Ampersands of the Industry

Three short interviews with Sanna Wani, AGA Wilmot, and Laurie D. Graham

Wani/ Wilmot/ Graham

Sanna Wani

is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi, 2022), a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She is the poetry editor at Fernwood Publishing, columnist with Herizons and artist-in-residence with The Seventh Wave magazine. She loves daisies.

TALI VORON: My Grief, the Sun is incredibly moving. When I was reading it, I couldn’t put it down; it resonated so profoundly. Can you share the inspiration behind the collection?

SANNA WANI: Thank you so much for saying that. With inspiration I think poetry is hard to talk about. I was listening to this podcast a couple of years ago called the VS Podcast with Donna Smith and Franny Choi, which was very popular at the time. They had this episode where they talked about how poetry is odd because it’s almost like an accumulation. It can be kind of not about something because it’s an accumulation of a poet’s time. But then they were also discussing, politically, “aboutness” is more and more becoming a part of books and how books are marketed or how books sell, even poetry books. So, when I think of that question, I think it’s about my family and my life, mostly, but it also resists the idea of a book being inspired. It was just an accumulation of time, as well. It was a period of my life that ended up in poems and then I put them all together. It was actually like three different manuscripts that I had been trying to place separately, and then I talked to Kevin [Connolly] at House of Anansi, and he was just, like, “Well, we can just put them all together.”

And I said, “Well, what do you call four chapbooks that are one big book?”

And he said a poetry collection. And that was that.

TV: In 2019, you published The Pink of The Seams, your poetry chapbook, and in 2022, My Grief, the Sun, your debut poetry collection was published. What is your approach to crafting collections of poetry? Did you follow the same/a similar process for both collections?

SW: I think my approach to crafting collections of poetry is mainly to gather enough poems to make a sizable Word document. The approach was very different with The Pink of the Seams. It was smaller, so I was able to work more digitally on it and conceptualize there what I wanted to happen. I don’t think I was as interested in a thread or creating any kind of narrative or bigger cohesion with the first book. I was putting it together based on vibe. I had a cute little Pinterest board that was my main, if not only, ordering device to create a structure for the book. I don’t even think The Pink of the Seams has a table of contents.

But then, with My Grief, the Sun, it was intensely purposeful. I spent a lot of time thinking about what would go where, and my friend gave me some advice, that there’s something nice about when you can feel a narrative thread in a collection of poetry. And I really liked that. I thought the easiest way to make a thread, and I still do this now, is to look at the beginning and the endings of poems. That’s one way I feel like you can create threads and the other way is thematically through what was going on. Like if a poem ends in a conversation about, let’s say, love or sleep, and the other poem begins with waking up, that’s a kind of thread.

There are other kinds of threads too. The idea of different sections. Some sections are more general and then two sections are more distinctly topical. I was playing around; should the two sections be split? How? Then I printed everything out for the second book, and I looked at it in a big way. I put everything on my dining room floor and followed it around to see how it looked.

TV: What is your writing process like?

SW: I think I’m only starting to have one now. It was very random for a long time. I’m one of those people where I don’t sit down at a desk and try to write. I don’t find I do well or that the work comes out well with discipline. I want to be more disciplined and now I’m trying to very gently integrate it into the practice, but there’s something about poetry that really resists discipline for me, and I found the more I tried to structure my poetry, the less I liked what I was doing. I am destined or doomed to be one of those people where I have to just walk around until the idea for a poem starts, and then write it down as quickly as I can. And then I’ll do a structured, disciplined process when I edit.

TV: How do you know when a poem is complete?

SW: Oh. No clue. I don’t know—it’s weird, right? I think that is something similar to the question: how does a poem begin? There’s a similar practice, or a feeling, when a poem is done. I’ll feel when a poem is coming on now. I can start to see the signs, and so I’ll go and I’ll grab my phone or I’ll grab a piece of paper or I’ll pick up whatever I have to write around me and I’ll sit and I’ll be like, okay, a poem is coming. And then I’ll receive it. It feels like it will pass through me.

Similarly, I think I’ve started homing in on the instinctual feeling of a poem being done. I think it’s less about me being satisfied with it or happy with how it looks, though that can be a part of it. It’s more about closure. Like, does this poem feel like it’s done what it had to do? The feeling that came over me that started this: does that feeling feel resolved?

