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Finding the Form with Susan J. Atkinson

Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time was one of those rare gems of a poem that start with a tiny spark that instantly ignites and the next thing you know the spark has exploded into a full blown fire or, in this case, a poem.

I’d been reading a New York Bestseller Rom-Com, which talked of how to judge the worthiness of a first kiss. It got me thinking about my husband and I’s first kiss, different story/different poem, but still leading to how I had always thought of our second kiss with the delight and memory of a first. When I casually asked my husband about our first kiss, having never discussed this before, it would be an understatement to say I was blown away that he, too, felt exactly the same way. I loved how after so many years he had also held close and dear, the thought that our second kiss was more like a first, and that he was able to recount, with such detail, the evening, which has now become the poem.

In that conversation I knew I had the perfect occasion poem – a second kiss that would mark the beginning of the greatest love affair of my life. It is my hope that despite the specifics and intimacy of our kiss, the poem transcends into the universal and ignites memories and moments of those beautiful occasions in each of our lives.

Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time by Susan J. Atkinson was one of the Honourable Mention’s in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Poetry Contest.

Susan J. Atkinson is an award-winning poet. Recently she was named Honourable Mention in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and was Longlisted for The 2023 Ruth and David Lampe Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in journals, anthologies and online. Atkinson’s debut collection, The Marta Poems was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2020. Her second collection, all things small, will be published in Spring 2024. to find out more visit www.susanjatkinson.com

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Finding the Form with Bobbie Jean Huff

I wrote what would become my short story “Generations” many years ago. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my writing then, but I knew enough to realize that it wasn’t any good. A story about a garden party? Who cares!

When I first started writing, I focused on poetry. I’d never considered writing fiction, or, god forbid, a whole novel. Four sons and my church organ job kept me busy enough. But once, when my brother was visiting from New York City, he said, “You’ve always been good at writing. Why not try a short story?”

So I took his advice and tried, and, like most neophyte writers, my efforts were garbage. But eventually they got better and I began sending stories off to journals. A few were taken—but not “Generations.” It was the orphan I had no idea what to do with.

After my novel The Ones We Keep was accepted for publication, I revisited my earlier, unpublished writings, and “Generations” was the one story that intrigued me. I knew at once what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it. On one hand I wanted, through my main character, to show how a person can remain the same throughout life, even as joys and sorrows and contradictions accumulate. I also wanted to portray grief, and the choices people make to protect themselves when the worst happens—in the case of my main character, the death of an adult child.

The story didn’t take long to revise, once I knew where it was going. When I’m in the middle of something I don’t write to a schedule, I basically write when awake—and sometimes when I’m asleep. As for editing, it’s never finished. When “Generations” finally came out, I couldn’t wait to read it, but by the time I got to the second page, I was thinking: Damn—wrong word! How did I miss that?

The story’s structure alternates past/present/past/present during the course of a garden party held every summer for fifty years. Although the events and people are fiction, I based it on a real garden party I attended every summer at a friend’s farm in Eastern Ontario.

During the first garden party—both the real and the imaginary one—all the characters were hippies, but over the years most went back to school or secured jobs. Their families expanded to include children and then grandchildren. I wanted the story to be a very brief slice of life, and I wanted it to end in the middle of things. I hope I succeeded. If there is a curve to the story, it’s a very gentle one, with no real climax—and no real resolution. Kind of like life.

Bobby Jean Huff ’s poems, essays and stories have appeared in Canadian and US publications. In 2022 her debut novel, The Ones We Keep, was published by Sourcebooks.

Header photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Jill Solnicki

In her Finding the Form online exclusive blog post, Jill Solnicki talks about her process, and reveals drafts of her poem “Blue Rooms”.

Finding the form of a poem is both a conscious process, and a mysterious one. Why mysterious? Because, for me, a poem seems to arrive from above, out of air, or from below, as if emerging out of deep water. The key for me is to be “there” for this arrival.

If that sounds magical, and maybe ridiculous, the creative moment is, in my experience, one of readiness: if I’m busy, preoccupied, problem-solving or focused on whatever is required to work through a day, I’m not receptive to poetry’s momentary visit. For this reason, I’m writing much more now that I’m retired from my day-job, teaching.

On the other hand, once the poem is “captured” (sometimes I carry a notebook, or I use “Notes” on my phone, or grab a napkin or theatre program—whatever available when words and images come), editing is a more conscious process. To a much greater degree, we writers take control of a poem’s editing: removing details that seem extraneous or overburdening; trying to enter and end the poem at its right moment; and looking for words, lines and stanza length that have the sounds and shape for conveying the poem’s meaning.

