IT’S THE NATURAL THING TO DO
A Conversation with Stuart Ross
STUART ROSS
is the author of over twenty books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, as well as scores of chapbooks. His most recent books are the poetry collection The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, the memoir The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, for which he won the 2023 Trillium Book Award, and the short story collection I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub. Stuart received the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize, the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the 2010 Relit Award for Short Fiction. He has been writer in residence at Queen’s University and the University of Ottawa, and has taught at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies. Since 1979, Stuart has run a micropress called Proper Tales. In the 1980s, he sold over seven thousand of his chapbooks on the streets of Toronto while wearing signs such as “Writer Going To Hell: Buy My Books.” His poetry has been translated into Nynorsk, French, Spanish, Russian, Slovene, and Estonian. Stuart lives in the tiny town of Cobourg, on the north shore of Lake Ontario.
TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: You are perhaps the busiest person in the writing and publishing world that I know. You don’t just do a little bit of everything, but a lot of everything. What does a day in the life of Stuart Ross look like?
STUART ROSS: Well, unfortunately, it involves reading way too much news and spending way too much time not doing things directly related to either earning a living or making my art. I don’t have any kind of routine. I’m fairly disorganized. I juggle so many things that I drop the ball sometimes. But I make sure I do some reading. Almost any reading, aside from the news, feeds my writing. I read from a novel, short stories, some poetry, every day, usually in the morning or at night. I only occasionally get to my writing projects, and when I do, it’s usually for a short burst of time. I’m not one of those people who gets up and writes from 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. every morning. I just scramble, I wake up in a panic, I read a bit, and then I go, “Okay, what’s next?” Usually, it’s the next freelance-editing deadline, and I plunge into that. Occasionally, I have time for some writing, or I set some time aside for writing. Or I go on a little trip and check into a motel somewhere for a couple of days and write. My days are a mixture of freelance editing, some reading, sometimes some writing, and teaching. I teach through the U of T School of Continuing Studies right now, an Intro to Poetry course I’ve been doing for about a dozen semesters. I also do class visits here and there in-person and virtually, so those things fill my schedule as well.
You know, it feels like it’s so rare that I actually write. But then I remember that I have twenty-three books published and a couple of other manuscripts that are out there, and another nine manuscripts in progress. I honestly don’t know when all that happened! It’s possible that I sleep-write.
I just spent three weeks in Banff at the Leighton Artist Studios, one of the most incredible and magical and productive times of my writing life. I was scared—I didn’t know what to expect because I am used to writing in these little bursts. What’ll happen when I have three weeks? But I ended up being so productive. In those three weeks, I produced a first draft of a short novel, which I only conceived of in a very basic way on the plane out to Calgary. I started one new poetry project and worked on a poetry project I’ve been at for about a decade. That time in Banff drove home to me how incredibly important it is, especially at this point in my life, for me to carve out that time to write. I’ve been writing for over fifty years now, and it’d always been in sporadic bursts up until that point.
TVL: That’s fascinating. When you were in Banff, was that the first time you allowed yourself to write day in and day out? Were most of your days spent working on your own projects?
SR: If I consider writing to encompass the acts of writing, reading, talking with other artists about creation, then yes. One of the fantastic things was that there was an amazing music cohort there. Thirty musicians were there as part of the Banff Centre music program. There was one musician, Marina Hasselberg, a fantastic improvisational cellist from Vancouver, who was also in the Leighton Artist Studios. I was fascinated with this idea of somebody who had been trained as a classical cellist, and then after about thirty years, she decided to get into improvisational work.
I started thinking of writing a novel improvisationally in the way a musician might improvise. In a sense, the way I’ve always been writing. But because I thought of it so consciously, I gave myself much more freedom with this novel. It’s so crazy, so all over the place, way more extreme than anything I’ve written before. My previous novels have been non-chronological and a little disjointed, but this one is totally wacky. I think it was listening to Marina’s music and discussing with her how she created it and how musicians improvise that inspired me. We also did some collaborative improvisation as well, which was fun and an incredible honour to work with this brilliant cellist.
The Kronos Quartet was also part of the music faculty while I was there. They’re the most famous contemporary quartet on the planet. They were accessible and wonderful and so inspiring. There were musicians who did field recordings, an experimental tango quartet, a twenty-year-old First Nations rapper, experimental voice musicians—all sorts of fabulous musicians were there, and on the second week, the writers arrived. It was nice to have a bunch of other writers around, but I spent most of my time taking in music, talking to musicians, and reading about improvisation. Also in the Leighton Artist Studios, there was a great painter there, a playwright, and a sculptor and sound installation artist. Talking to them about their work, I considered all that writing. So, I would say yes, every day I was writing. It was pretty much nonstop writing or fuelling my writing projects.
TVL: That sounds like such an incredible experience.
SR: It was so amazing. Now I want to do more of this, to force myself to carve out more time. It’s really one of the most important things in my life; I have to put it at the forefront. I love working on freelance editing projects, but I have to start getting more selfish about my own time, my own projects.
TVL: How do you juggle so many projects simultaneously? Do you find that this fuels your own creative process?
SR: I work on so many projects: freelance projects, teaching, my writing projects. I jump from one to another and usually, as an old mentor of mine— the New York poet Larry Fagin—used to say, “You hop on one of the horses out of the gate and you take it down to the finish line.” I do that because if I don’t finish something, what worth am I? I’m a writer! I think this way of working creates a lot of chaos, and there’s a lot of chaos swirling around in my head all the time. That is a huge influence on my writing. That’s why I’m attracted to writing poetry—my poems keep going into different places and end up somewhere I never imagined when I began writing the poem. It’s why my novels and short stories are sometimes chaotic and just incredibly unpredictable. Al Capp, the American political cartoonist of the 1930s through 1970s who created Li’l Abner, also created this character called the Shmoo. I read all the Shmoo comics when I was a kid. The Shmoo was a little grinning blob with whiskers and a couple of legs. They procreated at an incredible rate. If two Shmoos competed in a fifty-yard dash, the winner wouldn’t have been born when the race began. That’s how I feel about my writing. I usually start off with a line or an image, and the ending is something I never could have imagined. It’s like the Shmoo that wasn’t born when the race began.
