CanLit Author Spotlights

Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Amanda Fayant

January 4, 2023

Amanda Fayant is a Cree/Métis/Saulteaux artist (BFA Film Production) and researcher MPhil (Indigenous Studies) based in Trondheim, Norway. Amanda is originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, Treaty 4 land. Amanda’s art practice deals with the complexities of identity, exploring Indigenous feminisms and confronting the colonial history in Canada through various mediums.

Amanda’s research focuses on Indigenous research methodologies as well as exploring cultural knowledge production through an Indigenous feminist perspective. In addition to several group art shows in Canada, Trondheim, and Oslo, Amanda has also shared artistic and research work with ArtLeaks Gazette, the University of the Underground and is a member of the arts and sound focused group – AWNJS (All Women’s Networked Jam Session).

Amanda’s master thesis, “Thunderbird Women: Indigenous women reclaiming autonomy through stories of resistance” has been shared at several conferences and workshops. Amanda actively works as a guest speaker and moderator at schools, universities, art institutions and conferences.

Read her poems: “This is the poem you couldn’t write” and “After the 215 but knowing there were more . . .

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Kevin Tunnicliffe

December 28, 2022

Kevin Tunnicliffe is a PhD Candidate at the University of Victoria, Canada. His dissertation is entitled “Anaesthetic Narrative Form in Modernist Fiction,” and brings together theories of affect, neo-formalism, and neuroscience to challenge the canonical reading of high modernism that privileges aesthetics of shock and reinvigoration; instead, Kevin examines the widespread, if underappreciated, experience of insensitivity as a consequence of—perhaps the only rational response to—the shocks of modernity. Kevin writes for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.

Article

“Moonlight, Metaphor, and the Influence of Wallace Stevens in Don McKay’s The Book of Moonlight

Canadian Literature issue #248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Fiona Tinwei Lam

December 21, 2022

Author Fiona Tinwei Lam
Rebecca Blissett Photograph

Vancouver’s 6th Poet Laureate, Fiona Tinwei Lam has authored three poetry collections and a children’s book. Her poems have been featured in Best Canadian Poetry and BC’s Poetry in Transit, as well as in several award-winning poetry videos made in collaboration with filmmakers that have screened around the world, including Berlin, Athens, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Houston, Seattle, and L.A. She edited The Bright Well: Contemporary Canadian Poems about Facing Cancer, and co-edited two non-fiction anthologies. Shortlisted for the City of Vancouver Book Prize and other awards, her work appears in over forty anthologies. She teaches creative writing at SFU Continuing Studies.

Her poem “Covenant” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/covenant-2.

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 248: Author Spotlight – Melanie Braith

December 14, 2022

Melanie Braith is the Project Manager and research coordinator of the Six Seasons of the Asiniskaw Īthiniwak (Rocky Cree) Partnership Project, and the Research Coordinator for the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures at the University of Winnipeg. She holds a PhD in Indigenous literatures from the University of Manitoba, and her current research focuses on Indigenous storytelling and Indigenous children’s literature. As a settler scholar from Germany, she is grateful to be given the opportunity to live and work in Treaty 1 territory and the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Article

Braiding Stories, Braiding Kinship: How Cree Storytelling Restores Relationships in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen

Abstract

This article argues that Cree author Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen celebrates Cree storytelling as a way to restore kinship relations that have been impacted by residential schools. In doing so, Highway’s 1998 novel re-thinks what it means to tell one’s life story and envisions a form of Cree residential school testimony. This article focuses on a part of the novel that has received surprisingly scant attention from scholars: the plays that protagonist Jeremiah creates toward the end of the novel. As I will demonstrate, an unpublished Highway play sheds new light on the significance of Jeremiah’s plays and the novel’s ending. My discussion of the unpublished play manuscript gives readers a more complete idea of the vision that Highway had when he created Kiss of the Fur Queen—and shows how central the role of Cree storytelling truly is to his novel.

Canadian Literature issue 248 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Brian Barlett

November 30, 2022

Brian Bartlett has published fifteen collections and chapbooks of poetry, including The Watchmaker’s Table, The Afterlife of Trees, and Wanting the Day: Selected Poems. His poems have been honoured with the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry and two Malahat Review Long Poem Prizes. His other works include three books of nature writing–most recently Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal–and a compilation of his prose on poetry. Bartlett has edited volumes of selected poems by Don Domanski, James Reaney, Dorothy Roberts and Robert Gibbs, and Alden Nowlan’s Collected Poems. He has lived all his life in Eastern Canada–Fredericton, Montreal and, since 1990, Halifax/Kjipuktuk.

His poem “From ‘Spring 2020’” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/from-spring-2020/.

Canadian Literature issue 247 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Carl Watts

November 23, 2022

Carl Watts is from Hamilton, Ontario, and holds a PhD in English from Queen’s University. He has taught literature at Queen’s, Royal Military College, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, in mainland China. Aside from articles, book reviews, and poems, he has published two poetry chapbooks, Reissue (Frog Hollow, 2016) and Originals(Anstruther, 2020), as well as a short monograph, Oblique Identity: Form and Whiteness in Recent Canadian Poetry(Frog Hollow, 2019). His debut full-length collection of critical essays, I Just Wrote This Five Minutes Ago, was just published by Gordon Hill Press.

