Brecken Hancock Writers in Residence Archives
Brecken Hancock's poetry, essays, interviews and reviews have appeared in Event, CV2, Grain, The Fiddlehead and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is Reviews Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Interviews Editor for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. Her first book of poems, Broom Broom, was published by Coach House Books in 2014. She lives in Ottawa. Visit www.breckenhancock.com for more information.
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July 31, 2014Few Permanent Wounds
By far the great majority of the people who go through even the severest depression survive it, and live ever afterward at least as happily as their unaffilicted counterparts. Save for the awfulness of ...
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July 29, 2014Invisible Damage
I’m an addict. There’s no way to know what I will do. Most of the time I don’t know what to expect from myself. I have lots of evidence that proves this. While drinking, in the morning, on ...
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July 28, 2014Still Illegitimate
In this first-person novel I’m working on now, I told myself I wouldn’t write about clothes, I wouldn’t write about vanity, I wouldn’t write about depression, and I wouldn’t write about feminism, ...
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July 24, 2014Trash
I have entered middle age. I am overweight, and I live with a little dog and two cats. I have been alone for more than seven years. I keep a journal, as Jenny Craig suggests, about what I eat ...
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July 20, 2014Craving a Talent Not My Own
Those who work in London are all either going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu—even though most of the people going down with flu, recovering from flu or in the grip of flu don’t ...
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July 18, 2014Grounds for Communion
People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the conditions tellingly described as “dwelling ...
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July 13, 2014Modest Portraits of My Mother
So perhaps my mother doesn’t need to be my queen; simply being my mother is already a lot, even if the rare kisses I place on her cheeks aren’t so majestic. —Kim Thúy, Ru**As a statue:Bootprints ...
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July 11, 2014A Story That No One Owns
I’m sure my point is only too plain… Lizzie is not dead, etc.—but there is a “mixture of fact & fiction,” and you have changed her letters. That is “infinite mischief,” I think…. ...
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July 10, 2014His Gravity
We shun those who bear the mark of death, and this is a form of baseness to which even I succumbed. Quite deliberately, out of a base instinct for self-preservation, I shunned my friend in the last months ...
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July 07, 2014Tending Toward Liquid
Habit makes time relative for us. At twenty, the faces surrounding us have no history except in the present of the gaze we turn toward them. So, young adults, old people, and children seem forever framed ...