12 or 20 (second series) questions with Laura Cok

Originally from northern California, Laura Cok spent time in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Waterloo, Ontario before settling in Toronto, where she now lives. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto, where she won the E.J. Pratt Poetry Medal and the University of Toronto  Magazine alumni poetry contest. She has been previously published widely across Canada and works in corporate communications. Doubter's Hymnal is her first book.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This (Doubter's Hymnal) is my first book, so it remains to be seen! I work tangentially in the book industry for my day job, so I know enough to avoid the magical thinking that a published book will provide me with unambiguous professional fulfillment, but I do feel more legitimized as a writer/part of the literary community than when I was published scattershot in journals.

I think my more recent work has simplified a bit in terms of language -- I guess that's a typical younger-writer pitfall, the tendency to be a bit florid. I'm just as interested in form, and less interested in being combative.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I do write some fiction and non-fiction, but poetry always came more naturally. I wrote a poem at about age seven, something to do with the stars. I showed it to my mom, who complimented it and then gently explained the concept of linebreaks. My dad had a number of wide-ranging poetry collections I would steal and bookmark heavily. So I come from a well-read family, but I'm not sure why it was poetry specifically that grabbed my interest.

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's a long period of procrastination and avoidance, and then the actual writing comes fairly quickly. I'm trying to be better about heavier editing, but my first drafts and final drafts tend to be pretty close. No notes, except for random lines on my Notes app from the middle of the night.

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?
Usually it's a line or a phrase that has popped into my head, or a topic that's been obsessing me for no discernible reason. I did not at all have the book in mind from the beginning; it was only a few years ago that I realized I was close to having enough poems for a manuscript, and when I started putting them together it was clear that there were a few major themes.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I've only done a small handful of readings, most recently the Emerging Writers series in Toronto. I do not enjoy it, but I'm hoping that with practice it'll get easier! So they're not part of my creative process, but because my poems tend to be fairly narrative or linear, they do lend themselves well to being read out loud.

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?
Not especially. I approach writing poetry as "trying to work something out," almost like a puzzle. I think the dominant question is "how do we go on, given what we know [global warming, violence, the inevitable death of loved ones]?"

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'm wary of elevating The Writer to mythic status; we're all just muddling along, trying to do the best with our interests and talents that we can, and maybe offering a new perspective or shining a light on something unknown.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! My day job is in corporate communications, so I am editing and being edited all the time, which takes the sting out of it. I've had the chance to work with the editors of a few literary magazines (thinking particularly of CV2: Poetry Lives), which is a rare opportunity given all the demands on editors' time, but every time it's been so remarkable what a difference fresh eyes make.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
The most comforting advice is from Ira Glass, about dissatisfaction between what you intended your work to be versus what it actually turns out like on the page: "It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions...It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

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 day usually begins with an enthusiastic greeting from my dog, Penny. I work 9-5, and as much as I would love to be the kind of writer who gets up at 5 to carve out her creative time, I am not. So I usually work in very small pieces in the evening and on weekends. Dreaming of writers' retreats, but I'm often less productive when I have unstructured time. I would not have made a very good starving artist.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other poets! I read a lot of poetry (thank you, Toronto Library), and that's usually enough to jump the cables.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Eucalyptus trees. I grew up in northern California and we had one in our front yard.

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?
Well, I've got a science poem in my book, inspired by physics. I've tried to write ekphrastic poetry but haven't had a lot of success yet, because my poem is always worse than the art.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Emily Dickinson was the first poet I really loved, followed shortly by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Later I came to Sharon Olds and Lorna Crozier.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finishing a book was the dream for so long that it's hard to say! Writing the second one, I guess.

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?
As a kid I meant to be a doctor, and I retain my interest in the medical field to a certain extent (there's also a medical poem in the book).
 
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, I'm not any good at visual art. I had a lot of encouragement from my English teachers, and just enough bits of success along the way to keep me submitting. But I wouldn't have stopped writing either way.  

