A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock

The following interview is part four 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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mclean drive, - Samantha Nock

i break loose in isolation
crashing upon the rocks of myself.

i cry for two weeks straight
only stopping for sleep
and water.

long lessons learned
the hard way:
we are only loved
the way spring loves
fresh flowers.

even in endings,
there is renewal.

i break open myself,
to form new rivers.

mwîstas kakî wâpam’tin?

Reprinted with permission
from A Family of Dreamers
(Talonbooks, 2023)

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Samantha Nock is a Cree-Métis writer and poet originally from Treaty 8 Territory in the Peace Region of northeast British Columbia. Her family is originally from sâkitawâhk ᓵᑭᑕᐚᕽ (Île-à-la-Crosse), Saskatchewan. Samantha currently resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands in so-called Vancouver. She has had works published in Maisonneuve, Vice, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others.

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Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?

Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it. 

Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma. 

RT: I appreciate that, and sense the intimate nature of some of these poems. How has it felt to see your book go out into the world and reach people close to you (and strangers, for that matter)?

SN: It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it. 

RT: What about your own response to your book, looking back over those ten years?

SN: Many of these poems have existed in some form throughout years of my life and they’ve been edited and changed as I changed. In a lot of ways the poems grew with me as I was navigating the growing up that happens in your twenties. They’re like old friends that know everything about me and the time we spent together has been very cathartic. 

RT: You mentioned the Peace River region there, which is a recurring subject of the poems in A Family of Dreamers. You write about the region, and the Peace river’s tributary, the Kîskatinâw, with a sense of love, loss and longing. In “kîskatinâw interlude pt. II,” for instance, you write:

she never apologizes

takes you as an offering
and continues to flow…

i wish there were a better way to say
that i am jealous of a river

You write about “working hard in high school because i’m a / cliché of wanting to leave my small town,” and being warned that “you can never come back.” You’ve lived in Vancouver for some time now: have you been able to return to the region? Is this book a return of sorts to both the region and the rivers that sustain it?

SN: This is a very beautiful question. I return home often. In recent years I’ve been trying to return at least twice a year (in the summer and in the winter). Growing up in the north wasn’t easy and along with the deep, deep love I have for it, there is a lot of hurt and grief there. I feel like in a lot of ways this book is an ode to the BC Peace Region, because it really did raise me. But it’s also a way for me to say goodbye to a complicated childhood and teen years so I can let go and discover a new part of myself. There is grief in this, too, and I feel like that comes out in a lot of the poems I write. 

For a long time, I held onto being the northern girl who came to the city, but I’ve lived in Vancouver for fourteen years now, nearly as long as I lived in the Peace. I will always be Sam Nock from Dawson Creek, BC but I’m also Sam Nock from Vancouver, BC. 

RT: Speaking of letting go of that teenage self, in the poem “letting go” you write about being young and “feeling 13 / and 45 at the same time.” That resonated with me both as the way many of us feel in high school, but also as the natural condition of the poet: a childlike wonder meeting an old soul. Do you still feel like you’re living those two lives simultaneously, even if the years have shifted a bit?

SN: Yes, but now I feel like I’m sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five. There were parts of my teens where I was unsure if I’d see eighteen or twenty or twenty-five. I was severely depressed and struggling. I feel like “old soul” can also be a way to describe kids who had to grow up too fast, and it’s in that way that I felt like I was 13 and 45. It’s also why I feel sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five now. This book let me look at the ways I am healing my child self, my current self, and my future self. 

RT: Yes, very true. My father died when I was eleven, so maybe that’s what’s at work in this shared feeling of ours, even more so than the poetry. 

A Family of Dreamers is full of memorable lines. One that stood out for me was “my spine is my greatest love story” (from “my body remembers”). Could you talk about it a bit?

SN: “my body remembers” is a blunt poem about being sexually assaulted when I was twenty and the ways in which I felt isolated and alone as a scared kid who didn’t know how to process the experience. Through somatic therapy, my therapist asked me during one session where I thought I held my resilience, and I imagined it being stored in my spine. Writing this poem allowed me to look at what happened through a lens of the way my body knew how to keep us going. Even at a time where I felt like my autonomy was stolen, my body was there to remind me that it could never be taken away.

RT: In A Family of Dreamers you use romanized Cree words and phrases within English-language poems, including using the Cree words for the numbers one to six to title your book’s six sections. Unlike many poets in recent years who have integrated Indigenous words into their poems (Jess Housty, Dallas Hunt, Wanda John-Kehewin, etc.), you’ve chosen not to provide a glossary of terms at the back of the book. Could you speak a little about that choice, and what you hope it signals for both Cree and non-Cree readers?

SN: I wanted to be able to put in my poems the parts of my language that I was able to. That it’s limited to certain words and phrases speaks to where my level of language knowledge is at right now. It is an absolute dream to me to maybe one day be able to write a poem fully in my community’s dialect. 

I chose not to translate because I wanted non-Cree speakers to stumble on the words, let them feel heavy and awkward in their mouths as they try and sound them out. I wanted them to have to Google the words or phrases and find out what they mean, much like the process a language learner has to go through. For Cree speakers who are familiar or fluent, I wanted there to be parts in there that felt comforting. I know how I felt the first time I got to read a poem with Cree in it; I got so excited and felt welcomed.

RT: Your endnotes point to a number of contemporary Indigenous poets whose influence you can see in your work: Selina Boan, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dallas Hunt and Jessica Johns. Could you speak a little about your main literary influences in writing this book, either from this list or outside of it?

SN: I would be absolutely nowhere without being in this beautiful constellation of other Indigenous poets and writers. It feels impossible to even name them all. The biggest influences on my work, though, are Marilyn Dumont and Rita Bouvier. Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl was the first time I had read poetry by a Métis woman and in it I saw my family, and my lived experiences, too. Bouvier, who is from Ile-a-la-Crosse and also literally a cousin. I haven’t met Rita in real life but who I sent a very funny message to while writing this book. I was like, “Hey! I think maybe my kokum is your aunty or something like that, anyway we’re related and I love your work.” Her poems are such an inspiration because I feel like through them I am able to connect to family and places that I haven’t been able to connect to in other ways. 

RT: You also thank Emily Dickinson, who feels like a natural fit alongside the more “ghostly” and gothic elements of the book.

