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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Venez travailler pour PME-ART / Come work for PME-ART

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Venez travailler pour PME-ART !
Consultez notre offre d'emploi : Direction générale & production exécutive
Date limite de candidature avec lettre d’intérêt et C.V. : le 10 novembre 2024

Come work for PME-ART:
Read the General Manager & Executive Producer Job Offer
Applications are due by November 10, 2024


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Boycott Indigo

More info at: Boycottindigobooks.com

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by University-Rosedale for Palestine (@ur4palestine)

Reviews, Press & Events

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is in stores now.


Reviews so far:
Ian Colford in The Seaboard Review
Jean Marc Ah-Sen in Quill & Quire
Alison Manley in The Miramichi Reader
Ariane Fournier in Maisonneuve
Samuel Wise in the Montreal Guardian
H Felix Chau Bradley in the Montreal Review of Books
Greta Rainbow in The Walrus
Carl Wilson in 'Crritic!'
Khashayar Mohammadi Called to Fiction

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

Instagram so far:
booksaredeadly
Adam Ferris
whatithinkaboutthisbook
niknak.tbr.stack
tinamayreads
lindsay_wincherauk
readandbookmarked
leafbyleaf_official
valerier6671
thattmum
graceisbookedandbusy

Read an excerpt at Send My Love To Anyone.

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Events and Parallel Events

Thurs Sept 19 at 7pm:
MONTREAL LAUNCH with Alexei Perry Cox
at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly

Sun Sept 22 at 1pm:
Frontline Fiction: War and Humanity / Saad T. Farooqi & Jacob Wren
at the Toronto International Festival of Authors

Tues Oct 1 at 7pm:
TORONTO LAUNCH with Malcolm Sutton
at Another Story Bookshop / Eventbrite link

Sat Oct 5 at 11am:
Weaving the Self into Story: An Exploration of Auto-fiction
with Erin Brubacher, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Jacob Wren & Ann Yu-Kyung Choi (Moderator)
at The & Festival, Mississauga

Tues Oct 8 at 7pm:
Sofia Ajram launches COUP DE GRÂCE
in conversation with Jacob Wren
at De Stiil Books

Thurs Oct 10 at 8pm:
Aaron Kreuter's Montreal Launch for Rubble Children
with Jacob Wren and Anita Anand
at Bar NDQ

Sat Oct 19th at 4pm
An afternoon of book launches
Jacob Wren launches Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
Knut Ove Arntzen launches TEATER I BEVEGELSE
Hordaland Kunstsenter
Bergen, Norway

Wed Oct 23 at 8:30pm:
The Power of Political Prose
with Conor Kerr, Kirsten McDougall, Jacob Wren & Michelle Cyca (Moderator)
at the Vancouver Writers Fest / Waterfront Theatre

Sun Oct 27 at 3:30pm:
The Afternoon Tea
with Myriam J. A. Chancy, Anne Fleming, Conor Kerr, Kirsten McDougall, Claire Messud & Jacob Wren, hosted by Bill Richardson
at the Vancouver Writers Fest / Performance Works

Wed October 30th
Montreal Review of Books Fall Launch
with Amal Elsana Al’hjooj, Arjun Basu & Jacob Wren
at P'tit Ours (formerly Ursa)
Doors at 6:30, readings at 7:00pm

Ask for Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim as your favourite local bookshop or order it directly from the publisher here.

Renee Gladman Symposium

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Very excited to be part of the Renee Gladman Symposium

Porter Square Books: Boston Edition / Thursday, September 5, 2024 - 6:00pm to 9:00pm

RSVP here: https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/renee-gladman-symposium

Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is available for preorder

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim is available for preorder.

Read a long excerpt at Send My Love To Anyone.

And a brief excerpt below:

"I start to think about all the stated reasons for this war and other wars like it. For humanitarian reasons (every time an expensive humanitarian bomb landed on civilians, it was enough to turn even the most optimistic Pollyanna into a hardened cynic). To fight communists. To fight terrorists. To stop the spread of communism or terrorism or extremism or something else. To help people. To improve the lot of women. Because we’re right and they’re wrong. Because: Why do they hate us and why do they hate our way of life? Because war has always existed and will always exist. To increase the quantity of democracy in the world. Because we have a responsibility to the world and to freedom. For freedom. For strategic reasons. To stop a domino from setting off all the other dominoes.

