Spring has sprung and with it have come the poets! This issue of “Why I Wrote this Book” is poetry exclusive 😎.
P.S. Two of the poets included are also TMR contributors! So, if you’re playing along with our 2025 Bingo you could cross off two boxes if you read one of their books. Just saying… 👀.
Featuring Susan Wismer, Tolu Oloruntoba, Chris Bailey, and Lisa Timpf
Susan Wismer, co-author of Hand Shadows — with Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Studios, 2024)
In the dark times
Will there be singing?
There will be singing.
Of the dark times.
― Bertolt Brecht , Svendborg Poems, 1938
Hand Shadows is a chapbook, a short essay in poems and images. We wrote it because it is one song about and for dark times.
In the winter of 2020, when we thought that the pandemic would soon be over, Suzette Sherman and Michele Green, of Passionate Heart—Women’s Stories Through Dance, invited me to create a collaborative performance for International Women’s Day, in March. Along with much else, our IWD plans were soon set aside. We did not, however, set aside the idea of a poetry/dance performance. When regulations and conditions allowed, between shutdowns and amidst the upheavals and uncertainties of the next many months, I drove to the dance studio. While Suzette and Michele rehearsed, I sat, masked and distant in a far corner, scribbling in my notebook. Over time, notes became poems. Poems and dances evolved in conversation with one another, as our ideas of performance themes and possible poem/dance pairings shifted and changed. In the end three live performances of Hand Shadows were possible during 2021 and 2022.
Finding ways to continue our creative collaboration through those difficult days was inspiring and enlivening, a powerful antidote to fear and isolation. People who attended performances commented on how affected they were by the sense of authenticity and community in the room⎯ even though masked, limited to small numbers and widely scattered.
“It cracked our hearts open wide” ⎯ audience member
In a recent conversation, T. Liem talked about art as a “moment of attention”. I’m writing just now at the beginning of February, in the midst of a great baffle and clatter of disheartening daily news. It’s hard to hear myself think with all that noise. We wrote Hand Shadows as a reminder, an opportunity to pause for a moment, to listen: below the loud sounds of boom crash and rumble, there is singing. Our little book is just one invitation of many, to sing and to dance to the beat of a different drum.
“Is collaboration
the quiet sinew of resilience? Perhaps
its heart. A flexible resistance⎯pulmonary, pulsing….” (Resilience, Hand Shadows).
…
Susan Wismer is grateful to live on Treaty 18 territory at the southern shore of Manidoo-gitchigami (Georgian Bay) in Ontario, Canada with two human partners and a very large dog. Recent publications include a collaborative chapbook,Hand Shadowswith Michele Green and Suzette Sherman (Wintergreen Press, 2024). Hag Dancesis coming out with At Bay Press in Spring 2025.www.susanwismer.com
Tolu Oloruntoba, author of Unravel (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
The speaker of most of the poems in Unravel is a thoroughly undone man. I often wonder how much to say about the book without being overly autobiographical, because attempting to map it to one life will elide much of what I was trying to achieve. I wrote the book because I wanted to find out how to survive collapse, what caused collapse, and what may come after it.
And collapse, or unravelling, are universal, and can come in many forms: profound moral injury from betraying one’s principles, an extended crisis or loss of faith, physical decline or chronic illness, the normalization of fascism, the degradation of mental health, the inexorable depletion of the support our biosphere can provide, watching one’s country become a failed state, the unfurling of the consequences of trauma or abuse, watching children lose their wonder or older relatives dwindle, the fracturing of familial or romantic relationships, the loss of the illusion of a just and sensible world, ad infinitum.
How might we approach deconstruction, both as a rejection of normative meaning and as an embrace of cyclical ruin? The answer, individually and collectively, might help us survive one more day, or the rest of the way.
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TOLU OLORUNTOBA was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow.
Chris Bailey, author of Forecast: Pretty Bleak (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)
It’s just how sick I am. Michael Chabon called writing “the midnight disease,” it’s a compulsion, I guess, to sort of figure things out. Explain myself and the world and people around me to myself, or, more often than not, to others who I want to understand. There’s not many commercial fishermen grew up in the life writing about this sort of thing. Not that I can speak for all fisherman or, really, anyone other than myself. The book is a book because my writing tends to overlap in themes and what goes on. All these parts I can make fit together into one somewhat unified work. There’s no real answer to why I wrote this book, it just became one. Like how nor’west wind here can bring rain or snow off the water depending on the time of year, because that’s what it does.
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CHRIS BAILEY is a graphic designer and commercial fisherman from Prince Edward Island. He holds a MFA Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Chris’ writing has appeared in Grain, Brick, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2025, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, is available from Nightwood Editions. His piece, Fisherman’s Repose, was a winner of the 2022 BMO 1stArt! Award. Forecast: Pretty Bleak is his second poetry collection.
Lisa Timpf, author of Cats and Dogs in Space (Hiraeth Publishing, 2025)
My retirement in 2014 provided an opportunity to devote more time to writing. As a Star Trek fan as well as a long-time reader of science fiction, I found myself drawn to speculative poetry, which includes science fiction, fantasy, steampunk, and other sub-genres. A number of the speculative poems I’ve written revolve around cats and/or dogs. Some poems were sparked by news stories—like one about our efforts to understand what cats are thinking based on their facial expressions. Other poems rose from my attempts to cope with the loss of pets I have loved. Still others riff on myth and legend, or use science fiction discoveries, sub-genres, or tropes as a springboard.
When I looked at my body of work over the past decade, I found that I had enough poems related to cats and dogs to make a collection, and Cats and Dogs in Space was born. Some of the poems are meant to provide a laugh, while others express our yearning for an ultimate reunion at the Rainbow Bridge. I hope Cats and Dogs in Space will resonate with pet lovers, science fiction lovers, and those who are a little of both. Dedicated to all of the cats and dogs who have shared my life, Cats and Dogs in Space is a work of the heart. I plan to donate a portion of the proceeds to animal-related charities.
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Lisa Timpf is a retired HR and communications professional who lives in Simcoe, Ontario. Her poetry has appeared in Eye to the Telescope, Star*Line, Triangulation: Seven-Day Weekend, and other venues. Her speculative poetry collection Cats and Dogs in Space is available from Hiraeth Publishing. You can find out more about Lisa’s writing projects at http://lisatimpf.blogspot.com/. Lisa is also on Bluesky, @lisatimpf.bsky.social
