The following interview is part three of a seven-part series of conversations with BC poets which were originally published between January and April 2024 at ReadLocalBC.ca. This was the fifth year of my collaboration with Read Local BC (you can read all my Read Local BC interviews in one place here).
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September - Jess Housty
We are in the time of radiant rot;
berries drop from the stems
when we shake them and salmon
eat up the daylight
as their flesh falls away from
their living bones.We can feel the full weight
of our grief now
as everything that surrounds us
is shot through with final gold
and the world lays down its work
to rest.The stillness is like a fresh layer
of humus on the ground.We are hushed
as though we’ve entered a house
where someone is dying:
we hear nothing but the thuds of crab apples
falling into the yellowed grass.
Reprinted with permission
from Crushed Wild Mint
(Nightwood Editions, 2023)
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Jess Housty (‘Cúagilákv) is a parent, writer and grassroots activist with Heiltsuk (Indigenous) and mixed settler ancestry. They serve their community as an herbalist and land-based educator alongside broader work in the non-profit and philanthropic sectors. They are inspired and guided by relationships with the homelands, their extended family, and their non-human kin, and they are committed to raising their children in a similar framework of kinship and land love. They reside and thrive in their unceded ancestral territory in the community of Bella Bella, BC.
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Rob Taylor: The opening poems in Crushed Wild Mint establish parallels between prayer, ceremony and poetry. For instance, from “Nearshore Prayer” (one of four poems in the book with “prayer” in their title):
This is a prayer that extendsin the direction of the ocean:it is not a story; nothingis apocryphal in prayer
Do you consider poetry to be a form of prayer? A poetry book a form of ceremony?
Jess Housty: I get teased sometimes for how often I talk about prayer. I’m not a religious person. For me, prayer is the word I use to describe moments of meditation and communion that ground me in myself and the world around me. In that sense, absolutely—each poem is a prayer, regardless of the title! Because each poem depends on beings and places and ideas outside of myself, and so each poem is relational and connective. I hope that, taken together, they feel like a ceremony or practice grounded in communal blessing, curiosity, and thanksgiving.
RT: Yes, that’s so well put. I think of poetry books as spaces of (usually non-religious) communion, though we rarely talk about them as such. Connected to this, in “Bowing to Yarrow (1),” you write about “the directionality of prayer,” which “is moving all around us and through time,” so that a prayer given by an ancestor to a licorice fern or a cedar is returned to you anew by the plant in the present day.
I think something similar about poems—that they are not simply given to the reader by the writer, but co-created with the reader, then they are passed on to others and the process begins again. What is given is always traveling out and returning. I’m curious, now that Crushed Wild Mint has been published, how you think of your poems moving through the world. What is their directionality? How do you hope they might come back to you, or the generations that follow?
JH: I love this. I learn different complexities of my own poems when they’re reflected back to me by readers who are generous enough to share with me what they felt when they read my words. People who take in Crushed Wild Mint from a distance pull out themes and ideas I can’t always easily see when I’m so close to my own writing. The most surprising part of offering a book to the world is realizing that there is no final iteration—there’s always a chance that the light will refract in some unexpected way for someone, or that a new echo will bounce off the walls of the valley causing me to see and hear and feel my own words in a deeper way. I’ve had to learn to be comfortable knowing that I can’t control how my writing lives in the imaginations of others and to trust that this brings unpredictable nuance and richness to the practice of poetry. When I take a deep breath and trust that the world will be tender, it feels incredibly liberating to think of poems as conversations.
RT: Poems as conversations in a tender world—yes, that feeling is very present in your work, perhaps no more so than in your poems about/for your Gwani (Granny). You thank her at the end of Crushed Wild Mint for “the peace of rewriting poems while you napped beside me in sunshine,” which is just about the most lovely thing I’ve ever read in an acknowledgments page.
In “Luáɫ” you write about the different poems you would compose in different rooms of your Gwani’s house, and in a later poem you note that, after she died, “the land… stopped speaking to me.” Could you talk a little about your Gwani? How do you think she shaped your relationship to poetry, and the poems themselves?
JH: My Gwani was the embodiment of nurturing love. She raised and loved four generations of descendants before she passed, and I think all of us would say the same thing: she made us feel safe and held and nourished. In the last years of her life, my family cared for her at home around the clock, and in my shifts with her I got to witness her softening into our care and shifting our sense of time to become nonlinear as she began to slip mentally into her girlhood again. Loving her and taking care of her was an exercise in being present and grounded in a reality I couldn’t direct or control, and it required trust and curiosity that became a practice extending far beyond elder care. I wrote or edited much of Crushed Wild Mint sitting beside her and she anchored me and my words in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until after she was gone.
