reading in the margins : Susan Howe and Stephen Collis

I've been working for a few years, since the Covid-era, short essays on works by prose writers, most of which I've been posting over at the substack for a while now, and two of the latest have now landed: on the work of American poet and critic Susan Howe, and on the work of Vancouver poet, critic and editor Stephen Collis. Prior pieces have been posting for a while now, on works by Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Ernest Hemingway, Joy Williams, Kristjana Gunnars, Gail Scott, Jean McKay, Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Stuart Ross, Christine McNair, Sina Queyras, Jordan Abel, Karla Kelsey and Lydia Davis. You can see where my reading interest lay: a bit lyric, a bit off-side. Certainly not the straightforward narrative. I don't know: I might be half-way through a manuscript of such? "reading in the margins: essays on prose writers." Either way, I know there are further to go. Michael Ondaatje? Dany Laferriere? Sheila Watson? L. Maud Montgomery? Elizabeth Hay? Elizabeth Smart? Ken Sparling? John Lavery?

Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park, from GEIST

my non-fiction dispatch, "Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park," from GEIST magazine (print) is now online!

accompanying image: Jenny Bou, L'éveil de la bienveillance, 2020, handmade collage on cardboard

the genealogy book : (a new work-in-progress,

Nearly a year ago, I started a substack for the sake of prompting a particular writing project, and have just started posting from the most recent work-in-progress, "the genealogy book," the first two of which are now available here and here. Since my teens, I've been the self-designated genealogist for my family, and spent years working through a variety of archives to piece together innumerable threads of genealogy. Through this, I've been fully aware that I was adopted, and had other threads as well, but I've only been learning them over the past few years, and am now pushing further to explore those threads, and what that potentially means, through a non-fiction project. If I self-identified so heavily through one set of threads, only to be presented with a whole slew of alternate threads, how does that fit in with my consideration of self? What does it all mean?

Through the substack, I'm aiming to post weekly, with every third or fourth post for paid subscribers only (I mean, I have to give some incentive to sign up with money). The substack originally started to prompt my non-fiction "Lecture for an Empty Room," a book-length essay on literature, small press, community and responsibility, so there's a bunch of pieces on there for that. The weekly prompt I originally gave myself for posting sections on this blog of the manuscript-in-progress that eventually became my pandemic-era memoir, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022), worked out pretty well, after all. As well, I was posting fragments of a forty-ish page essay I had worked on, "A river runs through it: a writing diary," composed during the months that Denver poet Julie Carr and I were actively working on our collaborative poetry call-and-response. Other threads via the substack include a two-part essay on above/ground press, a variety of self-contained short stories, and the sprinklings of a journal project from 2019-2020 around genealogical discovery, Christine's health and my father's illness and eventual death, "the blue year." I've also been posting self-contained essays on fiction writers as part of an ongoing series titled "reading in the margins: a writing diary," with some new pieces forthcoming, hopefully, on Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Lavery and  Dany Laferrière, among others. Since starting, I've tried to treat the substack as a kind of weekly column, and the trickling of support from such has been helpful, although the big push is really to get me writing further and deeper into these ongoing prose explorations. Why not sign up? Who knows what might come next? And I'm completely fine with folk signing up gratis; the working-class farm lad in me always thinks that lack of finances should never be a hurdle to engaging with literature, after all.

Talking Poetics : an occasional series

Anyone paying attention already knows that I’m always starting up some ridiculous scheme or another (see also: On writing, the Tuesday poem, National Poetry Month, 12 or 20 (second series) questions, my (small press) writing day, many gendered mothers, G U E S T [a journal of guest editors], Touch the Donkey, Forty Proper Tales, Six Questions, the ottawa small press book fair : 2020 home edition or anything I’ve been cooking up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, or even above/ground press, which turns twenty-eight years old in July), but near the end of summer 2019, I started another new series of essays ("Talking Poetics") on the ottawa poetry newsletter blog, soliciting poets to see if they might be interested in talking about the nuts and bolts of writing. I asked questions such as: How does a poem get started? Has that changed over time? Do you begin with a loose structure, a phrase or a word, or the kernel of an idea? Are you prompted by the work of other poets, or, say, something you read in a newspaper? Do you start at the beginning, somewhere in the middle, or work from a scattering of notebook entries? Do you utilize notebooks, and how does that help? How are line-breaks (or the choice to ignore them) chosen? Etcetera. Maybe even focusing on recent threads in your work, or even a recent (and/or recently published) poem? Are there other writers at the back of your head as you work? I had originally considered the project to be one exclusive to Ottawa-area writers, but of course, the project took on a life of it's own, and progressed a bit further than that.

