Ongoing notes: TIFA Small Press Market/Meet the Presses’ Indie Lit Market (part three, : Sadiqa de Meijer + Ben Berman Ghan,

[MLA Chernoff at the Meet the Presses Indie Lit Market, receiving copies of their brand-new above/ground press title]

Again, this blended sequence. [see my first post on such here; see my second post here]. Will we see you at the ottawa small press book fair on November 22? Will we see you at the pre-fair reading on Nov 21 at Anina’s Café?

Kington/Toronto ON: Presented as Kingston poet and non-fiction writer Sadiqa de Meijer’s Joanne Page lecture at Queen’s University, October 29, 2024, is the chapbook-length Fieldwork (Toronto ON: knife│fork│book, 2025), which becomes a curiosity, given how recently her collection of essays, In The Field (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] appeared. “I remember only one conversation with Joanne Page,” the piece begins, “although we saw each other before and after. This encounter happened at the edge of City Park in Kingston. She looked at me, squinting against the sun, and said, We read your essay, we all read it and thought it was really good, we were surprised at how good it was. She was on the organizing committee of Common Magic, a conference celebrating the life and work of Bronwen Wallace. I had submitted a piece about reading Wallace’s work during my early years of living in Kingston and had called it ‘Arguments With The White World.’”

This lecture feels, in many ways, an extension of that collection, offering her thoughts on writing, Page’s work and Kingston thoughts, and thoughts through and around writing and thinking, all prompted by the Page Lectures, and the work of the late Kingston poet Joanne Page (d. 2015). In case you were unaware, the Lecture series was originally founded by Phil Hall during his tenure as writer-in-residence at Queen’s University in 2012, with lecture chapbooks, the “Fieldnotes,” originally produced by Maureen Scott Harris (with lectures in the series by Don McKay, Phil Hall, Daphne Marlatt, Elizabeth Hay, Stan Dragland, etc.), a series since moved onto Kirby’s knife│fork│book. It is rather striking how far de Meijer has come as a writer of non-fiction prose over the past few years, able to weave such musical thinking across such a stunning prose lyric, one heartfelt and grounded in curiosity. As she writes:

This lecture was written. I wrote it in a series of rooms that have left their quiet tracks. The kitchen was sunlit and my mind accelerated. The chair was uncomfortable and I disputed myself. I answered the door and a phrase was lost to me. I used the fast pen, my fingers pushed buttons. Knowing the text would be read out loud, I wrote differently than I would for an essay, because you as the listening cannot insert your own pauses, or read the same line two or thee times over. I didn’t make them, describing occurrences from another millennium and country—writing is miraculous in its dissembling of space and time. I couldn’t tell you what I intended without it, because my mind is unpracticed in what an oral culture would require. We live where settlers attempted for hundreds of years to eliminate orally transmitted languages like Ojibwe and Kanien’kehá:ka, and this was also a violence against the profound linguistic capacities of their speakers. Writing is rigid.

 

Guy Elston (with Jeremy Luke Hill to the left) announcing Hill's 'Microchimaera' (Baseline Press), as the winner of the 2025 bpNichol Chapbook Award

Calgary AB/Toronto ON: The latest from Calgary writer Ben Berman Ghan, author of a novel, two collections of stories and a novella, is the chapbook of poems Behold the Dead (Toronto ON: Anstruther Press, 2025), providing an interesting stretch of literary genre. Might a full-length poetry collection be far behind? Ghan’s poems stretch across narratives, allowing line breaks and silence between lines, attempting few words but across distances. With meditative elements of breath, staccato pulse and hesitation, composing open space as carefully as he places words. There aren’t many examples off the top of my head of prose writers that move into poetry—the late Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch, certainly, and Kemptville, Ontario writer Michael Blouin come to mind—and there are elements of Ghan’s lyric still firmly held in a foundation of prose narrative, although one he works to punctuate with open space, as the two-part poem “Annihilation” begins:

My body is a river

annihilated

in the hungry eyes of men.

 

Black waves hide a word, a body:

            Dissolve. 

                      Drown.

 

Becoming is the cruellest sensation. 

 

Bloody mouths

drinking in.

 

some calgary, amid the foothills, snow;

Christine and I and our wee two monsters were in Calgary not that long back, I'm sure you might have known. You probably saw my prior notes on our Toronto and Kingston readings and adventures [or my notes from reading in London, Ontario in January; or my notes on reading in Toronto last December]. We were in town to read as part of the single onion reading series over at Shelf Life Books, but more on that in a moment. We were a few days in Calgary for the sake of a reading, but flying out on Rose's eleventh birthday, so we certainly couldn't leave them behind, taking them along for the trip, and staying with Christine's aunt and uncle who live there, somewhere.

