CANADA DAY SALE OF 15% OFF ALL COPIES OF TTQ AT LULU.COM!!!

Take advantage of the Canada Day Sale of 15% here off all print and e-book copies of TTQ5, and on all back issues as well. Simply enter the code GREATWHITENORTH305 as you checkout and save. This sale will end on July 4, 2010!!!

Here's the link to order TTQ5 (order)






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SEND US YOUR PHOTOS FROM THE G20 SUMMIT IN TORONTO!!!!

The Toronto Quarterly wants to see your photographs and hear your stories concerning the G20 Summit protests in the streets of Toronto this past weekend (June 25-27). Send your photos and stories to g20photos@hotmail.com.


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THE MASTURBATING CATHOLIC: GRETA VALENTI - LEAD SINGER OF FUJI MINX!!

While the Vatican cries foul this weekend over raids carried out by Belgian police investigating priestly sexual abuse allegations read, Los Angeles rock band FUJI MINX was feeling the wrath of YOUTUBE, having had their new video The Music Made Me Do It banned after appearing on the site for just six days. Lead singer for the band, Greta Valenti explains that YOUTUBE has a policy of regularly allowing nudity in music videos that appear on the site (Valenti exposes her breasts during the video), so it's assumed the burning of a photograph of Pope Benedict is likely the primary reason for the video being banned.

Here's the video:

FUJI MINX - The Music Made Me Do it (Official Un-Censored Version) from FUJI MINX on Vimeo.

Valenti, a disgruntled Catholic, writes a regularly updated blog called Masturbating Catholic here, where she discusses, from mostly a satirical point-of-view, all things pertaining to religion and sex, especially when the two intermingle. We interviewed Ms. Valenti about her banned video, and other things, Greta.

For more information about Greta Valenti and FUJI MINX, visit the bands website:here


.........................all photos by Robin Davey...............


TTQ- First off, give us a little background concerning your band, FUJI MINX. Tell us about how and when you formed, and how would you best describe your music to those who have not heard you yet?

GV- The band formed a few year back when me and the bass player from a punk band, John Fry decided to start dating and start a new musical project. We performed a lot in a short time, paid a lot of dues, and recorded an album “Users Cheaters Theatres” that we released in 2007. Unfortunately, our drummer and keyboard player at the time both had terrible health issues that following year which didn’t allow them to perform, or tour. Around the same time John and I ended our relationship. A good portion of the last album was written by John, so I took this opportunity with FUJI MINX to actually be able to discover myself creatively, and psychologically too. FUJI MINX is now me, and like myself, it’s a work in progress always developing and pushing itself forward. The new album sound is industrial grunge pop - influenced by music I grew up with in the 90s, inspired by Johnny Cash and Mark Bolan.

TTQ- Tell us about the new FUJI MINX single, The Music Made Me Do It. The video for this song was banned on YOUTUBE after only a six day run. Were you quite surprised by the banning of the video, and what do you make of all the fuss?

GV- I’m not easily shocked or offended, and I have little to no personal filter about certain things, so it was hard for me to tell how people were going to react to it. I wasn’t concerned about YOUTUBE, because I had seen much more sexually graphic, violent, and offensive material on there. And to my surprise, people reacted amazingly well, 99.9% of people are not offended, and love the video, and most people actually get the point of the video, which is a cool relief. So when YOUTUBE removed the video, it really was quite a shock. If my Catholic family and friends are not offended, why is YOUTUBE? So we appealed, etc, and the only response we got from them is, “We are unable to provide specific detail regarding your account suspension or your video's removal.” So it’s actually frustrating because we can’t even edit the video, and put it back up because we don’t know what we need to edit out. Was it the brief nudity? Can’t be because YOUTUBE says in their own flagging conditions that nudity is allowed, and they have allowed the new UNKLE video, and I’ve seen the Manson video with nudity and sexually explicit situations, posted there… I would like an explanation from YOUTUBE.

TTQ- You're originally a New Orleans native. Was music something very important to you while growing up, and was it at an early age you decided to pursue a career in music? Have you gone back to New Orleans since the Katrina disaster?

