Month: February 2022

Bruce Geddes Writing Space

Here’s a stat that will surprise no one: The capacity of the average writing space is one. This has nothing to do with square footage or furniture This is about the simple needs of most writers: quiet, solitude, and enough space to stow junk. Most writing spaces are like toilets that way: designed to be used by only one person at a time.

And yet, undeniably, writers need and seek community. One of the few things I miss about working in an office is not working at the office. I miss colleagues, trading movie recommendations, showing vacation pics, betting on sports, among other non-productive activities. I wouldn’t want to go back to that full-time (and besides, who’d hired an admitted goof-off like me?)

So how to balance the need for solitude with the desire for community? I am fortunate to live within easy transit distance to the Toronto Writers Centre. This is a shared workspace, sort of like WeWork or others of the kind. Members get 24/7 access to a common room, a couple of board rooms, and a quiet room divided up by cubicles.

Why the TWC works for me is that it was designed with writers in mind. The Quiet Room is blessedly quiet. There’s a small library that includes pretty much every how-to-write guide ever published. There are lockers, a fridge, coffee. Most important, however, is the physical distance from home and all the distractions there that conspire to kill my work day.

“… there is a community. Pretty much every member is a writer of some sort, whether fiction, non-fiction, screen, television, stage or business communications.”

And there is a community. Pretty much every member is a writer of some sort, whether fiction, non-fiction, screen, television, stage or business communications. The value of this is difficult to define. It’s not about networking and it’s not about teamwork or culture, at least not in the corporate sense. 

And yet there is something quite perfect about this space and the community it offers. I think it comes down to this: during those inevitable difficult writing periods, when nothing seems to be working, when the cursor hasn’t moved for days, I take a deep breath, expire slowly, and take some small comfort knowing that everyone here has likely gone through the same thing. 

Bruce Geddes is the author of two novels, The Higher the Monkey Climbs (2018) and the forthcoming Chasing the Black Eagle. Born in Windsor he lives in Toronto. 

Photo by kate.sade on Unsplash

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A Conversation with Kieran Egan, Winner of the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

Kim Jernigan, former Editor and current Special Projects editor, interviews Kieran Egan whose poem “Latin Classes” won first prize in the 2021 Occasional Verse Contest.

Kim Jernigan: “Latin Class” is an elaborate joke, the humour a consequence of the Latin teacher’s pretense of secrecy and of the exaggerated importance given to the pluperfect, a little recognized grammatical form. The poem relies on the style as much as the punchline for its effect. To what extent is the voice in the poem your younger self? Did you become a teacher? If so, what subject?

Kieran Egan: I often find it hard to persuade people that poetry is as much a form of fiction as it is of auto/biography. I am surprised that some readers assume that poems are “true” in some literal sense, whereas I think of them primarily as exercises of imagination. I once wrote a poem describing “my” grandfather as a Nazi officer, and I was astonished that even people who had long known me assumed I must have had a Nazi grandfather!—which  I don’t and didn’t. In the case of “Latin Class” I never had such a teacher, though, of course, wished I had. In fact, the Latin teacher I remember best was one of the dullest and driest of my school years. The narrator I think is less ‘me’ than a generally imagined reader, such as yourself and readers of The New Quarterly. It’s a generally sane person, I imagine.

I grew up thinking I would be a priest, and did indeed attend a Franciscan Novitiate for six months, in England, but then left, and did some teaching, and then took a teaching certificate program after completing a B.A. in History. Instead, though, I went to Stanford, and then Cornell, universities in the U.S., to do a Ph.D., and became a professor of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

I suppose some familiarity with Latin does tend to make one more consciously aware of how English works, so I suppose I ‘use’ it all the time in that indirect sense. I did once share a flight in Asia with a priest, and the only language we had in common was a smattering of Latin. That’s the only practical use of it I can recall.

Kim Jernigan: Have you had opportunity of late to use the pluperfect? The context? Or can you give us a sentence in the pluperfect (for our readers: the pluperfect is an adjective denoting an action completed prior to some past point of time specified or implied, formed in English by had and the past participle, as in “He had gone by then.”)  

