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What is Matthew Hollett Reading?

I first encountered the work of Irish writer and artist Sara Baume through a friend who recommended her novel A Line Made By Walking. The title immediately intrigued me – it’s plucked from an artwork by British artist Richard Long, who in 1967 walked back and forth across a field until his path was well-trod enough to became a visible line. I remember marveling over Long’s walk-work when I was studying conceptual art and photography in art school. Documented in a muted black and white photograph, the artist’s path stretches towards a cluster of trees and back, plain and shining. Nothing could be simpler, yet it felt like an invitation to ask questions about art that I had never considered before.

So I read Sara Baume’s curiously titled A Line Made By Walking, and I loved it. For me, Baume’s novel captures something of the post-MFA doldrums – after years of focused, intense work among fellow creatives and colleagues, being plunked into a world that doesn’t know or care about conceptual photography, psychogeography, or the Oulipo leaves you a little adrift and broken-hearted. In A Line Made By Walking, Frankie is a troubled artist who leaves Dublin in search of solace and space, moving into an ancient cottage once inhabited by her late grandmother. She walks, sulks, and photographs small dead animals, attempting to pull herself together as the house falls apart around her. It’s a novel about depression and grief, about looking closely at things that make you uncomfortable, and about seeking comfort in a dispassionate world. It’s also rooted in place in a way that I really love. Baume’s prose is restless and evocative, with the concise inquisitiveness of the best poetry.

Though she’s published four books, in interviews Sara Baume calls herself an artist first. Much of her writing is semiautobiographical. Her tiny painted plaster sculptures of birds are scattered throughout Handiwork, a 2020 nonfiction project that perhaps comes closest to synthesizing her art and writing practices. “I have always felt caught between two languages, though I can only speak in one. The one I can speak goes down on paper and into my laptop, in the hours before noon. The one I cannot speak goes down in small painted objects, in the hours after.”

Handiwork is a book you can dart, birdlike, in and out of. It’s not quite a journal, but an interwoven series of memories, musings, and impressions. Baume writes about the soundscape of her studio, the poetics of migrating birds, the paint under her fingernails, and her relationship with her late father, “a scratch-builder of the monumental” who built everything by hand. His memory lends the book a certain melancholy, though Baume’s observations are mostly buoyant, wry and lyrical. “I would like to know at what stage of life a person stops making small, painted objects, and how I managed to overshoot it.” As an artist-turned-writer myself, Handiwork’s everyday reckonings hit home. It’s rare to come across a book that captures not only the artmaking process, but the artmaking instinct – along with the second-guessing, callouses, and occasional moments of magic that accompany that way of being.

Matthew Hollett is a writer and photographer in St. John’s, Newfoundland (Ktaqmkuk). His work explores landscape and memory through photography, writing and walking. Optic Nerve, a collection of poems about photography and visual perception, has just been published by Brick Books. Album Rock (2018) is a work of creative nonfiction and poetry investigating a curious photograph taken in Newfoundland in the 1850s. Matthew won the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize, and has previously been awarded the NLCU Fresh Fish Award for Emerging Writers, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem, and VANL-CARFAC’s Critical Eye Award for art writing.

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Karen Lee

What does it mean to silence a child?

When we enact oppression on other people, it lives in us too. What did it cost Miss Hirabayashi?

What would the river say to you?

In a single, intense, exhilarating writing session with Aurora Masum-Javed, writing coach, poet, educator, I played Twenty Questions with Miss Hirabayashi. I asked Jean Binta Breeze questions I wish she were here to answer. We combed the epistolary, poems, flashback and prose in my draft and untangled the trauma around silencing the voice and creative expression of a child.

I employed non-linear Afrikan-Caribbean storytelling traditions so This is Not a Poem! could express the dissociation of my childhood and teen years in the associative, fragmented, spacious nature of the lyric essay.

