Ariel Gordon : WiR-ring through the winter of 2025-2026

 

 

 

I joined Manitoba’s writing and publishing community when I was 19, when I started working at the University of Winnipeg’s student newspaper, The Uniter, and volunteering at Zygote magazine. I became aware of the Winnipeg Public Library’s Writer in Residence program around that time and I remember looking at the posters of Margaret Sweatman, George Amabile and John Weir and thinking, “One day, maybe I’ll be the WiR.”

Three decades and seven books with my name on them later, I’m so pleased to have spent seven months talking to writers and readers as the 37^th WiR. It’s not often that your dreams as a writer come true, so it was good that this one did.

During my term as WiR, I did two one-off workshops. The first was an ambulatory nature workshop at the Windsor Park library. The second was an ekphrastic workshop at the Millennium Library, where my office was located, which focused on Cliff Eyland’s artwork in the lobby and featured his collaborator George Toles.

I also facilitated an ongoing workshop called the Writing Circle for 10 writers who worked in a variety of genres. We got 35 applications for the workshop, so I could have easily done three separate sessions instead of one (and a part of me wishes I could have managed it…).

Finally, I did 75+ one-on-one consultations, in-person, via Zoom, and via phone. These conversations ran 45 to 90 minutes, depending on the needs of each writer.

But what is a one-on-one consultation, you ask? Well, since most writers need to focus on both their writing (i.e. their craft) and their writing life (i.e. the business end), I made sure that each consultation focused on both modes. People had to submit work in advance, or, failing that, identify what aspect of writing and publishing they wanted to talk about.

I would print out each submission and write notes directly on it before and during our conversation, because at least half of the people who submitted to the program hadn’t ever used Word’s track changes function, which is what I use when giving notes to peers. At the conclusion of our meeting, I would hand the writer my notes, or, in the case of the Zoom consults, I would scan my notes on a library photocopier and email them to the writer.

I met with people during the day and in the early evenings. I also did four or five consults on Saturdays. This way, most people could meet with me, no matter what their work life looked like or what their obligations were.

Among the coronavirus pandemic’s lessons were that while tools like Zoom are useful, nothing replaces in-person interaction. I found that most people preferred to meet with me in person, if they could. Another pandemic lesson was that tools like Zoom expand the accessibility of programs and events. Because of this videoconferencing software, I was able to meet with people who lived outside the city or who were immunocompromised or who had other barriers to in-person meetings.

Most of the people who came to see me were actively writing and had some idea that they should publish, but had no connections to the writing and publishing community. So I would ask about their writing practice. I would ask if they were in a writing group or had ever taken any creative writing workshops. I would talk to them about the publication credits that most book publishers would want to see on a book proposal. And then I would suggest genre-appropriate markets for getting those first publications.

Most of the people who came to see me had no one to read their work besides their bookish friends, their parents or their spouses. They were so hungry for feedback that didn’t sound something like this: “Yeah, it was good.” “Good how? What part did you like?” “It was just…good.”

It became clear that my consultations were as much about providing the writers with inspiration to keep writing as much as it was about giving them industry- or craft-specific tips. People tell me I have a lot of energy and I liked the idea of pouring some of my energy and enthusiasm into the people who came to see me. My ambition was to meet people where they were, to help them think through their goals for their writing and their writing life.

And while it took a lot of time and energy, I really enjoyed this work. I was seeing people at their best. They were making things just to make them, because they felt passionate, even compelled, to express themselves with words. So: very inspiring.

I also wanted to meet with every person who asked me: that is half the point of a public library writer in residence program, to my mind.

But it is worth saying that I sometimes had to sacrifice my own writing time to fit everyone in. Mid-way through the WiR term, feeling frustrated, I consulted with a number of writer-friends who noted that in similar positions they’d restricted meetings to 30 minutes. I was unwilling to do this, because talking about the writing and the writing life in one session meant that most of my meetings were naturally an hour. And I didn’t want to set a stopwatch, because that’s not inspiring for anyone.

This is my second long-term residency and I still don’t know what the solution is to dividing time between your own writing and other people’s writing. I tried to be flexible about it all, but the giant swimming pool full of time I envisioned when I started, which would allow me to jump in and luxuriate in all the extra time for my writing, didn’t materialize.

I think that doing a WiR gig in your own hometown, where you bring along all your preexisting obligations and social ties, means that it was inevitable that the swimming pool I was hoping for shrunk down into a wading pool of time I sometimes got to enjoy.

I could have worked harder to clear my proverbial (pool) deck before I started, but it just wasn’t possible this year.

After realizing all of that, I just tried to be more mindful of my time and the number of consults I was doing. One of the compromises I made was that I didn’t do any consultations during the week that the WC was on, because I provided written notes to each of the 10 participants as part of that workshop.