TVL: You are the author of twenty-five books of fiction, poetry, and personal essays, and your recent memoir, The Book of Grief and Hamburgers, won the Trillium Book Award in 2023. Your most recent poetry collection, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit, is titled The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky and was published with Coach House in 2024. When it comes to your writing, though, perhaps we should start at the very beginning. Can you share what your career as a writer has been like? How did you get started?
SR: I read like crazy when I was a child. I used to go to the bookmobile and to the library all the time. It was the most incredible thing, you know? I read Dr. Seuss books and the Madeline series: everything I could get my hands on. I started writing poems when I was about ten or eleven. I sent off my first poem then for publication to the Toronto Star, which doesn’t publish poetry—it was the only publication I knew of aside from books at the time. I got a very kind rejection letter from them. Then, into my early teens, I discovered some really great writers. I’d been reading Tennyson and Ogden Nash and children’s poetry before then, but around age twelve or thirteen, I came across E. E. Cummings, who I think inspires a lot of young writers. He’s maybe the first wild writer that people come across. I also discovered another American poet named Stephen Crane, who wrote in the 1890s primarily, and he’s most famous for the novel The Red Badge of Courage. He wrote around 128 poems, and they were very concentrated, strange narrative poems. They had a huge influence on me. I was writing poems that were somewhere between the narrative, allegorical absurdism of Stephen Crane and the crazy play with language of E. E. Cummings. A couple of years later, when I was about fifteen, I discovered a book of poems by David McFadden, A Knight in Dried Plums, in a library up in North York that blew me away. His poetry sounded like someone just sitting and talking with you. The poems were funny and absorbing. The narrator was quirky, and he wrote about very serious things, but often in very funny ways. I learned that you could write about heavy topics like death and jealousy and loss and so forth, but you could be funny. Or you could be absurd. Or you could be surreal. Around that time, I also discovered the New York poet Ron Padgett, and those two guys—Ron and David—are sort of my pantheon of where my poetry ended up going. Both were very adventurous in the poetry they wrote. They tried so many different things. David died in 2018, but Ron is still writing. He’s in his early eighties now, and he launched his twenty-fifth poetry book this spring. He is still exploring the different things that are possible in poetry.
I was hooked up with a publisher when I was fifteen, as a friend of mine saw a poster they put up. They were called Books by Kids, and they were publishing books by kids for kids. I think they did three books like that, including a book by me and my childhood friends, Mark Laba and Steve Feldman. There were about twelve poems by each of us, and a few of my drawings. It was called The Thing in Exile. It was a beautiful book. Rick and Ann were the publishers, and we went to their place to collate all the printed pages. I got my first hands-on book-making experience. Mark, Steve, and I toured junior high schools and high schools all around Toronto, so I was doing readings and selling books when I was sixteen years old.
At that time, I was attending an alternative high school with both of those guys. It was called AISP, now Avondale Alternative, and we had a lot of poets from the community come in and volunteer teach. We had a couple of people from Coach House come in, David Young and Victor Coleman. I think Robert Fones also came a couple of times. Joe Rosenblatt brought us down to Coach House, as he was publishing with them at the time. This was the most mind-blowing thing of my very young writing life, going downtown and seeing all these crazy hippie poets and fiction writers. They were publishing wild books in those days. We did some writing and workshops upstairs in the press’s coffee room. To me, this was what it meant to be a writer—having a book published and it being on one of the shelves at Coach House. It’s a dream I had for decades and decades of my life. I had a friendship with that press from that moment on until now, and hopefully into the future.
When I was nineteen, I published a twelve-page pamphlet using my dad’s electric typewriter, called He Counted His Fingers, He Counted His Toes. I called my imprint Proper Tales Press, and I made fifty copies. I was doing a reading at a place called the Axle-Tree Coffee House Reading series, down at Trinity Church near the Eaton Centre. My idea was to sell these for fifty cents and make enough money to get a good meal in Chinatown, which was just a block over. I sold thirteen of them, so I made $6.50, which got me an incredible meal at Kwong Chow at the time. I learned that creating and selling your own books has some rewards—a meal, but also that thirteen people went home from that reading with some of my poems in their hand. And it was just a little twelve-page thing. It wasn’t even stapled! I began self-publishing chapbooks in large editions a year later. I published editions of a thousand copies with my poetry and fiction in them. I stood out on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto wearing stupid signs like “Writer Going to Hell: Buy My Books,” “Shabby No-Name writer,” “Canadian Writer, Actual Size.” I was inspired by two guys who were doing selling their own chapbooks on the streets of Toronto at the time. One was Crad Kilodney, a fiction writer, and the other was the poet Don Garner. And I thought, I’m going to do that, too. And I did, for about ten years during the 1980s. Throughout my twenties, I sold about seven thousand copies of my self-published chapbooks. That was an incredibly influential and inspiring time for me.
After that, I started getting published by other chapbook publishers and published leaflets, postcards, and broadsides. Eventually, in my thirties, I began publishing perfect-bound books with “real presses.” First, with Mercury Press and eventually with ECW Press, Contra Mundo Books, and others. I now have about twenty-three proper books, but I still publish leaflets, chapbooks, broadsides, and all sorts of weird ephemera because I really believe in those forms for poetry and experimental writing.
I’ll mention too that I had a lot of mentors over the years. I was very fortunate to work with great writers at York University and I went to a lot of readings. I eventually met David McFadden in my early twenties, which was really exciting. I met Nelson Ball around the same time. John Robert Colombo came into the library where I worked—he’s most famous for Colombo’s Canadian Quotations, but he was also a pioneer in found poetry, and he encouraged me. I even apprenticed him for a couple of years. Working in a library, going to an alternative school, and then going to York University, where I never graduated but got involved in the radio station and at the student newspaper, which provided all the equipment to typeset and lay out books—all of this poured into my development as a writer.
