The anticipation is palpable in Catherine Parr Traill College’s Bagnani Hall on the night of April 5^th. Dozens have eagerly packed into the modest lecture hall awaiting the night’s programming. 

Outside, the chatter seeps through the open door as parents, partners, and friends eagerly line up waiting to purchase a copy of this year’s edition of the Trent English department's poetry and prose collection, Chickenscratch.  

Chickenscratch is, by now, a Trent University institution. With seven editions already published, the biannual volume collates poetry and short creative writing (less than 1000 words) from both undergraduate and graduate Trent University students across both of the university’s two campuses. 

Not only are all of the contributors to Chickenscratch Trent students, so too are its editorial team. The collection is curated and edited entirely by students admitted on an application basis to a course supervised by Trent University English professor and poet, Rob Winger.  

I of all people should know this—my co-worker and close friend was one of the people responsible for putting the collection together, and it was upon her insistence that I was encouraged (in the strongest possible terms) to cover this event. 

In his introductory remarks for the evening, Winger described the class as “a real crash course on a pretty insane production schedule,” a fact which I can corroborate by my colleague’s frequent disappearances these past few months to, in her words, “scratch [her] chickens].” 

I caught up with Professor Winger after the night’s festivities to learn more about the unique structure of this fascinating hands-on class. 

“I think I think the terminology people try to use when they talk about stuff like this is ‘experiential learning’,” Winger said. “I'm never sure what I think about that term because it implies that thinking deeply about stuff is not experiential. But I think the way people try to understand it is that you end up not just reading books and writing stuff, but learning some sort of applied practical skill that works outside of your brain and your heart.” 

“I do think that's true for this particular course,” he admits, in spite of his apparent ambivalence towards the term. “Students really get a crash course in how literary publishing works. They do all the basic steps of what happens when you publish a book. So in that way they get sort of a taste of what that world is about.” 

Winger says that despite courses like these being aimed at writers, students rarely know what to expect when they first enroll. 

“People that I know that teach in publishing talk about how their students are surprised by the parts of publishing that they like,” he confided. “They realized they really dig book designing, or marketing or something. I like that [the publishing course] gives people  a chance to see what that's like. I think publishing for most people—I don't know if you feel like this—it’s a bit of a mystery. People understand a little bit about how writing works and people understand going to buy a book. The parts in between,” he continues, “I think are a bit strange.” 

He attributes some of this to “an element of old-school gatekeeping,” though Winger admits that some of it is no doubt a “what goes in the sausage kind of thing.” 

“It's not very sexy. It's behind closed doors, you know?” 

In terms of how he structures things behind said doors, however, he admits that things are far from the degree of automation which one might associate with contemporary processed grocery store meats. 

“I don't have lecture notes, I just have an agenda,” he admits. “I try to make it a little like 20th century Communism,” Winger says, of his approach—one which strangely reflects my own aspirations for my tenure at Arthur. “I'm still an overlord, you know? I try to make decisions. We vote on everything. I think that it's a way of learning by doing.”

The night’s festivities—which celebrate the launch of the final, physical product—are the culmination of months of exhaustive debate, editing, and back-and-forth between student editors and contributors, whereupon the final selections are typeset, printed, and bound by Coach House Books in Toronto. 

“We make a book in about two months,” he explains. “It usually takes about two years to do that.” 

After reading William Carlos Williams’ appropriately chicken-themed poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” as a literary apéritif for the night, Winger invited student editors to come forward and introduce the night’s orators. Following a few brief remarks from each editor, contributors were welcomed to the front of the room to read their prosaic or poetic contributions to the collection in a program divided into two sets of five. 

Justin Muir was presented with the unenviable task of opening the night, with a short story titled “Constellations.” This appropriately astrologically themed piece, so close in advance of April 8^th's total solar eclipse, was promptly followed by a poem by Alex Deng titled “The Mall in the Middle of Town.” 

