How did you first come to poetry?
I read and wrote poetry as a child. Then I wrote plotless short stories for awhile. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that I was exposed to the writers whose work made poetry make sense to me as a form to focus on.
How does a poem begin?
With an image or sensory memory, combined with reading something that makes that image click into place, or makes real a possibility for transitioning it to language, or triggers a link to the right counterpoint. The reading is often poetry, but can also be fiction, nonfiction, a review of a film I haven’t seen, or a booklet on Nova Scotia lichens, for example.
Now that you’ve published a couple of full-length books, is there a difference in how you approach a poem? What have the challenges been?
I don’t think there is too much of a difference. I have always worked slowly, with lots of circling back and rearranging. I am starting to become more interested in longer poems, though—in beginnings that have the potential to keep unfolding and unfolding, maybe forever! The biggest challenges for me are finding the time/space, and maintaining belief in my own work.
Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?
There is no schedule. Writing begins in my head, somewhere in the spaces between/margins of walking to work, my email signature, a grocery list, washing grapes, the fifth repetition of a lullaby, the dream-traces of a poem read before falling asleep at night. I fight my way to my notebook at some point to make notes by hand, and then hope for a window where I can start typing up and shaping the lines.
What are your favourite print or online literary journals?
I’ve recently enjoyed issues of Arc, The Puritan, and Plenitude Magazine.
Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?
Some reads over the past while that have been
inspiring to me are: Jenny Offill’s Weather; Liz Howard’s Letters in
a Bruised Cosmos; Anna Quon’s Body Parts (a chapbook from Gaspereau
Press); Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread; The Collected
Stories of Leonora Carrington; Bardia Sinaee’s Intruder; Juliana
Spahr’s poem "Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache"… and many others
I’m sure I’m forgetting.
