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Kate Jenks Landry’s Writing Space

Welcome to my writing room.

I call it that, but other kinds of working and living happen here as well — painting, playing, sewing, tutoring, napping. It is also not the only place I write. In summer, you are just as likely to find me working on my front porch. In winter, I often write in the bath. And, of course, so much of writing is not writing at all, but reading, listening, thinking. I do these things while I’m going about my day, chopping onions, pulling weeds, packing my children’s lunches. I am constantly jotting down notes to myself on index cards, or pausing mid-dog walk to email myself cryptic little ideas or bits of dialogue that have popped into my head.

BUT. To have a quiet space with an actual door that closes to which I can retreat when it’s time to lay out all my scraps and stitch them together? That’s a blessing I don’t take for granted. When I am deep down in the querying trenches, or slogging away at revisions, this is where I come.

Not that that door is entirely impenetrable. My children like to work and play in here as well, messing with my art supplies, writing each other coded messages on all of my sticky notes. There is a bin of mostly-naked Barbies on the couch right now, and magnet tiles spread over the carpet. During lockdown, this is where much of the homeschooling happened. But the door does keep the dog out, which is important, because he loves to eat my pencils.

At the far end of the room, a pair of desks sit below windows that look out into the tops of the trees behind our house. One is a utilitarian Ikea trestle table, raised to standing height and mostly used for cutting fabric when I’m sewing. The other is an antique pine table that was the kitchen table in my childhood home. On top of it you will find either my laptop or my sewing machine, along with an impressive assortment of dirty coffee cups.

Beside the desk is a big board my mom made for me out of sheets of foam insulation wrapped in flannel, intended as a place to piece quilts. Mostly, I use it to tack up story ideas, outlines, and little drawings and notes from my kids.

There are books in the room, of course, many about writing and teaching. By my desk there is a basket where I try to keep the library books corralled.

There is a couch along one wall, perfect for curling up in a morning sunbeam to read or rest your eyes. It may be a little faded and saggy these days, but once upon a time it was the first grown-up piece of furniture my husband and I bought together. Above the couch are picture ledges that house a rotating assortment of picture books. The ledges are flanked with artwork by some of my favourite illustrators and artists, including Carson Ellis, Isabelle Arsenault, Amanda Farquharson, my children.

I feel so lucky to have this space, because it is bright, and personal, and quiet, and because it has so many nooks and crannies in which to jam all of my stuff. Most of all, I cherish what it represents, which is the room I have carved within my own life to do this work. It embodies the incredible gifts of time, money, childcare, and faith that my family has invested in my writing, even when I had no idea if it would lead anywhere at all.

Kate Jenks Landry lives in Kitchener, ON, with her husband Michael and their pair of wiley, brilliant daughters. She spends her days writing, baking, reading, re-writing, drinking dangerous amounts of very hot coffee, re-writing some more, and endlessly walking her dog.

Her poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Acta Victoriana, The Harthouse Review, Ecolocation, and Room Magazine. Her debut picture book, Beatrice and Barb, is forthcoming from Kids Can Press in 2023, with a second to follow in 2024.

Photos courtesy of Kate Jenks Landry.

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What is Susan Wismer Reading?

The Wild Silence came to me in a wonderful pile of loaner books from my dear poet friend Mary Barnes. Joy Harjo, Sharon Butala, Richard Powers— hard to know where to start. But my hand went quickly to Raynor Winn’s sequel to The Salt Path.

I am a walker. When all else fails me, I go for a walk. No surprise then that I would pick up a book about a middle-aged couple who decide that a reasonable response to a diagnosis of terminal illness, and the loss of their home, their income and their savings, is to walk England’s SouthWest Coast Path’s 630 up and down miles. That was The Salt Path. Along with (literally) about a million other readers, I was hooked with the first book. Of course I wanted to know what happened next.

The Wild Silence is about finding a home. It’s about ecological restoration on a piece of overworked, neglected farmland. And it’s about illness, health, life, death and the place of writing in all of that. Despite its many successes, the book is unassuming, humble. I loved that about it, perhaps most of all.

Photo courtesy of Susan Wismer.

