Karen Clavelle [photo credit: Leif Norman] is the author of The Mother Goose Letters (At Bay, 2018), BiRDSONG, and IOLAIRE
(Turnstone, 2018), for which she received the John Hirsch Award for most Promising
Writer (2018). IOLAIRE was short-listed for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald
Lampert Award (2018) and nominated for the Manitoba Writers’ Guild Mary Scorer
Award and the Aqua Books Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. IOLAIRE weaves a heart-rending story around the sinking of the HMY IOLAIRE. Her
first novel, The Mother Goose Letters, focuses on migration from the
vantage point of a runaway Mother Goose inveigling nursery rhyme cohorts to
join her in the Canadian prairies. Karen’s play, “Crossword,” was a finalist in the “Sarasvati Bake
Offs” (2015). She has been
published in At Bay’s Fiction Annual (2018), Border Crossings, CVII, Prairie Fire, academic
journals, and numerous chapbooks.
Through
her work on the Long Poem, migration, and the Canadian North, Karen has given
talks and readings in Scotland, Spain, and in Canada, most recently, The Winnipeg
International Writer’s Festival (2018). Her current work includes BiRDSONG, poems (atelier78, 2018), “The
Seasons” (At Bay, forthcoming, 2019), drama, and short fiction. A long-time champion
of chapbook publishing in Winnipeg, Karen is the founder of atelier78 press,
and a founding member of the enigmatic and somnambulant pachyderm press. She is
a board member of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, a former board
member of the Women’s Musical Club of Winnipeg, an active member of a fledgling
radio play troupe, and current Writer in Residence at St. Paul’s College,
University of Manitoba.
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, IOLAIRE (Turnstone Press,
2017), was a gift that gave me the enormous lift of external validation that was
underscored when the book was nominated for four awards, including the League
of Canadian Poets’ ‘Gerald Lambert Memorial Award’ and the Manitoba Writer’s
Guild ‘John Hirsh Award for Most Promising Writer’ (2017), which I won. The
book developed in part over the latter half of my PhD program.
In researching my PhD dissertation on the garden in Canadian prairie writing,
I had been looking for epistolary narratives on migration to the prairies from
the UK (Scotland), one of the topics that would come to bear on the emerging
long poem about the historic IOLAIRE Disaster of 1919, as well as on The Mother Goose Letters (At Bay Press,
2018).
IOLAIRE and The Mother Goose Letters are
light years apart, one being a serious creative work of mourning in the form of
a long poem, the other, a whimsical satire in a (hybrid) novel/long poem form. Gravitas governed IOLAIRE from the
beginning of the writing, with fictional voices speaking as survivors of the
shipwreck, twenty yards from home. I wanted to get at the mind-numbing sense of
loss that continues to be felt by people affected by disaster.
For me, research is a stimulating and rewarding part of the writing
process, and in the research and writing of the books, I was as constrained by one as I was freed by the other. Whereas homage and loss govern IOLAIRE,
The Mother Goose Letters are a case
of levity let loose with Mother Goose, who migrates into the 21st-century
as a wisecracking, opinionated, small ‘a’ anarchist - she’s a ‘goose’ - and
what might we expect of a goose?
As a writer, I would say I am driven by voice, not mine so much as the voices
that speak in my work. Looking back to earlier work, I see that my interest
speech, language, words, and word-play has been evident from the time I began
writing. (Tentative attempts in early poems appear as evidence.) IOLAIRE and The Mother Goose Letters feel different from that earlier work in
that a confidence in language has evolved as the writer has come increasingly
into voice. Increasingly my work pays homage to contemporary and poetic works
I’ve read, loved, and learned from, from the likes of James Joyce (Finnegan’s Wake, Ulysses, Dubliners) through to playwrights such as Samuel Beckett
and Brian Friel. Poets Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, and e.e. cummings come to mind
as influences, as well, along with poets closer to home - bp nicol, Steven Ross Smith, Dennis Cooley,
prairie writers. . ..
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as
opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t ‘come to poetry’
so much as I came down with it (as Eli Mandel once said). Three “exposures” it
took for the infection to take hold on me. The first exposure was a dip into
Canadian poetry in an intro 20thC Literature class where we studied Seed Catalogue; the second, in a
creative writing class with George Amabile, who introduced me as a poet (!) Being
introduced as poet had a bearing on my coming into poetry as well. That a poet saw
me as a poet essentially freed me to
‘be’ one - such an important thing, naming. Finally, the coup de grâce came in Dennis Cooley’s class on the Canadian
prairie long poem, the open and plastic form that embraces poetry, prose,
creative non-fiction, documentary, history, found materials. The list goes on.