TVL: That’s fascinating! I’m struck by the fact that you were publishing editions of one thousand. That’s a lot of books. What happened to all those copies?
SR: Crad Kilodney told me about a printer up north of Toronto called CP Printing. An old man named Leslie Steckler ran this press that printed mainly business documents. He was excited that a couple of writers came to him, and he gave us good deals on printing large editions of chapbooks. Because I worked at York University’s newspaper office, I had access to typesetting equipment at age twenty. I typeset my books and laid them out physically by hand, as one did in that pre-laptop era. I brought them down to Leslie and had him do one thousand copies. They probably cost me sixty cents each or so, and I sold them for two dollars—I was a terrible businessperson. I stood out on the streets of downtown Toronto for ten years, sometimes as long as six to seven hours a day, sometimes just a few hours. I would usually sell five to ten books in a day. On Christmas Eve 1988, I sold sixty-seven books, my record. Crad stood out for a lot longer than me and ended up selling about thirty-five thousand chapbooks in his three decades out in the streets of Toronto.
TVL: Wow.
SR: It’s pretty wild. I sold out the first three or four books that I did one thousand copies of, and a novel I did 1,500 copies of—I probably still have about thirty copies of that one, but most of them I eventually sold standing out on the street.
TVL: That’s really incredible. That’s so much commitment because it’s hard to sell books.
SR: You know, it didn’t feel like commitment or doing anything special. It just seemed like a natural thing to do—create my own books and then get them into people’s hands and make some money at the same time. I was working part-time at the library, working as a typesetter at the student newspaper at York U. Between my part-time jobs and the street selling, I was able to earn a modest living and pay my rent.
TVL: In 1979, you launched Proper Tales Press, a beloved literary press that has been publishing poetry, fiction, and non-fiction as chapbooks and ephemera. Can you share the story of Proper Tales Press?
SR: The first Proper Tales item was that edition of fifty hand-folded unbound chapbooks, He Counted His Fingers, He Counted His Toes, which I photocopied in my dad’s office up at Finch and Dufferin. It had a hand-drawn cover by me with typed lettering. To this day, with Proper Tales, I usually do hand-drawn covers. For the first few years, I only published my work. In 1982, I ended up publishing books by a few other writers: Mark Laba, my childhood friend who had been in The Thing in Exile with me, and Michael Boyce, another writer I’d met at York U., my then girlfriend Lillian Nećakov, and each of them stood out in the street selling their chapbooks as well.
That was my first experience publishing other people. I was about three or four years into the press, and ridiculously, I still published one thousand copies of each of their books. I expected they’d be out there just like me. But I learned that only I was crazy enough to be doing that so consistently. But they sold quite a few books out there. Gradually, I started publishing other writers, including writers I didn’t know. Mostly, I was publishing writer friends, but I would get some manuscripts in the mail. There was one guy named Wain Ewing from out west. and John M. Bennett from Columbus, Ohio, who’s still a small-press wizard. I published chapbooks by them in somewhat smaller editions, and Proper Tales Press just kept going. It still exists today; I publish in editions of one hundred to 125 copies, and even then it’s tough to circulate that many copies of a chapbook.
There are many kinds of writing I would love to do, but there are only so many kinds of writing I’m capable of, so if I can’t write the poems that Mark Laba writes or the poems that Sarah Burgoyne writes, I’ll publish chapbooks by them. That’s as close as I can get to writing their work. So, I mostly publish things I wish I had written.
After the first decade of selling my books on the street, and everything else I’ve published since, I’m sure I’ve lost $10,000 to $15,000 with Proper Tales Press. I never make back my money for the chapbooks I publish by me or by anyone else. I send the author about a third of the print run and gradually I sell things at book fairs. I give things away. I trade things. But it’s part of my practice—it’s part of my writing. It’s a crazy anti-business, anti-capitalist action. I’ll probably just keep doing it.
TVL: How many publications have you published to date with Proper Tales Press?
SR: I’ve probably published about eighty chapbooks altogether, and another hundred leaflets and a couple of cassette tapes and a few actual perfect-bound books.
TVL: That’s a lot of writers you’ve published, and a lot of work.
SR: I feel proud to have published a lot of first publications by writers who went on to do really great things. It means a lot to have helped encourage them. I want to publish the kinds of books I would like to read, to make them exist.
TVL: You are an incredible champion, and producer, of chapbooks and small-press activity. What do chapbooks, and small press, mean to you?
SR: I always thought that chapbooks were the natural form for poetry. Especially twenty-four pages, twenty-eight pages, thirty-two pages. That seems right for a collection of poems. Unfortunately, it’s not a thing that bookstores generally will sell. ’Cause, you know, again: capitalism. And that’s why poetry books are usually longer than that. They have to be the UNESCO length of forty-nine pages and over for perfect-bound books. But I really like the personal hands-on aspect of chapbooks and leaflets and so forth. I like the idea that Proper Tales Press isn’t really a publishing company. It’s me publishing a bunch of things I love, to support writers I love, and to fill in what I see as gaps in literature. It’s not a publishing company—I just see it as a thing I do.
I think that a lot of chapbook publishers from my generation felt that way. Now everything is a bit more professional. There are writing programs. There’s an MFA in creative writing in Canada, which is a relatively new thing. A lot of young writers are more career- and business-minded and would maybe think some of the things I have done, and still do, are crazy.
There are so many interesting publishers doing interesting things by another generation of writers who have a bit more of a business approach to what they do. Dani Spinosa and Kate Siklosi at Gap Riot Press, Cameron Anstee with Apt. 9 Press in Ottawa, Karen Schindler with Baseline Press in London. They put out amazing work.
