Month: March 2021

Finding the Form with Melody Goetz

Well.  I was minding my own business one morning, dutifully fulfilling a promise I’d made to my writerly self – that for 5 days a week I would set an egg timer (you remember those!) for 20 minutes, take out a battered old notebook, and write whatever came.  This was nonplussing, as you could well imagine.  The thoughts that poured forth from within were not Rilke, nor were they Rumi.  It wasn’t pretty.  But I’d promised.  See, I’d gone to enough writing workshops and heard this recommendation enough times to know that regular practice was essential.  That writing in free-flow was a way of keeping the writerly pipeline clean and fluent.  You may have also read of this concept as “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s book, “The Artist’s Way”.  Anyway.

And so it was, all rumpled and reluctant one morning, I set the egg timer yet again, took up my pen and began to write.  It had gotten to the point where I didn’t really pay attention to what I was writing – like, the inner critic who had every right to shriek with dismay and call a halt to the proceedings had been sent out for coffee, and my hand was happily recording whatever came out of my head.  (You may be thinking, ‘that’s what she’s doing now’.  Fair enough.)  So, there I was writing away, and all of a sudden I began to notice that, in some inexplicable way, I wasn’t providing the text anymore.  That there was someone dictating the words, and her voice was strong, and her personality even stronger.  Enter Isabel.  The story published here is the first story she told me.  On some level, I can’t claim it as mine, but I was her way into the world, it seems.  I was astonished; the story came out whole.  She was brash and unwavering, and …unscripted.  Here I was in my mid-30’s, writing out the life of some scrappy elderly farmwoman.  Huh?!

The next day after work, I went into my room, set the egg timer for 20 minutes, thinking ‘that was a one-off’, that now I’d be writing drivel once more.  But no.  Isabel wasn’t done.  She didn’t ask my permission, she just showed up and my writing hand obeyed.  In the end, she gave me 3 stories ‘for free’ – 3 stories I’ve hardly needed to edit, except for adjusting her vernacular for clarity. She proceeded to boss me around for the next few decades.  It seemed she expected me to finish her story, and it was my turn to unearth it.

Well.  The full manuscript languishes under my couch right now, waiting for a final epiphany.  I have 3 or 4 boxes (!) of tryings.  There is a knot at the heart of the story that seems to need time to loosen.  Every year or so I pick it up and sit with the old girl again.  Turns out I’m an old girl now, me self.  Just crossed 60.  And, turns out Isabel’s not going to loosen that knot for free.  She’s leaving it up to me.  And so, maybe it’s time to pull out the egg-timer, give it another go.  2021 may be the year…

I hope you enjoy her story.  Isabel & I wish you peace, health, and… well, even more peace. 

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.

Photo courtesy of Skull Kat

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Natalia Zdaniuk’s Writing Space

I write well on the plane. There are the practical reasons, ones that I’ve seen other writers point out: the benefit of few distractions, the discomfort of the narrow chair keeping you awake, the potential inspiration from unknown passengers. But for me there is also a specific emotional experience that comes from the liminality of the plane — the state of being in-between two places, momentarily nowhere so as to get somewhere. I find this gives space for a particular reflection and force of writing. 

As a child I spent my summers in Poland and lived there for a year when I was four, developing a strong attachment to the place and people that cared for me there. As such, I found, and continue to find, myself living two very different lives: one as a settler on Turtle Island, within and complicit in the project of Canada, where I am shaped by my mother’s chosen family and queer community; the other, in Poland, a land that holds the long history of the family my mother and I were born into. 

Like many other immigrants, I am often torn between these two places, never feeling a full sense of belonging in either. On the plane, however, there is a temporary suspension of this dichotomy. The flight attendants speak English and Polish interchangeably and there isn’t a clear sense of which language comes first. I am still full of the place I have left while becoming newly aware of the place I’m going, all the while having a particular distance from both. It’s a rare moment of cohesion that is inevitably lost once my feet touch solid ground and I immerse myself in the place I’ve landed. 

