Six Questions interview #238 : Harold Hoefle

Harold Hoefle lives in Overbrook, where the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation lived for 8000 years. He’s been there a month. Before that, forty years in Montreal, half of them teaching English & Creative Writing at John Abbott College (with three semesters of teaching at UVic). Writing-wise: fiction first.  Ottawa’s Oberon Press published his collection of linked short fiction, The Mountain Clinic, in 2008. It was a finalist for the QWF’s Paragraphe-Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His short story, “Ride”, won the 2012 Quebec Writing Competition, sponsored by CBC/Radio-Canada. Poetry…inspired by the ghazals of John Thompson – meaning: blown away by – he started writing poems in 2009. His work has won the Bliss Carman and Great Blue Heron poetry prizes, and garnered a silver medal at the National Magazine Awards. In 2018, his debut collection, The Night Chorus, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. rob mclennan is putting out a chapbook of Harold’s poems, Leaning In, in August 2026. A full-length manuscript, Give and Go, is wandering the realm of small presses. Realm? Dark woods? Right now, two of his poems are in The Antigonish Review. David O’Meara has kindly solicited a poem for the upcoming Riverkeeper event (and corollary chapbook), where eight poets – four English-language, and four French – will read a piece related to the Ottawa River.

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

As noted above: a month.  But in 1980, I came here for my undergrad, at Carleton.  Four glorious years: skating on the canal, new friendships, and reading dozens of books unrelated to my courses.  Also: the National Capital Marathon (flat course = good time).  Now I’m here for many reasons: nostalgia; grandchildren in Gatineau; old friends; and the belief that, at a certain point, it’s good to shake up one’s life.  New province; new city.  I love Overbrook: the entire world lives here.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Someone, probably a long time ago, said that readers become writers.  So: the Hardy Boys; Stephen King; then…Camus, Hesse; later, Elizabeth Smart, Munro, Norman Levine…I wanted to try.  But the real adrenalin-jangler was Kerouac’s On the Road.  So, after reading that, and finishing my undergrad, I spent four years Kerouac-ing around Canada, Mexico, Central America, and later Europe.  Notepads always on the go.  I tried to write stories; I did write stories; they sucked.  Then, in the summer of ’96, I began a year of teaching at St. Xavier’s High School, in Kathmandu.  In the evenings, I had time.  And I really felt: if I don’t start writing now, I’ll throw myself off a building.  No one wants to read about self-hate; I was feeling it.  So I started writing.  Stories.  First one, about my Austrian-immigrant mother; second, about my security-guard work at the asbestos mine in northern BC.  Third, the state coffee-farm in Nicaragua, seven years after the revolution…

The writing community here: I’ve met people at events.  Writers, here – no different from Montreal – will talk with you, about you, about themselves, about anything.  No wall of ego.  The opposite: kindness, crystallized by offerings: rob maclennan soliciting a chapbook; David O’Meara, a Riverkeeper poem: that kind of thing.  Writers, here, knowing that the new guy should be included.  Really – it’s heartwarming.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

Too early to tell!

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

Again, it’s early (for me), but I can say I’m impressed by all the stuff that’s happening: readings and a group-walk at Fletcher Wildlife Garden; events at Perfect Books; the upcoming Riverkeeper event (on September 2^nd).  Also: the few people I know, are introducing me to people I do not.

“Harold, this is so-and-so, she’s on the board at VERSEfest; “Harold, let me introduce you to so-and-so, she worked at the Carleton Library for thirty years…”. And so on.  I feel welcomed, as if space has been made.  And I’m sure that’s the way it is with other writers who move here.  You are brought into the room – or, as at Fletcher, into the garden.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

Well, the Riverkeeper poem, for sure.  I mean, one day I got up early and walked to the path behind the Parliament buildings…en route, I spent ten minutes staring at a cormorant on a rock in the Rideau River, then I exchanged greetings with a guy nursing a vodka soda on a bench – and this was before I reached the Ottawa River.  But it’s all in the poem: bird, guy, drink.  All writers know: composition is composite.  You take; weave; pull out the threads that ruin the pattern.  At least, that’s what you think you’re doing.