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Some recent poetry I've loved has been The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan, and Half-Hazard, by Kristen Tracy.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Trying to figure out how to write a short story. And I'm writing a novel about teenagers on a mission trip, so I'm also trying to figure out how to write a novel.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;
 

Guy Birchard, Only Seemly

Dad’s circa 1955 household trash-fire of wartime memorabilia lost in the ditch under cinders and sodden oak leaves a blackened stainless steel swastika: junior isolanto’s runic pulse of life examined.

Honked out of said creek the prettiest punkinseed sunfish through the eye. Not twice.

Hit the wasp nest with a flaky hucked rock from halfway up the block, and booked!

Deceptive li’l towhead fkr, treed. Condition Red: brandish dangerously dull Bemidji souvenir sheath knife and psycho Joey Allan.

Alfalfa?—gun shot? High summer, BILLIE HOLIDAY (alluring name) DIES. Some old writer with a beard blows his own head off, which, judging by 72-point bold, especially seems to grab the grown-ups. Sugar Kane, nude in her bed, she towards whom we’ve just warmed. Comes Death for Rascal Jazz.

Victoria, British Columbia-based poet Guy Birchard’s latest poetry title is Only Seemly (St. John’s NL: Pedlar Press, 2018). A poet who self-describes in his bio as living “below the radar, perfectly disaffiliated,” Birchard  is the author of multiple collections going back four decades, including Baby Grand (Ilderton ON: Brick Books / Nairn, 1979), Neckeverse (Newcastle upon Tyne: Galloping Dog Press,1989), Birchard’s Garage (Durham UK: Pig Press, 1991), Twenty Grand (Boston MA: Pressed Wafer, 2003), Further than the Blood (Pressed Wafer, 2010), Hecatomb (Brooklyn NY: Pressed Wafer, 2017) and Aggregate: retrospective (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2018). Birchard’s work emerges from a particular element of lyric collage, both text and visual, and this collection is both a narrative lyric memoir and a combination of both accumulation and collage, as fragments and clipped sentences accumulate and pivot against each other, furthering a line even while breaking that same line as much as might be possible. The book, Only Seemly, also, is made up of a single long-poem, constructed as a sequence of stand-alone prose poems, and yet, underneath the title “hypnogagia,” which makes for an intriguing structure: a book with one title made up of a single poem with another title?

Said goodbye to great friend. Years later, heard he changed his name. Name which I went and forgot. Across the country, the Goners giggled. I couldn’t make it, distracted by a death. Decade after, newly blown into an unlikely town, stepped that morning past entertainers still duded up in Canadio-Western-Swing show-duds stowing gear into a van outside a hotel. Over coffee in the next block, killing time perusing yesterday’s folk festival program I wasn’t at, there’s Ray’s mug fronting that band! New name, “Condo,” un coup de mémoire. Must’ve missed each other on the sidewalk by fifteen years and a minute. Seasons roll by High & Wild. One time a mutual acquaintance bore greetings between us miles apart. Next year, my friend, he passed.

While this might be the first title of Birchard’s I’ve properly explored, his is a name I’ve known for some time (most likely through jwcurry’s ongoing publications), and yet, skirting just under a particular kind of literary radar, despite the length of his publishing history. Every so often a book might appear, but little information otherwise, but for the acknowledgment in his author biography that he exists under the radar, and a different geographic location (an earlier author bio had him living in the prairies, for example). What I am noticing, also, is that many of those that do tend to reference his work are running under the radar themselves (such as this reference to Birchard’s work in this Touch the Donkey interview with Pete Smith, for example). He becomes fascinating, in part, due to the difficulty with which one might locate him. In a review of Baby Grand originally published in The Literary Storefront Newsletter (No. XX), January 1980 (discovered via the Brick Books website), one of the very few mentions I could gather of Birchard online, Colin Browne wrote: “Reading Birchard is like walking into a fence corner of juicy, tantalizing brambles and pushing deeper because you prefer to taste the blood the thorns tap. Birchard collages archaic usage with movie slang in the most amazing ways; his humour is dark and humid, his eye never glazed.”

Mounted on Moose Jaw Pathologist’s dining room wall, bleached skull of the honoured husky who saved him from freezing to death that time he lost only toes. At a Sons of Lucullus do there we ate the most piquant pronghorn roast served up by its shooter who would be killed playing baseball come summer.