TVL: Perhaps this is a very broad question, but how have you seen the publishing industry change since the 1970s?
SR: I don’t think there’s as much wild experimentation as there was in the ’60s and ’70s. It might be because fewer writers are doing lots of acid.
TVR: Maybe!
SR: What did some of those very early Coach House books say? “Printed at Coach House Press by mindless acid freaks,” or whatever it was that they stamped inside the covers.
There’s also more of a drive toward being professional. I think there are practical reasons for that. The first apartment I rented in Toronto was fifty-five dollars a week in the Annex. Now rent is insanely expensive; people can’t just throw money at things that are going to lose money or not make any money. And they must find ways to pay exorbitant rent and exorbitant prices for food and so forth. Also, people live in a much busier and more difficult city. If they’re from places like Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, there are practical reasons that people have to make writing a profession— for example, by getting a degree so they can teach, or create a press where they actually keep ledgers of how much money is spent and how much has come in. I don’t think chapbook culture exists now in the same way it did back then. People are sending out their chapbook manuscripts to get published by chapbook publishers, rather than creating chapbook presses themselves.
Chapbook publishers like Cameron and Karen don’t publish themselves. That’s not their reason to create a chapbook press. Back in the day, people created presses to publish themselves and then start publishing friends, creating magazines, and creating schools of writing. In some cases, this was inspired by the New York poets and their incredible publication burst in the 1960s and 1970s. All those mimeo magazines and chapbooks that were published. When I was young, it was rare for someone’s first publication to be a perfect-bound book. It was a lot of chapbooks, leaflets, and ephemera first.
I just published a chapbook by Peter Dubé. Peter’s only about ten years younger than me, so he’s not of the new generation of poets. He’s a Montreal fiction writer and prose poet, a great surrealist. I believe he has published about eight books. When I asked him last September if he ever had a chapbook published, he said no. So, I said he really should. It hadn’t really occurred to him before. So I published his first chapbook last fall, which is pretty neat. He was so excited to have a chapbook published. I think of somebody like George Bowering, who published a lot of ephemera and chapbooks and little books through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. George is still producing work. He’s had a lot of health setbacks, but he’s still creating work and in the last few years he’s still been sending out chapbook manuscripts, and he’s almost ninety. He has published over 110 perfect-bound books. He’s been the poet laureate, a Governor General’s Award winner, and a revered professor. I published a chapbook of his last year, which I was in a hurry to get published, because his vision was going and I wanted him to see the chapbook; it was part of a six-chapbook series, each published by a different micropress. I love that George is still so committed to chapbook publishing. In fact, the other week he sent me another chapbook manuscript—poems about Phil Hall. So Proper Tales will be doing that one this spring.
TVL: Now, let’s turn back to your latest poetry collection, The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky. The collection is described as “a celebration of possibilities and miscellany” as it “contains new entries in ... [your] ongoing Razovsky poems, prose poems, a remix of an entire poetry book by dear friend Nelson Ball, a couple of collaborative poems, some one-line poems, and lots more.” What was your approach to writing this collection?
SR: I’m first going to mention the dream I had when I was fifteen of having a book with Coach House. It took fifty years for that dream to come true. I got to go there to watch some of it be printed. I got to help bind and trim a few copies—it’s the great legendary thing that happens with Coach House and I was part of it. It’s a thrill. I was also thrilled to be published by Wolsak & Wynn, Mercury Press, Freehand Books, Mansfield Press, Anvil Press, DC Books, and ECW Press. All the presses that have published me were really important to me, and with Coach House it was important in a different way because it was so much a part of my childhood and my beginnings as a writer.
As with all the poetry books I’ve published, I never sat down to write a collection. I had intentions of publishing a collection, but not necessarily writing one. I just write and then, every once in a while, I figure I have enough stuff to make a book, or maybe too much stuff, and I gather a bunch of poems and I see what fits together. And by fits together, I mean I see which poems I think are still publishable, that I’ll stand behind, and I just put them all together and I call it a collection. Hence the celebration of miscellany. Every one of my poetry books to date has been written in the same way. It’s just mostly a bunch of things I’ve written since the last book.
Then the editors at the various presses will have some influence, like Paul Vermeersch, who edited A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent for his imprint at Wolsak & Wynn in 2016. He had this dream of a book of mine that would be very personal. It would contain the poems that were most accessible and often narrative. I think I gave him a pile of about two hundred poems, and he whittled it down to sixty or seventy pages. But the one that Paul curated is a very personal book. It’s probably my poetry book that has gotten the most positive response from readers. It won a couple of small awards and I’m really proud of it. It has a lot of poems about my family, and there are some wacky surrealist things in there, and even some of the poems about my family are surrealist poems, but very personal. At the same time, all the poems that he didn’t want, I sent over to Jason Camlot at DC Books. Those poems became A Hamburger in a Gallery, an insane book of crazy experiments and incomprehensibly dense poems. Jason wanted to publish a book by me, and he embraced the crazy experiments. So out of this big batch of two hundred poems, two very different books came out that were influenced by the editors who curated them. That’s exciting to me. I dreamt of being a playwright because I love the idea of writing a play and then seeing what the directors and the cast will do with it. This is the equivalent for me as a writer.
My editor at Coach House, Nasser Hussain, had a very gentle approach, but he had a pretty big influence through a few very long poems he suggested I not include. I think there were three, and I fought for one of them in this book, which is the Nelson Ball remix. It wasn’t because he didn’t think the poems were good; he just thought it put the balance off, and it made the book quite long. I decided the other long poems could wait for another book project, especially because they had both been published as chapbooks already. Or maybe the chapbooks will be their final stop.
