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The 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist

After thorough consideration, The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The longlisted writers and their essays are as follows:

The 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist

“Black Hammers Falling”
by Christopher Banks
“Every Possible Way”
by Adèle Barclay
“Staying Power”
by Gayle Belsher
“Threads Rumbling Softly”
by Christine Bissonnette
“Jailed in a Flawed System”
by Virginia Boudreau
“Release”
by Emily Cann
“Vigil for the Vigilant”
by Adrienne Gruber
“Not Nothing, but Everything”
by Monica Kidd
“Cantonese Lessons for a Foreign Daughter-in-Law”
by Danica Longair
“The Words of Strangers”
by Judith MacKay
“A Trail of Depression”
by Karen Moore

Thank you to all of the writers who submitted their essays to this year’s contest. Stay tuned for our winner announcement!

Benjamin Lefebvre’s Writing Space

I can sum up the state of my home office, the room in which most aspects of my writing life occur, in one word: piles. They are multiple, if not multitudinous—books and papers for the most part, as well as receipts, USB keys, pens, paperclips, electronic device chargers, and discarded teabag tags. My desk, so heavy and cumbersome that we needed two extra people to help us lug it upstairs when we moved into our house, has a double drawer for file folders. These folders are likewise covered in piles.

My laptop—the device I use to do the writing—can likewise be described in a single word: files. Most days, my virtual environment has as much clutter as my physical one, judging by the numbers of folders and subfolders with names like “Files—Sort Out” and “Documents from Old Laptop Sort Out.” My downloads folder has so many files that it can no longer sort them all by title or by type.

When I need to look for something in my office, I start by determining how long it’s been since I’ve seen the thing in question so I know how deep in the piles to rummage. The search function on my laptop is helpful, and sometimes it reveals that I’ve downloaded the same attachment multiple times. A few times a year, I make a point of imposing some order in both spaces by finding more permanent homes for the items in these piles and in these files. But then, inevitably, the avalanches soon return.

No doubt what I’m describing is most people’s idea of hell.

That’s why, for all my writing needs, I use Scrivener. Scrivener is an app that allows me to create order out of chaos by making it easier to organize all parts of writing—drafts, outlines, spade work, character sketches, research notes, and discarded bits—under one roof, so to speak. Each project file mimics the structure of my computer’s hard drive in that it consists of folders, subfolders, and files, yet somehow, the streamlined yet flexible visual layout gives me the illusion of freedom (and therefore a decrease of writer’s block) that’s lacking in the seemingly more formal space of my word processor.

I don’t mean for this to sound like a commercial for one particular app, but as a writer who struggles with keeping my writing spaces organized and tidy, I appreciate what Scrivener offers me: a contained virtual environment in which the writing can get messy when it needs to and can be cleaned up to conform to standard formatting conventions once I’m done. Perhaps most importantly, Scrivener has a full-screen view that allows me to block everything else out.

For fellow writers who need help keeping track of both the forest and the trees of a particular project, an app such as Scrivener might be a game changer in your writing practice. It certainly has been for mine.

Benjamin Lefebvre lives in Kitchener. His most recent books are In the Key of Dale
(Arsenal Pulp Press) and Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939
(The L.M. Montgomery Library/University of Toronto Press). Visit him online at
https://benjaminlefebvre.com.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

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John Vardon’s Writing Space

When I look through the dozens of other writing-space pieces, I am most impressed by, and slightly envious of, those writers fortunate enough to write from rooms overlooking gorgeous gardens or the shores of the “ramshackle sea,” to use a phrase by Richard Outram quoted in the blog post of Luke Hathaway. My writing and reading space is much more mundane but I’m proud to say that it has one thing in common with a poet I admire, Susan J. Atkinson, from Ottawa, who writes that her writing day begins on the corner of her brown living-room couch. Like hers, my couch is brown (leather) and it allows me to look out the front window. And perhaps I should say the the “couch” isn’t really a couch but “a love-seat commandeered as an armchair,” to use my wife’s words. Unlike the more dignified-looking piece of furniture on which Susan so photogenically sits, my couch is a more cluttered and untidy spot, often covered in newspapers, magazines, notebooks and novels, the foam in one of the love-seat pads compressed into a permanent depression contoured to my body. My wife, only half jokingly says she is waiting for me to get up so she can have it reupholstered.

