Tuesday 15 June 2021

Carla Barkman : part four

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

My work usually enters the world in ink on paper, my bedside journal. Often I record a mess of images and phrases first, stream-of-consciousness style, then start a poem. Sometimes I go back through old journals and find half-written poems there. Digging through the muck to find useful bits, assembling and reassembling, can be very satisfying. I feel fortunate to be meeting online once a month with Regina writers Bernadette Wagner and Shayna Stock to workshop new poems. Because of the pandemic, I’ve also been able to participate in sessions hosted in faraway lands that would otherwise be inaccessible, such as Columbia University’s narrative medicine series, which involve responding to a piece of literature as a group, then writing to a prompt, under the shadow of the text and in the company of writers and medical professionals from around the world. 

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