3 - How long does it take to start any
particular writing project?
That’s
something I am discovering at present as I move further from IOLAIRE and my Mother Goose, both of
which are very much still with me. I produced a lettered collection of poems (BiRDSONG, atelier78, 2018) after The Mother Goose Letters left my desk. I
usually have to or three piece underway at the same time.
Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a
slow process?
I tend to write in
series, poetry or prose, though I do write single poems sometimes. My writing
usually comes quite quickly to begin with, and there’s usually a voice or
several voices involved, and they usually have more to say than I can get into
one poem.
Do first drafts appear close to their final shape, or
does your work come out of copious notes?
I would have
answered that question quite differently before doing a writing workshop with
Steven Ross Smith some time ago. I took ‘finished’ poems to the workshop and
they rose to new heights with rigorous revision. To their benefit, multiple
additional drafts turned them into some of the best pieces I have written. It
takes many drafts for a poem to find its final shape. For me, a first draft
provides an armature, something to hold up a structure rather than define its
shape. If there are notes, they would derive from digging into a thesaurus and
testing alternative words, checking definitions, changing nouns into verbs,
trimming articles and prepositions, moving and perhaps reversing lines &c.
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?
In both IOLAIRE and the Mother Goose Letters, I did a lot of writing before I figured out
what I had. That said, the myriad voices in each piece, I think, still might
evolve into oral performance pieces.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to
your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I love doing
readings, perhaps because they extend the creative process to some degree. I
especially like letting my characters speak aloud and readings provide that
opportunity.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind
your writing?
My theoretical
concerns rest in the territory of the long poem as genre. I remember being
absolutely drawn in by the first long poems I encountered when I was nine or
ten years old. From the beginning, then, I loved the stories of “The Highwayman,”
“The Wreck of the Hesperus,” and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. My
major theoretical concern is with story, and immediately following is concern
with how best to tell it. I would most hope to engage readers to the point that
my stories become theirs in emotional experience.
What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with
your work?
In IOLAIRE, for example, I was trying to
understand loss. Coincidentally I had begun to work on the poem in the months
before 9/11. I was trying to understand what it might mean for literally everyone
in a community, an island in this case, to either know or be related to someone
lost in the IOLAIRE Disaster - and then came 9/11. It struck me that events
were not all that different if we consider the individuals lost and their
connections to the world. I suppose I was trying to understand hope, as well,
and what is it to carry on. . .?
The question
of loss would be one of the considerations in The Mother Goose Letters, too, but with respect to migration. And then
there is the question of Home. We live in a time of unprecedented migration,
and through the eyes of a rather ridiculous goose, I would hope to raise some
small awareness of what it might mean to leave family friends, culture,
language, “belonging”, and put down roots in another place (for whatever reason).
In part, my Mother Goose explores questions of Home: she invites friends to
join her in her new place (as is a pattern in relocation), and she and her
cohorts ‘story’ the new place with their presence and their naïve efforts to
get on with their lives.
What do you even think the current questions are?
It seems to
me that the single big question we have to contend with is the question of
belonging: this means not only where
we belong, but how. As I see it, we
are in a time of seismic social shift deriving, in part, from new
understandings of right and wrong. When what we understand to be right or wrong
shifts in some way, ‘belonging’ shifts with it.
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 one
of the roles of writers might be to assist
with societal and cultural change, both in light of pointing it out and in processing
it in some way - comedy, satire, drama, history come to mind. Irish theatre,
for example, is one of places that highlights change as it both proposes and
reveals ways to deal with the challenges of it. Forward thinkers write into the
future and speculate what might be; others write the past for much the same
reason. One important role of the writer is to encourage thought and invite
people to participate in larger conversations.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside
editor difficult or essential (or both)?
For me, it is
pretty much essential: editors bring the hand of experience on many planes. Writing
is very much a solitary activity, but paradoxically, it is also very much a
communal activity. Producing a piece of work as a book or a play, for example,
is a hugely collaborative undertaking that can only be to its benefit. But not
only editors are essential. It has been possible for me to work directly with
book designers whose vision has significantly enhanced my text.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“If you want
to be successful at something, surround yourself with people who love what you
love.” This was W.D. Valgardson answer to that question at a public reading. What
great advice!
