The Biblio File hosted by Nigel Beale

Robert Rulon-Miller is an antiquarian book dealer who lives, if not in a mansion, then at the very least in a great big house on Summit Avenue, one of the toniest in St. Paul, Minnesota. Not that toiling as a bookseller is anyway to get rich quick. He has worked hard for many years in the business, specializing in 'Rare, Fine & Interesting Books in Many Fields; 1st Editions, Americana; Literature; Fine & Early Printing; Travel; and the History of Language.' His most recent catalogue is titled Language and Learning. Robert is also the Director of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar scheduled for August 2nd-7th, 2009, at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, immediately following the Denver Antiquarian Book Fair. We met at his home to talk books. Topics covered include de-accessioning, railway and mining tycoon James J. Hill, Robert's friendship with Elmer Anderson, book collector and Governor of Minnesota; Robert’s interest in words and language, his expertise in dictionaries and grammars, and lack of interest in Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, Better World Books’s business model, partnering to buy and sell expensive books, and advice for the novice bookseller.   

Rosemary Furtak was the librarian at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for more than 25 year. She was co-curator of  ‘Text Messages’, an exhibit on artist’s books shown in 2009 at the Center. We talk here about her early championing of the artist book genre -  her definition being: "a book that refuses to behave like a book ("like the 35,000 books that sit in the stacks"), the line between books and art, and words and art, and librarians and curators…and how to go about collecting artist books. We talk too about the challenges of cataloguing artist Ed Ruscha’s 26 Gasoline Stations, about the prolific and surprising Dieter Roth, inexpensive materials and Richard Tuttle, and Lawrence Weiner's Statements, and his art making process. The works of these four were highlighted in the exhibition.  

Biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist Victoria Glendinning was born in Sheffield, and educated at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Modern Languages. She worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974. President of English PEN, she was awarded a CBE in 1998. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Southampton, Ulster, Dublin and York. Her biographies include Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, 1977; Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (1981), which won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) and the Duff Cooper Prize; and Rebecca West: A Life (1987), and Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West (1983) and Trollope (1992) both of which won the Whitbread Biography Award. We talk here ostensibly about her latest book, Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941- 1973 but in fact, mostly about the nature of biography, the difference between editing letters and writing lives, fabricating dialogue, compiling data, selecting facts; the importance of place, material and familial limitations, life over art, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst, and text versus context.  

Tanja Jacobs is a well known actress, director, teacher and coach. She has worked in the professional theatre since 1981, and performed at most major theatres in Canada. She has been nominated for ten Dora Mavor Moore Awards and has won twice. As a director, her credits include 1002 Nights, Johann’s Cabinet of Wonders, Goddess, and Mid-Life Crisis. On television, besides her role as federal employee SM3 Sexsmith on Power Play, Jacobs has guest starred on many Canadian shows including Ready or Not and Street Legal. Film credits include Trial by Jury and Loser. She recently finished a run at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa as Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days directed by Leah Cherniak. Happy Days, written in 1961, observes determined human optimism in the face of a universe without meaning. Winnie, Beckett’s "hopeful futilitarian" is buried up to her waist in the earth, woken and summoned to bed each day by the same disembodied bell. "Throughout the days she performs a series of carefully observed rituals all related to the contents of a worn old black purse. She combs her hair, applies lipstick, painstakingly examines a toothbrush, toys with a nail file, a tube of toothpaste and a revolver, all the while chattering at her inattentive companion, Willie. Hopeless yet hopeful, bleak yet funny, Happy Days is Beckett’s "testament to the resourcefulness of the human spirit" Tanja and I talk here about playing Winnie, the difficulty of working at cliff’s edge without a narrative, talking, doing nothing, and the need for communication and attention, loneliness, mid-life marriages, revolvers, supportive fellow actors, the quality of attachment and mirroring, the imperative to carry on, suffering and the avoidance of and surrendering to pain in front of an audience, revisiting moments of terror and fright and aloneness and the agony of doing this as someone who has been abandoned; the unbearable parts of being human, and how the use of simple descriptives can generate profound distilled moments, poems of events. To start off with I quote V.S. Pritchett on Beckett. Read the quote here.    

