Spotlight series #105 : Conor Mc Donnell

The one hundred and fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell.

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 and Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Tracy Wise

After an international childhood lived throughout Asia because of her father’s non-profit aid work, Tracy Wise has spent her career in theatre, opera, and then higher education administration. She currently writes university presidential speeches, campus communications, and news stories in California’s Inland Empire. She has a BA in Theatre and Spanish from Washington University in St. Louis (which includes a year at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK) and an MA in Cultural Studies (a historiography degree) from the University of East London in the UK. A life-long passionate reader, she designs social media for the Friends of her local Redlands, California A.K. Smiley Public Library in her free time. Facebook:  Tracy Wise, Author and Freelance Writer

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

MADAME SOREL’S LODGER, to be published by Type Eighteen Books in February 2025, is my first work to be published. So, watch this space! It is incredibly exciting to see my creative (as in, non-work related) writing entering the wider world.

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

I’ve been writing stories my whole life, and so fiction is the space in which I feel most at home. There’s a type of discipline for writing poetry which I simply lack.  I know there will be some non-fiction in my future (apart from my day job), but I don’t feel as comfortable in it as a form of creative expression. 

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 tend to start writing and see if the story continues to call me forward. I basically have a sense of where the story is going, but what happens along the way is part of the daily discovery. To get started on a project, I need the mental space to be open to it. Once the opening is there, it tends to continue until it says, I’m done.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

It is not a fixed thing for me. Projects may start as a short story and then say, there’s more here, keep going. Or not. Or they may emerge from the first as a full novel.

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 out loud. I’ve done it my entire life and used to record story tapes for my younger cousins and then their children when they were small. I hugely enjoyed recording the audiobook for MADAME SOREL, for instance. But I have yet to do a public reading of my creative work (apart from in writer’s critique groups)—am looking forward to diving in.

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 fully believe writers need to be alive and aware to the current moment, including concerns about racism, sexism, misogyny, and anti-LGBTQIA issues, as well as to issues around the question of appropriation. That being said, writers also need to be free to write. I believe that writers can tap into that well of creativity which is part of our common humanity, and that should be celebrated and supported.

            For example, in MADAME SOREL’S LODGER, the central character who I simply name “the Artist” is trying to pull all of life down onto a painted canvas, so that the canvas comes fully alive. I am striving to create a vivid experience for my reader using letters on a flat, white page or screen, so that this world and its characters come fully alive.

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 writer is a fellow human being in the larger culture and, therefore, they have as much right as anyone else to speak up. If they are published and well known, it can add weight to what they say in the public square and who is willing to listen to them. Perhaps I am an idealist, but I believe informed thoughtfulness and considered reflection can promote discussion and can strengthen us as a culture and as a society. Did I saw I was an idealist?

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

In my view, a writer always needs an outside pair of eyes on their writing (aka, an editor), the same way that an actor always needs an outside pair of eyes on their performance (aka, a director). We need another perspective, because getting lost in our own head can weaken what we are trying to do. So, yes, it is essential.

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

There are no rules when it comes to writing. Write. And read-read-read-read-read.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (fiction to news stories and speeches)? What do you see as the appeal?

Writing is how I best express myself, so moving from fiction to press releases to speeches is natural to me. That is, once you understand the “feeling,” format, and intention of each “mode,” it becomes an easy switch. And it all provides an opportunity to hone your writing. No effort is ever truly lost. Honestly, I credit my years spent on Twitter as providing an excellent training ground for distilling what I want to say into as clear and concise a statement as possible.

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?

While I dream of having a set, orderly routine (just as I dream having a tidy, minimalist, organized house), I have come to the realization that I will always resist that. I am very Type A—I map each day out, with all my tasks, deadlines, and goals, and then set to work getting them done. Which then also involves rearranging like mad as the day throws new things at you.

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

For me, the biggest hurdle is carving out both the time and the headspace to let the creativity free. I tend to overschedule myself.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

My college roommate was from Pakistan, one of the places where I grew up as a child. I came back to the dorm late one night after a theatre rehearsal. It was warm and humid, and she had the window open, the lights off, a couple of candles burning, and some Pakistani music playing softly. I opened the door and I was enveloped by the sound, the sight, and the smells, and I did not know where or even when I was. I have never forgotten that moment.

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?

