chaun webster, Without Terminus

i am the grandchild and great grandchild of rail workers. both of them porters of the sleeping car, both of them having demands placed up their bodies that interdicted their rest. during their employment they were both suspended in the irony of the sleeping car, which stole their ability to sleep, that robbery of rest a down payment for the ease of white train passengers. it is a familiar formula. i am trying to extend the sentences that arrived to me from my mother, and later the railroad’s archive, extend them into a different kind of exhaustion and limit point, to see where their lines fracture and whether ii can step into the space made by their splitting. i am attempting to insert the curvature of the comma into the sentence and line, a speculative practice emerging from a desire to converse with ghosts.

I’m deeply impressed by American poet chaun webster’s debut work of nonfiction, the remarkable Without Terminus (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2026), a book that follows on the heels of the author’s two Minnesota Book Award-winning poetry titles—GeNtry!fication: or the scene of the crime (Noemi Press, 2018) and Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (Black Ocean, 2023)—both of which I’m a bit frustrated at not having seen. As the back cover offers: “chaun webster traces how anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance. He begins with his grandfather Reginald, a Pullman porter who was denied rest and a pension, and follows Reginald and the train into a gloriously wayward exploration of comportment and confinement, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, and his relationships with his mother and child. Pushing sentences to their limits and troubling the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach.”

It is interesting how webster articulates and utilizes the archive, history and family history in a way comparable to the work of American poet Susan Howe [see my piece on Howe's latest here]: offering narrative threads and extended sequences, layerings of visual collage and an otherwise poetic structure. As well, this is a title that connects directly (inadvertently, I’m sure) to Calgary writer Suzette Mayr, through her award-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2022). Through Mayr’s fiction, she writes of R.T. Baxter, a Queer, Black man in 1929 working as a sleeping car porter on a train that moves across Canada, including the prairie provinces. webster’s narrative writes of a maternal grandfather known predominantly through family story and the archive, who also worked as a sleeping car porter, across the American Midwest, based in Saint Paul, Minnesota. “a mass of stories get imposed on experience, on the archive,” webster writes, early on in the collection, “comporting its materials to its shape, becoming the less by which not only the events and sequence of the past are determined but also their meaning. you are a student of story: a familiar one is that of uplift through adversity, that those who work and toil do so with the eventuality of ascendancy.”

This reads as a reclamation project, working through the archive, whether newspaper or family story or other records, to discover the possibilities of what otherwise the author can’t access. This is not the archival process of a poet such as Edmonton-based Jordan Abel [see my essay on Abel here], attempting to access the touchstone of an absent father and, thus, a distance from a particular culture and foundation, but one in which webster seeks, quite directly, the touchstone of an ancestor known only through these stories, one that can only be better known, at this point, through this piecemeal process of abstraction, unverifiable stories and unstoried facts. As webster writes:

you cannot bring together the complex material of your grandfather’s life through story, something is always erased from the surface when you attempt to constrict the dimensions of his living with that of a scene or chapter that takes place in the forty-two-inch-by-twenty-five-inch sleeping car and is reproduced on this five-and-a-half-by-eight-and-a-quarter page. even the one hundred twenty pages from Reginald’s employment files, which you have purchased photocopies of from the National Archives in Atlanta, are compressed, comport less to a life than to its abbreviation.

As webster works to write a way through the archival facts and family stories into something known, possible and tangible, Without Terminus offers the structure and cadence of a long poem through prose narrative, the strength of such a project compounded through the layerings of narrative structures. Through researching the grand elements of history and archive, webster seeks the intimacy of their grandfather.

your mother tells you a story about retirement, your grandfather’s twenty-five years of service as a pullman porter. every time you say the title you feel the word pull stretching itself out in your mouth, a pulllllllllman porter. she told you of the constraints of his labor, its years, and how they pulled from him, pulled years from him, how he would retire without pension and then would die with no triumphant ballad, your mother is the inaugural archive, your point of origin for what you come to know about your grandfather, archive here being a slippery word, one that could indicate a physical geography where the collected materials of history have been stored or something more ephemeral, a body of knowledge, the archive of material experience, both are full of elisions and gaps, you step into them.

 

Monroe Lawrence, Gravity Siren

My review of Vancouver Island-born Colorado-based poet Monroe Lawrence's Gravity Siren (Brooklyn NY: Beautiful Days Press, 2026) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. Catch my review of their full-length debut, About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021) here, or my interview earlier this year with them over at Touch the Donkey.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

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

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

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

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem.

