12 or 20 (second series) questions with dee Hobsbawn-Smith

dee Hobsbawn-Smith grew up in a gypsy Air Force family and is a fifth-generation prairie dweller. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays and fiction has aired on the CBC and has appeared in books, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and literary journals in Canada, the USA and elsewhere. In spring 2014, Hagios Press published Wildness Rushing In, her first poetry collection. Next year, Thistledown Press will publish Appetites: Stories, her first collection of short stories.

At present, dee lives on the family land west of Saskatoon with her partner, the writer Dave Margoshes, their dogs, cats and books. She has recently completed the fifth draft of a novel, The Dryland Diaries, as her creative thesis toward earning her Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.  dee has attended Sage Hill Writing five times since 2005, and participated in the SK Writers Guild mentorship program in 2011 with the poet Elizabeth Philips. She is a regular attendee at the province’s artists’ and writers’ colonies at St. Peter’s Abbey.

Dee attended culinary schools in France, Ireland, Vancouver and Calgary, and earned her Red Seal designation as a chef in 1986. Between 1992 and 1994, dee was chef and co-owner of Foodsmith, one of Calgary’s first restaurants to utilize and honour locally-sourced ingredients.  After selling her restaurant and catering company, dee transformed her food savvy into a freelance teaching and writing career that included eight years as the Calgary Herald’s popular food columnist, The Curious Cook. An active local foods advocate and long-time Slow Food Calgary steering committee member, dee served as president of Slow Food Calgary from 2008 to 2010, and she attended Slow Food’s 2008 Terra Madre conference in Torino, Italy as an Alberta delegate. For 12 years, she researched and hosted the Calgary City Palate magazine’s annual Foodie Tootles, rural farmgate bus tours culminating in on-farm locavore dinners. After her move to SK, in 2012 she helped to co-found Canada’s newest Slow Food convivium in Saskatoon.

During her 27 years in Calgary, dee taught thousands of Albertans the hands-on nuts and bolts of cooking methods, ingredients, knife skills, food and wine pairings, and food culture. She has written three best-selling cookbooks and the definitive resource guide to sourcing cooking ingredients and tools in Calgary.

Her fifth book, Foodshed: An Edible Alberta Alphabet (TouchWood Editions, 2012), examined the issues and politics of small-scale sustainable agriculture in Alberta. It was hailed by The Globe and Mail as ‘a locavore call to arms’ and in 2013, it won Best Culinary Book at the 2013 High Plains Book Awards in Billings, Montana. It also won the Best (Canadian English-language) Food Literature Award in the 2013 Gourmand World Book Awards.

dee is a long-time coffee aficionado and spends her spare time drinking lattés or wine, painting, reading, watching movies, cooking or sewing, writing, yoga-ing, walking or playing with her pets. She has two sons; both are talented and proficient professional cooks.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
My first book was one of five I wrote about food. I wrote it after I sold my restaurant in 1994. Holding that book when it came off the press was like holding another baby [I have two sons.] With each successive book, I saw myself more and more as writer first and chef second. With my fifth, Foodshed, an examination of the issues and politics behind small-scale sustainable local food production in Alberta, I began to see myself as a writer of literary work and not ‘just’ food books. My next, this poetry collection, Wildness Rushing In, cements that migration from the kitchen. Who knew I was a poet back when I was cooking for a living?

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?
Ha. The newer work is emerging closer to done, for starters. My previous, you’ll remember, that is, my current book, is my 1st poetry collection. I sweated over it for ages as I learned about craft.

How does it feel different?
As I work on my 2nd poetry collection, I’m more conscious of not just craft and form but the idea of my work as ‘book’ as opposed to a collection of pieces. The current work is more political, less autobiographical. More form poems, less internal interrogation, more examination of the external world.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I kept showing my poet-friend Rosemary Griebel my awful terrible wanna-be baby poems and she finally said, ‘You should go to Sage Hill.’ That was in 2005. I went that summer, worked with Phil Hall and Sue Goyette in the Intro to poetry and fiction, went back in ’08 to work with Karen Solie, and again in spring 2012 with Barry Dempster, then with Don McKay in spring 2013. Crash course, as such things go. And my partner is Dave Margoshes. We talk about writing poetry and fiction every day!

