This Blog Is Going Smash

Each month, we feature an interview with a contributor whose work stood out to us in some way. This month, we’re featuring Sarah Beck, whose excerpt from her book Currency can be found in our current issue.

Where do you live?

I currently live and work in Toronto, but consider myself a Saskatchewan artist. You can’t take the prairie out of the girl!

When did you start writing?

According to my parents I began very young – they always had a sense that I would become an artist or a writer. Turns out I have done both.

Your bio says that you are an artist, as well as a writer – what are you working on right now?

For the past year I have been preparing for a major exhibition that I am not at liberty to discuss until it is officially announced in August. I will say that it involves disaster, humour and postcards. You can see some of my other artworks on my website (sarahbeck.com).

Your last couple of pieces in TGS are excerpts from a full-length book. Can you tell us more about the book and how it originated?

The book is titled Currency. Originally it was supposed to be an artwork, not a book, to thank the late Kurt Vonnegut who inspired me to become an artist. He asserted that artists and writers can be agents of great change, that we are the canaries in the coal mines of our society.

Within a year of his death I was entering grad school in pursuit of my MFA, so I chose this time to make Kurt a monument. At the time I was also traveling the world to make artworks at major events. The research, the art, the travel and the writing all fed one another, and I ended up instead with an illustrated novel…so Currency is my thesis, the story about my thesis and an artwork. It turned out a little weird!

On Kurt’s advice found in the pages of his books, I began to study paper money for the clues he suggested would reveal the nonsense that concealed great crimes. I began a journey that lead me to explore money, art, colonization, assholes, fakes and escaped animals.

You should read the book – it is far more charming than my description!

What inspires you in your art and writing?

I entered university initially to become a photo journalist, and through a series of twists and turns I think I’ve found the ideal venue to report visually on the world and its events. Vonnegut’s ideas about the arts got me thinking that this would be a great platform to address political and social issues. Frequently I am drawn to ecological and economic events.

My sketch book is filled with stories I’ve ripped from the newspaper. When I respond to the world like Kurt’s previously mentioned canary in a coal mine, that is when I’m on to something. Art and writing give me a way to not only talk back, but to get other people to look at the world from a new point of view. I really like to embrace his use of humour so as to not be lecturing the audience in a didactic way. As long as the world is filled with ecological disasters, imbalance, and strange stories, I will continue to be motivated and inspired to create.

I keep wondering if I have another book in me, but figure when the time is right it will happen. Sooner or later something will make me yell at the TV, or doodle furiously on napkins, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Are you influenced by anyone’s work?

Obviously Vonnegut has been a major influence. Since film school I have been a great admirer of Orson Welles, and not for his outstanding achievements in film, radio and theatre; what gets me is that after bursting onto the scene as a wunderkind, then being ostracized and mocked by his community, he kept going. He needed to make the work he had inside of him. He’d do embarrassing commercials to fund the projects he believed in. He held on tenaciously and pursued his work until the end. It’s easy to be talented and on top, it is very, very hard to be talented and broke, with the odds against you and a head full of projects with little commercial value.

I should start by clarifying that none of these books were published in 2011. I don’t keep up with the world of fiction quite that well (plus I really don’t like hardcovers) so the following list is a selection of my favourite books of the twenty or so books I read last year.

Runners Up

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The critically acclaimed author of Cloud Atlas brings a fairly straightforward historical novel about Dutch merchants in Japan, 1799. The story has a surprisingly moral centre in the protagonist of the novel’s title, a rare treat in an age of flawed and conflicted heroes.

Maytrees by Annie Dillard

I’ve never been a fan of Dillard’s work, finding her nonfiction too languid and drawn in far too much hyperbolic detail. But Maytrees is quite the opposite, a subtle, tender story of marriage and grace.

Top 5

#5 Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

Walls is a master storyteller. In this “novelized” telling of her grandmother’s life, she follows her bestselling memoir with the same kindness of honesty that filled the first. Lily Casey Smith is a feisty protagonist, a tenacious, admirable woman. And Walls ability to capture Lily’s voice is as impressive as the countless stories of survival and triumph throughout.

#4 Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner

Dickner’s characters are a lonely bunch. Cast-off immigrants, forgotten family members, they’re all seeking connection amidst a rich history of artifacts. Each scene in this book is chosen with incredible care and painted vividly. It’s like scanning through someone’s scattered memories, bright red sparks where a moment left a mark.

#3 A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

I’ve been crushing on Lorrie Moore ever since I knew of her existence (which is only 4 years, but still, it’s something). Despite publishing her first book in 1985, this is only Moore’s third novel, and her first published work in over a decade (it was published in 2009). A Gate at the Stairs is by far her most ambitious and greatest novel. Her prose is at once witty, insightful, and affecting. A quiet, subtle look at a post-9/11 America.

