Uncategorised

A Good Cross-draft: The Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest

Originally published in full in Issue 148 of The New Quarterly.

TNQ has long been a haven for the well-wrought personal essay. Even so, it is a contest that comes with a distinctive set of challenges. To wit: we ask for essays in which personal experience is framed by thoughtful, bracing, or lively engagement with an issue that the author has researched. What people send us year after year ranges from travel memoirs, illness narratives, and eulogies to portraits of people and places loved and lost, recollections and evaluations, family stories, and so on.

People want a hearing. The essay contest gives you permission to speak your mind.

Judging, in turn, becomes something of an art form. TNQ judges work in close collaboration, labouring toward consensus to identify a winner, a runner-up and any other selections we feel should be published. These then make up our shortlist.

So, here are our criteria, in sum what the judges typically discuss:

Impact. Does the work excite you? Would you press the essay into someone else’s hands, recommend that others read it? Does it bear re-reading? A piece can be of passing interest; the question is, will it hold up over time?

Creativity. Does the work enrich/enlarge/unsettle your grasp of the subject? Is it a fresh take on a subject we have yet to cover? If a subject we’ve tackled before, why should we invest in this iteration?

Voice & style. Is the voice distinctive, compelling, a voice that’s overlooked or underrepresented? (See Marina Nemat’s introduction to Best Canadian Essays 2017.) Is this a work of superior literary (rather than journalistic or commercial) nonfiction?

Risk. Has the writer taken risks in letting the work go public? Would we stand behind that risk and if so, why? (See Jonathan Franzen’s editorial in Best American Essays 2016.) Is this a writer we want to sustain, champion, or mentor?

Resources. Is TNQ the right home for this piece? Why use TNQ’s valuable resources to support this writer? What signals are we sending if we do: that we’re striking out in a new direction, that this work challenges the canon? And so on.

Year after year, we are seeing an increase in deeply empathetic works that reflect on the human need for real connection—with earth and animals, with one another, and with the ever-imperfect self. Thank you to all who took the time to send work our way. I cannot stress enough how invaluable these contributions are; as readers, editors, and judges, we are enriched by the incredible array of nonfiction that you take the time to send our way.

Read more

What is John Steffler Reading?

My home is shaped partly by the books it houses.  There are bookshelves in most rooms and books piled beside reading chairs and the bed.  A chunk of my past life is contained in the books I’ve accumulated, and so, in a sense, is my future – possible futures, things yet to explore.  And books are doors into the cultural world I inhabit, a world that intersects with and influences how I respond to the physical world, especially the natural world that’s so important to me. 

Although I’m fascinated by wilderness – drawn to experience both the outer and inner worlds as directly as possible, namelessly – I recognize that I’m very much a cultural being.  I venture out from my book-house, loaded with cultural gear which I try to pare down, try to cast aside, and very soon scurry back indoors, babbling (or trying to sing) about what I’ve seen. 

I read for ideas (which I try to jettison), for concepts to carry me into the texture of the world.  I read for a sense of literary community, a sense of how the current world is reflected in writing; I read for a sense of historical continuum, how I (we) exist through a span of time that is much longer than an individual life.  I hope to learn things.  I’ve been reading Karen Solie’s In Caiplie Caves, her honest, angular poems that make the inner world of thought and feeling as concrete as the outer world they simultaneously explore.  And Susan Gillis’s Yellow Crane which also brilliantly balances an awareness of contemporary environmental and political issues with concise glimpses of the poet’s immediate personal world. 

I read Tomas Tranströmer in every translation I can find.  And Don McKay’s poems and essays.  Robert Macfarlane’s Underland and The Old Ways.  Patrick Modiano’s novels – that intoxicating ambiguity and precariousness. Ishiguro (everything). Books on Cézanne and William Blake.  Recently, again, Anne Carson’s incredible “The Glass Essay.  Philippe Ariès’ The Hour of Our Death.  Michael Crummey’s The Innocents. 

Around my chair are books on European Paleolithic art, prehistory and the ancient world (Jean Clottes, David Lewis-Williams, Christine Desdemaines-Hugon, Colin Renfrew, James C. Scott, Fernand Braudel, Barry Cunliffe, David Abulafia, Marija Gimbutas).  I don’t fantasize about the ancient world or imagine myself there rather than here.  What I get from this reading is an enlarged awareness of who and where we are as humans – and of this moment, for me, here in Canada.  

