12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jude Neale

Jude Neale is a master educator, a Canadian poet, vocalist, spoken word performer, workshop facilitator, and mentor. Jude has written eleven books, to date. Her book, A Quiet Coming of Light, A Poetic Memoir (Leaf Press) was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, which is in a national recognition of Canadian female poets. One of Jude's poems from her book, Splendid in its Silence, was chosen by Britain's Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion,  to ride with other winners around the Channel Islands on public transit for a year, and she was a featured reader at the Guernsey International Literary Festival. This book was an SPM Prize winner and was published in the UK.

Some of these poems can be heard on Jude’s collaborative (viola/spoken word) EP, Places Beyond with the renowned composer and viola player, Thomas Beckman, Jude and Thomas completed a successful collaboration for the world premiere of their St. Roch Suite, with the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.

Jude and Bonnie Nish started an online collaboration which lead them to write Cantata in Two Voices (Ekstasis Editions), A Blooming, (Ekstasis Editions) and We Sing Ourselves Back, which were published in 2019.

Impromptu, launched in Spring 2020, The River Answers, was published in the winter 2021. As was Inside the Pearl (Guernica Editions). The Flaw (Ekstasis Editions) is her most articulate collection, she believes. Her vocal and poetry CDs will be launched in Spring 2023, a distillation spanning over 50 years.

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, The Perfect Word Collapses, allowed me entrance to readings which gave  me the opportunity to connect deeply with each other, which is my main goal in writing. This eleventh book is a Legacy book, meaning I think it will be read long after I’m dead. It is a collection of 125 pages ranging from form poetry to haiku, a couple of rhyming poems  and mainly free verse. The one from last year, Inside the Pearl (Guernica Editions) was written while in residence at Joy Kogawa House and told of this controversial house in both photos and haiku.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve always written poetry. So did my grandfather. He memorized and orated all of Robert Service to me before I was five. I won my first poetry contest at eight with BC CBC contest for young people.

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 takes me two months to write a book. I deliberately write for two months using my own prompts so I can complete a manuscript of 100 poems. I learned how to edit for two years at Humber college with the acclaimed writer Elisabeth Harvor. She always sits on my shoulder when I write so I never have to go back and edit. I have written 8 books on my phone.

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?
I am working on a book from the very beginning, usually having already chosen the title and cover. One or two poems a day for two months and I have a completed manuscript.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I am an opera singer who loves to perform, so readings are an extension of that. I’m not happy until someone is in tears!

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 write about the news a lot. In this book I have genocide poems, political poems and societal reflection poems. I feel very strongly it’s my job to lay bare what is going on. I’m very concerned with the Canadian perpetration of injustice visited on our First Nations people. My last book dealt with the Japanese internment 1942-1946 of which my book reflected upon. I think in these wildly spinning global and national times it is a writer’s duty to address the issues facing us all.

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?
See last answer

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
No one has ever edited my books but me. I am pretty firm on each word choice or line break. Each book is a product of my mind only.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When Rachel Rose, ex Vancouver Poet Laureate told me “to find the golden thread” when ordering my many poems into a book. I totally understood her meaning which has always helped me since. Elisabeth Harvor told me to never be sentimental and maudlin—which I stick to.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to short/flash fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write flash fiction as well, which has been well received in the UK and Canada.

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 write on my phone between midnight and 4:00 am. I like the stillness and this otherworldly way it feels then.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I am one of the lucky ones who has never had writer’s block! It all comes pouring out of me like a conduit.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Baking bread because my mom baked it everyday and passed it on to me!

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?
Music is my biggest influence, both lyrically and cadence wise. I always read each poem out loud as I write so I can feel the silence and internal rhythm.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m a huge fan of the American writer Mark Doty, particularly for his beautiful use of imagery and visceral but tender subject matters.

Since I’ve become a grandmother this has opened up my vast capacity to reflect on them, my daughter and my own mothering.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’ve written a long piece of poetic narrative prose in a collaboration with Thomas Beckmann when we created a three movement suite based on the St Roch's navigation through the Northwest Passage. It was performed by the Prince George Symphony. I’ve also written songs, but my secret desire would be to write an opera!

