Friday 21 December 2018

Frances Boyle : part one

Frances Boyle is the author Light-carved Passages, a collection of poems, and most recently Tower, a novella from Fish Gotta Swim Editions. Her poems and short stories have won local and national awards, and been published in print and online journals throughout Canada and in the U.S. as well as in anthologies with themes as varied as motherhood, Hitchcock films and love poetry. A second poetry collection is due out in 2019. Frances lives in Ottawa, where she is part of the editorial team at Arc Poetry Magazine, and reviews for Canthius. Find her at www.francesboyle.com and @francesboyle19.

Photo credit: John W. MacDonald

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I have several fantastic writers’ groups who I rely on heavily. Two of them focus on poetry, and the third is for fiction. The Ruby Tuesday group has been meeting weekly for more than 10 years (!). It is not only the place where my work first enters the world, it is most often where poems are first generated since we do a 10-20 minute free-write each week, either a specific exercise / prompt or simply writing in response to a published poem. I very often go back (sometimes a very long time later) to find phrases or images from these timed writing sessions that I can use in shaping a poem. We also critique work that’s been brought to the group. The phrase “you’ve seen this poem before” is commonly heard and always welcome, since looking at revisions generates further discussion and new energy. Because we are a sizeable group, and we meet so frequently, there is no pressure to bring work every week. But most of us rarely let more than a couple of weeks go by without the urge to get feedback on new (or revised) poems. My other poetry group, sometimes known as the Other Tongues, meets monthly and we workshop one poem by each person. In all of my groups, we are not only first readers for each other, but also a support network and a source of close and continuing friendships.

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