Cover photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash

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Tammy Armstrong’s Writing Space

I live with my husband in a lobster fishing village on the south shore of Nova Scotia. When the weather’s cold and moody with fog horns, my writing space is a small upstairs room. My desk came from a retired music teacher in Lunenburg. Hanging above it are two animally prints. The larger one is by Sally Muir, a Bath-based artist who paints primarily lurchers. This one’s called “Charity.” I love the expressions she manages to capture in her dogs. My husband gave me the smaller print, “Six-part Harmony,” for my birthday last year. It’s by Kenojuak Ashevak. I think the coyote and fox feet are so wonderfully long and tricksy.

Unfortunately, I rarely write at my desk. Most days, I sit in the big chair by the window. The bulletin board above has bits and pieces from friends and editors, an Our Lady of Guadalupe card from Chimayó, New Mexico—where they collect holy dirt for healing—and a ticket from a trip to Delos, Greece, an island that was once too holy for anyone to live or die on. A friend in Boulder made me the quilt on the back of my chair to celebrate finishing my PhD some years ago. Outside the window are three English Walnuts. This is where all the bird drama happens. Grackles, finches, house sparrows and fox sparrows, starlings, hummingbirds, blue jays, and red wing blackbirds all use the upper branches to belt out songs come spring. In the fall, it’s busy again with blue jays scooping up acorns and fledgings putting on their shows.

On the other side of the room, is my husband’s chair. We often have morning coffee up here together. He put the skylight in last fall and now when it rains, it almost feels like I’m in a treehouse. Behind his chair are a few photos of friends and dogs, as well as poetry collections, my never-ending tower of library books, and some seal vertebrae and other bones I’ve found while tramping around local beaches in the winter.

If the weather’s nice, I work outside on our back deck. When we first moved here there was no backyard. Shoulder-high brambles and rogue grape vines covered everything, even backing up against the house. The first summer we were here, my husband found a scythe in the garage and started cutting everything back. Five months later, we could walk down to the water. We met a lot of neighbours while he worked. They liked to stand around and watch and make suggestions like, “You should just take a flamethrower to it!” Now it’s a small haven for wildlife (and sometimes neighbours too).

Warmer weather also signals a shift in how I work. I keep my summer months for reading, research, and editing projects I’ve worked on upstairs all winter. I enjoy the time away from the computer, dipping into books and writing notes for possible projects—always with no expectations. Being outside helps me think slower too. It gives me time to see how each of my writing spaces, and the work done in them, speak to each other. And good distractions are out there too: willets, seagulls, eiders, mallards, shags, and sometimes singing seals and hares poking around the greenhouse. I also have to throw the frisbee many, many, many times for our dog, who insists on coming out to work with me every chance he gets.

Tammy Armstrong has published two novels and five books of poetry. Her most recent poetry collection, Year of the Metal Rabbit (Gaspereau Press, 2019), was a finalist for the Atlantic Book Awards’ J.M. Abraham Poetry Award and won the inaugural Maxine Tynes Nova Scotia Poetry Award. Her novel-in-progress, “Ursula,” was a finalist for the 2020 Harper Collins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction. She lives in southern Nova Scotia.

Photos courtesy of Tammy Armstrong.

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What is Kate Jenks Landry Reading?

I’m an excruciatingly slow reader, but that never stops me from having many books on the go at once, scattered about the house for me to dip in and out of as I go about my day.

I like to keep a book of poetry in my purse, to be pulled out whenever I find myself with a minute or two to fill. Currently I am loving The Reluctant Housewife, my friend Jennifer Harris’s debut chapbook from Gasperau Press. Wry, heart wrenching, sharp as a kitchen knife, it taps into the heightened sense of domestic pressure felt by so many during the pandemic era.

I also always have a bedtime book on the go with each of my daughters. Right now, Zoe and I are reading Anna James’s charming Pages and Co. series, in which the protagonist, eleven-year-old Tilly, discovers she can wander inside the pages of the books she loves. My younger daughter Mae and I are currently enjoying Bee and Flea and the Compost Caper by local author Anna Humphrey.

I’m in the habit of keeping cookbooks on my bedside table to read them before I fall asleep. I’m currently working my way through Simply Julia: 110 Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food, by my all-time favourite food writer Julia Turshen. Turshen is a truly skilled recipe writer, consistently marrying clear, precise instructions with warm, encouraging prose. Her approach to food is accessible, simple, and inclusive, making her books the perfect gift for just about anyone. In this latest volume, she also offers tons of honest, nuanced reflection on the ways in which diet culture and issues of food justice impact our relationships with food and our notions of what healthy eating can look like.

