1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The most immediate answer is confidence. Now I have this artifact, this beautiful material thing that I can hold in my hands that is a record of my labour and imagination. It’s also a manifestation of a community of support—of publishers and editors and readers and friends and colleagues who believe in the work along with me. I’m not saying the confidence will last forever; the rejection letters continue. But the community also continues.
Before Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos, I wrote mostly academic stuff. Lots of narrative theory, ethics, and even ecocritical theory. It’s not that I’ve put those ideas away, but with the new book I’ve tried to find a new voice for them and a new medium. I think it’s working.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’m drawn to poetry because the claim it makes on a reader’s time is humble. It asks for a relatively small moment but in that moment asks for you to pay close attention and linger just a bit. It may be lyric, it may be narrative, it may be some strange hybrid, but when a poem’s at its best, it can rattle life back into you before you have to move on to other things.
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 am a very slow writer and starting something is always the most difficult. I’ll look at my watch and realize I’ve been writing (and deleting) a poem’s first line for half a day. I have trouble moving onto the next line before I’m happy with what came before. I’m not sure that’s healthy or sustainable if I want to keep writing books, but that’s where I’m at right now. Still, that also means when I finally do finish a draft (of a poem, or even a whole book), I’ve already done so much editing-as-I-go, that it does look somewhat close to what the final work will become.
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 think I always have a book in mind when I start writing poems, though that image of my book mutates with every new poem I write. Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos started off as a very different collection, but as I re-read some of my earlier poems, it helped crystallize what I was actually interested in and where my most creative insights actually were.
Some days when I sit down to write, I know I want to write a new poem, but I have no clue what I want to write about. When that happens, I’ll start with an image and just try to follow it until it’s no longer familiar. This is also, incidentally, how I condition myself to fall asleep on those nights my mind won’t stop racing.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m new enough at this poetry thing that I still love public readings. The fact that people will gather from across cities and towns and countries to listen to someone read poems fills me with joy and hope for all things human. I’ve not really considered public readings as part of my creative process, though hearing an audience react in real time to a certain line or word or phrase—gasps, laughs, grunts, scoffs, or whatever else—does very quickly let me know what may work and what may not. That said, I think a poem is always at least two poems: the poem that is read (and seen) on the page and the poem that is heard (but not seen). An audience may not hear my line breaks, but they matter; likewise, a poem read aloud makes different things more emphatic.
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?
The big one I grappled with when writing Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos was how to write about the non-human world without instrumentalizing it. In other words, how do we tell stories about things that do not tell stories without turning those things into something they are not? I’m certainly not the first poet to think about how to write ethically about nature. But I really am interested—and I suspect I will continue to be for the foreseeable future—in the ways narrative becomes audacious and arrogant, even in the midst of its beauty as a “technology.”
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?
I ask my students this same question, and we always, all of us, equivocate. I think the writer’s role, at its root, is to demand that we pay sustained attention to the world. To demand that we keep reading and keep thinking about things, even when others would demand we stop thinking and just consume. At the same time, that’s a lot of symbolic pressure on any individual writer. And maybe too much pressure, especially for emerging writers. Maybe a writer’s role is just to write—to be unequivocally, absolutely human.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
One of my favourite parts of the publishing process is working with an editor. Sure, it can be difficult, and it can poke a little at your ego. But what a true gift it is to have someone who sees real value in your work and is dedicating themself to make it even better. Maybe I’m naïve, but I think there’s an inborn kindness to the work of editors—shepherds and surgeons and soothsayers, all of them.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Always leave something for the next day. Don’t exhaust yourself. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway says he learned “never to empty the well… but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.” Very practically, I’ll try to leave a sentence or phrase or idea to come back to so I’m not starting from a blank page.
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 love writing in the mornings, but the problem is mornings are when I’m most productive for everything else in my life, too. If 1:00 pm rolls around and a task isn’t started, it’s going to be very slow-going. Ideally, I write for an hour or two after I walk the dog and feel really great that I completed something, which sustains me through all of life’s other daily exigencies. Mind you, this is an ideal—i.e. very rarely does it happen this way.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other authors, typically. One of my get-out-of-my-rut strategies is to return to strict poetic forms. For example, I’ll find a poem I love, then find a line I love, and then I’ll try to write a golden shovel poem. Or a glosa. There’s something about using a piece of writing that you love as a starting point that makes you feel less alone. Even if I end up tossing that poem, I feel less alone and less empty.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My dad was a pediatric neurosurgeon, so he worked really long hours. More days than not, he’d come home for dinner and then go back to work right after. But on the nights he didn’t have to return to the hospital, he’d pour himself a small scotch on the rocks. The scent of Cutty Sark blended scotch whisky will always remind me of home.
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?
There’s a lot of fishing and a lot of forests in Human Story will not Consume the Cosmos. Many of the poems germinated on a lake with a fishing rod in my hand or bumbling along a trail in the Hamilton Conservation Authority. There’s something to be said for the way a poem slows you down for a moment, makes you notice things you wouldn’t necessarily pay any attention to in your daily life. When I am staring at a fishing line that’s not catching any fish, or at a colonnade of sentinel pines off-trail, I realize I have borrowed liberally from fishing and forests.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Many of the poems in my book are epigraphed with other authors’ work: Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, William James, Stevie Smith, Robert Kroetsch, Kate Beaton, Billy Collins, W.H. Auden, Nicholas Herring, to name a few. It’s been said before and more eloquently by others, but writing is a conversation, and we are built by other writers.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d very much like to finish writing a novel. Good plot is so hard. If we’re talking about non-writing activities, I want to stand in a river in Wyoming or Montana with a 7-weight fly rod in my hand and a good salami sandwich waiting for me on the bank.
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?
I saw an ad the other day offering arborist training. I think I would enjoy that. I say this having held a chainsaw only once in my life.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I grew up with books all around me. The unspoken rule was every room should have books. For better or worse, writing felt inevitable.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Maria Reva’s Endling is, to me, a perfect novel. It is an object lesson in the way narrative form creates meaning—that is, the way it can shock us into new understandings of our shared, fraught world.
This summer, I fell hard for Carson Lund’s Eephus. An amateur baseball diamond is about to be razed. One last game to be played. It’s silly and deadly serious all at once.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I’m currently revising a 14-poem corona of sonnets about the death of the humanities at liberal arts institutions, which I hope will become a chapbook. I’m also working on a new full-length collection of poems, tentatively titled How to Build the Ocean. Long way to go on it, but one of its first poems, “Baseball Game, with Octopus,” was just recently published in the fall issue of CV2.
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