Find out how writers think
Entrevues
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An Interview with Maureen Hynes, Liz Ukrainetz, and Kye Marshall
Interviewed by Contemporary Verse 2
Contemporary Verse 2: The Lina Chartrand Award was established by the three of you after her death in 1994. How did you all know her, and how did your personal and creative paths come to cross?
Liz Ukrainetz: I met Lina in 1990 at a creative writing workshop with Susan Swan. Within the workshop, we were split into smaller groups, and Lina got our smaller four to continue after the class ended. She also ...
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Conversations with Natasha Ramoutar and Tazi Rodrigues
Interviewed by Contemporary Verse 2
We touched base with a couple of the emerging poets from our recently-published Emergence Issue to chat about everyday inspiration, reading different forms, working with a mentor, and how those things have helped inform their writing. You can read these brief interviews with Natasha Ramoutar and Tazi Rodrigues below, and find some of their poetry featured in the Emergence Issue—as well as a link to ...
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An Interview with Angeline Schellenberg
Interviewed by Sharon Caseburg
Sharon Caseburg: Congratulations on your most recent award nomination. You’ve had such a wonderful reception to Tell Them It Was Mozart, having won both the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for best first book. Now you’ve been nominated for the ReLit Award for Poetry. How does it feel to have so much attention placed on such a personal body of work?
Angeline ...
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An Interview with Richard Osler
Interviewed by Clarise Foster
Clarise Foster: In Hyaena Season the poems reflect a range of personal revelation and experience — your youth, relationships, family, your journeys to Africa, your work with addictions. But to start at the beginning—the first poem in the book is “Baptism.” I am always curious about the piece a poet chooses to begin a collection, especially a first full-length collection. Why did you choose this poem and ...
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A Conversation with Ben Ladouceur
Interviewed by Jan Zwicky
In fall 2016, Ben Ladouceur, who is prose editor at Arc, interviewed Jan Zwicky as part of a feature on her work. Zwicky wanted to know what Ladouceur thought about some of the issues that came up — millennials shrugging over climate change, self-promotion through social media — and they began a conversation in the margins of the interview. That discussion got interesting enough that they decided to pursue ...
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An Interview with Ós Pressan
Interviewed by Clarise Foster
Clarise Foster: Starting a publishing venture in Canada these days is a pretty ambitious venture — but it seems that the publishing industry for books in Iceland is quite robust, so I am wondering at what point during the workshop did the discussion of writing turn to one of publishing and how did that discussion turn into plans to create your own publishing house?
Ós Pressan: You’ve caught us at a great ...
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alternative fluency
Interviewed by Clarise Foster
Clarise Foster: How does a piece of poetry/art take root for you creatively? And how might you begin to work on a piece, does it most often begin as/with text?
a rawlings: Relationship. With land, self, friend, language. I’ve been running in counter-clockwise circles on North Atlantic foreshores. To make contact with. To land as in to arrive as in to touch. Down. Deeper, farther, under. To under-stand. ...
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An Interview with Michael Prior
Interviewed by Hannah Green
Hannah Green: Jen Sookfong Lee recently wrote a powerful essay* about the state of CanLit. She writes that “CanLit has always been heavily weighted to a certain kind of author writing a certain kind of narrative” and “CanLit has never been about the diversity of voices.” Your work doesn’t fit into the “certain type of narrative” Sookfong Lee describes as being popular in CanLit, and your voice is a diverse ...
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From the North of a Small Town to the North of Toronto
Interviewed by Mat Laporte
Sarah Pinder, author of Cutting Room (Coach House, 2012) and Common Place (Coach House, 2017) was born in 1983 in Sault Ste. Marie and grew up in Wawa and Sault Ste. Marie. Mat Laporte, author of RATS NEST (BookThug, 2016), was born in 1984 and grew up in Sault Ste. Marie. They didn’t meet and become friends until 2012 when they both lived in Toronto. There they collaborated on various projects and events ...
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Poetry, Politics and Poor Choices: An Interview with George Murray
Interviewed by Hannah Green
Hannah Green: What are you working on right now? Do you have another poetry collection slow-cooking in your head?
George Murray: I have a second book of aphorisms called QUICK coming in spring 2017. Other than that, I’m working on poems and a lingering, sickly novel.
HG: Oooh, a novel! What’s it like for you moving from poetry to prose?
GM: I started my writing life as a prose writer and published a ...
