griddle talk

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For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.

This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, produces, as if by accident, invariably astonishing social, moral and ethical critical insights. Each of these writers’ particular uses of language—the most radically different in contemporary literature—consistently foregrounds and interrogates the cultural origins of “common” perceptions that too often remain hidden and undiscovered in the dictionaries we search for “common” meaning: proof positive that each person’s perception of life’s most fundamental questions and answers is almost never shared, and is always and only ever subject to translation, even among those who “share” the same language.

Here is what they talked about:

Trouble and the Self

What is Forever

Does Belonging Exist

Luck and Life

We Need Not Hold Our Experiences Against Life

Is There a Script

The Role of Mysteries in People’s Lives

Time

Free Will and Wider Wiring

Families

God &/or the Loved One and Individual Freedom

Mortality and the Jigsaw Puzzle of Replicating a Parent in a Lover

Why “Shoulds” are No Good

Delusional Relationships

The Chemistry Metaphor

Censorship and Propaganda

True Love

Fact or Fiction—Where’s the Line

Do We Invent Everything We Go Through

Is Rationality a Costume

Can We Influence Larger Book Sales

Maybe We All Want to Move to Sweden

Just for Today I’m Confused About Religion

Tax Reform

Predictability

Stage Fright

Carol, What Is It

Them

Know Thyself and the Writer’s Delusions

Wondering What about the Stars and Our Friends

Childhood Versus Later On

Real Life—Does it Really Exist

All Those Prayers—Where are They Going, Exactly

Meaninglessness

Time and Relativity

Each Day We Wake Up and Realize They’ve Given Us Another Day

Everything is Answered

The Questions in Our Lives—the Balance, and What’s Peripheral

Dogs Give Unconditional Love, Why Can’t People

Life is Difficult and We are Up to the Challenge

Personal Happiness and Destiny

Federalism—Is It Too Late to Save It

The Payoff is Always Inside Ourselves

Cultural Translation

Can We Know Beforehand

Spirituality

Loss and Grief

Is This Real Life We’re Experiencing

Jealousy

Why Aren’t People in Love with Us When We’re in Love with Them

Do We Have Freedom Outside Our Imprintings—Can We Find Reciprocal Love if Our Imprintings Prevent That from Happening

AUTHOR

Carol Malyon

Carol Malyon has worked as a nurse, and then in health research, before owning a bookstore and hosting a reading series in the Toronto’s beaches area. She has published the poetry collections, Headstand; Emma’s Dead; and Colville’s People; the short story collections, The Edge of the World and Lovers and Other Strangers; and the novels, If I Knew I’d Tell You; The Adultery Handbook; The Migration of Butterflies; and Cathedral Women; and a children’s picture book, Mixed-up Grandmas. She and bill bissett co-authored Griddle Talk, a year of conversations at the Golden Griddle, where they discussed “love and life and anything else you want.” She is based in Toronto, but has led short story workshops in the Maritimes and North Bay, and has been writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick.

AUTHOR

bill bissett

bill bissett opened Canadian poetry to postmodernism and from there proceeded in every direction all at once. Since his invention of the blewointment press in 1963, bissett has worked diligently to explode all boundaries of author, text, and context, radically disrupting static and disciplinary modes of art making. Read, taught, studied, and imitated all around the world, he now lives in Toronto, painting and writing somewhere between painting and poetry.

derek beaulieu is the author 9 books of poetry and conceptual fiction, editor of the acclaimed small presses housepress and No Press and co-editor of Writing Surfaces: the Selected Fiction of John Riddell (2013). He is an instructor at Mount Royal University and the Alberta College of Art + Design. beaulieu’s Seen of the Crime: Essays on Conceptual Writing was published in 2011.

Gregory Betts is the Director of Canadian Studies and the Graduate Program Director of Canadian and American Studies at Brock University. He is the author of five books of poetry, and the editor of four books of experimental Canadian writing. His monograph Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press.

Reviews

“Malyon’s curiosity is bottomless: Her imagination creates and recreates. She makes us believe that with the turn of her pen she can invite us in any direction.”
— Ottawa Citizen

“[bill bissett] is the shaman of Canadian poetry.”
— Georgia Straight

Awards

There are no awards found for this book.

For 52 weeks, bill bissett and Carol Malyon met for brunch and conversation at the Golden Griddle in Toronto.

This sustained conversational encounter between Carol Malyon, who writes within the objective bounds of standard English usage, and bill bissett, one of contemporary writing’s most exotic practitioners, working with the visual forms of language in his own non-hierarchic, phonetic orthography, produces, as if by accident, invariably astonishing social, moral and ethical critical insights. Each of these writers’ particular uses of language—the most radically different in contemporary literature—consistently foregrounds and interrogates the cultural origins of “common” perceptions that too often remain hidden and undiscovered in the dictionaries we search for “common” meaning: proof positive that each person’s perception of life’s most fundamental questions and answers is almost never shared, and is always and only ever subject to translation, even among those who “share” the same language.

Here is what they talked about:

Trouble and the Self

What is Forever

Does Belonging Exist

Luck and Life

We Need Not Hold Our Experiences Against Life

Is There a Script

The Role of Mysteries in People’s Lives

Time

Free Will and Wider Wiring

Families

God &/or the Loved One and Individual Freedom

Mortality and the Jigsaw Puzzle of Replicating a Parent in a Lover

Why “Shoulds” are No Good

Delusional Relationships

The Chemistry Metaphor

Censorship and Propaganda

True Love

Fact or Fiction—Where’s the Line

Do We Invent Everything We Go Through

Is Rationality a Costume

Can We Influence Larger Book Sales

Maybe We All Want to Move to Sweden

Just for Today I’m Confused About Religion

Tax Reform

Predictability

Stage Fright

Carol, What Is It

Them

Know Thyself and the Writer’s Delusions

Wondering What about the Stars and Our Friends

Childhood Versus Later On

Real Life—Does it Really Exist

All Those Prayers—Where are They Going, Exactly

Meaninglessness

Time and Relativity

Each Day We Wake Up and Realize They’ve Given Us Another Day

Everything is Answered

The Questions in Our Lives—the Balance, and What’s Peripheral

Dogs Give Unconditional Love, Why Can’t People