Jacob Wren - from people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times, to a group of 'New Filmmakers' that devises increasingly unexpected sexual scenarios with complete strangers, to a secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right

Jacob Wren, Polyamorous Love Song, BookThug, 2014.

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an excerpt

From interdisciplinary writer and performer Jacob Wren comes Polyamorous Love Song, a novel of intertwined narratives concerning the relationship between artists and the world. Shot through with unexpected moments of sex and violence, readers will become acquainted with a world that is at once the same and opposite from the one in which they live. With a diverse palette of vivid characters – from people who wear furry mascot costumes at all times, to a group of 'New Filmmakers' that devises increasingly unexpected sexual scenarios with complete strangers, to a secret society that concocts a virus that only infects those on the political right – Wren's avant-garde Polyamorous Love Song (finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose) will appeal to readers with an interest in the visual arts, theatre, and performance of all types.   

Polyamorous Love Song is...surreal, transgressive, and unsettling. It has the capacity to not only deliver itself like a punch to the gut but also leave a lingering sting. – Quill and Quire (Starred review)

The book of your dreams.... – Globe and Mail

Polyamorous Love Song sets up every human being as an artist – oversexed, furry and holding a gun – to play through wicked palindromes of sex performance and political protest. This book notably asks: Are we all pretending? Wren mines the ethical implications of both hidden literature and mass entertainment. Reading it, I wondered why I wasn't more afraid. – Tamara Faith Berger

Everything Jacob Wren touches interests me, excites me – he's both sophisticated and innocent in attitude – he's a kind of wise old man and open-hearted lover. With his vivacious ideas, word play, and the serious and inane served up on a plate – Wren lifts my spirits, intellectual and other, because to know he's writing so beautifully in this mad, sad world is a wonderful thing. – Lynne Tilman

Ever wonder what it means to be an artist or to make art? Like, really wonder? If you haven’t, that’s okay (and if you have, even better!) because Jacob Wren is wondering about it for us. His latest novel, Polyamorous Love Song (Book Thug, 2014), examines art as a discipline, a performance, a political tool and a way of life.
At once thoughtful, thrilling, terrifying, comedic and disturbing, Polyamorous Love Song is difficult to describe when it comes down to it. That’s not a bad thing. Yes, it’s a novel, but it reads like a collection of connected short stories, rocketing between parody, fable, and even manifesto. It follows the secretive activities of a violent furry-mascot-wearing political group, the leader of a filmmaking movement that sees filmmaking as living life itself, the writer of a book about Hitler having sex with a dog, the writer of another book regarding conspiratorial orgies and the passing of a sexually transmitted disease from the political left to the political right. One reviewer calls it an instruction manual for a cult. Are you intrigued yet?
You may know Wren, a Montreal-based writer, not just from his other writing (Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, and Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed), but from his performance art, which also often makes the status of contemporary art its focus. He is the co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART. In an interview, he says that when he’s writing, he’s not only in dialogue with literature “but also with visual art, theory, performance, cinema. One of my desires for 21st century art is that more of the barriers between the disciplines continue to break down.”
Certainly, Polyamorous Love Song is a book the breaks such barriers down with alarming alacrity, as any work of the avant-garde is wont to do. Besides adopting an elusive, complicated narrative form that hardly fits its title at all, the novel makes you think about visual art, film, writing, and performance, all under the same creative umbrella and held to the same standard of political responsibility. Wren asks us to re-evaluate our assumptions about the art world and the business of making art.
When making art about art, things get as meta as any cultural theory geek could hope. But this is not a book to add to the dandy-led Art for Art canon. In the same interview, Wren states, “I [don’t] think all art has to be explicitly political – in fact, the politics of Polyamorous Love Song are highly ambiguous, difficult to pin down – but I definitely want to feel that the artist is thinking about the larger world, that something is at stake that goes far beyond aesthetic questions.”
In fact, if there’s one thing that’s constant throughout this book’s captivating irregularity, it’s the utterly earnest question of whether artists have a responsibility towards their audience, and to the world, to make it a better place. This question echoes throughout, but especially in Filmmaker A’s class on living as avant-garde filmmaking, where a disbelieving student critiques her teacher by pointing out that Filmmaker A is not really making a film, but simply living her life. Filmmaker A accuses her student of having too narrow a definition of filmmaking. The student closes her argument:
“The thing is I believe you, I believe that you’re sincere, that you’re living your fine, exciting life and really believe this great, dandy life you’re leading should be referred to as filmmaking…the problem is there is nothing more sad, more pathetic, than utter sincerity in the service of a lost cause.”
We are left questioning whether this student indeed possesses a definition of film that is too narrow, or whether her definition of art and the avant-garde is invested in something else entirely: a cause.
So what constitutes a lost cause? And do artists, in particular, have a responsibility to choose their causes wisely? These are the kinds of questions Polyamorous Love Song will haunt you with, especially if you are at all involved in or intend to be involved in the process of making art.
At times, didactic, it’s hardly dogmatic. In fact, it is hard to tell whether Wren is writing a love letter to or critique of the artistic community. But it is this concern with the political, real-world power of art that saves this book from the more abstract, egoist realm of aesthetic musings, bringing it crashing back down to Earth in a refreshing way. If you like the sort of reflections on media, art and society offered by Chris Kraus, David Foster Wallace, Marshall McLuhan, and the surreal, modern fables of Jesse Ball and Jorge Luis Borges, you’ll like Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song. - SHANNON TIEN

