Month: June 2022

Mark Foss’ Writing Space

For the past ten years, I’ve lived in an early twentieth century triplex in Mile End–Plateau in Montreal. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where a writer might easily spend an afternoon in a café with a coffee, a notebook, and a sharp pencil. Yet it’s not something that comes easily to me because I don’t drink coffee or write longhand. I type on a laptop in my home office with a glass of filtered water and all the comfort ergonomics can buy.

Despite its name, the Plateau is known for its wonky floors. When I set up my desk, it wobbled, and my chair rolled towards the door. A friend built a large platform that rises six inches off the floor to create a level surface. Behind the platform, two black Ikea bookcases are clamped together so they don’t teeter, either from the uneven floors or the weight of the literary giants on the shelves. On the wall facing me are mounted covers of five Faulkner novels and a poster from a Bruno Schulz exposition in Paris. To my left, next to the window, on a kind of literary clothesline, I’ve pegged 14 images of Fernando Pessoa who is often striding through the streets of Lisbon. Together, the three authors remind me to write about “the heart in conflict with itself”, to find whimsy in the everyday, and to push forward.

The pandemic has shaken up my writing practice in a good way. With the gym closed, I began walking more through the wooded paths on Mount Royal. As I navigate over rocks and tree roots, ideas will often come to me. I’ve taken to capturing them in a notebook. Sometimes the physical act of writing is enough to implant the words without needing to decipher my scrawl.

Mile End–Plateau is also well known for renovictions. With the sale of my triplex last summer, I’ve been forced to move. As I visited potential apartments in new neighbourhoods, I discovered the only criteria that matter relate to my writing space. Is it quiet? Is it large enough for my office, and all my bookcases and shrines? Can I set up my desk so the window is on my left? Is there a view when I need distractions? And finally, to my surprise, is it close to the twisting paths up the mountain? I will be happy to leave the Fun House floors behind, but I’ve become convinced it’s good for my writing to stay a little off kilter.

Photo of the author, Mark Foss. He is wearing a brown striped hat and a pair of glasses.

Mark Foss has appeared in The New Quarterly, off and on, since the previous millennium. His words also appear or are forthcoming in Existere: Journal of Arts & Literature, Hobart, Into the Void and elsewhere. He writes from Montreal, but you can visit him at www.markfoss.ca.

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash.

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How to Write in a Broken World

“The Creative Life” Keynote for the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus Writer-in-Residence Program

"The Creative Life: How to Write in a Broken World" Virtual Keynote Address

It’s impossible to speak of the creative life without speaking to the moment we are living in. Without speaking to the unbearable beauty and pain coexisting in this very second. And the next. What does it mean to be an artist, to be a writer, if not to embrace our humanness?

There are questions we all return to, over and over again. They may take different shapes and forms, even appear as characters, or poems, or paintings. There is a leitmotif of questioning that cycles in our breath. And it’s up to us to uncover what these questions are—not always in an attempt to answer them, but as Rilke says, “to live them.”

There is a question I have been asking myself lately, and it is an unanswerable one.

How do we write in a broken world? How do we write into a broken world?

First, the audacity. Imagine my audacity for titling my keynote with a question so big it’ll take a lifetime to answer. But that in itself is the point. The answer has to be lived, in the very bones of our experience.

And the first step is in acknowledging “brokenness.”

Lean in to the Brokenness

Have you ever experienced a moment like this, where you know there’s so much pain, either within your inner world, or the world at large—and yet right in front of you is this beauty—that you almost feel guilty to witness? That you can’t reconcile? There is a dissonance within your body? Heart? Mind? What IS that?

How much of our time is spent in resisting brokenness, or beauty? Of feeling the guilt of experiencing joy, or the desire to only feel joy? How much of our lives is spent in distracting ourselves from these extremes? These so-called opposites? How much of our society is obsessed with perfection, with the distraction of perfection, of silencing the quaking parts of ourselves?

