Train : a journal of investigation

Issue #2 : Michael Aird Chris Banks Erin Bedford Shannon Bramer Aidan Chafe Allison Chisholm Daniel Cowper Catherine Graham James Lindsay Dominik Parisien Constance Schultz Isabella Wang

A limited amount of copies will be available for free at the following locations:

Open Books: A Poem Emporium (Seattle WA), Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop (Brooklyn NY), knife| fork | book (Toronto ON) and the ottawa small press book fair, November 24, 2018 (Ottawa ON).

includes shipping

Canadian $4.00 CAD American $6.00 CAD International $8.00 CAD

Michael Aird lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He recently completed his first full-length manuscript, Something to Eat and Drink on Every Page.

Chris Banks is the author of four previous collections of poems. His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.  His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, Prism International, among other publications. He lives and writes in Waterloo, Ontario.

Erin Bedford’s work is published in William Patterson University's Map Literary, Flash Fiction Magazine and The Temz Review. She attended and won a Certificate of Distinction for her novel Fathom Lines from the Humber School for Writers. Currently, she is acting as shill for her second novel, Illumining, and has just completed a manuscript of poetry. Follow her to find out more @ErinLBedford

Shannon Bramer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Precious Energy, with Book*hug. Her plays The Hungriest Woman in the World, The Collectors and Monarita were all produced thanks to the dramaturgy and support of the Women’s Work Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Shannon has a children’s book forthcoming from Groundwood in March 2019.

Aidan Chafe is a writer and public school teacher. His debut collection of poems Short Histories of Light was published with McGill-Queen’s University Press (2018). His work has appeared in literary journals including CV2, Event, PRISM international and The Maynard. He lives on the unceded territory of the Qayqayt First Nation (Burnaby, BC).

Allison Chisholm is an award-winning pie baker. She lives and writes in Kingston, Ontario. She played glockenspiel in the Hawaiian-Dream-Pop band SCUB. Her poetry has appeared in The Northern Testicle Review (Proper Tales Press) and The Dollhouse (Puddles of Sky Press). Her chapbook, On the Count of One, was published in 2017 (Proper Tales Press). Her forthcoming book of poetry, On the Count of None, will be released this fall through Anvil Press. She is the curator of The Museum of Tiny Objects.

Daniel Cowper’s first book of poetry is forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press. His chapbook, The God of Doors, was published by Frog Hollow Press as co-winner of its chapbook contest. Daniel and his wife serve as the poetry editors for Pulp Literature, and live mostly in a small cabin on Bowen Island, BC.

Catherine Graham is a Toronto-based writer of poetry and fiction. Among her six poetry collections The Celery Forest was named a CBC Books Top 10 Canadian Poetry Collection of 2017 and appears on their Ultimate Canadian Poetry List. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and CAA Award for Poetry and her debut novel Quarry won an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for fiction. She received an Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Toronto and was also winner of IFOA’s Poetry NOW. Her work is anthologized internationally and she has appeared on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @catgrahampoet.

James Lindsay is the author of the poetry collection Our Inland Sea (Wolsak and Wynn) and the chapbook Ekphrasis! Ekphrasis! (Anstruther Press). He has a regular column for Open Book where he interviews poets about their work. He is also the owner of Pleasence Records, a Toronto-based record label. 

Dominik Parisien’s work can be found in The Fiddlehead, Wordgathering, Plenitude, Exile: The Literary Quarterly, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His poetry chapbook, We, Old Young Ones, is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press. He is also the co-editor, with Navah Wolfe, of The Starlit Wood, which won the Shirley Jackson Award, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with Elsa Sjunneson-Henry. Dominik is a disabled, bisexual, French Canadian. He lives in Toronto.

Constance Schultz has often been stopped by trains although now she doesn't see them much.  She has writing in various journals and literary magazines including Figroot Press, The Seattle Star, Empty Mirror, Stonecoast Review and some are forthcoming in Them Dam Writers.

