1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first book turns 25 this year, so I’m trying to remember… it didn’t change life as much as I thought it would. I still had small children to raise, and the week that first manuscript was due at the publisher’s my daughter was in hospital with a life-threatening illness. That put it all in perspective (she’s fine).
Some of the poems in this most recent book are quite old (10-15 years), but have been extensively revised. Like, more revision and rethinking than I’ve ever done. A good kick in the pants for a mid-career writer. I hope it means they’re more precise. Have less flab. Some part of me should have less flab.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I didn’t, actually. I wrote stories from childhood, lots of them. I didn’t grow up in a bookish home. But from an early age I loved to sing and was musical. I think that’s part of what prepared me for poems. I remember cool 1970s funky language arts classes with short poems, and pop lyrics in school choir, and when I hit college and got serious about studying and read Gerard Manley Hopkins and, well, the top of the head came off, as Dickinson said it would. Certain poems, and poetic prose, did things inside me I thought were impossible. I wanted to do that to other people. Does that sound like a threat? Maybe it is.
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?
No fair, that’s three questions… The first image is likely to come quickly, but of course the mind and heart have been brewing toward it for who knows how long? I don’t think it’s generally a slow process for me, no. Fits and starts. And the final form is generally not totally unrelated to the first draft. I’m not the most patient writer.
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?
Never working on a book from the beginning, or I haven’t yet, anyway. I write about “life”, whatever is arresting me in the moment, and worry about books as needs must. I wouldn’t advise this as a career plan, but there you go. Again, the poet-brain is always bubbling away in there, a long-simmering pot on a stove, and I try to catch the best things as they surface.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I get very nervous about readings but I’ve done probably hundreds of them and I do like reading per se. I can’t say they’re part of the writing process, but I definitely see them as part of a poet’s “job”. You should work to serve your poems as skillfully as you can as a reader. For the last few years issues of social anxiety have interfered and complicated things. But I look forward to real readings coming back! I think I’ll appreciate them more than I have for a long time.
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?
Who said “poetry is news that stays news”? That. I am decidedly old-fashioned in that I’m trying to set the texture and truth of lived life into words. Reality as it is, is so bottomless, so complex, so beautiful. Words to get at bits of that, at the heart of the Present Moment and hopefully where it touches the timeless. Where the material is interwoven with the ethereal. Where different times and experiences interpenetrate one another in the consciousness and the memory and the body.
I’m probably not paying attention to anything calling itself a “current question”. This extraordinary life is worthy only of the eternal questions.
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?
As always, the writer should try to tell the truth, in whatever genre. Kafka’s statement about a book being an icepick that breaks up the frozen sea within us, that’s always true. As attention spans fragment, I would hope that writers, poets especially, could call, or invite, or woo, people back to slow thinking, long reading, and other-centred living.
The role of some writers should be to call out the bullshit people try to pull off with language – the power plays, manipulations, obfuscations, euphemistic nonsense, and mental laziness. Words have power. They can build or break. And those of us whose vocation involves them should try to see they are properly used to serve human flourishing.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Oh yes both! I’m sadly still someone who wants to impress, and this causes me no small amount of anxiety when working with an editor. Still, it’s always been a valuable process. I am an editor as well, and pull no punches. So I expect an editor to deliver all requisite punches when I’m on the receiving end.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Assuming you mean writing advice and not general life advice I’d say Annie Dillard’s “Go at your life with a broadaxe.” I’ve not worked my way up to a broadaxe quite yet. Usually no more than a gently-wielded cricket bat.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to plays)? What do you see as the appeal?
Not easy! I had a great teacher and mentor in playwriting, the immensely talented Lucia Frangione. She helped me do the thing I hate, which is plot. I love to write dialogue and I love those moments in a play when things come to an emotional head and everybody’s cards get thrown out on the table. But that’s not a play. A play is the whole thing together, the process, the journey. It’s bodies in space, not just words.
The appeal of a play? Real people right in front of you living, being transformed, relating to other people or beauty or loss or pain… Few things are more glorious. And a great play is a great incarnation of great words. What a wonderful day it will be when the theatres open again.
And watching people watch a play you wrote... damn, that’s like being inside people’s heads when they read your book. That’s some kind of miracle.
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?
Until very recently I worked at an office job three days a week, so on those days I asked relatively little of myself as a writer. I’m reading more, though, between work and dinner, and loving silence more and more. Almost every day I begin with a short time of prayer with a devotional. And nearly every day I walk a few kilometres. The writing gets fit in around all these things, most particularly after a period of walking and/or silence.
I have recently given up my office job to take over bookkeeping for my husband’s small company. We will see how my routine changes as this new chapter begins.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
At the moment, walking. We moved from a suburban townhouse to a Vancouver apartment in 2019 and I’m loving long walks around many neighbourhoods. We live not far from where I grew up. Every block is full of the past and the present and I’m always nosy about the details of other people’s yards and gardens and such. I walk down alleys a lot too. They’re quieter, and are a more uncurated look into people’s lives. Wow I’m nosy.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Lilacs. Coffee. Cedar. Rosemary. The smell of a candle just snuffed out.
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’ve written a lot of poems responding to visual art. That’s a really satisfying conversation. I dabble in making some art as well, and the sensuous part of it – the smells, colours, substances… And I’ve always, as I said, been musical and involved in music. Also the language of liturgy increasingly fascinated me. Over the winter of 2019-20 I wrote a sequence of forty prayer-poems based on a very old set of prayers called the O Antiphons.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Reading C. S. Lewis makes me feel sane when everything seems shifty and shoddy. Regular Bible study is a connection not only to my faith, but to history and ancient wisdom and literature. The Psalms, for example, are a school of human nature and emotion as well as poetry. Being reminded that people are people, even thousands of years apart from one another, is a stabilizing yet exciting thing to contemplate.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Sing with a small jazz ensemble. Let out my inner Dianne Reeves or Diana Krall.
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 had more cojones, I’d be an actor. Preferably Shakespearean. If I hadn’t been a writer and actually had to make a living, I’d probably be an extremely crabby librarian.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Fear. Fascination. Alice Munro and Katherine Mansfield and John Fowles.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: I am currently reading Martin Schleske’s The Sound of Life’s Unspeakable Beauty and it is a wonder!
Film: I find it difficult to take in a movie as “great” if I don’t see it in a theatre. I miss going to movies! So I will say 2019’s A Hidden Life. Struck me dumb.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Dinner (pork chops).
Okay, I’ve been writing poems for children. It’s fun and freeing. And I’ve written a kids’ picture book I think is not terrible... thinking about how to bring that into the world has been occupying my mind lately.
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