1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
On the surface, my first book didn't change my life at all. But underneath everything, there was this actualization of a belief I had held since I was a child. It was a private vindication. I was a writer. My second book, Blue, is a book about depression, motherhood, grief and the transformative power of art. It has a more cohesive theme and purpose.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
It's a very strange thing. My husband (James Owens, who also writes poetry) and I were just trying to decipher why this has been the case for us. It comes very honestly and has its roots in the essence of who I am. Language has always been a living entity to me. I am and have been alert to it since my beginnings. It seems to be a facet of the fabric of me -- body and mind woven tightly together. Some people have ruddy complexions and gnarled fingers. Some people have one leg shorter than the other. I have poetry.
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?
Every project is different. Sometimes poems arrive as finished products while I am driving, and I struggle to get them down blindly in a notepad on my lap, while not taking my eyes from the road. When I can pull over, I try to make sense of the scribbles before all is lost. Other poems take years of observations and note taking, not to mention emotional development. I am only just now beginning to learn how to become humble to the needs of the poem. But we race death, and so I have to find the balance between waiting long enough to allow pieces time to mature and getting projects accomplished before I am naught.
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?
I am definitely an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project. However, there are a few different voices (registers) I write with. (See above: racing death. I try truth from every angle.) The voice determines which project the poems will call home.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I'm the kind of writer that is at home in the woods or in a field of grasses or beside a swamp or on a hill of fern. I greatly enjoy reading to ditches. I've known a red pine or two to seem to enjoy a few particular pieces I've written. I get shivers thinking of the rapt attention given me by granite. I'm thinking of trying an audience of snow-locked birches soon.
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 think the current questions are the same questions that have always existed. I am alive. Am I alive? What am I? Am I? What is this world that I believe I'm experiencing? What is time? What is language? My god, where has it come from?!? How do I take what is ephemeral and get it to stay, with meaning and value?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
“You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.” Wendell Berry
“A Poet is called upon to provoke a spirtual jolt and not to cultivate idolators.” Arseny Tarkovsky
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I laugh. Sometimes difficult. Sometimes essential. Usually, with retrospect, at least interesting. There are a lot of personalities and voices to be negotiated. (Deep gratitude to Jean Huets of Circling Rivers.) Also, this is how one begins to learn to become humble to the needs of the poem. There is a critical time when the poem leaves our hands, and while it technically remains ours, it is no longer ours.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Read. And widely.
“What I do is me: For that I came.” Gerard Manley Hopkins
“...go crazy or turn holy.” Adélia Prado
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?
I begin every day by reading the rounds of new publications, hoping to encounter something that will trigger a desire to pursue a new way of thinking, hunt down a particular piece of art, music or philosophy. If new publications don't have inpact, I turn to books. Usually by reading my favourite authors, something is ignited. Then I open my notebook and begin. If there is really no spark, I head to the woods. I always keep a notebook with me. I'm always looking, listening. Usually in the woods there are words to be taken down. Swamps rarely disappoint. If I have to go to my day job, I am quickly bereft. If I am lucky, a heron will fly overhead while I'm en route. If I'm really lucky, it will pass overhead during Beethoven's Sonata No. 31 in A-flat, Op. 110, Adagio ma non troppo. Need to give this movement a common name. Maybe The Heron's Sonata.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Books, nature, music, art (Wyeth, Turner, Whistler, Rothko, Morandi, Hammershøi), walking, which is a form of attention and a kind of prayer. It loosens one from the self and brings new perspective. I suppose all of these things are attention and prayer. Actually, deep attention is prayer. Also, by spending time with my children who are now young adults. They always have something to teach me about what it is to be a person and what the world is like these days. (In many ways, on my own, I operate as outside of the world as possible. No cell phone. The systems that are in place have corrupt underlying principles. If you have to buy it, don't trust it. And what isn't for sale anymore?) If I can stay away from the news (which is important but should be taken in small doses like medicine), CBC radio.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmoke, pine, a particular patchouli incense, homebaked bread...
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?
I'm from rural roots. Our family art was skinning beavers, surviving winter and putting up preserves. And those things are art. I don't quite know how I became what I am now, except to say I've always been hungry for the holy. Yes, books, the old ones, the great ones, works in translation, music (Hildegard von Bingen, Bach, Purcell, Beethoven, Kissin, Gould, Pärt), philosphy and art.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Lawrence, Tolstoy, Steinbeck, Stegner, Berger, Chekov, Fowles, Lispector. Gosh, the poets: Eliot, Thomas, Whitman, Roethke, Rilke, Celan, Gilbert, Rexroth, Thompson, McKay, Brett, Lilburn, Lowther, MacEwen, Crozier, Atwood, Szymborska, Tsvetayeva, Miłosz, Vallejo's Human Poems, Jaccottet, Tranströmer, Hauge, Carruth, Charles Wright, Hass... The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry is essential reading. Basho, Issa, Buson, Santōka -- the haiku poets keep me sane.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Walk more. Always more. Please, body, let me be able to continue to walk. Experience more art in person.
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?
In another life -- I wish I would have been a farmer, to have really developed a hands-on understanding of the interrelatedness of the natural world.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
My need, my nature.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Tree of Man, Patrick White
19 - What are you currently working on?
Three or four books simultaneously. One will be ready for submission this coming winter, the majority of the poems having already been published. The others need time. I am curious to see how they develop. I'm inside the unfolding of them, as ignorant (and excited) as anyone.
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