Uncategorised Archives - The New Quarterly

A Conversation with Grace Vermeer

Kim Jernigan: I’m curious about the timeline implied by your poem—how long an interval was there between hearing the stories and the wise healer’s “It is finished”? The last verse takes us back to the old story…Are we to see that as the ache from the old wounds?

Grace Vermeer: I heard the stories as a child. The wise healer’s “It is finished” occurred 40 years later. At the time, I was very ill with a disease that had gone undiagnosed for a number of years, when I finally started treatment, it was advanced. I was too sick to read, even talking was difficult. It
was a devastating time. This woman helped me move toward life and healing. Her own suffering
had led her to her gift, she was what some might call a wounded healer. She was a quiet woman,
ordinary and remarkable, strong in spirit.

When I decided to enter The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, this poem came to mind
as an occasion of pivotal change. I’d written it about five years ago and then thrown it in a box.
There were several drafts, none of it felt finished.

I came back to the poem with one question: Could I write about the past without getting stuck? As part of my healing, I had practiced cutting old limbic paths in the brain and creating new ones that nourished life, but I also wanted the poem to hold darkness and light. It was an experiment; I wasn’t sure which way it would go.

Kim Jernigan: Is the shift of the line “Who can say how” intended to draw attention to the turn from remembering to healing? Why that as opposed to just a line space before the third verse?

Grace Vermeer: “Who can say how” is the turn in the poem and shifting the line does draw attention as you suggested and links the two verses. I had tried it in various positions, but it seemed to get lost.

My mother gave me my grandfather’s book, it sits behind glass in a barrister bookcase. Before I wrote the first drafts of the poem, I randomly opened the book and read a letter that a man wrote to his wife the night before he was burned at the stake. He wanted to make sure his wife wouldn’t blame herself for his death—he had thought they should flee from the area but his wife had wanted to stay close to her family. His tenderness to her in his last hours, in the midst of such horror—I shut the book carefully and put it back on the shelf.

I was thinking of that story when I wrote some of the lines in the second stanza. I almost dropped the word “forgiving” but when I shifted the line “Who can say how” it sat close to “forgiving.” I decided to leave it.

“Who can say how” felt like a question that applies to most of the poem. Who can say how these atrocities happen or how these patterns repeat in nations and people groups or how they pass down into families? Who can say how they show up in our bodies? Who can say how we are led? By some great mercy we find the right person who helps us and shows us kindness. Our hearts break and we change—who can say how?

Kim Jernigan: Can you speak to how the peril lodged in your throat becomes your throat deep in shadow?

Grace Vermeer: Yes, as I mentioned, I came back to the poem wondering if it was wise to return to an old story that involved trauma. Would it jeopardize healing? So, as I was revising the poem, I was also watching the process. Would I bring the old fear on this new path of joy? I reworked some of the verses but it still ended with the fourth verse and felt incomplete. I wasn’t sure what to do. I asked myself if the ending felt true, five years had passed since I’d written it. I remember standing by the window looking out at the snow falling slowly through the lamplight. The house was dark and quiet. I started feeling my way through the poem and as I came to the last line, Be the doe, set free, I felt myself merge with the image. Yes, I was the doe, easing down among the tall grass, but I was also the doe sensing fear, stepping back into shadow, watchful, alert.

I had found a new ending for the poem, but in the process, I had also felt the throat deep in shadow. Would it always be so? The wound and the gift?

Grace Vermeer lives in Sarnia, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Vallum, Beyond Forgetting, and Tamaracks and was longlisted for the 2021 Mitchell Prize.

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Tristan Marajh

Like my protagonist Sofiya Shirazi stifled and suppressed herself before finding her true form in Sofiya’s Choice, so too did I stifle and suppress my tale before The New Quarterly let its
full form be expressed.

Short fiction writers will attest that they often omit and edit in order to have their work fit into externally-mandated constraints of word-counts, page numbers and editorial requirements. So, too, was Sofiya forced to omit and edit parts of herself according to the external – and subsequently, internal – constraints and constricts in her life.

She never felt right doing this. And it never felt right, to me, to have those unfulfilled versions of Sofiya’s Choice under consideration-under-constraints: be these restrictions from
journals or literary competitions. The original version of Sofiya’s Choice features prose and a protagonist full and complex – exuberantly, excruciatingly human. I always longed for the
story’s full form to be expressed, just like Sofiya longed for the same for herself.

And again, like Sofiya, when she finds herself grateful where the story ends and her new life begins, so too I am thankful to The New Quarterly for choosing to publish the fullest – and
most fulfilling – form of Sofiya’s Choice.

Tristan Marajh’s piece The Taste of Memory is published in TNQ’s Issue 147 and was also awarded 1st-Prize in the inaugural Stratford Writing Competition. His work appears in a number of journals, including Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature, Ricepaper Magazine, The Nashwaak Review, The Miramichi Reader, Tamarind: A Literary Magazine, and others. He is currently at work on two collections of short fiction.

