D.A. Lockhart, Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and Shores Bend

These Songs We Sing, We Sing Them for Ourselves
            after Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,
            (Make Me Wanna Holler)” 

Our Neon chugs through the dirty July heat and it is all smooth like lake bed when the water pulls back before striking. What isn’t rotten is peppered with hìtkwëtët, tuwchalakw, and këlëkënikànakw. It all moves by just fast enough to make this stretch of creation feel like Hollywood as seen on an RCA twenty-seven-inch cathode ray tube television. Street and sidewalks empty for lack of below union pay extras and the sagging bits of buildings strong enough to outlast rebellion and neglect. And you think this ain’t livin’, this ain’t livin’. Because everything from behind the wheel is a dream you have no part in. and then it is the new box and glass and still rise like moon shot rockets. Each new combusted shaft of new pre-fabbed high rise looks only upon itself, searching the sky above for a god they haven’t heard, nor necessarily believe in. And here we rest. Upon the one great gift we walk upon. Holler aloud our love. Holler it. Await the response.

                                    Stoplight blinks red. Man
                                    shuffles north, steam from     
                                    ground bends to meet him.

The latest from poet and fiction writer D.A. Lockhart is the poetry collection Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and Shores Bend (Windsor ON: Black Moss Press, 2020). Composed with an introduction, opening poem and two sections, Lockhart predominantly utilizes English-language adaptations of Japanese forms, specifically influenced by those who utilized the same as a way to explore ecological concerns. As he writes in his introduction:

            The forms used here play homage to what could be seen as a more environmentally aware moment and motion in North American poetry. These are moments and motions that saw the adoption of experimental and concrete poetry as an underpinning of metaphor and occasion for writers. These poems represent the satori and glimmer moments of revelation that lie at the heart of a more rooted way of living with the land. I trace my roots as an ecologically-centred writer through the works of notable American poets such as Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Gerald Vizenor. All of them poets and thinkers that understand the centrality of creation to the essence of our lives. And in our world imperiled by the damage done to the collective planetary climate, I see the rooted aspects of these forms important to explore.

After the opening poem—“That We Shall Move in Grandmother’s Light”—Lockhart structures two sections: “Ntakiyëmëna,” a section of thirteen poems, each composed out of a sequence of haiku-stanzas, and “Kityènay Asuwakàna,” a section of seventeen poems composed as haibun. “Cold light teases / old snow. How salt crystals / glimmer in spring sun.” he writes, as part of the poem “Chahkoll Kishux,” a poem subtitled “Frog Moon.” Given the limitations of English in the haiku form (adapting seventeen meanings, as I understand it, in the original Japanese into seventeen syllables in the English), the constraint of his choosing haiku, even in sequence, is an extremely tight constraint (and I say this as a fan and admirer of those who regularly work the compact form, whether Cameron Anstee, Mark Truscott, Gary Barwin, jwcurry and Stuart Ross, as well as the late Nelson Ball). This poem, “Chahkoll Kishux,” for example, accumulates eight haiku-stanzas, yet focuses on the briefly-sketched imagistic description of a particular set of scenes. The scenes are set, and described. The scenes are. Admittedly, there is a kind of zen-calm to the haiku-sequences, allowing description to unfold, quietly, each step in turn. In this first section, Lockhart writes a chorus of thirteen different moons, writing his “Falling Leaves Moon,” for example, the poem “Pënipahkihëleyòk Kishux,” as: “Purple sky above / stop light. Red eyes / flitter in puddles. // Above creation / hunter’s dog catches bear / sëpi shukël turns red.” As his introduction offers, “the cycle of haiku utilizes the movement of time measured in the passing of Lenape full moons. This usage mirrors much of the traditional means to organize Japanese haiku collections. This method of organization speaks to the rooted matter of many non-western Indigenous cultures. It highlights how even time itself originates from creation.” Think with colour, each moon is provided its imagistic description, its pointillist sketch.

