Lisa Timpf was a cocoaphile published in Cocoa Cabin in 2014. Funnily enough we crossed paths each from our trajectory to end up being both reviewers at The Mirimichi Reader. She is now a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her speculative poetry has appeared in New Myths, Star*Line, Triangulation: Habitats, Polar Borealis, and other venues. She’s also had more than 40 short stories and numerous reviews published in magazines and anthologies. Lisa’s collection of speculative haibun poetry, In Days to Come, is available from Hiraeth Publishing. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/.

PP: I missed seeing your title come out with Hiraeth this March. Congratulations. Good to learn there’s a sub-genre of spec fiction haibun. Maybe Haiku Canada members should especially take note.

What have you read lately that you loved and why?

LT: I recently finished Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different by Lisa Selin Davis. I really liked the way the author went about inquiring into the nature of the “tomboy” phenomenon, including personal reflections, research results, advertising material, etc. As someone who’d grown up being called, and acting like, a tomboy, I found the book both affirming and informative.

PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

LT: Now that I’m retired, I’m focussed on enjoying every moment. I have a spunky cocker spaniel-Jack Russel cross that keeps me on my toes, a garden and large property to tend, and tons of story and poem ideas to explore.

PP: Focussing on the moment certainly lends itself to haiku. A lot of people who retire often say they don’t see how they ever found the time to work. What do you have literary-wise underway or forthcoming?

LT: I’m revisiting the research I completed for my never-completed Master’s thesis in Sport History, wondering whether I can make a book or at least an article or two out of it. It seems a shame to waste it all. I also pitched an idea for an anthology I’d like to edit, so I’m waiting back to hear about that.

PP: What work do you have out there that people can read? 

LT: Many of my stories are available for free at certain venues. One such venue is New Myths (newmyths.com). Postings there include the poems “Canem Roboto” (Issue 55) and “Over the Rainbow” (Issue 56/57) and the short stories “Roxy” (Issue 32), “Roxy’s Rule” (Issue 40) and “The Switch” (Issue 59), among others.

I edited Eye to the Telescope Issue 32, Sports and Games issue, which includes a number of fine poems. I’ve also done book reviews for sites like The Miramichi Reader and The Future Fire. A more complete listing of the works I’ve been fortunate enough to see published appears on my web site.

PP: Super. Thanks for your time, Lisa!

Jacqueline Bourque was a Rubies Tuesday poet at the same time I was. She was in If and Where There’s Fire, our 2013 workshop group anthology chapbooks. She has since come out with her first trade collection, Repointing the Bricks (Mansfield Press, 2021).

PP: So, what have you been reading lately that lit you up? Why or how?

JB: I recently found Matilde Battistini’s Symbols and Allegories in Art at a moment when I was searching for inspiration. A friend I met for coffee was carrying a bag of books that he planned to donate to the public library, and while we chatted he spread them out on the table and asked if I wanted to take any of them home. I immediately reached for the Battistini book. The next morning, I flipped through it, stopped at the section on ladders, and wrote a poem on Icon of the Allegorical Ladder of Saint-John Climacus. My interest has progressed from there. I am currently writing a series of ekphrastic poems based on the paintings in the book.

There’s also Helen Weinzweig’s Basic Black with Pearls, which has led me to question connection and order in my poems. Her editor, James Polk, said that Weinzweig’s manuscript was “a stack of quality bond paper, perfectly typed, with a note advising him to throw the pages into the air and arrange them as they fell”. The novel reads as if this is what happened. The poetic implications of that randomness has me focused on finding the right hook for the first line when I write, and then with rearranging the order of lines as I go. 

PP: The value of random chance can never be underestimated, like crossing paths with that Battistini book. What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?

JB: I am constantly examining my choices, re-considering edicts, coming to terms with self-discoveries, and modifying habits to serve my goals. As if turning the peg of a guitar string to get the right pitch. This process explains the title of my recent poetry collection: Repointing the Bricks.

Sometimes, life imposes its own changes—such as with COVID-19. Isolation provided me with hours of uninterrupted time for writing. The challenge now that the world has opened up again is to find the right balance between social and cultural activities, while preserving that quiet space for writing.

PP: Glad to hear that shelter in place has had good effects. What is underway or forthcoming?

