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Finding the Form with Pamela Dillon

I rarely start with form unless I’m intentionally writing poetry; most other prose begins with a session of free writing. In the days when we were able to wander and sit in cafés I often spent a couple of mornings a week in a coffee shop journaling.

I remember playing with the idea of a poetic form for this story, something akin to a Pantoum poem with repeating lines. In the case of “Murmuration” I started the first sentence with the phrase—“I remember . . .” I thought I would repeat that line at the beginning of each paragraph.

The beginning of the story is dark. I wanted readers to feel a sense of a future as though the protagonist was looking back from a better time. However, as I went on the repeated phrase began to feel limiting and it necessarily fell away during the editing.

There were a few themes that interest me within this story:

  1. What makes some people respond to a crisis with hope, and others with nihilism? Why do many relationships seem to pivot between these two worldviews?

  2. I thought a lot about the romantic notions we have of nature and our place within it. Rather than being a part of nature we often seek to master it. I thought I might try to mimic this in the relationship between the two characters. In “Murmuration,” it’s Ava who seeks to master the relationship and Jenna who observes it.

    It also made me think about the ways we learn to live with an uncontrollable event. What conflicts arise? Yet, I hoped to contrast the notion of conflict as revealed with Jenna and Ava, and acceptance with the brief appearance of David and Liliane at the end.
  1. I also confess to a fascination with murmurations. I’ve been lucky to see a few large flocks play out this strange dance; I’ve also watched a few dozen on YouTube. One day while watching a particular murmuration video I wondered if the birds ever crashed into each other or hit the ground. That question really captured my imagination. Of course, I had to find out and went down the rabbit hole of the Internet searching for that answer which then led to an imagining of the opening scene.

I wrote “Murmuration” in 2018. Of course, I had no idea that we’d someday be in the midst of a pandemic. I’m grateful to have this story published now; perhaps it’s the best possible time. I truly believe the story finds the writer and its moment.

I’m most comfortable with fiction, and I’ve always thought of short fiction as considerably harder to craft. I find writing short fiction the most satisfying because the story has to be tight and there needs to be a firm grasp on the characters; it also requires a clear through line from beginning to end. I’ve become comfortable with this closer view.

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I’ve played with stories that move back and forth in time; it’s something I feel can be done well though I’ve not mastered it yet. I’m also working on a story with the narrative voice in the second person. I love inviting the reader into the story I’m creating; I love the immediacy of it. It’s exciting to play with the point of view and see what works.

I must add that I’ve a lovely relationship with an editor whose questions and comments I trust. Writing can be lonely work, it helps to have someone with whom you can share your work in progress, and who doesn’t think you’re odd when you speak of your characters as living people.

Pamela Dillon is a writer, poet, and graduate of creative writing from the University of Toronto. Pamela’s publications can be found on literary websites and print journals including the CBC Books – Canada Writes, and The Globe and Mail. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Photos courtesy of Pamela Dillon.

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Pamela Dillon’s Writing Space

I live in a village at the juncture of the Grand and Conestogo Rivers, situated on the historic indigenous lands of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Outside my window the Grand River winds through what is now Mennonite farmland. I’m aware of my place as a settler, though that wasn’t always the case. This is land once promised to the Six Nations; I’ve vowed to be mindful that I reside here as a guest.

I named my writing room, The Perch because it’s situated at treetop level. From my second-floor vantage point I can watch the cold winds of early April swirl through what’s left of the detritus in my garden while making a mockery of the seductive spring weather we’d enjoyed only days ago. My view is ever changing, between the budding of the trees and later fall of the leaves, or the freeze and thaw of the river there is no other place I’d rather write.

Best of all – there are birds: flocks of songbirds flit tree to tree in spring and summer: Blue Jays and Cardinals, Robins and Chickadees, Grackles and Goldfinches, and just last year an Indigo Bunting that perched high in the Chanticleer pear tree for the better part of an hour. Canadian Geese chevron the sky in autumn, red tailed hawks and the occasional bald eagle hunt the river and cropped fields for mice or rabbit in early winter. There’s something to be said for a bird’s eye view.

I typically spend my afternoon hours editing a work in progress, or transcribing the rough draft of a story I’d hastily scrawled into a journal in the still dark hours of a morning. For me, writing is a practice and having a dedicated space has helped immensely. I’m disciplined in my work practices, but not with my imagination. In the early stages of writing fiction, it’s best not to hold on too tightly to the rules. Still, even flights of fancy need a home.