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?
It varies. Poetry: I write and write and write, then I look at what I’ve written and pull the common threads.
Fiction: I imagine a character in a particular situation. Then I play ‘What if?’ and keep writing. If it grows too big to fit as a short story, it’s a novel. Some, I talk my way through, like Scheherazade trying on a story for size. Always, I walk it into existence. My novel, I carried around for several years before I had the nerve to start it. Ditto some of my short stories, but others arose out of specific situations, and a couple came together in a first draft. Amazing when that happens. And my essays too, arrive of a piece, and quickly. The time spent afterwards, polishing and addressing form and craft issues, that’s where time piles up.
Sometimes an essay arrives as a poem that needs to be teased and coaxed into being an essay, and vice versa, it’s a fluid boundary, that one between essay and poem.

Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?
Quick quick quick. Quick. Sandra Birdsell, my mentor as I went through writing my novel [as my thesis for my MFA in Writing at the U of S, my defence will be later this summer]  and my partner Dave both harangue me about moving too quickly, writing too rapidly, but it’s how I’m wired. I need to try something on, see if it fits, then re-cut it and do a second or third or fifth basting of seams. I’m so visual, I need to See it, and if it doesn’t work, I’ll pull out the stitches and re-write.

Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape,?
Now they do, mostly. Except for my novel. It’s in its 5th draft at present. I’ve pulled it apart several times, it has a complex structure and several narrative arcs.

… or does your work come out of copious notes?
No. Not poetry or short fiction. I often write a line in my notebook, then come back to it and it grows.
My novel is the exception. I have filled several notebooks, writing around that novel, its characters, plot, place, back story!

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you?
On the driveway [a long one, a causeway surrounded by water and fields], walking with my dogs. I walked my novel and this current poetry book and the one I’m engaging with now, walked them all into being.

Sometimes when reading another poem, someone else’s. A news item will trigger a short story.

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’ve taken both approaches. Both work, depending on the content and state of mind.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?
Part. I gauge the audience’s reaction to a piece, to its rhythms and words and content.

Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Yes. A bit of a ham. In small doses. I’m also very fond of being alone. I think that’s a necessity, if one is a writer.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?
No. I’m a writer, I tell stories, and the litcrit folks can analyze it after the fact.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?
Who am I? What is this world? How to make sense of it? And of the complexity and bafflement of humanity? Why is there so much pain? What is redemption? How do people find redemption? Is there good and evil in the world? How? Why?

What do you even think the current questions are?
aw shucks, why can’t I have another piece of chocolate? What happens if I do? Are those berries ripe yet? Why? Why? Why not?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture?
a mirror. a conscience. a voice.

Does s/he even have one?
Absolutely. She wouldn’t be writing if not.

What do you think the role of the writer should be?
The trickster/joker/Fool-philosopher/truth-teller of the court.

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

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Sleep on it, give it time, wait. Re-read it tomorrow and see how you feel.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)?
I move from poetry to fiction quite seamlessly, almost always have several projects in process, although I immerse myself in one at a time, for short or long periods of time. Just put my head down the well and breathe in the cool air. I don’t write critical prose.

What do you see as the appeal?
Of shifting genres? Some things are poems. Some aren’t. The words dictate the form.
   
11 – What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one?
I’m a fulltime writer, and I’ve just finished doing my MFA in writing, so my routine is the same now as it was [except for when I had to go in to town to attend workshops and classes]. I’m a pit pony, I like to work, so I put my head down and I work.
Mornings, I do yoga, drink tea and walk, eat breakfast, read what I wrote yesterday, revise it, then write. Afternoons, I write. After dinner, I watch a movie. I like silence, no music, while I work. I write in a 2nd-storey studio with floor-to-ceiling south-facing windows that overlook a large lake that arrived in 2011, with the floods in SK. I watch the waterfowl and shorebirds as I work. 

How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Yoga. Then tea during a walk with the dogs, with binoculars, notepaper and pen in my jacket pocket. Breakfast. Then I sit down to transcribe whatever I wrote on the paper.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I go walking. I read. I watch a good movie. Mostly, I walk. We live rurally, so there’s always something to listen to – the chickadees, the crows, the magpies, our dogs and cats, the neighbour’s donkeys, the grackle, the woodpecker, the killdeer, the coots, the geese, the teals…

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Just one? Cedar. Curry. Ocean. Woodsmoke. Horse sweat. Cinnamon, star anise, cloves. Alfalfa. Wet dog. Since the flood, wet marsh.

