rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Jake Byrne

DADDY, Jake Byrne
Brick Books, 2024
2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2025 Trillium Book Awards will be announced on June 18, 2025.

Jake Byrne is the author of Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023) and DADDY (Brick Books, 2024). In 2019, they won CV2’s Foster Prize for poetry. They live in Toronto/tka:ronto.

Much as your first collection, DADDY seems very much constructed as a book-length project. Do you see your books-to-date, or your writing more broadly, in terms of projects? How do manuscripts get built?

I think books in Canada are more likely to thrive in the ‘project’ format primarily because the provincial and federal granting systems, which keep the ecosystem running, reward applications – and therefore books – that have a clearly defined narrative project. It is the same way that grant applications for books that are, say, two-thirds finished already are more likely to succeed, if only because the author can describe their project with that much more specificity and clarity near the finish line versus from the starting line.

If you look at books published in the U.S., there are fewer ‘project’ books, and books tend to be eclectic compilations of very polished (arguably very safe) work, because the competition is so intense that it is contest juries that shape what gets published down there.

But this is a long way to say that I still think it depends on the book.

You describe DADDY as a book-length project like my first book, but from my perspective, Celebrate Pride with Lockheed Martin had a concept but no actual project until the second last round of editing, when it finally came together. I hated that book until two months before publication because I felt it did not live up to the idea I had for it, which was vague and ill-defined until the last minute.

To me, Celebrate Pride is a more classical ‘first book’ in that there are a bunch of poems in there that were not written for the book – tons of poems I wrote for school that I no longer liked but didn’t want to throw out either, formal experiments, trying on other writers’ voices, using personae, characters, all sorts of games and tricks.

DADDY was written as a project, and the project was to finally start writing poems about my relationship with my dad – poems about my other two parents followed shortly thereafter, and then the second half came as a joyful consequence out of the self-discovery I was doing in the first half. (There’s actually a third section that got cut because the book ballooned, and I wanted to keep this one lean. As lean as a maximalist can manage, anyway.)

I didn’t really think my story was worth telling, but I had been taught to think that my childhood was normal or even good, and I have since realized it was not.

The first poem in the book – “Parallel Volumes” – describes the thought process and genesis of the entire book. I felt I had been protecting my family by not writing about them. Readers can smell insincerity, though. The words don’t connect when you’ve filtered them through several layers of abstraction. Then I realized if I didn’t tell this story I was going to, on some level or another, die. Probably not literally, but there was going to be a big betrayal of my soul there, and that was not going to be good for me or my art.

That said, I listened to a few concept albums at a critical point in my teenage years, and that kind of ensured I’ll be doing the concept album thing forever, for better or worse.

What a long way to say it depends! But it’s true. The job of the artist is to figure out how to build the idiomatic better mousetrap, and the finished product will probably look like a mousetrap even if the internal process that led there was very different.

Curious. I’ve long considered the book as cohesive unit to be an extension, partly, of the west coast poetics (the Talonbooks/Coach House axis) of the long poem across the 1960s and 70s. I recall a complaint by one of them during that period, George Bowering, perhaps, of Irving Layton poetry books, how they were all completely the same: once enough poems in the pile, it became a book, and then onto the next pile. Through all of that, is your preference, then, to compose poems as they come, and worry about the shape of how they might fit into a full-length manuscript once you’ve enough to consider?

Well, I'm about to out myself as a dunce, but I have virtually zero education in the Talonbooks/Coach House axis of the 1960s and 1970s; my long poem comes from the Modernists.

More to read, I suppose. And yes – poems as they come, and the structure to fit them into after. I think poetry must have a somewhat spontaneous element to its composition.

If I were capable of writing book-length projects as planned and sequentially, I’d be a novelist – there’s more money in it.

I came to this art form mostly because my undiagnosed ADHD made it difficult to stick to the disciplines that required many hours of consistent practice. Poetry you still practice, but over long periods of spontaneous composition. There is a finite number of poems you can write in a day – and that number is three.

Oh, hardly a dunce: I think each of our different experiences through reading provides us different elements of information, including what to read and even how to read. Your answer made me wonder if I’m too often too comfortable within a set of held facts (new information to reframe and reshape is the key, I suppose). And we’ve spoken before about ADHD, and our different avenues there, also. Do you find a difficulty with completing projects, or even working on one project at a time?

Absolutely to both. The last 10-20% of any project is the worst for me, and I always have about four book ideas on the back burner.

People with ADHD are said to abandon things once they get past the point of proficiency, when there isn't the immediate feedback of ‘difficulty’ to keep the brain engaged.

And as a testament to that, I have about 70 video games in my collection played to the two-thirds mark and then cheerfully abandoned.

This is less cheerful a phenomenon when applied to vocations or relationships.

