Ignatius Fay is an invertebrate paleontologist and poet. He writes haiku, senryu, tanka, haibun, tanka prose and various other related genres. He is Regional Coordinator for the Ontario Region, in which role he has edited and laid-out three anthologies of poems by Ontario members. He is the editor of the monthly newsletter for the Haiku Society of America, serves on their executive and has been the layout artist for several of their publications. In addition, he is the founding editor of Tandem: The Rengay Journal. He has won a few awards and published a few collections of poetry, his most recent being After The Storm, a collection of illustrated haibun and tanka prose. Ignatius lives in Sudbury, Ontario

What draws me to the writer: I often admire the poet’s writing as they come across my radar online in journals, such as I posted recently at Instagram. We’ve never met but his work

The book: After the Storm (October 2021)

Sample:

Green Thumb Up

Every weekend, at eight in the morning, she is here puttering in my flower garden. Before her, the garden didn’t exist. That area of my yard was just a weedy patch I kept under some control by mowing.
I didn’t ask her. I don’t even know her, really. She just showed up one day and started putting in a garden. When I asked why, she said she loved to garden and had run out of room at home. It hurt her to see a space like mine lying barren.


she hurries
down the sidewalk pulling
a small cart
piled high with tools, a hose
and fertilizer


Her garden, three doors down, is the showpiece of the neighbourhood. Even now, ours is a nodding hello relationship, smiles sprinkled with rare idle talk about the weather.

She has certainly beautified my life. And I have told her as much. One day I’ll ask her name.


back bent
kneeling among the flowers
weeding
her son’s old hockey shin guards
protect arthritic knees

After the Storm by Ignatius Fay

Questions:

P.P.: What was the genesis of your book?
I.F.: I have been writing haiku and senryu for more than thirty years. Over that time, I was exposed to tanka, haibun and tanka prose, all of which I write regularly. One genre I find particularly interesting and fun to produce is haiga – haiku with an illustration – which has been around for many year. Fairly recently, the genre was expanded to taiga – tanka with an illustration. With this book, I take the concept of illustrated poem one step farther – haibun and tanka prose with an illustration – which I named haiga prose and taiga prose respectively.

With this concept, I approached Ray J. Belcourt, an accomplished photographer and friend with whom I have collaborated several times. He took many photos, then I chose the ones that best suited my poetry. Only the caterpillar photo was not taken by him; my daughter took that one in her garden. I used graphics software to manipulate  and enhance the photos, then laid out the book for publication.

PP: What was or will be your favourite moment(s) in making this book?
I.F.: All of the stories recorded in these poems are special to me. They are parts of who I am, my very essence. I have no clear-cut favourite in that sense. The best part of producing After The Storm was the writing of the poetry. In each instance, I was reliving and trapping a fragment of my life on paper where anyone could see them. And I am particulaly gratified when I hear that one of these pieces has touched someone in some way.

D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction. His most recent work includes Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli (Frontenac House, 2021), Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce Press Press, 2021), and Breaking Right: Stories (Porcupine’s Quill, 2021). His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island including Best Canadian Poetry 2019, the Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, and Belt. Along the way his work has garnered numerous Pushcart Prize nominations, National Magazine Award nominations, and Best of the Net nominations. He is a graduate of the Indiana University – Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing program where he held a Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation. Lockhart currently resides at Waawiiyaatanong and Pelee Island where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press and poetry editor at the Windsor Review.

What draws me to the writer: Daniel and I seem to keep intersecting, whether at readings, or committees or through haiku. He has been putting out a prodigious amount of poetry and processing even more as editor and publisher. What I like about his writing is that it is not pretend nor pretentious. He grounds it in observation, in paying attention to the the immediate and yet it is not plain nor decorative but on fire. His poetry seems to driven more compact with each book.

Book: Go Down Odawa Way (Kegedonce 2021)

About the Book: D.A. Lockhart’s Go Down Odawa Way is a poetry collection that explores the physical, historical, and cultural spaces that make up the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy. This is the region currently inhabited by southwestern Ontario and southeastern Michigan. Individual poems and sections of this collection explore the documented villages, history, and mythologies of the Odawa, Ojibway, Huron/Wendat, and Pottawatomi nations that were lost to the process of colonization and relocation. The project speaks to the history of the region that predates contemporary Canadian and American borders and namings as well as carves out a history that extends back past the mere couple of centuries of European colonization. The narrative focal point of the pieces find their roots in the traditional Lenape vantage point of the author and seeks to draw on the experiences of a modern day urban Indian in connection with the manner that land has changed with non-Indigenous settlement and those that inhabit it.

