Month: November 2022

Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Writing Space

There are not a lot of doors in my house. It took me until the pandemic to really notice this, but with two kids at home, I quickly learned the value of doors. In March 2020, I started writing in my bedroom, but all those sleep experts are onto something when they say that working where you sleep can mess up your sleep. Not to mention that my kids were constantly running in and flopping on the bed next to me.

But a few weeks into the pandemic, I had an epiphany—we had an uninsulated sunroom that was bike and stroller and shoe storage. I decided one Saturday morning that it would be my office. I moved the bikes out to the garage, got a small patio couch, a lamp from my youngest’s room, and moved in a small side table from the basement and just like that, I had place to work! With a door!!

Since then, I’ve upgraded my couch to one from the basement and filled the sunroom with my favourite things—art and postcards created by friends are lined up on the windowsill; I’ve got my kids art that’s faded in the sun taped to the wall, and a jar of doily flowers my youngest made in kindergarten; a stack of poetry books next to my space heater; a print of swimmers floating in the water, a gift from my sister, to remind me of the glory of being in the water; a framed poster by Sebastian Curi from a trip to Buenos Aires, and gorgeous bunting I also picked up in Argentina; and a beautiful painting my dear friend Laura Wills did of twelve rings my Papa Doug made for my Nana. (I will also add that my sunroom office is also filled with shoes and umbrellas and leaves my youngest has collected over the years and scooters and bike helmets and baseball gloves and sidewalk chalk and tote bags, because in addition to my office, it’s also a mudroom).

It is my favourite place to write in the early mornings—moonlight creeping in the fall, and when it’s warm enough, open the windows that let the spring air through. I did much of my Letters to Amelia editing on this couch, and all the edits for my forthcoming picture book, Dear Street. 

It’s not perfect by any stretch—it’s not insulated, so even with a space heater (and a scarf, toque and sleeping bag), I can usually only use it from April to early November. And then I’m back to writing in my bedroom and messing up my sleep, or at my desk in the basement where there are no outlets and not enough light, listening to my children thundering above me, counting down the days until my sunroom office is warm enough again.

Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based author, grant writer, educator, and the founder of the internationally-acclaimed Love Lettering Project. She is the author of the acclaimed debut novel Letters to Amelia in the permanent collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, and she leads creative writing workshops in schools and community settings. Her first picture book, Dear Street, is out with Kids Can Press in Spring 2023.

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Photos courtesy of Lindsay Zier-Vogel.

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What is Pamela Porter Reading?

I’ve spent some time thinking about how to answer the question, “Who’s Reading What?” And I’ve concluded that, as a poet, what I read is predominantly poetry, and what spurs me often to begin to write is the cadence in the poems I read from the work of others. For many months I read Linda Gregg’s books over and over. Her rhythm and flow would enter my ear and I found I could write from that flow, though the subject of my poem would be different from Gregg’s. Aside from being a poet, I’m also a musician; I play piano and guitar, and I sing. Lately, I’ve been reading Philip Levine’s later poems; the cadence of the poems, from The Mercy, News of the World, and Simple Truth slips into my ear, and my ear begins to put words together, on a different subject, but with the echo of a cadence in my head. I’ve also picked up the cadence of a Pablo Neruda poem or the quiet, deliberate cadence of a William Stafford poem. If there’s something in the subconscious that my brain is working on and reading the da Da da Da of a line of poetry begins to bring up a line or an image from the creative soup deep in my head, then I realize I have a poem and need to start on it before I lose the inspiration.

I hope that answers the question, and I hope others find inspiration in the music and rhythm of the poetic line.

Pamela Porter‘s work has won over a dozen prizes, including the Governor General’s award. She resides with gratitude on the traditional lands of the W‐SÁNEĆ peoples on Vancouver Island.

Photo by Brent Ninaber on Unsplash

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What’s Elana Wolff Reading?