My obsession with picture books trumps my love of all other genres, and you will find stacks of them all over my house. Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a Mac Barnett superfan. I would be hard pressed to choose a favourite title, but his last few have been particularly juicy.

The Great Zapfino, written by Barnett and illustrated by Marla Frazee, is the work of two absolute masters of the form. Every aspect of this book works in total harmony — even the trim size, tall and thin, reinforces the verticality of the story, mimicking the dizzying highs from which the protagonist must jump. The text is barely 70 words long, but it sets the stage for Frazee’s black and white illustrations, which feel wonderfully loose yet rich with detail and pathos.

When the young narrator in What is Love? asks his Grandma the titular question, she replies that she cannot tell him, but if he goes out into the world he might find the answer for himself. He spends what turns out to be a very long time wondering about, asking all sorts of people “what is love?” He receives answer after answer, each of which is unsatisfying to him. “Love is a house,” the carpenter says. “Love is a fish,” the fisherman answers. “Love is a list that goes on for pages,” the poet replies. When, finally, he returns to his grandmother she asks him if he found his answer. “Yes,” he says simply. He doesn’t tell us what it is.

I love this book. I love the lush palate and the bold, organic shapes that form Carson’s very particular aesthetic vocabulary. I love its powerful use of metaphor, how it mesmerizes us with the beauty of its language only to turn around and assert the limits of language: it can help us explain our feelings and experiences to others, but never fully.

I especially love the ending; like the narrator’s wise old grandmother, Barnett refuses to hand us an easy answer. Love is not a fish, or a house, or a poem. It is not the grandmother or the garden. It is all of these things, and none of these things, and other things entirely. Like the protagonist, we must decide the answer for ourselves.

Her poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Acta Victoriana, The Harthouse Review, Ecolocation, and Room Magazine. Her debut picture book, Beatrice and Barb, is forthcoming from Kids Can Press in 2023, with a second to follow in 2024.

Photos courtesy of Kate Jenks Landry.

Cover photo by Mike Benna on Unsplash

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Launched: Fast Commute by Laurie D. Graham

Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. Her second book, Settler Education, was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, won the Thomas Morton Poetry Prize, and appeared in the Best Canadian Poetry anthology. Laurie’s maternal family comes from around Derwent, Alberta, by way of Ukraine and Poland, and her paternal family comes from around Semans, Saskatchewan, by way of Northern Ireland and Scotland. She has about a century of history in Canada.

Q: Fast Commute illuminates levels of responsibility and implication—for the land, the landscape, the toll of humans at scale, but also for an individual life. How a person not of this continent can claim a home, a connection, and history on this land. The names of places and species. How did you approach such varied elements and connect them? As a matter of craft, how do you decide what weight each element will get? Was it many drafts, trial and error, or something else?

It all arrived in pieces, chunks, a few words/lines/images at a time in some cases, or a page or two at a time, and it took me a while to realize that all these pieces were organizing themselves into a larger thing, a book-length poem. Parts of this even started out in point form, so I knew early on that this book was trying to show something big, taking on attributes of the list poem, saying as much as it can about its (already quite large) subject.

Organization on the level of the line or the stanza felt almost arbitrary, or like the simple piling up of detail would yield the result I wanted more than the specific order it all came in, though there are lines and images that to my ear do belong close to one another, and there are pages that do lean toward existing more discretely on their own. But I moved things every which way when I was editing; it all felt pretty malleable, and at times too malleable, like I lacked firm ground to stand on, which is sort of what the book’s about—or rather, it’s not the ground’s problem but my understanding of it that’s lacking.

But two things did in the end guide how I organized the book: first, connecting the colossal ongoing “growth” in southern Ontario to the settlement of the West felt important. The poem starts on the prairies, at the moment after the Northwest Resistance, after Batoche and the sham trials and the hangings, with settlers and homesteaders creating towns and industries, and at its most basic level the book is arguing that nothing much has changed. And second, the overall shape of the piece—from disconnection to first gestures toward relation, from speeding over the river on a train to sitting down beside it and watching and listening to it—felt like the move I most wanted the book to make.

