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Marilo Nunez’s Writing Space

I read Virginia Wolff’s A Room of One’s Own while in university (my first degree was in theatre and I was twenty years old) and it changed my life. I longed for a room like the one she describes in her book, a place just for me, a space that contains all of my creative dreams. A place I could go and write all day. It would be many years, and many desks and spaces, before I would feel that I had found “a room of my own”. I always wanted to be a writer, my whole life. But I was always too afraid to admit it, fearing that if I let anyone read my stories, they’d laugh in my face and tell me they weren’t any good.

So, I did theatre instead. Yes, just as frightful (people to scrutinize your talents all the time) but somehow it felt safer than letting people read my work. I became an actor, then an artistic director and arts administrator running my own theatre company. But four years ago, my body began telling me I was pushing too hard- running a company solo for ten years is not an easy thing- and stress was literally killing me. I was getting pneumonia at least once a year and my marriage was falling apart. I decided to save my marriage and my health and so I closed down the company and we moved to Hamilton. The plan was to take a year for both my husband and I to engage with our creative selves. The windfall from the sale of our house in Toronto was supposed to make that happen for us. Our new house had so many more bedrooms than the one in Toronto. I chose my room, imagining myself spending hours of my day writing my plays and novels. But, as is the case when one is too afraid to jump, I was offered an arts administration job in my new city and so I took the job. Fear has a funny way of gripping you in its hold.

I was once again putting budgets together, making other artists’ dreams come true and I was denying the one person I should have been putting first, myself. I craved writing and going into my new room to create, but I was always too tired. I lasted three years and then I broke. I told my husband I needed to go back to school and get my MFA in Creative Writing or I was going to lose my mind. I even showed him a page from my journal that I had written over fifteen years previous, even before I’d met him, where I wrote, I want to get my MFA in Creative Writing or I am going to die.

I am about to graduate from the MFA program at Guelph this year. I have written five plays and several short stories, one of which is in this publication. It is a struggle every day to go to my computer and write. It doesn’t come easily for me. Writing is one of the hardest things I have ever done. But I love it so much. And I would rather do this than anything else in the world. And just this past summer, my husband helped me to repaint and re-organize my room. It is now the room I have always wanted. It holds all of my cherished books- plays, books on writing, poetry books, short story collections and the literature that I love, books by Marquez, Cortazar, Bolaño, and Allende. It has a couch where my dog Saga lies while I write and where my children come in to draw and talk to me about their days. The wall where my desk leans against is a beautiful pink and on the walls of the room are posters and creative designs of my plays. Oh, and I can’t forget the large poster of Frida Khalo that hangs just to the left of me, above my computer. Frida’s energy inspires me. And when I am feeling stuck, I’ll get up and do some yoga or lie on my floor to think out the plot of my stories. I have finally found my place , my room, where I can make all of my dreams come true.

Photo by Dustin Lee on Unsplash.

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What’s Margaret Nowaczyk Reading?

A month ago, I travelled to Iceland for the Iceland Writers Retreat and for weeks ahead, I boned up on Icelandic literature: Nobel prize winners, twenty-first century darlings, and a few thrillers. No sagas. In doing so, I was delighted to discover Sjón, a multi-talented poet, novelist and lyricist (he has written lyrics for Björk) and Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s sole Nobel Prize winner in literature. Right now, I am reading Sjón’s “The Whispering Muse”(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York), a clever retelling of Jason’s myth (he of the Golden Fleece).

“The Whispering Muse” is a slim novel, beautifully translated by Victoria Cribb. It is narrated by a comically dull self-appointed expert on fish and their contribution—as food—to the superiority of the Nordic race. Throughout, two narratives roll in like waves until Greek and Icelandic myths clash and crest. The endings—for there are two—will satisfy both speculative fiction and magical realism fans.

