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;

Cole Swensen, Art In Time

 

These artists—again, intentionally or not—have engaged the landscape genre in a fluid way, a way that puts the landscape back into motion, and in doing so, they have found alternatives to some of the presumptions and practices of landscape art common to Euro-centric contexts, such as the use of linear perspective, in which the proper viewing position can only be occupied by one person at a time, thus implicitly supporting hierarchical social and political systems and the regimes of appropriation, colonization, and exclusion that go along with them.

A substantial body of western landscape theory written over the past thirty+ years has critiqued the genre’s reinforcement of binaries such as inside/outside, subject/object, and culture/nature. Such binaries are part of the ideological approach through which landscape art can reduce a complex network of animal, vegetal, and mineral interactions to a static ornament, reinforcing a sense of human power over “nature,” imposing specific cultural values, and/or claiming or exercising control. Such a stance projects human interests and desires so thoroughly that they effectively anthropomorphize the world, subjugating its non-human elements to humans’ will to turn the world to our uses and/or reflect our domination of (and imagined separation from) the “natural” world.

And yet, throughout the centuries, various artists have taken quite different approaches, implicitly or explicitly advocating relationships with the earth based on collaboration rather than domination, conversation rather than control. Achieved through variations on conventional depictions of the world around them, such works, rather than standing back and looking at that world, instead participate in it, thus keeping something of the vital motion of the moment intact.

That motion is not only spatial, but also temporal, in the process of presenting space in dynamic flow, these works also acknowledge the fluidity of time. They are not interested in being “timeless,” an epithet often applied to works marked by a distilled quality that they’ve only achieved at the expense of remaining disengaged from their own moment; instead, these works insist on specificity, on particularity; in short, they advocate an art in time, inn all the possible meanings of that term—an art conjugated into the present, and in time to do something about that present. If art is the verb in the grammar of culture, it’s those works of art in the active tenses that have the most potential to play a role in keeping that culture responsive to its immediate demands and needs. (“Introduction: An Argument Against Timeless Art”)

New from American poet and translator Cole Swensen is Art In Time (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2021), the latest in more than a dozen poetry titles she’s released over the years: It’s Alive She Says (Floating Island Press, 1984), New Math (William Morrow & Co., 1988), Park (Floating Island Press, 1991), Numen (Burning Deck Press, 1995), Noon (Sun & Moon Press, 1997), Try (University of Iowa Press, 1999), Oh (Apogee Press, 2000), Such Rich Hour (University of Iowa Press, 2001), Goest (Alice James Books, 2004), The Book of a Hundred Hands (University of Iowa Press, 2005) [see my review of such here], The Glass Age (Alice James Books, 2007), Ours: poems on the gardens of Andre Le Notre (University of California Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) [see my review of such here], Gravesend (University of California Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], Stele (Sausalito CA: The Post-Apollo Press, 2012) [see my review of such here], LANDSCAPES ON A TRAIN (Nightboat Books, 2015) [see my review of such here], Gave (Omnidawn, 2017) [see my review of such here] and On Walking On (Nightboat Books, 2017) [see my review of such here].

Art In Time is made up of twenty sequences of lyric prose composed as essay-poems, each of which examines a particular artist’s work, including “Willem de Kooning: Composed Windows,” “Sally Mann: Untitled Ground,” “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Night Over Night,” “Renee Gladman: Acsemic Cities,” “Gustav Klimt: Seventeen Summers” and “David Hockney: The Four Seasons.” Her essay-poems exist as a blend of research, commentary and critique around a field or fields of movement by her chosen artist, and on their chosen work or works. “We’re considering only the late works because it’s only in them / that night gets built of light,” she writes, to open “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Night Over Night,” “letting contradiction lock into place as / the principal engine of Tanner’s oeuvre.” As Swensen describes through her introduction, the pieces in Art In Time exist as an extended essay on depictions of and approaches toward landscape through visual art, layered through individual “chapters” around individual artists. “Landscape with Person or The White Road,” she writes, as part of the sequence “Chaïm Soutine: Reeling Trees,” “1918-1919 / We’re falling up a hill—still as the light shines through— / climbing branches that hold a house up to the sky // as the road divides—as the cliff falls— / as the sky falls—as the road flays // and the world tilts red where it isn’t / walking along a road thrown farther up // as we pick our way down the red cliff / running in the sun.”