Kieran Egan: A joke in the poem, which it seems very few readers have ‘got’, is in the penultimate line of “Latin Class”, where the narrator says “I had maintained”, which is a pluperfect. Some readers have suggested I correct it to “I have maintained”, suggesting that maybe the joke is too subtle for people who today are not taught much in the way of English grammar, and certainly not in the context of also learning Latin grammar.

Kim Jernigan: Have you collected any other languages down the years?

Kieran Egan: Not really. Inadequate French, I suppose.

Kim Jernigan: What is the book you’ve read most recently?

Kieran Egan: My wife passed along the recent Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny thriller, State of Terror, which I enjoyed. And I also had to read the final printed version of my own comic campus thriller novel Tenure (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2021).

Kim Jernigan: A friend just sent me a list Dad (the Nick Blatchford for whom the contest is named) once made of essential books. What would be on your list of essential reading?

I really don’t know how to answer this. Everyone has different needs and interests, and I’m not sure the books I could call to mind would help anyone else. I suppose such a list might suggest something to maybe try, but I’m not sure. Putting Ulysses in wouldn’t help anyone, I suspect. Though I’d add Musil’s The Man without Qualities. And Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. But though they may be essential for me, they might not for many others.

***

For followers of the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest, here’s Nick’s list:

  • He noted at the time he compiled the list that he gives twelve titles, not the requested ten, and asks if he can have special dispensation on account of being late. If not, he says, he will concede the Whitman and the cummings assuming they are represented, in part, in The Norton Anthology. So here it is:

    The Three Mullamulgers—Walter de la Mare
    Treasure Island—Robert Louis Stevenson
    Huckleberry Finn—Mark Twain
    The early stories of Ernest Hemingway
    The Collected e.e. cummings
    Walt Whitman—Leaves of Grass
    David Copperfield—Charles Dickens
    The Counterfeiters—Andre Gide
    David the King—Gladys Schmitt
    Look Homeward, Angel—Thomas Wolfe
    The Great War and Modern Memory—Paul Fussell
    The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry

 

  

Kieran Egan lives in Vancouver, B.C. His novel, Tenure is to be published by NeWest Press in 2021.

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Finding the Form with Rose Maloukis

I use tools and lessons from my painting life which align well with writing. At one time, I made a splendid piece in black ink on craft paper. A few years later I did the same image in water-color, and again in oil. The latter two were only passable as art but the ink drawing sang.

Both Coif in Blackwork and Her Coif, are set historically in the 16th or 17th century. To me they warranted a simple format. Nothing else would suit them. They seemed to arrive with their form and their layout dictated by the content.

“To me they warranted a simple format. Nothing else would suit them. They seemed to arrive with their form and their layout dictated by the content.”

As for form in a broader sense—poetry is always my first choice.
I write very little prose other than notes and an occasional essay. Initially I wrote only short poems, very few any longer than the ones mentioned above (12–16 lines). Lengthy poems seem to require what I call a “true narrative.” In my attempts at writing such a poem, rarely was I able to sustain even my own interest. I have great admiration for poets who write in long-form; Alice Oswald is a favorite.

Recently I’ve become interested in experimental poetry and in the past year have combined “loose narrative” with that expression. I’m thoroughly enjoying the process. A few poems have shown up asking to be written in prose. I am attempting to accommodate them — experimentation in another form.

Rose Maloukis, is a poet and visual artist, with a BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI., who in 2015 found that her painted lines were turning more and more into written ones.  She has since then: been shortlisted for an international award, won prizes from Geist and ARC, and been published and featured in The Fiddlehead. Her chapbook, Cloud Game with Plums was published in 2020 by above/ground press. Several of her recent line drawings, as concrete poems, are part of her (nearly completed) first full-length collection.

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Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

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Anthropomorphization Writ Large: An Interview with Sandra Kasturi

One of our Consulting Editors, Barbara Carter, interviews Sandra Kasturi whose poem “Specializing in the Prehistory of Whales” won second prize in the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

Barbara Carter: Sandra, I am one of those who delights in the back story of poems. Would you indulge me and tell me about the backstory that prompted you to write this engaging narrative?

