Interviews Archives | FreeFall Magazine

Interview with Yusuf Saadi

FreeFall Editor — Sun, 14 May 2023 18:00:22 +0000

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 Canadian Griffin
Poetry Prize for your debut collection Pluviophile (Nightwood Editions). A searching quality runs through these poems, as if home may be searched for in language. Can you talk about how this book came to be?

Yusuf Saadi: Thank you! It was a compilation of poems I’d written in my early 20’s until now. I certainly was looking for something resembling “home” at that time, whatever that fuzzy word meant to me, and I think I still am now, though I’m also perhaps realizing there may be no home in the way I once anticipated. I once thought family could be home. It hasn’t been for me. Traditions could be home. I feel estranged from them. Language could be home. Even English feels strange for me—lack of knowledge in Latin, Greek make me feel unconfident in it, and also of course knowledge of it as the colonial language. I feel like in interviews I put pressure on myself to know answers, but I really don’t have many. I think I’m still in the process of searching, maybe just slightly less naïve about it. Perhaps there are different kinds of homes. There are tangible ones, ones I could build with a partner and feel physically and emotionally secure. Conceptual ones, the ideas I hold that keep me above water. Emotional ones, artworks that I feel an affinity to. Being at home with myself? At this moment, I can’t think of there being for me in the world that we live in a singular “home” anymore that would simply be a static time/place/concept where I would feel at peace.

CG: ‘Why can’t we harness sound for energy.’ Yes to that powerful line from your poem “Amperage.” Perhaps that’s what poets do—harness sound through form and content. Can you talk about the importance of sound in your work?

YS: I think that’s largely what I appreciate in others’ poems. I enjoy the kind of writing which reminds us how language can speak to the body rather than just our rational capacity for ideas. How an atmosphere can be conveyed through rhythm, tone; how time can overlap through rhyme, assonance. Those are the elements that often really move me, and I suspect it’s because it’s reaching into the sensuousness of my body rather than a fragmented part of it and to a fuller sense of the connectedness of time.

CG: It seems to me there’s a fine line between ‘word’ and ‘world’ in your poems that in turn, carves out a route, a road map for the imagination. The searching creates as it unfolds through language—sound, image, meaning and rhythm—where making and meaning meet. Can you tell us about your process? What did writing this book teach you?

YS: I don’t think I’ve learned anything for certain about the imagination, but I do, like I would think most writers do, have an intuition that the imagination cannot simply be reduced to paltry fantasy. It seems to me imagination is somewhere between being real and unreal, and maybe poetry has something to do with opening up that space, of rejigging that relationship. A poet cannot simply utter a word and bring something into flesh as a God would, but maybe there’s a glimmer of that capacity as well as a desire to do so.

CG: There’s a timeless quality embedded in your poems that coincides with the modern. A meeting place where old meets new. Your poetry funnels inward and outward as it moves across time. I wonder if you could talk about this yoking.

YS: I imagine these are probably just tensions within me, and within most of us. A desire for introspection to better understand myself as an individual, but also to better understand the historical factors that shaped me. I also think many texts and images I allude to have the timeless quality, and perhaps that echoes through my own writing? Certain texts, religious texts for example, are just endlessly mysterious and ambiguous. Perhaps that’s what gives it the timelessness, because it’s going back to questions that are inherently unsolvable yet demand one take a stance on them and use styles that resist closure due to their ambiguity.

CG: How did the title come into being?

YS: I knew I wanted something short, and that was one of the options that popped into my head.

CG: Form is part of your poetics, particularly sonnets. Have you always been drawn to the sonnet? Do you start with form first? Or does writing the poem lead you to the form?

YS: I just find them not too short, not too long, but just right to frame a poem containing internal tensions. There’s breadth enough to pursue any idea, no matter how philosophical I am capable of exploring, but also short enough that I think it pressures me into condensing and layering my languages, ideas, and imagery.

CG: When / how did poetry enter your life? Was there a poem or poet that opened this portal for you and made you want to create?

YS: I always wanted to write fiction, but somehow landed on poetry.

CG: What’s next for Yusuf Saadi?

YS: I will continue juggling different aspects of my life. Hopefully reading and writing things that don’t simply repeat what I’ve done; I’m working on a novella and have a few new poems coming out in journals. Dealing with my insecurities. Trying to overcome faults. Trying to form new meaningful relationships. Trying to atone for mistakes. Trying to make change to the world. I recently wrote a poem that ends “I’ll never know its language perfectly, / but wordlessly I’ll consecrate this life / to salvage Bengal’s beauty—and this / is how I’ll love my mother’s country.” Things are looking grim with capitalism and the climate crisis. My ancestors’ home, prior to colonization, was the wealthiest in the world before the British plundered 45 trillion dollars from it, and now its literal existence is in danger because we’ve destabilized the climate to such an extent. I don’t think my poetry is explicitly political, but in my personal life I would like to try to be more of a political agent, which does not come easy to me. We need a revolution because capitalism’s growth imperative is a suicide pact, and I want to try to contribute to the possibility of that change and I hope to learn some ways to do so, become the kind of person who can do so, maybe even through poetry. Right now, that seems like our ethical obligation and what I’d like to anchor my time around.

Catherine Graham’s most recent book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award and The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. Her debut novel Quarry was a finalist for the Fred Kerner Book Award, Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction and won an IPPY Gold Medal for Fiction and The Miramichi Book Award for Best Fiction. A previous winner of TIFA’s Poetry NOW, she leads their monthly Book Club and interviews for By the Lake Book Club. Graham teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. Her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, appears spring 2022. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet

The post Interview with Yusuf Saadi appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Victoria Chang

FreeFall Editor — Sun, 07 May 2023 18:00:16 +0000

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize for OBIT (Copper Canyon Press). The book has around 70 obits, plus sonnets and tankas. It illustrates how death encompasses much more than the absence of a body. How grief expands as well as contracts. Can you tell us a bit about the journey behind this book?

Victoria Chang: The book came out much like other books and poems, but in this case, I was actively resisting writing elegies because I didn’t feel like I could contribute anything more to the vast library of wonderful elegies throughout history. I also didn’t feel like my experience with grief fit the traditional elegy form. And I didn’t want to debase my mother’s death or my own grief by writing about it. But, one day I was listening to NPR and they were talking about the documentary “Obit” and I went home and wrote 70 of these obituaries in two weeks.

CG: The poems are visually compelling. The obits resemble coffins or headstones. Tankas, urns or flowers. And the loose sonnets in the middle section float as they connect. What drew you to the obit form?

VC: It’s hard to say, really. The creative process is the biggest mystery of all. I think humans are infinitely creative and one of the unanswerable questions is where things come from, where ideas come from, where poems come from because I don’t think they come from a single place— they’re from a magical collision of millions of bits of experience. We have hundreds of ideas a day, maybe even more. Once in a while, we catch one in a basket and make something. And then the whole thing shatters, along with the basket and we’re left facing the void.

CG: I was curious about the ordering of the obits. Did you write them in the order they appear? If not, what was the process like putting the obits in order?

VC: The first poem (I looked it up) that I wrote was “The Bees … ” and it ended up in the back of the book. Putting together a book is different from writing. As I was writing, I certainly didn’t think that I was writing poems or anything I might share. I just felt like I was creating, making something out of my own grief, finding a way out of it. Putting a book together came much later and for me, at least, usually involves laying the poems out on the floor and grabbing whatever catches my eye, forming some kind of arc.

CG: Grief is an entity, a force, as if the unknown is calling to you “the way grief needs oxygen.” The obits explore the bones and body of grief. Can you talk about this energy? What has writing about grief taught you? Did you learn, through your engagement with language, new things about grief while writing this book?

VC: I wasn’t even sure what grief was because I had never really experienced this kind of grief before. And I’ve since thought longer and harder about why I felt a kind of grief that flattened me and a whole other book came out of that: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief which is coming out later this year. I think that when my mother died, my whole history, her whole history, our collective history evaporated. Because she was so secretive, I knew very little about her past which was also my own past. I learn while writing, which isn’t much different than learning to live while living. No one knows how to do this thing called life. In many ways, we’re all learning live, while being watched by everyone. It’s a strange thing, being alive. Knowing this, I don’t know why we aren’t more generous with each other.

CG: I appreciate your engagement with play and intuition. How it directs and guides you. I sense a deep trust in your process. It seems that you allowed each obit to organically unfold so the real and surreal have no border just as grief is both real and surreal. The Waves by Virginia Woolf was also part of your process. Can you tell us about the roles of play and intuition in your work?

VC: I am not a very top-down person by nature. I try hard to push out thoughts of hierarchy in my mind whenever they come. I try not to plan things unless I have to (for my job, for instance) and just go along with the flow of life. It can cause much consternation in my personal life and it probably hasn’t actually been very good for me in many ways, but to use a cliche, I feel like my life and the way my mind works is floating along on a river that has a lot of branches. I just go where it goes at the pace in which it goes, wherever, whenever, however. My life has had many twists and turns because of this. It is hard to pin down or explain. My writing process is no different. I suppose I don’t know how to be another way or how to write another way. On The Waves, I tote that book around sometimes and just open it to read a few lines here and there. The lyricism and mystery of the writing feels like traveling inside a cloud. Sometimes I’d open that book and pluck a word or phrase and try to use it in a poem in OBIT. I’m not sure why, but sometimes looking at words, any words, while writing, can help my own writing process. I think I am a visual learner, now that I think about. I get very bored listening to people. I love reading subtitles while watching Korean dramas or Chinese dramas, even when I understand what they are saying.

CG: To my mind the tankas placed throughout the book serve as breaks— fresh energy bursts as they balance the heavier weight of the obits. And with their focus on children—life at its freshest—they are also points of reprieve. How did tankas become part of the collection?

