12 or 20 (second series) questions with Sharon King-Campbell

Sharon King-Campbell [photo credit: Ashley Harding Photography] is a freelance theatre artist and storyteller. Her work has appeared in Riddle Fence and Word, and on stages across Newfoundland and Labrador. Sharon grew up in Ottawa and now divides her time between downtown St. John’s and a little house in Winterton, NL.

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 is my first book, but I can already feel it changing my life. I've spent the last fifteen-ish years working as a theatre artist (and I don't plan to stop!) but there is something really fun and exciting about getting my work into people's hands in places that are far away. Live performance is magical, but it does require you to be physically in a room with the audience, which limits your reach, logistically.
 
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I had to think about this for a minute. I *did* come to poetry first - as a little kid. I think I was 7 when my first poem was published (in the children's section of the community newspaper). But then I went into theatre and started writing (mostly) plays, so this is a return of sorts.

I think I was drawn by poetry's connection to music. I was a very musical kid, so the rhythm and rhyme of lyrics, and of the kind of poetry that I was exposed to at that age, felt comfortable to me. I liked the problem-solving of it: this word doesn't fit, what can I use instead? What's the best rhyme here? Then, when I started to expand my writing interests and I kept a daily writing practice (which I've been doing off and on since I was fourteen - much more off than on, I must confess), often I would only have 15, 10, 5 minutes, and the automatic thing for me to do is to dive into a poem. I can't write a play - even a very bad first draft of a play - in 5 minutes, but I might scribble out some lines that could later be wrestled into a poem.

Now, I think certain stories want to be told in certain forms. Most poems don't make good plays, and most plays wouldn't make good poems. You can be elaborately detailed and simultaneously say something very large in poetry because it doesn't demand a fixed narrative.
 
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?
Irritatingly, it depends on the project. I have written full-length plays in three months that changed very little in the editing, and I have taken a decade to wrangle my unmanageable thoughts into a play someone might produce. Poems are similar. There are a couple of pieces in This Is How It Is that came out of me whole and have changed very little between the first draft and the published copy. There are also pieces that I wrote in 2012, that started out as three different bits of writing that I pulled out of myself over the course of several months and eventually found some meaning when I put them together. There are pieces in there that started as a 20+-line poem, got whittled down to a single line or even a few words, and then built up again.

I'm jealous of writers who have their works jump out of them fully-developed like Athena from Zeus' head. What makes that awkward is that sometimes (rarely) I'm one of those writers and I can never predict when that'll happen.

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?
Well, I'm a rookie when it comes to poetry, but I wasn't working on a 'book' until very late in the process. I mentioned that some of the poems were written in 2012, and I didn't start thinking about putting together a collection until 2018.

That on-again-off-again writing practice I talked about earlier is the genesis of almost everything I write, in whatever form, so the germ of the idea happens in this kind of terrifying moment when I stare at the blank page in my notebook and try to convince myself that I'm not empty. It's probably not surprising that the vast majority of work I produce this way is absolute garbage, but that's not the point. It's practice, so that you maintain your skills and develop new ones... like if you played the trumpet. Still, those notebooks are where I go when I'm looking for something to turn into a full piece.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
This will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever met a theatre performer, but I love doing readings. I'm hoping that I'll be able to do a couple of in-person events once that is safe again. I do like live readings much better than recorded ones.

It's certainly not counter to my process. I always read my stuff out loud while I'm editing, and I love the idea of delivering poetry as a performance.
 
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 spend a lot of time these days thinking about how I can contribute to the social justice and environmental justice projects in a way that's sustainable for me. You won't have to read between too many lines in the collection to see that I think a lot about feminism and climate change. I guess the big questions there are How did we get here? How am I involved? and Where do we go now? There are answers to the first two of those, although there's always more to learn. The last question is the biggie, and I don't think it's one we can answer individually, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep it nearby and visit with it regularly.

