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RELIT AWARD WINNER
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL
FOLLOW ME
Wave Forms and Doom Scrolls
Daniel Scott Tysdal's debut short story collection, Wave Forms and Dooms Scrolls, is available now from Wolsak and Wynn.
Order here or from your favourite bookseller, and read the collection the Toronto Star calls "bloody, clever and touch blackhearted".
If you missed the 2021 Fall Buckrider Books Launch, you can enjoy the festivities, featuring clips from the short films "Humanity's Wing" and "Wave Form", here.
"Tysdal is one of those rare writers whose stories change the way we look at the world." - SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods
"Here's a collection of stories that is part experiment, part essay, part movie adaptation all within the boundaries of prose, in this form-bending fiction debut. [. . .] True to his origin, this is the work of a hyphenated poet."
- Téa Mutonji, author of Shut Up You're Pretty
The Writing Moment
Daniel Scott Tysdal's creative writing poetry textbook, The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems, is available from Oxford University Press. Learn more about the book and order a copy at Oxford University Press or Amazon.
Read a sample of The Writing Moment here.
Send The Writing Moment Workshop inquiries here.
"Everything You Need to Write
a Poem (and How It Can
Save a Life)"
Some Work to Welcome You
I Wear a Hijab (Lol), or Professor Puts a Cupcake in the Fridge
poem submitted in fulfilment of an assignment given by the students of ENGB04
This is not what marks you in my memory,
though you write to me: “Remember? I wear
a hijab (lol).” This is a spell you cast
to charm memory, to summon some features
for me to reference in your quest for work.
What marks you is not the piercings. It’s not
the epic beard, for you. For you, it’s not
your bedazzled iPhone. It is not your
hijab: neither the rocket-popsicle-
blue hung loose around your crown, nor the black
of deep earth, edging your face the way soil
edges an orchid’s surface-bursting stem.
These details are adornments, seasonal
wreaths able to ornament the front door
of a home, but inept at expressing
the life of the lives that once resided,
and do reside, and will reside within.
What marks you is this: the pause as you caught
yourself grasping mid-sentence what it meant
that a wave could motion, “No, no, I drown.”
For you, it’s the far-out comics you shared.
It’s the poem you began, “We begin with
a book. The very first chain in this cave.”
It’s what you said about the pronoun “you”
after class: it hails all of us, and one,
and none. What marks you is that time you spoke,
mid-lecture, interrupting to instruct,
“then write it,” when I said in an aside,
“‘Professor puts a cupcake in the fridge’
would make an awesome title for a poem.”
And you, the first you, what I remember
is the story you wrote about your trip
to the country where your parents were born,
the last line bearing a rooftop in rain,
and you in that rain once, for real, and me
feeling it in your words, the full, wet fall.
"Daniel Scott Tysdal is one of Canada's most original, dynamic, and talented writers."
—Kenneth J. Harvey
"Daniel Scott Tysdal's words have torque; they turn the page inside out. [. . .] It's some of the most exhilarating, imaginative writing I've encountered: Tysdal's poetry is airborne."
—Anne Simpson