12 or 20 (second series) questions with Didier Leclair

Didier Leclair is a four-time finalist for the Prix Trillium and recipient of both the Trillium and the Alain-Thomas book prizes. His second novel, Ce pays qui est le mien, was shortlisted for the 2004 Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction. Its English translation, This Country of Mine (2018), was a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards.

Didier Leclair was born in Montreal to Rwandan parents. He grew up in different African countries, including Gabon, Togo, and Benin, before returning to Canada in the late 1980s. He is the author of eleven novels and a book of poetry and lives and writes in Toronto.

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 gave me the freedom to say what I think of my society (Toronto, Canada) as a witness and narrator. My most recent work gives me the chance to explore other genres and spread my wings. I feel rewarded.

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

I came to fiction because of my love for words. Since very young, I loved the written words. I started by poetry and after my teenager years, I felt the need to say more. I started to write novels.

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?

I don’t write notes. I start any novels the same way. I sit down and I write what comes to my mind. It is quick. I thought of the story long time before, maybe a two to three months before sitting down. I have already the story in my head and the challenge is to try to reproduce it on paper. I have corrections to make after the first draft. However, the story is all there. The second or the third version of my book is very similar to the first.

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 work on a book from the beginning. It’s been brewing in me and it comes out once I decide to sit down and write.

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

I like readings to a certain extent. One has to feel listened to and solicited to be willing to read out his or her work.

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 don’t have any theoretical concerns. I am not writing from an intellectual point of view. My purpose is to create emotions in the heart of the readers; however my only concern is to achieve a good book or a piece of art. There is no anguish behind my writing, just the pursuit of happiness and (or) beauty at the end.

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?

The role of the writer should be to entertain, to show the world as it is and as it should be. But one can be very distracted by all the futile activities offered by social media. Therefore, the writer can only do is part. One cannot ask of him or her to get into a competition with fast pictures and videos. The role of a writer remains the same to write and answer questions directed to him or her the best he or she can.

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

The work with outside editors is essential to give the book a chance to shine. The writer is mostly responsible for the content. Yes, participating in the choice of the book cover, the marketing would be great, However, all writers are not equipped with these skills.

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

“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch”. I heard it somewhere, but it is a great advice to writers. Writing is a risk one takes. It reveals oneself, even if it is fiction. Therefore, no explanation, apologies or justification should be given to the people who stand and watch.

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 write at night. It started with my first book because my kids took my attention all day. I had time for myself at night. I go down to the basement or sometimes I stay in my bedroom, and I start typing on my laptop. No music but I don’t need complete silence. The night activities outside my room are fine with me.

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

I read an essay by a writer I like. It stimulates my pleasure to read, then I can write to stimulate someone else.

What fragrance reminds you of home?

I can’t think of one.

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?

Dialogues in movies are important to me. They remain in the corner of my head and when I think of their meaning, it gives me an inspiration. Also, some entire movies would give me a few ideas. I should not call them ideas. It is more a feeling, and I carry this feeling to my writing page.

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

Movies, movie dialogues, slow songs. No writers. I love some of them, but I don’t write at all like them. One has to find his own voice and stick to it.

What would you like to do that you haven’t yet done?

Best seller.

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?

Musician-singer or fashion designer.

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

It was in my DNA. I suspect my parents being avid readers help a little.

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

Half blood blues by writer Esi Edugyan. The Sunset limited, with Samuel L. Jackson, a great movie.

What are you currently working on?

I am working on the third book of my spy thriller series. “The African Prince, the Translator and The Nazi” has a follow up.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Samuel Amadon, Divers

 

(I) 

Oh Monday, I said I had to look at
You and live with it. oh your face is full
Of holes I could put through each my eyes.
They’d be blue swoops, pretty diagonals
I could form from moving things around me.
Whatever you do, Monday, I can’t tell
The difference. How do I order you?
I cut a bag three holes to make a face,
And what was me vanishes like wind through
A skull. If I know what I want to say,
I find I can’t speak straight. On the windows,
April accumulates. I mouth my eyes
Are gray, plain. I make nothing behave
As pollinated rains curl down the drain.

