The Trillium Ten, with Jeff Latosik

Open Book: Ontario is celebrating the 24th Annual Trillium Book Award with The Trillium Ten/Trillium Dix interview series. Find out what this year's Trillium Book Award finalists were doing when they heard the news about their nomination, where in the province they most love to write, who their favourite Ontario authors are and more by following our series. Winners of the Trillium Awards will be announced on Friday, June 17th.

Contest! Would you like an invitation for you and a guest to attend the exclusive Trillium Book Awards Luncheon? Find out how here.

Toronto-based poet Jeff Latosik is nominated for the English-Language Trillium Book Award for Poetry for Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (Insomniac Press), his first collection of poems. Jeff Latosik was Open Book's March 2011 Writer in Residence.

Before catching up with Jeff, we asked Paul Vermeersch, Poetry Editor at Insomniac Press, to tell us about publishing Tiny, Frantic, Stronger.

Open Book:

Why did Insomniac Press decide to publish Tiny, Frantic, Stronger?

Paul Vermeersch:

Over the last five years, Jeff Latosik has been making quite a name for himself in poetry circles, winning the P. K. Page Founder's Award for Poetry from The Malahat Review and the Great Canadian Literary Hunt at THIS Magazine. Then, after completing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, he was named a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2008. It was clear to us that Latosik was a rising star.

All the attention he was getting was enough to make any publisher take notice, but in the end it was the power and originality of his writing that convinced us to publish him. Now that his book has been named a finalist not only for this year's Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, but also for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, it is clear that more and more people share in our opinion that Tiny, Frantic, Stronger is one of the most exciting poetic debuts in years, and we at Insomniac Press are very proud to have published it.

OB:

How does this book fit within Insomniac Press's publishing list?

PV:

Latosik's book is exactly the kind of poetry collection we love to publish at Insomniac Press. It's lyrically powerful, yet it confidently takes aesthetic risks. It's deeply intellectual, but with a nonchalance that prevents its more challenging elements from seeming unfriendly. We love the imagination, intimacy and conviction at the heart Latosik's poetry, qualities apparent in its craft and capacity to affect. That's why it was perfect for our poetry list.

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The Trillium Ten, with Jeff Latosik

Open Book:

Tell us about your Trillium-Award nominated book.

Jeff Latosik:

Tiny, Frantic, Stronger is my first book of poems. I always joke that I should have just called it The Ones I Currently Like Best. I wrote the book over several years and it went through several major renovations. What started as typically autobiographical became decidedly more strange through revisions, where my understanding of what a poem was changed. I suppose I tried to stick close to that great saying by Flannery O’Connor — “no surprise in the writer, none in the reader.” So I tried to make it swerve.

OB:

What gave you the idea for the book that received this nomination?

JL:

The book isn’t framed by an idea. Some of us do it that way; others don’t. Because I’m (at least on paper) an individual person, a single consciousness, there is a sort of inevitable constellation of themes, but even now I’m not sure what those are. For me, discussing them has become a means of delineating them too broadly. I’d be less interested in doing it if I really knew. If that seems strange, I can only say that underneath all the seeming, it is actually quite strange.

OB:

What were you doing when you received the news about your Trillium nomination?

JL:

I was in bed with my laptop on my lap, which I normally don’t do. It was morning. I wasn’t quite awake, and I didn’t really read the message properly so I thought that I was being forwarded the shortlist to comment on. I thought I was going to be paid to do this. This story will make you think I’m conceited, but I’ll only ask that you remember that it was early and that I did think it was odd….

OB:

What book would you give to a visitor to give them a sense of Ontario?

JL:

Haha, a challenge! Well, wow, how does one describe a place made of so many smaller places? Does one skew rural or urban? It would be hard not to go with Munro for the small town experience, Ondaatje or Brand for the city experience. But I’m going to go with Ontario Wine Country by Rod Phillips, a guided tour of the wineries in Ontario. If the reader didn’t like it (there’d be no reason not to; it’s a fine book), they could at least say they’d learned something applicable to their stay here. And now that they are fuming mad, they have reason to go.

OB:

What spot in Ontario most inspires you to write?

JL:

I’m inspired by where I live — Parkdale Toronto, but I don’t write about it, at least not consciously. That’s not true: in TFS, it does appear. There was also a field at my old public school that makes an appearance in the book, but it’s blasé look would be decidedly uninteresting to an outside observer. It’s a simple soccer field, but it appeared frequently in my mind when I was writing, though again the poem I did write was very short. Heh, I never did see what was coming even half well.

OB:

Who is your favourite Ontario-based author?

JL:

Alice Munro.

OB:

Do you have a favourite quote about writing?

JL:

See #1.

OB:

What distracts you from writing?

JL:

Guitars. Reaper. Forms. Loves. Zywiec. Marking. Jukeboxes. Crosswords. Chess. Dinner. Texting.

OB:

What are you reading right now?

JL:

Oh, wow, don’t get me going, seriously. You could say, though, that I make use of the general interest section of my local library. I’m reading a book about chess strategy right now, as well as book on Judit Polgar, a chess prodigy. Revisiting Armitage, Paterson, Glenday, among others; beginning the Metamorphoses, and also — great title btw — Oliver Sacks’ classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. This is a decidedly irresponsible, reckless reading list and shouldn’t be attempted by anyone who doesn’t want to incur formidable fines from the library. Of course, you could just return the books on time. I’ll stick with the fines.

OB:

What can you tell us about your next project?

JL:

I’m writing another book of poetry. It’s pretty early. I had some more thematic ideas, but they’re fallen to the wayside. This new one will have more to do with music, though, I think, or maybe bears. Musical Bears. Save and print.

Jeff Latosik's award-winning poems have appeared in magazines and journals across the country. He won the P.K. Page Founders' Award from The Malahat Review in 2007, placed first in THIS Magazine's Great Canadian Literary Hunt in 2008 and was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for 2008. He teaches at Humber College in Toronto. Tiny, Frantic, Stronger is his first book. For more information about Tiny, Frantic, Stronger please visit the Insomniac Press website. Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.