Maria Giesbrecht on “A Little Feral”: Crafting Poems of Heritage and Healing [INTERVIEW]

Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose work explores her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, Contemporary Verse 2, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Best of Net nominee, and the founder of Gather, an international writing community that connects poets worldwide. Born in Durango, Mexico, she now lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband.

James: I so enjoyed your latest book, A Little Feral. It’s right next to me here, and the cover is so beautiful, but I want to dive into the poetry. As someone who values rigorous material accuracy in poetry, I was immediately drawn to your prose poem, “Engaged.” You zoom in on the clinical, physical realities of long-term relationships, noting that if a ring is left on too long, “they have to saw them off (the rings, not the fingers, sorry).” You then write, “I wonder if a mother remembers the day she took off her rings. Did the sun suckle on the pale lines like candy?” What’s your approach to exploring abstract concepts like marital commitment through these highly specific physical details?

Maria: “I think for me, the physical always comes first. Something happens in my life, in my thoughts, or in my dreams. For example, with this poem, I had just gotten engaged and I had to go have my ring resized. I didn’t realize how they resize rings: they just saw off the gold, and you don’t get to keep the little piece that comes off, they just take it. I suppose it’s like an honor system for the people who need the ring resized larger; they get my portion of gold.

“I just thought it was so odd, and it’s such a specific moment of your life that you don’t know happens until it happens to you. That led me to the thought of marriage in general. At the time I was freshly engaged, and now I’m recently married, but I was thinking about what it means to be free. I think about that a lot in the context of marriage. My wedding song with Corey was actually called ‘Free’ because we talked a lot about what we wanted out of our marriage. We talked a lot about the cliché of the old ‘ball and chain,’ the way a marriage keeps you small, kept inside, and chained. We very much disagree with that idea and concept of marriage.

“That poem is an exploration of what being contained and being free means to people, and what it might feel like, even in the context of having children. I’m sure the next time I have to get my ring resized will be when I have a child and my ring doesn’t fit me anymore, and how something stays with us for our whole life and yet it has to grow, change, and evolve with us. I thought that moment was so small and granular, but really, when you think about it, kind of profound in a way.”

James: I love the way poetry can zoom in on a little detail and make it something more. I also look for moments in a poem that effectively violate reader expectations, and you execute this brilliantly in “A shepherd and a dead bird.” You transition from a biblical parable about a lost sheep directly into a meta-poetic plea, writing, “Someone call / the shepherd and tell him I’m stuck inside a damn / good poem. The lid is sealed shut. Lord, let me out.” Can you walk me through the inception of that tonal shift and breaking the fourth wall in this poem?

Maria: “Great question! Funny story: that line, ‘I’m stuck inside a damn good poem,’ was actually originally ‘I’m stuck inside a goddamn poem,’ and I ended up changing that at the very last minute with my editor. She suggested, ‘Maria, you could do something really cool here if you invert that phrase.’ I ended up really liking it because I thought it touches on the idea that sometimes we create our own poems to stay inside of them, and we create our own prisons to stay inside of them. Then we ask for someone to let us out or to save us, even though perhaps we’ve created these walls, these poems, to keep us inside. A lot of the poems in my book are about escape.

“That’s the funny story about that last line: at first it was a ‘goddamn poem,’ and then it was a ‘damn good poem,’ and both are true. I think we write poems to damn ourselves, but we also write beautiful poems to keep ourselves inside; we want to stay in the beauty sometimes. I don’t think I had ever written from the perspective of the poem and breaking out of the poem before, so it was really fun to shift that at the end.”

James: I love how an editor can suggest just the tiniest little thing and give you that feeling where you go, “Yes!”

Maria: “What a great idea.”

James: Exactly. I think that’s why poets have to have their ears open to feedback and have the filters to know what to act on and what not to act on. If your ears aren’t open to feedback, you won’t have an opportunity like that.

Maria: “Yeah, for sure.”

James: The collection unflinchingly explores the complicated legacy of a volatile father. In “My father, a horse whisperer,” you use staggered, heavily enjambed lineations that affect how the poem is read on the page and out loud; you wrote, “when he grabbed / the wire     twisted the end     between fingers / and     whipped my soft cheeks”. Devastating lines. How does reciting a poem out loud impact your editorial choices?

Maria: “Thank you so much for noticing that. It was very intentional; that poem especially uses a lot of white space, and I was trying to emulate how someone would tell a story when scared or when they’re in tears. When you’re speaking and crying at the same time, you get your story out in pieces and chunks, and you have to take a breath every few words. I was trying to emulate the speaker of the poem. If you read that piece out loud, you’re actually participating in the speaker’s sadness; you become an active participant in the story, as sad as it is.

