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Finding the Form with Nash Lott

It matters that I explain how I think about form before speaking to how I got there with “Polling Station”, or how I may approach it with other poems.

I acknowledge that form, in its most basic definition, tends to mean the “shape” of the words on the page; if one sticks to a textualist reading of “form”, as per The Poetry Archive website,

“Form, in poetry, can be understood as the physical structure of the poem: the length of the lines, their rhythms, their system of rhymes and repetition”.

In my expanded definition, I tend to include other “textural” aspects of the written word such as tone, punctuation, syntax, tense, point of view (first person, third person, etc.). In my head, these aren’t simple adornments. They feel essential to form—as in, we choose the shape, or form, to imbue the visual of the poem with that which is also expressed, or enhanced, by the other “textural” parts of the written word. They are not, in my thinking, mutually exclusive.

Much as the skeletal structure of the mammal is the underlying “form”, its skin, hair, movement, sound and manner are what animate it. Form is what you hang the poem on; it only resonates if it’s harmonious with that which is draped upon it.

“Specific to “Polling Station”, the form was a natural evolution. I’d taken inspiration from a line in Sue Goyette’s “Ocean”, but also felt the call of other inherent qualities of the poem. I felt there were three essential attributes of Sue’s work I wanted to carry forward, as a nod to her inspired writing.”

First, Sue’s stunningly beautiful line, “Love is like that, it knocks on doors and urges you to vote”, was the catalyst for me to write about complicated political times, in a manner filled less with the rage percolating in me (due to my unrelenting political dismay), and more from a place of compassion for our shortcomings and a resolve to work diligently—collectively—for change.

Secondly, the use of couplets clearly mirrors the structure of “Ocean”. Unintentionally, but providentially, the couplets end up reflecting the sense of disparate parts coming together as a more powerful collective. “Polling Station” is also semi-dense; the use of couplets allows sufficient space for the words and ideas to breathe. 

Finally, the use of We, the collective. I chose to use We in “Polling Station” to engender the idea of a support-rich environment, societally, thus emboldening a collective call to action.

As an artist who works mostly with metal, spatial relations come easily to me in the object world. This can translate into an asset for pattern recognition when writing: double meanings, homophones, alliteration, similarity in concepts, metaphors, etc. These aspects of poetry, if accounted for, help me inform form.

None of this is to say I have any of it “figured out”. It’s just one more aspect of poetry I continue to work on.

Nash Lott is an artist blacksmith. His work includes a collaborative sculpture installed at the University of Calgary’s Taylor Digital Library. Social justice, mental health, nonhuman animals and nature inform his life and poetry. As a neurodivergent writer, late-in-life diagnoses of autism and ADHD have helped put his complex experience into perspective. Autism intensifies his relationship with the sounds and textures of language. Nash lives near the Rocky Mountains with his wife, Patti, also a poet. After achieving world peace, he’d love to find a small cabin by a lake in the woods. He’s not expecting the cabin anytime soon.

Photo by Nicolas Messifet on Unsplash

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The TNQ Office Team’s Favourite Reads of 2024

The TNQ office team had a successful reading year both in and out of the office. Below, we share some of our favourite books we read for pleasure in 2024.

The Rasmussen Papers by Connie Gault

I decided to filter my search for the best book I’ve read this year by thinking about what surprised me, a joy I hadn’t unexpected, and I narrowed it down to two books. The first is The Rasmussan Papers by Connie Gault, immersive, with delightfully complex characters and exquisite writing. I couldn’t put it down.

Pamela Mulloy, Editor

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Middlesex is a book that reminded me what a joy it is to read. As I kept turning the pages, I was completely entranced with this family saga. From a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in 1922 to Prohibition Era Detroit, to Grosse Pointe Michigan, Middlesex unravels a guilty family secret through three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family. Rich, lyrical, and mythic, Middlesex is an unforgettable epic that stayed with me long after I turned the last page.

Eleni Zaptses, Managing Editor

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus is a poet struggling with the loss of his parents. His obsession with martyrs (personal and historical) leads him in a search for meaning in a world he can’t understand. Despite the heavy subject matter — addiction, unrequited love, orphanhood, US imperialism, to name a few — the story is enjoyable throughout and never feels pedantic or overly moralizing. 

Georgia Berg, Editorial Assistant

The Blood Trials by N.E. Davenport

The Blood Trials by N.E. Davenport is one of my favourite books because of how the main character, Ikenna Amari, is written. She is a woman who knows how powerful she truly is, and she is not afraid to let others know it. 

Aviana Reid, Marketing and Events Assistant

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Another book that surprised me is Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, which I read when it came out despite the description about astronauts traveling in a space craft. The rave reviews were not wrong. A quietly lyrical book, full of reflections and day-to-day interactions that define humanity. 

Pamela Mulloy, Editor

Beach Read by Emily Henry

Beach Read was the first romance novel I had read in years, and it was like a breath of fresh air. The way in which Emily Henry is able to not only create a believable relationship between the two main characters, but also flesh out their own lives and personalities is perfection.

Aviana Reid, Marketing and Events Assistant

Unearthing by Kyo Maclear

Three months after Kyo Maclear’s father dies in December 2018, she learns through the results of a DNA test that she and her father are not biologically related. This sparks Kyo’s journey of unravelling a family mystery, knotted with secrets and unwieldy questions. Unearthing is a lyrical, touching, and meditative memoir about the search for answers, yearning for connection, and the power of art. I loved the creative structure Maclear uses to tell her story and the thoughtful observations she makes about the small moments in life that can often point us toward the most telling answers.

