Month: February 2021

Angeline Schellenberg’s Writing Space

My requirements for a productive writing space are simple: sunshine, silence, and a dog.

In summer, I write outdoors whenever possible. This past summer, our neighbour from across the street built us a patio on the east side of our house under our apple trees. He took his time, partly because he’s a perfectionist, and partly because he’s lived alone since his wife—my dear friend Michelle—died; while he worked, he was never without food and company.

I’ve arranged the space with an old church pew by the table for when I’m religiously scribbling/typing and a swing at one end for reading and naps. My dog Lily dozes in a sunny patch on the lawn. 

The only sounds are the birds at the feeder, the wind in the leaves, and the occasional banjo solo from the open window next door.

Lovely as the patio is, since it is situated in Winnipeg, Canada, I need another space to write from October to May. Thankfully, the prairie sun follows me indoors.

For years, I’ve written in the corner of the living room sectional, in front of the picture window. The room is open to the front entrance, kitchen, and hallway, and features my daughter’s upright piano. Sunshine: check. Dog: check. Silence: sometimes. 

This winter, we moved our daughter to a newly finished, bigger bedroom in the basement, and turned her old room into an office. We’d wanted a separate workspace for a while, but with me being laid off at the end of 2019, and my husband and son zooming in to work or university from home due to COVID, the need became more pressing. 

For a small room, it fits a lot of stuff: our old kitchen table works as a writing desk, my Oma’s old recliner is perfect for reading or napping, shelves and baskets hold my books and art supplies (pottery glazes; napkins and embroidery floss for journal making; newspapers for collaging). There is even room on the floor for a half-completed puzzle.

The walls are decorated with framed sunsets and children from my husband’s photography shows, my daughter’s acrylic paintings, and my mom’s cross-stitch of a red barn which I nabbed from my parents’ house when they left the farm. 

Scattered around the room are reminders of my little brother Tim who died of liver cancer this past November: a framed sympathy card of a chickadee, a key my college roommate sent me because Tim collected keys (1,800 of them!), a wooden bear Tim made in shops class, the pottery tractor I made for his last birthday. I keep them here to protect them from the splatter and bustle of the rest of the house. They give the room weight.

The sun streams in through the window, lifting my mood. The only sounds interrupting the words in my head are my son’s giggles through the wall. And there’s my Lily: asleep in front of the electric fireplace.

Angeline Schellenberg’s full-length debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for Poetry. In 2019, she launched poetry chapbooks with Kalamalka, JackPine, and Dancing Girl Presses, and received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. The host of Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline has read at literary events across Canada. Her latest book, Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020), is a series of elegies for her Mennonite grandparents. When she’s not writing, Angeline enjoys creating pottery, talking to dogs, and eating other people’s baking.

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Photos courtesy of Sigmund

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Finding the Form with Mary-Lynn Murphy

I wasn’t working on a specific project at the time I wrote “Recalculating” and had no ideas in mind, so I approached the page with a familiar mixture of anticipation and hopelessness. I often begin by putting something—anything—on the page, sometimes just what I see out the window. Something to get the pen moving. The first line of writing that day was this: “There are things you want to outlive. Others you don’t.” I have no idea what that was all about, but what I wrote next began the ramblings that turned into “Recalculating.” That’s often how things go.

Not much of what I write is planned in advance; I just follow where the pen takes me. The “silent type” with the chainsaw at the beginning of this story had shown up before in writing that didn’t lead anywhere; I didn’t know what to do with him. This time, I found his opposite, and that ended up giving shape to the piece. The second-person point of view was there from the beginning of this effort; it seemed to drive the writing in a way. 

I’m drawn to work by writers like Amy Hempel, whose stories are often very short and don’t always follow “the rules” about structure—at least not that I can see. So I find myself wondering, what is a story? Even when I reached what seemed to be the end of this piece after several revisions, I had no idea whether it was a story. 

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I’m grateful to be a member of a small writing group whose focus is critiquing each other’s work. I submitted “Recalculating” to the group one time when I had little else to offer. After making a few good editing suggestions, they told me to submit it somewhere as a piece of flash fiction. And now it’s in TNQ; I guess it is a story after all.

