Month: October 2023

Finding the Form with Colette Maitland

It is in the doing, i.e. process, that I discover a story’s form. For me, form almost always springs from character development. The more time I invest getting to know my character or characters, the clearer the path forward.

            Case in point: Miss Touchy Feely (MTF), who appeared in a previous story, Overtime, where the main character of that piece, Axel Connor, referred to her as MTF. (He didn’t know her name either.) Currently, I’m working on a linked story collection, so it was only a matter of time before I’d write a piece from MTF’s point of view. I began by taking stock of what had been revealed about her in Overtime. She was a police constable in small town Kanawasaguay. She didn’t grow up locally. She and her work partner, Constable Saunders, had been called to an apartment complex in the evening to speak with Axel’s mother, Mable, regarding her suicidal thoughts. Axel described MTF as having a mole above her upper lip. MTF assessed and provided comfort to Mable while Saunders spoke to Axel. I also knew the ‘now’ of MTF’s story would occur during the same day as the ‘now’ of Axel’s story. I needed to understand more about MTF before I could begin to write: an actual name for a start, but also more about her job, colleagues, private life and relationships.

Photo by Alina Rubo on Unsplash

I began by researching policing, reading Gender and Community Policing: Walking the Talk, by Susan L. Miller. I took notes. I looked up information on-line about how one becomes a police constable in Ontario. I scrawled questions in my notebook – “At what point in the day do we take up with MTF?” “We know she’s not ‘from town’ – so where does she come from?” “How does she get on with her family – parents? Sibs?” “Could she be called to a local business to deal with some sort of situation?” I drew up a list of questions for two recently retired local police constables who’d agreed to speak to me. I took more notes, made a list of words related to policing: suspicion, community, rapid response, briefings, shifts, crimes, delinquency, etc. What if MTF was called out to investigate a minor crime at the beginning of her shift? A mink stole I’d once seen out front of a local business in my town came to mind. From my notebook: “there’s a junk shop on main street … outside the door they’ve set up a mannequin, headless…one of those sewing mannequins? – check proper name – displaying a fur stole – a ratty stole – hard to know what kind of fur … and the teen … has squirted a bottle of ketchup all over it in protest … the store owner … will know who the kid is…” Now there were three characters – MTF (still nameless), the kid, and the owner of the junk shop, but the ketchup bottle had quickly morphed into an aerosol can of red paint. I’d yet to scratch the surface of MTF’s private life.

Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash

            Everything was fluid, I hadn’t written a word of the story. The characters needed development/depth. I scribbled more notes, questions, and came up with a name for MTF (Cathee), the shopkeeper (Rona Blunt). I identified the teenaged girl. So many puzzle pieces in my notebook, in my mind. Still, others were missing. Who were Cathee’s people? What happened in her past, what’s happening now in her private life? What if her parents divorced when Cathee was a teenager? Why? A great aunt appears. What if Cathee’s great aunt, now living in a retirement home, was instrumental in some way I’m not yet privy to during that period of domestic upheaval? How might all these factors impact or affect Cathee’s behaviour on this particular day?

Photo by Damla Özkan on Unsplash

            What I know as I sit down to begin the first draft is that MTF, first name Cathee, last name undecided, will drive the narrative. I’m starting to see a shape. Cathee will appear at the junk shop, now called Vintage Chic. She’ll question the owner, Rona Blunt. At some point Cathee will have to deal with the kid. This story will wrap up before Cathee appears at Mable Connor’s apartment complex.

            Everything’s still fluid, but I feel ready to let the characters play. Something Anne Lamott wrote comes to mind: “Just don’t pretend you know more about your characters than they do, because you don’t. Stay open to them. It’s teatime and all the dolls are at the table. Listen. It’s that simple.” (Bird By Bird)

            Or that hard, depending on the day.

Colette Maitland has published two books: Keeping the Peace and Riel Street. Her short story “Downsizing,” was published in Best Canadian Stories 2021 and received the Metcalf/Rooke Award for best short story in that anthology.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

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A Conversation with Dagne Forrest, Winner of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

Kim Jernigan, former TNQ editor, interviews Dagne Forrest whose poem “Abecedarian with Sharpened Vision” won first prize in the 2023 Occasional Verse Contest.

KJ: Which came first, the form or the subject matter?

DF: For me, the subject matter always comes first. I’m usually pulling on several threads of thought and find my way to a poem. In this case, I think many things came together in ways I couldn’t have predicted. I’d been exploring the notion of eyes for a while, and had in mind a piece about three generations – my grandmother, my father, and me – who shared identical irises (described in the poem that resulted). I had some prose fragments and notes in a folder that I’d set aside.

