Experiments of Literature: André Forget, Jessica Johns, and Aaron Schneider

Hello

and welcome to the Summer Edition of Words, London's Literary and Creative Arts Festival.

I'm

Joshua Lambier, the Artistic Director of the Festival, and I'm coming to you live from Western University.

As

we all gather tonight, virtually,

near

and far, across Canada and beyond,

I

want to situate us in the territory on which this event is Zooming to you.

I'm

currently in University College at Western, just up the hill from the banks of Dashkanzibi, or Antler River,

also

known as the Thames River,

on

the traditional territory of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lanapawak, and Shinnoktan peoples.

In

the London area, there were Treaty 6 London Township, Treaty 7 Sombra Township,

and

Treaty 21 Longwoods,

as

well as the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum.

This

land continues to be home to diverse Indigenous peoples,

whom

we recognize as contemporary stewards of the land

and

water,

and

as vital contributors to the Words Festival.

The

river that flows nearby, Dashkanzibi, also connects us to local Indigenous communities, including the Chippewa of the Thames First Nation, Oneida Nation of the Thames, and Muncie Delaware Nation.

It's

my privilege to have the opportunity to visit with three authors this evening, writer and critic André Forgé, writer and Nahiyaw Antti, Jessica Johns, as well as author and creative writing professor Aaron Schneider,

to

explore new horizons for literary experimentation, as well as their own experiments of literature.

Our

event tonight was sparked, at least in part, in response to André's persuasive and provocative call in his new anthology, After Realism, to turn our collective attention towards a new generation of writers in Canada,

who

are, as he says, grappling with a tradition dominated by the realist short story,

a

tradition that emerges from a larger commitment to realism as a perennial motive in literature and other artistic forms. Realism claims to represent things as they are

or

were,

and

yet, it does so through the conventions that tell us, in a given place and time, what is to be taken as real,

in

literature and the work of art.

We

can think, for example, of the realist style's hallmarks,

the

linear narrative, the omniscient narrator, transparency of language,

all

of which testify to what André diagnoses as a certain kind of exhaustion with realism.

In

Canadian literature,

the

realist tradition is also dominated by

what

the critic Alex Goode has called

the

monsters of Can-Lit, to use his phrase,

or

the post-World War II generation of writers

who

have become establishment figures of, and to put this in quotation marks, Can-Lit.

How,

then, is a new generation of writers challenging the orthodoxies and conventions of this tradition to reimagine literary expression and experiment with new forms.

Over

the next hour or so,

we

are going to engage with new works by André, Jessica, and Erin.

We're

going to hear them read from their work, and we're going to take your questions in chat and on the webinar's Q&A function.

So

please do send along your thoughts and questions and cogitations any time during tonight's event to join the discussion as we go along.

I

will be here to take the questions out of the chat and the Q&A and serve them up over to our authors.

I

would also like to recognize the generous support of the Ontario Arts Council, the London Arts Council, Museum London, and the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, financial supporters who kept us free as a festival throughout the entire pandemic.

We're

very grateful to everybody who supported us to make this festival possible throughout the pandemic months.

So

to start off,

I

would like to introduce all of our fab guests for tonight's event. André Forger is the former editor-in-chief of The Puritan and a contributing editor to Canadian Notes and Queries. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines and newspapers in Canada and the United States. His first novel, In the City of Pigs, was recently published by Dundern Press in June, so it's hot off the press. André is the editor of a new anthology, After Realism, which I mentioned earlier, and I hope we'll hear more about this evening as well. Jessica Johns is a Nahiaw auntie and member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in northern Alberta.

She is the former managing editor for Room Magazine and a co-organizer of the Indigenous Brilliance Reading Series in Vancouver.

Most

recently, her short story, Bad Cree, won the 2020 Writers' Trust Journey Prize and won silver at the 2020 National Magazine Awards. Her short story, The Bull of Cromdale, was nominated for 2019 National Magazine Award in Fiction, and her debut chapbook, How Not to Spill, won the 2019 BP Nickel Chapbook Award. Her new novel, Bad Cree, will be alive to the world in January of 2023. And Aaron Schneider is the founding editor of the Thames Review and the founding editor of the Rusty Took. He runs the Creative Writers'

Speaker

Series at Western University, where he is an assistant professor in creative writing studies. His first book, Grass-Fed, was published by Quattro, and his collection of short fiction, What We Think We Know, which we'll hear more about today, is available from Gordon Hill Press. He also has a novel, The Supply Chain, forthcoming in 2022, and he tells me earlier that it's this fall that he's going to be launching that to the world. So Aaron, Andre, and Jessica, welcome to London's Words Festival.

I'm

going to start us off by turning to Andre, and I'd mentioned in my opening remarks, your new collected anthology, After Realism, or Beyond Realism, after Realism, yes, collects together 24 short stories that offer alternatives, or a provocative glimpse beyond the realist tradition, as a perennial motive that has dominated Canadian writing. To get us started, and maybe to provide some foundation for us, I wonder if you could help us understand, even in some broad sketches,

what

some of the features and tendencies of this realist tradition of CanLit

and

beyond, and why it's important or even urgent for us to start to think beyond them.

I'll

unmute myself, that'd help. Yeah, thank you very much for that wonderful introduction. I

was

putting together this anthology, and when one puts together an anthology, there needs to be some sort of organizing principle. And I thought of a few different principles that could be used. There's the national principle, right? It's Canadian,

and

I didn't want to do that

for

a variety of reasons. One of them was simply that I don't know if that's actually a particularly useful frame

for

understanding literature, especially in the 21st century.

And

as I was looking at these stories

and

thinking about my experience as an editor working with short stories for years, I would read

hundreds

of short stories through submissions, right? So you start to pick up on interesting little things that are going on, right? And I found that there was a real interest in a lot of the writers who were submitting

in

playing with this idea of reality, of the real, you know? And in some cases, that's including supernatural elements in a story, right?

In

some cases, that's, you know, using autofiction,

you

know, where a huge

part

of what makes autofiction autofiction is the idea that this is

the

goods, you know? This is real stuff that actually happened to this person.