Honestly, for me, everything I do is somehow connected to music. When I am writing, it is the rhythm and cadence of the sentences as well as the sounds of the words themselves which I listen to. And I also want to put clearly down on paper the scenes I am seeing in my mind so the reader can see them, too.  But all of that is also informed by a lifetime of being read to and then, from the age of 6, reading ferociously on my own.

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

There are so many incredible writers out there, it is hard to narrow it down. As a child, poetry was hugely important for me. A childhood writer I loved was Joan Aiken. Recent discoveries include Sarah Winman and Alice Winn. Maggie O’Farrell’s THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT moved so well into the mind of an artist and made her come alive, which added a whole other level to the impact of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” for me. I have loved Barbara Pym’s novels a great deal. Also, Robertson Davies has been very influential. Edward Carey’s LITTLE really spoke to me—the rhythms of his writing in the novel conveyed the strangeness and familiarity of fairy tales. Julie Otsuka’s ability to pack so very much into her short novels seems extraordinary to me—you get lost in her world and think you’ve been gone for hours, but you haven’t been. And Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ THE LOVE SONGS OF W.E.B. DUBOIS was just incredible (you can tell she is a poet in how she constructs her sentences and tells her story). There are also some amazing non-fiction writers in history and philosophy—I read a lot of history these days, especially in the years since I earned my M.A. I know I will leave someone off whom I love…

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

I always knew I wanted to write, but I also knew I wanted to perform. I decided to do the performing when I was younger and spent several years as an actress and then an opera singer (the first was something I had only dreamed of and the second I had never dreamed of; getting to do both was magical). I am reveling in my opportunity now to finally give time and attention to my writing.

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 do wonder what it would have been like to have gone fully into academia and the professoriate, instead of just dabbling around the edges (I call myself a “closet academic”). I also wonder what it would have been like to have gone into the non-profit aid work my father did or into the diplomatic service.

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

Writing is like breathing for me. I tried balancing it with my full-time work when I was living in Chicago but woke up one night just before my head hit the keyboard. I couldn’t afford to quit my day job at that time, so regretfully had to put it all away. So, it feels like coming home.

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

The last non-fiction book I really appreciated was Sebastian Smee’s PARIS IN RUINS:LOVE, WAR, AND THE BIRTH OF IMPRESSIONISM.  The last fiction book I really enjoyed was Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel’s DAYSWORK: A NOVEL and now I am re-thinking Herman Melville. I confess that I have largely stopped watching films, after a lifetime of being an avid filmgoer, and I am looking forward to that switch being turned on again.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have lots of ideas! When you put off doing something for so long and then you say, okay, it’s time, everything that has been in the back of your brain jumps up and says me-me-me-now! I have completed the first book in a trilogy which is again literary fiction and that flirts with the Regency trope and format but moves away from it at the same time. I have an idea around the years I spent caring for my mother through her dementia. And I have some ideas based on my rather itinerant and international lived experience.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Matthew Gwathmey, Family Band

 

FAMILY BAND

What was there to do but to play music?
Me on guitar and my sister on fiddle.
Father came out after tuning to blow
The porch top off with his harmonica.
Then a second cousin, on seeing shingles
falling sure on embouchure, would bring
his five-string banjo, mumbling about picket
fences, Double Dutch and potluck suppers.

Singers, we always had lots of singers.
Back in the house, next door, up in the hollow.
Singers we couldn’t hear. Singers we didn’t want to.
Our songs turned out grief lessons:
“The Little Lost Child,” “O Molly My Dear,”
“How Can We Stand Such Sorrow,” “Bury Me
Under The Willow Weeping.”

Nothing in return but quick toe taps
and off-beat claps, next tune chosen
by the fastest caller. That is,
until a few of our aunts came,
right hands flicking with rulers,
and made us all sing gospel hymns,
about life after life after.

