12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rickey Laurentiis

Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.

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

Certainly, Boy with Thorn changed my life. It suddenly thrust me onto a kind of national stage and lead to pivotal moments in my life, such as traveling to Palestine in 2016 for the Palestine Festival of Literature. When I leaf back thru that book, I notice an orderly, “tight,” well-workshopped book that explores the pain of not “fitting” with one’s body, if they did fit a queer & black identity, and the possibility of yet claiming that body in future. This diverges from Death of the First Idea—a bigger, and in some ways messier project about embarking on that reclamation. In some ways, I feel as if I’ve been on a Dantean trilogy: where I was “lost in a wood,” traveled thru a hellscape, banked in Purgatory—and am now contemplating what Paradise means for a black, trans woman. I italicized that word only to call attention to the fact that, prior to transitioning, I had no word: neither “man” nor even “non-binary” much made sense to me and the communities I interact with. And it does seem important to remind us all that Gender isn’t only a personal revelation, but a social contract of sorts: otherwise, the desires for correct pronoun-usage by others  wouldn’t have as much significance or sting. My second book explores this terrain, along a backdrop of the archaic and the future. I have new questions for the lyric like—“Why be tight?” “What is being held back, potentially, or denied a voice given such conscription?”

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 take handsomely from anywhere, and am constantly anticipating my next dive thru a Wiki rabbit-hole. I collect a lot of scraps of language. Sometimes for how a thing’s been said, after which I perform a sort of autopsy on that language to figure out, grammatically, how it works & succeeds; sometimes other times for what’s been said. I don’t have a conscious—or at least haven’t yet—had a fully aware idea that I was preparing a book thru most of both my first two books, but I assume this might less and less be the reality. As you write & publish more books, one grows ever more conscious she is publishing books. That’s also to say, one grows aware that a readership for their work exists and a readership who will arrive with some degree of expectation. For a long time, doubt courses thru my body at this acknowledgment; but now—now that I’ve written the messy book—I feel more courageous. I feel permitted to explore the lengths of my poetics.

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

Sure, public readings matter to me and the work. It wasn’t always this way. A naturally shy, bookish kid, I remember dreading the arrival of readings while at the same time recognizing its value. The value is community. And I recognize an early lesson: that to place ourselves in deliberately uncomfortable situations can encourage eventual ease, even familiarity. It’s been a while now since I was fully in the swing of readings, but I am looking forward to them. It’s important to me my work succeeds on the page & in the air—I even say so directly in one poem. Our art is to, first, to make, then to share.

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

I’ve longed for an editor, a real editorial relationship, since I discovered they exist. And I feel lucky now to have found one in my editor at Knopf. I personally believe more editors, at the level of journals, should engage revisionally with poems. It’s often that we can’t see our own brilliance, and that should make sense as to state directly in any light hurts the eye. An outside reader, but one with authority, offers that glimpse at the traveling photon; it may even see, before the light is exactly perceivable, the genius yet to come. I find myself particularly good at reading the work of others for a critical revision; it’s one of my happy services.

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

Toni Morrison is famous for saying, “The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.” She was a genius who understood the seduction of what I’ll just call the social world & all its ills, and how it drives the writer into unnecessary apologia, uncritical explanations. “It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being,” she continued. “Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” Bu

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

Years ago, a poetry professor, Suzanne Gardinier, assigned us to an essay with the instructions “not to forget we are poets.” I took that directive, like a liquor, physically, in. Because for me the lyric balances an expression of beauty (thru line, sound, collision) with a rigorous analytic (thru idea, question, contradiction), it’s been relatively easy for me to move between the genres while recalling I’m a poet. In any genre, writing asks you to press on the sentence until that sentence exposes its fresh concept and in a voice that meets it. If I can recall to do this, whether across liberation or captured in a paragraph, I find I can be permitted to write into and thru any genre, where language matters.

typical day (for you) begin?

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?

Recently, science & its interactions with the esoteric has played a more crucial role in my poetics. I’m just as fascinated with the old myths—the previous thought that, say, rays of light be emitted from the eye, which accomplishes sight—-as I am the new scientific theories & laws. Now we know rays react with our eye, coming from outside it, to drive the images of the world up into our neurological perception. Quantum physics, in particular, to my mind, feels like the meeting of all these disciplines, and my next thoughts consider how the lyric might comb its ideas. For centuries, the light fascinated poets. Can it again? 

