"...even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance."

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"And I’ve always had such a difficult, conflicted relationship with performing. All of the things you say are true: I do like the immediacy, connection, and the idea of a public life that are embodied in the act of performance. And, at the same time, I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to find or create even more immediacy, connection, and public life in art and in performance. There is a sense of ongoing failure that makes the real moments of immediacy and connection in performance all that much more precious. I feel that I’ve wasted my life and I also feel that I haven’t. In a way, for me the act of performance is embodied in this sentiment."

- Jacob Wren, from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART with Sylvie Lachance and Geneviève Robichaud


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Two Montreal events in September 2025

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1) Saturday September 20th at 7pm - The Air Contains Honey at Douze Douze
2) Tuesday September 23rd, 7pm / doors at 6:30 - The Longest Way to Eat a Melon at Rocket Science Room


1)
The Air Contains Honey performs only once a year. This year it will be on Saturday September 20th at 7pm at Sanctuaire Saint-Jude (10120, av. d'Auteuil) as part of Douze Douze, presented by LA SERRE - arts vivants. (Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes and hopeless situations, which I believe fits with our vibe.) The Air Contains Honey will start at 7 sharp, and we have to be finished by 7:45 so everyone can join the Burning BRASs Band on parade. This is your one Air Contains Honey chance in 2025 (and its free admission.) There are also many other amazing Douze Douze performances on September 20th - from noon to midnight - which you can find out about here. You can also watch some demos of an earlier version of The Air Contains Honey here. (Album coming in 2026.)

Facebook event

The Air Contains Honey―co-founded by Adam Kinner and Jacob Wren―is an “orchestra” that mixes professional and amateur musicians in search of a warmth and community spirit they may or may not find. All of their songs follow the same basic structure: a quote sung four times, an instrumental break, and then the same quote sung another four times. For the audience, as well as for the performers, this is a chance to hear an orchestra in the process of discovering its sound as it goes.

The Air Contains Honey’s lineup is ever shifting but the performance will likely feature some or all of the following members: Pietro Amato, Patrick Conan, Claudia Fancello, Michael Feuerstack, James Goddard, Thanya Iyer, Adam Kinner, Liam O’Neill, Lara Oundjian, Pompey, Rebecca Rehder, Catherine Fatima, Frédérique Roy, Mulu Tesfu and Jacob Wren.


2)
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross launches The Longest Way to Eat a Melon
at Rocket Science Room (170 Rue Jean-Talon O #204)
Tuesday September 23rd, 7pm / doors at 6:30
Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross will be in conversation with Carmen Faye Mathes
Plus an opening reading by Jacob Wren

Facebook event

Equal parts melody and malaise, The Longest Way to Eat a Melon charts the activities of a cast of speakers who all grapple in their own ways with what it takes to conjure a self in the midst of discordance. A brain argues with a non-brain about how to remain productive from a place of exhaustion; two supernaturally inclined twins named Han are separated at birth; and an emerging artist overwhelmed by possibility considers how best to transform a melon into a breakthrough work of art. Incorporating elements of fable, surrealism, satire, and art and cultural criticism, these stories have a playful peculiarity to them, an interweaving of self-deprecation and curiosity, of woe and hope, of absurdity and humanity. Reader, you will want to savor every bite.

“The cats begin coming through her window. And she feeds them – of course she does – to please nature, to please all animals, to please the mystics, to please the menace, to please the gods. Two at first, then six, then ten, their tawny stripes blending with the dappled light through the waving blinds. Q is friendly with them, even if it is true that she does not know what they get up to in the night. She is learning about and cultivating this kind of acceptance. Violences, valences. They purr and are energetic, even if their company is not the same as friendship, not the same as romantic love. They do have a certain terrible unknowability about them. Q entertains this even while, deep down, she feels fear.”
― Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, The Longest Way To Eat A Melon

Jacob Wren reads from his books

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Videos of me reading from and talking about my recent books:

Polyamorous Love Song Launch Reading
Polyamorous Love Song Interview
Rich and Poor Launch Reading
Rich and Poor Interview
Authenticity is a Feeling Launch Reading
Jacob Wren Introduces Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim


I recently posted on Instagram: "For the past few years I’ve been trying to figure out if there are ways for me to increase the readership of my books..." And one of the replies was: "I get it! What about videos? Your face talking to the camera? I can’t say what it would do for book sales, but you have a lot of followers already so reels could get good traction. When I go to your profile, I can see what kind of books you *read* but I don’t get a sense of what your books would be like or why I might need to get one. I think about this all the time for myself, so I’m just brainstorming out loud! Or pinning posts about your own books to the top row?" This is probably good advice regarding my use of Instagram. However, I would likely require technical assistance so instead I'm doing this. All of these videos, and much else, can also be found at: Jacob Wren Links



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Monday August 11th / Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren at Perfect Books in Ottawa

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Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren, hosted by Rachel Weldon
Perfect Books
Monday August 11th
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
258A Elgin St, Ottawa

In writing that speaks to the here and now, two protagonists, in very different ways, seek connection as an antidote for hopelessness.

Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren read from their recent novels: These Songs I Know By Heart and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, and converse on the intersections between literature and performance making, and the personal and political. Hosted by Debaser's Rachel Weldon.

-Erin Brubacher, These Songs I Know By Heart (Book*hug Press): Seeking and searching; making art; making new friends; getting divorced; falling in love; becoming a stepparent; surviving miscarriage; enduring the pandemic; valuing lakes, lilies, and mosses; and celebrating the quiet moments between people. A novel about living inside the unknowing: surrendering control and finding joy in the free fall of it all... It’s about love.

“This book left me feeling less alone.”
— Aimee Wall, author of We, Jane

-Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press): In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

“A knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace.”
— Eugene Lim, author of Search History

Mastodon & Bluesky

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https://mastodon.social/@Jacob_Wren
https://bsky.app/profile/jacobwren.bsky.social

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"I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight."

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“In some deep way, I feel I need to be an artist. But I don’t actually think what the world needs right now is art. I think it needs activism and it needs people who are really able to get out there and fight. I think art is probably more a reflection of the world than a driver of change.”
- Jacob Wren, from this interview with Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl



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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/

La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres / updated French translations from Le Quartanier

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I'm happy to announce that Le Quartanier is publishing updated French translations of my books La famille se crée en copulant and Le génie des autres:

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

Read an excerpt of La famille se crée en copulant. Read an excerpt of Le génie des autres.

This is the first in a series of translations Le Quartanier will be doing of my books. Stay tuned.

Also, in English, you can read an excerpt of Families Are Formed Through Copulation here. And read an excerpt of Unrehearsed Beauty (the orginal version of Le génie des autres) here.

Finally, in French, people have stared to write about it:
Yvon Paré in Quebec literature
Ariane Gagnon on Insagram

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Hey! Listen to me! I'm on the stereo!

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Thanks so much to Nantali Indongo and CBC's The Bridge for having me on air the other day.

We talked about Cheap Trick, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, PME-ART, Vulnerable Paradoxes, Every Song I've Ever Written, Zoom meetings, being on tour, my Instagram, child star syndrome and so much more.

[As well, if you want to check out Momus covering the songs I wrote when I was a teenager you can find the playlist here.]

[And if the title of this post doesn't mean anything to you, you might want to listen to this.]



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My column in The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

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I was happy to have a column in SDUK (The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge) published by The Blackwood Gallery. These are the three instalments:


The First Chapter

In Support of the Censure

In Spite of Defeatism




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Two short passages from Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART

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I have such a strong belief in collaboration: as something thematically essential, as a place to make artistic breakthroughs that are simply impossible to make on one’s own, as a way to attempt to break our culture’s (and art’s) incredible over-emphasis on individualism and the individual artist, as a way to be a little bit less alone in the world. At the same time, I generally find the actual lived experience of collaboration to be incredibly difficult. Perhaps psychologically I’m not really made for it. I guess there’s a lot of tension in this paradox, and some of that tension must be what energizes the work. As I was writing this, a strange sentence suddenly popped into my head: the work of PME-ART is both too collaborative and not collaborative enough. There is something off-kilter about our way of collaborating with others, and out of this something I believe a different kind of performance might emerge.


*


Yes, I like that way of putting it, our “performances are also about escaping performance,” but I think for me this is almost true of everything that has value, that it somehow needs to attempt to transcend previous conceptions of what it might be or become. I believe somewhere Alain Badiou says philosophy must also embrace anti-philosophy, and that has something to do with my approach as well: performance must also embrace anti-performance, and also embrace everything else as well, everything that’s outside of performance, so much of life that most performance so casually ignores. I want something unexpected to happen, to be surprised, and to surprise myself.

“Finding ways to make performances incapable” is also a formulation I’m very much attracted to. I think, for me, this also has something to do with life: I don’t feel I’m able to live and yet I somehow continue to live anyway. Sometimes I say that I’m good at art, bad at life. And this feeling forces me to live my struggles with life within art, within performance. So the performance can never feel okay, there is so much conflict, difficulty, ambiguity, uncertainty in my relations towards it, and in the act of performing it in public, in front of people who might very well find life so much easier than I do. On the other hand, perhaps many of them find it just as difficult. Performance (or whatever we wish to call it) might be one of the places where we can find out.