The third full-length collection by Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, following Our Latest in Folktales (London ON: Brick Books, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Tumbling for Amateurs (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023) [see my review of such here], is Family Band (Guelph ON: The Porcupines’ Quill, 2024). There’s long been a playfully-askance approach Gwathmey has taken blending formal elements of lyric and narrative, and this collection is no different, offering sharp lines across a folksy, familial and detailed backdrop. “2022 is the year of the lilac,” he writes, to open the poem “LILACS,” according to the almanac. // So tonight let’s walk the trail behind our house. // To the bushes growing in very great plenty and already divided. // Find an offshoot. Plant it in our side yard where it scent can flourish / in the full sun. // Water and wait. We’ll alternate scions with random grafts, // until its flowers appear at eye level, appearing just before summer / comes into season, // blooms lasting only a couple weeks.” Through short, sharp lyrics, Gwathmey swirls together a mixtape’s-worth of earworms and experience, documenting road trips, birdwatching, visual art, nature walks and playing music, a broadband of all that circles the domestic of family life, rippling quietly outwards. “Savannah sparrows gather ten times / their weight in detail to orchestrate / the ratio of land to water,” he writes, as part of the lyric “BIRD CARTOGRAPHERS,” “call a light tsu. Caroline / chickadees, cleaner edge of cheek patch, / mark dots of cities and dashes / of contours using a broad palette.” I particularly enjoyed the triptych prose-poem sequence “PHOTOGRAPHS OF BUILDINGS / BY DIANE ARBUS,” the first of which begins: “Chimneys can’t push out but so much steam, even the outline’s unfocused in blurry vapour. A quiet loosening of rigid matter. And how far they jut into the postsecular project of this guy, the sky. Just imagine such alternatives.”

PERMANENT RECORD: Poetics Towards the Archive, ed. Naima Yael Tokunow

 

            Before coming to this project, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the Black American record (or lack thereof), and how my understanding of myself as a Black American, my family, and my culture has been shaped by what I can, and do, know through searching archives. These archives include materials from my family and the state, from papers and oral histories, and from political and artistic recordings. Many records are missing, misremembered, or unfindable. Some are full and jumbled, hard to decipher. Most are couched in death, grief, and loss. This cannot be and is not the “full story,” although we are socialized to understand records as such, rewarded for reinforcing its “wholeness,” and often penalized for pointing to its deficiencies. Many have written beautifully about the wound of not-knowing—our homeland, our people, our tongues, our separation from culture.
[…]
            And so, Permanent Record hopes to apply the kind of pressure that turns matter from one thing to another by asking hard questions: How do we reject, interpolate, and (re)create the archive and record? How do we feed our fragmented recordings to health? How do we pull blood from stone (and ink and shadows and ghosts)? What do we gain from our flawed systems of remembrance? How does creating a deep relationship to the archive allow us both agency and legibility, allow us to prefigure the world we want? Through this reclamation, we can become the ancestors we didn’t have.
            Permanent Record wants to reimagine who is included in the archive and which recordings are considered worthy of preservation, making room for the ways many of us have had to invent forms of knowing in and from delegitimized spaces and records. In doing so, we explore “possibilities for speculating beyond recorded multiplicity” (thank you, Trisha Low, for this perfect wording). This book itself is a record. The book asks what can be counted as an epistemological object. What is counted. Who is counted, and how. (“INTRODUCTION: Archives of/Against Absence: exploring identity, collective memory, and the unseen,” Naima Yael Tokunow)

Newly out is the anthology Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025), edited by Albuquerque, New Mexico-based writer, educator, artist and editor Naima Yael Tokunow. Since being announced as Nightboat’s inaugural Editorial Fellow back in 2023, Tokunow has put together an impressively comprehensive anthology on loss, reclamation and the archive, working to gather together elements of what had, has or would otherwise be lost, pushing through conversations on what might emerge through and because and even despite those losses. “you spend a lot of time thinking about loss,” writes Minneapolis poet Chaun Webster, as part of “from WITHOUT TERMINUS,” considering if what is missing has / a form, wondering if there is a method to tracing what is not visible. there was / a time when you thought that if you just had greater powers of imagination, or / if you could somehow place yourself securely along the tracks of family and / cultural history that you could gather sufficient evidence, collect all the bones / to make something of a complete structure.” Across a spectrum of lyric by more than three dozen poets, Permanent Record speaks of a range of cultural and personal losses, from a loss of language, home and family, reacting to colonialism and global conflict to more intimate details, writing against erasures both historical and ongoing. There is an enormous amount contained within these pages. “In the obits mourning the billionaires,” writes Hazem Fahmy, a writer and critic from Cairo, in “THE BILLIONAIRE / (ARE YOU BOAT OR SUBMARINE?),” “it is mentioned that they paid / $250k to die before the eyes of the entire world // a laughably cheap ticket / compared to the cost of carrying // a child onto a floating grave. Whose mercy / would you rather stake your life on? The ocean’s?”

