Month: January 2025

Finding the Form with Geoff Martin

“The Isabel Letters” found its form super late in the drafting process. Which made it feel exactly right—the sudden realization that each short section should begin with a salutation of some sort, should gesture to the exchanges I’d been having with the writer Isabel Huggan for several years and that she’s been having with far flung friends and family her entire life. If I hadn’t been so excited to slice, mend, and revise Draft #4 into this new structure, I would have been knocking my head on the desk for not thinking of it earlier.

I wish such magic would strike more often. But of course, creative work arrives on its own terms. Our task as writers and artists is simply to make sure we’re there, ready to catch what’s on offer. This was the lesson I took from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way before I had any writing process to speak of, just a long simmering desire to write…at some point.

And that desire to write came in part from encountering Isabel Huggan’s award-winning debut collection, The Elizabeth Stories (1984), back in high school in the early 2000s—the same high school, not incidentally, that Huggan had attended forty years earlier. Whispers of controversy still circled the book for its depictions of childhood sexuality and coming-of-age desire, whispers that made of me an especially eager reader. I was assigned only the first story, but I had my copy for the entire weekend, so of course I read them all. As I remark in the essay, “I hadn’t yet imagined that there were words to be written about or inspired from life in town. That reading experience was a profound one, and for years I’d carried it around as a quiet secret.”

But it was actually her later book of essays and short stories on home and belonging that made me want to write about her writing. Belonging: Home Away from Home, which won the 2004 Charles Taylor Prize for Nonfiction, offered me an example of an artist writing about making home in a new place (France) while missing other homes in other places (the Philippines, Kenya, Ontario). I had also been moving constantly throughout my adult years. And in the processes of reading and re-reading Belonging, the book offered up a set of craft lessons about shifting fluidly between the topographies of the past and the present in an observant and reflective storytelling mode. The book has been a clear model for my own writing. But still, how to go about writing about her writing?

The pandemic changed the calculus. From lockdown in my San Francisco apartment in March 2020, I asked Kyle Wyatt, editor at the Literary Review of Canada, if he could put me in touch with Isabel, who had been living in France for some twenty years. Not knowing when I would ever have the chance to meet her and still unsure about ever writing (that is, starting) an essay about her work, I thought I would at least just say thanks. Which is what I finally wrote: Thank you for your writing.

That email launched a correspondence that became a long-distance friendship. Midway through the pandemic, we both ended up moving back to southwestern Ontario. And in the fall of 2022, she came through Kitchener and stopped off at my place, our first in-person meeting. I served her tea, and she surprised me with an account of the deep personal and familial pain that the fallout from The Elizabeth Stories had caused her. I had no idea, and it upended a bunch of my assumptions about her work and life. 

I had just begun writing “The Isabel Letters” at that point, so these revelations shifted the direction of the piece. I was also using numbered sections as structure, but they lacked cohesion. The whole essay felt jumpy. I had also amassed considerable material (two days with her archival papers at Western University, for example, as well as the transcript from a four-hour interview I conducted with her at her home in Orillia). As a result, the essay had grown to more than 7,000 words but hadn’t yet found its raison d’être, my writing group kept pointing out.

Later that summer, August 2023, I discovered the formal constraint I mentioned at the outset and that I desperately needed in order to re-organize the sections and cut down the wordiness: I would use an epistolary format throughout, beginning each section with a salutation: “Dear Isabel…,” as the essay kicks off, followed by her reply, “Dear Geoff….” The essay then pivots to some of the letters from her professional correspondence or my own inquires to other people as I research and write about Isabel’s story, all of which serve to enliven the piece with additional voices while also conjuring a kind of in media res action to the unfolding narrative. Eventually, the essay returns to several more recent exchanges between Isabel and me, exchanges that push into greater vulnerability and newfound awareness.

I hadn’t predicted that the essay would evolve to become more about Isabel Huggan herself than about her published work. I also didn’t know how personal I would need to get. But this was when I knew I was on to something both good and frightening, the form of the piece now dictating the terms and pulling me along into new, unfamiliar territory. Magic was striking, and I had only one task—to chase after it, bottle open in one hand and a lid in the other.

Geoff Martin is a writer and editor based in Kitchener, Ontario in the Haldimand Tract. His essay “The Isabel Letters” won the 2024 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, and his work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. His place-based and environmental essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Literary Review of Canada, Boulevard, and The Common, among others. In 2023 he co-founded The Creek Collective, a group of artists making art in response to—and alongside—Schneider Creek in Kitchener.
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Profile photo credited to Woolwich Observer / Andrea Eymann

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Finding the Form with Laurie D. Graham

They arrive in two ways.

Either suddenly present before me, there in full, kablammo, and I’m scrambling to get it all affixed before it disappears or dissipates or morphs or whatever it does by its nature, that nature being beautifully fleeting.

