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 don’t know if the first book changed my life—that was Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems (The Muses’ Company, 2013). I mean, I wrote the book about things that changed my life—almost becoming a parent, then becoming one. And I wrote it while I was doing a one-year MA program, researching and writing about feminist poetry about motherhood, and getting involved with a group of women visual artists I would collaborate with for the next ten years. And then it was published while I was working for a scrappy magazine I loved, but which I would soon leave to go back to grad school again. I suppose that book gave me credibility as a poet. It taught me I could write a book. It marked a shift from more typical prairie lyrics into something more experimental, and after it was published I decided to lean even more into visual poetry, found text, research, and collaboration. I’m super grateful for that book. Also, of course, the chapbooks I have published with you, rob, and elsewhere.
I think it’s funny that my first book was about motherhood and my new one, Goose, is in a sense about fatherhood. Both are feminist books, and this new one is more overtly anticolonial and antiracist. Goose feels different because the first book was very personal. Some of the poems in The Happiness Threads were impossible for me to read aloud because they were still so painful. Goose is intentionally and ironically impersonal. It’s difficult to read aloud for its own reasons—because it’s visual poetry and doesn’t always work that way. Although The Happiness Threads is funny at times, and it’s about a wide range of emotions, the dominant mood is quite sad. With Goose, the silliness is at the forefront, with deep critique and sadness in the background. Both books ask a lot of questions about what we love, and why, and how.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I honestly don’t remember. It’s just always been that way. I love reading, language, sound, and ideas. I had to memorize a lot of Bible verses as a kid, and I read a lot of flowery and archaic and difficult language as part of a strict religious upbringing. Maybe that? I remember writing playground rhymes, limericks, jingles, and parodies all the time when I was young. I used to believe that I could write pretty much anything, but I don’t think that anymore.
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 can write lyric poetry quickly. Early drafts of Goose were lyrics, written in the evenings while visiting “father of the tar sands” S.C. Ells’s fonds at the National Archive. Poems like that just come sometimes, and I jot and revise them in my journal, but I don’t really assume that they will turn into anything I would want to publish or turn into a bigger project. I’m glad I wrote those lyrics about Ells, capturing my strong sense of his presence haunting the archive, trying to control it even then. But those poems kind of got digested into the visual poetry, so that eventually I felt the project didn’t need them anymore. And the visual poems developed more slowly. rob, you published early drafts of these poems—the lyrics, then the word-processed found poetry that would eventually lead into the hand-tracing method I eventually figured out. It took a long time to land on what this project—or at least the book version of this project—would be. I don’t usually start writing poems with notes, but for this book I kept a list of concepts for poems on a sticky note inside a copy of Ells’s Northland Trails. It took several years for Goose to come together.
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?
Until I know I am working on a project or a book, poems begin as words, phrases, ideas that I put in my notebook (which I try to write in every night). I am best at making poems when I am busy doing other things like reading, editing, researching, etc. I am terrible at setting myself the task to create something when I have no idea what I want to write, and I hate doing creative writing on a computer. So I do a lot of rolling things around in my mind before I write them down. With both books, there came a moment when I knew I was making a book, and then things started to make sense. With Happiness Threads I knew at the same moment how I was going to make it—I listed out the titles of all the remaining poems I was going to write, and those would become the main part of the book. With Goose, it took longer to figure that out. Once I know what the project is and how to do it, I make one poem or more every day if I can.
Goose poems start as an idea about Northland Trails—like I’m going to find every adjective used to describe geese, or I’m going to make a deconstructive reading of this one poem that highlights how sexist it is. Then I start tracing words and images and see how my poem shapes up. If I make a mistake, or change the procedure/method for the poem, I start over. Each poem gets remade several times. Depending on how complex the poem is, each version can take an hour or longer.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m honoured to get to do readings, but I am a quiet and private person, and readings are challenging for me. I do like being part of a community of writers and readers, so I do them. And I do them to honour the work.
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, always, but I try to keep these in the background—I’m not interested in writing theoretical or philosophical poetry. I would say I wrote Goose with literary-critical and environmental concerns. It is a reading or interpretation of Ells’s Northland Trails that does its work by making poems with and about Northland Trails. The questions it asks are questions like: What if Sid Ells liked to think of himself as a goose? How would I use his creative works to “prove” that, and what could I do with that evidence? What would it say about him? Do the geese or the land or the northern peoples in Northland Trails exceed or undermine what Ells tries to make them say, and how might I highlight those voices? What values and ideas and land relations were foundational to the tar sands industry, and are they still at work in the industry and in Canada today? What do we do with the legacies of “founding fathers” like Ells in the time of decarbonization and decolonization? Who speaks for the land? How can the image of this honking founding father serve as a warning or a corrective to the “great men,” grandiose plans and “nation-building projects” that are being sold to us today?
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?
