Spotlight series #115 : Anna Veprinska

The one hundred and fifteenth in my monthly "spotlight" series, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online, featuring Calgary poet Anna Veprinska.

The first eleven in the series were attached to the Drunken Boat blog, and the series has so far featured poets including Seattle, Washington poet Sarah Mangold, Colborne, Ontario poet Gil McElroy, Vancouver poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, American poet Elizabeth Robinson, American poet Jennifer Kronovet, Ottawa poet Michael Dennis, Vancouver poet Sonnet L’Abbé, Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Fredericton poet Joe Blades, American poet Genève Chao, Northampton MA poet Brittany Billmeyer-Finn, Oji-Cree, Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer from Peguis First Nation (Treaty 1 territory) poet, critic and editor Joshua Whitehead, American expat/Barcelona poet, editor and publisher Edward Smallfield, Kentucky poet Amelia Martens, Ottawa poet Pearl Pirie, Burlington, Ontario poet Sacha Archer, Washington DC poet Buck Downs, Toronto poet Shannon Bramer, Vancouver poet and editor Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Vancouver poet Geoffrey Nilson, Oakland, California poets and editors Rusty Morrison and Jamie Townsend, Ottawa poet and editor Manahil Bandukwala, Toronto poet and editor Dani Spinosa, Kingston writer and editor Trish Salah, Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, Vancouver poet Adrienne Gruber, California poet and editor Susanne Dyckman, Brooklyn poet-filmmaker Stephanie Gray, Vernon, BC poet Kerry Gilbert, South Carolina poet and translator Lindsay Turner, Vancouver poet and editor Adèle Barclay, Thorold, Ontario poet Franco Cortese, Ottawa poet Conyer Clayton, Lawrence, Kansas poet Megan Kaminski, Ottawa poet and fiction writer Frances Boyle, Ithica, NY poet, editor and publisher Marty Cain, New York City poet Amanda Deutch, Iranian-born and Toronto-based writer/translator Khashayar Mohammadi, Mendocino County writer, librarian, and a visual artist Melissa Eleftherion, Ottawa poet and editor Sarah MacDonell, Montreal poet Simina Banu, Canadian-born UK-based artist, writer, and practice-led researcher J. R. Carpenter, Toronto poet MLA Chernoff, Boise, Idaho poet and critic Martin Corless-Smith, Canadian poet and fiction writer Erin Emily Ann Vance, Toronto poet, editor and publisher Kate Siklosi, Fredericton poet Matthew Gwathmey, Canadian poet Peter Jaeger, Birmingham, Alabama poet and editor Alina Stefanescu, Waterloo, Ontario poet Chris Banks, Chicago poet and editor Carrie Olivia Adams, Vancouver poet and editor Danielle Lafrance, Toronto-based poet and literary critic Dale Martin Smith, American poet, scholar and book-maker Genevieve Kaplan, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic ryan fitzpatrick, American poet and editor Carleen Tibbetts, British Columbia poet nathan dueck, Tiohtiá:ke-based sick slick, poet/critic em/ilie kneifel, writer, translator and lecturer Mark Tardi, New Mexico poet Kōan Anne Brink, Winnipeg poet, editor and critic Melanie Dennis Unrau, Vancouver poet, editor and critic Stephen Collis, poet and social justice coach Aja Couchois Duncan, Colorado poet Sara Renee Marshall, Toronto writer Bahar Orang, Ottawa writer Matthew Firth, Victoria poet Saba Pakdel, Winnipeg poet Julian Day, Ottawa poet, writer and performer nina jane drystek, Comox BC poet Jamie Sharpe, Canadian visual artist and poet Laura Kerr, Quebec City-area poet and translator Simon Brown, Ottawa poet Jennifer Baker, Rwandese Canadian Brooklyn-based writer Victoria Mbabazi, Nova Scotia-based poet and facilitator Nanci Lee, Irish-American poet Nathanael O'Reilly, Canadian poet Tom Prime, Regina-based poet and translator Jérôme Melançon, New York-based poet Emmalea Russo, Toronto-based poet, editor and critic Eric Schmaltz, San Francisco poet Maw Shein Win, Toronto-based writer, playwright and editor Daniel Sarah Karasik, Ottawa poet and editor Dessa Bayrock, Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia poet Alice Burdick, poet, writer and editor Jade Wallace, San Francisco-based poet Jennifer Hasegawa, California poet Kyla Houbolt, Toronto poet and editor Emma Rhodes, Canadian-in-Iowa writer Jon Cone, Edmonton/Sicily-based poet, educator, translator, researcher, editor and publisher Adriana Oniță, California-based poet, scholar and teacher Monica Mody, Ottawa poet and editor AJ Dolman, Sudbury poet, critic and fiction writer Kim Fahner, Canadian poet Kemeny Babineau, Indiana poet Nate Logan, Toronto poet and editor Michael Boughn, North Georgia poet and editor Gale Marie Thompson, award-winning poet Ellen Chang-Richardson, Montreal-based poet, professor and scholar of feminist poetics, Jessi MacEachern, Toronto poet and physician Dr. Conor Mc Donnell, San Francisco poet Micah Ballard, Montreal poet Misha Solomon, Ottawa writer and editor Mahaila Smith, American poet and asemic artist Terri Witek, Ottawa-based freelance editor and writer Margo LaPierre, Ottawa poet Helen Robertson, Oakville poet Mandy Sandhu, New Westminster, British Columbia poet Christina Shah and poet, critic, curator and former publisher Geoffrey Young!
 