I’m reading Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time.  His films, and what he has to say about them and about the art of cinema, offer a vast resource for anyone interested in poetry.  Passages from his films live on in my mind as vividly as memories of my personal life.

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

Photograph courtesy of John Steffler. Cover photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash.

 

Read more

Dora Dueck’s Writing Space

Writing space. Oh. My mind wobbles a little, because I see first a long lovely narrative of “rooms of my own” in the past—beginning with a typewriter parked in odd spots, at the side of everything else going on in the household and often alternating with a sewing machine, to the ecstatic happiness of a personal desk in our bedroom, and finally, for decades and through several houses, on to an entire room for myself and my work, each one anchored with a big drawered desk and a succession of computers, and featuring, in addition, views of wall art and photos, and out windows, prairie and sky or a backyard lawn or a tree-lined street.

Now—and this is the wobble—I’m back to the odd spots. My life is different since my husband retired four years ago and we massively downsized and moved from Manitoba to British Columbia to a two-bedroom apartment, to be closer to children and grandchildren. It’s far less square footage than we had for many years and with the two of us generally about, we have to negotiate where we set ourselves down. And after we moved he got the cancer again, so our days pass relatively home-bound.

Dueck2
Dueck3

I still have an office of sorts, but it’s actually guest room with a spare bed and store room with the freezer. The desk is simple IKEA, and I work there when I’m feeling particularly professional and able to coax my ancient (in technology terms) desktop computer into another round of hours. I also spend writing time with a laptop in “my” chair, which happens to be the pumpkin-coloured one, facing bookshelves and television and the balcony doors and beyond. Sometimes my laptop and I move to the round black table in the corner of the same room, if it’s not cluttered, that is, with my recent attempts at watercolour. Now and then I write in bed, in my pyjamas, which gets uncomfortable after a while but does accommodate short bursts.

Small and down-sized and flexible is a function of the current stage. And of somewhat reduced ambitions. Writing is the constant, but spaces form a chronology. When I was younger, everything was full and expanding and I required more; the arrangements were like family trips with numerous suitcases. I’m travelling lighter again; a carry-on will do. At 70, it’s good enough.

Dora Dueck’s fourth book of fiction, All That Belongs, was released in the fall of 2019. She lives in Tsawwassen, B.C.

Photographs courtesy of Dora Dueck. Cover photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash.

Read more

Chris Masterman’s Writing Space

I write in different spots around the house, but the most frequent places are my study on the second floor and the kitchen table. It depends on the quantity of light, tea, flowers, and cat companionship I’m after on that particular day. Both these spots face west, and, come to think of it, my favourite writing spots have always pointed west. I’m not sure what that’s all about. Perhaps someday I’ll set up a writing spot in a different country and see if I still need to be looking west. I can’t seem to write in coffee shops—although I love the idea of writing in coffee shops—I always end up eavesdropping instead and not getting any work done. Of course, eavesdropping is valuable writers’ work, too, but if I want to finish something, I have to write at home.

Right now, I’m going through what feels like a sea change in my writing process. My routine has always been to write with a pencil in a notebook and then transcribe it later. Lately though, I can’t write fast enough by hand to keep up with what I want to say, so I’m trying to get used to writing on my laptop without a notebook intermediary. I’ve started using the non-judgmental American Typewriter font, which has been a big help.

6
5
4
2

When I took the photographs for this piece, I had yet to reclaim my study since my grandsons’ visit, so my eldest grandson’s drawing was still on the desk.

I like to have lots of objects around that are meaningful to me: shells and sea glass that we’ve collected on family trips, a photo of me at about age two driving a boat which reminds me to be as fearless as I used to be, a toy fox to keep the story I’m working on now top of mind (at this point the story is mostly in my head while I figure out what form it’s going to take because it’s part children’s story and part memoir and I have to figure out how to make that work). The painting of the woman hanging up laundry represents hope, and the daydreaming cow makes me smile every time I look at him. I have collected a few rabbits coming out of hats, and winged impossibilities—flying pigs, a sort of hyena-like figure with wings, pottery bird whistles whose wings don’t look like they would ever get them off the ground, and a pottery dragon.