SN: I’m a formerly pretentious teenager who devoured the works of Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Mary Oliver. I feel like they allowed me to dream of poetry. I still return to their work often. But if I’m being very honest, one of the biggest poetry inspirations for me is my dad. He’s a wonderful poet who writes gorgeous pastoral poems about the Peace Region. He doesn’t publish or share his work with anyone but family, but he was the one that taught me that there’s poetry in nature and the places we call home. 

A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty

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 extends

in the direction of the ocean:

it is not a story; nothing 

is 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.

The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo

The following interview is part two 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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Six Bottles of Wine - Rodney DeCroo

I haven’t washed the dishes for over a week.
The sink and counter a precarious pile
of dirty pots, plates, bowls and glasses.
The whole mess on the verge of slippage,
of shattering into mundane but dangerous pieces.
I haven’t bathed in five days or brushed
my teeth. I can barely stand the sight or smell
of myself. I am a riot of self-pity in a filthy apartment.
And yes, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’m gloriously,
hideously drunk. I’ve been reading poetry
out loud, shouting through walls
at my neighbours. Every night the landlord pounds
on my door, tells me to shut up. I will
have to pay for my behaviors with sickness,
debt and shame. But I have six bottles of wine
before I have to remember that she is dead.

Reprinted with permission

from Fishing for Leviathan

(Anvil Press, 2023).

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Rodney DeCroo is the author of two previous books of poetry, Allegheny, BC and Next Door to the Butcher Shop. His poems have been published in Canadian publications such as subTerrain, Geist, Event, BC Bookworld, The Vancouver Province, Discorder Magazine, and The Georgia Straight, among others. His poetry has appeared in Beyond Forgetting, an anthology celebrating the work and life of legendary Canadian poet Al Purdy, and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He has appeared on CBC to read his poems and is also a well-known, touring singer-songwriter with eight albums to his credit. His solo plays Stupid Boy in an Ugly Town and Didn’t Hurt have toured across Canada and the US. In 2019, Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s National Writing Centre, awarded him an International Poet in Residency.

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Rob Taylor: Near the end of Fishing for Leviathan you write about the poets (Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Al Purdy, John Keats) who provided the “thinnest thread of light” in some of the darkest periods of your life. In those times, you were also sustained by writing your own “wonderful, worthless poems.” Where do you think you’d be today without poetry’s thread of light? From that perspective, are the poems really “worthless”?

Rodney DeCroo: I was seventeen years old when I encountered poetry in a high school English class. I’d only recently arrived from Pittsburgh to live with my father in Surrey, B.C. He was the manager of the infamous Newton Inn and wasn’t around much. I spent most of my time pilfering from my father’s considerable cache of drugs and getting high, so I made it to school maybe three out of five days a week. No one at school seemed to notice or care and I was good with that. My English teacher—I can’t remember his name—didn’t like me much. On one of the rare days I attended class he was teaching T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men.” I had no idea what was going on. I knew nothing about poetry. He kept asking me to explain for the class what various lines of the poem meant. I felt humiliated by him and whatever this indecipherable fucking thing poetry was. 

A year later my father moved us to Cranbrook and I had to take an English literature course taught by a man named Mr. Fossey. The first poem he taught was Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and that was it. He talked about the poem in the context of Keats’ life when he wrote it and I was hooked. I didn’t necessarily understand the poem, but I loved the sounds and it made me feel something I could relate to even if I couldn’t articulate it. I kept repeating lines from the poem to myself. After school that day I rushed back to my room in the Tudor House Hotel (my father was the manager so we lived there). I grabbed some paper and a pen from the front desk and started writing poems. They were horrible, unintentional parodies of the poems I was reading at school but they were pure magic to me. I’d nothing going on in my life. I’d drink alone almost nightly in my room and/or get high depending on what I could get my hands on. My dad didn’t care what I was doing as long as I wasn’t causing trouble in the hotel, and it wasn’t too hard getting booze or dope surrounded by drunks and addicts. My father ignored me and I had no friends. So I’d lock myself in my room, get wasted and write poems.

When I dropped out of high school and ran off to Vancouver—even when I lived on the streets—I carried around an old battered briefcase filled with pages of my poetry. I used to give free poetry readings on the bus for my fellow commuters. One time a man stood up on the #14 Hastings Street bus to applaud and I was thrilled. Hey, an appreciative audience is an appreciative audience! I’ll take it! And throughout that time I was reading all the poets you mentioned. They all excited me in different ways. At the time Bukowski spoke to me the most because his poems were so accessible and used language that was similar to the way I spoke. When I started reading his poetry I felt like hey, maybe I can actually do this and I began to try and write the way I spoke. 

Poetry gave my life purpose— I was part of something fine— and that made me feel like I mattered in some way. I was a poet, goddamn it! By my late teens when I dropped out of school I was already a drunk and a drug addict. I lived on and off the streets and worked horrible, humiliating jobs and got fired regularly. I got into fights and often got my ass kicked. I spent many nights in the Vancouver drunk tank. So while my poems were awful they kept me going. I was betting everything on them. Now, I think differently about those poems. Sure, they weren’t much but learning to write poetry is a long, unbroken process that is never finished. The poems I write now contain the DNA of those early poems no matter how awful they were. So yeah, my wonderful, worthless poems. Without them I wouldn’t be here. 

RT: I see two distinct styles in the poems in Fishing for Leviathan. One is Purdy-esque story-poems, akin to what you just described, which flow with a natural speaking rhythm. The other style is these more tightly-packed, non-linear, associatively linked poems written in couplets, reminiscent of John Thompson’s ghazals in Stilt Jack. The content of the poems in these two styles is distinct, too, with the subject matter of the story-poems more raw, ala Bukowski, and the others more abstract and lyrical, seemingly removed from the harshness of your early years. How did you come to write in these two modes? Do you see a clear distinction between them, or do you move between them more fluidly? 

RD: I’ve always had these two approaches both as a poet and songwriter. As a young poet I found it difficult to control the non-linear poems. I didn’t trust them because I didn’t have a process, or enough craft, to work with that material. When I did write those poems they tended to be more like automatic writing that went on and on and on. Song lyrics allowed me to experiment more because a song doesn’t necessarily live or die on its lyrics. You can get away with things lyrically in a song that you never could in a poem. 

As I grew as a poet, and as I got used to working associatively with song lyrics, I became more confident in my ability to shape non-linear content into what I feel are cohesive poems. Honestly, after writing a bunch of narrative poems I get bored and switch gears. I relish the freedom and magic non-linear material offers, and yet the storyteller is always there. I think that’s part of how I’ve learned to control those poems. I tend to write in bursts. I’ll write several of those poems over a couple weeks, but I’ll start craving solid ground to stand on—and so, back to the narrative poems. I can’t prove it but I think these styles are in dialogue with each other. You know, like how our dream lives and our waking lives are in conversation. And I think the satisfying change in rhythm those poems provide me as a poet do a similar thing for the reader. 

