Interview with Roxanna Bennett and Jeremy Luke Hill

Interview conducted by Kevin Heslop

This conversation took place on 26 September, 2019. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Gordon Hill Press

(Gordon Hill Press, 2019)

I wonder if we could begin by talking about orthodoxy and divergence. Luke, what about publishing orthodoxy are you consciously shucking and what are you intentionally inheriting with this new press?
 
Jeremy Luke Hill: So, we’ve sort of gone looking for non-orthodox writing. Especially when it comes to fiction and non-fiction, we’re looking for things that are a little bit off the beaten path. But we’re also looking for people poetically who are willing to experiment with form––which is more Shane Neilson’s area than mine. And part of that is really deliberate in the sense that––this is gonna sound bad, maybe, but––if you’re already not trying to fund yourself, why not take on more interesting projects. We’re not gonna sell thousands of copies and be Doubleday anyway. We’re already operating in a market where we’re gonna survive on government funding and people donating and being in that mode. We’re able to do things that aren’t dependent on having to sell a thousand copies.
 
Mm.
 
JLH: You talk to some small publishers, and it seems like they’re still playing that game: if I could only get a book that hits the book club market, we’ll make money that way. And I feel like if you’re gonna be in that market, be in that market. Find the things that are interesting. Find the things that are strange. Find the things that are talking. Find the things that are dealing with issues that aren’t really being dealt with, and then roll with that––because those are things that won’t get picked up otherwise. So there’s almost a little bit of perversity there. But also, I feel like those are usually the things that resonate with me most. I read a lot of CanLit, and I’m not picking on anybody, but a lot of the time I feel like what comes through that pipeline is not bad writing, but it’s very much the same writing. And that comes from an increasing professionalization of writing where everybody’s got an MFA and--I’ve got no problems with MFAs, but--there’s that kind of professionalization that results in a sameness of writing. And at some point, I want to read something different, something interesting that knocks my socks off. And there are people out there doing that, and that’s kind of where we want to be.
 
So, speaking of MFA programs, or post-secondary education generally, Roxanna, I know that you studied and dropped out of the Experimental Arts Program at OCAD.
 
Roxanna Bennett: I did.
 
And I wonder whether you felt that sameness was being encouraged at that institution or at schools in general––whether they resist a sort of originating creative impulse.
 
RB: School in general, I think, has that effect of sameness. I mean, school as we have it here in Ontario is really just training us to go to work at whatever jobs the province has an agenda for. So, it’s training to be a good cog in the machine, I think––a lot of it. That’s not to say that there aren’t wonderful teachers and wonderful subjects, but systematic education I think discourages individuality and diversity, and institutions do that, I feel. You asked me about OCAD?
 
I did.
 
RB: I went there before it was OCAD; it was OCA, so it was still a little less of a formal institution than it is now. It was part of the university system, so there was still a sort of hangover from back in––it was part of the Rochdale Institute, back in the day. So it was still a little more experimental when I went there. But it was definitely … not what I expected of an artistic institution. I have a problem with visual art teachers who ask you to explain the project they gave you. Especially something like colour theory, where it’s like, Paint blue. We want you to paint blue. And you paint blue. Blue squares. Paint blue squares chromatically––a row of blue squares. And you go home and you do the assignment and you come back and they say, Tell me about your art.
 
*laughter*
 
RB: It’s not art; it’s an assignment: you told me to paint blue and I painted blue. Yes, but tell us about it. Describe it to us. I painted blue! I did the thing you told me to.
 
*laughter*
 
RB: So there’s an encouragement to lie and bullshit and make stuff up and make things larger than they are or need to be. And I’m not good at any of that, so. Yeah.
 
So why did you persist for the year, then?
 
RB: Well, I was already there.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
*laughs* It would have been inconvenient to leave.
 
RB: I had access to the cafeteria; I got my OSAP; my friends were there. So, you know.
 
So you painted blue for a little while.
 
RB: I painted blue until––yeah, I got too sick and left. And also a combination of being too sick to be in school and teachers being sick of me being in their school because I’m––because I was argumentative. I was a jerk. I was an asshole to the teachers.
 
I mean, I remember hearing in an interview Noam Chomsky saying that basically graduate schools select for obedience.
 
*laughter*
 
I wonder, Luke, if that at all resembles your experience of––was it an MFA at Guelph?
 
JLH: That I took?
 
Yeah.
 
JLH: No, sir. I have an MA in English Lit. And that was a little bit my experience. I resonate with Roxanna when she says that she was a jerk to her teachers. I was there also. And I had taken the thesis option to do my MA and eventually I decided that I was going to write––I was so frustrated with the whole thing––that I was going to write it as a personal essay, very much in a kind of visceral, personal way. And knowing the whole while that my particular supervisor would probably pass it, but that it would kill any opportunity to go do a PhD.
 
RB: Look at you.
 
JLH: Well, at that point I decided––I had always thought that I would do the PhD thing and go be a prof, but halfway through, I realized that I couldn’t do another five years. I didn’t think I could cope as a prof in the academic institution, and I had no idea what to do after that; I had literally no idea. And I’ve been bumbling along looking for a place to do stuff ever since. I have a very tolerant partner.
 
RB: *laughs*
 
So, on this point of the personal essay, written from the first-person perspective––something that is maybe suspicious in the lordly academy––I remember, Roxanna, a reading you gave that you preceded with an anecdote––that I hope you don’t mind my reiterating here––about your having taken a nightschool course with a serious heterosexual man-poet––
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
––Who encouraged his students to move from the first-person perspective to the third-, and that it was his opinion that shifting that perspective makes a more powerful poem. So, when you worked with Aileen Miles, her response was, Fuck that. Let yourself into the poem. Let everything in. If you’re sitting in a room writing a poem about your father’s death and a dog walks in, let that dog into the poem with you. And something she kept saying throughout the workshop was, I don’t see you in here--as though you were important enough to inhabit the poem. And that that was a strangely liberating idea for you. And you went on to say that it was really fascinating that the serious heterosexual man-poet advised objectivity and the serious queer poet advised subjectivity. 
​
RB: Wow. I used a lot of words all at one time like that? That does not sound like me at all. I must have written it down.
 
