Q + A
STUART ROSS INTERVIEWS NOAH LEZNOFF
Noah Leznoff is the author of two books of poetry, Why We Go to Zoos and Outside Magic. Born in Montreal, he now lives in Markham, Ontario. This Magazine fiction & poetry editor Stuart Ross spoke with him recently.
Mr. Leznoff, and how are you today?
I ripped a piece of lateral meniscus during a floor hockey game, taking also and incidentally an elbow to the mouth from an economist. Thirteen-plus months later, I’ve got three holes in my knee and a script for Percocet. So hobbling tonight, but no complaints.
What drove you to write short fiction after two books of poetry?
Fiction’s always been in the background: Lots of lower-drawer, undercooked files that I’m getting to now, just for a change. Moving from language and impulse to sustained character in sustained contexts—a different aesthetic and process for me. I mean, a poem in mid-stage is more portable; you can play around with its specifics on the way to work or walking the dog, reciting and revising. The off-the-chair work with fiction, the daily carriage, is more conceptual. Maybe a need to step back from detail and play around with bigger systems. That’s appealing now.
Has teaching high school had an influence on your writing?
Yes. Debilitating. Endless paper. On the upside: The kids are, for the most part, fun—though some are messed in ways that make it hard to be hopeful. Either way, they keep you honest; it can’t help being an intimate profession. And the collegiality’s good. So yeah, a ton to learn in a high school environment—absurdist politics, the subtle tick of young psyches, new stuff always to read—but there’s little time during the school year to make good sense of any of it, much less write.
What writers of any genre would you most like to act with in a dinner theatre production of Assassins?
DeLillo, for Libra—and to meet him—as Oswald; Carol Ann Duffy as Sara Jane Moore; John Barlow as John Hinkley Jr. (the hair, and because he’s a fearless singer); Will Self as John Wilkes Booth, maybe; Stuart Ross (in drag) as Squeaky Fromme. I’d be The Narrator.
You think poetry or fiction can effect change?
I guess we’re talking print here, as opposed to hip-hop or film. So: Not single-handedly or especially. It’s hard to make a case for fiction or poetry (here in North America) as activism per se—given the more direct, hands-on work people do. But, like anyone else, writers can be part of changes in process.
I’m trying to remain optimistic about the possibilities for ink and paper. Maybe, beyond that, print as simply a locus for recuperation, one that’s paradoxically both private (silent!)—at least initially—and connected. The premise that fiction hangs on empathy—what John Ralston Saul calls “the ability to imagine the other.” Or maybe reading’s just another mode of consumption: in, out and away we go, on to the next exigency or stimulus.
For now, I’ll be naive and conservative—and agree that, incrementally or subconsciously at least, reading poems and stories matters. Or maybe the question’s best answered by posing it in the negative: How would we be different without poems and stories?
