Atlantic Books

Atlantic Books

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Young Writers

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transVersing
For the Love of Learning
Breakwater Books

TransVersing is a fishy tale, to use the metaphor of co-crafter Daze Jefferies; it slips along, weaving six unique narratives of transgender (trans) youth in Newfoundland and Labrador. The beauty of the “fishy” metaphor is in its capture of the queer-ness of trans identities, its harkening to the ecosystem and culture of the province, and its use as means of connecting embodiment and place.

The stories presented in transVersing are diverse. They come from around the bay, with vernacular and local accents well represented; from life in the capital city and from experiences crossing borders. There are stories of growing up in small town Newfoundland, small town USA and small town Ontario. These stories converge in St. John’s.

TransVersing is a layered series of convergences really, both in narrative and in its creation. It grew out of a need for a trans-specific opportunity for expression and was born of a collaboration between the Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland theatre company and For the Love of Learning, an arts-based and skill-building program. First funded by a Canada 150 grant, transVersing was written originally for stage. It’s had three runs and continues to evolve in an iterative, collaborative way; keeping time with lives and loves, hopes and dreams, politics and passions of the six young writers and performers.

Before this collaboration was created, another had been tried. A few years prior, Gemma Hickey–local trans activist and educator and a household name for many–had invited LGBT (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual) community members to stage a performance called “Queer Monologues.” There was keen interest from folks who identify as LGB but Hickey found few trans folks wanting to participate.

In a place where religion has figured prominently in community life, and where difference has been seen as dangerous, identifying as LGBT, or queer, in these parts has meant risking everything. And for trans folks, even LGB/Queer spaces have at times not been understanding of trans identities, trans embodiments or trans ways of being. It became clear to Hickey that trans people in Newfoundland and Labrador didn’t feel safe or comfortable or even welcome in many queer spaces. But if you know Hickey, you know how tenacious they can be!

Hickey approached Artistic Fraud, identifying that a space for the plurality of trans narratives was needed, that it was–and is–essential to foster spaces that give rise to trans voices. And so transVersing was born. Dramaturge Bernadine Stapleton of Artistic Fraud has helped weave these narratives into a cohesive piece of theatre they regularly receive requests to perform.

The strength and vulnerability of this creation is its magic, as is its distinctly local voice. The narratives presented raise authentic, and too often silenced, voices of trans people in the enclaves of Atlantic Canada. Following a recent performance, an audience member commented that having come out as trans in their small town, they were told that there had once been someone else trans in the community … back in the 1970s. Imagine the isolation of knowing that the only other person from your hometown who might have understood your experience had left more than 20 years before you were born.

Isolation in these parts is stark and true, and the feeling of being frozen out is all too real. But, this person says, they have been going home as trans for more than five years; there are now three young people in that same community who have bravely opened up about their own trans identities.

Sharing our trans and queer stories changes lives. Sharing our local stories creates community, builds trust and makes our lives real–and even normal–for the people around us.

And now these stories are being shared even more widely. The incredible team behind this project has worked with Breakwater Books to bring their fishy tales to the page, captured this time in stillness and no longer living within their transmorphic qualities or slipping through iterative presentations.

I imagine however, given the creative strengths of these youth, and of Artistic Fraud’s contributors, that while the book will freeze these narratives in a particular moment, their slippery, queer qualities will not be lost. This book is both education and emancipation.

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Danny JacobsGrowing up in Riverview, New Brunswick, Danny Jacobs wasn’t one of those kids writing poetry for the high school yearbook. He was more likely to spend his time reading popular science books by the likes of Stephen Hawking.

He ended up studying astrophysics at Saint Mary’s University. “I quickly realized I didn’t like sitting in labs watching pendulums and deriving formulas,” he says.

His English classes, on the other hand, captivated his imagination.

One of his professors was Halifax poet Brian Bartlett, who opened Jacobs’ mind to creative writing as a serious endeavour. “A lot of kids go into university thinking they know what they want to do but they don’t really,” he says.