Eleni Zaptses, Managing Editor

Knife by Salman Rushdie

Written as a part of his recovery from a brutal attack where Rushdie was stabbed fifteen times, Knife blends the facts with Rushdie’s own imagination to try to understand how such an attack can be perpetrated. While Rushdie’s anger and trademark sarcasm are very alive in his retelling, he also turns his focus on truth, love, and the power of stories. 

Georgia Berg, Editorial Assistant

What was your favourite book of 2024? Tell us, and we will share a full reading list in January.

Renée D. Bondy’s Writing Space

I wrote the short story “Döstädning” (TNQ 172) in my home office. The word ‘office’ makes the space sound more substantial than it is. Bigger than a closet, but smaller than a room, it’s more like a nook. The ceiling slopes, and if I stretch out my arms, I can easily touch the walls. My desk, two small bookcases, and a tropical houseplant fill it to capacity. If anyone needed to enter, I’d have to step out. 

I’ve grown fond of my tiny office over the years. I love everything about it: the coziness, the plum-coloured walls, the little window which looks into the crown of an old maple. It’s difficult to calculate the number of hours I’ve spent there, but if I were to measure in words, it would be about 13 essays, 15 magazine articles, 16 short stories, and a novel’s worth – plus the dozens of lectures and talks I wrote when teaching at the university. That’s a lot of words. And the beauty of it is that, cocooned in my office, I know I could write millions more. 

Here’s the thing: we’re moving. My partner and I made this decision together, and from the start I knew it was right. Our new house is in the same city, not so far from our current home. It’s bigger, with a better floorplan and a modern kitchen. However (and I think you know where this is going), I will have to adapt to a new office. We haven’t moved yet, but each time I visit the new place, I stand in the room that will be my office and try to imagine writing there. It’s spacious and airy, with high ceilings and bright corner windows. I’ll have room for a larger desk, more bookcases, even a reading chair or two. I know I should be thrilled. But the thought of writing in this unfamiliar space is unsettling. Will I find my comfort zone, my flow, my words there?  

It probably sounds like I’m prone to magical thinking, as though my old office has the transformational power of Superman’s phonebooth. I know that entering an office is not the same as passing through a wardrobe or falling down a rabbit hole. But it is a portal, at least for me. It’s a place where, word after word, sentence after sentence, wholly new ideas emerge and grow. I believe there is something akin to magic in that, something I hope to conjure in my new office. 

Renée D. Bondy’s short story “The Explosion” appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of The Humber Literary Review Spotlight. Her début novel, [non]disclosure, was recently released by Second Story Press.

Photo by Norbert Levajsics on Unsplash

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What’s Kevin Irie Reading?

As with people, some poetry books hold your respect, others hold your imagination. I am thinking in particular of a debut collection I bought earlier this year. shima by shō yamagushiku (McClelland & Stewart 2024) is an absolutely compelling achievement, a work set in our time that lives beyond this time, spiralling like his visual poems into concentric circles of cumulative self-awareness. 

shima focuses on yamagushiku’s search for his ancestral roots in Okinawa, Japan, yet it is simultaneously an escape from that very search: he knows that the ideal of a “reclamation of identity” may simply perpetuate the same social power structures, here linked with the father and patriarchy. He writes: “I wander down Crenshaw / looking to buy an ancestor.” In an interview with Yvonne Blomer, he stated how he is well aware that “what lies beneath a wound is often simply another wound.” Hence, there is yamagushiku’s immersion in, or into, nature: “the trees taught me intimacy when the waking world ran from me.” Hence, the movement from one dreamlike state to another where images of nature overtake him, transform him, offering change but not closure. Identities can be shed like leaves, bark, branches, or skin. 

I am also struck by yamagushiku’s uncanny ability to spatially arrange his lines so that his poems breathe and expand, or contract into strict prose, as needed, as to how he just knows how to visually convey the mood of individual poems to the reader. You are unaware of how much yamagushiku guides you forward even as you read of a self adrift. He is a rare visionary poet who transforms the reader into an acolyte of his own ardent quest.

        I am taking the sharpest stick

 

and poking the root

 

         ancestor. I am

 

insisting that if he awakens

 

        I will have something 

 

useful to say.

What can you do but listen?

Kevin Irie is second runner-up in The New Quarterly’s 2024 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and won Grain Magazine’s 2024 Short Grain Contest for poetry. He will be in The Gates of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Press 2025). His most recent collection is The Tantramar Re-Vision (MQUP 2021). 

Photo by Kevin Irie.

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Kelly S. Thompson’s Writing Space

My military dad always had a saying: Flexibility is the principle of administration. Not exactly a warm family motto, but when you move around a lot, a necessary one.  

Now, as a spouse of a Canadian Forces Officer, I’m used to moving all the time—at least every year or two, which means the space in which I do my writing must be flexible, too. Sure, I usually have my office, which is the first room I set up when the movers unpack my boxes (and boxes, and more boxes) of books. Inevitably, at each new post, I arrange the vintage typewriters, the knick-knacks, the collected art, the tomes, and I recreate my space in province after province, state after state. There remains one constant though: a snoring dog nearby. 

