Send us your BEST poetry (4-6 poems), short stories (1-2 stories max, 500-3000 words), artwork, and photographs. We prefer that you copy and paste your poetry into the body of your email or send as ONE attachment in word.doc format. Send ALL short story submissions as a word doc. attachment. Any poetry or short story submissions sent as multiple attachments or not in word.doc will NOT be read.
If you have a novel/poetry book, a poetry/music cd or dvd that you're interested in having us review, please email us your query to thetorontoquarterly@hotmail.com with REVIEW REQUEST typed into the subject box. BOOK and MUSIC REVIEWS submitted will be considered for publication.
Send us your ARTWORK and PHOTOGRAPHY. Send in high resolution (jpeg file). We consider all artwork submitted for the COVER of TTQ. (5-10 photos/drawings/paintings per submission)
ALL SUBMISSIONS should contain a short biography (5-6 lines MAX) stating town/city you reside in, previous publishing accomplishments, educational background if so desired. Please DO NOT send us a novel about yourself. Make it interesting and promote your books and/or webpages if desired.
PLEASE: ONE submission per issue. Multiple submissions will NOT be read. Be sure to send us your BEST work the first time or wait until the following issue to submit again.
We DO NOT publish previously published works.
PLEASE NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS
ALL RIGHTS and COPYRIGHT upon publication with TTQ remains with the author.
PAYMENT: Each contributor to TTQ6 will receive a FREE e-book of TTQ6 as payment. It will be emailed to the contributor as a pdf file.
ALL SUBMISSIONS should be emailed to: thetorontoquarterly@hotmail.com
Sheniz Janmohamed is a freelance writer, poet and spoken word artist. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and an Honours BA in Religion and English from the University of Toronto. She has written for a variety of magazines including South Asian Living and Anokhi magazine and has had the pleasure of interviewing a variety of talented artists including Booker Prize Nominee Mohsin Hamid, critically acclaimed actress Seema Biswas and musical maestro, Nitin Sawhney. Her work has also been published in the Hart House Review, the UC Review and Asian American Female Poets Anthology: Yellow as Turmeric; Fragrant as Cloves.
She is the founder and president of Ignite Poets, a spoken word youth initiative that promotes peace and social awareness through poetry. She has performed at various venues across Toronto, including the Strong Words Reading Series, Masala! Mehndi! Masti!, Majlis Arts’ Figure of Speech series and the Mini Shebang High School Tour. She has also completed a manuscript of ghazals in English under the mentorship of the late Kuldip Gill (UBC). Two of her ghazals have been musically composed by classical singer, Tanya Jacobs. Sheniz is also collaborating with international dub/electronica artists including State of Bengal, Mahisha Empire and The Mosienko Project.
TTQ- When did poetry first become a prominent part of your life and why did you decide poetry was the best platform for expressing yourself?
SJ- I can’t recall the exact moment, but I remember being around 13 and thinking, “I want to be a writer.” I wrote and doodled a lot when I was a child, and referred to my poems as “polems”.
When I was in high school, I didn’t fit in. I was the girl in the cafeteria who spent her time writing and drawing. I found solace in the page, and began writing song lyrics and rhyming poetry (which, I realized later, was spoken word). I used my poetry to defend myself against people who misunderstood and ridiculed me. A lot of that work is still relevant, and I still perform some of it.
TTQ- You have said that Poet- Kuldip Gill, who recently passed away, was a mentor to you. How did the mentoring you received from Kuldip Gill influence you in the way you express yourself through your poetry?
SJ- I took a poetry workshop with Dionne Brand (Toronto’s current Poet Laureate), and she encouraged me to explore the ghazal form. The ghazal is a poetic form dating back to 7th century Persia and consists of many formalistic aspects, including couplets with refrains. Ghazals are often sung in Urdu, Hindi and Farsi (and other languages), and the audience is directly engaged in the performance, often knowing when to repeat the refrain, or shouting out their amazement and appreciation when the singer concludes a brilliant couplet.
I studied Kuldip Gill’s English ghazals and requested her to be my mentor for our summer project (which required us to write a mini-manuscript in our preferred genre under the guidance of a mentor). Although the project was meant to be creative in nature, Kuldip insisted that I study the ghazal form extensively and write a research paper before writing ghazals. I am so grateful to her for making me undertake the academic study of ghazals because it gave me a stronger understanding of the nature of ghazal writing. Kuldip was very encouraging and receptive- when I sent her a new ghazal, she responded with her comments and suggestions within 24 hours (she was in BC, and I was in Toronto).
