Author Spotlights

Author Spotlight: Gabriel Milhet, 2026 Ellemeno Prize recipient

Recipient of the 2026 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize, Gabriel Milhet is an African Nova Scotian writer. He is a winner of the 2025 Varma Prizes in Gothic Literature. His research appears in Intersections and Canada’s History and is forthcoming in The Canadian Encyclopedia and Findings / Trouvailles. His poetry is forthcoming in The White Wall Review and The South Shore Review.

Below is Gabriel’s winning poem, “Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812,” which responds to a photographic portrait of Gabriel Hall (1892) taken by George H. Craig.

Following the poem is Gabriel’s artist’s statement and an interview conducted by Sonja Boon, last year’s Ellemeno Prize recipient and a member of this year’s selection committee.

"Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812"
Gabriel Milhet

I.
For Gabriel Hall

I look into his eyes and see
the Chesapeake rice-field escape,
the hemlock hull harboring his shadow,
the rusted promises chained to him—
to all of them.

My eyes take shape,
the scar-splintered archive
assembles my body—
as history seeps into my bones
writing me in its hand.

II.

“I’m going to write about Gabriel Hall,”
I say to my mother.

She keeps doing what she is doing.

“From the War of 1812.”

She doesn’t look up.

“Is that one of those old stories?”

I wait.

“You’ll never find much,” she says.
“They didn’t keep records for people like that.”

“And if they did,” she adds,
“don’t believe a word that they say,”
before changing the subject.

“The old people always told us that.”

III.
Archives

Sources to consult:
– MG 15, “Ethnic Groups” (formerly “Negro Papers”)
– MG 100, Volume 44, Miscellaneous Manuscripts concerning
“Negroes sent to Halifax during the War of 1812”
– Miscellaneous, “Blacks”

(III. a.

Ages recorded:
inconsistent

Status:
amended

Handwriting:
illegible

*Margins used
for later correction.)

IV.
A PROCLAMATION by the Honourable Sir Alexander Cochrane, April 1814

This is therefore to give notice,
That all those who may be disposed to emigrate from the
United States, will, with their families, be received on
board His Majesty’s Ships or Vessels of War, or at the
Military Posts that may be established, upon or near the
Coast of the United States, when they will have their
Choice of either entering into His Majesty’s Sea or Land
Force, or of being sent as FREE Settlers, to the British
Possessions in North America or the West Indies, where
they will meet with all due encouragement.

V.
The Acadian Recorder
3 September 1814

“Ship News:
Thursday, Sept. 1—
H.M Brig Jaseur, Capt.
Watt, 10 days from
the Chesapeake; also
a transport with a few
hundred Negroes

(dead and alive).”

(V. b.
Marlborough,
San Domingo,
Ganon,
Mariner,
Fox,
Diomede—
recorded as arrivals.

Harbingers of salvation.

The tickets: tomorrow.)

VI.
Return of [B]lack people at Halifax arrived from the Chesapeake,
Autumn 1815

“[we hereby acknowledge the receipt of one
‘Gabriel Hall’
a Boy
from 1 to 13
years old.

he comes without
family
or
friends

as do forty-four others

such is the oppression
we
have liberated them from.

we sincerely hope
that he can
make something of himself—

(against the afflictions of nature,
opposition,
and abuse at our hands) ¹

unlike those lazy loyalists
and murderous maroons
who quitted to Sierra Leone.]”

VII.
Halifax List:
Return of American Refugee Negroes who have been received into the Province of Nova Scotia
between 27 April 1815 and 24 October 1818

“Hammond, William”
a male
59 years of age

“Hammond, Wife of William”
a female
40 years of age

“Hammond, Child of William”

“Hall, Gabriel”
a male
17 years of age

“Higans, William”
a male
38 years of age

VIII.
Lost Chapter, 1818-1824

deemed
too adolescent
for allocation,
left destitute by the liberators;
alone
he struggled against sterile soil,
downpours,
and merciless mice—
refusing to give.

IX.
Claim of Walter Wells, Case 113

“[my boy
was born around 1801
on my plantation
in Calvert County,
Maryland

he was always treated good
stout fellow
valued accordingly at
600 dollars

he could see the boats
down the Patuxent
and ran off with
James Duke’s,
mine, and Jenny—
no-good wench]”

(IX. b.
Department of State Compensation Commission

“[next…

to Mr. Walter Wells, esq.,
we herewith award the sum of
$840
for the loss of his three slaves—
for loss of property

next…]”

X.
Petition on behalf of the black people at Preston and Hammonds Plains

“[we,
the (white) gentry of Halifax,
humbly sheweth
that the extreme poverty of the
Black immigrants
calls aloud for relief

these poor people lack
food,
shelter,
clothing,

and
will not
have the means of growing seed—
although much has been done
by his Majesty
in distributing bedding among them]”

XI.
Memorial of Gabriel Hall, 1824

“he has no means of making a living
but
by husbandry”

XII.

XIII.

Claim of Walter Wells, Case 113. Case Files, compiled ca. 1827 – ca. 1828, documenting the period ca. 1814 – ca. 1828. *ARC Identifier 1174160 / MLR Number PI 177 190*. National Archives, College Park.

“Halifax List.” African Nova Scotians: in the Age of Slavery and Abolition. Nova Scotia Archives (hereafter NSA).

“Return of black people at Halifax arrived from the Chesapeake,” Commissioner of Public Records NSA RG 1 vol. 305 no. 7 (microfilm no. 15387).

“Memorial of Gabriel Hall of Preston,” Commissioner of Crown Lands NSA RG 20 series A, vol. 90 (1824) (microfilm no: 15737).

Whitfield, Harvey Amani. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006.

¹ Reference to Lord Dalhousie to Earl Bathurst, 14 August 1817. Almost a year after his (now) infamous “slaves by habit and education” musing, Dalhousie, upon visiting several refugee settlements, wrote: “almost every man had one or more Acres cleared and ready for seed & working with an industry that astonished (him)—against difficulties of nature almost insurmountable & opposed, abused & cheated by the old Settlers near whom they had been placed.” It is important to note that Lord Dalhousie was very erratic in his treatment of the Black Refugees.

Artist's statement

My poem “Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812” responds to a photo of Gabriel Hall taken by photographer George H. Craig in March, 1892. It is the only known image of an African American refugee who came to Nova Scotia after the War of 1812.

In my article “Setting the Record Straight: Colonialism, Biographies & History’s Accountability to the Enslaved” (which appears in Intersections 8.3, a publication of the Canadian Historical Association), I argued that the archive itself is designed to preserve the voices of powerful members of the predominant group (drawing on research done by Stefanie Slaunwhite and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy). This poem highlights the violence of colonialism by reconstructing Gabriel Hall’s life through primary sources that scholars have used to capture it.

The poem is composed almost entirely from documentary fragments: petitions, claims, newspapers, compensation records. Sections devoted to research processes and archival consultation are demonstrations of what some may deem a systemic failure, but what I would argue is a structural success. What emerges is a system that consistently records ownership, loss of property, and benevolence more clearly than Black survival. I have deliberately avoided imagined interiority — what Saidiya Hartman coined “critical fabulation” in her article “Venus in Two Acts” — for historical silence. Gabriel Hall speaks only where the record permits him to speak; under conditions that require justification for subsistence rather than recognition of humanity. In contrast, enslavers and state institutions speak fluently, are named, and are compensated. This asymmetry is not corrected by the poem; I chose to repeat this logic.

Ultimately, Gabriel Hall is the refugee who we know the most about; the archive — and its logic — has swallowed the others.

Interview with Gabriel Milhet

Sonja Boon (2026 Ellemeno Prize selection committee member): As a committed archives nerd and someone who is interested in lost, hidden, and silenced stories, I was struck by your poem on a number of levels. What resonated particularly strongly is your use of space, which evokes silences and silencing, while also making room for possibly hidden voices to burble up. Can you speak more about the power of silence as a response to erasure, and how you experienced this while writing your poem?

Gabriel Milhet (2026 Ellemeno Prize recipient): This is a very thought-provoking question. I will apologize in advance for my enthusiasm; it manifests through my wordy (and sometimes garrulous) writing.

For me, the silence in the poem—especially the near-complete absence of Gabriel Hall’s voice—represents refusal. It refuses to let the record speak as if it is complete. The spacing, as you probably ascertained when judging, was used intentionally to emphasize the power-imbalance(s) of the archive. Sometimes spacing was used to emphasize the minimal control that the Black Refugees had over their circumstances (not their responses to the circumstances); the dire conditions of their immigration (i.e., “he comes without/family/or/friends/as do forty-four others); white benevolence (i.e., “we/have liberated them from”); hierarchical and gendered violence within slavery (i.e., “James Duke’s/mine/and Jenny—no-good wench”); the commodification of black bodies (i.e., “$840… for loss of property); and sometimes spacing was (not) used to preserve colonial voices.

The blank paragraph in particular was inspired by Shannon Webb Campbell’s poem “Her Eros Restored,” which won the inaugural Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize. It was strategically placed to force readers to imagine what Gabriel Hall’s life might have looked like beyond the documents. And what does this imagining tell us about the archive and how it was constructed?

For me, writing the poem was a counter-archival, counter-hegemonic practice. I take a great deal of inspiration from M. Nourbese Phillip and her magnum opus, Zong!, where silence and fragmentation is used to subvert the ordering of grammar and structure; what Phillip dubs the “impulse of empire.” I too wanted to hold that absence in place to make the limits of the archive apparent.

SB: In your artist’s statement, you write, “Sections devoted to research processes and archival consultation are demonstrations of what some may deem a systemic failure, but what I would argue is a structural success. What emerges is a system that consistently records ownership, loss of property, and benevolence more clearly than Black survival.” Can you speak more about this? Are there risks to repeating the logics of the colonial archive—and if so, how do you see your work pushing back against them?

GM: I think of section III of my poem, Archives. The titles of those bullet points: “Ethnic Groups (formerly Negro Papers),” “Miscellaneous Manuscripts concerning Negroes sent to Halifax during the War of 1812,” and “Miscellaneous, Blacks” are how Black lives appear at the Nova Scotia Archives. Not two hundred years ago: today. There do remain references to Blacks that appear in the “Biography” section, among others, but they are few and far between. For many visitors—or the untrained—these headings are the primary point of entry to African Nova Scotian history.

I argue “structure” frequently because most issues are structural. Archives are reflections of societies that create them. Many collections we consult today were completed when Black lives were deemed disposable, Black servitude ubiquitous, and Black autonomy non-existent. Why record their history? (I cannot speak for other groups). This constitutes structural success. If you were a colonial official who harboured wholly racist notions, wouldn’t you consider this—that Black history, whether it be triumph or defeat, was, and remains, hardly recorded (even hundreds of years later)—a success? What about the “progressives,” who held sympathetic (paternalistic) views? Their efforts, it would appear, in welcoming the “Negroes” who were sent to Halifax haven’t been forgotten by posterity. (Emphasis on the word “sent,” which removes the agency of people who performed many acts of defiance before arriving, including the initial abscond and fighting alongside the British.)

The danger associated with engaging the archive is recreating its violence. The nature of the sources that do exist tend to record eurocentric values (property ownership, tax assessments, etc). The sparse sources that do illuminate the “everyday lives” of socially marginalized peoples are themselves violent, typically court records. Do we—as writers, researchers—want to solely highlight the negative? (To remediate the lack of voice?) Do the positives of this action for the subject of research outweigh its pernicious effects on communities today? In her seminal essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman (whose work I draw on extensively) articulates my logic succinctly: “How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” It is very tricky as you can imagine.

I see my work as an indictment of the structure itself, rather than as an indictment of those who edified said structure or participated in the violence frequently written about.

SB: I’m interested in form: you chose to write a poem to respond to the photograph of Gabriel Hall. Why poetry? What does poetry make possible that a more traditional narrative form might not? What would have changed if you’d chosen creative nonfiction or short story instead?

GM: Well, this may be too forthright, but poetry is my only art form. The choice was that simple; I was limited by options. It worked out great, I guess! I really wanted to tell Gabriel Hall’s story—rather than a story about Gabriel Hall—and felt that poetry would be the best medium. Poetry offers much more flexibility in its structure compared to a more traditional narrative form (given the contemporary insistence on free verse). Other forms—I imagine—with their rigidity would force stricter creative choices. I don’t think I would be able to oscillate between voices and perspectives as fluidly, from observer to son to researcher to narrator to Hall to Wells to the archive itself, and that was something that I had set out to do from the poem’s conception.

SB: In your artist’s statement, you reference Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation.” Can you talk more about this, what you find appealing about this approach, and what it means for your work?

GM: The concept of “critical fabulation” is a critical methodological approach which blends historical research and imagination. (Think typical experience and its interactions with the environment.) It was first coined by Saidiya Hartman in her article “Venus in Two Acts” to describe the brutal murder of two enslaved girls aboard the Recovery. She sought—admirably—to move them beyond inert subjects of violence. “Picture them,” Hartman writes:

The relics of two girls, one cradling the other, plundered innocents; a sailor caught sight of them and later said they were friends. Two world-less girls found a country in each other’s arms. Beside the defeat and the terror, there would be this too: the glimpse of beauty, the instant of possibility.

