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What is Beth Downey Reading?

                  Recently, I was out with a clutch of friends—all readerly-writerly types, which tells you something of how spoiled I am in life—when one of our party asked, ‘how do you guys cope with how much there is to read out there?’

                  How, indeed. In a world heaped with outstanding books, articles, poetry, film, and with friends constantly giving recommendations or sending links or writing books themselves, the hard truth is that one is always, at every moment, missing out and losing ground. “Life piled on life were all too little,” laments Tennyson’s aging Ulysses. I would need several lifetimes to even hope of reading everything I might wish to read, or benefit from reading. In this way, I sometimes think voracious readers confront their personal mortality every time they open or close a book.

                  Yet—as in the knowledge that death is inevitable and that it will come too soon and that life will end unfinished—one must learn to live, and read, anyway. One must make peace. Which brings me to my friend’s initial question: how do I ever begin to sort out what to read? Now that you understand how provisional my answer is, and that it comes laced with the awareness of its certain inadequacy, you can take it for what it may be worth to you. Godspeed, my friend.

                  I’m a free-love reader. (Though of course, free love entails the freedom to devote oneself to a single paramour, for a time. As the spirit leads.) Essentially, I try to treat life like one big research project: I keep individual reading lists that pertain to different interests, writing projects, spiritual or intellectual quests, the types of work I’m engaged in, etc. I keep them all separate, usually in my desktop sticky notes, but I also keep them all thrown together in a giant online wish-list, so the almighty algorithms can aid me in seeking out what artists and researchers greater than I have learned about these things. The internet knows books and people you’ve never heard of.

                  At any given time, I try to keep a bookmark in at least one thing from two or more of my topical lists. My end tables are thus permanently crowded with stacks of books I’m working through all at once, and my tidy, longsuffering husband deserves credit for putting up with this. At the moment, all of the following are somewhere in the soup:

                  Winter: Five Windows on the Season, by Adam Gopnik. (Gopnik adapted his 2011 CBC Massey Lectures series from these essays.) This is one of a cluster of books that fall under “Making Peace with Pain.” I sought Gopnik out because my husband and I were returning to Manitoba after two transformative years in my ancestral home of Newfoundland; I was torn about the move for many reasons, but one very real reason was that I dreaded the return to Winnipeg winters. Reader, when winter is as long as it is in Winnipeg, hating every minute of it is just no way to live. So I sought help. I’m not through Winter yet, but I am delighted to report that Gopnik’s work has absolutely rocked my world. On a weekly basis, it is transforming my attitude toward both literal and figurative winter.

                  Also in this category:  The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality, by Belden C. Lane, and Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies of Loved, by Kate Bowler. The first is a raw yet elegant investigation of apophatic theology as taught by harsh landscapes. Dense, by turns academic and confessional, it was recommended to me by our minister, Jamie. Blessed are the discerning book-pushers! As to Bowler, you can get a taste of what you’re in for there through her New York Times article, “Death, The Prosperity Gospel and Me.” One line sold me on the book: “Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.” Woman, preach.

“For me, audio format is perfect for a first reading, since it encourages me to simply take the book in as a whole, mentally flagging things I want to examine more closely next time.”

                  In complement to my own creative writing, I also work freelance as a literary editor, which means I’m often reading something that either isn’t published yet, or just recently hit shelves. Dig by Terry Doyle, is a gritty, observant collection of short fiction about contemporary life in St John’s. Released last year by Breakwater Books, it was a pleasure to work on. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to cut past the simple, touristic image of local life that you will confront on first visiting St John’s, and glimpse the more greyscale realities through the eyes of an artist who loves his home. This winter, I’m working on a manuscript by rising star Jim McEwan, who was long-listed for the CBC short story prize in 2016, and recently completed an MA in creative writing supervised by Lisa Moore. Jim’s novel, tentatively titled Fearnoch, will soon to be seeking a publisher and b’ys oh b’ys, once this gets out they’ll be tripping over each other to publish the next one. Mark my words.

                  Lastly, I’ll tell you a bit of what I’m reading to inform my secret novel-in-progress, (shh, don’t tell,) and what for pure, unadulterated fun.