At the same time, I did get up one morning in very early spring, and when I looked outside, the frost-covered ground was almost blanketed in birds, all of them slowly lifting and lowering their wings. That image led me directly to the opening as well as to the fringe of eyelashes and the blinking that ended up in this piece.

Finally, I was listening to a science podcast one day about how hummingbirds process visual information differently from other animals, including other birds, and I was beguiled by this idea. That’s definitely when the earlier threads I’d been gathering really started to make sense. A yellow bird had been knocking on my window some mornings, and was destined to arrive at the end of the poem, unlocking or unfurling the path I followed to get there.

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash

In terms of form, I was reading quite a few abecedarians around this time, and I very much wanted to try one. This poem felt like a strong candidate, as I found myself with an abundance of concrete visual imagery and several thematic layers to explore, and I felt the discipline of an established form would keep me from overwriting.

It was important to me to write a fairly tight and even line, as part of that discipline. I’ve read some abecedarians with wildly different line lengths, and my brain feels they are a bit of cheat (perhaps unfairly!). As a poet, I more often write regular line lengths than not, and here it felt especially important to me. It was a challenge to stick to the form and a regular line length, while still striving for a piece that felt very natural and organic (which the subject matter seemed to demand).

I have yet to try another abecedarian, and am intrigued to see what comes of it when I do find another another poem bubbling up that feels right for the form.

Photo by Clicker Babu on Unsplash

KJ: As you may know, the contest is named for, and in memory of, my father, Nick Blatchford, an occasional poet himself, lover of nature and birds—he would strew birdseed saying “Birds of a feather, flock together!”. He would have loved the way you’ve connected your father’s donated lenses enhancing the recipient’s vision with the enhanced vision of birds. Where did that inspiration come from?

DF: I love knowing that about your father, Kim, that’s such a lovely image! It brings to mind St Francis and the Birds, a painting by Sir Stanley Spencer.

This is definitely a case of a very long gestation for a poem that came out of themes that have been on my mind for years.

My father died very suddenly just weeks before my youngest child was due to have open heart surgery as a baby. It was a traumatic period, and while so much of those weeks and months is lost to me, I remember very clearly the ceremony for families of organ donors that I attended with my family. We were so grateful to know that someone had their vision restored thanks to the gift of my father’s corneas, and it led me to wondering for years what it meant that someone else was seeing with my father’s eyes, in a sense. It left me with a real sense of longing for his lost experiences and recollections, as much as the person who’d been my father.

Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

KJ: Did you choose this poem particularly for the OV contest? If so, why?

DF: I love the title and the notion of this contest in honour of your father, Kim, and reading the selected poems and interviews from previous years is a real delight. Although a great poem can give you all you need, I’m always hungry for the backstory and love delving into why a poet made the choices they made with a given piece.

I felt that my poem was both a response to an occasion or happening in my life, and a way to make many ordinary, mundane aspects of our lives special through noticing them, so it gave me enough confidence to give it a whirl. What a lovely decision that has turned out to have been!

KJ: We appreciate both morning and mourning contexts you’ve created—where did that inspiration come from?

DF: If I’m honest, I never saw the morning/mourning parallel in real time. It all happened very organically, and it’s so satisfying to have you point that out now. The process of working on the poem was definitely a way to revisit the grief that I’d deferred experiencing for many years. 

The early minutes after waking occupy a strange space of their own, and that was the mood I was keen to convey for the opening and ending (the middle part of the poem is naturally much clearer in focus). That very particular kind of liminal space where the past, present and even potential futures can mix together, is really intriguing to me, which brought to mind the zoetrope as the starting point of the poem’s final line.

KJ: Is this poem part of a larger collection you’re working on?

DF: The poem is included in a chapbook that I’m trying to find a publisher for, but as someone who has yet to put out a first collection, it feels very fluid. If I’m not successful with the current incarnation, I’ll develop another.

In the meantime, I’m just concentrating on the poems that seem to demand to be written. Those largely sprang out of my own life in the first five or six years of writing poetry (and I came late to poetry, in my forties), but lately I’ve been obsessed with a series of twenty self portraits by the painter Frank Auerbach that garnered media coverage early in 2023. Auerbach is in his nineties and doing some of the most profound and dizzyingly inspirational work of his career. I adore the paintings he has created and have been in “conversation” with some of them for a series of poems, but I’m also just awed by the heights his creativity is reaching in his tenth decade.