VC: I had finished these obits and was revising them actively. At some point, I had this feeling that I didn’t know how to write anymore (does one really ever “know” how to write anyway?) I decided to write some formal poetry just to write something. I wrote sestinas, villanelles, sonnets, ghazals, and they were all dreadful and went into the trash bin. But my friend told me that the tankas were speaking to the OBIT manuscript and suggested that I spread them out in the manuscript so I did. I read my poems aloud and whenever I felt I needed a break as a reader, I slotted in the tankas. They seemed to want to be in pairs for some reason. Maybe they were too resisting loneliness, as grief is a very lonely existence.

CG: It’s an arresting cover. Your image with an obit multiplied. By writing about death, did you feel you were also facing it? Perhaps this might relate to the line: ‘Death isn’t the enemy, knowledge of death is the enemy.’ Did you begin to see death in new ways after writing OBIT?

VC: I didn’t make the cover or give any input, which is exactly how I like it. I’m very aesthetically driven but I’m not a designer so I like people to do their jobs without my influence, not even a word. I just tell people to please please make it beautiful as an object. That’s my only prompt. Phil Kovacevich was the cover designer (and he did my other book too—Barbie Chang). The cover was a bit scary to me because I am superstitious (I’ve carried a lucky jade fish that my mother gave me, around in my purse my whole life), but everyone at Copper Canyon Press seemed to like that cover so I trusted them. On interpretation, you’d have to ask Phil why he designed it the way he did but I think he did a great job.

CG: What’s next for Victoria Chang?

VC: I have a new book of prose/hybrid writing and art coming out this fall from Milkweed Editions (Dear Memory) and there’s some neophyte visual art in there as well. I also finished a book of poems that is coming out next spring from Copper Canyon (The Trees Witness Everything). I don’t write regularly at all because I’m simply too busy to do so. I started writing OBIT in 2016 and finished in 2018. So since 2019, I’ve written a lot (for me, at least). I’m a little tired of that constant angsty mindset that I live in while I write and revise so it will be nice to take a break from that. I’m actually dreaming of taking a proper vacation which I think will be at the end of the year, early next year.

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Interview with Tracy K. Smith

FreeFall Editor — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 18:00:52 +0000

By Catherine Graham

Catherine Graham: Congratulations on being shortlisted for the 2021 International Griffin Poetry Prize along with Yi Lei and Changtai Bi for My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree (Graywolf Press). You worked closely with Changtai Bi (David) and Yi Lei to translate Lei’s work from the Chinese into American English. Sadly, Lei died before the completion of this book. Thanks to this bilingual translation, her name “will grow wide like a tree.” Can you tell us about your initial connection to Lei’s poetry? Do you remember your first reading of “A Single Woman’s Bedroom”? If so, what was that moment like for you?

Tracy K. Smith: I remember sitting down to read that poem during a moment in the day when my twins who were then infants were napping. Motherhood pulls you in so many new territories. There are disruptions, upheavals, new depths of exhaustion. I still remember feeling very much like a stranger to myself. And then Yi Lei’s voice on the page called to me. It almost felt like my known self was calling to the stranger I then felt myself to be. It was profound, and I knew I wanted to dwell in that space, and with that voice, for a lot longer.

CG: Before beginning the translations, you asked Lei: “Would it be okay, if in certain of my translations, instead of being faithful to the literal features of the poem, I sought to build a similar spirit or feeling for the readers of American English?” I imagine trust between you deepened when you received her consent. Was there something specific in Lei’s work that brought you to ask this question? Was receiving her permission a way of adding authenticity through the lens of another language?

TS: I think I was worried about trying to make things familiar to readers of American English that would inevitably be new or even “exotic” to them. I didn’t want to disrupt the feeling of intimacy the poems maintain. They remain intimate even at their moments of heightened collective urgency.

CG: Lei was writing about female sexual desire from a single woman’s perspective during a time when cohabitation was still illegal in China. The thread of desire and its many manifestations runs through her work along with the intimate and the infinite. Can you talk about these forces?

TS: The courage of that impulse in her work cannot be overstated. She insisted upon attesting to the realness and the profound validity of capacities the state sought to quell, to discredit. There are regions in every life that are subject to this kind of attack. What I love is that it is not anger, not blunt defiance that runs through these poems, but love, the desire to connect, the urge to be alive in one’s human fullness. Whoever you are, it’s enlarging and humanizing to be spoken to by a voice like that.

CG: Walt Whitman was a pivotal poet for Lei. We witness the celebration of self throughout the book—from “A Single Woman’s Bedroom” to “With Whitman.” As an American poet, did Whitman serve as a bridge or a source of connection during the translation process?

TS: I have studied Whitman and taught his poems. I harbour a sense of awe for the scale of his imagination, for the ways he is so instantly able to invest the rough and the real with the holy. But I’ll be honest and say that Yi Lei’s poems pulled him off of the public pedestal he had occupied in my mind and makes him feel intimate, familiar, human for me. I think part of that has to do with the ways she claimed him as a confidant in concerns that were private, and with the ways she made him useful to her experience not just as a human or a citizen, but as a woman.

CG: It seems to me that deep listening is an important part of the translation process. It helps the translator discover an underlying image base to carry the words forward into another language, as well as the sound and meaning. While working with David’s translations did your confidence grow? Your intuition? What was the journey like for you?

TS: I trusted David to take me through the literal narrative terrain of the poems, and to orient me to questions of tone and to referents beyond the scope of my own experience. I think he did such a good job at keeping me from feeling lost that I could allow something as subjective and willful as intuition to enter into the process. That was when I felt myself to be conversing with Yi Lei—not just with her words but with the feelings and wishes animating those words.

CG: What was it like working with David as the work went through its multistep translation process—from Chinese to literal English to American English and back to Chinese for Lei’s approval?

TS: David was patient, lightning-fast, and always so encouraging. Insecurity being the beast that it is, his encouragement—his way of always finding a way to tell me “you nailed something”— kept me from letting my own sense of inexperience and conspicuous difference hinder me. Mostly what I love about the process we shared are the meals, the talks, the long meandering ways I got to know the two of them across two languages and various other seeming borders.

CG: When the poems moved from Chinese to American English, a new space was created, a portal where three minds met. I wondered if you could talk about this space. If I recall correctly from our telephone conversation, you mentioned how Lei, even in death, continued to speak to you and helped guide you to complete this book. Can you tell us more about this ongoing connection?

TS: I am a credulous person. I rarely try to talk myself out of believing in the numinous, the uncanny, especially when it seems to come for the purpose of guidance or consolation. And so when I was trying to finish this book, I asked Yi Lei to help me. I asked her to show me how best to honor her and her poems. I asked her to give me a suggestion for the book’s title, and to let the poems I hadn’t yet translated but ought to include somehow call to me. I remember having this conversation with her out loud while sitting in a hotel room in Cleveland. And I don’t really know how to convince anyone disinclined to believe me that I felt her there with me, and I felt her agree to help.

CG: How has working on this book impacted your own poetics?

TS: I think Yi Lei’s rhythmic insistence got inside me. I feel that as an engine in the newer poems I’ve written. I also think that sense of wanting to serve as a medium—both in the literal terms I just described, but also in the figurative way that translation works—have lingered to shape some of my own process. And there are poems in Wade in the Water that feel like direct homages to Yi Lei—poems like “Eternity” and “The Everlasting Soul.”

CG: What’s next for Tracy K. Smith?

TS: I’m working on a book of essays about the collective American imagination. I wonder—will my experience of trying to tap into another person’s imagination and worldview come to the aid of that project?

Catherine Graham’s most recent book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award and The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. Her debut novel Quarry was a finalist for the Fred Kerner Book Award, Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction and won an IPPY Gold Medal for Fiction and The Miramichi Book Award for Best Fiction. A previous winner of TIFA’s Poetry NOW, she leads their monthly Book Club and interviews for By the Lake Book Club. Graham teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. Her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, appears spring 2022. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet

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The Quiet in Me: An Interview with Lorna Crozier

FreeFall Editor — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 18:00:29 +0000

The Quiet in Me: An Interview with Lorna Crozier

by Rosemary Griebel

Patrick Lane was revered as one of Canada’s most prolific and influential poets. When he died in 2019 at the age of seventy-nine, he left behind 25 collections of poetry, works of fiction and nonfiction, and a heart-broken community of readers, students, and friends.

In 2014, Patrick published Washita, a stunning collection of poems which was shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award. With Patrick’s death many of us thought this may be his final poetry book. But fortunately, there were more poems which Lorna Crozier, his wife and acclaimed fellow poet, has edited into a beautiful, moving collection of final poems. The Quiet In Me contains lyrical meditations on the connectivity of the natural world, life and death, memory, and what haunts us. In “Small Elegy” Patrick writes, “The silence of the dead is what we own. / It’s why we sing.” Only someone who has devoted his whole life to poetry could write so spare, while also conjuring such a wild, mysterious force, to the very end.

Rosemary Griebel: This posthumous collection of poems, The Quiet In Me, is such a beautiful gift to poetry readers. Did the editing of this book comfort and distract you from grief, or did it amplify Patrick’s silence?

Lorna Crozier: The editing of these poems didn’t comfort me and distract me, quite the opposite. I put off reading them closely for months because I knew it would be difficult to have to occupy his mind and his heart in the deep way that would be necessary to understand the poems, his intentions, and their demands as I tried to nudge them from early versions to the final drafts.

RG: In your Introduction to the collection, you mention that the editing of Patrick’s final poems “was a daunting task.” Can you speak further to that?

LC: The editing process drew Patrick out of silence for me. I began to talk to him out loud, to say things like, “I hope you’re okay if I take out this word,” etc. It wasn’t easy to make changes, even though they were usually minor, because we never did that to one another’s poems before. We’d make suggestions, sure, and write editing notes on the pages, but the final decision was always left up to the poet. This time I had to decide whether to follow my advice or not. He would not have tolerated that had he been alive. But he wasn’t, and I ended up saying to himself and to me, “Well, who better to do this?” We’d been living and writing in the same house for close to forty years, and there was no bigger admirer of his work than me.