                  Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. I’m listening to this one as an audiobook during my daily commute (praise be to LibriVox!) That’s a strategic choice, since I plan to read the book more than once. For me, audio format is perfect for a first reading, since it encourages me to simply take the book in as a whole, mentally flagging things I want to examine more closely next time.

                  Also for the (secret) novel: Every Monica Kidd poem I can get my hands on. I discovered Kidd through a chance encounter, when she was (and this is delicious) giving a reading from her latest collection, Chance Encounters with Wild Animals, in Winnipeg. I wept through the whole reading—not because the poems were sad, but because they spoke to me so deeply when I had not been expecting it. Tears of rapture!

                  As to joy (the only way to make an end,) this is almost always going to fall in one of two categories for me: Dickens or Dragons. That is to say, classics or high fantasy. Most recently it’s been fantasy. After, I am ashamed to say, years of my very best friend imploring me to read a little book called The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfus (long may he reign,) and me putting my best friend off with a bunch of (factual) guff about assigned readings and the pressures of grad-school and blah blah blah…I finally read it. The ending made me gasp, and cry, and scream, and jump around my kitchen rejoicing. And now you know what a sterling man my friend is.

Now go my friends! Life is short! Read what you want to read.

Beth Downey is an emerging writer of poetry and fiction, currently dividing life between Winnipeg and St John’s, where she is a graduate student. She also moonlights as a birth doula.

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Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash.

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What is Paola Ferrante Reading?

As someone who actively writes both poetry and fiction, I alternate between reading poetry and fiction regularly. I find that reading poetry really makes me think about sound of my sentences, often to the point where I make sure I read my fiction out loud and will spend sometimes half an hour or more on it if I feel a sentence doesn’t sound right. It also makes me hyper-aware of form, and how to play with it, something I’ve been experimenting with more and more in my fiction.  Currently up on the poetry docket is Matthew Zapruder’s Father’s Day.  Most of the poetry I read is concerned with hard truths and in this collection, I think Zapruder does a brilliant job of persuading us, with beautiful words, that words are not enough, not matter how beautiful, when we talk about the current social and political issues.

“When I’m writing fiction, I actually like to start my writing sessions by reading the work of writers I feel that I’m in conversation with.” 

I read a lot of both poetry and fiction when I’m feeling “dry” creatively, no matter what project I’m working on, because I find that poetry informs my fiction, and fiction also gives me images to play with in my poetry. In my new poetry collection, I’m writing a lot about fear and the end of the world lately and sometimes I see echoes of Paige Cooper’s absolutely brilliant post-apocalyptic worlds in Zolitude, where humans terra-form desolate planets, staring back at me. When I’m writing fiction, I actually like to start my writing sessions by reading the work of writers I feel that I’m in conversation with. I’ll re-read stories in Zolitude and Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties (I’m working on her memoir, In The Dream House, right now–if it can be called work). I love the way Machado’s work blurs the lines between genre fiction, like horror and erotica, and literary fiction, and invents its own forms (much like poetry), which is something I’m also trying to do with the collection of short fiction that I’m working on. Currently, I’m taking a deep dive into Karen Russell, and recently started her first short fiction collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves which made me appreciate all the more the way magic realism can turn on a series of images, working by emotion and the logic of half-remembered, archetypal stories.

Paola Ferrante’s poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published 2019 by Mansfield Press. She is Poetry Editor at Minola Review.

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Finding the Form with Stephanie Harrington

“I think “Blackberries” divided people, which in retrospect, isn’t a bad place to start. At least I provoked something in readers.”

“Blackberries” started as an assignment for a creative nonfiction class at the University of Victoria. Our professor, David Leach, asked us to write a “Modern Love” essay like those published in the long-running New York Times column. A nearly 10-year relationship with my partner had ended months earlier. I was grieving the loss, but I wanted “Blackberries” to have a bigger scope than that relationship. I decided to incorporate other storylines and characters, including my family, into the work. Much of what we learn about relationships comes from the environment we grow up in, for better or worse. I tried not to impose anything on the material I included. I simply let my mind wander.

