12 or 20 (second series) questions with Josh Denslow

Josh Denslow is the author of Not Everyone Is Special (7.13 Books), Super Normal (Stillhouse Press), and the upcoming collection Magic Can't Save Us (UNO Press). His most recent short stories have appeared in Electric Literature's The Commuter, The Rumpus, and Okay Donkey, among others. He is the Email Marketing Manager for Bookshop.org, and he has read and edited for SmokeLong Quarterly for over a decade. He currently lives in Barcelona.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first collection was plucked from the slush pile at 7.13 Books, and it changed my life for sure. Because after years of trying, it showed me that it was actually possible to publish a book. So I continued writing them. In that first collection you can see the formation of how I employ humor in my writing, and nothing sounds less funny than using the words “employ humor.”

2 - How did you come to short stories first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

I came to fiction in general first because that’s all I knew growing up. There were tons of novels in our house, and I read them all. I didn’t come to short stories until much later when I started writing my own stuff and was excited to learn I didn’t have to dive directly into a novel! For me, they were like novels with training wheels. But of course, short stories became much more profound for me later.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

Starting a short story can be the hardest part because I will rewrite the first paragraph dozens of times until I find some magic alchemy that gives me the tone of that particular piece. Then it tends to flow much faster after that, though I do rewrite quite a bit as I go.

Everything is about flow for me so I’m constantly rereading, especially that first crucial paragraph, to keep me on track. Tweaking is happening throughout so by the time I get to the end, it’s pretty close to what the final will be.

That’s for short stories.

For novels I do something similar, but the difference is that when I finish the first draft, I basically start over and write it again with what I learned in the first pass through. My second published book was a novel, and I wrote it from scratch four times until I got to the version that Stillhouse Press published.

4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

For my newest collection, MAGIC CAN’T SAVE US, I purposely wrote each of the stories with the idea that they would form what I was calling a “thematically” linked collection. Every story features a couple whose relationship is falling apart in some way, and then a magical creature comes along and makes things worse. It was a really exciting way to work, and I would do it again! In fact, I already have some ideas for a “science-based” collection of stories.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I don’t enjoy doing readings. I don’t necessarily enjoy going to readings either. But I’m very supportive, and I can disregard my own personal enjoyment as long as the reading is not hours long. Then, as it turns out, I had other plans that night.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

No matter how fantastical things become, I’m always in search of ways to make the characters more human. More real. More relatable. And I want to carve out a bigger slice then just my limited worldview. The questions I want to answer are the questions that plague human beings no matter the background. I’m looking for that ooey gooey center core. And a lot of the time, those questions are the ones we ask ourselves regarding our place in the world and how we can do better on an individual level. To be a better mother or father. A better daughter or son. A better friend. A better citizen. Better.

But I typically make things pretty difficult for my characters. Maybe now is a good time to apologize to them!

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This is tough because I don’t think writers are necessarily obligated to do anything other than write. But then on the flipside of that, I think as humans we have an obligation to learn more about the world. To be curious about life outside our circle. And one way to do that is to read. And if all the writers are tasked with this when they write, and the readers are looking for this when they read, then it’s a pretty amazing circle where the writer helps the reader build empathy.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I think having an outside editor is a gift and should be cherished. In all my publishing experiences (MAGIC CAN’T SAVE US is my third book), the end product is infinitely better because of the time spent with my editors. It’s the best way to see where you’re falling short. Where you can dive deeper. Where you can find hidden treasures. And I haven’t only edited my work. Some of the notes I’ve received have given me the tools to edit myself. To become an actual better person and a better writer going into the next project. It’s amazing.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

I think if I paid attention to advice I would not have ended up where I am now, and that would be an epic tragedy.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to music to film)? What do you see as the appeal?

Music takes up a lot of real estate in my mind. I’m obsessed with finding and listening to new music. I also have been playing the drums for decades now (!!!) and had a bit of local success with the band Borrisokane which I started with my wife and her brother. I think my love of music is what gives me that obsession with “flow” which I literally can’t define but I spend most of my time trying to capture in everything I write.

