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I Keep Coming Back to What Gives Me Courage: An Interview with Kate Braid

Former PRISM poetry editor Rob Taylor sat down with poet, author and former journey carpenter Kate Braid to discuss her newly released poetry collection “Elemental” (Caitlin Press, 2018).

I spoke with you briefly for PRISM international back in 2014, and at that point you noted: “Looking over my recent poems, I’m a bit alarmed to find I’m writing more personally, neither behind the mask of another or out of my experience as a carpenter – which also became a sort of persona.” True to that statement, Elemental, though certainly structured around “elemental” themes, feels in other ways like your first “general” collection (your past collections having channeled Glenn Gould and Emily Carr, among others). In that sense it feels almost like you’re living the traditional poet’s trajectory in reverse (the early, more personal/general collection, followed by themed “projects”).
 
Do you think of this book in those terms (“general” and personal), and do you think it represents a larger shift in your preoccupations/energies as a writer? Did “removing the masks” allow you to access some more “elemental” part of yourself?

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Writing Light: An Interview with Sarah Selecky

Photo credit: Michelle Yee

Photo credit: Michelle Yee

Interview by Erin Steel, 

Sarah Selecky is a vegan, a Virgo, and a lover of dark chocolate. But she’s more well-known for her writing and her teaching. The New York Times called her first book, This Cake Is for the Party, “utterly fascinating.” This collection of short stories was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean, and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and The Journey Prize Anthology. Through Sarah Selecky Writing School, she runs online creative writing and mentorship programs, and an annual international writing contest. Her new novel Radiant Shimmering Light will be published by Harper Collins Canada in May 2018.

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Olga Holin read more

Get to Know: Marc Perez

Interview by Kyla Jamieson

Emerging writer Marc Perez’s story “Dog Food” appears in our “BAD” issue. Of his story, Perez says, “I once had a dog, and I named her Bruce. The story is a lament for her.” For this issue, we sought work that took us to true places along difficult or unexpected paths; “Dog Food” is one such story. In it, a boy witnesses violence he’s helpless against, and is denied understanding in the aftermath. His pain is real, but nobody sees or acknowledges it; where can it go but forwards, into his future?

Marc Perez immigrated to Canada from the Philippines and now lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Perez has been working in the nonprofit industry for the past five years; in addition to this work he is currently participating in Writing Lives, a project in which writers collaborate with Holocaust survivors to write their memoirs. Read on for Perez’s thoughts on identity and home, privilege and marginalization, and the best time to write—while asleep and dreaming.

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Winners of the 2018 Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Contest!

We are absolutely delighted to announce the winners of the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction Contest, as selected by our contest judge Thalia Field! We received so many wonderful stories this year, so thank you to everyone who submitted. Read the three winning stories in our forthcoming summer issue 56.4!

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Decolonial Confession: A Review of Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries

Heart Berries
Terese Marie Mailhot
Doubleday Canada
Review by Cody Caetano

Often when I’m reading memoir, I’ll remember a quote from a misguided Neil Genzlinger, who penned “The Problem With Memoirs” for The New York Times in 2011: “There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir… Sure, [Amazon] has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of” (italics mine). It is important to note that marginalized memoirists, especially early-career Indigenous women, Two-Spirit, and queer folks, have fraught histories with Genzlinger-types, their “old rules” and antiquated tastes that mar the merit of writing, publishing, and participating in the predominantly white spaces of the literary world. And then along comes Terese Marie Mailhot, a Salish First Nation woman from Seabird Island Indian Reservation with the assertion that memoir “functions as something vulnerable in a sea of posturing” (137). And it is in vulnerability that Mailhot effectively rejects the moth-eaten straightjacket that would otherwise restrict the inventive, decolonial confession of Heart Berries.

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Get to Know: Beni Xiao

Interview by Matthew Kok

Beni Xiao is a nanny and writer based in Vancouver, BC. They are tired all the time, so they would appreciate if you’d let them sleep. Bad Egg, Beni’s new chapbook, is full of quiet, important things. There is a garden of variety in these poems, and the chapbook is drawn together by the strength of Beni’s voice. The effect is a lot like having a small bug perched in your ear, joking, encouraging, asking. They are willing to go with you into storms. They will not lie and tell you your impact on the world is going to be anything other than what it is. They will tell you about the hard, strong thing we all need to be sometimes, and as they describe it you may believe it is you—it may depend on the day, or whose limbs you’ve found crossed over your own, but the bug will say it for you if you can’t. There is a whole world of people who will speak around the important things rather than to them, or ignore the strange and the wonderful, but none of them are in this chapbook. You should start listening to Beni Xiao—I promise it will be worth it.

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