How often I have thought some version of, “I wish I didn’t feel broken” when really, perhaps, what I meant was, “I wish I felt fully alive in my life.”

What happens, if we listen for the cracks and fractures along the heartbeat of the earth, what happens when we listen for our own brokenness, and not see it as a failure, but the very evidence that we are alive?

I am currently resisting my imperfect heart, and the fact that it continually requires repair—surgery after surgery. On a recent trip to the hospital, I witnessed the live image of my heart on a scan, and was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for how much it has endured. It keeps showing up for me, even when I don’t know how to show up for myself.

What are you resisting in this moment? What is your fear telling you?

Attend to the Moment

There are times, especially during the pandemic, where I find myself wishing I were somewhere else, where I could be truly inspired and enriched by the environment around me. While this is a necessity for so many creative people, it’s also an opportunity for observation. I’m searching—we’re searching—for something that’ll make it all make sense. Make sense of the world. Of ourselves.

Is the cherry blossom enough? Is this cold tea enough? Is the rain enough? Is this typo enough? Is this keynote enough? What is enough?

When I have just a little bit of space to be present with that deep longing for something to make sense, if I just, for a moment, suspend the desire to finally feel “enough”—maybe I, maybe we, will have the ability to witness the grace of what is unfolding right in front of us.

What if instead of finding joy in spite of brokenness, we included it in our experience of joy?

Fill with Gold

Kintsugi, now appropriated and popularized, is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It is an act of refusing to discard parts of our own experience, not by jamming them together in an attempt to make them “fit,” but in teaching us to illuminate the scar. To illuminate the points of breakage. These breakpoints serve as ways in to our humanness. They remind us to have the courage to tell our stories without censoring ourselves into perfection, numbness, or negation.

And yet, it’s important to remember that as storytellers, creators, our task is to also investigate stories we tell to ourselves, and why we have convinced ourselves they are “true.”

I’ve had the gift of speaking to a lot of young writers through the Writer-in-Residence program. Through these conversations, I was reminded of the narratives I inherited when I was starting out, about what it means to be a writer. The trope of the starving artist or the struggling writer was seen as a badge of honour, as something to aspire to because it’s a sign that you’ve made it. And then what? What do you do with this narrative of “brokenness”? What do you do when you need to eat? When you’re burned out? What do you do with the scarcity?

Then, the question becomes deeper: How do we illuminate the scars of our experiences while not repeatedly seeking them out, or identifying with them? Brokenness is not a quality to aspire to, to give us a sense of identity, but rather, an opportunity to own the humanity of our experiences.

And with that, here is a last offering of gold, a question for myself, and you:

Are you broken, or are you whole in your humanness?

Sheniz Janmohamed is a poet, arts educator, and nature artist. The author of three poetry collections, Sheniz spends much of her time working—namely making masala chai and contemplating existence.

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Artwork by Sheniz Janmohamed.

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Finding the Form with Frances Boyle

The title of my poem “Rounds” gives a solid clue as to how this piece and its form came to be. It started with a two-pronged prompt: to write about “things that go in circles”, and “an escape scene that includes a bowl of fruit”.

So, what goes in circles? In addition to the requisite spilled fruit, I thought of the hands on a clock, my dog’s circling before settling himself on his mat. I began to freewrite, as is my usual process. Remembering how water in sinks and toilets circles counter clockwise in the Southern hemisphere led me to an “escape” to Chile. I speculated on what how someone might feel as they got ready to move countries, thoughts going in circles as they do (or at least as mine do) when overwhelmed with too many things to accomplish.

Photo of the author's notebook, open to the page where she brainstormed the poem, "Rounds."

And who could be dealing with all these circles? The idea of rounds on hospital wards led me to a young doctor about to start a residency overseas: who she would be leaving behind, and what she would miss. I pulled in a sister, and a young nephew whose drawings featured a spiral sun. When I remembered the way voices braid in a children’s round like “Row row row your boat”, the circle felt nearly complete, and the spinning of merry go round and whirlpool closed the loop.