GV- Yeah, I mean you can’t grow up in Louisiana, and not be touched by music in some way. Music is everywhere, it’s just a part of the culture. In fact, when you grow up there you don’t even think about how much it means to you. It’s when you leave that it starts to hurt, and the world feels a bit colder without it. The only other place I’ve found this spirit is in parts of the UK and Europe. I hope I keep finding it. I always remember wanting to be a performer, and I found a paper recently from when I was little that said “When I grow up, I want to be a singer.” Which was funny. That was the scary thing about Katrina, not only the terror of losing people, my family, friends, anyone, but also the fact of losing such a great culture. I went back there this past February for Mardi Gras, and man it was fucking awesome! One of the best Mardi Gras’ ever. It made me really miss New Orleans, and I’m glad it was so recovered in spirit. Of course, The Saints winning the SUPERBOWL (who dat, who dat!!) helped a little bit too. There’s still a lot of housing issues, and people that need help still from Katrina, but NOW with the BP Oil Spill, I’m really worried about the state, and it’s environment. This is really, really, bad news.

TTQ- You have played with The Bastard Fairies in the past. Tell us about your relationship with them, and will you be doing further projects/tours with the Fairies down the line?

GV- Well I first met them while in a music video competition together on a new video site called YOUTUBE back in 2006. I was instantly a fan, and luckily they thought I was decent enough to hang around. If they invite me back, I’ll be there. I actually sing backups on their new single “Dirty Sexy Kill Kill,” and I’m a Zombie in the Intermission part of their new B-horror music video. Can’t wait to hear their new album.

TTQ- What are your opinions on the current state of popular music across North America, and do you think the business of music needs to change in a big hurry, or is it too late?

GV- Oh God! This answer is an entire book in itself. In short, it seems to me, people who run the music business (the major labels) don’t actually know how to run a successful business, no matter what the product.

Problem 1- Spending: It’s like an obese person eating 4000 calories a day, and only burning 500 calories a day, and saying ‘I don’t know why I’m fat’. Calories in – Calories Out. Business is the same…Money In- Money Out. The music business is a fat person. They spend insane amounts of money on extravagant lunches, frivolity, and music videos that cost millions. Millions on a 4 minute video? Are you kidding me? Some of the best movies in the world were made for half that amount. Cut the ridiculous spending, and manage your bottom line better.

Problem 2 – Product: They also have bad product. Sure the Snuggie is a cheap and fun gift to buy someone, but if all you were able to buy was a Snuggie you’d probably stop buying them. So, sign acts with talent, and with something to say.

Problem 3 – Old school is dead. Labels and Artists need to know that technology is moving, and it’s moving FAST. Everything they used to know about promotion is gone, BUT the good news is there are so many cool new technologies that I think if utilized properly could propel music into an entirely new realm. These labels are desperately trying to hold onto the old instead of embracing the future. There are many more reasons, but those are big ones. Music is universal. Everyone can feel and love some kind of music. It’s somehow a part of us, and it’s just one of those things that all humans can connect with. So music will survive, we just have to find ways to help the artists that create the music be able to survive while doing it.

TTQ- Are there any particular underground bands you predict big things for in the future? What are you listening to these days?

GV- Wow. Hmm...I listen to a lot of older things like Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, T-Rex, NIN, Rage, Klaus Nomi, anything Motown, and I’m really into old school rap right now TuPac, Dre, Snoop Dog, everything, but some newer artists I’m diggin' right this second are, Cage the Elephant (I like their 90’s raw vibe), the Gorillaz (of course), M.I.A., Robyn…Underground artists…definitely The Bastard Fairies, and also Wanbdi (who is Yellow Thunder Woman’s sister, and was in the band Indigenous).

TTQ- Will there be a full FUJI MINX album coming out in the near future?

GV- YES! And other things…

FUJI MINX "Cat Wine" Music Video - Directed by Lady Ransom from FUJI MINX on Vimeo.

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TORONTO POETS - 5 QUESTIONS SERIES - VINCENT PONKA!!

Vincent Ponka grew up in rural Northwestern Ontario, and moved to Toronto in his early twenties. He has a degree in history, and a minor in philosophy, which have had a large influence on his writing. After graduating, he attended film school where he specialized in scriptwriting; then spent ten years in the Toronto film industry, and after that worked in broadcasting. He's father to one-year-old twins.