The latest from South Carolina poet and editor Samuel Amadon, following Like a Sea (University of Iowa Press, 2010), The Hartford Book (Cleveland State University Press, 2012), Listener (Solid Objects, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Often, Common, Some, and Free: Poems (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021) [see my review of such here], is Divers (Omnidawn, 2026), an assemblage of sixty numbered (Roman Numerals) sonnets, clustered into five numbered sections. I’m always curious as to those poets who favour the sonnet form, attempting to find new in what has been utilized tens of thousands of times over the past century alone, perhaps the most prevalent poetic form utilized across English-language literature. “Every morning with the last coffee / In me,” he writes, within the book’s ninth poem, “woke what was left where I was it / Leaving. I had a feeling flutter trees / On the face it stops.” There’s always such a lovely music to Amadon’s lyric projects, pulling tighter the line-spacings of some of his previous work, while still allowing a lightness across the rhythmical bounce of his accumulated, continuous phrases. ‘If I moved my body / Into sun over grass,” he writes, mid-way through the book’s twenty-first poem, “I would not be / Alone. An uncomfortable sentence / Is where I live on the edge of something. / Or not. The song changes. It is as if / I walked a steep hill.” Part of what provides fresh breath across Amadon’s sonnets is in the patterning of phrases and line-breaks, set somewhere between the classic sonnet and what Ted Berrigan accomplished, through his own collage-work, The Sonnets (1964). There is such a musicality to Amadon’s stitched-phrases, one thought or thought-fragment set against each other, allowing such fine collisions of meaning, breath, sound and cadence. Or, as the second half of poem thirty-nine reads: “Not everything / Fits, that’s the story. It’s majestic in / The moments before the election, but / If the hour falls, if the street is cleared / Or filled, if I forget in the midst of / A sentence what I was going to say, / If the sea is silent, if I see it, / If I’ve read about it, if it comes on / Shore. If I heard a rumor once before.”

VERSeFest : Ottawa's International Poetry Festival : Become a VERSeFriend

Become a VERSeFriend
Every single person who buys a show ticket, attends a workshop, or volunteers is a VERSe Ottawa supporter, but you want to go deeper. Becoming a VERSeFriend will support our annual, international poetry festival, VERSeFest, and allow us to bring shows, workshops, and other events to Ottawa all year ‘round.

VERSeFriends
Join VERSeFriends and you’ll receive free access to all VERSeFest performances (readings, lectures, and panels), so you can take your pick of shows and see what your support helps create.

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Join VERSeFriends Plus and, in addition to access to shows, you’ll also be able to attend one VERSe Ottawa workshop – at VERSeFest or at another point during the year – free of charge as both a thank you, and so you can see how your support is helping local poets find their voices and sharpen their skills.

Become a VERSeFriend, at either level, and you’ll also receive tokens of our appreciation over the course of the year, like:

poetry post cards
priority seating at shows
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chapbooks from the vaults (generously donated by above/ground press)
…as well as a charitable donation receipt.

We look forward to getting to know you, hearing your feedback, and continuing to build Ottawa’s spectacular, world-stage worthy poetry scene together.

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12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Kindig

Patrick Kindig is the author of the poetry collections Agape (Saturnalia 2026) and fascinations (Finishing Line 2025), the academic monograph Fascination: Trance, Enchantment, and American Modernity (LSU 2022), and two chapbooks. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and other journals. He lives and teaches in Annapolis, MD.

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?
Neither my first chapbook nor my first full-length collection changed my life very much because, I think, very people read them. My most recent collection, Agape (Saturnalia 2026), however, has felt a bit more life-changing: because Saturnalia has published so many other poets whose work has been important to me over the years, publishing with them has made me feel like I've finally come into my own as a writer—like I'm part of a broader literary conversation, contributing to a creative tradition.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first! As an undergrad, I was really taken with Ernest Hemingway's economy of language, and I tried my hardest to emulate him. Thankfully, that was a total failure. From that failure, though, my love of poetry—that most economical of language's vehicles—emerged.

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?
When it comes to individual poems: I tend to draft in one sitting, then revise over the course of one or two days. When it comes to longer projects (such as chapbooks or collections): I work obsessively until I have what Anne Lamott would call a "shitty first draft," or a collection of poems that's technically book- or chapbook-length but that doesn't really cohere. Then, I slow down and begin to add and cut poems, which can take anywhere from several weeks to several years.

