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Finding the Form with Pamela Hensley

For me, the seed of a story is often the question: what if? Something I see or read or become suddenly aware of sparks a feeling that I cannot shake. My mind begins to wander. I reimagine the situation, only worse, the worst it could possibly be. I slip into another life and push it to the edge.

I wrote my story, Paulina, from a place of fear. Just before the pandemic we moved to Colorado with our daughter, who was in high school and didn’t want to go. Within weeks, she had withdrawn from us and everything that had once seemed simple and easy became difficult and strained. She was at the age when a child pushes back from her parents but we were close to her, we had always been close, and part of me thought we might breeze past this little phase. Was it moving that altered her agreeable nature? Or was it bound to happen anyway? I have no way of knowing but can only report that the change we experienced was so sweeping and sudden that I’d wake up afraid of what the day might bring.

The house we bought and lived in for eighteen months was in the foothills outside Denver. It’s a part of the country where the landscape is stark and the views all around are breathtaking. I’d go for a hike across the edge of a canyon, wade through wildflowers beneath a pretty, blue sky, then pick up an angry daughter from school. I was not thinking of a story at this time but of how to fix our problem. I tried many things, none of which worked, but took comfort in the knowledge that it would surely pass. Until that annoying little voice asked: what if it doesn’t?

In April 1999, the tragedy that was the Columbine High School massacre took place in a building around the corner from the library where I now went to borrow books. My story got its legs when I saw that name and felt an ice-cold chill whip through my heated car. This is where it happened. I thought, my god, what came before that day? What tangle of benign events could form such a deadly knot? I read old articles about the shooting. I learned the names of the perpetrators and their parents. The killers were teenagers in grade 12. They seemed to come from ordinary families.

“While I was writing Paulina, I kept asking myself: what’s so different about me and the mothers of those Columbine teenagers? What’s so different about any of us? Paulina is a story that contains hard truths I think anyone who’s been a parent to a teen will recognize.”

When I started to write, the words came out in spare, melancholy paragraphs, which I loved. At the time I was reading the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, famously depressed, and this helped build the mood even further. I had a few scenes, not yet connected, and some wonderful contrasts I knew I should combine: the beauty of the landscape and the danger within. The rest was a game of invention. The mother became Dutch, the father absent, and the daughter just as cruel as she should be. I worried about using Columbine in the story, in case it might be seen as a gratuitous reference. I worried about writing a “domestic” story. I worried about people thinking it was autobiographical.

I never wanted to write about a school shooter but about that unsettling period when the parent-child relationship shifts and you don’t know where it will go. While I was writing Paulina, I kept asking myself: what’s so different about me and the mothers of those Columbine teenagers? What’s so different about any of us? Paulina is a story that contains hard truths I think anyone who’s been a parent to a teen will recognize. By the time we left Colorado, I had finished the first draft and our lives had moved on.

Pamela Hensley is the Managing Editor of yolk literary journal and host of the podcast How I Wrote This. Her fiction has appeared in the Queen’s Quarterly, The New Quarterly, the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, The Montreal Review, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, EVENT Magazine, and elsewhere. To find out more about her podcast, visit www.howiwrotethisthepodcast.com or follow her on Instagram (@howiwrotethisthepodcast).

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Under Review: Derek Webster’s National Animal

Derek Webster’s name is not new to the editors of The New Quarterly, his poems first appearing with us in the Spring issue of 2000. Nor is it new to the editors more than a dozen other literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United Kingdom. He is also an editor himself, most notable for founding Maisonneuve Magazine. In an online interview with John Wickham of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, the poet said that his first book (Mockingbird, 2015) amounted to a personal reckoning but that National Animal was more of a national reckoning. That reckoning does indeed take place on a much broader moral scale, involving cosmological considerations in its final sequence.

The challenging thematic scope of these poems is reflected in the poet’s adventurous approach to form and style. He gives us sonnets, free-verse poetry with various stanza configurations, and one poem, “Naught,” which uses traditional terza rima the with ironic effectiveness. The three boys make off with the what’s left of a manse burned to the ground, because for them “Out here, there’s naught to do/but wait till God’s will cools, then rend/a use from what can’t last.” There is a also a variation on an ekphrastic poem, “An Old Painting of Charleston Harbor,” in which the speaker asks in regard to the man and boy depicted in the scene, “After two hundred years, if/these/ deft shapes—head/thrown back/arm raised—seem to cry/ out from the shore off their captured world/who hears them?” For readers who have forgotten (but shouldn’t have), the poet points out in his “Notes” that the port was prominent for its slaving activity. Webster’s adventures in form also include the prose poem, “Blanche Dubois at Mercy Asylum,” in which the poet takes on the voice of the protagonist from Tennessee Williams famous drama after she has been living in the asylum where she was committed at play’s end. Now back mentally from the fantasy world into which she retreated after her assault, thanks, she believes, to electroshock therapy, she now possesses a lucidity that makes intolerable the mind-numbing routine of the institution, where “the days unspool at the sewing machine/in the kitchen the garden the latrines” and where the patients “are either on duty or old biddies rocking in chairs.” She is part of a very mad world, witness to and perhaps victim of the asylum’s cruelties and abuses. As she realizes that the only means of escape involves a brutal medical procedure, she once again consigns herself to “the kindness of strangers.” Webster emphasizes the non-stop intensity of Blanche’s internal world by eliminating all punctuation, most notably periods.

