John Phillips, Language Being Time

 

THE POINT

Why add more
words to the
too many there
already no one
pays much
attention to or
acts differently
after reading
as if the point of
it all were acting
differently which
hopelessly it is

It took some time for me to get to, but I am finally moving through British poet and expat currently living “in the hills of central Slovenia,” John Phillips’ fifth full-length poetry collection Language Being Time (Shearsman Books, 2024), a book that follows his Language Is (Sardines Press, 2005), What Shape Sound (Skysill Press, 2011), Heretic (Longhouse, 2016) and Shape of Faith (Shearsman Books, 2017) [see my review of such here]. His short lyrics each sit the small measure of a koan, thoughtfully offered and considered, held with a small turn. His are not the extreme and casual densities of poems by such as Cameron Anstee [see my review of his latest here] or the late Nelson Ball [see my review of his selected poems here], but something quieter, looser, and at times, more flexible, subtle.

He writes in small turns, poems that occasionally offer a narrative hinge mid-way, where the poem might alter direction, or a straight line heading somewhere other than you might have been thinking, through a deeply thoughtful and engaged poetics. Listen to this short poem, “DISPENSATION,” in full, that reads: “History begins / when loss is / saying what / no one present / understands / this going / towards when / & where / no tense / makes sense [.]” As well, I appreciate this note set just at the end of his acknowledgements, hinting at further engagements, which I would be interested to hearing more than this single hint of what is most likely far larger, and ongoing (including with another favourite of mine, American poet John Levy): “Certain poems are from collaborations with John Levy and James Stallard in which we responded to each other’s words.”

REPLY

This poem isn’t written
until you finish
                          reading it

 

Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau

 

At the beginning of her marvelous book, Planetaria, Monica Ong declares her intention with an epigram taken from Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist, who was known as the ‘Queen of Nuclear Research’:

The main stumbling block in the way of any progress is and always has been unimpeachable tradition.

Instead of aligning her writing with an established, avant-garde agenda, Ong has defined a fresh trajectory that arises out of living in the diaspora while being aware that we inhabit an expanding universe. By incorporating family photographs, Chinese star charts, astrology texts, scientific diagrams, unwritten and neglected histories and biographies, and symbolic language, she is able to synthesize aspects of the microcosmic and macrocosmic into something original and disruptive.

Ong’s visual poems replete with charged language expose the obstacles shaping an individual’s life. Motivated by a propelling desire to dissolve the constraints of literary tradition, gender bias, family history, and cultural beliefs, she has intervened in classical Chinese texts and written shaped poems in praise of women scientists, always making something new (John Yau, “Foreword”)

I would say you absolutely have to get yourself a copy of Planetaria: Visual Poetry by Monica Ong, with a Foreword by John Yau (Trumbull CT: Proxima Vera, 2025), a stunningly-intricate blend of visuals and text as simultaneous poetry collection, experimental memoir, visual poetry assemblage and fine art catalogue. Planetaria is a book on family, constellations, loss and storytelling, wrapped in a visual array of wistful gestures and grounded expression. If you aren’t aware of Connecticut-based American poet and artist Monica Ong [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here], she is also the author of the poetry debut Silent Anatomies (Tucson AZ: Kore Press, 2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, with further work appearing in numerous journals including Scientific American, Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024), among other places. Planetaria is swirling with full-colour gloss, as Ong collages text on maps of constellations and an archive of family photographs that weave stellar cartographies and mythologies across a tapestry of storytelling, family story and song. Her gestures are heartfelt, visual and far-reaching, ever looking to the stars to hold what the ground allows. As she writes: “This interactive poem takes the form of a lunar volvelle. As the moon reveals its ever-changing shape, so too does the poem that radiates from the volvelle’s heart. Fear not. During the full moon, my father’s mother will watch over you.”