In a letter to a friend, Franz Kafka once wrote, “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song is such a book: surreal, transgressive, and unsettling. It has the capacity to not only deliver itself like a punch to the gut but also leave a lingering sting.
While the idea of such a physical reaction might be off-putting to some readers, it would be an injustice to downplay the disquieting experience of reading Wren’s fourth book. The characters in Polyamorous Love Song maintain a constant state of disconnection, from each other and from the reader, though this effect appears to be intentional. The book’s premise involves the way artists relate to and interact with the outside world, but no simple connections are offered, and the characters’ emotional distance is so great it’s almost clinical – the detachment a filmmaker might achieve with the lens of a camera.
“All you want is people to look at you and look at what you do and think you’re special and talented,” says the elusive Paul, near the start of the novel. “You want it so badly that you think there’s something wrong with those of us who don’t.” This comment sets up much of what follows, but offers nothing of the violence, sex, and terror that Wren weaves into interlocking narratives as his characters drive themselves harder and harder to not just create but live their art, even in the most unnerving situations. An artist is kept chained to a radiator; there is searing aggression at the hands of a violent subculture called the Mascot Front; and a radical leftist group infects right-wing thinkers with a sexually transmitted virus.
Polyamorous Love Song presents the fetishization of viciousness and brutality for the sake of art, but what if this fetishization results only in disillusionment? “When they had tried everything, what would be left to try?” While the question may be legitimate for these characters, it’s difficult to imagine an author as innovative as Wren ever needing to wrestle with that issue. -Liz Worth

What resonates after we wake from our dreams? Not simply the weird event, since what feels weird in a dream is not always the same as in real life: in the dream you are very distressed that your bus is taking a wild detour; you are not at all bothered that you are wearing your pyjamas to work.
Nor is it solely dreams’ preternatural qualities: your dreaming self’s new physical or mental capacities – to read minds or switch bodies – or leaps of understanding. You somehow know, in the dream, that the owl is your mother. Or, you do not know why you must run across that field, but you know you must.
What stays is the feeling. Why you felt fear or exhilaration might go unexplained, but because so much goes unexplained, what remains is the sense that, though you have descended into a new layer of meaning – you have seen something or someone in a new light – you have still only skipped over the dream’s surface. There is something even deeper there, touched only momentarily.
Jacob Wren’s latest novel cannot be explained away as “all just a dream,” that old, rightly maligned plot twist, though it presents a waking reality that feels consistently dreamlike.
A novel of this type presents a challenge to a reviewer, since when we ask what a novel is about, we mean to ask after its characters, their dilemmas, the setting, some plot. And Polyamorous Love Song can be described in this way. The time is roughly the present: one chapter jumps back to the Weimar Republic, but most of the events take place in the post-9/11 West. A loosely connected collection of artists and revolutionaries (these roles are not always distinct) push their respective movements against the twin evils of creative compromise and the neoliberal police state. The events often combine sex and violence: a deadly, sexually transmitted virus infects only those on the political right; a character sexualizes the mascot-clad members of an underground social-liberation movement as they lose chunks of flesh and fur in a gun-battle with police.
Freud warned against confusing a dream’s manifest and latent content, its literal subject matter for its underlying truth. That’s worthy literary advice as well. The problem with the above description is that while it is true, it doesn’t give an entirely accurate representation of what Polyamorous is, since it is also a book in open revolt against these elements as sources of meaning. Here is a world ordered by the logic of dreams, of intuitive knowledge and uncanny coincidence, one where it is difficult to find the solid ground of the novel’s reality, even from the first line. Here are the opening words of chapter one: “And my theory about professional artists was as follows […].” That opening conjunction, “and,” is a grammatical non sequitur. Characters receive placeholder names like “Filmmaker A” or we are told that “Paul” is not Paul’s real name. A chapter ridicules your typical war-drama Oscar bait simply by providing a synopsis: plot as weakness.
In many other works, this shifting, uncertain nature might be considered a negative, which speaks to the dominance of realism as our go-to aesthetic. But Polyamorous is not a realist novel. It’s nonlinear and fragmentary. It’s unabashedly metafictional: one narrator is named “Jacob Wren”; whole sections of the narrative are introduced as fictions, whether dreams or stories or films.
Are these just postmodernist games? To put aside the easiest criticism, it might be non-linear, but it isn’t slapdash. The table of contents reveals a precise parabolic structure. And the meta doesn’t come at the cost of the fiction: even when a chapter begins “This is a film,” this framing device is forgotten soon after. Even the use of multiple narrators follows Jung’s subjective approach to dream interpretation, in which every person in a dream represents an aspect of the dreamer’s self. Repetition – several books within the book bear the title A Dream for the Future and a Dream for Now; events from dreams and fiction recur in “real” life – gives a sense of a greater organizing structure or consciousness, not to mention déjà vu.
Polyamorous Love Song is a dream-like novel about the meaning and value of dreams, a convention-busting novel about breaking social and aesthetic norms. Wren has successfully married content and form, but it is important to remember to what end. Form is prescriptive. The value of a polyamorous love song would be the new kinds of love stories it would allow us to tell. This Polyamorous Love Song is dark, murky, anarchistic, but also deeply aspirational – a form to better reflect the conflicting desires of our lives and our dreams. - Jade Colbert

Switching gears from poetry to fiction, I'd also bring Montreal-based writer Jacob Wren's new novel Polyamorous Love Song to your attention. Wren is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with literature, art criticism, radical politics, cinema, and performance installations. His books are structurally innovative, but functionally, necessarily so. He writes about love triangles, secret societies, gallery curators turned con-artists, politics as reality tv, interpersonal relationships and romantic crisis as fodder for avant-garde art, and more. His style is much more indebted to and reminiscent of  the central European and Latin American authors you'd find on a New Directions or Archipelago roster than anything published in Canada. Which, I guess, is partly why I like his work so much: it's heartening to know someone in Canada is not only reading as widely as Wren, but also finding an authentic way to synthesize the material. For Wren, "reading is always an act of creating one's own personal literary canon and then trying to put it into play, put it into some sort of dialogue with the world."

