Year-end Review: A Chat with Jacob McArthur Mooney and an Overview of Folk

There are a lot of people in the world.  Billions. To make a national or even regional award’s shortlist is quite a feat, but to land on one for an international award is astounding; something fewer than 1% of people will ever do. In 2011, Jacob McArthur Mooney was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, which recognizes exceptional authors under 30, in all genres. Mooney is an award-wining poet with two collections and a novel in progress. His latest release is 2011′s Folk, which is what got him on this shortlist, alongside Orange Prize winner, Téa Obreht, the author of the international sensation, The Tiger’s Wife, and London’s Lucy Caldwell who made the list a second time. He was the only Canadian shortlisted.

“Throughout the book, short terse poems full of memorable phrases capture a sense of place and the lives of people coming to terms with their identity and communal realities.” – Dylan Thomas Prize Jury

It’s the strong, unifying concept in Folk that draws a reader in and holds them there. Its inciting incident is the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Nova Scotia, not far at all from Mooney’s bedroom window at the time. The collection is divided into two sections: Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the crash, and the modern day immigrant communities around Toronto’s Pearson Airport, where Mooney also lived for some time. It deals with motifs of identity and community; how towns, and the individual, react separately and together to, in his own words, “the psycho-cultural reorganization of what a small place means before and after being reframed by the sudden impact of such a massive thing as the death of 200 plus people.” Many of the book’s passages are subtle, understated commentary on the world’s and the townspeoples’ appropriation of the tragedy.

“Everyone can tell you where they were
when the world arrived. Everybody happened
to be walking their dog,
eyes on the ocean, 11
P.M. and raining.

Those who didn’t own dogs
went out walking their intentions

…. And everyone wanted to pose for their portrait. Everyone wanted
to figure.”

But it is the poems and passages that scale back from the community “we” to the narrator’s “I” that reveal an affecting personal affinity for the disaster.

“Newsprint on my hands
Drowned names smudged free and left to float
to foreign surfaces. A pen. A desk. The greying tape at the handle
of my Little League bat. Death gets into things like that.”

Quill & Quire’s review of Folk spoke of Mooney’s “unsettling poetic grace” throughout the collection, and I can say it was the most satisfying collection of poetry I read in 2011. The poems in Folk are compelling, confidently constructed, muscular in form, and tender in content. It’s also a collection of poems as accessible as it is insightful: if you’re not be an avid reader of poetry, but find Mooney’s concept intriguing, trust me and buy yourself a copy.

 What’s been a highlight or two for you and Folk this year?

Let’s see. I went to the Yukon for three months. I went to Europe for three more. I fell in love. I learned to bake. Folk has of course had its own adventures, too, but mostly we’ve been spending the year apart, after the launch and the readings I did back in the spring. We haven’t really been in touch much.

Making the 2011 Dylan Thomas Prize shortlist technicality crowns you as one of the world’s best under-30 writers. How do you like that, and what’s your stance on literary awards?

It’s nothing if not ambitious, isn’t it? I will say this: I was honestly and unironically excited by the news, both for my own rotund ego and for the possibility of an expanded readership it gave the book. But let’s not kid ourselves; I live in a rich and youthful literary community filled to overflow with dazzling with young brains, and I’m lucky if I go out to a reading or a coffee shop and I’m the best writer under 30 at the bar, let alone the world. It all depends on the tastes of the jury, and I guess this was just my year. Next year it’ll be five other people’s year and then they can be the best writers under 30.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Recent books? I’ll assume so. I liked Sue Goyette’s new collection quite a bit.  David Hickey is a PEI guy originally and I can definitely shout some love for his new collection, Open Air Bindery. There’s a lot of books on my must-read list right now, what with all the time I’ve been away, and chief among them is Mark Callanan’s second book, Gift Horse.

What about a book or two from people you’ve met up there in Toronto?

A pretty endless list, really, for reasons detailed by that “overflow of dazzling brains” line above. I think my favourite new collection of the year, and I say this having missed a lot of books I’d likely love, is Ken Babstock’s Methodist Hatchet. His life’s work, from Mean to now, is an incredible little object lesson in the tension and the joy of a constantly expanding aesthetic. Ken refuses to break anything down, to erase; he just wants to build and build and add and add, you know? People think his new work is too antic, too obscure, but that’s because they loved Mean too much and they refuse to let him move beyond it. If, say, Airstream Land Yacht had been his debut, nobody would bat an eyelash: the new collection is just a more assured, more politically and sociologically mature continuation from his last one. This is the thing people don’t get, everything Ken’s done is built directly on the husk of what came before it, with no clearing away or even any recommission. Starting from that intimate specificity of Mean and just building out, out, more and more and more. It’s like watching someone construct a pyramid upside down, starting with the tip on the ground floor and expanding out toward the base. It’s foolish and wasteful until you pause enough in your complaining to see the miracle present itself. That fucking thing actually stands. It somehow doesn’t fall over on the greedy dude who made it.

Your blog, Vox Populism, is fantastic, even if you’ve been understandably sidelined lately. Where do you think book blogs fit in, in the modern online world? Are they an alternative to straight-laced traditional media, or a distraction from them? And why write an unpaid blog instead of a paid gig? To write about whatsoever you want?

I’m not sure what blogs are. They’re not an antidote to anything, surely. I started Vox Pop to try and capture, in a semi-permanent place, the energy and vocabulary of informal conversation, by intelligent people, about ethereal things. I wanted the bar room rants and the overcaffeinated arguments that are the lifeblood of my sense of literary community to have a sort of sandbox where we could bounce things around between each other, where we (or sometimes just I) could be flippant, audacious, ignorant, impassioned, rude, all these things that get–quite rightly–edited out of official essays and reviews. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next with the blog. Doesn’t it seem, looking around at the poetry bloggers that are left, that’s it’s just become a bunch of gig announcements and reading lists?

Obviously, I’m partly responsible for that. I’m going to try and bring Vox Pop back this year though, in one form in another. Mostly, the blog has served as an instrument to make people I’ve never met feel confident in their hatred of me. And that’s a shame, because I imagine many of those haters are decent and committed people with whom I’d agree with on 95% of the world’s important topics. Blogs eat subtlety and poop out earnestness.

You’ve been away at the Berton House Writers Retreat in the Yukon. I’ve only heard good things about people who’ve been there. How was that?

It’s awesome. How could it not be awesome? It’s you, in a historically resonant cabin in the middle of a historically resonant small town in the middle of the most beautiful landscape in the country, for three well-paid months with nothing to weigh on your time except the books you’re reading and the book you’re writing. Nothing has been more comfortable since the womb. Well, maybe I’m saying this because I was there in the summer. It’s not quite womb-temperature there now, I understand.

Tell us a little about your novel-in-progress?

Sure. It’s about 400 pages long, and it’s set on The Earth, and it’s typed up in Times New Roman on 8.5 X 11 paper, and that’s all the information you’re getting until I finish it, Chad

You’re a graduate of the University of Guelph-Humber’s MFA in Creative Writing program. What’s one concrete thing you can say you took away from that experience.

Friendships with generous and intelligent people that I hope to hang onto forever, both among my classmates and my teachers. Also, time. Authors always say that grants are a form of time, they let you quit your job and take time out to focus on writing. I’d argue that an MFA program is a gift of structured time. It makes you throw your life away for a couple years, to push your tired old dreams and authorly pretensions to the forefront.

Also, I took my girlfriend away from my MFA experience. She’s not made of concrete, though. She’s made of skin and patience and something I can’t identify that always smells like lavender.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part is editing. I love taking something that I’ve cobbled together, or written down in haste, and begin pulling it apart, jostling it and making it uncomfortable. I love relineating a poem completely, on a hunch that the natural grain of the thing wants to be a sonnet, or all long couplets, or prose. First drafts are an emergency, really, you drop what you’re doing and tend to their intensity, but editing is where it’s at for me. I like to move things around in the quiet.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

Sure, but why bother? I mean, there’s too few good book stores, too many shitty ones, and the wrong books get read by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. But my problem with complaining is this: my dad is a butcher. My grandfather worked odd jobs for forty years. They both would have been much happier doing something else with their lives.  There are many injustices afoot in the book world, and people have often said brilliant things about those injustices’ root causes, but I can’t stay invested in that conversation. I always find myself drifting back to the historical unlikelihood of my being able to spend this much time with something as beautiful and useless as a poem. It shocks me out of the minutia. Not to be a brute about serious and complex things, but I’m just too fucking lucky to care.

Maybe that’s Vox Pop’s problem. Maybe I can’t maintain the day-to-day grumblings of the blog when the above is my core opinion…

Folk is divided into two sections. Peggy’s Cove Nova Scotia, after the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111, and modern day neighbourhoods around Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. Explain the origin and the concept of the collection to those who haven’t read it.

Okay. Well, it’s what you said, a two-parter. The throughlines connecting the two parts are in descending order of importance: airplanes, community planning, geometry, atheism, and me.

You were still living in Nova Scotia at the time of the crash in 1998, and it occurred quite close to your home. What lingered so much that you wrote about its effect a dozen years later, or, have you been working on this set of poems for quite  some time now?

I’ve been working on them on and off for a few years. The necessity of having to wrap something up for use in my MFA thesis spurned the decision to focus on the crash more directly. What I wanted to capture in the Swissair section is the tension between the diversity of individual expressions of grief and the homogeneity of the public face of that grief.  And that tension really becomes the tension of the book: How do you belong to something? How to you manage beholdenness,  in the context of being an individual?

Do you think people and places shape each other equally, or, do we shape our communities more than our communities shape us? How has being a Haligonian transplanted in Toronto affected your identity (if at all)?

Being a Haligonian gives me a place to cover myself in outsiderness when talking about Toronto. It’s a bit like being a Canadian when talking about, say, American popular culture. You can shield yourself away in a sort of truculent “we don’t do that back home,” stand separate when you need to feel superior to something. I love Halifax, love Nova Scotia, but life here is more all-in, it’s more naked and weighty somehow. I know that sounds awful and people who hate Toronto are going to love that answer, but so do I. I love this city and feel protective of it. But maybe that’s me being shaped by where I came from, even there. To be a Maritimer is to fall quickly in love, and turn on a dime to protect it. Or maybe it’s just me.

I love these four lines and could interpret them so many different ways. “Every night in winter / a forgotten million snowflakes fall / on the ocean and so all / they learn about is water.” What’s it like to write a poem, put it out there, and hear other peoples’ interpretations (or misinterpretations) of your work? Likewise, do past reactions – criticism, or praise of specific qualities — affect your mindset as you write a new poem? 

It’s great, you know, it makes the heartache of publication worthwhile. We have to take our individual readers so seriously, as poets, because there are so few of them. I try to read the critical work that’s out there, because I feel like it’s part of the process, part of the conversation. You need to scan over the adjectives a bit though, those words that get affixed to you, for better or worse, can start to pull you apart. My adjectives tend to be conspicuously tied to my being a younger person: lots of boyishness and brashness and (in the negative reviews) naivete. They’re words you use to describe kids. But I still think you need to look into the fire all the same, you need to read other people’s readings of you.

There’s a line in your book. “everyone / is nationless. Everyone’s a nation.” I think it’s fair to say there are very few things that unite me and the people in my neighbourhood. I think it’s fair to say PEI and Alberta are two very different provinces. So what makes a “nation” or country, beyond geographical borders? Anything?

This is a question of political sociology really. A nation is a geographical expression of shared history: linguistic history, ethnic history, religious history, whatever. A country is a self-governing political construct. Some countries are nations (France) some nations are not countries (Tibet) and we happen to live in one of the few countries that aren’t nations. I’m not being disparaging of Canada when I say that, I prefer our calmer acceptance of the truth (despite the occasional nostalgic hymnals from the Don Cherrys of the world) to the attempt to force the lie of nationhood on non-nations or supernational entities like what so often happens in America. America is my favourite country but it makes me cry a lot.

Ours is a post-modern country, and we should embrace everything that word post-modern encompasses. We should embrace the irony and obscurity of ourselves. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a culture, or lots of shared experience, it just means that we live less in our borders than everyone else. And that’s a good thing. There’s another poem in the book that ends on something like, “This isn’t patriotism. Maybe it’s the opposite, the decision to bend in the wind.” I could bend in the wind with others, I could be beholden to that gesture, within a crowd of fellow post-modernists. Who wouldn’t want that?

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