Featuring Pearl Pirie, Alexis Von Konigslow, Caitlin Galway, and Farah Ghafoor
Pearl Pirie, Author of We Astronauts (Pinhole Poetry Press, June 2025)
Why did I write a chapbook of sex and love poems? It started in the early 2000s at a rob mclennan workshop. The “sex in sevens” tradition from the 70s idea struck me initially as males writing their narrative of sex, with no female narrating participants. It seemed like a gap and challenge to push my comfort zone.
Why these poems this way? A lot of poetry is soothing, blunt, or evasive. Published love poems seemed prevalently written after a death or breakup or in the flush of fresh new love. They seemed occasion poems more than intimate, a generic you, mope on a rope or shinplaster poignant. Where’s the vitality and continuity? What about after initial chemical crush and while not having all the crushed Big Feels? And where is the sense of humour or individuality?
So I tried to pay attention to the niche human experience I wanted to read with particulars of time, person, and place.
One chapbook was pulled from the manuscript nine years ago, and this is a second portion. It centres around the subjective universe of each other (partner and I are together since ‘91, not that length makes any relationship more or less significant) and the large distance to anyone else, exacerbated by Covid. We all feel a little weird, extraterrestrial, yet connected by our shared disconnection. But mostly, joined by choice.
Why now? We need more attention to tenderness, to valuing, to caring, to play. when news is scarier than usual, modelling that it is okay to love and trust anyway — that seems useful to share.
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Pearl Pirie’s latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet
Alexis von Konigslow, author of The Exclusion Zone (Wolsak & Wynn, May 2025)
I wrote this book because I had an interest that got weird.
I found myself thinking about the Chernobyl accident. I don’t know why. I think I was on my way to work at the time. I know that when I got home that night, I started to read about it. I started by looking around on the internet but very soon after, I went to the library, and I got out as many books as I could. I read a lot. I didn’t even leave it there. I watched documentaries, and then I found as many pictures and stories and descriptions and firsthand accounts as I could. I read the blogs of people who snuck into the current Exclusion Zone. I read all the research conducted in and around the area of the accident that I could find. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the historical incident, the current situation, how the whole mess is changing over time. I started to think about what it would be like to be there now.
Eventually, I had a novel. I fleshed out characters and situations and things. I wrote a book that let me think about safety in a degrading world, and about what drives people to do research, and about how women are treated in science, and about how women can be thrust into all kinds of unsafe situations everywhere and all the time, and about how safe sometimes isn’t even safe at all.
It all started with a strange thought that I couldn’t shake.
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Alexis von Konigslow is the author of The Capacity for Infinite Happiness. She has degrees in mathematical physics from Queen’s University and creative writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto with her family.
Caitlin Galway, author of A Song for Wildcats (Dundurn Press, May 2025)
Years ago, a friend-of-a-friend read an early draft of my first novel, kind enough to offer input. She queried: Why are all the characters so damaged? It was a strange question for several reasons, one of which was the broad and rather disparaging term “damaged”. My characters reflected—in highly veiled and slanted ways—my own struggles, or those of my loved ones. As with my novel, grief and trauma are explored throughout the stories in my new collection, A Song for Wildcats, and occasionally as I wrote them, an almost comical echo would ask, Why are all the characters so damaged? My answer would be that people, in general, are damaged—or rather, wounded and dimensional. They are fractured and whole, weary and resilient, vulnerable and harmful. There is such frailty in all living creatures, and it does not look like damage to me, so much as a capacity to continue, to endure.
The stories are not about me, yet they are inextricably rooted in my experiences and perception of reality. I am not a young queer man in love with a student revolutionary in 1968 Corsica—but, like him, I am a queer survivor of abuse (with a soft spot for revolutionaries), who similarly wonders how much of my philosophical approach to love is a response to violence. The neglect and magical escapism experienced by the twelve-year-old narrator in another story, set in the bush of 1940s Australia, mirrors my own, however different our circumstances. I have also not, as of this writing, been haunted by my doppelganger through a time-lapsing Las Vegas and Mojave Desert; what better way, though, to immerse a reader in the disorienting haze of trauma response, in the hopes that they might contemplate it differently or—if they have themselves experienced it—feel acknowledged? Though it is not a conscious choice, my stories are the channels through which I navigate relatively inaccessible pain. If I ask myself why I wrote A Song for Wildcats, I would say that I became ready for a more explicit intrapersonal confrontation. I wanted my characters to run headlong into the fear, the grief, the pain, and come out stronger for having fought, and no less their luminous selves for having been scathed.
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Caitlin Galway is the author of the novel Bonavere Howl. Her work has been published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets throughout Canada, and she has won or been nominated for numerous prizes. She lives in Toronto.
Farah Ghafoor, author of Shadow Price (House of Anansi, April 2025)
I wrote this book to understand the world we’re living in and my place in it. I had been feeling overwhelmed by climate anxiety for a while, and since I always turned to poetry to understand my emotions, it felt natural that I try to manage them in this instance as well. I wrote and wrote but still felt this sense of great, impending doom.
It was only when I stumbled upon an interview with Andri Snaer Magnason in Emergence Magazine about his book Time and Water — in which he reframes the climate crisis in terms of the tangible human lives of his grandmother and daughter — that I truly embarked on the process of writing this book. What is most unfamiliar to us, I realized, is the rate at which the climate crisis is moving, especially as the internet has simultaneously shrunken our attention spans and exponentially expanded our individual worlds with vast amounts of new information. The progression of capitalism and modern imperialism has also kept most of us in an individualistic survival mode, so it’s difficult to place ourselves in the history of the world. Although we’re already in deep trouble, the climate data shows that 2035 is the point of no return while 2100 remains the deadline for many climate targets, when the damage has already been done. If the optimal human lifespan is about 100 years, then that would be near the end of my life. Who wouldn’t want a life without food insecurity and a natural death as opposed to one without access to food, take by a climate disaster that our world is not built to bear? At 2100, people in my generation, for those who opt to have children, will be grandparents or great-grandparents. And who wouldn’t want a safe world for their immediate family, their friends’ children, and their neighbours?
Understanding time is what led me down a more focused writing journey as I explored different facets of what it means to be young and alive at this time. Now, my aim as a poet is to object to the systems we’ve accepted – that we are pushed to accept, and that have in turn changed our priorities. I want to remind readers that the world isn’t ending tomorrow, but we actually do have a ten year deadline to meet, otherwise the consequences will be dire. When we feel helpless about our situation, we can start by focusing on what we control. We have agency in our lives, and influence the people around us regardless of our intentions. I believe that we all have a part to play in the future we build together, whether we’re ready for it or not.