It didn’t look at all like you were reading from a prompter. It seemed to be spontaneous, yeah.
 
RB: Fascinating.
 
So, Luke, as you mentioned, a personal essay wasn’t going to be the form that would allow you to proceed into a PhD––and Roxanna, as that move from third-person to first-person was strangely liberating for you––I wonder if either of you have any remarks about the importance of the first-person perspective, and whether that’s in contrast to what universities look for.
 
RB: Hm. I don’t really know what universities look for, not having gone to one. I’ve taken a couple of night-classes, and I was shocked at how they encourage you to write terribly.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: Like, why do they make you use a lot of jargon and big words that don’t mean anything, and then they ask you to write your opinion as though it’s authoritative fact. And I just––that just seems gross and disguising your subjectivity as objectivity.
 
Mm.
 
RB: Those are two––objectivity and subjectivity are things I think about a lot in terms of––Those are things that have always concerned me since I was quite young. Things that are presented as fact that are not, in fact, fact. And we say they’re objective, but really they’re more like many people’s subjective opinion presented objectively. So, what does objectivity mean? And subjectivity is inescapable, but I have no clear answer. Now I’m rambling.
 
It sounds like the objectivity you’re describing is basically subjective consensus.
 
RB: Yeah. I like that. I might have to steal that.
 
It’s yours. 

JLH: One of the things that I think is interesting when we get on that subject, is that I don’t think it’s impossible to write good poetry or good whatever from the third-person. But the risk that we run, when we speak in the third-person, is falling into the idea that we are an authority even when we’re not, or that we have factual basis for what we’re saying even when we don’t, or that we have an air-tight argument even when we don’t. That’s the risk of the third-person, when you’re dissociating yourself from your subject. So, you can do it, but that’s the risk. Just like the risk of writing from the first-person is that you rely so much on your experience that you don’t have any support for a larger position. And so, I think you need to know those risks when you’re writing in those modes. If I want to write in the first-person, I need to be able to understand the limitations of that; and when I write in the third-person, I need to understand the risks that that position draws me into.
 
So, on this point of the third-person perspective, Roxanna, I was caught delightfully off-guard by your attack on authors’ bios and photos from 2014, which is framed as a guide and full of contradictions. After berating the conventions of the author-bio––the third-person perspective, how you generate income, publication history, academic affiliation, information about your pets––you go on to explain that author photos should be in black and white to convey the seriousness equal to the business of writing, and should also be full colour to convey that one is young and current and relatable. And one’s photo should ideally look nothing like you. The goal here, you write, is to be completely unrecognizable.
 
RB: *laughs*
 
I wonder if either of you have a response to the orthodox, writerly persona, and why it fails.
 
JLH: Mm.
 
RB: It fails? Do you think it fails? It seems quite successful.
 
*laughs*
 
RB: It’s slick, financially. It’s also––you know, no: I think it’s very successful. I think they’re doing okay.
 
But it fails in a kind of heartstrings kind of way, right? I mean, introductions that are offered at readings often list the journals that someone’s been published in, or the awards that they’d been shortlisted for or won. And there’s something so anaemic about that. I think in that same piece you wrote something like, Why are these facts more important than one’s fucked-up childhood, or one’s weird secret habits? Why don’t we discuss those things? Those things seem to me to be more successful, in a way.
 
RB: Well, they’re certainly more interesting. And make the person speaking a human being instead of a list of credits that are sometimes a little alienating, if you’re not familiar with the publications or if you’d never heard of them. Suddenly this person speaking is so much fancier than you, which makes you feel very intimidated. Or, that’s me. I’m projecting, of course. But, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over the disappointment of learning what actual poetry readings and poets and poetry are like.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: Like, my childhood dream of––I remember being afraid, when I was twelve or thirteen, writing poetry and someone would be like, Oh, you’ll be a poet when you grow up. And I’m like, Oh my god. No. They go to institutions; they’re mad; they get locked up. I don’t want to be a poet. That’s terrible. They get locked in attics, or they die in gutters. I knew this already as a young child that that was a terrible fate, right? But exciting, right? And interesting. And then as a teenager, you want to be a poet because that’s sexy and they’re doing stuff and they’re hitchhiking and they’re having adventures. But then as a young adult, to realize, No, they go to school.
 
JLH: *laughs*

RB: They go to school and they have jobs and they’re just regular. And they all are still acting like it’s a job and it’s a regular thing, instead of this magical gift, right? Like from the gods or whatever. This mythical power to be a poet, and they’re just going to work, and they’re just kind of mean to each other––like it was just––
 
*laughter*
 
RB: What’s the point? Why are they so mean to each other? We’re all doing the same thing. But no, you have to go to school. It’s so confusing! Everything I read––all the poetry I read as a child and as a young adult––it was so exciting and invigorating. And then to find out it’s not at all like that; it’s just another job; it’s like all the juice, all the magic got sucked out of it at some point. It’s continually disappointing that everyone is not just constantly: WE GET TO BE POETS! Like, this is an incredible––like, you are making art with language. What a gift! How lucky we are to be able to do any of that. But no, we’re just going to talk about our credits and our prizes and––I don’t know. I don’t understand it, and I think it broke my heart so much to realize that this was the case. You have to have a deg––Like, I remember the first time I heard someone went to school and got an MFA and it’s like, Yeah, but what do you mean you went to school to write a poem? Why? You already wanted to write poetry. What are they gonna teach you there? I don’t understand why––That seems the opposite of poetry. It’s just so confusing to me. All of it seems counterintuitive to poetry to me, which is the part that I rarely ever hear anyone speak about––the actual words, the actual lines, the actual poem. That’s what I care about. The rest of it is just––I don’t know––not even gravy.
 