In fact, I’m in the middle of another last-minute move to upstate New York, with my furniture still lingering somewhere in Kansas, if the AirTag is to be believed. Amidst the election results, amidst so much war and killing, I’m sitting in my hotel with the lingering scent of bleached towels and floral air fresheners, struggling to create here, to make anything beautiful amongst all this hate. I’m used to not having a particular writing space, but I’m not used to such racist, misogynistic, homophobic, bigotry swirling in every vortex. 

My empathetic heart is hurting. And my dog knows it. 

His solution? A good smothering.

“If you love a pet, you know what it is to feel unconditional, joyful, smothering love that only furry family can deliver. They demand nothing of us other than food, some snuggles, a warm bed, ideally. They demand that you live in the moment. Smell the literal roses and embrace the beauty that is in the everyday. Love without restriction. And if you have a bully breed, then you know your 65-pound chonk knows is a lapdog in spirit only, and laying directly on top of you is the only way for everyone to find symbiosis.”

We adopted Ham, my third bull terrier, when he was two, and has such an impossibly gentle soul that my husband and I often wonder how we got so lucky. If I cry, he brings me Essie (his stuffed emotional support squirrel) and plops himself atop me like the gigantic, snuggly potato that he is. My students have come to expect him to bomb all our Zooms, because writing nonfiction is emotional work and Ham knows that we need him there for comical relief, if nothing else. Pets do all the good work without any pay, any biases or judgements. Humanity should take a page from their books.

Which brings me back to my writing space. What does it look like? Sometimes it is a perfectly curated office in a bungalow, with framed photos of my loved ones behind me. Sometimes it is smushed into the backseat beside a pile of luggage while driving across the country to the place that I will learn to call home. Right now, it looks like an uncomfortable hotel couch. It looks like 65 pounds of snoring on top of 170 pounds of curvy human. It looks like slivers of dog hair stuck in the laptop keys and a bit of drool on the mousepad, which I’m pretty sure is Ham’s but am unfussed if it’s mine. 

Most of all, when I sniff his Frito-feet, kiss his anvil-shaped head, my writing space looks like the antithesis to hate. Hate doesn’t live here, even when it feels like it’s multiplying around me. 

And in my writing space, buried underneath the most perfect of boys, the conditions are set so that I can create words aimed to fight hate, to cast light to the beauty and complexity of what unites us.

Kelly S. Thompson holds a master’s and a PhD in creative writing and teaches the King’s MFA in Nonfiction. Both of her memoirs, Girls Need Not Apply and Still, I Cannot Save You were national bestsellers.

Photo by sarandy westfall on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Megan Beadle

I can’t take credit for the idea of a full moon party on a wildflower farm where ladies from the Barrie area go to let loose. In fact, I stole the inspiration from my own generous mother. This fact adds further commentary to this story about the nature of motherhood, but I’ll let you decide exactly what that commentary is.

On a weekend visit home to see my parents, I was surprised when my mom wasn’t with my dad in the passenger seat of their trusty blue van “Gurty” to pick me up from the GO train station. 

When I inquired about her whereabouts (she is usually too excited to see me to wait at home), my father said that she wasn’t feeling well. “She partied just a little too hard last night,” he said, as he pulled onto the 401. 

I thought he was joking.

When I strolled into their cute blue-doored bungalow, my mother was laying on the couch with the curtains of her bay window closed (very unusual indeed since she loves natural light and spying on neighbours), a book laying open on her face which wasn’t being read and was instead being worn as a sun guard, and a gigantic glass of water, a mug of tea, and half a glass of orange juice all within reach on her Bangladeshi-trunk side table (acquired from one of many world travels from postings abroad). And there was Leo, too, their black, furry French water dog laying between her body and the pillows of the floral couch. He barked happily twice but was reluctant to do his joyful greeting dance with me today, where he jumps around you on hind legs, full body bouncing and tongue lolling. Instead, concern and adoration were obvious in his unwillingness to leave my mother’s side while she was ailing, his head pivoting between his protective duties to her and his excitement about my return.

My mother groaned, the dog whined. Mom pulled the book off her face. “I’m hung over!” she announced. 

It’s not that my mom doesn’t drink. She does. She is known to have a glass of wine (or two, sometimes three), to dance at parties, to host like a champ, but never in my lifetime had I witnessed her hungover until this day. She is one for everything in moderation. And she is tough. She has been known to command a classroom in the throes of Dengue fever and to horseback ride across a desert in Egypt with a freshly broken ankle.

She sat up, smoothing her orange galabia over black leggings, reaching out for me to come sit with her.

“I was at a full moon party with the ladies. On a wildflower farm. I stayed up till dawn!“

“Excuse me?” I said.

In my defense, thinking of your sweet, organized mother letting loose, gallivanting in a field of sunflowers, dancing and drinking under a blue moon, is a tad jarring at first. Not that you haven’t seen her shake her groove-thing at the Mariposa music festival, but this seems different somehow. Us children tend to think we are the ones who should be out causing mischief and partying with mayhem, until we consider that our parents are full-fledged and complicated human beings who also enjoy having fun and living to the fullest. Particularly my adventurous, world-traveling parents who grew up in the sixties.

