In partnership with Writers Read Concordia, “COVID Writing Rooms” highlights the writing spaces and practices of artists during the early days of the pandemic.
Q: How does your current set-up differ from pre-Covid?
A: This space is now the single location from which I write, teach, and socialize. As a result, the wider world into which I wish to write can feel out of reach.
Q: How has this space shaped your writing routine and ritual?
A: When I am sitting at this desk, to my right and within immediate
reach is my bookshelf of poetry, so that I am accompanied by other voices (H.D., Lorine Liedecker, Mina Loy, Daphne Marlatt, Erín Moure, Lisa Robertson) as I begin a new line, revise a suite of poems, or copyedit a forthcoming manuscript.
Q: What are you missing?
A: I am missing the city’s elsewheres; a special sort of inspiration lifts exclusively from busy cafés or friends’ couches.
Q: How are you finding joy in the current moment?
A: Surprisingly, or not, dystopian fiction! N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, and Doris Lessing’s five-volume Canopus in Argos: Archives. I just began the first book of Lessing’s “space fiction” yesterday!