gillian harding-russell<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>is a poet, editor and reviewer. She has published five poetry books and a new collection,\u00a0Lift the Ear of the Nautilus<\/em>\u00a0(Turnstone), is forthcoming.\u00a0Also, her eighth chapbook\u00a0A Handle on Things<\/em>\u00a0(The Alfred Gustav Press) was published in summer 2026. She has had her poems short-listed three times for\u00a0Exile\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Gwendolyn MacEwen chapbook award, and in 2016, the sequence \u201cMaking Sense\u201d was chosen as Best Suite by a poet at any time in her career. Her poems have been anthologized in 23 poetry collections and published in journals across Canada. She received an MA from McGill and a PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, completing her doctoral dissertation on postmodern Canadian poetry. gillian is also the poetry editor of EVENT\u2019s popular Reading Service for Writers<\/a>.<\/p>\n OLIVIA MACDONALD:<\/strong> You served as EVENT\u2019s poetry editor from 1988 to 2005 and have continued working with poets through the Reading Service. Have you seen any trends in how the poetry submissions and the kinds of guidance writers seek have changed? What has remained consistent?<\/p>\n gillian harding-russell<\/strong>: Looking back on the submissions I have read during my term as EVENT\u2019s Poetry Editor and later as the Poetry Editor for EVENT\u2019s Reading Service, I would emphasize a branching out of the poet\u2019s individual style while it serves a private subject and have primarily noted new subject matter that mirrors societal concerns rather than a shift in poetic form. These include poems about identity and gender, poems about addictions and world angst, love poems that break from the heterosexual norm, poems written by immigrants that look back on their antecedents and\/or days of oppression (often by women from countries where their status is undermined). There are travel poems that explore foreign landscapes or scenes derived from their lost heritage, as well as poems that come from trauma and\/or war and perennial carpe diem<\/em> themes (often from the perspective of age), and elegies about loved ones that open up questions which look beyond our existence and complete understanding.<\/p>\n Poetry has been a genre that welcomes innovation at least since Walt Whitman came up with free verse in Leaves of Grass<\/em>, Allen Ginsberg with his concept of the breath-take as cadence, e.e. cummings with his minimalist shorthand, and Baudelaire coined the conundrum of the \u2018prose poem.\u2019 Removed from the requirements of fixed metre and established stanzaic and poetic formats, the poem was opened up to fit the particular needs of the poet and their expression. Without outside strictures, the poet was then free to make up their own rules for their brand of poem.<\/p>\n That said, the principle of innovation has been explored since that time, with experimentation in taut short lines versus longer meditative lines (often heterometric), run-on stichic poems with enjambment and typographical poems that use the field of the page for expression. Poets today are more likely to remove capital letters from the beginning of verses and to exclude end punctuation to facilitate the flow of language. With the absence of structured end-rhyme, there has been a greater reliance on internal rhyme to enhance the musicality of the line, and a pattern of end-rhymes has largely been replaced by accidental rhyme. There are linguistic poems that focus on words that take the poet where they will without a clear narrative, and imagistic poems that speak solely through their images, and poems that treat the page as a landscape with blank spaces part of their expression.\u00a0<\/p>\n Over the years of my editorship, I have encountered all these variations of style, including what appeared to me as something of a novelty at the beginning of my career: the prose poem. And I have encountered the work of poets\u2014typically older poets after a lifetime of exploring free verse\u2014who choose to return to a more structured poetic format for various reasons, often to contain emotion within a disciplined form sanctioned by tradition. That said, the poets of today have been given freer reign to do as they please and have taken advantage of the freedom so that innovative form is perhaps no longer the novelty it once was.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>Could you tell us about your forthcoming collection, Lift the Ear of the Nautilus<\/em>, and chapbook, A Handle on Things<\/em>? What subjects or ideas brought these collections to life? Do you see these projects as interconnected\u00a0in any way?\u00a0<\/p>\n GHR: <\/strong>Lift the<\/em> Ear of a Nautilus<\/em> is a collection of poems that I wrote in honour of a poet friend who died from cancer on April 6, 2022. Most interesting, I first met Lisa Rawn through EVENT\u2019s <\/em>Reading Service, to which she made several submissions before asking Ian Cockfield, then managing editor, if she could contact me personally. Over a decade I helped Lisa edit her poems, and we became close friends, with her meeting me in Regina on several occasions, once for her reading a couple of her poems published in The Saskatchewan Writers Guild\u2019s Spring<\/em> magazine at the now defunct Artful Dodger pub, and on another occasion to attend the Moose Jaw Festival of Words.