Critical fabulation is derived from both “fabula,” the basic elements of a story, and the word “[to] fabulate,” which is defined as “[relating] (an event or events) as fable or story.” It allows scholars to tell “impossible stories” that the archive alone cannot convey.

I find critical fabulation appealing because it provides a framework for restoring people’s lives beyond fragments that the archive leaves behind. I think of the story of Mary Postell. For readers who don’t know, Mary Postell was an enslaved Black Loyalist whose life has received sustained scholarly attention because it illustrates the ways in which Black people attempted to negotiate their way out of bondage. In 1791, Mary Postell went to the court and “Complained against Jesse Gray, of Argyle, for taking away her children.” The most damning line from her affidavit—which highlights Gray’s grotesque (mis)treatment —was: “when asked ‘if she made any objection to… Jesse Gray selling her to Mr. [Mangrum],’ she says that she did not, because she was glad to get out of his Service, [for] he used her so ill.”

The line has always stuck with me.

Mary’s life—like so many others—appears in the archive primarily through violence. It is studied because of violence. It is remembered because of violence. Critical fabulation invites us to consider the life that existed beyond those moments: the ordinary experiences that never entered the record.

SB: Here’s the archives nerd question: Can you talk a bit more about what it might mean to be “captured” in the archives? How does your poem respond to this?

GM: Being “captured” in the archive, I think, is really a form of valuation. It means that some aspect of your life intersected with what the prevailing power structure considered worthy of recording. It typically manifests through the “great man” or “exceptional” orientation of history. I mean, who doesn’t love the story of two friends from different backgrounds who form an enduring friendship in the face of hardship; of wartime love and shotgun weddings; of a mentor who recognizes the potential in their struggling protege; of an ordinary person who harbours a vagrant; of the vagrant himself; or of the story of an immigrant who overcame all odds to become successful.

I am a sucker for it personally! I write a lot—like, my mom gets tired from hearing my daily “guess what” spiel a lot—about B.A. Husbands, who prolific historian Bridglal Pachai dubbed the “father of incipient Black politics in Nova Scotia.” He arrived in Nova Scotia as a destitute teenager from Barbados; by the end of his life, Husbands was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) for distinguished patriotic service in the Second World War. The Canadian (American) dream!

Archives preserve what institutions valued. When marginalized people appear, it is often because they entered those structures in some way. (Husbands was heavily involved in promoting youth sports, for example.) My poem responds by foregrounding that logic rather than trying to escape it. The fragments, headings, and austere archival language show how recognition itself is structured—who becomes legible to the archive, and under what conditions.

SB: At the end of your artist’s statement, you write, “Ultimately, Gabriel Hall is the refugee who we know the most about; the archive—and its logic—has swallowed the others.” How might you, as a poet, respond to archival swallowing—a form of capture that is also cannibalistic? How would you write (or have you written) complete archival silence? Is it possible? Is it desirable? Why or why not?

GM: I think writing complete archival silence is impossible. Silences are all about perception. They only exist because we recognize them as such. We know there should be something there because records allow us to perceive the absence. Which documents have survived? Whose voices are preserved? The archive allows us the privilege of actively interrogating it in pursuit of the truth. The “true” silences are those completely unimaginable to us.

It is my view that attempting to write archival silence could become problematic. Humans are inherently egocentric. There exist many developmental theories built on the idea that we interpret the world through our own position and experience. Because of that, any attempt to represent silence is already an act of interpretation. Further, active engagement in any form of critical study is political and unquestionably teleological—it moves towards particular ends. Can we ever—objectively—imagine what someone lived through? Can we be honest in our imagining? I think not (or at least I can’t).

SB: Do you see this poem as a standalone work, or are you working on a series of poems that address similar themes?

GM: I see my poem as a standalone work. My eventual foray into academic history was what compelled me to start writing seriously and remains my principal focus. I am sure I will continue to write poems about similar themes along the way. That’s what all writers do when they encounter new material.

Congratulations to the four artists and writers named as finalists for the 2026 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize: Shelagh Howard, Basma Kavanagh, Gabriel Milhet, and Rebecca Wilson.

The annual Ellemeno Prize celebrates creative cross-pollination between the literary arts and the visual arts. The selected writer or artist receives a cash prize ($250) along with digital publication of their work and a featured interview on the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia website.

The 2026 Ellemeno Prize recipient will be announced on March 12.

Finalist Shelagh Howard’s long-exposure photo series, The Secret Keepers, responds to the poetry anthology Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #Metoo (University of Regina Press, 2021), edited by Sue Goyette.

Shelagh Howard (b. 1971) is an award-winning photo-based visual artist whose work delves into the layered terrain of selfhood, interrogating themes of gender, trauma, vulnerability, intimacy, and isolation. With an unflinching gaze, she peels back the surfaces of constructed identity to reveal the tenderness beneath. Her images thread motion and stillness, capturing the ephemeral shadows of the self and offering a fleeting glimpse of what lingers behind our carefully assembled facades. She studied psychology at The University of Toronto and photography at Ryerson University. She lives, works and befriends crows in Halifax, Mi’kam’ki, Nova Scotia.

Finalist Basma Kavanagh’s textile work, Untitled (Tidelines embroidery), responds to an unpublished short poem by fellow Nova Scotian poet Sean Howard.

Basma Kavanagh is a Lebanese Canadian artist whose multidisciplinary practice includes writing, drawing, printmaking, artist’s books, textiles, land-based explorations, performance, and scholarly work. She has published three volumes of poetry, Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots (Frontenac House, 2018), Niche (Frontenac House, 2015) and Distillō (Gaspereau Press, 2012). She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from University of King’s College, Halifax, and her nonfiction work has been recently anthologized in Best Canadian Essays 2026. She currently lives in Nova Scotia, in the Kespukwitk region of Mi’kma’ki.

Finalist Gabriel Milhet’s poem, “Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812,” responds to a photographic portrait of Gabriel Hall (1892) taken by photographer George H. Craig.

Gabriel Milhet is an African Nova Scotian writer. He is a winner of the 2025 Varma Prizes in Gothic Literature. His research appears in Intersections and Canada’s History and is forthcoming in The Canadian Encyclopedia and Findings / Trouvailles. His poetry is forthcoming in The White Wall Review and The South Shore Review.

Finalist Rebecca Wilson’s watercolour painting, Desire Paths, responds to Robert McFarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (Penguin Books, 2012).

Rebecca Wilson is an artist from Bedford, Nova Scotia, who works primarily with watercolour paint. Working in an illustrative and folk-art inspired style, she engages with themes of memory, community, and nostalgia in her art. Her background in academic research comes through in the theses of her paintings, which often engage in conversation about history, literature, and personal identity as it ties into time and place.

Author Spotlight: Gabriel Milhet, 2026 Ellemeno Prize recipient Read More »

Author Spotlight: Sonja Boon, 2025 Ellemeno Prize recipient

Author Spotlights

(Photo credits: Ritche Perez [left], Sonja Boon [right])

Recipient of the 2025 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize, Sonja Boon is a mixed race writer, researcher, flutist, and teacher based in Kjipuktuk. Her memoir, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, appeared in 2019, and she has published nonfiction, poetry, and fiction in a range of journals, including Riddle Fence, Room, Geist, Pinhole Poetry, and Unlost, as well as in anthologies. She is passionate about life stories and the myriad ways these stories emerge: from traditional diaries, letters, and memoirs to archival ephemera. Her work attends to the relationship between text and textiles and to the ways that women’s lives have historically been stitched rather than written.

Below is Sonja’s winning textile work, At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl); her artist’s statement; and our interview with her.

At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl), 2024
Sonja Boon

Details: Casket cloth: 178 cm (L) x 106 cm (W). Hand-dyed, and mono-printed vintage linens with machine piecing and quilting. Mourning shawl: 156 cm (L) x 36 cm (W). Hand-stained and hand-dyed vintage linens and recycled fabric with hand and machine stitching.

Artist’s statement:

In 1886 and newly married to a sea captain, 23-year-old Alice Coalfleet started a diary, a transcription of which is held at the Dalhousie Archives. “Six Years of Fortitude and Tragedy” describes social activities at various ports around the globe, including visits with sea captains’ wives and dinners with local dignitaries. I found these recountings tiresome; they felt like name dropping of the worst kind—especially given Alice’s comments about Indigenous and other racialized folks, none of whom, bar one, are named. But through them, I reflected on the everydayness of colonialism and empire and how it was stitched into every interaction. The final two years of this very short diary are different: instead of the social whirlwind, Alice navigated the loss of six family members: three siblings, two grandparents, and her husband. How to reconcile the newlywed social butterfly with the grieving widow, sister, and granddaughter?

The quilted casket cloth presents Alice’s colonial social world through colourful strips of goutweed-printed vintage linens. But this rhizomatic tangle sinks into hand-dyed depths, submerged under the weight of loss. The black border, meanwhile, recalls similarly bordered death announcements.

The mourning shawl features “weather maps” created from hand-stained vintage linens, with six hand-stitched “hurricanes” to suggest emotional gales. Hand-dyed vintage linens in Victorian mourning colours—black and purple(ish-blue)—serve as borders. I maintained raw edges along both borders to evoke overlapping and ongoing waves of grief.

I didn’t intend to create two pieces in response to Alice’s diary, or to create something as large as a casket cloth (it just kept growing, seemingly of its own accord). I’m not remotely prone to superstition, but I wonder if in some curious way Alice had a hand in creating these pieces that mark both living and dying—and a very intense period in her life.

Interview with Sonja Boon

Dea Toivonen (WFNS Outreach & Social Coordinator): Your project, both the casket cloth and the mourning shawl, integrate a variety of slow crafting processes: quilting, hand stitching, dyeing, printing. What was your relationship to process, and did it feel important for you to filter your relationship to Alice’s diaries through a slow and multi-staged process? What did you gain from that pace?

Sonja Boon: This question made me smile because, usually, I’m a speed demon driven by outcome more than by process, but over the past year or so I’ve been really thinking a lot more about process and about time. That’s becoming even more the case as I’m currently working on a project that’s 99% hand-sewn (and that, like Alice’s casket cloth, has grown much larger than I anticipated).

I started Alice’s quilt with the fabric. I really wanted to work with vintage textiles because I wanted their softness and I wanted to ‘feel the hand.’ There’s a life energy in vintage and historic textiles.

In her doctoral thesis, art historian Vanessa Nicholas studied three nineteenth-century embroidered quilts created by settler women in Ontario and theorized that these three quilts might be seen as analogous to men’s landscape painting: they were gestures to assert colonial identity in this place now called Canada. She called these quilts, which include English floral designs, “invasive species” quilts that articulated a form of domestic colonialism, a way not just of situating oneself in a new geographic space but of claiming that space as a colonial space dominated by English values and systems.

This idea resonated very strongly with me. I wondered how I could bring the idea of “invasive species” to bear on my thinking through the lives of nineteenth-century settler Nova Scotian women. I happened to pick up a gel plate and then I went poking about in my backyard to see if I could find things to print. What did I find? Endless, endless, endless amounts of goutweed! And what is goutweed? The ultimate colonial invasive species: it was introduced in the nineteenth century, and like colonialism itself, it is a rhizome that sends its roots under the surface only to appear all over—and it’s virtually impossible to eradicate. (It’s currently taking over our front garden again….) Printing goutweed onto fabric seemed like an ideal way to make colonialism visible in material form, and it also aligned, in odd ways, with the ways that English textile printers appropriated South Asian prints and produced them inexpensively for the English market in the early nineteenth century. So, in terms of the making aspect, that was the kernel and the heart of everything. All other decisions flowed from the fact that I had found a way to create “invasive species” fabric.

I was also experimenting with other forms of staining and dyeing recycled fabric, and some of these experiments made their way into the casket cloth and mourning shawl as well—not because of the processes involved but because of the effects they produced. This, together with hand stitching hurricanes, made it possible for me to imagine a tactile and ‘whole body’ experience of grief—and to think of grief as a process always in movement, sometimes overwhelming, and never predictable.

In terms of my relationship with Alice’s diary: I feel like thinking with and through textiles brought me a bit closer to the world that she inhabited as a white middle-class settler woman from a seafaring family—even though my own background, apart from being a middle-class settler, is otherwise completely different. Sewing, decorating a home and making it comfortable, and managing social niceties would have been central to her life and essential to her social role. Feeling and working with fabric allowed me to connect with her life at a different level. And this did require me to slow down, which as a speed demon I found simultaneously frustrating and exhilarating.

DT: Was the process of cross-pollination between written material and crafting/physical art practice a new experience for you? What do you think is gained through this bridging between forms and practices?

SB: Over the past year, I’ve been part of an online community of research-based artists hosted by English textile artist Ruth Singer, and it’s been absolutely fantastic to think about how I can translate ideas from archival materials into textile form—and to be inspired by the projects others are working on. That relationship between “text” on the one hand and “textile” on the other has been very fruitful on so many levels, and it’s definitely broadened my creative palette.

