Month: February 2020

John Steffler’s Writing Space

I’ve written in various places, travelling and at home, indoors and out.  I wrote much of The Grey Islands, the first drafts of the pieces, outdoors, wandering around the island with a clipboard and pads of paper in a backpack.  I’m doing some outdoor writing again in the countryside around where I live.

As for indoor writing, I like to be at ground level, near a window, ideally with a door to the outdoors not too far away.  Of course, this isn’t always possible.  The space I create or gravitate toward for writing tends to be more like a small simple living room than a typical office.  I like a comfortable chair or sofa with a side table for books and a coffee table to rest my feet on.  I write in a sketchbook or on a clipboard on my lap.  I generally spend time at a desk only when I’m revising and developing work.  It’s true that I spend hours, whole days, at a desk, at a computer doing just that.  But I usually make my first sketches away from the desk.

John Steffler was Canadian Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2009. His latest book is Forty-One Pages: on Poetry, Language and Wilderness (URP, 2019).

Photographs courtesy of John Steffler. Cover photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash.

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Exposed: An Interview with Sarah Ens

“It’s possible that I hoped when my hair was ripped away so too would be my sense of shame. My disappointment, always, in what my body is or isn’t.”

Sarah Ens, “Entangled”

 

TNQ’s 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest winner is Saskatchewan-based writer Sarah Ens, for her provocative essay, “Entangled.”

You can read the essay here, or in our fall 2019 contest issue, TNQ 152.

TNQ’s annual Personal Essay contest has no word count and all submissions are considered for publication. The 2019 adjudicators were Lamees Al Ethari, Pamela Mulloy, Emily Urquhart, and yours truly.

–Susan Scott

TNQ Contributing Editor

 

“An hour and a half before I leave my apartment to get all of the pubic hair ripped out of my body, I wonder if I am making a mistake.” So opens “Entangled.” What follows is a series of candid considerations about this “iconic feminine experience,” laced with troubling personal memories and scenes at your aesthetician’s that turn on submission and doubt. Let’s just say that the contest judges found your approach unsettling and enchanting. We wanted to know more about the writing process. How did this piece come together? What’s the life story of the essay?

The story of this essay truthfully does begin with that first sentence, with me sitting at my kitchen table, looking at the waxing appointment on the calendar, and wondering what on earth I was doing. I started writing down the troubling and contradictory feelings I was having as a way to make sense of them. Then during the waxing, I mentally made notes so I could sort it all out later. My thinking was, well, if I can make a story out of this, maybe it will have been somewhat worth it.

Back home after the appointment, I scribbled a sort of stream-of-consciousness account and was surprised by how vulnerable, even violated, I felt. I think that’s why the essay’s tone is so candid. The writing was coming from a profoundly exposed moment.

It was only a few days later, when I decided to take what I’d written and turn it into an essay I could submit to my (extraordinarily supportive) MFA nonfiction workshop, that I decided to braid the present-tense narrative of the actual waxing with reflective passages that examine the external pressures that drive people, particularly women, to do things like get all the pubic hair ripped from their bodies.

It was this research and reflection that helped to clarify my own internalized feelings about my body hair/body.

 

Public/pubic—one letter separates these words, and in its addition (or deletion) lies a world of difference. You use the word “exposed,” which begs the question: why tell such an intimate story in the first place? And why an essay, rather than poetry or fiction?

This question about what should be publicly written about and what should be kept private is something I struggle with a lot.

I tend towards confessional writing and I’m drawn to poetry and prose that says things that “shouldn’t” be said. I’m learning, though, that just because an experience is important or makes a good story, that doesn’t mean I have an obligation to share it.

For this piece, humour helped me feel more comfortable discussing personal details. Humour can function as a shield against too much exposure. That’s also where the form of the essay, as opposed to a poem or a story, came in. The personal essay allowed me to pull in other voices as historical and sociological information on body hair, and that research made me feel validated in my oversharing.

I mean, getting waxed is a strange and invasive activity—it only felt right to write about it from a first-person, nonfiction, “stripped back” perspective.

Plus, as I say in the essay, I’ve had so many conversations with women about waxing! I thought: if this many women get waxed regularly, it really should be something we talk about more publicly.

 

Are you a fan of certain essayists? Did you take any works as models as you wrote this piece?  

