Month: January 2020

What is Sarah Ens Reading?

The Long Poem Anthology and The New Long Poem Anthology

As I am currently in the midst of my MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan, much of my reading lately has been focussed around the themes and genre of my thesis project: a prairie long poem about home, migration, and climate change. Both The Long Poem Anthology edited by Michael Ondaatje and The New Long Poem Anthology edited by Sharon Thesen have been incredibly instructive, immersing me in the works of Daphne Marlatt, Phyllis Webb, Robert Kroetsch, George Bowering, Fred Wah, Dionne Brand, Don McKay, and many other brilliant “long” poets.

In his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology, Ondaatje writes that the long poem allows poets to “take a longer look at themselves and their landscape, to hold onto something frail—whether the memory or discovery of a place, or a way of speaking.” I want to learn, through my reading and experimenting with the form, how to look longer and more precisely, and the poets in these two anthologies offer profound lessons on the language of attention and reciprocity. Though these two books were published in 1979 and 1991 respectively, and some time before terms like “Anthropocene” became commonly known outside of scientific communities, their collected poems “explore place through the lengthening line” (Marlatt), speaking powerfully into topics, like eco-grief, that I sometimes find unspeakable.

“I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is.”

A few more long poems that have been recent revelations for me:

Dart by Alice Oswald, Blue Marrow by Louise Halfe, Moosewood Sandhills by Tim Lilburn, and Comma by Jennifer Still—she says that “home unwinds from the mouth.”

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

Chaim Potok’s novel My Name Is Asher Lev took me almost a year to read. My brother gave it to me for Christmas last year because he felt it was a true examination of art, God, family, violence, and love. I wanted to read a novel “for fun,” and for some reason chose this one. It made me weep for weeks. “I do not sculpt and paint to make the world sacred. I sculpt and paint to give permanence to my feelings about how terrible the world truly is.” Oof. It is a great novel. Maybe don’t read the ending in a public place. My seatmate beside me on the plane was concerned.

Sarah Ens is a MFA in Writing candidate at the University of Saskatchewan. Her debut poetry collection, The World Is Mostly Sky, is forthcoming in Spring 2020.

Link Instagram Facebook

Photo by Brian Holdsworth on Unsplash.

Read more

Finding the Form with Andrea L. Mozarowski

The writing of “Amphibios” has been a revelatory journey. Each step of the way, I was compelled to venture deeper into a post-war world which I first evoked in a series of Freefall writing sessions. In her reflection on reading submissions to the Peter Hinchcliffe short fiction contest, “Once to Admire,” Pam Mulloy closes with a nod to the (all-too-familiar) inertia that writers contend with when they “fight the urge to leave [the story] in the bottom drawer.” Over many years, I revisited “Amphibios,” retrieving it from its consignment there.

 

Written as an experiment, this Freefall weekly exercise I entitled simply, “Post-War London Chapter.” Inspired by Graham Greene, I used the Freefall precept of “write all of the sensuous details” to evoke a world that the reader might experience as intact and complete unto itself. The principal characters of my larger narrative were in fact Soviet Ukrainians displaced by the war, and not George and Joanna. But in this chapter, which I later conceived/rewrote as a standalone fiction so as to give George his fullest incarnation, I wondered what it would be like for a reader to encounter these refugees through a unique set of filters.

“I had to answer for myself the question of what he was doing during the war. In my heart I knew he had not seen combat. I went in search of historical possibilities.”

I drew my inspiration from lived experience and an anecdote shared by my mother. Growing up, I knew my parents only as sworn enemies. But once or twice, I remember kind words uttered by my mother: “In London, dad loved taking and developing photographs. The night he lost his camera – that broke my heart.” I had this testimony and albums filled with black and white photos shot and developed by my dad. I chose to build a story around this account and actual photos of the Daimler in procession and my mother in the park (Hyde Park I surmised), taken, I imagined, during my parents’ courtship.

