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Q & A: with rob mclennan - Excerpt from "Departures"

Broken Pencil: Is there anything behind the title Departures? Did the writing group serve as a jumping-off point for its participants?

rob mclennan: The title came from the group as a whole deciding that a loosely-themed chapbook might be more interesting than a book of random fiction. As far as jumping-off point, I know at least that Amanda Earl has gone on to publish various pieces that she's passed through the group, and a couple of others as well, but I think for most, it's pretty much too early.

BP:What's planned for the book launch? Any readings, performances, etc.?

rm: For the launch, all of the contributors that are able to show up will read. I think that in itself could be considered a performance, don’t you think? I mean, it's not like any of them will be doing slide shows, dance or PowerPoint.

BP:Will Departures be a regular publication from above/ground press? Will the writer's group continue as well?

rm: I hope so. I like the idea of annually dipping into the group to see where we've gone since the previous publication. The original idea for the occasional magazine The Peter F. Yacht Club, which recently celebrated it's eleventh issue, also came out of an informal writer's group that I'm part of. Unlike this fiction group, the poetry one was far more informal, which means we haven’t actually met more than once or twice since, I think, 2001 or so, but at least everyone is still writing and publishing.

Excerpt from "Silence So Large and Complete" by Spencer Gordon:

What’s a kid from Ottawa know about Nevada? Only what he can imagine, dreaming of roulette wheels in early-stage childhood depression; only what he can glean from television westerns, tales of red-skin trails, fallout from nuclear test sights. Pierre’s imagination, addled by misinformation, an atlas from the 1950s that coloured the state an almost pasty yellow, and a fervent, secret desire for escape, weaves the state into an illimitable desert, an enormously vast, barren, open-ended wasteland of the type that dries the throat, leaves one stumbling in sand, begging in a hoarse whisper for water through lips as chapped as sandstone. Nevada’s cold earth is as lonely and unpopulated as the cliffs and craters of the moon – which it may as well be, coming from a kid sheltered by the leafy suburbs of 1960’s Ottawa, somewhere near Bank and Riverdale, where even a good bike ride leads into the checkerboard slopes of the downright bucolic (this being before the population booms of later decades, before the amalgamation of the townships, before the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Transit Commission). Pierre cannot conceive of a Nevada during the day – the state exists in permanent stasis under a sable blanket, eliminating distinction between land-horizon and sky, a cold easterly wind blowing stinging sand and rock over a haphazard and jagged Basin and Range. And under the cloak of darkness Pierre imagines the scurry and tread of a legion of chitinous arthropods, venom dripping from bared fangs and poised stingers, the screech and cough of rapacious scavengers as they leap from carrion to sky in graceless, malevolent bounds.

Laura Trethewey
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posted: July 19, 2008

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