1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Getting the first book published was heartening and humbling—especially the excitement of Goose Lane Editions’ poetry board about my manuscript, and their dedication to making it the best book it could be. The family themed poems in Dust or Fire emerged over almost a decade, beginning with a suite of poems that springboard off odd Frisian sayings, including, “I may visit you, but I’m not God.” My father died when I was finishing the book, so the eulogy (poem) I wrote years before his death settled into the sofa of the collection as if it had not been an early guest. My parents’ first meeting at the Leeuwarden train station is the subject of a long poem, and the closing (short) poem. Among other things, the book evokes parental hauntings (haunting not limited to the dead). In the second book, Poisonous If Eaten Raw, the father stands in the wings, while the shape-shifting mother—the many mothers in the mother—takes the stage in wild array of performances—as funnel spider, a chickadee, Geddy Lee, and more. The book stops at seventy-one portraits without exhausting the possibilities; perhaps, as my friend Kathleen Skerrett suggests, opening out into questions: “what is a metaphor? what is a portrait?” My impression is that the poems in the second book have more sonic richness and structure, an impression confirmed by a colleague, David Deane, who refers to the second collection as “stylistically more ‘abundant’” than the earlier work.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I spent years writing (though not publishing much) short fiction, or auto-fiction as it’s called now, and I came to poetry afterwards. In 2007, I attended a poetry reading in Halifax given by Ken Babstock and Mark Strand—something in Babstock’s temperament jarred an internal shift in me, the realization that I could and should try writing poetry, and I cast my lot with the poets from that point on.
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?
A writing project takes a long time to emerge for me. Years ago, at a conference dinner, I recall a man saying (in a Southern accent), “writin’s a temperamental thing”—my temperament requires long gestation, not quite as long as the cicada, but long. In a letter, Emily Dickinson says she’s becoming a snail. I’m a writerly snail. My first drafts are very messy, but within them a few shiny trails take me to feeding spots.
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?
A poem usually begins with attention—to what I see on walks, hear in conversations or on the radio, read, anything I find jarring or delightful or resonant in some way. I began writing with a more fragmented approach, poem by poem. Now I often have a sense of a larger project but it doesn’t necessarily work out the way I originally envisioned it.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
There is a creativity to public readings—selecting poems that talk to each other in unanticipated ways because they’ve been placed next to each other. The Q & A after readings can intensify the question: what have I done in this book? At the same time, I find it takes immense psychic energy to do readings, even, or especially because of the pleasure involved.
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?
Yes, I think so, but I may not be the best person to identify them. I explore questions rather than answering them—any question that persists over time is a question I want to engage—these questions have greater ethical moment and momentum for me. How do we avoid “the avoidance of love” (to cite the title of a brilliant Stanley Cavell essay)? How do we limber our capacity for witness to our own strangeness, the strangeness of others, and the world? How might “the unknown that remains unknown” (Thomas Merton) keep burbling up, a spring agitating the sands inside us?
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?
A writer, and other artists, manifest a non-dominant way of thinking, sometimes called right brain or gestalt thinking, that is critical to social well being. In her book, The Experience of Meaning, Jan Zwicky contends that the sidelining of gestalt thinking in favour of “thinking as calculation” (working in discrete steps, breaking down into parts) is implicated in our climate crisis. While she admits the importance of calculative rationality, she finds the practice of gestalt thinking at the heart of our experience of meaning, of resonance to and within the world, a practice of perception and discernment. “Real thinking does not always occur in words; it can decay under analysis; its processes are not always reportable. This means that real thinking is in some sense wild: it cannot be corralled or regulated” (95 italics added). I often have the sense that my thinking, out loud, sounds zigzaggy, baggy, and I tend to devalue this in favour of speech that sounds as if it’s walking a straight line. I felt surges of joy in response to Zwicky’s affirmation of wordless or baggy thinking as a source of insight, beauty and vision, making the experience of reading of her book unforgettable hours of delight.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Difficult and essential. I can’t see the tonal drift of a work as a whole when I’ve been immersed in it for years. I rely on regular meetings with a poetry group, and occasional writing workshops to jumpstart or re-invigorate what I’ve been working on in a solitary way. Are others hearing what I’m hearing in this poem? How far can I go into idiosyncrasy, and still communicate? The intricate work comes at the end, with a poem by poem walk through of the manuscript (for both books, with Ross Leckie). He’s a tough, generous editor, who, among other things, has helped me distinguish when a brief, delicate poem is finished or when it’s a sketch of a potentially much longer poem. When needed, he’s taken the car apart to analyze the mechanics of particular poems.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I often recall Sue Goyette saying, “Allow yourself to write a really bad poem—I mean really bad.” Also, “you begin again with nothing.” As I hear her, writing is a spiritual exercise, an acceptance of our fallibility, without which we can’t love ourselves and others. A long lesson to learn.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
The energy and time I have for writing used to be expended on critical prose almost exclusively, essays on theology/religion in film and literature. Then for a time I was writing only poetry, and while I’m planning to continue in this vein, I’d like to explore hybrid forms where ideas move through complex poetics as in Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost and Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Argonauts, and Jan Zwicky’s “Lyric, Narrative, Memory” in A Ragged Pen, and her books, Wisdom & Metaphor, and Lyric Philosophy.
