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David Arnason, by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough	An Interview with David Arnason, by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, on July 27, 2009, at University of Manitoba. David Arnason was born in Gimli, Manitoba, on 23 May 1940, to Baldwin and Gudrun Arnason. He received a Bachelor's degree (1961), a Certificate in Education (1963), and a Master's degree (1969) from the University of Manitoba, and a Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick (1983-1984). He began lecturing at the University of Manitoba in 1973. He is currently the chair of both the Icelandic and the English departments with a full professorship. His many accomplishments include acting as founder and editor of The Journal of Canadian Fiction, general editor of the MacMillan Themes in Canadian Literature series, editor of Turnstone Press, and member of the advisory board of Anansi Press. Arnason also began working for the CBC in the early 1970s as a book and theatre reviewer. His work included radio adaptations of books, such as Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh. Arnason has been and continues to be a prolific writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. His most recent book is another novel called Baldur's Song (2010, Turnstone Press). Arnason has three children. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough hails from the UK and currently lives in California, although she has lived and worked in places as diverse as Jakarta and Reykjavík. Elisabeth holds a Ph.D in English and is married with three children. ESC: To begin with I thought I would ask you some general questions. So, broadly speaking, what do you think is the point of writing fiction and poetry today? DA: Okay. I suppose it’s the same point as always, which is to try and communicate—to try and leave some residue of yourself on the world, because really all you can do is convey your take on things that you want to communicate to anyone, beyond your closest friends. And writing is, I think, still the best way of doing that. Film, TV, of course, to some extent... But writing is a way of meeting other minds. In fact, writing is a kind of erotic relationship with the reader. In a story called “The Girl’s Story,” in which the story ends with a kiss that goes on forever and ever and I thought that was, in a sense, the kind of brush of a kiss, of the relationship between author and reader, that there was something kind of eroticist in that. I write because I enjoy writing, because I have fun writing, I read the work and talk to people. ESC: And you come from a great literary background. DA: Yes. ESC: Since you are a writer and a teacher and a critic, do you think combining these roles raises any difficulty and which is more important and why? DA: Well, I think of myself primarily as writer, but I’m very much a teacher and I really enjoy teaching, I really like to mix with students, and I think there’s an incredible advantage as a writer to be able to speak with young people who otherwise would have no reason to talk to you. It’s a way I get to hear the shifting accents over the years, with my students now, particularly when your students don’t sound at all like they sounded 25 years ago. The way they speak, the attitudes they take, and the dress, even down to gestures. And for a writer, having some sense of gesture, of speech, of mindset, all of these things are really important. As you grow older you get less and less chance to be part of whatever is emerging in the culture, so you’re left only with a kind of retrospect, and a nostalgia, and a distance that becomes, I think, almost unreachable. I think it’s really important to teach. ESC: Right, so in that way it feeds into your work, your writing and it informs you – DA: Yes it informs me, the students bring to my attention books that I might not have known about, they certainly come up with ways of thinking about books I haven’t talked about for years, and suddenly they change my whole feeling about them. So that is why I write. And when you take on the notion of being an artist, or any kind of a writer, what you engage in is a kind of subversion. You really want to be able to alter the way people think, in a very small way you can, in fact, change the whole world, because, if you get enough people to change to your way of thinking, then it’s part of what you’re doing with art. ESC: So, in that way, it sounds to me, as if you’re writing more for other people than yourself. Some writers write to resolve conflict within themselves, but it sounds as if you’re writing, like you said, to alter perspective? DA: Yes. I regard this as art, not therapy, the writing is not intended, in any way, to cure my own psychological problems or to deal with the conflict for, you know, dead fathers or something like that. But I think that...well, I write to entertain first and when I teach creative writing the first thing I tell my students is the writer’s first job is to get the reader to read the next sentence. You’re not there, it’s not a class project. They don’t have to read, they can shut you down any time, so you have to keep in the know. You have to know your craft well enough to be able to keep people, in a sense, hooked into reading and reading. ESC: When you said craft just then a word popped into my head, is it “Kraftaskald?” Is it Icelandic “Kraftaskald?” DA: Yeah. Yeah. ESC: The poetry, the writing, it’s more than that…isn’t it the way you just described it? DA: Yeah. ESC: So, talking of the Icelandic influence, the old Icelandic family sagas contain much information about the landscape of Iceland and make use of a wide topographic vocabulary. The effect of these descriptive elements is to create within the sagas, I think, a remarkably vivid sense of place. I get the same appreciation of setting when I read one of your short-stories. Is this something that you deliberately set out to do or was it something unintentional? DA: I deliberately set out to do that, of course. I read all those sagas. In fact, when I was a child growing up, my grandfather used to tell me stories out of the sagas, without explaining that they were sagas, and he would say things like, “Oh, that was a tough time when Grettir swam with the fire to the island of Drangey”. But he didn’t say “Drangey”, just “the island.” People made all sorts of ...announcements with the names...Icelandic names...when I grew up everybody had those kind of Icelandic names, and he spoke always as if this were something that just happened. Yet, most of the community couldn’t actually swim. When he talked about it, I thought it was a burned-out house a couple of miles from where we lived. So, in one sense, I was kind of immersed in that culture. I read and I loved the sagas and the Norse mythology; and, very often, the rhythms of the language in my stories take its shape: the patterns and the rhythms that I’ve found. One is Landnámabók, the book of settlements, in which it describes all of the people who first came to Iceland and had incredibly repressed stories. They’re one or two paragraphs long and, yet, you’ve got all of the gritty sagas, and all the people from here had descended from there, and all the people from there... And you get the kind of rhythmic, Greek storytelling. ESC: It’s almost biblical isn’t it? DA: Yeah. ESC: Like Noah’s Ark when all the people descended –? DA: Yeah. ESC: In “The New Icelanders” you recalled you never learned to speak Icelandic because your parents were determined you should not sound like an immigrant and I read somewhere else that it wasn’t very fashionable to speak Icelandic in Canada in the 1940s. At which point and for what reason did you decide to embrace your Icelandic heritage? DA: I’ve never thought of myself as a born-again Icelander. I just thought of that as part of what I was and it was nice to have a different kind of background, you know, and know other mythology from the Greeks and Romans and to have another storytelling style, in a time when people told stories. So, I never thought very much about it really, until it just... It was within a week that I started working on a long poem and I was… ESC: Was that Marsh Burning? DA: Marsh Burning. And in it I did sort of find that a lot of that Icelandic mythology gave me answers but I wanted (inaudible) and how identity is fragmented and how they are not really borders and boundaries. So I was thinking in terms of a kind of floating identity that would shift and change and be effective, so in Marsh Burning, for instance, in the first section, [it] is all governed by Icelandic mythology, as the marriage of the poet collapses and he tries to come to terms with who he is, and the second section, I think is kind of the language of Science to try – ESC: and make it real –? DA: Yeah. It moves through a kind of set. Next, he tries to go to a kind of natural world...with individual memories and, then from there, to a kind of group memory of the people who have arrived. ESC: The voices of the settlers? DA: The voices of the settlers. So, in the poem, what the poem is about, is, there is one section of the poem where the guy says, “I am not myself today”; and then he clearly isn’t himself because every line or two he shifts the perspective; and he is somebody else through the whole poem and that’s what I was thinking of, how do you find your identity; and that’s one of the things that started coming to me. My identity is tied into the past that informed me of where I came from and I said, “I’m just going to be a Canadian writer and forget about this”. As soon as I said “Forget about this –” ESC: Marsh Burning was a real turning point, then? DA: Yes. Marsh Burning really was a turning point. And then, between the hours I was at the university, I