I am partial to narrative, and write fiction as well as poetry (and have been lucky enough to have had both published in The New Quarterly). The initial prompt came from Sarah Selecky via her writing school, which is focused on fiction, so her suggestions are often geared towards scene. I have notebooks full of freewriting around prompts like these and as usual the words I’d written lingered in one of them for several years.

When I finally revisited the section, it could have become the start of a new story, or I might have woven some of the text into an existing story draft (as I did with sections of my novella, Tower, and several of the stories in my short fiction collection, Seeking Shade). However, the circle motif suggested that this piece would be better as a narrative poem. The quintain stanza structure came to me fairly quickly and required trimming and shaping to make the line breaks work effectively. Next, I enhanced the internal rhyme and assonance/consonance and tried to sharpen images ad use more evocative words, revising the poem in layers or (perhaps more accurate) in spiral iterations.

Photo of the author, Frances Boyle. She is smiling and wearing a red patterned scarf, and holding a glass of white wine.

Frances Boyle’s newest book, Openwork and Limestone, her third poetry collection, is forthcoming from Frontenac House in fall 2022. She is also the author of Tower, a novella, and Seeking Shade, a short story collection that was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Award and a winner of the Miramichi Reader’s Very Best! Award for short fiction. 

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Photo by Mika Korhonen on Unsplash.

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What’s Elliott Gish Reading?

Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio

An unhappy marriage. A troubled life. A lonely death. This is the story of the woman behind Anne of Green Gables.

L. M. Montgomery has fascinated me since I was nine years old. As a child, her books made me aware of my own desire to be a writer, an ambition that had been bubbling away at the back of my brain for some time. When I read the information about her at the back of my paperback copy of Emily of New Moon, I was surprised to see it reference her feelings of depression and loneliness. Although much of her work is light and hopeful, with happy endings (and happy marriages) all but assured for her heroines, Montgomery’s private life was riddled with financial woes, legal troubles, family tensions, and struggles with mental illness and addiction. This compelling biography, which chronicles Montgomery’s life and development as a writer, is a direct contradiction to her public image as a wholesome remnant of a bygone age.

Mary Henley Rubio spent more than two decades collecting material for this book, and the result paints a picture of a deeply passionate and deeply unhappy woman constrained by her time and by herself. Her life and her work are both a curious blend of the passionate and the Puritan, the desire to live freely at war with fear of gossip, censure, and judgement. Contrasting the author’s work through the years against the realities of her life, Rubio uses the progression of Montgomery’s body of work to explore the psychology of her subject. Montgomery used her fiction both to escape her troubles and to work through them in public, giving voice to her innermost thoughts and feelings in a way she never could outside of her books. Through Anne Shirley, Emily Starr, Sara Stanley, and others, she gave voice to her own feelings of alienation, oppression, anger, and fear. Her protagonists are both conventional in their fates and unconventional in their desires. When Emily declares “I am important to myself,” we hear Montgomery’s own indignation in the line.

The first time I read this book, I wolfed it down in the space of a day or two, eager to immerse myself in the private life of a woman whose work I have long admired. This time, rereading it, I moved at a slower pace, taking the entirety of a life in page by page. I read it outside as often as I could, immersing myself in nature just as Montgomery so often did to soothe herself. The story it tells of a vibrant woman frustrated at every turn by disappointments, slowly becoming mired in her own feelings of anxiety and depression, was easier to take in the sunshine.

Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Nova Scotia. Her work has been published in the Baltimore Review, Grain Magazine, Wigleaf, and others. She lives in Halifax with her partner. 

Photo by Scott Walsh on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Jeremy Colangelo

The skeleton of “Hearth” is the life of Lee Miller (1907-1977), a photographer affiliated with the surrealist movement who became a photojournalist during the Second World War. She covered, among other things, the liberations of Paris and the Buchenwald concentration camp. Like the character Vanessa, she found the experience of covering the War traumatizing, and eventually retreated into cooking, doing occasional photography for Vogue (including a spread based on the life of James Joyce) but for the most part trying her best to prove that Americans can, in fact, cook. Though to be frank on this matter I retain a pinch of skepticism.