His 2010 novel Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a personal favourite of mine which, as Chris Kraus puts it, "recasts the recent political past as dystopian sci-fi." Polyamorous Love Song only came in yesterday, but I read half of it in a sitting last night, and so far it's about the parasitic nature of the artist; the fraught enterprise of creativity; an art movement in which "the idea of making [a] film is gradually replaced by this new idea of living it out instead"; a shadowy terrorist group advocating for "the social liberation of those who wear mascot uniforms"; a man writing a book about Hitler having intercourse with a dog; a woman writing a book about orgies whose purpose is to spread a virus engineered to eradicate high-ranking members of the political right (when a woman from the left gets it and becomes terminally ill she is forced to reexamine the authenticity of her political beliefs); and a book that is possibly the instruction manual of a cult and also shares the same title as the book about orgies: A Dream for the Future and a Dream for Now. How this all synthesizes is difficult to describe, but it does, and it's blowing my mind. Wren's fiction depicts a world in which everything is mediated by the political, a thrilling and terrifying world in which conceptual art bleeds into an underground nexus of conspiracy and intrigue and where the lines between life and performance are dissolved: 

"If this was one of your projects, one of your films -" Silvia was really shouting now, trying to be heard over the music that was filling her head, trying to be heard over her own crying and anger, "if this was one of your projects then you'd really be paying attention. Then you'd know what the fuck I was talking about."

"What do you mean one of my projects?" Filmmaker A realized she couldn't help herself, she was getting angry, raising her voice too, as they stared each other down across the expanse of the warehouse balcony.

"One of your projects." Silvia was crying so hard now she could barely make herself heard. "one of your fucking projects. One of your films."

"What are you talking about?" Filmmaker A was really yelling now, really getting upset, "This is the film ... What we're doing now, this is the film. Haven't you understood anything I've been saying ..." But then she caught herself and quieted down a bit too suddenly, nonetheless continuing to speak, almost to herself, though still loud enough for Silvia to hear, "This is the film." Silvia was crying but listening. "This is the film. And it's heartbreaking. And it's wonderful." - Jesse Eckerlin

In Polyamorous Love Song, Jacob Wren—a Maisonneuve contributor— gives us a collection of stories unified by a concern with the tenuous line between fiction and reality and what happens when we cross it. His interrelated narratives, complete with shifting protagonists and stories-within-stories, collapse into each other like scenes in a fever dream. There’s Filmmaker A, pioneer of the “new filmmaking,” in which the camera has become passé and life itself is rethought as the artform’s locus. Dismissed by many, she nonetheless influences a whole generation of directors at The Centre for Productive Compromise, whose work focuses on that “most real” act: sex. Alongside them is the Mascot Front—an insurrectionary group of furry mascots leading a very real “social liberation” campaign misunderstood by many as an extreme version of the new filmmaking. And there, interchangeably at the centre ... Keith Cadieux

“We though the new filmmaking was about blurring the line between what’s scripted and real. And there’s nothing more real than sex.”
“Death is more real.” It just slipped out. It was absolutely the last thing she meant or wanted to say. She was nervous, uncomfortable, it was unlike her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that anyone should die.” It was unlike her to apologize.
“But that’s what’s so powerful about the new filmmaking,” Steve was really trying to persuade her. “When you fuck you really fuck, when you die you really die.”
“I suppose.” She was being evasive. She didn’t like this line of reasoning. This wasn’t what she had meant. She had only been searching for ways to make her life more vibrant, more alive, and to make this very vibrancy her art. Fucking and dying didn’t feel alive, at least not in the way she had meant.
“You don’t seem convinced.”
“I don’t know.” There was always some way out. “When you’re an artist, if you’re a real artist, in some sense you always have to kill the father. That’s our legacy: the modernist break.”

***

The last paragraph of the segment quoted above is both fantastic and maddening. The idea of there being a definition or defining set of characteristics for who is or isn’t a “real” artist has been a perpetual thorn in my side. In my younger days it was something I lusted after—to do or create something that would somehow instantly elevate me into the pantheon of “real” artists. When I was in the thick of it during my twenties, producing and exhibiting with some regularity, I did my best to shove the idea of the “real artist” out of my brain—it wasn’t something to strive for, after all, it was something to be (or so I tried to convince myself, but being someone with a great deal of anxiety and self-doubt… well, let’s just say I didn’t always succeed along that line of thinking).
Now, several years and at least one major career shift away from all that—specifically the visual and performing art world—I can step back and, with some clarity, see the modern art world for all its insecurity and inability to think for itself. It’s a reactionary world, one that at least on an academic level takes a look at its immediate surroundings and says “nope, not me, I don’t like this,” and then purposefully diverges—sometimes to great social commentary, sometimes in ridiculous, even immature ways.
I realize I’m being a bit unfair in this assessment, but it’s an unfortunately true stereotype of the avant-garde mindset: that in order for art to matter, it must divest itself from anything approaching social norms or acceptance. Because art needs to constantly challenge and be challenging. But while I agree that art is essential in forcing audiences to stop and second guess their established social order instead of simply taking things at face value, the placement of the avant-garde at the top of the elitist hierarchy, with all others creators of art subservient to this ideal, is horseshit. Art is art—whatever your reasons, political or personal, commentary or beauty, if you make art, you are an artist.
This is why I so thoroughly enjoyed Jacob Wren’s Polyamorous Love Song—it simultaneously analyses, exalts, and condemns the strange reactionary madness of the art world. And it does so by constantly questioning and satirizing the notion that once an artist’s season has passed, so too has their purpose.
Wren’s novella is a post-postmodern book. It is a continuous thematic story told in nine short vignettes that jump between time, place, and style, revisiting a specific set of characters from a variety of perspectives. The characters themselves are thinly drawn, in many ways existing more as ciphers for the discussion of ideas. There’s Filmmaker A, who seeks to expand the definition of filmmaking by removing the cameras and having day-to-day existence become the film, where everyone is simultaneously acting in and viewing the works of others at all times; there’s the artist seeking to gain the trust of the Mascot Front—a group of militant furries who exist in many ways as a counter to the new filmmaking, hiding beneath plush characters and products anathema to the authenticity the new filmmaking seeks to promote—in order to do a piece about them; and Paul and Silvia, authors, the former writing about Hitler fucking a dog—because no postmodernist story would be complete without talk of a generously lubed Aryan erection. Naturally.
That the characters feel thin, however, is not a criticism; this isn’t a narrative in the traditional sense, but, as previously stated, a collection of ideas meant to rile expectations. That there’s even a loose narrative to it at all feels like a bonus. In many ways, Wren’s book is a natural extension of Janet Wolff’s The Social Production of Art, which presents art and artists as being wholly reliant on externalities to provide them with meaning and/or relevance. In Wren’s world, the art, artists, and audience are one, an Ouroboros both devouring and providing constantly: the Mascot Front forms to provide resistance to the new filmmaking, which exists to catalogue the “real lives” of its subjects—in other words, all of us, because the only way to subvert a style of filmmaking that both exists at all times and in all places by virtue of its actual non-existence is to live an “unreal” life, masked, hidden in some way.
The success of Wren’s book is that it manages to straddle the thin line between satire and possibility: the new filmmaking is, conceptually, aggressively postmodern. It is hilarious in its total absurdity, yet also totally believable, and more than likely an idea at least one avant-garde filmmaker has already had at one time or another. Similarly, there’s the cocktail, “the drug to remember phone numbers, the drug to supress jealousy, the drug to keep you hot and bothered and a little something extra to keep you going all night.” Like the new filmmaking, the cocktail is an artificial X factor introduced into this all-artist world to transform every interaction into a form of performance art.
While I thoroughly enjoyed Polyamorous Love Song, it will more than likely frustrate many readers. It’s not a difficult book to read, but it does require a willingness to dig deep and pull apart the layers of what is and isn’t satire. Between the novella’s many absurdities is rather deft commentary on the art world’s own demand for newness, for the avant-garde, and for the conflicts that spring forth naturally when society is pushed beyond established norms and boundaries. - Andrew Wilmot

To enter the world of Jacob Wren’s novel Polyamorous Love Song is to enter a bizarre yet compelling dreamscape, a parallel universe where everyone is an artist (regardless of whether they produce physical artwork or not) and where revolutionaries don mascot uniforms and risk death for their cause, the politics of which are left ambiguous. A thrilling though at times disturbing read, it is flirtatious and experimental, unconcerned with literary convention, and unapologetically playful yet utterly serious.

One of several narrators – the one who is writing this book and possibly also the one who shares a first name with the author – has a theory about artists: they are “not necessarily the most creative or inspired individuals in any given community.” Rather, they are “those individuals most willing to exploit their own creativity and inspiration, most willing to gain personal profit from their unconscious and its emanations, those with the most missionary zeal for the dissemination of their own idiosyncratic perspectives.”

In the book, Wren, an interdisciplinary writer and performer, explores the possibilities and boundaries of art making and the relationship between artists and the larger world, thereby questioning artists’ responsibility toward their audience and the ethics of incorporating real life into art. The novel is made up of several narratives that, at times, intersect, and the perspective shifts from character to character, a technique that seems to borrow from “a kind of dream therapy in which one takes turns placing oneself inside each of the different characters within a remembered dream.” This is most obvious when the initial first-person narrator is later found in a basement chained to a radiator, as seen through the eyes of another character.

First we meet Filmmaker A, who, after a “crisis of faith,” goes on to found a new type of filmmaking. Based on her example, “‘filmmaking’ becomes slang for scripting your life as if it were a movie, and then, throughout the process of such scripting, enacting quite naturally and casually each of the scenes you write.” The line between life and art becomes increasingly blurred: “This is the film,” Filmmaker A yells at her girlfriend Silvia during an argument. “What we’re doing now, this is the film.”
Parallel to and overlapping with the narrative of Filmmaker A is the story of the Mascot Front, a “shadow organization” of revolutionaries who live their lives mainly in uniform, and a group of new filmmaking devotees, individuals who drink a daily cocktail that allows them to remember phone numbers, suppress jealousy, and remain in a state of sexual arousal for what seems like nearly around-the-clock sex with other members of the group.
Though the prose could arguably stand the occasional tightening, its looseness and quasi stream of consciousness is also part of the appeal. This story wouldn’t be properly expressed in perfectly wrought prose, but only in the imperfectly beautiful, in the fragmented, honest, and raw. Polyamorous Love Song isn’t a book for everyone, but it’s likely to appeal to fans of art theory, performance art, and Chris Kraus, to those who like their narratives obscure and bold with a smattering of sex and violence. - Lesley Trites
 

Jacob Wren, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed,  Pedlar Press, 2010.                             