So

I was playing around with this idea of

a

lot of these short stories that I grew up on that I love,

you

know, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, like,

no

shade to those writers.

I

mean, I really love a lot of that stuff, but I felt that there was something changing or something moving, and I wanted to kind of focus in on that and spend some time thinking about why that might be happening,

because

I think a lot of the stories in After Realism do contain elements of realism, but they're pushing. There's a sense of tension, and in my introduction, I argue that that sense of tension is in some way influenced by the fact that

we

live in a reality that's increasingly difficult to represent. over the past

10

years, a lot of people would say, but I think really, you know,

it's

a long trend that's been going on

probably

since the beginning of the century. There's a sense of anxiety about reality,

and

the reality we experience, the

role

that literature has in creating realities or reflecting them.

Yeah,

so I found that that to me was just a very productive idea

to

think about, and I found that the stories, as soon as I started thinking about them in that way, all sorts of

connections

opened up in what the writers were writing about and how they were writing style. Yeah, so I think that's kind of where the collection really kind of came into being in my mind.

Right, so that it's not, as you say in your essay, it's not the post-realism, it's after realism, and you have this really interesting way of parsing out after realism. Could you say a little bit more about why you added after as the modifier of this tradition?

Yeah,

well, post-realism just seemed wrong. It seemed like you walk into a bookshop, you'll find plenty of realist fiction, right? So it's not right that, you know, we're just not writing this kind of thing anymore. But I like after

as

a term, because you'll often see it in poetry, right, that a poem is written after a certain poet.

And

so there's a sense of homage,

but

then there's also a sense of

maybe

tension or competition or

challenge,

almost,

that's

going on between poets. And that's not necessarily hostile, although it can be.

So

it just, the word seemed like the right one. I don't want to make too bold a claim about what's happening,

but

I also think that there is something

happening. Right,

and that's fantastic. That really gets us off on a great footing in terms of what we're thinking about here in terms of that term experimentation. In the introduction to after realism, Jessica, you appear as one of the first authors mentioned, I believe in the first paragraph, you're mentioned by Andre in reference to your short story, Good Bones. Andre draws this really fascinating comparison between what you call a standard eulogy and conventional realism,

where

platitudes and cliches, as Andre notes, seduce us into thinking they're adequate to the things they describe, like a eulogy matching up to the person in life.

The

narrator of your story, by contrast, who has imagined the deaths over almost everyone she knows, creates eulogies that verge art into the fantastical. And I also love the dream work of bad Cree as well, those haunting crows. In your writing process, how do these moments of formal innovation emerge? Do they come to you like a compelling opening or closing line that you build around? Or do they come in the writing?

Yeah,

that's a really good question.

I

think there are a couple of elements to this. The first is

really

questioning the idea of,

and

Andre even does this in this introduction a little bit, which is that

reality

to who?

So

a lot of what can be considered supernatural, a lot of what can be considered speculative fiction in

the

works of a lot of the time, like black and indigenous people,

that's

not that that is reality. That's very much based in a reality they and we experience.

So

the dream work in bad Cree, for example, dreams are a very integral aspect of how Cree people understand the world. It's how we understand information, it's how we impart information from

different

realms because different realms exist for us.

And

people and, you know, ancestors live in these different realms and how do you talk to them? It's that's how. And with the eulogies, you know, being able to speak to something that hasn't happened yet,

such

as a death. I mean, a large part of that story is somebody grappling with this new reality of of many deaths in her life.

So, so

yeah, so a part of that is just me really wanting to bring

what

I interpret, what I experience rather, as my everyday reality into, build that world, build that future into writing.

And,

and then, you know,

it's

difficult, especially when in,

we

have particular genres that we do, particularly in marketing and things like that. We do want to, you know, hold on to these and,

and

we want to use them to be able to describe something that

other

people will understand as experimental, or, or what have you. But in some cases, that's not experimental at all, depending on, on who that person is, or that's not,

that

is, or that sits firmly in, in realism and nothing else. So

I

think in trying to do that,

it,

it creates that tension, it creates really great discussions like this,

and,

you know, opens up a lot when we talk about what contemporary realism can look like.

And

actually, as Andre was just talking before about these, because same thing, these are the,

the, the

Canadian realist writers that I read and had to study growing up, wrote in a particular way that didn't necessarily speak to me.

And

I think also a part of that shift, certainly being in this age of, and in a time of

increasing

uncertainty and, and fear,

is part

of this shift. And another part is that the Canadian literary scene, which is still predominantly white,

at,

at that time in particular, was, that was it.

And

now we're seeing, which you see in this anthology,

all

the different contemporary writers, black and indigenous writers, writers of color, queer writers, gender diverse writers,

and,

you know, a reality that perhaps some people just aren't used to seeing.

And I

think that is

a

really wonderful shift, and also incredibly necessary. Absolutely. I

was

thinking, I

was

thinking, I

was thinking,

as you were saying that, I think I read somewhere that when you were doing your MFA, somebody had given you the advice not to read about dream, or not to write about your dreams. And it was even right there where you started to resist that. Is that the case with

the... Yeah,

that was, that was the original impetus for Bad Cree, the short story.

It

was in a nonfiction writing workshop.

And

at the time, this has changed in the institution where I did my MFA. But at the time, there weren't any indigenous or black writers, professors.

And

so I was in this nonfiction class, and the professor gave this very,

what

he thought was advice

to,

to us writing nonfiction, which was that don't write about your dreams,

you

will lose your readers, they will get bored. You will not, you know, that it's not a reality. Like, that's not something that belongs in nonfiction. If you're gonna write dreams, write about it in poetry, or something like that.

And

that just didn't sit with me. Because as I said, that's, that's reality to me. That's how I,

that,

that,

that's

my life. So why, why would I not put that in my nonfiction?

Right? So

disjointed way for

a

disjointed piece of advice

for,

you know, me, an emerging writer wanting to, to do this thing, and be successful, whatever that means. And also how I was, was brought up and taught to believe.