I love that rare opportunity to see the drafts of famous poems: the crossed-out lines, the inserted or removed words: what has been rejigged as the poet distills the poem to its final entity.

I humbly offer up two earlier drafts (there were more) of “Blue Rooms” for that kind of elucidation, to illustrate aspects of the journey to “finding the form”.

Looking back at these, I see my removing many of the initial details; the honing in on the stronger images; rearranging ideas; and my lengthening the lines to create the sound appropriate for an elegiac poem.

Paul Valéry said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Needless to say, I don’t pretend that this final version of “Blue Rooms” is perfect. But isn’t it interesting to observe how a piece of writing, any piece of writing but especially a poem, emerges from its initial bulk—the way a block of stone gets chiselled to its final polished form

BLUE ROOM (Draft 1, March 3, 2021)

I rode that room—aged five to twenty-one/two—
blue walls, bedspread blue with red,
drapes the same material,/drapes like material/fabric
window looking [out] onto the backyard—

the bookcase on the left,
behind the door,
the books unread—foisted by my parents—
heavy with expectation—The Life of Marie Currie—
and ones I read again, again—the fairy tales
[and their gorgeous illustrations]:
prince, princess, horses’ heavy manes and tails
like wind, or ocean,
around them forests deep.

I loved my address:
Rosemary Lane,
as if my house were a pretty girl
sitting on its curve, its step,
her number—twenty-one—
rich in/with threshold.

But with the beauty, birdsong [at the window],
I knew, too, that the wolf hunched under the bed.
He curled/hunched each night, he waited.
I did not dare let my hands hang,
but kept them safe at night, tight to my torso/body
under the blue blanket.
And in the closet something even worse [lurked]:
faceless, nameless, a shadow inside shadows
hiding behind/among the dresses,
in the corner by the shoes—
by day eluding bright inspection,
but at night, lights out,
it watched, waited,
hovered, hooded—
sniggering at the baby nightlight
that threw its/throwing feeble beam.

And here I am, on another/different narrow bed;
the walls are the blue again —of/merging everything—
water, sea, sky
as if I floated on eternity;
[and here they come.]
And I didn’t know,
not until/till now …
that all along, they’d been with me:
the wolf in the skirts of my wedding dress/gown,
inside the stuffed animal/toy my baby chewed—
through/during all those walks in woods, in gardens,
just out of sight behind the pine,
the tall purple iris.
And from the closet, too,
the shadow in its black hood,
it has now thrown off: really a skeleton—its white/
had reached out, for me, all my life,
bleached bones the sun, its long legs and arms
had whitened/whitening the grass, the road [saw each day.]

And now they climb up,
the wolf with a leap/jump, the skeleton bending her
clanking knobbed knees,
lie, one on each side.
The wolf looks at me, its eyes devoted as a dog’s—
I bury/sink my face in his deep fur.
I take the skeleton’s hand, her fingers long,
elegant, polished as marble./
The skeleton takes my hand in with her long, lanky,
knobbed fingers.

And here we lie,
I and my two old friends
like three figures carved on a sarcophagus,
[serene,] eyes closed, deep in the well of dark wolf earth,
cool as a bone’s white stone.

BLUE ROOMS (Final draft, July 27, 2021)

In my blue room, in my childhood house,
a wolf lived under the bed.
At night he hunched, hungry.
I dared not hang my hands—tucked them
tight to my body under the blanket.

Also, in the blue room closet,
the shadow. Faceless, nameless, it hollowed
behind the pink smock dress my mother made.
By day it eluded detection;
but at night, lights out,
it laughed at the nightlight’s dribble.

The house sat on the bend
of a street named Rosemary Lane—
as if its green shutters, white birch,
winding walkway, were a pretty girl
sitting on the front step—rich with threshold…

Yet, here I am—surprised, somehow,
to find myself on another narrow bed,
in another blue room.
Not robin’s egg blue, the colour
of hatching, fledgling, flight—
this time a dissolve of water, sky…
I float.

And here they come again!
And I never knew
that all along they’d stayed:
the wolf curled in the skirts of my wedding gown,
and at the foot of my baby’s crib;
that he’d followed, like a faithful spaniel,
during walks in woods, gardens—
out of sight behind a pine, the purple iris—

and, child-blind, I never saw
that beneath the shadow hood
a skull stared out from socket hollows—
or that all these years

the shafts of sun whitening the grass,
the white lines leading the tar-black road,
were bones.

