Callista Markotich’s beautiful debut collection of poetry enchants on many levels—even before you open the book. The cover of Wrap in a Big White Towel (Frontenac House Press, 2024) conjures feelings of cozy introspection and curiosity. We are pleased to have Callista join us today to talk about how the cover of her collections mirrors the themes explored within.

Welcome Callista!

*Wrap in a Big White Towel* by Callista Markotich (Frontenac House Press, 2024)

Q: Tell us about the cover of the book and how it reflects—in our opinion—so beautifully, themes and feelings explored within your collection.

A: I am so happy you asked about the cover—unsurprisingly, a painting of a woman wrapped in a big white towel! But it was painted by my granddaughter, fourteen at the time, and struggling with the shadow of social anxiety that Covid cast upon her. Still, she could paint. Neil Petrunia, publisher of Frontenac House, encouraged us to see what we could come up with. There were a few false starts. In early sketches the wrap looked turban-like or like a babushka, a shawl or a salon wrap. One of the prospective models, Harry the cat, emerged huffily from a tunnel of swathed towels, and stalked outside, affronted. In the end it was a photo of her mother, my daughter Steph, with a towel draped around her head and shoulders, to be painted on a serious black background. This wrapped woman has a slight esoteric look, as if Charlotte’s brush was soaked with the enigma of her personal struggle at the time. There were moments of doubt – the folds of the towel, the tucked border, the tendril of hair, sometimes the shaky paintbrush in Char’s hand, but here it is: a towel, around the face of a woman, an archetypal “everywoman”, whose thoughts are inscrutable, wrapped, and I am so proud of this cover.

The title came first. It is is a line from a poem in the manuscript about The Innocents by Michael Crummey, in which wrap is about protection and comfort, about hugging safety and well-being to oneself, wrap as in cover, conceal, prevaricate, deny – and it is about interrogating those illusory senses, unwrapping them. I assumed that there would be times when I would try to explain the title, but of the questions I’ve had, no one has asked me to elaborate on that. Had I been taken by surprise, I would have told the simplest truth: my husband and I sat with coffee in bed one Saturday morning and looked at lines from several poems that might have an application as a comprehensive title, and this was the line he liked best.

But I have had time to think about why it seems right for this book. In the title poem, it is I, wrapped, staring at my reflection, dimly understanding, through steam, in a mirror, in a white room, what is by definition un-understandable – the utterly cold, clear, dark reality of lives we do not live, in worlds and times not ours. In the poem, access to such a world is through bitter literature, yet it is not merely literature; this novel comes from historical records of an orphaned sister and brother, incredibly isolated in a remote Newfoundland bay, straining to survive. Those children haunted Michael Crummey. He had to write The Innocents. And for me, as his reader, bowled over in compassion and humility by the spectre of unimaginable hardship that make up daily existence for the young siblings – the small mercies that sustain them, their courage, their uneasy, stalwart survival; as a poet, desiring words for that self-conscious draping of a reality too stark to face.

And, in all these poems, really, there is wrapping, and there is unwrapping, uncovering, going deeper to mine for duende, the universal shade that underpins cognition and affect in us humans; duende found even in poetry about love or joy, because all is finite for us. Love is mutable in this life. Joy, by the semantic nuance it contains, will fade.

Sometimes it’s been a precious thing wrapped, like a memory, like a permanently bronzed baby shoe, to be unwrapped with love and awe through the diction of a poem, as in Daughter’s Softball Tourney. Sometimes the unwrapping yields a thing I did not know was there, as in Safe U-turn. When there’s nothing that can be said, as in Windmills Café, when there’s a truth so hard that I must hide from it, as in Windmills Café II, when a revelation is wrapped away for years until words finally find it, as in Nightmare Rite, there’s been the wrapping, the unwrapping. When something is so grievous it cannot possibly be borne, as in the poem Fugue, there is the fleeing, the hiding in a labyrinth of shocked thought, the wrapping in a winding cloth of words the truth too hard to bear.

This is what poetry is like for me. Language does the work, wrapping, unwrapping.

About Callista Markotich:

Callista Markotich has enjoyed a lifelong career as a teacher, principal, and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Her poems appear in numerous Canadian reviews and quarterlies from The Antigonish Review through Vallum and in several American and British magazines and journals. Her poetry has received first and second-place awards and a placement in the League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket campaign. It has been short-listed and Honorably Mentioned in several Canadian contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Her suite, Edward, was a finalist in the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award and the 2024 Toad Hall Chapbook Contest, with The Poets Corner. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. Callista’s first collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel (2024) was published by Frontenac House. Callista lives gratefully on the banks of Lake Ontario, traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nation, in Kingston Ontario, with her husband Don of fifty-nine years.