Jeff Parker Can't Lose (an interview)

An interview with author Jeff Parker, published in Broken Pencil Magazine.

JEFF PARKER CAN'T LOSE
US author is here to stay ... but what’s with all the ties to Russia? Spencer Gordon investigates...

Are we to assume Jeff Parker is telling the truth? Sure, he may want you to believe that he's just your average everyday up-and-coming American author, living in Toronto, editing anthologies of Russian fiction. You know - the sort of career move every celebrated American writer dreams of making. He may try to convince you that it's every American's wildest fantasy to live low-key and under-the-radar in a frigid northern city, far from the prying eyes of Washington, able to frequently fly to St. Petersburg to "research" an upcoming project...

Seems pretty typical, right? Or does it? What's Parker's agenda? What's his interest in our fair city, so far north of his native Florida? What does he find so interesting about those Reds? And why does he carry a suitcase, a revolver, and a strange red button? Whatever it is that Agent - er, I mean Mr. Parker is doing here, I think it's high time the loyal readers of Broken Pencil found out.

I recently caught up with Parker in his rad-and-bullet proof office in the bowels of the University of Toronto campus to discuss his position of influence and authority, his business with our nation, his suspect trips to the former Soviet Union, and this so-called American 'literary' tradition.

Here in big bad TO it's always nice to discover another great writer (even a suspect one) hard at work in our own backyard. And Jeff Parker - writer, editor, and professor - just might be one of Toronto's best kept secrets. He's the author of Ovenman (Tin House 2007), the story collection The Back of The Line (DECODE), and the editor of Amerika: Russian Writers View the United States (Dalkey 2004). He's also the acting director of the prestigious Master's program in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto, where he preps and coaches aspiring writers enrolled one of the most unique MA degrees in the country.

Parker received his own MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University, where he studied under such heavyweight authors as George Saunders, Arthur Flowers, and Mary Caponegro. “The most important thing for me was the reeducation I got in terms of what it means to be a writer,” he recalls. “I kind of knew that it meant you have to call out the world and yourself on all the bullshit. And I kind of knew that it meant you had to strive for things that had never been done before. What grad school and particularly the writers I worked with there taught me that I didn't understand was that failure was a part of it, that most of us do time in the trenches (even the Chosen Ones) and are the better for it, and that to be any good you have to really care.”

Parker spent his younger years split between Tallahassee and Destin, Florida – a section of state situated somewhere between “the theme park culture of Orlando and the profound Southern-ness of Georgia," fondly referred to by locals as the "Redneck Riviera". But since his Central-Floridian beginnings, Parker's lived just about everywhere in the US, spent a great deal of time in Russia, and now calls Toronto home - a move which has allowed him a far greater awareness of the sometimes mysterious world of Canadian writing. "With publishing, the border is like a one-way strainer," he explains. "American lit tends to sieve through, whereas Canadian lit doesn't go the other way. I think it's a real shame. There's a lot of really exciting work being done here that goes outside the bounds of CanLit, which is a phenomenon that both intrigues and repels me. There are so many great writers I never would have come across without moving here: Michael Winter, Ken Babstock, Christian Bok, Lynne Coady, Lee Henderson ... I could go on and on."

The effect of his extensive travel throughout North America has been one of “adding tics and grammar and syntax from all those places, in what is," he hopes, "a unique sound on the page. That’s what’s interesting to me at least, sentences as instruments.” It’s a part of what makes his narrators so sharp and distinct; it explains his particular mastery of voice. “Sound drives my writing,” he says. “It’s the engine that makes it go. The South is one of those places with a particularly strong linguistic flavor, like Newfoundland or Glasgow. And I'm pretty sure [my interest in sound] came from an interest in the fucked-up way people talked around me while I was growing up.”