Speaking of waves in narrative, “Meander, Spiral, Explode” by Jane Alison (Catapult, New York), presents a gentle yet firm denunciation of the climactic Aristotelian narrative schema taught in all creative writing classes. Using patterns from nature: waves, radials, and honeycombs in addition to the titular three, she dissects literary works from flash fiction to epic tomes illustrating alternative but equally satisfying narrative structures, all in a non-scholarly and engaging manner.

Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash.

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David Waltner-Toews’ Writing Space

Every writer, I think, needs a space. This need not be a room, as Virginia Woolf imagined. When I was trying to fairly contribute money and labour into raising children, paying mortgages and cars, maintaining a household and a couple relationship, writing at home was not possible. I wrote poetry in hotel rooms in Kathmandu or Nairobi or Bogota. For longer pieces, or to gather my thoughts into some semblance of coherence,  the only place I could write was a cabin on the Bruce Trail, which we rented from a psychiatrist, a friend and colleague from my wife’s work. I would sit at a small wooden table and look out over Georgian Bay, and go for long walks along the escarpment.

When I retired from the university, I was afraid that my writing would suffer, and perhaps even disappear. How could I nudge open a head-space in the home that was so crowded with memories of a young family, of getting lectures ready, of fussing over academic articles? Every time I looked up from a story or poem my mind would be cheerfully assaulted by thoughts of yard work, housework, meals to plan. It took an effort, and a few turbulent years, but for me writing, like water, always finds its necessary way. I now mostly write at a computer in a room that overlooks our backyard. Within the room is a bookshelf with books that I have most recently pillaged for my latest books, a large painting from Vietnam, some family pictures, a couch. Looking out the windows, I see a yard surrounded by towering, ancient, black walnut trees. When the kids were teenagers, there was a clay tennis court back there. Now, I see a green space, shrubs, grasses, semi-feral flowers.

What both the cabin and this room have in common is the opportunity to lift my eyes from the writing task at hand, to rest and re-focus, to remind myself that these words I struggle with, that I forget, that so often fail me, are not all there is. I can’t always see the view directly—the spruce tree off our deck has grown so big that it partly obscures (or enriches) the view—but I know what’s there. I can get up and look out another window, or go downstairs (my main exercise!) and walk outside. I can talk to the chickens. I can be in a world greater than the word-nets I use to grasp it. At the cabin there were loons, mergansers, waves, crumbling cliffs, rocky beaches, and clusters of spruce and poplar; at my home in Kitchener, that mind-calming role is played by cardinals, forsythia, juniper, grasses, robins, crows, and, more recently, a small flock of chickens.

Photos courtesy of David Waltner-Toews.

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What’s Jennifer Lynn Dunlop Reading?

My favourite poet, Mary Oliver (Sept 10, 1935 – Jan 17, 2019) passed away recently, and I have been re-reading her work. I am captivated by her images of nature, the way her words depict scenes vividly and imaginatively, such as ‘the eyelash of lightning’ (Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does it End?). Doesn’t that provide a compelling visual? I also admire the imagery in this excerpt from Rhapsody part 7: “If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt’. Isn’t that a thought-provoking way to represent love?

Her work challenges and inspires me, not only to be a better poet but to fulfil my own unique potential as a person. In her poem ‘When Death Comes’, she states: “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” I agree with her sentiment. It motivates me to consider what I am leaving to the world – what memories, what words. Will I have any impact on it? Am I interacting and engaging enough with the world?

And who hasn’t appreciated her famous quote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life” (The Summer Day)? She asks us personally what we will choose to accomplish. She emphasizes that we have only one life, and that it can wriggle out of our grasp if we are not careful. She challenges us, but she also accepts us:

‘You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.’

‘Wild Geese’ is framed on the wall of my bedroom, and it has helped me cope with some difficult times.

Mary Oliver loved her partner Molly Malone deeply, and I appreciate how she adored unreservedly and that she was forthcoming about it: “from the complications of loving you i think there is no end or return. no answer, no coming out of it. which is the only way to love ” (Thirst). She was true to herself and her love, not just of Molly but of the natural world, and she inspires us to do the same. I understood her, because our gratitude for nature and our continuous curiosity and openness to feeling are similar.