Article

“a dungeon every night and every day”: The Zany Neo-liberal Subject, Alcohol, and Poetic Agency in Catriona Wright’s Table Manners

Abstract

This article locates Catriona Wright’s Table Manners (2017) within a framework of cultural criticism that describes the neoliberal dissolution of boundaries between work and leisure time as well as Sianne Ngai’s conception of the zany subject. It locates in this reality the rituals of consumption that furnish Wright’s subject matter, finding that her depiction of alcohol consumption, specifically, at once sustains participation in this economy and denies her poetic subjects agency. Suggesting that Wright departs from common depictions of alcohol consumption in Canadian poetry, the paper argues that Table Manners registers a dynamic of neoliberal containment in its engagement with food culture as well as with a repetitious, consciously traditionalist poetics that forecloses any possibility of fulfillment in the development of one’s poetic craft. At the same times, its registering of neoliberalism at its most jarring, using its very curatorial tools, indicates a possibility of poetic agency.

Canadian Literature issue 247, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Elana Wolff

November 16, 2022

Elana Wolff lives and works in Thornhill, Ontario—the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat First Nations. Elana’s poems have recently appeared (or will appear) in Arc online (Awards of Awesomeness), Best Canadian Poetry 2021, Bear Review, Canadian Literature, The Dalhousie Review, Grain, Montréal Serai, Taddle Creek, Vallum, and Voices Israel. Her collection, SWOON, was awarded the 2020 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry; her newest collection is SHAPE TAKING (Ekstasis Editions, 2021).

Her poem “Vestigial” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/vestigial/.

Canadian Literature issue 247 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Toyah Webb

November 9, 2022

Toyah Webb is a writer and graduate student at the University of Sydney, where she is currently completing her MA thesis. She is interested in translingual poetics, archives, and the materiality of literature. Her chapbook THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE OF TENDER FORGETTING is forthcoming from Ghost City Press.

Article

Ash-Memory, (M)other Tongues, and Spectral Poetics in Erín Moure’s The Unmemntioable

Abstract

This paper presents a critical reading of Canadian poet Erín Moure’s The Unmemntiobale (House of Anansi Press, 2012). I employ a close-reading methodology to situate Moure’s text within its historical and geographical context, namely the Holocaust in western Ukraine. In The Unmemntioable, typographical markings map moments of dissonance where the book’s transhistorical and translingual ghosts interrupt and rub up against one another. This spectral poetics requires an engagement with differential reading forms, to elucidate the voices afloat in each sign. I propose the term ‘ash-memory’ to articulate Moure’s themes of language, violence, and cultural memory. Jacques Derrida’s writings on cinders and the shibboleth provide a further theoretical framework. I conclude that it is the spectral traces of the past that connect the body to place and place to language.

Canadian Literature issue 247 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Vange Holtz-Schramek

July 21, 2022

Vange Holtz-Schramek’s (she/they) writing appears in Canadian Literature, The Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Fashion Studies, the Martlet, and Grain Magazine, and is forthcoming in the University of Toronto Quarterly. Vange is from the territories of the Qayqayt peoples, currently called New Westminster, BC, and is a PhD candidate in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in what is currently called Hamilton, ON, the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations.

Article

“Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees”: Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars

Abstract

Cecily Nicholson’s 2014 documentary long poem From the Poplars takes up the history of a small island in the Fraser River delta. This island is the original territory of the Qayqayt peoples; it contains their ancestral burial grounds, yet they are denied access due to the island’s current designation as Crown land. Nicholson’s text posits that “there is no hierarchy of oppressions” (Lorde) wrought by the condition of perpetual “second-class citizen status” (Thornhill 324) bestowed upon certain bodies in the Canadian state by drawing together the long-standing pain of two of Canada’s most historically marginalized groups through a shared “affective public” (Papacharissi) of grief (Cecily Nicholson qtd. in Chariandy et al. 75). The island’s currently perceived emptiness of Black and Indigenous presences is actually an “optical illusion” (Compton 105)—From the Poplars brings these “strange fruits” into view. Just as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” instigated waves of protest and stoked anti-segregation movements in the United States (Davis; Fields; Hobson; Lynsky), From the Poplars as political ballad signals to new and radical futures for Black and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.

Canadian Literature issue 247, is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.


Issue 247 Author Spotlight – Susan Ioannou

July 13, 2022

Born in Toronto, Susan Ioannou has a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Toronto. Over three decades, she variously taught creative writing for the Toronto Board of Education, University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and Ryerson University Literary Society, and served as Associate Editor of Cross-Canada Writers’ Magazine. Her publications range across short stories, literary nonfiction, and children’s novels. Several poetry collections include Clarity Between Clouds (Goose Lane Editions), Where the Light Waits (Ekstasis Editions), Coming Home: An Old Love Story (Leaf Press), Looking Through Stone (Your Scrivener Press), Looking for Light (Hidden Brook Press), and The Dance Between: Poems About Women (Opal Editions). Her website is http://www3.sympatico.ca/susanio/.

Her poem “Organic (after hip replacement)” can be read on our website at https://canlit.ca/article/organic-after-hip-replacement/.

Canadian Literature issue 247 is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues/.