JLH: I remember that the first bio I wrote for a magazine included a whole list of things that I was into. It was a bio that said something about who I was, and I sent it to the magazine and they sent it right back, and they basically told me to give a list of places where I’d been placed. And yet, when you go to festivals and whatnot, the very first thing people ask is about those personal things. When they have a chance to talk to authors, what they want to know is, What went on in your life that brought you to this spot? They want to know about you as an author because that’s the point of human connection.
 
RB: Mhmm.
 
JLH: So it’s interesting that we don’t put that in bio’s at all, ever. I hadn’t really thought of that, but it’s a true fact.
 
RB: I thought, when I worked as an editor, that putting credits in a bio was a short-cut for editors who are going through submissions: Oh yeah, this person has been in five different places; they’re probably good. That’s gonna make it closer to the top of my list. It makes it easier just to go through submissions, I think. Or, easier to sell the poet, or sell the work, because other people have already put time and money into it, so it’s worth it to take this person, I think.
 
Subjective consensus.
 
RB: And I think, Ew, gross. Just gross.
 
JLH: And there’s a tendency to do that when you have a pile in front of you.
 
RB: It’s easy.
 
JLH: It’s easy. So, I might embarrass Roxanna here a little bit here, but that runs very counter to the way I encountered her work, for example. I’m in London; I’m tabling beside Baseline Press. I had never really encountered them before. Beautiful chapbooks. I picked one up; it was Sam Cheuk. I read it; I was really impressed. He’s supposed to read at Knife|Fork|Book, so I go to Toronto to see him there. He doesn’t show up because of something––I’m not sure what––and I’m talking to Kirby, and Kirby says, Well, we have his book. And I’m like, I already have his book. What can I spend my money on? He says, You gotta read Roxanna’s book. And I read it, and I’m blown away by it. And so I decided to review it. And those kinds of organic ways of running into people and discovering their work and being influenced by it, and having it take you to somebody else, who takes you to somebody else––it feels better to run into people that way. And it’s harder when you’re faced with a pile of submissions: you don’t know anything about those people, and you’re just trying to read one manuscript after another. Yeah. You’d much rather do it the organic way. 

RB: It’s slower to do it organically, too, right?
 
JLH: Mhmm.
 
RB: The same is true for me when I’m to work with a publisher. The manuscript unmeaningable had been accepted by a couple different publishers whom I turned down--which was a weird thing to do--because it didn’t feel right. But this did, working with you, Luke, and working with Shane. I knew I wanted to work with someone who liked what I was doing, but would also understand me, and that I’m not on social media, and I probably say inappropriate stuff sometimes, and I rarely leave my house, and I’m weird. I like having a publisher who just let me be myself without making myself ill to promote the book. Like, you’ve been so flexible with me and made sure that the launch is held someplace accessible and taking those things into account, which a lot of publishers don’t do at all. The publishers that I decided not to work with, it was for reasons like that. Publishers who had their offices up a few flights of stairs where I would never be able to go. Those kinds of things.
 
Luke, you’re talking about that sort of organic and slow process of discovering new writers, at least in that instance, being facilitated by Kirby, and I just wanted to tip my hat to that entity of Kirby.
 
JLH: Yeah, and the brand new space.
 
RB: Oh, absolutely.
 
JLH: We’re gonna be launching there on November the 27th at the new Knife|Fork|Book space, which we’re really excited about, and Danny Jacobs will be in town from out east at that point. He’s doing a unique thing there, Kirby. There are not a lot of places in the world where you kinda get that vibe of somebody who just really loves what they’re doing, and who’s taking some risk and doing some fun things. He’s been in business for like three years and he’s already launched a second imprint geared specifically towards queer poets. And he’s just doing really good work. I tip my hat to him for sure.
 
RB: Kirby’s an angel. Kirby’s like the fairy godparent of poetry. Angel, angel. Love, love Kirby. And the love for poetry––
 
JLH: Yeah.
 
RB: ––is incredible. That’s just pure love. KFB is just fueled by poetry and love.
 
Yeah, the way that that organic facilitation of community takes place is because Kirby reads every book on the shelf and every book coming through––
 
RB: Mhmm.
 
––And it’s totally out of a place of love, yeah.
 
RB: Mhmm.
 
So, Roxanna, speaking of working with Shane: after a cursory study in anticipation of this interview, it seems that people with disabilities have historically been almost anthropologically studied and spoken for by people without disabilities. And I wonder, in contradistinction to that––sorry, this is an unnecessarily large word––opposing that, you’ve had the opportunity to work with Shane Neilson as your editor, and I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about that experience and what that has meant for you.
​
RB: Oh, everything. Everything. No one else could have edited that. Shane has spoiled me for all other editors ever.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: One day there will be a statue to Shane, you know? I look forward to the day when Shane wins The Order of Canada for all the work he does.
 
Fuck yeah.
 
RB: He’s a powerhouse, and such an incredible poet, and he was so good with me. I remember the first email he sent me had lots of words I didn’t understand. And I thought, Oh, no. He thinks I’m a went-to-school smart person.
 
