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Birk Sproxton is a writer and editor based in Red Deer, Alberta, where he teaches Canadian Literature and creative writing at Red Deer College. His publications include The Hockey Fan Came Riding, Headframe:, The Red-Headed Woman with the Black Black Heart, which received the Manitoba Historical Society's award for historical fiction, and the anthologies Great Stories from the Prairies and Trace: Prairie Writers on Writing. He also edited the "Winnipeg in Fiction" issue of Prairie Fire. He is currently completing a book on the Precambrian Shield.

I was first drawn to Sproxton's work because he writes about things others seem not to address: the north, mining, work, rocks, the vernacular, the body, obscure history. And he does so in a complex, genre-bending way, querying and challenging form, tradition, and convention. Old forms are renewed in the unlikliest of ways: Flin Flon becomes the location of a late twentieth-century Mennipean satire, and imaginative invention stands for history. Readers are asked - required - to think and to participate in the meaning of his texts and are forever kept off-kilter in an elaborate aesthetic game that is a Sproxton narrative. He is thought of as a prairie writer and yet all his books are about the Precambrian Shield, a landscape that comprises a large part of Manitoba (far larger than the prairie so commonly associated with that province). He is the only person I have ever met who will spontaneously drive six hours anywhere (it does not matter where) to look at a rock formation he has read about, but rocks are what interest him, and occasionally lakes - and these are the elements of substance in his imaginative and literal worlds.

This interview took place on a rainy spring day in the old court house in Red Deer, where Sproxton maintains a writing office. On one wall there was a large, bolted-down metal ring to which, he told me, prisoners used to be chained while they awaited trial. The rest of the room was barren but for a table where the business of writing could be carried out. The sound of the rain outside the open window, the buses passing by, and the history of the room and building resonated appropriately as we spoke.
 

C:	I wanted to start by asking you about the very interesting mix of epigraphs to Headframe:. You cite Rabelais from Gargantua and Pantagruel, Ken Dryden's The Game and Charles Bramble's The Land of the Lobstick. Dryden's passage Hundreds of tiny fragments of action, some leading somewhere, most going nowhere. Only one thing is clear. A fragmented game must be played in fragments. Ken Dryden, The Game (1983) seems to be a kind of message to the reader about method or about your approach to narrative. Was that your intention?
B:	I meant that as a clue to the nature of the book. The text is a collage, a series of fragments. That is how we understand the world anyway, it seems to me - in bits and pieces. So what I have given are fragments of narrative, fragments of document and, I guess, ultimately fragments of a larger story that all the smaller fragments together make up. So yes, I see the Dryden quotation as a hint to the reader about how to read the book - not to look for a single narrative but to look for multiple narratives which may comprise a whole.
C:	And this is a notion that is carried through in all your full-length works to a degree.
B:	Yes, right, yes, to a lesser degree in The Red-Headed Woman with the Black Black Heart but there again I incorporate bits of documents, newspaper accounts; and in The Hockey Fan I use something of the same strategy.
C:	Dryden, of course, is talking about a game in that passage and given that all of your narratives require quite a bit of work on the part of the reader I wonder if you strive for a connection with the reader maybe at the level of play - textual and formal play?
B:	I am playing with these texts and then inviting the reader to play with them as well. The texts may not engage everybody equally at all points but I think that with The Hockey Fan and with Headframe: you can dip and skip. You can dip in and read the text for a bit and go quickly to another place and start again so that while the sequence may be important I think it's more important to the reader to find his or her way through the network and create a path.
C:	So, do you think the notion of game - I know, I am pushing this a little bit not only because of the Dryden passage but also because of the overt references to games in The Hockey Fan - is a metaphor for process?
B:	I think play is central to the writer and I guess for the reader as well. When you come to the game, then you butt up against notions of convention. Part of what I do in all three books is to play with the conventions of reading and writing. The nature of the game is to play with the conventions or the "rules" that we work with.
C:	I am thinking also of the epigraph from Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel which is a work that celebrates the overblown, the grotesque and the excessive, amongst other things. Now a Silenus, in ancient days, was a little box, of the kind we see to-day in apothecaries' shops, painted on the outside with such gay, comical figures as harpies, satyrs, bridled geese, horned hare, saddled ducks, flying goats, pot-bellied pelicans, dewy-eyed moose, bears sitting on toilets, dogs wearing socks, stags and other parties in harness, and other devices of that sort, light-heartedly invented for the purpose of mirth, as was Silenus himself, the master of good old Bacchus. But inside these boxes were kept rare drugs, such as balm, ambergris, cardamum, musk, civet, mineral essences, and other precious things. Adapted from Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532) I wonder if this passage is reflective of your approach to content? In The Red-Headed Woman there are many overblown characters, sort of excessive types. Are you drawn to that sort of figure?
