Lisa Fishman, Write Back Now! : A Novel

The time of year that I’ve arrived is not the time of year when anyone arrives. This storm is an example of why no one comes here at this time of year. Tomorrow the neighbour, an uncle of the woman whose house this is, will say: “That was the biggest weather event in twenty years.” I know what the neighbour will say because it’s already tomorrow, after the storm.

I was intrigued to see Write Back Now! : A Novel (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2026), not only the latest title by American-Canadian writer Lisa Fishman, but the latest in 1366Books, the prose imprint edited and curated by writer, editor and small press impresario Stuart Ross. Write Back Now! follows other Fishman titles such as the compact and Covid-era poetry title One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) and her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. I’m fascinated by the long, narrative thread that Fishman composes across this novel, one that harkens back to the most recent prior title in the same imprint, Northern Ontario writer sophie anne edwards’ A Mouth of Vowels (Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is such fluidity to Fishman’s prose, a very different stretch and tone and even music to that of her short story collection, a book that seems much more straightforward in comparison (and I wouldn’t call that collection of stories straightforward, certainly).

Composed as a sequence of moments within immediate and intimate space, Write Back Now! unfolds into a story of a narrator with a husband, living on a remote shoreline with an ocean, and living in a house owned by a woman “I met once and whose mother and father, aunt and uncle, and other aunt and uncle live in the three surrounding houses. I am the one not related, the one who clips clothes to the line when it’s -17 Celsius and they simply freeze. Well, then they thaw.”

There’s a fluidity and an intimacy in Fishman’s accumulated, occasionally disjointed, prose sections, and an attention to detail to this novel, akin to edwards’ own, that stretches back through Canadian writing (through early Michael Ondaatje novels, perhaps) to Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), offering accumulations of lyric passages that require attention, otherwise one might simply slip between the music of the lines, and miss something important. “On the landlocked farm where my husband and I planted an orchard,” Fishman writes, later on in the book, “all four seasons come and go in turn. Its calendar, if calendars were site-specific and varied in scope accordingly, would be the longest.”

Part of the delight in catching books such as these is in knowing that, for the longest time, such lyric novels, such narratives of lyric prose haven’t been easily published in Canada (our publishing leaning more conservative than the scope of our writing)—and this book, so clearly crafted and precise and lush, offers some of the best of what the small press can provide. Seeing that Ross, through Guernica, is providing an ongoing home for such works is hopeful, indeed.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Claire Taylor

Claire Taylor is a writer for both adult and youth audiences. Her poetry collection, April and Back Again is available now from Publishing Genius. Claire is the founding editor of Little Thoughts Press, a literary magazine for young readers. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland, in an old stone house where birds love to roost. You can find her online at clairemtaylor.com.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I wrote and self-published my first chapbook, Mother Nature, during the pandemic. It’s a hybrid collection of poetry and essays about pregnancy, the postpartum period, and early parenting. I don’t know that it changed my life per se, but being able to find readers who connected with the themes and emotional vulnerability at play in that book helped solidify my desire to keep writing, to remain open to the experience of sharing my life and my feelings in this way. 

My new collection, April and Back Again, focuses on a single year in my life from the period of April 2024 when I turned 39, to April 2025 when I turned 40. It's a sort of time capsule for that period, a point in time when when both my life and the US were on the cusp of significant changes. I think the themes of family life, aging, and obviously politics and trying to parent through a fog of existential dread are universal and extend beyond the single year in which I wrote these poems, but this book feels especially like a snapshot of a particular moment in time for me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I started writing poetry as a kid. I had my first poem published at age 10 in Highlights Magazine. It was about what it might feel like to be a leaf. Then I wrote a bunch of angsty and lusty poems in high school, your typical teenage stuff. After that, though, I mostly shifted away from poetry and only came back to it after becoming a mother. I needed to write about that new experience but had very little free time to sit down and do any long-form writing. I would write poems in my phone’s Notes app while I was nursing my baby or when I was up in the middle of the night trying to rock him back to sleep. Poetry is a good outlet if you need to express your emotions but only have five minutes and one hand free. 

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?
Because I initially returned to writing after having a baby, I had to get good at doing it quickly if I wanted to do it at all. The period between the initial spark and when I get something down on paper is very short. I’m not precious about my work. If one poem doesn’t pan out, whatever, another will come along later. I mine retired drafts for lines when writing new poems. I resurrect old poems months or years down the road to see what new spin my current self can bring to them, so a lot of my poems look very different from their first drafts, but I’ve had a number of poems come out whole in one go and change very little before they end up published. 