His poetry has been published in Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament,The Toronto Quarterly(issue 5), Otoliths (issue 10), The First Hay(na)ku Anthology, Common Sky: Canadian Writers Against the War“, Kiss Machine, Peter O'Toole, and Broken Pencil Magazine. He has written chapbooks entitled Vodka on the Rocks and three volumes of Subway Poems. His greatest love is the novel, and currently he has two making their rounds to publishers: Bastards of Destruction and Vicious Dogs.


TTQ- What are your impressions of the Toronto poetry scene? Do you find Toronto's poetry scene to be as vibrant as other cities you have lived in?

VP- Toronto definitely has the best poetry scene of any city I have lived in. I know of a few weekly reading series that give poets a chance to try out material in front of a (hopefully) receptive audience. My friend, and fine poet/playwright Cathy Petch hosts the Plasticine Poetry Series (the 3rd Sunday of every month at the Central Pub, 6pm), and I know it’s a great place to be. I admit I never regularly attend these readings since I am either working too much, and tend to be too anti-social for my own good. There are a number of small presses and journals (like TTQ!) that give people a place to publish. Seeing words in print definitely helps keep poets working at their craft.

TTQ- Were you fortunate enough to have a mentor of some kind who encouraged and/or inspired you to try and take your writing to the next level, and what advice would you give to young writers trying to get themselves published?

VP- Keep writing. Keep submitting. Getting published in print is tough and only getting tougher. Only a handful of new authors have books published in Canada each year, and even established writers can find themselves struggling to find a publisher. When it comes to poems and short stories, aside from the many great literary magazines we have in this country, the internet has opened up a whole world of opportunity to get your work out there. E-zines are a good place to start getting your work some attention, and help to build a publishing history. Editors are busy and it makes their job a bit easier if they see that other editors have liked your work. They can also see that you have put in the time, and are serious about your craft. They know that getting published isn’t easy, and if your work has been placed in several e-zines, they may look at your submission in a more favourable light.

I have never been fortunate enough to have a mentor that helped me in a significant way, though I would appreciate one! As mentioned, editors are busy, and it would certainly make their job easier if Margaret Atwood were to drop Bastards of Destruction onto their desk and announce:

“This book is marvelous. Vincent Ponka is the next great voice in Canadian fiction.”

Who could say no to Ms. Atwood? She’s done it for others, so could I be next, please? Surely she’d love a novel that begins: Anderson Powell sits on his penthouse balcony drinking a mug of strong sweet coffee and smoking a joint. The pot is helping settle the cocaine jitters.

In terms of the importance of mentors I would imagine they could be invaluable. Writing can be hard lonely work, and even something as simple as getting positive feedback from a person whose work you respect can keep you going for months. I took David Donnell’s, Poetry Master Class, at the University of Toronto, and after the last class I brought in one of his books, and asked him to sign it for me. I was, and remain a big fan, but didn’t want to make a big thing about it until that last night. He signed the book “To Vincent, a great poet,” and even though he may sign every student’s book that way, I felt a certain vindication in regards to my poetry. Take what you can get!

TTQ- You recently had a poem published in the Rogue Stimulus: The Stephen Harper Holiday Anthology for a Prorogued Parliament, by Mansfield Press. What are your opinions about the Harper governments handling of the publishing industry in Canada, and do you think literary journals have a bleak future in Canada?

VP- Wow. It’s going to be hard not to turn my response into a rant. I will pause to catch my breath and get my anger in check, and say that it was great to be a part of this Mansfield Press book alongside so many fine poets. Okay, rant time. As someone who has worked in the arts (film, music and TV) for close to 15 years, I have seen first-hand how negative an impact the Harper government cuts have had on cultural industries. I suppose it stems from his government’s attitude that they represent only those 30-some-odd-percent of Canadians that voted for them and that they couldn’t care less about the rest. (This attitude was infamously encapsulated by Tony Clement’s comment that they don’t govern on behalf of the “chattering classes”. What is poetry and literature but chatter for the ages) I think that if Stephen Harper saw someone drowning he would call out to them before tossing them a life preserver: “Did you vote Conservative?” if they call back “No” I imagine he would sit and watch them go under. He would likely pull out his cellphone, and record a video of the event to enjoy for years to come. Too harsh? Not at all. I was at last years Gemini Awards. It was a big celebration of Canadian film and culture (hosted by Dave Foley with an open martini bar! Fabulous!), and even though it was in Ottawa, not a single representative of Harper’s government was in attendance.

