12 or 20 (second series) questions with Barb Howard

Barb Howard is the author of Notes for Monday, Whipstock, The Dewpoint Show, and the award-winning short story collection, Western Taxidermy. She has served as President of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta, Writer-in-Residence at the Calgary Public Library, and editor of Freefall Magazine, and has taught Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, the Alexandra Writer’s Centre, and the Banff Centre. Barb is the Calgary writing mentor for The Shoe Project, a literacy and performance workshop for immigrant women, and sits on its board of directors. She is also a member of the board of directors for the Calgary Arts Development and Calgary Arts Foundation. She lives in Calgary, Alberta.

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 book didn’t change my life as much as I had hoped. I thought that after it came out I would feel that I had officially arrived as a writer. However, after that first book I then figured that I needed my second book to feel that I had arrived. And then my third, etc. Happy Sands is my fifth book of fiction and I’m pretty sure the “not there yet” pattern will continue. Happy Sands does have some fundamental differences to my first book Whipstock. In Whipstock I used a third-person point of view and avoided explicit interior thoughts (while hinting at those thoughts through action and dialogue.) Happy Sands is written in first-person and is an interior novel. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily progress, but it’s different.

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

I came to fiction first because that is what I mostly read. Also, when I started writing I was doing legal writing for a day job. I had heard that it’s best to write something that is not like your day job (otherwise it feels like your day job). It still seems like good advice.

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 slow to start and, once it gets going, also a slow writer. None of it comes easy. In Happy Sands I had to resort to the Pomodoro Technique (25-minute timed intervals) to finish the manuscript and the first big round of UCalgary Press edits.

I don’t take notes or write in a journal. I figure if an idea or detail is good enough it will stick with me. That might be code for laziness. My first full draft usually captures a sense of the general story idea and setting – but underdoes everything else. The most common editorial comment I get is “more here?”

4 - Where does a work of prose 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?

Usually, I know the approximate length of a piece when I start. There are occasional surprises, but the length and genre mostly end up being as I envisioned. I start writing at what I think might be the beginning and write to what I think might be the end, skipping over parts that give me difficulty. Then I go back and dig in and rearrange and fill-in and delete.

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

I see public readings as part of the job. I don’t dread them but they definitely occupy my mind for a few days leading up to the performance. During those days when performance planning and practicing and jitters take over my mind, my creative process for writing is obliterated.

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?

When I begin a new piece my initial concern is: does the world need another book or story, particularly by another old white woman, and more particularly by me? I answer no. And then, illogically, go ahead and write anyway. When I write I don’t try to answer anything, rather I try to represent a feeling or a circumstance. And then when I finish I ask myself the dreaded question: so what? And usually have no answer.

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 think the role of a writer has always been to observe, to report and, in the case of creative writing, to effectively and artistically interpret or represent aspects of (pretentious phrase coming here) the human condition. “Effectively and artistically” is the tricky part.

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

An experienced outside editor is absolutely essential to my process, and I love working with them. When else will someone spend that much time on a piece of my writing? A strong editor is a gift – even when we disagree. Working with a weak or inexperienced editor can by stressful and problematic – but that has only happened to me a few times in over 20 years. And every editor has to start somewhere.  

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

Long before it was a Nike slogan, my mom used to say “Just do it.” Basically – stop whining and waffling and making excuses and get on with it.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to essays to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?

Moving between genres has been organic for me – more a function of time and stage of life than pre-planning, although deep down I think of myself primarily as a short story writer. Short stories were easier to keep in my mind in the tiny writing-time allotments I had when I was working full time and had young kids. My novels tend to be short – more like really long short stories or novellas. But they feel long to me.  Whenever I finish writing a novel I swear I will never write another one. I never say that after finishing a short story. The essays that I write are usually more reflective or personal than journalistic and I am glad I didn’t start on then until fairly recently. I have more life experiences to reflect upon now.

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 set up daily “office hours” that, in theory, are devoted to actual writing, and not to just “writing-related” activities like mentoring, or Board work or editing for other people. But I find it hard to keep to the office hours. In practice, my lowest daily bar to reach is to at least “touch” (= do anything, e.g. open the file and insert a comma) my current work-in-progress every day. Often that turns into a long writing session. But I still frequently end up regressing to my old habit of writing late at night.

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

If it’s a little stall, I go to the piano, play a bit, and then go back to my desk. If it’s a medium stall I take my dog for a walk or go for a bike ride. If it’s a huge stall and there’s no deadline, I set the work aside for a few months. If it’s a huge stall and there is a deadline, gulp, I use the Pomodoro Technique.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Loose leaf Market Spice tea. I make a highly-caffeinated pot every morning.

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 influenced by music and often choose specific playlists to listen to while I’m writing in the belief that something about the music, maybe the mood or pace, will filter into my writing. I use nature to re-think aspects of my work. In nature, I don’t actively think about the work, but just walk or hike and let the writing issue simmer in the back of my mind. It only works if I am on my own. Conversation kills that process.

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

I’m drawn to authors and works that rely heavily on dialogue and sharp humour. Roddy Doyle, for instance. I’m also drawn to Alberta writers – I like to see what my peers are up to. There is a lot of unheralded talent in this province.

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

Canoe the Nihanni River.

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?

I probably would have stuck with law and become an independent legal researcher – which still involves writing, but more boring writing. My mom was a dietician and, in retrospect, that occupation would have been a better fit for me than law. Maybe I would have given that a go.

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

Good teachers and positive reinforcement. Also, I’m not super comfortable expressing myself verbally, especially on-the-spot; writing provides a less pressured, more subtle, mode to “say” something.

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

I just re-read Slaughterhouse Five because one my sons gave me the copy he used in university. I’d forgotten what a great book it is. In terms of films, for the past month I have been working on Michael Nyman’s music on my piano and will be watching the movie The Piano soon (hopefully tonight!) – in part to see if the movie has remained great over time, and in part to see how the music works within the movie.

20 - What are you currently working on?

I’m working on a collection of short stories about “average” girls and women in outdoor recreational sports. The themes and tensions are different, of course, but the settings are all outdoors in canoes, on skis and mountain bikes, that sort of thing. I think there is a shortage of sports stories featuring women. Also, it’s a good excuse for me to go outside, have fun, be average… and call it all research.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Ingrid Ruthig

Ingrid Ruthig [photo credit: Iwona Dufaj] earned a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Toronto in the 1980s and practised the profession for more than a decade. Her work as a writer, editor, and artist has appeared widely, with poems published in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, The Malahat Review, Descant, and many other journals and anthologies across Canada and abroad. She is the author of the poem sequence & artist’s book Slipstream, the chapbook Synesthete II, and editor of The Essential Anne Wilkinson, Richard Outram: Essays on His Works, and a forthcoming volume on the work of David Helwig. Her poetry collection This Being was published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside in spring 2016. Ingrid lives near Toronto.

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?

A first book offers a sense of legitimacy, marks you as a paid-up member of the tribe. Even though I’ve been part of the lit community for a long while – remember how we chewed the fat at Toronto’s Small Press Fair way back when? – I skirted around my ‘first’ book by producing so many others: 17 issues of the literary journal I co-edited & co-published from 2000–2007; anthologies; a chapbook; a poem-sequence-artist’s-book; a volume of critical essays I edited about another poet’s work; and a volume of poems I introduced and selected from the work of yet another poet. So, in a way, my first book doesn’t quite feel like a first. While I’m glad now that it didn’t leave home sooner, the pressure to get it out there has finally eased.

Built on all that’s come before, my recent work has settled into its own skin, I think. No more toe-in-the-shallows, all fuck-this-I’m-swimming-for-open-ocean, I’m focused on my own direction, not someone else’s.

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

Poetry clobbered me and dragged me off to its lair. Even if childhood exposure to hymns, psalms, choral music, and Shakespeare signal formative poetical beginnings, I was into fiction first. However, one career, two children, a few published short stories, one drawered ms, and one burned (yup, I set fire to it, partly so I could say I did) novel later, I’d realized I couldn’t commit to the marriage demanded by fiction. BUT I found I could dip in and out of poems with short, intense bursts of energy and, as I read more and more, gaining my poetic education, I understood how well it suits me, how much I like what it can do.

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?

It varies. Sometimes I can’t write fast enough – those rare moments when a ‘gift poem’ seems to materialize fully formed out of thin air. Other days it’s worse than pulling teeth – like you’re yanking on the spleen too and getting nowhere. The stubborn poems piss me off, yet I’m oddly suspicious of the obliging ones. I’m far more trusting of the process of steady application and as many drafts as it bloody well takes.

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?

It often begins with an observation, idea, line, or image that hooks into me, aggravates till I get it out and find temporary relief. I prefer not to write with a ‘book’ in mind – I figure the threads of my preoccupations will weave themselves together eventually, to produce something far more interesting than what I could’ve mapped out ahead of time. In other words, I’d rather make discoveries along the way, than work to a plan. All the same, I’m a big-picture person by nature and by training, so some days book ideas fall all over themselves.

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

In theory, much like the whole tree-falls-in-the-forest thing, you can write a solid poem, never read it aloud to anyone but yourself (which you must do when you’re working on it), and it would still be a solid poem. However, readings are a testing ground – a way for the poet to offer and for the listener to experience a poem differently. I enjoy them – it’s a buzz to be able to voice the words as you intended them to be heard, then listen for how the audience engages. It’s not exactly part of the creative process, but you do find out pretty quick whether or not the poem has done its job.