RT: Steven Heighton referred to his job as a poet as being a “stenographer to my nightmind,” and told me that he hoped engaging with his dream mind allowed his poems to move “more vulnerably and associatively.” That seems to be the case for you, too. How do you think your non-linear poems have influenced the nature of your narrative poems? Do you sense that how you tell your life’s stories in poems has changed over the years?

RD: As a multi-disciplinary artist I find that when I work in one medium— say, street photography, for example—that it effects how I approach my poetry when I’m back on the page, whether it’s in my writing process, or the poem’s content or form. The changes are often subtle, just small shifts in perspective, but sometimes they’re big. Writing song lyrics helped me to start writing the non-linear poems which I write a lot of now. I’d say writing non-linear poems have made me less rigid in how I approach narrative poems that tell my life’s stories. I used to feel that I had to stick to the facts—to what actually happened—but I’m not writing an autobiography, I’m writing poetry. I realized that, for me at least, having to adhere to the facts limited where the language could take the poem. I was limiting my poetic imagination. I’m more interested in getting at the emotional truths below the details. What I called the “facts” of a story added up to a story I was already telling myself. If I wanted to get at something deeper I needed to allow new ideas into the poems. Also, we’re always trying to say in poems what is unsayable within ourselves—otherwise we wouldn’t need poems. My hope is that some of the more associative movements of the non-linear poems can begin to work into the narrative poems to allow for deeper, unseen currents to move within/ under the narrative.

RT: Wonderfully put: poems as existing to say something beyond the story we tell ourselves; to say what we couldn’t otherwise say. Perhaps connected to these realizations, you dedicate Fishing for Leviathan to acclaimed BC poet Russell Thornton, “for helping me stand up to myself and write better poems.” Could you talk a little about the role Russell has played in your development as a poet? 

RD: I initially met Russell because he invited me to appear on a poetry show he hosted on Vancouver Co-op Radio. I’d heard him read on a couple of occasions and admired him as a poet. With the exception of Al Purdy, my few interactions with older, accomplished poets hadn’t gone well. I’d an enormous chip on my shoulder and was deeply insecure, so I was pretty belligerent. I was a high school dropout, I’d no publishing history except in zines and underground publications, and outside of the local underground scene I was unknown as a poet. The truth was my poetry didn’t merit much attention then and—when I was willing to be honest— I knew that, but I didn’t know what to do. I was in my early forties and still writing like a young, unrealized poet. I was getting a little long in the tooth for that and was deeply afraid that maybe I wasn’t capable of more. I was experiencing some success as a singer-songwriter, I was touring regularly with my band and was with a label that enthusiastically supported my releases, but poetry was my first love.

I was surprised by how gracious Russell was when I came on his show. He asked questions about my poems that made me feel like a peer. He was coming from a place as a much more accomplished poet, but he didn’t talk down to me. I liked him immediately. He easily cut through all my usual defenses. Russell and I have some stuff in common in our backgrounds and he recognized that in me. We slowly became friends and I started sending him my poems. He would comment on them kindly. He pointed out what he liked, but he also was direct—without putting me down—about what he felt wasn’t working. I was able to listen because of his approach and gradually started internalizing the things he taught me about craft. Just being aware of basic elements of craft forced me to dig deeper, and my poems quickly showed improvement. 

He also taught me—I feel this is the most valuable thing I learned from him—to trust the language. He would say it to me over and over again. He’d show me where my poems broke down. I’d ask him what he thought they needed and he’d say, I don’t know, it’s your poem, trust the language, Rodney, it knows. He encouraged me to go inwards and to find my poethood which is about—in my opinion—listening for the language to speak and letting it guide me. So when I found myself resorting to clichés or trying to force an ending I learned how to sit patiently and wait for the language to show me the way through the seeming impasses I’d reach in poems. I could hear it and feel it. It was visceral. When I lost that feeling I knew to stop and try later. Previously, I’d had few tools or the confidence to write fully realized poems. I truly believe that without Russell’s help I wouldn’t have made the transition from an undisciplined young poet to a reasonably competent poet. 

RT: Is that what you mean by “standing up to yourself”? That discipline to listen to the language and wait?

RD: Yeah, that was part of it. Giving up the bad habits I’d developed as a poet which had to do with my ego and getting down to the real business of writing poems, which requires humility. But also, I was a recovering drunk and addict dealing with untreated C-PTSD. I was very damaged and very reactive. Without alcohol or drugs to numb what I was feeling I simply couldn’t cope. I reached a point, in sobriety, where I had a total breakdown. I abandoned a cross-Canada tour with my band and hid in Montreal with a friend who was a writer. He let me stay at his place rent free. It was an incredible act of kindness by my friend. All I did was go to 12th step meetings a couple times a day (where I made many friends), walk around Montreal for hours, and talk to Russell on the phone. I don’t know where he found the patience. He helped me recognize and stand up to a lot of the self-destructive behaviors that were ruining my life and hurting my friends and colleagues. I eventually got professional help, but in the initial stages Russell provided understanding support. He also challenged me. He said to me once, “We have to stand up to ourselves, Rodney,” and that became a kind of mantra for me. And of course the personal changes I went through improved my poetry. 

RT: Russell sounds like as good a friend as he is a poet, which is really saying something. That patience in waiting for a poem’s language to explain itself to you seems echoed in a few poems in Fishing for Leviathan. In “The Buck” you write about a boy waiting in a hunting stand for hours until “the silence… is not an absence but a living / presence both outside and in.” Were you consciously drawing parallels there between hunting and your evolving writing practice? What role has welcoming silence played in your development as a writer?

RD: “The Buck” is based on a strange experience I had as a teenage boy hunting for the first time by myself. I was in the woods for several hours and it had snowed the night before so everything was covered in fresh snow. I slipped into some sort of trance or something and had an encounter with a buck that seemed—for lack of a better term—mystical. The buck was gone before I realized I hadn’t raised my rifle. It didn’t even occur to me. The embodied silence I talk about brings me a deep sense of wholeness and connection to something much larger than me. It’s fleeting of course. It’s why I write poems. If a poem I write is successful there’s a silence that resonates after the final line. It’s a distant echo of that silence I felt in the woods that day. I mostly experience that sensation both as a poet and a reader of poems and sometimes— though rarely—while performing certain songs for an audience: it’s like there’s a silence underneath the song that holds both my performance and the attention of the audience. It becomes so intimate that it’s impossible for me to describe. If I was able to experience that silence without poetry—who knows—maybe I wouldn’t bother to write anymore. I think I write poems out of the various conflicts within myself. Maybe in those brief moments at the end of poems I experience a truce between internal adversaries, and it results in what feels like silence. 

