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.

Lisa Fishman, One Big Time

 

Two weeks is better than one week
which reminds me
this is quarantine, by law
staying in place
14 days
Border Control will call every day
they said, but haven’t yet

I make a list
two moose one loon the single
constant chipmunk
multiple birds
no boats except a metal row

& scruffy kayak

cloud      sky

temptation

to plainest words (“July 10-13”)

I’m charmed by duel American/Canadian writer Lisa Fishman’s most recent title, the compact and Covid-era One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025), following her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], and a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. One Big Time is composed as a kind of lyric sketchbook—less a density than an exactness and easy precision—across eight small temporal poem-captures. The table of contents for the collection, titled “TABLE OF DAYS, 2020,” lists her eight lyric poem-sections as “July 10-13,” “July 14,” “July 15,” “July 16-18,” “July 19,” “July 20,” “July 21-22” and “July 23-24.” While the poems offer an immediacy of moments, sketches and relays, the framing sets this firmly as a pandemic response, and a title that suggests the uniformity across that time, the perpetual, endless now of timeless space that occurred within lockdown. “you could just say / not anything / in the forest / under hemlock,” the opening poem begins, “waterbeing going by // meant to write waterbody // but it came out waterbeing / under treebody [.]”

The immediacy of Covid-era responses of titles such as British writer Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (Penguin Books, 2020), Toronto poet Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], Barcelona-based American poet Edward Smallfield’s a journal of the plague year (above/ground press, 2021), Toronto poet Nick Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Tacoma, Washington poet Rick Barot’s chapbook During the Pandemic (Charlottesville VA: Albion Books, 2020) [see my review of such here], not to mention my own pandemic-suite of essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2022), composed across lockdown’s first hundred days, find new ground in Fishman’s lyrics. There’s a calm to this collection, even with the framing, the background, of uncertainty across that first Covid-era summer. There’s also something quite graceful to the subtleties of a smaller collection—the poems themselves take up but thirty of the fifty-six pages of this published book, allowing for a great deal of open space, which I very much appreciate here, and seems a smart and deliberate design-response to the requirements of the poems—one fully aware of the lyric geographies she moves through. “The river Niedecker / wrote of minerals / comprising blood / I think she said we’re made of / rock,” she writes, as part of “July 20,” “she of the Rock / River / but I think she said that / near Lake Superior [.]” The immediacy of Fishman’s notes provide something far quieter, more immediate and localized. Fishman offers something intimate, and detailed, through her sketchnotes from the landscape of a borrowed lakeside cabin, somewhere on the Ontario side of the border, syllables across a deliberate wish to retreat and refocus, in part through the very act of writing—“Present location / for nine more days: / up hwy 129 / north of Thessalon / Ontario // North of U.S. / Undone States”—where she holds to solitude, and an attempt, a sense, of grounding calm. “and down there is the lake / full of fish / and there is no reason / to stop writing [.]” Or, elsewhere, as she offers: “Where the lake cuts through the forest it does not / show you.” she remarks. “Go around.”

5:30 a.m.
Morning star and Crescent moon
in dusky light (orange red purple)
an hour later, light’s bright yellow
then silvery yellow
then clear or no color, transparent
light

A novel confused me just this year
bc she was talking about dusk
first thing in the morning, at dawn
so I looked into it and sure enough
dusk is really
a quality of light, not a time of day
(light with colors)

& yesterday “at dusk”
the dusky light was blue

I notice not being tempted
            to say so what (“July 14”)

 

Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton, with an introduction by Lisa Fishman

 

When a book or a poem or essay or performance has already been made, are there ways for it to keep changing, so to speak, in part by means of being thought about, spoken about, written about, overhead by others? We know that the answer is yes, and that criticism is one word for that process, even if cultural space for meaningful criticism seems to be shrinking. A practice discussed at length by the panel is curation; each writer approaches curation in ways likely to expand and refresh one’s sense of what critical engagement is. When Andrew Steeves sets type as a printer and publisher, when Jim Johnstone reviews a book, when Chris Patton exhibits fragments of a text written by a person who was once alive, when Klara du Plessis creates the conditions for a new text or experience to be made by way of bringing writers together to share their work in unforeseen ways (her name for this is Deep Curation) – when any such endeavours are undertaken, work by someone is brought forward to be encountered by someone else. Curation lays the ground for conversation, critical inquiry, collaboration, and – as the panelists light upon with palpable hope – community. (Lisa Fishman, “INTRODUCTION”)

I recently caught a copy of Fast-Vanishing Speech: The 2023 Douglas Lochhead Memorial Book Arts Panel: Jim Johnstone, Klara du Plessis and Christopher Patton (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2024), originally curated as one of the Wayzgoose Talks via Gaspereau Press, the full list of which is included at the back of this collection. “At the annual Gaspereau Press Wayzgoose,” the collection cites, “authors Jim Johnstone, Christopher Patton, and Klara du Plessis were invited to discuss the topic of Literary Criticism and Curation by their publisher, Andrew Steeves.” Have publications been produced of every talk-do-date? It would seem a very Gaspereau thing to do, certainly. Either way, I would hope that transcripts of such might be available, somewhere, as a kind of checking-in on how various writers, curators, thinkers etcetera are considering their craft. As Steeves began these particular proceedings: “I think the best place to start would be for all of us to just locate ourselves. Briefly, in what way do each of you write about writing?”

For those unaware, Klara du Plessis has been engaged for some time with what she terms Deep Curation, an absolutely fascinating curatorial structure she discusses as part of this conversation. As part of the panel, she offers that her sense of the term “literary curator” “[…] includes my more recent and ongoing project, Deep Curation, that experiments with collaborative poetry performance and centers the poetry reading as more than a vehicle for disseminating published texts, as an artform in its own right. In my academic work, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of labour that goes into organizing poetry readings (like the ones we saw here today). It’s very under-valued and under-theorized work. Both in the practical and theoretical sense, for me, this literary curatorial work is a form of thinking about and enlivening writing. This work becomes an analysis, whether I engage with more traditional scholarly forms or not.”

The ensuing conversation floats easily through and across literary curation as each participant sees such, specifically around each of their individual practices, much of which begins to overlap, in quite interesting ways, one I dearly wish I could have attended in person. So much of this work, this community effort, is being attended by multiple across the country, so any kind of deep dive into the conversation around such is essential, especially given the rarity of such conversation. It is one thing to say there aren’t enough reviews, for example, but then even fewer are discussing the arguments and ethos of reviewing, let alone any consideration of literary curation, from editing books and chapbooks to writing reviews or essays and organizing and curating literary readings. “When we’re talking about curation,” Johnstone says, near the end, “we’re talking about filtering noise. There are a lot of people who write, and there’s a lot of writing waiting to be published – a good curator can get a community excited about what’s happening. They can bring voices into perspective in a way that makes you want to hear them.”