 

The challenge then was to forge a narrative that wasn’t gimmicky and to avoid turning this inspiration of the lost camera into a clunky plot device that might move the story along but fail to move a reader. During a trip to London, I walked a portion of the route George’s cab takes and more recently consulted Laurence Ward’s Bomb Damage Maps 1939-45 to ensure that the routes George travels are plausible.

 

At a minimum, the Freefall piece was atmospheric and hooked me. Joanna sprang fully-fledged, as if from a god’s head. George became my biggest teacher, a character I patiently coaxed out of the shadows. As the protagonist, for a long time, he existed on the fringes of my imagination and the narrative’s time and place. I had to answer for myself the question of what he was doing during the war. In my heart I knew he had not seen combat. I went in search of historical possibilities. I learned about the Home Guard and as I kept digging, I discovered Osterley Park and the training of Auxiliary Forces (an Irregular Army) whose role it would be to stop a Nazi invasion on British soil. Continued inquiry eventually led me to an understanding of the role played by surrealists, chiefly the contributions of Roland Penrose (married to Lee Miller), in theories of camouflage and the instruction of auxiliary units in warfare. Penrose and John Langdon-Davies emphasized the mimicry of nature as foundations for concealment and observation (Robinson and Mills).

These underpinnings of imaginative participation in nature inspired me to evoke through the narrative structure George’s way of seeing the world. Around the time that I was making these discoveries I attended a workshop with Betsy Warland on “Writing the Between.” Betsy led us through an inquiry into the “betweenness” we were sensing or wondering about in our writing. In sharing the reasons she was inspired to offer the workshop she said: “Another thing that’s really powerful about writing the space of between is that it’s a threshold and threshold periods are very powerful periods in which things get destabilized. It’s a time when we get a lot of insight; in this state we can acknowledge a different point of view.” Betsy invited us to consider how the between was surfacing in our writing and thinking. As I worked with these possibilities I allowed material from George’s consciousness and unconscious to leak into the narrative. Eventually, I had to scale back on my ambitions because too many “between” spaces were disorienting for the reader. I had to be sure not to sacrifice unity.

While the overall narrative structure proceeds rationally, there exists a permeability within the container that allows us to glimpse George’s perceptions intimately, in an unmediated way.

I struggled with the ending and am still not convinced it’s right for the story. In previous drafts, the ending felt tacked on and anti-climactic. I found guidance in David Jauss’ “Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov’s Subversive Endings.” Jauss writes, “Chekhov tends to end his stories by returning his characters to life and the problems created either by their change or their failure to change.” He then goes on to illuminate ten of Chekhov’s strategies for forging “inconclusive conclusions.”

And thus, I sent my protagonists off in different directions to honour the brokenness and longing for love in both them, and their unwitting accomplices.

Andrea L. Mozarowski’s writing explores revolutionary spaces of survival for characters who experienced war on the Eastern Front. Reaching beyond polarities of love and hatred, liberator and jailer, she inquires, How can love begin again?

Link

Photo by KAL VISUALS on Unsplash.

Read more

What is Beth Downey Reading?

                  Recently, I was out with a clutch of friends—all readerly-writerly types, which tells you something of how spoiled I am in life—when one of our party asked, ‘how do you guys cope with how much there is to read out there?’

                  How, indeed. In a world heaped with outstanding books, articles, poetry, film, and with friends constantly giving recommendations or sending links or writing books themselves, the hard truth is that one is always, at every moment, missing out and losing ground. “Life piled on life were all too little,” laments Tennyson’s aging Ulysses. I would need several lifetimes to even hope of reading everything I might wish to read, or benefit from reading. In this way, I sometimes think voracious readers confront their personal mortality every time they open or close a book.