RG: Were all the poems in this collection written after Washita, or did Patrick return to some earlier, unpublished pieces for the manuscript?

LC: I don’t know if all of these poems were written after Washita. Certainly most of them were, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few had been floating around before that. And a few I added to the folder he’d given me to seek my editorial opinion. “A Christmas Poem” is probably the oldest, predating Washita. He wrote it at the request of Peter Gzowski for Morningside. After his death, three others, “Fog on the South Shore,” “Icebergs Off Fogo Island,” and “The Sea Is Our Home” were sent to me by Kim Grey, the editor of the e-mag, Toque and Canoe. Patrick had written them when he came with me on a writing assignment to Fogo Island in 2016. He’d probably lost them, but I thought they were good enough to be included with the others he’d shown me as a possible manuscript.

RG: Patrick’s declining sight and debilitating health required him to adopt a more laboured way to put poem to paper, letter by slow letter. Can you talk about how his illness influenced the crafting of these final poems, and also his unwavering drive to create?

LC: One of the things that was so obvious about Patrick was his absolute dedication to his life work, the crafting of poetry. And in the last few decades, the writing of prose, first his memoir, then two novels. His last novel, Deep River Night, had been accepted for publication by M&S, but he fell ill in the middle of the editing process. I remember so clearly when he was in the hospital once again, he received an email from his editor suggesting that he write an entirely new first chapter. Though he was too sick to read or walk or carry on a conversation, he did it. And it is beautiful. Though he’d started a third novel, he ended up giving up on that because he couldn’t concentrate on the long stretches of time a novel demands. Even in his weakened state, though, he couldn’t give up on what defined him as a human being and his place in the world—finding the words to make sense of his time on earth. That’s how these poems got created; as long as he was breathing, he had to turn his internal music into language, he had to continue to sing his songs.

RG: You mention in the Introduction that even while dying Patrick’s greatest sorrow was the destruction of the natural world. Certainly, Patrick’s attentiveness and devotion to nature was detailed throughout his life’s work, but in this collection, it is even more pronounced and poignant. For example, in the poem” Bitter” he writes “It is the honey lands you will leave, / the land of the bees and the fat birds calling … Sift me with the withered seeds in your fists.” Can you comment on his connection to nature, particularly in his final years?

LC: I worried about how Patrick was going to be able to deal with the catastrophic effects of climate change. Of course, any thinking person gets upset by the news about the environment, but he was particularly sensitive to those stories. Part of that sensitivity comes from his early years as a hiker and over-nighter in the mountains of the Okanagan. He walked with coyotes and bob cats and moose and came to know their beauties and their habits. Part of it comes from a tenderness and empathy for the other creatures of the earth. Like William Blake who reminded us to see a world in a grain of sand, Patrick saw a world in a leaf, a wolf spider, a hummingbird’s small heart. He used to claim it was because he was born myopic and could only see things very close at hand. That made him pay attention to the intricate worlds of the miniature, moths and dragonflies and poverty grass, and see up close their intrinsic value and beauty. In his final years, this recognition hurt him because so much of the natural world that he had known and loved was disappearing and wouldn’t come back.

RG: Patrick writes in the beautiful elegy “Kintsugi”: “I am outside myself, without disguise. / There is only little left to know. Water returns to water. / The dew in my eyes, a moment ago an ocean.” Many of the poems speak to the circular nature of seasons, memory, and life itself. This circularity feels like a springboard to something more ineffable or transcendent. Can you comment?

LC: When I read these pages, I feel I am reading the work of a very wise man, one who has gone through difficult times, but who has never turned his eyes away from suffering. They’re the words, not of a young man who expects answers or surcease, but an older man who is looking back, even at his younger self, with clear eyes and a big heart. A man who also has learned to see what is in front of him and treasure it. A man who has studied the old texts and absorbed the teachings of the masters. He hears the ghosts and listens, but he also values the ones who are close to him now and is able to look back on his years, even his losses, without regret.

RG: Although the poems in this collection are aware of the beckoning finger of death, they are not filled with anguish or despair. In fact, the poems sing, and contain a certain wonder of the world that has always been present in Patrick’s poems, but particularly so in The Quiet In Me. Is this the work of a poet not only reconciled to death but welcoming it?

LC: Patrick never told me he thought he was dying. He kept saying, “All shall be well.” I don’t know if he was in denial or if he was trying to protect me from the sadness our talking about his demise would have brought to our last days. I regret that we didn’t talk about that now. After, when I went through his email to see if there was any business I needed to take care of, I found a note to our good friend, Sean Virgo. Patrick had written, “I can taste my death in my mouth.” So I guess he knew he wasn’t going to get better and perhaps he was reconciled to it. I don’t like to think he welcomed it, however. I don’t like to think that he was fine with leaving me.

RG: Patrick was a great teacher and mentor. What lessons do you think emerging poets might take from Patrick’s literary legacy?

LC: Patrick’s passion for poetry was without question at the centre of his life. He believed in honouring the local, in appreciating your place and your ancestors. He believed in being generous with the writing of others and in doing your own work with as much attention and love as you would bring a garden. He believed in the value of your own stories, no matter what kind of background you’d come from. He believed in learning from those who went before him and shaping one’s own voice, both influenced by the masters but marked by your own tenor and music. He believed in working through your words toward beauty and justice and respect for all living things. I think these are all lessons and part of his legacy to other poets.

Rosemary Griebel is a Calgary poet who is proud to have been both a student and friend of Patrick Lane. She considers Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier as wise mentors, and is grateful for all they have contributed to the Canadian literary landscape.

The post The Quiet in Me: An Interview with Lorna Crozier appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Terry Ann Carter

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 21:02:31 +0000

by Skylar Kay

Terry Ann Carter is an American born poet and paper artist who moved to Canada in 1965. Carter lives in Victoria, where she is the facilitator for the Haiku Arbutus Study Group. Author of seven collections of poetry and five haiku chapbooks, she is the past president of Haiku Canada, a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild. She is an active member in the Haiku community; her current projects include Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir (Ekstasis Press, 2020) and a collection of essays on pioneering women haiku poets in Canada (forthcoming in 2020 by catkin press.). Other publications include Tokaido, (Red Moon Press, 2017) a collection of haibun which won the Touchstone Distinguished Book Award in 2018, A Crazy Man Thinks He’s Ernest in Paris (Black Moss Press, 2010) was shortlisted for the Archibald Lampman Award, and day moon rising (Black Moss Press, 2012) was shortlisted for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award, among many others.

Skylar Kay: One part of Haiku in Canada which fascinates me is the in-depth discussion of distinct haiku groups based on location— The Magpie Haiku and Tanka group from Calgary, for example. I am not familiar with any other form of poetry that has as many groups, magazines, and conferences specifically dedicated to it. From your perspective, what are some unique features of haiku that cause this sense of community, and do you see such groups growing or shrinking?

Terry Ann Carter: The opening sentence in William J. Higginson’s seminal work on haiku (The Haiku Handbook: How to Write, Share and Teach Haiku, McGraw Hill Book Company, 1985) states, “The primary purpose of reading and writing haiku is sharing moments of our lives that have moved us, pieces of experience and perception that we offer or receive as gifts.” The operative word “sharing” leads me to believe that this unique feature of haiku poetry, leads to community. These communities or study groups are spread across Canada, and I feel they are growing. More and more people are becoming interested in this literary form, and are wishing to be part of a group of “kindred spirits” where sharing and learning can take place.

I facilitate such a study group in Victoria, British Columbia. Our first meeting was held in the winter of 2014, making “Haiku Arbutus” six years old. During the Covid experience, four local writers have inquired about joining our group.

SK: You have written many other books in or about a Japanese poetic tradition, both creative and educational—Tokaido and Lighting the Global Lantern for example. Is there a particular reason you felt compelled to write this book? Who would you say is your target audience?

TAC: This book followed an evolution of presentations and earlier drafts. In 2011, I was invited by Michael Dylan Welch to present a paper on the “History of Haiku in Canada” for the Haiku North America (HNA) conference, in Seattle Washington. Which I did. Shortly after that conference Brick Books approached me for an “online history of haiku in Canada” and I sent them the paper. It was published on their website and drew quite a bit of attention. Some of the attention had to do with errors, and important “bits” that I had left out, so I hit the drawing board, and continued to revise. At the time of the Haiku Canada conference in Victoria (2015) I posted a revised edition of the history which met with more responses and more critical thinking.

For the next several years, I researched all the study groups in Canada, the early anthologies, the pioneers, the Japanese haiku traditions in Canada, and the contemporary poets using haiku in abstract ways. It was exciting research and I loved every minute.

I think my target audience would be poetry lovers of all kinds, but I would like the book to make a deeper splash. I would like to see the book in the hands of anyone interested in history and literary culture in Canada. There are some marvellous poems here, so the book serves as a poetry resource, as well.

SK: This book was a long work in progress, several years! How did the aim or form of this project change from start to finish, and what were some of the influences (if any) that caused changes?

TAC: Through the years, and through my connections with haiku poets across Canada, the essay “History of Haiku in Canada” began to grow. In the middle of the process, I moved to the west coast (Victoria, British Columbia in 2012). By 2013 I had started the Haiku Arbutus Study Group in Victoria and became connected to the activities of the Victoria Nikkei Cultural Society. Through the kindness of Sally Ito, I met Dr. Susumu Tabata, and became interested in his story of writing haiku in an internment camp. This opened the door for more research on other camps and other writing. More regional haiku groups came into being. More books. More poems. More annual conferences for connections.

Finally, I had a collection of papers, newsletters, journals, emails, personal notes, letters, books, chapbooks—all pointing to the development of haiku in Canada; and the direction of the writing began to change. It was no longer the history I had started nine years ago, but rather a combination of “styles.” Some of the writing was formal (needed for the accuracy and “tone” of the historical facts); some scholarly (although I am no scholar); and some personal and anecdotal—for I knew so many of the poets, had attended their book launches, and read and re-read their poetry collections, reviews of their books, and essays on their techniques and content. Had fallen in love with their poetry. I wanted this book to contain poetry. Haiku poetry. How to make a gestalt from all these parts?