<\/p>\n The title Lift the Ear of a Nautilus<\/em> comes from the title poem of that name. The nautilus has been seen as resembling the universe with its segments closed to each other, but with a convoluted and unseen passage through its centre, and through this iconic image I would like to suggest a listening channel between our physical world and a spirit world where those who have died may exist in another sphere. With the phrase \u201cLift the ear,\u201d my purpose in writing these poems is to \u201cuplift\u201d rather than to write a requiem or solemn elegy. I have written these poems in honour of my friend, Lisa Rawn, also a poet, and for her \u201cto hear\u201d and for outside readers to listen and perhaps find themselves seeking her chapbooks out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here is a brief description of Lift the Ear of a Nautilus<\/em>:<\/p>\n A Handle on Things,<\/em> a micro-chapbook or holm (defined as \u201can island in a river,\u201d so a small work in a larger stream) was published this summer by The Alfred Gustav Press (2026). Although the poems are unrelated to Lift the Ear of a Nautilus<\/em>, they are part of another larger manuscript Domestic Disorder,<\/em> which has been accepted for publication at Guernica Editions.<\/p>\n A Handle on Things<\/em> presents the quotidian problems and anxieties that we face with daily living, and Domestic Disorder <\/em>provides a wider spectrum of household problems, with an epileptic and wily, willful black lab who is a love and worry at its centre. In the title Domestic Disorder,<\/em> I play with the idea of the microcosm (the \u2018dome\u2019 of my head) as linguistically part of \u201cdomestic\u201d and of the larger extending world where thoughts wander and sometimes take off with a life of their own.<\/p>\n Here is a brief description of Domestic Disorder<\/em>:<\/p>\n Disorder most often sets off the plot in Domestic Disorder.<\/em> The speaker writes from a domestic setting inside an aging house, but also, as inside Chinese boxes, from inside the \u2018dome\u2019 of her head. Within the microcosm of her consciousness, she mulls haps and mishaps, loves and their worries, undercurrent dreams, an epileptic dog, spectacular migraines and god-thoughts that spark thunderous or tender feelings amid realizations that lightning can strike to light up the dome of that skull-house. Far from tame, these household poems aspire\u2014often jauntily, with shades of comedy and irony\u2014to the roots and outer vibes of the universe. These poems may remind readers of their own domestic experiences with house repairs, pets, accidents and the problems that sometimes surface amid dreams, throwback memories, and out-of-this-world wonderings that happen between.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>When assessing what makes a collection, how do you decide whether an unusual poem that might be a thematic or stylistic outlier adds necessary range or weakens the manuscript\u2019s coherence?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> What an interesting question! I think an outlier poem should have at least a tangential, perhaps subconscious, connection\u2014whether tonal or through theme or imagery\u2014that adds resonance to the collection as a whole. Often a gnomic or dream poem or an imagistic piece can work on several levels, one of which includes a thread that is related to the collection as a whole.<\/p>\n As an example, in Margaret Atwood\u2019s Dearly<\/em>, the feminist poem \u201cDigging Up the Scythians\u201d might be considered an \u201coutlier\u201d in a collection that is elegiac and dedicated to her husband, Graeme Gibson, who suffered from Alzheimer\u2019s during his final years. Nevertheless \u201cDigging Up the Scythians\u201d with its treatise on ancient warrior woman coupled with a poem later in the collection, \u201cUpdate on Werewolves\u201d in which the poet\u2019s husband\u2019s condition as transformed into a \u201cwerewolf through his medical status is implicit allows the two poems to blend on a fantasy level to suggest how things have always been as they are amid variant transformations as recently as today. In a humorous turn, werewolves are seen to have evolved among the female sex as well as the male: \u201cLong-legged women sprint through ravines\/in furry warmups, a pack of kinky\/models in sado French Vogue getups\/and airbrushed short-term memories,\/bent on no-penalties rampage.\u201d Accordingly, Atwood modulates the elegiac mode with a trademark symphony of fairy tale and gothic moods.<\/p>\n Similarly, in Patrick Lane\u2019s The Quiet in Me<\/em>, the poem \u201cCarefully\u201d might be considered more of a fragment and so a structural and enigmatic departure from the more fully developed poems in the collection. In this poem, the poet presents a stoical mole that, in a seemingly futile endeavour \u201cin his small room\/moves out a small stone\/and waits out the rain.