Lisa Pasold

Talking about my work-in-progress terrifies me. But it is probably a good habit to confront such things before breakfast... and two writers I respect & love, Lauren B. Davis and Jennifer K. Dick, both tagged me with this—many thanks, you two. Now I owe ya. So...this is a questionnaire which has been circulating through writerly websites: ‘the questions are the same for everyone. The answers, they are not.”

What is the working title of the book?

Up to the Knee

Where did the idea come from for the book?

One morning during my daily walk in Paris, I walked up to the big white Basilica in Montmartre, Sacre Coeur, and thought about how impossible the route would be in a wheelchair. I don’t even know why that thought came to me, at that instant. But I went home and started on the book.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fiction

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Okay, let's say time travel is possible and I’ll cast Belle du Jour-era Catherine Deneuve as French war photographer Geri, Roman Holiday-era Gregory Peck as the soldier Mug, and Japanese silent film actress Toshia Mori as Annie, the fashion journalist. And I’ll convince the ghost of Theadora Van Runkle to do the clothes (she costumed Bonnie and Clyde!) 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Injured Canadian Sergeant Mug Rusken arrives in Paris to visit his girlfriend, Geri, a successful war photographer—but when he arrives in the City of Light, he discovers that her latest assignment has ended in disaster.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

To get a first draft - 2 years. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My Up to the Knee war photographer character, Geri, first popped into my head during a laughter-filled night drinking red wine with a photographer friend—we discussed the craziness of photographers in general and the over-the-top craziness of war photographers in particular. ‘What makes them so crazy?’ we wondered. And I started to think about the myriad possible answers to that question. Not long afterwards, I was looking for something to do on a grey afternoon in Toronto. I wandered into the Textile Museum and saw an exhibit of rugs from Afghanistan—specifically, rugs woven with images of battle and weaponry, from a country that has seen war for most the past century. Walking through those rooms, I felt as if I could see the plot of a novel woven into those rugs. My lead character, Mug Rusken, came into my head there and then.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Up to the Knee is a literary thriller set in the contemporary City of Light—which means my lead character, Mug, spends his time bumping his wheelchair through the cobblestone streets of Paris, confronting corrupt officials, manipulating French media moguls, and bribing hard-working mercenaries, all with the help of a dippy fashion journalist named Annie.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I’m fortunate that Up to the Knee is represented by Chris Bucci at Anne McDermid & Associates 

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are (click on their names to visit their sites & check out their work!)

Kristin Saunders 

Mari-Lou Rowley

Anna Leventhal  

Mandy Len 

Sandy Florian 

I went to see LES MISERABLES. Yes, I know the movie has some historical 'foibles' but I love its creative choices. I think Victor Hugo might even approve of his novel's transition through musical theatre into film--he enjoyed using melodrama for effect.

When the June 1832 uprising began, Hugo was apparently in the Tuileries Garden. He heard gunfire coming from Les Halles. A firm supporter of revolutionary ideals--and no doubt curious to see news events first-hand--Hugo left the Jardins. It's possible to retrace part of his route...

i am incredibly honoured that my book, Any Bright Horse, is one of this year's nominees for the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry. 

The Governor General is Queen Elizabeth II's representative in Canada; the award dates back to 1937 and winners include Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, and Leonard Cohen. Needless to say, I'm pretty darn thrilled to be nominated.

Faulkner's birthday in the Crescent City: real mint juleps in traditional silver cups, a perfect sunset, and Napoleon's deathmask in the next room

(Of course, nothing in New Orleans is entirely what it seems, and this mask might actually be the face of Bony's friend who sometimes pretended to be the fallen emperor. It is accompanied by the emperor's handkerchief. which is somehow so much sadder, so fragile and starched and old, more tragically human than the overlarge paperweight of the deathmask.)

William Faulkner lived in this city for barely 16 months, but his relationship with the place was as formative as Hemingway's with Paris. He invented himself various times over--and routinely stole other people's stories to make his own life more interesting. And it was here that he really became a writer. He was often quiet, often dishonest, and often disreputable. Anita Loos (author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and one of my personal heroines) was introduced to him with the warning 'don't expect much of Bill, he has a silver plate in his head, you know.' 

Faulkner did not have a plate in his head--this was just one of his many invented personas. He did drink rather a lot. And apparently his favourite cocktail was a mint julep. So that is what we raise in toast to his fabulous convoluted sentences and tremendous story-telling. 

Tonight, the traditional drink is too cold to hold. Now I understand why the silver cups are used--they keep your hands nicely chilled against the summer heat. And this New Orleans summer has lasted a long long time--"The way summers used to last when you were a child, how they lasted forever," poet Lee Meitzen Grue tells me. The sunset illuminates the Pontalba buildings across from where we stand in the second-floor glassed-in balcony of the Cabildo.

Sherman Anderson lived just across the way, on the opposite side of Jackson Square. Author John Shelton Reed explains that if Anderson hadn't been in New Orleans, Faulkner might never have been inspired to try writing fiction. Maybe he'd have remained a fabulist, rather than a practical working writer. He was only a rather bad poet when he arrived in New Orleans. He left rather better. 

So happy birthday, Mister Faulkner. May your ghost wander down Pirate's Alley every now and then, regaling fellow-ghosts with stories.