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?
Mostly nature. Wildlife, scenery, plant life, animals. Visual art and written art, paintings and sculptures. Sometimes science, occasionally music or trying to make sense of philosophy.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Annie Proulx. Louise Gluck. Don McKay. Guy Vanderhaeghe. Dave Margoshes. Guy Vanderhaeghe [again]. MFK Fisher. Alice Munro. Annie Dillard. Pat Lane. PK Page. Jan Zwicky. Phil Hall. Vandana Shiva. Wendell Berry. MFK Fisher. Madeleine Kamman. Michael Pollan. I re-read things.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Blow glass. Spin pots. Make silver jewellery set with stones. Make wine. Make prosciutto and air-cured sausages. Write a sestina. Write a play. Travel Asia and India.
Making things with my hands is an irresistible draw; my maternal family are Hutterite artisans, and my sibs and I all make things.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?
I’ve done a few good ones already; I’ve been a restaurateur, chef and a journalist.
A perfumer, my nose and I are like this.
A vet. I love animals.
A gemmologist. I love stones.
A geologist who wouldn’t work in the oil patch.
A potter, jeweller, clothing designer, fabric artist, winemaker, cheese maker, weaver.

Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
A painter.
A winemaker.
A cheese-maker.
A haute couturier.
A sculptor [stone, not metal]
A silversmith.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
First I cooked. Then I wrote down what I’d made. Thought about al the “What if’s?” that arose. What if that cook had an affair? What if that couple lost their child? What if that dog ran in front of a bike and the little girl on it broke her arm? I started with stories. 
Writing is textural, like cooking. Like sewing. They’re all about transformation. Writing gave me a chance to set down the rhythms and stories in my head. Spin words.

19 - What was the last great book you read?
The Horseman’s Graveyard by Jacqueline Baker. Before that, The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney. Before that, The Shell of the Tortoise by Don McKay.

What was the last great film?
Donnie Brasco starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp.

20 - What are you currently working on?
A novel, my first, titled The Dryland Diaries.
I’m also revising my first short fiction collection, which will be published by Thistledown Press in 2015. Writing new poems. Waiting to settle down and revise my existing poems and see what they are. Writing essays.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

HIJ : ONE, TWO and THREE

After twenty years of attending literary events of all kinds and hosting a few ourselves, Hazel and I have come to realize that what we like best are gatherings at which the “ten people who give a shit” (famously said by Bill Kennedy at another recent gathering) show up. We have decided that the place where this should happen is our home, where we read books and make books and make a living in and among bookish things – why would we not love the idea of gathering people for literature and talk here at our centre? It is all very Salon de 1846, if you catch my drift this sort of small, off to the side, do-it-yourself culture – what our teenage son will hopefully agree is very punk – is exactly what we wanted to be a part of when we started HIJ, and so it seems fitting as grownups with all sorts of grownup stuff to think about like kids and a house and work and such, to loosely pay homage to our youthful efforts by welcoming people into a house poetry built to experience some literature by people we like. (Jay MillAr, “HIJ: SOME HISTORY”)

From the house of BookThug (quite literally) in Toronto comes a charming, exciting and highly enviable new reading and chapbook series, loosely built as a continuation of publications BookThug publishers Jay and Hazel MillAr were producing some twenty years ago. With their fourth gathering now under their belt, the first three publications of HIJ include chapbooks by Fenn Stewart and Mat Laporte (“ONE,” 01/19/2014), Daniel Canty and Liz Howard (“TWO,” 02/23/2014) and Jenny Sampirisi and Pasha Malla (“THREE,” 03/23/2014). It’s an intriguing idea, and one that I’ve considered hosting/curating over the past few years as well (Hoa Nguyen and Dale Smith have been hosting house readings in Toronto for a while now as well through their Skanky Possum, but haven’t yet paired such with publications), but haven’t quite managed to piece together yet, so I’m completely envious of what they’ve been doing. It’s interesting to see the authors selected for the curated series, a nice mix of emerging and more established authors, some of whom have been in and around the BookThug circle for some time, and others, included here for the first time. Each publication holds two chapbooks in an envelope, published in editions of fifty copies or less.