Mary-Lynn Murphy’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall, Grain and Dandelion. She was a prize winner in TNQ’s 2012 Occasional Verse contest. Her novel, Finding Grace, was published by Scrivener Press in 2013. She lives in Northern Ontario, near Superior’s eastern shore.

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Cover image by https://writix.co.uk/

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Finding the Form with Tom Wayman

I first met Giorgio, who eventually served as Toronto’s poet laureate between 2004 and 2009, when I went to the University of Windsor to be their writer-in-residence 1975-76. My poetry collection Money and Rain, published by Macmillan of Canada in 1975, had included poems about an eight-month stint working in Burnaby, B.C. as a factory assemblyman for Canadian Kenworth. The UWindsor selection committee felt that my writing about building trucks was a good match for the city, given Windsor’s auto plants integrated with Ford and Chrysler production on both side of the Detroit River.

I can’t remember whether I was introduced to Giorgio through the Italo-Canadian poets then active in Winsor, Mary di Michele and Len Gaspirini, or whether I met him through mutual friends in the Toronto literary scene. I was frequently in Toronto between 1975 and 1996, in part because my parents lived there and in part because during that era Toronto really was the literary centre of the country—different than today, when a proliferation of literary foci across the Dominion has supplanted the former binary paradigm of centre/hinterlands, of national/regional.

However we met, Giorgio and I became friends. I admired not only his poetry, but also his determination not to be Peter George—something new in Canada at that time, when immigrants traditionally Anglicized at least their first names. 

In the 1970s, as a result of post-World War II immigration, the population of Toronto had become about one-quarter Italian or of Italian descent—a transformative change for a place known previously for Anglican and Presbyterian rectitude: Toronto the Good. And Giorgio played a vital role in achieving importance in Canadian Literature for the writers in English active among the relative newcomers. In 1978 he put together the first anthology of Italo-Canadian poets writing in English that I was aware of, Roman Candles.

Unlike the current advocates for writing by various racial and sexual micro-minorities, Giorgio in presenting his seventeen authors had confidence in the accomplishment of the poems. He needed neither to attack mainstream CanLit (literary production seen as a zero-sum activity) nor blather about “underrepresentation” (which author can say with a straight face that she or he truly represents his or her community?). Instead, Giorgio states in his Preface, concerning the material he had collected:

The Italo-Canadian experience expressed by these contributors . . . ranges from poems that directly speak from a displaced sensibility to poems that are not conscious of any such dilemma. . . . As poems should be, they are not so much a resolve as they are a discovery. They map out a journey towards a new citizenship, one that has little to do with anti-Americanism or the convenience of a melting-pot.

As a person, Giorgio was easy to feel affection toward. He had a huge heart toward his friends, and a deep seriousness about life, literature, and ideas. His solemn approach regarding the latter sometimes verged on the ridiculous, although he took the ribbing he received for such behavior with an unfailing sense of humor. Good talk and Italian coffee—long before the flooding of North America by corporate espresso—were two things he enjoyed, based on his thoroughgoing appreciation of the sensuous and his delight in people.

The elegy in TNQ was not the first poem I wrote for him. In my 1986 collection, The Face of Jack Munro, published by Harbour, I have a poem called “December Letter to Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in Toronto.” In it I suggest that, since he and I both have large Mediterranean noses, we should decamp to the sub-tropical sun of southern California where 

in the end
we will marry women
who never head of Canada, and have children
who never heard of snow.

Instead of taking my advice, Giorgio was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1993. He wrote stunning poems about the tougher aspects of that occupation—how to act honestly in conducting a funeral for a family that in a tragic accident has lost their children. And as Toronto poet laureate and afterwards he thought hard and wrote passionately and insightfully about the purpose of a city (I skim the surface of some of his ideas in my elegy). 

His sudden death a few days before Christmas in 2019 was a shock to me. I was used to middle-of-the-night phone messages from him where I live in B.C.—being a priest never, as far as I could see, changed Giorgio’s proclivity toward rising around noon and going to bed in the early morning. Plus I’m not sure he ever grasped the concept of time zones. But every message he left me ended with an earnest, “God bless you, Tom. God bless you”. Vintage Giorgio: wishing the best for a friend, even though he knew I’m about as religious as a compressed air impact wrench.