Her words stay with me. Her poetry has calmed me, contented me, inspired and challenged me. That is what art is meant to do, what it is capable of accomplishing. What more can you ask for?

I am also reading Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. I am in awe of the way he writes. His prose is gorgeous and intelligent. I enjoy every sentence. I am a voracious reader, and I read several books a week. And some are more satisfying than others. I appreciate poetic language and learning something new – whether about a culture or historical event. Michael Ondaatje leaves me feeling both refreshed and knowledgeable, a superlative combination.

Photo by Duncan Maloney on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

Welcome to the latest installation of “Finding the Form.” In this new series, contributors share how they found and developed the creative form for their recent work in The New Quarterly. You can find Callista Markotich’s “The Bed-Making” in Issue 150.

It had to be a Poem.

Try to convey in prose, the feeling of being watched, being witnessed by spirits, spirits of women long buried, while making a bed. Your telling can’t explain, can’t specify time and place, doesn’t begin here and end there. There is no pivotal moment; nothing really happens. In fact, in one draft this poem was titled Drift, so gauzy are the elements of where, when and how. You’ll sound fey.

Yet, it is told. Poetry can do that, streaming the lush Orphic invitation across the River Styx flowing between life and death.

And it’s poetry I’m writing these days. For years my ‘pen’ was bristling with communiques concerning the concrete world of directives and actions: memos, policies, guidelines. Freedom to plumb the affective domain for the making of a poem was like stepping off the grid of sidewalk and entering a woodsy, winding, dipping, climbing trail. Even when challenging, there’s that dappled sun, that rich shadow, that chance of meeting a muse just over the rise.

It had to be a poem. At first (oh, such a draft this was!) it was “This Way to Love”
What souls surround me/ as I make this bed/
silently approving /this way to love?
This poem was on my desktop, the subject of the furrowed brow and the midnight flash of genius, gone at dawn, while I toiled to convey a feeling, one that I experience from time to time, one that I believe might not be unique, although no one has ever admitted to me that dead women watch them work.

In one iteration the poem was called SKIRTS. Indented and in italicised were the faint sounds of skirts worn by phantoms from other epochs gathering together to observe the performance of a ritual, one that in life, gave them comfort and satisfaction, the daily intersection of tenderness and task. Work. Kahlil Gibran’s love made visible, the making of a bed.

In SKIRTS, I relished the sibilance, rustle of taffeta/ whisper of silk/ rasp of homespun. But it was technically problematic to include these skirts and the sounds they might make. Sounds are of the physical world, they don’t read well in the quietude of the piece; they challenge the airy, almost-not-there character of these unsummoned souls. They were distracting. Especially, they were inauthentic. I’ve never heard skirts, I confess. So delete, delete, delete and tap, tappety tap – more revision.

In another version I had a final stanza that grieved the absence of my own mother in this ghostly company, how she never came with them:

I can’t conjure the sound of stockinged leg /the brush of tweed or tartan

her memory still too ponderous with grief/ no, I would sit upon the unmade bed

and weep…

I’d like to say it only took moments to recognize the devolution into more than a little pathos/bathos. So thought my dear, small, hard-thinking editing group, so thought I. And, although it is true that at this time I mourn her heavily, that element is not authentic either, as the wraiths in this poem are fully illusory; they do not have identities or temporal or personal associations, or skirts, for that matter.

It is a common, mundane task, making the bed, yet this poem does not invite the vernacular into its diction and tone. These spirits, this task, absent that tensile thing, fitted with a pop, belong to their recollections, their pasts. Formal language tries to ennoble it, bestows importance to that mystery of having lived, being dead. The vocabulary wants to elevate the bedmaking,

the weightless instant of unfurled white, offer the gravitas of tombstones with their formal inscriptions. Archaic usage, such as “aloft above the unmade bed,” reverences the presence of these spirits from centuries past.

