Sometimes, I harbor a strange paranoia that although I keep visiting and having visitors to my desk, nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something. I refuse to see that the mirror too is glass, a window, a glass with a thin sheet on which I am written, a sheet that keeps the inside in. To be a part of it is to be apart from it.
Jenny Boully, Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life (2018)
My own poetry, or perhaps all of my writing and attempts, begins with a consideration of structure. I think upon shape, the sentence or sequences of shapes. I think about tone. Perhaps I am considering the prose poem, or a poem of long lines and breaks, and the visible spaces and silences. Sometimes I begin with a word, or a phrase, which might even be jettisoned down the line of repeated edits: removing the prompt that got me to where the poem began. John Newlove’s “Ride Off Any Horizon,” centred around the prompt he meant to remove but never did. Perhaps I am attempting a moment to become itself, or somehow impact something else down the line. This is the way I approach fiction: how the smallest moment might carry further effect upon a particular character. Perhaps there’s a sentence one character read when they were twelve, or eighteen, or twenty-five that they simply carried around at the back of their attention. Perhaps this simple throwaway influences the way they behave as an adult; how certain choices are approached, or allow the establishment of lines that are no longer crossed. Not every prompt needs to be so large, or obvious, such as a death. Not every story is Peter Parker, feeling responsible for the death of his uncle, or Bruce Wayne watching his parents murdered. Oliver Queen on that endlessly-referenced, ridiculous island after their shipwreck and the death of his father. What if those particular characters had been able to live, and a lesson imparted through a turn of a phrase or an example of how they had lived? The small lessons count too, and can hold as much impact. Why do we fall, Master Bruce?