“I think that’s what we are as readers: at any given point in time, we are active participants in the stories we are reading. Especially if we’re reading it out loud, the next level is to participate in the story bodily, with our actual physical sensation. I think I’ve only ever read that poem out loud once in my life because it’s the saddest moment in my book. You feel it in the breath and become a part of that within your body, which I think is very powerful.

“It’s also a responsibility that you have as a writer to know that about your reader, because you can take that for granted, and you have to be pretty careful. I would not have put a lot of poems like that in my book because I think that would have been asking a lot of a reader, maybe too much. That was my thought process behind the spacing.”

James: Another poem that jumps off the page visually is “Night sky as a tissue,” the words snake down the page, you wrote “like memorizing / a collar / bone / in a black / winter storm” (another beautiful line.) The visual form of this poem approaches that of a concrete poem. When did that visual form take hold? Was it something you knew going in, or had you written the poem and then realized it needed to be visualized this way?

Maria: “I remember I wrote this poem during a Gather session where we were talking about poems that ‘slow dance’ across the page, swaying from one side to the other side and back again. So many wonderful poems came out of that session; in fact, many people have told me they’ve had their poems published from that session, so there must have been something magical in the air. I remember talking about the idea of taking up space on a page and not being afraid to use both the left and right margins.

“My poem sways back and forth. Our immediate impulse is often to start a poem on the left margin, make our way about halfway through the page, break the line, and go to the next. This was an experiment in what it felt like to take up space on the page. For some people, myself included, there’s a deeper level to that, almost a psychological phenomenon where it feels good to take up space on the page, especially if historically or personally it has been hard to take up space in general.

“I wrote it and loved it, and it’s one of those poems I can’t entirely explain. There’s a surreal element to it; it feels dreamlike to me and yet very complete. I can’t fully explain why that form works for it, except to share the story of how it came to be.”

James: We will circle back to Gather at the end of the interview (a little teaser for folks, Gather is amazing). but I want to focus on the book for now. The book is steeped in both Canadian landscapes and Mexican memories; an example is “The menu at Bar George in Montréal” in “Things I’ve memorized trying to stay alive.” How does your dual heritage shape the emotional and physical environments you construct in your poetry? As a side note, I’m a dual American-Canadian citizen, and living half my life in two different countries has definitely influenced my worldview.

Maria: “How can it not? It has shaped who I am as a person because my whole life I’ve sort of tiptoed in between, not really knowing where I’m from. A lot of the genealogy and the history of my family is gone. I grew up in Mexico, but my grandma lived in Manitoba for a lot of her life and then emigrated to Mexico, and then my family immigrated back to Ontario. How we have stayed alive as a family is by moving forward, looking to the future, and taking very little inventory of what happened in the past.

“While my family looks forward, I’ve always been curious about what came before me and what stories and memories have shaped where I am now and how I got here. So it inevitably comes through in my poetry. I had a manuscript ready before A Little Feral called Home Free, a play on words about where we find home and where freedom is in our home. It was all about bouncing between countries, truths, cultures, and heritages, and some of those poems ended up in A Little Feral.

“I would say the collection as a whole isn’t strictly about that, but those threads definitely come from that earlier unpublished manuscript. There is value in thinking about these things, writing about them, parsing them through, and looking at our past even if we survived our whole lives by looking forward. It’s been an experiment in patience, kindness, and compassion for the people who came before us. It infiltrates our writing simply because we write about who we are, what we are, and where we’ve come from. We don’t really have a choice, at least, that’s how it feels to me.”

James: That’s what makes poetry such a unique art form and why it’s hard for AI to write interesting poetry, it doesn’t have that unique life thread. Your life thread is totally unique to you, and mine is totally unique to me. As you get older, you get more elements you can pull in that, when added up, are completely unique. A single moment might be shared with millions of people, but all those moments strung together are not. The more poems you read by a poet, the more you build up a sense of who they are in a way that differs from prose, plays, or movie scripts. In poetry, it’s almost impossible not to sprinkle in who you are.

Maria: “You have to try very hard not to.”

James: I’m sure there are poets who claim they don’t infuse themselves into the poetry, but I’d be impressed if that’s actually true. A recurring thread in A Little Feral is your relationship with God and religion. In “Because I don’t have Spotify Premium”, you construct a prose poem that turns an algorithmic YouTube music queue into a space for religious connection, you wrote, “For one song, God and I, we’re together again, cutting up the dance floor of my soul.” How did you land on the prose poem as the form for this poem?

Maria: “In the same way that when you’re on YouTube and you start a song, it just suggests the next song to you, and the next one after that, and if you let it, it will just play whatever it wants. I wanted my lines to feel like that, where the next one was just coming and coming. Prose poems work very well for narrative poems because the narrative is the focus, and it doesn’t draw undue attention to the line breaks, double meanings, or cool tricks that surprise the reader.