TV: Is there a book or a text that you would describe as essential reading?

SW: Personally, my answer is probably The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand. I think there’s something about that book that teaches poets, but also anyone, how to step behind the veils of your mind. Like, how do you step into a deeper place of how we feel, or how we process an event, or the world? I think there’s a lot in that book that is about being a person who feels a lot and how to understand that and where it comes from and why. It’s also about how to understand how stories are made or structured, even, and why we should step outside of structures to really look at them before we participate in them. It’s so enriching to think of our minds that way.

TV: So, switching gears a little bit, you are also publicity and promotions manager and poetry editor at Fernwood Publishing. How does your work as a poet shape your approach?

SW: That’s a great question, actually, because I think I have been thinking really deeply about my job with publicity lately, and it’s really developed since I first joined. I’ve been understanding that different people do publicity in different ways. My job as a poet is actually not disengaged at all from the work of promotion because promotion is all about relationships, too. It’s all about momentum and relationships and how to build an economy of attention around a book, and how to do that ethically—especially with Fernwood, because of our politics.

When you’re a poet, one of the main things that we wonder and ponder over is relationships, relationship-building, and community-building. I think all poetry happens in community, and publicity and promotions is all about community. It really only works with community; that’s when it’s the most rich. So I think my abilities to think as a poet, and that whole disposition, has been very useful in my job. And thankfully my coworkers have been so supportive in creating a kind attitude toward promotions that is very in line with poetics as well as politics.

TV: Can you share one common misconception about publicity and promotions in the publishing industry?

SW: Hmm, I mean I have this thing that I call my conspiracy theory, which is really not a conspiracy at all. I think there’s a misconception—I’m about to sound like an absolute pessimist, but I think there’s a misconception that the books that deserve the most love are the most covered. There’s a lot more politically happening in the publishing industry that relates to the kind of way that money is arranged. Industries have economies and how money is distributed matters a lot for publicity and promotions. By the end of a production cycle, how much do we have left to spend on books? What other books are part of the season and how do we distribute resources? How many people are working on any given book? And so on. I also think that there is a culture of individual celebrity that also reinforces this kind of complicated highlighting of books. It’s a kind of exceptionalist culture where we’re uplifting certain authors or certain books topically and then often not realizing that culture of uplifting is embedded in the capitalist tendencies to assign one voice to one thing. There’s a lot that’s outside of how good your manuscript is that decides who gets to be that voice. Not to say that the books highlighted by mainstream media and popularized are not good books. But I think that it’s just really way more calculated behind the scenes. Again, there’s a big asterisk on myself because a lot of good books get a lot of good love, and they deserve that good love. But, if you see a book get a lot of coverage, I think that it’s always good to know that there are a lot of good books that don’t get that kind of attention and it’s really important to not just think of attention as equivalent to value or worthiness.

TV: What is the biggest challenge you face in your role?

SW: Honestly, relationships again, because the misconception is outward relationships, toward community, and the challenge is the inward relationships with authors. What I didn’t realize is there’s also a client element to my role as well. Authors bring you their art and have a very particular idea of how they want their art to be treated, but then you are the conduit between them and the real world where that conspiracy theory is happening, so you have to be very gentle in how you handle those relationships.

People have a lot of emotions around their books. A lot of editors get called “book doulas”; they go through that emotional work and that’s really, really intense and important. I feel like I’m then the book’s nanny for a while after: the person who has to take the baby to the playground and babysit for a year and be, like, “Now meet all the other children!” And then their parents are yelling at me and being like, “Why did you do this? Why do you do that? Why didn’t you do this?” Not all of them; just some parents get very protective of their child and they want their child to be treated in a certain way. Anyway, that’s my extended metaphor.

I also really don’t like the old culture of treating authors with kid gloves because I think it can be very patronizing and paternalistic. “Author handling” is a word that I’ve heard before and I don’t think that’s fair to authors as people, but I do think there needs to be more awareness and transparency between authors and publishers about what the reality of the situation is.

I think it’s really important and helpful for people to be more informed on what the reality is, because then it doesn’t make you feel bad when your book doesn’t get twenty reviews or a star-studded virtual launch or whatever your aspirations are for publicity. Going back again, to the conspiracy theory, which plants [the idea that] maybe some of those dreams as generally achievable when they are exceptional. It just clears the air on what can be done and how it can be done, and how to best work together. It’s a relationship where we’re in it together, we’re both working on it, so let’s work together as well as we can. That’s really

what helps books get out in the best way possible.