Too early to say whether the city and community are changing – or will change – the way I work.  Hmm.  Maybe more café time.  I have some volunteer-work ideas, but I’m afraid to air them.

Q: What are you working on now?

Poems.  Brewing up a novel; it’s still in primary.  Nowhere near the siphoning into a carboy of actual pages.

Six Questions interview #237 : August Chun

August Chun is a queer, Han Chinese writer, organizer, and researcher based on unceded Ohlone land (Bay Area, California) and unceded Algonquin land (Eastern Ontario, Canada). Their writing has been supported by Periplus, Kearny Street Workshop, McCormack Writing Center, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Abode. They have been published in Seventh Wave, Prism, and SOLRAD, and have work forthcoming in Crucial Comix and Xenolithic Edges. 

Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?

I grew up in Ottawa! I immigrated here with my family when I was very young. We lived all over-- South Keys, Billings Bridge, Barrhaven, Kanata. I moved away for undergrad and then lived in California for almost a decade before moving back to Ottawa in January of this year.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

I was really lucky to have grown up in Ottawa when there were so many writing opportunities for youth: I was a part of the Cappies program where I wrote some high school theater reviews, and even wrote a (terrible) play for the Youth Infringement Festival way back in the 2010s (terrible because of my writing, not because of the hardworking producers, stage managers, or actors). I took writing classes with the City of Ottawa. I even submitted a really terrible poem to Bywords as a teenager-- it was rightfully rejected, because it was so bad!

Even though I majored in English in my undergrad, I didn’t start seriously writing creative nonfiction or poetry until much later, after I finished my graduate degree in LA and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There, I started doing more formal writing retreats like McCormack Writing Center (fka Tin House), and Kearny Street Workshop.

When I moved back to Ottawa earlier this year, I was pleasantly surprised to find a beautiful little writing community, with lots of small gathering spaces like the small press fair, the Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, Possible World’s Object // Project Art Book Fair, and Versefest. I got to have a wonderful little mentorship session with Cassidy McFadzean, who was Arc Poetry’s Writer in Residence. I’ve started getting to know so many amazing folks in the zine community, especially in the queer zine scene (shout out Trans History & Queer Zines and Ottawaisms) and those involved in the city (like Good Golly Zines).

Sadly I’m moving to Toronto later this year to start my PhD (not in writing) but I feel deeply rooted to this city and its people. I hope to continue building more relationships with the writing community. Moving back has showered me in constant, mostly pleasant surprises as I’ve realized how this city has changed, and how much I’ve changed: I’m finding many little writing pockets and communities that I either didn’t know about before, or simply did not exist. It’s a gift to find my hometown, with all of its frustrations and annoyances, continuing to grow.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?

I really reject the idea that writing is a solitary, individual activity: I write in community. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically writing beside another person at one table (though I love that too), rather that I like to respond and be in conversation to what others have written, what they’ve said, and think about how my work can contribute to movements. My poetry, comics, and my creative nonfiction are all rooted in liberation, organizing, and justice, and like Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is done with other people”. It’s what Mahmoud Darwish implores us to do in his beautiful poem “Think of Others”.

Because the writing community is so intimate and small in Ottawa, folks truly have to take the initiative to start their own projects. The community here has taught me to be agile, nimble, and to just go ahead and do things! I was so inspired by the many critical and organizing conversations I’ve had since returning, and by Object // Project, I was inspired to be a part of “Critical ‘Ottawa’ Studies”, which is meant to be an ongoing research and organizing writing & art project thinking about this complicated city at large.

I also wasn’t out as a queer, nonbinary person when I last lived here, almost a decade ago. I was also just starting to critically examine what it meant to live here, occupy space as a racialized person. There is such a big, beautiful queer writing and zine community here, and to a smaller extent, a queer BIPOC writing community. It’s healing to return and find the folks and people I feel like a younger me really needed but didn’t know to ask for.

Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?