RT: As someone who has a parent living with dementia, I’m very moved by your description of the illness as “slip[ping]… into her girlhood again.” My mother, who has forgotten so much of her life, is also always discovering things anew, and there’s joy mixed in there with the loss.
The acts of living with a person with dementia and of writing a poetry book both cause us to think a great deal about memory: what we can hold on to, and what we have to let go of. When you wrote poems beside your napping Gwani, you were engaging with both at once, which may in part explain why the final word in Crushed Wild Mint is “memory.” What did your time writing poems in the sunshine teach you about memory?
JH: I come from a culture where our knowledge systems, storykeeping, and historical records are passed down orally and held collectively. Some of the ideas and knowledge embedded in Crushed Wild Mint felt like a remembering from outside myself. So in some senses, it feels very normal for memory to be fluid and collaborative. Gwani illuminated this for me. Witnessing her showing up authentically as so many phases of herself—and being witnessed by her in so many forms of my own, from grandchild to stranger to someone she simply called “auntie”—made me realize that how we experience ourselves and one another is deeply dynamic, and so of course memory and the stories we tell are dynamic too. And because memory thrives on witnessing, it binds us in a shared experience.
RT: I was angered when I read your poem, “To the scientist who called my beloved salmonberries “insipid.”” This was both due to what the scientist said and the fact that their words caused a (thankfully temporary) rupture between you and my very favourite berry on earth. It made me think about how disconnected many of us on the West Coast are from the plants that surround us. People are often surprised to see me eating salmonberries or huckleberries when out on a walk—they didn’t know you could do that—and sometimes those people have lived here their whole lives! And I am sure I stroll ignorantly past many other plants that could benefit me greatly.
Your book teems with local plant life, with poems dedicated to yarrow, wild crab apples, bog cranberries, salal, wild aster, skuusiid (an endemic variety of potato) and, of course, the titular wild mint. It feels a bit like you’re writing an alternate field guide in response to that scientist—one designed to induce love and curiosity instead of shame. Would you say that’s true?
JH: Plants bring me incredible joy. They nourish and heal. They signal and indicate. They put tools in my hands and structure in my seasons. It brings me great comfort to know that I can walk out into the wilderness of my motherlands and know that I’ll be fed, that I’ll be able to tend to my ills, that what I need most will be provided in exchange for the care I return to what surrounds me. Plants are the reason trust is such a fundamental presence in my life. My grandparents (and my ancestors) knew plants were our relatives, and that kinship engendered a lot of fierce mutual love and care. I was raised with that knowledge too. The only time I’ve ever doubted it is when I listened to people who think we are apart from nature, and that this distance somehow elevates us morally above everything around us. How preposterous! I wanted to infuse Crushed Wild Mint with all the bursting berries and bitter, potent medicines that help me thrive. I wanted to insist on them. I don’t think I could ever tolerate them being diminished to me again.
RT: In what ways would you like readers to think more deeply about their relationship with the plant life around them?
JH: I hope readers become curious about the personalities of yarrow, licorice fern, and every other relative nestled in the book. And I hope that curiosity becomes an invitation into joy.
RT: This book is so intimately bound to the plants—and also the land, language, and animals—of the Haíłzaqv (Heiltsuk) territory in and around Bella Bella that it seems impossible to imagine it being written anywhere else. What do you think your poems would look like if you’d written them in a big city, or simply far from Haíłzaqv territory? Would you be writing poems at all?
JH: I’ve wondered about this. Looking back at my life, the quietest periods—when I’ve felt like I had no stories to tell—were when I lived in urban places, or when I was traveling in other parts of the world. I know my motherlands deeply enough that we can speak to one another, and those conversations often seed stories and poems. I admire people who can ground themselves anywhere and speak those places into the world. I don’t think I’m one of them—and I am learning to love being hyperlocal and in relationship with what surrounds me and holds me close.
RT: The last section of the book is devoted to the story of a historical y̓úzua (flood), and the two mountains, M̓ṇsǧṃx̌λi (Mount Merritt) and Q̓aǧṃi (Mount Keyes) that nearly drowned in it. While the poems look backwards in this way, I couldn’t help but feel that they were also looking forward towards a future of rising sea levels and floods. “How did we miss the signs / of a multiplied disaster?” you write in “Remembering the Flood,” and you seem to be speaking of the past and the present/future at once. How did the looming presence of our oncoming “multiplied disaster” shape your writing about the natural world in Crush Wild Mint? Did it add an urgency to the composition of your poems? A sadness? A sharper appreciation?