Nasser had a nice way of influencing the shape of the book. He suggested the division of it into three parts, and he suggested the name for each of those parts: The Sky, Is a Sky, and In the Sky. I thought that was a great idea; it allowed me to shape each of these three sections, almost as if they were large chapbooks. It was fun to organize the book in this way. I’ve been really lucky with the various editors I’ve been able to work with, especially the ones who have been more hands-on. I like the idea of a hands-on editor with my poetry. Those were a few of my favourite experiences working with Jason, Paul, and Nasser. I’ve worked with other excellent editors as well, like Melanie Little back when she was with Freehand Books.
So, it wasn’t an idea of writing this collection. It was more like I had a bunch of poems, and it was time to have another book. Now, it’s not what people do, I think because of grant applications and because of MFA programs where writers have to complete book-length projects. I don’t see a lot of books that are just a bunch of poems a poet wrote over the last few years, and the thing that gives them cohesion is that they’re all by that poet. If you read the poems individually, you might not know they were all by the same writer. The things that excite me the most are the celebrations of miscellany, and not a lot of publishers are publishing books like that. I feel very lucky I still can find one or two, maybe three, publishers who are willing to publish a crazy book like that by me.
TVL: I have to ask, what inspired the title The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky?
SR: The title is from a poem in the book. Originally, I wanted to name it Neither Foot Forward, after a line in one of the poems. I thought that was hilarious. That was the working title as I assembled the manuscript. I thought it was a great portrait of the way my sad-sack brain works. Then Nasser said, “We have to get rid of the title.” He told me I had to put aside all my self-deprecation because my work should be celebrated, and I shouldn’t be making fun of it myself. So, I gave in. I had recently won the Trillium Book Award, which was absolutely stunning and shocking to me. It still is, especially to win it for The Book of Grief and Hamburgers. My reflex to everything is to be self-deprecating and to be negative about my own work. So, I got rid of the old title. I wanted an evocative title that was more positive, possibly even beautiful. There is this one poem in the book called “The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky,” which was written after a poem by Charles North, one of my favourite poets. He’s a great New York poet who’s now become a friend, and he honoured me with some words of praise for the back of my book. It’s amazing to me that this great poet who began in the 1960s in the poetry movement that was most influential to me, has been such a supporter. I thought it was appropriate to name the book after a poem that was after a poem by Charles North. I love this B-52s song “There’s a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon).” I played the B-52s a lot in my twenties and thirties. I think that’s where I unconsciously took the title The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky from. I just love the sound of it, the use of the prepositions.
TVL: You have participated in many collaborative writing projects. In fact, “Taffy and Clytemnestra” appears to be written with Sarah Burgoyne in your latest collection. Can you share what your process is like for collaborative projects? How do you approach them?
SR: The process changes from writer to writer, depending on who I work with. I’m excited when the other writer comes up with an idea of how to collaborate that I’ve never used before. I’ve been collaborating since I was a teenager. Mark Laba and I wrote collaborative sound poems when we were fifteen or sixteen years old. We even wrote some collaborative short stories and a collaborative novel. Gary Barwin and I collaborated early on in sound poetry, poems on paper, and a short novel called The Mud Game. I collaborated with then Toronto poets jwcurry and Lillian Nećakov with sound poetry in the 1980s too, so collaboration has always been part of my practice. It’s something that just happened. I mean, it was the natural thing to do, to collaborate. I think almost everything I write feels like the natural thing to write at the point when I do it. I have an entire book of collaborations with about thirty other Canadian poets that came out from Mansfield Press in 2015 called Our Days in Vaudeville. I have a collaborative book of poetry with the late Ottawa poet Michael Dennis called 70 Kippers. We wrote 120 poems together and seventy of them were keepers—or kippers, as we ended up calling them.
When I sit down to collaborate with somebody, I have one rule, which is that we don’t discuss the poem while we write. It interests me to not discuss what we’re doing, but to set either a constraint or rule. The rule might just be I write a bit, you write a bit, I write a bit, you write a bit. It could be we alternate words, or alternate writing lines. Or we could each write seven lines and then interweave them into a sonnet. I collaborated with Tom Walmsley on some poems, and it really surprised me because I asked him to write the first line, and he gave me a limerick. So I wrote a second limerick. And then he wrote a third limerick, and we have this poem that is five or six pages of limericks, mostly about celebrities. I never imagined I would be writing an extended sequence of limericks.
I wrote a book-length poem with Jaime Forsythe, a poet in Nova Scotia, and we wrote it over a period of about ten years. It’s only about sixty pages long, and that’s just one long poem divided into about thirty parts. I’m going to self-publish it through Proper Tales. I also completed collaborative projects with both Jason Heroux and Jason Camlot over the past year, and every one of those manuscripts was built using a different method.
I once collaborated with the Montreal poet Marie-Ève Comtois. She’s a fabulous poet and a great person. I don’t speak much French, and she doesn’t speak much English. We sat down to collaborate and decided that she would write in French, and I would write in English, and we wouldn’t know exactly what the other person was writing. We wrote an eight-page poem, and then we gave it to a francophone writer who was bilingual and a bilingual anglophone writer, and they translated it in both directions. It became a chapbook that had the original poem, plus the entirely English version and the entirely French version, and it was wonderful. In Banff, I collaborated on a poem with the great cellist Marina Hasselberg, and she wrote in Portuguese. So she knew everything I was writing, but I could only figure out a bit of what she was writing. I’ve also collaborated with a lot of musicians, including Marina—often by reading works while they perform improvisational music. I used to be part of a noise band, Donkey Lopez, with two other musicians, Steve Lederman and Ray Dillard. We released one CD. We’ve got four more CDs’ worth of material recorded, but we had a fight about cover art. So we broke up. Maybe it’ll happen someday.