*A NOTE ABOUT MY MOTHER*

My mother is fearless. She grew up in Pickering, Ontario, with a dream of one day going to Africa. She met my father on Valentine’s Day on a bus in 1969 at the age of nineteen, fell in love, and six months later they were married. A year later they were living in Tanzania. Together, my parents had seventeen postings all over the world, while raising four children. Fifty-two years later, you can still catch them making out (which is gross, but also kinda cute).  My mother was an international school teacher, a librarian, and an avid reader. She is also an author: a memoirist. She loves adventure, her home, and her people. Also her dog, Leo, obviously.

 I should never have been remotely surprised that she went to a full moon party on a wildflower farm. That one’s on me. Her vitality cannot be confined and she will keep you guessing!

Julie and Rob Beadle in Tanzania
Julie and Rob Beadle, 1970 in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

My mother’s experience was the seed. Albeit, the seed and the setting only. Though there is a flower farm where dance parties happen in the Barrie region, it is not the flower farm in my story nor is it technically a full moon party. Though my mother may have partied, may have experienced her own grief, may even have lost a child, and though my mother served as inspiration for my idea of what a mother is, the mother in the story is not my mother. The daughter in the story is nothing like her daughter, my sister, or our story of loss; My sister lived into her thirties and died from cancer. Though Lake Couchiching exists, there was, as far as I know, no skinny-dipping involved, and if there was, my mother would never tell on her friends, who are not the ladies in this story. Sadly, Susan does not exist (though her spirit is very much alive in some of the women I know). 

Inspired by, blooming from, “Wildflower Ladies” is what happens when you let your imagination run away with you and you happen to have a wild imagination. Once I pictured these vivacious women partying in a sea of undulating tulips and sunflowers and roses and strawflowers, spinning and crying and letting loose by the fire, drinking and hula-hooping and commiserating (no men allowed), their stretch marks and lived bodies on display under moonlight, how could I not wish them into existence? 

Then, I added a sprinkle of my own thoughts about motherhood and being a woman, a dollop of my own grief from losing ones I love and ones I’ll never get to meet, a dash of my own experience as a daughter with a mother who loved me and my siblings unconditionally, and a measure of what she taught me about being strong and brave and courageous. 

Then, the story took shape; Like a dandelion, tough and hardy, grounded but with reaching roots, whimsical and made for wishing upon. I wrote it in one sitting, letting it flow like a river, like tracing the curves on the body of a beautiful woman. And then there was editing, and submissions, and rejections (in all about six, with about half personal) until the acceptance from The New Quarterly landed in my inbox. I was thankful, and it felt instinctively like the right home, the perfect fit.

This story is my mother’s favourite of anything I’ve written (she reads everything I write—even the steamy stuff—and is one of my first readers and editors). She graciously gave me permission to use her experience as the fodder for fiction. I hope I did her credit because I wrote this piece for the moms, but mostly for her, the inspiring woman who raised me and my siblings. For all the labour and care, the compassion and commitment that went unacknowledged or underappreciated, for all the times I forgot to say thank you, Please forgive me? I see you, mom. And I love you.

Megan Beadle is an emerging writer and freelance editor from Toronto. Her writing highlights include being published in The Antigonish Review, having a cover story for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, getting picked as the winner by Catherine Hernandez for the Room Magazine Short Story competition in 2019, and recently getting an OAC recommender grant from Anansi Press.

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Photo by Aaron Burden

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The Root Cellars of Elliston: An Interview Between Poet Richard Brait and Consulting Editor Barbara Carter

Barb Carter, Consulting Editor, in conversation with Richard Brait on his poem “The Root Cellars of Elliston,” the runner-up of The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest for 2024. The poem will appear in the upcoming Issue 172 of The New Quarterly.

Barb: What prompted your visit to Elliston, Trinity Bay, “The Root Cellar Capital of the World”?

Richard: My visit to Elliston was in the summer of 1978. I was a law student at Queens University and came home to St. John’s for the summer. On weekends, my girlfriend and I would often drive “out around the Bay” with our tent and camping supplies – most of the land in Newfoundland is unclaimed, and there were no commercial places to stay in any case, so we’d stay beside a river, on the verges of a stony beach, basically anywhere that was scenic and protected. Elliston was one of the places we went to, though I don’t recall giving the whole root cellar topic a lot of attention at the time. The real source of my interest in root cellars was the work of print-maker Don Wright. I visited his workshop at Saint Michaels, south of St. John’s, and became interested in his work – it was all about the connection of man with nature. When Wright contracted Aids through the blood supply (he was a hemophiliac and so needed frequent transfusions) his work became focused on mortality, and root cellars were a common subject matter. I’m not sure exactly what role he envisioned root cellars playing – he talked about death resulting in a union with nature, a disappearing into it, and I took him as representing them as the places where that might happen. But I’ve taken my own, more positive, approach – if they’re perfect for the storage and preservation of vegetables and fruits, why not something even more meaningful.

Barb: Why not indeed? With each reading of your poem, I am transported to Newfoundland, not only by its unique setting, but also by its characteristic diction. The speaker invites the reader into one of these “earthen forts dug into the rocky ground” warning “it’s hard to stop the bivvering–/ it’s so cold and damp even at the height of summer.” The reader is reminded that the root vegetables are kept separate from “the grander crops”, “apart from the mushrooms, the tomatoes , and/ those blueberries gathered in our dippers each fall—“. And as the poem turns to speculation of the possibility of the speaker’s own mortality preserved in the root cellar, the reader becomes a guest at “a scuff” complete with “a brace of fiddles and squeeze-boxes, the participants all dancing in “stockinged feet”. You have made it impossible for me, and I am sure for others, to resist the lure of this outport. Do you have a particular connection to Newfoundland that encourages you to create it for others?