*laughter*
 
RB: And I had to email him back and say, Could you please dumb everything down and explain it all like I’m five, please? And he did, in a totally not-condescending way. He took the time to really patiently break down words I was not familiar with and concepts I didn’t understand. Which meant a lot. Not many people would take that time to do that. And Shane being disabled and working so much––his activism work for disability, and he’s doing a thesis, I believe, on pain.
 
I think he defended it not long ago.
 
RB: Did he? Yay, Shane.
 
JLH: Yep.
 
RB: Good lord. Does he ever sleep?
 
JLH: No, he doesn’t.
 
RB: *laughs* Good grief. But I could not have––Nobody else could have edited that, I think. They couldn’t have understood it on the multiple levels that Shane did. Not just the subject matter, but also, you know, he’s a fantastic poet himself and he’s a driving editor. Anything wrong with the book is my fault totally ‘cause I’m stubborn. I can’t think of anyone else who could have directed it and guided me and given me editorial feedback in a sensitive way, cognizant of where I’m coming from and altering the way he communicates so that things are clear for me. It’s a big deal. It takes time to do that. It’s extra effort for him to explain things to me that he might not have to with other people who are more educated or who are better at words––at like, speaking or communicating. So, I really appreciate the extra effort that takes and that he gave and didn’t complain or make me feel small or diminished for needing that support.
 
Let me just––before I ask Luke to discuss the evolution of his relationship with Shane towards co-founding Gordon Hill Press––I just wanted to say that after having produced a book like unmeaningable and the fluency and honesty with which you’ve spoken so far, I’ve got to challenge your––You just seem to me to be an expert communicator, and the poems are astonishingly fluent, so.
 
RB: Thank you. Thanks.
 
Luke--so, how did you meet Shane and how did the conversations preceding Gordon Hill Press look?

JLH: We met in the unlikeliest of places for poets, maybe, these days. We met in a church hallway.
 
*giggling*
 
JLH: And he was introduced to me by the pastor who said to the two of us, Oh, you guys should know each other. You’re both writers. And I thought, Well, that could mean a lot of things. And we shook hands and looked at each other awkwardly and we went our ways. It was funny because I had read some of Shane’s work earlier, but I had never seen a picture; so I didn’t know who I was talking to. And it sort of dissipated. And then we ran into each other again a little while later: I had written a review, and his first words to me were, Why did you like that book so much? There was hardly a hello. And we had a twenty-minute conversation about this review, and then I started to realize who he was. And we had a few conversations over time. Got to know each other a little bit. We have kids aged similarly. And then one day he showed up on my porch out of nowhere and he came in for a coffee and he said, We should buy Porcupine’s Quill.
 
Wow.
 
JLH: And I said, No one will ever submit to me. He said, That’s okay. They’ll submit to me. And we had that chat. But that was a really long kind of process before we realized that buying PQL wasn’t going to happen. But by then, we had all of this work done. And by that point we said, Okay, let’s just start something on our own. And it’s probably worked out better in that we were able to do some of the things that were important to Shane, which is to have a real emphasis on representing people with disability, people who haven’t been––not unrepresented, always, but not well represented. And we wanted to have a real emphasis on making sure that people were able to do what they were able to do.
 
Right.
 
JLH: So we had that element to it. And also, it meant that we were able to make it very representative of Guelph. Guelph has never had a publisher of any kind; and it’s weird, because we have a university there. But, because it began as an agricultural college rather than a religious college, it never saw the need to have an academic publisher. And that lack has spawned some interesting micro-publishing stuff there, but we thought that it was a good idea to have a connection between the local area and the larger nation and the larger work of literature. And I want in particular to have that element. So it did give us some unique opportunities to kind of pursue the things that we’re passionate about. But we hadn’t planned it as such. It kind of spiraled out of control from a meeting on a porch.
 
So, to take a look at unmeaningable, Roxanna, I notice a compendium of texts that informed the work, and that there were a number of sort of inverted recurrences of lines from T.S. Eliot, the first being in the second line of the title poem “The Trick”: 

The Trick
​
Let me be a “poet of cripples” not
a patient etherized upon a table,
not a brain floating within a body.
In a moment I must be a body
in the place incision produces in the body,
previously intact. Inert, poor body,
inarticulate. Pain flees from the word “pain.”
Between meaning and the unmeaningable
is the trick of thinking I can fix what I can name.
Inertia insists on comfortable
contraries, less on chastened patients.
Let me be any other word, any other body:
stone, swan, sycamore. Perform patience
full time; retirement a normate luxury
I will not be afforded. My need to mean
alien to the pain, yet I remain, unseen. 

And a term I’ve seen recur in your work and remarks and in the field of disability studies is bodymind. I was wondering if you could discuss the importance of that word in your thinking about disability.
 
RB: Bodymind. It comes from a few different places. One of them that’s important for me is continually being told that what you’re experiencing is all in your head. Which, the last time I checked, is usually attached to your body, so that doesn’t make any sense. To say, It’s all in your head, they mean, It’s all in your mind. Well, where is your mind? In your body. Is it in your body? If not, then where is it? This dualism in Western medicine of splitting the body from the mind, treating them as separate things––I think that is entwined with my subjectivity/objectivity fascination, because it’s baloney, it’s bullshit.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: Right? We’re a mess of things, and we’re not one or the other, and we all have bodies with minds in them, inseparably. And there’s something about the systemic institutionalization in the Western world, maybe, that is insistent upon this divorcing of mind from body which is unhealthy and unnatural and untrue, I think. I think we’re one thing. We’re a body and a mind. And––whatever illness, affliction, impairment someone has––it’s a combination, because those things are actually the same thing. I don’t think there truly is a separation of those things. They’re one thing, and the easiest way in language to say that just seems to be bodymind as one thing––to enfold both those concepts into one word instead of making a new word.
 