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 don’t know the best answer to this, rob. But my writing process is very chaotic. I am not very organized, and I won’t recommend my model to anyone. My writing is very slow and scrappy at first. Many of my works, including creative non-fiction, don’t make it out and end up in the trash bags. I may have an idea to work on and gestate for a long time; bit by bit, the lines may appear. Maybe one or two of my poems came perfectly shaped. The others are through a series of revisions, and the editorial infrastructure I have built through friendship and mentorship.

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?

A poem can begin in any way from random things: a scene by the roadside, a conversation with a friend, a walk in the bush, your annoyance with a TV show, or an event going on locally or globally. Inspirations can come in different ways, including dreams.  I think when I started writing Contraband Bodies, I just wanted to reimagine out-of-placeness in another way, especially for the African on the move. I wrote a number of poems that Elee Kraljii Gardiner worked on during my Yosef Wosk Fellowship, but it was she also who told me, you have a powerful collection in view. Then I wrote a bit more and went through a series of revisions before I had my first full-length.

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

I think from my little understanding, community is everything. It is what poetry, like any other artistic form, thrives on.  Public readings are a great chance to talk more about your work and connect with your audience. I do not think they are counter-creative. I think even in reading, there is a chance to open your work up to a conversation you might not have imagined, prompting you to see its weaknesses and strengths.  I am grateful for all the invitations to read Contraband Bodies since its publication.

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?

Quite a poignant one there, rob. Truly, I just want to write first, but my writings generally are concerned with social change, and raise more questions about the atrocities rather than providing answers; I want to escalate concerns about abuse of human rights, and dehumanization of Black African migrants across micro-macro spaces, including the low mumble of racialization of African migrants within Africa. I want to explore the conditions of Nigeria’s nationhood, and so many things that postcolonial failures in Africa can evoke. I think this is not to say that my work reveals nothing, but I do not want to pre-empt my readers or lovers of my writing. I can only hope that when they embark on the readerly journey of my work, they find moments that are striking, that subvert hegemonic tales, and that absorb them emotionally. I want to meet my readers, and ask, so my poetry does that too. Oh, I never knew!

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?

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

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

I think editors need to be acknowledged more for the powerful work they do in the replenishing ritual of the manuscript. It is vital to work with an editor. This is a peer-review process that allows one to see some of the blindspots in one’s work as a writer. I was able to publish Contraband Bodies, for example, because of the wonderful work of Jennifer Bowering at NeWest, and my Nigerian editor, Joy Chime, at Narrative Landscape. Thanks to many friends, too, including Hussain Ahmed, Ifeoluwa Adeniyi, and Jumoke Verissimo, who read the manuscript.

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

Write and wait for the loads of rejection. It is not exactly how Wole Soyinka put it in an interview I watched. But don’t think rejections won’t come. They will, and so many great writers, have those in them inbox. You remember the New Yorker's rejection letter to Gabriel García Márquez on July 15, 1989, for his story “The Trail of Your Blood on the Snow.” This is a common thing in academia, though. We should not just be discouraged by them. For Contraband Bodies, I got many rejections from presses in Canada and beyond. Thank you to NeWest and Narrative Landscape for their faith.

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?

With a bottle of water spiced up with lemon. That will be followed by a cup of coffee. I want it Black too. No writing routine, especially for my literary work. I just write when the impulse grips me to do so. Sometimes it is morning; other times it is in the afternoon. I do writing where it meets me–jot on my phone, scrap of paper, email drafts, inside the bus, and so on. This is not the same for academic writing, which is more methodical and demands some linearity in planning and scheduling.

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

See films/documentaries. Explore Edmonton. Chat and gossip with my partner. Read more. 

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Foods! As a Yoruba man, Amala precisely. I have tried to reenact the memories of home through the diasporic foodways, but you know, it can’t be the same. Have you tried Nigerian jollof, rob? There is a great war going on in West Africa between Nigeria and Ghana now about who cooks the best Jollof. Nigeria, of course.

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, rob. Music, science, visual arts, sculpture, farming, travels, and even reading other people's work influence my writings. Take, for example, my poem “Akiwowo” from Contraband Bodies, which was influenced by the music of Grammy winner Babatunde Olatunji, also titled “Akiwowo.”

