Rob Mclennan's Blog, page 393

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dilys Leman

Dilys Leman’s first full-length collection of poetry, The Winter Count , was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press  in August 2014 (Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series). Cactus Press published her chapbook, The Lunacy Commission, in 2012 (Jim Johnstone, editor). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Arc, Grain, Prairie Fire and CV2. She is a former winner of Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize (Honorable Mention) and the Prairie Fire Prize for Fiction (First Place), and has written and co-produced plays for the Ottawa Fringe Festival. Originally from Ottawa, Dilys has worked as a teacher, performing arts manager and freelance writer/editor. She lives in Toronto and works in educational research.

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?
My first chapbook, The Lunacy Commission (Cactus Press, 2012), came out in a rush, quite unexpectedly. I had stopped writing for a number of years. The chapbook gave me the confidence to keep going – and formed the kernel of my first full-length collection The Winter Count (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I have vague memories of writing poetry while in high school – I don’t recall the specifics, just a fleeting sense of being in a trance-like state in my bedroom, scribbling away on paper.  It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I began exploring poetry – after taking a creative writing class led by Diana Brebner. I met Anita Lahey, Lesley Buxton and Una McDonnell in that class and we formed a writers group, “The Gang of Four.” I focused mostly on short fiction at the time, and then got side-tracked with writing a play – the hardest thing imaginable – I shredded it. A decade later, the research for that play morphed into “The Lunacy Commission.”

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 doesn’t take long to start, depending on what you consider the start position to be. I tend to be project-driven, which has meant a lot of reading and research (historical/ archival) before actually sitting down to write. But I’m now allowing myself not to be so obsessed with research, to stop worrying about where the narrative may or should be heading. That said, archival photographs are immensely powerful as writing prompts. So are borrowed lines of poetry. I stay away from the computer as long as I can possibly stand it – and write by hand – very free flow and chaotic. I try to keep things as open-ended as possible because my experience of writing that wretched play (during which time I followed a foolhardy prescribed method) taught me a difficult but useful lesson on how NOT to work. Chaos has its virtues. My first drafts rarely resemble their final shape. I would say that my work comes out of copious free-flow writing followed by extensive erasure. The notes come later, when I have a decent first or second draft. 

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?
With The Winter Count, a poem typically began with a voice, a particular character, or with a scrap of found text such as an intriguing entry in a medical report (archival). I was working toward a book, and had a narrative in mind based on historical events and my family history – and so it was a back-and-forth process: writing bits of poems and doing more research, and going back to the bits and looking for connections within the historical record. My process is changing, I think. I’m open to the idea of writing short pieces that may or may not end up together in a larger project, which is wonderfully freeing mentally. The whole book project idea can be daunting when you’re back at the starting gate.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I actually love doing readings, though I haven’t done that many. I have a theatre background, and so the performance aspect of readings is something I enjoy.  

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’m always asking myself, “Why am I doing this? The world is seemingly falling apart. What can poetry accomplish, and for whom?” I don’t know the answers to those questions. But I take heart from something that C.D. Wright once said: “In my book, poetry is a necessity of life. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” I do wish that poetry in Canada played a more dynamic role in public discourse. Imagine what it would be like if Canadians went around quoting poets because they recognized the relevance and power of their words … How do we ever make that happen?  

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?
Writers perform different roles, depending on what they have to say and why. But I think we need at least some of them to provide relief from the incessant babble and distractions of life. To calm us down so we can think and feel more deeply than we typically allow ourselves to do. We’re so easily diverted from our true selves, and from others. It’s quite alarming.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I like working with an outside editor. It’s affirming. And it forces me to consider the writing choices I’ve made, and why I made them. And how to look at my work as a reader would, or could.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Years ago, when I was struggling to write a young adult novel (yes, add that to the list), YA novelist Janet Lunn said to me something like this. “There will always be someone more talented and accomplished than you, but no one can ever write your story. It is uniquely your own.” Back then, it was small comfort (I eventually trashed my YA novel, surprise, surprise!). Now, with the publication of The Winter Count, her words ring true. Sounds like the most obvious thing, but easy to forget…

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical/journalistic prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write full-time for a living – mostly policy-related work on education and social issues. The experience of moving between, for example, an evidence-based report on early childhood learning in Bangladesh and a poem about a buried river, feels quite wrenching – like I’m operating on two different planets. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll get stuck in transit.