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?

Poetry offers a chance for connection, so it should capture more than the obvious. I’m fine with someone writing the ‘duck-on-a-pond’ type of poem, but it seems like a missed opportunity to reach deeper. Beyond that personal objective, and trying to acknowledge our linguistic and literary inheritance, I leave off theory. I want to spend my time paying attention, absorbing and reacting, documenting the what, while accepting that the why will always exist and answers will always be elusive.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Is being a writer a uniform you don, OR, is it a way of being you’ve had no say in? If you write, you observe, question, connect dots, mark incongruities and synchronicities, then offer up the results – because you can’t do otherwise; it’s how you take in the world. Still, that’s only one part of the equation. Readers come to the work on their own terms, and if they’re willing to engage, maybe something more happens – a change of viewpoint, an understanding, a vested interest that nudges out discord. Yeah, sounds grandiose. Bottom line: the written work is the offer of a meeting place.

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

No matter how capable an editor you might be with someone else’s work, you can’t always be that for yourself. Another set of eyes on the work is crucial, because when you’ve crept too close to the trees to see the forest, a respectful editor pulls you away from the bark and swings the axe first. In that, I’ve been very lucky – working with Evan Jones has been exhilarating. Hard work, mind. But exhilarating nonetheless.

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

Hmm, I can’t think of any. Guess it sucked, whatever it was. Or it’s gone because I don’t take kindly to unsolicited advice. Ha.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to visual art)? What do you see as the appeal?

It feels natural, doesn’t even register as a ‘move’ or shift – it’s the way I think. As an architect, you explore and communicate through both language and image, so I’m also used to the process. Taking text into the visual, for example, offers a different experience of the words, a different perspective. Moving between mediums provides another way to play out an idea and find something new, and sometimes it’s simply the only way I can get to where I want to go.

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 try to maintain a routine – news and administrative stuff in the morning, then creative work in the afternoon. That said, I go when the going’s good, which often includes evenings, nights, weekends. The muse doesn’t read the clock and vacation isn’t in my dictionary.

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

Books. Visual art. Music. Poetry that reboots the brain. Conversation with creative friends. A change of scenery. The lake on a foul-weather day. A challenge. A deadline. Silence.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Lilac, in glorious, heady May-June bloom. And not quite so delightful, though just as potent: fresh-spread manure that damned-near singes the hair inside your nose.

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?

Living informs the work: travel, visual art, history, people-watching, the land (it’s ingrained – my great-great-greats settled in SW Ontario in the early 1800s), and the Great Lakes themselves (same reason).

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

There are several, though the details fluctuate, depending on the day or year. The work of contemporary Irish and Scottish poets sits well with me right now – maybe it’s the inherent musicality, the manifest reverence for language and cultural inheritance.

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

Indulge my Scottish genes and return to the Highlands. And bide a wee. In a castle.

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?

I’ve worn several hats. As a kid, the first thing I ever wanted to be was an archaeologist. My parents thought a pianist or artist. I worked in construction, retail, and banking. I became an architect and practised for over a decade. I think I’ll stick with the hats I’m wearing now – the work is much like archaeology, as it happens.

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

The other things I’ve done. And all the things I’ve no desire to do.

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

Tough questions. I’ve really been digging Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s collection Waterlight. Film? Jane Campion’s Bright Star – don’t know if it was ‘great’, but I liked it.

20 - What are you currently working on?

More poems. Always the poems. Essays – one is for another volume I’m editing for Guernica’s Essential Writers series, this one about the work of David Helwig. And I’m building a body of visual works for a solo show that will go up in fall 2017.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Six Questions with Anne Compton: 2014 Pat Lowther Award + Raymond Souster Award Shortlist(s)

From early April to early June, I’m featuring short interviews with the authors of the six shortlisted titles for each of the three awards run through The League of Canadian Poets – the Raymond Souster Award, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Pat Lowther Award. Today’s feature is Saint John, New Brunswick poet, critic, editor and anthologist Anne Compton, whose book Alongside (Toronto ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2013) is on the shortlist for both the 2014 Pat Lowther Award and the 2014 Raymond Souster Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interview with Elizabeth Bachinsky here. The winners to all three awards will be announced on Saturday, June 7, 2014 at The League of Canadian Poets 2014 Annual General Meeting in Toronto.

