A Sushi Machine, a Style of Massage, and a Japanese Publishing Company: Brock Warner talks to K.I. Press about her poetry collection, Types of Canadian Women, Vol. II (2006)

(This is a condensed version of the original interview, which was conducted via email, 16—19 March 2008.)

The use of K.I. Press as a pen name for TOCW can certainly influence readings of the text, depending on how it is initially interpreted by the reader. Could you expand on some of your reasons for the decision?

Press is actually my name. It is indeed an interesting name for a writer to have. I also studied publishing and worked in the book-publishing industry, where I got things like (at book fairs for instance, looking at my name tag and thinking it was the name of my company), "I've never heard of the Karen Press." Now my day job is as a publicist working with the media, and I'm always getting journalists saying, "Hey, that's a great name for someone who has to work with the press!" As an aside, my name makes it really hard to Google reviews of my books. "Ki Press" is apparently also the name of a type of sushi-making device, a style of massage and a Japanese publishing company.

One of my favourite sections of the text was the index, because I think it is an interesting possibility for reading male voice in the text, if one was to interpret K.I. Press as being either male or ambiguously gendered. What were some of the intentions behind creating an index, beyond the fact that Vol. 1 had one?

My friend and poetry teacher Bert Almon (at the University of Alberta) has a poem in one of his books that is a found poem of judiciously chosen excerpts from another book's index. Because words are pulled out of various contexts and put in alphabetical order, an index offers the possibility of creating "natural" juxtapositions, which I wanted to take advantage of. The index in TOCW is also written in the same faux 19th-century vein as the rest of the book—I have imagined what topics might be the preoccupations of the shadowy Victorian figure K.I. Press, Esq. It was also a good opportunity for me to review my own book to look for what might be common themes that I hadn't noticed before; however, I did not make the index scientifically in ANY way—there are many omissions, gaping stretches and grasping at straws, and it is not really meant for people to look things up with. (However, it has been clear from at least one review of the book that I've read—some readers ARE using it to look things up!). Rather, I consider the index to be another poem. When I was revising it, I read it in sequence as a poem, adding and deleting entries if I thought it sounded better. For example, I added "Zeitgeist" to the end only because I really thought I needed something beginning with Z.

When reading the poems with a very literal eye, it appears they could be cleanly organized into types and subsets, for example "the artist" poems can be further spliced into categories of writer, painter, musician, actress, and so on. However, close readings (with the help of that quirky index) reveal that the attempt to categorize is ultimately futile. I think a good example is "Whose Work has Been Much Admired" on page 21. The subject of the poem could be pegged as an artist, yet the rigidity of the definition melts away upon closer inspection. It is referred to in the index under: Dolls, Tragedy, Hysteria, Patchwork, Obscurity, Lunacy/Lunatics, Gravity, Servants-clumsy, Ashes, Blood, Chamber Pot, Chocolate, Cuckoldry. As the author working with a form of history, how important was it for you to resist rigid classifications within a text that seemed to demand it right from the outset with a title that begins, "Types of..."?

Those "clean" types come from the original book. The women profiled in the book fall into several key categories, Artist (with subsets of Writing, Musician, Painter, Actress) is a big one, also Philanthropist/Activist, Socialite, and Professional (doctors. nurses, professors). I had no intention of following these types closely, but they do happen naturally when you are using this source material. When I was coming up with the topics for the index, themes did emerge that you could also think of "types", that weren't in the original book. Themes like Lunatics and Hysterics. I guess my answer is that I don't need to resist rigid classifications. I'm more interested in working within them but making them do what I want them to do. I really like working within structures, because they create a literary challenge and are more interesting (and motivational) to me than writing without structure.

The construction of the book (the use of a jacket and the patterns underneath, the paper, typesetting, etc) adds highly to the experience of reading and immersing oneself in the text. I understand that the general style is common among Gaspereau Press, yet how important do you feel these elements are in influencing the poems?

Gaspereau Press is both a publishing company and a press (a printing operation), so it is able to print its own books. It even uses letterpresses (the old fashioned kind where you arrange lead type instead of creating a printing plate from a computer). This book was not letterpressed, but this is just to show how the publisher does really understand the history of book design, typography and printing and is very careful about creating books that are physically pleasing, functional and high-quality. In general, high-quality book design and production is more important to me than the precise design of this book. A book of Canadian poetry only gets a few hundred readers and you don't make any money anyway, so if I was interested in readership I might as well just publish everything on the internet and market it myself, because the world of Canadian poetry is very small and I could probably email it to everyone who'd care.

But I care about the book as a dying art that needs attention from people capable of practicing it. I am interested in publishing books that are books not just writing glued together. So far I have been lucky enough to only publish with presses that also cared about this. There are not that many of these presses left.

For this book, though I was not under the impression that anyone would pony up the cash to produce it à la 1903—letterpressed and with a cloth binding—I was interested in at least making all the parts work together so it was a unified object that was decidedly "faux" 1903 in the same way the writing attempts a kind of fauxness. And since the publisher was the kind of publisher up to this, I was able to do it. Even the marketing copy on the back flap, I had a hand in—they wrote it straight at first and I suggested that they rewrite it in the vein of the book.

I am interested in the line in the TOCW introduction that reads: "we would like to emphasize that while we have taken some liberties in our mode of expressing our subjects' lives, this is for the benefit of our inquisitive readers, who deserve a window not merely onto the lives of legendary women, but into their very souls." I interpreted this as an indication of the metafictive approach to the text, in that it draws to the reader's attention to what seems to be limitless control in the hands of anyone re-writing history. This was also the point at which I noticed the split between Karen Press as author, and K.I. Press as a fictional compiler/editor. If I am on track by interpreting K.I. Press as a fictional editor/compiler, do you feel that he/she then has any more right to delve "into their very souls" than you, or I? Could you perhaps elaborate on your thoughts about the boundaries, or lack of, how authorial responsibility should be defined when dealing with historical subjects?

The K.I. Press who wrote the introduction is indeed a fictional compiler. But you do have to be very careful in drawing conclusions on the author/persona divide. There is truth in that in every book and while I guess it works differently in different books, it is not something really remarkable. However, what you say is pretty accurate.

I would agree with the part about the control of the person writing history. I am very interested in exploring that and pointing it out. The past is past and all history is interpreted in some way. What is lost, which is everything, can only really be imagined. Even your own memories, might I add, aren't real and present; your memories change and are elaborated by you as time passes. Hence my emphasis on imagination. Sticking to the official versions of the past cuts off possibilities of what might have been and all the infinitely many things that have been completely lost and not recorded at all. So while K.I. Press the persona thinks he/she is compiling the "truth" about the women, K.I. Press the author knows that she is imagining it.

In the same vein as the previous question: while I believe we are all guilty of wanting to, do you feel that any audience deserves to come as intimately close to its historical subjects as the poems in your text do?

My approach to history in my writing is that it is all, in effect, invented or imagined, so you can say anything about historical subjects that you want so long as you leave room for other interpretations and approaches. So I would say there is no guilt or deserving involved at all, it just is what it is. Intimate views of historical subjects are just as appropriate as any other view.