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?
I taught writing in the schools for 25 years and sang. I think I’d be a singer if the pull towards writing had not been so great.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It is how I’ve always expressed myself from a very early age. I wanted to do what my Grandfather had done. I recognized early the power of language.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Best book for me was The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. She is my favourite author because she knows her subject so well and is able to write about it in a powerful and poetic manner.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on my next book with well known artist, Nick Jens, about Bowen Island, called Home to Stay. Each painting has or will have my poetic response. It will be four line poems and will tell the story of this island today.

My poetic collaboration with renowned textile artist Jane Kenyon will open at CityScapes Gallery in February.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Beth Kope

Beth Kope grew up in Alberta and is honoured to live, work, and play in Victoria, BC, Coast Salish territory of Lekwungen and WSÁNEĆ nations. Kope has taught in Alberta, Adelaide, Australia and Quebec and currently works at Camosun College. She has published two poetry collections and has been included in the anthologies Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017) and Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds (Caitlin Press, 2020). Kope’s first book, Falling Season (Leaf Press, 2010) detailed her mother’s decline due to an aggressive form of dementia called Lewy Body, which BC BookWorld described as “poems of honest dismay and almost unbearable sadness”. Her second book, Average Height of Flight (Caitlin Press, 2015), was a meditation on West Coast landscape and grief and a poem from the collection was featured in Poetry in Transit. Kope has read at Word on the Street Vancouver, been a featured reader at Planet Earth Poetry, The Writer’s Studio Reading Series, and The Victoria Festival of Authors. She is the co-host, along with Yvonne Blomer, of the annual Forest Poet-Tree event which is part of the Victoria Festival of Authors.

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?

OH, my, when Falling Season was accepted for publication I was flying!  How amazing it is when you find a publisher who loves your work!  That first book was satisfying on so many levels, and extremely personal, from the cover design and use of my mother’s photo, to the whole narrative thread of the poems. I can still feel it in my hands, the copy, the lustre.

The thrill when a manuscript finds a home is still there; it will always be there, for me.  It was there when Caitlin published Average Height of Flight, and my third, Atlas of Roots.

I know how rare it is to be published, and that there are so many amazing poets out there.

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

Only poems, only ever poems.  I’m not sure why…….she shrugs.

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?

I am very slow, I think.

My first two poetry collections sprang from the writer’s studio intensive with Betsy Warland.  When she read the poems on dementia and my mother she immediately saw a separate and distinct manuscript.

Most poems were written parallel to the experience, along day to day crisis’ with my mom, and step by step along with her decline.   I tried to ask the deeper questions such as who are you with no memory of self? And then came the editing. I worked on the book for years.

Then I turned to those “leftover” poems that had been waiting patiently!  I could see a real thread pulling the poems along; grief, and the healing in the natural world.  Average Height of Flight was truly a call response collection.  But again, it needed more answers and a framework as well. 

Atlas of Roots, my third book, explores adoption and how it informs my identity. There have been pivotal times in my life when I’ve longed for more information about my origins. As a teen, my questions were different from when I was pregnant, or a new mom, or when I found my sister’s birth mother.

I didn’t know my birth story.  I had no details about my parents, but the first poem I ever wrote on adoption came from a prompt in a workshop with Patrick Lane, around 1998 if you can imagine! He asked us to write a poem on the night of our conception.  My poem was a poem of rape.  And how very strange: that turned out to be a Truth.

Slowly, my core of poems on adoption grew.  I wanted to move from instinct to understanding, to look relentlessly, overturn stones to find something, anything, knowing many would be bare beneath. To ask questions of other people who had a connection to adoption;  the book has a section called Could one of these stories be mine? which reframes some of the adoption stories I’ve been told.

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?

I’ve worked in both ways, first from short pieces that grow into a full book, and I’ve also worked from a vision for a book.  The essential piece for either a full manuscript or a beginning poem is that I feel that a voice is required, my voice is required. I have something crucial to share, and it’s imperative to find the path

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

Here is something that I love;  an amazing performance of slam poetry with the musicality and rhythm front and centre. And damn, how do they memorize them all?!

I love listening to others read or recite their work.  I miss live events, the energy and commitment of every listener in the room to hold that moment, to be present.

And then for myself, I enjoy giving readings, even though I get extremely nervous beforehand.  When the energy is palpable, I feel so lucky, and it brings a whole new twist to my work.  Again, I find what rings true.

However, I have a long way to go to match the poets as bard, the poets that gather us around the campfire and awe us with their recitation and eloquence.

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?

Ah, to the universal macro level, now! How can I not respond to the injustices around us, my own pre-judging, my struggles with my footprints on this earth?