The speaker offers Miss Hirabayashi receipts for the legendary accomplishments, artistic rigour, and prolific excellence of multi-genre Jamaican storytellers in the academy, performing and recording arts, broadcast media, library sciences, community and literary canon. There is tension between Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and Musgrave Medal, prestigious degrees and awards in the name of the colonizer, and the very Jamaican/Patwah for which Doctors Breeze, Bennett-Coverley, Cox, and Mordecai, were variably honoured in the white spaces. Jean Binta Breeze, who is not alone in this regard, did not care for Empire but graciously accepted the MBE.

The river metaphor, as identity as ancestry as difficulty as possibility, braids the lyric: from Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers; through Miss Hirabayashi, one of many rivers I had to cross; through myself/ourselves as coastal people; through Whitney French, Hush Harbour Press; through Audre Lorde, Litany for Survival; through Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals; through Jean Binta Breeze, church came, like a frightening orgasm; through Mami Wata (river goddess, River Mumma, Yemanja/Yemaya…); and through the quadrille: let what moves me carry you. The River speaks to me.

COMPLETE EACH SENTENCE WITH THE CORRECT PHRASE: SOME SENTENCES ARE COMPLETE, sinuously addresses rivers eroding poetry/performing arts/communities. This interactive matching game poem invites the reader to complete meaning.

quadrille: let what moves me carry you, my first, is a nod to Jean Binta Breeze. A quadrille poem consists of 44 words. The quadrille derived from the English and French colonial coupled dances brought to Jamaica in the 18th and 19th centuries, to which a fifth figure was added. Breeze’s Fifth Figure, documents five generations of women in her family as memoir and novel in the form of a quadrille.

mango belly contains all of these received voices [that] exist inside the wound. (Masum-Javed). In this iteration, specific to this essay, Audre Lorde insists on breaking silence, against Miss Hirabayashi’s Detention! for the same. The speaker asks her father questions that answer questions Miss Hirabayashi never asked her student.

And with Masum-Javed’s, you know what you’re doing…your gut will tell you when it’s ready, I greased the scalp of Falling in Love with Poetry and braided This is Not a Poem!

 

Karen Lee won the 2020 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, PRISM international. Her polyvocal refusals appear in publications including The New Quarterly, Room, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, and the 2018 Small Axe Literary Prize shortlist. “Tekkin Back Tongue,” her first poetry manuscript, is named after her self-directed writing residency in Ghana, Kenya (2018). lee also self-directed writing residencies in Kenya (2021), Germany and France (2022). lee is a Jamaican Patwah court interpreter, voiceover artist/actor, vocalist and poet. She is working on two poetry manuscripts in progress.

Photos by Fraser Collins and Mrika Selimi on Unsplash

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What is Martha Batiz Reading?

Reading time is precious to me, as during the academic year I seldom find the chance to read anything besides my (many) students’ work. I wish I had the energy to devour books during these months at the same pace that I do during the summer, but if I have learned something since I migrated to Canada and reinvented myself as a professor, is to take things as they come, and be grateful. And grateful I am, indeed, to be currently enjoying the beautiful Papyrus. The Invention of Books in the Ancient World, by Spanish author Irene Vallejo. The book’s original title in Spanish is El infinito en un junco, and it has sold over a million copies and been translated into over forty languages. Vallejo is a philologist and historian, and in this long essay she explores the creation of books and their increasing relevance in human life.

I picked up this book because everyone I knew was reading it and praising its beautiful prose (beautiful is an understatement, really: Vallejo’s writing is a delicacy, and the translation into English by Charlotte Whittle is masterful), the seamless way in which the author weaves the events that took place in the ancient world and compares them to the present in order to help the reader truly understand their significance, and the honest declaration of love for books that these pages truly are. Reading Papyrus has helped me understand and visualize ancient Rome and Alexandria in new and different ways, and value the written word even more. We owe so much to those who came before us and treasured and protected historical texts embodied in rolls, clay tablets, vellum, metal, wax, wood, and paper for future generations −for us! Irene Vallejo brings their efforts and vicissitudes to our attention with captivating precision and grace. 