From this vantage point I can see our low, glass-fronted bookshelves beneath the window containing art books and reference works along with now ancient VHS movie tapes and CDs. On top are ceramic bowls, various glass-art-objects and framed photos of family members. The window allows me to see the limbs and branches of the large red maple tree on our front lawn where squirrels and sparrows squabble and where, a few months back, a red-tailed hawk perched one afternoon, munching on a songbird whose feathers floated down to form an untidy pile in the driveway. The window is also at a height where I can see only the passing heads of tall delivery people, mail carriers, occasional Jehovah’s witnesses (always in pairs, one silent and one non-stop talkative), various solicitors for charities both well-known and unheard of, plus various itinerant charlatans, one of whom said he needed to see copies of my hydro bill.

At one end of the couch is a standing lamp with one very bright bulb and another special reading bulb which mostly doesn’t’ work but which in poltergeist fashion turns itself unexpectedly on and then just as unexpectedly off. Beside the not really a couch are stacks of books, read and unread. (Shelf space in our house was filled long ago.) Also within reach is grocery bag to be filled with dull or disliked books or surprisingly discovered duplicates headed for thrift shops. There are also various writing aids like pencils, pens, and pads of paper because I still sometimes write in longhand.

I have never been a creative writer, at least not a poet, novelist, or short-story writer. My only foray into fiction was a parody published in TNQ (under a pseudonym) only because editor Kim Jernigan had a good sense of humour. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of my attempts at fiction when I was younger began with sentences Bulwer Lytton would have used to start his own contest for the most atrocious opening lines to imagined novels. Curiously, the only literary contest I ever won was Books in Canada’s version of that same infamous competition, in this case for the worst first sentence in a Canadian novel. Mine began:

“As she watched her ex-husband’s head roll woodenly down the stairs of her front porch, the indoor-outdoor carpet turning quietly crimson in the senseless sunlight of another heedless dawn, Jessica was seized by the realization, as sudden as crows startled from a garbage bin, that today would not be the best time to have her toilet repaired.”

But I also do most of my reading in the same couch-potatoish location, whether it’s the hundreds of poems submitted to TNQ each year or the many books that retirement has freed me to read, now recorded in my book journals, which I began about three years ago when I realized how thoroughly I had forgotten what some of these these books were about and even what they looked like. Fortunately, my summaries and assessments are usually enough to jog my memory of their merits or shortcomings. At the very least, this habit reminds me of how many books I read in a year on average, much fewer than some and far more than most, if the annual depressing statistics on reading are to be believed. I think I am now on pace with my late mother, who read about two books a week.

One of the constant comments I encountered as I read through TNQ’s Writing Space archives is that these spots also facilitate thinking—reflection, contemplation, inner argumentation, writerly and non-writerly wool gathering, all of which are essential to the creative imagination and sustained sanity. Another thing I can see through the window is the weather, and today the snow is falling faintly through my universe, inducing a sense of peacefulness and calm, interrupted too soon by the loud buzz of my neighbour’s snowblower, a sound James Joyce, quite thankfully, may never have heard.

After about 35 years of writing, interviewing, and editing for TNQ, John Vardon has had an article accepted for an upcoming issue of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Photo by Timothy L Brock on Unsplash

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Pride Month Reads

In honour of Pride Month, we’ve rounded up some works across our nonfiction, fiction, and poetry publications which centre 2SLGBTQIA+ characters, stories and authors. These reads will be accessible online regardless of subscription status until August.

Nonfiction

“Homebodies” by J.P. Letkemann

One time, we were raking leaves at my father’s cottage, and Ben rushed toward me excitedly. “Look, Jake! Look what I found!” he said. “A butterfly cocoon!”

In his hand, he was holding a pinecone.

To this day, he maintains he was joking.

“Mother and Child” by Dora Dueck

But if I claim the icon’s gravity and harmony for the occasion of our daughter’s coming out, I certainly cannot claim its serenity. She was nervous. She spoke slowly and carefully, consulting her papers, and beneath my held-calm exterior, my guts were roiling as I grasped what she’d said.

A revised version of “Mother and Child” appears in Return Stroke: essays & memoir

“The Plague Came with No Directions” by thom vernon

We kids balanced on the tips of our toes. Ready to bolt, duck, or escape. An attack could come anytime or anywhere. There were always incoming missiles. Once I made the mistake of shoveling an elderly neighbour’s sidewalk without asking the woman first.

“White Sneakers” by Tim McCaskill

People stop in the street to look at us as we pass, and we begin to feel like our glowing illuminated futuristic feet are a bit out of place. Yes we’re tourists, but we’d hoped to be maybe a little less obvious.

“How to Make a Gay Icon” by Kevin Shaw

While Garten will tell you that very cold butter is required to make the best biscuits, the ingredients for making a gay icon are less precise.