And then I move on to what I think the reasons are for this war and so many others. Because our leaders need therapy. Because a bully needs a victim. Because so-called powerful men are deeply insecure. So politicians in favour of war can get elected or re-elected by voters in favour of war. To make money. To placate the arms industry and their high-priced lobbyists. To justify never-ending increases in the military budget. To distract from rampant domestic problems. To bring certain natural resources and labour into the jurisdiction of the global marketplace. To ensure these resources most benefit the capitalists doing the bombing and least benefit the people being bombed. Because it’s easier to kill people who look or sound different than you. Because hatred takes on a life of its own. To explain to the world that you do it our way or suffer the consequences. Because a protection racket needs to constantly ensure no one steps out of line or seeks protection elsewhere. So they can set up permanent military bases to keep the surrounding countries in line. Because there is no alternative. Because there is only room for one empire at a time."

atmospheric quarterly

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Thank you to the atmospheric quarterly for publishing the opening section from Desire Without Expectation:

https://www.atmosphericquarterly.com/jacob-wren

Here's a short excerpt:

“I understand the desire for revenge. I have felt it, though I have rarely acted on such feelings. Instead I have let the desire for revenge fester within me. And yet, at the same time, I have never felt that if someone who hurt me was hurt in turn, it would make me feel any better. I have felt the desire for revenge but also see such desires as basically pointless. Sometimes I wonder if a sincere apology would make me feel better. Perhaps most of the apologies I have received didn’t quite feel sincere. Or I didn’t know how to take them in. I often find myself apologizing to others. I fear I might have gotten too good at it.”




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To the Giller Foundation: Cut Ties with Genocide

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"We, the undersigned, have made the decision to withdraw our books from consideration for the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and to refuse participation in all programming or promotions associated with the Giller Foundation."

Read the full letter here.

Instagram post here.

You can also read about it in The Globe and Mail, CBC, Toronto Star, Quill and Quire, and LitHub.

For a longer read: How the Giller Prize Became Associated with Genocide

Grateful to be a part of this. And to all the other authors taking a stand.

In one week, 27 authors with books eligible for this year's Giller Prize have pulled their titles from consideration. 2 of the 5 jurors (Dinaw Mengestu and Megha Majumdar) have also pulled out.

If you have a book out within the Giller Prize eligibility period (Oct 1 2023 - Sept 30 2024), then you should seriously consider signing this letter as well.

# No Business As Usual In Can Lit

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The table of contents from The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure

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The table of contents from:

The Poetics of Translation: A Thinking Structure
by Geneviève Robichaud

(Perhaps the first chapter on PME-ART written by someone other than me.)

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Excerpt from Things That Insist (in three parts)

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“What first attracted me to making performances was the fact that it was so ephemeral. You had to be in the moment and, if it was going to happen, it had to happen right fucking now. Yet now I’m basically over that aspect of it.

Artistically I lead a double life: half my life spent writing books, the other half spent performing. And more and more I prefer the books side of my life for the simple reason that books last.

Every once in a while, someone writes to me, saying they just read a book I wrote a very long time ago, and I experience these messages almost like a relief: that there is an object out there in the world, with my name on it, doing the work for me. Doing the work in my place.

Yet something similar does sometimes happen with performance. For example, I’ll add someone on social media and they’ll send me a message saying they saw me perform ten years ago, and they still fondly remember the experience.

Why do I find this version of past works entering into the present somehow less satisfying? The performance version less satisfying than the one involving books. Is it only because it occurs less frequently?

In 2018, I attempted to partly solve this dilemma by writing a book that recounted twenty years of my performance work. And, in doing so, I made a kind of small discovery: that the descriptions of the performances recounted in the book almost replaced people’s memories of the performances themselves.

The printed version was sharper, clearer and more recent when compared to the vagueness of memory. And yet, of course, there was another way in which memories were more intense, evocative and personal.

Performance is ephemeral, but the performances we remember also exist because we remember them. The very fact we remember them is a testament to their value.

