The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, a finalist for the ForeWord Review's Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also the editor of The Essential Daryl Hine, which made The Partisan's list of the best books of 2015. His poems have been published in The Paris Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, the National Post, and other journals in the U.S. and Canada.  I met with James in his home in Madison, WI to talk about You are Here. Topics discussed include blindness to Canadian poetry, the importance of anthologies, bad poetry, meter, rhyme, Robert Frost, argument, philosophers, poet-critics, autobiography in poetry, myth, Adam Kirsch, authenticity versus technique, rhetoric, poetry in totalitarian regimes, Michael Lista, Carmine Starnino; constructive, honest reviews, Eric Ormsby, and the need for a great anthology of Canadian poetry. 

As the editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books, Eric Lorberer is responsible for the voice and style that has brought the magazine widespread acclaim. He is also the director of the Twin Cities Book Festival, has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and speaks at conferences and literary festivals around the country as an advocate for independent publishing and literary culture. We met at his home in Minneapolis to discuss Rain Taxi's history and the literary events it puts on, the Twin Cities Book Festival, championing printed books, the current fixation on screens and devices, best-sellers, small press publishers, literary presses in Minneapolis, sharing books, technology and literary experiences, the Twin Cities Literary Calendar, being useful, Independent Bookstore Day and France. 

Eric Ormsby is a poet, a writer, and a man of letters. He was a longtime resident of Montreal, where he was the Director of University Libraries and subsequently a professor of Islamic thought at McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies. Presently, he lives and writes in France and Prague. Ormsby began writing poetry as a young man and began publishing in 1985. He has produced six poetry collections, among them Bavarian Shrine and Other Poems (1990), which won a Quebec prize for the best poetry of that year, Coastlines (1992), and Time's Covenant: Selected Poems (2006). His poems have been published in various journals and magazines such as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. He has also authored a book of criticism called Fine Incisions, which we talked about when we got together in Montreal.  Among other things we discuss the art of book reviewing, his aesthetic criteria, honesty, negative reviews, W.B.Yeats, Shakespeare and Eric's grandmother, standards and touchstones, Montreal, Canadian book design, William Logan, the first and last lines of a review, justice, personal affiliations, Tolstoy, War and Peace, self-revelation, translation, and the poet Daryl Hine. To finish off, Eric reads several of his poems. 

Will Rueter is the proprietor of the Aliquando Press which was founded in 1962 "to enable its proprietor to learn the basics of printing and binding books by hand." To date the Press has produced 109 books. It is located in Dundas, Ontario. Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson was a renowned British bookbinder, and passionate private printer. He was proprietor of the Doves Press, one of the most influential private presses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its standards of quality have influenced commercial and fine presses for more than a century. I met with Will at his workshop in Dundas to talk about his press, and Cobden-Sanderson. Among other things we discuss bookbinding, dinner with William Morris, the Doves Press, Emery Walker, Doves' type, Bessie Hooley, Majesty, Beauty and Order, red ink, Jim Rimmer, patterns and ornaments, Elbert Hubbard, Leonard Barr, Paul Dinsing, Rollin Milroy and his Heavenly Monkey Press, the Hogarth Press, the Nonesuch Press, polymer plates, Massey College, "The Seafarer", printing and emotion; responsibility, sincerity, and connection with the words and the author. 

Steven Temple is an antiquarian bookseller who, after operating shops on Queen Street in Toronto for forty years, moved to Welland, Ontario in 2014 where he now does business out of his home. He continues to specialize in literary books, especially Canadian literary books, general Canadiana, and select out-of-print and rare books in various fields.  We met at his home in Welland, where we discussed, among other things, his passion for finding "lost" Canadian literature, parasites on the Internet, the urgency to buy, poet Frank Prewett, rarity, utility bills, stories about books, examples of lost Canadian literature, Watters's Checklist of Canadian Literature, Steven's criteria for buying books, Robertson Davies, William Golding, Graham Greene, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, collecting the Governor General's Award for Fiction winners, G. Herbert Sallans's Little Man, artist Fred Varley, Canadian book design, being a pioneer, and patronizing Canada Post. 

James King is the author of six novels and nine biographies, including books on David Milne, Margaret Laurence, Jack McClelland, and Lawren Harris. His biography of Herbert Read, The Last Modern, was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, James lives in Hamilton, Ontario. And that's where I met him to discuss his biography of Jack McClelland, Jack, A Life with Writers. Among other things we talk of publicizing Canadian authors, happy childhoods, Patrick Crean, Esi Edugyan, magnetic personalities, P.T. Barnum, swearing, multi-national publishing houses, Canadian literature, Gabriel Roy, Margaret Laurence, Mordecai Richler, the New Canadian Library, editing, approbation, publishing poetry, Avie Bennett, the dangers of promoting Canadian culture, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, Bennett Cerf, James Laughlin, curiosity, Alice Munro, Michael Snow, Lauren Harris, The Handover, Dundurn Press, and naming Canada's national library after Jack McClelland. 

Darrel J. McLeod is Cree from treaty eight territory in Northern Alberta. Before deciding to pursue writing in his retirement, he was a chief negotiator of land claims for the federal government and executive director of education and international affairs with the Assembly of First Nations. His memoir Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age won the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction.  We met at the Canada Council's offices in Ottawa to discuss it, along with negotiating land claims and arguing for concessions; residential schools; catholic priests, sexual abuse and the fear of God. The United church, the Evangelical church, listening to birds; music; non-binary definitions of gender; traditional native foods, fish heads, red willow shoots, and moose thigh bones. Death. Unconditional love. Alcohol and weakness. And stand-up comedy. 

Marvin Post is the owner of Attic Books in London, Ontario - one of the largest, most successful used/antiquarian bookstores in Canada.  I met with Marvin to discuss the reasons behind his success. Among other things we talk about buying lots of books, religious books, double downsizing, millennial debt-load, fresh stock, on-line versus in-store stock, buying buildings, skulls on shirts, shows, areas to collect in, medical books, books as investments, books into movies, fake signatures, storage units, and enjoying your life. Marvin also provides commentary on a selection of used books that I brought into the store for trade. 

Sarah Henstra is a professor of English literature at Ryerson University in Toronto where she teaches courses in Gothic Horror, Fairy Tales & Fantasies, Psychoanalysis & Literature, and Creative Writing. She is the author of The Red Word, a novel that recently won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction.  We met in Ottawa to talk about The Red Word. Among other things we discuss The Scarlet Letter, shame, the double standard, Greek mythology, unspoken assumptions, #metoo, feminism, frats houses, university life, the 1990s, passive characters and withholding sex.