Today Tricia chats with Alicia Elliott, writer and editor, about her "deliciously dark and disturbing" stories, how identity is not a hard-and-fast concept, how to seprate politics and art, her own personal story of becoming a writer, and more.

Show Notes

• Do we need to feel uncomfortable when writing? When reading?
• What is considered correct, normal, comfortable? What happens when you only write about and with these boundaries?
• What are we casting out, especially in language? 
• What is failure for Alicia, and how did it shape her as a writer today?
• How did Alicia deal with rejection?
• What's behind the curtain?

Book and Author References

And Then She Fell by Alicia Elliott
A Mind Spread Out On the Ground by Alicia Elliott
Tanya Talaga, journalist and author
The Wizard of Oz, 1939 film
Episode 5 of this podcast, featuring Adrian Michael Kelly

About Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She's had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018 and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.

Alicia's next book, And Then She Fell, is out now!

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Acknowledgement

This episode was recorded and produced on the traditional homeland of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat First Nations.

Today Aara chats with Adrian Michael Kelly, author and writing coach, about growing up in northern Ontario, class, identity, the power and meaning of failure, his upcoming memoir, and more.

Show Notes

• How small communities and the working class informed Adrian's writing
• The importance of class in our society
• How Adrian learned to write authentically by embracing the reality of his own perceptions
• Can we imagine ourselves "into the cells of other people"?
• Is writing an escape from personality or identity?
• The involuntary urge to write, and how one can still block it
• How to deal with writer's block and failure
• Adrian's upcoming memoir
• How can a writing life involve meaningful community, self-care, mature commitment to spirituality?

Book and Author References

Episode 4 of the KWF Podcast featuring Jessica Johns
Down Sterling Road by Adrian Michael Kelly
The Ambassador of What: Stories by Adrian Michael Kelly
TS Eliot, 20th century American writer
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

About Adrian Michael Kelly

Adrian Michael Kelly is a writer of short fiction, fiction, and essayist as well as a writing coach. He is the author of the novel Down Sterling Road. His short fiction has appeared in three compilations of Best Canadian Stories and in the Journey Prize Anthology, and his essays and journalism have appeared in The Globe & Mail, the Calgary Herald, CNQ: Canadian Notes and Queries, and other periodicals.  He holds a doctorate in English (with a creative writing focus) and has taught writing and literature to students and professionals worldwide. 

Adrian’s most recent work is his debut short fiction collection The Ambassador of What, a series of linked stories about fathers, sons, and the complicated reality that is family. A Canadian Notes & Queries review calls “the way Kelly wields (and welds together) words is astounding . . . When your brain finally clicks into Kelly’s rhythm, Ambassador accomplishes something rare: it feels fresh, a brand-new mode of storytelling; it rearticulates your way of seeing the world, reprograms your brain, gets your feet tapping to a different beat. And this is what makes it a book worth slowing down for.” 

Adrian was born in Timmins, grew up in Campbellford, and currently lives in Kingston. 

Learn more about Adrian.

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Today Tricia chats with author Jessica Johns about identifying with one's own characters, representing the incredible diversity of Indigenous peoples, the responsibility of a writer and a reader, and so much more.

Show Notes

• How does Jessica's writing come out?
• What does it mean to sustain writing with work in other areas?
• How do we define an individual's responsibility, accepting that we are never truly alone?
• How is failure not about rejection?
• Why is receiving help and love hard for so many people?
• What is "auntieship", and how can it sometimes for a verb?
• Why are animals actual characters, not just mood-setters?

Book and Author References

Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
Bad Cree by Jessica Johns
The Trickster Trilogy by Eden Robinson

About Jessica Johns

Jessica Johns is a nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Her debut novel, Bad Cree, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award and won the MacEwan Book of the Year award.

Her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction has been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Glass Buffalo, CV2, SAD Magazine, Red Rising Magazine, Poetry is Dead, Bad Nudes, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Canadian Art, C Magazine, Brick, Reissue, Maisonneuve, The Globe and Mail, Best Canadian Essays 2019, among others. She has spoken at various literary and arts festivals such as The Bay Area Book Festival, WORD Vancouver, Vancouver Writers Fest, FOLD Festival, Victoria Festival of Authors, London’s Literary and Creative Arts Festival, and Blue Metropolis.

Her visual art has been featured at the 2022 Rhubarb Festival, grunt gallery, and at Latitude 53. 

She serves on the editorial board for GUTS – An Anti-Colonial Feminist Magazine, the advisory board for the Indigenous Brilliance reading series, and also brews kombucha as the founder of kokôm kombucha.

Learn more about Jessica.

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Today we’re speaking with poet Paul Vermeersch about relearning how to write, the use of failure as a learning tool, his most recent inspirational read, and so much more.

Show Notes

• Why you can't inhale and exhale at the same time when you write. You also need to read!
• How taking time off from writing can work... and not work
• New ways to think about the structure of a poem
• Writing during the pandemic, when writing felt like it was something to be recovered or rediscovered
• Every book is your first book
• The importance of caution in the homestretch of writing
• The different types of poetry: experience, observation, and imagination
• How being fat may be hereditary, but it doesn't have to be heritage
• What writing excites Paul these days?