came here to teach. Then the Head of the Icelandic Department was setting up a conference and he said, “I want you to do a paper on Icelandic-Canadian writers”. I said, “I don’t know anything about it”. He said, “Well, you’ve got six months to find out”. (laughing). He was a very interesting guy... and he made me do this. So, I ended up doing it, and, in the end, I started getting invited to do this here, do talks there, and before you know it – ESC: You’re immersed. DA: You’re immersed. And here I am now. I’m the Head of the English Department and the Acting Head of the Icelandic Department; as well, I go to Iceland to teach creative writing. I go there quite often. I never expected this. ESC: Amazing. Having talked about your Icelandic heritage, what key aspects of your writing connect with being Canadian? Which way would you say you are more comfortable – that is, with either contemporary Canadian writing, or to –? DA: I have a wider range of influences than most creative writers, but I’m not particularly interested in straight realism. I have enough realism in life without looking for it in writing. (laughing). I had a real interest back in the ‘60s in South American writing. ESC: One of your short-stories is “In Paraguay?” DA: “In Paraguay,” yes I was in Paraguay. But I wrote a kind of, what we now call, post-modern writing, but writing in which it is quite permissible to alter the laws of nature, to write full of play. Those are the people I identify with, much more than, say, Canadian, American, or British writers. ESC: Would you say that extends to the amount of realism? DA: Yeah. But also to Eastern Europeans, people like Bruno Schulz, the writer of The Streets of Crocodiles. Do you know Bruno Schulz? ESC: No, I don’t. DA: Bruno Schulz is a wonderful, wonderful writer. ESC: Is he Polish? DA: He’s Polish, yeah, so, much more, internationally. And, of course, German writers...which I had read many, many years ago, and it was a book [The Streets of Crocodiles] that I just absolutely loved, I love that book. Oddly enough, I hadn’t read the rest of his work until, in the last couple of years, I sat down and read a whole bunch of them, and found the real interesting way, in which a lot of the things that I write, highlight things that...Have you read (inaudible)? ESC: No. DA: The fishing scenes, the gorgeous and... I see immediately the rhythm and the way in which he uses the rhythms and the images from sagas. ESC: The title itself speaks of (inaudible). DA: Yeah. In (inaudible) is the man who guides a reindeer which is my version of (inaudible), in character you need to (inaudible) people who rides a reindeer down a river. So in (inaudible) and – ESC: Intertextual – DA: Intertextual elements. So (inaudible) had a lot of influence on that. Of course, on the other hand, I am an intellectual; I teach critical theory. I’m fully conversant with the history of philosophy from Aristotle onwards, I guess. I read a lot of Nietzsche and Heidegger and I’ve taught courses on contemporary and critical theory. I find that can generate stories, stories sometimes come out of experience. My first collection of stories, 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, was a kind of exercise. What I wanted to do was investigate the different ways in which a story can be told, different kinds of narrative, possibilities for telling the stories. So, the first one is a collection of kind-of-fragments which are sustained by a kind of secret voice. I thought that, if you want to read a story, I have all these stories about my growing up and my childhood. I thought it would take me my entire life to write them out, so why don’t I just do them all in one fell swoop, write even one story and they’re gone and I don’t have to go back. It really didn’t need much more than that anyway, stories so...[I] ended up writing others. And then a lot of stories come out of those questions of “How you tell a story”. I had a story called “The Boys” which was set in a bar and these two guys are talking together. In the story, neither of the main characters says a word and only a minor character says two words. So, how do you handle a story in which the narrative voice is...the entire [thing]? Then I wrote a story which was written entirely in the form of questions; there was nothing but questions, from one end to the other, in the entire story. I did a story called “Driving through Montana,” in which almost the entire story takes place in a pick-up truck. There was a story called “A Story with All the Elements,” in which I promised I was going to combine every kind of element in the story you can imagine: the reader, a male reader...into being the hero of the story and the reader gets the girl in the story. So, my editor from Turnstone looked at what I put together and said, “You can’t be sexist, you’ve got to write the story for girls, as well.” So I wrote “A Girl’s Story,” in which the reader is declared [to be] female, and is spoken with; and it’s a meta-story that talks about what the narrative is going to do and why. It is the most anthologised Canadian short story. ESC: “A Girl’s Story”? DA: “A Girl’s Story.” Yes. I think it is probably the most anthologised short story ever; it’s in several anthologies and it’s oddly enough very popular with American High Schools. So, those are probably more answers than you needed for the question. ESC: Oh no, really that’s wonderful. A lot of your work, well actually some of your short-stories, one collection in particular, was described as undermining habitual assumptions about social and political awareness in North American society. Which habitual assumptions form the greater part of your focus? DA: Okay. There are two kinds of things that I.... One is the series based on fairy tales that started when I wrote a short story called “The Goose Girl.” I wrote that story and published it. Then, the CBC asked if I would convert it into a radio play. So I did it as a radio play and then another person from the CBC said, “Could you write five of these for a national programme in one week?” So I wrote five more and, then they asked for another five, and I did those. Then, I converted them back into short stories. In one wonderful episode, I did five, sold them to the CBC, they broadcast them; then I converted them into stories and published them; then they bought the stories and did them as readings. So that went very well for me. But in fairy- tales what I try and do is to take the transformative power of the fairy-tale with wonderful, wonderful rhythms; and I went through...a lot of study on fairy-tales, folk-tales and Russian folk-tales... Grimm brothers...a great collector; and I wrote one of the stories called “The Girl and the Wolf”; and that story is a kind of, you know, it’s a highly poeticised story; the rhythms are very carefully constructed and it twists the assumptions that... Well, to begin with ...had written about it and said, “The disguised sexuality of the girl at the end of the story…” and all these hidden sexual things. What I found out in, certainly the earliest collection, the girl, in fact, undergoes a striptease, before she gets into bed with the wolf. And so, I wrote this story, in which the wolf says, (when she is saying, “What- what will I do with my dress?”) “Take it off and throw it into the fire, you won’t need it anymore.” In the end, rather than the wolf eating the girl, they have a sexual encounter; and, then, she lights up a cigarette and they [listen to] a certain station. To play with the fairy-tale, in that way, and to write a fairy-tale, that is set in a very local place: “The Dragon and the Dry Goods Princess” was set here... I wrote one called “The Ogress”, about a 12-year-old girl, who turns into an ogress and has a cousin... It’s a kind of an empowering story for the 12-year-old girl who suddenly grows twenty feet high; gets fangs and a tail and eats the bear – ESC: Suddenly, she has all these powers. DA: Yes, she has all these powers. So the 12-year-old girl eats monsters, but at the same time, it’s an empowering story for young girls. And young girls love it because the best audience is a bunch of girls who are about 12 or 13 years’ old. So, then I did a series of fables and they came out of... I’ve written a number of cabarets for a theatre and these…they were performances... So I got into writing a lot of musicals. I didn’t write the music, I worked with other musicians and I [did] the lyrics, and wrote around it. The result of this was I got invited again by the CBC to broadcast a very political cabaret. One was called “Section 23,” which was about French/English relationships in Manitoba. It was a play, a cabaret song and dance. We did it in both French and English and collaborated [on] the French. It was held over three weeks and sold out for the whole time, it could have run for [ever]. ESC: Very well received then? DA: Yeah it was very well received. But we started getting into a political song, so every time there was an election I would do [it again]. Elections last six weeks long, and every Friday for the election, I would write a political song. I did that, for years. It ended up, I actually have 63 songs ready to be [shared with] a society of composers. So I guess, they’re not very popular songs but I get about $14 to $25 a year, in royalties, for songs I wrote 15 years ago (laughing). But then, from that experience, I wrote a series of fables using the[m] as the pattern. ESC: I think I heard somewhere that your stories were described as “secular sermons”? DA: Yeah. And so I did “Goldilocks and the Healthcare System” and, [in] one of them, actually, just before Canada was voting on whether to separate from England or not; (it was very, very close) I wrote a story called “The Frog March” and it was about the election and was all done as