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 fantasize about being a psychologist or psychoanalyst, if you would believe it. I went to Sarah Lawrence College & received a pretty great education across the many disciplines, but none in the hard sciences. It was deliberate although today I find myself wishing it had been otherwise. I’m curious, being neurodivergent, specifically schizoaffective myself, about how the brain works and not only on its own, usual terms but at times of crisis and times of pleasure. Years ago, I corralled a group of writers around the question “What occurs to you during penetration?” It was a provocative question that lead to much insight. Today I still wonder the question, if it’s less sexual as intellectual. What penetrates, or is allowed to, our very minds?

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Marcella Durand, A Winter Triangle

 

In time of strange effusion, is it allowed
to count to 12 again or must I conform to
beat of 8, deemed most effective to convey
within medium of letters following one after
another doubled beat of heart before escaping
past reach of bran: but who says brain, furrowed
with infinite folds, can’t follow 12 syllable past end

 

  

 

of line into misty realms, who says gray can’t be
million shades of water, cloud and winter, who says
winter is not warmer now in changing skies, who
says every shade of color isn’t more attractive than
monotones that dull our eyes and train our tongues to
beats that end before brain and much less heart begin? (“automata of a perpetual flute”)

I’m attempting to catch up on my reading of American poet Marcella Durand’s work, having recently attended The Prospect (Delete Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Other Influences: The Untold History of Avant-Garde Feminist Poetry (co-edited with Jennifer Firestone; MIT Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], but still very behind on her numerous other titles, such as Traffic & Weather (Futurepoem, 2008), Le Jardin de M. (The Garden of M.) (joca seria, 2016), Rays of the Shadow (Tent Editions, 2017) and To husband is to tender (Black Square Editions, 2021). As part of this attempt, I’ve been moving through her latest, the book-length lyric suite A Winter Triangle (New York NY: Fordham University Press, 2025). Winner of the 2023-24 Poetic Justice Institute Prize, as selected by Srikanth Reddy [see my review of one of his recent here], A Winter Triangle is a collection composed and constructed as a kind of book-length constellation across boundless space. “now is the time to gesture toward a triangle,” she writes, to open the third section, “a winter triangle,” “a cold triangle not just because it appears / during the winter but / because it is in space very cold / and yet for seconds people seem to survive [.]” Across a triptych of extended sections, A Winter Triangle writes out a lyric expansiveness, large enough that, at times, one can’t see the edge. “is of the north,” begins the poem “Septentrional,” a poem named for a form she’s developed across this collection, “is of the seven stars of / Ursa Major: earth turns north / to constellation—turns to / forests, desert tundra and / settlements, darkness of / land contrasted with sea.” As the back cover provides, A Winter Triangle

[…] explores poetic space and forms amid the infinite possibilities of composition and change. Composed of three parts, or “points,” like its namesake asterism this collection is inspired by Stephane Mallarmé’s idea of composting poetry from the “senseless splendor” of the skies, as well as the designs for automata by twelfth-century inventor and engineer Ismail al-Jazari, and mythological depictions of Sirius, the dog/wolf star, as both a keeper of order and the agent of chaos and energy.

As Srikanth Reddy writes as part of his “Foreword” to the collection: “Like Paradise Lost and Un coup de dés, Durand’s extraordinary book transports us to a realm ‘where numbers end. / And begin again.’ One name for this ‘where’ might be God. Or mathematics. Or another, with apologies to Rimbaud, might oneself. ‘One has a chance to transform into zero,’ Durand observes, ‘if one takes oneself away from one.’” Across sections “automata of a perpetual flame,” “Septentrional” and “a winter triangle,” Durand writes her lyric around a particular shape, around the shape of an idea, attending facts and perspectives across a pinpoint of sequenced language. “Poetry is silence’s / musician and in // painting corners / malachite against // vermillion,” the poem “what noise of circles” begins, “while / orange springs.” It is fascinating the scope, the scale, of this collection; not just how her lyric outlines an idea but a lyric that writes out, around and through her subject, allowing the umbrella as a kind of touchstone, beyond which all other possibilities might find ground. Or, as poem “the etiquette of scribes” reads:

Understand the proportion of one letter to another
and of your emotion in proportion to mine; this selfishness
is intolerable! I deserve better missive, or an apology
the depth of an ocean comprised of centuries
of hurricanes of tears, oceanic sobbing and contrition,
clouds eternally closing over the globe, hunkering
down in an earth of mud sinking into its own regret
over having treated me so very badly!