I love the idea of call and response, how my best work is a response to a call from within and without. I’ve written very political poems and very personal poems.  I try to scoop from the common themes we all face; relationships that inform us, on death and dying and uncomfortable challenges we all face, of love and loss…. of identity.

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?

I would hope that my work resonates, for what a reader may be personally tackling, or viewing in our society.

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

Any writer wants and needs readers and an editor leads me in to that world, separates my work from me, and all my pre-judgings, to what the work holds when out there in the world.

I love that an editor is really my very own reader, a  critical reader,  who will share their questions, confusions, delights with me about my work

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

Patrick Lane said a fine poem will have the best words in the best order.  That’s intimidating, and makes for a true struggle to match that demand to the best of my ability!

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

Terrible.

I am just a poet

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?

No routine, no typical writing day, I write between the spaces I am given or carve out that place.

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

An honest question will open the poem, take my writing to another level.

A new poetic form will challenge me to turn the poem inside out, pare it to its essentials

A switch in the point of view will turn over a stone

A hike will open my heart to rhythm and pacing and details of the world around

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Clean flannel shirts hanging on a clothes line in the sun

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’m deeply influenced by the natural world.  It is shorthand for wonder.  I am blessed to have landscapes within spitting distance that lift me up and challenge me.  Forest hikes, mushroom foraging, swimming. Quite a few of my poems were born on a hike, the rhythm of my feet setting the metre. I’ve arrived back at the trailhead with a poem brewing inside me full of the details and tempo I’ve absorbed.

And because I am also a curious researcher, give me the magical mechanisms of this world, the intricacies and workings that surprise and delight, something true to carry into a poem.

And then, there is something about old myths and fairy tales that I return to again and again, the motifs of the lost daughter, the three tasks, the journey. 

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

I am so so blessed to have a long-time writing group.  They are my first readers, they are honest, supportive and dear to me.  And they share their incredible expertise as writers abundantly.

When we went into Covid lock down in March, 2020, I turned to “comfort-food” reading.  These are the books I will always turn to, read and re-read: anything by Annie Dillard, essays by Ellen Meloy, Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer) ;  all of those yield to my curiousity of the natural world. And then The Summer Book (Tove Jansson) and all the children’s books I’ve ever loved.

So many poets.   Think Don Domanski, Don McKay, Maggie Nelson, Tim Lilburn, Jan Zwicky, Lorna Crozier, Alice Oswald, Ruth Stone, Eavan Boland, Gwendolyn MacEwan, PK Page, Ocean Vuong, Claudia Rankine, Carolyn Forche, anyone in the New Yorker, and the small mags that introduce us to new and daring poets in the Canadian writing scene, Indigenous voices like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Billy Ray Belcourt, ….always, always, I’m open to hear new voices.

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

I would like to write a completely, totally, hilarious poem!

I so admire poets who can stretch to include the witty, the wry, the tongue in cheek, the absurd.

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?

I am many things, not just a writer.  And permission to call myself a writer didn’t come until much later in my life. I do wish I had conquered my fear of heights and learned how to pilot a small plane.

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

Humans are called to express, to give voice, to create; we find our métier be it wood, stone, sand, rock, gardens, or music.  It inches out of us or pours from us, a blurt at a time or a torrent. I happen to love words, and the struggle to match the world with words is my calling.

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

The Innocents, by Michael Crummey and Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

Last great film is tough; I miss going to movies.  But I watched Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon at Christmas and I will always love that story.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am teasing together another manuscript, and the working title is Ordinary.

And long long time ago, a playwright friend suggested we co-write a play on dementia using poems from my first book, Falling Season.  Perhaps when I retire.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Adrienne Gruber

Adrienne Gruber is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Buoyancy Control (BookThug) and This is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), and three chapbooks, Mimic (Leaf Press), Everything Water (Cactus Press) and Intertidal Zones (Jack Pine Press). She has been a finalist for the CBC Literary Awards in poetry, Descant’s Winston Collins Best Canadian Poem Contest and twice for ARC’s Poem of the Year Contest. Her poem Gestational Trail was awarded first prize in The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest in 2015 and she won the bpNichol Chapbook Award for Mimic in 2012. Originally from Saskatoon, Adrienne lives in Vancouver with her partner Dennis and their daughters Quintana and Tamsin.