On one wall I have three low books shelves and on the other two wooden file cabinets of research, magazine photos, story ideas, a novel in draft, and final edits of my short story collection. I find it comforting to be surrounded by so many words.

I’m known to be a neatnik, a joyful cupboard labeller, and drawer organizer. I find clutter stressful and in every other room in the house I keep it to a minimum, yet here in the perch it’s another world – here my imagination is free to run wild.

Above the file cabinets is my vision board; a two decades long art installation filled with story and character ideas, quotes, post cards, and entry tickets to writing retreats and some of the worlds most sacred sites. I’ve festooned it with a Buddhist prayer flag, found feathers, rejection letters, and a few emails of praise for my work; there’s a note that says, ‘I miss you” and another with a six word tattoo I’ll likely never get. This board reminds me that the best cache for story is memory.

There’s also a photo I shamelessly ripped from a magazine in my dentist’s office many years ago. It’s a picture of Margaret Atwood wearing a floral turquoise jacket and her neck is adorned with heavy red beads; she looks thoughtful – a hint of a smile plays on her lips. I thought she’d make a great muse, so I carefully rolled it into my bag and snuck it home. I’m not normally a thief.

I tacked the page to my vision board. On days when I feel like abandoning a tough edit I turn to that stolen photo and ask my paper Margaret, ‘Should I call it quits?’ I know the answer, but I ask anyway. She hasn’t failed me yet.

Directly opposite the river view there’s a wall filled with over a hundred travel photos. It’s true that very picture is a story, and they’re there for the taking. Beneath the photos is an altar of sorts, a place of totemic offerings and tactile memories. I’ve holy water from the Chalice Well near Avalon, a brass vessel that once held offerings from the Ganges, lava from Iceland, a branch from the haunted forest of the Spirit Bear, wooden boxes, pottery bowls, stone and iron figures representing ancient goddesses, shells and rocks collected from seashores around the world, Buddhist chimes, brass bells, and a black and gold beaded leopard from South Africa – it all has its own magic. This altar grounds me in the real world, in observation and sensory details which are necessities for good writing. In the middle of it all there is one small framed fortune from a Chinese food dinner more than a decade ago, and it reads:

You are a lover of words

someday you will write a book.

How’s that for inspiration? Every day when I climb the stairs I’m as thrilled as the day before. It’s a gift to spend your life in love with your work. I don’t know what the future holds, but I do believe it’s the role of writers to imagine one.

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If I was to offer a last writing tip it would be this: we’re living in an extraordinary moment in history ~ write it down, or as Emily Dickinson said, ‘Tell all the truth but make it slant.’

Pamela Dillon is a writer, poet, and graduate of creative writing from the University of Toronto. Pamela’s publications can be found on literary websites and print journals including the CBC Books – Canada Writes, and The Globe and Mail. She is currently working on a collection of short stories.

Photos courtesy of Pamela Dillon.

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What is Sue Chenette Reading?

A few weeks ago, when the Novel Coronavirus became, almost overnight, something more than death at a distance, when a collective shudder started through Toronto, and rice and toilet paper disappeared from grocery stores, I pulled Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard from my book shelf. I’d first read it back in the ’90s. It’s set in Kiev, in 1918, during the Ukrainian revolution and civil war. The officers of the occupying German forces are deserting the city by night, Petlyura’s rebellious Ukrainian peasants are on the outskirts, and the Bolsheviks are waiting in the shadows. What had stayed with me was the sense of people huddled against a danger that hovers in colliding rumours and uncertainty. I opened the book to find it again.

“Their sister was worried. To hide it, she started to sing the tune with her brothers, but suddenly stopped and raised her finger. ‘Wait. Did you hear that?’… All three listened. There was no mistaking the sound: gunfire. Low, muffled and distant.”

Here it was on the page, the unfixed, amorphous danger. Bulgakov articulated it through his characters, made it a nameable thing. Named, manageable. Reading as catharsis; reading that found the day’s atmosphere repeated within the broader span of history and human experience. Okay, something inside me said when I finished, here’s where we are now. I Googled “pantry recipes,” stocked up on tuna and frozen veggies.

