An editor says, the publishing industry is entirely teeth.

A poem to end a semester of MFA.

I’ve been turning it over and over, 
this responsibility of telling a thing. 

On Sunday I dropped my Grandma’s story
into blessed water, watched it 
sink. On Monday an editor says,
the publishing industry is entirely
teeth obscuring empty stomachs. 
On Tuesday my nephew says, 
Tell me a story. On Wednesday, 
I visit eels. They float in ethanol, 
suction-cup mouths set to glass jar
in the name of biodiversity. 
Tell me a good story, my nephew clarifies. 
Tell a story so good, my faculty mentor says,
you get the award money for saving a life. 
 
There is no blue pigment in bird feathers. 
I learned that this week. Nothing to be ground
down, preserved in a packet or jar. 
There is only the bird. The trick of light. 
There is only the story
of sky. 

Scribble art made in collaboration with Billy, 3 years old.

I’ve long found fact stranger than fiction, and poems like this show it: it’s really just documenting the conversations had, in one week, about what makes a good story.

My first semester of a MFA (Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing — yup, an obnoxious amount of capitalization going on there) is over. And what a ride it’s been! I loved the opportunity to produce large quantities of work in three distinct genres all at the same time. In just over three months, I wrote and significantly revised two long non-fiction essays; wrote four unique pieces of fiction; and wrote and revised two comics (one poetry comics, one journalism comics). Phewf.

I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, but I’m already more energized to take on long projects than I was at the start of the semester. Part of that, I think, is the fact that, while I’ve always been writing, I’ve never had this much of my days and weeks go directly to writing (and re-writing).

As promised, here are three of my favourite reads, one from each genre:

It Lasts Forever and then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken (fiction). I was pretty excited for this as soon as I saw that Sabrina Orah Mark wrote a recommendation for it. This is officially the first zombie book I’ve read, but the lyricism and beauty far outweighed the horror.

In February I reviewed Jenny Offill’s Weather, and It Lasts Forever was styled in a very similar way — fractured, sensory and circular. And so I was very interested in how de Marcken still created a sense of plot. (I asked my professor how this is done: how does a writer know when they’ve given the reader too dense of prose to follow and the reader needs the relief of a paragraph break or a simple action or a clear raising of the stakes. How do you strike that balance? I just got a shrug and smile, so I’m afraid I can’t share a secret there.)

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (graphic novel). I realized, at the start of my comics class, that I hadn’t really read many graphic novels. I’ve discovered so many new favourites (no less than THREE Lauren Redniss books — her mind is incredible) but Tessa Hull’s stood out as an intricate blend of personal story, investigative research, intergenerational trauma, and incredible illustrations. (Tessa came and spoke to our class and said it took her ten years to make this book, as well as a few mental health breakdowns. She has promised to never write another book again, so enjoy this one.)

For one assignment, I had to copy by hand one page out of Tessa’s book. It took all day — I can’t imagine the effort she put into hand-drawing the entire book. But I loved how often she tied together smaller panels of text and action into one larger image, breaking a sense of time:

My copy of one page of Tessa’s book.

And finally:

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller (non-fiction). Okay, this one’s may get knocked off the top 3 by some new contenders now that I’m reading more book-length non-fiction.

Why Fish Don’t Exist was recommended by my professor after I showed up in their office with a messy first draft about taxidermied birds and birding (I’ve never taxidermied anything and I’m really not a birder). I was calling it a personal essay because of something my professor said: that a personal essay isn’t just memoir, it’s an essay that only you could write. An essay where your mind is so clearly at work, someone could pick it up and know it was you. This was their example of that kind of nonfiction writing — there’s just a smidgen of memoir but most of it is investigating one man who named a fifth of the world’s known fish. Which fed perfectly into the question I was asking in my essay: why are people so obsessed with naming everything? And it fed the deep unease I had with the fact that we kill living creatures to collect specimens — and call it preservation.

Needless to say, this book tipped me down a deep, deep rabbit hole.

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And that’s all! In a few weeks I’ll be jumping into three new classes, and you’ll come along for the ride.

In the meantime, I’ll be sharing a narwhal poem for Christmas and then coming back two weeks later for our next installment of weird and pretty experiments with words.