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, This is the Nightmare (Thistledown Press), was published in 2008. It changed my life mainly because it helped me to get grants and some short-term writing-related work, which helped buy me some time to work on new poetry. This resulted in several chapbooks, one of which won the 2012 bpNichol Chapbook Award, which provided me with some money and recognition, etc. So, essentially my first book got the ball rolling. Having said that, it has always felt like a young first book. Much of the work was written in my early twenties. My most recent collection, Buoyancy Control (BookThug), spans a later and longer period of my life and the length of time I spent writing the book allowed me to mature as a poet. I spent several years revising Buoyancy Control with the help of some stellar poets who provided me with incredible feedback through written comments and conversations. Without those experiences Buoyancy Control would be a very different book.

I like to think my recent work is tighter and has less of a desire to prove itself. My biggest fear has always been that my poetry isn’t ‘smart enough’ and I think I’m finally able to see how that fear has been holding me back.

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

Let’s be real, I came to poetry because fiction and non-fiction scared the shit out of me and poetry seemed like the easiest and safest way to express myself. I’ve always had issues with intellectual confidence and for some reason I envisioned poetry as this shortcut to expressing myself – short-term pain for long term gain, kind of? Weird, I know. In a way, I’m grateful for the naivety I had in those early years of writing because it shielded me from psyching myself out. I wrote poetry prolifically all through high school and in my early twenties, thinking I was cheating my way into being a writer because I could sit down and whip off two or three poems in an afternoon and call it a day. By the time I fully realized that writing poetry – good poetry, that is – is hard work, excruciating at times, I had been writing for over a decade and had already written my way through a bazillion poems that sucked and managed to rework a small handful of pieces and get them published in literary magazines. So being a little smug about being prolific worked to my advantage in a way. It allowed me to write through about a decades worth of clichéd lines and suffocating imagery and build my revision skills.

At one point I discovered I had no real desire to write fiction (it started out with intimidation of the genre, but then I realized there was just no drive within me to write it) but I was interested in non-fiction. I took a non-fiction course at UBC while doing my MFA and bumbled my way through it but just working in the genre for a bit confirmed my desire to explore it further.

Finishing Buoyancy Control and working on the first draft of my third poetry collection has me completely in love with poetry. There is so much a person can do within the genre; it seems to have no bounds. I love how the language in a poem can be both rich and simple. There are poems I’ve read when I was a teenager that have stayed with me my entire life. Poetry will always be what I return to, but last year I began a project that needed to be written as non-fiction, so that’s another thing I’m working on currently. It’s been an incredible learning experience. Scary to not just be dipping my toes into this genre but actually running full force into the swell. Terrifying, but radically fun and rewarding.

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 weakness is that I tend to be a quantity over quality person. My revision process has me trying to move away from that and recognize that how much I produce does not equal writing success. I like to feel like I’m accomplishing something, that I’m being productive, so the number of poems written (or started – sometimes writing the first couple of lines for multiple poems makes me feel productive) or the amount of pages of non-fiction written in one sitting mean something to me. Starting projects is something I’m good at. I love starting a new writing project. It’s after I’ve written a dozen or so poems for the project that I start losing momentum. Then I usually start a different project with the hopes of coming back to the first one.

Though truthfully, my work habits completely changed after I had kids. For the first year after my first daughter was born I didn’t write a thing and I was half-convinced my writing career was over. I tried not to worry or obsess about it but I was panicked at the thought of having so little time and energy to write. When I began to work on poetry again, it turned out that first year of parenting was a much-needed reprieve and I suddenly had loads to say. I wrote the entire first draft of my third manuscript when my daughter was two-years-old, much of it during her (wonderfully predictable) afternoon naptime. I credit her for forcing me into a new phase of discipline, where I no longer mess around on social media or clean the house when I have an hour of time; I get shit done. My youngest is eleven months and I’m back in that anxious phase of feeling like I have little time and energy to work and it’s driving me a bit mad. I keep reminding myself that this is all par for the course when you have a baby under one.

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?

I usually have a vision for a book very early on, but that book’s vision might change dramatically from the early stages to the time it’s published. I always prefer working on a whole book because it helps motivate me. I write for the future love of the book in my hands.

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

I love readings but still, after twenty years of doing them, I get very nervous. I simultaneously doubt the strength of my work and wonder why I’ve been asked to read alongside other poets who are clearly literary geniuses. I basically feel like a giant poser. After the reading is done I always feel high and excited and anxious to get back to writing and wish I did readings every night. It’s a really uncomfortable dichotomous state and hard on my stomach.