One of them eighteen-wheel juggernaut personal effects moving-van bigrigs in furious temper barely negotiating the corner at the intersection of too narrow residential streets coming inexorably on at speed like 3D movie FX. Jackknifing tractor unit’s fiberglass/aluminum sleeper berth grinding pup trailer bulkhead, rear-illumination spot pulverizing explosively. Reverse Datsun pickup the hell fastest or be mowed over sideways and blotted, amen.

Stephanie Young, Pet Sounds

Judy Grahn means death

who keeps us from / our lovers

the black man she leaves on the bridge

the women she didn’t hold didn’t kiss

the one with a knife she didn’t want

to sleep with—too fat too old too ugly—

she’s writing this in 1974

this woman is a lesbian be careful

this lesbian, separate from men

so it’s a big deal when she leaves him

on the bridge when she writes

as I have left so many of my lovers

that he should be counted among them

in 1974, Judy Grahn knows who the enemy is

six big policemen

who her lovers are

and the wind

could blow them all over the edge (“Pet Sounds”)

The latest title by Oakland, California poet and editor Stephanie Young is Pet Sounds (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2019), an accumulated sequence set in three increasingly long poems: “CONGENITAL,” “AVE │ VIA” and “PET SOUNDS.” Riffing off the infamous 1966 album title by The Beach Boys, the bulk of Young’s Pet Sounds is made up of the title poem, as the first two poems are but two and seven pages each, respectively, making it seem as though the first two pieces exist as a kind of warm-up into the main event. Weaving across and through fragments, threads and short scenes, Pet Sounds rolls, sweeps and riffs on love and coming out, lovers and exes, animal captivity and a variety of names (from basketball players Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala to poets and activists Pat Parker and Judy Grahn to Troilus and Cressida), as well as criticism both general and specific on music. Really, Young’s poems, at least throughout this collection, are very much engaged in both music and sentences, moving out of one love, and one sense of self, entirely into another. At the end of “AVE │ VIA,” for example, she plays off the lyrics of a particular song by the Talking Heads, writing:

a prairie, or a swamp

after the money’s gone

wholly lost and gone

since missed the right way

into the blue again

I do not even like that song

Change can be terrifying, and this entire collection articulates and shapes an evolution, both allowing and realizing a series of shifts in awareness, politics and sexuality. “I can’t tell what’s going on there,” she writes, deep into the title poem, “in the song, I mean // you remind me how it ends / lovers come and go // yes but did his one true love leave? is she dead? / or with him, and all the others // left, or died / flown away // it feels very true / to the feeling // regardless / either way [.]” In a short note on the collection’s second poem (where you can see the whole of “AVE │ VIA” online, also) for The Poetry Society of America, Young wrote:

The first version of “Ave | Via” included an epigraph from Jenny Holzer and a lot of sentences. The sentences were about foreclosure, development, student debt, and adjunct labor. About feeling unable to write poetry; about living in a neighborhood I could no longer afford. And yet I did live there, had for a long time, even as rent rose around us like water. I felt like a zombie. I felt like the epigraph I later removed, a line from poet Wislawa Szymborska as projected by Holzer: So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge? Close shave, reprieve? One hole in the net and you slipped through? I wrote about turning, in a kind of despair, towards Caroline Bergvall’s poem “Via,” constructed from the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno as translated into English forty-seven times by forty-seven different translators.

Which is to say that “Ave | Via” is the absolute opposite of Athena emerging fully formed from the head of Zeus, it's more like going back into his head (already split open by someone else) in order to retrieve something you forgot, or forgot how to do, so that you can think about uneven forms of life in the neighborhood. A little bit diving into the wreck, a little bit Orpheus. I love the sound of Bergvall’s poem, the circular condition of waking up again and again lost, and listened to her reading it on repeat. At some point I typed up “Via” and dumped the language into a spreadsheet, a familiar form of self soothing. Then sorted it alphabetically. I was looking for patterns which were of course all around me, old, and violent.