\u201d\u00a0 The poem is about tiny measures to survive and get on with things, and the wry tone may be said to be on a spectrum with the meditative poems, while the poet also makes the most of things by doing something small such as writing a poem when cooped up in winter and old age. Most delightfully the poem adds whimsical humour to a more sombre collection of poems.<\/p>\n Again, in David Zieroth\u2019s The Fly in Winter<\/em>, the title poem is imagistic whereas the other poems in the collection have narrative and dramatic elements and are essentially lyrical. So, the poem \u201cThe Fly in Winter\u201d might be considered an \u201coutlier,\u201d but it carries a carpe diem theme that runs through the collection and becomes iconic. Naming the collection after that structurally different poem, moreover, has the effect of highlighting its importance, both tonally and thematically, to the collection as a whole.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>Is there a form or technique that you particularly enjoy experimenting with in your writing? What possibilities does it give you?\u00a0<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> Rather than express an idea directly, I follow Emily Dickinson\u2019s advice, to \u201ctell the truth, but tell it slant.\u201d In other words, I prefer to express an idea through images that speak through my understanding (or gut feeling), but that then speak on their own terms: a kind of playing with my subconscious. Often this exercise can lead to what I like to call pure poetry.<\/p>\n In the past (indeed even recently!), some of my poems were considered too discursive, and so to avoid this weakness I have developed this \u201ctechnique\u201d (if you would call it that). Instead of expressing an idea directly, I present a picture in my mind that gives rise to an idea. Also, to prevent the poem from appearing too prose-like, I pare the language down to its essentials. I look for words and phrases or even whole lines that may be scrapped to let the bare bones of a poem say what is needed. Often introductory scaffolding or a digression can weaken the impact of a poem, so I must look out for these beginning and ending stragglers. I try to avoid stating what may already be implicit or mentioned in other parts of the poem. Poetry is a minimalist art form, and so fewer words often bring a concentration that can lead to a more poignant poem.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>You have five poems accepted for publication in The Antigonish Review,<\/em> written after a visit to Nova Scotia. Do you find that different environments or landscapes shape your creative process? More broadly, what tends to fuel your inspiration and when do you feel most motivated to write?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> Most definitely! With a new environment, one\u2019s perception is at its sharpest while everything is new. Coming from elsewhere allows you a distance that brings insight that might not occur to someone who is habituated to that location. Although I have visited my brother, a retired oceanographer (from Bedford Institute) before, I hadn\u2019t visited him for a long time. (When we had small kids, it was easier for my brother to visit us in Regina.) During my last visit, Gareth took me to visit various favourite hiking sites such as Peggy\u2019s Cove and Polly\u2019s Cove and Point Pleasant Park, and my son (also on vacation with me) walked with me to the Citadel near where his uncle lives, to Dalhousie University where he had attended, and the harbour with the American and Canadian warships near Halifax. My brother has a cottage in rural Morar, which faces Prince Edward Island, and there is considerable wildlife, including bears and an oceanfront where he might occasionally see a great white shark (with global weather change). My brother told me stories about the locals from near and far history and his personal acquaintance, and I have learned so much! Unsurprisingly, a lot of the stray information leaked or informed or in some way influenced the poems that I wrote during and after my visit, and they are all grounded in that terrain.<\/p>\n Visiting new places has inspired me to write other sequences as well. The chapbook Where the Days and Nights are Equal Length <\/em>was written after a visit to Los Cabos on the Mexican part of the Baja Peninsula, and I was thrilled when it was short-listed for EXILE\u2019s <\/em>Gwendolyn MacEwen Chapbook Award in 2013 (a favourite poem about a vulture, \u201cDesert Duets,\u201d was shortlisted for \u201cbest poem\u201d).\u00a0<\/p>\n Again, on my daughter\u2019s wedding in Bali, my husband and I sojourned in Bali, and I wrote a sequence of poems about our amazing visit to that exotic landscape so different from our own. As you may guess, I have quite a few stray manuscripts that need organizing and polishing, and this manuscript is another one of them. Possibilities for the title might be \u201cA maracas calls for rain,\u201d or \u201cBali: tales of wonder and terror\u201d or \u201cA seedpod of memories.