It’s a writer’s job to pay attention, to reach for ways of expressing things that are happening right now in the world and in our cultures, and, while resisting silly or grandiose ideas about the impact of art or literature, to try to write ethically and in ways that matter.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Both, but more essential than difficult. I would not publish a book without being edited, and I’m so grateful for the editors who have worked on my books with me—who have helped me see and fine-tune what the books are doing, and who have taught me so much. Much gratitude and love to you, Catherine Hunter, Clarise Foster, Jordan Abel, Andrew Faulkner, and Leigh Nash. And thanks to the other editors who alternately encouraged my projects along and rejected them when they were half-baked.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Jordan Abel said something in a mentorship session at a Banff Centre writing residency—something like “I would never take on a project that I couldn’t enjoy.” That advice changed Goose and my perspective on making poetry, even so-called experimental or visual or difficult poetry.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Easy. For me, poetry was an unintended byproduct of grad school and scholarly writing, editing, and publishing. I would write the scholarly version of what I was working through, but I would also be compelled to write the poetry version. Eventually, I learned to let the poetry infect the scholarly writing, and I wrote some neat creative academic work as a result. I think I’m finished being an academic now, and what I’m most proud of about my scholarly work is that I did it like a poet.
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 don’t really have one. I have never been only a writer—always an editor or student or scholar who also made time to write. I usually wait until I have an idea before devoting much time and attention to my creative writing. I used to go for a run to figure out writing tangles, and now walking every day is good for me and my writing. And I know it helps to write in my journal every night. I’m a neurodivergent person, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to focus only on one project. I will probably always do lots of other things, and those other things will somehow also help me write.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Hmm. The everyday? The world? Environmental activism? Or I read, or I throw myself into some other project or editing someone else’s writing. I don’t worry very much about this.
13 - What was your last Hallowe'en costume?
I bought a box of cheesy, vintage homemade costumes at a yard sale, then wore the one my kids didn’t want to wear. I think it was a lion.
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 am not a bird-watcher, but I have paid more attention to geese while making Goose. I LOVE them, in a very unscientific and silly way. And I have visited the Athabasca River several times while making this book, also the Assiniboine River almost every day, so I think of my writing as being in relation or conversation with these beloved rivers. Visual art, especially by the artists I have collaborated with through Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art (MAWA) in Winnipeg (Yvette Cenerini, Brenna George, Sandra Brown, Carolina Araneda, to name a few). Other influences for Goose include COVID-era Zoom meetings and podcasts, and lots of music (two songs to highlight: Tanya Tagaq’s “Retribution” and John K. Samson’s “Vampire Alberta Blues”). And the other forms I want to mention are DIY and amateurish aesthetics—zines, comics, the self-published, the protest poster or slogan or song.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Where to begin? And end? Books: Kate Beaton’s Ducks, Alvena Strasbourg’s Memories of a Métis Woman, Lindsay Bird’s Boom Time, Lesley Battler’s Endangered Hydrocarbons, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, K.B. Thors’s Vulgar Mechanics, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Kazim Ali’s Northern Light, Douglas Walbourne-Gough’s Crow Gulch, Richard van Camp’s Godless but Loyal to Heaven, Evan J’s Ripping Down Half the Trees, Joanna Lilley’s Endlings, Matthew James Weigel’s Whitemud Walking, Owen Toews’s Stolen City, Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism. And writers: Jordan Abel, Madhur Anand, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jenna Butler, Dionne Brand, Di Brandt, Moni Brar, Warren Cariou, Rina Garcia Chua, Ariel Gordon, Stephen Collis, Marvin Francis, Samantha F. Jones, Katłıà, Kaie Kellough, Sonnet L’Abbé, Christine Leclerc, Cecily Nicholson, Jamie Paris, Shane Rhodes, Kelly Shepherd, Kate Siklosi, Dani Spinosa, Jennifer Still, Michael Trussler, Katherena Vermette, Joshua Whitehead, Rita Wong, Syd Zolf.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to be a writer in residence. I will do that this fall at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. With that happening, and two books launching this fall, I honestly haven’t thought much further ahead.
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?
When I was young I said I wanted to be a librarian. That would work. I don’t know, I have already done a lot of things—communications work, university student services, magazine editing, journal editing, poetry editing, copy-editing and proofreading, teaching, research/scholarship. I’m focused now on attempting primarily being a writer for a change.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I write and do something else. But my something else is often pretty close to writing.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I’m reading Kate Briggs’s This Little Art right now. It’s fantastic. Before that it was Smokii Sumac’s Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, which is powerful, beautiful, and heartbreaking. I recently attended a screening of the film YINTAH and was blown away. Everyone in Canada should watch it, and it’s now on Netflix.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m preparing for the launches of Goose and the poetry anthology I co-edited, I’ll Get Right On It: Poems on Working Life in the Climate Crisis. I have a little chapbook project with one more sequence of poems about S.C. Ells. It didn’t fit with Goose so I set it aside to finish later (now). There is an ongoing research project with the McMurray Métis and Emily Eaton at the University of Regina that is related to Goose. I’m continuing my work as part of the Manitoba Energy Justice Coalition, including a public-art collaboration with visual artists Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies where we have been facilitating poster-making workshops that document the experiences of “wildfire season,” evacuations, smoke, and ongoing climate denial and delay in our province. And I’m getting ready to facilitate workshops on visual poetry and work-and-climate poetry as part of my upcoming writing residency.
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