Richard: My father was a career Bell Canada engineer and we moved to St. John’s when he became President of the Newfoundland Telephone Company. While I did all my university “away,” I fell in love with the place and came back to practice law in St. John’s. I ultimately left Newfoundland for greener career pastures, but I’ve been coming back to our fishing camp in Labrador for over 40 years with several Newfoundland friends. My first collection of poetry “Giants Brought Down to Their Knees” is subtitled “a Newfoundland Memoir in Poetry” and it is indeed comprised of poems that relate my experience of Newfoundland – incidents from my own life and stories told around our wood stove at the camp. Of course, poetry is fiction, so sometimes, as in “The Root Cellars of Elliston,” the real world is just a jumping off place for the poem. As the Newfoundland tourism video, from which I borrowed the title of my collection, says about Newfoundland tales: “rest assured, everything is true, especially the bits that are made up.”

Newfoundland diction, of course, is part of the character of the place. In my earlier Newfoundland poems, I didn’t hesitate to have my characters speak in the slang of the province, but that has moderated in my more recent poems (and in revisions to the earlier ones). Craig Teicher, my MFA advisor at Bennington College, was pretty firm on the point that colloquial language is no longer favoured in poetry, and I’ve taken that to heart, particularly since I personally don’t speak like a Newfoundlander (there are exceptions!). Hence, I generally confine my excursions into “Newfoundland English” to particular terms such as “biverring” (shivering) and “scoff” (a big celebratory dinner) – and a great source for these is The Dictionary of Newfoundland English (editors: Story, Kirwin, and Widdowson). Of course, much of Newfoundland was settled with Irish immigration, and my mother’s side of the family came over to southwestern Ontario from County Tyrone during the Irish potato famine. So, I do favour a bit of an Irish way of speaking and hence terms like “grand” creep in that way.

Barb: Not only does the poem transport its audience to a specific place, but it also nudges them to consider their own mortality. John Vardon, TNQ’s Lead Poetry Editor, was reminded of his aunt’s favourite saying: “Saints preserve us” when he read the poem, but he commented wryly that he doubted his aunt had the root cellar version of preservation in mind. I am so impressed by the originality of the ironic parallel you draw of the possibility of the speaker’s body also being preserved “at that perfect temperature,/ never less than zero, never more than four point five” in the root cellar. Can you tell me what prompted this imaginative leap?

Richard: Yes, I love those Newfoundland/Irish sayings too – in all their grandiloquence and constant references to religion. My favorite, which I’ve used in a later poetry collection to describe someone who is talkative, is “she could talk the hind leg off the Lamb of God.” This one is credited to George Horan, one of my law partners when I was in Newfoundland. George, at the time, was struggling with religion and whether it had meaning. And really, this poem of mine is doing the same thing. Of course, we all hope there’s an afterlife, but nothing in what we’ve learned in the sciences over the last 200 years has done anything but contradict the notion.

To answer your question directly, I’m not entirely sure where the creative leap came from. I tend to set up my architecture for a poem and then just start writing within it. And it’s sometimes surprising what comes out. The last step in my process is to take the prose I’ve written and to “versify” it. I’m told that’s how Yeats wrote his later poetry. And when I versify, I do two main things: (i) create lines and stanzas, and (ii) “lift up the language” (credit my mentor Laura Lush with that phrase!) by introducing figurative language, interesting images, … anything that might startle or entertain.

Barb:  The “surprise” in this poem is a gift to reader and poet. The movement of the poem is also mesmerizing.  Along with the speaker, the reader contemplates the “moist earth walls” that “stave off the drying/ and darkness the sprouting” for the root vegetables housed there, and dances for the celebratory “harvest at the end of our age, the raising up from humble vaults”. But it is the final third of the poem that catches in my throat and makes me quiver.  May I ask the intent of the change of tone that concludes the poem, that has me reading again and again the final six lines:  “I’ve never been much, after all, for puffy clouds,/blinding light,/ and all those angels/without any sign of the wear and tear/ of honest toil, and the wonder and worry/ of nights by a lovely, terrible northern sea.”

Richard: A tough question. I was educated as an engineer, and then a lawyer, and there are two indelible concepts which those callings impressed on me: (i) what are your facts (there can be no analytics or conclusions without them); and (ii) when you express yourself, your audience must be left in no doubt as to what you mean. So, I do believe in setting a solid base before you hit your readers between the eyes with your message. I remember Paul Muldoon saying that most poets “start too soon” – his point being that you should state your core message right away and dispense with the preliminaries. Then, he suggests that you go deeper. But after much consideration, I think in general that he’s wrong. You do need a set-up (as my description of the basics of root cellars does in this poem). But you need to keep it interesting. I’m also cognizant of the warning that Mark Wunderlich gave us at Bennington College – you need to draw your reader in in the first few lines or he/she will just move on. So here, I divide the poem into pieces: the factual set up (root cellar science); the imaginative leap (that bodies might be stored); and finally, the philosophical conclusion. I think the most important thing in this structure is the conclusion. I’ve always firmly believed that the poet shouldn’t be telling the reader how to think. And I’d like to think I avoid that here by having my narrator talking in a genuine and idiosyncratic way – then the statement becomes not a philosophical argument, but the perspective of a real human being, put out there as something to be looked at by the reader, who can then form his or her own view.

