Writer’s Block: Elana Wolff

ALL LIT UP: Tell us about your book Everybody Knows a Ghost. What can readers expect?

ELANA WOLFF: Everybody Knows a Ghost is a collection of sixty-seven poems, all of which touch on the notion of ghost—in its multiplicities. Ghosts appear in their various guises—as shades, traces, shadows, soundings, and presences; as indications in art, illness, nature and relationship, by way of the nebulousness of recollection, and through the extremity of life struggle. The poems turn on the fascination we humans have with the unknown, the uncanny, the forbidden, the frightening, and the transcendent. Hence the declarative Everybody of the title—for who has never been haunted, or felt visited or assisted by an enigmatic presence. The full title of the collection is drawn from words spoken, obliquely, by “Nana” in the poem “After-cast” (below). The narrator, the grandchild, looking back, recalls the mysterious words and tries to tease out their meaning—in light of images held in memory. While preparing these responses, apropos the throughline of the book, I came upon a piece on Margaret Atwood by Alexandra Alter in The New York Times Book Review. Alter recounts that “Sometimes, she (Margaret) can’t shake the certainty that Graeme is in the next room.” (Her partner Graeme Gibson passed away in 2019.) And in her new Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, Atwood relates how a house she and Gibson once lived in was haunted by a woman in a long blue dress. These spectres—as bone-close as the natural to the supernatural.

As for what readers can expect from my new book—hard to say. Readers come with varying expectations. If they’re familiar with my poetry—Everybody Knows a Ghost is my eighth collection of poems—they may expect thematic cohesiveness, a kind of loose narrative arc—as in previous collections: Shape Taking (2021), Swoon (2020), Everything Reminds You of Something Else (2017), Startled Night (2011), You Speak to Me in Trees (2006), Mask (2003), and Birdheart (2001). Craft-wise, they’d likely expect attentiveness to metre, rhythm, syntax and sound—what I think of as the musicality of the work. They’d likely also expect emotional resonance, quirkiness, allusiveness, turns and reversals; a challenge to reread. A reader returns to a writer’s work for the appeal of their style—their voices, use of language; their concerns. American poet Jami Macarty once called me “an ecstatic,” and I’ve pondered that. I don’t write with the intention of invoking mystical experience or spiritual transformation, but I am attuned to that metaphysical organ: imagination, to alternative states of consciousness, and the unexplained. I also hold on to hope and repair over cynicism and despair in a weird world. So, for readers both new to my work, and not: may the expectation be to engage, imagine, be “read in” anew.   

After-cast¹¹

Those who grew up
under trouble learned to do with less: no second helpings;
hand-me-downs—whatever the cut or colour.
Waste not, waste not, want—

The yard was frugal too.
Witchgrass, plants that toughed their way
each spring from stubborn soil. Snowdrops, yarrow,
Lenten rose. Nana was a saver.

She swaddled a book in gauzy cloth,
kept it like a miser
keeps his wealth,
and never wept. Or if she did,

it would have been into her pillow-slip, in secret.
The image that returns to me is pressed—
a butterfly, her serving tray (she never used for serving)—
real dead bodies

flattened under glass. Wings
so luminous blue
they shimmered orange under my lids:
the after-cast of gazing at them, dreamily,

then closing my eyes.
Everybody knows a ghost, said Nana
on the sand one day.
We were sitting side-by-side, gazing at the bay.

I had a child’s idea of ghost—a gauzy,
pillow-slip figure. Also the hidden thing
in plants that Nana called perennials—because they die
and come to life each spring. Butterfly-

blue transformed to orange
wings on my inner lids—my shimmery
notion of ghost. Nana, I suppose,
though, meant some tough, intractable
pith.

ALU: Is there one stand-out moment or experience you had that helped you realize you wanted to become writer?

ELANA: I suppose the first standout moment occurred when I was in grade two—the source, a piece of writing my mother kept. The teacher, Miss Brown, asked the class to write a few sentences about what we want to be when we grow up. She said our pages would be displayed for the parent-teacher meetings. I wrote, in very neat and upright handwriting, that I wanted to be both a teacher and an artist. I added that a teacher must be an artist too, to help the pupils learn to see beautifully (spelling corrected). I illustrated the page with carefully coloured elves, fairies, and other winged creatures. Miss Brown praised my work to my parents and told them (they later told me) that I might also grow up to be a writer. Perhaps she just said that out of kindness—she was soft-spoken, gentle, and very kind. But her comment must have served as encouragement. Shortly thereafter, I began writing little tales about the creatures I’d drawn. These have not survived, but I do recall that I named the main character, the elf, Izley. By the end of the school year, I was becoming an avid reader, and reading really did make me want to write.

ALU: Are there any real-life experiences or people/writers who have influenced your writing?

ELANA: I would say that all of my writing is influenced in some way by real-life experience (as opposed to virtual reality sourcing), and I’m including in real-life experience: imagination, dreaming, daydreaming, altered states, and reading—not only objective physical reality. There’s always a spark, an image, a word, a line, a passage in a book or dream, a conversation or encounter with someone alive or no longer living, that informs my writing. That’s not to say that the writing is fully autobiographical, or confessional, or bound to facticity. Fact can get in the way of craft. In order for a piece to work there has to be something happening artistically—in the way of metaphor, metre, sound, or unusual use of language—that moves the writing beyond mere description of experience. A factual anecdote, no matter how provocative, traumatic or traumatizing, does not make a poem.