Eric Schmaltz, I Confess

 

            In truth, I was surprised to learn that I was a witness to this collection’s inception. As I prepared to write this afterword, Schmaltz reminded me in a Zoom meeting that the foundations for I Confess had been laid at a Poetry and Poetics event, comprised of graduate students and faculty, at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. I vaguely recall that a small group of us had gathered to discuss his then-recently published book Surfaces. If I am to accept Schmaltz’s version of this event, I (allegedly) asked him whose body was represented in that particular book. In all honesty, I remember this discussion somewhat differently; I believe it was either Davy Knittle or Charles Bernstein (and I’m mostly sure it was the latter) actually posed this question. But in the context of my confession and Schmaltz’s I Confess, does the veracity of this moment really matter? The failure of our collective memory of this event underscores the fragile constructions of the truth and its expression in the book. What matters is that truth is really a partial thing, but the robustness of the lyrical poem can hold these ambiguities with grace, even if the documented record skips it. Such grace is inherent in the pleasure of poetic form and in the indeterminateness of memory that underlies Schmaltz’s verse in I Confess. Michael Donaghy may call the poem a ‘diagram of consciousness,’ but Schmaltz’s poems are forensic study into truth’s mystification. (Orchid Tierney, “Afterword”)

From Halifax-based poet, critic and editor Eric Schmaltz comes I Confess (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2025), a book-length poetic expanse that follows an array of chapbooks, as well as his full-length debut, SURFACES (Picton ON: Invisible Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here], and critical titles including I Want to Tell You Love, A Critical Edition by bill bissett and Milton Acorn (co-edited with Christopher Doody; Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Produced with an “Afterword” by American-based New Zealand poet, editor, academic and critic Orchid Tierney, there’s an enormous amount of play through Schmaltz’s I Confess; play, resistance, confession, self-awareness, visual expansiveness and lyric truth. It is as though he, as a poet who leans far more into experimental and conceptual forms, attempted to approach lyric’s “confessional mode” from an entirely different perspective, pulling apart the bones to thus reassemble into something else. “Remember, you can be as nervous as you like.” he writes, in his own call-and-response, “Nervousness and deception look different. // Do not move. Tell me when you would like to begin.”

There are those who might see the confessional lyric as an exhausted form, although through Schmaltz, a whole new life is introduced. Through text, photographs, visual text, waveforms, erasure, utterance, polygraph charts and accumulation, Schmaltz explores the tensions of truth and the body across the experimental lyric; exploring certainty and uncertainty, as he investigates text-forms and perceived truth, attention, poetry and poetic form. A caveat, whether descriptor or warning, by the author at the offset, offers: “This book is a document of truth’s performance under duress. // Some of what you will read is true; the rest is poetry.”

In many ways, the core of the book’s content is familiar—who am I and how did I get here—but examined through a unique blend of experimental and confessional, each side wrestling for a kind of control that might not be possible. Given the foundation for this particular mode of inquiry is the use of polygraph, it introduces a whole other layer of tension, of resistance: “I confess,” as the poem, the pages, repeat. “We’re going to focus on some background questions.” Schmaltz writes, “This part of the session ensures that you are able to speak truthfully and that you are mentally and physically fit to proceed with the polygraph test today. // Please answer the following questions truthfully.” There are occasionally ways through which certain conceptual poetry-based works can articulate human elements more deeply, more openly, than the lyric mode, something I felt as well through Christian Bök’s The Xenotext Book 1 (Coach House Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], and Schmaltz manages a dual-core through this work that counterpoints brilliantly, working from the most basic of human questions across a structure of the nature of being, the nature of expansive, articulated, inarticulate and impossible truth, composed across an expansive bandwidth.

after the fullness of night / I arrived at the border / he eyed the length
of my surname / a distance I could never travel 

there / he saw the lines of kin / ‘how do you pronounce your last name?’
he asked / ‘did your family change it?’ / this is where I found myself 

lost / my tongue lolled at its limit / unsettling the certainty of living it /
a line crossing a line / struck / I forced it through my teeth & stuttered
the revelatory cut 

I was sighed into a palimpsest / photographs with no names / a map
with lines faint / my family’s uncertain phrase 

we were not taught to look too deeply at the tangle of root / just the
finger pointing to the tree / I open its file & see the error line 

I could retrace my westward steps / to run my finger in the once
nomadic / only to settle again along these same waterways / taught
to shrug longingly whenever asked

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Qurat Dar

Qurat Dar is the author of Non-Prophet (icehouse poetry 2025) for which she received the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. She was the City of Mississauga’s third Youth Poet Laureate and a Canadian Individual Poetry Slam National Champion. Qurat’s poems have appeared in Augur, EVENT, Arc Poetry Magazine, and across the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) network.