TV: What is your favourite part of your role?

SW: My favourite part of my role is when I get to just see books be celebrated and know that I was a part of it. I think there are so many people with amazing books that start such amazing conversations.When I get to be part of planning any community gathering that brings together people in a meaningful way about a meaningful topic—there’s a particular example of an event coming to mind, which was about healthcare in Canada and how it’s linked to land struggle. Being able to help community be in conversation. It makes me really happy to have that be a part of my work. It’s a blessing.

TV: We’ll wrap up by bringing it back to your own writing. What are you working on right now?

SW: I’m not sure yet if it’s fiction or nonfiction; it’s kind of in the middle. I’m working on prose, because I’ve been wanting to write something in prose for a long time. I’m working on a book about my own life again. I think it’s a book about family, intergenerational trauma. It’s a book about freedom. I’m just thinking through a lot of complicated and recent changes in my life and I’m straining it through the language of personal essay. It’s still in that stage where it’s nothing. I wrote two sentences yesterday, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense right now. Loneliness, love, conversations with friends. My usual jam. Digging through my place in the world and how I make it and how we live.

TV: I’m excited about that. Hopefully we’ll be able to invite you back in the future and you’ll tell us all about it.

AGA Wilmot

(BFA, MPub) is a writer, editor, and painter based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for fiction, short fiction, and screenwriting, including the Friends of the Merril Short Story Contest and ECW Press’s Best New Speculative Novel Contest. For seven years they served as co-publisher and co-EIC of the Ignyteand British Fantasy Award–nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Their credits include myriad online and in-print publications and anthologies. They are also on the editorial advisory board for Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. Books of Wilmot’s include The Death Scene Artist (Buckrider Books, 2018) and Withered (ECW Press, 2024). They are represented by Kelvin Kong of K2 Literary (k2literary.com). Find them online at agawilmot.ca.

Tali Voron: You’re an editor by trade and have had experience in every area of the industry. Can you tell me about your journey and the kinds of projects you work on?

AGA Wilmot: My journey was a little bit unexpected. I didn’t anticipate I would wind up in publishing. In undergrad, I trained to be a practicing visual artist. I specialized in oil painting. I still love it, I just wasn’t cut out for making a career out of it. Had I followed that path, I think I would have started to hate it eventually. But while I was in undergrad, I stumbled into editing by accident—I just had a natural tendency for it with my own work. Then friends started asking me to look over their papers and I started to realize, “Oh, is this something I’ve been ignoring my whole life?” The answer was yes. That led me to doing some volunteer work with a couple of B.C.-based organizations, one of which was a local food culture magazine that only lasted for a few issues. That led me to applying for Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing program. That’s when I really fell in love with it, and I already knew by that point that I also wanted to write. I had heard so many stories of authors being furious with their editors and whatnot. I never wanted to be oblivious of the other side of the coin, but I didn’t expect that I’d wind up with a career in publishing as a result.

As for the types of projects I work on, I take on almost anything that comes my way, if I think I’m equipped for it. If someone’s coming to me for sensitivity reading for something that I have no experience with, for example, I won’t take that on. But generally, I do a fair bit of fiction, and a lot of academic work as well. I fell into the latter by accident. A friend of a friend needed help with a dissertation that focused predominantly on eating disorders and body dysmorphia. And this friend knew that I had a personal history with that. From there, it just spiraled out. One friend told another friend, another friend told their professor, and that process filtered me through their program. So, while I have a small career in academic editing, I largely edit fiction—sometimes speculative fiction, but honestly fiction of all types. The only thing I’m not terribly comfortable editing is poetry, simply because it’s never been my wheelhouse. I enjoy reading it, but I’ve never had the same level of understanding with it as I do with the conventions of fiction.

TV: Do you approach your fiction editing and academic editing in the same way? Or is it two completely different experiences?

AW: No. Every project is different with academic editing. There are some things I start with right off the bat, of course. For example, there are certain things that are inherent to the APA style guide, so I go through before I read anything, fix all the headers and make sure they’re all formatted properly. When it comes to fiction, I kind of dive in. I will usually read a synopsis of the work and then read through what’s been noted for me, because most times I’m doing copy and line editing. Then I get started, trying to experience it as if I were a reader coming to it for the first time. So it’s a bit different in that regard—I want to go in with some element of surprise, because that will help me gauge how the average person is going to approach this work.

TV: What do you believe is the biggest misconception about being an editor?

AW: I feel like the biggest misconception from the writer’s side is that we are here to interfere with your work, or to get in the way of your vision. That’s simply not the case. We’re trying to work with you to help bring out the best version of your vision. I feel like the biggest misconception from the publisher’s side is this idea that we will get our work done in the office. I think all editors should have the option for remote work because you need no distractions. Every time I’ve worked in an office, I’ve wound up doing the bulk of the work at home and not being paid extra for it. The biggest misconception from the editorial side, and this is purely for fiction, is to beware of the editor who thinks that their work can’t be challenged, because in fiction, any rule can be broken if there’s a reason for breaking it.

TV: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as an editor? And what is your favorite part of this work?

AW: My favorite part is honestly seeing someone see their work come to fruition. I was at a launch this weekend for a local author named Suzan Palumbo. She was releasing a book of short stories, and the first story in that collection is one that we published through Anathema back in 2018. It wasn’t her first publication, but it was still great to be able to see where she was a few years ago versus where she is now. It’s a very fulfilling feeling to know you’re playing any part in helping someone realize their dreams.

As for the biggest challenge, earlier in my career I worked more with independent authors, ones not tied to a publisher of any kind, and it was difficult getting them to accept that editors have to dip their fingers into their work. I had a number of people hire me who afterward I felt only hired me so I could tell them that their work was great. Hiring an editor was a step they felt they had to go through for accreditation, but they weren’t actually expecting you to say, “Well, here, here, here, and here are some problems. And also, this is deeply offensive, unintentional, etc.” That was the biggest challenge I faced early on. I would say the biggest challenge, broadly speaking, that I face nowadays is simply managing workload, because with the rising cost of inflation, you have to also raise your rates, but you can’t price out publishers because they also are limited in terms of what they can afford. There’s a constant push and pull with the work itself, which I don’t find terribly difficult. It’s more the juggling and separating things out with the freelance life and, you know, having to manage not just your deadlines, but shifting deadlines when other people miss theirs. You have to adjust and you have to watch as things cascade … life gets messy sometimes. I don’t encounter many challenges with individuals these days, but I have had projects that have been very challenging. I copy edited a book for Arbeiter Ring Publishing (ARP) years ago. It was fifty essays from Indigenous writers detailing the atrocities of Canada’s history and present. It was difficult in the sense that it was an emotionally draining project. By the end of it, I think I shut down a little bit, once I’d submitted my edits. But that’s a rarity. Usually, I’m able to compartmentalize.

TV: Let’s talk a little bit about your writing as well. You’re an author, and you have many publication credits to your name. Has your career as a writer influenced the way you approach editing?

AW: Yes, absolutely. It’s softened my approach. When I work with authors, especially fiction authors, I make it clear that my edits are suggestions and that everything is open for conversation. We’re working together—I’m not working for you; you’re not working for me. I find that as an author, that approach has also helped me come to what I’m given with more patience, more calm. It’s common that you get your edits back and immediately your hackles go up, like, “How dare this person say this about my perfectly formed idea?” But I don’t care who you are, no idea is ever as perfectly formed as you think it is. And so I say, as an author, the best thing has been knowing that this is a partnership. I try to begin all working relationships that way regardless of the side I’m on. I can always tell when I’m working with an editor who doesn’t feel that way, and it’s never a good feeling.

TV: What are you working on right now?

AW: Right now I’m dividing my time into a few different areas. I’m finishing up work on a book of my own that comes out next spring with ECW, titled Withered. I think I’ve delivered the last round of copy edits on that. I have been working on a draft of a different project for a couple of years now, Every Little Death. The novel is a very trans-heavy, art-heavy narrative about capitalism, self-worth and the apocalypse. It’s the best way I can describe it. It’s also a love story. I’ve also been plugging away at some short stories for various anthology calls. And I’m very, very, very slowly plotting out a couple of new things that I probably won’t get to actually touch for years. So yeah, it’s a multi-layered process with me—my brain is never on just one thing at a time.

TV: What is your favourite punctuation mark, and why?