Yes! I love essayists who reveal the strange, tender human-ness within what we usually skim over as mundane or ordinary. The anthology GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos of Our Times edited by Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, and Tanis MacDonald contains a number of essays that are really good examples of this. I also admire the essays of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Thomas King, Samantha Irby, David Sedaris, Lee Maracle, Rebecca Solnit, Scaachi Koul, Cheryl Strayed … many!

 

You wrote “Entangled” while a student at the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA program. Tell us how you came to writing. What attracts you to creative nonfiction (CNF)?

I will be graduating this fall from USask’s excellent MFA program. I’ve been super lucky to learn from Jeanette Lynes and Sheri Benning and their expertise in CNF.

I always knew I wanted to write. It was the only thing I for sure wanted to do. In Grade 12, I googled “creative writing programs Canada” and discovered UBC’s undergraduate program. Getting accepted to their BFA was a huge thrill, and made me feel like pursuing writing was something I could do.

I was mostly interested in writing poetry when I began my undergrad, but then I took my first creative nonfiction classes with Deborah Campbell and Andreas Schroeder and completely fell in love with the form. I remember reading Tom Junod’s profile of Fred Rogers, “Can You Say …Hero?” for Deborah Campbell’s class and being struck by the potency of combining factual information with metaphor.

I also grew up devouring my dad’s Rolling Stone magazines. I especially loved profiles with musicians, and the ways the writers scaffolded each interview. How do you tell something “truthfully” but in the most captivating way possible?

 

Submitting to literary contests can be time-consuming and expensive. Congratulations on taking the risk! What attracted you to the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest?

Thank you! At some point in my career as an emerging writer I decided that if I had a piece I believed in, I would submit it, regardless of how much of a long-shot it might be.

I’ve admired TNQ for a long time and always take note of its contest winners. When the Edna Staebler contest popped up on my Facebook, “Entangled” had just been workshopped by my peers. They’d received it positively, so I thought, I guess I’ll send my weirdo Brazilian wax piece to TNQ!

Although it’s an expense, I think it’s worth it to keep an eye out for contests that publish interesting work and to invest in one’s writing career by submitting. Worst case scenario, you’ll have a polished piece and (usually) a magazine subscription.

Of course, I didn’t really consider the risk of winning, then having to call my parents to say, “I won a contest about me getting a Brazilian wax!”

 

“Entangled” has been circulating for a while; has your relationship with it changed, now that others have clapped eyes on it? I’m interested in the feedback you’ve gotten and in the enduring power of a work—not only how it resonates with readers but its impact on the writer. Are you still exploring push-pull messages around beauty and the female form? Or have you said all you’ve got to say—for now?

I have a feeling I’ll be exploring my relationship with shame my whole life.

I saw on Twitter the other day this excerpt of a 2009 Vanity Fair profile of Jessica Simpson. The writer calls Simpson “fat” multiple times and defines the whole story around her body. Stories like that were everywhere when I was growing up, and sometimes that negative messaging directed towards women and our bodies still feels inescapable.

I have to work every day at undoing the body shame I’ve internalized. As long as I’m doing that work, I’ll be writing about it.

There is also something powerful in talking about what makes you feel ashamed. It flips the shame into something shared, something manageable.

That said, I might take a break from writing explicitly about my own body! I was nervous when the essay began circulating—and extremely nervous when I read the first few paragraphs of the essay at the Wild Writers Festival this past November. I would never tell someone I’d never met about my Brazilian wax—not face-to-face I wouldn’t. But there’s something about the page that enables courage, or maybe confession.

The response to the essay, from my aunties to acquaintances, has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel emboldened by that.

 

Edna Staebler—the contest’s namesake—was a pioneering writer in our region whose nonfiction attracted national attention. Thanks to her generous bequest, TNQ can offer the winner a $1,000 purse. Edna was a champion of emerging writers. It was her hope—as it is ours—that prize money would encourage emerging writers to embrace the writing life. What about you, Sarah? Has this win been affirming?

The win has been life-changing, truly. And not just because $1,000 makes a big difference to a graduate student!

When you’re an emerging writer, you’re always hoping someone else will get what you’re doing. For people to get my essay on this scale is absolutely affirming—it’s like saying, regardless of the dark days and the writer’s block, I am on the right track.