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

I think my first book mostly changed my life by showing me I could actually write a book, and that it was worth publishing. I competed in poetry slams for around two years in undergrad, and while only a few of the poems I competed with made it into the book, I can still see its influence. I love a punchy line or a bit of clever wordplay. Generally, poetry slams have a 3-minute time limit per poem – I found it a bit of an ordeal writing poems that long. My poems have gotten much shorter since I stopped competing. Since I was used to writing for performance, it’s only more recently that I’ve started trying my hand at more formal poetry and working with how the poem looks on the page.

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

I actually always wanted to write speculative fiction and wrote a terrible novel or two in high school, but the external motivator of poetry slam ended up pulling me towards poetry. Having a community of peers that I could write, perform, and compete with (for better or worse) kept me writing poems.

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?

It’s a mixed bag. My favourite is when (rarer than I’d like) an image or concept sticks with me for a few days and then when I sit down to write the poem comes out all at once. More often a poem comes out of bits and pieces I’ve collected over a while (in my journal, notes app, and in random Word documents) and finally found a unifying thread for.

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?

A poem for me usually begins with a single image or line and (ideally) snowballs from there.

For Non-Prophet, the “book” emerged after I already had the poems in hand (spanning eight or nine years!) and could see the patterns there, see what I kept circling in my work.

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

As a recovering slam poet, I love doing readings! Hearing how a crowd responds to your poems is a form of feedback too. It depends a lot on the audience though, performing to a room that’s dead quiet is brutal. Audience interaction is probably what I miss most from my slam days.

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?

To be honest, often I don’t know what questions my poems are asking until a while after I’ve written them. In Non-Prophet a lot of the questions are asked directly in the poems themselves. Largely, they revolve around identity and belief.

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 (and artists in general) is to surprise us with our own capacity for feeling.

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

Essential, working with editors improves not just the poems themselves but has made me a better poet. A pair of fresh eyes (or multiple) lets me see what’s effective and what’s awkward or confusing.

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

That any piece of art will end up different than how you imagined it initially and that is okay, even good. Writing is a process of discovery for me and too much planning bogs me down.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (works for the page to more performative works)? What do you see as the appeal?

I had a bad habit of leaving my poems in paragraphs instead of putting them into stanzas, but besides that it’s felt pretty natural. I try to write poetry that bridges the page and the stage. I find poetry that balances the two to be more compelling – it’s engaging enough to hold your attention but has layers of meaning to sit with and investigate.

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 don’t have a routine for writing poetry, I tend to just write poems when I get the poetry itch.

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

I like making Pinterest boards and playlists for writing projects so I can return to the specific mood/atmosphere I had in mind. Mostly I just have to give myself time.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

French fries and gasoline. I’m a child of the suburbs.

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?

Nature and science influence my work a decent amount. I currently work in stormwater engineering so I’m always listening for concepts or terms from work I can pull into my poetry.

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

I think every writer I read influences my work in some way. My peers in the Maza Arts Collective bring me so much joy, inspiration, and encouragement: Anjalica Solomon, Cassandra Myers, Franz Seachel, Kiran Shoker, and Namitha Rathinappillai.

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

I’d love to write for different mediums – comics, videogames, film.

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?

If I wasn’t a writer, maybe I’d be less mediocre a flutist/guitarist.

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

I was a huge bookworm as a kid, so naturally my childhood dream was to be an author. Of the art forms, I feel writing has fewer barriers to entry as well.

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

Most recently I read What Feasts at Night by T. Kingfisher – really enjoyed it. I don’t watch many movies alas.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a sci-fi manuscript!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #116 : Katie Ebbitt

The one hundred and sixteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring American expat poet in London, Katie Ebbitt.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah, poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young and Calgary poet Anna Veprinska!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

Drew McEwan, tours, variously

 

A voice might change.
                        From a distance a voice may appear to change.

I see the face of another and recognize a name. 

Support structures an unequal encounter.

                                                                  Name this distance. 

You’re always on the wrong foot, I might say.

Come closer and see. (“a tour, variously”)

The latest from Toronto poet Drew McEwan, following Repeater (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) and If Pressed (BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is the long-awaited tours, variously (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a book-length suite structured as a kind of call-and-response between extended lyric sections: “a tour, variously,” “exit strategy,” “a tour, variously,” “arger’s interiors,” “a tour, variously,” “theory of rooms” and “a tour, variously.” “I brace another entryway within a room.” the opening sequence begins, “You frame the performance of a beginning.” Described on the back cover as “a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms,” the open-ended complexity of tours, variously does read as an exploration of space, of being, moving between an uncertainty of rooms. In the first section, a bit further along: “My madness is the madness of sequence.”

