A fun Q&A with Salon Magazine (Saint John) Dec 5 09

http://telegraphjournal.canadaeast.com/salon/article/878483

DOGS IN HEAT

I am working on a new novel--one that has been tugging at me for about ten years now. It will not be one of my typical Saint John novels. I am letting loose and having fun. I am hoping to have a first draft complete by Christmas, and the rewriting process complete within 36 months of that.

I have decided to shelve my previous work for now. It just wasn't working the way I had hoped. That happens. I have found a new energy with what I am working on now. Vincent Van Gogh, Satan, and Ernest Hemingway all come together in Dogs in Heat, what will no doubt be the wackiest novel I ever write.

skeletons

laugh at morality
pure morality
because it doesn’t exist—
that behind closed doors
we are all immoral
we are all skeletons
and if there is a heaven and hell
then most of us
are in trouble

but hell might simply be
realizing that while you lived,
dead loved-ones
(the good ones anyway)
were watching
down
on
you
all
along

clogged (from SKELETONS)

he sliced his
arm clean off
in the lawnmower
blade.
it was a sunny
sunday morning and
the mower had been
clogged by the dew-covered
grass, and now,
meat and bone,
which will also be
difficult to get out,
especially with only
one arm.

skeletons from the closet

I've just put together a poetry chapbook called skeletons. These poems have been collecting dust for years and this is something I've wanted to do for a while--a neat little book I can hand out to my friends.

at work...

I've just completed another rewrite of The Goon and have begun work on my fifth novel. It's slow going at the moment but with a full summer to write I'm ambitiously hoping to have a first draft completed by September. This new novel will tie up some loose ends from The Dirty Milkman and will also revisit a few characters from A Place of Pretty Flowers (Jeremy Wiggins and Jimmy S.). I plan on heading in an entirely different direction after this and for my own sanity I need to put these characters to bed. For now.

Jean Rhys

Jean Rhys is the most underrated writer who has ever lived. A true genius, and one of my biggest influences. Her novels include Postures, (1928) (released as Quartet in 1929), After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (1931), Voyage in the Dark (1934), and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), all published to little fanfare. She would not resurface for nearly thirty years, when the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966 marked her triumphant return from obscurity and cemented her as one of the most important writers of the 20th Century. When asked about her new found fame, Rhys replied that it had come too late. She died in 1979.

Frederick Forsyth

The best thriller ever written is The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. He is one of the greats.

In Our Time

Most live writers do not exist. Their fame is created by critics who always need a genius of the season, someone they understand completely and feel safe in praising, but when these fabricated geniuses are dead they will not exist.

-Ernest Hemingway