And yet, I find it is in the second section, where he utilizes the haibun, where the book really begins to sing; where he allows himself more of an opportunity to open up the cadence, expand the point form of the haiku into a broader lyric. “Let these words come in as if fog from the long absent marshes to our / south,” he writes, to begin the poem “This Earth We Touch, At Rest, In Motion,” a poem “after John Lee Hooker’s ‘Carwling King Snake,’” “coast up the river past bridge moornings, shuttered steel mills, / piles of asphalt rocks and road salt.” There haven’t been many Canadian poets over the years to play with the haibun, although some examples I’m aware of would include Fred Wah in his Waiting for Saskatchewan (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1985), or more recently, Ottawa poet Chris Johnson. The poems riff off specific songs from Detroit’s lengthy history as a music capital, from pieces by Marvin Gaye, MC5, Aaliyah and The White Stripes to John Lee Hooker, Bob Seger, Eminem and Smokey Robinson. The poems sing and stretch and evoke, wrapping up the collection as a lyric of geography, belonging and influence. Tùkhòne: Where the River Narrows and Shores Bend is a poetry title geographically and culturally situated, writing an acknowledgment to the land, the peoples and its polyphony of song.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with André Narbonne

André Narbonne is the author of Twelve Miles to Midnight (Black Moss) and You Were Here (Flat Singles Press). His writing has been widely published in North American journals and has won the Atlantic Writing Competition, the FreeFall Prose Contest, the James DeMille Prize, the Clare Murray Fooshee Contest, and the David Adams Richards Prize. His story, “The Advancements,” was anthologized in Best Canadian Stories. He teaches at the University of Windsor.

André Narbonne reads this month in Ottawa, as part of the 7th annual VERSeFest Poetry Festival.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

How did it change my life? I wish I knew!

My son, Simon, was born a few months after the April launch of my short story collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight. My youngest daughter, Pearl, was 15-months at the time. Now my collection of poetry, You Were Here, is out and Pearl’s two and Simon’s seven months. That’s really what’s happening at our house, and as important and I know the books are, I don’t think I’ll be able to assess the impact of the publications until I get a full night’s sleep. I don’t mean that to sound flip. I am aware that I am mindful of audiences in a different way, and I think that’s good. Publication has made my self-evaluations about where I’m “going” with my writing a lot easier. I think I have a lot to learn from this experience, but I think that will come later, at a distance.

The books are very different but their politics are the same. Twelve Miles is a series of linked stories following the lives of two sailors. You Were Here focuses on the felt reality of early childhood. Both are sentimental – I’m not afraid of that word – because both are engaged in the politics of inclusion. Both are about value, especially how we create value through our ability to perceive it.

2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

It was the other way. I was always writing. I tried to write my first novel in grade three – something Hardy Boysish. I tried to write my own version of The Lord of the Rings in grade eight, my own version of Star Wars in grade nine. Kid’s stuff, except I was doing that when I should have been doing other kid’s stuff like playing football. That changed in grade eleven. My English teacher was Peter Baltensperger, owner of Moonstone Press. He brought poets into the classroom (I’m thinking Penny Kemp might have spoken to the class but I’m not sure because I didn’t know who anyone was back then – poets of her quality), got me interested in Carl Jung, Margaret Atwood, Ezra Pound, and Tom Wayman. From the time I read “Wayman in Love” I was a poet.

Wayman, whom I’ve never met, showed me the power of the line over the sentence, showed me the beautiful work that can be done by ironically naïve speakers. This was the first time I realized how much pleasure I could get from reading a poem. That same year I bought a copy of Fiddlehead. It was something of a random purchase. I don’t know who the authors were in the issue I read, but they inspired me greatly. (I’ve always read the journals and my teachers have been largely unknown to me – they could be living next door, which is how I like it.) I was kicking around St. Catharines, spending weekends at the public library to get out of the house and poetry spoke to me. On weekends I lay on my bedroom floor rearranging line breaks and spacing, seeing if I could pull off the same tricks. Again, not doing teenager stuff, but that didn’t make me lonely. I felt empowered.

Having decided to be a poet I took the next logical step and became a marine engineer. I wrote poetry from Thunder Bay to Texas. I moved to Halifax to be closer to my ship and while living there I served as chair of the Halifax Chapter of the Canadian Poetry Association. That’s what I was doing, by the way, when I first heard of rob mclennan. You judged one of our contests, I think in 1989. I’ll have to look it up. I have a complete library of the BS Poetry Society, as we called ourselves.

A few of the poems in You Were Here date back to my Halifax days (“My Brother,” “In Love,” “Beowulf on Wings”). The book that Flat Singles Press published is consistent with the book I started writing 30 years ago.

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?