I loved the poem Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass, and decided to write a call and response piece to the poem. I originally included stanzas from the poem in my essay and wound my four storylines around Hass’s work. My classmates’ responses to the early draft were interesting. I think “Blackberries” divided people, which in retrospect, isn’t a bad place to start. At least I provoked something in readers.

“You gain a lot of insight into other people’s lives as a reporter, but I realized the real work I had to do involved looking inward.”

I also wanted to experiment with form, which I hadn’t done much before. At the time, I loved lyric and braided essays. I’d worked as a journalist for several years prior to this and felt restricted by my training. You gain a lot of insight into other people’s lives as a reporter, but I realized the real work I had to do involved looking inward. So much had happened in my life, and by my early 30s, I wanted to start exploring it, to make sense of things for myself, but also to connect with other people’s experiences. Part of finding my voice as a writer meant swinging as far away from the objective reportorial style I had learned in journalism school and been practicing since my early twenties.

I put the essay away for a while. A friend of mine encouraged me to keep revising. Her faith in the piece kept me motivated. After several drafts, I shed one of the storylines, and gradually the essay began to have legs of its own. It didn’t need Hass’s stanzas anymore. I find structure the hardest part of writing—there are so many possibilities! Once I figured out the structure for “Blackberries,” I felt confident it would work. How this essay came to be remains somewhat mysterious to me, to be honest. I can talk generally about the process, but the ideas, feelings and form came from somewhere I hadn’t accessed before. It’s a vulnerable, sad essay, an ode to a formative relationship in my life, as well as a meditation on relationships in general. I’m afraid every time I read “Blackberries” of what the material might bring up, but it also feels like a lifetime ago, a different version of myself that I have preserved in an imperfect and hopefully affecting way.

Stephanie Harrington holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria. In 2018, she was selected for the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writers Mentorship Program.

Photo by Aurel Serban on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Eleanor Sudak

This poem began its life as an idea for a short story, a screenplay-like vision peopled by characters who can never quite come together in ways hoped for by the reader. I am so fond of the works of Mary Lawson, Anne Tyler, and Donna Morrissey that their themes flavour my thoughts. Or, maybe their themes fit congruently within the types of stories I tell. In the beginning I was trying to tell myself the messy, difficult story of the snow plow driver, and then, one morning the story tilted and became the record of a brief, unrequited moment in the man’s life. I am still playing with the idea that this frozen moment may become part of a larger whole.

Eleanor Sudak is a retired teacher. Her poem, “Today we say Thailand,” was published in an anthology from the University of Waterloo’s 2018 HeforShe Writing Contest.

Photograph provided by Eleanor Sudak. Cover photo by Damian McCoig on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Susan Vernon

Perhaps I am an intuitive poet who doesn’t really want to know exactly how she does it.  Even if, at times, a poem doesn’t come easily, it always seems miraculous:  to begin, to carry on and then to find an ending.

In my early thirties, I wasn’t writing much poetry even though I had thought of myself as a poet since my twenties, and had written some poems, usually in free verse.   It was then, in seeking to find that comfort which writing brings, I turned to the American poet Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town.  Because it was a library book, I made notes from some of Hugo’s essays on writing poetry.

I jotted down Hugo’s description of the process:  “A poem can be said to have two subjects, the initiating or triggering subject . . . which ‘causes’ the poem to be written, and the real or generated subject, which the poem comes to say or mean and which is  . . . discovered in the poem during the writing.”  For Richard Hugo, his triggering subject could be a “small town” about which he knew very little but for which he felt some kind of affinity.   He goes on to say that the triggering subject must become weaker and your allegiance to the words stronger.  “The poem is always in your hometown but you have a better chance of finding it in another.”

In those days, I’m not sure I understood what Richard Hugo meant.  Looking back now, I believe I got some of it, at least.  Once, I wrote a poem in which I referred to making beds as singing.  The bed making took place in an old summerhouse belonging to my husband’s family.  The house itself and my experience of it was the beginning of many steps I took to find my own “obsessions” as a poet.