JB: A film on Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers resonated with me when I was reading Catherine Graham’s Her Red Hair Rises With the Wings of Insects. She begins the book with a series of sonnet-like poems, so I began writing about Petit’s walk using the sonnet form. I completed fourteen poems in that series, and hope to publish it as a chapbook.

PP: Wow.

JB: After that, my grandmother appeared to me in a dream. As a child, I rarely heard her speak. Yet in my dream, she held the persona of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada. At the time, I was reading The Next Wave. One of the poets in the anthology, Evan Jones, writes terrific prose poems and his introduction of mythology has a striking effect. I’ve since written fifteen prose poems about my grandmother, portraying her, at times, as Leto, the Greek goddess of motherhood.  

PP: Wow, super-generative dream. What work do you have out that people can read? 

JB: My chapbook, The Dune as Bookmark, was published in 2019 by Jim Johnstone at Anstruther Press. I then expanded those poems into a full manuscript, Repointing the Bricks (Mansfield Press, 2021).

You can also find my poems in various Canadian journals and anthologies such as The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Fiddlehead, Queen’s Quarterly and I Found It at the Movies.

PP: Awesome. Thanks for your time, Jacqueline.

Someone who keeps at writing for 30 years or so are ones to watch. I came across Paul David Mena’s work on twitter and became a fan and eventually asked, please, pretty please could I publish some? The result was Morning Becomes Azaleas/, le matin devient azalées (phafours, 2019) with translations to French by myself and Julie Hamel. Copies still available.

Paul David Mena has been writing haiku and senryu for nearly 30 years. He is the author of the chapbooks “tenement landscapes” (1995), “trainsongs” (1997), “the brewpub chronicles” (1999), and “the morning becomes azaleas” (2019) and has had his poetry published in Brussels Sprout,The Heron’s Nest, Frogpond, Modern Haiku and numerous other journals over the years. He spends quite a bit of time on social media, providing mostly unsolicited commentary in a haiku format. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts with his wife and dog and works as a Software Engineer at a prominent marine research facility.

PP: What have you read lately that lit you up? 

PDM: I recently read “Platero and I” by Juan Ramón Jiménez and found it breathtakingly beautiful. It took me a long time to finish it because I kept rereading each poem. Naturally I read a lot of haiku, most recently “The Awakened One“, edited by Adjei Agyei-Baah and Gabriel Rosenstock. At the moment I’m reading a collection of novellas by Jim Harrison and have a number of other books queued up.

PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise? 

PDM: I try to write every day, and probably haven’t missed a day in about 10 years. Beyond that, I’m still working full-time but am within a year or two of retiring. I’ve probably spent more time that I’d like to admit watching the Red Sox when I could have been reading or writing. I’m trying to remain happy and healthy so that I can enjoy my golden years while I can. I’m also trying to learn Spanish so that my wife and I can spend more time in Mexico.

PP: What is underway or forthcoming? Anything you can tell? 

PDM: No projects are in the works at the moment, but I have a database of over 32,000 haiku that I can tap should motivation strike me. This is what happens when a techie writes poetry.

PP: What work can people read? 

PDM: I self-published “the brewpub chronicles” and had to print a minimum of over 200 copies. I still have many of them and will happily give them away to anyone who asks. The bilingual edition of “tenement landscapes” is still available from Amazon. I post a great deal of haiku on Twitter as “Extra Special Bitter” and on several Facebook groups.

PP: Any author site, social media urls or things you’d like to plug? 

PDM: My favorite authors these days are Luis Alberto Urrea and Javier Cercas. “The Heron’s Nest” remains a wonderful haiku quarterly after 20 years, and the brand new “Trash Panda” is also quite good.

At the beginning of the pandemic I ordered a number of haiku books from Snapshot Press in the U.K. and was particularly impressed by the work of Hamish Ironside. Sadly, I only discovered the single-line haiku of Stuart Quine a few months after he passed away.

Anything by Paul Miller (a.k.a. “paul m.”) is pure gold. Jeff Winke is a master of haiku and senryu and a good friend. I envy poets who could say so much with such an economy of language.

PP: Thanks, Paul. Let me reiterate, make a book, book, book…