His debut novel Ovenman definitely benefits from this careful attention to voice (a voice, by the way, which counts certain major-league American writers - Mary Gaitskill, Aimee Bender, George Saunders, Padgett Powell, and Sam Lipsyte, to name but a few - as its fans). Ovenman is narrated by When Thinfinger, a skateboarding pizza-cook with a curiously inarticulate, often hilarious take on the world - and who, if you've read the reviews, may be one of the most original-sounding narrators to come along in American fiction in recent memory. “It’s his voice that makes or breaks the book,” Parker admits. “It’s not based on any person in particular, though certainly fragments come from all over. Most of the revisions involved surgery on his syntax.”

Ovenman was edited by the "very sharp" Tin House Books team of Lee Montgomery and Meg Storey. Writer-editor relationships can be fraught with peril: conflicting personalities or domineering visions can ruin a delicate exchange between writer and reviser. In Parker's case, having a book edited the Tin House staff seems like a writer's dream. "In general their stance was: here's how we feel, but it's your book," he recalls. "I took most of their advice."

Since Ovenman, Parker's been hard at work co-editing (with Mikhail Iossel) a collection called Rasskazy: New Fiction From a New Russia, also scheduled for publication by Tin House Books. It's a work which no doubt draws on his extensive experience living in Russia as the program director of the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg. "That's been a blast," he says, considering the immense body of contemporary Russian fiction he's been happily poring over for the collection. "The new generation of Russian writers is off the charts. They somehow manage to hold onto everything the great tradition of Russian writers did, and re-construe it in these dark and foreboding contemporary landscapes."

Luckily, Team Parker only seems to be picking up steam. "I'm currently finishing up a story collection The Taste of Penny coming out with Snare in Canada in November, next year in the US," he says. "Got the Russian anthology coming out in September. Finishing a nonfiction book to be published September 2010 on Russia, thinking of it as Fear And Loathing on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. And also piecing together a new novel about animal rights terrorists. We'll see..."

We shall see indeed. Until then, consider yourself watched, Mr. Parker. And consider your writing very carefully read.

Recent Reviews

Some recent reviews, published in Broken Pencil Magazine.

REVIEW OF SELECTED BLACKOUTS (Insomniac, 2009), by JOHN GOLDBACH

Simply put, John Goldbach is a good storyteller. In the world of Canadian small press hiccups and stalls, his refinement of storytelling is impressively, refreshingly competent. In his debut collection Selected Blackouts, the style is smooth, uncluttered, and clear; his sentences have the air of effortless polish. He attends to the appropriate sensory details and works consistent wonders with dialogue. But what’s also refreshing about Selected Blackouts (if a good blackout can ever truly refresh) is Goldbach’s willingness to entertain a variety of structural and generic options, shifting between television script to short vignette and back to the standard short story (though even more variation would have been certainly welcome). The strongest stories in this collection are the shorter works, such as "Odin Letourneau and Debbie Siskind's Second Date", "Conversations at Four A.M.", or "Wedding" – pieces that showcase Goldbach's rather Spartan efficiency and aptitude as a storyteller, his enviable knack with crafting immediately engaging and arresting opening lines, and his ability to pull out and shut things down when the time is right. Selected Blackouts is raw, bittersweet, and intelligent. It’s about our contemporary malaise – our lives of beautiful addictions and viral loves. This is a very strong work, and surprisingly strapping for a debut.

However, praise for the book seems to verge on the hyperbolic. Of course, it’s Insomniac’s obligation to push its own products, but calling the collection “utterly original” sounds a little fishy. Many of the stories tread upon somewhat familiar ground – sad-sack failed writers, listless alcoholics in their late twenties, smart people who drink or smoke too much and then face the terrible angst of hang-over remorse – so what seems to arise is a blurring of character, voice, and story. In other words, a lack of distinction or challenge. Most of us are sad or promiscuous or addicted or vapid; we only need to turn on the TV (or log-in) to be reminded of our rotten stomachs and bad consciences. Though Goldbach depicts this cultural predicament with a knowing and believable hand, it’s just this knowing that's the problem – we know it, he knows it, and Bret Easton Ellis certainly knows it. Hopefully, for his next collection, Goldbach will pull out all the stops and deliver something entirely unexpected. And judging from his better moments in Selected Blackouts, I bet he’s got the right stuff, the right moxy, to pull it off.