She taught me how to get at the heart of expression instead of circling around it. This is crucial for the ghazal form because each couplet has to contain imagery, a sense of longing, and a kernel of wisdom. Sartre spoke of this essence of expression in Nausea, “to rid the passing moments of their fat, to twist them, dry them, purify myself, harden myself, to give back at last the sharp, precise sound of a saxophone note."
Having a mentor who was very familiar with the ghazal and its historical/cultural implications was vital for me because she allowed me to ‘run free’ with my creativity.
TTQ- Would you consider yourself a spoken word artist first or a poet-activist or simply a writer who is socially aware of her surroundings? Do you think it's important that modern day poets write about the injustices around them? In your opinion is that kind of writing missing for the most part from poets of today?
SJ- I don’t think I can choose a label for myself—Trying to pin down what kind of writer I am is difficult because I wear so many hats. At the moment, I’m rehearsing for performances, writing a Sufi-inspired novel, editing my non-fiction essays and polishing my ghazals for print. I think every writer is aware of his/her surroundings—how they interpret those surroundings is style. There are many poets who are speaking out against injustice and violence. Some poets are more vocal and blatant than others. If every poet wrote about injustice in the same way, people would stop listening. The variation of voices is what makes literature so appealing. For example, I listen to Saul Williams and read Derek Walcott. They are both political, but in very different ways.
I write from my heart, whether I’m writing about war or a willow tree in the backyard. It’s what ever strikes me at any given moment. Each writer has a calling, or a topic that they continually come back to. For me, it may be to draw attention to injustice, to infuse spirituality into spoken word- and many other ‘callings’ I have yet to discover. Perhaps what is missing from poets today is not just what they are saying, but how they are saying it. Crafting the word is just as important as the word itself.
TTQ- You are the founder and president of, Ignite Poets. What is your mission statement with your organization and how can other poets get involved?
SJ- Ignite Poets was established in 2003 and its aim is to provide opportunities for young poets, musicians and spoken word artists to collaborate and creatively work together for peace and partnership. In September 2009, I traveled to Nairobi, Kenya to establish its Kenyan branch. With the guidance and support of fellow poets Muki Garang, Pepe Haze and Dennis Dancan Mosiere, we organized a show of Kenyan poetry, music and spoken word. The show, Ignite Poets: Two Nations, One Flame, was held at the Alliance Francaise De Nairobi on October 7th, 2009.
Featured poets included Maik Kwambo, Wanjiku Mwaura, Kennet B, Moses Omondi (Pillars of Kibera), Ritongo Afrika, Joshua Muraya (Storymoja) and many more. The proceeds from the ticket sales were donated to the Hawkers Market Girls Centre in Parklands, Nairobi. The Hawkers Market Girls Centre is a partner with the Kenya Girl Guides Association and trains young underprivileged women in various skills including computer literacy, basic accounting and entrepreneurship. The girls from the HMGC performed for the first time at Ignite Poets: Two Nations, One Flame, reciting a poem written by one of their peers, Carolyne, entitled “Unity and Diversity”. The topics covered at Ignite Poets: Two Nations, One Flame included government accountability, the post-election violence in Kenya, women’s empowerment and hope for Africa’s future and its next generation.
Other poets can email Ignite with their questions, comments and suggestions: ignite_poets@hotmail.com
TTQ- What projects are you currently working on and should we expect a book/cd of your poetry any time soon?
SJ- My first book, Bleeding Light, a collection of poems in ghazal form, will be published by TSAR in Fall 2010. Bleeding Light is a collection of poems in ghazal form that traces the steps of a woman’s journey through night. She knows that in order to witness dawn, she has to travel through dusk first. Throughout her journey, she is caught between West and East, religion and heresy, love and anti-love, darkness and the knowledge of light. Each couplet is an independent thought and reflection, a pearl strung into a necklace. Bleeding Light is fraught with opposing, stark and often violent imagery heavily influenced by Sufi philosophy.
For more information on Bleeding Light, visit here : http://www.tsarbooks.com/Book_Samples/TSAR_FallCatalogue_2010.pdf
For more information on Sheniz, visit here: www.myspace.com/shenizpoetics
Sheniz Janmohamed created her own poetry video for her poem Child of Contraband:
The Toronto Quarterly is pleased to announce the appointment of its first intern, Caitlin Galway!!!
Caitlin is a twenty-two year old writer currently residing in Toronto. While majoring in English Literature at Queen's University, she is also a student of creative writing and fine arts. She has previously been published numerous times in various university literary journals, and recently won the McNeil Prize for attaining the highest standing achievement in the study of Modern British Literature. Alongside her primary focus of writing short stories, she has also written one novella, and is presently completing a second.