See past ageless faces

Landfills in green, they wryly drill

& Countless masses are now fast upon them

They are now covered with these fortress people

with shards of tenderized opinions

The ageless faces sideways, sighing

All retrospectively like me

            It’s here injected into the spine

My day’s endeavor is to be complete

For me, an audience is impenetrable

No gleaming James am I

No trencher analects (Fenn Stewart)

The untitled chapbook by Fenn Stewart appears to contain an extended sequence, “from WALTZING,” set to a particular cadence of fits and starts striking out across a wide canvas. The author of a couple of small items so far, including chapbooks through above/ground press and Ferno House, I suspect that when she finally releases a full-length trade collection of poetry it will strike like a punch to the sternum. Really, that could be said about a couple of the authors listed here, such as Mat Laporte and Liz Howard, both of whom have been publishing in bits and pieces over the past few years, hopefully (he says) working up to trade collections. For example: influenced by the work of Margaret Christakos, Toronto poet Liz Howard’s poetry has a wild, almost savage, energy and an engagement with language, philosophy and history, as well as a very physical attachment to the landscape of Northern Ontario. The second part, “[CONTACT],” of her opening piece, “excerpt from OF HEREAFTER SONG” reads:

she rested back unto the lakes and marshes

into the light dialysis of heron and arrowy

swallow with all the trees of silver tongue

gently from the melting lakes and streamlets

into the sweet radiation of the earliest flower

in the Northland intolerable toward

the red stone the stem a reed

into the puffed metastatic coal became the water

into the affirmative action embryonic mortality

of the loon summit  robin glazed

into the bigger than the big-sea-water

bioaccumulation became us Athabasca

sweet reconciliation spoke in

mercury, arsenic, lead and cadmium erotic

as the archaic physiognomy of a fishhead

we descended

the women of bitumen looked over  tailing ponds

like a cloud-rack of a tempest

rushed the pale canoes of wings and thunder

to kill the wilderness in the child

sweeping westward our remnants

sulphur infinite, sorrow extracted tuberculosis

under the jurisdiction of ravens

in the covert of pine-trees

or an education of thieves in the evening.

I look forward to seeing how this series develops, and perhaps, possibly even be able to attend one at some point.

Six Questions with Laurie D. Graham: 2014 Gerald Lampert Award Shortlist

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 London, Ontario writer, teacher, reviewer and editor Laurie D. Graham, whose book Rove (Regina SK: Hagios Press, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Gerald Lampert Award. See my previous Gerald Lampert Award shortlist interviews with Murray Reiss, Jordan Abel and Julie Joosten. 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.

Laurie D Graham grew up in Sherwood Park, Alberta, and now lives in London, Ontario, where she is a writer, teacher, reviewer, and editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. Her first book of poetry, Rove, came out with Hagios Press this past fall.

1. Rove is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer have developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
Rove is a book-length poem, but it started out as a bunch of discrete poems, written over a period of years. The lion’s share of it came out of my time working on a BFA at the University of Victoria and an MFA at the University of Guelph. While I was head-down through those years, these single-serves were accreting, and an overarching sense began to emerge. That idea continues to grow: out of the work I did on this book came more ideas for poems, so my process seems to be akin to a snowball rolling down a hill. The more I’ve done, the more poems present themselves.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
I just returned to Adrienne Rich the other day. Walt Whitman, Andrew Suknaski, Jan Zwicky, Dionne Brand, Fred Wah, Dennis Lee, Derek Walcott. I need to go back to Emily Dickinson; I need to read Louise Halfe again.

3. Between Toronto and London, you’ve lived in Ontario for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as a variety of Ontario landscapes, may 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?
I often wonder what kind of writer I’d be if I never left Edmonton. I’ve got a cumulative total of eight years in Toronto and one year in London, and I’m still trying to figure out this southern arrow of land, these enormous lakes. I’ll soon be taking part in a workshop with Don McKay, and he has asked us to wander around in some pocket of nature in or around London prior to workshop day, so I’ve been absorbing the bird sounds and the tree shapes and I’m learning, slowly. As for the community of writers around me, both in Toronto and now here in London, I’m lucky to have found people who are toiling in the same way. I’ve got both mentors and friends on this arrow of land, and that has been vital.

4. Rove explores, as Tim Lilburn suggests, “the struggle to live deeply in the West.” How were you able to approach such a terrain of geography and family through writing, and what do you feel the experience taught you? How did the book end up being constructed in the form of poetry as opposed to a non-fiction work, or even through the space of a novel?
That terrain is just what ended up on the page, perhaps inevitably. It was only later that I became more aware of what I was doing. Times and places get confused and conflated in the book. That’s one thing I realized needed to happen: I had to monkey with time and space if I had any hope of saying anything meaningful about my “home.” I don’t know if you can monkey with time and space to the same extent or effect in prose.

5. What do you feel teaching writing has brought to your writing and writing life? Or are the two entirely separate?
I teach the tenets of grammar and essay writing to students who overwhelmingly want as little as possible to do with the tenets of grammar and essay writing, so most of the time writing and teaching feel resoundingly separate. However, I have learned a lot from my students about why people write and how they read, and I am more precise in my writing because of teaching. Otherwise, the two worlds rarely meet, and that’s significant in itself.