RT: The silence being the reason you write the poems—I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but it feels very accurate to me. Thank you. And the idea of a truce between adversaries, too. A central theme of Fishing for Leviathan is working to break generational trauma. 

In “Tying the Centuries Together Like a Funeral Wreath,” you write, 

I want a eulogy that says
it stopped with me, this line of broken labourers,
shattered soldiers, depressed housewives,
schizophrenics, suicides, alcoholics, criminals…

Later, you close the book with a loving embrace between speaker and child, and so many of those destructive cycles appear broken. Yet Fishing for Leviathan is also filled with declarations of personal and career disappointment, such as:

My therapist says given my childhood
I’m lucky to be alive. Maybe next life let’s set
the bar a little higher.

I’m curious how you define “success” in your life and writing. Are you able to appreciate your accomplishments in stopping some destructive multi-generational patterns? 

RD: I think we all deal with patterns of multi-generational trauma to varying degrees. Hell, life is traumatic at times for nearly everyone. I think sometimes higher social class status and the stability that comes with that can take the edges off it, but it’s still there. Unfortunately, because of the poverty, violence and neglect I experienced as a daily reality during my childhood I have struggled most of my life to simply survive. That looked like years of extremely self-destructive behaviors, such as addiction. I was a petty thief, highly dishonest and violent at times. I’m a high school dropout and so on. I’ve never had any financial security or a professional career. This isn’t about self-pity, it’s just a statement of facts. I’ve had some amazing opportunities come to me—like a budding successful career as a singer-songwriter—that I self-sabotaged in very dramatic and public ways.

I’ve been learning one day at a time for the last fifteen years to manage C-PTSD flashbacks effectively. I’ve been free from alcohol and other drugs for 23 years. But I don’t think the destructive cycles are ever fully broken—I’ll always have C-PTSD and I’ll always be an alcoholic / addict—but I can have a daily reprieve contingent on my willingness to be accountable to myself and those around me. I have to engage in regular self-care, to become more aware of my negative patterns of thought/ behavior conditioned by years of childhood trauma and make different choices. I have to be willing to stand up to myself or, as an old 12th step sponsor used to say, “Strive to have an asshole free day, Rodney.” The same patterns conditioned by years of trauma still present themselves to me, but I make different choices now and as a consequence my life looks much different. That changes how I feel about myself, which strengthens my desire to keep doing the work. The child I refer to in the poems, Lucy, isn’t my daughter, so I can’t say I’ve broken a multi-generational cycle of trauma, but I’m close to her and being a care-giver and an “uncle” (her term) for over a decade has changed me in ways that helped me break through some of my destructive tendencies. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I feel like I’m living now, rather than just careening through the wreckage that I was creating. 

RT: Not cheesy at all, and it should be a point of pride. How about when it comes to career success, now that you have this third book of poems now out in the world (enthusiastically praised by Russell Thornton and Claire Askew, no less!)? Is “success” achievable for you, or will you inch your bar higher with every accomplishment? 

RD: I don’t know. I’d like to have some stability that comes from a certain level of financial and professional success, but those things aren’t given out for free, they’re earned. I am fifty-six. I wasted a huge portion of my life, so that may not be a reality for me. Who knows, maybe my artistic pursuits will help eventually in that regard, but it’s highly unlikely. I am thrilled however to have published books of poetry that poets I admire like Russell Thornton and Claire Askew have said good things about. The same goes with my other work. And in the moment—when I’m performing and connected to an audience—well, that’s a special thing that I don’t think everybody gets to experience. But the truth is, I was imprinted as a small child with messages that I didn’t matter, that I was unlovable, that I was a piece of shit, and so on. And I’m not talking about not getting held enough. I’m talking about stuff that people go to jail for now. If I could ever silence those voices that would be something. I don’t think writing any number of books of poetry or playing any number of shows or getting accolades will ever do that for me though. I’ve had some small successes and found that they are fleeting and don’t impact those feelings much for long. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful that folks like Silas White at Nightwood Editions, and Brian Kaufman and Karen Green at Anvil Press, have been willing to publish my books. I wouldn’t trade that away for anything, and I hope to publish more. But I suspect that no matter what I achieve as an artist, I will always be inching that bar higher as you suggest, because that’s not going to solve the core dilemma, is it? The irony is that the conflict I have with how I feel about myself in my core is the source of my poetry, and that same thing drives my desire to be recognized, which is ultimately not going to resolve the problem. But I don’t think it’s about resolving the problem, I think maybe it’s about learning to live with it. 

RT: In “My Self-Pity Is Bigger Than Yours” you write “Oh someday poetry / is gonna explode out of me like a truck / full of fireworks on the darkest night / of the year.” You wrote this in your third book—you’ve already exploded quite a bit! What do you aspire to in your poetry that hasn’t yet exploded out? 

RD: Well, thanks, but my inner critics disagree! They demand more exploding! But really, I don’t think I’m any different from most artists whether you’re a poet, a mime or a painter. I think we’re always persuading ourselves that someday we’re going to paint our masterpiece! I read this a while ago in a Wikipedia post about Dylan’s song “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and it made so much sense to me: 

Douglas Brinkley, while interviewing Dylan for the New York Times in 2020, noted that “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was a song that had grown on him over the years and asked Dylan why he had brought it “back to the forefront of recent concerts”. Dylan replied, “It’s grown on me as well. I think this song has something to do with the classical world, something that’s out of reach. Someplace you’d like to be beyond your experience. Something that is so supreme and first rate that you could never come back down from the mountain. That you’ve achieved the unthinkable. That’s what the song tries to say, and you’d have to put it in that context. In saying that though, even if you do paint your masterpiece, what will you do then? Well, obviously you have to paint another masterpiece”.

RT: Oh, I love that song. You’re in good company with Bob, eh? Ever dissatisfied poets/singer-songwriters.  You’ve touched a bit earlier on the influence of your music on your poetry, but I was wondering if you could expand on that a bit before we wrap up. How has your work in other fields influenced your approach to the writing and performance of poetry?