Samples:

Old Bhikkhu Throws Smoke to Welcome the Storms

He says that rain is coming
up from the south, in the way 
you can’t trust it. Camels package
in one hand, other shadowing 
the lit prayer half dangling
from his lip. Nods to floods
not so distant and the certainty
that we all need water. Eyes 
squinted into creases the shape
of maxkalaniat claws, know he reads 
land and sky in manner that hunters
in flight read land beneath them.  

D.A. Lockhart’s Go Down Odawa Way

Questions:

P.P: What’s your favourite part of the process? Was it research, writing, editing or doing readings, if you’ve got the chance?

D.L.: I typically have really enjoyed working on the research for individual poems or collections. Go Down Odawa Way was no different. It is much more of a “lived” or experiential work of mine. And given that the research for so many of the pieces involved simply “being” in the places described and meditating on the Indigenous history of that place. The included poem is from one of those moments, walking the streets in Lansing. The writing was fun, mind you. Scribbled down in an airBNB loft down the street from the site of that poem. That whole process there is the best part, the exploration and the creative response to that. 

P.P: How did this book change you as you wrote it? 

One of the most surprising things to me was the development and inclusion of the Lansing, MI poems. And how that development really keyed in the exploration contained within the collection as a whole. It came as a surprise because initially the book was about just Waawiiyaatanong (the communities directly placed along the Straits of Detroit). Yet organically, I began spending time yet ago in Lansing during the writing of the book. And it all felt a natural extension of the original project. Which makes sense given that Lansing is well within Three-Fires Confederacy territory. It is a region that is profoundly still Indigenous and, most importantly, heavily Odawa. I would be remise to not declare that the poem “Namegos,” is the turning point for the collection. It’s a piece about the trout navigating a changed river through Central Michigan and Lansing in particular. Perhaps a tuning fork piece is the best way to describe it. All the other poems in Go Down Odawa Way, in their final forms, grew from what was going on in that particular poem. Discussions of survival and resilience in face of colonial change. It caused a fair amount of revisions to a lot of the individual pieces later on and focused the overall collection to what we see know. “Namegos” perhaps opened up a more lyric path for the collection as a whole. I have definitely tended fall more strongly on the narrative side of poetry over my career. And this one poem came at about a midway point in the construction of the manuscript. Funny enough, it was because of that poem that the entire Bad Boys/Mahtenu/Detroit Pistons section emerges for the collection. It also changed and lengthened that final poem, “The Gospel of Seger,” to better suit the collection. A regular keystone you should definitely say.  

P.P: What do you expect a reader to take away?

D.L: Simple enough, some notion of decolonization. Windsor-Essex might be among the worst regions to recognize its Indigenous heritage. I personally have fought local government institutions and “academics” to have the traditional name and peoples of this region recognized. We have propaganda offered up in place of history in our community. It’s why the city built a statue to an Indigenous leader that never lived here and was fighting for a homeland in modern day Indiana rather than recognize an Indigenous mayor or the location(s) of the original Odawa communities.  This collection is attempting to undo some of the prevalent and virulent white supremacy in our community. Because when this sort of blatant lying passes as history the community as a whole suffers. We haven’t had a BIPOC city councillors until a very recent by-election. We have a single woman on our city council. Ten wards. One woman. And until very recently no BIPOC representation. And it’s been that way for well more than a decade. In a city that is one of the most diverse in the country. And this affects more than Indigenous folks. When I speak of decolonization this all part of it. Truth telling might be a better way to put it. This book hopes to kick open some doors, illustrate to those of any background willing to listen, that things need to change, truth needs to come to the surface.

Tanis MacDonald is an essayist, poet, professor and free-range literary animal. She is the host of the podcast Watershed Writers, and the author of Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. Her essay “Mondegreen Girls” won the Open Seasons Award for Creative Nonfiction in 2021. She identifies as a bad birder, and lives near Ose’kowáhne in southwestern Ontario as a grateful guest on traditional Haudenosaunee territory.

What draws me to the writer: We have common interest in wild and urban spaces and similar sensibility.

Book: Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female (Wolsak & Wynn, June, 2022)

Book description: Tanis MacDonald walks the reader down many paths, pointing out the sights, exclaiming over birds, sharing stories and asking questions about who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks and wilderness. She walks to understand the place she now calls home in Southern Ontario, catalogues the fauna around her and walks through illness. Wry, smart, political and lyrical, these essays share the joy and danger of walking, and uncovers its promise of healing, of companionship and of understanding.

PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?
TM: My aha! moment for this book happened in Saskatchewan in 2019, when I was at St. Peter’s Abbey. It’s hard to explain, but a switch in my head flipped while I was getting up every morning, working with writers until about 2 and then writing until 10 at night. Suddenly and slowly, by benefit of this schedule and atmosphere, this book that I assumed I would write became the book I was writing, and I couldn’t get the words down fast enough. All the puzzle pieces of the text came flying at me and, while this was less magic and more the donning of a mantle of determination, I love that moment: its certainty, its resolve.     

I also had the pleasure of talking through this book with writers that I respect. Meeting regularly with them while I generated and edited pieces felt like such a privilege and an ongoing engagement in literary collegiality, far from the kind of isolated experience I’ve had when putting together with other books.  

PP: How did you corral what to include and exclude?
TM: Corralling the material is the right term! I knew I was entering a big arena; walking is a huge subject and the wealth of books about its various practices is nothing short of overwhelming. I didn’t want to write a straight-up scholarly text, or a heroic narrative of achievement. I’ve been working on the in-betweenness of lyric essays and prose-poems for a few years and wanted to include material that was nonfiction with an edge. I wanted to shake up genre so that it could better reflect my experiences of walking: sometimes joyful, sometimes painful, never the same thing twice. 

I also wanted to address a few open secrets, personal and social. I walk splay-footed and have nearly all my life, but most people are too polite to mention it, even though it does impede my gait and sometimes my ability. I am also a mental health advocate, with a long history of panic attacks. I also was surprised that so many books about women walking seemed to dismiss (or just assume) the kind of confidence it takes for a solo trek, no matter than length.  I was inspired by the kinds of work being done by Jenny Bruso in Unlikely Hikers, and J. Drew Lanham, in his work on whiteness in birdwatching. I wanted to join those conversations. 

In the end, I chose pieces that engaged the most fully with how moving through the world is a constant negotiation with self and surroundings. I still have plenty to say about the function of walking at work, but that’s for another book.

Cameron Anstee is the author of Sheets: Typewriter Works (Invisible Publishing, forthcoming 2022) and Book of Annotations (Invisible Publishing, 2018), and the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins (Chaudiere Books, 2015). He is the editor and publisher of Apt. 9 Press and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Ottawa. He lives and writes in Ottawa on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people.

What draws me to the writer: Cameron is a pillar of Ottawa’s literary community. He doesn’t organize a reading series or sit on boards that I know of but he shows up to events, he encourages. He is a staple of the small press fair as he sells (and sells out) of his beautiful papery objects. He cares deeply about the history of publishing and the future. He writes extremely brief poems so I’m particularly delighted that a second book is coming out to follow his Book of Annotations. I suspect some of the poems were also in his chappie Baseline Variations that came out last year.

Book: Sheets: Typewriter Works (Invisible Publishing, Oct 2022)

Book Description: Sheets: Typewriter Works extends the minimalist explorations of the Cameron Anstee’s first collection, Book of Annotations. Prompted by receiving the Olivetti Lettera 30 typewriter that belonged to poet William Hawkins after his death in 2016, the works in this book explore how small poems operate through the freedoms and constraints of the typewriter as both a decaying machine and a mode of composition. Through engagement with writers and artists like Jiri Valoch, Barbara Caruso, LeRoy Gorman, Cia Rinne, William Hawkins, Dani Spinosa, Kate Siklosi, and Norman McLaren, Sheets: Typewriter Works re-embeds the minimalist poem in the typewritten page.

Sample poems:

PP: What was your aim with the book?

CA: When I started writing what eventually became this book, my aim was not to write a book at all. After William Hawkins died in 2016, I received his typewriter. I initially began re-typing some of Bill’s poems on his typewriter as a way of re-engaging with his work, before starting to use it to explore how my own minimalist poetics would develop by using the typewriter as the mode of composition. The aim of the manuscript, as it developed, was to dwell in the constraints and freedoms of the typewriter as an object and as a way of writing poems—the way that you can run the same page through the typewriter repeatedly, the grid imposed by the fixed-width type, the way that Bill’s typewriter had decayed and warped over the years, and the relation of my small works to the seemingly enormous visual space of the letter-sized page.

PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?