Sandra Kasturi: The poem came out of a conversation I had with my husband a few years ago. We were lying in bed and he was Googling himself, you know, as one does. He found entries on himself, but also found a couple of other guys with the same name. I think one was a lacrosse player and the other one, my husband told me, specialized in the prehistory of whales. Or at least, that’s what I thought he said. I was fascinated and asked, “What kind of whales? Blue whales? Humpback whales? Killer whales?” In fact, he’d actually said “prehistory of Wales,” the country. And I was terribly disappointed. I thought the prehistory of whales much more interesting. I mean, Wales is a wonderful place and I am a great lover of Welsh mythology and grim Welsh police dramas, but I was so fascinated by what the prehistory of whales actually was, I had to look it up. So some of the content is actually based in science, believe it or not! And that led to writing the poem and taking off into the land of the fantastical, from a somewhat empirical base. And that was the weird and very specific occasion that resulted in this poem. I found the whole exchange absolutely hilarious—I frequently misread things (which also leads to poetry), but this was the first time I’d misheard or misunderstood something that took me to a creative place. I’m amused by how our brains function and how our synapses (mis)fire, sometimes with wonderful results.

Barbara Carter: I am drawn to the voice in the poem. It is consistent, playful and clever addressing the whales as “You,” a knowing confident voice aware it seems of the nonchalant dominance of Nature over humanity. Does the title of the poem suggest the identity of the speaker? Who is the speaker in the poem? How did you choose the voice?

Sandra Kasturi: I suppose the speaker in the poem is me, or a version of me, though I’m not sure the title suggests it. So it’s my voice, giving free rein to my own loopiness. It’s my love letter to whales and nature and our own weirdness, and an acknowledgement of how small (and big) we are. Of course, whenever we write about nature these days, it seems to be about what an ecological disaster of a world we’re living in now, and how profoundly we’ve destroyed things. It was nice to write about finding joy in something for a change. I found the whole incident with mishearing what my husband said to be so funny—so I think I went into the poem in a very good mood and feeling gleeful. I whipped it off in one sitting, in maybe half an hour; it sprang out of my head full-grown, like Athena out of Zeus. That so rarely happens, and it’s such a gift when it does. I did make some editorial changes later on, with some suggestions and feedback from my poetry group, but the poem is still largely pretty much as written on the spot.

Barbara Carter: I love too the exuberance of language in this poem. The exuberance begins in the first verse: you whale-faced whales, . . . snuffling about the riverbeds of central Asia/ rooting in the mire of millennia . . . underlined by repetition of consonants—alliterations, the very sound of the words. This exuberance never stops. The personification of the whale in the second stanza to a medieval traveller is a charming tour de force: And you packed up your steamer trunks/and your charabancs, waterproofed/ your trousers and moved—/moved to a fully marine lifestyle/ a backstroke differential of being. What prompted you to use the word “charabancs”? It is marvellous for it places the reader in an entirely different world.

Sandra Kasturi: Thank you! Exuberance is the perfect descriptor—that’s exactly how I felt writing the poem: full of fizz. I have a great fondness for old-fashioned language and interesting or funny words. “Charabanc” is just such a great word! I can’t remember where I heard it first . . . probably in an Agatha Christie novel. And it seemed so wonderfully weird for whales to have luggage. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy and horror, so there’s frequently an element of the fantastical in what I write. Of course, using archaic or unusual words can bite you in the ass too—throw a charabanc in the wrong place and it becomes this bright neon sign screaming at you, and then that’s all anyone notices. I think once the charabanc showed up, I figured I just had to keep getting more and more over the top and just go with whatever delightful insanity came next.

Barbara Carter: The diction is such a powerful aspect of your poem. The poem is an absolute joy to read aloud as the words tumble off the tongue urging the reader or listener forward to discover each step in the whales’ history. How conscious of word choice were you as you crafted this poem? How do you approach diction in your crafting of any poem?

Sandra Kasturi: Like I said, I wrote the thing in one sitting and it just poured out onto the page. It was very stream-of-consciousness and in-the-moment. So I wasn’t terribly conscious of making word choices. More often when I write these days, it’s such a grind and I’m pondering every syllable and every comma, and it’s so tiresome. With “Whales” I just enjoyed myself. And I am fond of things Victorian, so I think there’s a sort of Victorian-ness in the poem too. I’m sad I wasn’t able to work in “the vapours” or a chaise longue in there somewhere. Maybe for the next poem. “Prehistory of Whales 2: Electric Boogaloo.”

