Uncategorised Archives - Page 26 of 76

Finding the Form with Allan Serafino

Hare

A white hare has been living in my back yard all winter
in his home in the cave under the fir tree.

He thumps the snow from his feet against the house
Perhaps just to sound his hundred names.

The imprint of those feet is white on white,
small scrim and blush on the snow and a prophecy

of seedlings under the tree are also all we know of him.
Everywhere that winter there were rumours

small reports and the sky heavy with doubt.
Clear doubt.

The poem “Hare” began with the Buddhist jataka – literally, “birth story” that refers to the many reincarnations of Buddha mostly in the form of animals. Though not a Buddhist myself, I can ask “Is the lowly hare in my backyard a form of Buddah? What is he saying to me?” Squirrels, sparrows, and other animals now leave clues for me about myself like the fact that I know nothing. That is clear. Buddhist poems have tended to be short, aphoristic with simple lines and observations. They dare us to wonder and to doubt and then laugh about it.

Allan Serafino’s poems have appeared in over fifty Canadian, American, UK and Australian magazines and in three collections Troubled Dreams, Alien States and Another Way (Ekstasis Editions). He was the former editor and president of Dandelion/blue buffalo magazines and president of The Calgary Writers Association.

Photo by Gary Bendig on Unsplash.

Read more

Finding the Form with Alex Merrill

Yelling Fire was born of frustration and confusion and being fed up with my own writing. Unlike most of my work, this essay came out fast and in chunks, like an explosion at one of my dad’s mines.

At the time, I was working on a book-length memoir about my dad and my childhood in an asbestos mining town. I’d done a ton of research, too much, I’d started to think. And I had far too much to say. But my story—THE story—kept slipping through my fingers. I was stuck. I worried about misrepresenting my father, whom I loved, and who managed asbestos mines for his whole working life. With that anxiety piled onto my ambivalence about asbestos—toxic villain versus a century of lifeblood for my hometown—I wondered if I was up to this task. I’d spent two years on it, produced a bunch of pieces, but they didn’t add up. I was feeling more and more desperate: Should I quit? How can I throw it all away? Goddamn it!

After that tantrum blast, after the dust* settled, I had this thought: I have to forget about writing the memoir for now, and write about what’s keeping me from writing it. I flashed on the last cigarette I’d smoked, a day or so after Dad died. It’s too much to parse in one paragraph, but smoking, asbestos and Dad had a long and thorny relationship. And me quitting smoking right then was my gateway into this essay.

The rest of the piece came in about a month. All the blocks I’d been facing in writing my memoir tumbled out to where I could see them. It was cathartic, I admit. And the end, the dream of driving, careening on a dark, twisty road, with my father in the backseat? That was a real dream I had while writing the essay. It was like Dad was handing me the final scene, like he was saying, So, are you happy? Have you got it out of your system? Can we get on with it now?

*I’m thinking of creating an appendix for my memoir – the memoir I started again after Yelling Fire – where I park all my puns about asbestos and mining. And then I’ll delete it in the final draft.

Alex Merrill began her life in a Quebec town that once billed itself as “The Asbestos Capital of the World.” Her father contributed to that legacy and later became deeply embittered about what became of it. She has been published in TNQ, Event, Prairie Fire and several anthologies. She lives in Winnipeg.

Photo by Viktor Talashuk on Unsplash.

Read more

Finding the Form with Brian Henderson

So, this poem, bent water light something: Does it ever happen to you that a feeling, seemingly out of nowhere, will sweep through you, an awareness of something but you’re not quite sure what it is? Standing at the kitchen window looking out into the sun-splattered cedars one spring morning while making coffee, that kind of strange sensation washed through me, a sort of wave-spell or possession, or perhaps dispossession, but a haunting certainly. A feeling of familiarity, almost nostalgic, but at the same time not, more like defamiliarization, like a déjà vu but not quite that either. A déjà rêvé? Certainly memory-like, but there was no specific memory, kind of like a timewarp in space – one of the dark pits in a Murakami novel perhaps, but luckily I was in our kitchen – I think.

“Standing at the kitchen window looking out into the sun-splattered cedars one spring morning while making coffee, that kind of strange sensation washed through me, a sort of wave-spell or possession, or perhaps dispossession, but a haunting certainly.”

Maybe time really does bend around the gravity well of feeling, but it was a feeling in which the me of me was displaced. An immersion in a somehow fragilely sacred memory-ness filled with glimmerings and shadows. And as a result (and ha! once I’d recovered so to speak), the poem became central to the journey that turned out to be unfinishing, just published in the Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series at McGill-Queen’s.