Her poetry titles over the past twenty years have become increasingly project and research-based, as studies on landscapes and the human structures set upon nature, whether elements of time, painting or medieval French gardens, exploring the human capacity to arrange presumptions of order upon the untamed wild, as well as what and how exactly gets depicted. As she discussed her then-recent array of book-length poetry projects in a now-disappeared interview conducted a few years ago by Andy Fitch for The Conversant: “They revolve around separate topics, yet address the same social questions: How do we constitute our view of the world (which, of course, in turn constitutes that world), and how does the world thus constituted impinge upon others?” As she discusses four 9-screen video installations by British artist David Hockney towards the end of “David Hockney: The Four Seasons, Woldgate Woods”:

And though throughout the series, we’re constantly moving, we will clearly never arrive, but continue to shift in relation to the relative proportions of road and trees. Chinese aesthetic theory had rejected the idea of a vanishing point by the eleventh century because it meant that you—the viewer—weren’t there. you weren’t moving. If you’re not moving, in a way, you’re dead.

This is a fascinating study on how both artist and viewer potentially enter the space of a depicted landscape, through a book that, hopefully, is critiqued at some point by someone better versed in the history and study of visual art. I’m fascinated by these essay-poems, and how she moves across entire lengths of geography, styles and history in her list of artist subjects; fascinated by how her essay-poems ebb and flow through biographical detail, intricate critique and broad, sweeping strokes that highlight even the smallest details. “He worked slowly,” she writes, to close “Gustav Klimt: Seventeen Summers” (a piece that appeared in an earlier form as a chapbook through above/ground press), “meticulously rising before anyone else into the / empty house, into the summer that far north in which the question / of morning is increasingly simply a tone on a pallet, a gravel path / from which you could see the foothills of the Alps. A gravel path / up which no one is walking. There are never any people in Klimt’s / landscapes, no animals, and so we must concede that it must be / the landscape itself that is moving.” Swensen writes of how each artist’s work allows the viewer to enter into the landscape, writing out how one is simultaneously part of and separate from the landscape, and the effects it has on the viewer, the view and on the art itself. “Renee Gladman’s drawings could be anything,” Swensen writes, as part of Gladman’s section, “but they happen / to be cities.” Or, as she writes as part of “Rosa Bonheur: Animals with Landscape,” focusing on the painter and sculptor Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899):

She lived an independent life, insisting on it, never married, wore trousers—which required the permission of the police at the time—and traveled widely, bringing a wealth of images back from her trips:

Morning fog and up through fog, the way things come up through fog, somehow seeming closer as they grow yet more faint. They retain the ghostly—you can see the ghost inside them, a morning in Scotland, several cows, but because of the fog, they can’t settle into a finite number. Became Morning in the Highlands, 1857.

And another, a lake across which the cattle swam on their way to the annual market at Falkirk, some of them, almost drowning, held above the water’s surface by their horns by men rowing alongside them in boats. Became The Boat, 1856.

And later, on the same trip, another lake singing in the dark, across a lake around a lake, the way the dark makes the walk, and farther on, we hear (Nathalie writing to her mother) It was the only time I ever heard her sing.

1850: in the Pyrenees, admiring the grandiose savagery of the mountains from the back of a horse that she and Nathalie shared in order to cut the cost. You have no idea how hard it was not to bring back a sheep and a goat. On a later trip, 1853, they did bring back an otter, who often snuck into the house and joined Henriette in bed.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Christy Ann Conlin

Christy Ann Conlin is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Memento. She is also the author of the short fiction collection, Watermark, a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Award and the Evergreen Award. Heave was a national bestseller, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, the Dartmouth Book Award and was a Globe & Mail Top 100 Book. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Geist, Room, and Numéro Cinq. Her short fiction has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize. Her radio broadcast work includes co-creating and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer radio series. Christy Ann studied theatre at the University of Ottawa and screenplay writing at the University of British Columbia. She was born and raised in seaside Nova Scotia where she still resides.

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?

The Speed of Mercy, my most recent work, feels like a homecoming, a coming together of all I have learned and explored, since I first fell in love with reading when I was a kid. It’s a novel which demanded a high level of skill and focus to write, so it was years in the making. It’s a literary mystery, infused with both comedy and tragedy, with despair and with big shining hope.