The emerging rabbit figures and the impossibility collection are physical manifestations of how the writing process works for me. There’s alchemy involved. In my head, I can see what I think should happen in the story, and the challenge is to get it out through the ends of my fingers onto the page so that it comes as close as possible to resembling what’s in my brain, which is one of the most frustrating aspects of writing. But on the other hand, one of the joys of writing is even when you think you have some idea of what you want to write about, you never really know ahead of time where the writing will take you. Maybe you’ll pull out a rabbit, but it’s also possible you’ll end up with a handful of glitter or a magpie. And I’m ever hopeful the story will lift off, even with gossamer wings.

By far the most problematic part of writing for me is the actual sitting down and doing it because I’m a championship procrastinator. For example, today I cleaned out the cutlery drawer in the kitchen before I sat down to write this. Did it need to be done? Probably. Did it need to be done today? Nope.

Chris Masterman is working on a short story collection and dodging swans in Stratford, ON. Someday she hopes to live in a place with “by-the-sea” at the end of its name.

Photographs courtesy of Chris Masterman. Cover photo by Jarek Ceborski on Unsplash.

Read more

What is Sarah Klassen Reading?

The quilt that covers a small couch in my work space depicts a library. Some of the spines carry the titles of my published books. The rest, left blank by my quilter niece, can represent the books I haven’t read but want to.

I grew up with a hunger for stories in a house with very few books. Our sparse school library and other people’s books helped stave off starvation. Even the drab book—dull illustrations, bland stories, gothic font– from which my mother taught me to read German was a treasure. I still have it.

So what am I reading, now that my home is full of books and the quilt-covered couch an ideal place for reading?

Recently I finished a memoir, I Keep the Land Alive, by Tshaukuesh Elizabeth Penashue. The author, an Innu elder and activist from Labrador, walks the traditional territory of her people, accompanied by friends and family members she’s persuaded to join her in protesting thet  forces that are destroying the Innu habitat and way of life: the roar of NATO’s low-flying  supersonic fighter jets, test bombing, or hydro projects. While she walks she prays. And writes. The book is an edited, translated version of her journals. It’s a moving account of a strong woman with faith and courage to envision and fight for a healthy future for her children and grandchildren.

Good books are worth rereading, and from time to time I take from the shelf one of Margaret Avison’s poetry collections and savour favorite lines:

Nobody stuffs the world in at your eyes./The optic heart must venture jailbreak/and re-creation..

Or:

For everyone/The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes,/But many at that moment will not say/‘this is the whirlpool, then.’

Last week I brought home from the library a graphic novel, a new kind of reading for me. Enamon, a Japanese manga, is part of a series. A young woman who can’t remember her own life or who she is, possesses an amazing memory in other areas. This engaging story of a troubled wanderer is told through sparse dialogue and page after page of black and white drawings, sometimes intricate, sometimes haunting, always compelling..

With my Libby app I can now read on my phone. I’ve just downloaded Louise Penny’s Kingdom of the Blind to read in bed or waiting at the dentist’s or on the bus. Murder mysteries are not my usual choice, but occasionally I change up my reading diet. I’m well into this story with its colourful characters, a chief inspector under suspicion and an intriguing mystery.

It’s not unusual for me to have several books going at once. Right now I’m well into Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House.  I knew I’d be in for a good read. The story is about family dynamics, a subject this author has written about brilliantly in The Commonwealth. Already I’m hooked by the description of the house, its inhabitants and the narrator’s compelling voice. As the family configuration alters, there’s mounting tension between the children’s knowledge and expectations and the puzzling words and actions of the adults.

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediment,” says Shakespeare (another author worth re-reading). These lines came easily to mind as I read Becoming Mrs Lewis by Patti Callahan. The story of the friendship and love between C.S.Lewis and Joy Davidmn is well known. At least parts of it. Callahan’s well-researched novel offers new insight into the slowly developing relationship between these two remarkable people. This is not a light-hearted romance. And it’s not sentimental:  Lewis’s legendary home, The Kilns, is messy and run-down; Lewis’s brother is a back sliding alcoholic; Joy’s aging body becomes more diseased, less able. And there’s no conventional, perfect ending. But what a celebration of the many faces of love.

The most recent book to enter my home is a poetry collection, Geistliche Sonneten, by 17th century Austrian poet Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. This long-neglected, prolific  poet has been receiving attention recently. Two friends and I have for several years been tracking down and downloading her sonnets from the internet and translating them into English. CRvG’s work is characterized by spiritual, often over-the-top fervor, inventive play with the German language, and a fondness for the sonnet form. Here, in translation, are the first lines of a poem in which she defends her use of that form.