Isabella Wang: I am an emerging Chinese-Canadian writer living in Vancouver B.C. My poetry and prose have appeared previously in The New Quarterly and Looseleaf Magazine. At 17, I am the youngest writer to be shortlisted for The New Quarterly’s 2017 Edna Staebler Essay Contest. I will be studying English at SFU in the fall of 2018, while serving as an intern for Room Magazine.

Of Senility

Michael Aird

dribbling a constant Standard & Poor’s
fixity for youngsters, as far as
primary production—I too
lovingly gaze at the brute strength now used
for lifts and transfers—just don’t get him shouting
if you’re going to reminisce about
brick and mortar or Made in America—
success might be nothing but a decay
in volatility, the lull that looks like
what analysts describe as
most afternoon naps—the general
could be close to anesthetic in such
an equilibrium—but every donation
is still meant to guarantee
that wage rigidity feels as bad as
putting the socks on, pulling off
caregiver preferences—
it’s been repeated optimally
until you can no longer distinguish
having from not having one



Michael Aird lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He recently completed his first full-length manuscript, Something to Eat and Drink on Every Page.

Girl in Transit

Téa Mutonji

we talk about trauma in between

tasking dishes and beer orders:

last night, two little girls were shot in a park

whenever my ex-boyfriend touched me
I thought twice before showing affection
affection leads to obsession obsession leads to
crazy crazy leads to borderline borderline leads
to bipolar bipolar leads to what the guy before
the last would say every time I said, I love you
you hurt me— “there’s no pain in love, repeat after
me,” no pain in love love in pain, no
it’s been years now, he would say, “tell yourself
it didn’t happen and you’ll believe it
also, bend down for me, show me how good you
are at blowjobs.” I am good at other things too:
table number 242 has ordered two rolling rocks
one for himself and one for his brother
who he left behind a little girl who thinks goth is sexy
I offer him a tequila on the house—this house!
I’ve taken naps on the bar wood
have gotten naked in the staff room
have made love in the parking lot
(making love is what happens when
a cock slips inside a cunt and nobody knows why)
“a transaction,” Mother said
those two little girls are sisters
they will be taught how to perform
their mother will be charge by the hour
the littlest one is now twenty-seven years old
her boyfriend says “it’s all in the past now”
she hears the gunshot whenever the faucet runs
solution: she drinks her own saliva
another waitress comes up—her eyes are deep
like a toilet bowl, whenever she blinks
I hear it flush, “How are you?”
my ex-boyfriend was good at this—his head was so bald
I could crack an egg on it, at night
I’d count the hair follicle on his head
afraid to wake up and forget how I got here
solution? I never slept
there’s an empty mason jar on my bedside table
I keep it there in case I need the reminder
the waitress reminds me
they were just little girls.



Téa Mutonji is a Congolese-born writer currently living in Scarborough. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bad Nudes, The Temz Review, and Minola Review. Mutonji’s debut collection of short fiction will be the first title published under Vivek Shraya’s newest imprint, VS. Books, in association with Arsenal Pulp Press.

Yet Another Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Catherine Graham
 
 
In this version, father is Icarus.
Daedalus, daughter, the quarry, Crete.
The sun-rust light—his need to escape—mother’s
 
red hair, she visits them daily in the blades that set nightly,
highlighting the water into fall colours.
No feathers or wax, just a widower eager

to test new boundaries, to flag his wide arms
in a New York bar, to soar into alcohol’s sky
of lost self and achieve flight.
 
But the daughter is fearful with red
thought alert. She whispers behind him
before he goes out: Father, be careful.
 
The sun is the deer on the dark road home.
The flight is the car as it flips.
Father as Icarus soars into sky—
 
 
 
Catherine Graham is a Toronto-based writer of poetry and fiction. Among her six poetry collections The Celery Forest was named a CBC Books Top 10 Canadian Poetry Collection of 2017 and appears on their Ultimate Canadian Poetry List. Michael Longley praised it as “a work of great fortitude and invention, full of jewel-like moments and dark gnomic utterance.” Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and CAA Award for Poetry and her debut novel Quarry won an Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for fiction. She received an Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Toronto and was also winner of IFOA’s Poetry NOW. Her work is anthologized internationally and she has appeared on CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers. Visit her at www.catherinegraham.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @catgrahampoet.

