go to sleep, wake up, do a few more lines

Ron Everson and Lorna were friends for many, many years going back to Montreal. Ron was a lawyer and well off. They had a lovely apartment in Westmount. He was a bit of a square peg in our group, but he was always around the poetry scene. He didn't turn into a great poet or anything but he was one who really kept at it. He had his set time every day when he would go to write. I've always been suspicious of poets who do that because it's contradictory to the intuitive part of poetry. How can you sit down and decide you're going to write a poem? To me, and I think to Al certainly, the ideas are there and then he'll sit down. Al would write in the middle of the night if the spirit moved him. Go to sleep, wake up, do a few more lines. If there were people over and he got an idea, he would go off by himself. That was his method. Wait for the idea, but be ready to write when it came. I'm sure he and Ron argued about it - they argued about everything.

- Eurithe Purdy, being interviewed by Howard White while she ran a yard sale, as published in The Al Purdy A-frame Anthology (Harbour Publishing, 2009).

At the time of this posting, my wife, son and I will be arriving in Toronto, our our way to Ameliasburgh to begin our two-month stay at Al and Eurithe's refurbished A-frame. If you're unfamiliar with the project, you can learn more about it here (and if you want to send the A-frame trust a bit of money so they can support more poets down the line, you can do so here).

To celebrate my time in the A-frame as the first BC-based writer-in-residence, I will be profiling a BC poetry book a day right here on this blog throughout April. You can learn more about the project here.