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John Adames’ Writing Space

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

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

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

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Deepa Rajagopalan’s Writing Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Finding the Form with Janice McCrum

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

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

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

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

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

Header photo by Brice Cooper on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Alexander Hollenberg

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

Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law

Or some frail china jar receive a flaw,

Or stain her honor or her new brocade.

Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade,

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

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

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

the connection of leader to line

must always end in chiasmus, the extra twist

obscuring line and leader.

Not a perfect knot

but it should last for the season.

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

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

Photos courtesy of Yannick Forest.

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Megan Callahan’s Writing Space

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

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

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

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

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

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Finding the Form with William Ross

Our family, a Caucasian father, a Chinese mother and two mixed-race children, is fortunate to take part in the annual holidays and celebrations of two cultures. For example, we enjoy two different New Year celebrations. One occurs on the last day of December and the first day of January according to the Gregorian calendar. The other is based on the lunisolar calendar with New Year falling on the second new moon after the winter solstice. The Chinese New Year festivities last sixteen days with prescribed customs and traditional foods associated with each day. There is enormous richness in the stories and customs associated with the twelve-year zodiac cycle of the lunar New Year.

2022 was the Year of the Tiger. At the beginning of every year there is speculation about how the character of the presiding zodiac animal will influence the unfolding of days ahead. That was where the poem began, wondering how the ferocious tiger might affect 2022. I liked the idea of subverting the image of ferocity and focussing on what the tiger often does, staying hidden in the tall grass, staring out at what might be happening in the distance.

I’m a visual thinker, and often have to draw a picture of something in order to better understand it, or just to explore the structure and relationship of its parts. One of the early images that came to mind was a gigantic, cogged wheel rotating and clicking into place in the sky.

After I have let a first draft pour out, I often do some research to verify facts in the setting of the poem. Unexpected details that come out of research can add richness to the lyrical voice, allowing the reader to absorb the poem in more vivid ways. In this case, having experienced Chinese New Year for over four decades, many of the details and customs were already familiar to me, but there was still a need to comb through, looking for the images that would work together to tell the story.

I had no pre-determined idea of how the poem would end, and it wasn’t until many drafts on, when I was musing about the difference in character of the tiger and the animal for the following year, the rabbit, that the poem found its ending.

William Ross is a Canadian writer and visual artist living in Toronto. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Bluepepper, Humana Obscura, New Note Poetry, Cathexis Northwest Press, Topical Poetry, Heavy Feather Review,*82 Review, and Alluvium. Recent work is forthcoming in Bindweed Magazine and Anti-Heroin Chic.

Header photo by Scott Graham on Unsplash

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Of pantsers, plotters, and being of use

I want to be a plotter. Oh, how I want to be a plotter. In the way I want my car to stay clean or to keep my spice drawer organized, I want to be a plotter. Each time I start a new project, I delude myself with an outline and visions of stepwise arguments, character development, of writing with the end in mind.

But — and this is not an insouciant gesture toward having some rare and untameable intelligence — I just can’t do it. I am constitutionally someone who writes — and lives — by the seat of her pants. I am constitutionally a pantser. I changed my major three times in undergrad, was miffed when I was told I couldn’t do a double-major in two different faculties, started my career in science, followed my curiosity over to journalism, then came around another hairpin curve into medicine. The first books I published were novels, followed by nonfiction, then poetry, with a radio play and a few short films thrown in there.

What can look like fickleness, or deficits in attention, or collecting careers (my c.v. is a disaster), has, in fact, been me trying to be a decent generalist. Remember back when it was okay to be a generalist? When I was growing up, my family owned the only general store in a very small town. My parents worked hard to have a good selection of most things a person might need for daily life, to spare them a drive into the city: milk, meat, fruit, dry goods, ice cream, nails, paint, a few gifts and greeting cards, and the occasional snowmobile. They took pride not in showiness, but in being useful.

Usefulness can be a slippery concept. The pursuit of usefulness led me from journalism to medical school. The kind of journalism to which I was assigned had stopped feeling important, and I was itching to contribute something. Surely medicine would be something? Two decades later I know I’ve been useful to some people sometimes, but art is as essential to a good life — as useful— as is medical care. My heart has not for one second stopped questioning the choice to leave behind writing as my daily bread or stopped wanting the freedom to be in the field and to go on adventures. Being a generalist, straddling arts and science, working across genres, has been my way of keeping my boots by the door.

In only a few of these things I have written have I known exactly what I wanted to say, or even how I wanted to say them, until I was partway into the writing. Sometimes I try to write something as fiction, but it finds a truer form in poetry. Sometimes life allows only episodic writing. Poems can start with a single image and be drafted quickly to capture a moment; my favourite moments of revision reshape first drafts into something unexpected, something under the surface that wasn’t immediately apparent when pen first touched paper. The essay that appears in this issue of The New Quarterly was like that. Initially just a bunch of journal entries collected over multiple trips to Antarctica, interspersed with quotes from books I happened to be reading, the many parts became an existential journey to find everything waiting at the centre of nothing. I didn’t know that’s what I was going to write, and the only writing I could do at the time, while busy working, was to collect images and scenes in what became something of a logbook. I kept the useful bits. Everything else was a hand up along the way.

So while I chase the illusion of personal and creative control, in truth I live for surprise. I write until something lights up in my mind or on the page, often scrapping what I started and chasing down the thing that has just visited me. I try to live like that, too: by plunging in and working my way out, pantsing. In my worst moments, I make a garbled mess of things. In my best, I can stumbled on separate images or ideas and make one hold up a mirror to the other, creating a new conversation. In this time of wars old and new, maybe conversation is the most useful thing there is.

Monica Kidd’s most recent book, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals (Gaspereau Press, 2019), was short-listed for the 2020 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry. She works as a family doctor, a freelance journalist, and is doing an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction at University of King’s College.

Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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What’s John Adames Reading?

The death of Louise Glück this year and her winning the Nobel Prize prompted me to reread two volumes of her poetry – The Wild Iris and The Seven Ages – that I had purchased many years ago from the famous City Lights Books in San Francisco. One of my favorite poems from The Seven Ages is “Radium.” In this poem radium metaphorically refers to the world of work outside of the home and the choices we all face in this context. In the background, but skillfully not mentioned in the poem, are Madame Curie and her discovery of radium. Glück’s memories of her own anxieties as a young girl and her mother who did not pursue a career are both chilling and transcendent in the poem’s concluding stanza:

Time was passing. Time was carrying us

faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,

and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.

My mother stirred the soup. The onions,

by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.

I am also reading Simon Armitage’s A Vertical Art: on Poetry, based on his public lectures at Oxford. I am enjoying his insights into various poets and so far I am particularly interested in his comments on how Philip Larkin (one of my favourites) often ends his poems:

Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies – those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness.

Finally, I feel that almost any poet will certainly be intrigued by the book’s coda: “Nighty-five Theses: On the Principles and Practice of Poetry.”

In addition to a career as a professional musician, John Adames received a PhD in English from the University of Toronto and has taught courses in literature, music, writing and rhetoric at various universities and col- leges in Canada. He has published in First of the Month and, most recently, in First Literary Review-East.

Header photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

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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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