B:	Yes. There is another thing about Rabelais that applies. The novel is an example of a Menippean Satire - or another word that people use instead is anatomy - and so each of these texts can be read as anatomies. I use the notion of the anatomy as form. I am interested in the relation of form to content. The documents section in Headframe: is a good example of the anatomy in textual terms. The documents section might call up the idea of a Caesarean section where the body is in fact cut in some way or another. So I cut the documents up with the hope content itself will become the form. The anatomy as a form includes exaggeration, especially of a philosophical type. Well, Frye explains that in the anatomy, or in Mennipean Satire, philosophical ideas are exposed. So in The Red-Headed Woman I have some characters like Judge Knott, who is really not a character so much as a figure or a representative of a certain set of attitudes. A character like Smallbearing has a certain sense of decorum that is at odds with the values of the larger community. So, you have then both the satirical nature and the concern with content and form.
C:	Could one could say that the Silenus referred to in the Rabelais passage in Headframe:, which is described as "a box painted with strange and comical figures - dogs with socks and bears sitting on toilets - and that is filled with rare drugs and precious things," is a statement on your take on the relationship between form and content? The idea of a box is a little more rigid than some of the things you have been telling me about, but all the same you do play with this notion.
B:	If you look a little more closely at what Rabelais is playing with there you will see the notion of a container and the contained - or inside and outside. I am interested in the nature of mining activity; the discovery of the unseen - at least initially - or to take a strike into the earth in the form of diamond drilling - as in the diamond drilling episode in Headframe:. In diamond drilling the purpose is to take an extract from the earth, a core, and then read that core and imagine an ore body or a great body of riches. The act of working from the fragment to imagining the whole seems to me to connect with Rabelais's inside and outside. So they are making things inside and outside this box - the box being the earth itself, or in my case the box being the book.
C:	I want to turn to other formal concerns here. The Hockey Fan Came Riding and Headframe: are not obviously novels nor are they another clear form such as the short story collection or poetry collection. What would you call them?
B:	Books [laughs]. It gets to be a problem. In fact, The Hockey Fan was submitted for the Alberta Writing Awards and I received a call asking what category it should go in. At that time they didn't have a category for short fiction, so I had to say in the fiction category. I guess it is a kind of book of short stories as it is mostly prose but it is not exclusively so. Headframe: which is mostly poetry is not exclusively so either.
C:	But there are narrative links between the different types of writing in these works.
B:	Yes, there are, but I think of them more as musical categories than as narrative ones. I see the sections of Headframe: as movements. I think Headframe: actually fits nicely into the category we call the long poem. There are a number of books now that are like that - though perhaps there were not so many at the time using documents in that manner. And The Hockey Fan is a book of short fictions that tie together through the itinerary of the narrator that is outlined at the beginning of the book. It is a travel narrative, so you have a departure, an encounter with a new (old) world, and then a return. A three-part pattern, but that does not really make it a novel. So I think of them as books, but books aren't often thought of as books; people often want more direction than that.
C:	Thematically, much of what you write is not what some people would term the matter of "high literature": working class and labour issues, the underbelly of society, tall tales, gossip and anecdotes. You also deal with long-forgotten or unofficial history and archival documents that are marginalized. Conversely, the work is sophisticated and complex formally and functions in quite difficult ways at times. Do you set out to work with this material specifically; or to put it another way, are you working against the distinctions between high and low literature and those kinds of polarities that are often thrown around? Do you think that you are pushing against those kinds of bounds?
B:	Yeah, I am certainly aware that most people wouldn't think of my books as literature at all because they stay so close to the vernacular, for example, or to the working life or the life of the body. But it seems to me as you suggest in your question that these variants haven't been much explored and in any case they seem to me to be the more interesting and the more lively. What I am interested in is the liveliness of the language an individual can find by staying close to the working life and the life of the body. In Headframe:, for example, after many years I discovered that I grew up in a world where languages were in competition with one another and that the language I grew up with didn't fit the world I discovered as a university student. When I thought about it more I realized the language used by my parents didn't fit the world that we lived in. They were from a Saskatchewan farming background and would use expressions I didn't understand in any way. The words and phrases stood out for me as interesting anomalies. So I begin Headrame: with the father asking the narrator whether he is homesteading in the bathroom, and of course homesteading didn't mean anything to me though it meant something to him. All I knew was that it meant that you had been in there too long. Similarly, the mother character in that book accuses the son of uttering "horsefeathers" [he laughs], and I knew nothing about horses. These are prairie expressions that my parents used that refer to the particular kind of life around us. The language was at odds with the nature of the world. That's when I saw that part of what I ought to do is to show languages in conflict with one another. When we come to The Red-Headed Woman, I extended the exploration of competing languages to characters whose values differ, so that a character like Smallbearing, who uses proper English, finds himself at odds with people who are more closely attuned to the working of the community. He is an accountant and the language that he uses is the language of an educated person. He is capable of using the word "poltroon." He seems not to be sympathetic to the people around him.