While I was creating this work—and I’ve created other “invasive species” quilts as well (shout out to my Maritime Modern Quilt Guild friends, who have now heard endless stories about nineteenth-century diarists and goutweed printing!)—I was also writing found poetry. I drew on Alice’s diary and the diaries of other nineteenth-century settler Nova Scotian women to create lexicons that I used as a basis for my poems. Found poetry became another meeting ground between the diarists and me, and a way that I could respond to what I was reading. Again, my interest lay in the domestic life of colonialism. In fact, I have a chapbook of found poems, fair wind: as ships, coming out with Pinhole Poetry later this year.

I don’t think I can go back to just writing or just< stitching (or, given my background as a classical musician, just fluting). They’re all elements of a broader storytelling process, and each informs the other. Sometimes the stitchery is more dominant; sometimes the writing is more dominant. And sometimes they are in balance with one another. I kind of just love it all, honestly.

DT: How did you come across “Six Years of Fortitude and Tragedy,” the diary of Alice Coalfleet that your textile work is communing with, in the Dalhousie Archives? What was your first encounter with that work like?

SB: I first encountered Alice’s diary in 2022, a year before we moved to Halifax (but when we already knew that we’d be moving here). As someone who loves archives and diaries and women’s history, I felt that one way to start to learn about this new place I was going to call home (the sixth province I’ve lived in!) was to look for some early diaries. Alice Coalfleet’s diary was one of the first I dug into. And with a title like “Six Years of Fortitude and Tragedy,” who wouldn’t want to dive in? (I actually think it was titled by someone else because Alice herself is not at all melodramatic in her writing. Rather, she’s matter-of-fact and quite reserved, even in moments of intense grief, and it requires considerable re-reading to get to know her emotional states more intimately.)

The very first thing I noticed about the diary was that it starts in Vancouver, just a few weeks after the great fire of 1886. I used to work at the Vancouver Public Library, and one of the branches I worked at had a blown-up image of a really famous photograph taken just after the fire, so her words immediately transported me back to Vancouver. I could both see and smell the aftermath of the fire as she wrote about it.

I also noticed the extent of her travels: she went all over the world with her husband (and later, her son, too). And she clearly revelled in these journeys and in meeting so many people. She really was a social butterfly, and when she wasn’t allowed to disembark—for example, during one stop in South America, when there was a yellow fever outbreak on shore—she was disappointed.

That said, I found all the name dropping difficult because it became evident that, while she travelled all over, she travelled entirely within her colonial bubble. (This is, of course, not surprising, given the era and her social position!)

DT: While you express being struck by the tiresome nature of Alice’s recounting of her colonial expeditions, were there ways in which you related to her as a subject or found unexpected sympathy for her experience?

SB: There definitely were. I’m not a social butterfly because I’m much more of an introvert than she was. But, like Alice, I’m someone who revels in travel and in visiting new places. Like Alice, I’ve also crossed oceans and learned to make “home” wherever I happen to be. (Very unlike Alice, I did not give birth on board a ship with my husband as midwife!)
In terms of sympathy: I can’t even begin to imagine the depth of her grief at losing so many close family members in such quick succession or the delays in hearing about some of these losses: she didn’t hear about her husband’s death until a few months after the fact, for example. Her grief must have been completely overwhelming—and, in that sense, I don’t think the diary’s title, “Six Years of Fortitude and Tragedy” really does that emotional journey from newlywed social butterfly to grieving wife/sister/granddaughter justice. Perhaps no title could capture that.

DT: In your description of your project, you mention how your encounter with Alice’s diary prompted you to consider the “everydayness of colonialism” and the nature of her colonial social world. You represent that in your piece of the casket cloth with the colourful quilted centre of hand-dyed linen. How do you see your design choices symbolically making sense of or organizing that colonial reality?

SB: When I think of “everydayness,” I’m thinking of the fact that, for people like Alice (as for anyone today), colonialism and empire were in every breath they took: they were surrounded by colonialism and empire, so much so that they were just parts of their daily lives. This was how Alice would have seen the world and how she would have understood herself within it.

I chose a very conventional quilt pattern (a pinwheel inside a square with another border around it), and I used thrifted linens (sheets, napkins, tablecloths) as a basis. This allowed me to position the quilt within a very conventional, domestic space. But I also consciously adapted this conventional pattern in order to comment on and respond to its colonial framing. First of all, I used the goutweed printed fabric, in this way making the “invasive species” idea visible in the actual fabric I used. I also put the conventional pattern off-centre because I wanted to disrupt the idea of empire, where everything flows out from the “mother country.” Off-centre allowed for an “off-balance” framing. And then, to get at the specifics of Alice Coalfleet’s life, I “drowned” the pinwheel and its borders, sinking them under the weight of the ocean that claimed her brother, a sister, and her husband. I wanted the ocean to be powerful, to have an overwhelming force.

DT: Both of your textile works, Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl, relate to grief, mourning, and death. Can you speak to the mourning and grief that these are processing? Do you see the grief as Alice’s, or is it a more complex and multifaceted grief?

SB: This is such a great question. I think the grief is multifaceted. I think there is a melancholia that pervades the project as a whole for me, and perhaps that started with the opening pages of Alice’s diary, when she’s writing about the aftermath of the Vancouver fire.

But I think there is also melancholy within Alice’s own life: her life was fundamentally shaped by the inherent uncertainties of life at sea. From childhood, she would have heard about lives lost at sea, both within her own family and beyond. That uncertainty must have been an undercurrent (no pun intended!) of her adult life as well, especially as she and her sister married ship captains.

That said, I also wanted to get at the complicated nature of grief. Grief is not just about loss; it is also about beauty. Within grief are also joy and love. Grief hurts because it’s founded on love. And like love, grief is an undoing of the self; it is an intense vulnerability.

I keep coming back to the words of Judith Butler, who writes (in Undoing Gender),

Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel.

I wanted something that could capture not only loss but also love, not only impossible longing but also beauty.

I hope that At Sea captured some of that.

Congratulations to the the three finalists for the 2025 Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize: Sonja Boon, Doretta Groenendyk, and Jamie Samson!

The Ellemeno Prize annually celebrates creative cross-pollination between the literary arts and the visual arts. The winning writer or artist receives a cash prize ($250) along with digital publication of their work and a featured interview on the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia website.

Learn about the finalist’s inspirations below.

Sonja Boon‘s textile pair At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl) responds to the diary of Alice Ann Coalfleet, “Six Years of Fortitude and Tragedy,” held in the Dalhousie University Archives. (The Avon River Heritage Centre excerpts Alice’s diary entries relevant to the ships Plymouth and Hamburg.)

Doretta Groenendyk‘s painting We Just Swim responds to Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim (Algoquin Books, 2021) and a musing by surfer and activist Dave Rastovich: “We forget our bodies as we know them and we just… swim.”

Jamie Samson‘s poetic sequence Still, Life. responds to three paintings—each, in Jamie’s words, “reflecting on a particular part of the working person’s day”: John Brack’s The Breakfast Table (1958); Salvador Dali’s Living Still Life (1956); Antoine Vollon’s Mound of Butter (1875-85).

Author Spotlight: Sonja Boon, 2025 Ellemeno Prize recipient Read More »

Author spotlight: Tiffany Morris

Author Spotlights

Tiffany Morris is an L’nu’skw (Mi’kmaw) writer from Nova Scotia. She is the author of the Indigenous Voices Award- and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novella Green Fuse Burning (Stelliform Press, 2023) and the Elgin Award-winning horror poetry collection Elegies of Rotting Stars (Nictitating Books, 2022). Her work has appeared in the Indigenous horror anthology Never Whistle At Night, as well as in Nightmare Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and Apex Magazine, among others.

Dea Toivonen, Outreach & Social Coordinator: Where does your interest in horror writing come from? Do you have any favorite horror writers or inspirations that have shaped your practice?

Tiffany Morris: Oh, too many to name, really! Shirley Jackson has been a lingering influence, as has Leonora Carrington. Every Indigenous writer who has come before me, not just limited to horror—Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm and Louise Erdrich have been big influences. People who deftly merge poetry and abstract imagery like Joe Koch continuously inspire me.

I know you have run workshops that integrate the tarot into creative writing, and it has come to my attention that you are into astrology. I am an astrologer and hobby tarot reader and love to talk about these things, but also find them to be sort of taboo, especially in ‘professional’ fields. I tend to compartmentalize these interests from some of my ‘worldly pursuits.’ First of all, what are your big three (if you don’t mind)? And then how do you integrate the ways of knowing of these systems into your writing practice? I love how symbolically rich both the tarot and astrology are, and no matter what your belief is, I feel like all storytellers can learn a lot from these. Do you have any advice or exercises for writers that are looking to use spiritual or divinatory practices in their writing? And this last part of the question is purely from my curiosity as a fiction writer and astrologer: do you know your characters signs when you are writing them?

I love talking about these things, though I hear you on the way it can really alienate people in professional settings: I try to get a sense of whether someone is open to talking about it when I’m first conversing with them. My big three are Aquarius Sun, Virgo Rising, and Sagittarius Moon. I don’t tend to use astrology too much in my writing practice, though I try to be disciplined about communication and writing during Mercury Retrogrades! My tarot practice is a little different, as I like to really think through archetypes and storytelling with tarot as a tool for ‘thinking through’ story. It can be a really helpful way to write, like trying to figure out character motivations by giving them a tarot reading, creating my own spreads for sorting out my feelings about a project, or something as literal as plot. I don’t always deliberately figure out a character’s sign, but I have some suspicions!

Before publishing your novella, Green Fuse Burning, you put out a collection of poems, Elegies of Rotting Stars, a rich and glimmering collection of poems that speak to the apocalyptic dimensions of the present. I will circle back to ask about this apocalyptic or wasteland world that you portray, but for now, I am curious how your work in poetry informs your fiction? Is there one form that you feel more at home in or find easier when bringing forth your vision? What was it like moving into fiction writing?

My first love is poetry, both reading it and writing it, but I’ve developed a deep love for writing fiction. Writing fiction allows me to be expansive in a way that poetry doesn’t always—though finding ways to incorporate that expansiveness into my poetry practice is going to be an interesting challenge going forward. I personally tend to think in image and emotion, so it’s easier to translate that into poetry—but I also let that tendency show up in my fiction writing. The thing that’s quite special about fiction writing is the opportunity to spend time with a character, to create a person with a whole worldview and mode of being outside of your own that you, nonetheless, still shape. Creating those images and emotional states is almost like an act of translation when going from poetry into fiction: I’m finding commonality of meaning to create meaning.

In Green Fuse Burning, you represent the present as a time that is deeply layered with legacies of colonialism, capitalism, climate collapse, trauma, suffering, and all the busy vectors of life that keep people dissociating from that reality. I really admire your capacity to communicate this messy complexity and your ability to make visceral the feeling of living in this dense present, showing how that is experienced by bodies. In reading your work, I am reminded of the truth—communicated by many Indigenous knowledge keepers—that white, Christian settlers think about the apocalypse as something yet to come but, in an Indigenous world view, the apocalyptic event is colonization and its ongoing outcomes. Do you see the world that you are writing as an apocalyptic one? What do you feel or believe that your role as storyteller stands in relationship to this reality and to these legacies?

This is such a great question and a complex one. Settler colonialism has a very specific view of time—one that is linear, one that is reified in the Marxist sense, where we experience the deep objectification of our bodies in clock-measured, labour-oriented, capitalist measurement time. The concept of apocalypse presents a different relationship to time: we refer to it as “the end times,” and it’s interesting to think of it quite literally. Colonialism has always been an alternate sense of time, divorced from what tends to be Indigenous understandings of being in time, living in a more harmonious sense with the natural unfolding of a day, month, season, etc.—which is built into the Mi’kmaq language, for example. I definitely had all of this in mind while writing Green Fuse Burning: apocalypse, grief, trauma—it all disrupts a sense of time. It also points to the possibilities that exist outside of that: apocalypse need not be a total annihilation, and Indigenous survivance (a term brought forward by Gerald Vizenor) signals that. I work in that tradition, and it’s because of the writers and storytellers who came before me.

Following from that question, I want to ask about hope and the possibility of reconciliation. Horror can be a quite bleak genre that doesn’t avoid the darkness in the world, and I think that makes it powerful at exposing some of the underlying realities of our time. Do you see, within the framework of your writing, a message or a glimmer of some light or some hope? If you are writing an apocalyptic landscape, is it one that you think can be made whole or recovered through right relationships?

Absolutely! I think it’s much worse to live in denial of the grim realities of the past, of the present, and the possibilities lingering in the future. Only by looking these difficult things in the eye can we understand the dangers they represent in the present and how their legacies continue to show up in everyday life. Horror can be hopeful because it is cathartic and it has that element of memento mori. We understand life through story, regardless of genre, and in horror we get the opportunity to turn over the rock of denial and see what crawls and writhes in the mud beneath it.

