rob mclennan : 2025 Trillium Book Award shortlist interviews: Matthew Walsh

Terrarium, Matthew Walsh

icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2024

2025 Trillium Book Awards • Poetry Shortlist 

interviewed by rob mclennan

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

Matthew Walsh grew up in Nova Scotia and now lives in Toronto. Their poems and short stories have appeared in Joyland, the Capra Review, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, and Geist; in a chapbook entitled ICQ; and in their celebrated book-length collection These are not the potatoes of my youth, a finalist for the Trillium and Gerald Lampert Awards. Terrarium is Walsh’s second full-length collection.

Much as your first collection, Terrarium 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?

Yes, it started out as a book-length project called Loose Future. It was called that for a long time. I started writing these really short, confined poems and the project shifted. It started getting personal and more like broken interrogations about the things I would see on the street or the internet. Then A.I. started creeping in here and there and I just had this idea of all these broken little glimpses of a person’s life. I looked for the bizarre and the Wonder Bread truck. Most of this book is inspired by my self induced isolations and things I’ve overheard or seen in real life, or these very vivid dreams I was having, past failed relationship, what we know and don’t know, failures and the little tiny victories that can be as simple as a rat dragging away a paper plate.

Was “Loose Future” always a placeholder title, or was it more a matter of the book moving beyond it, and towards something else?

Loose Future could have been the title but I started writing these more 14 line poems, like sonnets or sonnet-like. And I began to think of confinements. How we can be trapped in these repetitive cycles or how we have to contain ourselves. And my friend was making terrariums at the time and I kept thinking of being able to see things or to desire something but there is some barrier in the way of you achieving a goal or wanting to be desired and to desire something that is sometimes right in front of you but you can’t get it it. So the book became Terrarium some time after that.

What brought about your fondness for the sonnet? What do you feel the sonnet allows that might not be possible through other forms?

I didn’t adhere specifically to the sonnet form totally and completely, but I wanted the poems or the majority of them to be terse, short and sweet. There are some longer poems but for the most part I tried to stick to a 14 line rule. I like the history of the sonnet and the constraint that it comes with it. I wanted the poems to feel broken or confined in some way to their weird perspectives and world.

How did this book feel different from what you were attempting in your debut? Following a debut can often be tricky, especially with the positive attention yours received. Was there anything you were attempting to move away from or towards with the poems in your second?

Some poets keep doing the same thing or a variation on themes that work for them. I feel like there are some similarities. I love to break lines in unexpected ways to create surprises or tension. Each line I want to feel like the reader is on a cliff or something like that, to keep the excitement and energies. I tried not to mention a single potato or have the poems be specifically about me. I think I managed to make it about the environment the speaker inhabits and the world they are seeing and still have it be personal and also about what is going on in the bigger world with art, A.I. , and capitalism. I wanted the book to feel varied and different and more cerebral and sly.

When I asked about what drew you to poetry over any other particular form back in 2019, as part of your “12 or 20 questions” interview, you answered: “I just like fragments.” Does that still hold? And after two published poetry collections, has your relationship with the fragment changed or evolved?

Most of my poems are inspired by the pieces I see throughout a day. It could be the last on the subway with a bunch of dollar store flowers in her hair or a pigeon in the middle of the road. I tried to get meaning out of these subtle little moments and tried to give them more weight. I like to go and eavesdrop or catch little snippets of conversations, and try to make poems out of those fragments as well. Most of my stuff starts with pieces or a turn of phrase I try to turn into something else, if that makes sense.

I’m curious about your relationship to form. Beyond the sonnets in this particular collection, have you a potential shape in mind when you begin to compose? Are there particular structures in the back of your head, or is the process more intuitive, formed through the process of composition?

I just have these unconventional ideas about form. I would say they are “sonnets” or “gonnets” not sonnets. I wanted to keep the book clipped and have short poems with a few longer ones thrown in. I wanted the collection to feel fractured and vulnerable. Some of the poems black out on themselves. I just wanted to use the collection to experiment and play. Everyone was saying the second collection is the hardest so I internalized that and was really hard on myself. I made up words. I listened to what was happening around me. The Cocteau Twins are mentioned because a lot if not all of their songs have no real words, and just evoke a feeling or a memory through their use of no words. A lot of the collection is about avoiding the real problem. I love to use a fixed form to get started and I thought the sonnet was the best fit for me this time around. My first book had a lot of long lines and was because it was travelling across Canada in a Greyhound bus. This was more of a fixed place for Terrarium. There is a brief detour with an ex boyfriend to Los Angeles. Otherwise picture me in Toronto walking around and looking at all the things that aren’t there anymore.

You almost make it sound as though Terrarium is a book populated by ghosts. Is Terrarium a book populated by ghosts?

I don’t think there is a single ghost in this book! It’s about things that aren’t there, lost time, dreams, failures, little successes. The book mentions a few book stores and Toronto locations that aren’t there anymore, for instance, and things that are ephemeral. Eliot’s Books is gone, This Ain’t The Rosedale Library is gone, for instance. Not to be grim, but what lasts? I just kept thinking about that.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Terrarium was completed? What have you been working on since?

I just finished a chap book collab with someone, so we each wrote ten short poems for that project. I have four poems for one project that I’m slowly working on and I have about 14 poems for this new poetry book that has a bit of steam behind it and I’m excited for that one. I’m going to the middle of nowhere in July for ten days to live in a trailer so I’m hoping to finish at least a solid draft of that poem. The town is between two ghost towns. It’s about working minimum wage jobs and capitalism and silent reading and making art. I found this quote from Clarice Lispector I have in the back of my mind for inspiration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

rob mclennan’s latest, the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, October 2025), is already up for pre-order. Do you need to know anything else?

 

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 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.