An important part of my reading these days, momentarily set aside for Bulgakov, is the poetry of Brenda Hillman. I’m lucky to be exploring her work with a small group of poet friends. We meet (now on Zoom) to read her poems aloud and to muse over them together, their imagery, structures, and concerns emerging as we pool what we notice, what speaks strongly to us. We began with Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days, and have continued with Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. Hillman addresses the precarious state of our world ─ anger at our lack of social justice and our willful blindness to approaching ecological disaster sparks from her poems. But this is couched within a marvelling attention to the particulars of the natural world, and offered in language that is by turns (and sometimes all at once) inventive, lyrical, witty, playful. Underneath and within all of this there is something like a calm faith, a sense that the world will go on (with or without us). Important here are the decomposers, both actual ─ the lichens that grow, extra hidden life, on bark, leaves, rock ─ and metaphorical:

“My wife of decomposers has brown skin,/ she visits me among the forms. Lichen says/ accept what is then break it down.”

 These lines, so striking when we first read them, have taken on the comfort of a mantra, a way of looking at each day.

And then there’s Proust ─ another shared commitment, providing companionship and motivation to keep going. These long quiet days invite those paragraph-long sentences, intricate and  needing to be savoured. Looking up from my reading, looking out the window at sky and bare trees and backs of houses in afternoon stillness, the hour dissolves, and the afternoon stretches ─ like the Proustian page ─ out into the slow movement of the day’s weather, with its sudden visible gusts, its subtle underlying shifts, all that will become what will have changed.

Sue Chenette is an editor for Brick Books and the author of Slender Human Weight and The Bones of his Being.

Photo by Kleomenis Spyroglou on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Anastasia McEwen

About a year ago, I received an unexpected visit from the parents of a girl I had taught in 2004. I invited them into my cramped hallway, thankful the dim lighting masked all the mitts and backpacks piled along the wall. They stomped the snow off their boots and smiled at each other with a glance that said wait till she sees this!  The woman pulled a folded quilt out of a plastic bag, spread it across her arms, then let it drop to the floor like a stage curtain. Patches of blue, pink and floral were stitched between rows of pink hearts—each with a hand-written message from a different student: “Thanks a bunch,” “I really enjoyed your class,” and my favourite, “Your (sic) a great English teacher.”  

The woman explained that she and her daughter Sarah, who now had her own family, had made the quilt for the baby I was carrying. The quilt was supposed to be presented to me on my last day of class, but when the baby died three weeks before my due date, it was shelved in a closet where it remained for sixteen years. The woman refolded the quilt and handed it to me, “We thought enough time had passed” she said, “You should have this.” Later that night, I too thought enough time had passed and started to write Anomalies, an essay about the still born infant I gave birth to so long ago.

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Anne Lamott, in her essay, Shitty first Drafts, writes, “The first draft is a child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place.” My first draft was less of a romp and more of a heavy trudge through wet cement. Anomalies read like a police report: First this happened, then this happened, then this happened. By draft two I loosened up and began to pry open the past. Around draft five I wove in a few disparate threads (the cat fetuses, the stray kitten, the serial killer tomcat). With each revision I added more reflections and flashbacks and casual asides, and before I knew it, the narrative had mutated into a braided essay, a bubbling sloppy braid with four strands and even more chaotic timelines that lurched and jolted from one event to another. At this point I closed my laptop and took a breather. I had to take a step back and fiddle with each section, on paper, until the structure was intact. This is, I think, the most satisfying part of the writing process, when the scaffolding is complete and I can finally move on to the fun stuff—picking away at those little details.

When I first started writing creatively, I’d comb through volumes of America’s Best Essays and Journey Prize Anthologies and study one sentence at a time, trying to crack the code: what made these prose glisten? I discovered how much weight concrete nouns could carry. Most of my memories boil down to physical objects so I try to utilize them in my writing. When I think back to the day I delivered the baby, I clearly remember the black gum spots on the parking lot pavement, the violent zigzags exploding on the monitor with each contraction, the unlit baby incubator beside my bed. Concrete nouns allow me to add sentiment without appearing sentimental.

I find there are myriad ways to leap into a story but few ways to exit. I wrote one overly- philosophical coda after another, trying to sum up the entire pregnancy. Finally I had to ask myself the big question: what would Flannery O’Conner do? She once wrote (I can’t remember where) that an ending need not tie up loose ends but simply bring closure to a story. So I veered in a different direction and concluded with an image of my dad in the barn, with a shot gun, waiting for the tomcat. Perfect I thought, until I submitted the essay to my writing group. Some found it a tad abrupt, others downright jarring. I put the essay away and re-read it a week later and realized they were right; leaving the reader with that image seemed gratuitous—it put way too much emphasis on a minor thread. In order to convey something like, time heals but you never forget (but in a less clichéd vernacular), I slipped back into the realm of the concrete and came up with two images: a purple bruise turned yellow and crocuses sprouting through the snow. At that point I was able to build my final two paragraphs.