And

so I wrote this

Bad

Cree, though it's fiction, I wrote it

as

a talk back to this initially. And then,

as

I was writing it, I thought, I don't want to,

all

of my writing to be resistance. I don't want to be,

so, because

in that way, I'm still centering a colonial perspective of what dreams is,

what

dreams are, and what dreams can be. And I didn't want to do that. I wanted to center and keep centering my own, which is

dreams

being this very powerful source of knowledge and magic.

And

so, so, so it shifted, and my intention with it shifted, which I'm glad it did. But it certainly was sparked from

what

I would say, very bad advice.

Right. And now you can read the outcome of that in the Journey Prize collection, where it is nicely collected together. To Erin, as I was reading through the stories in your new book, I was struck by how daring, audacious, I would even say, you are with innovating on form, including your use of autofiction, as Andre had mentioned earlier, to explore challenging subject matter, your playfulness with perspective, and even the use of language around data analysis, alongside an interrogation of lived experience. For example, in your book, you can find figures, charts and graphs, researcher interview, and heavy footnoting, statistical analysis.

You've noted that the book taken together tracks your progression from more conventional writing towards experimental forms of writing. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more of that progression towards the experimental and why that's so essential to your book.

I

mean, the progression is pretty straightforward, right? I think that it's a very typical kind of movement. You start off writing

the

kind of things that you read. And I think that all three of us have already talked about sort of beginning by reading pretty conventional stuff, and

then

you start to move away

from it.

And in my case, that's motivated by all sorts of things. I think that

a

part of, so just to take one element of what you talked about, right? But part of the use of things like the instruments of data analysis and representation, so figures, charts, things like that, a bunch of that stuff was written sort of around the beginning of the pandemic and

kind of

edited as it progressed.

And

that's a period where, and there are ways in which those kinds of ways of communicating information have become more and more predominant over the sort of past couple of decades,

but

that really intensified in those years, right? I think at this point, we're all very, very used to looking at

information

as data

points,

right? And at the visual representation of information, like we were talking earlier,

I

mean, you can think about the pandemic, but we were talking earlier about the war in Ukraine, which comes to us

through

the media, sort of as stories of like heroism and tragedy, but also as a set of data points, this many guns, we need this many artillery pieces,

right,

as a set of numbers. And that was really,

really

intensified during the pandemic. So

there's

a way in which it didn't feel particularly experimental to do that.

In

that moment, you know, the most experimental and most audacious, the least realistic thing,

would

be to write a pretty conventional story that ends with it, you know, that follows a standard kind of narrative and ends with an epiphany.

You

know, that would feel just extraordinarily at odds with reality. So it just seems to fit with the way that we're encountering the world at this particular moment,

right?

There's a Spanish writer I really like called Augustin Fernando Malo, who has this idea called complex realism. And his idea is that the way you write needs to reflect the circumstances. So he wrote a trilogy that essentially narratively is the equivalent of like changing channels on a television set with cable,

when

there's nothing on on any of the channels, so you just keep cycling through them.

But, you

know, if you look around your world, look around the world that you're in, when you're writing, there's something to that idea of taking the way in which stories come to you, and taking the way in which information and narrative comes to you in that moment, and reflecting that into your stories. It doesn't,

it

is admittedly different than what you would consistently see in writing. But to me, at least, it doesn't feel that different for that particular reason, right? Because it emerges out of a particular moment, context, and hopefully speaks to people who are embedded in that same moment,

context, right?

You're right, too. During the pandemic, I have friends who would update us on you know, the figures of COVID deaths and COVID cases like they were updating sports scores, you know, it was just this constant monitoring of these these data points that were unfolding. I have a question too, with the auto fictive in your in your collection, which really, you delve deep into subjects that are very personal to your life, I imagine are very personal. And the story, not unlike what you're describing that they do have a kind of conventional cleaving to notions of realism, like stories of fathers and sons, that's something you're going to discover.

But with the experimental form that you use it, I wonder, maybe I'll let you phrase this out. Does the experimental form allow you to go into topics that are so challenging to you?

I

don't know, maybe a little bit. I think that what that in that case, what it allowed was to draw together a lot of different things. And so

it's

less a question of going into those topics, but it allowed the space to understand them in a more complex and normal

way. You

know, to set up a set of juxtapositions that make the kind of basic personal experiences at

the

core of that,

that

give them a little bit hopefully more more resonance that allowed me to speak to something other than just the relationship that I was talking

about. So

at least in that respect, the experimental form allows them to breathe a little bit. I don't think it was necessary to kind of write about them. It was probably necessary to write about them in a way

that

was worth sharing with

them. Right. Right.

Because otherwise, it would have been very close to Darwin. And I don't really want to inflict that on anyone else.

Right.

And Jessica, in your writing, I've also noticed a theme of mothers and daughters, and fathers and daughters as well, like the story about the bull, which I really enjoyed. Even in the title poem of your chapbook, How to Spill, we can see that relationship to mothers and daughters.

What

is it that attracts you to that that subject as well in your writing, that intergenerational discussion that that unfolds, whether it's your life or not, or the narrators of your stories. But it's something that I see coming back in your writing.

Yeah,

I think that

it

is something that I am very

these

generational relationships, whether that is mother and daughter or auntie,

and their

nibbling or,

you

know, grandfather, grandma, again, like ancestors that have come before us and ancestors that will come after future ancestors.

I

think about

those

relationships a lot.

And

it is something I'm particular, the only word that I can think of at the moment for it is like particularly obsessed with,

which

is

because, you

know, I think a lot about,

of

course, intergenerational trauma, as that is

something

I think through a lot and the effects that that has had on me that has had on my kin, but also

intergenerational

and generational joy,

and

what that looks like to pass that on what it what it looks like to,

to

want to create futures for

for

my kin that are coming after me that I want to see, I want to have them witness,

and

how my mother was also trying to do that for her children,

in

big and little ways.

And

so I keep returning back to that in my work a lot. I also think that

the

wet nature of relationships

is

very, very,

I

always say that I'm not going to like bring any talk that I'm in back to treaty, but unfortunately, it just happens in my brain.

But I

think about

the

direct relationship between

what

treaty is, which is establishing and building relationships,

and

these web relationships that we have, and how essential and important they are.