An interview with Julia Polyck-O'Neill

Julia Polyck-O’Neill is an artist, curator, critic, and writer. She is a doctoral candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, where she is completing a SSHRC-funded interdisciplinary and comparative critical study of contemporary conceptualist literature and art in Vancouver. She has taught in art history and contemporary visual culture, and is currently a visiting lecturer and scholar in Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her writing has been published in B.C. Studies, Feminist Spaces, Tripwire, Train, Where is the river, Fermenting Feminisms (a project of the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, curated by Lauren Fournier), The Avant Canada Anthology (WLU Press, forthcoming 2018), and is co-editing a special issue of the journal Canadian Literature with Gregory Betts. Her debut chapbook, femme, was published in 2016 by above/ground press; her second, Everything will be taken away, also from above/ground, appeared this month.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I began writing quite young, as a form of rebellion and self-sustenance, which writing often is for young women growing up in small places, perhaps particularly in Northern Canada, where realities can be especially isolating. (I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon.) I found opportunities, which were thin on the ground, in a few institutional spaces to workshop my writing and to perform and publish, although my teachers tended to focus on my other creative talents, so I never learned to identify as a writer, but instead, as a visual artist and a member of the visual arts community, broadly. I rediscovered writing mainly by means of my academic voice. And so, I found myself performing and publishing from within a shifting academic subject position, and from a place of understanding myself and my voice as interdisciplinary, dynamic, and unfolding.

What keeps me going? There’s a dialogic quality to my writing, and I write in conversation with others. I find being the member of an expanding intersectional feminist community in Canada and the U.S. to be quite emotionally generative in ways that only writing and reading can satisfy. Recently, I’ve has the opportunity to work as a visiting lecturer and scholar in transnational American studies in Germany, at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, and I’ve found myself driven to write by solitude and alienation, and a longing to reunite with my communities in Canada, which oscillate between Vancouver and the Toronto area.

What was the process of putting together your first chapbook? Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing poems now that you’ve published a chapbook?

My first chapbook was produced as part of a special series rob mclennan produced to commemorate “The Concept of Vancouver,” a Canadian studies conference I co-organized with Gregory Betts and Andrew McEwan that featured scholars, artists, activists, and poets. I had assembled a series of poems as a result of responding to a selection of critical posthumanist and other feminist texts, and receiving the invitation to put something together, I thought it might be interesting to see how it felt to see them published and out in the world. I’ve been surprised at the amount of support I’ve received in relation to releasing this little book, and it’s helped me establish a stronger and more sustained writing routine. I credit the sense of writing for and with a community in helping me develop as a writer. That shift from writing only for myself and my own thinking process, to writing with a sense of purpose has helped me to find a voice that in turn helps my academic writing; I feel more assertive, and I feel I have something to share with my audience. I feel the care and attention of the experimental poetry community.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Because my research project is so engaged with the poetics of specific poets, it’s inevitable that my work in theory and criticism and my creative project intersect significantly. My poetic work also engages directly with the work of others because of my often ‘uncreative’ method. To name a few influential poets in my academic life, I’d first gesture to the more obvious: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets; KSW poets, especially Lisa Robertson and Jeff Derksen. Oakland poets; Buffalo poets; Philadelphia poets. Transnational poets. There are also the less-obvious figures of the writerly conceptual artists whose manifestos, art writings, and autobiographical writings I reference in my recent work: Martha Rosler; Adrian Piper; Gillian Wearing. And then there are the philosophers whose work becomes increasingly poetic as I re-examine and turn it over it in my writing: Sara Ahmed; Rosi Braidotti; Hélène Cixous.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Consider first that the question of who and what has hindered my development as a writer would also make for a useful question, as least rhetorically. We should be turning our attention to the structural issues that discourage women and marginalized individuals from writing and publishing.

