Featuring Saad T. Farooqi, Shawna Lemay, Jamie Kitts, and sophie anne edwards
Saad T. Farooqi, author of White World (Cormorant Books, 2024)
In Pakistan, there is a saying that a child’s relationship with reality depends on their connection with their mother. If there is any truth in this, then reality to me is diseased and haunted by her past. It is something I’ve dreaded would not exist when I wake up in the morning. Reality is the woman I’d watch at night as a child, to reassure myself that she was breathing, because a big part of her presence was in the constant threat of her absence.
And a child’s connection to the father? That, supposedly, shapes their identity. Orphaned during the 1947 Indo-Pak partition, my father was raised by his military uncles as a deeply patriotic, devoutly Muslim man. Even as he made the UAE his home for over 20 years, my father never stopped longing to return home. Growing up, you’d think it natural for me to inherit my father’s longing for Pakistan. Yet it never happened. For me, the longing for home became abstract and directionless. In the Middle East, your nationality determines a lot, if not everything, so Pakistan became a place I never knew and a place that seemed to define me everywhere I went.
Islam, too, often left me whiplashed. Whether it was Friday sermons lambasting homosexuality and indecency, or the constant fearmongering about hell and a vengeful God, I was filled with doubt. Where Islam was a grounding force in my parents’ lives, a source of strength in their many tribulations, it was a source of dissonance and disorientation for me. It was like white noise: constant and jarring. When I finally walked away from my religion, I felt clarity and harmony for the first time. However, this also isolated me even more from family and friends, and from nation and normalcy.
So, why did I write White World?
There were many reasons. Perhaps the biggest one was that it was my way to come to terms with my identity and sense of reality. The Pakistan I invoke is at once familiar in its religious bigotry, martial law, and violence, and unfamiliar in its post apocalyptic setting. The ephemeral snow that falls simultaneously shapes the world around the characters but also blinds them to it. Their national identity is forced upon the protagonists, not a source of pride. Reality is elusive and indelibly stained by the past, making characters repeat the same mistakes over and over. Pakistan is a constant source of suffering and misfortune. And yet, like me, it’s the only semblance of home they’ll ever know.
…
Born in Saudi Arabia, Saad T. Farooqi moved to Pakistan before his first birthday. There, he survived three separate kidnapping attempts before he was eight. His family eventually settled in the United Arab Emirates. After initially enrolling in electrical engineering to please his parents, Saad graduated with a BA in English Literature from the American University of Sharjah. He then earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Kingston University, London. Saad immigrated to Canada in 2015 and resides in London, Ontario. At Kingston University, he studied under several notable authors, including Rachel Cusk and Elif Safak. His short stories and poems have appeared in various magazines in the US, UK, and UAE.
Shawna Lemay, author of Apples on a Windowsill (Palimpsest Press, 2024)
Baked into the process of making a still life is the question, “What can I do with what I have on hand?” This question, and “what can I do right now that is useful?” along with, “what do I specifically have to give?” were the inquiries that underpinned my book, Apples on a Windowsill. As writers we are always trying to find the proper vessel for those things we want to say. Sometimes we struggle to figure out what it is we need to write; my subject was right in front of me.
My partner of 35 years is an artist who has primarily painted still lifes his entire career. In 2008 I published a collection of essays titled Calm Things, about my relationship with still life and our life together in art. Afterwards I was often asked when the sequel was coming out and at that time, I always said that a sequel was unlikely. However, about 20 years after some of those essay were written, I felt like I did have more to say. I had lived a life thinking and reading about still life, watching my partner paint still lifes, looking at still lifes in museums, and finally, I began photographing my own still lifes. I’ve been deeply interested in what it means to live as an artist all through.
I had mapped out Apples on a Windowsill somewhat, before the pandemic. And while it’s not entirely a book about the pandemic, there is a long diary piece written during that time. I asked questions and made observations about still life that I might not have, had it not been forged with all these uncertainties and continuous changes to our everyday lives going on.
In an essay titled, “The Practice of Still Life,” I say “The subject of a still life is never the subject. The subject is light, or time. The subject is our mortality.” And that really hit hard a few years back. But the thing is, with a still life we can rearrange things, we can add and subtract, reconfigure. We can try again and again. So the reason I wrote this book is that I think still life provides a useful way of thinking about how we can live. We can keep pushing things into the light so they might lead us to see differently, so that we can be transformed by our seeing, so that we might remember to live beautifully and inventively while we are still alive.