Barb: I confess I appreciate a poem, almost any narrative in fact, that leaves me something to ponder and invites me to draw my own debatable conclusions. I suspect that is why “The Root Cellars of Ellison” lingers in my consciousness and entices me to return for more readings.

Your “short” bio is delightfully intimidating:  a corporate lawyer with degrees in Engineering and Law and a more recent MFA in Poetry from Bennington College. How have each of your professions informed your poetry?  What drew you to writing poetry? Who are your favourite poets? What are you writing now?

 

Richard: I’ve already answered a few of these. I guess to summarize, my poetry is fact-based and generally narrative in form. I’m not a believer in obscurity. Readers should spend their time formulating their own views on the facts and images the poet conveys, not trying to make sense of the work. Starting to write poetry, rather than fiction or creative nonfiction, was a pretty random choice. But a good one for me, I think. I generally enjoy the process of plotting the overall architecture of a work, then populating it with the right poems, fragments, etc. To an extent, I also enjoy crafting and revising the line, but only to an extent. When you write mostly long poems, as I do, that’s a dangerous trap you need to avoid. I’m also conscious that my start in poetry was very late in life – I don’t have a lot of time to spare for the niceties. 

My first three poetry collections were very much groupings of individual poems. The structure of my MFA program really forced that on me – the creative requirement was 5 new poems and two revisions per month, the critical part required reading 6 to 8 books per month and writing about them, and then there were major essays too. So, it was a bit of a scramble to create enough poems to submit. I found I had to write about whatever came to hand.

Now that I’m free of that, I’m tending to pick subject matters for a book length work and then write all the poems to fit the plan. It’s important when I do that to pick a subject where I can inject some personal elements. My first advisor at Bennington, Carmen Gimenez, was quite direct with me in our first meeting. I told her what I thought I needed to work on (metre, the use of figurative language, …) but she just dismissed my suggestions out of hand. “Not important,” she said. She told me that my poetry was too much of a chronicle – I needed to work in an “emotional thread.” I came to agree with that assessment and generally the best way for me to accomplish that is to work in my personal experiences and things I care about. Of course, poetry is fiction, so I don’t feel tied to the facts, just their spirit.

Of the five collections I’ve “finished,” the last two follow that subject matter approach – one  imagines that the Virgilian lottery (the concept of using random passages from Virgil’s Aeneid as a source of prophecy) becomes a popular element in bingo halls around the world; the other, titled “Strangers in Strange Lands,” highlights the dichotomy of Labrador by portraying the lives of its indigenous peoples (particularly those taken to Europe and put on display) and also the activities of the “strangers” who came to Labrador to exploit its natural resources. As for work-in-progress, I have two topics right now. The first is a collection entitled “The Ends of History” – poems that explore Francis Fukuyama’s notion (now looking rather shaky) that the global triumph of liberal democracy would follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second is a modern retelling of The Canterbury Tales with elements of the Domesday Book, trial by ordeal, and the unknown fate of Thomas Becket’s bones.

When I’m picking a theme for a collection, I’m always reminded from my science and engineering days of what the academically inclined would take as their direction: “what are the hard problems?” or “what are the great questions?”. It’s a little less direct with poetry – I try to pick a subject matter that can allow reflection on something deeper than just the story or the words. In the Canterbury Tales case, for example, the nature of pilgrimage and the people who are seeking some meaning for their lives, the nature of idolatry, and the way medieval societies ordered themselves and what we might learn from that.

As to favourite poets, I’m a great fan of Alice Oswald – her first book, The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile, remains a huge favourite, and her poem Dart – a single long poem about a river – represents a model for me of what a long poem, or a project book of poetry, should look like. But I think several of the Irish poets – MacNeice, Yeats, Heaney, Muldoon, Mahon, and Ciaran Carson are my biggest influences. Among these MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and Carson’s Still Life are the works I keep coming back to. And I can’t forget the great lines from Yeats – collectively his “rag and bone shop of the heart.” In fact, in my latest collection I’ve used two of his poems – “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for my Daughter” as the basic superstructure for a large section of the work. Copyright has expired in both poems, so I feel a wonderful sense of freedom to do as I please with them.

Finally, I need to give some credit to the profession I’ve been practicing for the last 45 years. I’ve never considered myself a natural writer, but lawyering forces you constantly into close reading, and structuring and writing thoughtful and precise prose. I don’t think there’s a better calling for being exposed to new vocabulary, new phrases, countless different ways to structure an argument … . When you have a love of words as I do, these just become one great big data lake that you can draw from when you want to write something. Whether you’re an engineer or a lawyer, or even a writer, the most important thing is to innovate, to find a new and better way. But innovation doesn’t come from the ether, it comes from a big storehouse of prior achievements and ideas and uses these to take things one step further. My time as a lawyer helped me build that storehouse. And, as I like to say, all innovation is really “found” innovation.

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What’s Trish Sissons Reading?

