12 or 20 (second series) questions with Guy Elston

Guy Elston is a UK-born, Toronto-based poet. His debut collection is The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025). His poems have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, The Ex-Puritan, Grain, Geist and elsewhere. He is a member of the Meet the Presses collective.

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

Publishing my chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode gave the confidence and direction to focus more on what I’m better at, moving away from more directly ‘confessional’ stuff to the kind of persona, character and dialogue work that makes up a lot of The Character Actor Convention. 

They encourage you to ‘find your voice’ as a poet. Finding that ‘my voice’ could be many voices – or that I could push my voice into many different personas – was very exciting for me.

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

As a kid I wanted to write fiction, not poetry. I wrote some bad short stories. A turning point was picking up Raymond Carver’s collected poems and realising I preferred his poetry to his short stories. Then the bug bit me.

I like the idea of poetry as literary popcorn, literary snacks, literary hors d’oeuvres. You can eat something mind-bending and delicious. Then another, but sadder. Then another, but funnier... and you never really get full. Just tired.

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?

Poems tend to either come together fairly quickly, or not at all. (Apart from the ones that take years. Or never get finished. Or started.)

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?

Poems start in my notes app, graduate to the notebook, and then to the laptop. I like the move between the different mediums to test, break and refine. 

For The Character Actor Convention, it’s very much a book of individual poems. I’d like to work on something with more of a full-length concept in future.

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

My poetry tends towards the page, and I’d usually rather read a poet’s work myself than hear them do it. But I’m getting into the performance side of poetry more, which I think is necessary given the theatricality of a lot of my poems. I like doing readings, particularly when they’re full of hundreds of adoring fans.

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?

My girlfriend teases me by describing my poetry as - ‘What if a chair was sad?’ - and really, can you think of any greater theoretical concern than that?

I don’t see my poetry as truth-telling, proclamation, or a call to action. I see it more as storytelling, and I like being comfortable with ambivalence and uncertainty.

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 only role of a writer is to exist. While writing, I suppose.

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

Essential, and something I’ve really enjoyed. Shane Neilson helped me to push my poems into new forms and places. Thanks, Shane!

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

I thought that Kathryn Maris wrote something like ‘If you want a life in poetry, you can have one’. But now I can’t find this quote anywhere. Perhaps I dreamt it?

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?

Not much of a routine – writing poems happens in and around everything else. The notebook stage of writing a poem, which is the biggest chunk of the creative part, typically happens in parks, at the lake, or late at night.

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

Books, news articles, random magazines, Wikipedia. Non-fiction is usually what gives me a jumping off point – if I read enough interesting stuff, something will get me going.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Horses.

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?

Any other type of artform – definitely.

Science – very much so, I love getting ideas from science articles and headlines. Part of the fun comes from my inability to think scientifically.

Nature – not at all. I can’t write about nature. I think it's already speaking for itself.

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

My most influential poets would be people like Simic, Tate, Strand, Szymborska, Milosz, Selima Hill, Michael Bazzett, Matthew Sweeney. Robert Browning. People with an inclination towards storytelling and/or a pinch of surrealism.

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

Write some kind of Pale Fire-like metatextual piece with fictional footnotes from unreliable historians and such.  I know I have to try.

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?

When I was a child, adults would tell me that I should become a lawyer when I grew up. At least that didn’t happen.

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

I can’t remember wanting to do anything else. I loved reading from when I was very young. I remember being about 8, and saying something like ‘when I’m reading a book, I feel like I’m in another world’, and my sister rolling her eyes.

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

Book – The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. A wild and empowering ride.

Film – I finally saw Metropolis the other day. Kick ass!

19 - What are you currently working on?

More, more of the same! But better...

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

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.