Month: January 2024

What’s Liz Harmer Reading?

I have just finished a book that a dear friend recommended: Faces in the Water by New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Published in 1961, Faces in the Water is a novel narrated by a woman living in a psychiatric asylum in the 1940s and 50s (I think), and has only the barest plot: she enters the hospital at around 20 years old and lives there for nearly a decade. She receives electroconvulsive therapy (which she dreads) and dehumanizing treatment, and faces the ongoing threat of a lobotomy, which she narrowly avoids. But the novel does not sensationalize any of this; instead, it meditates on the self and is a loving testimony about the other patients and their suffering. It’s mainly very sad and very poetic, and it so happens that Frame herself narrowly avoided receiving a lobotomy when, days before it was scheduled, she won a major literary prize and her life completely changed. I have been writing about my great-grandfather’s time in a similar institution in the mid-century, and about my own experiences with mental illness, so it felt close to home for me. Especially on the topic of loneliness and the need to have a coherent self, it is a gorgeous elaboration. Here’s an example of the prose: 

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“I was ashamed of my wholeness compared with Brenda’s fragmented mind scattered by secret explosion to the four corners of itself. I knew they had tried to bore holes in her brain to let the disturbing forces fly out, like leaves or demons from a burning tree. Who could make her whole? Where was the conjurer? I was powerless. I knew only a rotund cleric who might, on persuasion, produce a stream of silk handkerchiefs from a top hat.”

I am also reading a great deal of student work. One of the MFA students I’m advising–Tlotlo Tsamaase–is writing really interesting genre-mixing fiction, and I have the privilege of getting to work with her on her new novel-in-progress. Her first novel, called Womb City, comes out next month, and based on my knowledge of her prose and her inventiveness, I recommend her work very highly. 

Photo courtesy of iStock Getty Images. 

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Kathy Mak’s Writing Space

Like the way inspiration spontaneously emerges from a single grain of existence, my writing space is a simple, makeshift corner of the kitchen table. Sandwiched between a wall of house plants in pottery vases, and boxes of scribbles, doodles, scraps dating back from my childhood days, I work under the same fluorescent lights and clang of running water pots and pans. It is within this cavern of sounds that I’m able to create. Odd bits and pieces come to me at any time of the day, and I jot them down in my little red notebook. When it comes in the cold, rainy evening under a bus shelter, I use my phone to record these bursts and pen them in my notebook later. After dinner, I turn on my laptop to revise. The dark but glowing silence at night thrums in cadence to my own tapping. Being in this space of impromptu and homeliness makes me feel most at ease. Writing roots from a deep part of me and not everything may be seen as true in another’s eyes, but I aim to write from sincerity and care, the same notions this space has given me.

Kathy Mak_Author Photo

Kathy Mak is a writer and drawer. She is the author of chapbook Another Day (845 Press, 2020). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in a dozen literary journals including The /tƐmz/Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and PRISM International. She creates to capture fleeing moments of life and to reflect on her experiences. Visit her website: http://kathymak.weebly.com/

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John Adames’ Writing Space

The most interesting aspect of my writing space is a comfortable couch where I meditate before writing or revising my poems. I am a huge fan of Eckhart Tolle and every morning listen to one of his guided meditations that help to still the mind and allow for creative thoughts to come from a deeper place of pure being or what he calls an alert state of pure presence – a process for settling the mind similar to what Ted Hughes in Poetry in the Making says he acquired from fishing with a float:

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a “mental exercise in concentration on a small point, while at the same time letting your imagination work freely to collect everything that might concern that still point.”

Finally, I love being surrounded by my library where I can refer again and again to see how my favourite poets have dealt with a compositional issue I may be struggling with in a particular poem.

Photo Courtesy of iStock By Getty Images 

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Deepa Rajagopalan’s Writing Space

Orhan Pamuk said in an interview with the Paris Review that he thought that the place where he sleeps, should be different from the place where he writes. That the domestic rituals and details kill his imagination, and so he always had a little place outside the house. I sometimes imagine having a space like that, away from the dishes and the refrigerator and the laundry. But for now, I write in cafes, on trains, in hotel rooms during holidays, on long walks, on a chair beside the fireplace, and in my study. 