This year meets with Caitlin's first attempts to enter the literary realm on a professional level. With a knack for the macabre, and a propensity toward all things melancholic, she aims to showcase through her own work a blend of sympathetic realism, dark wit, and surreal imagination. She is honoured to be interning with The Toronto Quarterly this year, and hopes it to be the start of a thriving literary career.
Jacob McArthur Mooney resides in the Parkdale district of Toronto. His poetry, creative and critical writings have been published in various literary journals and newspapers including The Walrus, CV2, Prairie Fire, and The Globe and Mail.
His debut book of poetry, The New Layman's Almanac (McClelland & Stewart, 2008), has been best described as a collection of poems that surprises us with protean language and satisfies us with wry, earthy sense. His follow-up collection is still untitled and due out in 2011 through McClelland & Stewart. He has served as the Writer-In-Residence for Open Book Toronto and is the poetry columnist for The Torontoist's Book Page.
He also hosts a poetry blog at: http:/voxpopulism.wordpress.com/
TTQ- Why should citizens of the world who are more likely addicted to reality television and more concerned about twittering details of their daily routines instead take poets of today seriously and read their books?
JMM- I'm not sure if the two sets of pursuits are mutually exclusive. Twittering, though not something I'm really into, is basically formal poetry--it's concerned with the constraining of language into some sort of expressive essence. And "daily life" has been a key vein of poetic inspiration for as long as there's been the anecdotal lyric. I can't speak to reality television, really.
People are welcome to care about poetry, or not. It's always going to be there. It can be marginalized, surely, but it can't be killed. And there's nothing wrong with it being a minority entertainment. If there was ever a new poem with popularity equal in magnitude and pattern to, say, the popularity of "Jersey Shore", I can be pretty certain that that poem wouldn't be very good. The best ones hang on like cockroaches, clicking away at the periphery of the culture, for as long as the culture itself survives. The rest get flushed down the toilet. This is fine by me. I'm at peace with this.
TTQ- What writing projects are you currently working on and should we expect a follow-up to your first poetry collection, The New Layman's Almanac, any time soon?
JMM- You should. March, 2011, to be exact. The title is still being worked out, but the themes will be civil aviation, identity, and community. Its inciting event will be the 1998 crash of SwissAir Flight 111 off the coast of Southeastern Nova Scotia. I grew up just outside of Peggy's Cove, and was around at the time, so it's somewhat of a personal subject, though the pronoun used within is more often "we" than "I".
I'm compelled to say that it's not shaping up as a book of grief, it's more about how towns react to an influencing event that significant, the semiotic or psycho-cultural reorganization of what a small place "means" before and after being reframed by the sudden impact of such a massive thing as the death of 200 plus people. It's what Europeans generally refer to as "The Lockerbie Effect", that act of a place becoming an analogue for an event that happened there.
The book starts with this idea, but moves on to look at "place" from a few different angles. The speaker (essentially myself) moves around a bit, and the whole second half takes place in the immigrant communities around Toronto's Pearson Airport (Malton, South Brampton, Rexdale), where I lived for a few years. The book ends on questions of rootedness as a form of imperialism, the idea that everything from ancestry to history to home towns, to even names, are all things that own us.
TTQ- What are your thoughts on the current state of literary journals in Canada? Do you feel the recent funding cuts to literary journals will ultimately affect the number of accomplished poets/writers coming out of this country or is that already an ongoing concern?
JMM- It doesn't interest me much. I'm concerned for the welfare of a handful of journals that I care about as a reader, but as a writer I'm not convinced that the stated role of journals in the ecosystem of Canadian literature is really accurate. I'd never want to dissuade anybody with so noble an intention as publishing poetry, but do we really need to be publishing this much of it? Do we need 20 university-hosted poetry markets? If the 20 were all unique, with a clearly relatable local aesthetic that positioned them within some niche in the national landscape, I'd argue that we do. But do we need 20 markets with no discernible differences between them? Isn't this the opposite of what we should be considering "aesthetic diversity"? There are exceptions to this rule, surely, but people who say that each journal is unique are just tasting the labels. I'd suggest a blind taste test. I defy anyone to remove the covers of a random Malahat, a random Antigonish, and a random Prairie Fire, and identify which is which based on content alone.
TTQ- Who are some of your favourite poets in Toronto you enjoy seeing read live and do you have a particular poetry venue you like to visit regularly and why?
