Luigi Mangione

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So many people have written to me to say that the Luigi Mangione story reminds them of my novel Rich and Poor. [Rich and Poor was also translated into French and published by Le Quartanier as Riches et pauvres.] The perfect gift for Xmas.

Years ago I also started writing a sequel to Rich and Poor but then gave up on the endeavour. If you’re curious you can find it here: The Biography (Unfinished Story Fragment).

As well, so I don't need to do another post, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a bestseller at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.



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Some favourite things from my 2024

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[So it seems like I now do this list more or less every year. I really do love lists. As with previous years, this is in no particular order and many of these things didn't come out during the previous year. As well, there should really be more performances on the list, but since the pandemic I'm still not seeing nearly as much as I used to and sadly this is where things currently stand.]



Music
serpentwithfeet – GRIP
Tomeka Reid Quartet – 3+3
Tomeka Reid Quartet – Old New
Mike Lindsay – supershapes volume 1
Quinton Barnes – HAVE MERCY ON ME
Jeff Parker ETA IVtet – The Way Out of Easy
Robert Wyatt – Different Every Time
Grian Chatten – Chaos For The Fly
Ka – The Thief Next To Jesus
more eaze – lacuna and parlor
Sports Team – Gulp!


Books
Mauro Javier Cárdenas – American Abductions
Eunsong Kim – The Politics of Collecting
Nuar Alsadir – Animal Joy
Stacey D’Erasmo – The Long Run
Sofia Samatar – Opacities
Kevin Yuen Kit Lo – Design against Design
Yaniya Lee – Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art
Valérie Bah – Subterrane
Angel B.H. – All Hookers Go To Heaven
Mercedes Eng – cop city swagger
Renee Gladman – My Lesbian Novel
Camilla Townsend – Fifth Sun
Jonas Eika – After the Sun (Translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)


Performances and Visual Art
Rébecca Chaillon – Carte noire nommée désir
Sonia Hughes – I am from Reykjavik
Michikazu Matsune – All Together
Louise Liliefeldt – Seen and Heard


Plus:
Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir
Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo
Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman



[Finally, as you probably already know, I published a book this year that got some really nice reviews.]




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Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman

Some passages from My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman:


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I find it hard to pretend like something is happening all the time. I resist, in fiction, the notion that you must write the boring stuff to make the parts you’re excited to write about more believable. If something makes you go dim, I think you should avoid it.


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But I want to be a kind of reader as I write. That means not knowing what’s up ahead.


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I learned how much people who are not writing experimental novels have their characters eat pizza and watch TV.


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Did I say that a large majority of books in the lesbian romance genre are poorly written? This is the case for hetero and other queer romances, too. It’s an asshole thing to say but no less true. The genre does not regard language as a living force, as an inhabitable space, a space for encounter. Rather, each sentence tends to be treated as if it were a sharp-edged container with one function. Like: point. Or: explain. Or: dramatize. It goes: “Lucy opened the refrigerator.” “I drove home.” “We looked at each other with heat in our eyes.” “Doug nodded.” “Bess was puzzled.” “After everything that happened yesterday, Morgan knew what she needed to do.” In a way, these are the sentences we live with. Maybe we don’t say them, but this is what we’re acting out all day, and someone had the bright idea, yes, let’s use these sentences for writing. Conversely, though, literary fiction is bad with love. Very very bad. Like ugh, could this be any more devastating, any heavier or more hopeless? I do it too. I leave my characters sitting on hilltops for all eternity. I have them being swept out of a familiar world into an unknown and dangerous one. People walking the streets desperately alone, fleeing a crisis they can’t even see. So… yeah… could I write something that made people feel good – women, I guess, or people who were excited to see women fall for each other – and could the language have some aliveness to it? Be porous? Be responsive? Make atmospheres?


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When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet. You can’t have just any figment be a character. They should have to pass a test.


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Some passages from The Long Run by Stacey D’Erasmo

Some passages from The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry by Stacey D’Erasmo:


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In the same way I envy gardeners, I have also envied people of deep religious faith, because they know that they are part of something so much bigger than themselves that is kindly disposed toward them, and they can lean back against that.