In Green Fuse Burning, the character Rita is forced into an artist residency in a time of immense grief by Molly (her girlfriend) and is not apparently happy about it. It is coming at a bad time, even though the gesture from Molly is an attempt to “do something nice.” The description of the retreat house’s “quiet cottage” aesthetic—perhaps a cheap version of a white idea of ‘rustic charm’—seems eerie. And the conventional version of success and opportunity in entering this space is, for Rita, something very different, something murkily embedded in colonial ideals and power relations. Were you interested in the way that different things and environments are experienced differently depending on one’s history? Can you talk more about the setting of the book—the way you are using an artist residency in the woods as a site of horror?

I was interested in exploring that element: how an environment is changed depending on your history and relationships to it—or even just having to be there when you weren’t planning to be. Molly having a history in that general region—one so different from Rita’s father’s relationship to the land there—makes that contrast more apparent, as does Rita being unsure how the townspeople feel about her. There’s the complexity of histories on land, along with the landscape and ecology changing with climate change, widespread diseases, and other issues. I wanted the pond in Green Fuse Burning to represent the possibilities of the wetland, how the vibrancy of life can be alienating when you’re deep in grief and mental health crisis and being forced to return to work because you don’t really know what else to do, This kind of harkens back to that idea of time and alienation. It all gets threaded together for Rita because the setting forces her to look at everything she can’t deny.

I really enjoyed the design and graphic language of the book. It features beadwork pieces, which are very cute and contemporary, of a strawberry and a house on fire overlaying photographs of mosses. And each chapter contains a black ink drawing of a different animal in a style resembling traditional Indigenous drawings. Is there something about these artworks, images that are both contemporary and stylized and that integrate Indigenous craft and methods, that reflect some of the ambition of the story or that reflect your approach to art-making? Where did the art in the book come from? Do you also craft and make visual art?

My wonderful editor, Selena Middleton, wanted to incorporate work by Indigenous artists in the book, and I am a huge fan of contemporary Indigenous art. Before becoming a writer, I had intended to become a gallery curator focused on that field specifically. I was thrilled that Mikhaila Stevens was able to provide the beadwork and Kaija Heitland was able to provide the interior illustrations. I was also thrilled to have a cover by Chief Lady Bird! We have multiple Nations and forms represented in these art pieces, which speaks to the plurality of my own approach to art, writing, business, life: I deeply appreciate opportunities to be in community with other artists, especially Indigenous artists, and to show people the variety of what we do. I also make visual art—collage, digital collage and painting, and mixed media painting—but it’s mostly for fun. I do freelance art criticism for the magazine Visual Arts News, so it keeps me in touch with that field without the pressure of creating within it. Haha!

Each chapter of Green Fuse Burning opens with a curator’s descriptions of Rita’s painting that she completed at her residency. Why did you want to open each chapter in this way? I like how it grounds us in the materiality of the artwork and reminds us of the trace left behind by Rita, but I’m curious what this is saying about curation, especially about curating work by Indigenous artists in museums.

I wanted the framing of the curatorial notes to keep Rita’s fate ambiguous—as well as to speak to the relationship all creative people experience between what is created and how it gets described, especially institutionally. The gallery itself is an ostensibly supportive environment, but it’s still using language to describe her work that may not be how Rita herself would describe it, and it comes following a fairly sensational event. There are always systems of which we’re a part, and that process of sharing our pain sometimes involves finding a route to bring it to the public, to community, to a creative ecosystem.

A thread running through your novella is language: how it fails, how it’s lost, and the struggle to recover it. Rita trys to summon from her memory Mi’kmaw words for certain things, and her conversations fail: either she is either ignored or she struggles to say what she really means. Towards the end of the novella, Rita confesses, “Life was like a language I couldn’t speak.” As a writer, using language all the time, do you still see language as something that fails? Do you see your writing as counteracting or pushing against the limits of language?

I have a deep love of language. I always say that in my next life I want to be a linguist, and the process of reclaiming Mi’kmaq has shown me many of the limits of English: Mi’kmaq has such complex constructions and concepts that get built into a single word. That said, I think that language in general fails all the time. I don’t think that any one language—or even all languages—reflect the full spectrum of human experience, which is why I’m so grateful that we have all of the different arts, sports, and spiritualities that expand lingusitic expressions. My favourite books are those that play with what language can do, and I endeavour to work with that in mind.

Do you have any new projects in the works? What is next for you and your writing?

I have a novella coming out this fall from Nictitating Books and a novel in the works! Wela’lin for this great interview, and wela’lioq to all who have read it!

Author spotlight: Tiffany Morris Read More »

Author spotlight: Peter Counter

Author Spotlights

Peter Counter is a nonfiction author and cultural critic living in Dartmouth. He is the author of Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays and, most recently, How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory (House of Anansi), which has been described as “a brilliant, humorous, heartbreaking examination of how certain events break our lives apart, and what we do with the pieces.”

Dea Toivonen, Outreach & Social Coordinator: Your nonfiction integrates a lot of personal anecdote and detail from your own experience, and you weave this together with a lot of cultural artifacts—descriptions of various media and textual or digital encounters. The connections often feel very organic and sometimes feel surprising. Do you tend to know where you are going when you are writing? Or is your process more emergent and spontaneous?

Peter Counter: I start with outlines, and I stay open to discovery, surprise, and play when researching and writing. Both of my books started with detailed outlines of every chapter and essay (plus a few essays that were cut from each book). These included working titles, summaries, and three-to-five supporting ideas from personal experience, pop culture, or science and philosophy. Then, during the drafting process, I allowed myself to deviate from those outlines. After a draft, I would re-outline the essay and then re-draft it based on that new outline. And over and over. It’s a very iterative process of outlining, writing, re-outlining, rewriting, and on and on until I’m confident that I have communicated the idea or emotion that I intended to.

I’m very obsessed with two aspects of writing: I want to communicate complicated emotional ideas to readers, and I want everyone involved to be entertained. The complexity of the ideas require that I frequently look at the big picture and how sections and chapters speak to each other. The entertainment part demands that I have fun when I’m writing. I’m a strong believer that writing can contain the essence of the moment it was written, so if I allow myself to make discoveries and play around while composing, readers will hopefully feel that when they read my words.

What do you think is the role of the critic, and what of the expectation that role often carries to be objective? Do you think of your writing as cultural criticism or as some adjacent genre?

I think of my writing as cultural criticism, which is a tradition that I’m proud to be a part of. My gateway to nonfiction writing when I was a teen was music criticism, and since my twenties, I’ve identified as a culture critic first when it comes to writing.

My definition of criticism—the shared application of critical thinking, context, and analysis to art and culture—might seem counterintuitive. The popular conception of the critic has been corrupted by consumer review culture, which collapses everything into binary “buy” or “don’t buy” categories. But that kind of objective pronouncement always makes me catty. Cultural objects provide anchor points for us to gather around and share subjective viewpoints. After all, art is activated by the personal experience an audience member brings to their viewing. Done well, criticism deepens the experience for the reader, spurring their own self-refection and engagement with culture. And I think that’s essential for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Although you’re writing nonfiction, what you do sometimes seems to bend genres within the form—weaving criticism, personal essay, and memoir. What do you think about these distinctions and classifications, and how do you see yourself fitting into them (or not)?

I’m very flattered when people call my work genre-bending. So: thank you! In the moment of writing, I don’t think much about genre. My focus is on trying to communicate an idea or emotion, and the genre switching comes out naturally. If a point I’m trying to make is best illustrated through a memory, then I write memoir. If an idea I’m trying to communicate is best illustrated through criticism, I write criticism. And if that idea is best explored through speculation, I use fiction—which, in my nonfiction, is accessed through the hypothetical, like the karate tournament with time-travelling Jeb Bush I describe in the essay “Gotta Do It (Kill Baby Hitler)” in How to Restore a Timeline.

The effect I’m aiming for is a heightened conversation with the reader. The best conversations are deep and personal and flip between all sorts of communication modes without apology. When we talk, we don’t constrict ourselves to genre conventions. We just engage and communicate by the easiest means.

How to Restore a Timeline seems like it would have been both difficult and cathartic to write. The title suggests the healing power of writing and criticism to dive into the past and make sense of its happenings. Do you feel like writing this book was a healing process or that through writing it you were able to reckon with something you needed to?

Like many writers, I don’t really understand something until I’ve written about it. And while I’ve lived with PTSD for half of my life, there are some aspects I never gave myself the time to explore until this book. I feel like, with How to Restore a Timeline, I have finally been able to communicate how it feels to be sick with an event. In that way, I know myself better, which is cathartic.

I don’t really believe in healing from trauma, and I think that causes some folks discomfort. With this book, I try to propose a path through post-trauma that honours survivors’ experiences, in which community and family and humility can make our violent world more compassionate. The last thing I wanted to do was alienate a fellow traumatized person by placing an ethical imperative to return to pre-traumatic normalcy. There’s nothing wrong with honouring the negative experiences of the past and acknowledging their echoes. I actually think that’s beautiful. I’m still afflicted by my trauma in severe ways, but the love and understanding I have found in my community has made that less of a dangerous prospect.

While your work has often maintained a ‘memoirish’ tone, How to Restore a Timeline seems like it was particularly vulnerable to write. What was the most difficult part of the process of writing this book?

I have a rule about my own personal writing: if it’s not vulnerable, it’s probably not very authentic. The most difficult part of writing How to Restore a Timeline was coming to terms with the parts I couldn’t include—because, while they might have met my vulnerability requirements, I couldn’t quite find a way to express their core ideas in a compelling way. That level of editing is really painful. But I’ve been writing long enough to know that some ideas just need more time to develop or a different framework in which to thrive. This book is better without the cut chapters, and those ideas will find a way into the world eventually.

Your chapters in this book are often quite short, feeling like flashes of memory or fragments coming back to you. Was this an intentional choice or just the shape the writing took?

This was an intentional choice, but—and how convenient is this—I naturally seem to write essays between 1200 and 4000 words. The idea was always to have a non-linear memoir composed of flashes, and when it came to writing it, that was the easiest part. Which I suppose makes sense. Memoir is an invitation to see how an author thinks. I think in short essays about watching TV and listening to music.

What is your daily writing practice and process?

When I’m in the drafting phase of a book, I have a pretty routine daily writing practice. I wake up early and write, edit, or rewrite as much as I can before I start work. In order to facilitate this, I write in batches of four essays or chapters at a time. This way, if I wake up and don’t feel excited about one topic, I can just pick whatever seems the most fun that morning.

Outside of the drafting phase, things are a little more nebulous. My practice is still daily, but it’s not just typing or scribbling. Sometimes it’s reading, sometimes it’s research, sometimes it’s outlining or composing a pitch. This is all under the umbrella of writing for me, but because it rarely results in being able to look back at a word count, it can be fraught with self-doubt and anxiety. The most crucial moments for me as a writer are moments of self-forgiveness, when I’m feeling guilty about prioritizing these less tangible but crucial aspects of writing.

Having lived in bigger cities, do you find moving to Nova Scotia has shaped your writing practice? How do you find the writing community here?

Moving to Nova Scotia in 2016 was very positive. Earlier that year, I’d been rejected from a creative writing MFA program I was excited about, and I decided I was just going to write a manuscript anyway, out of spite. My partner was accepted to NSCAD that September, and when we moved, I had access to this city’s rich interdisciplinary artistic community. That—plus the time and space and affordability that Halifax offered at the time—was indispensable. I wrote that manuscript in like three months! I definitely credit moving here as a major catalyst for my maturing as an author.

Obviously, the Halifax of 2016 is long gone. The affordability crisis has squeezed out many important arts community members. It also means that the freedom from the hustle that I found in 2016 is no longer a reality for anyone who has to work for a living. It’s not easy to live here. And when it’s not easy to live, it’s not easy to create. That said, the community that remains here is excellent and welcoming and supportive. Nova Scotia is full of creative people—not just writers. And the culture they have fostered is one of collaboration and cooperation rather than competition.

Who are some writers that influence and inform your work? Who are you reading now?

My main influences as an author are Chuck Klosterman, Carmen Maria Machado, Alicia Elliott, and George Orwell. And because I am self-conscious about not having formal creative writing education, I am constantly reading and rereading books on craft. My favourite of these is Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark, which I revisit probably once every two years.

Right now I’m reading Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, Kaoru Takamura’s Lady Joker, and The Divine Comedy. For nonfiction, I’m reading Alexandra West’s horror essay collection Gore-Geous.

Are you working on anything at the moment?

Yes, right now I am finishing the outline phase on two books. One is a nonfiction book about Hell and technology. The other is a Catholic horror novel about rock music and nostalgia. Hopefully I’ll have more to share about these soon.

Author spotlight: Peter Counter Read More »

Author spotlight: Elliott Gish

Author Spotlights

Elliott Gish is a writer of speculative fiction and librarian living and working in Halifax. Her stories can be found in publications like The New Quarterly, Grain Magazine, Vastarien, The Baltimore Review, Dark Matter Magazine, and Wigleaf. Her debut novel, Grey Dog, came out in April of 2024 with ECW Press.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): Grey Dog is a work of speculative historical horror set at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th. What about this period compelled you to write about it?