Q: This long poem has a you and an I. Are they multiple speakers or a single speaker with different angles of approach? The posters referenced, with their advertising slogans, also seem to function as speakers from the past. Can you talk about this fluidity of perspective?

That wasn’t intentional, that shifting perspective, but I think it results in a thing more slippery and hence more broad and perhaps more true to life or able to take up more of the world. I did puzzle over that one. And consistency of pronouns, keeping it to a neat “I” throughout, was striking me as suspect or false: as I was writing I really was talking both to and about myself, and pointing fingers at people, addressing the perpetrators. Not worrying about consistency or organization created the potential to take us all up, writer and reader together, draw us into thinking deeply about how non-Indigenous people, and especially white settlers, account for this mass obliteration still being done in their names, and what we have to do, all the frameworks and systems of belief that need to change, in order to stop it.

Q: You document human impact on the land—a catalogue of degradations—in a way that expands our vision. We must see the garbage collecting at the foundation of a new build, the bulldozed berms, the white breadcrumbs scattered by the creek—and I felt that those things, too, hold a kind of beauty in this depiction. Rendering of them in poetry creates fine language out of something ugly, a paradox. What do you think?

This might, in a way, be what Adrienne Rich describes at the end of her poem “What Kind of Times Are These”: “to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.” My goal with this book is to have the reader pause on that ugliness you mention, that catalogue, its expansiveness and relentlessness, to consider it for long enough to see it as a direct outgrowth of resource extraction and a mode of supremacy that insists on its own presence only and the eradication of all else. To have the reader see well and sit with the profound harm we’re still perpetrating on this continent, it’s perhaps necessary to find the beauty that remains in its contours. And this might then lead to seeing better what life remains there, surviving in spite of, in the midst of, the destruction. An ode to life, even as that life is being decimated.

Q: You are credited with the cover image. Tell me about that image and its use in the cover design.

When I was deepest into the writing of this book, I was taking the train between Kitchener and Toronto regularly to go work at the Brick magazine office, and I was snapping lots of photos of all I was whizzing past—holding my phone up to the window and pressing the button a lot, which felt like a kind of research—and when my publisher asked me to send ideas for cover imagery, I sent a selection of those train-window photos, as reference. And Andrew Roberts, the book’s designer, ended up incorporating one of those photos into the design, overlaying a sort of commuter train map on top of it. I love the green Andrew chose as the background colour, and how if you’re looking at the book from far away it just looks like foliage and you can’t make much else out.

A similar thing happened with my last book, Settler Education: I sent some reference photos and they used one as the background image, so now a theme has emerged. I feel it important to stress, however, that I am in no way a photographer!

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ve got most of a draft of the next book of poetry written, and I’m at the point of trying to figure out what’s left for me to do to make the thing a thing; as often happens with me, the writing happens fast, and then I have to sit and figure out what I’ve done, what work the poems are doing together, and whether they’re doing the right things.

I’m also taking tentative steps into prose, of a sort, of a style that’s feeling quite new to me, and which these days I’m kind of test-driving in a biweekly newsletter. I hope something comes of it, but that might take a while. Poetry I can fit into the crannies of my life pretty well, but prose, to me, needs the day, needs all the days, so I’m just trying to figure out how that one fits. I want it to fit. It’s a stretching out that has been feeling good and urgent.

Laura Rock Gaughan’s fiction and essays have appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Her short story collection, Motherish, was published in 2018.

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On Writing and Vulnerability with Sarah Caley

The first time I participated in a creative writing workshop was in my final year of undergrad at Wilfrid Laurier University. I had finally gathered the courage to take the creative nonfiction course, after years of telling everyone around me that “I am not a creative writer.”

I came to the workshop prepared with my first assignment—a personal essay about my ambivalent relationship with boyfriend t-shirts and my body image. Writing the piece felt relatively natural, but my heart jumped into my throat when I was told it was my turn to read my piece aloud. With a clammy hand, I clicked the unmute button. As I read, I felt desperately out of breath.

During my time as Circulation Assistant at The New Quarterly, I have been on the other side of this exchange. In the past six weeks, I have been responsible for processing countless submissions. I have read everything from blog posts to proofreading the upcoming issue. I even had the opportunity to read the current cycle of CNF submissions.