I first heard of Miller at an academic conference in Toronto in 2019 – the last such conference I attended before COVID-19, in fact. The paper was by the scholar Christina Walter and was mostly about Miller’s cooking. I’d never heard about her before (Miller that is) and I found the details of her life, and especially the post-traumatic retreat into domesticity, fascinating, and creatively quite stimulating. Using some details from Miller’s life as a rough outline and fictionalizing the rest, I wrote the first draft of “Hearth” on the train ride home to London, Ontario, rattling the little Via Rail tray with the keystrokes on my tablet.

Telling this story feels somewhat mean. I’m almost afraid to say any more. I’m reminded of an anecdote I was told by a professor of mine about a poet (it really doesn’t matter which one) mentioning off-hand a particular book that had been a strong influence on them. Of course, scholar after scholar began pouring over the book in question, and together they compiled reams of correspondences comparing every minute feature of the book to this or that line of poetry. Then they found the author’s personal copy of said influential book and discovered that only the first chapter had its pages cut. And like, look, I know the author is dead and all, but that’s still gotta sting.

In photography there’s a technique much beloved by the surrealists called double-exposure, where you “expose” a piece of film twice, essentially taking two photographs on the same place so that one appears as a ghostly overlay upon the other. There is also a technique that the poet Ezra Pound liked to use, which he called “super-position,” where two poetic images would be placed one after the other such that the reader was encouraged to see them as overlapping, or as different instances of the same thing. One could even go so far as to say that I have used that sort of technique before, in this very paragraph even, but that’s probably a stretch.

This will have to be where the blog post ends. I have far too many things to say, which is an excellent reason to shut up.

Photo of the author, Jeremy Colangelo. He is wearing glasses and a light grey button-up shirt.

Jeremy Colangelo is an author and academic living in London, Ontario. He is the author or editor of three books, including the story collection Beneath the Statue. His work has also appeared in Carousel, The Dalhousie Review, The Puritan, EVENT, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a novel.

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Photo by Andrew Draper on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Mark Foss

My last two books have been novels, but I’ve struggled to write long fiction since the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve been too restless to focus on the demands of a larger story. It didn’t help that I already had two unpublished novels in slush piles.

I wanted to concentrate on the space between words, not story, so I tried writing poems. My attempts were too linear, too serious, too wordy. It didn’t help that I hadn’t published a poem since my high school yearbook. My brief foray into poetry was mostly naïve, but several elements from a failed poem — a comic book vampire and psychoanalysis — did find a home in my story “Allowance”.

For the past two years, I have mostly toggled between short fiction and creative non-fiction (CNF). Usually, I don’t know the genre until it’s finished, and even then. In the summer of 2020, Montréal Serai published one of my pieces as a “meditation”. On my website, I called it a prose poem for a few months before settling on CNF.

Whatever the genre, I also oscillate between “flash” writing and longer pieces.

My shorter pieces tend to be more whimsical, with past and present colliding like marbles set loose in a game of Kerplunk. Both “Allowance” and “Big Mis” draw on childhood reading material, which has been informing other flash writing during the pandemic. New stories and CNF both play with Silver Age comic book ads, one for selling seeds to earn prizes, the other a pitch from Norman Rockwell for a free drawing test. Meanwhile, the CNF piece in Montréal Serai refers to GI Joes.

My longer pieces are often structured around a conceit. One recent story explored grief through a lifetime of sandwiches. A forthcoming essay looks at aging parents, mental illness and legacy through the lens of cottage attics.

In my writing group, we sometimes experiment with ten-minute story prompts. Since I struggle to write longhand, I often steal glances at the other members for inspiration. They seem so sure of themselves. I keep at it, ever hopeful something unexpected may turn up.

Photo of the author, Mark Foss. He is wearing a brown striped hat and a pair of glasses.