In early 2019, I revisited Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book. It simply fell off the shelf into my arms. And what a discovery. I was familiar with the work of this Heian Court writer, but this time the writing came under closer scrutiny. Her book was a recording of observations and musings—including essays, anecdotes, poems, opinions, interesting events in court, and her famous lists. Around 164 of them. It seemed as though I had found a “model,” and although Sei Shōnagon lived long before the concept of “haiku” (her poetry was waka, or tanka), it was her writing style “zuihitsu” or “assorted writing” that intrigued me. A perfect example of this “assorted writing” occurs when I use first and third person when referring to myself; everything depends upon context. My new title “Haiku in Canada: History, Poetry, Memoir” seemed more appropriate, and would allow me to share the historical details along with my own reflections.

SK: Like many other poetic forms, haiku finds its roots in an oral tradition. Most journals still present haiku in a solely typographical format, but what ways do you see haiku interacting with other forms of art, either visual or oral? What about haiku lends itself to this sort of synesthesia?

TAC: Haiku lends itself to wonderful collaboration with other arts, primarily visual. This new hybrid is called haiga, although it is not so new. When Japanese poets first began composing haiga (haiku with an image) the resulting work was usually in a form of calligraphy, each artist’s brushwork with ink (sumi-e) resulting in an individual style. Today, haiga artists use photography, pen and ink drawings, collage, watercolours, and more to produce haiga.

SK: In the final chapter of the book, you mention your collections Tokaido and Haiku from Cambodia which were written in Japan and Cambodia respectively. What would you say is the role of place when writing haiku, and what are some of the biggest differences, if any, you have noticed between haiku from Canada and haiku from other countries?

TAC: The role of place can be huge in composing haiku. The word for place is “ba” in Japanese, and I have attended entire conferences dedicated to this matter, alone. The first, and obvious difference in these kinds of poems, is the “naming” of places: street names, names of mountains or rivers, flora and fauna. I found when I was travelling in Australia, I wanted to learn everything I could about gum trees, about native birds, about local foods. The aspects of seasons that were different from my Canadian references. Haiku (usually) contain a “kigo” or reference to a season. Kigo differ from country to country. So interesting to discover.

My son and his family live in Panama. My granddaughter is learning Spanish and I am trying to learn with her. Language, or names of particular animals or foods or festivals become part of the immersion into another culture. When I was in Cambodia, I spent a great deal of time reflecting on the brutal history of that country, and tried to impart some of my understanding through haiku.

A second, and perhaps deeper “role of place” is trying to understand the development of haiku in that place. Canadian haiku has a deep rich history of experimentalism. It is a constant topic for research and study. I will be a student, forever.

SK: Speaking of place, Haiku in Canada begins with a section discussing the early history of haiku in Canada. Given that Canada placed many Japanese citizens in internment camps less than 80 years ago, how do you as a Canadian writer of a Japanese form navigate the potential appropriation of culture? Do you see these kinds of practices in place often?

TAC: I have never experienced any feeling of appropriation of culture as a haiku poet. My first concern would be how Japanese poets feel about this topic. And it has been my experience to be welcomed wholeheartedly into the Japanese haiku community. I have presented papers (with translators) at conferences in Japan, I have participated in renku (linked haiku) in Japan (with a translator), and most recently, I was asked to judge an international haiku contest by Morioka City Hall. (Morioka is the Japanese sister city for Victoria) I certainly do not propose to write as a Japanese poet.

In Japan there is an honouring of the five, seven, five, “sound not syllable” count. It was this very mistranslation in the early days that brought about the forceful teaching of the “five/ seven five RULE” in writing haiku. English is a very different language in its syllabic structure. Again, many conferences, scholarly papers, book reviews, blogs, haiku magazines (in English) continue to reinforce the concept that haiku should be written within that structure: in other words, a short line, a longer line, and then a return to the brief last line. But, counting syllables is not the main point. Capturing the moment is the essence of the composition. I always remember a haiku workshop that I gave at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, during the cherry blossom festival. A number of adults and a few teens signed up for the short presentation. I started off by asking everyone to write a haiku about cherry blossoms, and sure enough, everyone wrote a short poem about the blossoms using the five seven five structure.

The teenaged girl wrote:

The cherry blossoms
grow outside my front window.
They are beautiful.

I spoke very briefly about haiku. The two parts of the haiku. the big picture (the cosmos) and the small picture (yourself). Somehow tying these two things together in one instant. I spoke about the difference between blossoms (on the tree) and petals (fallen). I talked a bit about the “tone” of a haiku. How cherry petals falling might create a sense of something ending, something closing, something happening that was not pleasant.

Now my teen wrote:

cherry petal rain—
my father grounds me
for six weeks

So now, she was writing about her own life. The fact that her father had “grounded” her for six weeks was just the worst thing that could possibly happen to her.

Now, I felt that she was connected in a much deeper way than her first haiku which was just an observation. My teen was a young Japanese girl. She told me her grandmother wrote haiku but that she never thought about it. It was for “old people.” She told me how happy she was to learn about writing haiku in English. Her parents were both there. If I were to ever feel uncomfortable in a cultural situation, this might have been the moment. But both of her parents were wildly interested in “writing haiku in English”. We even laughed about the grounding.

I came away from that experience, and others, knowing that there are deep cultural differences in haiku composition. The very life fibre of Japan is filled with references so totally different from our North American ones. However, poets today, on both sides of the pond, are interested in sharing, in learning, in exchanging.

SK: Schools often teach that haiku have a 5-7-5 syllable structure, but often do not go further in depth than that. As someone who has taught at Royal Roads University and writes about how to create haiku, what space would you say haiku currently occupies in Western academia, and how/when do you see that evolving?

TAC: I am reassured by the fact that many poets and writers in general are pursuing an interest in haiku. More and more are leaning about “that mistranslation” from R. H. Blyth that sent most of North America into a mindset of “five/seven/five” thinking. Blyth mistook “on” or “sound” for syllable, and created the forced box of haiku thinking. With so many scholars working in the field (I begin with William J. Higginson) we have slowly come to realize that it is the moment, not the syllables that matter in a haiku construction. Most of us do not stray too far from this pattern, keeping a short line, a longer line and then a short line for reference. Then there is the matter of the “two parts” of a haiku, the phrase and the fragment. There is the seasonal reference (kigo) and the “cut” (kireji) that most haiku poets honour. But there is experimentation, innovation, creation. I am hopeful for continued interest in haiku.

And with this season of COVID upon us, I am seeing and reading more about this interest. People are slowing down. Going for walks. Observing closely. People are finding solace and refuge in nature. All good signs! I think haiku is a way for healing. A way to reach for the light, A way to devote one’s time and attention, and gratitude, toward the great cosmos that surrounds us.

Skylar Kay is a not-so-new writer who has a passion for Japanese forms, specifically haiku. Her work has appeared in several online and print journals, including Autumn Moon Haiku Journal and Ephemerae.

The post Interview with Terry Ann Carter appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

An Interview with Jenna Butler

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 21:37:07 +0000

By Jamal Ali

Jenna Butler is a poet, professor, essayist, and organic farmer. She teaches Creative Writing at Red Deer College. She is the author of a new travelogue and poetry collection, Magnetic North: Sea Voyage to Svalbard; an award-winning collection of ecological essays, A Profession of Hope: Farming on the Edge of the Grizzly Trail; and three critically acclaimed books of poetry, Seldom Seen Road, Wells, and Aphelion. Butler was born in Norwich, England. Jenna immigrated to Canada with her parents in the early 1980s. Jenna grew up within Edmonton’s vibrant literary community, but always possessed the desire to return to life on the land. Two decades later, Jenna and her husband began to build Larch Grove, their off-grid organic farm and artists’ retreat, on a quarter section near Barrhead, Alberta. In this interview, Butler talks about life on Larch Grove, her experience as writer in residence onboard a sailing vessel, “Antigua,” in the Norwegian Arctic, and poems from Magnetic North.

JA: What is life like on Larch Grove, your off-grid organic farm and artists’ retreat in Alberta’s North Country? Can you share your experiences?

JB: Our life at Larch Grove is closely tied to the seasons in a way that
is not necessarily true of our time in the city. The weather and the light dictate when everything can happen: spring is sowing-out time, after the last night frosts; summer means long, long days of work in the garden and fields with the late northern evenings, and it’s also the time for ongoing harvest of wild and domesticated food plants, and canning; autumn is the season for preparing the following year’s firewood and getting our home ready for the cold months ahead; and winter is the season of staying warm, resting, tracking on snowshoes in the forest, planning the coming year’s projects, and working our off-farm jobs (we are both teachers). Because we are off grid on the farm, the pace of our days is dictated by the amount of available sunlight for the solar panels and the power stored in our batteries. Cloudy days mean a much closer attentiveness to how many appliances we have plugged in, and switching from electric lights to candles where possible to conserve power. Because we also harvest or haul our own water, we are very careful to monitor our use in the house and garden so that we don’t take more than is sustainable.

People often comment that our life on the farm is a life that requires constant attention, and that’s true! I don’t think we’d have it any other way; that attentiveness keeps us present to the land we work with. We heat and cook with wood, and that requires attention to the wood stove in the form of (constant) chopping and hauling wood, and feeding the fire. We dry, can, and freeze much of our food, and that means keeping up with the garden through the growing season. And we work primarily with hand tools, so that requires us to use growing techniques that minimize weed growth in organic ways and allow us to more simply and efficiently keep up with tending the gardens. So, absolutely, it’s a way of life that requires more attention to everyday tasks that we wouldn’t think twice about in the city (turn on the thermostat and walk away!). But there’s something comforting about throwing the strength of our bodies behind a task, and about giving daily work the time it needs for completion. It re-dignifies the work of our hands and allows us to be present with the world.