As befits the moral reckoning at the heart of this collection, the tone of these poems is often serious, admonitory, but this book is not all regret and reprimand. One of the most enjoyable is “Homemade Blueberry Wine,” which is wonderfully funny, in contrast to the grief and grievance which characterize so much contemporary poetry. I would say that it reminds me of Al Purdy’s “Homemade Beer,” but confessing a knowledge (or worse still, an admiration) of that poet’s work is, in some editorial circles, tantamount to confessing a love for the verses on Hallmark greeting cards. Less comic but just as amusing is the sustained sarcasm of the five sections in “Dominion,” the last of which begins, “Our canoe keeps sinking/Something inside is too heavy/flowing in and out when seasons change/escaping all our frantic bailing.”

The sad state of our nation is reflected metaphorically in the title poem; It presumably refers to the poor beaver, which “chews up the book/of what it was…gnawing/ on itself, surviving on its wiles.” Equally metaphoric in its intent is “The Writing on the Wall,” which literally describes the efforts of a city worker who erases the ever-proliferating political and sexually suggestive graffiti on a Montreal building but symbolically suggests our willingness to forget dissension and unpleasantness, in keeping with the poet’s intention, stated in the interview mentioned earlier, to address “the gap between wishful thinking and what is actually going on.”

The final section of the collection, “The Thinker,” moves from the confines of the earth to the vast reaches of the cosmos, from the Big Bang to the universe’s end. Inspired by Wallace Stevens “The Auroras of Autumn” and informed by concepts in theoretical, experimental, and particle physics, with titles like “Singularity?Genesis” and “Entropy/Language,” the poems juxtapose these concepts with human development, the images and allusions centred on earth, as in the last poem, whose title is a nod to Douglas Adams’ novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. One of the most impactful poems in this section is “Movement/Contact,” which refers to the recordings sent into space on Voyager 1, in the hope that one of the civilizations hypothesized in Frank Drake’s famous equations on the possibility of extraterrestrial life might find them and respond. But the poem ends with a warning: “whoever we meet out there, along highways of dark matter or lonely spots between stars:/may they not do to us what we have done to ourselves.”

To hear that Webster’s editor at Signal Editions is poet Carmine Starnino is to expect poems with a distinctive style, precise imagery, and some sense of poetic heritage, and that is exactly what we get here. Let me end by returning to what he himself has called “the poet’s difficult task: to sing in ways that alert readers to what is important and unite people in a shared experience.”

Photo by Derek Otway on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Heather Debling

Flipping through some old notebooks recently, I came across the very first notes I made for the story that would become “Resilience.” The page is dated 2017, and there’s a working title of “Ms. Thrashings Grade (4s-5s?) Prepare for the Coming Apocalypse,” then a couple of paragraphs half-covered with a post-it, a scribbled note to myself about the possibilities for the voice (the collective we).

I distinctly remember the moment I had the idea for this story. I was working as an Assistive Technology Tutor, mainly with elementary students. Walking into a school one morning, I was stopped mid-stride by a question that contained a story: How would a teacher struggling with her own fear and grief about climate change prepare her students?

I probably wrote those initial notes in my notebook that evening after work. A couple more pages follow that first one, a list of possible apocalypses, one more short freewriting passage and then a list of descriptive details I could use.

And then there’s really nothing in my notebooks for the piece until spring 2019 when I decided to write the first draft.

That’s fairly typical for me. I have an idea for something, I do some initial writing in the first excited flush of that idea, but rarely more than a handful of pages. I might also make some notes, the barest bones of what the piece will become, but I don’t tend to start drafting right away. It’s usually months, but more often a year or two before I really start work on a piece, as was the case for “Resilience” and a previous story published in TNQ, “Count Your Blessings.”

“During a silent writing period, I sat at the desk, staring at the all too familiar blank page, fearing that again nothing would arrive. Out of desperation, I decided to write about what was right in front of me: some small, black, stick-like bugs. And there it was: my way into the story.”

When I did decide to write the first draft of “Resilience,” I remember it being a struggle to get started. A story usually arrives to me through voice, a voice speaking a particular first line. For this piece, I had a concept and I had the type of voice, but I didn’t have that first sentence.

There were a lot of false starts, a lot of writing sessions spent staring at a blank page or at the wall trying to will a beginning. Nothing seemed to be working. I went in that state of frustration to a weekend writing retreat. During a silent writing period, I sat at the desk, staring at the all too familiar blank page, fearing that again nothing would arrive. Out of desperation, I decided to write about what was right in front of me: some small, black, stick-like bugs. And there it was: my way into the story.

The rest of the story developed in a similar way. For the scenes set in the present timeline, the ones where the children are lost in the woods, I would go for walks around the river near my home, and some detail would catch my attention, and I would build an entire scene around that image. For the scenes from their past—the classroom scenes—they were also built on small details or images, but this time I pulled on my memories of teaching. Graphics organizers, a row of coat hangers, found object art projects, they were all very small, precise images in my mind that created the possibilities for each scene.

Rather than knowing the action and/or character development of the scene and mapping out the beats of the scene as I typically do—building a frame and then filling it in—I’d start with the smallest image and see what action could be built from that. In that way, the form of this piece felt much more organic, like the scenes grew in an entirely different and more natural way, a process that felt totally aligned with the story’s setting.

