Month: March 2022

What’s Grace Lau Reading?

I just finished reading Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle, which was just an incredible read.

To be honest, I picked it up because of the current white supremacist occupation in Ottawa and blatant complicity of the Canadian police forces. The book’s subject seemed timely.

I’d read Mercedes Eng’s poetry collection, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, previously, but I felt like I needed to better understand the concept and history of the abolition movement—and Angela Davis does a wonderful job of laying the groundwork.

Even though she’s a scholar and an academic, Angela Davis writes in such a way that even someone like me, who knew very little, could grasp these ideas and not feel intimidated, because abolition really is a big, big subject. Even so, I definitely want to (and need to!) re-read this a few times.

“Even though she’s a scholar and an academic, Angela Davis writes in such a way that even someone like me, who knew very little, could grasp these ideas and not feel intimidated,..”

I did a lot of reflecting afterward on things that I’ve always just accepted or taken for granted. Why are prisons featured in so many TV shows and movies? What is the purpose of the police and what do they actually achieve? My partner has taken to (lovingly) calling me a “commie.”

For anyone who’s living in the Ottawa area (and beyond), if you’re curious about policing and abolition, I’d highly recommend both Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Prison Industrial Complex Explodes. They’re a great introduction to imagining a future that has alternative solutions to policing as we know it today. The next step after reading these, for me, is to find other writings that go into more detail and specific examples of how cultures and countries outside North America have evolved their approaches to policing.

 

Grace is a Hong-Kong-born, Chinese Canadian writer raised in Vancouver and currently living in Toronto. She enjoys Harry Styles’ fashion choices, swaying to music, and sushi. Find her on social media @thrillandgrace.

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Ken Victor’s Writing Space

My writing space is messy. It doubles as a home office, so work and writing are hopelessly intertwined. My ancestors watch all of this without commenting. Photographs of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents at different stages of their lives decorate the walls. A few quotes and poems taped to the wall talk to me: Wendell Berry’s poem How To Be A Poet, Martha Graham’s magnificent insistence that the artist must let their unique self flow unimpeded into their work, and Robinson Jeffers’ poem The Beauty of Things.

What is most precious to me though is off in a corner. If you were to come into the room you likely wouldn’t notice it. It’s a somewhat grainy photograph taken in the Spring of 1985 leaning—appropriately enough I suppose—against an empty box meant to house the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The five people are huddled close together, they’re wearing sweaters and jackets, hands in pockets. It is the only photo I have from the small poetry cohort that spent two years together studying at Syracuse. Jane, Lucia, Chris, myself and our mentor in that spring’s workshop, Philip Booth.

Philip was known as a “Maine poet”, respected for writing beautifully crafted, meditative, lean lyrics of place. He was mentored by Robert Frost and could tell us stories of conversations he’d had with E.E. Cummings. Poetry is surely a place of ancestors, even more so than any wall of photographs, and Philip seemed like a direct channel back to ancestors whose work we knew. He organized the photo shoot that spring day, bringing his camera to the final class. We knew, without knowing why at the time, that Philip especially enjoyed our workshop together and wanted the picture. None of us could have known there would be no other record of that small cohort of hungry wannabees who had been called to the art.

Years later, in a conversation with Chris, I could surmise why Philip may have wanted the photograph. Chris would go on to eventually become the Director of Syracuse’s creative writing program which meant he would experience cohort after cohort of young writers. Few cohorts, it seems, bond; aspiring poets arrive and what comes next is anybody’s guess. The four of us, however, bonded like close brothers and sisters, appreciating one another’s writing, breaking bread together, supporting each other to thrive and, most important, internalizing each other’s voices of loving critique. Philip wanted, apparently, to document this rare occurrence.

“The four of us, however, bonded like close brothers and sisters, appreciating one another’s writing, breaking bread together, supporting each other to thrive and, most important, internalizing each other’s voices of loving critique.”

