Vera Hadzic is a
writer based on the unceded territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation in Ottawa,
Ontario. Her poetry chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was published by
Proper Tales Press in 2023. She has an Honours BA in English and history from
the University of Ottawa, and an MA in English Literature from Queen’s
University. Her first full-length book, Several Small Animals Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery, appeared from Anvil Press in fall 2025.1 - How
did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent
work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first
chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow, was the first time I got a sense that
people I didn’t personally know were reading my work, and even owning physical
copies of it. There was something very exciting about that, and because it was
the first time I had taken a series of poems and worked on editing them into one
collected thing, it motivated me to keep thinking about future collections. The
same summer that the chapbook was out, I started thinking about my next
project, which would become my most recent work, Several Small Animals
Enclosed in a Benedictine Monastery. There are definitely similar poems in
both works, and similar experimentations with form and subject matter, but I
think the tone of the collections as a whole is quite different.
2 - How
did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
One of the
first poems that I remember writing was a Halloween poem about a haunted house
for an English assignment in elementary school. We got to open up a document in
the computer room and the whole class could work on their poems; I remember
that it felt very easy to write, in the sense that the words just kept coming. My
experience with poetry has remained similar—either the words don’t come, and I
don’t succeed in writing a good poem, or the words come, and I get something I
like on the page.
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?
My writing
initially comes pretty quickly, if I have an idea to run with. What takes
longer is finding consistent time to keep writing, if it’s a longer project, or
to edit, after I’ve gotten a first draft down. My first drafts often do look
close to their final shape, with some exceptions. I find it hard to return to a
piece after I’ve written it, so editing takes a strong surge of willpower, or
an upcoming deadline (which is more common).
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?
With my
chapbook Fossils You Can Swallow, I didn’t intend any of those poems to
make it into any kind of larger project until I was gathering them together and
seeing how they fit together as a kind of miscellany. But with Several Small
Animals, I was definitely working on a book project from the beginning. I
actually had the title of the book before I had a single poem in it (including
the poem which shares its title with the collection itself!). At the time, I
was thinking through images of enclosed spaces like monasteries or convents,
and of the ways that bodies are both enclosed and not, and how they can be put
in these enclosures, too. It was a title that hit on all of that, and I wanted
to keep building those throughlines and themes. For the next year or so, I
wrote poems with an awareness of that, seeing what would fit into the
manuscript and what wouldn’t.
5 - Are
public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort
of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love
doing readings. I think I just love to stand in front of people and talk. A
good reading makes me feel fulfilled; it satisfies something about me that
loves to perform. Attending readings, just to hear others read, is also
valuable to my process; if I haven’t been writing lately, hearing a good
reading will make me want to.
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?
Right now
I keep coming back to two interests that are related. One of them concerns the
nature of poetry and of language as a whole. Why is it that poetry as an art
form seeks to complicate rather than simplify? What does it mean when poetry
fails—is poetry always a failed attempt to say something about the world? My other
concern has to do with the body. How does the human body come together, exist,
live, love, hurt, and come apart? I’m interested in the body as a kind of
container, for emotions and fluids and organs, but also a failing container,
one which inevitably lets things slip. In this way, how is it like language?
The “I” in
my poems is not always me, but lately I have also been experimenting with
writing work that is more personal, and which addresses some of my own
psychological and physiological concerns, including anxiety and obsessive
compulsions.
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
writers help people feel invested in the world around them. It can be easy to
develop a sense of apathy in our day-to-day lives, especially when living under
the economic, social, political, and environmental conditions we are living in.
It can be easy to feel like there are few individual actions we can take, or
that those actions won’t matter in the face of large-scale climate disaster, fascism,
genocide, and colonization. I think writers help us to be present. Even when we
read books that take us out of our present reality, that are escapist or feel
“light”, the act of reading and thinking helps us return to ourselves and
remember how implicated we are in everything around us.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
Essential!
I’m often initially unsure about edits, but when I take some time away and
return to the piece, I always see that they’re integral to getting the central
idea of the poem across. Working with Stuart on Several Small Animals
has been such a privilege and has really tightened the collection up in ways
that I couldn’t imagine going in. One of my favourite poems in the collection
was much weaker before Stuart pushed me to rework it; the final product is, I
think, so much stronger than the original attempt, and I’m so grateful for the
push from Stuart which got the poem to that point.