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I have long said that the experience of queerness, in the time when I was coming out, prepared me beautifully for being a writer. Like being queer, being an artist means that you are continuously insisting on doing something that maybe no one wants you to do, that very possibly isn’t going to work, that’s only going to end in defeat and humiliation, and that is unlikely to bring worldly rewards or general approval.


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When dealing with power – the power of employers, the power of gatekeepers, the power of the critical establishment – being able to say no is perhaps the most crucial point of leverage. It’s a common assumption that being able to say no to authority comes only with an equivalent, or greater, amount of power, money, and fame. However, it is, of course, precisely when one doesn’t have as much power as authority that the ability to say no matters most, particularly if one is in it for the long run.


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This requires not the momentary strength of the assassin, but the deep stamina of the double agent.


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Some passages from Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir

Some passages from Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation by Nuar Alsadir:


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The dominant issue bringing people into my office for psychoanalysis is the sense that, after sacrificing so much to achieve the lives they had dreamed of, they’re unable to experience the pleasure they had expected to accompany those ideal lives they labored to construct.


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“Look at your aggressiveness,” Winnicott writes in a letter; “…it provides one of the roots of living energy.” By numbing aggression, as by supressing anxiety, you may avoid conflict with those around you, but you will also lose access to the taproot, the ability to feel creative, alive, connected to others, real. By harnessing your living energy – aggressiveness, anxiety, primitive destructive impulses, savage complexity, you can, as McGonigal suggests, “use some of this energy, some of this biochemistry to make choices or take actions that are consistent with what matters most.” 


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One of the exercises in clown school was to take the stage with others and spontaneously create a game. The first initiated action functions as a proposal that is then collaboratively developed through improvisation. When I performed this exercise, one of the actors onstage with me lifted his shirt and another spontaneously slapped his belly. We then created a game of shirt-lifting and belly-slapping.

However, as anyone who has participated in a group project knows, there is invariably an alpha participant, who, believing they have an idea superior to the one at hand, directs their energy toward changing course, switching from shirt-lifting and belly-slapping to some other game that has been proposed by them that is more in line with how they would like to be perceived.

One of the most meaningful lessons I learned in clown school was offered by Bayes in the moment when one of the actors onstage with me tried to do just that. “There is no better game,” he admonished, “than the one you’re playing.”

Or, as in driving, always turn your wheel in the direction of the skid –


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Le génie des autres and remembering 1998

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At the bottom of this post is a picture of the French translation of my very first book Unrehearsed Beauty (from 1998, translated into French as Le génie des autres.) Thinking back to 1998 (the year I moved to Montreal and began working with PME-ART) is really something else. I was so focused on the desire to make a new kind of theatre. And then we did. (Our performance Unrehearsed Beauty/Le Génie des autres was perhaps the best example of this.)

As you might already know, Christophe Bernard is in the process of translating all of my books for Le Quartanier. They’ve already done four:

Le génie des autres
La famille se crée en copulant
La joie criminelle des pirates
Riches et pauvres

https://lequartanier.com/auteur/95-jacob-wren

[In the original English these books are Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates and Rich and Poor.]

Today I’ll be signing books at the Le Quartanier table at the Salon du livre de Montréal from 6pm-7pm. A moment when I go back in time, instead of promoting my current book Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim.


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Here’s a short excerpt from Unrehearsed Beauty:


“The corpse must properly digest its food.


The food must be grown in pastures where just the briefest hint of ideology remains.


Ideology pertains to time.


Time is a character in a morality play with the following title.


The title of the morality play is “Actions Against Reason.”


In the play a corpse is featured prominently.


The corpse neither eats nor digests but is somehow made aware of the presence of food.


Food is laid out on the table in such a way that it spells out the defeat of those who understand only what they were born to someday understand.


When you are born you admit defeat.


Admitting defeat is the same as committing a crime.


And there is only one crime: to vomit when you know from the bottom of your heart that it is unproductive to do so.


Productive vomiting is tolerated but not encouraged.


Criminals require encouragement. Corpses do not.”