RD: At the heart of everything I do, I’m a poet. Through my late teens and early twenties I only wrote poetry. A little past my mid-twenties I started memorizing and performing my poems at poetry readings. In the mid-nineties Vancouver had a thriving underground poetry scene. There were readings nearly every night in cafes across the city, but mostly in East Vancouver. I became part of a poetry performance group called the Ducktape Platypus Poets Coalition. Honestly, we weren’t very good, but I guess we were entertaining because we had a local following. Bernie Radelfinger was part of that group and had been in the band Bob’s Your Uncle. He helped me write songs using lines from my poems and we’d perform them together with Bernie playing guitar. When I was in my early thirties I taught myself to play guitar and a couple years later I put out my first album and began touring. 

RT: What about playwriting? I understand that a play you wrote will be performed later this year?

RD: Yes, my first two act play (which I co-wrote with Samantha Pawliuk and David Bloom) will open the fall season at The Shadbolt Centre. 

I mostly write one-person plays which are long monologues, really, and they’re a form of dramatic speech that works partially through the use of poetic devices to a moment of personal discovery / transformation, which isn’t a far cry from the type of poems I write, I guess. So I think they’re extensions of my being a poet. 

RT: Do you have any other artistic “extensions” of your poetry?

RD: My latest obsession is street photography which I’ve been doing for four years now. Anvil Press commissioned a book of street photography from me that will be published in the fall of 2024. Like my poetry, my photography attempts to take a moment and freeze it. To make time stop. There’s something in that. And also my poems tend to—I hope—conjure strong images, and street photography is an attempt to capture a compelling image pulled from the chaos of the street. 

RT: I can’t wait to see more of them in the book next year. It should be a nice companion piece to Fishing for Leviathan.

Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich

The following interview is part one 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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Sockeye - Meghan Fandrich

People are fishing today
the Nlaka′pamux
dipping their nets into strong water
hanging deep red flesh
to dry in the wind
almost like
life goes on

my neighbour brought me a salmon
heavy gift
almost like she had always been next door
almost like her house
didn’t burn

I washed the dishes
sat down outside
watched a dry leaf shake
in the wind

almost like
I was ok

 Reprinted with permission
from Burning Sage
(Caitlin Press, 2023)

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Meghan Fandrich lives with her young daughter on the edge of Lytton, BC, the village that was destroyed by wildfire in 2021. She spent her childhood and much of her adult life there, in Nlaka’pamux Territory, where two rivers meet and sagebrush-covered hills reach up into mountains. For almost a decade, she ran Klowa Art Café, a beloved and vibrant part of the community; Klowa was lost to the flames. Burning Sage is Meghan’s debut poetry collection.

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Rob Taylor: Burning Sage is your debut poetry collection, written about the 2021 Lytton fire which destroyed your café, most of your neighbours’ houses, and almost your own. To say the least, it’s not your typical debut. Could you talk about the way this book came into being? 

Meghan Fandrich: When the fire destroyed our little village, it wasn’t just the buildings that were gone. It was my community, the place of my childhood memories and my daughter’s, and the future I was building for us there. It was everything that was normal in my life, everything I trusted would always be there. Past, present, future. All gone.

About a year later, summer meant another fire was burning homes and farms near Lytton. Support and stability, and even a precarious “new normal,” were still impossible. I was living in fear and trauma and knew I had to focus on something, a distraction, so that I could be a present parent—a present person—again. I decided I would do an art project for a friend (a love), the “you” of the poems: I would write out some memories and musings from my life, things we hadn’t talked about yet, little pieces that make up who I am. I decided to start with a memory from the fire.

Up until that point, I think, I had just been focused on survival, on single-parenting, on adjusting to life in an isolated burned-out place that kept getting hit with natural disasters, even after the first fire. I hadn’t stopped to think about it; I probably couldn’t have. I couldn’t have acknowledged the depth of the experience when I was in the worst of it.

So I sat down at the typewriter on the living room floor, and memories came pouring out. They weren’t the memories I expected, but instead subconscious memories, scenes and feelings that I had never put words to before, even in thought. When I took the page out of the typewriter and read the words, I started crying—for almost the first time since the fire.

RT: Was poetry something you’d written a lot before? Did it feel natural to find yourself processing your trauma in this way?

MF: I was surprised that the words emerged as poetry. I’m not a poet. I’d never written poems (other than the rhyming poems of Grade 6, of course). For the past decade, I hadn’t written at all, not even in my journal; I had only recently begun to journal again when I met the friend, the love, six months after the fire. There was no reason that the memories would come out as poetry. But they did.

And then, maybe an even bigger surprise: I felt the intense need to share what I wrote. I’ve never shared my writing before, and with that first poem, “Entrails”—and all that followed—there was the absolute need to share.

Instead of working on the art project for that friend, I kept writing. Each time a little memory of the last year would surface, I would write it out. And cry it out. I started writing poems as events happened, too, letting the emotions out immediately instead of suppressing them. The stack of pages beside the typewriter kept growing.

In one of the first poems in Burning Sage you write, of watching the fire burn, “we stood together / in silence // and then looked away.” So much of the book takes place in the personal and collective aftermath of the fire, showing what happened after the rest of the country “looked away.” You’ve spoken about how writing these poems was a way for you to be a more “present person.” How did poetry help you not “look away”?

For me, looking away was never an option. The fire was just a moment, and yes, in that moment we had the eyes of the world on us; but when the world looked away, we were still here, and the trauma was just beginning. We had to keep going. We had to keep living, even though everything had changed. And because the world looked away—because we existed as just that one moment in the eyes of others—we became invisible.

Trauma is isolating, even collective trauma. We all experienced that with the collective trauma of Covid, right? How we were all “in it together,” but each of us felt so alone. And it was the same with the fire. As we kept going, as we started to realize that there would be no immediate rebuilding, no quick return to normal, no “better than ever,” as the reality of the situation set in, we were each alone. Alone and invisible.

When I started writing the poems, and more importantly, when I started sharing them, I suddenly saw my own experience reflected in others’ faces. When the poems said, “This is how I feel,” I saw the readers nod in recognition. With tears in their eyes, they saw me. They gave me the gift of their emotions in response to mine, and I started to become visible.

RT: Two sources of invisibility in this book, which draw your anger, are the news media (“aggressive / bloodthirsty / cameras rolling”) and the government crews which cordoned off and leveled the town (“Keep your windows up, / they say… don’t look at us while we stand / and laugh”). Did writing Burning Sage give you a chance to speak back to these groups on your own terms? What do you hope they might take away with them if they read your book?