(When I visited Faulkner's house in Oxford, Miss., I photographed the famous wall in his study, where he plotted out the events of his work A Fable, scribbled in pencil on the plaster. I've just moved into a new workspace; I better not drink too many mint juleps, or I'll be plotting out the story of my next novel across the rather battered walls...)

"The narrator meditates on the ebb and flow of motion and stillness, and the disorientation involved in returning home... Pasold acknowledges Don McKay and Daphne Marlatt as influences: both have an affinity for nature imagery and graceful ease in poetically conveying human experiences. Pasold carries on their traditions with distinction, craft and beauty."

- Quill & Quire review for ANY BRIGHT HORSE

when the new book gets reviewed, it is stressful.

when the new book gets reviewed by Quill & Quire in the July/August issue, it is even more stressful.

when the new book gets reviewed by Quill & Quire in their July/August issue and I am out of the country & can't get a copy, it is even more super-extra-stressful.

but the review is good! break out the champagne! the review is really great, actually, and i should probably send critic Shannon Webb-Campbell a glass of Veuve-Clicquot, but i don't know her. she might not like champagne.

(the whole review is here )

 AND... happy Bastille Day!

Ottawa poet/editor/publisher rob mclennan hit New Orleans to read with his lady Christine McNair and with Stephen Brockwell at the atmospheric Goldmine. Of course, it is New Orleans, so most venues are pretty damn atmospheric...but the Goldmine is the home of 17 Poets! hosted by Dave Brinks & Megan Burns--for a perfect description of the recent Canuck-invasion soiree, see rob's blog here.

The Goldmine always makes me think of Dawson City, because really the place could only exist here in New Orleans or in Dawson.

There's a fissure in the floor that runs down past the performance/reading area, a fissure that surely leads to a gold seam deep in the swampland of Crescent City. And whenever any poet reads a poem about death (and poets, well, they often read poems about death)--whenever that happens, one of the old pinball or video machines in the front part of the bar gurgles and bings to itself, in a secret game-thought about obsolescence and poetic survival.

The latest issue of Big Bridge is now online & I'm thrilled to be included alongside Paris-based poets like Alice Notley & Jennifer K. Dick. Check out my work (excerpted from any bright horse) here. And peruse the whole 30 Poets line-up here

My first reading from the new book! I was at the April 2012 Calgary Spoken Word Festival (founded by kick-ass poet & performer Sheri-D Wilson). 

thunderstorms across a city that smells of jasmine flowers, crawfish, mules & mud. living on Bourbon Street (no lie), and reading Vincent A. Cellucci's AN EASY PLACE / TO DIE. because this city rings, an old cracked bell/belle:

“This book is a journey through the bookended history of poetry localized in the most magical place in America. The poems are eager to turn you on to death. Not erotically. Nor religiously. Nor philosophically. Simply. May they ease you as they ease me. We are all death’s children and we’ve yet to stop squirming but poetry is our grandmothers’ whiskey dipped pacifier. Poems are also words living on a page. Simple moments when world rings instead of your cell.” - Cellucci

John Kliphan is one of the reasons I'm a poet in Paris, and I'm going to miss him. John died last month, here in the city he loved. The Live Poets Society, founded, curated, and directed by John, was the longest-running reading series of its kind in Paris. Through Live Poets, we were given the chance to meet once a month--always in an excellent pub--to listen to new work, hear old favourites, and talk about poetry. For John, poetry was something very much alive and spoken; he used to explain patiently that Live Poets wasn't a Society you could buy a membership for...you simply became part of it by showing up, by listening, and by reading your work. He always (ALWAYS) wore a black beret.

John was one of the first people who ever invited me to be "a featured reader" and he actually paid his poets for their work, which was (and remains) a radical concept. He believed that poetry was valid, necessary, and completely normal, rather like breathing--a lesson which I continue to appreciate. I was lucky to read with John a few times, and I'm honoured to be part of his memorial reading on March 4. 

Here's John Kliphan's poem for Chet Baker, from his collection, Chain Songs:

Chet

I don't want to die

I just want to go in the back room

For a while

March 4, 2012, 13h at The Highlander Pub, 8 rue de Nevers, 75006 (just off the Pont Neuf on the Left Bank) Reading begins at 1pm (NOT 3pm as I originally thought), and a wide assortment of Paris writers & friends will be reading from John's work. If you're in Paris, come on by! It'll be a very Irish-style of wake, I assure you... 

what kind of noise exactly does a lobster make while walking along Italian marble mosaics? in honour of Gerard de Nerval, a pet lobster featured as a character today in the story-walk through the 19th-century arcades between Passages Jouffroy & the Palais-Royal.

then we warmed up our chilled toes at the ever-grouchy Cafe Nemours...always redeemed by the view onto Place Colette & the decent hot chocolate. made me think of meeting Janet Skeslein Charles there last spring in the sunshine, when we talked about writing & being thrown off trains in Belarus (seriously!) here's a link to my chat with Janet.

thanks everyone who joined me today in the cold Paris sunshine for the 'Mysterious Passages' walk as part of my WALK INSOLITE series! This painting is how I imagine Rachel, at a celebratory dinner a week or two after this story...)

after the beignets have disappeared - the tell-tale icing sugar trails out of the Cafe du Monde and into the night