Friday, May 15, 2026

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mekyle Ali Qadir

Mekyle Ali Qadir is a Pakistani poet currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. His writing explores the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. Writing in both English and Urdu, his emerging work explores South Asian cultural traditions, migrant identity, mysticism, and intertextual art.

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

This is my first published book so I can’t compare it to anything other than not having a published book, which feels pretty different! For that reason, it’s too soon to say how it’s changed my life. But the decision to compile my poetry into a coherent collection and the work I’ve done to achieve that has shifted my attitude towards writing as an occupation. I now think about my creative work as pieces of larger wholes rather than just impulsive projects.

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

I’ve been writing fiction and poetry concurrently for many years. I enjoy both but poetry has a way of expressing spiritual truths that other forms of writing just don’t. I think being from Pakistan, especially being Punjabi, inclines me towards poetry naturally. I’ve grown up hearing poems recited to me, in English, Urdu, and Punjabi, especially by my grandparents, which is something I’ve taken for granted and I’m now starting to become aware of its impact on me.

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 starts almost instantly, the weird idea comes from nowhere and usually when I’m occupied with something else. But that doesn’t go very far until I start the slow process of putting it down and looking at it and getting frustrated at why it looks like that on a page and sounds different in my head. As for drafting, I’m terrible at it. I usually edit as I go which I know is not recommended. Mostly, I revise and rewrite a line before moving onto the next. I have notes scattered here and there but these are more like ‘verbal moodboards’ than coherent research.

4 - Where does a poem or 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 haven’t thought about long projects yet. That doesn’t mean I haven’t fantasized about becoming the author of a great novel, but I’m grateful for being taught early on to be realistic and not jump into ambitious projects. I’ve had many successful people guide me through the realities of writing. One of the most important was: work from small to large. Start with flash fiction, small poems, maybe polished journal entries, put your energy into those first, then move onto longer forms. I’ve barely begun a ‘career’ in writing so I have to trust this process and see where it goes.

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

My poems don’t lend themselves to spoken word performance. I write them to be read and don’t put much thought into how they’ll sound. So when I do readings, they don’t sound good as they’re being performed. I’m trying to get better at writing more performance-ready poems, especially by drawing inspiration from Urdu sha’iri which has a very strong spoken word component. 

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?

My writing is probably too theoretical. I’m very occupied with intercultural knowledges, negotiating my home traditions with Western modernity. My writing interrogates the assumptions that come with intercultural dialogues, especially in a place like Canada with all its performative multiculturalism rhetoric. I draw much of my inspiration from postcolonial thinkers who challenge hegemonic and Imperialist epistemologies, especially Edward Said, Fanon, Cesaire, Iqbal, and Shariati. I’m just regurgitating their words and adding personal anecdotes along the way. Aside from that, though I don’t count it as a “theoretical concern,” my writing is steeped in mystical thought and teachings. As I repeat throughout my answers, the Sufi traditions give me inspiration beyond these great thinkers. Mystical inspiration doesn’t work in the question-answer structure because it’s beyond language so it’s hard to say what questions I answer when I write through this inspiration. But a tangible result of it is a keen sense of empathy that pushes beyond personal and cultural barriers and lets me capture intense personal and social experiences.

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 there’s more creative writers operating at multiple levels of culture than we tend to acknowledge because they don’t call their work ‘creative’ even though it is. I think writers always find themselves in strange ‘moments’ in history, but now especially their work has been threatened by AI and slowly, their value is starting to be remembered in the wake of AI’s disappointing capabilities. I also think writers should see their work beyond its political impact. It’s a result of Eurocentric reductionism that writers are encouraged to think only in terms of political, material ends. I don’t think all writing is or should be political, though you can stretch definitions to fit your argument as much as you want. There are truths that transcend that, which all writing, but especially poetry, can uncover. I guess that’s what writers should be chasing after, to unveil Maya and reach the Gha’ib.

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

I haven’t consulted a professional editor before, but I’ve had the opportunity to share my work with incredibly talented people, who are my friends and also my mentors and have dedicated a lot of their time to editing my writing. I think that’s the best place to start, if you’re lucky, and unless a large project demands professional editing, leave your work in the hands of friends and family who aren’t thinking of marketability or industry practices.

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

One really talented writer told me writing is an extroverted activity. People seem to think being a writer means sitting in a dark room at a desk and being overly existential about everything (all things I’ve associated with writing and romantically tried to imitate). That’s just one very small part of it, the majority of the work involves engaging with your communities, as many as possible, and sharing experiences that may or may not make their way into your writing but that make you sensitive to seeing the meaning in apparently mundane interactions. That stuck with me because I think it’s an attitude shift that gives you more endurance and a healthier approach to writing and art in general.

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’m a very poorly disciplined writer. I’ve tried to write regularly, to keep a writing journal and all that. I think I have four or five notebooks with just the first couple of pages of regular ‘entries’ and nothing more. But I think a writing routine can involve a lot more than hitting a daily or weekly word count, it may not even involve writing any words at all. I consider hikes and listening to music and reading as part of my writing process, when I do these things consciously and presently. My body, including my mind, becomes primed to absorb and reflect what my senses are telling me during these moments. Verbalizing that reflection becomes easier after that.

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

The biggest influence in my writing is mysticism. Specifically Sufism, which is the Islamic tradition of mysticism. The overwhelming amount of writing produced by Sufis across the world for thousands of years has been intertwined with poetic and artistic traditions in the majority of Islamic cultures. I always draw on the words of the Sufis when I don’t know what to write or how to process an idea. Because it always works.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I’ve written about this a few times in my first poetry book. I deal with nostalgia and home a lot in that book, and the sense of home I keep coming back to is strongly connected to scent and fragrance. I remember the smell of the living room in the house where I grew up in Pakistan, something like varnished wood and old curtains, but also something else I don’t know how to describe. It’s hard to find smells that remind me of home in a different country so a lot of my writing about that is based on the memory of the fragrance alongside the memory of the place itself.

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?

I see what he means I guess, but I don’t like to think of it that way. Writing for me is one form of art that has to coexist with others. The creatives I admire most are creative in multiple ways, it’s only now that we’re siloing ourselves into discrete ‘disciplines’. I like to draw and play music, both of which make their way into my writing. Poetry is a mathematical activity, sometimes a scientific one. Poetry for me is tied to my religious expression concurrently with all of these other forms. Defining poetry through delimitations leads to dead ends, I think.

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

I’m an English Lit grad student so I study writing more than I write. My focus is on postcolonial literature, theoretical and creative, so I read a lot of Global South literature and colonial resistance fiction/poetry. I like theory and I have a lot of fun translating theoretical concepts from my research into creative pieces. Aside from these, as I say above, the most important writing I keep turning back to belongs to the mystical traditions.

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

I want to travel and be able to write about it. My academic focus, and creative interest, is postcolonial literature and I would like to see more places with a colonial past and connect with people there so I can write about it. And I want to meet more people on the Sufi path, to learn more from them directly.

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 don’t think I’m a writer yet, and it’s definitely not my occupation, but I want it to be a bigger part of my life. I am pursuing a career in academia, focused on literature, so my creative writing will complement my academic writing. I don’t know if I’ve had any other career ideas since I finished high school, and even then I knew I wanted to be a writer.

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

I started seriously writing poetry when I moved away from Pakistan. Since the beginning, my writing has been occupied with migration, belonging, identity, all those diaspora buzzwords. My poems became a way to understand that condition and respond to it as fully as possible. Alongside that, visual art has always been an emotional outlet that gives me the same way of reflecting on whatever is going on.

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

Sea Without Shore by Nuh Ha Meem Keller. It’s a memoir and a manual by a Sufi, describing the great mystic teachers, Sheikhs, he has met since he started out on the path, and their most important teachings. The book is an amazing journey through the mystical world and also provides a thematic guide for the major teachings. I keep revisiting this book trying to incorporate its insights into my life and my writing. The film scene is really sad nowadays, but I really enjoyed Dune Part 2. They got it right, and it’s a really tough book to get right on the screen, as past adaptations have shown. The Dune books are heavily inspired by Sufism, which most viewers don’t pick up on, but Villeneuve’s adaptation handled that part really well.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m writing some short stories which I plan to turn into a publishable collection. I received a grant from the OAC to work on them so that’s good motivation. I keep writing as often as I can, but my master’s research takes up a lot of my time so it’s hard to stay consistent with creative work.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Thursday, May 14, 2026