MF: The poems emerged, one by one, as fragments of that first year. I didn’t write them with any intention; I just had the need to get each of those memories out of me, out of my body, out of my subconscious. But when I read through the stack of poems, I saw that thread of anger and was able to acknowledge how harmful both entities—media and government—have been throughout this experience.

Since the fire, I’ve tried to speak with the media when possible, to advocate for my community and our ongoing struggle. Almost invariably, the reporter would bring the interview back to the moment of the fire, the moment of running from the flames. Reopen the wound and run that footage on the six o’ clock news. And it would feel like I only existed as that sensational moment of June 30, and now, after, I didn’t matter. I was invisible. The reporter would move on to the next story, and I would be left, shattered, to cope with my reopened trauma.

Overall, I wish the media would consider the harm they can cause. But some are doing it right: I’m grateful for journalist Francesca Fionda and the Climate Disaster Project, who are making a difference in how survivors’ stories are shared. 

And government… I don’t even know where to begin. Every level of government has failed us: municipal, provincial, and federal. And more than that, their complacency has augmented the trauma we have experienced. I don’t mean that in an abstract, emotional way, although there is that too. They have also failed to meet our basic needs, the minimum necessary for survival.

For example, between a six-month Do Not Consume Order and a three-month Boil Alert, the homes left in the Village of Lytton and Lytton First Nation’s IR17 had potable water for three out of the twelve months in that first year. It meant that in deep trauma, in an isolated burned-up town, we had to find drinkable water to keep our children alive.

A year after the fire, I attended an unmet needs committee meeting with other Lyttonites, various NGOs, and the Village of Lytton’s recovery team. We stressed that drinking water was still a primary unmet need. I remember very clearly that the recovery manager at the time, who worked for Lytton from the comfort of his home in the Okanagan, leaned back in his chair and said, “Look, you’ll get water when you get water.”

RT: That’s awful. And a window into a dynamic most of us in BC have yet to experience. In focusing on the aftermath of the fire, you offer readers a glimpse into the long-haul effects of forest fire destruction. 

In 2023 we suffered the worst fire season in BC history, and that record’s likely to be broken again soon. What do you wish you’d known in advance about the long road to recovery? What would you like to tell those who experienced losses in 2023, or those who might in the future?

MF: I don’t know if there’s anything I wished I would have known. Would it have helped with any of the trauma if I knew in advance that recovery—of the village, of ourselves—would take years? Would it have helped if I had known that the slow-moving and impersonal systems of government are incapable of adapting to pressing needs? Would it have helped to know that only time would get us through the worst of it, and not everyone would survive that journey? I don’t know. I think I would choose naïveté and have those truths unfold one at a time, as they have for me.

I do have a wish, though. I wish that my little book might help other survivors of climate disasters to feel that they’re not invisible, even after the media moves on. The book shares my very personal experience, but through sharing, through others bringing their own emotions to it or recognizing their own experience in it—their experience of loss and grief of any kind—it becomes universal, and the experience becomes shared experience. Does that make sense?

RT: Yes, very much so. The path to the universal must run through the particular. I think a great number of people will see their lives reflected in your book, even if they’ve never experienced a major fire. 

On this theme, despite Burning Sage‘s dramatic subject matter, relationships—some tender and loving, others strained—sit at the emotional heart of the book. This feels in keeping with the true nature of grief: all loss is personal loss. Could you talk about your decision to widen the scope of the book to include your personal relationships, such as the “friend (love)” you mentioned earlier? Was it a decision at all, or was this the only way you could think of approaching the subject matter?

MF: I think if I had decided, “I’m going to write a book about the fire,” the result would have been very different: less personal, less intimate. But the poems simply emerged as I processed individual memories, and the personal relationships were an inextricable part of those memories. 

One choice I did consciously make was to include the “breakup poems” in the book. I was already writing the book when the relationship ended, and those poems were written in all the pain and agony of that loss; as such, they feel more vulnerable than any of the other poems. But I had to include them, because the breakup, too, was part of the healing. I cried because my heart was broken, and then I couldn’t stop crying—weeks of crying on the living room floor. I couldn’t understand it, the extent of the grief, until a friend pointed out that I was finally crying out the fire and the impossible life after, and all of the struggles from before the fire too. Finally, finally, crying them out.

For me, more than anything, Burning Sage is a love story. I wrote it for and about one person; it’s about the way that one person saw past the moment of the fire, and saw me for who I am. And, feeling seen, I could see myself—no longer invisible—and the network of love and support and community that is all around me. What I mean is that love showed me that I was never, ever invisible.

RT: In “Fabric” you write about knitting something inspired by smoke: “dropped stitches / disrupted fabric / intentional deconstruction / damage.” This made me think of your poems which, in their raggedness and repetitions, convey panic, fear and breathlessness (as in “At Siska,” where “I am not ok” is repeated five times). Could you talk about the style you adopted in writing these poems? What are their dropped stitches and disruptions?

MF: I wish I had a good answer for you—I wish that any of it had been intentional. I didn’t consciously adopt any style; I just wrote the poems as they emerged. But maybe I can explain it a little.

After the first poem or two poured out, and I felt how cleansing it was to finally put those memories on paper, I wanted to keep writing. I would step into my memory just enough to see the flash of an image or the hint of a feeling, and that would be enough. Bare feet on hot asphalt. My daughter Helen covering my eyes. The numbness of the first visit to the ruins of my café. A fireball. A moment of intimacy. In a way, I would hold an emotion-memory in my mind, something that needed to come out, and I would start typing. And often the buried feelings surprised me as they emerged.

Each poem, then, is an emotional snapshot of that particular moment in my experience and in my memory. Does that make sense? So when “At Siska” repeats the hum of “I am not ok,” it’s because at that time—in the first hours and days after the fire—I didn’t know anything except that I wasn’t ok. Or when the nice tidy love-lines of “Highway 12” explode into messy fragmented lines at the reappearance of trauma, it’s because I was ripped out of quiet peace when we turned a corner in the road. It wasn’t intentional, and maybe it all surprised me.

Throughout the whole experience of life after the fire, there was never a smooth, unblemished fabric, except maybe in the briefest moments of love. But no, not even then. I would be ok for a minute, an hour, and then another stitch would come unravelled: at the memory of a mushroom cloud, or the smell of smoke, or the sight of an empty fridge with the closest grocery store now an hour away.