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, now, shortlisted writer, what are your feelings on literary award culture generally?
A writer friend joked to me not long ago about how you could make a pretty solid living wage if you won the Griffin every two or three years. Nice work if you can get it! What I like about awards is that they provide reading lists to readers. After the Lampert, Lowther, and Souster shortlists were announced, everyone had eighteen books to read that they perhaps didn’t have on their radar before. So awards draw attention to books, which is good, but it seems to me that this can’t be the only way. Review sources for poetry are scarce and not terribly timely, independent bookstores are closing with increasing frequency, and poets exist mostly outside the apparatus of literary agents or marketing departments. Plus, I don’t know if we’ve figured out how to move poetry into the form of the ebook yet, at least not as far as I’ve seen. So more and more, awards might seem to have an outsized importance. I am delighted that judges Keith Garebian, Carl Leggo, and Pearl Pirie saw something in the book to single it out like they did, and it might lead more people to buy and read it. It would also be nice if people who don’t read poetry are shown some compelling reasons to do so. Three recent episodes of The Simpsons quoted Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde, so they seem to be holding up their end pretty good. During the last of the Truth and Reconciliation events in Edmonton, CBC’s The Current played Dennis Saddlemen reading his poem “Monster” and it was astounding. At the beginning of April George Elliott Clarke read a poem to Toronto City Council that everyone should look up. And we need even more of this, as well as awards.

two poems for poetry month (plus another one);

I've had two poems posted in various places for Poetry Month: one on Amanda Earl's NationalPoetryMonth.ca site, and another on the Chaudiere Books blog. Exciting, yes? Another fragment of the same poem Amanda published also appears online in the all-new online Grey Borders.

Laressa Dickey, Bottomland

Between

I have not said my prayers. My god is tired and lonely. Dressed to see him, I am lonely too. My brother makes pecan pies and wears a blue hat. In the corner, our mother murmurs the prayer of the 7^th horse and rolls a penny along the slanting floor. No one comes to talk with me. That boy snaps his fingers, tap dances to The Night Hank Williams Came to Town. A long time ago, our mother saw a portrait of a woman who reminded her of an orphan, someone she knew and could not save. I have never said enough prayers. My god rolls around in the back of a pickup. Our mother stomps mushrooms with her open hands and they puff out smoke. No one tells me it’s time to eat. (“Bottomland”)

Minnesota “poet, dancer, writing consultant and somatic worker” Laressa Dickey’s first trade poetry collection is Bottomland (Bristol UK: Shearsman, 2014), a book, as the catalogue copy tell us, that “sustains something of the spirit and space of the poem over a longer period of time, and explores the poem as an improvisational space. The poems were born in the deep chill of the Minnesota winter, and they begin out of her experience and memories of growing up on her family’s tobacco farm in Tennessee, but move on to much more.” Dickey’s poems in Bottomland seem geographically fixed under a very large sky, sketched out as postcards from a complex rural expanse, and acknowledge both the lighter and darker aspects of country living, a ravenous intellectual curiosity, and even a kind of charming, self-aware folksiness. As she writes to open the first poem in the final section, “Mimesis, synaptic”: “His mother said he put his ear to the ground when he was scared. I stood across the café from him when this happened. We were lost, but then I crossed the room to put my ear down. It cost fifty cents, but it cost.” Constructed in six extended sequences—“American Rough-Leg,” “Bottomland,” “Catalogue of Utilities,” “A Pictorial History of Wilderness,” “Route to Cloudless, Day” and “Mimesis, synaptic”—the poems in Bottomland are physical, descriptive and restless, and built of lines rushing along in an extended, at times breathless, gallop. “From above, the land only patterns,” she writes, in the poem “Espalier,” the first of the title sequence, continuing: “lines of which connote movement. This does not equal progress.”

