12 or 20 (second series) questions with Kelly Kaur

Kelly Kaur grew up in Singapore. She works and plays in Calgary. She is a writer, author, speaker and an educator. She was awarded the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Award, the Calgary South Asian Inspiration’s Outstanding Arts and Culture award, nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and won Honourable Mention in the International Human Rights Art Movement in New York. Kaur’s poem, “A Singaporean’s Love Affair,” landed on the moon in 2024 — the first historic library and an Artemis Accords Heritage Site. Her novel, Letters to Singapore, will go up in 2026. Kaur has a passion for human rights and is a creative writing instructor and Special Projects Editor for the International Human Rights Art Movement, New York. She has a children’s book, Howdy, I’m Singh Hari that was introduced to and celebrated at the Alberta Legislature in Edmonton for honouring Punjabi Sikh culture and was just shortlisted for the 2026 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Her creative works have been danced to on stage, displayed on beer cans, at museums and art galleries, placed outdoors at Leighton Art Centre, and is on a permanent display at the Little Museum of Poetry in Italy. 

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was a novel, Letters to Singapore. It was a dream to see it published by Stonehouse Publishing. It changed my life by giving me the inspiration to write more, be braver, and take more chances. I also met the 3 other incredible authors who were also published by Stonehouse, and we became friends. We launched our books in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Vancouver, and the experience was incredible. My second book was a children's book about the first Sikh immigrant in Alberta - Howdy, I'm Singh Hari. This book was well-received and one I am proud of as well. It has also been shortlisted for the Alberta Publishing Book Award for the Children and Young Adults Book of the Year.  I love the feedback from everyone who has read this book, especially the children I have read the book to at schools and presented it online for the Calgary Public Library, and anyone can still access it for free. My third book is My Love is a Durian - this poetry collection is coming out on October 15, 2026, is yet another incredible vision come true. I did not think I had a collection of poems at all until, one day, I counted how many poems I had that had been published in anthologies all over the world. These poems are special to me - from my heart and soul.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I always wanted to write poems. I thought it was easy. I struggled, continued, gave up, read more, wrote more, edited, and, thankfully, I kept at it. I love the beauty of poetry. I want to keep evolving, experimenting and writing more. Since I write in many genres, I love dabbling and moving from one genre to the other.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I wish that I had a million dollars and not have to work full-time. Therefore, I go with the flow and steal whatever time I have. The first novel took me 100 days because I was selected and was in a 3-month writing mentorship for BIPOC writers. I really wanted to write that bucket list novel. I also had an incredible mentor, Aritha van Herk. The second one, Howdy, I'm Singh Hari, was faster to write but more laborious to start as I had to interview and research more before I could even begin. For the poems, I love to procrastinate from marking university essays, so I would meander off from grading essays and would write a poem, instead. Often, I begin with an idea – for example, my Papa. Then, I continue with throwing out some words/images/descriptions and recalling those special memories. Voila - I see the makings of a rough draft poem. Then, I come back to it every day to edit until it takes that shape that I like - it can take 2-5 days per poem. It is much more fun than marking!

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I am a thinker, dreamer and crafter “in my mind and imagination” type writer. I have so many ideas for a novel, and I am open to any opportunity that comes up. I have so many ideas brimming and overflowing in my brain. When I see a theme or a call, I am inspired to submit a piece. This year, I had 4 pieces accepted in 4 different anthologies - short stories, a poem and creative non-fiction.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Luckily, my toastmasters' experience has given me the practice, training and confidence to present with joy. I made it to the top 100 toastmasters around the world, represented Alberta and Saskatchewan at the 2017 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking in Vancouver. Then, in 2025, I was selected to give 2 different TEDx talks at Western University and McMaster University, both talks 3 weeks apart. All these experiences have made me enjoy doing my book readings, though I still get butterflies in my tummy.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

For me, personally, I explore my own questions and concerns of being an immigrant, a woman and a writer of colour. In my writing, these concerns, fear and challenges are examined and prodded by the characters as well. I hope that readers can share these observations, empathize, sympathize and think about these invisible issues. Sadly, the current issues of immigration and colour persist today.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

A writer should write. They should share their passion for storytelling. They should weave stories that capture their own imagination and those of their readers. Some want to entertain. Some want to make a point. Some want to educate. Some want to experiment. Some do all. A writer should do whatever they want to do.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I have been very lucky in that I had 2 amazing editors. Lisa Murphy Lamb from then Stonehouse Publishing was my editor for Letters to Singapore. She was incredible. I looked at her notes and suggestions and ended up adding 100 pages to my novel. I appreciated her insights. For My Love is a Durian, I watched with wonder and amazement as the brilliant Aritha van Herk, University of Calgary Press, shuffled pages and pages of my poems on the table and came up with the thoughtful plan and planning of the themes, besides her astute edits. I learnt so much from my editors and was grateful for the end result. Essential!!!