I find it interesting that Ong includes a back cover blurb by Los Angeles-based poet Victoria Chang, as the pieces here are reminiscent of the interplay between the collage-visuals and prose stretches of Chang’s own stunning non-fiction project, the deeply intimate Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2021) [see my review of such here], a book that also writes of memory, history and mentors. Through both volumes, there is a particular collaboration between the visuals and the text, each one reacting to the other to create something that sits amid and surrounds them both, wrapped into a single, sustained image or narrative thread. The images that Ong collages and employs here are not there to accompany her text, but exist as one half of a larger structure along with those texts, offering different structures and purpose from piece to piece, from visual poems to what appear like large visual art displays to more subtle blends of image and words. While other contemporary visual poets might be attending smaller, even sequential, works that interplay visual and text, such as Canadian poets Kate Siklosi, Gregory Betts, Gary Barwin or Erín Moure, Ong’s Planetaria is an expansive, full-bodied book-held installation, a structure my dear spouse suggested was closer to the blend of collaged image and text of what British Columbia-based writer Nick Bantock began with his debut novel Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence (Raincoast Books, 1991), the larger narrative structure of the work including visual and physical elements, although Ong’s doesn’t share the design and narrative (convoluted) intensity of Bantock’s novels. And while this collection does include a startling array of visual poems, I wouldn’t call this a collection of visual poems per se, as Ong’s visual poems are but part of a much larger and complex multitude of text and image structures, with much of the collection built out of works that work to interplay and collage the elements of visual and text, but more in way of conversation or counterpoint than as a sequence of individual pieces where one form isn’t able to be removed without the whole structure collapsing (whereas this might be me simply splitting hairs, admittedly). This is absolutely beautiful, and narratively complex. As the poem “WOMEN’S PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE” writes:

Odd number. Odd girl. One is an observation. The other, a polite indictment. She preferred to arrange her studio against the laws of symmetry, her way of saying up yours to Confucius and his man-pandering precepts. No matching pillows, tilted walls, her father’s books all perfect bound yet bent like a wormwood granny’s feet.

Imagine a woman’s calculations opening up the sky, the sun’s orbit but a mole on the lip of solar clustered nipple. How she spilled the milk from the glass of her astronomer eye knowing it would feed another hunger in another womb of time.

Mathematics were just foreplay. There is nothing wrong with being easy. Any man can scribble odes to flatter a goddess of the moon. She turned her garden into a laboratory to decipher the secret turning of the stars. Behind the ecliptic strung up crystal, she glimpsed her face in the lunar mirror’s  gleam.

Infinite planets. Her endless ether. There are those whose greatness grows in shadow, whose outer limits the spotting of blood cannot contain.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Holly Flauto

Holly Flauto's book of poetry, Permission to Settle (Anvil Press), is a CBC Books pick for Best Canadian Poetry of 2024. The memoir-based poems fill in the blanks of the application to immigrate to Canada, while investigating the implicit biases in the colonial system of boxes and check marks that still seek to categorize "the other" and to harness it in the face of reconciliation. Holly grew up moving between the USA and South America; she immigrated to Canada in 2008.  Holly teaches creative and academic writing in the English department at Capilano University.

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

This is my first book! And it’s certainly changed my life. The biggest change is my own confidence in my writing and the willingness to tell people “I’m a poet!”

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

I’m not sure I can confidently say I came to poetry first. See now that I said above I am more confident saying I’m a poet, now I have to admit that I’m not. I have published both short stories and essays – and I love storytelling on the stage. I think the idea finds it’s genre for me most often. As ideas emerge they sometimes pull themselves into poetry or maybe from poetry to fiction or creative non-fiction.

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’m feeling a very slow start right now to my next project, but Permission to Settle came quite quickly. I even have lots of poems that didn’t make it into the collection.  My first draft looked very different for the book. I considered the poems as one long poem, and it was only after getting some editorial and mentoring support that they became more individual poems.

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 feel like I generally start with an idea that seems like it will be short, but then it goes somewhere else sometimes.  I find that I obsess over the same themes for a while where similar lines or shapes or ideas keep repeating across different pieces of writing. So, I’m often working on a theme through a few pieces, and then sometimes those will kind of merge together in something longer.  Sometimes the theme moves forward and sometimes the short starting pieces just get to then hangout on their own.

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

I love readings! Love, love, love. I love talking to other writers, I love the audience questions, I love it all. The book has been a portal into being able to do that. I wrote my book to be in conversation with the reader, and I love how that can happen in real time in public readings.

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?

My reoccurring theoretical concerns, I think, are about identity for one, and then with that comes relationships and family. And there’s always the current of exploring inequity and privilege and how we normal immigration and inequities. Theoretical underpinnings of antiracism come from academic writing and composition, and the work of Asao Inoue about the systemic racism inherent in how we assess writing and grammar.

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 think the role of the writer is to be in conversation with what’s happening in the world around them – with world being defined however they’d like. The writer can bring ideas forward and into other people’s thoughts and conversations and writing and art. We all build on each other.