#2 St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raise by Wolves by Karen Russell

This is a fascinating collection of short stories! The world of Karen Russell is imaginative and complete. It is at times creepy, at times witty, at times heartfelt, but always interesting. And yet it’s more than that, amidst all the fascinating flourishes, the bizarre and the surreal, at the core of each of these stories are characters with genuine, relatable emotions.

#1 Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Somewhere in South America at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is held in honor of a powerful Japanese businessman. In attendance is a world-renowned opera singer—an idol of the businessman. The party is immediately interrupted by a group of terrorists who take the party hostage. What ensues is the most beautiful book I’ve read all year. It is filled with tenderness—the smallest of connections are made and blossom between strangers. As one critic says, “It’s the most romantic novel in years.”

I’m kind of a big CBC radio fan, and one of my favourite shows/podcasts is Spark, which focuses on the relationship between technology and culture.

Last week, the show featured an interview with Paul La Farge about the evolution–or not–of the novel format. From the Spark blog:

Paul La Farge is the author of Luminous Airplanes, a hypertext novel. It unfurls a branching, non-linear story based on the links you click. The genre was all the rage in the 90s, but quickly puttered out. Now that we’re in the age of Kindles, microblogging, and iPads, are there any bold experiments in literature? Why are we satisfied with porting the same old-fashioned novel format to futuristic gadgets that are capable of (almost) anything?

The interview is about 10 minutes long–perfect for a coffee break–and you can listen to it here.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed a few days ago when I came across this headline from HuffPost Books: “Local Bookstores Ask Customers To Boycott Amazon Over New Price Check App Offer.” Intrigued, I clicked.

It seems that Amazon has recently released a free app that allows people to go into a bricks-and-mortar book shop and scan the barcode of a book using the phone’s camera. The app then shows the lowest price for that item, if bought through Amazon, and allows the user to purchase the item right then and there from Amazon (or one of its merchants).

Adding fuel to the fire: this past Saturday, Amazon offered Price Check customers up to five dollars off products whose barcodes were scanned using their app. As HuffPost writes,

“The effect of this is to encourage consumers to use their local brick-and-mortar stores as ‘showrooms,’ while not spending money supporting them.”

It’s not hard to see why this app has been controversial.

As a consumer (and lover) of books, I feel a bit uneasy about the whole thing. I try to save money where I can, and that often leads me to get books from the library, or buy them second-hand, or buy them new for a discount, if possible. And Amazon – particularly Amazon in the UK – is kind of great. Free shipping with no minimum order and a foreign food store that enabled me to make this for Thanksgiving in October:

Whatever they’re buying, people do tend to shop around – and the internet makes shopping around easier than ever (especially with stuff like Google Product Search and Bing Shopping).

But the Price Check app … it’s not encouraging consumers to shop around, per se; it’s encouraging them to shop at Amazon.

In a few years, maybe more and more of our shopping will have moved online, and conversations and controversies like this will be a thing of the past.

But regardless of if (and when) that happens, the question remains: Is the price of the product always the most important factor when we make choices about where to shop?

Mindy Kaling is best known for her role as Kelly Kapoor on The Office, but she’s also one of the lead writers for the show, and as of this season, the co-executive producer. Better yet, she just released her first book of comic essays, rivaling Tina Fey’s popular ‘Bossypants’ for hilarity.

The book is called ‘Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me’ and although I have yet to pick it up, the excerpts I have read on her blog and elsewhere have been great– funny, honest, and sweet. She was recently interviewed on one of my favourite podcasts and she was admittedly “adorbs.” You can listen to the full interview here. It starts around the 19-minute mark.

What’s great about Mindy is that she doesn’t shy away from her obsessions (for clothes, for junk food, for bad movies) and is simply the most down-to-earth actress in print I’ve ever read.

Happy Friday.

- Joel

I had a sick day yesterday — trudged home from work at the weird hour of 1 pm after I found myself with my head resting on the desk next to my magic mouse. Crawling between the covers on a weekday afternoon is delightful for two reasons — sleep at an hour I’m usually desperately caffeinating to stay alert, and the luxury of reading with no time limit.

I have been admitting that rather neglected part of my personality — the bookworm — back into my time. Packing for a trip is always a bit of a window into a soul’s desired priorities I think, and on my recent honeymoon I did what I usually do when traveling and packed a massive bag of books, notebooks and pens. A cabin on Saltspring Island with a woodstove and an perfectly book-appropriate 50% chance of rain gave me hours to curl up with my favourite pastime. Better yet, my new husband is also a reader — though he tends to read via headphones, while moving restlessly about painting canvases or chopping wood. This mutual bookish understanding provides for guilt-free reading pleasure. Reading together is a form of companionable silence that provides us fresh conversation fodder for the dinner table.

One of my good friends recently brought me a slim, lovely volume titled Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman. Never one to read a book at a time (I’m currently working on McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, Solie’s Long Haul Engine, Shield’s Collected Stories, and rereading Parker’s On Vocation), I dug into Fadiman’s book yesterday afternoon while wrapped in duvets and blankets and found a kindred spirit in the realm of reading. Reading is a shared pursuit for the author and her husband as well, and her essays abound with the kind of wry humour and gentle insight that comes from bringing what can be a rather cerebral passion into everyday life, and sustaining it as a way of life.

