Articles

I once heard Michael Cunningham say that fear is the biggest hindrance to writing well. He said that the best writers are those who aren’t afraid to write poorly. They do not worry about how their work will be received or whether and where they will publish it. They write because the act of writing is fun. This is a great reminder when motivation starts to wane. Sure, writing is hard work but it’s also about invention and play. The very act is its own reward.

Our decision to share stories and the way we tell them is a political one…Few native-born Americans can understand the emotional upheaval of leaving your home country and becoming a citizen of another, whatever the reasons.

One thing that keeps me writing is having a network of poets to share work and ideas with. “Self-Portrait” came about from reading Maya’s work and responding to some of her images and ideas through my own lens. Her poetry is, generally speaking, more personal than mine, and I admire it for that, and with this poem I let her striking honesty guide me into a more personal territory of my own.

I’ve always been drawn to exploring how different artistic mediums can work together to create something whole. One artist that had a big impact in my creative process for this piece was Neil Shea. He’s a writer and photographer for National Geographic.

In the darkest fairy and folk tales, there is the hollow sound of wood chopping to comfort abandoned children. There’s a wolf waiting in forest shadows for a red hood. There’s an intricately carved box meant to hold a girl’s insides, but a pig heart glistens in its stead, warm and leaking. In Julia Bouwsma’s debut poetry collection, Work by Bloodlight, readers will find the hungry children, the predators, the pig heart steaming in its own reek, and precious little comfort.

I think Canada is too big and too geographically diverse to contain a single aesthetic to writing about place and space—and for that, I’m grateful. Across our sea-to-sea-to-sea country, there’s room for a multiplicity of approaches to writing ourselves into and out from our landscapes. However, that doesn’t mean the full range of voices is making it into print. The more we hear from marginalized writers of all kinds—but especially Indigenous writers, whose roots go deepest—the more nuanced our understanding of place and space will become.

It seems to be an unwritten requisite of being a kid that, at some point or another, you secretly imagine tiny people living inside your guts.

The best teacher I ever had once told me: “the young writer’s best friend should be the garbage can.” He taught me that one should not be afraid to throw something away if it wasn’t good enough, or to start something new (or again) to get it right.

I don’t know if there’s a particular Canadian aesthetic, period. I doubt it. I think an artist’s relationship to her environment will always inflect her work, but Canada is a huge and diverse country with a complicated (and in some ways shameful) history—so my Canada might not be another writer’s.

The longer I work in nonfiction (it has been fifteen years now), the more I see the essay as a way of life. Creative inquiry becomes a style of thought.