 

 

Sarah Ens is a writer and editor living in Treaty 6 territory. Her debut poetry collection, The World Is Mostly Sky, is forthcoming (April 2020) with Turnstone Press.

 

 

 

Photographs courtesy of Karla Froese, Lynette Ens, and Laura McAlduff, respectively.

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Finding the Form with Glen Huser

Back in the 1970s—were any of you alive then?—as I worked on an Education degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, I had the good fortune to study creative writing under the guidance of W. O. Mitchell and Rudy Wiebe. In our seminars we worked on shorter pieces for discussion. Mitchell, in particular, encouraged us to “fall into” our stories—explore experiences that came freely to mind with as much sensual recall as we could muster (“sensual” in that we should seek to immerse ourselves in all five senses to bring a scene to life). While what emerged from my typewriter (remember—it was the 1970s) was loosely formed, I was finding a way to tap into the energy of scenes. And later these first runs offered the seeds for developing and shaping the material into stories that might prove publishable. A couple did appear in literary magazines and one in a NeWest anthology.

            What factors were involved in shaping the Mitchell raw material into more polished entities? Here I think a lifelong love of movies came into play. I saw characters and scenes as if they were a movie playing out in my mind. My words had to become the camera and the sound track. Somehow it worked.

“Mitchell, in particular, encouraged us to ‘fall into’ our stories—explore experiences that came freely to mind with as much sensual recall as we could muster”

            After the publication of those short stories, my writing road took different directions. My first novel, Grace Lake, was shortlisted for a number of awards. Stitches, my second young adult novel, won a Governor General’s award for children’s literature. I became immersed in writing novels and scripting picture books for young readers—and taught that genre for several years for the online program in Creative Writing at UBC.

            In the last couple of years, though, I’ve begun sorting through some of my writing that has lain dormant in file cabinet drawers. Among the pieces were a couple of short stories that urged a recall to life. One of these, “Coffee Boys,” was published by the Victoria online magazine Plenitude a year ago (you can still read this if you access their site). “Dancing with Christians” caught the eye of editorial readers at The New Quarterly. I couldn’t be more pleased. Both stories are centered on gay central characters and, as in a good deal of my fiction for both adults and young adult readers, draw to some extent on my own experiences in the LGBT world and its expanding horizons.

Glen Huser’s first novel, Grace Lake, was shortlisted for several prizes. Stitches won a Governor-General’s award. His stories have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies.

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Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Kathy Page

I knew from the beginning that this piece would be something different: it would not involve character development or dramatic events unfolding but was more a matter of exploring an emotional predicament in a personal way, using a set of interconnected images. I’m far more confident and experienced as a fiction writer than I am as an essayist or writer of CNF, so embarking on “The Astronaut’s Wife….” was baffling as well as exciting. The only common ground between it and my fiction seemed to be a three-part structure—again I knew early on that it would be that way, though I did at one point try it out as a shorter piece in just two parts. It seemed less powerful and less complete that way. Pretty much everything I do comes out in three parts, even if that structure is not always made formally explicit.

It began with the astronaut’s wife. She was someone I had some fun with after hearing an interview on CBC. I didn’t know what, if anything, she would be part of, but she and the ideas and questions she provoked seemed very much alive. Then, as the summer progressed, and my ongoing concerns about the lack of action on climate emergency deepened and became almost my only topic of thought and conversation, I began to write notes about that, and at a certain point I realized that I was writing a personal essay of some kind about one of the extraordinary mindsets our current desperate situation creates. The hike and the demo were obvious incidents to focus on.  I felt the usual discomfort associated with writing about actual people and events and I asked my friend Maggie whether she’d like a name change; she said not.

It was risky to begin with the astronaut’s wife and only reveal quite a way into the piece its specific, earthly concerns, and longer, more desperate emotional trajectory. At the same time, it seemed that this indirect approach to difficult subject matter allowed for some humour and would work better than beginning with the hike. The image of the earth as home is set up in that first section, as well an image of what I call aliveness, which is a vital element in a text that is also much preoccupied with death. When I began to fine-tune the essay, I saw that much of its impact came from image-patterning and repetition: in that way it is or will perhaps be read more as poems are.