And

I've been thinking about them all my life without realizing it all my life. Because that is how I have been taught how to

be

in social situations is being at these massive family gatherings,

where a

million aunts and uncles and other family members are,

there's

a governance going on at all times,

and

learning that governance system, and, you know, bringing that into my own world and how I forge other relationships,

you

know, it just all comes back to that. And,

yeah,

I think that it's just a very particular,

it's

a very particular thing that I'm always working through. So it just it makes its way

into anything

I write.

Right,

that's brilliant. One of the common threads that works across all three of your work is a commitment to the short story form as a genre of experimentation, whether that's in terms of form or subject matter, as we've been discussing right now, language, style, and so forth.

The

great short story writer, Frank O'Connor, famously stated, and this is his words,

for

the short story writer, there is no such thing as an essential form. The plasticity

of

the genre seems to lend itself to experimentation. But I imagine there, there may also be a kind of anxiety around the openness of the form of the short story as well. And it's a question for all of you.

And

maybe I can start with Andre. What is it about the short story? Because I know you've collected in the anthology, you've collected these short, the short stories to make up after realism. What is it about the short story do you think that lends itself so much to experimental work?

Very

good question.

I

think,

well,

first of

all,

I should say, I don't think of myself as a short story writer, in part because I had a huge amount of respect for the form.

Right.

And I think it takes

quite

a bit of dedication to figure out

how

to write

your

kind of short story,

because

it has that

plasticity,

as you say.

So

I've always been drawn to it as a kind of like,

this

is a, I don't know, it's a bit like to bring in a music analogy.

You

know, there's a,

there's

something about, you know, a very short pop song, you know, that it's

two

to three minutes, there's a huge amount that has to be done in that time

in

order to immediately bring some, someone into a world and into a feeling, into a mood,

and

then to play with that mood. And I just, I have a huge amount of respect for it.

And

in putting together the, the anthology, part of the pleasure was just reading a lot of short stories by writers I hugely admire. And there, I mean, it was hard because

I

wrestled with whether or not to include excerpts of novels.

Right.

Right.

Because I wanted, there were certain writers who I wanted to have in there because I

am a

huge fan of their work.

But

in the end, I, I decided

that

that would,

it

wouldn't quite work. It wouldn't quite work for this as a, as a collection of specifically short stories that are doing, that are all bound together in part by their

commitment

to doing this kind of work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's great. That's fantastic. And you've anticipated a question. So we'll hold this in advance for a moment, but I, because all three of you also have novels that have just recently emerged to the world or will. And I do want to ask you about that relationality between the short story and the novel and what, if, whether there's things that you can do in the short story, but not the novel. But before we get to that, I'd like to, to hear from, from Jessica and Aaron, and maybe after I get a, after you have a chance to chat about it, maybe we could also get an example from, from your writing.

Although I'm not sure if it's necessarily a short story that you selected, but we'll, we'll get a sample of maybe your writing afterwards. So maybe I could, either one, who would like to go next in terms of, uh, that short story.

All

right. Um, so why the short story?

Um,

yeah. And, and whether it lends itself

to experimentation. Yeah.

Um, so I think I like that quote from, from O'Connor, um, just because I'm,

at

least when I sit down to write, I,

my

starting point is an understanding of this short story as something that really only exists as a word limit.

Um,

and often, sometime, not often, but sometimes doesn't even necessarily need to include words. So this is, there's this openness to it.

I

think one of the reasons that it potentially works, or I should say, like, it works for me for experimentation is especially if you do something

a

little bit unexpected from a reader's perspective.

Um,

and if you do something

complex,

but also a little bit out there and a little bit unique,

um,

those kinds of things sometimes have a time limit on how long they'll work for.

Right.

Um, and like they, they, they just, it's just a nice kind of like, you know, the kind of trick sometimes.

Right.

And the trick works for five, 10 pages.

But

if you were to stretch it out to a novel, um, it would really wear, uh, I think.

Um,

so it's something simple as that, uh, um, at least from my perspective. And then like, it's, it's also just a question of,

of

what stories you want to tell. And sometimes you want to focus on a particular moment, a transition,

you

know, a way of looking at a character and that's all. And that's makes for a really strong short story and a very weak novel.

So.

Right. And, uh, do you have something ready that you could read for us?

Sure. And

I think you're

going to be sharing your screen.

I

am. Yeah. So this is from, um,

the

third story in the collection. There's a, an appendix of, um, or a three, there's three short stories. This is the third one. And they're all linked.

They

follow a character through a substantial portion of them life. Um, and this third one, the section that I'm going

to

read to you from is, um, a series of charts

that

analyze her relationships. So it's,

uh,

changes in emotional commitment over time,

Kara

and selected long-term partners and relevant secondary variable, variable characters called Kara.

Um,

so

I'm

just going to give you a brief explanation of how the charts work. Um, and then, uh, dive into a couple of them. So solid lines indicate emotional states or intensity is confirmed by the partner and supported by external observation.

Raps

indicate an absence of reliable data. Broken lines indicated discrepancy between reports from the partners and external observers.

In

these cases, values were weighted according to the reliability of the informants and adjusted to match trends in the

of

reliable, reliable values in the data

set. Um,

values are represented in numerical scale that ranges from minus 10 to 10,

um,

and represent relative intensities rather than absolute

quantities. So

I'm going to start you with the first chart. Um, this is, this picks up a portion of the way through the story. Um, and it comes after a really tumultuous relationship, the kind of relationship that is defined

primarily

by the fights the two partners have.

So figure

seven C Kara and Mike spur casual relationship, 2006.

Both

parties accounts are mirror true reflections of the relationship,

or

in other words, correspond exactly in their outlines, constitutive details, but transposed.

Kara

reported that Mike spur was as invested as she reported as he reported. She was in vice versa.

In

this case, both the data and its attribution are in dispute. We have represented both lines and used that vertical mark, which means or between them to indicate that each line may represent the investment of either Kara or Mike spur spur, but not both.

So

that assigning one line to one partner automatically, but not permanently assigns a second line to the other partner.

The

two lines must be read as equally significant, definite in their values, but indeterminate in their reference. Presence to herself, the third variable in the graph, represents Kara's presence in the moment of their being together

in

the small, self-contained universe that every couple creates around themselves,

no

matter how casually and incidentally they are connected.