This apprenticeship stays with me.  I borrow much that isn’t mine by birth—another’s childhood, the unfolding of hepatica in a Southern Ontario spring, a 19th century barn—all of which, and more, continues to be my way in.

 

Photograph provided by Susan Vernon. Cover photo by Conner Baker on Unsplash.

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Launched: Watermark by Christy Ann Conlin

Christy Ann Conlin’s short story collection, Watermark, was published by House of Anansi in August. Based in Nova Scotia, she is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Memento, as well as the co-creator and host of the CBC radio series, Fear Itself. Our correspondence began with a postcard and quickly shifted to email.

Q: The eleven stories collected in Watermark upend expectations. They are quite varied—specific worlds yet all grounded in coastal geographies—with settings on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, even the shorelines of Hudson Bay. Natural beauty comes with bleakness and danger: the sea as a source of wonder and peril, the remote mountain roads. Can you share your thinking about the harsh landscapes of your stories, and the people who live or hide out there?

 I think geography and landscape, be it in its natural form or altered by people, has a massive impact on humanity. From a story point of view, drilling down, if you’ll pardon the pun, into how terrain impacts an individual and their community, is so artistically compelling. Mountains, valleys, oceans, water of all kinds, these are elemental forces at play in all of our lives, from the womb where we first swim, to our bodies comprised of so much water, a life force. The ocean and sea, rivers and streams, shape the land in the same way life and experience shape both the individual and society.

I lived in Vancouver for a long time, and my in-laws are all from British Columbia, so this bicoastal experience and contrast, the Pacific and the Atlantic in a kind of conversation, infuses the collection.

Q: Reading these stories had me recalling Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley, although it’s been years since I read it in university—but isn’t this his geography, too, the harsh mountain where the main character dies, covered by snow?

I grew up on the Bay of Fundy shores. Buckler spent his life inland in the shadow of the South Mountain. The North Mountain and wild sea I grew up with had a very different impact on my life and by turn, how it shapes my work. When I was a teenager, I read The Mountain and the Valley. Its main impact on me was that I would die very young if I didn’t get the fuck out of Dodge, ha ha ha. While glimpses of the pastoral world Buckler loved still exist, for me the world was gashed open by technology. Both worlds exist, in conflict with each other, rarely in harmony. The only story in Watermark which speaks directly to Ernest Buckler is Beyond All Things Lies the Sea, where Seraphina flees the oppression of a traditional and conservative society which demolishes females and preys on vulnerability. Flight drives Seraphina’s life, escaping a restrictive past that imposes itself on younger generations. Seraphina is a Classical Studies scholar, and a student of Seneca. It is his words, beyond all things lies the sea, which she remembers, how we are nothing more than water and salt, that in the end, we return to the ocean. This story became the opening of my first novel, Heave.

 Q: In “Dead Time”, we follow the thoughts of a teen who may or may not have committed murder. The story is told in the first person, from her cell, as she recounts the events that led to her incarceration. What inspired this story and its form? 

Stylistically, it’s a stream of consciousness piece, a subversion of fairy tale, an extremely privileged unreliable narrator, who tells herself stories and explores her past, her choices and decisions. She is both preparing for what she’ll say publicly and conducting an excavation of self. What she discovers both horrifies and bewitches her. The story came about through two things. First, reading about the 2008 Toronto murder of Stefanie Rengel by teenager Melissa Todorovic. Todorovic was convicted of masterminding the murder of Stefanie Rengel, using a young man as her operative. Second, I taught literacy at a youth detention centre, working with young people who had committed very violent crimes. I came face to face with their humanity and inhumanity. It was a real reckoning of the idea of human and monster, what society creates, how it tries (and often fails) to protect and nurture the young. Isabella, the protagonist, is also telling her story in order to understand how adults and society have shaped and created her. It’s an origin story, of sorts, a distortion of autobiography. She views herself as a creature who has leapt out of a mythic realm. This allows her to justify crazy violence and brutality while at the same time, because she is so young, this is the only way she can make sense of what she is.

Q: Several of the stories reference characters that appear later, in other stories. There is a sense of weaving a community. Were the stories planned that way, or did the notion of subtly linking them come later, as you were compiling the collection?