JMM- Such a hard question. I'll say that, generally speaking, I'm excited to be a part of this particular generation of Canadian poets. I think that the group that's, say, 35 and under right now, is incredibly rich. Some recent Toronto books I've really fallen for include The Reinvention of the Human Hand, by Paul Vermeersch; Bloom, by Michael Lista; Sweet, by Dani Couture; Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, by Jeff Latosik; and Reticent Bodies by Moez Surani. I'd argue that the "reading series of record" in Toronto is Pivot at the Press Club, but my heart still goes for The Free Speech Series at Tinto on Roncesvalles. It's always a wonderful little crowd, and they pair poets up with their natural cousins (stand-up comics). I can't really do ArtBar anymore. If I wanted to get yelled at by some self-righteous sock puppet, I would just go to work.
TTQ- Please recommend to our readers 3 books of poetry that you found to be great reads and please tell us a little about each book.
JMM- Well, avoiding the ones I mentioned above:
1. Canadian Poetry 1920-1960 ed. Brian Trehearne
I think, like a lot of people, I was holding off on this anthology series until they got a little closer to the "golden generation" of Canadian poets, so to speak. But we forget that a lot of those people (Page, Layton, Cohen...) were active before that. This big, beautiful, hardcover deals with them, and also the whole interwar period and the 40s. I've found a lot of great poets here, and been introduced to more.
2. The Nights Also by Anna Swanson
Anna is one of my earliest poetry friends (we took a class together when I was just starting out a few years back, at Memorial University). Her work is vivid and constantly strong. Fans of everyone from Anne Simpson to Elizabeth Bachinsky to Patrick Lane will likely find something to take home.
3. Sea Legend, by Mark Callanan
I have two caveats for this one. 1. It's a chapbook and 2. I actually haven't read it yet. However, Callanan's first collection, Scarecrow, is maybe 7 years old now and I think is one of the great lost books in Canadian poetry. I'll get my hands on this as soon as possible, and will be lined up to buy his next full-length (coming out in 2011, I hear, from Signal) as soon as it becomes available.
Talia Zajac was born in Ottawa and is currently in her second year of the Ph.D. at the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the marriage alliances between Catholic Western and Orthodox Slavic royal families in the Middle Ages, and associated issues of acculturation and cultural accommodation. These themes also appear in her creative writing, in which she attempts to negotiate her Ukrainian Catholic identity in multicultural Toronto. Her poetry investigates the formation and construction of the self in relation to personal memory, heritage, and history. Drawing on the lyric translation, her writing also examines the sometimes painful tensions between faith, aesthetics, and sensuality.
Talia's poetry has been published in The Toronto Quarterly, Acta Victoriana, The Grammateion, The Hart House Review, Misunderstandings Magazine, NoD Magazine (published by the University of Calgary), and Carousel. Her short story, “Dinner at the Sandstone Hotel” appears in a recent anthology, Writing Without Direction: Ten and a Half Short Stories by Canadian Authors Under Thirty (April 2010). Driven by constant curiosity and a sense of wonder, her writing has been a life-long passion.
TTQ- What is it that brought you to writing poetry and short stories? Were you an avid reader growing up and influenced primarily by the writers you were reading back then?
TZ- I have wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. Even as a toddler, I would ask my mother to staple scrap paper together so I could draw on the sheets opposite her writing to make “picture books.” I was read to as a young child: C.S. Lewis, Roald Dahl, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series, frightening Grimm fairy tales, myths and legends, tales from the Arabian Nights... My interest both in medieval history and in writing in general is certainly rooted in those magical stories. I can remember reading a prose translation of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene as an eight-year-old.
I still think that we can learn much about storytelling, structure, and psychological truths from fairy tales and myths. But in high school I was introduced to the fully fleshed-out characters of the Victorian bildungsroman, and to the richness of poetry. I think my writing became less naive, more open to metaphor. I became more aware of language itself and its limitations, the role of the (sometimes unreliable) narrator, and the structure of fictional forms and the effect they have on how you tell a story.
TTQ- Do you have a particular writing process that you prefer when starting a new poem, for example is the environment you are writing in all that important or the time of day? How long does it usually take you to complete a poem and do you go through an expansive editing process?
TZ- Inspiration for a poem can strike me when I am least expecting it, so I always carry a notebook around to jot down my thoughts or record an overheard conversation or the germ of a story. I enjoy taking long walks around the city and it is often in the course of these walks that ideas start to form.
I then go home and write down a first draft as soon as I can, so as not to lose the momentum of the writing or the freshness of the idea. I edit a poem or a story for months and often years afterward.
TTQ- What are your feelings concerning the local poetry community in Toronto? Does it promote its local poets in a positive way in your opinion or does there need to be more positive change?