My best ideas come while I’m jogging and they present themselves abstractly. My wife finds folded-up notes in coats, jeans, laundry. My backpack is about two inches deep in scribbles I’ll get back to whenever. I don’t know whether I’m thinking poetry or prose at first. I don’t think lines or sentences. In the end, I write as many short stories as poems. If I’m writing a story, the plot is pretty much the last thing I come up with. The argument is the spine. For fiction, I keep to a 3-day first-draft writing schedule. I might think about a story for a month before I write the first draft in three days, which is my practice. Get it down as quickly as possible. Spend as much time as necessary on either side, planning and then revising, but make sure to have an authentic first draft that isn’t constantly looking over its shoulder. I do something similar with poetry. Perhaps this is the result of being an engineer. I’m into system. I admire a good blueprint. Time-wise this is the opposite of how Alistair MacLeod wrote stories, although his expression was “measure twice, cut once,” and that’s close to what I do. I measure twice, cut once, and then I file.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction 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?

The first part I’ve inadvertently answered above. In answer to the second, because You Were Here replicates the felt reality of childhood, I intended from the start that it be cumulative in effect. Not all the poetry I’ve written over the past years has been for this collection, but I’ve known when it was. I see the book spatially. I see the reality getting larger, more involved with each poem. Think of a room that keeps expanding. The room of childhood is meant to be as large as any room in which you would find an adult. This from a writer whose favourite book is Under the Volcano.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

I am a very nervous reader. Readings are too important for me not to be very, very serious about them, and no-one catastrophizes like I do. My imaginings of possibilities are endless. How will this sound? Should this come next or will that throw off the whole impression I’m trying to make? Will people hear my voice as I do?

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?

No. I mean everyone writes with theories. But theories are not my muse. The two most pressing issues for me are completeness and pleasure. I’m more into readers. A poem can be true to a theory, it can be bang on and still be a drag. That said, I think my answer to question four is suggestive of a theory, the idea that poetry can be cumulative in effect, that poems can have a spatial relationship to each other.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Well there are many cultures happening in the same space. Every day I walk by people who will cancel out my vote at the next election. The writer has a definite role in some of those cultures; less in others. I mean, we’re still here. If we were easily done away with, we’d be gone.

People have been reading Lyrical Ballads this past two hundred years but that didn’t change the American election.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Patricia Young very graciously agreed to be my editor for You Were Here and her input was essential. I needed to know other possibilities: both in terms or writing and also in terms of being read. Three years ago, I helped my dad write his memoir. My father is a francophone and a retired French teacher. I saw my role as keeping the tone of his voice – its Frenchness – while removing his exclamation marks. I think that’s what Patricia did for me. (I think that our exclamations marks are often invisible to us.) Another important thing she did was to tell me not to throw poems out when I wasn’t certain about them. “A building is an idea” is one of the poems she said to keep, and I’m glad I did. She told me what to keep in. So did Joe LaBine. Patricia and I edited over Skype. I’m not a Skyper. I don’t know where to look. I loved every minute of it. It was another classroom and I’m someone who loves school.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Read everything. I’ve heard that a lot.

Another good piece of advice came from Kay Tudor, owner of Roseway Press. I was in a creative writing class she taught at St. Mary’s and I wrote a story about an elderly couple who feared death. Kay called me on it. Why did I assume they feared death just because they were old? Maybe the elderly welcome death. What I got from that was the importance of fully evaluating people’s motivations. I’m told that’s what I write: stories and poems about motivation.

To change the question, were I to offer advice to other writers it would be to memorize poems. What you learn from memorizing poems is equally useful to writers of prose. I suggest starting with Paul Celan’s “Your Hand Full of Hours.” Maybe follow that with “Batter My Heart Three-Personed God.” I find Donne extraordinarily difficult. He’s taught me a lot.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short stories)? What do you see as the appeal?

Whether an idea becomes a poem or a story has a good deal to do with how the ironies in it operate. Some ideas need the irony of the line to complete them. Also, poetry is harder. I’m far more critical of my poetry. It seems to me that I can be more objective about my short stories: this character is round, this is a meaningful turn, a good bit of anagnorisis that sides with what I want my argument to do etc.

Sometimes a poem just doesn’t work, and who gets to decide?

