12 or 20 (second series) questions with Blair Trewartha

Blair Trewartha’s debut collection, Easy Fix (Palimpsest Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Relit Award. He is the author of three chapbooks: Break In (Cactus Press, 2010), Porcupine Burning (Baseline Press, 2012), and Human Energy (Anstruther Press, 2022). Blair’s poems have recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review, Prairie Fire, and The Fiddlehead. Born and raised on a farm outside of Clinton, Ontario (Treaty 29 Territory), Blair now lives in London, Ontario (Treaty 6 Territory) with his partner, two children, and their hyper Beagle. Half-Earth is his second full-length collection.

1 -How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

It’s hard to compare them, but I think the biggest difference is the context and the focus of the poems. My new collection, Half-Earth (Palimpsest Press, 2026), feels broader in scope and yet much more personal than Easy Fix, which was published way back in 2014. Easy Fix generally explored the current culture at the time and alienation, the tension between rural and urban life, and the poems had the restless energy of a younger narrator trying to locate himself within a fractured culture, asking where he fits into it all (which makes sense since I wrote a lot of that book in my late 20s). 

Half-Earth looks outward to climate change, artificial intelligence, and the pandemic while filtering those concerns through fatherhood, illness, and family history. It moves more deliberately between personal memory and experience, deep history, and an uncertain future, and it is written from the perspective of a parent wondering what kind of world his children will inherit. It’s much more personal. Half-Earth feels like the question has changed from one of belonging (like in Easy Fix) to one of coping; the poems acknowledge where we are now, how we got here, and where we’re going next, but they’re exploring how we cope with all of this. What does it mean to live, and go about our lives and raise children in a world full of failing systems, whether environmental, socio-political, economic, technological, a planet and species nearing our demise?

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

I actually started writing mostly fiction in my youth, several short stories and a never-finished novel, but once I had initial success with publishing a few poems in literary magazines in my early 20s, I started to focus more exclusively on poetry. Eventually, fiction fell to the wayside. Although if I think back to high school, frantically scribbling in my journal at night when I couldn’t sleep or sneaking back to the creek on my parents farm to smoke cigarettes and attempt poems and song lyrics; that was all poetry, long before I ever attempted to write a short story. Poetry was always the initial impulse to write. 

Every once in a while I make another attempt at fiction, but I rarely get far. It feels sluggish and stalled, like I’m learning a new language and struggling for vocabulary and structure. I’d like to get back to it someday, but there’s something about poetry that feels more intuitive and also more malleable, more workable, and I find it easier to actually finish a poem or collection. The initial creation seems to come from impulse and spur of the moment; but then I can edit and fine tune it later. I think poetry will always be my first impulse, and more workable as a craft to me.

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?

My writing process varies, depending on the poem, so my answer to most of these questions would be yes and no. Sometimes, a poem flows quickly out of an experience or moment, like it did with the poem “Lightshow” in my new book, Half-Earth. I was putting my son to bed one night after he had choked on a marble earlier that day, and he started asking me questions about what dying looked like. The entire poem is almost verbatim our conversation, and I wrote that down immediately after leaving his room once he was asleep. It went through some editing in my workshop group and with my editor, but 90% or more of that poem hasn’t changed from its first draft that night.

Most poems though have a much longer grinding process, working through drafts in my workshop group and with my editor, even if the initial draft comes out in full. It could take months to write a single poem and have it ready for publication, while once in a while a poem comes full force in a matter of minutes. It’s rare, but beautiful when it happens.  

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?

For both my poetry collections, I was never working on a book as a cohesive concept until at least 75% of the material was written. It was more a matter of slowly churning out enough poems to finally justify structuring it into a manuscript and submitting to publishers. I think the themes and topical sections of the book came out organically based on the things I was preoccupied with over several years.   

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 

Public readings are always a mandatory after thought and never part of my creative process. I’ve never actually thought about reading a poem in public until the book or chapbook is published, and discussions about launches start. Like many writers I’m sure, I’d rather be reading or writing privately than performing in public, partially because I’m introverted, and partially due to a moderate but consistent level of social anxiety.