Papyrus is the perfect read for booklovers everywhere. You don’t need to be a scholar to enjoy it. Vallejo tells her tale in an accessible and endearing way. If you want to find out where books come from, as well as how and why they have become such an important presence in our lives, you will definitely love Papyrus. Get your copy now! You won’t regret it. 

Mexican-Canadian writer Martha Bátiz is the author of two short-story collections in Spanish (A todos los voy a matar and De tránsito), and two in English, Plaza Requiem: Stories at the Edge of Ordinary Lives (Exile Editions 2017) and No Stars in the Sky (House of Anansi Press 2022). Martha has a PhD from the University of Toronto, has curated several anthologies, and works as a sessional professor at York University and the University of Guelph-Humber.

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Photos by Hamilton Book, Talent o abrodo, Martha Bátiz and Sergiu Vălenaș on Unsplash

 

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Finding the Form with Noriko Hoshino

I often start writing about the things or the people I know. Occasionally it works, but I usually end up producing lame stories. I suck at writing autobiographical stories or something that is related to my family because I tend to make me look like the nicest person on the planet living with an ideal family with no issues.

Chance encounters spark inspiration. Call me crazy, but there are times I feel that this person has a story. It can be a brief eye contact. It can be a quick chat. I don’t start scribbling, though. The story doesn’t take shape then and there. The nebulous feeling simply goes into a tiny pod somewhere in my head until the incubation period is over or something triggers a premature
birth.

Over a decade ago my husband and I went camping at Mew Lake in Algonquin Park in late December. After breakfast we were standing around the fire pit. A large dog, probably a Lab mix, wandered into our campsite. The owner, an elderly man, apologized for letting his dog roam. No problem, we said, we love dogs. We talked about the beauty of winter camping. No bugs, no bears, no party animals. Then he said, “My wife and I used to come to the park every winter. This is the first time to come here since my wife died.” He patted his dog on the head with a sad smile. “He keeps me company.”

A few years later, we went canoe camping to Massasauga to see Perseid meteor shower. The night sky theatre experience went into another pod in my head. A year or two passed. We went on another canoe camping. At night, when the moon rose, we saw the gleaming trail on the lake. I took some photos of the reflection of the moon with my phone. A few days later, while I was looking at the photos, the little pods merged and the story hatched. As I’m originally from Japan, I added some Japanese twist.

Noriko Hoshino was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She came to Canada in 1997 and now lives in Toronto. She mainly writes historical fiction, but some of her short pieces are contemporary. Her short story “Spring Snow” won University of Toronto’s Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for fiction 2017. Her short story “Spring Migration” appeared in The Fiddlehead Winter 2023 No. 294. She is an avid birder and extreme picnicker.

Photos provided by Noriko Hoshino

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What is J.R. Patterson Reading?

On a recent journey through Morocco, I read André Gide’s short novel Strait is the Gate. The story of two adolescents, Jerome and Alissa, on the Normandy coast falling in love and failing to court one another was at odds with my surroundings—dirty souks, rattling trains, the call of the muezzin. The discord was comforting; it was an escape, and anytime I wanted, I could slip into that distant world of manners and witness two people agonize over their love.

North Africa was the other pole of Gide’s sensibility. While he made several travels to Alegria, Morocco, and Chad, one doesn’t read his account of those travels (Amyntas, Le retour de Tchad) for the description—Gide wasn’t much of a documentarian. In his works about Africa and France, one finds far more of the interior world than the exterior. And yet, without the temperate French spring in my mind, would the chill of the Rif Mountains have sunk so deep into my bones? Without the thought of demure Christmas parties, would the vendors of Marrakesh have been so bothersome, or the tagines so sweet?

The question of values—what they are, why we have them, how to live up to them—formed the core of all Gide’s writing. Strait is the Gate depicts the conflict between desire and duty. Jerome and Alissa are ultimately damned by their attempts at ultimate virtuousness. Their desire for perfection scuppers their chance to be happy; they value their purity too much.