The literary landscape in my mind has many intersections and this is why there are often glimpses of other characters, like glimmers and shimmers of a lake through a forest, the sound of a waterfall in the woods. I wrote the stories over a long period of time, from the late 1990s right through to 2018, so it wasn’t a question of planning, but of how my creative process works, returning to the same artistic terrain but exploring it from a different perspective, examining an alternative side. I wrote the stories individually, not with a collection in mind, so many of the subtle links surprised me when the stories came together in book form.

Q: How easily did the collection come together for you? I’m fascinated by decisions around ordering stories, and also, which to include and leave out.

This is such an interesting question. It’s my first collection, so it was all very new to me. Now that Watermark exists, I can say with hindsight, that I think writing stories with the intention of a collection is very different than how I did this—gathering the stories unto me, like a strange sort of shepherdess in the wilds, rounding up the wild wayward black sheep and seeing how they worked together as a flock. It’s a question of literary purpose and artistic form, but also, with the reader in mind, how they’ll enter into the world of the book, and come out the other side. The same goes for title selection. What a process that was!

It was really hard to know which story should go where. Of course, there are considerations such as length and contrast of style, as well. I wish I could have contemplated and played with story order for a long, long time. My amazing editor and I played around with different orders, and a few writerly friends also weighed in. It was like working with an opera, though, and moving one piece altered the collection as a whole. I have a new reverence for order of story. And what I was also very focused on were the titles, and how they looked together in the table of contents. They become a found poem. Even with a novel, I look at the chapter titles together on the page as a form of poetry.

Q: The older characters surprise the reader. We might be tempted to see them as sweet, or harmless, at first—they look like stereotypical grandmothers and even call the younger characters dear—but they are anything but. I’m thinking especially of Charlotte in “Full Bleed” and the old woman on her porch in “The Flying Squirrel Sermon”. Tell us about the damage that these older characters manifest, the threats they pose to the people who come back to visit.  

I wanted to play with our stereotypes of the elderly, elderly women in particular, and how we so often underestimate them or completely misjudge them, based on society’s ageism and stereotypes. “Full Bleed” is a direct homage to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, written as a response to that story, a Northern Gothic response to her Southern Gothic.

Yes, and you gave your “misfit” character, Herman, the grace of a backstory in which he has been kind to his younger relatives on occasion, unlike the misfit in O’Connor’s story…

My story features a very problematic old lady and a young man’s deference, his grief- drenched naiveté, which ends up leading him into unexpected danger. In O’Connor’s work we are never quite sure who the villain is, who the wise one is, who is innocent, and who is sly. Our expectations are always disrupted. The older characters are upholders of the arcane ways. In “Full Bleed”, we see the terrible old ways, women who carry a violent and oppressive emotional power given to them by a patriarchal society. Lucretia in “The Flying Squirrel Sermon” is an entirely different kind of old woman, the last of her kind, keeping the old ways alive, finally able to tell her story to the young Ondine and introduce her to ancestral mysteries. I decided when I was writing many of these stories to view them through the eyes of Werner Herzog, to see the fascination and mystery in the obscure and unexpected.

Q: In several stories, the young people escape the life others plan for them, whether it’s leaving a man at the altar and racing for a flight overseas or leaving the community to go to university. The locals, the older characters, seem to want to weigh them down. Some wish their offspring would just be normal, meaning lead lives like their own—although those lives can seem circumscribed or severe. Were you conscious of commenting on the differences between generational expectations—that change over time in what could be expected from life—or is this more about place, or something else? 

It’s all about that, this human conundrum which rises up between generations, of a sense of place where traditional expectations are KING and one must bow down before them, even if it means sacrificing your very self. This is especially true of the female characters in my stories, where they are time and time again expected to conform and betray themselves and their own humanity, in preservation of a society which sees them as nothing more than handmaids. Of course, in my stories, characters rail against this, fleeing, escaping, and often fighting against it, ultimately finding a sense of personal integrity and triumph. As a writer, I’m fascinated (and horrified) but this hallmark of rural life and the old-world culture of early immigrants and settlers, who are displaced in a world where they don’t belong, suffering from the loss of the world they left behind and inflicting damage everywhere they turn. I think every new generation is a chance for hope and transformation. And there is inevitably a massive conflict when those two worlds clash, or when the younger generation tries to extract itself and evolve into something new.

