Myna Wallin is a poet, prose writer and small press publisher. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including: The Algonquin Square Table Anthology, Eye Weekly, Taddle Creek Magazine, Surface and Symbol, The Annex Echo, My Lump in the Bed; Love Poems for George W. Bush, edited by Stuart Ross, Moosecall #1: Mating in the Bleak City/Romance in the Urban Wilderness, and Kiss Machine, the Disposable Issue. Myna is also the host of "In Other Words," the monthly literary radio show on CKLN 88.1 FM.
Dani Couture interviewed Myna Wallin in March 2006.
Your first book of poems is being published by Tightrope Books this year. What kind of experience has working on the book been?
It's been a dream. I'm ridiculously lucky to be working with someone as talented and creative as Halli Villegas. She's a wonderful supporter of talent as well as being a brilliant strategist. She manages to gather a number of talented people, from artists and designers, to publicists and filmmakers, and do whatever she can to make a book and a book launch an exciting event. Halli gets involved in every area of book publishing, taking the editing, publicity, promotion, and distribution of each book seriously. Plus, she's a lot of fun to work with!
Will the book include mostly work that we've seen in your previous chapbooks or a combination of new and older work?
Both new and older work, published and unpublished poems, will lie down side by side inside the covers. My fingers are crossed.
Since you do work as an editor, do you find it difficult to have your own work edited by others?
Good question. No, I'm like a psychiatrist who can see everyone but herself. Even though I have edited many other writers' work-in fact, freelance editing is my day job-I find I get myopic with my own and can't see the forest for the trees. And as for working with my editor, Ray Hsu, he's nothing short of inspirational. Sorry for the hyperbole, but this is the best experience I could possibly have hoped for! He has a way of analyzing the shape and progression of a book that is extremely sophisticated.
What is the Believe Your Own Press 2006 line-up looking like?
I must admit-I've been dragging my feet on the press of late, since I find it hard to concentrate on more than one big project at a time. As soon as my manuscript goes off to the typesetter, I'll throw myself into that. We already have some talented writers for our next launch: widely-published poet Carolyn Clink (this will be her third poetry chapbook), Teresa Dunat (this will be her first publication), Nahsira Dernesch (the 2006 Discovery Night Winner at the Art Bar) and David Clink (co-publisher of the press, we will publish his fifth chapbook). To check out our link: www.poetrymachine.com/believe and we'll be at the Toronto Small Press Book Fair in the spring.
What has been your largest challenge as host of "In Other Words" on CKLN?
Definitely it's been on the technical end of things. I'm not exactly what you'd call techno-savvy but I'm no technophobe either. Still, it's a bit daunting because any mistakes you make are heard live immediately. For the first six months or so I've had technical assistance from production manager, Mark Bialkowski. Now I have worked the actual board twice while conducting interviews. When it all comes together, it feels like what I imagine flying a plane would be like-terrifying and thrilling simultaneously.
Finally, what books are on your bedside table?
I've always got a dozen books half-falling off of it at any one time, and another three lost under the covers. I like reading poetry, obviously, and am enjoying Karen Solie's Modern and Normal (Brick Books, 2005), Shannon Bramer's The Refrigerator Memory (Coach House Books, 2005), as well as K.D. Miller's Holy Writ: A Writer Reflects on Creation and Inspiration (The Porcupine's Quill, 2005). I'm also reading Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. (Ballantine Books, 1992).
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading