Conyer Clayton, the lake-shaped excuse: poems

 

I’ve never
wanted anything 

except for someone
to understand

I actually want
many things (“Kneeling in our name”)

The latest full-length collection from Ottawa-based Kentucky poet Conyer Clayton is the lake-shaped excuse: poems (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2026), a book produced through Paul Vermeersch’s Buckrider Books imprint. Following their Ottawa Book Award-winning debut, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2020), and the Archibald Lampman Award-winning But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves. (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], the lake-shaped excuse is a book-length and unapologetically open-hearted lyric, surrounding the authors’ grief following the death of their mother, Sharon Conyer. “What’s left living of you in me.” Clayton writes, as part of the sequence “Kneeling in our name,” “My voice was once the loudest in the room / and now no one can hear me. // Your laugh was once the loudest in the room.” Poets have been writing on mothers as long as history might provide, with Dennis Cooley’s book-length Irene (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1999) being a particular highlight, although very few across the length and breadth of a full collection, and certainly, rarely so emotionally raw.

One could mention Krestova, British Columbia writer, educator and mentor Leesa Dean’s recent Interstitial (Sackville NB: Gaspereau Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], a collection surrounding the loss of her own mother, another collection that also wove through elements of addition. There’s also Los Angeles, California poet and translator Youna Kwak’s For This and Other Cruelties (Iowa City IA: University of Iowa Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], writing through the loss of her mother. Around grief, more generally, one could mention other recent poetry titles, including: Jessica Bebenek’s No One Knows Us There: Poems (Toronto ON: Book*hug Press, 2025) [see my review of such here], a collection shaped around the loss of the author’s grandmother; Denver, Colorado poet and editor Andrea Rexilius’ Sister Urn (Portland OR: Sidebrow Books, 2019) [see my review of such here], writing through and around the death of her sister; Memphis-based poet Emily Skaja’s Black Lake: poems (Graywolf Press, 2026) [see my review of such here], a book-length suite that works through the spectrum of grief through the loss of a child; and New England poet Susan Howe’s That This (New York NY: New Directions, 2010) [see my review of such here], writing through the unexpected death of her husband. The only way out, as each of these authors understood, simultaneously the most difficult and straightforward way, is through. “When you catch my eye in dreams,” Clayton writes, to close the two-page poem “Encasement,” “I cannot remember you warm in my hand.”

Through the poems of the lake-shaped excuse, Clayton writes both their grief and their mother across short poems and longer sequence-stretches, writing into and through grief, loss and addiction in waves: an accumulation of lines and moments and lyric fragments of grief that build, swell and recede. “I already have / every memory of / you I ever will.” writes the opening of the six-poem sequence, “Perennial.” The details and heft of such immediacy has moments that occasionally overwhelm, albeit held by a lyric that sustains, provides and allow. To follow an idea, one might say, follow it completely, and here Clayton has done exactly that, a lyric grief without hesitation. The poems loop, swirl, into each other. Set with opening poem “Day of rest” and three sections—“Kneeling,” “Floating” and “Standing”—each of which hold their own title echo, the first section of which is entirely that the sequence “Kneeling in our name,” a way of anchoring each section into the moment of the larger sequence of grief. “Every day / like a sermon,” that opening poem-section reads, “I kneel / to stretch my neck // Like a prayer to / something [.]” The poems loop, echo, play off each other in a kind of layering, providing interlinkages across what might seem like distances. Repeated lines, repeated phrases. The sequence “Floating in our name,” set in the second section, is one that holds a structural echo, perhaps, of Phyllis Webb’s infamous Naked Poems (1965), composing scant lines set in open space. The tension between such emotional clarity and earnest rawness with precise lyric is palpable, writing and writing out and into and through. Or, as that same poem, “Encasement,” begins:

Because you were given to me when I wanted you gone, I felt I owned you.

Because I saw a concrete box enter a furnace but never your body, I owned what was left of it.

Because I wish for your body, and regret that wish, your body becomes both wish and regret.

Because I never saw your body, I own it and your falling.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Miri Karraker

Miri Karraker wrote garden path (Community Mausoleum, 2026) and lives in Minneapolis.

1 - How did your first book change your life? 
It hasn’t.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
garden path felt really organic when I was writing it. I was/am sort of fixated on this concept of the garden path sentence, but I don’t think I belabored it as I would’ve in the past. I think too there was so much happening in my life and in Minneapolis (I wrote the last third or so in January 2026), I really was just writing and letting the language be. 