Leesa Dean, Interstitial


The latest by Krestova, British Columbia writer, educator and mentor Leesa Dean, following the short story collection Waiting for the Cyclone (Brindle & Glass, 2016) and a novella in verse, The Filling Station (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022), as well as a couple of chapbooks, is the poetry collection Interstitial (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026), one of a trio of recently-released collections by this new iteration of the legendary Canadian small press. Composed as a lyric of detail, both meticulous and sketched, and incorporating visual elements, Dean quilts her Interstitial with incredible precision across five numbered sections—“I. APOGEE,” “II. TRAPPINGS,” “III. THE DEEPEST KIND OF LISTENING,” “IV. INTERSTITIAL” and “V. PERIGREE”—all wrapped around the illness, loss and aftermath of her late mother. “She’s not your mother anymore,” she writes, to open the short sequence “Brace Yourself,” “my father warned as the hospital doors / flung open to reveal her final ecosystem [.]” At times, she writes her descriptions slant, confronting directly when required and skimming across an interiority, an abstract of lyric, as counterpoint, holding a fine balance between what needs to be said and what can’t be easily held. “I inherited my wildness / from the midnight sun / long,” begins the poem “L’appel du vide,” to open the second section, “lean days in a resource town / where greasy oolichan flashed / beneath the wide-toothed Skeena [.]”

I’m curious as to how a number of her poems throughout sit as block text, as though utilizing a physical constraint on her lines, almost as a kind of containment to push against that very sense of wild, or even to keep certain poems, through the rawness of her subject matter, from falling apart entirely. “She cried the first three months. latched / while sobbing.” begins the short lyric “Firecracker,” “mouth as big as her soul. / woke every hour. didn’t want to miss a / thing. I watched her every move. don’t / fuck up—not sure who I meant. two / years sober then. Still white-knuckling, / saying you saved me baby girl. how do we / quantify our saviors.” The poems of Interstitial directly confront the loss and the aftermath of her mother, the grief of a family, and family secrets that always have a way of making themselves known. It is a book of and around loss, but one of connections made, seeking to unpack and articulate details of her mother’s experience; working to solidify through writing what otherwise might have slipped entirely away. To make solid, and therefore more present, that loss, perhaps, working to unpack threads and speculations around her mother’s direct experience, as the poem “Learning to Walk,” for example, offers: “My mother is released at eighteen / months. She has lived most of her life / in hospital.” It is through Intertidal that Dean allows her mother her own agency, one that wasn’t always present, possible or even acknowledged by those around her, such as she writes as part of the extended sequence “Cripple,” that includes:

What nagymama didn’t say when she betrayed your secrets
is that you survived. You grew and thrived, became a nurse
for sick children and then had two children. The doctors
labelled your body an unfit vessel for childbearing—there
was nothing you enjoyed more than proving people
wrong. This is a trait I have inherited.

 

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

above/ground press (and myself!) at Banff! , with six new titles + an online reading,

In case you hadn't heard, above/ground press (and myself) are in the midst of a week at Banff, wandering through the writing studios as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the writer-in-residence program at the University of Alberta! See the interviews I conducted with twenty-seven prior writers-in-residence back in 2016, as part of the fortieth anniversary celebration, as well. and of course, there are six new above/ground press chapbook titles to accompany this new anniversary:

METAL OF THE FUTURE, ryan fitzpatrick $6 ; shore thing, J. R. Carpenter $6 ; So Now, Daphne Marlatt $6 ; Shanzai, Fred Wah $6 ; from the green notebook : , a writing vigil, rob mclennan $6 ; Sparky and Squire, Derek Beaulieu $6

See the prior cluster of new above/ground press titles here;

There will also be an online (and in person, if you are nearby) reading as part of the week! Register here.

May 15, 2026 7-10pm MDT
Clvb 33, St. Julien Way, Banff AB and online


With readings from Thomas Wharton, Fred Wah, ryan fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, JR Carpenter, rob mclennan, Daphne Marlatt, Jana Pruden, Hiromi Goto, and Marilyn Dumont.


Tuesday, May 12, 2026

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rainer Diana Hamilton

Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of five books, including This Reasonable Habit (co-authored with Violet Spurlock, Spunk Editions, 2026) and Lilacs (Krupskaya Books 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?

I wrote my first book, Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012), mostly by collaging found language related to women crying at work. I’m not sure publishing that book changed my life any more than a great fling or a bad fall would have, but both have consequences.

I was interested, then, in the apparent tension between emotional “content” and formal strategies (like appropriation) often set against the personal-emotional-lyric impulse. I was also in my mid-twenties, with the heartbreak common to those years; as Okay, Okay came out, I found myself much more often in the position my poems had been meant to represent at a distance. By making it clear the speakers of the poem were the pitiable chorus found on forums or HR webinars, and not myself, I tried to generate a protective, ironic distance. I did the opposite. 