9 - What
is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you
directly)?
It’s not exactly a concrete piece of advice, but I encountered an idea that’s changed the way I see the world in Jennifer Baker’s course on poetics at the University of Ottawa, when we discussed what makes poetry different than prose. We talked about how poetry has a tendency to obscure what it wants to say. Thinking about what poetry does in the world—creates spaces that move toward meaning, but never quite just hands it to you—has improved my writing, but it has also enhanced the way I live in the world. Many things that are hard to understand feel like poetry, and understanding them in that way gets me closer to expressing what they mean to me.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I have always written both poetry and fiction. I get an idea for a poem, or an idea for a short story, or sometimes an idea for a longer work of fiction, so I don’t usually consciously choose a genre; it’s already embedded in the idea itself. I find it hard to switch between projects in the same day or the same week, regardless of genres!
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 wish I had a writing routine. I have sometimes tried to develop one. When I was on vacation last summer, I wrote a poem every day for three weeks. (Some of these poems ended up in my book, and others were just terrible.) This was great, but I couldn’t keep it up after I got home. Right now, I’m keeping a daily streak of winning at least one game of Spider Solitaire a day (I play on my phone). Unless I’m very inspired, it always takes a long time for me to start writing; I usually need to marinate before I start really thinking.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’ve become better lately at not feeling guilty when I’m not writing. If the motivation isn’t there, it doesn’t make sense to force it. When I get stalled, I usually need to take time away from what I’m working on, or I can try to read something—anything—to get back into it. However, I’m often not very good at identifying that I’m stalled—I’ll spend hours trying to write which just turn into hours of procrastination. The trick is to turn to something else and let myself come back to the work from another direction. Engaging with language in another medium often makes me want to write again; if that doesn’t work, it just means it’s time to do something else, and wait for the motivation to come back.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
There’s a particular scent of laundry detergent that always reminds me of my family home in Ottawa, and also of my grandparents’ apartments in Belgrade. I once spent five minutes standing in a hallway somewhere on campus at Queen’s University because I could smell this extraordinarily nostalgic laundry smell at that exact spot.
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?
Yes! Many of the poems in Several Small Animals are inspired by visual art. Some of them I wrote while sitting in art galleries. Sometimes I’m inspired by movement, especially contemporary dance—both by the images that movement and music evoke for me, and by the ways that dance teachers describe the body and its movement, which often leaks into my writing. Science is another important influence for me. I particularly gravitate (haha) towards writing about space, stars, and planetary bodies, largely because my academic work, studying astronomy and astrology in Renaissance plays, has me thinking a lot about the ways we imagine and investigate the universe.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I find myself to be a very porous writer, in that almost anything that I really enjoy reading will make me want to write in that style. In that sense, reading in general is essential for my work. Kathleen Graber is someone I turn to when I have big ideas about theory or history that I don’t know how to approach. Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing is one of my favourite novels, partly for the precision and delicacy of its language. Since I was in middle school, I have loved J.R.R. Tolkien, not just for the scope of his fantasy, but for the delicate and rich way he writes about his world and our world. I am compelled by writing which is lush, but also sharp.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Learn to surf!
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’d like to work in museums or archives. I volunteered for a few years at a museum at the University of Ottawa, and it made me realize that that was a road I could have gone down.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I can’t remember what got me started—I just remember always doing it. My mother studied French literature at university, and I think her love of books and language has had a fair amount of influence. Everyone around me always seemed to accept that I could be a writer; I never felt the need to try anything else.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I just finished Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and am currently reading Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, which is excellent. I’m trying to carve out time to read uninterrupted. I just recently watched Sinners (2025)—it’s such a compelling film which just moves so quickly and powerfully through its story and its music. I loved it.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m rewriting a science fiction novel that I have been working on, on and off, for years: it’s set in space, and is about ballet, cyborgs, and assassins. I’ve been writing a lot of poetry lately, so it’s exciting to be working in prose again.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