Small literary magazines have been extremely hard hit. Keeping such a venture going issue after issue has never been easy, and now it is that much more difficult to keep it financial viable. That being said, it is within our power as readers and writers to help. We need to buy these magazines, and subscribe to them in order to keep them afloat. They are important to keep alive or we may lose a generation of literary talent. Surely even a Harper would see that as a negative. Okay, probably not.

TTQ- Tell us about your writing rituals. When, where, and how do you prefer to write, and what are you working on these days?

VP- I find that I have different rituals and methodology for each project. I wrote my novel Bastards of Destruction when I was working in the film biz. There is a lot of downtime during a shooting day, so I would write on the back of each day’s scripts, or whatever scraps of paper I could find. Sometimes I would even be organized enough to have a small Rhodia pad in my pocket. Each weekend I would input those pages into my computer. I wrote my next novel Vicious Dogs during my three month winter break from the film biz so I wrote it directly onto my computer. The only thing I keep the same when writing novels is to put words down every day. Keeping contact with the characters and the story is essential to my writing process.

With poetry I have different methods as well. I have some poems that come from flashes of inspiration that I write extremely quickly, and don’t edit. I see these as moment-in-time poems. Take this moment, written about my wife (we were dating at the time):

Art Matters

Korea, you
are sitting next
to me on a bench at the AGO
between W & M (where
I once wrote
a poem
about Jack
son Pollock)
& I say
I love your stomach
and want to write
a poem upon it.
I might, for (why
are you
laughing?)
there is little
time left.


With other projects, like my Napoleon Poems or Proust Poems, it is more of an academic exercise. For the latter I will sit with Proust in front of me, and use the text as a source for a poem. I see it like a sculptor who has a block of granite, and cuts away and away until they are left with the Aphrodite who was inside the stone the whole time. It takes a long time, and many edits before, for example, page three of Proust’s dense prose becomes this:

proust. 3

Drowsy in an armchair
after dinner.
The magic chair
through time and space.

My sleep so heavy I lost all sense
of place. When
I awoke at midnight I had the most
rudimentary sense of existence.
I was the cave-dweller

then memory
would come like a rope
from the abyss of centuries.

Perhaps conviction and immobility struggled
to discover me
through the darkness.

I was lying face to the wall
my mind glittering flame.


I enjoy challenging myself with different methodology and would encourage all beginning (and even seasoned) writers to do so. It is a great warm up exercise to begin your writing day.

In terms of what I am working on now, I have one-year-old twins, and as profound an experience that that has been, it has cut into my writing time. I am trying to decide which of the several ideas I have for the next long prose project is the most interesting to me, but there is no clear winner yet. I have been submitting my work to publishers, and am making plans to start a small publishing concern that would specialize in beautiful books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that challenge convention. Though it is a tough industry, I am drawn to dive in nonetheless. We will be putting out a call for manuscripts soon!

TTQ- Is there one poetry book in particular, or a group of books that inspired you in some way to try your hand at writing poetry?

VP- I only began writing poetry in a serious way in my late twenties (ten years ago), and before that I was strictly into prose. I enjoyed reading poetry, but it wasn’t until I discovered two books that I was then drawn to write it myself. The first was The Buddhist Third Class Junkmail Oracle which is a collection of d.a. levy’s art and poetry. The second was The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry edited by Alan Kaufman. Both showed me poetry that was coming from a non-academic place: political, angry, provocative, direct poetry. d.a. levy wrote in the late 60’s, committed suicide at 28 (some say he was murdered) yet produced an abundance of quality work. Suburban Monastery Death Poem (I loved it for the title alone!) is a poem that should be placed among the greatest in literature for the counter-culture era:

only ten blocks away
from my total helplessness
from my boredom enforced by the state
they are looting stores
trying to get televisions
so they can watch the riots
on the 11 pm news


A highlight from The Outlaw Bible is David Lerner’s Mein Kampf which is great from start to finish:

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords


and a little further on he writes:

I came not to bury poetry
but to blow it up
...
throw it off a cliff into
icy seas and
see it the motherfucker and swim for its life

because love is an excellent thing
surely we need it

but my friends...

there is so much to hate These Days


I love the anger in this poem - the manifesto quality. It was like a call to arms for me, and I saw a place where my own sensibilities would fit the in great broad world of poetry. These books showed me just how wide a world it could be.