Jacobs notes the debate over creative writing programs and whether they churn out young writers whose work is homogeneous, following some sort of Canlit formula. But he doesn’t see it that way. “It can be quite a beneficial place for aspiring writers.”

He was inspired enough by several good teachers at SMU that he went on to take a Master’s of Arts closer to home, at the University of New Brunswick. He dabbled in a bit of every creative writing form and settled on fiction for his thesis. But it was his poetry that seemed to find the most success.

He graduated in 2008 and a year later his poem, “How to Shoot Skeet with My Grandfather’s Lost Double Barrel,” won Grain Magazine’s national poetry contest.

“As a writer, you never know if you’re good at it,” he says. “And it’s a crap shoot with contests; the best piece doesn’t always win.”

But the win gave him the boost in confidence he needed, simply knowing that at least one judge with a literary background deemed his piece worthy of national recognition. His poems have since been published in a number of journals across Canada.

Prestigious prizes and publications build confidence, but they don’t pay the bills for long. So Jacobs headed back to school with a specific vocation in mind, this time to study Library Sciences at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

Danny Jacobs Songs That Remind Us of FactoriesHe wrote most of the poems from his first book, Songs That Remind Us of Factories, living with his wife in rural Nova Scotia. In his review of the book, George Elliott Clarke wrote that Jacobs’ “work means the arrival of a new generation of poets, intrigued by the connective and alienating aspects of electronic communication…”

That interest may link back to the popular science books he still loves reading. “I love technical writing, any kind of technical jargon,” he says. “I love the torque you can get from the technical terminology.”

He was thrilled at the chance to revisit his old Alma Mater, Saint Mary’s, as part of Brian Bartlett’s excellent reading series there. He also travelled to readings in Montreal and Ottawa, but as a full-time librarian it was hard to find writing time, let alone book-touring time.

Jacobs is now the managing librarian at the Petitcodiac Public Library, which is about a half-hour drive from his house in Riverview, sort of a suburb of Moncton. It’s a one-person library so he does a bit of everything.

Finding time to write remains a challenge. “I keep saying I should have a schedule, write a certain amount of time every day, but it’s hard to do that with the long commute and work. But sometimes you just have to get your ass in the chair and do it.” Often he spends parts of vacations writing poems.

Danny Jacobs LoidThis year, Frog Hollow Press published Jacobs’ second book, a limited edition chapbook “printed on 80 lb. Mohawk Via Vellum and Smyth-sewn into a full-colour soft cover,” according to the publisher. It’s entitled Loid – meaning a thin piece of celluloid or plastic, an imitation of a credit or debit card used by thieves.

A significant theme in Loid is suburbia, and especially suburban objects. “I’ve lately been fascinated by lawn implements,” Jacobs says. “I have a snow-blower poem; I have a weed-whacker poem.”

But don’t call that a theme. “I find writing around a theme can be constraining,” he says. “I write one poem at a time” rather than setting out to create a book of poems on a specific topic.

Lately, he has found himself revisiting prose, this time writing creative nonfiction and literary reviews. He likes having deadlines.

By all accounts, the nonfiction is going well. Jacobs won Prism international’s 2016 creative nonfiction prize, judged by Newfoundland’s Russell Wangersky, for a piece called “Ghostly Transmissions from John D. Rockefeller.”

Jacobs is also working on a new piece for The Walrus, an essay about Alexandra Oliver, a poet who lives in Burlington Ontario. He cites Oliver along with Kayla Czaga and Richard Kelly Kemick as some of his favourite young poets in the country. “It’s intimidating how much talent is being published but it’s good for Canadian poetry,” he says.

But his praise isn’t universal. “I have reservations about some of the new poetry, which leans a bit too much on high-wire risky, experimental stuff. I like a grounded poem.”