Now they climb on the bed—
the wolf with a leap,
the skeleton bending her knobbed knees;
the wolf gazes—I bury myself in his deep fur den.
The skeleton takes my hand;
how elegant her fingers—candles, cool stone.

Jill Solnicki has published two volumes of poetry, This Mortal Coil and The Fabric of Skin, and a memoir, The Real Me is Gonna be a Shock. She is working on her third poetry collection.

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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.

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.

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?

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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A Conversation with Simon Peter Eggertsen, Second Runner-Up of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest

The New Quarterly’s Lead Poetry Editor, John Vardon, sat down with Simon Peter Eggertsen, whose poem “Ah see it all wit’ mih own two eyes” was the second runner-up of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

John Vardon: You could legitimately be called an emerging writer, now that efforts to purge the term of its youthful associations have largely succeeded. As you say yourself, you came late to poetry, publishing your first poem at 64. The reason for this delayed emergence, as you mentioned in an email, is that “life intervened to suppress my creativity.” Your wonderfully alliterative academic accomplishments consisting of degrees in literature, language, and law must have kept you busy, but I imagine other professional and personal commitments had something to do with it as well. Was this urge to write poetry something new and surprising, or did you somehow awaken it from its long hibernation?

Simon Peter Eggertsen: I was made aware of my earliest poetic ventures only after having my first poem published much later in life, as you point out. It was then that my mother, with a bit of ingratiating humour, sent me a poem I had written in the second or third grade. It was about puffy clouds and blue skies, likely copied in pencil (on that paper we got in elementary school to practice writing the alphabet, upper and lower case—where you could see the wood chips from the pulp in the paper itself!). It is true, though, that there is a history to my formation as a poet, why I emerged so late.

In my early years, I lived in a family environment that took enjoyment from using language, so we were exposed to the word craft that goes with formulating puns and other word play, expressing oneself in limericks, short, rhymed verse and doggerel. Mostly my father’s influence. He was famous in our social circles for writing ditties, sometimes metered, for family occasions on the backs of bank deposit slips. His rhymes were always tortured but funny, not unlike some of Blatchford’s I gather.

But I drifted away from these practices in my late teenage years, spent my Gladwell 10,000 hours playing sports, though I did study English literature and Spanish language at university. The latter exposed me to poetry and other forms. But I never thought to write anything creative. I eventually got a law degree, and, because I had lived overseas already, my interest went into comparative international law.

This eventually led to working in the field of law and policy as they affect health programs around the world, particularly reproductive health. This meant that I worked over the years in more than 30 countries, from which it became my habit to accumulate examples of modern and cultural art. It eventually occurred to me that I should write about these places rather than take things out and away and this led to my start in poetry.

JV: According to online information, you have visited or lived in a great many countries, the accumulated travelling experience of which resulted in one of your earlier poems, “Keeping Quiet While Crossing Borders,” which speaks of passing over borders “resolutely…trying to keep quiet about the memories I carried with me…even if what I remembered was contraband.” This is a fascinating metaphor with some significance for you given that the title of your 2014 chapbook is Memories as Contraband. Can you elaborate?

SPE: That title has its roots, again, in family experience. My mother had eight sisters. By the time I was 21, I had 46 cousins on that side! Once they had started their own families, the “aunts” would often get together, usually at Wildwood, a place where my grandfather had built a large summer cabin in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah back in the 1920s or at my grandmother’s home in the nearest town, Provo, which we referred to as “59 West.” These were lively sessions, lots of laughing and storytelling. In my teen years, though, I became aware that the aunts would at times share intimate details about the lives of the cousins with each other during these “catch up” sessions.

This secret sharing bothered me immensely—had me wishing that my story had not been shared by my mother with others. The bother was more than just a quirk in my adolescent sensibilities. I came to regard these conclaves as breaches of privacy, to associate my aunts with those immigration agents who grill you on what you are carrying with you as you cross borders. I liked the idea of keeping my memories as contraband, unregulated, unshared, especially when demanded. I tried to free myself of the compulsion I had seen in others to tell everything, or want to know everything. But rather than seek counselling, I turned to poetry!

