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ELIZABETH BACHINSKY

Elizabeth Bachinsky for DESK SPACE

DESK SPACE Who?

ELIZABETH BACHINSKY Elizabeth Bachinsky, poet.

DS When did you start writing, publish your first book (or when are you publishing your next)?

EB I’ve always written—that is, as a kid and a teenager I wrote—but I started publishing in literary journals when I was 24. I was 29 when my first book, Curio, came out with BookThug (2005). I have two other books. Both are published with Nightwood Editions. There’s Home of Sudden Service (2006) and God of Missed Connections (Spring, 2009). I’m at work on another book that might be called Infidel. But that one won’t be done for a while yet. I’m 32.

DS Where do you write (at your desk/outside/in bed)?

EB I share a one-room studio in Vancouver with my husband, so, whenever I get the place to myself, I work there on my desktop. I also work on my laptop in the café downstairs where they make good coffee and leave me pretty much to myself. I also seem to do a lot of house sitting and travelling these days, so I write a lot in other people’s spaces and in hotel rooms or wherever.

DS Why do you work where you do (at your desk because it is a quiet space/outside b/c it helps you think, in the park b/c you can smoke, etc)?

EB This question makes me want to smoke. I may have to hike into town and get a pack of cigarettes now. And then I’ll want to take my computer outside on the deck, work out there, and smoke. Right now I’m in a cabin on the Sunshine Coast. I came up here to finish God of Missed Connections, which I delivered to my editor yesterday. So now I’m just kind of reeling around trying not to be nervous about it. I’m also trying not to smoke.

DS What are you working on now?

EB Poems. An introduction for a friend’s new book. A short story. More poems.

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Thursday: Elizabeth Bachinsky

ANDREW HOOD

Andrew Hood for DESK SPACE

DESK SPACE Who (a witty one-liner or a bio)?

ANDREW HOOD Andrew Hood: ditherer/short story plugger-awayer-ater.

DS When did you start writing, publish your first book (or when are you publishing your next)?

AH I've been up to it since I thought I could impress my older brother by writing (so, what: 12 or 13?) and Pardon Our Monsters came out Fall 2007, dedicated to the lovable lummox even. My next submission to "heaven's unchangeable heart" will come out when I get my act together.



DS Where do you write (at your desk/outside/in bed)?

AH The lion's share of the "work" (in person, I'd wryly make a "tossing-off" gesture here) has to be done anywhere but at my desk, so at my kitchen table, or in coffee shops (either the Red Brick Café or the Corner Stone in Guelph), or in bars (The Woolwich Arms in Guelph and Dieu du Ciel in Montreal). Only the most final of final drafts seems to get done at my desk, which can sometimes make me feel like I'm being kept in during recess writing out lines of "I will not… in class." I can't really write-write at my computer, only arrange and gerrymander there, I guess.

DS Why do you work where you do (at your desk because it is a quiet space/outside b/c it helps you think/in the park b/c you can smoke, etc)?

AP Apart from the respective vices available there, probably I work best in cafés and bars because with strangers ostensibly watching you and wondering what you're writing exactly, you've got to keep your head down and your pen to paper—there's just no opportunity for dicking around or stroking your chin contemplatively in that situation, you know. But at home and at the desk, the smaller and more cramped the space the better. In this way I seem to be slightly autistic: I need to be hemmed-in when I do what it is that I supposedly do. A few weeks ago I was over for dinner at a friend's house and she's got this awesome two-year-old, and this kid's got his own little fort made out of a refrigerator box right there in the living room (there's a little pot in the window for flowers and everything). I saw that and I thought, Now that's the kind of office I need. Or maybe I actually said it out loud. (The kid's not autistic, by the way. He's just understands the benefits of having a home inside a home.)



DS What are you working on now?

AH I'm writing stories for a collection called Traps and Attractions while glacially working away on a book structurally akin to somewhere between Who Do You Think You Are? and Go Down, Moses about the "Canadian Condition" (toss-off gesture here, too), tracing the downfall of a Scottish lineage from the doomed settlement of New Caledonia to the moon landing, with some Mennonites, two-headed horses, and country fairs dappled throughout.