12 or 20 (second series) questions with Steffi Tad-y

Steffi Tad-y is a disabled artist + writer from the Philippines. She is the author of From the Shoreline, Notes from the Ward, and Merienda. She is based in Manila and Toronto. 

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?
Even though the books were published three years apart, From the Shoreline and Notes from the Ward share similar themes — mental illness, family, kinship with earth and its creatures. Both are also driven by a roving eye. Lots of looking around and writing down what I found.

Notes from the Ward differs in the sense that many of the scenes there are set in a psychiatric hospital. I was also told by my editor, Shane Neilson, that my new book contains more sketches of people in community. 

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was young, I was certain about my attraction towards children’s novels and essays. I remember being blown away by Charlie in the Chocolate Factory and The Giver. Every Patricia Evangelista essay in the Philippine Inquirer held a force I felt in my body. 

Poetry came when I was at a Canadian Lit class (ENGL 474 with Dr. Deena Rhyms) in my mid-20’s and we read Marilyn Dumont’s “Memories of a Really Good Brown Girl.” It cracked me open then I hurried to the library scouring for more. 

I grew an appreciation for poetry last but it changed my life, and sometimes, even became almost all of my life. Oh the follies of youth. But I’m learning to actively resist this because my health matters more now. In a very gentle and forgiving way, poetry showed me that what was happening inside me mattered just as much as all the exterior markers of life. 

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?
Fast in marking the images or phrases that come to me. Slow in making it somewhere close to a poem. 

I can think of only two poems out of many years of crumpled drafts that came out really fast. 

Jonina Kirton calls them “given poems.” 

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?
Something I see, both outside and inside. 

Really short! Notes, lists, images, series of questions… 

But when I applied for a grant for the first time, I had to imagine a full-length book project. I had to state its overarching themes, possible significance, sources and inspiration etc. The book which received a grant (Notes from The Ward) ended up way different from what I said it would be but applying for funding taught me to look at book-making as another skill in and of itself. Before that process, it was very much poem to poem. 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I don’t always enjoy it because I feel so much and so deeply to begin with but I know it’s really important, humbling, and beautiful. While I’m reading, I get to see how my poems work out there, hear what lands, and what doesn’t. Aside from this editorial function, I also get to be in a circle of people telling stories to one another. That’s very moving to me. 

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?
Hmm.. right this moment, I think I am asking what a poem as a small piece of technology can offer its reader. 

In both my books, there’s a page that lays out a series of questions. I housed it there in case the reader would like to reflect on the images, lines, or themes they found in the poems. To constellate and draw connections. To pause and have them “reply” to the text. 

Two questions I remember are “What if we wrote about the violets if we can’t yet about the violence?” in From the Shoreline and “Do you have money?” from Notes from the Ward. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
For now, I think it has something to do with witnessing and listening. Something to do with memory and imagination and being human. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! They widen my purview, warn me of my cliches. They encourage me to work on being a thoughtful and rigorous writer. I’m a recipient of their generous work. 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Listen with a giant ear. Don’t scrimp on sleep. 

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?
Something I observed is I always find something to write about when I’m in transit. Car, bus, train, plane, I have my moments there. One of my wild dreams is to be a poet for TTC or be granted an artist residency by Amtrak.

Other than that, no routine unfortunately. 

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go for a walk! Last week, I saw people huddled around a food cart at a busy intersection. They each had a small orange bowl to the their chest, slurping noodles, shoulders touching. I was struck by the glow of the bowls against the violet sky. Their hands. Separate but also together. Another night, I saw two kids sharing a pair of rollerblades. One wore it on their right foot. The other wore it on their left. The wheels rushed in opposite directions. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Sampaguita. Rain on warm soil. Onions and garlic in a scalding hot pan or gisa in Tagalog. 

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?
Yes, totally. For me, it’s music, movies, sports, memes. Notes from the Ward mentions The Bee Gees. From the Shoreline, Muhammad Ali. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Aracelis Girmay, her work is like the sea to me. Rick Barot, his poems that span a world, his faith in the particular. For making a book that ends with “I was wrong.” Raoul Fernandes, for who and what his poems see. Oliver de la Paz, for The Boy in the Labyrinth and Diaspora Sonnets. 

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A poem that makes you cry and laugh at the same time. Something for my brothers. 

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 dreamed of being a doctor or stand-up comedian. I still do!   

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I feel embarrassed to say this but I suppose I really love it. It’s like a life partner. 

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Private Life of Trees by Alejandro Zambra translated by Megan McDowell is a short, mesmerizing read. Makes you giggle. Stays in your bones. Sinners by Ryan Coogler is a movie of immense and affectionate imagination. Deeply relational. 

19 - What are you currently working on?
Poems on childhood. My manuscript’s working title is Uyayi. It means "lullaby" in Tagalog.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Graeme Bezanson, Ultra Blue

 

Let the dead wolf speak
Backing out of the night
As the bull’s horns rise
Let the moon shine through
The last translucent gods
No hard beds
For worn-out bodies
Slow volcanoes
On the horizon
These were not the first
Of our misfortunes
So the strangeness
Was filtered from them
Combing burrs
From a boy’s hair
Your name an arrow made
Fast to a tangled
Gust of wind

I am intrigued by Ultra Blue (Toronto ON: Anansi, 2026), the full-length poetry debut by Nova Scotian writer Graeme Bezanson, a collection composed, as the back cover informs, as “a book-length sequence of poems about the emotional lives of boys.” In poems carved and shaped, almost whittled, with straightforward ease and an undercurrent of experience and wisdom, the poems of Bezanson’s Ultra Blue speak with a slow and purposeful care, offering meditations on boys and childhood, fathers and sons. “Remove us / From our places / But never bring us / To another” he writes, early on in the collection. Composed as a book-length suite of untitled self-contained lyric bursts in sequence, Bezanson’s accumulated, almost unspooled, phrases write around masculinity and its toxic elements, how it emerges and how emotions get mangled, comparable to Toronto poet Dale Martin Smith’s Flying Red Horse (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], a comparison that seems even further fitting, given the inclusion of a blurb by Smith on the back cover. If you want young men to learn, after all, you have to teach them.

Tracy Zeman, Interglacial

 

I wake early & in all that black    leave home
moisture in the air made visible by clouds      blue coolness
rogue waves borrowing form from the troposphere
harlequin in flight      floating world of coots canvasbacks
& hooded mergansers      white moon ringed with black
we peddle the rocky berm counting ducks 

census of species in a long series of signs 

                        daughter’s stars thinly inked
she sings while she draws      cattail      tree swallow
song sparrow’s burnt streaks a sunburst from beak to chest
like the cumulus along the lake’s perimeter
drifting & flattening into nothing into
a smooth white haze (“POINTE MOUILLEE”)

The second full-length collection by Michigan-based poet Tracy Zeman, following Empire (Anderson SC: Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2020), is the Great Lakes book-length suite Interglacial (Parlor Press / Free Verse Editions, 2026). “Her little scrawl at the edge of my notebook / while I am away,” she writes, as part of the short sequence “SUPERIOR,” “watching brown waves / crash against cold beach [.]” I’m intrigued by these lyric moments held in temporal and geographic space, in stasis; held and turned in the light, in the blink of an eye. There’s a narrative thickness to these pieces, a density combined with light touch, writing out landscape and ecology, habit and habitat and habitation. A way in which this poem-sequence extends into a single piece across the length and breath of the collection. While there are comparisons one can make to such as Lorine Niedecker’s infamous “Lake Superior,” the lyrics of Zeman’s Interglacial are more delicate, lyric; offering a particular tone, certainly, but one that extends across a far broader landscape, setting precisions against each other, from stone to the narrator’s daughter and dog to the water’s edge. “Sand everywhere,” she writes, as part of “THEANO POINT,” “morning white pine mist / floating over point    ocean-sound // mined crater on overlook [.]” Zeman’s lyrics, as well, echo variations I’ve seen over the years on the English-language adaptation of the utanikki—a poetic journal that includes haiku chasers—with variations over the years by Canadian poets Roy Miki, bpNichol, Fred Wah and Roy Kiyooka, among others, combining these elements with articulations of accumulated fragment, sequence and the book-length lyric meditation. There is an enormous amount of detail here, with much to admire and appreciate, allowing the phrases and sentences to roll like waves, perhaps. Or, as part of the sequence “NORTH”:

Shale shaped by water into river valleys
my canoe seemed as if it hung suspended
in that element        rough-hewn forts built by fur-traders
& black robes      longboats portaging
smooth gray & pink undulated rocks whirl up
to the forest surface      Precambrian remnants 

 

gneiss shot
with granite

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christian Wessels

Christian Wessels is a poet and critic. He is the author of Who Follow the Gleam (University of Massachusetts Press, April 2026), winner of the Juniper Prize in Poetry. His poetry has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, and Harvard Review Online, among other journals; his criticism has appeared in Literary Imagination, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Cleveland Review of Books. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Rochester, from which he received his PhD in English. He splits his time between New York and the Black Forest, Germany.