Book and Author References

Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems, 1995-2020 by Paul Vermeersch
On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche
Tanis MacDonald, author and guest of KWF Podcast Episode 1
The Fat Kid by Paul Vermeersch
Fugue with Bedbug by Anne-Marie Turza

About Paul Vermeersch

Paul is a poet, multimedia artist, creative writing professor, and literary editor. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Shared Universe: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020. He has been a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Trillium Book Award, among other honours. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph for which he received the Governor General's Gold Medal. He teaches in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College where he is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. He is also the senior editor of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers where he created the poetry and fiction imprint Buckrider Books. He lives in Toronto.

Learn more about Paul.

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Today we’re speaking with acclaimed poet Otoniya Okot Bitek, who will be appearing at the upcoming 2023 Kingston WritersFest in Event No. 22: The Black Experience in Kingston. Otoniya chats with co-host Tricia Knowles about failure, inspiration, identity, and what her mom once thought of her poetry.

Show Notes

• How does a writer’s identity affect their work, and their use of subjective vs. objective writing?
• “There is a more recent awareness that who writes matters.”
• How does the abstract of a scholarly paper affect its writing, and why does the methodology for academic work not always apply to creative work? Is there a crossover?
• The exciting potential of the blank page
• Writer’s block: how do we define it? How do we work through or around it? How should we reimagine it as something else going on, like writing percolating in the brain?
• Is writing a need or a structured practice?
• Otoniya’s analogy of overcoming writer’s block being similar to overcoming “builder’s block”: would it be a good idea to just hammer nails into wood?
• Can failure be a way of saying, “this is not the right time?
• How Otoniya once had her high school paper read aloud as an example of what not to do—and how she learned from the experience of shame.
• What did Otoniya’s mom once say about her poetry?

Book and Author References

Song and Dread by Otoniya Okot Bitek
100 Days by Otoniya Okot Bitek
Joanne Arnott, Canadian author
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

About Otoniya Okot Bitek

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her collection 100 Days, a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several prizes including the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Awards and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. “What makes this collection such a pleasure to read,” says a Huffington Post review, “is that it’s laced with moments of such grace that you have to pause and re-read the lines again in order to reflect upon each phrase….a masterpiece of uncommon splendour and Juliane Okot Bitek is a virtuoso performing at the height of her powers.” Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards for Poetry, and “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize.   

Her work has been published widely in publications such as Event, The Capilano Review, Room, and Arc, and anthologized in Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ups, Downs, Ins & Outs of Marriage, and Transition: Writing Black Canadas, amongst others. Her newest poetry collection, Song and Dread, offers COVID meditations rife with the paradoxical forces of boredom and intensity. The poems remind us of community, connectedness, and the ways the strange can become normalized when there is no other option. Otoniya holds an MA in English, a BFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from UBC. She has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University, and a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity, English, and Creative Writing at Queen’s University.  

Learn more about Otoniya.

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Welcome to the first episode of the KWF Podcast, where we go beyond author chat that typically occurs at the festival. This is an opportunity for listeners to learn more about authors not only in the context of their books but about where they come from regarding their process, their struggles and their inspirations. We want to unearth what drives them in their craft by exploring the material they write about but also how they navigate failure.

Failure is a key theme to today's episode, and we chat about that and more with Canadian poet, professor, reviewer, and writer Tanis MacDonald. 

Tanis will be part of the Writers Retreat Faculty at the next Kingston WritersFest, taking place from September 27 to October 1, 2023.

Show Notes

In this episode we cover a lot of ground between Aara and Tricia before Aara's interview with Tanis MacDonald. Some highlights include:

• What is failure? How do authors navigate failure?
• How do we change the perception of what failure means?
• How does failure lead to resilience?
• What does it mean to be a "bad birder"?
• Curiosity as a driver for writing
• The need for discipline and tools, not strictures
• How is writing informed by identity, and identity informed by writing?
• Importance of scrutinizing classic texts according to class, pushing back against an “abuse of subjectivity”
• What does it mean to be a working class feminist?
• What is Tanis working on now?

Book and Author References

• How to Fail as a Pop Star by Vivek Shraya
• On Writing and Failure by Stephen Marche
• Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernadine Evaristo

About Tanis MacDonald

She is Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University with specialities in Canadian literature, women’s literature, and the elegy. Her memoir via instruction, Out of Line: Daring to be an Artist Outside the Big City, is now available from Wolsak and Wynn. Tanis is also a co-editor (with Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild) of the multi-genre anthology GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times (Frontenac House), and her book The Daughter’s Way (WLUP, 2012) was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Tessera, Prairie Fire, Studies in Canadian Literature, Hamilton Arts and Letters, The New Quarterly, and in Far and Wide: Essays from Across Canada (Pearson), and in the forthcoming anthology Far Villages (Black Lawrence Press). She is the author of three books of poetry, with a fourth, Mobile, now available from Book*hug.

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