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?
I try to devote the first two hours of my day to poetry – reading, drafting, researching – when my mind is uncluttered. I work at the dining room table because I associate my desk with “real” work. Then I turn off the poetry switch and head into work-writing mode for the next eight or so hours.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Usually I sit with a book of poetry I love. Or with several. I choose books that are in the same “family” as what I’m working on, that occupy a similar world.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Vine-ripe tomatoes.

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?
Historical photography. Environmental science. Medical science. History. Drama.    

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I seek out works that relate to what I’m writing about. Right now, environmental and social histories of Toronto.  Several Toronto poets are important in my life  – as poets, friends, mentors. Anita Lahey, Catherine Graham, Sue MacLeod, Jim Johnstone, Maureen Hynes, to name a few. I am grateful for their encouragement.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Explore Viet Nam.

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?
I don’t know. Maybe something in the performing arts (acting, directing). The world of international development also pulls -- Doctors without Borders.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Initially, because it seemed like it was the only thing I could do relatively well and enjoy.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I loved Michael Redhill’s Consolation. I don’t know about the last great film. Maybe The Year of Living Dangerously . 

20 - What are you currently working on?
I live in an apartment built over Taddle Creek, and am obsessed with the notion of buried rivers, and how we treat waterways as disposable waste sinks. Lately, I’ve been trolling Toronto’s beleaguered Don River for inspiration – writing linked poems that reference its social and environmental history.

[Dilys Leman reads in Ottawa at The TREE Reading Series with rob mclennan on January 27, 2015]

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

"Pearl Pirie: two new poems," at Jacket2

The fourth of my 'commentaries,' "Pearl Pirie: two new poems," is now online at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joseph Massey

Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014) and Illocality (forthcoming from Wave Books in the fall of 2015), as well as a dozen chapbooks.

His work has also appeared in various journals and magazines, including the Nation, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).

He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.

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, Areas of Fog , was more or less a collection of all of my chapbooks up to that point, with the exception of one ( Eureka Slough ). Once the book came out I felt like a space was cleared — I felt free to get to work on other things — so it changed my life in that respect. With all of those out of print and often very delicate chapbooks reprinted in a single volume, I was able to really look at what I had done. The book provided a beginning.

What’s unfolded since then revolves around the same concerns — attention to immediate details of the daily surroundings, the actual backyard and the universal backyard, the seams and fractures between natural worlds and human intrusion, and perception itself — but lately there’s a gradual drift inward, something (I almost hate to say it) personal coming into the work.

I think that can be heard in the book that’s coming out in the fall, To Keep Time, from Omnidawn.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I found poetry — poetry found me — when I was very young. I was drawn to how it charged language so far beyond ordinary usage. My miserable life at home and the abuse of language that surrounded me was outshined by the discovery of poetry. And I feel very lucky to be able to continue to discover it over 20 years later.

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?
Most of the poems gestate in notebooks (the paper kind) and then I type up those drafts. Once they’re on the screen I’m able to get a better grip on what the poem is doing, or not doing, and proceed from there.

Some poems take five minutes, some take five months. Some take years. I have a habit of not discarding anything I work on; I’ll revise a poem into oblivion before throwing it in the trash.

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?
Sometimes it begins with a word, a phrase, an entire line that appears seemingly out of nowhere; and other times it’s just a feeling, speechless, some undercurrent, an internal rhythm that wants to find language.

I work on one thing at a time, whether it’s part of a sequence or a discrete poem. The idea of collecting work into a book is an afterthought.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I gave my first reading in five years last November at Flying Object, the poetry nucleus here in the Valley, and despite my nerves I found that hearing my own work come back to me in that way — alone with my own voice in a shared silence — was useful.

I plan on doing a few readings in the fall when To Keep Time is out.

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?
If I have any theoretical concerns and questions they’re thread throughout the poems themselves. They’re more articulate than I am about their particular intentions.

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?
As things become more artificial, isolated, and controlled in our overwhelmingly technology-driven society, poetry can be an antidote.

Poetry reimagines language beyond the toxic parameters of commerce and, generally speaking, death. And that isn’t a definition — it’s an observation, an on-going field experiment, that has proved itself valid to me.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve been lucky to not have any difficult experiences with editors. Working with Rusty Morrison of Omnidawn was pretty much seamless. Her editorial suggestions brought To Keep Time to a sharper pitch. She has an amazing ear and eye, and I trusted it.

Joshua Beckman at Wave Books has also been a dream to work with. His keen sensibilities helped bring several poems in Illocality (forthcoming in the fall of this year) back to life.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Don’t lay that helpless trip on me,” Allen Ginsberg in a letter to me, when I was fifteen years old.

