Cicely Grace, for “Rather Her Clean”
read Grace’s shortlisted work here
2025 Bronwen Wallace Awards • Poetry
Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan
Established in
memory of writer Bronwen Wallace, this award has a proven track record of
helping talented developing authors secure their first book deal. Two $10,000
prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short
fiction. The 2024 Bronwen Wallace Award will be announced on June 2, 2025.
Cicely Grace has a degree in English literature from the University of British Columbia. A finalist for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Pulp Literature, The Foundationalist, and The Garden Statuary. She was awarded second place in the Foster Poetry Prize and first runner up in the Magpie Award for Poetry. Grace lives in Vancouver.
What first brought you to poetry?
I studied poetry in a very academic way during my literature degree at UBC, and fell in love with reading it once I discovered poets like Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Kim Addonizio, Ada Limón....but I would say that in terms of my own writing, it was my diary that first brought me to poetry. I began keeping a diary religiously after I fell in love with Anais Nin’s diaries. Like her diaries, mine contains everything I think and experience and witness. Once I write all of this down, the threads and themes connecting these things become apparent, and poems follow. Nearly all of my poems can be traced back to a diary entry. And each diary entry is like a prelude to a first draft. Writing poetry and writing a diary are very similar mediums to me because they share a confessional, elusive, secretive quality. In this way, I suppose I could say my love of secrets brought me to poetry, because for me, my diary and my poems are both spaces where secrets are confessed, and at the same time veiled, obscured, kept safe.
What is that process like of transferring writing from the diary to crafting as work that might be sent out into the world? Are there pieces you might work on as poems that might not leave the house?
It entails a lot of revisions. My poems always begin as works that are very personally revealing, but by the second draft they take on worlds unto themselves. I imagine new details that feel true and essential to the poem that were not present in whatever element of real life it came from. The speaker starts to have a voice of her own, an “I” that is very separate from the “I” in my diary.
There are some that will probably never leave the house. At least not for a long time. But I’m getting braver about that part of it, the sharing part of it. There are a few poems in Rather Her Clean that I thought would never leave the house. The Bronwen Wallace Award seemed such a far off dream when I applied for it. And when I learned I was a finalist I checked what I had submitted and there were a few that I was shocked I’d had the gall to include in the collection. So who knows….
Is the biggest process for moving drafts from the diary into poems an attempt to shifting the narrative “I”? How do you keep the two separate?
I actually find the separation happens very naturally. I love the freedom of having my speakers think and act in ways I wouldn’t. The greater dissonance happens when someone close to me reads my poems and says, “I remember that happening to you” because even though they’re right, the separation between life and poem feels so large to me that I think they couldn’t possibly. I think that they’re picturing it all wrong, that the way they remember it prevents them from seeing it the way I’ve reimagined it in the poem. My friends and family are at a disadvantage this way; probably the best way to read my poems is to know nothing about me.
There’s a straightforwardness I appreciate to your lines, your sentences. How much effort might go into crafting a line that reads with such ease?
Quite a bit. I tend to overwrite, so the final step for me is often stripping down the language to make the poem more clear and frank. This is where I think my academic background really helps me. I’ve been able to transfer, to my poetry, my editing skills from writing literary essays in university.
Do you see a relationship, or conversation, between your academic work and your literary work? Or do you see them as entirely separate?
There is a lot of overlap in terms of theme between my academic papers and my poetry. And in general, whatever I am reading often informs in some way what I am interested in writing about, whether that is a direct reference or just the exploration of a certain theme. I have a poem that references Othello, another that references Dante’s Inferno. Of course, “Ode to the Hymen” from the nominated collection is after Sharon Olds. I wouldn't go so far as to say my academic and creative works are in direct dialogue with one another. But rather that I like to imagine my work falling into a lineage with the literature that has informed so much of my life.
The submission process for the Bronwen Wallace requires putting together a small, chapbook-length selection of your poems. What was that process like, to assemble your poems into such an order? Did you find it difficult? Enlightening? Did you learn anything about your poems by attempting to put them together into something for submission?
The selection process was tricky for sure. All of these poems were written quite independently of one another. But I tried to choose poems that work together, share themes and build upon an overall narrative, rather than whatever I think is “good” or a favourite at the moment. For “Rather Her Clean” I wanted to base the collection around the titular poem which speaks to the concept of “keeping” the things that happen to you rather than being “clean” of them. Each poem in the collection contains something that relates to this theme.
In terms of order, I wanted to make sure it didn’t feel like a linear progression from girlhood to womanhood. I wanted it to feel closer to the way memories work: a little haphazard, resurfacing at inopportune moments. And I wanted to somewhat evenly disperse the tone. “Ode to the Hymen” is a very hopeful poem for me. I wanted to begin with one that feels relatively light, before progressing to the collection’s darker themes. “Home Video,” perhaps the saddest poem in the collection, I placed fourth, serving as a middle point, because I wanted there to be time to recover from it. “Closing Shift” comes last not only because the title indicates a sense of finality, but also because in that one the speaker has finally gotten enough courage to address, somewhat viciously, those who have tried to degrade her. It felt important to end with something memorable, even a little scandalous to indicate a fully realized and shameless voice.
Do you see yourself working a larger structure, a larger manuscript, of these poems?
Yes! They will eventually be part of my debut collection which I am very close to having a full-length draft of. This collection will be titled HAVE YOU SEEN PRECIOUS? after a poem that was published in the fall 2024 edition of Pulp Literature.
Very nice! How easy or difficult have you found the process of putting together a full-length collection? Have you any models for the kinds of structure you’ve been aiming toward?
I think the hardest part will be the point I am at now. Up until now I have mostly been writing on a whim. But now that the collection is almost fully formed, I’m starting to see what it looks like as a whole, which means I’m starting to see the gaps I’d like to fill in, the themes I’d like to expand on. So now I am mostly writing things I have assigned myself specifically to fit the collection.
In terms of models, I have been frequently rereading Anne Sexton’s All My Pretty Ones which is organized into 5 short sections with about 6-7 poems each. This is likely the structure my collection will take. Because a lot of my poems are long, I think short sections will help it feel less overwhelming.
Born in Ottawa,
Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa,
where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine
McNair. The author of some fifty trade books of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories
(University of Alberta Press, 2024), the poetry collections Snow day
(Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press,
2025), and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of
above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). Oh, and a new chapbook is out now via Ethel Zine; did I mention that? The current Artistic
Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the
2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of
Alberta.