But my recent books still take comfort in attributing speech to someone else. I’ve restored the quotation marks, the tags, rather than playing with the flattening effect of a cut-up or collage that puts all the found language on the same level, but I still need the poem to stage a conversation. 

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

I tried to cure my childhood stutter by reciting TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” aloud in my bedroom at night. I had found an excerpt of Eliot in the opening to one of Stephen King’s Dark Tower books, and then went to the public library to request the full text on interlibrary loan. I memorized just the first few stanzas, but I loved reciting them, and they gave me the sense that poetry could contain a lot of language without explaining why. I was often wandering around Terre Haute, Indiana muttering “they called me the hyacinth girl.” It wasn’t until many years later that I learned the “Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu /  Mein Irisch Kind” was from Wagner. I had taken it as a sign that it was a good idea to throw a bit of German nonsense in.

That said, I came first to fiction. My best book remains one I “published” in elementary school, Murder in the Mansion, a wallpaper-covered hardback with spiral binding, about the NYPD murdering rich people to inflate the crime rate and get more overtime. 

Because I was reading a lot of very good novels—A Wrinkle in Time, say—and only what kitsch poetry appears in children’s books, I was in a better position to pull off a story. Total unfamiliarity with a genre or medium can be generative: if you have never seen a poem, or a movie, you’d probably make a good one. But as soon as you’re exposed to conventions, you need experience to know which ones to adopt and which to reject. This is why very young children are good poets, but middle school students write schlock. 

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 takes a long time for me to find out what book I’m writing, but it comes quickly once I know. Each book began as an unfocused manuscript collecting whatever scraps of language I had managed to eke out since the last one. Eventually, one or more of the poems gained authority, and the others are all cut to give it room to grow. 

This process started with Okay, Okay. I sent a manuscript to Truck Books, and they liked two pages of it, asked if I could write another book that looked like those. Taking this advice was pleasurable. 

4 - Where does a poem or 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 am always trying to write a book-length poem, but again, it takes time to find out what that poem is. With Lilacs, for example: I wrote “Images Lilac” first, and then I didn’t write another poem I liked for many years. I had a .doc on my computer titled Lilacs and Complaints that included this poem, some short stories, a few assorted paragraphs about my cat, some metered sonnets I had been playing with, and so on. It was an ugly, purposeless book, one that gave the sense of a good student’s exercises. This changed when Brandon Brown suggested I keep going with the other senses, which started a satisfying year of taking notes, getting ready, and then writing them each in one sitting. By the time I had a poem for each sense, “Image” was my least favorite, and only stays in the book as its foundation. 

But as soon as the premise changes, I slow down again. That book ends with “Love Lilac,” a poem that argues that love is a kind of sensory organ, or at least a particular mode of perception. It went through many, many drafts, and even through many loves. It needed a form capable of synthesis, and of disagreeing with itself. 

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

I love reading in contexts that make it easy for the audience to pay attention: a two-person reading, say, at the Poetry Project, where the soundtechs are Heaven-sent, or a house reading where everyone is comfortable and fed and cuddled up on the floor. I absolutely hate the kind of reading where six unrelated poets are given 15 minutes to torture the unwitting drinkers at a Bushick bar, or an outdoor reading with a mic that seems specially programmed to dissolve the lines into the sounds of rustling leaves.

Sometimes the perfect conditions surprise me. I loved reading at Anthology Film Archives last year (once, among dozens reading from Shiv Kotecha’s book Extrigue, while a slowed-down version of Double Indemnity played behind us; another group event on Shiv’s invitation for Prismatic Ground). I think more poetry readings should happen in movie theaters. In each case, the theatre gave a dignity to the performances that made it easy to listen to everyone, since theaters are the last secular places where people are free from both phones and the expectation they’ll understand everything, and their seats are meant to hold you there. 

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 want the poem to represent a total thought, with all of its references and digressions and changes of heart. Questions I’ve tried to answer include “How can a poem be as good as a donkey?” or “Why does early love make us so curious and good at learning?” or “How to sublimate instead of repress?” 

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?

The culture we have, right now, in the US, is proudly illiterate. In this context, I imagine that the most important writers are those whose books get more people to read? But beyond that, I think writers should try their best to be idiosyncratic, pleasurable, surprising, and difficult, and to resist all the forces that make cynicism or dishonesty tempting.

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

I have depended on outside editors. I loved working with Anna Moschovakis on God Was Right, for example, and there was the better part of a decade where Shiv Kotecha read all my early drafts. When I am edited badly, though, I feel crazy and sad. 

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

“Go to sleep.” 

