Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Anna Swanson, The Garbage Poems
Monday, September 29, 2025
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lynda Williams
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The Beauty and the Hell of It is my debut, so it’s too early to tell, but I can speak to how my first story changed my life. I submitted it to a contest and it won. The prize, which I still consider to be one the best I’ve ever won, was a couple mentorship sessions with Gail Sobat. The goal was to revise the story in preparation for a reading at Audreys Books in Edmonton. I’m not exaggerating when I say Gail taught me the value of both revision and mentorship. That story is actually the first in the collection. The stories included span about 15 years, so there’s an evolution to my writing within the book, but voice and compression remain my top concerns.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
I didn’t. My first paying gig as a writer was for a local newspaper when I was still in high school and I started submitting poetry to literary journals when I was 15. It took me four years to get my first publication credit. I was still writing poetry when I started university and happened to take a creative writing class. I was one of two people in a group of twenty writing poetry and next to the title of one of my poems the prof penciled the words: Pam Houston Cowboys Are My Weakness. I didn’t read it right away, but when I did, it blew me out of the water. That collection changed my perspective on short fiction. Up to that point I thought stories were a punishment teachers assigned in high school. I should also add that I read a lot of novels and when I pictured writing a book, that’s what I envisioned—until Pam came along.
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 never research stories before I write them. They usually begin with a line bouncing around in my head, and sometimes I just repeat it to myself obsessively as I go about my day until I’m compelled to sit down and write. Other times I’ll write the line in my notes app or on a scrap of paper and free-write for a bit. Then I sit back to assess what I’m working with. I’m already revising at this point. Sometimes the initial draft comes quickly (there’s one piece in the collection I drafted in the span of an afternoon), but usually there’s a point where I pause in the middle. This probably wouldn’t happen if I outlined, but I learned early on that I write to discover what will happen and knowing the outcome kills my enthusiasm. Some drafts changed dramatically, and others stayed remarkably true to my initial vision. It varies so much from piece to piece.
4 - 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 find the idea of working on a book to be very intimidating. The very suggestion of it activates imposter syndrome, so I work on short pieces and try to gather them around a theme. It’s easier to admit that you’re writing a book when 2/3 of it is already written.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Public readings make me incredibly nervous, but I also find them very energizing. Making an audience laugh is one of the greatest pleasures of being a writer. So as much as I agonize over readings, I do believe they are central to the creative process.
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 didn’t give a great deal of thought to theoretical concerns in this collection. My overarching concern as I was writing the stories was how do women push back against expectations of how they should behave. I often refer to these expectations as the “loveliness imperative”—the patriarchal notion that women should make themselves appealing to men in everything they do. It is unfortunately an evergreen topic. Above all, my goal is to make my readers feel something, so I try not to intellectualize what I’m doing while I’m doing it. I think the current questions of our time centre around the climate crisis and genocide.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m an ordinary schmuck, but on a good day I can write a paragraph that will make you feel something and perhaps even cause you to reflect on what you believe. I’m not a moral compass, but it’s my job to think critically about whatever sh*t the world is shoveling.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential. Feedback isn’t always easy to receive, but I’m always grateful when someone takes the time to read my work and reflect on it. It might sting at times, but it can also open up possibilities for the work that you didn’t recognize yourself.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It’s actually something I started telling myself to deal with hard mental health days years ago: You can do some of your best work on your worst days. Which essentially means show up.
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?
When I’m immersed in a story, I try to wake up before my inner critic (between 4:30 and 5:00), so I can start typing before I’m fully awake. But not every day is a writing day for me. Sometimes I find other ways to touch the work—submitting or revising something old—and that tends to happen in the afternoon. I do freelance copyediting as well, so if I’m not writing a story, the day often starts there.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I return to my favorite books: Austen’s Persuasion, Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness, anything by Lorrie Moore, Carver’s Cathedral to name a few. I bake because it feels creative to me, but it’s not remotely related to writing. If I’m still struggling I look for lighter reading. Something outside my genre.
12 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
I was a pirate.
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?