There’s a proximity and closeness with the Ottawa community that I feel here-- folks are close to each other. We’re not Toronto or Montreal, sure, but there are people here doing interesting, compelling work. Ottawa excels at putting on tons of community events: the small press fair, Object // Project Bookfair, Ottawa Comic Arts Festival, and on and on. There’s a feeling of intimacy that can feel suffocating, but there’s also a comfort in finding yourself in a smaller city like Ottawa.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

I’m obsessed with Ottawa. The city haunts all my writing, often explicitly, but sometimes silently. By trade, I’m an urban planner: it’s a lens that informs everything I write and think about. I’m constantly thinking about the city, the land on which it was built, its histories, movements, and struggle. When I lived in California (both LA and the SF Bay Area), I worked and organized with people committed and building toward better futures in the communities and excavating histories where they were raised-- it made me homesick, and reflect on my own relationship to Ottawa as well. It really undergrids my two intentions for writing: the first, seeking to illuminate, analyze and invite discussion and learning; and the other, excavating parts of my own experiences growing up.

There’s a wonderful interview in Bomb between Ryan Lee Wong and Kyle Lucia Wu that I think about often. Ryan wrote Which Side Are You On?, a thoughtful book that blurs the line between oral history and fiction and features an Asian American protagonist thinking through his relationship with his parents (both Asian American organizers and activists) and his hometown of Los Angeles in the wake of Akai Gurley’s murder by a Chinese American police officer. Ryan pointed to an epitaph by Walter Benjamin in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: “A native’s book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain.”

When I first returned, I wrote endless poems about the locations I was returning to but also encountering for the first time: a Barrhaven Wal-Mart where I first experienced a jolt of gender dysphoria in middle school; downtown nightclubs; federal boardrooms with Ministry staffers; protests outside City Hall; the edge of the urban boundary in Kanata. Ottawa is a strange, weird, and often hostile place: returning has made me reflect on the ways in which it’s changed, but also the hidden histories I wasn’t taught growing up. It’s a big theme in what I write about, but also, as all writing does, takes inspiration from my time growing up.

Q: What are you working on now?

I’ve got a few different projects on the go!

-       A chapbook (or some longer project) on the thinking through Ottawa suburbs and colonization;

-       A comic on immigration court observing in the SF Bay Area for Crucial Comix;

-       A piece on surveillance technologies for Contrapuntal;

-       Continuing to build out Critical “Ottawa” Studies (please check out the Instagram to see the call for submissions!); and

-       A poem coming out in Xenolithic Edges!

Six Questions interview #236 : Sara Graefe

Sara Graefe (she/they) is a playwright, screenwriter and essayist who lives and works on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations in Vancouver. She is a three-time winner of the National Arts Centre (NAC) Young Playwrights Search and her early play Sadly As I Tie My Shoes premiered to critical acclaim at the NAC Atelier in Ottawa. Other plays include Scribbles, Dreamspyre (Honourable Mention, Jane Chambers Playwriting Award) and Yellow on Thursdays. Her current work-in-progress, Courage, developed in collaboration with Vancouver dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel and at Banff Playwrights Lab with Montreal dramaturg Emma Tibaldo, is an anti-war play exploring intergenerational impacts of migration and flight.

Sara was a screenwriter-in-residence at the Canadian Film Centre and has worked for many years in the BC film industry, including five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series. She also writes creative nonfiction and is the editor of Swelling with Pride: Queer Conception and Adoption Stories (Dagger Editions/Caitlin Press), selected for the American Library Association’s 2020 Over the Rainbow Nonfiction Longlist. She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre from UBC, where she now teaches in the School of Creative Writing.

Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?

I was born and raised in Ottawa. I grew up in Blackburn Hamlet in the east end. In the 1970s and 80s, Blackburn was still a shiny new suburb, surrounded by NCC greenbelt and crawling with kids. I graduated from Gloucester High School in 1988 and moved to Kingston to study Drama at Queen’s. I came back to Ottawa after each year of university to work at various summer jobs, e.g. at Ottawa Public Library, NCC Infotent on Parliament Hill, Gloucester Summer Theatre Camp, and National Science Library (then known as CISTI). I left Ottawa for good at twenty-three, when I moved to the west coast to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing and Theatre at UBC. Other than a short stint in Toronto as a screenwriting resident at the Canadian Film Centre, I’ve made my home in Vancouver ever since.

Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?

Like many writers, I discovered my passion young, making picture books as a kid and writing long, complicated stories for creative writing assignments. When I was at Emily Carr Middle School, late Ottawa author Jan Andrews came to my class as a visiting writer for two consecutive years. What an incredible gift this was. She got a classroom full of awkward, hormonal tweens working on novels. This was my first introduction to long-form writing and I was all in. I finished a book-length fiction manuscript each year Jan was with us. The content is cringe-worthy when I look back now, but most importantly, Jan taught me that I could create a long-form narrative and follow it through from start to finish.

By high school, I’d fallen in love with plays. My friend’s older sister was studying Theatre at University of Ottawa and invited us to watch countless student productions at Academic Hall and in the studio of the now-defunct white Theatre Department house on Waller Street. To my young eye, the student work seemed edgy, provocative and exciting. I was taking Drama myself at Gloucester and performing and working as crew on school shows. Around this same time, the National Arts Centre English Theatre, under Maureen Labonté and later Gil Osborne, started offering a myriad of outreach and development programs for local playwrights in the now long-gone Atelier, an intimate, 100-seat black box theatre on King Edward Avenue. One of these initiatives was an annual Young Playwrights Search, where four winning teen playwrights would spend a week with professional actors, dramaturgs and directors workshopping their scripts at the Atelier, cumulating in a public staged reading.

When I heard about the inaugural contest in 1985, I was inspired to merge my passion for writing with my love for theatre and script my first-ever stage play. With the confidence I’d gained writing long-form prose with Jan Andrews, I wrote a full-length, lighthearted family drama called Hunky Dory and won the contest. The week I spent at the Atelier working with Ottawa theatre professionals was immersive, exhilarating, and life-changing. I now knew without a doubt that this is what I wanted to do when I grew up – not just write, but write plays and collaborate with other artists to make theatre.

I kept writing plays and won the Young Playwrights Search again in 1986 with Gimme Some Truth and in 1988 with Sadly As I Tie My Shoes. The NAC went on to produce the Canadian premiere of Sadly As I Tie My Shoes as part of the 1988-89 English Theatre Off-Centre season at the Atelier. The show was directed by Stephen Malloy, dramaturged by Janet Irwin, and starred Birgitte Solem, Michael-Valiant Saunders, Joan Gardner, Noel Counsil and the late, great Heather Esdon. It received critical acclaim and was voted best new play of the year by Ottawa Citizen theatre critic Barbara Crook.

Through the local playwriting community, I also discovered Tree Theatre and, by extension, Tree Poetry, and had the pleasure of attending numerous readings and events there while still in town.

Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?

Emerging as a writer in Ottawa at a time when the two major theatre companies in town, NAC and Great Canadian Theatre Company (GCTC), were actively nurturing local playwrights and new play development, set me on a career path writing for theatre that might not have otherwise happened. For this, I am forever grateful.

When I arrived in Vancouver in the early to mid-90s, there were far fewer opportunities for text-based playwrights. Instead, the doors that initially opened for me as a dramatic writer on the west coast were in film and television. I’ve done a lot of screenwriting and story editing here, and spent five seasons in the writing room of Edgemont, CBC-TV’s Gemini and Leo award-winning teen series, created by fellow Canadian playwright and TV showrunner Ian Weir.

Further, part of my MFA coursework took place in the multi-genre Creative Writing program at UBC, where I now teach today. As graduate students, we were expected to branch out and work in at least two other genres in addition to our speciality. This key learning experience has emboldened me to move more freely between dramatic and literary genres than I might have, had I completed my MFA solely in a Theatre department. For example, I am now also known in the literary community as a published writer and editor of creative nonfiction.

Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?

Something unique and exciting about Ottawa theatre is the rich cross-pollination that occurs between English and French practices. During my time there, I saw some amazing francophone shows produced by NAC’s French Theatre, as well as French Canadian plays in translation at GCTC. My sensibility as an emerging playwright was as much informed by the work of Michel Marc Bouchard, Michel Tremblay, Jovette Marchessault and early Robert Lepage as it was by the likes of Judith Thompson, Sharon Pollock, George F. Walker, Timberlake Wertenbaker and Caryl Churchill.

Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?

The plays I created as a teenager were all set in Ottawa. I was writing about the world I knew. My adolescent characters in those early plays get around the city on OC Transpo, hang out on Rideau and Elgin Streets, and cross the river to Hull to buy alcohol underage at the Dépanneur.

My plays tend to be very theatrical. I like to play with time and space on stage, and to incorporate stylized, movement-based elements. I think this is a direct result of the highly evocative, inherently theatrical French Canadian work I experienced in Ottawa as a young playwright.

Q: What are you working on now?

I have two big projects on the go right now, that are in conversation with one another.

I’m writing a play for the first time in a long while. It’s called Courage and is an anti-war play that explores intergenerational impacts of migration and flight. It interweaves three main narratives: my grandmother’s 1948 escape through the snowy East German Harz Mountains with five month-old twins in a baby carriage; playwright Bertolt Brecht’s return to communist East Germany that same year, after a long exile abroad, to stage his famous play Mother Courage in East Berlin; and my present-day return with my queer family to hike the Harz Border Trail, retracing my grandmother’s footsteps and making peace with the past. While this may all sound pretty serious, there are also healthy doses of humour and magic realism sprinkled in. Time and space fold in on themselves, present intersects with past, and magic happens. I’ve been developing this script over the past couple of years in collaboration with Vancouver dramaturg Joanna Garfinkel, and this past May at the 2026 Banff Playwrights Lab with Montreal dramaturg Emma Tibaldo.

I’m also working on a book-length collection of creative nonfiction, a memoir in essays, about growing up as a Canadian Kriegsenkel (a German word coined in the early 2000s, meaning “war grandchild”). The book, like the play, examines intergenerational war trauma and, more specifically, my experiences growing up in Ottawa with immigrant parents (a British mom and a German dad) who’d spent their early childhoods on opposing sides of World War II. The collection explores my struggle to reconcile various facets of my identity, namely my British heritage and Canadian nationality, with their heroic World War II narratives, with the guilt and shame associated with my German heritage and blood ties to the nation that perpetrated the war and the Holocaust. Add to the mix my queerness, deemed “un-German” by the Nazis, making me simultaneously an embodiment of hero, perpetrator, and victim/survivor. While this book aims to provide an unflinching look at the trauma and tragedy of war and its lasting impact on subsequent generations on all sides of a conflict, it also expresses themes of healing, post-traumatic growth, resilience and social responsibility. As with the play, there are various lighter, more playful pieces to offset the more serious parts. For example, there’s an essay about why I love bike riding, and another about my life-long Davie Bowie fandom. A couple of early pieces from the book have been published in Canadian literary magazines: “My Summer Behind the Iron Curtain” appeared in Geist and “My Other Tongue” in Prairie Fire.

 

National Poetry Month : Maleea Acker,

 

Carpaccio

 

I’m under the blue tarp. My feet hidden
in polyester onesie pajamas, Max’s wolf suit
but without the trap door. Climbing out
for goodnight under a low stage and a flywheel
of stars. It wasn’t you who dissected the fish
with the still beating heart, not you, who couldn’t
club anything without a Yiddish epithet or a sigh.
I didn’t say a thing at your funeral. Family
plus two. So I climb back in, dragging
a Coleman, tequila, crackers, a 5 gallon of water.
My neighbour yelling at her cats like that
will do a thing. Step into memory: the Polish graveyard
where maybe we’re from, crack a summer globe
of tomatoes like a note wrote to myself each decade
before the possibility there might be less
than one left. You feel to me like a lake towel
left in an overgrown lot. An unnameable key.
I eat the uncolour of the Hebrew letters. Watch
the minutes tick like rain’s café chatter, wash water,
your label maker labeled Tupperware: Lines.
Scrapers. Fishin’. The tide changes again.
If I had the god damn organ still
I’d eat it or flick it into the massacre forest
let it listen for the ticks of two clocks run
by anxious scorekeepers, their bicker. Corner kick
for Saka. I could have made a chowder, carpaccio,
or buried it here and visited. Brought beer.

