The (CanL)It Crowd with rob mclennan
With the recent release of rob mclennan’s newest book, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press)—a marvelous collection of short fiction—(you can read an excerpt of it here), I wanted to invite him to share his thoughts on literary citizenship. Lucky for me—and all of us, really—he said yes.
CanLit may be a koan, but rob is a one-man source of hope within the riddle. He runs a fair for small presses, he hosts a site for book reviews and does countless reviews himself. He’s written a whole host of wonderful books. While I have no doubt he must be tired of a great many things, he retains a nonplussed persistence within a sometimes fraught and often uncertain literary landscape. I may not be dignified or nonplussed, but I do live in a near-constant state of existential dread and this agonizing awareness of our fleeting time on this mortal coil can really rid a gal of fleeting preoccupations with bottom lines and even scores, you know? So the rob’s unwavering focus is something I can understand, though perhaps not for the same reasons.
I am proud to welcome rob—a literary institution in himself—to The (CanL)It Crowd.
rob mclennan: the man, the legend.
The (CanL)It Crowd with rob mclennan : Lecture for an Empty Room
I’ve been thinking about citizenship: mentoring, editing, publishing, hosting, reviewing, reading. The ways in which we interact. Unpaid hours and positions in often self-made small publishing ventures. Hosting book fairs and readings and launches. Attending the book fairs and readings and launches of others. Reviewing. The back-and-forth. My farming father, assisting a neighbour repair part of their fence, responding to cows newly spilled across the cornfield and along our dirt road. With my teenaged self in tow, the summer my father and the hired man baled and barned elderly widower neighbour Cameron MacGregor’s first and second cut of hay, after Cameron had become incapable of managing himself. As Monty Reid wrote in his 1986 essay “Small Town, Small World”:
Here, talk about the weather is not small talk. The person you’re with may be ploughing his wheat under the next day. Still, the weather is a mythical creature and is a clue to what I think is one of the definitive features of small-town dwellers. The weather is beyond control, it cannot be organized, yet it is a determining factor in our lives. The small townsman, in other words, believes in power but knows he does not control it. Its source is always located somewhere else. They can attempt to go there and seize it, which is why so many rural people remember John Diefenbaker with nostalgia. Or they can create a mythology out of their own powerlessness. Hence the weather.
I caught a tweet by a stranger, desperately seeking advice on how to “enter” a literary community. I offered my thoughts on the matter, which this stranger, a poet somewhere in the United Kingdom, graciously accepted. I followed them, naturally. I took it quite personally when they didn’t follow me back. To my mind, they had missed entirely the point of their query.
During my time as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, a grad student responded that he’d long thought that Canadian writers raised on farms was apocryphal. It was only once he landed in Edmonton, he offered, did he realize it was a real thing. Where, I wonder, had he been before that? While there are tons across the broadband of Canadian writers of similar vintage, or roundabout, to the late legendary Alberta poet Robert Kroetsch—Charles Noble, Earle Birney, Brian Brett, Raymond Knister, Robert Hogg, Louise Abbott, Dennis Cooley, John B. Lee, James Reaney, Daniel David Moses—there are also plenty closer to my age, not simply myself: Karen Solie, Sheri Benning, Angeline O’Neill, Philomene Kocher, Sandra Ridley, Lee Gowan, Ann Shin, Brenda Schmidt. And of course, Canadian poets Charlie Smith, Alisha Kaplan, Nora Gould, Jenna Butler and Susan Haldane are each currently farming. How does a farm experience colour an approach to the arts? Perhaps I make too much of this. At one point, I attempted to connect the idea of poets farm-raised to Lisa Robertson’s self-declared pastoral, a matter of perspective shifting the ways in which we approach the work: to daily wake and attend what needs attending. That daily impulse, muscle.
In that way, I suppose, one might suggest Robertson’s pastoral along similar lines to American poet Cole Swensen’s work: an attentiveness, attuned to a broad spectrum of seemingly-exterior systems, whether ecological, of landscape, language or history. If taken far enough, one might even consider all writing, or certainly all poetry, pastoral. This call-and-response.
A creative life constructed from little, but little enough. Scraps of folded, stapled, sewn. A foundation as simple as a breath or a line, as hard as sound or as soft as an utterance. I offer unsolicited insights to emerging writers—suggesting that I’m kind of an idiot and if I can do it, therefore anyone can—fully ignoring my own privileges and support, and situational layerings that have provided the very agency of choice. Not democratic as such, but.
I wrote and I wrote, choosing to live without the safety of a particular net of employment. I saw no purpose to giving my best energy to what I loved less. Fully aware I wasn’t interested in waiting for weekends or even retirement to live my real life. Our high school guidance counsellor who spoke repeatedly of post-work plans, only to die just short of retirement. The Head of the English Department who retired early in response. Unaware of just how much time might be left.
My mother’s forty-some years of illness shaped a great deal of my perspectives. The farm provided me with a work ethic, whereas her situation might have driven my determination. All that she could have wanted, or done. Instead, she spent the second half of her thirties and most of her forties out of commission. When she finally died in 2010, the year I turned forty, it was forty-three years after she’d been handed a terminal diagnosis: at twenty-seven, told she had but three months to two years to live. I suspect stubbornness a factor. Might I have inherited some of that as well?
I don’t know what time I might have. I need to get this all down.
There was an article I caught somewhere in the late 1990s, I think in the Toronto Star, by Toronto playwright Jason Sherman, who suggested that too many artists pretend to be bourgeois, when we should all just admit that we’re working class: we wake up daily to attend to the work that requires attending. The daily activity of thought and making, although there are an equal amount of comparisons one can make to science or study; this life-long process of attempting to explore and discover, and our notes in the making what we leave on the page. Perhaps, in our own ways, the writing itself not of our conclusions but a record of progress. Our conclusions might never come.
More about rob mclennan:
Born in Ottawa (Canada’s glorious capital city) and raised on a farm near Maxville, Ontario, rob mclennan 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, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. With recent titles including World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is his fourth work of fiction, after the novels white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), and The Uncertainty Principle: stories, (Chaudiere Books, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], and co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994, which he’s run twice a year on his own since, The Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, 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
On Beauty: stories by rob mclennan (University of Alberta Press, 2024).
The thirty-two stories in On Beauty exist as lyrically dense bursts of short prose that move across wide swaths of narrative in compact spaces, offering explorations of characters working through small or large moments. The stories include parenting, pregnancy, the death of a parent, complications between friends, spouses, etcetera. These stories, in their own ways, explore moments as potential sequence, and how each of those moments might impact each other. To ask where, when, how or who: the “why” is the story; all else are facts.