I think there is only one line which could reasonably be uttered by a normal modern-day person in ordinary conversation: and someone smiles…. In diction and tone this is vernacular.  It also introduces a playfulness, a nod to the light triviality of a bed-making. These are not the twisted spirits of, say, Edgar Allen Poe, crossing the Styx with tortured purpose, dark issues to resolve. It is also the only line that asserts a tiny apologetic, a diminutive insistence against possible scepticism…. I know that someone does.

The concept originates from a feeling that I have had infrequently since early days of being responsible on the home front. Growing up haphazard in my approach to domestic matters, this is odd, I admit. I sometimes had a sense that when I took extra care, when I consciously performed a household thing well, that bit of mindfulness was witnessed in the spirit world of women who once performed these quotidian tasks; they approved. Not every household thing, chiefly making beds and loading dishwashers.

Wraiths and dishwashers? Seriously? Yet that was one of the tasks that evoked the feeling. I would load as many pieces as possible, for efficiency and conservation; I would load them with great precision, for cleanliness for my people. You could say on one hand for efficiency, and on the other for love. Before you say weird, bear with me, because I think there’s a history here.

I had an aunt, Aunt Fan, on my father’s side. Aunt Fan never married, but she adored her sister’s children (my father was one of those) and their children (I was one of those). She loved us as her own for as long as she lived.

Aunt Fan was a woman painstaking in her approach to domestic tasks from making coffee to making beds and, as a girl, I confess to a degree of bafflement and impatience, I have to say, at the effort and time she put into these works.

Aunt Fan was a pioneer female employee of Bell Canada, rare in her day. In this role, she was brisk, no nonsense and without flourish, yet at home, elaborate as any chatelaine. As time went on, I came to understand that she was committed to our creature comforts, for love. She did these things well because she could, and she wanted to, for us. Aunt Fan isn’t one of these spirits, they truly are anonymous. I etched her name on a stone, though, in this poem:

Rest in Peace, Fanny, Mary, Nell

Fanny.  Aunt Fan. I think she is the genesis of the feeling which spilled into The Bed-Making.

Photos courtesy of Callista Markotich.

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Quilt of Stories

This feature is part of the Platform Series, which was made possible with generous support from the City of Waterloo and the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation. Read more about the Platform Series here.

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop is a community arts initiative that connects women who are immigrants or refugees with artists who assist and mentor them in writing and performing their own stories. The X Page is the opposite of a blank page: it’s the space where we enter into an image using all of our senses. Throughout the 12-week writing and performance workshop, participants develop a personal narrative, and work collaboratively to bring their individual stories together into a cohesive presentation. The project culminates with a performance before a live theatre audience and their stories are published here.

Table of Contents

Rana Alsafi, “Unexpected Gift”

Olga Barmina, “When the Shoe Fits.”

Uzma Bhutto, “Green Avocado Bag”

Maha Eid, “My Cherished Siblings”

Hamideh Eltejaei, “The Patchwork Story”

Dani Guse, “The Invisible Border”

Mahtab Kamali, “Surrender”

Amna Kulsoom, “A Day at School”

Peggy Law, “I love Who I am Because He Chose to Love me”

Margaret Emilia Looker, “‘You’re late!'”

Zahra Mohamed, “The Shelter”

Sumeyra N., “Where Am I?”

Samina Naz, “Ear Piercing”

Nermin Ozdemir, “Things I Wish I’d Known: A Letter to Myself Before Leaving Turkey 16 Years Ago”

Yomatie Persaud, “Role Reversal”

Paulina Rodriguez, “Teachings of Nature”

Pooneh Torabian, “The Piano Teacher”

Umut Uzunel, “Sitting at the Back of the Classroom”

Ati Zar, “The Chemistry of Calligraphy”

 

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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The New Quarterly Secures Two Silvers

The New Quarterly won double silver in Poetry and Personal Journalism at this year’s 42nd National Magazine Awards, securing the best showing by a Canadian literary magazine and ninth best overall. The magazine’s success was announced on May 31, 2019 in Toronto after more than 185 Canadian print and digital magazines put forth submissions in both official languages. The New Quarterly garnered five nominations at this year’s National Magazine Awards, including two in Poetry, two in Personal Journalism, and one in Fiction.