For the last two years I’ve also been working with an incredible watercolour painter named Nadine Faraj in Montreal, and our idea was that we would collaborate on paintings that had text and image, but they wouldn’t be ekphrastic. We often work at the same time, or in a way that I write some text and cover it up, then Nadine paints, and we would reveal my text and see how the two elements meshed. Sometimes she gives me a painting she’s abandoned, and I just put it in a typewriter and type wildly over it. We’ve done about eighty or ninety pieces, and we’ve just started to finally let them trickle out into the public. I think that will be an ongoing collaboration for years. It’s fun to find different ways to collaborate. We’ve done paintings that are comic strips, paintings that are political posters or advertisements for imaginary films. Her solo paintings are usually great celebrations of sex and non-binary orgies and so forth. Just completely wild, joyous. And my poems are nothing like that. It was her idea to collaborate. I said, “Why do you want to collaborate with me?” And she said, “Because we do such different things, we’ll pull each other into areas we’re not used to.” She’d never created art about death. I’d rarely written about sex. So we decided to see what would happen. The exciting part of collaboration for me is to become part of a piece of art that I never would have become complicit in on my own.
TVL: If you could make sure that readers read one poem from The Sky Is a Sky in the Sky, what would it be and why? Or if you could ensure that readers read one of your books, which would it be and why?
SR: My initial impulse is to say, open it up at random and read any poem, but I think there are poems they could open to that would be less representative of everything that I do. And there are poems they might not like as much as they might like other poems. I would have to know the reader and what they like. It’s an impossible question to answer if you’re asking which poem I am most proud of. There are so many poems in there that I’m proud of. The title poem would be a good place for somebody to start. I mean, it’s wacky. It’s weird. It goes into strange places, but I think it’s representative of the kind of improvisational poetry I naturally create.
Now, if the question is about which book of mine to read ... I’m proud of all my books. There’s not a book I’m embarrassed by. There might be a few poems I’m embarrassed by, from early on especially. I think my opening story in I Am Claude François and You Are a Bathtub, called “The Elements of the Short Story,” is one of the great Canadian short stories. I think it’s amazing, and that book got almost no attention, and that’s fine. That’s the usual thing that happens with books. Of all the books I’ve written, maybe the one that is most meaningful to me, and the book I thought would really change things for me, which it didn’t at all, was Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew. It’s the longest novel that I’ve written. It’s probably the most blatantly autobiographical thing I’ve written. It’s also quite surreal. It’s strange. It’s anti-fascist. It talks a lot about elements of me that I don’t talk about a lot—my Jewish identity, my childhood, incidents of anti-Semitism, ridiculous acts of hopelessly falling in love, and very, very personal things about my parents’ deaths. The death of one of my brothers. They’re not all in there in a literal sense, but all those things are represented in the family of the main protagonist in one way or another. I think it’s a good novel and I’m deeply proud of it. It co-won a small prize, the Mona Elaine Adilman Award for Fiction on a Jewish Theme. I’ve gotten some good feedback about it, but it didn’t change things for me particularly, except that I knew I’d written that book and I was really proud of that. It was a breakthrough in terms of allowing more autobiographical content into my writing, and since that book, there’s been more autobiographical content in both my poetry and my fiction than there had ever been previously.
TVL: Not only are you a writer but you’re also an editor, and an exceptionally talented one at that. How does your writing practice inform your editorial work?
SR: I think it mostly goes in the other direction. I learn a lot from editing that I then implement in my writing. I encourage people to do things that I, as a writer, might be reluctant to do, so that encourages me to challenge myself in my own writing in the way I challenge writers I’m working with.
I had an imprint with Mansfield Press for ten years, called A Stuart Ross Book. I released about fifty books through that imprint. I would say 75 percent of them were books I wish I had written. Another 25 percent were books I really admired, and writers I wanted to give a break to because I thought they were doing very interesting things. Then there were writers such as George Bowering, Nelson Ball, and David McFadden, who were senior writers and big influences on me; I was honoured to edit some of their books. I would say that I’m a fairly hands-off editor. For Mansfield, I was acquiring poetry, fiction, and the occasional non-fiction book. I’ve had an imprint for the past eight years with Anvil Press called A Feed Dog Book. Those are entirely books of surrealist or surrealist-adjacent poetry. They are mostly books I wish I’d written—some first books, some books by established writers. For the last couple of years, I’ve had an imprint with Guernica Editions called 1366 Books. That’s two books a year of experimental fiction. All of these imprints were and are to some degree attempts to fill gaps in what I feel is missing in Canadian literature. Books that might not get published somewhere else, but I feel they should exist, and I often can’t see anyone else publishing them. That’s especially the case with 1366 Books. There’s a lot of experimental poetry out there getting published and a wild range of poetic fiction. But I want to see fiction that is as experimental as some of the experimental poetry, and that is my intention with 1366 Books.
With 1366, I try to accept books that I think are pretty much there as they are. I accept that the author’s name goes on the cover—all final decisions will be the author’s. It might be that working with a few wild fiction books also helped free me for the recent novel I wrote in Banff, which, by the way, has the most ridiculous title: Barbara Stanwyck Just Happened to Be. That’s almost a challenge to a publisher. No one’s going to publish it with a title like that. But I’m going to stick by that incredibly uncommercial title. I think it’s very evocative, and it fits the book in so many ways.
With my poetry imprint, I might suggest getting rid of some poems, or suggest that certain kinds of poems be added to create a thread throughout the book. Usually, the authors are game to meet those challenges. Then I do the line editing and stylistic editing. Most of my editing is simple and is almost never substantive. In fact, I would say that I have never done a substantive edit on a book put out through my imprints. Generally, the books I accept are manuscripts I would almost be willing to publish exactly as they are, but I want to help make the book that the writer intended as strong as possible.
And then again, this idea of challenging writers to do things. I think that it goes more in that direction—my approach to editing influences my own writing more than the other way around.
TVL: It’s neat too that you mentioned that with your poetry, you like an editor that gets more involved and is more hands-on and your approach is more of the opposite, where you have a lighter touch.
