At the heart of authorship lies the creative process. My research explores the ways in which the capricious internal rhythms of creativity, as well as the cultural and biographical forces that nurture artistic production, have shaped the contours of twentieth-century literary careers.

Celebrating submission day (July 31, 2015 – also incidentally a blue moon) with red nail polish and a sunny afternoon in the park.

My dissertation, “‘A Strange Gestation’: Periods of Poetic Silence in Modern Canadian Creative Careers,” which I successfully defended at McGill University in November 2015, considers the distinctive experience of mid-career “silence”—a frustrating stage of creative obstruction—shared by a diverse group of celebrated and innovative Canadian modernist poets including P.K. Page, Phyllis Webb, Leonard Cohen, John Newlove, and Anne Marriott. I showed that amid the vigorous cultural nationalism of the mid-twentieth century in Canada, any waning of a writer’s output seemed to threaten the country’s blossoming literary tradition; fallow periods were thus freighted with shame and anxiety and came to the writers to seem, rather than a natural stage of creativity, a notable and distressing phenomenon. Such distress manifested in the poetry—both full, published poems and abortive, fragmentary efforts—in images of excess and disorder, which reveal the poets’ feelings of impotence as they lost confidence in their mastery as modernist “makers” of artistic order and meaning. But this painful experience did not end their careers; on the contrary, it enabled them to reconceive entirely of what it meant to be a late modernist poet. Once they stopped fighting against silence, they were able to revalue it as a fertile and receptive creative condition; images of excess in the poems were replaced by a focus on stillness and listening as the writers began to locate poetic authority in humility rather than in aesthetic mastery.

Leonard Cohen expresses such humility eloquently in a song from his 1984 album, Various Positions: “If it be your will / That I speak no more / And my voice be still / As it was before / I will speak no more / I shall abide until / I am spoken for / If it be your will.” My research shows that it was no coincidence he recorded these lines just as he was emerging from a state of deep literary paralysis.

Phyllis Webb, too, highlights the importance of silence in the Foreword to her 1980 volume—her first book after a fifteen-year hiatus—Wilson’s Bowl: “My poems are born out of great struggles of silence,” she wrote; “Wayward, natural and unnatural silences, my desire for privacy, my critical hesitations, my critical wounds, my dissatisfactions with myself and the work have all contributed to a strange gestation.”

**

Some of my work on Phyllis Webb was published in the Summer 2013 issue of Canadian Literature as an article titled “‘The Great Dreams Pass On’: Phyllis Webb’s ‘Struggles of Silence.’”

Some of my work on P.K. Page’s middle silence was published in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews as an article titled “P.K. Page’s Poetic Silence.”

I have also presented portions of this research at conferences including the Space Between Society Conference (London, England, July 2014), the ACCUTE Conference (St. Catharines, Ontario, May 2014, and Victoria, British Columbia, May 2013), and the Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics Conference (Sackville, New Brunswick, September 2012).

**

Since I completed my dissertation, I have been working on several other projects on modernist literary careers and transnational relationships among authors. I have recently completed an edition of selected letters between the American poet and editor Amy Lowell and the little-known Canadian poet Louise Morey Bowman, forthcoming in Canadian Poetry later in 2018. Bowman was one of the first Canadians to experiment with free verse and Imagism in the 1920s, and yet almost nothing is known of her life and career. The correspondence fills in that history substantially, illuminating in particular the composition and assembly of her second volume of poetry. It adds a new thread to the narrative of modernism’s influx into Canada in the 1920s, and, on Lowell’s side, introduces a new cross-border dimension to the American poet’s already well-known role as a mentor of younger writers.

In addition to my peer-reviewed scholarship, I have published numerous book reviews in publications such as Canadian Literature, CuiZine, and The Bull Calf Review, where I was also an Assistant Editor from 2011 to 2017.