Kathy Page’s eighth novel, Dear Evelyn, won the 2018 Writer’s Trust Prize for fiction, and two of her collections of short fiction have been nominated for the Giller Prize. She lives on Salt Spring Island, BC.

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Photographs courtesy of Kathy Page. Cover photo by NASA on Unsplash.

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What is Avi Sirlin Reading?

Florida. How about that title, huh? One state. Maybe also a state of mind? Think, for example, swampy, super-heated air; overwhelming fecundity, raging wind and water. Conjure up condos, freeways and malls, economic insularity and frayed race relations. Consider the short-sighted slaughter of our precious planet.

Given these connections, who wouldn’t despair? And in Lauren Groff’s collection of stories set predominantly in Florida, the central characters, mostly women, do despair. They also brood, self-loathe and drink because, ultimately, there’s always another dark sky brewing a fearsome storm on the horizon. And maybe because the world threatens annihilation, these women also seek solace in sensual pleasure, discover wonder in their children, derive beauty from the very surroundings that menace them, and pin their hopes on the coming dawn.

“The rain increased until it was loud and still my sweaty children slept. I thought of the waves of sleep rushing through their brains, washing out the tiny unimportant flotsam of today so that tomorrow’s heavier truths could wash in. There was a nice solidity to the rain’s pounding on the roof, as if the noise were a barrier that nothing could enter, a stay against the looming night.” — The Midnight Zone

By way of contrast to that singular state, The Boat by Nam Le introduces us to a sprawling range of settings. We’re whisked to Colombia, Iran, Japan, Australia and Vietnam. Le boldly lets his imagination loose and we encounter hard-edged street kids, politically savvy young adults as well as ignorant rednecks, seniors both soft-voiced and acid-tongued.

Perhaps this ambitious array explains in part why I didn’t quite find the same virtuoso consistency that I did in Florida, but there were still knockouts: an estranged Vietnamese father and son share a prickly reunion in California; Medellin street kid gangsters settle scores; an ageing artist in New York ruefully confronts the life he has sown; and there’s the tale of a small-town Australian teenager that reads like a compacted Tim Winton novel. The final story, The Boat, in spite of its predictability contained details so visceral I’m not sure anyone else could have painted it so clearly.

Both books will vividly stick with me for quite some time.

Avi Sirlin’s novel The Evolutionist was published in 2014 and his short fiction has appeared in The Fiddlehead. He has recently completed a new novel.

Photo by Aral Tasher on Unsplash.

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What is Frances Boyle Reading?

As usual, my to-be-read pile grows more quickly than I can keep up with it. Here are a few that recently made it to the top of the stack.

I read Winter Willow by Deborah-Anne Tunney (full disclosure: she’s a good friend of mine) in one or two sittings and it’s likely you’ll want to do the same. The story has elements of the gothic – a grieving young woman comes to live in a memory-ridden old house as the assistant to a once-renowned older man – but its meditative pace, gorgeous writing and literary underpinnings take it sideways from any expectations of gothic thriller. Told retrospectively, as Melanie contemplates “the season that everything changed”, the book is replete with insights about memory and art, and offers rich rewards to the reader.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is told in several voices:  Roy, a young husband on the cusp of a successful career, wrongly convicted and jailed, his wife Celestial, an artist who must redraw and fill in the outlines of the lives they had planned together; and Andre, a friend of Celestial’s since childhood who becomes her support and more in Roy’s long absence. The stunning injustice in the way that an African-American man like Roy can be punished for a crime he did not commit is treated as a simple matter of fact, and is at the core of this story of real unfiltered emotion and loss, and their impact on these characters’ lives. The supporting characters, ranging from Roy’s parents, to his cell mate, to the lawyer who continues to advocate for his release are all compellingly drawn. For me, one of the major strengths of the book is that two key sections are told in letters, mostly between Celestial and Roy. I love epistolary stories when they’re done well, and this one certainly is.

I also love books with a setting between the two 20th century World Wars. Jocelyne Parr’s Uncertain Weights and Measures takes place in 1920s Moscow, and brings the history and the ideas of the time alive in the lives of the main protagonists. One is Tatiana, a young brain scientist wholly devoted to the way science can further revolutionary aims, the other is Sasha, artist and skeptic. The writing is clear and compelling. I’ve had to put the book aside since hardcover books, especially library copies, don’t work well with the no-checked-baggage trip I’m currently on.