4 - Where does a poem 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 always try to have some kind of project going. That’s not necessarily a book in my mind, but just something that can help guide my writing and creative energy. April and Back Again came out of a project where I tried to write a sort of summary poem each month for a year. My younger son had just turned one, and I was worried I wouldn’t have much time to write, nor much memory of the year between his being one and turning two, so I set out to do one poem a month that served as almost a journal entry. It was a project that I was doing entirely for myself with no intention of turning it into a book. I have a lot of writing projects that start that way. My chapbook One Good Thing had a similar origin. I would go on these long walks and try to think of one good thing and then let my mind spiral in all directions from there. Eventually, that experience and the ideas that came out of it turned into a collection of prose poems that all start out the same way: “ One good thing…”

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
In the past, I did not particularly enjoy doing readings because I always felt too nervous, but as I’ve gotten older, I care less and less about what people think of me and have come to really look forward to reading my poems for an audience. It’s nice to have an opportunity to share my work. I also spend a lot of time reading aloud. I have two young kids. For the last nine years of my life I’ve spent at least an hour pretty much every day reading something aloud to someone. Now when I read my poetry in front of an audience, I just imagine myself sitting on the couch reading aloud to my boys and it feels very natural and familiar. 

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?
I think the main concern behind my writing is how to make sense of being human. I think about writing poetry the same way I think about parenting: It’s my job to illuminate the complexity of being human, to say, here is what is hard and here is what is beautiful about being alive and now you have to decide what to do with that information.

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?
I don’t know about the role of “the writer” more generally, but for me, I think my role as a writer is to be open and vulnerable so that other people can feel more comfortable being open and vulnerable. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Depends on the editor! I run a literary magazine for kids and in that capacity I work with both adult and youth writers. I think editors have a lot of value, but I also think having an opinion on someone’s writing is not the same as being an editor. You have to learn how to support a writer’s voice, not insert your own voice into their writing and that does take some practice. 

Generally, I’ve had good experiences working with editors, and I have a number of trusted writer friends and first readers that I regularly go to for feedback. Often you need someone who can say, I don’t understand what you’re going for here, or this poem feels clunky and awkward in this spot. What you know about your own writing and how it sounds in your head and on your tongue are not always going to translate clearly for a reader and it’s useful to have someone who can point out the bumps and cracks in your writing that you might not see as clearly on your own. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Just try your best and remember it’s supposed to be fun.” –My son, after inviting me to play a new video game with him for the first time. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to children's literature)? What do you see as the appeal?
Pretty easy. They satisfy different needs for me and tap into different kinds of creative energy. Because I have kids, I spend a lot of time reading children's literature so it's never very far from my mind. I think writing children’s literature, particularly picture book texts, is great practice for writing flash prose. They are short texts that are in conversation with illustrations, so each description, each word has to earn its place. If you have a tendency to overwrite, it’s a good way to practice cutting your stories down to only what is absolutely necessary. And for poetry, one of the things I find fun is taking a single topic and trying to write two different poems about it–one for adult readers and one for kids. It’s good practice for finding lots of different language and ways of expressing the same basic idea. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I have no routine. I try to write whenever I can. I’m constantly pausing to jot down ideas or lines for poems. I have about 18 hours of childcare coverage for my toddler spread over three days during the week and I have to squeeze into those hours my own writing, work for the magazine I run, and anything else I want to do for myself that allows me to stay healthy and feel sane. It’s a lot to fit into not very many available hours. I can set out with a grand plan to get a lot of writing done in a week and it can quickly be derailed by a child getting sick, or as has happened many times this winter, an unexpected school closure thanks to snow. I have learned to ignore all opinions and advice about how to create and stick to a writing schedule. If you don’t have young kids and a thousand obligations pulling you every which way all week long, we are not the same and your advice is not for me. I suppose I could wake up early or stay up late, or forgo social interactions to fit more writing in, but I need sleep and I need community, and I need the reset that comes from not trying to be productive all the time. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I like to listen to stand-up comedy albums. Not for inspiration exactly because I’m not a comedy writer, but they help clear my head and I think there’s a lot to be learned from good stand-up about rhythm, language, and storytelling. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Right now, unfortunately, poop. We just got two cats and oh my god somehow two cats poop way more than twice as much as one cat. We also have an elderly dog who is increasingly flatulent in his old age. And I have a potty training toddler in my house so there are just so many poop smell sources and iit was a very cold winter and we were trapped inside with the smell. A temporary spring has arrived so we can open up the windows and that helps. I'm looking forward to when the scents of the lilac bush and sweet bay magnolia in our yard return.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My children are the most obvious influence in my work, both the experience of parenting them, but also the way they force me to take notice of little things that I would otherwise ignore. Take a walk with a toddler and you’ll be shocked by how many different things there are to marvel at without having even made it ten feet. 

Also, growing up, I was an emotional child who spent much of her time listening to Fiona Apple, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Sheryl Crow, and Jewel. That brand of female singer-songwriter lyricism exists on a cellular level in my body forevermore. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I read a lot of fiction. Ordinary People was the first book I read that made me want to be a writer. I read it when I was probably too young to be reading it and it opened my eyes to how expertly crafted writing about grief and hardship can make you feel and I have forever been in pursuit of matching that skill. Flight by Lynn Steger Strong is a book I return to again and again when I need a reminder of how to write complicated relationships. Evvie Drake Starts Over by Linda Holmes is my favorite book for when I need inspiration for writing natural-feeling, authentic romantic tension and dialogue. 