And, I mean, how dismissive and condescending is a statement from a medical professional like, It’s all in your mind––as if that made it any less real.
 
RB: Ha! Right? It’s like, Okay, well maybe it is. And now what? How does that change––That doesn’t actually change anyone’s experience. A person’s experience of pain is their own and it makes no difference if it’s an hallucination or has an organic origin. The perception is the same. So, treating them as different––Oh, it’s all in your mind: that pain is all from your mind. It’s not worth anyone caring about. We don’t care about it; it’s just in your mind; it’s a figment; we don’t have to pay attention to it; we don’t have to pay attention to you. You shouldn’t pay attention to it either. Don’t pay attention to your imaginary pain, and there’s no such thing. Either it all is, or it’s not. It’s an easy thing to say, It’s all in your mind. And now we don’t have to deal with it because it’s your problem. It’s an imaginary thing. And there’s nothing we can do about your imaginary thing, so go away now.
 
There’s a beautiful––and on this point––encapsulatory line in “Language of Hospital” where you write: “Incurious / surgeons treat patients like plague / as though stories are contagious.” 

Language of Hospital
 
Stories like cathedrals I cradle,
I carry my religion in ribcage
from waiting room to waiting
room. Being here at all a radical
act. Rate symptoms of violet
from one to ten. Name victims
of violence from birth to death.
Think kingdoms want women,
think again. Nurses needle, nag
with stifling kindness. Incurious
surgeons treat patients like plague
as though stories are contagious.
My father spoke the language of stone,
swan, sycamore stuck in the throat. 

JLH: Mm.
 
Just gorgeous.
 
RB: I never met less curious people than doctors. It’s shocking.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: Like, you would think just one of them would be like Dr. House from TV––just one.
 
*laughter*
 
RB: One time they could be like, Oh, tell me more. That’s fascinating. I’ve never heard of that. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Not one. They’re just checking their watch the whole time. And I mean, come on. Like, some shit is weird; don’t you want to find out why? And they don’t want to know, which I find fascinating, too. It seems like the less information a doctor has about you, the better. And they really want it to come from other doctors, not from you, because you’re not the authority; other doctors are. So don’t waste their time by telling them more than they need to know. That’s been my personal experience. I understand they’re busy people and doing very difficult work––I get that, too––but I think they’re taught to be callous. So, no wonder so many of them have mental health issues because, yeah, they’re put in very stressful positions.
 
On this point of stories as contagions, there’s a program and a lecture series at Western University in London––I think it’s titled Narrative Therapies––that identifies a problem in the medical profession generally where people with chronic illnesses kind of go from one expert to the next without any narrative continuity––like, in a series of disjointed interactions with ostensible experts, and what they’re going through is never turned into the language of story. And some of the lectures there were from sufferers discussing their experience of treatment.
 
RB: Interesting. Well, narrative is how we understand and process as humans. And if you are stuck in the middle of a chaos narrative––which is just: and the next doctor and the next doctor and the next doctor––it’s like a broken story, right? For chronic pain, there is no resolution. You’re in the middle of the story always. So, making sense of that––I could see that being a very helpful, healing thing to have some kind of––to find a way to understand your experience through narrative.
 
So, this might be perhaps too personal a question verging a little bit away from the book, but I wonder how you’ve gone about the process of creating a kind of narrative for yourself in the experience of chronic pain, going, as you mentioned, from expert to expert. I suppose the book is that story, but I wonder if there are other ways that you think of that personal narrative.
 
RB: Hm. It seems to––You mean, to put it into a coherent narrative, like a chronological, linear … ?
 
Yeah.
 
RB: I think I would have trouble with that.
 
Yeah, yeah.
 
RB: Because where do you begin with an illogical story?
 
Right, right.
 
RB: There’s no––I think that’s why I write about it in poetry rather than prose, because I feel prose demands more of a linearity. Not all of it, of course. I’m wildly generalizing, but you don’t need that in poetry, or you can … I struggle with the idea of putting it in prose in that kind of way, in a more linear way, because it feels inauthentic to my experience of it. I wouldn’t know where to start; and who wants to read about someone being born? It just seems so boring. Like, where do you begin?
 
I mean, and yet, if I may, the crown of sonnets are connected one to the next.
 
RB: Mhmm.
 
So, I suppose there’s a sense of––does that feel like––linearity?
 
RB: Does it feel like linearity. No, because it goes around.
 
It goes around, yeah. That’s it.
 
RB: Because it falls one from the other, but then––if I’ve been successful––you end up a little bit back when it began. So, there is a linear progression because you have to turn the page, and one page follows another.
 
*laughs*
 
RB: But the work, I hope, becomes a little less linear as it progresses, because that’s certainly my lived experience as things become more … what? Fluid’s not the right word. More … something? More … less linear, less tight, less––Like, the older you get, the less you realize you have a grip on anything, right? So you just kind of have to loosen and go with it, and realize you have no control over anything. And especially if you’re disabled, you can’t control how people react to you, or your body, or your environment. I mean, nobody can, really. But I think disability really brings a lot of those concepts home in a visceral way that if you’re able and sane, perhaps you don’t have to experience so often. Oh my god, I’m completely rambling; I have no idea what I’m talking about; I have no idea what you asked me.
 
I think the question is less interesting than the answer regardless of where it begins and where it ends. Luke, I wonder if you have a word to offer about the distinction between linearity in prose and poetry.
 
JLH: One of the things that I really appreciate about unmeaningable is that, although it has a continuity to it, although it should lead you around in a circle a little bit, it also gradually loosens. The form begins fairly strict, but it loosens throughout the volume, which I think is an interesting thing too. And if you are reading it in a circular way, you get this periodical tightening and loosening of that form, but then the disruptions in it of the non-sonnets––and I really love that sense to it. Not only because of how it represents, but also because when you’re reading something like that, it’s possible for a really strict sonnet sequence to get structurally stale.
 
