1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book, Miraculous Hours, arrived at my door on my 27th birthday. Later that year, my first child was born. My most recent book, Fine, will launch on April 6, the day before my 46th birthday. That kid from 2005 is now completing 2nd year university. It’s probably too neat an analogy to say that the difference between the two books is an entire childhood and adolescence but the difference between the two books is an entire childhood and adolescence.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was a small kid, Dennis Lee bounced me on his knee while he read poems. I ran away crying. Later, I drew a picture of Shel Silverstein’s “The Bear in the Frigidaire” that I felt was really good. My mum helped me write a haiku about the sea when I was about 8. When I went to university, I thought I might be an illustrator. I took a poetry writing class and my teacher, Patrick Lane, looked like my dad who was a long-haul trucker and later a crane operator. Then I thought I’d be a novelist. Then I thought I’d try social work. Meanwhile I kept taking poetry classes with Lorna Crozier. Eventually, I had no choice but to write poems.
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?
Any one poem or story or essay might start as if from nothing and come into some wholeness within days or weeks. Other poems—and especially books—might take years or even decades. Sometimes I take many notes, sometimes I don’t. Truthfully, it’s impossible to say definitively what time or note-taking really have to do with the work in its “final” form. Even work that appears to arise from nowhere and come out fully formed also seems to be the product of all the prior living and “work.” Research and patience might be like dance-steps practiced over and over until some pattern is embodied and then no longer thought about.
4 - Where does a poem or work of prose usually begin for you? 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?
This depends entirely on the project. With poems and stories, I typically begin with short pieces that at some point suggest a larger scope. However, I’ve also worked with the bigger project or book in mind from the start. Grant writing and academic life have often required that I articulate a larger project or area of research. I tell my graduate students applying for grants and scholarships that they only need to tell a good story about the project they’re going to work on and then ignore that story while they create the work. Inevitably, the final work always bears an interesting resemblance to that story anyway.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’ve been involved in organizing literary readings my entire adult life. Nevertheless, I’ve always had an ambivalent feeling about them. What matters to me about a reading is that it is a moment in which people gather to privilege works of the imagination. I can’t honestly say that I enjoy doing readings, but I can say that taking part in a reading as an organizer, audience member, or reader is something that I value, that I think is a good in this world, and that I often find very moving.
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 even think the current questions are?
Questions are always being replaced with other questions. For a long time, I asked, How do I expand what I think is beautiful? This has many dimensions and is a deeply political question. I’m still living with that question. Before that question came to me, I wondered for many years how I might live in my own body, and then later in the “body” of the Okanagan Valley (Sylix Territory) in British Columbia, where I’ve made my home for 10 years. More recently, I’ve asked myself how I might talk to the people around me. That might sound like a simple question but the terms “I” and “talk” and “the people” and “around” are all fields of profound consideration. Today the question is, Can I tell the truth?
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?
For me, at their best, writers—and poets in particular—are people who disturb habits of language and story. Literature makes our lives and our use of language strange and new to us and in this way creates a potential for change. Writing is never neutral.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
If by editor we mean anyone who might offer input on a draft, then I find it necessary (which is perhaps different than essential). In this sense, all my work has at a least a couple of “editors.” Language use is a community event. It’s extremely helpful to seek out the guidance of the community.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Don’t fight with pigs. The pigs love it and you get filthy.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?
Stories, essays, and poems all favour different styles of thought. For me, stories privilege narrative. Essays privilege the development of ideas. Poetry privileges sound, image, and graphical representations. Of course, stories can be poetic, essays can tell a story, and poetry can develop an idea, but these areas of privilege are the, for me, the appeal to switching genres. There’s also a productive distinction for me between verse and prose. Because verse privileges changing direction, its relationship to time and idea is often stranger than work in prose.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
For much of the last year, my day has begun with exercise. I write in the margins of my day, as it were.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Relationships. Time. Exercise. My body. Music. Only later books.
13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
Last year, I went as my dad.
14 - 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?
I like a good tautology. McFadden was clearly right in the most basic sense—we can only call something a book because we have a previous example of a book to help conceive of what this new object might be. Everything is an influence though. A book is an entangled cultural product; it’s entangled with all other cultural products and all habits of human being including what we perceive as “natural.” One aspect of my work is to become more and more aware of these influences.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Seamus Heaney’s collection Seeing Things. The poems of Louise Glück. These both have strangely enduring holds on me. A list of the other writers and writings would be too long as to be largely meaningless. Garrett Hongo’s poem “The Legend” is something I return to many times a year. Michael Longley’s “The Linen Industry” is sublime.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Get really old.
17 - 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?
A doctor working in an area of functional medicine.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I was better at it than drawing or playing guitar.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Excluding the great books, I re-read on the regular, the last great book of poetry I read was The White Light of Tomorrow by Russell Thornton. The last film to really move me was Celine Song’s Past Lives.
20 - What are you currently working on?
This questionnaire. Now I’m done. Thank you.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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