I first drafted the story “It Freed You, Didn’t It?” (for the Scatterings Series, Issue 157), a few years ago on the plane, returning from my most recent visit to Poland. I remember trying to turn off the little T.V. screen in front of me, but it would not go off completely. Instead it showed a map of where we were in our journey, the pixilated plane right in the centre of the electric blue ocean. As I wrote about my mother in Canada and my aunt in Poland, and the very different trajectories of their lives, I felt a certain significance in knowing that I was currently at the midpoint between them. I wrote steadily from this place, looking up occasionally at the screen to watch my own trajectory. 

Natalia Zdaniuk was raised in Pittsburgh and Poland, and is now based in Toronto, where she works and writes. In 2018 she was runner-up for the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction. Her short story “It Freed you, Didn’t It?” is part of The New Quarterly Scatterings Series highlighting new views on migrant experiences.

Header photo courtesy of Natalia Zdaniuk

Biography picture courtesy of Kerria Gray

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What is Ami Sands Brodoff Reading?

During the early days and months of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I found I could not read.  Normally, my reading times—a bit with morning coffee, a longer swathe at teatime after I knock off my own writing, a scoach before bed—are among my favourite parts of the day and compose a ritual.  Like so many of us, I was anxious, distracted.  I compulsively doomscrolled which made my disquiet spiral out of control.

Finally, in late March, I dipped into Shuggie Bain, the debut novel by Douglas Stuart, not on my Kindle or iPad but into the physical book.  I was hooked. Once again, reading was soul-sustaining and I couldn’t wait for those times when I could pick the novel up again.

Shuggie Bain tells the story of a young gay boy in 1980s Glasgow and his enmeshed and passionate bond with his beloved single mother, Agnes, who struggles with alcoholism. It’s a visceral portrait of Glasgow during the Thatcher years, which was wracked by poverty and unemployment, a macho, unforgiving place where most of the working class men were unemployed.  Someone like Shuggie who was “no right” just did not fit in and was mercilessly bullied.

Shuggie Bain, which ultimately took home the Booker Prize, is an immersive read, like the best Victorian novels.  Stuart’s prose, built on a series of vignettes with the two main characters, but also featuring many secondary and minor ones, is unsparing, lyrical, and revelatory. The reader feels like she is inside every scene and can see, hear, smell, touch and taste what is happening. The book is both brutal and beautiful.  It’s tough, desperate, funny, and incredibly true to life.  I loved this novel so much I ordered a signed hardback for our library all the way from Scotland, the only place I could find one at the time.

Once I got back into reading, I couldn’t stop!  I loved The Vanishing Half, the sophomore novel from the talented African American writer, Brit Bennett. The story focuses on the Vignes sisters, identical twins, who grow up in a colour-conscious tiny little Louisiana town where most of the Black people are light skinned.  As teens, Desiree and Stella escape.  Many years later, Desiree returns home with her young daughter after fleeing an abusive marriage, while Stella disappears.  Across the country, Stella is secretly passing for white and has built a whole new life based on lies and a false identity.

Bennett has a warm, enveloping style, and her brilliant novel explores combustible and timely issues of race, gender, and identity. 

I’m about to start Zsuzsi Gartner’s acclaimed novel, The Beguiling, a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Prize. Mona Awad calls it “a symphony of a novel, multi-voiced and kaleidoscopic.” The main character, Lucy, is a lapsed Catholic who turns into a “flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall,” with strangers confessing their sins wherever she goes.  I know from Gartner’s stories that she is an original and electrifying stylist. I can’t wait to crack this book.

You’ll see more tempting titles pictured here that I plan to read during our long, cold, Northern winter. And oh, by the way, everyone is reading, including our Brittany Spaniel pup Xeno.  No, he’s actually devouring a book he does not approve of at all!

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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.

Photos courtesy of Ami Sands Brodoff

Header image courtesy of Aaron Burden 

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What is Heather Paul Reading?