I think writers with ADHD should focus their thoughts on publishing during the last third of working any manuscript, to be aware that that the true difficulty of any writing project, in fact, might lay elsewhere. Given that, what loose strands have you been focusing on since DADDY was completed? And might that excised “third section” of DADDY ever see the light of day?

I hate to report this, but I have done zero literary work since editing DADDY. Zero grant applications. Haven’t even attempted to fix my busted literary website. Maybe wrote thirty poems in the last two years.

Life has been all maintenance work: resting, meditating, couples counseling/therapy, physiotherapy. Boring, necessary things. I'm proud of DADDY but publishing it came with a pretty serious cost to my family relationships.

That third section will be published eventually, but it’s about a – corniness warning – “spiritual journey,” and it feels a bit presumptive to publish on that subject.

It might be a while before I publish another book. I dunno. Ask me again in two years.

It sounds as though you are doing exactly what you need to be doing, and that’s a good thing. We can’t get to anything else until that stuff is properly covered. And thirty poems across two years is a lot for some writers, so I think you’re still fine. Separately, and this might seem like a foolish question, but has the Trillium nomination added or changed any of how you see the book, or your work generally?

I wouldn’t say it has changed it, but it’s definitely provided a little spark of hope. It’s silly – I want my practice to be immune to prize culture, but my ego is obviously not. The external validation is helpful, especially in light of my family estrangement. And it’s always humbling to be recognized by your peers.

 

 

 

 

 

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 newchapbook is out now via Ethel Zine (but you already know 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.

Pearl Pirie : Elegy for Opportunity, by Natalie Lim

Elegy for Opportunity, Natalie Lim
Wolsak & Wynn, 2025

 

 

 

I do like a poetry collection that prompts m to learn. On entering Elegy for Opportunity by Natalie Lim (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) I didn't catch that Opportunity was a very specific one, the Mars rover active from 2004 to 2018. I could compare the narrator point of view to Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2025) in that the narrator of that novel was relating her emotional energies to a robot world far away in time and space, while Lim's poetry similarly looks out to Mars and a robot as a companion. Whereas Opportunity sent back over a 1000 reports, Lim shares 44 poems with a connecting thread of the little rover that could, an anchoring key. The rover is emblematic of the planet itself with time available ticking away. The rover acts as a counterpoint to our option on earth to build each other up instead of being cut-off from both good and bad. She sets her mind to sorting what is worth keeping, small not-ornamental beauties but moments that make people worth saving.

I don't know the composition of all the poems but they feel like Covid lockdown poems in that they centre around isolation and secondary experiences, like movies, twitter, Spotify, and a video game while the remarked on "unreal" is crickets in a park. Even winter cold is an abstract that becomes a marked form of being. There are musing of dating and dogs, gratitude for a partner who looks after her when not feeling well.

The central idea of Opportunity (and opportunity) act as a tether to hope and love so we don't float off in the deadening polluted waters of information floods. When the world is hard, resistance must cultivate its tenderness. As Tennessee Williams said, "with age comes the realization that nothing is as erotic, attractive, rare or calming as kindness." It is not an automatic given. (p. 9) "I know so much more about tenderness /than I used to. my hands are learning to be kinder,/ reaching for yours across the table, squeezing once/ to remind you that this is all real." Later she returns (p. 50) "I learned tenderness/from the girl across the bar/who didn't know me/but asked if I was okay."

The phrasings throughout are loose and casual, as if confidential to a friend. Spoiler alert: in her title poem Elegy for Opportunity, (p. 11) she reflects how one can be tender and still that not cancelling out the cruelty of what we set in motion for destruction. Hers, a variation on saying sorry doesn't un-break the cup. There's a melancholy to isolation on another world with no means to communicate or return. She does not unpack these things explicitly but leaves that to the reader.

The poems are tender shoots, tentative yet pressing. Many of the poems are snippets such as "Inside Out Made Me Cry This Week". I know I watched the movie but I retained nothing, nonetheless the main thrust is explicit enough to come through. In it she observes "what an odd thing, to know everything about yourself/ and still be on your own side."

It is marvellous how a poet in her 20s is confident enough to put her poetry in public discourse, to stand up and be counted as a poet, to share what she sees from where she stands. "I should not treat poems like subtweets" (p. 4) makes no concession for older paper people who I've seen complain about digital terms. All life is appropriate for tipping into poetry.

 

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie works on manuscripts in parallel while she lives quietly in Quebec with her loudest part being her laughter, she's told. www.pearlpirie.com Watch for her Pinhole Press chapbook this spring.

rob mclennan : 2024 VERSeFest interviews: Armand Garnet Ruffo

 

Armand Garnet Ruffo is from remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial and historical roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His books include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest work includes Reclamation and Resurgence: the Selected Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2024), which he edited, and his own book, The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, 2024 winner of “The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.