Time will clean the carcass bones, as one of Lucia’s poems says. She would go on to receive a MacArthur genius award, be in a wheel-chair by her 40’s from multiple sclerosis, passing away in 2016 after having an esteemed career in poetry. Jane would be a finalist for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. We planned to rendezvous in Toronto for the occasion, but Jane would be unable to attend as she received a diagnosis of uterine cancer a month earlier that would take her life a year later. Chris is still at Syracuse and stepping back from some of the demands of teaching.

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I would leave Syracuse to move to Canada for work, poetry drifting to the periphery of my life. When I finally had a book come out in 2019, I felt like I’d completed an unnamed promise to that loving quartet from years ago. And what matters most to me in the book isn’t any poem, but the page at the back where I thank them in writing. That small photograph in my messy office is—in its own way I realize now—a picture of ancestors. We may grow into who we are but we are surely descended not only from our younger selves, but from those who accompanied us through passages best navigated in their presence. The poet I have finally become is their last gift to me.

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Finding the Form with Suzanne Nussey

I’ve always wondered when it was that I first became aware of the passage of time. How do we recall something that wasn’t actually an event, was more of a transition? Does this awareness depend on our ability to describe it? Is this a classic, epistemological issue, or just a bee in my own tiny headgear? How do we reconstruct something we did not, at the time, have language to describe? Such questions prompted the writing of “Morning Walk, Summer 1956” in Issue 161 of The New Quarterly, and influenced its form and structure.

To answer these questions, I first tried to recall early memories, memories that pre-dated school, before I was taught various conceptual markers of time—hours, days, weeks, seasons, etc. Not exactly a pre-verbal time, but certainly a time when my vocabulary was limited. Could I recover those sensory experiences (sight, sound, touch, smell) or emotional experiences of fear and delight, deeply embedded at a cellular level? Some of my most successful poems have begun with vivid images of more recent, momentary experiences of the world around me, sometimes no more than an evocative smell or a threatening sound. Using the genre of narrative poetry to elicit and explore such strong images, then, seemed like the best choice for writing this piece.

“Using the genre of narrative poetry to elicit and explore such strong images, then, seemed like the best choice for writing this piece.”

“Morning Walk” began with a distinct memory of the scent of bridal wreath spirea, an overpowering fragrance that I was never fond of, though it certainly did stick with me. That scent evoked other images—the tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual images of fresh paint, soap and talcum, hard sugar candy, my father’s voice and hand, those wonky sidewalk slabs so treacherous for short legs and small feet, the neighbourhood dog that scared me silly—merging into one narrative of numerous visits to my father’s parishioners that happened weekly, probably when I was three or four, definitely before I started school.

The structure of the poem suggests a “before” and “after” (“the beginning” in stanza 1 and the tablet in stanza 4, “not yet tipped”), temporal concepts that children as young as two are able to grasp, placing the persona in a time of early childhood. How does a child make the journey toward the “after”? Partly by acquiring vocabulary. So the earlier list of sensory images then gives way to a list of vocabulary words, “the things I do not know.” “[E]verything new,” including new vocabulary, will eventually usher the persona into another kind of awareness. What the little girl sees but does not recognize in the old women’s faces (stanza 2) is named by her father in stanza 3, “Widow.” Now she is headed toward an understanding of “calamity.”

In the final stanza, the physical structure of the poem with progressively indented lines mimics the tablet and the uneven, sidewalk slabs that move the reader toward the journey beyond the page’s white space (the tablet empty of words). While the stanza presents final sensory images of light and the father’s face, the personified image of the season invites the child toward a future, an “after,” when the child will acquire language that demarcates time and defines sensation—words that facilitate and impede awareness by both capturing and naming reality as well as preceding and modifying the absolute, unmediated experience of “the beginning.”

Suzanne Nussey lives in Ottawa, where she has worked as an editor, writer, memoir coach, and writing instructor. Her writing has been published in The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and EVENT, and has won poetry and creative non-fiction competitions in several journals. 