My poet friends Vic Nogay and Annie Powell Stone have been essential sources for feedback, commiseration, and discussions about writing. Their help and friendship keep me going. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In terms of writing: finish and publish a novel.

In terms of life: finish a cup of coffee without interruption and before it has a chance to turn cold.

17 - 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 was a massage therapist for 15 years before I had to give it up for physical reasons. I was very good at that. I think I would have made a good psychologist, which is what I was planning on becoming when it came time to pick a major in college. When I was a kid thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up, the two main things were writer or marine biologist. I never did particularly well in science, though. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have always enjoyed writing, but I came back to it in a serious and determined way after having kids. Becoming a parent and suddenly having very little free time for my own interests and desires really helped me clarify what I wanted from my life and what I wanted was to spend my days writing. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Oh gosh, I've read so many great books. I'm reading The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers right now and really enjoying it. I'm also going back and reading books I loved as kid to my son. Charlotte's Web is a perfect book. The Giver remains amazing. I really want to read Bridge to Terabithia to him but I need to be sure we're both in stable emotional states before I do because it's going to crush us. 

I don't get a chance to watch many movies, though I would like to! I think the last movie I saw was Train Dreams and it was gorgeous and sad, and quiet. I really liked it. I watch more TV than films at this moment in my life. If you aren't watching Shrinking, I recommend doing so. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel about a group of women who are brought together by a shared grief experience. It's coming along and I'm thankfully still enjoying writing it. That's really the only project I'm focusing on right now. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Lydia Unsworth, Stay Awhile

 

FFS

It’s like, you built this. You don’t just get to say I quit and start again like you’re 77 and can father a new family without consequence any time you feel up to it. You built this and you leave it behind. The guardians say no while you try to cut it out like circles from a tight orange dress. But who listens to a guardian? We’ve got the loud man here. And he’s outwitted us again because in the rules, rules he wrote, it says culture is the hand around the wrist.

The latest from Manchester, England poet Lydia Unsworth is Stay Awhile (Merseyside UK: The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2026), a book of buildings and human occupation, construction and how human construction occupies space. Through the poems of Stay Awhile, Unsworth stcutures a book-length suite that examines how building construction shapes the way we interact with each other and our environment, including apartment towers, sculpture and monuments. “no one knows why Intestine City is called Intestine City,” she writes, as part of “Ex Terra Lucem,” a title that translates from Latin into “Light from Earth,” “no one / but people are able to find a tiny piece of glass / from 2,400 years ago and explain it / from the earth comes light / we should not deny it [.]” She writes on connecting human construction to human response and interaction, and into parenting, differentiating the responses between our first-person narrator and her two young children, who regularly appear to provide their own commentary. Through moving across such landscapes, the poems ask: what become our responsbiliities to such spaces, each other and even to ourselves, through such repeated and continuous abandonment? Or, as the poem “You Get Free Parking All Day” offers:

 

 

little trees have been popped at the bases of all the stairwells
so we don’t notice the stairwells and attempt to ascend

they don’t want us to be reminded of what was once
dreamt for the upper level 

we’ve got to ignore the fact that we are all ashamed

Through long stretches of accumulation, Unsworth composes her poems through layerings of narrative shorthand, offering only what is absolutely necessary, that form lyric shapes, turning at times from a kind of music to more direct speech with striking effect. “you can start to appreciate scale // a horse reared / behind a low fence // signs started to imply we shouldn’t be here,” she writes, as part of “Unproductive and Unfunctional Blankness,” “I hate guard dogs / the way they ruin an entire species [.]” Unsworth offers poems that blend description, meditation, prose blocks, line breaks and visual rhythms that cohere into a poetry of subtle but seismic narrative force. “If you don’t like it,” begins the short piece “Middlehaven,” “knock it down. Knock it down again. Just keep knocking it down until you get it right. My child does this with a pack of cards, her hands full of dice. // This is my home. I have bought it and I will keep on buying it.”

rob reading and podcasting in Victoria, April 24 + 25.

I seem to be doing a whole slew of events in Victoria, British Columbia later this month, in case you are around. Reading twice, and even on stage doing a podcast! Who can keep track of it all. Promoting the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025), with most likely a handful of chapbooks as well. Might we see you?

April 24, 2:00pm: reading at the James Bay New Horizons Centre, 234 Menzies St James Bay, open set sign-up 1:30pm. hosted by Anna Cavouras. 

April 24, 7:30pm: reading with Anna Yin and Phoebe Wang as part of Planet Earth Poetry, Russell Books. Doors and open mic sign up, 7pm.

April 25, 5:30-7:30pm: The Poet Laureate Live Podcast: rob mclennan and Kyeren Regehr. Be part of our live studio audience! Tickets required. Haus of Owl Creation Lab, 780 Blanshard St 4th floor.