With that said, I also can’t deny that magical, extremely rewarding feeling of a book launch, the responses and feedback from the audience, the relief afterwards when it all goes well. It’s a special moment, to feel part of a literary community that welcomes you and wants to hear what you have to share.  

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 in Half-Earth in particular, I’m trying to explore what it means to live in our current reality, to progress and raise children and attempt to move forward and what impact that has on us, knowing that as both a species and a planet, we are devolving, we’re in decline even as we continue to innovate, expand, procreate, and live our lives. I’m stuck on this idea of how do we continue individually and collectively living day to day, which is always focused on progression (whether that’s our passions, careers, children, relationships, homes, etc.) knowing full-well that the human population and the planet are on a downward trend.

I guess I want to know what it means to survive on a personal level knowing that it’s likely no longer possible for us to thrive or even potentially survive long term collectively. What does it mean to cope and live our lives with so many facets of our world (environmental, political, social, economic) in decline? It’s a strange feeling in the back of your mind, this backdrop that’s always in crisis, as we commute to work and buy coffee and take our kids to soccer practice. Cognitive dissonance is used a lot, but I think that implies it doesn’t affect us consciously or subconsciously, but I believe it does. It’s the impact I want to explore.

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’d love to say the writer has a specific, vital role in a culture because I believe we do have that potential, but ultimately, I think the writer’s role is simply to participate in a given culture, to  experience the world and cope with life by producing art. Ideally, the work they produce helps others cope as well. Writers are often expressing joy or sorrow, portraying social or political injustice, or deeply intimate personal experiences. Either way, I think it’s all a form of processing and coping with the world around them, and expressing that aloud for others to experience as well.  

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I only have experience working with two editors, Karen Schindler from Baseline Press, and Jim Johnstone from Anstruther Press and Palimpsest Press, and both were essential. A good editor can see things you can’t, weaknesses in your poems that you’re too close to. I’ve never actually found it difficult, but I’ve also been lucky to work with incredibly skilled editors. With both my first book and my second, I think I placed an immense amount of trust in Jim Johnstone, knowing that he has the rare ability to balance deserved praise with much needed criticism. He finds that perfect middle ground between generosity and objective ruthlessness (and that is a compliment). He knows when to tell me a poem is complete and impactful, and when to chop off a stanza or two or even pull an entire poem from the manuscript because frankly, it’s not good enough yet. That’s such an incredible gift to receive as a writer trying to improve their craft.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

If you’re given a space in the literary community, create two.

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 wish I had a writing routine, but I don’t. Two kids and a full time career, and an autoimmune condition that requires me to put a lot of time and energy into physio and exercise and self-care, makes it very hard to have a regular writing routine. Instead, my writing is sporadic, writing a poem in my head as it comes to me on a walk with the dog or driving or reading a book, and at other times it’s extremely intentional, where I block off time to be alone for a couple of days so I can be more productive. In order to finish Half-Earth, I had to book four days of vacation and go solo to an off grid cabin with nothing but my laptop, no internet, and a pile of books. If I could do that even just a few times a year, I’d be far more prolific than publishing two books 12 years apart. Hopefully the third book comes much sooner.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? 

I turn to nature and reading, coffee shops and libraries. It’s very much a physical location change that’s needed when I’m most stuck. That, and I read when I can’t write. It softens my mind and gets the words flowing again. If I can be reading at a cabin in the woods, or a hammock at a campsite, even better. Also, listening to music and walking the dog at night. I don’t look for specific sources of inspiration to initiate stalled writing; I look for specific environments and stimulation to get my mind to the right place.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 

I grew up on a farm in a drafty farmhouse built in the late 1800s, so three distinct smells remind me of home: dead flies, cow manure, and fresh cut hay. I haven’t lived in that house since my early twenties, and it was sold and destroyed many years ago, but to this day, I can still vividly conjure the exact smell of the upstairs hallway and my old bedroom, and I think it’s a combination of those three smells. Such a weirdly comforting combo of good and bad smells.   