That is the unifying element among the poems in that chapbook. They are all poems about things I have experienced that I was now willing to share, on my terms and in my language. The most trenchant example of this propensity is a strong protest poem about the quashing of the student protests in Tiananmen Square. In Beijing that weekend in early June, 1989 as part of my work in international health, I witnessed personally much of the aftermath of the tragedy, especially around some of the universities. I was deeply affected. Nearly twenty years had to pass before I wrote about it.

JV: “Ah see it all wit’ mih own two eyes!—sixteen questions in a long Caribbean sentence” suggests that there are some things in your travels that you can’t keep quiet about, in this case the legendarily beautiful Maracas Valley in Trinidad, a country where you resided for two years. This place must have etched some indelible memories on your brain and heart, so much so that you have reworked lines from a much longer on-line poem, “Hawking, My Father and I Expand on Relativity and Ancestry in the Language of Theoretical Physics,” into your winning entry, especially the ones that describe the mesmerizing enticement of the cold blue ocean waves. Apart from the stunning multi-sensory imagery in the poem, you also incorporate a sense of wonder engendered by what you elsewhere have called “the cosmology of questions embedded in Trinidadian folklore.” Can you say something about the inspiration of the poem and the process of condensing that question cosmology into fewer than forty lines?

SPE: This poem details part of what I did during two years in Trinidad or at least what I noticed. My wife’s family comes from Trinidad, still has property and ties there.

Down the road from us in Maracas Valley lived Carlyle Harris, a gregarious, noted artist who also has a detailed knowledge of the local terrain, flora, and fauna. He was the man people would call when they needed a snake wrangled; he kept a lively set of hummingbird feeders on his balcony, where any one of the 18 types of the species found there would come as he painted. He used to take me into the woods around Valley View, the place where we all lived, and explain nearly everything in nature. This got me taking note of the intriguing environment I was living in. It was on these treks that I began to collect some the striking images that emerge in the poem.

As I was looking for something to do with all of these images as an expression of memory, I realized that each image provoked a question, a question that, were I there, I would have relied on Harris to answer. So these lines slowly formed into a dense poem, matching each image with the question it posed.

In the end, I relish the richness of the vocabulary in the poem for things integral to the island and its culture, some of which verge on patois, some on local idiom. And, I took pleasure in making it all one sentence, like those lengthy Germanic sentences that seem to go on and on. I have often wondered if I could get through it in slam poetry style, but all in one breath!

JV: You have a fairly substantial online presence and one chapbook to your credit (published by Finishing Line Press). So it would seem that you have emerged as a poet in a way that is sustaining to you. Writing for the sake of writing. That said, do you have a poetry project on the go, a manuscript making the rounds of publishers, or are you just writing poems as the occasion demands?

SPE: “Sustaining” is a good word. But I have had to work and have had help. My wife often tells me that poetry allows me to avoid reality. Fair enough. But from my side, I believe poetry is its own reality. I now often wonder what my high school English and literature teacher would think about what I have managed to do this late. Or, what one of my college professors would say, the one who laughed out loud at my attempt to recreate the essay “Walden” for his class and gave me a C- for the effort. I think they would be startled because for them I am sure that I was only an unimaginative, mind-numbed athlete who struggled to put words together!

In a way, though, even I am startled by what has happened.

Many of my early poems, I will say, were pastiches mimicking in some measure the work of some important poets—Neruda, Rilke, Frost, Hopkins, Sappho, cummings, Williams. I needed models to work from. One Frost-like poem was actually a runner-up for the Frost Award some years ago! And the Neruda and Rilke-like poems have also been honoured. But, over the years, I tried to move on, learn more of the art and how to give shape to my own voice, rather than lay it on top of others. This I have done by study and at workshops by writers like Paul Mauldoon, Kevin Young, Carol Ann Duffy, Mark Abley, Toi Derricotte, Barry Dempster, Kimiko Hahn, Annie Finch.

Anyway, to answer your question, I am racing to get a full book of poems published before I turn 80. I have a manuscript sitting at a couple of Canadian publishing houses at the moment, Hawking Comes Close to Finding God, which takes its title from a poem about the work of Stephen Hawking, the well-known British theoretical physicist, who worked on the Theory of Everything, the deepest unified explanation in physics of how our universe came into being. He was unable to finish that work before he passed in 2018.

In the spirit of all this, many of the poems in the volume, though they take up other subjects, are imbued with some of the rich language and vivid imagery of theoretical physics. In short, though, not everything centres on Hawking, science, or God. As a group, the poems go much further, cover a larger arc of subject matter.

