Mid-Winter Haiku – Julia Retkova

And the sun, dissolved,
dusted in shards over snow.
Broken harmony–

Julia Retkova is a King’s College London graduate student with two degrees in Literature and Digital Studies: she’s currently working on her dissertation while running a small literary journal. She was born in Ukraine, but grew up in the south of Spain. She loves reading books in the sun and writing when everyone’s asleep. Her writing has been previously published in Storgy, Literally Stories, Masque & Spectacle, Sublunary Review, the tide rises, the tide falls, and is forthcoming in a few others. 

Mid-Winter Haiku – Megan Cannella

Shoes full of slush

It is colder here
than anywhere else, promise.
Frozen lake of toes.

Megan Cannella (@megancannella) is a Midwestern transplant currently living in Nevada. For over a decade, Megan has bounced between working at a call center, grad school, and teaching. She has work in or forthcoming from @PorcupineLit, @dailydrunkmag, @VerseZine, @TBQuarterly, and @perhappened.

Mid-Winter Haiku – David Watts

sun on winter pond
ice and water
changing places

David Watts’s literary credits include seven books of poetry, three collections of short stories, two mystery novels, seven western novels, a Christmas memoir, and several essays. He is a physician, musician and past Radio/TV personality. His haiku have appeared in Hedgerow, Modern Haiku, Creatrix, The Bamboo Hut and Akitsu Quarterly among others. 

Mid-Winter Haiku – NL Cook

Snow falls shadowless,
sweeps the reeds on frozen ponds.
Jammed ice moans and sighs.

U.S. writer Nancy Cook lives 475 kilometers from the Canadian border. She runs the “Witness Project,” a series of community writing workshops designed to enable creative work by underrepresented voices. Some of her newest work can be found in The London Reader, Raven Chronicles: Art Against Hate. and the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Mid-Winter Haiku – Darrell Petska

frilly flakes
sashay from on high
Moose plods through

Darrell Petska is a retired communications editor, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Journals that have published his poetry include Muddy River Poetry Review, Modern Haiku, Chrysanthemum, Shamrock Haiku Journal, Failed Haiku–Journal of English Senryu, and many others (see conservancies.wordpress.com). Forty years a father (eight years a grandfather), and longer as a husband, Darrell lives outside Madison, Wisconsin.

An Interview with Kayla Czaga

KAYLA CZAGA is the author of two collections of poetry—For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014) and Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019)—as well as the chapbook Enemy of the People (Anstruther Press, 2015.) Her debut was awarded The Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and nominated for The Governor General’s Award for Poetry, The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and The Debut-litzer. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, ARC Poetry Magazine, and The Best of the Best Canadian Poetry in English.  She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and lives in Victoria, B.C. 

Michael Edwards: Your most recent collection, Dunk Tank is a book largely concerned with the speaker’s coming of age. This past Summer of 2020, The Walrus published a new poem of yours, called “The Peace Lily.” It is a poem that seems to deal in a blend of the existential and more daily things of adult life, through caring for a potted plant. I wonder, how do you feel your writing has changed from your earliest poems, to this point you currently find yourself? Do you see a pattern or progression in your work?

Kayla Czaga: I no longer feel compelled to write about childhood and adolescence. Having spent the better part of two books there, my work on the subject might be done. Lately my poems are less concerned with “coming of age” and the associated disappointments and more concerned with “being of age” and the similar but different disappointments. My voice hasn’t changed much (I’m still asking can I make it funny and sad and also weird and relatable?), but my speaker is older now and I’ve acquired more tools for getting through my poems.

ME: Poet Sharon Olds has talked about “being brave” in poems. Does this resonate with you in any way? The sense of being more brave on the page, than in everyday life? Other than bravery, what are some qualities a poet (poet as poet, persona, speaker), can bring to their work to make for compelling and interesting poems?

KC: Always with a poem I believe something must be at stake. Like in poker, you have to make a bet in order to have a chance at winning. When the bet is larger, you have the chance of winning more. There’s a natural bravery involved. If I try to capture a moment, if it feels necessary to do that, I run the risk of not doing it justice, of failing, of losing my shirt, my car and my house. Coming back to a new page again and again, failing constantly, not doing my memories and the people in my life justice is tough work, but if I don’t make the bet I’ll never have the chance of winning the whole pot.

A thing that’s fun about poetry is that every poet is going to bring their own personality to the genre. That’s why I need to read one million poems about childhood or lost love or anything else. It’s like hearing the same story retold by all of my best friends: they all find a different way of telling it. Some are funny or melodramatic or serious or mystical. Some are straightforward and some take detours. Some are full of empathy and some are totally ruthless. And they’re all totally necessary.

ME: What keeps you writing poems, where do they come from for you? Are these things possible to articulate?

KC: What keeps me writing is the part I can’t articulate. Though I have more skills as a poet now than I did a decade ago, I still can’t plan a good poem. Every time, it feels like a miracle to write one. And that feeling never gets old. It’ll always be magical. To some extent I can encourage my process through reading, routine, and exercise, but there’s still no formula, no predictability.

ME: You are currently a mentor with The Writer’s Studio Online (SFU). How has teaching and mentoring in creative writing and poetry informed the way you personally write? Has it altered the way you think about writing?

KC: I have written a few poems about teaching poetry. They’re not very interesting, but they’ve been a natural byproduct of the job. To some extent, teaching has kept me curious and it’s increased my own experimentation as a writer. My students are often very curious about poetry, about what it can be and do. Talking about those things has kept me asking the same questions and because I encourage my students to try writing exercises and consider new creative strategies, I’ve been trying new things as well.

ME: In 2021, what are some collections of poetry you’re most looking forward to reading?

KC: I’ve been on a bit of a social media break, so I might be missing some, but these are the titles I will absolutely be pre-ordering: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong, Walkman by Michael Robbins, Intruder by Bardia Sinaee and Exhibitionist by Molly Cross-Blanchard.

Michael Edwards lives and writes in Vancouver, BC. He is editor of Red Alder Review.

Mid-Winter Haiku – Kersten Christianson

Scattering ashes
to mountain, mountain, mountain
someday I’ll join you

Alaskan Poet, Moon Gazer, Raven Watcher, Way-finder, Northern Trekker, Teacher. Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild places, wandering ambles, and road trips without any real destination. She gathers words from the wind and finds a path through. Kersten serves as poetry editor of the quarterly journal Alaska Women Speak. Her latest collection of poetry is Curating the House of Nostalgia (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2020).