Terence Young’s “The Bear” won silver in Poetry. Young—a retired teacher of English and Creative Writing at St. Michaels University School—is not new to receiving recognition; his poem was also a runner-up in The New Quarterly’s 2018 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. “That Time of Year,” a story from his second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age, was selected for the annual Best Canadian Stories in 2012.

In Personal Journalism, Meaghan Rondeau’s “Half-Thing” won silver. The New Quarterly first celebrated her innovative essay by awarding it first place in the 2018 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Rondeau’s work is not limited to poetry and short fiction: her first play, Cassandra in the House, was produced at the Brave New Play Rites in Vancouver.

“The competition was fierce at this year’s NMAs—in Poetry, there were eight shortlisted, and in Personal Journalism, there were 11 shortlisted,” The New Quarterly Editor Pamela Mulloy said. “It’s always a surreal experience to attend the NMAs with all their razzle-dazzle, and to see The New Quarterly‘s name on the big screen makes me incredibly proud of all the work that goes into bringing these winning writers to this very big stage.”

In the 20 years that it has participated in the National Magazine Awards, The New Quarterly has won ten gold, nine silver, and had 43 honourable mentions.

About The New Quarterly

The New Quarterly (TNQ) is a non-profit Canadian literary magazine that has been publishing the best of Canadian writing—short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—since 1981. TNQ also holds three annual contests: the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The magazine hosts the Wild Writers Literary Festival and manages the Write on the French River Creative Writing Retreat. TNQ is housed at St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo and acknowledges that its office is located on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

For more information, please contact Pamela Mulloy at: pmulloy [at] newquarterly.net

Photos courtesy of the National Magazine Awards. For the latest award updates, follow them on Twitter at @MagAwards.

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Finding the Form with Natalie Southworth

When I started “The Realtor” my hope was to write a story where the reader wouldn’t feel compelled to judge any one of the main characters for what happens. No one would be blamed for the break down of the family. It would be a true tragedy in that way.

To do this, I started out by using a third person omniscient point of view, which allowed me to better understand and imagine each of the characters. It was helpful in unearthing material, but not much else. Not having any one point of view created too much distance between the reader and the characters and too many missed opportunities to delve deeper into their emotional worlds. Also, Frank, the father, quickly emerged as the most interesting character. Making him a puppeteer opened up a whole world to explore. The other characters were interesting mostly because of Frank.

The problem was I didn’t want the story told through Frank’s eyes. Life was happening around Frank and to Frank. I thought his mystery, his inability to reinvent himself, would be understood best if he was observed.

As an experiment, I rewrote the story in Frank’s teenage son’s point of view. In doing this, I discovered the ending. Knowing the ending helped the story’s structure fall into place. It would be told chronologically and cleanly, driving forward to the ending, heavy on scene over exposition.

Knowing the ending also allowed me to go back and heighten the significance of the puppet scene at the BBQ fundraiser. In that climatic scene, I layered in the narrator’s quiet observations. It’s the moment he realizes he admires his father, when the seed of the life-changing choice the narrator makes at the end is planted.

Natalie Southworth’s award winning stories have appeared in literary journals in Canada and the UK. She lives and writes in Montreal.
www.nataliesouthworth.ca

Photo by Sagar Dani on Unsplash.

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Stephen Maude’s Writing Space

Saturday morning and here I am sitting alone at Mitzi’s Café. That’s the way my narrator, an anxious cinephile named Emily, begins her story in “Happy Enough”, which appears in TNQ150. And that’s the way the story began for me as well – sitting alone in a café. “Happy Enough” is the third of my stories to feature Emily and her friend Morah (see TNQ123 & 141). The first of these also opens in a café, a now-defunct coffee house in Toronto’s west end. I was sitting in that same place in fact, in January 2011, gazing out the window with my notebook lying open on the table, when Emily and Morah walked in, picked up my purple gel pen, and wrote themselves onto the page.

