By Ben Ladouceur
At the start of an academic year, one of the first things Professor Kimberly Quiogue Andrews might ask her classroom full of creative writing students is: “What can you tell me about your weird uncle?” Almost everybody has at least one weird uncle. “In a class of fifty,” says Andrews, “it is hilarious how many students are willing to tell a room full of strangers about their uncles doing shady things.”
After several students have shared tales of avuncular misconduct, Andrews pivots to other, more rhetorical questions. “I say, look how specific these stories are. Have I asked any of you how you feel about your uncle? No. Have you told me how you feel? Also no. But do we have a very solid picture of how you feel about him, from what you’ve described? Yes.”
This is Andrews’ way of driving home a principle about great creative writing: Show, don’t tell. It’s a familiar tenet, and one that’s important to establish early in students’ writing practices. Once they are accustomed to using images to convey the “feel” of their works – stories, poems, essays, whatever they want to create – then other ideas can get built on a firm bedrock. Concepts like syllabics, meter, and form don’t come into play until Andrews’ advanced poetry class a couple of years later.
Andrews’ commitment to the power of imagery is evident in her published work, including her poem, The Server at My Local Tells Me All Viruses Arrive on This Planet via Comet, from the Fall 2022 edition of online magazine, Sixth Finch. The poem relays image after image – alien technology, allergy attacks felt by “the tiny feathers / behind my facial bones,” and lunar tides (“the tug that moves the oceans but cannot / lift even our fingers”).
The poem’s titular “local” is the now-gone Dalhousie Street restaurant, Das Lokal (RIP). Andrews has lived in Lowertown since starting her work as a University of Ottawa creative writing professor in 2021. A reader might be able to guess that an Ottawa resident wrote the poem, based purely on its fixation on tree management: “I want [my server] to keep telling me about these streets / in the 70s, when they were tired of picking up those little / propeller things dropped by all the female trees and so / they ripped them up and planted only males.”
The year before moving to Ottawa, Andrews had published her first poetry book, A Brief History of Fruit. This was February 2020, when attentions were firmly fixed on toilet paper shortages, mask mandates, the “new normal” of COVID days. Not a great time in history to convince people to pay attention to a debut author (ask anyone who published a book around that time).
“I might as well have thrown it into the ocean,” Andrews laments with a smirk. Andrews has since published a book of literary criticism, The Academic Avant-Garde, and is now working on a follow-up poetry collection.
But, having had such a challenging experience with the release of her first collection, how does she convince her students that poetry is worthwhile? “The nice thing about teaching poetry is that you don’t have to convince them of that. They’re taking poetry for themselves, because that’s what they want to do. They know they’ve picked the weird genre.”
Visit www.kqandrews.com for links to poems and more info about the author. “A Brief History of Fruit” is available for purchase at Perfect Books (258 Elgin St.)