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

Essential. The real difficulty is getting back in the mind space after that period of time when you’ve released the work as the best that you can do right now.  So there’s that initial reluctance to change something because it means work, even when you see it’s the right direction. I have to think of it as a bit of an uphill part of the trail, where you need to push yourself a little.

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

Write what you are afraid to write about. (Thanks, Rachel Rose!)

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to memoir)? What do you see as the appeal?

Easy! But only if I’m ok with it changing as I’m writing. Hard when I’m trying to stay in one genre with an idea and it won’t stay there. It becomes a more difficult project when the idea has to change to fit the genre instead of the other way around.

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?

My best writing is done when I stick to a routine, but for some reason, I don’t do it with consistency. I am most productive in community – writing groups, online and in person.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Writing events – public readings, really – are the most effective form of inspiration for me. Art museums sometimes, maybe something I’m reading too, or a writer being interviewed on the radio or a podcast. But hearing writers talk about their work and ideas and hearing them read in a space with others is when my ideas notebook fills so quickly.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Garage. Is that a fragrance? There’s a certain smell of the garage at my mom’s house. It’s dead leaves and boxes and memories and somehow the ice cream in the outside freezer.

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?

I love to sit in an art gallery and write. I have so many poem fragments musing about pieces of art. I don’t think I’ve ever thought to revise these for submission anywhere, strangely. But art

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I feel like I could never list all the writers or writings I find important. One that always resonates with me is Leonora Carrington. I love the magic of her stories and how they feel like painting and stories and myths and truths and dreams all at the same time.  My book came into it’s form after reading Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant. I learned through that book that a whole book could be one poem really and  I could be so indulgently memoir-y in poetry.

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

I’d like to finish a novel. I have one almost done – but it’s been in that state for almost years now. It is my white whale of a project.

I wonder sometimes if I should give up on it and start another one. I have a story that keeps asking me to complete it – and I’m pretty sure that completion is novel-length. I’m resisting.

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 love teaching. I had a brief career in upscale retail management that I also loved. Dream careers if it’s all possible:  improve actor, artist of large scale paintings, photojournalist, talk show host.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Compulsion. I have to write. It’s an undercurrent of anxiety that’s always there.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I’m not a very astute film watcher.  I am very sensitive to violence on screen – domestic violence, other violence, et al – and the intensity of seeing that and hearing it and feeling it is often overwhelming, especially when I don’t expect it as part of the story. And it’s so often part of the story.

The last great books were The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew and All Fours by Miranda July.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Great question. I just finished teaching for the year, and I’m having trouble transitioning back into writing mode. Teaching is intense! I made a list of ideas compiled from all my scraps of ideas penciled or typed all over the place. It has about 20 ideas on it. Then I highlighted four.  I’m trying to pick one. Maybe others can weigh in? Should I choose idea 1, idea 2, idea 3 or idea 4?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Hajer Mirwali, Revolutions

 

January 22

In 1994 Mama gave birth to me in Amman on
her way from Baghdad to Richmond Hill and
Mona with wood sand metal electric motor
transported us to the first home we were
exiled from. Two daughters of a revolutionary
split. Two mothers of a contracting uterus
waiting to be Palestinian again. 

Past noon. Shadows cast by a swinging
mobile are longer, higher. 

Repetitive sounds mimic Mona’s repletion:
whirring projector light, needle hitting
copper thread. Mama held my slippery body
to her chest. Mama’s slippery body on my
chest. She asks if I have ever listened to
+ and –. Grains of sand flowing through one
another. Every daughter grain resorbs her
mother grain as first foreign body. Lives her
whole life with that inside her. 

I later fix “Mona’s repletion” to repetition to
repletion. Mona so near bursting every line she
erases reconfigures its genes to another line. 

Every time Mama asks what I am writing
I only say + and –.

The full-length poetry debut by Hajer Mirwali, “a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto,” is Revolutions (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that the back cover writes “sifts through the grains of Muslim daughterhood to reveal two metaphorical circles inextricably overlapping: shame and pleasure. In an extended conversation with Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, Revolutions asks how young Arab women – who live in homes and communities where actions are surveilled and categorized as 3aib or not 3aib, shameful or acceptable – make and unmake their identities.” Composed as a book-length suite, this collections weaves and interleaves such wonderful structural variety, offering a myriad of threads that swirl around a collision of cultures, and a poetics that draws from artists and writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Erín Moure, M. NourbeSe Philip, Naseer Shamma and Nicole Brossard, writing tales of mothers and daughters; and how one self-edits, keeps hidden, and also provides comfort, solidarity. “Yes,” Mirwali writes, as part of the poem “January 23,” “a very good daughter who loves / her motherlands and her God. // A daughter more or less. // A daughter + and –. // Never the same twice.”

