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So if you live in San Diego, like I do, and you’re having great conversations online with someone who lives in British Columbia north of Vancouver, where do you meet? In Washington, DC, of course. When I was there back in June, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Jeremy Stewart, a poet, essayist, scholar, and musician. He was in DC for a conference on Jacques Derrida (who knew they had those in DC?) and headed on to other stages of a journey, the next of which I think was Boston. We’ve been having conversations online since 2017, when he wrote me about publishing some of my poems in his magazine Dreamland.
Jeremy’s most recent book, In Singing, He Composed a Song, published by the University of Calgary Press, concerns alienated youth in a British Columbia town and the way music and their friends and hanging out and drinking and taking drugs (usually not too serious ones) gets them through a difficult growing up but can also land them in trouble with schools, the police, and even hospitals. It’s a novel (loosely) comprised of poems, photographs, prose narrative sections, and interviews (fake or real: they seemed so true that I couldn’t tell the difference). The story centers on one young guy and how trading a cigarette for a poster about a poetry reading while on school grounds can land someone in a lot more trouble than they ever expected.
Oh, and by the way, Jeremy told me he was doing some academic job interviews too. Given his wide array of talents, someone ought to hire him and quick. They won’t regret it.
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