Ongoing notes: mid-January, 2026: Julia Drescher, Sarah Anne Wallen + Michael Goodfellow,

Yesterday was a snow day over this way. Were you somewhere warm and safe, hopefully reading a copy of my Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025)? I mean, this is the right time for such. 

We’re kicking off our VERSeFest spring season (leading up to our festival in March) with our Volunteer Recruitment and Appreciation event very soon! Sunday, February 1, 3-5pm at Cooper’s Creative Kitchen (main floor of the Embassy Ottawa hotel at Cooper and Cartier, one block east of Elgin), featuring performances by Myriam Legault-Beauregard, Daniel Groleau Landry, Margo LaPierre and natalie hanna. Might we see you?

Garner NC: I’m always pleased to see new work by Julia Drescher, and her latest is the small chapbook-sequence Notes on Film (Further Other Book Works, 2025). I’ve published three chapbooks by her to-date through above/ground press, and I’m always eager to see more. I’m admittedly surprised she only has one full-length collection to date—Open Epic (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]—given how much work she seems to have worth compiling (although this is a frustration I have with a few other poets as well, including Jessica Smith and Amish Trivedi—these writers are clearly brilliant, why aren’t they getting published more often?). I’m intrigued by Drescher’s endlessly long lines, the way she continues a thought-line, layering movement upon movement. There’s a flow akin to a meandering across this essay-stretch of lyric, writing the ebbs and flows of notes on film and whatever else might slip into her view. “everyone’s middle of wood wound tight around a whistle / & eviction notices.” she writes, mid-way through the sequence. “there’s the edge of something & then there’s water / I feel in you in, you said, like atmospheric variations then / it’s the hardest way, how people enter a room.”

at noon, someone is standing, at noon wide open. there is a feral friend & daunting
wood—flocks of leaves, a copse of birds & unbearable lighting, there is whimsy
& then there is harm. the film gets started after the crowd departs, after the figs & the contact improv,
the ghosts of fallen grasses, drowning.
you said, country is monstrous art is merciless, thus
there’s an ear to do, imperfect. we build boats of rocks & then we burn them. you are walking in a film
& then you are eaten. I said, this is a test, a squandered passage & you said not knowing
where any thing is, we move from building
to building & I said what

Brooklyn NY: I’m intrigued by what appears to be the chapbook debut by Brooklyn poet and bookseller Sarah Anne Wallen, the chapbook Same Day (ugly duckling presse, 2025). Assembled as short poems and extended stretches of lyric, many of which feel variations upon the New York School aesthetic of first-person movement—the poem “DAYS OF THE WEEK,” for example, is dedicated “for Lewis Warsh,” and includes:

Monday the sun comes in hot through the window
Tuesday the heat is off and I can see my breath inside
Wednesday my toes never warm up
Thursday the line for the grocery store goes out the door
          and around the block
Friday I leave work feeling nothing at all
Saturday I think about love letters
Sunday I write a poem about wanting to write a love letter
Monday I do not write

There’s such propulsion to these lines. As the extended sequence “ISSUE OF PULP” begins: “today I feel / like the clouds / deflated / last night / I made / a phone call / dreamed / I had sex / in a laundromat / against the / dryers / warm / when I cry / I go out / on the balcony / press the back / of my hand / against / my forehead / there are other / people / down there / it’s easy / to feel / lonely […]” These poems are smart, wry and observational, sharp and quietly witty. The use of different rhythms is interesting across these pieces, from the staggered layering of lines to the extended stretch, one step against another, offering declaration and observation twirled and parried in delightful patterns. I think I need to see further poems by Sarah Anne Wallen.