Photo by Darkmoon_Art on Pixabay

Read more

Hollay Ghadery’s Writing Space

Where do I write?

You name it! The kitchen table, the bed, the bath, on walks or runs, riding shotgun in the car on the way to swimming or piano or drama lessons, or in my actual office: there’s no place I don’t write, which isn’t to say I don’t have favourite places to write (snuggled on the couch with the dogs or in the sunroom, for the record).

Having four young kids has forced me not to be precious about writing time or spaces—and I used to be debilitatingly precious about it, expecting the words to come only when I had set aside time for quiet and calm. So for many years, I wrote little. It took me a decade to crank out my first book and this taught me a lot about the grind of writing. Writing takes time, yes, but after a certain point, the only person not doing the work was me.

Eventually, I learned to stop romanticizing the writing process. Those thrilling flashes of verse and vision that proceed the physical act of writing can be quite romantic, but for me, the stringing together of many coherent words on a screen or page is…less magical—but not any less fulfilling. In fact, I’ve found taking the writing process out of the clouds and grounding it with me, wherever I am, makes it much more real, and the results, more attainable. It may have taken me 10 years to write my first book, but I finished my second and third in three years.

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

Photos provided by Hollay Ghadery

Read more

What is Amber Fenik Reading?

I just finished Ducks by Kate Beaton. I retreated to my bed – my perpetual happy place especially throughout the neverending pandemic quarantine and lockdowns – reading it from cover to cover all in one go. It was one of those fingertip-gripping, page turning, blurry-eyed, I-don’t-think-this-is-good-for-my-back, all nighters. I loved the author’s long running online comic strip Hark! A Vagrant as well as her previous two book collections of equally light-hearted fare: Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection. A comedic yet heartwarming reimagining of people and events in history and literature, they are a welcome escape from the all too harsh realities of the modern world.

Ducks marks Beaton’s venture into a more serious topic, covering the period of time in her life following university when she had to leave her community of Cape Breton to find work in Alberta’s oil sands in the hopes of paying off her student loans.

What I enjoyed most about this graphic novel is that it can’t be categorized. It takes place in such a specific time and location, but covers a myriad of important issues that are still prevalent today: the persistence of poverty in certain parts of the country, mental health and the lack of access to adequate healthcare, workers’ rights and dangerous working conditions, climate change and environmental impacts of certain industries, drug abuse and addiction, sexual harassment and sexual assault, and the lack of job opportunities and the struggle to maintain quality of life in an increasingly unaffordable society – especially for younger generations.

This graphic novel presents us with the question, “Can we find community outside of our home towns surrounded by strangers?” Most painfully, it wonders why in Canada, entire communities have to travel halfway across the country in order to make a livable wage, often in very unsafe conditions.

You would think that this would be a heavy read but the collection of stories recounting this period of Beaton’s life is interwoven with humour and contains many heartfelt moments. Beaton’s ability to convey emotions through her illustrations is masterful. You can tell exactly what each of the characters are thinking, see the nuances in their expressions and body language. That’s pretty impactful for black and white lines.

Through a painfully honest, vulnerable, and detailed account of her personal life and experiences, Beaton creates a vivid picture of humanity and connects the reader to unfamiliar people and places. But what shines through most of all is the deep
attachment and longing for home inherent within all of us as well as the feelings of peace and joy that our loved ones bring us – no matter where we may be.

I’m not a crier, but I cried a lot. I ugly-cried my way from cover to cover.

P.S. There is a shimmery duck embossed on the front of the hardcover copy of this book that looks like an oil spill. If that can’t convince you to read it, I don’t know what will.

Amber Fenik was born and raised in Perth, Ontario where she heard many local ghost stories. She has thwarted death on several occasions and enjoys spending time alone with her cat. Contrary to popular belief, she is not afraid of the dark.

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Sarah Totton

“To Break the Liquid Moon” was inspired by a true story told by Kate Bottley on the BBC Radio 4 program “Three Vicars Talking, Death” (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007qb0). This was a very consciously structured story. I made a rough outline, and I knew what the last line would be before I started writing. This isn’t my normal process, but I wanted to try something different with this story. I’d just finished a several-months-long stretch of writing rambling stories that were unplanned and unplotted and that ultimately didn’t go anywhere and had to be abandoned. I was determined that I was actually going to finish something for a change. I think it’s a good idea to explore different methods of storytelling, to see which ones work (or don’t) and how well they work (or don’t).

I write a lot of stories in the fantasy genre and this particular story seemed to lend itself to a fantastical premise. I drew on the myth of Charon, flipped his gender, and set the character in the modern day. I wanted to explore how someone who played this role in a modern community would live and how she would be treated by the community. I imagined that people would respect her but that she would also be ostracized because of what she represents. I like to use settings from real life, especially when I’m writing fantasy. It helps me ground the stories and make them feel real. This story is set at an actual cottage in Wales that belonged to a distant family member who I visited as a child, so I know the place well.