Heave, my first novel, changed my life as I felt compelled to write it. On good days I describe it as a calling. On a lot of days I call it The Affliction. Heave taught me that the writing of a novel, all the stages and drafts, that it’s a sublime magic accessed only through great discipline and commitment. The other lesson Heave gave me is that the publishing side of creative writing is a business, and always has been, and it’s very challenging.

The Speed of Mercy, my most recent work is different on a craft and style level – it’s very suspenseful, and has a spiraling structure. The writing process was an exploration of both internal and external voice, rhythm, memory, and how narrative structure is often shaped by a traditionally male literary legacy. The Speed of Mercy set in the same literary landscape as all my previous works and characters and places from my other books appear in this one. What feels different this time is how much more confident I am in my approach to writing.

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

I’m an accidental novelist.

My first writing efforts were in stage play and poetry, and screenplay writing. But I always admired the razor sharp skill of short fiction writers, and the stamina of novelists. They were like seers moving among us. I also work in radio broadcast doing documentaries because of my interest in voice and telling stories in different media, working with sound.

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?

The Speed of Mercy was developing in my head for years, underneath the busy of everyday life, the hustle of the sandwich generation life I live with my husband, looking after children, elders, and hustling to make a living.

The length of time to start a project is always different, always dictated by the story, and time allowed. I don’t wait for the muse. I am the muse, ha ha, so when there is time, I get down to work, before it vanishes, both the time, and the idea.

Most of the work is done in my brain, where the idea will germinate and then produce the form it will take (poem, short story, novel, drama, etc.). Once I start writing, it comes very quickly on the page. I need breaks between drafts, for my subconscious to work things out, solve plot problems.

I store my big ideas in my mind in what is called a mind palace, or the method of loci. I’ve been doing it for years. It was recommended to me by a psychiatrist. It came into the common parlance through an episode Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch. But mine is no palace, ha ha, but a mental 1978 mudroom/utility room/laundry room, with lots of drawers, shelves and closets. I put them there, and they wait, alive, until I can battle time and create space to put them on the page.

My copious notes are mostly in my mind. I keep notes the way a physicist works with algorithms and equations in their minds eye. I always have a box of ephemera for every project as well.

4 - Where does a 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?

The Speed of Mercy rose out of my previous books, the same literary landscape, but from a specific character, Stella, who appeared in my mind one day.

It’s always different. Sometimes an image appears in front of my mind’s eye or my minds ear will hear a character speaking. Sometimes I’ll see a house or a couple in a café, someone waiting in an line, and then story will spark.  My characters travel throughout my short pieces and long pieces, moving in and out.

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

I love connecting with readers, people who love books and stories, who thrive on the experience of tumbling into a fictional world, and letting their imagination soar and breath and expand.

A writer is nothing without the reader, the person who is brave enough to sit quietly with the book in their hands (or on their screen, as it were) and let time sweep them into a different reality. It’s a symbiotic relationship. I don’t understand writers who have disdain for readers. They are life blood. It was reading which saved me as a young child, and was the pathway into a refuge which then brought me back into the world.

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?

Hmm. In The Speed of Mercy, I’m interested in the human condition, which for me, means how we are alive in the world, how we deal with joy and devastation, love and loss, how we find hope, and come to terms with a vast universe and world, where we are tiny players. The Speed of Mercy was influenced by Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, the work of Resmaa Menakem, the poetry of Mary Oliver, among others.

I’m very curious about how mainstream ideas allow so many people to become invisible in society, for us to underestimate them, and not see their true power and beauty.

I’m interested in the neurology and science of memory. And on a creative front, how memory has a life of its own which begins to accompany us once we get through adolescence. As a woman, I’m curious about how women remained hopeful for change, or take a dark turn into accepting thousands of years of oppression and become oppressors themselves.

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 can only define the role of the writer for myself, no other writer, and for me, as a fiction writer. I’m not a scholar. Truth, courage, objectivity, a massive commitment to integrity above all else, mixed with passion, joy and hope. The courage to speak your truth in your art, to be confident in your artistic vision and methods.

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

Outside editorial was key for The Speed of Mercy – objective, brilliant editorial perspective is critical. I love working with an outside editor, when I’m at a point where I don’t have any objectivity left, when I need skilled and passionate outside eyes. Editing is a very different skill/calling than writing, and working with a talented editor, for me, is critical. I view the editorial process similar to working with a dramaturge.