When I look back at the initial notes written in 2017, there’s not much there, but the essence of the story is. The basic concept, the theme of survival and what responsibility we have to others, the possibility of satire, and what has defined the story most for me: the first-person plural voice. As much as the story might change or evolve, the things that were fundamentally true about it, about the initial impulse for it, are still there.

And the morning I found those old notes? It was the day my contributor copies of Issue 170 arrived. More than seven years between idea and publication. When I tell the writers I teach and coach about it often taking 4-7 years for one of my stories to find its way into the world, I’ve seen their shoulders drop with relief, letting go—even momentarily—of the idea that we always have to go faster. Stories have their own timeline, and some of them take a long time to come into being, but I learn over and over again that their timing is always perfect.

Heather Debling is a fiction writer and playwright based in Stratford, Ontario. Her fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Agnes and True, The Antigonish Review, Room, and Tulip Tree Press’ 2021 Stories That Need to Be Told anthology. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and is also a creative writing instructor, developmental editor and writing coach who helps writers embrace their unique visions and creative processes.

Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash

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Indigenous History Month Reads

To commemorate Indigenous History Month and Indigenous Peoples Day, TNQ has collected a variety of works from across our publications which centre Indigenous stories and voices. These reads will be available, regardless of subscription status, until August.

In Conversation

“Keeping Good Company: A Profile of Richard Wagamese” by Bruce Johnstone

Richard Wagamese is a living, breathing example of how human beings take care of one another. “Human beings.” He uses the phrase often and it’s powerful. It’s a phrase we don’t often use in our community. Hearing this man say it, the phrase assumes a whole new meaning.

Poetry

“Pawatamihk (Dream)” by Catherine Phillips

But by then my flesh
was softened like cooked meat, peeling off the bone.
The whiteness of my skeleton, far too bright.
A great hell hidden in pieces.

“My Native Mother Mourns the Queen” by Melinda Burns

the Great White English mother
who presided over the land
that once belonged to your people

Two Poems by waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy

these months my ceremony
is an intentional gaze
into a smooth,
hollowed out,
porcelain moon—

Three Poems by Janet Rogers

Leaving my people to
Fight, flee or die
The strength of our identity
Quite independent of yours
Was formed before you were born
And doesn’t include hops and hockey

Fiction

“Tracks” by Alicia Elliott

With traffic it took me two and a half hours to drive here, ten minutes to find parking. St. George. One of the busiest subway stations in Toronto. Isolating even at capacity. It’s a depressing shade of green—one I imagine I’d find peeling from the walls of a crack house bathroom on the Trail.

Soundings

“The Dreamless Void” by Helen Knott

That’s why I went there. To erase myself. To crash into the other non-existents and melt into their ever-changing formation. People disappeared every day. Native women like me disappeared every day. Becoming an invisible Indigenous woman was a goal of manifest destiny that I was no longer willing to fight against.

“In A Canoe, Chasing My Métis Grandmother Like a Dummy” by Carleigh Baker

“I can’t put rocks where rocks don’t already exist. I can point out what a great lesson that rock had for you.”
“To pay attention?”
“And to ask for help when you need it,” Grandma C said. “But not from me. There are people here who want to help you. Their lives depend on you. Your lives depend on each other.”

Essays

“Half-breed” by Francine Cunningham

You’re one of the good ones. This phrase, this compliment that I am supposed to be grateful for is one strangers speak to me too often. And when I look them in eye and ask them what they mean, they stammer back, well you aren’t a drunk, you have a master’s degree, you’re working, you’re a good one.

“Soar” by Chyana Marie Sage

When I was twelve, I stood at a podium. The judge was before me, a little to the right, and further right still, was my father in handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit. I watched him. He was sobbing. I opened up my letter and began to read.

Writer At Large

“New Year’s Eve 1984” by Troy Sebastian

Back at the hotel there is celebration. People are partying. Mom, Sherry, and I wait for the elevator to come back to the lobby and bring us to our floor. It comes and we enter, stunned, broken, and beyond loss.

Photo by Jess Lindner on Unsplash

Finding the Form with Mark Anthony Jarman

This story comes out of very rough notes I wrote 40 years earlier, flimsy onionskin pages I recently found in a folder when cleaning out my UNB office (an extremely slow exit). The notes were from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was at the Iowa Workshop, then Yaddo, an artists’ colony in upstate NY, then Seattle and western Canada, and traveling many roads between those very different points. Hence the jumps in geographical and geological references.

Yaddo is a grand mansion, but I was flat broke, would put a group tab on my Visa card, collect cash from everyone for the bill, and live on that cash. John Cheever wrote a lot at Yaddo; I had a stripped copy of his Collected Stories with me, and I joked I also had his old-fashioned black metal lunchbox. Yaddo provides artists with breakfast and dinner in the mansion’s impressive dining room, but lunch was carried back to your room to keep the day free for work on projects. A night owl, I rarely made it to breakfast, so the black lunchbox was my breakfast.

I’m sure some pages were typed on an old electric typewriter I had at my parents’ house. Its letter E had come loose and was held by tape, but the letter had a mind of its own. Like musical notation, the E moved higher and higher on the page as I typed madly until the E flew across the room. I’d stop, find the errant letter E, and apply new Scotch tape.

“At first, I thought of a series of postcard stories, but the story, like the letter E, had a life of its own, the narrative morphing and growing into a much longer piece that quickly became the story ‘The Bodies.'”