Mark Foss has appeared in The New Quarterly, off and on, since the previous millennium. His words also appear or are forthcoming in Existere: Journal of Arts & Literature, Hobart, Into the Void and elsewhere. He writes from Montreal, but you can visit him at www.markfoss.ca.

Photo by Jan Kahánek on Unsplash.

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What’s Suzanne Stewart Reading?

With new curiosity, I recently began to reread Jane Austen’s Emma, her second last (major) novel, which she completed in 1817, two years before her death, at age 41. Like most of Austen’s readers, I instinctively guard a list of my favourite books, which hadn’t included Emma, following my first encounter with the novel four or five years ago, but this time, I intuit a maturity of thought in the author that I had previously overlooked, as I now imagine how Austen might have desired, by that point in her writing life, to pursue a little more liberty, exploring with freshness elements that we don’t readily find in her earlier works: the atmospheric beauty of an evening snowfall; the vivacious presence of young children; a widowed father who possesses the charm of the earlier Mr. Bennet while adding an elderly gentleness (without his predecessor’s sharp wit); and a heroine who, while her confidence and social meddling bring about blunders, exudes a loving kindness, especially, in her attentiveness to her father, a relationship that might have echoed Austen’s own fondness for her family.

As I read, I wonder if Austen might have had a double vision when she composed Emma, recalling her life as a young woman, while aware, at every stage of the writing, of her present moment, as an aging author? Was she looking backwards, reflecting on her life: pondering the wisdom of remaining single, without marriage and children (a circumstance that defines Emma, initially, while her sister, Isabella, has both); affirming her attachment to country life, described in loving detail; revealing her loneliness and longing for friendship (in the way that Emma mentors young Harriet); acknowledging the satisfaction of her sharp mind, while aware of its potential to lead one astray in moments of frailty; and savouring her power to perceive the world with subtly, including the ironic complexities of human relationships. Each of these elements intertwines so nicely in this late novel, I now see, as I (re)read with joy, in the evenings.

I admit that the circumference of my little library is narrow, as I anchor my mind in the nineteenth (and early twentieth) century, mainly in books with strong rural themes and settings. Prior to Emma, it was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and before that Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Recently, too, was E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, in which the gems of Florence intersect with quiet, English country life. The nineteenth century is remote and idyllic enough for me to forget the troubles of our present-day world, which aren’t what I wish to face when I read. Shouldn’t a book transport the mind? “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” John Keats remarked, doubling the metaphor of reading as a journey with his image of “gold”: imaginative richness that comes with a book. Virginia Woolf, too, conceived of that possibility, when she asked, “What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something . . . so elastic,” she thought, “that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind,” the voyage of thought embracing not only her writing, perhaps, but also her reading.

While transporting myself to a different era, reaching beyond our present-day circumstances, I also let the “elastic” constrict, through a single century and similar settings, as I read all of the novels by one author and revisit each one multiple times: how does Emma’s Hartfield differ from (or resemble) Dorothea’s Middlemarch or Jane’s Thornfield Hall or Lucy’s Windy Corner? The books take me in lovely circles.

Is writing, too, intrinsically circular? Is Emma a former, younger Jane, while Jane, in the moment of writing, is old enough to tinge the story with a little regret: a hint of the melancholy edge of time? Should she have married, raised children, abandoned writing, pursued more friendships? Is the snow in this novel, while lovely, an icy undercurrent of sadness, unlike the eternal springs, summers, and autumns that we find in the earlier novels, which no longer stand in as the sole or principal seasons? While she composed Emma, might Austen have thought in circles, and is that pattern of thought inevitable for all of us as writers, as we wrestle with the implacable march of time?

Either way, I will return to Emma, tonight.

Photo of the author: She has shoulder-length brown hair, and is wearing glasses.

Suzanne Stewart writes in Nova Scotia, where she also teaches at St. Francis Xavier University. Her book The Tides of Time: A Nova Scotia Book of Seasons was published by Pottersfield Press. 