For Everybody Knows a Ghost, a number of emotionally intense experiences and situations—involving people I care about most—had to be filtered and angled in order to be coaxed into poems. For me, some things simply resist being written. But for pieces that can’t be resisted, that must be written, I find an entry point and various ways through. Actual happenings and real people and places are sometimes named, yet slanted in ways that serve the psyche together with the work. I think I became sensitized to this kind of splintered, elliptical telling early on—as a result of reading Franz Kafka, who’s been a living-dead mentor for decades. From Kafka I learned about open concealment, precise yet angular writing, and fragmentation. Kafka is a master of the fragment, the believable fantastical, the absurd, dreamlike, and psychic real.  

There have, of course, been many authors over the years whose work has influenced my thinking and approach to writing. Among the poets: Louise Glück, Mark Strand, Jack Gilbert, Charles Simic, Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, and Mary Szybist. Whatever I’m reading in the moment may (or may not) influence my thinking. Influence is fluid. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the importance to my work of the Long Dash—the writing group I’ve been a member of for almost twenty-five years: founding members John Oughton, Mary Lou Soutar-Hynes and Sheila Stewart; also, Clara Blackwood, Brenda Clews, Kath MacLean, and Merle Nudelman. Those of us who are available meet weekly to share our work and give each other feedback. In terms of real-life support, attentiveness and collegiality, the group has been and continues to be invaluable.     

ALU: How do you overcome creative blocks when they arise?

ELANA: I read—there’s always what to be found in reading; misreading, too, has cracked a block, or several. Walking also helps—turning time into space. Many of my creative s/urges have come from walking—from being on the move, out-of-doors, away from walls, halls, furniture, fences, and screens. If I’m feeling depleted, I get horizontal, breathe rhythmically and slip into reverie, into that liminal state between wakefulness and sleeping. There’s a whole sea of inspiration swirling in the “inbetweenity.” I’ve also taken questions into night sleep—when the unconscious opens onto other planes. Not that direct answers have been provided upon waking, but blocks have been softened. I also paint. For twelve years, I worked at designing and facilitating social art courses with the City of Vaughan. I still occasionally offer one-on-one and small group workshops, and I paint for myself—as a way of creating on another track, an alternate that’s usually separate from writing, though it has happened that painting has jump-started poems. The key to unblocking is to shift, to switch direction, step away from the block—not give in to the grip of it.  

Not long ago, when I was struggling with a creative nonfiction quest-piece on Kafka, I opened a collection of his letters—like a bibliomant seeking guidance—to a long letter he wrote to his best friend Max Brod in July 1922. He was working on “The Castle” story at the time, ill with TB (to which he succumbed in 1924), and in crisis. It’s a dense, revelatory letter, but the lines that my eyes landed on in that random act of opening struck me like a clear and cautionary knock: I am a writer, which is actually true even when I’m not writing, and a non-writing writer is a monster inviting madness. A writer cannot not write—a writer must plough through the clot of blocking fear, whatever it is, and write. That was the message. About a month after penning that letter, Kafka abandoned work on “The Castle” (mid-sentence), but he continued writing, against all angst, even unto his deathbed. The illness took him, but he did not give in to “madness.” Fortunately, that bibliomantic message spurred me to shift energies and struggle through to completing the Kafka piece that had been stumping me. 

ALU: What does a typical writing day look like for you? Do you have any rituals that you abide by when you’re writing?

ELANA: Well, Marcel Proust wrote lying down. I sometimes write while lying—if I’m emerging from a reverie and want to be sure to cull the images or words that have come up before they slip away. Usually, though, I write at the kitchen table, my legs raised on the chair in front of me—in order to avoid ankle-swell. I recently read of a rather whimsical ritual that Louise Penny used to keep—of placing a bowl of jellybeans by her writing space and rewarding herself with the beans if she’d fulfilled her quota of writing a certain number of words. I’ve never rewarded myself for reaching a word count. Poetry is slow work. (Creative nonfiction, the way I write, is also slow.) A day will sometimes yield only notes, or a few lines that I consider polished enough to keep. And sometimes I think I’ve written something good and the next day I come back to it and wonder what I was thinking. But I do keep at it.

A typical writing day for me is actually atypical as I’m often out of town. But when I’m at home in Thornhill, I do have what might be called a ritual of sorts—of waking up to the radio, listening to the news, making the bed (that’s important), checking emails on my phone and reading the print news over coffee before opening my laptop. Then, following Kafka’s counsel, I remain at the table and wait, or I don’t even wait—

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   First published in FreeFall Magazine, Volume XXXIII, Number 1,Spring 2023 ↩︎

Elana Wolff is the author of eight solo collections of poetry, several collaborative works, a collection of essays on poems, and an original translation of poems from the Hebrew by Georg Mordechai Langer, co-translated with Menachem Wolff. Elana’s poems and creative nonfiction pieces have appeared in publications in Canada and internationally and have garnered numerous awards. She has taught English for Academic Purposes at York University in Toronto and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She currently divides her professional time between writing, literary editing, and designing and facilitating social and biographical art processes. Elana has twice won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, in 2020 for her poetry collection Swoon, and in 2024 for her cross-genre Kafka-quest work, Faithfully Seeking Franz, in the category of Jewish Thought and Culture. Everybody Knows a Ghost is her eighth collection of poems.