This summer, I’m trying to embrace a ‘do it for the plot’ mentality. I’ve always been a fan of doing things on a lark, but this summer it feels important and urgent that everything be mad and seasonally specific. Notably, that has led me to crash a near-stranger’s birthday party, suit up for a 50 Cent show at a pool party on a whim, and start drafting stories that live somewhere between sheer nonsense and absolute blissful insanity.

My summer reading has also been walking a funny tightrope over a chasm of potentially bad decisions, reckless behaviour, emancipation, and skylarking; books that are masterfully confronting and escapist in equal measure.

Joanna Biggs’ A Life of One’s Own explores how nine women writers began again and approached life after moments of profound grief and heartbreak, some seeking the light, some dancing with destruction in a way that feels very true. It is a beautiful reminder that conventions are not mandatory and, for me, that on the other side of depression is a Van Morrison song and a sunny day if you wait it out long enough. 

On the fiction side, I’m halfway through Emma Cline’s novel, The Guest, and I find myself delighting in, and disappointed by, Alex’s reckless behaviour and poorly conceived plans that have served to reassure me that no matter how messy I think I am, there is always a hotter mess. 

Both Dolly Alderton’s Good Material and Monica Heisey’s Really Good, Actually attest to the beauty of this messiness as the great unifier (albeit with less petty theft and property damage), as both peak relatability and catalyst for what comes next. Apparently, if you want it to, the wildness can be a gateway to something a little more healthy, a little less self-destructive. But only if you’re looking for that sort of thing. 

In service of my social insecurity, I’ve also kept a copy of Mrs. Dalloway and various Tom Wolfe books on my person at all times to hoodwink the general public into thinking I’m clever and high-brow when I’m really something akin to a human raccoon these days, looking for treasure in the trash; a little feral, but ‘hey look, she has opposable thumbs like us!’

Finally, I also have the great privilege of reading work by my writing group friends, which I’m both smug and sad for you that you can’t read yet. Eventually though, I’m doubtless that their books will become your favourites. 

Trish Sissons is a BC-born writer currently based in Tkaronto/Toronto. Her stories have been finalists for the Fiddlehead’s Fiction Contest and the Penguin Random House Student Award for Fiction. Her work has also appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review. A graduate of the SFU School of Communication and an occasional student at the UofT School of Continuing Studies’ Creative Writing program, Trish has studied and worked in Vancouver, Guadalajara, Melbourne, and Toronto. She was born and raised in the Bella Coola Valley, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest.
She has also been known to farm on occasion.

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What’s Adrian Markle Reading?

I teach a lot of short fiction, and I like to challenge myself to keep the content as contemporary as possible, so I’m always reading litmags from around the world. A high number of those are from Canada, since the quality is reliably high, and because it helps me feel connected to my home country. I’m also part of an informal short story club with primarily American authors, where this year we’ve discussed some great stories by Denis Johnson, Ted Chiang, and Danielle Evans. And I recently read Jess Walters’ We Live in Water, which was excellent.

“In terms of novels, I recently finished reading Rita Bullwinkel’s Head Shot, which I loved and which I mentioned in a piece for Electric Literature. I’m looking forward to Anne Fleming’s Curiosities, which is nearing the top of my to-be-read pile. I think Fleming is one of Canada’s most exciting writers and Anomaly is one of the best Canadian novels from this side of the millennium.”

But at this exact moment, I am taking my time with Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, where six astronauts on the ISS struggle to keep their focus and their professionalism when confronted with news of death and disaster back home. So high above the earth, they’ve never felt so much a part of—and apart from—humanity. Harvey is such a safe pair of hands; her level of craft is so elevated that her work is always enjoyable. And Orbital is short, coming in under 150 pages. I love a short novel. For me, this is evidence that the writer has a clear idea of the story she wants to tell and confidence in her ability to tell it. Give me a novel with focus, a novel that’s about something specific, any day of the week.

Adrian Markle is the author of the novel Bruise. He has numerous short stories in magazines and anthologies around the world, including EVENT, Queen’s Quarterly, and Pithead Chapel. He has a PhD from the University of Exeter and teaches at Falmouth University in Cornwall, UK, where he lives with his partner, the writer Eleanor Walsh.

Photo by Joyce Hankins on Unsplash

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Launched: Widow Fantasies by Hollay Ghadery

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in September 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of The Neighbourhood Bookclub on 105.5 FM, as well as a co-host HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

Q: The 33 stories in Widow Fantasies are all short yet deeply immersive flashes of experience. As a writer, what does this form demand from you that is different from your poetry, CNF, or longer form fiction? Technically, emotionally, or both.

These stories hinge on distillation, much like a poem, but also need to have a story’s narrative arc, so I definitely found the collection at times, challenging to write—despite the fact I was drawn by the form because I thought it would be easier to tackle with four young children milling round and a busy household to run. 

To an extent, I was right. Short, short stories like mine don’t demand that I become absorbed in another world and a long involved plot like a novel would. I could draft a story in a couple hours. Finish it in a week or two. But because I felt compelled to tell stories—to speak in voices outside my own and give into narrative—I couldn’t fall back on poetry, which is my default setting. I needed to take my head out of the ether, at least a little bit, and ground myself in some semblance of narrative structure, even if it was to challenge that narrative structure. My stories ask readers to consider that even stories we tell each other in a quick minute are complete stories. Brevity says something about who and where we are in our lives and ourselves. I am reminded of women in a play group I used to attend with my babies. We’d converse in these frantic little bursts. That’s all the time we had before a tiny hand was tugging on our pants with a request, or a baby was fussing and needed to be whisked away for a diaper change or nap, or a call came from the school because an or older child had an accident at recess and needed to be picked up, or a partner was bringing home guests for dinner and we had to leave now, and attend to the rest of our lives. 