Cafés and libraries are my go-to places to write. I have a lovely home and a wonderful family, but when I’m at home, there’s always something other than writing that I could be doing – or should be doing, a voice in my head keeps telling me. So, when I want to write, I get out of the house and go somewhere else. Someplace where I can feel anonymous for an hour or two. Not only does that free me from distractions around the house, it also liberates my imagination.

In her essay, “Woolf’s Darkness”, Rebecca Solnit draws on a 1930 essay by Virginia Woolf to make the point that venturing outside the familiarity of home and into the city can be a means of inducing reverie, subjectivity, and imagination, a sort of duet between the prompts and interrupts of the outer world and the flow of images and desires (and fears) within. When I’m walking or cycling city streets on my way to the café or library, I’m shedding thoughts about planning meals or paying bills, and making space for imagination.

Today I’m at my local branch of the Toronto Public Library – one of my favourite places to be. The shelves beside me are lined with books, works by Solnit, Woolf, and hundreds of others. Surrounded by great writers, it’s easy to feel intimidated, to fall prey to the negative chatter in your head. Who are you kidding, calling yourself a writer? Do you really think anyone cares what you have to say? But just as easily it can be inspiring. I have little doubt that, once upon a time, the authors of the books lining these shelves were likewise plagued by misgivings. They were staring at a blank page and wondering how to fill it, just as I’m doing now.

Photos courtesy of Stephen Maude.

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Launched: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott

Welcome to the latest instalment of Launched, the series with the scoop on new books by Canadian authors.

Alicia Elliott’s first book, an essay collection called A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was published by Penguin Random House Canada this spring. A Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child, Elliott’s writing has been published in numerous literary journals and magazines. She is currently Creative Nonfiction Editor at The Fiddlehead, Associate Nonfiction Editor at Little Fiction | Big Truths, and a consulting editor with The New Quarterly. Our interview took place by email over a couple weeks as she appeared at writers’ festivals and the book hit the nonfiction bestseller list.

Q: A Mind Spread out on the Ground is your first book. What does it mean to you to have published these essays? How has your experience of launching the book been so far?

It’s been both scary and humbling to publish them, as they’re deeply personal and vulnerable. While being vulnerable takes a lot of strength and, I think, opens up the possibility for others to be vulnerable, it also could be weaponized against you. I decided to trust that readers wouldn’t do that, and so far, it seems that’s been true. Those who have read the book have been very positive. A lot of readers I’ve heard from have said the book has helped them think more critically about their own lives and histories, which is great, because that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want it to be a passive reading experience. I wanted my book to start dialogue, analysis, and introspection that would, hopefully, lead to people wanting to make real changes to the world we share.

Q: In this book, you examine a wide range of topics: personal histories, mental illness, generational trauma, Indigenous and white identities, gentrification, misogyny, racism, cultural appropriation, representation in literature and photography, and more. There’s activism and cultural criticism. And through it all, art, the artful writing that compels the reader. How do you approach art and activism: are they flip sides of the same coin? Or do you separate them at all? 

I feel that all art is inherently political, regardless of whether the artist acknowledges that. In fact, I find “apolitical” art to often be the most political, because it hides its politics under aesthetics or entertainment, as though its politics don’t exist. This can encourage audiences to be less critical of the art’s underlying politics because, the artist claims, there are no politics to be critical of. But if your art doesn’t challenge the status quo, it is, by default, upholding the status quo. It’s saying that there are more important or interesting things to worry about than the politics that affect others’ day-to-day lives in meaningful, often difficult, ways. I don’t buy into that argument at all. The fact is, if you take an experience of the world and determine it to be worth examining and/or elevating, which all art does, you’re saying that this experience deserves our collective attention. What isn’t political about that?

Q: The essays vary in form. “Dark Matters” braids the verdicts in the killings of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine with the phenomenon of dark matter in the universe with the phenomenon of racism in the country. Others are collages, one essay is a response to Susan Sontag, and another incorporates a questionnaire that forces the reader to question received wisdom about abusive relationships. What is the composition process like for you, designing the form for your content?   

