collecting piles of books you may, or may not, ever read. But I will! That’s why there are piles from foraging thrift stores, piles of books reserved from the local library, and way too many bought online and in stores.

Nonetheless, I persevere, always dipping into several at once. Right now it’s Jill Bialosky’s riveting autobiographic book of poems, “Asylum” that is both poignant and astonishing in their intimacy; “Practically Vegan” by Nisha Melvani for total inspiration although I still eat animal protein on occasion, and “Sidewalking” by David L. Ulin, a look at his personal walks around that most un-walkable of cities, Los Angeles, where I live. Teetering on the piles are other memoirs, books on writing, and a novel or mystery.

A book you loved reading at a child.

ALL the delights of Ludwig Bemelmans but, in particular, the series of Madeline (my role model), and Babar just because it was so bizarre to read of a talking elephant.

A book you have given as a gift / recommended to a friend.

Not everyone I know is into poetry as I am, but all my friends cook and love to eat, so Nicole Gulotta’s “Eat This Poem” is a fun way to introduce this literary feast.

A book you have read more than once.

I never re-read novels, but do dip back into books of short stories and poems. One book that answers this question and those on one underrated and a book of personal resonance is Gina Berriault’s “Women in Their Beds” which is a masterclass on the short story. 

A book with personal resonance.

“Inheritance” by Dani Shapiro had me making countless notes of quotable lines and references to her quest to determine who her father was after a lifetime devotion to a man who turned out not to be her biological father. Shapiro writes relatively short books and yet there’s so much in them that they’re a testament to concision and Elmore Leonard’s admonition to “leave out the stuff people skip over” …This book, in particular, answers both the philosophical and fact-based questions of “who am I?” that Shapiro asks and her concerns about her identity as a Jew particularly resonated with me. I also envied her Aunt Shirley, a woman every family should have for her gentle wisdom. 

Return!

After a lengthy hiatus, originally due to long Covid, I'm restarting the Fill Your Books! interview series.

If you want to be considered for an interview, drop me a line at colonyink [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk (especially if you have a new product/event to promote). I'll send you ten questions, you pick whichever five you want to answer.

Have a look on the blog for the existing interviews to get a taste of what's expected. Happy reading!

Ross Thompson

Ross Thompson is an award-winning writer and English teacher from Bangor, County Down. His poetry has featured on television, radio and in an extensive selection of international journals and publications. He continues to read at arts festivals and literary events across the country, and he has also collaborated on several multimedia commissions. Threading The Light (Dedalus Press, 2019) is his first collection of poetry.


What book(s) are you reading right now?

Currently, I am very much enjoying Somewhere Becoming Rain by Clive James, a collection of critical essays on the poetry of Philip Larkin. It is surprisingly funny and at times very moving, which I absolutely was not expecting. James sees beyond the cliché of Larkin as a repressed and misanthropic curmudgeon, taking a more compassionate stance that delves beneath the surface of this complex writer. James, who knew a thing or two about poetry, writes prose that caused me to think afresh about Larkin, whose work I always appreciated but the cynicism therein never quite sat well with my idealistic nature.

I am also dipping in and out of Don Paterson’s The Poem, a lengthy – a mere 700 pages or so – yet eloquent treatise on the medium that alternates between tongue-in-cheek humour, refreshing analysis and brain-bending adventures into other dimensions that fold back upon themselves. It is a weighty book - in both the literal and figurative sense – that examines the viscera of crafting poetry in exhaustive detail and demands the reader’s full attention. Yet, it also offers helpful and illuminative guidance on the art form.

I tend to listen to audiobooks in the car on the way to work, and at the moment I have just finished savouring Jeff Tweedy’s memoir Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back). Tweedy is the chief songwriter in Wilco, one of my favourite bands, and his self-effacing, conversational style makes for genial company while threading up and down the A2 and avoiding being tailgated by angry drivers in sports cars that cost more than my yearly salary. It is the polar opposite of the braggadocio and mythologising that you tend to find in other autobiographies – the Springsteen book, for example, which I mostly liked but grew tired of the Boss slapping himself on the back. In comparison, Tweedy’s reflections on family, friendship, parenthood, loss and addiction are refreshingly honest and insightful. Also, if, like me, you enjoy obscure indie rock trivia and stories about Neutral Milk Hotel, R.E.M. and Guided By Voices, then this book is the mother lode.