JH: My climate grief is so raw. My identity and my ability to thrive are intimately and inextricably tied to my motherland and her thriving. I know, and I repeat through the stories and teachings we hold collectively as Heiltsuk people, that my ancestors have rooted themselves in a practice of resilience and mutual care for places and non-human kin. Through this resilience I have been able to inherit this beautiful world for a moment and then reach down to place that inheritance on my own children. But what am I handing down? Reflecting on the crises we know our people have survived historically does give me strength as I brace myself against a rapidly changing world. But the world is threatened precisely because there are people who don’t believe in that practice of resilience, who hold themselves apart from and above the clean air and fresh water and thriving systems that make me who I am. I need them to feel connected too.
RT: A tall task, but yes, very much one you take on in Crushed Wild Mint. Your poems on the y̓úzua frequently speak of resilience: “we are mountains / that help other mountains / withstand the flood.” What role do you think poetry plays in building our resilience against the flood?
JH: When I think of the poetry that resonates with me the most as a reader, it’s the poems that seem to place their hands on either side of my face, look me in the eye, and say this is who you are. I think it’s possible that poetry and art can help us get out of our own way, to shake off the dissociation of modern existence and get comfortable with the hard work of feeling. Speaking for myself, I have a deep desire to be of service and to be an agent of generosity and care and reciprocity, but sometimes I feel stuck. Sometimes I need the truth to be illuminated and for a shock to be delivered to my system to bring me to life so I can feel and do. It’s easy to feel stuck, but there’s no time. We’re needed. All of us. And I think poetry can help to wake us up.
RT: On the theme of awakenings, in your book’s acknowledgments you thank “Jerry, my Dutch uncle, for being the first one to believe I was a poet.” We all need a “Jerry” in our lives! Could you talk about the process of coming to see yourself as a poet? What did Jerry see in you that you perhaps did not yet see in yourself?
JH: My Uncle Jer has been telling me I was a poet since I was a small child seeing ecosystems in flooded ditches and finding wonder in every stone on the riverbank in Clatse Bay. It was years before I actually put a pen to paper to write a poem. What I value most about how I’m able to thrive in my motherlands is the deep sense I have of being grounded in place, and in relationship to the places and the non-human kin that surround me. I think that poetry, in some ways, is an act of witnessing and then externalizing what you’ve witnessed. And if there’s one thing Uncle Jer and others might have seen in me before I recognized it in myself, it’s the deep joy I find in being present and witnessing the world around me (and feeling seen and witnessed in return).
RT: Many of your poems directly address, or instruct, the reader. In this, and in their invocations to pay better attention to the natural world, they reminded me of much of Mary Oliver’s work, especially her most popular poems such as “Wild Geese.” Your writing also brought to my mind the work of poets such as Wanda John-Kehewin and Selina Boan. Those connections may only be present in my mind, of course! Which poets were the greatest inspirations for you as you were writing the poems in Crushed Wild Mint?
JH: I think if someone ever felt a reason to imagine my writing in any proximity to Mary Oliver’s, I might believe I’ve peaked as a writer! Her poetry teaches me about clarity and devotion, and her words are what I turn toward when I need to be reminded that I am grounded forever in the wildness that surrounds me. I also reach for Joy Harjo for poetry that holds its chin up high and speaks from a universally gorgeous and unapologetically Indigenous worldview. When I think about Crushed Wild Mint, I also feel like I need to acknowledge the vitality and magic realism of Eden Robinson’s writing. Being a reader has shaped me as a writer in ways I couldn’t even begin to untangle, and inspired me to ask myself over and over again with each new text that I encounter, Who can I be in conversation with you?
RT: Near the end of the book, you write “the gift economies of mountains / make us into bridges between peaks.” I was struck by how you brought the idea of a gift economy into the book in that way. I’ve long thought of poets as living and working primarily in the gift economy, in ways not unlike the lives of spiritual and religious leaders (Robert Hass points to the nineteenth century tradition of gift showers for ministers when they would arrive in a new town). This very much feels in keeping with how I sense you’d like your poems to be received by the world. How do you see the relationship between the gift value of a poem and the exchange/market value of a poem (especially as you’re now out promoting a product for sale)?
JH: I grew up in a cultural context where a person’s wealth is measured less by what they accumulate and more by how many people they’re able to take care of. The richest people are the ones who have given everything away—who had the privilege of caring for others and who had others in their life to care for. It feels to me that I have a responsibility to share anything I create or possess, and to do so generously. I can do this trusting that others will also take care of me. So yes, it feels spectacularly weird to bring in a commercial element! What feels true for me is that I’d share my writing freely with anyone who wanted to read it, but the book as an object is a vehicle to share my poetry more widely, and to keep my lights on while I try to create more gifts to share. In the same way, I never take money for plant medicines that I prepare, but sometimes people choose to pay me for the jar or the vial that contains the medicine even as they accept the medicine itself as a freely given gift.
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