And in all this reading, I have seen so many people who are willing to put their writing out into the world. I have seen them create meaning out of ideas and experiences I never would have thought to write about. But above all, I have been most affected by the emotions these pieces have stirred. I have read short stories that unsettle me in the most satisfying of ways, and personal essays that wash a warmth over my body.

To write is to reach out to another and ask them to feel the way you do, which is why it is so incredibly scary to share your writing. In the academic essays I was used to writing, you want your reader to understand your opinion. In a memoir, you want the reader to understand what you felt in a particular moment of your life. Writing is vulnerability because it is an act of human connection.

“Does this make sense?” was the most frequently asked question in my creative nonfiction class workshops. While this question was a kind of running joke, there is a very real motivation behind it—as writers, we want to ensure that human connection is being made. And while no one really wants to hear that their submission has not been accepted, it is perhaps just as scary to receive a “yes” response. A “yes” means that your writing will go off on its own, and you will be left to wonder if your readers are connecting with you.

As I come to the end of my time at TNQ, I will also be completing my master’s program, and I don’t plan on immediately pursuing more education. I must now have the bravery to go out into the world, and to share my own writing. But the word I’m looking for here is not quite bravery—it is more of an openness or a self-acceptance. Making peace with vulnerability. And I have been emboldened by the vulnerability I have seen at TNQ.

There are stories that I am afraid to write, but I am both comforted and terrified by the knowledge that someday, I will write them.

Sarah Caley recently completed her term as Circulation Assistant at TNQ as a practicum position for her master’s degree in English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She is an aspiring arts and culture journalist and creative nonfiction writer.

Photo by John-Mark Smith on Unsplash.

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Mark Foss’ Writing Space

For the past ten years, I’ve lived in an early twentieth century triplex in Mile End–Plateau in Montreal. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where a writer might easily spend an afternoon in a café with a coffee, a notebook, and a sharp pencil. Yet it’s not something that comes easily to me because I don’t drink coffee or write longhand. I type on a laptop in my home office with a glass of filtered water and all the comfort ergonomics can buy.

Despite its name, the Plateau is known for its wonky floors. When I set up my desk, it wobbled, and my chair rolled towards the door. A friend built a large platform that rises six inches off the floor to create a level surface. Behind the platform, two black Ikea bookcases are clamped together so they don’t teeter, either from the uneven floors or the weight of the literary giants on the shelves. On the wall facing me are mounted covers of five Faulkner novels and a poster from a Bruno Schulz exposition in Paris. To my left, next to the window, on a kind of literary clothesline, I’ve pegged 14 images of Fernando Pessoa who is often striding through the streets of Lisbon. Together, the three authors remind me to write about “the heart in conflict with itself”, to find whimsy in the everyday, and to push forward.

The pandemic has shaken up my writing practice in a good way. With the gym closed, I began walking more through the wooded paths on Mount Royal. As I navigate over rocks and tree roots, ideas will often come to me. I’ve taken to capturing them in a notebook. Sometimes the physical act of writing is enough to implant the words without needing to decipher my scrawl.

Mile End–Plateau is also well known for renovictions. With the sale of my triplex last summer, I’ve been forced to move. As I visited potential apartments in new neighbourhoods, I discovered the only criteria that matter relate to my writing space. Is it quiet? Is it large enough for my office, and all my bookcases and shrines? Can I set up my desk so the window is on my left? Is there a view when I need distractions? And finally, to my surprise, is it close to the twisting paths up the mountain? I will be happy to leave the Fun House floors behind, but I’ve become convinced it’s good for my writing to stay a little off kilter.

Mark Foss has appeared in The New Quarterly, off and on, since the previous millennium. His words also appear or are forthcoming in Existere: Journal of Arts & Literature, Hobart, Into the Void and elsewhere. He writes from Montreal, but you can visit him at www.markfoss.ca.

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash.

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How to Write in a Broken World

“The Creative Life” Keynote for the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus Writer-in-Residence Program

It’s impossible to speak of the creative life without speaking to the moment we are living in. Without speaking to the unbearable beauty and pain coexisting in this very second. And the next. What does it mean to be an artist, to be a writer, if not to embrace our humanness?