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

EB White: “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.”

That’s on my bulletin board by my rickety writing table. I’d also like to have it as a bumper sticker. Maybe wallpaper in my kitchen. And tattooed on my arm.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel to personal essays to critical prose to postcards)? What do you see as the appeal?

The story/writing finds the form it needs. It’s not a question of hard or easy. I may have a leading, and the work may lead me elsewhere. The appeal is the variation in form. I love working in different genres, and each one teaches me respect for the other genres.

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 find this question is awesome for people in a MFA without financial worries or time constraints or dependants. I grew up in a world we’d call “the working poor blended with the working class”.  Writing and art were not for people like me to even consider doing. What I’ve taken with me from those harsh rural years is that focus and discipline, and knowing what you believe, not what society believes, can become a bird on whose back you can fly to a new terrain of possibility.

My writing routine is largely shaped by my big hybrid sandwich generation family, with lots of elderly people, school age children, and our sprawling extended family, plus work I do for extra income.

In an ideal world, my work is done in the mornings, and reading in the afternoon. And when I am deep into the work, I can just have a few weeks to stay in the realm of the novel, and then I work on it even in my dreams.

The reality of this is that if we can manage it, I go away for a few days, and my husband runs the show. What I try to do is set up a weekly schedule, and then follow it. It comes down to discipline and commitment, how strong the beating heart of the work inside me is. It’s incredibly strong, and as time passes, the beat of my heart, and the call of my work rings out like a bell through the creative hills and valleys, and waters of my artistic geography. It’s a call I cannot deny, a summoning I must follow.

So, back to earth -- When I read about writers who go to residencies for 6 weeks, I cry with jealousy. But I’ve always known my best writing comes from staying the course, from a set routine. Mary Oliver wrote an essay about this work and it’s almost a religious text for me. Ursula K. LeGuin said to marry the right kind of person. I did that. My partner supports me unconditionally. We do a lot of plate spinning and passing those plates back and forth, and sometimes we do it with panache and sometimes there’s a lot of breakage. But we move onward.  

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

Nature. I go to the ocean. I walk in the woods. Walking. Alone or with my family.  I do housework. I devour film, art, television, poetry, as nutrition and inspiration. I love to bake so I make muffins and cakes for my family and friends. I mail postcards and letters and care packages. Gardening. Fixing old furniture. All the while, my subconscious sculpts, shapes, sorts, arranges, develops, expands, jettisons, and evolves my work.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Sea air. The smell of a wood fire. The wholly unique scent of forest meeting the beach and ocean. The smell of fog. Fresh cut hay. Line dried laundry. Also, exhaust on a hot day on a busy downtown city street. Early morning coffee. Lilacs. Saltwater roses on a hot day.

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?

Yeah, I don’t agree with that saying. Books come from many places. It’s not just a book which begets another book, although I reverently believe in the conversation books have with each other, which transcends time and place. But for me, the natural world, the ocean and forests, the seaside and countryside. Neurology and the science of the brain. I’m fascinated by architecture, how buildings and spaces shape our consciousness, how we are in the world.

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

In The Speed of Mercy, at the back of the book, is a list of my creative influences. 

A few are: Cormac McCarthy. Zsuzsi Gartner. Lydia Davis. Werner Herzog. Rawi Hage. Toni Morrison. Shirley Jackson. Aristotle. Henry James. Alistair MacLeod, Charlotte Gill. Mary Oliver. Chekhov. Joseph Heller. George Saunders. The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. Books on natural history. Antique postcards and vintage photos. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Lawrence Hill.

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

Write a one woman stage play about my left breast. Plus, go to Hawaii with my family. 

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?

My dream was to be a dermatologist.

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

See above – a calling/affliction. I love story, language, voice. It’s in my bone marrow. The rhythm and magic of words coming from the flesh, seeing those words standing up on legs on a stage, or manifesting in a novel, in the mind and heart – that’s everyday magic which transforms an ordinary moment into something profound. And then there is laundry to be done, or a kid throwing up with the flu, or the hustle to pay the bills.

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

The Beguiling by Zsuzsi Gartner. Us, directed by Jordan Peele.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I am working on a memoir, Crosstrees, about my unusual hybrid sandwich generation family. Also a novel which is a feminine, elegant pulsing homage and challenge to Fight Club and The Joker.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;