When I wanted to write an elegy for him, tone was all-important. I wanted to capture his mix of self-confidence, engagement with ideas, respect and regard for others, and a refusal to be cowed by precedent or authority (he had various run-ins with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but stood his ground: “The bishop knows,” he confided in me once, “it’ll be a long time until Toronto has another Catholic priest as poet laureate”). One model for me was the elegy by American spoken word poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) for the founder of the Salvation Army. Lindsay’s poem expresses appreciation of William Booth’s sincere if somewhat simplistic Christian faith, and of his accomplishment in founding a popular new religious movement, while gently mocking the silliness of trying to militarize a religion supposedly based on love.

I knew my poem had to be conversational in structure, given how important conversation was to Giorgio. A rigid stanzaic structure was out, because Giorgio was nothing if not iconoclastic, with a somewhat non-conformist lifestyle even as a priest. And I knew any Heaven for Giorgio would have to offer excellent coffee. Plus, given the Church’s present difficulties with past behavior by some of its representatives, I couldn’t see God‘s Son showing up, as in Lindsay’s elegy, to welcome even the most accomplished ministers—like Giorgio—before they could be properly vetted. Head Office would instead send a functionary, I reasoned. And given the traditional narrow-mindedness of functionaries compared to Giorgio’s broad range of interest in human beings and their communities, I had the plot of the poem.

Tom Wayman was named in 2015 a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Dr. commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their employment. His most recent collections of poems include Helpless Angels (Thistledown, 2017), shortlisted for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, and Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (Harbour, 2020), which appeared just before the pandemic lockdown, despite the book’s subtitle. In December 2020, North Vancouver’s Alfred Gustav Press published a chapbook of his, The House Dreaming in the Snow. He lives in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern B.C.

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Photos courtesy of Daniele Levis Pelusi 

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What is Melody Goetz Reading?

First to say that my introverted self has found the seclusion required of this pandemic, for the most part, as “permission” to deepen the contemplative, creative path that calls.  Still, there is the awareness of many for whom this is not so, and for whom much assails, and so sorrow and concern also sits with me in my chair.  

Surely, if I were a medical professional, I would give my heart to that work, or to any other external ‘helps’ that would match my skills.  And I do what I can with what I have.  Still, I’m in my 60’s, and a writer and painter; the interior life and its expressions seem my primary ‘skill’.  I remember Nadine Gordimer saying once, when interviewed during South Africa’s most harrowing season of apartheid, “In the end, the best thing a writer can do for her country is to write as well as she can.”   I find a focus on creative vocational work as an act of solidarity and love for the world as a helpful approach – it keeps me occupied in a life-giving way, and I can name it as a kind of meaningful engagement.  Even though its ‘effects’ may be less visible than other work.  As I look at my bookshelves, the chosen distilled collection of favourites, I am aware of how helpful and sustaining – even orienting – these books have been.  Even though I’ve not met their authors, they have been deeply good company, at times even a kind of ballast. And so, their solitary work has a shared life -who could predict it?

I am loving “Taken on Trust“, a book by Terry Waite – maybe my 4th time to read it, I dunno.  It’s amazing to me.  He was envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury back in the 80’s, was taken a hostage for 5 years – 4 years of which, he was kept in a windowless room chained to the wall.  During that time, he resolved to stay sane and to find meaning by revisiting his life reflectively – after all he had lots of time – with a view to writing a book.  No pen or paper, he just processed for a set time each day, and held it in memory.  When he was released, he took a year or so – I think – to ‘decant’ that story, weaving it in with his experience as a captive.  He writes about a whole different kind of solitude, and finds life within it.  I value the unflinching searchlight of “Taken on Trust“, and reading it again during the pandemic has offered an additional layer of richness.  His long toil has unearthed a singular writing – remarkable really, how a book about solitude can be such good company. 

