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 chapbook was a weird little e-book called Eclogues from H_NGM_N Books in Buffalo (free to download here). At the time I was thinking a lot about what astronauts mean. I’m not sure it changed my life a ton! But it was great to feel like I was participating in something bigger than just me. Poetry is pretty solitary work so it’s nice to do something a little more public every now and then.
Ultra Blue is my first full-length book. I’m still trying to figure things out by writing. Although it’s as fragmented and collage-y as my previous work, this book is probably my most straightforward stuff so far. It feels intensely earnest to me, to a kind of uncomfortable degree.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up in Halifax listening to CKDU, Dalhousie University’s campus radio station. They played all kinds of eclectic stuff—I remember making tapes of Jim Carroll reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project and listening to them over and over on my walkman at night. I still can’t fall asleep without some kind of talking in my ear. Around the same time, my older sister won a junior high English prize and was awarded a squat little paperback anthology called Immortal Poems of the English Language. I remember reading the line “After the first death there is no other” from a Dylan Thomas poem in there and not knowing what it meant but just being super impressed that in poems you could just say cool-sounding stuff like that.
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?
It usually takes me a long time to get going! I tend to have a long phase of accumulating bits and pieces, fragments and phrases. Then I have to spend time figuring out how the different parts might fit together. The last part, actually making a poem, comes quicker.
4 - Where does a poem 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?
Both! Sometimes from the ground up, sometimes from the top down. From the very beginning, the stuff in Ultra Blue was always going to make up one big project, or maybe two medium-sized projects that ended up coming together into one book.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings feel like a separate thing. It’s nice to connect with friends, meet people, hang out together. But it’s not really part of the creative process for me, other than how the prospect of a reading causes you to kind of take stock of what you have, what’s finished, what goes together etc.
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?
Well I’m interested in fragmentation and openness, in intertextuality, in how poetry emerges from other texts and discourses, how meanings build upon themselves. I like gathering bits and pieces of things and seeing how they might fit together. I like working with language as a kind of technology for thinking and for carrying meaning across contexts. I believe language is slippery and full of connotation and cultural baggage. Am I trying to answer questions? I feel more like I’m trying to describe questions, or restate them in new ways. I’m not sure what the big questions should be right now, probably something about how there’s this vast repository of all of human knowledge that is accessible at all times by people, corporations, governments, zombie algorithms. For instance I feel like poems should not pretend that the internet doesn’t exist.
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?
Different roles for different writers! I think it’s important for someone to be paying close attention to language, to how it’s doing what it’s doing and saying what it’s saying. This is one thing writers can do.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
It’s ok! I have to really believe in the editor. Luckily, for Ultra Blue I worked with Kevin Connolly, who is great, and the poems are better for it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Sister Corita Kent said that the only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. (All her rules are excellent advice for artists of all kinds.) In terms of direct counsel, my Grade 7 sewing teacher taught me that the first rule of stain removal is to do something right away. This is valuable advice that I have carried always. (Thanks, Mrs. Weber.)
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?
Last summer, I moved with my young family from France to Nova Scotia, so it’s been a year of upheaval and disrupted routines. Reading is probably the most important part of writing for me, and I’m usually able to keep that part going. I’m driving a lot at the moment to get to and from work, so I’m getting through a lot of audiobooks. I’m still working on a good system for safely taking notes while driving—speech-to-text is a little rough, it’s hard to highlight good parts of books to go back to, and so on. But generally the poem-writing routine is to go through the week accumulating fragments, little ideas or phrases here and there, and then whenever I have time, sitting down to try to shape those notes into poems.
When I’m writing fiction, it’s more momentum-based. I write a little bit every day, trying to turn off the critical part of my brain that wants very badly to tell me that the writing I’m doing is no good. Instead I try to focus on just moving forward. I find it helpful to call the files I’m working on things like “Dumb ideas for the part when A does B” or “Bad version of conversation between X and Y” which is silly but does in fact relieve some pressure and lets me write a little more freely. I try not to worry about the quality of writing until I get to the end of whatever fiction thing I’m writing, then I go back and try to make it good.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Books! New books or old books. Sometimes in my writing I get to a place where I convince myself that the secret to the only way forward is contained in some specific book that I have not yet read, which is a bit of a trap because a lot of the time the book turns out to be not quite what you imagined. Sometimes the book does give you a great idea and everything is cleared up right away, the path forward is revealed. And sometimes you have to go looking through more books. But always there’s someone who has thought about the same ideas you’re thinking about, or has struggled through similar struggles, or has managed to phrase things in a specific way that causes something to click. This is the great magic of books.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I lived in NYC for a long time and remember the smell of wild mint on the Highline. Then when I moved to France I mowed over a patch of wild mint and it was the same smell all over again. It’s nice to think that we can plant wild mint wherever we end up.
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?
Films, music, art. Science as well, I guess: I wrote a novel about relativity but it turned out not great (you can read some of the better parts here). Actually maybe the main thing I take from science is the idea of work building on work. My dad was a microbiologist and sometimes I look up his old papers and the citations to his work from scientists who followed. I try to build on what writers have done before me, though I’m not sure that poetry advances in the same way as our understanding of stomach bacteria. But it’s nice to feel part of a long chain.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
So many! Recently there’s been Susan Howe, Lisa Robertson, CAConrad, Mark Bibbins, Tomaž Šalamun, César Aira, John Thompson, Elizabeth Bishop, Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Uhh I guess homeownership?
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?
In another life I think I’d have liked to be a saltmaker, like the sauniers of Île de Ré. Once I tried to make salt in New York, lugging a bucket of Coney Island seawater home on the subway. Then I boiled it off on the stove. It made the whole building smell bad and the salt tasted metallic and awful.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Fame, fortune, etc.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Probably the last really great book I read was Debths by Susan Howe, which for me was one those books that make you go “Oh right, this is why I love poetry.” CAConrad’s Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return is another great one I read recently. In the car, I just finished listening to Accordion Crimes, and Annie Proulx is becoming one of my favourite novelists. I also just finished the Margaret Atwood memoir, which was pretty good if you’re interested in Margaret Atwood lore. Her family had a cottage a couple cottages down from my grandparents, perched on a cliff over the Bay of Fundy. Also there’s a lot of House of Anansi tea in there!
For movies, most of what I’ve seen in recent years has been at the Cannes film festival—I worked there the past couple of years and would just go to anything that happened to fall in gaps in my schedule. A good one from last year is the documentary about Shia LaBeouf’s disastrous community theater experiment called Slauson Rec. It’s a tough, compelling watch! He comes off as such a simultaneously charismatic and charming but manipulative and violent figure. Like I can’t believe he let the documentary happen. I’m not sure if it has found North American distribution yet, but I hope it does.
19 - What are you currently working on?
Ultra Blue is a very fathers/sons-coded book, and my daughter has negotiated that the next long project will be more up her alley. She has requested a novel involving caverns and peril, so that’s the main thing happening now.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
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