7

Grasslands came before man, coal swamps before reptiles. Avian, then floral. A million years pressed to stone, as lips, as fins. See: fish specialized for life in quiet waters. Some stories are shapes burned together. The tongue a torch on fire, remember it as a planked platform. We bisect the street, slip fingers out of mittens. Tiny photographs of your turning wrist we piece together. Somewhere a shallow field lobbing rockets, agrees with its verb here, to kill, as if. (“American Rough-Leg”)

Bottomland explores an articulation and exploration of personal origins and landscape, the myths and even the dreams of landscape, and does so fixed in a cinematic panorama of homemade pecan pies, magnolia, grandparents, power lines, tobacco leaves and the rushing river. “The distance is inside me and viscous,” she writes, in a section of “American Rough-Leg.” It is as though the poems are not of the geographies she references, but emerge from those geographies, as poems and author, both, unable to completely dislocate from such a strong and rich terrain. In many ways, Bottomland exists as a love letter to those unnamed landscapes and histories, complex and storied throughout, ready to bristle, burn and overwhelm at any moment. In the poem “Devotion,” she writes: “Some people find hope in dreams / live in between small rock crevices. Down // this road, the day sings.” The poem ends with:

*

What happens when devotion is eclipsed?

What becomes of? The wind in the tin of the tree-top;

photographs pieced together with fingernail polish.

This is what I looked for in the dream and found: small heart

threaded through the place before

Six Questions with Sadiqa de Meijer: 2014 Pat Lowther Award Shortlist

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 Kingston, Ontario poet Sadiqa de Meijer, whose book Leaving Howe Island (Fernie BC: Oolichan Books, 2013) is on the shortlist for the 2014 Pat Lowther Award. See my previous Pat Lowther Award shortlist interviews with Elizabeth Bachinsky, Anne Compton and Alexandra Oliver. 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.

Sadiqa de Meijer was born in Amsterdam and moved to Canada as a child. Her poetry, short stories and essays have been published in a range of journals and anthologies, including The Malahat Review, Geist, Riddle Fence and Poetry Magazine. Her first book of poems is Leaving Howe Island (Oolichan Books). A selection from the manuscript won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012.

1. Leaving Howe Island is your first trade collection of poetry. What was your process of originally putting the manuscript together, and how long did it take? How do you feel your concerns as a writer has developed over the space of starting the collection to finally seeing a finished copy at your front door? How do you feel the work, and even the process of writing, evolved?
The oldest poems in the collection were written around 2005, but there are scraps from earlier work, too. And at that time, I didn’t have a sense that I was a writer, working towards a book – I wrote poems occasionally, and journal publication was the edge of my aspirations. But over the years, I started reading more methodically, writing regularly whether or not I felt like it, and revising seriously. And when I’d written forty or so poems that I figured I could live with, that was the first version of Leaving Howe Island.

Then a few of the poems were written after that initial compiling – Community Pool at Noon was one of those, and Corridor. I did feel, after writing them, that they belonged with the rest of the work, while some other new poems didn’t. So even though I didn’t start with a structure in mind, that initial assembling of the manuscript did generate a thematic or atmospheric whole.

2. Who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
The poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop. The work of Dutch-American poet Leo Vroman. James Baldwin’s essays – Nothing Personal is a favourite. Michael Winter’s One Last Good Look. A recent find for me is Michelle De Kretser’s work – I loved her novel Questions of Travel.

3. You’ve lived in Kingston for quite some time, and I’m curious as to how the community of writers around you, as well as the landscape of Kingston, 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?
Yes, I’ve lived in Kingston for more than a decade – and I still have an ambivalent relationship with the city. But the local writing and arts communities are wonderful: there are internationally known writers here, as well as new writers like myself, and conversations happen easily, whether at readings or in a park. Over the years, I’ve been given encouragement and criticism in the right doses.

Place, and our temporal bearings to place, are big for me - I blame my childhood, which spanned three continents. I like the effort of conjuring places that I’ve left. When I write about the Netherlands, the setting takes on dream-like qualities: in reality it has changed, but living here I’m only marginally aware of those changes, and so there’s a sense of ghostliness. Kenya is even more spectral to me, with some very clear fragments. But writing about Kingston is like sketching from life, and the results differ: the details aren’t limited to what I happen to (mis)remember – it’s an exercise in observation, recording. I’ve been working on that lately.

‘January’ is a Kingston poem in Leaving Howe Island. Stone boundaries, and then the breadth of the lake. That’s a transition that feels essentially local.

What another place would do, I’m not sure – but I know it would matter.

4. In an interview at Open Book: Ontario you mentioned teenage years writing out poems by Dutch poets. Looking over your writing, do you feel much influence by Dutch poetry, or was that something that fell by the wayside as you began reading works in English? Or do you feel your work is a blend of the two?
I still read Dutch poetry and other writing, so I’m sure it continues to influence me. But the question of how or to what extent – I may not have the perspective to say. One thing that characterizes Dutch literature for me is the precision and concision of language – it’s instructive territory when it comes to those qualities. In some of my poems, like ‘Corridor’, the influence is direct: I took the first line from a poem by the Dutch poet M. Vasalis.