Although a good portion of the poems in You Were Here had already been published and some had won prizes, had either Patricia or Joe LaBine, the series editor at Flat Singles Press, told me the book was no good I would have taken their word for it and written a different book. Alexander MacLeod says in an interview I watched recently that you don’t get to decide if your work is any good. Somebody else has to say that. I guess that’s off topic, but I’ll leave it in.

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?

I teach. I’m a sessional lecturer. I have two very young children and an almost adult child who lives in Ottawa. My schedule involves working whenever I can. Creative work I almost always do in the morning, when there’s less clutter in the foreground of my mind. Whenever possible I reserve the time spent drinking the first cup of coffee for creative work. Nighttime is for notes not paragraphs.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I just keep working. By working I don’t mean writing but reading with a purpose. Listening with a purpose. Almost everything I’ve learned I’ve learned through imitation. Also, I’m not someone who sits at the computer waiting for the muse. I chart. I plan.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

I have a poem about this in You Were Here. Lilacs. Our lilac bushes formed a small wall on one side of the driveway, and I would come home from school and smell them on my way to the house. I have many memories of doing that – going to the lilacs and sniffing them.

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?

Politics. Family. Memory. Arguments with family over whose memory is right. Nightmares. Nature. Other people’s conversations. But definitely books. When I wrote You Were Here I had a small library of books in mind including, Archy and Mehitabel and Spoon River Anthology. My interest in those two books wasn’t because they were written a hundred years ago. I was interested in what the authors did with voice. You Were Here is very much about voice. I imitate, inhabit, reproduce the voice of a child, essentially a cockroach in an adult world, the child I nearly was, whose voice is now lost like the lost voices in Edgar Lee Masters’ graveyard.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There’s so many, but I would highlight magazine culture because people complain about it so much and it’s been good to me. That’s pretty much how I found Patricia Young. I read her short story collection, Airstream, and afterwards I kept finding her in the journals.

Other than that there is no science to my reading. I read everything. Alice Munro, of course, but also Mein Kampf. The Bible. I was a teenager when I caught my first ship. I packed The Tin Drum, Steppenwolf, The Complete Works of Kafka, and The Painted Bird. It took me a month to realize I’d have to get interested in sports if I was going to talk to people without coming across as weird.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Move to Iceland.

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?

Reading that, the first thought that came to mind was drug addict. I was very unhappy in high school. Poetry and engineering got me out of my funk. I had no real vocation. When I left engineering to study English my plan was to get into law. I stuck with English because I was thirty and it seemed to me that I could change my life once only and for that reason I should do the hardest thing and getting a PhD was harder than getting a law degree. I don’t regret the choice. My wife is becoming a lawyer. She can look after that.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

An interest in beauty. I wanted to make something beautiful. I was a pretty decent cartoonist but I would never be good enough.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Two books I’m really sold on are All Saints by K.D. Miller and The Meagre Tarmac by Clark Blaise. As for films, I’m “one of those.” I rarely go to movies and I’ve turned off my TV. The movies that interest me are black and whites. My favourite film is a silent movie: The General. It’s my “disaster movie.” I put in on when I’m depressed and it helps.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a study of Canadian educator, critic, writer, Archibald MacMechan. From 1906 until his death in 1933 he wrote a regular column for the Montreal Star, the same paper in which Leacock published Sunshine Sketches of aLittle Town. I have microfilm sent to me from a number of university libraries. Calgary, for some reason, has the Montreal Star. Windsor, where I work, does not. I’ve been copying and transcribing my way through his articles. I’m fascinated by Archy. (I feel I know him well enough to call him that.) The world is exploding and he’s focused on the task at hand: being the last Carlylean, as he tells his students at Dalhousie. He occasionally mentions WWI, but doesn’t notice the sinking of the Titanic. The North End of Halifax is blown to smithereens. He’s in the South End. Still makes his deadlines. Archy has already worked his way into my fiction, but I’m not finished editing the story in which he appears, so I won’t say anything about it.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with D.A. Lockhart