I’m definitely changing gears and feel that liminal space I mentioned before. Both of our children have had serious health/life issues to navigate, one of them since birth, and they are both in their twenties now and really finding their own lives (though my husband and I aren’t quite empty nesters yet!). It’s a time of great possibility in a world that can feel very dispiriting and ugly, if still full of wonder. Poetry keeps me focused and provides a different kind of purpose. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

DAGNE FORREST’s poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. In 2021 she was one of 15 poets featured in Canada’s Poem in Your Pocket campaign. She belongs to Painted Bride Quarterly’s editorial and podcast teams, a US-connection originally forged through a mentoring relationship.

Header photo by Mark Olsen on Unsplash

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A Conversation with Linda Hatfield, Runner-Up of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

Barb Carter, Consulting Editor of The New Quarterly, sat down with Linda Hatfield, who’s poem “Mondays with My Dad” was  the runner-up of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

Barb: As a former Lead Poetry Editor of The New Quarterly, now a Consulting Editor, I continue to act as a poetry editor and help select poems for publication in the magazine.  In addition, I have the privilege of helping adjudicate the Occasional Verse Contest. I cannot express what a gift the latter responsibility is.  Finding a poem like “Mondays With My Dad,” among this year’s entries and celebrating its choice as a winning poem makes my position with the magazine a joy.  

     Linda, your poem resonates with me more than I can say.  It brings back to me visits to my now deceased mother-in-law at a nearby nursing home.  My mother-in-law was an unexpected gift when I married my husband.  I grew to love her deeply over the years of our marriage (forty-three… my husband passed away in 2012). She was a gentle active woman well into her nineties.  Picture a white-haired independent grandmother up to her elbows in flour, baking special shortbread cookies for her grandchildren and brim full of stories to entertain them when she came to visit and/or babysit at a moment’s request. I watched my husband’s heart break a little more with each visit to the nursing home where we placed her, having moved her from Windsor (where she resided) to Kitchener where we had made our home. We wanted her close to help try and ease her descent into dementia. We couldn’t. The poignancy of your poem underlines the insoluble dilemma of being unable to help her. Your candid poem, well-crafted and moving, encourages one to return to it again and again, discovering a relatable nuance each time.

 I like the familiarity of the title.  It reminds me of Mitch Albom’s book, Tuesdays with Morrie. Can you tell me how you chose it?  

Linda:   My father, a physician, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995.  He saw his own MRI and knew that he was “done for”.  Dementia is a cruel disease that results in ever diminishing language skills, behavioural and mood changes, and of course, fading memory and cognition, all of which makes for awkward visits.  Early in the journey, my family (four girls and my mother) were struck by how quickly we all felt abandoned by our support community. When Dad was placed into long-term care in 2001, very few friends or family members felt comfortable spending time with him. Determined to be there for him, we daughters each took one day of the week, and my mother took the remainders to ensure he had contact with a friendly face every single day.

I am familiar with Tuesdays with Morrie, and acknowledge the connection, although it wasn’t intentional, at least not consciously. I was simply trying to capture the ritual of my weekly visits. My assigned day changed over the eight years he was in care, so Monday isn’t significant in any intended way.  It was always a weekday, though, and as I was a full-time teacher back then, it always came at the end of a long and often challenging day of work. So, my “Dad Day” was wrapped up in a complicated sense of duty as his daughter, of being a “team player”—supporting my mom and sisters—as well as a deep love and desire to ease the isolation, in some small way, of a man who had always been there for me.

Photo courtesy of NCI on Unsplash

Barb: The title is gentle, quotidian. The reader eases into the poem, but immediately the first stanza grips the reader, as she acknowledges the plight of the speaker: Duty calls and I reply,/battling buses and exhaust,/ exhaustion and resentment.  Mondays with Dad are not necessarily pleasant occasions. And then the final four lines startle the reader into recognition with the subtle religious overtones that will move throughout the poem.  The speaker is heading to a place called Bethany, where some say the (nearly) dead/can be temporarily raised/by the miracle of visitation.  How would you describe the tone of your poem, the intent of those four lines?  

Linda:  From the outset, our experience of long-term care was filled with frustration and concern. Three of us worked in the education system and were appalled at the lack of programs for dementia patients.  Amongst ourselves, we described it as “death by boredom”.   Residents were often ignored or forgotten, left sitting in hallways with absolutely no stimulation.

These lines attempt to capture the sense that our visits with our dad not only raised his level of engagement with the world, but also raised the hopes and spirits of anyone around us who would hear our chatter or singing or other efforts to stimulate a response from our dad.  We befriended many of the other residents on his floor (not all of whom had dementia) and made efforts to acknowledge and honour them.  Seeing them respond to our care and attention, however briefly, felt truly miraculous.  The fact that his care facility had Bethany in its name was a gift in terms of expressing the concept of reanimation.