Elliott Gish: The Victorian era is a period that has always spoken to me. On the most basic level, that is because so much of the literature I loved when I was growing up either came from or was set in that era. Authors like Louisa May Alcott, L.M. Montgomery, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Lewis Carroll sank their claws into my developing brain. Due to that early imprinting, I still find myself drawn to stories that include hoop skirts, buggies, and bonnets.

I also find that liminal space between one era and the next to be extremely interesting, especially as it pertains to social change. The time in which my protagonist, Ada, lives is one of tremendous upheaval. You’ve got class reforms, the emergence of socialism and anarchism, increased educational opportunities for women and the emergence of the “New Woman” as an icon of female independence. Things are changing, but older ideas about how people—particularly women—should behave still hold tremendous power. That creates an internal conflict that is really fun to explore!

What was the initial inspiration or seed of the story, and how long was that germinating before it became Grey Dog?

The very first seed of inspiration for Grey Dog was planted back when I was eleven and attended a historical summer camp in a “living museum” in New Brunswick called Kings Landing. I spent a week learning how to hook rugs, milk cows, and square dance, and had the time of my life. (I was a very cool eleven-year-old, obviously.) That experience made such an impression on me that, when I began to write the book, I used the Kings Landing layout as a blueprint for the town of Lowry Bridge. Actual buildings from the museum appear in the book multiple times, including the one-room schoolhouse.

Another seed was planted when I read Mary Rubio’s biography of L.M. Montgomery in my late twenties. Montgomery had been one of my favourite authors for years at that point, but I knew very little about her life outside of her work. I was fascinated to discover how unhappy she was—and how starkly her rather grim personal life contrasted with her fiction. Revisiting her books in the wake of that biography, I saw flashes of misery everywhere, even in her sunniest novels. I wanted to pay homage to Montgomery’s heroines and that darkness beneath the surface of her work. I wanted to create a character who bore many of the hallmarks of a Montgomery protagonist—a love of books and nature, a “genteel” and ladylike occupation, a penchant for journaling—and let her howl.

The novel is told through the diary entries of the main character, Ada Byrd, written in an honest and confessional tone. What about the epistolary form made you chose to write in this way? Did you consider writing in a different way, or was this form part of the conception of the story?

The book was a diary from the very beginning. The first little bit of narration that appeared in my brain was entirely in Ada’s voice, and I knew that it would be important for me to keep the audience anchored in that viewpoint. Throughout the book, Ada is not sure if what she is seeing and feeling is real. I wanted readers to be unsure about that, as well. What better way to do that than to stay in her mind the whole time?

There is also much to be said for the historical significance of the diary format as women’s literature. Women were restricted in so many ways during this period in history, their voices silenced in the public sphere, but it was considered appropriate for women to keep diaries. They were recording their thoughts and feelings, even as those thoughts and feelings were devalued by the world at large. You might not be able to talk back to your husband, or your father, but you could write down what you wanted to say to them. Writing in a diary was a radical act dressed up as feminine propriety. This ordinary, socially sanctioned activity becomes a vehicle of transformation for Ada. She is not an honest person in her day-to-day life, but she is able to tell the truth in her diary. And that truth ultimately frees her.

I love to read accounts and stories about ‘women on the edge’ especially as they relate to contemporary feminist struggle and understanding the experiences of the marginally gendered in a patriarchal society. I am wondering why you gravitated to writing a character like Ada that both suffers from societal pressures on women, and in turn continues to project and enforce those expectations on some the young girls that she teaches? Do you think that there something about the feminist perspective of Grey Dog that resonates with contemporary gender politics?

One of the worst things about oppression is how often we are made to be complicit in it. Just about every woman has, at some point in her life, chafed against restrictive and reductive gender roles. Just about every woman has, at another point in her life, expected other women to toe the line. We are none of us completely innocent of reinforcing patriarchy, just as we are none of us exempt from being victimized by it.

In Ada’s case, she has tried her whole life to conform to gendered expectations, even though they do not come naturally to her. She sees proper female behaviour as something that must be learned, considering it her responsibility as a schoolteacher to teach her female students how to be “young ladies.” When her experiences in Lowry Bridge erode her ability to conform to acceptable modes of femininity, she is able to let go of that need to project gendered expectations onto other women and girls. I think that this is a very common experience for women: when we feel freer in ourselves and more comfortable with defying gender norms, we are less likely to try and police the behaviour of other women when it does not fall within accepted parameters of feminine behaviour.

A theme that runs throughout the Grey Dog is the difference between appearance and reality. Ada is often ‘translating’ the true meaning of sentiments disguised by social niceties, and much of her existence in Lowry Bridge involves her concealing her past and her desires. This made me really think about what the horror of the novel actually is—is it the eldritch forces lurking out of the village, or is it the village itself or a social order that surveys and represses people’s (and specifically women’s) instinct and behaviours? Can you say more about how you were thinking about this dichotomy of appearances and reality in Grey Dog?

I wanted the reader to question Ada’s reality throughout the novel—not only whether what she sees and feels is really happening, but also where the true source of evil lies. The thing in the woods is a force of nature, divorced from good and evil as we understand it. It even becomes a source of liberation for Ada as the novel progresses. But Ada’s disciplinarian father, her sister’s abusive husband, the closed minds in Lowry Bridge, Ada’s own self-loathing and repression? Those, I would argue, are abundantly evil. Lowry Bridge appears at first to be a sweet town full of quaint, folksy people, and the woods around it a frightening and dangerous place, but small towns can harbour the worst villains, and the deep, dark woods can be a source of joy and beauty.

What were some of your biggest influences and inspirations for Grey Dog?

L.M. Montgomery was Grey Dog’s primary influence and inspiration. I was really trying to capture that golden, sunny feeling that pervades many of Montgomery’s books, from Anne of Green Gables onwards, and slowly pervert it over the course of the novel. The setting and tropes of Grey Dog are familiar to anyone who has read Montgomery’s work. You have your idealistic schoolteacher, your idyllic natural setting, your small-town gossips and precocious children. And then, as you go on, you have your eldritch abominations and malformed deer fetuses!

Another author whose work influenced me tremendously was Sarah Waters. I have been a fan of hers since high school and have tremendous respect for how she uses historical settings, making the reader look at them in a whole new way. She does this particularly well in The Little Stranger, which is both a horror novel and a story about the decline of the landed gentry after World War II. Every time I reread that book, I am delighted by how deftly she weaves together history and horror, the supernatural and the mundane. I wanted to do something very similar with Grey Dog.

And, of course, I would be amiss if I didn’t mention Shirley Jackson as an influence on this book and all my other work as well. She was an absolute powerhouse, and lives rent-free in my head at all times.

What was your biggest challenge in completing the novel?

I would say that the biggest challenge with this book, as with all long-form projects, was knowing when to stop! There comes a point in the writing process when all the changes you make start to feel lateral, as though you are just moving things around for the sake of moving things around. At that point, I was very glad that the final decision to stop writing was taken out of my hands by my wonderful editor, Jen Sookfong Lee. At a certain point, making further changes was no longer an option, and thank goodness for that, because otherwise I’d probably still be tinkering with the manuscript!

It was also challenging to always remain inside of Ada’s head. I like to play with different narrators and points of view in my work when I can, and that was not an option for Grey Dog. I had to come up with other ways of including other characters’ stories and opinions. That is why there are so many scenes of other characters telling stories, writing letters, or relaying gossip—it was a way to include other people’s points of view while remaining entirely within Ada’s.

What was you research process like in putting this book together? Did your research take you to any surprising or unexpected places?

Most of the research I did involved natural history, particularly from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I did not need to do too much research into the period in general because I already had that historical interest in the Victorian era, but I am very much an indoor cat and went into this book knowing very little about the natural world. Through various online archives, I was able to access some works of natural history that would have been publicly available at the time, which was very edifying.

The books of a self-taught Scottish naturalist named Eliza Brightwen were an especially wonderful resource. Her books were hugely popular because she made natural history accessible to ordinary people, writing about the creatures and plants she saw in her own backyard. Her work is referenced in Grey Dog, and Ada reads aloud from one of her books, Inmates of my House and Garden.

The most unexpected place I ended up was a weird corner of YouTube devoted to videos of deer giving birth. That really messed up my algorithm for a while.

Do you feel like you want to keep working in the genre of speculative horror, or branch out in other directions? Do you have anything new in the works now?

I definitely want to keep including speculative elements in my work, with an emphasis on the weird and unsettling. That is where I feel most at home, and what feels most natural to write!

I am currently working on three full-length projects as potential follow-ups to Grey Dog. The first is a historical magic realist novel set in 1961 called Ruby and Jude. The second is another nature-based horror novel, this time with a focus on the ocean, called A Wilderness of Salt. The third is a horror-fantasy inspired jointly by the Parker-Hulme murder and Enid Blyton’s boarding school novels, tentatively named The Book of Hideous Splendours.

I am also compiling a collection of short stories, mostly speculative. Its working title is Girls and Dead Things because I realized, after looking at all the stories I wanted to include, that girls and dead things are the bulk of what I write about!

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Author spotlight: Anna Quon

Author Spotlights

Anna Quon is the current Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality. She is a Mad and mixed-race poet and novelist, and she facilitates writing workshops, particularly for the mental health community. She is the author of three novels and one published collection of poetry, as well as many self-published poetry zines.

This conversation was conducted by video chat in K’jipuktuk, on June 6, 2024, at 10:45 AM, on the day of a new moon.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): First of all, big congratulations on your appointment in your role as Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality! I would love for you to talk about what that role means to you—and for readers who aren’t familiar with what a “Poet Laureate” is, would you perhaps shed some light on the position?

Anna Quon: Well, I am still working that out myself, but on the municipality’s website, it says that the poet laureateship and youth poet laureateship programs “aim to celebrate and elevate the literary arts through the written and spoken word. Poet Laureates are nominated and selected to advocate for poetry, language and the arts by attending events across the municipality, and beyond to promote and attract people to the literary world, and as an ambassador for Halifax and its residents.” So, that is what the city says, and I hope to do that—but I also like the idea of bringing poetry to parts of the city that we normally might not associate with poetry and also to bring poetry back from those parts so we can hear what people have to say. That sounds pretty simple but to figure out how to do that might be a little more complicated. I haven’t gotten to it yet: I have, so far, been responding to invitations from community groups and from the municipality itself for events that I will write poems for or perform poems at. So far, I have been reacting to what is brought to me more than going out and making something new that I envision for this role—but that will come.

I think you have already started to imply the beliefs that will guide your time in this role, but could you speak more to the foundational beliefs and philosophies that guide you in your poetics and your activism?

First, I will say that I don’t see myself as an activist. I was part of a panel called “The Accidental Activist” for Halifax’s Access Awareness Week, but I really struggle with the idea of being one. I see activists as doing a lot of hard work, as being the people who go out and organize, sometimes sit out in the rain for days on end protesting something—that kind of thing. And I don’t do those things or even go to demonstrations much anymore. But I am a member of the Bahá’í faith, which is an optimistic and hopefully, eventually, unifying world religion. I am also very fond of the social determinants of health, things like having enough income, housing, and food, not being socially isolated, having good health care and education—things that make a good life for people. I am also interested in social justice and in equitable access to what people need to lead a good life. When I say ‘a good life,’ I mean one where they can feel good, contribute to the world, and do it without too much anxiety about bombs dropping on them or losing their paycheck and their housing. Security of some measure.

I find the Bahá’í faith’s world-embracing scale and its optimism compelling because I think we need hope-fueled communities that have some idea of what they moving towards. So my next question, perhaps related, is about the role in society of the poet. I think that the fact that there are poet laureateships, that institutions and municipalities have these positions, says something about the poet’s importance in the social framework, and I am wondering if you have some thoughts about what that role is.

I think there are a lot of different kinds of poets, and I am not sure that I would want to be prescriptive about what poets should do. I write poetry about a lot of different things: sometimes it’s about the drudgery of housework, sometimes about basic income guarantee or the revolution [chuckles], or it could be about spring, or flowers. I write about a lot of different things, and the Poet Laureateship—as I have been told a number of times by my contact at the city—should be a role that I make align with my passions. I think the kind of poet that I am is an observer and a thinker and a feeler, so I am more interested in seeing the world clearly than I am in bringing some agenda to my poetry. I want to be more of a seer who is committed to bringing that into language than I do someone with an agenda, though I don’t always succeed. We all sometimes have ideas in our heads that we want to run with instead of responding to the world in a thoughtful way.

I think that is a beautiful ambition, that commitment to seeing with clear eyes and to being an archivist of the present.

It is archiving the present, it is true, but it is also seeing some essential things about being human and about the world we live in and, hopefully, transcending the present. That’s my hope. I am a hopeful poet, but I don’t always succeed in doing what I hope to do.

My next question is about the particular social issues or initiatives that you are involved with. What will you use your laureateship to bring more energy and awareness to?