an excerpt 

Rarely does a book come along with a strong academic bent that really blows me away; but man, it sure was the case with Jacob Wren's Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed, the first of several books I recently received from Canadian small publisher Pedlar Press. And that's because Wren manages to take a situation that would usually only appeal to the professor crowd -- basically, imagine if Julian Assange and Naomi Wolf started dating, and the thousands of NGO tongues that would start waggling because of it -- but then rapidly expands this storyline to quickly reach almost a fairytale-like quality; for example, after their breakup, the Assange character ends up starting a hipster art gallery in a third-world country, then hosting a hit reality show that combines The Apprentice with leftist political activism, then gets picked up by the CIA for impersonating an agent, and a lot more, keeping what would otherwise be a snoozer of a talky tale instead lively in a Michael Chabon kind of way. Now combine this with some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years, plenty of symbolic ridicule concerning the habit of radical liberals to talk problems to death without actually accomplishing anything, and simply a physical look to the manuscript that makes me believe that there's still a future for gorgeous-looking trade paperbacks, and you have what has so far been one of my favorite reads in the last year, and one I predict even eleven months in advance will likely be appearing in CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year. It's a true revelation in an industry that no longer sees many of them, and needless to say that I'm now looking highly forward to the other Pedlar titles in my reading list.

Set in a dystopian near-future, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed is a novel a kind of post-capitalist soap opera about a group of people who regularly attend the meetings. At the meetings they have agreed to talk, and only talk, about how to re-ignite the left, for fear if they were to do more, if they were to actually engage in real acts of resistance or activism, they would be arrested, imprisoned, or worse. Revenge Fantasies is a book about community. It is also a book about fear. Characters leave the meetings and we follow them out into their lives. The characters we see most frequently are the Doctor, the Writer and the Third Wheel. As the book progresses we see these characters, and others, disengage and re-engage with questions the meetings have brought into their lives. The Doctor ends up running a reality television show about political activism. The Third Wheel ends up in an unnamed Latin American country, trying to make things better but possibly making them worse. The Writer ends up in jail for writing a book that suggests it is politically emancipatory for teachers to sleep with their students. And throughout all of this the meetings continue: aimless, thoughtful, disturbing, trying to keep a feeling of hope and potential alive in what begin to look like increasingly dark times. Revenge Fantasies asks us to think about why so many of us today, even those with a genuine interest in political questions, feel so deeply powerless to change and affect the world that surrounds us, suggesting that, even within such feelings of relative powerlessness, there can still be energizing surges of emancipation and action.

different things get you: some sections romantic and conceptually smart, others filled with a carefully self-doubting and insightful political analysis. but the aspect that i most admired was an honesty and willingness for risk that’s hard to pinpoint but which was very moving. - Eugene Lim
Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
Carl Wilson at Back To The World

 

Jacob Wren, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Pedlar Press, 2007.

an excerpt

Formed Through Copulation is a book designed to convince the reader not to have children (or if they already have children simply not to have any more).Why should the reader not have children? Well, first they should honestly try to assess just exactly how they feel about their own parents. If this proves insufficient perhaps they might also contemplate the fact that the world we live in isn’t particularly fit to bring a child into. Keep in mind this is only a joke. Mr. Wren is well aware of the fact that essentially he will convince no one. That people will continue to have children regardless. Families Are Formed Through Copulation is also a book that continuously hovers on the verge of becoming a novel, focusing on a distorted family situation that can certainly be read as that of a single family but just as easily can be seen as the multiple, overlapping experiences of many different families, perhaps even all families. This narrative ambiguity parallels the thematic moral ambiguity of the extreme situations the characters continuously find themselves within, never losing sight of the fact that our feelings towards our own families are some of the most personal and intense emotions we are capable of experiencing.Finally, and most ironically, Families Are Formed Through Copulation describes what happens when one such family comes into contact with a particularly convincing and conflicted conspiracy theorist, sharply parsing the paranoia and media-saturated secret service logic of the times in which we live.

Self styled as “a book designed to convince the reader not to have children,” this is a beautiful collage of dialogue, tract, ideas, parables, monolgues, and the like from Canadian director, writer, and filmmaker Wren. Like all the books Pedlar Press has released that I’ve read (notably Ken Sparling), this book is singular for its sound and mannerisms: there is no other object you could want to have like it. It is it. And it sticks. The book worries over its sales rank on Amazon, mourns dead music, contains telephone correspondence with lost relatives, mourns more: “Some days there are a few things to do and those days are a little bit better than the others. Every once in a while I faintly remember just how ambitious I used to be.” And yet the sum is not morbid, more than a true haunt, a neon-colored wow box, a fun and frightening object of tricks and mannequin talk. Highly recommended. - Blake Butler