Photo courtesy of rosefirerising on Flickr

Barb: Tell me about the use of parentheses.  I admire your clever use of whispers under the breath.  I like how they continue throughout the poem.

Linda: Thank you!  As the poem unfolded, I found myself needing/wanting to add depth to the story I was telling but didn’t want it to feel too cluttered or wordy.  I found the parentheses useful in providing that detail as a kind of interior dialogue—or sidebar whispering as you worded it.  It also serves to emphasize that there was next to no back and forth to the communication with my dad; he was unable to speak for at least the last five or six years of his life.

Barb:  Stanza two is excruciating in its all too intimate sensual detail of the nursing home: the smell of loneliness, /the sounds of helplessness,/and the walls the colour of neglect/in the catacomb rooms of long-term care.  Why catacomb rooms of long-term care? Is there an intended echo back to the stanza that comes before?

Linda: Yes. The reference to raising Lazarus in ancient Bethany and to that time in early Christian history when burial tombs were hidden from the Romans is intentional.  The image of the cramped, partitioned chambers of the catacombs is intended to be a metaphor for Lazarus’ tomb as well as the tiny rooms within a long-term care facility, in which residents are largely left alone —their “resting places”.  Those rooms affect a kind of burial of who they are/were before they came to long-term care.  I visited the catacombs of Rome when I was young, and I remember the winding corridors as dark and bleak, hidden from the light and joy of the living world.  I couldn’t wait to leave them, and I confess I often felt the same way about my dad’s facility. Every visit was an act of will, to overcome the trepidation.  So many people would say, “I don’t know how you do it.” While meant to be sympathetic, comments like this one often stirred anger, instead. It was no easier for my family and me than it would have been for them.  But my love for my father would not allow me to give in to self-pity or self-preservation. Being abandoned is my number one fear.  I couldn’t let that be his experience.

Photo credit to Daniel Mennerich.

Barb: Anyone who has visited a long-term care facility recognizes the speaker’s walk through the halls to find her Dad in stanza three.  What do you hope we learn about the speaker in this stanza? 

Linda: I am a huge empath. I easily take on the pain and anxiety of others, to my detriment.  I hope readers can sense that burden, and themselves chafe at the thought of those poor souls simply sitting there, desperate for attention.  Walking past them on my way to see my dad was one of the most difficult parts of my weekly visit. It would have been easy to blame the staff, but that is not fair.  The work of caregivers is undervalued and underpaid. Their inability to fully address the needs of their clients is a systemic problem. And, based on my more recent experience with my mom in long-term care, not one that is going to get better soon.

Barb: I am moved by the intimacy of your poem, the candour, the diction so aptly chosen.  Stanza four reveals tenderly the love of the speaker for her father.  Seeing his face lit by the afternoon sun–/looking less his eighty years elevates him from the other residents.  As the description of him continues in stanza five and six we learn he has soft hands and a gentle touch.  And then the big reveal occurs in stanza six.  Dad was a doctor. How fiercely ironic that he could not heal himself.  For whom should the listener/reader feel more sympathy, the father or the daughter?

Linda:  I wouldn’t want one to garner more sympathy than the other, in all honesty.  The plight of both was excruciating.  It’s impossible to know how my dad truly felt about his circumstances; I don’t believe he ever imagined that he’d find himself there.  He was a well-known public figure in our community—a pioneer in the field of medical ethics, dying with dignity and treating the whole person.  He was a BIG presence—and I don’t believe his ego ever allowed for the possibility that he would fade into obscurity. I’m sure when he first realized his fate, he was as terrified of what lay ahead as we were. At some point, however, he was no longer aware of what was happening while we were not spared.  Still, our family believes that through it all, there were moments of grace—given and received—in a touch or smile, a moment of emotional or spiritual connection, if not an intellectual one.  That’s what got us through it—believing the man we knew and loved was still “present” and had something to offer.

Barb: Is the poem about the speaker or the father? It is she who paints the hell on earth in which he lives.  The allusion to the raising of Lazarus in stanza one haunts the poem.  How badly does she want to be the angel she imagines him expecting…/to rescue him from this purgatory?

Linda:  I believe the poem is about both of us, about the most basic elements of human connection and the bond between parent and child.  In writing it, I felt the need to be his witness, one who was accompanying him on his journey who could testify afterwards to his courage and humility.