9- What fragrance reminds you of home?

I grew up in Singapore. I go home very year to visit family and friends. It is a beautiful garden city. Here are two flowers I remember. I grew up surrounded by bougainvillaea and the intoxicating scent of the flowers of the frangipanni tree – the Singapore graveyard flower associated with the Malay ghost lady called a Pontianak.  Of course, any Singaporean will talk nonstop about the smell of Singapore food. Go to any hawker centre and be mesmerized and enticed. I mention food in many of my poems. Yes, the durian is that one scent that anyone who knows this fruit loves or hates. Indeed, My Love is a Durian.

10 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would love to write a play! I can imagine my novel, Letters to Singapore, as a play on stage.

11 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I still dream about being a lawyer. When I was a young girl growing up in Singapore, I gave up on focussing on school because I grew up in a strict family where I was expected to have an arranged marriage like my grandmother at 15, my mother at 16, and my sister at 21. Oh, my grades were awful because I was too pessimistic and did not study enough to get those A grades. It was a miracle that I passed my A level exams, ended up at the Institute of Education, and became a teacher. And yes, I did run away from an arranged marriage.

12 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

You don’t need that house in Canmore facing the Rockies to inspire you to write. Just write, ok! Advice given to me by me.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Dani Spinosa, Whispering Gallery: Poems

 

There is one student who is attentive and thoughtful in my college Classical Mythology class. She wants to make video games and has played Hades maybe fifty too many runs and she draws me an illustration of a non-binary Herakles wearing a raver outfit with a furry lion hat. She stays after class to talk to me about her final paper. The windows of this room do not open. I wonder if I’ve ever been in a classroom with windows that open. She has questions about the impending strike. The room contracts. I feel the questions’ labour. The clock on the wall moves itself forward again and again. She wants to know which source is definitive. I can’t stop her from taking notes.

The latest from Toronto-area poet, editor, publisher and critic Dani Spinosa is the trade poetry title Whispering Gallery: Poems (Prince Edward County ON: Assembly Press, 2026), following her full-length debut, OO: Typewriter Poems (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2020) [see my review of such here], and the monograph Anarchists in the Academy: Machines and Free Readers in Experimental Poetry (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2018). Furthering her exploration through the typewriter-constructed concrete poem, Spinosa’s Whispering Gallery is structured as a collection of duos—thirty-six two-colour typewriter poems titled via heroines from Greek mythology in alphabetical order, each of which follow first-person prose blocks—each pair held as point, and counterpoint. Alkmene, Alkestis, Andromeda, Antigone, Aphrodite, Ariadne, Artemis, and so on. Through the two narrative threads and multitude of voices, there’s an element of performance to this book-length suite, one that might sit equally at home on a theatrical stage, if one might imagine concrete poems, say, performed on stage (and honestly, why not?). Two actors on stage, each performing one of the two of this collection’s threads. The narrative quilt of her text blocks provide a structural through-line, writing on the many ways and times that women have been abused, reduced and restricted by the machinations, whether passively or overtly, by men.

Yes I am still—I am always—trying to find space for poems. I am looking for writing hours though my friends remind me that the day does not come with writing hours and you have to put them there.