Finally, and a nice way of leavening the overabundance of crotchety, aging males, I have just finished the graphic novel Laika, which is about the ill-fated space dog and the various engineers and handlers who jettisoned her into the void in the name of scientific advancement. I am currently working on a second collection of poetry, part of which will be devoted to poems about space travel, so let’s call it “research”. Like the best graphic novels, Laika elevates the written word and often does not use it at all to tell a tragic story – it still gives me the shivers to think of that poor street dog perishing in a shuttle while gazing at a universe it did not understand.

A book you loved reading at a child.

I was a very keen reader as a youngster. Anytime I was absent from school due to illness, my mum would buy me a new book – to the extent that, and I probably should not admit this as a full-time English teacher, I occasionally feigned sickness so that I could stay at home in bed reading books and drinking hot orange juice. I worked through the entire collection of Roald Dahl but the one that really resonated with me was Danny, The Champion Of The World, which lacks the nastiness that characterises some of his other books. I was particularly taken with the long sequence involving sleeping pills, raisins and pheasants. I was and still am a penitent follower of the rules so these passages of petty criminality were deeply exciting. Yet, beyond those elements of Boy’s Own adventure I was struck, even as a child, by the book’s melancholic quality. Whereas Dahl’s other books were cartoonish, Danny moved me in ways that at that stage I could not quite vocalise. In particular, Dahl’s treatment of themes of poverty and bereavement was neither patronising nor gratuitous, and even at that young age it taught me to think more compassionately about those less blessed than myself.

A book you have given as a gift / recommended to a friend.

Most recently, I gifted a friend a copy of Simon Armitage’s Walking Home. It recounts a hiking journey that the current poet laureate took along the Pennine Way, boarding with random strangers and doing pop-up poetry readings in unusual places. Much like his poetry, Armitage’s prose is wry, laconic and engaging, and his anecdotes about the various eccentrics that he encounters are full of charm and whimsy. Like all tales of physical journeys, the book soon takes a turn for the metaphysical as three weeks of trudging through the countryside in all weathers begins to take its toll on the writer. The follow-up book Walking Away is just as good: Armitage’s prose is lilting yet natural, and built around turns of phrase and colloquialisms that never feel false. Most appealing is the sense of warmth that radiates from the book.

A book you have read more than once.

I am an English teacher by trade, and I would not like to count how many times that I have read the likes of The Great Gatsby, Of Mice And Men and Macbeth over the years – I can recall entire chunks of those texts without too much effort. Or, to be fair, encouragement. In terms of reading for pleasure, however, a book that I have read multiple times is The Bottoms by Joe Lansdale. Part crime novel, part Texan noir and part bildungsroman, it echoes To Kill A Mockingbird in its story of a young person encountering prejudice and violence in the Deep South. It can be fairly grisly at times – the plot involves a hunt for a murderer with which the book’s young protagonist Harry becomes fascinated – yet as in Mockingbird the use of a retrospective narrator makes the grimness more palatable. More shocking is the depiction of racism that is featured here, as it is in much of Lansdale’s work. Segregation and the cruel treatment of others, while entirely relevant to our own troubled times, are upsetting yet they are counterbalanced by the sense of place and family that reside at the novel’s core. The deft way in which Lansdale weaves all of these elements together in the book’s final stretch is just terrific.

A book with personal resonance.

In my very early twenties, when I was feeling a little disillusioned and melancholy – it goes with the territory, I know – I was smitten with Girlfriend In A Coma by Douglas Coupland. It’s a (sort-of) post-apocalyptic novel that blends together post-teenage angst, religious imagery and lots of references to The Smiths. Its emotionally wrought nature was a lightning rod for how I was feeling at the time, which is perhaps why I have not read it again for a long time since – it would be like looking through embarrassing photographs of my gawky younger self. 

Anne Tannam

Anne Tannam has published two poetry collections; Take This Life (WordOnTheStreet 2011) and Tides Shifting Across My Sitting Room Floor (Salmon Poetry 2017), with a third, Twenty-six Letters of a New Alphabet forthcoming with Salmon in 2021. For more information visit www.annetannampoetry.ie

What book(s) are you reading right now?
I’m reading Elaine Feeney’s ‘As You Were’, Ada Limón’s ‘The Carrying’ and ‘It Didn’t Start With You’ by Mark Wolynn

A book you loved reading at a child.
All of the Narnia books by C.S. Lewis

A book you have given as a gift / recommended to a friend.
My last gift to a friend was ‘Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words’ by Ella France Sanders

A book you have read more than once.
Possession by A.S Byatt

A book with personal resonance.
The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien