rob mclennan is an award-winning author from Ottawa, Canada, who has basically done everything! He’s published over thirty books, of poetry and prose alike. He’s lived a fascinating life. Feel free to read more here! He’s also interviewed many many writers, and you can find those interviews? Here!
AND he also has a substack here!
Fortunately, he agreed to answer some questions, especially ones I had about his fascinating new story collection On Beauty, which is available now from University of Alberta Press.
Could you give us a brief sketch of your creative life thus far?
Quick sketch: I’ve been writing full-time since 1991 or thereabouts, soon after my first daughter was born. I ran a home daycare until she was four (ten hour days with her plus two other preschoolers, five days a week) while writing in a coffeeshop three nights a week from 7pm to midnight. If you want full-time out of it, Margaret Atwood once said, you have to put full-time into it. By 1994, I was writing full-time, had founded a chapbook press, above/ground press, as well as what became The Factory Reading Series; within a year, I had co-founded a semi-annual small press fair, all of which I still run. At the time, I was also co-running The TREE Reading Series, and co-editing a literary journal out of Carleton University, The Carleton Arts Review, but my involvement in each of those only lasted a couple of years, before passing along to others.
From there to here: I wrote! I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I submitted and I toured and I organized and have since published well over one hundred chapbooks and more than forty full-length titles, including poetry, fiction, essays and non-fiction. I’ve edited anthologies and single-author collections, run dozens of workshops, co-run a publishing house, been a writer-in-residence, toured extensively across Canada (as well as a few other places) and reviewed a million billion books over the past thirty years. I’ve been reviewing around one hundred and fifty books a year for at least the past few over at my blog. I write and I write and I organize events and I write, while home with the two young ladies I share with writer and book conservator Christine McNair. I have a collection of short stories out this season, with a couple more poetry titles and a book-length essay out over the next year-plus. Christine has a hybrid/memoir out this season as well, which is exciting; we’ve been wandering around doing readings and launches lately, both individually and as a pair, as much as Christine’s work-schedule and our childcare possibilities might allow.
Much of the first fifteen years of my writing life focused on poems, which evolved into a practice of the book as my unit of composition. Since then, I’ve expanded my explorations into prose, including through the novel, the short story, the literary essay and the hybrid book-length essay. There is still much I am working to explore.
Do you love all your work equally, or do you look back on some pieces or books as special favorites?
There are some favourites, although it feels akin to selecting a favourite child. Each had their purpose, strengths and weaknesses. I think the book of smaller (2022) is probably one of my finest poetry titles, and the follow-up, the book of sentences (forthcoming), furthers that thought. I still have strong feelings about paper hotel (2001), and A perimeter (2016), and various other of my poetry titles over the years. Really, I still like most of them. I’d only hide a couple of my books, I’d think, although I wouldn’t want to list those things. Each has been a step in me getting to here from there. My recent pandemic essay/memoir, essays in the face of uncertainties (2022), is damned good, and really provides a glimpse of where my prose has been heading since. On Beauty: stories, (2024) is amazing; most of the time I was working on that collection, I thought that this is the sort of work I should have been doing this whole time. Just wait until the follow-up drops.
What’s the Ottawa literary scene like? Should we all move there? Also, in a general sense, how difficult do you think it is to create a community around art?
Oh, we’ve long had a thriving scene, going well back to the 1860s, when the federal public service moved from Quebec City to Ottawa (once we properly became the capital city), bringing both French and English language poets into town. Back in those days, the poetry capitals up here were Fredericton and Ottawa, well before a shift into Toronto and Montreal across those first few decades of twentieth century. Since the 1990s (I landed in 1989, but wasn’t really paying attention to anything for another two years or so), we’ve had the Ottawa International Writers Festival, a semi-annual small press fair and various threads of other activity, including multiple literary journals–some of the current include Arc Poetry Magazine, Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], flo lit mag, Bywords.ca, Common House Magazine, etcetera–and a slew of chapbook publishers. We even recently launched our most recent Poets Laureate for the City of Ottawa: David O’Meara for English, and Véronique Sylvain for French, simultaneously covering two-year terms. Back in 1983, if you can believe it, Ottawa hosted the first municipal poets laureate in Canada!
Community is about activity, and people. Like a pot-luck: about what one brings, not necessarily about what one takes. I’ve complained prior about the difficulty of living through Ottawa in the 1990s, when most folk hit a ceiling with lack of funding or employment or publishing, and moved away, leaving less of us here. But events such as the writers festival have helped develop a great deal of activity, despite the city’s lack of literary media, funding and book publishers.
So: yes! You should all move here! Admittedly, part of the benefit of being a city sans literary media, funding or book publishers is that there’s nothing to be gained by being an Ottawa writer, so we tend to get along with each other pretty well. We aren’t fighting each other for anything locally, as there’s little to be had. We’re a pretty supportive bunch. One hopes that even as the city and community keep developing, we can allow this element to continue.
What inspired you to write “On Beauty”? How did the project come together?
I had already been exploring prose for a number of years, having published two novels and a collection of very short stories, but I was curious about what I could do with a longer form. Although, given the density of my prose, when I say “longer form,” I mean a story of roundabout a thousand words or so, which often can take up to six or eight months to work on. Carve, carve, carve. The collection formed (or pooled, or cohered) across seven years, one story at a time. It became.
What are some surprising or important things you’ve learned in your many years of interviewing other writers?
It’s a good question. I think the overall take-away from my years of reviewing and interviewing is the reminder that there are as many ways to approach writing as there are practitioners. What works for one wouldn’t work for another, say. And the endless diversity of approach and purpose I find fascinating.
You have written both poetry and fiction, and the quick sections in On Beauty had a lovely musical quality. Do you think your poetry informs your fiction, and vice versa?
Oh, certainly. I think my move into fiction allowed the storytelling elements of my poems to fall away, allowing my poems to move into different directions. And when I approach prose of any sort, I’m certainly attending elements of sound and rhythm, not simply seeking to utilize sentences as any dry function of moving from point A to B: the lines, the sentences, have to sing. To simply provide information sans music, why not just write narratives in point form? If one is offering writing, then one needs to attend the writing.
Admittedly, my taste in prose has always leaned into the lyric. Early models include Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976) and Kristjana Gunnars’ The Substance of Forgetting (1992).
To what extent do you follow the old advice to “write what you know”?
Apparently Vancouver writer George Bowering used to tell his Simon Fraser University students to write what they didn’t know, otherwise how would they learn anything?
There are ways to do both, certainly, and often one’s characters in fiction need to know more than the writer does. I don’t need to go to law school to write a character as a lawyer, for example, but if I’m referring to anything specific, the story would require proper details. One needs to know enough to allow for what isn’t there.
My short stories often begin with a thread or two that I begin to weave together, pulling in further strands, whether details from my experience or something I read or heard or thought about, until a character or a story begins to develop. After a while, such things take a life of their own, which can be helpful, but might also require research. What would that look like? How would they do such a thing? Etcetera. Well, if that detail is even required for the story, of course.
What question would you like to be asked?
I’m not sure. There must be something.
There’s always next time! Thank you so much for your insights, rob - we’ll see you in Ottawa!
thank you!