But yes, turning back to the actual question, those who make it easier and safer are of supreme importance. Mentorship has been tremendously important to the development of my work and identity. Certainly, Gregory Betts has helped me tremendously in feeling more comfortable publishing, and his continued support remains quite helpful in building international scholarly and writerly networks. Poet and published rob mclennan also figures prominently in my life as a kind of perpetual support system, not only in offering me opportunities to publish, but also in that he almost singlehandedly sustains a significant community of writers and readers. Poet Jeff Kirby is another person who helps foster and build community at their poetry-only bookshop, Knife Fork Book, in Kensington Market; the whole Toronto experimental scene seems to have undergone a facelift as a result of Kirby’s tireless efforts. I was lucky to read at the closing event for the initial space, just before I left for Germany.

My own emerging role as a mentor is also important to my work. I feel responsible to the students I’ve encouraged, as some of them are writing against all odds. I also do my best to nurture the work of other writers when I am given the opportunity. Writing can be a precarious, delicate affair for many.

What are you currently working on?

In an immediate sense, I am working on a second chapbook for above/ground, Everything will be taken away, which will be published in August this year as part of the press’ 25^th anniversary. I actually have two manuscripts I’m working on in tandem. I’m working on multiple projects in this way because I’ve started to think of my work in terms of seriality and thematic unity, largely because I’ve been enjoying tighter serial collections in my reading. In the longer term, I’m developing a full-length poetry manuscript that connects to my academic research, and explores poetics and visuality, particularly in terms of theories and philosophies of form, ontology, and materiality. And, of course, my dissertation.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

This is a surprisingly challenging question to answer, in that there are so many talented poets I read whose work occupies a peripheral space in literary performance and publishing, and sometimes in the intersections between literary and academic publishing.

I’ll start with a poet whose work is increasingly important given recent events, and I’m under the impression that many would benefit from encountering: Heriberto Yépez, whose work challenges U.S. border politics and the concept of borders more broadly. I saw him give a paper at the 2016 Buffalo Poetics conference and have been following his work ever since.

Closer to home, I’d recommend encountering the work of Dana Claxton, an accomplished visual artist whose decolonial poetics challenge settler poetics. There are also several emerging voices to attend to, particularly Dominica Martinello, Klara du Plessis, and Noor Naga. And we should all be watching and supporting poet activist Rita Wong who is dedicating her time and energy to protecting the Peace River Valley from the Site C dam, bringing attention to the destruction of sacred land and its longstanding Indigenous communities.

A Coral to Dedicate the Miracles You Enrich

Jared Schickling

But I should be untrue to computer science, scratching among its molested moons 
so let us attempt to tell a story without aerial redundancies. 
Spring brings all the penetrates. 
Enjoy the many hollow attempts to make 
the wonderful phlegm. 
There is solute fortune in entertaining it. 
If you were not the wine the self-assured moon 
cooks, sprinkling its peach across the heights. 

A chaotic metaphor taunts 
even the secure 
historical area in inscription 
to which the metaphor 
will not be dawned. 
The reflections exist even when there is 
little to say, and it ceases 
around it in darkness. 
My nocturnal nose relinquishes you always. 

One of them is cleansed, 
the other knows details. 
Where is everybody 
he quips, and when can we see what 
is going to happen? 
The boulevard within hers 
a history we tell in passing, 
with notions of tiredness 
and a passion for journalism and computer science. 

 

 

In addition to journal and ephemera pieces, Jared Schickling is the author of several BlazeVOX books, including The Mercury Poem (2017) and Province of Numb Errs (2016).  Other books include Needles of Itching Feathers (The Operating System, 2018); The Paranoid Reader: Essays, 2006-2012 (Furniture Press, 2014); Prospectus for a Stage (LRL Textile Series, 2014); Donald Trump and the Pocket Oracle (Moria Books, 2017); and Donald Trump in North Korea (2017).  He edited A Lyrebird: Selected Poems of Michael Farrell (BlazeVOX, 2017), and he edits Delete Press and The Mute Canary, publishers of poetry.  He lives in Lockport, NY. 