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 tend to agree that books come from books. Reading puts me in the mindset to write, and nature gives me the temperament needed to write a poem and open myself up to the lines that come. Most of the time, that’s the peaceful quiet walking down a nature trail or camping or cottaging by a lake or river, but sometimes it’s also the chaos and energy of a busy downtown street, staring out a coffee shop window and watching a city churn. 

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

There are too many to name, but there were several books I was reading deeply while writing Half-Earth, including the poetry collections I mention later in question 18, but also the non-fiction title The Future is Analogue: How to Create a More Human World (David Sax) and several articles about climate change, technology, deep history, mentioned in the acknowledgements section of my book. A few of my favourite fiction writers are Ocean Vuong, Zoe Whittall, and David Huebert. As for poets, some favourites over the years have been LizHoward, John Wall Barger, Matthew Dickman, Ben Ladouceur, Triny Finlay, and most recently Sabrina Spenser Smith, Zane Koss, Brandi Bird, and Jenny Berkel.

Outside of my own writing, I edit chapbooks for Anstruther Press and on my own independently offer manuscript edits and consultations, and this brings me so much genuine joy. I get to see early drafts from incredibly skilled writers, some of them on the cusp of their publishing careers and others more seasoned, and I get to work with their poems and help mold and tweak and fine tune them into their final published artifact. It’s so satisfying, and I’m continually amazed at what others are doing, how truly spectacular so many emerging writers are.  

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Skydive, solo back country camping, become fully fluent in a second language, learn to hunt (sustainably & respectfully), publish a novel or short story collection.  

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’m a learning specialist and instructional designer, and formerly a teacher, so education had always been my career plan. Writing was always my passion, but never something I pursued as a career. I suppose if I could pick any job, I’d love to teach creative writing at a University, something I never did in my 12-13 year teaching career. Alternatively, if I could pick any job regardless of income, I’d work in a bookstore or a library, simply because I can’t think of a better place to spend 5 days a week. It’s always been a fantasy of mine. And yes, I realize what I actually want is to be a customer in a bookstore 5 days a week. Working in one, I’m sure, comes with all kinds of stress and pressure that I’m not aware of.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

Compulsion and anxiety, and listening to Neil Young in high school and discovering Alden Nowlan and Patrick Lane as a teenager. Writing has been there since early high school, when I started devouring novels and poetry books and writing frantically in my room each night when I couldn’t sleep. It stayed with me all of these years, but became more intentional, more steady. The compulsion to write, to me, is more important than every other aspect of writing like editing and publishing and promotion. Whether or not I have a publication or a public reading, or even if I don’t write anything new for several years, the desire and impulse to write will, I deeply hope, always be there, or always return when it’s stalled.  

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

Last great novel was Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. I’ve read so many phenomenal poetry collections over the last year or so, but the few that stood out the most were Sabrina Spenser Smith’s A Brief Relief from Hunger, Triny Finlay’s Myself a Paperclip, and Matthew Dickman’s Wonderland and Husbandry. I rarely watch films anymore, but on a rare occasion I went to the movie theatre and saw One Battle After Another, which was a wild ride.   

19 - What are you currently working on?

Not allowing my writing to grind to a halt now that I’ve finally published my second book. After my first, I developed my career, had two children,  got a Masters degree, and had a spouse with a very busy career, so it took 12 years to publish my second full length. I’d like to make the third book happen sooner, not for any time line, just so that writing continues to be part of my daily life even when life gets chaotic.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Blair Trewartha, Half-Earth: poems

  

DAGUERREOTYPE # 1

Start on the fainting couch,
lay him there like a pair
of slacks, propped up as if
reading. His older brother
next to him in a wicker chair,
palming his four-year-old
hand. He holds it tightly
through each pop and burn
until fear or grief or the cold
breaks his grip. Secure the shadow
before the substance fades.