As I said before, I am not an activist, but I really value what those people that I would call activists do. I am not really sure how the world works, actually, in terms of what makes the biggest differences in it. Mostly I attend to things related to inequity. The housing crisis that we are in and the crisis of homelessness that is ongoing are very compelling problems for me. We see these all around us, and I really feel that the government has failed in this area.

I am going to speak at the Basic Income Guarantee Nova Scotia symposium in September, and sometimes I am very hopeful that that is one of the answers—that everyone having a basic income to rise above the poverty level would do a lot of good. But I can’t say for sure that I am sold on any practical solution as the answer. I have also been influenced a lot by the Canadian Mental Health Association and ideas around making the world better for people with mental health challenges, things like the social determinants of health and changing attitudes towards people who are different.

I consider myself Mad: I see the world differently from a lot of other people and have had experiences that shape that way of seeing. The world out there regards me differently because I have had those experiences, but it often gets me wrong—what I am about and what people with similar experiences are about—which makes me believe that stigma and prejudice and discrimination of all kinds are something to be eradicated, which takes constant education. I am hoping that my poetry can do a little of that. That it can help people see that how they see me is not who I am, how I see myself, or what I can bring to the world. Helping to reduce prejudice and discrimination, including ones that I hold myself—we all hold prejudices that we don’t even know that we have—goes a long way to making the world a better place and is something I hope to do as Poet Laureate.

We hold a similar belief that a lot of the world maintains a narrow framework for what is normal, or what is neurotypical, and experiences outside of that central accepted ‘normal’ have a lot to teach us about what is real, what is true about the world, and what our hearts really long for. I think it is beautiful to hear you talk about your desire to approach and write with these ‘outside’ voices and to use poetry, which I think of as the language of the heart—I don’t know if you would agree—to transmit shared experience.

I do see poetry as the language of the heart, even though people might hear that and think, ‘Woah, what does that mean?’ It means that my feelings and my deeply held values and beliefs are what speaks through my poetry. We have all written and read things that don’t come from the heart, including things that might be called poetry, but poetry, at least for me, is made of the feeling stuff and not so much the thinking stuff.

When we talk about poetry coming from the heart, it is important to me because it touches on another question you asked—about what poetry does. Words by themselves, I don’t think that they have the power to change people, but I think that they have the power to change how people see things. And when people see things differently, they may change the feelings that they hold in their hearts. That is to say, poetry doesn’t make people act differently unless it makes people see and feel things differently. But, also, it is not really up to me to decide what poetry is. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a good poem, which I think needs to change what people see and feel and think, or some combination of those three things that might change how people act or gives people hope to keep acting in a certain way.

In almost a conclusion, I wanted to bring some of the things that we have been talking about to your poem “To Council, 2024,” the first poem that you have written in your laureateship. In this poem, you begin by making note of how you arrived here, in Halifax, recalling your father’s foresight in moving to the heart of the city—then you proceed to situate yourself in the local landscape, traveling through and observing the city, its changing streets, its architecture and the way that architecture speaks to histories that are often violent, and noting the people who live here, especially those who are often neglected or abused by the policy-makers and cops.

I spent some time this year thinking about what I call “a poetics of arrival,” which is essentially the conviction that it matters how we narrate our own journeys and tell our own stories. I think story is very powerful and can inform how we find ourselves in the present and what we chose to do with our situation, and we can all tell our own stories of arrival in many different ways. I read your poem with this notion in mind, and the care you take in situating yourself as both a local and a witness of local political life feels important, especially in your first poem written as Poet Laureate. Is there anything that you want to add in accounting for your arrival, both as a person living here and as Poet Laureate? How has your journey brought you to the worldview that you currently hold? How does that experience inform your work?

I was giving some thought to how I have come to this place in my life, part of which is becoming the Poet Laureate. I have lived a quite comfortable life, economically, having the privilege of parents who are comfortably middle class. And I have never known, through recessions and difficult times, any feeling of insecurity. I never realized how much that had influenced me until later in life, that type of security. I have also suffered psychologically in a number of ways that I connect with perfectionism and with internalizing a colonial and capitalist and sexist and racist way of seeing the world. Because I am a mixed-race woman, I am Mad, and I am fat, I have been a lot of things that don’t match up to the ideal that these systems promote, and that was a cause for a lot of psychological distress. I also have a probably biological predisposition for depression and psychosis. I have a university degree, which I don’t believe I earned very well, but it has given me access to work that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise, which is, in my mind, a privilege.

That is some of the background on how I arrived here, but I also think, because I grew up in a home with supportive parents where books and art mattered, I had a lot of exposure to things that have led me to write, and I think reading novels has helped me develop a lot of empathy. I have had a comfortable life despite my mental health challenges, which have been really grievous at times, and realizing this makes me think about what makes up a good life. Like having a certain amount of economic and emotional security. These are not new thoughts, but in my life, I see how much they influence where I am and how I got here, and I think that everyone should have those things. These are things I value, the things that peacetime brings. ‘Peacetime’ meaning more than just the absence of war; ‘peacetime’ meaning the ability to live freely or “freeishly” in a place where a lot of our needs can be met. And we have in Canada a place that, compared to many parts of the world, offers a lot to some who are lucky enough to have enough resources and support.

Speaking as Poet Laureate, or just as yourself, do you have any advice to young poets or words of wisdom or hope to offer the local community?

I guess I would say, especially to young poets, read a lot. That is advice that people give young writers a lot, but keep that curiosity and openness and go with gusto after filling some of the gaps in your knowledge and experience through reading. That would be a wonderful thing for young poets to do. While I am not a big chaser of experience, I am a chaser of knowledge about the world, which includes subjective and objective knowledge, so I try to be open to reading all forms. And as for wisdom and hope for the community, one of the quotes from Bahá’u’lláh, the founder of Bahá’í faith, that I have been thinking about a lot goes,

“O SON OF SPIRIT! The best beloved of all things in My sight is Justice; turn not away therefrom if thou desirest Me, and neglect it not that I may confide in thee. By its aid thou shalt see with thine own eyes and not through the eyes of others, and shalt know of thine own knowledge and not through the knowledge of thy neighbor. Ponder this in thy heart; how it behooveth thee to be. Verily justice is My gift to thee and the sign of My loving-kindness. Set it then before thine eyes.” (Bahá’u’lláh)

What it basically says is that keeping justice in your sight will help you see the world in your own authentic way and see truth your own way. I believe in this idea, especially that justice is important in the world and that it will help us to see as we are meant to see to express that—which, I really think, is my job as a poet.

Author spotlight: Anna Quon Read More »

Author spotlight: Sue Goyette

Author Spotlights

Sue Goyette is a poet and educator living in Kjipuktuk. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and one novel and was the Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality from 2020 to 2024. During her laureateship, she worked with HRM to establish the Youth Poet Laureate program as her legacy project, making space for young voices in public forums.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): I want to ask about your term as Poet Laureate and how it felt to be in this role. Did you have ambitions or expectations for your term? Were they met? Was there anything that surprised you about the development in your role?

Sue Goyette: I was really interested in being in the role and bringing in an aspect of young people, so the Youth Poet Laureate was really important to my mandate. Prior to becoming Poet Laureate, I was going to those Friday climate protests that were organized by young students, and often, they would have the mic and speak poetry. I was really interested in how they were responding to their own bewilderment and frustration through poems. You know, I think everyone should have a mentor who is, like, twenty or younger—people who are responding to the conditions that have been created for them.

Then I got the position, and two weeks later, there was the total meltdown of Covid, so it was interesting how that changed the dynamic. I am really active on social media, sharing writing prompts and poems by other people. I just felt like I should be a presence representing poetry at that time because we were all so blown away and afraid.

You entered this role at a politically interesting and devastating time, ranging from the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic to recently. In this period, it feels like there has been an escalation of overlapping political failures and reckonings. As a poet and representative of the literary arts and spoken word, you were not given an ‘easy’ time to respond to. You have also been a beacon of consistency and perseverance, as you have continued to stay connected to the present realities and keep an open heart. This is one of the things I remember the most distinctly from the first poetry course I took with you—that you ended the class with a call for us, as poets, as humans alive today, to keep our hearts open, no matter how devastating and difficult that might feel. So firstly, thank you for that reminder, which I recall again and again when I can feel the impulse to protect myself by disengaging. Relatedly, do you have any advice for people struggling to keep an open heart or people who have closed off from feeling, given the vast grief of the world today?

What we are seeing is like when the sea monster finally breaches the water. Before, we had only just seen a tip of it. And then it’s like, Oh my God!, the system of oppression: white-bodied supremacy, late capitalist, neoliberal systems, the violence of colonization. And what happened in the summer of 2021—there was George Floyd and a string of murders by the police—and the next summer was an intensifying of the homelessness crisis here, with the tents at Halifax’s old library, and the city called in the police. We saw police using bicycles to thrash people down, pepper-spraying a 12-year-old. The violence was intense. And later that summer, there were police in Superstore because the price of food got so high that people were running with food. So yeah, cognitive dissonance—oh boy, like upper case. Like, how does this make any sense?

And yet, the most righteous and wondrous, dastardly thing we can do in the face of that oppressive, genius system is embrace our humanity, switching from a transactional way of being to a more relational way of being and caring for each other. I mean, if we just did that in little hives of community, gradually those communities would connect—and we are seeing it! You know, in encampments, in how some people are protecting the tents of people who don’t want to live in shelters or were promised places that weren’t yet finished but were still evicted. We are seeing the care and mutual aid that is coming up and the spaces for people to connect, to make art, and to pray, to protest, to learn about Palestine.

The climate crisis meanwhile is on a rampage, and I think keeping an open heart is a radical act, and it might feel hard. I think it’s okay to turn up with a wobbly voice, or to be in tears or to need someone to hold your hand. I think this is immense what we are living through, and I worry that not enough people are acknowledging it. I go to these events, like music events, and I always want to leave if people start as if everything is okay. I just want someone to stand, if they have a microphone, and at least say, “Wow, this is messed up, and I hope you are okay.”

Your poetry and the expanse of topics and approaches in your writing is vast, spanning from personal memoir to the local natural world to integrating feminist theory and ecocriticism. I get the sense, reading your work, of the poet as a jack of all trades, knowing a little bit about a lot of things and being able to trace new paths between and through these things to illuminate something new about their relations. Can you speak to the relationship between your poetic practice and knowledge—or, more specifically, what are the forms of inquiry that you interact with, and how do these inflect your craft?

I don’t see myself as a jack of all trades, I guess, but I am deeply curious about a lot of things—and I know that when I let my curiosity lead me, I land in places that feel like exactly where I need to be at that time. And the relational aspect in my work comes from a way of being, which makes its own way in how it connects, that I have nothing to do with but which I am always so grateful for. So it’s kind of like trusting a way of being to make meaning from, and the method is the creative act, if that makes sense.

It seems like you are inverting a lot of common ways of living—turning those on their head and totally reprioritizing.

Yeah. Like I have chosen to live in a gift economy. I do things for people and don’t charge. I just understand that it’s going to come back around, and I put faith in that. When I am asked to give talks, I give them a lot of thought and I walk around with it, but I turn up without notes because I trust that being in that space and talking from my heart will create an experience and an adventure for all of us that might be exactly what we all need. I have let that happen often enough that I am okay with it now and not as afraid, but I like that I am afraid: that means that there is something at stake.

Your approach to poetry is often speculative in that it seems to respond to a ‘what if?’ question. It conjures possible near futures, as in Monocultures (Gaspereau Press, 2022), or employs speculative strategies for reinventing personal memoir, as in Anthesis: A Memoir (Gaspereau Press, 2020). Do you think ‘speculative’ is an accurate term for your approach to poetics? How do you think poetry and the speculative commingle? What are some of the strengths of a speculative approach to writing?

I think the imagination kicks in when an old way of being is dying. How this is going isn’t sustainable, and everyone I know who is living with an invigorated creative practice is writing just past their knowing—and I think just past the edge of knowledge is speculative. I’d much rather be writing in an open system where I don’t know what is going to happen than a closed system where I arrive already knowing how it is going to end.

So, the speculative is activating the creative process as a methodology, as a way of being in this trouble that we are finding ourselves in, and that keeps me open. It is like a practice that I am trying to embody all the time, so that if something happens in the world, I can respond in a way that is open and unexpected and can maybe change something in the way a poem does. The fact that we are able to take creative risks and act without knowing the outcome, I think, is one of our superpowers. And right now we need that kind of engagement. Also,stakes are low in a poem: you are just writing and can be like, “What happens if this happens!? Ok, that didn’t work out. Ok, I’ll try something else.” It’s a good way to taste the future. Because it’s just a poem, you know. Very few people read them.

Speculating and improvising are so key for being agile and being willing to change and try something new. Just because we have done something a certain way so many times before doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it that way. Being able to shift into a new way of being is so crucial right now, and it’s crucial for our humanity and it’s a good way to be with each other. What if the creative process and creating and how we feel after we have been creative is the best thing for the world right now? What if that is the radical act? I think people are writing and reading past the edge because something significant is changing. Everyone I admire says, ‘stay with the trouble’ and ‘you need a bit of the past for the future.’ It’s a great time to be an artist! It’s very invigorating, if the world doesn’t get you too down.

