Canadian poetry journey: From early love of poetry to published collection

Callista Markotich has enjoyed a life-long career as a teacher, principal and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Her first collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel (2024) was published by Frontenac House. Callista's poems appear in numerous Canadian reviews and quarterlies from The Antigonish Review through Vallum and in several American and British magazines and journals.

Embarking on a Canadian poetry journey: Influences and evolution

Canadian poet Callista Markotich

Callista's poetry has received first and second place awards and a placement in the League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket campaign. It has been short-listed and Honorably Mentioned in several Canadian contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Callista's suite, Edward, was a finalist in the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award and the 2024 Toad Hall Chapbook Contest, with The Poets Corner. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. Callista lives gratefully on the banks of Lake Ontario, traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nation, in Kingston, Ontario, with her husband Don of fifty-nine years. In her own words here is Callista on her Canadian poetry journey.

On Creative Writing: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

Callista Markotich: Such a good question for any poet!

My dad loved poetry and he would talk about poets and recite snippets while helping me with the dishes. This provided double pleasure, of course, meeting two needs at once.

So often he chose dramatic lines with lofty language and sonorous periods. I specifically remember This England from Richard II! He loved vocabulary, loved words. So, I did too, in reading and in music and when I finally got around to developing a serious writing practice, I had that desire for rich lexicon and extravagant expression. At times I was aware of having to tamp that hyperbole down—I cannot have the language of Shakespeare and the formative experiences of Frederick Douglas, and these are not their times, but overall it is a love for language and diction that drives my efforts. I hope my reader/listener might feel something like the lift I felt when Dad quoted poetry, though my poems are much, much quieter.

Lorna Crozier retreat initiation into 'real' poetry writing

On Creative Writing: Has your writing evolved over the years, if so, how (experience, reading writing communities, all/other)?

Callista Markotich: Oh yes! I dove into writing “for real” about eight years ago, when my sister died. Prior to that, I was part of a very casual poetry group of four friends, just indulging our love of it. We’d take turns giving a prompt, have fun writing it, a timed process, share our pieces, admiring them lavishly, and then eat and drink wine together. We did this for years! Those were the first drafts, that part of the process, the fun, spontaneous part, and we did not subject them to revisions and edits, in all those years.

After my sister died, one of these poetry friends took me in hand and told me to register for a writers’ retreat featuring Lorna Crozier. And I obeyed my friend. That was my initiation into the full process and the quiet joy of writing poetry. I love revision now. I understand the process of editing, too, and know, from illustrious examples, what a poem should do.

I have at my back and in my heart the wisdom of Lorna, and so many other poets I’ve met, and read, since this journey began. I have a weekly face-to face meeting with another poet—in fact, another of the original four. We have such a bond of trust that makes it possible to go deep in our work, and we have time to discuss many aspects of our poems—technical things, like line endings, form, poetic devices, diction. We always begin with an exploration of another poet’s work, each of us bringing a piece to read and “study”, and we learn.

I also belong to an expansive and flexible Zoom group made up of people who have attended the same workshops over time. We have great meetings every second week. There’s always at least a critical mass and sometimes many more, but everyone who brings something to read will eventually read, and we have lively, friendly, helpful meetings. All of this is a far, far halloo from the tossed-off poems written just for the delight of it. But this is even more delightful.

Writing about your family or your life? First, ask yourself 'Who cares?'

On Creative Writing: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

Callista Markotich: These became more recognizable as time went on! At first, I was just writing poems and doing my best to submit some poems worthy of publication; there was no overarching theme. My first accepted poems were all about different things, not one about family or about myelf.

I was leery of the lyrical poem featuring aspects of my own self—I asked myself something Billy Collins famously said to ask—who cares? That is a sobering question. In fact, my first published poems were about a lost Chinese Checker marble, Thomas Cromwell, Yeat’s falcon and Alexander Pope’s mock epic on women’s hair.

When I began to entertain the idea of a chapbook or a collection, I was chagrinned to realize that I had no adhesive theme at all! But in the body of poems which eventually became my first book, a preponderance emerged—poems about my family, my mother and father, long deceased, and my sister, whose death seems yesterday still, and little bits of info about my only brother John and my younger sister Jane! I began to remember the essence of events, conversations, thoughts that seemed to present revelations, truths, aches, or humour! and I had a yen to tap into those, and I had to reach down to the heart, to go deep, but now it’s evident that personal, poignant memories have become thematic in my work. My first collection circles around the loss of my sister. My second manuscript, just sailing out to its own destiny, also bears family history, and as I’ve come to expect, family occupies that arc, head and heart tossed into the tumult of the beautiful, terrifying world that is our current world.

Mentorship and revising poems are great learning experiences

Wrap in a Big White Towel is Callista Markotich's debut collection of poems, published by Frontenac House

On Creative Writing: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

Callista Markotich: Well, I have been so fortunate to have had my first book published by Frontenac House! I have been treated so well and generously by this House, which feels like a family abode. The manuscript itself was a second or third iteration of the central poems in it, because when it was declined by another Canadian publisher, I would reorganise, revise, retitle, turf some poems, add new ones—twice with advice of wonderful poets that I asked specifically for this kind of mentorship, so I learned inestimably through those experiences. I submitted exclusively, because this is what the publishers prefer. In the normal sequencing of the submission windows, other options may be closed by the time a collection is officially rejected, which is too bad for the author, but the time might prove to be valuable for development. When I decided to try Frontenac House, they had recently published collections of poets I admired. I had heard wonderful things in social media about their editors, and I attended a (Covid time) launch on Zoom of their spring titles and I was drawn to the warm discussion and lively style. I took great care with that cover letter, speaking to the details mentioned in their submission guidelines, and I was happy when I emailed the package—with bated breath.

I was euphoric when I received the call from Editor John Wall Barger saying that they liked my collection! It was one of those unforgettable thrills.

On Creative Writing: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

Callista Markotich: Because I write exclusively on the laptop, I edit surface features as I go – that’s easier to do than leave mistakes to distract me again and again! When I revise, which continues to require editing, it is usually a much more sweeping enterprise. This is when I’ve got the first draft down. I don’t have real rules about it, but I would say that when I think the draft is finished, that’s when I am just beginning to figure out exactly what I’m trying to convey and how to do that well, with poetry. This is when I change things—maybe just words or order, form, maybe tense and person, or line endings, or I change a “tell” to a “show”, but I can also move major chunks around, or remove them altogether, or add a phrase or line or two that then shine like most important parts in the poem, and then wonder what I thought I had, before! All that can’t happen ’til the draft is done. I don’t usually save the original draft; I make the changes right on top. Sometimes it wanders quite far from the first draft— but I feel as if that draft was integral, like an armature in sculpture. I admire people who keep their work in journals and workbooks, in longhand, and you can see their lovely arrows and arcs and erasures and marginalia. That seems so organically beautiful to me! But I don’t do it that way anymore, because of the facile ease of word processing. Bet that this is an individual process for us all.

Thanks to River Street Writing for helping co-ordinate this interview!