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Tricia McCallum

Goodreads Author

Born

Glasgow, The United Kingdom

Website

http://www.triciamccallum.com

Twitter

triciamccallum1

Genre

Poetry, Arts & Photography, Memoir

Influences

Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel ...more

Member Since

January 2011

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Tricia McCallum is an award winning Glasgow-born Canadian writer and poet, a Huffington Post Blogger, and a nominee for the 2016 Pushcart Prize.

McCallum is the author of "The Music of Leaving" by Toronto's Demeter Press (2014) and "Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered" (2011). Her newest poetry collection entitled "Icarus Also Flew" was a finalist in New York's 2017 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

McCallum’s unrivalled passion is poetry. Her poem “Thirst” won the goodreads.com poetry competition in December 2011. In May 2012 she again won the Goodreads contest with her poem “There’s Always the Guy.” An Honorable Mention for "How Things Happen" came in 2016. In January 2017 McCallum won the Goodreads contest a third time with Tricia McCallum is an award winning Glasgow-born Canadian writer and poet, a Huffington Post Blogger, and a nominee for the 2016 Pushcart Prize.

McCallum is the author of "The Music of Leaving" by Toronto's Demeter Press (2014) and "Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered" (2011). Her newest poetry collection entitled "Icarus Also Flew" was a finalist in New York's 2017 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize.

McCallum’s unrivalled passion is poetry. Her poem “Thirst” won the goodreads.com poetry competition in December 2011. In May 2012 she again won the Goodreads contest with her poem “There’s Always the Guy.” An Honorable Mention for "How Things Happen" came in 2016. In January 2017 McCallum won the Goodreads contest a third time with her poem "The Things I Learned as Bartender."

An insatiable traveler all of her life, her various, seemingly endless incarnations have included stints as a bartender, flight attendant, shrimp de-veiner, speechwriter, writer of personalized wedding vows, chambermaid, house painter, au pair, TV product pitch artist, short order cook, corporate editor, legal courier and perhaps her favourite, a freelance photographer specializing in black and white.

McCallum’s poem about her mother entitled “To Her, I Was” appeared in the Huffington Post on International Women’s Day 2011. Her poem "The Island Dog" is included in the hardcover anthology entitled Estuary: A Confluence of Art & Poetry, an international poetry and visual arts album published in November, 2012 in England. Two of McCallum’s poems, “Following Seas” and “The Gift of Donovan,” appeared in the first issue of the quarterly poetry e-zine called IMPress, a poetry and art publishing house.

McCallum’s poem “Glowing Tribute” appears in the Key Porter anthology of Canadian verse entitled Barbed Lyres, edited by Margaret Atwood. Cosmopolitan magazine under the editor Helen Gurley Brown published a total of 20 of McCallum’s poems throughout the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, more than that of any other poet. Her poem “No Harm Done” appeared in a League of Canadian Poets’ newsletter. Most recently her poems have appeared online in many poetry journals including Every Day Poems, Poetry Breakfast, and A Quiet Courage.

In her career as a Toronto freelance writer she has been featured as a guest columnist in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and the Financial Post, written for Flare magazine, and lectured on freelance writing at Toronto’s York University.

McCallum also publishes fiction. Her short story “What Gets Lost” was published in the Canadian literary journal Quarry and her short story “Clutter” won a Toronto Star award for fiction writing.

"Put simply, I write the poems I want to read," McCallum says." I have always aspired to write intelligible, accessible poems. I can’t imagine doing otherwise.

"In essence I am a storyteller who writes poems. My poems tell of falcons in Ireland, elephants being traipsed through the Queen’s Midtown Tunnel and stray island dogs. About beleaguered mothers and neglected toddlers and subservient wives. About small town cashiers, beauty queens, and neurosurgeons. I am always curious about how people navigate their lives and what it is they struggle with under the surface."

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Tricia McCallum’s books

Average rating: 4.08 · 25 ratings · 13 reviews · 2 distinct works

	The Music of Leaving 3.56 avg rating — 16 ratings — published 2014 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Nothing Gold Can Stay: A Mother and Father Remembered it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 9 ratings — published 2011 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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77 posts
Tricia McCallum's Blog

The Cost

The Cost

Yes, painful so very often
to have fewer filters than most.
To be awake to the hurt in the world.
I look across at the driver next to me at the stop light
and wonder if he is loved.

It is involuntary. Born in some. Inescapable.
Manifest.
This breathing in of others. Then carrying them,
never failing to notice the one lonely person
in the room,
the resigned among us.

Drawn to what is broken, al Read more of this blog post »

2 likes · Like • 3 comments • flag

Published on February 10, 2017 15:00 • Tags: poetry

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Tricia is Currently Reading

Tricia McCallum is currently reading

What Work Is: Poems

by Philip Levine

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Jul 26, 2014 08:45AM

Tricia McCallum is currently reading

First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers

by Kathy Kiernan

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Jul 26, 2014 08:44AM

Tricia McCallum is currently reading

Bark

by Lorrie Moore

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Jul 26, 2014 08:44AM

Quotes by Tricia McCallum (?)

“There will be always be people stronger and not as strong, smarter, and not quite as smart. It's best not to get into the race at all: Just run your own.”
― Tricia McCallum

4 likes

Tricia’s Quotes

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

tags: belonging, company, desires, literature, longings

6412 likes

“I dwell in possibility…”
― Emily Dickinson

tags: possibility

1032 likes

“We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell
Of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

tags: laughter, longing, pain, sadness

279 likes

“Eternal life is great if you have the clothes for it.”
― Woody Allen

tags: humor

2 likes

“It was a delightful visit;-perfect, in being much too short.”
― Jane Austen, Emma

tags: visits

75 likes

More of Tricia’s quotes…

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Tricia’s Groups

¡ POETRY ! — 22276 members — last activity May 28, 2023 01:50PM
No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read No pretensions: just poetry. Stop by, recommend books, offer up poems (excerpted), tempt us, taunt us, tell us what to read and where to go (to read it!) Goodreads honors wordsmiths: poets and poetry promoted and prompted here. ~~~ "Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits." -- Carl Sandburg “God has a brown voice, as soft and full as beer.” —Anne Sexton On Clouds – “…what primitive tastes the ancients must have had if their poets were inspired by those absurd, untidy clumps of mist, idiotically jostling one another about…” —Yevgeny Zamyatin “If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn’t wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.” —Donald Hall “Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.” —Boris Pasternak “Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.” —Charles Simic “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” —Gustave Flaubert “Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.” —Allen Ginsberg. ~~~~~ Amy King, Moderator Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the WNBA Award (Women’s National Book Association). Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She serves on the executive board of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and is co-editing with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology, Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She is also co-editing the anthology, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. ...more

Goodreads Librarians Group — 199231 members — last activity 1 minute ago
A place where all Goodreads members can work together to improve the Goodreads book catalog. Non-librarians are welcome to join the group as well, to ...more

I Love Canadian Authors — 430 members — last activity Apr 12, 2023 05:56AM
Fans of canadian authors and Canadian authors here on Goodreads: This is a group for fans and authors to meet and discuss their favorite canucks and t ...more

THE Group for Authors! — 12346 members — last activity May 22, 2023 01:55PM
This is a group for authors to discuss their craft, as well as publishing and book marketing.