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?
This giant question deserves a giant answer:

Writers, and all artists, are engaged in a community-building project. We make cultural works that become shared experiences. Think about going to the theatre (I know, this was probably more than a year ago, but try to remember). You sit in a room full of other people, watching a story unfold. Maybe it makes you feel something. Maybe it gives you something to think about. Almost certainly, what you are feeling is something slightly different than what the person next to you is feeling, but it's caused by the same experience. And then the show ends, the lights come back on, and you go out into the world having shared something with a room full of strangers. Later, when you are making small-talk with your fellow commuter on the bus, you might discover that this person saw that show too, or worked on it, and then you have something in common with that person, you have a touchstone for your conversation. By comparing your reactions to the experience, you can get to know this person a little bit. You get off the bus and there is a person in your community who you know a little better than you would've without that play.

Of course this translates to books as well: have you read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? Me too. We have something in common. We can learn something about each other through that.

What makes artistic experiences different than the shared experience of sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office, or grocery shopping, is that artists have the opportunity to deliberately sculpt your experience. We work to elicit specific responses - to make you think about specific things, or to make you feel certain things. Most (but not all!) artistic work strives to elicit empathy, and empathy is one of those muscles that needs to be exercised regularly for the development of healthy communities.

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

Sincerely, I could never have made a single artistic product without the help of editors and outside readers. The editor of This Is How It Is did an incredible job of finding the connections between all of these poems from almost a decade of my life and shining a light on them for me. When I write I am too close to the work to really know what's going on for the reader, and I love and require outside input.
 
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Djanet Sears once said that if you can steal one minute a day, write one sentence a day, eventually you'll have a whole work. She didn't say that to me but it's in a video and it's awesome.

The best piece of advice that I received directly was from a casting director, and I'm paraphrasing here, but she said "when you get a part, it's because you were perfect for it; when you don't get a part it's because somebody else was perfect for it." Being an artist of any kind involves quite a lot of rejection, and you have to be able to bear it. Receiving rejection as somebody else's success, rather than my own failure, has been invaluable to me.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to storytelling to theatre)? What do you see as the appeal?
I've never really thought about it. I didn't stop being a theatre artist to be a poet... I'm all those things at once. I think they're all facets of the same practice. I'm just telling the stories in the medium that they come out of me.

There's certainly some truth in the idea of spending ten thousand hours working on something to become an expert, and it's vital for the world to have neurosurgeons and concert violinists, but that's not who I am. I get bored easily, and I'm always looking for the next project, so it's good for me to shake things up in terms of what I do every day. Like many things, routine is only helpful to me in moderation.

Connecting to a live audience is exciting, and so is working in rehearsal to bring the best performance out of a cast of actors. So is finding that perfect turn of phrase to express that intangible thing. I love all of it. Why would I pick one?

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 could never even begin to define a 'typical' day. Life when I'm working full-time in theatre is very different from my current (pandemic-impacted) life as a grad student, which is different again from the long swaths of my life when I'm working on three or four part-time arts contracts and spending the day running from meeting to meeting, sending emails from my phone in between. To be clear, this is how I like to live my life - with a different twist every now and then - but it does make a steady routine pretty impossible.

When I'm 'behaving myself', I will find 5-20 minutes every day to write something down, without any pressure to make it good. I just add it to the checklist of stuff I plan to do in a day and I sit down to do it whenever there's an appropriate window. The periods when I've most successfully maintained that practice have been while travelling or on tour, during the runs of shows I'm working on (not the rehearsal part, the show-once-a-day part), and when I'm desperately underemployed. Early pandemic saw a near-unprecedented run of daily writing until I started coursework for grad school and abruptly stopped having any spare brain cells.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
In terms of the 'what if I'm empty??' feeling that precedes a writing practice exercise, if I'm really stuck I'll grab any book nearby and flip through it until I find a phrase I can latch onto, and then I'll copy it down and build off of it. Otherwise, I spend a lot of time just staring out the window.

