It was awful to turn on the computer to the news yesterday that Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch had died in a car accident on Tuesday night, returning home to Leduc from a reading, mere days before his 84th birthday.
Do critics complain that Christian Bök doesn’t use enough rhyme-scheme? So why ignore the serious formal structures of, say, David McGimpsey, for the sake of his hilarious pop references, dismissing a collection that should have won major awards, it seems, as frivolity, and not “serious verse”? Are “flarf” authors, such as ryan fitzpatrick, accused of not understanding narrative storytelling? If books and manuscripts are to be (inevitably) judged, why can’t they be on their own merits, and not on what isn’t happening.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I think I was ready to write myself once I realized that just about anybody can do it. It’s also a pretty convenient and independent way to create. Lori Lansens told me she switched to writing novels from screenwriting because she got to be the writer, director, set designer—everything. And the budget allowed her to do anything. She said she’d never adapt one of her novels because she knows she’d immediately have to cut characters and scenes.
