When I moved to Edmonton, Canada from Jilava, Romania in elementary school, I felt so much pressure to assimilate that within a few years, I almost completely lost the capacity to express myself in my mother tongue. Since then, I’ve felt this desperate dor, or longing, for limba română.

For me, a poem is "finished" when it flows so smoothly that lines will randomly pop into my consciousness like catchy song lyrics. I know it's time to step away from the page when everytime I make a change, no matter how minor, I revert back to the original.

The whole of The Blue Gate weaves threads of love and loss. But in the long central section, where I’m thrust into grief, reality ravels and unravels. Death destabilizes, throws one into a space and time that is unknowable. I move physically into an unknown country but emotionally hold close to what is lost. In this time of transformation, I walk in two simultaneous realities. 

T’oyaxsut’nuun, I really appreciate the question and I would like to answer it but I have to be honest, I, luckily, have not been touched by the loss of a loved one on the highway of tears. I wish everyday for the safety of my family that lives along the highway, my friends, my loved ones. I really wish for the safety of all Indigenous people along the highway of tears.

Writing this novel, and thinking about it in the ramp up to its publication date, has done all of these things. Researching forest fires especially, I sometimes felt like River does watching clips and news stories about the fire that puts his mom on evacuation alert, sadness “like a log across his chest,” and I’d struggle with what can seem like an inevitability, that “from now on things [will] just get worse and worse.” There is a lot of climate grief in The Fall-Down Effect. Characters reflect on the increasing frequency and severity of forest fires; activist and government-worker characters alike feel, at times, defeated when they think of the environmental and climate costs of the logging industry; parents worry about the world their children will inherit. And yet, at the same time, each of the characters also tend to and preserve their hope for and connection to the natural world. None of them are going to quit caring for and about the planet. None of them will give up the fight and there’s nothing they can do.

Although a collection of minimalist poems (or one long poem composed of minimalist fragments), Wound Archive has a lengthy origin story. In 2016-2017, I was a Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I was researching instances of Holocaust survivors reading poems as part of their testimonies and was deeply invested in exploring the place poetry held in survivor testimony.

It was like laying beams in the dark, trying to trust that something will hold even though I could not see or understand the entire structure yet. There was a tenacious fear that I was imagining incorrectly, that I was misunderstanding my own creation, and mistaking whim for truth.

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

There is a story in the collection that doesn’t work, or it’s not doing what it really needed to do when I dreamed it to life years ago. I don’t know if every reader could pick it out before reading this, but I think some might.

I wrote the book in the ‘gritty realism’ style. That’s intentional, I want my readers to feel, see, smell and touch – everything that the main character, Steve Lewis, does. I want them trudging to calls in his work boots. Though it’s fiction, Shoebox is loosely based on calls I did or ones my crew mates were involved in. 

I discovered my love of swimming in 2019. One of my best friends had just died, and I was searching for escapism—away from screens, away from work, and, in some ways, away from my own body. The weightlessness of being submerged in the public pool eased my angst and softened the tension and grief in my neck and shoulders. The quiet beneath the water cleared my mind. The rhythm I could build toward, channel, and disrupt brought me a sense of control and steadiness. Stripping down my body and taking a warm shower before and after felt reverent. Small talk with strangers—those quiet good mornings in the lobby and the lanes—became part of the day’s calm order. The pool, like the poem, became a place of repetition, refining, and resistance. 

The setting for Into the D/ark is a relatively isolated farming community in the early nineteen sixties.  With the recent arrival of American network television, the larger world has begun to make its way into the daily lives of the characters living in this insulated folk society. 

We love live literary events. Festivals, reading series, bookstore book launches: we are just about always game for a good ol’ bibliofest. We also know that many of these events operate by the mercy of grants, volunteers, and long, hard, and often thankless hours. No one who loves books and literature should take these vital initiatives for granted. Not only do authors often depend on them to create more awareness for their work, but our culture depends on them to keep the literary arts vibrant. That’s why we reached out to one of of favourite downtown Toronto reading series, Brockton Writers, and asked them to be a guest this month on our Power Q & A series.

This past May, I turned sixty-five. Pearl, my beloved, asked what I wanted for my birthday. When she turned sixty-five, she wanted a party. I booked a local venue and chef, put together a 1970s top-ten playlist, and a birth-to-sixty-five video to the tune of “What I Like About You,” by the Romantics. It was a blast.

Me? I wanted a casket. I had stumbled on the Fiddlehead Casket Kits website. “Build your own pine casket in under 30 minutes with this handcrafted casket kit,” it said, “delivered directly to your door.”

I told Pearl, “I want a casket for my birthday.”

It is maybe odd to only write about where I live — all four of my novels are set in and around Cobalt, and most of my musings & reflections are also generated from this landscape. Odd maybe, but I feel a sense of the imperative to pay attention to the land I inhabit. Scrappy and used up as it is, and still showing the scars of short-lived but hyper-industrial activity, it is a place worth seeing, as in discovering the minutiae, the magic, the vulnerabilities, and the joy, in and of and around this place that I inhabit. It seems to me now obvious, though I wish I had seen it sooner in my life, that any hope we have of being better, of finding a way of being in the world that is non-destructive, lies in seeking atonement from the land we inhabit, its creatures and beings, wherever that happens to find us. 

Satire is tricky. In a free society, it can be a form of entertainment, which confirms for its audience the idiocy and silliness of “that thing we enlightened people are against.”  In dicier milieus, such as Putin’s Russia, satire cannot be reckless, lest it disappear. It has to be clever, damning, and opaque enough to cloak its true purpose, which is as a tool of resistance. Making fun of our overlords is serious, political business.  

The timing of the book’s release was coincidental, though it’s a fortunate coincidence in that Katrina and the subsequent levee breaches that wreaked such devastation in New Orleans are back in the public consciousness and may make readers more interested in the perspective the book offers. Sadly, the inequalities the disaster highlighted are even more acute now than they were then, and the climate change that contributed to the storm has only worsened.

I know I’m hardly the first writer to use my hometown as a setting for a fictional story. I came upon this totally by accident, though. When I set out to “become” a writer in my early twenties, I was trying to latch onto anything except where I grew up. And that’s not because I had negative feelings about Sault Ste. Marie – I just hadn’t processed anything about my experiences there. 

Some of the poems about family estrangement in this book started simply with me wanting to record what was going on – to create a record. But then, I have an urge to do more with it, to explore the nuances of the experiences and to create relationships.

To put it simply, because I’m not that interested in myself. Which isn’t true, of course – what poet isn’t obsessed with themselves – but perhaps I'm not that interested in the front-facing, autobiographical concept of ‘Guy Elston’. Memory, identity, the cause and effect of life and its happenings – it’s all a sheer mountain face, senseless. I need an angle, a longer way round.