In this interview, we chat with Mark Anthony Jarman about hockey fiction, deadwood words, finding inspiration in newspaper clippings, and so much more.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, My White Planet, 19 Knives, New Orleans Is Sinking, Dancing Nightly in the Tavern, and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors Choice with the New York Times. He was an acquisitions editor for Oberon Press, and introduced many new writers through the Coming Attractions series. He is also the editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. His novel Salvage King Ya! is on Amazon.ca’s list of 50 Essential Canadian Books and is the number one book on Amazon’s list of best hockey fiction. Widely published in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia, Jarman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a Yaddo fellow, has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick. He is also co-editor of the literary journal CAMEL.

Books and poems mentioned in this episode: 

• Flowers of Evil – Charles Baudelaire
• Study for Obedience – Sarah Bernstein
• Cathedral – Raymond Carver
• The Stories of John Cheever – John Cheever
• Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
• The U.S.A. Trilogy – Jon Dos Passos
• Literary Theory: An Introduction – Terry Eagleton
• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – T. S. Eliot
• The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Attack of the Copula Spiders: Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
• The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
• Dubliners; Ulysses – James Joyce
• The Incognito Lounge and Other Poems; Jesus’ Son; Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond – Denis Johnson
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• Panama – Thomas McGuane
• Dance of the Happy Shades – Alice Munro
• Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle; Lolita; Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
• The Cariboo Horses – Al Purdy