There’s a café near my place which I like because it is filled with people who, like me, sit there for hours doing things no one asked them to do: writing, drawing, building businesses from scratch. The café is loud and bright and has bad Wi-Fi, all of which is good for writing.

A lot of the untangling in my writing happens during long walks. When I am stuck in a story, an eight-kilometre walk usually fixes it. It helps me think about the idea without holding it too tightly. Sometimes, a friend or two would call me during the walk and I’d tell them that I’d call them back because I was thinking. There’s a trail behind my house that is flat and boring and long, all of which is good for thinking.

“The café is loud and bright and has bad Wi-Fi, all of which is good for writing.”

My favourite place in my house is a corner beside the fireplace on an orange chair. I usually sit there first thing in the morning, before dawn when the house is so quiet that I can hear my dog breathing, and I read or write or think.

I mostly write in my study, at my desk on an uncomfortable but pretty chair or on a comfortable but ugly lounge chair sandwiched between a window and my bookshelf. My books are organized in no particular order, but I always have a stack of emergency books on a floating shelf beside my desk at arms length. These are books that keep me going when I feel I don’t know how to write. I also have a small stack of magazines ad anthologies that I’ve been published in and little treasures from my daughter and my friends on the shelf. There are pictures on the wall, artwork from friends and strangers, and a few photographs I’ve taken.

A lot of writing is staring, so I have a few low maintenance, good looking plants scattered through the study: a monstera, couple of pothos, an anthurium. Sometimes, when I’m supposed to be writing, I stare at the plants, at the new leaves unfurling and think about their beauty, and how there’s so much beauty in this broken world, and how I simply want to tell the truth about this beauty in my writing.

Deepa Rajagopalan’s debut short story collection will be published in 2024 by the House of Anansi Press. Deepa has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @deerajagopalan. Visit her website: deeparajagopalan.com.

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Finding the Form with Janice McCrum

For me writing starts with an image I can’t get rid of, or a group of words that keep repeating themselves and won’t let me be. I have no idea where I’m going when I put the image into words, or when I record the line that’s almost become a mantra in my head. But when I put my pen to paper, that moment becomes the engine pulling the train cars, already filled with the words for the rest of the writing. Usually I don’t realize I’ve been gathering those moments for years. Whether happy, sad, frightening, sorted or confused, they’ve been there waiting, subconsciously. And if I try to avoid them, the whole page becomes a mess. I’ve learned they have a mind of their own and make their way known.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

In my poem, A Mother’s Will, the act of picking up my pen to sign my name unleased a flurry of images. I saw the homeless man standing on the stairway; my son’s cold feet; my obsession with socks; Elgar’s music depicting the important people in his life.

The poem took its own form and almost wrote itself. Line breaks came with my breathing, my sorrow and then my conviction.

I find my deepest emotions can only be expressed through poetry, where the impact of one word resonates and holds me, till I find the courage and often the joy, to unload the train cars and write on.

Janice McCrum’s poems and essays have appeared in Canadian, US and UK publications. Author of two children’s books, The Shifty Chef and The Boon Truck, she is currently working on a braided travel memoir set in South America.

Header photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Alexander Hollenberg

The germ of “Surgeon’s Knot” came, from all places, a lecture I was delivering on Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. If there’s one central, broken-record theme to all my teaching, it’s this: think hard about the relationship between form and content. On this particular day I was making my case for Pope’s sophisticated (or at least incessant) use of zeugma, a little-known and perhaps underappreciated figure of speech in which one word simultaneously applies to two others: “Alex lost his pen and his direction in life.” That’s a crude example, but still telling—the verb “lost” connects to both “pen” and “direction,” suggesting some unspoken relationship between the material and abstract. Here’s a better one from Pope:

Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law

Or some frail china jar receive a flaw,

Or stain her honor or her new brocade.

Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade, 

Or lose her heart, or necklace at a ball. (2.105-109)

For those of you who love close reading (everyone, right?), there are actually two zeugmas in there! The point, though, is that when I talk about zeugma in my class, I talk about it as a microcosm for what’s going on in the larger poem. Pope’s satire is deeply ambivalent: it is both a skewering of a certain type of gendered aristocracy and also a defense of it. And zeugma, if nothing else, asks its readers to pay attention to such ambivalence on the most granular of levels.

