Kathryn Mockler?s prose poem?White Snake is the featured text in the upcoming?Papirmasse Issue 37. ?A writer, screenwriter, filmmaker, and poet, she is the author of the poetry books?Onion Man?(Tightrope Books, 2011) and?The Saddest Place on Earth?(DC Books, 2012).?Her writing has been published most recently in?Lemon Hound,?Pilot Pocket Books, Descant, The Windsor Review, The Capilano Reivew, and?Joyland.
She received her MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and her BA in Honours English and Creative Writing from Concordia University.?In 2005, she attended the Canadian Film Centre?s Writers? Lab and wrote two short films for the NBC/Universal Short Dramatic Film Program. She has seven shorts films and videos produced to date. Her work has been broadcast on TMN, Movieola, and Bravo and has screened at festivals such as the Washington Project for the Arts Experimental Media Series, Toronto International Film Festival, Palm Springs International Festival, Worldfest, Cinequest, and EMAF. Her films are distributed by Ouat Media, V-tape and the Canadian Film Centre.
Currently, she teaches creative writing at the University of Western Ontario and is the co-founder and co-editor of the online literary and arts journal?The Rusty Toque.?Come back on January 8, 2013 to see Issue 38 revealed online, or subscribe now and welcome it to your mailbox in early January (featuring artwork by Pat Perry on the other side).
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I have a short attention span, so I like to work on many projects at once. Teaching and editing are a nice compliment to writing because for me they require a different energy than creative writing. Writing in diverse genres keeps things fresh, and collaborating with artists and filmmakers allows me to work on many projects at once. Often I adapt my work from a poem or story to screenplay or video art. My short film?Skinheads(2006, directed by Michael Vass) and my video project?The Reluctant Narrator?(2007, co-created with my husband?David Poolman) were both adaptations of poems from?The Saddest Place on Earth.
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You?ve published two books so far,?Onion Man?(Tightrope Books, 2011) and, most recently,?The Saddest Place on Earth?(DC Books, 2012).?Onion Man?is a series of linked poems exploring coming-of-age, drug use, drinking, sex, family dynamics, Alzheimer?s and disease.?The Saddest Place on Earth?is another collection of poems, this time satirizing contemporary politics. These collections at first glance seem to explore fairly different territory, but coming from the same writer in quick succession one would be inclined to believe that they deal with some of the same themes. Fill us in.?
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Although the books were published in quick succession, they weren?t written that way.?Onion Man?was a project I started over fifteen years ago when I was completing my MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. Over the years, I picked away at the poems, but I always seemed to struggle with the narrative. In retrospect, I don?t think I knew what the poems were trying to say until I went back to them much later. As I prepared the manuscript for Tightrope Books, I tried to bring out some of the gender and class issues in a more significant way. For example, I realized that the narrator had class biases of her own?even though she?s critiquing the world around her. I don?t think this is something I would have recognized as a younger writer because I was too caught up in identifying with the narrator and tapping into my own experiences to be able to critique her.
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I started writing the poems in?The Saddest Place on Earth?in 2004. These poems were a response to a few things that were going on in my life at the time. I was reeling from all of the post 9/11 media absurdity, and I was teaching composition at a community college and felt like a cog in a system that seemed to function more like a corporation than an educational institution. At the same time, my husband was working on a series of paintings and digital drawings called?Start as You Will Go On. As I continued to work on the poems over the years, I?m sad to say that what started out as a critique of American politics and media now extends to the Canadian government?s disregard for democracy and its assault on the environment?essentially this country has become a disgrace. Some of the poems that I wrote more recently such as ?The Government? and ?Environmentalism? speak to that.
While these two collections appear different in style, tone, and subject matter, at the heart of each collection is a critique. I also hope readers enjoy the humour that I?ve tried to incorporate in both books.
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Onion Man?s use of a linked, overarching narrative that tells a story over multiple poems is somewhat unusual for the genre of poetry. What compelled you to tell this story through poems instead of taking the more conventional route of short stories or a novella??
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It had been suggested to me to turn?Onion Man?into a novel, but I always saw it a series of poems. When I decide on genre, I tend to let instinct guide me. I was also influenced by a series of Canadian poets who were writing narrative novel-like poetry series such as?Douglas Burnet Smith (The Knife Thrower?s Partner), Michael Ondaajte (Collected Works of Billy The Kid), and Michael Turner (Company Town?and?Hard Core Logo).
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What is?The Rusty Toque?
The Rusty Toque?an online literary and arts journal that I co-founded with my colleague at Western University, Aaron Schneider. David Poolman joined us as art editor this year and is bringing in some exciting artists for our next issue.
Our mission is to publish diverse, innovative literary writing and visual art and to publish reviews of Canadian and international fiction and poetry.
The journal is published twice a year, and we run an ongoing interview series called?Rusty Talk?in which we interview writers on the writing process. To date, we interviewed Sheila Heti, Lynne Tillman, Rick Moody, Christian B?k, and many more.
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We?d love to hear more about your films and what relationship they have to your writing.
Since I completed my MFA, I predominately identified as a screenwriter. My thesis was a feature screenplay called?Piss Tank?that was optioned for several years but didn?t end up getting made. In 2005, I went to the Canadian Film Centre and had the good fortune to have two short films produced (Skinheads?and?Spoonfed)?through the NBC/Universal Short Film Program. I continued to work with Michael Vass, who directedSkinheads,?and we made two more short films?Umbrella?and?The Old Ways. During that period, I also collaborated with my husband on three video series:?The Reluctant Narrator, Reindeer in the Mountains,?and?Three Vignettes.?Over the past two years, I?ve focused a little more on poetry, but I?m still at work on a feature script called?Weak People Are Fun to Torment.?Many of my poems and short stories are visual and dialogue-driven. I don?t doubt that years of writing screenplays influenced this.
Your contribution to Papirmasse is?White Snake, a darkly funny story in which the narrator attends a party at the home of a woman with no arms who is married to a snake who works with at-risk youth. The story touches on social anxiety, trust and belonging. What inspired it?.
This poem was a dream that I recounted to my sister, Susan Mockler, who is a psychologist and fiction writer. She started analyzing it, and I thought?oh, I better write this one up. I?m sure it?s related to my constant state of anxiety about the affairs of the world, but essentially it was dream that I transcribed.
The problem and the blessing with this series is that they come to me pretty much intact. I can?t force them or think too hard about them while I?m constructing them. To be honest, it feels more like fishing than writing. My other writing involves a lot more planning and revision than this series does.
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What?s on your plate for next year?
I?m working on another poetry manuscript similar in tone to?The Saddest Place on Earth, and I?m starting a novel.
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Find more from Kathryn Mockler, including links to her writing blogs, online published works, and short films and videos, at:?www.kathrynmockler.com
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Source: http://papirmasse.com/art/2012/writer-interview-kathryn-mockler
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