“For this poem, I just wanted to tell the story of what I was experiencing: the feeling after leaving a faith, church, or community where, even though you made the right decision, there are moments when you miss the sweetness of it and the feeling of being connected with other people. Much like ‘engaged,’ these are stories about what I was going through. In many ways, I feel it would have been a disservice to the speaker of my poem to draw attention to anything other than the story itself.

“I have a bit of a hot take about prose poems: sometimes they really are just like mini short stories. Lately I’ve been getting into flash fiction; I was a beta reader for a friend’s brilliant flash fiction manuscript. While reading her manuscript I kept thinking, ‘These are just prose poems!’ And then reading my own prose poems, I think, ‘These are just flash fiction.’ I think a prose poem is a beautiful hybrid, a unicorn in the dark that is truly underestimated in the poetry world.”

James: With a prose poem, you know it when you see it, but it’s a nuanced thing. Someone who isn’t really into poetry might just see a paragraph of text and miss all the elements of craft hidden inside, especially since there are no line breaks or enjambment. For me, form comes later, it’s like having raw material, and like a sculptor, seeing what’s inside the block.

A number of poems confront the medicalization of the female body and the clinical dismissal of pain. In “My doctor says having a baby will cure my endometriosis” you contrast a sterile medical directive with a desperate bodily ache. This poem, almost as short as its long title, ends with: “crying for a chance / to grow a throat, / a perfect heart, / two little legs, soft / like warm potatoes.” Just devastating. How do you approach writing short poems, where so much is expressed in so few words? Did it start out super long and get pared down, or did it fall out of you all at once?

Maria: “Thank you so much for saying that, James; that’s very kind of you. This poem has a very special place in my heart because it’s one of my favorite poems I’ve ever written. It was actually selected for the Best Canadian Poetry anthology, which was a huge milestone in my career.

“There are two pretty short poems in my book: this one, and ‘Two Christian girls in the cafe next to me agree that romance books are porn.’ Both have long titles for a short poem. When I discovered that little trick, I was fascinated by it. Giving so much context, intrigue, and hook in a title works really well because you can get away with so much less in the actual body of the poem.

“The story of this poem is that it didn’t start out short. I wrote a very long draft because I had so much anger and rage within me that all of it had to come out first. Then I realized that the initial draft was for me and no one else. I picked out my favorite lines, including the imagery of the onion and the potatoes. There was something about those domestic images contrasting with the idea of becoming a mother and the sterile doctor’s office that worked really well.

“That was an example of having to seriously pare down something to what the poem wanted. The poem wouldn’t have been as impactful if all of my unfiltered rage was enveloped in it; in a way, that would have been egocentric. Sometimes to write really good poems, you have to get all of that out, and then realize you are in service of the craft. You have to do what is best for the poem, even if you want to be heard with all your other ideas. It’s okay to have that rage and anger, but it shouldn’t overshadow what the poem needs. That’s the story of my ‘warm potato’ poem.”

James: I was quite certain it was a longer poem where you pulled out those perfect elements, versus it just falling out of you fully formed. There’s a really important meta-point here: the best way to start writing poetry is just to write and not get hung up on the finished product. Just write, write, write, and be totally comfortable with ruthlessly editing. If you’re nervous about editing, a piece of advice I have is to use something like Google Docs that keeps your entire revision history. If you delete something and worry you’ll forget it, it’s there. You almost never go back, but it gives you peace of mind. For me, when I cut something, I know I made the right choice if five minutes later I can’t even remember what I cut!

While A Little Feral tackles immense grief and trauma at times, it also captures moments of beauty and intimacy. In “In the morning, we are ships,” you wrote, “What feels more like waking up / drenched in together, / than moving this ship, one oar each, / back to the yellow shore?” Another fantastic line. How does writing about moments of joy compare with capturing moments of sadness, and when constructing the final manuscript, how did you approach the arc of the book and interleaving emotional moments so the reader could take a breather?

Maria: “I thought about that a lot, more than I expected to. Traditionally, I’ve heard from other poets about constructing a poetry book similarly to a novel: you start somewhere, you build to a climax, and you have a resolution within the poems, even if they don’t tell a narrative story in the exact way a novel would. I used that approach for my chapbook, Peeling Oranges, but for some reason it wasn’t working for this book. I struggled because I felt like I was still living in the story and didn’t know where it started or ended from the outside.

“My editor suggested thinking of it as an emotional arc, a series of emotions, which really guided my thinking and the process of transformation in the book. Instead of thinking of each section as a chronological framework from childhood to adulthood, I thought in terms of what a series of moments explored, a specific emotion, or overcoming a challenge. In the end, the manuscript reads as a transformation story. Thinking in terms of an emotional arc rather than a narrative arc made all the difference.