Your poetic practice is often grounded in a commitment to observation over time. You visited an aloe vera plant daily for almost 200 days. You archived the days of December, 2020, leading up to the Solstice in poems that were published in The Coast. Can you speak to how these sorts of durational practices affect you and your work?

I think our brains really like discipline and there is a freedom to discipline. So durational practice, to me, is a number of things. It is a part of my discipline, which involves turning up. And I have been turning up to writing for so many years that I don’t feel like I’m breathing when I don’t. But it’s also about slowing down. We are so hurried, and there is something so remarkable to slowing down and watching something become itself. When you show up you see the emergence, and the manifestation of things. Bearing witness or with-ness to something as it is becoming is like being in the company of something else’s creative act, which in turn fortifies and recharges mine. It’s a way of being, and it’s kind of the way I am. Like when the magnolia is on the verge of opening, I want to watch every day, because woah, what a class act, first of all, and second of all, what a mystery! Like, why?! What?! Who thought of this!? So, this durational practice is relational and usually land-based. I think so much of what we know of the land is dying off. You know, people report that they don’t see half as many bugs as they used to. There are so many little things not turning up in the way we are used to, and I just want to be here for it while it’s still here.

Are there any writers or artists right now that you are inspired and excited by? Who are you reading?

I read widely. I am reading poets talking about poetry. I am reading a book about how animals communicate and the multispecies relationships and the history of those relationships that I am fascinated by. I am reading a book that I am really excited about called Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. And I am reading a book by the Dalai Lama on the Heart Sutra because I am very interested in this, as my heart is just a mess all the time. I am always reading like eight to ten books at once, which is gross. But I am also trying to change my language around that and see that as part of my natural curiosity and being a lifelong learner and not my ADHD (which it probably is too). It’s more of a curiosity-led way of being. You know, I land on things that connect to other things and it’s really exciting! When the texts start shimmering together in unexpected ways, it really reminds me that I am right where I need to be.

What are you working on now? What strategies or experiences are most informing your current approach to writing?

I am working on essays that are poetic in form. I am also working on poems about tents, which seems to be in the zeitgeist right now, and I am very interested in the transitionary, the crucial need for housing and for safe-enough places, like encampments. And weirdly, I am writing in the company of a live-cam on two endangered red wolves. So, all those things. And it depends on how I feel every morning. I was commissioned a lot in the last few months, so I wrote an essay about happiness and an essay about someone’s art show that I think is going to come to town soon. For that, I had to think beyond what I am interested in, which was really good to do, but now I am just feasting on what I am interested in.

Author spotlight: Sue Goyette Read More »

Author spotlight: Clare Goulet

Author Spotlights

Clare Goulet is a poet, essayist, editor, and instructor and the coordinator of the Writing Center at MSVU. Her interests include interdisciplinary writing, poetics, metaphor and the work of Jan Zwicky, especially applications of her notion of ‘lyric philosophy.’ Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau Press, 2024) is her first collection of poems. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Collateral, Poetry Canada Review, and The Dalhousie Review. She lives and teaches in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): How did you arrive at lichen as your subject? Do you have any seminal memories involving lichen that began this fascination?

Clare Goulet: Yes! One deep memory: Growing up, my backyard was woods. One summer, at 3 or 4, I climbed alone to the top of what seemed a granite mountain thick with crumbly brown bits—Umbilicaria [rock tripe] it turns out—something to peel as I lay on my stomach and sang to myself. I remember the heat and how the lichen-covered surface scratched my bare skin. I don’t remember a world without lichen.

I rediscovered them more consciously in Labrador—they’re the first growth after snowmelt and make treeless rock seem lush, teeming, rainforest. I came back from walks with full pockets, arranged them on a pine board, and resisted learning names to prolong that first encounter of seeing something as it is. Once names kick in you don’t see the same way—plus the danger of thinking you know or own, moving on once the label is pasted over. So I cultivated ignorance and just sat with them awhile.

Resistance broke in 2003 when Lichens of North America came out, big as a 19th century family bible, gorgeous and sacred. It was all there: fungus and algae, symbiosis and historic uses, Latin and common names—goblin lights, shield, here come the metaphors—with chemistry and keys to species. Philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky put out Wisdom and Metaphor that same year, so the two books cooked together in a pot on the back of the stove while I kept collecting lichen for joy and teaching poetry for work. Simmer, simmer.

Until the inevitable: in St. John’s in 2006, I gave a passionate paper on metaphor with a parallel thread on lichen—both composites of different elements that in relation make something new. Even their histories are analogous! Both dismissed for millennia, just starting to be understood. A fresh comparison of two or more things isn’t a figure of speech; it’s a figure of thought that changes your mind. And lichen isn’t a plant, it’s a hangout (fungus, algae, yeasts), a relationship you can hold in your hand. I mean, how cool is that?

I wanted metaphorical structures—poems—to explore that analogy. I sketched a lichen A-Z field guide on a notebook page then shelved it for umpteen years to raise my amazing kid. It felt good to get back to it. A joy. It felt like singing on that rock in the woods again.

After the manuscript went to press, I treated myself to the just-out English translation of Vincent Zonca’s Lichens and discovered that American poet Brenda Hillman made a similar analogy. Don McKay too, mapping that analogy via essay with genius verve in his All New Animal Acts. We’d each arrived to it in our own way and time, and I love that we crossed paths.

It seems that the process of integrating research into your work is quite intensive. Do you enjoy extensive research? What was your research process like?

It felt like simple curiosity. Once I opened up the Pandora’s box of what-are-these-critters, hyphal tentacles spread in every direction, and I followed—down literal paths in the woods around the pond, into libraries, herbaria, science journals, conversations with botanists, mediaeval drawings, fairy tales. Every book on lichen I’ve seen—centuries of them, even the most disciplined and scientific—seems pulled to cover everything: history, dyes, perfume and taxonomy, illustration and medicine, as well as types and species. This book’s alphabet structure, its index of names, thankfully gave it a tight container. Within that, it does spill everywhere. And when I thought it was done, I still ended up in an Oxford herbarium handling Linnaeaus’s specimens, then in 1810 Irish botanical letters of Ellen Hutchins, and now there’s a new section… a kind of herbarium visit for the reader. I blame lichen: its system is to integrate everything and spread.

In researching for this collection, what was the most shocking or exciting discovery that you made?

Three shocks. The first was symbiosis. When I first started collecting, I didn’t know about symbiosis: fungus plus photobiont in partnership, roomies. Swoon. The second was the thrill of being alive for Toby Spribille’s 2016 finding of not two but three partners—or more!—with the presence of yeasts. The third was slapstick. I was standing on a dock at Elbow Lake, Ontario, zooming in with my phone-camera on lush cup lichens at eye level on a shed roof. I was at maximum enlargement when a monstrous multi-eyed, fanged spider filled the whole screen. I screamed and fell off the dock.

Much of your career has been as a teacher, running a writing center, and as an editor. How do these experiences inform your writing? Do you find that your editorial experience refines your writing voice? Challenges it?

For sure the three feel symbiotic. Even the editing is an extension of teaching and mentoring, which I love. Does my editorial experience ‘refine my writing voice’? God no. If only. As a poetry editor, going all the way back to Helen Humphreys’s Anthem with Brick, I’m a slow, careful perfectionist-type, tilting to minimalist. As a writer of this book, I turned out to be loose, chatty, exuberant, disobedient. That was a shock. Perhaps in the practical circumstance of working solo parent, I had to deke my inner editor simply to get this book made. At live readings, she still comes out, that editor, horrified and tweaking and tightening, or changing up the order: and that’s ok, because the book is out.

Something that struck me—that I think this collection does exceptionally—is operate on multiple temporal scales. It conjures deep geological time, it engages with human history through mythology and historic figures from many eras, and it often occupies a contemporary landscape, populated with late 20th and 21st century cultural references. There were parts of the collection that felt primordial and elemental, some that felt particularly “pop” and of this moment, and many that felt both at the same time. How were you thinking about temporality and situating the lyrical voice in time?

If you look at lichen long enough, you start thinking like lichen, which means reaching in all directions and integrating as you go. I looked at a lichen, and it pointed everywhere. And maybe—in the same way a first novel is often autobiographical, bringing in everything in that writer’s life to date—this first book of poems ended up bringing in a lifetime of reading. In some ways, it’s a book responding to books, to myth and stories and language and translation. I didn’t intend that.

Deep time, I have to laugh: I was text editor for geologists Rob Fensome and Graham Williams for their Last Billion Years—twice, both editions—so geologic time is now a reflex. They taught me how to swing from the long view to the close shot and how to see both in any moment. It’s relaxing to know we’re just specks and dust.

Your language and rhythm, as well as surprising citational choices— from Looney Tunes, to ‘walk into a bar’ jokes, to ancient Greek philosophers, to Vogue magazine (and much more)—bring a great sense of humour to your poetry. I was interested in tone as I was reading, finding the tone ranging from trickster-esque or even flirtatious to the gravity of seriously reckoning with human finitude. Can you speak to your intended tone (or tones) and how those choices relate to the overall ambition of the collection?

I let the lichen, or my response to a particular lichen, situate the voice and tone—and these species are wildly diverse! Allowing that was tough; I prefer books and albums that are extreme in consistency, even monotone. But you can’t respond to tiny, hidden elf-ear the way you can to a bodacious red Cladonia. Each elicits certain thoughts, memories, rhythms, line lengths.

This drove Andrew at Gaspereau a bit nuts, as it presented a problem for page design, as poems varied from short lines to long, spare to storied. In the end, he hung each poem, as he explains it, “on a vertical centre line strung between the title and the folio to allow inner and outer margins to expand and contract as needed.” His design creates a physically coherent book, which was key, and his selection of Matthew Carter’s Galliard for typeface keeps it spacious. I am so grateful to Andrew for this wizardry, and it was fascinating to watch how the connection of tone and style unfolds through a built physical structure. And to see how early that takes shape—I’ll never write in anything but a 5×7 notebook again.

Your collection largely treats lichen as a metaphor for metaphor, and for either/or and both/and forms of knowing. What do you think we can learn from these ways of knowing, and what do you believe the power and possibility of breaking out of binary thought forms is? Essentially, what do you think this does? How does it change us?

You’ve cut to the heart of what I care about. I mean, if the quantum physics of the 1920s is to be believed (though we still live day to day as if it isn’t, like a weird flat-earth society), then simultaneous opposing states or multiple states co-existing is just how it is. So why wouldn’t we make things that enact or point to that, or create and organize ourselves in ways that align with the rest of the universe? This kind of thinking is emerging more in younger generations: adaptable, flexible, persistent, fluid, social, collaborative, more open to thought that includes but moves beyond analysis. Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy, Iain McGilchrist’s Master and his Emissary, Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robyn Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: perhaps these books and the current lichen renaissance strike a chord because other forms of knowing have failed us or turned out to be not what the world is, not how even our own 3-pound brains work. Metaphor and lichen offer another way of being—though whether we adapt, like lichen, soon enough to escape consequences is unlikely.

Can you speak more to how you see language’s relationship to the world and the way that your work is taking up an interest in both language’s possibilities and its limitations?

Language fails us. And yet!—

Are you working on any new projects? Do you have a sense of what you are inspired to next pursue?

A novel at last ready to go out, after a necessary hiatus, and a new work started, Loan Words—minimalist pieces made of words that English borrowed (not always nicely) from other cultures, telling those stories with the words taken. When we open our mouths, we speak with voices of other times and places—language tangles, and everything connects.

Author spotlight: Clare Goulet Read More »

Author spotlight: Donna Jones Alward

Author Spotlights

Donna Jones Alward is a New York Times bestselling author of many beloved romance novels that have been translated into over a dozen languages. She lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and two cats, and her much anticipated first work of historical fiction, When the World Fell Silent (HarperCollins, 2024), is out this summer, 2024.

Join us on August 20 at the WFNS office (Halifax) for the launch of When the World Fell Silent.

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): When the World Fell Silent—your forthcoming novel, a work of historical fiction—seems like quite a departure from your history of writing romance. Did this feel like a big gear-shifting moment for you? Can you speak to this pivot?

Donna Alward Jones: It was definitely a big shifting of gears, but one I was ready for! I had been writing romance for over 15 years when I started When the World Fell Silent and was looking for something new and challenging. I’m not sure I would have taken the leap if it hadn’t been for my publisher suggesting it, but I think things happen for a reason. I really didn’t want to look back and regret not doing it because I was afraid to take on something new and challenging, so I said yes and knuckled down to face a big learning curve.

What has it been like as a writer with an established readership who know you as a romance writer to write in a different genre? Do you expect this book to appeal to a different readership?