My reading life is typical of the rest of my life:  always a lot going on.  I usually have three to four books on the go, one of which will be an audiobook. Often the audiobooks will be nonfiction, usually in the realm of health and wellness, food and drink.  Recent non-fiction reads (approximately two per month) have included Gabor Mate’s, When the Body Says No, and Anodea Judith’s, Eastern Body, Western Mind. As I am also a yoga teacher, I find the connection between the mind, body, and spirit, inspiring and fascinating; and, I am able to enjoy learning while performing mundane adulting or exercising.  

In terms of actual reading, like fiction on paper, I always have several books scattered throughout the house.  As I like to say:  one for fun; one for challenge; and one for book club.  Right now, my fun read is Judy Blume’s, In the Unlikely Event.  I selected this title because I had never read any of her adult novels, but one of my most memorable Christmases as a child was receiving a box set of Judy Blume books which I tore through, read in about a week, and proceeded to read over and over again.  I still remember the trial scene in Blubber, Shelia the Great’s swim test, Deenie’s scoliosis brace, and have enjoyed rereading the Fudge books to my kids, so, I thought I’d give it a go.  Despite the subject matter, three planes crashed during one year in 1950’s Elizabethtown New Jersey (based on real life events), it’s an enjoyable read.  It isn’t complicated, it doesn’t require deep pondering, and has some interesting insights into life and social mores of the 1950’s which I enjoyed and was able to read quite quickly. I won’t say I loved it, but it was a pleasure to read. 

I’m also just about finished my challenging book which seems to be taking forever:  the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.  I had heard of, though never read, anything by Chabon.  When I was reading a collection of Nora Ephron’s essays that I picked up at Value Village, she waxed poetic about the power of fiction to escape one’s life citing Kavalier and Clay as powerful example of a quintessential New York adventure story. Not going to lie, it’s a tough, though thoroughly enjoyable read.  Chabon blends historical facts and figures, Jewish mythology and folklore, with fiction to create the tale of two Jewish comic book creating cousins before, during and after, WWII.  Overall, he plays thematically with the idea of escape:  from tyranny and the confines of social and familial expectations ultimately leading to personal liberation.  My favorite thing about the novel is the comic book references. 

Next on deck for me is the book club read which this month is, How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. I’m just about to crack the spine and begin. What a great feeling!

 

Heather Paul has worked as an art teacher, a canoe trip leader, a yoga instructor, at a men’s prison and a women’s shelter. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. She currently lives with her partner, children, and dogs in Ontario.

Photo courtesy of Andres Urena 

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Finding the Form with Margaret Nowaczyk

When Pamela Mulloy invited me to contribute to the Day Jobs column, I felt honored to be asked, rapidly followed by totally panicked. How to describe coherently and literarily what I have been doing for quarter of a century? 

Then I remembered an essay that I had been writing for almost five years.

Its first iteration was written in 2016, for a CNF course in my MFA program, but the seed for this story lay in my mind for few years before that. The realization that geneticists go through stages of professional life dawned on me when I was seeing the patient described as Justin in the essay — that watershed moment in my examining room when I realized that diagnosing patients was not the only thing that I was providing to my patients.

That idea got further traction when I mentioned it to the then editor of the American Journal of Medical Genetics, Dr. John Carey, over a plate of nachos and guacamole in a dive-ish Tex-Mex restaurant in Salt Lake City in 2011. He readily agreed that the concept of a natural history of disease would be an apt analogy for a physician’s professional trajectory, especially since the conceit of natural history of disease came from those written for pathology textbooks and was also used in genetics to describe the progression of genetic syndromes. He asked me to write it for his journal and published it. That article was the great-grandmother of the essay published in The New Quarterly this winter.