In his introduction to the poem, Chickenscratch editor, Julian Nakamoto, describes how he felt Deng “perfectly captures the sort of liminal ambiance of wandering around Peterborough square, or any other dead mall. Everything about this poem feels thought of, whether it's the language that carefully teeters between playfulness and melancholy, or the formatting that brings with it a sense of temporal and spatial awareness.” 

Winger, in his segue, added that “Alex’s contributor bio is one of my favourites…‘Alex Deng was born in China and raised in Toronto. He loves poetry and noodles.” 

In absence of editor Jacob Taylor, out sick, Winger introduced the next reader, graduate student Liam Andrews. Andrews, who per his bio, “often focuses on anxiety, internality, and workplace culture,” read a story titled “Portrait of an American Game Show,” a loquacious character study which incisively cut to the core of the human pursuit of wealth and fame. 

With no dialogue and using only limited-omniscient narration, Andrews’ prose, interspersed with trivia facts in the vein of the program his story examines, commanded the attention of the crowd and stood out even among the night’s quality selections. 

After his reading, I caught an attendee seated behind me whispering to a friend, “holy fuck, man. This guy’s good.” 

I caught up with Andrews at the end of the program to grill him about his writing and newfound niche Trent University fame. While this was not his first time being published, Andrews was characteristically modest about his print accomplishments. 

“The only other thing I’ve had published is a book review in The Malahat Review, like, years and years ago,” he confided. 

I opportunistically seized upon this moment to remind him of his publication in Arthur Issue 0 this past September, which prompted a string of effusive apologia from the Public Texts student. 

"Of course. Yeah, I forgot. That is kind of bad,” Andrews nodded. “That feels like so long ago. It was at the beginning of my masters.” 

Andrews is doing a two-year thesis program for his MA here at Trent, the bulk of which begins in earnest this coming academic year. 

“I'm about to go into the actual writing phase of my thesis, which is terrifying,” he admitted to me. “I think everybody who writes fiction has a lot less time to write fiction when they're in the middle of writing their thesis.” 

I commended Andrews on his bravery, not just for submitting his writing to the judgement of both the panel of student editors and the readers of the print version of Chickenscratch, but moreover for his willingness to recite it in front of an attentive audience—most of whom I would imagine to possess certain strong opinions about literature. 

“There were a lot more people here than I thought there would be,” he admitted, when asked whether getting up on the figurative stage daunted him. “It's an emotional piece and I practiced it a whole bunch of times and always ended up getting emotional in the middle of my practice run. I'm pretty comfortable getting up in front of people and talking about academic stuff, but I guess it’s kind of different from going up and baring your soul to everybody.” 

Knowing that Andrews is the only person ever to have read the entirety of Infinite Jest, I decided to see him off with a curveball.  

“Ernest Hemingway and David Foster Wallace, naked and covered in oil,” I submitted to him. “Who's winning the twerk off?” 

“Fuck,” he responded. “I mean, Ernest Hemingway was a burly man, right? I feel like he's got the stuff. But he would be way too self-conscious. I think that David Foster Wallace—if he was true to his own philosophy of sincerity—then he would go up there and not give any shame about it. So I feel like he would give the better effort.” 

Considerably enlightened from this sound line of reasoning, I again thanked Andrews for his work, patience, and candor, and bade him goodnight. 

The final two readers of the first set both brought offerings of poetry. Hannah McCammon’s poem, “Book Two V: Poem to Ondaatje,” lavished in evocative images and rich diction. The first of two pieces, McCammon’s subdued delivery of both belied a keen eye, not only for the scenery she described but equally for the construction of the stanzas she used to do so. 

By contrast, Christina Nikas’ minimalist “Thirty-Eight” sought a similar emotional quality in a comparably sparse poetic arrangement, rounding out the first set with a piece which editor Holly Mooney described as “clean and beautiful.” 

After a brief intermission, Winger again took the microphone to remind attendees that books were for sale outside for cash, and would remain available courtesy of “our friends at Take Cover Books,” who are stocking the collection in-store in their “local authors” section.

Following this promotional bout, Winger called forth a woman of many editorial hats (and my colleague), Abbigale Kernya, to introduce Dean Charrington and his epistolary short, “Swamp Beast Inc., L.L.C., subsidiary of Human Race Inc.” 

