Month: December 2022

Basma Kavanagh’s Writing Space

When the best seat in the house isn’t in the house: in praise of makeshift spaces

It’s a long story, but the big drafty room with plastic covering its large, unfinished windows is sometimes a difficult place to write. Perhaps it’s too dense with possibility—my messy piles of textiles, paper, and art projects. Books overflow the shelf. I get lost before I start.

I choose a room with only two walls, no desk, no lamp. For more than six months, I sit every day in an old wicker chair in my porch. My elderly laptop won’t work there—I don’t like the humidity, dear—and despite its name, it doesn’t really like being in my lap. I sit with my notebook and pencil, interrupted by insects and breezes, writing and reflecting. I make surprising progress on a collection of essays from the creaky chair.

Once a week, my friend and I go to a nearby café to write. Alert and restless in the not-quite comfortable chair, I squint in river-light glaring through the windows, endure the emotional rollercoaster that is pop music, the general hubbub. These slight discomforts activate a strange, dreamy state of focus—I write twice as much as I would in an afternoon at home.

When my partner goes away for work I unleash an avalanche of papers and books, the wild detritus of work-in-progress blanketing the dining table, couch, floor. I fill the bed with a person-sized drift of books. Titles that don’t usually touch find themselves in proximity, whispering to one another. The whispering filters into dreams; odd and elegant notions emerge from this haphazard séance, the confusion of books and body.

I’m mostly a creature of habit; many of us are. Routines can be helpful, but to paraphrase Ellen Glasgow, the difference between a rut and a grave is depth. I spend many hours in the bright, drafty room at the too-small desk in my desperately uncomfortable chair, and writing ensues, but whenever I can shape a new little nest somewhere fresh, I do, and it is good.

Basma Kavanagh is a poet, visual artist, and letterpress printer who lives and works in Nova Scotia, in Mi’kma’ki. She has published two collections of poetry, Distillō (Gaspereau, 2012) and Niche (Frontenac, 2015), and a book-length poem, Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots (Frontenac 2018). 

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Finding the Form with Anne Hopkinson

“Testimony, March 3 2011”

I attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Vancouver. It was overwhelming; the survivors, the stories, the crowd of indigenous people, the tears. At home I wrote pages and pages, all raw writing, a flood of sentences. I wrote by hand in a semi-legible scribble, drew arrows to connect ideas, doodled, crossed out words, and kept going until I was toast.

I read it over and remembered what Alex Leslie, Vancouver poet, had said years before in a writing workshop. She said, “Shrink your stories into poems.” Cut five pages of wild prose into three, then two, then one. The shrinking process makes you select the strongest words, clearest images, and most compelling ideas. At one page the writer decides either to write it as a poem or prose piece. I chose poetry. Which form brings out the theme, sound, and rhythm best, without dominating the meaning? I experimented with a few traditional forms first: pantoum, ghazal, sonnet. Betsy Warland says in Breathing the Page that to find the intrinsic form of your poem you must find a word or phrase that encapsulates the poem. Becoming an ally was my phrase. The skating theme was clear, and I chose which details of testimony I would use. Free verse felt right, content uppermost in the poem. Finding form includes finding voice. Because it was a personal day of reckoning, a day of remorse and shame, I had to write in first person. I had to face the truth myself in lines of poetry.

 

“Mother’s Day, Kigeme Refugee Camp”

This poem came from a diary I wrote while volunteering in Rwanda in 2014. I filled three notebooks in three weeks, some of it teaching material, some shopping lists, letters, Kinyarwanda vocabulary, and my observations of peoples’ lives in Rwanda after the genocide. I remembered what Ray Hsu, Vancouver poet, said about generating poetry. He said, “repurpose your work.” Take text you have already written and distill it into poetry. This worked well as I had already examined those feelings, sensations, and ideas in prose. My prose piece on the same material won the Non-Fiction prize for the Victoria Writing Society contest in 2019. I repurposed the text into poetry by focusing on one mother and her child. The time I spent in Kigeme refugee camp provided a bank of sensory information from which to draw. I chose free verse because of the gravity of the story. Denise Levertov calls it “fidelity to experience” when form and content integrate. The serious circumstances of women and children in that part of the world can’t be lightened by rhyme or compressed into a sonnet. There was too much to say for 14 lines. Free verse allowed me to make simple statements of the tasks she must do to survive – no clever wording or extended metaphor, no literary devices or tangents to dilute the meaning. 

Anne Hopkinson writes poetry in Victoria, and is President of Planet Earth Poetry, a reading series of 26 years. She is a nature lover, book addict, and water rat. 

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Finding the Form with Traci Skuce

I’m always teetering on the edge of fiction and non-fiction. Trolling my own life for stories and then spinning them into fiction. Sometimes this means combing through images or events that happened long ago, but other times it means opening to a story that presents itself in real time. “A Chorus of Injuries” is one such story.

