rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Nicole Mae

Nicole Mae, for “Prairie Bog”
read Mae’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 Two $10,000 prizes will be given for outstanding works of unpublished poetry and short fiction.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.

Nicole Mae is an interdisciplinary artist. Their poetry, films, and artworks reflect themes of nostalgia, longing, Prairie queerness, Hungarian diaspora, ill body, shame, and romantic love. Mae teaches poetry, hosts creative writing workshops, and runs a multimedia art subscription called Love Letters. Mae lives in Treaty Four, otherwise known as Southern Saskatchewan.

What first brought you to poetry?

I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid but it was during my upperclassman years of high school that I found my way to poetry. My creative writing teacher saw value in my poems before I did. She encouraged me to submit them to magazines and to attend local writing retreats. I was apprehensive at first, but the Saskatchewan poetry community was so welcoming. I found myself wanting to be a part of it. It was around this time that I met my first love as well. Instantaneously, I started writing poems every day. I studied up on the Beatniks, listened to word-heavy rappers, and bought as many books as I could afford. 

Who were you reading? What poets were prompting your writing?

At that time, the poets I found most inspiring were Audre Lorde, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Tyler Knott Gregson, Rudy Francisco, and Pablo Neruda. I also loved studying song lyrics. People like Lauryn Hill, Tupac, Nas, Nonname, Lana Del Rey, Nujabes, and Hotel Books inspired me greatly too.

What were those writing retreats you were attending, and how did they help inform your writing?

I attended a writing retreat called Creating in the Qu’Appelle a couple of times. Unfortunately, it’s no longer up and running. I had some wonderful mentors though—Jennifer Still, Evie, Ruddy, and Sheena Koops being a few. Attending Creating in the Qu’Appelle was pivotal to my journey as a writer because it was the first time I found myself surrounded by a community of storytellers. The energy was invigorating. There were spoken word readings, literary workshops, rap performances, Indigenous and trans keynote speakers, and forest cabins full of new friends. Plus, all of my mentors nudged me towards poetry. I had been writing a magic realism novel at the time, and they all expressed enthusiasm for my prose and descriptive language. They told me to apply it to poetry.

What did those first poem efforts look like? And how do you feel your work has developed across the time since?

In the beginning, my poems were impassioned and raw—full of bluntness and urgency. They focused on exposing specific feelings and experiences rather than shaping them with intention. Over time, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of craft, and have refined my work to become more thoughtful, immersive, and vivid. I feel as though I can express my stories and experiences with more ingenuity now. 

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 process felt organic! Prairie Bog is a part of a larger, finished manuscript. It was quite fun sifting through it to find ten poems that could best encapsulate its geist. I wouldn’t say I learned anything new about my poems but instead revisited some tender memories and experiences of mine. 

What strikes me about some of the poems in your selection is the physicality, the immediacy, of the landscape. How important is landscape to your poems?

Landscape is deeply significant to my poems because it holds many memories. Throughout my life, I’ve retreated to prairie fields, lakes, and hills to process grief. When language has felt out of reach, and my body has carried more pain than I could manage, the land didn’t ask for explanations. It offered its presence and a place to sit. There’s such solace in cold winds, shuffling grass, birdsongs, and Western sun. People are often surprised at my fondness for Saskatchewan because the politics are quite dreary here. There are cruel and unjust bills being imposed right now—all of which affect me directly. Gender diversity, disability justice, and reproductive rights are being trampled on, and I’m working hard with my communities to oppose that. Simultaneously, I’m able to remind myself that our land is not our politics. Our land is wiser and stronger than any system we’ve built. I can still find queer joy and mind/body healing when I leave my house every day.

How do you see your work in relation to the work of other Saskatchewan poets?

My poetry is definitely distinctive—written from uncanny experiences, linguistic experimentation, and a gender-bent perspective. This being said, I do share a deep sincerity and earnestness with other Saskatchewan poets. While our approaches to poetry may differ, there’s a common thread of authenticity and gratitude that connects our community.

Tell me about the multimedia art subscription Love Letters.