                  Yet—as in the knowledge that death is inevitable and that it will come too soon and that life will end unfinished—one must learn to live, and read, anyway. One must make peace. Which brings me to my friend’s initial question: how do I ever begin to sort out what to read? Now that you understand how provisional my answer is, and that it comes laced with the awareness of its certain inadequacy, you can take it for what it may be worth to you. Godspeed, my friend.

                  I’m a free-love reader. (Though of course, free love entails the freedom to devote oneself to a single paramour, for a time. As the spirit leads.) Essentially, I try to treat life like one big research project: I keep individual reading lists that pertain to different interests, writing projects, spiritual or intellectual quests, the types of work I’m engaged in, etc. I keep them all separate, usually in my desktop sticky notes, but I also keep them all thrown together in a giant online wish-list, so the almighty algorithms can aid me in seeking out what artists and researchers greater than I have learned about these things. The internet knows books and people you’ve never heard of.

                  At any given time, I try to keep a bookmark in at least one thing from two or more of my topical lists. My end tables are thus permanently crowded with stacks of books I’m working through all at once, and my tidy, longsuffering husband deserves credit for putting up with this. At the moment, all of the following are somewhere in the soup:

                  Winter: Five Windows on the Season, by Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik adapted his 2011 CBC Massey Lectures series from these essays.) This is one of a cluster of books that fall under “Making Peace with Pain.” I sought Gopnik out because my husband and I were returning to Manitoba after two transformative years in my ancestral home of Newfoundland; I was torn about the move for many reasons, but one very real reason was that I dreaded the return to Winnipeg winters. Reader, when winter is as long as it is in Winnipeg, hating every minute of it is just no way to live. So I sought help. I’m not through Winter yet, but I am delighted to report that Gopnik’s work has absolutely rocked my world. On a weekly basis, it is transforming my attitude toward both literal and figurative winter.

                  Also in this category:  The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, by Belden C. Lane, and Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies of Loved, by Kate Bowler. The first is a raw yet elegant investigation of apophatic theology as taught by harsh landscapes. Dense, by turns academic and confessional, it was recommended to me by our minister, Jamie. Blessed are the discerning book-pushers! As to Bowler, you can get a taste of what you’re in for there through her New York Times article, “Death, The Prosperity Gospel and Me.” One line sold me on the book: “Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.” Woman, preach.

“For me, audio format is perfect for a first reading, since it encourages me to simply take the book in as a whole, mentally flagging things I want to examine more closely next time.”

                  In complement to my own creative writing, I also work freelance as a literary editor, which means I’m often reading something that either isn’t published yet, or just recently hit shelves. Dig by Terry Doyle, is a gritty, observant collection of short fiction about contemporary life in St John’s. Released last year by Breakwater Books, it was a pleasure to work on. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to cut past the simple, touristic image of local life that you will confront on first visiting St John’s, and glimpse the more greyscale realities through the eyes of an artist who loves his home. This winter, I’m working on a manuscript by rising star Jim McEwan, who was long-listed for the CBC short story prize in 2016, and recently completed an MA in creative writing supervised by Lisa Moore. Jim’s novel, tentatively titled Fearnoch, will soon to be seeking a publisher and b’ys oh b’ys, once this gets out they’ll be tripping over each other to publish the next one. Mark my words.

                  Lastly, I’ll tell you a bit of what I’m reading to inform my secret novel-in-progress, (shh, don’t tell,) and what for pure, unadulterated fun.

                  Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. I’m listening to this one as an audiobook during my daily commute (praise be to LibriVox!) That’s a strategic choice, since I plan to read the book more than once. For me, audio format is perfect for a first reading, since it encourages me to simply take the book in as a whole, mentally flagging things I want to examine more closely next time.

                  Also for the (secret) novel: Every Monica Kidd poem I can get my hands on. I discovered Kidd through a chance encounter, when she was (and this is delicious) giving a reading from her latest collection, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals, in Winnipeg. I wept through the whole reading—not because the poems were sad, but because they spoke to me so deeply when I had not been expecting it. Tears of rapture!

