Ben Berman Ghan(he/him) is a writer and editor whose work has been featured in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Temz Review, Abyss and Apex, Pinhole Poetry, and others. He is the author of the novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Buckrider Books 2024), the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020), and the short story collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest Books 2019). Originally from Toronto, Canada, he now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is pursuing a PhD in English Literature at The University of Calgary.
You can read Home in the January 2025 issue.
How do you revise your work?
By drafting, and drafting, and drafting, and then cutting. The two ways I tend to write poetry are by writing something very short and simple and then adding and changing and growing it over a decent period of weeks, or I write one extremely LONG poem and then eventually pick away at it and separate it into several pieces or snip out all the fluff until I find that one actual poem. Home is an example of the latter, being all that remains of what was originally a five-page piece.
How do you know when a poem is finished? / Is a poem ever really finished?
The work is done the moment it is published. I am done with the work when I reach a point where, happy with it or not, I know there’s nothing more than I can do to it; nowhere else I can take it, except into the trustworthy arms of a good editor.
Is there a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone for you?
Whatever I’m reading at the time is always on my mind when I’m drafting. I think both Jaye Simpson’s It Was Never Going to Be Okay, and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field were on my mind when writing this.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
The drive to write poetry and the drive to write prose are very similar in me. So long as I’m writing something, I’m happy.
Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you’ve learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
“Please calm down” has been excellent advice for me. Very helpful.
What are you working on now?
I am knee-deep into my doctoral thesis, which has taken the form of a wildly strange speculative novel. I hate it. I love it. I’ve learned so much about jellyfish. Aside from that, I’m in a lovely moment where I’m waiting for work to recommence— there is a chapbook of poems I will be editing this spring, as well as my second collection of fiction for Buckrider Books! I love to be editing. Rewriting is writing.