Born, raised and currently resident in Ottawa, Canada, Christian McPherson’s poetry has appeared in a variety of print and online journals. He has won the John Spenser Hill Award and the Ottawa Public Library Short story Award. We met recently to discuss his first published collection called Poems that Swim from my Brain like Rats leaving a Sinking Ship. Listen as we talk, among other things, about death, the misery of TV news, and a light hearted approach to life.     

Ross Raisin is a young British author born in Keighley, Yorkshire. He studied at the University of London, worked as a trainee wine bar manager and completed a postgraduate degree in creative writing at Goldsmith's College. His debut novel Out Backward (God's Own Country in England) was published in 2008, and shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. It features Sam Marsdyke, a disturbed adolescent living in a harsh rural environment, and tracks his journey from an oddity to a malevolent, insane, psychopath. We talk about the novel here.     

Nadeem Aslam was born in Pakistan in 1966, moved to the UK as a teenager and now lives in London. He studied Biochemistry at the University of Manchester, but left to become a writer. His first novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993) won a Betty Trask Award and the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award. His second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), which took 11 years to write, won the 2005 Encore Award and the 2005 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize.  We met in Toronto at the IFOA, to talk about his novel The Wasted Vigil, about technique, self knowledge, writing 100 page biographies of his characters, the universal from the particular, Afghanistan, war, politics, love, the ignorance of history,  Flaubert, Proust, isolation, engagement and Yorkshire.  

This is part three of a series of interviews conducted with three acclaimed short storywriters: Rebecca Rosenblum, Nam Le, and Anne Enright. In each case we riff off those qualities which Flannery O’Connor thought best constituted a good short story. I’ve listed some of them here.  Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962, studied English and Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, and went on to study for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is a former RTE television producer. Her short story collection, The Portable Virgin was published in 1991, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Two collections of stories, Taking Pictures and Yesterday’s Weather were published in 2008. Her novels are The Wig My Father Wore (1995); What Are You Like? winner of the 2001 Encore Award; The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002); and The Gathering (2007) which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. We met at the IFOA in Toronto to talk about the short story, and, in so doing , about Beckett’s Happy Days, housewives with problems,  ideology, awakenings, characters’ voices, self deception, just doing it, James Joyce and women writers. Photo Credit Hpshaefer

Joe Dunthorne is a graduate of the Creative Writing Masters program at UEA, where he was awarded the Curtis Brown Prize. His poetry has been published in Reactions 5, Magma, Smiths Knoll, and Tears in the Fence. His work has been featured on Channel 4, BBC Radio 3, 4 and in The Guardian and Vice magazine. We met at the IFOA in Toronto to discuss his debut novel, Submarine, why the behavior of teenage boys is often seen as abominable, the importance of getting laid, ambiguous characters, depression, the brilliance of novelist W.G. Sebald, East Anglia University, how humour works, and dust jackets which both attract attention and complement content.

Bruno Racine was President of the National Library of France from 2007- 2016. Prior to this he held a variety of senior positions within the French government including: Director General Cultural Affairs for the City of Paris (1988-1993), Director of l’Académie de France à Rome (1997-2002), and Chairman du Centre Pompidou (2002-2007). He is also a writer. Non-fiction titles include his best-selling: Art of living in Rome and Art of living in Tuscany. His novel The Governor of Morée (Grasset) won France’s First Novel Prize in 1982. We talk here about the role of a national library, about scanning and digitization, Google, the Lyon library (France’s second largest), Europeana, the value-added offered by Librarians, amalgamation of Canada's National Archives and Library and the unlikelihood that France will follow suit, public servant novelists, Stendhal, and failure and success in work and love.