Renato Gandia
2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
The 2026 Bronwen Wallace Awards will be announced on Monday, June 1, 2026.
What first brought you to poetry?
I came to poetry through language before I understood it as poetry. I grew up in the Philippines, where language is already textured. Tagalog carries rhythm, repetition, and silence in a very particular way. Even in everyday speech, there’s a kind of compression and implication.
I was actually quite reluctant to write poetry at first. I didn’t know if I had something to say, or if I could say it in a way that mattered. And writing in English made it even more challenging, because it’s not my first language. I was very aware of that distance.
But I kept returning to poetry anyway. When I started writing more seriously, I realized it was the form that allowed me to hold onto that sensibility—to write with restraint, to lean into what can be suggested rather than fully explained. It gave me a way to be indirect, but still truthful.
How did you get from that point to starting to send out work? What did that process look like? Had you any models or mentors?
I came to sending out work a bit indirectly. An essay I wrote was published in Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing, and through that I met Patria Rivera. She was one of the first people who really encouraged me to take poetry seriously.
At the time, I told her I didn’t write poetry because I didn’t really understand how it worked. Back in the Philippines, one of my closest friends, Niles Jordan Breis, was already an accomplished poet. We had both tried writing poetry earlier on, but I felt like I was too slow to learn the form, and I eventually gave it up. Watching him go on to win awards only made that feeling worse.
But Patria said something that stayed with me—that poetry doesn’t have to begin with mastery, it can begin with expression, and that the precision it demands can be its own reward. That shifted my perspective. I started reading poems more closely, especially in journals, paying attention to how they move and where they go quiet. I began attending workshops, trying to understand the form from the inside out.
One winter, I submitted to a contest at The Confluence Historic Site & Parkland in Calgary, and I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the winners. That was just enough confidence to keep going.
After that, I kept sending work out. Sometimes I’d send poems to Patria and ask her to look them over. She’d come back with suggestions—specific, useful ones—and the work would get stronger. There were many rejections—more than acceptances—but I kept coming back to her voice, and to the memory of standing with seven other poets at the Confluence. I would feel the disappointment, of course, but it usually passed after a few hours. And then I’d return to the work. That persistence, more than anything, is what kept me moving.
How does a poem begin for you?
A poem usually starts with a feeling for me—something that’s been sitting with me for a long time, even if I don’t fully understand it yet. I think of myself as an emotional writer in that sense.
Sometimes that feeling is tied to memory. For example, I wrote a poem about the Second World War in the Philippines, and it began with something very small—I remembered a Japanese dentist who once gave me advice about a malocclusion when I was in Grade Four. That memory stayed with me, and over time it opened into something much larger.
Other times, the starting point is external—a song that moves me, or a film I can’t stop thinking about. I don’t always begin with a clear idea of what the poem is about. It’s usually an emotional response first, and then I follow it—through image, through memory—until something takes shape.
So the process is less about deciding to write a poem, and more about recognizing when something is asking to become one.
Your author biography mentions three unpublished manuscripts: a memoir, a poetry collection and a literary novel. How easy or difficult has it been to work across different forms simultaneously? And do you see any conversation between these works in different forms, or are they, in your mind, completely separate?
The different forms actually emerged at different points in my writing life, though I’ve come to realize they’re all in conversation with each other. I started with the memoir. That was the first manuscript I completed, and I think it came from a need to make sense of lived experience directly—particularly around faith, migration, identity, and queerness.
While I was doing early revisions of the memoir, I enrolled in Gotham Writers Workshop’s short fiction course. I wanted to understand how fiction worked from the inside. Later, I took Fiction II, which focused on novel writing, and that eventually led me to begin working on a literary novel. Fiction gave me a different kind of freedom. It allowed me to explore emotional and relational complexity through invention rather than strict lived experience.
Around that same period, I also began writing poetry more seriously. At first, I didn’t think of myself as a poet at all. But I found there were certain emotions and images that poetry could hold more precisely than prose could. Over time, the poems accumulated into a manuscript of their own.
So, in my mind, the forms aren’t really separate. They’re different ways of approaching many of the same questions—faith, longing, family, desire, belonging. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes a memory becomes compressed into a poem.
The challenge, of course, is that each form asks for a different rhythm and mindset. Memoir asks for emotional honesty and accountability to lived experience. Fiction requires architecture and patience. Poetry asks for precision and restraint. Moving between them can be difficult, but I also think each form sharpens the others.
What is interesting is in how this suggests you see your work-to-date, or at least these three manuscripts, as part of a single, larger and possibly ongoing project. Is that a fair assessment, or is this an idea that applies only to these three specific works?
I think that’s a fair assessment, though I didn’t consciously begin with the idea of building a larger project. At first, each manuscript felt separate to me because they emerged at different moments and in different forms. But over time, I started recognizing the same emotional and thematic concerns resurfacing across all of them.
When I started writing seriously, I realized I was consistently returning to the perspective of a Filipino gay man navigating faith, migration, family, and identity. Growing up in the Philippines and later immigrating to Canada shaped the way I see the world, and I became interested in bringing Filipino sensibilities into English-language writing—particularly the way emotion, silence, obligation, and tenderness operate in Filipino culture.
I also became aware of how few queer Filipino voices I was encountering in Canadian literature. Not that they didn’t exist, but it felt to me like there was still space for more stories from that perspective—stories with complexity, contradiction, and interiority. I think that awareness naturally began shaping the work I was drawn to across memoir, fiction, and poetry.
So while the forms are different, I do think the manuscripts are in conversation with each other. Sometimes a question I can’t answer in memoir reappears in fiction. Sometimes an emotional experience becomes compressed into a poem. At least right now, they all feel like part of the same ongoing attempt to understand experience through language.
The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan’s most recent titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). He recently bested a black bear in hand-to-hand combat, although only through technical foul.
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