The whole series can be found online here.

Anna Veprinska, Bonememory

 

I rode an escalator into a Kyiv
metro station just before emigration
in the summer of 1993. I remember
because it was my first escalator,
my first metro station. Now,
on the news, I watch Ukrainians huddle
in the metro station, birth children
from the privacy of the womb
into war’s pubic, hairy arms. Every year
since turning fifteen, I have longed
to return to Ukraine, if only
to lay stones on the graves
of my grandparents. What Ukraine
will be left for me, or for those
who still call it home?
Who, now, will witness
my grandparents’ graves? (“Vignettes for Ukraine”)

The full-length poetry debut by Calgary-based poet and academic Anna Veprinska is Bonememory (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2025), a collection of first person lyric observations dealing with conflict, heartbreak and intimate loss. As the back cover of the collection writes: “Memory is stored in the body. Memory sprouts in families and is transmitted from one generation to the next. Memory imprints at the level of bone.” This is a book of questions, and prayer, composed as poems with clear, sharp edges that write of generations, distance and the body, working through losses deeply felt, including that around immigration, colonialism, chronic illness and other upheavals. “Gravesite / suggests the dead are a site to behold,” she writes, as part of the poem “A goose lays eggs on the side of a highway,” “and aren’t they?” Further on, the poem “Testimony” offers: “Somewhere / there is a mouth generous // with opening. / Each lip stirs // in service of its own / secrets.”

Referencing the discovery of unmarked graves on multiple sites across Canada of former residential schools in the poem “Shoes,” she offers: “How much of this country is an unmarked grave?” She ties these recently-held memorials and acknowledgments to similar memorials at the Auschwitz museum, writing: “What comes from the reification of metaphor?” She writes of pain, and the bewilderment of patterns, repeating, all of which is held in the body. “Empathy,” the same poem concludes, “the lie with whom wee sit making small talk / until decorum dictates we can depart. / 215 Indigenous children. Makeshift memorials / of children’s shoes coast to coast. / How much of this country is an unmarked grave?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Anna Veprinska

Anna Veprinska is the author of Empathy in Contemporary Poetry after Crisis. She was a finalist in the Ralph Gustafson Poetry Contest, has been shortlisted for the Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence and received an Honourable Mention from the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary.

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?
My first collection of poems, Sew with Butterflies, was the realization of a dream. I was so young when it was published, and I knew nothing about publishing, except that a publisher (Steel Bananas) had heard me give a reading and asked if I had a collection I could submit. Their belief in me at that stage meant everything. The book that emerged held, at the heart of it, that moment of humility: that my poems had spoken to another human being. It was frightening and filling and fuelling.

Bonememory, my forthcoming second collection of poems, took a long time to write – or at least to arrive at writing. Although I published two chapbooks in between, Bonememory is set to appear about 10 years after my first collection. I needed that time to grow and believe in myself as a poet, and I think Bonememory represents that growth – it holds the poems I feel most proud of.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
In another interview, I’ve written about how at seven years old I asked my father for a notebook and began writing poems. I can’t explain this in any other way, except to say that poetry came to me, not I to it. I wrote it before I understood what it was – I am still trying to understand what it is.

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 slow writer. Excruciatingly slow. In conversation with my creative writing students, I’ve been championing the slow writer, the non-prolific writer, the ‘I-just-moved-a-comma-today’ writer. But I’ve also been reminding them that writing takes place off the page as much as it does on the page – I am constantly thinking about and in poetry.

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 my writing fits into both of those descriptions. Bonememory began as individual poems whose patterns I later traced and pieced into a collection, as did Sew with Butterflies. But the new project I’m working on began with an idea for a collection, which each of the poems is moving toward.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Even after all these years of reading my poetry aloud, I still get nervous before and exhausted after readings. It’s a kind of exposure (in both uncomfortable senses of vulnerability and publicity). But I do enjoy readings, especially when they allow me to connect with others in the audience; I deeply appreciate conversations after a reading. To hear how a poem landed is a gift.