The possibility of an angel watching over him provided me a source of comfort and wonder.  He really did often look up and over my shoulder, as though focused on another “presence”. If an angel, I imagined that he might welcome it to set him free.  Each visit pulled him a tiny step back from that precipice, so perhaps we were keeping him from that release. I did have dreams in which my father was cured, that he was raised from the “death” of his mind, that his disease was no longer a chasm that separated us. So perhaps I, too, subconsciously wished for that angel to lead him gently away.

Photo courtesy of Bournemouth Borough Council on Flickr

Barb: We see the interaction between the two through the daughter’s eyes. We feel him gently stroking her fingers…silently counting the joints/like a bone-bead rosary, /examining the upturned palms,/his touch, a wordless prayer. What a powerful, brilliant simile. Is she or is she not a believer?

Linda: I was raised in the United Church, a denomination with a liberal and progressive view of Christianity.  I was very involved in my congregation, in youth groups, choir and serving on committees.  I also attended a post-secondary, four-month program living in community and exploring faith with other young people. These experiences helped me to formulate my set of beliefs.  Although many of the religious images in the poem reference Catholic terms or practices, I personally, embrace a very ecumenical understanding of faith and find beauty and meaning in a variety of spiritual traditions. My father was also raised in the United Church and was very much a man of faith, and yet also a man of science.  That particular image attempts to demonstrate the meshing of the two—the doctor performing a ritual that is at once physical and spiritual. It also represents “old memory”, the last bastion against the ravages of the disease.

Barb:  How well the poem is crafted, constructed effectively to build to its understandable, but devastating climax.   Immersed in the reality of the long-term facility once more, we visit with them the table /where supper is served/in blobs of muted hue/(unrecognizable), /bathed in gravy.  But it is the final religious allusion that devastates.

…

Like a penitent bird, his mouth opens

and I offer him a bite,

(his body, broken)

and then a sip

(his blood, shed)

a strange Eucharist, this—

a communion of souls

without words,

without blessing,

on Mondays with my Dad.

Please comment on the deft conclusion of your poem.

Linda: At some time in my teens, I developed an understanding of the eucharist (communion) as the defining moment of Christ’s life, proving his divinity and humanity at the same time.  It is both a deeply religious ritual that hints at the promise of eternal life, and the acknowledgement of a most basic human need: the communal sharing of food.  I remember often feeing that feeding my dad also embodied those two realities: at every meal given with love and tenderness, not only was he the recipient of physical nurture, but of spiritual nurture as well.  It felt like a “holy” experience.

Barb:  What prompted the writing of Mondays With My Dad? Is this poem a stand-alone or part of a series?

Linda: I have written a few other poems about my experiences with my father as he struggled with Alzheimer’s.  Almost all of them have a spiritual dimension and religious references. I think I wrote them to capture the feelings of those years in a way that is deeply personal, but perhaps also universal—something others (like yourself) who have undergone a similar journey can appreciate.  Writing poetry is cathartic for me.

I have also written a few poems about my mother’s experience with dementia and long-term care. They may one day make it into a collection that I’m building of other such spiritual experiences in my life.

Photo courtesy of denisbin on Flickr

Barb: What are you writing now?

Linda:  I am part of a writing group called The Espresso Poetry Collective.  We gelled after taking a class together just before the pandemic hit and decided to self-publish an anthology called “Uncommon Grounds”.  We continue to meet regularly to workshop new poems and are considering putting together another anthology in the next couple of years.  I belong to another, less formal writing group that meets periodically to workshop other genres of writing, as well.

Since retiring seven years ago, I have also embarked on writing a Creative Non-Fiction/Memoir about my mother, her mother and grandmother, and their influence on my sisters and me. My Grannie died when I was just a year old, so I didn’t know her, and my mother never knew her own grandmother.  But we have come to believe that we all share/d similar traits.  I am attempting to examine these connections between women generations apart, and how biology and life experiences translate into behaviours/personalities that are passed down. It’s been a fascinating dive into my personal history and how the lives of my ancestors are still impacting my own life today.  I hope to bring it to the finish line in the next couple of years.

Linda Hatfield is a retired teacher who has been writing poetry since she was a teen and has begun penning a CNF/memoir. Her poems have been published in the ARTA magazine, the YYC POP online exhibit, and the Wine Country Writers’ Festival Anthology in 2021. She is a member of the Espresso Poetry Collective, who self-published an anthology called Uncommon Grounds during the pandemic. When not engaged with the written word, Linda loves to read, travel, garden, and create with paint, fabric and photography.  She lives in Calgary with her husband, Rick Smith.

Photo by David Sinclair on Unsplash

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