For writers, this conflict between desire and duty presents itself when we must choose between writing what happened and the message of what happened. Writers have a certain duty to the truth. We witness an event—a “fact”—and feel compelled to record it along with our feelings. What is more true: what I saw or what I felt? The event or the message of the event? When does fact become story?

We strive for veracity without questioning the nature of truth. Truth can be petty. True is true, we tell ourselves, convinced a pointed finger negates a shrug. Often when demanding truth, we disregard that we cannot recall things that we deal with on the daily, which falls to us alone to know: the cookies in the oven, where we put our car keys, the colour of the underwear we have on. Meanwhile, more universal truths become secondary: the need for kindness, the ability to put things in perspective, the importance of the benefit of the doubt. Our desire for  perfection scuppers our chance to be happy; we value our purity too much.

Gide reminds us that everything we do contains a greater question of who we are. Is it true? we ask the writer, forgetting it all washes away in the end. The writer asks rather: Is it true for me? Or better, What is true for me?

J.R. Patterson was born on a farm in Manitoba, Canada. His work has appeared in a variety of international publications, including National Geographic, The Walrus, and the Literary Review of Canada.

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Finding the Form with Jessica Moore

One day in the second lockdown winter, when my twins were nearly three, I was walking to the office – my office is a small room in a brutish 70s building downtown, with very thick walls and one window that looks out onto a tree and a patch of sky. It takes me about an hour to walk there from home, so I have lots of time for thoughts. This particular day I remember I had noticed a hair elastic on the ground – I so often see lost elastics and think of Annie Dillard’s wondrous passage about pennies and abundance, and more than once on a windy day I have stopped to pick an elastic up from the ground and pulled my hair into a ponytail to keep it from whipping in my face, a habit that makes my sister and my mother grimace, but what could really be so wrong with an elastic on dry concrete, and why waste your money, I tease them, when the world is fairly strewn with elastics

Around the halfway point to the office I had also witnessed a moment that made me grimace inwardly, outside the Harbord Bakery, when a middle-aged woman bent down to drop a coin into the hand of a man sitting on the sidewalk. He had a very soft-looking brown beard and reminded me of a video artist I know. It was the way the woman so urgently avoided skin contact that made me want to look away, and I suppose also the performance of abundance and lack in this city that is driving artists and others so steadily out (or into the ground), untenable, and who will be left when only the rich can afford to live here, and what kind of city are we already creating.

Thoughts of scraping by made me think of gleaners, and about how things in plain sight can still be invisible, at least to most eyes. I thought about the back-alley vision some of us – dumpster divers, for example – must have of this place. And then I got to thinking about Agnès Varda because she is one of my favourite artists to think about, and because her documentary The Gleaners and I inspired me so deeply when I first saw it, elevating as it does these practices, bringing in an awareness of waste and a gleam of delight.

I didn’t have my notebook with me on that walk so I took out my pen and wrote on my palm a list of vagaries floating in my mind: liminal; best I love; 2 old men; foraging, bargaining, Agnès Varda; perfect balance.

I suppose most of my thoughts for the book have come in these jumbled, palms-full, jostling annexed fragments that I try out alongside one another to see what resonates when they are in conversation. Metonymy is one of my favourite literary devices.

 Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now, is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN America Translation award. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 International Man Booker and won the UK’s Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Jessica’s most recent book—The Whole Singing Ocean—is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang and ecological grief, and was longlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Raymond Souster Award. She is currently at work on a memoir about the intersection of motherhood (to twins) and art.

Photos by Jeff Frenette on Unsplash and Jessica Moore

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Jamaluddin Aram’s Writing Space

I once met Colm Tóibín and asked if living in Spain helped with writing Homage to Barcelona. No, he said, there are so many problems in the world that the last thing people need is a writer complain he can’t write. Give me a pair of headphones, he said and pointed at a table in the corner of the auditorium, I’ll sit there and work.

So I have sat and worked on the trains, in moving cars, at long communal tables in busy libraries, at picnic benches in the parks, on the patios, in cafes. This was before I realized that I fall in love easily and have been avoiding crowded places since.