Brian Henderson is a Governor General Award finalist (for Nerve Language, Pedlar Press 2007) and a finalist for the Chalmers Award for Sharawadji (Brick Books, 2011). He is the author of twelve books of poetry. His latest is Unidentified Poetic Object from Brick (2019). He has a new book, unfinishing, forthcoming from MQUP. Visit him at brianhenderson.ca

Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Emira Tufo

The Wisdom of Titles – and Onions

Once I’ve got the title, I’ve got the story. Sometimes, the title comes from thin air because it knows the story that is ready to be told. This always intrigues me: that the title knows before I know, as if arising from the unconscious where some story, unbeknownst to me, has been brewing all along. At other times, months – or even years – of recurring ideas, images and memories finally coalesce into a title, and only then is the story ripe for my plucking. I have attempted to write stories while they were still nameless, and these were, without exception, fruitless efforts. Nor can the title be invented or forced or bent to my will to suit the story that I believe is worthy of being told. It is the title that decides, and I have only to follow.

I think of the title as a ball of yarn. I know the story’s wrapped tight and fully contained within it. I take the yarn between my thumb and index finger and I pull: and off it goes, unfurling into the story that I, as a writer, will discover as it’s being told. I trust that the title will guide me in the direction in which the story needs to go. Sometimes, I think of the title as an egg that I crack open into a bowl.

A title doesn’t last forever, though. Like once new books that have been sitting on the nightstand unread for too long, the story it contains can become covered in dust, superseded by other titles that arise and issue their own invitation. And so, every title is the gift of a story – and also a race with time.

“I think of the title as a ball of yarn. I know the story’s wrapped tight and fully contained within it.”

I’ve got a title beckoning now: The Wisdom of Onions. It is a story about my father. It takes place in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war when he took it upon himself to turn the cobblestone yard of his ancestral house into an onion patch. Or rather, onions were the only thing that thrived in the black unfertile soil which was revealed once he’d pulled up all the stone. He risked his life by going to the onion patch several times a week in order to harvest the onions and bring them home as flavoring for our lean and bland war meals. I have enormous respect for onions and all the improbable recipes we concocted with them at the time. One of them, which we simply called Onion, was the ultimate delicacy: chopped onions fried on a drizzle of vegetable oil and topped with powdered milk. Yuck, right? No, yummm!

Emira Tufo is a Bosnian Canadian writer based in Montreal and the recipient of the 2019 CBC/Quebec Writers’ Federation Writer in Residence award. Her essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, the Montreal Gazette and on CBC. Her storytelling has been featured on the Confabulation podcast.

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Rachel Laverdiere

Year after year, I told my students this modern-day ghost story that also happened to be true. Even the high schoolers, who feigned disinterest in pretty much everything, were rivetted to their seats—predicting the origins of the mysterious light, betting on whether there really had been a ghost or whether I’d missed a detail on my perimeter checks. Many were convinced (as I’d been) that the dressers were haunted. Year after year, the students stayed with me until the end of the tale, and even the toughest crew was never disappointed by the ending. I knew that when I “became a writer,” this was a story I’d have to write. Easier said than done.

“I knew that when I “became a writer,” this was a story I’d have to write. Easier said than done.”

I hardly ever keep track of where stories start or how they evolve, but something made me keep this scribbled mind-map, which became the starting point of “Saturn’s Rings.” It was October 2019, and I was participating in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) through the Iowa Writers Workshop. By this time, I’d “become a writer,” and I’d been writing and publishing CNF for a year, but I’d been avoiding linear narratives. My brain doesn’t register stories chronologically, but this story protested becoming a lyric essay—refused to parcel itself into my typical triptych or diptych format, said no to collage, hermit crab and flash. This story needed its beginning, middle and end intact and a focus on the plot rather than language or I’d lose my readers.

Mind-mapping was a technique I’d rebelled against since high school, but I was determined to follow the MOOC prompts, to become a better writer. This stretch out of my comfort zone allowed me into this version of “the haunting” of our Rosthern house from a different angle. I wrote the first draft and posted it for feedback. Monica M. said, You lay the breadcrumbs in such a pattern that it’s impossible to stop reading. I also enjoyed your unusual premise. I’d finally captured the story.