 

An interview with Shannon Bramer

Shannon Bramer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Precious Energy, with Book*hug. Her plays The Hungriest Woman in the World, The Collectors and Monarita were all produced thanks to the dramaturgy and support of the Women’s Work Festival in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Shannon has a children’s book forthcoming from Groundwood in March 2019.

Photo credit: Sadie Glenn Derry

How did you begin writing and what keeps you going?

I started writing when I was a child; when I was in middle school I discovered the work of Canadian poets Irving Layton, Gwendolyn Mac Ewen and Leonard Cohen and fell in love with what a poem could do, how a poem could make me feel. When I got older I started reading Ana Akhmatova, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and my love for poetry and language grew and grew. I continue write because the effort to create is so satisfying—because writing consumes me and because writing is hard but it also helps me figure things out, about myself, about the world.

What was the process of putting together you latest poetry collection? Have you noticed a difference in how you approach writing poems since working on plays or your forthcoming book for children?

I’m inspired by broken things and whole things: that’s how Precious Energy came to be. It took me a long time to write and refine the manuscript because I was in over my head with life: marriage, children and caring for my parents as well.  Once the manuscript was accepted I sat on it for a long time and then kept revisiting it. I did a lot of rewriting and also let new poems emerge. My publisher, Book*hug, also paired me with a wonderful editor, Jennifer LoveGrove (a brilliant poet and fiction writer), and she helped me figure out how to push many of the poems down further into the dark, surprising places they wanted to go, especially when it was hard for me to be as brave or funny or sad as I wanted to be.

I love listening to people talk; how people express and hide what’s inside. It’s so wonderfully peculiar and specific. Some of my poems are like monologues—they arrive in my head and want to speak their piece. They possess an individuality that is simultaneously fragile and immediate.

I find playwriting to be a more fluid process. Once I have a bit of momentum and have found the special way a character speaks, dialogue unfolds quickly; the work starts to grow and change and travel. The characters in a play say things and they don’t always understand why they are saying them. Also, my plays are more extroverted than my poems. My plays possess a bit more volatility and swagger. Poems are harder to write and take longer to finish because they need so much tinkering and tenderness.

The poems I’ve written for children are really poems for human beings of all ages. But I’ve tried to see the world through the eyes of a child in these poems; these poems were inspired by conversations with children and by conversations (overheard!) between children—both my own and those I have spent time with in schools as a visiting artist and kindergarten lunchroom supervisor.

All of my work explores tension and fluidity in relationships.  I’m compelled in all genres by the beauty and power of language itself, the space it creates, on the page and inside me.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

The list of poets that have influenced me over the years is enormous. The first poets I ever read and fell in love with as a child and then later as a young adult have probably been the most impactful: Gwendolyn MacEwen, Leonard Cohen, Federico Garcia Lorca, Langston Hughes, Roo Borson, Yehuda Amichai, Anne Carson, Janet Frame (a now deceased novelist from New Zealand whom I’ve been obsessed with for decades). Gypsy Guitar by David McFadden and Cruelty to Fabulous Animals by Gary Barwin were also two really important books for me—I remember being so buoyed and thrilled by the surrealism in those books, by the delight and aplomb. I still want to write poems like that someday!

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

I don’t think I would have found the confidence to pursue writing if not for the encouragement of my first poetry workshop instructor at York University: Libby Scheier. She was the first person, after my mother, to tell me that my poems were good. She was also an excellent, compassionate critic and it was from her that I first learned how to accept criticism and use it to help my work improve and grow. It was so wonderful to have a real-live poet (and a wonderfully bad-ass feminist poet at that) be my first poetry instructor. She did not shy away from difficult subjects in her work (sexual abuse is one example), which in turn inspired me to write about anything I wanted. I could write about flowers. I could write about terror. I could write about both at the same time.

What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a strange new collection of poems and miniatures called Little Guns.  It’s going to be quite different from Precious Energy. I’m also finishing a play for young audiences called Chloe’s Tiny Heart is Closed. It’s a play for children about death and divorce (but it’s also a comedy with an endearing and grotesque clown at the centre)!