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

I’m not sure I ever set out to be a writer in the first place, in the sense that I would have selected between genres. In my second semester of college I took a comparative literature course in which we studied the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. I remember reading his poem “Seaward” in translation and thinking it’s magic that language can move like this; it made sense to me intuitively, and by necessity at the time I wanted to foster that intuition. So it didn’t feel like a choice, more a compulsion.

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?

Starting a project seems easy enough to me—until I inevitably realize that the framework of a “project” has led to several false starts. Now I’m trying less to think about a poem in sequence and more about what’s immediately on the page. I revise slowly, making small changes until finally cutting more substantial portions of a poem. I fill up notebooks with asides and scribbles in the meantime.

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

I know some poets have strong feelings about readings. I attend far more readings than I give. I love getting dinner with writers after readings.

I feel more neutral, I guess. I enjoy readings when they’re good, and I enjoy giving readings when I can perform enthusiastically. It’s always useful to read your poems aloud, of course, to hear in a different context how a poem moves. In that sense giving a bad reading is also very useful.

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

Oh, there are many ways to answer this. Let me share a goofy, revealing anecdote. I remember working on my MFA thesis at Boston University, advised by Dan Chiasson. I was twenty-one and a little too self-serious, a common problem for writers starting out, as Berryman described: a way to propel oneself into work that is thankless by some measures. Dan complimented the work, but then reflecting on the temperament of the poems (and my temperament in the workshop), he said something like, “in the spirit of friendship, my best advice for you is to chill out.”

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

Writing criticism is a way to keep myself busy when I’m not writing poetry. I do love writing about poems and poets—as a practice of attempting precise formal observation—though I consider myself a poet above all else. This has made it very easy to switch between genres.

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

Because I have a young daughter, my day starts early; I try to get started at least a few hours before she’s out of bed. I only write poems in the early morning. Prose is for the afternoon. I wouldn’t say I keep a particular routine, though: between teaching, my spouse’s academic schedule, my daughter’s various dates and activities, I write when there’s time. And I’m very grateful to Tanja for building into her own schedule time for me to focus on poetry.

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

Poems come in bursts: I write a lot over a short period of time, then spend several months revising. This is how it’s always been for me, so I trust that, at some point in the future, I’ll have another intense phase of writing. In the between periods, I write criticism and, of course, I teach: it’s hard to overstate how much teaching has impacted my work, guiding these periods of silence. I’ve had brilliant students, and our conversations challenge and reinforce what I love about poetry.

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?

Oh, there’s so much. I try to disappear a little bit when it comes to taste. I have a large collection of music and love going deep into particular labels and catalogues. I’m listening to everything Billie Holiday right now. Also, in Who Follow the Gleam, there are a few poems indebted to particular films. I Married a Witch from 1942, one of my favorites, and two of Herzog’s, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and a made-for-tv documentary, Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices, about the sixteenth-century Italian composer. I’m lucky enough to be married to a brilliant film and television scholar, and luckier still that we have very different preferences. 

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

Finish Twin Peaks. Fall asleep in the Cologne Cathedral. Ride a horse.

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 come from a family of landscapers and arborists on Long Island. My siblings and cousins all worked (or still work) in the trade. It’s hard to imagine a life without poetry where I didn’t end up spraying pesticides on boxwoods. I would have lost my job by now though. I did it for a few summers and couldn’t quite keep up with the pace. I was always distracted.

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

After her death, I read Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie, which is a provocative, formally complicated book of sonnets that I will revisit. 

The last film I remember truly loving was The Haunting from 1963 – the famous adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. 

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’ve finished a second manuscript of poems. I’m always working on reviews. I have a few essays kicking around. I’m translating into English some poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. I’m learning German with my daughter. I’m trying to figure out if I have hobbies.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;