a fable, written at the time when Quebec was considering separating from Canada. Various [derogatory names] like “the frog”. The CBC bought it and was going to play it on the day of the election. At the last moment, they lost their nerve and they dropped it, they paid me for it, but they dropped it. Ironically, I happened to be driving [there] on July 1st [where I was] for the summer.... So, because the story works out that [way] and all this; and, at the end everything, was exactly the same as it was before; which is exactly what happened, as I predicted. (laughing). Yeah, so I did those kinds of things and... Yeah, I like to play with the boundaries of writing and, particularly with running on the edge of poetics... sometimes. Like the story “In Paraguay,” you’ve read it? ESC: Yes, definitely. DA: That works very much out of a particular kind of rhythm, it’s addressed to you; it’s a kind of love story and corresponds to Paraguay’s history with Argentina. But it was based on my experience of Paraguay, which was understood...It is very much in technicolour, you know, it does look as if the colours haven’t quite gotten to where they might. It’s a very interesting place, Paraguay…its poverty and its wealth, mixed together, but I wanted to play off the kind of rhythm. ESC: I can hear it now. It has got a very rhythmic sound to it, about the women who want to dance all day. DA: Dancing in light (Laughing). ESC: (Laughing) DA: So the love story of Eliza Lynch, she’s in several novels and you can read them in the library; she’s the Irish woman who married the man who became the first dictator of Paraguay. I’d say... a story called...or which.... ESC: I think I’ve read it. DA: It’s got all kinds of little crafts and...and things about horses. ESC: No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of. DA: But that one has got... I worked out a “Binary Lovers” and it is filled with little mathematical jokes everywhere, hardly anybody even notices. But it was a fun kind of thing to do. ESC: It definitely makes interesting reading. It’s not just a simple plot. I noticed that with “The Pagan Wall”. There are all these obscure references, and conundrums, and most of it went over my head! (Laughing). DA: Again, I wanted to communicate…I wanted to write a novel and I was thinking of Canada and the First World War. So I went to France and I had my characters, and I wanted to go and visit certain graveyards to try to find the old European culture. I took a sabbatical and I went to France and lived in Strasbourg for several months. I travelled around and found that Europe was not an old world, but a new world, a different kind of world. ESC: Yes, the initial chapter, in particular, highlights that—an old Winnipeg and a new Europe, where there were all these neon lights – DA: Yes. In teaching critical theory, Heidegger is really important, in critical theory, you know the whole deconstruction theory from Derrida onwards. Heidegger and deconstruction…So I made my character in[to] the philosopher Heidegger and I wanted him to speak German and, of course, Heidegger’s philosophies are all done in German. The philosophy can only be done in German because it’s all tied into the language, all this kind of loose trajectory.... Sein und Zeit. So, it became, shall we say, a political thing, the advantages that...I wanted it to be kind of a spy story, an intellectual mystery and so, unfortunately, the strange Canadian guy was murdered who had this elaborate organisation and who had invented this giant gun that could shoot 250 miles…shoot ballistics…and he was tying to sell it to Iraq and then was murdered. So that provided a kind of background for the story, the Canadian might be involved in some kind of strange dealing. And then the Heideggerean element in it…I had read Sein und Zeit, the book that had taught us using philosophy.... So I taught him – ESC: You didn’t read it in German? (laughing). DA: No. (laughing) I didn’t read it in German. But, again, the characters often speak directly out of... writing, the things they say. And one of the characters, David Mann ...das Mann…and there are all sorts of games and light…Heidegger…Heraclites. And the other thing was, when I lived in Strasbourg, I saw that walls... So I went out and found this incredible, very well-known Celtic wall, and it is a wall of 14 or 15 feet high and about 8 or 10 feet wide, built out of rock that had been brought from some place else. The closest rock was in Switzerland, so it was a couple of hundred miles, and then it was put together with some cement, and it had stood for 6000 years there on top of this mountain. And it drew it all... so I used that as a metaphor. Then I got into looking at using Celtic mythology and playing off perceptions of innocence. There’s a little girl with a sparrow in her hand and other elements of the Celtic mythology. So my idea was to try and lay [the myth as] intricately as possible and, at the same time, to try and keep the surface as real as possible. ESC: It does actually read quite easily. DA: Yeah, yeah. ESC: Like the characters’ motives – DA: The characters are not particularly attractive. They weren’t intended to be people you’d write about, that wasn’t what the novel was about. I know some people have said they hated the characters, liked the novel, but hated the characters (laughing), because, of course, the characters are always... Heidegger was very keen on angst...The key thing is that death is inevitable and so you have to consider the possibility of non-being. In order to be authentic, you have to think about that, and so your characters would be in angst. Well, you’ve got these two characters in continual angst. Actually I had Heidegger himself appear; I went to Germany and I went to Freiberg and there was a graduate student, who took me up into the mountains to Heidegger’s hut. So I did research for it, I did intricate research, even though I wasn’t intending to.... ESC: But that helped with the sense of place and location? DA: Yes, exactly. (Inaudible) and I think that it’s really important to find a place, to locate... Even little comic versions of fairy-tales I try and fill with the details of a place and (inaudible) reality of those small details that suggest a real place. ESC: The 50 Stories and A Piece of Advice, I know you mentioned it earlier, but it gives one a real sense of the history of the prairie region, but its individualism…pioneering spirit seems to be reacting to the collective experiences in cities like Toronto. I felt a real sense of individualism, a sort of pioneering spirit present in those stories. To what degree is that true—is that reflected in the characters? DA: I’m trying to remember what stories are in there. Yeah, again they’re individual and you might say they include other people, independent, other than those with an Icelandic background…of the need for individuality and independence are key elements in anybody’s life. And so the communal, it’s amazing that even now the Icelandic community in Gimli is 126 years’ old or something, it’s an amazing festival and the community has a much stronger community in a city. Germans who have been here for, you know, much less time, who came in the 50’s or 60’s or even years later. They don’t maintain it. ESC: Is that because it was a separate country for a while? DA: Yeah. ESC: Okay. DA: That’s right. I don’t know if you have read “The Myth of Beginnings.” It is in The New Icelanders; you know the book The New Icelanders? ESC: Yes, I have it, and have read, “The Myth of Beginnings.” DA: I think that explains a lot. ESC: Certainly. We’ve discussed “The Pagan Wall”, that was one of my questions, so I’ll move to Marsh Burning again if you don’t mind? DA: Okay. ESC: There is a tale of the marsh in [which] the two elements of fire and water play ambiguous roles; both are providers of life, yet both can be highly dangerous, causing destruction and death. We talked earlier about how regeneration.... DA: Yeah. ESC: The landscape and elements appear in your work a great deal. Both Canadians and Icelanders seem to be at the mercy of the elements. In your work, does the focus on the elements stem from your prairie upbringing, or is it something that’s carried on from Icelandic traditions? DA: When Marsh Burning first came out, some readers thought it was obsessed with death. Now, I hadn’t thought of that at all, but, of course, I grew up on a farm where things died all the time; you were out in nature and things died; the cows were being slaughtered for food; you were surrounded by death as an integral part of life. So I think it wasn’t so much my obsession with death, when you described the world where I had lived; in which there were these kinds of deaths, and people were dying, constantly. Fisherman drowned when I was growing up, maybe two or three a year would drown. I was a fisherman and my father was a fisherman for years; he fished until he was in his 30s and couldn’t swim a stroke. None of the fisherman could swim. ESC: I actually read that in an interview you gave, you said fishermen don’t swim. DA: That’s right. ESC: And the fishermen in the Maritimes? DA: They don’t swim either. ESC: Going back to that life/death cycle, when you said that there was a line that actually sprung to mind, then, a bold flame knocking us free, is that sort of capturing that sense of...? DA: Well, you see, what’s tied very much to Icelandic mythology is a sense of ragnarök, the immediacy, the world can end at any second and that’s the central thing about the Icelandic mythology: the world as you enter, it supports you, but it is rotting from within, it is eaten from below...the devil, the dragon, boars, deer...the badgers, and the squirrel also eats the leaves. So it is being destroyed from inside and from outside. The end of the world is inevitable, almost