Or via a glacial (though I don’t think that adjective means what we hold it to mean anymore) accretion, a few lines, a few words, a few syllables, no coherent understanding of shape or presence except in the micro: a whiff, a couple of notes through an open window, and only once lots and lots of those inklings are piled up together do the fuller dimensions start to unshroud, at which point I become one of those round-the-benders on the TV with the red yarn connecting all the evidence, it’s plain as day, just look. 

“Ave Maria…” falls into the former category. I feverishly clacked it into my phone with an ice cream cone in one hand. I was in the car with my aunt just before Christmas. We were in Midland, Ontario, and her brain was being slowly dismantled by dementia. She was living in a retirement residence not quite suitable to her needs, and I was the one who put her there, though she didn’t remember this and the question was no longer persistent in her mind. The dog and I were there for the afternoon into the evening to have a bit of Christmas with her. Going for ice cream was one thing my aunt could still understand and enjoy, so off we went. 

This was also around the time of the convoy.

I think of my work, in both its modes of arrival, as transcription, even though that’s not quite the right word. 

When a poem appears via the first method, there’s usually not much editing to be done. The only real tinkering I did was with the conceit, which also sprang from actual events: We really were sitting in the car in a parking lot eating ice cream and looking across the strip mall parking lot when “Ave Maria” came on the radio. It really was December 23. A woman did indeed walk across the parking lot clutching a stack of red envelopes. A man really did exhale smoke into a wreath shape around his balding, ponytailed head. The Canadian flags were very much on the trucks, and there were indeed a lot of trucks. And I really did feel a powerlessness in the face of all this, so the shape of the poem grew out of my appeal, silent and into the ether and exhaust, that my inadequate gestures could somehow meet this screwed-up, incongruous present moment, this song on the radio, this disease, this scene out the window, this horror, this failure, this ugliness, this grieving.

I grabbed the closest thing at hand and began to write.

Laurie D. Graham’s books are Rove, Settler Education, and Fast Commute. Her next one will be out with McClelland & Stewart in 2026. She lives in Nogojiwanong/Peterborough.

Photo by Frank Albrecht on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Kirsteen Macleod

I have a digressive brain. The tangential, undisciplined, and wandering-spirited in language attracts me. But my current poetry project is requiring a brevity that’s uncharacteristic for me.

How to find new concision? I’ve been inspired in part by a martial artist-writer friend who strikes people in the gut with incredible force, using both Krav Maga and poetry. Her effect is arresting – dropkick – and can’t be achieved in meandering lines. 

I’ve been experimenting awhile with stripped-back poems. But I love to describe things in lingering detail – love the physical world – so my results have often felt distressingly skeletal. 

At some point I hit upon writing three stanzas of five lines each. Not only was this fleshy enough, but it helped me to confront a writing problem I was experiencing — what to pull out from the monumental bog of personal material I was mired in. 

The compression of my short-but-not too-short poems seemed to magically foreground what’s most important. Or as poet Dianne Seuss sagely writes, “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do without.” 

Turns out that the form I’d fallen into, quintains, poems with five-line stanzas, are sonnet adjacent. Shakespeare’s sonnet 99 is an example, one of only three irregular sonnets he wrote– 15 lines instead of the traditional 14. 

I was inspired to try true sonnets, small transfiguration contraptions for strong emotions that veer unexpectedly at the volta, the turn, where the poem changes direction. I played with six-line stanzas, and varied the length of my poems, but stayed within a species of poem I’m calling loose sonnets.

On the page, I like how my three-poem TNQ series offers more visual interest than three little square sonnets would have. The loose sonnets feel like a fitting body for my new poems to inhabit, with just the right amount of flesh and bone.

Kristeen Macleod writes and teaches movement in Kingston, Ont. Her work has been a finalist for the CBC Poetry Prize and ARC Poetry’s Poem of Year, among other prizes, and has appeared in journals such as CV2, Event, Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, and The New Quarterly. 

Photo by cpastrick on Pixbay

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What’s Samantha Jade Macpherson Reading?

Over the past year, I’ve been working my way through Yoko Ogawa. I started with Hotel Iris, an uneasy read about an unsettling relationship, then moved onto The Memory Police, about an island where inhabitants slowly lose their memories under a fascist police government, and have just finished her collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. I’ve also read her New Yorker stories; “The Cafeteria in the Evening and a Pool in the Rain,” is a particular favourite. I have The Housekeeper and the Professor on hold at the library. 

I’ve always wanted to be the type of person who reads an author’s whole body of work. I find this idea both glamourous and academically rigorous, though I rarely pull it off. I like the possibility of seeing progression or movement; maybe I’d gain or apprehend something that reading a single work would not produce. This, for Ogawa, is not possible, at least not yet, as not all her books have been translated into English. So instead of a linear progression or staircase, reading her work is more like navigating a constellation of stars with half the sky below the horizon. I make shapes out of what I can see.