Structured as a book-length sequence of eleven poem-sections, each of which are set as individual poem-clusters—“3AIB,” “CYCLE GENERATOR,” “MEETING + AND –,” “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” “OPEN GUIDE OF PALESTINE,” “BORDER TONGUE,””OUD INTERRUPTED,” “RAMADAN RECORD,” “GROOVES OF ONE OR MANY XXXXXXX’S,” “REVOLUTIONS” and “SIFT”—weaving through conversations with her mother, swirls of text, erasures, ekphrasis, visual poems and first person description and reportage: “Waiting for the long Baghdad night to fall // down the mountain fold / fragments of rock for riverbed // between our homes he shields / his body over mine // storms of earth not rooted enough / eyes of sand and red sky // after it settles we sweep / a new day or the same long night // rub against other nights making / grains more and more circular [.]”

In the “NOTES” at the back of the collection, Mirwali clarifies how the collection, as well, exists in conversation with and response to a specific work by British-Palestinian multimedia and installation artist Mona Hatoum: “Much of Revolutions is a response to Mona Hatoum’s artwork + and –, which I first encountered online in March 2016 and in person January 2019 at the exhibition Open Works. Art in Movement, 1955-1975 at Le Pedrera in Barcelona.” As the Museum of Modern Art website writes, this particular piece (1994-2004) by Hatoum “is a large-scale re-creation of the kinetic sculpture Self-Erasing Drawing Hatoum made in 1979. Replacing conventional artists’ tools (pencil and paper, paint and canvas) with a motorized, toothed metal arm and a circular bed of sand, Hatoum mechanizes the practices of mark-making and erasure. At a rate of five rotations per minute, the sculpture's hypnotic and continual grooving and smoothing of sand evokes polarities of building and destroying, existence and disappearance, displacement and migration.” Through Hatoum’s piece, the cycle of creation and erasure exists on an endless loop, without anything new created or gained, set in a single moment of yin and yang. And yet, whatever else might be swirling through these poems, this is a collection that is also centred around that core of mothers and daughters, and how one navigates such a relationship to emerge as an individual self separate yet connected and interconnected; with all else, one might offer, as a means through which that articulation might best be explored, from meditation to conversation, citation and direct quotation. “Heaven lies beneath a mother’s feet.” she writes. “What is at her centre?”

What becomes fascinating is in how all of these moments that Mirwali articulates connect across distances, moving from collage into coherence, writing the interconnectedness between each of these disparate narrative threads. As she writes as part of the section “BORDER TONGUE”: “Sand in an hourglass falls in concentric circles until the space is filled then reaches back to where it fell from. I take photos of the camera’s small screen send them to Baba in Iraq.” She writes of multiple points of departure and relationships to people, to individuals, to geographies and geopolitical crises; she writes of home, of hearth. She writes of the contradictions of where the heart may go and how one connects to the world, seeking solace and urgency, a connection to where part of her might always remain, as the sequence “HOURGLASS PROCEDURE,” a poem subtitled “(twenty-minute poems to be read in two directions),” offers:

Have I stopped caring about Palestine?

I want to go skating

Want to eat hand-pulled noodles

To live alone

I want to be a mother

Again I want to listen to the oud

Naseer Shamma would not have written “Layl Baghdad” if it weren’t for the mirage

Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Mothersalt

 

Like an object from space, birth language is a sign of alien life: Mucus plug. Meconium. Also the language of newborns, with its twisted syntax of sleepless nights and bleary, milk-washed mornings. Rooting, latch. Fore- and hindmilk. For now, this private lexicon of flutter kick, swim. What feels like a heart, tumbling through the body. (“MOTHERSALT”)

