Leah Horlick, Moldovan Hotel

 

Learning to Read Hebrew

A shape is a door.

A door takes a different shape
if it comes at the end of the hall.

You can use your usual hand
to open the door, but if you reach

From the wrong direction,
the frame wavers, knobs
evaporate. 

This door, well, the original lock
has been lost. We have to open it
another way. We make it work. 

Many of these doors lead
to the same room. Many of them
only look the same, if you are not careful. 

Some of them, despite being very old,
do not make even a single
sound.

To understand the impulse that propels Calgary-based poet Leah Horlick’s third full-length poetry title, Moldovan Hotel (Kingston ON: Brick Books, 2021), one needs to look no further than the notes at the back of the collection: “It’s a Jewish tradition to dedicate a period of study to a departed ancestor or teacher.” According to the back cover, Moldovan Hotel emerged when the author “travelled to Romania to revisit the region her Jewish ancestors fled. What she unearthed there is an elaborate web connecting conscious worlds to subconscious ones, fascism to neofascisms, Europe to the America to the Middle East, typhus to HIV/Aids, genocide in Romania to land grabs in Palestine, women’s lives in farming villages to queer lives in the city, language to its trap doors, and love to its hidden, ancestral obligations.” Horlick writes of grandmothers and Romanian villages, of escape and survival, and of some of the dark folds of European history, some of which continues, through the dark stain of contemporary fascism. “Europe inhales sharp and folds in / on itself. Its shoulder is a triple cross // stamped with iron,” she writes, to open “Europe Eats Itself,” “one elbow / is a flag // held the wrong way / on purpose.” She writes of the past, but very much aware of how the past impacts the present, often impossibly so.

A collection that follows her Riot Lung (Saskatoon SK: Thistledown Press, 2012) and For Your Own Good (Prince George BC: Caitlin Press, 2015), Moldovan Hotel is a book of acknowledgment and study, constructed as a collection exploring specific individuals and geographies through a particular strain of her family history; exploring history and family, and how language, culture and people were forced to respond to trauma, violence and erasure. “You learn to use a word like a lock,” she writes, to open the poem “In Rumenye Iz Dokh Gut.” Through sharp, first-person lyric poems, Horlick works to explore those shifts and quiet erasures, and those spaces deliberately broken or hidden. She works to uncover stories, seeking to better understand her own relationship to trauma. As she writes, to open the poem “You Are My Hiding Place”: “The hole in the floor is old, old, old, country. / It lives under the kitchen table, yawns wide // While the family eats, wider still when they starve. / Cold above, so below. When the horses march up to the house, // the hole – it has teeth – it chatters. Grandma says the hole / is where the women go when the Russians come.” Or, as she writes to close the title poem, six pages deep:

It has been a long time
How long

doesn’t really matter

I have come back
to drink your wine

I have come back to touch the trees
in the graveyard

I have come back
to use your shower

I have come back to stand
in this field

I have come back
to sing in the car

to drive the car 

to drink your water
under the tree

I have come back
mostly to confuse you

I have come back
to drink your wine some more

This is just to say
Nazdrovye, bitches

I have come back
to close the gate behind me

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Leah Horlick

Leah Horlick is a writer and poet from Saskatoon. A 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow in Poetry, her writing has appeared in So To Speak, Canadian Dimension, GRAIN, Poetry is Dead, Plenitude, Force Field: 75 Women Poets of British Columbia, and on Autostraddle. Her first collection of poetry, Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) was shortlisted for a 2013 ReLit Award and a Saskatchewan Book Award, and a second collection, For Your Own Good, is scheduled for spring 2015 with Caitlin Press. She currently lives on unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, where she co-curates the city’s only queer and anti-oppressive reading series.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

            When Alison Roth Cooley and I made wreckoning, with JackPine Press, it was a process of learning to make a beautiful object and a collaborative work out of a beautiful friendship. We were so *in* each part of the process -- Alison made the ink, we soaked the paper by hand, and bound the books ourselves in her attic. Combined with the thrill of getting an ISBN and having a launch, it felt like we really had made the book. 

             In a lot of ways, Riot Lung was felt very solitary and significant, and something about the object coming through the publisher felt like being taken seriously in a different way. I was so fortunate to have been supported by a network of many women reviewing the book -- in Room, in Arc, in Herizons, and on Autostraddle, and that was a gift in the recent climate of sexism and reviewing in Canada.
            Looking back, the poems in Riot Lung are these little yard lights that say "I'm here, too! Look!" and to have those framed within a book was a real dream. My new work is much more about an emotional landscape, and trying to light that particular path.

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

            As a personality, I tend to really fixate -- on images, on sounds, on little chunks of narrative -- and poetry is my favourite way to recreate that fixation and share it as a moment on the page or in performance. I have a hard time creating enough of an arc to write fiction that would satisfy me as a reader, and as for nonfiction -- I need the mask of poetry as a genre because so much of my work draws on personal experience. In many ways, I feel like my poetry is a particular kind of nonfiction organized around stanzas and line breaks.

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 process tends to shift -- I used to write very quickly and edit in a way that was more like playing Jenga -- what can I remove without the poem collapsing? After my MFA, I'm much more of a glacier.  I read and re-read. Poems take a long time. Editing is about whittling things all the way down to the bones.

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?

            Riot Lung was very much a collection -- this little string of fires that had been sort of burning away since I was a kid. My most recent manuscript was the first time I'd played with narrative from the beginning. It was exhausting and I loved it. It was like there was another poem waiting behind each draft that I finished; little nesting dolls of poems.

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

             Readings are very much a part of my process. I have to read out loud to make sense of my drafts, and since so much of my writing is about being within and outside of communities. A lot of times I feel like the act of reading the poem out loud -- for audiences to see it as part of my body and out of my voice -- is just as much a part of the poem.
 

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?

            How do you make art that contributes to collective processes?

            What's worth salvaging from the canon?

            How do you create something beautiful out of trauma and grief?
            Can we dream up something new while telling each other stories about the past?      Is this any good? 

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

            "To tell is to resist." Wonderful quote -- it's the epigraph from a graphic novel called Killing Velasquez by Philippe Girard, though I can't remember the original speaker.

8 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

            There needs to be walks and tea and a lot of time, a lot of reading, and not very much talking.
 

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

            Esther McPhee, July Westhale, Zoe Whittall, Sara Peters, Dorothy Allison, Amber Dawn, Billeh Nickerson.

10 - 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?

            Other occupations I have attempted, almost all in support of writing: tour guide, juice barista, burlesque dancer, children's bookseller, retail doormat, and transcription monkey.

11 - What are you currently working on?

            Polishing up the manuscript I developed during my MFA. Co-organizing a reading series. Sunbathing. Tending to my emergent cat allergies. Living the dream.

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

            Compulsion, adrenaline, introversion, and love.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;