I can tell that some notes in the folder are aimed at my novel Salvage King Ya, but others are clearly miscellaneous, not aimed anywhere, just the collections of a young magpie. Youthful diaries or stories are often embarrassing, and these notes are haphazard and rough, but when I found them, I saw fresh images and lines and characters and hope I’d be able to do something with all the pages.

At first, I thought of a series of postcard stories, but the story, like the letter E, had a life of its own, the narrative morphing and growing into a much longer piece that quickly became the story “The Bodies.” The process was not planned at all, and the writing and linking of many different parts went faster than expected, inducing some minor writerly guilt.

Some of the notes are biographical or about people I knew, and some are complete fiction, and the parts become mixed up, as happens to anyone writing. The tractor at the dump and paddlewheel boat by the lake are from my childhood. The herons and dangerous horses and the topless woman chasing a man with a whip or lunge-line are 100% true, and I hope the rural slapstick elements work, though someone wielding a whip is not always seen as comic or affectionate.

After my stays in Iowa and Yaddo, a summer job working on my brother-in-law’s Rick’s road-crew in the Rocky Mountains allowed me to pay off my hefty Visa bill. That fall I started teaching part-time in Calgary and the folder of notes moved with me, job to job, city to city, coast to coast, hidden for years, but becoming a thoughtful gift from my younger self, a present that waited four decades to arrive.

Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of Touch Anywhere to Begin, Czech Techno, Knife Party at the Hotel Europa, 19 Knives and the travel book Ireland’s Eye. Published in journals across Europe, Asia, and North America, he is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a fiction editor for The Fiddlehead. Burn Man, published in 2023 by Biblioasis, was an Editors’ Choice with The New York Times.

Photo by Tibor Pinter on Unsplash

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On Hope: A TNQ Community Poem

Night

Night has erased the trees, near and far, but a frog croaks,

Grieving.

The sullen, miserly, late-winter storm has finally blown itself out.

Under snow and the mattress of pine needles in a pallet of darkness, it is safe.

In every tear, a seed of hope silently grows.

In the glassy light of winter,

A town, Hope is the name, emerges in the distant mountains, offering light.

The way the light spreads oily on the candling snow,

At midnight, I tuck your name between a poem and a prayer.

A vessel for hope.

I learn stillness from the trees. Who stand, bud, and sway silently.

I breathe a little deeper and a little longer this time. I am alive.

An inhalation so long and so deep it seems as if time itself pauses.

These things that happened never happened at all,

these vagrant thoughts will still be ours.

A crow sharpens his song on the whetstone of dawn.

My vision captures the golden crest of the sun,

the quaking world opens, offering rebirth to earth, animals, humans, oceans.

Praised be the path of totality doodling across the opposite shore.

Sometimes in these mornings, I feel absolved.

In the winter’s chill, a lone robin sings of spring.

But the snow, the snow,

is a December child in the heart of wind.

A fresh spring breeze gusting against the tired backdrop of winter,

the trees, their branches broken by snow, bud with white blossoms.

The world has finally opened their eyes

to the horrors of your daily life.

You’re no longer standing alone, fighting

for your right to exist.

A wave of voices now echoes the same cry.

Winter always turns to spring,

darkness has no antonym for hope.

The tentacles of grief are as long as the bonds of love,

there are no instructions in this maze of days,

hope is a four-legged animal walking on two.

Through the oval looking glass, I witness the majesty of the nimbus clouds,

cross-stitched globs of light splintering across the horizon.

What to do with all this beauty?

I let myself be luminous in this dark almost-solstice,

where a stranger’s kind words play on repeat in my head.

Can we be freer than we ever thought?

With the wink of a child’s moon,

bright stones wink from the sidewalk. I dream they are diamonds.

A clock rings, dreams shatter and emerge,

but I pull myself up and carry on.

Dawn

After a long winter of silence, a tree frog lifts his voice and sings,

songbirds write on the blank slate of morning,

Buds, phlox, columbine, upturned soil and bits of green,

A gentle breeze kisses our foreheads,

The gritty inhospitable crack now harbors the mighty dandelion.

The sun rises behind the horizon, the shadows of despair retreat,

and there is something so magical about finding a place where you feel at peace.

Second by second the light grows rich–brighter, yet never blinding,

I now hear the birds sing louder than ever before;

hope comes with an etch, not an edge.

The sun rises with the tulip, again.

Shoots and showers are part of the promise of April.

From grey snow, a daffodil, with its flawless reach,

this blade of grass, cut down, cut short, yet growing still,

we continue to grow with the persistence of weeds.

She strutted out her new train, peeping. Five in black, five in yellow,

conflict-free at last she entertained a reknitting of the brain.

Her ocean orbs stare into my bleeding heart,

Stirring a soup thick with regret,

She was the meringue centre bouncing in a jello mold.

We tilt our heads to catch the sun shafting through the tops of forest trees.

The return of rivers to rain and of rain to rivers,

as sure as water knows its way through solid rock, hope endures in every breath,

the riotous jazz of returning blackbirds,

feel Mother Earth’s love through the soles of bare feet.

Wellspring lifts her warm apricot breast

spilling ripe nectar into an unbroken carol of dawn.

The magnolia tree in my front garden, a calligraphy of white-pink song birds,

Sunlight on my skin cannot crack the carapace that binds my soul.