Sending off a completed work is always uplifting, but this time, when I clicked the submit button, I felt as if the last of a scab had broken free and dissipated into cyber space. Now, when I think back to that dark period in 2004, two other images comes to mind: a mother and daughter preparing a beautiful quilt, and twenty-six thoughtful teenagers writing a message to their teacher with a fabric marker.

“Anomalies” was awarded Honourable Mention in the 2019 Edna Stabler Essay contest. You can read it in the Winter 2020 Issue of The New Quarterly Vol.153. Anastasia McEwen teaches high school English and art in Guelph, Ontario. She was shortlisted for the CBC Non Fiction prize in 2018 and her short story, “Sea Girls”, was recently published in Grain. Her essay, “Standing on my Head Naked”, will be included an upcoming issue of The Antigonish Review.

Photographs courtesy of Anastasia McEwen. Cover photo by Daria Nepriakhina on Unsplash.

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In Conversation with Ian Williams

Kim Davids Mandar is the editor of (In)Appropriate, a collection of interviews with Canadian authors forthcoming in Fall of 2020 from Gordon Hill Press. The interviews explore questions of difference, identity, and appropriation, engaging writers on the subject of how they represent an increasingly diverse and complex culture in ways that avoid falling into appropriation. In this excerpt, Kim speaks with Canadian novelist Ian Williams, author of You Know Who You Are and Reproduction.

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Kim Davids Mandar: Have you had experience in conversation, as an author, with this topic of cultural appropriation or the respectful writing of difference recently? It seems to be a hot topic in our neck of the woods.

Ian Williams: At UBC I teach poetry. It think the debate is really charged in the genres of fiction and non-fiction — you know, to take someone else’s story and present it as narrative. There’s something in the narrative turn that really disturbs people. Because when we hear these conversations, it’s about taking my story, right? There’s something about narrative that’s especially charged in this — it’s not like taking my poem. Occasionally you’ll hear, ‘taking my voice,’ but that’s a bit harder to quantify. Does that sound right to you?

K: Absolutely, and I noticed in your book, Not Anyone’s Anything, there’s such a range of characterizations: you dive into the worlds of music and math and give voice to different genders and different ages and different cultures and ethnicities. Did the idea of potentially crossing acceptable boundaries — in taking stories or voices — enter your thinking as part of the process

I: That was in 2011 and I feel like the debate really shifted after that. When you look at books — when would be the peak of this? I guess, it’s always been in non-fiction, like hoaxes and things like that— people who fake their stories and whatnot. But the debate about appropriation really sort of heated up, I think, in Canada, maybe with the Hal Niedzviecki thing, John Degen stuff and the “appropriation prize.” Before that, there was a kind of  courtesy or common etiquette but there wasn’t a law. Now I feel like we’re moving towards a law, rather than an etiquette.

Yeah, for those stories I felt very free, and I still feel very free to write those stories. I think intent matters to some degree. That is, it was never my intention to be the authoritative, representative of female experience, or the Korean experience. To write that very first story in the book, with Soo and Goran — I’m not Serbian and I’m not female and I’m not Korean, I’m not any of those things. But, I studied Korean; I took Korean courses. I tried to get as much as possible on the inside of what that might be. And where my labour stopped, that’s where my imagination had to start.

I think the problem arises when people don’t do the labour. They don’t make any effort toward understanding a culture, how a culture thinks, how they use language, what their foods are, their practices, the soft unspoken customs of culture, right? Instead, they just sort of go straight to imagination.

One has to do one’s work in advance. I think I did my work with those spaces. I did a couple of years with Korean, Korean language courses, and I can still read it and still get by in it.

K: In doing the work, research obviously plays a huge role and we all do it differently — Are there any specific approaches that you found, or that you would recommend to your students?

I: Speaking to fellow writers, I think an embodied research is much better than book research. There’s a time to go to the library — that’s where you start off, you know?

I’m reading about Muslim eschatology right now, and what do I know about that? I’m going to start with a book, so that when I have that embodied experience I go there with some degree of preparation. I don’t sort of go there ignorant and bumbling, asking for forgiveness, when there’s basic internet stuff I can do or book stuff. But the core research is really embodied practice. That is, for the present novel, the woman sews, and I’m going to try to learn how to sew.