From San Francisco Bay Area poet Mia Ayumi Malhotra comes the collection Mothersalt (New Gloucester ME: Alice James Books, 2025), following her full-length debut, Isako Isako (Alice James Books, 2018) and subsequent chapbook, Notes from the Birth Year (Bateau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]. “I am beautiful with you. I wear you emblazoned across my face,” she writes, as part of the title prose sequence, “herald of my life to come.” Set with opening and closing poems on either side of three sections of meditative, first-person lyrics, Mothersalt expands the boundaries of her Notes from the Birth Year, offering a book-length suite of poems that provide an exploration, a grounding, on pregnancy and mothering, motherhood and family. “Tell me again about mothering. About the form it takes.” she writes, to open the poem “ON MOTHERING.” There is something deeply intimate and immediate about how she approaches these poems, akin to notes from a journal, carved and honed across graceful lines and still waters, run deep: “How language dawns slowly,” the opening poem, “WHERE POEMS COME FROM,” offers, “then all at once. / The dry, whitish lid working its way, reptilelike, / up the bird’s eye. This isn’t really about the duck, / the pointing. The point is that I saw you seeing / a creature for the first time—paused motionless / on the bridge, bits of debris shifting understood. / Every day you make some new utterance—ball, / more, meow—closing the space between the world / you live in and your name for it.”

Mothersalt exists as a book of breath and simultaneous exploration of the interplay between lyric and motherhood, and how one might inform or shift the other; of a rich and densely-lyric musicality, one that approaches the poem from the foundation first of form. It is fascinating to see the shape of Malhotra’s approach, focusing her lyric as a conversation around form, both poetic and personal, and how the boundaries of each might be expanded, well beyond anything she might have expected. “Tell me about the form mothering takes on the page.” she writes, as part of the poem “ON FORM,” a poem that also includes:

When I became a mother, my lines began to grow less regular, less sculpted—and this itinerant prose did not adhere to shapeliness.

Instead it spilled from birth into death and questions of beauty, arranging itself as it wished.

An artful, yet imperfect text.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Iryn Tushabe

Iryn Tushabe [photo credit: Robin Schlaht] is a Ugandan-Canadian writer and journalist. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Adda, The Walrus, and in the trace press anthology river in an ocean: essays on translation. Her short fiction has twice been included in The Journey Prize Stories: The best of Canada’s New Writers. She was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021, and a 2023 winner of the Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She won City of Regina writing Award in 2020 and 2024. Everything is Fine Here (House of Anansi, 2025) is her debut novel.

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

Everything is Fine Here has been out in the world for a month now. I’m still getting used to the spectrum of emotions when someone tells me they’ve read it. Previously I’d had short stories and creative nonfiction published in literary magazines and anthologies. What I’m learning so far is that once it’s out in the world, the novel/story is no longer yours alone. Now it belongs to you and everyone else. Readers bring their own experiences of the world to the story and interpret it in ways I didn’t anticipate. It’s a joy to hear these impressions and to participate in the dialogue sparked by the novel.

 

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

 

Growing up in rural Uganda, my family didn’t have a lot of books and there wasn’t a public library in my village. But we had no shortage of stories, folk tales mostly, that my many siblings and I told and retold each other. These emigane, as they are called in Western Uganda, are origin stories or even moralising tales attempting to respond to some of life’s biggest questions, such as where did death come from? And yet the stories themselves can be lighthearted, often featuring trickster characters and deities. They lend themselves well to embellishment so each teller can apply their own narrative voice and flourishes while keeping to the original plot. I often think about emigane when I’m crafting fiction, so perhaps that’s where my storytelling began.

 

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?

 

A compelling idea will hit me and demand my full attention. But lately I’ve learned to let even those ideas percolate for a week or two before I commit anything to the page. I make notes on my phone if something comes to mind. That way I’ve done a lot of problem-solving before the actual writing begins. My first drafts often ramble on for far too long, but I don’t worry too much about that now. I have writer friends who will tell me when I’ve written past the natural ending of the story. I’ve learned to listen to the ones I trust.

 

4 - Where does a 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?

 

It might begin with a situation or incident I have experienced, but that can only be the starting point, something to kickstart the imagination. But sometimes all I have is a strong sense of the mood or tone/atmosphere of the story. I’m usually attempting short fiction or a novella; they are the forms I most adore. I get quite sad when a story I’m writing keeps getting longer because then I can sense that it wants to become a novel. And novels, though I enjoy them, are unwieldy things to manage. Especially if there’s plot involved, changing one detail affects the whole and you have to keep track of everything. It can become exhausting, which is how writers block begins.

 

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

 

I’m a very nervous public speaker, so public readings are tough. Part of it might be that English is my second language. In a relaxed environment I pronounce words clearly, no problem. But in front of an audience, I stumble over words and get into my head about not being understood.

 

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?

 

When I consider my very small body of work so far, I see that I’ve concerned myself, for the most part, with ideas of home, faith, and grief. Having been born on the edge of Kibale Forest where I spent a lot of my childhood—it was truly and extension of my backyard—I consider myself its daughter, and so I’m also always writing about the natural world and wildness, always trying to bring the more-than-human into the narrative. I suspect that I will continue to engage with these themes in some way.