In this vein, she included chapter on the different ways avid readers treat books — a topic known to generate much warm feeling amid my friends. I was somewhat relieved to learn that Fadiman is no “courtly lover” of books — the type who shriek when you leave a book splayed face-down, or consider marking margins or turning down corners as small crimes punishable by small lectures. She is instead a “carnal lover” of books, as was the bookish family she grew up in.

“To us, a book’s words were holy, but the paper, cloth, cardboard, glue, thread, and ink that contained them were a mere vessel, and it was no sacrilege to treat them as wantonly as desire and pragmatism dictated. Hard use was a sign not of disrespect but of intimacy.”

I regularly mark my place by turning my book upside-down, or placing random objects found readily at hand in between the pages. I’ve been known to write in my books with pencils and turn down pages when hard-pressed. But I have to admit to a small shudder when she spoke of her father ripping out pages as he went to create more room in his air travel luggage. Or of her husband writing her a note on the flyleaf, tearing it off and handing it to her when he arrived home.

Which are you? A courtly or carnal lover of books, or a little of both?

And what’s your opinion on reading 5 books at once or 1? I tried to reform myself for years, but my nightstand’s collection seems to proliferate on it’s own. It seems more correct to read one at a time, but I just can’t do it. You?

A few weeks ago I talked about my writer crush on Sloane Crosley. This week I was reminded of a past crush when I learned that flash fiction wonder Amelia Gray will have a story in the 39th edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern (my favourite literary journal). I discovered Amelia and her tender collection of flash fiction, AM/PM, a couple years ago. In fact, I fell so hard for her that I wrote a series of Amelia-inspired stories in the Ninth Issue of This Great Society. My stories don’t do her justice, so I’ll let “16:PM” speak for itself:

Imagine if you could call up all your exes, and bring them together on a basketball court to play a pickup game. Maybe you could also call the girls you’ve ever loved, split them into the Girls You Had a Chance With and the Girls You Never Had a Chance With. Have them play shirts and skins. It won’t be for your honor, though you’ll be the only one watching. You will promise pizza and beer to the winners. The girls you never had a chance with will spit and glare, and the girls you still may have a chance with will snivel and look at you when they make jump shots.

            The winners will take your wallet and invite the losers out. Everyone will forget to give you directions, and you’ll be left sitting in the gym parking lot.

            You’ll go home and watch basketball movies. You’ll build a makeshift court from scrap lumber in your backyard, and leave messages on all of their answering machines, inviting them back. You’ll go out back every night and play H-O-R-S-E, waiting for them to return. You will wear your shirt when you are shirts and you will remove your shirt when you are skins.  

That’s Amelia for you: funny, heartbreaking, and strangely sexy. She’s also pretty cute. Her first novel comes out next spring and already has an awesome cover. She lives in Austin, Texas, which is also kind of awesome.

For more Amelia, visit her site.

- Joel

I spend a lot of time in the car commuting between Vancouver and Langley, so I like to make the most of my driving time. Usually this involves calling my mom or listening to podcasts or that new music I just bought, but lately it has been audiobooks. With little time for actually sitting down with a book, it’s been a great way to keep reading.

I’ve listened to audiobooks off and on for years, my enjoyment of them seeming to come in waves. More than once, I’ve started to listen to a book and stopped because I just couldn’t get into it, yet when I actually sat down to read the book I loved it. I’ve noticed that it takes a certain type of book for me to want to listen to it being read to me. It needs a quick plot, some action, and not a lot of detailed description.

That’s why The Hunger Games trilogy has been the perfect listening experience the last few weeks. It’s fast-paced and exciting with no need for extra concentration. I can drive safely and enjoy a good story. I’ve been enjoying it so much that my mom has been wondering why I’ve been calling so infrequently.

Have you listened to many audiobooks? What are your thoughts?

- Linette

These days I’ve only been working and studying – of course, with the occasional study break. These are some of the things I’ve been distracting myself with:

Walking around Trout Lake

Reading Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins

Watching new Fall TV

Knitting knee socks

Baking Power Cookies

What have you been doing now that fall weather is here?

- Linette

It’s true, you can tell my fiance that (she already knows). Sloane Crosley is an unexpected gift: a humorous intellectual, an essayist who not only plays with words, not only has a flair for the dramatic, but is also incredibly thoughtful and moving. As David Sedaris says of her, “How sure-footed and observant she is. How perfectly, relentlessly funny.” I’m 200-pages into her second book and couldn’t recommend her highly enough. Her stories range topically from horrible roommates to getting lost in Portugal to the etiquette and culture of public washrooms. She tells each of them with equal charm and wit. I’m totally crushed.

- Joel