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natalie corbett sampson

As a girl growing up in Mississauga, Ontario, Natalie Corbett Sampson fell in love with Trixie Belden, a precociously brilliant thirteen-year old girl detective. Fictional, just to be clear.

She quickly moved on to Cynthia Voigt’s (Bad Girls) complex young female protagonists. It was the heavy emotion in their difficult relationships that took Sampson – who had an idyllic if “perfectly boring” young life – to another plane.

It wasn’t long before she was creating her own art and literature, folding stacks of papers in half and writing books on them. “I won a contest in second grade for writing and illustrating a book and got to meet Robert Munsch in the school library,” she recalls, still buzzing three decades after the fact.

Words excited her from go, and pictures too. She attended a visual arts school where she got straight As and was a multi-sport athlete, competing in basketball and baseball while trying everything from badminton to curling. When she went to Acadia University to study biology (with an English minor, natch), she figured she’d be right back to Ontario.

But the crafty Nova Scotians hooked her. “I absolutely love seeing the harbour every day when I’m out and about. I love the pace and familiarity, the nature and the history,” she says. And the province has snuck into her two novels and one short e-book, even the ones not actually set there.

Game Plan (Fierce Ink Books, 2013) was set outside Boston, but as Sampson explains, “attentive readers will see landscapes and city descriptions that fit Halifax.” In her new novel, Aptitude, there is an “ancient clock on the hill,” i.e. the Town Clock on Citadel Hill, wink nudge. “I want to share the city with people who don’t live here.”

As a writer, Nova Scotia has been good to her. “I never expected to be treated like an author by other authors,” she says. “But it’s such a great and open community here. Other writers are so willing and anxious to talk shop and give suggestions, direction, encouragement.”

Still inspired by the books she read as a teenager, much of Sampson’s work focuses on that age group, particularly teens going through some of life’s big experiences for the first time: falling in love, finding identity or suffering profound loss. “There’s something piercing and magnetic about processing such important emotions and working through them for the very first time that makes for good storytelling,” she says.

Aptitude - Natalie Corbett Sampson

The sports she once dedicated herself to also play out in the lives of her characters. In Game Plan, basketball is a necessary means of escape for high school student Ella Parker, but also a means of gaining an education. And her short story, “Nine,” is actually structured around a baseball game.

Sport is a natural literary theme for Sampson because it is similar to art in its “ability to remove the participant from daily life, from stress, from routine.” It is also a rich source of drama as competitive athletes push themselves to perform better in arenas (or courts or stadiums or tracks) where there are only so many accolades to go around.

With her new novel, Sampson is proving herself unafraid to take risks at this early stage of her career. Aptitude features a young woman attempting to choose her lover in a dystopian world where choice is not allowed. It’s a love story with a thematic twist: “She falls in love with a person, but she also falls in love with writing and with creativity; she finds her own identity this way.”

Sampson has two more books on the way, sort of. One, released in February 2016, is via self-publishing. “There seems to be a good community and a good opportunity [in self-publishing] that hasn’t been there before,” she says. “I like the autonomy and the control and want to see if those benefits make the harder work and greater investment worth it.”

If not, Sampson says she’ll be happy to go back to traditional publishing.

She’s still wrestling with the other project, her first attempt at historical fiction. “That story and I are battling it out,” she says, though she is confident she’ll win in the end.

What is perhaps most remarkable is that she’s written this much in a few short years while working full-time as a speech language pathologist and raising four school-aged children.

Then again, she’s always been energized by words. Just as she once got excited folding paper stacks to make books, so it is now with her computer.

“I think it’s like running is to other people,” she says. “Without it, I feel off balance and rangy, wired and on edge. But the end result has become less important than the process.”

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Todd MacLean
photo credit: facebook.com/GlobalChorus

This PEI journalist and musician went from pondering our environmental future to publishing a book on it

Five years ago, Charlottetown musician, freelance journalist and writer Todd MacLean did an ordinary thing and got extraordinary results. It was a shower. He had U2 cranked.