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?

My current questions are;

Why did birth move into the hospital?

What happens when we try to intervene in and control the physiological process of birth?

Why are we always trying to control women’s bodies?

Who is making dinner tonight?

Why does my youngest keep pulling on her ears?

Will my house ever stop being sticky?

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?

I think this is a question for Google.

I don’t have a good answer, but I recently read This is Happy by Camilla Gibb and loved this:

We come to know ourselves only through stories. We listen to the stories of others, we inherit the stories of those who came before, and we make sense of our own experiences by constructing a narrative that holds them, and holds us, together. Stories are how we make sense of our lives. I have a job to do as a storyteller: we all do. To tell stories that make us knowable to others, most importantly our children. To give them the tools to help them know themselves. And perhaps we come to know ourselves differently as a consequence.

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

Essential. I cringe to think of the version of Buoyancy Control that would have been published had I not worked with the editors I had. It wouldn’t have been a bad book, but it certainly wouldn’t have been as tight. I can justify every word choice, line break and stanza, and each form I chose for the poems. I like knowing that every poem is meant to be in the book and needs to be there. There is nothing I would cut from the book. I couldn’t say the same thing about the draft I had a year ago.

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

You will never be less busy than you are right now. So get it done.

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?

My writing routine shifts depending on my parenting situation. Before kids I would write in bursts, working five or six hours at a coffee shop. In reality I would spend a lot of time on social media or stupid internet sites and get about an hour or two of actual work done. Lately it’s giving myself permission to not work on writing until my youngest turns one and then re-negotiating this hiatus. I’m trying to have faith in my ability to get back at it once the chaos calms down a bit. Or get back at it in spite of the chaos.

A typical day for me right now is spending 2-3 hours trying to get my kids dressed and out of the house so I can get my coffee.

At this point I pretty much spend every spare second I have that isn’t sleep-deprived revising the work that I wrote last year. I recently started a couple of new pieces but I have no idea where the work is headed.

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

These days my writing only gets stalled by my kids. I’m sure if I didn’t have them there would be other things that would stall me, but right now they’re the big obstacle (I say this with fierce love). I’m not lacking inspiration, I’m lacking time, energy and brainpower.

I spend most of my days longing for time to work on writing projects and planning my next two-hour stint at a coffee shop. What I’m currently trying to do is get even twenty minutes of work done in the evenings after my kids are in bed so that I feel like I’m still producing (while also recognizing that I gave myself a full year to get back at it, so anything I produce right now is gravy). Along with that comes my attempt to recognize that this period of raising young children is finite, that there will come a day when I start to get some of my time back.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

The smell of a wetsuit.

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?

Science, definitely. Biology in particular. I spent a lot of time researching various sea creatures while writing the poems in Buoyancy Control. It was an exciting time. If I had known I could have that much fun learning about reproduction and mating I would have considering taking some biology courses. My current work focuses on pregnancy and birth, so I’ve spent time reading about and researching these topics – more biology. My mother, who’s a biochemist, always says that biology is akin to art and I get that now. There’s so much beauty and complexity in how our bodies function and how we mate and reproduce.

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

The work of my peers has been crucial. I read primarily poetry and creative non-fiction these days and am feeling really awakened by what I’m reading.

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

Travel to Italy as an adult. Do a food tour of India. Scuba dive in Thailand. Eat the inside of a loaf of French bread.

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 would be a midwife. I’m strongly considering this right now.

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

I can’t not write. The alternative is that I am chronically depressed and feel like I’ve hobbled myself. Of course, I’ve done and will continue to do a myriad of other things to make money/feed myself. But I can’t have a meaningful life without writing.

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

So many great books to love. Again, I have kids so every time I finish a book it’s a huge victory. I recently read Soraya Peerbye’s Tell: poems for a girlhood and was completely captivated by it. Although I read it some time ago, Ongoingness: The end of a Diary by Sarah Manguso opened my eyes to what a poetic memoir could look like. It’s a stunning book.

The last great film I saw was Trainwreck with Amy Schumer. In the theatre. With all the popcorn.