C:	Given the historical components to your work, especially in Headframe: and The Red-Headed Woman do you think that your writing is recuperative, that you articulate things that are lost, particularly in terms of history?
B:	Well, I don't think that the story of Flin Flon has been lost, but what I do in Headframe: is to tell that story in my own way - in a different way. A good deal of the material I use is from the public domain. But people don't reread history; once they read something they think that they know it. So, yeah, I use the historical documents but I go beyond the usual kind of history people write and read by I going into documents. I spend a lot of time in libraries and archives unearthing details about narratives that might be broadly known. I am giving a new slant on things, for certain, and usually a weird one. I am not sure that recuperative is the right word since it implies that something exists and then is brought back. I think really what I am doing is making something different by using known materials and rearranging them in a particular way that sometimes gives new insight.
C:	How about reconstituting rather than recuperating?
B:	That's closer to it. I guess that what we would want, what a writer might want in a more arrogant mood, is a chemical metaphor that implies some kind of transformation. In the section in Headframe: called "A Likely Story" I take the novel, The Sunless City which was published in 1905, from which the character of Flin Flon comes and actually rewrite it. I am not working only with historical materials, though you can see how in that case history and fiction have a line between them and I try to make it alive. The novel is a historical fact. It did exist; not many people read it or not many have. It has actually been reprinted recently and is available in local tourist stores. I read that crazy novel as a history - I take fiction and read it as history, and history and read it as fiction.
C:	So how, exactly, do you write the line that separates history from fiction?
B:	When I read history, I am always looking for things that are funny or that are striking in an odd way or look for stories that haven't been told. The Red-Headed Woman actually began with my discovery of photos in the Manitoba archives. They are still housed there; they are photographs related to the strike. As I turned the pages, I saw a narrative in the photographs, complete with one character, his clothes half-torn off, walking into the sunset. When I came to write The Red-Headed Woman I set up a narrator who goes to an archive and discovers these photographs that have a narrative element to them. They are often funny. I think, for example, of the photograph of the man who is up to something or after something - you can't tell from the photograph what he is doing - but he is laughing. He is in the middle of a group of women. There must be thirty or forty women in the photograph and they are on the staircase of the community hall and he's a lone man amongst them. He's laughing and they are laughing and he seems to be reaching for something or someone. So I invented the story. The photograph is the historical document, but as soon as it has been taken and stuck in the book it is no longer history but an artifact that can be read in other ways. I am reading archaeologically. So I invented the story as I did other scenes in the novel. I like the idea of the unofficial history, for example the bum dance in the chapter "Moons" from The Red-Headed Woman where people show what they really think of their premier by sticking their rear ends out. I wanted to show that sometimes that is all that can be done when there are guns on the other side. I played down the danger of violence but there are always moments of danger when the police officers are armed. I put the comic within a frame of potential violence. I do make a point of indicating that the strike in Flin Flon in 1934 is only a couple of years after the episode in Estevan where people were shot and killed. I didn't want to play up those killings but I did want a contrast with the comic treatment.
C:	Your work is very much focused on Manitoba, though not exclusively so, and particularly on Flin Flon. How do you conceive of the local in relation to issues of nationalism? Are you redefining how one should define what is considered national?
B:	I begin to connect some of these concerns in a book I am working on now, although they are implied in my earlier books. In Headframe:, for example, I take W.O. Mitchell and Northrop Frye and turn them a bit. Mitchell says the least common denominator of sky and earth makes a world, but that certainly didn't make a world for me. In my poem I turn things around to say that the world requires more than just earth and sky. It requires rocks and trees and muskeg. My world is different from W.O. Mitchell's and part of what I have to do in the book I am writing now - and did in Headframe: - is to make sure that my story is seen as a Western story but not exclusively a prairie story. I have to push against the prairie iconography of gophers, wheat fields and grain elevators and to make the point that my story is set on the Canadian Shield, the Precambrian Shield. So I write the Shield story against the prairie story. I have to challenge at the same time notions of what constitutes nation, so when Frye says that in Canada we ask the question not Who are we? but Where is here? it seems to me not the right question. We knew where we were: north of 54 [he laughs] which implies I suppose a strange sense of the world that a prospector or a trapper or the native peoples might have who live a nomadic existence. When we say North of 54 we are asserting we live in a world different from the south.