Writing this poem brought me back to music again, as halting and rough as it felt. And then music became central to Pet Sounds, the long poem that followed, eventually forming a book this poem is part of. So too the refrain: what is it we even wanted in the woods / a little house?

Nikki Reimer, My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan

what this town needs is horse statues. more horse statues. another horse statue. a bigger horse statue. we gotta get more monster horses. move out the renters. this baby’s priced. this baby’s priced to move.

what this town needs:

                        horsewomen stay at homes. more horsewomen stay-at-homes.

            another horsewoman stay-at-home. a

            bigger horsewoman stay-at-home. we

            gotta get more monument homesteads.

            move out the renters. this backbencher’s priced. this

            backbencher’s priced to move. (“A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A ROSE MANHATTAN”)

Calgary poet Nikki Reimer’s third full-length collection is My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2019), following [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here] and DOWNVERSE (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and chapbooks fist things first (Windsor ON: Wrinkle Press, 2009) and that stays news (Vancouver BC: Nomados Literary Publishers, 2011). Much in the way of her previous collection, My Heart Is a Rose Manhattan is a book of absurdities and responses, whether to Alberta politics, the ongoing housing crises, capitalism, the patriarchy, poverty and literary politics, or social media, exhaustion, rage, bewilderment and grief. As she writes to open the poem “Dear Craigslist,”: “Knock it the fuck off with your stale tributaries, your overdrawn affluenza [.]” In an interview I conduced with her for Jacket2 in 2015, she responded:

My compositional process first and foremost is an attempt to process a bewildering array of “content,” and second, it attempts to uncover value systems that are embedded in discourse. As writer I am seeking some kind of catharsis, or impossible resolution.

Grief, in personal and political ways, is the foundation upon which this book sits, running the length and breadth of the collection. Both poems and author openly grieve, and work to explore that grief, and the implications such an ongoing grief will have upon the body, the family and culture: “i might suggest that grief has made my family embarrassing and ridiculous / but we were always already embarrassing and ridiculous / grief has metastasized our individual personality flaws and our family-culture flaws / my family is a cancer  cancer is the normcoriest of diseases / because it’s been pinkified and commodified” (“Our sorrow is normative”). In language twists and turns, Reimer’s poems rage and kick, concurrently firing back, standing firm and admitting defeat. Her poems alternate between lyric, collage and pointilism, narrating a series of sweeping attempts to figure out exactly what the hell is going on, and, even, how to stop it. As the poem “Kenya’s greatest elephant” begins: “Dandelions are delicious? / Peter MacKay explains lack of a special guest appearance. // Last photo was a teenager I appreciate our elephants. / You are the platform.” These poems kick the world bloody, and the world more than deserves it. As a fragment of the longer sequence “Our sorrow is normative” reads:

once, in Toronto in my twenties, i read a menstrual poem

the fifty-something dude who’d been flirting with me said

“men don’t like to hear” such topics

he was the husband of the sister of the man who used to helm English CBC

(a man whose Prada coat I’d hung in the Regional Director’s office

on more than one occasion)

he probably did not go into debt for his fancy shoes

i played exaggerated-dumb-uptalk bitch

            “They don’t like to hear about cats?”

because

fuck him

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Lauren Carter

Lauren Carter’s most recent book is the poetry collection Following Sea which traces her settler ancestry and her own infertility. Her second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You, will be published by Freehand Books in September 2019. Swarm, her debut novel, was listed by CBC as a Top 40 novel that could change Canada. Her poetry and fiction have been long-listed for the CBC Literary Prizes multiple times, anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, and awarded top prize in the Prairie Fire and ROOM literary contests. The Write Life called her website one of the Top 100 Websites for Writers in 2018 and 2019. Visit her at www.laurencarter.ca

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

I don’t really feel like it changed my life but I suppose it did. Lichen Bright, my first poetry collection, came out when I was 30, which felt old, but, I realize now, is actually young. It was very exciting, and great to finally have a book in the world but publishing my first novel did more to change my life because with it I acquired an agent and it received some great reviews and is still being read.