WHY 

did the girl
fall off the swing? 

because
she was born 

 

when you’re a dog
your mouth
is your hand 

today in therapy
I talked about birds

Kentville/Lunenburg County NS: One of the final titles by the recently-outgoing iteration of Gaspereau Press (currently in flux as the new publisher sets himself up) is Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow’s chapbook Cleft (Gaspereau Press, 2025), a title that follows his full-length collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here] and Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Set as a curious sequence of short bursts, the poem holds as kind of call-and-response between two works, interwoven, with one poem furthering on each left page, and the other poem furthering on the right. As the note that opens the collection offers: “The collection contains two interwoven poems. The poem ‘Snakemouth Orchid’ first appeared in Literary Review of Canada (July, 2022) and will also appear in Cape Cod to Nova Scotia: Art, Ecology, Poetry of the Gulf of Maine (Hachette, 2027).” And yet, why offer the title for one but not the other? Presumably “Cleft” sits as an umbrella-title, providing name to the combination between these two pieces, and not, say, an extension composed around the poem “Snakemouth Orchid.” If these are two poems, composed (seemingly) independently of each other, and interwoven here for the sake of a new, third piece, why not include? As the first page reads:

mallow, flower of borders
and western light, where
breeze caught the house’s corners
moonflower, his hands
against your other night, hard
windows double paned
the sky was river bottom, curved
where silt had gathered
wind, none of this could be stopped

Goodfellow’s work is known for a lyric attention to landscape, to his natural environment, crafting sharp first-person meditations around the understanding that humans are part of, and not separate from, the natural world, and these pieces, this piece, continues that exploration. It is interesting to see him working to shift the context between these two poems, interplaying the narrative, the lyric, and the italicized sections, presumably all part of the same “other” poem, offer themselves as curious asides to the main (so called) unitalicized narrative line. Less, almost, a call-and-response, perhaps, than the italicized lines as asides. Either way, the experiment is an interesting one. As the second page reads:

orchid, sky propped,
snakemouthed, July bright 

and star dark
it penciled the sky

 

Michael Goodfellow, Folklore of Lunenburg County

 

BALLAD

—tide scraped against rusty grate,
against ironstone, in and out of the culvert,

creosote burnished,
and pulled at its bleached beams

and rafters waterlogged with rot
salt had almost been enough to stop

—pulled at graves of the Protestant dead
at Riverport, in Creaser’s Cove,

at whitewashed stones and apple root
washed clean, bright with tawn,

where in some pit the sea rustled
and threw up sand

—d metal flaked off from the world above,
hulls, rock ground off Gaff Point,

wind pulled, sky turned,
salt line drawn,

horizon flat across the river’s face
and blew to keep the gash in place

The second full-length poetry title by Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow, following Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], is Folklore of Lunenburg County (Gaspereau Press, 2024). Goodfellow’s latest collection riffs off the volume Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia (Ottawa ON: E. Cloutier, King’s Printer, 1950) by Dartmouth, Nova Scotia folklorist Helen Creighton (1899–1989), the spirit of that particular collection utilized as a prompt for Goodfellow’s explorations on landscape, folklore and storytelling through the form of the narrative, first-person lyric. According to one online biography for Creighton: “She collected 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that spanned several decades and published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore.” “A haunting was a dream you had with your eyes open,” Goodfellow writes, as part of “OTHERS SAID DISAPPEARANCE / WAS RINGED LIKE A TRUNK,” “just as the sky was paved with the light of stones. / The forest was a wall that painted itself. / The forest was a door that didn’t close.” As the back cover of Goodfellow’s collection offers, his poems “are rooted in the ethnogeography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place.” Part of the strength of Goodfellow’s lyrics is his ability to offer such precise physicality, composing poems hewn, and hand-crafted with a hint of wistful, folkloric fancy in otherwise pragmatic offerings. “The light how stars are brighter / when you don’t stare at them,” he writes, to open “WINTER LEGEND,” “how a fall day could feel like spring, / how a dog won’t look at you when it’s frightened, // how ash is the last to leaf, / how on certain nights / it was said that animals could speak, // how we named the stars other things. / How often their names were animals.”