Let no one dare deny me heaven’ gentle gifts/The invisible ray, resounding mystery./That noble English artistry. This alone/In time and after time, when all is done, remains.

The newly-arrived book is a bit daunting, but I’ll plunge in.

And I haven’t even mentioned the lit mags that arrive regularly: Today, new issues of Image, Prairie Fire and of course TNQ are waiting for me on my quilt-overed couch.

Sarah Klassen is a Winnipeg reader who writes poetry and fiction. Her new collection The Tree of Life will be published in 2021.

Photograph courtesy of Sarah Klassen. Cover photo by Jeff Wade on Unsplash.

Read more

Melinda Burns’ Writing Space

When I’m deep in the world of a story or the unfolding of a poem, it doesn’t matter where I write—café, home, writing retreat. The hard part, of course, is getting to that point. That’s where a good writing space and desk come in, a designated spot that holds my place and beckons me to dream and create.

These days it’s the sunroom of my house and a vintage library desk I recently found in a thrift shop. The desk called to me from across the store with its worn oak simplicity, its rustic charm. When I saw that it had a little library shelf built into the side, I was hooked. I looked up its provenance on-line and found that its design is from the American Craftsman movement whose ideals are “simplicity, honesty in construction, truth to materials,” and whose motto was “to the best of my ability.” The surface of the desk is etched with “medullary rays” known as “tiger marks,” caused by the sap in the tree moving through the wood “from the heart to the extremities.” Metaphor upon metaphor. No wonder it called to me.

Desk-journal
buddha-and-picture
Bookshelf-desk
Chickadee-at-feeder

The sunroom surrounds me with light on even the dullest day and looks out on my backyard and bird feeders. It is my cabin in the woods, but attached to all the amenities of my house. There is a window feeder beside the desk and all through my morning writing, birds wing in and land with a surprising thud, even the tiny chickadees. The solidity of the desk, the airiness of the space, even the weight and presence of the birds, encourage me to write that first tentative word and see where it goes.

On the desk are various talismans—a stone Buddha, a glass polar bear, a serene seated ceramic cat (and sometimes a real one), a lavender candle. And a small framed school photo of me at five or six. The little girl’s clear gaze reminds me of the child’s view that I never want to lose in my writing—that seismographic sensibility we’re all born with and live from until experience makes us cautious and correct. The Buddha reminds me to breathe and be present; the polar bear, that I share this world with others; the ceramic cat, to not take myself too seriously.

When I want to make sure that no phone calls, e-mails, or chores call me away, I might pack my notebooks and retreat to a café and a table by the window. There I can be among people in this solitary practice of writing, even as the babble of voices around me fades away. But my desk and sunroom, that I come to each morning, where I watch the snow fall in winter or the trees green in spring and flame out in fall, is my sanctuary. A place that welcomes me and whatever thoughts, mundane or profound, I bring to the page, “to the best of my ability”.

Melinda Burns is a writer and a psychotherapist in private practice in Guelph, Ontario. Her writing has won awards for fiction, including first prize in the Toronto Star Short Story contest in 2001. She has published poems in various magazines, read her essays on CBC radio, and published essays on writing in Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly. She finally had a story published in Persimmon Tree after two previous rejections. Melinda lives in Guelph, Ontario within walking distance of the public library.

Link

Photographs courtesy of Melinda Burns. Cover photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash.

Read more

What is Bren Simmers Reading?

Stepping into my local Bookmark to pick up a copy of Michael Christie’s Greenwood, I got to chatting with the staff about reading piles. We all have them: on kitchen and coffee tables, on pianos, dressers, and desks. Each pile is unique. Essays in the kitchen; fiction in the bedroom. Poetry beside the old La-Z-Boy recliner in my studio. Stacks to be returned to the library or left at the community book box.

I start my day reading, waking an hour early to sit with a cup of tea and a book before going to work. Since moving to PEI, I’ve been reading a lot of work from Atlantic Canada. Tammy Armstrong’s Year of the Metal Rabbit is a new favourite. Living in the small community of Shag Harbour, NS, she writes poems about salt sheds, blueberry barrens, Nor’easters, vacation rentals, seabeds, and grackles. Her language crackles with close observations of the natural world. In “Mole,” she writes 

“they scull their fleshy asterisks/ against rhizomes’ stitch and chandelier/ and squint their guttering through/ sleevey tunnels strung with ice and after-crocus.”