But in 2016, my MFA classmates told me that there were too many “things pushed into the story” but that it would make a great start for a memoir that they would all love to read (!). I kept rewriting it, always maintaining the conceit of the natural history. For a long time, I didn’t realize that half of that essay dealt with my mental health issues which were not part of the natural history of a clinical geneticist but of this particular clinical geneticist. Two years ago, I wanted to submit the essay to a memoir contest with a 4000-word limit and my essay was three thousand words too long. I edited out all of the mental health references et voilà! — I had what I had always wanted: a clinical — meaning “detached and dispassionate, like a medical report” — description of the stages of my professional life. That was the conceit, except, of course, it wasn’t cold and dispassionate, I couldn’t be that when writing about my life. 

That is the beauty of and irony inherent in the hermit crab essay: an essay that takes the form of something un-essay-like and subverts it into a personal account. “This kind of essay appropriates other forms as outer covering to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly, it deals with material that is exposed and tender and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.” Using the form of a pathology textbook entry on the natural history of disease converted my fraught, fragmented story into eloquence and a coherent — I hope — narrative.

References:
American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2012, Part A 170A:2591–2593
Forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn, fall 2021
Oxford Dictionary of English, online
“Tell it Slant” by Barbara Miller and Susanne Paola, McGraw-Hill, 2012

Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatrician-geneticist and an award-winning short form writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. Her memoir about life in the medical profession will be published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2021.

Photo courtesy of Martha Dominguez de Gouveia 

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What is Kirsteen MacLeod Reading?

My new book, In Praise of Retreat, will be out at the end of March—so I’ve recently transitioned to ‘having written.’ As a result I’ve been in ‘kid in a candy store’ mode, deliriously reading works not related to my own book for the first time in ages, in all genres.

I just finished reading Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction. The novel intrigued me as it is set in my hometown, Glasgow, and I’d been blown away by Stuart’s short story, “The Englishman” in the New Yorker. What a debut: the book is lyrical, political and resolutely Scottish. I found it heart-breaking, based on Stuart’s traumatic experiences as a gay boy growing up in with an alcoholic mother in the city’s rough tenements. 

Also on my pile? I’ve been bingeing on all manner of poetry: Indigo by Ellen Bass, The New Testament by the awe-inspiring Jericho Brown, Laurie Graham’s brave, beautiful Settler Education, Bronwen Wallace’s Keep That Candle Burning Bright, which a friend gave me for my birthday. 

I was gifted a subscription to the knife/fork/book poetry dispensary, which I highly recommend. January’s selection was Word Problems by Ian Williams, Phil Hall’s latest book, Toward a Blacker Arbour, and a delightful white chapbook with orange bear claw scratches, Ballad of Bernie ‘Bear’ Roy by Cory Lavender. I have also, finally, opened a box of 50 poetry books that I ordered last year from Brick and started reading. As well I just re-read The Outer Wards by the brilliant Sadiqa de Meijer.

And essays. I am currently starting de Meijer’s new book of essays, alphabet/alphabet, a memoir of a first language. I re-read John Berger’s Confabulations, beautiful meditations I return to often. I have also pre-ordered essayist Susan Olding’s forthcoming book, Big Reader—will somehow have to wait until May for that!

Reading is one of the best freedoms I know. During this pandemic, books, along with nature walks and yoga, continue to be my liberation, and solace.  

Kirsteen MacLeod is a writer and yoga teacher. She is the author of two books, In Praise of Retreat (memoir/nonfiction) and The Animal Game (short stories, 2016). Her poetry and prose has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her work has been a finalist for prizes that include the CBC Literary Award. Kirsteen divides her time between the lakeside city of Kingston, Ontario, and a small riverside cabin in the north woods. 

Cover photo courtesy of Tim Wildsmith 

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Finding the Form with Nicole Baute

When I was seven or eight years old, I was unreasonably worried about losing one of my parents. Instead of sleeping I would lie awake at night trying to imagine my life without them. It was particularly bad on the rare occasion they went out for dinner and left us with a babysitter. I remember waiting from my bed in the dark for the sounds of their safe return: the front door opening, their voices in the hall.