immediate, and so it will be preceded by...the final winter where there will be no summer. But what I wanted to do, for the sense of this character, whose own world is coming apart, his marriage comes apart, and who sees in the world the inevitable end. The rainbow bridges are everywhere because it’s traffic between heaven and earth... Anyway, he sees these strange creatures and time starts to move backwards and the squirrels are there...flowers, [identifiably] Icelandic [mythic figures], a lot of them are [there] Odin appears, he has only one eye. So he appears in the story and... So I was using that to talk about the end of the world. Well, a certain kind of person or the character who sees Baldur is the cause of innocence. He is the absent pure god, one that all the animals and birds agreed not to damage, except for...and then Loki, the trickster figure, an arrow, and has a blind brother [who] shoots the arrow and hits him in the ankle and... So that it is a definite innocence in the world and Fenrir, the friendly wolf, who in the end will eat the sun and the moon. So, you see, I use Icelandic mythology as a template, as a kind of structure, to talk about disillusion. ESC: Okay. Sort of following along the lines of that... Boundaries such as...geography are explored in your work; what exactly do you intend to say when you unpick the historical forces that shape the contemporary world? DA: Can you say that again? ESC: What exactly do you intend to say when you unpick the historical forces that shape the contemporary world? DA: Well, I’m concerned very much with what I call “border blur”, the moments when something is not quite one thing and not quite another. The blurring of borders seems to be characteristic of contemporary writing. Coming from a much more static world where things stayed the same for centuries, we now live in a world of blurred borders. What, for instance, is the essence of a, let’s say... Okay, a handicapped Canadian-Indian woman, is she Canadian, is she Indian, is she a woman, is she a handicapped person? ESC: How do you categorise? DA: How do you categorise? Where do the borders end? And the same thing in writing, where are the edges, how you tell beginnings through endings? Because the whole notion that we grow up with is that things have a beginning, a middle and an end. ESC: Aristotle, isn’t it? DA: Yeah. Aristotle…a beginning, a middle and an end. We tend to think of history as causes of the Second World War; the Second World War; the results of the Second World War. It wasn’t like that. There wasn’t a series of causes that set it off and it didn’t end. It was an ongoing thing in the world, and not everybody was involved, and these are all false borders, created by a desire for a certain kind of order. Again, this comes into a practice of writing which is processional. I believe much in the process of writing and I write, I never really know what I’m going to write until I start writing, and then when I write, when I write a short story, I have a rule that, if I can think of the ending before I get there, I can’t use it. So, far from having any outline or plan, I write stories with a sense that, at least at the level of the first draft, it comes out of the end of (inaudible) you’re writing to find out what happens, because I don’t know how it ends and I want to find out. So I’m there busily typing away, trying to find out what happens. So I believe very much in the process of (inaudible). That’s another reason to write...that is the same reason you read, you enter into a mental process that interests you. A lot of people say, “Well, I only read the good parts”. I say, “Well, I will only write the good parts then”. (laughing). If it stops me getting from one place to another...a technical device that allows you to escape, technical devices that...[is to] know a lot about how narrative is constructed, and I’m very good at teaching writing; my students very often are writers themselves and do well, because I teach it very technically. [You] get in there and you learn the craft, learn how to...learn how many ways you can handle time in a narrative, what you do and what perspective [to use], how you focalise it. ESC: Yes, I read in an interview that you said something to the effect of you don’t believe in inspirational writing, everyone is capable... DA: Yes, I believe that. I just got back from Germany. I taught a very nice class of German students how to write; and they were amazing; they were terrific. Some of the stories (inaudible) I think that a large number of the poems and stories were published except...magazines, it had very good chances of being published because they took it very seriously because they were going to... What they really wanted to do was to write in German and there are no creative writing courses in German, so they wanted to write in English. ESC: Is that because the English language has a much wider audience? DA: No it’s because the tradition is very strong...and based on language and a strong belief that only geniuses can produce this, that it’s just ingrained that writing is done by geniuses. There are no writers at universities; you have to find the writers elsewhere because they say, “You can’t teach this” And I say, “Why? What about music, can’t teach music?” “Oh, yes, you can teach music.” “Okay, well what about that?” “Yeah, you can do that.” “Why can’t you teach writing, then?” “I don’t know.” ESC: Wasn’t that part of…when you were growing up you were engrained in the belief that writing was done by great artists elsewhere? DA: That’s right. I taught writing in university, served on arts councils and I believed very strongly in trying to build a culture and not just, you know, be a writer in the culture. I think a writer is a really only a writer when he or she is writing; the rest of the time you’re a citizen. The genius that gets you out of other kinds of duty (inaudible) was to prevent younger people coming up as writers from having people laugh at the very thought that you could be a writer; to help build the institutions that permit an artistic life, the life of an artist, the life of a writer. ESC: Encourage them. DA: Yeah. ESC: My final question…we touched on when you were talking about borders. Would you say that you have a bordered identity? DA: I guess so. Border blur... (laughing) coming from a static world…borders of language, the magazine called Border Crossings. The way that...this was the reason. It was called the Arts Manitoba Quarterly and I suggested a special issue on North Dakota and Manitoba and called it “Border Crossings”. So we called that special issue, “the issue of Border Crossings,” and then the rest of the world thought, “Hey, let’s just go with the name Border Crossings because we’re interested in the crossover between different kinds of borders…and it is very much concerned with that.” It’s ...frontier—The Journal of Canadian Fiction was consciously started for Canadian writers. ESC: Is that monthly or quarterly? DA: It started as quarterly. I think it was quarterly. So, yeah, the idea of borders and the collapse of borders and (inaudible) of breaking down the borders. I write poetry, short-stories, novels, plays – ESC: Songs? DA: Songs, critical articles, all sorts of things. As far as I can see, interview writers are right, I wouldn’t think of myself as a poet or a novelist or – ESC: You don’t define yourself as just a poet or –? DA: No, no I am a writer. I think that there... I like borders that you can move back and forth between them, and that a lot of the conventions and the elements that make a good poem, work in a short story. A lot of the elements of a short story would make a poem or a play. I like the idea of the, I suppose, bricolage, putting together all the spare parts. So, I’m a kind of handyman (laughing) who writes... But certainly not by (inaudible)... I’m not in competition (inaudible) and, frankly, if you want to write, you want your voice to somehow alter your culture; and if it goes further then that that’s even better, but I start by writing, I suppose, for my friends, and, if it goes further than that, then that’s fine. Arnason is the author of several publications including poetry books Marsh Burning and Skragg and the non-fiction works The Icelanders and The New Icelanders. His works of fiction include: 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, The Circus Performer's Bar, The Happiest Man in the World, The Pagan Wall, The Dragon and the Drygoods Princess, If Pigs Could Fly, King Jerry, and The Demon Lover. Arnason's plays include Section 23/L'article 23, Welcome to Hard Times, The Hard Life Cabaret and Dewline. He is a frequent contributor to CBC radio, working on adaptations of Tom Jones, The Tin Drum and Settlers of the Marsh. Arnason was the editor of Dorothy Livesay's Right Hand, Left Hand. Arnason is of Icelandic descent and often writes about the Icelandic community in Canada. He is the son of Baldvin and Gudrun Arnason and the eldest of seven children. He attended the University of Manitoba where he received a B.A. and M.A., and has a Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick. Arnason co-founded the Journal of Canadian Fiction with John Moss at the University of New Brunswick in 1972. He was one of the co-founders of Queenston House Press in Winnipeg and has been an editor of Turnstone Press in Winnipeg since 1975. He was chairman of the Literary Press Group and a member of the executive of the Association of Canadian Publishers. He served on the Manitoba Arts Council 1985-1987. He has taught at the University of Manitoba since 1972, and was the head of the English Department from 1997 to 2006. He was Acting Head of the Department of Icelandic, at the University of Manitoba from 1998 to 2006. His archives are held at University of Manitoba.

