Interview with 2025 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Winner Callista Markotich

John Vardon, Lead Poetry Editor, in conversation with Callista Markotich on her poem “Holiday in France” winner of The Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest for 2025. The poem appears in Issue 176 of The New Quarterly.

John Vardon: You have had some success with this contest, and your prose and poetry have appeared in previous issues both in print and online, including an interview with Kim Jernigan in which you talked about the very personal inspiration for your previous winning OV poem “Fugue”. Can you tell us something about the trip that acted as impetus for “Holiday in France”, and, apparently your honourable-mention poem, “Love and War at Dieppe”? Has it inspired other poems?

Callista: Doesn’t that title fly high—and it was trippy! The weather was magnificent, cuisine tantalizing, shadows of nuns and nobles drifted above cool, stone-floored cathedrals, satisfying our historical/romantical appetites, and yes, there were the picturesque wine-chateaux on the Loire, yet this trip had roots in work. It was 1991, and I’d  been appointed Principal at an immersion school in our board, the first non-Francophone principal there. This was an excellent reason to enrol in an intensive language summer school in Nice, France—both perk and  assignment. My husband Don was enthusiastic.  A WWII buff, he would get to indulge his interest in authentic sites, Dieppe, and the Invasion Beaches of  Normandy.

We flew to Amsterdam, rented a Peugeot and drove to Province in a memory-packed road-trip. How strange to never know which of the millions of moments in our lives would come back to us in full colour and sound! The Dieppe poem came first, subject of a personal hotspot – Don’s attraction to war-lore. The moment shines for me as if we stood there today, I staring resentfully at the stones in his hand. But Love and War in Dieppe is an almost unrecognizable third or fourth iteration of the memory and meaning of the treacherous stones on the Dieppe beach. Earlier versions focussed on aspects of the Dieppe Raid: tanks unable to obtain purchase on these stones, evident negligence in the planning of the Canadian foray, my general discomfort with war: I could smack them from his hands!  But in the current poem, I strove to unearth a more generous message. I had to dig deeper to see that awe and respect are not improper responses to courage and sacrifice, in fact, they are akin to love. Which must prevail.  In doing that work, a floodgate of memory opened to the more tender grief we felt in common about the lost warriors. The events of Holiday in France took place in a lovely, leafy  German Military Cemetery above an invasion beach, where Don and I shared the painful realization of their boyhood, these very young teenagers recruited in desperation late in the war to be foot soldiers in the German army. 

And although I didn’t write them, there was so much material for other poems! A canal tour-guide in Amsterdam, eighteen or nineteen, raising his young face toward the pretty scatter of cumulus cloud in blue,  sick boredom with us tedious tourists, his personal doldrums clashing with his impressive presence, this good-looking boy whose language proficiency stunned us, as he trotted out cultural and historic information in perfect French, English, German, and Netherlandic. That irony jabbed me: I, fumbling in inelegant French, but oh so happy, though so gauche. There were heartbreaking moments, too. One gravestone bore the chiselled words: 

For you, Frank, peace. 

For us, everlasting memories.  

If sadness is a wellspring of creativity, there it was. Neither of us could read that salutation aloud, tight throats for Frank, for his loved ones, for everyone who bears loss, for everyone.

John Vardon: Visiting a graveyard, cemetery or churchyard is a familiar theme (especially in poetry) largely because few other places remind us so insistently of our mortality, but what moves your poem from familiarity to freshness is evidence of poetic craft. I love how the repeated “ands” in the first seven lines accelerate the poem to a kind of collision–the sobering reality that these warriors were not young men, as is so often depicted, but barely into their teens. Then there are images of toys and texts and tools, chosen to reflect the urban and rural but also suggesting school, the one thing they have in common, and each image hints at things left aside hurriedly in the rush for recruitment. I also like the lines “the Atlantic shrugged her shining shoulders, the beautiful, helpless sea” where the word “helpless” literally suggests more indifference than vulnerability, its usual meaning. Of course I may be like the dreaded English teachers of the past who supposedly read too much into the poems they were praising. Can you say something about the style of your poems in both syntax and diction, to use that old-fashioned word.