Later my worries shifted to the man I would eventually marry. Whenever he flew for work, which in a pre-Covid world was often, I struggled to focus until I received a text saying he’d arrived safely. “Landed!”

I Feel Better When You’re Here is an attempt to animate and make sense of some of these anxieties. The story began as a novel draft in which I imagined what it would be like to lose the person you love over and over again. Each morning my protagonist would wake up grieving only to discover her husband was not dead after all. Each time she would have a single day with him before losing him again. Writing this out now it sounds like the plot of a bad movie, which is probably why the story became truncated, focused on one episode of loss and inexplicable resurrection.

I wrote the first draft at an artists’ residency in Spain, about an hour’s drive from Barcelona. The residency was based in a rambling old Catalonian farmhouse with loose floor tiles and haphazard furniture. The residency staff were all on vacation and the other residents never seemed to sleep. There was a sense of magic and mystery in the halls, and this percolated into my writing as I thought about another place that had always filled me with a sense of wonder—a provincial park in southwestern Ontario where my family owns a cottage. The park in my story is loosely based on this park, home to private cottages built mostly before the 1950s. My husband and I were living in India at the time and the distance from home allowed me to imagine the park in stark relief, with heightened nostalgia for its history and reverence for the physical beauty of the landscape.

“Instead of sleeping I would lie awake at night trying to imagine my life without them. It was particularly bad on the rare occasion they went out for dinner and left us with a babysitter. I remember waiting from my bed in the dark for the sounds of their safe return: the front door opening, their voices in the hall.”

Our life in India also influenced my work in subtle yet foundational ways. We’d moved to Delhi for my husband’s job as a journalist. I’d spent my first year there trying to write fiction set in the sprawling Indian city only to find this was impossible. It was a complicated place marred by a rigid caste system, intensifying Hindu nationalism and unbelievable air pollution, and as an outsider there was little I felt comfortable saying about it. At some point I started writing prose poems—simple nonfiction observations of daily life. Prose poetry allowed me to process my experience in India without the confines of plot or the artifice of character, and this story—although not about India—is in part an outcropping of a shift in style born from that time. Influenced by writers like Lidia Yuknavitch and Brian Doyle I began writing prose with a new intensity. In India I felt breathless and existential so I suppose it’s only appropriate that I fell into a style that mirrored this state of mind. 

At the same time my writing began to arch more deeply towards creative non-fiction and autofiction; the characters and settings of I Feel Better When You’re Here are closely derived from real life (even the cat shares traits with mine!).

It’s fascinating to look back on the process of writing this story as my life has changed dramatically since. We moved to Hong Kong the summer of 2019 and in late December the pandemic began next door in mainland China. The following September I had a baby after years of trying, quelling some of the loneliness that had crept into my writing. Over the past few months we have spent an extraordinary amount of time marvelling over her coos and smiles.

Like any work of art, I Feel Better When You’re Here was the product of a specific set of circumstances that will never again be. Now I long for the day when I can bring my daughter home to Canada to play on the beach at the family cottage and snuggle her grandparents, who remain healthy and well, if desperate to meet her.

Nicole Baute is a Canadian writer living in Hong Kong. Her short stories have appeared in The Forge, Prairie Fire, carte blanche and Wigleaf, and in 2018 she won the Pinch Literary Prize for Fiction.

Cover photo courtesy of Shubham Shrivastava 

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Finding the Form with Ian LeTourneau

Birds occasionally take centre stage in my poems and many fly through in minor roles, on their way, perhaps, to find better habitat elsewhere (in other poets’ poems?). Starlings, chickadees, pine siskins have been my subjects; crows, pileated woodpeckers, red winged blackbirds, to name just a few, have flapped or soared through my poems. 