I have never gone to an archive, any sort of archive, to look up a performance I’ve previously seen. I have only ever looked up performances I didn’t see.

In this way, I might intuit that I value the live experience more than I value any recorded account of it. I don’t want to spoil my fading memory of the performance by consulting an archived account of it.

But enough about me.”



From my response to the dance+words’ Dance Dialogues series. Read the entire piece here: https://www.dancepluswords.ca/artistresponses/jacob-wren



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Excerpt from the work-in-progress Desire Without Expectation

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When the weather is good, we sleep outside, far away from other people. There are enough of us to feel safe. Sometimes, in the morning, we would tell each other our dreams. Sometimes our dreams shared characters, the same characters would leave one dream and enter another. We would talk about these dream people, try to describe them to each other, try to ensure they were actually the same figures. That our dreams were falling into sync. Over time we gave these figures names. We argued playfully about what their names might be:

There was The Slickster, who smoothly entered into any dream situation and worked his way through it and into prominence. Other names for The Slickster that we considered and rejected: Mr. Busy, Hungry Guy, Don’t Like Him and Politician.

There was Lady Fighter, who would stand up against any injustice and hold space for others to do the same. Other names for Lady Fighter that were considered: The Organizer, Public Good, Solidarity 101 and When We Fight We Win.

There was New Romantic, who spent most of each dream explaining various genres of music, and the soundtrack of each dream would shift to correspond, like an in-progress personalized mixed tape. Other names considered: Adam Anti, Fade to Grey, Bron Area and Floppy Haircut.

There was The Quiet One, who was often unnoticeable in the background of a scene until some unexpected moment they suddenly became helpful. Other names: The One Who Knows, Catches Everything, Wallpaper Boy and Easily Forgotten.

There was the Irrepressible Being, a kind of ghostly presence that possessed an omnipotent overview of all that happened and therefore could give startling insights at key moments. Other names quickly rejected: Golden Spirit, Imaginary Figment, Dream Dream Dream Figure and Lost Forever.

And then there was you, the protagonist of your own singular dream. There is almost always you.




[I'm gradually realizing that Desire Without Expectation might be the final part of a planned trilogy based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.]



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An excerpt from Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone)

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The excerpt from Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement, from my text Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone), that I read at the launch:



“With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.

As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.

[…]

What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.”

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[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]



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Survival Technologies opens May 30th!!!

Survival Technologies
At Festival TransAmériques.
More information here: https://fta.ca/en/event/survival-technologies/

Produced by PME-ART

Creator, Director, Sound Design, Performer: Elena Stoodley
Co-Ideator: Kamissa Ma Koïta

Visual Design: Kamissa Ma Koïta, Elena Stoodley, Bay Dam, Vladimir Cara
Set and Lighting Design: Paul Chambers
Assistant Set and Lights: Jordana Natale
Interactive Art Design: Bay Dam
Performer, Cultural Consultant: Jean Durandisse
Performer, Dance Consultant and Costume Designer: Michèle Jean-Jacques
Performer and Dance Consultant: Sophia Gaspard
Percussionist and Cultural Consultant: Karl-Henry Brézault
Artistic Consultants: Dana Michel + Karla Étienne
Artistic Facilitator, Dramaturgy Assistant: Jacob Wren
Artistic Contribution: Sonia Hughes
Producer: Sylvie Lachance
Technical Director: Vladimir Cara
Assistant Stage Manager: Nicoleta Stoodley
Production Manager: Becks Lefranc

Co-produced by Festival TransAmériques + Forum Freies Theater (Düsseldorf) + Festspillene i Nord-Norge (Harstad)
Developed with the support of National Arts Centre’s National Creation Fund (Ottawa)
Presented in association with Agora de la danse + Tangente

Premiered at Festival TransAmériques, on May 30, 2024

Read a review here: https://ruinaacesa.com.br/survival-technologies/




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From 2015: My Apologies

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I wrote this in 2015:

"Guilt is conservative. We are all implicated in more ways than we will ever know but shouldn’t feel guilty. We should be angry, must become open to an anger that experiences possibilities everywhere, that opens towards genuinely other ways of seeing our predicament and where it might first or most crack."



