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Finding the Form with Lena Scholman

Halfway through the process of researching my WWII novel set in Holland, I was reading about Nazis requestioning animals, particularly horses, in the 1940’s, and found myself obsessed with the rescue efforts of Lipizzaner stallions from Vienna. (Yes, I had landed in another country and was seriously contemplating scrapping the whole thing and writing about Poland because suddenly Warsaw was more interesting than Amsterdam in the way that a new project is always more interesting than the beast one is currently wrestling with.) In trying to write the perfect WWII novel, I was procrastinating and getting lost in every WWII story never told.

I was deep in the weeds of research and editing when I began writing “Margaret” as a palate cleanse from rations, resistance and roll calls in concentration camps. I was craving romance, and into this void came a buoyant character I quickly named “Margaret”. I’d loved Maeve Binchy’s Irish romances, and her very down-to-earth heroines, many of whom are not twenty-somethings but women with a bit of life behind them. Most of the heroines in my stories who get a big love story are middle aged because I find women with some wisdom and self assurance often make more complex characters; they don’t need a partner for the same reasons a younger woman might. Middle aged heroines are at an interesting crux of independence and interdependence, and if they have formed rich friendships, they can afford to be fussy. And yet despite wealth, health and a beautiful garden, there remains the pesky business of loneliness, and here began my adventure into the world of online dating.

My fantasizing about what lengths someone would go to investigate a love interest online began at the blood donor clinic. Donors are asked dozens of personal questions, and it occurred to me that while most people paint a flattering portrait of themselves online, I would start my own search in the waiting area of the blood donor clinic, where everyone there has affirmed they haven’t had sex with a monkey or used intravenous drugs even one time. And this silly mental exercise had me wondering what one might do if they fell for someone and then discovered something about them that chaffed against their values. I liked the idea of a character wrestling between their desire and their values and finding a way forward.

The overall theme of “Margaret” was influenced in part by a podcast I’d been listening to that featured Duke University professor Kate Bowler, a young woman who wrote about her own cancer journey, toxic positivity, and our cultural denial of the precariousness of life. I noticed a distinct difference in the way older women thought of disease and how they perceived the unhealthy lifestyles of Gen X and Millenials, and to explore this gulf of perspectives I created the character of Margaret’s son, Daniel. In the end, I cut much of the Daniel storyline to focus on the immediate love story, but who knows, maybe I’ll return to Daniel another day.

At the moment, I’m searching for another palate cleanse from historical fiction research. This time I’m studying Mexico from the student movements of the late 1960’s to globalization in the 1990’s. My untitled novel is a coming-of-age story that’s part Elena Ferrante, part Laura Esquival. Right now, it’s stalled on the side of a Mexican highway between Veracruz and Oaxaca and sweat is dripping down the heroine’s back. I am allergic to unhappy endings, but a lot of people die, and so this seems like as good a time as any to start a new short story.

Let me say this when it comes to finding the form: nothing is wasted. My entire first novel
remains sitting, unpublished, in my desk drawer. However, the first chapter went on to place in the Toronto Star short story contest in 2019. It was a novel about four middle-aged women who move into an old home together and take a stab at communal living. So, when I say that Margaret came into the void, while I was procrastinating on another project, it’s true and also not true. Nothing is wasted. Good characters can be renamed, recycled, and even find love on the internet.

Lena Scholman is a writer, storytelling coach and educator. Her first novel, “Between Silk and Wool”, was released in 2022. She has been published in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Hamilton Spectator. She lives with her family in Hamilton, Ontario.
www.lenascholman.com

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images 

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Danica Longair’s Writing Space

Virginia Woolf famously hoped for a future where all women writers (and, likely, women in general) had “A Room of One’s Own” to create and be themselves, away from the noise and busyness of life. Nearly a century after the publication of her iconic essay, I am a woman sharing a condo in Vancouver, BC, Canada with four boys: my husband, two young sons, and our elderly cat. Though privileged to have stable housing in this city/world, I do not have a room of my own. I did apply to put a shed on our patio to turn into my writing space, but strata, unsurprisingly, said no. Instead, I have two desk areas and a wide selection of walkable cafés to choose from. Don’t forget the couch, where I spend much of my time, Macbook in lap, while supervising my kiddos. My spaces are important to me, as they reflect who I am more than my personal appearance. But that doesn’t mean they don’t get cluttered. I struggle with ADHD, Persistent Depressive Disorder, and Anxiety. Tinkering with my spaces and my home in general brings me calm and joy, a sense of control over the chaos, within and without. Because with those four boys, life is constant chaos, noise, and mess.