Vincent Ponka reads his poem Do You Listen Korea?




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TTQ ADDS A MUSIC REVIEWER TO THE FOLD!!!!

The Toronto Quarterly is pleased to announce Charmaine Santos as our new music reviewer for both the journal and blog.





Charmaine Santos was born in a small town in the Philippines, and immigrated to Canada with her parents and older brother at the age of 8. Her love for the arts has been evident since childhood, and her passion for it inevitably led her to pursue an education in English and literature at the University of Toronto. Her greatest literary influences are America’s Beat Generation, as they share a mutual affection for free-flowing, candid art forms, and the inspiring sounds of jazz and the blues.

She considers herself a full-time music aficionado, and an avid concert goer. Her musical tastes are widely eclectic, a longtime follower of the Delta Blues, she has most recently immersed herself in the spiritual sounds of Latin jazz. In addition to seeking a life dedicated to music, she is also an aspiring poet and writer. Several of her poems and prose have been published in a University of Toronto literary journal called Scarborough Fair in 2009 and 2010. She resides in Markham, Ontario, and is currently an English and creative writing instructor in a Scarborough school.







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EXCLUSIVE: FRANK HINTON, CREATOR/EDITOR OF "METAZEN" SPEAKS TO TTQ!!!

Francesca Hinton, aka Frank Hinton, is a 27-year-old female who resides in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of St. Francis Xavier University, and currently teaches there on occasion to pay the bills. She describes herself as both tame and timid, and also claims to suffer from pantophobia (the fear of everything). She enjoys reading metafiction, author-Joy Williams, listening to Ween records, and smoking in her free time. She is best known as the creative genius behind the online literary journal, Metazen.

We at The Toronto Quarterly were recently granted an exclusive one-on-one interview with the enigmatic Frank Hinton in order to better understand her ability to quench our thirst for literary voyeurism.

Visit the Metazen website:here


TTQ- Where did you grow up and go to school?

FH- I grew up in Halifax. It was fun because it felt safe even though people died in our neighborhood all the time. I saw lots of crazy things. I went to school at St. Francis Xavier University. I did a lot of big things there. I got drunk for the first time, had sex for the first time and did drugs for the first time. St.FX is good for all of those things. After all of that, it's a good place to attend classes too.

TTQ- Do you remember when and why you wanted to become a writer?

FH- I think there are a few things that sort of happened to push me towards trying to write 'full-on'. I wrote a story for someone I had a crush on and showed it to a friend and my friend said it was well done. I wrote a poem for the class about heather on the beach and my principal read it over the announcements to the school. My friend also wrote a story that was brilliant and I wanted to be able to write like them. I once didn't get accepted into a fiction class because I wrote an entry story about the professor having sex with me.

TTQ- Who were your biggest influences on you growing up and why?

FH- My dad had a copy of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver at our cottage when I was a kid and for a long while it was the only book there. I suppose I read it out of necessity, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I re-read it and enjoyed it. So, Carver is an influence. I liked feeling like I was closer to the scenes than the narrator in his stories, and how bland suddenly became important to me. I read a lot of Japanese authors like Haruki Murakami, Kobe Abe and Yoshikichi Furui. I don't know why. I always thought Japan was cool. I used to play a lot of Japanese video games and I felt that because those video game plots were so amazing that some of their fiction must be amazing too. Now it's just a habit. I also like Jonathan Goldstein. I think he is the writer I'm most influenced by, and I've read everything by him. I listen to his radio show every week, and read all of his newspaper articles too. He's the hottest girl in my literary high school and I'm just the awkward dweeb vying for his attention.

TTQ- How did the idea of creating your online journal Metazen come about?

FH- It was March Break (2009) and I was drunk and alone. I thought it would be cool to have a blog where I could post my drunk writing. So, I got drunk every night during the March break and I would write something new to post on the blog each day. That's how it all started. I left it for a few months and nothing much happened. (was she sobering up?) Then I decided to come at it from a different angle. I'd been meeting a lot of other writers online and started asking them for their stories, and it grew from there.

TTQ- What is Metazen's mission statement?

FH- Metazen's fiction works both before and after viewing porn online.

TTQ- On the Metazen homepage, Frank Hinton is referred to as being a "sad man, a pathetic man," when in reality you're an attractive female. Why the double-identity?