In the context of having a specific piece that I just can't seem to push forward, I'll generally throw it in a drawer for a few months and come back to it later. It's incredible what you can do with fresh eyes and a bit of distance, and if I stop caring about the project in the interim, that's probably a sign I should abandon it. If I don't care, why should anyone else?

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
This is a surprisingly complicated question. Where is home?

OK, here is one each for the various places that hold that title: cut grass, ocean, woodsmoke.

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?
Yes, all of the above, and the intangible stuff that connects them together. I'll add theatre to that list, for obvious reasons.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
It seems glib, but... William Shakespeare. Without that dude I would probably be a chemist or something. Also, an eclectic bunch of folks: Jane Urquhart, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Ondaatje, Tanya Huff, Timothy Findley, Norton Juster, Neil Gaiman, Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
A book tour!

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 come from a science family. My mother taught math & science, my father was an engineer, I have two close relatives who have PhDs in physics and chemistry, and I had an aptitude for math as a kid. So it'd probably be something in that area. I could've been evaluating the carbon emissions on worksites or something (this is a real thing that one of those PhDs really does for a living, and is the most specific science-related job I can think of right now... and I'm not even 100% sure that I've described it correctly).

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I do lots of other things, as discussed above! If I was exclusively a writer I wouldn't eat very much. I just keep writing though. It never goes away.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I really loved Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Honorable mention to John Green's Turtles All the Way Down, the audiobook of which made me ugly cry in my garden on a beautiful day last summer.

It's been an eon since I last saw a new film, so I have to reach back a few years, but Hidden Figures gets a couple of viewings a year in this house. It's so good.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A PhD English (har har). I also have a playwriting project in the works - it's a contemporary adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Triny Finlay, Myself a Paperclip

 

First it was for you, this world.

Jangle it like those coins in your front pocket.
Jingle it around. Loose.                              

Mindless sex in a crumbling clapboard house in the North Side|
while the cat digs at the mattress,
burrowed in the box springs: fey, vagrant rat. 

I should have been a librarian of the day’s anxieties 

– heat rash behind the ears, hair
slipping from knots
across and sinister. 

I’m not a sideways glance.

Repeat: I’m not the past.

Just give me your patience with the cat.

At the other end of Queen Street, a Civic flips, spills
its sloshed and sleepless contents. (“You Don’t Want What I’ve Got”)

Fredericton poet Triny Finlay’s third full-length poetry title, after Splitting Off (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2004) and Histories Haunt Us (Nightwood Editions, 2010), is Myself a Paperclip (Fredericton NB: Icehouse/Goose Lane Editions, 2021). Through the narrative lyrics of Myself a Paperclip, Finlay writes the intersperses, articulating a destigmatization of mental illness, simultaneously paired with an acknowledgment, acceptance and moving forward by moving through. Finlay writes of coming apart and reshaping, working through the shifts that medications prompt and allow, writing the light and the dark, and the uncertain journey toward a kind of balance. “When we changed my meds,” she writes, as part of “Adjusting the Psychotropics,” “I walked off a ledge backwards, / certain, uncertain. When we changed my meds, I fell into a soft / mallow field. // The friends were no longer friends. / The mums said, ‘Can you hold the baby while I pour the coffee?’ / The family said, ‘Never a dull moment.’”

Hers is a book of alternating structures, even from within the space of a longer sequence, composing short bursts of narrative focus in shorter poems, and again at the onset of longer accumulations of fragments before her line and her lyric is stretched out, writing hesitations and bursts, an exclamations amid multiple silences. She writes pauses, halts and bursts, writing a lyric notebook of experiences, of banality and balance. “Call it irrational,” she writes, as part of the extended sketchbook sequence “You Don’t Want What I’ve Got,” “mercurial. Wild / pink moons. It’s like / you’re not even trying. // Plucking guitar strings all ticky-tacky / in a high, unlikely room. // Wistful, hysterical. / And through the walls, wisteria.” She writes of #MeToo, and attempting to right herself after assaults from without and from within. She writes of lists and keeping score and keeping track. She writes poems that count backwards from ten, documenting progress, losses and frustration. The poems in Myself a Paperclip offer an open and direct account of her experiences through mental illness, one that is sharp, thoughtful and written almost as a notebook of slow return, as she writes:

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From the hallway, my room now smells like a breach of trout carcasses frequented by dogs. After the novels, after the mugs of tea, after the johnny-shirts that trail along the floor…after the aftershock.
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In the room, the women come and go.
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I need to be here.
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Douglas Barbour (March 21, 1940-September 25, 2021)

[Doug Barbour during the Edmonton launch of University of Alberta Press poetry titles by myself, Robert Kroetsch and Alice Major, 2010]

I’ve already spent half the day resisting the writing of this, but Edmonton poet, editor, publisher, critic and general literary enthusiast Douglas Barbour passed away this week, after an extended illness. He was an accomplished and easily underappreciated poet, and one of the finest literary critics that Canada has produced, something that was also less appreciated over the years than it should have been. As part of editing the feature “Douglas Barbour at 70” for Jacket Magazine in 2009, I wrote a bit about Doug’s work, and my own frustration with seeing how his work should have garnered far more appreciation than it did. He was well-known, well-loved and well-read in the Canadian prairies, but seemingly not much beyond that (although he had a number of conversations and engagements with New Zealand and Australian poets). His enthusiasm for poetry, jazz, science fiction and speculative fiction, as Andy Weaver suggested over Twitter yesterday, was unwavering over the years, and it took very little to get him talking excitedly about any of those subjects. There was always a kindness, an openness and an enthusiasm with Doug, and an involvement in the literary culture around him, even through his involvement over the past decade or so with Edmonton’s Olive Reading Series, or returning to being more involved with NeWest Press a decade or so back, due to some unexpected staffing changes. He showed up to do the work that so many writers and readers tend not to think about, and take for granted. As I understood it, he was instrumental behind-the-scenes in not only advocating for me to be writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta back in 2007, but in subsequently assisting in getting my Edmonton poetry manuscript, wild horses (2010), accepted by the University of Alberta Press. I’m sure there are dozens upon dozens of writers across the country that are able to have careers thanks to the support, encouragement and advocacy of Douglas Barbour, happily and enthusiastically (and slightly distractedly) doing all the invisible work that is required for a healthy and sustained literary culture, all while continuing to teach, and produce his own work. I would fully expect that retirement simply meant he was no less busy, but simply engaged with other kinds of activity.

I first met Doug in in Edmonton in the summer of 1997, during my first cross-Canada reading tour, touring from Ottawa to Vancouver with little to no spending money, but a box of various above/ground press chapbooks I aimed to distribute all across the country. I’d already spent a night or so staying with Edmonton poet Michael Londry and his mother, spending time in conversation with Michael, and meeting Lori Emerson, and was to spend another day or two with Tim Bowling before catching the next train heading west, into Kamloops. Doug and I had arranged to meet for an afternoon, during which he would transport me from the Londry house to the Bowling apartment: myself and my mound of chapbooks. That afternoon, he became one of above/ground press’ earliest subscribers, handing me a cheque for $100, even as he expressed frustration that he couldn’t get his own work published—I did try to convince him that if he could afford to give me $100, he could afford to start publishing his own chapbooks, to no avail. It would be some time before I discovered that he was one of the founding members of NeWest Press. Even now, I don’t really understand why he was having so much difficulty.

Around 2006, I ended up reading in Calgary with Doug, driving down from Edmonton and back again. Given the VIA line lands in Edmonton but not further south, I’d always done reading tours landing in Calgary with someone from Edmonton, offering to land us both a gig if my co-reader could assist with travel. Once Andy Weaver left Edmonton for Toronto (he and I had done at least one if not two jaunts south for readings), to teach at York University, I suggested Doug and I drive down in his car, which he was completely up for. Doug talked non-stop the whole drive in each direction, offering through conversation what felt like two separate three-and-a-half hour lectures on poetry and poetics. His insights and commentary, and enthusiasm for discussion, were both incredible and exhausting. I could barely get a word in (and I think as part of at least one of those jaunts I’d been hoping to get some sleep, worn out from the activities of the night prior). Although my recollections also having him stay overnight in Calgary in someone’s basement apartment, possibly kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s. My recollection has whomever hosted him that night extremely humbled and excited to be able to host him.