Working as an “educator and researcher with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric,” tours, variously is nearly structured akin to a thesis, following an argument across the length and breadth, layered in lyric instead of prose (reminiscent of titles produced through Essay Press, one might say). “Her theoretical parenthesis capitulates to a / demand for rigour where gravity gives way to / a flex behind apprehension.” she writes, mid-way through the collection. “This description / becomes furniture music.” The ebbs and flows of tours, variously hold an array of threads of awareness around depictions, rhetorical function and narrative gesture. “Without the ‘now’ of standardized speech,” she writes, “the / loiterers drag bruised aphorisms. Or so say the / lawyers on the courthouse’s brutalist concrete / steps. Or so say the courthouse’s brutalist / concrete steps. Either way the difference / amounts only to the distance between arrival / and departure lounges.” tours, variously is composed as a long poem talking out self-aware elements of self and being around language and depiction (“Has my narration become cold and inhuman?”), writing an exploration of betweenness, becoming and having become, having been the whole time, achieving an exploration not of uncertainty but of seeking, plumbing the depths of language into a solid ground.

Suppose autonomy. Suppose a hibernation.
A marker-adjusted room to breathe.
Motivated by an impossible exchange.
A room impassable. Reconsidered in miniature. 

Once horizontal withdraws, the work various access.
Vanishing point delegates a private scale.
Margins trace transitional infestations. (“theory of rooms”)

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Carter Vance

Carter Vance is a writer and poet originally from Cobourg, Ontario, currently resident in Gatineau, Quebec. His work has appeared in such publications as The Smart Set, Contemporary Verse 2 and A Midwestern Review, amongst others.  His debut novel, Smaller Animals, was released in November 2025.

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 chapbook of poetry released in 2017, which was definitely a smaller release though it did get some notice at the time. It was honestly a very surreal process in some ways – I submitted to it directly to a publisher without much knowledge about the process and certainly little expectation that I would be successful. It didn’t feel real until I actually had the paper copy in my hands. Though I wouldn’t say it was life-changing in a broad sense (I still had to wake up and do my day job after, you don’t get rich writing poetry!), it did give me the confidence to continue pursuing other longer-form projects.

The process of writing and ultimately publishing my new novel has definitely been different. For one thing, I planned it as a conscious singular project from the beginning and I was engaged in a deliberate process of submitting it to publishers for over two years after the manuscript was substantially completed. In that sense, it was a project I had greater confidence in and that I believed was worth other people reading from an earlier date. The fact that it’s getting a full print run and a bigger push from the publisher is definitely a change from my first book, which was with a very small independent press based in Windsor.

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

I actually started thinking about writing poetry as song lyrics at first, maybe that made it more comprehensible to me when I was in high school. I was (and still am) a big music fan and I wanted to be able to write songs and play in a band and thought I would start there. That dream didn’t really end up working out for various reasons but it was a bit of a gateway. The first pieces of writing that ever really resonated with me emotionally in a big way were actually song lyrics. I would pour over lyrics sheets and online transcriptions of songs looking for the hidden meanings – it felt like I was in on a secret code in some way.

That led to some of my writing getting noticed by a teacher in high school, who encouraged me to think of it more as poetry and that I could attend readings in my home town or submit pieces to the newspaper or other outlets. It took a bit of convincing for me to do this, as I was in some ways a very shy teenager. But with encouragement I ended up really liking it and seeing some (however minor) success.

I actually moved into doing a number of different forms of writing after that. I wrote short stories and won a contest at a local library, a friend and I co-wrote a play that was put on at our school. I ended up coming back to poetry after a break from writing at the beginning of university because it was easiest for me to get my mind around, especially without active collaborators at that time. But I’ve dipped my toe back into fiction and creative non-fiction over time since then, and the novel is kind of a culmination of those efforts.

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?

It very much depends on the project. For poetry, I tend to find it’s a matter of inspiration striking and just getting pen to paper quickly. I will usually do some small edits when I transfer from handwritten to typed for poems but beyond that the finished product is quite similar to the first draft.

For short fiction or non-fiction, I tend to edit my drafts as I go, which can be a bit of a frustrating process, but it does mean that my first draft is more-or-less as I want it to be once completed. That said, I try to welcome feedback from others so it may go through some changes on that basis. 

Writing the novel was a bit of different process – I had a general outline or roadmap of the way I wanted my story to go, where the characters would start and end, and it kind of became a matter of filling in the blanks and getting from point A to point B. I wrote some of the middle chapters before I had an idea of how they would link together, so, I had the key events and added some of the connective tissue afterwards.