On the back cover, the collection self-describes as a “visionary anthology that reimagines the archive as a tool for collective memory. Reflecting on identity, language, diasporic experiences, and how records perpetuate harm, this collection seeks to reframe what belongs in collective remembrance.” “When the ceiling drops / the rain stops / beating down but / now you’re beaten down,” writes Okinawan-Irish American poet Brenda Shaughnessy (one of only a handful of poets throughout the collection I’d been aware of prior), as part of the sequence “TELL OUR MOTHERS WE TELL OURSELVES / THE STORY WE BELIEVE IS OURS,” “though it’s the beat / that drops now / and we dance / in the rain / like sunbeams / made out of metal cloth, / tubes of blood, / and scared, sewn-up eyes.” The anthology includes writing by more than forty writers, most of whom are based in or through the United States and further south (with at least two contributors on this side of the border in the mix as well: Hamilton, Ontario-based Jaclyn Desforges and Toronto-based Em Dial). The work in this anthology is rich, evocative and very powerful, even more impressive when one considers that the bulk of the list of contributors are emerging, with but a single full-length title or less to their credit. Tokunow offers an expansive list of contributors from all corners, with an eye for language, purpose; one would think if you want a sense of the landscape of who you should be reading next, Tokunow’s list of contributors to Permanent Record is entirely that. Listen to the lyric of this excerpt of the poem “QUADROON (ADJ., N.)” by Em Dial, that reads:

QUADROON (adj., n.) language of origin: once again, linguists spit their bloodied air: from Spanish cuarteron, or one who has a fourth. i pinch the linguist’s tongue and gawk at the way they betray themselves. not one who has three fourths. not the haystack with a needle inside. instead, any drops of life in a sterile lake are isolated and named. the lake’s volume is doubled again and again and again and again until science feels faultless renaming them Statistically Insignificant.

The anthology is organized in a quartet of loose cluster-sections—“MOTHERTONGUED,” “FILE NOT FOUND,” “THE MAP AS MISDIRECTION” and “FUTURE CONTINUOUS”—each of which, as Tokunow offers in her introduction, “begins with an introduction of sorts—a lyric map legend to the work within, inviting you to pull the threads of the framework through the pieces.” The approach, as one essentially lyric, is intriguing, offering a collection of writing sparked by purpose, but driven and propelled by a core of stunning writing: Tokunow clearly has a good eye (part of me wants to ask: where are you finding all of these writers?), and knows well how to organize material around a thesis. The introduction to the final section, for example, reads: “We have your number and all quarters. Fortune folds us up—without a line to the dead we can hear the blood rushing, a cup against our drum. The gifts we make ourselves (destiny or doom) hold up in flat daylight, some familiar oath, some new contract: we are finger-deep in the sand, spinning and spiny, no new lines but this soft, fat earth. Still falling off the page, we ziiiiiiip. We hold the mirror slant—sky and her big feelings bounce. What can we mine of the future and if, oh not extraction, then what can we lift, whole and breathing, over our heads?” As San Francisco-based poet Talia Fox writes, to close the lyric “NOTES ON TIME TRAVEL / IN THE MATRILINEAL LINE,” as held in that same closing section:

the curse is simple, and it begins with water

  the water my mother bathed me in was crab water (it is, after all, the water
alotted for soldiers and the children of soldiers and their children and especially
their children)

like a spell, like a spell !

when i close my eyes i am wading through a shallow river at evening. i come|
across a forest clearing where bodies have been strung up, faceless, bobbing
in the trees

As I mentioned earlier, more than forty contributors, and I was previously aware of only a few, such as poet and translator Rosa Alcalá [see my review of her latest here], Jaclyn Desforges [see her ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview here], Em Dial [see her ’12 or 20 questions here], multimedia poet and author Carolina Ebeid [see my review of her Albion Books chapbook here], Phillippines-born California-based poet Jan-Henry Gray [see my review of his full-length debut here], Minnesota-based poet and critic Douglas Kearney [see my review of his Sho here], and Brenda Shaughnessy (all of whom I clearly need to be attending far better). The wealth in this collection is incredible. Or, as Brooklyn-based writer, playwright, organizer and educator Mahogany L. Brown writes as part of the expansive “THE 19^TH AMENDMENT & MY MAMA”:

The third of an almost anything
is a gorge always looking to be
until the body is filled with more fibroids
than possibilities