There are questions we all return to, over and over again. They may take different shapes and forms, even appear as characters, or poems, or paintings. There is a leitmotif of questioning that cycles in our breath. And it’s up to us to uncover what these questions are—not always in an attempt to answer them, but as Rilke says, “to live them.”

There is a question I have been asking myself lately, and it is an unanswerable one.

How do we write in a broken world? How do we write into a broken world?

First, the audacity. Imagine my audacity for titling my keynote with a question so big it’ll take a lifetime to answer. But that in itself is the point. The answer has to be lived, in the very bones of our experience.

And the first step is in acknowledging “brokenness.”

Lean in to the Brokenness

Have you ever experienced a moment like this, where you know there’s so much pain, either within your inner world, or the world at large—and yet right in front of you is this beauty—that you almost feel guilty to witness? That you can’t reconcile? There is a dissonance within your body? Heart? Mind? What IS that?

How much of our time is spent in resisting brokenness, or beauty? Of feeling the guilt of experiencing joy, or the desire to only feel joy? How much of our lives is spent in distracting ourselves from these extremes? These so-called opposites? How much of our society is obsessed with perfection, with the distraction of perfection, of silencing the quaking parts of ourselves?

How often I have thought some version of, “I wish I didn’t feel broken” when really, perhaps, what I meant was, “I wish I felt fully alive in my life.”

What happens, if we listen for the cracks and fractures along the heartbeat of the earth, what happens when we listen for our own brokenness, and not see it as a failure, but the very evidence that we are alive?

I am currently resisting my imperfect heart, and the fact that it continually requires repair—surgery after surgery. On a recent trip to the hospital, I witnessed the live image of my heart on a scan, and was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude for how much it has endured. It keeps showing up for me, even when I don’t know how to show up for myself.

What are you resisting in this moment? What is your fear telling you?

Attend to the Moment

There are times, especially during the pandemic, where I find myself wishing I were somewhere else, where I could be truly inspired and enriched by the environment around me. While this is a necessity for so many creative people, it’s also an opportunity for observation. I’m searching—we’re searching—for something that’ll make it all make sense. Make sense of the world. Of ourselves.

Is the cherry blossom enough? Is this cold tea enough? Is the rain enough? Is this typo enough? Is this keynote enough? What is enough?

When I have just a little bit of space to be present with that deep longing for something to make sense, if I just, for a moment, suspend the desire to finally feel “enough”—maybe I, maybe we, will have the ability to witness the grace of what is unfolding right in front of us.

What if instead of finding joy in spite of brokenness, we included it in our experience of joy?

Fill with Gold

Kintsugi, now appropriated and popularized, is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. It is an act of refusing to discard parts of our own experience, not by jamming them together in an attempt to make them “fit,” but in teaching us to illuminate the scar. To illuminate the points of breakage. These breakpoints serve as ways in to our humanness. They remind us to have the courage to tell our stories without censoring ourselves into perfection, numbness, or negation.

And yet, it’s important to remember that as storytellers, creators, our task is to also investigate stories we tell to ourselves, and why we have convinced ourselves they are “true.”

I’ve had the gift of speaking to a lot of young writers through the Writer-in-Residence program. Through these conversations, I was reminded of the narratives I inherited when I was starting out, about what it means to be a writer. The trope of the starving artist or the struggling writer was seen as a badge of honour, as something to aspire to because it’s a sign that you’ve made it. And then what? What do you do with this narrative of “brokenness”? What do you do when you need to eat? When you’re burned out? What do you do with the scarcity?

Then, the question becomes deeper: How do we illuminate the scars of our experiences while not repeatedly seeking them out, or identifying with them? Brokenness is not a quality to aspire to, to give us a sense of identity, but rather, an opportunity to own the humanity of our experiences.

And with that, here is a last offering of gold, a question for myself, and you:

Are you broken, or are you whole in your humanness?

Sheniz Janmohamed is a poet, arts educator, and nature artist. The author of three poetry collections, Sheniz spends much of her time working—namely making masala chai and contemplating existence.

Artwork by Sheniz Janmohamed.

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Finding the Form with Frances Boyle

The title of my poem “Rounds” gives a solid clue as to how this piece and its form came to be. It started with a two-pronged prompt: to write about “things that go in circles”, and “an escape scene that includes a bowl of fruit”.