Barbara Carter: You commented to me that this is one of the few of your poems that you felt worked. What is it that you like about your poem? What convinced you that this poem worked?

Sandra Kasturi: I think the fact that I wrote the poem so fast, but was still pleased with it at the end was the first inkling. Normally I’m horrified and embarrassed by anything I write and it takes me a very long time to get to a place where I can grudgingly admit that maybe it’s not too bad. I felt like that about both of my poetry books, and it was only years after they were published that I was able to look at them objectively and see them as things that worked. I see the flaws still too, of course! That internal hand-wringing editor never quits. The other thing that made me think the poem worked was audience feedback. My poetry group liked the poem, and when I’d do readings, the audience always loved it. Got lots of laughs and applause, which is of course like catnip to writers. But I was beginning to doubt the poem—nobody wanted to buy it, and it was never published. I’d stopped sending it out, actually. And then when the TNQ contest deadline came up, I thought, well why not? I’d been in a very dark place for a long time, and that was a moment of optimism I had. I reread the poem and it made me feel good and I thought, “Oh, what the hell. I’ll give it a go.” So the lesson is (are you listening, children?), if you don’t try, you don’t get. Well, we all know this; it’s interesting how often we don’t follow through because of the same old self-defeating refrain.

Barbara Carter: I fully believed in the prehistoric whale that threw its teenage diaries/ in a fit of pique into the Marianas trench. Do you often engage in such flights of fantasy?

Sandra Kasturi: Ha! I probably do. Comes from reading a lot, I expect. Particularly genre fiction. I engage in a lot of what ifs. “What would happen if . . . ?” and “Wouldn’t it be hilarious and amazing if . . . ?” Genre writers always talk about that “sense of wonder” and these days we so rarely feel that. Everything’s an apocalyptic, nihilistic landscape. It’s exhausting. I mean, I enjoy a cripplingly devastating futuristic hellscape as much as the next person, but I’m not always looking to read something that makes me feel that grim. Sometimes you just want writing that fills you with a bit of pep. So maybe some of that sensibility and energy managed to seep through in the poem! Though it does end on a more serious note.

Barbara Carter: By the end of the poem, the reader too is awed by these creatures, these Zeppelins of the deep who give a great slow blink, tip of the hat/ to starlight and sunlight . . . to us, with our measured instruments/ small in our whale-shaped boats. Have you always had an affinity for whales?

Sandra Kasturi: I have always been fascinated by creatures who live a life completely alien from what we know. Sometimes that’s whales. Sometimes that’s dinosaurs. (Oh, how I love dinosaurs!) Sometimes that’s other human beings. I was probably heavily influenced by ’70s and ’80s movies like Jaws and its knock-offs. I so clearly remember a scene from Orca in which they showed a killer whale’s brain and compared it to a human brain, proving the whale had a more complex brain structure. Oh dear. Is all my scientific knowledge based on undersea predator films from over 40 years ago? Also, the ocean is full of deeply weird and horrible things. And sometimes delightful things! Like the white-spotted puffer fish, who makes these big geometric circles and patterns in the sand to entice a female fish. Isn’t that wonderful?

It might also be a question of scale . . . it’s so difficult to really comprehend how enormous whales are. Those diagrams with the outline of a diver next to the outline of a whale sort of show you, but you don’t feel it. I always wonder what whales are thinking. Or dreaming. There’s a wonderful scene in Lev Grossman’s book, The Magicians, in which the student magicians spend some time being whales—I love how he portrayed whales and what they are talking about in the deep ocean. Anthropomorphization writ large? So to speak? Ultimately, I guess there’s that childhood longing that never leaves us: the desire to communicate with animals, with “the other,” with the unknowable.

Sandra Kasturi has had work published in CNQ, Amazing Stories, Prarie Fire, CV2, among others. Her two poetry collections are: The Animal Bridgroom and Come Late to the Love of Birds.