The second full-length poetry title by London, Ontario poet Blair Trewartha, following Easy Fix (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2014) [as well as a handful of chapbooks, one of which I reviewed here back in 2012], is Half-Earth: poems (Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of first-person lyric monologues shaped and centred around navigating climate crisis, fatherhood, illness, digital media and misinformation, the Covid-era, loss, love and memories of childhood. “We could have spun the earth / on its axis,” the poem “BACK THEN” begins, “slapped it like a beach ball / with our teenaged palms.” Later in the poem, writing: […] clutched our plastic guns // the way butchers must hold a cleaver— // knowing there’s a thread in the meat / that needs to be cut, lines / of fat that have to be severed.” There’s a way Trewartha explores memory, including recent memory, not as nostalgia but a reassessing, attempting to see from the perspective of distance, how certain moments shaped and were shaped, and allowed something else to occur. “Dying in a hospital bed,” begins “EQUAL TEMPERAMENT,” “she warned us / that your body is made of piano wires / and we’ll need to keep you in tune. / That sometimes you get so tight / you can’t breathe. Other times you fall / slack, so loose you can hardly speak.”

Presented across three sections of clustered lyrics—“ROOTS,” “STEMMA” and “DIGITAL MOURNING”—there is a tension, an anxiety, that exists in Trewartha’s lines, running through the length and breadth of the collection. “There are moments at home // streaming or scrolling / while my children mimic / and learn,” he writes, mid-point through the poem “AT THE CABIN,” “that I divide / into multiple visual selves, / so I run. I run nowhere // in particular, just out, / like how some dogs bolt / the second you open / the door, even the ones / who are loved // because that’s nature, [.]” This is an anxiety that articulates itself through subject, perhaps even founded in concerns through climate and the Covid-era (including Ottawa’s infamous trucker convoy), yet showing itself across the broader spectrum of a lyric that seeks ground, seeks a way to catch one’s breath. Writing on digital misinformation spreading through the Covid-era, including resulting in that infamous trucker convoy, Trewartha asks how, exactly, culture found itself in this moment, in this place, where misinformation runs rampant. Perhaps in the end, anxiety is the only way to respond to the current climate, this particular period of time. Perhaps anxiety, and not only articulating it but attempting to rise up to meet it, is our only option to begin. The only way out, one might say, is through.

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

Sometimes it’s a root
gone wild through silt and clay.
Every pull and tear, another
tuber reveals itself. So much easier
to simply see the weed at the top
and pluck its head. Call it a day
and be done with it.

 

Ongoing notes: late late December, 2012

Another year come and gone. Here’s a photo from our recent Peter F Yacht Club Christmas party/reading/regatta of Roland Prevost [see my full report on such here]. And have you subscribed to above/ground press yet for its 20th year? Forthcoming chapbooks have already been confirmed by Helen Hajnoczky, Abby Paige, Joshua Marie Wilkinson and Abby Paige. Just what else might the new year bring?

Since I’ve done my ‘best big thing’self-interview, two of the five I tagged have posted their own: Stephen Cain and Michael Bryson. Looking forward to seeing what the other three (eventually) have to say. And watch for these upcoming events.

Hamilton ON/Schenectady NY: Another small chapbook from Gary Barwin’s serif of nottingham is American poet NF Huth’s 3 Words (2011). In these nine poems, there is such a lovely quality of repetition and chant, composing poems underneath three little words nearly as an experiment in riffing and/or word association. The poems read sharp and quick, embracing tangents and qualities of sound, and it’s impossible to know where the poems might end up. I am fascinated by what she is doing.

WHEN IF AND

She throws out the dishwater that is still hot.

She throws out the dishwater that is still hot enough to use.

She uses cold instead.

She washes the dishes in cold water.

She rests on a chair that is not cloth.

She rests on a chair that is not cloth but that is wiped easily.

She sits on a vinyl chair.

She wiggles on a vinyl chair that is easy to clean.

She questions the sound from the hall.

She questions the sound from the hall that is rain but not.

She wonders if it’s wet.

She hears the wet rain that is a cough from the door.

Most words begin with B.

Words that flesh out thoughts begin with bees.

Bees are not inside with us.

Words that used to swarm land on the armchair.

Her eyes follow the swarm heavy with rain.

When silence swarms she fills the space between.

Silence is never filled.

Rain heavies the bees. They swell and drop from her mouth.

The clock signals some ends with sound.