You can read the full interview here: Hospitality Matters: Un entretien avec PME-ART



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Four passages from Authenticity is a Feeling

Four passages from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART by Jacob Wren:


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There are no individual solutions to collective problems. Nonetheless, it is individuals who must come together and figure out what to do. In all of this, there is the unaddressed question of leadership. The anarchist in me genuinely believes rotating leadership is a solution: people take turns taking the lead in the areas of their greatest competence, interest, or desire. Another similar collaborative idea might be: best idea wins. But art is so subjective, and for five different people five different ideas might each seem best. It has always been my thinking that if someone in the group feels strongly that we should do something, then we should do it, their strong desire shouldn’t be watered or sanded down by the democratic entropy of the group. I want the projects to be open enough to welcome the strongest impulses of each of the participants. This is my ideal, and like all ideals it is something I often fall short of achieving. Perhaps this ideal is not even best for every collaborative situation. In a sense, it is just another way of saying that I want to work in ways that are deeply collaborative while at the same time keeping our most intense individual artistic differences more alive than alive.


*


I went to the theatre and what I saw hinted at my desires but mainly felt like their frustrating opposite. If in conventional theatre you had costumes, characters, acting, scripted narrative, piped-in music, and artifice, instead I wanted people dressed in their normal clothing, being themselves, walking a tightrope between structure and spontaneity, music we loved played on vinyl, CDs, or with instruments, anything and everything that might bring us just a little bit closer to authenticity or reality. There was a kind of theatre that already existed and a kind of theatre that didn’t yet exist, might never exist, and I knew which side I was on.


*


I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried-wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes.


*


Not as much now, but more when we first met, Sylvie would sometimes talk about the power of being the official opposition in theatre or in art. That the official opposition can sometimes do more to change things, both more to change the discourse and more to change concrete policies and actions, than those actually in power. The official opposition has the freedom to push as hard as they want, to act purely on principle, and by continually doing so they can keep things moving toward change.


*


[These quotes can also be found translated into French here.]


[And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.]



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Quelques passages de Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART (Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty)

Quelques passages de Un sentiment d’authenticité : ma vie avec PME-ART (Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty):


*


« Il n’y a pas de solutions individuelles aux problèmes collectifs. Cependant, ce sont des individus qui doivent se réunir pour déterminer ce qu’ils vont faire. La question du leadership reste sous-entendue et rôde au milieu de tout ça. L’anarchiste en moi croit sincèrement qu’un leadership rotatif est une solution : les gens prennent tour à tour les rênes selon leur plus grande compétence, leur intérêt ou leur désir. Une autre idée collaborative semblable : la meilleure idée gagne. Mais l’art est tellement subjectif et, pour cinq personnes différentes, cinq idées différentes peuvent sembler la meilleure. Je pense depuis toujours que, si un membre du groupe est fortement convaincu qu’on devrait faire quelque chose, on devrait le faire, la force de son désir ne devrait pas être diluée ou décapée par l’entropie démocratique du groupe. Je veux que les projets soient assez ouverts pour accueillir les impulsions les plus puissantes de chacun des participants. C’est mon idéal et, comme c’est le cas pour tous les idéaux, il s’agit d’un objectif que je peine souvent à atteindre. Peut-être que cet idéal n’est pas le plus approprié dans toutes les situations de collaboration. En un sens, ce n’est qu’une autre façon de dire que je veux travailler d’une manière profondément collaborative tout en garantissant que nos différences artistiques les plus intenses demeurent plus vivantes que jamais. »


*


« J’allais au théâtre, et ce que j’y voyais éveillait mes désirs, ou incarnait surtout leur opposé frustrant. Dans le théâtre conventionnel, il y avait des costumes, des personnages, du jeu, une narration écrite, de la musique enregistrée, des artifices. Je voulais plutôt voir des gens porter leurs vêtements normaux, être eux-mêmes, marcher sur la corde raide entre structure et spontanéité. Je voulais entendre de la musique qu’on aimait sur des vinyles, sur des CD ou interprétée sur des instruments, tout ce qui pourrait nous amener un petit peu plus près de l’authenticité ou de la réalité. Il y avait une sorte de théâtre qui existait déjà et une sorte de théâtre qui n’existait pas encore, et qui n’existerait peut-être jamais, et je savais quel était mon bord. »


