Ingrid Ruthig: When did you realize writing was your game?
Mark Anthony Jarman: As a kid I was a bookworm, read a lot, and the family joked I never heard anyone calling. I wrote a couple of stories in high school that were pretty bad. So I thought I’d write. But then I found it’s like listening to a good guitarist for year and assuming you can play guitar. It’s not so. I learned a lot from W.D. Valgardson at UVic [University of Victoria]. Also Matt Cohen and the poets P.K. Page and Phyllis Webb. I started in English but moved more and more to CW [Creative Writing]. I found it a lot more relaxed and sociable. The English Department seemed more formal and distant. I wrote more and more but never planned on teaching; I thought I’d drive a truck for CN, which I had done off and on. Then at University of Iowa I got a position as a teaching assistant, and that was the thin edge of the wedge. I never had a Five-Year Plan; it just happened.
IR: Then, do you find a certain pleasure in the process of writing?
MAJ: I’ve always been a slow writer, and I hate people who say writing is a joy, but I do have fun at times. Some-times I laugh out loud late at night when I come up with a goofy line. It’s also a bit of an addiction or obsession. When I hear a good detail at old-timer hockey, I can’t wait to write it down. Why is that? Others survive without that impulse. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes panic, sometimes depression and a feeling of "What’s the use?"
IR: But you keep at it—your work ranges from poetry to short stories, from novel to the travel writing of Ireland’s Eye. Which form do you enjoy exploring most and why?
MAJ: This changes. Right now I want to work on stories but my editor Martha Sharpe would rather I work on a novel I owe Anansi [Press]. I wrote the hockey novel, Salvage King Ya!, because I wanted to try a novel after doing stories and poetry. I wrote the travel book, Ireland’s Eye, because I had made a few trips and wanted to use the material. I wasn’t sure how I would. Same with stories and essays. I wrote a piece about a guy who fell off a bridge in Fredericton ("Bear on a Chain"), but I had no idea what it was about or how it would end or if it was a story or non-fiction or an elegy. It just started rolling and got longer and longer and then it won a Prism [International journal] contest and won a National Magazine Award. So I was happy, but it wasn’t a deliberate choice of form. It seemed to evolve. Same with the Irish book. It grew from two shorter pieces I wrote, the first one at Banff. The challenge was to make the pieces into some sort of whole.
IR: Short stories seem to be difficult for publishers to market to readers, even in this era of brief attention spans and too little time. Do you have a sense of who reads your stories?
MAJ: No idea. I think my readers go off into some gulag. I say this because I have been giving readings for almost two decades and I keep thinking I’m building an audience but then they become "disappeared". This puzzles me. When I’m dead we’ll all meet up and give each other excuses.
IR: Do you find that reading your work to an audience adds or takes away from the story itself? Is a story something best read aloud or should the reader be left to engage with the words?
MAJ: I write for the page, but I love reading. I came from a big family so I think I like the attention, and I really like getting a laugh, which is stupid in terms of being the next T.S. Eliot or anything like that. I like to hear noise or reaction and hate to read into a vacuum/silence. But at night on my own it’s different: I write for the page and whatever I feel like. Later you dig through what you have to find what might work out loud. I would have been kicked out of the storytellers around the fire. Growing up in Edmonton, I had friends who could tell stories way better than I could.
IR: Storytelling doesn’t usually pay well though; writers often hold another job while trying to stay focussed on the writing they’re compelled to do. What are the difficulties—or benefits—of teaching and writing? Have you accomplished what you set out to do?
MAJ: I never planned my life; I kind of fell into it. Teaching came out of being a T.A. at University of Iowa and was a way to make money that seemed superior to mowing lawns and chopping wood or working on a highway crew, which I did before teaching. It eats up way too much time but is better than many alternatives. I’ve been lucky and don’t want to complain. I’ve read good plays and poems and stories because of teaching, so that helps my writing. But Barry Hannah once said to me he was burnt out on literature, and I think I’m finding out what he meant. Better than being burnt out working in a bank or handing out parking tickets.
Set Two —
IR: You teach creative writing. What is your opinion of the current state of mentoring for young/developing writers in Canada?
MAJ: I like the word "mentor" in the same way I like the words "Mother Teresa," but I don’t think about it a lot. I had help from many people, and I appreciate it. But I don’t think there is any shortage of writers. There is a shortage of readers, especially male readers. Let’s mentor readers. I think more in terms of editing and getting people to read more, rather than mentoring. Maybe that’s a failing.
