12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jane Park

Jane Park is a second-generation Korean Canadian writer. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and was a participant in the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, and Diaspora Dialogues. She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, lived in New York City for over a decade, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Inheritance 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?

I debuted last month with a novel that took me two decades to write. It has been life changing to cross from aspiring to published writer. I feel so much joy and relief.

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

I initially began writing (really) bad poetry during high school and university. At some point, I realized that my poetry was (really) bad, so I started writing 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? 

This novel took a very long time to write. I was probably too precious with my words, but, at the same time, I am proud of every word that I wrote. For this debut, I wrote whenever I was inspired, which isn’t the best way to write. But that did mean less revision.

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?

I always knew I wanted to write a novel. At the beginning of each section, there was an emotional place that I wanted to land at, and I wrote at getting there.

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

I read snippets of my novel at various residencies I did, but I like to keep things under wraps until it’s published. Not many people read my work. I entrusted it with my dear mentor, Shyam Selvadurai, because I trusted his editorial guidance.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I am not at all cerebral when I write. I just allow a voice to take over, and go wherever it leads me. Also, when I write, I likely write about issues I am wrestling with. 

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?

There are many roles a writer can take—to entertain, to distract, to inform. For me, I want to be the sort of writer that Kafka talks about in his famous quote, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” At times, I see myself wielding an axe coming at my reader’s frozen apathy. 

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

It depends on the editor’s capabilities and intuitive grasp of the work. I hired an editor, and felt he didn’t understand my work, so it felt like a complete waste of time and money. However, my mentor, Shyam, understood my work and helped give it necessary shape and direction.

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

Margaret Atwood’s advice to aspiring writers: read, read, read, write, write write. There’s no shortcut to good writing—you need to read a lot of good books.

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

It’s easy for me to switch genres. I actually find non-fiction easier to write because it’s just excavating a brutal honesty that might be too intense in fiction.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I have two sons age 7 and 9. Now that my youngest is in Grade 1, things are getting easier, but I have yet to maintain a solid writing routine.

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

I read really good books. That always ignites sparks in my brain.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sadly, I don’t have a sense of home. I attended six different elementary schools, and moved around a lot as a child and young adult. But maybe sesame oil reminds me of a sense of home? I lived with my grandmother for parts of my childhood, and she always infused her home with this scent. 

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?

Definitely music. I am always listening to music when I write.

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

I read the Bible daily and there are many things I wrestle with and reflect upon.

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

After I finished writing my novel, I started my MFA at UBC, where the program makes you take all of these different genre courses. I loved screenwriting and creative non-fiction. I have all these class projects that I want to finish and come to fruition.

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 would have pursued painting. When I was young, I was better at drawing than writing and I wished I had the courage to go to art school and pursue a BFA. But who knows if I would have succeeded. Any artistic pursuit is so, so hard, it’s a wonder that artists continue to create no matter how much the odds are stacked against them. 

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

It’s a compulsion I honestly can say I could not stop myself from doing (so yes, at times in my life I did try to stop writing and could not).

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

Susan Musgrave wrote a book of poetry, Exculpatory Lilies, after the death of her husband and daughter. Her poems gutted me. The last greatest film was American Fiction, adapted from Percival Everett’s book Erasure. The film is very clever and hits on so many things a BIPOC writer may experience.

20 - What are you currently working on?

Currently, my brain is very noisy and disorganized: a novel, a screenplay, and creative non-fiction. We’ll see how this all plays out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

 

Roxanna Bennett, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

 

II

& forgetting what you’re after &

      The pliers were used to open her mouth,
      was refusing to speak

    its keeper kept it supplied

in a ‘mental’ hospital. More radically than anywhere else in the outside is invalidated
as a human being. Must remain until the label is 

untainted by hate a necklace of 54 skulls
on my screen

 

 

myriad strange specimens

 

& the space he occupies is no longer of his own choosing. After being subjected to degrading
ceremonial known as psychiatric examination 

 

      the government indulges (“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus”)

The fifth full-length poetry title by Roxanna Bennett, following The Uncertainty Principle (Toronto ON: Tightrope Books, 2014), unmeaningable (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2019), The Untranslatable I (Gordon Hill Press, 2021) [see my review of such here] and uncomfortability (Gordon Hill Pres, 2023), is We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us (Gordon Hill Press, 2026). Moving beyond the sonnet-shapes of prior work into more of an expansive collage structure, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us furthers Bennett’s work across “disability poetics,” a conversation I would be curious to see the author extend, also, into the form of the essay. I know Toronto poet Therese Estacion [see my review of her debut here] has a new collection, Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability (Toronto ON: Bookhug Press, 2026), but I have yet to go through such. The poems are gestural, composed with great flourish and a sly and subtle wit. “Sound n,” Bennett provides, within the second section, “an impression of somebody / something formed from / but significant / especially /// thigh. The subtle body / wrote / GOOD BYE /// accommodate, make / would ever curse us / word, you can find out if /// can’t be both.”

What is interesting about Bennett’s book, beyond being produced sideways—which I always find irritating, admittedly, as a reader; why not just make a wider book? I think back to Méira Cook’s Slovenly Love (London ON: Brick Books, 2003) [see my review of such here] or Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s collaborative Decomp (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]—opens with a page of “acknowledgements & process notes” and a three-page list of “influences, references, & sources,” material usually held for the back of any collection. As Bennett’s “acknowledgments & process notes” includes:

Many of these are ‘found’ poems using text from various sources. We had originally set out to write about the divine shadow feminine but She will not be intellectualized, only embodied. As various illnesses took away my ability to use electronic devices & think & speak & write with coherency, She invited me to turn inward, dance deeper into Madness, & to use unconscious analog art-making methods such as cut-up, collage, & chance operations. &—although I don’t love this term, it smacks of the hospital, preferring instead to be divinely guided rather than operated upon—as adaptation.