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?
When I first began writing, I was definitely a "project book" person: I'd come up with an intriguing premise for a project, then I'd exclusively write poems that helped to realize said premise. My first collection, fascinations (Finishing Line 2025), was this sort of book. More recently, however, I've been writing a lot of one-off poems (thanks, largely, to a lack of free time) that speak more obliquely to one another. These poems grapple with a small set of personal thematic obsessions—queerness, eros, violence, climate change, dog parenting, etc.—so they'll likely end up getting collected, but they aren't emerging from some sort of focused, unified vision.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I hate organizing and preparing for readings, but once I'm in front of an audience, I usually enjoy myself.

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 think the specific questions shift from project to project, but my work generally revolves around the relationship between pleasure and discomfort, love and harm. Agape addresses these relationships head-on, drawing on both personal experience and Western mythology—particularly the iconography of Catholicism—to explore the connection between desire and pain. My current project (more on this later) addresses these relationships more obliquely, investigating not the interpersonal harm precipitated by human connection but the slow violence of climate change.

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 different kinds of writers fill different roles. My current aim as a writer is to shed light on the subtle pleasures and dangers that shape everyday (queer) life. Other writers very compellingly speak truth to power. Others elicit pleasure via sonic and imagistic play.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I've only ever worked with very hands-off editors, so I've found the experience quite painless.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My favorite piece of advice—which comes from a friend named Susan Amis, and which I often convey to students—has to do not with the writing of poetry but the reading of it. Once, in our MFA, Susan expressed bafflement at people who said they didn't know how to read poetry: "Read it the same way you read anything else—one fucking word after another."

10 - 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 like to draft in the morning when I'm fresh from bed, my brain is still a little fuzzy, and I have coffee in hand. I can usually only make this happen on weekends. When it comes to revision, I prefer to work in the afternoon when I'm feeling a bit more mentally focused.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I turn to other pieces of art: poetry, music, film. As someone with training in both poetry and literary criticism, I also like to turn to non-literary texts: works of critical theory and cultural history, historical documents, (pseudo)scientific texts, etc.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Fresh clover.

13 - 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?
Film and music—both pop and classical—definitely influence my work. So does (more obliquely) academic writing. Visual art has less of an impact on me.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Just a handful, chosen somewhat arbitrarily and arranged in alphabetical order: Anne Carson, Natalie Diaz, Mark Doty, Ross Gay, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, Anni Liu, Layli Long Soldier, Mary Oliver, Claudia Rankine, Shola von Reinhold, James Tate, Virginia Woolf.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to visit the UK and knit a sweater for a human. (So far I've only finished sweaters for dogs).

16 - 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 started undergrad as a pre-med student, so maybe a doctor? I would also love to run a bakery if I didn't have to wake up at 4am.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I used to be a pretty decent clarinetist, but writing was cheaper and easier to do on the go. Also, my husband is a classical musician, and I am 100% sure I do not have the discipline to practice as much as that profession requires.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book: T. Clark's short story collection All This Want (and I Can't Get None). The last great film: David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on a collection titled We Have Always Lived at the End of the World. At its heart, the book is about climate change; it explores what it might mean to make a life for oneself and one’s family in the face of accumulating personal, political, and ecological catastrophes.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Kirsten Kaschock, AutoPortrait (as flotsam)

 

Do not finish your work too much

It leads to death. When you perfect
a field, a field cannot breathe. If you touch her
ceaselessly, she will numb to what is
soft. I say withhold the fruit until the table
ripens. I have seen a child wither and rot
from too much getting. Sit at back of hut
and train your eyes to drink. Given time, colors
may accept you as vessel, ferment. Draw them
out—luxuriate in fume. Every stroke
has an origin. A terrible seed. These are mock
oranges, unfit to taste. Except. Give in utterly
to the work and find that everything has happened.
Rimbaud, for example. Leave. Have your long life.
Outlive your children even as you peruse
others’. The world is books. Your hands may be
starved for its pages but driftwood—by sea polished
to bone—stays jagged where God has broken
the femur. The missionary’s promise. In lieu of
mansion, erect lean-tos on beaches you dreamt
into existence as though they weren’t already there.
Any pleasure that lives lives in its endless washing
away, how far sin drifts beyond a girl’s hurt
before ocean returns it, ground to find volcanic
pitch. Art you do not conclude, it is what it will become,
however unlikely. It cannot be helped. 

