Wendy Donawa [photo credit: Chris Hancock Donaldson] left her natal Victoria as a young woman
to settle in Barbados. She attended the University of the West Indies, taught
college literature and became a curator at the Barbados Museum. Decades later,
she returned to Victoria to complete her Ph.D., taught literature for several
years and turned her focus to her first love, poetry. Her poetry collection,
Thin Air of the Knowable (Brick Books, 2017), was longlisted for the Raymond
Souster Award and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection,
Our Bodies’ Unanswered Questions (Frontenac House, 2021), launched with the
Frontenac Quartet. The Time of Falling Apart is her third poetry collection.
Her poems are published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Prairie Fire, Freefall, The New
Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Room and others. She is a
contributing editor with Arc Poetry Magazine and a board member with Planet Earth Poetry reading series. She writes a monthly review, “Unpacking the Poem,”
celebrating the diversity and creativity of BC poets. She and her wife live
gratefully on the unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen-speaking) Esquimalt and
Songhees people, in Victoria, BC.1 - How did
your first book change your life?
My first book, Thin
Air of the Knowable, anchored me in poetry, gave me encouragement, and a
reason to stay committed. The manuscript had gathered up what I’d selected from
my writing life, but finding a publisher followed two discouraging years of
rejections. Finally being accepted by Brick Books, a publisher I so admired, was validating; it told me I wasn’t wasting
my time.
How does your
most recent work compare to your previous? How does it
feel different?
It’s hard to bring
a rational perspective to about one’s own progress, but I’d say the craft and
complexity of recent poems developed, through my second book, Our Bodies’
Unanwered Questions, and now, The
Time of Falling Apart, from Harbour Publishing.
Also, the world
being the way it is, my mood and tone is frequently darker, less ebullient. And
now that there’s so much more behind than ahead, I muse on my own mortality,
and the urgency of using time well.
2 - How did
you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Although my
family was not bookish at all, we did have (as well as the Bible) many of the
children’s classics, and I knew by heart much of Robert Louis Stevenson, AA
Milne, the doggerel poems of the Alice books.
Before I thought of them as poems, I loved the rhythm and wit. Once in high school, I loved literature
courses, I became and remain a compulsive reader. I started writing poetry as a
private hobby, no one I knew did anything so eccentric. Anyhow, I thought I was going to be an
artist, a printmaker, and that’s where my creative energy went.
As a young woman,
having married a Barbadian, I settled in Barbados. I taught at the college,
attended UWI, painted, eventually worked as a museum curator. My time coincided
with Barbados’ Independence, and also with the emergence of several major
Caribbean writers: Vidia Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Jean Rhys.
All this influenced my writing, which still was mainly academic or educational.
After nearly four
decades, I returned to Victoria, still writing, and in 2007, joined Patrick
Lane’s annual poetry retreats. I’d say I “came to poetry” then; I owe him more
than I can say. This is where I began a regular writing practice, started sending
poems out and in 2009 published my first chapbook. Three chapbooks later, Brick
Books took my first collection, “Thin Air of the Knowable”, and I started
calling myself a poet.
3 - How long
does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your
writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their
final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
A slow process,
usually, unless I’ve been musing on a particular theme or topic. Occasionally
if I’ve been close to sleep, turning a topic over and over, several lines
appear in their final form, and if I race to write them down, the rest of a
draft poem will take something close to its final shape. That said, I more
often work on large sheets of paper, mapping my thought processes. Copious
notes, freewriting, looking up the linguistic roots of words. I think on paper
and write by hand; when it’s finished enough to be edited, I type it.
4 - Where does
a poem usually begin for you?
A poem
often begins from a memory, often my own, but also often an historical memory
or a geographical one. I’ve always lived
by an ocean; my life in Barbados and now on the BC coast, both landscapes
shaped by colonial conquest, so the land poses its own questions.
Or I read a
current event or respond to a question
posed by something I’ve observed. But these are all starting points; the real
work is finding a through-line for what the poem is really trying to say.
Are you an
author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you
working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Short pieces that
combine. I’ve followed single themes
through my four chapbooks, but an entire poetry collection dictates a more
complicated structure. Each of my books has taken about 4-5 years of writing,
and I can’t keep to a single theme that long. I try not to think “book” during
the process of making meaning in each poem. After two or three years, I find a large bare floor and lay
the all poems out—they generally sort into several themes or categories, then I
shift gears into collection mode, and start trying out titles for the whole.
5 - Are public
readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the
sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing
readings! Writing is necessarily a lonely business, so it’s very rewarding to
share with listeners who want to hear what you say. Often there are searching comments that fuel me
to push a poem harder, or to continue a dialogue.
6 - Do you
have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to
answer with your work? What do you think the current questions are?
These are thorny
questions! It’s often said that poetry
tries to articulate that which is beyond language, but if that is so, why
bother? I find my efforts tend more to
articulate a question or mystery, to unpack a dilemma or situation or ambiguity
that the reader may engage with.
The current
questions that surface for me are often linked to casualties of misused power,
whether they illustrate personal failures of empathy or all along the spectrum
to war, oppression, genocide.
Other questions
concern mortality: have I used my time well? Has my life made a difference?
What remains to be done?
7 – What do
you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even
have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Poets are
society’s truth-tellers. Unfortunately, poetry seems to have very little role
in our present culture, and poets are frequently seen as dilettantes with a
frivolous hobby. Perhaps our current
role is that we are Cassandras, our warnings falling on deaf ears.
But history may
tell a different story: one trend I’ve noticed is that the egregious political
forces unleashed over the last decade have led to an outpouring of really fine,
powerful, poetry in all
styles, forceful and articulate and outraged. These will last the ages, always
relevant: Ada Limon, Carolyn Forché, Margaret Atwood, Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Jan Zwicky,
Adrienne Rich, Tracy Smith, Anne Michaels….many more and many young writers.