One could argue that Families are Formed through Copulation is a very funny book. As evidenced by the 2008 Scream Mainstage where Wren read “People, Stop Having Children,” the book is a stand-up routine filled with wry wit and perfectly crafted jokes, all relying on the world’s constant cynicism and irony-steeped consciousness. Yes, this is an extremely engaging book and in its individual parts, a reader can trick his or herself into thinking Families is an extended joke, a satire in the finest Swiftian tradition.
But what makes Families an astounding book is that the narrator is very serious. He believes that having children is perpetuating evil. That the world is too screwed to, in good conscious, bring a child into it. That bearing children is unthinkingly selfish. That having a family is a greedy and automatic sin.
The majority of the book explores the notions of the modern family unit in an off-kilter depth, ping-ponging between therapy session transcripts and dinner table conversations. From these dialogues Families argues that the stability of personal relationships, whether they be familial, friend or lover, is always being undermined by a sense of power relations, skepticism and paranoia. The therapy sessions, where the parent and daughter switch roles, are especially telling as the long dialogue skips between the Cold War, suicide and murder; likewise, large parts of Section Two are paranoid ramblings mixed with first-person self loathing, all centered around the failing of relationships.
All of this is born from the notions of terrorism and the after-events of 9-11. The unsettled feeling of the narrator and the family involved in the story revolve around fear: people are not afraid of being attacked by terrorists but more what their own familiar government and close relations will do. The narrator expands in his section about the Oklahoma City bombing:
“Nonetheless the Oklahoma City bombing was masterminded either by the the CIA or the FBI in order to pressure then President Bill Clinton into signing the anti-terrorism act of 1996…an arm of the governmental security apparatus infiltrates a marginalized organization…and encourages them to commit greater and greater acts of violence. It then uses these acts of violence as a pretext for greater social control and police oppression…This is the history of modern terrorism.”
More than anything, it is the thing you put the most trust and power in, in this case the government (but could just as easily be the family), that is the most frightening.
To combat this, Families then creates a very strict, honest and convincing moral system within itself, where the world is already an irredeemable, flawed place and the best people can do is “not be born”. Original sin.
To this point, this is not a funny book but it is an ethical one. However, there is none of the typical, clinical nods towards rational wisdom; instead this book is infected with fervor, passion and religious rhetoric. The book is filled with parables like “The White Van of Unrequited Love”, with pulpit-pounding screeds like “Part Four: Reconciliation”, with existential exchanges such as “A Telephone Conversation with Someone Who No Longer Exists”. What is especially effectively convincing is the use of religious rhetoric within those sections which illustrate the ability to adapt and utilize the various methods of religious presentation and zealotry and present the message with such feverous impact that it’s impossible to immediately turn down. This work does not deal in Plato’s version of ethics but Billy Graham’s.
The engaging pull of this book is that the reader looks at the end results the narrator describes (the stripping of human freedoms after 9-11, the destruction of the world, the murders, the cruelty) and sees that what the narrator describes is, in fact, a reality: The U.S. government set many laws in place to take away individual freedoms after 9-11; the world is crumpling under global warming and over-population; there is constant violence and war, both locally and globally. It seems only natural then to give into the pulpit narrator of Families, to say that everyone from birth has had the mark of Cain put upon them, and then wallow in the cynicism and paranoia that courses throughout the work
But this is neither a negative nor a hopeless book. There is optimism, but only within the reader’s reaction. The temptation is for a reader to give a knee-jerk yelp or dismiss the book with laughter. But, like “A Modest Proposal,” Families is intended to act as a catalyst for thought and consideration. Yet, by giving us immediately counter-intuitive answers to these issues, Wren sets the book up to ask the reader tough questions: How do we deal with this screwed up world? Why should we bring children into it? How are we going to fix this?
Families posits a positive answer to all these questions, if only by asking the reader to consider them. Obviously people aren’t going to stop having children, but perhaps they’ll work harder to make the world better for this children to live in, voice their concerns, see through the injustices and falsities of their own world and take action. More than anything, this is a book against apathy. It is begging someone, everyone, to care, even if it has to shock or giggle each reader into it. - Aaron Tucker

Some books are meant to be taken seriously, some are meant to make you take yourself seriously, and some to make you question the validity of seriousness all together. Jacob Wren's Families Are Formed Through Copulation is all of these things. Wren's perspective shifts with the moodiness of someone terminally affected, wounded by the unreasonable demands that our world places on us: to be a functioning member of society who gives back what one has taken, to be responsible for one's actions, to never become angry or lash out from the weight of life's unfairness and lies, to have "regular," practical goals such as having a nice-sized home, a lush fenced-in backyard overgrown with organic fruits and vegetables, an upstanding occupation, and more importantly, to have children. Many strong and capable children, perhaps much like yourself, who will follow through with your personal intentions well after you are gone, who will see the world much like you see the world (if not exactly the same), who will do good things (even if you never managed to), who will follow through with your subliminal instructions to divide and conquer and succeed -- or to, well, just "be good" and not cause a lot of obnoxious trouble. Wren begins his work with a few powerful words that help you realize where this pensive book might lead you:
YES, OF COURSE IT'S TRUE WE BECOME OUR PARENTS, BUT WITH DIFFERENCES. WE CANNOT CHOOSE NOT TO BECOME OUR PARENTS BUT PERHAPS WE CAN CHOOSE WHAT DIFFERENCES THOSE MIGHT BE.
On a shaky spectrum careening back and forth between cynical, heartbreaking negativity ("People, stop having children. You are not doing yourselves or the world any good. Take the energies you would have spent on childrearing and use them instead to fight American imperialism. The world is not as it used to be") to somewhat disturbing, cheeky epiphanies ("And then I got older and I had children myself and I loved my children and my parents died and my children got older and they had children and I loved my grandchildren and then I died and on and on it went until the end of time, which was nice"), Jacob Wren doesn't want you to necessarily see the world as he does, but he does mention the sheer importance of having to get these heavy feelings and observations off of his chest before he no longer can. He sees importance in his voice joining the others who have witnessed, who have seen, who are still witnessing and seeing injustice. There is a kind of urgency that comes forth over and over again in Wren's Families are Formed Through Copulation. It is of dire importance that you at least hear what Wren says -- even if most of us are not well-equipped to do much about it. For instance, Wren writes:
I HOPE, WHEN THEY WRITE THE HISTORY OF OUR TIME, THEY WILL NOT SIMPLY ASSUME THAT NO ONE NOTICED, THAT THERE WERE NO WITNESSES, THAT WE WERE ALL TOO STUPID OR COMPLACENT OR COMFORTABLE. PEOPLE DID NOTICE. PERHAPS, LIKE ME, THEY ONLY FELT HELPLESS AND DEPRESSED. PERHAPS THEY TRIED TO FIGHT AND WERE KILLED FOR THEIR EFFORTS. PERHAPS THEY FOUGHT AND WON. THAT PART IS STILL IN THE FUTURE. BUT PEOPLE DID NOTICE.
Yes, people did notice. And maybe some of us will throw away our Depakote, Xanax, Prozac, Valium, Ritalin, Adderall -- or maybe, like Wren, decide to write a book or organize our thoughts instead into a cohesive structure so that our children (God forbid we have any!) don't do and think and make the world as utterly sad and inexplicable as we have universally managed to do. Despite some or our middle-class higher-than-thou attempts to send a check in the mail to some charitable donation X or some good cause Y, it's still not enough for our children to not think twice about thinking the worst of us, or even yet: think nothing at all. As Wren writes, "We all must stop and think. What are we actually doing?" Is some thinking better than none? Is negative thinking better than nothing? It's a little tricky -- this far-removed concept of progressive change, isn't it? - Jacquelyn Davis