For a while, I slept in a small bedless room at my parents’ house. In the morning, I would fold and put away the thin mattress and the pillow, pull the low Japanese table, and wait for the words or my two-year-old niece, whichever arrived first. That room was good for writing. I was happy, had my books, very strong coffee, and a window that brought light.

Now I write at an island table in a spacious kitchen. This, by the way, has nothing to do with what Rabelais said about Homer, who supposedly never wrote on an empty stomach; I sit here because I like that ancient yeasty smell filling the ashpazkhana when the ravenous fungus feed on the sugar in the flour. Aside from the invention of fire and language, no two things, I believe, have played a bigger part in man’s survival than bread and stories. So the sourdough rises and demands to be baked. And I stand by the pre-heated oven about to participate in the simple act of lurching our species fate forward into the great unknown.

The kitchen is also the best place to procrastinate.

I keep some plants close by as if hearing them grow will help the sentences take shape in my head. But the plants need watering. I water them. I reach for the knife while a character considers making a scene. But I allow him to take his time. I mince garlic, chop onion, sauté the beef until brown on all sides, add paprika, salt, cumin, sumac, some garam masala. I let it simmer. I refill the spice jars, wipe the counter, vacuum the coffee grounds, do the dishes. And when every surface sparkles like fresh snow on a sunny day, I know I haven’t been writing but I can hear the music in the words whispering in my ears.

And that is as good as writing.

Jamaluddin Aram is a writer from Kabul, Afghanistan. His works have appeared in Numero Cinq, Cagibi, and The Globe and Mail among others. Aram’s short story “This Hard Easy Life” was a finalist for RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2020. His debut novel, Nothing Good Happens in Wazirabad on Wednesday, is forthcoming from Scribner Canada in June 2023. Aram has a bachelor’s degree in English and history from Union College in Schenectady, New York. He lives in Toronto. 

Photo provided by Jamaluddin Aram and Mithea

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What is Joe Davies Reading?

I’m a very poor reader these days.

I’m slow about it and have several books on the go, including the King  James Bible, which I’ve never read and feel as though I ought to have a better sense of.

But the book that’s currently making the biggest impression on me is a collection of poetry by Charlie Petch, called Why I Was Late from Brick Books.

I don’t usually read poetry, not on purpose, but I ended up at a reading of Petch’s not long ago and bought his book and I find myself appreciating very much the abrupt and often unsettling turns his very personal and highly provocative poems make.

Petch is a trans man and over the past year or so a couple of people close to me have discovered they are trans as well, and though Petch’s experiences are clearly much different from theirs, nonetheless it’s a window into something I am daily coming to learn more about.

Joe Davies’ short fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, eFiction India, Prism, Grain, Descant, Exile, Stand, Rampike, The Missouri Review, Queen’s Quarterly and previously in The New Quarterly.  He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

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What is Margaret Watson Reading?

I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971).

 

Not that Elizabeth Taylor.

This Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was an English writer who published 12 novels and also wrote short stories, many of which appeared in the New Yorker. She was championed by friends like Kingsley Amis, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Elizabeth Bowen. And she needed champions because she was often panned by the critics, dismissed as a boring, suburban wife and mother with nothing to say for herself. Condescended to because she wrote about domestic
situations. Even her prose style was deemed “feminine”. She was a “lady novelist” in the language of the day.

But we don’t have to accept that judgement.

I return to Taylor’s novels frequently, but Mrs Palfrey is the one I take from my shelf most often. It was her most successful novel, being nominated for a Booker. There was a BBC production starring Celia Johnson (of Brief Encounter fame) and eventually a movie, in 2005, with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend.

Taylor always reminds me that no one is simply what they appear to be. Or, put another way, that appearance is always less important than substance.