JA: In 2014, you held a position as writer in residence onboard an ice— class barquentine sailing vessel, “Antigua,” in the Norwegian Arctic. Can you reflect on your experiences? Would you describe this experience as “novel” for a writer in residence?

JB: It was a surreal journey in so many ways. I’d prepared ahead of time as much as I could have done, but being there in person and interacting with the land impacted me in ways that I’m still processing. It’s one
thing to read about glaciers calving with the increased heat of climate change, but it’s another thing entirely to listen to them through the long, bright Arctic nights. I’d watched as many films on the Arctic as I could lay hands on before my trip, and read widely, but I was still floored by the tremendous evidence of human impact on the land. Everywhere we went, we picked up garbage from the beaches. It had floated thousands of kilometres to wash up on Spitsbergen. That, more than anything else, drove home to me exactly how deeply we impact other places around the globe through our actions, our choices, and our consumption.

Living in very close quarters onboard the ship was also something I hadn’t expected to impact me so deeply. I made some wonderful friends with whom I’m still very close, but as an introvert, the cramped spaces of the ship meant that there was no place to go to be alone or to recharge. I mean, you’re on a ship in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, and the closest land is peppered with polar bears. It’s not as though you can just get off and go for a walk when it strikes your fancy.

It was definitely a novel experience, and one that I am tremendously grateful for. I’m still walking with that landscape today, still journeying with some of the things I saw during that trip, and the things I felt. Voyages like that one are as much emotional and internal as they are physical and external.

JA: The following lines in your poem, “Night,” page 20 of your poetry collection, Magnetic North, Section 1, stuns my imagination: “Night is non- existent, circadian cranked to overtime. No twilight, / no dusk, no dawn.” How did you feel in this setting with respect to the above-mentioned lines from your poem? Was it overwhelming?

JB: It was absolutely overwhelming, but in the sense that we dropped into this 24-hour daylight for a few short weeks and then left again. I think it was the sudden change that struck so hard; when I left Canada, although the days were long leading up to the solstice, we still had a few hours of darkness at night. But when I arrived in Longyearbyen, the light was up
to 24 hours a day. That sudden shift was jarring for most of us on the voyage. There’s something about going very rapidly into constant daylight that disrupts the rhythms of the body. I found that, although I managed to sleep for a few hours every night, my body never felt as though it achieved deep rest. By the end of the trip, I had tremors in my hands.

At the same time, though, the bright Arctic nights afforded amazing opportunities to observe the land in solitude. There were many nights when I popped up on deck at two or three in the morning and watched the sea birds or the whales, or listened to the glaciers calving and the ice creaking. I don’t know that I’d choose to jump from dark nights
to 24-hour light again in such a sudden way, but I wouldn’t be averse to being in a northern location again and experiencing the full progression from the dark of winter to the light of summer.

JA: The lines in your poem, “Afloat,” page 51, Section 4 provokes deep thought: “Day Twelve: a sheltered bay where we hike melting permafrost, boots / filling with water that has not been water for eight thousand years.” What do these lines reveal about the impact of climate change in this polar environment?

JB: There’s so clearly an impact. Climate change is happening everywhere —witness the increasing unpredictability of global weather events and
the growing number of climate refugees around the world. The Arctic is widely considered the canary in the coal mine for global warming, and that’s what I witnessed in Svalbard. The glaciers, calving constantly. The permafrost squelching under our boots when we made landfall in the

Zodiacs to go hiking. The flooding of the Svalbard Seed Vault a few short years after our voyage. And then I came home, and four years after my Arctic journey, my husband and I had to move our entire farm from one end of the quarter section to the higher ground at the other because our county was experiencing horrible floods for the second time in five years. What the Arctic showed me, more than anything, was how interconnected these climate events are. I heard the glaciers constantly calving when we were onboard the ship, and then I went back home and the Fort McMurray fire happened. California and B.C. burned. Our farm flooded. And there are so many stories like this—the impacts are felt all over the world. Everywhere, these links.

JA: In the title page of your poem, “At the Face,” page 71, you quoted John Muir, the Scottish-American naturalist, author, and environmental philosopher: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people
are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home, that wildness is a necessity.” What are your thoughts on this quote in relation to your poem, “At the Face?”

JB: I saw that quotation by Muir in an exhibit at the museum in Svalbard, and it made me think, people everywhere are tied together in this deep desire to connect with the land in a meaningful way. I was thinking in terms of North Americans, particularly, where we live these high-octane, ridiculously paced lives that are widely recognized as having some of the most detrimental impacts on physical and mental wellbeing in the world. But the fact that the quotation was there, too, in an exhibit in Norway, spoke to this global desire to get out of our own heads, our own constructed spaces, and reconnect with the land that lies at the heart of everything. In “At the Face,” I’m breaking down some of the many, many ways in which that human/land disconnect happens: disrespect, lack of understanding, this strange need to create hierarchies, the devaluing of deep knowledge of land and place. In the poem, I’m playing with the ability of glaciers to reflect major environmental events in the particulate captured in the ice (ash from volcanic eruptions and so forth). When I was crafting the poem, I started thinking, well, if glacier ice can reflect an eruption that happened a thousand years ago, what if it could reflect specific human-created events, too? Industrial catastrophes. Wars. I used the poem to explore the increasing human impact on the land, and in the back of my mind, I was thinking, What will the future glacier ice reflect, if the glaciers are in almost constant recession and melting at this phenomenal rate? Will people in the future be able to see anything of the past reflected back at them?

JA: The opening line in your poem, “Song to the Boreal,” page 90, Section 1 is powerful: “I return home craving the forest.” With respect to the poem’s opening line, and the poem as a whole, can you describe the transition in your journey from the islands of Svalbard to your home in Alberta’s North Country?

JB: It took a long time to come home. The physical journey itself was relatively short, about a day and a half of solid travel from Svalbard back home to the Alberta boreal. The emotional journey took a lot longer. It’s probably cliché to say that Svalbard broke me open, but it did, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that, and my gratitude to the land that set me on a journey of some pretty deep emotional work when I’d come back home.

Two things stood out to me on returning to Alberta, and they were things I tried to reflect in “Song to the Boreal.” The first was the deep reverence I hold for the land I live on, the gratitude I feel to be there. The second was how intrinsic the connections are between all these places —Svalbard, the northern boreal, the Pacific Ocean—everywhere, they’re all linked. It’s common sense, but perhaps it doesn’t come home to us in quite so visceral a way if we’re only seeing the impacts of our changing climate somewhere else. But when we’re away, and then we come home again and see the same impacts, even though they might manifest in different ways, we start to draw long connections. In “Song to the Boreal,” I returned home craving connection to the space I knew, but also drawing threads of a larger connection with me across the Atlantic. The poem became a way of greeting and thanking the land I live on, and also of seeing powerful commonalities between this land and Svalbard. I came home again, but it was with an entirely different awareness and a renewed desire to walk with integrity in the place that I live.

Jamal Ali enjoys reading his poems at Single Onion Open Mic poetry events held every fourth Monday of the month at Good Earth Cafe located on 1502 11th Street SW in Calgary. For the month of May 2019, Jamal was the feature poet. It was his first feature.

The post An Interview with Jenna Butler appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Stella Leventoyannis Harvey

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 21:42:24 +0000

Stella Leventoyannis Harvey is a Canadian author and the founder and artistic director of the Whistler Writing Society. Harvey was born in Cairo, Egypt and immigrated to Calgary, Alberta with her family as a child. She now lives in Whistler, British Columbia. Her books include Nicolai’s Dauhgters, The Brink of Freedom, and her latest book Finding Callidora. Crystal sat down with Stella to discuss Finding Callidora and what it means to write about family.

Crystal Mackenzie: This story encompasses your own family history. What inspired you to do this and make it into a novel?

Stella Leventoyanis Harvey: That’s a good question. I think, for me, and I say this often, is I missed my culture my entire life. The hole where home is, belonging, probably my entire life, and I have always been very interested in that, and so I started to do some research trying to find out. Listening to stories is the other part of it, my parents would tell us all these stories about life before Canada and piecing those things together was really interesting for me, so I started to look for my family, my extended family. I was in Greece at one point and I was asking my aunt some questions about where we were from in the Peloponnese, and she said when she was younger, she had gone to the village where we were from, which was Kyparissia, and she’d asked somebody about the family lot, the family land, and the person looked at her suspiciously and said “are you with us or are you against us,” you know, this whole thing about royalists versus the Prime Minister. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but the man said to her “we need to know what side you are on, because there was a family vendetta.” And when she used that word “vendetta,” it was like a lightning bolt went off. How could there be a family vendetta? Where did it come from? What are the roots of it? All of these questions started popping up in my head about this word and it wouldn’t let me go. So that, and a bunch of experiences in meeting my extended family while I was in Greece, by accident, sort of started me down that road.

CM: How much of the details are drawn from your family’s past and how much creative license did you afford yourself?

SLH: The book is separated into four parts. And really, you know, I knew, for example, that my grandfather had been had been in WWI and in the Turkish/Greek conflict. I knew he had a brother that he never connected with after and, because they were both in the war, they assumed he died. I knew sort of where the family was from. So, the first section is totally made up because I have no idea about this vendetta, why would there be a vendetta, what could have possibly happened, so that is all made up because whatever the truth is, is long gone with the people that are long gone. But I wondered about that, so I made that part up. In sections two and three there is some family history and there is a lot of license, because I just don’t know and nobody’s around to tell me anymore. Then the last part of the book, which is the most recent Callidora, is, for the most part, fairly accurate, because I know that that side of the story, that generation. It is my experience. There is a lot less license in that part of the novel as there is in the rest of the novel.