It’s been a little bit tricky—mostly in deciding how to approach it. I decided to publish under a variation of my name to make a small differentiation; I also did a complete website redesign and have been adding historical content to my social media while still marketing my contemporary romance. But here’s the thing about romance readers: they are generally voracious. Many read other genres as well, so I think that, while this book will appeal to a whole other readership, I’ll also bring some of my established audience with me—because they read so widely. I think it’s more likely for romance readers to transfer over to historical fiction than for historical fiction readers to move to romance.

Were there any unanticipated difficulties in writing historical fiction—or departing from romance writing—that you didn’t anticipate?

I read a lot of historical fiction and know a lot of hist fic authors, so nothing really came as a big surprise. That doesn’t mean it was easy, though. I knew plotting would be more intensive, for example, and the story itself more complex. It’s twice the length that I’m used to—so that sort of thing.

Can you speak to your choice to write a book about the Halifax Explosion and its aftermath? Has this always been of interest to you?

You know, it still amazes me that I wasn’t taught about the explosion in Social Studies or Canadian History. I first learned of it when I read [Hugh MacLennan’s] Barometer Rising in my Atlantic Literature class in grade 12. Then, when I moved to the HRM in 2008, I learned a whole lot more. It was a natural fit for me to use as a backdrop for my novel: I have always been intrigued by how people respond and rebuild after tragedy. Plus, there’s the added perk of sharing something momentous that happened right here with the rest of the world.

Have you read other fictional accounts of the Halifax Explosion? Where do you think your account fits into this history?

I’ve read a few but not many. I adore Shattered by Jennie Marsland, a local author, and also really enjoyed Tides of Honour by Genevieve Graham. Each of us has a different account, and I think that’s because, while the historical record remains the same, it’s the characters and their journeys that really form the story.

A lot of your work is very place-based and uses historical buildings and landscapes to tell a story. Did this make the transition to writing historical fiction more seamless for you?

I wouldn’t exactly call it seamless. But yes, a strong sense of place is something I try to use to anchor a story. A lot of switching to historical fiction was taking what I know and simply employing it in a slightly different way. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small, contemporary town or an Alberta ranch or 1917 Halifax: worldbuilding through the eyes of the character is still done in the same basic way.

Are there any places in Halifax where you spent a lot of time or visited while you were writing When the World Fell Silent?

I cannot say enough about the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: the exhibit is so fantastic. The first time I went for the purpose of research (I’d already been a few times) was in 2020, so there were public health restrictions in place. I was the only person there for two hours. I’ve been back several times, and I’m doing a Tuesday Talk there in November.

Did you need to do a lot of research for this book? What was that process like?

I expanded my book budget for sure! There are so many terrific nonfiction books about the explosion, and I bought most of them; I went to the museum several times, and I also had the assistance of the librarians at Halifax Central Library in accessing materials that could not be checked out. Sometimes for other details—such as information about Camp Hill Hospital and nursing during the war—I did Google searches, and I also loved, loved, loved Newspapers.com. It is so easy to go down a research rabbit hole while looking at old newspapers!

Do you plan on continuing to write historical fiction or explore other genres in the future?

I’m definitely continuing to write historical fiction. It’s been a big challenge but so enjoyable! I’m really happy I made the decision to pivot.

You have a book launch in Halifax at WFNS coming up in August. How has the support of the local writing scene been for you, now and throughout your career?

I’m a recent member of WFNS, but for many years I belonged to RWAC—Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada. Having a supportive writing community has been incredibly important to me; this can be a really solitary endeavour. I joined WFNS almost a year ago, and I have felt incredibly welcomed. I participating in Booktoberfest and the Nova Swoons event and the Writing Rumble. Meeting new people in the writing scene has been wonderful! I hope to see some of my new friends at the launch of When the World Fell Silent on August 20.

What are you working on now?

I’m writing a story set partially on the Titanic, partially on the Carpathia, and then winding up here in Halifax. It’s got two female protagonists who sail on the Titanic to begin a new life—and whose plans are changed by the disaster.

Author spotlight: Donna Jones Alward Read More »

Author Spotlight: Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2024 Ellemeno Prize recipient

Author Spotlights

Recipient of the inaugural Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize, Shannon Webb-Campbell is of Mi’kmaq and settler heritage. She is a member of Flat Bay First Nation. Her books include Re: Wild Her (Book*hug, forthcoming 2025), Lunar Tides (2022), I Am a Body of Land (2019), and Still No Word (2015), which was the recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award. Shannon is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the editor of Visual Arts News Magazine.

Of Shannon’s winning poem, “Her Eros Restored,” prize jurors Sue MacLeod, Jessica Scott Kerrin, and Carol Shillibeer had this to say:

“‘Her Eros Restored’ loosens a too-tight corset—each of its poetic sections responding to Les Chiffons de La Châtre — Corsets roses [Rags of the Castle — Pink Corsets] (1960) by Gérard Deschamps. It does so by reclaiming small moments of feminine autonomy. From the first section’s ‘catapulting through moonlight… on the equinox’ to the last section’s ‘tangle like root vegetables,’ the poem perceives a world in which a person of mixed heritage, devalued within the dominant culture, can both fly above its restrictions and simultaneously dance with the earth and sea—so that life feels as if a new story is being born—a story of power, energy, love, and authenticity. No mean achievement. This is a thing of beauty.”

Read “Her Eros Restored” below, followed by our interview with Shannon.

Her Eros Restored
after Gérard Deschamps, Les Chiffons de La Châtre – Corsets roses, printemps 1960

1
on the last day of summer
we catch a Trans-Atlantic flight over midnight
catapulting through moonlight
before a swirling hurricane
makes landfall on the Equinox
we kick up our heels
as the city of light embraces
its second new year

2
at Le Comptoir Parisen alone
I write long after Anaïs Nin
for a world that does not exist
she was the first of her kind
to pursue pleasure for its own sake
I am now a sultry femme
a visionary sprite
who splits, sips and slurps

3
we are drinking champagne with the rats
on the steps of the Pantheon
beneath the only star in Paris
you toast to the writers and philosophers
gulping brut out of paper cups
I thank the poets, chemists, and revolutionaries
blood buzzed we tiptoe backwards
walking separately along the Seine

4
I need to break the glass of Deschamps’
Les Chiffons de La Carte—Corsets roses
smashing the patriarchy I must
set women’s rags and underwear free—
it’s no longer springtime in the 1960s, ladies!
unhinge your brasseries, panties, corsets and girdles
let the old girls breathe and fight back beyond
wives, mothers, child-eaters, witches and whores

5
you see the house lights
Illuminate Palais Garnier
I am strapped inside the opera house
on a boat ride of toil-and-trouble woes
charting a three sisters’ tragedy
waves of love, lust and revenge
while fancy Parisians take candlelit selfies
you wander alone in the rain

6
years after the wages of crude men
where I got cornered on slick streets
whose too aggressive tongues
pushed me hard down cobblestone
I became a Paris runaround
wearing my extravagant outfits—
pleather dresses, pleated skirts, fanciful feathers
you restored my best lace

7
reading e.e cummings’ erotic poems out loud
under covers we tangle like root vegetables
wrapped up in borrowed sheets you read to me
around you and forever: I am hugging the sea
tracing my lips with your wet fingertips
you tell me your only wish
a desire to draw me nude
but you never do

Andy Verboom (WFNS Program Manager): Tell us about your influences, Shannon. In your regular writing practice, how do the works of other artists and writers guide your hand? Do you think your primary literary form—poetry—is particularly attuned to influence from artistic others?

Shannon Webb-Campbell: My regular writing practice spans all kinds of inspirations from other artists and writers. As the editor of Visual Ars News and Muskrat Magazine, I spend a lot of time experiencing, reflecting on, and writing about art. I frequently visit galleries, engage with artists, and have my own visual practice. Art has leaked into my poetic practice. Tuning into other art forms encourages us to think, see, and feel differently. To experience the bends of sorts. As a poet, I draw from artistic others but also from poetry in general. Poetry bends language. Perhaps it encourages us to bend with life, too.

AV: I like this metaphorical knitting of “the bends”—a dramatic bodily disorientation in a rapidly changed environment—with the more common connotations of “bending,” like refraction and flexibility. Do you experience impactful artworks as productive disorientations? Put another way, do artworks need to disorientate us in order to shift our perspectives?

SWC: This is an interesting question, Andy. Part of me feels like, when I am disoriented, I look to art as a way of orienting, but perhaps it’s vice versa. Sometimes I am seeking pleasure, other times intellectual nourishment, but most often, I am interested in new ways of seeing the world, a disruption or shift from my own point of view. Art does this. Poetry also works in this way, too. When they are impactful, I think art and poetry are incredibly rich and productive forms of disorientation, a space where we can detach from our day-to-day thoughts and give our creative minds room to spark. Art and poetry are means to open up new possibilities, different ways of thinking and experience new and old life cycles.

AV: Your artist’s statement for “Her Eros Restored” mentions encountering Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre during a research trip to Paris. What were you there to research, and how did that topic lead to you to this artwork at the Centre Pompidou?

SWC: In autumn of 2022, I travelled to Paris to saturate myself in art, architecture, and beauty as part of sketching out my next poetry collection, Re: Wild Her (which is forthcoming with Book*hug in 2025), and I encountered Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre at the Centre Pompidou for the second time.

The first time I visited the work was on a solo trip to Paris in 2009, which was after selling most of my belongings, including my clothes, and hosting a small lomography art show, Moving Pictures, at Love, Me Boutique on Dresden Row to help fund my trip. Deschamps’s Les Chiffons de La Châtre left an impression in my mid 20s, but what struck me was how different I felt experiencing the work for a second time, which all these years later still bears the traces of the bodies who wore the rags and discarded women’s underwear. “Her Eros Restored” is a poetic attempt to overthrow the patriarchy, subvert the male gaze, and set these bodies and their discarded under linens and corsets free.

AV: “Her Eros Restored” is included in that fourth, forthcoming poetry collection, Re: Wild Her. As you approach a book-length collection, how do you think about its individual poems? And what does it mean, for you, to further separate a poem into individual parts or sections?

SWC: I initially imagined writing “Her Eros Restored” as a long poem but got distracted. Other poems interrupted the flow of that idea. Initially, I conceived of it as a numerical poem, but that’s evolved recently through the editing process with my fabulous editor, Sandra Ridley. The version of “Her Eros Restored” that won the first-ever Ellemeno Visual Literature Prize has gone through its own rewilding process and will appear slightly altered in the published book.

I think separating the poem into parts or sections lets each stanza exist as its own nesting doll. The space and line breaks are important to give the poetics room to breathe, as well as air out those fleshy pink corsets and panties that have been under Deschamps’s glass since the 1960s.

AV: Is there an echo, then, between the process of composing “Her Eros Restored”—the interruption and return to Deschamps’s work—and the space essential to the poem’s structure? Or am I overcomplicating things?

SWC: Honestly, I don’t think I had the poetic tools to draw upon when I first encountered Les Chiffons de La Châtre. In fact, the only piece of writing I published from my first trip to Paris are two letters included in When The Nights Are Twice As Long: Love Letters of Canadian Poets, an anthology edited by David Esso and Jeanette Lynes (Goose Lane, 2015). The anthology features over 129 love letters by English Canadian poets P.K. Page to F.R. Scott, Leonard Cohen, Louis Riel, Milton Acorn’s letters to his former wife Gwendolyn MacEwen, and Susan Musgrave’s letters to her late husband Stephen Reid.

AV: How does Re: Wild Her fit into the arc of your earlier collections?

SWC: Still No Word (Breakwater 2015), which was the inaugural recipient of Egale Canada’s Out in Print Award, seeks the appearance of the self in others and the recognition of others within the self, and it inhabits the mercurial space between public and private. Edited and introduced by Lee Maracle, I Am a Body of Land (Book*hug 2019), is a complex revisioning of an earlier work exploring poetic responsibility and accountability. Lunar Tides imagines the primordial connections between love, grief and water, structured within the lunar calendar. In a way, Re: Wild Her follows the arc of my earlier books as a poetic extension, but is a text entirely its own.

Author Spotlight: Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2024 Ellemeno Prize recipient Read More »

Author Spotlight: Gabriel Milhet, 2026 Ellemeno Prize recipient

"Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812"
Gabriel Milhet

Artist's statement

Interview with Gabriel Milhet

Author Spotlight: Sonja Boon, 2025 Ellemeno Prize recipient

At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl), 2024
Sonja Boon

Interview with Sonja Boon

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Author spotlight: Elliott Gish

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Author spotlight: Sue Goyette

Author spotlight: Clare Goulet

Author spotlight: Donna Jones Alward

Author Spotlight: Shannon Webb-Campbell, 2024 Ellemeno Prize recipient

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Author Spotlights

"Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812" Gabriel Milhet

Artist's statement

Interview with Gabriel Milhet

At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl), 2024 Sonja Boon

Interview with Sonja Boon

Experience Levels

"Researching the Life of Gabriel Hall (to 1824): Farmer, Freedom Fighter, and a Black Refugee of The War of 1812"
Gabriel Milhet

At Sea (Casket Cloth and Mourning Shawl), 2024
Sonja Boon