Right.
 
JLH: And to have those eruptions in it feels really good as a reader, too, and adds to the imagery or to the metaphorical levels of it. And I really like that quality of it. It paces well as a volume.
 
Roxanna, you’ve said that to communicate with others who are also bed-bound or patients or consumer-survivors has become the thread of practice that holds most meaning. And this statement seems to be epitomized by your poem “Wishes for Strangers,” which concludes: 

… I may never meet you, burn
with you, weep with you, but I hope
that you escape, that the world turns
and your pain does not flee the word pain.
That one day you will have roses again.

And it’s very possible that the poem says it better than conversation can, but I wonder if you’d say a few words about this thread of practice, how this provision of a kind of communication––if not a consolation––has come to be. How have you evolved in your thinking about the ideal reader?

RB: The ideal reader. I don’t think there is one, or everyone is one. But, I think I’m writing for people like––oh, that’s ridiculous: I’m not writing for people like myself; everyone’s like myself. Everyone’s a person. Hm. I think there is a different experience, maybe: people who are disabled, in chronic pain, people who are mad, people with mental illness, people who are neurodivergent, people who are queer, different, marginalized and who have been through the institutions and come up against the systems that have––in most cases––caused the marginalization and caused the mental illness––I think people who have had that experience and have taken something from that experience––Oh, I’m gonna cry. Oh, god. Please excuse me. Who have kept a piece of themselves inside that experience. Who have kept that core individuality, the person that they were born as, and kept going despite all that. The people who have kept that piece of themselves––that integral piece of themselves––or at least acknowledged that it’s there. I think that’s a person I’m trying to communicate with, which is really just myself, right? Which is really just me projecting, or wishing that I could have had another person to be a witness to this experience. And of course that poem, you know, is riffing off Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, “Wishes for Strangers,” because I think there’s something in that story that really resonates with me. The piece where––I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book or the story …

Mm. Mm.

RB: Where Evie, the main character––who has been tortured by V without knowing it––she doesn’t realize that’s who imprisons her, and she trusts him, and she’s following him. And it turns out he’s terribly betrayed her, and he’s tortured her, imprisoned her. She believes she was going to die. And then she thanks him, after all that. She finds out that he’s done these terrible things to her, and she thanks him. And she’s not giving in to him; she’s not sucking up to him; she’s not bowing down to him, but she’s recognizing that this experience has made her more herself than without it. So, it’s that. It’s that piece of integral humanity that is who we are essentially. So I guess that’s my ideal reader––the person who connects with that experience, or wishes for more of that experience in life, right? More of that––not the experience of being tortured, not the experience of being imprisoned, but––that experience of recognizing your essential self, and that your tragedy can be your strength, or your gift, or your reason. Your communication of your experience and your tragedy is maybe not even a tragedy at all, but just something that enriches your time on this earth. Again, I’m rambling and have forgotten what you asked me.

That was beautiful.

RB: *laughs* What keeps Evie going throughout her time in prison is a letter she finds in the wall of her cell from a prisoner who had been there before her. I think this letter is one of the most powerful pieces of literature I've ever read and the words that Alan Moore wrote have sustained me through difficult situations. In the letter, the writer says: But it was my integrity that was important. Is that so selfish? It sells for so little, but it’s all we have left in this place. It is the very last inch of us, but within that inch we are free. I wanted to put Moore's words into a poem with my own as a kind of letter in the wall for anyone who might need it, whatever circumstance they find themselves in. That last inch is the most essential and least visible part of us. To quote Moore: I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I don't often leave my house, I rarely speak to or interact with other people so I don't have the chance to offer support in person. I hope the poem gives the reader a hand to hold when they feel alone and unseen. 

Luke, I wonder if I could put the question to you as tersely as: we write what we wish to read, or what we wish to have written? Do you feel like you, as a writer, produce work that you feel you wish you could read––to make the music you want to listen to?

JLH: I would say it’s truer to say that I publish the work that I wish that I could write.

*laughter*

JLH: I generally say that I’m a good enough editor to know that I’m a mediocre writer.

RB: Ooh.

JLH: And I write far more for particular reasons. Generally speaking, I’m trying to drive people to read with the things that I write. They very often involve references to other writers and other books because I just––I really––in a world that increasingly conducts its business by the length of the tweet, I think that poetry is just one example of many places where art can slow us down and make us engage with the world in the ways that we need to. So, when I publish, I’m saying, Read this stuff. It’s worth reading. Take your time. And I sort of write in the same way. Read this stuff. Go; pick it up; have a read; use your brain to engage with your world rather than just to swipe repeatedly in one direction or the other.

RB: I’m so glad you’re my publisher. Thank you. Thank you so much.

JLH: *laughs* And it’s easier when you have six titles a year, right? Instead of fifty. And I know that people keep––the publishers in my life keep telling me that it gets harder as you go, because just to make a go of it, you have to have more titles, and you have to get bigger and whatever. But I figure that if I’m not going to make any money at it anyway, I might as well not make any money doing it the way we want to.

RB: High-five!

Yeah.

JLH: That’s where I’m at.

So, as a publisher producing work that you want people to read, one of the ways you can do that within the constraints of a book is by matching visually what words and sequences are doing tonally. I wonder if you’d open up your storeroom of technical expertise with regard to the lacunae between letters, the space between words and stanzas, how you arrive at a cover––perhaps thinking of unmeaningable in particular.