The novel also went through a more extensive external review process than any other previous work I have done, both formally with my publisher and informally with friends and colleagues. This was particularly helpful in refining the development of the characters in the novel, and making them more well-rounded and naturalistic. Readers were able to see gaps in character motivation and journeys that were not immediately apparent to me.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

For the two chapbooks of poetry I’ve published previously, they were not originally conceived as complete collections and were assembled on a thematic basis afterwards. The commonalities or shared ideas behind the pieces maybe weren’t apparent to me in initially writing them but became moreso after looking back and seeing how they could fit together. For the most part, this is how I’ve proceeded with previous projects, just writing what makes sense to me at the time and then looking to see how the parts could fit together later.

With the novel, I knew I had a wider story I wanted to tell, so I took a different conceptual approach and wrote down an outline of what I wanted to happen and who my key characters were before I started writing the novel itself. I wasn’t necessarily sure of how long it was going to be or what level of depth I wanted to go into the backstories or other aspects of the novel, but I knew it was going to be a “book” in the sense of a longer-form piece that I hoped would be published that way.

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

I haven’t actually done any public readings in a long time, probably since high school. Not out of any particular lack of interest in doing so, just haven’t had the context to do so and have been busy with other aspects of life. I would like to get back into doing it, so, if anyone has recommendations on where to do it, I’m more than happy to take suggestions.

That said, I do think it can add to the process to get feedback about what works and doesn’t about the pieces you’re working on. I definitely remember refining some of my short stories and other pieces based on public feedback when I still did readings. And definitely for any works that’s meant to be performed, as opposed to just read (like a play), public readings or performances are key to determine if the work is connecting in the way you intend as the author.

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?

The key question to any form of writing, any form of art at the end of the day, in my opinion is, what shall we do and how shall we live? That can take many forms, but it is the question that I find animates the writing that I really connect to in a deeper way and what I try to convey in my writing. I think everyone wants to believe that they are living in a good, moral way, or at least trying to as best they can and we look to various things for guidance in that. For some it may be religion, for some it may be cultural codes and ethics, for some it’s being active in politics or public life, for some it may simply be doing right by your family and friends. I’ve tried to make a mark on things in different ways through my life thus far, and I’m sure I’ll find new ones as I grow older, but my writing in one small way to do it.

The first draft of the novel was written in 2019, during a time I was working on a development project overseas. The separation from my previous life in Ottawa gave me the chance to reflect on what the city, the politics and the people had meant to me and develop the themes and characters in the novel. I felt that I wanted to capture and preserve some of what had happened to me and my peers in a form that could speak to others.

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?

This is a particularly apt question when, as it is so often remarked, reading, particularly reading for pleasure, is on the decline. The traditional answer to this question would be to say something like writers are meant to illuminate truths that others cannot see or cannot articulate and bring them to a wider audience. But that relies on the notion that the wider public is, in fact, reading what the writer writes. The space which the writer occupies is definitely a shifting one in the current cultural landscape and we’re speaking to a smaller audience than we might be comfortable with. In that sense, perhaps the role is shifting to something more akin to a keeper of the flame for the things that are important, in the hopes of keeping them alive for the future. Or maybe we are just tellers of tales to keep the world a bit brighter and more colorful than it otherwise would be.

I don’t give myself a greater air of importance than I warrant, I don’t expect my writing to become a bestseller or change the world. If I bring some illumination to someone’s life and if I cause them to feel like they’ve been seen or I’m able to broaden their horizon or change their perspective, that’s enough for me.

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

I’m fortunate in that I can pick and choose to a degree on how much I engage with outside editors on my work as creative writing isn’t my day job. It’s mostly up to me how much or little outside input I solicit and how I use it. That said, I would say it is a bit of both on the difficult or essential front. It can be hard surrendering a piece of your work to someone else’s hands, particularly if it’s a personal one or something that you want to remain in a certain way. For certain things, mainly poems, I tend to want them to stand on their own, warts and all, in the original way they came out of me.

That said, the process of formal and informal feedback has been most helpful in developing my longer form writing. For the novel, my initial manuscript was given more shape by comments from a number of readers, including my good friends Teresa Yang and Aoife Sadlier. My grandfather, probably the most avid reader I know, was also an early reviewer and provided a number of suggestions which shaped the final flow of the story. In addition, my publisher provided more technical and flow-based edits which caught certain errors that I hadn’t noticed. In all, it’s a much stronger work for their input, even if it was sometimes hard to hear that their interpretation of what I had put on the page was different from my intention.