“I also wanted to be as kind as possible to my reader. ‘My father, a horse whisperer’ appears early on, which is a very heavy, weighty moment, and I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader with back-to-back heavy poems. I wanted to be compassionate, so I gave drafts to friends to get their thoughts on pacing, whether it felt too fast or bogged down in certain areas. Ultimately, I had no set formula; it was intuitive, based on what felt right.

“Some poets say you should write as if no one is ever going to read your work, but I disagree. The goal of poetry and writing in general is connection, so there should be an assumption that someone will read it. That’s a relationship, and you should treat your reader with respect while putting your book together.”

James: I totally agree that it’s important to keep the reader in mind because they’re investing their time. That includes structuring the book to give them chances to breathe. I’ve talked to poets on this podcast who intentionally include shorter poems alongside longer ones. My poetry coach always emphasizes that the opening of the book is crucial, that a fifteen-page epic poem might not be the best way to start, because readers need to warm up, just like an athlete. It’s about respecting the reader rather than pandering to them.

In the title poem, “A little feral,” you establish a thesis for the collection, stating, “I press into the world’s chest — will it budge?” Yet by the time we reach the poem “Easily,” you wrote, “Every morning, I wake my poems / and we nuzzle like small horses.” Looking back at the finished manuscript now, what does being “a little feral” mean to you as a poet compared to when you first started assembling this book?

Maria: “That’s a good question. Every time someone asks me what it means to be a little feral, I have a new answer! Now that I’ve had a few weeks to step back from the whirlwind of a new book, I think it means to escape something and come away still being who you are—still being true to the wildness within you. For me, that meant leaving a strict organized religion. For other people, it might mean escaping a difficult family situation or an internal conflict.

“Coming away from a state of captivity, whether physical, emotional, or mental, and emerging still a little wild is pretty damn cool, and also pretty rare. For me, the book is about escaping and returning to that inner wildness we’ve had all along. It’s so easy to become jaded, miserable, and resentful. I have certainly been there, and parts of me still struggle with circumstances I can’t control, but retaining that ferality feels, above all, like the biggest win.”

James: Lastly, I’m an early member of Gather, a wonderful poetry community that Maria runs, and I don’t want to botch describing it. Maria, tell us about Gather, what people can expect, and how they can find out about it.

Maria: “You are a very early member, James! It’s been lovely writing with you over the years. I always say that we are a community of bold and gutsy poets, and that’s really it. We’re a community of writers that comes together a couple of times a week to do the thing that is often hardest: sitting down to write. Our sessions start with a brief craft prompt and a discussion about a poem, but mainly our time is spent writing together and sharing our work at the end, which is always wonderful.

“Mainly, it’s a support group for writers. We cheer each other on and encourage each other through both the wins and the challenging times that come with writing. It started online a couple of years ago when I asked some writer friends if they wanted to get together to write. In our last round of Gather, we had over one hundred poets from all over the world, which was amazing to see.

“We all share a love of poetry, which can be rare to find in everyday life. Very few of my offline friends are poets, but the poets in Gather have become real-life friends. We’ve started doing in-person events too, which have been wonderful—our meetup in Chicago last summer was iconic. We’ve also started publishing anthologies; our Fall 2026 anthology is coming out in October, and we’ll host a couple of in-person readings.

“You can find us at gatherpoets.com and on Instagram @gatherpoets, where we post poems, updates, and upcoming events. We bring in guest speakers, but at the end of the day, it’s about having fun and doing what feels good. It isn’t an MFA replacement, and you don’t need any formal background in poetry, the only prerequisite is that you love poetry. We don’t teach in an academic way, but we challenge ourselves and grow together. Seeing how much stronger our poetry has become over the years in the company of fellow writers is incredibly satisfying.”

James: One thing I find remarkable is how many poems have come out of those sessions that I’ve kept, edited, and turned into finished pieces. Most of the time, I walk into a Gather session with no idea what I’m going to write about. That reminds me of something the screenwriter of the Pixar movie Soul said, paraphrasing: a professional writer is someone who writes even when they don’t feel like it. If you wait for the perfect moment to write, you might write some beautiful things, but very few of them. If you just sit down to write, you may have to grind through ten or fifteen minutes of warming up your brain, like the first stretch of a long hike, and then you get going. Gather creates that smooth five-to-ten-minute transition from daily life into writing mode. Where can people find Gather on Instagram, the web, and elsewhere?

Maria: “Check @gatherpoets on Instagram for the most recent updates, and visit gatherpoets.com. We currently have a waitlist that opens up whenever spots become available. If you join the waitlist, you’ll receive an email from me so you don’t miss out.

“The proof is in the pudding for me too, James, because so many poems in A Little Feral originated in Gather sessions. Isabelle Correa, one of our inaugural members and now a mentor in Gather, wrote many poems for her forthcoming book during our sessions as well. There’s something magical about that subtle accountability of being in a Zoom room with others, knowing everyone else is writing makes you want to write, too.”