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 never leave home without a notebook and a few pens. That’s been my routine for the last 15+ years. And I’m always hauling around a few books — reading and writing are intertwined — and there are books everywhere in my hovel: on the desk, by the bed, in the bathroom.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
A long walk almost always works, followed by reading books that never fail to turn me on: Pam Rehm’s The Larger Nature, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Lorine Niedecker’s Collected Works, William Bronk’s Life Supports, Rae Armantrout’s Money Shot, Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path, Joshua Beckman’s The Inside of an Apple — that’s what I currently have on deck to wake me up.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rancid Miracle Whip®.

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?
There isn’t a single thing I experience that doesn’t influence my work, even if it doesn’t make its way directly into a poem. Who knows what’s happening in the subconscious at any given time. We don’t know the actual origin of our work; we merely learn how to steward the process once something, a poem, or whatever, begins to appear. What happens prior to that is mostly inaccessible to us.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The company I keep with poets through correspondence has been important to me from a very young age. That conversation has been essential in filtering out the unnecessary noise of daily existence — it helps me locate poetry.

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

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?
Most likely I would have ended up incarcerated or perhaps working in the bowels of a cruise ship as a janitor, maybe I would have learned how to make balloon animals, something like that.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t remember ever feeling like I had a choice. It’s what I do, how I see and experience the world.

18 - What was the last great book you read?
Peter Gizzi’s In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011, a veritable portable generator of a book — fully charged.

19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m slowly building what will become my fifth book of poetry. A chapbook of recent work will be released this year, What Follows, from Ornithopter Press.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

New American Writing 32 (final issue)

Sleeping Beauty
to all the waters we went it cannot be expressed and the vows so sorry we were /all the waters to no purpose the pilgrimages to no end and the days so sorry were /and tired in our seeking when she came from the ether it was no simple however /it was gold-back and bellsound rung toward future all the waters it wept/ til spindle-cursed the lure of cloth drew her up the tower / unknowing at the wheel a good woman and alone handed the needle kindly and oh quiet blood it cannot be expressed our waiting became her waiting / redsky redbird forgive us a life we grow tired in our sleep (Jennifer K. Sweeney)
While the nature of literary publishing has always appeared tenuous, there is still something disappointing and altogether sad about the demise of any literary journal, whether the recent announcement of the final issue of Toronto’s Descant (after some four decades), or that Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover’s New American Writing will cease publication (one can at least feel some twinge of optimism through the fact that Vancouver’s The Capilano Review, in the midst of a transition out of the institution that had long supported them, managed a highly successful Indiegogo Campaign to midwife their new independence). Any project that has continued this long should certainly be admired and celebrated, especially one that has managed so long with the original editors. I can easily imagine that the work they’ve done with the journal over the years has influenced an entire generation or two of American poet-publishers who have, themselves, gone on to produce their own publications, even as New American Writing continued to evolve, develop and annually publish. Having only discovered them a few years back, I’ve admired the work I’ve seen in each issue, and am sad to see them go. As Hoover wrote on the journal’s Facebook page in December:
Friends of New American Writing: Maxine Chernoff and I have decided to cease publication of the magazine due to overwhelming problems with the funding. We are grateful to have published some of the best poetry of the last four decades, including OINK, which ran 19 issues beginning in 1971. We are proud of our ability to help young poets become established and to have contributed to the larger discussion of poetics and the literary history of the period. Thanks to our many contributors, subscribers, and readers.
The final issue of New American Writing is therefore the current, NAW 32 (2014). That issue and all back issues except 4 (Australian poetry) and 5 (Censorship and the Arts) are available through www.ccnow.com.
Part of the enjoyment of going through issues of New American Writing has always been in the strength of writing from familiar and unfamiliar names both new and well established, some of whom run through multiple issues of the annual journal, and this, the 2014 volume, features new writing by numerous poets, including Endi Bogue Hartigan, Fanny Howe, Aaron Shurin, Geoffre O’Brien, Clayton Eshleman, Karla Kelsey, Laynie Browne, Lisa Samuels, Noelle Kocot, Lucy Ives, John Tranter, Matthew Cooperman, Edward Smallfield, Anselm Berrigan, Philip Hoover, Travis Cebula, Amish Trivedi and Sara Marinelli, as well as a series of translations by Gillian Conoley, Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, Stephen Kessler, and Odile Cisneros. I’m fascinated by the density of the three poems included here by Noelle Kocot, a poet I’ve long heard of but haven’t yet explored the work of, as well as the incredibly sharp lines of the extended sequence “The Hermit,” only some of which is included here, by the brilliantly talented Lucy Ives. Impossible to replicate here, the three poems included here in Anselm Berrigan’s “Rectangle” series are visually interesting, and suggest a far larger project down the line (that I am very interested in seeing). Attentive readers will not only see work by the late Chicago poet and publisher Dean Faulwell (1939-2013), prefaced by a short introduction by Paul Hoover, but some of the last work, the poem “Gogol’s Luck,” of the late San Francisco poet Colleen Lookingbill (1950-2014) who passed away in March, 2014, a couple of months before this issue was released. Her poem includes:




Meanwhile hints and questions are forgottenovercome, we spend a long timescrutinizing smart and beautifully shaped referencesback to the wasteland, return is seeingthat’s how we do things

"Chris Turnbull's endless directions," at Jacket2

The third of my 'commentaries,' "Chris Turnbull's endless directions," is now online at Jacket2.

rob features at The TREE Reading Series on January 27

Tuesday, January 27
DILYS LEMAN + ROB MCLENNAN

6:45p Workshop – Poetry Born of the Holocaust with Murray Citron
8:00p Readings – Open Mic and Featured Readers

Black Squirrel Books, 1073 Bank St in Ottawa

For more information, click here.

"Gil McElroy's cartography," at Jacket2

The second of my 'commentaries,' "Gil McElroy's cartography," is now online at Jacket2.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Joanna Lilley

Joanna Lilley’s first poetry collection, The Fleece Era , was published in 2014 by Brick Books. Her short story collection, The Birthday Books, will be published in 2015 by Hagios Press in their Strike Fire New Author Series. Joanna has lived in Whitehorse, Yukon, since 2006 after emigrating from the UK. Her awards include first prize in the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival writing contest, second prize in the Dr. William Henry Drummond poetry contest and third prize in The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron poetry contest. Joanna has also received two Advanced Artist Awards from the Government of Yukon. As part of the Ink writers' collective, she helps to organize literary happenings in Yukon. You can find out more about Joanna at www.joannalilley.com .

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 Fleece Era, which was published earlier this year, is my first book and it has certainly changed my life. I've been striving to get a book published for more than twenty years and it's very strange and wonderful when it finally becomes a reality. Up until it arrived in the post and I had a copy in my hands, I couldn't really believe it would actually happen. Having a book has helped me to feel less anxious about my writing and my identity as a writer. It's like coming out of the closet and admitting that, yes, I do spend hours and hours inside my own head, fingers tapping on the keyboard, and that's okay.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I actually came to fiction first. Or even non-fiction first because I desperately wanted to write and I thought becoming a journalist would be how I could do that. It was somehow more socially acceptable to say I was trying to be journalist than that I was trying to be a novelist or poet. It took me quite a while to find the confidence to tell people I wrote fiction, let alone poetry. Now, I'm a poetry convert. I'm not sure how I would manage if I stopped writing poetry.

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 really depends on the project. Occasionally, a poem might come almost fully formed and sometimes it can take years of writing and revision. The poems I'm currently working on, which are about extinction and related topics, require a lot of research so I do end up with a lot of notes and sometimes have to work hard to ensure those notes and sense of research are absent from the final version of the poem.

4 - Where does a poem or 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?
Initially with poetry I was just trying to write poems and wasn't sure I could ever produce a manuscript. The poems would always begin with something that I felt deeply. Now, I write poems with a book-sized project in mind but they still have to start with deep feeling. I think that will always be the case.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do enjoy doing readings, particularly joint readings when I get to hear others read as well. I do get nervous though and worry about talking too much. Or too little. Reading a poem out loud to an audience is a wonderful way to get to know it better. Sometimes an audience will surprise me with their reaction and that's when I realize with delight that the poem exists outside of me and I can let it go off and do its thing.

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 don't really know what the current questions are I'm afraid, except the question of how humans can use language to make connections and even create healing. In my own work, I'm trying to answer my own question of how to interpret human experience.

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 think there are many roles for writers. There are so many different kinds of writers and so many different kinds of writing. For me, I am interested in the writer as an translator of the difficulties of existence and helping to remind us that our current way of life is only one way. Writers, in fact all artists, help us pay attention and be mindful. I'm interested in movements such as the Dark Mountain Project which describes itself as a network of artists who have stopped believing the stories our civilization tells itself. I find that hugely exciting.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Only difficult in the sense that I worry the editor will tell me what I've written is rubbish! I really love working with editors and see it as a crucial part of the process. It helps me step back from my writing and write more consciously and mindfully.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Perhaps it comes in a book-sized package: Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer. I first came across it in a library many years ago and it simply gave me hope. It helped me persist and persistence is so important when you want to write.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Poetry seems to have become more essential for me than fiction, more fundamental to my existence, whatever that means. However, if I'm writing only poetry then after a while I start to itch to write fiction too. I aim to have a poetry project and a fiction project on the go at the same time but one or the other is always dominant. It's hard to write both poetry and fiction on the same day or even in one week, particularly as I have a full-time job and can't spend hours a day writing.