While I wrote this, I was listening to “Bright Eyes” written by Mike Batt (performed by Art Garfunkel) to set the mood, although in retrospect, I’m not sure it really helped. I was taking mood-cues from the music rather than from what I was writing.

The story took me sixteen days to write, from first conception to final draft.

Currently, I’ve moved back to a less conscious method of creating stories, but I’m now more mindful of choosing ideas that will move a story forward as opposed to spinning in circles, so I’ve spent less time writing drafts that ramble endlessly and end up abandoned.

Sarah Totton‘s work has appeared in The Walrus, Room Magazine, EVENT, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Nature, and The Conversation. Her humor has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Rumpus. She was named the Regional Winner (for Canada & the Caribbean) in the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

Photo by Jose Llamas on Unsplash

Read more

What is Ferrukh Faruqui Reading?

I recently culled my bookshelves. It wasn’t a one-off event, more a drawn-out process like someone crouching on wet ground, half-heartedly scooping a toy net into an overflowing bucket of water, half-hoping the canny fish, their scales flashing silver in the sun would continue to elude the snare.

There’s something about owning a book, the physical heft of it, its strong sturdy spine, its white pages inscribed decisively in black, fluttering in the backyard breeze, something fragile but strong, the font authoritative, something like scripture, a secular guide to living.

Eventually I admitted that I was just never going to reread some of my books, but I still winced when discarding these volumes in grocery store boxes that previously held heads of lettuce or yellow bunches of Costa Rican bananas. I tried to be ruthless, to not get waylaid by the beauty of random phrases or descriptions of strange landscapes, or by characters with teacup ears.

After a year of languishing inside their splitting cardboard vaults in a corner of the garage my husband hired someone to spirit them away. I turned my head as they disappeared.

Some books are so beloved I’ll never stop reading them. I hug them to my chest with pleasureful dread, knowing the steep price I’ll pay. Coinage not only in hours, but in tears, fat and salty. I’ll inhale deep lungfuls, down to the physiological dead space where oxygenated air rarely penetrates, to swim with the sharp-edged feelings the author rips from me. Long past midnight I’ll switch off my bedside lamp, my spent body sliding down my mattress like a wrung-out thing, to lie open-eyed, staring into bedroom darkness with thoughts ricocheting off each other like whizzing protons in quantum fields, dazed by revolutionary ideas. Sometimes we nestle into stories which are the literary equivalent of tea and toast, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s criminally underrated novel Wives and Daughters. Other tales slam into us like sledgehammers. Lanky, lonely Ruthie narrates Robinson’s Housekeeping, speaking truths we keep forgetting, leaving us as limp as convalescents. This is the book I read when I need to cry but can’t.

My first decent part time job paid enough for a modest book budget. I don’t remember when I first read Rosemary Edmonds’ translation of Anna Karenina, but I do know the Penguin paperback cost me only $5.95. As an earnest virgin I sympathized with poor naïve Dolly’s heartbreak, but try as I might, I couldn’t dislike her philandering husband Stiva. So many Tolstoian scenes ring with the messiness and malice – and kindness too – of real life. Anna alighting from the train in Moscow, pleasantly conscious of performing a good deed, Anna frantic for Vronsky while her punctilious husband shields her from the crowd at the steeplechase. The bloodless Karenin dissolves into tenderness as Anna delivers her lover’s child under his roof. All three actors in this unhappy triangle are doomed. Passion animates imperfect, perhaps immoral characters drawn in heartbreakingly human dimensions. The social strictures of 19th century Russia imprison both Dolly and Anna. Seriozha’s snuffed out joy in his mother’s clandestine visit plunk us into her tortured mind and forbid us from judging her too harshly. The final drawn-out scene tightens the screw with each beat of a ticking shell. We live in her head as she’s cornered, torn into pieces, driven to visit the pitying Dolly, firing off threatening notes to her lover yet panting for his return. The tension ratchets up till her pain explodes leaving her body crushed and broken on the train tracks.

I need to hear the stories that Tolstoy wants to tell. I want to tell stories that engage, enrage, delight. Whether Anna was bad, mad, or simply a woman trapped in a world not of her making, her story scorches me because she is flawed, she is real. Drawn back again and again I become Anna: desperate, furious, abandoned; seeking absolution, seeking release.

Ferrukh Faruqui was born in Karachi, the city by the sea. Raised on the edge of the Manitoba prairie, she’s content either streaking through water or tramping across snowy fields.

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Read more

Basma Kavanagh’s Writing Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Anne Hopkinson

“Testimony, March 3 2011”

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

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

“Mother’s Day, Kigeme Refugee Camp”

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

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

Photo by Eugene Chystiakov on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Traci Skuce

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

Let me backtrack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover photo by vonvix on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Jakub Kriz on Unsplash

Read more