As a writer, he was always game for trying different things, from his ongoing collaborations with Arizona poet Sheila Murphy that resulted in two trade collections, Continuations and Continuations 2 [see my review of such here; see my interview with the two of them on same here at Touch the Donkey] to his own experimentation with form and breath, most recently seen through his poetry collection Listen. If (University of Alberta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here]. I’m not sure what he’d been working on over the past decade or so [although I did manage to interview him earlier this year via Touch the Donkey]. Any conversation of what he may or may not have been working on, at any time, prompted a list of projects, some of which had been ongoing for years. I’d attempted multiple times to get another chapbook manuscript out of him for above/ground press, having produced his chapbook It’s over is it over: Love’s Fragmented Narrative in 2005, and Wednesdays’ in 2008, as part of the online (since disappeared from the internet) “ALBERTA SERIES” from my writer-in-residence year, as well as the first three sections of Doug and Sheila’s “Continuations” series as an issue of STANZAS magazine (issue #30, 2002), but nothing else. I checked in with him every few years, but he didn’t have anything right now, he was busy with other things, he would think about it, etcetera, and nothing ever came of it. I would suspect he was far too busy engaged with the work of others, whether as reviewer, editor, mentor or publisher. He was always in a thousand different directions at once. Even during my Edmonton year, when I’d hoped to actually be able to spend more time with him in person, I could barely manage to catch him beyond seeing him at a literary event (although he seemed to make it out to every one).

It was Doug who taught me the real value in exchanging books with other writers: the ability to connect with writers outside of Canada. It was far cheaper to get a copy of a book by an American, Australian or New Zealand poet, he suggested, by offering to exchange books through the mail. Apparently he’d been doing this for years, which had, in part, allowed his work to garner more appreciation, one might think, outside of Canada than from within. And consider how it was only through his enthusiastic and communal engagement as a reader that he was able to push any sort of self-promotion. Literature for him was very much the conversation that Robert Kroetsch had offered it, so many years prior. And I, along with many others, I know, am very much going to miss his voice.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Amorak Huey

Amorak Huey’s fourth book of poems is Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the chapbook Slash/Slash (Diode, 2021), Huey teaches writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His previous books are Boom Box (Sundress, 2019), Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank, 2018), and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015), as well as two chapbooks.

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?

I feel like writers are supposed to say that the first book doesn’t change anything. Like, that’s the pure response. In some respects, certainly, it’s true. Having a book doesn’t make the next poem any easier to write. It doesn’t get rid of impostor syndrome. For me, at least, and for most poets, it didn’t come with life-changing money, or, like, any money at all. But still, publishing that first chapbook — The Insomniac Circus from Hyacinth Girl in 2014 — and then the next year my first full-length collection, Ha Ha Ha Thump from Sundress Publications — well, it was a huge personal achievement. The fulfillment of a lifelong dream. I was 44 when that first chapbook came out, and I remain super gratified by its publication. The ability to say yes when someone asks if I’ve published a book? It means something to me. It matters. My fourth full-length collection — Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy — came out in May. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written, but I don’t know that it’s hugely different from my first books. It’s just the next step.

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

I went to fiction first. Thought I was going to write the Great American Novel (I kind of still think that). But a poetry workshop in college, and a couple of workshops in my first, failed attempt at grad school changed things. One fiction professor used my piece in class as an example of a story that wasn’t actually a story. Another writing professor asked me how serious I was about being a fiction writer instead of a poet; I think maybe she meant to praise my poems, but her tone definitely implied something not so great about my fiction. Anyway, I got more praise for my poems than for my prose, and as an approval-seeking older child, that was probably what did it. I also try to watch my tone with my students, because I know how long they might remember even the most unintended dismissiveness.