SR: Yeah. Jason Camlot really challenged me on some of the poems in A Hamburger in a Gallery. He did two books by me, and that was the second one. The first was Dead Cars in Managua. With Hamburger, there would be a phrase like “He held out a peanut in his hand” and he would change “peanut” to “accordion,” just to see how I’d respond and to suggest that there are much bigger possibilities. He took one of my longer poems and turned it into a six-line rhyming poem, which I rejected, but he shook me up and made me think that a poem could take so many different shapes. I loved his provocation. I haven’t done anything quite as extreme as that. The idea of taking one noun and replacing it with another that’s completely unrelated just to allow the writer to see other possibilities and allow them to let the unconscious mind take a bigger role in their work is an interesting approach.
TVL: What kind of relationship do you build with the writers that you work with as their editor?
SR: Often, I’m working with friends. I tend to meet so many of the writers whose work I admire, and I tend to have published so many people who I know from various Canadian writing scenes. It’s usually amicable. There have been some tense times for sure, but not often. Mostly people are grateful to have attention paid to their book, that somebody’s willing to edit their book, and there’s a publisher willing to put out the money to publish it. Most writers are excited about the book. I’ve never had a writer include something they didn’t like or change something they didn’t want to change. Sometimes it’s deepened the friendship or turned an acquaintanceship into a friendship, and occasionally it’s turned a friendship into more of a business relationship. Which is sort of sad.
TVL: What inspired you to start your imprints?
SR: I’ll go back to my first imprint, A Stuart Ross Book, which lasted from 2007 to 2016, with Mansfield Press. In my book Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer, I had a little essay with a throwaway line that said, “Some publisher should give me an imprint so I can just publish all the weird stuff I think should be out there.” I went to a Mansfield Press launch and afterward, the publisher, Denis De Klerck, chased me out onto the street—I think this was at Bar Italia on College Street—and said, “Hey, Stuart, you know that thing you wrote about someone letting you do an imprint? I’m going to give you an imprint. You can do two books and we’ll see how it goes.” I wanted to call the imprint Guided Missiles after a doo-wop song I love from the fifties, but he wanted my name on the imprint because he thought it would be a selling point, which I found absurd. So that was how A Stuart Ross Book started. Then it grew, where some years I did six or seven books under my imprint. In fact, most of the books for Mansfield ultimately came up under my imprint. When we parted ways in 2016, I think Denis was thrilled to be more hands-on with more of the titles himself, although he was very happy with what I did, and I loved working with him.
I also wanted to see more surrealist poetry out there. I wanted to see books that were more eclectic, that had more humour in them. I approached Brian Kaufman at Anvil Press, with whom I had published four or five books of my own, and I pitched him the idea of an imprint of surrealist and post-surrealist or surrealist-adjacent poetry. He was game, and we started off with two books a year. It’s exciting that we’ve done about thirteen or fourteen books now. Next fall we’re publishing a first collection by Vera Hadzic, a young writer I met when I was the online writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa in 2021. I’ve been following her work ever since. About a year ago, I pitched her the idea. She published her first chapbook with Proper Tales, and a little while after that, I said, “What about a full book?” And that will be the 2025 Feed Dog Book. It’s especially exciting to publish a first book. I love publishing mid-career books that are taking people in a bit of a different direction. I love publishing books by heroes of mine who are senior writers. But publishing a first book by somebody? It’s just an exquisite feeling.
1366 Books came from a short post I wrote on Facebook one day: Is there any millionaire out there who wants to start a publishing company devoted to experimental fiction and make me their editor? And no, there wasn’t one. But Michael Mirolla, the publisher of Guernica Editions, sent me a note: “I’m not going to make a publishing company for you, but I could give you an imprint under Guernica.” Two books a year of experimental fiction. We talked a lot about it, and I asked that the books all be uniform. They have an unusual shape, almost square, and I wanted to bring on my own designer, who would create the book covers to look like a series. There are three books so far. One has just come out in the spring, and we’re working on the fall book. They are all designed by Fidel Peña of Underline Studio. He’s an internationally award-winning designer who I think makes a lot more money doing commercial work for big companies, but he’s a voracious reader, he loves great literature, and he had designed the covers of two of my own previous books—Snowball, Dragonfly, Jew, and Buying Cigarettes for the Dog, my second short story collection. He said to me, if there’s ever a time when he could design book covers for me, I should let him know. The results have been beautiful.
The first three books are by Brian Dedora, a writer who started out in the sixties—again, a generation before me, and I’ve admired his work for a long time; a first book of microfictions by Sarah Moses, a translator who’s had quite a few translations out; and then the third book is a novel by Kingston’s Michael e. Casteels. The books range from accessible but very strange and experimental, to challenging and dense—books you have to learn how to read. That’ll be the case with the book coming out in the fall by someone who’s primarily been a poet, Sophie Anne Edwards. It’s a novel entirely made up of footnotes. It’s a beautiful, powerful book, and a challenging read.
I love the idea of being an editor and not having to put up the money for these books. I already do that with Proper Tales Press on a small scale, so I’m grateful to these publishers. I was grateful to Denis for ten years to have his trust in me at Mansfield, and I’m grateful to Anvil Press and Guernica Editions for trying this experiment of bringing me on board and sticking with it.
TVL: Establishing and nurturing creative communities is something I have seen you do so naturally, and you bring it into every area of your professional life. What are your thoughts on the role of community in the life, and work, of a writer?
SR: It’s a particularly poignant question for me now. I’ve been living in Cobourg, Ontario, for fifteen years or so. I moved here after living in Toronto for fifty years, where I was extremely active. I was part of various writing communities where I organized a lot of things. I haven’t really found a place in Cobourg, in a sense. There is a sort of poetry community here already, but I’m not part of it, though I go to some of their events. I have put on events here through bookstores and in cafés. I’ve put on book launches, and some readings occasionally. It’s been excruciating, like pulling teeth, to get people out to them. All but one that happened during a really terrible snowstorm have been pretty successful. I have gotten people out, but it’s been hard work because I’m not part of the poetry group that’s here. The leader of that group does not seem eager to help let people know about the things I’m putting on, and it’s not a town where you can put posters up everywhere like Toronto. I would like to do something more regular here. I have a couple of writing acquaintances here, friends even, but I don’t have the kind of community I had in Toronto. I love creating events. I love creating book fairs and reading series and little festivals and just one-off events, so I tend to do those, usually around the launch of the books from my imprints, creating little reading tours.