In the meantime, my beach reading in ebook is The Kingdom of Gods,  the third of N. K. Jemsin’s Inheritance trilogy that I began on my last vacation. Like her triple-Hugo Award winning fantasy / speculative fiction series, the Broken Earth trilogy, these books feature incredible world building with a wide and diverse set of characters. The cultural conflicts, dilemmas, consequences of decisions and emotions she draws are all too human – even when those experiencing them are gods (or godlings).

Frances Boyle is an Ottawa-based author of two poetry books, a novella and a forthcoming short story collection. Her writing has appeared throughout North America and in the U.K. Visit www.francesboyle.com

Photo by Markus Bürkle on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Deb O’Rourke

The Kindness of Port Angeles was made the hard way. No incident, dream or inspired line sent me running to the computer. I built the poem brick by brick, in response to a news story that had haunted me for years.

I began by collecting images and quotes from the article. I researched the orca to ensure that I filled in the gaps with facts, not romance. After a solid week of work, I had a very rough draft. The first two lines were problematic—they rhymed.

I write free verse, usually beating back the incidental rhymes that pop up. But these lines set the rhythm and tone I wanted, so I turned to Leonard Cohen and T. S. Eliot, to study non-traditional rhyme. I was encouraged by Cohen’s statement that in searching for rhyme, “you’re invited to explore realms that you usually don’t get to in ordinary, easy thought.” I saw that rhyme needn’t be regular—it can be used where it’s wanted and needed. But discipline, in the form of organic consistency, is necessary.

“Perhaps the rhyme’s outrageousness provides some comic relief in a serious poem, as does the orca’s view of the humans as awkward primates”

For this poem, rhyme opened up the stilted product of labor to chance and discovery. My favorites are subtle near-rhymes, like strait/strayed. Death/shibboleth I laughed at and rejected. But I ended up using it, because it precisely expresses the scientists’ struggle to explain something that their training gave them no concept for. Perhaps the rhyme’s outrageousness provides some comic relief in a serious poem, as does the orca’s view of the humans as awkward primates.

In free verse, I find a poem’s structure rather than setting it. So there’s often a stage when I parse it to find out what it’s doing. For this poem, roughly equal line lengths reflect the rhythm of time and tides. I tried tercets and quatrains but they killed the poem, so I kept the stanza structure loose.

The Kindness of Port Angeles was a breakthrough piece for me. I learned to build a poem through will and work. What I discovered about rhyme added another tool to my writer’s toolkit. It took weeks of work, over a period of about two years. It was my second success in the Nick Blatchford Occasional Poetry Contest.

The other second prize poem, Comet Lovejoy in 2016, was made very differently. I had a decent draft within an hour after the comet and I had our [non]encounter. Resolving it was matter of hours, stretched over a few unhurried weeks. I’m relieved that I can bull through something difficult that I’m determined to write, but glad it doesn’t always have to be that way.

I agree with Paul Valéry that: “A work is never completed, but merely abandoned”.  For both poems, I made a small change or two after it was accepted for publication. I struggle with finishing artwork, and I appreciate a relationship with the publisher that allows me to see the poem set in place before I abandon the search for resolution.

Deb O’Rourke’s work appears in various cultural and journalistic publications, view her art at www.milkweedpatch.com. She’s thrilled by her second inclusion among the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest winners.

Photo by Frank Busch on Unsplash.

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The Best of Both Worlds

When I started my co-op placement at The New Quarterly (TNQ), I remember how nervous and excited I was. I was nervous because I felt unprepared—I didn’t know what to expect. My co-op teacher reached out to TNQ for my placement because of my interest in literature – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I can recite every line from The Crucible by Arthur Miller…I sometimes mess up…joking! So I was worried that they’d expect me to be a ‘literary prodigy’. But I was quickly relieved to find out that it wasn’t going to be ‘that’ kind of placement.

Co-op basically provides high school students with experience in their field of interest. UCEP provides high school students with the best of three worlds—high school, university, and co-op (the workplace). I definitely got the ‘feel’ of what it’s like to work for a Canadian literary journal in this day and age.

“I learned about myself with each task we were given because they shined a light on my strengths and weaknesses.”