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David Arnason, by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough

An Interview with David Arnason, by Elisabeth Sennitt Clough, on July 27, 2009, at University of Manitoba.

David Arnason was born in Gimli, Manitoba, on 23 May 1940, to Baldwin and Gudrun Arnason. He received a Bachelor's degree (1961), a Certificate in Education (1963), and a Master's degree (1969) from the University of Manitoba, and a Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick (1983-1984). He began lecturing at the University of Manitoba in 1973. He is currently the chair of both the Icelandic and the English departments with a full professorship. His many accomplishments include acting as founder and editor of The Journal of Canadian Fiction, general editor of the MacMillan Themes in Canadian Literature series, editor of Turnstone Press, and member of the advisory board of Anansi Press. Arnason also began working for the CBC in the early 1970s as a book and theatre reviewer. His work included radio adaptations of books, such as Frederick Philip Grove's Settlers of the Marsh. Arnason has been and continues to be a prolific writer of short stories, poetry, and novels. His most recent book is another novel called Baldur's Song (2010, Turnstone Press). Arnason has three children.

Elisabeth Sennitt Clough hails from the UK and currently lives in California, although she has lived and worked in places as diverse as Jakarta and Reykjavík. Elisabeth holds a Ph.D in English and is married with three children.

ESC: To begin with I thought I would ask you some general questions. So, broadly speaking, what do you think is the point of writing fiction and poetry today?

DA: Okay. I suppose it’s the same point as always, which is to try and communicate—to try and leave some residue of yourself on the world, because really all you can do is convey your take on things that you want to communicate to anyone, beyond your closest friends. And writing is, I think, still the best way of doing that. Film, TV, of course, to some extent... But writing is a way of meeting other minds. In fact, writing is a kind of erotic relationship with the reader. In a story called “The Girl’s Story,” in which the story ends with a kiss that goes on forever and ever and I thought that was, in a sense, the kind of brush of a kiss, of the relationship between author and reader, that there was something kind of eroticist in that. I write because I enjoy writing, because I have fun writing, I read the work and talk to people.

ESC: And you come from a great literary background.

DA: Yes.

ESC: Since you are a writer and a teacher and a critic, do you think combining these roles raises any difficulty and which is more important and why?

DA: Well, I think of myself primarily as writer, but I’m very much a teacher and I really enjoy teaching, I really like to mix with students, and I think there’s an incredible advantage as a writer to be able to speak with young people who otherwise would have no reason to talk to you. It’s a way I get to hear the shifting accents over the years, with my students now, particularly when your students don’t sound at all like they sounded 25 years ago. The way they speak, the attitudes they take, and the dress, even down to gestures. And for a writer, having some sense of gesture, of speech, of mindset, all of these things are really important. As you grow older you get less and less chance to be part of whatever is emerging in the culture, so you’re left only with a kind of retrospect, and a nostalgia, and a distance that becomes, I think, almost unreachable. I think it’s really important to teach.

ESC: Right, so in that way it feeds into your work, your writing and it informs you –

DA: Yes it informs me, the students bring to my attention books that I might not have known about, they certainly come up with ways of thinking about books I haven’t talked about for years, and suddenly they change my whole feeling about them. So that is why I write. And when you take on the notion of being an artist, or any kind of a writer, what you engage in is a kind of subversion. You really want to be able to alter the way people think, in a very small way you can, in fact, change the whole world, because, if you get enough people to change to your way of thinking, then it’s part of what you’re doing with art.

ESC: So, in that way, it sounds to me, as if you’re writing more for other people than yourself. Some writers write to resolve conflict within themselves, but it sounds as if you’re writing, like you said, to alter perspective?

DA: Yes. I regard this as art, not therapy, the writing is not intended, in any way, to cure my own psychological problems or to deal with the conflict for, you know, dead fathers or something like that. But I think that...well, I write to entertain first and when I teach creative writing the first thing I tell my students is the writer’s first job is to get the reader to read the next sentence. You’re not there, it’s not a class project. They don’t have to read, they can shut you down any time, so you have to keep in the know. You have to know your craft well enough to be able to keep people, in a sense, hooked into reading and reading.

ESC: When you said craft just then a word popped into my head, is it “Kraftaskald?” Is it Icelandic “Kraftaskald?”

DA: Yeah. Yeah.

ESC: The poetry, the writing, it’s more than that…isn’t it the way you just described it?

DA: Yeah.

ESC: So, talking of the Icelandic influence, the old Icelandic family sagas contain much information about the landscape of Iceland and make use of a wide topographic vocabulary. The effect of these descriptive elements is to create within the sagas, I think, a remarkably vivid sense of place. I get the same appreciation of setting when I read one of your short-stories. Is this something that you deliberately set out to do or was it something unintentional?

DA: I deliberately set out to do that, of course. I read all those sagas. In fact, when I was a child growing up, my grandfather used to tell me stories out of the sagas, without explaining that they were sagas, and he would say things like, “Oh, that was a tough time when Grettir swam with the fire to the island of Drangey”. But he didn’t say “Drangey”, just “the island.” People made all sorts of ...announcements with the names...Icelandic names...when I grew up everybody had those kind of Icelandic names, and he spoke always as if this were something that just happened. Yet, most of the community couldn’t actually swim. When he talked about it, I thought it was a burned-out house a couple of miles from where we lived. So, in one sense, I was kind of immersed in that culture. I read and I loved the sagas and the Norse mythology; and, very often, the rhythms of the language in my stories take its shape: the patterns and the rhythms that I’ve found. One is Landnámabók, the book of settlements, in which it describes all of the people who first came to Iceland and had incredibly repressed stories. They’re one or two paragraphs long and, yet, you’ve got all of the gritty sagas, and all the people from here had descended from there, and all the people from there... And you get the kind of rhythmic, Greek storytelling.

ESC: It’s almost biblical isn’t it?

DA: Yeah.

ESC: Like Noah’s Ark when all the people descended –?

DA: Yeah.

ESC: In “The New Icelanders” you recalled you never learned to speak Icelandic because your parents were determined you should not sound like an immigrant and I read somewhere else that it wasn’t very fashionable to speak Icelandic in Canada in the 1940s. At which point and for what reason did you decide to embrace your Icelandic heritage?

DA: I’ve never thought of myself as a born-again Icelander. I just thought of that as part of what I was and it was nice to have a different kind of background, you know, and know other mythology from the Greeks and Romans and to have another storytelling style, in a time when people told stories. So, I never thought very much about it really, until it just... It was within a week that I started working on a long poem and I was…

ESC: Was that Marsh Burning?

DA: Marsh Burning. And in it I did sort of find that a lot of that Icelandic mythology gave me answers but I wanted (inaudible) and how identity is fragmented and how they are not really borders and boundaries. So I was thinking in terms of a kind of floating identity that would shift and change and be effective, so in Marsh Burning, for instance, in the first section, [it] is all governed by Icelandic mythology, as the marriage of the poet collapses and he tries to come to terms with who he is, and the second section, I think is kind of the language of Science to try –

ESC: and make it real –?

DA: Yeah. It moves through a kind of set. Next, he tries to go to a kind of natural world...with individual memories and, then from there, to a kind of group memory of the people who have arrived.

ESC: The voices of the settlers?

DA: The voices of the settlers. So, in the poem, what the poem is about, is, there is one section of the poem where the guy says, “I am not myself today”; and then he clearly isn’t himself because every line or two he shifts the perspective; and he is somebody else through the whole poem and that’s what I was thinking of, how do you find your identity; and that’s one of the things that started coming to me. My identity is tied into the past that informed me of where I came from and I said, “I’m just going to be a Canadian writer and forget about this”. As soon as I said “Forget about this –”

ESC: Marsh Burning was a real turning point, then?

DA: Yes. Marsh Burning really was a turning point. And then, between the hours I was at the university, I came here to teach. Then the Head of the Icelandic Department was setting up a conference and he said, “I want you to do a paper on Icelandic-Canadian writers”. I said, “I don’t know anything about it”. He said, “Well, you’ve got six months to find out”. (laughing). He was a very interesting guy... and he made me do this. So, I ended up doing it, and, in the end, I started getting invited to do this here, do talks there, and before you know it –

ESC: You’re immersed.