Q: What’s next?

I’m working on a memoir called Cross Trees about my big weird woven family, about life after breast cancer, how we find joy in a damaged life. And then there is my long-suffering novel.

Laura Rock Gaughan is the author of Motherish, a short story collection published in 2018. She lives in Lakefield, Ontario with her family.

Photos courtesy of Christy Ann Conlin. 

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Finding the Form with gillian harding-russell

“Although the square or rectangle of a sheet of paper – short or long, small or large – may influence the shape of the poem, I like to allow the words to find their own voice and presence on a sheet of paper.”

I allow the form to rise from the fall of the words inside my head. Sometimes an image or a phrase will be enough to propel the poem so that everything flows from that kernel. Or sometimes a phrase or a verse becomes a riff that asks to be repeated as anaphora or refrain. Although the square or rectangle of a sheet of paper – short or long, small or large – may influence the shape of the poem, I like to allow the words to find their own voice and presence on a sheet of paper. I cannot write the first draft on the computer. I must feel my way to the shape of the poem by writing by hand using pen or pencil in the initial stages. Once I have completed a first draft, I can revise the piece on the computer but do find myself printing off drafts to view on paper between revisions.

It is true that I prefer left justification (easier to read) and approximately similar length verses (looks tidier) but use that norm as a point of departure for more expressive and varying dramatic lengths. In short, I like the internal music of the line to take hold and allow the line breaks to dramatize the subject matter. I abhor chopped lines, though I have been guilty of them, and sometimes at their most prosy. Sometimes a poem calls for repetition as in a musical score but I listen for unintentional blips of repeated words that lose power on being repeated.

Although I have tried writing in other genres (none published), I long ago decided that I must concentrate on writing poems exclusively so that one day I can write, if not the perfect poem, a couple of good ones that may even be remembered by somebody. (A high hope, indeed…)

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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Jeanie Keogh’s Writing Space

“When I’m working late into the evening, I can watch the sunsets that the Flemish painters captured so well as the light dies out over my garden. The landscape connects me to the ebb and flow of the seasons (which often matches my writing process), and the view somehow helps me to weed out scenes that are not useful and shed unnecessary exposition like the oak trees do their leaves in fall.”

For the first time in my life, I write in a home office. There has always been a designated “space” for writing, but it was always just a makeshift desk – an antique Singer sewing machine table in the living roof of a loft in Brussels, a kitchen table made by a woodworking boyfriend in Vancouver, my mother’s roll-top desk in rural Ontario. Now I have an entire room dedicated to writing with a big painter’s table. It faces a big window that looks out onto the front yard in the East Flemish countryside, also a first. In the winter, the view is of sheep grazing. In the summer, corn grows up and blocks the view of the sheep. On the rare winter days that Belgium is not overcast, the office gets an explosion of afternoon sun which lights up the 70s-yellow walls. When I’m working late into the evening, I can watch the sunsets that the Flemish painters captured so well as the light dies out over my garden. The landscape connects me to the ebb and flow of the seasons (which often matches my writing process), and the view somehow helps me to weed out scenes that are not useful and shed unnecessary exposition like the oak trees do their leaves in fall.  

When my husband and I first checked out this mid-century modern home, the office was what sold us on it. It was lined on either side with books belonging to the recently-deceased owner – Franz Meert, a 90-year-old writer – who had lived in the house all his life (and who, according to an esoteric friend of mine, has not yet left). I loved the smell of his old rotting and yellowing Dutch paperbacks.

When we first moved in, I stayed away from the office for a while out of a sort of superstitious respect for the dead (his presence, my friend said, could mostly be felt in that room). Now I’m squatting (with his permission) and borrowing him as my muse from time to time.

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The office is my man cave and the space is under creative copyright.