For example, in the last story in Not Anyone’s Anything, I had a colleague who has property up in New Hampshire, and so I went up there and I chopped wood and used a chainsaw with him and did all these sort of lumberjack type things that I would never do. That’s what it means to embody something — to go out into the world and actually face the hardship and difficulty of it. That’s one way to get more sympathetically involved in your characters.

K: What’s at stake? What are the boundaries? When might you say it’s inappropriate? Even if you have dived in to personal experience and embodied practice, is there a time when it’s not appropriate to then write about it?

I: Oh, for sure. No amount of research can get you right to the soul of somebody else, right? We devalue people when we assume that we can know them fully. Even in the most intimate relationships, we strive our whole lives to get closer and closer and closer but we never quite hit it. It’s like an asymptote in mathematics; we never quite hit that axis.

I think, especially in cases of trauma, in cases of people’s personal and deep suffering, in cases of their accumulation of habitual discrimination — those things that accrue and sort of form tumors inside of us — those things are hard to represent. And to do it very casually is really to dishonour that person and that group’s experience. So, I could not, say, write about a genocide that is presently active that hasn’t touched me or my family, or something like that. I can’t guess at somebody’s else’s pain like that. No. It’s a disservice to them.

K: Let’s imagine that someone in innocence, perhaps, or ignorance, steps over that boundary in the name of writing fiction. What’s at stake?

I: The surface of what’s at stake is usually their reputation, their credibility, respect or ethos as a writer. Those are the things we see played out on Twitter. Also at stake is more about the larger social problems here, and the sense that in trying to help you’ve in fact reinforced the problem if you’re dominant. Let’s presume it’s a White writer writing about a Black experience or an Indigenous experience or something. If it’s done badly, and if they really screwed it up, there’s this reinscription of the patterns of dominance and inferiority. And so, in trying to help, they’ve just totally undermined the entire kind of social contract or advancement and that’s a big problem. (Like lots of good intentions — I don’t think people set out wanting to destroy, right?) So, it’s worth considering, and sometimes it’s just better to stay silent on things as writers, you know,  where we’re all into expression and experimentation and all of that, but culture teaches us the reverse of that, too. There’s blank space for a reason, and there’s oblique ways of approaching things. Like, sometimes the skill is not in language but in silence.

 

Photo by amirali mirhashemian on Unsplash.

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Rachel Rose’s Writing Space

You used to say that, having had three children, you could write anywhere. You wrote best in cars, while one child or another was off doing something or other, or in office waiting rooms, as long as the music wasn’t too loud. If it was, you retreated to your car. You could take any confined space and make it belong to you.

Ordinary life moves at ordinary speed. Seasons and birthdays, holidays and gardens. Books go out of print, children grow up, manuscripts are stillborn and locked in the bottom drawer of a desk.

But the world can change in a day.

One afternoon a flock of bats chatter under a bridge. Perhaps a Pangolin sneezes. Nobody notices.

One day most people you know have jobs.

You plan a dinner party and wonder about lemon tarts.

The first light of morning separates night from day. The line in the bedroom where you and your wife are unlearning how to sleep through the night.

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You can write anywhere. Tell yourself that as you sit up in the dark, thinking of your grown child in another city. Write him a love song and wing it by thought pigeon.

The world closes like a Himalayan poppy at night, one blue petal after another. The world shutters its brilliant eye. No, that’s not right. You mean the human world. Birds occupy the city squares. Coyotes strut down the Drive. Dolphins venture into Venice wearing jeweled masks. They leap the Ponte degli Scalzi and sing O Sole Mio through their blowholes.

When you learn this was a hoax—no swans, no dolphins, no drunken dancing elephants—you  lean against the upstairs window and remember the Venetian crowds, how they carried you along. Throng. Bustle. Marketplace. Words can become archaic in an afternoon.

You can write from anywhere, you don’t need a quiet study or a special desk. But what can you possibly say?

Because last year you wrote on a red couch in a rental in Venice, sitting by your dog as the family slept and the crowds jostled down the crooked streets. You wrote in those moments while they dreamed and later you’d go together to be carried along in the current of strangers. You shaped your mouth to the new language and readied yourself for stories that came to you, whispering in the full light, “Ecco, ecco!”

Because time last year has nothing in common with time now. Last year you wrote in Rome, and then you walked streets where your wife hadn’t been since she’d lived there as a child and time held you all gently.