During and after the writing process, I spent countless hours editing the poems. At first they were all on the typewriter, and each set of revisions meant I would retype the whole stack of poems, weighing the changes, reading them aloud, adjusting spacing by a fraction of an inch or travelling a long path of synonyms to find the right word. That’s when I started to notice themes that run through the book, and to find meaning behind so many of the unintentional decisions. And editing, too, more than writing, gave me control over those memories. I could distill them down, refine them, make them beautiful, and they would no longer have control over me.

RT: You mentioned visiting the ruins of your café there. While your house survived, you lost your business, Klowa Art Café, to the fire. Are you planning to rebuild? 

MF: Klowa was a really special place, but I can’t rebuild. I had insurance that was enough to rebuild at the time of the fire; with the bureaucratic delays and narratives of toxicity and supply chain shortages and many other circumstances, though, the quotes a year later were coming in at more than double my policy limit. In other words, I would have had to find an additional $350,000 or more just to rebuild the little building that I had. Impossible. 

My only other option was to hire a lawyer to negotiate a settlement with the insurance company for the subjective “actual cash value” of the building, which was substantially lower than my insurance policy limit and, in the end, was just enough to pay the lawyer and clear the two mortgages that I’d still been paying on that burned-up property. The claim was finally settled in September 2023, two years and three months after the fire, and I own an empty piece of land where Klowa once stood.

RT: I’m so sorry. While you can’t rebuild Klowa, do you see writing Burning Sage as a small way of rebuilding what was lost?

MF: I was going to say no, that it hasn’t been a part of rebuilding what I lost, that it honours the memory but what’s gone is gone… but maybe I’m wrong. 

A little while ago, I was telling a dear friend—someone who lost her home to the fire—that a surprising part of sharing my experience with the world has been how people then share theirs with me: their story, their grief, their emotion. It’s as if through honesty and vulnerability and a raw form of beauty, the book makes them feel safe to be vulnerable, to be themselves. And she answered, “But Meghan, don’t you know that Klowa was that for us, too?”

Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze

This interview was first published in the Fall 2023 issue of The Antigonish Review.

Kindling – Gillian Sze

And after days of rain, it suddenly stops and we peer out the window, watch the grey lift. Across the street, someone from the city has set up around an old stump. The grinder whirrs away as chips spit out, amass into a velvet pile. My son, who has learned to climb, clambers onto a stool and plays the radiator like a piano. On tiptoes he regards the man in goggles, the slow work of shredding years and smoothing out land. Damp grass encircles an open wound. When he was just learning to crawl, my son and I sat on the kitchen floor counting knots in the wood. Now it’s just the two of us, each on two feet: one startled by how swift and brute the uprooting, another contemplating how to fly.

from Quiet Night Think

(ECW Press, 2022).

Reprinted with permission.

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Gillian Sze is the author of multiple poetry collections, including Peeling Rambutan, Redrafting Winter, and Panicle, which were finalists for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her new collection of poems and essays, Quiet Night Think, won the 2023 Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She resides in Montreal, where she teaches creative writing and literature.

Gillian Sze

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Rob Taylor: Quiet Night Think brings together poems and essays, which felt like a rarity in Canadian publishing until very recently (in addition to yours, new titles by Jonina Kirton, Nick Thran and Wanda-John Kehewin all mix the two). Why did you choose to bring the two together? 

Gillian Sze: I intended to write a book of essays, but, in the end, I found an important relationship between those pieces and the poems I was writing during that same period. So much of Quiet Night Think is about fragmentation—across identities, languages, times—and it made sense to embrace those fissures and leaps between genres. I think the point of the hybrid form was to give readers that same sense of halting, slowing, and quickening that I was experiencing as an anxious new mother. The winding of the sentence, the hiccups of the verse.

RT: Did you receive any resistance from your publisher about mixing genres in this way? 

Quiet Night Think (2023)

GS: No. I’ve worked with Michael Holmes at ECW on two other books, and he has always been supportive. Panicle, for example, also has a bit of everything: prose poems, long poems, creative translations, sketches… Quiet Night Think seemed like a natural place to go in our writer/editor relationship. 

RT: In the book's titular essay you quote William Carlos Williams, who defined a poem as "a thing made up of... words and the spaces between them." Later in the book, you provide your father's counterpoint: looking at your MA thesis of poems (and all the space around each poem), he declared "There's nothing here - it's empty!" Throughout the book, you embrace the "space between"—between words, between languages, between cultures. It's even right there on the cover: those big gaps between each of the words in the title! 

At the same time, your move towards essays feels like a filling in of that space, that "emptiness," which bridges a gap between your father's expectations and your own. Was that part of your motivation towards non-fiction? Does it allow you to navigate, or fill in, the spaces between languages and cultures?

GS: I certainly felt more exposed when I was writing the essays. Even on the page, the essay appears as solid blocks of text. I felt like there was nowhere to hide. I couldn’t disappear into thin air. The words string along into sentences. The research is revealed. The history is told. In that sense, I think the essay was useful for me. It was a form that best suited the telling of all these threads: history, research, and memory.

I love the poetic spaces that the reader can drop into. I remember my first encounter with Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho. I still like falling into those gaps. Reading poetry is like that, I think. The reader enters the poem, ultimately filling those spaces in their own way.

RT: That’s really interesting. I think many people would assume the opposite is true: that poetry, so spare on the page, is the genre that leaves you no place to hide. But I guess those gaps a poem leaves for the reader can also be hideouts for the poet’s full self.

GS: There is certainly an intimacy with the writing of poetry. I think of my earlier writing as rawer, more of my “full self.” Now I prefer to hide behind a persona, which I felt like I couldn’t do when writing the essays. I couldn’t fully escape the “non” in creative non-fiction. Fanny Howe defines the lyric as “a method of searching for something that can’t be found.” I like that—it feels like the poet invites the reader to search with them, or perhaps the poem launches the reader towards their own private discovery.

RT: In your essay "Sitting Inside the Moon," you write about the custom in Chinese culture for a mother to spend a month housebound after the birth of her child: "You come out of it no longer the same person and no longer the same poet.” Could you expand on that? 

GS: Becoming a mother made me realize the expanse of time I had before motherhood. I’m writing this to you while on a plane, by the way. I was an ocean away last week, alone, just being a poet. I had never been this far from my children ever. I was removed from the demands of them, the domesticity, the routine of a home life. Instead, I was attending translation workshops, performing my work, and discussing my poetry. It was luxurious. Even being able to mull over your questions and write these answers to you, alone on a dark plane somewhere between Sao Paolo and Montreal, is luxurious. 