For

Kara, these oases of enclosure combined with Mike spur's essential indifference to create a stillness through which her sense of self could slowly return.

She'd

come back to her like a person who arrived on foot from a long way away,

a

figure that she watched as it became clearer and more definite by the barely measurable units of footsteps that neither hurried nor delayed,

that

approached at a rate that was uniquely its own, approached for what seemed like an impossible length of time until suddenly it was there within hailing distance

and

its face was wrong.

Figure

8C, Kara and Sebastian Shade, relationship 2006 to 2008.

No

reliable data exists. Kara and Sebastian Shade confirm either explicitly by implication or by telling a mission,

the

existence of a relationship stretching from late September of 2006 to February of 2008.

However,

neither provides sufficient or sufficiently consistent data points to produce even a hypothetical representation of this relationship. External observers might likewise confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt, the existence of the relationship,

but

could provide no specific data on its nature, intensity, fluctuations,

etc.

Sebastian Shade climbed the five steps to Kara's house on Oxford Street an unspecified number of times.

Kara

climbed the two steps to his townhouse in the northwest corner of the city at least once, two doors closed behind them

and

remain sealed to this day. Despite our best efforts, we've been unable to pry them open.

Figure

9C, Kara and John Neves, relationship 2011 to 2000.

Both

partners' investments in each other are represented with broken lines, not because they are in dispute. Both Kara and John Neves described their entire relationship in its limited but still detectable fluctuations and reliable detail,

and

the descriptions were uniformly reflected in reports from external observers, but because they represent something other than romantic love and its various affective cognates. Something closer to friendship,

really,

as both Kara and John Neves made clear, but which neither would specifically confirm, the comfort of someone whose life and interests you share without friction,

with

whom you never argue about what to watch, or which restaurant to order dinner from on Friday night, or how to love each

other. And

if you argue, everyone does, do they not?

You

do so only with an easy calmness that makes disputes synonymous with debates.

As

they both realized on a Tuesday evening in the middle of October, when the city was cool without being cold,

and

Kara looked at him from across the room and said, I'm moving out, agreement is not synonymous with commitment.

In

figure 10c, this is the last one, Kara and Alexander Campbell relationship 2014 ongoing.

There

is in these two unbroken lines reaching with little variation from November 2014 to the moment at which you read this

into

the vanishing point of the future. Happiness of a kind whose accumulation, accumulating depth and breadth exceed the crude representation of this pair of lines and forces us,

the

researchers to reckon with the limits of our tools, devices, frames, etc.

In

short, with all of the apparatus of investigation, and consequently with the investigation itself.

In

its gnomic simplicity, the right hand side of this figure confronts us simultaneously,

as

if our two sentiments are on at first parallel and then gently but inevitably convergent trajectories,

as

if they are in some way indistinguishable from the collection of data points to which we have reduced Kara and Alexander Campbell

with

our own inadequacy.

Thanks.

Brilliant. One thing that we miss when we do the webinar event is the applause that everybody would be sending for that wonderful reading. Thank you so much, Aaron. And we're going to come back and chat a little bit more too about some of the things that you're doing in that passage from Kara's triptych or Kara's triptych in the first section of your book, which

Aaron's

book here, a nice shot there as well.

And

I put in the chat links to everybody's websites. So Jessica, to go back to the question of the short short story and how it might lend itself to experimentation for you.

I just I love short stories so much. I love reading them. I love writing them.

And

I think I

think in

particular because it it does it kind of allows you

it allows

you to play in a way that maybe for a longer

work wouldn't

or or

maybe

a longer work would but the effect would be very different.

I

think there's also ways that you know, experimental instances that work for novels as well that might not for short stories. So they're just very specific things for

these

these different genres if if you

think

about the genres that way.

But

I do think it allows for a particular type of experimentation, which

Aaron

kind of touched on, which is that you can do these things that might not work for a really long for pages and pages, but for a short thing

it

can have it can do something really cool.

I

also think that

it

does it strips away everything else you really have to

whatever

you want to get to whatever it is that feeling you want to elicit or

the

thing you want to say there's restrictions, there's a restriction of space,

there's

a restriction of words or whatever. And so it's a challenge you have to work to to really get that

to

get that to happen

in

a way that makes sense to you. So that's that's how I think it lends itself a little bit.

Absolutely. That's brilliant answer. And would you have something that you could offer to everyone by way of reading?

Sure. I'm actually going to read

I'm

going to read a couple of pages from The Bull of the Cromdale, which is in the 2019 Best Canadian Essays.

The

reason that I'm going to read this is a couple.

First

is that it is about The Bull of the Cromdale, as noted in the story, is my papa,

who

which me my motion, my grandpa.

And

I just came back from my territory very recently, where

he

lived at the time of writing this. He was still alive.

I

wrote this in 2019 and he passed last year, last September. So this I haven't revisited this piece and I haven't read it

in

a long time. And just going back to

his

territory, my territory

and

thinking about him a lot, I just thought it'd be really nice to revisit this piece.

And

also because

this

was included in Best Canadian Essays

and

I wrote it as a piece of fiction.

So

it's interesting because of how this piece was interpreted to

certain

people.

And

I didn't correct them because I wanted to be included in an anthology.

But

also like this is it's largely it's largely based in reality, but there's just elements of it that I couldn't possibly know things about his past stories that I've been told that I had to make up.

So

in my mind, you know, it lived in this other genre, but like

neither

one of them really do the piece that

justice

if we think about them in these very defined terms.

So I

will read a couple pages. It's called The Bull of the Cromdale.

My

papa used to be called the bull

back

when he had black hair, styled it like Elvis

and

wore cowboy boots with silver heels.

He

lived with his cousin Dustin in Edmonton's north side neighborhood of Cromdale,

which

was off 118th Ave, which is also called the Avenue of Champions.

If

you didn't live in the area, you knew the Avenue of Champions was where Johns went to pick up women

and

where the machete attack happened.

If

you lived in the area,

you

knew the things that didn't get reported,

but

you knew the good things too.