JLH: Generally speaking, when it comes to a cover, I think that authors have a certain amount that they want to put into that, some of them more than others. I generally do want to get a feel for what the author has in mind so we can at least incorporate that into the final product. In this case, Roxanna sent along some public-domain photos of creatures that had supposedly been discovered on trips to Africa way back in the day––the typical things that you see from those colonial books, where they have people with heads growing under their arms, or people with snake tails or whatever. So, she sent those to me and I really loved them and just started playing around with them. We sent that back and forth a few times until we got something that we liked.

Right.
​
JLH: In other cases, if I know that the tone of the book isn’t something that I can do, I send it to somebody else and they do it. Marc LaLiberte did the cover for Sourcebooks for Our Drawings, and in the case of Gary Barwin, who is a graphic artist in his own right, we played around together with the cover for A Cemetary for Holes. So, it just depends. I feel like that is an area where I have been forced to do a whole lot of growing, because I’ve got a lot of experience banging around on InDesign, but trying to produce covers that meet what the authors think that they should be and that hopefully sell copies or encourage readers to pick them up––yeah, I’m learning as we go, for sure. I’m really pleased with the way that the books from the first season turned out, and the authors are pleased. Which is good: I won’t have anyone sending me hate mail. 

*laughs*
 
JLH: In terms of font, I can hardly even start with fonts. I’m such a geek with that stuff; I love it very, very much. When I asked Roxanna what she wanted, she said, I like the Q’s that have the little things on the bottom. And I was like, Done! That’s good. Let’s roll with that. But when we get into that kind of stuff, I have things that I do really like. And so I obviously have fonts that I like more than others, but, you know, it is kind of a fun thing for me to sit down and look through all the fonts that are out there and to get a feel for what works for a given project. I love it. And I love laying out the page, too. Right now I’m working on a book that is trying to draw on the feel of an encyclopedia, and that’s been a whole lot of fun too because I’m going back and asking, What kinds of old fonts do encyclopedias use? Can I still find those?
 
RB: That’s so cool!
 
JLH: Yeah, I really enjoy that part. I wish I could do way more of that and way less of, you know, bookkeeping and online shop management and things. It would make my life a whole lot easier. And also less social media. I’m looking for solid interns for social media. They could take that off my plate and I wouldn’t complain at all.
 
RB: Oh my god. We would all do better. Do you know how wonderful life is without that?
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: Highly recommend.
 
JLH: I survived so long without any of it, and then as soon as you start a business of any kind, people are like, Where’s your Facebook? Where’s your Twitter?
 
RB: I’m sorry that you’re doing all this, and I like how you were being so polite because I’m sure I was a pain in the ass about the background colour and all of that. He’s being very, very kind of polite.
 
JLH: The terrifying thing was that, when I sent it away to the printer, they were like––Roxanna, remember that overlay that we spent all the time figuring out how dark it should be––the printer was like, We can’t use that overlay. And I had to manufacture it by other means. And they said, Don’t worry, we’ve got it covered. So when that book showed up and it looked okay, it was a tremendous sigh of relief.
 
RB: It looks beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank your wife for her patience.
 
Before, Luke, I ask you about the other two books forthcoming this fall from Gordon Hill, I wonder if you’d talk a little bit about what the interior experience of looking through fonts is. I’m imagining it could be to some extent sort of synaesthetic, that you’d look at a particular font and have immediate associations with other texts that used that font in the past, or maybe––Are there tones, or anything sonic? What is the experience of leafing through fonts like for you?
 
JLH: The tools that they have now are so awesome. So, I generally go hunting for things. If I have a feel that I’m looking for, I’ll look for similar books and see what fonts are out there, but once you’ve got them in InDesign (which I’m using to typeset, mostly) you can literally select a bunch of texts, and then as you scroll through the font list, it renders the text as that font. So, especially for titles and whatnot, you can really get a good sense of what you’re looking for pretty quick. And then you narrow it down. I really like the standard font that we use on the license pages and in some of the text, Linux Libertine. I just really like that font, and also it’s open-source, which I try to support when I can. The other thing that you have to keep in mind is that a lot of these fonts don’t have full font-sets; they don’t have all the glyphs. So, I might find something that I really like, but if I need a macron and there isn’t one, then you have to––I have actually physically made glyphs before, which is maybe an admission of my geekdom that goes a little too far.
 
RB: No, no, no. This is fascinating. I’m so into this.
 
Yeah. You mention that you would make glyphs, but I wonder too if you could import glyphs from other fonts if they’re similar enough.
 
JLH: But if you want an “a” that’s taken with a macron over it and it doesn’t exist––for example, in Janson it doesn’t exist. So, what I do is I open Illustrator, type that letter, and I add whatever I want on top of it, and I save that as a little file, and then I import it into InDesign as a little gylph; and then I have to manually insert it––
 
RB: Get out.
 
JLH: But, at least it’s there.
 
Man.
 
JLH: There are probably easier ways to do it, I dunno. But that’s the way I do it.
 
Well, in a way, I hope you never publish more than six books a year because––
 
*laughter*
 
––it would detract from that tenderness and care.
 
JLH: Shane said something really interesting to me when we were first looking at this. I sent him a typeset of––I can’t remember which book––and I said, What do you think of this for solving this problem? And he said, When it comes to these things, I trust people who care about it. And that to me has been a key thing. In places where you know that you care about it, even if you screw up, in the long run I think it works out. And the places where you don’t find yourself caring, that’s where you have to find other people to do it. If you can’t put the care into it, you’re probably not going to get something you like.
 
Luke, I wonder if you’d say a few words about A Cemetary for Holes and Sourcebooks for Our Drawings also launching in late November at Knife|Fork|Book.
 
