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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
Tom Sandborn in Rabble
Caroline Noël in Literary Review of Canada
Lisa de Nikolits in A Turn of Phrase

Press so far:
Writer’s Block at All Lit Up
Possible Politics: A recommended reading list at 49th Shelf
Interview with Open Book
Sruti Islam in Cult Mtl
Read an Excerpt at: Send My Love To Anyone
Order: Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim

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

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

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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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.”

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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