The feedback and support of that MOOC, the years of students’ rapt attention, all of it forced me to persevere. My son is 24 now—a few years younger than the narrator in this story. My response to Monica M. was: This story is more linear than usual for me. It’s a true story, written for my son to capture a moment in our lives we often talk about. That 6-year-old in the story is now twenty-two, and indeed, love, our gravitational bond, doesn’t diminish with distance. Much has changed since we lived in that house on the edge of a field, but my son and I are as close as ever—he is still the son, and my world continues to revolve around him.

Rachel Laverdiere writes, pots, and teaches in her little house on the Canadian prairies. She is CNF editor at Atticus Review and the creator of Hone & Polish Your Writing. Find her prose in Grain, Atlas and Alice, The Citron Review and other fine journals. In 2020, Rachel’s CNF made The Wigleaf Top 50 and was nominated for Best of the Net. www.rachellaverdiere.com.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

Read more

What’s Grace Lau Reading?

I just finished reading Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle, which was just an incredible read.

To be honest, I picked it up because of the current white supremacist occupation in Ottawa and blatant complicity of the Canadian police forces. The book’s subject seemed timely.

I’d read Mercedes Eng’s poetry collection, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, previously, but I felt like I needed to better understand the concept and history of the abolition movement—and Angela Davis does a wonderful job of laying the groundwork.

Even though she’s a scholar and an academic, Angela Davis writes in such a way that even someone like me, who knew very little, could grasp these ideas and not feel intimidated, because abolition really is a big, big subject. Even so, I definitely want to (and need to!) re-read this a few times.

“Even though she’s a scholar and an academic, Angela Davis writes in such a way that even someone like me, who knew very little, could grasp these ideas and not feel intimidated,..”

I did a lot of reflecting afterward on things that I’ve always just accepted or taken for granted. Why are prisons featured in so many TV shows and movies? What is the purpose of the police and what do they actually achieve? My partner has taken to (lovingly) calling me a “commie.”

For anyone who’s living in the Ottawa area (and beyond), if you’re curious about policing and abolition, I’d highly recommend both Freedom is a Constant Struggle and Prison Industrial Complex Explodes. They’re a great introduction to imagining a future that has alternative solutions to policing as we know it today. The next step after reading these, for me, is to find other writings that go into more detail and specific examples of how cultures and countries outside North America have evolved their approaches to policing.

Grace is a Hong-Kong-born, Chinese Canadian writer raised in Vancouver and currently living in Toronto. She enjoys Harry Styles’ fashion choices, swaying to music, and sushi. Find her on social media @thrillandgrace.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Read more

Ken Victor’s Writing Space

My writing space is messy. It doubles as a home office, so work and writing are hopelessly intertwined. My ancestors watch all of this without commenting. Photographs of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents at different stages of their lives decorate the walls. A few quotes and poems taped to the wall talk to me: Wendell Berry’s poem How To Be A Poet, Martha Graham’s magnificent insistence that the artist must let their unique self flow unimpeded into their work, and Robinson Jeffers’ poem The Beauty of Things.

What is most precious to me though is off in a corner. If you were to come into the room you likely wouldn’t notice it. It’s a somewhat grainy photograph taken in the Spring of 1985 leaning—appropriately enough I suppose—against an empty box meant to house the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The five people are huddled close together, they’re wearing sweaters and jackets, hands in pockets. It is the only photo I have from the small poetry cohort that spent two years together studying at Syracuse. Jane, Lucia, Chris, myself and our mentor in that spring’s workshop, Philip Booth.

Philip was known as a “Maine poet”, respected for writing beautifully crafted, meditative, lean lyrics of place. He was mentored by Robert Frost and could tell us stories of conversations he’d had with E.E. Cummings. Poetry is surely a place of ancestors, even more so than any wall of photographs, and Philip seemed like a direct channel back to ancestors whose work we knew. He organized the photo shoot that spring day, bringing his camera to the final class. We knew, without knowing why at the time, that Philip especially enjoyed our workshop together and wanted the picture. None of us could have known there would be no other record of that small cohort of hungry wannabees who had been called to the art.

Years later, in a conversation with Chris, I could surmise why Philip may have wanted the photograph. Chris would go on to eventually become the Director of Syracuse’s creative writing program which meant he would experience cohort after cohort of young writers. Few cohorts, it seems, bond; aspiring poets arrive and what comes next is anybody’s guess. The four of us, however, bonded like close brothers and sisters, appreciating one another’s writing, breaking bread together, supporting each other to thrive and, most important, internalizing each other’s voices of loving critique. Philip wanted, apparently, to document this rare occurrence.