Dutch writers have long paid attention to English literature. There’s a small signal of that somewhere in the letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell – a mention of the Dutch poet Judith Herzberg’s admiration for Bishop’s work. But to be influenced in the other direction is less common of course – one place for English readers to start is the Poetry International website, which contains many contemporary Dutch poems in translation: http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/country/item/6/Netherlands.

5. In a more recent interview by Susan Gillis, you said that “having a first language other than English could be a factor. […] I wouldn’t be surprised if that affects my syntax and diction to some degree.” I’ve read how an important part of the syntax of American poet Rosmarie Waldrop’s poetry comes from the fact that her first language is German, and how her English-language lines and phrases become almost unconsciously shaped by the diction of another language. Since speaking with Gillis, have you gone back and looked at any of your lines? What of the Dutch language itself do you see within, if anything?
This is something I’m still figuring out – it’s complicated, how a first language continues to influence us after another becomes dominant. And as you describe in Waldrop’s case, it happens almost unconsciously.

One thing I’ve noticed is that part of me registers it when English words resemble the Dutch ones – I feel closer to those words, they seem more elemental to me.

So for example, in a poem like ‘Dag en Nacht’, I’m half-aware that in writing “birds in the woodcut,” the words are very different from Dutch phrase, which would be “vogels in de houtsnede.” Then, later in that stanza, the line lands close to the Dutch with “rivers and acres,” which would be “rivieren en akkers.” I’m saying it lands, and that seems relevant: it has something to do with place and knowing the ground.

It’s not that I’m constantly translating as I write – but the immediacy or emotional weight that English words hold for me has to do with how much they sound like their Dutch counterparts.

Another thing about this example is that sometimes a Dutch word broadens the English equivalent for me, because of their common origins. So ‘acres’ in English at present means a quantity of land; in Dutch, ‘akkers’ means cultivated fields, which used to be true in English as well. When I use the word acres, that lapsed or archaic meaning is still there for me.

None of what I’ve said has to do with effects on readers – I feel like that’s because my first language, at least when I write, has less to do with conveying something to others than with making the words real to myself.

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?
Literary prizes are awarded based on subjective criteria, and so the question of which works get recognized or overlooked has a lot to do with the composition of juries. It’s important that those are diverse in aesthetics and demographics. I also think the terrain between those two factors is much murkier than we generally acknowledge. Organizations like VIDA and CWILA, and writers like Roxane Gay and Madeleine Thien, have demonstrated in recent years that writers who are women, or people of colour, are particularly overlooked in reviews and in awards. I believe the reasons for that are multiple – but one of them is surely the strange idea that political concerns should not contaminate aesthetic processes. And more insidiously, that our lived experiences are political to different degrees – as Lucille Clifton observed in an interview: “Why is it that when you say something about yourself, you’re talking about yourself as a human, but when I talk about my life, it’s political?”

There’s no doubt that prizes make a difference to writers – for me, the CBC Poetry Prize provided validation, income, several readings and interviews, and the chance to work on new projects in Banff – it was wonderful.

I suppose that it’s contradictory to say then that it would be good if prizes made less difference to readers – but because of the subjectivity I mentioned, and the limited number of awards, it’s important that our reading is not limited to award-winning books.

And a deeper concern is that awards contribute – not intentionally, but effectively – to the larger capitalist machine that would publish only profitable books in the first place. And that should alarm us all.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dina Del Bucchia

Dina Del Bucchia was born in the Trail Regional Hospital, grew up in the village of Fruitvale, BC and now lives in Vancouver.  She is a creative director of the Real Vancouver Writers' Series and has coordinated and hosted numerous other literary events and performed a one-woman show at the Vancouver Fringe Festival and is editor of the Humour issue of Poetry Is Dead. Her short story, “Under the ‘I’” was a finalist for the 2012 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and has taught creative writing to young people. She is the author of Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks 2013) and the upcoming Blind Items (Insomniac Press, 2014) and her work will be included in Why Poetry Sucks: Humorous Avant-Garde and Post-Avant English Canadian Poetry edited by Jonathan Ball and Ryan Fitzpatrick (Insomniac Press, 2014).