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between
genres (poetry to plays)? What do you see as the appeal?
I am still
learning the conventions of writing for theater, but I think my experience as a
poet has really trained me to write plays as it has trained me to be a much
better writer than I would otherwise have been. That said, I don’t have a
published play in hand yet. I write in voices for the most part, and theatre
draws me because it is dependent on voices. I have long suspected there might
be a playwright in me trying to get out - I just haven’t quite yet figured out
how.
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’m a morning
person, so I like to be at work from about 6:30, 7:00. a.m., With my little
espresso at hand, I’m good to go till about 9:30 if I’m going to the gym, and
about 11:30 otherwise. If I am working to a deadline, I will put in another
three or four hours after that.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you
turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I love doing
the research for writing, so if I am stalled I will go and do a little research.
Sometimes the research means looking at the mechanics of someone else’s writing
or just reading favourite writers. Other times it might mean researching a
specific topic, such as the historic black houses in Scotland.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
What an
interesting question that is. I think part of the answer resides in what home
I’m thinking of. The smell of fresh floor wax would take me to being home as a
kid. I was very much at home on the Isle
of Lewis when I was researching IOLAIRE, and I will forever remember the
unmistakable scent of the peat burning in the house. At home now, it would be the fragrance of a
white pine Christmas tree from the days when we used to get real Christmas trees.
I think the best fragrance would be sweet peas
- they transport me to my grandmother’s garden on the farm, to a
neighbour who cut hers for me when I was quite young, to my favourite aunt, and
to my own garden.
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 have come
to recognise that music influences my work through comments of people who have
read it, and I love that my writing has sometimes been called lyrical and
musical. I grew up singing in choirs, and what are songs, if not poetry? I
expect that choral work probably has something to do with me being a poet, but
it’s my prose writing that’s more often been called musical. I don’t
consciously attempt to make my writing musical. I don’t know how I might do
that.
Nature, particularly in the Canadian prairies, has a strong influence on
my work. I draw on nature intentionally and knowingly after having spent a lot
of time researching nature in Canadian prairie writing particularly considering
the prairie of Sinclair Ross, W. O. Mitchell, Margaret Laurence, Robert Kroetsch, and Dennis Cooley.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writers
who are important to me have been named already. I attended a series of workshops
two years ago, with Stephen Ross Smith and during that six-week period my
writing changed dramatically. Dennis Cooley has been an invaluable teacher,
colleague, mentor, and friend for many years. I’ve drawn on his writing for
inspiration. His advice and continued support has kept me in the game.
Increasingly, I look to writers whose works interest me not only for the piece
at hand, but for the underpinnings - Thomas’s Under Milk Wood would be one example.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet
done?
I’d like to
get a play produced, for one. I’d like see part of IOLAIRE set to music. I’ve made some moves in that direction. And I’ve
been taking ‘voice over’ classes. I’d like a hand in producing something I’ve
written as a radio play or a podcast.
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?
If I could
pick another occupation, I would hard-pressed to choose between being a book
artist and being a book conservator. I love the zen of hand book-binding, love the
tools of the trade - handmade paper, a bone folder, needles and thread - no
technology there. I love the challenge of thinking my way in and out of
building a book, and I like doing something that I know others did hundreds of
years ago, and that has changed little in the interim.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It could take years to
answer this question, the answer would be changing with live. What else would I
do? In short, I wrote because I liked to write. I wrote because I needed to
speak, and writing brought me into voice. In short, I write because writing
makes me happy.
19 - What was the last great book you read?
Just one? So many great
books! I am currently fascinated with Lori Cayer’s long poem, Mrs. Romanov, for its richness and the
release of history through the imagined voice of the doomed Czarina and her
family. I keep reading The Hare with the Amber Eyes, in which Edmund de Waal weaves himself in and out of Western
history through the history of his family, and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, a fascinating novel exploring and exploiting
the Baba Yaga folk tales of Eastern Europe. The book is all the more impressive
for the lyricism that comes through translation from Serbian to English.
What was the last great film?
Maybe The English Patient
or Brief Encounter - both outstanding
in my emotional memory.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I have a few things on
the go, among them: a series of “shorts” deriving from the fictional setting of
IOLAIRE; the second in a series of
three chapbooks that began with BiRDSONG;
and a play that tells a murder story through the monologues of four characters.
Thank you for your stimulating and interesting
questions!
No comments:
Post a Comment