Fiction

“Body of Sand” by ViNa Nguyễn

Content warning: fatphobia, body shaming, light body horror

My body feels sluggish. I was excited this morning for the party. Even the thought of my extended family sleeping over didn’t faze me. But these days I often speak of excitement in the past tense.

“String Theory” by Jake Tobin Garret

Your dad’s job is so cool, Sam and Marlon said. He just gets to play video games all day. Kyle had shrugged. He didn’t tell them that his dad’s job mostly consisted of him squinting in front of a computer screen for hours typing tiny symbols and letting out frustrated grunts. Leave it to his dad to make even video games boring.

“Condolence” by Benjamin Lefebvre

…the prospect of entering a church for a funeral after learning how narrowly he’d missed being invited to join his friends for the most awkward-sounding threesome during a block of time in which his sex life had come to a screeching halt seemed to be beyond the realm of common decency.

“Catalogue” by Elliot Gish

Content warning: themes of abuse, intimate partner violence

When you finish, she lets loose a long and gusty sigh.
“So you remember standing in front of a building,” she says. “And?”
You guess that’s all it is, really, although it feels like so much more.

“Harold” by Daryl Bruce

Harold looks down at the floor. “Sorry. I’ve been trying to quit,” he sighs. “I didn’t think it was that noticeable.”
Roger wants to lecture him that smoking is nothing more than drawn-out suicide. That one day, his lungs will revolt and metastasize their anger. And long before he’s meant to reach his demise, he will lie in the dark of a bedroom, encasing him like a tomb and drown in his own fluids. “Promise me you’ll try harder to stop, Harold.”

Poetry

“That Time I Called An Auntie A Bitch” by Grace Lau

I’d stolen
her joy, proved my very existence
was sin
yet again.

Three Poems by Mattew Stepanic

Content warning: mass shooting

Our tongues are weighted to hold down truths,
our legs ever alert, and our endurance
innumerable years long.

“Christmas In July” by Kevin Shaw

More than a dozen television
holiday romances will be shot in the capital
this year. Many of them star my nineties icons,
their familiar faces uncannily preserved, oversweet
and taut as frosted sugar cookies.

“Book of Silence” by Helen Robertson

I can’t help but fumble. I was raised
A boy. Pressured by peers to never express
The wrong emotion. “See him there, crying?
Don’t be him or be cast out the same.”

Two Poems by Pamela Mosher

from bloom to brown, they’re cut down, yes. With wizened
stem nubs left protruding, unsightly, they’re a warning
to others who might think each peak should accentuate
a decline. There isn’t time to bend to the will of fluctuating
seasons. This is the practice of enforcing constraints.
This is a battle of wills

“Michif in Public” by Chase Everett McMurren

I am learning the language as it disappears.
Learning from an app on my phone, that is.

Thank you to our featured writers for sharing these stories.

Photo by Raphael Renter on Unsplash

Finding the Form With John Vardon

The person who said that there is no such thing as a stupid question was obviously not an author, especially one enduring interviews on a book-promotion tour or answering questions at the end of a reading. Having attended many literary readings, I dread the usual questions about where authors get their ideas or those prefaced by statements like “My question, more of a comment really, is in three parts.” Examples of questionable questions are sadly easy to find but my favourite is the one that a TV interviewer once asked Mordecai Richler: “Is this book of yours, Mordy, based on fact, or is it something you made up in your own head?” So I am always impressed when authors answer these these questions with patience, tact, and grace and try my best in interviewing writers to avoid the overly personal, impertinent or predictable.

To be fair, interviews (or in this case, more of a conversation) in literary magazines are seldom so egregiously silly but it’s still advisable to do your literary homework before asking questions that the author is tired of answering.

All of this serves in a roundabout way as my response to “finding the form” in my conversation with Evelyn Lau. The more sensational facts of her earlier life are a matter of public record, and she has written about them herself with a candidness that is beyond my own limits of personal disclosure. But what interests me about her once turbulent and now, I hope, more tranquil life is the stubborn persistence of poetry. I am interested in its language, its form, the process by which a poem forms in the mind and then on the page, and the way in which editors can facilitate and enhance the finished product.

My “homework” for any interview or review begins by reading as many previous interviews and books as as I can by the author, a task not easily achieved if the literary object of your attention is an established poet. Limited print runs of small presses mean that copies of early out-of-print collections are not easily obtained. Fortunately, I have been collecting books since grad school and have a sizeable library, so I already owned several of her books, both fiction and poetry. Just as fortunately, I live in a twin city with a good public library system, two university libraries, and three excellent used book stores. Nonetheless, I still had to order two of Evelyn’s books on-line via Amazon-owned Abebooks.