I understand not everyone will know what this experience is like; trying to relate a story quickly, breathlessly, because you know you will be interrupted at any second. I understand the form of these stories might challenge some readers. Still, there is a precious desperation to this sort of narrative, and I felt compelled to try to capture it.

And it was, at times, fun to try to capture it. Unlike my creative nonfiction writing, for instance, these stories have roots in conversations I’ve had with other women and slivers of my own life, and it was enjoyable to dress them up and show them to the world. I didn’t feel that exhausting mining of self I encounter when I write nonfiction.

Q: The topics treated in this book range from relationship conflict to bodily functions to tender and angry moments in parenting, to loss and impending loss, and beyond. The stories are vivid, intimate, and varied, with revealing details about characters’ lives, particularly the women and girls. Do you have any favourites?

 I do have favourites! I love “Jaws”, because it is very much based in my life and an attachment I formed to a Nowruz goldfish. (Though not all details of that story are rooted in my life.) I also love “Structural Integrity”, because it examines internalized misogyny in a horrifically embarrassing way. “Purple Bears” is a family favourite. My kids love it since the story captures the ferocity of a mother’s love at odds with trying to do what’s “right” and “expected” for a mother to do. 

I also love the story about the man with the hard arteries. A dear friend gifted me a detail of her parents’ marriage and allowed me to use it for this piece. This friend said she would never write of it, and I could. It is such an honour, to be trusted this way, with something so private. 

Q: With the book out now and some distance from the drafting and revising, are there any stories in this collection that you might revisit in a new longer work? Or is it the case that once you’re done with them, you’re done?

 In a sense, I already have. The story, “TikTok Virgin”, which captures a woman beginning to question her sexuality during middle age, is the basis of the novel I wrote which was recently accepted for publication with Palimpsest Press —just like the poem in my poetry collection, “Psychomachia”, became a creative catalyst for Widow Fantasies. I don’t seem to know it at the time, but whatever I work on now seems to bleed into what I work on next, in some way. There’s always some unfinished business in my mind. 

Q: The epigraph is from a poem by Sarah Venart, called “When in Pompeii”. It reads: “I can’t save all of myself. But perhaps / what is most precious might be / perhaps, perhaps preserved.”

Can you talk about what drew you to these lines? Are the stories in Widow Fantasies an act of preservation, or a way to save oneself? 

Yes, Widow Fantasies is about preserving and valuing the stories of women, in any form they take. I ask readers to let go of rigid narrative scaffolding and consider that there may be other (totally valid and compelling) ways to tell stories. 

Q: Switching topics to publishing: in addition to being a multi-genre writer, you are a busy publicist. You work with a lot of authors and presses. What is the most important advice for authors to help maximize publicity for a new book these days?

I have some long-run and short-run advice. Long-run first: Build a community. An authentic community. By “authentic” I mean surround yourself with people you admire, not people who you think might be of use to you. If you don’t admire another person’s work, supporting it is going to feel pretty soul destroying. And it helps if you don’t view your support as transactional.

How does uplifting other writers who may or may not get behind your work help your books? Because the community you are building isn’t necessarily with those authors. Or only those writers. It’s with other people with similar interests like booksellers, book clubs, readers — anyone who is literary-arts-adjacent and who loves this art form. These are people you can learn from and who can help you grow. There are no guarantees, but I do know that we can’t complain that no one reviews books anymore or shows up to our events if we don’t review books and show up to events ourselves. And we can’t belly-ache that no one values the arts if we aren’t celebrating the arts in our daily lives. By being a part of the community, and celebrating authors and books you enjoy, you are creating a buzz around literary culture that will benefit you. Just don’t expect instant gratification. You have to be ready to play the long game, to put yourself out there, and above all, be genuine. 

My short-run advice: build your own platform. The media landscape is changing and arts spaces in traditional and earned media spaces have shrunk. More people are vying for limited spots in book review sections and air space on radio shows. It’s wonderful to land spots within these spaces but don’t depend on it. Advocate for yourself with new media platforms. Get active on social media, start a blog and a newsletter, check out podcasts (though don’t necessarily start one unless you have the gumption for it). I’d love to write in a cottage in the woods with ivy climbing the walls and never think about publicity. I’d love my books to magically sell themselves. That’s simply not how it works. 

Q: You have two more books coming out in rapid succession—a novel in 2026, and then a children’s book in 2027. So, I hesitate to ask what’s next, because that’s already a lot, but any hints of what you’re working on or planning?

I am back to working on poetry, a collection of occasional verse that examines how we commemorate the passing of time, with a focus on how people who are neurodivergent experience time differently. The project is pretty new now, and in its sapling stage, but I hope it will start coming together. At present, I am just enjoying coming back to poetry, which always feels less demanding than fiction.

Laura Rock Gaughan is the author of Motherish, a short story collection. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Canadian, Irish, and US journals.

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