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?
In Bonememory, the questions I am working with are about how memory is held in our bones and what that means personally, familialy, intergenerationally, collectively. While I was writing many of the poems in Bonememory, I was simultaneously working on a postdoctorate project that centred around listening to Holocaust testimonies. And I was also watching and reading about horrific world events, including Russia’s invasion of my home country of Ukraine, and, here in Canada, the findings of unmarked graves at former residential schools. These violences are part of the questions, too, as are my own limits as a viewer of these violences and the potentially nefarious tentacles of empathy.

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?
Dionne Brand described Inventory, her 2006 long poem about the socio-political crises at the turn of this century, as an “antenna of the time.” In my own writing, I am often drawn to responding to the cultural and political moments we live in (when I can stomach writing about them, and that often takes time) and to ethics. But I don’t think that needs to be the role of the writer, especially if it doesn’t feel honest for that individual writer. I think it’s dangerous to prescribe a role for any artist.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I am so often a solitary writer, but I think working with an editor is a remarkable and imperative opportunity. My editor for Bonememory at the University of Calgary Press’s Brave and Brilliant Series, Helen Hajnoczky, was wonderful – attentive, honest, thoughtful. She offered care not only to each individual poem but also to the collection as a whole. It’s a gift to receive that kind of attention – it makes the work stronger. When I published my chapbook Stone Blossom with Anstruther Press, Jim Johnstone was likewise incredible, which I knew he would be from working with him as a mentor through Arc Poetry Magazine’s Writer-in-Residence mentorship program. Jim helped select the poems that became Stone Blossom and read each with a keen and honest eye. I am deeply indebted to the editors who have made my poems stronger.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I once heard a writer say, paraphrasing Lynda Barry, that one should touch the work every day. I like the spaciousness the word “touch” allows: you can shift a dash; you can move a word from one line to another. Touching the work keeps it close to you, keeps it breathing inside of you.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
My academic work means I am constantly moving between poetry and critical prose. I am at my best when I am merging the two. But, honestly, I think what I know best is how to write poetry, and I’ve learned to pass it off as prose.

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?
Most of the time, I don’t have a routine so much as a commitment. In the “my (small press) writing day” essay I previously wrote for you some years back, I speak of my writing day as an attempt to reach for the magic of poetry. That commitment to reach for poetry can look like dedicated writing time, but it can also look like reading or watching a sunset. There are periods when I have more of a set writing routine, and there are periods when I come to writing when it calls me. I work at not being too hard on myself during the routine-light times, but I am happiest when I am writing.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Other words. The writing of other writers reminds me what can be done with language. Also, moving away from the project – allowing the time it needs to awaken again – is part of the writing: this can look like walking, reading, listening to music, staring out a window.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The smell of my sweetheart.

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?
All of the above. A sound can lead to a poem. Or a smell. Or a brush stroke. Or science – I recently wrote a poem about a blue whale’s heart. I am especially enamoured of light, “a certain slant of light,” as Emily Dickinson wrote.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Oh, this is a huge question, because there are so many – poets and otherwise! Paul Celan has had an enormous influence on my writing – both my approach to language and my approach to the silences around and within language. Other writers that are indispensable for me include: Emily Dickinson, Anne Carson, Toni Morrison, Ilya Kaminsky, Ocean Vuong, Dionne Brand, Wisława Szymborska, Valzhyna Mort, Zadie Smith, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I’d like to write more creative nonfiction and, perhaps someday, even fiction. But mostly I feel that I love poetry too much to stray far from it for long.

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?
A professor, which I am fortunate to be, and which allows me to write and be inspired by the writing of my students. Alternatively, a psychologist: I am interested in the inner thoughts occupying (tormenting?) people’s minds, in what’s underneath the surface. I think a psychologist and a writer have this in common.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Was it Elie Wiesel who said one should only write if they could not live without writing? That’s why I write.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently read Elizabeth Rosner’s Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, which was published last year. It’s a compassionate and thoughtful nonfiction book in which Rosner beautifully threads together personal narrative with science, art, and theory. I had the pleasure of listening to it as an audiobook read by Rosner.

I’ve been watching some wonderful world cinema. I particularly love Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. It’s visually stunning, and there is so much power in what remains unsaid in this film.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a new collection of poems through a Calgary Institute for the Humanities Fellowship: the poems are about the tension between my intolerance to noise (I have auditory sensitivity) and my reliance on sound (I often rely on auditory accommodations). It’s a collection that challenges me to work with and through sound.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;