It is a privilege to have any space at all, let alone two dedicated spaces and access to cafés. I am cognizant that I am lucky and that being flexible with the words is important. A writer will be more successful if they are less dependent on the tools and environment than they are on their own minds. Just get the words down, whenever, however, and wherever you can. Especially if you’re a busy stay- at-home mom like me. Perfect conditions are an illusion, as is perfection itself. I present to you my space, right now, as I write this.

My writing space, wherever it may be, has started with Scrivener since 2011 when I first purchased the software (and, also, never paid for it again as Scrivener has vowed not to go to a subscription model). I have Scrivener projects for my current work-in-progress novel, for all my short pieces dating back to 1997 (pre-2011, they are imported into the project), as well as for all my abandoned novels and memoirs. Pictured, is the original iteration of “Cantonese Lessons for a Foreign Daughter-in-Law” dating from 2018. I am primarily a digital-based writer and planner (a productivity app nerd, I’ve been using a pre-launched app called Tana for over a year now for planning), although occasionally pen and a fresh new notebook call to me.

I have a wide screen, curved Samsung monitor (which I originally bought during COVID
times in 2020) mounted to the wall. My desktop was made by myself and my father out of wood that was once a windowsill in my childhood home as well as parts of the desk my father used to make his own desk while at Veterinary School. The desktop has sat on a variety of legs, but currently sits on two IKEA drawer units. On my desk is my essential tea, what I call a Habit Mise en Place (with my journal, book I’m reading and current Lego project – I build Lego to bring me into the present), and a small writing altar I made. In theory, when I write, a battery-operated candle goes on and a small tile is flipped from saying “am not” to “am” writing. I write about the altar more on my website. I have some DIY projects like my fabric covered cork strips and little posters I’ve made myself in Canva.

This past week, I tried to do some decluttering, but of course it took much longer than
expected, and I got sick along the way. So, my desk is surrounded by loose items and boxes of things that need to be sorted and found their own space. I also have my plants, and due to the lack of more space, my desk is my plant space as well.

Branches and waves are important motifs for me. Branches ground me in nature and remind me of neurons and synapses. Waves remind me of the constant ebb and flow of all things in life. Headphones are crucial to getting work done in this space when my family is home. My headphones signal to them that I am working and help me focus, music or not. When I took this picture, my boys had just had lunch.

Finally, is my beloved couch. The spot on the left is coveted in our family and where I am
often found, if it’s free. You’ll also see my Macbook (and a pillow) with quotes and art by Morgan Harper Nichols. As you can see, as much as I like to try to have a pretty space, chaos reigns.

My second writing space is new and the décor and set-up for it is in progress. I put a small,
second space in a room with a door I can close for meetings and quieter time. I moved my comfy desk chair to that desk, although I may move it back to the other desk. This desk, which folds down, is in a room that acts as my and my husband’s bedroom, my toddler’s bedroom, and our laundry room. It too is in the middle of being tidied and organized.

Yes, that’s my toddler napping in the photo in his Big Boy Bed. Nap time is get-stuff-done
time, including writing time for me. A writing space is nothing without writing time and I am grateful to my supportive husband and Mary Poppins-like part-time family helper, Kaiti, for allowing me that time.

I have always been prone to clutter and have found that allowing my spaces to evolve over
time fits with my creative, neurodivergent mind. Recent trends like recluttering and cluttercore, maximalism, and slow decorating validate these tendencies. As you can see, I’m a bit of a nature- inspired eclectic decorator. It may not be the room of my own Woolf envisioned, but it’s what has to work for me, a busy mom in a privileged, single-income family household one hundred years later.

Danica Longair is a mother, writer, and disabled, white settler grateful to be living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She usually can be found planted on her velvety couch trying to sip lukewarm tea while her kids and cat crawl on her. Please visit www.danicalongair.com for her occasional writerly adventures. 

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What’s Michael Lithgow Reading?