AW: Easily the em dash. I write a lot of dialogue. I am more of a dialogue writer than a prose writer, and the em dash is so useful as a harder pause. I probably wind up speaking with it a lot in my own life without realizing it. So yeah, I’ve used it more than any other punctuation mark.

TV: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

AW: Buy my books, and buy several copies for your friends! However, if I’m speaking more to editors and/or prospective editors and writers in this interview, it would be to offer the advice I give to any aspiring editor. Providing you’re comfortable, lean into what makes you weird or unique. The reason I say that is because the majority of editors out there have an English or literature background, or at least the majority that I’ve known. That’s what they did in undergrad or grad school, and that’s wonderful. I did a Bachelor of Fine Arts focusing on painting and drawing with a minor in film studies. And I have a background in conservatory piano. I’ve leaned on these things for different types of work, such as working with art magazines or getting asked to look at works of fiction that are a bit more art-heavy or that are rooted in music or film. And also, my history with mental health issues and anorexia, and being queer and trans—all things that I am able to speak to personally. If this is what separates me from the pack, I’m comfortable leaning on it. These things give me my own corner of the sky. I still like getting to look at almost anything that comes my way, of course, but this is how I can differentiate myself. And I feel like that is key for many editors. There are a lot of us out there. And a lot of editors who are brilliant, compassionate people who know their stuff. And that’s how you carve out your own corner. So yes, lean into what makes you weird.

Laurie D. Graham

grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her latest book, a long poem called Fast Commute, was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook of new work, entitled Calling It Back to Me, is out now with Deer Mountain Pages.

Tali Voron: An international literary journal with a focus on literary nonfiction, Brick has been pushing boundaries since 1977. What role would you say Brick plays in Canada’s literary landscape?

Laurie D. Graham: Brick is different from other literary magazines in that it publishes a lot of international writers. The editorial board solicits writers in addition to us reading unsolicited submissions, and we focus pretty heavily on literary nonfiction. We, like most other journals in the country, are a pretty small outfit, and we publish what winds up being a pretty big magazine. So, we share a lot of similarities with other lit mags, but our broad international reach winds up making Brick a little different. This was started by Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding when they took over Brick in 1985. They wanted to hear about what novelists and poets were writing about, and what ideas were driving their work. They wanted writers to turn from their projects to write about the things that really fuelled their passions. And now we’re really interested in publishing the widest range of nonfiction we can possibly find out in the world. In other words, we’re always trying to redefine what literary nonfiction is or can be.

TV: You are the publisher at Brick; can you share what a day in the role looks like?

LG: It’s tough for me to describe a typical day because we’re a pretty small group, so my role could involve anything having to do with the magazine. There are three paid staff and an editorial board of six people—I’m on that editorial board as well. We have a few freelancers who do copy editing and design and web development, as well as a small crew of readers who go through all the unsolicited submissions. I’m largely focused on the magazine’s editorial direction and financial situation, but I also, along with the other two editorial staff, query and proofread all pieces that come in.

Another thing that most people don’t know is that the editorial process at Brick is one of the more intense editorial processes among literary journals not only in Canada, but in the world.

We are kind of like book editors who are looking at singular pieces in a journal. We’re actually in the throes of production on the winter issue right now. These days, my day-to-day life has the Canadian Oxford Dictionary very close beside me as I comb through all the pieces. Then I will be working on fundraising and strategic planning and the long range vision for Brick. There’s always administrative work to do as well: later I’ll be sending issues for consignment and assisting the other staff with getting the newsletter out. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation at Brick for sure. With work like this you become very, very well rounded. You get to know every aspect of making a magazine.

TV: What are you most looking forward to in your next issue? What was your favourite piece or part of the previous issue?

LG: Our summer issue came out in June. My favourites from there were a piece by Omar El Akkad about memorable swims that he’s taken throughout his life. We had an astounding poem by Robert Bringhurst in memoriam for Stan Dragland, who was the founder of Brick back in 1977. In every issue we also publish an interview from Eleanor Wachtel, and in the last issue we published her interview with Percival Everett, which has many memorable moments. We also had a piece by Suzanne Gardinier, an American writer I wasn’t familiar with until recently. She writes a really pulled-apart, visceral, poetic work of nonfiction about Pablo Neruda’s assassination, statecraft’s intrusions on poetry, and what happens when poets become tied up in the bloody machinations of oppressive governments. It’s a wonderful piece that encompasses the whole world.