TZ- The richness of Toronto’s creative writing resources is almost overwhelming, but my experience with the local poetry circles radiates out from the University community. Certainly, though, I think that more could be done to reach out to younger writers. As someone who speaks a different language at home— Ukrainian— I am aware also of how little interaction there is between Anglophone poets and writers, and the various immigrant and ethnic writing communities of Toronto. Toronto prides itself on being a multicultural city, but I’m not sure if that multiculturalism is reflected in what most people think of as “the local poetry community.”
TTQ- Whom would you rather meet at Tim Horton's, Leonard Cohen or Margaret Atwood? And if either one accepted your invitation of tea or coffee, what would you hope to talk about or learn from them in that brief time together?
TZ- Well, if I were to ask Leonard Cohen to share a coffee, I would first get out of Tim Horton’s, and go sit on a park bench somewhere, perhaps in one of Montreal’s lovely fountain squares. I would be interested in asking him about growing up in the French-English-Lithuanian-Jewish milieu of Montreal, the experiences of his immigrant family, how he struggled with his identity and why he felt he had found it through writing. I would like to talk about his practice of Judaism and Zen Buddhism and how he balances his faith and spirituality with his past life around Warhol’s Factory circle, and his songs that celebrate sexuality.
TTQ- If you could recommend only ONE poetry book or collection, what would it be and why? (Give us a brief review of that book)
TZ- It’s very difficult to recommend simply one book! One very interesting collection, though, that I don’t think is well known in North America is Peter Abbs’ The Flowering of Flint: Selected Poems.
Peter Abbs teaches creative writing at the University of Sussex, and grew up in North Norfolk, England. He was the editor of the first Anglo-American anthology of eco-poetry, Earth Songs.
The collection opens with personal memory: his difficult rural working-class childhood, his relationship to the Catholic and Methodist (often antagonist) sides of his family, his aging father. He also writes in surprising and striking imagery about his faith, and about the environment. His language is deceptively simple, each word carefully chosen. For example, I was struck by his description “On Seeing Vermeer’s Kitchen-Maid in the Rijksmuseum”: “...Monumental in dark blues and yellows—/The maid stands steadying a household jug./ The white milk flows from vessel to vessel./World thickens. Time bulks. Breath slows.” Many of the poems are sonnets, though the volume closes with new work in a freer form.
The collection is also characterized by a deep consciousness of history and the Western literary tradition, and an awareness of where his own poetry and values fit within that tradition. This consciousness is something that speaks very strongly to me. For instance, in the poem “New Constellations” he writes: “You do not begin alone; rather, you extend/ A narrative. Through the half-open window/The breeze blows in spiked with salt/And distance. Your senses stir until/Your memories rise into new constellations.”
His poetry comes very much from his own personal memories, rooted in his childhood, but also reaches out to meditate on Socrates, on Ovid, Dante, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Osip Mandelstam. It is a volume full of surprising, sometimes unsettling imagery, but also lyric beauty, wisdom, and contemplation.
I'm officially opening submissions once again for the next issue (TTQ6) of The Toronto Quarterly, even though submissions are always welcome year round. If you would like your work to appear in the Summer Issue - TTQ6, the final deadline for submissions will be AUGUST 1, 2010.
Send us your BEST poetry (4-6 poems), short stories (1-2 stories max, 500-3000 words), artwork, and photographs. We prefer that you copy and paste your poetry into the body of your email or send as ONE attachment in word.doc format. Send ALL short story submissions as a word doc. attachment. Any poetry or short story submissions sent as multiple attachments or not in word.doc will NOT be read.
If you have a novel/poetry book, a poetry/music cd or dvd that you're interested in having us review, please email us your query to thetorontoquarterly@hotmail.com with REVIEW REQUEST typed into the subject box.
ALL SUBMISSIONS should contain a short biography (5-6 lines MAX) stating town/city you reside in, previous publishing accomplishments, educational background if so desired. Please DO NOT send us a novel about yourself. Make it interesting and promote your books and/or webpages if desired.
PLEASE: ONE submission per issue. Multiple submissions will NOT be read. Be sure to send us your BEST work the first time or wait until the following issue to submit again.
We DO NOT publish previously published works.
ALL RIGHTS and COPYRIGHT upon publication with TTQ remains with the author.
PAYMENT: Each contributor to TTQ6 will receive a FREE e-book of TTQ6 as payment. It will be emailed to the contributor as a pdf file.
ALL SUBMISSIONS should be emailed to: thetorontoquarterly@hotmail.com