“The four of us, however, bonded like close brothers and sisters, appreciating one another’s writing, breaking bread together, supporting each other to thrive and, most important, internalizing each other’s voices of loving critique.”

Time will clean the carcass bones, as one of Lucia’s poems says. She would go on to receive a MacArthur genius award, be in a wheel-chair by her 40’s from multiple sclerosis, passing away in 2016 after having an esteemed career in poetry. Jane would be a finalist for the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2017. We planned to rendezvous in Toronto for the occasion, but Jane would be unable to attend as she received a diagnosis of uterine cancer a month earlier that would take her life a year later. Chris is still at Syracuse and stepping back from some of the demands of teaching.

I would leave Syracuse to move to Canada for work, poetry drifting to the periphery of my life. When I finally had a book come out in 2019, I felt like I’d completed an unnamed promise to that loving quartet from years ago. And what matters most to me in the book isn’t any poem, but the page at the back where I thank them in writing. That small photograph in my messy office is—in its own way I realize now—a picture of ancestors. We may grow into who we are but we are surely descended not only from our younger selves, but from those who accompanied us through passages best navigated in their presence. The poet I have finally become is their last gift to me.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Suzanne Nussey

I’ve always wondered when it was that I first became aware of the passage of time. How do we recall something that wasn’t actually an event, was more of a transition? Does this awareness depend on our ability to describe it? Is this a classic, epistemological issue, or just a bee in my own tiny headgear? How do we reconstruct something we did not, at the time, have language to describe? Such questions prompted the writing of “Morning Walk, Summer 1956” in Issue 161 of The New Quarterly, and influenced its form and structure.

To answer these questions, I first tried to recall early memories, memories that pre-dated school, before I was taught various conceptual markers of time—hours, days, weeks, seasons, etc. Not exactly a pre-verbal time, but certainly a time when my vocabulary was limited. Could I recover those sensory experiences (sight, sound, touch, smell) or emotional experiences of fear and delight, deeply embedded at a cellular level? Some of my most successful poems have begun with vivid images of more recent, momentary experiences of the world around me, sometimes no more than an evocative smell or a threatening sound. Using the genre of narrative poetry to elicit and explore such strong images, then, seemed like the best choice for writing this piece.

“Using the genre of narrative poetry to elicit and explore such strong images, then, seemed like the best choice for writing this piece.”

“Morning Walk” began with a distinct memory of the scent of bridal wreath spirea, an overpowering fragrance that I was never fond of, though it certainly did stick with me. That scent evoked other images—the tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual images of fresh paint, soap and talcum, hard sugar candy, my father’s voice and hand, those wonky sidewalk slabs so treacherous for short legs and small feet, the neighbourhood dog that scared me silly—merging into one narrative of numerous visits to my father’s parishioners that happened weekly, probably when I was three or four, definitely before I started school.

The structure of the poem suggests a “before” and “after” (“the beginning” in stanza 1 and the tablet in stanza 4, “not yet tipped”), temporal concepts that children as young as two are able to grasp, placing the persona in a time of early childhood. How does a child make the journey toward the “after”? Partly by acquiring vocabulary. So the earlier list of sensory images then gives way to a list of vocabulary words, “the things I do not know.” “[E]verything new,” including new vocabulary, will eventually usher the persona into another kind of awareness. What the little girl sees but does not recognize in the old women’s faces (stanza 2) is named by her father in stanza 3, “Widow.” Now she is headed toward an understanding of “calamity.”

In the final stanza, the physical structure of the poem with progressively indented lines mimics the tablet and the uneven, sidewalk slabs that move the reader toward the journey beyond the page’s white space (the tablet empty of words). While the stanza presents final sensory images of light and the father’s face, the personified image of the season invites the child toward a future, an “after,” when the child will acquire language that demarcates time and defines sensation—words that facilitate and impede awareness by both capturing and naming reality as well as preceding and modifying the absolute, unmediated experience of “the beginning.”

Suzanne Nussey lives in Ottawa, where she has worked as an editor, writer, memoir coach, and writing instructor. Her writing has been published in The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and EVENT, and has won poetry and creative non-fiction competitions in several journals.

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Alison Stevenson

The idea for Mud Angels came from a visit to Florence at the end of 2016. A few months earlier was the fiftieth anniversary of a devastating flood there. Photos and information about the flood and its aftermath were posted around the city. Online you’ll find staggering images from the 1966 flood. That information formed a backdrop to my visit, and fertile ground for story-making.