IR: That said, to what extent do writers need to consider their readers?
MAJ: I don’t dwell on this. I want to be read but I want to be free to push my writing a bit. You can think about the readers all day but that may not get you anywhere. You can try to be commercial and fail. I knew someone who tried to make money with an historical romance, and it was a waste of time and energy and led nowhere. I’d rather fail with my own stuff. It depends on the writer. Cheever said writing without a reader is like kissing without another person.
IR: If there were one thing that would help readers of contemporary fiction to appreciate it more, what do you think that would that be?
MAJ: They could read some; it’s not Zulu.
IR: You grew up in Edmonton, although you now live in Eastern Canada. Is there is a difference between Atlantic writing and writing from Ontario or the West? If so, are you able to describe that difference?
MAJ: Yes, to the first question. No, to the second. I think setting is important though. There are Maritime writers living in Ontario but they write about the Maritimes, e.g. Wayne Johnston, David [Adams] Richards, Alistair MacLeod. Setting defines them. I envy that in a way but also like to be a free agent and write about anywhere: Edmonton, the West, California, the American Midwest, the East Coast, or the Russian space station Mir. There are advantages to both ways.
IR: The 2002 winners of the Booker, Giller, and Governor General’s awards might be considered ‘dark horses.’ What does that represent? What do awards mean to you?
MAJ: Awards mean jealousy, hatred, bitterness. But ‘dark horse’ is good. I get mad at the idea that a certain type of big sprawling book is automatically better than a collection of stories. Some of the best writers are story writers: Ha Jin, Babel, Cheever, Carver, Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Ford, etc. Big is not always better. It’s like Abba vs. a singer like Vic Chestnut; I’ll take Vic anyday. Same with Townes van Zandt. Yet the media is full of Abba or Michael Jackson. It’s ludicrous and wrong.
Set Three —
IR: During a panel discussion at the 2000 "Wild Writers We Have Known" series (celebrating and exploring the short story) held in Stratford, Ontario, you said you constantly jot down anything that catches your attention—ideas, snippets of overheard conversations, other people’s stories, things you’ve read. Do you think this practice constitutes the literary equivalent of cannabalism?
MAJ: I think Malcolm Lowry and Ondaatje have used the idea of spiders or spies. Most writers have had that moment when you fake a trip to the bathroom to write something down. I feel guilty sometimes, especially with people I like, i.e. my relatives in my Irish book. But if I don’t write it, it may be lost. Is that good? Maybe cannibalism is good. Maybe it’s semantics. I consume, use, recycle. Janet Malcolm in the New Yorker said a writer is always selling someone out, and it’s true. I block that out a little.
I have to write things down because my memory is a sieve, but I also can’t wait to get home and jot some image down, or get out of the shower and record an idea, even if it’s just for a book review. I need a waterproof pad and pen. My hockey teams are a weird source of information and anecdotes; a different world than academic circles. I also like the drive into the country to Burtts Corner, where I play: time alone in the car with the music on and looking at the old Loyalist farmhouses and Baptist churches. It’s a different world than the West Coast.
Change is good for a writer. It jars you, can be painful, but it opens your eyes. There is some link between travel and perception. I can go to California for a week and mine the material for a year. Same with Ireland. People who move are different than people who stay put. I wrote the piece "Bear on a Chain," about a skateboarder who fell off a bridge in Fredericton, when I first moved to Fredericton. I don’t think I could write the same piece now that I’ve been here longer.
IR: Does it take a conscious effort to meld the notes into a single storyline, to make them fit, or do they take on a shape and place of their own?
MAJ: My notebooks do take work. They’re a random mess and then I have to pull out bits for a project, whether a new story or my travel book, which took years. I had many different journals from ’97, ’99, and 2002, and parts were about Ireland and parts England and parts anything that popped into my head. I had to start using sticky notes to flag bits I knew I’d want later for the Irish book. Sticky notes saved me. But I’d be lost without my journals. I never have to look at a blank page.
I go by gut feelings, smashing bits together, moving parts around and adding parts where they might not seem to fit or where they resonate in odd ways. It’s fun when it works. I think I’m getting faster.
IR: Did other writers’ work influence your method of relating a variety of material?