If there is something of the wonder for the intricacies of the universe in the Hawking poems, there is also something of the wonder of our own world experience in the others. The poem you have honoured here in the Blatchford competition is included in the collection.

Simon Peter Eggertsen came very late to poetry after a career in international public health. Even so, his work has been published widely– Nimrod, Spoon River Poetry Review, Vallum (Canada), Ekphasis, Atlanta Review, New Millennium Writings, The Antigonish Review (Canada), Weber—The Contemporary West, FreeFall (Canada), Southword (Ireland) and beyond. His poems have been named finalists or shortlisted for numerous prizes: the Neruda, the Frost, the Malahat (Canada), the Fish (Ireland), the FreeFall (Canada), the Bridport (UK), the ARC Poem of the Year (Canada), the Plough (UK), and, recently, the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize (Ireland) and the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Award (Canada). Eggertsen was born in Kansas, raised in Utah, educated in Virginia and England, now lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal) on the traditional territory of the Kanien’kehà:ka people. He has degrees in literature, language and law.

Header photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash

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2023 Wild Writers Festival Reading List

LISA ALWARD – Cocktail

Cocktail by Lisa Alward is a collection of twelve pristine stories. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves. The writing is crisp and assured, and the characters are vividly drawn as they struggle between that which they believe to be right and that which they desire.

JAMALUDDIN ARAM – Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday

In this novel about peace in a time of war, debut author Jamaluddin Aram masterfully breathes life into the colourful characters of the town of Wazirabad, in early 1990s Kabul, Afghanistan.

RONNA BLOOM – A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom

With compassion, humour and sharp-eyed irreverence, Ronna Bloom’s work has made a significant impact on Canadian poetry. A Possible Trust is selected from her work to date.

ANITA LAHEY & PAULINE CONLEY – FIRE MONSTER

Set in a fictional version of the real Main-à-Dieu, Nova Scotia, where a 1976 wildfire caused catastrophic devastation, Fire Monster, tells the tale of a skilled oil sands worker who returns to the Cape Breton fishing village where, as a child, he was blamed for causing the fire that tore through the local community, consuming bush, trees, houses, boats, cars, animals and the century-old gothic church.

ALICIA ELLIOTT – And Then She Fell

A mind-bending, razor-sharp look at motherhood and mental health that follows a young Indigenous woman who discovers the picture-perfect life she always hoped for may have horrifying consequences

PAOLA FERRANTE – Her Body Among Animals

In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

HOLLAY GHADERY – Rebellion Box

This explosive debut collection pushes against the limitations of gender roles, race, bodies and minds, and explores our insignificance and impotence in the universe. The concept of otherness afforded by a marginalized and neurodivergent perspective is brilliantly represented in this book.

JENNIFER HARRIS – When You Were New

This picture book celebrates the joys of early childhood and all the first-time experiences that are exciting for parents and children, including beach days, befriending the family dog, story time on the couch, and so much more!

KATE JENKS LANDRY – Beatrice and Barb

Beatrice wants a pet of her own. Her mom has other ideas. They finally reach a compromise, and Beatrice gets … a Venus flytrap. She gives her new friend a name, Barb. She does all the things with Barb that good pet owners do, such as taking walks and playing fetch. Despite all the love and care, Barb is starting to look sick, with black spots on her leaves and some parts of her turning mushy. Beatrice knows she has to find a way to save Barb. But how?

HELEN KNOTT – Becoming a Matriarch

Having lost both her mom and grandmother in just over six months, forced to navigate the fine lines between matriarchy, martyrdom, and codependency, Knott realizes she must let go, not just of the women who raised her, but of the woman she thought she was.

KYO MACLEAR – Unearthing

When a DNA test reveals that the father who raised her was not biologically related to her, Kyo Maclear becomes a detective in her own life, unravelling the mystery piece by piece in a search tied to the seasons, plant life, and the making of a garden.

AMY STUART – A Death at the Party

Nadine Walsh’s summer garden party is in full swing. The neighbours all have cocktails, the catered food is exquisite—everything’s going according to plan. But Nadine—devoted wife, loving mother, and doting daughter—finds herself standing over a dead body in her basement while her guests clink glasses upstairs. What happened? How did it come to this?