The decision-making process for how I’m going to structure each essay is very instinctual. I don’t plan out the essays in advance, other than broadly knowing what topic I want to explore. Sometimes I don’t even fully understand why my brain is telling me to connect two topics until I’m writing, which is what happened with “Dark Matters.” For that, the hunch that there was something worth exploring came when I was watching the Tilda Swinton-narrated video on dark matter. I think because my mind was in that hopeless space of mourning, because I was seeing things through that lens, my mind was connecting everything back to Colten. In general, I just kind of follow my line of interest—both in terms of content and form—and then see if it works. It usually does, somehow.

Q: Your short story “Unearthed” was selected by Roxane Gay for Best American Stories 2018. Which do you write more of, fiction or nonfiction, and which do you like more? Do you write other genres, as well?

I definitely write more creative nonfiction. It’s easier for me, because everything is already created for me to piece together and make into a narrative. With fiction, you have to create everything from scratch, so it takes me way longer. I also feel like the structure of creative nonfiction is much easier for me to understand and play with, whereas with fiction, you’re expected to follow certain conventions, such as character, plot, narrative arc, etc. I get more intimidated by doing that in fiction. But I’m trying to push past that! I want to do more fiction writing, because to be honest, the real world has been pretty depressing lately and I’d like to escape a little bit.

As for other genres, I’m low-key working on a screenplay with my husband. I’m trying to keep it under wraps for now, but screenplays are an interesting form.

Q: Who are your most important nonfiction writing influences, and why?

Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking made me realize that creative nonfiction could be heartbreaking, exciting, structurally innovative, intellectually stimulating, blending personal anecdotes with research and philosophy to create something entirely original. I don’t agree with everything she writes, or her approaches to certain subjects in other essays, but her craft is highly developed and it’s fascinating to watch her work out ideas on the page.

I also love everything James Baldwin writes. His nonfiction is, to me, the perfect blend of intelligence and craft. His writing is perfect, even down to the sentence level, and the way that he grappled with the politics of his time (which unfortunately haven’t changed much) inspired me to want to be the sort of fearless truth teller he is. I don’t think I write with anywhere near as much grace or power as he does, but his work always gives me something to aim for.

Tanya Talaga is a writer with such compassion and fierce intelligence. Her books All Our Relations and Seven Fallen Feathers have shown me how to write about Indigenous issues with love, warmth, empathy, understanding, and strong ethics. Even her columns in the Toronto Star impress me, as she knows exactly what needs to be said and how it needs to be said, in the fewest words possible. That’s something I’m still trying to figure out, as I tend to be long-winded. She’s just an inspiration to me in all ways.

Q: How do your voice and presence on Twitter intersect with your writing? What does Twitter do for you, as a writer?    

Twitter has led to me getting writing opportunities, which is great. I never thought I would have wanted to write op-eds, for example, after deciding at 18 that I didn’t want to go to journalism school, but I actually really enjoy it, and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given. It’s my not-so-secret plan to use that access to help others who have important things to say to get platforms, as well.

I gain so much from other writers, thinkers, activists, and just engaged people on Twitter. It’s like having access to this incredible free master’s program. There’s so much I’ve learned from the generosity of others, who have shared their knowledge and experience in the hopes that someone would take it and apply it to their own lives. The work of Black and Indigenous women, two-spirit/queer and non-binary folks, in particular, has helped me develop in ways that I’ll never really be able to adequately thank them for—intellectually, critically, etc. I am thankful every day for that, even if Twitter can be a bit of a toxic hellscape sometimes.

Q: You tweet about pro wrestling, among many other topics. Might there be a wrestling essay coming at us readers in the near future? 

I’ve actually written about wrestling before, for the West End Phoenix. It was really fun, and I got to interview a wrestler who started his own wrestling promotion. And I’m going to be editing a book about wrestling, which I’m really excited about but I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about too much yet.

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

 

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