Let me backtrack.

About a decade ago, I found this writing prompt from Dorothea Brande. Write what happened to you yesterday—in the third person. It’s an awesome prompt for many reasons—it teaches you about voice, story consciousness, interiority—and it means there’s always something to write about.

Fast forward to a May long weekend a half-dozen years ago. I did trip and fall outside the grocery when my little town was bustling in celebration—just like my protagonist Anna.

It should be said that, at the time, I was enthralled with all things Virginia Woolf. (She still enthrals me.) I love Woolf for all the reasons people love Woolf but am particularly in awe of the way her characters tumble through time. How the linear movement of the story (going to buy herself flowers) simply serves what’s excavated in deep time (Bourton and Peter Walsh and the cabbages).

So, when I sat down to write ‘what happened yesterday’, the day after I fell, I’d decided to adopt the close-close third point of view à la Virginia Woolf. This brought me to a place where my character not only experienced the shame of falling “over nothing” but the fall shook all her old injuries—both physical and emotional—from the depths of her body.

I’m always curious about the overlays and filters characters experience in a present moment. And what’s held in the body. In this story, I wanted to stir my character’s wounds, wake them up, show how deep they are, how they separate her from the aliveness of the world. 

Traci Skuce lives on Vancouver Island–on the traditional and unceded territories of the K’omoks First Nation. Her work has appeared in several literary journals throughout North America. In April 2020, her short story collection, Hunger Moon, was released by NeWest Press and was a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. 

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Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

Fugio – I flee. I flee two thousand years back in time to Saint Stephen, first Christian martyr, and in distance, a good league hence, in the footprints of Good King Wenceslas. I run away. As if compelled, I circle back again to the realities: Boxing Day, the quiet nurse, the room in ICU, and to the choir, my sister’s choir and to her, herself, lying in the room. I loop again and again back to the far entities, Stephen and Wenceslas, and to the near ones, there in the room. I am fleeing.

Looking back, of course I am in flight. I didn’t accept my sister’s death.  For a long time, I hosted a triumvirate of numbing agents: denial, avoidance, magical thinking.  I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t face it. When we slipped out of ICU, slid silently down the KGH elevators, exited the near-empty parking lot, and drove through the street-lit city, I was in a kind of shock. What about those next promising therapies? What had happened?

When we spoke to our brother, who lives in Labrador and is a musician, like Joll, he noted that she died on the Feast of Stephen. Boxing Day. The day that Good King Wenceslas looked out. He asked, rhetorically, how many times had she sung that Christmas Carol. Many times; there was no arguing that, and as days went on, the concreteness of this assertion grabbed hold and dragged me towards the starkness of it. I began to think about a poem.

 In a musical fugue, the first melody is repeated, “chased” by variations in second and subsequent voices, sometimes randomly, unpredictably, repetitively. In “Fugue”, a poem written in the recognized poetic form called a fugue, Saint Stephen marches through it all, chased by Wenceslas and all the rest.  Yet it was I who fled. 

Poems desire to be compelling; thoughts, memories, experiences crying for expression, are finally gathered into chosen lines and language. Joll’s death, though, did not present itself like other thought, memory or experience, or imagination or dream. It was a knot of torpor in the middle of me.  It took the facts about Stephen, 2000-year-old canonized saint, whose feast is Boxing Day, to set me on a path winding around and through the events of December 26th, the night of my sister’s death, on the Feast of Stephen. 

A fugue, as a form described, with exemplars, in the excellent Canadian resource, In Fine Form by Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, was the outcome of a personal and painful flight, put into a poem, Fugue.

And by the time Fugue was finished, I had wept and I had grieved – not that grief is a finite thing, for it is not. But I was able to accept that Joll was not going to be reached by text or phone. We weren’t going to be able to chat in person about her choir, her cat, her new red coat.

Poetry by Callista Markotich is published in TAR, Arc, Grain, The Nashwaak Review, TNQ, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and Room, and has received First and Second Awards and Honourable Mentions. Callista is a retired Superintendent Education, living gratefully on the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat in Kingston, Ontario. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. 

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Finding the Form with Hollay Ghadery

My poem, “Rebellion Box”, is a sestina and the title piece of my debut poetry collection, which is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023. I first learned about rebellion boxes while attending a lecture by historian Allan McGillivray at the Uxbridge Museum. These boxes were carved out of stove wood by men who’d been imprisoned at Fort Henry as a result of their involvement in the 1837 Rebellion. The boxes often included personal inscriptions. 