From this novel I started but couldn't finish: My Apologies



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Lilly Dancyger Quote

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"I always tell my writing students not to try to wrap things up in a neat little bow when they’re actually complicated and unresolved. That the lack of closure can be a better ending than manufactured closure that’s not genuine. The parts of the story that don’t seem to fit together can often be where the real story is. I encourage them to look for those spots of friction and write into the complexity. That’s where the good stuff is."
- Lilly Dancyger



From this interview: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/finding-the-story-a-conversation-with-lilly-dancyger/



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protest music

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The fact that it's Macklemore who's bringing the protest music wasn't on my bingo card: HIND’S HALL.



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Riches et pauvres and La joie criminelle des pirates published by Le Quartanier

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Very excited that Riches et pauvres and La joie criminelle des pirates have been translated into French and published by Le Quartanier:

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

The original English versions of these books are Rich and Poor and If our wealth is criminal then let’s live with the criminal joy of pirates.

A review in Le Devoir: https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/813123/critique-fiction-riches-pauvres-petite-entreprise

And a review in La Presse: https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/litterature/2024-06-01/lutte-epistolaire.php

Thank you to the translator Christophe Bernard and to everyone else at Le Quartanier.

many false starts

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Between writing novels, I attempt to start writing new novels, many false starts. Why does one of the starts eventually take while the others don't? Not a reason but a feeling. Mostly a feeling that I don't know where it's going but I want to find out.



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Miguel Gutierrez Quote

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“Living longer means you witness the daily onslaught of stupid and mean that passes for reality.

Living longer means you witness the toggle between progression and backlash, over and over like a tennis game from hell.

Living longer means you meet young people who are better or worse versions of who you once were.

Living longer means you draw the logic of your perspective into a latticework of meaning that purportedly helps you see patterns, something you might call “maturity.” But more often than not it feels like you’re just decorating a cage of your own design, rendering yourself unsupple and resistant to change.

Living longer means coming to terms with whether or not this is true, every day.”

- Miguel Gutierrez, Aging Awfully



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Two Robert Wyatt Quotes

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Ryan Dombal: “…your career is a good example of how being an underdog isn’t necessarily something to overcome.”

Robert Wyatt: “Well, that’s about the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in years. I hope that’s the truth. It’s not even a moral question. It’s a question of pride. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don’t know how some people do that. God knows I’ve been so wicked and selfish in the past, but nevertheless, I do really think the things I think and support the people I support. I would encourage people to realize that you don’t have to panic if you’re not part of a mainstream or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don’t just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that’s going to be easier to live with when you’re at the end of your life.”

– Robert Wyatt

From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9544-robert-wyatt/


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“I kind of had nervous breakdown in ‘95. I felt burnt out before my time and just collapsed. I just didn’t want to be me anymore. I was tired of it, though not suicidal. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is me attempting to find an identity outside of the given one, whether it’s listening to Spanish music or Russian communist music or black music. They’re all ways of getting out of the prison of self, really. But at that point, I couldn’t get out. I just felt trapped. Maybe that was a decade-late delay about the accident – at last, the difficulty I was in kicked in. Alfie and I spent most of our time in a sort of fancy wooden cabin on the coast at this point, half an hour away from where we lived in Lincolnshire, and there was no electricity. We didn’t even have records. We listened to stories you could get on cassette.

I got some treatment. I actually went to the doctor and went to anxiety management classes. Alfie said, “I can’t handle this at all,” because I’d gone mad. She’d dealt with everything up to that point, but not that. I came out of that and started working on a record, which became Shleep, and that’s really what took me out of it.

I’d been making records on my own, and somebody said, “Why don’t you get some other people in? You don’t have to marry them. They can just spend a couple of days at your house and do a song with you.” And I thought, "Why not?" From that point on, my records got more crowded. [laughs] It’s helped me. I made two or three records totally solo, and I was going mad in this musical isolation. I just felt so cut off from the world.”

– Robert Wyatt

From this piece: https://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/



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L’idealismo infranto di Jacob Wren di Manuela Pacella

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Thank you to Manuela Pacella for an in depth and charming account of my work, first published in the Italian version of Flash Art, and now part of the book Tell me stories!