In the next issue, we have a piece about an Ed Roberson poem by the writer Douglas Kearney, who won the Griffin a couple of years ago. We have a new poem from Fanny Howe and a lovely short, poetic prose piece from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who’s a contributing editor at Brick. Eleanor’s interview this issue is with Michael Ondaatje, which is really fun, because they’re friends and you can see that in their exchange. We also have a piece from Maggie Helwig, who is both a writer and a priest at Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields church in Kensington Market in Toronto. She writes a really beautiful and heart-wrenching essay about her proximity to the people murdered in the gay village and being present for her father’s death.

TV: We’ll switch gears a little bit and talk about your writing as well. In addition to playing an integral role in the publishing industry, you are also an acclaimed poet. Each of your collections tackles incredibly important topics, from familial memory, to the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake, to land development and ecological injustice. What has made poetry your chosen medium to explore such complex topics?

LG: Ultimately, I don’t know. After I’ve finished writing a piece, and I think I’ve figured out what it’s trying to say, and see how I can’t properly translate what a book of mine is saying into grammatical sentences, then I know that I’ve picked the right form. It’s as close as I can get to philosophy, just to show some aspect of living that I can see and can’t put into proper words. Poetry is what allows me to look out at the world and to say what’s there at some length, and then a sort of thesis forms. Poetry is the form I feel like I can say the most urgent things the best. Poetry really does become a way of seeing, a way of sensing. The longer you do it, you find that it’s there with you all the time.

TV: What is your favourite piece of writing advice?

LG: I’m always a little hesitant to give writing advice. I feel like there’s not much I can say to a writer who already has that fire, but I am a big proponent of following your nose when you’re writing, to really try to let go of the internal editor in your head telling you what direction you should go in, what you should be doing, what might sell, and what might be best received. What I love most about writing is being able to sit down and go where I’m moved. Basically, if I want to write about what I’m seeing out the window, I go there. If I want to stop and dip into a book for a few pages, I’ll do that. If no words come and I’m just sitting, I’ll do that and try not to feel guilty about it. To me, that’s the process of being present so the words can show up when they’re ready.

TV: Do you have any pearls of wisdom when it comes to editing?

LG: My favourite advice actually came from the poet Tim Lilburn, who was my teacher at the University of Victoria in B.C. while I did the BFA there. He was a really astounding teacher who really changed my course. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing when I started in that program, and I gained a sense of what poetry could be and what it could do in large part thanks to him. One day in class, almost as an aside, he said when you’re reading someone else’s work, your job is to not colonize the text. You don’t get to exist within someone else’s text and make it into the thing you want it to be. Your job is to see and sense what the author is trying to do and try to help bring what they are doing into its fullest, most robust form, and that has stuck with me. He was talking specifically about workshopping, but I think this applies to editing as well. It’s how I try to edit: to really discern when I’m trying to insert myself or insert my preferences into someone else’s work. It’s hard though, because there is such a thing as house style. There is such a thing as having a piece exist in some relationship to the rules that the publisher has set, and so you have to balance that. You also have to understand when rules need to be broken, when a writer’s aims and their voice needs to be supported. Those rules have to go by the wayside when something is urgent. That to me is the most interesting and important part of editing.

TV: What are you working on right now?

LG: I just brought out a chapbook of poems that is from a larger collection that I think is nearly done. I’m trying to parse my great-grandparents’ immigrations to this country about a century ago to farm homesteads in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to understand more of the circumstances of their leaving and what they left behind, while also digging into how implicated I am in the harms of settlerdom. There was a lot of silence around these stories, and there was a sense that that generation wanted a clean break so they could start over in Canada. And that’s interwoven with poems that involve a family member with dementia who’s trying to pass along heirlooms from those great-grandparents, and what she knew of the stories is degrading as she does that. I’m also trying to write—I almost shouldn’t even talk about it because I feel like I’ll ruin something—a bit of nonfiction prose, trying to discern a shape at this point, something that’s been bubbling for a little while now. I’ve been able to fit poetry into my life pretty well because it’s quick compared to, say, writing a novel. But this prose has been urgently presenting itself lately, so I’ve got to somehow find some extra hours in my life to follow it through.