BIO
JACLYN DESFORGES is the 2023/2024 Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer In Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. She’s the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC's picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She's also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club.
Jaclyn is a Pushcart-nominated writer and the winner of several literary prizes, including the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award. Jaclyn was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her writing has been featured in literary magazines across North America. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.
ARTIST STATEMENT
PHILOSOPHY AND KEY THEMES
I can’t talk about my writing without talking about the world and how I see it: split in two, inner and outer, visible and invisible, physical and imaginal. My writing takes place at the intersection of the inner and outer gaze. My role as an artist is to function as a bridge between these two worlds. Whether I’m writing poetry, picture books or short fiction, my first task is to turn towards the inner world, the place where we as humans tend to stash away feelings, symbols, and memories. And then to translate the stuff of that numinous world into writing so it can be communicated to others.
I stand between inner and outer as I explore themes of nature, memory, embodiment, dissociation, mental health, sexuality, and motherhood. As a queer and autistic poet, themes of connection and mis/communication are essential to my work. My poems and stories tend to be inspired by real events, but often mixed with elements from fairy tales, nursery rhymes and popular culture. My goal as an artist is to look carefully at what goes unnoticed, the forgotten pieces of life. Whether writing for children or adults, I want to illuminate the very big feelings we tend to deny because we feel alone in them.
POINTS OF INSPIRATION
My writing is inspired by poets like Kim Hyesoon and the blunt power and strangeness of her collection Autobiography of Death (New Directions Publishing, 2018, translated by Don Mee Choi); Anne Carson’s story-poem-tangos in The Beauty of the Husband (Vintage Canada, 2002); the surreal prose poetry of Eve Joseph (Quarrels, Anvil Press, 2018); the exuberance of Donato Mancini in Same Diff (Talonbooks, 2017); and the sexy/playful/somber lyricism of Katherine Leyton’s All The Gold Hurts My Mouth (Icehouse Poetry, 2016). I’m also inspired by fairy tales, nursery rhymes, psychodynamic theory, nature, and mythology, as well as my own lived experience growing up as a neurodivergent girl in the 1990s.
TECHNIQUE & CONNECTION
While my style is always evolving, there are certain techniques that have come to characterize my work. My poems focus on musicality and rhythm and are meant to be read aloud. I like to use repetition and incantations in order to develop mood. In terms of the way my poems are arranged, I often use end-stopped lines, which provide a regularity of meter and invite the reader to slow down. Cadence is important to me, as well as juxtaposition – couplets are a favourite technique of mine, as they allow me to set one line against another, and change the meaning of the stanza accordingly.
I love writing in a variety of genres. My mentor, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, recently described me as “an ambidextrous writer who moves easily between fiction, poetry, and writing for children.” In addition to genre-hopping, I also enjoy moving between the inner world of creative discovery and the outer world of teaching and community building. I first began teaching general population writing workshops in 2015, in a renovated bank vault at the back of a Toronto coffee shop. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to facilitate writing workshops at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre/Multicultural Women Against Rape, around my kitchen table here in Hamilton, and at Indigo locations across the GTHA. In the past seven years, I’ve also mentored a diverse group of emerging writers one-on-one, both virtually and in person. Over the past several year I’ve also worked as the Poetry Review Editor at the Hamilton Review of Books, allowing me to shine the spotlight on individuals and organizations who are co-creating a vibrant poetic ecosystem in Hamilton and beyond. It’s wonderful to be able to centre new and underrepresented voices, both in the books I review and the reviewers with whom I work.