Being at TNQ was definitely a great co-op placement. To me, TNQ is like a home for writers. The writers are welcomed with open arms, receive detailed and helpful feedback from the editors (which allows the writers to grow), and they even give back to TNQ by being guests at TNQ’s Wild Writer Literary Festival (WWLF) and by submitting blogs/participating in interviews that will later be posted on TNQ’s website. TNQ has been able to create a tight-knit community with a passion for literature amidst all the distractions and difficulties surrounding them.

In the time that I’ve been with TNQ, it feels like I’ve accomplished so much. Since it’s experiential learning, everything I’ve learned I’ve gotten to do. I’ve helped organize multiple aspects of the Wild Writers Literary Festival (e.g. Young Writers Bursary, each guest writers’ itinerary). I’ve helped in the uploading process of issue 152 and issue 153 on their website. I’ve created multiple social media posts, co-created a Nick Blatchord poetry contest campaign with my fellow UCEP partner at TNQ, Joyce—we’ve helped mail out issue 152 to all of TNQ’s subscribers. I’ve improved my emailing-spreadsheeting-letter-writing-game a lot! These are only a few of the interesting and fulfilling tasks we’ve taken on for TNQ. Being your typical modern-Generation Z high school student, I was familiar with Google Drive, emailing, and basic workplace expectations. But with TNQ, I was able to dive deeper than what I was familiar with and discovered new things, and for that I’m extremely grateful.

I learned about myself with each task we were given because they shined a light on my strengths and weaknesses. I appreciated their trust and belief in my capabilities—even if I sometimes felt overwhelmed. I’m so glad I was able to do my co-op with TNQ.

I was blessed to be given the opportunity to work alongside such a great team who took us in and sacrificed their time and resources to pass down their wisdom for our gain. So for that, everything else above, and all the other things not mentioned, I want to give thanks to TNQ, especially the four ladies in the office—even more specifically, thank you to my supervisor.

My university course ended with the final exam, my co-op placement with TNQ is done today, and my high school courses this semester are wrapping up with the final exams next week. So now I must prepare to say ‘adios’ to one of the best highlights of my high school career.

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash.

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Unexpected Directions

Before the UCEP program led me to do co-op at The New Quarterly (TNQ), I had a very vague and largely inaccurate notion of what literary magazines were. Online forums, newspapers and writing contests were the three publishing platforms that came to mind—I wasn’t aware whether other platforms existed. A week or two into the co-op placement, the reality of literary magazines clicked for me. I went home and told my mom that there were actually magazines out there that accepted submissions of and published literature. For me, it was a great discovery, but my mom just looked at me like I had grown two thick heads. For her, it was common knowledge.

Doing co-op at TNQ was, in many other ways, an eye-opening experience. I was very grateful to be sharing the placement with Katherine, a fellow UCEP student, and thankful too that the team at the TNQ office was so open-minded and patient.

Over the course of a few months, there were many firsts: using social media, mailing, shredding, sending ‘nudge’ emails. Leading up to November, the main focus was the Wild Writers Literary Festival and sorting through applications for the youth bursary. Fortunately I can’t recite it off the top of my head now, but I distinctly remember at one point being very well versed in one of the applicant’s allergies (something about onions, leeks, garlic? In the column of dietary restrictions said applicant’s virtual shopping list of prohibited vegetables stuck out as one of the odder entries.)

What struck me about the writers and other guests who had dinner at the CiGi campus on the eve of the festival was that they appeared all very ordinary, very human, like any other person you’d pass in the street. Just seeing them at the dinner, in conversation, brought the whole business of writing and publishing down to earth for me. I think I sometimes tend to glorify writers, and many of them absolutely deserve to be praised and glorified, but my mindset also made writing somewhat mystical and unattainable; surreal. So seeing the writers at CiGi, along with reading their work as part of digitizing the newest issue during co-op hours, has generally helped me to realize that writing is concrete, and that it’s essence is work.

“I always get the feeling that it’s important to work in coexistence with everything that’s touched down in the office…”

In the process of sifting through old submissions, I got a taste of how the editors decide to reject or publish a piece. It really goes to show the time and effort that people in various roles contribute to each issue, often behind the scenes. While we had a good laugh over some of the contradictions of multiple editors’ remarks, there were very encouraging reactions, too, and there were definitely pieces of work that awed me. I love how some writers can tell their stories in a way that’s both literary and colloquial.