\u201d<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>You are both a working poet and an editor of other poets: Does one role ever interfere with the other? In what ways does your work as an editor complement or influence your own poetry?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> The two roles as editor and poet do require different modes of thinking, it is true. To edit a poem, I have to don one type of hat whereas to write a poem, I tend to go hatless:<\/p>\n As an editor, my mindset is logical and precise, aware of grammar as it applies even to poetry, paying close attention to details and the overall effect of the poem, considering whether the words that are chosen evoke what the poet intends (here I have to put myself inside the poet), getting rid of the superfluous where emotion can go astray or into overdrive and run over itself. And where there are intended deviations from ordinary grammar for a particular effect, my job is to make sure the laws in this self-created universe of the poem are consistently applied throughout. In cases when the poem falls short for whatever reason (in my view), I look for ways to make what I understand as the poet\u2019s intended expression more effective, and to render the poem perhaps more moving or poignant.<\/p>\n As a poet, I write more from what I describe as feelings and instinct (often drawing on a reservoir of subconscious imagery) in response to a thought or happening in my own life or world event that has somehow affected me. Thoughts in the raw are not all that logical before the rational mind organizes them into sentences, but in writing a poem those thoughts or half thoughts may be recorded in words that use unprocessed imagery and snippets of language, often song-like, as they enter the uncensored mind. So, my hope is that the reader on encountering that choice and arrangement of words may experience the same feelings that I, as the poet, have felt.<\/p>\n This is not to say when I write as a poet that I abandon my knowledge as an editor entirely. All the baggage of experience with writing stays with me while I work on a poem, and often I will grab a tool out of my mental suitcase on the trip of inspiration and fix a problem\u2014like right away swatting a repetitive stray fly that has made it into the house. However, the clearest view comes after a time away\u2014a day or longer from the particular poem\u2014when I can return and see the poem with a greater clarity and judge it as I would judge someone else\u2019s poem. Typically, I must read the poem\u2019s draft aloud (or aloud in my head) to listen to what flows and what does not and to attempt to streamline the language or, for some poems, I work on its deliberate jangle.\u00a0<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>Do you have any editorial advice you frequently give but still find difficult to apply to your own writing?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> Poetry writing doesn\u2019t get easier, and I face all the difficulties that those I advise who are attempting to write poems may experience. Each poem is different and poses its own challenges so that having written poems for five decades does not guarantee a successful poem.\u00a0 To get the right word arrangement on the page to elicit the thought and its feeling does not usually come on the first try, which may be too sketchy and fragmented or baggy and amorphous: too close to prose. I advise poets to cut excess verbiage so that the true lines of the poem shine through. For me the greatest challenge lies in revision with the need to chisel expression, often muddy with prose, into that rarefied form, poetry. I too have to look for ways to remove words and phrases that may be implicit, that are too chatty or clich\u00e9d or are merely what are grammatically termed \u201cdead wood\u201d (often excess modifiers, the relative \u201cthat\u201d or \u201cwhich\u201d and articles can be removed).<\/p>\n Although poetry has been described as a vessel through which the gods speak through the poet (as with a Greek oracle!), that stage of intuitive writing remains the first stage before the hard work of shaping the poem so it may reach the reader or listener and conjure the same magic of feeling in them as inspired the poet to write the poem. Of course, there is the rare, totally inspired poem that comes out fully formed or almost.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>EVENT\u2019s Poetry Reading Service asks you to assess up to 10 pages of poetry and provide both a detailed commentary and an edited manuscript. When you receive a submission through EVENT\u2019s Poetry Reading Service, what does your first reading look like? What do you listen or look for when assessing whether a poem is working?