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Sanchari Sur’s Writing Space

I have taken to writing on the couch. It’s the brightest spot in the house, and not just because of my recent acquisition, the mustard loveseat, something I purchased with earnings from my writing. There is a window looking onto the balcony, and the sky beyond. I find that while writing, when my thoughts begin to coagulate a bit, I stare at the sky figuring out a way to untangle them. The sky is in many ways my inspiration, sometimes blank, cloudless, but at others, white patterns spreading into the horizon. It’s unpredictable and chaotic, much in the way my brain works. But it’s also wide open, inviting to go beyond the superficial, the obvious, expanding the borders of my mind.

This space is unapologetically me, unlike the rather messy study space set up currently in the den, a place I retire to for work and academic things like zoom meetings and working on the dissertation. This space is creative and where all of my creative writing happens, filled with reminders of those I love. The tall blue vase, a gift from my ESL students from that hectic summer I finished my Master’s thesis and worked a full time job for five non-stop weeks. The jade green jug my husband and I picked up at IKEA on our first shopping trip for our home, an item that was sold out, so we picked up the last piece on display. The plants, some bought together, some gifted by my mother. The tiny side-table, inherited from my parents, an extravagant thing they picked up many years ago in Calcutta, when we still lived in Dubai and could indulge so. Same for the warm red carpet, that has travelled from Calcutta to Dubai to Toronto to our home in Mississauga. A remnant of my many childhood homes, the carpet is warm not just in colour or its softness under my feet, but also in the affect of warmth it emanates every time I lay eyes on it.

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Finally, the metal carving of goddess Durga slaying the shape-shifting demon Mahishasur—a gift from my sister—, an image that defines who I am now, who I have become for the past few years, who I am still becoming; slaying my inner mahishasurs as I become a writer, an academic, an editrix, a person with a strong sense of self, unafraid to stand up for what’s right, whether in my writing, or for myself when the need arises.

Sanchari Sur (she/they) is a PhD candidate in English at Wilfrid Laurier University. Their work can be found in Al Jazeera, Toronto Star, Toronto Book Award shortlisted The Unpublished City (Bookhug, 2017), Joyland, Michigan Quarterly Review, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Quill & Quire, and elsewhere. They are a recipient of a 2018 Lambda Literary Fellowship in fiction, a 2019 Banff residency (with Electric Literature), and Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2020 Critics’ Desk Award for a Feature Review. Sanchari co-edited Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to Climate Change (Coach House Books, 2020), and is featured in In/Appropriate: Interviews with Canadian Authors on the Writing of Difference (Gordon Hill Press, 2020).

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Photo by Billy Huynh on Unsplash

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The Best Wave and the Right Moment: A Conversation with Aaron Schneider

Kim Jernighan, former Editor and current Special Projects editor, interviews Aaron Schneider, the third prize winners in the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest for his poem “Surfing Near Tofino”.

 

Kim Jernigan: The judges of The New Quarterly’s Occasional Verse Contest work from a fairly loose definition of occasional verse, but your prize-winner, “Surfing Near Tofino”, fits neatly into the category of the occasional poem known as an epithalamion (for those, like me, who don’t remember from their school days, an epithalamion is a song or poem celebrating a marriage (epi means “upon” and thalamos means “bed chamber.”) The wedding depicted in your poem is an unconventional one—the bride and bridegroom arrive at the celebration riding a wave on a surf board (!), having waited for “the best wave and the right moment…” Occasional poems are most often addressed. What’s not revealed in “Surfing near Tofino” is who is addressing this young couple? Are you, the poet, the father of the groom? the Best Man? Was the poem read at the ceremony or written after? Did the couple meet on the break? 

 

 Aaron Schneider: I, the father of the groom, read the poem at the wedding ceremony. My son had asked me to write a poem for his wedding.

 

Kim Jernigan: I have a surfer in the family as well, and I confess I have mixed feelings about it, think about the various dangers lurking below the wave, dangers you evoke with the lines “Rolling deep below,/ a teeming world feeds on itself. Plankton becomes leviathan.” The metaphor acknowledges the need to navigate “the swells and stormy breakers” that marriage sometimes presents. It’s a little like inviting the fairy godmother to the wedding lest she be offended and curse the couple. When did the form of the poem come to you? Have you tried your hand at surfing as well? 

 

Aaron Schneider: I have tried but not pursued surfing although I have wind surfed for years. The couple had also windsurfed avidly so the metaphor was an obvious one; also I recalled a poem by William Stafford about skiers at an airport. Something about wishing everyone smooth boards to slide through life. Something like that.