The

Cromdale Hotel was a staple of the Avenue of Champions,

and

that's where the bull was made.

The

hotel had 44 rooms and the attached bar had a pool table with only a couple divots,

cheap

beer and country music.

Papa

and Dustin sharked people every night

and

could have made a living out of it if they wanted to.

But

Dustin was a bell rose,

which

meant he was small and made trouble.

Started

fights with Munyao, he knew the bull would finish.

Some

people called the Cromdale a hole to house men who didn't know where else to go.

My

papa called it magic.

I

learned about the bull, this man that my papa used to be,

in

the same way I learned everything about my family.

In

East Prairie, sitting against the backdrop of my papa's farm, gathering little bits of information and trying to piece them together like shredded paper.

I

learned that Papa and Dustin left East Prairie together when they were 15,

because

even though Edmonton wasn't big then, it was bigger

than

the Métis settlement where they were born,

big

enough for their dreams to fit.

Papa

and me were playing darts and he skunked me for the millionth time like he could do it in his sleep.

I've

never seen anyone throw darts like him.

Dad

just shook his head.

He

remembered the bull better than anyone.

The

bull could play poker, darts and pool at the same time, Dad said.

He

could spot a cheater through tobacco smoke and a 2-4 of whiskey.

If

anyone stepped too close or had eyes too hard,

he'd

knock them out before they had time to blink.

The

bull, Dad said, never lost.

Then

he conjured the man.

Dad

told stories about how Papa used to bring together the whole neighborhood,

how

he could strip sound right from the airwaves,

how

under the wing of the bull of the Cromdale you were always safe.

After

that, I couldn't stop thinking about him.

Even

when I slept, the bull lived in the periphery of my dreams.

The

dreams started coming in waves in the winters and changed with every new story I heard, but the bull stayed the same.

He

was like how I saw him in every old photo, stuck to the fridge

or

creased between book pages.

Black

button-up shirt,

arms

spread across the shoulders of his cousins,

a

smile so wide it looked like a wound.

He

moved like he was floating and I couldn't look at him directly or he disappeared.

So

I watched him from the corners of my eyes,

tried

not to lose him in the rest of the noise or the other people who would come to visit.

Most

times he ignored me. Sometimes he watched me back.

After

Papa had been living in Edmonton for a while,

he

started working at McTarran's bookbinding factory where he met my grandma.

Papa

would sometimes glue pages out of order and when grandma asked

him

about it,

he

said it was because logic was

no

good

for

stories or for dreaming.

She

said that's when she fell in love with him,

my

Uncle Will and my dad, but they were surprised about the changes.

Papa

packed up

and

moved to a quiet suburb further south

where

no one yelled in the streets after dark.

He

started gluing pages in the right order

and

even though he was still the bull, it was only on weekends.

He

had people to take care of and he did.

By

the time my dad was 12 and Uncle Will was 13, they'd already grown to love the weekends as much as Papa.

They'd

stow away in the back seat of his Ford pickup when he'd head to the Cromdale,

hang

around Papa's old neighbourhood and get into trouble of their own.

One

night, Uncle Will tried his luck getting into the Cromdale and made it pretty far before getting into a rumble. Nobody believed the bull at first when he stepped in and said that the white boy getting roughed up was his,

but

they believed him pretty good after he beat the other guy bloodier than he'd ever beat anybody.

When

Uncle Will talks about what he saw, he says the bull grew 10 inches taller

and

5 inches wider the minute he stepped into the Cromdale.

He

says it must have been the smoke or the dark, but he saw the wooden beams of the bar move in waves around Papa's body

like

it was making room for him.

In

the Cromdale, Uncle swears

the

bull was magic.

And

that's where I'm gonna leave that there.

Thank

you.

Brilliant.

That is absolutely terrific. Thank you so much for that reading, for both of your readings, Erin and Jessica. I mentioned right off the top that all three of you have either a novel that's recently out or is going to come out very, very soon. And that does lend me to this question that I anticipated earlier about how experimentation comes to the novel and whether there are things that you can do in the novel that you can't in the short story and vice versa. And I want to turn to Andre, because you have a new novel that was out in June and we'll hopefully get to hear about this.

And I wonder if you could talk about experimentation in the novel and how you, as a writer, wrestle with that question.

Yeah.

Um,

I,

I didn't set out,

uh, to

write, um,

an

experimental novel. I mean, I, for a first book,

the,

the challenge that I had set myself was

I

want this to be readable.

I

want it to move. I want people to want to keep reading.

And

I felt that that was important,

um,

because it's hard to do. Like, it's a challenge to actually, to do that. And,

um,

I have a tendency to over intellectualize things and make excuses for myself and say, well, it's supposed to be,

and

there's a bit of that in here. There is a little bit of that, but I, but I

really

wanted to see if I could pull it off. I really wanted to see if I could write

something

like, uh, buildings Roman, um, kind of traditional thing. Um, but I also wanted to play around with

structure.

Um, and the novel came about because, uh, back in 2017, my friend, Joel Peters, who's a composer, um, based in Montreal who composes for the organ primarily,

um,

got in touch with me and said,

um,

do you want to write a story about an underwater organ?

And

I thought,

well,

sure.

That's

a good prompt. Um, what I'm working on now isn't going well. So why not this underwater organ thing? I think he wanted something kind of short and Kafkaesque,

you

know, like a little parable.

Um,

and I gave him 10,000 words, um, about

a

journalist going to write about an underwater organ that's being built in Halifax.

Um,

so

after

I wrote the story, I sent it back to Joel and they composed a concert around the idea,

uh,

in the story, we brought in some poets who wrote

poetry

that was about this underwater organ

or

hydro organ.

Um, and

then we put on the show and

in,

in the, the brochure, like we included an excerpt, which, um, kind of talks about the origins of these, these organs.

And

I was quite shocked by the number of people who came up to me after the event and were like, why have I never heard about this?

Cause

it's not real. These don't exist.

Um,

but, but I had,

I

had tried to use a very kind of academic voice or journalistic voice in writing about it.