My soul soars in harmony as the sun kissed my skin.

Hope wakes me in the morning,

Cherry blossoms amid sirens, poems bloom in my mind

If poets are odd, may the odds be in our favour,

for loving love pleases us so, our forlonging too, may ease our lows

Despair can never share the power that flutters with hope.

Finding a fragment of meaning in an empty day,

Like a shard of glass in the carpet–a sudden crystalline clarity,

sharp edges slicing against emptiness,

a refusal of completion

but an undeniable presence.

Reaching out

a soft palm, fingers splayed open,

like when you feed horses apple wedges

My hope

is that outstretched hand.

Day

Frogsong at night above the howling wind. Birdsong in the frigid dawn.

Summer through the canopy brings days long in love.

Reminder of innocent pleasure, like laughing with a snorter,

who tips over her cusp of chortle control,

that was then, before.

Light as airmail paper, away she flew,

Always finding peace, continue the search,

even when you don’t want to admit

that blazes correct what bears our watermarks,

don’t let being lost spoil the fun of not knowing where you are.

A spring of wren song, drenched in chartreuse and blue,

because the sun’s call melts April snow, cups daffodil chins: “breathe!”

I’ll join the cheerful sandbox anarchy,

This liminal space

where even Dad’s Friday night drinking might be more friendly.

Here is the storm, necessary to spread the seeds

and when they buried us, we took root.

A faint sorrow rain can erase,

a tiny lion cradled by bombardment-you are born of us,

Old grievances wither at a human’s touch.

One by one, glittering above the Goddesses, star lights orchestrated the dance

The river and the woman walking by it

Singing

We wade through the stars, the suns at our feet,

The sun’s eclipse: a lesson for us all.

The shadow of the light etches the shape of a dragonfly’s wing on concrete,

Flying in the face of it all,

Hope opens the power of a universal spirit,

2023 and 2024 were amazing because of you;

Your dad. He would be so proud of how you all turned out.

Brazen, beautiful wind turbines, sentinels of the Rockies,

The delicate feather of hope from a phoenix,

Await the sunlight on the lake,

Even ugly flowers want to be picked.

Let laughter leak through your open windows as night.

Love is real, everything else changes.

Coffee is my love language and you fill my cup,

wild yeast uplift a loaf of bread,

Magic we cannot see but only taste and trust,

The way faith is called blind.

I’ll leave, pave my own path and fight the good fight,

knowing you’ll still be there beside me.

Learning now to trust in the next chapter of your life

Even when “Evil Never Dies.”

Isn’t tomorrow a great reason to stay for one more day?

Amidst the ash, a single green blade

reached cell by cell toward the sky.

The feathers don’t let go of the bird.

My pen burrows into the page;

It’s a messy kind of brave.

This Poem was created by:

Al, Alister Elya, Alysa JK Loring, Ama Ita Ose, Amber, Ana Dee, Anna Barvinok, Aviva Dale Martin, Barbara Caffery, Barbara Kordas, Bernadette, Biswajit Mishra, Bobbie Jean Huff, Brenda Sciberras, C. Ray, C.L. Boll, CA, Casey Flannigan, Cindy Webb Morris, Clare Mehta, Connie Madoc, Connie Yu, C. Scott Bryant, D Lee, D S Blenkhorn, Dagne Forrest, Dandarod, Deborah B, dee Hobsbawn-Smith, Deirdre Laidlaw, Derek Webster, Diane Massam, Elana Wolff, Eleni, Elisabeth Weiss, Elsie K Neufeld, Everet Almost There, Frank Beltrano, G E Welch, Gnilffus, Guy Chambers, Heather Bonin MacIntosh, Honey Novick, Inna Rasitsan, Jane Litchfield, Janet Pollock Millar, Janine Tschuncky, Jann Everard, Jennifer Londry, John Morris, Josée Sigouin, K.G McLeod, K.L. Healey, Karen Motyka, Kate Marshall Flaherty, Kathleen Brammall, Kayla MacIntosh, Kim J, K. J. Munro, Krista Winston, Lauren Carter, Laurie Anne Fuhr, Leslie Ramslie, Lily Finch, Linda Hatfield, Liz Gauthier, LouAnn Buhrows, lucy, Maha, Margarita Van, Marianne Guimond White, Mary Barnes, Maryann Martin, Max Vandersteen, MEB, Megan C, Michael, Michael McKinnon, Michael Stringer, Michele Rule, Michelle Weglarz, MWriterly, Mysterytail, Nan Purre, Nash Lott, Natalie Morrill, Nicholas Ruddock, Nicole Nigro, NJ Drake, Olivia Vanderwal, Orianna LRJ, Oswald Graden, Pamela Dillon, Pamela Mosher, Pamela Porter, Patti Lott, Paul Vase, Puneet Dutt, Rebecca Clifford, Rebecca Wellington, redpillsigma, Ric Perron, Rosa Frank, Rose Camara, Roy Blomstrom, Ruth Kennedy, S D Chrostowska, S. Godwins, Sange73, Shauna Grace Andrews, Shayda, Sheryl Niven, Soma Datta, Stephen Markan, Suey Mardelli, there, Thyra, Ursula Trousers, Van Waffle, Virginia Boudreau, Yvonne Blomer

What’s Kasia Jaronczyk Reading?