Armand Garnet Ruffo reads in Ottawa on Saturday, November 30, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.

rm: When did you first start writing?

AGR: High School. I guess it was poetry, although if anyone asked me what I was doing I said I was writing songs, which I’m happy no longer exist. It wasn’t something that I advertised.

rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?

AGR: They were muddled. I spent a lot of time, like most younger writers I suppose, just trying to figure it out. Later when I got to York (and then Ottawa U) and was reading widely, and I was basically sounding like whomever I read. Then one day while I was visiting my grandmother who was living with my aunt in Toronto, we got to talking about my studies and for some reason I mentioned poetry. Then out of the blue she recited me a poem that she had written called “Lost In My Native Land.” ( I later published it in a magazine I was working for in Ottawa called The Native Perspective. She was thrilled.) The form was rather archaic, in the style of Pauline Johnson, but the content blew me away. That’s when I realized I needed to write about my heritage and my own experiences. The writing developed from there. You have to remember that back in the 70s there were very few Indigenous people getting published, very few role models. Not like today.

rm: How did you get from there to the publication of your first book? What was the process of putting an eventual manuscript together?

AGR: Getting published was not straightforward. Most of the work I sent out came back to me with the standard responses, too political, too polemical, etc. (I later learned that other Indigenous poets had experienced the same thing.) As for readings I hardly did any. You have to realize it was a period when Canadian nationalism was still in full throttle. The scene was basically unwelcoming, and I even stopped writing for a period in the early 80s. Then in 89 I sent my work to the Banff Centre and to my utter surprise I got in. Adele Wiseman was the Head of writing. I also met Alistair MacLeod there who invited me to study with him at Windsor U. My first book, consisting of mostly earlier poems, was published by Theytus Books in 1994. It should come as no surprise that it took an Indigenous publisher to get the first book out. At the Banff Centre I had met the editors of Coteau Books, and they published my second book Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney, which came out in 1996 and is still in print. The 90s saw a huge shift in the general response to Indigenous writing, and it was a green light from there.

rm: Were there other Indigenous writers you were encountering during this period?

AGR: I guess it was the 80s when started going to hear readings. There was a pretty good poetry scene in Ottawa in those days, as there is today, but I really wasn’t a part of it and, as far as I can recall, there were no other Indigenous writers giving readings either.  I do remember giving a reading at a cafe called The Stone Angel with the great songwriter Willy Dunn. That was an honour.  Songs such as “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “Son of the Sun,” and “I Pity The Country” were certainly an inspiration.  

At that time I was also writing plays and going to see productions in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts. I met Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway there, but, again, I really wasn’t part of the scene, and I got to know them better in later years at festivals, conferences, etc.  As for Indigenous poets in Ottawa, in the early 90s  I met Anne Acco, Kateri Damm, Greg YoungIng and Joseph Dandurand. We hung out and even formed a poetry group we called W.I.N.O. (I hope you can see the humour.) Ann Acco provided funding for an anthology we put together, which was published in 1994. I also met the novelist Richard Wagamese, who was living in Ottawa and working on his first book Keeper’ n Me. We would meet for coffee and talk about writing. He was incredibly well read.

During this period, I ended up teaching at The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C.  It was a real hub with all kinds of Indigenous writers and artists, either teaching or passing through. Jeannette Armstrong was the Director; Lee Maracle was there; Greg YoungIng was both teaching and editing Theytus Books; Gerry William (a sci-fi writer) was there, as was the Native American poet Maurice Kenny; the poet Annharte visited, etc.  So it was an exciting place to be.  Once Grey Owl came out things changed for me, and I was invited to do readings both nationally and internationally.  I met Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Garry Gottfriedson, Joanne Arnott, Greg Scofield and Duncan Mercredi, etc. It was an exciting time because Indigenous literature as we know it today was really just getting on its feet.

rm: Grey Owl felt a huge leap in your creative work. What brought you to working that narrative in that particular form?

AGR: I wrote Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney because the infamous Archie Belaney lived with my grandmother’s parents in the village of Biscotasing in northern Ontario.  I had grown up with stories about him, and I knew I could complicate the telling.  As for the writing, I thought initially it was going to be a suite of connected poems at best.  However, once I started writing it bloomed into a full  book. I did struggle initially with the book’s POV.  I tried initially to tell it from Grey Owl’s POV and that didn’t work for various reasons. Then I tried write it using an omniscient narrator, ostensibly the poet’s POV, but it didn’t work either. It felt distant and detached.  Then I started to think about how other poets have handled long, narrative poems.  I went back and read Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, along with a few Native American poets who were on my bookcase, like N. Scott Momaday, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear.  As soon as I had a block of uninterrupted time, I just started writing, and once I got into it it actually kind of wrote itself. The multitude of voices seemed to jump onto the page. It’s a gift when that happens.