A final sound is a puddle of bees ticking on the floor.

Her meter is bursts of three.

Her meter makes constant ends.

London ON: Karen Schindler’s Baseline Press has been producing some intriguing (and quite attractive) limited edition chapbooks over the past year or so [see my review of the recent Gil McElroy chapbook here], and the most recent batch of short works includes Gabriel Wainio-Théberge’s Small Hallows (2012) and Blair Trewartha’s Porcupine Burning (2012). Gabriel Wainio-Théberge is a graduate of Ottawa’s Canterbury High School, and Small Hallows appears to be his first published chapbook.

CHRONICLE 1

What is left to say about autumn

and should it be said

before autumn begins? Will the words

curl up and go brown at the edges,

fall like yellow leaves to the ground

while the trees are still green

(in no particular order)?

Will they be gnawed at by insects,

tiptoed on by spiders?

Will the trees smoulder, die

and not be transfigured?

Omen of autumn: lantern leaves

glow yellow in a sulfurous sunset.

Acid of August. A single worried streetlight

watches it eat the night, sleeps

as it fades the day, blinks awake to find

the evening bubbling over

like a science-fair volcano –

day and night reacting,

burning the edges of the leaves, while inside

I wait for the colours to settle.

Largely autobiographical, Wainio-Théberge sketches a series of lyric narrative poems, and the strong narrative impulse throughout is enough that I wonder about his choice for poetry over prose. Why not compose short stories? Still, what there is in his poems does sharpen once the narrative begins to fall away and the image clears, composing into a series of fragments. And yet, he uses similes far, far too often. Why does everything has to be “like” a thing? Why can’t he simply describe “thing”? There are some moments here and there, most of which are still buried beneath youth and inexperience. I would be interested to see where his writing is in, say, another five years, or ten.

WNDRYN

Wndryn the rain. A season’s baptism

plasters leaves to the asphalt. Wndryn.

The asphalt sweats out its heart. A clod of cold

slips down its road throat. Something moves.

The leaves are transfixed. A twisting

inside the red branch, a twisting of something green.

The asphalt chokes, but it is

saying something – Wndryn.

Wndryn among the pumpkin fields. The corkscrew

of the cut stalk, cracking,

and energy being released

through hairline cracks in pumpkinstalks and clouds.

Where does it go? Rainwater

is easy to scatter. Draw a picture.

The rain falls like nails and sticks to the gravestones.

Wndryn, like graffiti on the hills.

Blair Trewartha’s Porcupine Burning tells the story of an event, as he writes to open the small collection:

On July 11, 1911, the gold rush town of Porcupine started to burn. Citizens fled to the lake, or perished in the buildings they had erected and the bush they prospected. The two-year-old town was cleared right down to the rock by dawn. The next day, survivors set up tents and took stock of what remained. With the dense bush now completely barren, it took only two months for Porcupine to return to a booming mining settlement.

Much like Wainio-Théberge’s collection, Trewartha’s Porcupine Burning composes a sequence of narratives, linked through a shared, historical event. He writes poems amid and between the actions of historical record, including “Porcupine, Burning,” “Vigil” and “Recovery.” Honestly, the poems actually become more compelling once the story is told and nearly out of the way:

BREAKER

In the lake, I am heavy stone.

Compressed weight submerged,

orbiting itself, gravity releasing its spiky grip

until I roll effortlessly, vertebrae separating,

spine snapping into alignment.

I used to call you a lake carp, when we’d fight.

Your slick skin maneuvering through the reeds

like a ghost, jagged rows of teeth

hidden beneath bed sheets.

Even your bite I miss, that sudden punch of breath

at the moment of puncture. The injection of pulse.

Anything is better than this—a stillness more solid

than shore. Your silence an undertow I waltz with blindly.

I’m rarely fond of the poem or poem-sequence reciting history (whether an event or figure), since so many simply regurgitate facts already-known, which make me wonder what the purpose is; why not go straight to the history books instead? It’s a difficult form, certainly, and one of the few that have worked might include Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (1972) or Steveston (1977), or even George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (1972). Just what is it about the form that compels?