And

I think that that style for a lot of people,

it

was like, well, this sounds real. This doesn't sound like a story. This sounds like

something

I would read in a magazine. Um, so that really got me interested in the way that,

um,

the tone of something kind of tells us how we should relate to it.

Um, and

that's often, uh, a problem,

right?

Because,

you

know, academic language, uh, has been used to further all kinds of, um, ghastly, uh, intellectual

projects.

Right. And it's been able to do that in part because it sort of sounds, uh, very official and very confident and,

um, that's,

uh, that's a dangerous thing,

you

know? Um, and so I wanted

the,

the, the play in the, in the book to be partially about playing around with,

with,

uh, how these kinds of language cues tell us

how

to take something.

Um,

and I, so, so after I had written this story, I wrote, uh, three others, uh, or sorry, I wrote five others. Uh, two of them got cut. Uh, so the novel is, is four parts.

Each

of the parts has the journalist writing about a specific artistic performance or a specific artist. And, um, it's structured a little bit like a symphony.

So

rather than being there,

rather

than having, uh, you know, we're introduced to the character,

the,

the problem of the novel is introduced, and we have that classic Aristotelian

kind

of rising action,

climax,

falling action.

Um,

instead, I, I wanted to

think

about how a symphony works and a symphony tends to work a lot more

with

mood, right? So the first movement has a certain mood and is often in a certain,

certain

key,

um,

or has a certain tone. And then the second movement is different in the third movement and the fourth movement. Um, so I tried to do that with the different parts of the novel to, to, to give each of them its own, its own sense,

um,

its own focus and to let the kind of greater themes of the book,

um,

emerge

through,

through, throughout the whole thing.

Um,

not in a,

in

an obvious kind of way, but in a, you

know,

maybe a more subtle way was what I was, was what I was trying to do. My editor told me that if I was marketing it as a novel, I needed to have, at some point I needed to have certain things. And so I,

uh,

I was convinced that that was, that was the case. So there is,

I

mean, there is a kind of climactic scene and that kind of thing, but I, I think the

experiment

that I was playing around with was, was about structure and,

um,

and voice.

Brilliant. I actually threw a link into the chat to the project. I was looking at this exact project earlier. Um, and there's a nice video too, by

your

collaborators where they walk through, uh, and you can hear the organ music that they came up for the, with, for the project. So I definitely recommend everybody check out that link. Uh, could we hear some of, uh, of what you're describing? Could, could you read some for us?

Absolutely.

Um, so I'm reading from the second, uh, the second movement,

uh,

which is set in Halifax and is about these underwater organs.

And,

um,

I

think it

hopefully

we'll

kind

of get at some of what I'm talking about here.

The

origins of hydroorganology are contested.

Print

references to underwater organs are almost non-existent before the 19th century,

but

this has not stopped some of the more enthusiastic hydroorganonologists from arguing that they are nearly as old as their more famous terrestrial counterparts. Textual evidence suggests a hydroorganon may have been among the many pleasures Tiberius arranged

to

be built as part of his Villa Jovis on Capri. Although the archaeological record is so scant and the possibility so unlikely given the Villa's placement high on a rocky promontory

that

most scholars dismiss it as being fanciful.

A

more substantive piece of evidence is the San Marcos,

discovered

just off the coast of Spain in 1977, which included several large pipes and a wind chest dating from the 15th century.

Given

that the remains are a mere kilometer from the site of a galleon known to have been wrecked on route from Genoa, however, the argument that it is a primitive hydroorganon and not simply the scattered parts of a conventional organ

rather

strains credulity.

Most

scholars agree that the first indisputable reference to an underwater organ came with the publication of Giovanni Bonavista's catalogue of musical instruments new and proposed in 1765, which includes schema for a rudimentary hydroorganon featuring 10 pipes and a bellows operated through an ingenious series of hoses and manual pumps. Bonavista claimed that the hydroorganon was a completely novel instrument

and

was in fact the first to use the term hydroorganon to describe a subaqueous organ.

But

this claim has been frequently debated. Skeptics point out that Bonavista was hardly scrupulous when it came to crediting his sources

and

had a tendency to claim authorship for ideas for instruments that had venerable, if usually obscure, theoretical pedigrees.

It

wasn't until later in the 19th century,

following

the spread of the industrial revolution across Europe,

that

speculative hydroorganonics really became a popular exercise for engineers and organ

makers. No

less an inventor than Eisenberg Kingdom Brunel came up with the design for a hydroorganon to be built off the coast of Cornwall,

and

Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky are both reputed to have written works for the theoretical instrument. Autographs are yet to be found for either.

But

it was after the Second World War that hydroorganonology really came into its own as a discipline.

During

the post-war construction boom,

several

of the more experimental architects placed miniature non-functional hydroorganons in artificial ponds, marine parks, waterfalls, etc. John Cage's journals are filled with references to the instrument. It is rumored that he made several attempts in the 60s and 70s to raise funds to build a test hydroorganon in the Hudson River near Stony Point.

And

it has been argued, most notably by Dr. Susan Shaw, the maverick director of Winnipeg's New Music Festival during its turbulent and anarchic period in the late 1980s,

that

Cage's legendary 433 was inspired by the paradoxical acoustical possibilities of an underwater organ.

Shaw

believed the famous four and a half minutes of silence were a tribute and gesture toward a future in which that silence could be filled by the deep tones of a hydroorgan.

She

even theorized that Cage had written a companion piece to 433, consisting of a score exactly four minutes and 33 seconds in length,

to

be played on a hydroorgan

once

it had been invented.

But

the beginning of modern hydroorganonology, hydroorganonology as a fully actualized musical discipline

is

precisely datable.

On

August 15, 1993,

an

unknown aquatic engineer slash architect slash amateur organist named Kenji Saito announced that he had completed his Senritsu,

the

first full-scale, fully functional hydroorganon to be built in the modern era

off

the coast of Numazu in Japan's Saruga Bay. Overnight, hydroorganonology went from being an armchair science to a controversial new form of public art, one that united disciplines as diverse as acoustics, oceanography, architecture, and musicology. Saito's masterpiece offered a concrete example of the challenges of practical hydroorganonics

and

a new way of thinking about the musical and musicological possibilities of the instrument.