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

As a critic, I admire many theorists and scholars. While I can’t say this set is my favorite, a number of writings influence my scholarship/critical writings, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe, Edward Said, Chigbo Anyaduba, Mahmood Mamdani, Akin Adesokan, Evan Mwangi, Carli Coetzee, Rinaldo Walcott, and so on. I have been mentored by many writers, scholars, and theorists whom I haven’t met. See, I can’t exhaust this list. Outside my work, I would say When Air Becomes Breath by Paul Kalanithi. It is a devastating one.

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

I like traveling, and I would like to see many great places I have read about in literature. Although, as you know, writers are always broke. Did you read this recent symposium piece by The Baffler, “The Profession That Does Not Exist”?

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?

Maybe a farmer. I still love farming. Back in the days, in my hometown Shao, I helped my father a lot with weeding guinea corn fields, yam fields, corn fields, and acres of cassava fields. 

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

I think as a literature student, reading writings by writers across cultures and societies makes me fall in love with writing as a creative process. The sublimating power of writing does it for me. There may be other talents I have not explored yet. But let me use this opportunity to recommend our film documentary project, on which I am an associate producer, Ebrohimie Road. It is a film on the African Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, directed by my friend Kola Tubosun.

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

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck is a wonderful work; Its style is distinct and distilled. I am now reading One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad. Film, haha, I would say, Mati Diop’s The Atlantique. Mati’s film may be considered a bit old now, but the poetry of the film makes it transcendental as a cinematic masterpiece that explores class and mobility. But there are so many great films out there that I have not been able to watch. People have talked a lot about Sinners, but I have not had time for it. I should do this in the summer! There is also My Father’s Shadow. My list of films is long o.

19 - What are you currently working on?

Now, I am working on an anthology project that explores winter experience and the Afro-Canadian diaspora. This will be published by Wilfried Laurier U Press in 2027. The call is out.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Our Winnipeg:

Okay, so we spent the weekend in Winnipeg, for the sake of Christine's family things. Her mother is from there, so our whole crew, plus Christine's brother and his family, met up with mother-in-law and her two Winnipeg-based sisters, to acknowledge what would have been Christine's grandfather's one hundredth birthday. The last time I was in Winnipeg was for the sake of the ARP launch in 2023, which was plenty fun [see my report on such here], but this trip more for a couple of family events, and the kids seeing cousins. I've been moving around a lot lately, far more than usual, catching a recent week at the Banff Centre [see my report here] and an exciting weekend in Victoria, with three events in two days [see my reports on such here]. Otherwise, our last family trips would be Park Omega in February [a quick overnight, see my report] or that trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland last July, following Rose and her choir around as they performed [see my reports on such here], or even Calgary, the November prior (where Christine and I also read, and Rose had a birthday) [see my report on such here]. There is talk of our household (sans cats) attempting to drive to Halifax later this summer to visit Christine's brother and his family, but nothing is settled quite yet.

We spent the weekend in Winnipeg, landing Friday just before noon, and the young ladies and I left Christine to rest in our hotel room while we ran off to the Assiniboine Park Zoo [our young ladies have requested fewer pictures of them online, by the way], another Robert Kroetsch reference, his poem "The Winnipeg Zoo" [see also: Mile Zero]. Although, if this zoo (established 1904) was always known as the Assiniboine Park Zoo, why did Kroetsch title his poem thus? Was it the presumption that folk beyond the city's boundaries wouldn't have known the reference? Or was he, in New York State, misremembering? Mid-point through the zoo adventure, we met up with Winnipeg poet Melanie Dennis Unrau [see my review of her debut here], which did prompt Rose to complain less about having to be out at all, at a zoo, whatever. Aoife was having a grand time. She wanted to see snakes! She wanted to see polar bears! Melanie showed us the polar bears, who seemed tired, bored. But the heat was some thirty degrees. One barely poked his head up from the pool.

After the zoo, we went off to meet up with Christine, and then with her brother and his family for dinner, before they took the kids to the pool, and I wandered out to a pub night with various Winnipeg writers (Christine had considered joining, but her energy didn't allow for such), including Unrau [pictured], Marjorie Poor, melanie brannagan frederiksen, K.I. Press, Angeline Schellenberg, Julian Day and Kathy Block at a local place called Barn Hammer, which I quite liked. It was good to meet Schellenberg, who I hadn't prior [she had a "Tuesday poem" back in 2022], and I'd forgotten that Poor actually used to work at the late, lamented Heaven Art & Book Cafe, so we hadn't seen each other since the end-of-Heaven party back in, what, June 1999? Apparently Block had attended, during Covid, an online chapbook-making conversation I was invited to do, sponsored through one of the provincial Writers Guilds (Alberta? most likely). And did you know that Unrau has a new chapbook with Gap Riot Press? It is a lovely thing, hoping to get my hands on a copy of my own at some point. It was a grand adventure! Always good to see folk, certainly.