DA: You’re immersed. And here I am now. I’m the Head of the English Department and the Acting Head of the Icelandic Department; as well, I go to Iceland to teach creative writing. I go there quite often. I never expected this.

ESC: Amazing. Having talked about your Icelandic heritage, what key aspects of your writing connect with being Canadian? Which way would you say you are more comfortable – that is, with either contemporary Canadian writing, or to –?

DA: I have a wider range of influences than most creative writers, but I’m not particularly interested in straight realism. I have enough realism in life without looking for it in writing. (laughing). I had a real interest back in the ‘60s in South American writing.

ESC: One of your short-stories is “In Paraguay?”

DA: “In Paraguay,” yes I was in Paraguay. But I wrote a kind of, what we now call, post-modern writing, but writing in which it is quite permissible to alter the laws of nature, to write full of play. Those are the people I identify with, much more than, say, Canadian, American, or British writers.

ESC: Would you say that extends to the amount of realism?

DA: Yeah. But also to Eastern Europeans, people like Bruno Schulz, the writer of The Streets of Crocodiles. Do you know Bruno Schulz?

ESC: No, I don’t.

DA: Bruno Schulz is a wonderful, wonderful writer.

ESC: Is he Polish?

DA: He’s Polish, yeah, so, much more, internationally. And, of course, German writers...which I had read many, many years ago, and it was a book [The Streets of Crocodiles] that I just absolutely loved, I love that book. Oddly enough, I hadn’t read the rest of his work until, in the last couple of years, I sat down and read a whole bunch of them, and found the real interesting way, in which a lot of the things that I write, highlight things that...Have you read (inaudible)?

ESC: No.

DA: The fishing scenes, the gorgeous and... I see immediately the rhythm and the way in which he uses the rhythms and the images from sagas.

ESC: The title itself speaks of (inaudible).

DA: Yeah. In (inaudible) is the man who guides a reindeer which is my version of (inaudible), in character you need to (inaudible) people who rides a reindeer down a river. So in (inaudible) and –

ESC: Intertextual –

DA: Intertextual elements. So (inaudible) had a lot of influence on that. Of course, on the other hand, I am an intellectual; I teach critical theory. I’m fully conversant with the history of philosophy from Aristotle onwards, I guess. I read a lot of Nietzsche and Heidegger and I’ve taught courses on contemporary and critical theory. I find that can generate stories, stories sometimes come out of experience.

My first collection of stories, 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, was a kind of exercise. What I wanted to do was investigate the different ways in which a story can be told, different kinds of narrative, possibilities for telling the stories. So, the first one is a collection of kind-of-fragments which are sustained by a kind of secret voice. I thought that, if you want to read a story, I have all these stories about my growing up and my childhood. I thought it would take me my entire life to write them out, so why don’t I just do them all in one fell swoop, write even one story and they’re gone and I don’t have to go back. It really didn’t need much more than that anyway, stories so...[I] ended up writing others. And then a lot of stories come out of those questions of “How you tell a story”.

I had a story called “The Boys” which was set in a bar and these two guys are talking together. In the story, neither of the main characters says a word and only a minor character says two words. So, how do you handle a story in which the narrative voice is...the entire [thing]? Then I wrote a story which was written entirely in the form of questions; there was nothing but questions, from one end to the other, in the entire story.

I did a story called “Driving through Montana,” in which almost the entire story takes place in a pick-up truck. There was a story called “A Story with All the Elements,” in which I promised I was going to combine every kind of element in the story you can imagine: the reader, a male reader...into being the hero of the story and the reader gets the girl in the story. So, my editor from Turnstone looked at what I put together and said, “You can’t be sexist, you’ve got to write the story for girls, as well.” So I wrote “A Girl’s Story,” in which the reader is declared [to be] female, and is spoken with; and it’s a meta-story that talks about what the narrative is going to do and why. It is the most anthologised Canadian short story.

ESC: “A Girl’s Story”?

DA: “A Girl’s Story.” Yes. I think it is probably the most anthologised short story ever; it’s in several anthologies and it’s oddly enough very popular with American High Schools. So, those are probably more answers than you needed for the question.

ESC: Oh no, really that’s wonderful. A lot of your work, well actually some of your short-stories, one collection in particular, was described as undermining habitual assumptions about social and political awareness in North American society. Which habitual assumptions form the greater part of your focus?

DA: Okay. There are two kinds of things that I.... One is the series based on fairy tales that started when I wrote a short story called “The Goose Girl.” I wrote that story and published it. Then, the CBC asked if I would convert it into a radio play. So I did it as a radio play and then another person from the CBC said, “Could you write five of these for a national programme in one week?” So I wrote five more and, then they asked for another five, and I did those. Then, I converted them back into short stories. In one wonderful episode, I did five, sold them to the CBC, they broadcast them; then I converted them into stories and published them; then they bought the stories and did them as readings.

So that went very well for me. But in fairy- tales what I try and do is to take the transformative power of the fairy-tale with wonderful, wonderful rhythms; and I went through...a lot of study on fairy-tales, folk-tales and Russian folk-tales... Grimm brothers...a great collector; and I wrote one of the stories called “The Girl and the Wolf”; and that story is a kind of, you know, it’s a highly poeticised story; the rhythms are very carefully constructed and it twists the assumptions that... Well, to begin with ...had written about it and said, “The disguised sexuality of the girl at the end of the story…” and all these hidden sexual things.

What I found out in, certainly the earliest collection, the girl, in fact, undergoes a striptease, before she gets into bed with the wolf. And so, I wrote this story, in which the wolf says, (when she is saying, “What- what will I do with my dress?”) “Take it off and throw it into the fire, you won’t need it anymore.” In the end, rather than the wolf eating the girl, they have a sexual encounter; and, then, she lights up a cigarette and they [listen to] a certain station.

To play with the fairy-tale, in that way, and to write a fairy-tale, that is set in a very local place: “The Dragon and the Dry Goods Princess” was set here... I wrote one called “The Ogress”, about a 12-year-old girl, who turns into an ogress and has a cousin... It’s a kind of an empowering story for the 12-year-old girl who suddenly grows twenty feet high; gets fangs and a tail and eats the bear –

ESC: Suddenly, she has all these powers.

DA: Yes, she has all these powers. So the 12-year-old girl eats monsters, but at the same time, it’s an empowering story for young girls. And young girls love it because the best audience is a bunch of girls who are about 12 or 13 years’ old. So, then I did a series of fables and they came out of... I’ve written a number of cabarets for a theatre and these…they were performances... So I got into writing a lot of musicals. I didn’t write the music, I worked with other musicians and I [did] the lyrics, and wrote around it. The result of this was I got invited again by the CBC to broadcast a very political cabaret. One was called “Section 23,” which was about French/English relationships in Manitoba. It was a play, a cabaret song and dance. We did it in both French and English and collaborated [on] the French. It was held over three weeks and sold out for the whole time, it could have run for [ever].

ESC: Very well received then?

DA: Yeah it was very well received. But we started getting into a political song, so every time there was an election I would do [it again]. Elections last six weeks long, and every Friday for the election, I would write a political song. I did that, for years. It ended up, I actually have 63 songs ready to be [shared with] a society of composers. So I guess, they’re not very popular songs but I get about $14 to $25 a year, in royalties, for songs I wrote 15 years ago (laughing). But then, from that experience, I wrote a series of fables using the[m] as the pattern.

ESC: I think I heard somewhere that your stories were described as “secular sermons”?

DA: Yeah. And so I did “Goldilocks and the Healthcare System” and, [in] one of them, actually, just before Canada was voting on whether to separate from England or not; (it was very, very close) I wrote a story called “The Frog March” and it was about the election and was all done as a fable, written at the time when Quebec was considering separating from Canada. Various [derogatory names] like “the frog”. The CBC bought it and was going to play it on the day of the election. At the last moment, they lost their nerve and they dropped it, they paid me for it, but they dropped it. Ironically, I happened to be driving [there] on July 1st [where I was] for the summer....