Having two books out helped me gain confidence that I could then do it again which helped me calm down which helped me focus more clearly on the work. Now I’m able to work more slowly, with more attention, more care, less panic, less doubt, less hurry, less concern about perfectionism, and more awareness that something will eventually be completed and polished and good enough to publish (after a few rounds of rejections and subsequent revisions, of course).

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

I started with poetry because my teenage life felt sometimes miserable and it was impossible to be honest about that. Writing poetry gave me the ability to encode my experience (at least it felt like that to me). As my reading broadened in high school, I also started to see how visceral experience could be created on the page through poetry. I remember being in the library in my high school in the tiny town of Blind River reading a Susan Musgrave poem, with a line about blood (I wish I could remember it exactly but my mind has never worked that way), and nearly falling over sideways. That’s what I want to do, I thought. Raw emotion on the page, visceral and alive in image and rhythm.

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?

This varies a lot, depending on what I’m writing. My most recent poetry collection, Following Sea, is a collection of poems that I’ve written over more than a decade. A section of the book is formed out of in-depth genealogical and historical research which needed an injection of emotion and imagination to bring it to life so those poems took lots of notes and drafts.

Others, of course, come out fully formed. And there are some that are sitting in my notebooks, where they’ve been waiting to gel for 20 years.

In the past, I’ve tended to try to not think about things until I had a pen in my hand and then I’d just let the writing come but I’m working differently now. I’ll turn things over in my head for a little while until I have a first line, then the next, then the next and then I’ll grab a pen and my notebook. I think this has something to do with trusting my mind more.

I do write everything long-hand first, including novels, because the connection with the page and the unravelling thoughts feels different to me.

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?

Most things that I write start with images. Swarm, my debut novel, came with the image of a woman in the window of a ramshackle house, looking out at a child’s footsteps in the vegetable garden. That picture popped into my mind in the middle of a lecture when I was in grad school.

With poetry, I write one poem at a time and often don’t really understand how things are coming together structurally and thematically, in the form of a collection, until I’ve got 50-some poems written.

With fiction, I tend to write as much as possible of a rough draft in a few weeks to get the story arc, start thinking about the plot points, etcetera (short stories I’ll write the first draft in one go).

Then, I’ll generally have to begin writing into the story (because my first drafts are really short) in order to expand it and turn it into a bigger, broader, multilayered story. It’s a bit like a plant. Once the seed sprouts, I’ll help the roots dig in, then start growing the leaves.

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

I’m an extroverted introvert, so I love to do readings once I get there but am also seriously tempted to cancel at the last minute because I’ve got a good T.V. show to watch and a bag of salt and vinegar chips. But it’s fun to talk about the work – as long as people are nice (which, of course, they usually are, especially in Winnipeg, which has a huge audience for poetry and an incredibly supportive and active creative community – if you ever thought this was a city not to bother visiting, think again).

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?

It’s very cool to be able to look back and understand one’s oeuvre after a few books are out. My fourth will be published in Fall 2019 and what I have realized is that I tend to write about relationships but also displacement and broken connections, emotional trauma and memory and the cracking of our illusions – including how we see our society versus how our society actually is, as explored in Swarm – as well as where we fit personally in the broader politics and happenings of our world. 

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?

To answer this, a quote from Ursula K. LeGuin:

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality.

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

Both, and I love it! I love getting an alternate perspective on my work when it’s still forming (although I don’t let anyone read until I’m well into an advanced draft). I’ve worked with some fantastic readers and editors – Alice Major, Naomi Lewis, Jane Warren among others – who have carefully, precisely, wisely, helped me expand my own meaning and more effectively put the pieces of my work together.

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

“Be kind and be useful:” how Barack Obama sums up the fatherly wisdom he’s passed on to his kids (I saw him speak last week).

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

I’ve always written in multiple genres: poetry, short and long fiction, non-fiction journalism, a little bit of playwriting and, recently, picture books.

I also do visual art: collage and fibre arts mainly (as well as gardening, which is a sort-of art). I usually have a few different projects going on at the same time - these days, mainly poetry and novels - which I find helpful for continuing to work despite being stuck on one or the other.