I recently returned to Canada after a long stretch abroad. I was on a caregiving mission and didn’t have a lot of time to myself. But I did read: Amor Towles’ comic romp, A Gentleman in Moscow, a stylish retro novel of manners; Ann Shin’s The Last Exiles, a chilling and compelling work inspired by a true North Korean story of love, escape and freedom; and Olga Tokarczuk’s 1996 novel Primeval and Other Times. I’d read Jennifer Croft’s 2018 translation of Tokarczuk’s essayistic novel, Flights, which inventively explores the psychology of travelling, and Antonia Lloyd-Jones’ 2020 translation of Tokarczuk’s quirky detective thriller, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, and loved both. I purchased Croft’s 2022 translation of Tokarczuk’s magnum opus, The Books of Jacob, just before going abroad but it was too heavy to bring along. I bought a Kindle copy of the shorter Primeval (also translated by Lloyd-Jones) and though I’m not big on e-reading I was again immediately captivated by Tokarczuk’s writing—at the level of the sentence, as well as by the grand sweep of her story. Primeval is a mythical Polish village populated by eccentric archetypal characters. It is devastated time and again by history and yet there is a “counter dream, full of creaturely magic and wonder.” The work is reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism in One Hundred Years of Solitude, though more to do with the grand clash between modernity/masculinity and nature/femininity than family sagas, and it’s as real-feeling as it is fabular. Tokarczuk is an original; one of the living writers I’m most drawn to at present. I reread Primeval on the long flight back to Canada and will soon turn to The Books of Jacob. 

I came home to several packages of books that had arrived in my absence. Two poetry collections that I’d edited: A History of Touch by Erin Emily Ann Vance, haunting poems that interrogate the female body in folklore, pop culture, and history; and Cage of Light by Ned Baeck, elegiac pieces that reflect on love and estrangement, addiction, pain and recovery. Both are fine collections that I’d read closely in manuscript and was delighted to hold and revisit in book form. I also received my order of Paul Bélanger’s Fernando Pessoa in Montreal, a bilingual collection of prose poems that straddle the ground between philosophy and fiction, sensitively translated by Antonio D’Alfonso. Bélanger’s poems are a stimulating accompaniment to Pessoa’s brilliant and disturbing masterwork, The Book of Disquiet, a book I read in pieces in order to properly digest them. From colleague James Deahl I received a copy of The Confederation Poets: The Founding of Canadian Poetry from 1880 to the First World War, an anthology that adroitly appraises, in Deahl’s characteristic clarion writing, the “Romanticism of the original dream” in the poetry of seventeen founding Canadian poets, and argues for what they bring to 21st century readers: a lot. From Gaspereau Press I received my order of the beautifully produced debut collection of poems by Michael Goodfellow, Naturalism, an Annotated Bibliography. I’d come across Goodfellow’s poems in online publications and each time was blown away by their unusual beauty: “The wind has hands for everything. / The sky was deaf but it could read / the wind’s lips. Whisper ran through them / the way geese turn south. The deep / where all the brightest days are dusk …” One can weep from lines like these. 

A number of books that I’d put on hold at the local library were timed to my return. So I’m now listening to the audio version of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquillity in the car. I’m not as proficient an ‘audio-reader’ as visual reader, but I do enjoy the accompaniment of a book while driving. And Mandel’s work is easy to access, relevant and redemptive. In worlds that are always on the threshold of awful and irreversible change, her characters find meaning in mystery and coincidence. Her style is largely locked-in conversational, but there’s lyricism in it as well. Over the weekend, I finished John Banville’s latest crime novel, April in Spain, featuring the pathologist-protagonist, Dr. Quirke. Too gratuitously salacious for my taste. But Banville, who’s been lauded as the “heir to Proust, via Nabokov,” is a stylist, and he crafts a slick page-turner. 

Next up are Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They are Changing the World, by Eliza Reid—First Lady, by marriage, of Iceland. (I’m a fan of most things Icelandic, particularly the novels of Halldór Laxness); music, late and soon: A Memoir by Robyn Sarah; The Most Cunning Heart by Catherine Graham; Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour; Finger to finger and In the Bowl of My Eye—the latest poetry collections by Keith Garebian, and Carmelo Militano’s new prose work, The Patina of Melancholy. Then there are the rereads, of which I have a good number of mainstays. So many titles, too little time.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash 

Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Her poems and creative nonfiction pieces have been widely published in Canada and internationally, recently in Arc online (Awards of Awesomeness), Bear Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Canadian Literature, Contemporary Verse 2 (forthcoming), Eclectica, Grain, Literary Review of Canada, Montréal Serai, Pinhole Poetry, Prairie Fire (forthcoming), Sepia, Waterwheel Review, and White Wall Review. Her collection, Swoon (Guernica Editions), won the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry. Her latest poetry collection is Shape Taking (Ekstasis Editions, 2021). Her hybrid Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, is forthcoming with Guernica Editions in 2023. 