What is your escapist read? What do you keep re-reading, perhaps in secret, because you are embarrassed to admit to loving a certain book to friends with a sophisticated literary taste? Every novel is escapist in some way, so I prefer to call them comfort books. We turn to them when we are anxious, depressed, or experiencing a loss. I’d like to share mine, with the hope they will console and restore you before you need to re-engage with brutal reality.

I can categorize my comfort books into three groups: 1 – literary novels, which are completely absorbing and intellectually engaging, 2 – novels, which feature characters who are also writers, either fictional or historical, and 3 – beloved books from my childhood.

Four years ago my life drastically changed – my beloved mother died suddenly and unexpectedly in early March 2020, and the following pandemic significantly shrank the fabric of my life – as a person with an autoimmune disorder I’m still avoiding crowded indoor spaces and have to limit my social life. I found consolation and escape in re-reading the Neapolitan quartet by Elena Ferrante, (My Brilliant Friend; The Story of a New Name; Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay; and The Story of the Lost Child), and the three volumes of the living autobiography by Deborah Levy (Things I Don’t Want to Know; The Cost of Living; and Real Estate). I have read all available books by Ferrante and Levy multiple times, but especially love the ones listed here, and each time I become completely engrossed. The Neapolitan novels describe a female friendship starting in childhood until middle age, with all its romantic complications and family and neighbourhood entanglements, against a backdrop of social and economic changes in Naples from the 1950s to early 2000s It’s an incredible, immersive read, with a complex narrative and yet easy to follow, and with characters so real and engaging that I cannot put it down every time I read it. Everything disappears as I become absorbed in Lenu’s inner world and life.

Reading Deborah Levy is like having a riveting, intellectually stimulating conversation with a strong and wise woman, a self-aware, empathetic, and perceptive human being. I want to write and be like her. Interestingly, at one point Deborah Levy contemplates pretending to be Elena Ferrante (who writes under a pseudonym and her identity is unknown), to crash a literary party. Levy also writes about her mother and her own motherhood, the subjects I’m preoccupied with as I’m currently working on a memoir about my mother and our relationship.

When I found a Polish Translation of My Brilliant Friend in a Polish bookstore near Mississauga I wanted to buy it for my mother. She would have loved it. In the middle of that very night my father called me with the devastating news that my mother had died.

My literary addiction is reading books featuring fictional writers and their struggles; I can never get enough. My oldest favourite is called Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. by Debra Weinstein, which I had bought decades ago on a whim from a bookstore discount table. It’s about Annabelle who is obsessed with “what is poetry” and who becomes a mentee of Z. – a celebrity poet and professor with a reputation of “eating her assistants”. It’s a comic novel about poetry, poetry scandals, extramarital affairs, romance and literary thefts. It’s light-hearted with lovable, engaging characters. Another favourite, Writers and Lovers by Lily Kings is about a 30-something year old Casey struggling to finish her novel while grieving for her mother, working, and becoming entangled with two different literary men. The writing is graceful and insightful, and Casey is an endearing character who finds love and creative fulfilment. A very similar novel about two sisters, one of whom is an aspiring playwriter who somewhat thoughtlessly uses her sister’s marriage crisis as a subject of her play is Playing Games by Huma Qureshi.

My new discovery is Mrs. Gaskell and Me (or, in the American edition, The Victorian and the Romantic), by Nell Stevens. This amazing literary novel uses Mrs. Gaskell’s unrequited love for her American friend, Charles Eliot Norton as a foil for the love struggles of Nell, an academic writing a paper about Mrs. Gaskell and her biography of Emily Brontë. This brilliant novel questions the idea of truth in biography, pokes gentle fun at literary scholarship obsessions, writing groups and ingeniously interweaves the two timelines. Nell Stevens’ other two novels, Bleaker House (about an isolated writer working on a novel and finding the writing becoming real) and Briefly, A Delicious Life (about a ghost narrator in love with George Sand) is just as stunning, cleverly inventive and worth repeated readings.

“In addition to offering escapism into their pink-tinged fictional worlds, these books are a time portal to my childhood.”

I read voraciously as a child and the books that I still return to have shaped and guided my nascent identity as a writer. They include Anne of Green Gables and the Emily series by L.M. Montgomery, which were very popular in Poland in the 1980s where I grew up. I love the slow-paced Victorian world of small communities with their gossip, but also neighbourly care, optimism, belief in the goodness of people, and the purple-prose descriptions of nature which formed my own sensitivity to its beauty. In addition to offering escapism into their pink-tinged fictional worlds, these books are a time portal to my childhood. My father borrowed Anne of GG from a church library and read it to me when I was in preschool, before I was able to read it myself. The Emily books are filled with practical writing advice my preteen-self found useful at the time when manuals for writing fiction and creative writing courses didn’t exist in Poland. They were also the first books I bought to read in English during my earliest months in Canada. My old copy of Anne of GG still has Polish translations delicately pencilled in above certain words.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer. Her novel Voices in the Air is upcoming from Palimpsest Press in winter 2025. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish- Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her short fiction was short-listed for Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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Launched: Cocktail by Lisa Alward

Lisa Alward’s first book, Cocktail, was published by Biblioasis last fall. Alward’s stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories as well as The Journey Prize Stories. She grew up in Halifax and worked for several years in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where she lives with her husband, John.