“I don’t know what other people think about in the shower,” MacLean says. “But I think about global issues.”

In this instance, he was wondering what Bono would say if MacLean were to ask him what kind of realistic hope humanity has for the future. Your standard political musician’s fantasy. And it hit him: the idea his wife Savannah would call his most inspired.

It was a way for him to marry his passion for writing to his deep concern for the environment and social justice. It would change his understanding of the world and his place in it.

It was a simple enough concept involving immensely complex logistics. For those of us who despair about our collective future, what if there were a different short essay each day – 365 in all – on how to “ensure not only the survival of the human race but the preservation of the rest of life on Earth.”

These kinds of insights could only come from the people who work most effectively to create change. That’s some pretty high-profile, hard-to-reach individuals.

It took MacLean another year, with inputs from his wife, academic advisor and a lawyer, to figure out how to go about it. He selected hundreds of high-impact potential contributors – artists, musicians, politicians, farmers, chefs, humanitarians, environmentalists – from across the globe. Many were his personal heroes.

For starters, MacLean aimed for big-time Canadian environmentalists, starting with David Suzuki. “It took three or four emails to his assistant and then finally I received 163 words from Suzuki. They turned out to be among the darkest in the book.”

Other big names followed, including the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Raffi, Bruce Cockburn, Stephen Hawking, Desmond Tutu and the late Nelson Mandela. Most found reason for hope despite the daunting array of environmental crises facing humanity and all life on the planet.

Several Maritime writers, including Richard Zurawski, Don McKay and David Helwig also contributed. “They aren’t always who you’d expect but they are all effective in moving toward sustainability,” MacLean says.

Three years later, Global Chorus: 365 Voices on the Future of the Planet was in bookstores. “It was so exhilarating to hold that book for the first time at Bookmark in Charlottetown,” he says. “Savannah, who in so many ways had made this possible, took my picture with the book. I was in tears holding it.”

That moment was the culmination of not only three years of tireless work, but more than two decades of writing. The stakes of MacLean’s subject matter haven’t always been this high. In Grade Five, his classmates closely followed his serial short stories about two comedic characters, John and Bob, and their wild worldly adventures including an Amazonian quest.

MacLean cultivated his writing talents doing an honours degree in English at the University of Prince Edward Island. His thesis was a novella that somehow found humour exploring philosophical tenets and ideas. Not long after graduation, he found himself writing a weekly music column with Charlottetown’s daily newspaper, The Guardian, a gig he’s had for ten years.

MacLean is also a freelancer broadcaster who has worked with CBC Radio and Television covering environmental issues, which remain his greatest concern. “In 1990, I had a great teacher named Bill Hogue at Eliot River Elementary School,” in Cornwall, PEI. “We had a slogan that went ‘there is no away,’ meaning you can throw stuff in the garbage but it doesn’t really go away.”

That year, a reporter and photographer from none other than the Guardian visited the school and ran a story with a picture featuring MacLean and his classmates, each holding a letter from their slogan. “We were just learning and spreading awareness. I thanked Bill Hogue in the acknowledgements of Global Chorus,” he says.

Mr. Hogue may want to prepare himself for fame. This fall, Global Chorus will be re-released across the United States with a new foreword by Jane Goodall. It’s also been picked up as curriculum material across Prince Edward Island, to be used to by Grade Nine social studies teachers.

Now that he’s coordinated and compiled words from humanitarian and environmental experts from around the world, he’s been inspired to take the big ideas and write about how they can be made part of our day-to-day practice of living.

Just as Mr. Hogue once lit a fire in him, MacLean hopes to inspire change among youth with his next book, with a focus on turning big environmental ideas into day-to-day practice. Sometimes all it takes is a good teacher. And sometimes what’s required is a good book.