Ogawa’s writing is irresistible. I find her characters to be quite cold, which I like. A cool exterior endears a character to me, especially if they’re psychologically tortured, or desperate, as Ogawa’s characters tend to be. At the same time, much of the work is whimsical, almost magical. I’m thinking now of a dark room full of ripe kiwis, a river of rose petals, the ruined remains of a factory that still smells like chocolate, all images from novels and stories that wouldn’t be out of place in a fantastical children’s story.

It’s a strange combination, whimsy and ice, and it creates an uncanny effect, one that is disconcerting. There’s the sense that the world of these fictions, and these characters is unknowable. I will be taken to a place that I don’t expect to be taken. I enjoy the surprise of a familiar image made strange tomatoes covering the street and carrots like hands—but I don’t expect to understand exactly what it means. Much is unexplainable.

Finally, and perhaps of least interest, I’ve discovered strange parallels between Ogawa’s fictional interests and my own. When I looked at the table of contents in Revenge, I was surprised by how many of the stories seemed to mirror objects and ideas that come up in my own work, the project I’m writing now: “Afternoon at the Bakery,” “Fruit Juice,” “Lab Coats,” “Tomatoes and the Full Moon,” “Poison Plants.” All these titles relate though of course the stories are different—to the work I’m doing right now. I cannot explain this either.

Perhaps certain authors find us when we need them. I am extremely grateful that Yoko Ogawaha found her way to me.

Samantha Jade Macpherson is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her work can be found in The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. In 2019, she was the finalist for The Journey Prize.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Amber Fenik

I feel that for myself, being a writer is akin to madness – or, the closest I’ll ever get to a permanently altered state of mind. I’ll be on my way to get groceries and suddenly the image of a man in a blue coat running through the woods during a thunderstorm will flash into my head. I’ll be washing my hair and a strange phrase will float to the surface of my mind like the unbidden answer from a Magic 8 Ball in response to an unasked question.

Sometimes, on a rare occasion, I am lucky enough to have entire stories pour through my brain and I merely have to sit in front of my laptop, furiously typing to keep up with whatever mysterious indecipherable force is delivering the message. A 21st century form of technological scrying. More often, I have to wait patiently, ruminating on the words or the image or the shadowy half-formed wisp of a character for a frustratingly unknown amount of time until, piece by piece, they fully reveal themselves to me.

I’m not a technical writer. I don’t know the rules. I couldn’t tell you the difference between first and third person point of view and am perpetually confused about the correct use of semi-colons (I probably shouldn’t admit that in an illustrious literary magazine, but oh well, what’s done is done).

I write what I feel about the imaginary people I make up, try to capture the mood of a place that none of us will ever visit in real life. I try, as best as I can, to commune with anyone who unwittingly stumbles across my writing, no matter who or where they may be.

In my short story “Lost Girls” the character of Sonia (aka Dead Sonia) doesn’t matter. The story is about her on the surface, but it isn’t really about her. It’s an exploration of those who are vulnerable in our society and why they might be susceptible to unknown threats. Many of us (myself included) live with those fears, adapt ways of mitigating our weaknesses. Even though we may have escaped the Worst Case Scenario (whatever our horrified brains ultimately think that is), most of us have been in a situation where there was an unsettling implication of what might have happened, if things had gone a little differently.

Inspired by an unsolved case that continues to possess the rural area where I’m from, “Lost Girls” is a reflection of how we are haunted by the past, unanswered questions, lingering doubts. Not knowing who to trust or how to move forward with the limited information we are left with. It’s about what remains behind when a person is no longer physically here. What impact do we ultimately have on other people’s lives? Do we matter? Or are we already ghosts and just don’t know it yet? Much like Live Sonia, Yaz, and Zeke, I don’t have those answers. Maybe you do…

Amber Fenik was born and raised in Perth, Ontario. She has been published in several anthologies and predominantly writes short stories. 

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

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What’s Jill Solnicki Reading?

I first “met” Virginia Woolf at the end of high school, just before I began university—those two transitional months of summer between the end of adolescence and the beginning of young adulthood. I can picture myself, lying in the garden on the chaise lounge that July, opening Mrs. Dalloway, a book about which I knew nothing, and, a few pages in, feeling stunned. I was encountering moments captured out of time: ordinary objects made extraordinary, light and shadow as they altered leaves and grass, a character’s consciousness, un-curtained…. I’d entered an unknown book, and suddenly found “my” author. 

And now, these many years later, and for the first time, I read The Waves.