Through both sides of the conversation, Spinosa writes trauma and women. “But I know traumas,” she writes, early on in the collection, “the traumas of women. My women. Other women. The real heartbreak stories. A woman answers the door with a toddler on her hip, bobs her up and down slightly as the cop details her husband’s DUI. A woman must birth her eight-and-a-half-month baby that, she knows, has died in utero while her family goes to their house to dismantle the already assembled crib. Burnt-down house. Stolen car. Missing cat. Kidney stone. One of those real asshole cancers that just doesn’t let go. This is a stupid game. There are only losers here.” From structural point to counterpoint, across these two threads, Spinosa offers a poetry collection of visuals and concrete poems that forms itself into a book-length essay, one that speaks to and through female agency and gendered violence, whether physical, emotional or cultural; a book that writes herself and students through heroines and old gods, a collection that directs itself, in whole, towards the young lady that will make the author an auntie, directing all this talk of agency and possibility into all the hopes anyone could have. This is Auntie Dani writing the world as it is and has been, and as it could be, all for the sake of this new life, an opening salvo of a mentorship, offered open-hearted, without cover or expectation or bullshit. Or, as she writes near the end:

I am here and you are there. Silly thing, that distance. I’ve been saying small, quiet things all morning while the dust and cat hair twirl in great winter angles of light. I hear the little whispers come and go as if it wasn’t me speaking them. I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll keep saying this shit anyway.

 

Speak to me as to thy thinkings, as thou dost ferry, (part three,

[catch part one here; part two here]

Thursday, August 20, 2026: Aoife and I went for a wander, for coffee and pastries, walking by the array of lobster traps. So many! We wandered over to the cafe they found the day prior, with quaint wee bookshop. Apparently Rose picked up a copy of Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019) from this charming shop. This is a book I've heard good things about, but can't really ask her if she's enjoying without making it weird, apparently. What kid would want to read something their parents find interesting? Cringe. Still, I am curious to know what she might think about it.

The cool air around water, and the view back to the mainland (if one could see that far, certainly). A morning of a brief walk in one direction, returning for the sake of an eventual spot on the beach. Apparently we're going to the beach? Repeating the brief jaunt we made yesterday evening, nearly losing Christine and Aoife along the shoreline, the walk along the sandy shore not the roundabout direction the car wished to take us (not every line is a straight line, after all).

The way of things. A splash in the water, as Christine and the young ladies wandered the beach, splashed around, collected smooth stones and other items. Aoife, who returned with handfuls of shells and small stones. An hour-plus at the beach, and then a quick jaunt back to Cricker's Creamery for ice cream, and a slip into the post office (to be able to send off my second round of postcards). Ice cream, and then a toy store, en route to the ferry. Where was this? I can't even recall. The children picked up nonsense and insisted on photos by the array of items outside in the yard (but requested that they not be posted, of course). And so, my own.

Naturally, any visit to the island requires as much Lucy Maud Montgomery as possible, so we drove and we drove, heading back to the ferry, but stopping along points as best as possible, none of which interested our young ladies in any way. I keep forgetting that Montgomery married a MacDonald, wondering if he was related in any way to eldest daughter's maternal grandmother, another MacDonald from the island. 

And, to the ferry. The ferry, where I attempted to take notes, but Aoife was more interested in wandering. And so, we wandered. Once landing in Halifax, we were hanging with Christine's brother and his family in their new house, having moved this way after five years in England, a house myself and the young ladies had not yet seen. And to a variety of baseball tournaments over the next two days, although I was already back to Ottawa by the next afternoon, due to my above/ground press event [see my report on such here] on the Saturday night. It would have been good to spend further time in the area, perhaps even visit the handful of folk either Christine or I or both know around this way, but the timing didn't allow. Neither, the drive. I was one night in Halifax, back Friday afternoon; Christine and the young ladies back by Sunday morning. Will we attempt again next year, possibly? Might we ever have enough time?

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Benjamin Gantcher

Benjamin Gantcher is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of a LABA fellowship as well as residencies from the UCross Foundation and the Omi International Arts Center. He is the author of the poetry collection Snow Farmer (2017), a finalist in several contests, and the poetry chapbook Strings of Math and Custom (2013). Gantcher’s first poetry manuscript, If a Lettuce, earned finalist honors in the National Poetry Series and Bright Hill Press contests. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Slate, Rhino, Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and DIAGRAM. Gantcher was Poet of the Week at Brooklyn Poets and is a former poetry editor of failbetter.