                  As to joy (the only way to make an end,) this is almost always going to fall in one of two categories for me: Dickens or Dragons. That is to say, classics or high fantasy. Most recently it’s been fantasy. After, I am ashamed to say, years of my very best friend imploring me to read a little book called The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfus (long may he reign,) and me putting my best friend off with a bunch of (factual) guff about assigned readings and the pressures of grad-school and blah blah blah…I finally read it. The ending made me gasp, and cry, and scream, and jump around my kitchen rejoicing. And now you know what a sterling man my friend is.

Now go my friends! Life is short! Read what you want to read.

Beth Downey is an emerging writer of poetry and fiction, currently dividing life between Winnipeg and St John’s, where she is a graduate student. She also moonlights as a birth doula.

Link Instagram Facebook

Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.

Read more

What is Paola Ferrante Reading?

As someone who actively writes both poetry and fiction, I alternate between reading poetry and fiction regularly. I find that reading poetry really makes me think about sound of my sentences, often to the point where I make sure I read my fiction out loud and will spend sometimes half an hour or more on it if I feel a sentence doesn’t sound right. It also makes me hyper-aware of form, and how to play with it, something I’ve been experimenting with more and more in my fiction.  Currently up on the poetry docket is Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day.  Most of the poetry I read is concerned with hard truths and in this collection, I think Zapruder does a brilliant job of persuading us, with beautiful words, that words are not enough, not matter how beautiful, when we talk about the current social and political issues.

“When I’m writing fiction, I actually like to start my writing sessions by reading the work of writers I feel that I’m in conversation with.” 

I read a lot of both poetry and fiction when I’m feeling “dry” creatively, no matter what project I’m working on, because I find that poetry informs my fiction, and fiction also gives me images to play with in my poetry. In my new poetry collection, I’m writing a lot about fear and the end of the world lately and sometimes I see echoes of Paige Cooper’s absolutely brilliant post-apocalyptic worlds in Zolitude, where humans terra-form desolate planets, staring back at me. When I’m writing fiction, I actually like to start my writing sessions by reading the work of writers I feel that I’m in conversation with. I’ll re-read stories in Zolitude and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (I’m working on her memoir, In The Dream House, right now–if it can be called work). I love the way Machado’s work blurs the lines between genre fiction, like horror and erotica, and literary fiction, and invents its own forms (much like poetry), which is something I’m also trying to do with the collection of short fiction that I’m working on. Currently, I’m taking a deep dive into Karen Russell, and recently started her first short fiction collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves which made me appreciate all the more the way magic realism can turn on a series of images, working by emotion and the logic of half-remembered, archetypal stories.

Paola Ferrante’s poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published 2019 by Mansfield Press. She is Poetry Editor at Minola Review.

Link Instagram Facebook

Photo by Ibrahim Rifath on Unsplash.

Read more

Finding the Form with Stephanie Harrington

“I think “Blackberries” divided people, which in retrospect, isn’t a bad place to start. At least I provoked something in readers.”

“Blackberries” started as an assignment for a creative nonfiction class at the University of Victoria. Our professor, David Leach, asked us to write a “Modern Love” essay like those published in the long-running New York Times column. A nearly 10-year relationship with my partner had ended months earlier. I was grieving the loss, but I wanted “Blackberries” to have a bigger scope than that relationship. I decided to incorporate other storylines and characters, including my family, into the work. Much of what we learn about relationships comes from the environment we grow up in, for better or worse. I tried not to impose anything on the material I included. I simply let my mind wander.

I loved the poem Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass, and decided to write a call and response piece to the poem. I originally included stanzas from the poem in my essay and wound my four storylines around Hass’s work. My classmates’ responses to the early draft were interesting. I think “Blackberries” divided people, which in retrospect, isn’t a bad place to start. At least I provoked something in readers.

“You gain a lot of insight into other people’s lives as a reporter, but I realized the real work I had to do involved looking inward.”