To be honest, I’m surprised I remember anything about what was said in the lecture. Not because it wasn’t interesting—it was, obviously—but because I had my eight-month-old daughter with me who was interested in everything except sitting quietly on my lap. I remember sweating with embarrassment while other attendees either gave me the stink-eye or sympathetically pursed-lipped looks. 

But the story of rebellion boxes did manage to stick with me. Not because I have any great knack for historic details, but because of the love story behind one particular box: the one Joseph Gould—a founding member of Uxbridge, Ontario—crafted for the woman he loved, Mary. Priopriety at the time made it so Joseph couldn’t communicate directly with Mary, so he instead wrote to Mary’s mother, sending her the box and obliquely inquiring after his love interest. 

The story of Joseph and Mary floated around my mind for a year or so. I suspect my fascination with it extended beyond enjoying a good romance and was rooted more firmly in my interest in examining the mores and values that bind us—an interest that can likely be traced back to my own identity as a biracial and bicultural woman. I’ve often felt, especially as a young adult, almost unbearable tension between what I want and what I am allowed to do. Who I am allowed to be.  

So when I had time, I did more research on the 1837 Rebellion and Joseph and Mary. I knew I wanted to write a poem because so much prose had been written about Joseph Gould and I didn’t see how I could add to it in any interesting way. 

Also, prose would require a level of sustained historical research I was not prepared to undertake. 

Also, love and poetry are a no-brainer combination. One of the most influential love poets I’ve ever encountered is Petrarch. He wrote many poems to Laura—the object of his unrequited affection. While thinking about “Rebellion Box”, I imagined Joseph wondered if his love was returned since—while Joseph would eventually end up with Mary—he was in prison. Who knew if Mary would wait for him? Who knew for certain the extent of her affection and if it would remain consistent? 

I started to think about how awful it must have felt, to be so young and in love and impotent. To be limited in your ability to even express how you feel because of familial and societal expectations.

In the end, the confining image of the box and the rigid sestina form made sense, though I would not have been able to articulate this sense at the time. I wouldn’t have been able to say I picked the sestina because Petrarch also used this form to write of his frustrations in love. These things aligned unconsciously. It was only later I could pick them out. 

What I knew at the time I wrote the poem was that I couldn’t get my thoughts straight and I have always gravitated to form to force my thoughts into order. When my mind is unruly, form poetry helps me plot a course to coherent expression. So I’m pleased that the form of “Rebellion Box” works on multiple levels, but I have to admit: I can’t help but feel as if this synchronicity has little to do with intention.

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023 and her short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in 2024. 

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What is Kelly Pedro Reading?

Black Dove by Colin McAdam

What is an airplane if not a story about people who wanted to fly?

As a writer (and I’m sure I’m not alone) I spend a lot of time living in my head, building alternate realities, processing my emotions on the page. And so, when I picked up Black Dove by Colin McAdam, a story structured in the form of a fairy tale about a father trying to write a different world for his son, it didn’t take long to get hooked. If you love a book that blends genres, this is the book for you.

I had read McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth and he also led a summer writing workshop group I was in where he helped me think more deeply about my characters and what makes them who they are. He’s done that beautifully here.

In Black Dove, 12-year-old Oliver lives in Toronto with his father, who’s a writer. His mother was a drunk who left the two and by the time we meet Oliver, his mother is dead and he’s being bullied by a group of boys at school. At some point, the story slides into a fairy tale, where Oliver has the power to overcome his past and change his future through gene editing. Like all good fairy tales there are kernels of wisdom woven throughout the story. At one point, Oliver’s father writes, “Maybe most people make up stories about who their loved ones are, and we never really know each other.”

For me, the book grapples with some central human questions: Can we fundamentally change who we are? Can we break free from our past? All fairy tales have a moral undertone and reading McAdam’s book, I wondered: If we try to change too much of ourselves, do we risk losing ourselves all together?

I’m a sucker for when form amplifies content and McAdam does that so well. Black Dove is broken into three parts that mirror the structure of a fairy tale — there is magic, there is good versus evil, and the beginning and end come together. The last book I read where form amplified content so well was Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.

McAdam’s writing is exquisite. As I write that it seems so vague. I’ve tried to pick out just one sentence to demonstrate its beauty but every sentence is hooked into the other like a carefully crocheted blanket. Unloop one piece and the rest unravel. It’s a testament to McAdam’s writing that every word has its place, every decision is intentional, and I’m reminded of my responsibility as a writer to have the same expectation for my own work. No filler words, no crutches. Just writing that transports the reader into a time and place, clutching them there until, as a writer, I’m ready to let them go.

Kelly Pedro’s fiction has appeared in PRISM and The New Quarterly. She was a finalist for the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. Her work has also been selected as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series. She’s currently revising a collection of linked short stories and lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, located on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbek, and Haudenosaunee peoples. You can find her on Twitter at @KellyPatLarge.

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