Anne Compton is the author of Processional--winner of the Governor-General's Award for Poetry (2005) and The Atlantic Poetry Prize, shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Prize; Opening the Island--winner of The Atlantic Poetry Prize (2003), shortlisted for The John and Margaret Savage First Book Award; and asking questions indoors and out (2009) – shortlisted for The Atlantic Poetry Prize. In 2008, she won The Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in the Literary Arts and a National Magazine Award in Poetry. Compton is the author as well of the scholarly works, A.J.M. Smith: Canadian Metaphysical (1994) and Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews (2006), and numerous scholarly articles. She is the Co-editor of Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada (2002) and the editor of The Edge of Home: Milton Acorn from the Island (2002). Compton's most recent poetry collection, Alongside, was published in 2013.

1. Alongside is your fourth trade collection of poetry, after Opening the Island (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2002), the Governor-General’s Award-winning Processional (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2005) and Asking Questions Indoors and Out (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2009). After four trade books over the space of a little more than a decade, how do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, has evolved?
Each book is concerned with a central idea. This idea or subject preoccupies me over the course of making the book. Alongside is about beauty (human beauty, landscape beauty, and the beauty of books themselves); asking questions indoors and out is about belief and doubt; and Processional is involved with the procession of the seasons. This is, and has been, my “process”: Each book is a long-term mental and emotional engagement with a subject. After writing an initial eight or ten poems, I recognize the preoccupying idea in the poems. That recognition gives energy and direction to the poems that follow. What I’m observing, overhearing, remembering, and reading attaches itself to the preoccupying idea. Usually, the individual poem begins with a visual or auditory observation.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
I return regularly to work by Michael Symmons Roberts, John Glenday, Charles Wright, Sue Sinclair, and Don Domanski.

3. You’ve lived in New Brunswick for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of New Brunswick, have contributed to your work. Do you think you might have been a different kind of writer had you lived in another part of the country?
As to a community of writers, I’ve never done a workshop or worked on one of my poems in a group situation, although I have taught many creative writing classes and I do free-lance editing, both of which are wonderfully conducive to the discussion of the nature and value of poetry. In terms of making my own poems, though, I do not belong to a community of writers. I work in solitude. Occasionally, I send poems to a journal, but it is generally true that no one sees my work until my editor, Evan Jones, receives the manuscript. I do work with colleagues on poetry-based projects such as the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada and, of course, I talked to many poets in compiling Meetings with Maritime Poets: Interviews. And, yes, certainly, I would have written differently had I lived in a different part of the country. My research for articles and for the interview book has shown me that here in Atlantic Canada poets are more likely to feel an affinity with Irish, UK, and  continental writers, and writers on the American seaboard, than with Canadian poets west of the Maritimes. “Place” is an under-discussed force in poetry. Place includes, as well as landscape, the cultural-geographic position of the writer.

4. In an interview posted on the Canadian Literature website, you mention how your poetry comes, in part, from your “rural roots.” The natural world exists throughout Alongside, from poems on the seasons, rain and the garden. What do you think you bring to the conversation of the natural world, and what has been called “eco-poetry,” and what do you feel you gain in return?
I understand “eco-poetry,” in the literary sense, to refer primarily to the shaping force of landscape on the forms and rhythms of poetry. It probably matters, therefore, that I grew up near the ocean and that I have lived for years close to the shore of a broad, deep river. The rhythm of water has a way of getting into poems. As for “eco-poetry” in the broader sense, all poets of the natural world summon us to attention, and paying attention is the first step in paying respect. I hope that I have contributed, in some small way, to a more vigilant concern for nature.

5. What do you feel teaching literature brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
Reading and teaching literature is no different from any other experience that goes into the making of a poem. Observing pigeons lined up on a power line may result in a poem image. Talking to a physicist may initiate a train of thought that leads to a poem; similarly, a novel might leave you with a gorgeous phrase that is the start-up of a poem. But it is these differing observational and cognitive experiences in combination that works best for poetry. Nothing, while you wake or sleep, is separate from poetry.

6. Literary awards have been known to shine spotlights on individual works and authors, as well as writing generally, but has also sometimes brought with it a particular kind of pressure, and a frustration for those works overlooked by awards. As a writer, reader and award-winning writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally? What difference has it made to the way you approach your work, if any?
Getting overlooked by an awards-jury is no different from having your work rejected by a journal. If you don’t want your work judged, then you shouldn’t publish or try to be published. Rejection is part of the process when you publish. I’ve experienced lots of that kind of disappointment.

Awards in poetry, though, are particularly important because they place poetry before the reading public. If those people who read fiction and non-fiction on a daily or weekly basis hear of a book of poems – by way of an award – and go out and get the book, that is positive for all poetry. Awards in poetry, however, make no difference in the making of poetry. Even if you win one, you still have to get back to the innocent, expectant, and exciting state you experienced in creating your first poems.