I don’t keep any books on the built-in bookshelves (those are in the living room on display – my husband has arranged them with his designer’s eye for balance and beauty). Instead, the shelves are kept as bare as the (inevitable) accumulating paperwork allows. As for furniture, there is a big mahogany lamp, a couch that can become a single bed, and a Victorian chair. There is nothing on the walls except a Japanese Buddhist scroll and a dream catcher that our dog ate all the feathers off of. When I sign my first book publishing contract, I hope to add an Alison Watt painting (either South, Octavo, or 1708) as a reminder never to fear the blank page.

The couch serves as a place to do my hard copy work – read, research, edit printed drafts, organize notebooks, review feedback from my writers’ group. I try to keep it so that my desk is the only place where screen time takes place. Sometimes I spread out manuscripts on the floor.

Although my deadline-driven journalism background has trained me to write wherever and whenever, my creative writing space is about defining my boundaries – both psychically (from Franz’s sometimes distracting energy) and physically, ie. not letting the space turn into a place to store the vacuum, bike equipment, or guitar amps. A world-class chef would never let people leave bags of baby clothes or folded laundry in his/her kitchen, so I’m not going to let the office become a place to dump things that don’t fit in the garage. There is also a proportional relationship between clutter in the room, and chaos in my mind. A space full of knick-knacks is like a run-on sentence with too many adjectives. If my office space isn’t treated with respect, then no one (least of all me) will take my writing seriously, and I’ve worked very hard on my inner demons to make sure that writing is not just a hobby.

Jeanie Keogh is a Canadian living in Belgium. Her fiction and creative non-fiction has been published in Filling Station, Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, The Puritan, Freefall, Broken Pencil, Riddle Fence, Matrix, and Room.

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Photos courtesy of Jeanie Keogh.

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Terence Young’s Writing Space

“I’m okay with clutter when it all serves a purpose.”

One of the key components of my writing space is music. I have a fondness for old stereo equipment and vinyl, and I also enjoy several of the local FM stations. So, my room also houses my record collection and several amplifiers, turntables and tuners. I also will distract myself from writing by trying to master the odd classical piece on guitar, so there are several instruments in the room, too. As a result, the space seems, especially to Patricia, a bit cluttered, but I’m okay with clutter when it all serves a purpose.

It is common for a writer’s space to change, and in my time writing, the changes have taken place mostly within our old house, which we moved into in 1983. I have written in the sun room, in what used to be my daughter’s bedroom, in the basement rec room (before the house fire in 1997), and currently in what used to be my son’s bedroom. I also have the good fortune to shift ground from time to time and write at our cabin in the Highlands region outside Victoria. In this aspect, I feel blessed.

Terence Young lives in Victoria, BC. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Claremont Review, a literary journal for young writers. The poem in this issue of TNQ is from a forthcoming collection called Smithereens.

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Photos courtesy of Terence Young. Header by Ivan Dorofeev on Unsplash

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What is Mahak Jain Reading?

“It’s not possible, in the audiobook format, to get caught up in the words or language because there’s no space to reflect on or ponder them.”

I have always resisted audiobooks. I am able to read faster than the speed of audiobooks, so the latter never seemed efficient. I also become easily distracted and daydream easily, so I expected audiobooks to be frustrating. But for my new job, I drive an hour each way; my reading time is more restricted too. So audiobooks have become a solace during a difficult commute. I recently read AN OCEAN OF MINUTES by Thea Lim.

It’s not possible, in the audiobook format, to get caught up in the words or language because there’s no space to reflect on or ponder them. I notice character and plot far more easily. I am also more aware now of skillful transitions. AN OCEAN OF MINUTES takes place during two different time periods, but Lim paid quite a lot of attention to how the story moves between the past and present, so I am never lost. (I tried reading LINCOLN IN THE BARDO by George Saunders in Audiobook format, but as innovative as the multi-cast audio format is, that’s a novel that I think is best understood in the text format.) I am reading in an entirely different way as a writer too. For the first time, I’m thinking about the best qualities of oral storytelling and how they can be used to strengthen storytelling on the page.

Mahak Jain writes fiction for children and adults. She lives in Toronto, where she is a professor of creative writing. Learn more at www.mahakjain.com.

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Photo courtesy of Max Rovensky on Unsplash.

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