REVIEW OF SOMEWHERE TO RUN FROM (Tightrope Books, 2009), by TARA-MICHELLE ZINIUK

With Somewhere to Run From – her sophomore effort – Toronto writer Tara-Michelle Ziniuk produces another undeniably readable, attractive little book of spare, plain-spoken poetry (maybe the nicest-looking volume Tightrope Books has released, to boot). It’s chock full of sarcasm, cleverly slurred confessions, and the broken-bottle-sharp perceptions of a hurt, vulnerable narrator on the other side of some vague and amorphous blues. Many of Ziniuk’s caustic, biting lines transmit a palpable sense of desperation, anger, and bitterness. References to hip Toronto locales and various pop culture ephemera ground the text in a real-world kaleidoscope of crushed straws, night-scapes, and bar lights, which may indeed prove attractive to readers enamoured by the romanticism of place and time and youth (though to others this might bear a suspect whiff of Toronto hipster bohemia; but hey, tomato, tomahto).

And yet, despite its honest attractions, the success or failure of Somewhere to Run From may be a timing thing. As in, in order for the book to be effective, the reader must necessarily feel the same way as the writer. We can tell the narrator is sad. The voice screams melancholy and regret. But the “delicious anguish” on display either remains a museum piece, preserved and dried, or suffers from being far too personal to reach the universal, as if caught in the minutia and particularities of a life without the liner notes. In other words, it means the reader remains regretfully unmoved. It’s actually quite frustrating – we’re pulling for Ziniuk to make her move and break our hearts, but the moment never arrives. It’s most painfully acute in the shorter poems, which seem like sketches or preliminary drafts of more composed pieces. These fragments do not have the internal strength to stand alone; they rely on the bulk of the collection and the sanctioning binds of the publisher to carry them through. Alternating the tone of the collection would also do wonders; maybe this would also encourage some welcome dabbling with form, which is decidedly absent. In the end, all this criticism should be taken with one hefty grain of salt. As I said – maybe it’s all a timing thing.

Rejection Letters

I've got a short, fun, inspirational piece on rejection letters currently on The New Quarterly's blog, The Literary Type.

It's called "Editors Make Mistakes, Too". Care to give it a read? Click HERE.

Thanks to Melissa Krone for adding that today.

Review of For Crying Out Loud!

Just got my hands on the new issue of Broken Pencil Magazine. Ferno House's first publication, For Crying Out Loud: An Anthology of Poetry & Fiction has been reviewed quite positively. I've scanned and copied out the review. Right on. Thanks, Mr. Leslie!
Here it is:

Hand-made chapbooks typically vacillate between the shoddy and the over-ornate – in other words, either photocopied booklets of staple-stitched construction paper or precious little darlings laced with gold thread and pasted feathers. Arnaud Brassard, designer and printer of the new Toronto micro-press Ferno House, manages to avoid either extreme with resounding panache, producing with For Crying Out Loud (Ferno House’s premiere release) a surprisingly beautiful, perfect-bound masterstroke of hand-crafted restraint.

For Crying Out Loud is a collection of poetry and fiction by the students and instructors enrolled in the Masters degree in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto. It boasts a poem fragment by seasoned veteran George Elliott Clarke, written in his audaciously lyrical, overtly musical hand, and a short story by American-born fiction writer Jeff Parker – a pitch-perfect, hilarious send-up of both presumptuous American ex-patriots holidaying in Canada and a somewhat lesser known, home-grown entity – the French Redneck. The rest of the book is divided between the program’s aspiring writers and students. In terms of poetry, one finds the subtle linguistic play and adventurousness of Catriona Wright; the spare, Biblically-inspired verse of Wendy Prieto; the meditative and sickly sensual lines of Alex Grigorescu, and the morbid, keen-eyed histories of Laura Clarke. As for fiction, Jonathan Simpson writes out the affecting, fragmented history of a father’s love; Andrew MacDonald provides a cheeky, happily-perverse look at voyeurism and crime; and Spencer Gordon (the editor of Ferno House) writes a dark reflection on cigarettes, death, and literary ambition, which takes an apt turn for the surreal. If what’s included in this collection is any indication of promise, then we should expect some remarkable work from these bourgeoning, Toronto-based writers.