Community-building, like every other aspect of what I do in writing, comes naturally for me. I thought there should be a small press fair in Toronto, so I got together with my friend Nick Power and we created a small press fair. I wanted a little reading series in Toronto, where one writer would come and read a bunch and just talk about their work, so I created a short-lived series called Talk Hunkamooga in a Toronto bar. When I was writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in Kingston, I created the Real Resident Reading Series, where I invited a local poet and then brought in two poets from outside. That series formed so much community; so many of those writers who met at those events are still in touch. A couple of them have started their own events and series. It’s just a natural thing. I love community, and I think I do have scattered community—in Vancouver and Ottawa and Toronto and Montreal and Kingston, and other places, all built around events and visits. My understanding is that in Toronto over the past decade, but especially since COVID, community doesn’t exist in the way I remember. There are fewer reading series, and fewer people coming out to things in general, so maintaining community is more of a challenge everywhere. Ottawa has an amazing and elastic poetry community and has for a long time. In other cities, there are more pockets of community, like in Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and so forth. My three weeks in Banff allowed me to be part of a community. Some of the writers I’d met before, but I mostly did not know them, or any of the musicians and visual artists. This community formed in three weeks. It was exhilarating. I think from now on, my community will most likely be this fragmented thing.
TVL: What is one book you always recommend?
SR: What I’ll recommend depends on who I’m talking to, whether it’s a book on writing or a novel or a book of poems. There are two poetry books I always recommend. One is by Lisa Jarnot, who is now Isaac Jarnot. The book is his fourth poetry collection, Black Dog Songs. To me, it is a perfect book of poetry, and also a book of poetry that almost anybody could love. Another book of poetry I recommend is Bird Tracks on Hard Snow by Nelson Ball. I find that people who’ve never come across Nelson’s writing before, including writers I’ve taught or mentored, when they are introduced to the kind of minimalist observational poems he wrote, almost everybody loves it. Almost everybody tries to emulate it in some way. It’s really transformed people’s poetry.
I wouldn’t say there is a novel I would recommend to everybody. Or any other kind of book. I love Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, a fantastic memoir. The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy is a 2019 novel, and the best novel I read that year, maybe one of the most terrific novels I’ve read in my life. It’s probably one of the first novels I would recommend. To certain people, I would recommend Peter Handke’s astonishing The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, or Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith.
But really, there are dozens of books. I’m that person who, you know, you go over to their place and they have a huge album collection, and they start playing you all these tracks because “You’ve got to hear this!” I love to foist books on people. It’s so exciting, especially to introduce people to writers they don’t know. I’m always asking for recommendations in both music and in literature. If I meet a writer from Vienna, I’ll ask for a list of Austrian writers so I can look for their works in translation. And also, what are some punk bands that come out of Austria? I love the exchange of recommendations. That’s what really enriches us.
TVL: What is the best piece of advice (about writing or otherwise) that you have received?
SR: Okay, something that really sticks with me is from when I studied for a while with the New York poet Larry Fagin, who died back in 2017. I only had about six or seven sessions with Larry, and he was outrageous. He was incredibly generous with his time and an audacious editor of my work. He gave me two pieces of advice that I think apply to anyone. One, referring to my poetry, was don’t try to be clever. I have really come to agree with that. I think cleverness is okay once in a while, here and there, but to be too showboating, showing how smart, how clever, how witty you are, I think it distracts. So, don’t be clever. And Larry’s other piece of memorable advice, which was far more counter-intuitive, was to make the ending of a poem boring. I mostly agree with him. An ending that feels a little flat or a little ambiguous allows the reader to stay in the poem for a longer period of time. They wander around in the poem more. If you end the poem with a bang or show off or have a clever ending, it erases everything that came before it. There’s no reason to stay in the poem any longer. But writing a boring ending allows the reader more space and is respectful of their intelligence, their own creativity. I don’t think any of these are hard and fast rules, but they’re good guidelines. Don’t be clever and have boring endings. You’ll win the Nobel Prize, guaranteed.
TVL: That’s great advice. Before we wrap up, do you have any final thoughts you’d like to leave our readers with?
SR: I’ve just told them how they could win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and you want more from me?
TVL: I know, how greedy!
SR: I encourage everyone, especially people starting out writing, to start their own magazine. Maybe it’s just one issue, maybe just one folded piece of paper with works by five different writers on it. Maybe it’s photocopied or rubber-stamped or just printed on your printer. Stapled or hand-sewn or paper-clipped together. But create something. Create community in this small way within these pages. Publish someone for the first time. Publish your friends. Create a school of writing. But have the experience of what it’s like to make a magazine. And again, I mean something very simple and inexpensive. Thirty copies of a letter-size sheet, folded into a magazine. You could probably print that for five dollars, or cheaper if you use your own printer at home. And self-publish in some way. Stand behind your work, just for the experience of it, even if it’s a leaflet, broadside, or poster of one of your poems or short stories. Publish a little chapbook, even a little eight-pager that only takes two sheets of folded paper. Make enough copies to distribute to family or friends. If you’re going to do a reading, maybe you’ll sell them each for a buck or two and you’ll get a good meal at Kwong Chow afterward. So that’s my advice. It’s more of an invitation than advice, really. I think it’s a necessity to feel what it’s like to bring other people’s work into the world, and to put your own work into the world and stand behind it, even if it’s printed in an edition of just ten copies. There’s a real sense of responsibility to your writing that comes with typesetting and designing something, and putting it in people’s hands.