The

first public performance on the Senritsu featured a program built around Bach's Klavira Ubang III,

with

some of Saito's own improvisations thrown in to show the range of the instrument.

A

recording was made, but issues regarding ownership and copyright have kept it from public release.

Those

who have heard it note that it is vastly inferior to the experience of seeing the Senritsu in action.

But

even at this, the first recorded performance of a hydroorganon,

the

audience was sharply divided as to the nature of what they had witnessed.

Most

found the music itself completely secondary to the spectacle of watching the air jet bubble out of the great pipes,

and

acknowledged they were at best able to hear only a rich humming sound,

with

a few quavering variations as new pipes were open.

But

others, a decided though not insubstantial minority,

claimed

to have heard a completely breathtaking range of tonal patterns.

Not

the music of a terrestrial organ, but a completely faithful transformation of it. Atsuo Tanako famously described it as like hearing Bach performed by Wales.

Over

the course of the late summer and early autumn of 1993, Saito brought several diving groups down to view the hydroorganon, and word spread in avant-garde musical circles, and among the more speculative branches of musicology, of this massive organ built into a rock face at the bottom of a Japanese bay.

The

question of what the hydroorganon meant, having been completed at a time with a traditional pipe organ, seemed little more than an anachronistic remainder from an era when people didn't have electricity and believed in God,

quickly

overshadowed the actual experience of listening

to

the performances themselves.

At

least for all but those stubborn few who insisted they heard something remarkable when the pipes were opened. Musicians and theorists made the pilgrimage to Numazu because they felt it would be gauche to write about the sinritzu if they hadn't actually heard it.

Some

of them came away utterly changed.

Most

of them managed to get something about it published in Music Reception or Interface.

As the winter

of 1993-1994 set in, Saito stopped bringing groups down to Sinritzu, citing the unpredictable weather conditions.

He

spent the winter in his cabin on the slopes of Mount Fuji,

where

he could see the restless waters and dream of his hydroorgan.

It

is generally agreed that it was during these months he wrote

what

would stand as his own most complete theoretical account of hydroorgan enology,

usually

translated into English

as

the base note. Saito resumed his tours the next spring to a double interest from both the local and international Baroque and classical communities.

He

received letters from Arvo Pert, Philip Glass, and Kaija Sarriaho,

and

was interviewed by

by

the BBC.

It

was an odd story and people liked its oddness.

This

young Japanese renaissance man, with a quasi-mystical theory of harmony and a deep love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, had created an instrument that the professional music world had always imagined to be nothing more than a curiosity.

And

he had made it beautiful. Some even believed he had made it sing. Kanji Saito's burgeoning career as the first professional hydroorganist ended early in the morning on June 18, 1995,

when

his body was found floating up the coast of Mishi'izu.

He

was wearing his wetsuit and his mask was off, although his oxygen tank was still at 30%.

It

was clear he had drowned.

No

one, however,

was

able to explain why. I love this lore, this story, this entire academic discipline

that

you have built around the hydroorganon. It's really fascinating, the reference to John Cage. While I was reading, I was laughing out loud, also in just complete awe of the story that you've stitched in. One of the things that I really love about that too is that the instrument itself is breaking the limits of a form, of an artistic form, in terms of whether actually people can hear

this

particular instrument. So is there,

when

you invented this entire disciplinarity, this entire instrument, were there places that you went in terms of thinking through on research? Or was this something that you sat down and was a complete imaginary exercise for you?

It all came very quickly. I mean, I'm very interested in musical kinds. And Joel,

who

is my compatriot in this, I mean, he loves the 20th century

avant

-garde stuff. So I knew, like, a lot of this I kind of picked up along the way, like I kind of knew,

you

know,

I

knew the broad strokes.

And

so creating like this new instrument and throwing that in there was fun. It

was

a very fun thing to write.

Yeah.

And so the story continues with what happens after Saito's death. And

his

apprentice is building this organ in Halifax. And so the story kind of leads up with this question of, is there is there a sound? Like,

does

this thing actually

work?

Which,

yeah,

was it was, again, came out of conversations with Joel about,

you

know, performance, and how do you know that someone's what someone's experience of music is? And I think it's just such an interesting question

that

ties back to some of the other things we've talked about with realism. Like,

how

do I

know that,

you

know, what your experience of reality is? I mean, it's, it's a,

I

guess, a bit of like a stoned undergraduate kind of question. Like, do you see blue the way I, you know, but I think like, there's something there, there's something there.

Yeah,

absolutely. I'm going to start pulling questions up out of the chat to bring in, we've got a nice good flex half hour up until 830 that we can continue to roll through. And I, the first question I want to bring out of the chat is from David Montour,

it's

to Jessica, but I actually think it could be a question to anyone, we'll start with Jessica. Are you conscious of writing between the lines of leaving something, some mystery on the page? I think this is a particularly great question around the short story form too,

in

terms of

the

concision and the compression

of

that particular genre.

So

maybe we could start with Jessica.

Yeah, I think I, yes,

but

it happens

sometimes,

and I'm sure this is true

for

perhaps everyone that writes

in

this form or in a longer form. Sometimes I do it

as

a tool, I won't say everything as a way to do something like

Andre

was saying before about creating a tone, more than trying to,

like

you're trying to tell something through, through the tone of it. Pardon me.

And

other things that go unsaid or like are written between the lines are things that,

um, some

people

that

are very specifically like

their

Cree references or their, um, I'm making a,

a

nod to something that,

um,

perhaps only Cree people will know because they have that piece of knowledge that will be like, oh, that, um, that reference to

the,

this plant say is significant for this reason, for them, it will mean something different to them than it will to somebody who didn't know that. Um, so I think there's, and that's un, unintentional in a way,

um,

because I, I'm not looking to spell it out. Um, but I, I do think that it's a, it's a fun tool to use, particularly when you are trying to, to be concise and,

um,

and also, yeah, keep,

keep

a bit of, um,

questioning

happening on the reader's end as well.

Right. Any

further thoughts from Andre or Aaron?

We

have another question here, um, from Delaney for Jessica. Uh, is there a character in one of your short stories who has stayed with you long after you finished writing?