Here is their summary, in Italian, of Polyamorous Love Song:

Il cinema e il film sono molto presenti in questo libro. Un personaggio chiave è Filmmaker A. Nel 2002 viene invitata al New York Film Festival, la stessa edizione alla quale Abbas Kiarostami non poté prendere parte perché gli fu negato di entrare negli Stati Uniti. Questo evento la sconvolge e si ritrova a vagare per le strade della città ragionando su come poter realizzare film più veri e riflettendo su Close-Up (1990) di Kiarostami. Ha un’idea che diviene esplosiva e la rende famosa, creando seguaci in tutto il mondo: non si girano più i film; si fa in modo che la propria stessa vita diventi una sceneggiatura e, semplicemente, si agisce, riprendendo la vita ma senza il filtro della telecamera. Ad estrema applicazione del mentore Filmmaker A c’è un gruppo, The Centre for Productive Compromise, che di base usa il sesso libero come sceneggiatura. Per evitare estreme scene di gelosia si sono inventati una droga, insieme a quella che ha il potere di far ricordare i numeri di telefono ma, come effetto collaterale, anche quello delle persone con le quali si sta avendo un rapporto sessuale. C’è anche il Mascot Front, un gruppo di attivisti politici estremi che indossano pelose maschere da mascotte e c’è un artista visivo che un giorno le vede dalla sua finestra correre, armate, inseguite da uomini in divisa: prima un orso, poi un coniglio, poi un cono gelato, una tartaruga e un canguro. Durante questa visione surreale un colpo di pistola lo ferisce per sbaglio. Da quel momento diventa un’ossessione e ovviamente vuole farci un’opera d’arte ma finisce rapito dalle mascotte e da queste legato a un termosifone in una loro sede. Poi c’è l’amico dell’artista, l’artista vero, con molto potenziale che se ne esce con frasi illuminanti tipo: “Tu, i tuoi amici, l’intera cultura mondiale degli artisti e dei bohémien, è come se aveste una strana sorta di malattia. Tutto ciò che volete è che la gente vi guardi, che guardi ciò che fate e pensi che siete speciali e talentuosi. Lo desiderate così tanto da pensare che ci sia qualcosa di sbagliato in quelli di noi che non lo fanno (…) Credimi, non ho bisogno di lettere di ammiratori che mi dicano che i miei pensieri hanno valore. Sono sicuro di me… La mia vita ha il suo percorso… I miei pensieri sono la giusta e unica ricompensa” 14. Ma poi si e ci tradisce: diventa scrittore. E la sua compagna anche è scrittrice e sta scrivendo A Dream for the Future and a Dream for Now, titolo che si scopre poi essere lo stesso di altri libri scritti da diversi autori. Ma mentre quest’ultimi sembrano avere a che fare con un nuovo tipo di religione politica, il principale riguarda una società segreta scomparsa subito dopo la Grande Guerra e riapparsa nei tardi anni Quaranta a New York (ho un flash con Che la festa cominci di Gabriele Ammaniti del 2009). Lo scopo è di organizzare orge a larga scala per assassinare imprenditori e politici di Destra attraverso un’infezione virale a trasmissione sessuale che non infetta, invece, tutti gli altri. Nel capitolo apparentemente meno confuso di tutto il libro, Wren nei panni di Wren si sta facendo tagliare i capelli da un barbiere a Berlino e si immagina un altro barbiere, emigrato a causa delle leggi razziali dalla Germania a New York… Beh, è lui l’inventore del virus, come credo l’inventore della nuova religione politica. STOP. Lo so, è tanto. Ma aggiungo che tutto quello che ho scritto non è affatto in una sequenza che rispetta quella del testo di Wren nel quale, poi, ci sono talmente tanti io narranti da far venire il mal di testa.

Ma è onestamente un capolavoro e la cosa incredibile è che nasce dalla mente e dalle mani di un autore che si autodefinisce cinico ma, in fondo, non è il cinismo “sempre e solo una sorta di idealismo infranto?”15. 
 Appunto, Wren. Non bisogna combattere contro i mulini a vento ma semplicemente, quotidianamente, desiderare qualcosa di diverso. Il desiderio. “Ma non il desiderio che è solo l’altra faccia dell’insicurezza: il desiderio come disperazione. Un vero desiderio, il desiderio di vivere e di essere vivi, di trovare un valore o un significato o una convinzione che possa riempire in modo convincente e dare un senso al nostro breve tempo su questo pianeta dimenticato da Dio”



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Scrolling through Twitter...