Our first day was a bit of a wander, heading over to a mall to catch lunch (as much of Calgary does seem designated "mall space," it would seem) and see what options our young ladies might have for clothes-shopping. After begging for months, we booked Rose (and Aoife) for iFLY, an indoor skydiving place. They were booked two rounds each, and Rose really had been begging for this for months; of course, she hated it. Aoife took three rounds, instead, and completely loved it. Rose appreciated the experience, but basically never wishes to ever do that again.

[above: me (left) and a bear statue (right)] It did look rather fun, but I'm not sure I'd be open to such, either. From there, we headed over to the University of Calgary Press offices, quickly, where I got to meet my publisher, Brian Scrivener [his ABC Bookworld profile is wildly out-of-date, I'd say] for the first time, and found out that my next collection through the press, the book of sentences, has a scheduled release date of October 15, 2025, so that was pretty exciting (I should probably be thinking about tour plans, possibly). And I was given a copy of my pal Andy Weaver's new poetry collection, The Loom [which I've already reviewed over here]. The young ladies were bored out of their minds at the visit to the office, to the campus, quietly writhing around on the carpeted floor (we didn't stay long).

Once back to the house, Christine's aunt Nancy had some dinner for the young ladies and a birthday cake and gifts for Rose, as well as the neighbour teen to babysit; our quartet of grown-ups went out for pre-reading dinner, meeting up with a cousin of Christine's I hadn't met yet (who lives in Calgary, and was delightful).

The Calgary crowd at our reading was energized, lively. What a fine crowd! Christine and I both noticed that the audience were reacting to elements of our readings we weren't used to hearing responses to, so that was pretty interesting. There was even a live-stream for those unable to attend in-person, although I can't seem to figure out if that same recording is available archivally online anywhere. Hm.

It was grand to see Colin Martin, Nikki Sheppy, Weyman Chan [see my review of his latest], Adrienne Adams and Monica Kidd (new novel out next year, you know)! It was grand to meet Ben Berman Ghan (I bought his new book, as I've heard very good things about it) and Ian FitzGerald! There was another event the same night in Calgary as ours, which did mean a couple of folk were unable to attend (an enviable-sounding talk by Anna Veprinska that sounded pretty cool; did you know she was there now?). The bookstore also held a remarkable selection of books, more than a few titles I had to pick up while there. Calgary, you have a very good bookstore. The store even sold out of the stack of my new short story collection, which provided me the opportunity for me (I checked with the store first, of course) to even sell a couple of copies out of my bag.

[Weyman, above] After the reading, Christine's energy was run out, but we discovered (randomly) that the reading host lives four houses away from Christine's aunt, so it allowed me to head out for drinks, which was rather fortunate. It was good to hang out with Weyman again; it had been a few years, since a ridiculous story of hanging out post-reading with one of Monty Reid's stepsons (who was still living in Calgary at the time), and Weyman insisting we call Monty on the phone (we did; um, remember there's a time-zone thing between 10pm Calgary and Ottawa, eh Weyman?). Apparently Weyman had been part of a group of students that travelled with Robert Kroetsch and Aritha Van Herk out to Drumheller many moons ago (Kroetsch describes the outing in his updated Alberta, which I do recommend).

The following morning, we managed to make up the trip for Rose (she didn't want to come along; and the flying thing made her grumpy) with a visit to their science centre, which was enormously cool. We could have spent the whole day there, and the young ladies (as well as us, and Aunt Nancy) were delighted. There were plenty of extremely cool exhibits, including a room of particle-light I can't even begin to describe, a device that flung them around in the air (Rose and Aoife each went at least twice), a bed of nails everyone (sans myself) tried, a board where one can write and affix their birth stories (I was tempted, but my story is rather sordid, honestly, with some sadnesses within). Aoife wrote a sad one also: "I gave my mom toxemia." God sakes (we had a wee chat about that after, to clarify that Christine's illnesses weren't "their fault" or anything as such).

Next, Christine's aunt Nancy dropped us at Christine's former (retired) work-colleage/work-mom Sheri's place, where we had dinner with her and her husband, and the young ladies played happily with Sheri's grandson, a trio that worked far better than we could have hoped.

[left: Kevin, Ben, Ken] From there? Nancy returned to collect us, and dropped Christine and I at a pub downtown, where I had organized a pub night at Tubby's with Kevin Stebner (new book with Assembly Press!), since he couldn't make the event the night prior. Nancy took the kids back to her place, and we got to hang out with a flurry of Calgary writers (the venue recommended by Kevin himself), including Ben Berman Ghan (that guy again), Samantha Jones, Ken Hunt (he still exists!), Ethan Vilu (who was good enough to hand out a couple of copies of the latest filling Station) and even Nikki Sheppy, who floated through briefly across the mighty snow.

[Kevin bein' awesome and Samantha being coy] It was a second glorious night across an array of glorious nights. Samantha had been to visit a few months prior in Ottawa, and I can't even recall the last time I saw Ken Hunt, but the rest I was meeting for the first time on this trip, so that was very, very nice. I had envelopes of chapbooks for various folk, as I tend to do, especially during these dark days of another Canada Post strike (give the workers what they want, I say; do it now!).

[Ken Hunt and Christine looking thoughtful, listening intently to the wisdom of Ben Berman Ghan]

The next day, we'd been originally hoping to drive out to Banff, or, failing that, Drumheller, but Calgary managed a record amount of snowfall, so that didn't happen. We made for another mall, took the young ladies to see Wicked, part one (which they considered "mid," or at least all they were willing to offer). And then, an early morning flight back to Ottawa, nestled back into our corners by mid-afternoon. I did manage a ton of notes on both flights, but I'm still working my slow way through all of them. It will come, soon enough.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ben Berman Ghan

Ben Berman Ghan is an author and editor from Toronto, and an incoming student of Ryerson University's MA in English Literatures of Modernity, having recently finished an HBA from The University of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Goose, The UC Review, Indigo Lit, Occulum Journal, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, South 85, Liquid Imagination, The Sweet Tree Review, The Spectatorial, The Trinity Review, Terse Literary Journal, The Strand, Intersections, The White Wall Review, and Half A Grapefruit Magazine.

He has served as the Fiction Editor of The Spectatorial, and Associate Editor for The Goose and The Hart House Review. He is currently the editor of a book of non-fiction for Guernica Editions and Prose editor of Terse Journal. His fix-up novel What We See in the Smoke hit shelves June 2019 courtesy of Crowsnest Books.

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

Perhaps this is a strange answer but…my first book changed my life because, in some ways, it didn’t. My first book passed me by in a blip of teenage angst and hotheadedness and self-pity. But it’s from this kind of “failure” that I embarked on the journey to be the kind of writer I actually want to be. My new book What We See in the Smoke isn’t like anything else I’ve done before it ­– it’s a dance between the novel and the short story and its blend of genres. But it’s also unique for me because it is the first book written in a voice that I really think is my own, a voice I didn’t quite have before, because before I was a kid. This is also the first piece of writing of mine since I’ve had any time for formal training. A few chapters of this book came out of a creative workshop at the University of Toronto with Robert McGill (Once We Had a Country, and more than half of the book were worked over, and over in a yearlong study with Sharon English (Zero Gravity, Uncomfortably Numb) to whom I’ll always be grateful.

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

I really came to poetry last. I entered into writing through fiction, took a detour through non-fiction (which I revisit mostly through scholarly writing) and came to poetry mostly through actually reading and studying poetry through my undergrad. I find poems come to me best when I’ve been given some sort of guideline or prompt, whereas with fiction if I’m trying to follow instructions, I can’t write anything at all. I find the best way to become inspired to write poetry is either to read poetry, or to simply write in a pocket notebook as I’m walking through the city, scribbling as I go and letting my lines become as big and messy and unselfconscious as they need to be.

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?

Writing can take years. This book took about three years. A short story can take anywhere between a few weeks and a few months, and even then, I might not perfect it for a long time after. I try to take notes as ideas come to me. Often, I hack out sloppy, messy rough drafts, and it’s only in the rewrite that I find what I’m trying to say, which is the most delicious feeling.

4 - Where does a poem or 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?

Both. I can’t seem to get away from short stories, but I also can’t help seeding my stories with a larger narrative. That’s how this book came about. I was writing short stories the whole time, but I was using them to tell something bigger. Even now I’m starting to write short stories again but I can’t help seeding them with larger narratives to continue on later. I find this a delightful way to write a book, because I never have to settle on a single set of characters or concepts or locations. I can let my imagine fly, so long as I can keep everything straight in my head (and in my notebook).

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. I grew up with my parents reading to me and listening to audiobooks on tape. There is a unique pleasure that comes to me from reading out loud, though I don’t get to do so as often as I like. I find readings, and listening to other people’s readings, inspiring.

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?

