A Dis-Ease in Lyric and Fragment
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Reflections on the London Terrorist Attack
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Supplied by Sadiqa de Meijer
Sadiqa de Meijer is a talented writer of poetry, short stories, and essays. Her work has been published in
The Walrus and
Poetry Magazine.
Like many, de Meijer found herself challenged by the pandemic both as a writer and a mother.
“I’m fortunate as a writer that I was working at home anyway, but the timing of things [in life] has changed,” de Meijer told
The Journal.
“Things were fairly close to normal, other than all the same anxieties and missing people that everyone was having.”
Last year, de Meijer was commissioned by Kingston Poet Laureate Jason Heroux to write about the uncertainty of COVID-19. Her poem, “Chronology of the Emergency,” is about adjusting to the changes brought forward by the pandemic.
Experimental memoirs have proliferated in recent years under many guises: sometimes called lyric essays or autotheory, these works often hybridize different forms, including poetry, essay, and memoir. Truman Capote’s true crime blockbuster
In Cold Blood, one of the first books to apply fiction techniques to hard reporting, is often cited as the grandfather of creative nonfiction. But, while the genre’s most exciting contemporary practitioners share Capote’s innovative spirit, the demographics and politics have shifted. Today, autotheory’s most acclaimed voices are nonmale, nonwhite, or queer. (Capote was himself gay.) Their experimental forms are often driven by the need to write themselves back into cultural scripts from which they have been shut out, such as the privileged status given to heterosexuality and whiteness. High-profile examples include Maggie Nelson’s