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

A university professor once told me (paraphrasing), that there are two kinds of thesis: the kind that is perfect and the kind that is done. That has really stuck with me in guiding how I write. There will be always something more to add and in a sense a work of writing is never truly “done” as the engagement and interpretation of every reader is part of the work. It’s helped me to keep this in mind when I struggle with completing something and whether it’s ready to go out into the world, that the only way something is ever  perfect is as an unfinished entity, because it contains the possibility of perfection still within it. In that sense, I prefer to think of my published works as being “released” rather than “finished”, in that I’ve turned them over from my mind only to that of the wider reading public.

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

The biggest challenge in moving from poetry and short fiction to writing at a novel length has been in the process of keeping the longer term vision in mind while writing and examining how my charters maintain (or don’t) their consistency over the course of the work. With short fiction and poetry, there’s less road to run where the plot can be lost, so to speak, and I didn’t have to go back and re-write as much as a result. The other issue I struggled with was how to retain reader interest over a longer work, where to put the chapter breaks so that each section of the book felt like a complete thought while still pulling the reader through to the next chapter and feeling like the end of the whole work had to be gotten to. This is where working with an outside editor was helpful to see where key themes or threads may have been getting lost and where they needed to come together better.

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?

The routine varies quite a bit based on what I’m working on at the time and how much time and I have to dedicate to writing and how intensely I can work on a project. At the height of working on the novel, I was writing for about 4 – 5 hours per day total,  mostly in the evenings, watching the sunset, but this was at an unusual point in my life. For the most part, when I write now, it’s more sporadic and takes one of two forms. The first, more with poetry, is a more spontaneous inspiration, where something will click in me, whether it’s something in the news or just something about the world around me, and I’ll feel the urge to really put pen to paper on it. This is usually written on the bus or while I’m running around. I’ll get the fragments first and then build out the whole piece around that.

The second approach is more if I’m writing a short story; I’ll have a few ideas written down and then let them percolate until I find some time to really sit down and hammer it out. I try to complete this in one sitting, at least for a first draft, just to avoid losing momentum. For me, it’s most important to keep that going, as I feel like a weight is lifted when I’m done. It’s not that writing itself is a burden, far from it, but just the feeling that I haven’t gotten everything out I want to say at the time tends to weigh on me.

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

This is probably a very cliché answer but the thing that helps me the most when I get truly stuck is going for a walk. I find it helps to be able to move and feel my body existing in space again, especially if I’ve been sitting writing for a long time, and feel more connected to the world around me. This helps to anchor my thoughts a bit and let the ideas for where I want to go next flow more clearly. 

If I get really stuck, I find talking to someone else about where my thoughts on a piece are going can be helpful, to see their reaction and get feedback on where may be the logical next step. As well, sometimes listening to music gets the thoughts moving in a coherent way again.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My grandmother used to have a candle in her kitchen which was a very strong, very artificial smell that was supposed to mimic apple pie. It didn’t really, and I honestly found it overwhelming when I was younger. It’s a very particular smell that doesn’t exactly smell like applies or cinnamon, or even the two of them together, more like a cross between a strong cleaning product and Christmas morning . But, as much as I found it off-putting at the time, it was also the fragrance of a place that always made me feel safe and loved, no matter what else was happening in my life. Especially since my grandmother died a few years ago, I sometimes will get a hint of something that smells similar to that and it makes me feel closer to home.

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 continue to be hugely inspired by music in my writing – I usually am listening to something while I write, whether it’s for work or outside of it. I tried to pay tribute to this a bit in the novel by having my characters listen to specific albums while working, something that’s fairly common to me but I don’t often see referenced actively in fiction.  Music influences my writing in some less obvious ways as well, I think about the rhythm of words in a musical frame sometimes, or how they might sound set to music, what music might accompany dialogue if it were heard in the context of a movie, and so on. Thinking in a musical frame sometimes helps to unblock a particularly difficult piece of writing.

Visual art and film also inspire some of my writing, again in terms of thinking about how images I write about might appear on screen or in the mind of a reader. I’ve also tried to capture feelings that I’ve had while observing art in some of my poetry. I remember a particular time I was a bit awed by a clock sculpture at the Musee d’Orsay and wrote about my feeling after that. It’s maybe not necessarily a direction inspiration from visual art by trying to invoke the same reaction by using words.

Finally, I wouldn’t necessarily say my work in inspired by nature in a direct sense, but I often find being in nature or just outside helpful to clear my head and focus more. 

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

In terms of stylistic approach, I am most indebted to Adelle Waldman (particularly her debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.) and Sally Rooney (particularly Normal People), as well as an older novel by the name of Prague by Arthur Phillips. All these novels deal with characters in transition in their lives, as well as sense of generational ennui. In some sense, they have a debt to “lost generation” novels, such as Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (which is one of my favourite books since reading it in high school) and Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, though I don’t know if I would dean to place my work in such august company.