FH- I kind of like ambiguity. I think if people know you're a girl or a boy you get pegged right away. I like the idea of an author that lives on a gender pendulum.



TTQ- How often do you add new content to the Metazen website and what criteria is used in determining what gets published and what doesn't?

FH- We add a new story every day, or new poem(s). We get a lot of submissions and the decision making process is simple. I send out submission pieces to my group of editors to consider and I read through some myself. If we like the story, if it sticks with us, if it has a lot of hooks, if the coterie is right, if the author attaches a nude .jpg file of themselves then we will probably publish them. I like impact-fiction.

TTQ- What is your opinion on the current state of literary journals in Canada, and do you read or subscribe to any?

FH- Ah, I probably read more American online journals. I read Geist and Carousel though, and I used to read the Antigonish Review a lot when I was at St.FX. I don't know what the 'state' of literary journals is. I think the state of journals as a whole is changing. Things are moving online; literary communities online are getting a lot more networked, and electronic reading is starting to become something normal. And I like that, of course.

TTQ- Are you planning on publishing Metazen in print form one day?

FH- We've talked about a book or an anthology. Nothing is set in motion yet, but it is one of our long term goals. I'd love to start reading manuscripts though. I think it is our next logical step. I'd want to do something unique though.

TTQ- How large is your team of writers and editors at Metazen and are you planning on adding more to the fold in the near future?

FH- There are three of us right now. There were four. Myself, Christopher Allen in Germany, and Julie Innis in New York. We're going to be adding some new editors in the coming months. We're growing pretty rapidly and I feel like we're all overworked. I'm all about growing.

TTQ- In your opinion, is the publishing industry heading in the right direction, and do you see a more digital era of publishing ahead, and is that a good thing?

FH- Yes, it's a good thing. That only means more options. I think we talked about this before too. With music we went from the record, to the cassette, to the CD, to digtal MP3s. With publishing it's changing from paper to online/digital. There's only really been one major shift. It probably seems scary to most, but it's exciting to me. I see a lot more things changing too. Reading experiences will change. Look at some of the e-books online, and some of the hypertext stuff people like Steve Ersinghaus or Susan Gibb are doing and you get an idea of what's to come. Movies, games, and music are all advancing art-forms via technology, so why not the written word too? It's all advancing in a good direction, and people will soon figure out a way to make money off of it.

TTQ- What other writing projects are you currently working on outside of Metazen?

FH- I write a lot, although I don't put as many things out as I once did. I finished up a novella earlier this year, and have a few short pieces floating around. I'm working on a novel right now about authors that are characters in one another's stories. It sounds kind of like trite metafiction, but it's not. I like metafiction, but I don't want to write the kind of metafiction where the point is to find out that the story or the characters are simply aware of themselves as fictional. I think that's been done. I think Stranger Than Fiction closed the book on that kind of metafiction. I want to write about worlds where it is just part of life that you are fictional. The fact of being fictitious is already out there. Something like that.

TTQ- Tell us about the last "inspiring" book you read and would highly recommend to others.

FH- In all honesty the best book I've read has been Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler. It is unlike anything else I've ever read. It is difficult and easy to read. It is depressing and funny. Butler just writes these incredible sentences like, "Tucked in the half-smashed ruins of some sand palace, she found a transistor buried up to its antennae. She dug it out and cleaned the speaker. She wiped the corroded batteries and licked the dials white, straightened the wires with her teeth. Soon she had the half-ruined thing alive, burping static broken by occasional squeals of incoming sound." I mean he's graphic and destructive and so sensitive at the same time. Every sentence feels perfect. I rarely feel that.