A few years later after the book was published, I ran into the Metis poet Gregory Scofield, and he told me he had been on a literary jury and Grey Owl came up in their discussion.  He said that others on the jury dismissed it because they said it wasn’t, quote, “pure poetry.” I have to laugh when you think about that today. The takeaway is just do your own thing and don’t worry about what others think. The book is still in print nearly 30 years later. 

rm: It does seem interesting that Grey Owl is simultaneously a work that holds direct influence from now-canonical works while being well ahead of its time, certainly in terms of structure and content alike. Given you recently won the Betsy Warland Between Genres award, I’d say you’ve been playing with genre for some time now. How aware are you of genre when you are working? How are decisions around structure made?

AGR: We talked briefly about this the other evening. I try not to repeat myself, and in that regard I’m very conscious of genre. That said, I never set out to explore a particular kind of form. Each project takes its own shape. To use a well worn metaphor each project is like a newborn who arrives with its own personality. And to extend that, I don’t create the baby and then give it a personality. I’m really unaware until it cries to be fed.  It’s at that moment that I have that “Ahah moment.”  Take The Dialogues, I wrote the libretto, essentially a long narrative poem, after about a year of doing research on the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the famous WWI sniper.  And in hindsight I would say it developed rather organically alongside the music.  After a few performances I was asked by audience members if I were going to publish it.  I thought about it, but the libretto was not written for the page and that presented a problem. 

When I imagined it without the music, I saw it full of holes, spaces, absences. I had to fill it up, but how?  I came up with the idea to create a dialogue with the libretto that would ‘open it up’ much like the music does on stage. With that in mind, I started to take chunks of the libretto and explore what it was saying, and what I could say about it – and I extrapolated from there.  That’s when the whole left side, right side page thing developed. At first I was just trying to get my ideas down, but later it got to a point where I was carefully fitting bits and pieces of multifarious text together.  And I soon realized that even the various literary forms of the textual inclusions were in a kind of dialogue with each other.  So, yes, as the project developed I became very aware of what I was doing, but only as it developed.  E.L. Doctorow famously said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the trip that way.” I agree with him, and I think it’s a hopeful sentiment for any writer, certainly for me, because I really only see glimpses when I’m writing.

rm: You mention working a libretto, but how aware are you, more generally, of sound or visual components as you write? How do you see sound exist upon the page?

AGR: Like many people I grew up listening to music, which I’ve written about it in my poetry collection At Geronimo’s Grave (winner of the 2001 Archibald Lampman Award), and when I’m working I tend to have something playing in the background. Because I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – it messes with the writing – it’s usually instrumental jazz, and in fact I’ve become a huge jazz fan because of it.  One of the things that I stress to my students is that when they are writing poetry they should read it aloud to hear and feel the rhythm.  So, yes, I’m very conscious of sound value.  As I say in the “Afterword” to The Dialogues, when I was writing the libretto I had to feel the words just as one feels music.

rm: You mention The Dialogues emerging out of doing research on Francis Pegahmagabow. How do such projects begin? Do you dig into researching a subject and see what writing might emerge, or have you a particular goal or shape in mind? Are you researching simply through your own interest and curiosity, and writing becomes a kind of secondary process?

AGR: That’s a good question. The libretto was originally commissioned by The Festival of Sound in Parry Sound for the 35th anniversary of the festival. They paired me with Tim Corlis, a classical composer out of B.C., and it was literally our job to come up with a musical about Frances Pegahmagabow. I talked about the process we went through in the book’s Afterword. Suffice to say here that we drove together from Toronto to  Francis’ home community of Wasauksing (Parry Island) to meet Francis’ family, and we talked, maybe strategized is a better word, about the project on the trip. Eventually Tim would send me snippets of music, and I would listen to them and write, and sometimes I would send him something.  Back to Doctorow’s quote about driving with one headlight; I had a very basic idea of where I wanted to go with libretto in terms of dividing it into three parts, Francis’ early life, the war, and then his political life after the war, but that’s really all I had.  After that it was all about feeling the music and letting the poetry come.  So, yes, I guess it was about letting the writing “emerge” as you put it.  As for the research itself, whether it’s about Grey Owl, or Norval Morrisseau, or Francis Pegahmagabow, it has always been connected to a writing project. There’s always been something in mind.

Miigwech, thanks, for the questions. 

 

 

 

 

 

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 more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent title is On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024). He is very excited that 2025 will see the publication of the poetry title Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil), the lyric essay a river runs through it: a writing diary (Spuyten Duyvil) and his follow-up to the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022), the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press). 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.