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Scrolling through Twitter and I randomly see that claire rousay is reading my book:
https://twitter.com/clairerousay/status/1769129525349368109
http://bookthug.ca/shop/books/authenticy-is-a-feeling-my-life-in-pme-art-by-jacob-wren/

New Jacob Wren chapbook: From Desire Without Expectation

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From Desire Without Expectation
Jacob Wren
$5

"Writing comes easily to me, while I find most other things in life exceedingly difficult. This is often a problem with writers. The truth of what they write is deeply shaded by a writerly distance from life which is also often connected to various forms of loneliness. Writers are often not the best people when it comes to understanding either community or solidarity. Maybe I should only speak for myself. Certain kinds of religious conversions bring one directly into community with others who are similarly converted. As you might have already guessed, I lean rather heavily into not wanting to be part of any club that might have me as a member. Religion has always been one of the places people look to for community. As has often been noted, in our current world, community can be rather hard to come by and even harder to maintain. One of the many reasons religion hasn’t disappeared, as was not so long ago predicted, is it allows its adherents to mainline a sense of community. This is the reason I find easiest to understand."

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
March 2024
as the twenty-fourth title in above/ground’s prose/naut imprint
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

This is Jacob Wren’s second chapbook with above/ground press, following Tributes To The Subtlety Of Matter (1996).

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9. E-transfer or PayPal at rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com or the PayPal button at www.robmclennan.blogspot.com

https://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2024/03/new-from-aboveground-press-press-from.html




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Final Words

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“My name is Aaron Bushnell, I am an active duty member of the US airforce, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal. Free Palestine!”



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Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring...

 

A quote from my book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART. As posted by Lucy Bellwood on Tumblr:

https://lucybellwood.tumblr.com/post/728466340736827392

“Sometimes it seems to me that the process of rehearsal is simply a process of emotional armouring: we will make everything absolutely perfect so no one will ever see who or what we really are.”



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Ten years ago I thought this was never meant to happen....

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I've been thinking a lot about how Polyamorous Love Song came out ten years ago. How it was a moment that, in some ways, really changed my life. The first time it had occurred to me my books could have any sort of readership. I had always assumed I would be a writer without a readership. I had always been told my books were too experimental for very many people to ever read them. And here was one of my most experimental books, being read by far more people than had read anything I'd previously written. I partly assumed the success of Polyamorous Love Song had something to do with the last minute title change, that the title itself drew people to the book. But, much later, a friend said the quality she most liked about it was its “surrealist polyvocality,” and this quality was one of the main reasons for its success. (When I was young I think I wanted to be some sort of “cult writer.” But now that I am in fact some sort of cult writer, I have the strange feeling that people don't even really know what that is anymore.) Ten years is both a long time and not such a long time. Sometimes I have the feeling I will never write anything people like as much again. But, I suppose, every time one puts out a new book there's a chance something unexpected might, once again, occur.

You can read an excerpt here.
You can find out about the original title here.

Plus some reviews of Polyamorous Love Song:
Shannon Tien at Cult Mtl
Liz Worth at Quill and Quire
Jade Colbert at The Globe and Mail
Featured book in Maisonneuve
Lesley Trites for the Montreal Review of Books Blog
Letters we wrote to friends after reading Polyamorous Love Song

Percival Everett Quote

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“In my writing my instinct was to defy form, but I very much sought in defying it to affirm it, an irony that was difficult enough to articulate, much less defend.” 
– Percival Everett, Erasure



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[Fascinated by the idea that they’ve made an Oscar-nominated film from Percival Everett's Erasure. As is often (but not always) the case, the book is considerably better. But I was intrigued by just how Hollywood they managed to make it while at the same time maintaining something of its original essence. Between American Fiction and Poor Things, I find myself wondering if turning experimental novels into Hollywood films has become something of a momentary trend.]


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