Two poems and I’m full.

Another East Coast writer whose work I admire is Douglas Walbourne-Gough. His first book, Crow Gulch, explores the social divisions surrounding a working-class community outside Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Through a braided narrative that weaves present and past, archival documents and family history, he explores his connection to place and how one makes a living from the land. In “Trouting,” he writes, 

“Forget trophies, you’re after pan-sized fish/ whose necks are broken with deft pressure/ from your thumb.”

It’s the kind of book that accumulates page by page into an understanding that is difficult to articulate, but one that you instinctively trust.

Hailing from a different rock, the red rock desert of Utah, Terry Tempest Williams’ latest collection of essays looks at the erosion of the environment, of democracy, and of belief. Written over the last seven years, Erosion covers the varied terrain of the Anthropocene: 

“How do we survive our grief in the midst of so many losses? How do we hold ourselves to account over our inescapable complicity in a fossil fuel economy? What are the necessary actions we can take in order to realize justice for all? And how do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?”

This collection has been a worthy companion throughout the dark days of winter, where storm day after storm day has me shuttered inside, curled up with another book.

Bren Simmers’ first book of non-fiction, Pivot Point (Gaspereau Press, 2019), is a lyrical account of a nine-day wilderness canoe journey and a frank reflection on the roles friendship, mindfulness, and creativity play in the evolution of our lives. She is also the author of two books of poetry, Night Gears (Wolsak & Wynn, 2010) and Hastings-Sunrise (Nightwood Editions, 2015), which was a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award. A lifelong West Coaster, she now lives on PEI. 

Cover photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash.

Read more

Susan Glickman’s Writing Space

My writing space was downsized a few years ago when my son moved back home and I gave him my airy treetop office to turn into his music studio. To compress a lifetime’s worth of scribbling into a smaller room, I stuffed 25 garbage-bags full of paper into other folks’ blue bins at 6 a.m. The purge was so invigorating! I felt I was not only relinquishing the past, I was marching into the future with clear eyes and no illusions.

Amongst the grad school essays and newspaper articles, postcards whose import I no longer recalled and rejected publicity photographs, were copies of every journal in which my work had appeared. I tossed them because they took up too much space, and because I was confident everything important was archived on my computer. Sadly, about a year later, whilst trying to assemble a collection of my essays and reviews, I discovered that many pieces had not, in fact, survived the migration from 3.5-inch floppy disks. (TNQ asked me if I had any tips to offer writers like myself.  Here’s one. Keep copies of all your work. Or two: And record the date of each draft.)

Losing a few book reviews was no big deal. Losing early poems and stories was more consequential. Occasionally, however, I discover some of these lost poems online. Here’s one that was published in Issue 4 of The New Quarterly back in the spring of 1982!

Sympathetic Magic

Always thought love would spill into my yard

like rain; thought it would have to.

Once thought things just happened that way,

nature righting the balance

if you waited long enough.

Once thought of absence as the shadow

of the real,

drawing a landscape as

not tree and mountain

but the edges where shapes intersect—

life as a conversation

with the important things left

unsaid.

Learning to talk now, learning

to ask the right questions.

A little rain dance, if you like,

giving nature

a nudge.

A year after this poem came out I met my future husband, father of the talented man whose music displaced my poetry – including the copy of TNQ in which this long-forgotten poem appeared. It pleases me to realize that, even then, I felt a connection between drawing and writing. Although I had given up the visual arts to make a life in literature, I have recently spent a lot of time in art school, going back to my first love. My office shelves still groan with books, but now they also display some of my artwork. This makes the space seem special.

The thing I like best about my new office is that it has a comfy sofa in it. I often take afternoon naps there with my assistant, Toby (see photo taken by my daughter, who is also an artist), which keeps us both productive and happy. (Here’s a third tip for writers: Take naps! And a fourth: Get a dog so you will also take walks).

Susan Glickman is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently What We Carry, seven novels, and a work of literary criticism. She lives in Toronto, where she works as a freelance editor.

Link

Photos courtesy of Susan Glickman.