CA: My favourite part of making this book was spending time with Bill again each time I pulled down the typewriter to try to translate an idea in my brain to the page. I was also delighted and surprised to finish the manuscript and find that I had indeed written a book. This is my second book—the first felt like a fluke, something I had no idea how I had done or how to do again, and so reaching the point where I believed Sheets had become a book manuscript was a lovely surprise.

Poet and paper artist, Terry Ann Carter is the author of six collections of long form poetry, two haiku guidebooks, and five haiku chapbooks; she has edited four haiku anthologies. As past president of Haiku Canada, founder of and facilitator for KaDo Ottawa (2001-2012) and Haiku Arbutus Victoria Study Group (2014-present), she has given hundreds of haiku and book arts workshops around the world.  A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press) was shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award; day moon rising was shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and Tokaido (Red Moon Press, 2017) won a Touchstone Distinguished Book Award. Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Editions) and Moonflowers: Pioneering Women Haiku Poets in Canada (catkin press) were both published in 2020. Blue Moon: The Ono no Komachi Poems (with book artist Heather MacDonald) is forthcoming from JackPine Press.

What draws me to the writer: What can I add? A devotee of haiku, a major force in North American haiku, a former Ottawa poet and teacher, I have read with interest several of her books. Each takes a different tack. I read Tokaido recently and was impressed by its leaps and distilled qualities as well as personal reveals. This book goes on another journey, more linear and more memoir-like.

The book: First I Fold the Mountain (Black Moss Press, April 2022) was assembled and made by a publishing practicum class.

In this new book, Terry Ann Carter, a poet and paper artist, and the author of six collections of poetry, we see a writer and an artist grappling and celebrating  life’s grand mysteries surrounding language and love, and aging.

This is an unusual book, and one that might be seen as a ‘love letter to books’ and the those who inhabit that milieu. Terry Ann Carter writes about love, notably her husband and family, but it isn’t sentimentality that dominates these poems. These are narratives that encompass a big—picture and small—picture view, showing how the small yet beautiful ways love presents itself in everyday life. But equally this is a book about paper art and book making, and in this instance, this is presented as a lens through which to view love. 
As a paper artist who makes books with her grandchildren, we see a mother, a wife, a woman nurturing and inspiring all those around her. The result is this unique love letter both to books and to people.

Reviews:

“With the delicacy of lacework and finely folded paper … Terry Ann Carter’s poems show us the world through a magnifying glass.” -Writer Kate Braid

“these poems celebrate the imagination and the intimate and tangible moments of truth.” -Governor General Award Winning poet Robert Hilles

Sample:

Origami Ragtime Razzmatazz

The best way to beat those West Coast January blues. 
Get the bends. 
Get the paints and inks, get the origami folds 
for a down home pop-up book. 
Clear the kitchen table. 
Stock up the glue. Start those mountain 
valley creases. 
You know what to do. 
Sharpen the scissors. 
Don’t count your loss(es) 
Don’t complicate the rain. Just 
use those thumb nails                  like a bone                 folder. 
Ease on up. Cut. Cut. 
A button for the cover
maybe a new lover.
Needles and threads    cor    ru    ga    ted         card    board
knock those knees, baby
one    two    three.

from First I Fold the Mountain by Terry Ann Carter

PP: What’s your goal with publishing haiku before they enter a manuscript?

TAC: This is a collection of longer form poetry….but the introduction is by way of a haiku.

I dont really have any “goal” around publishing haiku. I send off poems to favourite haiku journals now and again, and I like to support small haiku presses when they have a call for submissions….

PP: What was the genesis of your book?

TAC: The genesis comes from a number of experiences…first I had a book arts exhibition here in Victoria at the Gage Gallery. I made a chapbook to go with the books I designed for the show. That chapbook was also called First I Fold the Mountain. The title comes from this haiku,

book maker
first I fold the mountain
then the valley

One of the sections in the book is titled “Night Orchids/ Husband Wife” this section came about from some writing prompts that Patrick Lane gave at one of his writing retreats that I attended. We were to write in another person’s voice….so I tried it out. The poems in this section are part of a dos-a-dos book ….”the dos-a-dos book” (from the French for back-to-back)
binds two books with one cover or case. This allows the book to be divided into two distinct sections. I wrote poems in the voice of the “wife” and then the “husband”.

PP: What was or will your favourite moment(s) in making this book?

TAC: That would have to be the time I spent with Patrick Lane working on those poems in “Night Orchid”.

[Patrick Lane’s last collection, The Quiet in Me, released this week.]