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Both new and older work, published and unpublished poems, will lie down side by side inside the covers.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).
So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
I really do think of poetry in that way, in terms of providing a space -- an opening -- in which it might be possible to say the things that are hard, and perhaps impossible, to say otherwise; in which to express that inarticulate feeling that you get sometimes...continue reading
Steve McOrmond's new collection of poems begins with a caution. In the style of TV content warnings, "Advisory" lists potential disturbing content to come: "themes which could threaten the viewer's sense of security," "Evidence of fatalism and irreligion," and the typical forewarnings about sexuality, violence and "language." Here McOrmond displays the dual cautionary and playful perspectives that interact throughout the book, switching from warnings about a drowning and an animal attack to the line, "The following program may contain scenes not suitable for language."
The poem raises the expected questions about what we censor and screen in popular media. What is considered objectionable, and why? Placed at the start of a collection whose title references Armageddon, "Advisory" leads the reader to expect a certain discomfort.
With that warning, the book moves to the title...continue reading