I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle to make sense of the complications. In particular, it is her relationships with her mother, with “friends”, and with her one true friend that Klara struggles to understand. Partly what makes this story so compelling is Klara’s observational clarity. In so many ways, the indifferent logic of Klara’s presumably binary/Boolean brain gives Klara an unfiltered sort of lucidity largely missing from the humans encountered. It’s as if each human Klara observes has blinders rooted in past trauma, emotion, unresolved tensions. Ishiguro seems to exploring the naïve and perhaps innocent potentials of a mathematically based intelligence. (I have not finished
the novel yet, so we’ll see what else comes up… ). I loved Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (1986), and I’ve been working on a writing project that explores human relations with AI cognition, so it was a natural pick-up. The writing is beautiful.

I am also reading anna moschovakis’ participation (2022). I saw her at a reading in
Edmonton and was utterly compelled. Emerging from the intellectual racetrack and socially accelerated milieux of the New York/Brooklyn arts scene, the story is as much intellectual rumination as it is a narrative unfolding in times and spaces. The first-person narrator works three jobs to stay afloat, and in between participates in two reading groups called Love, and Anti-love through which relationships and connections form, change, unravel, self-destruct and vanish. The structure is fragmented–chapters are short and individually titled. The form shifts: narrative prose, chat dialogue, poetry, Madlib inspired news reports, random notes, sketches. The writing is sharp in observation, intelligence and wit. Reading moschovakis feels like being in the eye of the storm of an American intellectual, literary zeitgeist filled with anxiety and doubt about what is real, what has worth, what are the limits of relationship, and what is left to care about. It also feels like a modulated cry from a faraway land – far away, that is, from Alberta’s ‘rural advantage’ conservatism and anti-intellectualism. Refreshing, confounding, vitalizing.

And finally, I’ve just picked up Gerald Murnane’s Stream System, a collection of short
fiction that is popping open all kinds of doors and windows in my writing brain. I stumbled on Murnane’s work in the old school way of chance encounter on the shelves of a used book store. I had never heard of Murnane, but now know he is a postmodern literary giant, one of Australia’s most celebrated writers, someone challenging perceptions of what writing is, what it can do, how it can do it and why. Like many postmodern texts, the writing’s self-consciousness can challenge expectations of pleasure at times, but even when it does, soon enough it becomes compelling in its own strange ways opening up, as I say, new possibilities for what language, story and writing can do. I’ve become a fan and am lucky to have stumbled on the book.

Michael Lithgow’s poetry, essays and short stories have appeared in various journals including TNQ, the Literary Review of Canada (LRC), The /Temz/ Review, Cultural Trends, Canadian Literature, Topia, Existere, The Antigonish Review, The High Window, ARC and Fiddlehead. His first collection of poetry, Waking in the Tree House (Cormorant Books, 2012), was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award. Work from this collection was included in the 2012 Best of Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books). Michael’s second collection, Who We Thought We Were As We Fell (Cormorant Books, 2021), was published in the spring 2021. He currently lives in Edmonton, AB and teaches at Athabasca University.

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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What’s Lena Scholman Reading?

For a long time, I had a quotation on my wall that read “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” I knew a writer named Ursula K. Le Guin wrote it, but I didn’t know anything about her, and had never read any of her books. I just really liked the quote because I am a romantic. I am now remedying my ignorance and have begun “Conversations on Writing”. It feels as though I’ve inherited a long lost, very wise, California grandmother.

Also, for the first time in my life, I have multiple books on the go at once. I attribute this to the need for unperturbed sleep. In order to raise teenagers, I need a full night’s rest every night, so I
fall asleep to old Hercule Poirot mysteries. I’m unattached to the victims and fully trusting Poirot to get to the bottom of things. I highly recommend Agatha Christie as a sleep aid though some nefarious characters occasionally creep into my dreams.

On the topic of teenagers, and the world we live in, I read a lot of non-fiction. Although these two thick tomes took me awhile, I enjoyed Gabor Maté’s thought-provoking “The Myth of Normal” and David Brooks “The Second Mountain.” I enjoy broad perspectives parsing over the troubles of our times, though I rarely think it’s possible to diagnose malaise precisely when one is in the middle of it, prophets exempt.

And as for prophets, my three feminine fiction favourites are Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout. (I loved “Demon Copperhead”, “These Precious Days”/ “Tom Lake” and
“Oh William!”) But, let me slow down for a moment on Ms. Kingsolver in particular.

Though “The Poisonwood Bible” was written in the 90’s, I just recently picked it up again after abandoning it years ago. I remember thinking at the time “I don’t want to read another book where the Christians ruin everything.” (I stopped when the antagonist pastor throws dynamite in the river, killing all the fish in a village with no refrigeration) I am so glad I picked it up again. I keep it close at hand these days, almost like a textbook for how to shift a POV character into the background and let the conflict of a scene unfold. It’s magical.

Finally, I just finished “The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese, though I will confess that I half read, half listened to the audiobook version, something that I find myself doing with
increased frequency, as my desire to read and the need to move my body are now in midlife competition.

When I was writing my first novel, I almost abandoned the project due to sheer envy of Verghese’s prose in “Cutting for Stone.” I soon realized it was fruitless to become paralyzed by
jealousy by every gorgeous scene, and so I photocopied the best of the best and put them in a binder titled “The Jealousy Files.” And then I went on to complete my manuscript.

Lena Scholman is a writer, storytelling coach and educator. Her first novel, “Between Silk and Wool”, was released in 2022. She has been published in The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Hamilton Spectator. She lives with her family in Hamilton, Ontario.
www.lenascholman.com

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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Finding the Form with Oluwatoke Adejoye

I started writing The Condolence Visit not exactly planning for the interactions between the two major characters in the story to unfold in a single location. However, in retrospect, I think I might have subconsciously known this. After all, when the idea for the story first came to me in the first year of my MFA program, it was simply an image of two women who were simply next-door neighbours, not friends, in a house. This is not to say that the story, which is set against a backdrop of grief and reminiscing, does not venture beyond the confines of the house. In fact, it is through these, particularly the reminiscing of the protagonist whose presence in the house is the catalyst for the events that make up the heart of the story, that the reader is able to catch glimpses of events that transpired elsewhere years prior and see the world through the eyes of a younger version of the primary protagonist.

Apart from working as a context-providing tool for the reader’s benefit, those breaks allowed me, in a way, to catch my breath. Fleshing out the interactions between two important characters in one location felt like walking down a long stretch of road that I was yet to know where and when it would end. There were many turns and forks that I had to navigate; the almost non-existent relationship between both characters at the story’s beginning, a secret, and the need for the characters to mutually, albeit unintentionally, peel back the layers that covered the other person the longer they conversed.

By the time I was rested enough to get back on the road, I had a fresh perspective on how the next scenes between both women should unfold in the present-day, and what the protagonist’s reactions and actions might realistically look like for someone in her situation. Eventually, the end of the road revealed itself.

Oluwatoke Adejoye has a Master of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia School of Creative Writing. Her nonfiction is forthcoming in Harvard University’s Transition Magazine. She lives in British Columbia.

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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Finding the Form with Danica Longair

“What is grief, if not love persevering?” – WandaVision

Cancer is the same in both languages. At least, in my family of Hong Kong immigrants, who speak a mixture of Cantonese and English when they talk to each other. I don’t know how they
decide, subconsciously and on the spot, which words to say in each language, but it seemed to me that there was no Cantonese word for cancer, and that fascinated me. 

I first started my piece, “Cantonese Lessons for a Foreign Daughter-in-Law,” in 2018 while I was still trying to learn my husband’s native language, phrase by phrase. I had also recently taken classes with Creative Nonfiction expert Nicole Breit and learned about the hermit crab essay form. Such an essay takes the form of an everyday document as a shell, like a hermit crab, for the more vulnerable creative writing of a piece. Rowan McCandless is a master of this form, and it can be read in her book Persephone’s Children. The life I was living was one of healing from the prolonged trauma of caring for my mother-in-law in her final months of life. It was an honour to do so and to be so close to her as her life ended, but it was certainly a vulnerable time to write about. Thus, the hermit crab essay seemed the right form and what better form to take than a vocabulary list.

This is an early draft, which I actually entered in some contests. In it, I list some of the phrases I learned. I am terrible at second languages. Absolutely atrocious. So, I would write down the words the way I heard them and memorize the tones.