According to the Ferno House website, the book might still be found at choice locations around the city of Toronto for a reasonable $15. I say go pick it up – it’s a damn fine combination of DIY, entrepreneurial ‘zine-culture, sophisticated and meticulous design craft, and ambitious literary writing.

by Eddie Leslie

From Broken Pencil 45

Josey Vogels liks Dinosaur Porn

People are talking about Dinosaur Porn.

I was recently interviewed by Josey Vogels for See Magazine. We talked about our upcoming anthology, Dinosaur Porn, to be released in late November with The Emergency Response Unit.

Here's a sample. Go to the link for more. Although the interview says "Arnaud Brassard", these are all my answers.

"We received everything from sloppily written attempts at degrading, misogynist sex (again, ew) to spare, beautiful poems relating relationships to evolutionary cycles or extinction. We received stories about asteroids and fossilized remains of antediluvian love. Certain stories conflate older, geriatric literary figures with the dinosaurs we so love to imagine. Other poems and stories have engaged the linguistic and syntactical possibilities of our prehistoric friends, exploring dino genealogies and etymologies. Some stories have been more sex-oriented — some is straightforward erotica — while others have attempted to bring a more documentary-realist eye to the world of porn and its more animalistic, cruder realities. Visual art submissions have been as wild and varied and occasionally hilarious as we hoped they’d be. We don’t want to give any more specifics, unfortunately, because we’re still deciding on what made the final cut."

Open Book Toronto also talked to me about the anthology. Read it here.

Check out Susie Bright's journal. She seems excited, too.

So does Gary Barwin.

This is going to be quite singular, people.

Review of God of Missed Connections

My review of Elizabeth Bachinsky's God of Missed Connections is now up on The Mansfield Revue's website.

Here's the first paragraph. Click here to go to the site and read the rest.

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” So says Stephen Dedalus, famously, in Joyce’s Ulysses. To the speaker of Elizabeth Bachinsky’s God of Missed Connections, history can indeed be nightmarish — the hard facts of torture and war and famine; the inability to solve or resolve its contradictions and cruelties. But history, both private and collective, can also be drenched in the sunlight of nostalgia — the happy illusion that things were, at some uncertain point in the past, better. So we dwell in old family photos, use our mothers’ handed-down recipes, stoop to smell our fathers’ coats. What else can we do? For Bachinsky, reminiscence is inevitable; “what was lost / returns,” she writes. We ceaselessly dwell and uncover, though that which we unearth can be both beautiful and horrific. As one poem states, “we can neither love [it], nor turn away."

Interview with John Goldbach

Also posted on the Broken Pencil website.

I hope John Goldbach is nothing like his characters. I'm saying this in the most positive way imaginable; I'm saying this because I can imagine his characters as real people, coach surfing while snogging with their buddy's girlfriend, chain smoking cigarettes and chugging back countless pints of water and aspirin to rid themselves of massive, crippling hangovers.

It's to Goldbach's credit that most readers can recognize somebody they know in one of his stories - someone reasonably intelligent and sensitive, but clouded in ethical obligation and ambition by a certain type of everyday sadness: the kind that manifests in cynicism and bitterness and a tendency to hit the bottle way too hard. These aren't the destitute heroin addicts, pimps and criminals of a novel by Irvine Welsh or Hubert Selby, Jr., but the post-university crowd of men and women inching toward an overwhelming apathy, a pathetic truce with fizzled aspiration - what the late David Foster Wallace might call "the gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." Goldbach's younger crop of characters seem equally recognizable - naïve and stumbling but so desperately eager to feel - which is the typical way most smart kids endure their strange and terrifying high school sentences.

I got in touch with John Goldbach to discuss his debut novel Selected Blackouts (Insomniac 2009), the writing and editing process, his influences, and the literary scene in his home base, Montreal. I'm pretty sure he wasn't blackout during our conversation, but with veteran drinkers it's sometimes hard to tell.