*


« Je dis souvent que je ne me reconnais pas dans les gens qui font de l’art, de la performance ou de la littérature, mais que je me reconnais dans ceux qui font de l’art, de la performance et de la littérature, et qui toutes les quinze secondes pensent tout lâcher. Ce sont les miens. Je nous vois comme la bande de ceux-qui-crient-au-loup, qui annoncent constamment qu’ils lâchent tout sans jamais le faire, et que donc plus personne ne croit. Il me semble que quiconque travaille dans les arts aujourd’hui et n’entretient pas de doutes sérieux et lancinants sur la validité ou l’efficacité de la situation n’affronte pas avec lucidité tous les problèmes et questions actuels. »


*


« Pas tellement maintenant, mais certainement au début de notre relation, Sylvie parlait parfois du pouvoir que confère la position d’opposition officielle en théâtre ou en art. Que l’opposition officielle est parfois capable de contribuer davantage à changer les choses, le discours, les politiques et les actions concrètes, que ceux qui sont au pouvoir. L’opposition officielle a le loisir d’aller aussi loin qu’elle le veut, d’agir par principe, et, si ses représentants le font avec constance, ils peuvent faire advenir le changement. »


*


[The original English version of these quotes can be found here.]


[And feel free to check out the PME-ART website here.]



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Un sentiment d'authenticité: ma vie avec PME-ART

UN SENTIMENT D'AUTHENTICITÉ est un livre hybride, sorte de «roman sur PME-ART» qui se situe entre l’autobiographie artistique et le récit, dans lequel Jacob Wren revient sur plus de vingt années de création. Le récit commence lorsque le jeune performeur rencontre Sylvie Lachance et Richard Ducharme, et qu’il déménage de Toronto à Montréal pour concevoir un projet avec eux. C’est alors que s’amorce la passionnante histoire du groupe interdisciplinaire PME-ART.

Dès ses débuts, Wren veut créer un théâtre dédié à l’acte de rester soi-même en situation de performance: cette quête deviendra le fil conducteur de son livre, mais aussi de son art et de sa vie. Avec une intelligence affûtée, qui évite toute complaisance envers lui-même, son milieu et la société, Wren revisite en détail sept des productions les plus marquantes du groupe. Il se dévoile en toute franchise et avoue, entre autres, son incapacité à apprendre le français alors qu’il est codirecteur artistique d’une troupe bilingue. Il aborde aussi les avantages et les difficultés des collaborations intensives, les paradoxes du leadership, les répercussions venant du fait de produire des œuvres inclassables.

Dans une prose parsemée d’anecdotes et d’observations douces-amères, s’approchant de l’oralité, parfois même du stream of consciousness, l’écrivain compose sa «dramaturgie des idées» et nous mène vers d’habiles moments de chute, tantôt drôles, tantôt émouvants. Jacob Wren signe ici un livre à la fois intime et ambitieux, qui vise à transformer la manière dont la performance peut s’écrire et se pratiquer aujourd’hui.

Traduit de l'anglais par Daniel Canty.

Avec des postfaces de Kathrin Tiedemann et de Daniel Canty et 36 photographies en noir et blanc.

*

Depuis la fin des années 1980, la pratique artistique de JACOB WREN est une combinaison étonnante de performances créées en collaboration, de littérature et d’arts visuels. L’essentiel de son travail en performance a été réalisé à titre de créateur et de codirecteur artistique de PME-ART. Il a collaboré avec des artistes comme Lene Berg, Pieter de Buysser, Tori Kudo et Nadia Ross sur divers projets internationaux. Ses romans ont été publiés en anglais, en français et en norvégien. Il habite à Montréal.

Son traducteur, DANIEL CANTY, est, comme lui, écrivain et artiste. Il a traduit des livres de poésie de Stephanie Bolster, Benoit Jutras, Erin Moure, Michael Ondaatje et Charles Simic et était le traducteur attitré du poète officiel du Parlement du Canada, Fred Wah, de 2011 à 2013.

Éditions Triptyque | Collection Difforme
En librairie le 20 janvier 2021 | 318 pages | 28,95 $
LIVRE: 978-2-89801-116-0 PDF: 978-2-89801-117-7

📚 Sur commande ici: https://www.leslibraires.ca/livres/un-sentiment-d-authenticite-ma-vie-jacob-wren-9782898011160.html
📌 Plus d'infos ici: http://www.groupenotabene.com/publication/un-sentiment-dauthenticité-ma-vie-avec-pme-art

🎥 Réalisation: Cédric Trahan




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Since apparently I do have some sort of double life...