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 tend to write either rapidly or not at all. Periods of getting nothing done followed by periods of getting lots done. Some drafts come out near their final form; others require numerous and extensive revisions. All of which is to say I’m all over the place. I envy writers who have a regular routine or process.

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’m definitely a one-poem-at-a-time kind of writer, which of course leads to challenges when it’s time to assemble a manuscript. Poems start all sorts of places for me: with fragments of language, with images, with experiences I want to make sense of, sometimes with a title. My chapbooks have been projects where I’m circling the same concept or topic, but in general I’m writing only the poem in front of me. How it might fit into a collection is a question for later.

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

I am very much not a performance poet, but I love reading my work to an audience, and I love hearing other poets read their work. At least, when it’s a poet who understands how to read their work and who understands which of their poems work well when read aloud. Reading my poems aloud to myself, over and over, is a huge part of my composing process, so by the time they’re done, I think I have a sense of how or whether they work aurally as well as on the page.

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 new book explores fatherhood and masculinity and mortality. I think all poetry is about mortality. I don’t know if I read this somewhere or if I made it up, but I think one of the defining characteristics of a poem is that it knows it’s going to end, while prose is in denial about that. Every poem is an elegy.

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?

Let me quote Jen Benka here: “We know the secret to survival. It is saying. It is naming. It is telling. It is recording. It is singing. To soothe our fears. To fuel our inner fire. To remember all those who came before on whose shoulders we stand. To illuminate and ignite new guiding lights.”

That’s the role of the writer.

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

Working with a good editor is an amazing, inspiring experience. The best editors know how to help you unlock what’s possible in your writing. I worked with Maggie Smith on both Boom Box and Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy before they were accepted for publication, and her care and thoughtful response made both books better. my experience with the editors at Sundress has been similarly excellent. Erin Elizabeth Smith worked with me on Ha Ha Ha Thump and Boom Box; Jeremy Michael Reed was the editor for Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. Again, the books are so much better for their attention. 

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

My friend, colleague, and collaborator W. Todd Kaneko talks about the need for writers to keep the “life of art” distinct from the “life of commerce.” One is about writing poems, the other about getting them in front of an audience. Both are work. Both are important. But they are not the same.

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

I have this kind of half-baked theory. All writing is, at its core, about the human experience: how we live, love, grieve, and die on this planet. But each genre brings different forces to bear on that experience. Poetry centers language: the search for words to describe what cannot be described. Fiction centers narrative: the cause-and-effect relationships between events in a character’s life. Essays center memory’s flawed relationship to truth: the leaky vessel that holds all of our experiences. There’s overlap, of course, and you can’t always draw a bright line between genres, but for me, as I approach a piece of writing, the questions that interest me most in relationship to the topic determine what genre I work in.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

My days begin by getting teenagers out of bed, fed, off to school. They end with soccer-practice carpools, choir concerts, nagging about homework, laundry, what’s for dinner, what’s for dinner, what’s for dinner. I’m not complaining, it’s all good stuff. But as for writing? I have no routine. I fit the words in around the edges of my life the best I can. Some seasons are better than others.

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

Sometimes I just let it stay stalled. We need breaks. But the answer is reading. I always go back to the page. Find the poems that make me feel something. Those are the ones that make me, like, “I want to make something like that.” Reading refills the water trough, even when the season is dry.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Kudzu blossoms in spring.

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, for sure. I almost always listen to music while I’m writing. Many of the poems in Boom Box, my 2019 book, are explicitly engaged with music, specifically the metal I listened to in high school. Plug here for Jason Isbell, probably my current favorite artist.