Collected across two section-halves, “TOPOLOGIES” and “REVENANTS,” the poems of Goodfellow’s Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia are grounded in a particular geographic tradition of storytelling, crafted through direct statements that bend as required, offering hints of unexplained conditions and supernatural encounters, extending or turning his view. His is a precise lyric of landscape and dreams, folktales and loss. As he writes to close the poem “GHOST STORY”: “When the ground was cold such things were clear. / Only later did it seem like we’d imagined them.” There is something intriguing about how Goodfellow utilizes the suggestion of outside sources for his framing, from the “bibliography” of his full-length debut to now taking Helen Creighton’s work as a prompt through which to respond in his own way to what he sees, as though seeking an outside lens from which to jump off of, to begin to explore, in his own way, the landscape, stories and people of his home county and province. Through Creighton, Goodfellow responds to both the stories themselves and the collection of those stories. “The stories collected were fragmentary,” he writes, to open the prose poem “MOTIFS,” “not even stories / in some cases, just a line or two about what they had seen.”

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Michael Goodfellow

Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collection Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography, just published by Gaspereau Press, spring 2022, and of a collection in draft titled Folklore of Lunenburg County, which is supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, where he grew up.

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 changed my life in that the publisher I most desired agreed to publish it, and my dream came true.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I saw poems doing things that no other form of writing or art could do. They were more eviscerating and life changing than any painting or song. I didn’t want to make anything else.

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?
It’s a slow process with many drafts, revisions, edits and pencil marks.

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 usually begins for me in the woods behind the house, in a field, along the shore or in the garden.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
They’re neither part of my creative process nor counter. I don’t absorb information well aurally, so I don’t listen to the radio or podcasts or attend poetry readings. I’ll sometimes do readings if asked because I understand other people enjoy them. In terms of promoting poetry collections, I think readings are one of the most inefficient ways of raising awareness about a book; they’re the literary equivalent of burning coal to produce electricity—dimly lit, energy intensive and unsustainable in the longterm of a writer’s daily life.

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 poems are generally situated in the place where I live and grew up—the south shore of Nova Scotia.

My first collection, Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (Gaspereau Press, 2022) explores the way humans’ relationship with nature is often mediated through text and guidebooks, engaging with things in the forest that show humans once lived there: wild apple, stone walls, clearing piles. Just as we can’t seem to understand nature without naming the things we see, we’re unable to move through it without leaving markers of the lives we’ve led. In this way, a rain-worn ironstone wall in a clearing of hemlock inadvertently becomes the name we tried to form for what we saw in nature, but failed: a mark or word that even the rain couldn’t wear away.

My second collection, currently in draft, is titled Folklore of Lunenburg County and uses Helen Creighton’s 1950 ethnographic collection of fragmented experiences of the supernatural in this part of Nova Scotia as a departure point on the way to something darker and more hidden, exploring the way that the supernatural has been an analog for loss, disappearance and violence, and the way that early experiences of the supernatural in this area were often mediated by love, community, and neighbours. The collection is supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

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 think that the role of a poet is to burn what can’t live and cauterize what mustn’t die.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I find that literary magazine editors in Canada rarely suggest or request edits, though magazine editors in the U.S. are more proactive in this regard; magazine edits, when offered, are valuable. In terms of book editors, working with Andrew at Gaspereau when editing the book was more than essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It was what Alice Munro told The Paris Review in 1994 in relation to what place and landscape meant to her and all that she had written: “I’ll never leave.”

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 get up around 5:30 a.m. and sit on my kitchen floor for a while, writing in my notebook, before I make coffee. Just after waking up, my brain is still making analogies and strange connections between things before the rational part of the world has come into focus. I fit in writing and edits into various points throughout the day: parked in my ’98 Rav4, sitting on the porch, waiting for dinner to cook, waiting for appointments and in the bath.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Nature, and the places in nature that show humans were once there.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Garlic, just harvested.