Because the years have gone by, I cannot remember the exact impetus to expand the piecefrom here. Initially, I wrote a longer draft that was nonlinear. For each Cantonese phrase, I wrote it out the way I heard it, defined it with the meaning I understood, and then gave one or more examples of the phrase from my own life and perspective. I was lucky to have the opportunity to get some editing feedback on the piece from author Doretta Lau. She offered many excellent suggestions, and it was she who convinced me to re-form the piece to be linear. While I am a fan of nonlinear structures that give readers the info they need in the order they need it, rather than technically in the order I lived it, Doretta was right that using both the hermit crab and nonlinear structures was making the experience confusing. Add the various unnamed characters and the reader will likely get lost.

Doretta also helped me with the correct spelling and definitions of Cantonese words. I aim to write in a decolonial way, and this was an important step towards that. In the essay, my greatest aim was to honour my mother-in-law, who was born on colonized land and living under settler rule. She was kind and wonderful, and before her cancer diagnosis, a happy woman. Her cancer changed her dramatically. We lost her long before we had to say goodbye. I loved her dearly and, having experienced loss, know that I am privileged, as a writer, to be able to write about my loved ones so that they live on. In some library, hundreds of years from now, this issue of The New Quarterly will hopefully exist. My artifacts will be my afterlife, and hers.

I struggled with how to write about my relatives, living and gone beyond. Shared trauma brings out all sorts of emotions, many ugly. I was careful to write in a way that both honoured the truth of my experience and also in a way that would do no harm. I wrote about times when my mother-in-law was vulnerable, confiding in me, or experiencing things she likely would not have shared in life. It took a long time for me to decide that she would ultimately support the truth, the compassion in the piece, and the empathy I aimed to provoke in the reader. I wrote a lot about what it would be like to live with cancer around that time and was careful to use my own empathy to show people living with cancer that I saw them. I see what it’s truly like.

Now that this piece is published, I return to the vulnerable feelings the experiences evoked. I am closing this chapter of non-fiction writing in favour of fiction. I have yet to have any of my fiction published. My current focus is on a novel about mental illness and intergenerational trauma. It shows my characters’ past, present, and dystopic future, in a nonlinear format. My writing, no matter the genre, will always aim to show truth.

Danica Longair is a mother, writer, and disabled, white settler grateful to be living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She usually can be found planted on her velvety couch trying to sip lukewarm tea while her kids and cat crawl on her. Please visit www.danicalongair.com for her occasional writerly adventures. 

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images

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Susan J. Atkinson’s Writing Space

It has been six years since The New Quarterly published my poem “The Dining Room Poem by Another Poet” in their Spring 2018 issue #146. Six years since I last offered a glimpse into the space where I write. I still maintain the same writing routine when I am home in Ottawa. I still start my morning sitting on my brown couch, composing first thoughts and ephemera in my journal, in the hopes that something will gel and be the beginnings of a poem. Nothing much has changed there but since then I have created a second writing space.

As a child, there were two things I dreamt about being when I grew up. The first was to be a writer. By the age of nine I was constantly making up stories and reading relentlessly. (I had not yet met poetry, hence the general desire to be a writer rather than a poet.) My second dream was to live by the ocean. I didn’t have a specific ocean in mind, I just wanted to be a writer living by the sea.

Once I reached high school I was introduced to poetry and fell madly in love. That’s when the dream morphed slightly, from being a writer to being a poet. And now that I am grown-up (!) I have had the great fortune to realize both dreams as I spend part of my year beside the Caribbean Sea in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It is here where I have found my perfect winter-writing space.

When I first started writing seriously, I thought I would need an office walled with bookshelves, and stacks and stacks of paper filling whatever floor remained. As it turns out, I don’t need a lot of space, or even a specific room for that matter. Of course, I have bookcases crammed with poetry collections, anthologies and journals, but a desk and a dedicated writing room are not priorities for me.

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While in Playa I write on the back terrace, surrounded by tropical plants and the sound of burbling water from a small fountain, fed by a cenote. I sit on a brown teak chair and prop my journal on my knees and write musings and first drafts. When it’s time to input the work on the computer, I bring the laptop outside or stand at the kitchen counter click-clicking away. In a sense my writing spaces have become very portable and nomadic!