Born in Chatham, ON and raised in Windsor, ON, D.A. Lockhart holds degrees from Trent University, Montana State University, and Indiana University. He is a graduate of the Indiana University - Bloomington MFA in Creative Writing program where he held a Neal-Marshall Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in the Windsor Review, Sugar House Review, Hawk and Whipporwill, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, and Contemporary Verse 2 among others. He is a recipient of Canada Council for the Arts grant for Aboriginal People and Ontario Arts Council grants for his poetry. He is author of Big Medicine Comes to Erie (Black Moss Press 2016) He is a research consultant and is editor-in-chief for Urban Farmhouse Press based out of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He is a member of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Oddly enough, the concept of the first book hasn’t exactly had this massive effect on me. I feel like it should, but things sort of feel, well, the same. Having that first book is important, I won’t lie on that accord. As a professional it’s an absolute critical step in the process of one’s career. Because of that I feel deeply thankful to Black Moss Press and Marty Gervais for taking on chance on my work. But I’m still just focusing on the other work I’m still trying to wrap up. And that feels pretty normal. So you could say that there is a change internally, in the day-to-day of what I’m doing. But externally it’s an important and big change because it’s the physical thing that people can see about me.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Funny on this one because I actually majored in fiction in graduate school. I did write some rather amateurism poems when I was doing my undergraduate in Montana, but on the whole I first came to fiction. My thesis was actually in fiction and the majority of my studies focused on fiction. But my success has come mainly in poetry. It has always seemed more natural, in a very personal way, to construct. You could say that I just find something that is more me in poetry. It’s a more natural way for me to do the work I often find myself wanting to do. But let’s be honest, I did have excellent poets as instructors at IU with Catherine Bowman and Maura Stanton. They probably helped me straighten out those amateurism poetics.

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?

Easy answer is as long it takes. But that’s a bit of a cop-out. So let’s go on with some nuance. Some writing projects are quick, others take a considerable amount of time. One of the shortest poems I’ve ever written took me about seven months to get to a place I wanted it to be. An exception, yeah, but I think you get the point about “as long it takes” because I rarely get that amount of time with a single poem anymore. Typically it takes about a month of pretty focused work to get a given individual piece to a place I would want it to be before submitting to a journal or magazine. My thesis director and Indiana University was Tony Ardizzone. He’s known for teaching the “waxing-the-floor” method. In it you lay down a rough “floor” of a piece (poetry or fiction) and you then you keeping smoothing the piece with successive layers of revisions until it gets to the place you need it to be. The very process is rather indicative of the length it takes me to get through stuff.

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?

Oddly enough, a lot of poems start with the friction between two ideas or items or places. There is a lot of Richard Hugo in where my work starts. For me, The Triggering Town, is just about all you need to know to get going on writing a poem. But they are organic. Meaning what you see is the end process. The basic concept is that you come up with something, say an image, an event, a place, and then find something else that haunts you about it and put them down on the page and see how they play out. It’s the whole chorus girls in the silo thing that Hugo talks about in his essay. That is the manner in which I explore individual pieces. But a lot of my recent work has actually been envisioned as larger works first. Take for example the “Devil in the Woods” manuscript I’ve been working away at. The over-arching concept of the collection is craft an indigenous consciousness in the heart of Ontario’s physical being that then reacts, both spiritually and vocally, to the key figures and events in Canada’s consciousness and self-identity. With that framework, I then crafted the individual pieces in the collection. But the individual pieces, I construct my poems organically.  

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Public readings are definitely part of what I do. They aren’t necessarily central in any way to the creative process of the world. As I write the pieces I definitely consider the sounds and the musicality that goes into the way the poem reads. I see even an individual reading a poem on the page or screen as an event that must take into account the sound of the poems. But what I read, by the time I do so in a public reading is already past the creative process. I generally don’t read unfinished work in pubic readings. I enjoy reading as much as the next poet. Thing is that once I’m there and reading I feel as though I’ve already crafted the piece and am performing what I’ve come to know as my work.

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?

I am interested in the manner in which land defines us. My characters and poems ride heavy on that. There is a spirituality in my work that explores that connection. Although I am profoundly interested in the manner in which the land shapes and defines everything from our emotions to our choices to the very types of creatures we are. I do have to admit to a slight Marxist bend on things on top of that. But to a certain extent perhaps every working class poet must claim a connection to Marxist ideology if not even just tangentially.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

We have a duty that extends beyond how much we can get paid for our work. We’re fortunate enough to be a given a voice that rises up for the masses. Our words should and must be measured. Because writers are people and every person must serve a certain role (I’m thinking about the clan system in many First Nations traditions) we all writing a tad bit different. But we do have an obligation to be engaged with the world, aid in the addition of voices that we know to be required, respond to things that need to be responded. 

