Claudia Radmore appeared in a group chapbook co-published with Tree Press and phafours over a decade ago as well as with a single author collection of monostitches, Cough of a Sloth (phafours, 2017). She has also published poetry and non-fiction: Rabbit (Aeolus House, 2020), Park Ex Girl: Life with Gasometer (Shoreline Press, 2020), The Business of Isness (Éditions des petits nuages, 2017), fish spine picked clean (Éditions des petits nuages, 2018), Blackbird’s Throat; and Three Sets of Literary Haibun, (catkin press, 2015) Accidentals (Apt 9 press, 2011) Your Hands Discover Me / Tes mains me découvrent – poésie et prose poétique (Éditions du tanka francophone, Montréal, 2010), Arctic Twilight: Leornard Budgell and Canada’s Changing North (Blue Butterfly, 2009).
PP: What have you read lately that lit you up?
CCR:Don Domanski, All Our Wonder Unavenged; David Blaikie, A Season in Lowertown. I am fascinated by how I can sit with their poems for hours trying to figure out their magic. With Don Domanski, it only takes a line; with David Blaikie’s poems, each piece is so complete, yet not confining, and gutsy.
PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
CCR: Words and Art. I am going through Artwork I’ve done, lots of figure drawings, trying to figure out how to lengthen their lives, get them out in the world. I am working on a large painting incorporating some of these drawings. It is not going particularly well, but it’s great fun getting paint all over me again. I still look forward to The Ruby Tuesday Group each week for stimulation and revision of current work.
My small garden.
PP: What is underway or forthcoming?
CCR: I’m working on a book-length poem based on a house I once designed and built, from the wishful idea and childish drawings of it to its completion and what, and who, were necessary to consider it finished, and why I sold it. I’m near the end of writing its parts (fragments). Soon I’ll put them together and see whether a long poem is there. You’ll connect with this theme!
I’ve just sent a draft of a novel to novelist Diane Schoemperlen in Kingston. We’ll see what comes of that. It’s based on the hunt for my Aunt Wavy, whom I knew as my aunt, but who was most likely my grandmother. She went back to England in 1925 leaving lots of questions but seemed intent on creating more secrets throughout her life. Fun ones!
My poetry collection Pink Hibiscus: Poems of the South Pacific will be out in a month or so with Éditions des petits nuages.
I am part way into a memoir of my CUSO stint in Vanuatu from 1986 – 1989. I am hoping to convince the Mississippi Valley Textile Museum to put on a small exhibit of the weavings and artifacts I have from Vanuatu.
PP: What work do you have out?
CCR: Sweet Vinegars: The Secret Lives of Wildflowers, a collection of lyric poems.
A query to The University of Manitoba re possible publishing The Fur Trader and The Artist, the sequel to Arctic Twilight: Leonard Budgell and the Changing North (ms ready to go)
PP: Any author site or social media urls you’d like to drop?
Today in Checking In: Where Are They Now: Carol Stephen an active blogger and poet. She was the rep for the Canadian Authors Association and has been on the board for the Tree Reading Series. Although living outside of Ottawa, she often trekked to Ottawa for poetry events. Her previous chapbooks include: Chromatic Beliefs (group chapbooks, phafours, 2011), Above the Hum of Yellow Jackets (2011),Architectural Variations (2012), Ink Dogs in my Shoes (Nose In Book Publishing, 2014), collaborations with fellow poet, JC Sulzenko, Breathing Mutable Air (Nose In Book Publishing, 2015) and Slant of Light (Nose In Book Publishing, 2016), Unhook (Bondi Studios, 2018), Lost Silence of the Small ( Local Gems Poetry Press, Long Island New York, 2018), Winning the Lottery (Crowe Creations, 2019).
PP: What have you read lately that lit you up? why or how?
CS:Things That Join the Sea and Sky, by Mark Nepo. It’s a series of short prose pieces that help “when someone is struggling to keep their head above water”.
PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
CS: My focus right now is on my health; have just started undergoing dialysis treatments 3 days per week among a few other issues.
PP: Since you have poems born of ICU and Clostridium Difficile as Winning the Lottery, perhaps this too will become fertile poetic ground. What is underway or forthcoming?