I have also discovered a limestone slab, on the beach not far from my place. On my luckiest days it makes an amazing desk, where I can literally write poetry by the sea.

at the end of the day

heat seeps between

the pages of a journal

 

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 Exile Edition’s 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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Lori Sebastianutti’s Writing Space

I am not the type of person to write in public spaces. I remember my university days and how I marvelled at the students who could study in loud, communal areas — cafés, cafeterias, and common rooms. How do they do it? I wondered. How do they concentrate?

I am lucky to have, as Virginia Woolf said, “ a room of my own” in my family home. It is where I spend my days reading and writing essays for the collection I’m assembling. It’s closed off from the rest of the house by a very important feature — a door. However, an opportunity came up in the fall of 2022 to write in a setting that had intimidated me for so long.

My then-six-year-old son was starting art class at the Dundas Valley School of Art, which is a  half-hour drive from our home. For eight weeks, every Saturday from 10 am to 12 pm, he would
learn the basics of cartooning. It made no sense for me to drive back and forth, so I decided I would pursue my creative passion while my son followed his. 

 I had the idea of writing an essay about my mother for a long time. I wanted to explore the restrictions placed on her life as a result of her Sicilian culture and Catholic faith. I used her devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as well as a 500-year-old Marian festival, celebrated in both Sicily and my home city of Hamilton, Ontario, to examine how my mother sacrificed many of her own dreams, including becoming a nurse, to adhere to the expectations prescribed for her by the men in her life.

That first Saturday, the sun was bright, the breeze warm and inviting, and the crowds plentiful on King Street, a collector road brimming with boutiques, restaurants, and cafés in the east end of town. Deterred by the long line at Starbucks, I headed west a few blocks until I came to an inviting sign I could not pass by. Black, with large white letters that spelled Café Domestique, the large awning boasted splashes of red and yellow that drew my eyes in, as did a dog bowl filled with water at the base of the front steps.

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Once inside, with a hot cappuccino in hand and the scent of cinnamon lingering between me and the page, I began to jot down ideas in my purple and pink floral notebook. Surprisingly, I found it easy to block out the background noise. I also found the practice of people-watching a needed distraction to clear my head when it got bogged down. Many patrons were cyclists, others were friends conversing over hot drinks and savoury sandwiches, yet others were families with young children and four-legged fur babies. The constant hiss of the large, steel espresso maker served as a reminder to stay on task, and the floor-to-ceiling windows gave me a glimpse into the world outside, where people strolled and shopped.

A different environment seemed necessary for me to write this essay, one in which I was not the main character but an observer of a life. In this busy ecosystem of people coming and going, greetings being exchanged and treats being enjoyed, I was able to block out my own story and focus on the part of my mother’s life that existed before I did.

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The temperature and the leaves dropped in the subsequent weeks, and I sank deeper into my mother’s story. Café Domestique still bustled with faces, some new, some familiar, and by mid-December, it was time to bid farewell to my temporary writing space. I came away with something just as alive as the sights, sounds, and smells I encountered there, now living and breathing in the pages of issue 169.

Lori Sebastianutti is a writer and teacher from Ontario, Canada. Her essays have been published in Canadian and American journals, including The Hamilton Review of Books, The Humber Literary Review, The New Quarterly, Nurture, Porcupine Literary, Serotonin Poetry, and Broadview Magazine, among others. Her award-winning essay “Cutting Ties and Letting Go” can be found in An Anthology of Canadian Birth Stories, published by Praeclarus Press.

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Finding the Form with Gillie Easdon

Tw: finding a corpse

I wrote a list of ten memories that stick. You know the ones you can call up from decades ago that are always all-senses-high-def? Do you have some? It’s a curious exercise I certainly recommend. Especially if you relish productive procrastination. Here are a few from my list:

The bus driver’s gloved hand emerged from the window in thanks for braking so the bus could pull from the curb, downtown Victoria, BC 2005.

The fresh lamb couldn’t walk straight, Opio, NZ, 1999.

My newborn being rushed to my breast, Victoria General, 2010.