Perhaps this is because Elizabeth Taylor was not who she appeared to be. This presumably staid housewife from the suburbs carried on a secret love affair for more than a decade, only ending the relationship to keep her family together. This apparently boring woman with no opinions had joined the Communist Party in the 1930s and retained her membership for decades. (My favourite story: She spent an annual holiday with Robert Liddell in Greece until the military coup of 1967, after which she insisted they meet elsewhere or not meet at all. It became a topic they couldn’t discuss. In his memoir of their friendship, Liddell derides Taylor’s boycott as a pointless folly.)

Taylor was a private person, or became one, but she knew it was only a mask of middle class respectability that she wore. And she brought that awareness to her writing, in her portrayal of characters, revealing their inner lives and stories. The substance behind the appearance.

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is set in a small hotel with a clientele of the old, the lonely and the near-indigent. They struggle to maintain their independence and their dignity. They know and fear what awaits them as they age and their financial resources dwindle – illness or injury, incapacity, and the final admission to a nursing home or hospital where they will end their days.

Laura Palfrey is the widow of a British Colonial Administrator. We see her class position, her prejudices, her quirks and weaknesses but also her strengths, all revealed with subtlety and sympathy and a measure of humour. Mrs. Palfrey is no stereotype and neither are any of the other characters, whether their roles in the story are large or small.

On this reading, I pay closer attention to Ludo. An unemployed young man writing his first novel, he comes to Mrs. Palfrey’s aid when she stumbles in the street and becomes a stand-in for her absent grandson. Here is Ludo, the impoverished but attentive writer, arriving at the Claremont for dinner:

He came forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. At the same time, he registered the strange, tired-petal softness of her skin, stored that away for future usefulness. And the old smell, which was too complex to describe yet.

I watch him closely. Now he is in the launderette, waiting for his clothes to dry, reading a novel by George Gissing. Who is George Gissing? A quick google search and I learn that Gissing was a Victorian-era novelist, author of New Grub Street. He wrote about people living in poverty, a poverty he had shared, and many of his characters were women. According to Judy Stove in The New Criterion, he considered that all of life was fodder for art. As does the fictitious Ludo.

A small, delicious crumb. I am grateful to have found it. Glad that I took Mrs Palfrey down from my bookshelf again. 

Margaret Watson was raised on a family farm in southwestern Ontario.  Like Elizabeth Taylor, she has a more famous name-twin, although the other Margaret Watson is a writer of romance novels and not a glamorous movie star. 

Photos provided by Margaret Watson and Johnathan Ellul 

Margaret Watson's Website

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Finding the Form with Susanne Fletcher

I wrote the first draft of “Ghosting” in 2017 and thought I had the final version by the fall of 2018. My husband, who edits most of my writing, advised he did not buy the flirty on-line relationship between grieving Rhonda and Richard, the potential buyer of an elliptical trainer she was selling. I ignored his insight and began to send out the story to potential publishers.

The original story was half the length of the published version and focused on banter between Richard and Rhonda. Most of the story was dialogue with a ton of sexual innuendo. I had a lot of fun writing it. It was silly and light but none of the characters had a backstory to hold up their actions. Reading those earlier drafts now I cringe and am horrified that I submitted them to a dozen Canadian literary magazines. 

Following each rejection, I tweaked the story here and there but resisted starting over. In this story’s folder on my computer are eight slightly different versions of the story with two separate titles. Finally, after so many rejections, I listened to my editor’s advice, rewrote the story, and gave it a new name. 

I kept the basic premise that Rhonda – grieving and vulnerable – engages in an on-line “flirtationship”. I added Rhonda’s adult daughter, Alex, to create tension in the story. Mostly, I allowed myself more time and space within the story to show why Rhonda would participate in such an unlikely situation and how she changes as a result.

Susanne Fletcher is a hat-loving, sock-knitting individual that lives in Ottawa near Sawmill Creek, one of the Rideau River watershed’s many streams. Her daily walks along a path that follows the creek’s route offer sightings of foxes, ducks, myriad birds, and the occasional beaver. Susanne’s poetry, non-fiction, and short stories have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Bywords, Flo, and others. 

Photo by Derick McKinney on Unsplash

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