CM: In the second and third part you have some characters that find each other again, like Yanni, who would be your uncle, spends part of his youth living with a cousin, Sofia, and his father’s sister, Katarina. Katarina and Yanni’s father have not seen each other since he left home for war. Yanni also meets up with the rebel girl, Chloe, who has a family connection, as well. Is Sophia based on a real character, is there a Sophia in your life that did have some of the knowledge?

SLH: Not really. There is an actual Sophia, but it wasn’t someone that passed anything on. I wish I knew more of the history and the background, but like all Greek tragedies you have to make some of it up.

CM: Did you always know it would be a book, or did that evolve as you were doing research?

SLH: It evolved as I was doing research. The word vendetta sent me down this particular path, and the accidental meeting of an extended family member that no one, including my father, knew about also took me down this particular path. But yes, I knew it was going to be a novel and that there were some things that I wanted to experiment with like, for example, each section of the novel has a different protagonist that is related to the original matriarch and patriarch of the family. I knew I wanted to experiment with that as opposed to having one story of one or two characters throughout. The other thing of it was, my family was always really interested in history and in politics and in newspapers. My father always read a lot of newspapers, I read a lot, and so I wanted to portray what was going on at the time, what was happening globally in the world, and reflect that in the characters and what was going on for them personally. I think it was always going to be a novel, but it was these other things like the vendetta word, and the meeting of the extended family that really sent me down the road.

CM: One of your cousins in the USA also has the name Stella, is Stella a family name the way Callidora is?

SLH: Yes. It was my grandmother’s name. There are three of us in my generation, also a cousin in Greece, with her name. I think it’s very traditional in the Mediterranean culture. It might also be of other cultures, I don’t know, but certainly in the Mediterranean culture.

CM: The book spans four generations, almost 100 years, which includes some really big historical events like World Wars, civil wars, immigration, rebellions. The book makes great leaps forward in time, with a headline from that time period beginning each chapter. This technique really helps orientate the reader in time and place. What gave you the idea to use headlines to help focus the reader, and what was the process of choosing just the right ones?

SLH: The idea was actually not mine. I belong to a critique group in Whistler and we review each other’s work. When we get to a completed work like a novel, they agree to read the whole thing. Someone in my group said, well it’s really interesting that newspapers and politics and all of these things are so important to the all these characters, have you thought about using headlines as chapter headings? And I went, no, I didn’t. But, in the research of the book, I had found a number of headlines because I wanted to know what was going on in that time, so I thought about it and I started to look for other headlines given the years, and it just worked really well because it shows you what’s going on in the world at the time and keeps you grounded, because the novel does span 100 years. There are various characters in the 4 sections, so how to keep them connected, who are they, what’s going on, all of that stuff, the headlines actually place the reader, so it really worked well. I’d written to a number of Greek newspapers, some of whom did not get back to me. I had spent some time in a library in Athens, just an incredible experience because Lord Byron had been in this particular library (the Gennadius Library) and his writing pen was in the cabinet, and I contacted that librarian and she sent me a bunch of headlines. I contacted Pier 21, and the researcher who contacted me back was incredibly helpful and excited about the project, so he sent me some headlines that were really great about the immigrant experience coming to Canada. I started to comb things like the Globe and Mail. Ernest Hemingway was with the Toronto Star, so I looked up archives of the Toronto Star to see some of the headlines from him because he was in Turkey at the time of Greek Turkish war and writing for the Toronto Star. It was a long hard process. Lots of contacts and lots of internet searches. Some newspapers just don’t have that kind of archive, and others do: the New York Times was excellent, The Globe and Mail, excellent, the Toronto Star. Even in the Egyptian papers I was able to find some things, like one headline, “Peacemaker dies,” which is about Anwar Sadat when he was assassinated. And then finding the right headline for the year. I remember, when doing edits, realizing there were a couple headlines that were off from the years I wanted them to be, so I had to go back and find some new headlines that reflected what was going on in the world.

CM: Yes, it was layered like that. Every headline put you in that time and space.

SLH: That’s what I wanted, I wanted it to mean something to the characters as well, which was really important to me because they were such news junkies as I am, that it reflected that too. In fiction, I think you want to use techniques and processes that reflect character, setting, place, storyline, and controversies in the crisis, the tension that is going on within a character, within the storyline.

CM: I’d like to touch on the story of actually finding Callidora, that land. It seems like a crazy, far-fetched coincidental, too good to be true kind of story, but that is how you finally found it. Can you tell me that story.

SLH: Yeah, it was just such an interesting thing. I had gone to Kyparissia many times on my own and tried to find someone who would talk to me about the land. I had found grave sites and went to City Hall and I found a woman who was very helpful in terms of finding my family history: My grandfather, his siblings, my great grandfather’s name, all of that kind of stuff, and had a person who happen to speak English in the office write it out, but I’ve never been there with my father. And so I said to my dad you know when we go back to Greece together you are going to have to come with me to Kyparissia, because my father was fluent in Greek, and I thought he would make more inroads then I could in my terrible Greek. We stayed in this B&B, and I said to the owner, “I’m searching for my family history” and he said “yes, you foreigners all like to do that sort of thing. We don’t have to because family is all around us, our history is all around us.” He told me to go to a land registry office, which is in the book, and I asked the lady there and she looked at me and said, “well do you know any coordinates of this place?” and I said, no, I thought maybe you could help me, and she goes, “you know it’s just like in your country, you need to have the information about the property so we can find it for you.” Okay, well I guess that’s not going anywhere. So we’re walking down the road going back to the hotel, and I said to my dad, I think we’ve done everything that we possibly can to find this, I don’t think we can do anymore. The people are long gone, even my father at that point was in his late 80s, so I said, I don’t think we’re going to find it, and just as I said that a truck went by with Leventoyannis, which is my maiden name, my father’s name, my family name, on the truck. And he stops a block away. He was picking up his son because he was going to Kalamata to deliver watermelon. I spoke to him through my father and he said, “I don’t know if we’re related, but here’s my number, call me and I will ask my father.” My own father said, oh, don’t bother the man, we’re not related, Leventoyannis is very typical name of the Peloponnese, but of course I never listened to my father, so I phoned him, and the next day his father came to the hotel. We talked and I had my family tree and he was repeating certain names and I wasn’t quite sure and then he said, páme, which is let’s go. He took us to his farm, and he made us a meal, and he got on the phone with someone in Athens, a cousin, who was asking my father all sorts of questions. I figured there must be some relation because they were talking about my aunts, they were talking about my uncle, names I knew. So, we’re going back, he’s dropping us back off at the hotel, and he says to my father, see that piece of land over there, and my father said yes, and he says, I don’t know why it always had a name, a woman’s name, Garifalia, which is Daisy in English, and I just began to sob. I said Dad, that’s my great grandmother’s name, your grandmother’s name. It was just an incredible thing, just by accident. In the book and in life, I have found things, like my American cousins, by accident. I think when things are meant to come together, they do. Like when you search, and search, and search, as I’ve been doing, I think it just somehow comes together. I don’t know why or how, but even with my paternal grandmother, we walked into the town where I knew she was born and I asked the woman at the bar about my grandmother’s name, and she goes out in the middle of the street, yells up at another woman, and the woman says, oh was her father’s name Yanni? I said no, that was my uncle, so she knew my grandmother, Stella. You know, it’s shocking to me, but I think when you look you find, you search you find, or maybe it was just luck. I don’t know, but I just feel very lucky. Yes, my novel is fiction, but some of the story contained in the book really happened.

CM: This book captures the complicated relationship people have with family, land, and home and as immigrants, this relationship is even more complicated. The Alevizopoulos family is three generations displaced from their homeland when they arrive in Canada, but they are Greek from heart to head to toe. What does Greece, that land, mean to the Alevizopoulos family, and what does that land mean to you?

SLH: I think it depends on who in the family you’re talking to. I’m not sure it means the same to my siblings who were younger when they came to Canada, as it means to me. I fell in love with Greece as a teenager when we went back for the first time, with the country, with the land, with the people, with everything about it. We never gave up our heritage either, even though in Calgary it was very difficult to get things like feta cheese back in the 60s in the 70s, my parents found a way. My mother would make everything Greek, we would celebrate Greek Orthodox Easter, we would celebrate Christmas in the Greek way, so I grew up with these traditions that my parents never let go of. For me, that’s my connection to home. Someone at a reading I did asked me, do you know who you are now and where you belong? and while Whistler will always be my home, it’s the longest place I’ve lived in my whole life, there’s always going to be a part of me that home is somewhere else. When the plane comes in to Athens, flying over the beach on the outskirts of Athens, I start to feel it and when it lands, I feel like I’m going home.

CM: Did you have or have you since the book was published come across any resistance from family members for telling the family story?

SLH: Not really. My Greek cousins have not read the book yet. My American cousins were the ones that I was most worried about just because of my uncle’s history. They read it and they just felt sad because they got an insight into something they didn’t have before. I mean, I asked them for permission, whereas with my Greek cousins it wasn’t as big a deal because I don’t really delve that much into that part of the family history. I was mostly worried about my American cousins, because there are some very sensitive issues that come up in there.

CM: There’s a scene were Callidora and her mother are shopping at the Safeway, and it made me think of how much food is important in a culture, and what a change this Safeway would be compared to a market back in Greece or Egypt, but also a comfort. What role do you think having that Safeway so close to home for the Alevizopoulos family and for your family would be?

SLH: My mother in particular loved the market, we’re the talkers in the family, so going to the markets—and it was the same for me when I lived in Italy for two years—at the market you know the people, talk to people, the market is more than food, it’s food, but it’s also your social network. I lived in Italy and after I left, for longest time, we would go back every two years and we’d stay in a hotel in the same neighborhood and Bruno, my market guy, would go “Stella, where’ve you been?” because I went to see him every Saturday. Even though I was a foreigner, it was like going home.

CM: As a historical fiction writer, what is the difference between historical fiction and creative nonfiction?

