Preview
STUART ROSS
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Thursday, October 16
Uptown Stage
Saturday, October 18
Margaret Greenham Theatre (The Banff Centre)
Some artistic pursuits seem like an upstart kind of thing – a young person’s game. Punk bands or one-person fringe theatre shows, for instance, seem like places to start rather than destinations. In publishing, small presses and self-publication have that upstart feel to them. And yet here’s poet and publisher Stuart Ross, almost 30 years into his small-press and self-publication career.
"I started self-publishing in ’79, so next year will be my 25th anniversary of Proper Tales Press," he says, referring to the imprint he created to publish books like He Counted His Fingers, He Counted His Toes and When Electrical Sockets Walked Like Men. "We’re planning a real big shindig."
Persistence has certainly gained Ross an "established" aura in a non-establishment realm. It’s not just that his poetry collection Hey, Crumbling Balcony! is an actual hardcover book (or, to use Ross’s categories, a "spiny" as opposed to a "spineless" publication like a broadsheet or pamphlet). There’s also the fact that the new book amounts to a mid-career retrospective – something Ross would not have expected back in the days when he stood on Yonge Street with a sign around his neck, selling his verses to the passing hookers and headbangers.
Hardcover book notwithstanding, Ross has always supported his do-it-yourself publishing habit with day jobs. Since he’s only been able to quit these when the occasional arts grant came along, he relishes some of those quitting-time memories. For example, his last day at Harlequin books.
"I proofread there for a year and then copy-edited for two-and-a-half years," he says. "I read 200 of those suckers!"
Yes, Ross has seen the world of big-money publishing up close and realized he’s not cut out for it. "My dream of writing a commercial suspense novel is long gone," he says.
Ross now enjoys writing and publishing for their own sakes. Though not all of his work is self-published (along with Crumbling Balcony, published by ECW, he has a short-story collection forthcoming from Mercury Press), he says he continues to publish pamphlets and even single-sheet leaflets of his poems. "I just take such pleasure from doing that."
As we talk, Ross demonstrates a casually encyclopedic knowledge of the small-press world and its intersections with small punk labels and zines. After all these years, he still appears to have the genuine enthusiasm of a fan. This gives him just a touch of the persona – slightly wide-eyed, startled and delighted by the oddness of the world – that he adopts in much of his writing. That poetic persona has been with him a long time and is starting to change, he says.
"I think it’s something that’s been transforming over the years. When I went to high school, I remember getting a short story back and my English teacher had written on it, ‘Why are your characters all so dense?’ I think that denseness, which I would more charitably call naiveté, is the sort of voice that ends up in a lot of the poems.
"Maybe it’s some kind of yearning for simplicity and yearning to be a simple person. It would make life so much easier in a certain way."
In more recent work, Ross addresses autobiographical themes and family history that seem to demand a more serious approach, but that doesn’t mean he repudiates some of his own earlier descriptions of his work as "weird shit" that might "amuse or bug readers."
"I don’t think ‘amuse’ is a trivial thing," he says. "It’s important for people to be entertained and intrigued, to be provoked in a certain way. A poem that is sort of absurd or has silly things in it really bugs academics, or those who think poetry is ‘not supposed to be goofy.’ I think there’s this goofiness that runs through all of my stuff and I think there’s also a real seriousness that runs through it."
Stuart Ross joins fellow poets at the Rockin’ Poets reading on October 16 and the Banff Poetry Cabaret on October 18. Both events are at 9:30 p.m. |
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