So, because the story works out that [way] and all this; and, at the end everything, was exactly the same as it was before; which is exactly what happened, as I predicted. (laughing). Yeah, so I did those kinds of things and... Yeah, I like to play with the boundaries of writing and, particularly with running on the edge of poetics... sometimes. Like the story “In Paraguay,” you’ve read it?

ESC: Yes, definitely.

DA: That works very much out of a particular kind of rhythm, it’s addressed to you; it’s a kind of love story and corresponds to Paraguay’s history with Argentina. But it was based on my experience of Paraguay, which was understood...It is very much in technicolour, you know, it does look as if the colours haven’t quite gotten to where they might. It’s a very interesting place, Paraguay…its poverty and its wealth, mixed together, but I wanted to play off the kind of rhythm.

ESC: I can hear it now. It has got a very rhythmic sound to it, about the women who want to dance all day.

DA: Dancing in light (Laughing).

ESC: (Laughing)

DA: So the love story of Eliza Lynch, she’s in several novels and you can read them in the library; she’s the Irish woman who married the man who became the first dictator of Paraguay. I’d say... a story called...or which....

ESC: I think I’ve read it.

DA: It’s got all kinds of little crafts and...and things about horses.

ESC: No, that’s not the one I’m thinking of.

DA: But that one has got... I worked out a “Binary Lovers” and it is filled with little mathematical jokes everywhere, hardly anybody even notices. But it was a fun kind of thing to do.

ESC: It definitely makes interesting reading. It’s not just a simple plot. I noticed that with “The Pagan Wall”. There are all these obscure references, and conundrums, and most of it went over my head! (Laughing).

DA: Again, I wanted to communicate…I wanted to write a novel and I was thinking of Canada and the First World War. So I went to France and I had my characters, and I wanted to go and visit certain graveyards to try to find the old European culture. I took a sabbatical and I went to France and lived in Strasbourg for several months. I travelled around and found that Europe was not an old world, but a new world, a different kind of world.

ESC: Yes, the initial chapter, in particular, highlights that—an old Winnipeg and a new Europe, where there were all these neon lights –

DA: Yes. In teaching critical theory, Heidegger is really important, in critical theory, you know the whole deconstruction theory from Derrida onwards. Heidegger and deconstruction…So I made my character in[to] the philosopher Heidegger and I wanted him to speak German and, of course, Heidegger’s philosophies are all done in German. The philosophy can only be done in German because it’s all tied into the language, all this kind of loose trajectory.... Sein und Zeit.

So, it became, shall we say, a political thing, the advantages that...I wanted it to be kind of a spy story, an intellectual mystery and so, unfortunately, the strange Canadian guy was murdered who had this elaborate organisation and who had invented this giant gun that could shoot 250 miles…shoot ballistics…and he was tying to sell it to Iraq and then was murdered. So that provided a kind of background for the story, the Canadian might be involved in some kind of strange dealing. And then the Heideggerean element in it…I had read Sein und Zeit, the book that had taught us using philosophy.... So I taught him –

ESC: You didn’t read it in German? (laughing).

DA: No. (laughing) I didn’t read it in German. But, again, the characters often speak directly out of... writing, the things they say. And one of the characters, David Mann ...das Mann…and there are all sorts of games and light…Heidegger…Heraclites.

And the other thing was, when I lived in Strasbourg, I saw that walls... So I went out and found this incredible, very well-known Celtic wall, and it is a wall of 14
or 15 feet high and about 8 or 10 feet wide, built out of rock that had been brought from some place else. The closest rock was in Switzerland, so it was a couple of hundred miles, and then it was put together with some cement, and it had stood for 6000 years there on top of this mountain. And it drew it all... so I used that as a metaphor. Then I got into looking at using Celtic mythology and playing off perceptions of innocence. There’s a little girl with a sparrow in her hand and other elements of the Celtic mythology. So my idea was to try and lay [the myth as] intricately as possible and, at the same time, to try and keep the surface as real as possible.

ESC: It does actually read quite easily.

DA: Yeah, yeah.

ESC: Like the characters’ motives –

DA: The characters are not particularly attractive. They weren’t intended to be people you’d write about, that wasn’t what the novel was about. I know some people have said they hated the characters, liked the novel, but hated the characters (laughing), because, of course, the characters are always... Heidegger was very keen on angst...The key thing is that death is inevitable and so you have to consider the possibility of non-being. In order to be authentic, you have to think about that, and so your characters would be in angst. Well, you’ve got these two characters in continual angst. Actually I had Heidegger himself appear; I went to Germany and I went to Freiberg and there was a graduate student, who took me up into the mountains to Heidegger’s hut. So I did research for it, I did intricate research, even though I wasn’t intending to....

ESC: But that helped with the sense of place and location?

DA: Yes, exactly. (Inaudible) and I think that it’s really important to find a place, to locate... Even little comic versions of fairy-tales I try and fill with the details of a place and (inaudible) reality of those small details that suggest a real place.

ESC: The 50 Stories and A Piece of Advice, I know you mentioned it earlier, but it gives one a real sense of the history of the prairie region, but its individualism…pioneering spirit seems to be reacting to the collective experiences in cities like Toronto. I felt a real sense of individualism, a sort of pioneering spirit present in those stories. To what degree is that true—is that reflected in the characters?

DA: I’m trying to remember what stories are in there. Yeah, again they’re individual and you might say they include other people, independent, other than those with an Icelandic background…of the need for individuality and independence are key elements in anybody’s life. And so the communal, it’s amazing that even now the Icelandic community in Gimli is 126 years’ old or something, it’s an amazing festival and the community has a much stronger community in a city. Germans who have been here for, you know, much less time, who came in the 50’s or 60’s or even years later. They don’t maintain it.

ESC: Is that because it was a separate country for a while?

DA: Yeah.

ESC: Okay.

DA: That’s right. I don’t know if you have read “The Myth of Beginnings.” It is in The New Icelanders; you know the book The New Icelanders?

ESC: Yes, I have it, and have read, “The Myth of Beginnings.”

DA: I think that explains a lot.

ESC: Certainly. We’ve discussed “The Pagan Wall”, that was one of my questions, so I’ll move to Marsh Burning again if you don’t mind?

DA: Okay.

ESC: There is a tale of the marsh in [which] the two elements of fire and water play ambiguous roles; both are providers of life, yet both can be highly dangerous, causing destruction and death. We talked earlier about how regeneration....

DA: Yeah.

ESC: The landscape and elements appear in your work a great deal. Both Canadians and Icelanders seem to be at the mercy of the elements. In your work, does the focus on the elements stem from your prairie upbringing, or is it something that’s carried on from Icelandic traditions?

DA: When Marsh Burning first came out, some readers thought it was obsessed with death. Now, I hadn’t thought of that at all, but, of course, I grew up on a farm where things died all the time; you were out in nature and things died; the cows were being slaughtered for food; you were surrounded by death as an integral part of life. So I think it wasn’t so much my obsession with death, when you described the world where I had lived; in which there were these kinds of deaths, and people were dying, constantly. Fisherman drowned when I was growing up, maybe two or three a year would drown. I was a fisherman and my father was a fisherman for years; he fished until he was in his 30s and couldn’t swim a stroke. None of the fisherman could swim.

ESC: I actually read that in an interview you gave, you said fishermen don’t swim.

DA: That’s right.

ESC: And the fishermen in the Maritimes?

DA: They don’t swim either.

ESC: Going back to that life/death cycle, when you said that there was a line that actually sprung to mind, then, a bold flame knocking us free, is that sort of capturing that sense of...?

DA: Well, you see, what’s tied very much to Icelandic mythology is a sense of ragnarök, the immediacy, the world can end at any second and that’s the central thing about the Icelandic mythology: the world as you enter, it supports you, but it is rotting from within, it is eaten from below...the devil, the dragon, boars, deer...the badgers, and the squirrel also eats the leaves.