Read more

John Steffler’s Writing Space

I’ve written in various places, travelling and at home, indoors and out.  I wrote much of The Grey Islands, the first drafts of the pieces, outdoors, wandering around the island with a clipboard and pads of paper in a backpack.  I’m doing some outdoor writing again in the countryside around where I live.

As for indoor writing, I like to be at ground level, near a window, ideally with a door to the outdoors not too far away.  Of course, this isn’t always possible.  The space I create or gravitate toward for writing tends to be more like a small simple living room than a typical office.  I like a comfortable chair or sofa with a side table for books and a coffee table to rest my feet on.  I write in a sketchbook or on a clipboard on my lap.  I generally spend time at a desk only when I’m revising and developing work.  It’s true that I spend hours, whole days, at a desk, at a computer doing just that.  But I usually make my first sketches away from the desk.

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

Photographs courtesy of John Steffler. Cover photo by Allef Vinicius on Unsplash.

Read more

Exposed: An Interview with Sarah Ens

“It’s possible that I hoped when my hair was ripped away so too would be my sense of shame. My disappointment, always, in what my body is or isn’t.”

Sarah Ens, “Entangled”

 

TNQ’s 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest winner is Saskatchewan-based writer Sarah Ens, for her provocative essay, “Entangled.”

You can read the essay here, or in our fall 2019 contest issue, TNQ 152.

TNQ’s annual Personal Essay contest has no word count and all submissions are considered for publication. The 2019 adjudicators were Lamees Al Ethari, Pamela Mulloy, Emily Urquhart, and yours truly.

–Susan Scott

TNQ Contributing Editor

 

“An hour and a half before I leave my apartment to get all of the pubic hair ripped out of my body, I wonder if I am making a mistake.” So opens “Entangled.” What follows is a series of candid considerations about this “iconic feminine experience,” laced with troubling personal memories and scenes at your aesthetician’s that turn on submission and doubt. Let’s just say that the contest judges found your approach unsettling and enchanting. We wanted to know more about the writing process. How did this piece come together? What’s the life story of the essay?

The story of this essay truthfully does begin with that first sentence, with me sitting at my kitchen table, looking at the waxing appointment on the calendar, and wondering what on earth I was doing. I started writing down the troubling and contradictory feelings I was having as a way to make sense of them. Then during the waxing, I mentally made notes so I could sort it all out later. My thinking was, well, if I can make a story out of this, maybe it will have been somewhat worth it.

Back home after the appointment, I scribbled a sort of stream-of-consciousness account and was surprised by how vulnerable, even violated, I felt. I think that’s why the essay’s tone is so candid. The writing was coming from a profoundly exposed moment.

It was only a few days later, when I decided to take what I’d written and turn it into an essay I could submit to my (extraordinarily supportive) MFA nonfiction workshop, that I decided to braid the present-tense narrative of the actual waxing with reflective passages that examine the external pressures that drive people, particularly women, to do things like get all the pubic hair ripped from their bodies.

It was this research and reflection that helped to clarify my own internalized feelings about my body hair/body.

 

Public/pubic—one letter separates these words, and in its addition (or deletion) lies a world of difference. You use the word “exposed,” which begs the question: why tell such an intimate story in the first place? And why an essay, rather than poetry or fiction?

This question about what should be publicly written about and what should be kept private is something I struggle with a lot.

I tend towards confessional writing and I’m drawn to poetry and prose that says things that “shouldn’t” be said. I’m learning, though, that just because an experience is important or makes a good story, that doesn’t mean I have an obligation to share it.

For this piece, humour helped me feel more comfortable discussing personal details. Humour can function as a shield against too much exposure. That’s also where the form of the essay, as opposed to a poem or a story, came in. The personal essay allowed me to pull in other voices as historical and sociological information on body hair, and that research made me feel validated in my oversharing.

I mean, getting waxed is a strange and invasive activity—it only felt right to write about it from a first-person, nonfiction, “stripped back” perspective.

Plus, as I say in the essay, I’ve had so many conversations with women about waxing! I thought: if this many women get waxed regularly, it really should be something we talk about more publicly.

 

Are you a fan of certain essayists? Did you take any works as models as you wrote this piece?  

Yes! I love essayists who reveal the strange, tender human-ness within what we usually skim over as mundane or ordinary. The anthology GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos of Our Times edited by Rosanna Deerchild, Ariel Gordon, and Tanis MacDonald contains a number of essays that are really good examples of this. I also admire the essays of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Thomas King, Samantha Irby, David Sedaris, Lee Maracle, Rebecca Solnit, Scaachi Koul, Cheryl Strayed … many!