The appeal is constant creativity, and allowing myself a way to express myself in a multitude of genres and forms.

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 thrash and burn, abandon things, hate myself, battle depression, try to remember to meditate, practice self-coaching, advise emerging writers to write as often as possible then break my own rules and feel like a hyprocrite. That’s about it.  

But, on a good day, like today, I get up, grab my pen and notebook without any whining, bring it back to bed with coffee and write for three hours. When a project’s really burning, I’ll also often get up at 2 or 3 and do a few hours in the middle of the night.

So, you know: chaos and unpredictability woven with humming hours of intense focus pretty much sums it up.

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

Walking. Art galleries. Reading in the hammock (in good weather). Weeding. Knitting. Anything that lets my head get loose so the seeds I need to see can sprout. I’ll also turn to books, of course, and the writers I most love and admire: T. C. Boyle, Paul Auster, Joyce Carol Oates, Lisa Ko, Karen Joy Fowler, Tash Aw, Alice Munro, among many others.…

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Pine trees and open water.

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?

Books do come from books. After I put down We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler, dried my tears, and reached for a pen, This Has Nothing To Do With You came out in a frantically written and fast rough draft.

I’m also inspired by history and visual art. My mom is an extraordinary oil and watercolour painter and, as I get enough work behind me to realize I have an ouevre, I can notice the links and connections between her explorations and themes and my own: loneliness, landscapes, open water.

This connection really comes together in an interesting way in the cover of Following Sea, which is a painting that she did of me as a teenager (but which she often says is me but isn’t me – sort-of a fictionalized echo of her own experience of longing and loneliness).

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

Lately, my Winnipeg community – Ariel Gordon, Erna Buffie, Donna Besel, Sue Sorenson, Sally Ito – who have done a lot to help me resettle to this part of Manitoba, after living several years in the north (after living until then in Ontario). Others are Ian Williams, who helped me a lot through conversation and simply an awareness that he was writing his own novel while I was writing mine (we were both in Calgary doing writer-in-residence gigs and set a deadline to take finished drafts to dinner which was really helpful). Naomi Lewis from Calgary is also a writer I respect a great deal and who was a smart, sharp and terrific editor (I also adore her new memoir coming out this spring, Tiny Lights for Travelers).

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

Oh, boy. Plant a prairie garden in my yard. Learn how to spin my own yarn. Get really good at crochet. Walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall. Paint my ugly kitchen cupboards. Finish a (good) novel written in third person (or maybe second).  

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?

Visual artist. There was a time when I was doing crazy things like building anatomically correct papier-mache hearts and selling Japanese paper dragonflies at craft markets. But, then again, I’ve also had fantasies of being a dog trainer and a big city lawyer.

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

Life. Genetics. Who knows. I started writing before I could write.

I’d make scribbles with a pen and ask her what words I’d written and tell my mom stories that she’d write down. One she even illustrated: The Girl with the Green Hands. My late uncle was also a writer and poet. I think it’s in the blood. Plus: my mom and brother gave me books all the time for presents and pens and journals.

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

I am reading the last few pages of Paul Auster’s epic, enormous 4321, a novel that weaves together the four possible lives of Archie Isaac Ferguson, a young writer (in all his realities) growing up in the U.S. in the 1950s and ‘60s. It’s intrigued me, bored me, surprised me, stunned me and left me incredibly inspired to take on an enormous canvas. Other books I’ve recently loved: How To Be Both by Ali Smith, TheFirst Book of Calamity Leek by Paula Lichtarowicz, The Red Word by Sarah Henstra, and The Leavers by Lisa Ko. I’m just about to crack open Reproduction by Ian Williams. As you can tell, I mostly read fiction, and also don’t watch enough great films (although I LOVED Russian Doll but do Netflix series count?)

20 - What are you currently working on?

A collection of poems about grief, depression, gardening and my brother’s life and death, and a couple of novels in the literary and weird fiction genres. Promoting my new poetry collection. Also, securing permissions for the quotations in my next novel, talking about the cover, and that sort of administrative, dressing the baby before it’s ushered out the door sort-of stuff.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;