* * * *

Selected Blackouts wasn't the product of sudden inspiration and manic output (a la Kerouac's On the Road), but rather one of slow, steady discipline. Though some of the works included in the book are "connected and interrelated", most were written "independently of each other" over the course of several years. "I spent a good deal of my twenties working toward the book," Goldbach admits. "The book came together over a long period of time, [with] seven or eight of the stories being published in journals before the collection" (journals including Descant, Matrix, Hobart, Smyles & Fish, Waccamaw, The Shore, and The Globe and Mail). For any aspiring writer, this is always nice to hear - that the hurdles and ditches or our twenties can eventually flatten into firm ground, and we realize that it's never been a race, but a marathon.

I find Goldbach's stories to be accessible, stripped-down works that swing between first and third person without a dramatic change in voice - a kind of minimal mixture of Raymond Carver and Bret Easton Ellis, albeit with a decidedly lighter tone. "I don't know if I think of the stories as minimalist," Goldbach counters, "but with short stories there isn't a lot of room for digression, so I wanted them to be fairly tight, in a sense, if possible." It's interesting, then, to discover that several of Goldbach's literary influences and current interests (which he was understandably enthused to share) aren't exactly known as masters of concision. "Dostoevsky, Gogol, Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Beckett are a few writers I love to read and reread," he lists, "as are Philip Roth and Mordecai Richler and Gilbert Sorrentino and David Foster Wallace and many more. I'm just finishing António Lobo Antunes's What Can I Do When Everything's On Fire? (W.W. Norton 2008) and it's a remarkable novel; in some ways, it reminds me of Faulkner but also of William Gaddis - two other incredible, impacting writers. It's one of the most interesting and awesome novels I've read recently, that's to say, by a contemporary writer (i.e., someone who's alive!). Also, I'm currently reading The Essays of Leonard Michaels (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2008) - which is terrific - and I'm about to start Ann Quinn's Berg (Dalkey 2001), which a friend highly recommended - so I'm looking forward to reading it, too."

I asked Goldbach about his experiences working with Insomniac Press, as well as his editor - fiction/poetry writer and all around very busy guy - Jon Paul Fiorentino. "Working with Jon was good. He didn't change much - just suggested a few cuts, which I was happy to implement, and made a few other suggestions. He's an encouraging editor and I enjoyed working with him quite a bit. Working with Insomniac, too, went well." I suppose if readers want any juicy gossip about the Insomniac editing process, they'll have to pry it from Fiorentino - Goldbach is perhaps wisely keeping details under wrap.

Living in the very literary-friendly city of Montreal, and judging by his characters' social habits, one might imagine that Goldbach is a frequent and enthusiastic attendee of readings. Not so, as it turns out. "I don't read live that often," he says. "I like it, I think, ultimately, but at the time it's a little anxiety-inducing. It can be fun, though I wouldn't want to do it all the time. And I enjoy going to readings sometimes. And as far as the Montreal literary scene goes, I have some friends here that are writers and some that are very good readers and some that are both - a lot of people seem to read literary fiction in this city, which is great - but I don't think I'm that involved in any scene, though I do like to have beers and talk about books with some of my friends sometimes. And I do read my friends' work, too. I think Montreal's a city of several scenes but also a good place to work on what you're working on. I like that about the city; there's a lot going on but room to do your own work."

For enthusiasts of Goldbach's writing, there's some good news: it seems he's already got a few more projects on the go. "I'm working on some new stories and a novel," he says. "It's hard for me to say if the themes are similar in the newer stuff but if the themes are similar, the treatment's a little different, I think. But I'm sure there'll inevitably be some recurring ideas."

And yet, alas - with the good news comes the bad: that's all I could seem to get from him on the subject. All you avid Goldbach fans will simply have to keep your shorts on and wait until these new pieces are revealed in print. One may feel the urge to go on an extended bender until then, but please, take it from me - speeding up time by means of a massive blackout is never, ever a good idea.