Clare Goulet is a British-Québécoise hybrid raised in Nova Scotia. Essays, fiction, reviews, and poems have been published in journals and books in Canada and abroad including The Fiddlehead, Grain, Room, Dalhousie Review, TAR, Collateral, and Listening to the Heartbeat of Being (MQUP). With Mark Dickinson, she co-edited the anthology Lyric Ecology (Cormorant) on the work of Jan Zwicky; she's given papers for various scholarly associations on metaphor in science, polyphony, manuscript editing, machine-generated poems, and writing pedagogy. Graphis scripta / writing lichen (Gaspereau) was released May 2024. She lives a few steps from woods and ocean at the edge of Halifax, where she teaches and directs the Writing Centre at MSVU.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
Graphis scripta snuck up between an anthology of essays on Jan Zwicky, far behind me, and a novel just ahead: between those slower, thicker books, this one deked through like a breakaway kid chasing the puck for the slapshot & through sheer luck landing it. After decades collecting lichen and slow walks, plus a daily whirl of work and parenting, the book itself happened fast—had to—and was a sneaky joy to make. I thought that would be the end, didn’t realize that a book can generate its own life once it’s out, and now it’s me chasing after it—readings in unexpected places, lichen walks, scientists getting in touch about poetry, connecting with ecopoets in other countries, new projects. New life.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Oh I’ve written all three always – particularly essays about
metaphor and science and looking, and small fiction-poetry hybrids, and I can
feel fiction for better or worse tugging at some of these poems – the 2 boys of
Hypogymnia (H in the Index of names,
power-headed tube lichen) —they popped out of nowhere as main characters and
took over with plastic 80s tampon applicators flapping on their fingers. And Acharius in his garden bent over
specimens, and the pre-war northern British street kids of hammered shield
lichen. Fortunately the whole point of
the Index was, in a way, to character-ize lichen, unpack the metaphoric names. Way back when I was agonizing over genre as
you do in your 20s, Don McKay penciled a marginal quip: “Poetry has always had
the hots for prose, and vice versa. As lovers they are much more interesting
than as categories.” It’s still pinned to my wall. The novel ahead, allegedly
fiction, has a prose-poem and non-fiction threads running alongside the story—so
perhaps I’ve found the form for me at last!
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 quick idea—seeing it all in a flash —then slow and painful and dread and masses of overthinking—then
(usually, though not with this book) forcing myself to the table, until the
relief of revision. But this one was fun—an idea sketched in 2010 on the back
of an envelope, then I raised a kid, then found the envelope in the pandemic and
went for it.
I was heartened by Joel Plaskett’s song-a-week project and built weekly deadlines
for 26 pieces into its Canada Council Research & Creation grant, and made the
game-changing rule for myself that writing had to happen alongside the research, not after. To always be writing, to have
the thing always cooking on the front burner. Thank god for that and for Pavia café
in Herring Cove and its excellent window ledge for scribbling those first
drafts.
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 write lots of one-offs in the moment, most in my drawer, be
glad, but I love reading books with a
tiny focus—could be structural, thematic, conceptual—as they tend to take you
everywhere, and that’s what happened here.
After a couple of early lichen poems and essays on metaphor, the idea of a science-art poetic field guide
with an Index of Names came at once, sketched, grounded in walks for local
species, after years of silent looking. Graphis scripta was always a book.
As for the poems themselves – most begin with looking and a phrase that arrives
unbidden —like a line of music—the notes and the vibe all there – and for me the
work is to see if there’s more there, a whole song. Often what comes first is an end that I then write
towards (chasing after the puck again). What to me are the four or five truest
poems in the book arrived entire like that, whole, one draft, it was like
taking dictation. Elf-ear, mushroom, the diva Cladonia, a couple others. Maybe some writers can access that
sphere often or easily or all the time. I’m not there yet!
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m more used to creating and
hosting and organizing and applauding other
writers at readings; I prefer to be offstage and tend to disappear if a camera’s
pulled out. But I know that public readings and hearing poems in the moment, together, matters, and so far they’ve each been unexpectedly
fun, particularly with this book. I’m so passionate about lichen that it
overrides shyness, people ask hard, fantastic questions, and it’s the poems out
there, not me. Maybe improper, but I discovered
that readings (and Brian Bartlett says it’s ok!) are where you can keep revising your poems after publication or try out
different versions—I’ve rarely read a poem exactly
as published in the book. Taking
different ones out for a spin, or in different combinations for different
venues—mini-curating—is also fun and changes my own perception of what I
thought I knew.
Readings underscore how place matters: I’m half British, and some poems have turns of phrase that worked fully only in Ireland and the UK, whereas other poems couldn’t go over at all! (When writer Clare Pollard was looking at a couple in revision, I had to explain a ‘cakewalk’—which by the way sounds super-odd as a custom to non-initiates). Here in Halifax local audiences know the landscape at Herring Cove so I can’t get away with bullshit. Last month, reading pieces on 1810 Irish botanist Ellen Hutchins in her landscape of West Cork, Ireland to her family descendants became suddenly high-stakes – I felt a responsibility of care that probably should always be there.
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?
John Berger famously switched from painting to writing to meet his own particular 20th-century moment. Here in the 21st, at this tipping point, I’m not sure that writing meets the current questions. I do seem to trace over the same concerns; failure of language, failure to connect, seeing and mis-seeing things as they are.
