2024 saw the publication of nine interviews here on the blog - seven originally published over at Read Local BC and one each from Arc Poetry Magazine (with Matt Rader) and The Antigonish Review (with Gillian Sze). I'll have at least as many new interviews coming your way in 2025, as I release my sixth-annual Read Local BC interview series, along with a couple other interviews elsewhere: Rhea Tregebov, Ali Blythe, Cecily Nicholson, Anita Lahey, and more. It's going to be a good year!
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| Weather, with its "Best of 2024" sticker! |
It was a ton of fun launching Weather this year and touring it around southern BC with Kevin Spenst (if you haven't already done so, check out Kevin's new book, A Bouquet Brought Back from Space). Some highlights of releasing the book have included a wonderful "hometown" launch in Port Moody; my essay on the book, "Some Notes on Writing Haiku," reaching many readers in both North America and further afield (it was reprinted in New Zealand!); a couple lovely reviews; and, recently, its being named a Miramichi Reader Book of the Year!
Enough preamble! On to my review of my favourite posts of the year:
October 2024: The Sponsoring Condition: An Interview with Matt Rader
November 2024: A Freely Given Gift: An Interview with Jess Housty
December 2024: You Are Your Own Landscape: An Interview with Onjana Yawnghwe
"Pain is very difficult to speak about except in symbols, metaphors, and analogies. It reminds me of poetry: the best poems can’t be paraphrased because how they say what they say is, to be tautological, what they say." - Matt Rader
October 2024: Halting, Slowing, Quickening: An Interview with Gillian Sze
"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." - Gillian Sze
October 2024: Becoming More Visible: An Interview with Meghan Fandrich
"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." - Meghan Fandrich
November 2024: The Silence of the Woods: An Interview with Rodney DeCroo
"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." - Rodney DeCroo
"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." - Jess Housty
November 2024: A Beautiful Constellation: An Interview with Samantha Nock
"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." - Samantha Nock
November 2024: The Hinge Where the Mysteries Lie: An Interview with Donna Kane
"I am... obsessed with the liminal space between one moment and the next. I feel like that hinge, that transition point, is where the real mysteries lie. I hadn’t actually thought about the silence of the blank space or pages between poems as reflecting this same sort of liminal space, but it’s a great observation. Because my poems have always focused more or less on the same subjects—the material world, phenomenology, consciousness—I feel they have always been in conversation with each other. I think any poem we read is in conversation with all the other poems we’ve read or written. " - Donna Kane
December 2024: You Are Your Own Landscape: An Interview with Onjana Yawnghwe
"It was important [for me] to get at an emotional truth that was authentic to my own experiences. I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true... Writing about my parents was a way to get out of my own head, an exercise in empathy and creation, a sort of “negative capability,” as Keats would say. I’m writing about myself, but not really—I’m putting on the page ideas that branch out and become larger than myself, a self that, after all, is an insignificant thing given the scope and nature of life itself." - Onjana Yawnghwe
December 2024: Amphibious Poetics: An Interview with Leanne Dunic
"When it comes to making art, I like to think of the idea of cross-training. Cross-training refers to using various modes of exercises outside of a central activity so that other muscles in the body are engaged and balanced in strength. For me, cross-training is key to my practice and involves me working in one discipline in order to keep my senses sharp in another." - Leanne Dunic
Happy New Year, all!