For those who haven’t, how to describe this complex novel? Virginia Woolf thought it was her most experimental work, and Leonard Woolf deemed it her best book, and a masterpiece. The structure is confusing, until one sorts it out: Six characters, the only action their stream-of-consciousness inner monologues—beginning when they are together as kindergartners, and moving through childhood, prime years, midlife, and on to old age and death—each character’s consciousness growing, awareness changing—but always through the lens of their particularity, coloured by their histories, sensibilities, ambitions, inhibitions, deep-seated fears. 

And the inner soliloquies of these disparate characters connect: through their shared experiences as they age; through Woolf’s repetition of imagery and symbols; through the death of a seventh character, whom they all had loved; and through the natural cycles: day to night, spring to autumn, the passage of the sun across the sky, and the pyramidal movement of a wave. 

Introducing each section, and alternating with the monologues, Woolf added “interludes”, small symphonies of poetry that follow the sun as it is moves through one day; sunbeams as they illumine and alter the same room in a particular house; the waves as they roll in, roll out.

What was Woolf aiming for with this experimental structure?  “I am convinced that I am right to seek for a station whence I can set my people against time & the sea,” Woolf wrote in her diary as she was contemplating this new book. The time had come, she decided, to abandon “this appalling narrative of the realist…. Why admit anything to literature that is not poetry—by which I mean saturated?” 

“I am writing to a rhythm, and not to a plot” … she wrote to a friend, the book resolving itself “into a series of soliloquies… running homogeneously in & out, in the rhythm of the waves.” Woolf wrote fast, furiously (though through numerous drafts) as she crystallized her vision of “a very serious, mystical, poetical work”, while, at the same time, not having “any notion what it would be like”. Her diary entries alternate between the repeated admission, “I don’t know”, and the conviction that “there is something there”.

And how familiar that state of uncertainty is for those of us who are writers and, especially, poets! 

So why have I picked up this book, now? From Mrs. Dalloway to The Waves, Virginia Woolf is bookending my life. Both novels explore the passage of time: for Mrs. Dalloway, it was one day; for the characters in The Waves, an entire life. Both are meditations on consciousness, and on time. And what better subjects to ponder at another transition in my life—when, dare I say it? I am becoming old—through the intermediary of the brilliant Virginia Woolf? 

She should have the last words here.

She gives them to Bernard, one of the six characters, who, with his personae of the writer-narrator, is perhaps the closest of them to Virginia Woolf. His extended soliloquy ends the novel.

The final monologue is elegiac, a contemplation of old age and impending death. The sadness of loss runs through it, acceptance, fatigue, and, also, anger. But beneath his words, his individual loss, we hear the voice of the universal, of the eternal: listening, we can hear the sound of the waves breaking on the shore.

From the second last paragraph in The Waves:

“Again I see before me the usual street. The canopy of civilization is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale bone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on the plane trees somewhere chirping. There is a sense of the break of day. I will not call it dawn. What is dawn in the city to an elderly man standing in the street looking up rather dizzily at the sky? Dawn is some sort of whitening of the sky; some sort of renewal. Another day; another Friday; another twentieth of March, January, or September. Another general awakening. The stars draw back and are extinguished. The bars deepen themselves between the waves. The film of mist thickens on the fields. A redness gathers on the roses, even on the pale rose that hangs by the bedroom window. A bird chirps. Cottagers light their early candles. Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.“

Jill Solnicki has two published collections of poetry, This Mortal Coil and The Fabric of Skin, and a memoir of teaching at-risk students, The Real Me Is Gonna Be A Shock. Her work has appeared in numerous journals. A new volume of poems, The Darkening House, is pending publication.

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

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What’s Kimberly Peterson Reading?

I keep poetry books on my bedside table so that I can begin my day with a teaspoon of quiet reflection. Hand Shadows (Wintergreen Studio Press, 2024) sits on top of my stack these days. It captured my attention by featuring two of my favourite passions: poetry and dance. Susan Wismer responds poetically to dancers Michele Greene and Suzette Sherman of Passionate Heart – Women’s Stories Through Dance. The black-and-white photographs of these expert dancers capture their physical embodiment of unfiltered emotion in exquisite detail. Wismer replies with words rooted in the soil and passing seasons. She infuses everyday tasks like threading a needle or unearthing a radish with deeper meaning and resilience. This uplifting collaboration is accessible to those new to poetry. The authors certainly achieve their goal of highlighting the particular importance of creative arts during times of upheaval, fear, and uncertainty. I can feel the soft smudge of feet /on the floor.

Kimberly Peterson is a retired nurse who lives as an uninvited guest on the unceded lands of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg in rural Ottawa. Inspired by the wildlife that surrounds her, she is thankful for her partner. He cares for gardens that welcome pollinators, fills bird feeders, and understands that poetry takes priority over (almost) everything.

Photo by Álvaro Serrano on Unsplash

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