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> Typically, I print out two copies of the 10 poems and read the first copy of all 10 poems that I mark with first impressions and note if they are part of a sequence. I then go back and read each poem and analyze it separately, making notes on the text of the poem that I later transcribe or enlarge on a written EVENT Reading Service report. I consider, first of all, does the poem move me? I consider where the poem is coming from, the voice that speaks through the poem. I listen for the flow of language and consider whether there is a music of the line that complements the subject matter, and I look at the poem\u2019s imagery and consider how images are used (avoiding mixed metaphors) to evoke a thought that has become one with its feeling. If a poem somehow falls short, I consider ways to enhance the poem\u2019s impact. In the cover letter to the EVENT Reading Service report, I make a point of mentioning the most successful poems among the 10 pages, since it is so helpful for the poet to know what works. I will then point out some of their strengths followed by a list of weaknesses and suggested changes and\/or recommendations.<\/p>\n Finally, I read the second printed copy of the same poems all over again, and make final comments on the poem, often adjusting a comment or revising a criticism that I may have noted on first reading the poems. And if I feel that I have misjudged a poem on my first reading, I will also go back and revise my comments on that poem in the EVENT Reading Service report.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>Writers can submit up to five questions with their manuscripts when submitting to EVENT\u2019s Poetry Reading Service. What kinds of questions tend to lead to the most fruitful assessment?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> The questions that tend to lead to the most fruitful assessment might be: What are the strengths in my poems? What are the weaknesses that might be detracting from their final impact? My poems were fun to write but would they be of interest to an outside reader? How may I strengthen my writing style and poetry? What poets and poetry collections would you recommend that I read? To which journals or literary magazines would you recommend that I send my work? Might there be any poetry workshops that might help with my writing?<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>What do you listen or look for when deciding whether a poem is working? Does your attention go first to its voice, sound, imagery, structure, emotional movement, or something less easily defined?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> When I read a poem, I first of all discover whether it moves me, and voice plays an important role. Each poem works through a different medley of techniques with an appeal to various senses, so I would not consider any one literary device in isolation nor proscribe any one of those devices. All of these aspects of the poem work in particular combinations that shape the individual poem, but they may not all be found in any one poem. Whereas imagery may shape one poem, the music of the line may be a defining feature in another. Structure and emotional movement inform a more narrative poem. Voice and affective impact are paramount but are influenced by other distinguishing features in the poem. Usually, a poem should return to the speaker so that the voice of the poet is clear.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>What poet, poem, or collection do you return to when you need to recalibrate your ear?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> There is not one poet, poem or collection to which I return, but many. Among earlier poets, I have become fond of Rumi\u2019s elemental style and simplicity, especially the elegant extended metaphor in \u201cThe Guest House.\u201d I also return to John Donne for his metaphysical conceits and whimsical sonnets, as well as his meditations, which read like prose poems. Gerard Manley Hopkins\u2019s \u201cThe Windhover\u201d is unsurpassed in its sprung rhythm, which mimics the bird\u2019s flight. The bird\u2019s soaring and diving and the speaker\u2019s daunting feelings toward God are reflected in the poem\u2019s movement. Yeats\u2019s work ranges from the mellifluous early poem \u201cThe Lake Isle of Innisfree\u201d to stark and ominous poems written in response to tumultuous times, such as \u201cEaster, 1916\u201d and \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em> and Duino Elegies<\/em> are collections I first picked up during my university days and still treasure. I am partial to Ted Hughes\u2019s terse precision in \u201cThe Thought-Fox\u201d and many of his other nature poems. T. S. Eliot\u2019s \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\u201d is a melancholic and satirical reflection on societal malaise. I also return to The Waste Land<\/em> and \u201cBurnt Norton,\u201d the first poem in Four Quartets<\/em>, both of which I find beautiful and profound.<\/p>\n Among Canadian poets, I long ago became enamoured of the poetry of Gwendolyn MacEwen and Michael Ondaatje. I wrote a PhD dissertation on the mythopoeic element in their work. My favourite MacEwen collections are perhaps The Shadow-Maker<\/em> and The T. E. Lawrence Poems<\/em>. Poems from The Shadow-Maker<\/em> that still speak to me include \u201c\u201cThe Red Bird You Wait For,\u201d \u201cDark Pines Under Water\u201d and \u201cThe Discovery.