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Last year you wrote on a glass table in Florence at a small, strange apartment once lived in by an artist. His frescoes on the ceiling, crumbling into your dinner, but his creative spirit with you as you wrote. Whenever it rained you had to set out pots to catch the downpour. The traffic, the motorcycles, shouts of Florentines came right through the windows which never quite closed. Like the windows, you were ajar, open to everything. Not like now.  Now you coach each other on how to buy food like football players before the big game.

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Last year you lived in Toulouse, a city now in lockdown, a place where elders now die alone and are buried by soldiers. You greeted the morning from your high apartment windows, looking over the tile rooftops at morning light announcing the day. You wrote at the kitchen table, at a stool by the window, on your bed. It didn’t matter where. You could write anywhere.

The big game. Each day is terrible, but interesting also. Can you say that? One day you make a face mask out of a diaper and a panty liner that you are certain will save lives. Your wife, a doctor, laughs until she cries. With both thumbs you lift the tears of mirth from her cheeks and bring them to your mouth. Contagion.

Once upon a time you ate in restaurants with friends, leaning in to laugh at jokes. 

Your wife goes to work and nothing has ever seemed more reckless.

You are of the generation of queers whose friends died. We calculated risk versus desire and only some of us got the right answer. You don’t know who. They wore high heels and lipstick better than you did, those beautiful boys, carried off in the night. If only it were so gentle. But abused first by a world that should have loved them. Attacked, as some now, in their diseased hearts, attack ordinary Asian people walking home from work.

Slowly you cut off the physical. Each day more curtailed than the one before it. You learn to love people only through the mediation of devices. Your nephew reaches for your face through the screen.

You will become the generation known for saying hello by waving while backing away slowly.

The pangolin’s scales gleam like tortoiseshell dipped in blood. The punchline has gone viral.

You used to have a recurring nightmare. You were out on a beach in the sun. Sometimes you were walking, sometimes holding a child in your arms. Sometimes you were a child in this dream. Then a towering glistening wall of water came rushing up the shoreline. It hovered above everyone as you all ran screaming. The wave ate the light. Caught in the wave were men in office  chairs, children suspended holding jump ropes, dogs, trees uprooted—all held above you. You ran but you couldn’t outrun it. You were trapped under this wall of water, waiting for it to crash down. And then you’d wake up.

Now you’re living the dream, we all are. Days tick by. The dogs nails tick across the wood as the wave gathers force overhead. We wait for it to drown us. Or spare us. Strange calculus.

One spring you shop attempting to calculate which is worse—to buy local onions wrapped in plastic or bulk onions shipped from Morocco. The next spring—to risk exposure or do without fruit.

In Italy there was a kind of sweet your wife ate as a child called cornetti. When you lived in Florence you would buy them fresh and rip them apart with your hands, hand them out to your children. Licked sugar from your fingers like it was nothing. Now you are afraid to touch your face. Her parents are locked in an apartment in Paris, waiting for the trees to unfurl their leaves, living behind glass, suspended. You wait to see those you love. When you hold them again who will you be?

You used to think you could always return to a place, just because you wanted to.

You can’t solve for X. The variables are unknown. But you have to take the test anyway. Never mind biting your nails. Never mind saying you didn’t prepare. You will be tested.

Anywhere, you used to tell yourself. I can write anywhere. Now you live inside, walking from room to room, picking up all the books you meant to read, then putting them down again. From where you write, words fail you.

You go to the supermarket wearing a homemade mask and pink kitchen gloves, an elegant lunatic. You feel the heat of every breath reflected in your eyes. You know you aren’t safe but at least it makes people keep back. Garlic in your pockets, an iron dagger under your pillow. Then you see a woman walking by in a gas mask, another couple in what looks like scuba gear. The wave shimmers over your heads.

You swim through the supermarket, holding your breath. Only two weeks ago you compared prices and always chose the bargain. Now the bargain is speed, how fast you can pile a cart full. Whole shelves barren. You take what you will need for a week, but you are wrong, they all eat too much, you don’t bring home anything sweet, you don’t write anything worth keeping, you don’t know yet whom you will lose.

You grab two bags of mushrooms which you will later regret but force yourself to eat. The cashier, a young man, asks how your day is going as he coats his hands in sanitizer. You imagine putting your arms around him, a corona of hazard.

The mask obscures your cheeks. Should you mention you are smiling?

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Rachel Rose is the author of four collections of poetry, including Marry & Burn, which received a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her memoir The Dog Lover Unit: Lessons in Courage from the World’s K9 Cops, was shortlisted for the 2018 Arthur Ellis Award for best non-fiction crime book. Recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Antioch Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review and Joyland.