I find birds endlessly fascinating. So when I read a CBC New Brunswick article about chimney swifts (“Nature’s air show awes nightly crowds below a Fredericton chimney,” June 11, 2018) after hearing a feature on the local morning show, I knew I wanted to try to write a poem. And I made a start on June 12, typing a few initial thoughts. Not a very good start. Embarrassing, really. But I guess we have to push through the embarrassing to get somewhere hopefully not embarrassing (or in other words, bonus embarrassing lines and phrases to come below!).

The idea of a mass of birds flying into a chimney struck me as a potent image of an industrial reversal. And for some reason I thought of Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, which I must have spent some time leafing through and then wrote the quotation down. The “touch of the hat” of the Amis quotation, to me, strikes me now as a fine gesture from the birds. 

In my next drafts I started to try to find some industrial language that would set up the reversal, which is clear from “shipping lane,” “teeth,” and “smoke that belched.” 

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Ten days later, I came back to the poem, and it started to become a bit more cohesive. You can see below that I may have found the progress frustrating as I was clearly noodling around by playing with the font of the title. Also, the image “luggage carousel of air currents” which appears in the next few drafts was eventually pilfered and subsumed into another poem.

At this point, I didn’t come back to the poem until 4 months later at which point I added some more detail that I must have been hoping to incorporate into the poem. And you can see some of the eventual shape coalescing.

Then 6 months later I took another run at the poem. I had recently been to the AGO on a trip to Toronto and saw an exhibition of paintings that documented the industrial revolution so I had the idea – which never stuck – to begin with the dramatic imagery of Maximilien Luce’s “Steelworks,” which was one of the more striking paintings I saw. (Sidenote: I also happily attended my first Blue Jays (more birds!) game with Daniel Renton and Daniel Tysdal.)

Then the very next day, perhaps sensing that the poem needed focus, I wrote the following in my notebook:

When I took up the poem again, a month later, while I was staying for a week at the Elizabeth Bishop house for a writing retreat, the next two images show a few printouts of some progress, as the file remained open on my computer for a few days.  By the end of May 22, the poem was in its final form (as printed in TNQ).

As for the actual form — a blank verse sonnet: I am obsessed with sonnets. Robert Lowell’s sonnets (History) are particular touchstones that I re-read every couple of years. So I basically start every poem as if it’s going to be a sonnet. It seems like a natural limit: I usually say what I want to or need to say in 14 lines or so. It’s a convenient unit of thought. (I also obsessively date every piece of paper I write on… ever since I read somewhere that TS Eliot admonished a younger poet for not doing so.)

Ian LeTourneau is the author of two chapbooks, Defining Range (Gaspereau) and Core Sample (Frog Hollow), and the full-length collection Terminal Moraine (Thistledown). He lives in Fredericton, NB.

Photo courtesy of Josi Ribeiro

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Heather Paul’s Writing Space

For those of you who haven’t studied women’s literature, Virginia Woolf wrote a book called a Room of One’s Own, the premise of which noted that women are largely absent from literary cannons because they were not deemed worthy of education and were usually stuck cooking, cleaning, knitting or caring for someone instead of being able to contribute to culture at large.

 She posits, what would happen if Shakespeare had a sister?  Would we be reading her plays? Nope.  She’d be too busy darning socks.  You get the picture.  The other thing this seminal woman’s manifesto suggests is that in order to create, one must have a space of her own.  Ideally, of course, a room.  Many of us may never have the privilege of claiming such a place.  

I am fortunate to have been able to carve a space for myself in a windowless storage closet in the basement, which, I might add, I am continually reminded by three teenaged boys that it would make an excellent “gaming room.”  Fat chance.   This is my place of reverence and centring.  A place to focus, to meditate, to honour myself and claim a space for my creative offerings. I shut the door and write or make art in a place that is just for me. A place where I can leave all my research and writing papers all over the desk and they will be exactly where I left them.

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Heather Paul has worked as an art teacher, a canoe trip leader, a yoga instructor, at a men’s prison and a women’s shelter. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. She currently lives with her partner, children, and dogs in Ontario.

Photos courtesy of Annie Spratt 

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