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?
If that’s what David W. McFadden once said, I think he is dead wrong, and the idea that books come from books is monstrous, framing their growth as a kind of cancer. It’s truly levelling and devaluing of all that is rich in the world.

Your question also frames nature as a form, like music or visual art, which is an interesting concept. Nature is the most important influence on my work, but I don’t see it as a form. If we’re talking about human life, we’re the form of the work, and nature is the ending. In a while, when all of this is gone and there are no longer humans, nature will still be here—the blank page after the book ends, the cover that holds it together, the table on which the book is set, the bedrock under the table.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Alice Munro, Robyn Sarah, Carl Phillips, George Johnston, Jack Gilbert, Jenny George, Gabrielle Bates, Aria Aber, Patrick Modiano, Louise Glück, Mavis Gallant, Thomas Wyatt, Chaucer, W.S. Merwin, Linda Gregg, Richard Siken, Anne Sexton, Denise Jarrott, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Despy Boutris, Catherine Pond, Taneum Bambrick, Hailey Leithauser, A. E. Stallings, Alice Oswald, Kevin Young, George Oppen, Ashley Anna McHugh.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to buy a woodstove.

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?
If I couldn’t write, I’d rather be dead.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It was the smallest and most fatal knife in the drawer.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. Near Dark by Kathryn Bigelow.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on my next collection of poems, Folklore of Lunenburg County.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems by Michael Goodfellow

 

DIESEL

Tide was a motor,
gap in the sparkplug

twisted black.
Sea shone

with undercoat,
windy days

were gears
grinding, clutch

of a storm.
Rockweed choked

the beach in wire,
cable running

the pitchy bottom.
Through rotten

cast iron, suck
of brackish water

in the basement
drain. The sump

ran all night,
jerrycan of diesel

at the basement
stairs. Nothing stopped

turning. Sunset
left a sheen.

I’m fascinated by the single, staggered, unbroken sentence of Lunenberg County, Nova Scotia poet Michael Goodfellow’s surefooted lyric as displayed in his full-length debut, Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography: Poems (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022). Through an assemblage, nearly a suite, of short poems, Goodfellow offers a descriptive layering of landscape across the connective tissue of his self-described “small waterfront acre,” rippling slowly out from that central, singular focal point of roots, observation and interaction. He writes of home and his landscape, offering a lyric of the right words in the right order, and a tangible and concrete poetics of light across the water, the movement of human culture and sunsets, beaches and sullen hillsides. “The moon rose behind us,” he writes, as part of the poem “HIRTLE’S BEACH METONYMY,” “an animal // staring out the brush. / The thick, you called it. // You had other words for things, / you tongued them out, letting them shape // in the air, then dampen: / sand the colour of bark, // how night was the green of a burnt forest, / how years leaf-out loss, // their bloom.” Goodfellow’s approach to “naturalism” offers exactly what the word entails: the belief that everything depends upon that accurate description of detail, and his is certainly that, writing a lyric deeply attuned to his specific time and place, allowing it to breathe and react, attempting to determine and detail without overt interference. Even if a reader might know this place, this scene, Goodfellow’s tone and temper offers up a glimpse into the heart of it. “Ashley Conrad owned a general store,” he writes, as part of “HUNGRY,” “the kind that sold can goods, tobacco, salt, // whiskey, snowshoes, handwoven nets / and things the neighbours made—trade a rake // for a bristle broom, apples for a hooked rug. / The Depression was in another country. // No one along the river went hungry / or lacked a thing they needed.”

What intrigues about this collection is in how the lyric is textured, certain of itself while feeling out what words might best capture, or hold, more solid in its approach; a thickening lyric reminiscent of certain poems by Don McKay during the era of his Birding, or Desire (McClelland and Stewart, 1983). Or, as the fourth poem in the seven-part sequence “BOOK OF DAYS” reads, titled “Hop Bar”:

Metal slammed
to leave a hole,

water the suck
of wet dirt,

old mud, hand against
cold soil,

heart wood,
hard roots.