Foreword

Fifteen years ago, in 2010, Athabasca University (AU) welcomed its very first writer to our virtual Writer in Residence program.

Launched with substantial Zoomer support garnered by professor emerita Evelyn Ellerman and shepherded into institutional life under the guidance of Veronica Thompson (then Dean, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences), the Writer in Residence program has since been sustained by the resourceful expertise of the program committee. Current members notably include colleagues like acclaimed novelist Angie Abdou and professor Paul Huebener, both of whom have worked with our writers in residence and with AU colleagues to secure ongoing support from Athabasca University and the Canada Council for the Arts. The Writer in Residency program has likewise benefited from the stellar leadership of writing professors here at AU, many of whom have previously served on and chaired the program committee, including Manijeh Mannani, Rumi translator and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Their leadership has kept top writers coming to the program since its inauguration.

The authors who have graced our residency program include well-known, award-winning literati like Myrna Kostash and the late Steven Heighton. Writers in residence have received accolades during their time with us and for work undertaken while in residency, among them: Joshua Whitehead (who in 2021 became the first Indigenous writer to win CBC’s Canada Reads) and John Vaillant (who penned much of his book Fire Weather while at AU and who went on to become not only a New York Times bestseller but also a Pulitzer Prize finalist).

Prior to COVID (the before times), our resident authors would make valiant efforts to visit our home community of Athabasca to deliver talks in person to the AU community. We have been honoured and delighted to meet literary luminaries like Tololwa M. Mollel, Tim Bowling, Richard Van Camp, Katherena Vermette, and Esi Edugyan. Despite the occasional technological hiccups, our virtual and hybrid talks have also been well-attended and well-appreciated, including those provided by Hiromi Goto, Anita Rau Badami, Christian Bök, and most recently Bertrand Bickersteth (our resident for 2024–2025).

All our writers have risen to the occasion (and the challenges) of residency at an open, higher education institution. All have proven to be unwaveringly helpful and universally pleasant, both generous and thoughtful — often entertaining. During their residencies, these authors have mentored many members of the AU community, including students, staff, and faculty from across Canada and around the world. These authors have constructively critiqued our community’s own creative projects while taking part in engaging interviews and conversations. More recently, AU Press has started publishing work arising from the authors’ time with our university as part of the Writing in Residence series.

My Works, Ye Mighty by Christian Bök joins this recently founded book series.

It would be a woeful understatement to say that the poet Christian Bök likes a challenge when it comes to developing an artistic project. Best known for Eunoia (2001) — a bestseller in Canada and the UK — Bök occupies a unique rank among poets as a preeminent innovator. No work cements his reputation more thoroughly than the Xenotext project, a dream-haunting work of staggering ambition on which the poet has laboured for decades.

The Xenotext project aims to produce a work of “living poetry” that encodes a poem into the genome of a deathless bacterium named Deinococcus radiodurans. (Mark A. McCutcheon, the co-author of this foreword, recalls Bök describing such a mad project in some detail over drinks at the first of Smaro Kamboureli’s TransCanada conferences in 2005.) Following publications about this work, like The Xenotext (Book 1) in 2015, Bök has achieved some remarkable discoveries and qualified successes. He is the first person in history to write a poem that, when enciphered into the DNA of a life-form, can cause the organism to “write” a poem in response — a poem durable enough to outlive humanity itself.

The writing of a poem into the genome of one of Earth’s most unkillable organisms is far out, wilder than science fiction. (How does one cite a bacterium?) To write a poem that might outlast terrestrial civilization puts Bök in the company of . . . whom? Of what? Maybe the Voyager probes and their Golden Records? Maybe these probes are the closest comparators to Bök’s work — after all, these probes also tackle the most radically existential problems of our posterity, of the vicissitudes of human communication; these probes are, likewise, going to outlast our species in its current, evolutionary phase, perhaps even our planet in its current, geological era.

Bök’s expansively imaginative work “cleanses the doors of perception,” as William Blake (and The Doors) might put it. Bök’s poetry hacks time itself.

Bök’s imagination is mythopoetic, his methods seemingly both rigorous and mad, with no shortage of mischievous humour. The Wildean conceit, if not the Ozymandian audacity, of the Xenotext project; the vocabularic acrobatics of his lipograms in Eunoia; the deadpan minimalism of his poems about the colour white in The Kazimir Effect: all these works show a wicked humour that remains underappreciated, but nevertheless quintessential, in Bök’s astonishing body of work. Perhaps the wit comes through clearer in his commentary, in his talks about his writing process and about his artistic purpose. (In light of a thing like the Xenotext, take this book’s title, for instance, with however big a grain of salt as you wish.) We are delighted to present, for you, Bök’s further words on the work of writing — together with his new writing!

Let us, then, not look on Bök’s works as so mighty that they might make us, in our own endeavours, despair — instead, let us celebrate them for their extraordinary reach, their tilting at infinity, their capability to inspire emergent writers and avid readers alike to think as beautifully as angels, if not to dream as big as the cosmos itself.

ADIEN DUBBELBOER and MARK A. MCCUTCHEON

Writer in Residence Program Committee, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University