He is the editor, publisher and designer of unbound books, “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books,” that can be found @benjamingantcher, at the unbound books Substack, and HERE.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

            My daughter was just told that she is curious and courageous because she went to an intense summer program that brought her into contact with different kinds of people in an environment that was designed to stress the kids out physically and mentally. She appreciated the praise but was surprised. She said, “I just do stuff.” That’s how it is for me when I’m writing well: I just do stuff and language comes up. I follow the language or the feelings. For some of the poems in The Coronation of the Ghost, I was trying to transpose a certain kind of motion, the way a drop of pigment unfurls in a glass of water, or smoke billows, but the motion also connects with the flight of a hunting swallow — the way the plucking out of the air reveals where the bug was and the curves and layers of the carnal air. There’s a question in that image: what’s there that isn’t obvious? Sometimes getting at that is more strenuous than at other times. When I’m not writing well, I’m trying to just do stuff, which involves running it through my internal censors who check it against whatever notions are preoccupying me at that time.

            In the context of our violent idiocracy, I ask myself about the utility of poetry. It’s an anxious question, the clashing of pots and pans that drowns out what I know to be true about the vitality of art, but I have tried to answer it in some poems. I noticed, for instance, that my feelings about sirens had changed. When I was small, they meant one thing; now they also summon things that I know about distressingly many places, near and far. I tried to write about the change in imagery and emotion, giving a reader my childhood relationship to the phenomenon of sirens at bedtime and also what they do to me now, tried to make both versions real. 

Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? 

I like to read theory, but I know that my attraction to it is one of my weaknesses in that it gets in the way of making art that is — I lose sight of my experience and set out to write a poem that starts elsewhere. In that vein, I’ve been irritating myself with a current obsession: staking out a political and economic position on art in response to this moment. It’s been important to me to articulate the virtues of poetry and other art in the face of pressing needs for direct political action, but I have needed to keep it separate from the writing. It gets in the way of making poems that are lively and felt, not dragged down by injunctions or sloganeering or meeting what I think are expectations of the moment, serving up ideas that could be stated plainly as not a poem. 

And are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like reading to an audience. I used to perform as an amateur musician, and I miss that; reading to an audience scratches a similar itch. I get nervous before a reading, as I do before I sing, but preparing for a reading has become part of the reading — choosing poems and working through my patter is part of the exchange between me and the audience, which is the point. And reading to a crowd of any size, and sharing the audience with other writers (and artists and musicians), and the audience reacting — everyone could be someplace else, but we’ve chosen to meet in those physical and imaginary spaces. Every person there loves or at least cares about one or more of the readers or language or poetry specifically. When I was starting out I wasn’t sure what a reading was for, although sometimes I could feel the goodness of it. Now I see giving a reading as art-making that can be collaborative.

Are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

            Nature, music, science, visual art, yes! I live in New York City and often think about natural landscapes. Some of the poems in Coronation take the urban landscape as natural. For some that meant an attitudinal shift, accepting that built things are natural because humans are part of nature; for others, it took translation from mundane to marvelous. The idea was to not regret the lack of grass here and the shrieking train alarms and the bad air. The idea is to keep the passage open to delight.

            I read widely and listen to podcasts about all those things and to a lot of music. One of the questions from astrobiology that sticks with me is whether or not consciousness is fundamental in the universe, a fact of matter, which works nicely with how I see the world: personalities everywhere.

            In Coronation there’s a poem that invents a Northern Renaissance painting and alters a Hockney, part of speaker’s memories of a visit through a museum, the context for a meandering reflection, suggesting rooms on rooms of experience, entered and glimpsed. And another one names the video artist Pipilotti Rist in the title — she’s so joyous, whatever else she’s doing, just naming her brightly colors the ironies in the poem. In my previous book, Snow Farmer, there’s an ekphrastic prose poem that interprets a Vermeer. That one I wrote to put a personal, un-art-historical reading into the world.

            I like to work with visual artists, too. I used to, and might again, publish unbound books, a zine series comprised of “free, downloadable, printable, foldable, downright handsome books.” Many of them were collaborations between visual artists and writers. Cornerstone Press let me include facsimiles of three of them, three I did the writing for, in Coronation. I think they came out well in the book, and two represent a kind of parallel play of word art and visual art — not one explaining the other, but each influencing your experience of the other. The third is like the prose poem about the Vermeer but more bananas.

