Making and Independent Publishing

This time last year, me and a few friends got together because we wanted to put together our own literary magazine. We were all creative writing students with basically no idea how publishing worked (or at least I didn't).

It's funny when you want something, this end product that you have in your head, but you don't really know how all the working pieces fit together. We all kind of had different ideas of what we wanted but we knew we wanted it, and after 4 hours deliberating in the Kelowna Denny's we had a goal to work towards. Our mission statement that would drive the production of the magazine.

OK Magpie is a literary magazine dedicated to fostering a contemporary writing community. Writings in OK Magpie are selected by a jury of our editors. We don’t quite care why it’s good, as long as it is.

Things had to be good, we wanted to build community and it had to have writing in it.

When the thing started I always had this idea of something like McSweeney's, with no idea how that would actually work. So, we decided we would be different and do an audio recording of all our writers.

What was crazy was that it felt like a roller coaster. It felt like we were putting it together with sticks and spit. I had no idea what I was doing but I had seen handmade books before, I had seen Mcsweeney's, I collected chapbooks, so I kind of knew what I wanted.

What I am trying to say is that I learned something completely different from actually making the work than I could have ever learned from reading about it or sending my own manuscripts to publishers. When you make something you learn about it intimately, and there is so much more value when you see finished products because you know what went into it. Doing that first magazine got me building other books, and precipitated my 2014 summer project.

So, now it's March, one year later. Pretty much or pretty close to being the birthday of our magazine, and I have the pleasure of doing it again. We are working on issue #2! and this time is different because we made that first one. I'm still sure it won't be perfect, but nothing ever is. The other editors that I worked with last year have all gone on to do other things, finishing different degrees and moving on. So now we have a team of new editors and there is a better idea of what we want and how the thing is going to look.

This is the part where I shamelessly plug the chapbook contest that we are running... which might be the most exciting part. But before that I think the point of this whole thing is... to make stuff! The best way to learn about something, to really know something, is through making it. We have been making things our whole lives. We learned to talk through talking (making words), we learn to write through writing, and then somewhere along the line most of us forget a bit about the making of things.

Vancouver 1963 -- A mecca -- and where am I now?

I am having a crisis of faith.

I am lucky enough this semester to be taking a course with Prof. Karis Shearer at UBCO on the rise of poetry in Western Canada, and more specifically the Vancouver Poets of the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference. This was a huge time in Canada for poetry. The people at the conference were like rock stars. Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg. It feels so strange to be a poet in Western Canada and to be learning about this now, in the terminal semester of my degree. This time last year I would have been able to recognize the name Charles Olson as being a poet, but I certainly would not have been able to tell you what he did or how he changed poetry. This time last year the only poet of this noble poetic peerage I would have been able to tell you anything about would have been Allen Ginsberg. The progeny of these American poets, post-coference--George Bowering, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, Frank Davey-- have done so much, and certainly should be a bigger deal than they are.

I feel like I need to say this right now: I am so proud to be a Canadian poet. I love Canadian poetry and other Canadian poets. We are so lucky in Canada to be in a community of poets that are so diverse, and with so much tension over form and the avant garde (because controversy means that people care). I am struck with rampant poetic nationalism. Leaving the university at the end of this semester, at the end of my degree seems like a terrifying prospect because where are the poets outside the annals of the academy?

THESE PEOPLE ARE CANADA'S POETIC CANNON! Why is education so fixated on old poetry? Why is education so fixated on on the English cannon? How many times does a person have to study Robert Frost's "Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood" before we can get to that? (The answer to that last question in my experience has been between 3 and 6.)

I guess part of this blog post is about how I am afraid, the way that most people are afraid, to graduate. I'm not afraid about work, because the real work as a poet is living. I'm not afraid about where I will go because where ever I go I will build a world. The thing I am most afraid of is how I will be able to know poets when I go. Canada is a big country after all.

2015 begins! On resolutions, writing, reading, and heroes

Happy 2015!

It's my last semester of my undergraduate degree and the year that I will turn a quarter of a century, and needless to say, I have (until this moment) not set any resolutions that have to do with writing. Because 'write better' is kind of a constant goal, it is hard to want to set a solid resolution, of number of pages or poems, or published pieces or what have you. Setting resolutions from a place of quantifiability seems like setting myself up for failure. I do, however, think that resolutions on a theoretical level are important. (More a question of who I want to be, than the number of times that I want to go the gym this year.) The first thing that comes to mind is 'be kinder to people', which is not all that interesting in terms of writing goals for the new year, but still important.

In terms of writing, writing better should include reading. Reading is one of the most important things that a writer can do (besides writing and publishing, of course!). Reading should deepen the scope of a writers language and help to develop voice and themes. So, to this list I will add 'read more'.

--And so far I have been, whiling away the class and study free hours re-reading the seventh Harry Potter book. Which gets us to the meat of the matter. What is it about Harry Potter that entranced my generation? What is it about the series and its characters that has made me and so many of my friends go back to it over and over again? I have read each book in the series probably about a dozen times and I still want to go back every winter and re-read one of them. 

Certainly, there is the nostalgia of the thing. I received the first three books one year for Christmas, and, while I always liked reading and being read to, it was the first time I really felt sucked into a world on my own. Even now, I wish that I had magic but, who doesn't in one way or another? It blows me away that one series of books could so inspire a generation of readers, that the bowels of the internet are filled to bursting with fan-fiction (which is another blog-post for another time), a theme park has been created and vacations can be planned to Polish castles where guests can experience Hogwarts. 

Then I think of the hype over Tolkien's, Lord of the Rings, that I certainly also felt entirely enthralled with as a kid (and still do), and the comic book heroes that are so important and prevalent in writing and media.

It strikes me that all of these stories have a kind of ethos in common: the reluctant hero. Through the whole Harry Potter series, all Harry wants is to be a normal person with a normal family and friends. He certainly never asked to be special or famous, and we readers, get the sense that he would trade all of it to have his parents back magic or not. Bilbo too, in the Hobbit never wanted to go on any adventures or do anything out of the ordinary, and yet he ends up on an adventure where he wishes often that he was safe at home in his nice warm hobbit hole. The more I think about it the list seems endless.

There is something about this reluctance that resonates with us. Sometimes, the thing that seems the scariest for me is getting what I want, having an opportunity for success, because that means that I actually have to do something about it. It means that I actually have to get up out of my comfort zone and try something new, take a chance on something that could fail, really put myself out there. 

The fact that we love characters that are forced to push boundaries, says something about what it means to be human. Maybe what it means to be human is in that getting out into the wide world with strange companions and making the best of it, no matter how dark or complicated things are. In so many ways I think that, these stories and their reluctant hero's resonate because the thing they have in common is hope.