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TORONTO POETS - 5 QUESTIONS SERIES - NATHANIEL G. MOORE

Nathaniel G. Moore is a Toronto writer and editor. Most recently, he's been writing outside of the arena of fiction and poetry. He has written for Bravo!Fact in 2007 and 2009, has done some fashion writing and worked on his own blog called Critical Crushes. He is the author of two poetry collections, the humour book Bowlbrawl (Conundrum Press, 2005) and the novel Wrong Bar (Tightrope Books, 2009), and they can both be purchased along with a year's subscription to Broken Pencil for a mere $40 (see Broken Pencil's website for more details). He has written for Broken Pencil since 2000 and in 2008 became assistant editor. In 2007 he wrote the Globe & Mail review for professional wrestler Bret "Hitman" Hart's biography entitled Hitman. He has participated in This Is Not A Reading Series on three ocassions, had a cameo in the Tony Burgess and Derek McCormack musical Die Scream Die (Scream Festival, 2009), worked at Indigo Books and Music, interned at Quill & Quire, and read at the International Festival of Authors in Ottawa in 2008. He was the features editor of Danforth Review from 2004-2009, co-edited Toronto Noir (Akashic Books, 2008), and was thrown through a table in Ottawa by poet-rob mclennan in June of that year as part of a literary event put on by The Puritan. He finally got published in Taddle Creek magazine, and has work forthcoming in another great literary magazine on the other side of the country.



TTQ- Congratulations to you on having recently published your third book, a novel entitled, Wrong Bar, through Tightrope Books. You started out doing performance poetry with the likes of David McGimpsey and Jon Paul Fiorentino. Is poetry still as important to you these days and do you still write a lot of it and perform your poems at live readings?

NGM- In 2000 I produced a spoken word CD called Unheard Of… and did a lot of spoken word type performances, or slams. Spoken word itself as a medium was really big in the late 1990s, particularly in Montreal. I moved to Montreal in 2002 for a while and before moving back to Toronto in 2004, met most of the small press figures in the city who were starting to step away from “performance poetry” and were working on actual writing. The poets you mentioned are not what I classify as performance poets, but are both great readers and poets. To answer your question: poetry is not as important to me as it once was. I think I've been exposed to too much poetry over the last ten years and as a books editor for a magazine, receive approximately three books of poetry per month, and these books tend to pile up and then I feel guilty for not reviewing all of them, when it's really not my fault. Some poetry is quite amazing and great, but as you can imagine, some books just get published because of block grants and bad editorial decisions, insider trading, etc. I also hate poet's bios, they are so ridiculously long and always mention the exact same journals and magazines over and over again. I was at a reading recently and the bio reading was just as long as the poet's actual reading. Ben Hur had less detail.

TTQ- Tell us about, Wrong Bar. What inspired you to write this book and what's the public reaction to the novel been like?

NGM- I wanted to write a novel as a reaction to the continuous violence in teenagers that seems prevalent in our culture today. Social network tools seem to make it easier to kill each other, and I wanted to write about a group of teens who were all plotting against one another. The book has received some positive reviews so far. I really like the cover. People have taken it out of the libraries in Toronto, so that’s good as well.

TTQ- What's your opinion on the current state of literary journals in Canada? Do you anticipate many will soon become extinct due to cutbacks in government funding and/or is that a bad thing?

NGM- Journals will always thrive and die, it’s part of the business. It seems these days if you don’t produce enough you get cut, but then if you produce enough to avoid these cuts you might go bankrupt doing so. It’s been talked about to death by the industry, I think it’s pretty clear what the government values in terms of magazines and journals here in Canada. Elle Magazine gets a lot of money from the government don’t they? We need Elle Magazine in Canada it seems more than Querty.

TTQ- What's your relationship been like with the folks at Tightrope Books? According to publisher-Halli Villegas, Tightrope prides itself on introducing readers to new writers who are out there, writers who have a "schizophrenic sensibility." Would that be an apt description of your sensibilities?

NGM- I like Tightrope Books, working with them on Wrong Bar has been fine. I think for this book in particular there is a "schizophrenic sensibility" to it, though I’m trying to become less confused and deranged as the years go on. I get a lot of press it seems for being a performer, yet here we are halfway through 2010 and I have done zero readings in Toronto. Mostly I just show up and nod at readings and the community seems to be okay with that.

TTQ- What's next for you? Is there another book in the works or another project you're currently involved with you would like to let folks know about?

NGM- I have a second poetry book out with DC Books which no one knows about. I could tell you that's it's already been launched, and that I've read from it at least once. It’s called Pastels Are Pretty Much The Polar Opposite of Chalk and has a great poem in it about Emily Haines. It's very important that she reads this poem as it's quite good and would make an excellent short film starring her. It was edited by Montreal poet Jason Camlot. The whole book was, not just Emily. I am working on a new book called Savage. Chapters of this book have appeared or will appear in the country’s best lit-mags. I expect to be finished this book in 2015.

Promo video-clip for Nathaniel G. Moore's humour book, Bowlbrawl:





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