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

I can’t help myself, but it causes problems: the poems are too much like essays, which are too much like stories, which are too much like poems. 

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?

If I have the day off work and my plan is to write, I pull the covers over my head and try to think about what I’ll do first while I hit snooze. Then I have coffee, read something unrelated to my project, go for a walk. There’s a lot of nervous getting ready. I try as much as possible to avoid long stretches where I’m at the computer or notebook and failing to write, because I find sadness unhelpful. 

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

If I’m in the middle of a book, and I know what I’m meant to be doing? That’s the time to talk the project over with a friend, or read, or do a little timed writing to break the spell. If I’m between projects, what works best is to see as many good movies as possible, read widely, get hungry, try to find the will to live that I find creatively generative. And then, once I have an idea, return to this paragraph’s start. But occasionally in grad school I had a real routine (breakfast, writing, run, writing, reading, walk, writing, see a friend), and it was lovely. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Smoke, sage, cinnamon.

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?

For better or for worse, my work tends to be about whatever I’ve recently experienced, learned, perceived, whatever. So anything perceptible, imaginable, thinkable is a possible influence. 

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

Oh my god, it’s too many. But I hope my own books answer this question. 

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

I am not fluent in any languages but English, which is shameful.  

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 considered dropping out of my PhD to go to nursing school, but I feared the long shifts! 

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

It is so satisfying to take language and rearrange it. I remember showing my mother a draft of some homework in the first grade, an unstructured list of all the facts I had learned about koala bears. She said, “Do you want to add paragraphs?” Of course I asked what a paragraph is. She took down some books, and we thought about how the writer decided where to add these breaks, what kind of unit a paragraph is. 

I wrote the essay again from the beginning, thinking about what relationships my sentences had to each other. This was really thrilling! But my handwriting was terrible, preventing my satisfaction. My mom then also taught me how to use the typewriter, so that I could see my new koala paragraphs cleanly. 

As I type this out, I realize it sounds exactly like the process by which I revised all my books, and that’s just fine. I wrote because it was the only way to find out what a paragraph does. 

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

I’m just finishing my friend Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, which is as much a great book about the pleasure of research as it is about the life and work of Hujar and Thek. I had such a good time following this narrative built between archived letters, photographs, and interviews—work I’ve never done, somehow—and it led me to read the letters in Bruce Boone’s papers at Buffalo.

As for movies? My friend Peter and I just saw Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Gabbeh, which tells the narrative of a rug, 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am finishing a novel, Shit Advice Columnist, about a woman named Artemis who writes an advice column about defecation. Her advice suffers when she cures her IBS. A new friendship helps her develop more creative bowels.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Monday, May 11, 2026

two new chapbooks, the uAlberta writer-in-residence (online) showcase, an interview + an above/ground press (zoom) conversation,

So, ryan fitzpatrick interviewed me across those early days of the pandemic, a selection of such is now available online via his MODEL Press as a free pdf download (check out further titles here, of course), in case such intrigues. As well, I've two recent chapbooks through above/ground press: an excerpt of my work-in-progress poetry manuscript, Origin Stories, in which I responded across 2025 to Benjamin Niespodziany's weekly "Sunday poem + prompt" substack, and an excerpt of "the green notebook," a prose writing and reading journal composed across a full calendar year (a number of which I'd been posting-as-excerpts across my substack). Watch, also, as I've got forthcoming chapbooks through Broke Press and Subpress, which is pretty cool.

I'm doing two online events over the next little bit. This Friday evening I'm part of the online Writer-in-Residence 50th Anniversary Alumni Showcase (well, online unless you are in Banff, Alberta): May 15, 2026 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM, Clvb 33, St. Julien Way, Banff, AB and online. REGISTER HERE. "The Writer-in-Residence program in the Department of English and Film Studies is delighted to invite you to attend our 50th anniversary Writer-in-Residence Alumni Showcase at the Banff Centre's Clvb 33. All are welcome to attend either in person or virtually. There will be readings from Thomas Wharton, Fred Wah, Ryan Fitzpatrick, Cody Caetano, JR Carpenter, rob mclennan, Daphne Marlatt, Jana Pruden, Hiromi Goto, and Marilyn Dumont." 

A week or so later, American poet and translator Cole Swensen will be interviewing myself, Jennifer Baker and Misha Solomon as part of "Publishing in-Transit: above/ground press," a whole conversation on and around above/ground through Brooklyn Rail. Wednesday, May 20, 2026 1pm Eastern/10am Pacific, via Zoom. REGISTER HERE. Oh, what an exciting week or so of things!