In this case I wanted to read
a field guide to lichen that explored the nature of metaphor and couldn’t find
one, so I wrote one. At one stage it had a Preface for the concept, deleted
last minute: Metaphor and lichen each about two or more wholes sharing the same
space; lichen isn’t a plant, it’s a relationship,
alliance of fungus and at least one photosynthetic partner (alga,
cyanobacterium)—as well as other elements we’re only beginning to see. A metaphor, too, associates one thing with
another: something is like but not the same as, not literally, something else,
changing our minds in ways that we’re just beginning to understand. The main
move is that in a metaphor, as in a lichen, each partner remains whole, yet
their conjunction creates something that wasn’t there before. I gave a talk in
2006 on this and encountered the analogy twice since, Don McKay in an essay and
Brenda Hillman in a recent interview (so hey it must be true!). We each saw
different points of congruity, took different paths to the same clearing.
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?
Oh god, I remember interviewing Karen Connelly back in the ’90s – she was
just back to Canada from Greece and Thailand and had an articulate impassioned despairing rant
on the lack of role in the culture,
here in Canada, compared to elsewhere, back in that golden era when something
like the state of writing seemed like a serious problem.
I do think—for any art—stitching together disparate fragments into a piece of wholecloth of some kind—integrating what appears separate, illuminating a relationship of this to that, connecting—is of immense value at a time when other interests seek to break us apart and see us as pieces more than wholes, for the purpose of control. I think this kind of art-making of whole paintings, poems, books, jokes, photographs, bread loaves etc is of value not only (or even primarily) for the culture but for the person doing it, the maker. Whole persons can make whole cultures that are resistant and resilient to forces of destruction and control. Putin and his Kremlin cohort know this: there’s a reason missiles are targeting theatres, libraries, schools, galleries, and cafés where influential writers like Victoria Amelina were known to congregate. Ukrainians know this and rescued books when the Dnipro dam broke, drying them page by page in the sun. The last thing Maksym Kryvtsov did the day before he was killed defending Ukraine from invasion—expecting he might be killed—was to write a poem in the company of his cat. You can read it here.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential and wildly enjoyable—putting
a book out means to me the poems have to aim to work for others, as a
hospitable gesture, to point and look with someone at something, together. But as a working parent-writer of a younger
child For this book, it was impossible to access the standard Banff editorial programs
that glimmered and beckoned; like many
parents, I couldn’t at the time turn the key and leave for a month, or stop
working. Thankfully Andrew Steeves at Gaspereau gave a lucid sensitive read, plus
time, and I invented an editorial development project with a UK writer for a
half-dozen poems over Zoom, with the Canada Council’s professional development
grant and the brilliant Clare Pollard.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Margaret Laurence, in an interview with her I found when I was 16: “You’d be a fool to be an optimist in this world. But you gotta have hope.”
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Over a life I’m noticing the reverse direction—critical prose to poetry—though I still flip back and forth. I used to love the flip and how each fed the other, but now, moving into complex stories I can feel myself wanting to leave analysis behind—having a bit of a break-up with it. It hogged the mic for way too long.
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?
The day begins with the dog needing something, continues with the dog and amazing child needing something, then my wonderful students, returns to the dog and family, and in between I write. For anything complex, I use long stretches pre-dawn before the dog or the world is awake. (The dog has a great routine though; too bad he doesn’t write.)
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I take the problem into the woods and walk a circular trail and let my brain solve it sideways, without trying to. Or just embrace the stall and sit in granite cliffs by the Atlantic, big ocean, and aim to be empty of words—to let language, to quote Don, “fray back into air” and just breathe.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Coal. It conjures 1970s Staffordshire where I lived with my grandmother and went to school briefly as a child – coal in the grate to heat the tiny house, coaldust in the bricks, in the air, in your mouth. Here in Nova Scotia it’s the stink of seaweed at low tide: it fills you.
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?
Yeah this book feels built from
and for a lifetime of books, in a way. Other art forms? Music! Virginia Woolf once said she always conceived
of her books as music before she wrote them. I think certain pieces of music
can respond to and also shape the rhythms of what you write, or offer complex
polyphonic structures that help you build other complex structures. The novel
to come has one thread that’s entirely music, a score composed for and built
into the story. Without music how can you articulate loss?
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Fairy tales and Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and the 1986 reprint of Eli Mandel’s Poets of Contemporary Canada 1960-1970—one of those 5-dollar McClelland & Stewart NCL paperbacks. In college Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy changed my life in the full Rilkean sense. Don McKay’s “Baler Twine,” ditto, and not only his essays and poems (Birding, Or Desire and Apparatus and Vis à Vis and Paradoxides) but the marginalia, jazz collection, postcards, quips and asides, with Don it’s all gold and of a piece. Sue Sinclair, Elizabeth Hay, Anne Simpson, Helen Humphreys. Ilya Kaminsky. In the UK Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage speak to my north-midland English soul, as does Kate Atkinson, whose stories somehow permit serious fun.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Write a mystery. It’s inescapable, like cultural genetic code. See: Atkinson, above.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
It was hands down a cello-playing marine biologist for saltwater
plants until I realized there was such a thing as a lichenologist.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Probably lack of ability to do something else. I read and wrote freakishly
early so I have no memory of learning to do them, or of not doing them; it’s a hard question to answer as there was never in
memory a ‘before’ books time.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last
great film?
Film: the slow intense Banel & Adama
by Ramata-Toulaye Sy, with my daughter over the summer, and watching her watch
it. Great pleasure books are always for my
greatly pleasurable book-club, currently Emily Wilson’s Iliad and Speedboat, a wild
1976 novel by Renata Adler, and I’m behind on both. For poems a recent slip of
a thing that lingered is Slant Light
by Sarah Westcott.
20 - What are you currently working on?
Fiction and poetry at the same time, god help me! Small steps into
a new thing, Loan Words, more
language stuff, and a long poem/recording, Subliminal,
using 1810 letters of an Irish botanist from the other side of the Atlantic, which forever pulls. Basically whatever
I can make at dawn before the rest of the house wakes up.
12 or 20 (second series) questions;
No comments:
Post a Comment