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Finding the Form with Alison Stevenson

The idea for Mud Angels came from a visit to Florence at the end of 2016. A few months earlier was the fiftieth anniversary of a devastating flood there. Photos and information about the flood and its aftermath were posted around the city. Online you’ll find staggering images from the 1966 flood. That information formed a backdrop to my visit, and fertile ground for story-making.

 The first thing I imagined was Emily, a young newlywed in 1966. I imagined her reacting to things I was seeing as I visited museums and other sites, places I believe are largely unchanged since 1966. Her husband Charles was, I initially thought, going to be a bit of a stuffed shirt. But, as the characters developed, they surprised me.

I’d written a little over the years, but I feel I really began writing in 2016. Writing my story Graceland (much-edited version published in 2020 in Prairie Fire magazine Vol. 41 No. 2) felt like I was rewiring my brain. But I didn’t have writing experience or craft skills (and five years later, they’re still very much a work in progress).

“But I didn’t have writing experience or craft skills (and five years later, they’re still very much a work in progress).”

Mud Angels is my second story. I wanted to set it before the flood, and have the reader know the flood’s coming (though not when), while the characters don’t know. Having a story take place in the context of things that haven’t happened yet was a challenge. The first draft had a kind of prologue at the beginning, like a newspaper article, with the story of the flood. Ultimately, I dropped the prologue and brought the information about the flood into the body of the story.

 

Simone Martini Annunciation Detail

You could say the evolution of Mud Angels maps to my learning path as a writer. In 2018 I had the opportunity to work with John Metcalf as a mentor through The Humber School for Writers Graduate Certificate Program. The first draft of Mud Angels was the first work we discussed, and through it I learned a tremendous amount. In 2019 I received valuable input workshopping it in Dennis Bock’s Short Story Masterclass at U of  T. In 2020, I worked with mentor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, who helped me push further into the characters and the story. Finally, after it was accepted by The New Quarterly, I had the chance to work with Editor Pamela Mulloy to bring it to the version you see in print. I’m grateful to all these people who, in the course of working with me on the story, taught me so much about writing.

It was fantastic to have Mud Angels appear in TNQ’s Vol 160. The theme, ‘The In-between Time’ captured important aspects of the story. Not only is Emily’s honeymoon a kind of interlude before her married life begins, but she seems very confident about how things are going to go, while the reader knows events may not unfold as she expects.

The story had a long journey. I’m so glad it found its home in TNQ!

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. alisonstevensonwriter.com 

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(photo credit: detail from Simone Martini, Annunciation, Uffizi Gallery, Florence Italy. Photo by the author)

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Finding the Form with Kari Lund-Teigen

Reading it now, it strikes me that The Octopus feels like a pandemic story. Not about a pandemic, but emerging out of the conditions familiar from it: the isolation, the octopus from the Netflix documentary everyone’s watched, the sourdough bread! But the first draft emerged in the winter of 2017-2018. The spark for this story was an absorbing book by Sy Montgomery called The Soul of an Octopus. I love to read this kind of nonfiction when I need a reminder of all that is amazing and beautiful in the world.

A first draft, for me, drifts into place through what I hesitate to call a process. I don’t mean to make it sound mystical. It really is just putting pen to paper when something occurs to me: a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph, bits of dialogue. I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing or where it all comes from. It’s not often I look back on finished stories to figure it out.

“It really is just putting pen to paper when something occurs to me: a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph, bits of dialogue.”

In addition to the obvious fascination with octopuses, I can look back now and see other threads connected to my life at that moment. We’d just moved across the country and I was in the middle of my first “real” winter in almost a decade. I missed my old neighbours. I missed the ocean. I was worried, as always, about the future. And I was thinking, as always, about stories.

In subsequent drafts, I cut a lot, mostly background. Where are they? What happened? Those details were important for me to write the story, but weren’t important enough to include for the reader. Next, I had to make the connections between adjacent ideas more concrete. This took time. I’d work on it, put it away for a while, then work on it again. The story slowly settled into place.