The result is this rough beast before you.

Thank you for reading.

Assembled across three sections, each of which are constructed as extended lyric sequences that interconnect—“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus,” “The New Bodily Ethos” and “Excavation of the Colossal Mother”—there is something interesting in how one might see Bennett’s prior engagement with the sonnet as attempting to find order within a particular kind of chaos. Through the use of found material set in collage, a different kind of order, Bennett works a lyric structure more overtly chaotic, or, more likely, one that allows for a coherence through the chaos itself. Working with, and not against, what Bennett’s own possibilities provide. And in which Bennett’s compositional approach evolves from composing a poem with one’s own material, to being able to discern where the poem might already exist, within that same material. The pastiche provides Bennett a way to think through their improvisations to achieve something entirely fresh. Or, as Bennett themlseves write, towards the end of the second section:

      I rise & become one
in new shapes

 

 

Jacob Schepers, Ugly Ground Swell Moss

 

Ugly ground, swell moss finds you worth keeping neat.

Ugly ground, swell moss knows of some face of you you cannot.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you all to itself. To cover you until your

            surface area is its surface area.

Ugly ground, swell moss feels the cool of your touch. Offers itself as

            covering to benefit the both of you.

Ugly ground, swell moss wants you two to be exclusive. With your gray

            its green. Your steady its growth.

Notre Dame, Indiana-based poet, editor and scholar Jacob Schepers’ second full-length poetry title, following A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Buffalo NY: Outriders Poetry Project, 2024), is Ugly Ground Swell Moss (Spokane WA: Carbonation Press, 2026). Ugly Ground Swell Moss is a deeply-ambitious book-length project, purposefully considered and sketched-out as a kind of gestural monologue or book-length essay, one that accumulates, relying on long sentence-thoughts and structural repetitions, looping through a conversation in and around biologist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) and philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995). To offer, quickly: Linnaeus is best known for his work in taxonomy—the science of identifying, naming and classifying organisms—with Levinas best known for his conversations around ethics, and how we are most responsible for ourselves in relation to others. What, then, are our responsibilities, Schepers inquires, to ourselves, in relation to our natural environment? The structure of this particular ecopoetic is incredibly unique, however similar the kinds of questions and explorations I’ve seen recently through a variety of poetry titles by British Columbia poets, specifically Vancouver poet Elee Kraljii Gardiner’s sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026) [see my review of such here], Kelowna poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. One might suggest that such a conversation, a thesis-via-the-lyric, becomes particularly curious to explore through this particular form, and one might wish to ask exactly what prompted Schepers to approach his material through this accumulative overlay, this loop, of the extended lyric sentence.

Across four numbered sections—“To Name,” “To Call,” “To Maim” and “To Cull”—with an afterword, the poem loops, perpetually returning to the beginning, returning to that “Ugly ground,” akin to Robert Kroetsch’s perpetually-begun sequence without end, or the repetitions of poets such as Sawako Nakayasu or the late Denver poet Noah Eli Gordon. The loops begin, almost slow at the offset, allowing the anchor of that opening phrase to swirl the stretch of his thought-line well beyond the boundaries of a normal page. Each section offers an opening salvo, “Taxonomy,” before the loops begin as self-contained pieces in sequence. “Taxonomy” opens the foundation of each section, each chapter, like a thesis. The first begins:

To limit is what’s to taxonomize. Taxonomy is what is to assume a

            specialized attempt, a knowledge of prescriptive meaning

            shaving off borders.

To clear it up, this isn’t a romance: no Petrarch calls to you.

Forget the lover: this dynamic exchange? There’s no winner, no call for a

            witness-takes-all. No, none of that.

Through the repetition, Schepers offers less a return to the beginning than a series of concentric circles, as each sentence-section returns to the beginning before stretching out again, furthering the narrative cohesion and accumulation. The looped phrase offers a grounding to such an expansive, gestural, lyric, set in a compact package. Or, as the author’s “Afterword,” “On Identity, Legacy, Ugly Thinking, and Ethical Endlessness” provides, to open:

            Ugly Ground Swell Moss is at its heart a philosophically poetic project that spins around inquiry, obsession, relationality, ontology, and the epistemological questions that derive from such foundations. That sounds busy, I know, so consider all of that as the equivalent of holding a diamond up to a light source to see the various facets, reflections, and dispersions that can all be present in order to scrutinize as many details as possible to get a clearer sense of the whole thing. I am no systematic philosopher. I much prefer the lateral thinking that poetic processes depend on and thrive within. I’m grateful for big questions and for the relief of not having to answer them definitively.
            Resembling, on the one hand, a collection of odes in their insistence on apostrophe, and, on the other hand, a sonnet sequence due to their cumulative effect and twisted incantatory syntax and voice, the text of Ugly Ground Swell Moss explores the identities and relationships of the two title characters within a sparse ecosystem of longing and allegorical desire. This collection interrupts the centrally questioned relationship with tangential epigraphs and so-called “Taxonomies” that draw on the 18^th-century work and ensuring controversial legacy of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and the 20^th-century’s Lithuanian-born, French philosopher of Jewish heritage named Emmanuel Levinas. To varying degrees, I confront each of these thinkers’ afterlives in intellectual history—more on this below—and consider them within the ongoing discourse around lyric subjectivity, rhetoric, and ethics. All the while, there is shifting away from an exclusively anthropocentric viewpoint and towards the nonhuman ecology beneath our footing.