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Working with an outside editor can be both rewarding and difficult. Editors are people too and you can’t possibly get along with everybody you meet. I was lucky enough to have a very good one when I lived in Indianapolis. Stephen Fox, he did some essential work on my manuscript back then. But generally, I don’t work with an editor.  Not recently anyways. Maybe that’ll change.   

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Fail. A lot. Learn from those. Be ok with those failures. Grow from what you learn.

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 have to write every day or I go a little batty. Although as a dad that works from home it means that I generally have to organically find the time to work. This means I usually end up doing most my work after well into the night. I spend a lot of time with headphones on and writing rough drafts in my journals to CBC (I do love Laurie Brown’s the Signal) and a good deal of 1950s and 60s jazz or Phish concerts.  After I spend some time working through new stuff I generally give a few hours to revisions and transcribing my journals to computer.  It all depends where I am with given work. Recently, it’s been more about creation. This means a lot more journal writing. Which I tend to enjoy a great deal.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I read. And then I often make notes, sort of talk to the works I’m reading. If I’m ever really stuck, I’ll sit down and copy out work I’ve really been digging. It’s how I get down to the technical framework of the pieces. I like to see the act of creation on a word-by-word, line-by-line manner. So you could say that I turn to the work of other writers to help me break through. Although, on occasion I can say a good walk along the waterfront here helps, too. But that is when things get a little too unhinged.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

White sage, Sweetgrass, Cedar, Lillacs.

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?

I listen to music a lot when I work. I do have to admit to a great affinity for Phish and Grateful Dead.  They are a very heavy rotation for me. But a lot of classic jazz, Monk, Dizzy, Freddie Hubbard, makes it on to my playlists. To an extent photographs do influence me. Robert Frank’s work most definitely has over the years, as has Paul Strand’s work.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I’m huge on Seamus Heaney’s work. Simon Ortiz is one of my cannon. I mentioned him before, but Richard Hugo. I would say that poets of substantial influence would be Catherine Bowman, Campbell McGrath, Maurice Manning, Maura Stanton, and Greg Keeler. If studied under almost all of them or I was simply around them enough to know them before I knew their work. It really helped me to sort of back-engineer their work to understand how a poet comes through on the things they writer.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Finish the novel I’m still working on.  Visit Nunavut and Yellowknife. Well, maybe as much of the Canadian Arctic as I can. Norway and Iceland, too. So, plenty.

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 might have been a sports journalist. Like I said, I have to write. It drives me crazy not to. Plus, I’m a sports junkie. So that would make it at least passion drive. If I couldn’t write at all, maybe something in farming. Who doesn’t have dreams about going back to the land? It would be a very good failed or retire poet thing to do. Raising goats and chickens, some heirloom okra and bean crops, all that sort of stuff that super cool folks in Indiana and Montana were up to while I was out there. Maybe the farm thing should be an answer to question 15, too.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

It was something I had to do. As have, really can’t explain why. I sort of get up every day and know that I have to write something. It’s been that way since I was teenager. It’s hard not be what you are supposed to be.  

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

It’s not a recent release, but I’ve read it recently and it’s a great book. Bob Earl Stewart’s Something Burned along the Southern Border was a great read. The pieces are gritty and real and just feel like the city I grew up in. In Windsor had a Richard Hugo, it was Stewart. Film’s a little tougher. I read a lot more than I watch films. So maybe I’ll just promise to find some great films in the near future.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m just finishing up the first draft of a historical fiction novel set in southwestern Ontario in 1849 called “The Waters that Divide.” The book explores the aftermath of the burning a Jesuit mission on Walpole Island and sort of powder keg this frontier region of Upper Canada was at the time. All of this is done through the viewpoint of an “urban” Indigenous protagonist as he explores conceptions of culture and self in the face of an ever-burning conflict between those in power and those without. I’ve also just received an Aboriginal Arts grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to finish up a poetry manuscript entitled “Devil in the Woods.” It’s a collection of letter and prayer poems loosely based on Richard Hugo’s 33 Letters and 13Dreams. Major difference is the viewpoint is from an Anishnaabe man in Central Ontario and he is addressing famous real and fictional figures in Canadian society.  

12 or 20 (second series) questions;