McFadden has a point to the extent that books are in conversation with other books, but when I think about what influences my stories, music and movies are top of the list. Nearly every story in the collection has a soundtrack, one song I listened to on repeat while I was working because it evoked in me the feeling I wanted to evoke in readers. Movies are interesting. I watch them to escape, which means a lot of them are mediocre, but sometimes there will be a fantastic scene buried in an average film and it will just haunt me. I’ll reinvent the situation and give my own characters a better chance. Love Does Not Insist was inspired by a scene in a movie with two minor characters that had a plot line that eclipsed the rest of the film. I watched that scene over and over trying to figure out why it undid me and then I found a song that did the same thing and the rest is history.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Everyone named in question 11, but also mentors like Danila Botha & Alissa York, and peers like Su Chang.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Mentor other writers at the beginning of their journey.
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?
Assuming I had different aptitudes, a musician.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I tried doing other things, but writing is the only thing I’ve ever been passionate about.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: Vermin by Lori Hahnel. I love how she puts Calgary on the map and her range is incredible. Film: John Candy’s Delirious.
19 - What are you currently working on?
More stories. More women misbehaving, but this time I’m working with themes of betrayal.
Sunday, September 28, 2025
Sophia Dahlin, Glove Money
THAT’S MY WEAKNESS NOW
I’m well known throughout
the co-ops for being a splashy dishwasher,
and I’m well known in the
suburbs for singing to the mayor’s daughter.
Wine is cheaper than
books unless you drink it by the bowlful.
I need books hand over
hand and my hands are soulful.
Softer than a cloud in a
child’s rhyme, your dainty cleaning after love.
Softer than the edges of
a fan’s blades furred with dust.
You speak intimate
universes to your listeners, then make moue.
Surely no one since Boop
has winced at fierier triumphs than Sophia.
Saturday, September 27, 2025
Farid Matuk, Moon Mirrored Indivisible
To stay inside the blind’s
slat light, words
Would touch paper, a jar,
the smell of the laid upon
By foundations, the same steady, wide sunlight
Cut through at the bottom
By busy diesel routes and
my citizen skin
Walking around dares beheading
In a recruitment
video Then the outrage comes
To make a story of the
tool,
When it’s just an iteration of sky
Piled with tactical
flight paths (“Perfect Day”)
Edging his circle of subject matter beyond the immediate domestic and fatherhood of some of that earlier work, the ripples of this current collection still hold at that central core, but move further out into the world, attempting a declarative staccato across a firm lyric, something that has long been present within his work. “Porno Clydesdale leadership pony totems,” begins the poem “Form & Freight,” “On fire sons would be Bid us prance / Tamp this scrub grass to come up in sparkler light, / Branching into three or four points at the ends, every time [.]” In clear tones, Matuk articulates his observations across an increasingly hostile culture, from within an America ramped up in rhetoric, domestic terror and foreign wars, and even the purpose of poetry across such divides. “However mannered,” he writes, as part of “Concentric,” “the poem dares // Write about the poem / I’m fool enough to say it flattens [.]”
Friday, September 26, 2025
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sid Ghosh
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I am a poet. So getting here is a life flow situation, I think.
3 - 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 mostly keep some amorous tether to the wisdom inherent in volumes of books living in me.
4 - 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?
Amorous tether lets me be quick.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
So freeing to interact with a live audience. Settles 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?
Why answer when you can ask!
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?
Really freeing the public’s mind.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Want final say. But editor is essential.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Foster your inner poet. Write.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Mother, asters, lakes that flow, amorous tethers, yaks, math.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Tarragon.
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?
Still poetry, asters, lichen, lakes that flow, winds that rest.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Herman Hesse.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Love, live, laugh.
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?
Fermenter.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Chris Martin and Mother.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
All X-Men.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Sufi poetry.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Gina Myers, Works & Days
Everybody’s working for the weekend
Unless you’re working for
the Clampdown
The Jam sing, If we
tell you that you got two days to live
Then don’t complain
John Maynard Keynes
thought that technology
Would advance enough to
give us
A 15-hour workweek
And David Graeber pointed
out that it probably has
There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing.
