Spotlight series #105 : Conor Mc Donnell
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
STATEMENT:::October 13th 2024: 15:15–15:24 hrs:::
I write what I see in the world around me therefore I tend to use multiple voices, forms, styles, devices, etc. but it’s always, I’m told, recognizably me. Though I am a doctor, scientist and academic, I despair at how technology increasingly puts us further than arm’s length from each other. At those times I point out fragility to build resilience; separation to build resistance. I try to use language in all its beauty to steer us toward song, our secret weapon in a sea of secrecy and increasing apathy. I am happier and more fun in person than I sound here because I take care of very sick children every day and their energy gives me the strength to smile and sing with them. My latest collection, This Insistent List, has been described as: “…collection of near-future technological and medical catastrophe converges into a lyric symphony of collapse — …(This Insistent List) silvers the darkness with perseverance, art, and what it truly means to be human.”
I couldn’t say it better myself. I don’t like talking in depth about my writing which is why I tend to embed myself within multiple voices and characters, not so much to hide as to remove myself from the foreground so as to allow the reader experience the landscape for themselves as best they can. That being said, I do love to sit down with a drink and a comrade in arms and talk poetry and literature until the sun comes up.
what we know so far is
cars crash. Bhopal. Wrists are slapped. Nothing happens
not willed in a haptic universe. Were you to decode my
red-herring DNA, escape our accumulated rubbish –
omnibus Sandman, Gandalf & Saruman, Verses by Salman,
Siamese Dream on vinyl, cassette & double-CD, the animal pets,
our unarticulated selves (Innominatum Os of us) –
such loss would leave me light-headed yet clothed in rubble to
ground me: rough judgement pressing on raw nerve until
it’s like listening to a fucking headache. Can stasis be wished
for, lifeless words writ onto plasmic existence? If so,
silence this lisp of spirit, steady this teleological stutter for,
sometimes I misread words: Their children are grown
does not scan as their kids are now adults to me. My first thought:
how are they razed? Are they hand-picked at birth,
harvested pruned by secateur instead? The Irish word for
harvest is Fómhar (Fómhar means Autumn too). We say
Autumn, you think Fall, as in, we harvest what autumns
from the trees. Either way, less bloodshed come time to reap
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a physician at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of three chapbooks and two collections of poetry (most recently This Insistent List). He has recently published many essays and reviews on The Woodlot, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Ampersand Review Essay Contest. He works weekends at Sellers & Newel used & rare book-store in Toronto and you can follow his escapades as a bookseller on @in_the_basement_books on IG. He is Editor in Chief of Case Repertory, a narrative-based-medicine publication he co-launched with Damian Tarnopolsky at the University of Toronto. The poem below is an excerpt from his third collection which is due for publication with Wolsak & Wynn in the fall of 2025.
