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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