BC Publishers Spotlight: Talonbooks

Garry Thomas Morse is the author of four books of fiction and five poetry collections.

Over the next couple of months, The Town Crier will be featuring short interviews with Canadian authors published by B.C. publishers, conducted by B.C. publishing professionals. The first in the series is an interview with Talon Books poet Garry Thomas Morse by Harbour Publishing’s Nathaniel G. Moore. Here, Moore speaks to Morse about his latest collection, Prairie Harbour.

Nathaniel G Moore: The speaker of these poems is engaged in an all-encompassing sense of history, presence, and direction. I was startled at first by the length of the book, and then realized, like in a recent review in Eclectic Ruckus, the breadth isn’t simply in the book’s length but in the guts too. An entire civilization of voices seems to be teeming from the pages. For how long had you been toiling on this project prior to publication?

Garry Thomas Morse: Prairie Harbour is not that long vis-à-vis the American poetic epics it apes. I think of it as a mock-epic—my prairie Dunciad. I was actually toiling over another poetry manuscript for quite a few years that kept changing, based on inspiration from stellar work I got to edit for Talonbooks before I left Vancouver. Soon after, I lived for a year in Regina, Saskatchewan, in which time the long poem arrived and seemed to write itself. I must respond with immediacy to place.

NGM: Can you talk about the concept of “wrecklogue?”

GTM: Translated fragments of one of Virgil’s Eclogues about his father’s confiscated farm are in the long poem, proving that he wrote wrecklogues too. At the time of this interview, it’s hard not to think of those militia yokels in Oregon who have taken over a wildlife refuge. We see ourselves as dramatically different from these cartoonish figures, and yet as consumers with vast energy needs, we ultimately endorse their anti-environmental philosophy. In Regina, I fell in love with all the biodiversity in one of the only wild fields left in town. You might say that it precipitated my departure for Manitoba when it was destroyed to build an extension to the “Grasslands” mall. So part of the book is a wrecklogue for the plants, insects, birds, and hares that have lost their feeding ground to make room for more big box stores.

NGM: You infuse the language of commerce and use historical data, areas are blacked out in collage-like altitudes. Can you talk about how these texts influenced the manuscript?

GTM: A couple of examples spring to mind. Back when America was awesome-sauce, my ancestor Jedidiah Morse was pretty much in sync with the paranoid and xenophobic views we are hearing expressed at the onset of the US election. However, Morse was also deeply concerned about the effects of capitalization on Native Americans. His schismatic mindset (and my own) results in the confluence of historical voices you mentioned. Another example is the influence of the fur trade on our perception of First Nations culture. One oddity involves the equivalent of relatively placid Métis office workers being encouraged to get in touch with their inner “Indian” and become “weekend warriors” so that they could launch raids on Assiniboia for the North West Company. I condensed some of these historical snapshots into somewhat acerbic heritage minute poems in the interlude called “Company Romance.”

Find more information on Prairie Harbour here.

About Talonbooks

“Talon’s dedication to the publication of over four decades of excellent Canadian literary work, created through an unbroken line of internal mentorship and succession of ownership in the company, has earned our publishing house the privilege of being one of the pre-eminent independent Anglophone literary presses in Canada. We are the only one of the pioneering “first generation” of Canadian literary publishers of the 1960s to have consistently maintained our success and independence over the past 45 years. We are Canada’s largest independent publisher of drama; do more translations from Québec than anyone else; and publish more Native voices than any other Canadian publisher with the exception of First Nations publisher Theytus Books.” —From the publisher’s website

About Garry Thomas Morse

Garry Thomas Morse’s poetry books with LINEBooks include sonic riffs on Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets in Transversals for Orpheus and a tribute to David McFadden’s poetic prose in Streams. His poetry books with Talonbooks include a homage to San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer in After Jack, and an exploration of his mother’s Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations ancestry in Discovery Passages, finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Discovery Passages was also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by the Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC’s 8th Fire. Morse’s books of fiction include his collection Death in Vancouver, and the three books in The Chaos! Quincunx series, including Minor Episodes / Major Ruckus (2013 ReLit Award finalist), Rogue Cells / Carbon Harbour (2014 ReLit Award finalist), and Minor Expectations, all published by Talonbooks. Morse is a casual commentator for Jacket2 and his work continues to appear in a variety of publications and is studied at various Canadian universities, including UBC. He currently resides in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His latest book is Prairie Harbour, a book that “traces multiple lines of the author’s mixed ancestry back to the nomadic “pre-historic” movements of Wakashan speakers who later formed various West Coast First Nations.

Nathaniel G. Moore is a Canadian writer, artist and journalist. He has authored four books. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and newspapers across Canada including This Magazine, The Globe & Mail, The National Post, Filling Station, Prism International, and subTerrain. He has appeared on CBC Radio 1, and on television including The Fight Network. He has written for short films (Bravo! Television) and is a columnist for Open Book: Toronto. His novel Savage 1986-2011 (Anvil Press) is out now.