8 - Do you
find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or
both)?
Both! I’ve been very lucky in all three books, to
have had empathic, intelligent, insightful editors, whose council pushed me push
harder on one aspect or delete another (ouch). A few times I’ve argued
successfully for a poem’s continued form. So I can be confident only my best writing
“survived.”
9 - What is
the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Can I choose two
pieces? But both require unpacking:
1. “nobody
cares about you!” From one of Ellen Bass’ instructional videos. It felt shocking, but she was talking about
giving your poem energy and distinction, deleting all the excess, particularly
the tendency to start: “I woke from sleep /and I/and I was so sad/I cried as I
looked out the window/and I…”etc. Get
to the point, said Ellen, what is your poem trying to say? Nobody cares about
you!
It was good advice and an editing strategy I use frequently.
2. “What behooves us?” (Adrienne Rich, An Atlas
of the Difficult World)
This
is a bigger, metaphysical question, and one I use thinking about the purposes
of my own poetry. Surely poetry can be a
call to action, to stir the imagination and the conscience, to deepen
understanding, to “sing about the dark times.
10 - What kind
of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
I make excellent resolutions! At times that
works, but often it goes downhill from there. I work best in the morning, I write in my
journal and have fits and starts of productivity. I don’t write every day but I can’t imagine a
day when I don’t read. Sometimes I scribble notes, or freewrite, or prowl the
library. When I get on a roll, the start
of a good poem, or an idea for a sequence of poems, I work almost non-stop.
When I’ve got a dry spell, I defrost the fridge and tidy my closets.11 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
See “dry spell”
above. I try to find ways to tease out a
difficult poem by looking up linguistic sources, or historical analogs. If
there’s an interesting workshop coming up, I join. Collect snippets from good journalism and see
if they’ll work as prompts. Try using
different forms. Try ekphrastic poems. Go
back through some excellent writers’
instructions (Tony Hoagland’s Art of Voice, Ted Kooser’s manual, Adonizzo and
Laux, Dobbyns’ Best words…etc
I have a couple
of poets’ groups who meet monthly.
12 - What
fragrance reminds you of home?
I’m always pulled
in two directions. When I lived in Barbados, I was nostalgic for the scent of
cold salty air, the smell of cedar, the resiny woods smell, good coffee. From here, I’m nostalgic recalling the heavy smell of frangipani, the
tumultuous pounding and smell of the seasonal rains that broke the long dry
season. All the cooking smells. But the pandemic nearly erased my sense of
smell, which in turn diluted my sense of taste. Tragic for a foodie like
me—where I used to cook by taste and smell, now I cook from memory and
conjecture.
13 - David W.
McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms
that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
My early leanings
were with the visual arts, mainly printmaking, painting, I worshipped the
Japanese printmakers and dreamt of Japan.
As inspiration for poetry, early music, pre-Baroque enthralls me, nature
sustains me, and the interaction of science and art is compelling. I’m
definitely not any kind of expert in science or math, and do a lot of (admittedly
superficial) learning on the spot. E.g. I was reading an agricultural report to
find out what abscission was; the article began by saying describing it
as the time of falling apart. Halleluia! This was the title I’d been
looking for, and so many things fell into place.
14 - What
other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life
outside of your work?
Despite an annual
pruning, the groaning boards of my
bookcase reach the ceiling. But here are some of the keepers I re-read and
re-read for their heart, their intelligence, their insight and foresight, their magical craft:
Margaret Atwood, AS Byatt, Michael Crummey, Margaret Drabble, Esi Edugyan, Katherine Govier, Hilary Mantel, Jane Urquhart, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Abraham Verghese.
15 - What
would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d love to be
proficient in at least one musical instrument and in more than one language.
16 - If you
could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or,
alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a
writer?
I’d probably
still be a teacher and artist. Or a museum curator
17 - What made
you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Opportunity. I always wrote privately. When I settled back
in Victoria, I discovered a poetry community, and Planet Earth Poetry with its
weekly open mic. Many fine poets are
also teachers, and I took advantage of that, and particularly Patrick Lane’s
annual retreats.
18 - What was
the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
In Winter I
Get up at Night Jane
Urqhuart
Films: two
because they both blew me away with their astonishing visual qualities:
Dark, dark in
every sense, totally absorbing
The Tragedy of Macbeth, with Denzel
Washington and Frances McDormand as the regal pair. Wish I’d had this on hand
when I was teaching Macbeth.
Conclave: Another visually stunning film, this one in arresting colour.
A coincidence I
chose these two: both about power and its uses, both a struggle between good
and evil, But ambiguous, not an obvious goody/baddie dichotomy. Both with
powerful visual metaphors—saturated colour in one, pure light and dark in the
other.
19 - What are
you currently working on?
I’m currently in
a dry spell, but busy with the business of looking for and arranging
readings and reviews—that’s really hard work for a shy person. It’s a short
window of opportunity until the next poetry season launches its new poets.
A few projects
hanging in mid-air:
• A half-finished
illustrated chapbook called Something
has Been Left Out, poems noting the unawareness, the lacune around some aspect of Indigenous history or rights. I
fear trespassing, so have left it hanging …
• My column, Unpacking
the Poem, about 2 years of monthly exegesis of a BC poet’s poem. Intended
to catch the interest of those new to poetry, or who like to see how and why a
poem works http://planetearthpoetry.com/unpacking
It would be nice to develop further, see if
a book were possible
• A long time
ambition, to see if the focus of my doctoral dissertation, a study of the
dynamics of womens friendships, A Rebel
Band of Friends—to see if its substance could be translated into a
long poem.
Thank you for the
opportunity to tangle with these though-provoking questions!
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