All this made me wonder what my own ‘figure-of-speech-as-microcosm’ poem might look like. I have a soft spot for poems that show you their bones, quietly asking that you look again and again. “Surgeon’s Knot” is certainly a poem about my dad, about fishing a lake that feels warmer and emptier each year, and about the ways we are intimately knotted and unknotted over the course of a life. But it is also about the struggle to write that love:

the connection of leader to line

must always end in chiasmus, the extra twist

obscuring line and leader.

Not a perfect knot

but it should last for the season.

Chiasmus is another one of those underappreciated figures of speech. Its name derives from the Greek chi, written as X, and it describes that moment when a phrase is repeated but in reverse order. Or another way of putting it, when a phrase, like the letter X, becomes the mirror image of itself: “leader to line… obscuring line and leader.” It’s a pretty good image of a knot and, yes, fathers and sons, sons and fathers, too.

Alexander Hollenberg is a professor of storytelling and Pushcart-nominated poet, whose work can be found in Grain, Riddle Fence, untethered, and Poetica. In 2021, he was longlisted for the CBC poetry prize and, more recently, won CV2’s 2-day poem contest.

Photos courtesy of Yannick Forest.

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Megan Callahan’s Writing Space

I once had a creative writing teacher who said he could write anywhere, as long as he had a window. At the time, I nodded and thought, of course! Who could write without a swatch of sky? A dusty sunbeam or street-side view? It seemed intuitive, somehow, that my creativity would be stunted without these basic elements, and I carried the belief with me for years. I sought out skylights, glass doors, and second-floor balconies. I wrote stories on park benches and sun-kissed stoops. But as I got older, and much busier, I found myself writing in poorly lit, sterile, underground places: in grim basement offices, on crowded metro platforms. I’d get home, read the bones of first drafts typed in bursts on my phone, and wonder where they’d come from.

I’ve learned that my best beginnings come together when my mind is restless and roaming. For something to happen, a certain amount of discomfort is required. Multiple times a day, I thumb notes on my phone: lists and scenes, sometimes chunky blocks of description. A snippet of dialogue overheard on the street. An idea sprung from a memory that bubbles up during a dull meeting. I’ve read that boredom and mind-wandering can move us into a state of daydream, where that creative spark lives, and this has definitely been my experience.

But when it comes to building something sturdy from those fragile parts, it would be a lie to say that I can write anywhere. When my Notes app is packed and I glimpse the outline of a story, I grab my laptop and write my first, exciting draft at the café around the corner. Finding quiet moments at home has been tricky since my daughter was born, so Florence Café has become a haven. The baristas are warm and friendly, especially with those of us deemed Regulars. And the windows? They’re large and southeast facing, which means early morning light and a clear view of passersby. I’m also an eavesdropper (aren’t all fiction writers?) and cafés, with their close tables and sleepy conversation, are ideal for that.

For me, editing—which, I once heard a novelist say, is the real work—is the only part of writing that tends to happen in my apartment. The cozy home office I share with my husband, who has against all odds greenified the space with tropical vines and Californian succulents, is where I do my 9-to-5 job. I spend 35 hours a week in my ergonomic chair, at my perfectly adjusted desk, with a lovely balcony door on my left. In this space, which I associate with calm and focus, is where I hunker down, on lunch breaks or after my daughter is asleep, to rewrite my first drafts. I analyze sentence structures and obsess over word choices. I write second and third, and often fourth and fifth drafts. I absolutely love and cherish my little office. But I’ve also come to appreciate and even seek out those grim, uncomfortable, windowless spaces.

Megan Callahan (she/her) is a writer, book reviewer, and French-to-English translator. Her stories have appeared in various American and Canadian literary magazines, such as Fractured Lit, Carve, FreeFall, Nashville Review, PRISM international, and Room, as well as in several anthologies, including 2021 Best Canadian Stories. She lives in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal with her husband and daughter.

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