            Years ago I tried to invent writing systems analogous to 20th-century music composition systems, including tone rows and aleatory procedures. I’ve also tried to adapt visual art practices to writing. Serra’s verb list was exciting, as much for the way it looks as it’s generative potential, and I made a four-axis grid of ideas, taking pains to develop handwriting that would look good. It’s a fine artifact but didn’t help me make poems. Another time, I thought I’d divide poems into vertical auras, like a Rothko. All those trials were generative in a caffeinated way — not producing specific works but swirling the energies around. I wasn’t able to find an explanation of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics, but the music, the texts I was able to find on it, and the name itself were exciting. I don’t hanker after a system anymore, but liner notes can get me going. I just read about Steve Coleman’s M-base — trying to translate what he describes as a very open system of improvisation into poetry composition is appealing, though, again, I don’t plan to make a system like it. 

            The scope of art in NYC is just one of the gorgeous tradeoffs for the indignities of the subway. And some of it happens right there on the platform! I am grateful for all of it. Recently I got to hear three of my favorite musicians, two different shows at Roulette, a storied organization housed in an elegant old theater, an intimate concert hall. Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson played their album Bone Bells straight through. And Marc Ribot played solo guitar; I have his most recent album on repeat: Map of a Blue City.

            I’ve been laboring over a poem about a map of myself and recent ancestors; after this interview, I think I can go back to it with less labor and more pleasure.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Maria Nazos, Pulse

My review of Maria Nazos' Pulse (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2026) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Hari Alluri, Tabako on the Windowsill

  

Windowsill Offering for Eric

In the crematorium’s service room, taking clumsy, ginger turns around the cardboard holding your body, such a thin distance, 4 generations of multi-iteration family scrawl and draw our messages for you to take. An act of reaching. Even here, the squeal and fight of children over markers carries what’s most sombre.

This act of releasing you to mark how we must begin to hold you another way, a promise in touch, which no one can live up to constant: from outside the chapel’s doors, through the service room, around and down the hall—Sade’s “By Your Side” playing off your celebrant’s phone as we arrange ourselves—one hand reaching forward to the next shoulder, in to the shoulders of your closest and your closest blood, finally onto Niki’s.

Hers, the most difficult task. Even as it’s her finger on the switch: when she presses it to give your body to fire—held and utterly alone—none of us are free of it. Our hope, which is also our fear: that we reach across to the other side with you, that the messages we wrote carry us with them in the flame.

The latest poetry title by British Columbia-based “a migrant poet of Filipinx and South Asian descent” Hari Alluri is the collection Tabako on the Windowsill (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2025), a book I’m just getting to now. Subtitled “(poems to burn),” Alluri’s first-person narratives offer quiet gestures composed as direct response, akin to elegy or prayer, both for and to the living, and the dead. “May you outgrow many pairs of shorts, Anak. / And if a dryer doesn’t get them first,” begins the poem “Mountain Walk Offering for My Godson,” “your socks might inch down past your heels / bothering your arch and toes. That pattern will turn / to wearing thin, to changing style.” There’s a calming, soothing effect in Alluri’s lyrics—a gentle and attentive intimacy—even as losses compound across these meditations, so, too, the celebration of life and family, heart and the present moment. These are poems of witness, of gesture, attempting to articulate, appreciate and hold (“capture” doesn’t seem the right word, here) a moment, before it might fade. “Here, on the morning ride to work,” Alluri writes, as part of “A Pavement Sweeper’s Quarry,” “I’m jealous at the trolley doors: they get / to yawn. I would say the city is only mouth if it didn’t hear: we want to stay.”

The strength of these poems are found precisely through the understated way they’re written, attending and appreciating what so often isn’t noticed, caught or spoken. “I will always thank the day I turned towards these mountains here and saw / not the country I feared wants me dead or gone or totally subsumed,” he writes, as part of “Hum Its Dizziness Like Sugar in Tea,” “but / mountains, volcanic. Cousins / to those who made the islands my nanay is from, and beautiful even if they weren’t. // The deities I brought with me and seek, may they never become a pipeline dug into this land.” It might seem out of fashion to compose poems so overtly thankful, both for those the narrator has known and where he now lives, but Alluri manages a grace through the hush, across the foundations of human connection. As well, moving through prose poems, couplets and more traditional lyric stanza-blocks, the twists and turns of Alluri’s sentences and phrases are subtle, offering twists that hide in plain sight, shifting an effect of what one reads against what one might expect to read. The effect, to be sure, is quite striking. This is a book that will absolutely surprise.