Love Letters is my monthly snail mail project! Each month, I write a letter and include an art piece (such as a poem, zine, sticker, photograph, painting print, etc.) that goes along with it. I started this project at end of 2024 with the interest of distributing my art and writing in a tactile way. With the rise of malicious social media and AI art theft, I wanted to create an intimate, safe, and slow-paced experience for those who want to engage with my work. It’s been a lot of fun making small art and sharing life events as they happen in real time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 lands with Ethel Zine in June. 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.

rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Dora Prieto

Dora Prieto, for “Loose Threads”
read Prieto’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.

Dora Prieto [photo credit: Adri Montes] was a 2023 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers poetry finalist and a 2024 Writers’ Trust Mentorship participant. Her work has appeared in Acentos Review, Capilano Review, and Catapult. Prieto won the 2022 Room Poetry Contest and was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Poetry Prize. Prieto shares the tools of poetry-making through a project called El Mashup, a workshop for Latinx youth on experimental poetry, fiction, analog cinema, sound art, and performance. She lives in Vancouver on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. 

What first brought you to poetry?

I credit two amazing poets and teaching artists: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Sheryda Warrener. Both teach at UBC. I started the MFA in fiction in 2021, after quitting a job in communications I was really struggling with, and having done little creative writing prior. One of my first classes was with Billy-Ray and he introduced me to poets who became foundational for me: Ada Limón, Natalie Díaz, Tommy Pico, Aracelis Girmay, and Victoria Chang, among others. After taking an incredible class with Sheryda the following summer, it was set: poetry had claimed me and I had to claim it back. Sheryda helped me get in touch with my deeper inquiry and taught me how to get out of my own way (usually by tricking the brain into submission). I really got hooked after that.

Now. There are many ways to think about the question of what first brought me to poetry, and another answer could be this: growing up between Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia and San Cristóbal de las Casas in southern Mexico, my identity and way of thinking was formed through betweenness and attempts to bridge those worlds, cultures, languages, family members, and realities. A lot of poetry is written into rupture, so once I started reading more poetry, I recognized immediately the sense of urgency and attempt, of mending, and of the multiple selves that the speaker gives voice to. My sister Rosa and I are first gen university grads and I spent most of my 20s doing hard labour jobs, so the language of poetry wasn’t really in my world until I did the MFA. But once I got there—BOOM—I was in deep! 

Jumping into a literary MFA from, as you say, “having done little creative writing prior,” is an enormous leap. What were you hoping to gain, or even jettison, through such a program?

Haha yes, I’m aware there’s a bit of a flex in that. I came into the MFA hoping to write a polyphonic, multigenerational novel spanning Colombia, Mexico, and Canada—a way to document my family history and get closer to the complex real-life characters of my geographically and culturally disparate family. That didn’t end up being the right approach for me, but it was the original engine, and in some ways it’s still running beneath the work I’m doing now.

I also applied out of a kind of desperation. At the time, I was deep in my first desk job—something I’d worked hard to land, only to find it soul-crushing—and the pandemic had cracked open a lot of the capitalist myths that shaped my undergrad ideas of success. When I asked myself what kind of writing I’d do if money weren’t involved, it wasn’t the freelance music journalism I was doing for free concert tickets, and it definitely wasn’t the website copy, social media, and newsletters I was writing for work.

I’ve always been a heavy reader—books were a lifeline during a pretty unstable childhood spent moving between countries. International, but not in the sexy, middle-upper-class way. So even though the MFA terrified me, when I got in, I figured: at worst, it would be two years that didn’t advance a “career,” and I could always go back to communications. Or go back to firefighting, which I actually think is a much better job (more on capitalism’s lies in the poems!) In the end, I didn’t write that novel, but I found poetry—and a new way of listening to language, memory, and history—that feels far more alive to the questions I was trying to ask in the first place.

Once you made your way to poetry as your form, did the poems come quickly, or was it still a process? What were those first pieces attempting, and how close did they get to what you’d been hoping?

A trickle and then a rush. My first poems felt direct and honest in a way that my fiction hadn’t. They were primarily lyric and narrative, often with an elegiac tone, á la Ocean Vuong. Mimetic, to some degree. I remember the shock, delight, and significant imposter syndrome I felt when my first poem was published in Catapult (RIP) when Billy-Ray was on the editorial board. Jorie Graham’s words, “A poem is an experience, not the record of an experience,” became a crucial lesson for me, leading to a shift toward more looseness, humor, and freedom within the lyric “I.”

The “rushing” really started in Sheryda’s class in May 2022. Since then, I’ve been writing quite a bit—10 to 50 pages of poetry a month—and reading voraciously. I’ve never felt so intrinsically motivated by something, and I’m incredibly grateful that things aligned for me to discover poetry amidst all the randomness. Sheryda has an exceptional talent for guiding students to produce their best work through interdisciplinary, process-driven, and material explorations. Under her guidance, my poems became more expansive, layered, and deeply engaged with an inquiry process, rather than existing as isolated pieces. She not only taught me to love poetry but to love it in my own way.

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 poems are from my manuscript, which I’ve been editing, rearranging, and expanding since I graduated from UBC last May. The submitted selection came from what was draft six of the manuscript, and I'm currently on draft eight!

When putting the packet together, I focused on choosing poems that I felt best represented the collection as a whole, were among the strongest pieces, and shared enough thematic and narrative connections to flow together, even without the surrounding poems in the full manuscript.

The process of shaping those ten pages was actually very beneficial. It pushed me to make cuts for the submission that I might not have otherwise had the motivation or courage to do.

I like how your poems are built as accumulations of phrases that appear, at first glance, to be straight, but then bend a bit. I see you quoting Anne Boyer at the offset, but where did this adherence to the deceptively straight phrase emerge?

I started writing in monostich during a 2023-24 christmas visit to Mexico. Between family obligations, little time alone, and intense conversations, my Notes App got full of potent fragments I needed to jot down, but that didn’t cohere together. When I revisited them to send to my mentor (I was on a thesis deadline at that point), I kept them mostly in that form, more out of lack of time than anything else.

My mentor, Sheryda, recognized something compelling in these isolated lines and encouraged me to explore them further, rather than reverting to my usual stanza structures. She introduced me to francine j. harris’s “Single Lines Looking Forward” and other monostich poems, which helped me appreciate the unique power of the single line. It offered a directness that my previous use of enjambment and line breaks hadn't achieved.

A single line feels exposed, urgent, and definitive. It can even hold a certain audacity. And what really captivated me was the potential for associative movement created by a line break after every line. When each line of poetry is followed by a line of absence, the leaps between ideas intensifies. I also find a connection to the concise nature of tweets and memes, and elsewhere in the manuscript, I explore how the assertive yet often capitalized-upon voice of girls online adds another dimension to this form.

I’m still learning so much from the single line—how much weight it can carry, the sensation of taking a step and then encountering open space, and the challenge of balancing a sense of forward movement with the pleasure of associative jumps.

How did you get involved in El Mashup, and how has that informed, or been informed by, your work?

Daniela Rodríguez, a dear friend and collaborator, and I started El Mashup in 2021. Our paths crossed in 2019 at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival’s (VLAFF) Youth Jury, and we recognized the lasting impact of having a creative, leftist space for Latin Americans. Noticing a gap in similar opportunities for Latin/e/x youth between 13 and 18 years old in Vancouver, we decided to create a program focused on building community, developing skills, and exploring artistic expression. El Mashup has since grown into a collective of five members, and we now operate out of the Clinton Park Fieldhouse in Vancouver, a three-year residency.

At its heart, El Mashup embraces interdisciplinarity, mashing up everything from creative writing to experimental film, sound, and performance. While my own poetry work is more traditionally rooted, El Mashup inspires me to experiment more—this winter I’m making an experimental documentary that blends poetic travelogue and family research in Colombia. I think El Mashup also reminds me to connect my practice with the community whenever I can. Dani and I aspire to be the “weird art aunties” who encourage them to keep creating!

 

 

 

 

 

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 lands with Ethel Zine in June. 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.

rob mclennan : 2025 Bronwen Wallace Award shortlist interviews: Cicely Grace

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.