I also have a degree in film from Columbia College Chicago, and I spent ten years in LA working on film sets and writing and directing my own short films. I hear a lot that my stories have a filmic quality, but I have no idea what I’m doing to give that impression, other than I just steeped myself in film and now it’s coming out in my dialogue. On a side note, whenever anyone says that about my work, I take it as the highest compliment even if it wasn’t intended as one.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I have no writing routine. What I have instead is a full-time job as the email marketing manager for Bookshop.org as well as three children and an incredible wife and we all live an incredible life that I don’t want to miss. I just write when I can! Luckily for me, I have no shortage of ideas and things slowly find their way out into the world.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Reading. Always reading.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

A cake in the oven.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I’m incredibly influenced by music and film, but as I said, it’s an immersion in those forms and then that manifests itself naturally in my work.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

My life experiences influence my writing the most. But, of course, reading is why I love writing. Here is a smattering of writers who have been important to me in one way or another over the course of my life to now: Ellen Raskin, Kazuo Ishiguro, George Saunders, Ursula K. LeGuin, Fernanda Melchor, Olga Tokarczuk, Margaret Atwood, Kelly Link, Charles Yu, Marlon James, Isaac Asimov, David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell, and Yōko Ogawa.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I would like to direct a feature length film and play drums in a band that goes on a world tour.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I would have loved to be a professional drummer doing session work and playing shows every week.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

If I don’t write, I feel like something massive is missing in my life. And that feeling can loom heavy over everything. So I write to keep the beast away! Writing make me feel like me. 

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

The last great book I read was It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne de Marcken. One of my favorite movies lately was that Dungeons and Dragons one with Chris Pine. My wife and I saw it twice in the theater and then watched it again at home!

20 - What are you currently working on?

I have a completed 540-page beast of a novel that I’ve been shopping for the last couple of years, but sadly, I think everyone is scared of it. I’m doing a fourth pass on a middle grade book that I’m really excited about that might have better luck in the next few months. Also, I just started two new novels, one leans more science fiction than I’ve ever done and the other is a bit more existential and influenced by some of the stuff I’ve been reading lately. I’m waiting to see which one finds its flow first. As for short stories, I have just begun a series of small stories influenced by physics and some of my science obsessions.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Mónica de la Torre, Pause the Document

my review of Mónica de la Torre's Pause the Document (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics.

Em Dial, In the Key of Decay

 

Mamestra Brassicae

In the early spring, cabbage moths bloom,
a likely target of coos from my students,
whose hands I hold as I reach them the word
pupae. What an agent of evil I am, to dash
their hopes of the swarm drifting across
drafts of love, like Monarchs. The white
flock has descended on our broccoli,
our brussel sprouts, our collard greens,
to unleash a tsunami of hungry mouths
and I can’t lie to them. They aren’t butterflies.

I’m just now seeing a copy of Toronto-based poet Em Dial’s [see their ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] full-length debut, In the Key of Decay (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2024), a collection of lyrics held in monologue, gesture. I’d seen Dial’s poems recently in Permanent Record: Poetics Towards the Archive (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2025) [see my review of such here] and was impressed, although I’d even think their poem included in that particular anthology a direction I’d like to see further. Their poems in this collection are a narrative blend of performative and meditative, offering elements of beauty and decay and everything between, amid and through, a collection, as the back cover offers, that “pushes past borders both real and imagined to attend to those failed by history.” “In my worst nightmares,” the poem “On Beauty” begins, “I am pregnant / my body swelling out / with a demon        but a small task to country. // Just as when awake, I am begging / myself into a somewhere        thumbing / my ribs for the definition of country / other than the two blue passports / kissing in the desk drawer.” The poems in In the Key of Decay are declarative, considered. In the Key of Decay is a solid opening, and I’m intrigued by Dial’s formal considerations, pushing against the boundaries of lyric constraint, but one open to further possibilities (such as their poem in Permanent Record, which does move into some really interesting structural territory). The poems are smart and wild and restrained, offering elements of fantastic monologues and short scenes and lines that lean into the musical, as “Lost in the World” offers:

My chest ticks          to the rhythm

of a frenzied compass.          Where are we again?