The other longer things I’ve written have also had collaborative elements (I wrote a book that was basically all ekphrasis and event scores called Works on Paper or Without, and Dawn Noon Dusk Midnight was co-written with Caroline Rayner). My MFA program poisoned my brain for many years and I really felt like I had to have A Project. garden path has been a return to writing in a way that’s organic and close to my everyday life and a method I used to write for years but lost sight of. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My parents sang to me and read to me every night when I was little. Rhythm probably has a lot to do with it. 

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?
I’m always starting something, probably. Language comes quickly, ideas accumulate slowly and that’s how I like my process right now. I like writing during the gaps in my day, often waiting for things (the bus, a friend, a movie to start, water to boil). In the last few years I’ve enjoyed watching these little fragments pile up and noticing certain sonic fixations, patterns, shapes, etc. I tend to do more rearranging than granular, line by line, word by word revision.

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?
It’s all sort of simultaneous. That said, I’m not really into discrete poems. Everything I write depends on what’s around it. I also really like writing chronologically, at least lately. I’d prefer for all the little fragments to live together but I’m also open to the productive estrangement that can happen when you excerpt things. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I used to have pretty bad stage fright, but I now have a prescription for beta blockers so I’ve actually been enjoying doing readings for the last couple years. It’s important to make our private labors as writers public with one another, and it's even more important that we party together. 

Reading aloud in general is more important to my composition process than doing readings, though. And I care a lot about how the language sounds. 

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?
In general: I’d like to ask better questions and be more receptive to their answers. So much of living right now is trying to discern what’s even real. I want to be brave enough to slow down, and to be discerning enough to accept reality and move to action. 

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?
Writers write. We would be better off if they also did other things, too. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
garden path wouldn’t exist without Zach Peckham. I remember he shared something with me in an early email exchange that his friend/colleague/mentor Hilary Plum shared with him, which is: books are patient. 

I’m so grateful for his friendship and that he kept pushing me to trust my instincts and where the language was taking me, even if I wasn’t totally sure myself. 

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

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to sound/performance work)?  
I used to play music more, and have a project that I’ve put in the drawer that has a bunch of scores in it. It’s all related, it’s just the material that changes (language, sound, people in a space). I never really think of moving between genres as difficult because I’m following my impulses and what feels called for in the moment or by the subject at hand.

What do you see as the appeal?
Why does anybody do any creative pursuit? It feels good to make something, different genres feel good for different reasons. Music has a certain appeal to me though because it’s an excuse to hang out with friends. Writing is immediate but towards some larger body of work. I can say a poem is a score, but then there’s also writing a score for a performance: which is something I have done when I’m thinking about language as a speculative space for (in)actions to take place. 

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? 
I guess I have habits more than a routine. I make a point to write things down when I think of them, but I actually made a rule for myself that I wouldn’t put pressure on myself to synthesize or edit the little things I’ve written  this summer. Summers here are so beautiful and all I want to do is be outside and indulge the frenetic social calendar the season brings. Winter is for sorting through all the stuff I’ve gathered. 

How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Every day starts the same: I wake up to my clock radio (best purchase I’ve ever made–shoutout to my favorite local station, KFAI), eat breakfast, and go on a walk around the park near my house and say hi to the heron or whoever. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Go someplace I haven’t been before. Invent some arduous parameters then examine my many failures. 

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
In summer: anise hyssop. In winter: all the wood in my house shifting. 

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?
It’s all continuous, but I think the practices I have where I’m able to observe over a long period of time are particularly important. Gardening and volunteering with a harm reduction org take up many hours of my week and let me see how smaller decisions and actions shape our environment and lives. Showing up to care for a place and its people over and over again is a huge privilege/honor/joy and probably shapes my fixations in language in a discursive way. 

Playing music with my friends Noah Ophoven-Baldwin and Mitch Stahlmann off and on for many years has taught me so much about listening. I grew up playing classical violin and viola and quit after I went to a noise show in Portland, Oregon when I was 19. When I moved back to Minneapolis, I met Noah and Mitch and I finally felt like I wanted to play music again after seeing them play. I was really attracted to how they treat silence and their instruments, still am. When we make music together it feels like stewarding the space we’re playing in, making some kind of sonic substrate for other sounds to land on–but more importantly it’s fun and it feels good. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Noticing language out in the world–signage, graffiti, vanity plates, garbage, branding, etc.  