Callista: Allow me to maintain that you didn’t read too much into this poem, and thank you! I wanted the diction I used to enhance the liveliness of that glorious morning in the stately  cemetery, made less sombre because of the softening effects of time. I wanted to emphasize the “quick” (as opposed to the dead) with the mention of the grasses springing with crickets and the Atlantic glittering her sapphires. I hoped the repeated “and” would create a sense of unstructured vacation activity – us, wandering like tourists until we come to the math on the stones, simple math – until breached with the realization how small the number between birth and death, the youth of these dead. Just boys. After that, I wanted the lustre the of the natural world to be affrontive, or at least ironic. The bluest sky, the beautiful sea, the loveliness of the natural world, absolute and enduring as it is, can’t comfort us, mocks us, almost, when we human beings choose an ugly and destructive course of behaviour. And I, wanting to write a meaningful thing in the visitors log, a thing to connect us humans in feeling, the way we poets always want to, was also helpless. My first book editor, John Wall Barger, is purposeful about “breaking the heart”, sharing a depth of feeling with the reader. I tried to do that. As for syntax, it seems to me a conventional grammatical approach serves the remembering and retelling of an occasion like this one, and, handily for me, it is my inclination to write that way. I also tried to be faithful to my memory—this was one of those that I see in almost cinematic detail. I do remember the angst, wanting to think of something to write to capture the sadness, twisting the chain on the pen, having no more agency than the sea.   

John Vardon: The judges were impressed with many things in “Did You Know Our Mother Read to Us of You?” – both in sense and sound. They noted the poem as a pleasant and welcome reverie in evoking the mother’s voice reading Winnie the Pooh to her (and siblings?) as a child,  a memory triggered by seeing in a roadside paddock a donkey with a “purple boiled-wool coat on its broad back,” reminding her of the ever-pessimistic Eeyore of A.A. Milne fame. Also noted were its  phonetic qualities of assonance sibilance, and alliteration: (“The restive horses merely roll their eyes, content to twitch their tails at peace”). What nearly escaped notice was a seemingly insignificant detail of punctuation, in this case the use of a colon at the end of the first stanza in the line “Love is why:”. This seems to direct readers to the real focus of the poem, not the delightful donkey, but the enduring memory of the mother. None of these critical details is directly relevant to this question, but do suggest to me that this poem was composed with special care, loving care, to resort to a cliché. What can you tell us about the composition of this poem?

Callista: This poem about a donkey came well after my first brash bash of words trying to express the special something about donkeys! I had to abandon every powerful thing about GK Chesterton’s donkey, my editor John Barger’s stated draw toward the pretty animal, forget references to Omeir’s sweet donkey in Antony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land. I’d heard somewhere that people are drawn to the proportions of a donkey—the large head relative to the body—because it resembles the ratio of  children’s heads to bodies, and we love that about children, with their expressive, full-size eyes and long eyelashes, which donkeys also have. Alternately, I learned that donkey are prized as livestock protectors because of their discordant bray and dangerous kick!  There was so much content burdening  my cumbersome early drafts, I had to jettison everything and see what was left. What could I write about the animal on the Moreland Dixon road, a treasured  sighting of a small beast in a farmstead near where we lived, a little donkey wearing a purple boiled-wool coat in a pastoral paddock. 

What was left? A soft evening, a pastoral scene,  a note of deference to the donkey’s practical worth in the barnyard, and evidence of love—a purple coat—and then, admittedly, the donkey Eeyored , a conduit for me, my  remembering my mother, my mother reading to us from AA Milne. A poem this soft and misty, dreamy and suggestible would have to pump up the feeling with poetic devices. I really tried to create images for the brain’s eye to see and  musicality for its ear to hear. Strange and wonderful how, when feeling is attached to a moment of memory, it comes back in vivid technicolour. The specially remembered moment wants to please,  wants to have readers recognize something and have their own revelation, wants to become a poem

You can explore Callista Markotich’s poem, published in Issue 176: Waiting For the New today.