\u201d \u201cLetter to a Future Generation,\u201d which continues to address our times, also comes to mind. As an admirer of Ondaatje\u2019s poetry, I would cite older poems such as \u201cLetters & Other Worlds,\u201d \u201cTo a Sad Daughter,\u201d \u201cWhite Dwarfs\u201d and \u201cPig Glass\u201d for their abrupt dislocations and ironies. From his more recent work, I return to \u201cTalking in a River,\u201d with its quietly observant speaker looking back on a lifetime. A good book for aspiring poets is Ondaatje\u2019s The Distance of a Shout: Selected Poems<\/em>, which gathers poems spanning 50 years of his work.<\/p>\n I have rambled a bit in answering this question and still do not feel that I have answered it sufficiently. There are so many other poets whose work I admire. Tim Bowling\u2019s Fathom<\/em>, which explores memory, ancestry and the salmon-fishing culture of the Fraser River, and George Elliott Clarke\u2019s Execution Poems<\/em>, which tells the story of his cousins George and Rufus Hamilton, are two more collections that stand out in my mind. The brothers were hanged in New Brunswick in 1949 after being convicted of murdering a taxi driver. Other collections that stand out include Margaret Atwood\u2019s flinty, heartfelt and whimsically wondrous poems in Dearly<\/em>; Patrick Lane\u2019s meditations on mortality in The Quiet in Me<\/em>; Russell Thornton\u2019s Two Songs: Selected Poems 2000\u20132025<\/em>; and David Zieroth\u2019s Governor General\u2019s Award-winning The Fly in Autumn<\/em>. I also admire the balcony poems in Zieroth\u2019s watching for life<\/em>, a collection inspired by the pandemic and a move. His first here and then far: Selected Poems 1971\u20132024<\/em> gathers work from more than half a century.<\/p>\n But again, I find I have left out so many wonderful poets. Don\u2019t forget Pablo Neruda\u2019s love sonnets and Seamus Heaney\u2019s secular poems, so earthy and human, among countless others. Randy Lundy\u2019s Blackbird Song<\/em> is a well-tuned and forthright collection by an Indigenous poet, and lately I have been struck by Jane Hirshfield\u2019s nuanced work about nature and human nature. I would advise aspiring poets first to find an anthology of older poetry, then perhaps pick up selected works by contemporary poets. They should also subscribe to literary magazines and journals to see what is being published today.<\/p>\n OM: <\/strong>If you could go back to when you were publishing your first collection, what would you tell your past self?<\/p>\n GHR:<\/strong> I would tell myself not to get discouraged by rejections. To persist with a poem to make it better, perhaps setting it aside to gain some distance on its shortcomings before returning to it.<\/p>\n I would tell myself to open myself to criticism and to learn from my failures. I would remind myself that, introvert though I may be, I would like to reach an audience who might share my thoughts and emotions through poetry.<\/p>\n I would tell myself never to give up\u2014which I did for a couple of years under work-pressure during a PhD program in English and Canadian Literature during which I wrote a thesis on postmodern poetry with a focus on mythopoesis. Again, I slowed down when my children were small. But if that happens (sometimes it cannot be helped), I think of what Carol Shields\u2014who was writer-in-residence at Douglas College when I first began assisting EVENT <\/em>Magazine as a reader\u2014advised me: she told me not to worry about not being able to write, and that when the children grew up a bit, I would surely find time to pick up the pen again. She confessed that she, too, had stopped writing during early motherhood.<\/p>\n So do not feel dejected when times are difficult because if you persist, you will surely be able to write again. And I have found writing poems is a marvellous way to understand the world you live in with yourself a small point floating somewhere\u2014a ripple or a faint sparkle\u2014in its midst. And yes, I write a poem longhand in its first draft\u2014I cannot face the face of a computer without my own footprints blazing some sort of homely trail on familiar paper.<\/p>\n And, at all costs, I would tell myself if I were beginning today, don\u2019t let AI take over an iota of your brain or soon you will be writing in algorithms.\u00a0<\/p>\n Want feedback from gillian on your own poetry? Through EVENT\u2019s Reading Service for Writers, you can submit up to 10 pages of poetry and receive a detailed assessment and an edited copy of your manuscript. All manuscripts are also considered for publication.<\/strong> Learn more and submit to the Reading Service.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n OLIVIA MACDONALD <\/strong>is the Magazine Intern at EVENT. She is currently completing a Master of Publishing at Simon Fraser University and is co-editor-in-chief of Bitter <\/em>Magazine.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n <\/div>\n
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