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Photo by James Shaw on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Tom Wayman

On Nov. 22, 2020 I was shocked to receive an email from the wife of a very good friend, the California author Dennis Saleh, stating that he had died suddenly of a massive brain bleed that day. Dennis and I had met when we enrolled in the same graduate writing seminar at the University of California at Irvine in 1966. When he proposed to his wife, Michele, in 1969, I had been at his side. And over the decades we visited frequently back and forth. I last stayed with them just before Hallowe’en 2019 at their house in a Monterey suburb, and the three of us had plans for a road trip together to southern California in the fall of 2020—plans postponed because of the border closure as a consequence of the pandemic.

Besides being a close friend, Dennis was in many ways a literary mentor. He was a much more attentive reader of poetry than I am, plus he stayed on top of developments in the US poetry scene that I often was unaware of. Our aesthetics differed in some ways: he once said he could never read a poem longer than a page, whereas my writing can be long-winded. In contrast to my foregrounding of the social implications of poetic approaches, he insisted that play with words and ideas is a proper function of the art. Some of the differences between us are visible in the last photo Michele took of us together, standing in front of their son Brandon’s house in Salinas during my 2019 visit. I’m in my Kootenay attire on the left, and Dennis had just bought the yellow shades and sports jacket at a pop-up Hallowe’en costume store. (He was writing a series of poems featuring a character, Yellowmore, whose dimensions he was still discovering—including the reason for the color—as poem after poem occurred to him.) Yet despite our divergent approaches in matters of craft, theme and, indeed, the purpose of the art, I continually learned a lot about poetry’s possibilities from him.

The author, Tom Wayman, with his friend, Dennis Saleh. Tom is wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans, and Dennis is wearing the bright yellow glasses and jacket.

Dennis’ interests were simultaneously wide and intense. So when I decided to write about the impact of his death, I knew no single poem could encompass what I wanted to say. He described himself in one poetry anthology contributors’ note as being “something like an Anglo-Egyptian; my father’s parents came to Fresno from Egypt . . . and my mother’s maiden name was McKoy.” Born in Chicago, Dennis was raised in Fresno from 1948 on, eventually becoming one of poet Philip Levine’s students at Fresno State College, and later a friend of Phil’s for many years. Dennis was an enormous Rolling Stones fan, never missing a concert when the band toured California, and most times wangling his and Michele’s way backstage afterwards.

Following teaching stints at UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz, Dennis became a full-time author. His nonfiction mass-market books include Rock Art (LP covers as art) and Science Fiction Gold (stills and essays on 14 classic 1950s sci-fi movies). His poems appeared widely in little magazines, and his collections include Palmway, 100 Chameleons, and This is Not Surrealism. His artwork—dense collages of words and images taken from headlines and ads—frequently appeared in Ventura’s Artlife magazine. At his death he left, as yet unpublished, a book-length history of the B-49 Flying Wing, precursor to today’s stealth aircraft, and two novels: one that imagines what happened during the unaccounted-for weeks of Oscar Wilde’s first tour of America, and the other set during pharaonic Egypt’s 22nd dynasty, when smuggling cats out of the kingdom was publishable by death due to the animal’s importance in protecting granaries from rodents.

My poem “Papyrus” arises out of Dennis’ fascination with 22nd dynasty Egypt. He marvelled at how stable Egyptian civilization had been, millennium after millennium, and collected and shared interesting facts about that society. Other poems I’ve written about me trying to process Dennis’ death focus on other facets of his personality. “Papyrus” revolves around the swampland plant that seemed to tie together so much: ancestry, writing technology, the writer’s role, and how the rich farmland of Monterey County’s Salinas River valley echoes that of the Nile. Because the enduring and unchanging structure of life under the pharaohs was part of ancient Egypt’s allure for Dennis, I knew my poem had to embrace at least one formal element. Hence the six-line stanzas.

Tom Wayman’s latest collection is Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (Harbour, 2020). “Papyrus” honors a friendship and literary mentorship of more than 50 years. 

Photo by Evan Yang on Unsplash.

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