What are you working on right now, Victor Enns?

Reading www.victorenns.ca takes time, but references my current projects in the reading and writing headings. My current priority is finishing Music for Men Over Fifty, which I described to Prairie Books Now as poems about “dejection, depression, drinking and decrepitude leavened with love.” Taking off where Lucky Man (Hagios, 2005) left off, the poems take a hard look at aging and love, especially in the title sequence, which, as you would expect, feature many musical references including a visit to The Green Mill Jazz Club in Chicago for example.

I am also learning to write fiction, and have sent my first complete short story to Joan Thomas, the Writer-in-Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Often my initial conceits are outrageously ambitious and my current plan is too learn, practice, and become competent at the craft of fiction writing by writing 26 stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, most about men – who are not me. I am finding this quite liberating, but at the moment it’s all practice, which I plan to complete in the next four years.

What I am practicing for is the writing of three novels, when I leave government and have more time and a better grasp on what I need to do to best realize the stories I want to tell. The novels on the drawing board are Susann and/or Against the Grain loosely based on my mother’s struggle for freedom and independence in a hostile conservative Mennonite family and southern Manitoba rural society. I took my first crack at this in The Dead Mother which I wrote for the Three-Day Novel contest, modeled on Barthleme’s The Dead Father. Both my mother and father are dead, committed to the earth, and to poetry in Lucky Man.

The second is starting out with the rather flat title Mill Road, a riches to rags story based loosely on the family who owned the mill and all the homes on the street next to it in a small southern Msanitoba town with some resemblance to the one in which I grew up. Preacher’s Kids would be the last following a coeterie of high school friends from 1969 to 1999.

Working is the right word, but I also have a full time job, so am trying not to get frustrated with lack of time and presence of pain – all expected to change in the next four years. I still have two unplaced manuscripts (excerpts on my website) to which I would return should I be fortunate enough to find a publisher.

Victor Enns is the author of Jimmy Bang Poems (Turnstone, 1979), Correct in this Culture (5th House, 1985), Lucky Man (Hagios, 2005), and boy (Hagios, 2012). He is employed by the Province of Manitoba as Publishing and Arts Consultant in the Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism.

The First One's Free.

The First One's Free.

To celebrate (over) a decade since my first book, I’m offering it for free.

EX MACHINA is a choose-your-own-adventure-style poetry-novel hybrid about how machines have changed what it means to be human.

Fill out this form so we can stay in touch, and I’ll send you the book.