Another book I’ve re-read is Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila”.  I can’t possibly encompass it in words; she is a brilliant writer, and deeply thoughtful human.  Suffice it to say, among the many threads the book weaves together, it’s about two people of disparate backgrounds and belief systems, who are drawn by love to make a life together.  Their raw, respectful, broken, sincere journey fills the heart.  The first time I read it, the words arose in me, unbidden, “I want to be buried with this book.”  Goodness!  I’d never thought of that sort of thing before.  But my experience of it was so… hmmm… fulsome, and utter.  And these days, to witness a respectful albeit difficult exchange between different ‘takes’ on life is sheer gift.  It’s like a window being cleaned.  And the view it offers is hopefulness.

Born in Saskatchewan, Melody Goetz currently lives in BC. Her short stories have been shortlisted twice in the CBC Literary Competition, and she is the author of a poetry chapbook as well as a book of stories garnered from a professional career in corporate management in an eldercare community. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She is also a practicing visual artist.

Photos courtesy of Steve Johnson 

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Finding the Form with Lori Sebastianutti

My essay Seeing in 3D, was a project five years in the making. For the longest time, it lived only in my head, snippets appearing while washing dishes or folding mini blue and black track suits into neat piles. Having a crisis of faith is hard to think about, let alone write about. Plus a thought constantly nagged: who would publish a piece about a woman feeling betrayed by a church that had been the centre of her spiritual life for forty-one years? A book and a literary festival provided the answers.

The essay collection, Body and Soul. Stories for Skeptics and Seekers edited by Susan Scott, started me on the path to visualize a space for this essay. Listening to Susan speak a few months later at the Wild Writers Literary Festival in Waterloo solidified the hope that there may be a place for writing about spirituality in CanLit after all. I attended the panel Shaming or Celebrating? Challenging Norms in Personal Nonfiction moderated by Susan which featured some of the talented contributors of Body and Soul. Her impassioned plea that we need more writers coming out of the shadows to explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of spiritual tradition was the permission slip I needed. That week I set to work.

I began like I always do— by reading. I read spiritual memoir like Alison Pick’s Between Gods as well as the works of theologians and Christian mystics like Richard Rohr and Thomas Merton. When reflecting on my own story, the idea that kept coming to the surface was my failure to look beyond ritual and tradition to zero in on what I truly believed as a Catholic. For the better part of my life I had lacked depth when it came to practising my faith. And with that thought, a series of images quickly unravelled: a childhood eye condition, the saint I prayed to cure me, and the traditional Sicilian dish I ate every year in honour of Saint Lucy and her perceived ability to cure eye diseases. The question then became, how to tie it all together?

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The same I day that I sat in on the spiritual writing panel I attended Ayelet Tsabari’s workshop,  10 Tips for Writing Great Creative Nonfiction. The tip that stood out to me the most was #8: Every Story Has Two Stories. To make this point Ayelet, challenges the writer to ask the question, what is your story really about? What is bubbling beneath the situation or circumstance of your subject? This is where I had the idea to weave my childhood eye disorder and Saint Lucy alongside my failure to see the way my church’s actions were not always aligned with its central teaching. From there the essay came to life, and flowed freely. As I revised, I paid attention to the themes of seeing, perceiving, and light that became the thread that pulled the entire piece together. 

Lori Sebastianutti is a writer and teacher from Stoney Creek, Ontario. She is the former managing editor of the Fertility Matters Canada blog. Her essays have appeared in the Hamilton Review of Books and are forthcoming in the Humber Literary Review. You can read more of her work at lorisebastianutti.com.

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Photos courtesy of Chris Flexen 

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What is Edward Dewar Reading?

“Some invisibility would come in handy” is one of my favourite lines by Wislawa Szymborska. I often ask myself, if I had to choose three poets and they would be the only poets I could read for the rest of my life, which three would I select? Would it be best to focus on free verse poets or maybe a formal poet like Donald Justice? Should I select prize winning poets or stay with lesser known poets? What about foreign poets such as Jorge Luis Borges who has written some of my favourite poems, in particular The Dagger.