I like hearing how different writers consider structuring poems, and the decision-making processes that go into poems starting, continuing and going further. So far the series has included thirty-four short pieces: Sanita Fejzić, Amish Trivedi, Amanda Earl, Gil McElroy, Sonia Saikaley, Rusty Priske, Pearl Pirie, Dale Tracy, Barâa Arar, Jean Van Loon, Sarah Kabamba, Lydia Unsworth, Michael Blouin, Mary Kasimor, Eric Baus, Kate Siklosi, RM Vaughan, émilie kneifel, ryan fitzpatrick, Ashley-Elisabeth Best, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Jami Macarty, Conyer Clayton, Misha Solomon, Derek Beaulieu, Genevieve Kaplan, Jeff Alessandrelli, Dina Del Bucchia, Chris Banks, Valerie Coulton, Stephen Collis, Rose Maloukis, Johannes Göransson, Juliet Cook, Michael Edwards, Nathanael O'Reilly, Courtney Bates-Hardy, Claudia Coutu Radmore, Michael Lithgow, Jack Jung and Nicole Raziya Fong. Did you want to write one? What else might happen?

essays in the face of uncertainties

One element I’ve appreciated is how well our two young ladies play together, making up games and stories and songs. We knew of this prior, but our appreciation deepens. Once we wrestle them off the tablets, our first couple of weeks included the television on in the basement, which quickly became background to their attentions. After a while, they stopped even bothering going downstairs at all, unless they were wrapped up in some complicated game involving forts or babies or Cinderella. How many times has our dining room table become centre-stage for one of their structures, or where they’ve self-determined a Lego city, a mound of drawings or some other invention? Today, self-slathered in sunscreen, they navigate the hose and their wading pool out in the backyard, occupying themselves for hours. I grew up on a farm, after all, so I very early on learned the benefit of managing my own time, wandering the fields and collecting stones. The last thing I want to do is micromanage the young ladies, although I do attempt to get Rose to draw daily in one of her notebooks, and report on her drawing. We’ve only managed this once, but I keep trying her. I check in on them, regularly. Or they come inside, seeking freezies. Little wet footprints on the floor of my office that run down the hall.

Another element is the array of stories that have drifted up, out of the ether, of comparable stories from days-gone-past. This is not the first time in memory that those in the world have lived through such a situation, even if some of the details might be slightly different. Public television offers a small tale of a centenarian who is living through the current pandemic, born during the lock-down of the Spanish Flu, her mother somehow managing solo throughout birth and her newborn daughter’s first few months. You can do this, the piece offers. You can get through this. In the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Emily Moon writes “How the U.S. Fought the 1957 Flu Pandemic.” Her short article begins:

In April 1957, a new strain of a lethal respiratory virus emerged in East Asia, caught local health authorities by surprise and eventually killed masses of people worldwide. Today, in the age of Covid-19, that scenario sounds frighteningly familiar—with one key difference. Maurice Hilleman, an American microbiologist then running influenza monitoring efforts at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, saw the problem coming and prepared the United States ahead of time. “This is the pandemic,” he recalled saying. “It’s here.”

This is not historically abstract in the way the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic might appear to us, but something, for numerous people, that occurred within living memory. To remember the 1957 pandemic, one might say, would put you disproportionally right in the path of Covid-19. Back then, there was notice, notification and response, and 116,000 Americans succumbed to the disease, although far more could have been killed. Over email, Bay Area poet Susanne Dyckman offers her own:

When I was a baby I had scarlet fever, and the Chicago Board of Health tacked a quarantine notice on our basement apartment door.  My mother’s not alive (gone too early) but I so wish I could talk to her about it, how she managed with an infant and a five year old, even something as basic as how she got groceries. All she ever told me was that we, as a family, were under quarantine (of course, somehow my doing?)  Later, still being a kid when she told me the story, I didn’t think to ask questions.  Now I’m beginning to see what it takes to manage.

According to family lore, my mother caught scarlet fever while babysitting, although I’ve no clue if there were any quarantines for her, still living at home with her parents, and four of six siblings. It was this that, according to family lore, affected her health and began the eventual loss of her kidneys, and her inability to have children of her own. Isolated incidents are never that, and there are lessons to learn from any situation. And yet, we can watch in real time as segments of the population refuse the lessons and warnings of history.

It is hard to look at those numbers and see, on the other side, individuals holding up hand-made signs with “I want a haircut!” With fear comes desperation. And there is little logic to, or argument against, desperation. Someone on Twitter suggests that of course there are those who consider haircuts, the casino and other short-term pleasures worth the risk. Because they’ve no hope for anything else.

essays in the face of uncertainties