 

You wrote “Entangled” while a student at the University of Saskatchewan’s MFA program. Tell us how you came to writing. What attracts you to creative nonfiction (CNF)?

I will be graduating this fall from USask’s excellent MFA program. I’ve been super lucky to learn from Jeanette Lynes and Sheri Benning and their expertise in CNF.

I always knew I wanted to write. It was the only thing I for sure wanted to do. In Grade 12, I googled “creative writing programs Canada” and discovered UBC’s undergraduate program. Getting accepted to their BFA was a huge thrill, and made me feel like pursuing writing was something I could do.

I was mostly interested in writing poetry when I began my undergrad, but then I took my first creative nonfiction classes with Deborah Campbell and Andreas Schroeder and completely fell in love with the form. I remember reading Tom Junod’s profile of Fred Rogers, “Can You Say …Hero?” for Deborah Campbell’s class and being struck by the potency of combining factual information with metaphor.

I also grew up devouring my dad’s Rolling Stone magazines. I especially loved profiles with musicians, and the ways the writers scaffolded each interview. How do you tell something “truthfully” but in the most captivating way possible?

 

Submitting to literary contests can be time-consuming and expensive. Congratulations on taking the risk! What attracted you to the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest?

Thank you! At some point in my career as an emerging writer I decided that if I had a piece I believed in, I would submit it, regardless of how much of a long-shot it might be.

I’ve admired TNQ for a long time and always take note of its contest winners. When the Edna Staebler contest popped up on my Facebook, “Entangled” had just been workshopped by my peers. They’d received it positively, so I thought, I guess I’ll send my weirdo Brazilian wax piece to TNQ!

Although it’s an expense, I think it’s worth it to keep an eye out for contests that publish interesting work and to invest in one’s writing career by submitting. Worst case scenario, you’ll have a polished piece and (usually) a magazine subscription.

Of course, I didn’t really consider the risk of winning, then having to call my parents to say, “I won a contest about me getting a Brazilian wax!”

 

“Entangled” has been circulating for a while; has your relationship with it changed, now that others have clapped eyes on it? I’m interested in the feedback you’ve gotten and in the enduring power of a work—not only how it resonates with readers but its impact on the writer. Are you still exploring push-pull messages around beauty and the female form? Or have you said all you’ve got to say—for now?

I have a feeling I’ll be exploring my relationship with shame my whole life.

I saw on Twitter the other day this excerpt of a 2009 Vanity Fair profile of Jessica Simpson. The writer calls Simpson “fat” multiple times and defines the whole story around her body. Stories like that were everywhere when I was growing up, and sometimes that negative messaging directed towards women and our bodies still feels inescapable.

I have to work every day at undoing the body shame I’ve internalized. As long as I’m doing that work, I’ll be writing about it.

There is also something powerful in talking about what makes you feel ashamed. It flips the shame into something shared, something manageable.

That said, I might take a break from writing explicitly about my own body! I was nervous when the essay began circulating—and extremely nervous when I read the first few paragraphs of the essay at the Wild Writers Festival this past November. I would never tell someone I’d never met about my Brazilian wax—not face-to-face I wouldn’t. But there’s something about the page that enables courage, or maybe confession.

The response to the essay, from my aunties to acquaintances, has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel emboldened by that.

 

Edna Staebler—the contest’s namesake—was a pioneering writer in our region whose nonfiction attracted national attention. Thanks to her generous bequest, TNQ can offer the winner a $1,000 purse. Edna was a champion of emerging writers. It was her hope—as it is ours—that prize money would encourage emerging writers to embrace the writing life. What about you, Sarah? Has this win been affirming?

The win has been life-changing, truly. And not just because $1,000 makes a big difference to a graduate student!

When you’re an emerging writer, you’re always hoping someone else will get what you’re doing. For people to get my essay on this scale is absolutely affirming—it’s like saying, regardless of the dark days and the writer’s block, I am on the right track.

 

 

Sarah Ens is a writer and editor living in Treaty 6 territory. Her debut poetry collection, The World Is Mostly Sky, is forthcoming (April 2020) with Turnstone Press.

 

 

 

Photographs courtesy of Karla Froese, Lynette Ens, and Laura McAlduff, respectively.

Read more