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Young writers is a new monthly feature focused on our region’s young talent, those whose names you may know, and those you don’t but should. Please share your thoughts on this column in the comments box below or email your feedback to kim@atlanticpublishers.ca

Poetry worked its way into this award-winning young writer’s bones in his teenage years

In the mid nineties Mark Callanan could have been a portrait of proto-teen, banging awkwardly at a guitar trying to make up songs. You know, working on his music. It didn’t take him long to realize it was the words he cared most about.

“I had this Robert Service book that was my dad’s and had been his dad’s. From there I got into Dylan Thomas and this romantic imagery associated with his short career, drinking himself to death.” Self destruction held a dark appeal for teenaged Callanan.

At Memorial University he joined the Society for Creative Urges, or SCUM as it was acronymed, a group of creative writers that flagellated themselves on the alter of public feedback – that is, they read before an audience and actually let people publicly comment on the work. “It was the first time I was forced to reckon with an audience,” Callanan recalls. “It was a formative experience.”

He remains close friends with many of the poets he met there, particularly James Langer, with whom he would eventually co-edit The Breakwater Book of Contemporary Newfoundland Poetry in 2013. Langer and other peers from SCUM helped Callanan connect with Newfoundland’s tight-knit writing community, which warmly welcomed him, usually over a beverage at the Poet and Peasant Café. “I got a featured reading with the Writers Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador before I had anything published. It was a very productive time.”

Poetry had infected his spirit. The son of a former Roman Catholic priest (turned communications professional), Callanan is an atheist, naturally. But, “there is something in the cadence of poetry that reminds me of prayer.” Poetry is his connection to the divine, whatever or wherever it might be.

In his early twenties, Callanan published his first book of poems, Scarecrow (Killick Press), to rave reviews across the country, many of which focused on the youth of the poet. “The insight, emotional rigour and formal dexterity of such writing serve as important reminders that a young poet can and should be a fully formed poet,” proclaimed Maisonneuve.

Thinking back, I can all but hear him shake his head (we’re talking by phone) at such praise. “I don’t think anyone is ever fully formed,” he says. Moreover, he’s not entirely satisfied with the work he once produced. “I feel like I rushed publishing my first book. I was very young. There is a lot I regret in my first two books … and I will likely regret things in future books.”

His fans had to wait seven long years for the second book. Callanan had a near-fatal medical emergency in 2007, but he also wasn’t eager to make new mistakes. “My second book took my editor forcing me to publish it,” he says. “I’m a bit of a perfectionist.”

In 2010 he published Sea Legend (Frog Hollow Press) and in 2011, Gift Horse (Véhicule Press), which focused on his near-death experience. Both collections were received with the same enthusiasm as Scarecrow. All appeared on prestigious shortlists and some of his individual poems won Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards and a Gregory J. Power Award.

Despite the regrets of his earlier work, Callanan remains enthusiastic about young poets. “There are a lot of super talented far-too-young writers, and that’s my jealousy showing in the phrase ‘far-too-young.’” Recently he’s become a fan of Cassidy McFadzean (McClelland and Stewart) and Ben Ladouceur (Coach House), both in their twenties. “Their talent far exceeds what mine was at that age.”

Despite his perfectionism, he is driven by the need for self discovery, to better understand himself. “Part of the reason I do it is to query myself, how I feel about things.” It is a process that by definition starts out rough.

Callanan is a father of four children, the youngest of whom is three. After a deep foray into parenthood, he’s re-emerging onto the poetry scene having co-founded a new reading series with his old poetry pal James Langer. The North Atlantic Poetry Series brings English, Irish and Scottish poets to St. John’s and pairs them with local poets.

He is also working on a new collection about “personal and cultural romanticism, narratives we tell ourselves to explain why we are the way we are.” That, and quitting smoking. It harkens back to his early love for the Dylan Thomas narrative, the dark appeal of the self-destructive artist.

“I’ve come to tie it so much into my own identity but it’s complete bullshit. There were a lot of word geniuses who weren’t self-destructive.” Ever the perfectionist, Callanan is taking a hard, honest look in the mirror and examining his own myth.

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