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Since apparently I do have some sort of double life – half of my life spent making collaborative performances, the other half spent writing books – one question I often get asked is how are these two artistic lives similar and how do they differ. There are a couple of different ways of answering this question, and how I think about it has changed a great deal over the years.

I think at first I started writing novels, trying to re-invent myself as a novelist, as a way of trying to escape, or take a break, from my performance-making life. All of our performance work is based on the paradox and vulnerability of “being yourself in a performance situation,” and therefore in my novels you can almost see me actively fleeing from that limitation, doing all the things I would never allow myself to do in a live situation. Most of the things that happen in my books could physically happen in reality but the books are also, more or less clearly, not reality, more in the world of theory, thinking, dreams, parable and fable. So, in this sense, my books were a way of escaping from the overwhelming reality (or feeling of authenticity) that was at the heart of the performance work.

But then, over the years, I started to think of it all in a different way. Both my books and the performances have a fairly intensive quality of structured improvisation. At the very beginning of writing a new book I have some idea what will happen, but most of it is left open, and as I write I try to constantly surprise myself, keep myself on my toes, with the idea that if I’m engaged and surprised the reader will be as well. Most of our performances also have a clear structure in which much is left open, and as we’re performing there are always things, small and large, that have never happened before, that are happening in the moment, and this quality of moving freely through a pre-determined structure, and surprising each other, and surprising ourselves, is always my favourite aspect of the particular ways we engage with the act of live performance.

In some ways, if I were to now speak more specifically about Authenticity is a Feeling, it represents the two separate parts of my “double life” coming together, I often find myself thinking of it as a kind of car crash between the two separate parts of my artistic life, which for the most part, in the past, I’ve kept as distinct as possible. It’s a coming together of things that have never really come together before, and this is intriguing, though I’m still more fully trying to understand why and how and what it means and what the future repercussions might be.


- From the interview Stranger than Fiction: In Conversation with Jacob Wren



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Michael Eddy Quote

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One could argue, like Maus above, that the antidote to irony is actually authenticity. If the self-reflexivity I called for above meant authentic presence, maybe we could indeed eliminate the risk of artificiality in the vague appropriation? In a performance of Jacob Wren’s recent book Authenticity Is A Feeling, which recounts the history of PME-ART, the performance group he has headed for twenty years, Wren explained that his ultimate goal and what keeps him going is work that strips away the baroque theatricality of most performance art (like scripts, affectations, etc.). It may be odd to finish this essay on an example that seems to eschew the scaled plating of appropriation for some type of biographical vulnerability. But while I found Wren’s performance affecting, I also could not help finding it affected. “In a way this echoed something that had followed us since the beginning of the show: when you are being yourself, when you are trying to bring more of this reality into the performance situation, so many people think that because it is still theatre, taking place onstage everything you’re saying must not be true. Or at least they come expecting fiction, and when it’s so unclear how the things you’re saying match or don’t match this expectation, they can easily become suspicious.” In my suspicions of Wren’s call to “being yourself in a performance situation,” I display the ironic symptoms of so many people. But a few pages later, I get a sense of why I enjoy this suspicion, these symptoms: “I am rewriting history from the perspective of now, because non-fiction is always also a kind of fiction.” Authenticity always also has a kernel of irony, not least when representation is involved. If we hope to find a more productive and just form of appropriation based on authenticity and sincerity, I have a hunch that scenes of self abuse would be necessary to make us feel possessed of our identities; or that dedication to a principle of opacity would firewall errant interpretation; or that it may not be appropriation after all.

- Michael Eddy, Vague Appropriation



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Authenticity Was A Feeling: A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren

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Authenticity Was A Feeling:
A conversation between Claudia La Rocco and Jacob Wren
Monday August 24th, 8:30 Berlin Time
Online at Tanz im August




And you can of course still order the book Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART here. 

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"Those are really my people."

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"I often say I don’t necessarily relate to people who make art, performance, or literature, but I do relate to people who make art, performance, and literature who think of quitting every fifteen seconds. Those are really my people. I call us the boy-who-cried wolf set, since we always announce we’re quitting but never do, and therefore no one believes us anymore. It seems to me that anyone who works in the arts today and doesn’t have serious, ongoing doubts as to the validity or efficacy of the situation is not facing all of the current, inherent problems and questions with open eyes."

- an excerpt from Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART



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A few online things I was part of this past year

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Stranger than Fiction: In Conversation with Jacob Wren


October Thought Residency at SpiderWebShow


Momus Podcast: An Ethics of Abundance with Jacob Wren and Dayna Danger


Imago Theatre Feminist Men Series



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Feature Friday

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Feature Friday: Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART



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