SLH: That’s a hard one. Creative nonfiction is nonfiction right, it is based on true events. I mean, historical fiction can also be based on true events, like my first book Nicolai’s Daughters is also historical fiction in that its parameters are the history of a particular country, so those are true events, but everything else is fiction. None of those individuals are true, no characters are true, all of that kind of stuff. Whereas creative nonfiction is 80 to 90%, true, so, you’re using real names, typically, you’re using real events, things that have happened, etc. Creative nonfiction would be memoir, personal narrative, essay, something that is not just based on the truth but at its core is the truth. The difference between Nicolai’s Daughters and Finding Callidora, is that the latter was much more autobiographical and historical, whereas in Nicolai’s Daughters I used history as place marks for what was going on at the time and the impact of war on this particular family. WWII was the part that was real, everything else was made-up.

CM: Thank you Stella for your time and for sharing your family with the world. Finding Callidora was such an interesting read and really made me think about the concept of home, land, and family connection. Thank you.

Crystal MacKenzie is an author and editor from Calgary, Alberta. She is the Editor in Chief of FreeFall Magazine.

The post Interview with Stella Leventoyannis Harvey appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Denise Chong

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 20:17:42 +0000

by Jamal Ali

A third-generation Chinese-Canadian, Denise Chong, the internationally published and award-winning writer, was born in Vancouver and raised in Prince George. She studied economics at the University of British Columbia earning her bachelor’s degree in 1975. She received an MA in Economics and Public Policy from the University of Toronto in 1978. Denise began her working life in the federal finance department and went on to become senior economic advisor in the office of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. After Trudeau’s retirement in 1984, Chong left her role as a public servant in order to pursue a career as a professional writer. Chong is the author of the following non-fiction books of literary non-fiction: The Concubine’s Children, The Girl in the Picture, Egg on Mao and Lives of the Family. Denise Chong was the 2017-2018 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary’s Distinguished Writers Program. She lives in Ottawa with her family.

Jamal Ali: Can you reflect on your career as an economist with the Federal Government in Ottawa? What was it like?

Denise Chong: My siblings and I were the first generation of our family to go to university. My goal of academic training was to land me a job, not only to apply and test what I had learned, and to learn more, but I had student loans to pay back. I graduated in the 1970s. As a product of the Trudeaumania that swept the country in the 1960s, I headed for Ottawa, wanting to be part of a progressive vision for a more enlightened society. For sure, working in government was a satisfying start to my working career, more particularly when I moved on from the Finance department to join the office of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. From Pierre Trudeau, I learned the importance of intellectual rigor, which has sustained me in my writing career.

JA: What inspired you to pursue professional writing?

DC: While I had always wanted to write, I recognize the luck involved in one’s career. Many write, and will write well on important and timely subjects. I was lucky in my time; I first wrote The Concubine’s Children as a feature-length article in a magazine. That was my first such article; publishers came to me with proposals to have me turn that into a book.

JA: You are best known for The Concubine’s Children, a memoir of your three generations of family set between Canada and China. How did the idea for this book come about? Can you share your personal experience in the writing process of the book? The Concubine’s Children has won several awards including: The “City of Vancouver Book Award” in 1994, The “Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction,” and The “VanCity Book Prize.” Knowing that this is your first book, what was your reaction about this work of Creative Non-Fiction winning several awards? How did you feel?

DC: The book began with a nagging curiosity since early childhood of trying to make sense of my origins. My family had a mere handful of black and white photographs from my mother’s side of the family, which was all that we had of her past; anything of value had long gone the way of the pawnshop with the death of the last surviving grandparent. Among those photographs was one of two sisters, marooned in China and whom my mother had never met, and we didn’t even know if they were dead or alive. It was on a trip to China, with my mother, then almost sixty years old, when we found one of those sisters alive that I decided only an act of writing could retrieve the past and restore the two halves of the family.

For certain, that first book’s success helped launch me as a published author and led to my next book, in terms of my writing life, the thinking and reflection that I brought to that first book affirmed a sense of family as providing a scaffolding for storytelling; it can wrap in its embrace the tumult of history and politics, it crosses generations and even continents.

JA: Your second book, The Girl in the Picture, is described by Amazon.ca: “A rare look at the Vietnam War from the Vietnamese point-of-view and one of the only books to describe everyday life in the wake of this war and to probe its lingering effects on all its participants.” What are your thoughts on this description?

DC: I believe that stories that pivot on an individual’s story also afford an opportunity to tell a social history. In The Girl in the Picture besides telling the story of Kim Phuc as a casualty of the war, I was determined to portray life in a war-torn society and thus, explore how war may end, but its effects linger. I was even more determined as I did my research, and found almost nothing written or reported from westerners on life in Vietnam after the end of the war. That was why I wrote in the book that to the west, Vietnam was a war, not a country.

JA: According to Wikipedia, your third book, “Egg on Mao was written with the intention of helping Westerners to better understand the issue of democracy and human rights in China.” Any comments?

DC: I was particularly interested in Egg on Mao portraying human rights in terms of everyday life, of giving it meaning in how one goes about one’s daily life, one’s relationships, and one’s concept of a future. My intention was to explain it in concepts of the human condition—in other words, without resorting to the term “human rights”—and the instinct and right to love and to live with decency and fairness. And, in my telling of the “three friends” participation in the 1989 democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, I wanted to explore the yearning for freedom, and comment on the nobility of protest, even in the face of a knowledge of futility, and on whether repression and years of prison can douse that yearning.

JA: The Vancouver Sun’s praise for Lives of the Family: “The stories are powerful, poignant and personal, but they are also microcosms of the immigrant experience in this country of immigrants.” What’s your perspective on the Vancouver Sun’s praise for Lives of the Family?

DC: As much as the stories in Lives of the Family portray immigrants, my literary idea was twofold. I wanted to explore the arc of the immigrant experience—including leaving and arriving, feelings of exile and isolation, and of looking to the future and looking in the rearview mirror at the same time. I also wanted to illustrate how both the momentous and the small, from war to revolution to say, a sister’s refusal to go abroad such that her parents send a substitute younger sister can equally dramatically change the course of one’s life.

JA: What do you think of The Calgary Distinguished Writers Program?

DC: The program is an enormous boon to the writer, affording both the time and financial stability to write, and as well, the opportunity to live in Calgary and to immerse oneself in the community here of both its writers and its readers. I’m grateful, more than words can express.

Jamal Ali lives and writes in Calgary. Originally from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamal immigrated to Canada together with his parents and siblings in 1967.

The post Interview with Denise Chong appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Lori Hahnel

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 21:47:27 +0000

by Jamal Ali

Lori Hahnel is the author of the following books: After You’ve Gone (a novel), Nothing Sacred (a short story collection), which was shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for fiction and Love Minus Zero (a novel). Her work has appeared in over forty journals in North America, Australia and the United Kingdom. She holds a BA in English from the University of Calgary. Hahnel lives in Calgary where she teaches creative writing.

Jamal Ali: You worked as a reference assistant at the Calgary Public Library from 1988-2006. Can you share your experiences? What was it like? In what ways did your experience influence your writing career?

Lori Hahnel: Actually, I only worked on the fourth floor reference desk at the old Central Library for approximately the last five years of my time at Calgary Public Library, partly before and partly after being at home with my kids for five years. The rest of the time I worked in circulation, first at Fish Creek Library, then Central. There are far too many experiences from those days to share in a short space, but I will say that I’ve been a user and supporter of libraries since childhood. I was a library page in my elementary school library back in Regina, and while shelving books I came across and read a lot of things I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. In my teen years, my closest friend and I spent many hours together in our local branch, Southwood, and we were there at least a couple of times a week for years. That experience had a huge effect on me in many ways. And I do think that being a reader from an early age and having a deep love of reading from early on is key for any writer. My mom said I was reading independently by the time I was three.

Not surprisingly, libraries and the people who use them and the people who work in them appear frequently in my work. The fourth floor at the old Central Library was an excellent place for a writer to work, since that collection held fiction and literature, and material on the craft of writing. I made good use of those resources when I worked there and continue to make use of libraries frequently now. And I try to make it my mission to tell people to use libraries. I was working with a writer recently who was feeling overwhelmed by research and had no idea that she could get help with it from libraries.

JA: During the early days of Calgary’s punk scene, you were a founding member of The Virgins, a power-pop punk group that carved its place in Calgary rock history as the city’s first all-female rock band. Can you reflect on your experiences? In what ways did your experience inspire your writing career?

LH: The Virgins were so long ago, 1979-1984, when I was just a kid, sixteen to twenty-one years old. The first and most obvious effect it had on my writing career is that my first novel, Love Minus Zero, is loosely based on the experience. To an extent, the experience also shows up in my second novel, After You‘ve Gone, and at least a couple of the stories in Nothing Sacred spring from it as well. I suppose the “do-it-yourself” ethic that was a hallmark of the punk scene influenced my work and the way that I work – I prefer to do things my own way and work on my own, always. Although I’m never sure if people picked the DIY thing up from the punk scene or if the punk scene was attractive to DIY types of people. Either way, I’ve always been a firm believer in going with my gut when it comes to writing, and when it comes to most other things.

JA: You are the author of two novels and a short story collection. What are the differences in the writing of a novel and putting together a short story collection?

LH: I think the differences between novels and short story collections are less distinct these days. I was recently a mentor at the Banff Centre Summer Writing Retreat and many if not most of the participants were there working on linked story collections, which have become a kind of middle ground between the two forms. The differences in writing these two forms are not as significant as some people believe, in my opinion. Yes, with a novel you are telling one story that probably takes years to write, whereas with a short story collection you are telling a number of different yet connected stories that probably take years to write. Then again, that one story in your novel is likely to be complex and have subplots and a large number of characters, and is certainly not something you sit down and write all at once. With a linked short story collection, as with a novel, there needs to be some kind of narrative arc to the stories, some kind of thread that holds them together. To say it’s a case of ‘potato,’ ‘potah-to’ is a little glib, and not always true, but maybe there’s some truth to the idea.