 

 

 

Maleea Acker is the author of three books of poems: The Reflecting Pool and Air-Proof Green (Pedlar Press, 2009, 2012); Hesitating Once to Feel Glory (Nightwood 2022) which was a finalist for the Victoria Book Prize, and; Gardens Aflame: Garry Oak Meadows of BC’s South Coast (New Star, 2021). She is faculty in the English Department at Thompson Rivers University and an instructor at the University of Victoria. Maleea is currently Program Lead for the post-doctoral ECCC-funded project Engage with Nature-based Solutions (engagewithnbs.ca), which is producing science storytelling, educational curriculum and funding climate artists nationally to create a climate and NBS toolkit.

National Poetry Month : Junie Désil,

 

 

Cento for a Beautiful Broken World


Friends will you bear with me today  
I took a chair outside and –
some things on this earth 

are unspeakable  the end of the road 
is far ahead I watched the sun  it is 
already behind us  before the apocalypse  

when you lie in your bed and lie to yourself  
no matter the pull toward brink you 
could make this place beautiful  

the world begins at the kitchen table  
we are feeding each other 
the gift of earth ocean,       get up

the leaves come patient plodding 
speak of underneathedness and 
the welcome of mosses a green skin 

ask me if I speak for the snail and 
I will tell you 
We protested / but not enough. 

We Lived Happily During the War
the world keeps ending and the world goes on  
Life is short, bang bang you’re dead 

I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First 

and the world asks what can you do,  
to change this deep-broken, fractured
world  held together,  really  

it is held together by the love and 
the passion of a very few 
The Thing is Perhaps the World Ends 

Here it is burning. It is dreaming. It is waking up 
Say tomorrow doesn’t come. Some things 
disappear for a while, 

and you only leave home  when home 
won’t let you stay.  We are drawing the line 
here  don’t be afraid to love it 

even when you have no stomach for it 
lie in your bed and you lie to yourself and 
love life,  

I speak of life that springs up, little lives 
that pull back and wait for a moment a new 
slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm. 

I count my hopes: the bumblebees, 
And I feel no pain   and let me stop here 
and say only, I have a mountain, a kitchen 

and thank you. Thank you, thank you 
thank you, and keep a Catalog 
of Unabashed Gratitude



This poem is a cento composed from lines by Smashing Pumpkins (“Silverfuck”) and poems by Ross Gay, Franny Choi, Ilya Kaminsky, Natalie Diaz, Maggie Smith, Warsan Shire, Joy Harjo, Camille T. Dungy, Jericho Brown, Ocean Vuong, Ada Limón, and Fatimah Asghar, and an interview by Jame Baldwin.

Junie Désil is of Haitian ancestry, born of immigrant parents on the traditional territories of the Kanien’kehá:ka on the island known as Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), and raised in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg). Junie has performed at various literary events and festivals. Her work has appeared in Room Magazine, PRISM International, The Capilano Review and CV2.

A UBC alumnus, a participant in Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio, and current Uvic MFA student, Junie’s debut book of poetry eat salt | gaze at the ocean (Talon Books, 2020) was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her second collection allostatic load (Talon Books) came out April, 2025.

Junie mentors poets at SFU's Writers' Studio and also teaches in SFU's Leadership Essentials Certificate program.

National Poetry Month : Jordan Davis,

 

from Free Throws

Get away from the gold city
and you feel naked
without your chain

“Naked, in chains”
does that excite you 

It’s ok to feel a feeling
and not know what it is 

and not act on it

* 

Then the sorrow
comes filling up the streets
and stays there 

everyone looking out the window
then closing the curtains
for good 

You get to the old city
and find a pensione
with large wooden shutters 

and a smell of cloves

*

A handmade feeling
Quiet, waiting;
a feeling you could lie in bed with
and not talk 

and not have to get up right away

*
 

I want the whole heart
to go flying
like a religious person
on a zipline.
 

*

 

 

New poems by Jordan Davis are forthcoming in Dream Boy Book Club, The Fortnightly Review, The Bayou Review, and Hanging Loose; a microchap will be published by sider0xylon later this year, and his first review in a long time will appear in American Book Review 46:4 (soon).