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?
A typical day begins with yoga and feeding animals (cats and me). I have to schedule writing, since my work as a professor often involves many brief but urgent tasks (administration) and the intensity of teaching. I prioritize writing in the first part of my day whenever I can, and have the good fortune to often have months of sabbatical or large chunks of summer term to devote almost exclusively to writing.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The same things I turn to when it is going well: books, exercise (cycling, walking, gardening), art, conversation. Overall, though, writing for me isn’t a particularly fluid process; it feels like a continual struggle, from stall to start to stall to start again, giving it a spasmodic feel. Related to this, I return frequently to Louise Gluck’s Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry, particularly her observation that when “the aim of the work is spiritual insight, it seems absurd to expect fluency.”
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of lake. I live near the ocean, but that is not a home smell. Also the fragrance of horse manure from the Bengal Lancers stables close to downtown Halifax.
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?
Nature, music, science, visual art, conversations—beauty in some form, though that beauty could be perceived by others as ugly. Wherever this influence comes from, it is often a surprise: as a visit to an art gallery will show, you don’t know which painting will arrest you and why—it may not be the famous vase of sunflowers by van Gogh, but a more obscure painting, and the reason it surprises and provokes curiosity is elusive.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Mystic writers throughout the centuries (Augustine, Evagrius Ponticus, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton….), Adam Phillips, Stanley Cavell, Talal Asad, Thomas Bernhard (Gathering Evidence), Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Kathleen Roberts Skerrett, Rowan Williams, Catherine Keller, John D. Caputo, Iris Murdoch, W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Hannah Arendt, Alice Munro, Steven Heighton, Carole Langille, Sue Goyette, Jan Zwicky, Maggie Nelson, Jack Gilbert, Don McKay, Brian Bartlett, Ross Leckie, Sue Sinclair, Don Domanski, Jorie Graham, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Barton, Anne Compton….
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Travel from Nova Scotia to British Columbia by train. Odd people often take trains, as I discovered in 1999 on the Southwest Chief travelling between Chicago and Albuquerque. I was a doctoral student then, and did the twenty-nine-hour journey sitting upright (in my seat or the dining car), reading the first two volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diary. With its entries of varying lengths, the diary was perfectly suited to long pauses of looking out the window or talking with strangers who were not in a hurry to get to where they were going.
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?
Rancher, psychoanalyst? Though I like the diversity of my present occupations.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have always felt the necessity to write, though for a great many years I also felt immense internal constraints against the threat and pleasure of being seen (a struggle that continues).
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (found in one of those free mini-libraries on posts driven into people’s lawns). Mesmerizing idiosyncratic characters, intriguing and elusive lines between fiction and non-fiction, runic physicality of trauma, marvelous use of black and white images.
Film: Francis Ha. In an interview with Sarah Polley, Greta Gerwig (co-writer, actor in the film) talks about the style of dance in the film, based on a “release technique” of learning how to fall—letting the joints and skeleton fall, the knees to slip out, and the whole body follows; using the momentum of the fall to get back up again. It’s dance performance that looks like random seeming movements, or mistakes. Gerwig’s character Francis inhabits this practiced falling in some cringe-worthy conversations and her dance performances, which captured my imagination because of my fear of falling, my fear of making mistakes (in life and art). Recently I’ve become aware of how a physical fall feels different to me now, something I attribute to the physical meditation of a yoga practice. A few weeks ago, walking home from the grocery store, I fell to my hands and one knee; my body, spring-like, bounced back up, an amazing visceral feeling—but I also felt ashamed of being seen falling, and walked on quickly without pausing to see what caused my fall. I hope my mind and spirit is gradually getting more attuned to that fleshly spring.
20 - What are you currently working on?
A Book of Psalms. A project as yet undefined, praise and lament for the earth. A few years ago, while cycling, I stopped at my usual rest spot, Cranberry Lake. In a brief conversation, a man sitting on the rock that edges the lake, asked me what I do, and in response to my reply, “I’m a theologian,” said, “how presumptuous.” This would be an appropriate response to my imagined project.
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