 

Kim Jernigan: The line “as you wait”, set to the right and followed by a space, is the pivot on which the poem turns. How did you find your way to it? You also capture the soundscape of ocean with the repeated ‘s’ sounds in the poem. I guess I’m asking here about your poetic process, different, I’m sure, for each poem, but how did you find your way in this poem? 

 

Aaron Schneider: When I write, things take their own way if I’m lucky. All that you mention above just come directly from a subconscious collection of images and impressions stored somewhere, accessible once I start to write the poem. There was, I recall, a strong momentum at the start and then things happened.

 

 Kim Jernigan: What other occasions have you addressed in verse down the years?

 

Aaron Schneider: The loss of friends, of course.

 

 Kim Jernigan: Are you the only poet in your family or is versifying a family occupation?

 

Aaron Schneider: I am the only committed poet in my family but my sons show either interest or promise.

 

 Kim Jernigan: What poetic projects are you working on now? 

 

Aaron Schneider: I am trying to put together a new collection (selection) of poems written over the past several years.

 

 Kim Jernigan: If you’re willing, a last question that might give you some more scope: Who are the poets to whom you return? Can you also send us a photo of you (or the newlyweds!) to run alongside?

 

And an aside: My surfer son, who learned to surf on the west coast where he did a degree in environmental studies at Victoria) and then taught surfing at a resort in Nicaragua, now lives in New York City which, it turns out, has a surf break. Who knew! Alas, he arrived home for the holiday with a bad case of swimmer’s ear, an occupational hazard for surfers I’m told. 

 

Aaron Schneider: Their wedding was at the Victoria Art Museum in the garden. Group of 7 exhibit was the apres wedding treat.

 

With regard to the poets I return to, there are many including William Stafford, James Dicky, Galway Kinnell, Gerrard Manly Hopkins, Al Purdy, Philip Levine, Earl Birney, Peter Everwine, Michael Crummy, Sharron Olds, Margaret Atwood.

 

I hope you son’s ear is better. Coincidentally I lived in New York (Brooklyn and Queens) as a child and my second degree was in environmental studies. I loved the beaches on L.I. but knew nothing of surfing then.

 

Aaron Schneider lives in Cape Breton. His poems have been published in North America and Europe, and read on CBC Radio. His collection, Wild Honey, was published by Breton Books.

 

 Photo by Silas Baisch on Unsplash.

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Alison Stevenson’s Writing Space

I write in various places around the house, but this is my ‘office.’ As well as writing, I keep writing-related stuff here, including notes and papers and some books I find useful and/or inspiring. I also carry out my day job here. It’s a kind of Murphy-bed set-up, in that I can sit on a chair or a ball, and the desk raises up and I can swivel everything around to the other side where there’s more space for standing. (How much do I stand? – not very.) I can close my work laptop and stack my personal Mac on top and thereby transform from mild-mannered day-job Clark-Kent-esque bespectacled person moving words around a page into the same person but moving (hopefully) more interesting words.

 

 

There’s no window to look out of, which is just as well, since I’d probably spend a lot of time looking out of it. Another good thing is the ergonomic set-up, which I think is crucial, given the amount of time I (like many people) spend at a keyboard.  

The artwork is by my mother,  Joyce Stevenson, and by my children when they were young. There are various other things here that please me, like sashiko embroidery from my daughter, a wooden box with a secret drawer my father made for my fourteenth birthday, a rock that looks sort of like a brain and another piece of rock with dried mould on it that looks like leaves.

I would describe myself as a slow writer – no splashing down pages of stuff and editing it later. I usually build up a story word by word, sentence by sentence, and do a lot of editing and re-editing as I go. I would say that’s reflected in my physical space by not having external stimulation from a window, or music, and by having a set-up that lets me work for long periods away from distractions.   

Alison Stevenson’s work has appeared in Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly, was longlisted for the CBC and TNQ/Peter Hinchcliffe prizes, a finalist in the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story and was selected for the Eden Mills Festival Fringe Stage. She has attended The Humber School for Writers, U of T  School of Continuing Studies and Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer workshop. She is working on a collection.

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