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This first questions is so personal. Life change! Scary. I don't know if anything has changed. I'm still writing and my life is still mostly the same. Where are the cashmere blankets and convertibles I was promised? I'm trying to focus on fiction right now, but the genre switch doesn't feel as jarring as I thought it would. But it does feel more difficult. The fiction muscles are weak.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
As a writer I didn't come to poetry first. I'd been learning about and writing both fiction and poetry for the same amount of time. Now, non-fiction. That's too intimidating. That is serious shit where if you lie about something then Oprah yells at you on television.

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?
The initial writing comes quickly. And depending on the piece some things look very similar to their original first drafts and others get serious plastic surgery. I like to free-ball it for a while before I really start editing and getting things into their final shape. Notes come when I force myself to get serious.

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?
Poetry-wise I like a big project. I like a series, a sequence. Exploring an idea in different ways, just pushing and pushing a concept. Usually I'm not finished with an idea until I've sucked all the drops I can suck out of it. I'm sure this stems from a super healthy obsessive quality.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
For me public readings are a part of my creative process. I read things aloud while writing. I like an audience's reaction. I enjoy planning literary events that are both traditional and also more unusual. The entertainment value of listening to people tell stories and read their work is underestimated. And I like attention and readings provide me with that. When people try to use attention-seeking as an insult I feel like they're probably really bored.

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?
Much of my writing stems from pop culture and our engagement with it, but I don't know that I'm providing any answers. I’m questioning and hopefully providing a shred of insight. There are never-ending current questions.

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?
Write stuff.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I've found it enjoyable. Working with Garry Thomas Morse on Coping with Emotions and Otters and Sachiko Murakami on Blind Items were two really wonderful experiences. They were essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Listening to advice is a sketchy game. There’s so much of it. It's an avalanche of everyone knowing what's "right." But, I'd say the best advice I've heard is to know/figure out what works for you.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to performance to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I like to move between genres. The appeal is variety. Being able to play with different forms, different ways of using language. That’s interesting to me and keeps me from boring myself.

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 have a somewhat unpredictable schedule and I don't have a routine. I have writing goals and I take those seriously. Typical day: Find time. Don't mess around too much during that time. Reward(s).

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

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Nothing! I am terrible with smells. Only when I'm surprised by something familiar, really caught off guard do I register that there is some memory attached to that smell. And it doesn't happen very often. I used to get a weird, uncomfortable nostalgia from a whiff of ck one. Good old high school dances.

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?
TV, movies, comedy, magazines, memes, fashion, visual art, animals, advertisements, memes, YouTube. 

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
The writers that are truly important to my work and life are the ones in my life. My writing group, people I've been with for over nine years. All of my other friends who are also writers. And people like Leonard Cohen and Lena Dunham. These are my people. Also, a Cohen-Dunham production needs to happen. Now.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I'd love to write for a teen drama. Degrassi, and less serious ones like Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, are a delightful addiction. The story lines are so outrageous and fun and often nonsensical. They're the best.

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 always said that ice cream tester seems like the best job. I mean, you get to test and taste ice creams. Also on the list: lipstick namer and personal stylist. Of course I’d love to run my own television network for teens. Teen TV all day long!

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Well, as a writer I do lots of "something else" so I can be alive and buy dresses and food and drink. The something else allows for the writing. The simple answer is that I've always loved stories. If you're not great at anything that actually makes money then you should do what you love.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I'm currently reading Gary Shteyngart's Little Failure and loving it. That man is a treasure.

The Lego Movie. Great story, great characters, great voice acting and great jokes. So many greats.  I guess I thought it was great.

20 - What are you currently working on?
Many things. I just finished a draft of a collaborative project on rom coms with Daniel Zomparelli. And I've guest-edited the Humour Issue of Poetry Is Dead. I've been working on finishing a collection of short stories since I felt young enough to be IDed. Novel dabbling. Co-creative directing the Real Vancouver Writers' Series. Jotting down notes for other unformed projects. I like to mix it up.

12 or 20 (second series) questions,

National Poetry Month: Chaudiere Books,

In case you might not have noticed, April was (supposedly) Poetry Month, and to celebrate such, Chaudiere Books posted new poems by Chaudiere authors and friends of the press alike all month on the blog, with a new piece posted roughly every second day. There are now new poems on the site by Amanda Earl, Roland Prevost, Gil McElroy, Rhonda Douglas, Anita Dolman, Marcus McCann, Eleni Zisimatos, Pearl Pirie, derek beaulieu, Karen Massey, myself, Helen Hajnoczky and plenty of others.

Watch for our spring Indiegogo campaign! You can join our facebook group to keep track, or even join us on twitter @ChaudiereBooks.