And yet—I tell myself I
am unlearning productivity
Then I found out I have
to have surgery
And will be off work for
a couple of weeks
I ask for recommendations
of movies and TV shows
To watch and make stacks
of books to read
I think maybe I’ll
finally work on that essay
That has been kicking
around in my head
Or write a book review or
two
Things I enjoy doing but
have felt too depleted
By work in recent years
to work outside of work
When it is time for me to
return to work
I feel like a failure
even though I know it is wrong
I was not productive at
all as my body healed
And I slept entire days
away
Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.
In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist. “It turns out when I wasn’t writing” she offers, “I still filled notebooks with words / But I didn’t think it counted / Because there wasn’t a product to show [.]” Myers writes of fear and of silence, and of being too tired to think about writing, despite such fervent wish to get to the page. She writes of her own expectations, and through capitalism and propaganda, wasted time and work-speak, reminiscent of the corporate-speak that Canadian expat Syd Zolf examined through their own full-length collection, Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), attempting to turn a dehumanizing language back in upon itself. Simultaneously many-layered and straightforward, these poems are very different than how Bernadette Mayer might have approached the same subject matter. One might say the world is different now, certainly, as Myers pushes her lyric far deeper into a critique on capitalism, and a study around how writing gets made, among and between the requirements and expectations of full-time employment.
This is the fear: that we
go through our lives unable to do
The things most important
to us, everyone making demands of our time
The working condition
says there will never be time enough
When you think you’ve
made it, it’s too late
Or as the Dead Kennedys say in “At My Job”:
Thank you for your
service and a long career
Glad you gave us your
best years
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Jane Shi, echolalia echolalia
Across five sections of lyrics that offer visual and language play—“Unreliable
NarReader,” “griefease,” “picture/que,” “The
Organization” and “ECHOLALIA AS A SECOND LANGUAGE”—Shi offers poems
as declaration, observation, visual reference, restraint and expansive gesture,
study notes; as points of clarity, both to the reader and herself. “You offer
to run him over with your wheelchair.” begins the poem prose sequence “I’ll
Dial Your Number,” a sequence that counts down in reverse order, starting with
five. “I come to you deceived and smelling of fish oil. You pat my back with
your hospital-gown grin. It’s so soft I cackle. I cough him out tat the rate of
decomposing newspapers.” Her lyric is delightfully witty, even absurd, and subversive,
articulating through her exploratory gestures an underlying loss that layers,
ripples, the more one moves away from those points of origin. Listen, for
example, to the opening of the poem “then you put missing them in your calendar,”
that begins:
after tax season you stare at the gingko leaf lines of your excel sheet. long bridges dull linger of lullabies. until. you pause at each last lantern lit desk doorknob dusk grip laptop foxglove-covered drawer. open it to sort through documents you were too tired to sort through last winter. return to each drawstring/word dock/sticky note: another year, gone. smoke in song-shadow, milk candle rehearsal. you light things up to shimmer chimney what they’ll say when they hear you. you light things up till your steps are in step with theirs through history’s afterword.
These are such lovely visual and gestural sweeps, such as the poem “I want to face consequences,” which begins with and leads into such an expansive swirl across the page, one of a number of such she composes throughout: “17 / years / old, and / still throwing / tantrums, the suburban / problem so specifically / misdiagnosed / as the problem / of picky eating, on a sunday 10 / years later she’ll check / into a resignation hostel, become / an audible ghost, beckon a make-believe / social worker to arrive at her pillowside like a tooth / fairy.” There’s a coming-of-age or coming-into-being element to these poems, but one far more self-aware and wry, more playful, than most examples I’m aware of, providing a sense of exploration and wonder, collaging observation with cultural and pop culture references, and what one carries no matter where one lands, such as the poem “is it literature or deforestation?,” that includes:
you imagine her in the faces of others: you see the
mogui of race in the crowds of this too-Asian campus: so you emptied yourself
of what they saw as competition: remaining useless so you no longer needed
needing: years later he will Gwen Stefani another sidekick: she will have the
same name as you: will get another chance to pay respects: stilling a compass
of coincidence: had a knife fight in the Uwajimaya parking lot: not a shell
(not a shell): you belong to shoe polish: you belong to gavel polish: goodbye
2014: your legs froze: your throat thawed: you ripped up their contract: refused
to take hush money: god/dess of mercy smiling through the paragraphs: ghosts: historians:
hesitations: scrawled hi: hello: the caramel salt sting: sigh: wont be long now