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)

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?

Yes, Quillfyre

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!

from Transcribing Moonlight (Frontenac House, April 2022).

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, however most of my writing is now focused on the draft project noted above. 

PP: What work do you have out? 

GS: She Don’t Mean a Thing if She Ain’t Got that Swing by Guy Simser (Catkin Press, 2016), Shaking the Basho Tree (essays on haiku) by Guy Simser (Inkling press, 2017), War is the Father of Us All (phafours press, 2015) and Chromatic Beliefs (group chapbooks, phafours, 2011)

PP: Any author site or social media urls you’d like to drop? 

GS: Note Blaikie’s book mentioned above.

Thanks for the opportunity Pearl.

Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri settler living near the Missinnihe river (Eastern Ojibwa: trusting waters), on land stewarded since time immemorial by the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Anishnaabeg, the Chippewa, the Wendat, and the Haudnosaunee among many other diverse First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.

What draws me to the writer: Hugely anticipated at grass roots, Sanna Wani’s vivid poetry collection My Grief, the Sun, has been getting big love after her debut chapbook, The Pink of The Seams (Penrose Press, 2019).

About the Book:

Sharply political and frequently magical, these poems reach for everything from Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 film Princess Mononoke to German Orientalist scholarship on early Islam. Love and grief sit side by side. My Grief, the Sun listens carefully to the planet’s breathing, addresses the endless and ineffable you, and promises enough joy and sorrow to keep growing.

Praise for the book:

“Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun makes such a convincing case for astonishment as a way of life. Each poem enveloped me with so much tenderness it was as if I were the sun! The theological music that courses throughout the book was not a narrowing toward some esoteric knowledge but rather an opening toward a collective sense of enmeshment with the inscrutable world. This book is a necessary reminder that ‘there is something inside / [us] that says live.’ My Grief, the Sun is a wonder and a delight.” — Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of This Wound Is a World and NDN Coping Mechanisms

Wani practices the act of artful surrender to each poem’s strange, budding logic. That she can do so with such apparent ease is astonishing. That we get to witness the places her gorgeous poems take her is a profound gift. I’m wonderstruck.” — Heather Christle, author of Heliopause and The Trees The Trees.

Sample:

Questions:

PP: For an unanswerable rhetorical question to start, how do you make something so fresh and alive as that?

SW: You’re sweet! I wrote that because I read this fresh and alive poem, “Insha’Allah” by Danusha Laméris.

PP: Your poems are dense and agile, pivoting yet holding together in leaps. Do they come together assembled from pieces or come out of a passionate stream-of-consciousness?

SW: They tend to come out in one fell swoop. But it’s messy! I edit very slowly and very particularly. Have you heard that quote? A poet will move a comma in the morning and a comma at night and say, Oh what a day’s work! My friend’s dad told me that. But sometimes there are new waves hiding behind commas, cracks in the rocks, pieces hiding behind other pieces.

PP: Do you have writing rituals that help you into the writing frame of mind or do you write in stolen moments?

SW: Definitely stolen moments for poetry. Middle of the night, subway rides, grocery stores. I want to try the writing desk routine life someday but that day has not come yet.

For editing or prose, I can sit at a desk or in bed and crank something out. But my poetry is much more chaotic. Like catching sight of a bird and having to drop everything to chase it before its gone.

PP: What was the most fun part of making the collection?
SW: Ordering it! It was also torture. Laying everything out, choosing the way poems appeared felt like making a roadmap. Some stayed, some went. And then I set it all on fire! 

PP: Heh, sometimes that’s the route we have to take to get to something better. Thank you for your time and for your poems.