I also wanted to experiment with form, which I hadn’t done much before. At the time, I loved lyric and braided essays. I’d worked as a journalist for several years prior to this and felt restricted by my training. You gain a lot of insight into other people’s lives as a reporter, but I realized the real work I had to do involved looking inward. So much had happened in my life, and by my early 30s, I wanted to start exploring it, to make sense of things for myself, but also to connect with other people’s experiences. Part of finding my voice as a writer meant swinging as far away from the objective reportorial style I had learned in journalism school and been practicing since my early twenties.

I put the essay away for a while. A friend of mine encouraged me to keep revising. Her faith in the piece kept me motivated. After several drafts, I shed one of the storylines, and gradually the essay began to have legs of its own. It didn’t need Hass’s stanzas anymore. I find structure the hardest part of writing—there are so many possibilities! Once I figured out the structure for “Blackberries,” I felt confident it would work. How this essay came to be remains somewhat mysterious to me, to be honest. I can talk generally about the process, but the ideas, feelings and form came from somewhere I hadn’t accessed before. It’s a vulnerable, sad essay, an ode to a formative relationship in my life, as well as a meditation on relationships in general. I’m afraid every time I read “Blackberries” of what the material might bring up, but it also feels like a lifetime ago, a different version of myself that I have preserved in an imperfect and hopefully affecting way.

Stephanie Harrington holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria. In 2018, she was selected for the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writers Mentorship Program.

Photo by Aurel Serban on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Eleanor Sudak

This poem began its life as an idea for a short story, a screenplay-like vision peopled by characters who can never quite come together in ways hoped for by the reader. I am so fond of the works of Mary Lawson, Anne Tyler, and Donna Morrissey that their themes flavour my thoughts. Or, maybe their themes fit congruently within the types of stories I tell. In the beginning I was trying to tell myself the messy, difficult story of the snow plow driver, and then, one morning the story tilted and became the record of a brief, unrequited moment in the man’s life. I am still playing with the idea that this frozen moment may become part of a larger whole.

Eleanor Sudak is a retired teacher. Her poem, “Today we say Thailand,” was published in an anthology from the University of Waterloo’s 2018 HeforShe Writing Contest.

Photograph provided by Eleanor Sudak. Cover photo by Damian McCoig on Unsplash.

Read more

Finding the Form with Susan Vernon

Perhaps I am an intuitive poet who doesn’t really want to know exactly how she does it.  Even if, at times, a poem doesn’t come easily, it always seems miraculous:  to begin, to carry on and then to find an ending.

In my early thirties, I wasn’t writing much poetry even though I had thought of myself as a poet since my twenties, and had written some poems, usually in free verse.   It was then, in seeking to find that comfort which writing brings, I turned to the American poet Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town.  Because it was a library book, I made notes from some of Hugo’s essays on writing poetry.

I jotted down Hugo’s description of the process:  “A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject . . . which ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean and which is  . . . discovered in the poem during the writing.”  For Richard Hugo, his triggering subject could be a “small town” about which he knew very little but for which he felt some kind of affinity.   He goes on to say that the triggering subject must become weaker and your allegiance to the words stronger.  “The poem is always in your hometown but you have a better chance of finding it in another.”

In those days, I’m not sure I understood what Richard Hugo meant.  Looking back now, I believe I got some of it, at least.  Once, I wrote a poem in which I referred to making beds as singing.  The bed making took place in an old summerhouse belonging to my husband’s family.  The house itself and my experience of it was the beginning of many steps I took to find my own “obsessions” as a poet.

This apprenticeship stays with me.  I borrow much that isn’t mine by birth—another’s childhood, the unfolding of hepatica in a Southern Ontario spring, a 19th century barn—all of which, and more, continues to be my way in.

 

Photograph provided by Susan Vernon. Cover photo by Conner Baker on Unsplash.

Read more