Written with what Kernya described as “an affinity for carefully structured passive aggressive letters,” Charrington’s piece is a side-splittingly funny and honest chronicle of coming out as queer, presented under the pretense of memos sent between the operator and management of a growing, adolescent man. One part Pixar’s Inside Out, another Being John Malkovich with, of course, a healthy dose of Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” and a drop of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, “Swamp Beast Inc.” is an eminently compelling piece which had me grinning throughout (and if a cursory survey of the room is to be trusted, I most certainly was not alone). 

Winger returned to introduce the next reader, May Lauriault, on behalf of editor Kristi Dallemagne in absentia. Lauriault’s story, “The Bear,” though short, meditates on interpersonal relationships with what Dallemagne described as an “oomph which makes this story such a great addition to Chickenscratch.” 

English major, Alexandra Boyd, came next with two poems to read. While both of Boyd’s submissions lavished special attention on sensorial imagery—specifically taste—her second offering, “Gluttony,” makes formidable use of it in imagining “[eating] until there isn’t anything left in this world that wanted to consume [her].”  

Mikayla Bronte’s poem, “The Great Upstairs,” followed with a potent portrait of a family struggling with their mother’s dementia, rendered with careful attention and placing the reader/listener wholly in the stream of the narrator’s consciousness. 

Before the final reader, Winger spoke briefly to Chickenscratch’s almost decade-long history. Since then, “every edition has had at least one writer who’s based at the Durham campus.” 

Whilst chatting with Winger after the event, he explained to me part of the importance of this fact. 

“When [Chickenscratch] started, I worked in Oshawa for a year,” he explains. “It was back in the days when I was applying for my own job every year kind of thing. While I was there I started to create a reading club there and we kind of came up with [Chickenscratch]—this small group of us just did it together.” 

This was back before the publishing course was even conceived of. “We did the first four or five of them just as a sort of extracurricular event. It was only in the last couple of years that I thought, OK, students are doing all this work. They should get a course credit for doing this work right?” 

To that end, Chickenscratch would not only seem to bridge the divide between Trent’s Durham and Symons campuses, but in many ways owes much of its history to Trent Durham.

It seems fitting, then, that the last reader of the program should be one who, in the words of Winger himself, was “sort of repping the Oshawa campus.” 

To conclude the night, Kernya again took the stage to effusively introduce Ethan Wright, the final reader of the night. “It is hard to articulate Ethan's talent fully,” Kernya admitted. “Frankly, I will never stop once I start, so I'll let him speak for himself,” she said, inviting the contributor to read his poem, “How to Make Chicken Parmesean.” 

While Kernya has gushed to me many a time in our shared office about Wright’s abilities, and the pair’s mutual admiration for poet Ocean Vuong, listening to “Chicken Parmesean” prompted me to mentally make a note to ask Wright whether he’d ever read Casey Plett’s short story “Twenty Hot Tips to Shopping Success” from her collection A Safe Girl to Love (which, incidentally, I know my colleague has not read on account of it having sat neglected on our office couch for the better part of the past month). 

Regrettably, Wright slipped out of the reception before I had the chance to do so—presumably because even by the standards of Southern Ontario commuter students, Oshawa—Peterborough can be a haul—so permit me to submit here the question: Ethan, have you read that story? And, regardless of your having done so, please understand that I invoke the comparison as only the highest of praise. 

As Wright returned to his seat, Winger again took the podium to deliver a few closing remarks, urging attendees to “please, buy more copies,” and to give them away to friends and family, should they find themselves so inclined. After offering his sincere gratitude to Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mark Skinner, to Traill College, book designer and typesetter Carleton Wilson, and to the student editorial team, Winger again thanked attendees for coming, and bade everyone goodnight, before ushering the milling masses to the Trend for the afterparty. 

Chickenscratch 2024 can be purchased independently both in-store or online at local bookstore, Take Cover Books (retail $20.00). 

Copies can also be ordered through the Trent University E-Follet Bookstore.