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Photographs courtesy of Rachel Rose. Cover photo by Milad B. Fakurian on Unsplash.

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What (and Where) is Sivan Slapak Reading?

A couple of weeks ago, which feels like an eon, my idea was to dedicate this post not only to what I’m currently reading, but when I read, which have become inextricably linked.  Although life has changed drastically since then, as I emerge from a second weekend of self-isolation, it feels relevant. Shabbat—those twenty-five hours between Friday sundown and Saturday night—is still my reading day.

Of course, during the week I may graze through a few pages. But between work-reading, social media and the news, like many of us I’m mainly imprisoned by screens. And the reading I do on them is for the most part distracted scrolling and clicking. (This week amplify that a millionfold and add ‘panicked and exhausted.’)  

Observing the Jewish day of rest as I do comes with many details, but they all boil down to creating an ‘island in time’, where the noise and anxieties of daily life are muted. For decades I’ve appreciated both the social aspect and the quiet schedule of Shabbat. But as our devices have become pervasive and – for me – endlessly consuming, saying goodbye to electronics for a day has been what I value most.

To the rituals: Though unfortunately shuttered, as most places are for the time being, for years my Shabbat prep has included visiting the library across from work or the little indie bookstore in my neighbourhood (going strong for 30 years!) to ensure I’m well set up.

At sunset, with screens turned off, candles lit, reading glasses on (they’re new -ack!) I stretch out on the sofa with a book in hand, cat at feet, (probably wine in glass,) knowing that there are no emails to receive and many uninterrupted hours to read. This moment has always filled me with the sense that I lack for nothing, that all is well in the world.

Now the world is not well. And after a week of prying myself away from news articles on the computer only to switch on the radio, I did wonder what it would be like to ‘go off the grid’ again come Friday night.

Well, it was good. The silence was an especially dramatic contrast to a week of continuous, overwhelming updates. It was also a lift after feeling quite down about living alone right now, when I’m usually pretty content in my apartment. Putting away the computer and phone (yes, in an emergency I’d pick up) did a lot to calm me, and reading on the couch was not another reminder that I’m by myself in a crisis, but a familiar delight.

For me, that is what Shabbat is for.

Here’s the book I read last Shabbat:

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, which won the Pulitzer in 2009. I’ve only discovered Strout recently, and I think she’s a brilliant writer. This book is a series of connected stories that all take place in fictional Crosby, Maine, arranged around the character of Kitteridge, who, depending on the story, is central or a passing figure. To me, the narratives are reminiscent of Alice Munro; the similar small-town setting, and Strout’s skilled descriptions, rich but economic. And the way she allows us to inhabit (often repressed or questionable) characters with total empathy, offering emotional insights that are so clear and obvious, but only after she’s said them.

I’m feeling on edge this week as it is, but this book held my heart in a fist. It was Strout’s resonant examination of relationships that did it: how complex and unfathomable people are, how much we can go through, how connected we become in this precarious condition we call life.

It was a comfort to be reminded of what reading—and writing—is for.   

Sivan Slapak works in Montreal’s arts and culture sector and towards completing a collection of short stories. Still-delighted past-winner of TNQ’s Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award.

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Headshot by Leslie Schachter. Cover photo by Ehud Neuhaus on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with John Steffler

My most recent book is a collection of essays and poems called Forty-One Pages. I wanted to work in a loose essay form, in this case, because I wanted to expand my focus and include what lies outside the edges of individual poems – the issues, the planning and daydreaming that precedes and follows them. I wanted to write about writing and language, to step back behind the process itself and think about how it works for me.

I tend to approach genres as labels applied after the fact rather than as prescriptive building codes. I blur genres. I try to create a form that enacts the imagined thing. Some of the essays in Forty-One Pages I thought of as prose poems as I was writing them.

And yet, approaching artmaking as an exercise within the guidelines of a genre can be liberating or enabling. Perhaps while one part of the mind is focused on formal conventions, another part of the mind is freed to access subconscious intentions. Setting to work in a genre can be like invoking the muse, drawing on the vision, the imaginative stance and accumulated energies of generations of poets or artist who have left a legacy in that genre.

Perhaps. And yet I put genre in the background.

As I was writing what became The Afterlife of George Cartwright, I referred to the project as a “thing” not a novel. I didn’t (and still don’t) know how to write a novel. It was only after it was finished that I started calling it a novel, for practical reasons.