The atmosphere of the office will likely stay with me for a long time—even though it’s quiet, there’s always a sense of momentum, which becomes slightly more stubborn when things are hectic (people aren’t replying to nudge emails. Microsoft Word is being insufferable. There are a gazillion questions to answer in an application for a grant. The numbers won’t balance. And is that a dog or a pig on the cover of an archived issue?) Sometimes having a mess of file folders splayed across the table creates an illusion of productivity, which has made us more efficient, but there is still a struggle with space. Nonetheless, I always get the feeling that it’s important to work in coexistence with everything that’s touched down in the office—in spite of the clutter, nothing feels disorganized. I guess it’s something unique to TNQ.

Katherine and I are the latest generation of UCEP students to spend a term at TNQ. Thanks to the wonderful team at The New Quarterly’s office, we’ve been able to read many evocative and honest pieces of writing and even dig into the magazine’s archives. It was cool to see how the publication evolved over the years to become what it is today. I really hope any future UCEP students would be able to pick up where we left off with the archives, to be involved in the Wild Writers Literary Festival, and simply to come in contact with more of the world through what’s published by TNQ. Personally, a reference to Flannery O’Connor on the cover of 137 spurred me to explore her work, which I ended up really enjoying for its gothic quirkiness—I guess this is just a small example of The New Quarterly’s potential to point people in new, unexpected directions.

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Credence McFadzean

The real-life “Log Cabin” thrift store is not located in Banff, AB, or some plains, but firmly in the heart of Regina’s North Central neighbourhood. It’s a few blocks east of where painter and diner-owner Roger Ing coined his Rogerism movement—the eminent New Utopia Café, a locale for Regina artists or those seeking orange gravy on their fries in the 80s and 90s. One block from there is the redbrick house my mother grew up in; the house I knew as my grandmother’s in younger years and my brother’s place in now-years, the versions of its spaces occasionally fighting for precedence in my mind when I go over there.

Most of my stories begin life as igniting moments I stumble into which soon prove to be hard to un-stumble out of. I would risk calling these moments “seeds” if their development was a smooth time-lapse into beautiful, fully formed story-plants. Instead, I’m going to gesture vaguely to the process by which a shelled mollusk forms a pearl. Keep in mind, I don’t think pearls are very great at all, so this is definitely NOT a humblebrag about “the timeless glimmer” of my work, or whatever phrases readers are using!

 

The igniting moment for one of my stories can be a strange observance in day-to-day life, a bit of stray dialogue zapped into my mind, or a surprising emotion I discover within myself that lingers. If this is like the microscopic irritant trapped inside the mollusk’s shell, then the time I spend thinking about it in the shower or while driving or on a walk—my first early attempts at imagining a narrative apparatus suitable for it—is the calcium carbonate secreted around this idea to contain it.

The Log House Thrift Store became the igniting moment for “Excavate” one afternoon while I was rifling through the bookshelves in a cramped corner and could hear my mother, fellow thrift-seeker, speaking to one of the employees on the other side of the bookcase. I thought for a second, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I didn’t recognize my own mother, even though she’s just on the other side, there?” This opened up that whole existential landscape of “Wow, people’s parents are actually just people who lived whole lives before having their people, and then suddenly they turn into ‘parents’—but wait, what if they’re still just people even after that??” Then I thought persuasively about this character who, for one mysterious second, didn’t recognize the voice on the other side of that shelf.

Through serious shower-thinking, note-jotting, and tinkering of drafts, I came up with a kind of calcium carbonate that could explore how this character’s voice communicates with the mother’s. Most of my work ends up featuring parents in some salient role, and I sometimes wonder if this is entwined with the act of storytelling. Navigating life after childhood, there is a fundamental authorship that everyone has to contend with. We are out there, a published text. We don’t belong to our authors, but to an avid and sometimes skeptical world.

Credence McFadzean is a Saskatchewan-based writer whose stories have appeared in Bad Nudes, untethered, and others. He has also been longlisted for the 2017 PULP Literature Hummingbird Prize. He teaches English at the University of Regina.

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Photo by Hannes Netzell on Unsplash.

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