So it is being destroyed from inside and from outside. The end of the world is inevitable, almost immediate, and so it will be preceded by...the final winter where there will be no summer. But what I wanted to do, for the sense of this character, whose own world is coming apart, his marriage comes apart, and who sees in the world the inevitable end.

The rainbow bridges are everywhere because it’s traffic between heaven and earth... Anyway, he sees these strange creatures and time starts to move backwards and the squirrels are there...flowers, [identifiably] Icelandic [mythic figures], a lot of them are [there] Odin appears, he has only one eye. So he appears in the story and... So I was using that to talk about the end of the world. Well, a certain kind of person or the character who sees Baldur is the cause of innocence. He is the absent pure god, one that all the animals and birds agreed not to damage, except for...and then Loki, the trickster figure, an arrow, and has a blind brother [who] shoots the arrow and hits him in the ankle and... So that it is a definite innocence in the world and Fenrir, the friendly wolf, who in the end will eat the sun and the moon. So, you see, I use Icelandic mythology as a template, as a kind of structure, to talk about disillusion.

ESC: Okay. Sort of following along the lines of that... Boundaries such as...geography are explored in your work; what exactly do you intend to say when you unpick the historical forces that shape the contemporary world?

DA: Can you say that again?

ESC: What exactly do you intend to say when you unpick the historical forces that shape the contemporary world?

DA: Well, I’m concerned very much with what I call “border blur”, the moments when something is not quite one thing and not quite another. The blurring of borders seems to be characteristic of contemporary writing. Coming from a much more static world where things stayed the same for centuries, we now live in a world of blurred borders. What, for instance, is the essence of a, let’s say... Okay, a handicapped Canadian-Indian woman, is she Canadian, is she Indian, is she a woman, is she a handicapped person?

ESC: How do you categorise?

DA: How do you categorise? Where do the borders end? And the same thing in writing, where are the edges, how you tell beginnings through endings? Because the whole notion that we grow up with is that things have a beginning, a middle and an end.

ESC: Aristotle, isn’t it?

DA: Yeah. Aristotle…a beginning, a middle and an end. We tend to think of history as causes of the Second World War; the Second World War; the results of the Second World War. It wasn’t like that. There wasn’t a series of causes that set it off and it didn’t end. It was an ongoing thing in the world, and not everybody was involved, and these are all false borders, created by a desire for a certain kind of order. Again, this comes into a practice of writing which is processional. I believe much in the process of writing and I write, I never really know what I’m going to write until I start writing, and then when I write, when I write a short story, I have a rule that, if I can think of the ending before I get there, I can’t use it. So, far from having any outline or plan, I write stories with a sense that, at least at the level of the first draft, it comes out of the end of (inaudible) you’re writing to find out what happens, because I don’t know how it ends and I want to find out. So I’m there busily typing away, trying to find out what happens. So I believe very much in the process of (inaudible). That’s another reason to write...that is the same reason you read, you enter into a mental process that interests you. A lot of people say, “Well, I only read the good parts”. I say, “Well, I will only write the good parts then”. (laughing). If it stops me getting from one place to another...a technical device that allows you to escape, technical devices that...[is to] know a lot about how narrative is constructed, and I’m very good at teaching writing; my students very often are writers themselves and do well, because I teach it very technically. [You] get in there and you learn the craft, learn how to...learn how many ways you can handle time in a narrative, what you do and what perspective [to use], how you focalise it.

ESC: Yes, I read in an interview that you said something to the effect of you don’t believe in inspirational writing, everyone is capable...

DA: Yes, I believe that. I just got back from Germany. I taught a very nice class of German students how to write; and they were amazing; they were terrific. Some of the stories (inaudible) I think that a large number of the poems and stories were published except...magazines, it had very good chances of being published because they took it very seriously because they were going to... What they really wanted to do was to write in German and there are no creative writing courses in German, so they wanted to write in English.

ESC: Is that because the English language has a much wider audience?

DA: No it’s because the tradition is very strong...and based on language and a strong belief that only geniuses can produce this, that it’s just ingrained that writing is done by geniuses. There are no writers at universities; you have to find the writers elsewhere because they say, “You can’t teach this”

And I say, “Why? What about music, can’t teach music?”
“Oh, yes, you can teach music.”

“Okay, well what about that?”
“Yeah, you can do that.”

“Why can’t you teach writing, then?”
“I don’t know.”

ESC: Wasn’t that part of…when you were growing up you were engrained in the belief that writing was done by great artists elsewhere?

DA: That’s right. I taught writing in university, served on arts councils and I believed very strongly in trying to build a culture and not just, you know, be a writer in the culture. I think a writer is a really only a writer when he or she is writing; the rest of the time you’re a citizen. The genius that gets you out of other kinds of duty (inaudible) was to prevent younger people coming up as writers from having people laugh at the very thought that you could be a writer; to help build the institutions that permit an artistic life, the life of an artist, the life of a writer.

ESC: Encourage them.

DA: Yeah.

ESC: My final question…we touched on when you were talking about borders. Would you say that you have a bordered identity?

DA: I guess so. Border blur... (laughing) coming from a static world…borders of language, the magazine called Border Crossings. The way that...this was the reason. It was called the Arts Manitoba Quarterly and I suggested a special issue on North Dakota and Manitoba and called it “Border Crossings”. So we called that special issue, “the issue of Border Crossings,” and then the rest of the world thought, “Hey, let’s just go with the name Border Crossings because we’re interested in the crossover between different kinds of borders…and it is very much concerned with that.” It’s ...frontier—The Journal of Canadian Fiction was consciously started for Canadian writers.

ESC: Is that monthly or quarterly?

DA: It started as quarterly. I think it was quarterly. So, yeah, the idea of borders and the collapse of borders and (inaudible) of breaking down the borders. I write poetry, short-stories, novels, plays –

ESC: Songs?

DA: Songs, critical articles, all sorts of things. As far as I can see, interview writers are right, I wouldn’t think of myself as a poet or a novelist or –

ESC: You don’t define yourself as just a poet or –?

DA: No, no I am a writer. I think that there... I like borders that you can move back and forth between them, and that a lot of the conventions and the elements that make a good poem, work in a short story. A lot of the elements of a short story would make a poem or a play. I like the idea of the, I suppose, bricolage, putting together all the spare parts. So, I’m a kind of handyman (laughing) who writes... But certainly not by (inaudible)... I’m not in competition (inaudible) and, frankly, if you want to write, you want your voice to somehow alter your culture; and if it goes further then that that’s even better, but I start by writing, I suppose, for my friends, and, if it goes further than that, then that’s fine.

Arnason is the author of several publications including poetry books Marsh Burning and Skragg and the non-fiction works The Icelanders and The New Icelanders. His works of fiction include: 50 Stories and a Piece of Advice, The Circus Performer's Bar, The Happiest Man in the World, The Pagan Wall, The Dragon and the Drygoods Princess, If Pigs Could Fly, King Jerry, and The Demon Lover. Arnason's plays include Section 23/L'article 23, Welcome to Hard Times, The Hard Life Cabaret and Dewline. He is a frequent contributor to CBC radio, working on adaptations of Tom Jones, The Tin Drum and Settlers of the Marsh. Arnason was the editor of Dorothy Livesay's Right Hand, Left Hand.

Arnason is of Icelandic descent and often writes about the Icelandic community in Canada. He is the son of Baldvin and Gudrun Arnason and the eldest of seven children. He attended the University of Manitoba where he received a B.A. and M.A., and has a Ph.D. from the University of New Brunswick. Arnason co-founded the Journal of Canadian Fiction with John Moss at the University of New Brunswick in 1972.

He was one of the co-founders of Queenston House Press in Winnipeg and has been an editor of Turnstone Press in Winnipeg since 1975. He was chairman of the Literary Press Group and a member of the executive of the Association of Canadian Publishers. He served on the Manitoba Arts Council 1985-1987.

He has taught at the University of Manitoba since 1972, and was the head of the English Department from 1997 to 2006. He was Acting Head of the Department of Icelandic, at the University of Manitoba from 1998 to 2006. His archives are held at University of Manitoba.