CS: I have my first full collection coming out later this year, What I Carry With Me (Friesen Press, 2022)
What I Carry With Me (forthcoming, 2022)
I also have two other manuscripts: one is ready to go, the other is in final process of edits. It’s already been out to beta readers.
PP: Congratulations! Any author site or social media urls you’d like to drop?
Skylar Kay is an Albertan poet currently living in Windsor while she completes her MA in English. She has an interest in Japanese poetic forms–namely haiku–but has explored longer forms as of late. Her debut book is Transcribing Moonlight (Frontenac House, April 2022). She is thrilled to see what comes next.
What drew me to this poet:CBC did a profile of a book of haibun(!) and then she read at the Haiku Canada Conference reminding me that the book was out there.
About the book: Transcribing Moonlight is a collection of autobiographical haibun which outlines the life of a trans woman from December 2018 to December 2019. The form of the journal itself is traditional for haibun; while experimental at times, the haibun pay attention to the physical world and are therefore able to capture the changing seasons, moons, and phases of the narrator’s life. The traditional trope of the moon and the traditional form of haibun become more nuanced and modern, as they represent a marginalized group and some of the struggles that trans women face, both externally and internally. These phases and struggles include gender (eu/dys)phoria, coming to terms with sexuality, life after graduation, relationships, and family issues.
Praise for the book:
As a trans haiku poet, Skylar Kay is breaking ground with her achingly beautiful and monumental collection of haibun in Transcribing (the perfect word) Moonlight. Haibun first appeared as a literary genre in Matsuo Bashō’s Oku No Hosomichi, a journey through Japan’s interior. Kay’s debut, also a journey to the interior, explores identity, the process of becoming self. She writes across, through, and into the body, all the while aware of the moon’s wax and wane, the subtle changes in seasons. And Kay has done her homework. Notable haiku publications include Autumn Moon Haiku, Haiku Canada Review, Presence, Haiku Page, Ephemerae and an honourable mention in the prestigious Betty Drevniok Award. Certainly Bashō would be proud of such an extraordinary gift to the world. ~ Terry Ann Carter, past president of Haiku Canada, author of Tokaido (winner of the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award).
Sample haibun:
Fourteen years ago, Leo sun scorched itself into my skin. Sunburn-blisters shaped like bowties emerged when we cut my shirt off and I puked on the floor. Doc said the blisters were from dehydration. Characteristics of Leo bubbled up, changed me over the summer: determination, generosity, masculine energy. I saw peach fuzz, heard voice cracks. How much still remains in my skin and blood today?
heat wave– my stubble back already
I exorcize the testosterone with little white pills, recite my prayer for surgery: remove this shit once and for all from my veins cut it off please fuck just cut it off like that shirt I couldn’t pull over my head fourteen years ago let me puke out masculine bile a decade and a half too late please Doc just take it away
wishing for another body– dandelion fluff
In recent years, Leo sun heralds forest fire season. British Columbia blazes beneath its fury. Oh dried out pines, how I know that pain. I promise it will get better
smoke obscures half the valley– but the blackbird song!
PP: How did you get first find to haiku and haibun?: SK: This is actually kind of a fun story! So the university where I did my undergrad, Mount Royal University, had these events where they would take old books that nobody took out from the library anymore, or books that were being replaced, and would sell them for a dollar. During my second year I stumbled across a copy of Basho’s travelogues. Looking back, the translations were not the best, but it still got me totally hooked! I was just so enthralled with just how much could be captured by such a short and seemingly simple form. I began to view haiku almost more as a philosophy than just a poetic form, and let it take over my life completely.
PP: Wow, that is a cool encounter. How did the form help shape the manuscript?
SK: As with many collections of haibun, Transcribing Moonlight follows a chronological progression through the seasons, through shifting lunar cycles. This was a perfect opportunity to use these poetic tropes to reflect and augment my own experience as a transgender woman, allowing my own phases of transition to kind of be swept up into the changes that one sees throughout the year. Beyond that, however, I felt that I needed more than just haiku. While I love the haiku form, and think it can capture a lot, there are quite a few instances of my life that I could not totally put into a handful of words. The longer length of haibun allowed me to provide a bit more detail and express myself more fully than I could have done otherwise. It took me a while to learn to write the prose, but I think it was a great experience!