Q: First, let’s talk about the very positive critical reception that Cocktail has received since it was released. And it was longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize and is a finalist for a New Brunswick Book Award. Congratulations! As a debut author, and as the author of a book of short stories, what were your expectations going in? How have you processed this good news?

Well, I was not expecting to be on the Carol Shields long list. Right after I heard, I had to update my bio and compose a quote for the prize foundation and struggled all morning trying to come up with any words at all. Later, after I’d had a chance to process the announcement more, I felt deeply honoured and still do, in no small part because Carol Shields is one of my fiction muses. (Swann was my favourite novel in my 20s and ditto The Stone Diaries in my 30s. And her writing journey has always inspired me: how for years she could only write in the hour and a bit before her five children came home for lunch and how she didn’t publish her first novel until 40.)

As for my expectations going in, I’m conscious of having kept these deliberately, almost forcibly, low. This has had as much to do with self-protection as with any rational assessment of the prospects for a first collection of stories. I haven’t wanted to feel disappointed, to let that mar the pleasure of having a book out in the world after so many years of believing this would never happen. During production, I remember telling myself that all that matters is creating a beautiful object I can share with family and friends. That I got this, as well as so many thoughtful reviews and two prize nominations, still feels like a dream.

Q: The stories in Cocktail are varied in their settings and conflicts but connected by theme—women in relationships, navigating their own desires versus what is expected of them, whether that’s by their husbands, children, parents, other mothers, or society. Your characters look askance at the conditions of their life, quietly appalled. They’re digging into the past, exposing sedimentary layers, often with wry observations.

What is it about the changing conditions of women’s lives that fascinates you, artistically? Is it the small details, or politics of the day, or something else that is a springboard into story for you?

For me, the springboard is almost always an image. Often this is more of a fragment, the picture in my mind not at all clear at first. Occasionally, as in my title story, it’s just a piece of remembered speech. The problem with parties is people don’t drink enough. My mother really did say this once, and I laughed, just like my narrator in the story. Yet, however vague it may be, there are feelings attached to this image, feelings that interest me, that I don’t fully understand, that keep pricking at me, and in a sense the story becomes an exploration of all that. This, I guess, is my round-about way of saying that I don’t tend to think in terms of theme and certainly not politics, certainly not at the outset. I’m too preoccupied with uncovering the story. I love Stephen King’s metaphor of stories as fossils, or relics, “part of an undiscovered pre-existing world,” and the writer’s challenge being getting as much of one out of the ground as possible. It does feel as though I’m excavating.

Later on, I can see themes in my work. All those quietly appalled women you mention, like Laura in “Hyacinth Girl” and Ruth in “Bundle of Joy,” wondering how they let themselves get so stuck. And safety — what lengths we’ll go to stay safe and yet the risks we’re also prepared to take to get what we want. Doubt, I think, is another theme. Deborah in “Little Girl Lost,” for instance, has left her children for a lover but finds herself worrying over his endearments, clinking her memories of these together like beads on a rosary. And then there are all the repeating images: the messy houses and failed artist figures, the natural environments that seem alien or frightening, all those stubbed cigarettes and half-empty glasses. But this recognition seems to come from a long way off in my brain. Filling out marketing forms definitely helped! So have reviews. I feel I’ve learned so much from other readers.

Q: Doubt is a rich vein. That reminds me of Gwyneth’s (justifiable!) doubt about her ex-partner Ray’s plans to finish a tumbledown cottage and cultivate an organic garden in “Old Growth,” a story I have loved since it first appeared in The New Quarterly.

According to your bio, you began writing fiction at the age of 50. Your book came out when you were 61, which I only know because you mentioned it in an interview or perhaps a social media post. It struck me at the time: you owned this fact with pride, and I wanted to ask you about your perceptions of our writing culture with respect to age. The notion that an emerging writer is often synonymous with young writer. That pressure on writers to produce quickly—and yet, we have many examples of first books published successfully after 50. Did it worry you, before you pulled together your manuscript?

While you could argue that Carol Shields didn’t really start that late, I’m definitely a late bloomer. Although I wrote throughout my childhood and teenaged years, I had pretty much stopped by the end of university. For a long time, almost three decades long, I accepted what seemed so painfully obvious to me at 22: that I simply wasn’t cut out to be a writer, that I lacked not only talent but the necessary stamina and grit. Looking back now, though, I can see that U of T in the early 80s was not a particularly nurturing environment for a young aspiring female writer from the Maritimes with low-ish self-confidence. For one, there was the problem of the courses required for my English specialist, which were still astonishingly male-centric in those days. I did take a fourth-year seminar from one of the few female professors in the department (who introduced me to Virginia Woolf), but as penance I had to put up with a male classmate constantly challenging her literary authority. Outside the ivory tower, women were writing, but inside it felt as if only the guys counted. I remember chatting with another aspiring fiction writer at a house party. He was Irish with the beard and slight stoop of a young Joyce. “I want to write too,” I confessed over my draft beer, and I could tell he thought that he was letting me down gently when he mused, “Well, there aren’t a lot of important woman writers.” And the worst part? The only rebuttal I could think of was the Brontës.