I worked on a number of new projects while I was WiR, from ekphrastic poems written to individual paintings in Eyland’s lobby conglomeration to collaborations with Edmonton visual artist Amanda Schutz. I also worked on my two WIPs, a poetry ekphrastic manuscript focused on micrographs of insects that are considered pests and a CNF manuscript about the urban forest and grieving.

I’m obsessed with trees and mushrooms and, from the very beginning, I wanted to bring something living into the office. As I prepared for the residency to begin, I put a call out on my social media to see if anyone had any plants or seedlings or cuttings they could spare. I was lucky enough to be gifted with a) an office with windows and b) enough flora to line two of the three desks/work surfaces that line said office.

But I wanted to extend the gesture, so I asked each person who came to see me to email me a mushroom. It didn’t matter what it was, just that it had to fit in an email — the last thing I wanted was to be accused of was shaking people down for mushroom kitsch.

The writers responded with photos of mushrooms they’d seen on their walks, with the covers of books, with recipes and poems. I tacked them up on the wall around the desk where my computer sits and they became a mycelial network of writers that I would look at when I needed inspiration of my own.

When people asked how it was, working at Millennium Library, which in Winnipeg’s downtown and has had its share of challenges over the past decade — including a controversial metal detector at the main entrance — I commented that I was seeing people at their best but also at their most real.

I appreciated being a part of the community of people who gathered at the library. I became convinced, again and again, of the societal value of libraries. So: thank you to librarians and library staff for your work, both to keep WiR programs like the Winnipeg Public Library’s going but also for the day-to-day work of running libraries, their multitude of programs and services. 

I particularly want to say that I noticed the kindness and patience of library staff, of the security guards and the Community Safety Hosts, towards patrons at the Millennium and I was so glad that people had a place to come, a safe haven, during the long winter of 2025-2026.

 

 

 

 

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with Plume Winnipeg and the Winnipeg Arts Council that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. She is the author of seven books, including four books of poetry. Gordon’s most recent book is Blood Letters, co-authored with GMB Chomichuk (Great Plains Press, 2025), a hybrid novel combining letters, drawings and poems. Her work appeared in Best Canadian Essays 2025, edited by Emily Urquhart, and in Best Canadian Poetry 2026, edited by Mary Dalton. From October 2025 to April 2026, she was the 37th Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library.

Brook Houglum : How does a poem begin?

How does a poem begin?

 

 

 

Beginnings are fluid, and poems have multiple start points—subjects, geographies, emotions, texts, events. The poems I write often intersect with my reading or research. For example, “Here at the Mouth”—a sequence focused on colonial shipping history in Vancouver—emerged from archival clippings and books, but began when I took a walk in a local park just as a television crew was setting up. Seeing the strange juxtaposition of piles of trees and large fake bushes laid on top of real foliage caught my attention, ignited an impulse to represent it in language. (How would a cognitive scientist answer this question?) Lines that eventually became a poem called “Holdfast” first registered while on an oceanside hike amid weeks of reading about kelp forests. Perhaps juxtaposition, and/or motion, are methods for beginning. Other recent work “began” while scanning parallel lists of words generated through procedural sampling, a smaller, page-based move.

Below, I represent what I understand to be the experience of beginning to write a poem. Here, I’m interested in the moments when phrases or lines begin coming to mind, the process of setting down first words then more words. In Betsy Warland’s formulation, I’m thinking about inscription, not composition. Often there is disorientation or an unexpected turn; sometimes, a steady motion towards. Inhabiting or tolerating uncertainty is involved. So are tangents, accidents, and the unfamiliar. In one of the entries in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers titled “How will you begin?” she writes, “Flying from Heathrow to JFK, I see below, an unknown arctic landscape of black mountains and white rivers” (24). The line—the vantage point, topography—signals the initial locating or perceptive moment, and links beginning to registering the unknown. I find the experience of beginning to write a poem also akin to the experience of beginning to read a poem. Often there is disorientation or an unexpected turn; sometimes, a steady motion towards.

 

How does a poem begin?:

: backwards, flying up the tracks, rain crawling rivulets across windows

It’s like this: boarded and chose the ocean-side aisle of a train, window seat, stared at the brick station then shot backwards: physical sensation of moving in reverse through space.

Miscalculated or sense of direction shot—shot through with bramble, porches, retaining walls, not the ocean view—going the opposite direction on the opposite side, the place adjacent to the place you thought you were:        begin here.

 

A body in motion, careening past banks of birch and blackberry, ivy barbed wire, pallets—“Are we going backwards?” others murmur in the intimate public car—turned-over canoes, deflated trampoline. How does a poem begin?