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Finding the Form with Kristine Sahagun

Where does form begin and does it have a happy ending? I am twenty-five in second year, second time around, sitting in a short fiction class on love, sex and death. We’re talking about a book or a film and I’m waving my pen like a baton trying to complete my thoughts. I find myself spilling, a stutter, a pause—”…her memory of pain makes sense since I was sexually abused by my grandfather when I was four to seven.” The professor stands and shuts the door. I notice my classmates sitting up straighter, some lean forward, some back. We are still a room full of strangers in September. This is the first time I hear the secret I’d held for so long. My voice was my own, yet it wasn’t. I was expecting shame, pity, regret. But I only felt this weight lift from my chest. And for the rest of the year, our class became a therapy session, where people felt safe to speak about what they held close. Did form begin then?

I am twenty-six out of school, with a Keppra prescription sifting inside me, whiskey hidden in travel mugs on the morning commute. In an effort to lift my spirits, my best friend, Kristina, takes me to Bob McNally’s for a reading from an Icelandic author. She shows me a flyer of a competition—write a 250 word story based on this photo prompt and win a trip to Iceland! I download the photo of Harpa Concert Hall. It looks like a dream.

At home, I plug myself in at the dinner table and play Olafur Arnalds on repeat, wanting to heal but not knowing how. Wanting to write again, but my brain is a fog of twisting tree flesh that only calms if I swallow a pill I can hardly afford, whose side effects make me want to stay in bed and never get up. “Kristine, come have breakfast.” My mum at the foot of my bed. “Don’t you have work today? I’ll drive you to the station.”

I am thankful for Kristy, my boss during this time and now good friend, who understood how every step was made of lead. “Kristine, let’s go have a tea break. Are you cold? I have a scarf.”

At twenty-seven the story prompt becomes a poem and Iceland stays a dream. But the photo nestles in my head, an unexpected calm through the nights. Is this where form began?

Maybe it’s more specific. I am twenty-eight and it’s December. My house is dry, my head is clear and dad turns on the light so I don’t write in the dark. The poem becomes a one-page story on the glow of my screen. Charlotte starts out as Beth, but Tomas is the same. And they end their scene sitting at a piano with the curtain stirring.

DAD: What are you writing?

ME: I don’t know yet.

DAD: That’s fine. You’ll get there. Here, have some dragon fruit.

Can I write this truth, tell the world of strangers a story that my father can never know? Please, tell me. What is the right thing to do?

I am thirty, back in school, but with a fresh head on straight shoulders. Beth becomes Charlotte, and Benny is born. I couldn’t help adding my dog, Arnie, in there somewhere. I am sitting in Innis College with a cup of black coffee I brought from home, sending voice messages to my boyfriend, Chris, in between classes. And I’m taking a fiction workshop where we’re asked to build a story that started years ago.

I think of my grandfather.

I am afraid.

Chris texts me: You can do this, Kit.

Yes, but do I want to?

I am thirty-two, finally graduating, and I’m sitting in a bubble tea shop with my head clear, pages of my story marked up. Lines crossed. Words added then taken away. This story won’t leave me alone.

And there is the professor’s thick scrawl: I think this needs to be told.

Yes, but who will read it? Who will care?

Maybe this is where form began; in the hope of being held and accepted.

There’s a pandemic, and when it releases its hold for a heartbeat, I head out with a group of writers on a retreat to Niagara on the Lake. Look at me. Kristine, writing freely again with no lightning storms weighing her down. We spend the days on writing sprint sessions, and nights with bottles and music. Our voices echo around the rooms of the rented house where the floors creak and K-pop music videos blare on the tv. I step outside with two friends, tipsy but controlled.

This is what happiness looks like:

  • – How is the story going?
  • – Guys, I hate it.
  • – Why? Too close?

Yes. It’s too close. It has always been too close. My story is Icarus staring into the sun, Orpheus at the mouth of a cave, Atlas clutching Earth as if she would disappear once he let go.

Form ends when the story feels right, when I exhale and hold it out. After hours on end of self-loathing, sprints of genius or quiet lulls, sitting back, sipping coffee, reading the same lines again and again, maybe then the ending will come. Now, thirty-five. Give it a new ending, send it out, find a home for it.

Now, thirty-six. I am a completely different person. No longer a poem of Beth, and now not even Charlotte. But every word wrung out of me was real. Connie Converse taking twelve steps; days at the piano, childhood ballet memories, my nightmares, friends hidden like easter eggs, and cups and cups and cups.

READER: This is good. I can feel it.

WRITER: Thank you. But is it right?

Will it ever be right?

Kristine Sahagun is a second generation Filipino-Canadian, living with epilepsy and a dog. Her work has appeared in The Hart House Review, Raconteur Magazine, and The Antigonish Review. She wishes she can speak Japanese and is working on her first novel. 

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Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

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