So, what goes in circles? In addition to the requisite spilled fruit, I thought of the hands on a clock, my dog’s circling before settling himself on his mat. I began to freewrite, as is my usual process. Remembering how water in sinks and toilets circles counter clockwise in the Southern hemisphere led me to an “escape” to Chile. I speculated on what how someone might feel as they got ready to move countries, thoughts going in circles as they do (or at least as mine do) when overwhelmed with too many things to accomplish.

And who could be dealing with all these circles? The idea of rounds on hospital wards led me to a young doctor about to start a residency overseas: who she would be leaving behind, and what she would miss. I pulled in a sister, and a young nephew whose drawings featured a spiral sun. When I remembered the way voices braid in a children’s round like “Row row row your boat”, the circle felt nearly complete, and the spinning of merry go round and whirlpool closed the loop.

I am partial to narrative, and write fiction as well as poetry (and have been lucky enough to have had both published in The New Quarterly). The initial prompt came from Sarah Selecky via her writing school, which is focused on fiction, so her suggestions are often geared towards scene. I have notebooks full of freewriting around prompts like these and as usual the words I’d written lingered in one of them for several years.

When I finally revisited the section, it could have become the start of a new story, or I might have woven some of the text into an existing story draft (as I did with sections of my novella, Tower, and several of the stories in my short fiction collection, Seeking Shade). However, the circle motif suggested that this piece would be better as a narrative poem. The quintain stanza structure came to me fairly quickly and required trimming and shaping to make the line breaks work effectively. Next, I enhanced the internal rhyme and assonance/consonance and tried to sharpen images ad use more evocative words, revising the poem in layers or (perhaps more accurate) in spiral iterations.

Frances Boyle’s newest book, Openwork and Limestone, her third poetry collection, is forthcoming from Frontenac House in fall 2022. She is also the author of Tower, a novella, and Seeking Shade, a short story collection that was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the ReLit Award and a winner of the Miramichi Reader’s Very Best! Award for short fiction.

Photo by Mika Korhonen on Unsplash.

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What’s Elliott Gish Reading?

Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio

An unhappy marriage. A troubled life. A lonely death. This is the story of the woman behind Anne of Green Gables.

L. M. Montgomery has fascinated me since I was nine years old. As a child, her books made me aware of my own desire to be a writer, an ambition that had been bubbling away at the back of my brain for some time. When I read the information about her at the back of my paperback copy of Emily of New Moon, I was surprised to see it reference her feelings of depression and loneliness. Although much of her work is light and hopeful, with happy endings (and happy marriages) all but assured for her heroines, Montgomery’s private life was riddled with financial woes, legal troubles, family tensions, and struggles with mental illness and addiction. This compelling biography, which chronicles Montgomery’s life and development as a writer, is a direct contradiction to her public image as a wholesome remnant of a bygone age.

Mary Henley Rubio spent more than two decades collecting material for this book, and the result paints a picture of a deeply passionate and deeply unhappy woman constrained by her time and by herself. Her life and her work are both a curious blend of the passionate and the Puritan, the desire to live freely at war with fear of gossip, censure, and judgement. Contrasting the author’s work through the years against the realities of her life, Rubio uses the progression of Montgomery’s body of work to explore the psychology of her subject. Montgomery used her fiction both to escape her troubles and to work through them in public, giving voice to her innermost thoughts and feelings in a way she never could outside of her books. Through Anne Shirley, Emily Starr, Sara Stanley, and others, she gave voice to her own feelings of alienation, oppression, anger, and fear. Her protagonists are both conventional in their fates and unconventional in their desires. When Emily declares “I am important to myself,” we hear Montgomery’s own indignation in the line.

The first time I read this book, I wolfed it down in the space of a day or two, eager to immerse myself in the private life of a woman whose work I have long admired. This time, rereading it, I moved at a slower pace, taking the entirety of a life in page by page. I read it outside as often as I could, immersing myself in nature just as Montgomery so often did to soothe herself. The story it tells of a vibrant woman frustrated at every turn by disappointments, slowly becoming mired in her own feelings of anxiety and depression, was easier to take in the sunshine.

Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Nova Scotia. Her work has been published in the Baltimore Review, Grain Magazine, Wigleaf, and others. She lives in Halifax with her partner.

Photo by Scott Walsh on Unsplash.

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