The next morning, a brunch, as our young ladies hung out with their cousins. More time at the pool, in which the young ladies hung out with their cousins [and I began to read the book, above, that Christine found at the Ottawa airport, as we were leaving]. And a bbq at Christine's auntie's house, where the young ladies hung out further with their cousins, a wall of photographs of Christine's grandparents. Christine's brother's family live in Halifax, after all, so we're only able to see them a couple of times a year. And at the bbq, a birthday cake or two for Christine, to mark her own birthday [do you remember the birthday poem I wrote her in 2011?], even wearing the birthday pin that I got her (or was it the one her mother got her? we each picked up the same). 

We visited the graveyard, on Sunday, where mother-in-law's parents lay, and a quick trip to Red River Books (finally) and then the Manitoba Museum before heading back to the airport. So quick! The big ship at the back of the Museum was pretty cool. Go see that!

And did you know that Winnipeg is the Slurpee Capital of the World? I had no idea! Although we did appreciate it, in the thirty-plus degree heat.

Spotlight series #122 : Kevin Stebner

The one hundred and twenty-second in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Calgary artist, poet and musician Kevin Stebner.

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 and Toronto-based Palestinian and Iraqi writer Hajer Mirwali!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Hyland

Emily Hyland is the author of My Wise Little Ghost (Trio House, 2026), Divorced Business Partners: A Love Story (Howling Bird Press, 2024) & Emily: The Cookbook (Ballantine Books, 2018). Her third collection, Post-Mastectomy Poems, will be published by Cornerstone Press in 2027.

Hyland is the eponymous co-founder of the international restaurant groups Pizza Loves Emily + Emmy Squared Pizza. She leads poetry & movement retreats across the country & lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she writes & teaches at Yogasource, a beloved local studio that she co-owns & directs.

1 - 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 checked the box of achieving the goal. I did this thing I’ve been hoping to do since 7th grade when I first started writing poetry during National Poetry Month for a chapbook unit with Mrs. Berrian. The new book feels different because it’s the next iteration of lived experience being processed—themes from the original book get teased out and more deeply explored in My Wise Little Ghost. This book, and the special voice within, emerged during a consciousness-explanding period for me—this book was quick and unexpected and poured out onto the page.

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

See above! I first started writing poetry during National Poetry Month for a chapbook unit with Mrs. Berrian in 7th grade. I still have that chapbook, and she actually came to my first book launch back in 2024. What a gift of a teacher!

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 have a fairly generative process. I’m in a bi-weekly writing group, a weekly drop in group with peers, take an array of classes, and go on poetry retreats, so there are always constructive reasons to write. My process is very much meditation/processing-in-action—working through whatever’s in the field through the use of language and creative expression. Typically,  I’m drafting in free form, then go back to edit and finesse. Drafts are alive; one of my favorite parts of the process is being in collaborative conversations with friends or editors who help me sculpt and refine my poems over the course of many evolutions.

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?

I’m project oriented. Each poem feels like one piece of the larger whole.

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

I like doing readings that have a conversation element to them. I like being in dialogue with others and learning from each other in community.

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?

Right now, I’m exploring how so many of my behaviors and expressions of emotion stem from old, stale narratives from family of origin. I’m interesting in discovering what plug sockets those old wires are plugged into and then untangling that big mess of wires and updating to a more current operating system. It’s been wild to tease the storylines out from where they originate and then see all the doors that open up into lineage and ancestry.

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 are deep observers; I think that quality of being a witness and then writing it is a vital check in society. I’m a yoga teacher and practitioner, and the yoga practice also requires contemplative awareness. I do my best to honor what practicing yoga actually means; according to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: yogash chitta vritti nirodhah, essentially translates as “yoga is the quieting of all the changing states of the mind.” The primary purpose of this practice is to clear the lens to be in a state of heightened clarity at the present moment. What better conditions exist for poems to emerge than from the place of sheer presence?