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?
As I mentioned, I work full-time, so my writing routine is therefore to write each evening or at least do something writing-related every day such as research or sending out submissions. Then at weekends I write for longer. My ideal is to wake up and start writing straight away, before I'm properly awake. It's a magical state of mind to be in. That's a luxury that doesn't happen too often though!

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I read. I pick a few books of poetry off my shelf and read a selection of poems. Or, if I'm writing fiction, pick up a novel I love. It only takes moments before I'm ready to have another go myself. Walking the dog in the woods is a wonderful way to jumpstart the writing process too.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of a wood stove. The smell of my husband. My dog's honey ears. The smell of snow.

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?
Visual art. Absolutely. I love going to art galleries with my notebook. I studied art history and did fine art too and now I love going to galleries and looking at whatever I like without any academic analysis, yet with the comfort of a little knowledge. And nature too, being in the landscape helps me feel the connection to being human.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
So many writers are important to me, poets and novelists in particular. My writer friends are hugely important to me. I feel blessed to know them. I'm in a wonderful novel-writing group here in Whitehorse where I live. We meet once a month and I can't even describe how much that sustains me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
In terms of writing, I would love to get a novel published. I've been trying to do that for twenty years.

In terms of non-writing, I would like to go the islands of the Canadian arctic. I've been to Iqaluit on Baffin Island but only briefly. I hope to make it back there one day. I would love to go to Antarctica too. A writing residency at the north or south pole, wouldn't that be heaven?

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?
It's hard to imagine earning a living from anything that didn't involve words but I'm also aware how privileged that sounds. I don't actually earn a living a writer but I am in public sector communications, which is very much to do with writing. I do quite a lot of editing in my day job which makes me very happy. I love films. I think that's the industry I would otherwise pick.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I wrote because I loved reading and wanted to try it for myself. Then I discovered how happy writing makes me. I'm so grateful I made that discovery.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm a bit behind the times but I just read Donna Tartt's A Secret History. It was marvellous. The last great film? Anything with
20 - What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on a manuscript of poems about extinction. And there's a novel I've been working on for rather a long time. I'm trying to work out what the structure should be and it's a puzzle I haven't solved yet.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

A ‘best of’ (dusie) list of 2014 Canadian poetry books

It’s been a stellar year for Canadian poetry, and I haven’t even been able to talk about everything yet (given my baby-distraction of the past year, and a couple of titles I haven’t even seen yet), so my usual ‘best of ten-or-so’ over at the dusie blog [now posted here] is slightly longer. And yes, this is my fourth annual list ( see 2013 here ; 2012 here ; 2011 here ), with my regular caveat that the misnomer ‘best of’ is simply a list of Canadian poetry titles over the past year that I think are worth seeking out and reading. A ‘worth repeating,’ more like.

My list this year includes: Brecken Hancock, Broom Broom (Coach House Books), Suzannah Showler, Failure to Thrive (ECW Press), Sina Queyras, M x T (Coach House Books), Karen Solie, The Living Option: Selected Poems (Bloodeaxe Books), bpNichol, bp :beginnings, ed. Stephen Cain (BookThug), Dennis Cooley, abecedarium (University of Alberta Press), Cecily Nicholson, From the Poplars (Talonbooks), Natalie Simpson, Thrum (Talonbooks), Renée Sarojini Saklikar, children of air india (Nightwood Editions), Nikki Reimer, Downverse (Talonbooks), Arleen Paré, Lake of Two Mountains (Brick Books), George Stanley, North of California St. (New Star Books), Nikki Sheppy, Grrrrlhood: a ludic suite (Kalamalka Press), nathan dueck, he’ll (Pedlar Press), Kate Hargreaves, Leak (BookThug), ryan fitzpatrick, Fortified Castles (Talonbooks), Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present (Coach House Books) and Alex Leslie, The Things I Heard About You (Nightwood Editions).

"Selecting Phil Hall" at Jacket2

The first of my 'commentaries,' "Selecting Phil Hall," is now up at Jacket2! Keep your eye out for one to three pieces a week throughout January, February and March!