19 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a third collection of poems called Q & A about my first pregnancy and the birth of my third daughter. I’m also working on a book of creative non-fiction about the pregnancy and birth of my second daughter. I’m a little afraid that I’m going to have to have a third child just to have more material for future projects.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Six Questions with Emilia Nielsen: 2014 Gerald Lampert Award Shortlist

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Squamish, British Columbia poet and academic Emilia Nielsen, whose book Surge Narrows (Lantzville BC: Leaf Press, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Award. See my previous Gerald Lampert Award shortlist interviews with Julie Joosten, Laurie D. Graham, Jordan Abel, Murray Reiss and Juleta Severson-Baker. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Emilia Nielsen holds a BFA from the University of Victoria, a MA from the University of New Brunswick, and a PhD from the University of British Columbia. Currently, she holds academic teaching positions at Quest University Canada in Squamish, BC and at UBC in Vancouver, BC. Her poetry has appeared in literary journals across Canada including The Antigonish Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Event, Descant, The Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire, Room Magazine, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry by Prism International. Surge Narrows, published by Leaf Press in 2013, is her debut collection of poetry.

1. Surge Narrows is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
Not unlike other first books this one also began as a Masters thesis. I was very fortunate to be given an opportunity to work with Anne Simpson via the Creative Writing Programme at the University of New Brunswick, and she mentored me as I wrote and revised these poems. Yet when I graduated I still needed to turn my graduate project into a manuscript. Another fortuitous opportunity arose, and at the Sage Hill Summer Poetry Colloquium under Daphne Marlatt’s mentorship, from a thick folio of poems, this manuscript emerged. Surge Narrows is now made up of six long poems.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
To reenergize, I’m drawn to poets Lisa Robertson, Karen Solie, and Sina Queyas. I often return to If Not, Winter, Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho, Dionne Brand’s No Language is Neutral, and Phyllis Webb’s Sunday Water and Water and Light, which made an especially strong impression on me as I wrote the ghazals and anti-ghazals that make up the middle sections of my book.

3. Between Victoria, Vancouver and Squamish, you’ve lived in British Columbia for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as a variety of BC landscapes, may have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country, or in fewer parts of the province?
I have lived in BC for much of my life. (But I’ve also lived in New Brunswick and Alberta, albeit briefly.) Yes, I’d be a different kind of writer if I’d grown up and made a life elsewhere, but I wonder if I’d also be a different sort of person? What I do know is that because I spent a significant part of my childhood in the community of Surge Narrows in the Discovery Islands I felt drawn to trying to write about this childhood experience. And the first long poem of the book—not to mention the title, which functions more as a metaphor—refers directly to a particular place in BC. 

4. In a review posted on the Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian blog, she speaks of Surge Narrows as a collection of poems in which the environment remains a central character. What is your take on the conversations around “eco-poetry,” and how did you approach writing out descriptions of landscape and other natural concerns, as opposed to attempting to articulate any other kind of subject or space?
I’m interested in doing more than simply describing a particular landscape or the particularities of the natural world. The observational gaze can be revealing. But I’m more invested in struggling through, in words, the process of speaking to deeply human experiences in wild places. In “Pass Creek” I wrote from a subjective and physical place. At that time, I was employed as a fire lookout in northern Alberta, and found myself in a very different geography and place than the one I was most familiar. I hint at how human interactions in the boreal forest have fundamental changed it, but I leave the reader to decide how to feel about it all. And while this book may begin in a rural coastal setting it ends in a very urban one, and the last poem of the book “Vernacular Hearts” draws from the cityscape. Now, I feel both pulls in my life, and in my writing.

5. What do you feel teaching has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
After my MA in English and Creative Writing, I completed a PhD in Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC, and my university teaching is in the arts and humanities as well as the social sciences. At Quest, where I currently have a full time teaching position, I have mostly taught foundation courses in gender studies. Whereas at UBC, where I now return as a visiting lecturer in the summer, I have had the opportunity to teach introductory gender and sexuality studies courses as well as an intensive social justice in literature course. I love introducing students to critical theory and theorists, essays and concepts and, of course, literary writers and I nearly always manage to work a little poetry into each of the courses I teach! My academic work financially supports my poetry habit.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
Personally, I feel grateful for this acknowledgement. (It took this book longer than perhaps originally expected for it to be selected by a publisher, and brought out in trade paperback form. So I’m also thankful to Ursula Vaira and Leaf Press for recognizing something in that original manuscript I submitted.) I also enjoy reading not only award winners, but shortlisted books because there I find gems I might otherwise not have learned of. For me, at best, awards are a celebration of writers, writing and literary culture.