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about how whales manage to take in enormous quantities of water without choking. It turns out they have a special plug that moves into place. In the endless grind of disheartening news, I’m grateful for information that leaves me awed and humbled. So far, no story involving whales is brewing. But I do have a book about eels that I haven’t started reading yet, so who knows.

In addition to TNQ, Kari Lund-Teigen’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and Grain. You can listen to her read at drumlitmag.com. For more, visit karilundteigen.com.

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What Richard Brait is Reading in his Writing Space

I’m a corporate lawyer, living in the Toronto area. Four years ago I decided to make a serious attempt at writing poetry, and ultimately enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington College. It’s a low residency program (five 10-day residences over 2-1/2 years) and because of the pandemic three of my first four residencies have been virtual. For these residencies I retreated to our country place – a 110 year old former schoolhouse in Grey County.

The big dining table is where I do our Zoom workshops or anything requiring a lot of spreading out, and my small table up in the bell-ringing room is where the composing and revising of poems mostly happens.

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In summer, nearby Sauble Beach is where I often read my poetry and make notes in preparation for my critical writing.

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So how much reading has there been in my MFA?  In all I’ve read 124 books, almost all poetry, with a few works of literary criticism sprinkled in.  For each of those books I’ve written some critical analysis – a 1.5 page section in a letter to my instructor, a 3 page critical “annotation”, or inclusion in one of my longer critical term papers.

In reporting on my reading, where do I start? The rate has been about 7-8 books per month (mostly self-chosen), and each month tends to have a topic – The Beat Poets, The New York School, Prose Poetry, Modern American, British, … The numbers are big enough to show trends, and two stand out – the Irish and the Gypsies.

I started my reading of Irish poetry with the poets of Heaney’s four towers of Ireland: Spenser, Joyce, Yeats and MacNeice. I quickly concluded the poetry of Ireland was the poetry of the peat-bog, the ruined castle, the tragedy of war – real scenes with meaning in the physical world – but then a movement at the end to the summing up, the statement of theme – great lines that plunge the reader into his own thoughts. Yeats did this well with his great lines that are so familiar: “That is no country for old men” (Sailing to Byzantium); “A terrible beauty is born” (Easter, 1916); “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (The Second Coming). But my favourite poet was MacNeice. He was accused by Yeats of pursuing too much the communal over the personal. And yet his Autumn Journal is a stunning combination of both, covering the autumn of 1938 and the early days of 1939. It records his thoughts and memories on the great events of the time – the fall of Barcelona and the annexation of Czechoslovakia – but also personal topics such as his return to lectures after summer, a night drive, a morning contemplation, and his lost love. The Journal has an urgent, almost breathless, feel. It moves from the end of summer (“Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire”), through the failure of resistance in Spain (“As if veneer could hold / The rotten guts and crumbled bones together”), to the threshold of war (“All we can do at most / Is press an anxious ear against the keyhole / To bear the Future breathing …”).

In later readings I included Seamus Heaney himself, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, Eavan Boland, Ciaran Carson, and finally Carson’s protégé Gail McConnell. From all these I’ll highlight just two:


1. Carson’s Still Life. Ekphrasis, yes, because it contemplates visual works of art. But it’s also a wander through Belfast, and features the poet coping with the cancer that would soon kill him. Perhaps the best of the 124 books I’ve read.
2. Gail McConnell – Her father was killed by the IRA because he ran Belfast’s best known prison. And her book The Sun Is Open explores the “Dad Box” she’s created of his gathered memorabilia. A moving work of prose poetry and (for those looking for sources of recommendation) this one came to me from the Poetry Book Society’s Quarterly Bulletin – the absolute best source for finding new poetry to read.