 

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 think the job of a writer is to tell stories of all kinds. Hopefully those stories can show us a wide-ranging humanity and maybe even unsettle us, thereby sparking dialogue.

 

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

 

Both, for sure, but absolutely essential. I didn’t always feel this way, especially as a beginner writer, but now I can’t imagine publishing anything without the (sometimes annoying) nitpicking of a sharp-eyed editor.

 

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

 

To approach revision as an act of love. Re-writing and editing can be long hard work, but there’s beauty in attending to a story, or parts of it anyway. In coming back to it again and again until it is doing what you mean for it to do. Opacity is important in fiction, but too much of it will and you risk disorienting the reader. How to strike the right balance? Well, for me revision has proven most useful and fulfilling. It is nice to be able to trust the process, to believe that if something is confounding me today, I can bring myself back to it later and try again.

 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short fiction to creative non-fiction to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

 

What I love about short stories is language and precision. Every sentence or image in a short story has to earn its place on the page; there’s no space for anything extraneous. But a novel is less restricting, and that’s part of its appeal. You have freedom to excavate far and away from the central idea and then come back. Both genres have their strengths. I suppose part of the job for the writer is to be intuitive and curious, and to pay attention to whatever form will best serve a particular story.

 

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 like to write in the morning after my kids are off to school and my partner goes to work. I like the silence, just me and my steaming huge mug of black coffee. I’m always so grateful for that time to write. Sometimes I can easily pick up from where I left off however many days ago, sometimes it is harder. Usually I can read something—a poem, a play—and get the wheels rolling again.

 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

 

There’s something about listening to an audio book or a short story while walking or jogging that has proven effective lately. Often I’ll listen to books I’ve previously read so that I’m not really too invested in the listening, and this allows my mind to wander. (Did you know that Toni Morrison narrated all her audio books?)

 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

 

Lemongrass. And passionfruit fresh off the vine.

 

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?

 

The natural world certainly, and visual art.

 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

 

I often say I left Uganda Omukiga woman and arrived in Canada a Black woman. The shock was significant. I’ve been learning ever since what it means to be a Black person or “a person of colour” making art on these stolen lands. Earlier when I was still in university, the women’s studies classes I took introduced me to Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde, women whose writing came rushing back to me years later when I was reading Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Dionne Brand. They and other black thinkers continue to inspire me and to provide me a kind of road map of the possibilities of language and how to tell stories with responsibly and care.

 

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

 

I went to film school at the University of Regina, but graduated in time for Saskatchewan to axe the film tax credit that had made filmmaking possible in this province. I’d like to write a screenplay some day, something to justify all that money I spent in tuition.

 

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 suppose I’d still be doing journalism full time. I love journalism and I’m always consuming news, but for me the job was stressful. Journalism requires a level of confidence and assertiveness that I unfortunately lack. I’m a shy person; I’m not comfortable asking tough questions and confronting people. Fictional characters I can probe and hold to account, but most actual people make me anxious.

 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

 

I started writing fiction during a brief period in 2015 when my postgraduation work permit expired before my application for permanent residency came through. Suddenly it was illegal for me to work in Canada, so my employer let me go. An immigration officer said I could stay in the country if I wanted while I waited for a decision to be made my application for permanent residency. I started writing as a way to distract myself. I was also trying to make sense of this strange in-between place in which I found myself. What would happen if my application was denied? But writing fiction and creative nonfiction quickly became a refuge for me. By the time I receive my permanent residency status, I’d decided that I would practice journalism as a freelancer and devote the rest of the time to trying to become an author.

 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

 

I’ve just finished reading Jessica J. Lee’s Two Trees Make a Forest and I’m in awe of how the author, by exploring the geological history of her ancestral homeland of Taiwan, and through careful attention to the lives of her grandparents, reaches a greater understanding of herself and her place in the world. It’s a truly marvellous book.

 

The greatest film I recently watched is Sinners. It’s this genre defying piece of art that’s soulful and daring and deeply affecting. The cinematography is gorgeous as is the sound track. I’m going to try and see it once more on the big screen before it leaves theatres.

 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a memoir-in-essays, but one of those essays keeps getting longer and longer so that I don’t know if it’s really still an essay or something else. But I’m not too worried about the architecture of things and this stage. I’ll keep writing and see where I end up.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;