How did you become a writer? Not sure how I ended up writing, I never knew what I was doing, never had a Five Year Plan. I was a bookworm as a kid and the family home had newspapers and magazines and books. After high school and a few years of blue-collar jobs, I went to the University of Victoria for English, which I liked, but I liked CW workshops more. I am very pro-workshop. Workshops gave me deadlines for years and the variety of feedback was often contradictory, but beneficial. I could tell what was helpful for what I was trying to do. CW seemed friendlier, hanging out at the pub after class to chat. Lit class was less so, but both were good for hearing about significant writers, too many to list. I haunted used bookstores, collecting. Cormac McCarthy said books come out of books, and he is correct.

Name your writing influences. In high school I was very lucky to find the John Dos Passos trilogy USA in the library: it was a huge influence in terms of what was possible in writing, the mix of headlines, bios, fragments, issues of class and labour, many different characters, and even drawings. In high school I also read Hemingway, very spare versus the spawl of Dos Passos. I admired both styles. I was also lucky to have a string of very good English teachers throughout grade school and high school.

In first-year university the short story writer Bill Valgardson got me to read Flannery O’Connor and I am indebted for that. Phyllis Webb showed me books by the poet John Thompson, and I also pored over Joan Didion and Alice Munro’s early books (how are they getting this effect?) and met Munro briefly in Victoria.

I was the kid who read every word of album covers (who’s playing bass on the Gilded Palace of Sin?), and I read and listened to song lyrics. I cannot separate music from books as an influence; in a way, music is everything.

When and where do you write? I write in different places. At home I may take over the dining room table for years on end, but I also like to get out the door, whether to a café or bar. I tend to cabin fever, so a different scene gives me new eyes and ears, unexpected words and ideas show up. I can write in noisy places and often collect stray bits of dialogue. I eavesdrop all the time and use the found material in my stories; very good for minor characters or parallels or humour. When it goes well, I’m happy. Sometimes I write in binges, sometimes I take time off and recharge. I don’t lose sleep over it, I’m not 9-5.

When traveling I look for “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” say a café where I can hide comfortably in a corner and catch up on my notes. My memory is not good and I need to jot notes or it’s lost.

Once I had jobs and kids, I realized I no longer had big blocks of time; I had to use what tiny bits of time I could; a minute here or there adds up over ten years. Being a night owl helps. I write differently at midnight than I do when the larks call.  

As a proud Luddite, I always carry pen and paper; I feel naked without a pen and a minor key harmonica. I print out an ongoing story and work it over by hand with a pen; I see a printed page differently, I can see more easily what isn’t working or flowing. And I like less time staring at screens.

What are you working on now? Right now I am working on a new story about a pickpocket who was following me last month in Venice. I evaded him, but in my story I get to play God and make him pay. I also have CNF travel pieces on the go concerning Florence, Marseille, and Arles. In Florence last year our neighbour became unbalanced, ranting and trying to break into our apartment at 4 am. A very romantic Italian interlude.

Another piece concerns four Afghan refugees trying to get to Paris, but it includes Van Gogh and the Camargue’s wild bulls. The Camargue is an amazing landscape.

Over a period of 25 years, off and on, I have written several Wild West stories to do with Custer, and to do with Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, leaders of Metis rebellions in western Canada. They all lived and died in the same era; the plan is to make this a novel.

Last fall while downsizing I found a folder of old notes from late ’70s and early ’80s, notes made when I was at Iowa and the Yaddo artists colony, then misplaced. From the old notes I made two new stories very quickly and sold both quickly to lit mags, which was much smoother than usual. I have a suspicion I will pay for this somehow.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I keep very rough notebooks of anything I feel like jotting down, anything at all, so a blank page is rarely an issue. I may begin with an image or one scene and add to that. Postcard stories are a low-pressure way to start, and it may become longer, which is fine. When teaching CW I don’t give prompts or writing exercises. I tell my students that Margaret Atwood does not call me and say, Mark, what should I write? She knows what she wants to write about.

I do have sympathy for someone feeling blocked. After I was out of Iowa, out of workshops and deadlines and starting a new job, I lost momentum. I had to find a way to write on my own. It took a few long years to adjust. Now I can’t stop, can’t shut up.

Walks are a great aid for writing. I believe in letting the brain work; give it time and your brain will help you. Take it out for a stroll and the right word or new idea will pop into your head. Thanks for that!

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? Decades ago I had strange, but memorable advice from Canadian writer Matt Cohen who told us, his CW students, that we needed to drop acid. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe he meant we needed to stir up our brains more, that our writing was not very exciting.

Bill Valgardson pointed out concrete vs. abstract diction, and to write in scenes. This was an eye opener. I devoured books, but hadn’t really noticed how prose was put together, word by word, scene by scene. It wasn’t visible to me. Then it was.

Martha Sharpe, my editor at Anansi, asked me to convert as much prose as possible to dialogue. Your Irish aunts are funny? Prove it. That’s too hard, I thought. But I became a believer. You need exposition and dialogue both, but the human eye and brain prefer dialogue.

Mamet’s very useful screenwriting dictum: Get into a scene late, get out early.

Elmore Leonard once mentioned getting out a notebook when watching a doc on coal miners. Now I always collect while watching TV, docs, films, sports, sitcoms, collecting slang, jargon, and odd expressions. You never know when you may find them useful.

What’s your advice to new writers? My simplest advice to new writers? Be very messy. No need for a draft to be perfect; I work with frags and ragged segments and my early drafts are a shambles. I’ll fix it later. And I leave lots of room to make changes, to improvise and add more as it hits me.

Take your time. One image or word or idea leads to another, then another, and the piece slowly builds to something larger with unexpected turns, which makes me curious and happy.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives, and the travel book Ireland's Eye. Published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, he is a graduate of The Iowa Writers' Workshop and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead literary journal. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.