Let me not forget the gypsies. Again, it was the Poetry Book Society’s Bulletin that introduced me to David Morley. His Fury was shortlisted for the Forward Prize in 2020 and led me into his other works: Enchantment, The Poet and the Gypsy, Scientific Papers, … He paints a portrait of Britain’s gypsies that is realistic and filled with sympathy for the problems they face, but above all gives them the individual characters that they so lacked in earlier British poetry. His subjects range from the violent world boxing champion (and gypsy), Tyson Fury (“My corner-man and cut-man / are mist and water, mist and slaughter”) to the quietly conversing friends, poet John Clare and Wisdom Smith, prince of the gypsies (“‘Poor John,’ whistles the Gypsy, ‘a quaking thistle would make you swoon.’”). Reading Morley prompted me to read everything else about the gypsies, and this became the subject of my critical thesis.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of my recent readings, so I’m ready to engage on what I’ve said above, but also on a number of other poets who really impressed me:

• the Canadians: Ondaatje (…Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter), Dennis Lee, Anne Carson, Steffler, Maggs, Solie (The Caiplie Caves)
• the British / Colonials: Derek Walcott, Alice Oswald (!), Simon Armitage, Les Murray (!), Sean O’Brien’s wonderful “Hammersmith”, and finally Robin Robertson’s masterpiece The Long Take (!).
• the Americans: Forché, Levine, Rekdal, O’Hara, Frost, …

Richard Brait is a corporate lawyer living in Toronto. He is completing his MFA in Poetry at Bennington College. Richard’s poetry has been published or accepted by TickleAce, The Queen’s Quarterly, EVENT Magazine, The New Quarterly, Exile Quarterly and The Dalhousie Review. He was shortlisted for the Fish Anthology’s Lockdown Prize in 2020 and is the 2021 winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition for Emerging Writers.

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Finding the Form with J.P. Letkemann

A couple of days ago, my sister sent me a link to a recent CBC interview with John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Koenig’s project, according to host Piya Chattopadhyay, involved coining new words to fill in the “blind spots of our emotional vocabulary.” Describing his rationale, Koenig explains how new words can “install a handle on a feeling that [is] otherwise unspeakable or undefinable.”

The article accompanying the interview focuses on several of Koenig’s words. When I came to the definition of “onism,” I shivered with recognition. “The awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience in your lifetime, forever stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.” I know this feeling. And it gave me pause to realize that this feeling is universal enough for someone to coin a term for it. 

“The awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience in your lifetime, forever stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.”

In part, my essay “Homebodies” is an attempt to grapple with the frustration of being trapped in one body, in one place, in one period of time. I suppose the feeling was always there, vague and unspeakable, but something about pandemic conditions—lockdown, working from home— brought it more clearly to the surface.

In a way, “onism” describes not only the feeling that gave rise to the essay but also my experience of grappling with the essay itself. I wrote the first draft in the early days of the pandemic, in April and May 2020. During the revision process, our collective experience of the pandemic evolved dramatically. For me, the days and months unfolded like a spiral pattern. Periods of hope circled back to periods of despair. Time felt linear and progressive (vaccines! new variants!) but also cyclical (déjà vu: “here we go again!”). As I revised the essay, I chafed against its limited and preliminary perspective. Knowing neither the full impact of the pandemic nor its interminable length, the narrator now struck me as clueless. Depending on my mood (and on the current pandemic situation), I sometimes found his attempts at humour to be ill-advised. The “onism” I experienced was the awareness of how little I could convey with this piece, stuck, as it was, in one time and one place. I wanted it to speak more fully to the isolation, the depression, the unbearable tedium of the winter of 2021. Nevertheless, I recognized that for the sake of integrity, for the essay to be coherent and true, I needed to firmly maintain a limited point of view, which meant rooting the piece in my headspace, in Kitchener, Ontario, in March-May 2020.

Perhaps I will write another pandemic essay someday, one with a much broader scope. I shudder as I write this; even the idea exhausts me.

J.P. Letkemann lives, walks, and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.

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