Throughout 2015/6 Drew McEwan and I collaborated on a project titled “Nature Building,” that repurposes/reinhabits/rewrites lyric nature-based poems from the Canadian canon.
We developed a close set of rules and parameters for the project which we may write about later. Here is a glimpse of it – two poems included in ti-TCR’s web folio on “Stuff” edited by Matea Kulic. Work from this project also appears in Watch Your Head, an anthology of writing and multi-media project about climate change.
Here is Drew talking about Nature Building with rob mclennan. Read here about Drew’s poetry practice
The collaborative project with Elee came about through an inside joke that developed the first time we met. We joked about nature tropes of Anglo-Canadian anthology verse and how these formed much of the landscape in which we developed our understanding of poetry as youth and students. We decided to pull natural imagery from early Canadian anthology poetry (pre-1950) and send them to each other to write around, through, and into. Since that beginning, we’ve departed from this original premise as the conversation developed. As for your second two questions, I’m still figuring these out. Right now I’d say the difference is that the composition and idea development happen in conversation, and over a prolonged period. There are far more delays in development of new directions and ideas as we wait for the next skype call to discuss them. This has been a really great thing, though, and it’s allowed the project to develop in a very natural way. It’s changed the way I think about my solo writing insofar as it’s helping me to see writing as a conversation with my own ideas over days, weeks, years, and to slow down when ideas need time to develop.
Dr. Drew McEwan ( (she/they)) researches and writes on literary and cultural representations of mental disability, madness, and neurodivergence. She has published academic writing in the edited collections Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health and Imaginary Safe House. Drew is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). She has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can’t tell if this book is depressing or if I’m just sad, Theory of Rooms, and Recoveringly. She works as an educator and researcher in Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Disability Studies, and writes on literary and cultural representations of madness and disability from a position of lived experience.