Photo credit: Blair Elliott.
What are you working on?
Improbably, I’m currently working on two different, full-length themed poetry manuscripts. The way I seem to work is that I’m deeply uncomfortable unless I have a project on the go. In 2016, with the editing process for We Are All Just Animals & Plants—my debut poetry collection with Metatron Press—winding down, I started work on something new: a poetry collection that would combine my passion—for lack of a better term—for romantic love and my history of devout Christianity, which lasted up until I was 18 or so and then quickly died. Despite now being a staunch atheist, I wanted to write something that paid homage to the role religion had played in my life as I grew up, as well as an ode of sorts to the beauty and power of certain aspects of faith: the ‘religious experience’ and/or ‘holy moment,’ the beauty of cathedrals, classical sculpture, Michelangelo’s “Pièta,” and so forth. In my head, it was a very gray book—solemn, sombre, tall and skinny and mournful. Meanwhile, nearing the end of the first draft of that manuscript, I began work on another, different manuscript: a collection of poems written to and in and around the concept of Canada. I wanted to investigate something about this country—its vast expanses, its milquetoast reputation, its ‘old stock’ Canadians and immigrants, its hockey games, its racism. And I wanted to write a collection of poems that spoke to the Canadianness that my father instilled in me, one that was straightforward yet wry, serious yet winking. I wanted a Beaver Tail, a stubby Molson, and a wheat field. Right now, I’m trying to get both published… tell your editor friends.
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