Fear of failure was no doubt also a factor. I didn’t know in my 20s that writing is mired in failure, that this is one fear you never get over. At any rate, after my MA, I gave up the idea of trying to write and looked around for a writing-adjacent job in publishing and then — as in To the Lighthouse — time passed. When I finally dared to try fiction again at 50, it took me eight years to compile enough good stories for a book. That book came out last September when, as you note, I was 61. I’m not sure I’d go far as to say I own the fact of my age, but it is a fact, and I try not to be embarrassed or discomforted by it. And while we do associate emerging writers with youth, there’s thankfully no cut-off age for starting to write. This is the literary world after all, not Hollywood. Not tennis! However, I am a slow writer, or I have been up to now. I write usually four or five drafts of a story and then tinker, tinker, tinker. I would certainly like to write my next book a little faster, not so much because of that pressure to perform, which I agree is out there, as the sense that I might not have much time left.

Q: As someone who worked in literary publishing long ago, you likely had more insight than most into the processes involved in bringing a Canadian literary title to market. But it’s different being the author, of course. What surprised you about the publishing process, and the launching of your book into the world?

I worked in publishing from 1985 to 1994, first as a publicist for Dundurn Press, then as a rep with the sales agency Cariad, then as sales manager for the Literary Press Group, and, after my daughter was born, as a freelance publicist and marketing consultant. Once my husband and I moved to Fredericton, I continued to freelance, including doing some proofreading and copy editing. If I learned anything valuable about being an author from these experiences, it’s humility. There’s nothing like spending your days pitching poetry and fiction by first-time authors to tired booksellers or leaving yet another phone message with the producer of Morningside to make you appreciative of how hard it is to get a book noticed, especially one from an independent (i.e., Canadian-owned) publisher, and I feel so grateful to Biblioasis for all their incredible work on Cocktail’s behalf.

If anything has surprised me, it’s how insulated I am as an author from publishing’s front lines. Apart from filling out those marketing forms and giving my thoughts on cover design and, of course, showing up for things, I’ve had very little do with sales and marketing. No complaints, by the way! Another surprise is the whole community aspect. I’m now in touch with writers across the country and have heard from so many old friends as well as strangers who’ve read and enjoyed my book. This has been a tremendous source of joy.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’m just starting work on a new collection. The story that I think could become the title story is inspired by a family drama from my childhood. After my grandfather died, my grandmother made a rash and disastrous second marriage to a handyman who’d lived for years two doors down from her in the same village on Nova Scotia’s south shore. This was in 1967, the Summer of Love, and gifts of flowers were involved. Four years later, my mother and her sister “kidnapped” her. How they came to this decision and what actually happened that morning has always intrigued me, and I’m excited to see what else I might discover.

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

Carolyn Smart’s Writing Space

38 years ago when my husband and I bought this house in the middle of the woods we added on two rooms: a bedroom in the attic, and my writing space. It’s a large and airy room, filled with light, and has now become a sort of greenhouse for which I am
especially grateful in the winter.

The desk on the far eastern side of the room once belonged to my mother and is a treasured piece. The view from where I sit looks deep into the woods and in Spring a very marshy area popular with ducks and deer. Once I saw two wolves running through the trees. Last year I saw a river otter hopping past.

On the southern side of the room is an old table that features a grouping of ornamental elephants I have collected throughout my life. They are spread around cacti and succulents that love the sun.

I need quiet and peace in which to write, and I have both in abundance in this room. I am surrounded by my favourite books, family photographs, and memorabilia from years
of writing and teaching.

Carolyn Smart has written six collections of poetry including Careen, Hooked, and The Way to Come Home (all from Brick Books). A section of her memoir At the End of the Day (Penumbra Press) won 1^st prize in the CBC Literary Contest, Non-Fiction category. For three decades she taught Creative Writing at Queen’s University. She is the founder of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and since 2021 has worked as an editor and mentor for emerging writers.

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Mina Sharif’s Writing Space

I do love to write at the library, but I can only do that if the high school kids aren’t hanging out in the study section. Otherwise, I hear the sound of a considerate teenager next to me, trying to eat chips quietly, torturing my nervous system in the process. When I’m home, I sit in a place that says to me, “You can and will do this.” It was once a little room in the basement, no longer in use, hosting a bed, a dusty treadmill, a lot of dark paint, and a hideous carpet. Until one day, mid-pandemic, I was struck with a “You can and will do this” determination. I decided the space could be reborn, and I would make it happen. Would this be the “new normal”? Social distancing and tackling home renovation projects on tiny budgets? I can confirm four years later—I still feel socially distanced, but the renos were a one-off.

Anyway, I DID make the room over. I ripped out the carpet and researched how the city prefers you dispose of fuzzy trash. I painted walls and installed brighter lighting.

I filled my personal space with colours and fabrics that speak to who I am and what I love. While I have a standard desk that does the trick, what I love is peering over my screen and being surrounded by my own creation. The diffuser bubbles and fills the room with the scent of cardamom oil. I sit directly across from my reading spot, a floor couch with my pillow covers from Afghanistan. The side table I found on the street, now painted coral, another piece in gold. I look back down at my keyboard, and say to myself, “You can, and will.” We are all creators.

Mina Sharif lives in Scarborough, where she advocates for the rights of Afghan people through cultural advisory services, voluntary aid work and public speaking. Her essays and commentary have appeared in various publications including Al Jazeera, Teen Vogue and Femina Magazine. As an emerging author of fiction, Mina aims to challenge stereotypes and present a multifaceted view of Afghanistan. Mina was shortlisted for the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award in 2023 and is currently longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize.

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