I’m really into leaf miners right now. 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Make a book on tape, figure out how to successfully grow moon flowers in Minnesota, square the circle.

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?
Weaver of beautiful textiles on antique looms. 

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It’s so accessible and nimble. You can do it alone, whenever, wherever. Moving words around on a page doesn’t get old for me. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Modern Nature by Derek Jarman–I’m reading it right now every morning before I water my raised beds. “Always becoming, never arriving.” It’s such a treat to read him after seeing so many of his films.

It’s been a big movie season for me. I Love Boosters, Maddie’s Secret, Sentimental Value, Purple Noon, and La Piscine (did a double feature with A Bigger Splash) are recent favorites. 

20 - What are you currently working on?
My garden and having friends share music, writing, and food in it. Last year was my first spring in this house and my friends helped me tear out the dying grass, plant a bunch of native plants, and assemble some raised beds for herbs and vegetables. 

This year is more about celebration, beauty, and processing this horrific winter. I’ve been doing little events every month and just having people over for dinner. I have a vegetable garden, but I also sowed an egregious amount of seeds for cosmos, zinnias, various sunflowers, and marigolds. I’m learning a new kind of discipline and patience. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Ongoing notes: mid-November, 2026: Wayde Compton, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews + Bryn Robinson,

Don’t forget! The ottawa small press fair is tomorrow! And the pre-fair reading is tonight!

Vancouver/Victoria BC: Did you know that poetry/in/canada has been producing chapbooks? I mean, I just found out, myself. I recently received This Radiant Life + A Singing Question by Chantal Neveu & Erín Moure (2025), produced in a numbered edition of thirty copies “for the Third Annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading, 5 April 2025,” as well as their latest, The Wreck, excerpts from Epistles To Ọya by Wayde Compton (2026). As the colophon offers: “This poem was read for the Fourth Annual Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading, 11 April 2026.” Naturally, I’m curious: were there chapbooks for the first two events as well? As Compton offers as the note at the back of the collection:

“The Wreck” is Book II of a four-part narrative poem whose working title is “Epistles to Ọya.” It is loosely based on the Argonautica by Apollonius of Rhodes, the 3^rd century BCE epic poem about Jason’s voyage to find the Golden Fleece. Here that poem is a vessel through which I tell a slave narrative set on the Pacific coast of North America in the 18^th century. “The Wreck” roughly corresponds to the episode in which the Argonauts land on the island of Lemnos shortly after the women there have killed all its male inhabitants.

Writing around the scaffolding of another well-known work in “translation” or adaptation, as Compton is working here, has long been utilized, whether the film O brother, where art thou? (2000) or even Erín Moure’s own “transelation” of Pessoa via her Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2001). The work is expansive, writing around and through one text for the sake of excavating a whole other thread of narrative. In certain ways, this might be less Moure’s Pessoa than George Bowering’s classic reworking of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” (1923) through his own Kerrisdale Elegies (Coach House Press, 1986). As Compton writes: “These seething dresses have the beach. / They flourish beside the broken // planks timber lines litter bones.”

I recall a further excerpt recently appearing in an issue of The Capilano Review, which does make me intrigued for when the full project might appear in print. Are there further self-contained excerpts, perhaps, floating around further Canadian publications?

Imagine the apron, here in the vivid
hive of the wreck and its strewn 

society in the unmaking. Under the mauve
of the sky. Clustered in the gesture 

of collection. Flecks of freedom,
their own doing, their own 

object existence as interpretation,
a deciphering 

of subjection. They undulate.
They flit from intention 

to aspiration, supine
in the lant 

of shore to ascendency: the apron
says ere is where the story 

becomes their object own, on luminous
sand. They can join the strewn 

and stand outside the rendering
of destinies festering 

like rot from fruit not
theirs. Here is where an object
future is if, she says, 

they stay.