Maybe all the generations          dressed in

Immigration because lost         and          love

are as universal as          a drum beat.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lee Upton

Lee Upton is a multi-genre author of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism. Her novel Wrongful, a literary mystery that deals with writers behaving badly, is due out in May 2025 from Sagging Meniscus Press. Her comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, appeared in May 2024 from the same publisher. Another novel, The Withers, is forthcoming in 2026 from Regal House Publishing. Her other books include The Day Every Day Is (Saturnalia 2023); Visitations: Stories; Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles: Poems; The Tao of Humiliation: Stories; and the essay collection Swallowing the Sea: On Writing & Ambition Boredom Purity & Secrecy. She is also the author of an award-winning novella, The Guide to the Flying Island, as well as six additional books of poetry and four books of literary criticism. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, and three editions of Best American Poetry.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book was a collection of poetry, The Invention of Kindness. It opened up new and gratifying friendships for me. Wrongful is a literary mystery and, as such, differs a great deal from my previous book, a comic novel—Tabitha, Get Up. This new book, Wrongful, feels quite different because questions about evil animate the book. It’s a romance, in some ways, but there’s terror lurking.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry came most naturally to me—the way rhythm and images unfold, the way associative links lead us through a poem.  It has taken me a long time to learn how to orchestrate fiction in which cause and effect propel at least some outward action. Writing both poetry and fiction is satisfying—you can’t help but find yourself inside mysteries within other mysteries.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I tend to work on multiple manuscripts at the same time—and things move quite slowly. When I hit a wall in one area, I work on another manuscript. By the time I return to the original trouble-making manuscript, I may discover a solution. This way of working means that multiple manuscripts finish at roughly the same time. My final drafts often are very different from my first attempts.

4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

My poems, short stories, and essays tend to have individual lives and often stubbornly resist becoming part of a collection. Or so I tend to think at first. And then I realize that the same obsessions are winding their way through much of the work.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I like readings. It’s only the hours before readings that tend to be problematic for me. I’ve hardly ever not been a nervous person. Once I begin reading, however, I’m often very happy to voice the work.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

In Tabitha, Get Up (2024) I was concerned with issues of self-trust and how we may attempt to defeat entropy and create sustaining meaning. In my new novel Wrongful I’m interested in questions of evil, how evil always has its “reasons” and a self-perpetuating vitality. Wrongful is not only about the temptations toward bad behavior that writers and all of us face; it’s also about readers and reading—the intimate romance of reading

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

This is an individual matter, but it seems that writers should be profoundly grateful to whoever taught them to read and write and find their way to new adventures through the imagination. We can help others find their way by mentoring and by allowing ourselves continual freedom to be bold in our own writing.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I’ve been able to work with marvelous editors and publishers and designers. Publishing takes a willing and devoted team, and I’ll always feel gratitude for those I’ve worked with.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

 “Relax.” It sounds so insulting, but it’s pretty good advice. If you can relax, your own mind will give you something to imagine and consider…

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

Each form is difficult. Moving toward extended time and action frames in the novel was especially challenging for me, given my general proclivities. Each genre comes bearing its own gifts for discovering whatever mystery we might be avoiding otherwise.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I’m now able to write full-time, and so my life is very different from the days when I was working full-time and had small children and many other obligations. Typically, now, my day begins with too much coffee, and then maybe with my making a list about what I want to do, and then—if I don’t have any larger responsibilities—I dive into working. Usually on my laptop first. Then I print out the manuscript and revise. Next, I put those revisions into my manuscript on the laptop, and the process begins again. And again.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I usually read poetry or fiction—to hear another voice. I might pace around the house…I might eat something, like chocolate. Chocolate needs no defense.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilacs.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Visual art, flowers, trees, talking with family members, overheard conversations

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m inspired by the writing of Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Transtromer, Anita Brookner, Tracy K. Smith, Margot Livesey, Timothy Liu, Charles Holdefer, Rachel Cusk….and so many others. I’m fortunate to have a number of friends who are writers, and they’re deeply important to me.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I think it would be nice to stay for a while in a cottage by the sea and take long walks every day. And have marvelous hot soup on those days. (I sound deluded. I’m actually serious. It would be so nice.)

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

If I could pick up another gift and had the talent…I would still want to be a writer. For the freedom and the adventure of it. If I couldn’t be a writer and were suddenly gifted with ability, I’d want to be a singer who worked on original material. Which really means being a writer with vocal range…

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I’ve wanted to be a writer since childhood. I also, as a child, wanted to be a spy. Now I don’t want to be a spy. Although writing is a little like trying to spy into the depths of the culture’s hidden life.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great book: The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch.

