Read Online Flirt: The Interviews by Lorna Jackson - Free Book Online Page A

from university and its theories. I read the authentic details of rural experience out my living room window: junco, herring ball, dozer boat, pike pole. I read nature writers – the Transcendentalists; the newsboys turned eco-journo rockstars in primo-tents along any river; Emily Carr and her sad expertise – and I paid attention to their nouns, their connecting tissue. I watched colour lighten in May on the red cedar, and texture convert on browning bracken. I saw birds through a bastard-saw honed vision and heard their tone clusters. I memorized their names. First lambing season, I learned new words for stuck and sick and abortion; I connected stars and colostrom and warm molasses in a midnight poem never voiced: too abstract. I was ready to find words sufficiently germanic and consonant to fit nature’s ugly turns, I was going to make the anti-pastoral into something sharp, clean.
    But then the nouveau critics down east passed the legislation: Get urban, get punchy. Those days are gone, man, we’re all on-line, we are all one big connected city so get with it, grow up, be vegan. Get a tuxedo. Get high heels or just get high. Get a personal trainer and browse the bars. Pick
friends with Underwoods and crantinis, or better friends with laptops and craft beers and agents. Get cleavage.
    Do you know what happens to the septic fields of vegetarians?
    Are you finding material in the same places you used to? I’m not asking where you find it so don’t get mad. Do the same things move you, Richard?
    â€”I’m just takin’ notes, you know, I’m just takin’ notes all the time. In essence, where I am finding material is in what I hear, what I hear people say, what I think about what people say, what I read in the newspapers, what I see on TV, what I read in other books, yeah, my source material is unending. Things that move me? I think a lot of things move me, so I will assume that the same things do move me, matters of life and death, matters of love disappointed and love realized, relationships between parents and their children, the difficulties of spacial and physical dislocation, the adaptations necessary to new landscape, those kinds of things are the same things that move me.
    â€”Do you still venture up to Saskatchewan to hunt? You seem a frequent visitor to Canada. Is it the hunting and fishing that draws you? Do you still run with Jim Harrison and Thomas McGuane and the boys? Do you fish on the West Coast, was that ever a part of the business?
    â€”Yeah, Ray Carver and I did it for years and when he died I quit going’cause I don’t get along with his wife. Not that she would take me fishing anyway. She might take me out on a boat and throw me in with a big piano tied to my leg, if she possibly could, but I don’t, I quit doing that when Ray died. And now I have a house in Maine and I do some. I haven’t seen McGuane in a long time, I see Jim once in a while. The odd thing about life as it has gone on, I see fewer and fewer and fewer people of any kind and particularly fewer of my writer colleagues. I’m still friendly with Jim, Jim’s very dear to me, and Tom, who I’m less friendly with, we lead different kinds of lives. I don’t hunt with either of them. I mostly hunt with my wife.
    â€”Thirty years I was a city chick and came to the country without friends from that botched landscape. I lived in the city when it meant something, before it meant so little. I disagree with you: it is not complexer. Those Eastern pundits want me to believe that urban has not been covered. They seek a new urbanity? These press corps dilettantes
have only just discovered the city’s gifts – inflated price tag still dangling from its sleeve – and so prescribe that art must cover the action, the family and its flirting, cheating, and corrupt inventories, the flippo drugs for which the privileged brats of my graduating class now hock mumsy’s