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

ESSENTIAL. The right set of objective eyes, (or a few of them), is essential to crafting and refining poems when the poems are ready for that stage of work. This is part of the journey is a wonderful opportunity for self-inquiry, because it allows me to explore my relationship with ego, want, and attachment. Why am I clinging to this couplet? What makes this image so damn precious to me? What happens if I let go and allow the space for possibility beyond what I originally imagined?

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

Last year, I had the opportunity to study with Ellen Bass on her Truth & Beauty retreat in Santa Cruz with Marie Howe. When I was concerned about about what the poem was uncovering about the person and situation it was based on and feeling guilty about putting all of the mess into the poem, she told me, “Give the poem what it needs.” It was such a declarative moment of wisdom. You can go back after and do all the things to care for the humans who’ve inspired the pieces or think about how the audience will meet the piece, but as the poem is coming to life, don’t hold back. When I head into tough territory around family of origin work, I hear this reminder and charge forward, emboldened and reminded to meet the poem where it is and tend to its needs.

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 up early to feed my fur babies, then coffee and clearing the inbox of administrative distraction. On my non-studio days, I strength train and run, then write, read, edit, or work on array of poetry tasks like these interview questions. On yoga days, Friday-Monday, I head to the studio and teach and take classes. Each weekend, I teach through the lens of a poet, and read their work as part of my opening talk, then weave the themes, concepts, and new learning into the way we are thinking about being and breathing in our bodies on the mat. What is the poem that the body is writing today? Where is the old tangled set of wires lurking in the connective tissue that need to be combed through, cleared, and exhaled out?

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

Books. Opening a book and reading is a natural inspiration boost for me. Stall is also part of the ebb and flow, and it’s been important for me to explore patience and ease during times when writing seems less available. I had an extremely generative few years then almost a full year of fallow field. The best way to meet that was to myself rest in the field, trusting the poems would start to sprout when ready.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Palo santo. Grounding and warm.

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’m starting to spend more time with visual art, and the dimensions of color and story, among other elements, that live in a painting excite my creativity. As I mentioned earlier, the predominant place of inquiry and influence for me is the body. Every experience we have ever had lives in our tissue. The somatic space is its own endless universe of poems waiting to be written. My big toe wrote a poem this past year with a big moment of awareness with an acupuncture needle; just a few weeks ago in yoga class, my hip flexors tuned me to a hard memory I’ve been avoiding for a long time and nudged me to try and write it. Running feels like meditation-in-action as well and my morning runs are spaces where my mind can open up to a quality of thinking while resilience-building in a way that also creates potent conditions for poems to come forth.

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

Reading Sharon Olds in college was my entry into this world. Mark Doty has been my primary teacher for many years now; he has built a wonderful community of poets and creates the safe, supportive, kind circumstances to grow as a writer in workshop. He shares many students with Ellen Bass and Marie Howe, and both of them are huge influences both as teachers and as poets. I’ve recently studied with Gaby Calvocoressi and Shira Erlichman, and look forward to studying with both of them more. I’m inspired by Ocean Vuong and Ross Gay. I’m in a peer group with emerging poets like myself: Sarah Williams, Lexi Pelle, and KuhuJoshi. These are three powerful poets to be on the lookout for. I’m peers with Kristin Lueke and LO Naylor, two other raw, outstanding new voices I’m lucky to call friends.

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

Run a half marathon. Yikes. Now that I’ve said it I have to do it.

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 seem to be someone who does a lot of different things already; I’ve been a restaurateur for over a decade, I co-own and direct a yoga studio in Santa Fe called Yogasource—come take a class if you pass through! I also lead creative expression and resilience skill-building retreats with Mark Doty and other folks wherein we discuss, read, and write poems, and move our bodies as a means to be with the poems as they come to fruition. If I had the time, I would become an esthetician and clean pores all day long.

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

As a kid, the page was a space I could trust early on. It was the place I could best relate to my feelings and feel safe to express them. Thank god for that!

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

Just watched Bugonia. AMAZING. WOW. I just read Creature in Bloom by Rebekah Hewitt. I met her at AWP this year and we bought each other’s books. Another amazing woman writing about the experience of being a woman in her body and her life. Highly recommend!

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on community building in writing and movement land: my next retreat, Magic in Mexico: Light & Joy in Practice, with a renowned meditation teacher, Erin Doerwald. We’ll be helping folks tune towards the key resilience skills of levity and gratitude. She’ll be teaching gentle movement and meditation practices, and I’ll be holding poetry discussions and teaching somatic movement classes around this important topic. Come with us!

12 or 20 (second series) questions;