(Paul Gaugin) (“Arearea no varua ino”)

The latest from Pennsylvania writer Kirsten Kaschock is the poetry title AutoPortrait (as flotsam) (North Adams MA: Tupelo Press, 2026), following Unfathoms (Slope Editions, 2004), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press, 2011), WindowBoxing (Bloof Books, 2013) [see my review of such here], The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize, 2014), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press, 2017), and Explain This Corpse (Lynx House Press, 2020), with a further, Docenture: A Tale of Hue as Told by the Estate, forthcoming from South Indiana Review Press. As the back cover offers, this collection is arranged as a kind of gallery-walk response to the works of other artists (predominantly visual artists), as Kaschock offers individual responses across the lyric to works by Paul Gaugin, Alice Neel, Mark Rothko, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miro, Amadeo Modigliani, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Theo Jansen, Arthur Garfield Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pablo Picasso, Jacob Lawrence, Sinead O’Connor, Michael Stipe, Paul Klee, Edvard Munch, Donovan, Eva Hesse, Berye Saar, Joan Mitchell, Lucille Clifton, Romaine Brooks, Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Chagall and Francisco Goya. “They will never know what not to do / with you. This is a layering,” she writes, to close the poem “Contingent,” citing Eva Hesse, “a vanish into / potential, a technique to impossibilize / biography. My material they may long to have // illuminated. But I am no monk, no man- / uscript. And within this doubt / no woman you cannot.”

Structured in three parts—“Maiden (woman),” “Daemon (bird)” and “Nomad (star,” each section holds a cluster of poems, offering her individual responses to specific artists, many of which then extend from that initial response as a kind of prompt into further exploration through memory, memoir and specific experiences. It is as though her poems responding to artists are utilized as touchpoints; offered as a way to jump further into and through specific subjects, memories or conversations. “What happens / happens because of the way light twists / as it filters in.” she writes, earlier in that same poem for/after Eva Hesse. The follow-up, or extension, of that particular piece begins:

After college I tempted across Manhattan, tightroping overtime between skyscrapers until I had enough for a ticket.

In Paris in late March, sky and buildings fought a dovegray and off-white war, the low architecture invariably wearing its subtlety with more panache, churches interrupting. But I developed a fondness for the clouds amassing from fields like on a market day. Also d’Orsay, all arches and color and clocks.

Three weeks I stayed with my aunt and her husband outside the city as it bloomed—the path down to the RER along the Marne, the windowboxes, umbrellas, cemeteries.

They worked.

Those initial poems on and for and around artists, whether as prompts or anchors, even backdrop, against what the rest of her narratives touch upon; holding the poem in place, after which follows a more fluid lyric, free-floating and extended, confident enough through that opening section to know that the poem is rooted in place, allowing the remaining lyric the freedom to explore. “I gave the name Agnes to the protagonist of a novel I set in central Pennsylvania,” she writes, further beyond the poem “Caryatid,” responding to the work of Amadeo Modigliani, “not far from my childhood home and where the flood’s damage was heaviest. My family moved from Ithica when I was two. Not odyssey, a simple car trip, straight down the map, the car blue. // The hurt one accrues living in certain locations can be gothic. Wet leaves, saplings sprouted from porch gutters, beauty described in apathy. Our house sat ten miles from Three Mile Island. During the meltdown, we were evacuated, briefly—the meltdown partial, a mere near-catastrophic seeding dread.” How do the follow-up stretches and the initial poems responding to artwork relate? Composed across a sequence of posts and threads, pins and flayed lines, Kaschock’s lyrics are gestural and theatrical, a narrative-as-collaged-fragment, working to stitch together what she has deliberately pulled apart, seeking out the possibilities of new lyric and narrative shapes, new forms. “Make no mistake,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “mistakes are work.”