Gary: For sure. Well we were lucky. We sold 1,000 copies the first day of each book and we underestimated that. We should have printed 1500. We ended up printing only 1200 of some titles, so 2 weeks later the writer's book was almost out of print. So I made some mistakes. I had to learn. The press was written up in MacLean's and the Financial Post. It was exciting stuff, but it was a great distraction from writing. Barry: How many titles all tolled did you print in the 3 different presses? Quite an extensive list with Cormorant alone. Gary: Yeah well, I can't take too much credit for Cormorant because my wife Jan took over in 1989. But between to the two presses it must be 150 books. Nuage was a press that started out of my creative writing editing and publishing class. The students found and selected and edited and marketed and found subscribers for those books. It went off with a couple of them as a permanent press. It's now running out of Winnipeg, apparently. Don: I have a question about The Terra Cotta Army. I'm interested in the two line structure in the poem. How did you evolve that? Gary: I don't think I had any serious thoughts on what structure it should take, I just began to write the first piece, which is the first piece in there and it came out in 18 lines. It was what I call my approximate sonnets, or my Chinese sonnet. After that I broke it up into 9 couplets and it looked kind of interesting to me. It reflected on one level the column of those figures that I'd seen underground. The couplet is sort of a dominant form in Chinese literature. In fact, they have the closed couplet and a friend of mine, a Chinese friend, eventually translated that into Chinese and I don't know how he did it, but he twisted every one of those run-on couplets into a single closed couplet. I don't know what kind of distortions to the book that that created; it happened more or less by chance. But when I saw what it looked like, it seemed to me it might be a good form to work with. Don: Did Barry tell you his story about being translated from English to Chinese and going into English again? Gary: Yes. Barry: It's a pretty interesting process because the translation becomes a new poem. To see that new poem and say"its quite beautiful", but I didn't write it! (laugh) There are echoes, some literal lines that are pretty close, but the poem I wrote is actually about death and depression. The translation is about hope and light. (laughter) The other thing is that the translator or editor had a little