Technology comes in. Sometimes at night instead of a book I hold a Kindle. This is an evolution. I am evolving. Readers are evolving. Yet: I zip open the cord on a package. The package arrived in my mailbox. The mailbox is posted at the end of our driveway, a red flag to signal when we have outgoing, the still icy winter hanging about. Inside of the package is a book -- Jacob Wren's Families are Formed Through Copulation. Matte cover, a beautifully engorged design with pinks and green, pages a thick buttery stock as rippled as water-color canvas. Holding its weight and words, I am once again mesmerized by the physical presence of a book.
And then I got older and I had children myself and I loved my children and my parents died and my children got older and they had children and I loved my grandchildren and then I died and on and on it went until the end of time, which was nice.
So go Wren's words, molding Families are Formed Through Copulation into a book that suffocates us in the same beauty it is identifying. This is a book that claims from the first to be about never wanting children, then having them anyway, reasoning about why no one else should, why we shouldn't have, and the forever-stance of not being able to plug them back into the innocence of never-existing. But Wren does all of this so poetically, and with such surrounding directness, that we become both swept up in the argument and carried underneath its currents, drowning here and there, or at the very least left gasping.
The people we knew and had known for years were getting paid less and less or were out of work altogether. There was a kind of anti-ironic stillness in the air. Suddenly people didn't want 'knowing irony' any more. They wanted an end to the immediacy of high-level stress generated by the rapid erosion of their daily little comforts. For example, some friends of ours, both with reasonably good jobs, started drinking their morning coffee without milk. It is only a small detail but it is one of thousands that were occurring every minute. And the poor became the dead.
Families are Formed Through Copulation is a political book. It is an essay about want and need and desire. It is a rant about wanting and not. It is a diatribe about war and gracelessness and the sickness of always making more in our already enough. Without Wren at the helm, an endeavor such as this would surely fail, would blunder and sink into its own gaping holes, but Wren keeps it aloft, pulls us back into the understated, the poetic stillness, only to set us up for the next round. We are a pin in his capable words, knocking down over and over.
In the mornings I cannot get out of bed. If I do manage to get out of bed and make it into the shower, I can't get out of the shower and spend hours on end being beaten by the scalding hot water until my overweight and out-of-shape body is nothing but a shriveled and wrinkled scrap of defeated posture and quiet, half-resigned exhaustion. Some days there are few things to do and those days are a little bit better than the others. Every once in a while I faintly remember just how ambitious I used to be.
Pedlar Press makes me love books, keeps me in lust with books, creates the scene where I say to my wife, 'Feel this,' a smile on my face, my hands running over its slick front, her rolling eyes up and back into her head, capitulating to quiet me, 'Yes, yes yes.' And Jacob Wren is the writer we run into for a variety of reasons: word of mouth, a glanced-at review, or the package that arrives in our black metal mailbox at the end of a still frozen-over driveway, showing again the difference between holding our hands on something or holding in them nothing, the difference between enchantment and not. Wren has, does, and Pedlar too, until tonight I want to hold above my head, in the dim of light, pages that I can hover below, my fingertips, another child born. - J. A. Tyler

Body: I admit it was the title and the book's cover design that drew me to Families are Formed Through Copulation. The couple on the cover depicts a water coloured figure and green skeletal man hand in hand, in love perhaps? How lovely. But when I began to read my mood started to change. A close friend kills herself after a terrifying night hitchhiking. Next, a short parable about a sadistic family that uses incest and rape against each other while keeping up appearances to the outside world. It's too dark. I leave the book alone for a while, and when I return it shifts into something less perverse. The works in Families are Formed Through Copulation were adapted from a stage production in Montreal. Inside are thoughts on politics, paranoia, cynicism and family. The book is split into sections, some parts are dialogue, random thoughts or stories. The first section focuses on growing up, being bitter, family therapy and reconciliation. One part is aptly titled "Parents are Punching Bags, Children are Tyrants". The second and third parts deal with paranoia, complacency and despair in a post-9/11 world. In these sections, we are exposed to a more personal side of Jacob Wren. It reads like pages ripped out of his journal. "Last night I saw a film. The film was quite good, beautifully made. It was about a young woman whose boyfriend commits suicide. The young woman experiences a great deal of angst and I suspect, as viewers, we were meant to sympathize with her cinematic emotional inner turmoil. But I couldn't help but think: What is one woman's emotional suffering when compared to the complete and ongoing suffering of the entire Iraqi people." Families Are Formed Through Copulation is a challenging read that lets you lose yourself in pessimistic thoughts. - Andrea Nene 


Jacob Wren, Unrehearsed Beauty, Coach House Books, 1994.
               
read it at Google Books
archives.chbooks.com/online_books/unrehearsed_beauty/1.html

The Artist Formerly Known As Death Waits christens his new public persona with the release of 'a series of theatrical proposals to be repeated, discarded, performed simultaneously and/or recombined in any and all possible combinations – all vaguely relating to the topic of the author's moral ambivalence.'