PAMELA MULLOY – As Little As Nothing

Set in the south of England in the tumultuous year before World War II, As Little As Nothing focusses on the lives of two women: Miriam, recovering from her fifth miscarriage, who looks to flight as an escape from both the impending war and the disappointments in her life; and Audrey, a 53-year-old, upper-class activist (an acolyte of Stella Browne, a Canadian reproductive rights activist who lived in Britain at the time) who has shunned her society, travels the UK lecturing on reproductive rights, lives in a Reading Caravan, and whose daily ritual includes a swim in a nearby river.

ERIN NOTEBOOM – A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen

A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen takes exact and exquisite measurement of what carries a voice through illness, grief, loss, and through the failures and triumphs of work and love. Various theories and hypotheses are tested in these poems: sadness is knowledge and science “is only half a turn from love.”

MARGARET NOWACZYK – Chasing Zebras

Margaret shares a journey that is both inspiring and harrowing: from leaving Communist Poland to enduring the demands of medical school, through living with a long undiagnosed mental illness to discovering the fascinating field of genetics, plunging into the pressures of prenatal diagnosis and, finally, finding the tools of writing and narrative medicine.

ZALIKA REID-BENTA – River Mumma

Alicia has been out of grad school for months. She has no career prospects and lives with her mom, who won’t stop texting her macabre news stories and reminders to pick up items from the grocery store. Then, one evening, the Jamaican water deity, River Mumma, appears to Alicia, telling her that she has twenty-four hours to scour the city for her missing comb.

ELIZABETH RUTH – Semi-Detached

In December 2013, an ice storm buries Toronto as realtor Laura Keys prepares to sell a one-of-a-kind house on behalf of its comatose owner. Haunting Laura, and longing to be invited in, is a mysterious teenage girl with a Scottish Terrier tucked into her coat. While uncovering the past, Laura navigates both the death of her mother and a troubled marriage straining under the weight of her infertility.

VINCENT LAM – On the Ravine

In his downtown Toronto condo, Dr. Chen awakens to the sound of streetcars below, but it is not the early morning traffic that keeps him from sleep. News banners run across his phone: Fentanyl Crisis; Toxic Drug Supply; Record Number of Deaths.

Claire is a violinist. After two overdoses in twenty-four hours, she sits in the blue light of her computer, searching a notice board for recommendations. And then a message catches her attention, about Chen’s clinic: be a guinea pig—why not get paid to take it?

Y-DANG TROEUNG – Landbridge: life in fragments

In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son’s illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease.

LINDSAY WONG – Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality

From the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettling ways. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants.

What’s Ronna Bloom Reading?

Usually I have a novel, a few poetry books, and some nonfiction around my bed. I like to move between them.

The novel:

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. This is a novel about five Indigenous children who were sent to a residential school, what happens to them when they are little, and when they grow up. It is crushing and heartbreaking and full of compassion and love.

The poetry:

Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. I read one short poem by Shire in a magazine years ago, and it blew my mind. She caught the hurt of the whole world in a few lines. This new book was longlisted for The Griffin Prize and I was rooting she’d be shortlisted so I could hear her read in Toronto. Alas not. But I got the book. Her words “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark” from the poem “Conversations about Home.”

The nonfiction:

Ordinary Notes: I was introduced to Christina Sharpe through an interview with David Naimon on the podcast Between the Covers. A deep and thorough listening experience. I am tremendously moved by these notes of which there 248 that make up this book on Black living and seeing. I am only on Note 14 because each one is so distilled, it asks for all my attention and I want to give it and then I want to start all over from the beginning. #beautyeveryday.

What Comes from Spirit by Richard Wagamese.
In the fall of 2023, I’ll be doing some poetry workshops for and with health care workers in Northern Ontario: Thunder Bay, Fort Frances, and Kenora. I’m drawn now to read the work of Richard Wagamese. Richard Wagamese was an Ojibwe author born 120 miles north of Kenora, part of Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. This is a book of short essays and meditations. I read it at night because it brings peace and grounding.

Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall will be published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in September.

Header image by Henry Be on Unsplash

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The 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Winners

The New Quarterly is delighted to announce the winners of the 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award!

Winner

“Bruise and Shine”
by Alex Kitt

Runners-up

“Prepper”
by Meagan Callahan

“Singing to the Gods”
by Deepa Rajagopalan

Honourable Mentions

“Harold”
by Daryl Bruce

“Ms. P’s 5Ds”
by Heather Debling

“Soap”
by Nedda Sarshar

“Lemon Print Scarf”
by Mina Sharif

“Paulina”
by Pamela Hensley

“In the Western City”
by Rishi Midha

“Messier Objects”
by Margaret McCutcheon