The first thing I imagined was Emily, a young newlywed in 1966. I imagined her reacting to things I was seeing as I visited museums and other sites, places I believe are largely unchanged since 1966. Her husband Charles was, I initially thought, going to be a bit of a stuffed shirt. But, as the characters developed, they surprised me.

I’d written a little over the years, but I feel I really began writing in 2016. Writing my story Graceland (much-edited version published in 2020 in Prairie Fire magazine Vol. 41 No. 2) felt like I was rewiring my brain. But I didn’t have writing experience or craft skills (and five years later, they’re still very much a work in progress).

“But I didn’t have writing experience or craft skills (and five years later, they’re still very much a work in progress).”

Mud Angels is my second story. I wanted to set it before the flood, and have the reader know the flood’s coming (though not when), while the characters don’t know. Having a story take place in the context of things that haven’t happened yet was a challenge. The first draft had a kind of prologue at the beginning, like a newspaper article, with the story of the flood. Ultimately, I dropped the prologue and brought the information about the flood into the body of the story.

You could say the evolution of Mud Angels maps to my learning path as a writer. In 2018 I had the opportunity to work with John Metcalf as a mentor through The Humber School for Writers Graduate Certificate Program. The first draft of Mud Angels was the first work we discussed, and through it I learned a tremendous amount. In 2019 I received valuable input workshopping it in Dennis Bock’s Short Story Masterclass at U of T. In 2020, I worked with mentor Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, who helped me push further into the characters and the story. Finally, after it was accepted by The New Quarterly, I had the chance to work with Editor Pamela Mulloy to bring it to the version you see in print. I’m grateful to all these people who, in the course of working with me on the story, taught me so much about writing.

It was fantastic to have Mud Angels appear in TNQ’s Vol 160. The theme, ‘The In-between Time’ captured important aspects of the story. Not only is Emily’s honeymoon a kind of interlude before her married life begins, but she seems very confident about how things are going to go, while the reader knows events may not unfold as she expects.

The story had a long journey. I’m so glad it found its home in TNQ!

Alison Stevenson’s work has appeared in Prairie Fire and The New Quarterly, was longlisted for the CBC and TNQ/Peter Hinchcliffe prizes, a finalist in the Alice Munro Festival of the Short Story and was selected for the Eden Mills Festival Fringe Stage. She has attended The Humber School for Writers, U of T School of Continuing Studies and Iowa Writers’ Workshop summer workshop. She is working on a collection. alisonstevensonwriter.com

(photo credit: detail from Simone Martini, Annunciation, Uffizi Gallery, Florence Italy. Photo by the author)

Photo by David Pupaza on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Kari Lund-Teigen

Reading it now, it strikes me that The Octopus feels like a pandemic story. Not about a pandemic, but emerging out of the conditions familiar from it: the isolation, the octopus from the Netflix documentary everyone’s watched, the sourdough bread! But the first draft emerged in the winter of 2017-2018. The spark for this story was an absorbing book by Sy Montgomery called The Soul of an Octopus. I love to read this kind of nonfiction when I need a reminder of all that is amazing and beautiful in the world.

A first draft, for me, drifts into place through what I hesitate to call a process. I don’t mean to make it sound mystical. It really is just putting pen to paper when something occurs to me: a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph, bits of dialogue. I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing or where it all comes from. It’s not often I look back on finished stories to figure it out.

“It really is just putting pen to paper when something occurs to me: a sentence, sometimes a whole paragraph, bits of dialogue.”

In addition to the obvious fascination with octopuses, I can look back now and see other threads connected to my life at that moment. We’d just moved across the country and I was in the middle of my first “real” winter in almost a decade. I missed my old neighbours. I missed the ocean. I was worried, as always, about the future. And I was thinking, as always, about stories.

In subsequent drafts, I cut a lot, mostly background. Where are they? What happened? Those details were important for me to write the story, but weren’t important enough to include for the reader. Next, I had to make the connections between adjacent ideas more concrete. This took time. I’d work on it, put it away for a while, then work on it again. The story slowly settled into place.

Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about how whales manage to take in enormous quantities of water without choking. It turns out they have a special plug that moves into place. In the endless grind of disheartening news, I’m grateful for information that leaves me awed and humbled. So far, no story involving whales is brewing. But I do have a book about eels that I haven’t started reading yet, so who knows.

In addition to TNQ, Kari Lund-Teigen’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and Grain. You can listen to her read at drumlitmag.com. For more, visit karilundteigen.com.

Photo by Serena Repice Lentini on Unsplash

Read more