…
Shawna Lemay is the author of The Flower Can Always Be Changing (shortlisted for the 2019 Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction) and the novel, Rumi and the Red Handbag, which made Harper’s Bazaar’s #THELIST. She has also written multiple books of poetry, a book of essays, and the experimental novel Hive. All the God-Sized Fruit, her first book, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Calm Things: Essays was shortlisted for the Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. She lives in Edmonton.
Jamie Kitts, author of Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024)
Puberty 2 is an absolutely wild experience. If you’re unfamiliar, Puberty 2 refers to an early point in gender transition where you feel like you’re going through puberty again. While you can start accessing the feelings and the mindset without hormone replacement therapy, it really starts to kick in once you’re on medication. If you’re transfeminine, you can go from having absolutely no interest in sex at all to being down bad 24/7. You might want to chase pleasure at the cost of responsibility. You might want to try a flurry of new and amazing things. You can feel and think things so loudly that you will want to explode one way or another. For better or worse, you will feel like you’re in high school again. It’s a lot.
I wrote Girl Dinner all through my second puberty, from just after I came out to the point where I started feeling normal again. It’s a work with no chill — there are no poems about birds or whatever poets are supposed to write about. It goes from “Dude I miss my grandmother” to “I wanna fuck my brains out” to “I saw in GamerGate the rise of fascism while the cishet men around me boasted about the quality of vinyl records” to “THROW BRICKS BREAK SHIT AND START FIRES” with little to no build between them. This is your brain on estrogen, spironolactone, and progesterone: your whole city’s on fire, a tornado’s carrying a car, and you can’t decide if you want to flee the scene or throw yourself into the destruction. They say you’re gonna cry a lot; sister, I hope all you need to do is cry a lot. You’re gonna lose your mind in ecstasy and anguish for a while. Writing Girl Dinner was my way to help cope with these feelings.
That sounds like a lot, and it is, but it’s also a lot of fun! I mean, aside from the parts where you’re writhing in anxiety as the world’s elected officials strip you of your human rights, you feel less and less human as people who’ve never met a trans person in their life say awful things about you on the internet, and you do the mental risk assessment about whether a public bathroom of any gender is safe to use, Puberty 2 is also the first time in my life where I truly felt happy to be alive. There are tremendous lows, but the highs are exquisite. They make you want to keep living instead of merely existing.
…
Jamie Kitts (she/her) is the Managing Editor of Qwerty Magazine and the Editor-in-Chief of Gridlock Lit. She is the author of Girl Dinner (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2024), co-author of All Things to Keep You Here (w/Egg Poets, Qwerty Homerow, 2023) and the editor of Qwerty Crystal: The Best of Qwerty Magazine—Part I, 1996-2010 (Qwerty Magazine, 2024). She is also a poet and a PhD student living on the unceded and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik People.
sophie anne edwards, author of Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024)
I didn’t set out to write this book. Rather, it followed me.
What I had set out to do was spend time on the Kagawong River. Dealing with grief, I was drawn to be in the bush and beside the water. While the process helped me, I felt this was another form of taking from the River. How, I wondered, might I be reciprocal with the River? I’d been given teachings about rivers being animate, that the land teaches us. How might I listen to a complex river ecosystem and take seriously that she is a lively agent? How do I, as a settler, navigate love for a colonized landscape?
And so began several years of exploring these questions, finding ways to invite collaboration by installing poems and paper alphabets along the River, then finding ways for various agents – sapsuckers, otters, wind, bullrushes, currents – to ‘write’. In the end I found that my process created a middle space, a place of translation between me and my English, and the River and her various languages.
Knowing the book would have a life beyond me and the River and this personal relationship I had, it was important to engage with the history of the River, and how she was constructed, changed, and formed over time through various colonial, historical, and social processes.
And so, the final book includes visual poems, erasure poems that intervene in Treaty history and settler texts, text-based poems that grapple with environmental change and the climate crisis, and with support from local Anishinaabeg language speakers and elders, River terms in Anishinaabemowin and the inclusion of Anishinaabemowin history and relations to the Kagawong River (Gaagigewang Ziibi) and the village. Throughout are personal reflections that give insight into my time with the River, how my perception changed, and tell the story of the process.
…
sophie anne edwards works on and off the page, at her desk, and in the bush on Manitoulin Island. Her debut book of poetry, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks) was recommended by CBC as an October ‘must read’, and made both CBC’s and Quill & Quire’s most anticipated fall release lists. She was longlisted for the 2021 CBC poetry prize, shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2019 Poem of the Year, and recently long-listed for Omnidawn’s 1st/2nd book prize.