PP: What was or will be your favourite moment(s) in making this book? SK: Oh there are a few! I shall go through them in order haha. So, firstly, getting rejected the first year I submitted this collection to Frontenac House. I knew it wasn’t ready, but a friend told me to submit it anyways. They rejected it, and rightfully so. My editor-to-be, however, Micheline Maylor, gave me a great piece of advice that day that I held onto throughout the course of writing and revising this book; she simply said ‘Work harder.” I loved that and took it to heart. Next, I gotta say that writing a poetry book that hurts to write is also super therapeutic. When I eventually really got into this collection, what it needed to be, it was liberating. The collection almost became therapy for me, as I could do a free-write session and just write out my thoughts and experiences. It made me face a lot of stuff I had been afraid to discuss before, and when I finally took that pain and made it into something beautiful, it meant the world to me. Finally, getting a call the next year to find out that Frontenac accepted the manuscript! I think I had a big grin on my face for the next two days. The whole process has been such a blessing and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
PP:That’s awesome. Micheline Maylor has a keen eye and is a great encourager. Thank you for seeing it through. Looking forward to what’s next for you.
Today in Checking In, Where Are They Now: phafours poet: Guy Simser, the current president of KaDo Ottawa, a haiku group. Guy has 2 published books and a chapbook and is a long-time member of Ottawa’s poetry scene. He has stood as contest judges. He has won the Diane Brebner Poetry Prize, Carleton University Poetry Prize, AHA Books Tanka Sequence Prize (USA), Keji Aso Senryu Prize (USA); Hekinan Haiku Special Prize (Japan); and the IODE Ontario Short Story, CBC Ottawa Radio Documentary, and Alberta Culture Radio Drama Prizes.
PP:What have you read lately that lit you up? Why or how?
GS: Just finished CAIN (hard cover edition,150 pages) by Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago. His last published book. I can imagine him laughing his way into the grave. CAIN offers a rib cracking parodic donkey ride through the Old Testament according to Saramago. If only my Sunday School teachers had had the chance to read it in the late 30’s & early 40’s; and would they have done so if it was available to them??? Thank Heaven for humour, particularly in these days of wars and Covid and Monkey flu, et al.
At the same time, I have been reading Cdn Military Historian Tim Cook’s At the Sharp End. An examination of WW1 through the eyes of the soldiers at the front. As a Cold War infantryman on duty in Germany I find this a worthwhile reminder of our human weaknesses and strengths under the worst deprivations, moral and physical.
Lastly, I just finished local poet David Blaikie’s A Season in Lowertown (Wet Ink Books): winner of the 2021 Don Gutteridge Poetry Award. David has a mature reporter’s eyes and ears which brings his 70’s Ottawa city “gritty” memories vividly to reader. Gritty yes, but so human too as expressed in the last poem of the book, ‘The Bridge’, “where we mellowed without resistance in the soft slow melt of time and words walked lightly on our tongues in the crevices of our days…” I’ll leave that poem’s final stanza for the reader to appreciate in the quiet of his/her reading. David is an Ottawa Mother Tongues group poet, originally from “Down East” and that geographical origin for me is frequently evident in his poetic voice. Not surprisingly, his book is dedicated to G.G. Award winning poet Alan Nowlan.
PP: What’s life’s focus these days, literary or otherwise?
GS: Well Pearl, I’m stepping outside of my box at 87…I have a collection of 153 pages of poems/prose nearing completion, yet… now seriously considering reframing this as a short poem/prose novel of a child-mother relationship “do no harm” and that child carrying an unexplained guilt to old age. “Hast thou forsaken me?” I figure one is never to old to experiment and I have no reputation to try t o protect, so why not give it a try?
PP: What is underway or forthcoming?
GS: I do spare time work on polishing some draft ekphrastic poems… I enjoy the creative buzz certain works of art/artists give me in my unfinished work pile, howevermost of my writing is now focused on the draft project noted above.