Once complete, I reviewed the list. Some memories were obvious contenders, others, not so much. No idea why that gloved hand stuck. Next, I wondered what would happen if I mulled over each image one by one. Would it sprout a new story of its own? Where would it go? This is where my currently unpublished interconnected collection of short fiction, Little Always Big, began. My fiction short story in issue 169 of The New Quarterly, Slippery Mind Allegiance, is one of the tales that bloomed from this deeply creative, immersive and fairly inefficient process.

I began, carrying one memory around with me, rolling it like a marble in my mouth as I went about the day. Chewed on it. Anchored and breathed into it to see where it would wander.

The memory seed for Slippery Mind Allegiance is turning a corner outside our condo in Tamsui, a seaside district in New Taipei City, Taipei. The cicadas are screaming. Two feet are
sticking out of a raised hedge on August 1, 1999—The worst moment of my entire life and the end of his. My soulmate and fiancé had fallen 15 floors (or was it 14? I don’t remember anymore)—A late night early morning party accident. No one commits suicide on e., but I’ll never know if I’m right. “I saw the feet first.”

For Slippery Mind Allegiance, I held that image in my mind and heart over a few weeks. It detached from my story and began its own unfurling. A dead teen in a rhododendron in Victoria. Our opioid crisis, an uncomfortable conversation between an adult son and his mother over a game of crib. I did pull the foot grabbing in the pool from another unpublished story that was fun to write but gratuitous-dark—the woman in that story kept getting banned from hobbies and sports she tried. But Aunt Rose was new. She surfaced from the mulling.

Short stories, as a genre, occupy a tender place in my heart—the specificity and brevity, a concentration that must not feel too squished or rushed. The distance I can travel in a single short story is deeply satisfying. Plus, I can usually finish them the same day I start. I love writing dialogue, especially when I can sense the personalities in my head. It feels more like transcribing than inventing. Fiction gives me more room to explore and also lets me stay backstage. I recently read Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart, by Jen Sookfong Lee. I devoured the raw, straight-up vulnerability and honesty, especially with her masterful writing, humor, and the interweaving of pop culture. I related to a lot of it. It was an important and gouging read. But it also reinforced that I do not want to write a memoir anytime soon. Too centre-stage, too exposed, too much feeling and sharing lol.

The hardest part of writing Slippery Mind Allegiance was playing both hands of crib and writing it down without losing track, mainly because I have a crib board with a blue resin crest without numbers and it is very easy to lose track. That took a few attempts. Plus, it’s easy to forget
whose turn it is when you are playing both ; )

Thanks for reading, sing out if you have questions. I’d be happy to chat.

This piece is Gillie Easdon’s first published fiction. It is part of Little Always Big, a yet unpublished interconnected short fiction collection that explores aspects of tenderness, inspired by memories that stick. She’s a writer and single mom in Victoria BC.

email: hello@gillieeasdon.com 

instagram: @gillie.easdon

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Finding the Form with Tricia Dower

When I started writing fiction, I went to school on Alice Munro— eleven volumes of her stories sit on my shelves. Although I’ve written two novels, I love the shorter form’s power to encapsulate a character’s complexity in relatively few words as well as the freedom it allows me to isolate a voice and perspective. In Complicated, I use a close third person point of view to portray Ladonna’s gumption as she recovers from her husband’s suicide and her own troubled past. She hasn’t knuckled under to life, despite all she’s suffered and, for all her toughness, she has a decency that makes you want to root for her—at least that’s my intention. Ladonna first showed up in my collection, Silent Girl, then went on to play a major role in my novel, Stony River. She’s not the only one who makes encore appearances in my work. I find it hard to abandon characters I’ve spent months or even years creating. I have explored Ladonna from the ages of thirteen to forty, so far, in a running narrative that takes the form of random notes stuffed in a manilla folder and entire scenes in electronic files. Some of the material may find its way to publication, like Complicated has. Some of it may not. What matters more to me is getting Ladonna right. Although she is only eighteen in Complicated, I’ve tried to portray her with the self-respect I imagine her continuing to gain as she matures. I do hope that comes across.

Tricia Dower is the author of the collection Silent Girl (Inanna 2008), the novel Stony River (Penguin Canada 2012) and the novel Becoming Lin (Caitlin 2016). Her short stories have won awards and appeared in magazines in Canada and the United States. She lives and writes in Sidney, BC.

Photo Courtesy of iStock Getty Images 

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