an old abandoned building there with a number of other downtown artists - most of whom were painters, and I sent a manuscript to her, and she answered and I came out to UBC. And through that I heard of David Robinson, Jim Brown and I think then that I sensed immediately that these guys would have to be the ones that I would do some eventual publishing with. I felt that this sort of filled the gap. BM: They certainly wanted your book, I know that. I was wondering, at one time, if it was Michael Yates (then of the UBC Creative Writing Department) who took it to them. Somehow he seems connected with promoting that book. KB: I think Mike also saw in me that I was not ever going to be the kind of man who would hang out with the university poets at all, and so it is today. I have really no interest in any of them that I can think of. I think Mike saw that in me that I was wasting my time at UBC - that there was really nothing in it for me BM: You weren't a student there. KB: I was there a lot - a year or two. I sat in a lot of lectures. I attended UBC just as a sit-in student for I think 2 years, and just would walk into classrooms and sit down and ... (laugh) BM: Anyone's class? KB: Not anyone's, but a lot of classes. I can remember going to math classes. Bob Harlow was good to me. Bob saw in me something I think that he was familiar with from his old Prince George background, and I think influenced Mike Yates to steer me back towards Talon. I felt pretty good about Jim Brown and David Robinson and David Phillips and all of us who published in Talon. It seemed ok to me. It didn't seem to have the kind of barriers that I felt in most of the other publishing areas that I'd been in, because I'd been drifting from one group to another for several years. BM: That's what you end up doing. When I was in Montreal I couldn't make very many contacts, but it was little Talon magazine that, in one sense, probably saved a lot of writers writing lives. Brown and Robinson were paying attention, publishing and promoting the work and essentially creating a community - they created a situation where I knew your work before I met you, and I knew David Phillip's work and it was just a matter of time before I said, "I'm going to go out and visit those boys" whereas the older writers, guys ten years ahead of us I found a bit more intimidating. I would never have gone to meet John Newlove. These people had reputations - for me a little intimidating to approach them, so it was the guys our age that ended up hanging out a bit because of Talon magazine and Talon books. KB: Ya. I'll never know but I've often wondered if John and George Bowering and Margaret Atwood and others who were a few years older than us - if they didn't - I wondered if they didn't in fact enjoy a more helpful and more constructive environment than we did, in a literary sense - so they were more easily eased into being poets than we were. We I think - at least I met with what seemed to me to be the beginnings of a deterioration. I'm not so sure that a lot of the people I met were all that helpful, eventually. There were people who . BM: Might want to stop you! (laugh) KB: Ya BM: Let's face it. The scene was competitive and it's even worse now. Someone with your experience in writing does not have somebody who says " I'm your publisher - I will look at anything you do and negotiate for publication." Maybe what you're saying is that the generation ahead of us hooked into the major publishers from Contact on up to McClelland and Stewart and were nurtured, supported, and promoted. KB: I felt that. BM: We had Talon but then the press went a different direction and lost its stable of writers, writers like Phillips, yourself. They kept bill bissett. I think all of this created a kind of self-