Derek Mahon’s Unborn Child is a poem I often return to for inspiration. It’s also a poem I keep in a binder of my 12 favourite poems. I only keep 12 in the binder at any given time and when I find a new poem that I think may belong, I compare the poem to the others, which forces to me look at the strengths and weakness of the new poem and consider whether it stacks up.

The Mud Turtle by Howard Nemerov is poem that has found a place in my binder, so Nemerov would be a solid choice. Galway Kinnell’s line, “Ink is their ichor” rolls off the tongue. He should be given consideration. And Langston Hughes’s lines “When the old junk man Death/Comes to gather up our bodies” are lines that are rich in word play and grab my attention. He is a poet who deserves his place in my big three.

A few years ago I purchased Patrick Lane’s collected poems and this past year I returned to some of my favourites: Wolf, Weasel and Two Crows in Winter. His line, “The owl knows he will starve”, has resonance and generates a great backstory. He’s a poet who I could continue to learn from. This past summer, Lucille Clifton caught my attention. She’s more relevant today than ever. Her line, “you, with your point blank fury”, is a line that reverberates during these troubled times. Poets will always call to me from their place on the bookshelf. Some a little louder than the others. 

Edward Dewar’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Event, PRISM international, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Nashwaak Review, Vallum and Southern Poetry Review.

Photos courtesy of Álvaro Serrano

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Finding the Form with Ami Sands Brodoff

My mother hadn’t been feeling well.  She’d developed a throat-clearing tic that seemed to come out of nowhere.  We were all worried.

After a battery of tests, it emerged that mom had lung cancer.  She’d been a smoker for a long time, but had quit decades earlier.

My relationship with my mom, a psychiatrist, had always been fraught and painful. She was a hypercritical woman with lofty expectations for her three children.  It was hard to get her attention, even tougher, her approval. (Her own mother, my grandmother, Florence, had been even more daunting.) Busy, respected, and known in the community, my mom was one of the few professional working mothers in my group of friends, one of a minority of women in her medical school class at New York University.  These were accomplishments I came to admire later on, as she provided me with a role model of a woman with a successful career.

Talking with my mother’s doctors, I knew that she did not have long to live. She was a person who did not like things done to her body.  I found out that she had been sexually abused—along with her identical twin sister—by their violin teacher. Even spa days did not appeal to her, let alone surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.  It was a hard no for further interventions.

Death is long and I felt an urgency to spend as much time with my mom as I could, and to heal our relationship if that was possible.

I visited often, making the six hour trip from Montreal to visit her in her apartment in New York.  We had long talks, meals, a short walk if she could manage it.  I shared feelings with her that I had never dared to share before. It didn’t always go over well.  She was a real tough cookie.

One afternoon during winter, while we were sharing a cup of tea, she told me about a relationship she’d formed with a man who delivered food to her apartment from a small local grocery store.  Apparently, he’d been a pilot.  He’d deliver her meals and then sit with her to chat, sometimes for hours.  They got close.  She told me he was handsome.  She told me he was at least twenty-five years her junior.

This little story glowed bright and got the fiction antennae in my brain buzzing.  I was fascinated!  Mom had a tantalizing secret life even near the end of her life. Though my story in the Winter issue of TNQ, The Sleep of Apples, is transformed through imagination, my mother’s story was the seed.

The Sleep of Apples took multiple drafts to get right. Originally, I had alternating points-of-view between Miri and Guy and a great deal of backstory. As a novelist and fiction writer, I am definitely a putter-inner who hones in closer and closer to the heart of my stories which invariably includes a great deal of cutting and distillation. I ultimately decided to focus in on Miri.  The epiphany came when I used the second person, Miri addressing Guy.  This point-of-view provided such an intimate voice. After that, everything came together.  

I gave the eulogy at my mom’s funeral and addressed her directly.  I dream of her often and when I dream she is alive. Now that my mom is dead, she is with me all the time.

Ami Sands Brodoff is the award-winning author of three novels and two volumes of stories. Her novel-in-stories, The Sleep of Apples, is forthcoming. Ami is a participating writer in StoryScaping, a new program offering creative writing workshops to teens and seniors in underserved areas of Quebec. Learn more at Amisandsbrodoff.com.

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Photos courtesy of Josephine Baran 

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