My next book, called And Yet, is a straight-up collection of poems that will be published by M&S in the fall of 2020.

I like poetry’s sculptural, three-dimensional quality: words combining to form an object that stands free in space. This sculptural quality is at the heart of poetry’s musicality, I think.  Poetry’s music is not so much about the sound of the words as about the fact that a song or a piece of music is also a chronological sequence that hangs free in space on a trajectory from singer or musician to listener. The musicality in a poem is in the sequencing of parts spatially and chronologically – the patterns, tensions, delays, contours, protracted curves. It comes into the ear this way or runs down the page this way as a performance.

I wanted my poems in Issue 153 of The New Quarterly to work as self-contained sequences, performances – hanging free in space.

John Steffler was Canadian Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2009. His latest book is Forty-One Pages: on Poetry, Language and Wilderness (URP, 2019).

Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash.

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What is Karen Enns Reading?

I finished reading Flights, Olga Tokarczuk’s brilliant, complicated novel, a few weeks ago, but it’s still very much on my mind. I’m so intrigued by the structure of the book; the narrative is constructed entirely of fragments that work, it seems to me, the way metaphors do in a complex poem, layering themselves, sometimes obviously interconnecting, sometimes barely touching, always building meaning and reference through the shifting textures. There is intellectual work to be done by the reader, for sure. Beautifully translated from the Polish by Jennifer Croft. I’m now reading an earlier work of Tokarzcuk’s: Primeval and Other Times.

The bookmarked poetry books at the top of my present pile include Paulette Jiles’ vibrant Waterloo Express (I can’t believe I haven’t read her work before now), and Kyeren Regehr’s hot-off-the-press Cult Life with its dense, wonderfully charged lines.

For clear-eyed guidance in these anxious times, I’ve just started reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition.

Karen Enns is the author of three collections of poetry: Cloud Physics, Ordinary Hours, and That Other Beauty.

Photo by Nico Frey on Unsplash.

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What is gillian harding-russell Reading?

“That ice island has melted away, a reminder that our world is changing under our feet, and in ways that began with us supposedly in control.“

Since my father worked in British Intelligence during World War II, I have been intrigued by the underground workings of that war. In that area, I have read Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight, which in its panoramic sweep interweaves generations and their stories with a renewed belief in heroism that occurs in unexpected ways but often at a human and/or moral cost. Another engaging novel that takes place during the same era but in the United States and written in 1962 is Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke, a buildungroman about a Kentucky novelist, his amiability and overreaching ambition and human mistakes and the irony that recognition of his achievement comes after his death. Other more recent works that drew me in include Steven Price’s By Gaslight and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, both entertaining novels set during the nineteenth century with high action and intriguing characters (both of which novels send the plot into unexpected places and ways of thinking).

Among quirky, insightful novels, Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs and Michael Redhill’s Bellevue and George Sanders’ Lincoln in the Bardo are refreshing and often riveting in their originality. Also, a nineteenth century novel that was given to me by a friend, We Think the World of You by J.R. Ackerley charts a strange love story that is most revealing in what it says about love and ourselves. Another novel (recommended by the same friend) is Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which weaves history and folklore with magic realism in what might be described as a fractured fable about death. Michael Crummy’s The Innocents is painful and beautiful to read, the subject disturbing but the style with its Newfoundland dialect so poetic. 

Of nonfiction works, I have lately read Michael Palin’s Erebus that charts the various journeys of that infamous ship, including its less famous journey to the south pole. I have a long-standing interest in the north since my daughter lives in Yellowknife and my older brother, an oceanographer, worked in the north for several years. During the late 1960’s and 70’s, he was stationed on the Beaufort Sea and on an ice island, Fletcher’s Island (also called T3 or ‘Target 3’ during the Cold War), that had calved from Ellesmere Island. That ice island has melted away, a reminder that our world is changing under our feet, and in ways that began with us supposedly in control. 

Among recent poetry collections, David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night is truly a gem with its charting of the human psyche using a fine minimalist poetic style. Other collections that I would recommend include Randy Lundy’s lyrical nature and indigenous poems in Blackbird’s Song, Jan Zwicky’s elegiac Long Walk with its love of nature and lyricism, and Joy Harjo’s often mythopoeic How We Became Human.

 

gillian harding-russell’s most recent publication is In Another Air (Radiant Press, 2018), which was shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award.

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Photo courtesy of British Library on Unsplash.

 

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