 Last great film: 1900, by Bernardo Bertolucci

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on poems—always—and I’m redrafting a novel in which a younger visual artist believes her life has been dramatically damaged by her relationship with an older artist.  I’m also rewriting a couple of novel manuscripts that I lost faith in earlier. I’m now trying to give those manuscripts new and more exciting lives.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Spotlight series #106 : Micah Ballard

The one hundred and sixth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring San Francisco poet Micah Ballard.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern and Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell.
 
The whole series can be found online here.

snow day (new book!) + reading soon in Vancouver w Christine,

I’ve a new poetry book this month! My third title with American publisher Spuyten Duyvil, Snow day (2025)—following How the alphabet was made (2018) and Life sentence, (2019)—is now available to order! A collection built out of a sequence of sequences, it includes the title poem, “Snow day” (produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2018), and “Somewhere in-between / cloud” (also produced as an above/ground press chapbook in 2019), was composed for and published as part of Dusie Kollektiv 9: “Somewhere in the Cloud and Inbetween”—A Tribute to Marthe Reed (1958-2018) as an unofficial/official element of the New Orleans Poetry Festival, April 18-21, 2019. Much thanks to Susana Gardner for her ongoing support. This poem, in places, utilizes the occasional word and phrase from the late Marthe Reed (as well as a fragment quoted from Timothy Morton), including from her co-editor afterward, “‘Somewhere Inbetween’ : Speaking-Through Contiguity” from Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Linda Russo and Marthe Reed (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2018).

The poem “What they write in the snow” was included in the first issue of Julian Day’s +doc: a journal of longer poems (Winnipeg MB: null pointer press, summer 2021). “for my fifty-first year,” appeared as the great silence of the poetic line through Derek Beaulieu’s № Press (Banff AB) in an edition of fifty copies, July 26, 2024. Thanks much to all the editors/publishers involved, and the whole team over at Spuyten Duyvil! Now, of course, we get to work on the final copy/proofs for another title with the same publisher, my forty-page essay, A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (2025); stay tuned!

Hopefully I’ll even have copies of Snow day on-hand soon, including for the reading Christine and I are doing later this month in Vancouver. You are coming out to hear us, yes?

Poetry in Canada: Off the Shelf Reading Series Part 5
Featuring: CHRISTINE MCNAIR + rob mclennan

February 28, 2025
Doors: 6:30 pm /  Event: 7 pm
SFU Belzberg Library
SFU Harbour Centre, 515 Hastings St. Vancouver BC

https://www.poetrycanada.org/

I'm also reading to launch the new book in Ottawa soon, the day after my birthday, with Jorge Etcheverry Arcaya, Rob Manery, Grant Wilkins + Chris Turnbull, so if you're around, that would be good to see you. Oh, and here are the blurbs on the back cover. Brilliant thanks to all three for their generous words:

There is snow and the school buses are cancelled. Letters come from afar in spite of the weather. In Snow Day, rob mclennan documents the detritus of living – the snow, the children, their toys, their resistance to naps, the accumulation of small daily events that make up this specific life. Except for what filters faintly through the media, there are no bombs, no daily fights for food or shelter. Even so, mortality is the quiet accompaniment rumbling beneath this work. We live on and find connection in spite of death. “How do [people] get strength to put their clothes on in the morning?” notes rob, quoting Emily Dickinson. By observing the private moments, specific to his world but common to many, he finds some kind of answer and some kind of grace.
            Samuel Ace, author of I want to start by saying (CSU Poetry Center, 2024)

In Snow Day, rob mclennan squints through the hazy weather of everyday life to wonder what value a writing life might offer. As time passes from his desk, his couch, his car, his books, his screens, mclennan looks forward and back in time, his continued commitment to the process-based long poem working its way through a midwinter day boiled over into weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. These poems show us how the smallest gestures can open onto wider fields of connection, bringing things into contact even when they feel distant.
             ryan fitzpatrick, author of No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks, 2025)
                         and Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023)

In Snow Day, rob mclennan offers a quiet sibling to Bernadette Mayer’s beloved Midwinter Day, a personal reverie to revisit each year as the world darkens. Part history, part elegy, Snow Day weaves together an international poetry community, reflecting mclennan’s long-term commitment to spinning and repairing that creative web.
            Jessica Smith, author of How to Know the Flowers (Veliz Books, 2019)