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Eunsong Kim Quote

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“Because of TZ, I want to write a treatise against the ways in which utilitarian thinking has mutated our activism, our education, our action, our lives. I want to write declarations that defend trying, and trying again, because why not. This would be a manifesto that proclaims empowerment is not the state of feeling good in this reality, but a practice of life unsurrendered to living.”
- Eunsong Kim, “What I Did Not Do, Will Change Me”




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From Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech

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"We learn commitment and discipline not from the soulless neoliberal conditioning that turns radicalism into a brand rather than a practice, that tells us the only way we can make change as writers is to “witness” or to “speak out” as individuals, but from the examples of revolutionary writers, who are also some of our greatest organization-builders, who have sacrificed everything for their people.

We learn from Ghassan Kanafani, who said to his niece Lamees the day before they were both martyred by Zionist forces in 1972, when she asked him if he would ever focus more on his writing than his revolutionary activities, “I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles. The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty.”

We learn from George Jackson, who wrote more than fifty years ago from prison, “Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved… Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

As writers we are trained in description and critique, in imagination. But what we need more of is practice. Practice withholding our labour, practice talking to each other, practice organizing our own alternative spaces that aren’t beholden to corporate sponsors who profit from producing death, practice giving something up to help each other survive.

Every campaign we wage together is practice. It goes beyond any one prize, any one sponsor.

We’ve fielded a lot of critiques since this campaign started, some genuine, many in bad faith from elites now attending the Giller gala across the street—for expanding our targets to include Indigo Books and the Azrieli Foundation, for not trying to make slow institutional change from the inside, for not trying to find a third way, a more “pragmatic” way.

To that, I want to share the words of the political theorist Joy James, who writes, “If you’re going to use the term ‘pragmatic’ to discipline radicals, my preference is that you say nothing…If you want to discipline rebels then pony up something tangible: raise bail funds, pay for their attorneys, feed their kids while they are inside, or try to get them out. You cannot lecture risk-taking people about being politically ‘infantile’ out of your fear or out of your accumulations…There’s nobody we admire who is pragmatic… Everybody could have been ‘pragmatic.’ But if they were, we would not have any ancestors.”

I want to do away with this false binary between writers and organizers. Culture alone, the work we do on the page, will not be enough. Reasoning with or trying to reform the cultural institutions that prop up this settler colonial state will not be enough. We have to be willing, at the very least, to take risks for each other, to relinquish the false accolades, the fancy galas, all of them the oppressor’s incentives to keep us from actively building solidarity with each other."

- from Jody Chan’s Boycott Giller Speech



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Two new opportunities at the National Arts Centre

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Two new opportunities at the National Arts Centre:
- Creative Producer Fellowship
- Apprenticeship Program for Technical Production, Producing and Design
The calls close on Dec 4th.


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Monday, November 18th

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Solidarity is our Strength: Auction for Gaza, Lebannon and Sudan
from November 18th-28th

NO ARMS IN THE ARTS TOUR
Monday, November 18th - 7-8:30PM
Librairie Drawn and Quarterly, 176 Rue Bernard O
Featuring: Catherine Hernandez, Jacob Wren, Marcela Huerta, Nyla Matuk, River Halen, Sadie Avery Lake, T. Liem, and more!

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Some press quotes for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

Some press quotes for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim:

“This is a deeply moving, challenging novel, and certainly very prescient. What is our obligation to others, particularly those in war-torn countries? How are we implicated through the tangled threads of history? Wren has written an anti-war novel, but it’s far more nuanced and unclear than I think we’d like to believe that the position of anti-war is. … A perfectly positioned novel for the current historical moment.”
– Alison Manley, The Miramichi Reader

“In Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Jacob Wren has written a courageous, alarming and utterly original work of fiction. The ethical conundrums it addresses are myriad and relevant, and while it offers no solutions, it is relentless in its exposure of unflattering human truths that many of us, given a choice, would prefer to avoid.”
– Ian Colford, The Seaboard Review

“A Jacob Wren novel is known for several things: narrators undergoing neurotic self-interrogation, a consideration of the gap between theory and practice, and a certain metafictional flair when it comes to signalling the work’s own existence as a radical text. All of these authorial trademarks are sent into overdrive in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, Wren’s introspective protest novel about the role that doubt plays in any political awakening.”
– Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Quill & Quire

“Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is an anti-war novel that reminds us of our complicity in global conflicts, while offering a glimpse of the hope that drives resistance.”
– Ariane Fournier, Maisonneuve

“Jacob Wren’s latest scintillating work of literary fiction, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, is a book in revolt. Wren crafts a bold and unsettling narrative with the kind of clarity to explore ethical dilemmas that are both numerous and timely.”
– Samuel Wise, Montreal Guardian

"Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is a book full of discomfort, despair, and uncertainty, as collective organizing can be; but, like collective organizing, it also brims with the energy of argument, exchange, and a staunch belief in alternative ways of living..."
- H Felix Chau Bradley, Montreal Review of Books

"In Jacob Wren’s Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, published in September, an unnamed narrator navigates an unnamed war zone, internally monologuing on morality and pain. These slightly blurrier, vaguer worlds suggest a search for a human universal. While reference-heavy writing is stuffed, like a meme’s compaction of complex emotion and history into a single low-res image, there’s an alternative roominess: space to take ideas past previous or logical bounds, or to articulate opinions that a mutual follower hasn’t posted already. Those ideas are probably harder to sell, and to write."
- Greta Rainbow, The Walrus

"So is it a satire of western activists’ mentality around the suffering of faraway others, or is it a case of it? Does it offer a utopianism we need, or a fantasy couched in sophistry? Yes and no, and guilty on all counts. But in risking annoying/offending everyone, like an inverted Houellebecq, its currents of maximal yearning and doubt still agitate the nervous system weeks after reading."
- Carl Wilson, 'Crritic!'

"Dry Your Tears To Perfect Your Aim is a swan song to fiction where the "Utopia" it imagines is NOT the utopia where a single person, through sheer tyranny of will, can change the world. It is instead a "Utopia" where "fiction" is once again useful in creating an immediate, urgent, revolutionary and libidinal mythos."
- Khashayar Mohammadi, Called To Fiction

"Wren’s protagonist is not the first visitor from safer, more privileged parts of the world to visit revolutions in progress, and to wrestle, with varying degrees of success, with the ethical puzzles that permeate this strange, somewhat difficult but in the end important work of fiction."
- Tom Sandborn, Rabble

“If the personal is political, then isn't the political personal? This was a question that I had throughout reading this reflective and well-written book. No matter where your political beliefs fall, Jacob Wren's new novel demands to be read for its poignant and propulsive nature. And I will double down on Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim on being one of the best pieces of Canadian Literature this year. Just don't let the prize lists fool you. You're smarter than that.”
– Adam Ferris on Goodreads

"Still, Wren is one of the few “political” writers of quality working in the Canadian small press. If you are able to accept that Dry Your Tears is more a work about the paralysis of western do-gooders than the lives of active revolutionaries, it has considerable insight to offer—particularly on the centrality of faith to radical political activism. In its final third, the protagonist and a character from “the thin strip of land” struggle with the grey lassitude of living in Canada after experiencing revolutionary life. Faith is a phenomenon fed by privation, sparked by opportunity, and sustained by fellowship—to maintain a faith in revolution in the face of the comfortable, mannered aloneness of Canadian culture requires uncommon conviction. Having thus diagnosed the challenge, Wren uses his final act of authorial sleight of hand to move himself out of the way, implying that a younger generation shaped by eroding material conditions, grounded in collectivist principles, and raised without a reflexive shame at its own being will be the locus of a change to come. It’s a notion based on faith as much as evidence, but belief is what is called for now."
- Mulgrave on Goodreads

“Subversive and experimental in approach, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim brings forward questions, as urgent as they are conflicted, around issues of personal responsibility in times of political turmoil. The book asks readers to confront the ethical, moral, and practical considerations of becoming involved in political struggles – especially when they are not the struggles of your own people. Who has the right to bear witness? Who has the right to tell the stories of others? Does Wren’s narrator act out of courage and compassion? Or the curiosity of a tourist? Original in its form and passionate in its prose, Wren has offered an important anti-war novel that poses big questions and dares the world to answer.”
- Jury comments from 2024 Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

Plus:
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is #3 on the October edition of the Hamilton Review of Books' Independently Published Bestsellers List.



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