C:	In The Red-Headed Woman, the north-south axes are much more evident than the east-west, upon which we predicate the notion of the Canadian nation more conventionally.
B:	I don't know anything about Charles Bramble, whose book The Land of the Lobstick I cite in the third epigraph to Headframe:. stand on a horse of country rock and look over an ore body which is visible and proved Charles Bramble, The Land of the Lobstick (1920) I use his name in The Red-Headed Woman. Part of what he is doing in his pamphlet is to write as an official of the government. He explains what a lobstick is and what country rock is in order to place this great ore body, so that others might understand the potential of a mining district not yet opened up in 1920. He has to explain the language of the place to his audience in order to persuade them, I suppose, to provide money, which eventually did happen with mostly American capital. In working with Bramble's story I bring to the fore the unique language of the place.
C:	You mention Mitchell and Frye as writers that you write against, but what other writers do you see as influential to your work? In one passage in Headframe: you play with William Carlos Williams's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" so I wonder about the larger scope of influence. How do you think of your writing in relation to a tradition of some kind?
B:	You've nailed it with Headframe:, as it comes out of Williams's notion of a local pride which is amongst the first words in his Paterson. A second idea that comes out of Williams is the idea that a man is a city. Following Williams, I deal with the local and explore the notion of an individual as a city. Part of the way I do that is to make rather odd connections between scars on the narrator's body and scars on the earth. The section called "Another Belly Button" does in fact deal with that man-as-city - the earth is scarred and so is his body. The connections are intimate. So we come back to the notion of an anatomy.
C:	What about tradition in a larger sense? Do you see yourself as part of a movement or tradition of Western writing?
B:	I am very concerned with form. I guess the writers closest to this position in the West are Aritha van Herk, Robert Kroetsch, Rudy Wiebe, David Arnason and Dennis Cooley. All of them look to make texts wrought from the West. That is the tradition closest to me. I guess I am connected with the St. John's mafia [individuals associated with St. John's College, University of Manitoba, including people like Kenneth Hughes and Robert Enright]. I was there in the early 1970s. Those people were responsible for a small revolution. They created or were instrumental in Turnstone Press, the Journal of Canadian Fiction, Arts Manitoba, which is now Border Crossing. I think this activity can legitimately be seen as a historical movement. Another strand of my work, though, comes from my connection with people at the University of Regina, where I taught in the 1960s. People there were interested in theory and criticism and left wing theory. We used to think we were neo-Freudian Marxists or something like that. We were particularly interested in Freud, Marx, Marcuse, Raymond Williams and some of those people, so I am interested in that sort of slant. Ray Mise, Aydon Charlton and Wayne Tefs were among the key people. I have also been connected with the Newest Institute of Western Canadian Studies, which was founded by George Melnyk. For about 7 years in the 1980s, I was president of the Institute and we organized annual conferences on the arts dealing always with western Canada.
C:	Do you consider yourself to be a regional writer? I mean regional in the most positive of ways.
B:	I think that most writers are regional, but some don't recognize that. Certainly we have to tell the story of our place for no one else will or can tell it in the way that we can. There's nothing to be done but to do it. In the West we may not have to contend with a body of narratives that have preceded us, although that is an illusion if one takes narrative broadly. Part of what I want to do is to tell the stories of place that no one else has told or can tell. Mickey Marlow is a historical character but no one has said anything about her. There are historical studies of the 1934 Flin Flon strike but no one has told the stories inside the history. So much is given in tracking down these stories. On a larger scale, it seems to me that in writing about the Shield I am writing about Canada. In terms of Canadian iconography the Shield is "Group of Seven" - which I have to fight against too - because the Shield isn't only the lonely land or it isn't only the poetry of F.R. Scott or A.J.M. Smith. I am more inclined to take something like what Earle Birney does in "Way to the West", which is about Sudbury, and take the Shield ironically. But immediately I want to qualify myself. I have to go beyond Birney, too, because it is easy to satirize a place like Sudbury or any other mining town where industry is clearly at odds with our notions of an untouched landscape. Yet these mining people have committed their lives to doing this work. Their story is a legitimate story. So in telling the story of a mining town I am telling the story of many Canadian mining towns. But only if I get the specific local details correct will I be able to give my narratives any force.