Talking with playwright and poet Jacob Wren is like attending a dinner party with Salvador Dali, Bertrand Russell and Woodly Allen: conversation is convoluted, cerebral. Willfully obscure and above all, entertaining—Toronto Life

Jacob Wren seems to be an original, an artist with a deep urge to share his strange black private jokes with the rest of the world—The Gobe and Mail  
 Interviews:The BookThug YouTube Interview with Jacob Wren
Malcolm Sutton at the BookThug Blog
Beth Follett at Open Book Toronto
Catherine Lacey at HTML Giant with ten sentences and a short interview
Kathryn Mockler at The Rusty Toque
Heather Palmer at Poetry Teachers NYC 
In Different Situations Different Behaviour Will Produce Different Results: Yaniya Lee in Conversation with Chris Kraus and Jacob Wren
Satu Herrala at ESITYS
Puneet Dutt BookThug Interview Part 1
Puneet Dutt BookThug Interview Part 2
Writer's Block at LPG 
Tobias Carroll at Vol.1 Brooklyn

A few things I wrote:
The Infiltrator in Maisonneuve
Big Brother Likes This in Maisonneuve
Be But Could If Is Not What for YYZ
Diaries in TheState, lonely girl phenomenology / a violation of my quotation marks
Resistance As Paradox and Two Other Texts in VerySmallKitchen
Review of Matias Viegener's 2500 Random Things About Me Too in Lemon Hound
Review of Jessica MacCormack's The See in Lemon Hound

Videos of performance work:
The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information (Hospitality 5)
Hospitality 3: Individualism Was A Mistake
Music and Theatre Must Learn to Disassociate / Adam Kinner & Jacob Wren
TPAM in Yokohama 2012: Jacob Wren + Tori Kudo/Maher Shalal Hash Baz
Every Song I've Ever Written / Helsinki Band Night
Every Song I've Ever Written / Montréal Karaoke

Manifesto for Confusion, Struggle and Conflicted Feelings

I’ve been making art for my entire life and I’ve never felt more lost. In this, I believe I am not alone.
Do we care enough about art, meaning, the world to admit there is no obvious or effective way forward? That we’re going in circles with an ever-lessening effect? That we’re going in circles but are unwilling to admit it?
The grand excitements of art – the modernist breaks, the new movements, the cataclysms – are long behind us. More recent trends are fleeting at best. The belief in originality is utterly depleted and, more importantly, no longer feels like a worthy goal. All we have now is A LOT, far too much, of everything. A LOT of art, theatre, dance, performance, music, installation, painting, literature, cinema, internet: of every possible type and gradation of quality. More stuff than you could possibly experience even if you lived for several million years.
But we don’t live for even a million years. Our lives are brief and what it means to seize the day is by no means clear. Why must we pretend that we know what to do?
Politics have lost the plot – right wing governments and the ascendancy of the super-rich are the order of the day – and artists are of little assistance. On our current environmental trajectory we believe the planet will not survive. But, if we keep hurtling forward, in fact it is we who will not survive, as the planet steps in to take care of itself. (Then again, it is likely at least a few of us will survive to sort through the wreckage. But we can’t make art for them. They’re not born yet. We must make art for now.)
With this present, and this future, how can one feel that bold artistic moves have any real energy? Conflicted feelings rule the day. Daily confusions of every stripe. Ambivalence is king. Where is the art that strikingly knows it’s own futility but stumbles forward compellingly, anyway, because as an artist you have no choice?
To change anything you have to work together with other people. This is the essential logic behind an art movement, behind a manifesto. To work together with other people you need to line up behind a potent conviction, agree to all run in the same direction, at least until you score the first few goals. There is power in numbers, in clans, clubs and mafias. So why can’t all the artists in the world who feel as lost as I do come together, think about what is left to do and how? There may be no convictions to unite us, but why can’t we unite in the potency of our contemporary ambivalence? In the desire to be honest and vulnerable about where we actually stand?
(An artist who is little more than an advertisement for him or her self is so lost there might be no way back towards meaning. I live in constant fear that this is what I might become.)
I dream of energy, content, value, meaning. Effective left wing populism. The end, or reduction, of alienation, consumerism, war and stupidity. But when you dream you are asleep, and right now I would prefer to be as awake as possible. And to be awake means to admit I have almost no idea how to bring such dreams closer to reality. All roads seem blocked. I have no idea what strategies – in life, politics or art – might be genuinely useful or poetic. I want to be awake, while not losing touch with the knowledge that to stay sane one must continue to sleep and dream.
In fact, I wish to write a manifesto that will admit to everything: ambivalence, conflicted feelings, doing things only for money, humiliation, cynicism, confusion, not being able to tell my friends from my enemies. To admit to everything and find out if anyone agrees. If anyone out there is with me. If such honesty and confusion can mean anything in the current world. If there can be any integrity to it. If it can transform itself into a useful truth.
An artist doesn’t need conviction. An artist doesn’t need to know which way to go. An artist needs talent, naiveté, community and life experience. None of these things are incompatible with feeling lost.
 (I would someday like to write another manifesto about how art that is not intrinsically connected to life is of no value. But I feel too lost to enter into life. I’m an extreme case. I can’t find the way in.)
 Of course, about such things one doesn’t write manifestos. But perhaps we should find a way to start.