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

I’m sure there is more than one poet out there who should be receiving more attention! There are so many books and so many poets; but I’m quite delighted by the work of those who are currently in the spotlight in Canada. I am a poet and I am fan of poets. I only wish every poet could experience that feeling of being acknowledged and rewarded for their efforts. Writing a book is a huge amount of work and an accomplishment in itself—one that should be celebrated! However, it’s unfortunate (and understandable!) how deflated one might feel after all that work if a book isn’t properly reviewed or if seems none of your peers notice or like it. Before social media it was harder to tell who was getting attention and who wasn’t, so it’s easy to get tangled up in it all and feel worried and self-conscious about it.  I try not to. The prevalence of online magazines and blogs mean that more books are being reviewed than ever before and I’m grateful for that. I had ten years between my last two books and it feels very good to have something out in the world again. 

Aubade

Annick MacAskill

Who’s to say when spring arrives? The crowns

of jays on the deck, a downy woodpecker who mistakes

man-made for natural habitat.

The surprise—a great heron’s flat yellow eye,

sharpened through the lens of your father’s

binoculars (hauled in a black carry-on

across provinces), its feathers navy and slate, jean-

coloured, startling against the river,

the anemic grasses—a pop quiz on

photo-receptivity

after months of white on white, the clouded absence

of spectrum.

Annick MacAskill is the author of No Meeting Without Body (Gaspereau Press, 2018), and a chapbook, Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos (Frog Hollow Press, 2016). She has new poems forthcoming in Canadian Notes & Queries, Event, The Antigonish Review, Room Magazine, and The Nova Scotia Advocate. Originally from Ontario, she currently lives and writes in Halifax.

An interview with Geoffrey Nilson

Geoffrey Nilson is the author of In my ear continuously like a stream (above/ground, 2017), O (Swimmer's Group, 2017), and We Have to Watch (Quilliad, 2016). His poetry and prose has appeared in various publications including Coast Mountain Culture, CV2, Lemon Hound, PRISM international, and The Capilano Review. He is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and is currently at work on a collection of short fiction. When not exploring the weird and wonderful in his writing, he takes film photographs and educates his daughter on the merits of punk rock.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

My writing has always been a product of my reading, and beginning at an early age, I was addicted to books. Some of my earliest memories are trips to the local library where my parents would turn me loose in the stacks. I’d come home with an armful, reading until I fell asleep in my bed with the light on (something I still do regularly). I didn’t have any dreams of being a writer, then. I just loved stories.

But at 16 I started working at the same public library I had spent so much time in as a kid, and one of my tasks was shelf-reading, where I went over a section of books one-by-one to make sure they were in order. I discovered so many different writers, so many different forms of writing, which I didn’t know existed. At the same time as stealing novels assigned to my older sister for her university classes, I found Kingsway by Michael Turner while shelf-reading, and the rest, as they say, was history.

Well not quite. I wrote for a few years, took some classes, published a little, won a contest, and then promptly quit writing in 2003 to play guitar in a band. I didn’t write again for a decade. I got married. My daughter was born. I got divorced. Quit music and went back to school. I was worried I wouldn’t know what to do anymore, but as I should have expected, once I started reading the words came too.

Every writer has doubts and feels like a failure sometimes, at least all the writers I know. We’re only as confident as our last finished piece, if that, so commiserating does help. Thankfully I can also fall back on books for motivation. There’s just nothing that excites me more about writing than reading, about the feeling I get when I read something that makes me feel less alone in the world, as if the words on the page were, as Flaubert wrote, “some vague idea you once had, some blurred image from deep down that spells out your finest feelings.”

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Influence is a strange word. To be honest, I don’t give it a ton of thought. I’ve been asked a few times and I stumble through my answers, listing off the first writers I can think of. I will attempt to do better here.