JA: Malcolm Azania (referred to by his pen name, Minister Faust), the Kenyan-Canadian novelist wrote, “Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings.” What are your perspectives on this?

LH: I agree with Minister Faust to a degree here, though I’m not altogether sure the relationship metaphor really works for me. Yes, it is true that it takes much longer to write a novel than it does to write a single short story. But a good short story can have as much impact, as much gravitas, as a novel, and I don’t think because short stories are shorter means they are less serious or less important. Or that there is somehow less craft involved in the writing of them. In fact, I think you could argue that in some ways short stories are harder to write than novels. I mean, using that same metaphor, what is a poem?

JA: According to the French novelist, Gustave Flaubert, “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” What are your thoughts on this quote?

LH: I feel like this quote should really be, “The art of living is the art of discovering what you believe.” I have felt for a long time that creative writing for many people is a journey of self-discovery. Self-discovery is at once both the reason we go on the journey and the destination we wish to arrive at. I also think that the more we write and the longer we live the more we realize how much more there always is to discover. For me at least (and I think for many others) what I believe is always evolving.

JA: What writers have influenced you and how?

LH: I love Alice Munro for her characters, who are never what they at first seem to be. Hemingway’s short stories (however unfashionable he may be) for his economy of language and his ability to evoke with small details. Kurt Vonnegut for his wildness and his wit and his melancholy. Ann Patchett for her ability to keep you riveted to her story no matter how many crazy turns it takes. Edna O’Brien for her honesty and her deep courage. Roddy Doyle for his humour and his big heart.

I also recently reread a favourite series from childhood, the All-Of-A-Kind Family books written by Sydney Taylor in the 1950’s. They’re about a family of Jewish immigrants who live in the Lower East Side of New York just before World War 1. I read them over and over when I was a kid, but haven’t read them in over forty years. I was amazed to find how much they influenced me in terms of style and subject matter. I can’t say that for some other books that I read later that I would have thought had a bigger influence on me. So now I’m curious to go back and read some of my other best-loved books from my formative years to see what kind of influence they had on me and my writing. Looks like I need to go back to the library once again.

For more of Lori Hahnel’s wisdom, witticisms, and words, visit lorihahnel.ca.

The post Interview with Lori Hahnel appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

Interview with Vivian Hansen

Freefall Magazine — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 21:58:48 +0000

by Joan Shillington

Vivian Hansen is the author of two Chapbooks of poetry: Angel Alley – the victims of Jack the Ripper, Never Call it Bird: the Melodies of AIDS (Passwords Enterprises) and three poetry collections: Leylines of My Flesh (Touchwood 2001), A Bitter Mood of Clouds (Frontenac House 2013) and A Tincture of Sunlight (Frontenac House 2017). Her essay ‘Hundedagene and the Foxtail Phenomena’ appears in Coming Here, Being Here: A Canadian Migration Anthology (Guernica 2016). Vivian is a member of The Canadian League of Poets and The Writers Guild of Alberta. She holds an MFA in

Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and teaches at the University of Calgary, Mount Royal University and the Alexandra Writers’ Centre.

A Tincture of Sunlight, to me, was not a book of poetry to read in one sitting. Rather, it was best to linger over each poem and allow the flavour of your poetry, the story of Old Man, complexities of war and your relationship with Old Man reveal themselves slowly. Growing up under the umbrella of WWII, I identified with these men who saw action, great violence and suffering. They were hard working, irreverent ‘Fresh Snow’ (page 97) He is irreverent, men who had an honest and soft side they exposed to a select few.

Joan Shillington: In the ‘Thanks’ section of A Tincture of Sunlight you thank the ‘Van Moorlehem family for filling in the loose ends of the story when you travelled to Europe and retraced Old Man’s Regiment. Old Man’s stories are rich and in the poem ‘Fresh Snow’ (page 94) Old Man is rum tellin. In ‘What’s Born of Rum and OJ, (page 23) His truth spills from the rum tincture of sunlight. Were there any surprises on your trip in his telling or not telling and if so, what were they?

Vivian Hansen: The Van Moorlehem family were the relatives of Old Man’s girlfriend in Canada. Dawn Van Moorlehem died in 2001, and when Old Man died in 2007, I sought out her family to let them know. Dawn’s sister welcomed me and opened some insights about Old Man prior to my time with him. In answer to your question about old girlfriends, that is about the Maas family – owners of the extensive Maas Makelaars insurance business in northern Europe. When I cleaned out his estate and private papers, I found an old card sent to him by a woman named Florentine Maas. A friend of mine – Jane Warren – who lived in Holland, offered to take the cards and an old picture of Glenn (sitting on a Bren gun carrier) to the Maas family to find out what had happened to Florentine Maas. Jane spoke to Florentine’s nephew, who was chuffed about the picture and the old cards. He said his aunt was alive (2008) at that time, and in a retirement home. Unfortunately, we never made contact further. I am not sure of Old Man’s relationship with her, but I believe he billeted with the family during the war. In any case, he kept his correspondence with Florentine for 63 years, and died with the artifacts. That suggests to me that his connection with her was a precious memory.

JS: Most war veterans do not talk of their war experiences yet you held Old Man’s trust as a first communion, ‘Pennywhistle’ (page 8). You cared for him, ‘Vigilae’ , my vigil is to watch his face open in trust and after he died entered into family dynamics, (page 103) ‘Who Wrote that Obituary Anyway?’ But perhaps the really unutterable secret//was his passion for me,//or worse://that he told me blood secrets of his bone and sinew. This telling of family dynamics created a new dimension to Old Man’s life. Was it a difficult decision to include Old Man’s family dynamic poems as part of A Tincture of Sunlight? Were there any repercussions from this book?

VH: It was difficult to make that decision. I had always enjoyed a positive and supportive relationship with Old Man’s immediate family – his five children. They had some challenges with accepting me as his final partner, but they were my rock in the last years of his life. More distant relatives were not so accepting and challenged the truth of his obituary, which described his ancestry from an unnamed Swampy Cree woman (his great-grandmother) from northern Ontario. Old Man’s mother Pearl had discussed this with him in her final years. He spoke of it to his children as well. I was accused of writing complete fiction in that obituary. The accusation decided me on writing the poem.

I have not experienced any repercussions from the writing. I did, however, consider carefully my reasons for writing it. One reason was certainly to straighten out the accusation, but primarily to bear witness to the truths of the man I loved. It seemed horrific to me that an ancestry he had embraced would be dismissed because others did not believe his story. He suffered greatly from PTSD from his wartime experiences. Embracing a Cree heritage was a healing story for him; especially as it came through his mother who had hidden her native heritage for a lifetime. I think the core message for any decision about writing a story (even an obituary) is to bear witness to a life. As a poet, that is my grounding theory.

JS: Can you please talk about your process writing A Tincture of Sunlight, from your first inkling of a poem to publication?

VH: Beginnings are strange, because you may not always know what constitutes a beginning. I began to write about my life with Glenn Burgess more than twenty years ago when he lived with me. They were small poems of peace, and the gifts of love that emerged from that grace. When we drove off the grid to camp in the summer, a completely new landscape emerged for me. I was practising my poetry back then, and he was a part of it. Eventually, I knew I had written about a character who was larger than Glenn Burgess. The character became Old Man, who took on a Forest Gump-ish perspective of life. Old Man seemed to transcend all the WWII horrors, and cast a healing intensity into one man’s life. I wrote the poems between 1996-2010. I tinkered with their order and impact until well into the editing process with Micheline Maylor, my editor with Frontenac.

JS: In A Tincture of Sunlight, your first Glosa, Translation of Leaves (page 59) is like a calm alpine meadow after a long climb. A change of pace. There are two more glosas, ‘Poise, Through Winter Light (page 54), ‘Bones Picked Clean’ (page 41) and a Haibun ‘Sounding the Medicine Map’ (page 84). Can you explain these forms? How do you feel form poetry can be used in creating tension or mood in a long poem or book?

VH: Form poetry can be intensely freeing. ‘Bones Picked Clean’ is a glosa on Dylan Thomas’ poem: And Death Shall Have No Dominion. It is so perfect to pick up on those anthemic lines and explicate just how death has no dominion.

With the two other glosas, both were explications on the sheer effacing power of love from two great poets – Don McKay and Leonard Cohen. I loved creating two beautiful poems from their pinnacle work.

The Haibun effect in ‘Sounding the Medicine Map’ was my editor Micheline Maylor’s insightful suggestion. I had wrestled for years with the last lines on these prose poems. When she suggested Haibun conclusions, that was the answering knell for how to wrap them up. ‘Sounding the Medicine Map’ was aired in August 1998 by the CBC. The ‘Haibun’ effect was not created until twenty years after that radio reading.

JS: What poets do you read?

VH: My collection of poetry includes almost all the Frontenac writers. I also read Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier, Don McKay, Don Coles, Don Domanski, Pier di Cicco, Richard Harrison, Weyman Chan, Stuart Ian McKay, Lisa Martin-Demoor, Joan Shillington (of course!) Sheri-d Wilson, Micheline Maylor and Kirk Miles. More recently Ron Ostrander, Laurie Fuhr, Adrienne Adams and Marco Melfi. These last four are emerging poets whose work I hope we will read in the years to come.

JS: As an educator and writer, what advice would you give beginner writers?

VH: Don’t stray far from your roots. Consider the ‘bearing witness’ effect of your life and the authenticity you gain from that. Bearing witness is an eavesdrop upon your life and the stories you hear from your own experience. You can master all the tools of poetry and still not listen effectively for your own truths. Stay true to what you hear from your soul.

A Tincture of Sunlight
by Vivian Hansen
Frontenac House (2014)
ISBN 978-192-7823675

Joan Shillington is Calgary-based poet. Her first book, “Revolutions,” was published by Leaf Press in 2008, and “Folding the Wilderness Within” was published in 2014 by Frontenac House. She is a regular contributor to FreeFall Magazine.

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