Yes, I do, but those questions change as I change. I think right now I’m finding myself concerned with concepts of survival, of how to survive the world as it is and as it changes, and how to survive without losing we and making survival all there is. I’ve also spent a lot of time in my writing with characters struggling with meaninglessness, or the struggle to express themselves, and maybe that says something.

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?

I don’t think that’s an easy question to answer. For many, the role of the writer is to tap into culture, to critique, to bring a voice to those who have been denied, to tell stories that are powerful and important and necessary and start conversations we as a society need to have. For others, the role of a writer is just to write. I’m not going to say where I might land on that spectrum. Some of my stories are trying to say and represent something more, and some aren’t.

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

Essential. I’ve had some great editors, and I’ve enjoyed my own work as an editor for literary journals. Sometimes it takes an outside pair of eyes to kill your darlings or help you pin down what you were trying to say. Sometimes it takes lots of eyes, as I listen some of my mentors above who assisted that book, as well as my editors at Crowsnest Books, and others who have since edited me and helped me come to a new understanding of the craft and my goals.

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

George Elliott Clarke said to me in the fall, that when I hit writers blocked, to just write down as many nouns as I can with no context or theme, and then make something out of that. It works, it’s good advice. I’ve built a few pieces out of noun-lists, and they always end up being some of my more “out-there” work.

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

It’s pretty hard for me to shift sometimes, but only because I’m always gravitating back to fiction. Sometimes it’s easier to move to poetry, because there are feelings and images that can only be captured in a poem that prose can never reach, because poems transform the blank space on a page the way nothing else does. But personal essays are difficult for me, because I don’t like writing about my own life. Everytime I get halfway through I can feel my more speculative sensibilities bleeding in, and lines like “and anyway, it was the year 2050, and did I mention the space-war??” start popping up, no matter how hard I resist them.

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?

Routines are hard for me, mostly because the whole time I’ve been a writer I’ve been a student too, and the irregular hours of a student make it hard to keep regular hours as a writer. Right now I write mostly in the mornings or the evenings, but really I just put down words whenever I can. My only consistent routine is to make coffee each morning before breakfast, and to feed my cats each morning before making coffee.

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

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Black coffee, but not fresh. Cold coffee, because I left my cup out on the table and everybody thinks I’m going to come back for it even after it cools off (because I will). That, and fresh bread, but not normal bread. Spelt bread, the kind my father makes for my little brother because he can’t have wheat, which has a light but persistent smell like whole wheat dialled up to a hundred.

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?

I find influence from lots of places, yes. I visit a lot of art galleries with my partner, and things come to me there, and I read comics, and music can strike something inside me. Movies can also be a good source of inspiration sometimes and can end up being a tremendous influence. Sometimes it isn’t even the specific writing or characters of a film but the way it makes you feel coming out of theaters. Movies can make me feel a certain way and make me say “that’s the feeling I’m trying to capture”. Does that make any sense? Honestly I’m not sure. Movies yes, but also classic rock and jazz.

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

I don’t know about being important to my own work, but to my life, works like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man have always meant a lot to me, along with the works of Kurt Vonnegut Jr, with novels like Slaughterhouse-five, Cat’s Cradle, and Hocus Pocus being particularly close to my heart. But other authors like George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, A.S. Byatt, and many more. I’m a reader as much as I am an author. All authors should be.

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

I’d really like to try my hand at writing a play. I’ll get there, eventually. I also want to try more collaborative ventures, such as co-writing something, or working with an artist to create a graphic novel.

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?

If I could carry a tune at all, I might have been a musician. Or maybe I’d be the letterer who decides where the speech bubbles go in comic books?

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

I truly don’t think I could have ever avoided writing. It’s more of a compulsion than anything else that I chose to embrace.

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

Gonna stick to some Canlit here. I picked up Ben Ladouceur’s poetry collection Mad Long Emotion (Coach House Books 2019) a week ago at Toronto’s Knife-Fork Books. I also read David Chariandy’s novel Brother a few months back and it hasn’t left me yet. For movies? While I’m typing this, I’m a few hours out from finally seeing Avengers: Endgame and it’s all I can think about. I’m a big nerd and proud of it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

A new book! What We See in the Smoke was 1 of a 2 book contract with Crowsnest Books, so I’m hard at work on a follow up, though I’m ages away from being able to talk about it. I think I thought of a title at some point last night when I woke up in bed with a start, so that feels like a good sign to me. I’m also working on some short stories about holograms, burnout culture, and an android romance. Oh, and I’m in the final stages of editing a book of essays on Bruce Meyer for Guernica Editions, which should come out next year.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;