For a conversation, finding the form also involves finding the medium. Evelyn was more interested in a telephone discussion than one conducted by email, presumably because it would be more spontaneous and less time consuming. This proved to be easier than I thought, thanks to something called voice memo on my computer and my wife’s technological assistance. In the days before email, says the old geezer, personal interviews were much more onerous. One of mine involved recording questions and answers on a cassette tape so small it looked like the one whose message self-destructed in the opening segment of the television series Mission Impossible. Then and now, however, what’s required is the often undervalued skill of transcription, which in this case was done quickly and efficiently by my daughter Elena.

Literary interviews give writers a chance to challenge common misconceptions, perhaps offer insights on the genre in which they write, or provide interesting details about their craft. It’s even better if there is a surprise or two. One was that, after all my questions about her, Evelyn Lau asked one or two about me, including a perfectly innocent one touching on an issue that I have never fully come to terms with: being a poetry editor without ever having written a poem. Another was that she has, apparently forever, forsaken prose in favour of the decidedly unprofitable but ever pleasing practice of poetry.

After about 35 years of writing, interviewing, and editing for TNQ, John Vardon has had an article accepted for an upcoming issue of Canadian Notes and Queries.

Header photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Fiona Tinwei Lam

The writing process for me has never been linear. I tend to circle around themes and subjects, revisiting them over the years, trying different approaches to go deeper, to attempt to plumb the symbolism and connections. It has surprised me how often that yet another poem will emerge about my mother’s prolonged struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Ordinary objects have served as a lens for writing poems for many poets, including me. My last poetry collection was partly inspired by Pablo Neruda’s Odas Elementales (Elemental Odes or Odes to Ordinary Things). There can be so many stories, events and relationships related to any one gift or household item. I decided to try to write a poem about this blue wool scarf that my mother knitted for me during the early stages of her cognitive decline. I seldom take the scarf out of the drawer, but will never give it away because it’s the last thing she made for me before her death. Its preciousness to me has increased every year as I approach the age she was when she was first diagnosed.

The draft poem was just a jumble of thoughts, memories and phrases until I integrated key bits of knitting lingo (thanks to consulting my friend, Analee, who crotchets and knits) which immediately created an axis or narrative spine that ordered the images and ideas. The poem depicts the shifts in the mother-daughter relationship and the fraught intermingling of duty and love as the narrator attempts to distract an ailing parent. But the poem is also about “knitting” a tangible connection between past and present.

Fiona Tinwei Lam is Vancouver’s sixth poet laureate. She is a past winner of TNQ’s Nick Blatchford prize and the author of three collections of poetry and a children’s book, as well as the editor of The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer. Her award-winning poetry videos, made in collaboration with others, have been screened internationally. Her work appears in over 40 anthologies, including Best Canadian Poetry 2010 and 2020.

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What’s Morgan Dick Reading?

For many years, I considered myself allergic to poetry. Most of the poets I studied in school were eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmen who wrote about beautiful women, so you can see why I thought the form silly and self-important. By my twenties, I’d done my best to avoid reading it. Beyond a few mopey verses composed in seventh grade for an English assignment, I’d never tried to write it. (I still haven’t.)

Around this time, I stopped reading what a syllabus had told to me read and started wandering around the library on my own, pulling the titles that intrigued me or which the staff recommended. My feelings about poetry, like my feelings about reading in general, began to shift. Slowly but surely, I realized that girls wrote poetry, too. And they had quite a lot to say.

“Slowly but surely, I realized that girls wrote poetry, too. And they had quite a lot to say.”

An Alberta poet and novelist I’ve come to admire is Erin Emily Ann Vance. Published by Guernica Editions as part of its First Poets Series, A History of Touch is Vance’s full-length poetry collection. I picked it up because I was in the mood for something folkloric and dark, and the collection hasn’t disappointed.

Vance’s poems bear witness to women throughout history—figures both real and imagined—who found themselves othered due to illness, disability, or independence of mind. She writes about healers, artists, midwives, purported witches, and in one especially striking example, factory workers who experienced phossy jaw, a condition caused by unsafe exposure to the phosphorous in matches, which caused the jaw to rot.

I’ll say this collection isn’t for the faint of heart. The language is visceral, grim, and deeply unsettling. But that’s the whole point of poetry, I’ve learned—to not just read the words but to feel them.