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

Wow, that’s a long list. My favorite poet is Traci Brimhall. My favorite book is Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas. My favorite poem is Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Song.” And if we’re looking at poets who were early, formative influences on my writing, the list includes David Kirby, Bob Hicok, Jorie Graham, Adrienne Rich, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Robert Lowell, and Emily Dickinson. I could go on. More recent influences include Matthew Olzmann, Natalie Diaz, Rebecca Hazelton, Jericho Brown, Catie Rosemurgy, Karyna McGlynn, Franny Choi, Natalie Shapero, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Jamaal May, and Leila Chatti. There are others. Like I said, it’s a long list. Not that I think anyone would necessarily see those poets’ work in my own, but still, their poems have arranged my brain, changed how I see the world and the possibilities of poetry. I read a lot, and read like a sponge soaking up pieces of pretty much every poet I read and wringing their language back out into my own.

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

Visit Paris. Watch a game in Dodger Stadium. Attend the Manchester Derby at Old Trafford. Writing-wise, so many of my ambitions are the usual foolish ones involving fancy kinds of recognition that are beyond my control. Maybe finish and publish my novel. That one is at least partly within my control.

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 mean, the honest answer is playing first base for the Dodgers, though I guess the window has closed on that. I was a newspaper journalist for a lot of years, and sadly, the window has kind of closed on that, too.

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

Writing has just always been there. I can’t imagine not doing it.

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

Presently re-reading the amazing book of poems 1919 by Eve L. Ewing. I read it last year and knew immediately I was assigning it in class someday, and so this spring I put it on the list for my advanced poetry section. I recently finished The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones and can’t stop thinking about it. As for last great film, I’m not sure. I saw Knives Out and Emma right before the pandemic shut everything down, and both were super fun. Does that count?

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m making my way through a third draft of the novel I mentioned above. It’s historical fiction, set in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Writing a novel is a trip. 98,000 words, multiple drafts, and I still don’t know if it’s going to turn out to be anything worth reading.

12or 20 (second series) questions;

Síle Englert, The Lost Time Accidents

 

Garbage Disposal

My mouth, where you put discarded things:
rust-icicle broken from a car-body,
dark apron, its pocket still heavy with coins,
fingerpainting in purple, black and blue.

I swallowed paper names
your tongue stumbled, forgot
and spat, mispronounced, at the air. 

Wore down my teeth chewing cast-off
clothing, hoping saliva would dissolve
your smell, a dusting of cells. 

My mouth, your unwilling oubliette:
tonguing broken aquarium glass,
the taste of ink licked from salt palms,
my lips mottled by storm clouds.

I eat your leftovers.

London, Ontario poet and editor Síle Englert’s full-length debut is the poetry collection The Lost Time Accidents (Fredericton NB: Icehouse/Goose Lane Editions, 2021), a collection of poems composed via curious dream-like narratives. Writing on the late American actor Buddy Ebsen (The Beverly Hillbillies), elephants, PT Barnam, Nikolas Tesla, lost pennies or Voyager 1, Englert’s poems exist as echoes of folk tales or fables, offering her takes that thread a particular truth or deep wisdom through its narrative quilt. Hers is a surrealism that enters the room like smoke, providing a quiet use of space and rhythm. “Shaking / loose infinite tectonic layers of minutes. Everything / that never happened,” she writes, as part of “Give Us Our Eleven Days,” “pulled with its threads still / dangling like a weed ripped from the ground, roots / and all.”

Set in three numbered sections, her short lyrics exist as elegies for lost items and moments, and of vulnerabilities, those that sit just under the skin beyond our control, as well as those ways in which we need to remain open. She writes her lyrics nearly as a museum of antique objects—mannequins, trains and even those lost pennies—attempting to carry forth the lessons and set aside possibilities such objects provide, attentive to their beauty and continued value. As part of the quartet “Requiem for Toys,” she offers this to end the first of these poems, “Dummy,” writing: “And he knew what it was to disappear, / to be a thing that is a threat because it speaks.” Englert’s poems articulate the feeling of being adrift, and attempting to, once again, find anchor; attempting to connect, and re-connect what has been untethered. As she writes as part of the poem “Voyager 1 Sings to Her Sister”:

What does interstellar mean?

It means the space between stars,
where we are only what we remember.
It means trying to measure darkness
with no dawn coming.