Chico CA/Ottawa ON: Winner of the Flume Press chapbook competition, as judged by Rae Gouirand, is Ottawa-based American poet Kimberly Quiogue Andrews’ latest, Animals I Never Saw (Flume Press, 2026), a chapbook-length homework response (as the author recently termed it) as part of a solicited project. As the gracefully-produced small publication opens:

This book is part of Delisted 2023, a collective artistic project that focuses on the members of 34 species, subspecies and morphs of plants and nonhuman animals that were most recently proposed for removal from the U.S. Endangered Species List due to extinction, a long legal process known as “delisting.” Two species remain on the list. The rule that declared the remaining species extinct is by far the largest delisting due to extinction since the early 1980s.

From 2023 on, more than 45 artists and writers have individually and collectively created literary, visual, ceremonial and other pieces centering and honoring these species. The book you have before you is thus just one part of a much larger endeavor. That endeavor has been organized and stewarded by the author, attorney, and biologist Jennifer Calkins, and I am endlessly grateful for her care, generosity, and courageousness of spirit.

As the publisher offers online to describe the chapbook: “Through a blend of prose, poetry, and structurally innovative forms, Andrews breathes life back into the Hemignathus Procerus, an extinct species of bird, a used-to-be native species of the Hawai’ian islands, and asks us to reexamine what it means to be a neighbor of the living and the dead.” The pieces here explore elements of visual and sound, far different in shape and scope from the more formally-lyric elements of her full-length debut, A Brief History of Fruit (Akron OH: The University of Akron Press, 2020) [see my review of such here] for the patter and patterning of language around this extinct bird, perhaps decades-long gone. What intrigues is how Andrews used the sourced language as way not to directly describe or document but to shape sound, meaning and visuals from this element of discovery, loss and absence. “The moral arc of the universe bends.” she writes, mid-way through. “In the documentary panorama, this Rorschach test a beach barely visible / above the waves, a Coke bottle bobbing, poignantly – // Your handprint. Your hand the size of birds. The cup of the hand, three or / more readable arcs. // Inverted, the moral arc of the universe is a bowl.” There’s something wonderfully rhythmic through these loops, these waves of lyric, specifically writing out that absence; that unseen, long-dead species of bird. Not described, but allowing the language, this elegy, the cadence of song. As she writes: “[…] accounts / for our profound / anxiety and sense / of mystery surround / ing the fact of lang / guage itself, the link / between naming / and being being / perhaps so strong / as to see the for / mer eclipsed […].” Or, elsewhere:

A bird in the hand. A bird in the fake hand. The white glove on the fake hand, the bird in the hand and the tag in the hand or on the hand or on the bird. The bird the size of the hand, the fake-hand-sized bird. The bird in the palm of the hand. The gloved thumb cradling the head.

Two in the bush. Two in the painting of the bush. Two eye-bright, little suns, wings like a waiting. None in the bush.

“In one instance I shot a female, and the male stopped in the top of the tree calling desperately. I fired at him without effect, and so intent was he in looking for his mate that he immediately returned and was brought down by another shot”

Saint John/Fredericton NB: Through Ian LeTourneau’s Emergency Flash Mob Press comes Saint John photographer and poet Bryn Robinson’s (seeming) chapbook debut, DAYS IN MICROGRAVITY (2026), a pretty hefty title, at some thirty pages. Being a debut, there is some interesting formal play throughout, working first-person narrative shapes through short poems to sequences through haibun to the tight lyric, feeling out an exploration of what form might allow. “How do we move on? / The room is empty,” begins the poem “Razorlight,” “except for thinly shaved light; / except for a willing participant / in search of the simplest explanation.” Working through kitchens and preserves, she writes of astronauts, constellations and space travel, a lens through which she looks far to catch what is immediate, close.

460 City Line

Fault lines
are not stable
foundations for a home. 

We ache
from growth arrest
in years of aftershocks.

Spotlight series #127 : Dag T. Straumsvåg

The one hundred and twenty-seventh in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Norwegian writer and translator Dag T. Straumsvåg.

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, Calgary poet Anna Veprinska, American expat poet in London Katie Ebbit, Brooklyn poet Nada Gordon, Kingston poet Jason Heroux, Vancouver poet Scott Inniss, Lethbridge-based Brazil-born poet Carlos A. Pittella, Toronto-based Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali, Calgary artist, poet and musician Kevin Stebner, Canadian-American writer, editor, and educator Suzanne Zelazo, Brooklyn poet Gregory Crosby, Chicago-based Chinese-American writer Elena Zhang and Whitehorse, Yukon poet Dawn Macdonald.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

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.”