Outside of those direct inspirations, I’m a huge fan of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly Player Piano) and Raymond Carver for short fiction (most of my high school short stories were, in retrospect, fairly blatant attempts at Carver knockoffs). For non-fiction and historical writing, I love Tony Judt’s work (particularly Post-War), and that of Eric Hobsbawm, who managed the unique feat of making sometimes dry historical matters sweeping and magisterial.

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

In terms of  writing, I would like to write a long-form piece of non-fiction. I’m not sure what it would be about but I’ve entertained the idea of going across the country and writing about the neglected or forgotten spaces in the land and how the people there live, what their frustrations are. I feel like in some ways I come from one of those in-between spaces, not quite a city, not quite a town, not quite in Eastern Ontario, not quite in the GTA. It’s in those in-between spaces sometimes dreams are found, and sometimes they die. Of course I would need time off from my day job and a travel budget to make that project work.

Outside of writing, probably more things than I can think of, but the one that comes to mind right now is learning a another language (beyond English and the bit of not-entirely-functional French I speak). The ones that immediately come to mind as the most useful would be Mandarin or Spanish but I’ve always been attracted to learning a regional language, like Romanian or Kurdish. To me, learning another language in a deeper way is like having a whole curtain of the world lifted and being able to access a new piece of it previously unknown to you. Both in terms of literature and art but, in a deeper sense, worldview and meaning-making are contained in a language. It’s a pity I can only see the world from a limited lens in that sense.

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?

With the caveat that, unfortunately, my writing isn’t my day job, I’m very interested in sustainable agriculture and have a lot of family history in farming. I would probably go into something related to that, if I had the chance to change careers or do everything all over again. The older I get, the more I find I like being outside, being in nature, working with my hands. It’s sort of ironic given how much I often just wanted to be isolated when I was younger, but I suppose I just hadn’t found the right way to be engaged in it.

Either way, I really do admire the people who keep the whole thing running in a deeper sense and I think we could all do with being more actually connected to the systems that sustain us rather than just being out of sight, out of mind. I also just think it would be interesting to try and work with types of plants or animals that aren’t typically found in Canada and see if there could be a way of producing them. I’m particularly interested in teff grains and alpacas, probably two of my more esoteric interests.

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

I’ve always wanted to make art, to make something that causes people to stop from whatever they’re doing in the hustle and bustle of their day and think about something bigger. Unfortunately I’ve never been good at painting or visual arts and though I love music as a listener I’ve never been able to dedicate enough time to learning an instrument to make music myself (and anyone who has heard me try would attest that I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket vocally). I think I settled on writing to make my impact because it simply came more naturally to me. I’ve always liked reading, even from a very young age when it was X-Men comic books and elementary-level histories of Ancient Egypt and Rome, so I thought that maybe I could bring some of that .

I was also told when I was younger I was “smart for my age” or “talked like an adult” so maybe that convinced me I had enough of a way with words that people would listen to me. I think it was just that early encouragement that convinced me that this was something worth pursuing, when maybe I hadn’t received the same with other things, or felt like they weren’t for me.

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

I just finished reading The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, which is a fascinating book. I’m not sure if I would say it’s great in an unqualified sense, it’s written in a highly particular style that takes getting used to, but I really felt it effectively portrayed the challenge of living in a time of immense, profound change through a historical lens. It deals with the Norman Conquest of England and the resistance to that, written in a language meant to evoke Olde English. Maybe not for everyone but for the adventurous reader it’s a fascinating take on a post-apocalypse story.

I’ve been watching a mini-series, adapted from the novel by Antonio Scurati (which I haven’t yet read but want to), called M: Son of the Century, which deals with the rise to power of Benito Mussolini. I love historical dramas but this is one of the most compelling I’ve seen in a while. Not staid or stage-like at all, really has lots of propulsive energy. Mussolini acts as a narrator to the series and often breaks the fourth wall to address the audience directly, a surprising amount of dark humour. A lot of masterful camera work and use of light and shadow to draw out the world.

Beyond that, I recently watched The Worst Person in the World, which is a charming little Norwegian film about a woman experiencing something of a quarter-life crisis. Definitely would recommend if you like the works of directors like Noah Baumbach.

20 - What are you currently working on?

In turning my mind to future projects, I have an idea for a historical novel set around the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall that I’ve been considering writing for a long time. Perhaps having this initial novel published will be the spur that finally causes me to put pen to paper on it, but I feel like I should do more research on the topic first.  I’m also continuing to write poetry and the occasional piece of creative non-fiction.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;