Walking down the jostling car, hands touching every head rest for balance, doors between cars slide open, jagged streams of water hit the vestibule floor. “There’s a leak in the roof!” someone calls, pulls napkins from a supply shelf and stuffs them between ceiling and overhead rack to absorb drips from a seam; “this is a real 5-star train.”

Slowly, or in a rush, words and phrases accumulate at different angles. Fields of pools of marshy water, twenty herons fishing in stillness, unflinching, as mergansers and buffleheads arc and zag away from the rumble. It’s like that.

Now what do you notice? Words propel parallel, diagonal. A poem begins inchoately, comes in thinking one direction and then orients, reorients.

 

 

 

 

Brook Houglum has published two chapbooks, Anthronoise (2024) and Inventory (2025), with above/ground press. Her poem “Rewilding” was recently selected for the Best Canadian Poetry 2027 anthology. She teaches at Capilano University and lives with her family in Vancouver on unceded land of the Skwxwú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəỷəm, and SəỈílwətaʔ Nations.

Misha Solomon : INTRODUCTION: Stephanie Bolster's BIODÔME: Twentieth Anniversary Edition

 

 

 

          When it was confirmed that Stephanie Bolster was to be my thesis supervisor for my poetry MA, I wrote to rob mclennan to ask that he send me copies of all of her available chapbooks. I always like to read as much as possible of what my poetry mentors and colleagues have written—I call this my “oppo research,” which is ridiculous since I view hardly any of these poets as my opposition. And certainly not Stephanie, whom I asked to work with in my application and about whom I had heard only glowing reviews from her former students.

          I knew that Stephanie was interested in zoos (it said so on her Concordia faculty profile and she had co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems, an essential anthology), but what I discovered in her Biodôme was a way of seeing, and thereby meeting, the animal world just as it should be met. In “The Arcades Project,” the chapbook’s opening poem, glass is “slanted, divided / by iron, shat at by pigeons.” The description is beautiful, but it’s not beautified. The pigeons have a subtle, surprising agency: they’re shitting at and not just on. Even here, in a poem mostly interested in Walter Benjamin’s mythic unfinished project and its Parisian subject, the life of non-human animals is impeccably rendered.

          The collection gradually and methodically grows into its animal focus, moving from arcades to ruins to gardens, from pigeon to poodle to unnamed beasts, until we get to “Where the Bear Was,” the first incontrovertible “zoo poem.” This short poem set at a Parisian zoo takes us, in only sixteen lines and a drop title, from the 21^st century to World War II and back, with a gut punch of a final line that elegantly encompasses all of history: “Once this was not even Paris.” And what is “Paris” to a bear? And what are “London, Chicago, Barcelona” to the paddocked giraffes of “Ubiquitous in This Domain”? As Stephanie handles both human and non-human concerns in her poems, we’re permitted to access the lives of both her speaker(s) and that which they see.

          In the chapbook’s titular poem, we see tamarins plunging through light thickened by snow, and then we learn that the speaker is mourning someone who has died. “This is not the difference between life and imagination.” The poem’s penultimate line serves as a kind of summary of the project: the poems of Biodôme don’t mine the difference between life and imagination, they fuse life with imagination, allowing life and imagination to, if you’ll allow me, shit at one another. These are poems of beauty without beautification, poems of observation without beatification. Zoos (and humans) simply exist here, for better or often for worse, without the sanctification sometimes found in poems that deal with the so-called natural world.

          When I was tasked with writing about a place for a PhD course taught by M.J. Thompson, I thought of the Biodôme, a place of childhood wonder and adult consternation, and with it I thought of course of Biodôme, a chapbook that confirmed for me how much I wanted to work with Stephanie Bolster. And how gratifying, how life-changing and life-affirming, how transformational her supervision has been. There are dozens and dozens of poetry collections that thank Stephanie in their acknowledgements, and each does so without routine or superficiality. It’s always clear how seen the poet has felt by Stephanie, how much of a positive effect Stephanie has had on the poet’s work. And that’s because Stephanie can see, and therefore meet, poets and their poems just where they need to be met.

          I’m thrilled that rob is reprinting this phenomenal chapbook for its 20^th anniversary, and I’m honoured that Stephanie allowed me to take the final line of “Biodôme” (“Even the briefest distance is divisible.”) as the starting line of my Biodôme chapbook. I’m sure that readers will find themselves as “rapt” as the speaker looking through daffodils in “Children’s Zoo, Central Park,” as pleasantly destabilized as the speaker is when they realize they hadn’t in fact seen daffodils, “it was too early for that or too late.”

 

 

 

 

 

Misha Solomon is a homosexual poet in and of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. His work has twice appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and in journals across Canada. He is a student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary PhD program. His debut full-length collection, My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet, appeared with Brick Books in March 2026. Misha Solomon’s Biodôme: A Bestiary after Stephanie Bolster (above/ground press, 2026) is his third chapbook.