JLH: Yeah. So, Tom Prime and Gary Barwin have co-written A Cemetary for Holes. It’s poetry that deals a lot with the experience of childhood trauma, family trauma, and PTSD. And they’re written back and forth to each other through the whole first part of the volume; and then near the end they’ve co-written some together. So the collaboration in the beginning involves call-and-response, and in the end it involves direct collaboration on certain pieces. And it’s a really interesting book and really visceral. There’s a lot to it, and that collaboration continues. They’re still working on things together, which is kind of interesting to see. And one of the things that I really like is collaboration in writing. So, our first fiction title, which will come out in the spring, is another collaborative work called The Archaic Torso of Gumby––
 
RB: *laughs*
 
JLH: ––which is a great title. And it’s a prose collaboration, which is quite interesting. And then Danny Jacobs’s book is called Sourcebooks for Our Drawings. It’s a kind of hybrid memoir/essay that explores growing up in New Brunswick. It gets a whole lot into family history and the history of place and also has a certain critical element to it. He is a librarian, so he’s very engaged with the literary history––but also the literary found-ness––around him. It’s a really remarkable bit of writing. It’s one of those times when you pick that book up and it doesn’t take you very long to realize that you’ve probably never read essays quite like that. He’s published as a poet previously, but this is his first work of prose. I couldn’t be more pleased with the content of our first season. The terror, when you go into this, is certainly that you’re not going to find––when you’re just starting out––quality writers, and it’s been … I mean, I’m so, so happy with the quality of the writing, and the support that we’ve had from people. I feel like we have three books out that are prize-worthy. That’s where I’m at, and that’s––to say that in your first season is pretty exciting. 

So, as you mentioned The Archaic Torso of Gumby as a fantastic title, I wonder if we could return, Roxanna, to your book, and where unmeaningable came from and what it represents to you.
 
RB: The word?
 
Yeah, the word and the choice of that word as the title for this collection.
 
RB: The word I found on the Book*hug website in a conversation between Chus Pato and Erín Moure. The conversation was about translation, I think; and there were a few quotes in the conversation that I thought were really interesting. But the word stuck out to me because it doesn’t make any sense, which is something I get stuck on. If someone says a word I don’t understand, it’s really like an alarm: I have to sit down and puzzle it out. I can’t do anything until I’ve dealt with that word. I still don’t really understand what they mean by that word, but I love that there’s so many different pieces in it. I like the play of “able” inside of it, and I like adding “un-” to it because that’s something else that I’m fascinated with––the idea of taking something that’s whole and deconstructing it. It’s a confusing word which I think makes beautiful sense for a confusing experience, and you make what meaning can be made of something that doesn’t seem to have much meaning. I think that’s enough words about a word that I don’t understand.
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
I wonder, in closing, Roxanna, if I could ask you why your favourite book is Alice Through the Looking Glass.
 
RB: Oh, it’ll always be. That’s funny, because I’m working on a poem now that I’m like, How do I work the Dodo and the Mock Turtle into this poem? Today I’m working on that. I think there’s a lot of stuff going on in that book. I have a childhood connection to it: I learned to read early, and Alice Through the Looking Glass and Alice in Wonderland were two books that I had. And I’ve had two doctors tell me that one of the reasons that I survived my childhood was that I learned how to read early, and reading was an escape hatch. And I spent a lot of time down the rabbit hole. I spent a lot of time in those books. And not just as a child. I return to them. They’re friends. They’re home to me––a lot of children’s books are home to me. They’re comforting and reassuring. I’m also interested in the books themselves. Lewis Carroll was a mathematician and a great satirist, so there’s all these interesting little puzzles and satire and things in the book; and the chess game in the book can actually be played. The characters play as giant chess pieces, but you could actually recreate the game-moves, which I find fascinating. I find it fascinating as a work. All the satire and the nonsense and the words he invented and all these different characters, and the physics concepts in it, and the math concepts in those books. And yes, his questionable proclivities with young children are a problem. Yes. Yes, they are. But, you know, bad people can make good art, I think. That’s not true, because I don’t really believe anyone’s a bad person at all. So, complicated people make complicated art, I think, is a more accurate statement. Those books I feel very connected to and I still––I mean, they’re right here on my shelf. I have a copy right beside me. And I think, also, mad-as-a-hatter––I think a lot of people with mental illness have a connection, against their will, with those stories. I had a psychiatrist once recite “Jabberwocky” to me because in the sixties he saw an Alice-in-Wonderland parade, and he recited the entire thing, which is a long piece––
 
JLH: *laughs*
 
RB: ––During an intake appointment. And I remember thinking, Why are you the doctor? How come you get to be––
 
*laughs*
 
RB: ––The person in charge of me when I’m not the person here making poems at you.
 
*laughs*
 
JLH: And I could.
 
“And I could.”
 
RB: And it’s a way that people have of speaking about madness. It’s part of our popular culture. We see it in movies. We go down rabbit holes on YouTube or whatever, right? That’s from the book. So, I think there’s many different components of those stories that are part of our collective unconscious.
 
Well, here’s to the magnificent titles from Gordon Hill Press moving, if not towards our unconscious, at least our conscious minds in the near future.
 
*laughter*

Gordon Hill Press will launch its Fall 2019 titles on Wednesday, 27 November at Knife|Fork|Book

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Kevin Heslop is a London, Ontario-based poet and actor whose second chapbook, there is no minor violence just as there is no negligible cough during an aria, is with Frog Hollow Press; his first chapbook, con/tig/u/us, was published by The Blasted Tree in 2018. His poems won Poetry London and Occasus Literary Journal prizes in 2015. As an actor, he has appeared as Creon, Katherine Minola, and Saul Levi Mortera. Kevin is also the resident interviewer for Poetry London and organizes LOMP: reading series.