MAJ: John Dos Passos was a big influence on me. My high school had the trilogy USA in paperback and I loved it, the mix of headlines and drawings and many many characters. He was around the same time as Hemingway, but no one seems to read him. Isaac Babel was an influence too, very spare and tough Red Cavalry stories. Joan Didion too, Renata Adler, Pinter, Bruno Schulz, Jack Cady, Thomas McGuane, Carver, Atwood, T.S. Eliot, "Coming Through Slaughter" [Ondaatje]. Some poets. They had a jagged way of mixing information that I liked.
IR: You frequently refer to contemporary songs and bands. In your story collection 19 Knives (Anansi 2000) titles borrow from musical form or style, and sections of narrative read like guitar solos; the choice of word and rhythm is finely tuned. Is music tied into your ability to write, or what you write, and does it influence the way you write?
MAJ: Music is important to me and to my writing, but I’m not sure I can explain how or why. I listen to music when I write, and joked about that in my "Note on Writing" in Event magazine [Issue 30.1].
I do like the idea of going off on tangents or solos, but that can be indulgent. You need the right balance, the right power-to-weight ratio, as Tom McGuane says. The irony is I’m terrible on guitar. Two of my brothers were very good. I play loud blues harp with a band in town, and that’s fun, a good outlet. Had a garage band years back in Victoria and played bass, but didn’t write fiction. Wrote songs instead.
Music is a big influence. I know that bands like Joy Division or Dan Hick and his Hot Licks or the Flying Burrito Brothers or Fairport Convention or Wire were an influence in the same way Melville or James Purdy were. I love the idea of rhythm in a sentence. In a first-year workshop, Bill Valgardson referred to the pleasing rhythm in a sentence by Anne Milne, and I was completely puzzled. What is rhythm? I thought. How do you hear it? Now late at night at the laptop I love tinkering with a sentence or a few words to get the best sound and music to my ear. It takes time and tinkering, layers, perhaps like in a studio. I’ve always liked that Kerouac-style flow, which some critics have complained about.
IR: How much consideration do you give to what critics say?
MAJ: Too much, unfortunately. I didn’t like Kildare Dobbs’ wrongheaded review of my Irish book in the Globe [and Mail] and it cost me sales, but I have given out some negative reviews, so I have to be able to take it. I’ve been very lucky with reviews; Ryan Bigge reviewed Ireland’s Eye for Books in Canada and Amazon.ca, and you couldn’t ask for a better review. But I write what I write. Reviews don’t matter that way. They don’t change my approach to writing (I think).
IR: Here’s a pretty sophomoric question: If you could work with any writer, living or dead, who would that be?
MAJ: Not sure what is meant by "work": Is this sexual, as in "Work With Me, Annie," by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters? Or work on a highway crew by Jasper? Or as in have free drinks with? I’d like to have a beer with Shakespeare. Or Malcolm Lowry or John Thompson. But drunks can be a pain in the ass. John Cheever. Some writers I like a lot, but I do not want to meet. I think it might wreck or alter their books. They’d hate me, or I’d hate them.
IR: What advice would you give emerging writers?
MAJ: None. I feel pompous giving advice. Maybe one thing: Write lots; don’t be too earnest. Two things: Stop writing about writing. Three: Bet against me.
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IR: How much consideration do you give to what critics say?
MAJ: Too much, unfortunately. I didn’t like Kildare Dobbs’ wrongheaded review of my Irish book in the Globe [and Mail] and it cost me sales, but I have given out some negative reviews, so I have to be able to take it. I’ve been very lucky with reviews; Ryan Bigge reviewed Ireland’s Eye for Books in Canada and Amazon.ca, and you couldn’t ask for a better review. But I write what I write. Reviews don’t matter that way. They don’t change my approach to writing (I think).
IR: Here’s a pretty sophomoric question: If you could work with any writer, living or dead, who would that be?
MAJ: Not sure what is meant by "work": Is this sexual, as in "Work With Me, Annie," by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters? Or work on a highway crew by Jasper? Or as in have free drinks with? I’d like to have a beer with Shakespeare. Or Malcolm Lowry or John Thompson. But drunks can be a pain in the ass. John Cheever. Some writers I like a lot, but I do not want to meet. I think it might wreck or alter their books. They’d hate me, or I’d hate them.
IR: What advice would you give emerging writers?
MAJ: None. I feel pompous giving advice. Maybe one thing: Write lots; don’t be too earnest. Two things: Stop writing about writing. Three: Bet against me.
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