Morgan Dick is a neurodivergent writer living on Treaty 7 territory. Her fiction has appeared in Grain, Geist, CAROUSEL, Cloud Lake Literary, Vagabond City Lit, and The Prairie Journal. Find her at morgandick.com.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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Meraj Zafar’s Writing Space

For me it’s as much about time as place. Time and context, maybe, which is a way of starting to explain why the woodshop’s workbench doubles as my favourite writing space. I have my desk at home too, where I write properly in my notebook, and edit OpenOffice docs on my cherished and ancient computer, but something about the rhythm of building things makes me want to write. I’ll turn over phrases in my head while sanding pieces; I’ll pull up my notes app, unwilling to forget a certain line or idea. Back and forth through the shop, switching from tool to tool, hands and body busy, and every part of me aware there’s something I want to say. And then, eventually, lunchtime hits, the shop empties out, things get quiet (or at least quieter), and I can sit down and write.

“So much of writing requires hope and faith.”

I’m sure many writers feel the same longing while at their day jobs. At work we’re the most alert and quick-minded that we will be all day, but we’re not free to use that for ourselves. I’m just lucky that the tactile nature of my work helps my writing. I think it’s similar to how people keep pen and paper on their nightstands. Dreaming awakens the part of them that can receive inspiration. Or maybe it’s more how athletes feel after winning a match—that exhilaration, the adrenaline rush. In any case, as a writing space, the woodshop itself acts as inspiration, as well as serving one more purpose. So much of writing requires hope and faith. For me, writing at my workbench renews that faith daily. Being surrounded by my tools, my notes, my projects, all of them evidence of a trade learned and deeply loved, serves as a kind of reassurance: a reminder that I know one kind of making, and that I can learn to practice another.

Meraj Zafar works as a cabinetmaker in Toronto, Ontario, having previously worked in communications in the not-for-profit sector. She has a B.A. in English from the University of Toronto.

Photo by Yasamine June on Unsplash

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The 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Results

The New Quarterly is proud to announce the winners of the 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest!

Winner

“Abecedarian with Sharpened Vision” by Dagne Forrest

Runner-Up

“Mondays with My Dad” by Linda Hatfield

Second Runner-Up

“Ah see it all wit’ mih own two eyes” Simon Peter Eggertsen

Honourable Mentions

“Year of the Tiger” by William Ross

“The Love Song of Grindstone Marsh” by Lisa Borkovich

“Last Fly of Summer” by Linda Hatfield

“Volodymyr Zelensky at Westminster Hall, Day 349” by Natalie Hryciuk

“elegy for a groundhog” by Alexander Hollenberg

“Having A Day” by Ken Victor

“Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time” by Susan Atkinson

“Consider the Ear” by Jennifer Frankum

“A Mother’s Will” by Janice McCrum

We look forward to publishing these poems in our Fall Issue.

Thank you to all of the wonderful poets who submitted.

Finding the Form with Alanna Marie Scott

Relevance snuck up on me.

I wrote In the Bowers in 2018, sitting on a towel on my fourth floor balcony, looking out at a grid of parking lots and alleys, listening to Mystery of Love by Sufjan Stevens on repeat. It was spring, and unseasonably warm.

At the time I was interested in acute loneliness and isolation. I was more than a hobbyist, but less than an expert. But, hey, give it a couple years.

To be honest, I find a security in loneliness. In equal measure I rail against it and seek it out. I’ve moved across the country to different cities where I knew no one twice. I live alone, I don’t get out much, I’ll go nocturnal if left to my own devices for too long. It was on my mind a lot, which happens, periodically.

In the moment, I remember having an interest in apocalyptic manifestations of unhappiness, and I have a regular interest in collisions between two people in short fiction, and so here came two people whose everyday loneliness became catastrophically magnified. After one of my usual false starts, the whole thing came very quickly.

Anyway, it’s strange to have something written and finished, and then for the world to reshape the story. When I looked at In the Bowers post-2020, it was like time had done its own revisions of the work. Context and meaning are inherently linked, and the context had shifted in such an unexpectedly universal way.

Would it read now only as something capitalizing on pandemic isolation? Watching world events over the last few years, I watched too as this thing I had written about being lonely and unhappy in the springtime took on meanings I could not have anticipated on my balcony in 2018.

We’re all more than hobbyists now, I suppose.

Alanna Marie Scott is a lifelong Torontonian who has lived in Edmonton for almost 10 years. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Victoria’s writing program and the Dungeon Master for her D&D campaign.

Photo by Seiji Seiji on Unsplash

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