I suppose at the formative place, where I began to love poetry, is Michael Ondaatje. His sensuous attention to language and his keen use of allusion both made me realize the poem is not limited to what I know, it can also spur me to other discoveries. Vancouver poetry of the 1960s, the TISH poets and the Downtown poets and the small press culture, they were very important too, but that poetry motivated me to create my own literary reality rather than waiting and hoping for something to happen. bpNichol is my beacon, my light. Whenever I am unsure, Nichol has something to offer me. His daring, his love, his weirdness, and his forms—they loom large for me in all the writing I do. More recently while working on a suite about the end of my marriage, I’ve been reading Lynn Crosbie and Sharon Olds. Both have unique ways to approach the confessional. I especially love Crosbie’s Liar, a book length serial that reinvents what the love poem can be.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem, now that you’ve had some experience putting together chapbook-length manuscripts?

I think what has changed most for me over the years is my attention to each part of the poem or the sequence. I have gotten better at keeping all my important concerns in check. I’m a writer who is comfortable in letting the writing dictate the form, so I listen to the work I am doing and let it tell me what it needs to be. I’m thinking here of Dennis Lee and his notion of “cadence.” Ideas can be expressed in different ways. I don’t create with any exacting or specific method. I try things. I make mistakes. I throw stuff out. Usually a form best suited for the content will present itself. Only after I listen to the work, sometimes I must train my ear, will a form show itself. I’m not just talking about stanzas, line breaks, and rhyme schemes, but about the line, page, and book level considerations of how an idea is manifest, about the poem as physical object and conceptual space.

Putting together a manuscript is fraught with considerations and sometimes it can be difficult for me to get enough perspective. I can obsess a little and get attached to structures as they develop. Thankfully I’ve had great editors who have helped me develop arcs for my sequences I had not considered. Editors really are the heroes of literature.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Mentorship has been vital to my development. Without a doubt I would not be where I am without the help of many people. I am very fortunate to have studied with some fine poets in the past few years: Don Domanski at the Banff Centre, and Jen Currin, Rachel Rose, Billeh Nickerson and Aislinn Hunter at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Billeh actively encouraged me after I started writing again and his words of support gave me the confidence to pursue my path as a writer. But it was Aislinn who became my mentor over the years I completed my university degree.

I met Hunter in 2012 when I enrolled in a creative non-fiction class she was teaching, and connected with her deep well of academic and literary reference as well as her penchant for hilarious self-deprecating anecdotes. She taught me so much about how to approach big themes, how to use philosophy and art history in my poetry, and encouraged me to think in a granular way in which sequences accrue for the reader.

She was my hardest editor, calling me out when I didn’t put in enough effort, letting me know it was unacceptable to waste time with bad work. She was also my biggest champion, encouraging me to apply for residencies when I didn’t think I deserved them, and editing work for me in her office hours that had nothing to do with my classes.

Pearl Pirie wrote that a mentor is “Someone who shows you that doors exist.” I’m eternally grateful for the doors Aislinn showed me.

You are currently on the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine. Why was this important, and have you been learning through the process of working on a journal?

My work with Arc and other literary journals has made me appreciate all the people working in literary publishing much more because anyone who is in this racket is in it because of love. That’s a good feeling to be around and it infuses everything I do in my life. The sense of community I feel from participating in the literary culture is important to me.

For me, the whole thing of reading for a literary journal is like crate digging at a record store. It’s about the search for some unknown gem buried in the mix. Finding beauty in a batch of submissions is the same as finding it any other time: delightful.

Your author biography mentions that you’re working on a collection of short fiction. What is the difference between working on poems to working on short stories? Are you able to work on both poetry and fiction concurrently?

Fiction is an entirely different process and I really need to separate it. Poetry is so idiosyncratic for me, and I expect the reader to participate, collaborate in making meaning. But when I write fiction, I think much more about readers and about what the story is trying to say to them. It also just takes more physical time to develop a story from beginning to end, from idea to completion. More words, more drafts, more frustration when I toss out something that isn’t working.

Prose writing in general is more structured and doesn’t usually reward leaps of tangential fancy. I don’t malign the restrictions. I enjoy the opportunity to create within them. Like my approach with listening to form, I listen to the story and let it determine how and in what voice it wants to be told.

Can you name a poet you think should be receiving more attention?

Matea Kulić.