I soon realized that as a brand new, breastfeeding mother, the time and concentration I once had for poetry was changing. I was following a different schedule, one that was intimately tied to my body and heart, and I was anxious about it all. How can I write when I’m so tired? How can I read when reading is forbidden during the month-long postpartum care? What am I missing out on when my daily life and thought processes have radically changed? 

Chinese postpartum care is essential for the new mother to recover, to heal, to strengthen. It’s only now that I see how this physical healing was also an important transition period for me to accept that writing isn’t always the act of writing. It is also experiencing, thinking, becoming. 

RT: In your essay "The Hesitant Gaze," you write of your desire to, like William Carlos Williams, "write with hesitance," pausing "at the sight of a leg, the taste of cold plums, a red wheelbarrow." Contrasting this desire towards the small and still are your comparatively large essays. Do you think these twin desires are in some way tied to your loss of that “expanse of time”? Some mix of the desire to observe and record a particularly vital time in life, and the lack of a physical capacity to do so? 

GS: I’ve always appreciated the small shapes of poems. I don’t think it’s a surprise that I recently turned to picture book writing (another short form with its own constraints). I wonder if the longer form of the essay came about because I was finishing up my dissertation when I was pregnant. Perhaps those sentences just seeped into my creative work! 

I was also reading about the lyric essay, which continues to fascinate me as a poet. The form straddles the essay and the lyric poem and moves, according to Deborah Tall and John D’Agata, “by association…by way of imagery or connotation…or sidewinding poetic logic.” Moreover, I think I was returning to the word “essay”—not the noun as we know it—but the verb “essayer” (to try). As students, we come to the essay fearfully, reluctantly. We learn it as a rigid form. Imagine my delight when I was learning that Montaigne, in Essais, was seen as playing on all the meanings of the word’s Latin root, “exagium,” which includes “trial,” “attempt,” “risk,” “exercise,” and “temptation.” He calls the essay “a ramble”—and I love the confusion and pleasure implied in that walking/talking description. G. K. Chesterton also calls the essay “the joke of literature.” Suddenly, the essay becomes a place one can wonder and wander and play.

RT: Amidst the changes in your writing, you've consistently written ekphrastic poems in response to works of art. In "The Hesitant Gaze," you write about the importance of a second "look" at a piece of art—a painting, a poem—as you, the viewer, will see it differently, having changed in the interim. This chimes with what you said about writing before/after "sitting inside the moon," and I'm curious to what extent you now think about ekphrastic writing differently. Do you now think about art in a different way than you used to?

Fish Bones (2009)

GS: I’m not sure if I view or think about art in a different way than before. Ekphrasis has always been an exercise of patience, attention, and free association. From the start, I think my approach to ekphrasis has always been loose and tendrilled. When I was working on my MA thesis (the basis of my ekphrastic collection Fish Bones), I wanted to move past pure description and traditional approaches. I chose not to include an appendix in that book because I wanted the poems to stand on their own, to have the artwork disappear, to let the words be the only things on which the reader leans. So I think I’ve always made that space for me to slip in. I continue to search for exhilarating encounters between me and works of art.

RT: In the essay “Perennials,” you write about your futile determination to weed your grass, and compare it with your determination to write: “I accepted [the] mundane hell of always starting over, condemned both at my desk and in my yard.” You close the essay with the image of blowing on dandelions: accepting what you cannot defeat. I’m curious about what you see as the writerly equivalent to that weeding-acceptance? A fallow period of not writing (“I was resting from poetry,” you write in a later essay)? Silence? Or perhaps the transformation from poetry to essay?

GS: I think it’s all of the above. There was an obsession, an ongoing-ness, to weeding and to writing that I felt keenly before becoming a mother. It’s still there, but it’s different. I think sitting in the moon, having children, taking a rest from writing, were experiences that were vital for me. I worried that if I wasn’t obsessing, I would cease to be a writer. My husband was far wiser; he was confident that the writing would return. His perspective was, of course, from beyond the moon. The blowing of the dandelion is an act of surrender. It was a gesture of pause, of mercy. It was an allowance to give myself a bit more time.

RT: As you returned to writing, did you come upon this book quickly? Did you write a stretch of poems, then essays (or vice-versa), or was the composition itself also intermingled? 

GS: This manuscript came together slowly and with little planning. The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec supported my proposed essay project, so when I realized they were willing to fund the book, I was more attentive to essay writing. I’m always writing poetry, so that was still going on, albeit more slowly. The first completed piece in the book that really inspired me to consider a full-length essay project was “Quiet Night Think.” The final piece to enter the manuscript was “Babble.” Interestingly, the first version of “Babble” was actually my first attempt at writing poetry after becoming a mother. I returned to the (terrible) scribblings of an early draft, saw it with clearer eyes, and revised it for the book. Time and forgetfulness are useful for a writer. 

RT: Ha! Absolutely. I don’t think I’d be able to edit without forgetfulness. 

A central theme of Quiet Night Think is coming to a better understanding of your parents with age (and with becoming a parent yourself). Poetry was a source of division earlier in your relationship with your parents, but it also seems like it might have offered a path back for you, via your own writing and the writing of others (perhaps Emily Dickinson especially, as explored in "Fricatives," the long poem which closes your book). Could you talk about the role poetry has played in your life as a source of both division and union?

GS: It really took time, experience, and learning, to realize the irony of how poetry found me, how it shaped me, and how it fits into my life. For example, my mother, who was unable to translate Li Bai for me when I was small and who still plays down her language abilities, was really the first poet in my life when she constructed my Chinese name. I don’t think she even considers it a poetic act, but it is: to ponder over and decide on my name’s meanings and sounds. That marked me from birth. My father, so against my literary pursuits, was the one who bought me my first poetry anthology, which I’ve kept close since. 

Growing up, I thought my family’s relationship towards poetry stemmed from their being of and from elsewhere, but I realize now how wrong I was. Chinese culture is full of poetry. The pictorial quality of Chinese characters. The economy and density of meaning. And poetry continues: in the musical Hokkien utterances between me and my children, in their linguistic errors because they live in three languages, in their own Chinese names, which are new poems “written” by my mother. The writing of this book was really a softening of so many parts: myself as a new mother (and a new writer), my relationship with my family, and all of us as imperfect, babbling humans.