Tara Quinn - The New Brick Reader

Copyright 2013 by Brick, A Literary Journal

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This edition published in 2013 by
House of Anansi Press Inc.
110 Spadina Avenue, Suite 801
Toronto, ON, M 5 V 2 K 4
Tel. 416-363-4343
Fax 416-363-1017
www.houseofanansi.com

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

The new Brick reader / edited by Tara Quinn.

A collection of literary essays, interviews, memoirs, travelogues,
belles lettres, and unusual musings previously published in Brick.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77089-408-2 (pbk.). ISBN 978-1-77089-409-9 (html)

1. Canadian literature (English) 20th century.
2. Canadian literature (English) 21st century.
3. Authors, Canadian (English) 20th century Anecdotes.
4. Authors, Canadian (English) 21st century--Anecdotes.
5. Authors, Canadian (English) Interviews.
I. Quinn, Tara, 1980, editor of compilation

PS8251.N49 2013 C810.8'0054 C2013-903779-9 C2013-903780-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013941770

Cover design: Brian Morgan

We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

CONTENTS

Michael Ondaatje ~ Introduction

Jeffrey Eugenides ~ The Lover of the Hummingbird: Remembering John Hawkes

Elizabeth Hay ~ The Writers Life

James Wood ~ An Interview with W. G. Sebald

Robert Fyfe ~ Bargains with the land

Jane Rule ~ I want to speak ill of the dead

Alistair MacLeod ~ The Writings of Hugh MacLennan

Michael Helm ~ Garry Winogrands Moment of Exposure

Proulx, Brand, Creeley, Rushdie, Wright, Atwood, Gibson, Banks ~ What Id be if I were not a writer

Peter Harcourt ~ Sites of Citation

Jim Harrison ~ Dont Go Out Over Your Head

Helen Garner ~ Antarctic Voyage

Michael Ondaatje ~ A Conversation with David Malouf

Melora Wolff ~ Fall of the Winter Palace

Roo Borson ~ Persimmons

Albert Nussbaum ~ An inside look at Donald Westlake

Jonathan Lethem ~ Yoked in Gowanus

Tim Lilburn ~ Getting into the Cabri Lake Area

Reza Baraheni ~ A Minor Mistake in the Evin Prison

Robert Creeley ~ Fielding Dawson Remembered: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum

Michelle Orange ~ An Interview with John Orange, on Completing the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a Jigsaw Puzzle

Paule Anglim ~ An Interview with Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia

Fanny Howe ~ Au Hasard Suicide

A. L. Kennedy ~ Swimming Pool

Semi Chellas ~ Some notes on infinity

Don DeLillo ~ Counterpoint: Three Movies, a Book, and an Old Photograph

Alastair Bland ~ How Scientists Party

Dionne Brand ~ Manos de Piedra

Esta Spalding ~ An Interview with David Sedaris

John Berger ~ The chorus is in our heads or, Pier Paolo Pasolini

Sarmishta Subramanian ~ Why I ride a bicycle

Clark Blaise ~ A Delayed Disclosure

Clayton Ruby ~ A visit from Jean Genet

Robert Hass ~ Tomas Transtrmer: A Tribute

George Toles ~ Silent Cinema: An Aesthetic Call to Arms

Stphan Bureau ~ An Interview with Mavis Gallant

Roberto Bolao & Forrest Gander ~ Two Encounters with Nicanor Parra

Craig Howes ~ Leon Edel and G. Bernard Shaw

Colm Tibn ~ Music

Don Paterson ~ Phantom

W. S. Merwin ~ Her Own Words

Sean Michaels ~ The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock: The Story of Pariss Most Secret Underground Society

Charles Foran ~ The Here and Now

Eleanor Wachtel ~ In Conversation with Anne Carson

R. Chandran Madhu & Colum McCann ~ An Ode to Curling

Tara Quinn ~ Afterword

Contributors

Credits

INTRODUCTION

Reading Time: four minutes

B RICK has always been a magazine cobbled together by writers who seem to have a slanted perspective of the literary world around them. We have published articles where writers celebrate other writers Robert Hass on Tomas Transtrmer, John Berger on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Bolao on Nicanor Parra, Don DeLillo on Thelonious Monk and Glenn Gould. But we have also published somewhat strange pieces: one on fishing by Graham Swift, one on writers who wrestle, and a piece by a well-known Toronto lawyer whose shoes were stolen by Jean Genet when he stayed at the lawyers house (what did he expect?). Over the years we have run interviews with Kazuo Ishiguro, W. G. Sebald, Anne Carson, Zadie Smith, and Mavis Gallant, as well as many others. William Gaddis has mused on Herman Melvilles impressions of Cologne Cathedral, Patricia Rozema has written about what it was like to direct Harold Pinter in a film, Jeffrey Eugenides remembered John Hawkes as a teacher, a prisoner in San Quentin interviewed the mystery writer Donald Westlake, and the son of a scientist wrote a personal memory about How Scientists Party. It is as if anything around us can be somehow gathered and carried in the canoe or the split-pea shell that is Brick, A Literary Journal.

To some of us it feels that Brick began in the Middle Ages. It was started by Jean McKay and Stan Dragland in 1977, and the magazine has gone on from there in various shapes and sizes in the hands of three other publishers: Linda Spalding, Michael Redhill, and Nadia Szilvassy. But throughout all these years more than thirty-five now its editors have always been writers. Right now there is an editorial board of six. Some prefer to act as scouts for what might be out there a conversation with a writer, or some idea that can perhaps be encouraged into an essay. Some prefer the more triage-like role of judging what is really good. But most of all we are enthusiasts for what is interesting to us first of all, and then hopefully to our readers.

One of our consistent desires is that writers from elsewhere rub up against writers from Canada, and we want established writers to meet with newer writers in our pages. So we invite artists and writers from all over the world as well as welcome the strange and random pieces that come over the transom one man whose job it was to destroy books in a library found a book of poetry there, read it, admired it, and promptly reviewed it for us ( Brick 90). We have had recipes based on road kill ( Brick 77), a piece on a strange underground cult in Paris ( Brick 85), and one on the souls of dogs ( Brick 80). In another era we would have asked the author of Moby Dick for a chowder recipe, or Henry James for a monthly list of his dinner invitations, or Dorothy Wordsworth for her recommended map of rural walks.

Sometimes we ask a range of writers to deal with one of those essential questions, such as What would you have been if you were not a writer? (A dog, said Robert Creeley; A rock guitarist, said Ian McEwan; An actor, said Edmund White; Dead, said Russell Banks.) And in a recent issue we asked writers and artists about their favourite endings in novels. Of course there are internal battles within the editorial board. I have pushed for years for the magazine to be printed on pink paper like the Financial Times , and for all of our articles to have a line at the start that gives the approximate reading time of the piece, as magazines did in 1950s England, just so that we could reprint Yeatss Sailing to Byzantium and list the reading time as somewhere between seventeen seconds and twenty-five minutes. I never was able to convince the others. The final selection can also lead to fights. Even for this anthology, many of the editors wanted Helen Garners wilder article on experiencing a high colonic cleanse as opposed to her more reasonable piece on an Antarctic journey.